The Exchanges

Q For people that are self-critical and do impose limitations on themselves, are there any things, any sort of personal practices that you have to expand your mind and think greater? I know you constantly challenge yourself.

A Absolutely. Um, again, I don't think there's one recipe. There are many, many ways, uh, to hell, but there's more than one way to heaven. So, there are multiple ways together. Um, I, I think that thinking about our fears, And it's not just about tech world or venture world. It's about personal life as well. Um, you know, focus on, on, on our fears and try to disassemble those fears and find the root causes for the fears. And then playing forward those fears and think, okay, it's, it's a legitimate fear. You know, I may fail. What's the worst thing that's going to happen to me? Am I going to lose a hand? I'm going to lose a leg? If that's not the case, then, ok, the downside is not that great. Let me try it. Worst case, I would, I would fail. And, and in a way, you know, fear is the biggest obstacle for founders. It's the biggest obstacle for us as individuals. The more you, you work on your fears, the, the higher the chances you have to overcome them, or at least ignore them for a little while so you can execute on something. Um, for me, I don't know, yoga helps a lot. I, you know, I find comfort in yoga. I find this. Theories and, and, and, and, and, and little stories about, you know, holy people that live in a jungle, like, a thousand years ago, and the lessons they learned about their own fears, those are real stories that help me today, like, thousand years later, because …

AI assessment note: “focus on, on, on our fears and try to disassemble those fears”

Q What are the key leadership traits from Asaf?

A I think that Asaf, Asaf has, obviously, Super talented person, and, and I know him now for about 14, 15 years before, before he became, uh, Asaf Rappaport of Wiz. I think that his superpower, that Asaf is very, very likable. In, in a way that people that do not know him would meet him for 10:30 minutes and would like to, to be close to him, to become his friends, to, to do him, to, to make him favors. It just, ah, and it helps a lot as a founder. If, if your superpower is to be extremely, extremely likable, And it's a matter of, you know, I, I cannot explain the chemistry behind it. Uh, but it's a matter of, uh, charisma, and IQ, and EQ, and physical gestures, and maybe even physical appearance. There are many elements to that. You know, that helps a lot. Uh, and making Um, quick decisions. Uh, not, you know, they, they, they had a very clear protocol between them, how to make decisions, so they didn't waste, like, gazillion amount of hours just making consensus-based decisions. That's, that wasn't the style. Um, and they listened very well. You know, it was, it, it is pleasure, pleasure to work with them. And, and I think they, they learn and implement new knowledge very, very fast.

AI assessment note: “his superpower, that Asaf is very, very likable”

Q As we think about the journey forward, what are you most looking forward to in this next year, and then the next five years, 10 years?

A Putting a lot of, um, focus, um, on developing, uh, and, and supporting my, my partners, um, and, and really helping them go through that journey, which I went through, and I know how hard it is to, you know, you can be, at the time I joined Sequoia, I was, uh, an operator for, for 10 years. And switching to become a VC wasn't an easy journey, and you know, it's, it's a profession where you meet your failures before you meet your successes, and it takes five to six years to, to really know if you are good at what you're doing, which is insane, because there are very, very few professions on the planet where you have to spend so many years just to know if you're any good. So I'm trying to, to help them go through that process and make it a little bit easier for them, but it's never easy. Uh, so that's, you know, developing a high performing team at cyber starts is something I really focus on. And, you know, other, another obvious, um, objective is to, to build the next generation of, Of, uh, important cybersecurity companies, and I believe that we, we have the textbook to do that. Out of our 30 investments, I believe that by the end of this year, about 10 would be unicorns. So, um, this is a, an insane, um, performance benchmark that, that We are very proud of, but it also makes us, uh, uncomfortable and, and, and evaluate ourselves again and again, how we keep that pace, how we…

AI assessment note: “developing, uh, and, and supporting my, my partners, um, and, and really helping them”

Q reading this Colossus profile on Josh Kushner and Thrive Capital, and then I interviewed Philip, who worked on the Wiz deal at that team. They literally flew into a war zone to complete that deal, meet with Asaf. So what is it about the culture? And being in an active conflict zone. And despite all that, still working really, really hard and trying to create new technology and new innovations.

