Mark Jacobstein: From Game Exec to Venture Builder

From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land. It's getting to alpha. The show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now, here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim. Mark Jacobs' dean is co-founder of Mir Horizon Ventures, a VC firm with an unusual approach. They announced just invest in startups. They joined them as co-founders. In this interview, you'll learn about Mark's journey as a serial entrepreneur and find out why he decided to pioneer a new investing model with near horizon. Stayed at the end to hear what Mark looks for in a startup when he's investing. And the red flags to watch out for that can kill your pitch. I'm incredibly excited to be here with Mark Jacobs' dean. Somebody that I've known as a colleague for years. But Mark and I have never really gotten to sit down and go deep into his philosophy, his experiences, what he's learned from this amazing walk through the gaming and tech universe. So thank you so much, Mark, for being here and welcome. No, thank you, Amy Jo. I'm excited for the conversation today. Me too. So one of the things that most interests me in your background is the choices you've made. And the path you've carved that included both tech and gaming. You've moved pretty fluidly in those worlds, it seems. Yeah, parapetetic is the word I've used sometimes. Games and gaming tech, which include consumer internet, wireless, mobile. And then actually the last 10 or 12 years, an awful lot of work in biotech tech biome, I'm going to the diagnostics,omics, in some ways, it's easy to look at it and think sort of all over the map. There are certainly some comments reds I could pull through. But I think it is a reflection of a couple things I'm curious. I enjoy a lot of different things and I'm a journalist. I don't know many things, maybe nothing all the way down. But I know a little bit about a lot of things and that's how my mind works and that's what I enjoy. And so I think I've tried to create a career that reflects that. So I read, but I don't know the story of how you co-founded digital chocolate. Yes. So digital chocolate for those that don't remember digital chocolate was a high flyer of a mobile game business. We founded in 2003. And I co-founded the business with trip hawkins and we had six other co-founders as well. So trip was the founding CEO and I was the founding president for those who don't know. Trip to legend trip was the founding CEO of electronic arts and a 3DO. And I think the second person ever inducted into the video game all the fame and one of my first real mentors. And I was very reluctant to start the business. I started my career as an entrepreneur in New York in 1994 and built two businesses. And what we used to call Silicon Alley and loved New York City. And it was happily and scanced in Brooklyn and before it was cool. And host.com crash got a call from trip that he was trying to put something together. And he wanted me to move to California and be his co-founder and sort of run the business. You know, trip with sort of set strategy and I would report to trip and everyone else had report to me. And we would build this great game business. And it was obvious to me that mobile was going to be a very big deal. I'd been to Japan. I actually tried to build mobile fantasy sports on Doca Mothe phones in 1999. Believe it or not. In fact, maybe even earlier than that, I'd been going to Japan, which was for those that don't remember. We're sort of the mobile revolution started. And I used to talk about mobile as the one mobile was the one device to rule them all. This was like 2001. I was saying this. Anyways. So I believed in the vision, but I knew I wanted to move from New York. So anyways, trip worked me over for a while. And he finally hit me with, look, I've got Sequoia and Kleiner are putting in $8 million. Mike Mord's the greatest venture capitalist in history is sitting on the board. I will introduce you to everyone in Silicon Valley. You are crazy to turn this down. And he was right. So I backed up my bag. So I moved to California in late 2003 and have never looked back. Do you prioritize relationships and exposure to greatness and learning? Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. I would say if there are a few things. First of all, I would sort of recommend this for anybody who's early career, which I certainly still was at the time. The things that matter most are, are you working with great people on big problems? And what's your learning curve going to look like? I knew this was going to be hard and challenging, but interesting. But it was difficult. I found his own East Coast and I love New York City and I had great friends there and all the rest of it. But Bayer is all right too. So they worked out. Wow. So what made Trip go after you? That's a good question. I mean, Trip used to say he thought we had an awful lot in common. There were certain things we did have in common. We both sound like the sounds of our own voices. We both can talk about almost anything even things we don't know an awful lot about. Both both game businesses in our early 20s. So he was the first business employee at Appal and then he founded EA when he was 24 or 25. And I've done the same