Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY]

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1:12 Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus Review, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing. You can find Colossus Review along with all of our podcasts at joincolosis.com. Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Some.

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3:23 If you're serious about your firm's AI strategy, RidgeLine should be part of that conversation. You can request a demo at ridgeline.ai. Mm. Um My guest today is Sam Hinky.

3:37 Sam worked for more than a decade in the NBA with the Houston Rockets and then as the president and GM of the Philadelphia 76ers. And now, after years of personal investing, he has launched his own venture capital firm, 87 Capital. Every conversation I have with Sam is alive with insight and this one is no different. We explore the idea of studying the breadcrumbs that someone leaves as a way of tracking their progress and trajectory, finding and attracting the right people into one's orbit, and the lessons from the NBA that most shape his investing career. Sam has taught me the most about the topic of building trust, which we cover here as well. I'm excited to share my conversation with Sam with all of you. Please enjoy.

4:17 So Sam, I thought a place to begin this conversation would be with the art of interviewing and getting to know people really well. The episode that I have in mind specifically is a time that you helped me. So I've been hiring a lot recently. And I hadn't done that a lot in my career to that point. And so I started calling people I know were sort of artists of this. process, this interviewing and recruiting process. And then you actually helped me interview the final five or so candidates for a job that had started with

4:46 five hundred applicants. And when I asked each of the five after the fact, they each said that the conversation they had with you was the most unique interview that they had ever been a part of. We're sort of all awstruck by the experience. And so I would love to just know what is behind that. What have you learned about conducting a good interview as you get to know somebody for the first time? that let's say you're much better at today than than you were at the beginning of your career.

5:10 That's kind of you to say. I'm this weird dichotomy on a whole bunch of areas. One of which is at some level I don't really value interviewing all that much. And I don't really value the output you get out of interviews. Yet at the same time I do try to do it quite differently than others. I think in a bunch of ways you get weird signal out of interviewing. And so you have to be careful. I'm mostly trying to understand how it is you Learn how it is you Perceive the world

5:34 And where you sort of think the edges are. Oftentimes I'm not particularly good, particularly on a first interview, it being hyper scripted, oftentime I'll try to find something interesting to you and let's go to the bottom. Let's go all the way to the bottom of what that thing is. And by the way, it's fun for me. I'll learn all sorts of stuff. It'll be something random that I know nothing about. And sometimes the bottom, honestly, is not very deep. And sometimes the bottom, you can never get there.

5:56 You can just never get there. That dynamic. I like people who can zoom out and say, This is what I know, but I'm not even in the 70th percentile of this. I'm just like above average. I'm a tenth grader and you're a middle schooler on this topic, but let's not kid ourselves. I'm not a PhD on this topic. And so here's the things I understand and the things I very much over indexed towards people who

6:18 sort of understand the limits to their own knowledge. And say I know that's cold. But there's a whole nother level out there that I'm not at and that I respect some people that I think are at. One of the things that each of the people mentioned to me was that they would say something and then you would ask some clarifying question on that thing and then just like you said, keep on drilling downwards.

6:38 What are the most interesting things you've seen revealed when you've done that with people in the past? Is it just Finding where the depth is or not finding it, which of course sounds like it would be a good thing if you can't find the bottom. What else have you learned about that sort of probing process? And why do you think more people don't do it? That's maybe the strangest part about all this is That it's so unique. It seems like something that would be obvious to do. I wish I could say this was like hyper thoughtful and I had design some winning system. That's not clear to me at all. I'm actually just curious. And I'm actually curious to learn and

7:07 I usually take the approach I can learn something from anyone. Whoever's sitting across the table from me is getting my Utmost attention and I suspect I can learn something that they know about the world. And I'm not just trying to evaluate them. I'm trying to learn at the same time. And so I'll sort of push in those areas.

7:23 It seems obvious to me you should try to find things that they want to talk about. I don't want any gotcha questions where I ask you something that I think I know the answer to and see if you'll fake knowing the answer. I'm not trying to trick anyone, I'm just trying to understand who you are. All interviewing should be a matchmaking game of who they are and how they see themselves and where they want to be. And is this a fit? And if this isn't the best fit, isn't it in everyone's interest to get to that as soon as possible, not six months after you're hired or six years down the line, you feel like you wasted a big chunk of your life doing this thing. But instead you really want to

7:55 See where it can go. I'm trying to understand how people think more than I am to understand what it is they Actually know because they can If you can get to that essence. If you can get to that, then it's much easier to predict sort of where they'll go if you give them new infrastructure.

8:09 to stand on top of, or you give them a different set of colleagues. You're like, oh my gosh, they could get up this learning curve massively because that's how they think about how to learn in the real world. You've obviously met a ton of people across domains and fields. What percentage of people Do you think have the quality. I don't know what to call the quality, but

8:28 The quality that makes you really interested in spending more time with them. And how has that changed over time? How rare is it for you to meet someone and just be sort of awed by them. Two things are true. I have a very high bar. People that actually get on my tribe over a long period of time that

8:43 I feel like are amazing on one dimension or another, and we really resonate. That's a very rare combination. If you're lucky, you find one or two of those people a year. That you sort of add to your group that you go through life with. On the other hand, I'm so aggressive with my time and like how I spend it that if I've chosen to spend time with you. It's no front. It's the thing that I thought was the single best use of my time for this thirty minutes or this hour. You're getting all of it.

9:09 We may take it into weird places. We may not talk about just your business. We may get down a whole bunch of what seem like rabbit holes to you, but you're getting all my attention. I'm like sort of filled with wonder about who you are and what you know and what you could teach me and what's interesting and and often, I mean, venture by nature. the nature of sort of how I look at things now is like, are you trying to see Call it 500 deals in a year and do five. So by definition, you're saying no. If people are asking for money, you're saying no the overwhelming majority of the time.

9:41 That doesn't mean I can't try to find things to store in my brain about what it is they're looking for or what they would be amazing at, or who would be a perfect partner for them if in fact I'm not. And so I'm trying to like dig and dig and dig to understand what's deeply meaningful to them and see what they can sort of teach me along the way. You said in the beginning, when you're meeting somebody, you're trying to get a sense for how they think. Who stands out in memory as an example of someone that thinks in a very strange or different way that interests you.

10:09 I'm drawn to a bunch of people who Sort of footnote as they go. And you can't help but hear it'cause they talk about it. So they'll summarize a book and Two phrases. That's not that good. If you haven't read that, you should maybe read this. You get a sense there's real

10:23 evidence behind that. I think a lot of the people in sort of public discourse these days, that's obvious when you talk to them that they think about it differently. I think both of the Collison brothers are sort of similar to that. I think Mark Andreessen is similar to that. I think Naval Ravacon is similar to that. In that

10:40 It's quite clear the number of sort of primitives underneath something is quite high that they thought about many topics and many topics. relatively deeply as they go. I'm often looking at each of those, that's a vein trying to figure out which of those I want to explore. But on occasion you'll come across people that are truly differentiated and how much of their own thinking they do, but then the kind of lattice work they can bring with everyone else's on top of it. One of the coolest things that you and I have discussed often about the modern world is that

11:09 many times we can run this process of feeling your way to the bottom of someone's experience or thinking without actually having to talk to them. You're able to follcet breadcrumbs, we'll call them, whether they intended to leave it behind or it was sort of a natural course of their behavior. Can you talk about what your interest is in digital breadcrumbs and how you use them. If I can't find breadcrumbs sort of in the wider world, I'll often ask them for them. I'll often ask people like, send me an awesome book, or send me something cool to read, or send me something really influential to you, or send me something you've written. So I end up reading lots of senior theses from college or old things they wrote or old posts or

11:47 One of the recent investments I made is in a company I'm really excited about, obviously. Just happened a few months ago called Scoutapp.ai, and I got Deep into the founders there. Deep. I'm watching. videos of their parents talk about their life journey. I'm reading the medium post of one of the founders over the last several years and reading all of his medium highlights.

12:08 It's not hard to say like In this case, his name is Shrey. If Shrey is thinking about this topic at this age and this topic at this age, and is deeply curious about this, and sort of gave the clap on medium for this that this was interesting. And his GitHub repository looks like this. That's all.

