#101: The Oracle of Silicon Valley, Reid Hoffman (Plus: Michael McCullough)

Reid Hoffman (@reidhoffman https://twitter.com/reidhoffman) is often referred to as "The Oracle of Silicon Valley" by tech insiders, who look at his company-building and investing track record (Facebook, Airbnb, Flickr, etc.) with awe. Reid is Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/, which has more than 300 million users. He was previously Executive Vice President at PayPal, which was purchased by eBay for $1.5 billion. There, he was nicknamed "firefighter-in-chief" by CEO Peter Thiel. Noted venture capitalist David Sze says of Reid, "[he] is arguably the most successful angel investor in the past decade." They are now both partners at Greylock Partners http://www.greylock.com/team/. In this podcast, he is joined by Michael McCullough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_McCullough_(entrepreneur), MD, a close friend, co-founder of QuestBridge.org, and a successful investor with training as an ER physician. Michael is as an Assistant Clinical Professor at UCSF and previously served as the on-call ER physician to the Dalai Lama. Michael is also a Rhodes Scholar, Kaufman Fellow, and Ashoka Fellow. An avid meditator, he is particularly interested in investing in technologies and companies pertaining to the mind. We cover A LOT, including: Meeting Mark Zuckerberg for the first time and deciding to invest in Facebook "Fire-fighting" in startups and beyond Using board games to develop strategy Reid's view of what Uber has done well and what they could improve Some of Reid's suggested philosophers for entrepreneurs Non-technical founders and symbolic systems Going "off algorithm" in the ER to manage life-and-death decisions The 3 types of CEOs What Reid has learned from his network, including the founders of Airbnb, Kiva.org, etc. And, of course, we discuss QuestBridge http://www.questbridge.org/, as Reid and I are both on the advisory board. All show notes, links, and resources from this episode can be found at http://fourhourworkweek.com/podcast This podcast is brought to you by MeUndies http://meundies.com/tim. Have you ever wanted to be as powerful as a mullet-wearing ninja from the 1980's, or as sleek as a black panther in the Amazon? Of course you have, and that's where MeUndies http://meundies.com/tim comes in. I've spent the last 2-3 weeks wearing underwear from these guys http://meundies.com/tim 24/7, and they are the most comfortable and colorful underwear I've ever owned. Their materials are 2x softer than cotton, as evaluated using the Kawabata method. Check out MeUndies.com/Tim http://meundies.com/tim to see my current faves (some are awesomely ridiculous) and, while you're at it, don't miss lots of hot ladies wearing MeUndies http://meundies.com/tim. This podcast is also brought to you by 99Designs http://99designs.com/tim, the world's largest marketplace of graphic designers. Did you know I used 99Designs to rapid prototype the cover http://99designs.com/tim for The 4-Hour Body? Here are some of the impressive results http://99designs.com/tim. Click this link http://www.99designs.com/tim and get a free $99 upgrade. Give it a test run... Enjoy!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  No, it would seem inappropriate, Diana.

• 0:12Speaker 01

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• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:06Tim Ferriss?

  you can see all of the underwear that I've been wearing. There's some pretty ridiculous ones, and I will also highlight my favorite. You'll probably be able to guess which it is. These underwear are made from Mikromodau, which is extruded from Austrian beechwood trees in the Alps. Yes, fancy. And it's two times softer than cotton. Scientifically tested, using the Kawabata method, developed in Kyoto. You know those Japanese, very crafty. And I will say a few things. Number one, if you go to meundies.com/tim, you get to see all of the spectacular underwear that I've been wearing, and I am a bit of an underwear connoisseur. Socks, fashion sense, with sweatpants, not so much. Underwear, I understand. So check 'em out. And if you go to meundies.com/tim,

• 1:49Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:14Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by 99designs, your one-stop shop for all things graphic design related. I've used 99designs for everything from banner ads to book covers, including sketches and mockups that led to The Four Hour Body, which later became number one New York Times, number one Wall Street Journal. And the brainstorming, a lot of it took place with designers from around the world. And here's how it works. Whether you need a t-shirt, a business card, a website, an app thumbnail, whatever it might be, you submit that project and designers from around the world will send you sketches and mockups and designs. You choose your favorite and you have an original that you love or you get your money back. It's that straightforward. And many of you who are

• 2:57Tim Ferriss?

  listening have already used it and created some amazing things that I'll be sharing in the future. But in the meantime, if you want to see some of my competitions, some of the book covers, as well as get a free $99 upgrade, go to 99designs.com/tim. That's 99designs.com/tim. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, ladies and germs, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, to tease out the habits, routines, influences, et cetera, that you can apply to your life. And those experts, the world-class performers, range from hedge fund managers to actors like Arnold Schwarzenegger, to people like General Stanley McChrystal, to chess prodigies, and everyone in between.

• 3:42Tim Ferriss?

  And in this case, we have a business icon, none other than the Oracle of Silicon Valley. That's Reid Hoffman. He is referred to as the Oracle of Silicon Valley by a lot of tech insiders who look at his company-building and investing track record, which includes, for instance, well, of course, PayPal, LinkedIn, but then Facebook, Airbnb, Flickr, and on and on with awe and rightly so. Reid is co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, which has more than 300 million users. Before that, he was executive vice president at PayPal, which was purchased by eBay for $1.5 billion. There, he was nicknamed firefighter-in-chief by the CEO, who is Peter

• 4:23Tim Ferriss?

  Who's also been on this podcast. Noted venture capitalist David Z says of Reed, he is arguably the most successful angel investor in the last decade or past decade. And they are both now partners at Greylock Partners. He has a track record to envy. In this podcast, he is joined by a friend. He's joined by Michael McCullough, MD, who is also a co-founder of questbridge.org and a successful investor of his own right with training as an ER physician. Michael is clinical professor at UCSF and previously served as the on-call ER physician for the Dalai Lama. Michael is also a Rhodes Scholar, Kaufman Fellow, and Ashoka Fellow. He is an avid meditator and is particularly interested in investing in technologies and companies pertaining to the mind. So we bounce around

• 5:07Tim Ferriss?

  a lot in this conversation. We cover a ton, including how Reed met Mark Zuckerberg for the first time and how he decided to invest in Facebook. Lots behind that. Firefighting and startups beyond, using board games to develop strategy, Reid's view of what Uber has done well and what they could improve upon. Some of Reid's suggested philosophers for entrepreneurs. We talk about going off algorithm, per se, in the ER to manage life and death decisions, the three types of CEOs, and much, much more. It is a very dense, intense, and useful episode. And of course, we discuss QuestBridge as Reed and I are both on the advisory board. QuestBridge, guys have to check it out, questbridge.org, currently supplies more exceptional low-income talent, meaning kids to top universities than

• 5:50Tim Ferriss?

  all other nonprofits combined. QuestBridge has created a single standardized college application that's accepted by 36 or so top universities like Stanford and MIT, Amherst and Yale. This allows them to do some very, very clever and innovative things, such as giveaway laptops and the giveaway forms double as college applications. This offers scholarships to many kids who might otherwise not even think of college. So if you want to break the cycle of poverty, QuestBridge is easily one of the most fascinating, effective, and highly leveraged tools I've ever seen. So check it out, questbridge.org. We will talk more about that. So please check out the show notes. There are a lot of cool show notes for this episode, four-hour work week, all spelled out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com

• 6:33Tim Ferriss?

  and click on podcast, all the book recommendations, et cetera. And you can find a lot more there about everything that we talk about. So without further ado, please enjoy this conversation with the Oracle Silicon Valley, Reid Hoffman, and Michael McCullough.

• 6:53Tim Ferriss?

  Reed Michael, welcome to the show.

• 6:55Speaker 03

  Great to be here.

• 6:56Speaker 04

  Thank you for having us, Tim.

• 6:57Tim Ferriss?

  I'm thrilled. I'm really excited to have you guys on and I know you've both known each other for some time. And I was thinking about the commonalities that you might have, the common threads, and we'll certainly come back to this. But I had heard Peter Thiel had said of you, Reed, that you were the firefighter in chief at PayPal. And I think that Michael, certainly based on our conversations at least, certainly has exhibited tremendous firefighting qualities. So we'll come back to that. But I thought we could begin with just some basic context for folks. And Reed, perhaps we could start with you. When people ask you the question, what do you do? How do you answer that?