thing. So I founded small world sports and my living room when I was 24, which was the first online fantasy sports business in the world. So I had a claim to fame. It was inventing online fantasy sports. Trip invented many things in the console gaming business. And I arguably kind of really made the console day gaming business world. And so we both going to Harvard had sort of I think didn't love working in a traditional corporate structure and that it was reflected by starting things when very young. We had a lot of other things that were we have different personalities. I think I have a little more easy going, which was the other piece. I think trip actually recognized that I would help smooth over some of the things that were difficult inside of digital chocolate. You took the words out of my mouth different leadership styles and apparently you also were the grown up in the room working with Sam Altman at loops. Is that true? That is true. So that was actually immediately following digital chocolate. So in 2005, maybe 2006. Sam was 19 year-old wonder can do had just raised from Sequoia and NEA. And I was introduced to him actually originally by David White because we had such similar views with mobile. It's hard to imagine, but if you go back to 2005, 2006 people were thinking mobile is you made phone calls that was cool. And maybe you played games on your phones. That's what we done in digital chocolate. And what I wanted to do in digital chocolate in place where trip and I clash was to build more interesting applications. I hadn't conceived a Uber, but we were thinking of lots of things you could do with mobile that went way beyond and were much more important to the world than just games. Not the games are great, but I and Sam was building a company called Loops. Loops was find your friends on your phone using the location based services. And it wasn't even a GPS yet and was exactly a kind of application I was interested in deeply important social problem of like interconnectedness. Sam was obviously brilliant and he was also 19 of the way I was describing it. It's like I think you know Sequoia wanted me to be Cheryl to his suck. Well, the Facebook didn't really exist yet. The problem was that loop never scaled. And so having this experienced gray hair. I don't think I actually agree here, but I agree here number two, who was there to help with all of the operational challenges didn't make sense when the company frankly never really succeeded despite having an incredible team. There were Sam Yam, who started Patriot and Evan Tana and all kinds of very talented people went on to do great things inside the company. But we had a fundamental, but several fundamental problems is the product we were actually building such a valuable learning experience, you know, looking back on it that you can see it clearly now probably at the time it wasn't as clear. Go hindsight, of course. Right, but that's the thing about having done what you've done and carved your path is that kind of insight you have the perspective to do that, which is very cool. So tell us about what you're doing now. I know a little about it. I know that you've transitioned into venture builder after being a long time operator. Yeah, so after 30 years being an entrepreneur and helping to build six or seven companies that mattered, not all of which succeeded, but many of which did. And sometimes as a founder, sometimes not sometimes as a CEO, sometimes as a CPO or CMO, I decided about a year ago, I want to solve for a few things. One was I liked working on multiple projects with great people, but I didn't want to be a pure venture capitalist because although meeting great entrepreneurs and picking the right companies is interesting. I still like to build so I wanted to still build, but I want to work on more than one project at a time and along with my partner Sean and Mike and I'll mention them a little bit more about them in a minute, we identified a whole in the market that we thought that there was a great need for talented entrepreneurs, particularly solo founders at company inception to get help building their businesses from zero to one. And because of the experiences that I had from 30 years all over the place, many different successes and many different failures and different lessons from all that. And similarly for Sean and Mike, we felt like we could accelerate people past some of the problems they might have given the maxes to things that they might access to and the risk. And we had great entrepreneurs working on important problems, we're not a venture studio, so we built a company the firm is called near Verizon you can find it near Verizon. PC. rate entrepreneurs, ad company inception. help get them from zero to one. It is not a studio. We are not trying to make our own stuff and then find a CEO after the fact and sort of bolt them on. That model can work. Certainly, it worked for flagship pioneering. I mean, they made Moderna and it's worked for IEC and others. But it has its challenges and what we're trying to do is find people who already know the problem area they want to work on. Already have some unfair competitive advantage. Know something that no one else knows, including us. They have to be venture backable on their own without our help. But