EP 144: Jeffrey Katzenberg & Sujay Jaswa (WndrCo) on What Startup Founders Can Steal From Hollywood

A day in a life of Sujay is, I love this idea, it's the greatest thing I've ever heard. This is a stupid idea, we should not be doing this. Are those the same idea? Oh yeah, multiple times a day. You're like, Sujay Lahore is on the couch. You talked to my wife, ready to do this. There's people who drop us who work for me. Dino described us as schizophrenic. Yeah. Yeah, we can laugh about it. All right, guys, thanks for doing this. Great to be here. So for people not familiar, can you give a little bit of overview on what you guys do and how the partnership came together? Well, how the partnership came together is kind of a fun story if you want it. Yeah, you want to talk about that some time. But at least I do. I don't have you guys do, but we have some time to do it. Yeah, we have a big time. She sleeps four hours a night, so like literally, I can never get genetic things. The exact right. It's five. What is that? It's genetic, literally, since I was 15 years old. Have you ever done like an aura ring or one of those things to try to figure out? Do you get like a disproportionate deep sleep or something? Or it's just never. I've been doing this for 68 years. I don't need to be analytical about it. Yeah, it just works. I'm fascinated by the sleep process though of like the people that can do it, because I can't do it. I can do like six and a half seven, but the people that can operate on that, I just don't know like what they do differently. Let me re-print it. Because I have to travel with this guy all over the world for now, almost a decade. He'll sleep his four or five hours. He'll go to the gym for two and a half hours. Then all meet him for breakfast. And then we like literally roll meetings or phone calls or like micro meetings that he sets up until like 10 p.m. And this is five hours after we landed. And then you just do that in like four countries and then you go home. And you've always been that way. Always. It's a blessing. It's fascinating for sure. You know, it's like Beatles wrote a song for me. It's called Eight Days a Week. Yeah, I mean, listen, you got a far more hours than I do. But it's a competitive advantage. So here's another one that's so, so yes, I sleep five hours and 15 minutes. Kind of no matter what, I can't sleep six or seven hours. It just doesn't, I wake up staring at the ceiling. That's crazy. I don't get jet lag. I can tell you that's the other thing. It's just no matter where I fly, how long, where in what time zones I'm going through in it. There's like a thing, you know, on your on the old-fashioned watch where you could turn the time. Yeah, just adjust the watch in it. Somehow or another, I turn my brain to like where we're landing. And I'm on now on that zone, time zone. And when I land there, that's it. Do you guys keep up football fans? Do you guys follow that? So Adrian Peterson, like Torres ACL and came back like three months later, whatever I was playing. Like I feel like that's what I'm hearing right now. There's some people are just like genetically built differently. But here's the other side of it, though, which is unfortunate, which is, I have fairly extreme dyslexia. And it has very, you know, there are certain aspects of it. They're really, you know, their real liabilities. Yeah. They're hard that you have to work to overcome. I have over the years. But, you know, with the good comes the challenge. Yeah, sure. It's a challenge. When you were younger or something figured out later, 40 years old before I understood anybody understood what it was. And so, you know, I invert words. I can't read off a teleprompter. I can't put names and faces together. Like literally I could run into you tomorrow in a hotel in San Francisco. And I will, we will spend two hours together here. And I will recognize you. But literally, you know, it's like a switchboard. I can't find the plug to do other creative manifestations of it. Like you think that elements of creativity, because it's something you hear dyslexia can lead to more hard to say. I have no idea. Yeah. Again, I've asked a question a million times. How do you know what a good idea is? Which is what I've spent a lifetime. Trying to truffle on. I have good ideas. Somehow or another more often than not, I know when an idea is a good idea. I don't know where it comes from. I, again, it's a unique thing to be able to listen and to be able to see and to recognize when something is unique and special and could be great as a story or you know, what we do together and venture. It's, it's, you know, isn't that sort of like the heart and soul of what we do? Which is just find that rare person with those attributes of, you know, persistence and vision and ambition and perseverance. And we can go through all of those things that you would say are fundamental to a great founder. It's also fundamental to a great storyteller. Yeah. It's interesting. So, so how did the partnership come today? So let's see here. So 2015, I leave Dropbox, figure, you know, we just had a really good run. I think fastest run at that point in the history of software. An amazing density of talent, by the way. We can talk about that too if it's for a long time. And that's one of the best parts of the company. But I think we had gone from a cold start to when I left 600 million of error in four and a half years, five and a half years. And coming off of that, I thought I would just go back to venture capital. I'd come for, I joined Dropbox from NEA. And in the process of talking to many of, you know, the good firms, I just realized my heart wasn't into it. Like I wasn't excited about it. I want, I like the building. And I felt a little bit lost because drew invented a product that at that point, four, five hundred million people were using, I was never going to invent a product that I didn't think that four, five hundred million people were going to ever use. And so I was sort of in the wilderness kind of figuring it out. And a friend of mine in New York, who started Spruce Point Capital, he's Spruce House Capital. He's one of the all-time great guys and actually a fantastic, interesting investor. Gaming this book, The Outsiders. Yeah, sure. Yeah. So I never, I never come across this. This is 2015. And I was like, oh, wow, I can't do what Drew did, which has come up with a product that hundreds of millions of people want to use. But there is a whole, there's like this whole thing in building businesses where it turns out that if you look at the history of tech, many of the great businesses didn't start the way we all storytelling them. Right? IBM started as a private equity rollup. And I remember, I'm a student of tech history. And so I started remembering that book, which I'd read, you know, in the Maverickon's machine, which I'd read in business school or something like that. And I was like, oh, wow, maybe I can do that. And so I started looking for companies to buy a Smyr Gandhi at Excel and Joe Lonsdale and I were going to partner up to buy a company and we're going to go pursue this outsider strategy. And out of nowhere, I get a phone call from Diego Brudakian. I don't know if you can work on this to go. So Diego is the founder of Cloud Kitchens, which Travis is now a CEO of. And Diego is one of my best friends. Diego calls me and said, listen, I just played poker with Jeffrey Katzenberg. He just sold dreamworks to Comcast. He wants to start a holding company. You know, he saw what Barry Diller had done with ISE. He wanted to start a holding company. I told him that, you know, you've kind of figured out like some of the mechanics of it. Would you be willing to just talk to him and tell him like kind of what you're setting up? And I did. And so we had a great phone call. Of course, I wanted to talk to Jeffrey Katzenberg. And Jeffrey and I talked. And he's like, hey, are you ever in Malibu? And I said, actually, they're most weekends right now because a handful of us used to share a beach house in Malibu at that time. And so we had lunch the next Saturday or Sunday. And Jeffrey said, why don't we just do this together? And I was like, why? Obviously, you know, you're like, you know, whatever world famous person. But like, and that's cool. But like, like, I'm like a Silicon Valley software guy. You're a Hollywood guy. And over the next two months, we talked every day. And in August, you know, we said, let's, let's do this thing. And what was the vision? So I'll give you my side of that, which is, um, so when I was 22 years old, I was here in New York City. I had worked for John Lindsay, literally since I was a teenager. Just an amazing ride and sort of saw the world. That was my, that was my college education was the streets of New York. And he ran for president in 1972. Failed. Um, everybody went back to city hall and I wanted to go find a career. And I remember at the time, actually consciously having this thought of like, I had been exposed to all these amazing things working for Lindsay. And as I was a, like, advanced body guy. And so I got to see everything. And I thought, I want fortune and fame. And in 1973, too, you want fortune, if you go to Hollywood. And in fact, that's what I did. So skip forward. So then through the, well, there's a connection here in this through every, uh, chapter of my uh, storytelling career, you can actually go and see that one of the foundational elements of certainly what I think was my success is how aggressive I was in finding state-of-the-art tech from my storytellers, wherever I was, whatever studio I was at, whatever era I was in, I always looked to what are the best tools to be able to realize the most exciting and interesting stories. I always love the story. You know, when Steven Spielberg first made JoA's, he cut a piece of plywood out of the shape of a shark fin, painted a gray and dragged it behind a motorboat. That was a special effect. So now think of generationally all of these things that happened with optical effects and digital effects and then CG animation, completely trans, the animation industry and digital distribution and digital projection. And I could go on and on in this and in. And so I was constantly handling these pilgrimagees to Northern California to the tech world where I partnered with Hula Packard and Andy Grovitt Intel and Steve Jobs on Pixar and I, you know, on and on in this and so having, you know, we dream works animation had a studio in Ridwood City with 800 artists there. It's actually where the first Shrek movie was made. So back at this, I'm now a cell dream works and right literally nine years within a week, I think. And I actually recall that same thought like, okay, well, if you were 23 years old today, I was 65 or six or what would you do? And I went, I'd go to Silicon Valley. That's where Fortune and Fame is today. I also recognize that I know what I know, I know what I don't know. And if you asked me to say, is there a recurring theme or ingredient in the success of different chapters I've had over my career, I would say yes, I would start with fundamentally at every one of these chapters I have had either an amazing mentor or an amazing partner. And that's like foundational to everything great that has happened to me. So I can go back into politics. I won't, but you know, David Pickard, Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, David Geffen, Steven Spielberg, Sujay Jaisois. And I interviewed in this before I got introduced before Diego and one other person put the two of us together, I had met 300 people over a series of months trying to find, you know, that partner, that person who knows more than me knows everything I don't know. And I believe that at that time I had found that in Sujay and nine years later I can tell you, I am certain that I found that in him and to his embarrassment in this, which is, I do believe that when people someday look back and look at which, you know, which chapters of my career or which acts of my career, you know, what successes did I have? The best ones and the most successful ones, the most important and impactful act is going to be the one I'm in right now with him. Literally. We will do more good for the world. We will have success depending on what, whether it's fortune or fame, however you want to measure it in it that I think will outdo everything that I've done to date. And I'm saying with, you know, I hope a bit of humility, that humbleness that I understand, Lion King, Intrek and Conquananda and Dragons and all of these things and beauty and the beast and a lot, you know, all of