Straight Answers

“There are publications which have paywalls, but their names are great. How do you think about that?”

answered: “Now, going to your question, which was?”

“There are publications which have paywalls, but their names are great. How do you think about that?”

answered: “Now, going to your question, which was?”

“Oh, we actually didn't anticipate this. Oh, this thing didn't go as planned.”

answered: “we follow the trajectory of our customers”

“Is the brand that you have with Flow?”

answered: “talking about PR, I think it's slightly different. It's, uh, it's mostly about”

“Can I ask, with such a fantastic angel portfolio, what was behind the decision to institutionalize your angel investing with the move to Founders Fund? What was the catalyst for that decision?”

answered: “having kind of put in log the time on the operating side”

“Eric, can you talk to me about when you've had the highest level of conviction and you've been wrong?”

answered: “for me, the question is not, will people be wrong? It's a question of”

“It means limiting your activities. Again, I'm really sorry for the base question.”

answered: “It's almost tough to answer that question because, you know, they won't be successful”

“One is like competencies. What's, what are the other two?”

answered: “so the competencies are your big buckets, okay?”

“Um, so sorry, I'm going in the weeds. What were your margins then at the beginning, and what are your margins today?”

answered: “The way that we talk about the business is actually what we call dollars per box.”

“What would you most like change about the music industry?”

answered: “Daniel Ek came along and transformed everything. And now it's the richest it's ever been”

“A lot of startups today have subsidized LLM costs, very much like AWS did and Google Cloud did with credits for years, and Anthropic and OpenAI have done, ah, now very much with this generation of startups. Should they account for them in costs or should they let themselves be artificially impressed by their margins despite this clear steroid injection of free for this time period?”

answered: “Why would OpenAI sell the LLM under cost? Yes, it's like market grab”

“Am I right in saying that only one of the four members needs to vote yes for you to be accepted?”

answered: “it's a combination of different things, but at the end of the day”

“Okay, so, so now with Keep, you're, you're quite, well, very famous for raising VC funding at 19. How difficult, though, this, this question's actually from Chris Redliss, um, who I actually spoke to before the interview, and he wondered, how difficult have you found it to raise growth capital beyond Series A?”

answered: “from a early stage standpoint... able to raise 300,000 in our seed round.”

“What would they do without venture deals? I mean...”

answered: “Recommend it for everyone. I say to download it so you can, like, search terms”

“Of NVIDIA's usage, what percent will be training versus inference?”

answered: “I think they will continue to have a meaningful business on both sides.”

“I mean, thirty eight billion. Like, if I asked you the same, would you have done it?”

answered: “while I added it into Salesforce, I didn't pivot Salesforce entirely around deep learning.”

“I love that story of Steve and the lessons there. On the flip side of like, bluntly, the worst decision or the worst mistake, when I asked that, what's the time that comes to mind, and what did you learn from that?”

answered: “what I've really learned over 25 years of leading Salesforce is”

“How would you say you do it? How do you bring children up to have that same hunger and tenacity in very different financial environments?”

answered: “It's probably a better question for her.”

“Where do you have little resilience where you would like to have more?”

answered: “I'm going to stay away from that one.”

“We'll buy you out at a great price. Why was that not an option?”

answered: “So the SoftBank conversations, ironically, Travis and Emil started those conversations”

“To what do you stand with AI? Do you think we are overestimating what we can do in one year and we're all getting ahead of our skis?”

answered: “are there extraordinary opportunities and extraordinary companies getting built here? And if so, like, You, you, you just gotta do it.”

“What did you think would be really good, but turned out to be a flop?”

answered: “I have always tried to temper expectations with everyone”

“Um, I've made many hiring mistakes, dude. What's your biggest hiring mistake?”

answered: “Like hiring is hard. And so just building a rigorous process actually is really important.”

“How do you get it done? What happens there?”

answered: “unbeknownst to me, the NWSL also had this big scandal brewing underneath it.”

“What have been the biggest lessons in terms of what it makes takes to make remote work having done it since day one?”

answered: “I don't know if these lessons apply outside of chess. So, uh, you know”

“Why is the NHS not always looking to cost cut? Because, like, there's no, there's no benefits of getting rid of middle management.”

answered: “I'm going to refuse to accept any revenue that's services based from you”

“I'm always going to read your sorting agendas before a meeting, that's for sure. What is the strongest belief which turned out, which you had that turned out to be wrong?”

answered: “I call it active recovery. It's pretty weird, but if I go on a vacation”

“One thing I do struggle with often in enterprises, I enterprise sales cycles along and measuring rep effectiveness is naturally harder. How do you think about measuring rep effectiveness in strategic sales with much longer sales cycles?”

answered: “The first thing I do is grab the hypo and put them inside of that organization”

“Now, I think that what I love so much about, you know, your history and your success is actually the integration of sport and business. And so a question that I wanted to ask as we enter the business discussion is when we think about high performance, what does that mean to you when I say the words high performance?”

answered: “I don't want to digress, but one other thought came out of mind”

“Is triple, triple, double, double dead? Have we completely had growth expectations blown out of the water?”

answered: “Software is going to be purchased or used by agents.”

