20VC: Lux Capital's Scientist-In-Residence on Why We Cannot Just Be Specialists Today, The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Thinking & Computational Creativity That Makes Man and Machine Partners with Sam Arbesman

Sam Arbesman is the Scientist-In-Residence @ Lux Capital, the fund that supports scientists and entrepreneurs who pursue counter-conventional solutions to the most vexing puzzles of our time, the more ambitious the project, the better. Sam works with companies and founders that recognize the future happens at the boundaries of science and technology infusing computation into everything from biology to manufacturing. Sam’s scientific research has been published in everything from the Wall Street Journal to The New York Times and The Atlantic. Sam is also the author of the award-winning The Half-Life of Facts and the new book Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Sam made his move from being a best-selling author to Scientist in Residence for Lux Capital? As Scientist in Residence, what does Sam do on a day-to-day basis? 2.) What does Sam mean when he says that startups need to embrace "radical interdisciplinarity"? What really is "radical interdisciplinarity"? What are the benefits it brings to an organisation? Does this go contra the importance of specialisation? 3.) How does Sam view the partnership between man and machine? Why does Sam believe we will see computational creativity in a way never seen before? How does Sam view the societal barriers to the embracing of this partnership? 4.) How does Sam view the promise of analogizing in the face of such complex systems? How does Sam assess the perils of such analogies? Does Sam believe that VCs of today are equipped to invest in such complex systems? What must they remember? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Sam’s Fave Book: The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson, The Three Body Problem Sam's Fave Blog: Marginal Revolution As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Sam on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Lattice is the #1 performance management solution for growing companies. With Lattice, it’s easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want. And you also get a continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time feedback, and 1-on-1 meetings to make sure employees get feedback between reviews. Find out why the likes of CoinBase, PlanGrid, Birchbox and WePay trust Lattice as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That’s Lattice.com. Recurly, the company powering subscription success, with Recurly’s enterprise-class subscription management platform providing rapid time-to-value without requiring massive integration effort and expense and they have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7% but also reduce the all-important churn rate. That is why thousands of customers from Twitch to HubSpot to CBS Interactive trust Recurly as their subscription management platform. Check them out on recurly.com that really is a must.

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

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, we are back on the 20 minute VC for part two of this very special feature week, diving into the world of scientists in residence at venture funds. On Monday, we had Aaron at Founders Fund on the show, and if you haven't checked that out, then that really is a must. And today, we're joined by another very special scientist in residence. We featured his colleagues, Renata and Josh on the show in the past. Both Renata and Josh, personal favourites of mine, and so I'm thrilled to welcome to the hot seat today, Sam Arbesman, scientist in residence at Lux Capital. I'm going to get in trouble for saying this, but to me, one of the most exciting funds in market today. Lux supports scientists and entrepreneurs who pursue counter-conventional solutions to the most vexing puzzles of our time. The more ambitious the project, the better. And at Lux, Sam works with companies and founders that recognise the future happens at the boundaries of both science and technology, infusing computation into everything from

• 0:45Harry Stebbings?

  biology to manufacturing. And Sam's scientific research has been published in everything from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times and the Atlantic. Sam's also the author of the award-winning The Half-Life of Facts and the new book, Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension. I'd also want to say a huge thank you to Josh and Renata at Lux for the intro to Sam's day, without which this show would not have been possible. But before we move into the show today, if you're a founder or operator, your most important job is people operations, whether that be hiring execs, developing managers, or retaining top talent. And that's why you need Lattice. Lattice is the number one performance management solution for growing companies. With Lattice, it's easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want, and you also get an incredible continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time

• 1:29Harry Stebbings?

  feedback, and one-on-one meetings to ensure employees get feedback between reviews. So find out why the likes of Coinbase, PlanGrid, Birchbox, and WePay trust Lattice as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That's lattice.com, the number one performance management solution for growing companies. And speaking of number one there, you must check out Recurly, the company powering subscription success, with Recurly's enterprise-class subscription management platform, providing rapid time to value without requiring massive integration effort and expense. And they have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7%, but also reducing the all-important churn rate. And that's why thousands of customers, from Twitch to HubSpot to CBS Interactive, trust Recurly as their subscription management platform.

• 2:13Harry Stebbings?

  And you can check them out now on recurly.com. That really is a must. But enough of these fine British dulcet tones, and I'm thrilled to welcome Sam Arbesman, scientist in residence at Lux Capital.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 2:32Harry Stebbings?