where they recognize that with our help, their odds of success are going to go up. Their chances of moving quickly are going to go up and the piece of equity that we're going to ask for in exchange is fair and not usurice. And so they get control. It's their company. They still control the majority of the equity by the time they're done with us. But when they're done with us, they're sort of app one. They know where they're headed. They've hopefully got the first bits of product market fit. They've raised some money. They built their team and they kind of know where they're headed. It doesn't mean they're going to succeed, but it certainly means they're in better position, hopefully, than when they started. And so that's near horizon. We've been doing it for about a year now for the first 10 months or so. Self-funded, it's semi-stealthily with entrepreneurs. We already knew to make sure that the model worked. And it has. And I think our entrepreneurs would say that they've loved the experience. They are much further along than they would be. They're probably in a different place than they would be. We've enjoyed it. And what's interesting is I think we started outtrying to solve something we wanted to do. And we discovered along the way that we seem to be solving a very important problem with the ecosystem in general. Not to overstate it, but I read the power law last year. It was a phenomenal book. I recommended to anyone who hasn't read it yet. Incredible sort of history of venture capital and the way it has changed entrepreneurship in the US and around the world, starting with Arthur Rock all the way through to YC and what if seller he just did, etc. And it's interesting to me like the grandest version of what we're trying to do with near horizon is to change the way venture works and the way new businesses get built where even very talented entrepreneurs who've done this before, who could build a team on their own that don't meet us would still want to work with us because we're going to do risk things for them. We're going to help them to think bigger. We're going to accelerate their time horizon if they're in a competitive environment. And so far it's working. So we're excited. We'll see. Well, you have a long history of being ahead of your time. So I'm paying attention. Thank you. The goal here is to be right on time. So it's an interesting thing with startups, right? You actually want to you don't want to be too far ahead. Looked us too far ahead with Sam, right? We were doing yeah, services to find your friends on your phone before smartphones existed and so literally doing the fancy math, you know, TVOA's time distance of arrival, triangulation off of cell towers to like figure out where an individual phone was. If you're building that much infrastructure to solve a downstream problem, you're probably too early. Anyways, I'm hoping that we are just at the right time. So I want to go deeper into how you see the tech landscape and how you evaluate startups because what you're describing is a really interesting perspective. And if you think of the mindset of any investor, whether you're investing money and time and grit or just money, right? You're going to be making yes, no choices all the time. Before we get into that, I want to follow up on learning from the stakes. Earlier today, somebody challenged me and said, you know, you talk about learning from the stakes and leading into failure and squeezing all the learning juice out of it. Give me an example. When does that really happen? And so you mentioned looped in the big lesson there about market timing, right? And just not just the startup and the idea, but the way it's embedded in the market. What are some other moments or mistakes or like insights that you've gleaned from watching when things didn't work? So I'll tell you one of my favorites. So I was at Garden Tell helping to run the business of the business. Garden Health is I think the second largest molecular diagnostics company in the world and builds circulating to our DNA assays to help people choose the right therapy for cancer treatment and then moved into early detection and a variety of other things. One of the really interesting conversations I had early on in my tenure with our chief medical officer was Garden Health's assay was actually better than the standard of care because it was able to it was a blood-based test. You could figure out what was going on with some of these metastases, not just with their primary tumors of metastases. They're one of kill you and so you want to treat the met's, not the primary. And we published this very extreme paper in a high impact journal from a University Chicago professor who was famous about how Garden Health's assay found things that were not found by the traditional tissue-based biopsies. And our medical affairs team was so excited about this. It was amazing science and the KOLs we talked to keeping leaders and loved it. And they wanted us to market the heck out of it. And what we figured out in talking to sort of your ordinary garden writing oncologists was what they wanted for our from our assay was for it to be exactly the same as the tissue-based assays that they already knew and understood and that except that it was easier to use because all you had to do