Mental Models That Change How You Think | Bill Gurley

Bill Gurley spent years on Wall Street, built his career as a partner at Benchmark, worked through Uber’s hypergrowth era, and now serves on the board of the Santa Fe Institute, where he studies complexity and systems thinking. In this episode, Bill shares the mental models he returns to most, including systems thinking, second- and third-order effects, and the importance of understanding both the bedrock of your field and the bleeding edge. He explains what separates great founders, why storytelling and product instincts matter, how he uses AI across different models, and what he sees coming in open source, China, stablecoins, tokenization, payments, and venture capital. ------ Timestamps: (00:00) Key Mental Models (02:02) Investing Journey and Key Players (05:21) Knowing the Bedrock of the Industry (08:50) Obsessive Learning in Founders (10:04) The Silent Edge (11:44) Surprising AI Use (13:13) The Future of AI Models (14:17) Global AI Regulation (18:12) Impacts of AI on Investing (19:53) Are There Limitations on Training AI Models? (23:04) Would You Sit in the Back Seat While Your Tesla Drives? (24:15) Non-Consensus Opinions (24:53) Are We Overfunding this Buildout? (29:40) The Role of Retail Investors and Tokenization (34:26) What is a Stablecoin? (37:58) Competitive Mode: Visa and Mastercard (39:55) AI and Debt Analysis (45:05) The Craft of Storytelling and Writing (48:07) Founder Advantage: Product Instinct (50:12) Real World Lessons from Working With Uber (52:10) Inside Benchmark’s Success (59:42) What is Success for You? ------ Newsletter: The Brain Food newsletter delivers actionable insights and thoughtful ideas every Sunday. It takes 5 minutes to read, and it’s completely free. Learn more and sign up at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠fs.blog/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------ Follow Shane Parrish: X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/shaneparrish⁠ Insta: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/farnamstreet/⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/shane-parrish-050a2183/⁠ Follow Bill Gurley LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billgurley/ X: https://x.com/bgurley?lang=en Check out Runnin’ Down a Dream: How to Thrive in a Career You Actually Love ------ Thank you to the sponsors for this episode: +CoinShares: Delivering Reason to Digital Asset Investing. ⁠https://coinshares.com/⁠ +Granola AI, The AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings: https://www.granola.ai/shane Check out the Granola Notes +HeyGen is a message-first AI video platform that helps people and AI agents turn ideas into professional video in minutes. Try for free at https://www.heygen.com/tkp +LMNT: My go-to zero sugar electrolytes — get a free LMNT Sample Pack here: DrinkLMNT.com/TKP Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We do live in a world where information is really cut up, but we also live in a world where you can have access to more information than you ever could.

• 0:10Shane Parrish?

  What are the key mental models that you keep coming back to that sort of explain how the world works to you?

• 0:16Speaker 00

  I'm a big believer in systems thinking. There's a, there's a book called Thinking in Systems that I read.

• 0:21Shane Parrish?

  What does that mean to think in systems?

• 0:23Speaker 00

  I'm on the board of the Santa Fe Institute. The Santa Fe Institute studies complexity theory. I would describe complex systems as multi-variable nonlinear systems. And multi-variable nonlinear systems are very hard to predict. They can behave one way for a long time and then one variable can switch and they can behave another way. The weather, stock markets, all these things. There's consequences that can be first, second, third derivative. And, you know, you, you can't just think with a linear model or just think one variable because things can, can go way off the path. Being aware that if you make a change here, it could change something here, which could change something there. And it has to be the whole system.

• 1:05Shane Parrish?

  How does that help you when you're solving problems or thinking about stuff?

• 1:09Speaker 00

  I think it keeps you out of trouble because you can avoid consequences that you might find out later. You know, I was, I was talking to a guy that worked at one of the large dating sites. They had this, this idea, making the profile longer would lead to more engagement. Simple, you know, heuristic. And they tested it and it was true. And so they rolled it out. They found out many, many months later that it, it was negative for conversion. Like when people knew more at that level.

• 1:42Shane Parrish?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:43Speaker 00

  And so, but, but you find that out way later. There's my point about like a second derivative effect. And so you just gotta, you gotta be really conscious of the consequence and not get too deterministic about a single metric or a single variable. And know what's important and what's on top.

• 2:02Shane Parrish?

  What was the process you took to go about learning the craft of investing? And who are the mentors and peers that played a role in that?

• 2:09Speaker 00

  So because I started on Wall Street, you know, and not in venture directly, I got caught up in all the people you would expect, you know, around.

• 2:22Speaker 00

  Wall Street and stocks. And so, you know, that starts with Peter Lynch, One Up on Wall Street, you know, bestselling book, probably the first book I read about investing, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Burton McKay, All the Buffett Letters, you know, Ben Graham. Once you read Buffett, you have to read Ben Graham. And so, and then Howard Marks, who's just incredible. And you were talking about the purpose of your podcast, those, those people have spent their whole career assembling their thoughts and publishing them, you know, along the way. So, so that, those were the ones that I read everything. I think it had a very strong kind of bedrock of financial understanding.

• 3:02Shane Parrish?

  It's, it's interesting because as you're saying that, I'm thinking like value investing, and then you went into non-value investing in a way, right? Like, how did that translate? How did what Buffett said translate into seed investing and sort of venture investing?

• 3:17Speaker 00

  I think having a firm understanding of the bedrock is super valuable. And then, when you recognize the need to innovate on top of it, it's just really good to have that foundation. I have an incredible peer in this guy, Mike Mobison. I don't know if you've heard of him, but he's a writer of financial books. We started at First Boston. He had probably been there a year, year or two ahead of me. So it, you know, just super fortunate that I landed in the same place as him. And we've been lifelong friends since then. He introduced me to a gentleman named Bill Miller, who ran Legg Mason and had this like 15 year run of beating the S and P, one of the most famous investors of all time.

