10 | NAVAL RAVIKANT - Founder of AngelList and Angel Investor in Uber & Twitter

At the end of the day, having a great startup boils down to picking the right team in a great

market and welcome back to off record with your host Corey Levy today. We speak to entrepreneur and investor in a vial. Robert Kahn who is best known for a fan of AngelList. A platform where you can find a great startup job, invest in the startup or raise money. He's also an active, angel investor, and is invested in more than

Companies, which include Twitter Ruba, Yama Postmates and more in this week's episode. The Vowel talks about the perfect way to find what you're good at, how to get started. In learning about cryptocurrencies. What's most exciting about the effects of blockchain? The startup ecosystem for both feces and Founders and also were healed changed about. Today's education system. Does that and many more? We hope you enjoyed this week's episode of off record.

Thank you, navall for taking the time today, appreciate you spending it with me. Yeah, thank you for having me on the show. So I'd like to start by asking what is your advice to young people who are you figure out what they want to do with their lives but not sure what. Yeah, I think there's kind of this bad idea that somehow at the age of 16 to 21. You're supposed to somehow figure out what you're going to do for the next 20, 30 40, 50 years of your life and I think not only is that a wrongheaded idea that's based on some concept of basically vocational training.

Thing where you study to be a doctor for five or ten years and then your doctor forever or you study be a lawyer for five or ten years and then your lawyer Forever. This is partially based on that partially just kind of on false certainty. It's also just kind of fun question that adults like to ask young people, just to kind of see how they think. I would say just forget about that whole concept just do what is intellectually interesting to you and is difficult difficult. Otherwise why are you in school if it's easy to do even just do it at home and then kind of just pursue what's intellectually interesting to you and over time you become good at that you don't get rewarded Society anymore for

Doing things that you can be trained, how to do? Because if you'd be trained, how to do them, the next monkey can be trained how to do them, and then you can be replaced and then you don't have to end up being paid with your work and just get paid based on the time that you put into, not going to be that great. So I would argue that all the interesting professions and all the interesting people don't settle down on a single career too quickly and they usually do it by following intellectual interests. Now, the problem is you follow this advice and you could end up, you know, just reading English literature all day long and not necessarily building a career if you really want to build a career you want to make money to

It's not going to be good advice. So I would temper that by saying that if you have a choice of went to study study the hard thing study the stem topics in science, technology engineering math because those are foundational skills that are not going to go as style. They're going to help you. No matter what you do. You know, even if you ended up being doing artists and artists with a scientific background, I think is more interesting than artist with a killer English Lit background, and given that you're spending all this time and money in school anyway, studying something hard. But in terms of what you do do, what you think is interesting, especially when you're young, especially when you're straight out of school.

I need the freedom to explore and find out what it is that you like to do, because you're not going to have figured it out in school. It's an unusual person who's figured out and by the time they get out of school and even there the world changes so fast that the thing that you thought was interesting, May no longer be interesting, 20 years later. It's a look at the medical career everybody who study to be a doctor for decades. You know now is facing a very different kind of employment than when they went in because now it's much more of a government-run institution. There's much less Private, Practice much more large hospitals, etc, etc. What do you think? Are some

Ways one can figure out what he or she is good at. Yeah I think my rule for that is like if something comes easily to you and doesn't feel like hard work to you, but it looks like hard work to your friends or the if your friends are always saying, boy. So, and so I don't, I don't understand how you do that and the way you've such a fast typing. So, you're still good with computers or something with people. Or you have just a knack for helping people solve, their emotional issues, or whatever it is. You know, in my case, when I was a kid, like, I was always that second businesses. I just couldn't help it. So even though I wanted to be a

Test. I thought I want to be a scientist reality. Those going to go more into business or the business of science known as technology because I just love dissecting businesses and it was effortlessly good at it. I can look at my neighborhood pizza shop and be like, oh well you know, they should have set of two people running around cash register, and Pizzeria and it should divide and conquer in. This is simplify the menu. And they could probably charge a little bit more for that item and should charge a little bit less for that item etcetera Etc. And so I just always had ideas on how to optimize the business and it just came effortlessly to me. It didn't feel like work, it was just