was draw blood instead of doing like a long biopsy on somebody. And so I told Rick this was amazing science. I love what he was working on but there was no way in heck we were going to push this as the marketing message because it was exactly opposite to what people wanted to hear. We're better than the standard of care means we're different than the standard of care. That is not what they wanted to hear. What they wanted to hear was we were going to produce exactly the same results. Only were easier to use and the results would come back in seven days. Those were the winning marketing messages. And anyways it was eye-opening for me because one of the things if you work in Silicon Valley, you always want to work that things make things better, right? And Garden Health was doing that. I mean the assay was amazing and the technology and science were incredible but we weren't selling science. Actually what we were selling even in a molecular diagnostics with oncologists who are some of the smartest people in the world. The thing we were selling was ease of use and familiarity. And so for me it was I'd seen this before to sort of mind-blowing right to have this basic marketing lesson that I was very difficult to drive home with even very smart people because they're so counterintuitive. Don't tell them about the thing that makes it better. Anyways, now there's a lot of those along the way that I think are important and counterintuitive and even a great entrepreneur might look past. In the same way that Sam Altman looked past the fact in 2005 that it was going to be too hard to implement the location-based service when most phones didn't actually have GPS. Yeah, market timing. It's huge. So what are some of the things you've learned from your successes? I think one of the things that I would say is that even as a company is succeeding, the start-up, the remain start-up challenges. There's always another step to take. You have to sort of relentlessly innovate. It's just perhaps you're innovating on different things. I mean, Garnes and issuing examples. Garnes is a huge success. It has helped millions of cancer patients. It's a multi-billion dollar business in Helene, Altouki and Amirali, TalaSaz, who built it our geniuses and deserve enormous amount of credit for making it happen. They started with scientific innovation. And then there was innovation around the IP and IP protection and a very litigious space. And then there was innovation around the initial commercialization and then there was innovation around the medical affairs and the outreach to getting all the KOLs using it. And it was like step by step by step. For me, being inside that while it was happening, it was very interesting to watch, especially in healthcare. Actually, there are certain types of businesses where you only got to nail one thing. And then the whole thing works. My favorite example of that, the history of the world is probably WhatsApp. It's just like, it's self-one problem. SMS is too expensive. They nailed it. They only have like 15 employees and whatever it was, a 20, 30 billion dollar business because they, but that is the exception to the rule. Almost all great businesses require you to like get that one thing right. Once you've got that right, now you're succeeding. You've got to get that next thing right. And then you've got to get that next thing right. And a tribute to say that you have to put the emphasis on the right syllable. I think for a great entrepreneur, even as you're succeeding, you have to continue to figure out like, what's the thing that is going to really unlock the next part of the business. And stay laser focused on that. And it means in part, like not doing certain things. And then once you've cracked that, now you got to, now you find the next thing. And Garton just nailed that. I mean, we included everything from like, Oh, how did we get reimbursement? How do we build a giant, they have a multi hundred million dollar biopharmal business that was built from zero by an internal consultant, Daniel Simon, who went on to run that whole business line. Anyways, step by step. And I think that's a really important lesson for every great startup. It's so true. And I think it's particularly challenging to go from the messy scrappy 15 people in a room, throwing it together to the next level where you have to say no to things. Right. And I've worked with a lot of startups that have struggled through that transition. But the ones that make it, it opens up the next level, just like you say. Yeah. And there's also certainly lots that have been written about the cultural transition that occurs particularly I think there's a big one at like 15 or 20 people. There's another big one at like 120-ish people, whatever work, where maintaining the values and culture of a business become harder. And you know, I'd say one of the things for entrepreneurs is, and this is hopefully where like my gray hair helps. Understanding who you are and what your intrinsic strengths are and also what your weaknesses are is a really important part of the entrepreneurial journey so that you can, I think the goal generally is not to become, try to become good at things you're not, which is a good at it, I don't think that works, but it's to understand where the weaknesses