The Exchanges

Q Are you going to make more money from climate than you are from tech?

A Absolutely. I'll, I'll get way richer from this. I mean, we have, I have multiple companies in the portfolio right now that have the, the very, like they have a trajectory to being multi-trillion dollar market cap. And it's just, that's not like, like, yes, we, I mean, look, we are in the business of curved lines rather than straight lines. And a lot of the naysayers in the business are still extrapolating off of the straight lines. Like, look, here's, Here's where we are today. There's no way that I'll ever be big. And I'm like, yeah, but we are in the business of these, of these lines that bend upward at radical rates that some of the OGs in the space just can't wrap their heads around, you know, like fusion. So we have a handful of companies in the fusion space forever. People have said nuclear fusion is 30 years off and it always will be. And so, and I just, I got in a Twitter fight the other day with a guy who's like, it'll always be 30 years off. And I was just like, You know, I deeply respect all the work you've done in the space, but you sound like someone who hasn't visited the lab in a while, because that's not where it is, and I can't preempt any announcements coming from any of our companies, but I can assure you it's, I, fuck, I, I overstepped my bounds in terms of what we know, but I can assure you it is much, much more near term than 30 years, like imminent, um, …

AI assessment note: “Absolutely. I'll, I'll get way richer from this.”

Q forward slash two zero VC to find out more. But that is enough from me, so now I'm so excited to hand over to our first guest on the impact of of children, and the incredible Chris Sacker. You have now arrived at your destination. What have also been some of your big lessons on what great parenthood means to you and the type of dad you want to be?

A It's funny, one of the things I've seen, and it's a strange correlation, the less formal education some of my friends have, the more obsessed they seem to be about getting their kids into the right schools and the right enrichment programs. What I worry about is this race I see among too many of my friends to just push their kids on this path to Stanford. They have to go to the best school, They have to start coding early. They have to take all the enrichment classes. They have to take the IQ tests. It's this fucking insane treadmill. And I also see it take over my friends' lives where they're like, no, we can't possibly leave school, you know, a few hours early to do something fun because God, if they missed a few hours of school, their life would be over. You know, when I was a kid, we used to just be able to play sports. Like if it was soccer season, you know, I hadn't really touched a soccer ball until soccer season. Our team wasn't amazing, but we would play against other And then when soccer season was over, it was over, and you picked up your tennis racket, or you played basketball, you know, you ran cross country, you were just on one of the other teams. You know, now it's specialization. My daughter, when she turned eight in her little soccer league, they were going to have a draft. I'm like, you're drafting players to teams. Like, it's getting that competitive now. It…

AI assessment note: “What I worry about is this race I see among too many of my friends”

Q know, Bill Gurley, um, was the one that told me, um, you don't want to be the guy that stops dancing before Mr. Brightside comes on at the party. I love that. Um, but, like, I'm like, I'm looking at the industry, I'm like, shit, I should have discipline, and then no one else has discipline. Like, how should I think about this, and how do you think about this?

A Yeah, it's not discipline, it's, um, it's, it's, okay, I think there's this fake discipline to these requirements that, that the industry somehow thinks have been imposed by LPs, and they may have been, and any, but any LPs who think like this are fucking backwards, and so, and I see this in decks, you know, my, Crystal and I are LPs in dozens and dozens of funds, Because that was one of the ways we paid it forward, you know, and, uh, to help kind of promote diversity in the industry, we backed literally dozens of first-time general partners who are women, people of color, and other underrepresented groups. And so, but we'd see these decks, and they'd be like, okay, this is exactly how much I'm going to own of each round. This is my deployment velocity. Um, these are the board seats I'm going to take, et cetera. And every time I was like, stop, like, take that slide out. You know, I, well, when I wrote my checks into Uber, They were out, they were too big, quote unquote, for my fund, and one of my LPs called me, and I was like, look, I have conviction about some things, but this one I fucking know. I mean, so much of Uber came together in my fucking kitchen. I'm going in, and like, if I, if I fucking crash and, you know, and, uh, crash and burn, then it's on me, but this one I fucking understand, and I'm betting the farm on it, um, and I was right. I mean, I shouldn't take much…

AI assessment note: “I think there's this fake discipline to these requirements that, that the industry somehow thinks”

Q Can we just give these kids back? I think this is the question, like, Bezos, will you take a refund on these ones?

