What's up, everyone? This is Anthony papiano. Most of you know me as pomp. You're listening to the podcast. Simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Alex. Conrad is a senior editor at Forbes covering Venture Capital cloud and enterprise software out of New York. He also added to the Midas list Midas list Europe Hot 100 list and 30 under 30 for venture capital in this conversation. We discussed the various stories. Alex has
written including Dustin moskovitz.
Leaf ixil masayoshi son Chris sacca canva Clubhouse zoom in Snowflake. I
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This is technology Finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pump letter.com again pump letter.com. All right, let's get this episode with Alex. Hope you guys enjoy it. Anthony promptly on O is a partner at Morgan Creek digital all opinions expressed by pomp or his guests on this podcast for solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of more Creek digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management.
And you should not treat any opinions expressed by pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy. But only as an expression of his opinion this podcast is for informational purposes only. All right guys, bang bang. I've got Alex here with me. Thank you so much for doing this. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Awesome. Let's just start with your background before we get into a bunch of the the stories that you've written about. Where'd you grow up and kind of what did you do before you?
To Forbes. Yeah, so I'm Alex Conrad. I'm a senior editor at Forbes. I've been at Forbes for a long time now, especially for media since 2012 grew up in New York City on the upper west side and you know went to school at Harvard up around Boston. Otherwise, I've lived in New York City my whole life at first I kind of was hoping to follow some sort of Indiana Jones like career paths, but I realized that that was not
super practical in the 21st century. So well, I did kind of study more of that kind of course work in college and I'm passionate about archaeology and history. I realized that storytelling was kind of the only skill from that that would meet kind of a two requirements. It would keep me fed. And you know, what a house but it would also allow me to just go deep on a ton of different subjects and I think for me that's that's
Kind of the way I'm wired as I love to just, you know, learn a ton of different things every day. I'm sure you get to experience that a lot, you know in your job to so gravitated to journalism as a way to tell stories and get paid to do so and at Fortune Magazine as an intern in 2010. I basically face a choice. Do I want to do politics or do I want to do business writing? I thought the technology and sort of business around technology was just going to increase in
Dance over time and I think that was right. I mean 2010 it wasn't that shocking but you know, there were a lot of exciting companies popping up both in New York, but just, you know everywhere so just really leaned into the tech writing back then started covering a lot of the startups that were sort of, you know, popping up in the New York scene locally because most tech writers were out around San Francisco and the rest is history at kind of just grown with that beep over.
I'm it's been 10 years, but it's been a lot of fun. Yeah. What So when you say you wanted to follow the Indiana Jones path what exactly and most people in college probably don't have like a grand plan. But like what was the general idea was to go be an archaeologist or something else? Yeah. I think the idea was I wanted Discovery and I wanted to be sort of sharing the story of like old forgotten civilizations and places, you know with the world. And so I studied archaeology dug up Harvard Yard.
Yard, which was really fun. We found like an old building from the 17th century. You know where just the foundation's were underground in the tourists were like who are these people like why are their shovels that it was really fun? And then I was also, you know, I studied some Arabic for a couple years wasn't that great at it, but that was really interesting Latin medieval history and I kind of just envisioned, you know, in some world. I would be like in Sicily or in Egypt or somewhere, you know, just like finding
Forgotten things and then, you know writing about them and sharing them with the world. That's awesome. I can only imagine the approval process. It went through to get K. We're just like dig up the Earth right? No problem. So you get to Forbes and talk a little bit about what you're doing now on a day-to-day basis because you've got kind of some of the major list that you work on but you also write stories on a pretty consistent basis. So, how do you think about your day to day job totally?
So I'm a senior editor. One of them were senior Tech Folks at Forbes. And so what that means is I kind of have a balance of anchor lists that I oversee as well as a lot of our but not all of our Tech coverage. My specialty is more kind of venture capital and then more the B2B world where it comes from startups all the way to the big companies like Microsoft and Salesforce, you know, I've written cover stories on Satya and Marc benioff
So for years, but then also, you know a lot of small companies I read about to in terms of the list. I run the Midas list, which is the sort of most visible ranking of the world's Venture capitalists by the returns. I also have co-led RVC 30 under 30 list for a long time. And then in 2016. I created the cloud 100 list of the top private Cloud companies in the world.
Old with our partner Bessemer and that's really grown over the past few years. It's going to be coming out in a few days. Awesome. Let's start with the Midas list. It is one of these lists that it almost feels like the higher up somebody is the less they care about it and the people who are on the bubble, right the people who might get into it or just barely got into it. They really care a lot and so it always provides a couple of weeks of fodder on Twitter where everyone is debating.
Got what is that, you know legitimate or not. How do you think of the Midas list and kind of the purpose behind it? And then maybe talk a little bit about the process you guys go through and actually determining who makes Alyssa doesn't make the list and kind of where they rank. Well first, you know, there's definitely something with less where I think you know, the ultimate Mike Trout move is when someone wins an Oscar or something and they don't show up and so I do think that there's part of that Dynamic where if you make the list it might be considered cool to kind of downplay that
that but definitely privately we get a ton of feedback could get a ton of feedback from the people who don't make the list privately so it is it is one where I know the whole industry is watching really closely and we feel a lot of responsibility because of that too. We know we really wanted to be as accurate as possible in terms of kind of the process, you know, the list is a data-driven list and I'd say that one of the big complications is we follow it by individual not by firm.
A lot of VCS will say that that is a team sport which is totally fair. But when you know, it's Mike Trout ever leaves the Angels his numbers will follow him and it's not like, you know, the angels can just write him out of their history. And so I think like in VC there is a bit of a tendency to for firms to kind of trade-off of the big companies like an Uber forever, even if the people who did that deal have left and so we do follow it by individual the best we can and
We also are looking at exits or highly valued companies of the previous five years. So private companies don't count as much as a public company because they aren't liquid but we're looking at basically companies that have raised in up round or gone public or been acquired over the previous five years. That way we don't get you know long time retired folks, but at the same time it's not a popularity contest of like which VC is meaning the hardest that year. Absolutely. What's the craziest thing? Don't name it.
Any names but what is the craziest thing? Somebody has said who didn't make the list in private like it are we talking like anger are we talking about like kind of posturing and and almost like trying to position themselves to win in the next year like one of those responses? Like I think I think the the most Brazen is correction request where it's like we've made a formal factual error and you know, their PR firm is like you forgot.
And so please update the list to reflect their name and it's like that's not really how it works. But we also get folks who will DM me or email me and be like, hey just had this exit probably not good enough to ever make your Midas list where that salt is definitely a parent, you know, it's really not personal and I do feel bad when these feelings are hurt to a degree. Hopefully they give me good stories because they're trying to get nervous more.