are and fill those gaps in around you and also to lean into the strengths. And so, you know, one of the things I think I helped with at Garmin was as the company got bigger, making sure that the culture was one, and how many, and merely were high ethics, very nice people, but they weren't like a fusive communicator sort of naturally. And so one of the things I think I helped with inside of Target was as the company got larger, making sure that like who we are, what we stood for, why we were doing what we were doing, which you think would be easy, right? We're helping cancer patients, but even still, like lots of biotech on earth is helping people, but a lot of them don't actually feel that way. Anyways, making sure that that was pulled through in the culture because that was a strength of mine, was something that I leaned into. And I think that's for every entrepreneur, I think trying to figure out your authentic self, building companies that feel and look like your authentic self, but also then complementing yourself with people who are different. But I think that's why Tripp recruited me to help build digital chocolate. - Right, yeah, circling back to that. So there's a threat I wanna pull here of communication because you're talking about effective communication, leading to cultural transmission, which it does, and different leadership styles. And I know personally from working with you that when you pitch something to me, I'm spellbound. I mean, you're amazing at that. And I know that's a lot of skill and thinking that goes behind that. How did you develop these communication skills? - I'm not sure how you actually really know the answer to that, to be honest. I'll say a few things. And whether like I was in debate club, and I wasn't certainly particularly comfortable public speaker for the first five, six years of my career, I was pretty anxious getting up on stage, what had you like anything I think practice helps. I will say this, first of all, you can't articulate something you don't understand, full stop. And so I use that as an important measure, by the way, when I meet an entrepreneur and they describe a problem to me, and I can't describe it back to my partners or somebody else. What that means to me, I don't understand it. And maybe that's on me because I wasn't an active enough. Lister, maybe it's on the entrepreneur who's trying to convey the story to me, somehow it got lost in translation. And I think it's an important thing to take note of. I think there's other pieces, I'm gonna try, if I practice this, but that are useful, right? Pitching is storytelling, right? Humans respond to stories, metaphors are super effective. I think one thing I try to use frequently, it's not conscious, but I think it's developed over time, is sort of micro examples to prove macro points. So when I was a government, I could talk, I have to tell you, I don't know the science all the way down, not a chance. My wife is a world famous geneticist, I understand what that attitude looks like, that is not neat. But I know just enough about a few examples where I could speak to them, and it would make it very clear what it was that our assays were doing. We had blood-based tests that would allow you to figure out the genomic drivers of your cancer tumors, and pick the right therapies. EGFR is a gene that drives a lot of lung cancers. I could talk about EGFR mutations, and what that would mean, and what therapy you should be on. And that one example was enough, so that if I was talking some hardened skeptical K-L from mass-general, or MD Anderson, who didn't think that the kid who didn't have an MD, or a PhD, knew what he was talking about, I could tell him that example. By the time we're done, he or she knew that they're talking to somebody who wasn't a clown, and then we could actually get about the business of talking about what we needed to talk about. I think it's very useful to have an arsenal of stories where you can kind of press play. Like, I know this story, and I can modify it for my audience. By the time I'm done, there's a very specific example that I can then project across in some sort of macro sense to the larger problem I try to solve. So I think that's an important part of it. You gotta be able to reach your audience, which is very hard in the era of Zoom. I will say, like, this was easier, giving great pitch in person is much easier. It's much harder to read a room in Zoom, and to sort of make the uncomfortable people comfortable, or to make a light joke that sort of pulls the conversation back to where you needed to go. I guess if there's only one other hot tip, which is, I suppose, Ronald Reagan was the best I've ever seen at this, which is talk about what you want to talk about. Right? Like, I still remember, people would ask Reagan some policy question, and he would talk about a city on a hill, because that was the message. Right? I think as an entrepreneur, your job is not to make everyone happy, nor is it to answer all the questions. Your job is to solve a really important problem, and that usually requires focus on a few things, and getting a few dedicated people focused on that thing, all else's noise. And so I think Yankee back from the distraction is another piece that's really important. Yep. All right. So let's