Thumbtack CEO Marco Zappacosta on why trades are AI-proof, the trillion-dollar home services market, and why software stopped being a capital asset

Marco Zappacosta is the co-founder and CEO of Thumbtack, the home services marketplace he started in 2008. Thumbtack connects homeowners to 300,000+ local service professionals, with nearly 100M projects started on the platform. In this episode of Summation, Marco and Auren discuss: Why home services is bigger than groceries but barely any is booked onlineHow AI collapsed Thumbtack's product pod sizesWhy Silicon Valley underrates leadership and overrates management The single trait...

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

• 0:00Auren Hoffman?

  Hello fellow data nerds. My guest today is Marco Zappacosta. Marco is the co-founder and CEO of Thumbtack, a home services marketplace that was founded back in 2008. Thumbtack connects over 10 million homeowners to over 300,000 local service professionals. Marco, welcome to Summation.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Thank you, Orin. It's great to be here. I also consider myself a data nerd, so I'm in good company.

• 0:25Auren Hoffman?

  Oh yeah, this is great. And by the way, full disclosure, you and I have been friends for a long time. You're also kind enough to have taken the angel check for me back when you started Thumbtack. So I'm also an investor, and I'm a huge fan of Thumbtack as well.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  I appreciate that. Yeah, you've been a longtime supporter.

• 0:41Auren Hoffman?

  Everyone is worried about AI eliminating jobs, but it seems like the trades are kind of like a weird safe harbor in the AI economy. Is that too simple of a story, or is there some sort of nuance there?

• 0:53Speaker 01

  The trades and things that interface with the real world, in particular in ways that are hard to automate, are very durable. OpenAI put out a paper, I think with ChatGPT-4, that came out about the jobs most at risk and least at risk. And the least at risk was filled with home service jobs. It was like oil and gas jobs and Thumbtack jobs, like things that you gotta be there.

• 1:21Auren Hoffman?

  So I'm gonna put a rug into your living room, carpet in your living room. It seems like AI is not gonna be able to do that anytime soon. Now, maybe you could assist with AI by using the measurements or other types of things, but you still need a smart professional to do it.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  You got it. Well, I think the magic is that the AI can do the digital interface for these folks in a much better way than they've ever done for themselves.

• 1:43Auren Hoffman?

  Do an estimate and understand everything so that they come with the right materials.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  Front of house. Have your website and your social media presences up to date. Respond to people quickly. Answer questions. Submit follow-ups. Submit estimates. Basically, the admin work that's involved, which is rarely why these people got into the business.

• 2:05Auren Hoffman?

  That's not their core thing that they're great at. They're great at what they do, their core profession.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  Correct. Yeah. And so, you know, our dream is for the folks who have the time, the talent and the hustle, that should be all it takes and we provide the rest. And I think AI is going to be this incredible kind of catalyst for so much for them to just, yeah, unburden their lives and let them focus on what they do best.

• 2:31Auren Hoffman?

  It's really interesting because if you take, if you take that example of someone who's like really good at putting in carpets, this is a very hard thing to do. Well,

• 2:39Auren Hoffman?

  and probably before, like the people who are most successful in that industry were the ones who were like really good at marketing themselves, but they weren't necessarily the best at that. Now, if like, if marketing is, is, is, if everyone is the same as their marketing, et cetera, now it really goes to like quality.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Totally. I think that's a real promise of this AI future that we can extract true signals about people, products, things, such that when you go to search or find or discover, you're not just getting the best at online marketing, you're getting the best of the thing you're looking for.

• 3:14Auren Hoffman?

  Now, home services is massive. It's at least, it's at least five, $600 billion in the US.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  Sometimes you'll hear me say a trillion. I just want to use the T, you know?

• 3:25Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, I like the trillion. Okay, I'm going to start saying a trillion too. And from what I understand, like still less than 10% of it is booked online. You've been at this for like 18 years. Like what is the, what's the resistance to getting more of that online?

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, look, it's the same homeowner. It's the same set of thumbs that uses Uber and DoorDash and Airbnb and Amazon. So, the laziness and the desire to do things easily and quickly is there. What it highlights though is that this purchase is mediated by something else. It's not simply about convenience or ease of use. It's much more about certainty and peace of mind. A, because the dollars are much higher here. Two, it's the opposite of a commodity, right? You're, you're getting the floors done in your house. Like you walk on them every day. You care about that. Also, it's your house. So, if it goes wrong, you got to live with it and it may be super expensive.

• 4:19Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, even bringing in like you're hiring a bartender or something like you want, even if it's a temporary thing, you kind of want to make sure it's a good person.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Is much higher than sort of delivery or sort of a ride to your friend's house. And so with that, people are very careful and they really work hard to ensure that they're spending their money on the right people and the right things. And that's why I think today our biggest competitor is word of mouth. Because to gain that confidence, people often turn to their neighbors, their friends, their colleagues. And I understand, you know, there's real value in that. I think what's coming though is that AI lets us package up a lot of that intelligence, which you've previously gone to your friends and neighbors for, into our product. And I really think kind of the two together will be radically better. So I think it's inevitable, but it's a different category.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  You know, we're not in the business of helping you buy things or rent places. We help you hire people. So sort of rent the time and talent of the people in your community. And that's just different. It's actually probably more like dating than it is like delivery.

• 5:25Auren Hoffman?

  It's really hard to, because I guess if I'm hiring like a bartender, I kind of like have a sense of like how to hire that person and have a sense, okay, what I want. But if I'm hiring like someone to deal with my pool.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  Even though you're not even a drinker, right?

• 5:42Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, but you know, you have a sense of, okay, they're gonna do this, they're gonna pour this, they're gonna shake this or something, and they're gonna be nice. Like you have a sense of like what a bartender would need to do. They have to show up on time, they have to look pleasant. But if I'm hiring someone to like maintain my pool or something, I don't know anything really about pool maintenance. I don't even know how to evaluate that person if they're good. They say a bunch of things, they seem nice, you hire them. Like, I need help with the hiring front. Like, that's what an AI could potentially help me for, right?

