Uncapped #29 | Thomas Laffont from Coatue

Thomas Laffont is the co-founder of Coatue, one of the world’s largest technology investment platforms active in both the public and private markets. Thomas leads the firm’s private investment platforms across early-stage and growth, and oversees their software investments across private and public markets. Coatue has partnered with some of the most enduring and impactful companies of the last two decades, including Applied Intuition, Canva, Databricks, Figma and Rippling. Thomas began his career at the Creative Arts Agency, where he represented artists in film and television. A few highlights: The system of record being over Wanting to be a founder’s second call Investing with a wide aperture Tom Cruise validating star quality Working with family --- Timestamps: (0:00) Intro (0:25) Making sense of the current cycle (5:31) Investing from inception through IPO (10:36) Depreciation of the system of record (14:04) Value beyond databases (18:46) Winning strategies in venture (23:43) Operating at early-stage (28:56) Navigating investing conflicts (34:29) Wide aperture lens of investing (36:45) Star quality being a reality (40:30) Firm strategy and decision making (48:25) Everything that’s great about golf (54:34) Working with family (57:20) Advice to young professionals --- More on Thomas: https://www.coatue.com/ https://x.com/thomas_coatue More on Jack: https://www.altcap.com/ https://x.com/jaltma --- https://linktr.ee/uncappedpod Email: [email protected]

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I looked at maybe the top 10 to 15 P and L winners that I've had over my career on the private side. Without exception, my first opportunity to invest was a no. It might have been a no from me to the company, passing, or vice versa, the company passing on me.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  I am really excited to be here with you today, Thomas. Thanks so much for taking the time for this.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  Very excited.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  So my note to myself on this first topic is this time it's different. And a lot of people recently in the last few weeks have been saying things that are implying that a bubble might be going. And it's like, there was a tweet from Brian at Sequoia that was like, this is a good time to sell your company. There have been a lot of blog posts written behind closed doors. It's a frequent topic of conversation, like valuations are expensive. We're back to 2021 multiples for a certain flavor of company. Obviously, Kotu has gone through, over its last 25 years of existence, a bunch of cycles. So you've seen this happen many times.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  And so I'm curious, sort of your spot temp check, fall 2025. How do you make sense of where we are in the cycle and sort of in capital deployment?

• 1:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I've been lucky to be doing this for a while, almost 25 years now. And there are a few seminal moments that I recall as a tech investor. The first was the iPhone and Apple and the quarterly earnings that would come out. And the absolute blowout, if consensus was one, they would print three or five. You just didn't see those kinds of beats and the magnitude of the transformation that Apple was bringing into the market with the iPhone. So that was kind of one, right? The second I remember, like it was yesterday, was Nvidia, when it guided its data center business to be up 100% year over year. And no one thought that that could be possible.

• 2:02Speaker 00

  So that was obviously that and the ChatGPT moment kind of happening at the same time, right? I do think the Oracle announcement from two weeks ago was really profound and important as well.

• 2:20Speaker 00

  Just a fascinating story of how long Oracle's been around and how it's been able to shed its skin and reinvent itself. What was interesting about that specific company is if you look at the AI infrastructure build out up to this point had really been funded with cash flows from big companies, right? So Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, generating incredible amounts of revenue, having very high operating margins, very high cash flow margins, and the ability to invest, right, some of those cash flows into this AI build.

• 3:03Speaker 00

  What was different about the Oracle announcement is now you're seeing kind of some leverage come into, right? Where it's actually not just the free cash flow positive companies that are investing, it's actually free cash flow negative companies that are investing, right? So OpenAI is an example, right? Is making a huge bet, right? It's not producing free cash yet, but it kind of sees a version of the future where it demand for its products kind of keep increasing. So I do think that's something that we spent a lot of time kind of looking at and thinking about.

• 3:45Speaker 00

  The question now will be, does the competitive intensity between the hyperscalers really start to intensify, right? We kind of had a staid oligopoly, I would say, where Amazon kind of started, then Microsoft, and then Google kind of crept in, and it was kind of the three of them for a bit. Boy, does that feel different today, right? You've got Oracle putting its foot into the ground, and now I think establishing itself as an absolutely key player, you could see them getting to maybe 15% market share of cloud in a few years from essentially zero. You have companies like CoreWeave, right? GPU-only cloud, so.

• 4:27Speaker 00

  I do think the market competition is intensifying. There's more companies now, it's not just cash flow companies that are investing. Both, right, OpenAI, Anthropic are making huge investments. So I do think the stakes to me feel different, right? Than they were maybe two years ago. So that's one, how would change the element, you know, the environment feels a little bit different to me. It's one thing if Meta's saying, well, I'm so profitable, I have so much money, I'm just going to choose to sprinkle some of my cash flows into AI. Like, that's one thing.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 5:01Speaker 00

  We've now moved into a different phase where I think companies are saying, no, it feels more existential. I'm actually willing to invest significantly more, maybe even more than the cash flows that I'm producing in the case of some players in the ecosystem, right? To go and win this market. So I think it's, it's a sign of multiple things, right? And to me, the biggest one is the intensity and the criticalness is increasing. And so I think our vigilance has to increase as well.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  The companies that you just talked about, for the most part, you know, huge behemoth public companies. And what's interesting is if you look back at like the Zerp bubble, the, the private company bubble happened, but I would argue that the, like, then QQQ, like the, the Mag Seven, they, I think, looks like they were undervalued. And they took a dip, but it's like much higher now in a way that's different than what happened in private markets, in particular, early-stage private markets. Obviously, COTU invests from, you know, inception round through IPO. And so when you're thinking about this, you know, AI transformational moment that you're talking about, that, you know, I think we kind of all agree is real, you could look

• 6:14Speaker 01

  at that and say, okay, I can invest in these, you know, these huge public companies, I can invest in Oracle, I could invest in the labs, I could invest in Growth Private, I could invest in Seed. You know, you've got, you know, a big team that's capable of, you know, walking and chewing gum at the same time. To what extent do you think at a high level about the market and where should buckets of capital be deployed versus finding just individual, I like this seed and I like Oracle and I'm not thinking about, you know, the buckets, I'm just thinking about birds?

• 6:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we, we do tend to be very thematic, and I use this often, but having a wide aperture lens into the world of technology globally, public and private. US and kind of rest of the world. So I think about, okay, what do I, what do I know and have conviction in, right? Well, I started my career as a semiconductor analyst for Co2, partially because I was trying to find a semi analyst and couldn't find one. And Philippe, one day, came into my office and dropped a universe, which was essentially like all the semi names in a spreadsheet that was printed and said, well, we can't find anybody, so you do it, right? And so I just took it upon myself to kind of learn the semi business. This was in the early 2000s. So what do I know?