“Um, and we just live in a continuously cyclical game too. What's different and what's the same?”

answered: “sorry, I'm missing, I'm missing the core of your question, which was what?”

“You said there about kind of getting hands dirty in the data, in the trenches there. Can you talk to me about a decision that you made without data, and how did it go?”

answered: “So lack of data is not good. You certainly want to start with”

“But then I've also been in situations where we've just been fucked because we could have avoided mistakes and situations that could have been known. Where do you sit in that balance?”

answered: “I forgot the question you just asked, so I apologize.”

“Um, you said there about kind of the best. What did you do that with the benefit of hindsight you wish you hadn't done?”

answered: “I don't think we actually need to be first ever in market.”

“Do you expect to grow as quickly as you have done?”

answered: “I feel like we are, we're, we're on this journey that we're meant to be on.”

“So this leads me to ask, what's the admissions process like to, to get investment from 500 startups? I mean, what criteria do you look for when decision making?”

answered: “we get accused of sort of spray and pray, and I actually think it's not really true”

“What's easier, the equity raise or the debt raise?”

answered: “biggest challenge has been figuring out the right aligned financial structure Across both”

“I didn't have money when I grew up and I was like, I'll be happy when I get like, you know, X amount of money. Any advice on escaping that money treadmill?”

answered: “I was very lucky that, you know, I went to Singapore on a government scholarship”

“Should companies like Harvey and Lagora be building their own model? And actually, if you don't, what happens?”

answered: “software development, uh, especially SaaS space has been significantly disrupted”

“I was just being nice to you, Harry. And like, you need, you need that resolution of feedback to have confidence, right?”

answered: “my question to you is like, we all say it's all about the founder.”

“Right? Like, music shouldn't be special like that.”

answered: “What would you say to me? Be excited? Be nervous? How do you feel?”

“So it's both, do you get like the lightning in the bottle of having this initial thing that finds product market fit, but then can you scale a company around yourself? And the ones that can do both are the ones that become really big companies.”

answered: “Do you worry that you're too nice?”

“It means limiting your activities. Again, I'm really sorry for the base question.”

answered: “It's almost tough to answer that question because, you know, they won't be successful”

“I'm always going to read your sorting agendas before a meeting, that's for sure. What is the strongest belief which turned out, which you had that turned out to be wrong?”

answered: “I call it active recovery. It's pretty weird, but if I go on a vacation”

“How much of the six hundred million will be spent on compute?”

answered: “how much of our funding goes to compute? It shifts over the years. Um, but a lot.”

“And of course, people look at it every day and look at their net worths. Yeah.”

answered: “it's been hard, you know, emotionally... the sentiment is so negative.”

“And so I, I think there was a recent thing which was because of the price points of, you know, your products, they're under a certain point, which means you don't have to pay tariffs. How much of your success is on going underneath tariffs to avoid that?”

answered: “let's take a look at why people want to reform.”

“If you were to advise me to study another company, if you study business history, as you say, which should I study? I love it too.”

answered: “I think there's still a lot more to be disrupted in fintech”

“That was off record. But what did she mean by that?”

answered: “If I think of our industry, you know, we're really privileged, right?”

“I think so many people are shaped by their past. When you think back on yours, How do you think about what you're running from?”

answered: “Why did I start working on artificial intelligence?”

“Um, you mentioned David there. What did you learn about great partnerships from that first partnership with David?”

answered: “I don't know if it's relevant for your particular podcast”

“What happens if interest rates go to six percent to quell inflation? Where do we invest then?”

answered: “I don't think the Fed has to raise rates that much more.”

“Who's the best board member you've sat on a board with, and why?”

answered: “the best board members are ones who, Really know the, the sector”

“I didn't have money when I grew up and I was like, I'll be happy when I get like, you know, X amount of money. Any advice on escaping that money treadmill?”

answered: “I was very lucky that, you know, I went to Singapore on a government scholarship”

“And what is it you see in the best in those periods?”

answered: “I've made so many mistakes with Do Not Pay... I can give them a crash course”

“Okay, well, can you, can you name one of them?”

answered: “I would talk to a specific company, um, actually, this is a good example”

“When you think about something that you believe, I like this question from Twitter. What do you believe that the founders fund partnership will heavily disagree with you on?”

answered: “there's always a way to structure your arguments such that you are on the winning side”

“You'd be like, oh, fuck. How do I compete with that?”

answered: “I've received more fair treatment testifying in front of Congress than I have from, uh, various media outlets”

“When are you able to call a bad decision, a bad decision? When, when should one read the tea leaves and say enough is enough?”

answered: “I tell the story. I was on a flight to India.”

“What role are you best at? What role are you worst at?”

answered: “It's an interesting question because we place all kinds of talent.”