The Exchanges

Q And how was the culture in the UK different when you moved there?

A The UK was a lot more formal. In the UK, I remember being shocked that you had to stand up when the teacher came into the room, and if you wanted to go, you know, to the bathroom during class, you couldn't just stand up and go, you had to ask for permission, and you had to wear a school uniform, and you had to make an appointment to see a friend of yours. You couldn't just show up at the house, which is what we used to do in Israel. And so again, I felt like their society has, well, firstly, been formed over a much longer period of time, right? Israel is a much, Younger country, and a lot of things there are still evolving and adapting, whereas in the UK, there was a lot more structure, and a big part of that is because, you know, these structures have been evolving for hundreds of years, and these customs have been too.

AI assessment note: “The UK was a lot more formal. In the UK, I remember being shocked”

Q We ended up working a lot on entrepreneurial stuff, investing together. You're my chief of staff for a couple of years, and you have this kind of cultural anthropologist analysis now of the Soviet Union and Israel and UK. What, what was different versus Goldman Sachs London versus, you know, working in the entrepreneurial world?

A Oh, a lot. Goldman is full of a lot of really brilliant people. Um, but what I found was different is that Goldman was a lot more hierarchical than what I saw in Silicon Valley, right? Goldman, as someone in your early twenties, most of what you're doing is you're doing what others tell you to do. So there are very clear structures around meetings. You know, it really mattered when I was there, who's, who, which order you put the names of people in the true line and emails. And that can become pretty repetitive, right? A lot of what you're doing is You're taking instruction from your associate, who's taking instructions from their VP, who's taking instruction from the managing director, and so on. And something that I was honestly really inspired by when I met you was realizing that you don't need 10 years of work experience to want to solve a problem, and that if you're someone who's intellectually curious and willing to work really hard, you can, in your early twenties, start making a huge difference to solving these problems And actually taking a lot of ownership yourself.

AI assessment note: “Goldman was a lot more hierarchical than what I saw in Silicon Valley”

Q So the construction industry is notoriously adverse to change. These people are stubborn and, you know, there's lots of inertia just doing what they're doing. Uh, I mean, did people think you were crazy trying to do this? Like, you know, what was the initial reaction?

A I mean, people definitely thought I was crazy. Um, I mean, when we got started, people constantly would tell us, aren't your sales cycles going to be 10 years long? You know, are people actually going to use the product? And the reality is that construction fundamentally changed 10 years ago. You know, up until the advent of smartphones and especially tablets and iPads, there was no connectivity on job sites. And so, That essentially meant if you wanted someone on a job site to use tech, you would need them to exit the job site, go back to their trailer, open up their laptop, and do their work there. And around 2011, when iPads and tablets came out, that really changed the game. And so what we realized is that starting from that point onwards, the possibility of getting technology onto a job site was just dramatically transformed. And that meant that sales cycles weren't 10 years anymore. Now you had both that dynamic coupled with this generational shift of people saying, well, you know, I use DoorDash to order food and I use Amazon to order goods. Why am I still needing to call my distributor and handle everything over the phone?

AI assessment note: “I mean, people definitely thought I was crazy.”

Q Which is crazy. It's one of the lowest productivity growth sectors. You spend trillions of dollars. Why is that?

A Well, it really comes down to a number of things. Number one is that we haven't changed the way that we build anywhere near as much as we change the complexity of what it is that we're building. You know, the built environment has become infinitely more complex. We have cities where delivery zones are limited, and there's a lot more regulation around health and safety, and there are a lot Some stricter building requirements around what it is that we're building and the materials that we're using to build. At the same time, how we build has largely been the same since the 19 fifties, right? And a lot of that comes down to number one, under investing in technology, right? If we don't build great tools to help people minimize manual work and automate a lot of the things that are very repetitive about more robots going around hammering for people. Well, for things that Can be automated. Absolutely. We should automate them. But more importantly, what we need to do is minimize errors, right? We need to make it easy to minimize human error that often comes from the fact that you're doing something really repetitive many, many times. And that's where errors really occur.

AI assessment note: “we haven't changed the way that we build anywhere near as much”

Q and, uh, who has very different views in the world that I knew, but someone, someone I respect a lot. We were talking about the sense of the good, like, has your sense of, of the good life and of what is good for people and what's good for society changed based on your experience as an entrepreneur now versus what you guys would argue about back, back at Oxford?

A No, it's a great question. You know, for me, a guiding principle in my life has always been this concept from Judaism that's called tikkun olam, which quite literally translates to fixing the world. And the idea there is that you're meant to leave the world better than how you found it. And so for me, that was always a guiding principle that led me to think, well, in my lifetime, what I want to do is actually leave the world better than I found it. Now, the thing I learned in moving to Silicon Valley is that I didn't need to wait 20 years before I started doing that. I could Do that right now. And I think that that underlying tenant hasn't changed. What has changed is realizing the speed with which you can affect a lot of this change, right? And I think right now we're actually in this really incredibly interesting moment where there's a lot of tools at our disposal that mean we can actually move even faster and solve more of these problems. You know, think about the advents in AI, right, or large language models. Those are tools in our toolkit that didn't exist five years ago.

AI assessment note: “that underlying tenant hasn't changed. What has changed is realizing the speed”

Q So what's an unusual custom in Russia that people from the outside might not have known about?

A I mean, I don't know as much about modern day Russia, but I think for my parents, they grew up in the Soviet Union, so they were extremely strict. Both of them are academics. Both of them come from an extreme belief in hard work and a lot of real discipline. And then when I moved to Israel, it was completely the opposite, right? There's no school uniform. You call teachers by their first names. It's incredibly informal. And so I remember all my friends at school would have tons of freedoms. They'd be running around, you know, they, Sort of had a lot of free time, and I literally, from six o'clock in the morning till nine p.m. at night, had a regimented schedule.

AI assessment note: “I don't know as much about modern day Russia, but I think for my parents”