Natural. So I think the other people I always kind of look at like, what is the thing that comes easily to you that it's difficult for other people odds, are you like that thing and it could just be a skill set. It doesn't necessarily have to be occasional, but there are skill sets that come more naturally to you and trying to imitate other people and copy them so that you can be good at what they're good at. That's a Fool's errand. The combinatoric, some human DNA are staggeringly large, you're not going to beat anyone else, it being them and no one's going to beat you at the EU. So you may as well, figure out what you're the best in the world that and then go

See if the world needs that thing, that's just going to come more on what you just like to do. And you're naturally good at the posterior train to be good at the training is a little bit overrated. Jordy of value from schools comes from filtering who gets in and credentialing those people in the right way and not really educating them. And that's kind of a, you know, dirty secret. What do you wish? You had started doing much earlier in your career, specifically, like, actions or activities with compounding effects. I wish I had studied a lot more math because mathematics is up.

Stream of almost everything else. You know, like the old joke is that before I got to college? I wish they'd told me that psychology is really biology. Biology is really chemistry. Chemistry is really physics. Physics is really mathematics. And, you know, getting extend that mathematics is really just philosophy and logic and on the other end psychology, you know, it's like economics is actually, especially microeconomics is mostly psychology. So I wish I'd just did math because math is at the top of the food chain in here. If you're good at math, you can go learn anything else. But if you're not good at math and their textbooks, you'll encounter that you'll be

Wanted to open because the math is beyond you. The other thing is, I think being good at the basics is way more important than being good at the advanced stuff. So, even math been great at arithmetic, and geometry is going to be much more useful and algebraically, much more useful to you in life than being incredibly good at calculus. Unless you happen to be in a profession that needs calculus and I find that a lot of people, they lose the plot on the basics at some point and then they end up sort of muddled thinkers with memorize lots of formulas and fancy signing statements but unless you can reconstruct it from the ground up through pure logic, you don't

Really understand it. So I think I would have spent more time on the fundamentals, more time on mathematics. And then when I found something that I was interested in, I would have just done it rather than seeking advice or training or learning the reality is. Yes, you can learn from other people, but there's no substitute for learning by doing. So, for example, if you want to start a company at some point, which is the big thing in Silicon Valley, but just go start a company, you're going to learn far more, starting that company than you will apprenticing with other people and how to start a company. Even, if first one fails chalk that up as your trains,

We'll be learning experience but that learning experience will be far more valuable than doing it under somebody else. All right, what happened in the last few years, have you developed that has changed your life? I developed a daily workout habit which is great. I was never that healthier fit growing up, so it took me some time but now in the morning I work out every single day. It's not the most intense workout. It's not the most detailed, and I think that people inherently, they know how to eat and how to work out. But they spend a lot of time arguing or optimizing what the workout is or

What they should be eating, and that's just a way of procrastinating from the inevitable. It almost doesn't matter what you do every day, but if you move your body and physically exerted, way every day, and I think that habit will have lifelong benefits. The mind. It is part of the brain and it's attached to the body and we're Mechanical Mobile creature in. This is no way getting away from that. If your body is not healthy, then your mind won't be sharp either or at least not once you're past your 20s. And you have a trainer that you work out with every day. No to this too much overhead. So part of what makes working out everyday possible, for me is I

Literally roll out of bed, get on my yoga mat with a couple of weights and just do it right there. If I have to go and go to the gym and then work out there and then leave the gym and go to work like that, overhead on that whole transaction would be an hour and a half, where it's working out by myself, it's 20 minutes and what's something, you know, you should do, but you haven't done yet. I should not engage in any substance abuse whatsoever. Like I should just stop drinking completely and I should learn to just be happy and peaceful and calm without needing any of that stuff. But the reality is this,

Still enjoying my glass of wine. Yeah. One could argue that the big killer as you age is stress. And so these rituals for distressing a good but I'm always kind of a little envious of the people who have a common of mind that they don't need to engage in any of that stuff. But I'm getting there gradually. And when you feel lethargic what are some of the things you do to? We motivate yourself. I used to get lethargic. I'm not really lethargic these days anymore. I think there's two kinds of lethargy. There's physical, and there's kind of emotional / mental, physical lethargy.

Comes from you just taking bad carrier body, you're not working out or your dependent on caffeine or your engaging in substance abuse. So just watch out for those things, the emotional mental, lethargy is a little more complicated. It really just comes from being burned out from working on things, you don't want to work on. What do you want to work on something? You're really excited. I mean to give an example like say like you know your teenage male and you're like getting on Tinder for the first time and you're trying to figure out a date. Women, you have infinite energy for that because you're motivated like doing that all day long. Not rob you of energy on the other.