• 7:30Speaker 00

  I know that we're not going to have AI without semis. So semis are kind of a foundational layer. So when I think about AI infrastructure, I think about we're going to need semis, we're going to need data centers, and we're going to need power. So all three of those, to me, present really interesting investing opportunities, right? Across both actually, public and private. So if you think about semis, obviously Nvidia,

• 7:56Speaker 00

  to me, maybe the other great tech story that I think very few people know about, but Hawtan at Avago Broadcom, right? 1.7 trillion of market cap. Might soon be as big as Meta. I think Meta's 1.7 and I think Avago's 1.4. So there, he's kind of closing in.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 8:18Speaker 00

  Which is an amazing story.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  So I know that, and then private companies like Cerebras that are innovating and doing interesting things, right? So I'm a big believer kind of in that layer.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  How would you play power out of curiosity?

• 8:32Speaker 00

  Nuclear is one.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Fusion or fission or?

• 8:36Speaker 00

  I would say we don't quite have, you know, the conviction yet on fusion and whether it's going to work or not. But I do think there's two technologies today that are critical. So one is nuclear. So Constellation Energy, as an example, has now done what's called behind the meter deals with Amazon, right? And Microsoft, where those can tie directly into some of their plants. They just did a deal with Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania to kind of reactivate one of the, one of the reactors there. And so that's one. And then G. Vernova, right, with liquid gas generators.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 9:12Speaker 00

  Right. So as it turns out, we have a lot of liquid gas in this country. It's clean, it's extractable. The issue is they're basically sold out of capacity for the next five years. But that's an example, right, of of the trend. And I think we have a lot of

• 9:33Speaker 00

  belief that value is going to accrue there and you're not going to be able to have AI without that foundational layer. So that's that's kind of maybe kind of layer one, right? High conviction.

• 9:44Speaker 00

  I think layer two, now moving up the value chain one is we definitely think models are going to be important.

• 9:52Speaker 00

  It does feel like the world is kind of coalescing around a handful of companies. You know, I would probably put OpenAI, Anthropic.

• 10:02Speaker 00

  I would definitely put Google, right, kind of in there.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  And maybe there's, you know, we'll see what Meta ends up doing. We'll see what kind of Microsoft and Amazon end up doing.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  So I think that's going to be the foundational models are going to be incredibly important. They're going to power transformative apps like ChatGPT, which, you know, as you know, has completely transformed, you know, how we work and our expectations of how software is going to work. So I would say very high conviction in kind of each of those, right? I think now, as I start to get to layer three,

• 10:41Speaker 00

  you know, my lens probably gets a little bit fuzzier.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Now we're talking applications.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:45Speaker 00

  Right. So what do I know there? Well, I do think the data layer is going to be foundational and really important. I think, curious to get your view as a SaaS founder, but my view is the era of data being locked into SaaS platforms is over. There was an underreported, but in my opinion, very significant press release put out two weeks ago by Workday, where it essentially came out and said, we're giving up on trying to kind of keep all of our data inside of our locked SaaS ecosystem. We're going to plug into Snowflake. We're going to plug into Databricks, right? We're going to give customers the ability to merge their their Workday HR data with some of their other data to kind of power an adjunctive future, right?

• 11:31Speaker 00

  To me, I think that's critical. And Carl, the CEO of Workday, was on the board of Snowflake, right? So he understands the data landscape really well. I think that's going to unlock now Workday. Its future is about building the best Fortune 500-grade agents for HR and finance, right? Not where's my data stored? Like, does that, do I even really care about that? I mean, of course, it's got to be secure and stuff like that. But boy, I want an amazing agent and stuff like that. So I do think that data layer, I think Snowflake and Databricks and other companies like that is going to be kind of foundational. Now I get to like the apps, right?

• 12:12Speaker 00

  And one area where I'm spending a lot of time personally is trying to think through, what does this mean for a Workday, for the whole SaaS ecosystem as we've known it, right? Is software dead? As, you know, a lot of people have kind of been writing about over the past 12 to 18 months? Or does it get reinvented?

• 12:32Speaker 01

  It almost sounds like what you're describing is like, is the system of record dead? Like, you know, kind of like what I'm imagining as I'm listening to what you're saying is you've got Snowflake or Databricks. There's a system of record that's traditionally stores the data that then integrates with a lot of ecosystem apps. And many of those ecosystem apps today might look like companies that are agents or like doing work for you. And so then the question is, what's the role of where that data is stored? Does it just go straight to the databases?

• 12:59Speaker 00

  So I do think the system record is dead. I also think, by the way, another belief that I have is that every interaction within the enterprise within three years will be recorded. And I think the default is going to be record on versus ironic since we're taping right now, but right? The default is just going to be an assumption that this meeting is being recorded. So why is that? Because if you think about the intelligence of an enterprise that should get fed into a system of record. It's all coming from interactions that are in meetings that are over email or Slack or over Zooms, right? How's my customer doing? How's my sales process doing?

• 13:42Speaker 00

  All of that is by and large captured and even in-person meetings, right? I think people will start recording. So all of that can be fed into, right? Automatically, why do I even really need to write a note on what was just discussed? Right? Actually, the system is listening, will extract all the information, right? And knowledge, and then it can just be kind of queried later.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  It's an interesting prompt about the system of record. So obviously, one of the things that a system of record does is it holds the data, which I agree with you, I don't think that is like, that doesn't seem like that important in the future. I'm thinking through in real time right now, but like, other things it does is coordination between the other apps, making sure the data is consistent.

• 14:23Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  It makes it tamper-proof, you know, so security is a big deal.

• 14:27Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  You know, it gives the customer a central place so that they're not working with nine million vendors all the time and they have some sense of how their business systems are working.

• 14:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  So there's some other things there, and I'm curious how that could shake out otherwise. I mean, maybe you could see a world where like, the Databricks, Snowflake layer become massive companies because they start kind of really being the hub of all of that stuff. But it does feel like there's some, you know, as I think about a Workday, a ServiceNow, a Salesforce, there are some functions of those products that aren't just databases.

