“There are a couple of companies that I chose not to invest in because they were founded by people whose work that I just, that, that I worked with and for whatever reason in that environment weren't amazing. And so I made the assumption that that was them, not some combination or interplay between them and the environment that they were in. And I didn't invest and they went on to do amazing things.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
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What-if
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What-if
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