So you're saying like in between the list coming out people will literally send you the deals that they do so they just a double check that you for sure know that the deal happened this morning. I woke up to an email from an unnamed VC of an exit for a company saying if this doesn't put me on the Midas list, I might as well just give up say look to be honest. Like there should be an entire list. You should rank all of the responses you get through the year, right Mike.
Almost like strip out the names and just say hey here was the best things that I got from people who didn't make the list because I'm sure that there's some absurd stuff on.
Yeah, I would say it's almost worse with the 30 under 30 list because 20-something Hustlers are possibly even more Shameless. I mean it definitely is always interesting to see really successful Heavy Hitters in the VC World kind of taking things personally, but at the same time, you know, it's also kind of flattering so so we don't want to
Like punch down too much I'd say with 30 under 30. Unfortunately people really get the wrong impression that kind of the more annoying or omnipresent. They are the better they'll do so, you know, we'll get Instagram DMS and stuff like that and it's like, you know, like anything in life. Why would why would seeming like you're a stalker be a good thing.
I love it and talk a little bit about so the 30 for 30 under 30.
Talk a little bit about the process there because that seems to be a little less data-driven just given the fact that there's kind of not as much quantitative data to actually
analyze. Yeah, so, you know, we are taking nominations right now in the fall and we're especially looking to have like a more inclusive diverse list. Unfortunately anything where people are nominating themselves or their friends it can end up a bit of a popularity contest and you know, we don't love to see the same faces over and over so that
that is something that we are working on intentionally that list is nomination based. So people either raise their hand or they raise someone else's hand for them. We also do our own Outreach and then their industry judges. So unlike some other places. We actually don't we don't like claim to be the experts. We actually just try to find experts in the domain so I can Venture Capital my worlds. We've had passed judges like
I'm all men of all Robert Hahn for that decadence era tocqueville, Alexis, Ohanian Arlen Hamilton a lot of big names every year. We have three or four of those folks who are actually evaluating the people my job is to make a baseball card of each credible person pipe them as much as I can to the judges and then see what the judges think
awesome and so obviously you're managing these lists and kind of working through all the nuances there and those are coming out.
On a periodic basis, but at the same time you've got what I'll call kind of your day job, right or what least before the list you were doing which is writing you do a fantastic job of that talk a little bit about the recent story on Dustin moskovitz, right? So Facebook co-founder kind of, you know, forgotten a little bit. It seems like and then now comes back with this company that is you know, multi-billion Dollar business and seems to really taken the World by storm but talk a little bit about like why write this story
They kind of what that process look like
totally. So I first met a sauna in 2015. I think they were always able to kind of get in front of reporters throughout their history to some degree because Dustin moskovitz co-founded Facebook for a while. He was the youngest self-made billionaire in the world that obviously is going to have some cash a Justin Rosenstein. His co-founder was also one of the sort of key early Folks at Google and then
Facebook as well. So they had that kind of pedigree and they were on the radar but it's on itself as kind of a work software team management company wasn't the buzziest over the years and I think you know what I found out is that a lot of that was somewhat intentional this year with covid its it works software is just so important. I think, you know when you can go just walk into someone's office or just like shout across the hallway. You have to be more intentional about how you
And so we felt like these tools were very important in this moment. And then we also knew that a sauna was likely going to go public this fall and so given that every year for the cloud 100. We like to profile a really interesting company that's doing well on the list it felt like now or never with a sauna and so I you know use the that multi-year relationship with Dustin and the team there to try to find a way that
Can talk to us, you know, even given the the IPO constraints so that we could tell the story and the issue this year
got it. And as you're doing this I what were some of the biggest surprises to you you'd already known the company obviously since 2015, but any surprises that you kind of went really deep dry the story.
Yeah. So for the audience who may have read The Lean Startup, it's always a pleasure to chat with Eric Reese who's doing that and long-term Stock Exchange and a bunch of
of interesting things and Eric is an old friend of Dustin's. So one of the interesting takeaways I got from from calling Eric was that basically there was a lot of pressure and not a super high expectations among the sort of technorati of 2008-2009 when Dustin and Jay are left Facebook to build a sauna, you know, Peter teal Sean Parker Mark Zuckerberg, Matt Cole or all those kind of bigwigs who had made money.
Off of Facebook or it seemed like they were going to because Facebook hadn't gone public yet. They all put money into a sauna But Eric told me that they didn't really see work software as like a huge opportunity, especially not compared to a social network and you know 10 years ago social networks were one of the big things that you could look at right Twitter was still on the up, you know, there was a lot of excitement there. And so Eric told me that a lot of these kind of, you know, very famous influential people thought
Oh, they'll work on a sauna for a couple years and they'll probably go move on to something. That's a bigger idea. So I think it was really interesting to kind of see now in hindsight how they persevered there with the huge expectations of having come from Facebook. But without that buzz of you know, a Facebook or a tick tock or something like that. So that would be probably the first one and then I point to one other which is you know, he said that the hot companies this is Dustin as they were building. We're kind of like palantir.
Dropbox companies like that at least in his world. They were all bragging about how fast they were hiring. They were bragging about big customer wins. It was kind of like fill it, you know part of that supercharged culture and it's at a sauna. They just took a very different approach where they had they took a week off every quarter to talk about what went well and kind of map the next quarter which is a long time to take as a start-up. I'm sure your you know you probably
A lot of guests who would be like that's crazy and they also have like no meetings on Wednesday is just Bam's from having meetings. They just wanted people to be in Flow State. They brought an Executive coaching really fast. So all this kind of mindfulness and then they also practice what they preached by saying we're not going to we're not going to more than double head count in every any one year period so they kind of like deliberately put these guardrails on how fast they would grow to try to be that kind of like
All company that maybe seems a little cooler now, but especially I think like a few years ago. That was not the Uber approach. It was not the approach that was being hyped. And so I found that kind of interesting to see a paying off today.
Yeah, and it feels also like it's just proof point that you can build these Enterprise Cloud companies in a whole bunch of different ways. Like there's no one, you know one size fits all in terms of you have to put it this way or it's not going to work. Do you feel like that?
That mentality is changing like obviously there's this deep profile that you wrote it as they kind of look to go into the public markets and things like that. Do you feel like the they're more open now and kind of they almost are being forced to be more public about what they're doing.