• 6:19Speaker 01

  Hugely, especially because we have ground truth data around who's great at what. Homeowners are telling us sort of all day, every day about the projects they want done. And then we're getting pretty high rates of reviews and feedback on those jobs, including pricing and pictures. And what that gives us is a really high fidelity signal about who's good at what, where. And that is very specific. And so that is already there. But what we can add on top of that is kind of the The subtlety, the category-specific questions and context and feedback, which, you know, we're so wide. We cover 500 different occupations. There's no way we could have done it with an army of category managers.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  It's really only now that sort of these APIs that exist that have like captured all of human kind of like judgment behind them, that you can pipe it in efficiently and you can create a tailored and personalized experience for every need and want that people have.

• 7:19Auren Hoffman?

  Is there a way for somehow you to like test these professionals? Like if they say, oh, I'm really good at servicing this type of air conditioning unit. Like, you know, sometimes what I'll do when I meet with them is I'll like go on Claude or ChatGPT ahead of time. I'll get all the cool things and then I'll start asking them some questions. And if like, if somehow I feel like I know more than them, I just stop right there.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  So we do a lot to try and qualify. And I think this is sort of another layer that we can bring in, which is like, again, sort of leveraging the corpus of knowledge to sort of test the knowledge of individual pros. But I'd argue we have the ultimate test, which is market feedback. And that's really what you need, right? You need like, how are these folks in the world serving customers? Are those customers happy? Are they repeat buyers? Are they leaving tips? Are they kind of giving us the signals that show us that this person did a great job? And the great thing is like, very often, yes, these pros are in business for a good reason, not perfectly so. And we can use that to kind of match people up correctly.

• 8:25Auren Hoffman?

  I remember like when Amazon got into home services, when Google got into home services, they've kind of backed off. You survive. Like, it's a huge market. What do you understand that they didn't? Because if like, if Amazon and Google were going to go come compete against me, like, I would be pretty worried.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, Facebook was in there too.

• 8:45Auren Hoffman?

  Oh, good point.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  Microsoft dabbled for a hot second. eBay took a run at it. So I think we are certainly not the only ones who have had this idea or this dream. But I do think we've attacked it very, very specifically and with the most kind of technology forward solution. And that's why I think we're ahead. I think one big difference from the startups, because there were sort of an army of startups that we competed with, is that we were very broad. And that was considered the wrong choice for a long time. You know, VCs would poo poo. It'd be like, oh, you have to focus. You have to narrow.

• 9:19Auren Hoffman?

  Is there someone just doing like home cleaning or just doing dog walking?

• 9:22Speaker 01

  You got it.

• 9:23Auren Hoffman?

  Or just doing, you know, whatever.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  There were multiple for every vertical and they were trying to be the Uber four X was often how they talked about it. And I think that misappreciated that the core value a marketplace provides is liquidity. It's why Craigslist still exists. It's not because it's a beautiful product. It's because it has liquidity. And we actually, by being broad, could invest in liquidity building mechanisms that no narrow vertical ever could. And so because of that, that sort of aggregate sort of leverage, we could bring in more pros, engage more pros, support those pros, retain those pros more effectively than any of the verticalized players. And so even though the experience on the front end may have been less customized or

• 10:07Speaker 01

  less tuned to that category, the fulfillment capabilities and the marketplace experience was vastly better. And that's ultimately what satisfies buyers. Like, can I find the seller that I'm looking for here?

• 10:19Auren Hoffman?

  It's interesting because like in like Uber's case, the, the most important thing in the marketplace is the supply side. Because the demand is there and you're using it all the time. You're using it like some people use Ubers every day. In your case, where the, the demand is, you know, for any given thing, the demand is could be like every four, four years or something.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:45Auren Hoffman?

  Or whatever it might be, right? So in your case, like the limiter is the demand side, I presume, or am I wrong about that?

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Today, the limiter is. And these marketplaces have gone back and forth.

• 10:55Auren Hoffman?

  So you kind of like need to invade the mind of the homeowner or the home person to just to remember to use it. Cause there's probably like 40 things I could use thumbtack for. And maybe like, once I use it three times, then I'm going to use it 30 times or something.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Totally. Um, and so, yeah, the dynamics of these marketplaces definitely are different. You know, a, a big difference from the pro side is this is these folks livelihood. Uber was incredible as a secondary source of income, as a side hustle. And, you know, it truly is life changing for people, but it was never their go to. And so there was just a lot of natural churn in that on the supply base. On our side, like this is their livelihood. They're a plumber today, tomorrow, and in the year from now, which is sort of useful in a sense, because they're going to stick around. But also trickier because they have an existing business and operating kind of practices and technologies that we have to interface with and connect with.

• 11:53Auren Hoffman?

  Oh yeah. Good point. You start and you're, the first time you start, you're 0% of their business. They already have a business. And then over time, you become a greater and greater percentage and you have to integrate. They've got a scheduling system. They've got this, that, the other, and you have to integrate with, whereas like an Uber, they're all, they all kind of like jump on the Uber's platform.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 12:12Auren Hoffman?

  Do whatever Uber says.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  You got it. That's exactly right. Mm hmm.

• 12:15Auren Hoffman?

  What else about like home services wouldn't like, we appreciate?

• 12:20Speaker 01

  The dollars and the aggregate dollars. So our average purchase is a thousand dollars. If you compare that to your Average. Yeah, yeah.

• 12:28Auren Hoffman?

  Wow.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  And so compare that to an average Uber ride, which is probably like 15 bucks globally, might even be less.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  It's a just very different, much more considered purchase. Also, the trillion dollars in spend or 800 billion, however you want to cut it, is bigger than any other consumer vertical. So you take groceries, it's way bigger than that. You take gas, you take apparel, you take any of these.

• 12:52Auren Hoffman?

  It's bigger than groceries?

• 12:54Speaker 01

  It's bigger than groceries.

• 12:56Auren Hoffman?

  Oh my gosh, I had no idea. Okay.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  The margin inside of it is way bigger than every other category. Thing you have to appreciate is our pros have typically not that much of a cost of goods sold. It's really just their time. There's sometimes a pass through expense of parts and materials. But like to deliver you the service, it's their time. And so they have very high gross margins, but in that they also have this inventory that's perishable. Right? Like if they don't make money today with their hours that they have, like they can't put that on the shelf and save it for tomorrow.

• 13:30Auren Hoffman?

  Yep, yep.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  And so they're very motivated to try and, you know, give a discount, drum up some demand, invest in a marketing platform.

• 13:38Auren Hoffman?