A I quite literally, okay, I quite literally was walking out of an event yesterday, and there was a mom and dad and two boys walking in front of us, and, um, and the boys were just being shitty to the parents, and the parents were like, okay, don't do that, you're running across the road, etc., and I said, I said, she, the mom was kind of walking next to me, and I was like, you know, some days I just feel really blessed to have three badass girls who Who actually listen to directions, and she turns to me and she goes, take me with you. Like, it's just, we have this crisis, and I mean, a lot of it, one of my favorite books, by the way, is How to Raise an Adult by Julie Lithcott Himes, who, who was both the Director of Admissions at Stanford and the Director of Freshmen, or that Dean of Freshmen, as well as a parent of a young kid, and so she talked about seeing the consequences of helicopter parenting and how it's ruining a generation of American kids, and in parallel, finding your, you know, not preaching from A pedestal because she found herself guilty of the same kind of parenting of her young kid, and it's incredible book for anyone raising kids right now, but we're doing that an incredible disservice by bailing them out of every situation, giving them a participation medal. Our kids do karate, and their karate instructor is like a Zen master. He, um, because on the very first…

AI assessment note: “she turns to me and she goes, take me with you.”

Q forward slash two zero VC to find out more. But that is enough from me, so now I'm so excited to hand over to our first guest on the impact of of children, and the incredible Chris Sacker. You have now arrived at your destination. What have also been some of your big lessons on what great parenthood means to you and the type of dad you want to be?

A It's funny, one of the things I've seen, and it's a strange correlation, the less formal education some of my friends have, the more obsessed they seem to be about getting their kids into the right schools and the right enrichment programs. What I worry about is this race I see among too many of my friends to just push their kids on this path to Stanford. They have to go to the best school, They have to start coding early. They have to take all the enrichment classes. They have to take the IQ tests. It's this fucking insane treadmill. And I also see it take over my friends' lives where they're like, no, we can't possibly leave school, you know, a few hours early to do something fun because God, if they missed a few hours of school, their life would be over. You know, when I was a kid, we used to just be able to play sports. Like if it was soccer season, you know, I hadn't really touched a soccer ball until soccer season. Our team wasn't amazing, but we would play against other And then when soccer season was over, it was over, and you picked up your tennis racket, or you played basketball, you know, you ran cross country, you were just on one of the other teams. You know, now it's specialization. My daughter, when she turned eight in her little soccer league, they were going to have a draft. I'm like, you're drafting players to teams. Like, it's getting that competitive now. It…

AI assessment note: “What I worry about is this race I see among too many of my friends”

Q So you worried that you were going to be a B-teamer, but you, you weren't. Actually, that was a wrong assumption, correct? Or did it prove to be true and actually you needed a couple of years out of it, out of fun cycles? When you reflect, was that right?

A Look, the people who succeed in this business, and this is not an endorsement, this is an observation, are not normal. Like they, they don't have incredible balance. And so they may, they may like make good time for family and good time for health and working out and may put vacations on their calendar, but their brains are obsessive. And so, and so there is not like intellectual balance in their heads. They're obsessive readers, listeners, askers of questions, absorbers of knowledge, triers of new things. And so they're obsessive. And, you know, I, I, I know kind of most of my friends have to do something to fall asleep because their brains are racing. And so they can't not think about things. My family laughs at me because those ideas come to me in moments, and I, I have to carry the notebook to write them down. Um, and, you know, Crystal will be like, are you really fucking thinking about lithium mining right now? And I'm like, I can't help it. Like, I'm just, I'm thinking about, I'm synthesizing this shit I read, and I can't keep my fucking mind off it right now, you know? Or like, you know, I'll be like, I'll say to one of my kids, like, hey, I have to stop to write something down. And they'll be like, what are you writing down? I'm like, This, uh, nuclear fusion reflection I have. I have a question for one of my teams. You know, I read something. It just, and I just want …

AI assessment note: “what happened for me was that I just wasn't that obsessive about this shit anymore”

Q How do you retain an optimistic mindset then? When you're wrong, and you lose money, or the deal doesn't go as planned, To not go, ugh, consumer social's crap, or healthcare's crap, or you name it's crap, because you've lost money there before. How do you keep that optimistic, fresh mind?