do red flag, green flag. Yeah. So you meet with a lot of teams, right? And you've worked with a lot of teams. Now in your new position, you're meeting with teams, considering working with them. What are the green flags? When you see it, you kind of lean forward, you want to know more. You've mentioned some things already, I think. But what are the things that really get you excited about working with the team? I mean, some of them are obvious to the sort of the combination of energy, passion, and raw intellect that sort of jumps off the page with some great entrepreneurs. I mean, there's people you meet where, by the time you don't with that conversation, you're like, I just want to work with this. This is amazing, right? There's an entrepreneur and Kazakhstan right now that I've been going back and forth with for a month who just jumps off the page in terms of like energy. And I'm going to knock down walls, but also so sharp, and passionate about the things he's been working on for quite a long time. You know, I think the sort of less obvious piece, but at least is important for building a successful business is do you have some sort of unfair competitive advantage? I mean, the first entrepreneur we worked with at New York Verizon is Andrew Panou, as an old colleague of mine, who started out like as a hedge fund analyst in biotech. Andrew identified an important problem, the tools for analysis in the bioconemy were not nearly as ML driven as they should be there, like banging two rocks together. So wait, you were describing it. And he was his own customer. So that was useful. But way more useful is that Andrew had become extremely important influencer in the world of biotech nerds. So Andrew's got like 20,000 followers on Twitter and LinkedIn. And every one of them is like a sea level executive at a biotech or pharma company. Like nobody follows Andrew unless they're like a deep biotech nerd. And then we would post things, be beautiful landscape analyses, like what's happening with GLP ones and whatever. And like you get a million reads. That's a big deal. From our perspective, what that meant was when he wanted to build his company, he was going to have a huge distribution advantage. So he could get to his customers. It's a very obvious thing. Most Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are product driven, including me. I get excited about products. What people forget is that with very few exceptions, your product must have a distribution, and it could be traditional marketing. Whatever it is, it depends if you're selling or if you're doing marketing or it's consumerization, it needs to be viral, whatever. But you need to have the way to get in front of people. And this was something that Andrew had in space. He could post something. He does this now. You go look at his LinkedIn profile. He'll say, "DMD, if you're interested in this thing I'm building, and he'll get the CEOs, big biotechs, and farmers, pinging him, which is an amazing advantage." So that's the other thing we really want. It's something you know nobody else knows that gives you some kind of intrinsic advantage as you go after a problem. - Love it. That's such a great insight. So let's play red flags. - Yeah. - What are some of the things that if you see them during a pitch with a team, it's a red flag? - There's some obvious ones in terms of like low-a-6, you know, bad reputation, you're working on a problem that we don't actually want to see solved, it's literally forget it, like we're not going to work on anything that isn't going to make the world a better place. And if you can't get me excited about what you're working on, we do see people occasionally like, that person would be a great member of an early team, but they're not the CEO because he or she just, being a part of being a CEO is you have to be able to get people excited. I don't think a great CEO ever who couldn't inspire their investors, their customers, and their employees. 'Cause I don't think you can build an innovation business without having that. There are certain types of businesses that are slow, grow, etc. or maybe that's different. But kind of stuff I work on in Silicon Valley. If you can't get me excited, it's not going to work. I think the other thing for us, we do see a lot of people who are certain the minus one to zero phase and that we like them. We want to stay in touch with them, but we don't want to work with them yet. So South Park comments, for example, says that they work on minus one to one. And I love it. I think that's great. They can do that. And minus one to zero is like, I'm not even sure which problem I'm working on on just a talented entrepreneur. It's sort of like an EIR shift thing. We admire that, but it's not the part of the, it's not the phase that we want to be involved with. Frankly, because we sort of can't afford it. We don't have the time to do that work. We really need to find people who they don't have the answer to the problem, but they at least have the thesis figured out for like, here's the problem space. I'm going after why I'm the right person to work on it. And, but probably don't have the exact solution. There's still customer discovery work to do, etc. We want to catch some inception. We want to catch some at zero, not a point five