• 7:38Speaker 03

  Well, there's a short answer and a long answer. The short answer is I'm an entrepreneur and investor. That's when I want to be very quick and move through the question. The long answer is I essentially build, design, and improve human ecosystems through software, either as a creator or as an investor and partner. And what that means is everything from, you know, things like PayPal to LinkedIn to Airbnb, each of these things are ways that you craft how people find each other, how they interact with each other, how they establish their identity, and how they make progress in their lives. And that's part of what I mean by building and improving human ecosystems.

• 8:22Tim Ferriss?

  I love it. Michael, what about yourself? You wear many hats, but how would you answer that question these days?

• 8:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'd say it's probably pretty similar. I create and I help people create things. Entrepreneur and investor as well, but I'm in ER position by training and I actually began my life in reverse from most people, kind of creating nonprofits actually first. So I made eight nonprofits before my first company, including like angel investments and things like, you know, Heartflow and such. And I'm currently a partner at Carapicorn Healthcare.

• 8:58Tim Ferriss?

  And that's a, I'd love to bridge just on the medical side of things. Michael, you had a very difficult beginning, so to speak, and that is going way back to birth. I was hoping you could just give us a brief description of your experience at birth.

• 9:17Speaker 04

  Sure, yeah, no, it's interesting how sometimes small little slips from like an intern or like a resident can alter your life. Where I was eight weeks premature with a twin birth and they squeezed a little too hard on my head and it hemorrhaged and it was missed for nine years. So I couldn't speak much until I was about in high school. I couldn't speak as fluently as I am now till I was in my 30s. And even, even like right now, I have like a speech impediment device, kind of like they have in the Kings, a speech movie. Or I speak in accents if I need to speak more fluently. So for me, I learned how like watch people a lot when I was younger because it was harder for me to interact with them kind of verbally.

• 9:56Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. And the, as, as the lines for both of you started converging and, but before you met, Reed, you went to, as I understand it, a somewhat unconventional high school in Vermont. I think it was the Putney School where you farmed maple syrup and drove oxen. What did you, what did you take from that experience that stuck with you, if, if anything?

• 10:20Speaker 03

  Well, it was actually a, at the time, you know, it's funny, it's kind of as you're older, each decade you look back on your life and you actually in fact have a different view of your early decades. So if you'd asked me 10, 20 years ago, it's like, well, it's completely off track. I've become a technologist and an entrepreneur and none of that stuff was actually directly relevant. And now, when I kind of look back at it, I say, well, actually, in fact, it was very grounding. I had experiences there, everything from blacksmithing to actually a bunch of artistic things. I had, you know, kind of some intensity around cross-country skiing and sports. And all of that actually, I think,

• 11:01Speaker 03

  helped me understand the breadth of human condition. You know, typically Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and, and, and investors and technologists tend to be very narrow focused. And I actually think it's helped me keep a broader focus as I think about kind of what it is to be human and how do we increase our humanity.

• 11:26Tim Ferriss?

  And I might be skipping ahead a little bit, but do you have then a sympathetic ear for say, non-technical founders who come in without technical chops? Or how do you look at that?

• 11:40Speaker 03

  Well, so I, it depends on the project. Some are depth of technology. Usually when I talk to a non-technical founder who wants to create something, I, the very first, second, and third piece of advice I give them is to find a technical co-founder. Because, you know, it's not, you know, it's not so easy to just say, oh, well, I'm gonna hire some engineers in some remote location to build the app that I think of. Because actually, in fact, you have to be much more detailed, much more specific about how it's evolving. And so if you're building technology and you don't at least have a good technical co-founder, you have a problem.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  Now, that being said, there's a number of businesses that the technology is only one compete, it's an important piece, but it's only one piece, like Airbnb, for example. You know, Nate's very technical, but Brian and Joe are design folks, they're product folks, they're art folks, they both, you know, kind of coming out of RISD. And so, and actually, that helps fundamentally with the Airbnb product. And so, it isn't that you, it isn't that everybody in a founding team has to be technical, but if you're doing that technology thing, at least one of you does.

• 12:55Tim Ferriss?

  Right. No, that makes perfect sense. And where did philosophy enter the picture for you? Because I know a lot of people in Silicon Valley think of you in part as a philosopher, at least a thinker along those lines. How did you become interested in philosophy and why?

• 13:10Speaker 03

  Well, it's funny, actually, very, I'd say one of the small critiques of Silicon Valley is, and this may actually speak more to you than the people of Silicon Valley, very few people in Silicon Valley interface with me as a philosopher. It takes another thinker like you to actually ask that question. But the way that I got to it is I did my undergraduate at Stanford University, you know, along with Michael, and my undergraduate degree was called symbolic systems, which is, in short speak, cognitive science and artificial intelligence. And I've always actually been very interested in kind of what makes us uniquely human, and that's continued throughout my entire arc of my career and childhood.

• 13:52Speaker 03

  And so then it was like the scientific study of thought and language. But then what I realized when I was at Stanford is that actually, in fact, even though we were trying to be scientific about what it is to be intelligent, about what it is to communicate, about what it is to have a point of view in the world, the science hadn't really gotten there yet. And actually, in fact, I should experiment with philosophy to figure out whether or not the rudiments of understanding these things, I could get out of philosophy in order to pursue a more scientific view of intelligence. And so, because the modern analytic view on philosophy is it's pre-science, it's like how you think about things with precision,

• 14:36Speaker 03

  and then science births out of philosophy. And so I went to Oxford in order to study philosophy.

• 14:42Tim Ferriss?

  Are you currently drawn to any particular schools of philosophy or philosophers in the context of, say, recommending someone who has never been exposed to philosophy or feels that they haven't? What starting points might you suggest?

• 15:00Speaker 03

  Well, one of the things that I, the papers that I read at, and because it's, when you do a course, you read a subject. One of them was Wittgenstein. And so, one of the things I actually frequently refer people to when they're thinking about, kind of, how do we think of ourselves as sharing a world, as talking to each other about it, as understanding it? Matter of fact, I recently, when I was explaining a theory on Bitcoin to some fellow technologists, I said, "Look, it's like a Wittgensteinian language game." Right? The notion of how you play, and they're like, "Okay, how do I understand that?" I'm like, "Okay, well, here's some good books on Wittgenstein, and here's a couple of points."

• 15:42Speaker 03

  But it is, that would be the one that I would probably start with, just because I think he is one of the, you know, one of the fundamental philosophers who is still being understood. Because the, the, the, the, kind of, one of the bedrocks of modern analytic philosophy is to think of, of, if you're trying to talk to someone else about some problem, and you're trying to make progress, how do you make language as positive an instrument as possible? And what are the ways that language can work? And what are the ways that language doesn't work? And so, for example, on that, on that thread, when I wrote my thesis in Oxford,

• 16:23Speaker 03

  it was on thought experiments, because most philosophers actually, in fact, analyze and argue through thought experiments, and there's actually more limitations in the methodology than at least many believe.

• 16:36Tim Ferriss?

  No, it's, it's, I find language just an endlessly fascinating topic, because you, you'll find, I mean, Silicon Valley and elsewhere, people will debate, say, the existence of God, without ever defining what God is for, for each of the parties involved.

• 16:53Tim Ferriss?

  So, Michael, you and I have, have spoken about, I suppose philosophical topics, a lot about meditation, and I think people gravitate towards, say, religion or philosophy respectively, to, to often face the prospect of death or mortality.

• 17:12Tim Ferriss?

  I would love for you to elaborate, if you could, about going off algorithm in the ER and what that means, because I've had some fascinating conversations with you about this, and I was hoping you might be able to just explain that and give a few examples.

• 17:27Speaker 04

  Sure, well, I, I think, I think algorithms protect a lot of people, particularly from,

• 17:34Speaker 04

  if physicians aren't being fully attentive or on top of all the literature, but in, within...