• 15:02Speaker 00

  I agree. So I do think the databases of, and I think stuff like in Databricks will be very large companies. I think the role of Workday will A, sit on top of it as a validator of, okay, this is, this is like important data and, you know, we validate it and kind of stand by it. But the future will be, okay, now, actually, you think about Workday that in the past only saw kind of its own data, right? Now Workday is going to be able to make HR and coaching decisions based on the entire data set, right? Potentially even the recorded meeting data set.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:36Speaker 00

  So yesterday, we hosted for one of our early-stage companies, an AI compliance summit. So we had the head of AI for the SEC and the GCs and compliance of all the kind of major kind of investing firms. And we had the chief compliance officer of Meta as an example. And I was discussing with him my, my view that meetings will be recorded, right? And His mind as a chief compliance officer went like, oh my God, this is a nightmare. Like, I don't want, I don't want to know. I want no transcripts. I don't want the data. And I said, okay, well, let me give you two scenarios. Okay. Scenario one is you have a bad actor in your enterprise. He's belligerent in meetings, says completely awful things. He's demeaning to other people, you know, all the vile things that you can imagine, right?

• 16:22Speaker 00

  No one speaks up because they're too afraid and turns out six years later, one person actually speaks up. Now everybody comes out of the woodwork. Now you're on a defense. You have to go on, well, why didn't you tell me? Well, I was afraid because the boss likes him. Now you got a whole shit show to deal with, right? So that's version one of the world. My version of the world is actually the meetings being recorded, right? And the compliance agent afterwards seeks out that individual and says, by the way,

• 16:51Speaker 00

  your behavior wasn't appropriate.

• 16:55Speaker 00

  Right? And for this reason, and I'm going to suggest some coaching to you. Or it's not even just necessarily like in HR, they could be, what you actually talked about is anti-competitive. And it's not something that we can do, right?

• 17:10Speaker 01

  So only the agents reading this stuff, it's not something visible to employees?

• 17:13Speaker 00

  That could be kind of step one is the agent just goes to the actor and offers remediation. Assuming it's not so egregious that it has to be. Stage two might be, I'm sorry, that's your second violation, right? Now you have to go through a mandatory three-day compliance process. And step three is actually now it's been flack to HR, right?

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:33Speaker 00

  I'm just kind of inventing the system, right? But you can see that now companies are going to be able to diffuse issues before the grenade's gone off, right?

• 17:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, definitely like the, the trend line here is comfort with this stuff. Like, you know, years ago, if somebody had a recorded meeting and you didn't know about it, or somebody brought an agent into a Zoom meeting, people would be like, what, what are you doing? And now I just, even if I don't see the granulage, and I'm just like, anything I say on Zoom is recorded. And that's just like the plan now.

• 18:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. So one of our portfolio companies, Gong, which is in sales intelligence, right? And listens to the calls of salespeople.

• 18:10Speaker 00

  Has completely re-accelerated now because generative AI has enabled that corpus of data to be so much more powerful. Right? So now. If you're a great salesperson and you know exactly how to sell against company X, I can extract what makes you so good. Is it that you pitch the company this way, that you pitch the competitor that way?

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  Right, so they're seeing significant increases in ramp of, uh, lower ramp time for reps, right? So I just think we're gonna start seeing that through the whole, uh, through the whole enterprise.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  So I'm curious, as we've been talking about, you know, public, private, early, late stage.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  I asked you before if you identify as a VC, you're like, no, not really an investor. You know, that includes making investments that look like VC investments. When you sort of look, uh, you know, at the world around you and sort of how VC is evolving, I'm curious your read on what's the winningest strategy or strategies in venture today? Like, when you think about who's really doing venture in the right way in your estimation today, how do you think about that? Who do you sort of look towards or what are the models that make the most sense to you now?

• 19:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, so look, we started, um, which is a couple of million under management, right? So we kind of grew the business organically by kind of compounding over time, right? And Philippe and I have always run, uh, the business in a way where we just try and think what's in the best kind of long-term interests of our business, right? And don't make kind of short-term decisions. We never had the luxury in venture of, you know, I sometimes use this analogy of, of venture and, and investing is kind of a river and, you know, the good investments are kind of swimming in the river, right? And, uh, if you got there early, you got the best spot kind of, you know, that, that protrudes into and you kind of ca- capture the best fish and, you know, we didn't get there early.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  So, um, you know, I, I don't have like the best spot on the river, like some of the firms that have been doing it for a really long time or a, a founder that started a generational internet company, right? So, um, we had to, to just try and rub shoulders and elbow and be the seventh player on that. That wasn't kind of interesting to me as a founder, right? I'm sure when you decided to do your podcast, well, there's a ton of podcasts out there. So I'm not going to just do like what the seventeen other people are doing. I'm going to try and do something different. Well, we, we kind of brought the same approach and we thought that what was uniquely suited to us. Right. Was well, since I don't have the best plot of land on the riverbank, right?

• 20:47Speaker 00

  Where maybe like Benchmark and Sequoia sit, I'm actually just going to be the fisherman that just could just travels up and down. Right. And I'm just going to try and find the best opportunities kind of as I see them. And I think it's more common now, but back then it really was, no, you stay in your place. You know, we're going to be here on our part of the river and then there'll be another cast of characters on the other.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:10Speaker 00

  And then, you know, and so forth and so on, right? And then, uh, uh, to their credit, players like, uh, Yuri Milner and Tiger came in and said, well, hold on. Why, why is that the case? Right?

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 21:21Speaker 00

  So, um, as it happens, it also tends to suit my personality, right? Which is, um, I don't tend to think about whether a company is private or public. I don't tend to think about whether my time is spent between public or private, right? Because some of the best research that I do for my public investing is by meeting private companies or vice versa.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 21:46Speaker 00

  Right? So sometimes investors will ask me, investors in our platform, right? They'll ask me, um, well, how do you kind of spend your time? And I think from a research basis, I, I don't think about it that way. I really talk to companies, find big themes, find big trends, and then find companies that can kind of, uh, benefit from them.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  Yep. I think in venture, one of the things that has morphed recently, that probably has moved, I would imagine directionally more towards your way of thinking is it's okay to scale. And there are many ways to be successful and you don't just have to have 20x small early stage funds. Like a lot of venture capitalists who I think maybe started small have gotten much bigger and are saying, we're still going to get, you know, very good returns, but it's going to look different. It's giving a much bigger capital base and it's okay if we didn't hit it at the seed because we can get it at the B or C or D or, or so on.

• 22:42Speaker 00

  And that's certainly my thinking and the thing I dislike the most about venture is, um, the zero sum nature of the business at times, right? Where there's a round, there's only. X amount of dollars and every dollar that you take is a dollar that I don't have.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Which is the source of competition between firms, obviously.