  Sam, it's such a pleasure to have you on the 20-minute VC today. I mean, where do I start? I've heard so many great things from Josh and Renata at Lux, but thank you so much for joining me today, Sam.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Thank you. I'm excited to talk.

• 2:42Harry Stebbings?

  So let's start today with a little on you and how you came to be in the very unique position of scientist-in-residence at Lux Capital. What's the story for getting that job?

• 2:50Speaker 02

  Mine is certainly a circuitous path, I guess, as it is for many people in the venture world. I grew up in Buffalo, obsessed with science, technology, science fiction, surrounded by a mix of Martin Gardner, Legos, Arthur C. Clarke, all that kind of stuff. And I wanted to work at the frontier of science and went eventually to graduate school for a PhD in computational biology, where I was initially interested in using computational mathematical approaches to understand evolution. And then while I was there, I became fascinated by complexity science more generally, which is the science of trying to understand big, complex systems, whether in biology, technology, or social systems like cities or societies. And so after the PhD, while I was doing a postdoc involved in this area, I also began thinking about the nature of innovation more generally and the future of scientific and technological change. And so then after my postdoc, I left the world of academia and then joined the Kaufman Foundation,

• 3:34Speaker 02

  doing essentially that kind of stuff, trying to better understand innovation, science and tech, and then became enmeshed in the world of startups and their role in essentially unfolding the future. And then so alongside this, I also began doing a lot of writing about science and technology for popular audiences, too. And so then after the Kaufman Foundation, I ended up joining Lux as their scientist-in-residence to help bring this sort of interdisciplinary approach of related to complexity science, the future of science and technology to the venture world. Then the question becomes, what is scientist-in-residence exactly? What does this title mean? Yeah, so essentially, my role is one of really acting as connective tissue for ideas and people. So I surveyed the landscape of science and technology, finding areas that we might want to explore. And then based on this, do a number of different things. I source deals, I find people we might want to build companies around,

• 4:18Speaker 02

  I engage with the public through writing and speaking about these topics. But then I also connect scientists and technologists and other groups that are not traditionally connected to startups and the venture world to our portfolio companies. And so what this means kind of on a daily basis essentially is thinking about something new every day or sometimes even every hour, and interacting with lots and lots of people who are Really just creating the future that we want to live in.

• 4:37Harry Stebbings?

  And you said interdisciplinary there. We had a great chat before this and you discussed radical interdisciplinarity and startups. So first, what do you mean by this? I'm not going to repeat it again, but what do you mean by this?

• 4:49Speaker 02

  So we're in an age of specialization. We strive to learn more and more about less and less when as we specialize. Which is great. It's a great thing to be a specialist. We need experts and people deeply versed in some small specialized areas. But as the world becomes more complex and interdisciplinary, where ideas are interacting and even technologies rely on a huge number of different domains in order to operate. We can't actually just be specialists anymore. We need people who are more generalist minded and more essentially radically interdisciplinary. So radical interdisciplinarity, it's essentially then an import-export business of ideas. Recognizing that in this age of specialization, the combinatorial power of domains that are not normally connected is actually a competitive advantage. So ideas from one area can and should then be connected to other areas.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  Whether it's importing ideas from physics to understand the sizes of living things or cities, ideas from network science being used to understand technological complexity, or even mathematics for thinking about Legos. You can actually do all these different kinds of things and combine lots of different areas. And because specialization, it's not enough in this highly connected age. And so this kind of thinking is particularly important for startups to embody and for helping startups to succeed through bringing ideas from one area to another.

• 5:54Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, why is it so important? What are the benefits of this kind of radical interdisciplinary thinking with startups?

• 6:00Speaker 02

  So I think if a startup can bring together disparate ideas and carve out a niche and a unique way of thinking and provide something of value to the world, that's something that is both differentiable and also a defensible mode. Because it's hard to jump across different domains. So a startup's openness to interdisciplinary thinking can therefore be a proxy for its ability to adapt and to thrive. So for example, let's say a company can bring together a team or a set of ideas from computer science, AI and the tax code, which is something that's reasonably novel and hard to replicate. Most accountants aren't playing with machine learning and vice versa. Or take the idea of, let's see, combining together recipe generation and big data, which is something that's actually part of a field called computational gastronomy, which is this idea of using computational approaches to do things like rethinking how ingredients and flavors combine to create novel foods. And so

• 6:44Speaker 02

  These kinds of interdisciplinary perspectives, they're very useful and a number of tech companies are actually rethinking the future of food through this kind of stuff. But ultimately interdisciplinary thinking, it's not just a source of new ideas, but it also provides new and defensible modes of operation for startups.

