Podcast appearances and mentions of Michael Moritz

My guest today is Matt Huang, co-founder of Paradigm, a leading crypto investment firm with over $12 billion in assets under management. Before launching Paradigm in 2018 with Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam, Matt was a partner at Sequoia Capital, where he led many of the firm's crypto investments. It's widely reported that Michael Moritz called Matt “the only regrettable loss in Sequoia's history.” In our conversation, Matt shares his framework for navigating the often illegible frontier of crypto, how his early investment in ByteDance (now worth 10,000x his initial capital) shaped his approach to identifying exceptional founders, and why he believes so deeply in crypto's long-term potential. His firm, Paradigm, not only invests in many of the leading companies in the industry, it also builds open-source tools used by most of crypto. Matt has a rare blend of IQ and EQ that allows him to understand technical complexity, bring together unique talents, and ride out crypto's notorious volatility. Whether you're crypto-curious or crypto-skeptical, I think you'll find his perspective valuable. Please enjoy my great conversation with Matt Huang. Matt Huang's Profile in Colossus Review. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- This episode is brought to you by Ramp. Ramp's mission is to help companies manage their spend in a way that reduces expenses and frees up time for teams to work on more valuable projects. Go to Ramp.com/invest to sign up for free and get a $250 welcome bonus. – This episode is brought to you by Ridgeline. Ridgeline has built a complete, real-time, modern operating system for investment managers. It handles trading, portfolio management, compliance, customer reporting, and much more through an all-in-one real-time cloud platform. Head to ridgelineapps.com to learn more about the platform. –  This episode is brought to you by AlphaSense. AlphaSense has completely transformed the research process with cutting-edge AI technology and a vast collection of top-tier, reliable business content. Invest Like the Best listeners can get a free trial now at Alpha-Sense.com/Invest and experience firsthand how AlphaSense and Tegus help you make smarter decisions faster. ----- Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com). Show Notes: (00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like the Best (00:06:15) Matt Huang's Early Life and Career (00:08:13) College Years and Early Career (00:12:27) The Failed Startup and Lessons Learned (00:25:58) The Journey to Sequoia Capital (00:32:51) Discovering Bitcoin and Crypto (00:39:33) Founding Paradigm (00:45:40) Building a Unique Investment Team (00:46:37) The Role of Engineers and Researchers (00:48:03) Challenges and Volatility in Crypto (00:52:11) The FTX Investment and Its Aftermath (00:58:40) Crypto as a New Financial System (01:05:19) The Importance of Stablecoins (01:09:54) AI and Crypto: The Next Frontier (01:16:19) Personal Motivations and Mission (01:29:23) The Role of Regulation in Crypto (01:32:27) The Kindest Thing Anyone Has Ever Done for Matt

Michael Moritz is an organizer with Stop TxDOT I-45, an organization that is fighting to stop the expansion of Interstate 45 through the city of Houston, Texas. The expansion project is expected to displace over 1000 homes.

In this episode, hosts Dr. Cody Savage and Dr. Ali Tejani speak with Dr. Pranav Rajpurkar and Dr. Michael Moritz about the future of AI in radiology, from research breakthroughs to real-world implementation. They discuss building AI models that detect every disease, the challenges of integrating AI into clinical workflows, and the entrepreneurial journey of bringing cutting-edge technology to medical imaging.

Any elite athlete would tell you that it takes a village to support their ability to achieve their goals throughout the season. A big part of that support comes through partnerships, and in today's episode of Second Nature, we have a deep conversation about athlete partnerships with Patrick Lemieux. He's the person connecting the dots between athletes and partners for mega athletes like Lionel Sanders and Taylor Knibb, to name a few. Show Notes: Pat Lemieux: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-lemieux-5a9aa91a6/ Lemieux Group: https://www.lemieux.group/ Lionel Sanders: https://www.lionelsanders.com/ Taylor Knibb: https://www.instagram.com/taylorknibb/ Kat Matthews: https://www.katrinamatthewstri.com/ Tom Pidcock Deal: https://www.cyclingnews.com/news/tom-pidcock-to-ride-a-pinarello-in-off-road-racing-but-use-a-scott-on-the-road-with-q365/ Andrew McQuaid (Agent): https://www.trinitysportsmanagement.com/andrew-mcquaid Gravel World Champs: https://ucigravelworldseries.com/en/world-championships/ T100 Series: https://t100triathlon.com/ Michael Moritz: https://www.forbes.com/profile/michael-moritz/ Chris Voss - Never Split The Difference (Book): https://amzn.to/3VHxLZu BPC: Athletic Brewing: https://athleticbrewing.com/ Pro Tri News (podcast): https://protrinews.buzzsprout.com/ Aaron's SF Tourism Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHqGcGxmvGw Join us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/second-nature-media Meet us on Slack: https://www.launchpass.com/second-nature Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/secondnature.media Subscribe to our newsletter: https://www.secondnature.media Subscribe to the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@secondnaturemedia

Guest: Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO and co-founder of KlarnaLiving and working in Stockholm, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski thinks a lot about how he's perceived in Silicon Valley: “I feel like here I am, I am the small, country cousin from Sweden.” And on top of that, he knew that someone like Sam Altman wouldn't initially think of a European banking startup as an ideal partner for OpenAI — so, he made up an excuse to fly to San Francisco and meet with Altman. “I felt like, OK, this is going to be the busiest man in the world very soon,” Sebastian recalls. “When I first booked it with Sam, I think I got three hours in his calendar. By the time I arrived in San Francisco, it was down to 30 minutes.”Chapters:(01:02) - Workday and Salesforce (06:01) - Rolling your own (08:45) - AI-driven customer service (15:33) - Automation at scale for business (19:28) - The Toyota way (23:40) - Sam Altman (25:36) - Playing offense (28:25) - Reinventing Klarna (31:44) - The startup journey (35:37) - Common equity (39:28) - Champions League (42:24) - Hype cycles (47:35) - Sebastian's father (52:28) - Control and stability (57:23) - Comfort zone vs. stretch zone (01:02:27) - Creating resilience (01:06:23) - Why Klarna isn't hiring Mentioned in this episode: OpenAI, Seeking Alpha, Slack, Workday, ChatGPT, Stripe, CRMs, Mark Benioff, Twitter, Anthropic, Waymo, Devin AI, the Collison brothers and Stripe, Pieter van der Does and Adyen, Daniel Ek and Spotify, General Atlantic, DST Global, Anton Levy, Michael Moritz, Sequoia Capital, Niklas Adalberth, PayPal, CNBC, “Under Pressure” by Queen, Boris Johnson, Elon Musk, Google, Sam Walton, Made in America, Nina Siemiatkowski, and Snoop Dogg.Links:Connect with SebastianTwitterLinkedInConnect with JoubinTwitterLinkedInEmail: grit@kleinerperkins.com Learn more about Kleiner PerkinsThis episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

We start our show with Joe Rivano Barros, senior editor at Mission Local who describes the monied interests behind Proposition D and the people who stand to profit from and the November elections should San Franciscans vote in favor of Proposition D. The proposition would slash the total number of oversight commissions, give the mayor more authority over those commissions and specifically weaken the police commission, giving the police chief ultimate authority to regulate officer conduct. Internal documents obtained by the Phoenix Project reveals the four year plan on Together SF, the nonprofit backed by tech billionaire Michael Moritz. Read more about that at Mission Local: https://missionlocal.org/2024/09/togethersf-wants-structural-change-in-city-hall-internal-doc-shows-its-just-beginning/ The Oakland Police are threatening to crack down on sex trafficking, but how exactly they plan to do that remains to be seen. Jennifer Lyle, Executive Director of MISSEY, an Oakland based organization which was founded to respond to sexual exploitation describes the criminalization of sex trafficking victims as an attack on poor people. Lyle details what could instead be done to protect vulnerable young women and gender expansive people from falling prey to violence and sex trafficking. — Subscribe to this podcast: https://plinkhq.com/i/1637968343?to=page Get in touch: lawanddisorder@kpfa.org Follow us on socials @LawAndDis: https://twitter.com/LawAndDis; https://www.instagram.com/lawanddis/ The post SF Prop D Would Weaken the City's Oversight Bodies; Plus Oakland Police Threaten to Crack Down on Sex Trafficking appeared first on KPFA.

On day two of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago the party is rolling out the big guns again to whip up support for their nominee Kamala Harris. However, the party will need to mobilize more than just loyalists if it's going to beat Donald Trump to the White House in November. Michigan's Democratic State Senator Mallory McMorrow last night warned delegates of the dangers of re-electing him, and came with a gigantic prop, the conservative blueprint known as Project 2025. She's a rising star in the party and she joins Christiane from Chicago.  Also on today's show: correspondent joins us from Tel Aviv to update us on Sanaa's story and discuss the hopes for a ceasefire; Tanya Haj-Hassan, Co-founder, Gaza Medic Voices; Michael Moritz, Senior Adviser, Sequoia Heritage  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski led the rise from a profitable business to their peak $50 billion valuation, in which they were burning $150 million a month. In my latest episode, Sebastian shares how he turned Klarna back to profitability and discusses Klarna's ongoing pursuit of creating a digital financial assistant. He also reflects on their recent boardroom drama with Sequoia and outlines the operating principles and the repaired mistakes that have made Klarna the company it is today.(00:00) Intro(01:45) Personal Reflections on Alcohol and Family(03:03) The Journey to Sobriety(05:57) Milestones and Achievements(07:59) Understanding Company Success(10:54) Challenges and Pivots in Business(16:50) Building and Maintaining Company Culture(26:16) Leadership and Motivation(32:42) What Klarna Does(41:33) Reflecting on Leadership and Self-Development(41:48) Promoting Young Talent and Internal Growth(44:52) Balancing Autonomy and Standardization(46:29) Adopting Agile and Toyota's Influence(55:05) Navigating Regulatory Challenges(01:00:11) Klarna's Financial Journey and Market Expansion(01:10:38) Handling Valuation Resets and Layoffs(01:23:57) Evaluating Individuals in Business Relationships(01:24:22) Stability of Institutions and Individuals(01:25:40) Perverse Incentives in VC Firms(01:26:50) Hands-On Leadership in VC Firms(01:28:54) The Impact of Michael Moritz(01:34:52) Leadership Evolution and Self-Reflection(01:39:11) Facing Challenges and Finding Solitude(01:42:19) AI Integration at Klarna(01:52:03) Balancing Capitalism and Societal Impact(02:00:53) Creativity and Constraints in Problem Solving(02:05:41) Conclusion and Final Thoughts Executive Producer: Rashad AssirProducer: Leah ClapperMixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA

Julie Pitta and Jeremy Mack are part of the Phoenix Project, which is tracking the wealthy wannabe overlords of the Bay. They run down dossiers of five extremely rich dudes who want to run local politics: Michael Moritz, William Oberndorf, Chris Larsen, John Kilroy, Jr., and Garry Tan. Phoenix Project - request the Phoenix Papers: Volume 2 Episodes mentioned:  "VCs vs. SF" f/ Julie Pitta  "Michael Shellenberger Thinks He Knows Your Gender" f/ Soleil Ho "Stop Garry Tan to Stop Asian Hate" f/ Emily Mills

This week Yanni and co-host Charlie chat with Sam Renouf, CEO of the Professional Triathletes Organisation (PTO). Sam joined the organisation in 2019 has been central to the organisation's strategy and development since. We kick off the conversation by setting the scene, with Sam discussing the inception and evolution of PTO, including its recent partnership with World Triathlon. He digs into the organisation's goal of becoming a more consumer-facing brand with its T100 Triathlon World Tour and outlines the strategies for growing a sustainable fan base for triathlon. "It's taken us a couple of years to figure out the right model. But we think that in the T100 we have something unique," he says. "We're like the PGA Tour from a governance structure because we've got the athletes and the pros. We're Formula One with this season long narrative with glamorous locations. And we're the World Marathon Majors with the mass participation. So really it's super exciting." We were keen to chat with Sam about the role technology plays in the roadmap for the T100 series. Tech, Sam explains, will be baked into almost every element of the series – from its broadcast and commentary, to the sponsorship proposition and management of mass participation rankings.  Sam also mapped out the PTO's funding model, with the likes of Michael Moritz as a lead investor, alongside Warner Bros. Discovery. And with the prospect of the organisation securing further funding to accelerate the growth of the T100, it's going to be a fascinating journey to watch. Timestamps: 10:46 – Evolution of PTO's business model 25:11 – Importance of technology and investment from Warner Bros. Discovery 29:39 – Consolidating high-value audience with first-party data 30:21 –  Using data for sponsorship, media, and direct-to-consumer 35:09 – Storytelling and technology in triathlon 40:59 – Bringing non-endemic sponsors into triathlon 43:50 – Building revenue streams for triathletes 53:18 – The future of the PTO

This segment delves into the intricacies of board member dynamics, specifically focusing on the removal of board members. Highlighted by the situation involving Michael Moritz's removal from Klarna's board, the discussion covers the complexities and nuances of board construction, including the distinction between preferred and independent board members, contract terms, and the impact of diversity.We need to demystify board operations — how they work, voting dynamics, and what they do! Open call for any listener (ex-CEO preferred) who can come dig into the gritty details of board dynamics in a future episode.Forward this to any HR Pro who needs to hear some real talk - and tell them to subscribe. hrheretics.substack.com--SPONSOR: This episode is brought to you by AttioAttio is the next generation of CRM. It's powerful, flexible and easily configures to the unique way your startup runs, whatever your go-to-market motion. The next era deserves a better CRM. Join OpenAI, Replicate, ElevenLabs and more at https://bit.ly/AttioHRHeretics --TIMESTAMPS:(00:00) Intro(01:22) The Complex World of Boards(03:53) Sponsor - Attio(04:48) Nolan and Kelli Share their Experiences and Expectations of Board Members(07:52) Picking Investors and Board Members(08:22) Board Construction(09:52) Diversity of Boards When A Company Matures(10:32) Stories From DoorDash(11:32) The Mysterious Notion of Board Votes and Equity Approval--GET IN TOUCH WITH NOLAN, + KELLI ON LINKEDINNolan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nolan-church/Kelli: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellidragovich/HR Heretics is a podcast from the Turpentine podcast network. Learn more at www.turpentine.co This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hrheretics.substack.com

This week Mary Ann, Kirsten, and Alex gathered to chat through a massive sheaf of news. A note before we get to the rundown that Reddit filed to go public after we had recorded this episode, so notes on its IPO filing are not included in this particular episode. Don't think that we won't discuss its S-1, it just came too late for this particular entry. More to come!Here's the rundown:Deals of the Week: PermitFlow raised $31 million to bring software to the construction permitting market, one man's plan to keep Cake ebike's alive for just a while longer caught our eye, and we had thoughts about Match Group's tie-up with OpenAI.Fintech drama: With Reddit's IPO in the hopper, eyes are turning to other companies that are expected to list this year. One such company is Klarna. And, the buy now, pay later company has been the latest recipient of governance drama. Former Sequoia leader Michael Moritz won this round, unsurprisingly.Video game startups could prove surprise 2024 winner: While the venture market retreats and venture funding for gaming companies slows, there's good reason to expect fortunes to turn around for the startup genre. And while venture wallets might open for gaming companies this year, some others like Frost Giant are turning to their own community to raise.More to come, including Reddit IPO notes!For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity's Simplecast website.Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more! Credits: Equity is hosted by TechCrunch's Alex Wilhelm and Mary Ann Azevedo. We are produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.

Riskkapitalbolaget Sequoias försök att avsätta sin tidigare partner Michael Moritz från ordförandeposten blev inte av. Även vd Sebastian Siemiatkowski sitter kvar i Klarnas styrelse inför börsnoteringen – som bland annat påverkar Karl-Johan Perssons techportfölj.

GrowSF, TogetherSF and other benign-sounding local political organizations are more rightwing innovations from rich tech barons like David Sacks and Michael Moritz. Julie Pitta, a journalist previously at the LA Times, Forbes, and the SF Richmond Review, talks about the newly launched Phoenix Project, which looks at how dark money flows in California politics. (FYI: The conversation with Julie was recorded in early February, shortly after Garry "Die Slow" Tan's drunken appropriation of Tupac lyrics calling for the death of a bunch of local politicians, and just before a rightwing trolling campaign convinced the Richmond Review's publisher to abruptly end Julie's column there.) The Phoenix Project 'Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics' (Julie Pitta in the Richmond Review) 'The Tech Plutocrats Dreaming of a Right-Wing San Francisco' (Gil Duran in the New Republic) Our Garry Tan episode (f/ Emily Mills) Sad Francisco is produced by Toshio Meronek and edited by Tofu Estolas. Please support the show and find links to our past episodes on Patreon.

CURSO de Inversión en ETFs ya Disponible: https://go.hotmart.com/U91482169YBienvenidos a Salud Financiera. Un programa en directo diario dónde puedes aprender y preguntar sobre finanzas personales y mercados financieros. Disfruta de sus secciones y atrévete a preguntar lo que siempre has querido saber de forma gratuita. En este episodio #23 hablamos acerca del segundo proyecto empresarial de Elon Musk X.com, su relación con Michael Moritz y Sequoia Capital y las negociaciones con Paypal. En la sección del curso de bolsa diario descubriremos que son los dividendos y los términos más asociados a este estilo de inversión. Recuerda que puedes enviar tus dudas de forma gratuita al email preguntas.saludfinanciera@gmail.com o al teléfono +34614239639

Email Us:dbahnsen@thebahnsengroup.comwill@calpolicycenter.orgFollow Us:@DavidBahnsen@WillSwaim@TheRadioFreeCAShow Notes:Florida's policies could bring a dying California back to lifeDavid Bahnsen vs. Oren Cass debate / National Review InstituteCalifornia Democrats say pro-Palestinian protesters who broke rules will be ‘held accountable'Newsom responded quickly, and very publicly, to L.A. freeway fire but still faces scrutinyTrump said the border wall was unclimbable. But hospitals are full of those who've tried.John Fisher blames Oakland on his way out, plots to build a World Series contender in Las VegasA's relocation: Teachers union to file lawsuit that could stop public funds for Vegas stadiumSequoia icon Michael Moritz bets $300 million on reshaping San FranciscoColorado River deal opens cash spigot for big farmsFodor's puts San Gabriel Mountains National Monument on its 2024 ‘No List'

In the early days of facebook Mark Zuckerburg would wander into the company bathrooms and if he noticed someone sitting down in the stalls he would pop his head over and try to talk to them about their projects. Or if he was taking a poop he would host an emergency meeting and he would tell them to come over and pop their head over the stall to talk it out. Everyone just went along with it because it was either YOLO SILICON VALLEY LMAO or they were just too intimidated. That all stopped when Michael Moritz, legendary silicon valley investor, and one of Facebook biggest early investors and shareholders, was at the campus doing research for leading a 2nd round of funding. He was doing diligence all day and at one point had to poop and that's when Zuckerburg popped his head over with a smile to ask how's the diligence coming along. Michael Moritz, not one to mince words, was apoplectic. 'GET THE FUCK OUT HERE YOU IDiOT LIZARD LOOKING FUCKER.' Mark Zuckerburg nervously tried to laugh it off and persisted, because he really loved intimate poop conversations 'Aw c'mon Michael, it's silicon valley'. Zuckerburg finally withdrew when Moritz flung a poop at him. 30 minutes later, Mark was in a very import meeting when Moritz walked into the conference room. 'Everyone except Mark Zuckerburg, OUT'. As intimidated as they were of Zuckerburg, at the time Moritz was the bigger deal, and they all scurried out of the room. Zuckerburg, however, is not one to be intimated by anyone. Not the Winkewoz twins, not Eduardo Savarn, not Peter Thiel, and not one of his biggest shareholder Michael Moritz. Zuckerburg passionately defended his practice, but Michael Moritz was having none of that. Moritz told him that it was a ticking PR and HR catastrophe, and threatened to pull out of leading the 2nd round of funding if Mark continued, which would have been a calamity for the company. Zuckerburg pretended to arbitrate 'Ok fine, but you need to give me a good reason'. Moritz was flabberghasted at this response. Was this a serious question? He answered with the most obvious answer 'Because it's not FUCKING NORMAL'. Unknown to Moritz, Zuckerburg had guessed a conversation like this would happen as soon as he was kicked out of the toilet stall, and began formulating a strategy to counter Moritz demands. Zuckerburg knew that Moritz would have all the leverage, but Zuckerburg was a master strategist. Zuckerburg went for the pounce. 'Okay, I'll lets write out an agreement, in writing I'll rescind the policy because it's not normal'. Moritz was dumbfounded, but he was used to being dumbfounded by eccentric tech founders, afterall he was also an early investor in Apple, and he still found Zuckerburg tame compared to Steve Jobs. Moritz had a long day of work so they signed the agreement so that he could go back to doing his due diligence. When Moritz left, a broad grin spread across Zuckerburg's face. " 'Not Normal' eh? " Zuckerburg said with a menacing laugh. Ever since then, Mark Zuckerburg has been on a life-long crusade to normalize poop conversations. He had a checklist of what he needed to accomplish in order to realize this. His advisors would tell him it's impossible, but one by one Zuckerburg checked off the list. From trusting Mark with their private photos, to normalizing people giving up their internet browsing privacy. In 2015, Zuckerburg knew he would hit a wall, having people watch you while you poop was still too much of a leap. That's when Zuckerburg decided to buy Occulus, and eventually shift his company towards virtual reality. If he could coax people into having life-like conversations while they were pooping in a virtual reality, then doing it in the real world wouldn't be too big of a leap. Zuckerburg only has 3 more boxes to check off before poop conversations are normalized. Mark Zuckerburg wants to watch you poop. Are you going to let him?   Yeah I said it. You might be offended. You've probably heard this a thousand times before, but believe me you will hear it again. Because it's deserved. You're French. A parasite. A slug. A leech. A failure. But, of course, you may think I don't have evidence to justify this. But you are wrong, as always, your failures stand out like a shining pile of manure among your pristine neighbors. So let me begin. First off, your cuisine. Dogshit. What have you got? Spoiled milk that smells like shit. Okay what else? Alcohol because you need to drown yourself in wine to escape your life. Sounds right. Frog legs? Snails? Yeah, that seems about right for you. But cusine doesn't matter compared to your successes or lack thereof. What is you history? A long, long list of failures and losses. So let's start off. The Gauls getting invaded and conquered by the Romans before getting conquered by the Germanic tribes. Getting invaded by the Vikings and forced to give up Normandy to them. You might say you conquered England, but no, those were the Normans who were Viking descendants and actually fucking useful. The Hundred Years' War. Which you lost. You even needed God to send you a warrior to try to save your sorry ass. Then what? Following the Spanish and Portuguese discovered to the New World and being kicked out of all the good land to an icy tundra. Server you right. Brutally enslaving people in Haiti? No surprise. And then proceeding to demand reputations for their revolt, which you failed to stop, until the mid 20th century, which was what kept your country barley afloat. Then your rulers were so incompetent they were all killed and you had a revolt. Then Napoleon, who wasn't even born in modern French territory, cause you lost it, and then proceeded to lose. And then you were appointed a monarch by Britain. You even had to sell most of your territory in America, which you couldn't develop or protect, to the U.S. Then WW1 were with the help of all the allied nations you barley managed to stop the Germans from getting to Paris. Then you built the Maginot line because you knew you couldn't stop them normally but you built it where they didn't even attack last time and didn't finish it. Then they attacked around it, surprised, and you were turned into a puppet nation of the Nazi surrendering almost immediately. Hell, French guards were some of Hitlers last men. It took the combined forces of all of the Allies to actually help you and kick the Nazis out for you. You've had so, so may revolutions since then because of your incompetence. You want to talk about shootings in the U.S? Well how about your history of bloodshed violence and failure. Unrest? Look at all your riots. Hell, at one point your naval flag was a white flag. TF2? Yeah you play spy cause you can't even fight correctly. What are you known for? Failure. Justly, you are losers, and always will be. Go fuck yourselves and become a decent country like your neighbors. But that's not all. Speaking of your neighbors, let's look at their successes. Spain and Portugal actually have good food and managed to colonize almost the entirety of South and Central America, conquering Empires and making a name. Britain, controlling almost a 1/4 of the land on Earth and kicking your ass almost every time. Germany, the heart of the E.U, able to fight against the entirety of Europe twice in a row, the Holy Roman Empire, fighting and controlling the Pope? Inventing Lutheranism and the printing press? Oh how about Poland, the winged Hussars, all of them coming together to fend off the Ottomans and Mongols. Italy, with some of the best cuisine in the world, the Roman Empire, which kicked your ass, the Pope, the Church, Florence, Rome, incredibly important. All of them so, so much better than you. Of course, you might say the past is no indication of the future. And you have a bit of a point. But really, what have you done? There is a short, short list of deeds in which you have not failed. You have an unstable, failing government. You have a weaker military than UK, U.S, China, etc, etc. You are by far the weakest member on the UN Security Council, an unfunny joke, a gag. Your economy is weaker than any of these good nations. Your “luxury” products suck and and overpriced shit shows. Culturally, you have jack shit. You seem to have missed out on the Renaissance and basically every other period of advancement. Ethically, you hate migrants, in fact you hate everyone. Your national anthem is so fucking baton is listing despite having nothing to be proud of, talking about using countries as fertilizer, yeah bud that's not going to happen. One thing you did good was have nuclear energy, but your government realized its mistake in doing something halfway fucking decent for once and is now removing power plants and nuclear energy. So fuck off. You are a failure without anything good to say for yourself. Not one accomplishment. Nobody wants you. They pity you for the whole you've dug yourself in. You will not get my respect or sympathy. So leave, and never come back.

"It is easy to forget that, when he was a student, the man who brought us the Macintosh, iPhone and iPad (and, with his little finger, Pixar) collected bottle caps to make ends meet. The need to stretch every nickel informed the way Apple was run during the early days." In 2015, Mike Moritz wrote an opinion piece for The Financial Times called "Imitators take note — Steve Jobs was more than a showman." It's a great reminder that the best businesses — including Apple — are the most capital efficient businesses. That what matters isn't how much you raise, but the business you build with what you raise. And that even Apple, started out life being incredibly cheap and capital efficient. Being frugal and stretching every nickel ensures that your business is as durable as possible. While revenue will always ebb and flow, expenses are typically subject to inertia. Expenses tend to build up invisibly, almost imperceptibly, and can require heroic acts to shrink. While is why it's so important to build a culture of frugality from Day One — ensuring that as many dollars spent as possible go toward strategic expenses that sustain and grow your business. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/aoDwtbLW71I Show notes: https://www.outlieracademy.com/episode/173 Read the newsletter for this episode: https://newsletter.outlieracademy.com/p/essay-breakdown-imitators-take-note Subscribe to newsletter: https://newsletter.outlieracademy.com Subscribe to podcast: https://pod.link/outlieracademy Learn more about Steve Jobs: https://www.danielscrivner.com/articles/who-was-steve-jobs-wisdom-from-the-man-who-built-apple-and-pixar Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"It is easy to forget that, when he was a student, the man who brought us the Macintosh, iPhone and iPad (and, with his little finger, Pixar) collected bottle caps to make ends meet. The need to stretch every nickel informed the way Apple was run during the early days." In 2015, Mike Moritz wrote an opinion piece for The Financial Times called "Imitators take note — Steve Jobs was more than a showman." It's a great reminder that the best businesses — including Apple — are the most capital efficient businesses. That what matters isn't how much you raise, but the business you build with what you raise. And that even Apple, started out life being incredibly cheap and capital efficient. Being frugal and stretching every nickel ensures that your business is as durable as possible. While revenue will always ebb and flow, expenses are typically subject to inertia. Expenses tend to build up invisibly, almost imperceptibly, and can require heroic acts to shrink. While is why it's so important to build a culture of frugality from Day One — ensuring that as many dollars spent as possible go toward strategic expenses that sustain and grow your business. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/aoDwtbLW71I Show notes: https://www.outlieracademy.com/episode/173 Read the newsletter for this episode: https://newsletter.outlieracademy.com/p/essay-breakdown-imitators-take-note Subscribe to newsletter: https://newsletter.outlieracademy.com Subscribe to podcast: https://pod.link/outlieracademy Learn more about Steve Jobs: https://www.danielscrivner.com/articles/who-was-steve-jobs-wisdom-from-the-man-who-built-apple-and-pixar Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The self-appointed voice of techbros and “effective accelerationism,” Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan is a prime example of a common archetype in Bay Area tech - a libertarian who wants socialism, but only for corporations. Emily Mills (@sf_mills on Twitter/X) does the undervalued job of keeping track of some of the richest people in the Bay, and which politicians and campaigns they're spending their money on, including Garry. Taping of an evening with Garry Tan, featuring Martin Shkreli, hosted by techbro hype house AGI House: youtube.com/watch?v=xMRlKPqNMT4 Latest puff piece on Gary, from venture capitalist Michael Moritz's SF Standard (Josh Koehn): sfstandard.com/2023/09/27/garry-tan-y-combinator-declares-war-san-francisco-politics-progressives-elon-musk/ "Pro-recall committees have raised 46 times more money than the anti-recall campaign, according to Ethics Commission data" (Will Jarrett, Mission Local): missionlocal.org/2022/01/who-is-funding-the-school-board-recall "Internet billionaire Reid Hoffman apologizes for funding a group tied to disinformation in Alabama race" (Tony Romm, Craig Timberg and Aaron C. Davis, Washington Post): washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/26/internet-billionaire-reid-hoffman-apologizes-funding-group-behind-disinformation-alabama-race “Immigrant Rights Activists Renew Push Against Palantir to Cancel ICE Contract” (Kevin Gosztola, Shadowproof/Truthout): truthout.org/articles/immigrant-rights-activists-renew-push-against-palantir-to-cancel-ice-contract More Sad Francisco: sadfrancis.co

For years, Solano County residents wondered who was secretly spending hundreds of millions of dollars to buy up family farms in their community. The rumors swirled: was Disney planning a new theme park? Was it some sort of Chinese government land-grab? In August, the mystery was solved: the New York Times reported that a group of tech moguls including billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz, philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and were making the purchases as part of a plan to build a city from scratch, on 50,000 acres of agricultural land. They've now gone public, under the name California Forever, and are promising to bring benefits like good paying local jobs, solar farms, and open space. But many questions remain. In this hour of Forum, we'll talk to the group's CEO as well as one of the local lawmakers raising concerns about the plan. Guests: J.K. Dineen, Bay Area housing reporter, San Francisco Chronicle Jan Sramek, Founder and CEO, California Forever Catherine Moy, Mayor, Fairfield

PayPal was the defining tech company of its generation, with alumni going on to start YouTube, Tesla, Yelp, LinkedIn, among many others. But the company nearly didn't make it. The PayPal of today only exists because of how its team navigated early, unprecedented inflection points. Find out why Max Levchin now says he does “not recommend” a merger of equals to anyone, how the team pioneered CAPTCHA to fight $10M in monthly fraud that nearly sank the fledgling business, and how they maneuvered through ongoing battles with eBay on their way to an IPO. Host: Roelof Botha, Managing Partner of Sequoia Capital  Featuring: Max Levchin, Michael Moritz, Jimmy Soni Transcript: https://www.sequoiacap.com/podcast/crucible-moments-paypal/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In Deutschland wurden 2022 in der ersten Jahreshälfte über 1400 Unternehmen in sogenannten M&A-Prozessen übernommen oder zusammengelegt. Der Großteil dieser kapitalintensiven Transaktionen lag im Bereich zwischen 1 und 50 Millionen Euro und der durchschnittliche Preis der pro Deal erzielt wurde lag bei rund 47 Millionen Euro.  Aber wie kommt ein solcher M&A-Prozess eigentlich zustande? Wie werden diese Deals abgewickelt? Und wie kommt man auf so hohe Summen bei einer Übernahme?  Hier kommen M&A-Berater:innen wie Michael Moritz ins Spiel. Mit seiner Firma Carlsquare hat er in den letzten 20 Jahren über 500 Fusionen, Übernahmen und Einstiege von Investor:innen betreut. Ein Fokus seiner unternehmerischen Tätigkeiten liegt dabei im E-Commerce. Michael hat unter mit der Quality Group, besser bekannt als More Nutrition und ESN, SNOCKS, Bears With Beneftis, Erlich Textil und vielen weiteren Unternehmen zusammengearbeitet. Laut eigener Aussage hat er dadurch in den letzten eine dreistellige Anzahl an Personen zu Millionär:innen gemacht.  Im Podcast analysiert er am Beispiel der Quality Group wie ein M&A-Prozess abläuft, wie Firmenbewertungen zustandekommen und welche verschiedenen Investor:innen es gibt.  Folgt uns auf Instagram ❤️ Johannes LinkedIn Romy LinkedIn Michael LinkedIn  Du hast Vorschläge, Wünsche oder Kritik an uns? Schick uns gerne dein Feedback via Typeform Shownotes: (00:00) Start (01:57) Wie läuft ein M&A-Prozess ab? (09:12) Wie viel Gründer:innen hat Michael bisher zu Millionär:innen gemacht? (09:31) Wie wird ein M&A-Prozess vorbereitet? (15:12) Wie lange dauert ein M&A-Prozess? (24:05) Welche Red Flags gibt es unternehmensseitig in M&A-Prozessen? (28:30) Welche Firmen können nicht verkauft werden? (32:03) Wie lange sollten Gründer:innen nach einem M&A-Prozess im Unternehmen bleiben? (34:31) Wie unterscheiden sich strategische Investor:innen von Finanzinvestor:innen? (39:50) Wie berechnet man eine Firmenbewertung? (46:23) Wie werden sich langfristig die Multiples auf Bewertungen verändern?