• 23:05Speaker 00

  Correct, and it it feeds into a lot of different types of behavior and and things like that. My approach as a public market investor was always like, great. If you have a great idea, let's bat it around because guess what?

• 23:17Speaker 01

  We can both do it.

• 23:18Speaker 00

  We can both benefit. So I'm have built my whole life and business model basically against being a zero sum thinker, right?

• 23:32Speaker 00

  So that's the piece that is the toughest for me, right? Is when I run into, you know, on either end, a situation where somebody has to win and somebody has to lose.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  Yep. So how do you navigate that? Because I guess in your in your public world, maybe to some extent in your very late stage private world, there's probably more supply or there's probably more demand for dollars from the companies than, you know, any given firm, even as big as Co2 is going to supply it. The early stage rounds are more competitive, obviously, like VC is like somewhat tribal in nature. And there are these kind of like co-opetition, you know, friend circles in venture where even people who should be economically competitive decide to play a repeated game and, you know. So how do you operate, you know, on on the early stage side?

• 24:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, a couple of things there is. One is you're right that VC is really tribal.

• 24:24Speaker 00

  My view is I like to visit all the different villagers, you know, so I'm not one of the villagers, but I'm accepted by most of them and I come in and I try and kind of leave the village better than, you know, when I walked in. So I have a lot of friends at at different firms and, you know, I always try and tell them that the bar of of whether

• 24:44Speaker 00

  we were successful or not is, you know, we we had a positive contribution on the company or the board or, you know, whatever.

• 24:53Speaker 00

  But.

• 24:56Speaker 00

  That tribal element is just kind of part of it. What I was seeing a tweet from Keith Raboy, who I love his brain and how he thinks. And he had analysis of his deals that he had looked at year to date by geography. And it's actually something that I do as well. I look a lot of my own P and L in both public and private. One of the elements of my private P and L that's interesting is I looked at maybe the top 10 to 15 P and L winners that I've had over my career on the private side. Without exception, my first opportunity to invest was a no. It might have been a no from me to the company, passing, or vice versa, the company passing on me.

• 25:40Speaker 00

  What's funny about both of those moments is you kind of think like, wow, it's over, you know? And in fact, what ended up happening is opportunities to invest later came around. And as it turns out, they were very successful. So I've tried a lot to think about, well, what's my learning from that? Right? And to me, the way I've thought about it is sometimes it just takes a while for an investor to understand a company and for a company to understand an investor.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  We know, obviously, we don't have nearly as wide an aperture of rounds, but we have a little bit. And I often will say, you know, we didn't miss a company, we just missed a round. And that if it's going to be great, hopefully there's another way in, whether you passed or they passed.

• 26:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  Obviously, it changes the, it changes the return multiple. But in many situations, it doesn't really make that much of a difference in the exit number of absolute dollars that come out.

• 26:33Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:34Speaker 00

  And so to me, that mindset is one where, well, if I'm only doing series A, then I have to think differently. Right? Because almost by definition of those types of firms, I only get one shot. I get one bullet, so I got to be really careful. So that does tend to lead to a more zero sum, like this is my one chance to be in this company. I can't afford to lose it. I can't afford to give a single dollar to anybody else.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 26:58Speaker 00

  Because this is my one shot.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 27:00Speaker 00

  I think that's an increasingly difficult game, right?

• 27:06Speaker 00

  My way of doing it is, okay, well, I may never be, you know, the best, but at any, you know, individual point, but I do have the ability to kind of float around and try and find the best opportunities.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  Have you ever looked back, you know, on the P and L or geography question? Have you ever like looked back and just been like, ah, we've made the most money at venture stage or growth stage or like, do you know where you end up doing the best?

• 27:29Speaker 00

  I do. And.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Does that influence your behavior then?

• 27:35Speaker 00

  It changes, you know, like there was a time as an example where China was an incredible market for investors. And we were very successful in that market. That market is functionally not available to us anymore. So you do have to just kind of adapt, right? There was a time where, you know, SaaS was everything, right? And the future. And now it seems like AI is kind of. So I think you, you have to, I don't want to read too, too narrow into it because sectors change, right? Like consumer internet as an example was foundational for us.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's a super lagging indicator, I guess.

• 28:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. And now, what's, what, what would we say is the greatest consumer internet franchise of the past decade? New.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Chat GPT.

• 28:25Speaker 00

  Correct. Right? So I'd throw Chat GPT in there. I might throw Robin Hood in there. Right? I might throw Revolut, but you know, it's just different than when the phone came out and it was Uber and it was Airbnb and it was Spotify and it was Snapchat and it was Instagram. And it was like all of these apps that were coming around, explosion of internet apps, right? Consumers changed.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:47Speaker 00

  So I don't want to anchor too much on, on that. So that's why I look more at round composition.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:53Speaker 00

  Patterns of meeting founders, you know, things like that.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  Because you think thematically, I assume, and because you invest late stage. I would assume a lot of times you want to invest in multiple companies in a sector. And clearly, the public side, that's totally fine. But you probably also want to do it at the private side. And you and I chatted a little bit before. And a lot of the people I've spoken to on this podcast have said that in venture, conflicts are like a big challenge. And particularly as venture firms scale, it's actually a really big challenge.

• 29:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, I remember Mark's quote on that, right? His biggest stumbling block towards scaling was.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I said, what's your number one problem scaling? That was the one.

• 29:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  And I think you have a divergent view here. So I'd be interested to hear it.

• 29:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, look, I do think traditional venture capitalists have set themselves up to be the entrepreneur's first call. And so, think about it as a founder of my own business.

• 29:51Speaker 00

  Do I want to try and compete with every other person that's trying to be the person's first call? Well, no, actually, I'm trying to be your second call. So the first call you're going to call, you're a VC that's been with you for a long time. And then you're going to think, okay, well, what do I do about this now? And who can I turn to help? I want to be the second call where it's like, gee, why don't we call Thomas and see if he knows somebody or has a point of view on a market or can make an introduction.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  It's also a lot more scalable for you, a lot less phone calls.

• 30:19Speaker 00

  Different types of phone calls, right? Different stakes on the phone calls.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  I assume they're trickier phone calls if.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  They can be. So, look, I still believe that if you're a 20% owner and on a board of a Series A company, that to back another company that does the exact same thing in the exact same framework, I think that's a legitimate conflict and we don't do that. But I do think that the position of conflict that I have has also a lot of benefits, right? It might mean domain expertise because I'm able to see the whole playing field, right? It might mean a very deep network in a certain industry.