Other hand, yeah. Studying this topic that you don't want to do does Robbie of energy. So you know, if you look at someone playing video games they seem to have unlimited energy. So I think energy comes and goes just based on are you interested in what you're doing or not? So keep moving until you find something that is as interesting to you and as productive as some of your more unproductive activities like playing video games and aside from working out every morning. Do you have any other morning afternoon or evening routines? I don't have other routines sometimes that stretch a little

That night before I go to bed, I guess. This is kind of a routine. It's not an enforcer routine. I don't, I don't believe in being myself. I can say, thou shalt torn down must but just by sheer interest. I usually read every night before I go to bed part of keeping it. Interesting means I just read whatever I feel. Like so, if I want to read fiction, I read fiction. If I want to read junk, re junk, if I want to read science of it, science for each philosophy every policy, but I'll just read whatever. I feel like and I have tons of Books open any given time, and I'll flip around and then I don't care about the ordering, I don't care about finishing, I just care about like, oh well,

Going to find something that I'm really interested in. I'll just read until I'm tired. And I'll go to sleep. So that is kind of a regular ritual for me. And I think a lot of people talk about reading, very few people actually do it and many reasons, you know, we're all busy and we're also unfortunately trained that like reading is something you do for homework as part of school but reading for its own sake is really really interesting. And I think we just have to get away from a straightjacket of a must-read intellectually interesting things or I must read our must finish that book that I started, you know, I don't love it. So I'm stuck in it. So my

Liz instead of reading one book and struggling to finish it. I have 50 books of open at any given time and I would actually rather reread my favorite books, then read a new book. That's not very good and I feel no compulsion to finish a book or to read it in order or to even read the beginning or the middle or the end. I just flip around and read whatever catches my fancy and it works for me. What books have you reread the most? There's quite a few. I mean I'm going to exhibit recency bias and it's going to go through the ones that I've read recently. But Charlie munger's Portuguese Almanac is a great book by the best book on business.

I know it's a collection of these lectures and talks. I like Siddhartha the Herman hash novel, its spiritual beautiful fictional. I love snow crash, the old cyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson. Pirate that a dozen times, I'm sapiens. You all know of her. He's booked a rather that a couple of times, I research when I reread, what I've done is that this re skimming highlight that I've made like some philosophy books, I like Osho. So I've written a fair bit, a couple of his books. Krishnamurthy is another philosopher of life. There's a couple of science books like Carlo. Rovelli these books on quantum gravity.

Are really interesting. They're very approachable. Even that sounds fancy Richard feynman's, you know, show you joking. Mr. Feynman is six Easy Pieces. Six, not so easy pieces. I refer back to those books, a lot. I just got the Princeton companion to mathematics thumb through that occasionally and just pick a random spot that I can understand. It looks interesting and go into it. And it's not because I'm gonna be a mathematician but it just keeps my brain sharp. And you know, these are intellectual logic. Puzzles. I reread a most of Matt Ridley's books Matlab is amazing. That he wrote The genome, the origins of virtue, the Red Queen

In the rational Optimist, the evolution of everything. He's a very powerful thinker. So those are the kind of things I read. I also like reading original sources of red Origin of Species by Darwin Watson and Crick. It's always better to read the original that you can Wealth of Nations. Adam Smith. You know, you don't have to read regurgitated stuff all the time. We also get used to that school because schools want to sell your textbooks in the professor's want to sell you their books but sometimes it's better just to go back to the originals and what are some of the things that you are doing to keep your brain? Sharp, is there anything new that you're trying to learn?

Always reading. And I'm always trying to learn new things. I'm really interested in cryptocurrencies in the last couple of years, so I just read everything I could find on that topic. That's interesting to me. So I think I naturally am a creature, who likes to stay intellectually interested, so I don't need to do anything special on that. Even over time, my friends have ended up being the people who are also intellectually curious and I can learn a lot from them. I do spend a lot of time in Twitter, which normally, I think would be a time suck. But the way I justify that to myself is that I'm actually trying to connect with a small number of really bright.