I think part of that is dust and growing us a leader. You know that I think he's more comfortable. No people can follow him on Twitter. He shares a lot of points of view and I think you know, he has evolved he calls himself an introvert and he talks about having an extrovert budget of kind of like, you know, public-facing things that he'll do including an interview with a place like Forbes and I think his managing that budget has helped them be out there, but I also think as you're saying
Saying it's this is the space that matters a lot to not just tech people but anyone who's trying to like work in a knowledge worker role right now, and so if they're not out there talking when would they be like this is their moment, you know, and so I think they have to be out there but it's not just a sauna another company that does well on our list is Monday.com. They are like, you know audience members may know them from their YouTube ads. Like I feel like every other YouTube video I
There's a Monday at so they've taken like a very consumer approach to getting their word out there and there are bunch of these companies doing well notion are table. So I think we're seeing this exciting moment for like workflow companies. And if you want to be in that game, you got to be out there.
Yeah, that makes sense. You also wrote a story about another guy who I think is very well respected in the circles that he operates in but is not well known to kind of the average person.
Which is leaf ixil talk a little bit about the business that he built before he left to go on his own and kind of what that process of writing. That story was like,
yeah. So writing about Lee was tough because he keeps a really low profile. I think your your partner pulling a was like I finally got him to talk sort of like which was which was a fair way to put it, you know,
I did really well in Tiger Global. They're one of the big kind of growth investors out there, especially in the tech space and and Lee is one of a couple of kind of people who were really successful there. They started pretty young under Chase Coleman and then they became these kind of titans of Finance. It's Lee and Scotch Slifer being the sort of two biggest ones perennial Midas list members and Lee last year. Basically it was like
Like I want to do my own thing. This is you know, this is my understanding from conversations with a ton of people in this world. Of course, I don't want to make it seem like I'm directly quoting him on a lot of stuff. But basically you can be super successful being a ton of cold startups like Peloton many others classy a at Tiger, but you can't run your own shop. It's like a more traditional Financial firm and solely has started his own fund addition billion-plus funds where
In kind of Groom the Next Generation and be doing his own thing investing in startups with like total flexibility what stage the coolest thing about that was I spoke to a ton of his entrepreneurs for the story and they had some really good good stories like John Foley. The CEO of Peloton told me that he only the only stock he owns is Peloton, but if he were to venture out from from that he would give money to lead to invest on his behalf.
And that there was actually a boardroom push to get rid of John. You know, when Peloton was not a sure thing and Lee defended him and kind of Thor did the coup So Stories like that are just fascinating to hear and so as someone likely who gave us a statement who I've known just from Midas for a long time, but didn't give me along on record interview. The fun thing is to just talk to like everybody you can find in their life to kind of get those anecdotes.
And why do you think he's been
So much more successful than most. Is it something in terms of the way he thinks about the market does he have you know, the the ever-elusive kind of proprietary deal flow. Like what is it? That makes him special?
I think you know one thing is that Lee is definitely not an ego-driven investor. He's not on Twitter. He doesn't want a public profile and I think that allows him to basically avoid getting swept up in any Trends or hype cycles. And I think that that helps him just be a sort of
Of dispassionate investor like I'm a bad poker player because while I think I'm I have decent instincts eventually my emotions get the better of me and I do something that's you know messes me up and I think like to be able to just kind of keep that Flatline heart rate as an investor is a skill that Lee is probably the best step and then I would also say he's just really good at spotting market trends. Obviously. There are a million people at hedge funds and everywhere who are like reading reports.
They trying to like see where the puck is going. I think we just has really good decisiveness where he can see a couple Trends and say okay Peloton, you know, like like he was actually on vacation reading about different exercise Trends and options and saw palette on and at the time it was a deal that like was very hard for them to do because the numbers weren't great, but he was just like I really think this is, you know, the rising tide that I wanted back and I'm going to stick.
My neck out with my own firm to commit to it. So I think like any of us in hindsight can be like, oh, well, I could have seen Peloton but to actually just like put your chips on the table there quietly is what makes lie so good.
Yeah and the other pieces the billion plus LR from that he has I think is split like a third of its gonna go to early stage if I remember correctly and two-thirds of de-growth. Yeah, are you is that a trend that you're seeing where more and more investors are kind of blending the early stage in late stage investing into
Go funds or is that something specific to his strategy?
It's something that's hard to do when you're firm gets too big. So a firm like Andreessen Horowitz will have a crypto fond. It'll have a growth fund. It'll have you know, an early stage fund because if you have a lot of people whose careers are depending on success, I think you know, when you get to blended it can be hard to kind of extricate one person success from another or the fun performance.
So if a growth deal is not going to have the same multiple as a successful early stage investment. How do you kind of adequately reward someone for for a great growth investment versus a great early stage investment. So I think there are sort of structural challenges that big firms eventually faced their look at a lot of the best firms and they are split someone likely can move faster because it's just him at the top and it's just him deciding. What is the success and how
All you know should be rewarded. So I think that's where the flexibility is really attractive to him. I would say I think like LPS like universities or you know, the big foundations of the world who give money to these species. They probably see him more as a growth investor, but he would say that some of his early stage wins were actually as good and so to not let him do that kind of series a check or whatever is just leaving money on the table.
And I just think that being a small especially being a one man or one woman band right now you get to make that kind of choice.
Yeah. Absolutely. Another company that I think is again know maybe to Consumers but to the average kind of person just paying attention to Tech didn't know two years ago and now is seems to be everywhere is canva and this story is fascinating to me because they're not based in the u.s. Took a very
Very different approach to building that business, but now multi-billion dollar company. When did you first meet them and kind of what was maybe even your first reaction when you came across the approach they were taking the location they were based in ETC.
Yeah. So Melanie Perkins the head of Canada is one of the most inspiring or impressive entrepreneurs I've ever met but what I first met her I probably didn't take her seriously as I showed of I was at the cloud 100.
Dinner that we do most years this year. We're doing a live event for anyone to join because we can't do a dinner but she had just made the rising stars list of companies that have raised under 25 million, but we think are kind of like on a trajectory to make the top 100 in the future and she came all the way from Australia to San Francisco for the dinner and I just kind of met her, you know, casually and was like, oh, you know design software that sounds interesting. She seems like to have a lot of charisma.
But I didn't have any sense of kind of the community and the numbers that they were pulling then I watched as they became a unicorn they hit a multi billion valuation a 2.7 billion valuation when I was you know talking to them and I was like, okay what what is the backstory to this company that is not getting taken seriously enough because it's based in Australia. So I actually flew down to Sydney last June and I spent a lot of time with her.
Her and her partner and co-founder Cliffs to kind of just try to like understand what they had nailed so much to build a community of mostly like very small businesses because as I'm sure you know, well, you can have a ton of small business customers and you may not get the scale of like one of these Enterprise companies that only has a few dozen but they're huge canva is both. It has a ton of Revenue and a ton of scale while also like living off of these
And pop and small type businesses. So we went there fascinating time for me and I did have a few kind of learnings from that that I'm happy to share but I would say overall, you know, the number one lesson was you can build a business like that anywhere with the right ingredients. And so I think being in Australia, they just crept up on a lot of
people. Yeah. What were some of the other lessons?