• 31:00Speaker 00

  So I think there can be significant advantages there. Now. You have to do it the right way. And so to me, there's a couple foundational principles of if I'm going to invest in conflicting companies. The first thing is I'm going to tell the entrepreneur first. So I am a big believer in disclosure, right? So if I'm in two companies that might have or might be perceived, right? Because then you get into, well, is the conflict real or is it just imagined by the founder, right?

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  And sometimes we might have a different view on what a conflict is, right? But I'm also going to kind of disclose it, right? So that's kind of number one. And then the second is kind of trust and reputation, right? So the trust of making sure that information doesn't leak.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 31:51Speaker 00

  We take information, actually, security really seriously. We're, first of all, we're regulated by the SEC. So, right? If you think about a bad piece of information that could come into the firm, if a trade happened on our public side, even if it wasn't related and it was never communicated, could immediately implicate you in something really bad.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  By the way, I also think when you, when you designed for this from the beginning, you can, you can manage it. Like, why see invest in tons of competitive companies? But you're never going to see them share information across. Like, it just will never happen.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. So people know, we have a very stubborn and intrusive compliance department.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 32:35Speaker 00

  And we would have a zero tolerance policy on anything like that.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 32:38Speaker 00

  Again, if I'm in the venture business, I can afford to do things differently. And I think for the, for that business model, it works. But again, we're trying to do something different.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:50Speaker 00

  You know, I always, I always thought about rounds in venture. It's like, God, I got the best at my first round, and then the second or third, now I'm starting to get a Xerox copy of a Xerox, you know? And by the fifth round, like, you can barely tell, right? So I'm like, well, why don't I just add a complementary point of view, a complementary business? We have the opportunity to think really long term over multiple rounds, over an IPO, over a company going public. So it's just about adding a different perspective and network to, you know, a cap table.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  I also think companies in their later stages really need somebody around them who understands the transition from private to public and what happens in public markets and things. It just becomes like a very different set that people who traffic in series days all day just don't spend their time on.

• 33:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I also think, look, public markets, just public market investors think really differently, right? They don't mind going to a company and saying, I don't understand your business, or it makes no sense, or why, you know, they can be very direct, they can be very confrontational, because at the end of the day, it's a transactional kind of relationship, right? Venture investors might feel really differently, right? If I've invested in your company, I really want to make sure that the next founder that I'm trying to invest in calls you and boy, you better say something really nice, right? So the incentives can really start to get murky.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 34:16Speaker 00

  So I've always prided myself on being direct and at times saying what everybody else in the room is thinking but not saying.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, which I think is refreshing. You talked about the like wide aperture lens of investing and sort of, you know, what it means to sort of have this kind of broader mindset. I'm curious like what that particular phrase means to you because, you know, when we were catching up, you used it a couple of times.

• 34:43Speaker 00

  I really love technology. I just have a curious mind, you know, from when I was a kid, I was the youngest in my family. And so I just, I read a lot and played a lot of video games. So I was just really curious about the world.

• 35:02Speaker 00

  And I think almost every great investor I've ever met from Stan Druckenmiller to Marc Andreessen or, you know, are just deeply curious about the world, right? And so I'm just lucky where I don't have to be bound in my curiosity. I can just go out and seek out people and information and then I kind of figure it out later on what does it mean or what's where is it relevant? I don't have to use a filter, right? And say, well, because I can only do this, I probably have to focus.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:36Speaker 00

  Now, that can have a downside, right? It can mean that in crypto, as an example, I think that's served us poorly.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 35:45Speaker 00

  Because I think crypto was an area where deep specialization actually in the beginning really helped you. Right? So it's not a perfect formula, right? It's got trade offs.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  Right? And I think the investors who early on when crypto came around, right, and were willing to deeply go down the rabbit hole and specialize and really understand something that was brand new, right? That had no equivalent in the public market or anywhere else in the world, right? It was almost like this big bang. Yeah, I always think of Bitcoin as like a big bang that just kind of happened.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:20Speaker 00

  Right? So I think those investors kind of benefited. So it's not foolproof. But I do think it's kind of how my mind has tended to work. And I've always kind of made bets on myself and, you know, on the parts of how my work that I thought were the most productive and, you know, that's, that's one of them.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  We've talked so far mostly about markets and themes. Obviously, you care a lot about like the founder and the person you're investing into.

• 36:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  I'm sure this is true at all stages. Like, I would guess even at the, you know, latest stages of private, public companies, you're still thinking quite a lot about the person. What guides you on people?

• 37:05Speaker 00

  A lesson I learned at C A is star quality is real.

• 37:11Speaker 00

  Most people don't have it, some do. What is it? You just know it when you see it in a room.

• 37:19Speaker 00

  Tom Cruise is maybe my favorite actor growing up. I've seen Top Gun a zillion times. I loved Maverick. I had the opportunity to meet him one day in a very kind of random setting. I was delivering a package to him and, you know, he shook my hand and looked me in the eye and we talked for three minutes and, you know, for three minutes I thought, wow, this, no one cares more about me in the world right now than Tom Cruise does, right? The way he just commands a room in his presence. But also when Colin Farrell came to us and he had never been in a movie before and you spent 30 minutes in a room with him. And he just had so much magnetism about him, the way he composed himself and talked to you and looked at you and just his general kind of persona.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  So I do think that to me, I do look for that in founders. It's the combination of a mind at work and an opportunity that they're addressing, right?

• 38:17Speaker 00

  I remember when I first met Evan from Snap, he, you know, basically was making the argument that, look at the, look at the generation of young people coming up with the Iraq war essentially having been, you might say a hoax, right? The W M Ds were never there. Rolling into the financial crisis, oh, you told us we had the best economic system and then it almost collapsed, right? And then COVID,

• 38:48Speaker 00

  right? The, he built Snap as a platform, as a reflection of those trends, right? So what was it? Well, everything disappears, right? No one kind of stores your data. You can't trust institutions to look out for you. I think it ended up being incredibly prescient of where we are today as a world, right? Where the institutional breakdown that we've seen. So

• 39:10Speaker 00

  I think that that magnetism about a person in a room.

• 39:16Speaker 00

  And an idea and a market that they're going after.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. One of the things I often think about with the magnetism quality is there's examples of people who have, who are pure magnets where everybody loves them and everybody wants them to succeed. And then there's examples where people are highly polar, where half the world loves them and half the world hates them. And both of those work, but I think you gotta, you gotta at least have the strong pull, if not the whole thing.

