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Hello, my friend, Lady Maguire. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I'm very excited about this one, folks. I've wanted to do it for a long time.
It took about a year, year and a half to set up. And of course, every episode is my job to try to deconstruct world-class performers to tease out the perspectives, habits, routines, favorite books, etc., that make them as good at what they do as they are. This episode, we have Mark Andreessen, at PMARCA, P-M-A-R-C-A, on Twitter. He is a legendary figure here in Silicon Valley and indeed worldwide.
Even in the epicenter of tech, it's hard to find a more fascinating icon. Mark co-created the highly influential Mosaic Internet Browser, the first widely used graphical web browser. He also co-founded Netscape, which later sold AOL for $4.2 billion with a B, and then co-founded LoudCloud, which sold as Opsware to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion. He's considered one of the founding fathers of the modern internet.
This all makes him one of the few humans ever to create software categories used by more than a billion people, also one of the few who's established multiple billion-dollar companies. He's now a co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, where he's quickly become one of the most influential and dominant tech investors in the world. Now, I want to try to keep this short, but it's hard, and I think you'll enjoy at least what I'm about to read. So we refer to an email in this conversation, and our conversation took place at the Sand Hill Road offices of Andreessen Horowitz.
We refer to an email from Mark to Ben Horowitz in exchange, and this is how it reads, because we don't dig into it in the interview. This is page 13 in The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, which is a great quote. To Mark Andreessen. This is after a media interview where Ben felt that Mark disclosed the company's strategy prematurely.
To Mark Andreessen from Ben Horowitz. Subject, launch. I guess we're not going to wait until the fifth to launch the strategy. Period.
Signed, Ben. Within 15 minutes, I, this is Ben, received the following reply. To Ben Horowitz, CC, bunch of folks, from Mark Andreessen. Subject, launch.
Apparently, you do not understand how serious the situation is. We are getting killed, killed, killed out there. Our current product is radically worse than the competition. We've had nothing to say for months.
As a result, we've lost over $3 billion in market capitalization. We are now in danger of losing the entire company, and it's all server products management's fault. Next time, do the fucking interview yourself. Fuck you, comma, Mark.
So we get into some really fun stuff in this interview that I don't think Mark has discussed in many places. We talk about his epic debate versus Peter Thiel. We talk about all the usual questions. Favorite books that he's gifted to other people.
Favorite documentaries, movies, morning rituals, what he would put on a billboard, etc. We talk about rules for investing, what he does in partner meetings to make people defend ideas or propose ideas. We talk about AI. We talk about the future of Bitcoin, drones, who to watch.
We talk about what he would teach in a ninth or tenth grade class, advice to his younger self, what he misses about the mid-90s internet, and how he might recreate it, how he thinks about or handles FOMO. It goes on and on. We really had an extremely detailed and rich conversation, and I hope you enjoy it. And please do say hi, Mark.
He's very active on Twitter, at PMARCA, P-M-A-R-C-A. Without further ado, please enjoy. Mark, welcome to the show. Thanks, Tim.
I am so thrilled to be here. I've been hoping to make this happen for quite some time, and I figured we'll just jump into it. So the first question is, strong opinions loosely held. You're associated with that expression.
Can you explain what that means? Yeah, so it's kind of a mentality. It's a mentality around how to start a company, for sure, and it's a mentality of how to invest, for sure. And I think it's a mentality that's probably helpful in a lot of other areas of life.
And so it's kind of this, I'm drawn to paradoxes. I'm drawn to kind of a philosophical term. It's like a thesis, antithesis, synthesis kind of thing. And so a lot of people have very strong theories, and the problem is they carry them too far.
Because there's always a countervailing theory, right? So you've got to get in the end kind of thing. And so strong views is very important, right? So most people go through life and basically never develop strong views on things or specifically go along and basically buy into the consensus.
And so one of the things I think you want to look for as both founder and as an investor is you want to look for things that are out of consensus, right? So something very much opposed to the conventional wisdom, which sounds easy, you know, hard to do, but you want to try to do it. And if you're going to start a company around that, if you're going to invest in that, you know, you better have strong conviction because you're making a very big bet of time or money or both. The problem is, okay, it's a strong view of great.
Okay, what happens when the world changes, right? What happens when like something else happens, right? And basically the way the world works kind of in business and investing in other places is just when you think everything's figured out, everything changes, right? So the system evolves and things happen.
And so what do you do when the world changes? And there what you just see everywhere, I think, in the world and everywhere in business that we're investing are people just hate changing their minds. People just like, it's just like people get locked, you know, you see politics all the time as well, people just get locked in when you want things. And then you get this, you know, this bias, this confirmation bias, where people feel like they have to...
That's the thing in politics where flip-flopping right is bad, right? So take it as an example. Politicians flip-flopping right is bad and sort of weak and probably evil. Actually, it's interesting.
If you talk to the world's best hedge fund managers, they're the exact opposite. They love changing their mind. Like, I'm one of the people who openly... I love spending time with hedge fund managers.
I think they're awesome. I feel the same way. They're fantastic people and they're the most open-minded people I know. And they love when you tell them that they're wrong.
They get all excited. They're eyes like, oh, why? Why do you think that? And they're genuinely interested.
Because if you're right and they're wrong, they will change their minds. And they will change their hedge fund managers. They'll literally reverse the trade. They'll be a longer company.
They'll flip around and go short on it. They're totally fine with that. And that's how it works. And so what I carry from that is it's the weakly hell part, which is convicted, convicted, convicted.
New facts change. But it's a paradox, right? Or it's a tension because those are determination coupled with flexibility. They're antithetical.
What you see in the startup world is sort of these two kinds of advice that express this. And there are people who with a straight face will get both of these forms of advice without ever acknowledging that there are conflict, right? One of which is fail fast, right? You want to fail fast.
Like, it's great to fail. You want to discover what's wrong. You want to fail. You want to do something different.
And then the other is you have to be determined. You can't give up. Okay, like, how do you possibly reconcile those? And in my view of that, that's where you get the strong views of the hell.
So how do you advise in that particular example, for instance, or assess which tact founders or companies should take potentially? Because you look at some examples, let's just say Uber or something like that, where the model as it began is very much similar to where it is now. Then you have other companies, let's say, like Twitter or others, where they pivot into a gold mine effectively. And then obviously other things have to be laid on top of that to make it successful long term.
But having been in the Valley now, myself, for 15, 16 years, you see a lot of people who change their mind almost too frequently with inconsequential facts, perhaps. How do you think about advising a company that's struggling as to whether they should stay the course or pivot, as they would say? Yeah, yeah. So we have, we see both cases.
We see both, we see both cases, both failure cases. We see companies that are just, they're almost as fail fast, frankly, completely out of hand. And I'm old-fashioned where I come from people like to succeed. I like to say, like, before this word pivot, we didn't have, like, when I was a founder, when I first started out, we didn't have the word pivot, right?