• 4:00Speaker 00

  And he claimed to be a value investor, and he was the largest shareholder of Amazon for a very long period of time. And what he would say, I'm getting back to your question, he would say that, you know, value just means that the asset is underpriced relative to what you think it will be worth in the future. I spent a lot of time talking with Bill about network effects. And if you believe in that, then Amazon might be able to grow at a unreasonable growth rate for a very long period of time, which he believed. And so that, that's how you get there. But yeah, I, I, I've often thought that many of the... VCs in Silicon Valley would benefit from having a better understanding of finance. And one other answer to your question about how it becomes valuable.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  You know, I've always thought of Wall Street as the buyer of the product that venture capitalists create because of the eventual liquidity is either an M and A or an IPO. And now the price is being set by that group and that institution. So if I know what they value, even if we're starting at a very early place, two people on a PowerPoint, you're still thinking about when this thing grows up, is it going to be something they're excited about?

• 5:14Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, the trajectory matters more than the starting place.

• 5:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's where you're going to end. That's the out, that's the output at the end of the day.

• 5:21Shane Parrish?

  What does it mean to know the bedrock of the industry? We live in a world where people skim, they want the gist of things, they want, give me the summary, give me the executive summary.

• 5:31Speaker 00

  I'm going to tell you a story. So my partner at Benchmark, Alex Balkanski, would go to this charity auction that I think Andre Agassi would run in, in Vegas. And one year he bought a dinner with John Lasseter, the creative genius behind Pixar. And we go to John's house and he serves us in his movie studio, he serves us in his viewing room, a 10 course meal. And each piece of the meal is tied to a classic cartoon that he believed was, was super important to understanding animation. And he would show it and he would talk through it and explain it.

• 6:16Speaker 00

  And you see that and you're like, holy crap, like he knows more about the history, you know? And, and then here's another data point that I just love. There's a, you know, world chess tournament and they take a break and run a trivia contest and Magnus Carlsen wins the trivia contest and it's all about the history of chess. We do live in a world where information is really cut up, but we also live in a world where you can have access to more information than you ever could. And that's even more true now with L L Ms. I mean, you could just sit there, you have an hour drive and you could sit there and talk to OpenAI and learn about anything you want to. And I think more

• 6:58Speaker 00

  people would benefit by studying the history of whatever field they're in. There's another one that we mentioned is Picasso was a wildly successful realist painter by the time he was 14. If you go to the Barcelona Museum, you can see that. And I don't think anyone that looks at his Cubist paintings would intuit that that was true. And then one last thing I would just say about this, and I think this is broadly applicable to almost anyone in any career. Imagine, let's just pick a field. I'm going to pick marketing. All right. Imagine you're interviewing for a job at P and G or Pepsi out of college, and there's 20 people there, and you're the one that understands the masters of marketing

• 7:43Speaker 00

  more than the others, and you're able to bring that up in the interview. Isn't that wildly differentiating?

• 7:49Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, totally.

• 7:51Speaker 00

  I can't, I can't imagine how it would land on me if I that I met that person. And and yet, other than fields like, I think in like, literature, you probably, everyone studies the greats, but in these other fields, it's not a practice. And I just think it would be like remarkably differentiating for people to walk around with the history of their field.

• 8:13Shane Parrish?

  I had a friend who actually recommended to people that their college essays do that when their admissions essays talk about, like, if they want to go into physics, talk about the forefathers of physics and, and show them, and like, you'll instantly create tons of contrast with everybody else.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  And you'll show a passion, like, it infers passion to want to know that. And then the other part I get into, if that sounds tedious, it's probably not the right, like, if it's tedious to learn that, this isn't a passion. Like, you're not in the right, I don't think you're in the right lane.

• 8:49Shane Parrish?

  So you've spent your life working with outliers, all these founders. Are there?

• 8:55Shane Parrish?

  Is that a common trait? And I mean, not just the the history of the field, but the details as well?

• 9:02Speaker 00

  I don't know if the history is a common trait. I would say that that a more common trait that's related in the entrepreneurial world is obsessive learning, like constant learning, because the disruptions that allow for the technology waves that allow for companies to be disruptive and take market share from an incumbent are all tied to something dynamic that's happening on the edge. And every entrepreneur that's exploiting that, it's AI right now, they're they're going home at night and reading everything they possibly can because the edge is moving and they need to be right there and they need to be a top one percentile person that understands this new thing that's happening.

• 9:47Speaker 00

  And today it's AI, but that was true of the mobile wave. Like, like when the mobile phone came out, there were no engineers that had written apps for mobile phones. And a few people got on that edge and figured out what that meant. And that requires obsessive learning on the edge.

• 10:04Shane Parrish?

  The way that I'm thinking about that, and maybe I'm coming at this wrong, is, you know, if I'm young and upcoming, I'm on that edge and I'm going to dive into it. But if I'm an incumbent, it's much harder to dive into that because it might mean it's the innovator's dilemma in a way, but it might mean giving up a previous decision I've made or saying that I've been wrong and going backwards. How do you think about that in terms of competition?

• 10:27Speaker 00

  I mean, I think that anybody in any field should want to be on, like, curious about the bleeding edge and what happens. And, you know, as a venture capitalist, you know, we're always definitely afraid that some new app's going to pop in the app store that we haven't seen. And so everything that comes up, I play with, I roll around. Right now I have like five premium AI accounts because I just don't want to miss something and you get trained that way. I think everyone should operate that way. I mean, it's kind of an interesting contrast. I'm suggesting you should understand the really old stuff, the history, because it's different. And shows a passion and it gives you a great frame of mind. But you also wanna really understand the new edge.

• 11:12Speaker 00

  If you do both of those things, like you're, I think you're a power player in your field, you know? And the, the second one is a great way for young people. That's another thing that could really differentiate you in an interview. If you're applying for that marketing job and you understand all the legends and the history, but you also really get TikTok, like that's super, like that's gonna be a very differentiated skill going into those companies and it matters, like it really matters, gives you a chance to shine.

• 11:44Shane Parrish?

  If I was to observe you use AI for a week, what would surprise me about the ways that you're using it?

• 11:50Speaker 00

  You often underestimate how much it can do. So you might ask it um to fi- identify the top 10 of something. And then you're gonna take those 10 and go study them, but you can say, identify the top 10, list their pros and cons, and then rank order them based on this dimension, and then rank order them again based on another. Like stuff you would have done later, you can just build into the prompt and it can, it can do more of the work earlier for you. Early on, I would often ask it for numbers and then I would go add them up and I'm like, oh shit, you can just tell it to do that part too.

• 12:24Shane Parrish?

  Do you find ChatGPT is the best one?