Today, Shivam talks about how employees of Twitter in Ghana are facing an uncertain future and how Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital is leaving the firm after nearly four-decades. Topics discussed: how employees of Twitter in Ghana are facing an uncertain future how Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital is leaving the firm after nearly four-decades Links mentioned in this episode: https://invstr.com/twitter-layoffs-in-ghana/ https://invstr.com/michael-moritz-leaves-sequoia-capital/ https://invstr.com/market-recap-july-20th-2023/

Terraform Labs appoints interim CEO amid legal troubles, IPG makes changes to data and tech arm, UPS and Teamsters union to meet ahead of strike, US single-family homebuilding falls in June, Apple reportedly developing its own AI language model, global pet training services market expected to reach $7.81 billion by 2030, Michael Moritz departs from Sequoia Capital, gold investing as a hedge against inflation and market volatility, Aza Entertainment CEO aims to change portrayal of women in entertainment, Paris-based entrepreneur creates all-in-one spend management platform.

San Francisco has a powerful asset in its fight against its well-publicized civic challenges: its caring community of doers.Kanishka Cheng, founder and CEO of TogetherSF, is working to revitalize the city by reconnecting its residents with their government. She's built an organization, with the backing of Sequoia's Michael Moritz, that provides educational resources and spaces for open dialogue on how to solve the complex issues faced by one of America's largest and most culturally significant cities.Join a conversation with our host, David Stiepleman, and Kanishka about the intentional steps TogetherSF is taking to help San Francisco reach its full potential. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What I learned from reading Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words.This episode is brought to you by Tiny: Tiny is the easiest way to sell your business. Tiny provides quick and straightforward exits for Founders.  ----This episode is brought to you by Meter: Meter is the easiest way for your business to get fast, secure, and reliable internet and WiFi in any commercial space. Go to meter.com/founders ----Follow one of my favorite podcasts Invest Like The Best and listen to episode 293 David Senra: Passion and Pain ----[3:48] He gave an extraordinary amount of thought to how best to use our fleeting time.[4:24] He imagined what reality lacked and set out to remedy it.[7:27] Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview Video and My Notes.[10:02] Edwin Land episodes:Instant: The Story of Polaroid by Christopher Bonanos. (Founders #264)Land's Polaroid: A Company and the Man Who Invented It by Peter C. Wensberg (Founders #263)A Triumph of Genius: Edwin Land, Polaroid, and the Kodak Patent War by Ronald Fierstein (Founders #134)Land's Polaroid: A Company and the Man Who Invented It by Peter C. Wensberg (Founders #133)The Instant Image: Edwin Land and the Polaroid Experienceby Mark Olshaker (Founders #132)Insisting On The Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land and Instant: The Story of Polaroid(Founders #40)[13:23] Think of your life as a rainbow arcing across the horizon of this world. You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear.[14:10] One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization by Dee Hock. (Founders #260)[15:42] Read Jeff Bezos's shareholder letters in book form: Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos or for free online: Amazon Investor Relations(Founders #282)[19:45] If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent. — Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman by Yvon Chouinard. (Founders #297)[30:47] How important product is based on how much time you spend with it: People are going to be spending two, three hours a day interacting with these machines—longer than they spend in the car.[39:02] Return to the Little Kingdom: Steve Jobs and the Creation of Appleby Michael Moritz. (Founders #76)[40:32] The real big thing is: if you're going to make something, it doesn't take any more energy—and rarely does it take more money—to make it really great. All it takes is a little more time. And a willingness to do so, a willingness to persevere until it's really great.[45:07] Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull [45:31] Steve's enthusiasm kept him writing check after check to Pixar, ultimately investing some $60 million.[47:47] It is better to have fewer people even if it means doing less. Let's build our company slowly and carefully.[53:36] I'm not so dominant that I can't listen to creative ideas coming from other people. Successful people listen. Those who don't listen, don't survive long. — Driven From Within by Michael Jordan (Founders #213)[54:40] You never achieve what you want without falling on your face a few times in the process of getting there.[1:00:11] There wasn't a hierarchy of ideas that mapped onto the hierarchy of the organization.[1:03:33] Don't be a career. The enemy of most dreams and intuitions, and one of the most dangerous and stifling concepts ever invented by humans, is the “Career.” A career is a concept for how one is supposed to progress through stages during the training for and practicing of your working life. There are some big problems here. First and foremost is the notion that your work is different and separate from the rest of your life. If you are passionate about your life and your work, this can't be so. They will become more or less one. This is a much better way to live one's life.[1:05:11] Make your avocation your vocation. Make what you love your work.[1:05:58] Think of your life as a rainbow arcing across the horizon of this world. You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear.[1:09:27] In the Company of Giants: Candid Conversations With the Visionaries of the Digital World by Rama Dev Jager and Rafael Ortiz. (Founders #208)[1:10:52] Much of it is also drive and passion—hard work makes up for a lot.[1:13:28] A risk-taking creative environment on the product side required a fiscally conservative environment on the business side.[1:13:57] You've got to choose what you put your love into really carefully.[1:14:38] A remarkably consistent set of values that Steve held dear: Life is short; don't waste it. Tell the truth. Technology should enhance human creativity. Process matters. Beauty matters. Details matter. The world we know is a human creation—and we can push it forward.[1:19:24] Steve Jobs speaking to Apple employees (Video) [1:29:48] Apple is the world's premier bridge builder between mere mortals and the exploding world of high technology.[1:30:14] Steve's favorite quote: We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. – Aristotle[1:32:29] The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley by Leslie Berlin. (Founders #166)[1:42:27] That's been the most important lesson I've learned in business: that the dynamic range of people dramatically exceeds things you encounter in the rest of our normal lives—and to try to find those really great people who really love what they do. [1:43:00] Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Productsby Leander Kahney. (Founders #178)[1:47:27] It's a circus world, and you never know what's around the next corner.[1:53:40] Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography by Laurie Woolever. (Founders #219)[2:01:00] All glory is fleeting.----Subscribe to listen to Founders Premium — Subscribers can ask me questions directly and listen to Ask Me Anything (AMA) episodes.----Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book----I use Readwise to organize and remember everything I read. You can try Readwise for 60 days for free here.  ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

In der Rubrik “Investments & Exits” begrüßen wir heute Daniel Wild, Gründer und Aufsichtsrat von Mountain Alliance. Daniel spricht über die Finanzierungsrunden von Oyess Beauty und MakerVerse: Das Hamburger Start-up Oyess Beauty hat erfolgreich eine Series A Finanzierungsrunde in Höhe von 3 Millionen Euro abgeschlossen. Unter den Investoren sind die Beteiligungsholding des Burda Verlags, die Enabling Company, sowie weitere Unternehmer und Startup Gründer wie Karl-Heinz Holland und Michael Moritz. Die Gründerinnen Anna Breidt und Nadja King sowie Frank Hoffmann wollen mit ihrem Unternehmen innovative und nachhaltige Kosmetikprodukte entwickeln und produzieren. Die Marke ist bereits in vielen deutschen Drogeriemärkten und in einigen Ländern Europas und Asiens gelistet und hat verschiedene Auszeichnungen erhalten. Das Berliner Startup MakerVerse hat in einer Serie-A-Finanzierungsrunde 9,4 Millionen Euro gesammelt, um seine KI-gestützte On-Demand-Plattform für die Lieferkette zu skalieren. Die Runde wurde von 9.5 Ventures angeführt und von Investoren wie Siemens Energy und ZEISS unterstützt. Das von Manish Katoch, Tim Marten Schark und Markus Seibold gegründete Unternehmen plant, sein "One-Stop-Shop"-Konzept für fortschrittliche Fertigung um weitere Technologien und Materialien zu erweitern und den Support für die Integration der Plattform in die bestehenden Systeme der Kunden zu verbessern. Mit der zusätzlichen Finanzierung wird MakerVerse in der Lage sein, seinen End-to-End-Support für Produktionsaufträge zu erweitern und noch größere Projekte zu unterstützen.