as it were, but that's important for us. I mean, I guess the final thing I'd have to hear is arrogance is a killer. And I also say it's pretty rare. I feel I think you hear a lot of Silicon Valley people are so arrogant. Like, I don't know not many of the ones I talk to. I mean, most people out here actually have kind of a radical humility of like the scale and scope of the things you're trying to fix or work on are so hard or the people around you are so much more talented than you are. I know so many things you don't know, or especially your experience, you realize like, you know nothing, you know a tiny fraction of what there is to know. And that's just sort of how it goes. And we encounter some of you things they've got it all figured out. That won't work either. And yet you worked with Trip. Well, you know, if there's always the exception that proves the rule, right? Yeah. Yeah. I have many good things to say about Trip. Me too. I mean, he's a legend. I don't feel like humble would be one of them. But probably not the first word that would come to mind. But I will say this here. So here's a different way of thinking about it. He's like, I'm an optimist. There's my positive spin. He knew how to surround himself with people who were really good. I mean, he's once told me and this was 20 years ago that he had 70 people who'd worked for him who'd gone on to be venture back CEOs. And so he certainly wasn't shy about bringing in talented people who knew things that he didn't know and making them part of the team. That certainly reflects a certain kind of humility. He wasn't always the best at making them feel great about themselves along the way. But that's for another day. Well, that's actually true. And in my most vivid headbutting with trip, which a meeting I think you might have been in, trying to get a game shipped, right? Like we're like about to ship this game, trying to tie up the loose ends. There was some friction. I thought I was going to get fired because I it was fiery. It was a fiery meeting. Guess what? We made changes in ship the game after the meeting. I wasn't fired. So that told me, oh, this is somebody who can take a strong argument. Yeah, for sure he could. And I mean, I guess one of the things I'd say at Grungewinner is it's like, you just have to build your companies with a culture, I think, that is authentic to who you are. It's a problem if who you are is deeply unethical. But putting that aside, there are different personality types and there are people who sort of roam through fear and through love and through. Right? I think that the best way to lead is by having a vision that everybody can get very excited about and having enough structure so that people know what they're doing. I'm not a communist. This isn't like a egalitarian sort of thing. There needs people like to be led actually. But like we're great people feel like they can they have the tools they need to do their work on an emission that matters. And like for me, and then we treat each other with respect. And the rest of it is follows from that. There are different ways to run break businesses though. I don't think anybody would say that about a long mask. I'm not a fan of him personally, but you can't argue at least with the success. Obviously, his style can work. I just want to work on other companies. Is there a leader you've worked with who embodied a lot of these qualities who springs to mind? Sure. Ilka, Patanen, is the first one that jumps off the page. So Ilka worked for me at Digital Chocolate. He was the founder of a tiny little game studio in Helsinki called Suméa that we acquired in 2004 because every wireless operator in the world vote a phone. They all told us like Ilka makes the best games. He's amazing. Go talk to him. And so we went over there. You know, we've been back back. So Koei, and Sliner, we tripped. Anyways, we were able to acquire his already terrific little company, roll it into Digital Chocolate. I would give Ilka most of the credit for most of the success that Digital Chocolate had and his team, crew, business, anyways. Eventually Ilka had enough and went and started a little company. You may have heard of called Supercell, which is still one of the great. High slide. Yeah, the punchline. So Ilka and his three co-founders, I think are the four wealthiest people in Finland. They run a company where everyone loves to work there. And he said what he meant and meant what he said. I remember Ilka used to talk about like celebrating failures. It's the thing people talk about in Silicon Valley. You can go read his blog. It's about Supercell. People will build a game for a year. And if they decide it is not good enough to represent the brand and not worth the effort, they will kill the project. But they will have a giant party to celebrate all the hard work that went into it. And those people will get promoted and go work on the next one. And people love it. What a great story. People love Ilka. I mean, I told them this. When I decided to leave Digital Chocolate, it was hard. It was emotional for me. And I flew over to Helsinki to say goodbye to the team because they'd all worked for me and I really sort of led the acquisition and all the rest of it. And I told Ilka in front of his old team that I thought Ilka was the