  Also optimize because like these pros, like if they're driving an hour to get there, that's a problem. So if they can drive an hour to get there and do three that are all in that like roughly the same location. Well, that's a huge, that's a good deal as well.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 13:53Auren Hoffman?

  Because you have to do it because I would say almost all your business that doing onsite, it's not like you can do it over video or something.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  None of it is remote. You can do some like admin remotely.

• 14:04Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, some back and forth, but to do the work.

• 14:06Auren Hoffman?

  Help people repair, you know.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, to do the work, you're onsite. And, and actually that's kind of a core tenet of ours. We want to help with that real world in-person work. You know, we have categories that, you know, some of it could happen remotely and that's just not what we're focused on.

• 14:22Auren Hoffman?

  Interesting.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  AI is going to take all of those for what it's worth, right? Like your remote guitar teacher, that's tough. You're going to compete with a really good app.

• 14:31Auren Hoffman?

  AI, yeah.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 14:33Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, your Spanish tutor, like you're already having an AI instead, right? Yeah, it's a good point. Or even your workout, like, yeah, that if you're going to do a remote workout, you might as well just have an AI instead of the remote workout.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  It's just going to be so cost competitive that even if the quality is not exactly there today, it will be soon, but the costs are just so much lower.

• 14:54Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I think that, I think the biggest thing is just the size of the space. You know, you're talking about, you know, a way that millions of Americans are earning their livelihood every year. You're talking about the maintenance of people's biggest asset, their home. And yet because it's never been aggregated before. Like even the Yellow Pages wasn't really like a singular business marketplace, it was very fragmented. I think people fail to appreciate the opportunity. And you know, that's definitely kept me motivated. Like, I don't think it's been won. I think we have the leading kind of offering. And I know what it looks like when a category gets fully disrupted. It looks like mobility, or delivery, or travel, or e-commerce. And again, it's the same homeowner in all of those that we serve.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  So it's in my mind, it will happen. We just haven't built a good enough solution for it yet, or a complete enough solution for.

• 15:47Auren Hoffman?

  You've spent like your whole career in one company. You started twenty-three, when you were twenty-three, I think.

• 15:57Auren Hoffman?

  Did you have a sense that it was gonna be like a two-decade arc to, and it could be, it could be more than that?

• 16:04Speaker 01

  No, I mean, that's for sure not what I thought upfront. I thought we would solve this much faster.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  And I've, you know, there's been self doubt about that and frustration about that, all the feelings. But A, I think there's two things. One is I, we keep making progress and we keep winning. And so that we haven't won the whole prize is sort of just fuel for the fire, but we're making progress towards that. And then two, here's, I have to give my parents a lot of credit. They were entrepreneurs and, you know, it's not something they pushed on us or sort of advocated to us. But they both worked at their companies, separate companies, for almost two decades each. And so, you know, if you were to have asked me like, how long does it take to sort of like start and build something of comic sequences? I probably would have said a couple of decades, just because that's what I saw at home.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  And I feel lucky that I have that because I think most people's expectations around these timelines are totally misset by sort of media narratives and company narratives where it's all compressed for effect size. And I really believe in the sort of Bill Gates quote of people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in a decade.

• 17:17Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, that's really interesting. Now, on hiring, like, how has your hiring changed with AI? Like, has your criteria changed? Has how you evaluate people changed?

• 17:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're actually in the midst of redoing that right now. I mean, I think basically a year ago, we updated them to look for AI fluency.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Now, we're really looking for evidence of having built and being like an AI builder of some sort broadly defined, right? Like if you're a finance person, it can be something that helps you model better, sort of, you know, extract information from Ks and Qs. If you're an engineer or designer, it should be some like side project app that you've always sort of wanted to do, like whatever, like it doesn't matter. I think what is clear is that you need people who have both the curiosity to explore these things and then just the agency to figure it out. I mean, what's remarkable, I think with these tools is like the main kind of like support path is just prompting it for help. You're like, I'm stuck. This won't work. Is it not getting me what I want?

• 18:24Speaker 01

  And it's like, if you say that enough times, you'll probably figure it out. It may not every time, but just about. And so I think it's in some sense a test for agency if you've done anything with this stuff.

• 18:35Auren Hoffman?

  Right, because it's the most important thing going on in the tech world. So if you're not engaging with the most important thing that is in a smart way, you don't have to be on the leading edge of it. You don't have to have like 15 open clause running and so, though if you do, that's probably a really good sign. But you have to be, you have to be, you know, let's say in the top 20% or something.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Yep, yep. And that I think is like table stakes at this point, simply because the transformation that we're seeing internally and just how we work is so fundamental that if you're not kind of just like jumping in excitedly, you're gonna either be left behind or be frustrated, neither of which is a good fit.

• 19:21Auren Hoffman?

  Was there a type of person that you were maybe excited to hire before that you don't think is as good in the AI world? Or the opposite, a type of person that you weren't as excited to hire before that you think is better in the AI world?

• 19:38Speaker 01

  One of the things that this technology is kind of pushing is like the rise of generalists at the expense of specialists. And what we see is that the really narrow roles at Thumbtack. Are under pressure because like instead of having that, you know, designers specializes in that one part of design, it's actually you can just lever Figma Make or Claude Code to help you do that when you need it every so often. You know, the hyper specialized engineer, you know, I think that is the thing that it may change the most where we might have fewer roles that are broader and more general and have fewer kind of specialists.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  Cause there was a period where we went the opposite way where to really up the craft, what we were putting together, we went after specialists sort of across the stack. But when you build your org that way, you kind of get put into more of a waterfall type process because it kind of just has to pass through the hands of different people. And there's power to that. There's sort of like, yeah, polish and sort of craft that can come from, but it's slower for sure. And I think one of the just superpowers of this technology is how fast it lets you move, particularly when you lower the group size that's required to get anything done, you know, to the extreme of just one person, that's the fastest.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  But even taking a product team, like at Thumbtack, historically our pods were like 10 to 14 people. Now they can be like three to six, three to eight. I think that alone makes us faster.

• 21:13Auren Hoffman?

  That changes the game.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  There's just fewer skulls.

• 21:15Auren Hoffman?

  They all fit in one room and have a chat.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  They have just more shared state, more shared context and can just move faster. And so that I think is something we're going to lean into and I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of people lean into that.

• 21:29Auren Hoffman?