12:24 Super interesting. Likewise, one of the other founders, he had been Producing these YouTube videos for the last seven or eight years uh going through one thing after another showing how he's doing his own thinking. And so you could see him at a very early age, he's quite young. You could see him at a very earitizing the larger system and thinking about what his expectations were and how that matched. I often think of it the other way. If you wanted to understand me better.

12:49 I'm forty two. If you went back, call it for the last thirty years until I was twelve and just found one person per year. And talk to them about me and ask them a set of questions. That's all me. The middle of that distribution is me.

13:01 You'd find a hater, you should discount that. You'd probably find my mom, you should discount that. She'd be too nice. Everybody else would be like, oh Sam is Awesome at this and sucks at this and is frustrating at this and is amazing at this. And we love him for this. True, true, true. That's roughly true. And I've changed plenty, but the sum total of all that is useful. And so to the extent people have

13:22 written blogs or Posted things on Twitter or Created some artifact that I think of they've sort of buried in time that I can go find. That's often amazing because you get a chance to. see people over a long period of time. Doesn't mean you agree with all their ideas. I no one would have agreed with all my ideas when I was twenty five or thirty five. We all change a lot, but you see sort of where they are and you can kind of watch them grow throughout it. My favorite version by far is when you find someone on Twitter or something you like and then you realize they have a blog.

13:53 And you'll find the blog and you're like Oh my God, it's like a diamond mine, the whole thing. This is the first time I when I found Patrick McKinsey's blog. I was like, what? I have to read all of these. I've known him enough on Twitter to know I respect the way he thinks, I love the way he writes. And so I have to read all of these. Then I have a new problem.

14:10 How do I read all these? What order should I read them in? Where should I start? Who knows more about his essays than I do? I felt the same way when I found sort of Paul Graham's stuff. I need to get into the good stuff as fast as possible. And I will probably read it all, but in case I don't, I want to make sure I've read all the good stuff, even if I only read two thirds or three quarters. I want to make sure I got Ninety five percent of the value, even if I did only did eighty percent of the work.

14:32 It makes me think that The phrase I can't remember who said it. That you should invest in arrows or lines, not dots. Never invest in something static. A PowerPoint deck, by its definition, is sort of this weird point in time thing, and somehow is the way through which we start to have these conversations about backing young companies, but

14:48 It sounds from all these descriptions like Instead Is that like the thing you care least about? And instead you care more about building as much context around the person and the founding team. as possible and trying to find

15:00 The right arrow. To hop on the ride along with them? For sure. That's how I think about it. I heard this somewhere and it's stuck in my brain for years now that Expertise. Is a

15:09 predictive model about the future that works. I don't care how you got there. Might be instincts, might be actual data, might be something, but you can make a prediction. And it became true. Over time. Experiences how many times you've done this? That's totally different. That's totally different.

15:23 Doesn't mean people without experience don't have expertise, but they're wildly different things. getting down the learning curve for some set of people is often very, very quick. And you might not care at all that they're bringing sort of a beginner's mind to a new industry. In fact, that might be Preferential. You might want them to attack an industry in which The incumbents are sleepy. or the incumbents have long held the belief that technology can't help.

15:45 Or the software will never disrupt their business. Or that their advantages will always remain. You often want someone from the outside to say, there's so much I don't know and I'm so worried about what I don't know about this industry. So I gotta get down that learning curve. I gotta surround myself with people that can help me on that. But I have this idea. that I'm coming into this new ecosystem where I don't think people have fully valued that.

16:06 Personally, I'm often looking for people who are quite pointy in one way or another. Who are really unusual act. one item here or there. and are cognizant of their weaknesses. And then the ones I really like are often

16:20 Open about their weaknesses and are keeping them their weaknesses because they think it's an infinite game that you don't quite understand yet. That they say, yes, you're right. We haven't thought much about go to market, but that's not really a problem until years two to six. Yes, I think it's solvable. And yes, I don't know much about it. I don't quite have a plan of how to solve it yet, but I think we're going to be able to, whether it's via people we bring on or advisors or investors along the way. But what we need to focus on right now is the compounding advantage. That's the thing to focus on for the first 12 months. And by the way, if we don't have a compounding advantage, thing isn't even venture scalable anyway. So we shouldn't even raise a series A. We should just be done. I love that answer. That's a great answer to say

16:58 You're right, I do suck at this go to market thing, and I might get some of these other things, but those things are steps. three or five or seven. And if we don't get one and two right, there's no platform to build on anyway. So this thing is a sort of a waste of time to spend much time on that now. I don't think it's like raw intellect. It can be it can be grit. It can be EQ. It can be your ability to sell. It can be your ability to inspire a set of people to inspire people smarter than you in a bunch of ways to join up. to drop what they're doing.

17:27 And sort of be your acolyte on your path that you're trying to go down. Doesn't mean you have to be the smartest person in the group at all. Maybe not even the most talented, but you have to have a way in which you can bring all these people together. I do think you're going to need some really really, really pointy skill that you can lean into. And even better, if that skill will be rewarded in this game. If it's not, maybe you should play a different game. There's an example you've told me before that I'd love you to recount here of how you first came across the person who I believe now is the assistant GM still at the Rockets back in your sports days.

18:00 'Cause I think it's a great example of this breadcrumb concept. And I'm kinda harping on this because I just think it's like a strategy that's mispriced. I don't really know many people that do enough of this. It's typically not the way that people or deals or investments are approached. I think the world is making it more and more valuable to do this. So could you tell us that story? The assistant GM of the Rockets right now is Eli Whitis, who I got to know and Must have been two thousand eight.

18:25 At the time, he had just started a blog, but prior to that, there had been a sort of a message board and open forum where people would post all sorts of interesting analysis. Back then it was called APBR metrics. It was the way in which people communicated, sort of think of it like Hacker news or something today in this space at the time. And there was a prolific poster who was quite good under a pen name. And after a while it became clear that. That person sort of Docs themselves, think of it like someone like Slate Star Codex or something, where Eli said, You know what, I'll go ahead and say that was me. That was me that's been doing it all this time.

18:54 It's like, oh, that's interesting because there's this trove of information. It's him. And then at the same time, he started this blog. And the first blog post for years, I've told people, I tell people now, if you see something awesome, send it to me. I'd love to read it. He has his first blog post, and by the end of the first day, four or five people sent it to me. And it's amazing work. And I'm like, Oh, that's wild. And I'd heard a little bit about him from another friend of mine. And I was like, Oh, that's super interesting. A week or two passes and there's another blog post, and by noon, four or five people have sent it to me. And I'm like, Oh my gosh. This is massively good and the primitives you would have to understand to do this kind of work, not to mention alone, are massive.

19:29 Another week or two passes and here comes another blog post. And by now I've got it like hooked into an RSS feeder back then. I read it quickly and I just printed it out and walked down to Daryl Morey's office and I said, I'm about to hire this guy. I haven't met him yet, but I'm about to hire him. Today. And he said, Why? And I printed off what he had done and he said, I get it.

19:47 Let me know how it goes. The truth is, we did real interviewing and we spent a bunch of time with him over many, many weeks to try to understand him better. We did hire him based on that. I like processes where you hire people where you run a tournament. where there's an actual tournament, but he was the number one seed in the tournament.

20:02 To be clear, based on his prior record, and that that was massively influential for how we would think about him. So because of the amazing amount of work he had done, it was clear to us that we needed a couple of things to happen. One, we needed him to join forces with us, and two, we needed him to stop leaking this stuff out to the internet. He was bleeding away small amounts of competitive edge for us that was half percent here, one percent there. It wasn't huge, but I didn't have great confidence that he wouldn't leak out 10% of it in one big post. That might only be 10 more days away. He's been now, what is it? Two thousand twenty. He's been at the Rockets now twelve years and he's done amazing work there. But much of that was on the backs of his early writing where he could show what he knew. He didn't have to say, Oh, I learned fast. It was obvious he learned fast. He didn't have to say, Oh, I'm hyper passionate about this. It was obvious he was. You've told me this story before, but I've never actually then asked

20:52 What was he writing about? that post one, two, three, whichever one really stood out in memory. What was he writing about and what was so impressive about it? things that were mispriced in basketball at the time, how to think about shot location data, how to think about defense at large. These were the kinds of things that even back then that were wildly misunderstood. One obvious example is

21:13 If you get an open three on the wing and no one's within ten feet of you. And you make it, well fine. We should give you some credit, but it's not that hard a shot. you're pretty open. We should probably give the passer and the coach and the screener. A bunch of credit. We should probably dock the defender. If you've hit an amazing shot, call it

21:29 Kyrie Irving at the end of Game six or game seven, I guess. an amazing shot that's quite difficult. You should get an amazing amount of credit for that. There's some luck in that. But there's a ton of skill in that too. Those were the kinds of things that he was adjusting. But to do that, you had to have an underlying set of data that was quite robust at the time. And then the skills and abilities and sort of at that time industry know how to be able to build on top of that. What's in common between people that continue to evolve on that same trajectory? So you said

21:59 Used to be mispriced. Tends to be that things like that in basketball or in markets that are competitive. advantages erode over time as more people become aware of them. What have you learned about people that can evolve?

