Latest / ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence / The Chris Yeh Experience: On Design, Leadership and Blitzscaling (#035)

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The Chris Yeh Experience: On Design, Leadership and Blitzscaling (#035) · ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: The fact is, if you're doing something new, then other people haven't done it before.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: There's no proven playbook, and there's going to be ambiguity and uncertainty.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: People will say, Well, is this going to work?
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I say, I don't know.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: We just think that's that's the wrong question.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: The right question is, is this the highest probability action we can take, or is this the best expected value action we can take?
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: And therein lies the mindset shift that you want to make, which is to say, I'm going to get comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty around outcome.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: But what I'm also going to do is I'm going to look at the expected value of this action.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'm also going to look at what is going to be enabled if we're successful, right?
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: In many cases, success comes from compounding, from building on one success with another success, with another success, with another success.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: And compounding creates exponential growth, and that's what we're really after.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: Hi, Chris.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh thanks a lot.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: And uh it's quite a privilege to talk to you.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: And uh thanks a lot for taking time and being a part of the Contramines guest list.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Swami, it's a pleasure to be here.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Vignesh, same goes for you, and I'm delighted to be a part of this conversation.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Chris.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I'll straight away uh deep dive into something that uh we thought uh we could start with.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh very early in your uh career, uh way back in 1995, uh what was interesting when we looked at your uh you know background really was you did creative writing, you were in product design, you got a job in IDEO, and literally you decided uh to take up something else, and uh something that you really talk about, which is choose the most interesting choice, right?
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: And uh that's something that uh we were really uh intrigued.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: And uh what are the real benefits, the goods and bads of having taken those decisions?
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so what you're referring to is one of the big turning points in my career.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it was the turning point at the start of my career, where instead of going to work for a company like IDEO, which was pretty conventional for somebody who graduated from Stanford in product design, I ended up taking a job with D.E.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: Shaw and company to focus on internet startups.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason I did this is because I had a strong conviction about the power of the internet.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I had arrived at Stanford as a freshman, and when I was a freshman, we were part of the first class that had access to email.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: We were given email accounts.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so for the very first time, I learned, oh, you can actually send messages electronically.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: And at first it was from the computer clusters, eventually they had Ethernet in our rooms and we could connect our computers up to the internet.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: So it was quite a remarkable thing.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I had seen it grow over the time I was at Stanford so that when I was graduating in 1995, it seemed to me that this was going to be one of the biggest things that ever hit the economy, the world of business, just the world in general.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so I wanted to be a part of it.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: And it turned out that I received a letter from D.E.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Shaw inviting me to interview, and I almost threw it out because D.E.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Shaw is a hedge fund.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't really have any desire to go into Wall Street.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: And my mother said, Well, you know, if they're a rich Wall Street company, then if you interview with them, they might fly you to New York first class.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: And it would be nice to see what first class was like, wouldn't it?
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Well, you know, that's a good point.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so I interviewed with them with no intention of taking a job just so I could ride a first class flight.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: And instead, when I got there, I discovered that they were really interested in the internet.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like me, they were convinced it was going to be huge.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: Unlike me, they had billions of dollars.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so they said, Well, we would love to have you consider working on some of our internet projects.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: And at that point, I flipped from not caring whether or not they were interested in me to really wanting to be a part of it.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now, interestingly enough, I think you could argue that it was a mistake in some ways still, because obviously the best thing to do under that circumstance is not to leave Stanford University and fly across the country to Boston to pursue a startup career, but rather to do so right in Silicon Valley.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: And that probably would have been, depending on what I chose to do, might have been better, might have been worse, right?
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: Suppose that I'd stuck around and been one of the first people to work at Yahoo, who knows?
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: But as it turns out, I went to work for DESHA, and I was able to get into the startup game, and that sort of kicked off my entire career.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: But the lesson to be learned here is if you are looking out into the world, looking for change, looking for new things, well, then you can actually make a decision based on that conviction.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason why I believe it's important to look for change, to look for new things, because that's where the opportunity lies.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: If something is well established and predictable, then you know everyone knows how to compete there.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're going after something that's new and innovative, something where there's a lot of uncertainty, well, there's actually a lot of opportunity to create value if you believe that you can better predict the future, better understand what's going on, better learn from your surroundings, and then act accordingly.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_03: So, Chris, I just want to that's a great answer.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_03: I want to go back to your time at Stanford.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, do correct me if I'm getting this wrong.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_03: Was David Kelly your advisor when you were at Stanford?
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, the great David Kelly was my advisor.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now I had two advisors because I had two majors.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: David Kelly, of course, the very famous founder of IDO, incredible guy, brilliant, funny, just uh wonderful, wonderful person.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm also friends with his brother Tom, who is also a wonderful person.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a great family.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: And my other advisor was the late John Lara, who was a famous novelist and was the head of the creative writing department, also a wonderful guy, a great mentor, uh, somebody whose funeral I attended a couple of years ago.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_03: So could you talk uh a little about what David was as an advisor?
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_03: And uh, you know, now David and Tom are now today well known for the uh creative confidence uh movement, if I may use that term.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_03: So could you just share a couple of experiences about what it was like to have David as an advisor and how he might have helped you unleash your creative confidence?