• 39:42Speaker 00

  Well, Travis from Uber is an example, right?

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Polar.

• 39:46Speaker 00

  I think if you, if you referenced him, to your point, half the people liked him and half hated him, right? I remember meeting him at the Goldman Sachs Technology Conference in Vegas. And we were in like a little cubicle, you know, we had like 20 minutes, right? And, but man, I walked out thinking, wow, that is someone who's going to dominate.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:11Speaker 00

  Right? So, um, so it doesn't necessarily mean magnetism, like, you know, uh, it could just be, yeah, their aura, their energy.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:22Speaker 00

  You know?

• 40:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it doesn't have to all be positive.

• 40:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  A competitiveness. It does have to be strong, I think.

• 40:27Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:29Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. When you're making these investment decisions, you know, one of the things that is often hard is some of the great founders are not to everyone's taste. And so, you know, a lot of the best investment decisions were extremely contentious in a firm.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  I think, you know, this probably relates to how a firm is run overall, where you have, you know, there's the investment decision process, which can either be single trigger or fully unanimous or somewhere in the middle. There's how a whole firm is run, which can be, you know, a CEO, you know, hierarchical model or an equal partnership. I'm curious just to hear your reflections after being in it and around, both at the decision-making level and at the firm level. You know, especially as you think about the fact that a lot of what needs to happen is kind of counterintuitive a lot of times.

• 41:18Speaker 00

  I've always envied firms that had this quote investment committee where the wise men and women would get together and decide yes or no.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  And the smoke's gonna go up the chimney.

• 41:29Speaker 00

  Exactly. We've tended not to do well in that environment. What I would say, and we do have an investment committee, but it's, the way we've tended to work is just momentum of deals, you know, and we're very collaborative from the very beginning. So people will come in and pitch an idea, the public market team's gonna opine, you know, Philippe's gonna have a point of view, you're gonna be fielding information, points of view, possible connection

• 42:00Speaker 01

  You're talking about internal momentum, like there's a groundswell inside Co2 of like, by the time you get to a yes, it's like, come on, we gotta do this as a firm.

• 42:07Speaker 00

  Correct, right. So it's not any single meeting, and we do have like these check-ins over time, we pitch the idea, but it's incredibly collaborative where we solicit opinion incredibly early from a wide variety of people.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  That's similar to how we do it, actually. I've never heard it described that way. But by the time you get there, it's like, there've been so many conversations and you've worked so many kinks out that you're not like debating.

• 42:28Speaker 00

  The investment committee is more like, okay.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  It's been a process.

• 42:31Speaker 00

  Correct. Or the opposite is that the no's tend to not necessarily happen by then, it's just an idea peters out and it loses momentum. So the way we've found more or less it works is, and it's, you know, the number one thing I tell people when they join is, realize that when people wanna come in and chime in about something, or help you with something, that's not credit being taken away, or that's actually what makes us better. So yeah, if we're pitching a software idea, the software analyst who covers our public business is gonna chime in with an idea and with a point of view, right? And in fact, if we don't, because you don't want them to be in that meeting and say, well, what

• 43:14Speaker 00

  does so and so say? Oh, well, I didn't ask him. What do you mean you didn't ask him? He's an expert in this space, he works at Co2, and you didn't ask him what he thinks about this idea? So I solicit input really early on. I want to get that feedback, whether it's positive or negative, how to improve the idea, how to make it better. I want to iterate it in real time, right? Versus just having this holy grail moment in a meeting, the perfect deck where all of the data that you need is there to make this decision and all, you know, the council of popes has gone, of cardinals has gone together, right? We just, we just don't work that way.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Yep. When you think about sort of, you know, that's at the decision-making level, when you think about it at the firm level, because obviously you also need to say, hey, this year we're gonna slow down our pacing, or we're gonna focus more in this area, this theme, this stage. Obviously, you guys are sort of run in not like an equal partnership model. How do you think about the trade-offs of those two? And like, obviously, you know, you guys are running code to a certain way and have a preference. But like, when you think about what's the advantage of each, what, what comes to mind?

• 44:22Speaker 00

  I think that because we, we can run kind of incremental, right? You can, you can get promoted and have an impact, I think, faster at a firm like ours. Because we don't have to say, gee, we're gonna have to wait, you know, eight years for you to become a general partner. And by the way, there's these other 12 general partners around and we're gonna kind of have to wait for them to term out of this fund. And, you know, so we, we don't kind of have any of that, right? So I think we offer an opportunity for young people who want to have an impact quickly. They can probably do so at, you know, our firm. You know, that's gonna be a great opportunity for someone like that.

• 45:05Speaker 00

  Now, the conferences, we also don't suffer debt wait, right? And by the way, by debt wait, I mean two kinds of debt wait. Younger people that come in and just aren't good, they're just not gonna last long with us.

• 45:20Speaker 00

  On the flip side, also, we don't want a lot of dead weight at the top either. So it cuts both ways.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:26Speaker 00

  Right? The expectation has to be, whether you're new, whether you're young, or whether you're old, your contributions better match the economics that you have in the business.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  I think from my time, you know, I was in New York for a few years after college and spent time, you know, around a lot of people in private equity and hedge funds. Contrasting that with venture, I would say it is maybe a ruthless is a negative word, meritocratic might be a positive word, but it is much more clinical, I would say, than the way venture firms are run. And I think that comes with both positives and negatives, but it's definitely different. Is Co2 run like, you know, like a West Coast VC, an East Coast financial firm, somewhere in the middle?

• 46:10Speaker 00

  It's in the middle, and I will say, I think it is very difficult to run an East Coast firm and a West Coast firm because they are very different, right? Look, if you think about the hedge fund business, right? The hedge fund business is one where every single year...

• 46:29Speaker 01

  You know if someone did well or not?

• 46:30Speaker 00

  You do, and, and, you know, we get paid out on a yearly basis, right?

• 46:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:34Speaker 00

  So we know at the end of the year, did we do well? Did we not? And who did? And so forth and so on, right?

• 46:39Speaker 01

  I mean, there's so many examples of a venture firm, like, firing a partner because they thought they were a bad investor. And then five years progress and that was the best investor they had.

• 46:49Speaker 00

  Right? And venture plays out maybe in six or seven year cycles. So it's just, it's just different, right? So we definitely, what I think, like, if I think about what the crossover funds brought, is I think we brought a competitive metabolism to the industry that I think might not have been there before, right?