• 12:26Speaker 00

  I, I like the project structure and I'm being sucked into the memory element in that it knows who I am and it knows things about me. For, for restaurants and stuff, I've, I've been using Gemini just because it has all the Google review data and you can, you know, you, you don't just ask it which restaurants are good. You can say, what are three plates people rave about and what do people warn against? Like you can go deep into the menu, which I, I do all the time. You know, the coding people swear by Claude. And I met a guy this morning who says for finance, he prefers perplexity, but if he's doing deep research on companies or like.

• 13:07Speaker 00

  Companies and countries he doesn't know, he find Claude does better. So I think it's still a mix.

• 13:12Shane Parrish?

  Do you think we're going to end up with like one model that just sort of like dominates? Or do you think we're gonna end up with niche models and they're effectively going to be commodities in some way?

• 13:22Speaker 00

  I think it's highly dependent on how things play out. There are certain examples in the verticals, especially in the coding one, which is probably the largest vertical right now where people have swapped out models, you know, cursor even lets the the user pick the model that they're using. And as we move towards optimization and price optimization, which isn't really the objective function right now, but it will be in a few years, um, you may see more people try and do those swaps. I think the thing, you know, that could cut against that, if the regulation gets extremely difficult and mundane and expensive, that could actually lead to more oligopoly.

• 14:06Speaker 00

  And I think some of the players know that and are begging for regulation.

• 14:10Shane Parrish?

  Oh, because they want that because it's a protective mode.

• 14:12Speaker 00

  Pulls up the bar against, especially against the Chinese open source models.

• 14:17Shane Parrish?

  How do you think about regulation in the global sense? Just zooming out a little bit here. If if one country is regulated on AI and it slows them down effectively and another country is not regulated on AI and it speeds them up, like, how do you think?

• 14:29Speaker 00

  This has come up especially around copyright, you know, and if if if if our models all have to adhere to some special rule and there's already been settlements and whatnot. And the Chinese open source models don't, it it could have, it could have an effect. You know, it's very un, I'm very uncertain how the EU might rule in that type of situation. So I don't know, you know what I'm saying? I don't know how they might view it.

• 14:58Shane Parrish?

  How do you think about it from a systems point of view, just from like China seems they have four open source models now that are really good?

• 15:05Speaker 00

  By the way, this is a great, a great question, just to talk more about system thinking. So they have like 10 open source models. And so you have a situation where the competitive dynamic in China is more intense because it's more intense, everyone's chosen to go open source. And that creates a system that in my mind is capable of innovating far faster than the competitive system we have here. All the models learn from one another. You can actually have a model train another model or test another model. I'll use a simple metaphor, but imagine you have two societies and both agricultural societies and one of them, whenever all the farmers come to market, they just sell each

• 15:49Speaker 00

  other goods and then they go back. And the other society, when the farmers come to market, they're forced to share best practices with all the other farmers. Which, which one of those is gonna, gonna evolve faster?

• 16:02Shane Parrish?

  And open source allows me to see what they're doing, how they're doing it. Are they open sourcing weights too, or just the?

• 16:08Speaker 00

  Yes, and a lot of them are publishing how they figured it out, like new techniques and, and things like that. So it's more, it's way more dynamic.

• 16:16Shane Parrish?

  And does that help Western nations then too?

• 16:18Speaker 00

  Well, there's an irony that a lot of the startups are forking those models. And this will be a question of how regulation plays out and whether, you know, someone tries to stomp those out or not. I would say it's kind of a quiet secret, just because I haven't read it on the front page of, of the journal, that, you know, especially from a breadth standpoint, like a volume, the, the companies are using these models all over Silicon Valley.

• 16:43Shane Parrish?

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• 18:02Shane Parrish?

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• 18:12Shane Parrish?

  If AI is really going to change everything, or you have such a big impact, how does it change how you invest? When you look at a company, are you looking like this is a wrapper on AI? You're effectively like a calculator app on the iPhone? Or like, how do you think about that?

• 18:27Speaker 00

  I think that question is up for grabs, and it's a hot discussion between everyone. So, you know, if, if you believe that these models become near sentient, then there will be no need for a vertical model because this one model will just do everything. I've probably come down on the other side of that. I think that there are workflows and data moats that if you get, and also just understanding, like there's three or four legal startups in the AI space. They're just spending so much more time making sure they ingest all the case law and, and really understand, you know, the processes and principles there.

• 19:09Speaker 00

  And, and then you implement with them and they're writing stuff on your behalf and you're building new databases out of there. I just don't know that you then switch that to ChatGPT as they climb up the stack. But, and I'll take, I'll flip back to the other side. You know, they have talked about in their product groups, you know, going after verticals. So it's, I think it's a TBD. People point to Microsoft, you know, starting with the OS and then, you know, there were, there was Lotus one, two, three, and there was, I forget, I can't even, oh, there was a Word Perfect. Like, I can't remember the, the specific apps, but, you know, they eventually moved up the stack. That could happen. We're gonna see how it goes.

• 19:53Shane Parrish?

  Do you think there's limitations to how we're training the models now, which is sort of they're trained on all the data from the internet, including like, you know, Elon has the opposite approach where he's like, we're gonna take all the data and then we're gonna filter out clear untruths. We're gonna use that as the starting point versus the other?

• 20:10Speaker 00

  I do think that there is a valid argument that we might be running out of data, you know, that, that we're, I call it painting in the corners. Like, you know, just we've filled in everything. Right now, one of the most powerful solutions to improving the models is hiring experts, literally hiring experts for thousands of dollars an hour to, to sit in and fine tune and, and, you know, ask various hard questions and then tune them to, to be able to solve those. There's gotta be a limit to that. Like, where's the edge of, of human knowledge? So it's a big question, like, do, do we run into asymptotes or not?

• 20:51Speaker 00

  And part of it goes back to, do you believe these things can become super intelligent? At which point they start solving things that we've never imagined. There's a lot of debate about that.

• 21:03Shane Parrish?

  I mean, if, I guess the theory, correct me if I'm wrong, is like, the minute that they are super intelligent, they can effectively make themselves a little bit better. And at that point, you just, you enter a nonlinear curve.

• 21:15Speaker 00

  That, that's an argument that some people have made. I, I don't know that I believe it, but.

• 21:20Shane Parrish?

  Give me the other side of it.