  It's interesting what you just said about kind of like these quote, quote, experts in their craft. We are seeing all across like all of our companies that they're hiring fewer and fewer experts, not exactly for the reason where you're saying it's just, but somewhat, I think it's just like then the, the need for the expert is less like an everyday need and more like an episodic need. And when they have that need, they want like the best person in the world at that thing. So they, they. They rent them because usually you can rent an expert for you just pay whatever hourly rate is you get that person. You're like, okay, I have this problem or have this need.

• 22:10Auren Hoffman?

  Maybe it's a great designer or maybe you said like we all use like, oh, you might use like an M and A lawyer if you're buying a company or something, right? But you don't necessarily need that person on staff 24 7. So we're seeing like much more of that kind of shift. Are you guys seeing something similar?

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's very, very true. I think it's sort of a different version of what I was talking about it. And I think you see it across roles too, right? The PM who can ship a simple PR and just sort of submit it to be reviewed. The designer who can ship sort of a front end change because they're using cloud, you know, like it's blurring across specialties too, which I think is amazing. Because again, it just gives people more leverage and that lets you go faster and do more with kind of fewer skulls.

• 22:54Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's interesting because it's like in some ways like. These analogies are not always great, like, you know, people often make like the sports analogy. If you have like an NFL team, you need like this incredible kicker who's really good at like kicking field goals. And like, that's basically what they do. They don't tackle anyone. They don't throw anything. They don't run with the ball. Like they're just like fantastic at kicking that field goal. They're an expert. But when your company is like, sometimes you need those people because like, yeah, you're an NFL team, you do need that person on your team. But your company like, okay, every once in a while you can just like rent the kicker or something.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think that's huge. I think the other big thing that we're all going to be living through is forever in building a technology business. We've been limited by the amount of software that we could create. The rate limiter was writing code. And all the apparatus was to feed that machine as effectively and efficiently as possible.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  I think that's going away, right? Not instantly, but over time, I think.

• 23:56Auren Hoffman?

  It's in the last like three months. It seems like there's been a huge shift.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, you know, when you kind of play that forward, you get to a world where you become sort of idea, vision, prototype, hypothesis limited, which I think is very, very different than the world we've been in today. And it's actually going to really expose companies on their strategic thinking in a way that I think is often kind of like not obvious. I would argue that the median kind of post-product market fit company is actually strategy limited, not execution limited, and that they could be increasing their growth or ultimate sort of level of achievement by some strategic change or evolution, much more than just working harder, right? They all work hard. Like, that's not the issue. It's like, do you have the right and best ideas?

• 24:45Speaker 01

  And I think that's really going to get brought to the forefront as like we become more and more kind of like empowered to build whatever we can dream up.

• 24:54Auren Hoffman?

  It's, it's really like, if you think of like the building a house in America, let's say like the median house in America costs $350,000 to build.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's now like four forty, four sixty.

• 25:06Auren Hoffman?

  Four forty to build, right? Now, the reason why it costs so much to build is like, well, you, you, you kind of needed to last for 30, 40 years at least, you know, and hopefully longer than that. It's got a, it's got a deal. Imagine if like you could just like rebuild this house every month.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. You would take a wildly different approach.

• 25:27Auren Hoffman?

  And you could like change it around as you need it. It's like, oh, I thought I wanted a closet like this, but I really want a closet like that. Or I want that, you know, imagine a scenario like, like that's what software is now. Like, we used to build it, maybe not for 40 years, but we'd build it for at least, we're trying to think, okay, this is going to be around for 10 years or five years or something.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  It was a, it was a depreciating asset. It was like a capital asset. It's something we thought about having kind of permanence, for sure.

• 25:50Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, and now it's like, okay, we can like, we literally can rebuild this every week, every month. So like, we can switch it around. It's like, oh, you want this room? Great. You want this room? Like, you couldn't change. It's like, almost like totally changes the game.

• 26:04Auren Hoffman?

  In a way, and like, you don't have to predict the future because it's before it's like, oh, I gotta make these changes. Like, okay, it's gonna be so hard. I gotta really, it's like, there are some big strategy things that are important. And if you're gonna put marketing dollars, it's really important. Or it touches the user experience, that might be really important, but like.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  What makes most things reversible, which as soon as something is reversible, then you can give, you can test it with, with no risk effectively, just change it if it's wrong.

• 26:31Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's like, hey, I went to a restaurant, I'm like, oh, just, I don't know if I like the chicken, I'll try it out, you know? And worst case scenario, I spent 20 bucks on the chicken and I didn't like it or something.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  I think it will also highlight that the value in these businesses was never the software. Right? Which I think it makes this interesting debate right now around SaaS of like, oh, SaaS is worthless. It's like, well, the software might be worthless. Yeah, sure. But the relationship with the enterprise and the sort of data that's sort of the system of record that it represents, the sort of like.

• 27:02Auren Hoffman?

  And there's some flow that it is and understanding the workflow and there's a knowledge that goes in there. And it's like fulfilling, it's like doing some sort of job that potentially a human would do or something, right? So in some, and hopefully a decent way. Now, could be better, maybe, maybe you're gonna have more competition. And, and so that's, that's the tough thing on the SaaS market.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  Totally. And I mean, maybe that not every SaaS company has things that are truly valuable. And that is actually rarer than what we thought. You know, it's pretty wild that like, five years ago, vertical SaaS was considered like the safest long-term asset there could be. Like, all of private equity was pivoted towards it, private credit levered it up. And then poof, right? Like, not very much long later, like, all of that disappears. So, um, man, these things can change.

• 27:55Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, they can change. I mean, that's been the history of the software market, though. If you go back, and I know you're kind of a student of history, so if you go back the last forty, fifty years, like a lot of best companies in that in the eighties, everything like most of the best companies in the eighties, Cybase, you know, all those companies, like, they're not around anymore. You look at even best companies in the nineties, like, most of those aren't around. And even in the early two thousands, because those aren't like, things change and it's a very competitive. But, you know, if you, it's not like car companies or something, or hotel companies, or, you know, or something like that.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  It's hard to create durable value for the long term. You know, you've seen those statistics that like only six percent of companies, public companies created all the wealth over the course of the like twentieth century. It's remarkable how hard it is to, yeah, create durable value over the long term.

• 28:51Auren Hoffman?