A Well, it's funny. It was, it was a lack of optimism that cost me some money in the beginning when I met the Airbnb guys and, and I pulled them aside and was like, look, somebody's going to get raped or murdered and the blood is going to be on your hands. And you know what? That's turned out to be true once they've had hundreds of millions of, of users of the site. Yes. And people are going to get hurt. It's the law of big numbers, but I had let the bad case get in the way of me seeing the most obvious case. You know, most humans are good. Most of these services are obviously going to work. I mean, we, You know, I, I once, we were, we were in an Uber meeting talking about how, um, there was this, you know, like, I mean, you see articles about this driver hurt somebody, and so we dug into the data. First of all, half of the time, it's passengers hurting the drivers, um, and so there's this even split, uh, but the reason those articles get written is because, thanks to Uber, we know about them. We know exactly who was involved, right? If you get assaulted by a cab driver, you'd never know. Um, but the other thing is, Just the law of big numbers. There's so many damn drivers and passengers out there now. So many collisions between individuals is going to lead at scale to some bad ones. And I, I once did some math and I, I can't make it up now, but it was like Walmart employees, som…

AI assessment note: “I had let the bad case get in the way of me seeing the most obvious case.”

Q we chatted before the show about things that you were most passionate about, and one of them, again, on the safety net, was raising kids to be happy, balanced, helpful people. I guess when you look back at that, and also the interrogative process, what have also been some of your big, like, lessons on what great parenthood means to you, and the type of dad you want to be?

A Yeah, so, so it's funny, one of the, one of the things I've seen, um, is how, And it's a strange correlation. It's obviously anecdotal, but the less formal education some of my friends have, the more obsessed they seem to be about getting their kids into the right schools and the right enrichment programs. And so, you know, I, I, I was lucky to go to a cool university. That's where I met my wife, um, and study the humanities and have this incredible, you know, education in the classics and all and other cultures and got to study abroad in multiple countries. And so I feel super lucky and privileged for that. But I definitely don't think it's the only way forward. You know, I, I have very close and successful friends who didn't go to college at all. Um, I have one friend who left high school, uh, and has been a wild success. And so I think there's countless paths to this really, um, to, to success, however you measure it, you know, not just in business, but in art and, um, and, and philanthropy and volunteerism and stuff like that. So, but, What I worry about is this race I see among too many of my friends to just push their kids on this path to Stanford. They have to go to the best school. They have to start coding early. They have to take all the enrichment classes. They have to take the IQ tests. And it just gets like this, it's this fucking insane treadmill. And I also see i…

AI assessment note: “What I worry about is this race I see among too many of my friends”

Q So you worried that you were going to be a B-teamer, but you, you weren't. Actually, that was a wrong assumption, correct? Or did it prove to be true and actually you needed a couple of years out of it, out of fun cycles? When you reflect, was that right?

A Look, the people who succeed in this business, and this is not an endorsement, this is an observation, are not normal. Like they, they don't have incredible balance. And so they may, they may like make good time for family and good time for health and working out and may put vacations on their calendar, but their brains are obsessive. And so, and so there is not like intellectual balance in their heads. They're obsessive readers, listeners, askers of questions, absorbers of knowledge, triers of new things. And so they're obsessive. And, you know, I, I, I know kind of most of my friends have to do something to fall asleep because their brains are racing. And so they can't not think about things. My family laughs at me because those ideas come to me in moments, and I, I have to carry the notebook to write them down. Um, and, you know, Crystal will be like, are you really fucking thinking about lithium mining right now? And I'm like, I can't help it. Like, I'm just, I'm thinking about, I'm synthesizing this shit I read, and I can't keep my fucking mind off it right now, you know? Or like, you know, I'll be like, I'll say to one of my kids, like, hey, I have to stop to write something down. And they'll be like, what are you writing down? I'm like, This, uh, nuclear fusion reflection I have. I have a question for one of my teams. You know, I read something. It just, and I just want …

AI assessment note: “what happened for me was that I just wasn't that obsessive about this shit anymore”

Q Help me out here. I, I have the same, you know, I, I built out a team with my new funds, um, and the disappointment sometimes does hit, and you are pissed off, and I, I, I didn't know the right way to do it. Like, how do you relay that? What is right? What is constructive? Help me out here, Chris, learning from you.