22:12 with the erosion of pre existing edge to find new edge. humility about what they don't know. Always worried there's someone else out there looking harder. Somebody smarter, somebody hungrier. Someone trying to find an edge.

22:27 While you rest on your laurels. My favorite kinds of hires Back then, often these people are wildly data oriented. We'd give them a bunch of sort of standardized tests. as part of it. These tests are more like here's your abilities with HTML, or here's your sort of understanding of SQL database structures at large and the kinds of people we

22:49 Often hide. Ne would've been one of these. We'd say like Oh, how do you think you Did on that test. Oh, I got crushed. I got crushed. It is hard, don't worry about it. Where do you think you would like score on that?

23:00 across the world and they're like, um I'm pretty good, so Sixty percentile or something, not seventy fifth. Okay, how about the other one? Oh, the other topic I'm much better at. So maybe that one I'm like 80th percentile, but no way I'm 95th. And then the scores would come back, and instead of being sixtieth and eighty fifth, they would be

23:18 Ninety eight and ninety nine point nine. You're among the very best in the world and can't believe it. You're worried someone else out there is better. And you're underplaying your skills, not overplaying them. And you're constantly looking for new edges because you presume there just must be someone out there that's even better.

23:37 I think one of the things we agree on is that you kinda keep digging on anything and you ultimately come back to people, that people drive just about everything. And I know at the Rockets You told me before that If you weren't spending your time on finding the a great player or finding a great personnel or staff member to join you in the center office.

23:54 You're kind of annoyed. So talk about how back then You shaped your life so that it was always As focused on people as humanly possible. I'm a deep believer that

24:05 People are a power law too. Whether you're running a small company or whether you're running a big company, like your ability to attract the best in the world, I think is so Incredible. Even right now, like one of the things I sort of watch the most closely, uh sort of deal in politics at all, but what I watch the most closely is how welcoming are we to the best in the world to come here and do the thing.

24:27 as a country. I think that's terribly important is to be that place where It's obvious to people around the world that your bat signal, if you think you're amazing, like this is the place. The old sort of Stephen Covey line. to get the highest platform to see how good you are. I very much want that to be here. So I think that's terribly important, not the least of which is the downstream impacts of all this. Awesome people bring you more awesome people. They compound over time. They sharpen your own thinking and they materially add to what it is you're trying to do.

24:57 I've yet to find advantages that overwhelm that. I'll give you one example. Sometimes I say this and it gets me in trouble, but I believe it. I think I care about the value of recruiting more than almost anyone I know. I think getting in amazing people at the start, in the middle, at the end, all the way through, having an ever raising bar that someone has to clear.

25:16 It's not quite everything, but Often it's close. I'd love to pick that apart and break it into the push and the pull. There's an aspect of this, which is the creation of the platform that is just the default. If someone is the most talented, they want to go to Harvard, they want to go to Stanford or something like this. There's a institutional platform and gravity that I think you can build that does some of this, but I'm sure some of it too is outbound salesmanship. So in the various places that you've worked in

25:43 tried to create that beacon, the bat signal, the gravity, whatever you want to call it. What have you found most effective in those two categories to attract and win the most talented people. I think a lot of times you're trying to disclose a lot. You're trying to be really be open about who you are and what you're after. I think amazing people are often drawn to be around. Other amazing people who have lots of intellectual humility about what they don't yet know can sort of have a sense of wonder about what's knowable out there.

26:10 You're trying to be hyper open for what kind of environment you want. An old story that sort of comes to mind. I think lots of good organizations, like a great way to onboard someone. Particularly someone high potential and hopeful almost all the people you're hiring are very high potential. is to write down a lot of what you do.

26:26 Write down a lot of your Processed. be true for invest like the best. It's like, hey, here's how we have guests and here's how we think about questions and here's how we Think about reach, and here's how we think about follow up after the podcast, and it's all written down, and we say, You just got here today, we're so excited you're here. Plop.

26:42 Make it better. You got a month. Make it better. I need a report. I need a meeting. I need something where you criticize what we're doing. Because we think

26:50 It's the best we have right now, and we're not at all convinced it's even an A. Please make it better. that kind of notion. So I think if you can send those signals out to people as you're trying to understand where they are, which is this weird balance between what could be, and then a whole bunch of honesty about which is what is is exciting and what is is an amazing platform, but what could be is An order of magnitude more.

27:13 than what it is now. And we're only going to get there with unique ideas from people like you. And the other people you will bring us. So there's kinda two pieces there. One is Obviously people are attracted to other talented people. If you can keep the quality bar high.

27:26 the gravity stays strong. But it sounds also like there's a couple other things like the difficulty or interestingness of the problem being tackled. And maybe like a why now and what the incentives are for that person. How do you think about aligning those two things? Their incentives, maybe they care about money or power or fame or Charlie Songhurst old framework.

27:46 What did you learn in those regards of like Tailoring things to someone's unique Motivations. You might be confident you're in a deep snow environment. You might not be

27:56 confident in how long the hill is. So it's that. One of the things I want to do is compound trust with a relatively small set of people over a long period of time. If that's what I want, then sort of my staying power in that lane, which I've sort of defined is much longer. Where if what you want is to be at company A for two years and then company B for three years and a new title and company C in a new title. That might be fine too. Just make sure that's a match for what it is you're looking for.

28:21 you may be far more interested in something that where the value accrues in duration. Because do you think these things actually compound over a long period of time and trying to understand that coming in and understand everyone's deeper motivations coming in, I think determines The area under the curve, how long this thing is going to be interesting. Obviously, someone amazing will create real value for you on day one. Should create incredible value for you in the first month. But if they only stay for twenty four or thirty six months, you just learned a lot. about how much sort of value is under the curve.

28:53 What's the most amazing thing that stands out in memory that you've seen somebody do in the first couple months of either working with them or having invested with them. So maybe this is a a strange story, but it's it's one that comes to mind. When I was in Houston at the Rockets, we traded for James Harden and he was twenty Two, almost maybe twenty three years old.

29:13 And we traded for him. Three days before the regular season. He came in. Our team had sort of been somewhat gutted to get him at the time. And so he came in and I went to the very first practice. And he was sort of lacing his shoes up and so were the other guys and he had met everyone, he'd met them hours before. The coach like blows the whistle and is like, Hey, you know, it's time to get going, everyone come down here.

29:33 All the players. Get together and coach gives his little thing for a minute. Here's what we're gonna do. Here's the first station we're going to, et cetera. And everybody goes to put their hands in and James says. Tuck your shirts in. And tucks his in. And fourteen players.

29:48 Tucked their shirt in. And from that moment forward, it was like The new alpha is here. And a whole bunch of ways. And at the time you're thinking, I hope we can back it up, and I hope this goes well. And I hope these is gonna be amazing, and you're not sure. There was a little bit of uncertainty. Think of it like a sort of a power vacuum, a little bit of uncertainty.

30:06 That lasted for about forty five seconds. And at the end of that, it was like A signal sent that There's a new way to do things, and I have ideas about what those would look like. quite forcefully said.

30:17 Do it. Maybe that's for his cute in hindsight, because James has turned out to be an amazing player. But that combined with He balled out. his first game and the next night he went for like forty five. That combined with amazing performance out of the gate. was not hard to imagine. You were on a new trajectory.

30:34 It reminds me of the episode in that incredible Jordan documentary when they play the Olympic pickup game. And he sort of bests Magic's team. And there's this incredible tension and magic relieves it in the bus, basically handing the alpha crown over to Jordan. What are the different brands of leadership that you saw and learned from in sports? at either the executive central office level, coaching level, or player level.