  One of the other hard things about software is, like, if you think of a car company, I'm not gonna, I'm never gonna go make a car. Like, I'm gonna go buy a car, I might buy like a newer brand, like a Tesla than an older brand, but I'm gonna go buy a car. I'm never gonna go make a hotel for myself. Like, I'm gonna go into, you know, Marriott, or I'm gonna go to Hilton, or whatever it might be. But software, like a lot of companies, like most companies, like you make probably more than you buy. I was, for JP Morgan, they probably spend way more dollars making and maintaining their own software than buying software. So there's this whole other kind of category of software of just like, these companies, they don't just buy.

• 29:36Auren Hoffman?

  If you just think of the total software budget today, it's massive, and it's actually only buying software is only a tiny percentage of it.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that building is now going to extend to individuals, right? Like,

• 29:49Auren Hoffman?

  That's right.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Twenty, thirty years ago, people didn't write their own documents or make their own spreadsheets.

• 29:54Auren Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  Now they do. And I think software creation was historically an expert sort of field, and now it's being democratized where, you know, I'm no expert, I can't build a system for the long term, but I can definitely build a silly little web app for me and my kids to sort of like, make a fun story. Like, yeah, we use it for three days and then disappears. Like that, that is now possible and that was not possible like 12 months ago, 24 months ago.

• 30:21Auren Hoffman?

  Going back to hiring, in the past, you had said you thought culture fit was a luxury. Do you still feel that way?

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean,

• 30:33Speaker 01

  I think early, super early stage companies attract people through self-selection. And that often gets you a lot of what you want around culture fit, which is not just values, it's ambition, it's attitude, it's pace of work, right? There's a lot of things that go into fit. But getting all of those, A requires knowing what they are and having kind of self-awareness, which takes a while. And then two, has the ability to be choosy. And I'll tell you, at first Thumbtack, you know, couldn't be that choosy. We went after the people we knew who were excited about us and like, found amazing people, but you know, they weren't perfect. They weren't at a central casting and in part because like,

• 31:19Auren Hoffman?

  If they were, they would get a, they'd get a much higher paying job with a higher company.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  We did not have the status or, and that attracts sort of missionaries. And that becomes really important for the DNA and those people that you bet on end up being super talented. But you also learn things where like, you know, we definitely hired some people who were hyper talented, but also incredibly challenging to work with in ways that were ultimately, I thought, net negative. And we'd have to sort of decide to part ways.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  At first, I, I kind of tolerated that because I had to, or I thought it was worth it. And over time, and I think what really changed was after Sequoia invested. That was the first time it felt like we started to have our pick.

• 32:07Auren Hoffman?

  Just because you had this kind of halo brand a bit and a few other things.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's the number one thing.

• 32:12Auren Hoffman?

  Reach a certain valuation and.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  I think the number one thing hiring a tier one VC does or getting them involved does is help you recruit grade A execs. Like, that's what Sequoia has done for Thumbtack more than anything else, and it's created a tremendous amount of value. And, look, I tell execs the same thing. Go look at who Sequoia just did the series A of, or whatever round of. Go talk to all those. Go talk to the recruiters at these top-flight VC firms. They have unfair access, and they can put you into the right companies. So, yeah, I think that's been enormous. So, yeah, like, I learned a lot, too. I just didn't know how to hire at first, right? Like,

• 32:56Speaker 01

  there's something you learn on the job, or, you know, I didn't work anywhere else. So, I had to learn it on the job.

• 33:04Auren Hoffman?

  And when you think of hiring exec today, as opposed to just a couple of years ago, in some ways, as you said, like, the value of the quote-unquote "expert" is less important. So, whereas the value of maybe someone who can lead, and they could manage, and they could, or strategy is maybe more important. So, has that kind of, like, infected the way you think about, like, an executive?

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, hugely. So, I continue to think that Silicon Valley underrates leadership, and I really care about it. I think leaders have tremendous leverage.

• 33:41Auren Hoffman?

  What do you mean by leaders? Like, someone who can, like, organize a team, delegate well, strategy?

• 33:46Speaker 01

  No, that's management.

• 33:47Auren Hoffman?

  That's management. Okay, sorry. Okay.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  Leadership to me is, yeah, well, to set a vision, galvanize people towards that vision, motivate them towards that, provide the courage and moral authority to take risks and sort of venture something. That's all lead. That's the hard part. Like,

• 34:07Auren Hoffman?

  That's really hard.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, organizing a meeting, like, staffing, like, you can do that poorly or well, but that's not the hard part.

• 34:16Auren Hoffman?

  How do you figure out if someone's a leader before you've worked with them?

• 34:20Speaker 01

  So, this is where I really lean on their career. Like, I think you can fake an interview. Especially if you're like a top-flight leader, or top-flight exec, you've just, you've been put in rooms, and you've used your words to escape so many times, that you're just like a savant at that.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  But when you look back over the last 20 years of somebody's work, it's really hard to fake that. And so A, you just look at the arc and you know, how were they promoted? What were they given? How did they kind of progress? You can dig in very deep with that. I think it's a very useful way to spend an hour, about two hours with an exec is just going in detail through their career. And then two references where, you know, especially, there's often a couple of things that I'm most zeroed in on in terms of how I want this leader to help us get better, evolve, change. And you can go talk to bosses, peers and reports to get a sense of not just generally tell me about this person, but say, hey, I'm looking for someone who's 10 out of 10 at this.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  How would you rate this person at that? Tell me a story about when they did great. Do you know people that were better? Were they the best person at the company about this? Hey, if I'm trying to get more signal on this, who should I talk to?

• 35:33Auren Hoffman?

  And by the way, you are personally doing these references for the execs? Or do you kind of divide them up in your team or something? Or how do you do it?

• 35:41Speaker 01

  I do them for my reports. Yeah.

• 35:43Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah. You do every, and if there's 15 references, you do all 15?

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, my head of talent will help me if like schedules get in the way. So him and I will do all of them. I, I would guess I'm doing two thirds, three quarters of them.

• 35:58Auren Hoffman?

  And these are like 15 minute call type of thing where you're just kind of driving into a few?

• 36:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I usually ask for 20. That's usually enough time.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  I'm trying to be very specific. I don't think it's useful to just have this person give you like general impressions. Like I've spent a bunch of time with this person. I have a point of view. I also have a point of view of what I think this role needs to do. And so I'm trying to get the person to react to that. And I'm trying to give them a way to give me signal that is kind of,

• 36:31Speaker 01

  that like, doesn't put them in an awkward position.