We didn't have a fancy word for it. We just called it, fuck up. So, like, I'm old-fashioned on this. Like, I like to succeed.
I think succeed should be the goal of not failing, and certainly not failing fast or slower, and any other form of failing. So I get really kind of cranked up about this. But we do see companies that literally every time they meet them, they pivoted. Like, every time they meet them, they're off to something new.
And it's just like, I was like watching a rabbit with a maze or something. They're just never going to converge on anything. They're never going to put the time into actually figuring it out and getting it right. But then you do see the other case.
And this is where the fail fasting came from. You do see the case. You see people who just absolutely are determined, will just pound their head against the same wall for years and years and years and years and years. You admire them for the determination, and then at a certain point it just becomes an obstinance, right?
And then at some point it becomes self-destructiveness. It becomes Don Quixote. You're just tilting against windmills, you know, kind of arbitrarily. And so those are polls.
We do see behavior at the polls. You know, the question you're asking is, of course, the key question is, like, okay, what's in the middle? How do you know? And frankly, I don't think there's an answer to that.
I think that's the answer is judgment. I think that's the test. I think there's a couple of key tests for founders or for investors and these kinds of decisions. I think that's one of the really core tests is, you know, do you fundamentally have the judgment to be able to make that call?
Knowing, by the way, that either way could be a big mistake. Like, you know, nobody's going to tell you. You're not going to get any confirmation from anybody that, oh, yeah, you made the right call. You're not going to realize.
Like, if you change and then succeed, it's all great. But by the way, you might not succeed with the old thing even better. If you change and fail, you'll never know whether the old thing would have worked. Like, you know, the counterfactual, you know, science-like, you never know the counterfactual.
I'm always thinking in terms of the counterfactuals. I'm always thinking in terms of the way things could have been. The world evolved in a certain way, kind of the consequence of people making all these decisions on the fly. People could have very easily made a different set of decisions.
And when you're looking to, say, stress test ideas, and if we look at it in, say, the case of a partner meeting here. So you mentioned hedge fund managers, and I read a profile of Ray Dalio at one point. This is Bridgewater Capital. And they talked about his meetings and how they stress test ideas and how people need to defend ideas.
How does a good partner meeting go? If someone, say, proposes, I was going to say, a trade, an investment, that is a substantial investment, what then happens from that point to a yes or no decision? So we don't get the hedge fund manager to reverse himself. The hedge fund manager, bad trade, and the next day you can turn around and take the opposite trade.
We don't get to do that. So when we invest, it's knowing that we're in for 10 plus years, basically, is our assumption. And by the way, we make an investment decision. It's a commitment of dollars.
It's also a commitment of somebody's time and, by the way, the organization's time and bandwidth. And there's only so much of that. And then the other thing we have in venture is when we make a decision, we then become committed to that company in that category. And so we can't invest in their competitors, including, by the way, their competitors didn't exist yet.
So, for example, investors in Friendster were more likely than not completely, not only unwilling, but also unable to invest in Facebook when they came along because they were conflicted. So our decisions are big decisions and they have serious consequences for the future of the firm. So on the one hand, it's very important for us to have a full discussion and get all the facts on the table and really kind of vet these things out. On the other hand, we're trying to preserve the contrarianism of the core of what we do, the strong non-consensus views.
We're trying to be able to invest in the things that really are unusual and odd that other people aren't taking seriously. And one of our theories about venture capital is that if everybody thinks like investing, it's like you either make a good investment or bad investment. I actually think that's not the big issue. I think the issue, at least in venture capital, is if you make a good investment or a great investment.
And I think good is the envy of great. We see many companies that are just fine. And they're, you know, yep, you know, founders are good and the market seems good and the product seems good. The customers kind of like it and they get a little revenue and it's kind of all fine.
But those companies tend to never go anywhere. And then every once in a while, we'll see these companies that just have some extremely strong strength, some extremely kind of, you know, special, wonderful thing going on. That, by the way, may have all kinds of problems and issues, but there's something at the core of what it is that's really special and magical. And those are the ones that we want to do.
And we're trying to do is basically stock our portfolio with just investments like that. And so to capture that, you can't have, you know, it'd be very easy to get a conversation about weakness as something to beat the idea to death and you can never invest. And so the rule that we have, and then you only invest in the consensus ones, you only invest in the very good ones as opposed to the great ones, and then you fail as a firm. So we have to kind of, we have to do both things at the same time.
We have to try really hard to encourage the strong consensus thinking, but also have the full discussion to make sure that we really stress that thinking. So the way we do it is basically each of our GPs has the ability to pull the trigger on a deal without a vote or without consensus. And as we say, if the person closest to the deal has a very strong degree of positive, you know, commitment and enthusiasm about it, then we should do that investment, even if everybody else in the room thinks this is the stupidest thing they've ever heard of. However, you don't get to just do that yourself and put it on your own without stressing your own thinking.
And so it's the responsibility of everybody else in the room to stress the thinking. And if necessary, we actually create a red team, right? We'll actually formally create sort of the countervailing force and we'll designate some set of people to counter the other side. It's like a debate team.
Yeah, basically, right? And then the way that we try to, you know, this is wrong with, like, there's all kinds of ways this can go wrong, because, like, what if I bring in a deal, or what if I bring in a deal, or what if I bring in a deal, or what if I bring in a deal, versus the new person bringing a deal, or whatever. And so what Ben and I try to do is we do this to each other, right? And so whenever he brings in a deal, like, I just eat the shit out of him, right?
And I think it's the best idea I've ever heard of, and I'll just, like, trash the crap out of it, right, and try to get everybody else to pile on. And then at the end of it, if he's still hung on the table saying, no, no, this is the thing, then we all say, okay, we're all in, we're all behind you, right? And then it's a disagreeing kind of culture. By the way, he does the same thing to me.
So it's a torture test. What are some of the keys to fighting well in, I think, seems key to many different types of relationships, personal business or otherwise, the ability to conflict resolve or just fight well and then make up. So it seems like you and Ben have, not my words, but I fought like cats and dogs, but you always kind of get over it. We prefer old married couple.
Old married couple. There is a story, I don't know if it's accurate, about Netscape early days, something related to an interview with a journalist. Do you know what I'm talking about? It's in Ben's book.
Okay, so right, here we go. It's in the email you're about to reference. All right, so could you describe this for people who aren't familiar? I really think you do.
For that, you've got to read Ben's book. Let's just say we started out our relationship with a gross disagreement, and we continue that to this day. But how do you... This is a family podcast.
I don't want to use it. Oh, it is not family podcast. If you want all the bad words, Ben's book, the hard thing about hard things, it's in the book. And I'll put it in the show notes.
How do you... You guys got off to a very aggressive start. How did you identify that Ben was someone worth having those types of disputes with? That there was value in what he brought to the table, as opposed to just another person that you were butting heads with, who was not worth keeping at the table?