• 21:21Speaker 00

  Rather than me stand on that hill, like, Jan, you know, Jan Le Cun, you know, makes that point. Like, he says that, that the next version of AI is not, it's not LLMs, it's, it's outside of LLMs, it's broader than LLMs, and that, that we're gonna run into a... A asymptote with these because they're language based and there's just a limit to what language, what you can capture with language is part of why they're not specifically great with math and numbers, right? There are much better people to talk about this than me, but there's a, people point to this famous game that Google, AlphaGo, where Google implemented and the

• 22:03Speaker 00

  bot eventually came up with a move that was shocking to all humans and that I forget the number, it's like a famous move number, whatever. And that is proof that they can innovate, you know, beyond what they're taught. The people that take the other side say that's a very constrained game and environment and the computers can search a field of possibilities that's impossible for a human to search because there's just too many. Right? And that that gives it the ability to find that move that that we didn't know about before. But in the real world, it's not constrained enough where you can tell it to walk all the possible paths.

• 22:46Speaker 00

  There's an infinite number of paths in a complex, in a big complex system. And by the way, those AI models aren't LLM based, like AlphaGo is not LLM based. It's a AI model trained to a very specific constraint system.

• 22:59Shane Parrish?

  And that was trained just by playing, is that true?

• 23:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. But and even FSD is, you know, at Tesla is a constrained environment. Like there's the inputs are the brake and the steering wheel and the gas pedal. And are those are the outputs, actually, the inputs are are all the visual data.

• 23:19Shane Parrish?

  It's scary good. I mean, I was telling someone the other day, I was like, I would be comfortable sitting in the backseat at this point with full self-driving. Like, I don't, I don't feel a need to drive anymore.

• 23:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:31Shane Parrish?

  What's your take on that?

• 23:32Speaker 00

  The corner cases.

• 23:33Shane Parrish?

  Would you sit in the backseat with your Tesla driving?

• 23:35Speaker 00

  The the corner cases are impossible to fathom at this, you know, right now. Yeah, maybe at some point. I mean, I certainly think if it were in a world that didn't have the randomness of the real world. So if you were in a geographic area where all of the cars were that, it'd be easier to to to go into that mindset. Is that we got humans that think it's fun to test people are jumping in front of these cars.

• 24:02Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 24:02Speaker 00

  Like that's, that's, that's not good.

• 24:04Shane Parrish?

  I was talking to Rory Sutherland. He's like, you can just have fun with this. They're gonna stop. You know they're gonna stop. And so like, you don't even have to look both ways now. What are the consequences of that?

• 24:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, that's not good.

• 24:15Shane Parrish?

  What do you, what opinions do you have today that are sort of non-consensus that you, you think are correct?

• 24:20Speaker 00

  Having spent a ton of time in China over the past 20 years, it's hard for me to adopt this mindset of vilification that's heavy amongst many in Washington and now many in Silicon Valley. The US is like three, four, five percent of the global population. American exceptionalism. When people utter that word, I always wonder like, imagine the other 95% of planet thinks when they hear someone say that, you know, that's probably a non-consensus viewpoint.

• 24:52Shane Parrish?

  Are there, do you think we're overfunding this build out? How do you think about that? I saw that smile on your face.

• 24:59Speaker 00

  I mean, it's such a hard question to know. If you told me five years ago that the, that these MAG7 would become worth $3 trillion and then turn around and take their free cash flow from 50 to 100 billion a year down near zero because they're gonna spend it all on CapEx, I'd have been like, no way. Like I wouldn't have believed it. So from a certain standpoint, I'm shocked that the money's this big. I will tell you that the venture capital community, you know, I mean, we talked earlier about increasing returns and, and that concept. And other people call it power laws, like when startups have become important in an ecosystem.

• 25:43Speaker 00

  And then they've been able to prove that they can grow and that, that growth might be a function of their size already or their footprint or their users. And that would include everyone from Google to Amazon to Meta. That they end up being worth way more than anyone thought. And I think the investor community writ large has slowly.

• 26:06Speaker 00

  Become aware of and believes it strongly in increasing returns and power loss. And so over time, if they all believe that they're going to be more willing to invest on the come and take risks. Right? That makes sense. That follows. And so, you know, someone forwarded me a chart this morning of the losses of the leading company in the field prior to going cash flow positive. And you look at, you know, what for, for, for Amazon, it was like two or three billion for Uber. It was like, you know, 15 billion. And now for these companies, it's going to be way bigger than that.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  And so the venture capital community as a whole is, is getting more risk seeking and taking on more risk because of their knowledge of how things have played out in the past.

• 27:00Shane Parrish?

  What do you think are, assuming we are overfunding, we haven't had a correction.

• 27:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, not, not really.

• 27:06Shane Parrish?

  Not like a mini one kind of like, and usually that, that weeds out sort of the weak competitors. The strong ones survive and.

• 27:14Speaker 00

  It depends. Yes. But it, but it can be, you know, if you look at what happened with the dot com crash, you know, there was a four year, three or four year lull before the Amazons of the world started climbing out again. You know, it was, it was like a nuclear winter. Like right now, there's so much optimism and belief in AI. Do you get to the place where there's very little, you know?

• 27:38Speaker 00

  I don't know. Some of the, the, these quote circular deals that people are talking about, enhance the probability that we'll have a correction, but also extend the time before we have one.

• 27:53Shane Parrish?

  Wait, how so?

• 27:54Speaker 00

  Yesterday at the Dealbook conference, Dario was asked about circular deals. And he goes, well, maybe people just don't understand. Let me explain how this works. You know, imagine you're a cloud service.

• 28:07Speaker 00

  Echoing what he said, imagine you're a cloud service provider and you notice that this company Anthropic wants to develop this model. It's going to cost maybe $5 billion, but they don't have that money. So you give them that money so that they can spend it. And I'm like, well, if you didn't give it to them, they wouldn't spend it. And so like the growth of everything is enhanced by the fact that you're giving money to companies to spend back on your service they wouldn't have otherwise. And so i- if you were in a more constrained environment where you didn't do that, things wouldn't be growing as fast. You inflate, you inflate what's happening.

• 28:48Shane Parrish?

  So you push further ahead faster?

• 28:51Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 28:51Shane Parrish?

  But there's still is likely to be sort of a culling of the weaker competitors.