• 36:34Auren Hoffman?

  And it's important to have the 15 because like any one data point is not that good, right? So you need a kind of a holistic data point there.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  If you get a consistent signal out of a crop of like five to 10, you have a very good idea about, especially if that starts to match your own intuition or your sort of interview panel's intuition, then you can start to be sure. And you know, I've said this before, I think my confidence in being able to assess talent.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  Has probably gone down and I use the career and references more to sort of assess, hey, is this 10 out of 10 talent? And then I trust my gut more when it comes to fit with Thumbtack, with our ambition, with our way of working, with our values, with everything. And I'm looking for both of those, right? Like, I want the right talent, but I also want to fit with our organization.

• 37:27Auren Hoffman?

  Interesting. Is there a question that you, is there a specific question you think is like really valuable to ask on the references?

• 37:38Speaker 01

  I think it's just the more specific, the better. So typically, I, you know, I am like, I'm on the, I always have like a tagline for my searches. So like, I'm doing a CPO search today. I'm acting CPO.

• 37:54Auren Hoffman?

  Chief Product Officer.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  Chief Product Officer, and I'm looking for an obsessive builder. And so that's like a, the prompt I'll start with.

• 38:01Auren Hoffman?

  So that's, by the way, that you, you, you figure that out before you start the search. Okay, guys, that's really, that's probably, that's probably step one that most people don't do is like really, really narrow down. Okay, I want this type of person.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  So I think that's the first failure mode. People don't understand clearly enough what the role needs and in particular, what would, what the role would most benefit from them being a superstar at. And so you want to define that so that you can go look for superstardom as opposed to a lack of weakness. Cause I see a lot of early founders be like, I want the most talented person who's good at all these things. Well, then you're just looking for lack of weakness rather than spikiness in the thing that you need most. So that's, I think, key number one. Number two is this fit question of like, just because they're talented, if they don't fit with your organization, if they don't fit with your timeline to liquidity, if they don't fit to the values and way of working, like we're virtual first. If you want to be in an office every day, that's not a fit.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  It's not right or wrong, but like, we should just get that out of the way.

• 39:01Auren Hoffman?

  But I assume like you're, before they even get to you, you'll know that about them because like there's just some weird or things to know. Okay, you know, we work this number of hours a week in general, we're virtual, we do these, you know, et cetera. So don't, don't apply unless you have these things.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, often with exec, it comes down to risk tolerance. You know, if someone is in their mid to late 40s, they're looking at this as the sort of

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Operational capstone of their career. There's varying degrees of risk seeking in that. Right? Like, some people want like no risk and they just want it to like pay them a certain amount of money over the next five years because they have a life that requires X more money. And that's, that's fine. Then there's some people who are like, hey, I finally got to the top slot. I want to be part of something that like really is going for it and where I can like leave my mark and prove myself. And I get that there's risk that may take longer, be harder than expected. So yeah, I think fit is usually about those things, not just the like, you know, virtual work. But then the last aspect that I have keyed in on is

• 40:13Speaker 01

  self-awareness. You know, after hiring people who are super talented who fit with your organization, the last failure mode is that these execs don't appreciate their imperfections and are sort of stubborn or hard-headed or defensive about it. And I'll tell you, like, I have hired extremely talented people exclusively. And yet they're all imperfect and they all have like major blind spots, particularly if you hire very spiky people. They often have deficiencies elsewhere and that's fine so long as there's self-awareness about it. And I care a lot about finding execs who are comfortable in their own skin and get it. They see it, they recognize it.

• 40:54Auren Hoffman?

  You, you want people that have like a somewhat accurate view of their strengths and a somewhat accurate view of their weaknesses, essentially.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Correct. And, you know, I, I think Mark Andreessen's recent comments about introspection.

• 41:10Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Are just totally wrong. Like, I love.

• 41:12Auren Hoffman?

  Okay. All right. Let's talk about that.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I love Mark. I, he's like an amazing philosopher for tech. But he's not a leader of men. He's a thinker. He's a philosopher. He's never run big orgs. I don't think anybody reports to him at Andreessen. Like, that's not his superpower. He's not a leader. And I think, again, this is sort of Silicon Valley underappreciating what leadership is. And I would point him like Bill Campbell, mentor of his and someone I knew and was a little bit close to, like, was a leader. And I think one of the hallmarks of a leader like Bill is how self-aware and comfortable in their own skin they were.

• 41:49Auren Hoffman?

  Self-awareness is different than introspection, or they're kind of, you think they're pretty linked?

• 41:54Speaker 01

  I think they're, they're, they're inescapably linked. Like, to become self-aware requires at least the curiosity of introspection.

• 42:05Auren Hoffman?

  I think Mark has an extremely good understanding of his strengths and weaknesses. Do you like, and, but, but he would not say he was self-aware. But, but he does probably know his strengths. In fact, he's designed his life not to manage people because he doesn't, because he thinks that's not his strength. And he's designed his life to like, really, really lean into his strengths, right?

• 42:24Speaker 01

  I'd be curious if I, my guess is he's not the most self-aware human there ever was, and that's fine. Like,

• 42:30Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  Like, it doesn't

• 42:32Auren Hoffman?

  Again, like, like, I think he knows his strengths and weaknesses super well, but maybe he doesn't know other things about his psyche or something. I don't know. We can ask Mark about it.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not sure. And I like, and, and this doesn't take anything away from him. I think it highlights that he's much more a thinker. He, he lives in the realm of ideas rather than the realm of people and teams. And I think leadership requires, yeah, or, or benefits from this introspection in a very real way.

• 43:08Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, interesting. And how do you understand someone? Like, how do you, how do you understand if someone knows or has at least a some sense, accurate sense of their strengths and weaknesses?