best leader I'd ever met. And he was only 27 or something at the time. And I meant it. And honestly, I think he'll probably be Prime Minister of Finland someday. I mean, he's really pretty special talent. So third one example. I love that. What a great story. Right now, Mark, you're building near horizon with your partner. You're, you know, talking to and developing relationships with all these different founding teams in the larger world. What are you paying attention to? What trends are you following? What are you noticing? What's on your mind? That shaping sort of how, you know, navigate? It's a great question. I mean, some of them are sort of obviously cliched. I mean, what's happening in the AI is incredible and miraculous. I mean, the funny thing. So I have a two year old. I have an eight year old and a two year old. The two year old is still in like language acquisition phase. And like, you know, it's still in like trying things and falling down and figuring out this is how you don't fall down. And this is how you end up, you know, we've been bilingual home. So she's learning English, but also learning some Spanish and you watch the whole thing happen. And then to watch what's happening with generative AI and like, it's a similar sort of this is miraculous. And actually having a spot. I'm actually, I think it gives me even more perspective on it. Like, wow, the human brain is also miraculous. But this is incredible. But that's also, it's also sort of obvious. I'm very interested in some of the larger social challenges and how technology can help to solve them on disson misinformation, loneliness, fear, mental illness. I think there's a lot that plagues our country and the world that among other things generative AI is going to make worse, but also can help be part of the solution. I mean, this is the thing about tech. It's almost always a double-edged sword. Mobile phones have made the world indescribably better and are also a dopamine machine in our pocket that have made everybody anxious and are a huge problem both. And I think I'm sort of paying close attention to what that means, these are the AI. I'll give you a concrete example. Our second portfolio company even worked with a near Verizon, it's a company called Sanctum. That's building cognitive automation tools to help busy prosumers sort of improve their digital communications. But where it started and actually still a core part of the product offering is the founding CEO's mother got scammed. There's an online scam, she was taken for $10,000. This is a kind of thing that happens every day. The erosion of trust, like without trust, I've always thought the manure civilization is like this. It's really much thinner than we would like human beings that our limbic brain is not far from the surface. And so without trust, bad things happen. And online scams are a great way to erode trust. And oh, by the way, also most of them have been driven by basically like farms of slaves. I mean, the other than sex slavery, the biggest form of enslavement on earth is like people who are forced into like these horrible places where they are scamming people all day long. It's a terrible problem. Anyways, if you think you technology can help to solve this problem, that feels very important to me. And if you think about what Gen A.I. is going to do, it's also going to make creating things like scams that much easier too. And so it's an arm race, right, between the bad guys and the good guys. And so we want to be involved with building the tools that are going to help with human socio-psychological problems, things that range from loneliness to mental illness to scams and trust, etc. that are being exacerbated by the rise of things like AI and mobile, but also can be solved by the same technologies. That's an area I'm really fascinated by. Me too. Wow, that's really interesting. You know, I learned that lesson in my first job in tech, which was at Sun Microsystems. That's back in the day. And in one week, our group had visits from a huge hospital network who was going to install our computers in the databases I worked on to solve all kinds of problems and treat people better and the NSA. And I was like, oh, okay, these powerful tools go both ways. You're always. And that's a, it's a good lesson because then you don't spend your time wishing it wasn't so. You just spend your time fighting for the white hat rather than the black hat. Mark, I can't thank you enough for sharing your stories and your wisdom and things you've learned. I love hearing about what you're trying to do at near horizon. And you are not afraid of a challenge. It makes things interesting. There, there's great value in doing something you've done before. You are a subject matter expert. You become very good at the thing. There's also value in variety. And if you happen to be a journalist as I am and you can pull lessons from one thing to the other, that's what makes me get excited in the morning. Awesome. Thank you so much. I look forward to seeing you soon and have a wonderful day. Thanks for listening to Getting to Alpha with Amy Jo Kim. The shows that help you innovate faster and smarter. Be sure to check out our website GettingToAlpha.com That's Getting NumberToAlpha.com for more great resources and podcast episodes.