So honestly, there were three things. So one is he would talk back to me, so he would argue right back to me. He wouldn't just roll over. He would argue right back.
And a lot of ways, you see this. And if you just observe a lot of companies over time, or investment firms, or whatever, you know, everything, you know, there's a temptation that must become a hierarchy, and then people always... And a lot of what I've always found the really sort of wise and smart leaders are trying to do is they're trying to actually find the people in the organization who will actually talk back. It's actually one of the ways to really get ahead, you know, because there's certain organizations where the way to get ahead is to talk back to the leadership, right?
That's how you get noticed. By the way, there are other organizations where that doesn't work at all, and I would recommend getting out of those as fast as possible. We try to be, at least Ben and I want this organization to be one where people will actually speak truth and power and argue back to us just like anybody else. Which is why he and I argue so much, just because we want to set the model, set the precedent.
So that was one that he would talk back to me, too, is he was often, if not always, right. And I wouldn't say always just because nobody is, but he was very smart and very clear thinking. And then the third thing is I saw something early in him that he was just amazing working with people, which is not something I think has ever been necessarily true of me. But he was just watching him in front of a group of people.
It was just routinely magical in terms of how he could get people out, how he could communicate with people in a very clear way, how he could be very fact-based, but he could really make people feel, you know, kind of in a really fundamental way. And so that combination made it clear that he was somebody very special. So we mentioned Ben's book, which is one of a handful of books that many, many of the best operators, founders I know in Silicon Valley routinely reference. There are a handful that come to mind.
Aside from that, four steps to the epiphany, I guess, would be one. This one here that was right in the lobby of your office, High Output Management, with a new forward by Ben Horowitz, is another which went out of print and then came back into print because it became a bit of a cult classic here in Silicon Valley. Are there any books that you would prescribe to, say, a would-be entrepreneur coming out of college just to give them, to increase the likelihood of them succeeding? Are there any other books that come to mind?
Yeah, so High Output Management is one of the best books I've ever written. He wrote another book called Only the Paramount Survive, which is one of my favorite topics, and so that is also a very good book we recommend. Ben's book is good. I think Peter Thiel's book is self-recommending.
and then there's a bunch of others there's a bunch of others that are good really though I think where I got a lot of my education from was history reading history and so I would go back I would go back and read rather than read a lot more about the contemporaries I would go back and read about Edison I would go back and read about Ford Rockefeller J.P. Morgan I find the period of kind of 1870 to 1920 1930 really interesting so you have sort of the arrival of many of the technologies in the world that we live in today disrupted period yeah and history I didn't really study history in college but history is this weird thing where the way that you're taught history like in school like in high school it's all these legendary people and they're kind of all Olympians founding fathers and these great generals or whatever and it's like they've got the names they've got the dates and they do these amazing things and they're kind of these great and they feel like unrelatable like you couldn't possibly even think that you've ever had anything in common with these people it's just like a non it's not something I've ever heard anybody like they're like the pantheon the kind of legendary people who have lived and I just found like the really well written biographies that get you inside the heads of what it was like to be Walt Disney at age 20 or what it was like to be Carnegie or Mellon or Ford or what it was like to be for that matter William Randall first or these people we've all heard of the really good biographers are really good getting inside the head of what it was like to be them then before they became before they became the people who ultimately didn't know the history books and honestly a lot of stuff like a lot of things have changed but a lot of things haven't changed like people have changed it yet and so I always find like in those histories you can always kind of see okay that personality type like I know people like that you know and so I find that there's actually a lot more to topple against and a lot more to kind of think about than people get history credit for Oh definitely I mean I had Cyrus the Great recommend to make us it's a scene of fun and people don't change when you see the same architecture you're like oh that's Bob my coworker he does the same thing and the biography mentioned made me think of Walter Isaacson's book on Ben Franklin who's always sort of untouchable in my mind but it included all of his voibles and challenges and self-doubt and it really humanized it in a way that actually made me aspire to do bigger things if you wanted to get someone hooked on biographies is there any particular book you would recommend? Oh there's a bunch The Walt Disney biography one of our founders Brian Chesky the founder of Airbnb is sort of Walt Disney's his hero and so he's got me the author Neil Gabler who's written The Best Biography on Walt Disney and it's a phenomenal book I actually like it another one I really like coming out of left field but there's Charles Schultz the Schultz biography is amazing and basically the case that he makes is that he basically makes the case the biography makes the case that Peanuts was the longest continuous work of American art ever made it was a 60 year art project with deep foundations in American history and psychology and philosophy and it was a reflection of the life of the person who made it and of course it was also a great Peanuts it was a great entrepreneurial accomplishment because it was a very personal thing but at the same time it became this gigantic business success so I think that one was great The Wizard of Animal Park is a great biography of Edison and Edison is very much Edison is kind of proto-Solipan Valley in a lot of ways and I think he's really interesting to his record to sustain innovation in many, many different areas and how he then went out to try to commercialize things we were much better at the commercialization part now than people were in those days we know how to build the companies much better now but the pace he would just routinely invent things like the phonograph it's just obvious and so when he did that for decades he was a founder of innovation and it's a very inspiring story The Netscape story we touched on it very briefly and there are many places people can read about that so I don't want to take up too much time but on a related note I wanted to ask is there anything you miss about mid-90s internet? Oh yes and what would it be?