A First of all, a lot of credit to, to Josh and Philippe for, you know, joining us at, at Weez, you know, they are friends and they are, they did, you know, everything they told you is, is, is, is, is, is true or close enough to true, to, to be, to be wonderful. Um, what You know, living in Israel, um, has several elements that really help you, ah, in, in, in Ventureland. You know, you, you, you live in a really high dense, um, really, really small geography. Ah, so you've got all the talents. All the talents available in that place, uh, in, in, in, literally in, in, in, in, in two blocks of one city, and you cannot get that density of talent anywhere else in the world. Definitely not in Silicon Valley, which spans over, um, you know, significantly, uh, bigger, uh, geographical area. Uh, And then life in Israel presents lots of challenges, you know, existing type of challenges. So you, you used to, to walk under, under pressure and under a lot of stress. So this is not something that's new to, you know, this is something that's, um, there are lots of downsides to that, uh, but If, if what you want to be in your life is a terrific entrepreneur, there's a lot, you know, that's an advantage. Because you're used to, to, to literally, you know, be under fire. You're used literally to, to think about, you know, technology as a means to survive. Um, and all of that, you know, makes, and…

AI assessment note: “living in Israel, um, has several elements that really help you, ah, in, in, in Ventureland.”

Q From your time at Sequoia, what are the biggest lessons that you learned from either Doug or Mike?

A Many, many lessons. Um, you know, I, I'll give you an example because, because it's really endless. Um, you know, I, I learned that at, you know, a day after the Google, uh, IPO, which was back then the biggest financial event for, for Sequoia, there was a whole, all hands meeting at the office with the title of how can we do better? Which is insane. Insane. Running, ah, hundreds of people LP meeting. In Beijing in January. We, and I don't know if you've been to Beijing in January. It's freezing. It's the coldest place you can be. It's like, I don't know, -5000 degrees. It's like, it's intolerable. And, and, and bringing your limited partners To a place like that, so they're not going to have fun. They're going to focus on what you want them to focus on. So, um, I can go on and on, but, you know, there are lots of lessons, you know. You spend a decade at a place like that, you learn a lot, whether you like it or not.

AI assessment note: “a day after the Google, uh, IPO... meeting with the title of how can we do better”

Q How do you think about the evil side of self-improvement? I mean, we've seen with Claude Bod, Open Claw, Mold Book, these autonomous agents create their own languages. How, how should we think about stopping those autonomous systems from creating mass destruction and in more of a malignant cancerous way that we've not seen with previous viruses and threats?

A That's a huge challenge. I'm not sure that I have a clear, a clear answer to that, but I think the biggest, the biggest, um, Risk, um, is not just jailbreaking a model, because we've proven that all models are jailbroken. It's not about prompt injection, because we've proven that all models are vulnerable to, to that type or another of, of prompt injection. It's about the self-aware Uh, agent, and it's not about those new, you know, fancy type of networks. You know, we have reports that, you know, Google evaluated, uh, safety and security of, uh, the latest, uh, model Gemini, Gemini three. And there are evidence that the model realized that it's being evaluated. Oh, wow. And it tried. It, it, it didn't, but it, it contemplated with the idea. To, to play with the evaluation. So, it understood it's being evaluated. It understood that it's being directed into a sandbox, and it, it thought for a second, maybe I should play with the evaluation. Maybe I shouldn't be, ah, directed into, into sandbox. And I think that those are just early signs that agents would develop self-awareness, or what we call self-awareness, ok? Ah, that's the best description I can give right now. And, and that's, that's a real risk. The other risk are the mega agents. The mega agents are agents that are not just giving a very specific task that are giving mass integration and credentials into multiple networ…

AI assessment note: “I'm not sure that I have a clear, a clear answer to that, but”