At people and learn things from them in a highly compressed manner. Almost pithy wisdom. But then, I can remember. And recall, when I, when it's useful to me, I've made some great intellectual friends on Twitter and let's talk a little bit about crypto. I remember, you telling me about that in late, 2013 or early 2014, what would be your advice to somebody young who has heard the blockchain and Bitcoin and aetherium? But doesn't really know what to do next. Just dive in, there's no great. Starting point, people have good primers, some of which I would be tweeted out our link to, for my Twitter account. But

Get in there and start following the top people in crypto and eventually will make sense to you. It's a new emerging science, so there's not going to be a, you know, well, laid out textbook that has all the definitions, it's an emerging field. So you're going to have to have to learn alongside everybody else. It's intellectually, fascinating. It's a really deep Rabbit Hole In which we're both reworking internet protocols, where we working, how we organize humans into networks and we are reworking the nature of money and finance and the intersection of those three is the most exciting thing I've seen in my lifetime. So

So for me, infinitely intellectual curious, rabbit hole that I can just get lost in for hours and hours and I do best way to learn from me. Is I just go follow the top crypto accounts on Twitter and then I read what they write and then I try and verify and understand it for myself, going back to the original point of starting with the basics, going to be the original Bitcoin white paper, the original theory of white paper. So start with the basics. What do you believe about blockchain that few other people? Don't, I think they were fundamentally new way of organizing humans. Think that the story of humans is a story of networks we are

As ourselves into networks that, we then use to get things done and networks and I use the term loosely. So you could also use it as a protocol or its safety. As you all know of hurry say stories were the storytelling, monkey. But essentially humans are Co-operators, we cooperate across genetic boundaries that our cooperation results in things like Nations and currencies and religions and beliefs. And when you have these networks of humans operating together, you need a protocol, you need a way for them to cooperate, the protocol, lays out the rules of cooperation and normally these protocol Networks

Oops, I have need somebody in charge because somebody always cheat. Somebody always takes more than they give. And so, historically to organize networks of humans, we've had people in charge. So you might have a king in charge or a leader that you might have an elite or an aristocracy. You might have a corporation like the Google or boober running their various networks, or you may just have a Commons like a mob or you may have a democracy where every person gets one book. And this is historically, how we've organized networks in. The problem is that if you put a single person, charged you can end up with a despot or a tire. If you put a elite in,

Orange. Then they become an aristocracy overtime and extract a big tax. If you put a corporation in charge and you created a monopoly and if you put a crowd in charge, sometimes you just get a thought of as mob. So over time, you know, these are the story of the human race is an interplay between these different ways of managing governing networks. And at the same time we have networks and protocols that are completely open. Today's internet is a version of that. The English language is a protocol is open. We communicate in English, language not owned by anybody. Imagine if English is owned by Disney and we could only speak Disney approved words.

Give Disney license fee and every time a new word was added like we'd have to get Disney or approve, the new word, right? You'll be ludicrous, we wouldn't want to do it but that's because we have an open protocol today. So open Protocols of the way to go. And what blockchains do is they allow us to have open protocols and almost everything protocols where we can kind of cooperate in a way where no single entities and charge where we all participate in the network. But unlike a mob or like a democracy or like a Commons, it's not completely flat. It's based on Merit. So in the Bitcoin Network, the more

Security you provide the network, you get paid in more Bitcoin. You have more of a say in how its run etherium. You get that for compute verification in the file coin Network, we get paid for providing storage and the people who provide the storage, get a say and you get rewarded by the network in file coin as well as the saying how the network is governed and the bulbs. So I block chain based Network in that sense or a lot more like marketplaces their merit-based open systems as opposed to free-for-alls or systems that are ruled by small groups of people or entities or corporations.

And that to me is super exciting. That is the promise of blockchain. There's going to liberate us from from single points of control as going to democratize access to all kinds of resources that are held inside these networks but the same time have it actually work and be efficient which pure marble doesn't get you too and you've been very vocal about the blockchain crypto. Is there a reason for this? I think it's one of those rare things where you can combine something that is good for Humanity with something that is technically intellectually interesting and is being developed right in our time. And it's something that is also financially lucrative.