• 43:22Speaker 01

  I ask a series of questions to sort of like get to it. And, you know, what's the push and pull that brings you to this conversation? Describe to me the best possible next chapter. And talk to me about your proudest professional accomplishment. What about the biggest regret of your professional career? And specific ones like projects you wish you had do-overs. And then I bring up sort of a framework that I got from an exec coach who said that executive talent, irrespective of technical domain, has three core skills to it, which are visionary evangelism, relationship building, and management of execution. When you hear that, you're like, oh, all of those matter.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  Like, yeah, they all matter. But ultimately, I think individuals have varying kind of sort of degree of these. And so I ask them to stack rank it and ask them to sort of tell me about their superpower. I also, I think what's very revealing is our weaknesses tend to not be random. I think there almost always are strengths or our superpowers over-applied or kind of like, you know, over-applied. And so I'll ask people about like the shadow of their strengths. Tell me about the failure mode. Like, yeah, you have the superpower, great, but how does it fail you?

• 44:51Speaker 01

  I'll ask them about whatever they put third. So how do you mitigate that? You know, talk, talk me how, great, this is not your superpower, so what do you do? How do you, how do you get that? So kind of every question, even if it's not specifically about like self-awareness in some sense, is giving me a signal. Another thing I found very useful is to have somebody share their last 360 with me.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  And actually, essentially, even asking somebody to share it tells you a lot. You know, some people kind of like really bristle. And they're like, what do you mean? Like, I guess that's so context specific. Like, what could you ever, you know, get from that? Like, I don't actually, I don't know if I can share that with you like as company property. And you're like, okay. As opposed to be like, oh, I don't even need to share it. Do you want to just hear? I've had the same review my whole career. I can tell you exactly what's on there. And I've, and I've wrestled with it and like, man, it's fucking hard. It's tough that I still get the same thing, but like, that's me. You want to hear it? And like, they just bang it out.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  That I think says a lot. So, yeah, I, I care a lot about self-awareness. I think it is key to being an effective leader. And I think leadership is key to sort of like healthy, effective institutions.

• 46:07Auren Hoffman?

  For certain strengths, I think most people are really good at evaluating them. Like, if you ask someone, like, where do you rank on IQ? Or something. I think most people would have a pretty good understanding of where they rank on IQ. And if they say they're the top 10%, they're probably in the top 25%. Like, they, whereas like, if you ask someone, where do you rank on EQ? I think people would have, like, they have no, like, if someone says they're in the top 10%, they're probably somewhere in the top 90%. Like, it's just like, it's not indicative at all of where they fall.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  You may hang out with a disproportionate number of, like, aspy, low EQ people in life. And so your sample may be, may be biased.

• 46:55Auren Hoffman?

  Those, those are the people I think that are very accurate in EQ because they, they rate themselves very low. But whenever I see someone, like, most people, like, if you ask most people, where do you rank on EQ? Most people will say, I rank in the top 10%, 15%. Even if they ranked in the, you know, in the bottom 50%.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  I find people's self-assessment in general is terrible. Like, we're all, we're Americans, right? We're above average in everything.

• 47:20Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, uh, you know, and I probably would be at fault of all of that, too. So. I tend to not ever ask sort of directly like that.

• 47:30Auren Hoffman?

  What I found is I remember one person I worked with for many, many, many years. And we did the 360. And there was always this like huge glaring weakness in the 360. And then we would spend like our entire one on one talking about this weakness. And I remember like after the fourth year, you know, like I love working with this person. Like they're never going to be better at this thing. And by the way, that's like totally fine. Like, why am I even talking to this person? Like it's a waste of my time. It's a waste of their time. It's making them feel bad. It's like, it's like, it's so stupid to even talk about this. Like they're never going to get better at this, but they're so great. Like, why not, why not just focus on their strengths or something?

• 48:12Speaker 01

  So, I mean, I give this speech to my execs. Um, you know, they get a very detailed 360. We, you know, interview their reports, their peers, me. Sort of, you know, it's like probably a 20 page doc full of notes that they get. And before they read it, I say, hey, look, remember this is not a to do list. It's a mirror.

• 48:34Auren Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Now it's on you and me as your manager to sort of go through it and identify the things that you want to focus on. And that may very well be doubling down on a strength. It may be sort of saying, look, I'm hearing this feedback and I recognize this tension and I'm at peace with it. Because what I'm solving for is more important and is worth it. So I really don't believe that your 360 gives you a to do list. I think a good 360 gives you a mirror. And that then helps you think about, okay, as a leader here with goals and priorities and whatever, what should I be spending my time working on? And often it's a, it's a doubling down on some good things and I'm saying, okay, fuck, like this is bad.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  I like, and I wasn't aware about this and I can fix it. And so I'm going to spend some time and yeah, that's how it should be.

• 49:26Auren Hoffman?

  You know, you guys are a remote first company.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 49:30Auren Hoffman?

  To me means you have to be a way better manager. Like it's way harder to manage in remote first. But.

• 49:39Auren Hoffman?

  What else does, how else, or we could talk about that, or how else does an organization have to like change radically to work while there?

• 49:46Speaker 01

  I feel lucky that the sort of like cultural attributes about Thumbtack enabled effective virtual work.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  And I think it's total happenstance. I think a couple of things. One is we have a really high trust culture. And so it's sort of extremely values aligned and with that has an extremely high degree of trust, very low politics, no BS. You can be really straightforward. People don't think, take things personally. So I think that's critical because otherwise there's a lot of distrust when you're remote. And I'm like, hey, I don't know this person as well. I'm in the same room. I haven't broken bread.

• 50:19Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's hard to build those, it's hard to build trust without like spending, going to lunch with people and, or being in the same room with them.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  So that's key. Two, we have a very explicit culture. We write shit down. We have values. We have principles. We like, yeah, are declarative. I think there are many cultures, particularly sort of younger companies, where everything is sort of like organic and sort of ephemeral. And that's fine. There's benefits to that. We happen to be one that likes to document and likes to be explicit. And I think that is really beneficial when it comes to online virtual work. And then the last thing is I do think we really care about like management and leadership and therefore have invested in practices where I think it aids this kind of work.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  Like, you know, you'd hear execs like, man, I don't even know what everybody's doing anymore. It's like, what do you mean? You didn't have a system of like goals and accountability that kept your hundreds of people in check? It was just you walking around the floor? That was the system of accountability?

• 51:23Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  That's insane. That's embarrassing that you thought that was a real answer. And virtual work just expose it. It's not like. Yeah, so how clearly do you set goals? How well do you hire? How accountable do you hold people to their goals? How effective do you have? Is your performance management kind of culture? And all these things, I think, get magnified in a virtual context. And again, I think played to our strengths. Luckily, or excitedly, I would say. I think these are the things that also support an agentic evolution.