• 6:58Harry Stebbings?

  I want to speak there first, kind of before we do jump into those modes. I want to speak between the balance of generalist and kind of that interdisciplinary thinking. And just how you balance between specialization and interdisciplinary thinking within startups and within yourself. Is it something where organizations should have specialists and then those interdisciplinary thinkers? How do you balance between the two?

• 7:18Speaker 02

  So I think it is a balance. And so there's kind of the organizational level of organizations need to have the ability to bring lots of different people together who are specialists. But you also need individuals who are more generalist minded, who can do that within a single person. And so this, this often involves actually the ability to overcome jargon boundaries. So like, let's say one person who's deeply versed in one specific area, has their own sort of jargon, sort of language they use to talk about something. And there's another area that the same problem arises where they also have their jargon barriers. You have to find someone who actually is somewhat versed in both of these, who can almost act as a certain amount of translation and can actually translate from one area to another. Thinking about what a good balance might be. So there's a term that some people talk about called T-shaped individuals. This idea that you kind of look at like the actual physical shape of the T.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  You have kind of the horizontal part and the, and the vertical part. So the vertical part says you need to be deeply versed in one area, but you also need to have this horizontal ability, this kind of ability to interact with other disciplines. And I think we need more and more of these T-shaped individuals, coupled with sometimes just deeply specialized individuals. But then alongside that, you also maybe need some of these people who maybe extremely seem almost a more generalist minded, maybe almost like a dilettante. If you're going to use something a little bit more negative connotation wise. But you need these people who can kind of jump from different areas and engage with lots of different modes of thinking. And I think bringing all those different people together, specialists, T-shaped individuals, people who are a little bit more generalist minded into an organization is going to make it the best aversion possible.

• 8:39Harry Stebbings?

  Canaz, how would you like to see this integrated into the current ecosystem? Is this from a startup level? Is this from a VC level? Is this LP level? Is this integrated throughout?

• 8:47Speaker 02

  I do think we need to have it integrated to a certain degree throughout. I'll contrast it with like the startup ecosystem is certainly in a much better shape than, for example, like. Where academia is incredibly siloed. But we need to make sure startups are drawing people from lots of different areas with wildly divergent backgrounds and knowledge. But the other thing, though, is you also have to recognize that in many cases startups, like you want them to be monomaniacally focused on a certain topic. And that makes them much, much more successful. While oftentimes in the venture world, you have the luxury of being able to think about lots of different ideas. That being said, in the startup world, you might want to be monomaniacally focused on your success. But that success might derive from many, many different areas. And so being able to synthesize these in some sort of productive way really gives you some sort of competitive advantage. So you really actually need it at both level, kind of the startup level as well as the investor level.

• 9:30Harry Stebbings?

  Does this not go deeply contrasting the traditional VC thesis of you have to focus, focus, focus?

• 9:35Speaker 02

  So you certainly have to focus on your success. But if that focus derives from bringing together ideas from multiple different areas, then you should be doing that. At the same time, though, you don't want to be billed as a dilettante, just someone who says, okay, here's a really cool area. But wait, there's also this other area over here that's really interesting. And I can also combine these other two things and maybe do something else. If that's not part of your core mission and you can't see a clear path to success, then you are going to be distracted. So there is a balance between you want to focus and maybe that focus derives from being able to bring different ideas together in some sort of novel and defensible way. But at the same time, though, you don't want to just kind of be interested in lots of different things because they're simply interesting.

• 10:13Harry Stebbings?

  Speaking of the relationship between these two kind of thought processes, I'd love to speak about the relationship between AI and man. Now, we have many guests on the show who state their concerns for AI and the potential overhaul of mankind as we know it. How do you view the partnership then between man and machine to start with?

• 10:29Speaker 02

  So I'm going to limit my comments primarily to the partnership, at least in the space of creativity. But I think that there are a huge number of rapid advances where computational approaches mean that actually computers can make advances in domains that we view as broadly creative. And so this can be art and music, design, even computer programming, or even scientific discovery. This is all fantastic, but it actually can be somewhat worrisome for some people. So I view this as a partnership where machines actually allow humans to sift through creative solutions, allowing us to do our work in even better ways. But even more in that, I think as the world around us is becoming more and more complex. Becoming more difficult to fully understand either the technologies that we ourselves have built or the systems that we're trying to understand in science, like a biological system, for example.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  And so, which means we might actually need computers to help us explore these systems that we might not fully understand any longer. So this can mean maybe we need the creation of things like automated hypothesis generation in science or using machine learning and big data to optimize our own technologies or even generate novel source code when we can't fully understand the technologies that we're building or grapple with them in quite the same way we could when they were maybe smaller and more easily understandable. But ultimately, I think creativity, it's always been to a certain degree, a collaborative act. And now we're going to increasingly count machines as part of our collaborative teams now.