• 17:43Speaker 04

  A bell curve there, there might be ways to save people or just even improve people's lives that that aren't in kind of the standard operating procedure. So like I had a patient one time who came in with head to toe burns and and you can look at him and you would know, once you intubate him and and have him in the ICU, he he wouldn't possibly actually wake up again, but he was lucid enough. And I thought, you know, I'd want to call a few people before I had to go to sleep. So I gave him my cellphone to use, much to the chagrin of the people in the room. But to make a few calls, but even even there, like I I had to stop him from making additional calls, but he got to call a few people. He

• 18:25Speaker 04

  had begun to swell his airway shut, so I had to make sure I could intubate on kind of the first try, or I probably would have lost my job. But

• 18:33Tim Ferriss?

  And by intubate, you mean get a tube down his trachea?

• 18:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:37Tim Ferriss?

  Before it was completely closed?

• 18:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, because if you inhale hot air, then you're the the soft tissue in in your kind of your mouth will swell up and you won't be able to breathe. Now, in in his case, it didn't change outcome that much because he was either going to die in the ER or in the ICU. So so I thought enabling him to make kind of a human a connection ahead of the ICU would be would be helpful.

• 19:04Tim Ferriss?

  And now, in in in your experience, then, when you look at, let's just define maybe the use of the word algorithm. So is it is it fair to say that in this context, one could think of an algorithm as a mandatory checklist, which also excludes certain options?

• 19:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, I think that's true. And I think a tool, Aguan's work and others shows, a checklist is profoundly helpful.

• 19:31Tim Ferriss?

  A checklist manifesto.

• 19:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a really good book. And even things like, you know, washing your hands between patients or things as simple as that will save a lot of lives. However, sometimes you do know everything on the checklist, and sometimes there are things you can do that that aren't on the checklist that actually ought to be done. So Example was also that I had a patient who, in our ER, they have a policy of making sure they call the donor network after the patient's actually passed away to see if they can, with the permission of the family and the intentions of the patient, help with

• 20:12Speaker 04

  a skin transplantation or like a cornea, but they became confused to think, well, that means you then shouldn't call earlier to talk about the heart or the liver and things like that. So in that particular case, an algorithm or a policy actually made people not appreciate the more important organs to kind of think about too. So have I answered your?

• 20:42Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, you have. And I just, we've had dinner before, and I'd love for you to describe, if you could, and it was fascinating for me to hear your description of this, but what is it like to, and I know we're bouncing around a bit, but to stare into someone's eyes or to look into their eyes as they pass from alive to not alive?

• 21:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, I had the honor of having that happen a few times. And it's interesting because it often depends on the emotional state of the patient, right? So if the patient's afraid, you're trying to give comfort to them as they're dying. And other times, patients die and they're giving you a sense of peace and kind of universality that would be hard to pay for, kind of a depth of understanding that they are dying and this is kind of the moment of their death. And so it's an honor to be there either way, to either like witness it happening from a person who's content with it or to comfort and hold the hand of someone who's not.

• 21:51Tim Ferriss?

  And in that type of context, or just in general, what to your mind separates a good ER physician from a great ER physician? What do the great people have do or not do that the good lack?

• 22:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think a good ER physician is thorough. You know, they make sure they don't like needlessly miss anything or not like, you know, wash their hands between the patients. I think if you layer on to that, that you actually care about the patient. You know, you like to like laugh with the alcoholic or to make, or to help the woman the first trimester of her pregnancy feel comfort that she is, you're likely not to lose her child, but even if she does, it wouldn't interfere with her being able to get pregnant in the future again. And so you could either pay attention to say the odds that that she'd lose this particular

• 22:50Speaker 04

  pregnancy or to make sure to reassure her. What she's actually worried about is, you know, will I ever have an infant? Will I ever have a family? And I think, like, a lot of people don't know that a third of all pregnancies are actually lost and that's normal for humans. Every animal has like a normal rate of like losing one and that's a known pregnancy. So it's likely more like half. And yet, since we no longer live in tribes with other people, we hide the fact of losing an infant in the first trimester. So if you don't take the extra time to comfort people, sometimes they think they're abnormal when they actually are not.

• 23:33Tim Ferriss?

  Right. No, that makes perfect sense. I don't think that applies to therapy of all different types. I mean, outside of the context of an emergency room. The firefighting that I mentioned earlier, Reed, my understanding was that you had, you wore many, many different hats and had the role of interacting with a lot of external entities when at PayPal, whether that was regulatory or the credit card processors. Maybe that's not the right description of them. But what makes a good entrepreneurial firefighter in a context like that? Or what did your coworkers feel made you good at that job?

• 24:17Speaker 03

  Well, the most two relevant factors were Peter Thiel, who was the CEO, feeling that I was good and solving the problems. Everything else was was secondary to those two considerations. I mean, the on the firefighting side, I mean PayPal had perhaps the most the most kind of parallel thing to, you know, to date myself a little bit like Star Wars, you know, flying into the trench and trying to actually hit the target and a lot of different ways you could you could fail.

• 24:54Speaker 03

  And and so in in in the PayPal case for me, a lot of that was building an understanding of what each particular problem, particular threat was, what the key moving variable was, and then being able to solve that and then propagate that out to all of the places. So, you know, for example, one of the the kind of challenges that Peter handed to me was we had thought that PayPal might be a bank, and so we had started the process of applying for a banking license.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  Then what we discovered and decided upon inference was that, actually, in fact, banking regulation is so fierce in terms of not innovating, not building new things, it would be very difficult to build a new company on that basis. So I essentially had to move to to go persuade the regulators that it was okay that even though we had applied for a banking license, right, that we it was okay that we were not going to be a bank and that and that it wasn't a tell that was just inconvenient for us or anything else. And to give to full color to this, the the the basic statement about whether or not

• 26:17Speaker 03

  a a a company is a bank starts with the claim you accept deposits, which obviously if anyone has has exposure to PayPal, they say, well, you could frame what PayPal does as accepting deposits, right, you know, why is it you're not a bank? And so that would be the kind of challenge that was handed to me. And then what you had to do Is you had to figure out for this problem, which could kill the company, what were the key moving variables, learn them, talk to really smart people, and then solve that problem so that it was then fundamentally part of the cornerstone of what you were doing.

• 26:56Speaker 03

  And it ranged from relationship with eBay to Visa and MasterCard to international. Right, I mean, just a very long list of things. And each one, the looking at the problem had to be reframed. It was almost like building a kind of a view of the world. And then what are the key moving parts in order to get right in order to make PayPal succeed?

• 27:20Tim Ferriss?

  And when you were defining the moving variables, is that a list of the unknowns that where you need to go seek out information? Or is it, how would you go about putting together that list?

• 27:37Speaker 03

  Well, it kind of starts with, what is the end result that you want to have happen? So for example, in like the regulatory one, the key thing is that you can't, regulators will never tell you that they can't, that is not their job to regulate you because there's no interest in them for that. What they will simply do is say, oh, actually, in fact, there's nothing for me here to actively regulate. They won't tell you, I won't, you know, you're outside of my scope. They'll go, okay, fine, you now seem like you're an okay, like I don't need to actually regulate you because you're not in my positive purview. And so you say, okay, how do you get that state of affairs? And how do you propagate that? And then you start working back from that to say, okay, well, how would they make their judgments?

• 28:22Speaker 03

  What are their key considerations? How can I learn about that? Who would I need to know? Because those were some of the unknowns come in. What are the kinds of things that would get them to say, okay, you're, I think you're being reasonable and within my purview of how I am out to help govern society, help protect consumers, help protect other entities, you're good by me. And then you work back from that is the essentially way that you do it.

• 28:54Tim Ferriss?

  And how did you learn how to?

• 28:59Tim Ferriss?

  Do that. Were you part of a debate team? Did you study negotiation? Did you work at a state fair for the summers? I mean, how did you develop the ability to not only deconstruct a problem like that, but then to interface with all these various stakeholders at the table?

• 29:18Speaker 03

  I think the most fundamental was, I don't know if your audience knows what this is. You probably do. As a child, I played a lot of Avalon Hill board games.