30:58 That you Still carry with you. The way I think about coaching is very much how I think about parenting. And I think translates in lots of other places that you're Ability to drive change is about the quality of your relationship.

31:11 Not your hierarchy. We used to talk about this with our kids when your kids are Two years old, you're like, don't do this, do this. You're hopefully a benevolent dictator, but there's a bunch of rules. Don't touch the stove, don't put that in your mouth. They have to listen if they don't, they're draconian consequences. Now draw some line out in the future. They're twenty five.

31:31 How much authority do you have over them? Not that much. You can guilt them into some things. Maybe if you're still supporting them in one way or another, there's some ramifications for their behavior. But most of your ability to influence them, which isn't that what we all want, is to be able to influence the people we care about, particularly for their own good. It's about the quality of the relationship you've built up over time.

31:54 I think about it that you're sort of pouring yourselves into people you care about so that they will call down the line. When They don't have to do what you say. At all. When they're their own people, but they still respect your opinion and think He might be able to help.

32:08 Coach might be able to help me in this situation. Dad might be able to help me in this situation. I think that Notion is Critical. I tell founders this all the time. Sorry, you might be working for the CTO.

32:21 The CTO might be the most valuable person here, she might be, and if you don't know that, Better to get your head around it quick, because she leaves. This all falls apart. Yes, you're the CEO. Yes, you're out talking to the venture folks. Yes, you're in the papers more. Let's be real. Careful.

32:35 About what this might mean. For the company if Your Seven person engineering team. If the leader of that quits.

32:43 your ability to influence her. Influence is the right word. You can't make her do anything. Your ability to sort of influence her and influence her towards the kind of vectors you want the company to go towards is going to be everything. So start investing in the quality of that relationship right now. It's never too late, but you better get going. Were there exceptions to that? emphasis on relationships as sort of the fuel to great durable leadership that you saw

33:08 At any point from players or coaches or staff. I don't know what the right term for this is, like a hard ass or something. I don't know. I increasingly don't think those kind of authoritarian sort of versions work very much in most environments. And some, of course, they do, and in some Those are

33:23 truly necessary to be so aggressive, but I think for wildly high performers, I think There's often sort of a better way to Go about it. Do you think that there's anything that's changed about I'll use an intentionally pejorative term.

33:37 Which is like that we've gone soft. I'm now the old guy that is saying this about younger generations. Like I said, I never would. But I'm curious how you react to That idea.

33:47 That perhaps Everyone's gone a little soft. I think having very high standards is fine and appropriate, and I think Holding people accountable to those is fine, but to the extent they're not aligned with the person's individual incentives. I think it's quite difficult.

34:03 He's really difficult. It's possible that someone could really truly believe in your mission and be in a full on command and control. But Often I think you're going to need to find a way to tie it to what's good for them. One of the best things I think you can do as a manager is be good for the careers of the people who report to you.

34:20 And I think the best way to convince them you're good for their careers is to actually be good for their careers and to actually help them in a bunch of ways and say, what does it you really want to do? Well it's in a canonical example Snowflake. If that's snowflake and it's like what I really want to do is make huge coin, post the IPO, and that's okay, fine, pull an or right here, and we can do that. We've got a method to do that, and that this will line up. But if what you really want to do is go start your own thing or grow in these other areas or be known for excellence in this way, I have to find opportunities for you to take steps toward that. Because I can either fight against your nature. It's a sort of

34:56 Long hill version again. I can fight against your nature and get you to hold your breath and suck it up and do anything, but the moment you get freedom. The moment you make money, the moment you have better job alternatives. I think of it the same way with teenagers. The moment they get out of your house. It's gotta be like this. Yep, then they went to college. Now what? They got out of college, they've got their own money. Now what? Now what are you gonna do?

35:16 Turns out they're gonna reject a bunch of that and sort of plop back into their original shape and do the kinds of things that bring them meaning, get on that train or not, because the leverage just switched. In a whole bunch of ways. How do you suss out that alignment when dealing with founders specifically that you're meeting and getting to know? To make sure that

35:35 the thing that they really want to do is this thing that they're building in this company. Breadcrumbs in the past help a lot. The way they've talked about people in the past. Who they've looked up to, how that's changed, how that hasn't changed. Who they admire.

35:48 the kinds of leaders they admire, the kinds of leaders they detest. Do they want to be Steve Jobs and Elon and The like, okay, that's a certain style. Do they want to be

35:59 John Malone and Warren Buffett? Okay, that's a different style. from who people admire, you learn about some of the things that they value and who it is that they look up to and what trade offs they think are totally worth it. I mean you mentioned the last dance. Some ways this paragon of excellence and amazing in other ways is like woo

36:14 The cost of making that happen is like Real. Real. If that's what you admire the most, and if That ring chasing is the most important, which is

36:24 totally admirable in its own way, then fine. I should anticipate you're likely to cut many, many corners and fight guerrilla warfare in many ways that others would find untoward and I need to be comfortable with that. What are the best ways that you've learned to avoid transactional type people. Slow down.

36:42 Slow down. In a whole bunch of ways. Drives transactional people nuts. Fine with me. I'm trying to learn that. I'm trying to learn that.

36:49 So You read a book, I'll read a book. You don't want to read book? Cool. You read a book, I'll read a book. We don't have time to read a book. You got a No by Friday? No problem. I'm out. I'm out. You did this to me. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

37:00 I'm accused of being on occasion, you know, heartless or a data wonk or ruthless. And to be clear, I can be in a bunch of ways. I am super big hearted for the people in my drop. It matters a lot to me, but Shouldn't there be a high bar for? Who you trust. If you trust them.

37:16 Shouldn't you be trying to play a more infinite game? Where everyone trusts each other more and more, and you're trying to compound that trust. over time. The very notion of that. a lot of people are uninterested in. No problem.

37:28 That's totally fine with me. But yeah, I would say Slowing down is uh Common technique. We've talked a lot about people and their characteristics and I'm gonna come back to more of those questions because as I said before, I think ultimately people are the most interesting topic.

37:41 But you're very famous for having brought a lot of the ideas best practices thinking from the investing And business world. Two sports. And now you're going the other direction. And so

37:52 I'd love to map that journey to and from. By first asking. What you think. The most effective things that you brought from the investing and business learnings that you had done.

38:03 into the NBA and then I'll ask what you're taking out of that experience and bringing back to the business world. I don't think it's anything really about me or how I thought about the world. It's just a different perspective. what things that I think maybe move the needle for me or people like me. in sports where the ability to zoom out and have perspective. If I'm anything is perspective.

38:22 In a whole bunch of ways. Sometimes that gets me in trouble. It makes me not so good at day to day, sometimes week to week things, but makes me quite good on a multi year kind of thing. So zoom out and have perspective. Understand how to have intellectual humility about what you know and what's unknowable. And what your confidence intervals on all these things. You want to predict who's going to be a good free throw shooter next year. You want to have a fairly tight confidence interval, and data can help you a lot. Even simple data. look up last year's look up their career numbers.

38:48 It's pretty straightforward. People make plenty of jumps, those catch our eyes because they're anomalies because they're unusual. She shot eighty five last year. You might shoot eighty this year. might shoot eighty eight, you won't shoot ninety five.

39:00 You're not gonna shoot sixty five. That's on something easy like free throw shooting. There's a bunch of other things in which it's not easy. And can you say it out loud? We're trying to sort of Shoot fish in a barrel here and the barrel is huge. And we're kidding ourselves. And if you're not sure, here's the meeting notes from the last five times we made this decision. We went one for five.

39:19 And by the way, it's not because we suck. I'm not trying to get anyone fired. Everybody sucks. This thing is hard and we don't have much signal into this. And it's wildly sort of contextually oriented. Is there an example of that? Oh, all the time, just like causality. There's a common one in sports.

39:35 This guy'd be a great culture guy. Often great culture guy is something you name after the fact. Based on someone whose incentives were aligned with it. I think Jared Dudley was probably a great culture guy for the Lakers this year and he played just a few minutes in the finals and very little in the playoffs and waved a towel and was an adult and was useful and was encouraging in a bunch of ways. He's also quite near the end of his career. I think Jared Dudley at

40:01 twenty five might not have been quite as happy. to have not played at any of those. This might be a byproduct of success versus something that's coming in. I think your confidence interval on predicting how someone will behave when it's against their own personal interest. may be very, very different.