• 11:45Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, at what stage does one count that integration of man and machine? If you know what I mean, where does the limits of man's ability reach the beginning of machines? So in terms of like aiding and assessing us in reaching the next frontier, where does that barrier start where kind of the extent of man's ability and where machines can come into the foray?

• 12:04Speaker 02

  I think we've always been using machines to a certain degree to kind of augment discovery and creativity. I mean, this can be everything as simple as using like, yeah, calculators or various different tools to make our art or using telescopes or microscopes to discover new things. And so I think this kind of thing has always been with us. That being said, it does feel somewhat different when a certain amount of the cognitive effort is being offloaded into machine and algorithmic world. We've always been doing this. And so there's always been a certain amount of partnership. And so it's being able to kind of use these tools in service of our own creativity as opposed to at the expense of kind of just being worried about all these advances.

• 12:43Harry Stebbings?

  I completely agree with in terms of we've always been using machines to augment our ability. One thing that has changed is kind of the speed of integration into society. And I don't think we've ever seen such rapid technological advancement so quickly as we do today and integrating that so fast into society. Do you have concerns around how quickly it can be integrated and the kind of repercussions of such speed?

• 13:03Speaker 02

  So I think there definitely are certain concerns in terms of the speed and in terms of like automation, destabilizing job stability and things like that. But I think when it comes to certain areas within creativity, ideally, I think, over the next several years, it's going to involve building systems that actually make creative knowledge workers more productive versions of themselves. So rather than plateauing when it comes to creative output or discovery, we can actually continue doing more. For me, there's going to be certainly some destabilizing effects, and I think we need to be very, very mindful about that. But for me, one of the things that I think are really, really exciting are the ability to actually make novel types of advances and creative outputs in a way that were just not possible before. And so, for example, going back to what I was talking about, the incredibly complex systems around us, whether or not it's like things in biology that are

• 13:48Speaker 02

  very hard to understand, or even just dealing with the technologies that we ourselves have built in terms of machine learning and things like that. There's a certain amount of limitation in terms of all the stuff that we can hold in our head and actually truly understand. And so we're going to need these kind of machine partners in order to continue making advances. And so rather than viewing it as humans are being displaced, it's really essentially that humans are only through this partnership are humans going to be able to continue to work in these fields, which is actually pretty exciting.

• 14:14Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, in terms of the creativity element, do you think man's appreciation of machines will extend to the extent that they actually appreciate creativity augmenting that? So if you see a piece of art that is part human, part machine-made, do you think their appreciation will be the same with the knowledge that it's been partly done due to machine?

• 14:31Speaker 02

  I think people will appreciate it. And I think we're going to see new and more exciting forms of creativity. But we already have this. When I was younger, people were on their computers, they had screensavers. We don't really need screensavers anymore. They're still around, but they've kind of fallen out of favor. But screensavers, in a sense, they were this beautiful computational creative act. But they were incredibly generative and algorithmic, where you didn't really know exactly what the screensaver was going to look like from moment to moment. And so there was this combination of, oh, it's this algorithm generating something, but the algorithm was written by a person. And I think that kind of thing is perfectly fine. And the way I like to think about this is, there's a term from Yiddish called nachos, which is essentially kind of like this vicarious pride or joy that you have. So you might have nachos, or the Yiddish term is to shaf nachos. Like a kid's wedding or graduation.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  Like, these are not your own achievements, but you can still take pride and joy in them. And I, and I think to a certain degree, even though it almost sounds a little bit silly, we are going to increasingly need to have a certain amount of nachos for our technologies, where these technologies might be doing things, might be doing activities that they might be making creations that are not our own. But we were the ones who ultimately programmed these things. And so there is, and we can still have a certain amount of nachos and pride and joy in these creative artworks or creative works. And I think that's the kind of thing we're going to need to think about in terms of like making sure we are not just constantly worried or viewing these things as highly derivative or not particularly novel. Because I think these things are going to be incredibly beautiful or interesting or important. And humans are going to be involved, maybe several levels removed,

• 16:00Speaker 02

  but that doesn't decrease our level of excitement for them.