For the first episode of the Newcomer podcast, I sat down with Reid Hoffman — the PayPal mafia member, LinkedIn co-founder, Greylock partner, and Microsoft board member. Hoffman had just stepped off OpenAI's board of directors. Hoffman traced his interest in artificial intelligence back to a conversation with Elon Musk.“This kicked off, actually, in fact, with a dinner with Elon Musk years ago,” Hoffman said. Musk told Hoffman that he needed to dive into artificial intelligence during conversations about a decade ago. “This is part of how I operate,” Hoffman remembers. “Smart people from my network tell me things, and I go and do things. And so I dug into it and I'm like, ‘Oh, yes, we have another wave coming.'”This episode of Newcomer is brought to you by VantaSecurity is no longer a cost center — it's a strategic growth engine that sets your business apart. That means it's more important than ever to prove you handle customer data with the utmost integrity. But demonstrating your security and compliance can be time-consuming, tedious, and expensive. Until you use Vanta.Vanta's enterprise-ready Trust Management Platform empowers you to:* Centralize and scale your security program* Automate compliance for the most sought-after frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR* Earn and maintain the trust of customers and vendors alikeWith Vanta, you can save up to 400 hours and 85% of costs. Win more deals and enable growth quickly, easily, and without breaking the bank.For a limited time, Newcomer listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Go to vanta.com/newcomer to get started.Why I Wanted to Talk to Reid Hoffman & What I Took AwayHoffman is a social network personified. Even his journey to something as wonky as artificial intelligence is told through his connections with people. In a world of algorithms and code, Hoffman is upfront about the extent to which human connections decide Silicon Valley's trajectory. (Of course they are paired with profound technological developments that are far larger than any one person or network.)When it comes to the rapidly developing future powered by large language models, a big question in my mind is who exactly decides how these language models work? Sydney appeared in Microsoft Bing and then disappeared. Microsoft executives can dispatch our favorite hallucinations without public input. Meanwhile, masses of images can be gobbled up without asking their creators and then the resulting image generation tools can be open-sourced to the world. It feels like AI super powers come and go with little notice. It's a world full of contradictions. There's constant talk of utopias and dystopias and yet startups are raising conventional venture capital financing.The most prominent player in artificial intelligence — OpenAI — is a non-profit that raised from Tiger Global. It celebrates its openness in its name and yet competes with companies whose technology is actually open-sourced. OpenAI's governance structure and priorities largely remain a mystery. Finally, unlike tech's conservative billionaires who throw their money into politics, in the case of Hoffman, here is a tech overlord that I seem to mostly agree with politically. I wanted to know what that would be like. Is it just good marketing? And where exactly is his heart and political head at right now?I thought he delivered. I didn't feel like he was dodging my questions, even in a world where maintaining such a wide network requires diplomacy. Hoffman seemed eager and open — even if he started to bristle at what he called my “edgy words.”Some Favorite QuotesWe covered a lot of ground in our conversation. We talked about AI sentience and humans' failures to identify consciousness within non-human beings. We talked about the coming rise in AI cloud compute spending and how Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are positioned in the AI race.Hoffman said he had one major condition for getting involved in OpenAI back in the early days when Musk was still on board.“My price for participation was to ask Elon to stop saying the word “robocalypse,” Hoffman told me. “Because I thought that the problem was it's very catchy and it evokes fear.”I asked Hoffman why he thought Musk got involved in artificial intelligence in the first place when Musk seems so worried about how it might develop. Why get the ball rolling down the hill at all, I wondered?Hoffman replied that many people in the field of artificial intelligence had “messiah complexes.”“It's the I am the one who must bring this — Prometheus, the fire to humanity,” Hoffman said. “And you're like, ‘Okay, I kind of think it should be us versus an individual.'” He went on, “Now, us can't be 8 billion people — us is a small group. But I think, more or less, you see the folks who are steering with a moral compass try to say, how do I get at least 10 to 15 people beyond myself with their hands on the steering wheel in deep conversations in order to make sure you get there? And then let's make sure that we're having the conversations with the right communities.”I raised the possibility that this merely suggested oligarchic control of artificial intelligence rather than dictatorial control. We also discussed Hoffman's politics, including his thoughts on Joe Biden and “woke” politics. I asked him about the state of his friendship with fellow PayPal mafia member Peter Thiel. “I basically am sympathetic to people as long as they are legitimately and earnestly committed to the dialogue and discussion of truth between them and not committed otherwise,” Hoffman said. “There are folks from the PayPal years that I don't really spend much time talking to. There are others that I do continue because that conversation about discovering who we are and who we should be is really important. And you can't allow your own position to be the definer.”I suggested that Thiel's public views sometimes seemed insincere.“Oh, that's totally corrosive,” Hoffman said. “And as much as that's happening, it's terrible. And that's one of the things that in conversations I have, I push people, including Peter, on a lot.”Give it a listen.Find the PodcastRead the TranscriptEric: Reid, thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm very excited for this conversation. You know, I'm getting ready for my own AI conference at the end of this month, so hopefully this is sort of a prep by the end of this conversation, we'll all be super smart and ready for that. I feel like there've been so many rounds of sort of AI as sort of the buzzword of the day.This clearly seems the hottest. When did you get into this moment of it? I mean, obviously you just stepped off the Open AI board. You were on that board. Like how, when did you start to see this movement that we're experiencing right now coming.Reid: Well, it's funny because my undergraduate major was artificial intelligence and cognitive science. So I've, I've been around the hoop for multiple waves for a long time and I think this kicked off actually, in fact, with a dinner with Elon Musk years ago. You know, 10-ish years ago, Elon and I would have dinner about once a quarter and he's like, well, are you paying attention to this AI stuff?And I'm like, well, I majored in it and you know, I know about this stuff. He's like, no, you need to get back involved. And I was like, all right. This is part of how I operate is smart people from my network tell me things and I go and do things. And so I dug into it and I went, oh yes, we have another wave coming.And this was probably about seven or eight years ago, when I, when I saw the beginning of the wave or the seismic event. Maybe it was a seismic event out at sea and I was like, okay, there's gonna be a tsunami here and we should start getting ready cause the tsunami is actually gonna be amazingly great and interesting.Eric: And that—is that the beginning of Open AI?Reid: Open AI is later. What I did is I went and made connections with the kind of the heads of every AI lab and major company because I concluded that I thought that the AI revolution will be primarily driven by large companies initially because of the scale compute requirements.And so, you know, talked to Demis Hassabis, met Mustafa Suleyman, talked to Yann LeCun, talked to Jeff Dean, you know, all these kind of folks and kind of, you know, built all that. And then it was later in conversations with Sam and Elon that I said, look, we need to do something that's a for pro humanity. Not just commercial effort. And my price for participation, cause I thought it was a great idea, but my price for participation was to ask Elon to stop saying the word robocalypse. Because I thought that the problem was that it's very catchy and it evokes fear. And actually, in fact, one of the things I think about this whole area is that it's so much more interesting and has so much amazing opportunity for humanity.A little bit like, I don't know if you saw the Atlantic article I wrote that we evolve ourselves through technology and I'm, you know, going to be doing some writings around describing AI as augmented intelligence versus artificial intelligence. And I wanted to kind of build that positive, optimistic case that I think is the higher probability that I think we can shape towards and so forth.So it's like, okay, I'm in, but no more Robocalypse.Eric: I appreciate the ultimate sort of network person that you tell the story through people. I always appreciate when the origin stories of technology actually come through the human beings. With Elon in particular, I'm sort of confused by his position because it seems like he's very afraid of AI.And if that's the case, why would you want to, like, do anything to sort of get the ball rolling down the hill? Like, isn't there a sort of just like, stay away from it, man, if you think it's so bad. How do you see his thinking? And I'm sure it's evolved.Reid: Well, I think his instinct for the good and the challenging of this is he tends to think AI will only be good if I'm the one who's in control.Eric: Sort of, yeah.Reid: Yeah. And this is actually somewhat replete within the modern AI field. Not everybody but this. And Elon is a public enough figure that I think, you know, making this comment of him is not talking at a school.Other people would, there's a surprising number of Messiah complexes in the field of AI, and, and it's the, I am the one who must bring this, you know, Prometheus, you know, the Fire to humanity. And you're like, okay, I kind of think it should be us, right? Versus an individual. Now us can't be 8 billion people, us as a small group, but I think more or less you see the, the folks who are steering with a moral compass try to say, how do I get at least 10 to 15 people beyond myself with their hands on the steering wheel in deep conversations in order to make sure you get there and then let, let's make sure that we're having the conversations with the right communities.Like if you say, well, is this going to, you know, institutionalize, ongoing, um, you know, power structures or racial bias, something else? Well, we're talking to the people to make sure that we're going to minimize that, especially over time and navigate it as a real issue. And so those are the, like, that's the kind of anti Messiah complex, which, which is more or less the efforts that I tend to get involved in.Eric: Right. At least sort of oligarchy, of AI control instead of just dictatorship of it.Reid: Well, yeah, and it depends a little bit, even on oligarchy, look, things are built by small numbers of people. It's just a fact, right? Like, there aren't more than, you know, a couple of founders, maybe maximum five in any, any particular thing. There is, you know, there's reasons why. When you have a construction project, you have a head of construction, right?Et cetera. The important thing is to make sure that's why you have, why you have a CEO, you have a board of directors. That's why you have, you know, you say, well, do we have the right thing where a person is accountable to a broader group? And that broader group feels their governance responsibility seriously.So oligarchy is a—Eric: a chargedReid: is a charged word. And I,Eric: There's a logic to it. I'm not, I'm not using it to say it doesn't make sense that you want the people to really understand it around, around it. Um, I mean, specifically with Open AI, I mean, you, you just stepped off the board. You're also on the board of Microsoft, which is obviously a very significant player.In this future, I mean, it's hard to be open. I get a little frustrated with the “open” in “Open AI” because I feel like there's a lot that I don't understand. I'm like, maybe they should change the name a little bit, but is it still a charity in your mind? I mean, it's obviously raised from Tiger Global, the ultimate prophet maker.Like, how should we think about the sort of core ambitions of Open AI?Reid: Well, um, one, the board I was on was a fine one and they've been very diligent about making sure that all of the controls, including for the subsidiary company are from the 501(C)(3) and diligent to its mission, which is staffed by people on the 501(C)(3) board with the responsibilities of being on a 5 0 1 board, which is being in service of the mission, not doing, you know, private inurement and other kinds of things.And so I actually think it is fundamentally still a 501(C)(3). The challenge is if you kind of say, you look at this and say, well, in order to be a successful player in the modern scale AI, you need to have billions of dollars of compute. Where do you get those billions of dollars? Because, you know, the foundations and the philanthropy industry is generally speaking bad at tech and bad at anything other than little tiny checks in tech.And so you said, well, it's really important to do this. So part of what I think, you know, Sam and that group of folks came up with this kind of clever thing to say, well, look, we're about beneficial AI, we're about AI for humanity. We're about making an, I'll make a comment on “open” in a second, but we are gonna generate some commercially valuable things.What if we struck a commercial deal? So you can have the commercial things or you can share the commercial things. You invest in us in order to do this, and then we make sure that the AI has the right characteristics. And then the “open”, you know, all short names have, you know, some simplicities to them.The idea is open to the world in terms of being able to use it and benefit from it. It doesn't mean the same thing as open source because AI is actually one of those things where opening, um, where you could do open source, you could actually be creating something dangerous. As a modern example, last year, Open AI deliberately… DALL·E 2 was ready four months before it went out. I know cause I was playing with it. They did the four months to do safety training and the kind of safety training is, well, let's make sure that individuals can't be libeled. Let's make sure you can't create as best we can, child sexual material. Let's make sure you can't do revenge porn and we'll serve it through the API and we'll make it unchangeable on that.And then the open source people come out and they go do whatever you want and then wow, you get all this crazy, terrible stuff. So “open” is openness of availability, but still with safety and still with, kind of call it the pro-human controls. And that's part of what OpenAI means in this.Eric: I wrote in sort of a mini essay in the newsletter about, like tech fatalism and it fits into your sort of messiah complex that you're talking about, if I'm a young or new startup entrepreneur, it's like this is my moment if I hold back, you know, there's a sense that somebody else is gonna do it too. This isn't necessarily research. Some of the tools are findable, so I need to do it. If somebody's going to, it's easy if you're using your own personhood to say, I'm better than that guy! Even if I have questions about it, I should do it. So that, I think we see that over and over again. Obviously the stakes with AI, I think we both agree are much larger.On the other hand, with AI, there's actually, in my view, been a little bit more restraint. I mean, Google has been a little slower. Facebook seems a little worried, like, I don't know. How do you agree with that sort of view of tech fatalism? Is there anything to be done about it or it's just sort of—if it's possible, it's gonna happen, so the best guy, the best team should do it?Or, or how do you think about that sense of inevitability on if it's possible, it'll be built?Reid: Well, one thing is you like edgy words, so what you describe is tech fatalism, I might say as something more like tech inevitability or tech destiny. And part of it is what, I guess what I would say is for example, we are now in a AI moment and era. There's global competition for it. It's scale compute.It's not something that even somebody like a Google or someone else can kind of have any kind of, real ball control on. But the way I look at it is, hey, look, there's, there's utopic outcomes and dystopic outcomes and it's within our control to steer it. Um, and even to steer it at speed, even under competition because.For example, obviously the general discourse within media is, oh my God, what's happening with the data and what's gonna happen with the bias and what's gonna happen with the crazy conversations, with Bing Chat and all the rest of this stuff. And you're like, well, what am I obsessed about? I'm obsessed about the fact that I have line of sight to an AI tutor and an AI doctor on every cell phone.And think about if you delay that, whatever number of years you delay that, what your human cost is of delaying that, right? And it's like, how do we get that? And for example, people say, wow, the real issue is that Bing chat model is gonna go off the rails and have a drunken cocktail party conversation because it's provoked to do so and can't run away from the person who's provoking it.Uh, and you say, well, is that the real issue? Or is it a real issue? Let's make sure that as many people as we can have access to that AI doctor have access to that AI tutor that where, where we can, where not only, you know, cause obviously technology cause it's expensive initially benefits elites and people are rich.And by the way, that's a natural way of how our capitalist system and all the rest works. But let's try to get it to everyone else as quickly as possible, right?Eric: I a hundred percent agree with that. So I don't want any of my sort of, cynical take like, oh my God, this version.I'd also extend it, you know, I think you're sort of referencing maybe the Sydney situation where you have Kevin Rus in New York Times, you know, communicating with Bing's version of ChatGPT and sort of finding this character who's sort of goes by Sydney from the origin story.And Ben Thompson sort of had a similar experience. And I would almost say it's sad for the world to be deprived of that too. You know, there's like a certain paranoia, it's like, it's like, oh, I wanna meet this sort of seemingly intelligent character. I don't know. What do you make of that whole episode? I mean, people really, I mean, Ben Thompson, smart tech writers really latched onto this as something that they found moving.I don't know. Is there anything you take away from that saga and do you think we'll see those sort of, I don't know, intelligent characters again,Reid: Well for sure. I think 2023 will be at least the first year of the so-called chatbot. Not just because of ChatGPT. And I think that we will have a bunch of different chat bots. I think we'll have chatbots that are there to be, you know, entertainment companions, witty dialogue participants.I think we'll have chatbots that are there to be information like Insta, Wikipedia, kind of things. I think we'll have chatbots that are there to just have someone to talk to. So I think there'll be a whole, whole range of things. And I think we will have all that experience.And I think part of the thing is to say, look, what are the parameters by which you should say the bots should absolutely not do X. And it's fine if these people want a bot that's like, you know, smack talking and these people want something that you know, goes, oh heck. Right?You know, like, what's, what's the range of that? And obviously children get in the mix and, and the questions around things that we already encounter a lot with search, which is like could a chat bot enable self-harm in a way that would be really bad?Let's really try to make sure that someone who's depressed doesn't figure out a way to harm themselves either with search or with chat bots.Eric: Is there a psychologically persuasive, so it's not just the information provided, it's the sense that they might be like walking you towards something less serious.Reid: And they are! This is the thing that's amazing. and it's part of the reason why like everyone should have some interaction with these in some emotional, tangible way. We are really passing the Turing test. This is the thing that I had visibility on a few years ago because I was like, okay, we kind of judge, you know, intelligence and sentience like that, Google engineers like it.I asked if it was conscious and it said it was because we use language as a way of doing that. And you're like, well, but look, that tells you that your language use is not quite fully there. And because part of what's really amazing about, “hallucinations”—and I'm probably gonna do a fireside chat with the gray matter thing on hallucinations, maybe later this week—where the hallucination is, on one hand it says this amazingly accurate, wonderful thing, very persuasively, and then it says this other thing really persuasively that's total fiction, right? And you're like, wow, you sound very persuasive in both cases. But that one's true and that one's fiction.And that's part of the reason why I kind of go back to the augmented intelligence and all the things that I see going on with in 2023 is much less replacement and much more augmentation. It's not zero replacement, but it's much more augmentation in terms of how this plays. And that is super exciting.Eric: Yeah. I mean, to some degree it reflects sort of the weakness in human beings' own abilities to read what's happening. Ahead of this interview, I was talking to the publicly available ChatGPT. I don't know if you saw but I was asking it for questions and I felt like it delivered a very reasonable set of questions. You know, you've written about Blitzscaling, so [ChatGPT] is like, let's ask about that. It's, you know, ask in the context of Microsoft. But when I was like, have you [ChatGPT] ever watched Joe Rogan? Have you ever been on a podcast? Sometimes maybe you should have a long sort of, you should have a statement like I'm doing right now where I sort of have some things I'm saying.Then I ask a question. Other times it should be short and sweet. Sometimes it, you know, annoys you and says oligarchy, like explaining to the chat bot. [In an interview, a journalist] can't just ask a list of like, straightforward questions and it felt like it didn't really even get that. And I get that there's some sort of, we're, we're starting to have a conversation now with companies like Jasper, where it's almost like the language prompting itself.I think Sam Altman was maybe saying it's like almost a form of plain language like coding because you have to figure out how to get what you want out of them. And maybe it was just my failure to explain it, but as a journalist replacing questions, I didn't find the current model of ChatGPT really capable of that.Reid: No, that's actually one of the things on the ChatGPT I find is, like, for example, you ask what questions to ask Reid Hoffman in a podcast interview, and you'll get some generic ones. It'll say like, well, what's going on with new technologies like AI and, and what's going on in Silicon Valley? And you know, and you're like, okay, sure.But those aren't the really interesting questions. That's not what makes me a great journalist, which is kind of a lens to something that people can learn from and that will evolve and change that'll get better. But that's again, one of the reasons why I think it's a people plus machine. Because for example, if I were to say, hey, what should I ask Eric about? Or what should I talk to Eric about and go to? Yeah, gimme some generic stuff. Now if I said, oh, give me a briefing on, um, call it, um, UN governance systems as they apply to AI, because I want to be able to talk about this. I didn't do this, but it would give me a kind of a quick Wikipedia briefing and that would make my conversation more interesting and I might be able to ask a question about the governance system or something, you know, as a way of doing it.And that's what AI is, I think why the combo is so great. Um, and anyway, so that's what we should be aiming towards. It isn't to say, by the way, sometimes like replacement is a good thing. For example, you go to autonomous vehicles and say, hey, look, if we could wave a wand and every car on the road today would be an autonomous vehicle, we'd probably save, we'd probably go from 40,000 deaths in the US per, you know, year to, you know, maybe a thousand or 2000. And you're like, you're shaving 38,000 lives a year, in doing this. It's a good thing. And, you know, it will have a positive vector on gridlocks and for climate change and all the rest of the stuff.And you go, okay, that replacement, yes, we have to navigate truck jobs and all the rest, but that replacement's good. But I think a lot of it is going to end up being, you know, kind of, various forms of amplification. Like if you get to journalists, you go, oh, it'll help me ask, figure out which interesting questions to add.Not because it'll just go here, here's your script to ask questions. But you can get better information to prep your thinking on it.Eric: Yeah. I'm glad you brought up like the self-driving car case and, you know, you're, are you still on the board of Aurora?Reid: I am.Eric: I've, you know, I covered Uber, so I was in their self-driving cars very early, and they made a lot of promises. Lyft made a lot of promises.I mean, I feel like part of my excitement about this sort of generative AI movement is that it feels like it doesn't require completeness in the same way that self-driving cars do. You know? And that, that, that's been a barrier to self-driving cars. On the flip side, you know, sometimes we sort of wave away the inaccuracy and then we say, you know, we sort of manage it.I think that's what we were sort of talking about earlier. You imagine it in some of the completeness that could come. So I guess the question here is just do you think, what I'm calling the completeness problem. I guess just the idea that it needs to be sort of fully capable will be an issue with the large language models or do you think you have this sort of augmented model where it could sort of stop now and still be extremely useful to much of society?Reid: I think it could stop now and be extremely useful. I've got line of sight on current technology for a tutor, for a doctor, for a bunch of other stuff. One of the things my partner and I wrote last year was that within five years, there's gonna be a co-pilot for every profession.The way to think about that is what professionals do. They process information, they take some kind of action. Sometimes that's generating other information, just like you see with Microsoft's co-pilot product for engineers. And what you can see happening with DallE and other image generation for graphic designers, you'll see this for every professional, that there will be a co-pilot on today's technology that can be built.That's really amazing. I do think that as you continue to make progress, you can potentially make them even more amazing, because part of what happened when you move from, you know, GPT3 to 3.5, which is all of a sudden it can write sonnets. Right? You didn't really know that it was gonna be able to write sonnets.That's giving people superpowers. Most people, including myself—I mean, look, I could write a sonnet if you gave me a couple of days and a lot of coffee and a lot of attempts to really try.Eric: But you wouldn't.Reid: You wouldn't. Yeah. But now I can go, oh, you know, I'd like to, to, um, write a sonnet about my friend Sam Altman.And I can go down and I can sit there and I can kind of type, you know, duh da, and I can generate, well, I don't like that one. Oh, but then I like this one, you know, and da da da. And, and that, that gives you superpowers. I mean, think about what you can do for writing, a whole variety of things with that. And that I think the more and more completeness is the word you are using is I think also a powerful thing. Even though what we have right now is amazing.Eric: Is GPT4 a big improvement over what we have? I assume you've seen a fair bit of unreleased, stuff. Like how hyped should we be about the improvement level?Reid: I have. I'm not really allowed to say very much about it cause, you know, part of the responsibilities of former board members and confidentiality. But I do think that it will be a nice—I think people will look at it and go, Ooh, that's cool. And it will be another iteration, another thing as amazing as ChatGPT has, and obviously that's kind of in the last few months. It's kind of taken the world by storm, opening up this vista of imagination and so forth.I think GPT4 will be another step forward where people will go, Ooh, that's, that, that's another cool thing. I think that's—can't be more specific than that, but watch this space cause it'll be cool.Eric: Throughout this conversation we've danced around this sort of artificial general intelligence question. starting with the discussion of Elon and the creation of eventually Open AI. I'm curious how close you think we are with AGI and this idea of a sort of, I mean, people define it so many different ways, you know, it's more sophisticated than humans in some tasks, you know, mini tasks, whatever.How, how do you think we're far from that? Or how, how, how do you see that playing out?Reid: Personally amongst a lot of the people who are in the field, I'm probably on the, we're-much-further-than-we-think stage. Now, some of that's because I've lived through this before with my undergraduate degree and the, you know, the pattern generally is, oh my God, we've gotten this computer to do this amazing thing that we thought was formally the provence of only these cognitive human beings.And it could do that. So then by the way, in 10 years it'll be solving new science problems like fusion and all the rest. And if you go back to the seventies, you saw that same dialogue. I mean, it, it's, it's an ongoing thing. Now we do have a more amazing set of cognitive capabilities than we did before, and there are some reasons to argue that it could be in a decade or two. Because you say, well, these large language models can enable coding and that coding can all, can then be self, reflective and generative, and that can then make something go. But when I look at the coding and how that works right now, it doesn't generate the kind of code that's like, oh, that's amazing new code.It helps with the, oh, I want to do a parser for quick sort, right? You know, like that kind of stuff. And it's like, okay, that's great. Or a systems integration use of an API or calling in an API for a spellchecker or whatever. Like it's really helpful stuff on engineers, but it's not like, oh my God, it's now inventing the new kind of training of large scale models techniques.And so I think even some of the great optimists will tell you of the great, like believers that it'll be soon and say there's one major invention. And the thing is, once you get to one major invention, is that one major invention? Is that three major inventions? Is it 10 major inventions?Like I think we are some number of major inventions away. I don't, I certainly don't think it's impossible to get there.Eric: Sorry. The major inventions are us human beings build, building things into the system or…?Reid: Yeah. Like for example, you know, can it do, like, for example, a classic, critique of a lot of large language models is can it do common sense reasoning.Eric: Gary Marcus is very…Reid: Exactly. Right. Exactly. And you know, the short answer right now is the large language models are approximating common sense reasoning.Now they're doing it in a powerful and interesting enough way that you're like, well, that's pretty useful. It's pretty helpful about what it's doing, but I agree that it's not yet doing all of that. And also you get problems like, you know, what are called one shot learning. Can you learn from one instance of it?Cause currently the training requires lots and lots of compute processing over days or in self play, can you have an accurate memory store that you update? Like for example, you say now fact X has happened, your entire world based on fact X. Look, there's a bunch of this stuff to all go.And the question is, is that one major invention is that, you know, five major inventions, and by the way, major inventions or major inventions even all the amazing stuff we've done over the last five to 10 years. Major inventions on major inventions. So I myself tend to be two things on the AGI one.I tend to think it's further than most people think. And I don't know if that further is it's 10 years versus five or 20 years versus 10 or 50 years versus 20. I don't, I don't really know.Eric: In your lifetime, do you think?Reid: It's possible, although I don't know. But let me give two other lenses I think on the AGI question cause the other thing that people tend to do is they tend to go, there's like this AI, which is technique machine learning, and there's totally just great, it's augmented intelligence and then there's AGI and who knows what happens with AGI.And you say, well first is AGI is a whole range of possible things. Like what if you said, Hey, I can build something that's the equivalent of a decent engineer or decent doctor, but to run it costs me $200 an hour and I have AGI? But it's $200 an hour. And you're like, okay, well that's cool and that means we can, we can get as many of them as we need. But it's expensive. And so it isn't like all of a sudden, you know, Terminator or you know, or inventing fusion or something like that is AGI and or a potential version of AGI. So what is AGI is the squishy thing that people then go, magic. The second thing is, the way that I've looked at the progress in the last five to eight years is we're building a set of iteratively better savants, right?It just like the chess player was a savant. Um, and, and the savants are interestingly different now. When does savant become a general intelligence and when might savant become a general super intelligence? I don't know. It's obviously a super intelligence already in some ways. Like for example, I wouldn't want to try to play, go against it and win, try to win.It's a super intelligence when it comes, right? But like okay, that's great cause in our perspective, having some savants like this that are super intelligence is really helpful to us. So, so the whole AGI discussion I think tends to go a little bit Hollywood-esque. You know, it's not terminator.Eric: I mean, there there is, there's a sort of argument that could be made. I mean, you know, humans are very human-centric about our beliefs and our intelligence, right? We don't have a theory of mind for other animals. It's very hard for us to prove that other species, you know, have some experience of consciousness like qualia or whatever.Reid: Very philosophically good use of a term by the way.Eric: Thank you. Um, I studied philosophy though. I've forgotten more than I remember. But, um, you know, I mean…Reid: Someday we'll figure out what it's like to be a bat. Probably not this time.Eric: Right, right, exactly. Is that, that's Nagel. If the machine's better than me at chess and go there, there's a level of I, you know, here I am saying it doesn't have an experience, but it, it's so much smarter than me in certain domains.I don't, I, the question is just like, it seems like humans are not capable of seeing what it's like to be a bat. So will we ever really be able to sort of convince ourselves that there's something that it's like to be, um, an AGI system?Reid: Well, I think the answer is um, yes, but it will require a bunch of sophistication. Like one of the things I think is really interesting about, um, as we anthropomorphize the world a little bit and I think some of this machine. Intelligence stuff will, will enable us to do that is, well what does it mean to understand X or, or, or, or no X or experience X or have qualia or whatever else.And right now what we do is we say, well it's some king of shadowy image from being human. So we tend to undercount like animals intelligence. And people tend to be surprised like, look, you know, some animals mate for life and everything else, they clearly have a theory of the world and it's clearly stuff we're doing.We go, ah, they don't have the same kind of consciousness we do. And you're like, well they certainly don't have the same kind of consciousness, but we're not doing a very good job of studying like what the, where it's similar in order it's different. And I think we're gonna need to broaden that out outcome to start saying, well, when you compare us and an eagle or a dolphin or a whale or a chimpanzee or a lion, you know, what are the similarities and and differences?And how this works. And um, and I think that will also then be, well, what happens when it's a silicon substrate? You know? Do we, do we think that consciousness requires a biological substrate? If so, why? Um, and, you know, part of how, of course we get to understand, um, each other's consciousness as we, we get this depth of experience.Where I realize is it isn't, you're just a puppet.Eric:  [laughs] I am, I am just a puppet.Reid: Well, we're, we're talking to each other through Riverside, so, you know, who knows, right. You know, deep fakes and all that.Eric: The AI's already ahead of you. You know, I'm just, it's already, no.Reid: Yeah. I think we're gonna have to get more sophisticated on that question now.I think it's, it's too trivial to say because it can mimic language in particularly interesting ways. And it says, yes, I'm conscious that that makes it conscious. Like that's not, that's not what we use as an instance. And, and part of it is like, do you understand the like part of how we've come to understand each other's consciousness is we realize that we experience things in similar ways.We feel joy in similar, we feel pain in similar ways and that kinda stuff. And that's part of how we begin to understand. And I think it'll be really good that this may kick off kind of us being slightly less kind of call it narcissistically, anthropocentric in this and a broader concept as we look at this.Eric: You know, I was talking to my therapist the other day and I was saying, you know, oh, I did this like kind gesture, but I didn't feel like some profound, like, I don't, it just seemed like the right thing to do. I did it. It felt like I did the right thing should, you know, shouldn't I feel like more around it?And you know, her perspective was much more like, oh, what matters is like doing the thing, not sort of your internal states about it. Which to me would, would go to the, if the machine can, can do all the things we expect from sort of a caring type type machine. Like why do we need to spend all this time when we don't even expect that of humans to always feel the right feelings.Reid: I totally agree with you. Look, I think the real question is what you do. Now that being said, part of how we predict what you do is that, you know, um, you may not have like at that moment gone, haha, I think of myself as really good cause I've done this kind thing. Which by the way, might be a better human thing as opposed to like, I'm doing this cause I'm better than most people.Eric: Right.Reid: Yeah, but it's the pattern in which you engage in these things and part of the feelings and so forth is cause that creates a kind of a reliability of pattern of do you see other people? Do you have the aspiration to have, not just yourself, but the people around you leading better and improving lives.And obviously if that's the behavior that we're seeing from these things, then that's a lot of it. And the only question is, what's that forward looking momentum on it? And I think amongst humans that comes to an intention, a model of the world and so forth. You know, amongst, amongst machines that mean just maybe the no, no, we're aligned.Well, like, we've done a really good alignment with human progress.Eric: Do you think there will be a point in time where it's like an ethical problem to unplug it? Like I think of like a bear, right? Like a bear is dangerous. You know, there are circumstances where pretty comfortable. Killing the bear,But if the bear like hasn't actually done anything, we've taken it under our care. Like we don't just like shoot bears at zoos, you know? Do you think there's a point where like, and it costs us money to sustain the bear at a zoo, do you think there are cases where we might say, oh man, now there's an ethical question around unpluggingReid: I think it's a when, not an if.Eric: Yeah.Reid: Right? I mean, it may be a when, once again, just like AGI, that's a fair way's out. But it's a when, not an if. And by the way, I think that's again, part of the progress that we make because we think about like, how should we be treating it? Because, you know, like for example, if you go back a hundred, 150 years, the whole concept of animal rights doesn't exist in humans.You know, it's like, hey, you wanna, you want to torture animal X to death, you know, like you're queer, but you're, you're, you're allowed to do that. That's an odd thing for you to do. And maybe it's kind of like, like distasteful, like grungy bad in some way, but , you know, it's like, okay. Where's now you're like, oh, that person is, is like going out to try to go torture animals! We should like get them in an institution, right? Like, that's not okay. You know, what is that further progress for the rights and lives? And I think it will ultimately come to things that we think are, when it gets to kind of like things that have their own agency and have their own consciousness and sets of existence.We should be including all of that in some, in some grand or elevated, you know, kind of rights conceptions.Eric: All right, so back back to my listeners who, you know, wanna know where to invest and make money off this and, you know.Reid: [laughs] It isn't from qualia and consciousness. Oh, wait.Eric: Who do you think are the key players? The key players in the models. Then obviously there are more sort of, I don't know if we're calling them vertical solutions or product oriented or whatever, however you think about them.But starting with the models, like who do you see as sort of the real players right now? Are you counting out a Google or do you think they'll still, you know, sort of show?Reid: Oh no. I think Google will show up. And obviously, you know, Open AI, Microsoft has done a ton of stuff. I co-founded Inflection last year with Mustafa Suleyman. We have a just amazing team and I do see a lot of teams, so I'm.Eric: And that's to build sort of the foundational…Reid: Yeah, they're gonna, well, they're building their own models and they're gonna build some things off those models.We haven't really said what they are yet. But that's obviously going to be kind of new models. Adept, another Greylock investment building its own models, Character is building its own models, Anthropic is building its own models. And Anthropic is, you know, Dario and the crew is smart folks from Open AI, they're, they're doing stuff within a kind of a similar research program that Open AI is doing.And so I think those are the ones that I probably most track.Eric: Character's an interesting case and you know, we're still learning more about that company. You know, I was first to report they're looking to raise 250 million. My understanding is that what's interesting is they're building the models, but then for a particular use case, right?Or like, it's really a question of leverage or like, do people need to build the models to be competitive or do you think there will be... can you build a great business on top of Stability or Open AI or do you need to do it yourself?Reid: I think you can, but the way you do it is you can't say it's cause I have unique access to the model. It has to be, you know, I have a business that has network effects or I'm well integrated in enterprise, or I have another deep stack of technology that I'm bringing into it. It can't just be, I'm a lightweight front end to it because then other people can be the lightweight front end.So you can build great businesses. I think with it, I do think that people will both build businesses off, you know, things like the Open AI APIs and I think people will also train models. Because I think one of the things that will definitely happen is a lot of… not just will large models be built in ways that are interesting and compelling, but I think a bunch of smaller models will be built that are specifically tuned and so forth.And there's all kinds of reasons. Everything from you can build them to do something very specific, but also like inference cost, does it, does it run on a low compute or low power footprint? You know, et cetera, et cetera. You know, AI doctor, AI tutor, um, you know, duh and on a cell phone. And, um, and so, you know, I think like all of that, I think the short answer to this is allEric: Right. Do you think we are in a compute arms race still, or do you, do you think this is gonna continue where it's just if you can raise a billion dollars to, to buy sort of com GPU access basically from Microsoft or Amazon or Google, you're, you're gonna be sort of pretty far ahead? Or how do you think about that sort of the money, the money and computing rates shaping up?Reid: So I kind of think about two. There's kind of two lines of trends. There's one line, which is the larger and larger models, which by the way, you say, well, okay, so does the scale compute and one x flop goes to two x flops, and does your performance function go up by that?And it doesn't have to go up by a hundred percent or, or two x or plus one x. It could go up by 25%, but sometimes that really matters. Coding doctors, you know, legal, other things. Well, it's like actually, in fact, it, even though it's twice as expensive, a 25% increase in, you know, twice as expensive of compute, the 25% increase in performance is worth it. And I think you then have a large scale model, like a set of things that are kind of going along need to be using the large scale models.Then I think there's a set of things that don't have that need. And for example, that's one of the reasons I wasn't really surprised at all by the profusion of image generation, cuz those are, you know, generally speaking, trainable for a million to $10 million. I think there's gonna be a range of those.I think, you know, maybe someone will figure out how to do, you know, a hundred-million version and once they figured out how to do a hundred-million dollar version, someone also figured out how to do the 30-million version of that hundred-million dollar version. And there's a second line going on where all of these other smaller models will fit into interesting businesses. And then I think a lot of people will either deploy an open source model that they're using themselves, train their own model, get a special deal with, like a model provider or something else as a way of doing it.And so I think the short answer is there will be both, and you have to be looking at this from what's the specific that this business is doing. You know, the classic issues of, you know, how do you go to market, how do you create a competitive mode? What are the things that give you real, enduring value that people will pay for in some way in a business?All of the, those questions still apply, but the, but, but there's gonna be a panoply of answers, depending on the different models of how it playsEric: Do you think spend on this space in terms of computing will be larger in ‘24 and then larger in 25?Reid: Yes. Unquestionably,Eric: We're on the, we're still on the rise.Reid: Oh, yes. Unquestionably.Eric: That's great for a certain company that you're on the board of.Reid: Well look, and it's not just great for Microsoft. There are these other ones, you know, AWS, Google, but…Eric: Right. It does feel like Amazon's somewhat sleepy here. Do you have any view there?Reid: Well, I think they have begun to realize, what I've heard from the market is that they've begun to realize that they should have some stuff here. I don't think they've yet gotten fully underway. I think they are trying to train some large language models themselves. I don't know if they've even realized that there is a skill to training those large language models, cause like, you know, sometimes people say, well, you just turn on and you run the, run the large language model, the, the training regime that you read in the papers and then you make stuff.We've seen a lot of failures, of people trying to build these things and failing to do so, so, you know, there's, there's an expertise that you learn in doing it as well. And so I think—Eric: Sorry to interrupt—if Microsoft is around Open AI and Google is around Anthropic, is Amazon gonna be around stability? That's sort of the question that I'll put out to the world. I don't know if you have.Reid: I certainly don't know anything. And in the case of, you know, very, very, very, um, a politely said, um, Anthropic and OpenAI have scale with huge models. Stability is all small models, so, hmm.Eric: Yeah. Interesting. I, I don't think I've asked you sort of directly about sort of stepping off the Open AI board. I mean, I would assume you would prefer to be on the board or…?Reid: Yeah. Well, so look, it was a funny thing because, um, you know, I was getting more and more requests from various Greylock portfolio companies cause we've been investing in AI stuff for over five years. Like real AI, not just the, we call it “software AI”, but actual AI companies.For a while and I was getting more and more requests to do it and I was like oh, you know, what I did before was, well here's the channel. Like here is the guy who, the person who handles the API request goes, go talk to them. Like, why can't you help me? I was like, well, I'm on the board.I have a responsibility to not be doing that. And then I realized that, oh s**t, it's gonna look more and more. Um, I might have a real conflict of interest here, even as we're really carefully navigating it and, and it was really important cause you know various forces are gonna kind of try to question the frankly, super deep integrity of Open AI.It's like, look, I, Sam, I think it might be best even though I remain a fan, an ally, um, to helping, I think it may be best for Open AI. And generally to step off a board to avoid a conflict of interest. And we talked about a bunch and said, okay, fine, we'll do it. And you know, I had dinner with Sam last night and most of what we were talking about was kind of the range of what's going on and what are the important things that open eyes need to solve? And how should we be interfacing with governments so that governments understand? What are the key things that, that, that should be in the mix? And what great future things for humanity are really important not to fumble in the, in the generally, like everyone going, oh, I'm worrying. And then I said, oh, I got a question for you. And he's like, yeah, okay. I'm like, now that I'm no longer on the board, could I ask you to personally look at unblocking, my portfolio company's thing to the API? Because I couldn't ever ask you that question before. Cause I would be unethical. But now I'm not on the board, so can I ask the question?He's like, sure, I'll look into it. I'm like, great, right? And that's the substance of it, which I never would've done before. But that wasn't why, I mean, obviously love Sam and the Open AI team.Eric: The fact that you're sort of a Democratic super donor was that in the calculus? Or, because I mean, we are seeing Republican… well, I didn't think that at all coming into this conversation, but just hearing what you're saying. Looking at it now, it feels like Republicans are like trying to find something to be angry about.Reid: WellEric: These AI things, I don't quite…Reid: The unfortunate thing about the, the most vociferous of the republican media ecosystem is they just invent fiction, like their hallucination full out.Eric: Right.Reid: I mean, it just like, I mean, the amount of just like, you know, 2020 election denial and all the rest, which you can tell from having their text released from Fox News that like, here are these people who are on camera going on where you have a question about, you know, what happened in the election.And they're texting each other going, oh my God, this is insane. This is a coup, you know, da da da. And you're like, okay. Anyway, so, so all like, they don't require truth to generate. Heat and friction. So that was, wasn't that no, no. It's just really, it's kind of the question of, when you're serving on a board, you have to understand what your mission is very deeply and, and to navigate it.And part of the 501(C)(3) boards is to say, look, obviously I contribute by being a board member and helping and navigate various circumstances and all the rest. And, you know, I can continue to be a counselor and an aid to the company not being on the board. And one of the things I think is gonna be very important for the next X years, for the entire world to know is that open AI takes its ethics super seriously,Eric: Right.Reid: As do I.Eric: Does that fit with having to invest? I mean, there are lots of companies that do great things. They have investors. I believe in companies probably more than personally I believe in charities to accomplish things. But the duality of OpenAI is extremely confusing. Like, was Greylock, did Greylock itself invest a lot or you invested early as an angel?Reid: I was the founding investor as an angel, as a, as a program related investment from my foundation. Because like I started, I was among the first people to make a philanthropic donation to Open AI. Just straight out, you know, here's a grant by Wednesday, then Sam and Crew came up with this idea for doing this commercial lp, and I said, look, I, I'll help and I have no idea if this will be an interesting economic investment.They didn't have a business plan, they didn't have a revenue plan, they didn't have a product plan. I brought it to Greylock. We talked about it and they said, look, we think this will be possibly a really interesting technology, but you know, part of our responsibility to our LPs, which you know, includes a whole bunch of universities and else we invest in businesses and there is no business plan.Eric: So is that the Khosla did? Khosla's like we invested wild things. Anyway, we don't care. That's sort of what Vinod wants to project anyway, so yeah.Reid: You know, yes, that's exactly the same. So I put them 50 and then he put in a, I think he was the only venture fund investing in that round. But like, there was no business plan, there was no revenue model, there was no go to market…Eric: Well, Sam basically says, someday we're gonna have AGI and we're gonna ask you how to make a bunch of money? Like, is he, that's a joke, right? Or like, how much is he joking?Reid: It's definitely, it's not a 100% joke and it's not a 0% joke. It's a question around, the mission is really about how do we get to AGI or as close to AGI as useful and to make it useful for humanity. And by the way, the closer you get to AGI, the more interesting technologies fall out, including the ability to have the technology itself solve various problems.So if you said, we have a business model problem, it's like, well ask the thing. Now, if you currently sit down and ask, you know, ChatGPT what the business model is, you'll get something pretty vague and generic that wouldn't get you a meeting with a venture capitalist because it's like “we will have ad supported”... you're like, okay. Right.Eric: Don't you have a company that's trying to do pitch decks now or something?Reid: Oh yeah, Tome. No, and it's awesome, but by the way, that's the right kind of thing. Because, because what it does is you say, hey, give me a set of tiles, together with images and graphics and things arguing X and then you start working with the AI to improve it. Say, oh, I need a slide that does this and I need a catchier headline here, and, and you know, da da da.And then you, and you know, obviously you can edit it yourself and so on. So that's the kind of amplification. Now you don't say, give me my business model, right?Eric: You're like, I have this business model, like articulate it.Reid: Exactly.Eric: Um, I, politics, I mean, I feel like we, we live through such like a… you know what I mean, I feel like Silicon Valley, you know, has like, worked on PE everybody be able to, you know, everybody can get along. There's sort of competition, but then you sort of still stay close to any, everybody like, you, you especially like are good, you know, you you are in the PayPal mafia with a lot of people who are fairly very conservative now.The Trump years broke that in some ways and particular, and that, yeah. So how did you maintain those relationships?I see headlines that say you're friends with Peter Thiel. What is, what's the state of your friendship with Peter Thiel and how, how did it survive?I guess the Trump years is the question.Reid: Well, I think the thing that Peter and I learned when we were undergraduate at Stanford together is it's very important to… cause we, you know, I was a lefty. He was a righty. We'd argue a lot to maintain conversation and to argue things. It's difficult to argue on things that feel existential and it's ethically challenged is things around Trump. You know, the, you know, Trump feels to be a corrosive asset upon our democracy that is disfiguring us and staining us to the world. And so to have a dispassionate argument about it is, it's challenging. And it ends up with some uneven ground and statements like, I can't believe you're f*****g saying that, as part of dialogue.But on the other hand, you know, maintaining dialogue is I think part of how we make progress as society. And I basically sympathetic to people as long as they are legitimately and earnestly and committed to the dialogue and discussion of truth between them and committed otherwise.And so, you know, there are folks from the PayPal years that I don't really spend much time talking to, right?. There are others that I do because that conversation about discovering who we are and who we should be is really important. And you can't allow your own position to be the definer.It almost goes back to what we were talking about, the AI side, which is make sure you're talking to other smart people who challenge you to make sure you're doing the right thing. And that's, I think, a good general life principle.Eric: Well, you know, I feel like part of what my dream of like the Silicon Valley world is that we have these, you know, we have, Twitter is like the open forum. We're having sincere sort of on the level debates, but then you see something like, you know, the…Reid: You don't think it's the modern Seinfeld show I got? Well, not Seinfeld, um, Springer, Jerry Springer.Eric: Yeah, that's, yeah. Right. But I just feel like the sort of like, if the arguments are on the level issue is my problem with some of the sort of, I don't know, Peter Theil arguments, that he's not actually publicly advancing his beliefs in a sincere way, and that that's almost more corrosive.Reid: Oh, that's totally corrosive. And as much as that's happening, it's terrible. And that's one of the things that I, um, you know, in conversations I have, I push people including Peter on a lot.Eric: Yeah. Are you still, are you still gonna donate a lot, or what was, what's your, are you as animated about the Democratic party and working through sort of donor channels at the moment?Reid: Well, what I would say is I think that we have a responsibility to try to make, like with, it's kind of the Spider-Man ethics. With power comes responsibility, with wealth comes responsibility, and you have to try to help contribute to… what is the better society that we should be living and navigating in?And so I stay committed on that basis. And I do think there are some really amazing people in the administration. I think Biden is kind of a good everyday guy.Eric: Yeah.Reid: In fact, good for trying to build bridges in the country. I think there are people like Secretary Raimondo and Secretary Buttigieg who are thinking intensely about technology and what should be done in the future.And I think there's other folks now, I think there's a bunch of folks on the democratic side that I think are more concerned with their demagoguery than they are with the right thing in society. And so I tend to be, you know, unsympathetic to, um, you know…Eric: I know, Michael Moritz, it's Sequoia, that oped sort of criticizing San Francisco government, you know, and there's, there's certainly this sort of woke critique of the Democratic Party. I'm curious if there's a piece of it sort of outside of he governance that you're…Reid: Well, the interesting thing about woke is like, well, we're anti woke. And you're like, well, don't you think being awake is a good thing? I mean, it's kind of a funny thing. Eric: And sort of the ill-defined nature of woke is like key to the allegation because it's like, what's the substantive thing you're saying there? And you know, I mean we we're seeing Elon tweet about race right now, which is sort of terrifying anyway.Reid: Yeah. I think the question on this stuff is to try to say, look, people have a lot of different views and a lot of different things and some of those views are, are bad, especially in kind of minority and need to be advocated against in various… part of why we like democracy is to have discourse.I'm very concerned about the status of public discourse. And obviously most people tend to focus that around social media, which obviously has some legitimate things that we need to talk about. But on the other hand, they don't track like these, like opinion shows on, like, Fox News that represent themselves implicitly as news shows and saying, man, this is the following thing.Like there's election fraud in 2020, and then when they're sued for the various forms of deformation, they say, we're just an entertainment show. We don't do anything like news. So we have that within that we are already struggling on a variety of these issues within society. and we, I think we need to sort them all out.Eric: Is there anything on the AI front that we missed or that you wanted to make sure to talk about? I think we covered so much great ground. Reid: And, and we can do it again, right. You know, it's all, it's great.Eric: I love it. This was all the things you're interested in and I'm interested in, so great. I really enjoyed having you on the podcast and thanks.Reid: Likewise. And, you know, I follow the stuff you do and it's, it's, it's cool and keep doing it. 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For the first episode of the Newcomer podcast, I sat down with Reid Hoffman — the PayPal mafia member, LinkedIn co-founder, Greylock partner, and Microsoft board member. Hoffman had just stepped off OpenAI's board of directors. Hoffman traced his interest in artificial intelligence back to a conversation with Elon Musk.