those as proud as I might be of those, I think the best is in front of me, literally. And that, this partnership is, is why. And so you guys are nine years in. Yeah. And so how has it evolved? Like what's the, what was the original vision and maybe give us a snapshot toward us today? Yes. Where we started was this idea that will create one or two companies here. And so in the, I think we've created 10 or 11, eight and tech, two or three in digital media. Digital media has been a challenging field. We can talk about that. But the eight and tech, I mean, couple them are recent, but this year, I think we'll do about one, close to 1.1 billion of revenue and 200 million of EBITDA. And, you know, we own at this point, after some dilution between 28 and 80 percent. And all those pure incubation, not incubations, but we'll do like acquisitions of products. Got it. They'll take private of one. They'll take private of one business that was in a challenging situation and did a whole bunch of crazy stuff with it. Yeah. So it's, it's, it's become like a pretty interesting portfolio. I mean, I think if you were to aggregate how much capital we've put in for that ownership position in those businesses, I think we've put maybe 300 million dollars. Yeah, well. So, yeah, so it's, it's looking pretty good at the moment. And, and who do you guys emulate? Like, if we were to say, I think you'd have to go back and look at the founders fund and get a deal in those guys, they, they did this in their own way years ago. Sure. They built companies and they also invested in companies. And because we've both been in the field of creating and building and that has a great fond and satisfaction to us, but also finding other great founders and, and, and betting on them is also equally interesting to us. And so we are this sort of unique blend of those two, two things. And they're very complimentary. Yes. We added that later. So, so the way we got into venture, because we originally weren't planning to venture. Yeah. We were holding company. Yeah. - Yeah, Diller, right. - It's like, if you think about it, it's like, who did we study and admire? It's obviously IAC, VMH, Buffet-Least-O, because we're really hands in, we're. - Got it, you want to be able to be involved. - I mean, obviously he's the goat, but in translation. - Sure. - Consolation, although there's less operation involved, but we admired how they could figure it out. - That's practice is exactly. - Exactly. - But it's like, we really studied the hands-on holding companies for that side of it. The big difference that we brought, kind of a maybe a more venture lens, it's hard to know from the outside of these things, is we really partner with someone that is like the founder CEO on each of these things. So we're kind of like founder chairman sort of thing, and they're the founder CEO, and we're like, you know, behind them, and partner at me talk every day kind of thing, but it's not, there have been periods where we've been like directly running the businesses, but we try to scale, you have to get people work with people who are amazing. And I would say the way we try to frame it, particularly for the ones that we are doing more venture investing in is say to them, treat us as an extension of your C-suite. How can we help you? I know everybody says that at all the time. In this there isn't a venture person. - Yeah, yeah. - Let's just say that. We try and do things that I think are unique to us, either by the relationships that we have, the access that we have. In my case, we talk about this all the time. The storytelling is literally fundamental to every business. There's not a business that exists that you, that there isn't storytelling at the foundation and the core of it. So whether it is the moment in time in which a founder has an idea, he needs to be able to explain that idea, or she, to other people that they want to come work with them. They have to be able to explain that idea to go out and raise capital. You have to have that idea in order to find your, go to market to find your sales, to talk to your consumer. Storytelling is literally at the core of business building. And that's the one place where those 45 years of experience actually have direct application to doing this. And so sitting with a founder and actually going through their sales deck with them and helping them frame it, perfect it and get it into that just rock solid. You're going to tell your story in 18 minutes on a zoom and be able to answer questions and be done at 29 minutes. It's an art and a science. And so there are lots of people that can give you the science of how to put a great storytelling, sales deck together. The art side of it, it's a nuance. - And what percentage of, I guess, the investments like of that 300 million capital in of those first, like how many of them wouldn't exist otherwise, either because the IP or the, it was a pure incubation. - No. - Yeah, so that's 300 million. And then the balance of dollars to play. - Yeah, so basically the way the way the thing that is inside of the holding company, it ended up, it's probably 60% on the build side and 40% on venture and venture adjacent things. And then we raised a regular traditional GPLP fund two or three years ago. And that's more 55 venture, 45 builds. - Got it. - And I think that's, again, I think in a traditional GPLP fund, you got to have a little more diversification. I think in the holding company, you can be pretty concentrated, take big swings, you get a lot of white hair from that process. But it also means you're committed to making these things work. - Sure. - Come hell or high water. How much time is spent, like I realized that's, it changes by the day. - So we just don't do that many deals. So that's our biggest constraint. So here's actually the crazy thing. Jeffrey described storytelling on sales decks. He will then sit down and do hundreds of sales calls with these founders. Like I actually really would love to understand at some point why you do that. Like I've never quite figured out what motivates someone who created it. - So I have a bottomless need to sell. - Yeah. - So give me something that I believe in. Just let me loose. - Yeah. - And so yeah, we find these, you know, for me, if I understand the application and why a product is going to make a company more successful, save the money, give them a better trajectory on this. And I know I'm doing something that's gonna help. I am a bulldog, right? Like I just, I will drive through any wall to get them to actually try the product. and allow them to see it for themselves. And so we don't do it with that. many, but when we do, you know, I'll literally do 100 sales goals. You know, with the founder, you know, to walk in the door together and, you know, get to the right person. That's the thing of the other thing that I think I bring. Because if you take the 10 ideas that have created all of the value of wonderco in our nine years, he's 10 for 10. They're all his seriously, like, you know, you know, you know, modest about it, they are. What I'm able to do is to accelerate and bring, I think, a level of access and resources and things to it that just make the partnership so powerful. I can't do what he does. Well, just because so the way I think of the partnership is worrying. So we have it's two of us and then we have four other partners. Okay. And he's that full team or there's a like six or seven associates got it. And we think of the group of partners kind of like a management team. Jeffries being modest. I mean, he's the magic. The truth is, without Jeffrey, we're just a bunch of people with reasonable resumes. But there's like, as you know, 500,000 people like us. There's one person like him in this world, in my opinion. So that's that's magic. And that's like, how do you potentially super accelerate or amplify a project that we're involved in? Chen Lee Wong, who's been with us since the beginning is like our chief product officer. Chen Lee, he was, you know, your classic term and scholar computer scientist from Stanford went, you know, did Goldman TMT banking went to NEA? He was like one of the two rock star pre- guys overlapped there. Yeah, that's how we knew each other. And Scott Sandell, who right now runs NEA, he and I had done investment work day back then. Chen Lee left to go to work day. When I went to Dropbox, I called, he was the leader of the first phone call. I was walking out of talking to Drew and I walked down, I called Chen Lee. I'm like, I need you to need you to come do this thing. And the joke at NEA was, do you must have realized real work has to be done? And Chen Lee's like, actually, my favorite Chen Lee story, Joe Lonzell told me this one. So at Clarem, it peers, yeah, so such fun. I just they used to administer some sort of IQ test equivalent to every candidate who was applying for a job. And Joe told me that Chen Lee scored the highest of anyone who ever took that test. So he's like an off the chart. If you spend time with him, you will just he's a great guy. So Chen Lee's kind of like our chief product officer by doing investments as well. Yeah, for sure. And you're awesome venture guy as well. But like when we're doing a bill, I'm talking about the build like when we're building a company, or if one of the venture portfolio companies needs help on product and engineering, Chen Lee goes deep in that. He ultimately ran the core product engineering team at Dropbox. So like what Dropbox was the core product and growth monetization data science analytics, all of that was Chen Lee's. And then Jeff Nike and who runs our New York office, he was a college buddy of mine was kind of like the smartest guy at Princeton when we were there. He actually came from the hedge fund world. So he was a managing director at one of the early Tiger Cubs, Shumway Capital, which became a 10 9 10 billion dollar public hedge fund. He then started with all the Shumway partners and other one called sidearmale. So he's a super analytical stockpicker person. But because he had started sidearmale, he understood the entrepreneurial journey, which is so different than just picking stocks. Like it's you can intellectualize it. But unless you've gone through the process of like putting those like initial documents together, like trying to build an office like you're doing right now raising money, raising money, getting people to believe in you, convincing all the quit their jobs to come join this crazy mission you're on. It's just unexplainable to people. It's it's it's a very unique process. And so he had gone through that and the finance side, he now runs our New York office. He's kind of like, you know, he'd all over Fintech, all that kind of stuff is what he covers, but he's also effectively like a CFO kind of kind of figure for a lot of these companies. And then we've got another person who's pure magic named Anthony Sallie. I don't know if you can work with Anthony. You love him. Anthony has been a great seed investor now for 14 years. He invested in Dropbox in the early days. He did seed or series A and Coinbase, Coupang, Robin Hood, I mean, the crazy crazy roster, the way he got into it is fascinating. He was an undergrad in in college in New York, working kind of as part of the extended team that was supporting Nas. And one day, Nas fires his entire team, except for Anthony, and Anthony at like as a junior in college or something 20 years old becomes Nas's manager. What year is this this is 2008 or something? 