• 47:13Speaker 00

  I think what founders like Andreessen brought is a competitive metabolism born from being an entrepreneur, right? I think both of those energies kind of collided at the same time into the venture market, right? In the, call it late aughts, right? Two thousand post-financial crisis, right? Like two thousand nine kind of timeframe, right? So they both kind of collided into the world of venture. And I think what we're seeing is kind of the outcome of that, right? Like what I love about what Mark and Ben have built, and ironically, we shared an office building when they first started. So, you know, I just really, really like them and what they've built. And Mark's father-in-law was someone I cared deeply about.

• 47:59Speaker 00

  But their ability to think as an entrepreneur and say, we're just going to think about this as a business and a company, ironically modeled after the company CAA, which was the only other job I've ever had, was that. We love that. So they brought that competitive metabolism from being an entrepreneur. And I think we brought it from a bit of that, you know, kind of hedge fund, you know, culture.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay, total gear change. It turned out we have some similar interests. I got into golf last year, which I'm kind of embarrassed to admit, but here I am, started becoming an investor, and I picked up golf, and I think it's awesome. I'm still really bad, but we chatted a tiny bit before, and you were actually talking about it in a much deeper way than like a excuse to just like get out and have fun. What is your experience with golf been?

• 48:51Speaker 00

  Golf changed my life. Just point blank, without exception, my life would be completely different if I had chosen not to play. And I think that can sound strange to maybe people that don't play or don't understand the game. Like, what do you mean? It kind of changed your life? Well, it really has. The amount of people that I've met, mentors that I've had.

• 49:19Speaker 00

  Through the game of golf has just been incomparable. The game is so layered, right? There's there's an integrity layer, which I really like, which is at the end of the day, in golf, you're responsible for your own score. There's so many opportunities to cheat in golf where no one would really know.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  Right, moving your ball slightly out of a divot, right? Sometimes an inch can make a complete difference, right? So I love the the continuous test of integrity and character that it shows, right?

• 49:50Speaker 00

  The the competition, at the end of the day, you're not you're not really competing against anyone else, you're kind of competing against yourself, right? The ball doesn't move, it's right there, you just have to kind of decide on how to execute the shot. So there's dynamics of the game that I love. But to me, those are entirely secondary to the social element, right? And the opportunity to spend four hours with either a close friend who's having a difficult time, or someone I've just met and who I don't know. And we're not looking at our phones, right?

• 50:26Speaker 00

  We're actually kind of in the open air, right? Walking.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:31Speaker 00

  Is so rare in this world, right? There's a there's a defined end, right? So it's not like you're having a coffee with someone and someone's wondering like, oh gee, you know, do I have to go to my next meeting or?

• 50:41Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 50:42Speaker 00

  Is it time to go, right? So we know, we're on hole one.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 50:45Speaker 00

  We're gonna go through eighteen, and by the way, afterwards, we're gonna sit and we're gonna have an iced tea or a beer and we're gonna just kind of catch up, right? It's an incredible test of of character.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I mean, it's so frustrating. You have to like have such.

• 51:00Speaker 00

  How people respond, right, to adversity. Sometimes the the inherent randomness of golf and where your ball's gonna bounce. So, but for me, fundamentally, it's about the people.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  Also, just the presence to not be on your phone is so hard to come by. We actually talked about a couple other interests that we both, you know, like video games. I love video games, and for I think partially similar reason, I love like listening to vinyl records. I think things that force you to just be present are so valuable because we're all just addicted to our phones all the time, otherwise.

• 51:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. Surfing is another really important part of my life and very similar traits to golf, right? You're you're kind of out in the water, you're not looking at your phone, you're kind of in the moment, you're kind of meeting other people in the lineup. So I always encourage people, um, do yourself a favor and learn how to play. You're just gonna spend incredible time with the friends that you already have. And you're gonna meet new friends. By the way, you're gonna meet new friends of different ages because what's also unique about the sport is you can compete with anyone at any level. So if I'm an expert, I've been playing my whole life and you're brand new and you've been playing a month, you and I can have a competitive match.

• 52:15Speaker 00

  Think of how many sports in the world that's actually possible to do. Tennis, UFC fighting like Zuck or anything like that, impossible. In golf, you can pair people through the handicap system.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 52:29Speaker 00

  Right, of completely different abilities and have a good match. What does that mean? It means you can play with people that are older. It means you can play with people that are younger. It means you can play with men and women and kids. You can all be paired up and you can all be competitive and have fun.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  What's funny is when I, so I grew up in like a, you know, suburb of St. Louis and I had like, I don't know why, but I, I grew up with like, sort of like an aversion to things that felt pretentious or snooty or country clubby. And I think I had golf bucketed there. And then when I learned that it's, I do think it's associated with some of that stuff and that's like a separate thing, but just the game itself and the experience itself is so good.

• 53:10Speaker 00

  Look, no question, um, it doesn't have to be.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:15Speaker 00

  You know, something else I get is, oh, I, I gotta be good. So, no, you don't.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:20Speaker 00

  You just gotta understand the rules and to me, you gotta play fast.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  And if you're not good, you actually have to bring a stronger mentality because it's so frustrating when you're not good.

• 53:26Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, it also, it rewards great teachers. I've been incredibly lucky to have amazing teachers, right? I, I love, I, there's a lot of benefits of, of, of doing well, um, and being successful financially. For me, um, one of the greatest is the ability to, to seek out true experts in a field and learn from them.

• 53:50Speaker 00

  I, I have an amazing teacher actually based at Stanford, right? And I'm just so lucky to be able to, to kind of learn from him, right? Um, and I kind of bring that to the different, um, You know, approaches that I bring is seeking out amazing people in their field and be able to learn from them, right? Golf is a game where you will get better with a good teacher. You will not get better by just going out on your own.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:19Speaker 00

  Just trying to, you know, make stuff happen.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 54:23Speaker 00

  So I've been lucky to have great teachers.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Another question, just about sort of your life experiences. You got into work with family, you work with your brother. I think that's like a super enviable thing. You know, another example I think of is like, you know, at SV Angel, you know, Ron getting to work with.

• 54:39Speaker 00

  Yep, the Conways.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  Sons, and I think like, that's just like special to work with family like that. And you've done it for a long time, and you've done it in a obviously very successful and sort of hyper-competitive together way. Just like, what does that meant for you? Like, what does it meant for the relationship?

• 54:55Speaker 00

  I mean, Felipe and I talk every day, I mean, I can't even count, right? Comedy times, right?