“This kicked off, actually, in fact, with a dinner with Elon Musk years ago,” Hoffman said. Musk told Hoffman that he needed to dive into artificial intelligence during conversations about a decade ago. “This is part of how I operate,” Hoffman remembers. “Smart people from my network tell me things, and I go and do things. And so I dug into it and I'm like, ‘Oh, yes, we have another wave coming.'”This episode of Newcomer is brought to you by VantaSecurity is no longer a cost center — it's a strategic growth engine that sets your business apart. That means it's more important than ever to prove you handle customer data with the utmost integrity. But demonstrating your security and compliance can be time-consuming, tedious, and expensive. Until you use Vanta.Vanta's enterprise-ready Trust Management Platform empowers you to:* Centralize and scale your security program* Automate compliance for the most sought-after frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR* Earn and maintain the trust of customers and vendors alikeWith Vanta, you can save up to 400 hours and 85% of costs. Win more deals and enable growth quickly, easily, and without breaking the bank.For a limited time, Newcomer listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Go to vanta.com/newcomer to get started.Why I Wanted to Talk to Reid Hoffman & What I Took AwayHoffman is a social network personified. Even his journey to something as wonky as artificial intelligence is told through his connections with people. In a world of algorithms and code, Hoffman is upfront about the extent to which human connections decide Silicon Valley's trajectory. (Of course they are paired with profound technological developments that are far larger than any one person or network.)When it comes to the rapidly developing future powered by large language models, a big question in my mind is who exactly decides how these language models work? Sydney appeared in Microsoft Bing and then disappeared. Microsoft executives can dispatch our favorite hallucinations without public input. Meanwhile, masses of images can be gobbled up without asking their creators and then the resulting image generation tools can be open-sourced to the world. It feels like AI super powers come and go with little notice. It's a world full of contradictions. There's constant talk of utopias and dystopias and yet startups are raising conventional venture capital financing.The most prominent player in artificial intelligence — OpenAI — is a non-profit that raised from Tiger Global. It celebrates its openness in its name and yet competes with companies whose technology is actually open-sourced. OpenAI's governance structure and priorities largely remain a mystery. Finally, unlike tech's conservative billionaires who throw their money into politics, in the case of Hoffman, here is a tech overlord that I seem to mostly agree with politically. I wanted to know what that would be like. Is it just good marketing? And where exactly is his heart and political head at right now?I thought he delivered. I didn't feel like he was dodging my questions, even in a world where maintaining such a wide network requires diplomacy. Hoffman seemed eager and open — even if he started to bristle at what he called my “edgy words.”Some Favorite QuotesWe covered a lot of ground in our conversation. We talked about AI sentience and humans' failures to identify consciousness within non-human beings. We talked about the coming rise in AI cloud compute spending and how Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are positioned in the AI race.Hoffman said he had one major condition for getting involved in OpenAI back in the early days when Musk was still on board.“My price for participation was to ask Elon to stop saying the word “robocalypse,” Hoffman told me. “Because I thought that the problem was it's very catchy and it evokes fear.”I asked Hoffman why he thought Musk got involved in artificial intelligence in the first place when Musk seems so worried about how it might develop. Why get the ball rolling down the hill at all, I wondered?Hoffman replied that many people in the field of artificial intelligence had “messiah complexes.”“It's the I am the one who must bring this — Prometheus, the fire to humanity,” Hoffman said. “And you're like, ‘Okay, I kind of think it should be us versus an individual.'” He went on, “Now, us can't be 8 billion people — us is a small group. But I think, more or less, you see the folks who are steering with a moral compass try to say, how do I get at least 10 to 15 people beyond myself with their hands on the steering wheel in deep conversations in order to make sure you get there? And then let's make sure that we're having the conversations with the right communities.”I raised the possibility that this merely suggested oligarchic control of artificial intelligence rather than dictatorial control. We also discussed Hoffman's politics, including his thoughts on Joe Biden and “woke” politics. I asked him about the state of his friendship with fellow PayPal mafia member Peter Thiel. “I basically am sympathetic to people as long as they are legitimately and earnestly committed to the dialogue and discussion of truth between them and not committed otherwise,” Hoffman said. “There are folks from the PayPal years that I don't really spend much time talking to. There are others that I do continue because that conversation about discovering who we are and who we should be is really important. And you can't allow your own position to be the definer.”I suggested that Thiel's public views sometimes seemed insincere.“Oh, that's totally corrosive,” Hoffman said. “And as much as that's happening, it's terrible. And that's one of the things that in conversations I have, I push people, including Peter, on a lot.”Give it a listen.Find the PodcastRead the TranscriptEric: Reid, thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm very excited for this conversation. You know, I'm getting ready for my own AI conference at the end of this month, so hopefully this is sort of a prep by the end of this conversation, we'll all be super smart and ready for that. I feel like there've been so many rounds of sort of AI as sort of the buzzword of the day.This clearly seems the hottest. When did you get into this moment of it? I mean, obviously you just stepped off the Open AI board. You were on that board. Like how, when did you start to see this movement that we're experiencing right now coming.Reid: Well, it's funny because my undergraduate major was artificial intelligence and cognitive science. So I've, I've been around the hoop for multiple waves for a long time and I think this kicked off actually, in fact, with a dinner with Elon Musk years ago. You know, 10-ish years ago, Elon and I would have dinner about once a quarter and he's like, well, are you paying attention to this AI stuff?And I'm like, well, I majored in it and you know, I know about this stuff. He's like, no, you need to get back involved. And I was like, all right. This is part of how I operate is smart people from my network tell me things and I go and do things. And so I dug into it and I went, oh yes, we have another wave coming.And this was probably about seven or eight years ago, when I, when I saw the beginning of the wave or the seismic event. Maybe it was a seismic event out at sea and I was like, okay, there's gonna be a tsunami here and we should start getting ready cause the tsunami is actually gonna be amazingly great and interesting.Eric: And that—is that the beginning of Open AI?Reid: Open AI is later. What I did is I went and made connections with the kind of the heads of every AI lab and major company because I concluded that I thought that the AI revolution will be primarily driven by large companies initially because of the scale compute requirements.And so, you know, talked to Demis Hassabis, met Mustafa Suleyman, talked to Yann LeCun, talked to Jeff Dean, you know, all these kind of folks and kind of, you know, built all that. And then it was later in conversations with Sam and Elon that I said, look, we need to do something that's a for pro humanity. Not just commercial effort. And my price for participation, cause I thought it was a great idea, but my price for participation was to ask Elon to stop saying the word robocalypse. Because I thought that the problem was that it's very catchy and it evokes fear. And actually, in fact, one of the things I think about this whole area is that it's so much more interesting and has so much amazing opportunity for humanity.A little bit like, I don't know if you saw the Atlantic article I wrote that we evolve ourselves through technology and I'm, you know, going to be doing some writings around describing AI as augmented intelligence versus artificial intelligence. And I wanted to kind of build that positive, optimistic case that I think is the higher probability that I think we can shape towards and so forth.So it's like, okay, I'm in, but no more Robocalypse.Eric: I appreciate the ultimate sort of network person that you tell the story through people. I always appreciate when the origin stories of technology actually come through the human beings. With Elon in particular, I'm sort of confused by his position because it seems like he's very afraid of AI.And if that's the case, why would you want to, like, do anything to sort of get the ball rolling down the hill? Like, isn't there a sort of just like, stay away from it, man, if you think it's so bad. How do you see his thinking? And I'm sure it's evolved.Reid: Well, I think his instinct for the good and the challenging of this is he tends to think AI will only be good if I'm the one who's in control.Eric: Sort of, yeah.Reid: Yeah. And this is actually somewhat replete within the modern AI field. Not everybody but this. And Elon is a public enough figure that I think, you know, making this comment of him is not talking at a school.Other people would, there's a surprising number of Messiah complexes in the field of AI, and, and it's the, I am the one who must bring this, you know, Prometheus, you know, the Fire to humanity. And you're like, okay, I kind of think it should be us, right? Versus an individual. Now us can't be 8 billion people, us as a small group, but I think more or less you see the, the folks who are steering with a moral compass try to say, how do I get at least 10 to 15 people beyond myself with their hands on the steering wheel in deep conversations in order to make sure you get there and then let, let's make sure that we're having the conversations with the right communities.Like if you say, well, is this going to, you know, institutionalize, ongoing, um, you know, power structures or racial bias, something else? Well, we're talking to the people to make sure that we're going to minimize that, especially over time and navigate it as a real issue. And so those are the, like, that's the kind of anti Messiah complex, which, which is more or less the efforts that I tend to get involved in.Eric: Right. At least sort of oligarchy, of AI control instead of just dictatorship of it.Reid: Well, yeah, and it depends a little bit, even on oligarchy, look, things are built by small numbers of people. It's just a fact, right? Like, there aren't more than, you know, a couple of founders, maybe maximum five in any, any particular thing. There is, you know, there's reasons why. When you have a construction project, you have a head of construction, right?Et cetera. The important thing is to make sure that's why you have, why you have a CEO, you have a board of directors. That's why you have, you know, you say, well, do we have the right thing where a person is accountable to a broader group? And that broader group feels their governance responsibility seriously.So oligarchy is a—Eric: a chargedReid: is a charged word. And I,Eric: There's a logic to it. I'm not, I'm not using it to say it doesn't make sense that you want the people to really understand it around, around it. Um, I mean, specifically with Open AI, I mean, you, you just stepped off the board. You're also on the board of Microsoft, which is obviously a very significant player.In this future, I mean, it's hard to be open. I get a little frustrated with the “open” in “Open AI” because I feel like there's a lot that I don't understand. I'm like, maybe they should change the name a little bit, but is it still a charity in your mind? I mean, it's obviously raised from Tiger Global, the ultimate prophet maker.Like, how should we think about the sort of core ambitions of Open AI?Reid: Well, um, one, the board I was on was a fine one and they've been very diligent about making sure that all of the controls, including for the subsidiary company are from the 501(C)(3) and diligent to its mission, which is staffed by people on the 501(C)(3) board with the responsibilities of being on a 5 0 1 board, which is being in service of the mission, not doing, you know, private inurement and other kinds of things.And so I actually think it is fundamentally still a 501(C)(3). The challenge is if you kind of say, you look at this and say, well, in order to be a successful player in the modern scale AI, you need to have billions of dollars of compute. Where do you get those billions of dollars? Because, you know, the foundations and the philanthropy industry is generally speaking bad at tech and bad at anything other than little tiny checks in tech.And so you said, well, it's really important to do this. So part of what I think, you know, Sam and that group of folks came up with this kind of clever thing to say, well, look, we're about beneficial AI, we're about AI for humanity. We're about making an, I'll make a comment on “open” in a second, but we are gonna generate some commercially valuable things.What if we struck a commercial deal? So you can have the commercial things or you can share the commercial things. You invest in us in order to do this, and then we make sure that the AI has the right characteristics. And then the “open”, you know, all short names have, you know, some simplicities to them.The idea is open to the world in terms of being able to use it and benefit from it. It doesn't mean the same thing as open source because AI is actually one of those things where opening, um, where you could do open source, you could actually be creating something dangerous. As a modern example, last year, Open AI deliberately… DALL·E 2 was ready four months before it went out. I know cause I was playing with it. They did the four months to do safety training and the kind of safety training is, well, let's make sure that individuals can't be libeled. Let's make sure you can't create as best we can, child sexual material. Let's make sure you can't do revenge porn and we'll serve it through the API and we'll make it unchangeable on that.And then the open source people come out and they go do whatever you want and then wow, you get all this crazy, terrible stuff. So “open” is openness of availability, but still with safety and still with, kind of call it the pro-human controls. And that's part of what OpenAI means in this.Eric: I wrote in sort of a mini essay in the newsletter about, like tech fatalism and it fits into your sort of messiah complex that you're talking about, if I'm a young or new startup entrepreneur, it's like this is my moment if I hold back, you know, there's a sense that somebody else is gonna do it too. This isn't necessarily research. Some of the tools are findable, so I need to do it. If somebody's going to, it's easy if you're using your own personhood to say, I'm better than that guy! Even if I have questions about it, I should do it. So that, I think we see that over and over again. Obviously the stakes with AI, I think we both agree are much larger.On the other hand, with AI, there's actually, in my view, been a little bit more restraint. I mean, Google has been a little slower. Facebook seems a little worried, like, I don't know. How do you agree with that sort of view of tech fatalism? Is there anything to be done about it or it's just sort of—if it's possible, it's gonna happen, so the best guy, the best team should do it?Or, or how do you think about that sense of inevitability on if it's possible, it'll be built?Reid: Well, one thing is you like edgy words, so what you describe is tech fatalism, I might say as something more like tech inevitability or tech destiny. And part of it is what, I guess what I would say is for example, we are now in a AI moment and era. There's global competition for it. It's scale compute.It's not something that even somebody like a Google or someone else can kind of have any kind of, real ball control on. But the way I look at it is, hey, look, there's, there's utopic outcomes and dystopic outcomes and it's within our control to steer it. Um, and even to steer it at speed, even under competition because.For example, obviously the general discourse within media is, oh my God, what's happening with the data and what's gonna happen with the bias and what's gonna happen with the crazy conversations, with Bing Chat and all the rest of this stuff. And you're like, well, what am I obsessed about? I'm obsessed about the fact that I have line of sight to an AI tutor and an AI doctor on every cell phone.And think about if you delay that, whatever number of years you delay that, what your human cost is of delaying that, right? And it's like, how do we get that? And for example, people say, wow, the real issue is that Bing chat model is gonna go off the rails and have a drunken cocktail party conversation because it's provoked to do so and can't run away from the person who's provoking it.Uh, and you say, well, is that the real issue? Or is it a real issue? Let's make sure that as many people as we can have access to that AI doctor have access to that AI tutor that where, where we can, where not only, you know, cause obviously technology cause it's expensive initially benefits elites and people are rich.And by the way, that's a natural way of how our capitalist system and all the rest works. But let's try to get it to everyone else as quickly as possible, right?Eric: I a hundred percent agree with that. So I don't want any of my sort of, cynical take like, oh my God, this version.I'd also extend it, you know, I think you're sort of referencing maybe the Sydney situation where you have Kevin Rus in New York Times, you know, communicating with Bing's version of ChatGPT and sort of finding this character who's sort of goes by Sydney from the origin story.And Ben Thompson sort of had a similar experience. And I would almost say it's sad for the world to be deprived of that too. You know, there's like a certain paranoia, it's like, it's like, oh, I wanna meet this sort of seemingly intelligent character. I don't know. What do you make of that whole episode? I mean, people really, I mean, Ben Thompson, smart tech writers really latched onto this as something that they found moving.I don't know. Is there anything you take away from that saga and do you think we'll see those sort of, I don't know, intelligent characters again,Reid: Well for sure. I think 2023 will be at least the first year of the so-called chatbot. Not just because of ChatGPT. And I think that we will have a bunch of different chat bots. I think we'll have chatbots that are there to be, you know, entertainment companions, witty dialogue participants.I think we'll have chatbots that are there to be information like Insta, Wikipedia, kind of things. I think we'll have chatbots that are there to just have someone to talk to. So I think there'll be a whole, whole range of things. And I think we will have all that experience.And I think part of the thing is to say, look, what are the parameters by which you should say the bots should absolutely not do X. And it's fine if these people want a bot that's like, you know, smack talking and these people want something that you know, goes, oh heck. Right?You know, like, what's, what's the range of that? And obviously children get in the mix and, and the questions around things that we already encounter a lot with search, which is like could a chat bot enable self-harm in a way that would be really bad?Let's really try to make sure that someone who's depressed doesn't figure out a way to harm themselves either with search or with chat bots.Eric: Is there a psychologically persuasive, so it's not just the information provided, it's the sense that they might be like walking you towards something less serious.Reid: And they are! This is the thing that's amazing. and it's part of the reason why like everyone should have some interaction with these in some emotional, tangible way. We are really passing the Turing test. This is the thing that I had visibility on a few years ago because I was like, okay, we kind of judge, you know, intelligence and sentience like that, Google engineers like it.I asked if it was conscious and it said it was because we use language as a way of doing that. And you're like, well, but look, that tells you that your language use is not quite fully there. And because part of what's really amazing about, “hallucinations”—and I'm probably gonna do a fireside chat with the gray matter thing on hallucinations, maybe later this week—where the hallucination is, on one hand it says this amazingly accurate, wonderful thing, very persuasively, and then it says this other thing really persuasively that's total fiction, right? And you're like, wow, you sound very persuasive in both cases. But that one's true and that one's fiction.And that's part of the reason why I kind of go back to the augmented intelligence and all the things that I see going on with in 2023 is much less replacement and much more augmentation. It's not zero replacement, but it's much more augmentation in terms of how this plays. And that is super exciting.Eric: Yeah. I mean, to some degree it reflects sort of the weakness in human beings' own abilities to read what's happening. Ahead of this interview, I was talking to the publicly available ChatGPT. I don't know if you saw but I was asking it for questions and I felt like it delivered a very reasonable set of questions. You know, you've written about Blitzscaling, so [ChatGPT] is like, let's ask about that. It's, you know, ask in the context of Microsoft. But when I was like, have you [ChatGPT] ever watched Joe Rogan? Have you ever been on a podcast? Sometimes maybe you should have a long sort of, you should have a statement like I'm doing right now where I sort of have some things I'm saying.Then I ask a question. Other times it should be short and sweet. Sometimes it, you know, annoys you and says oligarchy, like explaining to the chat bot. [In an interview, a journalist] can't just ask a list of like, straightforward questions and it felt like it didn't really even get that. And I get that there's some sort of, we're, we're starting to have a conversation now with companies like Jasper, where it's almost like the language prompting itself.I think Sam Altman was maybe saying it's like almost a form of plain language like coding because you have to figure out how to get what you want out of them. And maybe it was just my failure to explain it, but as a journalist replacing questions, I didn't find the current model of ChatGPT really capable of that.Reid: No, that's actually one of the things on the ChatGPT I find is, like, for example, you ask what questions to ask Reid Hoffman in a podcast interview, and you'll get some generic ones. It'll say like, well, what's going on with new technologies like AI and, and what's going on in Silicon Valley? And you know, and you're like, okay, sure.But those aren't the really interesting questions. That's not what makes me a great journalist, which is kind of a lens to something that people can learn from and that will evolve and change that'll get better. But that's again, one of the reasons why I think it's a people plus machine. Because for example, if I were to say, hey, what should I ask Eric about? Or what should I talk to Eric about and go to? Yeah, gimme some generic stuff. Now if I said, oh, give me a briefing on, um, call it, um, UN governance systems as they apply to AI, because I want to be able to talk about this. I didn't do this, but it would give me a kind of a quick Wikipedia briefing and that would make my conversation more interesting and I might be able to ask a question about the governance system or something, you know, as a way of doing it.And that's what AI is, I think why the combo is so great. Um, and anyway, so that's what we should be aiming towards. It isn't to say, by the way, sometimes like replacement is a good thing. For example, you go to autonomous vehicles and say, hey, look, if we could wave a wand and every car on the road today would be an autonomous vehicle, we'd probably save, we'd probably go from 40,000 deaths in the US per, you know, year to, you know, maybe a thousand or 2000. And you're like, you're shaving 38,000 lives a year, in doing this. It's a good thing. And, you know, it will have a positive vector on gridlocks and for climate change and all the rest of the stuff.And you go, okay, that replacement, yes, we have to navigate truck jobs and all the rest, but that replacement's good. But I think a lot of it is going to end up being, you know, kind of, various forms of amplification. Like if you get to journalists, you go, oh, it'll help me ask, figure out which interesting questions to add.Not because it'll just go here, here's your script to ask questions. But you can get better information to prep your thinking on it.Eric: Yeah. I'm glad you brought up like the self-driving car case and, you know, you're, are you still on the board of Aurora?Reid: I am.Eric: I've, you know, I covered Uber, so I was in their self-driving cars very early, and they made a lot of promises. Lyft made a lot of promises.I mean, I feel like part of my excitement about this sort of generative AI movement is that it feels like it doesn't require completeness in the same way that self-driving cars do. You know? And that, that, that's been a barrier to self-driving cars. On the flip side, you know, sometimes we sort of wave away the inaccuracy and then we say, you know, we sort of manage it.I think that's what we were sort of talking about earlier. You imagine it in some of the completeness that could come. So I guess the question here is just do you think, what I'm calling the completeness problem. I guess just the idea that it needs to be sort of fully capable will be an issue with the large language models or do you think you have this sort of augmented model where it could sort of stop now and still be extremely useful to much of society?Reid: I think it could stop now and be extremely useful. I've got line of sight on current technology for a tutor, for a doctor, for a bunch of other stuff. One of the things my partner and I wrote last year was that within five years, there's gonna be a co-pilot for every profession.The way to think about that is what professionals do. They process information, they take some kind of action. Sometimes that's generating other information, just like you see with Microsoft's co-pilot product for engineers. And what you can see happening with DallE and other image generation for graphic designers, you'll see this for every professional, that there will be a co-pilot on today's technology that can be built.That's really amazing. I do think that as you continue to make progress, you can potentially make them even more amazing, because part of what happened when you move from, you know, GPT3 to 3.5, which is all of a sudden it can write sonnets. Right? You didn't really know that it was gonna be able to write sonnets.That's giving people superpowers. Most people, including myself—I mean, look, I could write a sonnet if you gave me a couple of days and a lot of coffee and a lot of attempts to really try.Eric: But you wouldn't.Reid: You wouldn't. Yeah. But now I can go, oh, you know, I'd like to, to, um, write a sonnet about my friend Sam Altman.And I can go down and I can sit there and I can kind of type, you know, duh da, and I can generate, well, I don't like that one. Oh, but then I like this one, you know, and da da da. And, and that, that gives you superpowers. I mean, think about what you can do for writing, a whole variety of things with that. And that I think the more and more completeness is the word you are using is I think also a powerful thing. Even though what we have right now is amazing.Eric: Is GPT4 a big improvement over what we have? I assume you've seen a fair bit of unreleased, stuff. Like how hyped should we be about the improvement level?Reid: I have. I'm not really allowed to say very much about it cause, you know, part of the responsibilities of former board members and confidentiality. But I do think that it will be a nice—I think people will look at it and go, Ooh, that's cool. And it will be another iteration, another thing as amazing as ChatGPT has, and obviously that's kind of in the last few months. It's kind of taken the world by storm, opening up this vista of imagination and so forth.I think GPT4 will be another step forward where people will go, Ooh, that's, that, that's another cool thing. I think that's—can't be more specific than that, but watch this space cause it'll be cool.Eric: Throughout this conversation we've danced around this sort of artificial general intelligence question. starting with the discussion of Elon and the creation of eventually Open AI. I'm curious how close you think we are with AGI and this idea of a sort of, I mean, people define it so many different ways, you know, it's more sophisticated than humans in some tasks, you know, mini tasks, whatever.How, how do you think we're far from that? Or how, how, how do you see that playing out?Reid: Personally amongst a lot of the people who are in the field, I'm probably on the, we're-much-further-than-we-think stage. Now, some of that's because I've lived through this before with my undergraduate degree and the, you know, the pattern generally is, oh my God, we've gotten this computer to do this amazing thing that we thought was formally the provence of only these cognitive human beings.And it could do that. So then by the way, in 10 years it'll be solving new science problems like fusion and all the rest. And if you go back to the seventies, you saw that same dialogue. I mean, it, it's, it's an ongoing thing. Now we do have a more amazing set of cognitive capabilities than we did before, and there are some reasons to argue that it could be in a decade or two. Because you say, well, these large language models can enable coding and that coding can all, can then be self, reflective and generative, and that can then make something go. But when I look at the coding and how that works right now, it doesn't generate the kind of code that's like, oh, that's amazing new code.It helps with the, oh, I want to do a parser for quick sort, right? You know, like that kind of stuff. And it's like, okay, that's great. Or a systems integration use of an API or calling in an API for a spellchecker or whatever. Like it's really helpful stuff on engineers, but it's not like, oh my God, it's now inventing the new kind of training of large scale models techniques.And so I think even some of the great optimists will tell you of the great, like believers that it'll be soon and say there's one major invention. And the thing is, once you get to one major invention, is that one major invention? Is that three major inventions? Is it 10 major inventions?Like I think we are some number of major inventions away. I don't, I certainly don't think it's impossible to get there.Eric: Sorry. The major inventions are us human beings build, building things into the system or…?Reid: Yeah. Like for example, you know, can it do, like, for example, a classic, critique of a lot of large language models is can it do common sense reasoning.Eric: Gary Marcus is very…Reid: Exactly. Right. Exactly. And you know, the short answer right now is the large language models are approximating common sense reasoning.Now they're doing it in a powerful and interesting enough way that you're like, well, that's pretty useful. It's pretty helpful about what it's doing, but I agree that it's not yet doing all of that. And also you get problems like, you know, what are called one shot learning. Can you learn from one instance of it?Cause currently the training requires lots and lots of compute processing over days or in self play, can you have an accurate memory store that you update? Like for example, you say now fact X has happened, your entire world based on fact X. Look, there's a bunch of this stuff to all go.And the question is, is that one major invention is that, you know, five major inventions, and by the way, major inventions or major inventions even all the amazing stuff we've done over the last five to 10 years. Major inventions on major inventions. So I myself tend to be two things on the AGI one.I tend to think it's further than most people think. And I don't know if that further is it's 10 years versus five or 20 years versus 10 or 50 years versus 20. I don't, I don't really know.Eric: In your lifetime, do you think?Reid: It's possible, although I don't know. But let me give two other lenses I think on the AGI question cause the other thing that people tend to do is they tend to go, there's like this AI, which is technique machine learning, and there's totally just great, it's augmented intelligence and then there's AGI and who knows what happens with AGI.And you say, well first is AGI is a whole range of possible things. Like what if you said, Hey, I can build something that's the equivalent of a decent engineer or decent doctor, but to run it costs me $200 an hour and I have AGI? But it's $200 an hour. And you're like, okay, well that's cool and that means we can, we can get as many of them as we need. But it's expensive. And so it isn't like all of a sudden, you know, Terminator or you know, or inventing fusion or something like that is AGI and or a potential version of AGI. So what is AGI is the squishy thing that people then go, magic. The second thing is, the way that I've looked at the progress in the last five to eight years is we're building a set of iteratively better savants, right?It just like the chess player was a savant. Um, and, and the savants are interestingly different now. When does savant become a general intelligence and when might savant become a general super intelligence? I don't know. It's obviously a super intelligence already in some ways. Like for example, I wouldn't want to try to play, go against it and win, try to win.It's a super intelligence when it comes, right? But like okay, that's great cause in our perspective, having some savants like this that are super intelligence is really helpful to us. So, so the whole AGI discussion I think tends to go a little bit Hollywood-esque. You know, it's not terminator.Eric: I mean, there there is, there's a sort of argument that could be made. I mean, you know, humans are very human-centric about our beliefs and our intelligence, right? We don't have a theory of mind for other animals. It's very hard for us to prove that other species, you know, have some experience of consciousness like qualia or whatever.Reid: Very philosophically good use of a term by the way.Eric: Thank you. Um, I studied philosophy though. I've forgotten more than I remember. But, um, you know, I mean…Reid: Someday we'll figure out what it's like to be a bat. Probably not this time.Eric: Right, right, exactly. Is that, that's Nagel. If the machine's better than me at chess and go there, there's a level of I, you know, here I am saying it doesn't have an experience, but it, it's so much smarter than me in certain domains.I don't, I, the question is just like, it seems like humans are not capable of seeing what it's like to be a bat. So will we ever really be able to sort of convince ourselves that there's something that it's like to be, um, an AGI system?Reid: Well, I think the answer is um, yes, but it will require a bunch of sophistication. Like one of the things I think is really interesting about, um, as we anthropomorphize the world a little bit and I think some of this machine. Intelligence stuff will, will enable us to do that is, well what does it mean to understand X or, or, or, or no X or experience X or have qualia or whatever else.And right now what we do is we say, well it's some king of shadowy image from being human. So we tend to undercount like animals intelligence. And people tend to be surprised like, look, you know, some animals mate for life and everything else, they clearly have a theory of the world and it's clearly stuff we're doing.We go, ah, they don't have the same kind of consciousness we do. And you're like, well they certainly don't have the same kind of consciousness, but we're not doing a very good job of studying like what the, where it's similar in order it's different. And I think we're gonna need to broaden that out outcome to start saying, well, when you compare us and an eagle or a dolphin or a whale or a chimpanzee or a lion, you know, what are the similarities and and differences?And how this works. And um, and I think that will also then be, well, what happens when it's a silicon substrate? You know? Do we, do we think that consciousness requires a biological substrate? If so, why? Um, and, you know, part of how, of course we get to understand, um, each other's consciousness as we, we get this depth of experience.Where I realize is it isn't, you're just a puppet.Eric:  [laughs] I am, I am just a puppet.Reid: Well, we're, we're talking to each other through Riverside, so, you know, who knows, right. You know, deep fakes and all that.Eric: The AI's already ahead of you. You know, I'm just, it's already, no.Reid: Yeah. I think we're gonna have to get more sophisticated on that question now.I think it's, it's too trivial to say because it can mimic language in particularly interesting ways. And it says, yes, I'm conscious that that makes it conscious. Like that's not, that's not what we use as an instance. And, and part of it is like, do you understand the like part of how we've come to understand each other's consciousness is we realize that we experience things in similar ways.We feel joy in similar, we feel pain in similar ways and that kinda stuff. And that's part of how we begin to understand. And I think it'll be really good that this may kick off kind of us being slightly less kind of call it narcissistically, anthropocentric in this and a broader concept as we look at this.Eric: You know, I was talking to my therapist the other day and I was saying, you know, oh, I did this like kind gesture, but I didn't feel like some profound, like, I don't, it just seemed like the right thing to do. I did it. It felt like I did the right thing should, you know, shouldn't I feel like more around it?And you know, her perspective was much more like, oh, what matters is like doing the thing, not sort of your internal states about it. Which to me would, would go to the, if the machine can, can do all the things we expect from sort of a caring type type machine. Like why do we need to spend all this time when we don't even expect that of humans to always feel the right feelings.Reid: I totally agree with you. Look, I think the real question is what you do. Now that being said, part of how we predict what you do is that, you know, um, you may not have like at that moment gone, haha, I think of myself as really good cause I've done this kind thing. Which by the way, might be a better human thing as opposed to like, I'm doing this cause I'm better than most people.Eric: Right.Reid: Yeah, but it's the pattern in which you engage in these things and part of the feelings and so forth is cause that creates a kind of a reliability of pattern of do you see other people? Do you have the aspiration to have, not just yourself, but the people around you leading better and improving lives.And obviously if that's the behavior that we're seeing from these things, then that's a lot of it. And the only question is, what's that forward looking momentum on it? And I think amongst humans that comes to an intention, a model of the world and so forth. You know, amongst, amongst machines that mean just maybe the no, no, we're aligned.Well, like, we've done a really good alignment with human progress.Eric: Do you think there will be a point in time where it's like an ethical problem to unplug it? Like I think of like a bear, right? Like a bear is dangerous. You know, there are circumstances where pretty comfortable. Killing the bear,But if the bear like hasn't actually done anything, we've taken it under our care. Like we don't just like shoot bears at zoos, you know? Do you think there's a point where like, and it costs us money to sustain the bear at a zoo, do you think there are cases where we might say, oh man, now there's an ethical question around unpluggingReid: I think it's a when, not an if.Eric: Yeah.Reid: Right? I mean, it may be a when, once again, just like AGI, that's a fair way's out. But it's a when, not an if. And by the way, I think that's again, part of the progress that we make because we think about like, how should we be treating it? Because, you know, like for example, if you go back a hundred, 150 years, the whole concept of animal rights doesn't exist in humans.You know, it's like, hey, you wanna, you want to torture animal X to death, you know, like you're queer, but you're, you're, you're allowed to do that. That's an odd thing for you to do. And maybe it's kind of like, like distasteful, like grungy bad in some way, but , you know, it's like, okay. Where's now you're like, oh, that person is, is like going out to try to go torture animals! We should like get them in an institution, right? Like, that's not okay. You know, what is that further progress for the rights and lives? And I think it will ultimately come to things that we think are, when it gets to kind of like things that have their own agency and have their own consciousness and sets of existence.We should be including all of that in some, in some grand or elevated, you know, kind of rights conceptions.Eric: All right, so back back to my listeners who, you know, wanna know where to invest and make money off this and, you know.Reid: [laughs] It isn't from qualia and consciousness. Oh, wait.Eric: Who do you think are the key players? The key players in the models. Then obviously there are more sort of, I don't know if we're calling them vertical solutions or product oriented or whatever, however you think about them.But starting with the models, like who do you see as sort of the real players right now? Are you counting out a Google or do you think they'll still, you know, sort of show?Reid: Oh no. I think Google will show up. And obviously, you know, Open AI, Microsoft has done a ton of stuff. I co-founded Inflection last year with Mustafa Suleyman. We have a just amazing team and I do see a lot of teams, so I'm.Eric: And that's to build sort of the foundational…Reid: Yeah, they're gonna, well, they're building their own models and they're gonna build some things off those models.We haven't really said what they are yet. But that's obviously going to be kind of new models. Adept, another Greylock investment building its own models, Character is building its own models, Anthropic is building its own models. And Anthropic is, you know, Dario and the crew is smart folks from Open AI, they're, they're doing stuff within a kind of a similar research program that Open AI is doing.And so I think those are the ones that I probably most track.Eric: Character's an interesting case and you know, we're still learning more about that company. You know, I was first to report they're looking to raise 250 million. My understanding is that what's interesting is they're building the models, but then for a particular use case, right?Or like, it's really a question of leverage or like, do people need to build the models to be competitive or do you think there will be... can you build a great business on top of Stability or Open AI or do you need to do it yourself?Reid: I think you can, but the way you do it is you can't say it's cause I have unique access to the model. It has to be, you know, I have a business that has network effects or I'm well integrated in enterprise, or I have another deep stack of technology that I'm bringing into it. It can't just be, I'm a lightweight front end to it because then other people can be the lightweight front end.So you can build great businesses. I think with it, I do think that people will both build businesses off, you know, things like the Open AI APIs and I think people will also train models. Because I think one of the things that will definitely happen is a lot of… not just will large models be built in ways that are interesting and compelling, but I think a bunch of smaller models will be built that are specifically tuned and so forth.And there's all kinds of reasons. Everything from you can build them to do something very specific, but also like inference cost, does it, does it run on a low compute or low power footprint? You know, et cetera, et cetera. You know, AI doctor, AI tutor, um, you know, duh and on a cell phone. And, um, and so, you know, I think like all of that, I think the short answer to this is allEric: Right. Do you think we are in a compute arms race still, or do you, do you think this is gonna continue where it's just if you can raise a billion dollars to, to buy sort of com GPU access basically from Microsoft or Amazon or Google, you're, you're gonna be sort of pretty far ahead? Or how do you think about that sort of the money, the money and computing rates shaping up?Reid: So I kind of think about two. There's kind of two lines of trends. There's one line, which is the larger and larger models, which by the way, you say, well, okay, so does the scale compute and one x flop goes to two x flops, and does your performance function go up by that?And it doesn't have to go up by a hundred percent or, or two x or plus one x. It could go up by 25%, but sometimes that really matters. Coding doctors, you know, legal, other things. Well, it's like actually, in fact, it, even though it's twice as expensive, a 25% increase in, you know, twice as expensive of compute, the 25% increase in performance is worth it. And I think you then have a large scale model, like a set of things that are kind of going along need to be using the large scale models.Then I think there's a set of things that don't have that need. And for example, that's one of the reasons I wasn't really surprised at all by the profusion of image generation, cuz those are, you know, generally speaking, trainable for a million to $10 million. I think there's gonna be a range of those.I think, you know, maybe someone will figure out how to do, you know, a hundred-million version and once they figured out how to do a hundred-million dollar version, someone also figured out how to do the 30-million version of that hundred-million dollar version. And there's a second line going on where all of these other smaller models will fit into interesting businesses. And then I think a lot of people will either deploy an open source model that they're using themselves, train their own model, get a special deal with, like a model provider or something else as a way of doing it.And so I think the short answer is there will be both, and you have to be looking at this from what's the specific that this business is doing. You know, the classic issues of, you know, how do you go to market, how do you create a competitive mode? What are the things that give you real, enduring value that people will pay for in some way in a business?All of the, those questions still apply, but the, but, but there's gonna be a panoply of answers, depending on the different models of how it playsEric: Do you think spend on this space in terms of computing will be larger in ‘24 and then larger in 25?Reid: Yes. Unquestionably,Eric: We're on the, we're still on the rise.Reid: Oh, yes. Unquestionably.Eric: That's great for a certain company that you're on the board of.Reid: Well look, and it's not just great for Microsoft. There are these other ones, you know, AWS, Google, but…Eric: Right. It does feel like Amazon's somewhat sleepy here. Do you have any view there?Reid: Well, I think they have begun to realize, what I've heard from the market is that they've begun to realize that they should have some stuff here. I don't think they've yet gotten fully underway. I think they are trying to train some large language models themselves. I don't know if they've even realized that there is a skill to training those large language models, cause like, you know, sometimes people say, well, you just turn on and you run the, run the large language model, the, the training regime that you read in the papers and then you make stuff.We've seen a lot of failures, of people trying to build these things and failing to do so, so, you know, there's, there's an expertise that you learn in doing it as well. And so I think—Eric: Sorry to interrupt—if Microsoft is around Open AI and Google is around Anthropic, is Amazon gonna be around stability? That's sort of the question that I'll put out to the world. I don't know if you have.Reid: I certainly don't know anything. And in the case of, you know, very, very, very, um, a politely said, um, Anthropic and OpenAI have scale with huge models. Stability is all small models, so, hmm.Eric: Yeah. Interesting. I, I don't think I've asked you sort of directly about sort of stepping off the Open AI board. I mean, I would assume you would prefer to be on the board or…?Reid: Yeah. Well, so look, it was a funny thing because, um, you know, I was getting more and more requests from various Greylock portfolio companies cause we've been investing in AI stuff for over five years. Like real AI, not just the, we call it “software AI”, but actual AI companies.For a while and I was getting more and more requests to do it and I was like oh, you know, what I did before was, well here's the channel. Like here is the guy who, the person who handles the API request goes, go talk to them. Like, why can't you help me? I was like, well, I'm on the board.I have a responsibility to not be doing that. And then I realized that, oh s**t, it's gonna look more and more. Um, I might have a real conflict of interest here, even as we're really carefully navigating it and, and it was really important cause you know various forces are gonna kind of try to question the frankly, super deep integrity of Open AI.It's like, look, I, Sam, I think it might be best even though I remain a fan, an ally, um, to helping, I think it may be best for Open AI. And generally to step off a board to avoid a conflict of interest. And we talked about a bunch and said, okay, fine, we'll do it. And you know, I had dinner with Sam last night and most of what we were talking about was kind of the range of what's going on and what are the important things that open eyes need to solve? And how should we be interfacing with governments so that governments understand? What are the key things that, that, that should be in the mix? And what great future things for humanity are really important not to fumble in the, in the generally, like everyone going, oh, I'm worrying. And then I said, oh, I got a question for you. And he's like, yeah, okay. I'm like, now that I'm no longer on the board, could I ask you to personally look at unblocking, my portfolio company's thing to the API? Because I couldn't ever ask you that question before. Cause I would be unethical. But now I'm not on the board, so can I ask the question?He's like, sure, I'll look into it. I'm like, great, right? And that's the substance of it, which I never would've done before. But that wasn't why, I mean, obviously love Sam and the Open AI team.Eric: The fact that you're sort of a Democratic super donor was that in the calculus? Or, because I mean, we are seeing Republican… well, I didn't think that at all coming into this conversation, but just hearing what you're saying. Looking at it now, it feels like Republicans are like trying to find something to be angry about.Reid: WellEric: These AI things, I don't quite…Reid: The unfortunate thing about the, the most vociferous of the republican media ecosystem is they just invent fiction, like their hallucination full out.Eric: Right.Reid: I mean, it just like, I mean, the amount of just like, you know, 2020 election denial and all the rest, which you can tell from having their text released from Fox News that like, here are these people who are on camera going on where you have a question about, you know, what happened in the election.And they're texting each other going, oh my God, this is insane. This is a coup, you know, da da da. And you're like, okay. Anyway, so, so all like, they don't require truth to generate. Heat and friction. So that was, wasn't that no, no. It's just really, it's kind of the question of, when you're serving on a board, you have to understand what your mission is very deeply and, and to navigate it.And part of the 501(C)(3) boards is to say, look, obviously I contribute by being a board member and helping and navigate various circumstances and all the rest. And, you know, I can continue to be a counselor and an aid to the company not being on the board. And one of the things I think is gonna be very important for the next X years, for the entire world to know is that open AI takes its ethics super seriously,Eric: Right.Reid: As do I.Eric: Does that fit with having to invest? I mean, there are lots of companies that do great things. They have investors. I believe in companies probably more than personally I believe in charities to accomplish things. But the duality of OpenAI is extremely confusing. Like, was Greylock, did Greylock itself invest a lot or you invested early as an angel?Reid: I was the founding investor as an angel, as a, as a program related investment from my foundation. Because like I started, I was among the first people to make a philanthropic donation to Open AI. Just straight out, you know, here's a grant by Wednesday, then Sam and Crew came up with this idea for doing this commercial lp, and I said, look, I, I'll help and I have no idea if this will be an interesting economic investment.They didn't have a business plan, they didn't have a revenue plan, they didn't have a product plan. I brought it to Greylock. We talked about it and they said, look, we think this will be possibly a really interesting technology, but you know, part of our responsibility to our LPs, which you know, includes a whole bunch of universities and else we invest in businesses and there is no business plan.Eric: So is that the Khosla did? Khosla's like we invested wild things. Anyway, we don't care. That's sort of what Vinod wants to project anyway, so yeah.Reid: You know, yes, that's exactly the same. So I put them 50 and then he put in a, I think he was the only venture fund investing in that round. But like, there was no business plan, there was no revenue model, there was no go to market…Eric: Well, Sam basically says, someday we're gonna have AGI and we're gonna ask you how to make a bunch of money? Like, is he, that's a joke, right? Or like, how much is he joking?Reid: It's definitely, it's not a 100% joke and it's not a 0% joke. It's a question around, the mission is really about how do we get to AGI or as close to AGI as useful and to make it useful for humanity. And by the way, the closer you get to AGI, the more interesting technologies fall out, including the ability to have the technology itself solve various problems.So if you said, we have a business model problem, it's like, well ask the thing. Now, if you currently sit down and ask, you know, ChatGPT what the business model is, you'll get something pretty vague and generic that wouldn't get you a meeting with a venture capitalist because it's like “we will have ad supported”... you're like, okay. Right.Eric: Don't you have a company that's trying to do pitch decks now or something?Reid: Oh yeah, Tome. No, and it's awesome, but by the way, that's the right kind of thing. Because, because what it does is you say, hey, give me a set of tiles, together with images and graphics and things arguing X and then you start working with the AI to improve it. Say, oh, I need a slide that does this and I need a catchier headline here, and, and you know, da da da.And then you, and you know, obviously you can edit it yourself and so on. So that's the kind of amplification. Now you don't say, give me my business model, right?Eric: You're like, I have this business model, like articulate it.Reid: Exactly.Eric: Um, I, politics, I mean, I feel like we, we live through such like a… you know what I mean, I feel like Silicon Valley, you know, has like, worked on PE everybody be able to, you know, everybody can get along. There's sort of competition, but then you sort of still stay close to any, everybody like, you, you especially like are good, you know, you you are in the PayPal mafia with a lot of people who are fairly very conservative now.The Trump years broke that in some ways and particular, and that, yeah. So how did you maintain those relationships?I see headlines that say you're friends with Peter Thiel. What is, what's the state of your friendship with Peter Thiel and how, how did it survive?I guess the Trump years is the question.Reid: Well, I think the thing that Peter and I learned when we were undergraduate at Stanford together is it's very important to… cause we, you know, I was a lefty. He was a righty. We'd argue a lot to maintain conversation and to argue things. It's difficult to argue on things that feel existential and it's ethically challenged is things around Trump. You know, the, you know, Trump feels to be a corrosive asset upon our democracy that is disfiguring us and staining us to the world. And so to have a dispassionate argument about it is, it's challenging. And it ends up with some uneven ground and statements like, I can't believe you're f*****g saying that, as part of dialogue.But on the other hand, you know, maintaining dialogue is I think part of how we make progress as society. And I basically sympathetic to people as long as they are legitimately and earnestly and committed to the dialogue and discussion of truth between them and committed otherwise.And so, you know, there are folks from the PayPal years that I don't really spend much time talking to, right?. There are others that I do because that conversation about discovering who we are and who we should be is really important. And you can't allow your own position to be the definer.It almost goes back to what we were talking about, the AI side, which is make sure you're talking to other smart people who challenge you to make sure you're doing the right thing. And that's, I think, a good general life principle.Eric: Well, you know, I feel like part of what my dream of like the Silicon Valley world is that we have these, you know, we have, Twitter is like the open forum. We're having sincere sort of on the level debates, but then you see something like, you know, the…Reid: You don't think it's the modern Seinfeld show I got? Well, not Seinfeld, um, Springer, Jerry Springer.Eric: Yeah, that's, yeah. Right. But I just feel like the sort of like, if the arguments are on the level issue is my problem with some of the sort of, I don't know, Peter Theil arguments, that he's not actually publicly advancing his beliefs in a sincere way, and that that's almost more corrosive.Reid: Oh, that's totally corrosive. And as much as that's happening, it's terrible. And that's one of the things that I, um, you know, in conversations I have, I push people including Peter on a lot.Eric: Yeah. Are you still, are you still gonna donate a lot, or what was, what's your, are you as animated about the Democratic party and working through sort of donor channels at the moment?Reid: Well, what I would say is I think that we have a responsibility to try to make, like with, it's kind of the Spider-Man ethics. With power comes responsibility, with wealth comes responsibility, and you have to try to help contribute to… what is the better society that we should be living and navigating in?And so I stay committed on that basis. And I do think there are some really amazing people in the administration. I think Biden is kind of a good everyday guy.Eric: Yeah.Reid: In fact, good for trying to build bridges in the country. I think there are people like Secretary Raimondo and Secretary Buttigieg who are thinking intensely about technology and what should be done in the future.And I think there's other folks now, I think there's a bunch of folks on the democratic side that I think are more concerned with their demagoguery than they are with the right thing in society. And so I tend to be, you know, unsympathetic to, um, you know…Eric: I know, Michael Moritz, it's Sequoia, that oped sort of criticizing San Francisco government, you know, and there's, there's certainly this sort of woke critique of the Democratic Party. I'm curious if there's a piece of it sort of outside of he governance that you're…Reid: Well, the interesting thing about woke is like, well, we're anti woke. And you're like, well, don't you think being awake is a good thing? I mean, it's kind of a funny thing. Eric: And sort of the ill-defined nature of woke is like key to the allegation because it's like, what's the substantive thing you're saying there? And you know, I mean we we're seeing Elon tweet about race right now, which is sort of terrifying anyway.Reid: Yeah. I think the question on this stuff is to try to say, look, people have a lot of different views and a lot of different things and some of those views are, are bad, especially in kind of minority and need to be advocated against in various… part of why we like democracy is to have discourse.I'm very concerned about the status of public discourse. And obviously most people tend to focus that around social media, which obviously has some legitimate things that we need to talk about. But on the other hand, they don't track like these, like opinion shows on, like, Fox News that represent themselves implicitly as news shows and saying, man, this is the following thing.Like there's election fraud in 2020, and then when they're sued for the various forms of deformation, they say, we're just an entertainment show. We don't do anything like news. So we have that within that we are already struggling on a variety of these issues within society. and we, I think we need to sort them all out.Eric: Is there anything on the AI front that we missed or that you wanted to make sure to talk about? I think we covered so much great ground. Reid: And, and we can do it again, right. You know, it's all, it's great.Eric: I love it. This was all the things you're interested in and I'm interested in, so great. I really enjoyed having you on the podcast and thanks.Reid: Likewise. And, you know, I follow the stuff you do and it's, it's, it's cool and keep doing it. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Every couple of months or so, a rich person in California decides "enough is enough" on our homelessness crisis, and believes that they will be the one to spur the state into action.   Last month, that rich person happened to be billionaire partner at Sequoia Capital/San Francisco resident Michael Moritz, who has thrown millions of dollars into local elections to hamstring progressive initiatives to get folks into housing and connected to services. For some reason, his gripes about San Francisco ended up in print some 3,000 miles away, in the pages of the New York Times.   In the coming days, a number of Bay Area outlets wrote deft take-downs of Moritz's fact-free missive. Our favorite was the one by Joe Eskenazi in Mission Local. We take a moment to discuss this tired trend of billionaires spouting the same nonsense ad nauseam.   Oh, and did you hear? Sacramento's District 5 city council member Caity Maple held something of a town hall in response to residents' anger over the fact that she ran for office on a platform of demilitarizing the police, and then upon gaining office promptly voted to give Sac PD a tank.   There's no video available of the meeting, but journalists Tess Townsend and Robin Epley covered the bases quite well on Twitter.   We also take a moment to discuss the second failed recall attempt against District 4 council member Katie Valenzuela by angry rich folks. Funny how they tried to bury the lede by announcing their candidate to run against her in 2024 the day before news of the lame recall effort dropped.   Thanks for listening, defund the police and, as always: Twitter: @youknowkempa, @ShanNDSTevens, @Flojaune, @guillotine4you Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/voicesrivercity   Sacramentans can hear us on 103.1 KUTZ Thursdays at 6 pm and again Fridays at 8 am. If you require a transcript of our episodes, please reach out to info@voicesrivercity.com and we'll make it happen. And thank you to Be Brave Bold Robot for the tunes.