A Yeah. So it's actually, it's the same thing I do in parenting, by the way. So, so I raising kids has informed how to, how to manage relationships, uh, across the board. So I'll tell you first one, when somebody else is upset, when somebody in my org is upset, I do the same thing I learned to do with our little kids. And so the first thing you do, and by the way, this works in any relationship, romantic relationship you have too. The first thing you do is when somebody's upset, you repeat back to them what you just heard them say. Like, and so if it's a little kid, you're like, ah, like, you know, Dave is upset that he can't drag his, uh, you know, his toy car outside onto the lawn. And so you've heard them whining about it. They're crying about it. And then you follow it by a sigh.

AI assessment note: “when somebody else is upset, when somebody in my org is upset”

Q Mine was essentially if they're okay, not great. Um, and how do you deal with that?

A Um, so one of my daughters walked into my office recently and, um, and she was sitting on a call with me where I was really frustrated by, um, another investor who I thought was fucking up the situation at a company. And I hung up with them and our middle daughter walked in and asked the older daughter, what was going on there? Like dad sounded upset. And she goes, oh, this guy was just being a B teamer. And I was like, it was amazing because those words hadn't left my mouth in that call, but my girls had picked up on, on this idea of like, just don't bring half effort, you know, like just don't half ask something like, like be all in or all out. And so for me, the people who suck, it's, it's never a lack of raw talent. Like there's definitely people who are, who, who have some raw talent and blow my mind. It's just, it's always a lack of, of effort and ownership. Like, I can't fucking stand. We, we had a, we have a guy who works with us, like, on our, on our house, and he was brand new to the job, and he did not have prior, like, physical maintenance experience, um, and, uh, and so he came into the job totally green, and he was, like, kind of reading manuals and trying to learn stuff on YouTube, and, and I w, I was so impressed with him compared with other people we've worked with, because he'd be like, hey, I just, Just so you know, I fucked this thing up earlier, so it's goi…

AI assessment note: “for me, the people who suck, it's, it's never a lack of raw talent.”

Q Why is that? Is that their own insecurity? I'm just intrigued.

A Yeah, I mean, look, you see the same thing play out in sports, particularly in America. You know, when I was a kid, we used to just be able to play sports. Like, if it was soccer season, you know, I hadn't really touched a soccer ball until soccer season. You know, our team wasn't amazing, but we would play against other schools, and then when soccer season was over, it was over, and you picked up your tennis racket, or you played basketball, or you just, you know, you ran cross country, you were just on one of the other teams. And, you know, now it's specialization. My daughter, when she turned eight in her little soccer league, they were gonna have a draft. Like, I'm like, you're drafting players to teams. Like, it's getting that competitive now. It's crazy, you know, and, ah, our daughters are on the ski team here. We live in Wyoming, ah, and Jackson, and our daughters are on the ski team. And, ah, you know, the head of the ski program told me, because our, our daughter is just turning 10, and he said, well, now, you know, at this stage, it's no longer fun. And, I was like, wait, thank you for telling me that ahead of time, because we're going to pull out of the ski team. But just being that candid, like, no, this is the stage where it's no longer fun. I'm like, why the fuck would my daughter play a sport at 10? That's just not fun. Like, that's the whole idea behind playing…

AI assessment note: “you see the same thing play out in sports, particularly in America.”

Q Mine was essentially if they're okay, not great. Um, and how do you deal with that?

A Um, so one of my daughters walked into my office recently and, um, and she was sitting on a call with me where I was really frustrated by, um, another investor who I thought was fucking up the situation at a company. And I hung up with them and our middle daughter walked in and asked the older daughter, what was going on there? Like dad sounded upset. And she goes, oh, this guy was just being a B teamer. And I was like, it was amazing because those words hadn't left my mouth in that call, but my girls had picked up on, on this idea of like, just don't bring half effort, you know, like just don't half ask something like, like be all in or all out. And so for me, the people who suck, it's, it's never a lack of raw talent. Like there's definitely people who are, who, who have some raw talent and blow my mind. It's just, it's always a lack of, of effort and ownership. Like, I can't fucking stand. We, we had a, we have a guy who works with us, like, on our, on our house, and he was brand new to the job, and he did not have prior, like, physical maintenance experience, um, and, uh, and so he came into the job totally green, and he was, like, kind of reading manuals and trying to learn stuff on YouTube, and, and I w, I was so impressed with him compared with other people we've worked with, because he'd be like, hey, I just, Just so you know, I fucked this thing up earlier, so it's goi…

AI assessment note: “for me, the people who suck, it's, it's never a lack of raw talent.”