2007 2008. Okay. Now you remember in that 2007 2008, Nas is literally the biggest rap artist. Yeah. Whatever that album. I mean, dude, he's like a romantic. I mean, it's a guy's a guy's a he's like incredible, right? And so like true historical icon in music. And Anthony basically built this music management. Actually, he has Kendrick Lamar now. So that's he out. I mean, he's like he's the coolest person in Fintech, but he works full time with you guys. Yeah, he has even he has some management company that he oversees, but he works, you know, like he super will have to have some trouble stuff, right? And but he runs our seat fund. And Anthony, the way he got into the seed investing business was he read that Ben Horowitz likes rap music. And he called emails him and says, Hey, you know, we're thinking about maybe in this 2009, we're thinking about maybe, you know, Nas and I are thinking about maybe investing in some tech companies, which would be willing to like teach us something. And Ben replies like in according to Anthony in like two minutes, do you want to have dinner tonight? So funny. And and the way I met Anthony through Ben, when we were doing some rap stuff. And so Anthony is he's like literally the got I mean, Jeffrey loves to say this, Chenley has more IQ than anyone else in the shop. And Anthony has more EQ than anyone else in the shop. Well, I actually say he has more IQ than all the rest of us added on. So so there. I mean, anyways, Anthony's magic, they're they're both magic. And then we just promoted a six partner who started with us in our first associate crop in 2017, Justin Wexler. And Justin, you know, he kind of did the old school venture associate route went to business school came back. The thing we loved about Justin is he is a dog with a bone. He's like Jeffrey. If he decides he needs to help a company sell something or if he wants to go track down something or meet some executive, he will not he's relentless. And he's the kind of guy that we said, you know what, we have to bet on this person because he is, you know, he doesn't have the same track records as everybody else yet. But boy, if someone's going to have it that we know close, you know, that we're close to, it's going to be this guy. So six of you at the part of the level and how many investments a year? Five to six venture one build one build. And that will how much money will it be any given year generally? I don't know. I mean, it all depends how much we can raise. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Like call it a 150 year. Okay. 150 year 200 years and with that. And so what what makes a company that you guys are looking for and how do you actually make the decisions? Is it consensus? Is it, you know, silver bullet different people or is it tug of war? Depending if we're building something or if we're venture? You know what, it's such a compatible group. Yeah. And the process is just so strong. We it is one of those things where everybody has such high regard for one another that you want to know what Anthony thinks. Yeah. You want to know what Chen Lee thinks. You want to know what Nike and things like you want those voices at the table strong. And you encourage them to speak their mind always. You know, so I know I would say that it is, you know, vote consensus. It's sentiment. Yeah. consensus. Right. If somebody's violin thinks, Oh my God, this is a mistake, but we've never had it. Yeah, we, I mean, by the way, we're not right all the time. Obviously. I wish we were. I think the process is very much, I mean, it's kind of what we're all doing the same thing, right? It's you're trying to build as prepared a mind as possible that prepared mind process comes from fundamental research, market mapping, playing with every available new innovation you can, but also just talking to smartest people in the network, talking, collaborating with other people. We're very collaborative. Yeah. Not in the, you know, this is our ball. We're, you know, we're trying to grab all of it. You know, it sounds like you guys air on the side of like consensus rather than hey, other groups will be a little bit more I see oriented where someone gets like a silver bullet or they take feedback from the partnership. But then ultimately it's their decision if they really want to push it through. It's like we've never worked. Yeah, you guys are like a management team. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess has, I mean, it sounds like a lot of this group has been together for a long time. Anthony's been there since the beginning. Actually, anything was one of the people that connected us in the beginning. Anthony is one of my son's closest friends. Oh, so there's implicit kind of trust in the in the group and plenty of ups and downs now. Yeah. You know, like in, and we stuck it out, you know, it's like so much of this industry is about grinding through the hard times and capitalizing on the good times, then grind through more hard times than in well, there's like two different models. So I would just say, Logan, for me, the test of of of a partnership is is really how much do you look forward to being together? For sure. And I just have to say, in the case of every one of our partners, I'm happy when I'm with them, one of them, all of them, I literally, they are, you know, they're wind beneath my wings. Like I just feel like I'm excited, challenged, and you know, when somebody put take family out of the equation, if you have a handful of these in your life, you're very lucky in this, is when somebody walks in the door, like, you know, a great friend or a partner or a colleague, and you just, you're just like happy to see them, I feel that way about our five partners. - Yeah. - I'm like, I'm just happy to be with them in it, and out of that, you're, you only find, you find things to succeed together at, you know, it's not about taking down, it's about building up. - Yeah, well, and I sort of think there's two different constructs, plus or minus in the industry. They're sort of the cherry-picked model, which a lot of venture firms will look to the outside, more often than not, and try to pull people in. I was at battery for six years, now I've been at a red point for five and a half, they were looking for someone, and they pulled me in. Now my two partners have sort of grown up within the firm, but more or less, I think some firms kind of gravitate to looking to the outside, and some firms gravitate to looking to the inside as they evolve over time. It sounds like initially from the ground up, you guys were opting into people that you wanted to work with, that you knew network wise, that you knew from-- - Well, we did, I mean, we bet, I mean, that was, you know, you go back to nine years ago, the gamble, particularly on the people who gave us capital, was most partnerships don't work. - Yeah. - You guys get a lot. - Yeah, like literally, we couldn't be more different. - Did you guys do trust falls and stuff to like, you know, like we were ropes course, like how did you guys get to-- - We just jumped off a bridge and stuff. (laughing) - But I mean, it's witch and sundance. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - It'll be okay. - It's okay. - That's what we guys talked every day, though, and just sort of built the trust over time, had enough commonalities. - You never know until you go through really hard times. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Like when things are like, you know, should we shut this thing down? - Yeah. - You know, that's when you know whether you want to be partners with somebody. - Yeah. - And, you know, Chenli and I had it, and the way Anthony and I had it, 'cause we had several years together, you know, Jeff joined in 2020 or 2021, but I knew from knowing him for so long that it would be likely to work, but you never know. But, you know, the thing that was the big risk, as Jeffrey said, was whether he and I would really have, and it's been, I mean, he's like, I mean, I don't know, let's say, commonize age, but he's like a second dad for me. - Yeah, yeah. - You know, it's, he's amazing for you. - Well, that's what LPs are. - Yeah. - Yeah, really validate to, especially with the emerging managers, like, you know, when they're underwriting to a first fund or whatever, it's like, we're underwriting the risk that the partnership blows up, and a lot of them do, by the way. - By the way, in life. - Life. - I mean, I, you know, I, as I said, you go back and I can go, I could have gone on with the analogy about partnership, and just say, I just had my 50th wedding anniversary, what? - Yeah, wow. - Yeah. - Not too many of us. - Yeah, I think we are. - I think I'm a true unicorn. - Oh, it's gonna say. - I was gonna say this. - I'm gonna say this. - This is a dog year of the billion. - A long year of the billion. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Yeah. - And so, I really, I just, I think about partnership. I think about friendship. These are things that are just so foundational, and I think about how, you know, character. And so one of the things that I, I love about Sujay, and it's so interesting because, to find these two qualities in a person, one person is in itself a unicorn. It's a contradiction, which is, in order to be a great investor, or in, for the most part of my career, a picker, you have to be able to do these two things. One, you actually have to be able to see a dream. Somebody tells you an idea, right? And if you're not a dreamer also, it's not gonna be possible for you to actually, for a moment, put yourself in their shoe and see their dream. And understand what that might be, if it actually, you know, realized itself in it. On the other hand, most dreams don't come true. And you need to be skeptical and cynical. So think of the contradiction of being able to see a dream and also being able to be skeptical and cynical at the same time because it's about filtering through, you know, what are the, you know, are the best of those in this. And the thing that is we laugh about because, you know, a day in the life of Sujay is, I love this idea. It's the greatest thing I've ever heard. This is a stupid idea. We should not be doing this. - Are those the same idea? - Oh yeah. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Multiple times a day. - Totally. - But his process of how he sorts through that and he's actually quite verbal. - Yeah. - But he's, you know, the one day is, okay, well, the world's blown up, skies falling. Then we are dead meat. - Yeah. - And it's like, "Hey, you know what? The sky might be falling, but it's gonna be good news for us." - You're like, "Sujay Langhorz, on to the couch." - Yeah. - If you talk to my wife, or any of those people in Dropbox who work for me, I mean, I think they're described as schizophrenia. (laughing) - We didn't laugh about it, but the medicinal stuff and all that. I guess I'm curious, you referenced earlier, obviously, great partnership with Y50+ years, Eisner, Diller, all the different people you've worked with over the years as well. What do you think, maybe what's counterintuitive about making a partnership work? Or what's something that's non-obvious? - Not, okay, trust. Some of those things that maybe are, of course, well, I can tell you about marriage. That's, I'll start with that one. - Well, I guess that's actually the simplest one in a way. And you know, so I am asked all the time, is there a secret to, you know, 50 years? - You're like skipping the after party or something? - No, it's actually a simpler than that. It's just two words. But, yeah, it's the, yes, dear. - Yeah. (laughing) - That's not hard. - Okay, so that's marriage. - That's the wife. - And the rest in life, I would just say to you, fundamental to partnership, any and all partnerships, is you must be more of a giver than a taker. And I actually think that's true in life. I think the greatest satisfaction and rewards come, if you can actually find more satisfaction from giving than taking. And we could go take that analogy, you know, throw that equation through almost anything in this. I am, I, just in everything, try to be, and I don't succeed at it all the time. I try to be generous. And by the way, I can't say that I had those attributes earlier in my career when I was fighting to get to the top of the Mount Everest and, you know, along the way. And I'm sure people would say that, you know, I played hardball and was, you know, bare knuckles and blah, blah, blah. And I'm sure that's perceived to be true on the other side. And probably was true to some degree. I don't think you win in that world without, you know, getting into some knife fights all the way. But over time, I really came to appreciate and understand the rewards of giving. But in business and credit and philanthropy, you know, most rewarding thing in the world to be able is to help somebody else. - What surprised you about moving into attack, like directly, Silicon Valley, obviously you're exposed to attacking all those stuff you did before. - The cultures are antithetical to one another. They couldn't be, they could not be the over-spoilerative. - Controversy, I don't think it's that. I just think that if the one is very introspective and the other is sort of much more external and honest in it. And so there's a way more social networking, cultural networking knowledge. Like it's, you know, they really are just so very different. The work ethic and, you know, the heads down, you know, founders in tech are, they're unique, they're impressive. And, you know, so there's just a different dynamic there than I think exists, you know, the cultures of the two worlds are really quite different. - Presumably you got an exposed to