• 29:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 29:31Speaker 03

  And each board game is actually a complex set of rules and circumstances. And essentially, as you're analyzing each one of them, you kind of look back from, okay, these goals mean that these are the kind of moving parts, and how do you do it? So it was actually, in fact, my childhood gaming for being able to build a model of what a game was. That was essentially the fundamental thing that informs my strategic sense. Because this all comes out of strategy.

• 30:03Tim Ferriss?

  And if you were giving advice to, say, someone leaving Stanford undergrad, and they had no gaming background, what would you recommend they do to try to develop strategic ability or thinking?

• 30:20Speaker 03

  Well, you know, there's a lot of different paths to it. Most people think they're better at strategy than they are.

• 30:29Speaker 03

  And so you really have to actually really hold up a very clear, you have to have a very deep self-awareness of, am I in fact really good at it? Because like having an idea or saying, like for example, you say, well, I just do this. Well, one move, a real strategy is actually built up off a, you know, what are your competitors doing? What is their mindset? What are their assets? How are they going to move? How are you going to move? What are your edges? What's the way that you can make that work? How is it when they're playing against you, you can still play to win? So games are a very good way to do that. And getting a lot of different exposure, not to computer games, because computer, you know, AI strategies are usually not that interesting, but against other...

• 31:13Speaker 03

  People is very useful. I think it's also useful to read some, which I did as a child, you know, military strategy, Sun Tzu, Bon Klauswitz, other sorts of folks, more modern folks, and to think about kind of like what are the set of principles that when you're thinking about how to how to win a game that's in contention, in conflict. And then a lot of people also, of course, have some sports knowledge on this too, although one of the things that's frequently a little limiting on sports is that the sports game that a person tends to do, they tend to be like, I play soccer, or I play football, or I play basketball. And then they have a very deep sense of what the strategy is there, but

• 31:58Speaker 03

  they haven't played enough different kinds of games, enough different circumstances. You know, it's it's like understanding like, well, what happens if I change these four rules in basketball, right?

• 32:09Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 32:09Speaker 03

  You know, how would you play the strategy now?

• 32:11Tim Ferriss?

  Totally.

• 32:12Speaker 03

  That's the kind of thing, because actually, in fact, most of the circumstances you find yourself in, actually, in fact, you have to figure out what is the current game look like, and how do you play that? And that's, of course, also, by the way, the reason why frequently, you know, companies rise and fall is because they learn to play one game, they got good at it, and then the marketplace changes, and now it's a new kind of game, and you have to adjust to playing that new game. And that's actually, in fact, part of recognizing when a strategy applies.

• 32:44Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I was just having a conversation with someone about the rise and fall of Kodak yesterday. And of course, this is sort of the disruptive theme that one encounters so much in Silicon Valley. I wasn't planning on asking this, but I'd be so curious to hear, given your experience with regulatory risk and so on, what do you feel, if you have an opinion, Uber has done well, and what could they have executed more effectively or strategically?

• 33:18Speaker 03

  So what they've done well is essentially quickly deploying their product so that it's clear that there's a bunch of people who are benefiting from it, both consumers and drivers in various circumstances, so that there is an ecosystem of people by which you go, "Look, see, we can actually add a lot of positive to the system." I think that's been kind of one of the things that they've done most positively within it. On the negative side, you know, the company tends to be very combative, and, you know, when you actually think about the mental space in which regulators tend to operate, they tend to have gone into that job because they view themselves as protectors of important

• 34:02Speaker 03

  groups in society, whether they're consumers, or workers, or other folks. And so they don't tend to respond very well. It's not a competitive game with them. It's not you bulldoze through them or over them. They're actually, in fact, what they want is, they want to know that their concerns are being answered. And it's frustrating, of course, of the company, because, you know, the regulators are being triggered by, you know, competitive interests, like, you know, taxi cab companies and other kinds of things, which want the world to stay only exactly as it is, which is not actually good for anyone to just say, you know, "The way that we're going to run is the way that we were running in the 1950s, and that's the way we're going to be running in 3000." You know, that's obviously not a very good idea.

• 34:46Speaker 03

  So actually, in fact, innovation and change and the pushback is frustrating, but nevertheless, when you're interfacing with the regulators, you have to interface with them with the understanding that they're, they may be conservative, they may be slow to change, they may be risk averse, but their goal is a mission of protecting society, and so you should interface with them on that channel, more than on the...

• 35:09Speaker 03

  Just get out of my way, I'm innovating. And I treat you like I treat a competitor. And that creates a lot of unnecessary friction.

• 35:16Tim Ferriss?

  Right, no, that makes sense. You are, of course, considered a company builder. You've had an integral part in building some massive successes, but you're also very well-regarded as an investor. And I would love if you could tell the story of getting introduced to Mark Zuckerberg and how you decided to be one of the first investors in Facebook.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  Well, actually, I could have told you I was interested in investing in Facebook even before Mark Zuckerberg. I tracked the product. I thought it was extremely well-done. When I tracked it, you know, he and his co-founders, Dustin, Chris, and others, were in Boston, you know, going to Harvard.

• 36:01Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 36:02Speaker 03

  And so I went, ah, it's too much of a hassle. I was an angel investor, it's too much of a hassle. If I was a venture capitalist, I probably would have flown out there. But it was an angel, too much of a hassle. And so I kind of went, oh, that's cool, and then went back to it. And then I got this call from Sean Parker, who I'd known from his work at Plaxo, and, you know, is a good product inventor and a good systems thinker on these things. And Sean said, "I've just met these really good guys, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and others, who are doing this thing, Facebook, that I'm joining, that's really awesome." And I'm like, "Oh, that's really cool. Are you moving to Boston?" He's like, "No, no, they're here." And I'm like, "Oh, that's interesting." He's like, "Yeah, and we're looking for a investment." I'm like, "I would definitely like to meet with them. You know, I'm super interested in this."

• 36:46Speaker 03

  I tend to think, and one of the things I said, which is, I think, totally, you know, even though it's probably the most expensive economic decision I've made in my life,

• 36:54Speaker 03

  but it all in a good outcome, I said, "Look, you know, when I led the Series A in Friendster, I got a lot of pushback on, am I having my cake and eating it too? Because even I don't see any conflict between Friendster and LinkedIn. You know, it just generated all this stuff. And part of having integrity and having, you know, a high sense of ethics is not just having it, but also making some work to appear to have it." So actually... I think we should do is we should have Peter Teal lead the round. And I'll follow because then Peter can be the board member. And even though I'm super interested in this, I think that's probably the best thing to happen. And so my actually very first meeting with Zuckerberg was at Peter Teal's office with

• 37:36Speaker 03

  Sean there, who I'd known, and with Zuck. And then Matt Kohler was there as well, and who was working for me at the time. And that was our very first meeting. But, you know, basically, the meeting was very confirmatory because I'd already seen the product, already known the product was really amazing, already seen it having traction. And really, what I learned from the meeting, which is hardly a surprise, especially now in retrospect, was that Zuckerberg, extremely smart, very much of a learning machine, very good at the evolution of technologies. But I'd already more or less was positive. He'd said, "I don't want to meet with you, but you want to put in money," I probably would have put in money anyway.

• 38:18Tim Ferriss?

  Right. And what was Mark Pincus's role at that point, or his involvement with Facebook?

• 38:28Speaker 03

  Well, actually, so the way Mark had also, Pincus had also known Sean Parker back from Napster days. Pincus had done an early startup called Freeloader. But part of actually how Mark got involved in the Facebook investment was separately, Mark and I had bought a patent called the Six Degrees Patent, since it has some number, which describes the viral expansion of a system. And, you know, again, kind of on the ethics basis, I went, "Look, Mark and I are partners on this. We're actually trying to protect all these new Web 2.0 viral companies. That's our principal goal in this patent, in going and buying this patent.

• 39:13Speaker 03

  But, you know, given that Facebook's also in this, I should, in fact, split the investment with Mark because, you know, basically, it's part of being a good partner with him." And so that's part of how Mark, now, he also had known Sean Parker, and Sean had talked to him about it as well, so there's a bunch of different things. But that's fundamentally how Pincus also became a Series A investor in Facebook.

