The Exchanges

Q don't know if you want to answer this question or not, but in, um, Warren Buffett's shareholders, he has this great line where it's like really important to pick, uh, to, to play against weak competition. Did you feel that there was going to be weak, like that, that point in time in venture capital history that, that you, you were going to be playing against weak or weaker competition?

A I would say not exactly. We didn't view them as weak. We, we viewed them as basically, we viewed them as running on a status quo, on a status quo set of ideas. And so, and, and, and to be clear, like we, we, and part of why we think about this, we had to raise money from at the time, in, in the time we were probably the two Ben Fisher firms. So Clare Perkins in the nineties, and I worked with John Doerr very closely for five years in Netscape. And then we, we, Loud Cloud, we raised money from, from Benchmark when they were like King of the Hill and Andy Ratcliffe, who was one of the founders of the firm and as a, you know, legendary, brilliant VC. And so we had worked with, we just had, you know, for accident of history, we had worked with two of the whatever top five or whatever people in the field, you know, for a long time. And, and, and they were, and are, by the way, um, brilliant at running on, on the model that, that they, that, that existed. Like John was brilliant at that. Andy's brilliant at that. They're still brilliant today. It was less a competition of, oh, these people are soft, or these people aren't smart, or it was none of that. It was, no, they're really good at executing against this particular playbook. So, and by the way, that's why it's okay. Like, if we're going to do this, we need to be, we need to be playing by a different playbook.

AI assessment note: “I would say not exactly. We didn't view them as weak.”

Q You think it's in a vast majority of people agree with you?

A Look, it's becoming more common. I mean, when you get an Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, when you get these kind of archetypal examples of it, it's a lot easier to, you know, to, to, you know, to sell it. You know, Mark Zuckerberg, we were talking about earlier, like, you know, he's now a great case study of this, right? He had, you know, when Mark started Facebook, he has never, he had never had a job before. Okay. Not only had he not managed people, he had not worked for anybody, right? So like he had, he started with zero and his, his learning curve, which by the way, was, happened fully in the public eye. Right. His learning curve is vertical. And by the way, it's still vertical. Like he spends like an enormous amount of time learning how to become better at running, running, running these things at large scale. He's still the founder, and he's still the innovator, and he's still like a fountain of ideas on what to do. So he, so he's, he's, he's that double, you know, he's, he's like the classic example of a double threat. And then what happens is other founders look at that and they're like, oh, I could do that. Right.

AI assessment note: “Look, it's becoming more common.”

Q Do you find a lot of the greatest founders that you've spent time with and backed and partnered with are at low introspection?

A Yeah, generally. Although in fairness, um, you know, the, the, the introspection is probably linked to the, the personality trait of neuroticism, right? Um, so, you know, a lot of, a lot of the best founders are, you know, I think Like, zero percent neuroticism. Like, they just don't get emotionally phased by things that happen, which is a superpower when you're an entrepreneur. But having said that, some of the great entrepreneurs are, in fact, very neurotic. Like, you know, that's also the case. It's not a, you know, it's not, it's, maybe it's nice to have to be low neuroticism, but not necessary. And so, you know, there are some that kind of get wrapped around the axle on kind of personal issues. You know, as you know, you know, these days, sometimes that then, you know, kind of turns into, you know, use of, Uh, you know, psychedelics, you know, different kinds, and hallucinogenic drugs, and, you know, that's like one very interesting kind of trajectory for, you know, kind of the culture of the country, culture of the world, and, you know, we'll, we'll see where that goes.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, generally. Although in fairness, um, you know, the, the, the introspection”

Q The machine and the man, or the man and the machine, right?

A It's one, it's one, I'm not sure if it's that one, but it's one of those. I think it might be that one, yeah. He actually went back, and this is like, you know, this is what we're talking about, like, making forties, 19 fifties, 19 sixties, and he went back and he got them, at that time, they, they had a, they had a secretary transcribing in real time all of the executive staff meetings, uh, every, every Monday morning, and he went back and he actually got the archives of the transcripts of the executive staff meetings, and it's just literally Thomas Watson's just, like, cursing everybody out, and just, like, just like a complete tyrannical psychopath, just, like, screaming at people, and it's all, it's all in the records, and so it's like, you know, So how much of this stuff ever changes? You know, it's like, you know, whatever, I don't know, whatever Elon gets accused of or whatever, Steve Jobs, it's like, oh no, that guy was, whatever it is, it's a pale version of what that guy was doing. But anyway, the point being is like IBM, so by the time I got involved in IBM was like six years later, you know, yeah, six, 50 years later after that, and so they were kind of peaking in their power, but what happened was, I remember this because I was their intern and I was trying to figure out whether I should, I should work, I should work there after college, and they had a, their intra…

AI assessment note: “I'm not sure if it's that one, but it's one of those.”

Q And almost no one knows who he is. Can you just talk about how you met him? What was it like working with him?

A I knew exactly who he was. And the reason was because his company, Silicon Graphics, his first company, they were the company in the valley between like, call it, call it, yeah, eight-seven to 94 or something. They were like, whatever, Google or OpenAI or whatever, you know, comp you want to make. Like, they were like the company. And by that, I mean, like, they were the company where the smartest people in the industry all wanted to work there. They built the products that were, like, the coolest products you could possibly imagine. They had this incredibly young and vibrant and dynamic culture. And then they hit this, like, cultural moment that was just incredible in, I think, 92, which was, uh, yeah, which was the turning point in the movie business when computer graphics really kicked in. And the two movies back to back were Jurassic Park and Terminator two.

AI assessment note: “I knew exactly who he was. And the reason was because his company, Silicon Graphics”

Q Do you want to say what bicycle face is?

A Bicycle face. Bicycle face. Bicycle face. Bicycle face. Yes. So it basically turns out every new technology is greeted with what they call a moral panic, right? So and a moral panic basically is whatever this new technology is or this new form of media is, it's going to ruin everything. It's going to ruin everything. It's going to ruin society. It's going to ruin morality. And then especially it's going to ruin the children. Um, and then, and then back, the bicycle was pre-feminism. So it also was, it's also going to ruin the women very specifically. It's going to ruin the women. Which clearly cannot be, because women clearly in, you know, cannot be trusted to use a bicycle without getting into real trouble. I'll explain, I'll explain why. So this is this persistent theme, and basically you, you go all the way back, and this is like, you know, this is like this famous thing where Plato and Socrates thought that like, you know, basically they thought that written language was a big mistake, that all information transmission should be oral, and they had this, you know, whole thing back in 500 B.C., and then it was just like every, you just have to like imagine, it's, I always like to hypothesize like, you know, the first guy who brought fire, you know, it's like, Down from the mouth. They probably killed him. Yeah, they were like, what the fuck is, you know, Right. Exactly. Like,…

AI assessment note: “every new technology is greeted with what they call a moral panic”