some of the stuff in all of this world. I know you guys, I've heard you guys do a wonderful conference for founders and as well. I think that brings in different media folks, or Hollywood folks. What's been interesting to get exposure to that world? It's like that, that I guess you think maybe within our industry we could have a little bit more of. You can say nothing to. - Well, I actually mentioned, not only thought about it in the sense of like what we could do better, but I do think the thing we sometimes under appreciate in tech is the value of beautiful things. Like one of the most interesting things to me about people from, call it Southern California, but you know, the world of media is that they are very tasteful. And there's just, they bring, they sort of elevate environments that they're in. And there's a magnetism to them as people in terms of what they say, how they communicate. And I think, you know, we're all nerdy folks. folks up here, you know, in our world, right? And it's like, you know, I think obviously do a great job with this as a platform, but in general, our crew is like, very, as Jeffrey said, internally focused. And we tend to talk to each other, hang out with each other, you know, our, our, you know, we'll go hiking, you know, but these folks are influencing people at a human level, not, not impersonally. And I think it's pretty interesting. I think the people in, in the media and entertainment are more vulnerable. And so the emotional aspects of them, good and bad are much more extreme. So on one hand, there's enormous empathy out of many of them. And out of that comes philanthropy and doing social good and they become activists and stuff. And, you know, on the other side is, you know, sort of outsized egos. Very, very, very, very, very, super needy. And super insecure, much more so than I would, you experience in Silicon Valley. And so it's just, as I said, it's just, they are different, no question about it. And they love being like the people from one of the things we have tried to do is to bring those worlds together. And what's fantastic about it is, is that when the media entertainment, movie TV sports music people get to be with, you know, tech, tech founders, CEOs, they love it. And they don't get off, they don't get asked very often, right? So that's one of the things we've done is, is that we've brought these worlds together, both of which, all three of which appreciate one another more than they recognize until they're there. And then it like they light up and they go, wow, these are really interesting people. All sides. You know, it's funny, as you was saying, this kind of lipopop is in my head, which is what I think, the, I think the reason that insecurity might be there more on a human level is, you know, let's say we built, let's say we, let's say one of us starts a company, we build a product and nobody wants to use it. You know, you take that very personally, like this is your work. For a lot of these folks who are in the entertainment world, if people reject their product, that's them. Yes. If they're rejecting them as human, in a sense, it's like, it's the rejecting my humanity. That's the way I feel it. Right. Like about a buddy who's a comedian and it's like, I can go assess his job on a Friday night. I can go to the comic club and look how he's doing and be like, yeah, no, not great. Didn't find it that funny. No one really gets to do that for me. No. They like don't really know when we got into what value, wait, shouldn't have the company's doing and all that. But even if one of it doesn't go, well, you got a portfolio. It's not, it's not, it's like you personally. It is not me as a human. It's like, hey, maybe they were chasing your decision. Exactly. Which is a different thing. But here's the thing which is, you know, failing has a stigma in movies, TV sports and music. That is, as Sujay says, it's quite personal. And so particularly in the culture in the world that we live in, you go up and you go down and they are severe. And I've watched it so many times with so many people over so many decades, whereas in Silicon Valley, if you took a great shot and it didn't work, great, and start again, right? Like failure doesn't have the same stigma in this. I'm even to the quibi, you know, the one truly, you know, big swing and a miss, you know, that I took in the media space in this, in Silicon Valley, it was like, wow, it was a huge idea. It was a real genuine moonshot, you know? And you know, you can't hit a home run if you don't swing for offenses, right? And this was a swing for the fences. And people in Silicon Valley were like, you know, okay, it's too bad it didn't work, but it's not because it wasn't a great idea and that you did every put your heart and soul into it. And then by the way, when it wasn't working, you shut it down and gave people as much money back as you could in Hollywood. It's a black eye. It never goes away. Literally. And it's unfortunately, I don't care. Or what? But literally, you know, Sujay, we'll tell you this five years later. And there's just simply never anything that's written about me. At some point you were gonna get the quibi. I actually, I figured you guys, there's enough forums of answering that question. I, listen, I have been given way, way, way, way, way, either so much or too much credit for all the successes that I have had in my career. More than I deserve, I'm okay owning my failures. Yeah. You know, fortunately, they're way, way, way, way from them that there are the other. And so you can't have it one way. You gotta take both. Yeah. If you're gonna own your success, then you gotta own your failure in this. And so I, again, I wish it had worked, but I'm certainly proud of the shot that we, that we took. What has you guys excited these days? I mean, obviously all the stuff, raw collect, I mean, hey, we all know that it's a platform change. The first meaningful one, you know, in the reason 2008, 2010, 12 were such great years for our industry was you had, you know, social media, you had the cloud, you had mobile devices. And so it enabled all this amazing, you know, product development that solved big problems for people at home where it worked, right? And then we've all been kind of waiting. Yeah. For like 15 years, we've been waiting. Basically, AWS and the App Store kind of launched around '07, they're, they're marketing social media. And marketing on social media. Yeah. Customer acquisition on social media, right? So those three things like fundamentally changed literally everything. Yeah. And so you could build businesses doing anything and do something magical. Yeah. And then we got the data dogs and the crowd strikes and we got the bite dances and the Instagrams and the WhatsApps and the Uber's and the many, right? Like, and and all the enterprise business, I mean, it's just crazy what we feel like this is that time again. And again, maybe there's too much hype, maybe the bubble's too big, but this one is for real. Yeah. See literally transformational, not evolution, revolution out of the power of, you know, of super computing and AI and these app. I mean, there, it's just, it is a change the world moment and we're seeing things that are exciting. It no question right now. It's a bit too frothy. It feels like it's just gotten ahead of itself a bit, but that's not to say it isn't a, a sea change. It is. The internet got ahead of itself and we still had Google and eBay, Amazon and Amazon. And you know, my guess is net net. It was still like an outstanding, even if you indexed 1995 to 2000, as much as like the commentators like to make fun of the excess, I bet you still did great. Yeah. You know, if you indexed it, if you indexed it. And that's the interesting thing is you sort of had to get into everything. The eight names that really matter to power through. And some of them actually came later. If you look, I mean, you know, Facebook came a little bit later, Google came a little bit later. So yeah, it's interesting. But I guess no, Google was 98, 99, 99, 99. But yeah, 90, yeah, 99. Yeah, but I guess it was on the later part of the internet wave. Like I guess you were at a time base. Yes. If you were to index against net scape and chat GPT, we probably haven't, Google probably hasn't been founded. I think it was, net scape was 92, 93, and Google was maybe 95. Yeah. And so, 94, 94, I think we're around the time of, if chat GPT is the net, that's a great moment. We're probably around the time of Google getting started, which is interesting to think about. Yeah, I just think it's going to have, I just think distribution is so much more compressive. There's an acceleration. That there's an acceleration. Yeah, I think, again, we're just going to see, the human creativity being unleashed in these kind of new ways. I think we'll find out. We like to remind everyone internally over and over again that at the end, and we've been doing this since the beginning, but at the end of the day, there's probably around the world five to 15, five billion plus companies, ultimately five billion R plus companies created every year. Yeah. And in our typical portfolio, we're talking about 25 companies, 20 of which five are built, so take those out. But of the 20, which is three years period, we got to get at least one or two a year. That's our job is to get at least one or two of the five to 15 every year. And even in the middle of a bubble, I guarantee you there are going to be Google's created and things like that. And so in general, I think being cynical in our world about excess and bubbles is a silly, silly, silly game. I think on an individual, you can sound really smart being cynical. Right? People who can put out negative, critical things about anything always sounds smart. By the way, you're probably going to be far more-- You'll be right on a percentage per time, on a percentage basis. But when you're wrong to really-- In a power-alive business, it turns out it doesn't matter if you're wrong 99 times. It's that one time that makes all the difference. You know, it's funny because I mean, I didn't realize you never get your money back in venture. And so from 2012, I started-- Oh, check, scan. Yeah. So-- Oh, there's this carousel thing. Yeah, yeah. Well, no, it's so even before this is even worse than being on the venture side. Because in 2011, I think I started a program where everyone at Dropbox could sell some percentage of their holdings. And so we had liquidity starting around there. And so, of course, I would start investing in all the venture funds. And so I invested in dozens and dozens and dozens of venture funds. Probably good ventages, all things considered. Yeah, the paper, they should be amazing. Yeah, better than 2020. Yeah, but then you fast forward. And I'm still like, dude, when am I taking my money? Give me a principle back at some point. I think it's been 15 years. But the funny thing is when you look at the underlying portfolio companies, it's amazing. It's, well, there's, but it's amazing, but it's still one out of 50. Yeah. And that one out of 50 investments, the funds, yeah. One of 50 investments in a fund will be amazing. And by the way, that one out of 50 is going to return like, in some cases, 15, 20 X on the fund. But boy, that's 49. Totally. A lot of losses. A lot of, a lot of, I don't know if I have like the mental fortitude to do, like, super early stage investing because you have one company that goes really, really well. And then you, you mostly, you know, there's a lot of cheerleading going on and like, yeah, keep doing more of this stuff. And of course you help. And I'm making it simple. And then there's a lot of shitty board meetings. And you know what? Like the proportionality of pain you feel, it's like that loss mitigation framework or whatever you feel pain two or three times. It's like worse than you feel success. It's an interesting thing. Yeah, I was actually, do you, are you like that? Are you wired to, like, if you have something that loses money, does that hurt you more than the fun of the winners? I've, I've had to, it's been an interesting internalization. Battery was much more, I would say, growth, the in nature where it was like, you know, let's make sure every investment has a good shot at a 3x, 4x, 5x in that range. And red point what I've had to internalize is a lot more like swing for the fences. Hey, if we're not, if we don't have a shot at a 10 to 15, 20x, like what are we doing? Yeah. There's been a, I think if you go back and look like the, my first couple of investments at red point, you could see I was trying to internalize