So you can kind of combine your work and of your broader passion for Humanity as well as your intellectual interest all in one thing. I'm not saying that's the only place where that happened. There are other domains where that's happened to this is just the one that happens to capture my interest. And can you comment a little bit on the hype cycle and how to actually think about technological progress? There's always a hype cycle to almost everything including technology. I'm a little skeptical of the hype cycle of this laid out now because now it's a former that's like, yeah, it always be a booming will always be a crash and it's

The moment, everybody believes something especially in these kinds of reflexive situations, it stops being true. So, now that everybody believes the hype cycle, they're convinced crypto for example, is going to go through the hype cycle, not necessarily may go through a variation of it. That's unrecognizable or hard to understand or not one that you can capitalize on. So I kind of tried not to pay attention to what everybody else is doing so much and really try to understand everything from first principles. First principles means that you should be able to derive it without relying on. Definitions if you keep having to Define things by you,

Fancy words. And that's a problem. The fancier the words you have to use to explain something the less you actually understand it. So I try to understand everything in very simple terms and I would rather understand the basics and not know the complicated stuff than vice versa because other than your knowledge is, but I'm very shaky ground. So that's one way to avoid the hype cycle. Another is to not have too many preferences. So if you have strong preferences as to how you think things should work out either because you have a very strong sense of identity or because you're politic for lean, very sharply left or right. Then you're just

it's much less likely to see things the way they're actually going to work out. The more dispassionate you are, the more likely you are to actually call the correct outcome, because we're Masters are fooling ourselves. If we want the result to work out a certain way, what up first order principles to think a new technology project or startup should fall out. There's a set around how you organize and structure startup that you probably shouldn't innovate on too much because you're already trying to innovate on your basic product. As it is at the end of the day, having a great startup boils down to

In the right team in a great market. So and that's glib. That's simple. That's easy. Except it's incredibly hard. It's really hard to figure out who the right team is you almost have to be snobbish about it. The best group teams. I think have all the dependent, the domain like in the blockchain space. You don't need sales people but let's see. An Enterprise software. That salesperson will be really important but General classic configurations, one person who's really good at selling and one person's really good at building team up and then they should have extremely high integrity and trust with each other. If they don't have a longitudinal data of having

Work together for a while. Then they could be in for a nasty surprise with different personalities or different goals. And then you want to pick a market that you are convinced is going to be big but is not big yet. Because if it's big today that's already being pursued by lots and lots of people. And if you're not convinced, it's going to be huge, then don't don't do it. It takes just as much work and just so much effort to run the pizza parlor, or the laundromat down the street. As it does the run Google at least for the founder. They work just as hard, they put in the hours. You know, the average small business owner Works their fingers to the

On. So they're trying just as hard. We just doing something that's a lot, less lucrative and in this their case requires less specific knowledge and is therefore subject to more competition. If you have specific knowledge and the technology industry, and you get to apply that in a domain where not many people will compete with you, then go after the largest market possible, it won't take more work to build that business. First principles, that I would stick to is only work with really amazing people and better off, not working with anyone, then working with the wrong people, and try and do something that you think is going to be huge, because it takes no extra work.

Compared to being small kind of do. Something small takes just as much work. And What markets do you think are undervalued today? I think that's really hard to call. You know, I'm a technology Bowl. I still think that technology is underrated relative to the impact. It's going to have people treat technology like it's some other sector alongside. They'll say oh energy is a sector and you know Finance is a sector in education sector and Technology sector know. All of these sectors used to be Tech sectors Once Upon a Time. The history of the human race has a history of Technology if it weren't for

Elegy. We would just be monkeys, sitting around in the cold trying to figure out how to start a fire. Fire is the beginning to acknowledge that turned us from being prey into the Predators and all human progress. Comes from technology. It's just that when something starts working really well, we stop calling it technology. We give it a different name. And what's happened now is the pace of technical Evolution and Technical Innovation is increasing, you no longer have to be in Silicon Valley, you no longer have to be Venture back you. No longer need a distribution channel from a big retailer. You no longer need permission from your betters.

Appears to succeed. So Technology Innovation is increasing. I think the number of successful startups is going up and it's all about technique these days. If you're in Silicon Valley and eventually in the rest of the world, either you're telling a computer what to do or the computers telling you what to do either. You're programming the Uber app or the Uber app is programming. You and telling you like, where to drive the car, you don't want to be on the wrong side of that transaction. So technology I still believe is underrated and I believe that the every other industry sector is actually a subset of the technology side.