Yeah, I would say, you know canva spent a lot of time.
I really like making sure that its customers were ambassadors of the product. So they they wanted to make sure that anyone could get up and running in less than 10 minutes and they would actually track how long it would take someone to actually make a design on canva. And I think that's an interesting thing to keep in mind is like how quickly can someone actually take the plunge to use your tool so they did a lot of work there and then they
So did a lot of work basically paying it forward with their business where they gave away a ton of their features for free and they really didn't stress about Revenue early on obviously, they had to say very lean to do that. And I think being in Australia their costs were lower but they basically nailed this kind of freemium model in a better than usual way so that then when they turned on their Enterprise
That's you know business has started to convert and then I would say they also nailed the visual Trends right like Instagram and and the power of strong visuals and video as part of our brand say whether it's a person or a company like that was something that I think five six years ago still wasn't quite as obvious to businesses, especially and so they enable people to basically start bikini.
Going to use by just having like great designs to show off their products. I actually met an Australian bikini company through the process, but they but they basically saw that in the Instagram world's brands that did not stick out in more than just kind of their text or their products would not get noticed and they were like, how can we build tools for those folks? And so I think like they would tell you that.
Social media was not the original end-all be-all for them and especially not Instagram, but they just really quickly leaned into that. I don't know how Tick-Tock plays into that in the future, but I'm sure they're thinking about it.
Yeah, it just seems like that's a company where it's very obvious the founders understood. Hey if we can solve problems for the consumer, they'll eventually become our customer right and it just seemed like, you know reading through that you're like every step of the way they kept that Focus.
I recently wrote a piece basically talking about this idea of most of the tech companies seem to have been customer or consumer focused for a while. Now that's playing out now and being a huge tail wind during covid a lot of the Legacy kind of non tech companies. So others are lines, you know fast food chains Etc think they always talked about it, but now they're realizing like, oh maybe you know Airlines shouldn't charge $200 to let you change your flight right? Maybe actually we should just let you do that because that's a some of that reduces friction and will lead to you.
Teasing the number of fights you book rather than decreasing it. And so it just feels like Camp was like the perfect embodiment of that where they just paid attention to what their customers wanted and have been able to to grow obviously incredibly
fast. That's a great point. I think if you're a business we're talking to your customers is fun. That's a huge Advantage. Right? If it's not fun that changes the game completely if it's like, how do we minimize our engagement with you so that you don't cancel company like canva. I think they just
Really enjoyed like being out in the community and talking to their customers and I think especially someone like Melanie when her users felt like they knew her or that you know, she was one of them it created a brand loyalty that is powerful because Adobe does, you know, it does have a good leader in its kind of competitive unit and Scott belsky and and it has good products and you know design software will not be the most defensible tool from emotes.
An Point forever, but canvas brand is extremely strong because I think you know, they actually just love working with people. And so if you you know wrote them and this is actually the same as Eric you want it Zoom if you wrote These entrepreneurs and we're like here all my problems with your products. They're the kind of founder who wouldn't get upset. They be like, thank you so much. I will take all this to heart. You know, I'm so grateful that you would reach out and that's definitely a mindset thing.
Absolutely. Let's talk about Zoom you wrote the perfectly timed proof.
All there and they obviously have become the darling of this entire pandemic. What was kind of your experience writing output?
Yeah. Eric is one of the nicest people you'll meet. He you know, I should frame a couple of emails that he's just sent me whether it was like fact-checking or just feedback because you can just see how genuine he is even now valued at it depends on the stock but like somewhere around 20 billion dollars or something is his net worth.
But I guarantee you that that would not come across meeting. The guy he is a real kind of just Builder Creator where like all he wants is his software to be used by as many people as possible so that he can feel like he's helpful. Like he just wants to be useful to the world and that really comes off and everything with that company. I would say even you know, when they've had challenges his genuine self has
Kind of given them some credibility there to figure things out. But Zoom crept up on a lot of people because it's always been in a crowded Market video software didn't seem that exciting and they just decided to build a tool that was a little bit better in as many ways as possible then what was out there and it turns out you don't have to have the perfect tool if it's just the best available and you keep improving it, you know, everyone's going to switch to it. Right? So I think like Zoom was
Is perfectly pain, you know position for the pandemic, you know, I feel bad for folks who didn't read my story at their IPO and missed out on all that success. I think the stock is up like 6X since we wrote Our initial story around their IPO, but it was just perfectly positioned because now it has Brand loyalty and it's hard to see them losing out on features when they can just kind of quickly improve things.
Become a priority. So like they've been improving a lot of their consumer e Futures right now because they just spent three months focused on security and I think you know, their their competitive Advantage is just they know this space as well or better than anyone right? I mean it's now been tweeted a lot but like a lot of the top Engineers that work for Eric at WebEx, you know jumps to help start Zoom. So just like deep expertise when I wrote the story.
E I'm assuming share one funny anecdote. Eric was going around with these little envelopes because it was the Chinese New Year and they just had a dollar in them each But Eric gave one to every employee. He could find like he walks up and down his building and every time he was like this is going to make you rich like, you know working at Zoom finally paid off like don't spend all this at once and the employee would open it and there'd be like a dollar and they be like, thank you Eric and he
Laughs every time like he's a he's a carny dad but like Dad humor, but I love seeing that too. Just like the actual Joy. He had like mixing it up with the employees and I think they all got the joke. Like if you're a CEO who's kind of not a very nice person and you're going around giving everyone a one dollar bonus that would probably go over very
different. I've literally Imagining the reaction that some people would have and that would not be good. How much do you
Think about kind of the financial performance of the company that you're writing about from the standpoint of you mentioned. Hey, we wrote a piece and then the zoom stock has basically 6X since then. Do you see that as a good thing a bad thing? Is it kind of agnostic to you? Like, how do you just think of I guess the market impact of the stories that you
write? Yeah, I would say
Where I'm kind of betting reputationally a bit the way that an investor does I obviously and for those who don't know like I can't own individual stocks as a reporter. So I don't own any Zoom or any of these companies unless it's in like a mutual fund in my 401k or something right, but I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about a company being interesting or doing something. Well if they're not right like it's irresponsible. It makes me look like
Tom makes forms look silly. So there is some risk reputationally every time we go deep with a company. So that said it's very validating when the company's end up doing well financially because it helps me feel like I wasn't crazy but something stood out about
them. Absolutely speaking of a company that is crazy in a positive way Clubhouse the the sweepstakes as I think you called it talk a little bit about who actually
Before we do that for those that don't know Clubhouse is I think they described it as a drop in audio app that you know, it's kind of like a conference call with an audience to some degree talk a little bit about the the absolute chaos around there their most recent fundraising round in the competition.