• 55:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:03Speaker 00

  I think to me, the biggest positive by far is we don't question each other's motives. So there's no politics. Why? Because we know we're kind of stuck with each other, right? No matter what. Even whatever happened with Co2, we're still going to be brothers, right? So it completely eliminates a whole waste of energy around the politics and the, all the, this kind of stuff that can happen at other firms. Like, we just have none of that. He and I, I always laugh about this. I think we've talked about economics, i.e. what he gets and what I get. Over the 20, almost 25 years we've been working together, if you accumulated the amount of

• 55:46Speaker 00

  time that we've discussed that topic, right? For himself and for myself, it probably adds up to 30 minutes.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  And it's just because you trust that it'll be fair?

• 55:56Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:58Speaker 00

  So we just, I just never think about it.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  That's amazing.

• 56:00Speaker 00

  And I go to everybody else, and I'm like, look, I want to, I want to keep, you know, contributing and, you know, and if I don't, then, you know, my economics have gone diluted over time as others have come on, and, you know, I'm delighted by that. So, um, so it makes a lot of things simpler, right? Um, so that's, that's good. The bad is that it just, but I think that's just part of being a founder is, yeah, it's, it is kind of almost all you think about kind of all day long.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:29Speaker 00

  You know, so it's.

• 56:31Speaker 01

  So it dominates the relationship, basically.

• 56:33Speaker 00

  When you're at a family dinner, you know, when there's a problem at the end of the day, uh, it's, you know, it's kind of upon us, right? So it can become really overwhelming and it can be difficult, um, to turn it off, right? When we're together because it's kind of a lot of what we, we, we think about, right?

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:50Speaker 00

  Um, so we've learned to modulate that and find actually activities like golf and others, right? Where you can kind of turn the volume down a little bit on that. But, you know, actually I was chatting with Jensen about this one day and, um, you know, it's like, what, what does it matter where you work in an office this, that way? We're kind of working all the time, right? I mean, it's, it's always on my mind. It's always something I'm thinking about. Um, so that's, that can be the downside.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, makes sense. Maybe a final question I would ask is, um, you know, you spend a lot of time, you talked about the importance of mentorship for you. Obviously you spend a lot of time mentoring people. You talked about sort of, um, you know, young people coming up in COTU elsewhere. Any sort of, uh, things you find yourself repeating often when you're speaking with younger people?

• 57:38Speaker 00

  First of all, I think having a mentor is a blessing. Um, I was really fortunate where, um, you know, the, the first job I had out of college was, uh, I went to CIA, which is a talent agency in Los Angeles. Um, I got promoted to the desk of an agent. I end up working with him for almost three years. And, um, to sit with someone in a room for that period of time, um, uh, th- this is Brian Lord, who actually still runs the agency to this day, to watch the integrity with which he pursued his career, um.

• 58:14Speaker 00

  And the way he just treated me as someone who made mistakes and just said, just don't do them again. Right? Is something that, um, yeah, it's kind of helped me my whole life. And I just think it's a more interesting and rewarding way to lead your life.

• 58:33Speaker 00

  I do find sometimes in tech, we can be, you know, very focused on

• 58:40Speaker 00

  the, the mission that we're driving. And I think the ability to kind of share it with others is so much more rewarding. So it's both being a mentor and then being a mentee. Right? It's something that I take a lot of pride in and I always tell people when they, they think about coming to C2 or investing in us, I'm like, talk to everyone that's worked with me, uh, whether they still work with me or not.

• 59:06Speaker 00

  I think that's how people kind of define themselves. So, uh, yeah, for me, it's a fundamentally kind of a core, uh, principle that I, that I live by.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  You mentioned something about, uh, gift wrapping.

• 59:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. So when, um, when I was at CAA, before, uh, you got to, uh, work on a desk, you had to work in the mailroom. And that's literally what it was. We would kind of sort through mail. We would copy scripts. And I'm so grateful to have had that job because

• 59:37Speaker 00

  when you're starting out, I kind of tell young people, I'm like, focus is a luxury. Right? Think about the C, think about Jensen at Nvidia today, the amount of things that he has to worry about. He's got China and what's going on there. And he's got Amazon trying to build competing chips. And I mean, the, the, and he's got to run his own company and it's got to like the government. I mean, every day there's something new that he's got to think about. And he can't afford the luxury of just thinking about one thing. Well, generally, when you start in the workforce, you have the luxury of actually focusing on one thing. So I always tell people, I'm like, that is a luxury and enjoy it. So the, the example that I use is, um,

• 1:00:18Speaker 00

  during, uh, uh, you know, the holidays, we would send out a lot of gifts to our clients. And so we kind of had a gift wrapping station. And the way mostly it worked is an agent would put a gift in their outbox and say, gift wrap it for me. So you would take the gift, you would go down, you'd kind of wrap it as quickly as you could, you know, this, that, and you'd, you'd bring it back to the agent. Right? So I looked at it as an opportunity to differentiate myself. So if I saw an agent a gift, I would take it. I'd be very meticulous on how I gift wrapped it. And I started experimenting with different techniques. And one that I really liked is actually putting cellophane around the paper. And it just kind of gave it a really glossy feel. And it looked really nice.

• 1:01:01Speaker 00

  So I went, I bought the, you know, the film myself and I would put it and I would kind of make these really.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  It's like Joe Dreams of Sushi.

• 1:01:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  For gift wrapping.

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  Well, what ended up happening is that agents ended up seeing like the nice gifts. And I ended up being pulled out of my regular duties and I became like the gift wrapping guy. And so what was nice is no, I no longer had to run around everywhere. I had like my own little station and you know, for two weeks I was just responsible. And well, as it turns out that when a desk opens, you know, think of an agent who's got, you know, like 15 different trainees that he can, he or she can pick from. It turns out that being known for being really having attention to detail and doing something well, it turns out that that served me really well. And so, so I always think when I, I tell an analyst and they're just starting, I'm like,

• 1:01:54Speaker 00

  you might only have one or two companies, like think of that model, the way, you know, I was thinking about gift wrapping, watch over every cell, every line, the formatting, what font you use, right? Every line has to be, have a purpose, right? Because you might live in a world of 10,000 lines, but when you pitch the idea to Philippe, he's got 17 other things he's thinking about that moment. So your ability to crystallize that model in a way that's simple, that shows that you understand what you're talking about and that you can do it in 50 lines, not 10,000, is an incredible skill, right? And so a lot of how we mentor our analysts are derived from kind of some of those principles.

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  I love it. Thomas, this was really fun. Thanks a ton for making the time. I learned a ton.

• 1:02:39Speaker 00

  All right, thank you.