both elements of it. When I go back and look at like, you know, what I was thinking or reread the memo, we're all that. There was elements of both. And honestly, you need to, you need to pick one. Both can be great answers, but you kind of need to pick which side of the fence you're going to be on. Which give you a good one. I, I, I saw something recently that 1% of all exits drive, I think like 50 to 55% of value in venture. And so it's like, it's even more than that. I, it's 1% of exits. So that's not count. Okay. The other ones that don't work out. The zeros. So it's probably like 0.1%. If you count all the things that you don't have any exits around, which makes sense. There's a power law. And it's even true at like later stages. I think any fund that generates like over 3x, I think 64% of their value comes from a single investment, something like that. I mean, it's not surprising. I mean, it's, you know, it's funny. When I think back on my personal investments, what should I, I used to do a lot of that. Everything is your one or go now. But my two best personal investments where I put in 2009, a third of my at the time net worth, which wasn't much in Facebook secondary, 8 billion. And which would, which would allow me to leave any aid to go to drop us. Did you have a, do you have any connection to the team or was this like a, so Matt Kohler, who was one of the early ex, he was an analyst at McKinsey with me. Oh, fun. He was my best friend. Oh, well at McKinsey. And I don't know. Kohler had a crazy one. Kohler had an amazing run for Bill. I don't know. He was, he was linked in. He was the first employee at LinkedIn. He was like read offman's like, like EA turn sheep of staff turned like first employer something. I don't know if you get what that was quite, it wasn't exactly quite the path. Someone someone said, I think this is where I heard was. And, yeah, someone's going to correct me on this. But I think I heard the story was read was like, yeah, I'm not really hiring. I need people to like, you know, help me put this thing together and he was like, okay, I can do that too. So maybe it's an exaggeration of it. Maybe there's some truth. It's not how I remember it. I'm back then. All these stories get mytholized. Yeah. mythologized in some way over time. And well, Matt's, Matt's had one of the more extraordinary careers. So wait, but then finish the show. We Facebook after that. Then, and then, and then SpaceX. So my buddy, John Herring, who runs VY Capital with Alexander Tamaas started investing in SpaceX. I mean, there must be a second largest investor in SpaceX or something. And he put together like a group of friends to invest in SpaceX, the template. And you know, at the time, it was like, hey, they're going to come up with the starling thing. And we're like, what are you talking about? Internet? Like, that's the future of rocket. Totally. And then it's turned out that's incredible, obviously. And so, you know, you look at it and that. And so when, when, when like some of our investors say, well, why are you guys doing some later stage stuff? Like we put a bunch of money in that last thing around, which is, you know, we think that's one of the great building companies in some, you know, in Databricks, all of these are really good for the mind. And so we did a bunch of Databricks. And they're like, why are you doing that? And I said, well, look, we're just trying to figure out, can we get a 10 or 15 X on something? And so if we think someone even at a $10 billion valuation is building something truly generational in a market, which has its market, but also the adjacencies that they're going to get into can justify a $100 billion our company one day, which is what we, you know, hope for for Dylan and Figma or, you know, half a trillion dollar company for Ali. Like those are the kind of founders who can do it. And so we'll do that, you know, which sounds, you know, to, you know, some folks, you know, wonder about that, but that's how we think about it. And so we're more modeled on like the way you described how red point is, which is we want things to be really big. We don't get many shots on goal, like six a year, 70 year. And so we want them to potentially be huge. We also have a lot of confidence in the portfolio because we know that the, the builds are very safe. Like those are things that we feel a high degree of confidence can deliver super solid returns for the whole portfolio, which means on the venture side, the juice and venture comes from us, hopefully getting a couple of big ones. And what do you think about like a, like Ali or Dylan in those situations? Obviously, the returns there. Is that just a picking those things specifically from a focus and constraint standpoint? Is that when they show up and you think you have some connection to it and it just feels like this is a special founder and we believe in the opportunity or do you actively pursue those things of like chasing the people around and when can they take money? I mean, we're, so there's two different things here. One is that we, we, both of us, but also the whole group, you know, we've just been friends with a lot of these folks for a very long time. Yep. And so if you actually would say what's the biggest mistake in the history of Wonderco? The biggest mistake was that we didn't do venture from 2016 to 2020. Right. Because that was that period where all of our Dropbox folks were becoming either founders or the top execs at all the next generation great, like literally every one of the next generation great company, you're like fighting with the entire family. Oh no, we don't, we don't invest in your kind of business. Yeah. Why would we invest in this? You know, it's, it, it means greatest regret. It's literally one of his closest friends is Ali Goatsy at ThetaBras. And he's had the chance to invest in him at 500 million. And he was always too. A billion and two billion, which is always true. It's always true. The great ones, right? Like, then, you know, and you look at, I mean, if you, you, you mentioned the Dropbox crew earlier, and you look at that crew, right, you look at the opening eye management team. Like that, I mean, a lot of them are like a huge percentage of them work to Dropbox. You look at Figma's management team. You look at literally everyone of these companies. There is one, two, three people on the top out of the top five or six. I would come back into investing some of it, but I guess I'm curious because we're talking about Dropbox and talent density. But what do you think allowed that network to permeate? Because Dropbox, I mean, Dropbox was the company in what, 12 to 16, 17, something like that. Ali, I pro 11 to 16, 11 to 16, late 11 to 16. 10 billion was, when was that round? I think I raised that. 14, 14. And I did the 4 billion round in the fall in August, September of 2011. Okay. So, so that's stretch of time when those numbers meant something. Now they don't have fast changes. Three kids in a row. It's like, yeah, that reminds me of when I made Star Trek and like, you know, a pretty woman. Totally. It makes fun of me because I sometimes will reminisce about these days. Yeah. So, what do you think the talent density there was just like a good talent thing? There were a few things. One is that, so Drew started the company with Arash Ferdosie. Arash was, and probably still to this day, is the most incisive, insightful person when it came to assessing talented people that we could collaborate well with. Like he either saw, I don't know how exactly is, he was so talented at that. That was number one. Number two is, we all put a ton of effort into recruiting super talented people. And we didn't care about experience because that was that. Yeah. Was that like a top down directive? Was that an innate thing that you guys just felt some moral or like business oriented impetus to go pursue? I don't know. We just like working with really smart people. Yeah. And, you know, and it's and and people who, and basically if you were to say, what were the three qualifications that, I mean, if you're simplifying. So one is super talent, super smart. Number two was, it would work well with the culture. And number three were insanely hardworking. And I think I probably slept in the couch at least once or twice a week in that first couple of years. You know, it was a nutty, nutty period. And then, you know, it's Jeffrey was time of partnership and also, you know, it's funny. So Drew is still to this day one of my best friends. We were so close. I mean, like we like we officiated each other's weddings. Like we're like, like he is one of the all-time great humans. He's a brilliant guy. And I think like we just collectively really enjoyed having people of that talent level around us. And then the final piece of the equation is that obviously you have a little bit of luck in these things or a lot of luck in these things. And so we were things were just firing like, you know, almost a lot of the growth initiatives we would do would inflect the business over and over again. And when you have that and the business is growing so fast, recruiting someone's super experience from the outside to go like a lot of times you'll just say, hey, talented person in X go do this job. So all of these insanely talented young kids got jobs that they were not qualified for it all. the ones that did a great job. like the sort of the my at least my management philosophy at the time was if someone's doing a great job make it bigger and bigger and bigger and if someone's Drowning I don't have time to mentor them and coach them and all this sort of stuff You just got to move on yeah, and so we were a little bit I don't want to we were in super nice people But we were we were a little bit ruthless in the sense that If you were great you would just get bigger and bigger and bigger jobs And if you weren't it just didn't it was willing to work out and so what happened was you ended up filtering for people who had two things One is that the people who were crushing it ended up getting bigger and bigger jobs And then they got hired to do really big jobs by the next generation of companies and number two is like as you know What's that whole thing a player's higher a players and whatever so they were so relentless at only hiring great people to work for them And so then the the generation below them were also super talented in the same thing So it's kind of like we created a talent culture and a way for this talent not just to get brought into the company But also to get jobs that allowed them to maximize their potential in that window which then resulted in more talented people wanting to join And so we just ended up hiring lots of great people that way. Yeah, it's fascinating how all that stuff compounds at cascades It's itself. I mean, I mean it's crazy And then of course the final piece of why it all spread around is you know, we got stuck at 10 billion and So if drop-ups have been a half a trillion dollar company. Most of it everyone would say that's what happened to Google right most of people stayed And so you didn't end up with that crazy Google diaspora, but why did PayPal have a diaspora? Well, they sold at 1.5 billion nobody was rich enough to just shut it down and move to same parts. Yeah, right? So at Dropbox very few people got rich enough to never work again But they were super talented. They had this amazing rocket ship experience and the company had a reputation for having good people So a lot of other companies wanted to hire out of that, you know talent pool And so I think that's a big part of why it all kind of happened. So going back to the investment side So the AI thing how do you guys pursue the different ideas that you're going after within AI? Is it is it? Kind of optimistic when the stuff comes in or are you doing like top down of what you think might make sense? It's a combination of all the above. That's what we all do. It's a combination of all of it I mean, I think the AI stuff is the hardest because the valuations are where they're at Yeah, you know, you're making it but you to the point you made about the address like the best companies are always overvalued I will say I was selecting in 2022 the beginning when the market like totally pulled out and I was looking at all these slides and graphs and Publix were down you know was trading at six times forward or something like across the board and there were private rounds going down at 150 or 200 times ARR And I was like we all we say is internally we want to be in special companies and we don't get too wrapped around the axle Evaluation