Yeah. So I mean Clubhouse had the perfect storm fundraise because it's an app that VCS are obsessed with
And as much as feces should be thinking about markets that are not themselves. It's really easy to see the demand for something when you are the Target customer. So, you know, if you go into a club house or you check Twitter to see who's talking about Clubhouse. It is a very high percentage of these individual investors Angel Investors Venture capitalists. And so that always meant that they were going to have a competitive fundraise. I think it got even more competitive.
T''v because of covid and the fact that basically people had nothing to do they were desperate for new platform and you know take talk was not really like an easy investment opportunity. It's such a big company at with bike dance. So I think there was a lot of there's a lot of Firepower waiting to back a company like this. The founders also had credentials having built social media companies before this kind of just like it's checked every box. So there was a bidding war
And you know, we were hearing that individuals. We're trying to put together into list syndicates to give them like a valuation closer to 200 million for a company still in beta with under 2,000 users totally crazy and juicing Horowitz gave them a valuation around a hundred million. They did did not confirm this to us, but we talked to enough folks that we were able to break that story and then of course, I hear that they're in clubhouse like that.
At night like, you know, basically like questioning the reporting or like, you know saying well, that's not the full story it I was frustrated. So I was like, well, you can tell me the full story if you want. Yeah. No, it was just it was it feels like a million years ago, but it's just a few months ago this sort of early in quarantine that app had just kind of struck a nerve with with a certain part of the tech world.
It's so funny too because a lot of these consumer apps, they naturally want Hurley you
Adopters and kind of beta testers and so who better than to go get people who understand how to build products and you know kind of do all that stuff which many of them now invest and so you go and you get those people on but I always joke with friends like you get on one of these things and if you're one of the first, you know, five hundred or thousand users on it, it's pretty much always investors and you see the same investors, right? And it's like, oh there's so-and-so and they're so it so the okay. I got it like the word is out that this thing is is being tested and doesn't necessarily mean that all
All of them become like these hot fundraising rounds to your point, but I do think that it's it's this balance between you know, a canva that says hey look we're going for small businesses and kind of as far away from Silicon Valley that user base as possible. Whereas a lot of these consumer applications that is who the initial user basis is, it just ends up being the people who know how to build products and you know, people will debate whether that's good or bad but it's just an interesting Trend OC.
Yeah, I think Clubhouse is an interesting test case where basically they
I have tried to gain the sort of consumer success trajectory in a bunch of ways and if it pays off if it works, we'll see more copycats, but it may not work and one of the things they've tried is have Oprah have these big name folks on really early on keep it small so that you can Tinker with a product with a small team getting feedback from these influencer types, but like basically only having the influencers on their right and that's very different from
uh Maps where it starts out with a bunch of like teenagers or whatever and then you're trying to bring on an influencer later on to kind of like confirm that energy so I think Clubhouse like has gone influence or first and I don't think it's guaranteed that that'll work and I do think that of course like
You know Community is built around groups that are not obvious could be much more passionate. It's just harder for those of us on Twitter or whatever to find them because we may not be in that
Community. Yeah, absolutely masayoshi. You you got the the exclusive interview. I remember playing a telling me at one point. She was like this has got to be the number one interview that everyone wants one. How did you get them to agree to do it and then to tell us
Nothing about that that piece.
Yeah, so talking to muscle yoshi-san was like top of my list for probably three years ever since the vision funds burst onto the tech scene and you know for those who aren't super familiar like hundred billion dollar fund to invest in companies. It was that's at a factor bigger than we'd ever seen before some of the biggest VC firms in the world. You know, they're aom is maybe 10 billion now, but so a hundred billion dollars
Ones just to invest in these companies. It was just a massive impact, right? And and we were talking about it the whole Tech World reporting World. We're talking about the impact of this fund for good and bad but talking to Masa who's based in Japan and doesn't do a lot of interviews was really hard. I basically found out that he gave me the one English language interview a year. And so I just had to like be that interview at some point and I tried, you know, multiple times and failed.
But around the end of last year the beginning of 2020. There were a lot of doubts around SoftBank and the vision funds we work had obviously been a massive blow-up and Uber its stock was not doing great. Its shares were underwater for from a softening standpoint. There was a lot of Doubt. So basically what I did is I said, you know, I am not going to be beholden to any narrative. I'm going to hear you guys out and if there's a way that SoftBank can still win here.
For that mossos misunderstood. I will like take that beginner's mind and I will hear it out and I will try to give you guys a fair shake and I think my track record and I guess my sales pitch we're strong enough that they thought okay, like we will try that and but I think it was definitely nervy on both sides and I did meet with Masa in March right before everything shut down in New York. It was really interesting.
Ting experience and interview and he was much more unrepentant than I thought he would be no. I had a bunch of questions. Like what have you learned from this or what would you do differently and for someone like him the answer was kind of like my tactics might have been wrong but my strategy is always right and it's like that is you know, that's what's made him so successful but it also is why I think the criticisms can be fair to so that was it was a trip talking to all the people in this office.
Orbit was a unique experience it was extremely stressful, but we were really happy with the story that we were able to put together and I hope that anyone in the audience who goes and reads that story would think it's fair look at kind of why they're in tough Straits, but also how Mas I can sort of always, you know, pull himself out of the fire in the end.
Yeah, when you met with them in person, was there any other takeaways that you had in terms of you know, it takes a special guy to on the way to pick somebody for
Three billion dollars to literally at say a think the story is there on the plane and somebody showed them the deck and it's at a 30-year plan and he said at a zero right to make it a 300 year plan. Well anyone who just thinks that way is obviously very different. But what were some of the takeaways from from even person getting talk to him.
Well first off Masa is a lot less Imperial than I think he comes off as part of that is because he has an Entourage. He's based in Japan. It's you go through so many Hoops to meet him.
You kind of built him up in your head, but he's actually, you know, a relatively, you know, small smiling, you know, unthreatening seeming man physically, you know, just in like his, you know, sweater and everything and and he kind of walks serenely surrounded by this constellation of like freaked out intense people. So that's kind of that was my first impression is just that everywhere he went it.