40:18 Someone in a contract year might react wildly differently. If their sort of numbers are being suppressed, than someone who just got paid and who is doing amazingly well and doesn't have to worry about that kind of security. So now going back the other direction. leaving sports and now devoting yourself and your time and all these hours studying breadcrumbs and people. into the investing world.

40:41 What ideas are you bringing with you that you think are distinct or different? Then The median venture capital investor would be applying as a part of their process to find great teams and founders. People are really a powerful.

40:55 And the best ones. Can change everything. Betting on people who have these incredibly high ceilings and a reasonably high likelihood of getting there. I think is much of where the game

41:08 should be even more than most. So the example I often use is I'll say I like the field you're in. I like that you're in DevTools. I like that you're in software infrastructure. I like that you're in an API driven business. Those are deeply interesting to me, call it left field. And you're gonna run it left field. I have no idea if it's gonna end up

41:27 dead center left field or left field foul pole, or maybe even center left. That's your job. And I'm backing you to do that. And by the way. When you're struggling, I hope you'll call. And when you're unsure, I hope you'll call. And when you want someone to bounce an idea off and play shadow boxer.

41:42 I got you. Call me. But you're going to actually tack and find that. And what I'm betting on is that the Area in which you're going is interesting.

41:51 And there can be several winners in that space. And then I'm betting that you are wildly likely to make your way through that maze. with a little bit of help and with a whole bunch of guidance from people around you and with some amazing people that you can find. That is the thing you're betting on. And you're going to have to change so much. That's one of the things that I feel like maybe I feel is different. Call it coming from a a world where you invest in talent in a different way, which is you're often picking someone in sports who doesn't have to double their skill level, but quadruple it or 10x it.

42:22 Have to get so much better at so many things, and to their credit, they're often 19 or 20. Most of those things aren't even on their radar. What? I'm gonna have to manage my diet. I'm gonna have to. Worry about how I sleep. I'm gonna have to manage my time way better. I'm gonna have to manage teammates that are 10 years older than me, and then someday 10 years younger than me. And I'm gonna have to work my way through that. I think that's wildly similar to being a startup founder. It's not about your ability to get this product shipped the very first one and have this amazing idea. Over time, you're going to have to get better at go to market. You're going to have to get better at fundraising, at recruiting, at raising capital, at

42:59 closing partnerships. And an evaluating people that you feel like currently you have no expertise in. I don't know how to hire a CFO. Founders say that all the time. I don't know how to hire a CFO. Okay. Great. There's a bunch of things you don't know. Let's design some plan by which you can get better at that. So that Five years from now, you don't say that anymore. You're like, Oh, we need a new CFO. It's time for that. We need a new CFO to get us ready for the IPO. Fine.

43:22 Let's have that be something that is far more in your toolbox than it was in the past. And you're going to need to be able to identify those things on your own, or even better, if people around you do it to be able to believe them to say, I'm going to have to get good at this. I've never liked that part of the job. I've never thought of myself as an expert in that part, but me getting relatively expert and the company getting truly expert in it is an actual risk factor that I need to mitigate. Can you get down that learning curve and can you sort of navigate your way through that maze because the things that got you here. won't get you where you're going.

43:56 If your goal is to build an enduring company that compounds over decades You're going to have to evolve yourself. many, many, many times to get there. If your goal is to flip this to Google in 18 months and do that, that's fine, but you should align your capital strategy with that. And you should align your partners with that, which is I'm gonna try to get to cash flow positive here. We're not gonna get above 50 employees. We're going to try to get to there. We think there's many multiples that are far short of a unicorn that get interesting, and that's the game we're playing.

44:23 You need to sort of a line incentives with all the people on the journey. You're early employees with your investors and with your partners along the way, because to the extent you've sold a different dream that is sort of more the norm that you're trying to go to the moon and then that's what you do, you're gonna leave a lot of people with uh sort of bad taste in their mouth about how that went. How portable do you think that concept is? Certainly in the NBA, it seems like Or I guess in sports in general, the smaller the team the more that power law thing exists where

44:51 If you have LeBron, I don't know how many straight years his team, if he hasn't been injured, has been to the finals now. I think it's like ten. No kidding people are power laws. Like if you have the best guy, you're just always in the mix. Maybe that's less true in football or soccer or something like this. And I think of startups where certainly early on, it's a small team, but it gets very, very big. Do you think that because of the team size and just the amount of randomness in a big more complicated system than a five on five game.

45:16 that that parallel thing is less true. than it is in sports and if as a result things like the market you're entering. matter as much or more. as the founders. For sure, I think the market you're entering and the sort of business you're going after really matters.

45:31 But even for scaling companies, I think many of your people propagate. Over time. And so they can propagate with increasingly high trajectories or with increasingly poor trajectories where if you're constantly hiring

45:46 brother in laws all the way down, then it's like, yeah, this thing is gonna be a mess quickly. If instead you're saying we have an ever higher of recruiting where we're trying to narrow our confidence interval on these people over and over and over and spend an increasing amount of our time on who gets in the boat with us. I think it's relative to sort of the market you're in, I think it's relatively unlimited. I do think it propagate over a long period of time and end up compounding. You better be careful about the kinds of people you let in early because they will influence your hiring processes heavily from then on.

46:18 How have you thought about shaping I'll call it the game. You're in a new game now and I think Your interest is in spending as much time as humanly possible with the sort of exceptional people that we've outlined in a number of different ways. But that's hard work. Like there's a lot of people out there that gotta kiss a lot of frogs typically in a process like this. You mentioned five hundred deals down to maybe five investments, something like this. How do you think about Designing the game itself into which you are now placing yourself for the next big chapter of your career.

46:47 What are you optimizing for? What are the rules of that game that you're trying to make different than the normal way things are done? that you observed in the venture ecosystem when you stepped into it. For sure the way I thought about it was could you design a world where you could spend nearly all your time with amazing people? That's one. And where you could get leverage on seeing around the bend a little bit, that mattered to me, and where patience and temperament are rewarded.

47:10 All three of those things. mattered, but they matter because I believe those are areas to spend time in. And they're areas I Enjoy spending time in it. That I sort of take energy from. So I love being around incredible people. That ought to be obvious. I'm a sucker for the old sort of Netflix parlance of stunning colleagues. I thought about could you design something where

47:30 Seventy or eighty or ninety percent of your time were just those people. By the way, at eighty seven capital, I can very much do that in that Anyone I hire into the firm is a part of that. And any entrepreneur I choose to spend time with is a part of that. And any entrepreneur that I pledge to spend Bukus of time with. I chose.

47:48 So if I chose them poorly, shame on me. I get to decide if they're stunning colleagues that take up my Tuesday or not. Secondly, I think in decades by nature. Like, where's this thing going? What aren't people thinking about? What are the second and third order effects to this shift that we're seeing here? And I want there to be leverage on that kind of thinking. Not momentum trading for this week versus next, but leverage on trying to see around the bend. And then lastly Some of this is a

48:12 We call personality quirk, I think, which is I'm super steady. Sometimes annoyingly so. I'm hard to fire up. I don't mind being alone in my opinion for a very long time. Can you get to a place where that kind of

48:24 steady temperament is rewarded and build an ecosystem with that kind of trust. Where people say, Yes, we too believe in this kind of approach and that we can first slowly and over time with more and more leverage turn this wheel. That generates the things. that you're interested in. And then for me personally. It's quite

48:44 Easy to sort of Design a vehicle like this because The things I'm actually after I'm trying to compound Wisdom and trust.

48:53 Try to figure out life better and try to figure out business because I'm deeply curious about it. And to try to Understand how to compound trust with a very small set of people, very small, meaning hundreds, not thousands. And how to sort of compound trust with them over a very long period of time, because I think that builds a snowball that is Amazing and one that's to be clear deeply fun for me.

49:15 One quick story, I'll tell you on that. Mark Andreessen has this line that I love that sometimes he says he's like looking at his phone and people are annoyed. And he's like, Of course I'm looking at my phone. The best of seven billion people on the planet. This is the best they can muster. So yeah, it's interesting. I'm looking at it. I would say I'm kind of like that, but different. I told you I you know, we sit in a meeting like I'm into you. fully into you. I'm not looking at my phone at all for sure. My phone is filled with people in my life that I've invested in. Over a long period of time.