• 16:02Harry Stebbings?

  No, I agree. And I love that example of the screensavers and the curtains. But I do want to delve one layer deeper into the scientific stack, which is worrying for me in this conversation with you. But we come to the integration of bio and CS and AI. So tell me first, what's the promise of analogizing in the face of such a complex system?

• 16:20Speaker 02

  So obviously, there's some very intriguing similarities between biology and computer science. And I'm far from the first one to notice this kind of stuff like we have in biology. It's defined by a discrete language of symbols. So in this case, base pairs of DNA. I mean, computers operate in bits. And in fact, it turns out actually there's some interesting historical analogies where the, the common roots, they're actually from around the same time period. So like 1953 saw the structure of DNA being elucidated. And that was also around the same time when a lot of early kinds of computing were developed, the kind of computing that we're familiar with. We're now able to store data in DNA, which has a certain similarity to, to computation. Modularity is a hallmark of both biology and technology. We've actually seen in the news recently this app that malware was encoded in DNA and then it compromised and took over a machine involved in analyzing the sequences, which is pretty wild stuff. So there's a, there's a great potential

• 17:05Speaker 02

  for taking ideas from one domain and applying them to the other. We've seen this in many people from the CS and AI side, applying this sort of technological thinking to biological malware. Of course, though, that's not quite the whole story. There's promise, but there are also a little bit of perils in doing this kind of thing as well.

• 17:21Harry Stebbings?

  I, I would love to hear that because there's always Perils to every side. How do you assess the perils of such analogies?

• 17:27Speaker 02

  So I think in our rush to import ideas from computer science, data storage or other technological concepts, we sometimes lose sight of the fact that biological systems, they're different in a very important way, which is they are massively and often not intuitively complex. So biological systems, they've evolved over millions of years. They might be much messier and much more complex than an engineer or computer scientists might expect. There's actually this great XKCD comic highlighting this. There's this engineer type, he's arguing that biology should be simple because DNA is just source code. And of course, it's not. And engineered systems, they could be orders of magnitude much, much simpler than biological ones. And so when we apply ideas from computer science to biology, we end up failing sometimes. So if we use like traditional linear thinking to understand them, we have to take into account the massive nonlinear complexity of these things.

• 18:12Speaker 02

  And so, so for example, one of Lux's investments, Recursion, actually uses machine vision in order to find drug treatments for diseases. But it engages with the full force of biological complexity and high dimensional data and a lot of this nonlinear subtlety. And so what this sometimes means is that you don't necessarily entirely understand how a drug works initially. But that's okay because it's a complex system. And so what this requires is iteratively understanding it slowly but surely, as opposed to immediately and completely figuring out the mechanisms because at base, and we, because you have this assumption that like, oh, it's code and therefore it should be simple. And so you have to kind of really grapple with the complexity. So I think there's a lot of power in analogizing from biology to computer science and technology, but there are also a lot of perils and we have to be very mindful of that kind of thing.

• 18:54Harry Stebbings?

  Often analogies within the startup and VC space are for the sake of the VC's intellect and to make them understand certain situations. I'm intrigued, you really believe today's class of VC is equipped to handle and invest in such transformational and deep tech transformations?

• 19:10Speaker 02

  Yes, I do think so, as long as we're really just not stepping too naively from one domain to another and we recognize essentially both the promise and perils of analogizing from one complex system to another. So as long as we do this with open eyes, I think we'll be fine. And but you really just have to make sure that you are grappling with the complexity of these technologies.

• 19:30Harry Stebbings?

  We have a serial angel, Eli Gill, probably one of the most famous angels on. That investors looking to invest in really frontier deep tech concerned him and made him remember the clean and green tech days of two thousand and ones, two thousand and three. Do you think it's fair to say that? And would you agree?

• 19:45Speaker 02

  While there might be certain similarities, I think frontier tech overall, and it's really this, it's very broad and diffuse space. And so in many ways, I'm almost hesitant to group it all under kind of that umbrella term. And because the knowledge you need to do something, let's say, related to drones, might be very different from something related to biology. And so ultimately, it really comes down to recognizing there are certain wells of knowledge that you have to, that you have to draw from in any sort of technical area. And just make sure that you're aware of that knowledge and how best to navigate that specific space.

• 20:14Harry Stebbings?