that's what that's what we'll say but but at that moment in time like one ladder caveat to the rule of like except once every like five 10 20 years Where this this huge dispersion of violations and then at that point in time we do care a little bit about it Now I was reflecting on we spend time with three investments at that point in time And all of them were just exorbitant Lee Price especially compared to the book markets and I actually think in retrospect we probably should have done them all They've also sort of grown through and it didn't really matter now have we been wrong and whether or not they're special it would have materially mattered but Would have mattered You can lose one X to the student of one that's that's the thing that's so hard to explain Like we get at you know for some reason when people spend time with you like with you talk about your business in our world They spend a lot of time time but why did that loser happen? Why did that loser happen when Instead what I would do is spend all my time trying to figure out For your outlier winners was that dumb luck? Yeah, or is that repeatable in some way? Was there some replicable things? Yeah, is there something that you did with that situation or those situations that will allow you To do that again in your next fund or your next fund spending time on the losers like it's like what is the point of that? Yeah So so within within the AI thing like is there other areas that you are particularly interested in like does the media stuff Come up and is that intriguing or it's getting intriguing. It wasn't early on because it was so clear that The rate of innovation is still so steep That whoever the winner is a year ago Not going to be the winner today or next year and if that they're going to get out innovated You know by the next generation of it is Only in these last couple of months that now we're starting to see uh Some creative tools that are image generation uh audio generation visual generation That are pretty compelling and we've actually invested in one or two of them now that we're pretty they're early so um, but it's still if you talk about traditional media in terms of you know longer form. I think we're still Whether it's a six months or a year or 18 months 24 months too soon for For that the disruption is a hundred percent. It's not even like I maybe Here in it uh, you know, it is a new set of tools and a new set of skill sets To you know, if somebody had a great line, which is that um It's not that AI is going to uh replace people it's uh People who know how to apply AI are going to replace people who don't know how to apply AI that's really where this is going going to happen and so in the world of you know creativity that person who understands how To create the best prompt is going to be invaluable is that akin to some of the other technological transitions you've seen happen within movies and in media at large or is it different? Yeah, but it's not It's not i mean i there's analogies. Well, yeah, but the hand-run animation. Yes, I was gonna say them You know that there was you know 70 years of hand-drawn animation and then john laceter comes along with this you know amazing short film that he made You know that the the the thing that was a Luxor the the lamp and and it was like a oh my god. This is This is a new world and that hit you like a lightning bolt when you saw that more like a ton of bricks. Yeah and and and so this and by the way it was exactly that at at dreamworks You know our first movie was a hand-drawn animated movie one of the last which is Prince of Egypt um and and then came Anson Shrek and and we're CG animation in this and our entire workforce had to be transition We had 1500 employees and a third of them were in non creative with business and support and tech and all of that um and uh That the other thousand there half of them were able to learn a new skill set Which is how do you animate with a computer versus animate with a pencil on paper And then some of them adapted incredibly well and half of them were not able to and so new set so it's very very very disruptive. I mean, you know painfully So uh, but you know that we we hadn't done it we we would have you know been out of business Was there was a comparable resistance to that transition that you're seeing today? Yeah. Oh no question culturally very very very difficult To to navigate through it and to come through the other side with lots of you know loss and insecurity and You know relationships and friendships and you know these people were like family and so um For those artists who were not able to you know grasp on to the new thing that wanted to hold on to the old tradition They got left behind. I hadn't really thought of this analogy. I mean, uh I think a lot of the like immediate job disruption transition At least in the the knowledge work areas. I think about it a lot of those things maybe We're kind of post mainframe a little bit post PC that a lot of the stuff that was done by hand started to move to the computer a little bit So maybe there aren't as many recent lessons and B to B that I can think of just like pure near term disruption that have happened So I'm curious and managing that communicating that are there things that you would Um either do exactly the same as you did do or do Totally different that you would maybe say to someone that Is thinking through how to leverage these tools and how to deal with the human element of the transition. Oh yes, I would be 10x more aggressive About embracing change as opposed to fearing change Change is inevitable. I mean, it's you know, as to again, other people said this you know We went through an agricultural revolution and industrial revolution You know now we're in the intelligence revolution and if you do not Understand it is and a revolution. It is going to you know 200 years ago 98% of the population was an agriculture Today's 2% You know, I mean and and it's no less important agriculture is still fundamental to human survival and existence in this But people have moved on and there are there are ways in which you can get redeployed here and this and so you know I I I think embracing that change understanding that trying to stand in front of it put your hand up and say You know, I'm going to slow you down. I'm going to hold on to it I wished I had gone faster. Not, you know, I mean, there was a point honestly where the company was in risk and we were in genuine jeopardy holding on, white knuckled on the cliff and then Shrek arrived. And it saved the company. And that is that moment, by the way, of, you know, making that full transformation. I made a half version of it, right? I was trying to hold on to, you know, the tradition 'cause I love the connection between an artist and a pencil onto a piece of paper. There's just something so organic and authentic about that kind of creation. And it was an emotional thing. And I had been asked the mantle of this amazing Walt Disney, right? And I was trying to carry that tradition on and to protect it and, you know, make sure that it prospered and all of that in it. And so trying to keep one foot in each world at the same time, and it's tough on the other hand, you know, go back and I was instantly brought, you know, an embrace using computer animation to support hand animation. So I remind everybody the ballroom scene and beauty in the beast. There's all that computer work of that amazing dance sequence in it was not possible, other than us embracing, you know, state of the art technology there, or the wildebeest, you know, Stampede and Lion King, you know, those things were not possible two years, three years before in it. So again, just, you know, that tug and pull. - Yeah. The enabling technology always seems, at least psychologically, it's an easier, right? But computer animation, CG animation, what John Lasseter did wasn't evolutionary, it was a revolutionary in this. And that's how I sort of differentiate here. And I believe AI is revolutionary, not evolutionary. And so to embrace it and to know it and to understand it and to try and harness it to make you better, to make you smarter, to make you more effective and more productive and is I think invaluable. No matter what job you have, no matter what you're doing, if you can find a way to, I mean, all of us, I don't know about you, but there's not a day in which now I am not on every one of these platforms and they are just making me just honestly smarter and more efficient and it blows my mind how much more effective I am on Chatchy BT and on Proplexity and on Grock and Gemini. Like they, if you, you know, I always believe that you can actually tell almost everything you know about a person, if you look at the front page of their apps, right, like that, if you actually went into that and did an analysis of like, we'll explain each one of these and understand why it's there versus all this other there. Like why is that, what is on that front page? And so here's on my Proplexity Grock Gemini. - You got 'em all. - Chatchy BT, you know, with WhatsApp, Slack and Google. - That's a little more extreme than I am. - You too. - I think I might have two of my home's free and I don't think I've found. - And each one has something, by the way, just to give them all interesting in that and llama, by the way, also every one of them has things about them that are unique and that are invaluable in this. And so I'm just trying to learn every day. Every day is, you know, just like something new is coming along here in this and it's just wild, wild. - So as you think about like are your incubations in this field yet or are they mostly, we've done one, I mean, the problem that we have in AI from an incubation standpoint is, we're not the smartest people in the world at it. Like for us to do something that's a build, it means we have to think that we're the most qualified people to do it. - Yeah, so we're in dog roaming. - Yeah, so we've got, you know, we've got-- - AI isn't gonna touch the dog room. - Well consumer cybersecurity was our big round. - Yeah, so that was that was where, I mean, frankly, I'm really proud of the stuff we've done there. - Yeah, maybe pretty good. - Well, so Aura, A-U-R-A, so this guy, Harry, right, each other, have you ever had Harry on? - No, I have it, but I know the business from the outside and I remember I was first exposed to it because they're the Timberloss sponsor. - Yeah, that's right. - I was like, every time I see a random, I'm watching a basketball game and I see a new sponsor, I'm always like, "Curious." I'm like, "Well, what is that?" And-- - Why does this come if you have so much money to waste? - I know, I'm like, "I need to learn what this business is." Or I don't need to learn what this business is. - Where is this? - Oh, right, I should figure out which one. - You should be the latter, but fortunately-- - This guy's I think the four, but-- - So we're a couple hundred million of Aura now. Harry is a, I mean, he's our other partner, he's our partner, yeah, I wonder how he's gonna have one or go. He is unbelievable. He is one of the rare people who is super deep in business and also super technical. - Those are like the most special entrepreneurs of the ones who can figure, like, learn both sides of this thing. And what we originally set out to do, which was an idea, he had an idea we independently had, and then Trevor Olshake from General Catalyst put us together. Because he's like, "You guys are about trying to do the same thing, you should meet each other." And which was that this is 2018 and '19. At that time, every week, you'd open a newspaper, go on whatever, Wall Street Journal of Commerce, whatever it was, and it would be X Corporation got hacked, 80 million social screen numbers are breached, or Grandmother took a spam call and gave away her bank information, or this creep was found compiling like social media profiles on the dark web, or someone reused their password, I'm gonna go on and on and on and on, right? And it was like, "Okay, I guess the little trade we've all made is for all the joy of being on the internet, one day we're gonna lose all of our financials, all of our money." And that's just kind of the price of being online, is that we're gonna get breached or hacked, or what have you. And we kinda had this aha moment where like that's insane. That's the insane trade. Why has the world gotten to this place? And we say this jokingly, we have a lot of friends in private equity, but we like to joke that, a good target for us is when an industry has gotten private equity if I'd. Because it basically