49:41 And invest it in with a lowercase I. These are my friends and people that I care about. Some of these people I've spent 15 years with, some of them 15 months with. And they're sending me awesome stuff. They've found a read. They're telling me incredible insights they've come across. It's a freaking treasure trove. When I wake up in the morning, I'm so excited to look at my text.

50:01 Which is maybe not super healthy, but I am because For someone like me that likes being dependable for those folks in your tribe, it's intoxicating. Here is said person that I love that I chose, that I very much led into my life. eight years ago or

50:18 Eight weeks ago. And Here they are with a real question. They're not asking me piddly stuff. They call me with big stuff. And say, I'm thinking about this. What do you think? This just happened. What should I do? Here's my approach. Please beat it up. I'd love that.

50:31 That only came from The way I've tried to live my life for several decades now, which is to really pour into a again, a relatively small set of people. I often sort of think about as like fewer, deeper relationships. I very much want that. I don't have any need to run an organization with tens of thousands of employees because I very much think about it in my mind's eye. The ten or twenty year

50:55 fifty that I spend the most time with and that I sort of get the most energy from and that that honestly are the most rewarding personally for You've mentioned the word trust a lot. It seems like prima facie just something that is a universal good, building trust is good. And you and I have talked about this a lot. And you've done this funny thing, which I absolutely love, which is you've even literally pointed out to me when I do something that builds trust with you, which I just think I've told my friends about this. It's almost like a Pavlavian thing where

51:22 Every single time I think of you, I'm like, oh, I better make sure I'm being thoughtful about this because I want to build that trust. What have you learned and you could abstract this away from yourself if you want. What have you learned watching Other people build trust with each other or with you or you with them.

51:37 That are key sort of strategies for doing that. Through time. Try to do things that's in someone else's best interest. Tell people things that aren't in your own interest. It doesn't mean that you can't benefit from it, but I'm a big softie for some of this, admittedly. Like I'm a softie for unconditional love.

51:53 And showing people that you care unconditionally. And I'm a believer that Over a long enough time period, most of the unconditionality goes away. People reciprocate, then people flourish in that kind of environment and

52:06 the harvest from those kinds of things are super meaningful, but most of the people I look up to, mentors of mine, or people I've read about, or people I sort of admire or aspire to be, are just like that. They have someone else in their life that they view as more important than them. They're quick to self-deprecate about who they are. And they'll tell you the hard truth thing? versus the short, maybe transactional thing that is

52:32 Wildly in their interest. I'll give you an example on the other side. I struggle with the realtors. Struggle. Struggle. Individually. We've gotten along fine. And one of them in particular we had

52:41 I had a very close personal relationship with, but the dynamics, the game they're playing is wildly transactional. And I very much struggle with that of like how we should interface best. given how sort of transactional you are. What areas?

52:57 Have you found yourself most in love with, maybe taking one step Away from people that are driving these areas and more just the areas themselves. You mentioned a few simple examples earlier, such as

53:08 An API first company. or a company building tools for other developers. What are the market areas? I know you're gonna be a generalist, but What are the market areas that really have your attention? Where you've done the same version of trying to reach the bottom.

53:23 of one of them that you might with a person. No code movement. I'm a big fan of that. I think anyone tackling the bottleneck for developers. It's huge. I was at the no code conference in two thousand nineteen in person. There was Two hundred of us? Four hundred of us?

53:38 Not that much in late two thousand nineteen as you're sort of looking at what is happening there. Obviously, like some of the big players from Notion or Airtable or the like you see, but then you see someone with real distribution like Microsoft. employ many of these tools. And employ them overnight in a way that should make many of these startups quite nervous. But that notion of building tools, I'm a big believer in the output of science is a machine. Once you build that machine, that's where it gets interesting. What no code tools largely do is democratize that.

54:09 For far more people. Over time. I think by some measure there's twenty five million developers on the planet and a billion spreadsheet users. And a spreadsheet, while occasionally annoying, is like A wondrous tool. Fifty years ago, people wouldn't have believed you could do that. You could replace literally all of these people with this thing, and it would free up these people to do all these other topics. That kind of notion, I'm big in. That's one example of one I've gotten pretty deep in. For sure. APIs. I could drone on forever about APIs. I'm such a big fan.

54:38 Those are examples of kind of rabbit holes that I've gone Way, way down. Maybe to peel back then in one more layer on APIs. What is something in that field that you think surprised you or

54:50 Mid you take a special note. You've got an interesting note taking system that I am fascinated by. I'm always interested when you pull out those small pieces of paper to take a note on. Like what's something in the world of APIs that's led you to take a special note? I increasingly have this view that it's gonna be APIs all the way down. And that

55:06 over and over you're going to outsource more and more of your business to some Maybe micro targeted Very narrow. Piece of software. Only in COVID do people make bread for fun at mass.

55:18 We've outsourced breadmaking. to someone quite good at it. I just think that's going to keep happening. With APIs, you've stopped building software for people. You're now you're building it for software. And connecting those two together, I think it's likely to be really, really huge. And I think

55:33 Over time, sometimes I think about it more like science, that it's like speciation, that you'll get more and more. ever niche. Things that will emerge and that will be dominant. Will just be absolutely dominant.

55:48 There's no world in which you should Try to like fight this thing yourself because it doesn't make any sense. Patrick McKinsey, I mentioned him earlier. I love the way he writes about this, which is like Someone somewhere built some tool. And they care about that tool as much as you care about anything.

56:03 Anything. If it matters and it might not. Maybe it's something small. Let them do it. I started my career at Bain and company. I was there a couple of years and I had this guy that I worked with that I loved. He's an awesome guy. One of our young people at Bain, they would undergrad out of MIT or something. You'd come back on a Monday morning and they'd been there all weekend and they're like, ah.

56:21 I've got a new trait. Five year treasuries. Combined with this It's gonna be huge. Put eight hundred dollars in it this weekend.

56:28 And my friend, he was from Virginia. He was like You ever been to New York? He's like, Yeah. He's like, see all those buildings? So yeah. What do you think they're doing?

56:36 Now those buildings. All those people. He's like, Well, uh working on all sorts of stuff. He's like same crap you're working on. You gave it eighteen hours. What are you thinking? There is no world. Imagine if you're a

56:48 startup today and you've got a 10 person engineering team that's wildly bottlenecked. Here comes your pencil pushing boss. And says hey, um I think we're gonna need to build a payments infrastructure.

57:00 I think we need to build that. 'Cause we're struggling with this to accept payments in all these ways. And so what is it gonna take? Two weeks, two months, something like you guys go away, put a little SWAT team together and like build payments infrastructure. Your developers should logically revolt. Be like What are you talking about?

57:15 Have you been to Townsend Avenue? Have you seen Stripe's headquarters? Do you know what they're doing? They're building this kind of infrastructure that Will go all around the globe and they're great at it. And they have an advantage and they have a head start. They've thought more about payments infrastructure than we ever will. And it's not like we have 150 engineers just standing around with nothing to do. We have so many things to do. Let's focus on the thing we're amazing at. and spend all of our time or as much as our time as we can on the thing that we're wildly good at and trade our money for time.

57:45 Does that follow then that you think kind of the future will have even a higher return to what did you call it, spikiness or pointiness of focus? For sure. Very much so. Very much so. You will outsource

57:57 More and more of your business process to something else. What was the average number of vendors of a Rockefeller Company. And what's the average number of vendors of

58:08 Microsoft. Come on, it's massive. That trend's not going to slow down. I think it will Increase. I think of it very much like you think of trade. You're trading off these specialties in ways that Make the most sense for all parties.

58:22 For all parties, you can make this wonderfully cheaply at scale. You can make this wonderfully cheaply at scale. We should trade. And do that. As a sort of a life principle. Trading money for time, yes. Yes, yes, yes.