Solidus has built an eco-friendly 8,000 square foot high-performance computing (HPC) Data Centre in a highly secure location in Europe. You can join the Private sale of Solidus with this link: https://launchpad.truepnl.com/app There's a GIVEAWAY OF 500$ in TruePNL's telegram with super simple rules! Join TruePNL Telegram to find out: https://t.me/+ESf3ueWO-3swMzg6 This is the story of Sequoia capital, one of Silicon Valley's most notorious and enduring venture capital firms, investing in the likes of Apple, Cisco, WhatsApp, Airbnb, Zoom, LinkedIn, PayPal and Google among others hroughout its 50-year history. It's investments are now worth trillions of dollars in public market value. And graduates around the world would love to get a shot at working at Sequoia. Because having Sequoia Capital on your CV carries massive prestige.

Vor kurzem konnten Michael Moritz und das Team von Carlsquare einen echten Coup landen.Der französische Investor Cathay Capital investierte in das weitere Wachstum des D2C-Onlinehändlers SNOCKS, um endgültig den Turbo Boost zu zünden.

This week's Espresso covers updates from UnDosTres, Revolut, Anyone AI, and more!Outline of this episode:[00:28] - Anyone AI closes a $1.5M pre-seed round[00:59] - UnDosTres closed a $30M Series B investment round[01:37] - Wibond extended its seed round, closing at $6M[02:16] - Merama acquires the Latin American startups Miind Brands and Culotte[02:54] - Mottu raised $40M in a Series B round and in debt financing[03:42] - Revolut announces plans to expand its business to Brazil[04:21] - Interview with Javier Sánchez Aldana, Managing Partner at Carabela[06:51] - Crossing Borders revisits a greatest hits episode featuring Agustin Feuerhake, Founder of Fintual[07:07] - Alejandro Guízar's article “Why is digital banking the first step toward financial inclusion in Mexico?”Resources & people mentioned:Companies & Startups: Merama, Anyone AI, UnDosTres, Wibond, Merama, Miind Brands, Culotte, Mottu, Revolut, Dooper, Gabu, Zuru, FintualVCs, Accelerators, Institutions: Latitud Ventures, Global Founders Capital, Canvas Ventures, Magma Partners, DC Ventures, IGNIA, Dalus Capital, Y Combinator, Trousdale, Soma Capital, Fintech Capital, Eureka Capital, Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global Management, Verde Asset, Base Partners, Crankstart, CarabelaPeople: Harriet Heyman, Michael Moritz, Javier Sánchez Aldana, Agustin Feuerhake, Alejandro Guízar

I moved from San Francisco to New York, in February 2019, back before it was cool to turn tail on the tech mecca. Truth be told, I’ll always have a special place in my heart for San Francisco, but my girlfriend beckoned from Brooklyn.I’m writing this from my flight back to New York after over a week in SF. I spent much of it in an Airbnb next to Mr. Pickle’s on Van Ness Avenue and then a few days crashing at a fellow tech reporter’s apartment in the Outer Richmond. I ate Mission Chinese and La Taqueria, drank at Brass Tacks and The Monk’s Kettle, and made it up to Calistoga for a picturesque vineyard wedding.But did I spend any time working for you, dear reader? Yes, not to worry. I spent my days shuttling from South Park to the Presidio, catching up with venture capitalists, founders, tech media insiders, and senior tech executives. And I spent my nights getting drunk with them, eager for looser lips.Here are my key immediate takeaways:One source told me that even Insight Partners — which announced a $20 billion fund in February — has decided to seriously slow down big late stage private investments. Until recently, Insight looked like one of the last holdouts when it came to doing late stage deals even as the market unraveled. But now, like pretty much everyone else, it’s mostly focused on its existing portfolio.VC advice on the downturn — even Sequoia Capital’s presentation to founders — has felt too much like content marketing. For some startup CEOs it can feel a bit like you’re the goody two-shoes, “A” student in the classroom, when the teacher reprimands everyone. You think the rebuke applies to you, but really the message is meant for the troublemakers. But it’s the most diligent among us that take these admonitions personally. Founders need advice specific to their company. There’s a sense that there have been many software engineers who have been overpromoted in the bull cycle and that this downturn could force some coders to reset their expectations about their appropriate rank and pay.I spent much of my time asking sources what the overarching, thematic story of the downturn would be. One venture capitalist gave me my favorite answer: He argued that we’d look back on this downturn as a story of the perfect storm between retail and professional investor excesses. On the retail side, we saw the rise of Robinhood and Coinbase, and r/wallstreetbets trades on Kodak and GameStop. On the professional side, we saw firms like SoftBank and Tiger go so, so long without enough diligence to back it up.If I had to name a couple companies/firms that I think are most likely to represent this downturn, right now I’d name Instacart, Coinbase, Robinhood, GoPuff, Bird, Tesla, Tiger, and SoftBank. Though, right now, I think increasingly crypto is looking like it will be the category most associated with this cycle’s excesses.There’s been a lot of envy in traditional startup world of people who went over to the the crypto dark side. Now there’s all sorts of schadenfreude going on as crypto prices plummet. Some VCs are starting to admit (mostly in private) that they never really believed in crypto. Still, there’s so much money. Just as I was leaving the city, Coinbase announced that it was brutally laying off 18% of its staff, locking them out of their emails before they even had time to say goodbye.We’re overdue for a reckoning over who screwed over credulous investors with implausible SPAC deals. ~cough~ Chamath ~ cough ~ At least, Brad Gerstner’s Altimeter led the PIPE on its own terrible Grab SPAC deal. Andreessen Horowitz still remains, probably, the biggest nemesis of many firms in Silicon Valley. Sure, Tiger blew up the startup world. But what Tiger did was so unlike anything venture capital firms were doing, so there’s less professional jealousy. There are whispers that things aren’t as copacetic internally at a16z as might appear from their highly choreographed public communications. It would seem that part of the explanation for the explosion of funds at the firm has been the explosion of egos. Instead of resolving interpersonal conflicts on the consumer fund, let’s just create a gaming fund. In that light, it’s pretty amazing that the firm couldn’t figure out a way to keep Katie Haun. Consumer investing across the board seems challenged. What’s going on over at Popshop, Lunchclub, Cameo, and Clubhouse just to name a few? I guess investors simply wishing consumer investing into being without a strong new thesis wasn’t exactly an omen for the sector’s inevitable success. (I will say that Whatnot and BeReal remain two consumer plays that I’m still following.) What will it mean for this generation of consumer investors? Benchmark’s next generation consumer investor, Sarah Tavel, seems to have made her best investment in business-to-business company Chainalysis, last valued at $8.6 billion. Speaking of Benchmark, the firm deserves some credit for holding firm on its strategy as other venture firms’ fund sizes got crazy. Sure, Benchmark probably could have made way more money if it topped up its own investments — but then it might be taking the heat that Benchmark favorite Altimeter is getting right now over its overexuberance. There’s money and reputation to manage. Benchmark has always made enough money to value its reputation. (That’s something Travis Kalanick, Adam Neumann, Nirav Tolia, etc. surely gripe about.)Last year’s hype around venture capital firms indefinitely holding onto private companies long after they go public is looking like pure bubble thinking. Sequoia’s timing on its all-in-one, hold indefinitely “The Sequoia Capital Fund” looks a little more like one of the excesses from the bull market. But limited partners seem too afraid to do anything to unwind the strategy shift that seems designed to enrich the firm’s general partners. (Reach out to me if you have off-the-record intel on this.)Investors are dramatically slowing the pace of their investments. These funds are going to last years longer than they would have in bull times. Multi-stage investors seem more inclined to double-down on their existing portfolio companies than to make new bets. Bridge rounds are on everyone’s lips. Still, I heard from investors who had made secret Series B and C investments in companies this year. It’s a good time to make a bet on a company that got away for a hype-y Series A round.Startup founders think prospective employees want assurances that their company is really worth what the company says it is. Good private unicorns are in a bit of a bind. Prospective employees are now automatically giving their equity offers a mental haircut based on the market downturn. So good companies have an incentive to reaffirm their valuations with funding rounds during the downturn — even if it otherwise might be smarter to keep their valuations artificially low so as to maintain room to grow should conditions worsen. (I wish employees would get better at assessing companies based on fundamentals, rather than the last tick fundraising round. Employees are basically begging founders to maximize for valuation, which then minimizes employee upside.)Some small-to-medium sized companies are shopping themselves to their rival startups but it’s not always clear why the competitor would want to buy. Why take on additional burn and headcount when all you might end up getting is leads on some new customers? Sure, you might do some venture capital firm a favor, but what’s that really worth?There are some cracks in up-start media world. The most obvious tremor is at BuzzFeed where the stock has sunk 54% in a month. Reporters have been leaving in droves. Meanwhile, The Information lost one of its top editors — Martin Peers. He’s long been a central figure over there. The Information’s up-and-coming venture capital reporter Berber Jin departed to the Wall Street Journal, as did Sarah Krouse who will be covering Netflix for the Journal. Stephen Nellis returned to Reuters. Meanwhile spirits seem strong at my former employer, Bloomberg. The ascendance of the player-coach editor seems to have people upbeat. Sarah Frier is leading big tech coverage and Lucas Shaw (who has been a guest on Dead Cat) is running the show on Hollywood coverage. And somehow Bloomberg just lured back a former star reporter who had left to join the startup ranks: Alex Barinka — who left Bloomberg as a deals reporter to help launch Imran Khan’s Verishop before going over to Stitch Fix — is joining Frier’s team as a social media reporter based in LA. Next week I’m in Toronto for Collision where I’ll be interviewing Uncork Capital’s Andy McLoughlin, Real Ventures’ Janet Bannister, and Left Lane Capital’s Vinny Pujji on a panel Wednesday called “Survival of the leanest: The importance of being capital efficient.” Then, less than an hour later I’ll interview General Catalyst’s Hemant Taneja about responsible innovation. On Thursday, I’ll ask “Has the tech bubble burst... again?!” in a panel with FirstMark’s Matt Turck, Lux’s Deena Shakir, and Neo Financial’s Andrew Chau. Expect the most interesting tidbits in this newsletter late next week.Talking about Chesa Boudin on Dead CatMy first meeting in San Francisco started with a tour of The San Francisco Standard, the Michael Moritz-funded local news enterprise. My old editor Jonathan Weber — once the editor of tech media dot-com icon The Industry Standard — is the editor-in-chief over at the SF Standard. Weber, Dead Cat co-host Tom Dotan, and I met up for a nice dinner at The Morris in the Mission. After spending the evening discussing San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin’s recall, Tom and I convinced Weber to come on the Dead Cat podcast and talk about the Standard and San Francisco politics.Tom thinks I’m going to get eviscerated by San Franciscans for my politics. This is something we’ve never seen before: a New Yorker opining on San Francisco local affairs. I did my best to offend conservatives and liberals alike, maligning the police while rooting for tech’s ascendant influence on San Francisco politics. Weber makes the case for objective, follow-the-reporting local news and outlines the real issues underpinning the recall. He explains how money is simultaneously to blame and not to blame for Boudin’s recall. And he defends the Standard against its critics for its influential story on Boudin’s refusal to make drug arrests. We interrogate what Boudin’s defeat means for the future of progressive politics and the city of San Francisco.Give it a listen.Read the automated transcript. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

I moved from San Francisco to New York, in February 2019, back before it was cool to turn tail on the tech mecca. Truth be told, I'll always have a special place in my heart for San Francisco, but my girlfriend beckoned from Brooklyn.I'm writing this from my flight back to New York after over a week in SF. I spent much of it in an Airbnb next to Mr. Pickle's on Van Ness Avenue and then a few days crashing at a fellow tech reporter's apartment in the Outer Richmond. I ate Mission Chinese and La Taqueria, drank at Brass Tacks and The Monk's Kettle, and made it up to Calistoga for a picturesque vineyard wedding.But did I spend any time working for you, dear reader? Yes, not to worry. I spent my days shuttling from South Park to the Presidio, catching up with venture capitalists, founders, tech media insiders, and senior tech executives. And I spent my nights getting drunk with them, eager for looser lips.Here are my key immediate takeaways:One source told me that even Insight Partners — which announced a $20 billion fund in February — has decided to seriously slow down big late stage private investments. Until recently, Insight looked like one of the last holdouts when it came to doing late stage deals even as the market unraveled. But now, like pretty much everyone else, it's mostly focused on its existing portfolio.VC advice on the downturn — even Sequoia Capital's presentation to founders — has felt too much like content marketing. For some startup CEOs it can feel a bit like you're the goody two-shoes, “A” student in the classroom, when the teacher reprimands everyone. You think the rebuke applies to you, but really the message is meant for the troublemakers. But it's the most diligent among us that take these admonitions personally. Founders need advice specific to their company. There's a sense that there have been many software engineers who have been overpromoted in the bull cycle and that this downturn could force some coders to reset their expectations about their appropriate rank and pay.I spent much of my time asking sources what the overarching, thematic story of the downturn would be. One venture capitalist gave me my favorite answer: He argued that we'd look back on this downturn as a story of the perfect storm between retail and professional investor excesses. On the retail side, we saw the rise of Robinhood and Coinbase, and r/wallstreetbets trades on Kodak and GameStop. On the professional side, we saw firms like SoftBank and Tiger go so, so long without enough diligence to back it up.If I had to name a couple companies/firms that I think are most likely to represent this downturn, right now I'd name Instacart, Coinbase, Robinhood, GoPuff, Bird, Tesla, Tiger, and SoftBank. Though, right now, I think increasingly crypto is looking like it will be the category most associated with this cycle's excesses.There's been a lot of envy in traditional startup world of people who went over to the the crypto dark side. Now there's all sorts of schadenfreude going on as crypto prices plummet. Some VCs are starting to admit (mostly in private) that they never really believed in crypto. Still, there's so much money. Just as I was leaving the city, Coinbase announced that it was brutally laying off 18% of its staff, locking them out of their emails before they even had time to say goodbye.We're overdue for a reckoning over who screwed over credulous investors with implausible SPAC deals. ~cough~ Chamath ~ cough ~ At least, Brad Gerstner's Altimeter led the PIPE on its own terrible Grab SPAC deal. Andreessen Horowitz still remains, probably, the biggest nemesis of many firms in Silicon Valley. Sure, Tiger blew up the startup world. But what Tiger did was so unlike anything venture capital firms were doing, so there's less professional jealousy. There are whispers that things aren't as copacetic internally at a16z as might appear from their highly choreographed public communications. It would seem that part of the explanation for the explosion of funds at the firm has been the explosion of egos. Instead of resolving interpersonal conflicts on the consumer fund, let's just create a gaming fund. In that light, it's pretty amazing that the firm couldn't figure out a way to keep Katie Haun. Consumer investing across the board seems challenged. What's going on over at Popshop, Lunchclub, Cameo, and Clubhouse just to name a few? I guess investors simply wishing consumer investing into being without a strong new thesis wasn't exactly an omen for the sector's inevitable success. (I will say that Whatnot and BeReal remain two consumer plays that I'm still following.) What will it mean for this generation of consumer investors? Benchmark's next generation consumer investor, Sarah Tavel, seems to have made her best investment in business-to-business company Chainalysis, last valued at $8.6 billion. Speaking of Benchmark, the firm deserves some credit for holding firm on its strategy as other venture firms' fund sizes got crazy. Sure, Benchmark probably could have made way more money if it topped up its own investments — but then it might be taking the heat that Benchmark favorite Altimeter is getting right now over its overexuberance. There's money and reputation to manage. Benchmark has always made enough money to value its reputation. (That's something Travis Kalanick, Adam Neumann, Nirav Tolia, etc. surely gripe about.)Last year's hype around venture capital firms indefinitely holding onto private companies long after they go public is looking like pure bubble thinking. Sequoia's timing on its all-in-one, hold indefinitely “The Sequoia Capital Fund” looks a little more like one of the excesses from the bull market. But limited partners seem too afraid to do anything to unwind the strategy shift that seems designed to enrich the firm's general partners. (Reach out to me if you have off-the-record intel on this.)Investors are dramatically slowing the pace of their investments. These funds are going to last years longer than they would have in bull times. Multi-stage investors seem more inclined to double-down on their existing portfolio companies than to make new bets. Bridge rounds are on everyone's lips. Still, I heard from investors who had made secret Series B and C investments in companies this year. It's a good time to make a bet on a company that got away for a hype-y Series A round.Startup founders think prospective employees want assurances that their company is really worth what the company says it is. Good private unicorns are in a bit of a bind. Prospective employees are now automatically giving their equity offers a mental haircut based on the market downturn. So good companies have an incentive to reaffirm their valuations with funding rounds during the downturn — even if it otherwise might be smarter to keep their valuations artificially low so as to maintain room to grow should conditions worsen. (I wish employees would get better at assessing companies based on fundamentals, rather than the last tick fundraising round. Employees are basically begging founders to maximize for valuation, which then minimizes employee upside.)Some small-to-medium sized companies are shopping themselves to their rival startups but it's not always clear why the competitor would want to buy. Why take on additional burn and headcount when all you might end up getting is leads on some new customers? Sure, you might do some venture capital firm a favor, but what's that really worth?There are some cracks in up-start media world. The most obvious tremor is at BuzzFeed where the stock has sunk 54% in a month. Reporters have been leaving in droves. Meanwhile, The Information lost one of its top editors — Martin Peers. He's long been a central figure over there. The Information's up-and-coming venture capital reporter Berber Jin departed to the Wall Street Journal, as did Sarah Krouse who will be covering Netflix for the Journal. Stephen Nellis returned to Reuters. Meanwhile spirits seem strong at my former employer, Bloomberg. The ascendance of the player-coach editor seems to have people upbeat. Sarah Frier is leading big tech coverage and Lucas Shaw (who has been a guest on Dead Cat) is running the show on Hollywood coverage. And somehow Bloomberg just lured back a former star reporter who had left to join the startup ranks: Alex Barinka — who left Bloomberg as a deals reporter to help launch Imran Khan's Verishop before going over to Stitch Fix — is joining Frier's team as a social media reporter based in LA. Next week I'm in Toronto for Collision where I'll be interviewing Uncork Capital's Andy McLoughlin, Real Ventures' Janet Bannister, and Left Lane Capital's Vinny Pujji on a panel Wednesday called “Survival of the leanest: The importance of being capital efficient.” Then, less than an hour later I'll interview General Catalyst's Hemant Taneja about responsible innovation. On Thursday, I'll ask “Has the tech bubble burst... again?!” in a panel with FirstMark's Matt Turck, Lux's Deena Shakir, and Neo Financial's Andrew Chau. Expect the most interesting tidbits in this newsletter late next week.Talking about Chesa Boudin on Dead CatMy first meeting in San Francisco started with a tour of The San Francisco Standard, the Michael Moritz-funded local news enterprise. My old editor Jonathan Weber — once the editor of tech media dot-com icon The Industry Standard — is the editor-in-chief over at the SF Standard. Weber, Dead Cat co-host Tom Dotan, and I met up for a nice dinner at The Morris in the Mission. After spending the evening discussing San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin's recall, Tom and I convinced Weber to come on the Dead Cat podcast and talk about the Standard and San Francisco politics.Tom thinks I'm going to get eviscerated by San Franciscans for my politics. This is something we've never seen before: a New Yorker opining on San Francisco local affairs. I did my best to offend conservatives and liberals alike, maligning the police while rooting for tech's ascendant influence on San Francisco politics. Weber makes the case for objective, follow-the-reporting local news and outlines the real issues underpinning the recall. He explains how money is simultaneously to blame and not to blame for Boudin's recall. And he defends the Standard against its critics for its influential story on Boudin's refusal to make drug arrests. We interrogate what Boudin's defeat means for the future of progressive politics and the city of San Francisco.Give it a listen.Read the automated transcript. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Doogles is excited about the optimism that Jason Zweig brings in a recent Wall Street Journal article, and then Skippy rains on his parade. Skippy recaps some analysis on a YOLO portfolio that bought money losers at the end of 1999. Doogles is upset about people calling TerraUSD a blue chip investment. Skippy is angry about the mismanagement of Peloton. The episode wraps discussing how SPACs are completely falling apart, and Michael Moritz's take on the tech rout. Join the https://skippydoogles.supercast.com/ (Skippy and Doogles fan club). You can also get more details about the show at http://skippydoogles.com/ (skippydoogles.com), show notes on https://skippydoogles.substack.com/ (our Substack), and send comments or questions to skippydoogles@gmail.com.

Hello everyone,I'm excited to share my second conversation with Sebastian Mallaby. Last time, we discussed his book More Money Than God. A quote from that conversation stuck with me:“The key was to do an unreasonable amount of preparation work. It shows you're serious and not wasting people's time by asking the obvious questions.”This time, we discussed The Power Law (see my write-up) in which he tackled the history of venture capital. The two worlds make for an interesting contrast: venture capitalists, networkers by nature, are more willing to meet and chat. But they're also natural storytellers which presents a challenge in the search for truth.In his book, Mallaby tried to disentangle luck and skill in venture investing, how to build winning and lasting cultures, and the importance of VCs for Silicon Valley. I had a lot of fun digging into these questions with him. I hope you enjoy the conversation. You can listen to it on your podcast player of choice: Spotify, Apple, at anchor, and via RSS.You can also add the Substack podcast feed to your podcasting player with the link on the bottom-right of the player.While individually “the story of every bet can seem to hinge on serendipity,” he argues that over the long run, “the best venture capitalists consciously create their luck.” The best “work systematically to boost the odds that serendipity will strike repeatedly.” A History of Systematic Serendipity and Grand Slams“The great challenge at venture partnerships is that the principals must refrain from killing each other.” Michael Moritz“When people write about the venture business, they're always writing about the startups we back. They never write about the most important investment we make, which is in the business.” Michael Moritz."The fast moving of ideas, people and money until they reached their optimal use, that's what made Silicon Valley worked. That's what made innovation turbocharged. "But where did that fast circulation come from, and my argument is it comes from venture capitalists."Some highlights from the conversation:* Sequoia:* “It took a year or two of networking to break into the cathedral. But once I was in they are very thoughtful people. … They explained to me how they thought about behavioral biases in decision-making. … For example, we know that we anchor on past decisions. When a VC decides not to invest in a startup at the Series A stage, it's quite difficult to change your mind at the Series B. … it's painful to pay much more … because we were wrong the first time. They kind put that on the table and said, we're probably anchoring, we're probably turning things down at Series B. From now on anybody who argues against the Series B investment is going to be subjected to cross examination - are you sure you're not anchoring?”* Strategy buckets in venture vs. hedge funds:* “Having written More Money Than God I was keen to put these different companies in buckets. I would see two different venture investors who had invested in the same company. I would try to find out … the contrasting mindsets. … People tend to have a few different stories going on in their head at once when they invest. It's not like you go with one chain of logic but not the other one. In venture capital, the distinctions people make are more around stage. Are you a seed investor, a series A investor, a growth investor. They might make distinctions by geography and they might make distinctions by sector.* But the mental approach, they say things like, some people want to bet on the size of the market and other people really want to bet on the type of founder they are backing. When I stress tested that kind of theory, I found it was normally not true.* Google had a strong position at series A because it had a working product which already had better search results than rivals. [Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins shared the round.] You had a natural experiment. The two were doing the same investment: did they have a different logic? And I came to the view that they had a subtly different logic. Kleiner Perkins was more a believer in technical breakthroughs, a product that was 10x better. I think that reflected the fact that both the dominant partners, John Doerr and Vinod Khosla were engineers by training. When they backed Google, I think they really believed the fact that the product was better was a huge deal. And therefore it justified a high valuation. I think Michael Moritz, who invested for Sequoia, came at it with a slightly different mindset. He also could see the product was much better. But I think he also thought of the Google investment in terms of the media side that he came out of himself. He said he made he invested in Google to look after Yahoo. He'd already invested in Yahoo. Yahoo had a popular web portal at the time. Part of him thought that Google could be the search engine in the top right-hand corner of the Yahoo site, a very valuable utility.”* Identifying founders:* “[At Accel] the idea was that when you saw a new technological wave coming, you would prepare your mind for what was going to happen. You would think through the potential businesses that would logically have to be created. … different types of business would logically have different types of founders.When you were building capital-intensive hardware you wanted somebody who was really responsible and deliberate and a good engineer and was not going to make the mistake of spending large amounts of capital on a manufacturing operation until they really got the design.* But when you were doing software, 10 or 20 years later … much more cheaply than a hardware product. The right approach is to move fast and break things. When Mark said that about Facebook, it wasn't some sort of t-shirt slogan.It was the logical implication of a world where software businesses were dominant. At software you do A/B testing. You put things in the market and … see which one goes better. The barrier to putting it into the market is so low, that's the best way to figure out product market fit. Therefore in a software world, a young founder who is brash and moves quickly and doesn't care about being responsible is perfectly fine.”* Asset manager franchise value:* “If you can create a machine, a system that can survive a change of staff and pretty much function the same way, then you've got something with franchise value. Also if you've got predictable revenue streams. … Private equity is so large that simply the management fee is attractive for the public markets. And there are fairly formulaic things that you do both in evaluating the deal and then adding value afterwards. Um, not to say they're simple because they could involve quite complex, say data science around improving the pricing strategy of the portfolio company after you've bought it. It's not simple, but it's formulaic.Hedge funds, when it comes to discretionary trading are simply not like that. There's a funny story in More Money than God about Paul Tudor Jones who tried to systematize this macro trading, had somebody to sit right next to him and watch his moves and … and take those insights and put them into an algorithm and do systematic trading. It just didn't work at all. … The exception in hedge fund space is algorithmic trading, where … concentrating market share in a few hands, those guys possibly could go public one day.”* Are VCs important?* “When I looked carefully and in detail at the history of Silicon Valley, I came away with a view that they were extremely important. People would say it's about Stanford. … But it just is wrong. MIT was a stronger engineering school in the sixties and seventies when this whole story began. … Then there was another story about defense contracts being the explanation for the origin of Silicon Valley. And yes, there were defense dollars being spent on semiconductors … but there were more defense dollars being spent on the military industrial complex centered on MIT and the Boston area. …* Another more persuasive story is about non-compete contracts. California has a special provision in the law that says you can't prevent your employee from quitting your company and joining a startup. And that's important to the startup ecosystem. I take that seriously. … When you look through these different variables, it turns out that venture capital really was the key thing that made Northern California special. That particular sort of risk friendly version of venture capital that was very hands-on and willing to back entrepreneurs even if they didn't necessarily have all the pieces they needed to make a startup function. …. * And so in this way, the act of entrepreneurship, which is scary and risky, is a bit de-risked by venture capital. Venture capital is a machine for manufacturing courage. That's extremely important to understanding how Silicon Valley grew up.”Disclaimer: I write and podcast for entertainment purposes only. This is not investment advice. I am not your fiduciary or advisor. Do your own work and seek your own financial, tax, and legal advice before making any investment decisions. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit alchemy.substack.com/subscribe