means they've gotten the companies tend to go into cash flow mode, right? And one of the easiest ways to generate a lot of cash flow is to kill a long-term R&D. If the R&D is gonna pay out seven years from now, why would a three to five year hold owner invest in a seven year payout like EBITDA killer? They wouldn't, right? And so even if they would, engineers don't really believe that, and so they all bail anyways. And so I think what happened is by and large, the entire series of companies that were set up to protect all of us online, starting with the antivirus companies and everything else, just stopped innovating. You cannot think of a new product out of the old AV companies in like two decades. - Yeah. - And they were all desktop and they were mostly antiviral. - Yeah. - Yeah, but I'm just saying, but you can't think of any innovation, right? Like it's nuts. And so we said, okay, well that's the problem. You basically have incumbents that aren't innovating. You've got like a threat, a group of threats that are of course innovating, and somebody should go do something about this. - They're founders and murdered more people than - Right, right, right. - They should do products. - You can look by the way. - I say that kind of thing. - I'm just totally half-jumped. - Yeah, yeah. - And so then of course the logical thing for us is like, okay, well let's go meet all the startups doing this. And what we realized is the problem is the surface area is so big, you've got to protect people in all these different ways that unless you're, there was a group of point solutions that were big enough that you could build independent companies like one bachelor, phenomenal business that we're investors in and NordVPN's an amazing job in desktop VPN. But there's a very small number of these kind of point solutions that could be big enough to become their own companies. Most of them were just sitting in like early adopter land. And so then we kind of had like an outsider style idea which is like, all right, well what if we put all these together and build a suite? - And what is all these together? - You know, like everything from identity protection - Identity protection is password management or is-- - No, identity protection is actually like monitoring, - Yeah, you got it. - your identity online and like social security is on dark front. - So it's pretty financial information like all that sort of stuff all the way through to VPN and AV and all this password management, all this sort of stuff. But then, and that was, that was where the business got going. And that we know Jeffrey reference that we had bought a public company. We actually bought a public company in the identity protections. - How big of a business was that? - That was, I mean, I think valuation was like, it was training like 50 million, it was like kind of a dying public company. - We're doing identity protection. - I was really about that in revenue or-- - No, so here's the crazy thing about it. They were a, they would basically, it was kind of like a life lock style product that their go to market was the big banks would sell it to their customers. It's a bank of America or a city group or whatever would sell this identity protection to their customers. I don't remember if it was white labeled or not, but I think it might have been. And they grew really fast in like the 2000s doing that. And then the CFPB passed some regulation in 2011. I don't remember exactly what it was. That basically all the big banks that you know, we're done with third party products. There's too much risk. It's not worth it. We're done selling three. So this public company, which it had, which kind of been a bit of a rocket ship, went into like this melting iceberg face. - Do you know what peak valuation was? - I don't remember. My guess is probably 500 million to a billion. It wasn't like a giant. But it got you to 400 million revenue, I think with the peak of 2011, 2012. And then when we saw it, it was at 140 million. And this is actually a case study of an associate doing a great job. So we were in this space, we were looking for more things to do in this space. One of our associates, this kid Tom Cooley, who now partner at Sequoia, Tom came to me with this thing, he was like, look, we should be really thinking about buying this thing. It's like 140 million of revenue at that point in time. It's shrinking really fast. But the stock market hates shrinking public companies with very little EBITDA. And so it's trading like a 50, call it a 50 million dollar market. And I was like, Tom, how the hell is it in Shantilly, Virginia, what are we gonna do with this rapidly melting iceberg Shantilly to be in this? - Of course, that sounds like a major place. - By the way, for all intents and purposes. - It could have been. - And so, and he was a dog with a bone. And he would listen to the earnings calls, he would call the management team and get whatever he could. There was like one analyst company. - I was gonna say, yeah, I'm not all people dialing. - Right, that's those who live at Tom, right? So Tom was on me, on me, on me. Trevor introduces me to Hari. Hari comes by the office and we're just having this conversation. And I'm like, okay, this guy's a stud. And I said, Hari, if you wanna use this as our starting point, like we would do that with you. And he called me a month later, it's like, I've been digging into it, let's go do this thing. - And did he, he didn't have a problem? - Hari did not, I mean, he was tinkering. - Tinkering, yeah. - At the time, you know, kind of thing. I forgot, I don't think he had anything. - So then you guys buy it for 50 million. - So we buy, I think if you loaded it up with all the equity that we had to give, I think it was 95 or 95. - 95, I think it was something of that range. - And then how did the rest of the business come together and how did it actually turn around? Did they take the same product and just sell it to consumers? We used the kernel of it. And then everything kind of got just built on top of that. I mean, honestly, we turned that with you, look, there's a big benefit of buying something, which is you get to skip the zero to one face. The bad news about it is that the reason it's being sold to you is 'cause there's everything else is broken. - Yeah. - And in the beginning, we thought we'd like coached, coached whatever the team was in the greatness. That doesn't work. - Yeah. (laughing) - It's a complete redo of everything. You're building a company. - How many people were there, you think? - 100? - 200. - Well, probably a couple hundred. - A couple hundred. - What do you think, like how much turnover, you think it's 50% left or 10% lost? - I don't think anybody's there. - Oh, really? So I think my fee zero. - Yeah, good. - But they're all good people. - No, I'm not sure. - It just meant that you signed up for something that's different than moving. - We said something to you. We were trying to create something told, it was just a starting point for us. It wasn't like we were trying to be in the identity protection business. - Totally. - It was just felt like a great way to really kick start into this thing. And then of course, we knew that the first thing you do is stabilize. It took us a couple of years to get the thing, to stabilize, I forget exactly where it stabilized, but it's definitely below a hundred million. And then we did a bunch of crazy stuff with this, which is we took the, what became the growth part, which was tiny, like it's probably single digit millions. And we took all the non-grotes stuff and moved it into something which was much more like a constellation software style company, which we called Pango. - Different, different whole co, or different. - It was all together in a sense. - Got it. - All this strategic, like super innovative, like all the R&D spent everything like that when it started. - Good stuff here. - Yeah, well, you know, there was good two road stuff. - Road stuff, road stuff. - What can potentially change the world when it to work? And what was gonna be like our version of a private equity business went into Pango. And then about 18 months ago, Harry, you know, sort of through a personal experience of his landed on what I think will end up being the biggest play, which is, you know, we're doing phenomenally well in protecting people online. That's growing like really fast now. And the unit economics are insane. And like, Harry's a stud. So it's all just working. - And roughly like, I mean, whatever you guys can share on scale. - 200 million. - 200 million. - Or is 200 million Pango is much bigger actually. Pango's huge actually. Pango's awesome business, but it's, anyways, so we can talk about that. - Sure, we're growing super fast. - Or is growing really fast. - Good, right. - It's got, and about 18 months ago, Harry was thinking like V3 of the product. Like, what's gonna be the next thing? And he had an incident happen in his family, where one of his family, one of his children, kind of went down, went and kind of took a left turn sort of thing. And he went through her phone and was like, and he's a very involved parent. He's a great dad, you know, we vacation together. I see it. And he was like, oh my God, all the signals were here. I'm her dad. And all the signals were here. I run the fastest growing consumer, you know, online digital protection company in the world. And I had no clue. And V3 of the product basically became, how do I leverage the data on that's being, you know, through, you know, like the message you're sending and the people you're following, Instagram, all the network traffic, all that stuff, to give parents insight into what's happening on their young children's devices that can inform them about how they can parent better. And it's about becoming spyware. Yeah, it's not spyware. We're not giving you messages and all that sort of stuff. It's, but it's interpreting the signal. So I'll give you a really simple example. If you have a 12 year old daughter and she's downloading calorie tracking apps and she's following fitness people on social media and so on and so forth, good chance you have a need to sort of come in your way. Right now people don't have a clue. They get blindsided by this stuff, right? Or let's say your kid is on their device from one to three M every night. And that was not the case a month ago. Like odds are not only is their sleep getting disrupted, odds are something has changed in their life and they're something's going to right. Let's say they're communicating with a whole new set of friends, whether it's taxed or WhatsApp or Discord or whatever, probably something has disrupted. You know, if there's suicidal ideation and communication around that, which by the way, like in our beta set of customers, we've 2500 users that we were beta testing before we announced the product. So we go, I mean, what was the percentage? I'm going to read it. 20% or something. Some horrifying percentage of kids, like 11 to 15, have suicidal ideation that they're communicating to people. And so this, you know, social media's done a lot of great things for the world. But there really, there's a real dark side that we all know, logically, the evidence is not, you know, scientific evidence is either the data sets or the public. Yeah, here are the stats. 46, so 2500 kids between 12 and 7 to 18 years old. So it's pretty significant. Okay. 46, 46% of them are depressed. 35% have social withdrawal. 