Like he was totally calm and this is someone that if you sat next to him at a you know, Ramen place, you can have a beer with him, but all his handlers all his lieutenants know you could not and they would not let you get close to him. So that was one I would say in terms of how he speaks. He is. Definitely one of these big picture folks like he'll speak in big metaphors. He'll speak in kind of the Arc of history as someone who studied history I could appreciate that but some people love
Of that that he can just sort of fit together a future, you know, the technological future of the next 30 years into a coherent narrative and that just really resonates and then everything he does is kind of fitting The Narrative for other people that is just inflexible and like impossible to actually do anything with like he could say AI is going to have a bigger impact on the world then the microchip and you can be like cool that may be right.
What does that actually mean for us in the day-to-day, you know and one of the big things that I was trying to understand was like okay if he thinks that data and AI are the future, what does that actually mean for these companies like can over actually benefit from that in any meaningful way Candor - suddenly beat all its competitors just because we understand the data is important like there limits to what you can do with data. And in fact, like people are much more mindful now about how their data is.
Used so I think for me the interesting thing was that he has this like forty thousand foot view of the world and then he's trying to apply it, you know on a company by company basis and I think that's where things can either go great or they can go really badly. Yeah, was there any
sense of maybe you talked about like him as a person but any of the views that he held where you felt like he is either really misunderstood or people just have misconceptions like he believes a but everyone thinks he believes be
Yeah, I would say that. He he sees the Power law of investing. I think just a little more nakedly than a lot of VCS who actually probably believe it more in private than they would say. I'm also just believes that a lot of markets are a winner take all Market effectively. That one brand is just going to end up crushing most of the others and obviously that's true in some Industries.
It's not maybe not so true in other Industries, but I think that directionally he's not as crazy as it seems about that and so are you know, are you really over paying in the short term if all you're doing is trying to find that outlier like winner take all Market. I would say probably not as much as he's sort of ridiculed for I think the problem is where you think that maybe a market is where take all and it's not and so you put a lot of money into something without it ever really being able to be the break
You know, like like hopefully there will continue to be a lot of podcast companies. And so if you would just crazy valued no gimlet or one degree or whatever like it will crush every other podcast company. Probably not going to be the case. The other thing I would say is that I think like Masa is more self-aware, but I think a lot of people think like he's mindful. He knows the criticism. He's not like some
Like I don't know naive person who just like doesn't understand what people think about him. I just don't think he cares and there is something to admire their of just the person who like knows that a lot of people doubt them and just sleeps well at night anyway, like he was like I was you know, I asked him like what do you think about everyone just kind of like, you know, making fun of the vision fund or thinking like you're a crazy person for what you're doing and he was like, oh I had it worse after the.com bubble. He's like, this is nothing.
I don't know like if I would feel that way but I did kind of have to respect him for just being so unprepared.
Yeah, well and I think the part that was interesting is I've killed forget he was nobody he became the richest guy in the world lost it all and then I think he became the richest guy in the world second time or came close to it. Right? And so he's kind of had this is very epic boom-and-bust Cycles personally, right? And so I think that that does probably Harden you a little bit
I think it also like, you know, I think it's weird.
For some investors to have an investor who doesn't seem to be motivated just by like hoarding money, you know, like like I don't know if it's a gambler mentality or what it is but like heat as you said he claims to have been the richest person in the world briefly during the.com. Bubble. Everything was so crazy that that's very hard to perfectly confirm. But yeah this he lost SoftBank lost nine over 90% almost 99% of its stock value the.com bubble burst and he could
Have easily just like moved on to something else if he just built it all up again. And the question is like why like if you're already the richest person in the world, what is compelling you and he's not Bill Gates going to you know, cure malaria or something. He just like can't stop trying to play out his thesis about like where Tech is going and I think that is really confusing for a lot of investors who whatever they say are ultimately like money-driven,
you know, it's it's absolutely fascinating one.
A company that you've written about that I think because it's in the Enterprise space people just don't know it as well as snowflake. But obviously now they're going to go public here and have kind of this big splash. What was your history kind of meeting the company and then writing that story?
Yeah. So snowflake is a database company, you know, I like to think of it as sort of like improving off of the old Oracle data Lakes of
either 20 30 years ago a company that I got to know on the enterprise software be and through my cloud 100 sort of the and I thought it was interesting that they basically we're like these French database engineered nerdy guys who built a tool that actually like could be sold pretty well and then brought in a series of a couple aggressive sales people to basically run the company.
That doesn't always go super well, but with Bob ugly and then Frank suit men, they've had these like Elite people basically brought in as mercenaries to like sell their tool to the world and yet at least one of the co-founders is still very involved on the deeply technical side of snowflake. So that was kind of interesting to me. But again, I think one of the most interesting things about this company is that it wasn't really known to anyone until
it hit the market and then people see it's numbers and suddenly, you know, everyone's everyone's like anticipating this IPO or thinking about how they're going to play this stock and all that and it's kind of like funny to me because I get to watch these companies whether its data dog or snowflake kind of go from boring can't get anyone to care about them to like should I buy this stock? Like what do I do? You know and it's like there was a lot in between right, but I do think that snowflake
You know deserves the attention. It's getting I'm excited to talk to Frank submit again when they're not in quiet period and I'm allowed to I think it's it is a huge company and the other thing that's interesting about them is that they've kind of perfectly drafted off of the cloud Wars between Microsoft Google and Amazon stay will be the biggest independent company in the cloud, you know, that is sort of deep in Cloud infrastructure, but not one of those
State players
absolutely. It's it's fascinating to see just you know, a couple of pop up out of nowhere be worth billions of dollars. So I people that way what does that company? Right but you're like look there's lots and lots of them. I actually saw Patrick O'Shaughnessy tweeted the other day or recently. He said, you know, who's somebody that is a Founder CEO that you'd love to hear from right and is basically running a business that you've never known about before so I saw somebody tweeted not forget the
Almonds name but basically he ended up taking the company public in the early 2010's and he owns the Memphis Grizzlies right here. Like this guy's like not trying to hide right? He believes that NBA team but just heard of them before right? And so you're just like that is pretty cool to see is somebody who's literally a multi-billionaire is out there in the technology world, but just because of the type of business that he runs, you know, it's not something that kind of gets covered every day and I think that a lot of these companies that's becoming more and more popular, right?
Yeah. I mean, I think unless
Are fascinated with like the underpinnings of the internet or you're trying to trade the stocks? It's not always obvious like why you should care about these companies that's always been my challenge. But I also see it as like a fun intellectual challenge to basically make these Enterprise companies relevant and relatable. So like when I read about a company like zoom in 2019, some people care then what the pandemic happened and I wrote about their like making the tool free for
Schools that was my most trafficked article of all time. I couldn't have written that without all that prep work. I had done, you know in the years before but it was cool to like see it. Finally finally resonate with people. You know,
that's awesome. One of the last times I want to talk to you about is Chris sacca, probably the most legendary angel investor of all time, depending on how you count definitely did things kind of differently right in terms of Truckee and all that. I remember
A reading that piece when you wrote it and just being like, you know, I can't believe somebody got him to talk. Essentially. You know, what what did it take to get him to talk and then kind of what do you remember from from doing that piece?