Q Oh my God. It would choke me too. I do have to also, you know, when you think back to like absolutely been fired up as fucking hell to do something, you have that again with lower carbon talking about like the formation days that the fundraiser itself, how did that come together? I mean, you're Chris Saka. Is it like, Hey, I'm Saka PayPal me a hundred billion.

A Well, you know, back at Google, I worked on, on, We didn't call it climate then. I mean, we were one of the largest energy consumers in the world. We were using more power in three US states than any other, any other consumer power. And so thanks to Larry and Sergey, they were pioneers of like, look, we got to make this shit green. And we worked on efficiency because it was, we used so much power that inefficiency would hit the bottom line of the company. And so back in oh, three or four, I was pursuing, uh, clean power deals. I remember doing a solar panel deal with Andrew Beebe, who's now at Obis Ventures. He was a solar, uh, entrepreneur at the time, one of the OGs of the space, and a guy I really respect a lot, um, but, but, so we were really driven as a company to find, um, to really push the envelope of clean energy, and so, you know, as, as time went on, the climate crisis was obviously increasingly apparent. I live in the mountains, which are a much more fragile ecosystem than a lot of other places, and so you see it happening, uh, between fire and melting and flooding and drought, it just, It's real, you know, the migration patterns of, of wildlife changing, the, the, um, the health of the rivers and creeks changing, and so, so it's right there in front of me, but, um, but as I was reflecting on what was going to matter to me, so kitchen gadgets weren't, but my wife an…

AI assessment note: “Well, you know, back at Google, I worked on, on, We didn't call it climate”

Q Help me out here. I, I have the same, you know, I, I built out a team with my new funds, um, and the disappointment sometimes does hit, and you are pissed off, and I, I, I didn't know the right way to do it. Like, how do you relay that? What is right? What is constructive? Help me out here, Chris, learning from you.

A Yeah. So it's actually, it's the same thing I do in parenting, by the way. So, so I raising kids has informed how to, how to manage relationships, uh, across the board. So I'll tell you first one, when somebody else is upset, when somebody in my org is upset, I do the same thing I learned to do with our little kids. And so the first thing you do, and by the way, this works in any relationship, romantic relationship you have too. The first thing you do is when somebody's upset, you repeat back to them what you just heard them say. Like, and so if it's a little kid, you're like, ah, like, you know, Dave is upset that he can't drag his, uh, you know, his toy car outside onto the lawn. And so you've heard them whining about it. They're crying about it. And then you follow it by a sigh.

AI assessment note: “when somebody else is upset, when somebody in my org is upset, I do”

Q Oh my God. It would choke me too. I do have to also, you know, when you think back to like absolutely been fired up as fucking hell to do something, you have that again with lower carbon talking about like the formation days that the fundraiser itself, how did that come together? I mean, you're Chris Saka. Is it like, Hey, I'm Saka PayPal me a hundred billion.

A Well, you know, back at Google, I worked on, on, We didn't call it climate then. I mean, we were one of the largest energy consumers in the world. We were using more power in three US states than any other, any other consumer power. And so thanks to Larry and Sergey, they were pioneers of like, look, we got to make this shit green. And we worked on efficiency because it was, we used so much power that inefficiency would hit the bottom line of the company. And so back in oh, three or four, I was pursuing, uh, clean power deals. I remember doing a solar panel deal with Andrew Beebe, who's now at Obis Ventures. He was a solar, uh, entrepreneur at the time, one of the OGs of the space, and a guy I really respect a lot, um, but, but, so we were really driven as a company to find, um, to really push the envelope of clean energy, and so, you know, as, as time went on, the climate crisis was obviously increasingly apparent. I live in the mountains, which are a much more fragile ecosystem than a lot of other places, and so you see it happening, uh, between fire and melting and flooding and drought, it just, It's real, you know, the migration patterns of, of wildlife changing, the, the, um, the health of the rivers and creeks changing, and so, so it's right there in front of me, but, um, but as I was reflecting on what was going to matter to me, so kitchen gadgets weren't, but my wife an…

AI assessment note: “Well, you know, back at Google, I worked on, on, We didn't call it climate”