• 39:40Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. And on the, on the, um, the decision, or maybe it's not related at all, but the, um, the suggestion that Peter lead the round, uh, it's the impression of some people that, that you have actively decided in the past, um, not to be, to take the CEO role yourself. Uh, and do you, have you sort of proactively, um, made decisions in your life to avoid being, uh, to taking the CEO role or, or having it for, for a long period of time? And if so, why is that the case? Or is that a misperception?

• 40:17Speaker 03

  Well, there's kind of three different CEO jobs at levels of scale in the organization. There's CEO jobs of, call it 10, 20, 50 person organizations, or CEO jobs of, you know, hundreds to, you know, like 150 to 500 people organizations. And then there's CEO jobs of, you know, over 500 people, like a thousand or thousands. I've always known that I'm fundamentally not really interested in the CEO job, that the large scale CEO job. When you're doing the large scale CEO job, your primary responsibility, you have to embody the strategy, you have to think about the things the right way, but your primary thing is the organization. You know, having the right, uh, culture, having the right, uh, structure of the organization,

• 41:01Speaker 03

  the right people in it, uh, the right way of hiring new people, the right way of empowering them, even though you're making kind of strategic decisions. And there are people like Jeff Weiner, who are completely awesome at that. And I'd rather help them rather than being, doing that, uh, personally. Then you get to the other two CEO jobs. So you get to the mid-stage CEO job. I'm okay doing that. It's not the thing I'm most passionate about. I actually prefer to work on, you know, product, uh, strategies, firefighting things, um, uh, business strategies, uh, uh, problem solutions, um, think about how to reconceptualize the strategy of the entire business. And either myself or we're working with people on that. But I'll do that in order to make it work. And then in the early stages,

• 41:47Speaker 03

  I'm actually perfectly comfortable doing it. It's not necessarily a job that I say, I want, I must do it. But being the CEO of a 10, 20, 50, you know, even up to 100 person organization, I can do that just fine because then you're still all kind of working on the same problem. It's less about how you build the org. Obviously, you have to build a very strong team, but it's less about like, okay, how do we take the org from 100 people to 1,000 people? It's actually much more like, okay, how do we just solve these key problems? And that's stuff I like to do. So it isn't really a, a specific don't want the CEO job, except in a very large scale.

• 42:25Speaker 03

  What it is, is I'm, I'm only interested in the CEO job as it's instrumental to something serious that I want to accomplish. And then as that organization grows, wants not to be the CEO.

• 42:39Tim Ferriss?

  And you've had some experience searching for CEOs. What should founders remember when looking for someone to replace themselves? Or things they should keep in mind?

• 42:51Speaker 03

  Well, so the first thing is generally speaking, founders should try to go, like, I'm still very active at LinkedIn, should still try to go the entire course of the company to the degree to which they're passionate and can be useful. Companies are always stronger with founders more in them, more connected and committed to it. But that being said, sometimes you go, look, my great skill set is, you know, product, or my great skill set is evangelism, or my great skill set is, you know, something other than building the scale organization. In which case, the fundamental way you look at it is, and so the, the former way that Silicon Valley used to look at it, which is, I wrote an essay about this, it's published

• 43:34Speaker 03

  in my LinkedIn influencer post and on my, my site, you know, readhoffman.org. But the fundamental, the way that Silicon Valley used to look at this is like you bring in gray hair, an executive, a person with management scale. And by the way, you want those skills. But actually, in fact, I think what you're, who you're bringing in as a founder is you're bringing in a later-stage co-founder. And you're bringing in a later-stage co-founder, ideally, who has scale skills, who knows how to build scale organizations, is passionate about this one. You know, has their identity as closely tied or nearly as closely tied to the organization as you do. It's this specific mission is something that they really care about. They're not just like, oh, I'm a hired gun. But actually, in fact, I'm a missionary on this as well.

• 44:18Speaker 03

  And then someone who would partner with you very well. And that's actually what you're looking for. And so that's part of, you know, the reason why Jeff Weiner has been so successful at LinkedIn. Is because, you know, he cares about not just scale organizations, but how do you transform people's careers? How do you demonstrate you can be doing compassionate business and that compassionate management is a high-performing culture of a company? How do you have people who have a culture of we make ourselves significantly better every year? You know, how do you bring all that? That's part of what he actually really cares about, which links, which, you know, which is deeply tied to the LinkedIn mission.

• 45:01Speaker 03

  And so he cares about the organization, he cares about the way he manages, and he cares about the product. All as a, essentially, a later-stage co-founder. And that's the kind of thing that you you should be thinking about when you're a founder and you're thinking, okay, it's time for me to bring in another person as a CEO.

• 45:21Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you.

• 45:23Tim Ferriss?

  Michael, you mentioned accents a little earlier and that you use accents in the ER often. And I know you've mentioned to me before that southern is best. And I was hoping you could elaborate on that.

• 45:38Speaker 04

  I'm getting too much trouble, but you know, when I had my head injury as a kid and brain surgery is in the fourth, fifth grade years, like looking for like ways to be more fluent. So in speeches, I talk like I'm a European. It's a good accent for speaking. But if I'm in the ER, I'll talk like I'm from Alabama, Georgia, because it's a good accent for sick people. You can almost like yell at them. They don't think you're mad. So it's, you can kind of raise the volume of someone who's hearing impaired pretty loud. They don't think you're mad at them. And it keeps the nurses also kind of humorously into.

• 46:16Speaker 04

  Attained as well.

• 46:17Tim Ferriss?

  And how has the ER experience or the skills developed or exhibited there translated to the other things that you've done in the nonprofits or in the for-profit investment world?

• 46:32Speaker 04

  The ER in particular has helped a lot with my investing because most of the specialties interface with the ER and enable me to like reach into like ophthalmology or cardiology and things like that. And investment in things like heart flow, I can just pick up the phone and speak to inter-ventilators or heart surgeons and things like that. So I think from a decision-making capacity, it teaches you the importance of actually making a decision because you don't always have all the information you need, but the stakes are high. So I think there's a lot of entrepreneurial kind of crossover there that can also be helpful.

• 47:11Tim Ferriss?

  Right, making important decisions with incomplete information.

• 47:14Speaker 04

  Well, also just the importance of having actually made a decision as well, right? Because if you're always kind of like waffling, it's sometimes, you know, nothing actually happens.

• 47:25Tim Ferriss?

  And you and I have talked a lot about meditation, but more broadly speaking, the people listening are very interested in morning habits and morning routines. So I'd love to ask you guys the same question. Let's start with you, Michael. What does the first 60 to 90 minutes of your day look like? And what time does it start? If we could get into specifics, that would be great.

• 47:47Speaker 04

  Sure. More recently, I used to fight this kind of hour and a half awake in the middle of the night thing between two sleep cycles. Now I kind of actually just kind of get up and do like probably, you know, half an hour to an hour of like meditation between like 3:00 and 4:00 AM in the morning or 4:00 and 5:00. And that then hands me half an hour of real clarity after that to kind of think about kind of my day and how I'd like to end up.

• 48:14Speaker 04

  Using it.

• 48:15Tim Ferriss?

  And what type of meditation do you practice?

• 48:18Speaker 04

  Uh, there, there are concentration and mindfulness techniques that you can use that are pretty common. I, I, I think, rather than talk about the type that I do, I, I think a lot of the debate between types of meditation is kind of like the debate of kinds of like weightlifting people do. And I think the important thing is that you actually just like, you know, lift the weights, right? So, um, I, I'm not convinced any one type of mindfulness training is superior to another, but clearly almost anyone would be superior to actually not actually doing it.

• 48:51Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any opinion of neurofeedback?

• 48:56Speaker 04

  I, I think generally, even as an investor, I think there's beginning to be a commercial breakdown between the interface of, um, the, the brain and you, you see these E, E, E G feedback pieces of equipment. I, I think they're not, not quite, um, a, a, as far along now as they should be, but I, I think you're certainly seeing some interesting applications with people that are taking, uh, the interface with the mind out of the realm of religion and into the realm of, uh, science and such. And I think, um, uh, they're even like a prep high schools who are doing a controlled, uh, experiments on mindfulness to see how it affects homework and performance and things like that.