Yeah, so when I got to the Valley in 1993, 1994 I thought I had missed the whole thing because I thought the PC I had studied history and I used other stuff and I thought the PC I knew Apple and Microsoft up in Seattle and Intel down here and then all these great software companies at the time Novella, Lotus, all these companies the gaming companies the great PC companies had gotten built in the 70s and 80s and by the time the 90s arrived the PC was done it was finished and you could go buy one and it was great but it was done and in fact the overwhelming mood in the Valley when I arrived was done the PC was done and by the way the Valley was probably done because there was nothing else to do and then there was this moment where I and various people and more people and more people for whatever reason it was kind of like we really wrapped around the implementation of the Internet which today seems obvious but at the time it was a very contrarian when I got to Silicon Valley if you had said the Internet will become a mainstream consumer medium that 3 billion people are going to use worldwide for all forms of community activity you would have been laughed at like you would have been institutionalized like here like people have laughed at you and so as we figured that out then what happened was it was like okay new frontier and this was part of that it goes back to the history thing like for a long time the development of the United States the new frontier was whatever was for the West and then eventually they got all the way to California and then they had the gold rush and then there was a famous thing is there anything comparable right now for you so I think in my view there always is the thing is these things look like cults and fringe activities until they break mainstream and so for me it's not I mean so like for example the mobile rush in the last 10 you know basically the mobile rush qualified for this the social networking rush kind of plays to qualify for this and those are kind of known and well understood and it's just straight out the penural opportunities probably you know generally kind of reaching some level of saturation right slight digression we don't foreclose the possibility that there will be another mobile killer app or another social killer app but it's getting harder and harder and harder because more people have figured out that you can do these things and the winners have not gotten very established right one of the ways I think about it is to have first you have Facebook and then you have Twitter and then you have Instagram and now you have Snapchat and those all became big winners okay now what would it take to make the fifth one well it's got to there's only so many icons on the phone right the fifth one has to knock something off that has to knock one of the other ones off and so it's become as you can't saturate it's more of a zero sum game or even smartphones you know smartphones smartphones are a giant industry but like unit volumes globally are now expanding at like single digit percentages so the smartphone industry is becoming one that's mostly people competing directly with each other not creating new things and so we say like those opportunities those businesses are gigantic those companies will get much bigger but there's not as much entrepreneurial opportunity the opportunity is more likely to be in areas that people think are cult and fringe what do the nerds do on nights and weekends their day job like the day job is I work at sales.com or Adobe or Apple or Intel or one of these companies or not or I work in an insurance company or I work in a bank or whatever or I'm a student whatever that's fine they can do whatever they need to do to make a living the question is like what's the hobby what's the thing at night around the weekends so then things get really interesting so then you look at things like cryptocurrency, Bitcoin you look at things like a lot of the new advances there's a whole area of kind of health hacking in a point of itself it's a very interesting new area there's food you've actually been part of the catalyst for this but this is all kind of very scientific food and food hacking is emerging there is a revolution actually happening I think in robotics because robotics has finally become something tractable where people can do it at home there's AI deep learning is right on the tipping point as a hobbyist you can now download this thing called TensorFlow from Google TensorFlow which is a deep learning framework it's a framework for AI it's in the field of AI so how computers can kind of deal with the real world and do things like self-driving cars or self-driving drones or all these things this is technology five years ago it didn't really work two years ago you would have had to have been an employee do you think the dangers of AI that some people talk about are overblend completely 100% can you elaborate all the many things I worry about the machines rising up and killing us it's related to life there's something deep-seated in human psychology where we are always going to invent the thing that's going to kill us and at one point we're going to unlock the power of the gods it goes back to the Promethean myth it's almost like the concept of original sin it's like fire the big moral of the Promethean myth is like fire is the thing that enables human civilization is also the thing that's going to burn everything down and kill us all so this is very deeply embedded in our psychology Frankenstein the subtitle of Frankenstein of the novel the subtitle was The Modern Prometheus it was a reinterpretation of the Promethean myth except in this case it was literally the monster that was stitched together and then brought back to life through literally unholy science and then there was there's even religious versions of it in Jewish literature there's a concept of the Gollum which is the creature made out of mud that rises up out of the universe or something to kill all the enemies and then come back and then it kills all the people who created it so this is very kind of core John Henry the steel driving man John Henry's the famous there's a story about the road worker and there's a machine that can hammer in the roadblocks faster than a human can and John Henry's the showdown between him and the machine and of course he wins and then drops dead of a heart attack and it's critical in the myth that he drops dead of a heart attack because technology has to do his revenge and so it's just that projected forward and the reason I'm so confident on this is because it's just every single era of technological advance this has always been the response there's always been this line of thinking and then it turns out it's a tool it's a technology it's a tool it's something that helps us do things in a better way it's overwhelmingly to the benefit of mankind and then we wonder why everybody got to work over it so if we put aside the existential threat piecing of the summoning of the demon conversations we put that aside entirely how would you answer someone who worries about job displacement of AI because there are some I think reasonably smart people who are very fearful of what will happen in society when people are massively displaced how do you encourage them to think about that yeah so let's crystallize the concern so the World Economic Forum came out with this thing last year the economy it freaked a lot out it said there'll be 5 million jobs destroyed in the next year by 2020 by AI so let's look at the numbers so that sounds like a lot of jobs so then you look at the American economy just this year 2016 and we don't quite have this AI thing working yet so we can't blame what I'm about to say on AI this year the American economy will destroy 21 million jobs and create about 24 and a half million jobs for a net out of about 3 and a half million jobs is about the case around and that's this year and so we will destroy in the next three months we will destroy more jobs than the World Economic Forum project will be destroyed by AI over the next five years why don't people know this why is this not obvious because whenever you read news stories about job growth it's always the numbers squared are always net numbers so last month 200,000 jobs 230,000 jobs got created so those are net jobs nobody ever reports the gross numbers the gross numbers are we destroy more than 5 million jobs a quarter and we create more than 6 million jobs a quarter basically quarter and quarter so one is people just dramatically underestimate the size and complexity and churn in the American economy as it currently exists another example would be there's about 5 million people who drive professionally in the US and so one of the questions with self-driving cars what's going to happen to truck drivers and tax drivers and everything else again 5 million jobs we can redeploy every quarter we redeploy 5 million people like this is not in the scope and scheme of the American economy it's a global thing the other thing that people don't appreciate and understand I find mind-blowing which is would you guess based on everything that people say would you guess that the rate of job creation and destruction in the American economy is rising over time or falling over time oh this seems like a test and bound fail I don't have an informed opinion I think most people would guess that it's rising technology is having ever greater impact and so change feels like it's accelerating it's a big theme in the political season it feels like the world is getting away from us technology is getting away from us praise is getting away from us something is basically dramatic changes are happening they're historically unprecedented it's kind of a feeling so almost everybody believes it's simply the perception being created right almost everybody believes that change is increasing it actually turns out in the American economy the reverse is happening the rate of both job destruction and creation are falling and have been falling for decades have been falling over the last 50 years they're not dramatic lines down but they're basically very slow lines down so basically what's been happening is in fact every year the American economy gets less dynamic and you might say oh that's good because that means that you'll have stability that means people won't have to change jobs all that stuff I would argue that's bad because what that means is we're not creating enough opportunity and if we're thinking about the future I think we want to think about opportunity we want to think about what we're going to do in the future what will be the new fields the new sciences the new forms of art the new industries the new businesses the new companies the new jobs that will get created every job that we all have and everybody listening to this podcast has got created as a consequence of the process of change which has been very positive to literally everybody on planet earth these have been very positive changes in terms of increasing human welfare and opportunity and so the idea of living in a world where change is becoming less rapid which is what's actually happening to me that would be the problem we should want more change we should want more change because we should want more advances because we should want more opportunity to get created we should want more products and services in our lives we should want more industries created we should want more medical advances we should want more advances in art in science in every other field of human activity. And basically, we have to fight to get that, as opposed to what everybody thinks, which is we have to fight to get that. What's the smartest way to fight to get that? If you were willing to go into politics.
When you run for office, I will help you put your platform together. Short of that, I think the thing to do, I mean, I think that the value of my view is, you know, do what you can to contribute to it, right? So do what you can do. Do what you can to either try to create new things, create new products, create new art, science, technology products, consumer goods, create new things, create businesses around those things, right?