58:33 As much as you possibly can. It makes me think of two other things. One is one of my favorite posts I've read in years by the intercom software team called Run Less Software, which basically says you should run as little software as possible and you should just focus on letting everyone else run the stuff that they're better at. You focus on your little tiny thing, and that's it. Stop trying to reinvent the wheel. How aggressive can you be about

58:55 Where you have edge. Do you have edge in one place? You don't have edge in ten places. No way. If you only have edge in one or two or maybe three places. Why are you not resourcing

59:05 Enormous chunks of your mind share. And your best people's mind share. And you're hiring. and your capital towards that. Letting someone else commoditize everything else.

59:14 and handle everything else for you. And if they hose you on margins, hope the system will make it right. If they hose you on margins, someone else will undercut them, you can switch to them. If that's the case, but In what world is this a good use of your time to try to do something, particularly for these things that have network effects? If something else has network effects and they got started early, good luck.

59:35 Good luck beating them at that. That's also why I like sort of APIs even internally. You make all these things sort of generalizable and externalizable out to the outside world. You thought you had this amazing tool internally. And you might. Odds are you don't, but you might. If you do, see if you can sell it.

59:51 If you sell it, you just took a cost center to be a revenue line. That's super interesting. And if you didn't, maybe we'll be like, okay, maybe we should start resourcing that thing. We had 10 person SWAT team building that internal tool. Maybe you guys should just use Twilio. Maybe you should just do this because We don't think it's actually that good and it's not that much more expensive. Because as they do have scale, they can often push the cost down. They can often do it cheaper than you could even think about doing it, not to mention better. What are the strangest things that you've seen

1:00:17 thus far in your time really focused on early stage investing. Extra points for things which Just persist but seem crazy to you.

1:00:27 on the investor or founder side. Of course I believe The way I'm going about this. Has some inherent edge, even if small.

1:00:35 that has some inherent edge in it, which is why I'm doing it. That I think I See the world in a certain way that will persist and will compound over time. I say that as my like intro to say The notion that in seven or eight minutes you'd say with a founder, that's it.

1:00:51 I'm done. I got you. I want to do this. I find very strange. By the way, I might in those first seven or eight minutes say This is amazing. I really like her.

1:01:00 She is wicked smart. I'd like to learn more. I don't say I'm done. And that race I find a little strange. that others think about it that way. Now, maybe to the extent maybe if something comes along that's very much in my wheelhouse that I've looked at not

1:01:15 two companies, but fifty companies, and I'm looking for it to be a certain way. Maybe I'll be that aggressive too on something when I meet someone with a unique approach that I've been looking for, but I think it will be rare. And I much prefer the sort of getting to know someone. Doesn't have to be Months, although that's ideal. Years and years is even more ideal. But the notion that 10 minutes in you turn your brain off. I think people do that in interviewing. I think is a huge mistake. Huge mistake that you

1:01:41 Ask a set of open ended questions and make a set of unconscious judgments. Two minutes in. And call it a day. That's how we end up with Some of the silliness that we do sometimes in hiring where a bunch of unconscious biases

1:01:54 Creep in. Have you met anybody that seems to be playing an even longer game than you? I'll tell you a story that embarrassed me once that's on this frame. I don't get outgunned there very often because I do really think quite long. We lived in Houston and we had our first child and we moved into this house my wife and I loved. We picked it on purpose and we looked at it forever, of course. For us, she's as picky as I am. It was literally a seven iron away from the best elementary school in all of Houston. On purpose.

1:02:22 Then we start doing a bunch of research and he was a summer birthday in July. And so then I'm doing all this research on like, Are we gonna send him to school when he's five, or are we gonna wait until he's six? And at the time in Texas, everyone's like sending their kids, particularly their boys, later to school. Largely I think they're playing some weirdo football game or something. They wanted to be a nineteen year old strapping linebacker someday in high school. That is not gonna be our kids.

1:02:45 No offense to my genes. So we're doing all this research. And of course, the sort of trope is like if your kid is bright, then they'll be bored and they'll cut up in school and they'll struggle in all these ways. But of course, there's some on the other side. And so we do a bunch of research and we finally get to the notion, my wife and I both, we're gonna hold them out. Until he's six and send him to kindergarten as he's six. But then I like read the Texas statutes. It's clear the schools hate this because it screws up their classes. They have a bunch of five year olds and a bunch of six year olds and they're all in the same class and everybody's really at different levels, makes it hard to teach, understandably. It's clear they're gonna try to make you sign a bunch of waivers and they're not gonna let your kid go, and they're gonna like try to say no, you're gonna screw your kid up if you don't do this.

1:03:25 And so I call the principal. And I'm like, hey, here's the situation. I've read this. Here's where we are. Here's our dynamic. What I really want to know is the answer to this question. If we show up

1:03:35 At age Six, is there any way in which you can force him into the first grade? And say he's just come from pre K, but you can make him skip kindergarten. And the guy very patient, God bless him. I've given my three minute preamble to it. He says No. We can't. You've read the statute, right? We will try to make you sign a waiver. We will probably send your kid to like a school psychologist kind of thing. We'll tell you the downsides of this. We will tell you we prefer not to do this. But if you're adamant and we'll sign the papers, your six year old can go to kindergarten. And there's no way in which at our school district we can force you the first grade.

1:04:06 I said great, cool. He said Can I ask you a couple more questions before you hang out? I said, Sure. He said, You live in our school district. I said yes. And he said, and you picked it because you thought it was the best school district in Houston. I said, Yes. He said, You and your wife have been thinking about this for a while. I said yes.

1:04:21 And he said Your son lives with You And your wife in the same house in our district, a few blocks from our school. I said yes. He said, Your son's two.

1:04:30 I said yes. He said, Sir, your son's gonna be fine. And I said, touche, touche, I'll take that. It's not every day someone like Al perspectives me, but touche, yes, you're right. We're probably quite fortunate in a whole bunch of ways, which is we care about education and we care about school and we care about the sort of downstream effects of our decisions now. And yes, he's two and we're worrying about how we're gonna feel when he's eighteen or nineteen. Yeah, I would say in a moment like that, I was embarrassed at my relative lack of perspective.

1:04:58 Why did you decide to call the firm eighty seven capital? I'm a sucker for this one author for Robert Carrow, who's written a bunch of amazing books that I'm often pushing people in particular. One of the books, his second book in a series is called Means of Ascent. And in that book, which may be a little timely as of now, in that book, one Candidate wins a little tiny election, seems tiny in retrospect, in 1948. He wins by 87 votes and launches himself to the presidency. The other candidate loses by 87 votes, but effectively wins back his life's work that he had been compounding over a long period of time and his family. And a lot of what I try to talk to founders about is that we're looking for winners. And that's not just who won. So much of it depends on what you're counting.

1:05:41 that notion, I very much want to be part of the ethos of the firm I'm building, which feels very entrepreneurial to me, to be fair. It's quite small and I'm a Solo GP and these days it's a fifty million dollar fund, this first one. And I suspect might be quite small for quite a long period of time because I prefer it that way. There's a particular way that I want to do it. And there's a particular set of axioms that I'm leaning into that I'm wildly confident, by the way, will be successful. And I'm confident will be the kind of thing that I want to spend decades on. Because it's uniquely me in a bunch of ways and uniquely my experiences, it makes me super excited to be doing it. What was the thing That you did

1:06:21 Along the path ultimately to a GM job. that increased your odds of ultimately getting one of those jobs the most. Where did you pick up the most probability points on that journey? Thought hard. About what other people are trying to accomplish.

1:06:34 And I tried to Shape my language in a way they could hear it. That's half of what I talk to founders about. It's just that how to build the API to the other person's brain. Doesn't matter what you say.

1:06:45 It matters what they hear. And it matters how they feel. That's not a way to manipulate someone, it's a way to deeply understand their set of problems. And to the extent you have edge and you won't always

1:06:59 To the extent you have edge. define it clearly in a way that aligns their incentives. With that solution. That's mostly it. All of the people that I

1:07:09 talked to along the way that gave me more and more scope more and more leash to be me and to lean into the kinds of things I want to do. Almost all of those conversations started just that way. Going back to Carol for a second. I love that answer. What can he teach us about playing a truly long term game.

1:07:29 And I guess for those that don't know Carol, you need to describe the the the insane game that he's been playing for decades. You just turned eighty five. A couple weeks ago. He's basically written five books in fifty years. And he's not done.