Hello everyone, I'm excited to share my second conversation with Sebastian Mallaby. Last time, we discussed his book More Money Than God. A quote from that conversation stuck with me: “The key was to do an unreasonable amount of preparation work. It shows you're serious and not wasting people's time by asking the obvious questions." This time, we discussed The Power Law (see my write-up) in which he tackled the history of venture capital. The two worlds make for an interesting contrast: venture capitalists, networkers by nature, are more willing to meet and chat. But they're also natural storytellers which presents a challenge in the search for truth. In his book, Mallaby tried to disentangle luck and skill in venture investing, how to build winning and lasting cultures, and the importance of VCs for silicon valley. And while he admits that individually “the story of every bet can seem to hinge on serendipity,” he argues that over the long run, “the best venture capitalists consciously create their luck.” Individual venture capitalists can “can stumble sideways into fortunes” and at times it seems like luck beats diligence and foresight. The best however, “work systematically to boost the odds that serendipity will strike repeatedly.” “The great challenge at venture partnerships is that the principals must refrain from killing each other.” Michael Moritz “When people write about the venture business, they're always writing about the startups we back. They never write about the most important investment we make, which is in the business.” Michael Moritz. "The fast moving of ideas, people and money until they reached their optimal use, that's what made Silicon Valley worked. That's what made innovation turbocharged. "But where did that fast circulation come from, and my argument is it comes from venture capitalists." I had a lot of fun digging into these questions with him. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Guest:Mark W. YuskoChief Executive Officer and Chief Investment Officer, Morgan Creek Capital Management & Managing Partner, Morgan Creek Digital AssetsMark Yusko is the Founder, CEO and Chief Investment Officer of Morgan Creek Capital Management. He is also the Managing Partner of Morgan Creek Digital Assets. Morgan Creek Capital Management was founded in 2004 and currently manages close to $2 billion in discretionary and non-discretionary assets. Prior to founding Morgan Creek, Mr. Yusko was CIO and Founder of UNC Management Company (UNCMC), the Endowment investment office for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before that, he was Senior Investment Director for the University of Notre Dame Investment Office.Mr. Yusko has been at the forefront of institutional investing throughout his career. An early investor in alternative asset classes at Notre Dame, he brought the EndowmentModel of investing to UNC, which contributed to significant performance gains for theEndowment. The Endowment Model is the cornerstone philosophy of Morgan Creek, as is the mandate to Invest in Innovation. Mr. Yusko is again at the forefront of investing through Morgan Creek Digital Assets, which was formed in 2018. Morgan Creek Digital is an early stage investor in blockchain technology, digital currency and digital assets through the firm's Venture Capital and Digital Asset Index Fund.Mr. Yusko received a BA with Honors from the University of Notre Dame and an MBA in Accounting and Finance from the University of Chicago.Hosted By:Austin WillsonMichael O'ConnorBZ: welcome back to another episode of the long-run show. This is your host, Austin Willson, along with Mike OConnor. And today we are going to be having another guest on our show. We have Mark Yusko from Morgan Creek Capital. He's actually the founder and CIO of Morgan Creek capital and the chief managing partner of Morgan Creek digital.Hopefully I got that right, Mark. And we're going to be good. We're going to be talking about we're gonna be talking about a lot of different things today. Spanning many different aspects. Obviously, mark, you have a lot of experience investing money and allocating capital and also a lot of experience just with thinking about large long run issues which is the name of the show.M: One of the things that I really don't like is everything is focused on short term and social media. And that just the explosion of content has made it even shorter and shorter. And really, if you think about investing, the art of investing, it really is about the longterm. And it's nice. You're nice to say I have a lot of experience. That's just a very nice way of saying I'm old and I am and that's actually a good thing because it means you survived all the mistakes that you made when you were young. But importantly it goes to. My whole career has been around. Long-term thinking, I a series of happy accidents. I didn't plan to be an investment guy. I planned to be an architect. And then I tried pre-med and none of those things really fit. But I went to work for an insurance company out of business school and the guy who was doing investments retired. And so I was now the investment guy. And what I found is it was the perfect thing for me as a science guy. And science is all about format hypothesis, forming experiment, gathering data, testing the hypothesis, and then deciding if it's right or wrong. And that's exactly what you do in investing, right? You come up with this form an experiment.You, you make exposure and then you test it. You gather the data and the market tells you whether you're right or wrong. And part of the. my aha moment over my career was that time arbitrage. So long run thinking, right? The title of your show is the ultimate win in investing. If you have a long time preference, if you have the ability to think longer term than the average investor, you will make more money. And that's kinda cool. And you don't have to be right as often either. That's the nice thing is you don't have to always be right or prove that you're right. Which is very dangerous and investing. Yeah. So quick. Went to school. I said to be an architect or a doctor then went to business.School, came out, went into investing. And my next happy accident was I went back to my Alma Mater. I went back to Notre Dame and I got into endowment management. And what I realized was I thought investing when I worked for the bond management part of the insurance company and then an equity firm. Was that It was just about picking stocks and bonds. That's what investing does. That's what the TV tells you. You should pick stocks IBM or GM or Ford. And what I realized is those were 15% of the longterm returns. 85% of returns comes from asset allocation. The big picture allocation of capital across stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities within stocks. Do I go international? Do I go domestic? Do I go technology? Do I go healthcare? And those big asset allocation decisions drove everything. So the endowment model of investing, which I learned at Notre Dame brought with me down here to university of North Carolina at chapel hill. Whereas the CIO there, that's what I learned. And all that endowment model means is you have a long time horizon. It's permanent capital. Therefore you have this ability to take advantage of time arbitrage. The second thing is you have to have an equity bias, because if you want to have a long term positive return, you need to outperform inflation and bonds just don't do that by very much. So you have to have an equity orientation, but equity doesn't mean stocks. You mean stocks? It means private equity. It means venture capital. It means commodity equity. There's all kinds of equities. And then the next stage was I left the university back actually now a long time ago, back in 2004, and I formed Morgan Creek Capital and more capital is just about bringing the endowment model to other investors, taking this idea of alternative, thinking about investments to the masses. Now everyone says what do you mean alternative thinking? I'm like I don't like the term alternative investments. People talk about it all the time. Hedge funds or private equity or venture capital. Those are alternative investments. alternative to what? you own stocks, you own bonds, you own currencies and you own commodities. How I own them in a mutual fund, in a hedge fund, in a private partnership, doesn't change the nature that I own. Stocks, bonds, and currencies and commodities. And the problem is whoever thought of the term alternatives, who was not a marketing guy or gal, they were not very smart. People don't like alternative stuff, alternative medicine, alternative music.They don't like alternative stuff. They're afraid of it. . And so what did he do? Tape put 5% in alternatives and 95% in tradition. That doesn't make any sense because if the traditional stuff isn't attractive, why would you want to own it? So fast forward Morgan Creek over the years has migrated from, this alternative thinking about investments to my big aha moment, which was investing in infrastructure around technological innovations. And it's a wave of about 14 year cycle is where the big wealth is created. on Twitter it's my pin tweet. The greatest wealth is created by investing in something that you believe in before others even understand. you will be mocked, you'll be ridiculed and it's worth it. And so back four years ago, we set up Morgan Creek digital subsidiary of Morgan Creek capital to focus on long-term investing in the digital asset ecosystem and having a blast. had more fun than I've ever had my career. And I love every stage of my career. But I'm having way more fun. Now I get to hang out with young smart people. I get to focus on this innovative technology. That's changing the world anyway.BZ: I love the term time arbitrage. That is just such a great term. And I find it so interesting because like you mentioned, using the that's so interesting, the endowment model, because that seems so foreign to wall street of the last couple of decades, or, having this model that you're actually considering long-term implications. You're not just looking for the next big short or something like that. What's been the reception from others in the field of that. Cause it seems like so much common sense to be able to look at the long-term, but it's pretty uncommon. What's been the reception ?M: We actually created a vehicle a number of years ago called the endowment fund and it took off, it was the most successful launch of a product in Merrill Lynch's history and everybody piled in and then something happened, gold financial crisis happened. We actually did well relatively well. We didn't do well. Absolutely. But we did less badly than everybody else. And, in investing the most important thing, right? There's three rules to investing rule. Number one, don't lose money rule number two, don't lose money rule number three, don't forget the first two rules and Roy Neuberger coined that phrase.And it's because of math. If I'm down 10, I got to be up 11. If I'm down 20, I gotta be up 25. I'm down 50. I gotta be up 100 to get even, God forbid you're like Russian market. I'm down 95 when it gets back to even which it will. Cause this has happened before. You'll be up 20 fold buying Russian equities. Great idea for the long-term not for the next week or the next month, but if you can buy spare bank at this price, you make 20 times your money, probably over a long-term period because you're down 95%. But that idea of avoiding the downside is what the endowment model is all about. And what happened though is after the gold financial crisis, the FED and other central banks around the world started pumping liquidity into the market. And that changed things. And what it did is it created this illusion that stocks, the S&P or going up every year. And so over the last 13 years has been pretty much a bull market in nominal terms, not in real terms, but in nominal terms. And maybe people not want to be value oriented. They want to be momentum players. They didn't want to take the long-term. They didn't want to make an investment today in a company that might take 10 years to harvest an S&P is up 15% every year. I'll just do that. So the endowment model kind of faded and can got out of favor and, necessity is the mother of invention that led us to say, all right, if nobody wants to think like long-term investors, then we'll find products that are, and the problem there was, we had an asset liability mismatch. We let people come out of the fund on any quarter, but we were making investments for long-term periods of time. And that doesn't work very well. It's like a bank. I give everybody, went to the bank to take their money. That's a problem. Cause there's not enough money for all the. Because they took $1 and lent it out 11 times and made lots of dollars. And there's nothing wrong with that. Fractional reserve banking is not in itself evil. It just, it operates on faith and custom where everybody doesn't run to the bank at the same time. And the same thing is true in long-term investments. If everybody wants their liquidity, they can't get it. So now we raise vehicles with longer-term lockups so we can focus on making those long-term investments.BZ: Interesting. Very interesting. So this kind of shifts and long-term cycle, or I guess midterm cycle, you were saying the 14 year investing in something that you're very convicted about, how did that fit into the endowment model or was that a kind of the next iteration for you?M: So it definitely fits into this endowment model of investing. But it was a discovery by being at the endowment actually. So I go back now and it's easy to tell the story because I grew up on the west coast. I grew up in Seattle and my dad sold and installed mainframe computers in hospitals. That's what he did cause they didn't have computers. And so if you go back to 1954, there was this innovation out in Boston, outside of route 128 around computing and suddenly companies could have computers. And 14 years later, there's an innovation out in Silicon valley on a microchip is suddenly computers can be smaller and companies like Intel and Cisco were formed and they did pretty well. Right then in 1982, 14 years later. And why it's always 14 years. I don't know exactly, but it's really because young people invent all the new stuff, because they don't know not to. And they don't know what they don't know. And so they just go ahead and do it. Marc Andreessen, 19 years old, he invented the browser. Larry and Sergei invented this company, Google, which I'll talk about in a second in their twenties. And so it's that young generation that gets innovation going. Cause the old guys are like, I'm fine. My flip phone is fine. I don't need a smart phone. And it's true. Confirmed myself that as I get older, but the key was I grew up in Seattle, many of my friends, they don't work anymore.They went to work for this little company called Microsoft. I was too stupid to do that. Now I defend myself saying if you've seen the picture of the original Microsoft 11, you wouldn't blame. Now there are multibillionaires. I'm not, I shouldn't make fun of them, but they looked pretty funny. We all looked bad in the seventies. Clothes were bad. Hair was bad. But look at the picture tonight, Google the original Microsoft 11, you go, oh my God, I wouldn't work for those guys either. So Steve bomber's mom said, honey, why would you work for that company? No one would ever want a computer in their house. He has 18 billion reasons. He was right. Mom was wrong. So 14 years later, I'm at my Alma Mater. I'm at Notre Dame and I'm working in the endowment office and we had the chance to make this investment in a company called Sequoia at the time. No one, not no one, but very few people knew who Sequoia was. It was not a famous venture capital fund. In fact, it was on the verge of failure because Don Valentine, the famous founder had hired this guy Michael Moritz, Michael was a wall street journal reporter. He had never done a deal before. The other partners like Don, what the hell? We're the future? Why are you hiring this kid? It turns out Michael turned out to be a pretty good investor, Yahoo, Google a few other things and maybe one of the greatest venture capitalists of all time, but we gave them 5 million bucks. They put half a million dollars in Google. And I actually remember. I remember saying guys, I don't get it. They're 20 search engines. There is web crawler and AltaVista and ask Jeeves, what do you need Google for? It's a stupid name. Now it's a verb, right? We totally reinvented search because Larry and Sergei young guys figured out that the way to do search is not to search the whole internet. There are 1.7 billion websites in the world. Half of them are owned by Google. What are you talking about, Mark? Think about it. When you start typing a question. They've set up a website for every question that has ever been asked. And as soon as you start asking the question, it directs you to a little tiny slice and they've already put all the information that you need to know. And sometimes maybe there's some bias, but that's how they do search and it revolutionized everything. And so we put in 500 K and we took out 200 million. So I now had this aha moment. This is a long story for an epiphany, but I had this epiphany that investing was about long-term investments in infrastructure companies around this cycle. And so 14 years later the mobile phone comes along and apple releases the smartphone The iPhone, their stock goes down 46. Think about this for a second. this iPhone and the stock goes down because people are never going to pay $500 for a phone.My flip phone is just fine. My Razor's awesome. Apple's now the biggest, most valuable company in the world. And I remember being back in Seattle at Craig macaws house, he was having an event for venture capital people. And Craig is a very famous pioneer in cellular telephony, the original flip phones. And I'm asked, as I asked his family office, guy said, do you think the mobile net will be as big as the internet? He's mark, you can me ask me if they want a computer? Yeah, whatever, ask them if they want a phone. Like I already have two, I don't need another one. So yeah, it's going to be a big deal. And what it did is it created the first network. 1 phone not valuable at all.2 phones, a little more valuable, 2 million phones, pretty valuable, 2 billion phones, really valuable. And the network effect is exponential and the people are bad at math. People suck at math, but that's just linear math. If I say what's two times two, both of you will say four. I say, all right guys, what's 17 times 23. I'll wait. That is the limit of human intelligence. The average person can not do 17 times 23 in their head. And so how are you at nonlinear? Exponential regression? Not very good. And so I do this challenge all the time. I say, take out a piece of paper, fold it in half, pull it in half again. I defy you to fold it seven times and it was a bag full of seven times. No problem. And they're like, whoa, okay. I can't fold it seven times. If you could fold it 20 times. It would be as high as your house. If you could fold it 30 times, it'd be the atmosphere. If you could get to 50, it'd be to the sun. And 100 is the known universe. So exponential growth is a really big deal. And so the network effect created these massive opportunities and the light bulb went off for me, just get in front of those waves. So buy things and you know how to find them, whatever the old people like me now say, will rot your brain or is a fad..anytime those two terms, come out, just buy it, tuck it in a drawer and go away.BZ: I love that guy that was going to be, yeah, that was going to be my follow-up ETF. And the 14 year pattern Have you seen that be very consistent? M: It's incredibly consistent and okay. What's amazing. So you went 1954 was the mainframe and they had four years, 1954 to 1958. We could make a fortune in deck and Wang and it's winching. Then you have a crash. Then 14 years later, 1968-1972 Intel Fairchild, et cetera. Then you have a crash then 1982 to 1986. Everything's great. Microsoft. Wintel. They have a crash then in 2010? No. Then in 1999, then in 1996, around the internet, 1996 to 2000, everything's awesome. Yahoo, eBay et cetera, Google, then you have a crash 2010 to 2014 to 2015. You have a little crash wasn't as big as the other crash, but there was a crash right now in 2024, which is the beginning of the blockchain era or the trust net as I call it. So the internet 1996, the mobile net 2010 and the trust net 2024. It's when everything in the world, everything in the world, everything of value, every stock, every bond, every currency, every commodity, every private piece of real estate, every piece of art, every collectible car, every private business, all $700 trillion of assets in the world will be tokenized. What does that mean? All a token is an entry on a block. It's an entry on a public ledger. That's all it is. It's not super crazy and exciting. It's really pretty simple, but it's code and we can trust code differently than we can trust people. And if you think about this, every technological evolution goes to making that trust in code better. When the internet first came out, people are like, I don't know what this thing isn't. It doesn't really work very well. And Netflix started a company and they're like, all right, we're going to use it. We're going to have video on demand. If demand is defined as four days, it took four days to download a movie. No one's going to wait four days to download a movie. So they almost went bankrupt and it wasn't until bandwidth was increased because South Korea innovated around broadband and suddenly you could deliver it in less than four days as a Netflix done pretty well. Pets.com. I'm going to deliver, pet food over the internet.Failed. It's the poster child of the failure of the internet, chewy.com. It's the same damn company, exactly the same, but we needed GPS tracking. We needed instantaneous access to information, to broadband. So it's these inflection points in technology and why they're 14 years. Again, it doesn't really matter, but it is very consistent. And so 2024, as great as it's been in blockchain and Bitcoin and all this other stuff, it hasn't even started. The players have entered the stadium, they're warming up. We haven't even played the National Anthem. And I was like, oh, it's the third ending? The eighth inning game. the game hasnt started.BZ:I think that's a phenomenal point because it's amazing how much we're already talking about Bitcoin and blockchain and web3. And it's The current figures are maybe 5% of the world has cryptocurrency. Like global adoption is still so early that it just seems like it's the next huge network effectM:If you overlay Mike, to that point, if you overlay the internet adoption and web three adoption or blockchain adoption, we're in 1997. Around the time when we invested in Google. And E-bay, I remember taking E-bay to our board at Notre Dame and they're like, let me get this straight. You want us to put money in a garage sale? Really? No. Think about this. So they were against it. The firm benchmark capital, some of the best investors on the planet they put in, they raised an $85 million fund, $85 million, not a lot of money. And they put a bunch of money into eBay, not all of it, but a decent amount. They took out $10 billion. The whole fund was a 96 X the whole fund. So she put it in a dollar, you got $96 back and on a garage sale company because people didn't get it or look at the market cap of PayPal today. And how many of the PayPal mafia are out there doing amazing things. humans are optimistic, right? If you weren't optimistic, you'd literally sit in your house in sheer shuttering because you wouldn't go outside. Cause you could get shot. He get eaten by a bear, all kinds of bad things could happen, but we're optimistic. And so we go on it's I always say, who was the third guy who went out to try to get a Mastodon with a spear? Cause the first two didn't come back. So who was the third guy who figured out, if he hit him right under the chin, you can kill the Mastodon. He was a hero, but, or who was the first person that tried surgery on without anesthetic before we figured that out. So we're optimistic and we try new stuff and that's good. And we have progress, but we're unable to imagine the unimaginable, right? We can't imagine. Right now we are talking to each other. We're actually, we're not talking to it. We're talking to a metal box, right? A metal and glass box. And it's coming in my glass metal and glass box into the airwaves, into a cell tower down through fiber optic cable out another cell tower into the airwaves, into your metal glass box and into your earphones in real time. Are you kidding me? I could imagine that 20 years ago, 30 years ago, no one. So it's really hard to invest for that long cycle opportunity set because you can't imagine. So who could imagine that money as we know it, which isn't money it's currency, the only money is gold because money is something exist in the absence of a liability dollars are not money they are currencies. But who could imagine that all of money will eventually be entries on a book? Not very many people. Yeah. It's amazing to me. And you spoke to this. The thing that we are the worst status imagining unimaginable, right? Cause we have a word for it that, that just goes to show you how big a bias it is.BZ: We have a word for it. It's unimaginable. And so I think the bias is to go, okay I can't do that. Or I guess the thought process is, I have this bias. I can't really know what's next because I can't see it. So therefore, I'm going to tighten my time horizon. I'm going to look for the short play I'm going to, and nothing against day-trading.I've seen it to be profitable, but I'm going to look for this short, interim intraday play or a week play or month play. At the expense of a longer term play, that may be an investment that may pay off 96X like, like the eBay story. And so it's a great, it's interesting that biting, there's nothing wrong with trading.M:There's nothing inherently bad about trading. It's hard. It's work and it goes to income and passive income and investing, we all work hard, right? We're doing what we do. We either create content or we manage somebody's assets or we make widgets, we all have this work that we do, but you think about it, the return on that, that work pales in comparison that if you can have something, take up a piece of real estate that you own, that someone else pays you rent and you make money while you're sleeping, it's actually a pretty cool or a Royalty. Think about Qualcomm that every time somebody builds an Android phone, they get paid. That's cool. And so they monetize their intellectual property and then you get into investing. Sure. If I can figure out if CEO, Adam tomorrow is going to wake up and do another great deal, like buying a gold mine, maybe I can get out ahead of AMC and it'll go up and I'll make some money, but what if he wakes up and he makes a bad investment, actually gold mines are usually are bad investments, but maybe this will be a good one, but what if it makes a bad investment? And it goes the other way. That's that? I don't have control of any of that, but if I can Intuit that, let's see. All right. Blockchain technology is really just an operating system for this injured, connected everything. Okay. That's interesting. So what makes money. When goods get traded marketplaces exchanges.So what if I just own a little piece of one of the exchanges like Coinbase, it doesn't matter if the price goes up, price goes down, people got to trade it. They take a cut. That sounds pretty good. If you look exchanges or there's the NASDAQ exchange with London stock exchange or the Brazilian , all of those have been great investments over the long term. Even the LME before they killed themselves the other day, by letting the Chinese billionaire say, "oh, I'm sorry. I know I lost money, but I'm not going to let you take it from me." And they screwed everybody else. Just mind numbing, how to destroy the capital of a business and one easy lesson, but there's time arbitrage. Right? There's short-term thinking I got this angry Chinese billionaire, right? Who's given us a lot of commissions saying he's not going to honor his margin call and I'll just cancel all the trades. That sounds good. Oh, shit. I just killed the golden goose because now no one will ever trust my exchange again, ever. Let's go to a different exchange. That's negative time arbitrage.BZ: So the way to, and I guess I, wasn't trying to position, day trading versus long-term investing because you're exactly right. They are very different. I guess my question that I was building to is with that bias in mind.How do we look at all of the trends that are out there, right? Because we could make an argument for metaverse right. that is the next 14 year cycle. Not withstanding there's crossover between the two, obviously, not withstanding that crossover. Okay. This is what I'm going to do. Or quantum computing, this is going to be the next large leap in computing technology. We're going to be able to calculate things we've never been able to before. So how do we think through these things that we might be seeing as trends or fads? And I like your rule earlier. Okay. "If some old fart says, oh, this is just a fad buddy, look into it." But how do we think through that? I tend to be more cynical. So I'm thinking, all right, great. We have all these trends. But how do we imagine the unimaginable? Sounds like a riddleM: it's the question that all of us should be spending at least a little time on, in fact, one of the best things to become a better investor is to spend some time every day or at least every few days just away. Not staring at your screen, take a hike, take a walk, meditate, whatever it is, and actually just think and try to cobble together these ideas because you're a hundred percent right. But the metaverse oh it's just Facebook. No, come on. Just think about that one for just one second. The metaverse is the decentralization of technology and the eraser of nation states and industrial conglomerates. That's clearly what the decentralized world is. So the idea of a centralized organization being the metaverse, it's an oxymoron it's jumbo shrimp, or military intelligence or whatever, and it just doesn't work. but the metaverse is big. Okay. So most, so maybe the metaverse is this next trend? And my 14 year cycle is all about computing power mainframes, microcomputers personal computers, internet mobile net trust net. And to your point, maybe the next is quantum net actually like that. I'm going to think about that a lot. Im going skiing next week with my son. So there are other cycles could be coincidence with the same 14 year cycle, or maybe they could be offset maybe within the 14 year cycle. There's a seven year offset for these other secondary or second order effects. Yeah, the metaverse is clearly something that, that is created out of this innovation around computing power. And so we do have to think, okay what does that mean? Does it mean I should invest in these centralized organizations that are renaming themselves? It's like when we were in long island ice tea named themselves long island blockchain stock went crazy for awhile, but what do you do? You don't do anything in blockchain. you make tea, but it's a great meme play, right? But they did it in 2000 and last bubble. I lived it and I, we invested in a company, true story called art technology group and what they did all this company. Did they help companies change their name to die? Because if you change your name to.com price went up. So these guys actually then listed as a public company. They were consulting company, long story short. We'd put some money in, through a firm called tutor ventures up in Boston. And our cost basis was 50 cents. The stock went public at a hundred dollars. Okay. So maybe 200 times our money. And I called the principal and I said, what should we do? He says, I'm an insider. I can't really talk. But I can tell you two things, revenue is 6 million market cap is 6 billion. And there was a silence. He's mark, did you hear me, Mike? Yeah. I heard you ı was like SELL, GET RID OF IT NOW! Here's the crazy part. It went to four. So it went down 96%. And I think about that at four, it was still an eight. Off our call list, but we sold at a hundred made 200 X. But the thing is that company didn't do anything. And these, so the third part of the question is, so you've got the main wave then how do you have then do you have these other opportunity waves, but then you got the scams that come into it that you want to avoid. So there's lots of crosscurrents and how you try to think about these big themes. But then the other thing is if you spend too much time thinking about it and not enough time acting on it, right yet, paralysis by analysis, you miss all the opportunities. And this is, to me, one of the things that's most, most important about investing is winning investors.Great investors lose more often than bad investors. They do win a lot, but they lose a lot. The reason losers, bad investors don't win or lose. They don't do anything. They're so afraid of losing that. They don't actually commit capital. So to your point, rather than try to figure out, do I, can I figure out which is the one I like to put bets and there are bets in a lot of different places. And then when things start to go double up, most people want to double down, right? When things go against them, they want to put more money in to prove that they're right in the market's wrong. The market is never wrong. The market is always right. You are wrong. And when we make mistakes, it's okay. As long as you Ralph. Okay. And we need to talk about this. Cause cause from Dean Smith and it's March madness and Tarell's play tonight, so recognize them. Not that hard. It's usually right in your face. Here's the hard part. Admit it. Yes. I made a mistake. there was a show on TV a hundred years ago called happy days. And there was this guy, Arthur Fonds rally, the cool guy. He said, Hey, and he couldn't say the word wrong. He couldn't say the word wrong. You got to say, you're wrong. Then you got to learn from it. Most important thing. And thinking investing is with every investment we get richer or wiser. Never both. We either learn something or we make money because when we're right, we don't actually analyze. We just say, oh, look how smart we are. Whoa, of course it was so good when you lose money and then you've got to forget it. And the forgetting is really important. And this goes to the other great coach who is still in the tournament as well. University of duke at Durham down the street, coach K has this great line. He says, you know what? Separates great. Players slash investors from the average? No, he says the greats focus on the next play. Watch the tournament game tonight and see how many times did you, so miss a shot go down and commit to a stupid foul. Cause they're thinking about the shot, a great player, doesn't even remember taking the shot, goes back, plays good, different defense steals A ball makes a layup.Bad investors they're constantly focused on, oh man, I'm a mistake. And I just can't believe it. It. Got to learn from it, but you got to erase it, forget it and go get the next up.BZ: Individual plays versus ETFs?M: You guys probably both play Fortnite. I watched my son play Fortnite. Does he take a shotgun or a sniper rifle? He takes both. Cause a shot is really good in some situations and the sniper is really good at another. So yes, the answer is yes. You definitely want a spray and pray and the whole spray and pray.I prefer spray and then water, the seeds that start growing. Okay. That's better to me and I pray a lot too, but hope is not an investment strategy. Hope is a four-letter word, particularly in investing, but the sniper rifle a hundred percent. And here's the thing. If you're willing to do the work, the sniper rifles really awesome, because if you actually will do the work that most people won't, then you get a better shot. And if you take that better shot, you can make a lot more concentrated portfolios, make you rich. Every great fortune in the world came from constant. Concentrated stock position, concentrated real estate position, contrary to business ownership, every fortune start with concentration. Now the joke is how do you create a small fortune start with a large fortune and stay concentrated, concentrated long enough competitors will come up and chip away and take all your wealth. So diversification keeps you rich. So if you are in the business of making money, which when we're young, we should be and ice. And I'm really good at talking because I sucked when I was young. I didn't do any of this stuff. I talk about. In fact, I sent a pre out to myself the other day, maybe a year ago, advice to my younger self, all the things that I did wrong, that I want people not to do wrong. And the key somebody asked me, how do you become a better investor in. Like all the time, a lot, like all the time and do the shotgun and do the sniper. And, but when it goes against you just move on, just sell and move on. And when things start going, don't pull your weeds. Don't pull your flowers, right? Peter Lynch has this great line. He says, investing is super simple. You pull your weeds and you water your flowers. But he says, the average investor does the opposite. They pull their flowers. Cause they're so afraid to loosen and they water their weeds because they want to prove they're right. Soros is not whether you're right or wrong. That has nothing to do with anything. It's how much money you make when you're winning, how much money you lose when you're wrong. And if you can constantly minimize your loss. First loss of the best loss and let your winners run and then do that work so that you think about a sniper. You guys have seen the movie sniper? .Does he just like randomly pull the thing out of his bag and then start shooting? No, he plans. He sets the stage. He gets where no one can see him. He's got the stuff, the cammo on. He lines up the shot, he waits and he makes the kill. So it's not like that's planning. And so if you do the work you set the stage, you do the plan, you get the cammo, you get the right rifle. You get the right ammunition. Yeah. You'll make some, you make some great investments. But that does mean an ETF is bad. Now the problem, the only thing on ETS, just make sure they actually do what they say they're gonna do in what you name the ETF. So you could have value ETFs that are filled with 30 times revenue. These is crap companies. Yeah. It's not value now, but the new value when it goes down 95%. But, and again, this personal experience. So when I, my first job, I had a 401k and, we had six options and one of them was the blue chip growth fund. And I had a thesis that the world was going to get lousy. This is back in 1991, 1992. Oh, we're going to have recession. I'm like, I'm going to put my money in the high quality blue chips. So I moved all my money there and we had the recession just like we thought, and this thing went down 40%. What the fuck? Probably shouldn't say that, but what the hell? And I go on, I look and it says in the footnotes though, "the blue chips of tomorrow" What the hell? This is my fault. I didn't read. I gotta pull that prospectus.BZ: It's interesting. I want to go back to what you said earlier, And I agree with everything you said, and I think it's actually one of, one of the episodes we recorded about two months ago. At this point we talked about just thinking about. How you invest in approach money and what are your biases and knowing yourself. And so for me, I know that I am very bad at acting quickly.I take, and I do the analysis paralysis. For me at certain points and this is one of them right now. I don't have the time to go and research and then implement and act quickly. Cause I know I won't. So I'm just going to buy a bow broad basket for now and hold it. And then like you said, in your answer, there's different ways to double down and concentrate, right? Whether that's your skills, whether that's, I'll say starting a business, right? So there are different ways to think about investing, especially as an individual. And so I, I'm interested to hear what you would say about the asset allocation portion that you said earlier, that's almost more important than picking the winners and losers because it seems like you can build a great portfolio that has a phenomenal asset allocation out of individual stocks, right? And individual positions. You can also do it with ETFs and it might be easier for the individual to do that. Factor in a lot of things. You've got to do your research on those ETFs. You can't be buying on the name of the tick thing, but it's that's the answer more than one or the other, right?M: Yup. No, you're a hundred percent right. Austin and the ETFs are an amazing tool because they give you big swaths of the canvas. So if you think of a canvas and it's got all the different colors all over and, international and emerging markets and developed markets and equities and fixed income and commodities and currencies and derivatives and leverage and all the things that you need to build a diversified portfolio. Using individual securities, you can do it. It's hard, like super hard because you got to decide, okay, I want autos, but do I want European autos or Japanese autos? Or, what about this Tesla thing? Is that really a car company? Oh, I thought it was a software company. It's a car. It sits out, it collects dust, just like every other car. And, oh, by the way, you're only in your car 3% to 4% of the time. Think about that. You're inside your car 3% to 4%. So I would say don't spend a lot of money on cars unless you're like really into cars. But the interesting thing about all of this is how you build that portfolio is important. So if you think about the four steps of investment asset allocation, manage your selection, portfolio construction and security selection. So the 85% is in those first three, that is the allocation piece. And then the security selection piece is the 15%. So it really doesn't matter over the term, whether you own Ford or GM, it actually doesn't. In short periods of time, it can matter a lot for sure. But over long periods of time, it's less important than knowing should I be in automobiles or should I be in flying cars or should I be in, whatever. So the big picture asset allocation, should I be in stocks or bonds? Credit or equity, should I be in currencies or commodities? Should I be long biased or should I be long short? Should I be fully hedged? Should I be in cash? Should I be in, in emerging markets or international? Where's the growth, all of those big pictures. It's those asset allocation decisions are really important. So that's where I always start. And I try to come up with five big themes 10-year trends that I think are going to drive investment and growth. And one of mine is the middle classification of the emerging markets, right? There's about 3.5 B that live at middle-class or below around the world. Most of them in Southeast Asia and. Most of them are going to move up. And it's just math got to move up. Now, China alone, China took 750 million people out of abject poverty and put them in the middle-class over the last 30 years. I don't know. Maybe those people that want to move up. They've seen Dallas. They want that life. So there's probably some opportunities in retail and consumer in China over the next. Give or take giving us the size of the U S and Europe put together. So that's a big thing. How do you play that theme? I could buy a and have bought this ETF called K web. Why? Because it owns technology companies that are making those middle-class lives better now marked I think is down 90% in the last year. Yup. So I bought it two weeks ago because anytime something's down that much, you gotta buy it. It doesn't matter what it is. If something's down 90%, you got to buy it. And so how else would you play the growth? The Asian consumer commodities is going to be more in demand. So I play it that way. Then you got to say how am I going to implement? That's the manager selection piece. So manager selection. I could do it myself. I, Mike and I could go decide, we're going to go rifle, shoot. We're going to sniper. And we're going to pick the stocks. SoI'm going to buy Alibaba. I'm going to buy jd.com. Totally fine. Totally acceptable. But what if we miss Mae Twan? What if we miss Pendo that K web is going to have them all. So that's outsourcing the manager to the group. That's doing that. Now the challenge with that is you got to pick between the managers and Howard marks has this great line. He says the problem with picking managers and picking people to manage your money is you have to decide between the good person who sounds good and the bad person who sounds good. They don't let the person who sounds bad, make the presentation. And it's so true. They all sound awesome. But then there's portfolio construct. This is, let's say I pick 10 things, either individual stocks or ETFs or hedge fund managers or mutual funds. I got 10, 10%, each 50% to one and 5% to the others that matters. It matters a lot actually. And there's capitalization waiting. There's equal waiting, there's rebalancing or not rebalancing. So all those portfolio construction things matter. Now the nice thing is most of us, we have lives. So it's like the cobbler's kids who have no shoes. We intend to manage our portfolio and we intend to rebalance and we intend to do all the work, if I look at my IRA, I have this little IRA from your way back when, and I look at that relative to the things that I do, or I just put it in my funds that are managed by people in my firm. It ain't close. You have all these great ideas. Why didn't you just put them in your IRA? Because I got busy and I didn't do it. And I wasn't smart like Peter teal to put in, private shares, which is what I really should have done, should put private shares at Morgan Creek. And then I should have written them down to the, basically zero in the global financial crisis like he did. And so then he gets this big basis and it created billions of dollars. Now I wouldn't have created billions of dollars, Peter is a genius. He's a mad genius, but anyway, so it's a long way of saying allocation first, spend your most time there because it's the most impactful. And particularly for younger investors, I have this thing that don't listen to anything I, or any other pundit on diversified portfolios and portfolio management. Under 60 years old, don't listen to that. Just concentrate on venture capital, equities tech. Like I believe it's not hyperbole. I believe it should be against the law for 25 to 65 year old people to own bonds. It is the waste of time and money. You don't need the volatility reduction because your volatility reduction comes from your future earnings. That is your fixed income.BZ: What are your emotions and feelings looking at blockchain now? Is this kind of is this really exciting?M:Oh, my God. It's the greatest look. It's the greatest wealth creation opportunity. I'll see in my lifetime and I'm gonna be around a long time. I got an 11 year old still. So I, I have this funny thing, we're a good Catholic family. I joke we had nine. We just skipped the middle six. So we have two older kids and a baby. And so we're going to be, I'm going to be around a long time. We'll be working for a long time. And so I'm not going here, but this is the greatest wealth creation opportunity I've ever seen because we're building on great tech. When you built the internet, you were building on shitty tech client server technology is really bad when you built the mobile net. You're building on pretty good tech. The internet was pretty good, but now you're building on top of an installed mobile net infrastructure. That is extraordinary and blockchain is a technological advance that is not linear, but exponential. So all these things are incredibly powerful. So I look, I got exposed to blockchain and Bitcoin in 2013. I didn't understand it. And so I was not a cryptography student and I missed it. I got blockchain, I got infrastructure my whole 14 year cycle thing and have done quite nicely. We've made good investments in infrastructure but I missed the opportunity of, a generation to really be early in, in behind joke that I got introduced to it the same month as the Winkle vie. And they're multibillionaires and I'm not. but there's a movie called the graduate and the graduate. There's a scene where he's asking his uncle for advice is one word plastics, go into plastics, which was good advice in the sixties. And today I said one word, "Jack blockchain go out to California. He wanted to live in San Francisco, said, go work at Coinbase." And he goes out and he interviewed and talks to people and it's I don't know, dad, maybe it's gonna be a big deal. I'm just going to KPMG safe. Gets me to San Francisco. " you're going to hate it whenever he did hate it. Quit after nine months" Coinbase goes public. Cause I find the right should have gone to Coinbase, but not as bad as you think you are. I might go, oh, do tell. I told you to go to quit, but you didn't lever up the house and put on Bitcoin. I'm like, "oh you a little shit." Okay. That's fair. No, one's crying for my son. Cause he works for snowflake and he's doing great, but, and I'm really proud of him, but I think it's interesting. It's a long winded way of saying I have never been more excited in my life. I've never had this much fun in my whole career and I loved my career. I loved every stage of my career. But my career has been in chapters, right? Chapter one, I work for not-for-profits. I was an allocator. I had fun. I loved it. I got second income working for the universities. Chapter two, I built a really nice asset management company, Morgan Creek, capital chapter three three years into a 20 year stint of tokenizing the world. And I really am having more fun. Now I get to hang out with young, smart, really creative people. I'm seeing technological innovation like the world has never seen. I now spend all my time doing venture capital, which has just so much fun backing founders and watching them build things. And it's, again, back to that long game, if you think that there are only four ways in the world that you can make money, all four require you to take risk. If you leave your money in cash, you get the risk free rate. Hence the name because you're not taking any risks. And unfortunately, if you do that, all your wealth is chewed up by inflation, right? Leave your money in the bank today, you get less than one. Inflation is eight, that sucks. So you gotta take risks. You can take credit risk, first risk.You can buy a bond. Now bonds are an actual claim. If you don't get paid, you can Sue pretty good deal. But you don't get paid a lot. You can take 2% above Risk-free rate not a very good deal. Look at bonds day, 2.4%. Woo big deal. And then you can take equity risk. Second risk equities are contingent claim. Meaning you only get paid if all the bond holders get paid. And so that's, that makes 7%above risk free rate. That's pretty good. So equity should be at the core of your portfolio. Then you can take illiquidity risk, private investments, private equity, private real estate, private equity, private debt, better get 5% more, 12% above risk-free. Awesome. 14, 15% compounded venture capital, even higher. And then you can use structure or leverage and leverage cuts both ways. Sometimes it's good. Sometimes it's bad, but illiquidity and venture capital and innovation as an asset class. And for all the ribbing she's taken, Cathy Wood is exactly right. Innovation is an asset class. It is where you want to invest for the longterm. And that's what I'm doing right now.BZ: That's amazing. Mark. It's been so good to have you on, I know we're running out of time here. But it's just been an absolute pleasure for both myself and Austin. Thank you so much for the time.M:I appreciate you guys having me on the show. I love this. That you guys are doing a show on the longterm, instead of all the day trading stuff again, nothing wrong. Day-trading totally fine. But sometimes you got to step back, take a hike, think big thoughts and really enjoyed the conversation to appreciate all your hard work, getting ready for it. And we'll talk again soon.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-long-run-show/donations