• 49:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, no, definitely. And Adam Gazali, who is also on this podcast, um, at UCSF is doing some really interesting work with iPad-based or tablet-based games for quantifying, um, progress in meditation and mindfulness. Uh, Reed, what about yourself? What do your morning rituals look like in an ideal day, assuming you have control of your morning, uh, the first 60 to 90 minutes of your day? What, what is, what does that, what does that look like if you had your sort of optimal recipe?

• 50:09Speaker 03

  Well, I don't know optimal or not, but, um, and I also don't know how interesting it is, but you know, most of my days are pretty packed, uh, because of, you know, responsibilities to Greylock, responsibilities to LinkedIn, portfolio companies, much of other things. So where my morning tends to be most highly tuned to is what is a creative problem that I've identified?

• 50:35Speaker 03

  Either like is something that I was like, okay, I want to work on this. I want to think about this the night, the day before, the night before. It's like, this is a key thing that I want to think about. A product design, a strategy, a solution to a problem that one of my portfolio companies is looking at. You know, that sort of thing. Or I need to solve this thing creatively for a meeting I'm having later today. Like I'm, we're making a decision at Greylock to invest in something. You know, a team is going to be pitching me or there's going to be some kind of business development relationship between LinkedIn or another of my portfolio companies. And so the very first thing I do when I get up, almost always, is to actually sit down and work on that problem because that's when I'm freshest.

• 51:19Speaker 03

  I'm, I'm not distracted by like phone calls and, and responses to things and so forth. So I'll, I'll, I'll actually, it's the most tabula rasa, you know, kind of blank slate moment that I have. And so I use that to maximize my creativity on a, on a particular project. I'll usually do it before I shower. Because frequently, like if I go in the shower, then I'll continue to think about it as I'm doing it. But I'll get it all fired up. Ideally, I would have 60 minutes for that. Some mornings I do. Frequently, it's like around 30, just because of the press of the day. And then the next things that kind of round out, if it's only 30,

• 52:01Speaker 03

  are a combination of a quick triage through email to see if there's anything that's a emergency that's or kind of something that's temporarily or otherwise important that I need to get on right away. And then frequently, most of my, during the work week, I must always have a business breakfast on some project. It could be anything from a nonprofit, you know, like Mozilla, to, you know, a portfolio company or just a general meeting with someone who's been recommended to me. And then on the drive to that breakfast, frequently I'll do a call that's kind of one of, because it's one of the,

• 52:42Speaker 03

  usually the days are so packed with meetings that some of the, the, it's typically the only real phone time I have. And so if there's someone I need to talk to that is not co-located, that's usually when I call them.

• 52:56Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. And when you're working on that first creative problem. Is that something that you've put in a notebook the night before? Is it on a laptop? How are you storing these problems and then working on them?

• 53:10Speaker 03

  So it'll either be most commonly, because I kind of grew up where I was thinking by using a pen and paper. Most commonly, I will have sketched a few things, thought about a few things. It'll be, you know, and usually it's in the notion of how do you solve this problem? Like, a little bit back to the thing we were talking about, like, setting up that framework, like, a strategy, you know, within a strategy of a game. What are the kind of key things that, you know, might be constraints on a solution? Or might be the attributes of a solution? And what are tools or assets I might have? Because part of what I'm trying to do is, I actually think, you know, most of our thinking, of course, is subconscious.

• 53:53Speaker 03

  Is part of what I'm trying to do is allow the fact that we have this kind of relaxation, rejuvenation period in sleeping, to essentially possibly bubble up the thoughts and solutions to it. And so, when I've woken up, not only am I kind of tabula rasa, but I'm also possibly primed for that. And so, you know, that's the way I do it.

• 54:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. No, that makes perfect sense. You've said before, Reid, that your network is your mentor? And that you learn from everyone in your network? I'd love to just tick off a couple of names of people I believe you know, and hear the first thing that comes to mind, in terms of what you learn or have learned from them. You mentioned earlier, the CEO of Airbnb, Brian Chesky. What's the first thing that comes to mind there?

• 54:43Speaker 03

  So, Brian, one of the things I paid, that I thought was an excellent focus from him, is that he, he calls this seven-star design, which is, you know, most review systems are, you know, go to five stars. And so, seven stars was thinking about the design at a much broader scope. But the precise way of thinking about it is, what he came to realize is Airbnb is not just an online product. It's not just a marketplace, a website, but is actually the entire experience that you have of going to the, you know, room or apartment, of checking in, of staying there, and of leaving. And how do you actually, in fact, best design within your abilities of doing a peer-to-peer

• 55:28Speaker 03

  marketplace, that entire experience? And so the way the placeholder he uses for that is this thinking of seven-star design, which is thinking through each step of the experience. And so I thought it was highly instructive and something I now use myself, use when I talk to other people, because our product isn't just the website, isn't just the mobile application, it's the way that people are embedded in the environment when they're using it, and you should think through that as much you can, even though you may have some very limited ability to control other aspects of it, or shape.

• 56:07Tim Ferriss?

  And what about one of your partners at Greylock, John Lilly?

• 56:12Speaker 03

  So John is about as deep and interesting as a technologist you get for an investor. He puts together kind of both the aspects of being very deeply technical about platforms. I mean, he was the CEO of Mozilla, growing it to being 20% of web browsers, with also kind of design experience, like he is a consulting professor at the Stanford School of Design. And so for me, you know, part of the thing that I get from John, I've learned from John, is to think about the intersection of kind of user design with deep technology and how, for example, design patterns then shape deep technology patterns and kind of a set of

• 56:57Speaker 03

  different questions that you'd ask about, look, what's the structure of the design space and does that inform the structure of your technology space? And so we talk about a whole wide variety of technologies, but those are the kinds of of mental and strategy and thinking patterns that I've gotten honed to a fine edge from John.

• 57:18Tim Ferriss?

  Also a hilarious guy, very sharp sense of humor.

• 57:22Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 57:23Tim Ferriss?

  What about your former coworker, now SpaceX Tesla founder, Elon Musk?

• 57:30Speaker 03

  So Elon, obviously super smart, obviously relentless, obviously thinking, you know, like, for example, the old phrase, "The sky is the limit," that's too short for Elon, right? You know? Mars and beyond. The thing that I most learned from Elon is actually in fact that so previous to Elon's amazing successes with Tesla and SpaceX and SolarCity. I had come to learn that that part of the business strategy is to solve the simplest and easiest, most valuable problem. And actually, in fact, part of doing strategies to solve the easiest problem.

• 58:14Speaker 03

  So part of the reason why you work in software and bits is that they that atoms are actually very difficult. You have sometimes real material, you know, product development risk, inventory risk, material science, you know, all these things that makes atom products harder. And so if you can work in the bits products, it's a lot more valuable, it scales more quickly and so forth. And all of that's true in terms of the fact that that it wasn't that that lesson I'd learned was false. But what Elon taught me was actually, in fact, if you have a very deep vision for something, you're relentless. And you choose something that really matters that the competitors are in fact really weak, right?

• 58:53Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 58:54Speaker 03

  Like they're not actually in fact, like for example, you know, all of the rocket contractors were mostly focused on how do they milk government contracts, not on how do they build new propulsion systems, not on how do they take advantage of the last couple of decades of of actual progress. And so that actually gave him a it's a very hard challenge. What he's done is extremely compelling and and, you know, very few people could pull it off. But that gives you a sufficient window, even when you're taking on a hard problem. And that's actually one of the things I learned from Elon.

• 59:31Tim Ferriss?

  And Julie Henna, kiva.org chairwoman.

• 59:34Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 59:35Tim Ferriss?

  What would you say to that?

• 59:38Speaker 03

  So Julie, now I knew this already, but Julie is a very good model for this, which is that you can have someone who is a world-class entrepreneur, see early experience with it, is a general learner, has done enterprise companies, has transitioned to thinking about open source, and was one of the early people of how do you apply open source to things, can also go and thoroughly apply all of those things into not just the for-profit world, not just her own companies, not just her angel investments, not just her work with various incubators and others,

• 1:00:22Speaker 03

  but also into the nonprofit world. And where it's one of the things when you say, you know, we have a tendency in Silicon Valley to say entrepreneurs are heroes. But you know, one of the things I think is truly heroic and awesome about what Julie has done is say, "Look, I can take all these skills, I can take my entire life only just building economics and enterprise businesses and other kinds of businesses. But actually, in fact, when I begin to think about how do I scale and how do I change the nature of humanity and human ecosystems, I'm going to take my technology skills and apply them to philanthropic projects with the same kind of scale, with the same kind of impulse.