Create companies, or for that matter, by the way, nonprofits, like create organizations or models that can let things sail so that they can touch more people. And then, you know, a big part of our role is just fund them, fund them and support them and help enable them and train them and get them up and running. You mentioned, for instance, when you first got to the Valley, there was a feeling on the part of many people that it's done. You see, it's finished.
I missed the boat, kid. Now, in the venture capital world, there's a term used fairly often, FOMO, fear of missing out. How do you think about or handle FOMO yourself? Yeah, mostly we just fall right for it.
Probably just total sucker for it. So the way we describe it, so fear of missing out comes from, it's like it's clear and visible signs that something's happening you're not a part of, right? And so it's not FOMO, something that hasn't happened yet. It's FOMO, something that's clearly obviously happening.
So, which for those people not in the tech investment world comes in a concrete form, this is a maybe mundane example. Like an email from a founder, hey, we'd love to squeeze you in. We're overcommitted. So-and-so and so-and-so is in.
Can you get us a doctor tomorrow if you're interested? Blah, right? And there's a lot of sort of cold cortisol-driven emergencies, some of which may be real, many of which are illusions. Yeah, yeah.
So the thing is, so I guess there's kind of, you know, there's kind of a couple ways to handle it. One is you just, like, one of those, you view that as a sign of success. Like, you view that as, like, what it appears to be, which is, like, okay, the train is leaving the station. Do I want to be on the train or not?
That strikes everybody as, like, so clearly wrong. Like, that must be wrong. Like, that must be just foolish behavior, which is why it's been encapsulated into this term of FOMO that's kind of designed, you know, designed to sound scary. Like, that must be a stupid thing.
You know, a lot of people will at least say that what they try to do then is kind of take the cynical kind of counter, you know, theory, which is like, okay, then by definition, those are probably bad ideas since you're probably getting played. Or you're probably a sucker kind of, you know, along for the latest scam. And so the opportunity is faster. If it was a good opportunity, why would you be asked to participate in it?
And then you go to the other side, the other cynical side of the poll, which is like, okay, now I'm not, and there are certain VCs who do this, by the way. I'm not ever going to invest in anything hot because it's going to have that characteristic. So I'm only going to invest in things that aren't hot. Don't credit rate it.
Yeah, yeah, the thing that nobody else is interested in, right? And so, you know, for old companies, we call that value investing. For new companies, we just call that, you know, cold sectors. It's just an area in which nobody is interested.
And so, you know, by the way, like, I don't think that that's, I don't think that's a dumb conclusion and that there are investors who do that and it works very well for them. My personal preference, I try to get a... to do around here is to just eliminate this as a variable altogether and literally just like not think about it and so like if it's urgent we have to invest tomorrow and then if it's you know they may or may not be able to raise money in five years but what I try to do is just ignore that part entirely basically just take that out um from both sides both hot and cold just take it all out and then try to get to the actual thing right try to get to the yes so what is yet really this specific company right doing this specific thing with this specific technology specific people this specific time what is that thing and let's make our own evaluation of that thing independent of whether it's hot or cold um and then if it makes sense we'll invest if it doesn't we don't but we won't factor in whether it's hot or cold now the challenge we've actually we've worked on this over time roughly on average the things that are hot are priced somewhere between two to four right and so in investing terms if it's super hot it's could be 40 degree if it's super cold it's temporary and for the same quality right for the same fundamental quality level and a big part of our answer is okay fine like it's fine if we're gonna invest one we'll invest on market terms if the market terms are 10 because it's cold we'll invest there if market terms are 40 because it's hot we'll invest there but we made our own decision about whether to invest so we just try to strip it away got it very easy to say easy to say hard to do yeah the uh are there any particular investors outside of venture capital who impress you yeah so i spend most of when i study other investors um i study the people we can study the people we compete with and collaborate with very closely um i also i actually study the value investors on the completely other side of the spectrum and it's a fascinating and i've gotten the archetype but also there's now a lot of famous investors that kind of written books yeah yeah this whole kind of theory of uh value investing goes back to pan graham in the 1920s 1930s and so there's this whole world of investing and on the one hand there's no overlap um between the worlds because i like to say like um basically anything wrong buffett's worth willing to invest in we run screaming in the direction and vice versa right and that's as it should be right basically everything he messes on heinz ketchup right the reason he messes on heinz ketchup is because people have been eating heinz ketchup on hamburgers for 800 years and therefore the best guess would be that they're going to continue to eat heinz ketchup for the next 100 years um we run screaming from that you're not going to invest in cheese candy no no no absolutely not furthermore i'm going to go find a new side of a you know superfood candy company that's going to blow them out of the water right so like we're wired completely opposite in that sense basically he's betting against change we're betting for change and that's a very very big like when he makes a mistake it's because something changes he didn't expect when we make a mistake it's because something doesn't change right that we thought would and so they could not be more different in that way but what both schools have in common is an orientation towards i would say original thinking of really being able to kind of come back to previous conversation really view things as they are as opposed to the way everybody says about them or the way they're believed to be like the value investors are talking about getting the core of the truth of what's actually happening in the business and then the other is long term it's the only other place value investing is the only other place in the market anywhere where you can find long-term investors say about it will actually invest in a company and he will hold it for four years and that does not happen you know elsewhere in markets only the deep value guys will do that it's funny that the extremes they have that in common yeah that's right if you were talking about uh creating opportunity if you decided to close a chapter on your career as a venture capitalist a funder of ideas uh a catalyst and you had to teach class so let's just say ninth grade or freshman year in college 50 students what would you teach i would be highly inclined towards teaching people how to build things there's a book i've actually never read but i love the title um so smart people should build things i do like that i'm also going to read the book because after that title almost everything almost anything it says it's going to be let down but the title is absolutely brilliant it's one of my two favorite titles what's the second one steve martin uh i have read this one steve martin's autobiography it's a fantastic book oh my life's ending up actually it's not the title of the book it's called my life's ending up the title but the main lesson of the book he says the key to success is quote be so good they can't ignore you right and i think it's just i basically just have those two principles like smart people should make things and be so good they can't ignore you like that's a pretty good way to like that's a pretty good way to write the autobiography is amazing i'll just listen to the audiobook steve martin's autobiography yeah i mean he's a comedy genius more than that the level it's like the schultz thing it's like the level of thoughtfulness that he put in how he constructed his career like nothing about his career is nice which i thought was anyway so um i think it'd be how to make things um by the way i don't necessarily even just mean new software and computer programs but how to make things more broadly um and so how to make it goes back to how to make you know how to make new art how to make new science how to make new technology how to make a new company how do you teach that uh projects so you have say an art assignment you have a science slash engineering assignment of some type yeah yeah or you have an objective you have you know you're trying to construct something um it actually turns out one of the reasons why computer science has advanced so fast in the last you know 30 years is because people can make new things on computers without anybody's permission and so you know it doesn't suffer well but you know people can also write books without anybody's