Podcast: The Tim Ferriss Show (LS 81 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)Episode: #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million JanitorPub date: 2022-03-02Brought to you by Athletic Greens all-in-one nutritional supplement, Allform premium, modular furniture, and Tonal smart home gym. Morgan Housel (@morganhousel) is a partner at the Collaborative Fund and a former columnist at The Motley Fool and The Wall Street Journal. He serves on the board of directors at Markel Corporation. He is a two-time winner of the Best in Business Award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, winner of the New York Times Sidney Award, and a two-time finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism.His book The Psychology of Money has sold more than one million copies and has been translated into more than 30 languages.Please enjoy!This episode is brought to you by Allform! If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you've probably heard me talk about Helix Sleep mattresses, which I've been using since 2017. They also launched a company called Allform that makes premium, customizable sofas and chairs shipped right to your door—at a fraction of the cost of traditional stores. You can pick your fabric (and they're all spill, stain, and scratch resistant), the sofa color, the color of the legs, and the sofa size and shape to make sure it's perfect for you and your home.Allform arrives in just 3–7 days, and you can assemble it yourself in a few minutes—no tools needed. To find your perfect sofa and receive 20% off all orders, check out Allform.com/Tim.*This episode is also brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 by Athletic Greens, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system. Right now, Athletic Greens is offering you their Vitamin D Liquid Formula free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit AthleticGreens.com/Tim to claim this special offer today and receive the free Vitamin D Liquid Formula (and five free travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That's up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive all-in-one daily greens product.*This episode is also brought to you by Tonal! Tonal is the world's most intelligent home gym and personal trainer. It is precision engineered and designed to be the most advanced strength studio on the market today. Tonal uses breakthrough technology—like adaptive digital weights and AI learning—together with the best experts in resistance training so you get stronger, faster. Every program is personalized to your body using AI, and smart features check your form in real time, just like a personal trainer.Try Tonal, the world's smartest home gym, for 30 days in your home, and if you don't love it, you can return it for a full refund. Visit Tonal.com for $100 off their smart accessories when you use promo code TIM100 at checkout.*Warren Buffett vs. Jim Simons. [06:43]What do people get wrong about the partnership between Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger? [13:45]The size is the strategy. [16:59]Six years after writing his “Financial Advice for My New Son” article for The Motley Fool, are there any points Morgan would add or amend? [20:27]While there's no way of knowing what kind of adults our kids will grow up to be, how might we instill in them the value of money and the ability to control how it affects their lives? [23:43]What unorthodox career decision did Morgan's father make in his 30s, and how did the family's life change as a result? How did earlier lessons of frugality give Morgan's parents more options later on than their more steadily affluent peers? [28:28]How Morgan's career path meandered from Denny's greeter to investment banker to reluctant writer. [34:18]After finally hitting his stride as a writer at The Motley Fool, what compelled Morgan to join the Collaborative Fund team? [42:15]What's a Markel and how did Morgan get involved with it? What was it hoped he could bring to the table there? [49:07]How does Morgan approach risk? [56:32]What “fin tweet” game is Morgan playing, and what are the rules? Who are the top players in this space, and what makes them worth your attention no matter the medium? [58:59]Investors Morgan respects — even if he wouldn't try to emulate them. [1:03:33]Don't beat yourself up too badly if you've ever been gamed by the market. Even Warren Buffett still makes mistakes. But would his younger version have made the same decisions he makes today? What made the early days of the pandemic such an uncertain time for even the most seasoned investors — Buffett and Housel alike? [1:09:37]Sometimes it's the counterintuitive bets that elevate an investor into deity or demigodhood in the pantheon of the money-minded — whether it's Benjamin Graham, Walt Disney, or Michael Moritz. [1:19:11]Notes on leverage and the “buy, borrow, die” approach to investing, and making sense of conflicting, diametrically opposed advice from seemingly intelligent, rational parties with differing opinions. [1:28:37]Sometimes peace of mind matters more than profit. [1:33:44]Is it better to be an antediluvian penny pincher who dies rich, or a high-roller who casts fistfuls of dollars into the sea only to pass away penniless? Maybe the middle ground is healthier than either extreme. [1:36:01]How does Morgan recommend someone of means ensure their children don't grow up to be horrible, entitled, and generally useless to society? [1:40:13]Biographies and memoirs Morgan recommends (and what they can teach us about current events). [1:48:19]How can you increase the likelihood that you will not respond in moments of panic by doing what cripples you financially? Morgan weighs in. [1:52:26]In Morgan's experience, how does someone who comes into money effectively allow themselves to enjoy it without succumbing to the all-too-common temptation to sink it all under a mountan of status symbols nobody really cares about? For his own part, what does his financial comfort allow him to enjoy, and how does he scratch the itch when he's pestered by such temptations? [1:57:27]Preparing for financially bumpy long hauls, and “understanding the difference between a fee and a fine.” [2:07:15]A handful of journalists and writers Morgan would choose as trusted informants in a world without Twitter or in-depth news sources. [2:10:37]Morgan's hall of fame for books about investing and finance, and how Dan Gardner's book The Science of Fear has made him think about fear. [2:17:02]Morgan's advice for helping someone (like me) regain a regular cadence of writing if COVID or other life interruptions have derailed such efforts, and a glimpse into what his own writing process looks like. [2:19:18]Tolerance for petty annoyance as a valuable life skill. [2:25:48]How did training as a competitive ski racer prepare Morgan for USC and, eventually, a world-class writer for The Motley Fool? [2:30:53]What does Morgan think is true, but is actually just good marketing? [2:39:17]What looks unsustainable, but is actually a new trend we haven't accepted yet? [2:40:57]What has been true for decades that will stop working, but will drag along stubborn adherence because it has such a long track record of success? [2:43:50]Which of our current views would change if our incentives were different? [2:45:46]What are we ignoring today that will seem shockingly obvious in a year? [2:48:11]Money is not spreadsheets. It's dopamine and cortisol. [2:49:06]Thoughts on near-future innovations both frightening and fascinating. [2:50:10]Websites Morgan thinks are worth your while. [2:55:23]Stories or points in The Psychology of Money Morgan wishes people paid more attention to. [2:57:39]Parting thoughts. [2:59:02]*For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors.Sign up for Tim's email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim's books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Margaret Atwood, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Balaji Srinivasan, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Dr. Michio Kaku, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Tim Ferriss: Bestselling Author, Human Guinea Pig, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

“You can talk in a grand fashion about a 20-year plan, but you also have to work on what ‘this afternoon' brings. Having a sense of where your compass is set, and then breaking it down into little steps – knowing they will change over time, but not losing sight – that's what you need to build an organization.” Michael Moritz, partner at Sequoia Capital, visited campus for View From The Top and shared what he learned as a journalist covering Silicon Valley in the 1980's and later as an investor within it. During Moritz's 33 years in venture capital, Sequoia Capital has provided early funding to tech companies now considered giants (LinkedIn, KAYAK, Google, and Zappos among them). Moritz also advised students on what he looks for in early companies. “To me, the best investments are always those that don't fit into a convenient bucket,” he said. “What isn't obvious becomes something really interesting. Look out for the unexpected.”

The Power Law by Sebastian Mallaby has been capturing headlines in the VC community lately. We sat down with him at The European VC to dive into his book and shed light on some of the stand-out quotes and stories from the book. If you love VC, you'll love this book (and hopefully also our interview with Sebastian

The simple story of Yahoo! Is that they were an Internet search company that came out of Stanford during the early days of the web. They weren't the first nor the last. But they represent a defining moment in the rise of the web as we know it today, when there was enough content out there that there needed to be an easily searchable catalog of content. And that's what Stanford PhD students David Philo and Jerry Yang built. As with many of those early companies it began as a side project called “Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web.” And grew into a company that at one time rivaled any in the world. At the time there were other search engines and they all started adding portal aspects to the site growing fast until the dot-com bubble burst. They slowly faded until being merged with another 90s giant, AOL, in 2017 to form Oath, which got renamed to Verizon Media in 2019 and then effectively sold to investment management firm Apollo Global Management in 2021. Those early years were wild. Yang moved to San Jose in the 70s from Taiwan, and earned a bachelors then a masters at Stanford - where he met David Filo in 1989. Filo is a Wisconsin kid who moved to Stanford and got his masters in 1990. The two went to Japan in 1992 on an exchange program and came home to work on their PhDs. That's when they started surfing the web. Within two years they started their Internet directory in 1994. As it grew they hosted the database on Yang's student computer called akebono and the search engine on konishiki, which was Filo's. They renamed it to Yahoo, short for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle - after all they maybe considered themselves Yahoos at the time. And so Yahoo began life as akebono.stanford.edu/~yahoo. Word spread fast and they'd already had a million hits by the end of 1994. It was time to move out of Stanford. Mark Andreesen offered to let them move into Netscape. They bought a domain in 1995 and incorporated the company, getting funding from Sequoia Capital raising $3,000,000. They tinkered with selling ads on the site to fund buying more servers but there was a lot of businessing. They decided that they would bring in Tim Koogle (which ironically rhymes with Google) to be CEO who brought in Jeff Mallett from Novell's consumer division to be the COO. They were the suits and got revenues up to a million dollars. The idea of the college kids striking gold fueled the rise of other companies and Yang and Filo became poster children. Applications from all over the world for others looking to make their mark started streaming in to Stanford - a trend that continues today. Yet another generation was about to flow into Silicon Valley. First the chip makers, then the PC hobbyists turned businesses, and now the web revolution. But at the core of the business were Koogle and Mallett, bringing in advertisers and investors. And the next year needing more and more servers and employees to fuel further expansion, they went public, selling over two and a half million shares at $13 to raise nearly $34 million. That's just one year after a gangbuster IPO from Netscape. The Internet was here. Revenues shot up to $20 million. A concept we repeatedly look at is the technological determinism that industries go through. At this point it's easy to look in the rear view mirror and see change coming at us. First we document information - like Jerry and David building a directory. Then we move it to a database so we can connect that data. Thus a search engine. Given that Yahoo! was a search engine they were already on the Internet. But the next step in the deterministic application of modern technology is to replace human effort with increasingly sophisticated automation. You know, like applying basic natural language processing, classification, and polarity scoring algorithms to enrich the human experience. Yahoo! hired “surfers” to do these tasks. They curated the web. Yes, they added feeds for news, sports, finance, and created content. Their primary business model was to sell banner ads. And they pioneered the field. Banner ads mean people need to be on the site to see them. So adding weather, maps, shopping, classifieds, personal ads, and even celebrity chats were natural adjacencies given that mental model. Search itself was almost a competitor, sending people to other parts of the web that they weren't making money off eyeballs. And they were pushing traffic to over 65 million pages worth of data a day. They weren't the only ones. This was the portal era of search and companies like Lycos, Excite, and InfoSeek were following the same model. They created local directories and people and companies could customize the look and feel. Their first designer, David Shen, takes us through the user experience journey in his book Takeover! The Inside Story the Yahoo Ad Revolution. They didn't invent pay-per-clic advertising but did help to make it common practice and proved that money could be made on this whole new weird Internet thing everyone was talking about. The first ad they sold was for MCI and from there they were practically printing money. Every company wanted in on the action - and sales just kept going up. Bill Clinton gave them a spot in the Internet Village during his 1997 inauguration and they were for a time seemingly synonymous with the Internet. The Internet was growing fast. Cataloging the Internet and creating content for the Internet became a larger and larger manual task. As did selling ads, which was a manual transaction requiring a larger and larger sales force. As with other rising internet properties, people dressed how they wanted, they'd stay up late building code or content and crash at the desk. They ran funny cheeky ads with that yodel - becoming a brand that people knew and many equated to the Internet. We can thank San Francisco's Black Rocket ad agency for that. They grew fast. The founders made several strategic acquisitions and gobbled up nearly every category of the Internet that has each grown to billions of dollars. They bought Four 11 for $95 million in their first probably best acquisition, and used them to create Yahoo! Mail in 1997 and a calendar in 1998. They had over 12 million Yahoo! Email users by he end of the year, inching their way to the same number of AOL users out there. There were other tools like Yahoo Briefcase, to upload files to the web. Now common with cloud storage providers like Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, and even Office 365. And contacts and Messenger - a service that would run until 2018. Think of all the messaging apps that have come with their own spin on the service since. 1998 also saw the acquisition of Viaweb, founded by the team that would later create Y Combinator. It was just shy of a $50M acquisition that brought the Yahoo! Store - which was similar to the Shopify of today. They got a $250 million investment from Softbank, bought Yoyodyne, and launched AT&T's WorldNet service to move towards AOL's dialup services. By the end of the year they were closing in on 100 million page views a day. That's a lot of banners shown to visitors. But Microsoft was out there, with their MSN portal at the height of the browser wars. Yahoo! bought Broadcast.com in 1999 saddling the world with Mark Cuban. They dropped $5.7 billion for 300 employees and little more than an ISDN line. Here, they paid over a 100x multiple of annual revenues and failed to transition sellers into their culture. Sales cures all. In his book We Were Yahoo! Jeremy Ring describes the lays much of the blame of the failure to capitalize on the acquisition as not understanding the different selling motion. I don't remember him outright saying it was hubris, but he certainly indicates that it should have worked out and that broadcast.com was could have been what YouTube would become. Another market lost in a failed attempt at Yahoo TV. And yet many of these were trends started by AOL. They also bought GeoCities in 99 for $3.7 billion. Others have tried to allow for fast and easy site development - the no code wysiwyg web. GeoCities lasted until 2009 - a year after Google launched Google Sites. And we have Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, and so many others offering similar services today. As they grew some of the other 130+ search engines at the time folded. The new products continued. The Yahoo Notebook came before Evernote. Imagine your notes accessible to any device you could log into. The more banners shown, the more clicks. Advertisers could experiment in ways they'd never been able to before. They also inked distribution deals, pushing traffic to other site that did things they didn't. The growth of the Internet had been fast, with nearly 100 million people armed with Internet access - and yet it was thought to triple in just the next three years. And even still many felt a bubble was forming. Some, like Google, had conserved cash - others like Yahoo! Had spent big on acquisitions they couldn't monetize into truly adjacent cash flow generating opportunities. And meanwhile they were alienating web properties by leaning into every space that kept eyeballs on the site. By 2000 their stock traded at $118.75 and they were the most valuable internet company at $125 billion. Then as customers folded when the dot-com bubble burst, the stock fell to $8.11 the next year. One concept we talk about in this podcast is a lost decade. Arguably they'd entered into theirs around the time the dot-com bubble burst. They decided to lean into being a media company even further. Again, showing banners to eyeballs was the central product they sold. They brought in Terry Semel in 2001 using over $100 million in stock options to entice him. And the culture problems came fast. Semel flew in a fancy jet, launched television shows on Yahoo! and alienated programmers, effectively creating an us vs them and de-valuing the work done on the portal and search. Work that could have made them competitive with Google Adwords that while only a year old was already starting to eat away at profits. But media. They bought a company called LaunchCast in 2001, charging a monthly fee to listen to music. Yahoo Music came before Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, and even though it was the same year the iPod was released, they let us listen to up to 1,000 songs for free or pony up a few bucks a month to get rid of ads and allow for skips. A model that has been copied by many over the years. By then they knew that paid search was becoming a money-maker over at Google. Overture had actually been first to that market and so Yahoo! Bought them for $1.6 billion in 2003. But again, they didn't integrate the team and in a classic “not built here” moment started Project Panama where they'd spend three years building their own search advertising platform. By the time that shipped the search war was over and executives and great programmers were flowing into other companies all over the world. And by then they were all over the world. 2005 saw them invest $1 billion in a little company called Alibaba. An investment that would accelerate Alibaba to become the crown jewel in Yahoo's empire and as they dwindled away, a key aspect of what led to their final demise. They bought Flickr in 2005 for $25M. User generated content was a thing. And Flickr was almost what Instagram is today. Instead we'd have to wait until 2010 for Instagram because Flickr ended up yet another of the failed acquisitions. And here's something wild to thin about - Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson started another company after they sold Flickr. Slack sold to Salesforce for over $27 billion. Not only is that a great team who could have turned Flickr into something truly special, but if they'd been retained and allowed to flourish at Yahoo! they could have continued building cooler stuff. Yikes. Additionally, Flickr was planning a pivot into social networking, right before a time when Facebook would take over that market. If fact, they tried to buy Facebook for just over a billion dollars in 2006. But Zuckerberg walked away when the price went down after the stock fell. They almost bought YouTube and considered buying Apple, which is wild to think about today. Missed opportunities. And Semmel was the first of many CEOs who lacked vision and the capacity to listen to the technologists - in a technology company. These years saw Comcast bring us weather.com, the rise of espn online taking eyeballs away from Yahoo! Sports, Gmail and other mail services reducing reliance on Yahoo! Mail. Facebook, LinkedIn, and other web properties rose to take ad placements away. Even though Yahoo Finance is still a great portal even sites like Bloomberg took eyeballs away from them. And then there was the rise of user generated content - a blog for pretty much everything. Jerry Yang came back to run the show in 2007 then Carol Bartz from 2009 to 2011 then Scott Thompson in 2012. None managed to turn things around after so much lost inertia - and make no mistake, inertia is the one thing that can't be bought in this world. Wisconsin's Marissa Mayer joined Yahoo! In 2012. She was Google's 20th employee who'd risen through the ranks from writing code to leading teams to product manager to running web products and managing not only the layout of that famous homepage but also helped deliver Google AdWords and then maps. She had the pedigree and managerial experience - and had been involved in M&A. There was an immediate buzz that Yahoo! was back after years of steady decline due to incoherent strategies and mismanaged acquisitions. She pivoted the business more into mobile technology. She brought remote employees back into the office. She implemented a bell curve employee ranking system like Microsoft did during their lost decade. They bought Tumblr in 2013 for $1.1 billion. But key executives continued to leave - Tumbler's value dropped, and the stock continued to drop. Profits were up, revenues were down. Investing in the rapidly growing China market became all the rage. The Alibaba investment was now worth more than Yahoo! itself. Half the shares had been sold back to Alibaba in 2012 to fund Yahoo! pursuing the Mayer initiatives. And then there was Yahoo Japan, which continued to do well. After years of attempts, activist investors finally got Yahoo! to spin off their holdings. They moved most of the shares to a holding company which would end up getting sold back to Alibaba for tens of billions of dollars. More missed opportunities for Yahoo! And so in the end, they would get merged with AOL - the two combined companies worth nearly half a trillion dollars at one point to become Oath in 2017. Mayer stepped down and the two sold for less than $5 billion dollars. A roller coaster that went up really fast and down really slow. An empire that crumbled and fragmented. Arguably, the end began in 1998 when another couple of grad students at Stanford approached Yahoo to buy Google for $1M. Not only did Filo tell them to try it alone but he also introduced them to Michael Moritz of Sequoia - the same guy who'd initially funded Yahoo!. That wasn't where things really got screwed up though. It was early in a big change in how search would be monetized. But they got a second chance to buy Google in 2002. By then I'd switched to using Google and never looked back. But the CEO at the time, Terry Semel, was willing to put in $3B to buy Google - who decided to hold out for $5B. They are around a $1.8T company today. Again, the core product was selling advertising. And Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo! In 2008 for over 44 billion dollars to become Bing. Down from the $125 billion height of the market cap during the dot com bubble. And yet they eventually sold for less than four and a half billion in 2016 and went down in value from there. Growth stocks trade at high multiples but when revenues go down the crash is hard and fast. Yahoo! lost track of the core business - just as the model was changing. And yet never iterated it because it just made too much money. They were too big to pivot from banners when Google showed up with a smaller, more bite-sized advertising model that companies could grow into. Along the way, they tried to do too much. They invested over and over in acquisitions that didn't work because they ran off the innovative founders in an increasingly corporate company that was actually trying to pretend not to be. We have to own who we are and become. And we have to understand that we don't know anything about the customers of acquired companies and actually listen - and I mean really listen - when we're being told what those customers want. After all, that's why we paid for the company in the first place. We also have to avoid allowing the market to dictate a perceived growth mentality. Sure a growth stock needs to hit a certain number of revenue increase to stay considered a growth stock and thus enjoy the kind of multiples for market capitalization. But that can drive short term decisions that don't see us investing in areas that don't effectively manipulate stocks. Decisions like trying to keep eyeballs on pages with our own content rather than investing in the user generated content that drove the Web 2.0 revolution. The Internet can be a powerful medium to find information, allow humans to do more with less, and have more meaningful experiences in this life. But just as Yahoo! was engineering ways to keep eyeballs on their pages, the modern Web 2.0 era has engineered ways to keep eyeballs on our devices. And yet what people really want is those meaningful experiences, which happen more when we aren't staring at our screens than when we are. As I look around at all the alerts on my phone and watch, I can't help but wonder if another wave of technology is coming that disrupts that model. Some apps are engineered to help us lead healthier lifestyles and take a short digital detoxification break. Bush's Memex in “As We May Think” was arguably an Apple taken from the tree of knowledge. If we aren't careful, rather than the dream of computers helping humanity do more and free our minds to think more deeply we are simply left with less and less capacity to think and less and less meaning. The Memex came and Yahoo! helped connect us to any content we might want in the world. And yet, like so many others, they stalled in the phase they were at in that deterministic structure that technologies follow. Too slow to augment human labor with machine learning like Google did - but instead too quick to try and do everything for everyone with no real vision other than be everything to everyone. And so the cuts went on slowly for a long time, leaving employees constantly in fear of losing their jobs. As you listen to this if I were to leave a single parting thought - it would be that companies should always be willing to cannibalize their own businesses. And yet we have to have a vision that our teams rally behind for how that revenue gets replaced. We can't fracture a company and just sprawl to become everything for everyone but instead need to be targeted and more precise. And to continue to innovate each product beyond the basic machine learning and into deep learning and beyond. And when we see those who lack that focus, don't get annoyed but instead get stoked - that's called a disruptive opportunity. And if there's someone with 1,000 developers in a space, Nicholas Carlson in his book “Marissa Mayer and the Fight To Save Yahoo!” points out that one great developer is worth a thousand average ones. And even the best organizations can easily turn great developers into average ones for a variety of reason. Again, we can call these opportunities. Yahoo! helped legitimize the Internet. For that we owe them a huge thanks. And we can fast follow their adjacent expansions to find a slew of great and innovative ideas that increased the productivity of humankind. We owe them a huge thanks for that as well. Now what opportunities do we see out there to propel us further yet again?