And is now vulnerable to disruption by technology. Thanks to smart phones, and blockchains, and better microprocessors and software in the internet. In terms of teams, have to find Diamonds in the Rough weather. That's coming to invest in or someone to hire that's the big one. If you look at the really successful Venture capitalists, if you look at the really successful even companies, what they do is they build a brand that attracts all the best and brightest of them and they run a very tight filter function on those people. And that filter function has a certain je ne sais. Quoi, you know, there's no shortcuts to it.

I think ultimately, you know, if you are a good Technologies yourself, you can be a snob about it and only associate with other good Technologies and that's one way to pick them same. If you're a great salesperson, you don't know when somebody else can sell it when they can. So you just kind of to trust your gut instinct on it. And I think, actually trying to rationalize and justify and put it into a checklist will cause you to fall into a trap. It's the same trap that schools create where someone can get straight, A's but still not be a very remarkable person because all they've shown is that they have an ability to follow the rules. What unique?

To look forward to identify founders with actual intellectual rigor. If you have any thoughts on. I just I just talked to them. Do I learn from them? Are they really smart? Are they clear thinkers? Can they debate me on something that they understand really well, can they teach me something? I think that ability to when a Founder comes up and they're obviously intellectually interested in something and they thought it through a deep level and they can explain it, they can defend it, and it comes out of genuine interest as opposed to the written a book, or it's the hot thing that they should get into.

That's what gets me excited. What is your best lesson learned from investing so far? It's so Random. There's so much luck involved, you see? Great people fail every day and you can see, you know, less talented people, succeed all the time, but I think over a long enough period of time, it sort of balances itself out, but in any single given move, you know, it's hard to say, you know, a lot of times you'll have two talented. People who are equally talented in one will win. A company will do, okay and the other one will really win and we'll make billions and it's just a lot of us is Market.

Timing and what the market wanted at that time. So it's not you know it's never that easy and I don't like to draw distinctions between successful and unsuccessful. People, there is a tendency in all Industries to think that successful people are smart and unsuccessful. People are dumb and I think especially in Industries like technology, which are so hit driven and so random that it's good to have some humility about the whole thing. There's clearly been an influx of capital, what's your advice to new investors? There's been an influx of capital has been influx of entrepreneurs.

And so I think that there's it's balanced out that these at some level my advice to investors is, you know, money is a commodity to be in the Venture Capital business. You got to have access to got to have judgment and you got to have proprietary deal flow and of course you got a capital, you know? So with Angel is, for example, we're doing this micro funds program. We're making Capital available to small up-and-coming individuals who are founders today but want to be funding their friends or good company. So we're giving them these little micro funds so you can get access to Capital at these a try it out if you have a little bit of a

Record or interest in the space which you really need to do is you need to have the Judgment, it goes back to a singer. You need to have a way to attract all the companies to use Indian strong brand. And the brand is going to come from having done something. Interesting with, you're doing podcast, we didn't into an appaloosa and somebody else. You're running, like the Engineering Group at Stanford, and somebody else might be writing, lots of papers on bitcoin, somebody else might be an open-source contributor. Someone else might be doing The Hacker News meetups. So you need to have a brand where entrepreneurs are going to want to work with you for something. It may be mean, and rude Shen Wen.

Are you like the viral marketing guy and then once you have the brand then you need to have a strong filter where you can apply your judgment and reject most opportunities come your way and go for the ones where you think there's a great team going after big market and their high integrity. Good people that you want to work with and learn from what are some ineffective things you see investors wasting their time on the investors doing lot of cocktail parties. I don't know any great brand that I build up. Again, cocktail parties or happy hours. I see investors who are like writing these blog posts all about

Like, you know, this is how you raise money for me or this is what I look for in a start-up. I find those incredibly arrogant navel-gazing, you know, if I was a entrepreneur and I went to some, VCS blog and all in, all he or she has written about it. Like how do you raise money? From me, me me, me me, what's my judgment, was my criteria. What's my this? It's just think this is like this, an arrogant person with done that much. And it's just really enjoying the trappings of power. So I think DC spend too much time talking to other VCS writing about themselves and doing generic things like conferences, and meetups

Sand and cocktail parties. When in reality, they should be becoming domain experts on something where they can add value. They should be cultivating. That works the best and brightest individuals in the space and they should demonstrate themselves. Some operating capability. I'll direct company that was successful or they develop some product or contribute to an open source project or something. I think the bar for Venture should be just as high as it is for an entrepreneur, but a lot of VCS kind of treat it as well. I've got the money now, so they have to come to me. So I can do, I can just kind of relax a bit and the markets is to compare.