1:07:41 And he's trying to finish another one that will maybe be a sixth or a seventh, really on two subjects, both of which were you sort of would round out to Power is the thing he's writing about. He starts with an end in mind in a bunch of ways where he knows the last sentence. of the book before he starts writing it. He knows the outline of the book before he knows the details. So he knows a set of outline of like where this thing is going to go and what the big

1:08:05 chunks of it are going to be. And he can zoom out and see a systems view of how the whole thing works and explain it to someone that's a novice. Some of what he's written about is government. I'm not without care, but politics is not. top of my list at all for things that I care about, but he can write it in a way that makes it accessible. If you can read and you like good storytelling, then he can write it in a way that makes it accessible. And the truth is what he's done is compress a decade of research into 500 pages. Isn't there so much to learn from that? And isn't that the whole idea, which is you're trying to

1:08:36 sort of find people that have done all that work and can compress it down in some way that you don't have to do it. Wouldn't life suck if he went out and learned all those lessons and then for the next person that came along and wanted to learn those lessons had to pay the same price he did. But instead he's got this machine called a book that can send it to the rest of us in a way that that can really help. Having studied him and read his stuff. What have you learned about the pros and cons of power?

1:09:02 His kind of big thesis is for a long time people would say power corrupts and he often says power reveals. when you get to a certain level of power, you might say, you know, in sort of a capitalist terms, you get to sort of F you money that it reveals who you really are can kind of do the things unconstrained that you've always wanted to do. But I think about it much more from a sort of a systems perspective that it shows you how the system works and how uh I think of it like a Little kid's Play Doh Maker.

1:09:28 You put raw Play-Doh in the back and you get this shape out the front and what that looks like. And it's wildly different than people anticipate. I think of it sometimes like I guess the Pacific salmon that sort of spend their whole life making this one journey back upstream to spawn in this one spot. And as soon as they do.

1:09:47 They die. That's largely what he shows you is an effort like that, which is To be successful in this place. you couldn't hold anything back. to win a tournament that was that big, no matter what your seeding was.

1:10:00 The two men he profiles, their seeding in life was not high. They were not a number one seed at all. They were quite low, quite without many advantages. And to get all the way to the top, you probably had to sacrifice everything to the effort. There could be nothing left behind. I think the meta lesson from there is if you zoom out, then you should say If you're not willing to pay that price, presume someone else will. And if you're trying to win a tournament that's

1:10:25 that popular. And try to chase something as shiny as call it the God forbid the US presidency. You should presume there will be someone out there that will and that will devote. Their whole life. their whole life and all their time, of course all their money, that's relatively in inconsequential to people driven this way. All of their relationships.

1:10:45 Most of their sense of ethics. Everything. in sacrifice of that one goal and of course that person. given a high enough starting point, given a high enough set of natural abilities, of course that poor person would win that race. Moses and LBJ are complicated.

1:11:01 Interesting characters for sure. Disgusting in a whole bunch of ways. To see it how it's made is like oh just like turn your stomach inside out. What quality in both those men is most redeeming, in your opinion. What quality in both those men do you respect the most, having studied them? I want to be super clear. I I very much don't like Carol's books because of those men or because of what they represent. In fact, it's the opposite. But to your point, there's admirable characteristics within there.

1:11:26 They could build a system. That compounded over time. Over decades. And they could see how if you could get on that trajectory.

1:11:35 And turn the wheel like this that it would Ever increasingly turn faster and faster and end up at that place, which I think is amazing. There's an amazing scene in passage of power. Where J F K gets shot and they're in Parkland hospital in Dallas. And LBJ's behind a Curtain.

1:11:53 in a room and secret service is surrounding him. His wife's in the room with him. Secret Service is surrounding him. 'Cause they think a coup is is on and maybe he's the next target. JFK's an operating table next door, and he describes a scene where for a long period of time, call it 90 minutes or something, LBJ sits perfectly silently. And things. Can you imagine what you would do in that situation? Pray or be worried or be overcome with anxiety or be

1:12:19 God forbid, excited and then be embarrassed that you're excited. Because you're maybe about to be the president, but that's only because our president's just assassinated. It's like and then someone comes in with tear filled eyes and says the president's dead. And from that moment forward, he lets out a set of instructions. For what should happen.

1:12:39 That effectively Govern the next Fifty days. That he all planned. Presumably.

1:12:46 In those ninety minutes. I mean. Can you imagine a situation more stressful than being the vice president. When the president has just gotten shot, the country's in a mess and you're likely to be tasked with something incredible that you may or may not be up to. And instead he sets out a set of

1:13:04 Principles. Really like a checklist that seems as best we can tell to be Hundreds and hundreds of items long. Sequenced in exactly the right order. Knowing which messes to step around.

1:13:16 Which ones are the critical ones and how to influence all the people he's going to need to influence to achieve his actual dream. His actual dream. Sadly, to get reelected. I wanna finish the conversation.

1:13:29 Basically where we started, which is with this idea of breadcrumbs. One of the reasons that I love doing this podcast especially with friends like you, is that these are breadcrumbs, right? We're putting something out for hopefully founders out there to listen to and be attracted to a certain set of attributes, which are different and distinct and unique. And that's a very cool thing. I think what you've highlighted for us today is how powerful those things can be.

1:13:52 Planned or unplanned. To create the right kind of serendipity in someone's trajectory. How would you suggest people listening to this.

1:14:01 That want us to throw out some of their own breadcrumbs. begin to think about doing that. Right. write and put your thoughts out, particularly if you're proud of them, particularly if you want to make them better. This is something I really only come to understand, I think in the last several years, last couple of years, which is the returns to writing well. And the returns to getting better and better at writing.

1:14:21 I love the way I'm a Stripe fan in a whole bunch of ways and their business and their founders and all of that. I love the way Patrick talks about That they're In some ways kind of writing to the unborn employees. That's right. You can have a meeting and you can have an all hands meeting and Stripe must have twenty five hundred employees, maybe three thousand employees these days. They could do an all hands Zoom meeting and it would capture all those. What do you do about the three thousand and first employee?

1:14:45 What do you do about the six thousandth employee? What do you do about the thirty thousandth employee? And one of the ways to do that is to write. is to write down what you were thinking at the time, to write down where you thought the things should go, to write down why you made the decision you did, so that someone that starts on the job next week or next decade. could learn from it. in a way that is useful. I'm a

1:15:09 Most of the writing I do is sort of among my friend group and I share things I've written and documents and things with a small set of friends around me. I don't do a whole lot of that publicly to date. I just think it's terribly critical as a way to Sort of put your mark in the sand about what it is that you believe. And by the way, people may not agree with you. You may get criticized massively about it, but over time it ends up being a shelling point where many people will sort of come your way if they resonate with it one way or another. You just made me connect two dots, which is so interesting.

1:15:36 friend of mine and the CEO of a company called Bottomless, in which I'm an investor. has this idea that the internet is the space of infinite possible actions. And that a lot of what's so magical about technology and software is Making stuff that was not Readable to software.

1:15:52 Legible to software. Basically what you're describing is a human making themselves legible to the internet. When you do that, weird, cool stuff just starts to happen. Your people find you. I'm smitten by all these examples. Imagine being Charlie Munger and meeting Warren Buffett.

1:16:08 over dinner and it's like yeah, of course they were rude to everybody for ninety minutes. Of course they Ignored everyone. Of course they got deeper and deeper into a private conversation in the middle of a large dinner. I don't want to overdo it. soulmates or something, but close intellectual sparring partners that In some crazy world both worked for

1:16:28 Whatever Warren's grandfather. Or vice versa, however it works, you come across this person and you can't find the bottom and you're like Oh my gosh. I don't know if either one of them went home that night and said I want to call this person every day for the rest of my life, but it's believable that they would.

1:16:46 And it's believable that they would say Finally, there's someone else out there that I can Shadow box width and pressure test my thinking with. It's surely been an amazing feeling in my life when I've come across those people. And of course, they're not hundreds of them, but dozens of them or more. It's an awesome feeling.

1:17:02 I think it's such a wonderful place to close this awesome conversation. I sometimes think about what will I title these things? as I'm having the conversation and this one might be called Find Your People. Everything you've done, the way you've architected the conversation and your activity. has been to find the right people and develop incredible relationships with them. So I think it's a wonderful place to close. Sam, as always, thank you so much for the time and a great conversation. Thanks, Patrick.

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