• 28:56Speaker 00

  Look, first of all, i- if a company's successful, someone will knock on your door and try and give you more money. So like, almost every round is preemptive for successful companies. And when you take that much money, $300 million, the only way to spend it is to take your burn rate up. And I always thought of burn rate as a measure of risk. 10 years ago, like it was super risky to burn a million a month. You know, today, these companies are burning $5 billion a year. Like, like, you know, you, you're burning $100 million a month or more. Like, it's really hard, and this may go back to financial bedrock and whatnot. It's really hard to know what your unit economics are, when you're being that aggressive financially.

• 29:39Shane Parrish?

  Do you think things will change? Like, I, I wonder about the role of retail investors in this? Like, if you tokenize some of these assets, like, they might be competing with VCs in some way to fund some of these startups. How, how do you think about all of that playing out?

• 29:53Speaker 00

  Well, first of all, there is zero lack of fund availability right now, so.

• 29:58Shane Parrish?

  That's not the bottleneck.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:00Shane Parrish?

  But the pricing would change, right?

• 30:02Speaker 00

  There's no constraint.

• 30:03Shane Parrish?

  If you have more supply.

• 30:04Speaker 00

  This has kind of played out in the public markets. I mean, I think you look at, obviously, like, stocks like GameStop, but I, I think most people believe Palantir is a stock that retail investors really love and take it to a valuation that it's very hard for institutional investors to get their head around. So some of that has played out. Yeah, it's, it's, there's, there's a risk with tokenization, especially if it happens on assets that don't have regulation around financial disclosure, that you get a ton of speculation and even worse manipulation.

• 30:40Shane Parrish?

  Do you think that that would affect private companies if there was, like if somebody figured out a way legally to tokenize Stripe, for example, and the price of the Stripe share that's tokenized effectively fluctuates wildly?

• 30:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:53Shane Parrish?

  Do you think that has an impact on Stripe or its employees?

• 30:56Speaker 00

  Well, it would. One of the reasons they're staying private is so you don't have that dynamic.

• 31:01Shane Parrish?

  Because they have more control over sort of like the market cap pricing?

• 31:04Speaker 00

  When they do liquidity events for their employees, they sit down with a handful of investors they trust and they negotiate a price. And so it's done on a one-off basis. And I think, we're going back to the financial bedrock, the underlying asset probably does move around a lot. It's just, it never, it never gets recorded, so you don't see it.

• 31:25Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 31:26Speaker 00

  And that's, I think from the operator's standpoint, that's a benefit. Like, if you've heard any public company CEO, if their stock moves around a lot, it creates a lot of chaos for the employees who are owners who are wondering what it means. This has already started to play out, right? Robin Hood has announced they were going to do what you just said. And, and the companies, you know, threw up a, a, a strong argument that that would be illegal, like you don't have a right to do that. So we'll see how that plays out.

• 31:55Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, it's fascinating how all that plays out. Or you tokenize real estate and what effect that would have on.

• 32:00Speaker 00

  Look, I, I, I think that, and I've been outspoken on this, particularly around the IPO process, I think it is insanely unfair to the companies, the way they're forced to go through this process where the bankers pick the price and pick the shareholders. There's just no need to do that. If you took a freshman computer science student and a freshman finance student and said, you know, imagine how a company should go public, they would match supply and demand anonymously, like you would in any auction, and exactly the way a, a ICO works.

• 32:36Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 32:36Speaker 00

  With tokenization. No one would invent this thing where you cherry pick your best customers and give them this sweetheart price. No one would do that. So I do think. That Wall Street, because they just can't get out of their, they can't let go of this greedy power grab they have around the IPO. You know, we, we pushed direct listings for a while, which, which uses this auction mechanism and they could have embraced that, but they didn't. They've gone back to this kind of controlled oligopoly. I, I think that is an area where, where tokenization, like just merely getting to the first base of how the shares should be allocated, um, could be very disruptive. Stable coins could be very disruptive too,

• 33:21Speaker 00

  to credit cards.

• 33:22Shane Parrish?

  Well, go deeper on that.

• 33:24Speaker 00

  Most of the rest of the developed world, the governments, um, established a, a, an ability to do instant transfer from bank account to bank account and from bank account to a partner, retailer, whatever. UK Faster Payments did this 20 years ago. Recently, Argentina did it with PICS in the past six years and it quickly became 60, 70% of transactions. And precisely because of regulatory capture, the banks have kept our government from doing that. They've, the government wanted to, they have something called Fed Now, but there's massive pushback in the Finance Committee in Washington, so it never happens. And as a result, you know,

• 34:06Speaker 00

  we have credit cards that charge two, two and a half percent and a whole ecosystem of companies that live underneath that umbrella. If you have a Coinbase account, you can put your money in a USDC stablecoin and earn 4% and within seconds immediately transfer money to someone else for pennies.

• 34:26Shane Parrish?

  What is a stablecoin? Like, I'm totally naive here.

• 34:29Speaker 00

  It's a cryptocurrency that if the company's following the regulation, I believe that USDC is, is in fact doing that. Um, where they have, they have created a dollar for dollar holding in treasuries, US treasuries.

• 34:46Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 34:46Speaker 00

  For each. Each stablecoin that's represented.

• 34:50Shane Parrish?

  So that's kind of like the gold standard back to the dollar almost.

• 34:54Speaker 00

  Yes, but because it's on the crypto rails, which are now quite proven and quite fast and global and immediate. It gives you the ability for me to to give you or for a company to give a company or anyone

• 35:08Speaker 00

  a dollar, you know, immediately.

• 35:10Shane Parrish?

  Who holds the dollars in this case? Like, i- if a bank transfers a dollar to another bank, I I just in my head, I'm like, you know, it's it's an electronic transfer, but in reality, it's probably like there's a dollar actually transferring at some point.

• 35:25Speaker 00

  Well, no one's taking a physical cash dollar, right? Like, that's all. It's all digital anyway, right? In America, if I want to send you fifty bucks digitally, I've got to go through ACH, which is three day settlement, which is part of this regulatory capture bullshit. In in in Argentina now, it's immediate because of PICS, but.

• 35:44Shane Parrish?

  So we don't actually need the three days. We do like the regulatory makes that happen.