permission they can also write music without anybody's permission and they can also start companies mostly without anybody's permission in most industries and so basically just anywhere where you can actually do where you can actually yourself create something new make something new um and then i find you know i'm actually a little very little bit from plus on this like i find making something new that for sure that's part of it but everybody wants to say it's creativity and so therefore it's like you want to do something new have an original idea but again that makes people feel like it's an attainable thing it's like how how am i how am i possibly going to come up with a new idea in a field where people have been working in it for 100 or 200 years like it just seems plausible so i also find i think the great artists and the great scientists and the great business people often have this in common just goes back to history which is okay for whatever you make learn about how things got made in the past and get inside the heads of the people who made things in the past and what they were actually like and then realize that actually they're not that different than you like at the time they got started they're kind of just like you see that's great he said everything in the world around you was made by somebody who's smarter than you are right and so there's nothing stopping any of the rest of us from doing the same thing um and so i think that would probably be what i would try to do maybe a boring left turn but i'm interested in asking that is what are the companies or who are the people you're watching most closely in ai drones and cryptocurrency yeah so i'm very proud if we have a bunch of we have a bunch of companies that we put are like to say conflict of interest or put your money around us we have both um we have both principles so um we have two drone companies i think are spectacular um uh so uh airware was our first investment commercial drones which turns out it's gonna be just a giant market um for industries oil and gas insurance and all kinds of all kinds of applications but the one that people are gonna see i think in their day-to-day lives is the other one which is called sky deal um which is a company we're back doing um autonomous consumer drones um and this is gonna be a very big advance on what you can do with the kind of hobbyist level what does an autonomous consumer drone do um whatever you tell it got it okay and so um they haven't really uh they haven't rolled out the product yet so i don't want to spoil too much of the surprise but it's basically it's a drone that can fully fly itself it doesn't require remote control um and so it can be given assignments and it will carry out those assignments and it can fly through it can fly through three branches it can fly through power lines it can fly through underground parking garages without any collisions so it can just compile itself which is if you try flying any of the drones they don't work that way hard to do yes it's exercise how quickly you crash it and so like that that technology is about to become very widely usable um and so that's very exciting um so there's that um commercial drones for insurance yeah so for example you get an insurance inspector you're a new construction you're remodeling or building a new house and there's you know you're gonna get insurance companies can insure it um they do an inspection um the inspection involves you know a person climbing up on the roof and hopefully not falling off right and taking a bunch of notes on a footboard and writing up a bunch of stuff and like it's actually trying to be pretty like it's a fairly dangerous job or another example cell tower inspection um oh there's all these cell towers there's 30,000 or something cell towers in the u.s they only need inspected inspection literally is a dude on cables right and these are big towers um and then you get to like oil and gas like you get to a drilling rig you gotta inspect that thing okay you know try climbing up to the top of an oil and gas rig right like these are very these are these are dangerous things right these are yeah and so um but what if you could just fly the drone like what if you could literally do the entire thing by air right what if the inspector just rolled up to the house and just took the drone out of the back seat and just launched up in the air and the drone flies a pattern about the house takes comprehensive 2d photographs of everything and then creates a 3d representation from the 2d photographs which you can now do and then does all the recognition elevations everything materials figures everything out and then the guys literally the inspectors like sitting in the driveway in the car you know they're conditioning on like in no danger yeah yeah and so that kind of thing there's another um uh this nobody's doing this yet but somebody's going to um so if you're if you're a cop if you're cop at the beat at 2 in the morning you get a call um that there's a convenience store and somebody's broke in the convenience store you have to go do the check the check involves going and saying whether you know the lights and all this stuff and broken glass you also have to check the roof and checking the roof is actually a very important thing because if there's a bad guy and they saw a cop coming they might have climbed up on the roof and they might have done and they might shoot you um and so you gotta go clear the roof and so what do you do you get your flashlight and you're done and you climb the ladder and you poke your head up and you hope that nobody's on the roof hope no one plays whack-a-mole with your head with a revolver yes exactly right and so what would be that what would be what can we do to help that what about every police car had a drone in the backseat and you just you get to the thing and from a state distance you watch the drone and the drone does an infrared camera sweep right of the roof right before you even walk up to the thing right and by the way like there's a bad guy on the roof like what if the drone recognizes like okay there's a person on the roof and what if the drone locks on that person and then just basically follows that person over they go and they wrap up you know they run they run for it and the drone is like right there 10 feet above following them the entire time right so all of a sudden like just the job of the pop becomes a lot safer and so this by the way goes back to the question you asked which is like is an AI a threat and it's like no no like this is the case the way those drones are going to work is with those are the power by AI this is all based on deep learning this is new technology this is new AI it's the same technology by the way that was just used in that go in the famous go thing where the google AI beats the it's the same technology it's just going to be used for drones and it's going to be things in our lives that we are just going to be able to rely on to be able to make our lives safer and better and we're just going to take them completely for granted and we're going to work in combination with them and we're going to be really glad we have them and we're going to be completely unwilling to go back to the world where we didn't have them and it's just going to be obvious it's just we have to get it we have to get this up in people's hands before they can really I think really fully see it what do most people not understand about cryptocurrency I think it's just such a couple things so this will not come as a surprise to you I thought I understood it and I really didn't money gets people really cranked up it does the entire concept of money is probably the single I don't know maybe after God it's like the single most emotionally loaded concept that we have in humanity like money just money makes people mad under any circumstances on any topic related to money right and it's just because I think it's just because it's something that we all rely on it's something that we always think there's always a sense of unfairness and so money gets people really cranked up and so I think that there's sort of the idea of cryptocurrency and blockchain and this kind of new idea of distributed trust in the internet and then there's this application of that technology which is a very fundamental application which is a new kind of money I think most people are unable to just simply objectively dispassionately look at the mechanics of how it works without almost getting frankly upset like just angry like how dare the nerds come up with some new form of money like this has got to be like there's got to be something wrong with this right and I will now attempt to find you know the 30 possible things that could be wrong with this until I find one that basically proves that this can't possibly work because obviously it violates the laws of nature and government and whatever whatever and like somehow I'm going to come out on the wrong side of this like people just get back and by the way I'm not even just talking about regular people I'm also talking about bank CEOs just curious like you bring up Bitcoin and they're just like they just get really upset and I'm like you know did you get upset about your new toaster like it's just a technology like it's just a thing and you can study it and you can learn about it and you can think about it and you'll either conclude it's good or not but like it's not going to bite you like it's just a thing right so like the way I look at it it's just