And what about four, Founders, what are some ineffective things that you see Founders waste their time on icy founder, spend too much time chasing be seized for money. When the reality is if you're building a great product fundraising is actually relatively easy. Usually what happens is when your company's not doing that? Well fundraising is really hard when your company's doing great. Fundraising is almost too easy in your over subscribe. So you should definitely of course talk to VC, then ping investors. But if you're paying five or ten of them and none of them are dramatically interested in one or two of them are chasing the term sheet then the correct answer is

To go back and maybe work on having a better team and work on having a better product than it is to keep chasing new VCS and what's your thought on San Francisco and Silicon Valley? Do you think people need to be here or are you certain to invest a lot of outside of the Bay Area? It's changing the various still the best classic place to do a tech company because of the network that's here. Giant Network effect, but it's starting to fade a little bit. I think. So can value will be fine, but I just think an increasing percentage of new companies are being formed outside of Silicon Valley. If you look at the blockchain crypto world, that's actually probably the most

Tributed of the recent technology waves where you can't pinpoint a center of gravity where there are operating out of, there's at least six cities and lots of scattered places. Lots of remote developers and it makes sense because they're developing protocols, and because they're fundable anywhere, because they can raise money through ico's, without having to move to Silicon Valley and go backing up and down Sandhill Road. So I think, historically a combination of capital, good weather universities, and just a prevalence of entrepreneurs, as well as people who know, how to scale businesses. In Silicon Valley has created a strong Network effect law,

But I think they're starting to fade, you know, California's ruinous taxation, it's pretty mismanaged State when it comes to governance is because still, that great weather really expensive to live in. They don't build any more housing and you know, CPR quality of life problems. In some cases is from mismanagement. So I don't think California has the the lock that I used to. It does still have the best warm dry Coastline United States. And that's the a sled lot of rule of law, but I think that you could start a company especially if it's one block chain basic cryptocurrencies, that's located elsewhere in the world and do just fine.

What are the things you would change about the current education system? I think I mentioned earlier that the current education system is much more about especially at the at the University level is much more about filtering and credentialing. I think people waste a lot of time learning things that no longer have value, like all the memorization based stuff should just go away. We have Google these days and our kids will have Google or equivalent so they don't need to memorize so many things anymore. I think we spend too much time on advanced stuff like we move people to calculus without even knowing if they really.

We understand and like a good at the basics, like the basic math. So I think we should also just always be checkpointing with kids to make sure they understand the basics before pushing them on, I think too much of it is based on rules and following orders, you know, grades are function of how well, did you play the school game? Not necessarily how well you understood what, what you're actually supposed to be doing. We don't spend enough time in computer science, and programming given how fundamental computers are to our society now, like everyone should be doing computer science. It should be like a basic thing. And I also don't think we should be like sending kids to get debt.

You know, for five years of education and degrees in social sciences and liberal arts that are never going to make them employable and pay back these all this debt. You know, we're graduating these kids out from school Under massive debt burdens and no hopes of digging themselves out. So I think we have to get much more hard-nosed about saying, well, like okay, here's a major where if you go into debt for this then you can get a job and you can pay it back and here's another major. If you go into it, don't take on debt. Go find the cheapest School. That'll do it or learn it online yourself. Because you have intellectual

You'll interests but don't take on two hundred thousand dollars in debt because you know, a PhD in medieval history is not going to give you the earning power to pay this off without ruining the rest of your life. And if they want to make that choice, they can. But I just don't think we educate kids in that choice. We kind of go to the fiction of that. Everything is equally valuable. And then the real world has to teach the lesson, the hard way. I also think you could start teaching some other things earlier, but I fear the like things like nutrition relationships, meditation, exercise, and those kinds of things.

Except the problem is that those kinds of things become highly politicized and I have very little faith in the educational system which is a one-size-fits-all monster machine figure out the right way to do that. The sad thing is I think you're real education, is what you get on the side from the internet and the books. When you're not busy being in school, do you think we'll see some of those changes in our lifetime? I think they'll be driven by people going off the grid as part of the homeschooling or the unschooling movement. We're seeing some of it in private schooling, which is a little unfair because only the rich people get to go to private schools.