  I'd love to move into a quickfire round with you there now, and my favorite of any interview, so sixty seconds per answer. How does that sound?

• 20:20Speaker 02

  That sounds great.

• 20:21Harry Stebbings?

  So what transformative technology are you most excited for? Terribly hard question.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'm certainly interested in a lot, and definitely one that I'm excited for is computational creativity. I think it's going to be incredibly transformative, as I've mentioned. But another technology that I'm excited about currently is autonomous vehicles, both on a personal level, I don't particularly enjoy driving. But I also think that there are some deeply exciting transformations for society in store when humans no longer need to drive. It's just not, oh, we don't need to drive. It's only, there's implications for rethinking urban design as well as things related to public health. So I think it actually can be incredibly transformative.

• 20:52Harry Stebbings?

  I'd love to hear about your writing process. You said about your books. What's the writing process for you?

• 20:57Speaker 02

  So when I'm working on a book, this is the ideal writing process. The ideal writing process involves probably a couple hours in the morning, trying to actually generate just a certain amount of raw number of words. And then the rest of the day, when I'm kind of in writing mode, either doing research, doing some editing, or kind of like lightly thinking about it. Because you actually can't write intensely for many, many hours during the day. You burn out. So you need to kind of have that balance.

• 21:19Harry Stebbings?

  We said about your books there. What's your favorite book and why? What must I take on the next plane ride?

• 21:24Speaker 02

  So I have a lot of books I like. I would certainly say one of my favorite books is actually The Baroque Cycle, which is, I guess, not quite a single book. It's a trilogy by Neal Stephenson. It's this great story about the scientific revolution, the nature of money, incipient globalization, beginnings of technological progress. And it's essentially like, it is the quintessential nerd fiction. It's awesome. And then as a bonus, another more Trilogy. I'd also recommend the Three Body Problem Trilogy by Liu Cixin. And then if we're going to go in nonfiction realm, I love the book Immortality by Stephen Cave.

• 21:52Harry Stebbings?

  What about the favorite blog or newsletter? Are there any must reads when they come in?

• 21:55Speaker 02

  So I love Jason Kotke's Kotke.org. It's this cornucopia of science, tech, typography, humanities and wonder about the world. It's awesome. I love it. I'm also a big, big fan of Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabrock's blog, Marginal Revolution, which is amazing.

• 22:10Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, no, I love Marginal Revolution too. Let's finish today then on the hardest element in your day to day role at Lux.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  I guess I might say the ability to have moved from one topic to another throughout the course of the day, because I end up being involved in huge number of different areas. But if I'm really honest with myself, I'm interested in so many different topics that it actually ends up energizing me rather than exhausting me. So it's hard, but I love it and I wouldn't have it any other way.

• 22:31Harry Stebbings?

  Sam, it's been such a pleasure to have you on. As I said, I heard such great things, both from Josh and from Renata. So thank you so much for joining me today.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 22:40Harry Stebbings?

  So much fun having Sam on the show there. I mean, people always think I talk fast. I do also want to say before anyone asks, we did not speed up Sam's voice for today's interview. His brain really does just work that fast. And if you'd like to see more from us behind the scenes at the 20 minute VC, you can on Snapchat at H Stebbings with two Bs. It'd be fantastic to see you there. And again, a big hand to Josh and Renata at Lux for making the intro to Sam's day, without which this episode would not have been possible. But before we leave you today, if you're a founder or operator, your most important job is people operations, whether that be hiring execs, developing managers or retaining top talent. And that's why you need Lattice. Lattice is the number one performance management solution for growing companies. With Lattice, it's easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want.

• 23:23Harry Stebbings?

  And you also get an incredible continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real time feedback and one on one meetings to ensure employees get feedback between reviews. So find out why the likes of Coinbase, Plan Grid, Birchbox and WePay trust Lattice as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That's lattice.com, the number one performance management solution for growing companies. And speaking of number one there, you must check out Recurly, the company powering subscription success with Recurly's enterprise class subscription. Management platform, providing rapid time to value without requiring massive integration effort and expense. And they have the ability to not only increase revenue by seven percent, but also reducing the all important churn rate. And that's why thousands of customers from Twitch

• 24:07Harry Stebbings?

  to HubSpot to CBS Interactive trust Recurly as their subscription management platform. And you can check them out now on recurly.com. That really is a must. But that's all we have time for today. And we look very forward to bringing you Friday's episode with Eventbrite co-founder and CEO Julia Hartz.