• 52:00Auren Hoffman?

  Exactly, because like you need to have documentation. You need to have like, it's actually a lot easier to go from remote to AI. They go from in person to AI because there's all these things that are not, that are kind of like in people's heads when you're in person.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 52:14Auren Hoffman?

  When you're remote, you're like, at least, even if you don't like, even if you don't have documentation, like you're probably like in Slack. So you can just point the AI to Slack or something and just grab it all.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  It it's wild. And now the last trove of content, meetings, is now digitized and part of our corpus in a way that like, I didn't even realize how much we were losing. Like, you know, obviously you have people who took notes, they took action items, there were follow ups, there was a summary. So like, there was a human process to deal with this. But now there's just a digital note taker that takes perfect notes, that synthesizes it, gets uploaded to the repository. So it's connected with everything else and it can be used by humans, by agents, by anything else. And because we're virtual, what it means is the entirety of our kind of work stack is digital.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  There is not any part of it that is sort of, sort of offline, quote unquote. And that, I think, is a real advantage for this kind of wave of of work that's coming.

• 53:15Auren Hoffman?

  This is awesome. A few personal questions. Okay, first, your your parents are from Italy originally.

• 53:21Auren Hoffman?

  And there's, I know a ton of entrepreneurs, founders who are from France, Germany, UK, even Spain. But I just don't know that many who moved to Silicon Valley from Italy. Even Italy is like all these incredibly smart people like, is that true still? And like, why, why is that? Like, why, why do you see more from, you know, Spain or France than you do from Italy and in Silicon Valley at least?

• 53:49Speaker 01

  I mean, we're praying mama's boys more than any of those. And I mean, I think the meeting Italian lives at home until they're 40.

• 53:57Auren Hoffman?

  No, is that still true?

• 53:59Speaker 01

  I think it's more true than ever, sadly. Yeah.

• 54:02Auren Hoffman?

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  So, look, it's again, the like.

• 54:05Auren Hoffman?

  By the way, Italy is just too awesome. Maybe it's just too awesome. Like, it's like, it's amazing when you show up there. Though Spain's pretty awesome, too. I don't know.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  The power of being so family-focused and community-focused is awesome. Like, there's real magic in that that we in America don't have. On the flip side is that closes you off from opportunity that you could go chase if you weren't prioritizing kind of staying close to home. So I'm thankful that my parents had this kind of wanderlust to them and sort of entrepreneurial bent to them. Because I think about it all the time, like, you know, I could have grown up there and I would have had a fine, happy life, but I would not have had the opportunities that I had here.

• 54:46Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, absolutely. Okay, two more questions we ask all of our guests. First is, what is a conspiracy theory that you believe?

• 54:53Speaker 01

  I'm shocked at how many people believe in conspiracy theories, given that when you look backwards, like, you know, doesn't seem like there's that many that turned out to be that right.

• 55:03Auren Hoffman?

  You don't think so?

• 55:04Speaker 01

  Like what? What's top of that list?

• 55:06Auren Hoffman?

  It seems like there's always these conspiracies, you know, to do things or you look, whether it's the, you know,

• 55:15Auren Hoffman?

  going like the CIA funding, like some arts thing in France or something in the 50s and it turned out to be true. Or it's like, there seems to be all these kind of like interesting conspiracies where like in business, people conspiring to, you know, do a lobby for this so they could, you know, or.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  I guess I don't think that's like people acting in their own self-interest. Like, that's not some.

• 55:39Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, well, that's kind of like what a conspiracy is, right? It's a bunch of people getting together.

• 55:44Speaker 01

  Are aliens real?

• 55:45Auren Hoffman?

  Moving the levers behind the scenes to act in their own interest, but don't want people to know that they're acting in their own interest.

• 55:51Speaker 01

  So that's, to me, is a very different question. I do very much believe in elites and that we live in a world that. Ultimately is controlled by some faction of elites. It's not a singular class. It's not one group of people everywhere. But when you look at the locuses of power, whether in politics or tech or wherever, it's shockingly few people in those seats. And

• 56:17Auren Hoffman?

  Do you think that number is shrinking or growing?

• 56:20Speaker 01

  In aggregate, it's probably growing within any one industry or place. Maybe not. And it's sort of like, there's just like more of these. But yeah, look, I'm

• 56:33Speaker 01

  I'm not that conspiratorial. At the end of the day, I think people are self-interested in sort of normal and predictable ways. And that explains a lot. And I think the government is terrible at keeping secrets. And I think groups of humans are terrible at keeping secrets. So yeah, I tend to think there's sort of less there that meets the eye.

• 56:57Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, great. Last question we ask all of our guests. What conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

• 57:05Speaker 01

  I don't think you should pursue your passions just to pursue your passions. Like, your passions may be worthless and maybe, yeah, it's not enough.

• 57:14Auren Hoffman?

  I mean, as part of your career.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we tell that to young people too much. And again, it's like, not irrelevant, but it's not enough. And, you know, I think pursuing your passions as a way to meet passionate people is amazing. And to sort of share in that and that being part of your life. But that may not align necessarily with sort of your career or where your kind of work and vocation should go. And so I think, yeah, sort of

• 57:39Auren Hoffman?

  Like, I shouldn't like, I have a pickleball passion, but I might not be a pickleball career person or something, or start a pickleball club or something, or whatever.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  Like, how many kids grew up thinking they're going to be athletes? And part of that is just like, these are high status people in our society and kids aspire to be that. So that's normal. But I do think we probably lead sort of our children on collectively in this regard. So, yeah, I think

• 58:08Speaker 01

  People should be a little more practical.

• 58:10Auren Hoffman?

  This is awesome. Thank you, Marcos Abacosta, CEO of Thumbtack for joining us on Summation. It's been really, really fun. I knew it would be great. I knew it would be amazing, but this is even more amazing than I thought. So, thank you.

• 58:22Speaker 01

  Always great chatting. Good to see you, Orin.

• 58:24Auren Hoffman?

  One more thing before we go. I read a blog called Summation. It's the same as this podcast. The blog is about non-obvious idea sharing on business, talent, data, longevity, and random contrarian takes. If you like the conversations on this show, you'll probably like the blog. It's free. New content comes out twice a month. You could subscribe at orin.substack.com. That's orin.substack.com.