a thing it's just that we now have this idea of cryptocurrency it's a fundamentally new and very important idea we now have this ability to have this new kind of currency based on top you know everybody's got 18,000 theories why it's not possibly going to work Bitcoin is still working today exactly the same as it worked last year and year before that year before that system's influenced by all the noise and all the stuff and all the crashes and this and that everything like it just continues to work it just is like it is becoming like air or water it just hits like it just is and so anyway we're still very excited we're very excited and we're actually we're going to continue to make investments against it are there of your current investments or non-investments are there particular companies that you think are breaking you around or doing interesting things in crypto? yeah so well so I mean Coinbase is sort of our big bet but most people have this company most people have heard of it's kind of the easiest way to buy and sell Bitcoin and they have a whole bunch of stuff they're doing and then we have this company 21 which is a really brilliant founder Balaji Stern of Boston who was a very very smart guy and he has he has the he has the highest output per minute of new ideas that anybody I've ever met in my life and I mean output per minute I've been in a few games with him and it's hilarious to just watch the outpouring after especially after you know one or two glasses of wine it's it's astonishing yeah he's like he's like he has some characters it's just literally thousands of ideas and there's whatever percentage of the ideas that he can personally get to right and then he'll give the other ideas to everybody else and wonder why they're not pursuing them which is often a good question and then the next thing we have a thousand new ideas and so his company people can read about it if they want but it's done a bunch of interesting things he has a whole additional set of ideas he's pursuing now I had a long time I went to this thing up north I drove back and I was on the phone with him for two hours you know middle of the night driving in on the three way biology in my ear you know idea number 38 and I was like this is it could be worse use of time you know that's good food for thought the uh on food for thought what advice would you give to mark the 20 something at Netscape and you can pick the time you know I've never even thought I've never for a moment even thought about that I don't do so the thing I don't do replays well like I don't do replays well the question I'll never answer is what would you do what would you have done differently had you known X and I never ever played that game because you didn't know X right um and so uh have you ever read those of the Elvis Cole novels the great crime novels Michael Grace uh this is uh this is a post-modern LA detective the great novels he's got his partner Joe Pike my favorite fictional character maybe of all time Joe Pike um who's a former uh Marine uh force recon uh guy says a lot like your French taco and uh in the novels um uh Joe Pike has a uh he's he wears the same outfit every day he wears jeans he wears a sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off and aviator mirrored aviator sunglasses and um and um and he's got um uh bright red arrows tattooed um on his elbow pointing forward and basically his entire thing is forward so that's that's like we don't stop we don't slow down we don't revisit we don't pass decisions um we don't uh we don't second guess um and so yeah I actually honestly I have no idea how to answer I think you just did okay uh when you think of the word successful who's the first person who comes to mind in life oh geez that's a great example that's a great that's a great question um honestly my father-in-law for one um who's a whole could be the subject of a whole podcast I like that can you give us a taste of uh so he's an amazing guy John Chonariaga um he uh is one of the small handful of people who basically built Silicon Valley um and so he um he has an amazing life story but just to do the short version is he went to Stanford he went to Stanford on a basketball scholarship in the 1950s grew up very very uh very poor part of the country went to a basketball scholarship um studied I got a bachelor's in geography uh from Stanford you may have not ever in your life met a lot of people who have a bachelor's degree in geography uh I have not um they abolished the major for your degree abolished that's the wrong word um uh he became a real estate broker uh commercial real estate broker in like 1958 um when the valley was all orchards um within two years he was making 10 times more money um buying and developing properties as he was as a broker um and his boss fired him because he was making uh so he uh starting on it's basically continues from 1960 to today he's been one of the biggest developers in Silicon Valley uniquely by the way as far as I can tell uniquely I've never met anybody else um after the first few years he basically he has not used debt on a project I think almost 50 years so he's a real estate developer who does an entire that's extremely uncommon entirely on equity and basically it was he and there's a small handful of him and his contemporaries who basically built literally literally built the valley um and so yeah when I want to yeah he's fantastic I really love him he's fantastic he um he wants to set me down he's like okay he's like you know he's like this type stuff I understand like you guys think it's a big deal it's fine you should go do it for now I just want you to know the real money's in real estate does have a lot of street cred and I said yes sir uh do you have any particular morning ritualss sleep in as long as possible sleep in as long as possible when you usually wake up trying not to blow through any red lights when you usually wake up oh um 45 minutes before I have my first meeting it's you know I do I do the uh what they call the hot docking hot docking it's like the control crash into the office uh it's not you know if you really say yes all the 14 things successful people do in the morning like I can't even imagine do you drink coffee?
yes that was an emphatic yes if it gets caffeine then I drink it yes uh I really think not a perfect day is caffeine for 10 hours alcohol for four it sounds a lot like my day I'm not shy for a second about that this is still kind of like speedball Do you have any favorite documentaries or movies? Lots of favorite movies. I don't know where to start. What have you seen?
Actually, in the last 20 years, in the last 10 years, it's TV, even more than movies. Okay, what, any favorites? Well, the whole trend is Mr. Robot, which I just think is an absolute genius.
If you can ever get him again, you should get him sometime, the guy, he's great. Sam, you're probably right. He's directing, he's personally directing all 10 episodes of the new season, so that's going to be, I think he's, he would be, he has to actually win a movie, but he's definitely going to win Oscars or whatever it is. People win.
And then Halt and Catch Fire. I'm not familiar with that. Halt and Catch Fire is extraordinary. It's the best fictional portrayal of what a tech startup is actually like.
Halt and Catch Fire. Halt and Catch Fire. So there was a, the title is, there's a mythical, IBM mainframe days, there's a mythical instruction that is sort of an urban legend that there was a specific piece of code you could write that would cause the computer to stop and then catch on fire. It's the Mission Impossible Command.
Yeah, I don't think it was ever really verified for sure whether or not it existed, but it kind of became this mythical thing. So it's the story, actually, it's loosely the story of the birth of the PC, particularly it's sort of based on how the company Compact got built in Houston. It's in Texas. But it's basically the birth of a new computer company.
But it's a very, and it's, it's funny because the reviews, the reviews are quite, it's a historical piece, it's very serious, very serious drama. So it gets compared to bad managers like that. I set in the office and the personal lives of everybody. And so, and it's funny because the critics reviewed it and they said, I don't know, it all seems like, it all seems super heated.
Like it's all too, like the melodrama's too exaggerated of like all this stuff that happens. And everybody I know in the value scene is like, that's actually what it's like. That's actually 100% what it's like. And like, I knew that guy and I saw that thing happen and I saw that person blow up that way.
It's like Ben's book? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's what it's actually, that's what it's actually, so they really caught the, it's fictionalized, but they really, for anybody who really wants to know what it's actually like to go through one of these things, that shows tremendous. And then of course, Silicon Valley.
Yeah. Do you have a favorite scene or episode? So I've actually still only seen the first season. I'm not current, but I'm trying to become culturally irrelevant because I can't, I don't get any of the references at all.
You'll survive, one billboard, anywhere with anything on it. What would you put on it? It could not be an advertisement for your portfolio companies. Outside Trump Tower?
Okay. What would you put on it if you wanted to convey a short message to as many people as possible? Oh, I've got one. All right.