• 35:49Speaker 00

  No, I can I can wire to you same day, but it costs me twenty five dollars and I have to fill out a page of forms and I might have to do a verbal commit with my bank.

• 35:58Shane Parrish?

  So the way around that is stablecoins because you're really just working around the regulation.

• 36:02Speaker 00

  Same, same, yes. And credit cards, which costs two and a half percent, but this, there's no reason that it should. And once again, these other countries, which include UK, Australia, India, China, Argentina, they've all done this, but we never did it and probably won't. Like, I, at this point, I think stablecoins will get there faster than than the government will will be able to do it.

• 36:29Shane Parrish?

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• 37:13Shane Parrish?

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• 37:57Shane Parrish?

  How do you think about the competitive mode of Visa and Mastercard?

• 38:01Speaker 00

  I think they will be heavily threatened by this. And historically, what they've done, and by the way, those two companies have two of the highest operating margins in the history of business. They have like 60% operating margins and they're duopolies and they were created by the banks and the banks have a stake in it. So it's like the whole industry is, is kind of stuck in this world where they make a lot of money because it is this way. But there's zero reason why it should cost two or 3%, just zero. And it will change. In China, because they had this digital immediate transfer,

• 38:42Speaker 00

  Alibaba and Tencent were able to very quickly build digital wallets that people carry around. And so if you walk around China, if you want to buy a hat from a street vendor or a car, you know, in a Huawei store, you use WeChat Pay and Alipay for everything. You scan a QR code, like at a checkout of a restaurant, like you can just pay at your table, there's a QR code on the table. You just take your WeChat Pay or Alipay and scan it and you're done, like one click. So they've innovated their entire payment system way further than we have because, because of this, the decision by the government to make money transfer easy.

• 39:30Shane Parrish?

  And that means like no three day settlement.

• 39:33Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly.

• 39:34Shane Parrish?

  And it doesn't necessarily mean stablecoin. It just means.

• 39:36Speaker 00

  That's true. I just think because they waited so long in the US, you know, this Fed Now project has been just out there forever, that that the threat becomes this new thing. And especially with the momentum, the crypto momentum in Washington, that could change with the new administration.

• 39:55Shane Parrish?

  As you were talking about that, I was also thinking about Moody's and AI. And I was like, oh, Moody's, you know, basically they sold analysis on debt.

• 40:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:04Shane Parrish?

  How do you think AI changes their competitive position? Because like in theory, AI would be able to do that better than or equal to Moody's, which also makes great margins.

• 40:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think Moody's power comes from the fact that um that it's a standard and everybody trusts it as a standard.

• 40:22Shane Parrish?

  Right. So even if they used AI on the backend, they're still the.

• 40:26Speaker 00

  The, yeah, the the watermark. Yeah, someone could pop up. I mean, there's been a lot of talk about these companies like ISS that that that tell shareholders how to vote. That came up yesterday

• 40:39Speaker 00

  at at the Dealbook conference and whether or not AI could solve that problem as well. It's possible. Yeah, I mean, I think everything's up for grabs.

• 40:47Shane Parrish?

  What do you think about independent sort of like services like that, that that offer advice on how to vote your shares?

• 40:54Speaker 00

  Oh, I think in the US, it's gotten to a really bad place because of the rise of the index funds. The index funds, and this is why they're asking Larry Fink about it at BlackRock, like they don't, the index funds don't have the time to truly evaluate the what the vote should be in these situations. And so the they rely on these services, but these services have been built. They play this game that that that. It's not particularly settling, but they they score you, but they score you with a black box. They don't tell you how they score you.

• 41:31Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 41:32Speaker 00

  And guess how you can learn more? You you hire them.

• 41:36Shane Parrish?

  Yes.

• 41:36Speaker 00

  So they get paid on both sides and it's just it's more of a heist, I think, than anything else. And I'm I've I've spent some time talking to I don't know that they they they they got focused on issues that weren't shareholders' interest, like what what's like which they really care about is is um what what's best for shareholders.

• 42:00Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 42:00Speaker 00

  And and they got away from that. Um, the the Tesla case is a great example, that that package, that type of package that they did for Elon. I've said this, you know, publicly. I would agree to that type of package for every company I've ever worked with, and most CEOs wouldn't take it. Uh, it basically says you don't make money unless the stock goes way up. And if you stock goes way up, you make an obscene amount of money. And I would do that deal over and over and over and over again. None of these ISS like evaluators agree with that. Like, they just, in fact, they take the opposite. They say, oh, no, that's a negative. We should vote against it.

• 42:42Shane Parrish?

  Is it just because they're looking at the headline number and they're like, that's egregious? Not like, yeah, what's required to make that happen?

• 42:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, and they started from a place of corporate governance where they were looking out for fraud. And so so risk mitigation rather than shareholder interest. And so when you come at it from that perspective, you're like, there should be rules and people should adhere to the rules. And when people get outside of the rules, that's bad. I think that's their legacy.

• 43:12Shane Parrish?

  What do you think are sort of the second order effects of the rise of passive? Like we've been indexing, which is mostly post the GFC. How do you think it plays?

• 43:22Speaker 00

  Well, this is one of those things like this. This wouldn't be a problem were not for because it's the large number of shares held by the the passive. One one thing that would be really great is if they just wouldn't vote. Um, because then the people that are active shareholders would have more of a say in what happens with these companies. But there's they own such a large percentage.

• 43:46Shane Parrish?

  There's also an argument that they should have to vote in the same proportion that direct holders vote.

• 43:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, if they didn't vote, that would happen just by natural because the the vote would just be might be more like how unfortunately how voting works in America where you only have like a 20% turnout, but.

• 44:04Shane Parrish?

  The second order factor that like I could have controlled the company with a very small share.

• 44:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. At first, I think the public investors got really scared because they were marked to the index and they ended up doing what people call closet indexing.

• 44:19Shane Parrish?

  Yep.

• 44:19Speaker 00

  To make sure that they didn't lose out. And like when the mag seven took off, if you didn't own those, like you had a bad year as an example. And so you're forced to kind of closet index. But they were they had kind of reached a point where they think the number of active investors is so few that the ability to get an edge is maybe increased as a result of the of the massive indexing.

• 44:48Shane Parrish?

  Do you believe that?

• 44:49Speaker 00

  I don't know. I mean, it's it's the buy side. It's a very hard job like to to beat the S and P. Some people have even highlighted the fact that, you know, QQQ has probably outperformed 80 or 90% of venture funds.