Investors have pumped capital into emerging markets since the beginning of civilization. Egyptians explored basic mathematics and used their findings to build larger structures and even granaries to allow merchants to store food and serve larger and larger cities. Greek philosophers expanded on those learnings and applied math to learn the orbits of planets, the size of the moon, and the size of the earth. Their merchants used the astrolabe to expand trade routes. They studied engineering and so learned how to leverage the six simple machines to automate human effort, developing mills and cranes to construct even larger buildings. The Romans developed modern plumbing and aqueducts and gave us concrete and arches and radiant heating and bound books and the postal system.  Some of these discoveries were state sponsored; others from wealthy financiers. Many an early investment was into trade routes, which fueled humanities ability to understand the world beyond their little piece of it and improve the flow of knowledge and mix found knowledge from culture to culture.  As we covered in the episode on clockworks and the series on science through the ages, many a scientific breakthrough was funded by religion as a means of wowing the people. And then autocrats and families who'd made their wealth from those trade routes. Over the centuries of civilizations we got institutions who could help finance industry.  Banks loan money using an interest rate that matches the risk of their investment. It's illegal, going back to the Bible to overcharge on interest. That's called usury, something the Romans realized during their own cycles of too many goods driving down costs and too few fueling inflation. And yet, innovation is an engine of economic growth - and so needs to be nurtured.  The rise of capitalism meant more and more research was done privately and so needed to be funded. And the rise of intellectual property as a good. Yet banks have never embraced startups.  The early days of the British Royal Academy were filled with researchers from the elite. They could self-fund their research and the more doing research, the more discoveries we made as a society. Early American inventors tinkered in their spare time as well. But the pace of innovation has advanced because of financiers as much as the hard work and long hours. Companies like DuPont helped fuel the rise of plastics with dedicated research teams. Railroads were built by raising funds. Trade grew. Markets grew. And people like JP Morgan knew those markets when they invested in new fields and were able to grow wealth and inspire new generations of investors. And emerging industries ended up dominating the places that merchants once held in the public financial markets.  Going back to the Venetians, public markets have required regulation. As banking became more a necessity for scalable societies it too required regulation - especially after the Great Depression. And yet we needed new companies willing to take risks to keep innovation moving ahead., as we do today And so the emergence of the modern venture capital market came in those years with a few people willing to take on the risk of investing in the future. John Hay “Jock” Whitney was an old money type who also started a firm. We might think of it more as a family office these days but he had acquired 15% in Technicolor and then went on to get more professional and invest. Jock's partner in the adventure was fellow Delta Kappa Epsilon from out at the University of Texas chapter, Benno Schmidt. Schmidt coined the term venture capital and they helped pivot Spencer Chemicals from a musicians plant to fertilizer - they're both nitrates, right? They helped bring us Minute Maid. and more recently have been in and out of Herbalife, Joe's Crab Shack, Igloo coolers, and many others. But again it was mostly Whitney money and while we tend to think of venture capital funds as having more than one investor funding new and enterprising companies.  And one of those venture capitalists stands out above the rest. Georges Doriot moved to the United States from France to get his MBA from Harvard. He became a professor at Harvard and a shrewd business mind led to him being tapped as the Director of the Military Planning Division for the Quartermaster General. He would be promoted to brigadier general following a number of massive successes in the research and development as part of the pre-World War II military industrial academic buildup.  After the war Doriot created the American Research and Development Corporation or ARDC with the former president of MIT, Karl Compton, and engineer-turned Senator Ralph Flanders - all of them wrote books about finance, banking, and innovation. They proved that the R&D for innovation could be capitalized to great return. The best example of their success was Digital Equipment Corporation, who they invested $70,000 in in 1957 and turned that into over $350 million in 1968 when DEC went public, netting over 100% a year of return. Unlike Whitney, ARDC took outside money and so Doriot became known as the first true venture capitalist. Those post-war years led to a level of patriotism we arguably haven't seen since. John D. Rockefeller had inherited a fortune from his father, who built Standard Oil. To oversimplify, that company was broken up into a variety of companies including what we now think of as Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, and Chevron. But the family was one of the wealthiest in the world and the five brothers who survived John Jr built an investment firm they called the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. We might think of the fund as a social good investment fund these days. Following the war in 1951, John D Rockefeller Jr endowed the fund with $58 million and in 1956, deep in the Cold War, the fund president Nelson Rockefeller financed a study and hired Henry Kissinger to dig into the challenges of the United States. And then came Sputnik in 1957 and a failed run for the presidency of the United States by Nelson in 1960.  Meanwhile, the fund was helping do a lot of good but also helping to research companies Venrock would capitalize. The family had been investing since the 30s but Laurance Rockefeller had setup Venrock, a mashup of venture and Rockefeller. In Venrock, the five brothers, their sister, MIT's Ted Walkowicz, and Harper Woodward banded together to sprinkle funding into now over 400 companies that include Apple, Intel, PGP, CheckPoint, 3Com, DoubleClick and the list goes on. Over 125 public companies have come out of the fund today with an unimaginable amount of progress pushing the world forward. The government was still doing a lot of basic research in those post-war years that led to standards and patents and pushing innovation forward in private industry. ARDC caught the attention of a number of other people who had money they needed to put to work. Some were family offices increasingly willing to make aggressive investments. Some were started by ARDC alumni such as Charlie Waite and Bill Elfers who with Dan Gregory founded Greylock Partners. Greylock has invested in everyone from Red Hat to Staples to LinkedIn to Workday to Palo Alto Networks to Drobo to Facebook to Zipcar to Nextdoor to OpenDNS to Redfin to ServiceNow to Airbnb to Groupon to Tumblr to Zenprise to Dropbox to IFTTT to Instagram to Firebase to Wandera to Sumo Logic to Okta to Arista to Wealthfront to Domo to Lookout to SmartThings to Docker to Medium to GoFundMe to Discord to Houseparty to Roblox to Figma. Going on 800 investments just since the 90s they are arguably one of the greatest venture capital firms of all time.  Other firms came out of pure security analyst work. Hayden, Stone, & Co was co-founded by another MIT grad, Charles Hayden, who made his name mining copper to help wire up the world in what he expected to be an increasingly electrified world. Stone was a Wall Street tycoon and the two of them founded a firm that employed Joe Kennedy, the family patriarch, Frank Zarb, a Chairman of the NASDAQ and they gave us one of the great venture capitalists to fund technology companies, Arthur Rock.  Rock has often been portrayed as the bad guy in Steve Jobs movies but was the one who helped the “Traitorous 8” leave Shockley Semiconductor and after their dad (who had an account at Hayden Stone) mentioned they needed funding, got serial entrepreneur Sherman Fairchild to fund Fairchild Semiconductor. He developed tech for the Apollo missions, flashes, spy satellite photography - but that semiconductor business grew to 12,000 people and was a bedrock of forming what we now call Silicon Valley. Rock ended up moving to the area and investing. Parlaying success in an investment in Fairchild to invest in Intel when Moore and Noyce left Fairchild to co-found it.  Venture Capital firms raise money from institutional investors that we call limited partners and invest that money. After moving to San Francisco, Rock setup Davis and Rock, got some limited partners, including friends from his time at Harvard and invested in 15 companies, including Teledyne and Scientific Data Systems, which got acquired by Xerox, taking their $257,000 investment to a $4.6 million dollar valuation in 1970 and got him on the board of Xerox. He dialed for dollars for Intel and raised another $2.5 million in a couple of hours, and became the first chair of their board. He made all of his LPs a lot of money. One of those Intel employees who became a millionaire retired young. Mike Markulla invested some of his money and Rock put in $57,000 - growing it to $14 million and went on to launch or invest in companies and make billions of dollars in the process.  Another firm that came out of the Fairchild Semiconductor days was Kleiner Perkins. They started in 1972, by founding partners Eugene Kleiner, Tom Perkins, Frank Caufield, and Brook Byers. Kleiner was the leader of those Traitorous 8 who left William Shockley and founded Fairchild Semiconductor. He later hooked up with former HP head of Research and Development and yet another MIT and Harvard grad, Bill Perkins. Perkins would help Corning, Philips, Compaq, and Genentech - serving on boards and helping them grow.  Caufield came out of West Point and got his MBA from Harvard as well. He'd go on to work with Quantum, AOL, Wyse, Verifone, Time Warner, and others.  Byers came to the firm shortly after getting his MBA from Stanford and started four biotech companies that were incubated at Kleiner Perkins - netting the firm over $8 Billion dollars. And they taught future generations of venture capitalists. People like John Doerr - who was a great seller at Intel but by 1980 graduated into venture capital bringing in deals with Sun, Netscape, Amazon, Intuit, Macromedia, and one of the best gambles of all time - Google. And his reward is a net worth of over $11 billion dollars. But more importantly to help drive innovation and shape the world we live in today.  Kleiner Perkins was the first to move into Sand Hill Road. From there, they've invested in nearly a thousand companies that include pretty much every household name in technology. From there, we got the rise of the dot coms and sky-high rent, on par with Manhattan. Why? Because dozens of venture capital firms opened offices on that road, including Lightspeed, Highland, Blackstone, Accel-KKR, Silver Lake, Redpoint, Sequoia, and Andreesen Horowitz. Sequoia also started in the 70s, by Don Valentine and then acquired by Doug Leone and Michael Moritz in the 90s. Valentine did sales for Raytheon before joining National Semiconductor, which had been founded by a few Sperry Rand traitors and brought in some execs from Fairchild. They were venture backed and his background in sales helped propel some of their earlier investments in Apple, Atari, Electronic Arts, LSI, Cisco, and Oracle to success. And that allowed them to invest in a thousand other companies including Yahoo!, PayPal, GitHub, Nvidia, Instagram, Google, YouTube, Zoom, and many others.  So far, most of the firms have been in the US. But venture capital is a global trend.  Masayoshi Son founded Softbank in 1981 to sell software and then published some magazines and grew the circulation to the point that they were Japan's largest technology publisher by the end of the 80s and then went public in 1994. They bought Ziff Davis publishing, COMDEX, and seeing so much technology and the money in technology, Son inked a deal with Yahoo! to create Yahoo! Japan. They pumped $20 million into Alibaba in 2000 and by 2014 that investment was worth $60 billion. In that time they became more aggressive with where they put their money to work. They bought Vodafone Japan, took over competitors, and then the big one - they bought Sprint, which they merged with T-Mobile and now own a quarter of the combined companies. An important aspect of venture capital and private equity is multiple expansion. The market capitalization of Sprint more than doubled with shares shooting up over 10%. They bought Arm Limited, the semiconductor company that designs the chips in so many a modern phone, IoT device, tablet and even computer now. As with other financial firms, not all investments can go great. SoftBank pumped nearly $5 billion into WeWork. Wag failed. 2020 saw many in staff reductions. They had to sell tens of billions in assets  to weather the pandemic. And yet with some high profile losses, they sold ARM for a huge profit, Coupang went public and investors in their Vision Funds are seeing phenomenal returns across over 200 companies in the portfolios. Most of the venture capitalists we mentioned so far invested as early as possible and stuck with the company until an exit - be it an IPO, acquisition, or even a move into private equity. Most got a seat on the board in exchange for not only their seed capital, or the money to take products to market, but also their advice. In many a company the advice was worth more than the funding. For example, Randy Komisar, now at Kleiner Perkins, famously recommended TiVo sell monthly subscriptions, the growth hack they needed to get profitable. As the venture capital industry grew and more and more money was being pumped into fueling innovation, different accredited and institutional investors emerged to have different tolerances for risk and different skills to bring to the table. Someone who built an enterprise SaaS company and sold within three years might be better served to invest in and advise another company doing the same thing. Just as someone who had spent 20 years running companies that were at later stages and taking them to IPO was better at advising later stage startups who maybe weren't startups any more. Here's a fairly common startup story. After finishing a book on Lisp, Paul Graham decides to found a company with Robert Morris. That was Viaweb in 1995 and one of the earliest SaaS startups that hosted online stores - similar to a Shopify today. Viaweb had an investor named Julian Weber, who invested $10,000 in exchange for 10% of the company. Weber gave them invaluable advice and they were acquired by Yahoo! for about $50 million in stock in 1998, becoming the Yahoo Store.  Here's where the story gets different. 2005 and Graham decides to start doing seed funding for startups, following the model that Weber had established with Viaweb. He and Viaweb co-founders Robert Morris (the guy that wrote the Morris worm) and Trevor Blackwell start Y Combinator, along with Jessica Livingston. They put in $200,000 to invest in companies and with successful investments grew to a few dozen companies a year. They're different because they pick a lot of technical founders (like themselves) and help the founders find product market fit, finish their solutions, and launch. And doing so helped them bring us Airbnb, Doordash, Reddit, Stripe, Dropbox and countless others. Notice that many of these firms have funded the same companies. This is because multiple funds investing in the same company helps distribute risk. But also because in an era where we've put everything from cars to education to healthcare to innovation on an assembly line, we have an assembly line in companies. We have thousands of angel investors, or humans who put capital to work by investing in companies they find through friends, family, and now portals that connect angels with companies.  We also have incubators, a trend that began in the late 50s in New York when Jo Mancuso opened a warehouse up for small tenants after buying a warehouse to help the town of Batavia. The Batavia Industrial Center provided office supplies, equipment, secretaries, a line of credit, and most importantly advice on building a business. They had made plenty of money on chicken coops and though that maybe helping companies start was a lot like incubating chickens and so incubators were born.  Others started incubating. The concept expanded from local entrepreneurs helping other entrepreneurs and now cities, think tanks, companies, and even universities, offer incubation in their walls. Keep in mind many a University owns a lot of patents developed there and plenty of companies have sprung up to commercialize the intellectual property incubated there. Seeing that and how technology companies needed to move faster we got  accelerators like Techstars, founded by David Cohen, Brad Feld, David Brown, and Jared Polis in 2006 out of Boulder, Colorado. They have worked with over 2,500 companies and run a couple of dozen programs. Some of the companies fail by the end of their cohort and yet many like Outreach and Sendgrid grow and become great organizations or get acquired. The line between incubator and accelerator can be pretty slim today. Many of the earlier companies mentioned are now the more mature venture capital firms. Many have moved to a focus on later stage companies with YC and Techstars investing earlier. They attend the demos of companies being accelerated and invest. And the fact that founding companies and innovating is now on an assembly line, the companies that invest in an A round of funding, which might come after an accelerator, will look to exit in a B round, C round, etc. Or may elect to continue their risk all the way to an acquisition or IPO.  And we have a bevy of investing companies focusing on the much later stages. We have private equity firms and family offices that look to outright own, expand, and either harvest dividends from or sell an asset, or company. We have traditional institutional lenders who provide capital but also invest in companies. We have hedge funds who hedge puts and calls or other derivatives on a variety of asset classes. Each has their sweet spot even if most will opportunistically invest in diverse assets. Think of the investments made as horizons. The Angel investor might have their shares acquired in order to clean up the cap table, or who owns which parts of a company, in later rounds. This simplifies the shareholder structure as the company is taking on larger institutional investors to sprint towards and IPO or an acquisition. People like Arthur Rock, Tommy Davis, Tom Perkins, Eugene Kleiner, Doerr, Masayoshi Son, and so many other has proven that they could pick winners. Or did they prove they could help build winners? Let's remember that investing knowledge and operating experience were as valuable as their capital. Especially when the investments were adjacent to other successes they'd found. Venture capitalists invested more than $10 billion in 1997. $600 million of that found its way to early-stage startups. But most went to preparing a startup with a product to take it to mass market. Today we pump more money than ever into R&D - and our tax systems support doing so more than ever. And so more than ever, venture money plays a critical role in the life cycle of innovation. Or does venture money play a critical role in the commercialization of innovation? Seed accelerators, startup studios, venture builders, public incubators, venture capital firms, hedge funds, banks - they'd all have a different answer. And they should. Few would stick with an investment like Digital Equipment for as long as ARDC did. And yet few provide over 100% annualized returns like they did.  As we said in the beginning of this episode, wealthy patrons from Pharaohs to governments to industrialists to now venture capitalists have long helped to propel innovation, technology, trade, and intellectual property. We often focus on the technology itself in computing - but without the money the innovation either wouldn't have been developed or if developed wouldn't have made it to the mass market and so wouldn't have had an impact into our productivity or quality of life.  The knowledge that comes with those who provide the money can be seen with irreverence. Taking an innovation to market means market-ing. And sales. Most generations see the previous generations as almost comedic, as we can see in the HBO show Silicon Valley when the cookie cutter industrialized approach goes too far. We can also end up with founders who learn to sell to investors rather than raising capital in the best way possible, selling to paying customers. But there's wisdom from previous generations when offered and taken appropriately. A coachable founder with a vision that matches the coaching and a great product that can scale is the best investment that can be made. Because that's where innovation can change the world.

Sebastian Siemiatkowski is the Founder and CEO @ Klarna, the company that makes online shopping simple, allowing you to buy what you need today and pay later. To date, Sebastian has raised over $2.1Bn for the company from the likes of Sequoia, Silver Lake, Blackrock, DST, Northzone, Creandum and even Snoop Dog to name a few. Klarna has been an incredible 16-year journey for Sebastian with it now being the most valuable private technology company in Europe with over 3,500 employees. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: I. The Importance Of Learning To Learn Fast What is the best way to learn fast?  “People talk about it like there's this learning curve, and the best spot is at the place where you're challenged to the precise point where you're almost giving up, but not entirely. That's exactly it.  “And I have this amazing swim teacher for my children, her name is Petra, and she's just fantastic. I just love watching her because she has this ability of taking my children in the pool and pushing them to that exact point where they are almost, almost giving up, and they're learning at such a pace. And if I can recreate such an environment in Klarna, if I can create an environment, if I can be part of creating an environment where we put people in that position where they just are exactly at that curve where they are challenged, supported, and kind of at the edge and being given the ability to learn really fast and really discover what it means to have an impact.”  Does Sebastian compare his work to other companies’? “I don't think that much about what other people or other companies or other things out there could have done different. And there's pros and cons to that. But the benefits of that is that it speeds up my learning. Because a lot of people – and I've realized that as I manage other people – is that because they're so obsessed with trying to think about what other people could have done differently, and why situations arose, and why it wasn't their responsibility and so forth, they spend a lot of time on that, because we've unfortunately been brought up in some kind of guilt that it's bad to do wrong, and it's bad if it's our fault, and you want to avoid that.  “And these psychological constraints, unfortunately, hinder people from developing much faster, because if you go into every situation and say, the only thing that's relevant here is what I could have done differently, what I could have learned from this – if that's the only thing, it's just like, whatever, I accept my responsibilities. What could I have done differently? If you only focus on that, you just learn much faster.”  How does Sebastian transform his self-doubt into a positive? “I think self-doubt is not nothing. It's not a bad thing, right? It's a very healthy thing, if it represents you continuously trying to understand, am I doing the right thing? Is this something that I want to do? Am I making the right decisions? So I think it's extremely healthy to do that. I'm not saying it's not painful or tough when you have it. But I think it's a very positive thing.  “I'm much more worried when people tell me they have no self-doubt. And then I'm like, uh-oh, because that means that you're not really reflecting on your actions, and you're not learning from them. So I wish I could give you something more comforting than that, but I would actually say enjoy it. Be happy that you have it, and it's gonna make you a better person.”  II. Sebastian’s Management Philosophy What does Sebastian believe companies can learn from soccer?  “I love the fact that Michael Moritz wrote this book that I still haven't read, so it's kind of funny that I'm referring to it, but he wrote this book about Ferguson, that manager of Manchester United. And I think it's very relevant, because today, the saying is that for people to be motivated at work, they need to have a higher purpose, the company needs to do something good, and so forth. And I am not disputing that, that is very true that it contributes to people's sense of purpose, and so forth. But before you even get to that level, we have to ask ourselves, what is it really that makes people motivated and enjoy themselves? And I think when I think about that, I often look at sports, because why do people love soccer? What's the higher purpose of winning Champions League? People say, oh, there's a massive higher purpose, but not entirely, you're not really making the planet better by winning. Still, people are massively engaged in these things. Why?  “Because it's a team effort, there are clear roles, you know exactly what you're supposed to do – I'm supposed to put the ball in that score. And then it's very clear how you win, there is a referee that stops people from cheating. And so there's a lot of things in that environment that makes it motivating, that makes people engaged, and those things are usually lacking in companies.” How do you know when someone is at that crucial point of the learning curve? “The problem with a company is that it's a much more complex environment with a lot of other things going on in parallel in people's lives. And so I have definitely occasionally missed to see that people are beyond that point.” “In Sweden, there's this course called Situation Adopted Management, which basically means that there is no single management technique. You look into the situation, you try to understand it from multiple angles. And then depending on where that individual is, and how you perceive the mental status, and the mood of that individual, and so forth, you try to adapt. Either you coach or you challenge or you instruct or you do different things. There's not a single methodology that will allow you to deal with those situations. But a lot of it is empathy. It's the ability to look at people and read them, and try to understand, and ask them questions, and understand where they are.” III. How Sebastian Manages Complexity At Scale What are Sebastian’s biggest lessons learned from Klarna growing to 3000+ people spread across multiple offices across the world? It’s the manager’s job to deal with the complexity in a company  It’s not for everyone  What role does Sebastian believe a manager should play in a company as it scales? “I think a lot of times as a company grows, what ends up happening is the thing just becomes so complex. So management tries to organize the company in a way that makes sense to them and that is easy to understand for them. But the consequence of that often, unfortunately, is it makes no sense for the person who's actually doing the job. So they lose the purpose. Why am I coming to work? What are we trying to achieve? All of these things get lost.  “So what we said is, we have to do the exact opposite. The critical element is that the people who are actually supposed to do something – not the manager – the people actually supposed to do something, if they program or to do a marketing campaign, or whatever they're doing, they need to come to work every day and feel I know exactly why I'm coming, I know how I'm contributing, I know who I'm contributing for, I know what value I'm creating.  “And if that thing creates tons of complexity for us, as managers, because the whole system becomes much more complex, then that's what we're getting paid for. That's the one. That's why we're getting a good salary. Because we need to manage that complexity.” What does Sebastian look for in talent?  “Keep very close on the recruitment … Especially in a country like Sweden, a country where a typical saying is, alla ska komma med, which means, everyone should come, everyone should join. And it's very nice. And I appreciate that with Swedish culture, I'm not trying to really call it. I think it's fantastic and it's a fantastic society. But as a consequence, it took us some time to conclude something which maybe in the US or maybe even in the UK as it would have been much more obvious, which is that it's not a company for everyone. It is a company for the people that want to have that challenge, that want to be in that environment, that think that's interesting, that want to learn a lot fast, and want to get a lot of things done. And that's not everyone, and that's okay.  “Like when you play soccer – some people play soccer for fun, other people play to win the Champions League. People do it for different reasons. And they have different ambitions with it and different objectives with it. And the same applies to us.  “So it took us some time to realize that we need to tell people, look, just so you know, this is not going to be your standard company, you're going to be expected to do a hell of a lot of things, you're going to be expected to be challenged, you're going to expect it to do your utmost. And we're going to try to support you and help you and grow. So just know what you're getting into, before you get into it.” IV. Retail Banking 10 Years From Now What does Sebastian see as the future of everyday banking services? “One thing I would say, it's going to be a much smaller industry. And that's because it is ridiculous that moving money back and forth is a trillion-dollar industry. That is ridiculous. There is no good reason for that whatsoever. This is going to be a much more cost-efficient, much smaller revenue business than it is today. But even though it would be much smaller than it is today, it's still massive, and Klarna has the opportunity to be one big player in that industry, similar to what Tesla is doing in cars or whatever, that's what I want to do. And I feel we have all the prerequisites to accomplish that.”  “There's going to be this push that's going to transform this industry and the people are going to lose on it are the suits in the marble offices in the city centers. That's where the pain is going to be felt, but the winner is going to be the consumer.” What do the next five years look like for Klarna? “It's a little bit like self-driving cars – we all know it's going to happen, the question is when. And based on what I've seen in the last 15 years, and I've seen how retail has gone from retail to ecommerce and all these trends, this decade is going to be the disruption of retail banking.  “At the end of this decade, there will be a couple of new total players that will be very dominating in this space, and the rest will either cease to exist, will merge and try to acquire some of the new ones, or maybe a few of them will manage to reinvent themselves. But this is going to be an extremely interesting time.” Sebastian’s Favourite Book: The Neverending Story As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

We cover Sequoia Capital a lot on this show. Not only across our now four(!) dedicated episodes, but across a stunning nearly 50% of recent season companies where Sequoia was a primary or only investor — the most of any venture firm by an enormous margin. Today in this very special episode, we dive into the principles that have led to the firm's 49 years of unparalleled success in venture, and the playbook behind how they identify markets and companies that create outcomes worthy of the firm's namesake tree. If you love Acquired and want more, join our LP Community for access to over 50 LP-only episodes, monthly Zoom calls, and live access for big events like emergency pods and book club discussions with authors. We can't wait to see you there. Join here at: https://acquired.fm/lp/ Sponsors: Thanks to MITIMCo for being our presenting sponsor for this special episode. They are truly some of the best and most well-known investors in the LP communit, and their investment performance supports MIT's cutting-edge research, and world-class education. If you or someone you know is starting a fund or recently launched, get in touch with them at: http://bit.ly/acquiredmitimco , and tell them that you heard about MITIMCo on Acquired. Thank you as well to Masterworks and to Perkins Coie. You can learn more about them at: http://bit.ly/acquiredmasterworks (use code “Acquired” to skip the waitlist) http://bit.ly/acquiredperkins The Sequoia Capital Playbook: (also available on our website at https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/special-sequoia-capitals-investment-playbook-with-alfred-lin ) 1. Bring a prepared mind. Founders (as they should) typically think more about solving a problem in the world, and less about the market context around what they're doing. Sequoia has always focused on the market — which allows them to bring a prepared mind to conversations with founders both pre and post investment. Great partnerships and great investments lie at the intersection of these two perspectives. Focusing on the market takes many forms at Sequoia. It includes building and maintaining market landscapes, constantly looking for white spaces, and convening quarterly "blue sky" sessions within the firm. 2. The two questions that matter are "Why now?" and "Who cares?". Early-stage is different from other forms of investing. As Don would say, it's predicated on investing in markets undergoing significant change: today's solutions are wrong for tomorrow. A good answer to "why now" upends the Warren Buffet quote about reputations of businesses with bad economics surviving intact. For example, DoorDash and Instacart had great “why now's” (ability to access a whole new class of labor through mobile devices), whereas Webvan (also a Sequoia investment) did not. Similarly, the key to evaluating market size in the context of early-stage venture is to focus on the opportunity size tomorrow, not today. "Who cares" is a great lens to predict and distill this: if this new solution were widely known and available who (how many people/customers, what segments, with what buying power) will care (how much will it improve their lives or businesses)? 3. The goal is not buying low and selling high. The goal is compounding capital. In a compounding environment, gains from the next few years will always dwarf all cumulative gains from years prior. The goal is to invest in companies that are able to become compounders, help them do so, and enjoy the returns as long as possible. Identifying compounding (and whether it will continue) is hard to get right. The question Sequoia asks is whether the future for a given market, company or investment looks brighter than today. When the answer is yes:

**O futebol é uma atividade humana desafiadora que recompensa os vencedores e rebaixa os medíocres, exatamente como acontece no empreendedorismo.**Em "Liderança" o premiado técnico Alex Ferguson revela como ele construiu, liderou e administrou o Manchester United por 26 anos, explicando o que funcionou e o que não funcionou para o clube durante esse período.*** Compre o livro na Amazon: https://amzn.to/356Iq5U*** Quer aprofundar seu conhecimento sobre esse livro? Faça parte da TRIBO DE APOIADORES do ResumoCast e tenha acesso exclusivo ao conteúdo extra que preparamos para você! Além disso, você poderá participar do nosso Clube do Livro, onde o conhecimento se torna aprendizado prático. Para se tornar um(a) apoiador(a), acesse:https://www.resumocast.com.br/apoiase

Emily Koons Jae, who leads ACTA’s Fund for Academic Renewal (FAR) initiative, has been keeping close tabs on the controversy around a $30 million gift to Ohio State University by the late Michael Moritz. In this episode, Emily explores this provocative story with Mr. Moritz’s wife, Lou Ann Ransom, and his son, Jeffrey Moritz.

Michael Moritz, owner of Borgo Pignano, talks with James Shillinglaw of Insider Travel Report about his boutique hotel estate in Tuscany, how it's gotten through the pandemic, why the property served as a founding member of Preferred Hotels & Resorts' new Beyond Green sustainable brand, a new discovery of Roman antiquity just steps from the hotel, and how Borgo Pigano is planning a new sister hotel in Florence in 2023. For more information, visit www.borgopignano.com or www.staybeyondgreen.com. Insider Travel Report Youtube channel or by searching for the podcast's title on Youtube.  

Bestselling author David Talbot has written an illness memoir with a twist. His lauded Between Heaven and Hell: The Story of My Stroke intimately chronicles the life-changing year following his massive stroke. From the remarkable care he received in Davies Hospital to daily life in recovery, this Type-A journalist was forced to slow down radically, depend on the kindness of others, and learn the value of what truly matters. David will share his experience and new plans with Sir Michael Moritz.

Time Stamps: 0:00 Scotty is an example of how intelligent people build great things | How Scotty did it | Sir Alex Ferguson’s book Leading with Michael Moritz | 6:00 Dryden gets to core of how Scotty thinks by getting him to figure out the best team of all time | 9:00 finding the right combinations of players | 9:30 Scotty used no formula | 11:00 How coach Mike Babcock did not seem to be able to change while Scotty and Sir Alex were willing adapt and change and therefore coached and won for years | 12:30 Scotty was very good at math from a young age | importance of analytics to this project | 14:00 Scotty’s soccer mind | Scotty’s mind’s eye | 15:30 players who make teams better | 16:00 Scotty the paint salesman knowing colours and codes | 17:00 There is no should. Though Pep Guardiola has won with a should | 18:00 Importance of Canadiens GM Sam Pollock | Coaching wasn’t consuming enough for Pollock whereas Scotty needed to coach | 21:00 Know what you’ve got. Find a way | 24:00 Scotty dwells on present not past | 26:00 Sam Pollock was a puzzler always thinking | 27:00 If you are a coach, are you a number one, a number two or management? | 30:00 Scotty the Hockey Night in Canada analyst | A Penguins Cup | 32:00 Scotty goes to Detroit to finally shape his own team | Great in-game coach | All he was about was who he was going to put on next: moment to moment | Scotty’s final Cup with Red Wings in 2002 and Dryden’s description of the taking of the team picture | the human aspect and analytic aspect of that picture | 38:00 Scotty as a numbers guy | Belichick | in the end Scotty is retired but ends up at elite youth evaluation camp and stays focused on what he sees right in front of him | 41:00 No formula for Scotty’s success except the power of his brain and his ability to be present in the moment | Buy the book. You'll have it forever.

Episode 235 - Newly elected City Council Member Michael Moritz Pollock is our guest. Michael came in today to discuss the run up to the election, how it felt to win a seat on the City of Bainbridge Island Council for the second time and what he plans to do with the next four years. Michael also told us that he has collected all of his campaign signs. We suggest he build a fort with the signs in the back of Council Chambers for naps during long meetings. Episode 235 is Sponsored by Outcome Athletics, the home of the Best Personal Trainer on Bainbridge Island, Bethanee Randles. Bethanee wanted us to tell you that she is offering 10% off Personal Training Packages for those that want to get fit. Just tell her Wake Up Bainbridge sent ya and we will get our cred!

How did a history major with no formal technical training become one of technology's most successful investors? During a visit to Stanford Graduate School of Business, venture capitalist Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital said it's critical to be able to process new information and ideas, as well as to communicate effectively. He also discussed how to identify promising companies that may not fit into conventional categories, and the challenges of diversifying the tech industry. Stanford GSB's View From The Top is the dean's premier speaker series. It launched in 1978 and is supported in part by the F. Kirk Brennan Speaker Series Fund. During student-led interviews and before a live audience, leaders from around the world share insights on effective leadership, their personal core values, and lessons learned throughout their career. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What I learned from reading Return to the Little Kingdom: Steve Jobs and the Creation of Appleby Michael Moritz.

In this episode, I introduce a few of the venture capitalists (Michael Moritz, Kai-Fu Lee, and Sam Altman) who are making investments in China.

Bloomberg Technology executive producer Emily Chang talks with Recode’s Kara Swisher about her new book, “Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley.” Chang says the idea for the book originated when venture capitalist Michael Moritz suggested that bringing more women to Sequoia Capital might mean “lowering our standards.” However, in between then and now, Donald Trump was elected president and the #MeToo movement arose, which “changed dramatically” how many women would speak on the record. Plus: Chang discusses the impact of Ellen Pao and Susan Fowler, and her much-discussed Vanity Fair story about sex parties and “cuddle puddles” in Silicon Valley. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Uber, Michael Moritz, Amazon, Apple and much more!

Uber, Michael Moritz, Amazon, Apple and much more!

Special guest Sam Reid from Tassie's Willie Smith's chats to Adrian about their cider, an exciting new release, and the Australian cider scene. Ciders Willie Smith's Traditional Booze Recommendations Sam: Willie Smith's Traditional, Henry of Harcourt cider, Red Sails cider Adrian: Boatrocker Blanc de Blancs Non-Booze Recommendations Sam: Leading by Alex Ferguson with Michael Moritz, Pisces Iscariot by The Smashing Pumpkins Adrian: Ride The Lightning by Metallica

Nikhil Basu Trivedi is an early stage investor with Shasta Ventures, where he focuses on consumer, mobile and SaaS. Prior to joining Shasta, Nikhil was a member of the Insight Venture Partners team in NYC. Before making the move into venture, Nikhil co-founded Artsy in his sophomore year at Princeton University, Artsy now employs over 100 people and has raised over $50m in venture financing. One of Nikhil's main passions is self driving cars and so today's show will be centred around the proliferation of autonomous vehicles and what that means for us as a society? In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How did Nikhil come to be a VC in SF having spent his early years in the UK? 2.) Why is Nikhil so excited about self-driving cars? What is the enabler that is allowing this mass rise of the autonomous vehicle? 3.) What happens in a world of little mechanical engineering at all, where repairs can be achieved with software updates? How does this change the complexity of production? How does this change what the supply chain might look like? How does this change the capital structure required? 4.)How does the rise of the autonomous vehicles effect the sharing economy? Is Nikhil bullish on Lyft, Uber, Didi? With on demand, when will we reach a point of equilibrium when the supply of drivers that gets drawn in and the price that attracts consumers will be equivalent? 5.) Who is the leader, is this a winner take all, will the acquisition of GM and Cruise mean a dominance? Who has Nikhil been impressed by? Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:  Nikhil’s Fave Book: Leading by Sir Alex Ferguson and Michael Moritz  Nikhil’s Fave Blog: Mattermark Daily, CB Insights Nikhil’s Most Recent Investment: Tally  As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Nikhil on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!   The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!  

Sequoia Capital Chairman Michael Moritz and Lisa Sugar, founder and president of Popsugar, describe the investor-entrepreneur dynamic based on their personal experiences. In conversation with Stanford University lecturer Emily Ma, they discuss how success starts with staying to true to yourself, following your instincts and interests, and doing what makes you happy.

Sequoia Capital Chairman Michael Moritz and Lisa Sugar, founder and president of Popsugar, describe the investor-entrepreneur dynamic based on their personal experiences. In conversation with Stanford University lecturer Emily Ma, they discuss how success starts with staying to true to yourself, following your instincts and interests, and doing what makes you happy.