Yeah, so that was again. We're like the power of my list was helpful. I had gotten to know Chris Abed through the Midas list and kind of was talking to him a bit about his Holdings and I think he was kind of like, oh, well, you know, I'll tell my story someday. I'll
I brought you know, I'll probably write a book but then when it became clear that you know, he wasn't going to write a book anytime soon. I was able to be like, okay. Well, you can still do the book later. But why don't you talk to me now and I think you know part of that was that he just felt finally comfortable to share some of the success, you know, his billionaire status with this Holdings. Some people like a leaf pixel would never want to be called a billionaire even if they may be but I think Chris was just like, okay it's time for me to kind.
As bite the bullet and be more public facing with some of that stuff and we developed a trust. So to just lots of lots of conversations talking to his world. And that was it. That was a tough one because Uber was still very much one of the top stories the day and Chris was very involved in the early days it ruber so I spent a lot of time talking to you know, all The Usual Suspects from the early Uber history and
you know, no one quite had the same story. Yeah, everyone remembers things a little differently. I think Mike Isaac did a really good job with super pumped with this book to try to like hit a lot of the main notes there. But even there I was CEO texting Mike being like, you know, oh, I heard something a little bit different back during the sack with story and it's just like it was one of those things that even as it was lived. It kind of became Silicon Valley floor. So that made it fun challenge like almost like a game of Clue like
Is the full story here and I think Chris would never lie. But like he maybe just remembers things a little differently, but he was in a unique place where his friends were the founders of uber of Twitter where he was like therefore this, you know, 2008 time frame moment in Silicon Valley that was pretty unique and I think he and I didn't send could and a couple other folks Mike Maples were just able to sort of aggressively sees that Gap in the market of the
Early stage investing, you know where the first the other firms they got a little too risk-averse a little too big and so these angels kind of were able to build their brand Steve Anderson is another great person and now there are million of these people, you know that we talked about Clubhouse like club house is full of these like solo investors, but Chris was definitely one of the first people where he had just built a network that allowed him to you know, get in early. So a couple of these really iconic companies the other
In from a business lesson is that he just really doubled down on himself. He bought out some of his investors to own more of his own funds even when he didn't have a lot of money, you know, and he was maxing out credit cards. Obviously. I'm not advising people to do that, but he just like had total faith in himself and and was willing to like have an extremely concentrated position in himself. So why did he become a billionaire because he didn't just invest in Uber or Twitter, but he kept
doubling down on those companies year after year buying out his own investors because he was so long, you know the position CI conviction in and I think that's where he's a good example. Yeah.
I came here if you lose your story or another story. I read where he was at on vacation or whatever with Travis and his father and Travis is playing Wii tennis. That was that your story.
No, I know. Okay, but I think it was it might have might have been in like Isaac special. I can't remember.
Okay, I just
remember thinking about like literally having those people as your friends, right and you know one friend ends up building, you know, a 70 billion dollar company another friend ends up building, you know, Thirty billion dollar company and all you're basically doing is you're just investing in your friends in the beginning and that's not to downplay the kind of evaluation and you got to believe you got to actually have you know, high quality friends that can build this stuff like all of that is important, but it is a pretty special I think network of people that he was able to capitalize
Jean and the other part of the guy took away was just how aggressive he was. Once he knew something was working right in terms of buying out the shareholders you're talking about do all of those things that just seem to to not have been popular before he started really doing.
Yeah. I mean for the audience to take away that I would say is, you know, Patek World felt a lot smaller then where you know, you could have like these small meetups at South by Southwest where all these Founders were getting to know each
There you could have you know, Travis would have people at his house for Jam sessions that you know went on to be founders of other companies. And so there was this like small Network. Unfortunately, like, you know, most of us are not in those networks, right? And so I would just say invest invest in your own network because South by Southwest everybody knows but like what is the next one? It may be virtual and maybe in a game and maybe in a telegram group, but I would say like
Hopefully the next generation of Chris tacos. There are dozens of these small groups where it's not just like one house in San Francisco is birthing all the big companies and I think that was as much just about the scale of the tech ecosystem at the time as it was that like Chris was better at picking people than everyone else. I mean obviously coming from Google and knowing entrepreneurs it became easier for him to meet more entrepreneurs, but I don't think that the nest next Chris sacca has
The you know a white dude who works at Google, you know,
absolutely I finish up each conversation with the same two questions that you'll get to ask me one. But before we get into that there was one question that came in through Twitter. That was very important. Natalie wants to know why Natalie is so great and I figured that you would have an amazing answer for her. So why is Natalie's so great?
Yeah. So my partner Natalie sportelli, if you if you follow me on Twitter, you'll see it.
We're talking constantly. She's one of the smartest people I know on Brands and kind of all things brand Marketing in the tech World working at a VC firm called lirikhype. Oh, I love having a partner who is in sort of in the industry with me. I love that we can sort of talk the same language and we can bounce ideas off each other. I think Natalie is just so driven that it can I joke, sometimes that She's My Lady Macbeth because she's going to get me killed, but but it's cheese just
Shit about like moving forward and making a difference and it makes me a better person in my job. Maybe you have the same thing, you know with your partner, but I'd say that's what I love about Natalie is that she's probably he's dropping right now. She's going to give me feedback when this comes out. She's going to Tweet about it like and having someone like that in your corner for good and bad is just awesome.
That's a fantastic answer you you made no mistakes. Great job the two questions. I asked everybody else is first. What is the most important?
current book that
you've ever read
Well, I should have probably prepared that one. I would say there are fiction books that have really resonated with me more than non-fiction books. Okay shadow of the wind and a gentleman in Moscow are two that come to mind a perfect spy by John look her a is one that I own the first edition of because it's had a huge impact on me. I find that fiction.
Can sort of allow me to see things differently and have perspective that I really need, especially when I'm spending so much of my day reading other news articles or sort of so deep in the tech news world's. So while there are business books that I think are valuable. I would really recommend to the audience like find a novel that just changes how you think about the world's and that will unlock things that you don't expect perhaps more than like, you know a book that's like 20
Tips that are going to improve your business.
Yeah. It's great piece of advice. Second question is a little bit more fun aliens believer or non-believer.