• 45:05Shane Parrish?

  One of the surprising things that I learned about you through reading your book was that you love the craft of storytelling and writing.

• 45:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:13Shane Parrish?

  Talk to me about what you've learned about storytelling over the years and because that's really important to founders. It's really important to anybody trying to get a message out in today's world.

• 45:22Speaker 00

  Someone asked me like the top three traits of founders that are successful and I put storytelling in there. There's another thing that happened, you know, when I prior to going to business school, I didn't read much, but some bit flipped when I was in business school, I started reading and I I started with business books that most people know. I got into personal development books, which I find a lot of successful people have this moment in their life where they roll through. You know, Dale Carnegie and

• 45:52Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:53Speaker 00

  Like Seven Habits and stuff like that. Um, and then, and then biographies. Uh, but, but after that, I, I've, I've kind of fell in love with, with long form nonfiction journalism that reads in an exciting way. And part of it was the wave that was Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Lewis and John Krakauer and those books that read like fiction, you know, even though they're nonfiction. And there's actually multiple books written on that art. It's called The New Journalism and The New New Journalism. I've read those books about that writing. And I just find it super powerful that someone can maybe put together 20 pages that like

• 46:37Speaker 00

  really impacts you in a certain way. And so I started studying the craft, studying Buffett and Howard Marks and seeing these investors that were successful, like putting their stuff out there. If I was thinking through a problem about a new, most of my most successful investments fall in this category, people call marketplaces. And before there was a first marketplace, like there wasn't a knowledge base. And, you know, we crafted that along the way and codified it and wrote it down. And that, in addition to helping you think through all the corner cases, and that's

• 47:18Speaker 00

  exactly why Bezos has his six-page letter concept at Amazon. He, he believes that if you have to write it out and make it stand alone and be cogent, that you'll think through more of the, the problems and you'll, it'll be more cohesive and it'll, it'll, um, you, you'll figure out the loose ends and you'll tie them up. Um, and it's, but in addition to that, in the venture world, for the founder that doesn't know you, when they see your knowledge on a subject or they see what you're talking about in their own business, they reach out to you. So it becomes a calling card.

• 47:56Shane Parrish?

  It's like a magnet.

• 47:57Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 47:57Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 47:57Speaker 00

  And I, I'm not the only one that's done it. A lot of people have done it. And some people don't use that technique. There's other ways to, to get deal flow, but it's powerful if, if you do it right.

• 48:07Shane Parrish?

  You mentioned storytelling. What are the other, you know, chosen unfair advantages that founders have? You said there's three.

• 48:16Speaker 00

  Oh, right. And I thought of a fourth one. I hope I can remember it. I think product instincts is another one that that comes partially from understanding the new edge, which we already talked about. But like, it probably took my whole career for me to fully understand how hard it is to hire someone who's not a product first individual and then get them to be good at it. I'm sure there are examples, but it's got to be 5% or less of the use case.

• 48:48Shane Parrish?

  Super hard.

• 48:50Speaker 00

  So storytelling is so important because in the founder case, you're recruiting employees, you're recruiting executives, you're raising money, you're closing customers, you're closing partnerships, you're selling all the damn time. And the best ones are just super effective at it. And you can see it with Bezos, you can see it with like Toby at Shopify. I mean, God, like, listen to any Toby podcast you possibly can. Like, of course, the world's going to follow this guy, Daniel Ek. Like, they're just so gifted at describing what they're trying to do, you know? And that's, that's just, just, you know, super, super valuable.

• 49:35Speaker 00

  I once asked Jeff Bezos, have you had such a successful angel portfolio? You don't have any free time. And he says, oh, when I meet an entrepreneur, there's only one thing I ask myself. Is this person going to do this no matter what? Come hell or high water, they're doing this. Like, they're just already convinced that this is so important, they're not going to stop. And I think that level of determination is present in all the great founders. Like, they're just going at it, you know, full blast.

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• 50:40Shane Parrish?

  What are the, what are some of the real world lessons you learned while working with Uber that you wouldn't find in like an HBS case study?

• 50:49Speaker 00

  Well, that's, that's an easy answer to get to quickly, although now, because I had, I had a moment in my brain where, where that exact phrase you just said popped into my brain. We were, you know, in a situation where I think most people that were investing in the category knew it had winner take all dynamics and network effects. And as a result, there was this determination that they were just going to have to fund it kind of ad nauseam. And you had a situation where the burn rates, you know, where, okay, well, someone hands lifts a billion dollars, well, then we get handed 3 billion.

• 51:34Speaker 00

  And so, and, and, and once again, the only way to compete in that world is to spend that money. And so you have these burn rates that are bigger than any public company would ever spend going after a new category and, and so aggressive. And I thought to myself at the moment, there is no HBA case study. You could take the board members from Walmart and Costco and GM and, and General Electric or whatever you consider the top 10 best companies, and they would have never been in this situation before. So there was no, there was no one to call. There is no, there's no mentor to go find, which was.

• 52:16Speaker 00

  Horrifying a bit to recognize you're in that situation. But now, all the AI companies are in that situation. So I, I feel for them.

• 52:25Shane Parrish?

  Uber was kind of the first in the, in the.

• 52:28Speaker 00

  In the mega burn. Yeah, I mean, why Amazon was, you know, they, they had a big burn rate, but then Uber took it to a new level. Um, but now it's had, they've added a zero.

• 52:41Shane Parrish?

  I'm curious from the, like, how Benchmark was structured on the inside and how that structure contributed to its success.

• 52:49Speaker 00

  I've talked about this a lot. I, I was very fortunate to get invited into Benchmark. I was, I, I joined on the third fund, so I wasn't there early. Um, they had left, the founders of Benchmark had been at hierarchical firms where they felt like the senior patriarchs were maybe taking too much of the money and too much of the credit and not doing the work that was imperative for the firm's success. Um, most partnerships, you know, you think law partnerships or accounting firm partnerships work in a way where the, the senior people have more power and take more of the economics

• 53:33Speaker 00

  and the junior people have to work their way up over a long period of time. The founders decided at Benchmark that they were just going to make it equal, an equal partnership. And there's no, there's no lead partner, there's no king, there's no president. There's just five equal partners.