• 1:01:05Speaker 03

  And I'll put real time into it, I'm not just going to talk about it. And I'm going to do it with the full set of skills that a world-class entrepreneur does. And so, you know, I've seen, I've taken heart and inspiration from Julie about the value of diving in and getting your hands dirty on projects that are outside of the commercial side that are really ones that you can actually, in fact, get to massive scale.

• 1:01:38Tim Ferriss?

  And last for this list, US Senator Cory Booker, who I actually met for the first time at an event that you co-hosted. So, thank you for that. But what have you learned or admired as it relates to Cory?

• 1:01:53Speaker 03

  Well, Cory is, I think, a great civic leader. He is entrepreneurial and bold himself. When he was the mayor of Newark, he lived in the housing projects in order to know what the experience was, in order to be able to be, to understand, how does he maximize the happiness and the economic potential and solve the problems of the people that he is there to help, as a mayor. And then, as a senator, part of what I have found him to be practically unique in, or

• 1:02:37Speaker 03

  the leading edge, there are a few others who I think also do this, but he's the leading edge of, I get that Silicon Valley is creating all this kind of interesting technology, and I get that there's these really powerful commercial models and I want to learn from them. But when Cory comes out to Silicon Valley, of course, he has the interest that every politician does, which is raising money, and there's a bunch of money in order to inform political campaigns. But his first, second, and third questions aren't about how do I get you to give me a check? It's how do I learn from you in order to solve a problem that's critical for the American people? And in particular, critical for the people who may be being left out, but all people as well.

• 1:03:19Speaker 03

  And so, whether his focus is on, we have a really serious problem with mass incarceration, or whether the challenge is, what do we do in order to have a good foreign policy? Any of these questions, he starts with, what do I learn from you? That can then help me figure out how to help us be better as a country. And then, of course, you know, if he ends up with alignment and he says, look, can you help me with X, Y, and Z? At that point, he's speaking your language and has understood and has asked you to participate in helping being a good citizen.

• 1:04:04Speaker 03

  And, you know, if we could have more senators like, you know, Senator Booker, Cory, my friend, I think the world would be a much better place.

• 1:04:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, totally agree. He's exceptional at asking incisive questions, and not just for the sake of asking the questions, but for actually listening to the answers. Michael, what is the book that you have given most as a gift or books?

• 1:04:33Speaker 04

  Recently, actually, a read book with Ben Casnosha, the startup of you.

• 1:04:41Tim Ferriss?

  And why have you chosen that book?

• 1:04:45Speaker 04

  It just has a lot of principles in it for young people right out of college or kind of in the middle of their twenties and such to think about how to pursue their careers.

• 1:04:55Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. And what would be your second book if you had to pick a second?

• 1:05:00Speaker 04

  Well, to young people, I often give them a simple book you probably heard about called Getting Things Done.

• 1:05:13Tim Ferriss?

  David Allen.

• 1:05:14Speaker 04

  Combine that with The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, because I think the former helps you actually to action and the latter helps your side which actions to actually, you know, take. So I mentor a lot of young people, and I think those two books together are probably good for them.

• 1:05:37Tim Ferriss?

  Wonderful. Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna dive into QuestBridge in a second because I want to make sure that we cover that. Reed, what about yourself? The book or books that you've given most as gifts, besides the ones that you've been involved with directly?

• 1:05:50Speaker 03

  Yes. Well, obviously, I tend to give out my two books, the Startup of You and The Alliance, a fair amount, partially because you can sign it and you can make it very personalized and it becomes a very, you know, personal touch gift. I'd say the two books that I have recently most given out, one of them is Conscious Business by Fred Kaufman. And Fred is, I think, to some degree, the modern, high-spiritual priest of capitalist business. His whole kind of thread is to say, actually, in fact, how you can express business and capitalism as a spiritual practice of compassion. And I, you know, it's a book that opens with a

• 1:06:35Speaker 03

  discussion of Aristotle, and, you know, not, not, not, you would be, you know, be surprised on a business book. So that's one. And then the other one is Sapiens by Yuval Harari, which is a very grand, it's one of the ones I've read most recently, a grand theory of humanity, and kind of how does the evolution's cognition work. And I don't know enough to know, like, is it really deep scholarly work or not? But it's exactly the kind of broad-thinking book that I think should be more in, you know, general consciousness.

• 1:07:11Tim Ferriss?

  And Michael, you, you mentioned mentoring. I think this is a good segue. Could you please describe QuestBridge and what QuestBridge does? Because, of course, that's, that's a common thread that ties everyone on this call together. Reed being, correct me if I'm wrong, but Chair of the Advisory Board. I'm, I'm one participant on the Advisory Board and very honored to be part of that. But could you describe, and you, of course, are one of the co-founders of QuestBridge, could you describe for folks what it is that QuestBridge does and some of the results or numbers?

• 1:07:47Speaker 04

  Sure. I'll describe what it does and the problem it solves as well. And, and you said, Reed is the Head of the Advisory Board, and we've really appreciated your help also, Tim. So- QuestBridge is, on one level, simply a common application for super smart low-income kids heading to top schools like Princeton and Yale and Swatmore and Amherst and such. You can apply to all the schools for free with our application online. The schools help to offset the cost of the pool, so we don't have to raise a lot of money and can focus on execution. The scale that's reached is significant.

• 1:08:31Speaker 04

  We're about, at some schools, about half of their diversity, and we put in more low-income kids than all the other nonprofits in the country actually all combined. But there are a lot more out there. And the interesting thing in America that people don't know is there's actually no shortage of smart low-income kids to use up all these kind of wonderful financial aid openings. Schools can afford to pay a full tuition award. It's just they simply aren't handing in applications. And so we're trying to make that process simpler. But in real numbers, we had over 140 kids accepted to Yale last year, over 100 to MIT were accepted. The majority of those accepted would actually go.

• 1:09:16Speaker 04

  So on the one hand, our numbers are large. On the other hand, we've probably gone from finding and having them apply, like one in 14 of the qualified kids, to one in nine. You could fail several times over every top school with smart qualified low-income academic kids for all the financial aid openings.

• 1:09:43Tim Ferriss?

  And, I'm sorry, go ahead. I didn't mean to interrupt if you had more there, but I-

• 1:09:48Speaker 04

  Oh, no, I didn't. My wife and I have been doing this now in some form for about 20 years or so, and are hitting a good scale, but are working with people like Reed and others to try to increase our scale. And also now, we have about 8,000 students in our schools. You know, how do you bring them into other corporate world and like- Medical schools and things also.

• 1:10:12Tim Ferriss?

  And the, for those interested, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal's had some excellent feature pieces recently on QuestBridge. Reed, you get asked for, to participate in different projects, different startups, different nonprofits, all the time. What is it about QuestBridge that led you to decide to participate, to contribute to it, to be part of it?

• 1:10:38Speaker 03

  Well, it's actually a very similar process to how I actually make a decision to be an investor. Not 100%, but close, which is, you know, roughly speaking, I think the mission of life is how do you maximize humanity? The expression of human potential, our consciousness, our sense of ethics and ethos, our ways of being with each other. And when you look at QuestBridge, you say, well, here is actually, in fact, one very intelligent system design for exactly that. Because the, you know, the way that you can change a life of this

• 1:11:18Speaker 03

  high talent, low income kid by providing a path and an understanding and a way of succeeding through a strong college is not only a way to change a life, but also to change the world. Because, you know, those, not only do they change their own lives, but then they model for others, they can actually give back to the community, and also then folks who, you know, benefit from elite universities have the knowledge and understanding and compassion to, you know, kind of what are the challenges for lower income and can help participate in a really positive way. So, part of, you know...