Man, so I argue about this with my friends. I tend to fall subscribe to the theory that there are probably alien civilizations elsewhere in the universe, but that at least under the current laws of physics as we know them. They're insurmountably far away and we just will not run into them that makes me kind of sad and a lot of ways, you know, but then I read something like the theory the dark Wilderness Theory, but actually that's a good thing because a lot
Us would be prey and there are predators out there. And so it's actually good if people don't know that you know humans are around. I do think that just it's hard to believe that we're the only ones out there. Unfortunately, I'm not super confident that we'll ever like be well we may never find out otherwise is I guess the way to put it. Yeah,
I think that's a very very fair way to look at it a friend recently was telling me he said, you know humans think that we're great because we're all human but if you just compare us
athletically to like animals the we're pretty stupid and unathletic and like not very impressive and so, you know the odds that there is something else out there that is less Superior to us when there's things on earth that are more Superior is not good. And so, you know to that point I think that you know, I always think of it in terms of do we want to find them or do we want them to find out so I think you always want to do the discovery, right? You don't want to be the discovered
unless unless they want to help us but
I do think that you know as much as I'm I love like space technology and I love a lot of like the thought about like The Innovation we can do to kind of both Explorer but also perhaps like leaves the planet. I do think that of course encourages thinking that leads us to invest Less in our own house. And so I do think like if we ever want that opportunity we have to like do a much better job of like protecting our own house from a climate standpoint from a lot of Saint points before we
Can like go like high-five with aliens, you know somewhere
else. Absolutely. All right, you get one question to ask me what you got for me to finish
up what has been the question that you asked the most to people because it brings the most sort of unexpected or just like gold answers to you that it's become your like favorite question.
So I'll give you to the reason why I asked the alien question is because I think it is the
Fastest way to get somebody to explain a lot about them without saying anything and what I mean by that is just it shows you how they think about, you know, kind of problems that I don't deal with every day. You get to see sense of humor you get to see seriousness you get to see scientific versus not you know, you get to see kind of like religiosity a little bit like just I believe because I believe type stuff so it's just a very revealing question the problem is that
I've done so many of them now. Like I pretty much can bucket the answers like it's either like I believe because there's mathematical probability or I don't believe because I haven't seen them yet. Like those are the two most popular answer so I don't know for me. It's like what people say is less important than how they say it with that question. So that's always been one that I enjoy but the question now that I don't remember where I got this from this was not like I had some you know major Aha and I was like I start asking people that but I really enjoy asking people after they told me
Perspective on something like what would change your mind? Mmm, right and so like especially when it comes to like, you know technology investing or business building and finance and stuff like that. Somebody will lay out like this amazing argument and like it's pretty compelling right most people I think are like fairly charismatic if you're you don't have some level of success for good salesperson, you've been able to convince employees and investors my goal is kind of stuff and then they have them like, okay now flip around on the other side of the table and tell me like what they see what your critics argument and like what would have to happen.
For you to like agree with them and what it does is it like one the smartest people that I've done on the podcast like by far they can say their critics argument better than the critic can write and like are very clear and like, you know a b and c happens that I would change my mind then you're like, okay, like that's actually pretty cool that you can do that. Then there's people who
are
like so convicted that nothing is going to change their mind and like they say that and so like I said, I haven't decided yet. Is that like a good
A bad thing because it's kind of situation depends. Sometimes you need the Blind Faith that something is going to occur whether you can explain it or not. And then other times like I don't know maybe you get we work right like, you know, like look you basically like run off the cliff blindly.
It's funny you say that because Massa would definitely be in the latter camp where you probably aren't going to change his mind. But Dustin moskovitz actually is known and with four employees for asking how can the opposite be true or okay, how could the
Act opposite of the story you just told me be true and he actually does play the same kind of empathy exercise. Yeah, I see the same sides of that coin all the time in my reporting as well.
Yeah, that's awesome. And I don't think either ones like right or wrong right because obviously both of those two people are highly successful. It's just a matter of to me.
As I look at this as like a learning exercise, it's the fastest way to get the counter narrative and you can pretty much tell you know, a case is person bullshitting or not, right and do they actually understand the critics argument, but the people who I think are the most intelligent they really really can outline like, you know, here's what would it would take for me change my mind. I just enjoy
that. Can I sneak one more question, of course, you've talked to a ton of people now, do you ever have a moment where you feel like you just
Really misread a person or how good would you rate your own ability to kind of quickly get the measure of someone just from your pattern recognition.
So it's one of these things where I think we all want to believe that we're really good at that type of stuff. But like we all probably actually suck at it and we're like worse at it than we than we actually are we believe we are I think that
You can cut a person in many different ways. Right? So like in one conversation, it's really hard to get a lot of reads in terms of like all these different things but like being able to make a reed like that person is intelligent and has sound decision making from one conversation. Like you can ask enough questions where at least directionally, you're probably more right than wrong. Right? So like that's something that I think you can get out of one conversation. The other thing is I think of it as like salesmanship and what I mean by that is especially
Our Founders like everyone wants to know and who's the smartest and being smart is really important but also being able to convince employees convince investors convince the market like all of that is really important as well. And I think that naturally when you just have a conversation with somebody you walk away and you like oh that person is charismatic or that person is not something you can read that pretty effectively things that are hard or just like how persistent is this person and they can tell you stories about their past where they were persistent or not and like maybe that gives you some signal but
For us like when early stage investing most of the companies that have failed like at some point the founders gave up and maybe there was good reason to or maybe there wasn't but I think like that's the stuff that you know, kind of what somebody's made of right? It's kind of cliche way of describing it. Just how do you get that out of a single conversation? I think you got to spend a lot of time with somebody to really unpack that and so, you know, if I had one wish it would be to be able to get that type of information out of a single conversation, but I think it's just, you know, human nature and makes it too
difficult.
Colt awesome. Thanks. Thanks for that. That's I'd say there's some there's a lot of important things to keep in mind there that I think reporters. We do the same thing where we can offer read. But of course people are putting their best foot forward with us. And so, you know trying to understand if you really have the measure of a person we end up having to sort of try to triangulate it, you know through talking to other people too.
I'm assuming nobody on a list or that you're doing a profile on it's like hey, let me introduce you to all of these.
These that didn't work that I was involved with.
No, we usually have to do that work ourselves.
Absolutely. All right, Alice. Listen, thank you so much for doing this. Where can people find you on the internet or find more of the stories that you're writing.
Yeah, so my Twitter handle is Alex are Conrad with a K. I'm always on Twitter if you tweeted me, I'll probably be responding and then if you go to Forbes, if you just Google my name, you'll find my Forbes author.
Page which has all these stories ditto the cloud 100. We have pretty good SEO so find me there but if you want to talk to me Twitter is probably the best place to be
some listen. Thank you so much for doing this and what do it again in the future?
Alright. Thanks, man. Really? Appreciate it.