• 53:51Shane Parrish?

  So what are the second and third order consequences?

• 53:53Speaker 00

  There's a bunch of them, and I think most of them are positive. The first thing is it makes it very easy to recruit exceptional talent from other firms because they're not in that situation and you immediately. And I was at a firm that was hierarchical and, you know, even if you went back and said, well, I'm going to leave to go to this equal partnership and they said, oh, we'll make you equal. Well, you did it because I was leaving, not because it works that way.

• 54:18Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 54:19Speaker 00

  That's one. The second one is it. Really encourages development of the new people that come in because I'm gonna take an equal part of their success when they start delivering. And so I'm not, I want them to be super successful and I'm gonna spend time and I, boy, on my way in, I felt that, like, I just felt like, you know, and the type of support, if you're in a upper out firm, I bet it feels kinda lonely. I bet you know you're competing against that person over there. Are you gonna share ideas with them? Maybe, maybe not. Like, and in this equal partnership,

• 55:00Speaker 00

  you know, if one of my companies needs a new CFO and they know of one, they'll probably just give it to me right away. My company succeeding is no different than their company succeeding. So you just create a different dynamic and you don't spend any time annually on comp review and recutting the pie. You don't, like, it's all, it's always equal, it's always gonna be equal. Like, that amount of political overhead just goes away. There is, there's one huge negative, so I don't wanna just say it's all, it's almost impossible to have, because you don't have a CEO, it's hard to scale out

• 55:42Speaker 00

  and it's hard to have new initiatives. Like, because there's no, oh, maybe we should, you know, the website was always a funny one, like, who's gonna own the website? Well, are we gonna hire, you know, someone to do that? And who owns that responsibility? Yeah. And when Matt Kohler came in, he had, he's like, oh, man, I'll take it on. I love, I know exactly what we need. He created this super complicated website and it had all the founders on it and now they're connected to all the partners and, and people started complaining because stuff wasn't right. And one day Matt came in. And he said, you know what? I'm taking it all down and I'm putting up a splash page. And he did that. He did that like, I don't know, 15 years ago.

• 56:26Speaker 00

  And still today, Benchmark has a single page. And that's a result of this issue that I'm describing.

• 56:32Shane Parrish?

  Well, you know, it's interesting you say that because I find a lot of websites have such a high cognitive load to use. A splash page with like, you know, four or five sentences or Berkshire Hathaway's website. I totally get it. I don't, there's not a lot of cognitive, like if I, you know, I heard this example from a guy a couple of weeks ago. He's like, if I'm going to buy a sweater, I don't want to know your mission statement. Like, I just want to buy a sweater.

• 56:56Speaker 00

  There's a little bit of bespoke confidence in, in just having a splash page. I would just add that there are plenty of highly successful venture firms that aren't structured that way. And so I don't, it's not, I'm not saying it's the only way to do it. It's clearly, there are clearly many ways to do it.

• 57:12Shane Parrish?

  In a world awash with capital, what makes a founder choose Benchmark or somebody else? Like, what goes into that?

• 57:21Speaker 00

  First of all, at a high level, if you're successful as a venture capitalist, people want to work with you. You know, when I came in, you know, the Mike Moritz, you know, John Doerr, like they've had so much success that, that not only, you know, is it likely that they are, are great at what they do and know people that will help your company succeed, but their stamp of approval of you will carry weight in and of itself. And so there, some people have said it's the only investing category where there are network effects because once you have a reputation, it, it, you have an unfair advantage in deal flow. Underneath that, I would, I would say founders are particularly motivated.

• 58:11Speaker 00

  To be around people who understand what they're doing and are excited by it and excited about it. And one of the reasons young people can break into venture and be wildly successful is they're much more likely to be the age of the founder. They're much more likely to feel

• 58:31Speaker 00

  someone that understands what they're doing. With with many of these technologies that are new, they're much more likely to understand them. And, you know, I I've used examples describing this in the past, but let's say you're a really into esports or something, you you it would be very easy to know more than the successful generalist venture capitalist in that category.

• 58:59Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 58:59Speaker 00

  Like, you could very quickly know more. And that could be true of of YouTube video creations. Like, it'd be very easy for a young venture capitalist to know more about what it takes to be successful on YouTube than John Doerr, or Mike Moritz, or me, or whoever. Like, because you could just go spend a hundred percent of your time on that.

• 59:23Shane Parrish?

  So so in that way, is it sort of like athletics, where you you age out in a way, and you're competing against younger people who know or understand a niche better? Or how?

• 59:32Speaker 00

  I I I think the the whole industry bends towards youth for that reason, and because it's a hustle business. Like, there there's, there's always a rock you haven't looked under. And, you know, age brings children and homes and and and

• 59:50Speaker 00

  other requirements you get tied to and responsibilities, and you're just not able to go spend eighty hours a week studying YouTube. Like, you just can't. Um, so I think it bends towards youth, um, which is great. Like, like, it's a, it's a highly competitive industry. It's hard to get a job. But if you get one, there are reasons why you can break in.

• 1:00:12Shane Parrish?

  We always end with the same question, Bill, which is, what is success for you?

• 1:00:17Speaker 00

  I'm a thing. I think it's changed over time. I would say when I look back on my venture capital career, I made a decision, a very specific decision to say, okay, I'm done. And, and I, I don't think I would have done that if I felt there was work left to do. I think I reached a point where I felt there wasn't any work left to do. So in that case, you know, that was my dream job. I was thrilled to do it. I loved every minute of it. I often said that I would, if we lived in a socialist society and everyone had to work for free, I would still take that job or the same salary or whatever.

• 1:00:56Shane Parrish?

  Might not be eating, but you'd be like.

• 1:00:58Speaker 00

  But that's now done. And so as I look forward, you know, I was very moved by this book Arthur Books wrote called Strength to Strength to Strength, where he talks about this next chapter in your life. I would like to take some of the techniques that I used to be successful as a venture capitalist, mostly around the blog and understanding problems and synthesizing and see if I can apply those techniques to bigger, broader problems in society and see if I can dent the universe a little bit that way.

• 1:01:35Shane Parrish?

  I love it. I wish you luck.

• 1:01:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, me too. Me too.

• 1:01:38Shane Parrish?

  Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:01:40Speaker 00

  Thanks for doing this. It's great.