• 1:12:03Speaker 03

  I think if anything, you know, Michael's being, you know, kind of socially apt and discreet and not, you know, kind of saying, look, it's a, it's an application, but not only is it an application, it's a community, it's a community helps, helps those kids succeed through college and then connect with the world around them at large. And so it's, it's a, it was a very quick and easy decision to, to join and help.

• 1:12:32Tim Ferriss?

  And so I, Michael, what I'd like to do is just give an example of the type of thing that gets me excited about QuestBridge. And please feel free to correct me because I know this is just a small part or maybe one example. But for those people listening, I mean, I'm involved with a number of nonprofits, but I, I try to apply like Reed, the same level of scrutiny and high expectations to nonprofits that I would to for-profits. And that's, it turns out to be very challenging. But in the case of QuestBridge, you know, Reed mentioned earlier, part of strategy being solving the easiest, most valuable

• 1:13:14Tim Ferriss?

  problem. And I think part of that is identifying, of course, the right problem. And as you mentioned, Michael, there's a lot of money out there. There is a lot of money. Colleges will give students more than $300,000 each to go to college. The, one of the issues is simply the lack of applications. These kids don't apply oftentimes and they may not have the social support and may not even enter their minds to apply. So how do you solve that problem? Because a lot of people are trying to solve the wrong problem by throwing more money at the problem, doing it too late, and they miss the window of opportunity. And so what, what really caught my attention first about QuestBridge was just one small example, which was

• 1:14:00Tim Ferriss?

  In these communities where they may not even be thinking of applying to college, doing for instance, an iPad giveaway, or a giveaway of some type, and the application, or the form to sign up for this giveaway, potentially, and win, just so happens to also be a standardized application that you've convinced 36 top schools to accept as college applications. And so these kids are incentivized in a way that is kind of culturally relevant to them, and then they get a letter in the mail saying, "Hey, by the way, Princeton University here, we'd like to offer you a full ride for four years."

• 1:14:38Tim Ferriss?

  And it's just such an elegant solution, and it's such an example, for me at least, of putting in a, getting a very large result for a small input, a small intervention. And that's why I've been so excited to talk about QuestBridge. I've been looking forward to this interview for many other reasons also, but to try to showcase it for people to say, like, not all hard problems have to be hard to solve. You just have to really surgically focus in the right place. So I'd love to ask, just as it relates to QuestBridge, for people who want to learn more, where should they go? And there are many people

• 1:15:23Tim Ferriss?

  listening to this show who are, perhaps like me, have recognized how they were set down a very fortunate path by having educational opportunities that are not available to everyone. So for people who might want to contribute to such, you know, an effective Archimedes lever, like QuestBridge, where should they go and how might they be able to help?

• 1:15:50Speaker 04

  Sure. I think to clarify the problem, just so your listeners can understand it, the...

• 1:16:01Speaker 04

  Before QuestBridge, about three quarters of the diversity was drawn from only fifth suburban areas in the country. So you were more likely to hear about heading to a school like Swarthmore if you had a 2.8 from Harlem than if you had a 4.0 from a lot of other areas in the country. So QuestBridge recruits at, you know, in New York, in Chicago, like other people do, but also in like Buffalo and Syracuse and other areas of other country. In defense of the kids, it's not intuitive that a school would give you $300,000 for free.

• 1:16:37Tim Ferriss?

  Of course.

• 1:16:38Speaker 04

  So to get their application data, Quest is unique in that we have our own kind of application data set. So as you said, if we create a prize, or if others, you wanted to help us do that, we've had a lot of success in attracting applicants to fill out a college application for a proposition unrelated to the application itself. So if it's a student who wants to get involved, they can simply go to our website at questbridge.org. We have an application actually open now for this fall's application cycle. We have access to about half a billion dollars of financial aid from our universities.

• 1:17:19Speaker 04

  And we'd like to, you know, harvest more of America's latent talent from areas that we haven't reached earlier. I'd say to your listeners to make sure that your local high school actually uses our application, and that only about a third of the high schools in the country have handed applications in. And then for people who would like to create their own intervention, let's say for law and come kids wanting to do math and science, or law and come women, or law and come people from the South, or almost any interest, they can even reach out to me directly.

• 1:17:59Speaker 04

  And on your blog, you can feel free to put my email address if you'd like to.

• 1:18:06Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, wonderful. And would you like to give that out now, or would you prefer just?

• 1:18:09Speaker 04

  Sure, yeah, yeah. It's Michael. At questbridge.org.

• 1:18:16Tim Ferriss?

  Great. And by prizes, you mean people could offer some type of, what might a prize look like?

• 1:18:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's really odd. It could be, it could be non-monetary. Like, we'd like to say, you know, have like a leadership award at like, the White House or something. But it can be as simple as we ran a pilot for Native Americans where we gave away a 20 laptops, hooking the actual university application up to the prize application. And we grew from having only 34 applicants one year to over 350 the year after that.

• 1:18:57Tim Ferriss?

  So for everyone listening, I just want to really encourage you. I am very, very, I have a very, very tight filter, tightness filter when it comes to working with nonprofits. And this, this one is worth your time. So I would just encourage you to look at it. Forget about the label nonprofit as an intervention that can better humanity, as Reid mentioned. This is, this is one of the rare gems out there, in my opinion. And, you know, other organizations that I've worked with, like Donors Choose, for instance, Charles Best is a huge fan of QuestBridge. And he said, the first thing he said to me when I mentioned a few years ago that Michael, you and I connected, he said, "That is an excellent choice. That is an awesome choice." So people, check out questbridge.org and you can reach

• 1:19:42Tim Ferriss?

  Michael if you'd like to discuss collaborating in some way, [email protected]. So I'll just ask one more question, guys. It'll take one or two minutes. And that is, let's, let's start with you, Michael. If you could have one billboard anywhere that said anything, what would it say and where would it be?

• 1:20:02Speaker 04

  I'd probably have people do what you do to him. Pick something you're afraid of every day and, and kind of go after it. And I'd put that on kind of people's, a way to work, I suppose.

• 1:20:18Tim Ferriss?

  What about yourself, Reid?

• 1:20:22Speaker 03

  Well, this is kind of a funny reflex, but it was just something I was thinking about recently. I think I would take the billboard in Washington DC. I think I would target congresspeople and I'd say, "Have you worked with someone across the aisle today?" Because what matters is not partisan conflict, but how do we govern our country to actually have a better future?

• 1:20:44Tim Ferriss?

  Here, here. Definitely. Last question, guys. Do you have any ask or request for my audience? Reed, we can start with you, and then where can people find you online? Where can they ping you on social networks, etc.?

• 1:21:00Speaker 03

  Well, on the social networks, it's very easy. There's this service that maybe a few people have heard of called LinkedIn. You know, findable there. I'd say two things. One is, you know, I would also echo the fact that QuestBridge is a scale way of changing the world for the better, of actually making us more of the, you know, kind of for us in the US, the American dream in terms of the ability for talented, low-income youth to actually, you know, live in a meritocracy. So I think it's awesome, and whatever way you can support, whether it's contributing, or helping,

• 1:21:43Speaker 03

  or, you know, pointing the right talented young kid at it is all great. And then the second is, you know, last year I published a book called The Alliance. Your audience tends to be highly literate, not a surprise, given you.

• 1:21:59Speaker 03

  And so, in as much as they're thinking about how is the nature of employment, and how is the nature of the relationship between an employee and a company changing? I think it might be something that could stimulate a few thoughts.

• 1:22:13Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely. And I have a copy of that book at home, and SF, everybody. Highly worth the read, so highly recommended there. Well, gentlemen, this has been wonderful. I've really enjoyed the conversation. And for everybody listening, I will put everything we discussed in the show notes. So we'll have links to QuestBridge, the book recommendations, and so on. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com, all spelled out, and click on Podcast to find that. And, guys, I really appreciate you making the time. This was a lot of fun, and I have pages and pages of notes just for myself.

• 1:22:48Speaker 03

  Tim, always a pleasure and always an honor.

• 1:22:51Speaker 04

  Thank you for the conversation, Tim.

• 1:22:52Tim Ferriss?

  All right, guys. Until next time, thank you. And everyone else, until next time, thank you for listening.

• 1:23:03Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:25:30Tim Ferriss?

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