22% are up late night on their device. So sleeping disorder, 30% with low self-esteem, 22% with self-harm/suicidal thoughts, and 52% with an eating issue. So that's our own data. That's not some third party data that we have from our beta users. That's based on who they're following and what messages are being sent. I mean, honestly, we use a lot of, I mean, it's a lot of machine learning. We're just about a day that the funnel's in. Right. And so rather than actually, as Sujit says, we're not, we're not actually as a parent, it is giving you knowledge, information, insight without actually going into the personalization. And the only time it will surface to you and alert is when there's something that we know is actually harm sure. And I assume there'll be dials or something. Or you have a 10 year old. We built it with Boston Children's Hospital. Got it. So all the shots I got is there. Got it. But also, think of it as a, when you have a kid and you're going to, they're now about to be able to get a driver's license, right? Was the first thing they have a learner's permit. And you have certain things that you need to do. And then they go from a learner's permit into a, you know, kids permit 16 years old in this. And that has certain restrictions around it. And you have to have a driver's test. And you earn, you, you're able to mentor your kid into being safe in a car. Well, this is the same thing. You need to mentor, but you can't mentor if you don't know it. When you grew up, your parents knew three things. Where you were, who you were with and what you were doing, right? Today, you can have a 13 year old sitting across the table from you and you literally cannot answer those three questions. They may be at that table. It's not where they are. On this device, they've gone to other places in a way that was never, ever, ever possible in this. And so parents stay there drowning, like literally, they're out in the middle of the ocean and they're just trying to stay afloat and they have no tools. If 50% of parents in surveys will say that when their kid goes to sleep, they go and try to read everything that's happening in other device. But that's the best tool that they have. And of course, kids are way too smart for that. And so this has gone from actually being a really, really good business and something where, you know, Hari and Sujay were like, you know, driven to build a great business that was going to be a fan. It's now turned into a mission. Yeah. Because we actually feel, you know, as I said, we can be givers here, not takeers in this in which we can actually give parents the wherewithal to be great parents. And they're, as I say, there's not a parent. Do you have kids? Maybe by the time we release this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but you'll just see when you get to that age there, I was actually a breakfast this morning. Someone who's got 11 year old boy, you know, and she was actually struggling when I described this. And I actually, we, I showed her what this actually does. It was like, okay, well, how fast can I, I mean, I like, I'm desperate. I need this. And so does every other parent in my, in my group. And honestly, this happens three times a day. every day for every one of us in it. And so we actually just launched the product two weeks ago. It's got a whole bunch of features and functions that come out over the next call it four to six months when it will be a sort of full. Are you guys, you're gating signups or people can anyone go and sign up right now? We've made it so you're it's slow to start. I got it because we want to just really nail it. Yeah, measure it. And as Jeffrey said, we've got a handful of things that we think are required before it's perfect. Yeah. And that would be perfect. But you know, I mean, four to six months from now. Well, all these things are trade-offs. We were talking about the privacy side of things. But like anything else in the world, there's, you know, with freedom comes other considerations in all of this. You get a phone, you get the ability to go. No, no, no. Start with a 10 or 11 year old, which is the conversation I have this morning. I said, listen, you're about to give-- Or you've given your son a device that's cost you somewhere between $500 and $1,000. By the time we really said, it'll be $6,000,000. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, next week. Nice weekend. And the planes that had taken off made were landed. They're OK. The $50 a month for various subscriptions and things that are on this. And so at 11 years old, I'm OK with you having it, but to be understand, I didn't return for that. I am going to have observational and controls. And so in 11 year old, you're not going to let them go on to sites and places that you know they are not. They should not be on at their age. So there's very specific features and functions and controls that you can determine how long, what time of day, and so every parent on the beauty of the product is is that each parent can make that choice with their kid about what level of control and the controls on the 11 year old versus a 17 or an 18 year old and not look anything like that. And also the way the parental controls model works here-- I mean, there's a lot of different functional aspects here, but one of them is fine-grained parental controls where you can basically set timers for various apps. And then the kid has to come to you and say, hey, listen, I'm working on my school project. I really need YouTube for another hour. And you can decide whether to give it to them or not. But it allows you, as a parent, to actually finally have some constraints. I mean, you'll see this when your next-- when your child turns like three, they can watch slime videos on YouTube for eight hours. Like it's the most bizarre thing-- I have three little kids. I mean, it's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen in my entire life. They love watching humans play with slime. So here's the thing, which is go back to your thing, which is this is only possible today because of machine learning and AI. It was not-- we couldn't have done this three years ago. You could do it with the clutch hammer, but not in a fine-grained way. Not in a way that would be-- Yeah, the keyable to the kids. Yeah, the parents would buy into it. So this is where one of the amazing benefits that are going to come out of it. And for-- we actually feel like we're on a mission right now that if we can deliver the promise of what this is, the impact of this will be just beyond anything. Certainly, I've ever done in my career. And I think that's saying something. What's the-- so the funding history of the company, so it came together with-- You don't want to hear about dog roaming. No, I don't know. We can do that. Yeah. I don't know if we should talk about dog roaming. This is a little more on top. Let's get to the one up. So the funding history here-- so we put money in-- I don't remember. 18. It's-- you know, this one was early 2019 as when we finally got the deal done, the first one. And then we did it-- I forgot how much general catalyst invested, but Trevor's been with us since the get-go. And then-- I mean, there's been a bunch of-- it was a journey. And so the cap table's basically-- I was to where it's at. It's hard to remember the exact history of it, but it's us general catalyst, Werber Pinkis Excel, and then more recently, 10, 11 ventures in Madron came in. But then we have other ones, right? Like we own the largest mobile VPN in the world. 350 million downloads last year. We own 65% of it. The CEO of We Still Run Engineering for me at another company, and he's an absolutely animal. And so, no, what happened was there was a founder and Singapore that had created this product. Now, we've just got to know the space so well that we basically approached-- and they hadn't done a bit-- it was a person with a product. And we said, listen, are you interested in selling that product? And we built a company around it. And so he didn't invent the product, but it would-- I mean, it was-- you know, when we bought it, it was tiny. And now it's, I mean, probably 65 million of revenue in 30 of EBITDA now. And we bought it for $20 million. No. These are all creative deals in some ways. Like, is that as you sort of-- what bucket does this go into? Are these in-cubals? These are bills. Because they wouldn't exist-- They wouldn't exist otherwise. That's it. And we know them cold. Yeah. Like, we-- You are an extent to the management team. This is-- Like, there's not much that we're particularly-- particularly good at. But the things that we do build in are things that we have confidence in ourselves. That we're really good at. I always have a line, which is that, you know, I know something about everything and everything about very little. In the builds, we stick to the things that we-- We stay within the line the fairway. The ones that-- The few that we know-- The ones that we don't know. Yeah. We're confident we do them. Now, I guess as we wrap-- So are you still having fun doing this? Here's what I will say to you. He's heard this, which was sort of my-- And I really-- I should have been-- I should have been heard all of this, instead of my shaver form. But I found these words a few years, maybe a year or two ago. And they actually are every day, which has never let your memories be better than your dreams. I actually, that was going to be my second question was asking about that quote here. I actually didn't ask a single question in my sheet. I have like 12 pages of notes or something. I don't actually know who originally said it. I went to the first and I couldn't actually find attribution of it. I thought maybe I should just take-- I was just like-- Cats are from Hollywood. I find them from Hollywood, and that's a mistake. Because I'll come back to my show in terms of-- No, you did not. I did not. But I didn't create it, but I own it. And then every day, I really do feel it. I just-- like, it couldn't be more exciting. I learned so much literally every day. There are things that I never knew. I didn't understand. I have a great teacher here. Great teachers in my partners. It's super exciting. I-- it's hard for people. He always says this. If you-- well, that's great. But you know, how about making Top Gun? And I go, no, I was great. But that's back. And I didn't want to make-- I did that. I did hundreds of those, literally, and most of them were bombs, by the way. So we were-- [LAUGHTER] Not many of them were like that. But so doing-- I find that the creating and the building of the companies today and the fact that this is all new for me is just incredibly energizing. And yes, it's just wildly fun. Well, you guys have a great partnership dynamic. I can see between how you guys work together and how you balance. You know what? It's funny. It's reminded me of this conversation I had with my friend. So someone was asking, when Jeffrey-- when we finally decided to get Wonder Co going, it told you there was a few months of dating or what I'm going to call it. I was really struggling with the idea of this thing, which was word zero, this idea, cutting it in half. I was like, I was like, why would I give half my company, which didn't exist? Oh, wait. I was like, going to end my head. And Jeffrey looks at me. And he's like, what's your problem? I'm 65 years old. This is going to be your fucking thing in 10 years anyways. And literally, I was telling this story to a friend of mine the other day. I was like, and the reason I was telling you is I was like, literally, my worst fear would be if Jeffrey decided to not do this anymore, because he is the magic. For one year. You know, it's like-- It's like-- so it's like this thing that's just so funny about life, right? Which is, you meet people very rarely like him who have qualities that you literally don't see in anybody else. I ran into this-- I don't want to name drop it. It's a very famous movie star yesterday who I know through Jeffrey. And he was asking how Jeffrey was doing in this and that. And I said, listen, like, Jeffrey's a maniac. If he's got 20 minutes of free time, he's going to spend that free time figuring out a schedule, something-- the schedule is next Tuesday, because he doesn't want to waste 20 minutes of his day. Worse for-- and you know, he and I were the other guy and I were joking. We're like, well, we need to start the morning, get a cup of coffee. You know, it's just-- Jeffrey is a very-- he's like a once in my lifetime, at least kind of person to be around. And that's what makes life fun, right? To get to work with someone who you-- like, you're just mesmerized by the habits and the practices and the kind of the ideas and all that sort of stuff. It's cool. And it's different with each of the people we get to work with. But that's what makes a partnership fun, right? That's the point of it. Otherwise, you're spending all your time attributing, like, who did what deal and how much credit do I deserve for that and how are we splitting up the economics based on this or that? And what a horrible way to spend your time. You know, it's so much more fun to just partner on figuring out what crazy stuff we're going to do together. Does it have a chance of changing the world when it doesn't work? We all roll up our sleeves. Don't get me wrong. You can get tense at my moments because that's a nature of doing hard things. But at the end of the day, there's this foundation of trust and love and just like a commitment to like trying to do something together. That's really, really fun. It's a good place to end. Thank you guys for doing this. A lot of fun. Thanks. It's great to meet you. Thank you. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO]