Marc Andreessen on the Mindset of Great Founders — with David Senra

We just have this fundamental view. The technology is like on balance and enormously powerful force in the world. And the big problem with the world is that there's not enough technology, there's not enough information, there's not enough intelligence. And we have this opportunity, we have these special sets of technologies that let us fundamentally improve things. Anybody can build a product, start a company, be a dreamer, be a VC, these are all completely open fields. And it's just shocking to me how few people actually give it a shot. And the fate of the world over the next 1500 years is writing on the people who actually want to give it a shot. You're much more likely to build something important in the 21st century. If you start with the founder and train them on management, then you are just start with the manager and try to train them on. Being a founder, creating new things. Take whatever amazing new thing you have and just put it in a room with normal people and let them try to use it. And you just like learn so much about how much of a bubble you're in. Mark and Jason recently joined David Centro on the Founder's podcast for a conversation about entrepreneurship, history, and what drives the world's most ambitious builders. In this conversation with David, he reflects on patterns he's seen across great founders. Why many of them focus relentlessly on building rather than introspection and how technology and entrepreneurship continue to shape the future. Here is Mark and Jason on Founders. I was expecting to start here. I want to talk about why you're consuming so much caffeine that you notice that your heart was skipping a beat. I love caffeine. So for a very long time, I always said that the ultimate day, like the perfect day was 12 hours of caffeine. I looked at my four hours of alcohol. That's just like the ultimate. I did cut out. At least for now, I've cut out the four hours of alcohol. But caffeine is just like one of nature's most marvelous things. But it turns out you can't overdo it. So yeah, a while ago I was drinking so much coffee at work that I was sitting in a meeting a couple years ago. I started to feel a little bit something felt off and I just took my pulse. I was skipping about every 10th heartbeat. So I had like an existential crisis because I need to call 911. It's just like in my butt to have a heart attack, my butt to die. So I go under the table and I go go home and I'm like, it's a problem. And before Dr. Grubel said, no, it's okay. It's fine. You just might want to cut back a little bit on the caffeine. We were talking right before recorded. I've read your entire blog archive, Fulgent Twitter forever, listen to every single one of your podcast that I can go back like a decade. You said something that I love and I never hear other entrepreneurs talk about. But I think it's super important that you don't have any levels of introspection. Yes, zero. It's a little as possible. Why? Move forward. Go. Yeah, I don't know. I've just found people who dwell on the past, get stuck in the past. It's just it's a real problem. It's a problem at work and it's a problem at home. So I've read obviously 400 and I think now 10 biophesiphysis case entrepreneurs. And that was one of the most surprising things. It was the most surprising thing that you've learned from this. They have little or zero introspection. Like Sam Walton didn't wake up thinking about his internals. He just woke up. He's like, I like building Walmart. I'm going to keep building Walmart. I'm going to make more Walmart to just kept doing it over and over again. And you probably know if you go back, before 100 years ago, never would have occurred anybody to be introspective. It's like the whole idea. I mean, it's just all of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy and all the things that kind of result from that are, you know, kind of a manufactured in the 19th, 19th, 19th, 20s. Same more about that. Great Nine of History didn't sit around doing this stuff. At any prior point, right? It's all a new construct. It was, you know, it's a first Western civilization had to kind of invent the concept of the individual. Right? Which was like a new concept, you know, several hundred years ago. And then, you know, for a long time, I was sorry, the individual runs, right? And like does all these things and builds things and builds empires and builds companies and builds technology, does all these things. And then, you know, kind of this kind of goat-based whammy, you know, kind of showed up from Europe. A lot of it from Vienna in the 19th, 19th, 19th, 20s Freud and all that, all that entire movement. And kind of turned all that inward and basically said, okay, now we need to like, you know, basically second guess in the individual. We need to criticize the individual. The individual needs to self-criticize. Right? The individual needs to feel guilt. He needs to look back where it needs to, you know, dwell the past. He had never resonated with me. Do you find a lot of the greatest founders that you've spent time with and backed and partnered with? Or have low introspection? Generally, although in fairness, you know, the introspection is probably linked to the personality trait of neuroticism. Right? So, you know, a lot of the best founders are, you know, I think like 0% neuroticism, like they just don't get emotionally phased by things that happen. Which is a superpower when you're an entrepreneur. But having said that, some of the great entrepreneurs are, in fact, very neurotic. Like it, you know, that's also the case. It's not a, you know, it's not, it's, it's, maybe it's a nice to have to be low in neuroticism, but not necessary. And so, you know, there were some that kind of get wrapped around the axle on kind of personal issues. You know, as, you know, these days, sometimes that then, you know, kind of turns them to, you know, you know, psychedelics, you know, different kinds. And those are just genetic drugs. And, you know, that's like one very interesting kind of trajectory for, you know, kind of the culture of the country, culture of the world. And we'll see where that goes. So, we've recorded on like a dozen of these so far, most of them with some of the greatest, you know, founders living for the show. I can't believe how many, how many times on almost every episode psychedelics pops up. And they're like, you should try to like, I'm not doing any drugs. This is going to be clear. I'm not, I've never happened to ever find two. Like, I have four, I have to, you know, the problem is I already have tons of horror stories from people I know where know of that, you know, kind of came out the other side. Like, well, I actually, I had a, my deepest conversation with actually, I was actually with with you, Roman. And, you know, and I was describing this phenomenon where we see it, Silicon Valley where, you know, kind of, these guys get under pressure and, you know, they kind of feel anxious or whatever. And they decide that, you know, somebody tells me those psychedelics and they try to. And they kind of come out the other end as a change person and they kind of come out like much more at peace. But then they also tend to like with their companies. And they like moved into Indonesia and become a surface director. Like, they're just like, it's just like peace out right there. They're just done. Yeah, there's a whole bunch of examples of this. And I was complaining to you about this. And then, and true people are kind of wise, you know, to style. He's like, well, you know, how do you know they're not happier? Like, maybe that was the positive outcome. Like, maybe the thing that was driving them to be a great entrepreneur was the fundamental level of insecurity. Right. And kind of this, you know, this kind of unsatisfied, you know, kind of neurotic impulse. And now they're just, now they're just satisfied. Now they're just, you know, whatever the serotonin levels are, whatever they're recalibrated. If they're just kind of satisfied, sitting on the beach and being a surface director. You know, maybe they're better off. And I'm like, yeah, but their company, it's failing. And so anyway, yeah. So there's a possibility that there's a better version of you or me on the other side of, you know, I wasca, but I'm not willing to find out. I'm not neither. That brings up something that like I think about a lot. Daniel Ak has the greatest way to put this like he thinks the best entrepreneurs are not optimizing for happiness or optimizing for impact. I think that's true. I think that's true. I think it's certainly true for Daniel. Yeah. Who's kind of a great case study of that. You know, having said that, you know, I always kind of wonder is that, well, intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations, it impacts, strikes me a little bit as an extrinsic motivation. You know, it's like, yeah, impact money, fame, you know, and by the way, I think extrinsic motivations are fantastic. And I think, you know, they could be very motivating. The people who kind of get the great rewards for building great things, you know, deserve them. But at least what I found is it's the intrinsic motivations that actually get people up in the morning. And there's where you, you know, you're dangerously close to string into introspection. But, you know, it's like, okay, like what is the thing that causes somebody who's now, you know, extremely wealthy, extremely successful, you know, to get up in the morning and continue to, you know, kind of punch away at the world. I think those tend to be interior. What's that for you? Oh, I mean, that would require introspection. I would have people speculate. No, you have to. It's a lot more fun to speculate about it. So, like, other people, other people since you're good. But I am curious about you because like what you have, you have a series of quotes that I absolutely love. I save a month alone and I reread from time to time. One of them, a butcher, which is like, you know, the world is way more malleable than you think. And if you just pursue something with a lot of maximum effort, drive and energy, the world will recalibrate around you easier than you think. And I actually reread that this morning before I came over here. And I was like, what is that for Mark? Like today, like, what are you waking up trying to change in the world? Yeah, there's a lot that we're actually trying to do. It's suspicious that that's my actual underlying motivation. Yeah, why? Just because I like, like I said, I don't think an external impact is enough to keep people going. Or at least I've seen way too many people who had a high level of external impact. And then at some point they just stop. Okay. Well, here's the problem with external impact. It's like, well, kids, four in the morning. You're staring at the ceiling. Like is that enough? Like, external impact is stuff that's happening to other people, right? It's like, all right, what is it about you? The story I like to tell myself is that I'm competing with myself, right? The story I like to tell myself is I'm getting up in the morning because I'm trying to become a better version of myself. I'm trying to become smarter and better informed and reach better conclusions and be better at what I do and continue to expand my skills. But again, to actually analyze that proper require a level of therapy that I'm not only to engage in. So anyway, so yes, the much more comfortable conversation is that, yeah, what are you trying to do in the world? Which I would love to talk about. I have almost no introspection either. So I understand that. All right, so tell me what you're trying to do in the world then. Yeah, I mean, look, we just, we have had this. It's actually fairly amazing that it's become a controversial kind of thing. But we just have this fundamental view. The technology is like unbalanced and enormously powerful force in the world. And basically, that's a big problem with the world. If there's not enough technology, there's not enough information. There's not enough intelligence. And we have this opportunity. We have these special sets of technologies that let us fundamentally improve things. And then there's this very special kind of personality type of the entrepreneur who's able to build the product and then able to build the company and build the phenomenon and really making impact on things. And so when I look at the world, I just like, okay, this is just like this is a very, the world we live in is just a very primitive and crude place, as compared to what it should be and what it could be. And so the whole thing that we've been trying to do, for 17 years at our firm is, build kind of the ideal partner to the founders that are trying to do that, based on our own experiences of having been founders that we're trying to do that. Overall, the world, especially the Western world, is just stagnant. Like the overall kind of theme of things, it's just everything is stagnant. And we could talk a lot about that. But every once in a while, you have somebody that comes along. It's just like, all right, no, I actually have an idea of how to make things like fundamentally better. And I have a way to build a business around that. I'm built a company, build an empire around that. And those people include ourselves in this. But those of us that are trying to do that, we're like a rough movement basically against stagnation. But like, you know, without us, there's nothing but stagnation. But it's actually really funny. I always, there's always this kind of criticism that you get from, you know, whatever the, you know, kind of the, the, the corporate press or, or, or, or, or outside critics, which is like, oh, you know, you VCs are funny, the wrong things are you out to where they're building the wrong things. It's like, well, nobody like licensed us to do any of this. Like we didn't like apply for a permit. Right. Like, like, judged by somebody ahead of time and told, yes, you get to do this. You don't get to this. Like many people could be trying to do this. Anybody can do this. Anybody can, anybody can, you know, start building products, start a company, you know, start to try to be a VC. Like it, it's, these are all completely open fields. And it's just, it's shocking to me how few people actually give it a shot. And, and, you know, and, and, you know, the, the, the fate of the world over the next 1500 years is writing on the people who actually want to give it a shot. So when you started the firm 17 years ago, it was your thesis exactly the same as it is today. I would say the core thesis is the same. The, the specifics of, you know, very, you know, they have changed enormously. You know, we can talk, you know, about both parts of that. But yeah, no, the, the core thesis was kind of the start of the entrepreneur, you know, the founder is going to be the core, the core engine of progress in the world. And I think that, you know, I think that's more of a treatment ever. In fact, when we started it was still controversial. The idea of the founder would run their own company. Even in 2008, 2009. Yeah, it was still very, well, it's a very controversial. In fact, in fact, you know, they were high profile companies at the time that were getting heavily criticized for, you know, basically having these little kids running around for any of these companies. Okay. So you, you have this like encyclopedic knowledge of the history of Silicon Valley in your head. I probably read, I don't know, 30 to 40 books on it. So, I have some level, but not that you do. I remember reading book on Nolan Bushnell front of Atari. He was like 27 at the time. And it was excessively rare. It talks about that in his stories. It's like, excessively rare for him not to be replaced once Atari started growing with, you know, CEO, like, an older CEO. Yeah. Like where there are other examples they before him. Well, so Christopher Columbus. Alexander the great. Right. So, so throughout history, most of the, you know, Tom Strefferson, throughout history, most of the great things that have been built have been built by this kind of super charismatic founder type, you know, will the power founder type who, you know, basically built and run something to. Okay. So Henry Ford. Hold on. I love that you went here because you don't remember this, but we had dinner in Miami with Jared Kushner, like a year ago or something. And mean you would wrestle because I was so excited to talk to you. And I was trying to get out of you, like, you know, because I think about his case in Schultz first all day. Like this is what I do seven days a week. Like who do these? Hundreds from history that you like. These are naming country founders. Yes. Sure. Exactly. There's this like, recency bias, right? Which is like the, the world that we live in today is the normal state of the world. And like everything that happened in the past is like, we're different and those people were like, that we are and like all screwed up. And it's like, well, maybe, or maybe the world worked a circle way for thousands of years and we're in the weird time. Like maybe we're in a time that's just like really unusual from a historical, you know, from a historical standpoint. And I think this, this is one of those dimensions in which that's true. It just, they never would have occurred to anybody a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years ago that if somebody was going to like, you know, start something that they were going to be the person that ran like, obviously, it was just obviously the case. The book that I was recommend on this topic is called the Matthew Williams, which is the sort of famous book from the 1940s by the Sky James Bond. It's like one of the great geniuses of the 20th century. And he described the way he describes it basically as he said, like, there have been two like fundamental modes of like business organization over the course of, like, this history capitalism. There's what he, what he calls bourgeois capitalism, which basically is like founder runs the company name on the door. The classic archetype for bourgeois capitalism was Henry Ford, you know, in the 1920s and today Elon Musk, right? It's just like that, that's you. And by the way, in the old days, it was Ford Motor Company, you know, it's not a Musk Motor Company. But, you know, everybody knows Tesla and SpaceX, like, you know, these are Elon. And again, that maps to this historical thing, which is that's also how countries ran and that's also how, you know, cities ran on like all these things. You just religions, by the way, like, you know, basically everything, you know, founders led the way. That's the historical norm. And then he said, what he basically says in this book is he goes through and he says that there's this new basically model, but basically as a artifact, again, it's an artifact of kind of this weird period of time between the 1880s and 1920s were kind of the modern world, you know, as we know today kind of formed. And he said there's sort of a new philosophy of sort of leadership and management, which is called managerialism. Sort of the rise of the concept of a manager, specifically a manager as contrast to two-eighth leader. And so, therefore, the manager, therefore, the idea of a management school, right, therefore, Herbert and Stanford Business Schools, right, therefore, the idea of the manager who replaces the founder running a company, you know, therefore, the idea of management as a skill set that can be used to run many different kinds of businesses. In the 70s, this then turned into the conglomerate, which is the idea that it doesn't matter what the company does. If you have a good manager, the company should do, you know, 30 different things. And so, managerialism is this idea that you have this kind of interchangeable management skill and that can basically run anything. And actually, what Burnham says is he says, "Look, people are going to try to draw value management on this and they're going to try to say this is better or worse than the old name on the door model." But he said the reality of the modern world is everything is big. Like, you know, for the electrical power grid to get big, or the road network to get big, or the car industry to get big, large-scale systems need to be run by people who are training how to run large-scale systems. And so, he said, "You may or may not, in some things like countries, large-scale countries are going to be run by people who are good at running large-scale things." Right? And the founding personality type is not the manager personality type, those are different. And so, there's going to be a handoff when things get big and complicated. And so, that's the model that Nolan Bushnell talks about and that's the model that dominates Silicon Valley for 50 years. The problem with his argument is that assumes the managers are going to do a good job. Right? And I think if there's like one dominant theme that we're seeing in the last 30 years, you know, in the West, for sure, it's like managers generally, you know, writ large, or not doing a great job. Or another way to put it is, the managers may be a good at managing something that's going to be status quo for a long time. Like, if it doesn't change, maybe they, you know, maybe they can run the banks for a long time, or they can run the power company for a long time with the car company. And as long as the car is the car is the car, you know, we're soup, soup, soup, the soup. It kind of doesn't matter. But the minute things change, the manager personality type, because it's not the founder personality type, it doesn't know how to deal with change. Not everything is changing. A lot of things aren't changing, but for the things that are changing, they're changing, like really, really quickly. I mean, SpaceX is like the classic example of this. Imagine being a professionally trained manager trained at like, you know, a top management school working for a rocket launch company competing with SpaceX. And the assumption of the entire rocket industry for, you know, the last 100 years has been the rockets are used once. And then, you know, that's it. And the economics of launch are dominated by having a building rocket every time. And then this like crazy guy in California comes up with this thing, where the rockets find in their bung. And you can't replicate it. Okay, your management skill, like what good are your management skills at that point? And I think there's like a whole bunch of interesting areas of human activity where like that shift is happening. And so I think this sort of burn them's thesis collapses, whereas just like, okay, the managers actually can't do it. Yes, there's need to run things at scale, but know the managers actually can't do it because they can't adapt. And the founder can just learn how to run things at scale. Well, that's the theory. And that's that's a big part of our theories. Yeah, the founders can actually learn how to do this. And, you know, and look, they're, you know, this is still a controversial top. And this, you know, this still comes up like, because is it controversial? What is? Because founders are, especially founders that they want are not good at doing this. Like, okay, so in tech, this should talk about tech specifically, like in tech, the founder tends to go ban in a lab, you know, literally or metaphorically for 20 years before they start the company. Like, they've been, you know, probably working by themselves or in a small team, they've been building technology, they haven't been running things. Like they haven't been, you know, managing large organizations, they haven't been, you know, running public companies. And so there is a missing skill set, right? And on day one, they don't know how to do that. And so they do need to be willing to learn how to do that. And then they, and then by the way, they do need to be capable of doing that. Because, you know, some of them can, some of them can. But yeah, so this, this maybe is like the court thesis behind our firm, which is it's, you're much more likely to build something important in the 21st century. If you start with the founder and train them on management, then you are to start with the manager and try to train them on being a founder, creating new things. And I think that this trend is intensifying. And so you're, because what's happening is all the old edifices, all the old incumbent institutions of the last 100 years that are on the managers, they're all at some state of fundamental collapse. Like they're, they're, they're all collapsing in my trust and credibility because, because they can't adapt. And so this issue is becoming more and more acute, which is the system that we thought was necessary and sufficient to actually just like, does not work. And if anything good is going to happen, it's going to have to be some, but it's going to have to be in every 40 or a month type who actually does it. You think it's in a vast majority of minority of people agree with you. Look, it's becoming more common. I mean, when you get any a lot of on-moss kind of Steve Jobs, when you get these kind of archetypal examples of it, it's a lot easier to, you know, to, to sell it. Mark Barck's Zuckerberg, we were talking about earlier, like, you know, he's a, now great case study of this, right? He had, you know, when Mark started Facebook, he's never, he had never had a job before. Okay. Not only had he not managed people, he did not work for anybody. Right? So like, he, he started with zero. And his, his learning curve, which by the way, was happened fully in the public eye, right? His learning curve was vertical. And by the way, it's still vertical. Like he spends like enormous amount of time learning how to become better at running, running these, these things at large scale. He's still the founder and he's still the innovator, and he's still like a fountain of ideas, so to do. So he's, he's, he's, he's that double, you know, he's like the classic sample that double thread. And then what happens is other founders look at that and they're like, Oh, I could do that. Right? Which is exactly what Steve Jobs said when he saw Nole Bush know. He's like, I can run my company. I can do that. Yeah. Exactly. And by the way, you know, it's, it's amazing. Like how fast this stuff shifted because like, you know, Steve famously had this, you know, short period of time where he worked for Hula Packard. And I think, I don't know true. The legend is that Jobs pitched his manager at Hula Packard. No, it was the act pitched him. Was it was? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Well, I was. Yeah. There was some other story where Jobs went into some meeting with some manager trying to pitch the thing and the line for the manager was absolutely not. This is the dumbest study I've ever heard. Get your feet off my desk and get out of here. Right? You can just imagine Steve with his, you know, and they had to be bare feet at that time. Oh, my favorite apple lore is that the first sale and apple, and Apple's history was made barefoot when he walked into the bike shop. He was barefoot. What's amazing about that is, you know, yeah, so, so it was, for sure, for Hula Packard, everything I'm describing was Hula Packard in the 1950s and 1960s and 1940s. That was also Dave, Dave, Dave Packard and Bill Hula were, were that founder type and Dave Packard and Bill Hula ran their company for between the two of them for like 50 years. Do you think that's the most important thing? And by the way, Silicon Valley was built in large part on HP was there. the original Silicon Valley company. Okay, that's the next question. - And it was run by its founders for 50 years and yet people concluded the founders should run the companies. - Right, and so it's like, it's one of those things where it's like it's kind of so obvious it was staring everybody in the face and so people had to construct kind of a lab, or you know, basically, you know, these elaborate kind of lattices of like, you know, theories to basically get around the fundamental fact that you need somebody who knows what to do actually running the thing. - Do you think HV might have been the most influential company Silicon Valley history? - It was for sure the most influential company from 1940 to 1980 and that probably after that Intel. - Well, you go to the founders of Intel and you read Barg提 you said them and they talk about modeling off of HP. - Yeah, that's right, that's right. - Yeah, that's right. - And then how many founders modeled off of Bob Noice in Intel after the fact including Steve Jobs, who goes we go to Bob Noice's house for dinner. - By the way, that's another great example 'cause Bob Noice at least, you know, appreciate, if you like it photos about Noice, you're like, wow, this guy's like a pillar of society like he's, you know, he's very, very well dressed and he's kind of very adult and he's very like, you know, he's famously the leader of the traitorous aide. You know, the group that left Shockley to start fairshell. - And that left Fairshell to start in. - To start in. - So Bob Noice was 100% the Steve Jobs of his time just in the short sleep white dress shirt and the skinny black tie. But it was, again, it's like the exact same thing and so I, you know, I never, of course I never met Bob Noice but I could easily imagine Bob Noice and Steve Jobs sitting down and being able to talk for three hours and completely understanding each other despite the fact that they look and feel as like completely. - He was almost like a disciplinarian to Steve because Steve was, you know, wild reckless. Like I was also wild in reckless. He needed mature. And I think Bob's wife maybe went to work at Apple early on too. So he talked about this in his biography. There's a few great biographies of Bob Noice but he said that the reason he spent so much time after he was really successful spending time with the young entrepreneur, he said it was a restocking the stream in which he fished from. He thought it was really important. And he's like, I learned from all the guys before me. I need to take that knowledge I've built up over multiple decades and push it down to generations. So what I'm trying to do with this show, I'm trying to do my other show founders. Like hey, I mean, if you, my other show founders, the what, when you click on the podcast description is like learn from history as entrepreneurs. That is what you're gonna get if you listen to it. The why's actually comes from you where you're like, I was watching one of your talks at Stanford like years ago. And you're like, hey, there's thousands of years of history where all these smart people, like invented new technologies, started new companies. And somebody wrote these lessons down in a book and he's like for a few moments of your time or a few dollars or a few hours of your time, you can always learn more stuff from the accumulated knowledge of history and like it's a good issue to tell you. I was like, that's the why. So I used your quote as the why to founders. I'm gonna go back to starting the firm though. This is interesting. What was occurring in your life either at that time or before that that you had this observation that this had to be done? - Oh, so I'm gonna see. We've got all these lever theories. The practical reality of it was bent, my partner, Ben and I had become very active angel investors. And I've been an angel investor since like the mid 90s, but then Ben and I started doing it kind of as a real thing. But he's significantly in time and do it probably starting in 2003. Well, I did it kind of throughout the early 2000s, but 2003, 2004, it's hard to remember now, but if you go back to 2003, 2004, there weren't like thousands of Asian investors. There were like eight, it was like I sure, I was like, I'm kind of way in, I'm handful of people. And then Ben and I were running around doing it. And this was a very significant in the evolution of the venture capital industry 'cause this was the point at which the traditional VCs got its intermediate by angels and seed investors who kind of inserted in before theancies arrived, which was this fundamental change that changed the whole industry. But we were part of that. So, but as a consequence, we were investing in all these new companies, basically at the point of formation. We were basically playing amateur early stage VC. And we were getting, and we were always like, when I go around the board, you're gonna raise money for real venture firm later, they're gonna go on your board and whatever and work with you. And what we just found over and over and over over again was we ended up getting pulled into these companies either because there were issues that just like the other people that they were working with or they either had raised venture yet or the VCs that they'd raised from couldn't help them with. And so we just kept holding it. And the reason was we had been running companies at that point for whatever 20 years. And so we set some idea over what we're doing. And then the other is we kept getting brought in into conflict resolution between the founders and the VCs. (laughs) So, especially, 'cause again, much more common at that time, especially if the VCs fundamental point of view is the founders not gonna run the company and we need to replace you the professional managers as fast as possible. Like the founders are not necessarily gonna like that and they might resist that. And by the way, even if they're on board of that idea, they might not like the person who the VCs wants to bring in. And so we kept ending up in these kind of, basically as arbitrators in this sort of, you know, in theory, we were kind of trusted in our meteors 'cause we knew the founders, we knew the VCs and we could kind of help bridge between that. But literally what happened was after a while, we were like spending like eight hours a day, just doing this and we're like, all right. And it's like, we're just like, you're writing a $100,000 check and you're like spending all this time doing it and then to basically arbitrator, somebody wrote a $10 million check. And it's just like, all right, we should probably just write the $10 million check. And that was, that was, so it was, it was, I always think like the founders, I always, one of my theories of like the great founders is they tend to be able to operate at kind of the conceptual level and then the practical level at the same time. And so we had a whole theory I could take you through for the evolution of the venture business. Yeah, but underneath that was just this actual, you know, the lived experience of what was actually happening on the ground. The big theory, the firm that we had at that time was linked to this idea of, was linked to this idea of a founders running the show. But it was also a structural observation of what was happening in the venture industry, which was basically what we did was we sort of align with your philosophy. We went back and we studied a lot of other businesses that have similarities to the venture business. So we studied private equity, venture capital, or sorry, private equity hedge funds, investor banks, law firms, management consulting firms, ad agencies, accounting firms. You know, basically anything where the product is fundamentally a relationship, you know, a knowledge work, you know, kind of relationship that's compared to something that gets manufactured. And what we observed is basically in exactly Hollywood talent agencies, actually, so long we've probably talked publicly about the most. And so that was a great case study. Oh, they all started. He was in this studio a few months ago. And so, and he actually, and by the way, he gave us, you know, we make a point, credit, like he gave us a lot of this theory, so a lot of this comes from him. But well, I actually, I'll tell you through his experience. So when he started his agency in, was it 80, whatever, no, 75, 75. In the 70s, in the 70s, like in the 70s. It was actually very similar. It structurally, it was very similar to when we started A16Z in 2009, which was the configuration industry at that point was basically a bunch of, essentially service firms, a bunch of talent agencies, none of which were at very high scale. And then each of them was basically a tribe of basically solo operators, kind of kind of long-moles. And so the concept in Hollywood was you had an agent, and that was your guy. And that agent knew, whoever that agent knew, and had whatever relationships that agent had. But the other agents at your agency were not available to you. And there was no collective benefit to the fact that you were at an agency that had not just your guy, but like a hundred other guys, there was no collective payoff to that. They ran that in that way for a very specific reason, which is this kind of what you kill a professional services mentality where everybody should have to go build their own book of business. But you end up, you're just dealing with a guy as opposed to a firm. Like there's no firm, there's no collective thing. And that was basically the condition of Metric App on 2009, which is, you have, and at this point, we knew all of you. See's really well. And we had raised venture, and we had worked with all these other companies that had raised venture. And basically all of the legacy venture firms at that point, they were all like that. They were all just like tribes of the wolves. And then the thing that we knew that was not public they know and was generally speaking inside the firms, they didn't even like each other. I hear stories like this all the time. Right? And so it's like, whatever, there's Joe and Mary, our partners at venture firm, and you're working with Joe. And Mary has a key connection that you need access to. And you see, Joe can Mary introduce me to someone. So what you don't know is they're having a brutal fight. They're like trying to destroy each other. 'Cause they're fundamentally economics. They're going for a greater slice of the profit pool. And so they're really going out. And so we saw example, for example, a venture firm that was basically either, two things actually, what is either melting down due to just internal strife and conflict. Or by the way, the other was generational session. The other issue is a lot of the dominant venture firms at 2009 had been around for 30 or 40 years. And they were now on their third generation of partners going to their fourth generation of partners. And again, it's the same thing. They had been founded by Dynamos. And then the later generation people were not like that. So we basically said, oh, this is where the oldest thing comes in. As we said, look, that's not gonna last. So our theory of what we call death of the middle, or we sometimes, the negative way to frame it is death of the middle, the positive way is the barbell. Which is what's happening in all these other industries, which is basically the industry gets stretched to part like Taffy. And what you get is you get this barbell thing. And on one side of the barbell, you get early stage angel seat investor who are really like first money in, a very interesting very light in their fee, writing a relatively small check, but like being involved in companies extremely early on, you're taking a lot of risk. And then on the other side, you get basically scaled platforms. Right? So you get large scale enterprises that have like a lot of throw away, a lot of access, very big networks and then access to a lot of money. Then the comparison we always make is to retail shopping, which is there used to be department stores, like Serious and JC Penney, which basically where the brand promise was, pretty good selection of products and pretty good prices. Right? And then now those are dead. And what you have instead of boutiques, like the Gucci store or the Apple store, and then you've got this super scale, e-commerce companies like Walmart and Amazon. And we were to the point where it's just like, there's no reason ever go to department store because it's got less selection than Walmart and Amazon. And it doesn't have the quality tier and the special experience of a good year or Apple. You had that thought in mind when you started A6, it was 100%. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, okay. It was a conceptual leap for venture capital to time, but the exact same thing had happened to private equity, the exact same thing had happened in hedge funds, the exact same thing had happened in a business. And you knew that by what just reading the right issue. So like investment banks, classic example. So if you read about the sort of original investment banks in the US between like 1880 and 1920, they were all like boutique venture capital firms in the 1970s, 1980s in the US. And it was like 20 times. And these are more like merchant bankers. Yeah, merchant bank merchant bankers. There's a book I just finished reading 'cause I've been spending time with Del's merchant bank. A lot of them. Cal is become a good friend. And I was like, well, if I'm going to meet these guys, I need to like read something about there to understand then. I read this book published in 1965 called The Russian Bakers and it walks through exactly what you're talking about. They were almost like family run partnerships. That's right. Yeah. The classic stories, which I love so much, JPMorgan's one of my kind of favorite historical figures. And JPMorgan was an example of that. The JPMorgan investment bank was like this, this, basically, this time. It was very important, but it was like this tiny little operation. It was a fit in a single office, I don't know, probably 20 principles and some office staff or something. It was not large. And actually, the hidden secret to JPMorgan was he was the son. The father was a genius Morgan. Okay. I literally, when you were talking, I was like, wait, you, I was shocking that you would say pick him because I actually found his father more formidable individual than him. He was. So he was, which is almost always the case of any famous public figure. The father is almost always more interesting story, which a lot of examples of that. However, yeah. So, JPMorgan and then JPMorgan has filled a specific economic role that's gotten lost in history, which is basically, uh, JPMorgan, the JPMorgan bank was in London, the JPMorgan bank was in New York. And with the Morgan family was doing, was they were funneling money from the old slow growth economy of Europe into the new high growth economy of the US. But again, it was exactly your point. Like it was this little boutique family operation. The other great thing about that area of history is these were, um, they were all bifurcated by religion. And they were the pros, that's what banks and they were the Jewish investors banks. And they did not mix. And no, not at all. Completely different worlds. And as a consequence, JPMorgan was the pros and banks like like JPMorgan, I'm able to find like the railroads, which were considered like the real businesses at the time. Yeah. But then like all the distributable stuff like movie companies and like department stores like that, those are all the Jewish investors. Well, by the way, but Jewish found almost entirely Jewish founders with like, and the end goldmits, and JPMorgan is the big survivor of that today and the former JPMorgan chase. And then on the Jewish side of Goldman Sachs, you know, it's the great survivor. But again, if you go back, there were, so that's, you consider that the, the barbell in investment banking, you have the, the JPMorgan kind of like family partnership. And then you have the complete scale of like Goldman Sachs. And so what happened was both JPM, both JPMorgan Goldman Sachs started out a hundred years ago. They were on the one side of the hundred years ago. They were actually in the middle. They were, they were kind of again, this sort of, you know, they were boutiques. But they were like, of their time, they were like today, you call them like mid market, you know, sometimes called bulge bracket, you know, kind of thing. As opposed to just like a solo operator or something, actually the way, JFK's father got started like literally hung out a shingle with the 1920s, which is Joseph P. Kennedy banker, you know, private banker. And he's like, just a deal. And he was like an angel investor at the time. And so, and then you had the big commercial banks, but the big commercial banks had no interest in issuing loans to these speculative crazy, you know, entrepreneurs. And so in that time, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs and Kuhnlob and Drexel and all these other kind of mid market banks, Morgan Stanley, the banks became Morgan Stanley. And so, we're kind of these mid-sakes. Now, what's happened, you know, sitting here 100 years later, those are now the scale players. The ones who didn't scale are kind of long forgotten. I mean, you said that there's one firm that survives in the old model and that's Alan Company. And there are other boutique investment banks, David Allen, a company was founded in the 1920s and has, you know, has uniquely the one that survived in the original model of boutique and deliberately being a boutique investment bank. And it stayed that way for a hundred years. And so one way to think about it is today, that's the barbell in banking, which is Alan Company on the one side and then JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs on the other side. So are you reading about this while you're finding the firm before you're finding the firm? Like, you know, Ben and I spent about a year and a half planning the firm. And part of it was he was in, we call, industrial server too, he was working for Gila Packard after we sold our company to HP. So he was running a bit of HP at the time. And so we could literally start a new full-time thing until he got free of that. So we had a year and a half, you know, to kind of study and think it worked. And because you had this, this period from 2003 or 2002 when you're doing angel-busting, you know, a lot, till you start to company six, seven years later, you're observing all of the weaknesses in the model. And that's where you're, hey, why don't we take the CAA? Think of it's caused a, like, the fan links where it's like, if you have one agent at CAA, you have all of us. And they were like, "World deep." I think he says in his book, like, it's like, "Oh, my agent's coming to the prayer." No, it's like 20 agents are coming. And I think they read Dresson, like the same kind of suit maker and like, they were intentionally trying to intimidate, like, their competition. Our money suits, sulca shirts was a shirt maker in Beverly Hills. And so we're also percolors white shirts. And then I think he had a bulk purchase deal, I think, with the local jacbar dealer. And the legend, at least, has it as the Lysus plates. I'll set CAA, one, CAA, two, CAA, three. And so, hey, you'd go to a premiere. There would be like 20 jigs lined up. And then 20 guys and identical suits coming out. And yeah, just this is exactly the thing. It's just like, now that's the Hollywood version. But like, just imagine the psychological impact of that if you're just like an old school agent. This is sort of, you know, Michael's a very dear friend. He became very controversial over the years. And the reason he became so controversial, I think, is just because he smoked his competition so severely. Like, he pouted them so hard. There was no response. You're just a guy working for an old agency and you've got your clients in these 20 CAA. Well, the fuck, we're showing up. And like, it's just, yeah, it's this force. And the clients, if you talk to them, like, you know, a lot of these clients, you're, you know, still so latched in today, you know, front of it. If you're talking to them, it's just like, yeah, it's just no brainer. It's like, do you want to work with a guy or do you want to work with a firm? It's just obvious. He has, I don't know if he told you all these stories. He'd tell you about his morning schedule, I think. The, the, the, the getting on the bike, doing the, for the firm, for the firm, for the firm, for the firm. No, no, no. So, so this is, again, something that's specific to Hollywood, but it's a great example of the, okay. So the agency business, at the time he started CAA, the agency business was like 90 years old or something, right? It like started out doing quadville bookings and like, music calls and like, it, it had been around for like decades. And so the people involved in it had had decades to think about like the best way to do it, and they had arrived at a set of practices. And one of the practices, I think I'm getting this right, one of the practices was at every agency, they would have their staff meeting in the morning at 9 a.m. and they would basically share, you know, whatever information is going to get shared in the agency, we get shared at that point. You know, this studio had lots of script to do. He wants to do a crime thriller and hear some script and whatever. And then, you know, this is like the point where there would be minimal, you know, whatever, minimal handoffing system to the other agency. And so this is where everybody would kind of get updated. And so the staff, the staff meeting would go from like 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. and then at 10 they would start calling their clients and they'd be like, oh, you know, we heard there's a, you know, whatever there's going to be a casting call for, you know, this great role for this professional fee for whatever you should consider in that. So of course, Michael's like, all right, we'll have our staff meeting at 7 a.m. We'll be done at 8. Yeah. Between 8 and 9 we'll call all the clients. By the way, we won't just call our clients, we'll call their clients, right? And so imagine you're whatever Paul Newman, and you've got some agent you've been working with for 20 years. And he calls you at your agent calls you at 11 o'clock. And it's like, I've got this great role. And you say, oh, the guy's CA called me about that three hours ago. And your agent's like, they don't represent you. And Paul's like, yeah, isn't it great? Isn't that fantastic? And so you just, again, you just like, you rinse and repeat that a thousand times. And it's just, it's just the client. It's just like completely obvious what to do. And so yeah, so the more reason I go through this, the moral of the story is, again, it's sort of this idea and in compensate, you know, in compensate status quo, like you just end up, you end up, you end up in any case, you just end up with all these embedded assumptions, generally, and then, you know, 90 years later, right? So the founders of the agencies were 90 years ago, they weren't involved anymore. So the people who were running competitive agencies were managers, not, right? They'd think managers, not founders, right? And so the thing a manager never does, unless they're under duress, is reconsider fundamental assumptions. Like they hate that. Like that's not the whole point of running something big is you don't have to do that. You get to run the big thing at scale. You don't have to go in and like reinvent it from scratch, like that sounds like a nightmare. And so, but, but anyway, as a consequence of that, you end up with like all these embedded assumptions that are basically just like unspoken, nobody's questioning. It's not happening. And if you take the time, you can kind of go in and go, you know, for principles, you can kind of go in and say, okay, well, how do they arrive at that? And what we found in just industry, I mean, this is what our founders do every day. It's just an industry after industry after industry. There's all these embedded assumptions that made sense. And they can seven years or nine can 30 or 1880, but just don't make sense anymore. I love that you did it. I always say it's like, not what you do. It's how you do it. And the idea that you can take, I'm not running a talent agency, but there's so many of these principles that I comply to venture capital. And your blog archive, which I absolutely love, and I told you I've read like multiple times, I did episodes on it. You would give advice to like young people. It's like my advice is like go work in an industry that's still the founders of that industry are still working. When I read Ovid's book, the way I would summarize his approach, because he is in this big stodgy, slow moving, you know, very bureaucratic organization is like, oh, mediocrity is always invisible until passion shows up and exposes it. Oh, interesting. Yes. And that's what he did. Yeah, that's right. He's just like, there's so many things you guys can be doing better here. I can't do it in there. And I remember correctly, he took some of these ideas to his boss, because that guy was his mentor. I can't even remember his name. Yeah. Yeah. Which was the biggest of the talent agencies at the time. Yeah. So were you, you would bend essentially just designing what you wish you had when you were founders? That's right. And again, maybe a cheat code, but yeah, if you bend the customer, obviously this all becomes a lot more obvious. I don't know if you want to answer this question now, but in Warren Buffett, Sherho, Elder T.S. is great line where it's like really important to pick to play against weak competition. Did you feel that there was going to be like that point in time and venture capital history that you were going to be playing against weak or weaker competition? I would say not exactly. I would interview them as weak. We view them as basically, we view them as running on a status quo set of ideas. And so and to be clear, like we in part of why we think about this, we had to raise money from it at the time, but in the time we're probably the two best venture firms. So Clientbrook is in the 90s in our work in John Dorr, very closely for five years in SK, but then we, we, I would talk we raised money from, from match market when they were like King of the Hill in Andy Rackleff, who was one of the founders of the firm and is a legendary brilliant VC. And so we had worked with, we just had, you know, action of history. We had worked with two of the whatever top five or whatever people in the field, you know, for a long time. And they were in R, by the way, brilliant and running on the model that they, that, that existed. John was brilliant at that. Andrew Spellinger, Tathor. still brilliant today. It was less the competition of, oh, these people are soft or these people aren't smarter. It was none of that. It was no. They're really good at executing, I guess, this particular playbook. So by the way, that's why it's okay. Like if we're going to do this, we need to be playing by a different playbook. There was no such thing as like a scaled venture capital. No, it's a talk. No, no. Because the firms all hit this. They all hit this limit. They all fundamentally hit this limit. They all hit this limit where they just could, the idea of a, of a partnership of equals or even a, even a hierarchal partnership. Like it just, it just breaks at some point because there's just too much internal dissension. It is too hard to coordinate. And then everybody's fighting for slices of what it was viewed at the time to be a fixed size pie. And so none of the other firms could, they structurally, there was just no way to get to scale. Where else did you take ideas from besides the agent, business, and Hollywood and like the merchant bank investment banking industry? Oh, I mean, it was just very obvious that it didn't happen in private equity. Like, you know, this was the, this was the time when like, it was actually really, this was around the time when like KKR and firms like it were hitting their stride with, they're actually building like a lot of operational capabilities in house. They were actually building their own actually investment banks in house. One of the things we've never done, but it's always been on the idealist, it's to actually just happen in house bank. And, and KKR had actually done that just to build a captive bank. And so they, you know, they had done a bunch of things like that. And so, and so we saw happening, which is the mid-tier private equity firms were collapsing. And you either needed a solo, you know, very light in your feet, kind of solo operator on the one side doing small deals, or you needed to have a scale platform like KKR. It happened at hedge funds. It happened in, but I mean, it had long, so actually, actually, the TV show Mad Men. Mad Men tells the structural story of this happening in the advertising field in the 60s and 70s. And I will rizzle see spoil Mad Men because it's been, it's been up to you for like 20 years at this point. But, you know, a big part of the arc of Mad Men is those guys are working sterling, sterling Cooper as a classic mid-market ad agency. Right? And then, and then it's, and then whatever, the third season, they sell it to McCann, which was the scale player at the time. And they show you all the pros and they clearly talk to people who had been through this because they showed you all the pros and cons of working for McCann because McCann's this giant machine. And so, Dandrayapers used to like making all the creative decisions. And now he's just in this conference room arguing with people until he just like gets up and walks out. But then, Dandrayper and Registraling start their own startup. They start sterling Cooper Draper Price, that's the second one, which starts out as a true startup, as a true boutique startup. And then they have this whatever year and a half, just fucking hell. Like, they can't get anywhere. They can't get clients, like because they're too small, you know, they're, they're sub-scale. And so, it kind of, and then I think, I think in the end, I forget it's been too long, but I think in the end, I think they end up selling it. No, no, no, no, no, sorry, I got it wrong. They sell the first one to the British ad agency, that just like concluded destroys it. And then they sell the second one of McCann. So, so they actually show that process happening twice. And so that, again, to go back to history, that is what happened in the ad agency, basically between the 40s and the 70s, like basically television catalyzed that. Like when, when television emerged advertising became a much bigger deal than it had been before, and it just had to be professionalized in a different way. The other thing happened is, of course, the external environment changes, right? So, so everything we just talked about just has to do with the internal mechanics of how these things run. But, but the other thing happens is the external environment changes, right? And so, part of what, I think what Michael would say, I think you would agree with this, part of what may CA possible is at one point, basically Hollywood was just boogies. And then there was like whatever a low kind of TV division. And by the 70s and 80s, the, you know, Hollywood was becoming much bigger than just movies, right? It was movies and TV and advertising and music and sports and, you know, politics and culture and like all kinds of things. In fairness to the kind of our competitors, you know, Silicon Valley between call it 1950 to 2010 was primarily just if the tools business, right? Primarily the companies, you know, starting with you look backward, the companies that we all backed and built were basically just building tools and you'd build a tool like an operating system or a destroy or something and you'd sell it to people and they'd figure out to do with it. It was right around the time we started our firm that the valley was going from being primarily tools businesses to actually building directed competitive companies and income companies industries, right? And so Airbnb going directly into the hospitality industry, right? So, alternate universe Airbnb is just boutique looking hotel software, right? For an Airbnb, it's a tiny little boutique business building basically a little spreadsheet software. But no, Airbnb, Brian Cheskey decided, really, anyway, we're just going to like go into the hospitality business that could be with hotels directly Uber and Lyft in the old world were just taxi dispatch software in the new world. They were full transportation providers. Tesla in the old world would have just been software for software and cars. Tesla in the new world builds, you know, the entire car. By the way, Facebook, Facebook, same things. Prior to Facebook, if you built like online ad, you know, software, you were selling it to the media companies. Mark's like, no, we're just going to be the media company. Like we're just going to build the entire thing. And so this was the other thing that happened was, you know, for us was that that was right around the pivot point when the valley's ambitions went from just building tools to going directly into incumbent industries. And then this goes back to the scale thing. It's like, okay, why do you need to scale venture firmals? Because the companies need to scale, right? And then of course, AI now makes that crystal clear, right? Because the winning in companies are raising, you know, billions, tens of billions, those in case of hundreds of billions of dollars, right? The old world of $10 million or $30 million or $50 million dollars checks, you know, where VCs tap out. It's just not a relevant thing anymore. But did you know the scale was changing at the time you founded the firm? We had a pretty good idea. So I've been involved in Facebook, you know, basically, you know, it informally sets inception and then formerly on the board says 2007. And so I saw the, and that thing hit the knee in the curve. It was just very clear. It was just like very clear that we didn't know how big it was going to get. But it was going to get much, much bigger than the internet 1.0 companies had gotten. And so there was that. What else? It was also around the time Apple was directly entering the cell phone market, which was another great example of this. Silicon Valley didn't used to make cell phones. There is no cell phones, weren't made by Silicon Valley. They were made by these like giant industrial companies like Sony and Nokia and whatever, mid Motorola, you know, Illinois or whatever. And then Silicon Valley would make the chips that go into them or the software. And of course Steve was like, yeah, I don't know, screw that. We're just going to make a phone, right? There were these signals that it was happening. And then the other thing was just the internet itself was maturing, right? And so, you know, at that point, the consumer internet was 15 years in. And we had, you know, seen every part of that. And so we, you know, we, I forget the number was that was probably around the time the global internet penetration was like crossing a billion users on a sweet of five billion. Yeah, you have a very interesting lived experience where like you were there at the very beginning of the internet. One thing that I'm fascinated by and that actually was going to be the first question for you because I've never heard you speak about this at least on a podcast, but your partnership and relationship with Jim Clark, you were 20 when you met him? How do we? I was old fashioned. I actually graduated from college in Silicon Valley. I was very stone age concept these days. So that was in 1990s for work. So I was about 20, 22, 22. So there's this great book. I don't think you like the book by my Michael Lewis Silicon Valley story. I've skipped it. I've read it twice just because I don't know if anything's in there's true, but the portrait he paints of this very essential character is just wildly entertaining to me. But what's shocking to me is when you talk to young founders and like this guy started three, I think it was the first person in history just to found three separate billion dollar technology companies. That's right. No one knows who he is. Can you just talk about how you met him? What was like working with him? I knew exactly who he was and the reason was because his company, Silicon Graphics, his first company, they were the company in the valley between like, 1998 and 1990s to call it. Yeah, 87 to 94 or something. They were like whatever Google or OpenAI or whatever, you know, company want to make like they were like the company. And by that, I mean like they were the company where the smartest people in the industry all wanted to work there. They built the products that were like the coolest products you could possibly imagine. They had this incredibly young and vibrant and dynamic culture. And then they hit this like cultural moment that was just incredible. And I think 92, which was the turning point in the movie business when the computer graphics really kicked in. And then the two movies back to back were Jurassic Park and Terminator 2. It ran on the machines they made. We built on the machines they made. The technology they made. The technology gym invented. It was the technology that made that possible. And those movies, you know, those are still two of the great old time, you know, movies. And but at the time, I mean, I still remember the chills that you get at St. Dinosaur or Sonska Grace, just like this is and then there's this company that builds the machines that do this. By the way, the solar graphics computers are actually in the movie. There's a scene in Jurassic Park where the kids are navigating through Unix. Yeah. And it was actually the 3D software. It was actually those were actually the solar graphics computers. And so like they just that was like this moment where they were just like they're just like the absolute yet company of all time. But by the way, their legacy lives on in Nvidia. Nvidia is still in graphics basically with one trick. It's like a trader or a same thing. It had to be a new company for instance we could describe to do the GPUs instead of the work instead of the workstations and servers. Nvidia Fundamental is based on Jim's ideas. That's where that stuff comes from. And so he was already legendary. And again, he was one of these. He was the full deal. He was legendary as a innovator in technology because you know, he's a PhD in computer science. And he actually he himself and that to the original field of the quality. He was the reality engine. The original interactive 3D graphics on a chip thing was actually him. And it was like his PhD thesis. And then he started the company and then he ran the company. And then and then by the way, and then the VCs brought in professional manager. And by the way, and the reason we know about Nvidia today and not SGI is because of this founder manager issue. Which we could talk about. No, let's talk about that. We're part. Yeah, yeah. Because I don't remember this part of the story. Yeah, yeah. So by the way, there's two sides of the story and and and I wasn't there. And so I just reflexively side which I'm Clark, but I'll try to at least represent both sides of the story. So so Jim, I don't remember what's in the list, but like Jim's like a true. Jim's like a true. He's like an Elon. He's like a true Elon Steve Jobs level. And so like incredibly creative and incredibly bright and incredibly charismatic. But like he's like he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's exciting. Like he's exciting. He's like being around him. It's just like incredibly exciting. There's always something new. He always says new ideas. And again, that was in that time where it's just like, okay, that's the personal I'd take the clearly camera of the company. And so the VCs brought in a guy out of Hewlett Packard who had been trained at Hewlett Packard. And because at the time, what happened is you want to hire a professional CEO. You went to I hired a general manager out of either he'll look back or I'd be out more than two training grounds for it. So they brought in a really, really sharp guy who, I don't really know, I think I met him once. I don't really know. By all accounts, he was like very, he was like a very good example of this kind of HP general manager type who became a CEO. He took over, he took over the company. And by the way, like in his defense, under him the company scaled enormously. Like, you know, I'd forget when he took it over, but it was like 87 or 88 or something. And then, you know, by the time I got to the Valley 94, like this company become huge and, you know, whoever's running the company gets at least some credit for that. But anyway, they got in this classic fight. Like they got in this classic fight. And the classic fight was, you know, you just, it's the same story every time. The founders like, founders starting to see you on the founders like to the CEO of like, we need to do things completely different. And the CEO's like, no, like what we're doing is working. Like stop fucking with, stop fucking with the thing that's working. And the founders like, no, it's working now, but it's not gonna work in the future. And the manager, and the CEO's like, well then we'll deal with it in the future. And the founders like, you can't wait to deal with it in the future because by the time the future arrives, it's gonna be too late. And the manager's like, where are you in my pants? I'm like making you all this money. The company's super successful. I get out of my shorts, right? And you get in this, and you see this, and that was exactly the deadlock that they got into. And Jim Clark basically made two predictions as the founder of Silicon Graphics. So Silicon Graphics, it's time was selling. Their computer's basically started list price at like $50,000 for a desktop workstation and then scaled up into the millions. And Jim was like, look, two things are gonna happen. But it's amazing that he, and you figured this out by like 1991 or something. He said two things are gonna happen. And he said number one, everything that we sell today from $50,000 is gonna go on a chip and that's gonna go on a card and it's gonna go on a PC and it's about 300 bucks. And either where the company is gonna make that, or we're gonna get destroyed, right? Which by the way is what happened. That's in video. Like that's what actually happened, right? So he was completely correct about that. The other thing that he had was, he's like, look, this idea of standalone computers is not gonna be the thing. These computers are all gonna get network together and the network is gonna become the important thing. As a time there were different terms. There were people were using terms like information super highway or video on demand or 500 channels. You had all these kind of concepts kind of coalescing around what became the internet. And even before the internet kind of became a mainstream thing, you're just like, look, it's just inevitable that this is all gonna become connected. And then the function of a computer is not longer going to be mainly what just a computer does. It's gonna be the fact that it can talk to all the other computers. And we need to do that. And to do that, he actually, once you can, he actually got this incredible deal Nintendo, then and now it's like this giant video game company. So he actually had this deal with Nintendo where number one, and so in graphic session, I did this actually built the original 3D graphics chip for a consumer game player, the Nintendo 64. So he did that deal. And then he went to Time Warner, which at the time was this very important, media company doing all kinds of things. And any struck a deal with them, did you know what it was called? Interactive TV, which was basically pre-internet. Basically it was like Netflix before Netflix. In 1991, right? Like, amazing foresight, right? Just like amazing foresight. But again, he and the CEO got in this conflict. And the CEO was like, look, we just can't, we have to focus on the thing that we're doing. We're gonna do these things. And so Jim did the classic founder thing and he left. And when I met him, basically that was the state that he was in, which was okay. Like, you know, I, Jim, I'm like in the crime of my life, I know I have all these ideas. I don't know exactly what to do with my next company, but I know it should be a software company not hardware company. I know it needs to be a company that is able to participate in these changes that are happening in the world. And I know that so ultimately, and he was very sad about this. So when graphics is not the company, it's gonna be able to do these things. And so I have to build the new company that's gonna do it. I wanna hear more about what I was like working with him, but there's a very student observation you made in your blog archive, 'cause you're trying to, you know, essentially this post is trying to educate founders, just like recruiting is the most important thing you're doing at the very beginning of the company, maybe forever, and you're underestimating how difficult it is. And you tell the story of Jim Clark in the blog archive. You're like, this guy was a legend. - He was. - Yeah. - Like, most famous person, best entrepreneur. And he's like, he tried to recruit all these other people. And like, I don't know, he's like 100 people. And you're like, you were one of two or three that actually followed through and took the chance and jumped and started working with him. - Yeah, and again, this is like, I don't know, Zuckerberg or Sergey Brandner, Elon or whatever, decided to start a company. I was like, that was his candle power wattage in the community at that time. And so yeah, you would think that the obvious thing people would just like say, you know, Jim Clark was just starting to come through with you. You know, just the obvious thing is you just say yes. Like, it was not happening. And so the, I don't know if I told the story, but the, my, the crystallized memory is dinner of 12 of us at Elf, the rest of famous Italian restaurant in Palo Alto, California. It's where a lot of these companies were formed. It was Jim's favorite restaurant at the time. So Jim had like a dozen of us, and us being people who were like in existing companies, who were like basically technical people who he knew up. Well, this is the thing, he was constrained. He had a not solicit agreement with Silicon Graphics. And so he couldn't just rip people out. And you didn't want to violate that. And so he needed to basically reach out to the technical community and find new collaborators. So there were like a dozen of us in there. I remember that, I remember that dinner very precisely for two reasons. Number one is I was the only one of the dozen to say yes. And then the other is this the first time in my life I drank red wine. And I didn't know what to make of it. And so I kept sipping it, trying to figure out if I liked it or not. And I didn't realize that I was getting completely hammered. Because I had no idea how to calibrate red wine. And so the true version of the story is, you know, I leave the dinner and I'm like, wow, this is amazing. Like, you know, I'm going to say yes to this. And I go to my car in the parking garage in Palo Alto across the street. And my brand new car. My first new car I've ever owned, right? My brand new car. And I, and I, and I got it and I pulled it out and I ripped the entire front end of the car off. It's like screaming metal. It's so, so like the whole front end of my car is just like hanging on the ground. And I'm like, oh, fuck me. So anyway, I parked the car, I got the car walk home. No Uber, this time. No Uber. [LAUGHTER] No, three mile walk at, you know, whatever, 11 o'clock at night with, you know, six bottles of red wine. And you're like 22? No problem. 22, yeah, exactly. Like, I think I probably won't mention this to Jim. [LAUGHTER] I don't know, there's some wild stories in that book. He might have admired you more. He might have. He, yes, yes. How many founders of the companies? Does he own him? And so originally, yeah, originally it was him and me. Yeah, we started the company. And we had a long, we had one of these things where we had a long conversations about like what to do. Well, good. OK, so then the problem that he had was, there was the idea of doing the graphics ship. But like, and again, that's what I did. But a video was essentially a spin off of SGI. But like at that time, starting a new chip company from scratch, it would have been tough. And he didn't want to compete with SGI doing that. And then the interactive-- you would just call it the interactive-- it's lost your history. But this interactive television street, like it wasn't time for that. Yeah, it wasn't actually time for Netflix. Yeah. And so it was going to be cost prohibitive. Time Warner had rolled out this interactive television thing in Orlando Florida to 500 people. Yeah, Microsoft was involved. They were doing there. They were doing a ton of-- At the time, all the big companies were-- So these Bill Gates-- --their fees. Yeah, exactly. He talks about that a lot. But the CapEx per house was like $50,000 of something because you had to have a Silicon Graphics representation in the house. It just wasn't going to work. And so you couldn't figure that out. And then we circled through a whole bunch of ideas. He actually went back to Nintendo. And we almost pulled the trigger on basically building what today you'd call Xbox Live, or was it called PlayStation Network or Xbox Live? Like an online gaming service for the Nintendo 64 in 1994, which might have been a good idea. We thought it was too early. We almost did that. And then what happened literally was the internet-- I had worked on the internet in college. And then this is, fortunately, only a few months later. But the internet just kept growing. Like it just-- Hold on, Mark. Yes. You'd work on the internet a little bit. That's a little bit modest. Well, I think a lot of people listening to this will know, but you should probably explain how you're working on the internet. So at the time, it was not-- So this is part of the story. At the time, it was not that big of a deal. It's not nearly that much of a big of a deal at the time as it's viewed now. So the internet-- I've told the story many times so I won't go on a huge detail. But yeah, so a group of us at Illinois did this thing called mosaic, which was the first-- the first widely used web browser that was the first one of the graphics. Explain what was different about what you made compared to what it existed before. Yeah, so the previous web browsers were like text-based. So there was this nascent concept at the web. But it was like text-based terminals. And then it didn't have graphics. It wasn't put in click. It didn't work in the way that you would like his back software to work. And then, by the way, it didn't also have no scripting language, no security. None of the actual capabilities that make the browser a useful thing. So there was this nascent idea, but it needed to get built into a full thing. And so the original full thing, full browser at Illinois. And then we also built the first mainstream web server, like the first web server again that kind of had everything that people needed. This had been a project at college. And then this was a-- and it's again, if the time the internet was not viewed as a consumer phenomenon. Was it illegal to commercialize Steve Case of AOL tells a story? They either like lobby and get a law change? That's right. What was the details there? So the internet, as we know it today, in the 1980s was called the NSF Net. NSF stands for National Science Foundation, which was a branch of the US government that funds research. And the National Science Foundation funded the internet. The reason I was able to do the work, I was able to do it in Illinois, because the NSF had actually dumped a ton of money into four universities around the country that they'll call the super computer centers. And then those were also the main hubs for the NSF Net. And the function of the NSF Net was fundamentally to connect the super computers to all the people who were going to use them. And so it was this government research academic program. And it was very exciting in the technical field. But there was no conception that ordinary people are ever going to use any of this. Like it was just not-- not nobody ever thought that this was the thing that the normally we're going to use. And so NSF, it's tax fair funding. So the government, at least, is not supposed to be funding businesses directly. Although sometimes they do. But there was formally go restrictions on funding things with commercial applications. So what there was is there is something called the AUT, the acceptable use policy. And the acceptable use policy said that basically the internet-- the internet. The NSF net turned internet was for academic and research use and commercial activities were strictly prohibited, like literally not allowed. And again, it's just like, oh, as a taxpayer, that makes total sense. Like I'm glad my tax money's not going to fund something, well, you know, like that. But like as a user, you're just like, all right, that's nuts. Like that's clearly crazy, right? And if you took the conceptual leap to say, no, this is going to escape the lab and this is going to be something that normal people are going to use, then it just became obvious that it would have to have commercial activities. Yeah. And then AOL was one of the early pre-internet online services that wanted to connect to the internet. I think they famously connected to the internet in 1993. Do you know about the concept of eternal September? No. Oh, OK. So there are two internet, so there are two internet. There is the internet that existed before 1993 and the internet that existed after 1993. People who were on the internet before 1993 often describe it in utopian terms. Because it literally was like you take the whatever million smartest people in the world and you put them on a network together with like no commercial activity, no advertising, no nothing, just the million smartest people in the world. And you just let them talk to each other. And it's just amazing. It was amazing. There was this old messaging system was called usenet. And the discussions I'm using now were just like absolute spectacular. It was just like this. It was amazing. It was the most pure, clean intellectual, vibrant space sense, I don't know, Athens in 500 BC. It was just like this amazing phenomenon. And then AOL connected. AOL had a whatever million or two million people at that point. And they connected. They connected all the AOL users, which were just normal people to the internet. September 1993. And so that became eternal September. Which is that's the internet changed. And by the way, I'm proud that I'm glad that happened. But like the pro and the con of that is that took the internet from this like ivory tower, kind of thing to this basically mainstream consumer or near people thing, which is of course just a fundamentally different thing. Obviously, right? Not so after the eternal September literally was, it was like when every new wave of college graduates like graduated and got their first job in one online. So September is when the new crop of like internet users showed up for a long time. So the September effect didn't just happen once. It like happened over and over and over again. And every cycle of internet user would basically be like, oh my god, this is great. But like it's all going to get ruined. It's a temper. Yeah. Right. And so the internet that we live in today is the result of-- They can only see us now. 30 September. But yeah. And by the way, there was controversy. There was controversy at the time about whether the internet, whether they acceptable use policy, should be revoked. There was controversy over whether normal people should be on it or not. There was controversy over whether the kind of content normal people wanted to be on it, should be allowed to be on it. There was controversy about whether there should be-- like there was controversy we got quite a bit of flight to the time for putting images and web pages under the theory that that would fundamentally make everything worse, because you'd have like normy content. That would be bad. And then you know, since then by the way, advertising-- I remember when there was actually a moment-- there was a guy there, the guy-- the guy named Sanford Wallace. And he became known as Spamford Wallace. And he was literally-- he sent out the first spam message on the internet in like 1992. And it was like literally it was like the first internet ad. And it was like a spam for whatever legal services or something. And he just dropped it on the use net. And it was like a thermonuclear explosion, because it was like, you know, get this commercialized crap out of my news feed. And so all of these things were like hot like controversial. I was generally on the other side of all these arguments, because I was like, look, this thing is great. Obviously, everybody should have access to this. Obviously, we need to connect everybody to this. Obviously, to do that, these need to be businesses. There needs to be commerce. There needs to be advertising like all these things. Obviously, you need to happen. So is that-- The discussions you and Jim were having, where you're like, OK, we're going to start an actual company on this. So yeah, so that's how we got to the conversation Jim and I had, which was basically like, OK, because that was right at the point that was like an early '94. So this is like the AUP had just been revoked. And it was just-- and it all had just done the first of September. And the whole thing was just about to tip. And I knew that because I was tech support for the browser. Personally. [LAUGHTER] No, explain that. Just me. Well, so if you-- Mosiah at the time was the browser everybody used. And so if you use Mosiah, there was a submit a bug reporter, whatever you have a question submitted here. And that went to an email box. And that email box was me. And so I became tech support for the internet. For like three years. And got all the emails. How many emails for you get? Where I should say that was one email box. And the other email box was Mosiah was actually created under-- there was also funded by the National Science Foundation. So it was actually not the original license that you couldn't be used for commercial use. It was for academic and research and individual use. And so we did this thing. We did a deliberately ambiguous license. And we said, if you want to use the browser commercially, you need to email us to arrange terms. Now we had no concept at all of what those terms would be. But we just said we need to create the same coming flow. So I was getting my parted with tech support requests. And by the way, tech support for the internet means your tech support for everything. So it's like the old PCs had the CD Ram Tray. You see press the button. The CD Ram Tray comes out. You put the disk in the thing. The problem is a lot of people thought that those were cup holders. So you press the button. The cup holder comes out. You put your cup in coffee now. And then 10 seconds later, the cup holder retracts back into the PC. And then you close your coffee all over the place. You're like, how the fuck do I keep the cup holder out? Right? It's like, man. Let me email Mark. Yeah, let me email Mark. It's like, sir, that's a CD Ram drive. So there was a lot of that. So one of the funnier things you can always do in politics they call this focus groups. But you can use your testing. You see this over and over tech companies. And you just learn so much about how much of a bubble that you're in about the kind of things that you're familiar with that normal people are just like, I don't know what the hell. I knew this stuff is. But then I had this other email box, which was all the commercialized the same request. And so I saw the consumer take off on the one side. And then I basically, I think that, and then the commercial request, hit like 400 messages. People wanted to pay money for this thing. And so I basically took those to Gem. And I was like, there's a business. This is going to happen. And then we actually went to my underwrite, my old boss. I had an NCSA actually had gone to, we actually went to Washington in '93 to try to get NSF funding to staff a support desk so that it wasn't me answering all the emails. And the National Science Foundation people were very nice. And they were like, yes, the National Science Foundation is not in the business of funding customer support desk for your software. And so I still have the denied NSF grant that would have kept the whole thing an academic project. But yeah, so like, at that point, it was like, at least to Gem and me, it was just obvious that that was going to be business. By the way, again, very controversial. The original press coverage on that's great for the first, like, year was at least people will never make money. Like this is ridiculous. Like everybody knows the internet's free. Like everybody knows it. None of this has got work. So, you know, even the business model, even then it's controversial. Was just literally licensing it. It was a combination of things. So it was definitely software licensing. And when we did this thing up front, or the browser was free, but the server software cost money. And then we, and then we started building all these, we called applications, server site applications. So we built like the first publishing system. We built the first publishing system for running a newspaper or magazine online. We had content management system. We built the first e-commerce system for selling, you know, this is pretty Amazon. So we built the first e-commerce system for selling things online. So we built this whole lot of that software. And then, and then we, you know, the main website that the browser had, is this default homepage. And so we built the original internet advertising business was basically, so NetScape was the largest in an advertising company until I think '97. - As you credit why didn't you know that? - Anyhow, who passed us, yeah. And so yeah, so we invented, people at the firm invented, at the company invented, I don't think, I don't exactly think it's credit, but like the original ad formats, you know, we're right around that time and a lot of them rolled out on our site, you know, first. And yeah, and so it was literally, it was advertising pre-auh, it was, it was e-commerce pre-Amazon. It was, yeah, content pre, you know, we literally sold, I mean, we put the Wall Street Journal online, you know, that was our software that did that. And a lot of other newspapers, magazines, all that stuff. And so yeah, it was a lot of that and then it was the web operation. And again, it was, again, it all looked obvious in retrospect, but like, again, it was like, okay, when we started this, like, I don't know, the total number was in like, so we started the company in April '94. There couldn't have been more than two million people total online, right? And then almost everybody was coming in over dial up. This is like pre-broadband, right? So everybody's coming in on like 14.4 kilobit modems and we're like hoping that people are gonna operate a 56-kilobit modems, like, you know, that would be super helpful. Computers at that time did not come with TCP/IP installed. So get your PC actually on the internet, you needed to buy a TCP/IP stack. Try to explain to a normal human being what a TCP/IP stack is. Like, it makes no sense at all. So they're gonna ask if they could put it next to the couple of other things. Exactly, yeah, it was just like, it was just like talking to Martians, right? Talking to us was like talking to Martians. And then, you know, monitors were, you know, like, three feet deep and just like bathing your radiation. You know, just kind of hoping that the radiation stays up here and, you know, everywhere else. In retrospect, it was like super early and it was all very, and then again, it was just like, okay, e-commerce, like, people gonna buy things online. It's like, I don't know, maybe. But like, the press at that time, it was just like wall to wall. Like, if you put your credit card number online, like, cashmars are gonna steal it. I was gonna say, if you read any books around this time, they're like, there's no way in hell anybody's ever gonna put your credit card in your net. But by the way, the other thing you would never, ever, ever do is put your real name online. Because it would be immediate identity after your life would be ruined. So you would never, ever do that. By the way, the other thing was right in the beginning, you had all the panic around, you know, kids, you know, this is gonna destroy children, you know, since the huge rest of children, so you had all that panic. And then there was a meeting, you know, there was the beginning of the call for censorship, you know, there was clearly all this stuff that you have to take down. Your time's gone for any stories, talking about how the whole thing was fake anyway. They kept saying that like, all the numbers were made up and like, there actually wasn't anybody online. It was like a tiny little user base and we were all like, you know, like, in the numbers and committing fraud. And so it was just this, it was just this, it in retrospect, it's all like quaint and cute and sweet. But it was like, it was the pre-court. - Sure, sure. - It was all the moral panics around technology today. - Okay, but you could see Nason versions of the back then. - You pick up on something that, 'cause I mean, you've read a bunch of the same books where it's like humans reaction to something new. It just consistent throughout history. And so I heard a podcast with you. I thought it was the only one that would tell the story in private about bicycle face. - Bicycle face. Do you wanna say what bicycle face is? - Bicycle face, bicycle face, bicycle face. Yes, so it basically turns out every new technology is greeted with what they call a moral panic, right? So a moral panic basically is whatever this new technology is or this new form of media is, it's gonna ruin everything. It's gonna ruin everything. It's gonna ruin society, it's gonna ruin morality, and then especially it's gonna ruin the children. And then back, bicycle was pretty feminist. So it also was, it's also gonna ruin the women, very specifically, it's gonna ruin the women. Which clearly cannot be, 'cause women clearly in 1880, cannot be trusted to use a bicycle without getting into real trouble. I'll explain why. So this is this persistent theme. And basically you go all the way back and this is like, this is like this famous thing where Plato and Socrates thought that they thought that written language was a big mistake that all information transmission should be oral and they had this whole thing back in 500 BC. And then it was just like every, you just have to imagine, I was like to hypothesize, the first guy brought fire, it's like down from the mouth. - They quite killed him. - Yeah, they're like, what the fuck is, (laughing) right exactly, this thing is horrible. This thing could burn down the village, this is awful, this is gonna destroy everything. And so it's just been this consistent thing. And there's this great website called Pesna Sarkyve, where these guys would go back and they find all these newspaper articles that are contemporaneous to these things. But it's everything. And so when I was a kid, it's like heavy metal music, duchess and dragons, it was like all this stuff was awful. I remember the moral panic around the Walkman, the very first cassette portable cassette player with the headphones, 'cause it was gonna destroy society, 'cause everybody's gonna just be listening to their own music. I remember the moral panic around the calculator was gonna destroy education, 'cause kids were not gonna learn how to be math anymore. And then you go back and it's like in the '50s, it was like comic books, and it was rock and roll music. Obviously it was gonna ruin everything. And the '20s, by the way, jazz music was gonna ruin everything. Playing cards, we're gonna ruin everything. What else? Novels, paperback novels. You know, we're taking kids, kids are gonna sit around and just read novels all day instead of doing any real work. So it's just over and over and over again. It's this kind of story. So the bicycle one is the great one. So the bicycle rolls out in like 1870, 1880. And so the US still at that point was like, thinly populated from today. And the West had been settled and sued all these little tons of villages to get it all over the place. But to get from one town to the next was like, 5, 10, 15 miles and so people didn't generally walk that. And so the bicycle comes out all of a sudden. It's easy to go five miles out of the next town. And then young people discovering the bicycle and they discover that there are young people who they didn't crock with who are in the next town over. And they're like, they had to do it. And so the specific-- To do it. To do it. Yes. To do everything. To do whatever it is the young people do. They're gonna hit the head. Yeah. Look, it's just the nature. If you've known the same group of people since you were two, you're gonna-- Yeah. It's over that hill. It was over that hill. Yes, exactly. I grew up in a small town. I can identify with that. And so-- and then specifically at that point, you know, young men obviously, the specific young women started to do the bicycle. And so this is a big threat. And so if you're like a guy in a town and like all the attractive young women are like heading over the hill to the next hill on this bicycle thing, that's a big problem. And so the press at the time created this thing called bicycle face. And the idea of bicycle face was it was part of the moral lecture that was given to young women in the press at the time, which was basically young women should not use bicycles. Because if you go on a bicycle, you have to exert yourself. And if you exert yourself on the bicycle, you're gonna end up making like an exertion face. But the thing was, if you did that too much, your face would freeze into bicycle face. They literally thought it would stay that way. It would stay that way permanently. And then you would never find a husband. And so, yeah. So that was that moral panic. Yeah. So these things just like ripped through every, I mean, it's just, it's incredible. Music is always a great one. Cause it's like, you know, it's over now. But like in the in the 90s, 2000s, you know, it was all this moral panic right hip hop. - Dude, Jimmy Ivean, who's your neighbor. - Yeah. - He was in here two weeks ago. - Yeah. - And he had a deal with it. They called him a, yes, like a chemical gas or mustard gas. Like they compare them to literally like what he's doing is the same as genocide. - Yes, that's right. - This is funding hip hop music and white kids are starting to listen to hip hop music. In the late 80s, early 90s. - It's like congressional hearings on this. - That's right. - Like the media behind him. - That's right. - He was pushed out of a conglomerate. - That's right. - This wasn't a joke. - Yes, that's right. And it's actually funny. Cause like we live, I'm not in the music business. But like hip hop has become so normalized. That's it. Today, it was just never even occurred. It just feels like hip hop is kind of, you know, it's a cultural phenomenon. It's been kind of fading today. But yeah, no, that was super intense at the time. And then rock and roll. That was like super intense in the 50s and 60s. And then the amazing thing is, so it was pressly, they wouldn't shoot him. - That's right. - Cause he would shake his hip. So they're like, no, no, he can't. It's waist up on TV from now on. - That's right. But here's the one. Here's the one. Jazz. They said all the same things about jazz. In the 1920s and 1930s. It was jazz music, it's corrupting. And it was the exact same thing. It's cause like kids are gonna get together and they're gonna dance to jazz. And then who knows what happens. And then it was like, there's a jazz musician. It's like smoking pot. And that means all the kids are gonna start. It was just, so it's the same. It's the same story over and over and over again. And I'll just say by the way, in fairness, it's not this society doesn't change. Like many of the technologies that we just described did cause society to change. Things are different, pre-imposed to bicycle. They're different, pre-imposed to car. They're different, pre-imposed, the creation of modern culture, rock and roll or whatever. But the more, again, this idea of the moral panic, this idea of just like outright panic into the world is just like this, repeated over and over and over again. And then what's happened is this is just, this is the obvious way to solve these papers. - Right, this is like the meta story of the press, which is just like whatever's happening is like horrible and awful and it's gonna kill everything. You know, be sure to buy our newspaper tomorrow. - Well, this originates 'cause I've done a bunch of episodes and read biographies about, you know, I get a lot of shit because I don't pay attention to the news at all. Like I read old books, listen to podcasts, talk to smart people, that's essentially like my immediate diet. Right now, obviously, you can even LLMs. But you know, like you're misinformed, or you're not misinformed, or you're ill informed, or you're not informed if you don't do this. I'm like, have you read the biography of Joseph Pulitzer? Have you read the biography of Willing Randolph Hearst? Like all these ideas that you think are new, it's just like they were the originators and the inventors of such a yellow journalist. Go read that stuff and what it was like, what media and newspapers were like before and after Pulitzer and Hearst and tell me I should be consuming this stuff nonstop. Like that's a ridiculous statement. - Yeah. - Something goes, "Mine, I wanna go back to Jim Clark real quick. Is there anything I wanna go to, you have this, you've had this very unique seat because you saw the beginning of the internet and now I wanna compare like what, the lessons from there, I'm like, where we're at when AI. But is there anything that you learned, 'cause Jim Clark was like, two deck probably 20 years older and you? - Yes, about that problem. - So like, is there anything that you learned working, what a fucking education you had to be able to work with that guy when you're early 20? - So is there anything that you learned by working with him back then that you still used today? - I mean, yeah, a lot, you know, these are said it was very formative for me, so a lot of it. But yeah, I mean, you mentioned that, the sort of quote earlier about the world's and Malibu place, like Jim was like the ultra version of that. And so yeah, he would just like, yeah, when he had an idea, and he was right, his ideas were correct almost all the time. And he would just like pound the world into, to be adopting them in the believe in them. Like, he would be just, you know, the idea of being like a complete force in nature. - One thing those Malibu was himself, he has this great quote in the book where he calls himself a self described loser at 30 years old. I mean, he got like two PhDs, he was a professor, but he just like, I think he'd been in a second or third divorce and he's just snapped one day and he's just like, I had won't go one day with the undeniable urge to achieve something. And that's when he goes from academic to founder and just rips off company after company for like a few decades. So it's like, oh, he's, he realized that he is Malibu too. He just re-immented himself over and over and over again. - And of course, he does that not just by life starting company, but like inventing interactive computer graphics. We're in like completely changing the field. Indirection, like completely changing Hollywood. But is there anything about recruiting or managing or any other way that he ran his company? - No, so my two mentors at that time, actually, they were in some ways polar opposites. They always got along with their kind of polar opposites. They were both gyms, so Jim Clark and Jim Barstale. So the Jim Clark side of my personality is like the like, will the power like, I'm just gonna bludgeon the world into doing what I want. And then the idea of just like, you know, try to be a founder creativity. Like just like they're a many new ideas out there. And like you just, you need to find them. And then you know what I'm gonna say also, put this like a sense of perpetual dissatisfaction. Like okay, like whatever, it's the other part of the story. Like a lot of founders would have had a success like selling graphics and that would have been it. And they would have spent the next whatever. Whether they were totally happy with how it turned out or not. Like they would have spent 30 years just coasting on that. Right, and having a great time and taking credit for it and the whole thing. But Jim was always, you know, at least in that part of his life, you know, dissatisfied in the productive positive sense of like, okay, no, there's something better. There's something bigger, you know, there's something new that we should do. So, you know, there's that side of it. And then Jim Barstale was the other, was the other way, just literally was with yesterday in Jackson, Mississippi. Jim Barstale's the other side, which was, Jim Barstale was like the manager of managers. So Clark is like the ultimate example of that bourgeois capitalist thing. I mentioned so the Henry Ford Elon Musk type. And then Jim Barstale was like the ultimate example of like the super the super manager. And Jim had run, you know, big parts of IBM and AT&T and as a federal express and you know, came in or you know, came in or that's okay. What was interesting was like that's kind of where I got a lot of this from and a lot of my skills drum is I got trained by both of those guys and then kind of both of those guys at the same time and then was able to like very clearly observe what is just the difference between those metallities. But then the other is of course how those concepts converge, right? Because just the founder creativity, you can't build, you can't build anything just with that. Just the management you don't do, you don't do, you do, you do things. - It's a great example of that from history. So like would it be like Nicola Tesla? Found a creativity. - Oh that's right, he knew somebody, he knew like a George Westing house to commercialize his ideas. - Well it's a Tesla versus Edison. Yeah, so Tesla versus Edison. So I'm an Edison guy. Maybe this is the thing. So Elon's a Tesla guy. Tesla guy obviously. But Elon of course himself has not become like a really outstanding, I mean obviously to come in outstanding manager, like in his own way. In fact to the point where I think he's actually inventing an entirely new school of management, which we could talk about. - But like let's go there next. - Yeah, he's maybe the greatest manager of our era, despite the fact that nobody thinks of him that way. But I actually think Elon's more like Edison than he is like Tesla. And there was a big war. And it was kind of this thing, 'cause everything kind of turns into these little morality plays. And so kind of the basic story of Tesla and Edison was, Tesla had all these ideas, couldn't commercialize them, couldn't turn them into companies. Ultimately, you know, couldn't figure out how to make money on them, couldn't build like big companies, kind of based on them. And then Edison, you know, basically, at least the way the legend goes is, he was more of this grinder. He was less than indefinitely brilliant. And he was more of a grinder. And he's just like, we're just gonna try a thousand things. You know, so when they invented the filament for the light bulb, they just tried like a thousand different combinations of things to get to the filament, to, you know, sort of this brute force approach. But then he built general electric. He built the like national electric grid, you know, he built these giant companies. And then he funded by, funded by, funded by JT and Morgan. - There you go. - As a venture capitalist in his spare time. - Yes, exactly, 100%. And so, and then, you know, Edison also invented the movie projector and then, and then literally spat, you're, you're trying to enforce his path, right? - And so it's a phonograph. - And the phonograph and the phonograph. - You tell a story and I knew because I read the book too. - Yeah. - We should tell people what he thought the phonograph is gonna be useful. - So this is a, it's a bit of a digression, but it gets the personality to say, so one of the things that people look for is like, oh, what are the consequences of a new technology going to be, oh, let's go ask the people who invent them. Because obviously they know. And so this is what happens when like these, when the AI got, for example, the AI guys get, you know, the pioneers of AI get interviewed in the press. It's like, well, tell us the future of AI. And it's like you get the, like, the one I'll pick on is Jeffrey Hinton, who's like an actual self-declared socialist. Like he's an actual, like he's an actual capital S socialist. And people ask him what's the future of AI. And of course he says it's gonna be rampant unemployment. And we need to give you, you be, you be eye to everybody. It's like what a coincidence, the answer from the socialist is communist. Like what an amazing coincidence. But people think because he's one of the inventors of AI that he must be the guy who knows. And so the story I always tell is the Edison story. Thomas Edison was like a very proper was, he was like a was, he was a wasp, you know, personality type of that. Extremely proper gentleman, always like impeccably dressed, very, you know, kind of very ethical, you know, upstanding, you know, kind of citizen of that time. And very religious for religiously devout. And so for him, it's just obvious that the application to record player was that everybody would buy a record player. And everybody would buy a library of discs. It would be the great sermons. Religious sermons hold the pre-shers of the time. And then you get home at night after a long day of work and you turn on the record player and you would listen to a sermon. You know, with your with your door, you know, wife and kids, you know, you get together around you. And of course the record player drops in immediately, of course, like it's just music. It's just like obviously music. And it's like ragtime and sweat and then it's jazz. And and Edison's just like completely horrified. He didn't know that if you put the phonograph in the window, you play good music. Then you have all these girls on bicycles coming over the hill with bicycle fists. Exactly, exactly. And so this is what I was told. This is always my thing. If Edison didn't know what the phonograph was going to use for, the idea that, you know, I don't know whatever Joe, Joe AI entrepreneur is going to be able to forecast the economic implications. Like no, no, like that's not going to happen. And in fact, the people who invest in technology are often like the least qualified people to understand the long-term implications because they're too buried in the specifics of the here and now. And then and then all these other questions, you know, these are all big cultural, social economic questions. You know, and by the way, I don't know, there's anybody to convert a big cultural or economic and social trends, but it's certainly not somebody who's been in the lab for 20 years, including myself. So how this started, you think you greatly benefited from the two gyms essentially like being polar opposites. Basically, yeah. Showing you. But also working very closely together. Did they get along? I don't know if I've told this story publicly. So I should tell the story. So they got along great. They came very good friends. But they both did great. And they're both, you know, very responsible for certainly everything that that's kept it and everything that I've done. But they, you know, it's a, it's a different disciplines, different world views. You know, there's an oil and a water kind of aspect to that. And so, you know, Clark Grant, Clark Grant, the company through the first nine months, which at the time felt like, you know, just like this internet time, it felt like much longer, but it was like this highly compressed nine month period. And, you know, and it was like, we were like doing it. We were all these new things. We were doing all these new things. Like, the company was just doing like that. A hundred new things. It was amazing. But like, nothing was being systematized, right? No, it was not, it was not going to, by default, it was not going to turn into like a large company without the management department. So Barstow comes in and he basically is like, well, the intention is this is great, but we need to like actually start to have systems like schedules and processes and actually like run this thing, run this thing like a business. And, you know, as founders do, Clark, you know, originally, you know, just found that a little bit frustrating because it's like, you know, whatever is the latest idea is not the thing that we're just going to turn the entire company you know, to pursue. And this is when Clark was still coming to Jim's Barstow staff meetings. And so, Clark got up, got up, got up, got up, got up. You had a negative reaction to Barstow saying, no, we're not going to do this new thing. We're going to keep doing this thing. It's already working, you know, one of those moments. And Barstow's like, you know, can I talk to you outside? So they, you know, they want to act and, you know, and, and, and I heard this from both of the later. And you know, Clark's like, you know, look, this is the whole reason we're here is because we do these new things. Many of you, if we don't do these new things, we're going to start a company. And Barstow looks right at him and says, Jim, I hear you. This is a serious, is dick cancer. [LAUGHTER] What? [LAUGHTER] The deep Mississippi draw, right? And Clark shares him right in the face and burst out laughing. [LAUGHTER] And they got a long great ever since. Like, they just, they love each other ever since. But the first step basically is saying, look, we can't, we're not going to make these decisions in a state of kind of superheated passion. Like, we're not going to do that. We need to have the full version of this conversation, but we're going to have it in kind of this, this, this longer and maybe more dispassionate way. But it was to, it was to, it was to puncture the stress of the moment. And so that, I will say, I have used that one a few times. [LAUGHTER] But I could see Clark. And Clark thought it was hysterical. And nobody had ever talked to him that way before. So. But I could see Clark, like, oh no, here we go. This is a replay of what happened at Silicon Graphics. So I think probably he was probably afraid of that to certain extent. But yeah, yeah. But-- No, I would say, yeah. I don't want to say anything negative about the industry. But yeah, I mean, Clark, like I said, Clark was just like, Barstell was just like, was the manager of managers. He was like so advanced on this. That story notwithstanding Barstell never took the position of like, no, it's time for the new ideas to stop. But it was always like, OK, we need to thread the new ideas into a business. Which is kind of the hybrid of the two. So I just had this thought while sitting and listening to you speak. Is there something about your partnership with Ben? Where you like, he's more Barstell, more Clark? Yeah. Although we do mix it up a little bit more because he does have his own edge. But yeah, there is some of that. So for example, he runs the firm. And then I will, I tend to come up with-- he comes up with lots of new ideas, but I do tend to come up with new ideas. And then we do have this kind of discussion frequently. So if I was to follow you around without you knowing with the camera, what would your day look like then? Are you just like a fountain of ideas or you're like this uncontrolled energy, like a gym clerk back in the day? But I've got both. This is the thing because they both train me. I've got both parts of it. So you're not as uncontrollable or unmanageable as-- Yeah, I believe Ben would tell you, oh, I mean, Ben's been working with me now for 30 years. And so I think if this is a real issue, I think that our partnership would not have lasted. But I think he would say that I have a pretty strong internal edit function. I want to see unedited. Well, unedited is really fun. Unedited is very enjoyable. It is very disruptive. And so yeah, it has to be calibrated. When do you show the unedited side? I don't tend to do it in this for the-- this is a thing. And you want to show it to us incredibly well, just incredibly well as does Zuckerberg. It is this thing. And again, it's because back to the Addison Tesla thing, when you're responsible for an organization, when you're responsible for a team of people, it's more than 5 or 10. If you're going to have an organization, it's like 100 or 1,000 or 1,000 or 1,000 people, you can't change the plan every day. You just can't. You'll just destroy everybody. You'll burn everybody out. You'll destroy everybody. They'll just be asking for you to be a human. People will quit. It's just going to be-- you can't do that. There has to be some calibrated middle ground. There are a handful of examples of great business successes for us, like one or two or three people. Right. Inside of maybe it's Bitcoin and Minecraft and WhatsApp and Instagram and then I start running out of examples. But AI, there will probably be more like single-person companies from here on out. Or by the way, artists. An artist and novelist. Let me say this is a difference between a novelist and a movie maker. A novelist is like, you put whatever you want. You're novel. But if you're a director of a movie, you can't change the entire plot on Tuesday while you're shooting the movie. Or there's 300 people who are relying on you to complete a movie. So the point being is like, intact. If you're going to have an organization or by the way, anything in any field of activity, if you're going to have an organization, you do need to have some calibration titration process. Like, change does need to happen, but it needs to happen in a measured way. And so you can't just blow it up every day. And so yeah, so either what you need in that case, to get the whole of the whole of the large-scale organization that's still innovating, either you need two people involved who are able to balance each other. And by the way, you could say this was like Steve Jobs and Tim Cook would be a canonical example. Or by the way, early on Zuckerberg and Sherel Stanford or early on Bill Gates and Steve Walmart. So you can have that kind of configuration. Or every once in a while, you can get that in a single person, which is very rare. But like, Jess and Wang would be a single person example of that. So every now and then you get that. And so I would say Ben and I have a version of the Yen and Yen kind of aspect to it. But like I said, he's very creative on his own. And I have this because I have the barstell training. I have this additional level of sort of most of the time, you know, sort of self-governance. Like I get it, like I'm not. But it's one of my big things is like, look, if I'm in a walk-in and I'm in a like throw-off fit and I'm in a like we have to change everything tomorrow and Ben's going to be like, fuck you like this fucking sucks. I'm like, that leaves nowhere good, right? So that can't be the thing. And so I do, like, yeah, I do do do a lot of self-identity. You just said something. I think you said you believe Elon is inventing a new way to manage. I think you may have figured out the best way to reconcile the two. The thought and ideas with the systematic builder, I think you might have figured out a lot of, I don't know if it's a new way to do it, but I think you might have cracked the code on like how to do that for the next 100 years or something. So break down what you've observed with the way that Elon's managing. Yeah, Shudson's start by saying, look, Elon's method has been described by people, you know, before. And I should say like I work with him, but from the outside. So I've not worked in one of his companies. So I, you know, have one layer of interaction, but I, you know, I'm working them quite a bit now and I study him, you know, very carefully. It's this extreme focus on substance. It's this extreme focus on getting to the truth. So one of the things you notice in any organization with multiple layers is basically that it's compounding lies. And I got this lesson early because I worked for IBM at the point of their kind of maximum size and importance in the world. Can you explain? I don't think people understand. Yeah. Just how big and powerful and almost monopolistic IBM was. Yeah. So I worked for IBM at the very height of their power right before they fell. It was my first job and when I was in college and they were in the mid 80s, they were 80% of the market capitalization of the entire tech industry. Right. There's nothing close to even close. Right. So this is like Google times 10 or something. It's just like our times or Apple times 10. It's just like I'm it's a level of scale and importance that just nobody had. And by the way, the TV show actually did a great job of this is a Holt and Catch Fire in the first season has this thing. The disappointment these guys are basically inventing the PC effectively. And it's the point where IBM shows up and it gives you a sense of like it's like the CIA story you told me. It's like the the failites. It's like 20 people on like Lucid's or just here, like completely crush you like it was just this overpower, you know kind of thing. And they invent stuff like all kinds of stuff and the industry wouldn't exist today without them. And they were an incredible company for a very long time. And the whole thing, by the way, run by their founder for 30 years, run by the founder's son for 30 years. You know, this incredible company, but you know, they're still, you know, they're not that anymore, but they're still a big and important company today, you know, whatever 1940, so 80 years later, it's like how many companies survive in tech, you know, 80 years. My favorite, I mean, stories. Thomas Watson, senior, had been convicted of antitrust crimes before he started IBM. This is the cash register? The cash register? So he had previously run a company called NCR, National Counter-Adjuster. And he had been convicted by the federal government of monopolizing the cash register business before he even started IBM. And then IBM, he monopolized the mainframe business and then they convicted him again. He's a double-dipper. He got various to being an antitrust court. So he was incredible. By the way, there's a Kevin Meaney old school tech reporter wrote a book biography of Thomas Watson, senior, which you feel the machine in the man or the machine, right? It's one of, I'm not sure if that one is, it's one of those. I think it might be that one. Yeah. And he actually went back and this is like, you know, this is a word time by like 1940, 1990, 1960s, 1960s. And he went back and he got them at that time. They had a secretary transcribing in real time all of the executive staff meetings every Monday morning. And he went back and I actually got the archives of the transcripts of the executive staff meetings. And it's just literally Thomas Watson's just like cursing everybody out. And it's just like, it's like a complete tyrannical psychopath. It's just like screaming at people. And it's all in the records. And so it's like, you know, so how much of this stuff ever changes, you know, it's like, you know, whatever, I don't know, whatever you like, it's accused of or whatever Steve Jobs is like, oh no, that guy was whatever it is. It's a pale version of what that guy was doing. But anyway, the point being is like, IBM. So by the time I got involved, I'd be almost like six years later, you know, if anyway, yeah, six, 50 years later after that. And so they were kind of taking in their power. But what happened was, I remember this because I was there in turn. And I was trying to figure out whether I should work, I should work there after college. And they had a, their internet was a mainframe, mainframe app. And you, one of the functions was a, it was a, was, was the order chart. And I kept it. It calculated there were 12 layers of management between the and the CEO, which meant the following. It meant it meant that my bosses bosses bosses bosses bosses boss had a boss boss boss boss boss. Before it got to the CEO. And then, and then really what happened, the story of the thing, really what happened was, and I saw that, I saw this happen. I saw this happen. Oh, close. I saw this happen was each layer of management was lying to the one above it. Right. And so, because each layer was to much to look good and must to, you know, whatever, put a little spin on the ball. And like, if one layer lies to the next layer above it, it's maybe that's, that's okay. But it, but when that happens two or three times, the lies compound, that happened six times, the lies really compound. That happens 12 times. The CEO had no idea what's happening. Like, absolutely no clue what's going on the company, which was the state of play that I bimmed. They actually had a term. There's actually a term they had a whole vocabulary. I mean, this company was like a nation state at the time. I think you like to leave your whole life like in Austin, Texas, never meet anybody who didn't work for IBM. Like it was just like this incredible thing. They had this gossip. They called the big gray cloud. And it was literally the cloud of man and great business who followed the CEO around to get prevented him from ever talking to anybody. It was something we're actually doing the work. And so when he would come to visit, he was like a state visit. It was like a visit from the king. And it was like the king and the traveling court. And so the if it was completely impervious, well, well, to get information through us. So, but I tell that story because that's the polar opposite of the Elon approach. Right. So, so, so, and by the way, being a CEO IBM in 1989 was a great way to live, right? Because it's just like, wow, everybody's bringing me good news all the time. Oh, like, like, like, I wake up in the morning and like, everything is great. And I'm like famous and I am like rich and I am successful. And like, I've got a chauffeur and I've got a jet. And I've gotten these 80 guys in gray suits who are like, take care of everything for me. And I don't have to ever talk to engineers and like, this is great. Until, you know, it's like the turkey on Thanksgiving, you know, until things change and there's a problem. And then you have no idea what to do about it, which is what happened to them. The Elon approach is the polar opposite of that. And the polar opposite of the approach is literally, like, I'm only going to talk engineers. Right. And so when there's an issue, I am going to go straight to the source of truth. And the source of truth is the engineer who actually knows what's going on. And so what do you lean on literally? And I've seen him do this. So he literally does. He goes to whatever the, but when there's an issue, how can he see goes to whatever is the engineer who's working in that problem? And he says down to the engineer, and they solve that problem. And I can just tell you like the number of CEOs and tech, even the great ones who do that, like, I mean, almost nobody ever does that. Why does nobody ever do that? Well, first of all, it's just like a giant pain in the ass because like your life consists of like having to actually solve all these problems, like the whole point of being like big and powerful successful is you pay people to do that. Now you're doing it. And you're in there like two in the morning doing it, right? Well, like, it just sucks. Right. And so like most people won't do it. And then the other is you have to, it means the CEO company has to have the skill set to be able to do that. So the CEO has to not just be a great CEO. They also have to be like a great technical technologist, not just that they have memories of having been a programmer, one pointer, whatever, a chip designer, or they can actually sit down with the chip designer. Right. And on Thursday night at 2 a.m. and Austin, and they can actually figure out like what's wrong with the chip. And Elon and Elon has that ability. And he's like encyclopedia, like every area of technology and is able to go hands on with rocket designers, and AI designers and everything in between. And almost no CEO has that. And so, but that's literally what he does. And then the way that he thinks the way that he thinks about it, I think, is basically, you know, he runs whatever six companies, all sorts of things. And it's like basically any given week, in any given week, he thinks about everything as a production, basic production line, you know, to product production process. He's actually like an old school industrialist. So everything's like the production process. And then any given week, there's, there's, in any production process, there's always a bottleneck. So there's always, there's always the thing that is slowing down the process the most. And that's always one thing. So what he does for each of his companies is to see identifies what the charts, he literally maps out the production process. And I've, I've, he literally has these like monitors where he like has the whole thing laid out. And then he, he basically says, okay, this is the issue that's holding up production this week. And then he goes anywhere. And that's the thing that he goes to work with the engineer on is he goes to fix that bottleneck. And he does it every week for every company. Right. And so think about what that is. Why Tesla is smoking the is, is like, it's been so much dramatically upperforming the rest of the auto industry is because Tesla, he's, he's fixing the critical production bottleneck at Tesla. 52 times a year himself. Yeah. I can tell you what the CEO of the legacy automakers are doing. Like, they're not doing that. That is not what's happening. Right. And so it's in a contrast like a normal company. It might take six months to solve these problems. And he was like fixing it like right now, tomorrow, like let's go fix it right now. And so he just like runs this, he runs this loop over and over again. He's just, he's absolutely indefitigable. I offered, he famously for a while. He had sold all of his houses, many just literally cofsurfing. You know, it's one of the most successful people on the planet. Yeah. And so I, there's a vacation house. I offered him, I said, if I take a week and use the vacation house, whatever, take the kids, feel free. And he sent back five minutes later, it's like, you know, whatever, 11 o'clock at night, they're forward or spots. I don't take vacations. Right. Which again, it's like there's no CEO like this. Yeah. The whole point of being a CEO is you get to, you get to go jet around. And so, so anyway, so he's doing that. And then, and then, you know, he, he, he, he turns this into routine. And so, you know, he, when he does like, he'll, he'll, he'll, he does like a day a week at each of his companies. And he'll basically do, like all day, he'll do like a 12 14 hour stretch, where he'll do design reviews with, with, with, but the way that he does it, he does with five minutes per engineer. Right. And so he does five, so six, he divided by five. It's been a way too long in this podcast. How much is that? 12, 12, 12 12 design reviews an hour. Yeah. And then he doesn't, 10 hours, so he's, so you know, you want to do 120 design reviews in the course of, in the course of a day. These 101. I have not actually said, I suspect there are other people around, including people, you know, we're for him, and you know, probably some, some of the leaders of the companies are involved in different ways. But it literally is the thing I know, it's literally a rotating cat. It's, it's the point engineer on each of the important things coming in and presenting for five minutes. And then the question is, like, how's, if it's going great, that's great. If it's not going, what's the problem? And then, how does that problem rank? Right. It is, is that the, is that the production bottleneck? And if it is a production bottleneck, then that's the thing that he then fixes. And then that's when he's there from whatever 8 o'clock to 2am working with that engineer to face that problem. One way to think about this is the velocity like in military affairs is called maneuver warfare, right? So just the speed at which he operates is just the cycle time is just so much faster than anybody running in a traditional method. It's hard to even compare the different. It's like four hours versus six months. Like it's just this incredible gap. And then the other part of it is somebody I know once went for SpaceX and they asked what it was like and he said it's like being dropped into a into a zone of shocking competence. Like everybody is like ultra competent. And the reason everybody's ultra competent is because number one, if they're not Elon sniffs it out and fires them. But he knows because he's he's talking to people I should do in the work. So he and he knows at this point in his you know, I mean, done this for whatever 25 years, he can he can sniff this out really quickly now. And then the other is the best engineers in the world want to work for him because he's he's the one CEO like this who's able to work with them as a peer on whatever the technology is. And as an engineer, you're just like this is like what would be better as an engineer than being able to design a rocket engine with Elon Musk is your engineer. Right. And so he just has this like incredible positive selection where like the smartest people in the world want to work for him. And then anybody who can't cut it's fired. The world sees this as like raw aggression. But it's beyond that, right? It's a very systematic way of optimizing these companies to be able to take on these like profound challenges and then being able to actually solve all the problems and do these things. And it has to be that it's just like completely unmasked. The challenge of all of this is like, okay, that all works great if you've got Elon. Right. And so one of my concepts is I think we need a metric for founders and so it's called the Millet Elon. Right. And so are you how many Millet Elon's are you? Right. Are you 10 Millet Elon's? That would be great. Are you 100 Millet Elon's? You know, that's 10% of an Elon. Yeah. That'd be fantastic. You know, you know, 500 Millet Elon's like I'm going to give you all the money. Right. Most people are like one Millet Elon or 0.1 Millet Elon. The question that falls out of this, which is a question that you know, but doubles us. It's like, okay, like, you know, you can't, can't clone you. You can't bottle the essence. So what out of that can be transplanted to like normal human beings. And how much of it is predictable or noble when he's much younger because like the famous example of this is Michael Morts passing made all his money in PayPal with Elon. Obviously there was contention there. He got kicked out and everything else. But then Elon pitched him Tesla and he passed because like, there's no way that you're ever going to surpass Toyota. And then Morts to his credit was just like I drastically underestimated the guy's determination and pain tolerance. I think is the term we used. I wasn't there for that. So I don't know about that. I will say the idea of the idea of having been a software entrepreneur building your car company. Okay. Building a when Tesla started building. There had been no new successful car companies in the United States for like 100 years. So like 100 years. There was like 2000 of them in 19 0 founded from like 1900 to 1910 and three this arrived. That's right. And the previous real attempt to start a car company in the US before Tesla in the preceding decades was Tucker Tucker automotive. Yeah. Yeah. Tucker, which was such a disaster that they made a movie called Tucker, which is about what a disaster was. And so like this, obviously you don't do that. Obviously this is insane. And for a software guy to do this is insane. Oh, by the way, this is only one of the things he's doing. He also has the rocket company. Yeah. Which is also insane. Right. And so yeah. So it's like the thing I wouldn't like by the way, I didn't see it. And I did. I was, you know, I'm a software guy and I just I was like, I don't know whatever he's going to go. I guess he's going to go do cars. I don't know. I need about cars. So I sound like I saw it, but I'm just saying like the level of incredulity that he was greeted with at the time was I think almost, you know, for And you know, there's that famous photo. The most famous thing I thought or I think the most the most powerful one is the one where he's young. Elon probably 2005 or whatever. And he's in the shorts in the polo and all and he's like crouch down and there's nothing but the explosion remains of the third rocket, the second or third rocket. The one he had been funding partially like, yes. Did you ever read Eric Burgers book lift off? Oh, you better read it. I'm surprised you haven't. It's it's only only focuses. I like these companies. He's the focus on like the first like six years. Yeah. And he just stops. Yeah. It's a first six years history of SpaceX. And it's just nothing good in the book. It's just reading one failure after another after another one catastrophe after another after another to read. When my kid was five, he loves rockets. And so his favorite rocket video was the compilation of all the SpaceX rocket explosions. Well, Elon talks about this that before his friends, when after he sold them, well, to he had I think I had like 180, I think at the story, I was like 180 million after taxes. He's like, I'm going to do this rocket company. One of his, I think a day or Rossi or for example, the friend sat him down and they made him watch all the rocket. There's a compilation. This is probably pre-YouTube of just rockets blowing up over and over again. Like, no, you're literally going to light your fortune off fire. It's going to explode in the sky. I mean, obviously it's working. So his method obviously is working. And it's obviously working like far better than I mean, certainly working far better than anybody else's method and cars are certainly working better than anybody else's method of rockets. And then in a bunch of other areas also so like it's clearly working. And so it's like, okay, there, you know, and then he just draws because of just who he is and what he's doing and how he does it. He just he draws so much heat. There's just so much. The environment is just full of criticism and attacks. Just not stop. And you know, we all kind of get sucked into these narratives. But I think the key thing is just for me is just like, okay, like there is a method there that he has been working on and refining for coming out 30 years that is working better than anybody's method. Like I don't know, like I said, I don't know how many people can do it. Maybe there's just like a fundamental limitation, which is you can do it if you're a lot of you can't do it if you're somebody else. Or maybe you need to be above 30 million allowance, but not below or something like that. Right. There may be there's some threshold where you break through on us. But it is clearly the best method. Like it clearly is generating the best results. And then again, concept conceptually I like it because it again, it's this bridging of the of the of the founder mentality with the manager mentality. Because he's not just doing these are not just one of these scaling everything is scaling. Was it Starlink just hit? What was the number? Just hit 10 was it 10 million subscribers? I'm one of them. Something like that. Right. You probably have read about it. Radio mentality. No. Oh, okay. Okay. So you lost not the first guy is that we're going to do satellite based like internet access. There were there was there was there was Bill Gates Craig McCaw. So with Microsoft on top of the world and Craig McCaw basically built so sell you which left me the US built what's now AT&T mobile. Those guys teamed up in the early 90s and did this thing called tele does it where they put up satellite based voice and then it was going to be internet access complete task for a total bankruptcy complete disaster. And then Motorola which used to make all the cell phones in the US had the had another one system that actually still called it ready. I mean again it's just classic business school case study. I've just completed disaster capital destruction. And so you want like I know I'm going to do number three of those. We're starting as a side project at the rocket. Right. Because he's like I read any of his in retrospect is total genius because he's like we're going to be putting up the if the rockets are reusable. We're going to be lost them all the time. And then the question becomes what's going to go in the rockets. And he's like I can wait for the customers to come to me with more such but the rockets or I can just put up my own satellites. Well, we decided like to put up. Oh, it would be consumer grade, you know consumer price internet access. And it's just like, okay, anybody who knew anything about the history of like satellites knew that that's like the great. You know that's the new crazy side deal in the world. And of course it's like this like you know giant success as like the site as like the site project. There's clearly method of clearly incorporates invention clearly incorporate scale. It does a brilliant job. Both of those it's it's clearly in part the Henry Ford whatever Alexander the great method clearly. But there's also like real scale and have to space X now is buildings. You know they got their own city like you know down Texas. Right. And so it's a formula that captures both sides of it and it it it may be like the least studied and understood thing. I know I'm in the world right now. Isn't quite a little mark. We're running out of time. When I started the show you were out to top my list for one of the guests I want to talk to you. Thank you so much for doing this. I hope you come back in a few months because there's a million other things we need to talk about. Good. Awesome. Fantastic. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode the A60C podcast. If you like this episode be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes go to YouTube Apple podcasts and Spotify follow us on X a a 16 Z and subscribe to our sub stack at a 16 Z dot sub stack dot com. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. This information is for educational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy hold or sell any investment or financial product. 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