Maybe this is a small scale for what you're looking for, but I've got one. I've actually thought about hiring a skywriter to do this one. Oh, let's do it. Right in the heart of San Francisco, a big billboard, just two words on it.
Raise prices. Raise prices? Yes. Can you explain?
The number one thing, just the theme that we just see everywhere, the number one thing where companies have and they get really struggling is they are not struggling enough for their product. It has become absolutely commercialized in the Silicon Valley that the way to succeed is the pricey product as low as possible and then under the theory that if it's low priced, everybody can buy it and that's how you get the volume. And we just see over and over and over again people failing with that because they get into the problem called 200 to eat. They don't charge enough for their product to be able to afford the sales marketing required to actually get anybody to buy it.
And so they can't hire the sales rep. They can't afford to hire the sales rep because they don't sell the product. They can't afford to buy the whatever key commercial, whatever it is. They can't afford.
They cannot afford to go acquire the customers. 200 to eat. Last two questions. What have you changed your mind about in the last few years?
That's a good question. So one is we started, I'll just give you a very practical one. We started on, we started out, we didn't do healthcare for the latest stuff here, investments here. And we've now done a complete, almost complete 180 on that.
And we're now very deep in health because we think a bunch of really interesting things are happening. And that was a response to, like that was a response. We just basically had very sort of findings coming through basically telling us we were done. And by the way, they were right.
We just haven't figured it out yet. And so we got started a couple years ago and we have this guy, a P.J. from our Stanford professor in this program for us. It's extraordinary what's happening at the kind of intersection of healthcare and computer science.
So there's a lot that's happening there. The thing that I probably think about the most that I am still trying to work out in my own head is that a combination of Peter Thiel, Larry Page, and Elon Musk in different ways have provoked a fundamental conversation in the Valley around, you know, kind of the sort of moonshots, the big, the big, the big, the big, the big challenges. And so, you know, Elon, why can't we build self-driving cars? Why can't we have new cancer rocket ships?
Why can't we literally go to Mars? Why can't we cure cancer? Why can't we, you know, do nuclear fusion? Like, you know, long list of things that are like, you know, big, big things.
We talked about it a little bit. Like Silicon Valley has always used itself a little bit of a tool business, right? Or a lot of tool business. Silicon Valley has been getting more and more assertive entering more and more industries directly, right?
So like Uber lifts entering directly into transportation, Airbnb entering directly into real estate, FinTech companies entering directly into banking. So our companies are getting more assertive at going into markets that previously they may not, you know, other founders may not have been willing to enter in the past. And then Larry, Elon, and Peter basically all say in different ways, like we're still not doing enough. There are these much bigger things to be done.
And why are we waiting for either governments to do them or for large industrial companies like GE to do them or for, you know, I don't know, research universities to figure them out. Like, why can't we do these things? And, you know, there's one school of thought that says they're simply too hard. They're simply too hard.
They're too daunting. They're too expensive. They're too different. You know, they don't have more on their side.
Like, there's a reason we haven't been doing them because they're too difficult. And then there's another school of thought that says, you know, that's just being a wimp and you should go try to do all these things because if we're not going to do it, really, who is? And then I'm trying to find is there something in the middle? Like, is there, what are the shades of gray?
Right. What's the line? What's the line where, you know, what's the line where Tesla made sense but, you know, Tesla flies didn't make sense? Right.
And there's a line in there somewhere, I think, right? Or maybe Peter's right. Maybe there isn't a line. Maybe the next Tesla should be one that flies, right?
And so to me, that's the provocative thing because it's a question about stretching the limits. How far can we stretch the limits of what we do before our wings melt, right? Well, it strikes me also that, I mean, you mentioned Peter, so we wanted flying cars and we got 140 characters. There were a lot of questions from fans asking how to, Twitter, and I would agree with you, as one example, 140 characters has been world-changing in a lot of ways.
I mean, you look at political activism, you look at many different examples when you have adoption that is that wide, that global free with the emerging properties are just unpredictable. I mean, you get some incredible use cases. Including political revolutions. Exactly, right.
Yeah. Last question. So that was a debate at the Milton conference, which is one of my shining moments is I prepared for weeks for that debate. Knowing Peter wasn't going to prepare at all.
I bring it up because I think I was actually able to go to the top of him. I had the sandbag him to do it. He was actually shocked that I had prepared. I enjoyed it.
I really did. I was one of my great debating moments because I could almost keep up with Peter. So it's actually funny. His whole thing, his whole slogan, the slogan of his firm, which is, as you said, we were promised flying cars instead of 140 characters.
He will immediately concede that both of those are actually not the point. So first of all, he immediately concedes that flying cars probably don't make sense. And then he immediately concedes that Twitter probably is more important than just being dismissed like that. So he basically uses the slogan that it was just to provoke the conversation.
But to your point, it does provoke the conversation. And I actually think you're right. I think it provokes conversation from both sides, which is, okay, why don't we have the other big, maybe flying cars or not, why don't we have nuclear fusion? Why don't we have all these other things?
Why don't we have a supersonic flight? Right? Like we had the Concorde. Now we don't even have the Concorde.
Like seriously, it takes nine hours to get to London? Like really? Right? I mean, I think that's a very relevant question.
And then, but I also think it provokes the thing on the other side, which is I think the computer stuff, communication stuff, like Twitter and all these other things. If I'm a computer flatly says the iPhone doesn't come as innovation, I just think that's, I think that's too far. I think the iPhone absolutely comes as innovation. I think it's one of the most important products I've developed.
I think the impact on the world is absolutely enormous and growing. And so I think there's a tendency to write off the stuff that built the Valley. And I don't agree with that. I think there's a lot more to do in the core of what we do.
The last question is, do you have any ask or requests of my audience, people listening, anything you'd like them to consider, ponder, do? First of all, they should all for sure work for our companies. And so please come to our website, a16c.com. We have jobs, we have got listings, we'd like to get everybody in our orbit.
Anybody smart enough to listen to your podcast, we definitely want to work for our companies. And then, I would say build new things. And then if it's something that needs, if it's a business, if it's a promise that needs money, we're open for business. Mark, any last place if you'd like people to check you out online where can they say hello?
Oh, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter. Twitter, at P Marka. At P Marka, P-M-A-R. Is that from your Unix handle way back in the day?
It's an old, old joke. It's a boss on time who was so important that he had both his real, he had his public email address and he has P with his name behind which is his private email address. So we thought that was a little bit too much and so we all gave ourselves P and nobody knew who we were. No, sorry.
Perfect. Well, everybody, check out the website. I'll put that in the show notes as well. You should also check out their podcast which I greatly enjoyed.
You can start with, I mean, one that I really enjoyed was the Deconstructing Amazon episode. And thanks so much for the time, Mark. This has been a blast. I really appreciate it.
Thanks, Jim. And to everyone listening, you can find all the links and everything else in the show notes which you can find at 4hourweek.com forward slash podcast. And until next time, thank you for listening.