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the key to remember is that David is an entrepreneur.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: So IDO was not a firm that he took over and then became CEO of.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: IDO was a firm that he started.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: So he actually began in the 1970s after he graduated from Stanford.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: He actually created a company that he actually called Galactic Destruction, which is very funny.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you know, those are the 70s, and people were doing a lot of quirky things.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: Eventually it became David Kelly Design and eventually merged with another design firm, it was Bill Mogridge's firm, and formed IDEO.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: And IDEO quickly became the premier design firm in the country.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, today it's a legendary place where they've built some of the greatest products the world has ever seen.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: And IDEO and ultimately the Stanford Product Design Department, which David also created, did not exist when he was there.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: So he's actually the creator of that as well, along with the late great Rolf Fasty, who was another wonderful mentor.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: He actually created this thing from scratch.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: And the Stanford Design Program and its approach to design thinking reflects David's own experiences and really created the whole movement around design thinking and creative confidence.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: And the whole point of the design program is we try to demystify creativity and innovation.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: It is not about suddenly getting a bolt of inspiration in the shower or something like that.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's about a process of really opening up your mind and having as many ideas as possible.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: And the creative confidence doesn't come from deciding that you're some sort of Da Vinci-like genius.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: It comes from realizing that there is a way to be more creative.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: There are techniques, and that if you apply them assiduously, you'll be able to come up with great ideas.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: And really the key is that it's a multi-stage iterative process.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: You begin first and foremost by researching the problem, researching, talking with users, getting as much information as possible.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: Only after you've researched the problem, defined the problem, do you then begin to ideate, to create new ideas.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: And there's all sorts of great techniques to improve brainstorming as well, ways to impose constraints because that drives creativity, ways to bring in randomness.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then once you have ideated and come up with many, many ideas where the quantity ideas is what's most important rather than coming up with a single great idea, you can then prototype, experiment, refine, and go through that process over and over again until you have a great idea at the other end.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: And the point is you don't know what sort of great idea or great product you're going to make going into the process.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: You have to have a bit of faith that the process will work.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: But seeing that process work over and over again gives you that creative confidence.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_03: So as a quick follow-up, I am very interested for some reason to know what was a project that you did when you were a student at Stanford that you're very proud of today.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_03: And what's a product or a project that you envisioned when you were a student but didn't quite execute?
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_03: And you were like, man, if I did that, that would have been like really cool.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_03: So do you have any in either categories?
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: Certainly.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: So there were a variety of products and projects that I made.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: I remember uh one of them that took a lot of work, but I think turned out really well, was a project around designing an interface for a thermostat.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: And in terms of the interface for a thermostat, in many ways you could argue that it was prescient of sort of the way that Apple would come to approach things.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, we used Macintoshes for the most part at Stanford.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: So there was Apple inspiration along the way, and IDO did a lot of work with Apple as well.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: And the thing about my particular thermostat is it took advantage of the basic form.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: So the thermostat is typically a square or a rectangle.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: And nowadays we have like nests, we have things that are circular.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: But what I had created was actually a thermostat that was a square tipped on its side to be a diamond.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: And what I did is I took the corners of the square, the top and the bottom and the sides, and made them into buttons.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: Because it just seemed to me like that was the natural flow of the interface, right?
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: Instead of having these little tiny buttons that you're pushing, just have these giant buttons that are very clearly up, down, left, and right, just by the nature and orientation of the shape itself.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was very proud of that innovation.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: I still haven't seen people do it.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe because it's hard to install a diamond, because it's easier to get it out of alignment, it's harder to measure and all that.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: But I thought that that was a really cool design.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: Now, something which I did not manage to execute on, it was just a concept was the following.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: I, being somebody who was a part of the creative writing department, a part of the product design department, felt that self-expression was very important.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: And that most people in the world at that time didn't have a means of self-expression, right?
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: It was like, how do I actually create something that other people will see, that other people react to?
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: What can I do to make this happen?
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't put two and two together because again, it was in the context of the product design department.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: I was thinking of physical products.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, I went down this path of is there some new form of art or expression that I can create that people could do that would be relatively simple, but which other people could give feedback on, and that would allow them to feel the same kind of great feelings I get from designing, from building, from creating, from writing, and so on, but make it a lot easier.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: And what I didn't realize is that I should have combined that with my belief in the burgeoning rise of the internet and created Web 2.0, right?
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: User-generated content and comments and self-expression writ large.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so, in many ways, I've often had this great regret.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: But of course, having the idea and actually executing are two different things altogether.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: And probably, by the way, the world of the internet would not have been ready for it in 1995, as it were.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: It was only ready for it, you know, seven or eight years later.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: So it was prescient, but it probably was not something I can greatly regret because it's not like there was a pathway for me to you know have become the father of Web 2.0, but I always think about that.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_03: So just before uh you know we move to the next question, I just want to also sort of uh touch on the point that you were a member of uh Phi Beta Kappa, if I am uh pronouncing that correctly.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_03: So for our listeners in India who are not aware of uh what Phi Beta Kappa is, I'd like you to just give a brief explanation on what Phi Beta Kappa is, A, and B.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_03: Um 5 Beta Kappa folks have traditionally been associated with uh statistically speaking, a lot of uh super quantitative, super uh math-heavy, economics-heavy sort of uh career tracks.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm very curious to know how somebody who has a traditional sort of journey into 5 Beta Kappa went into product design.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_03: I think that is a very interesting uh trajectory and uh decision.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm I'm curious to know that.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: And in many ways, uh there was an interesting fact that I was very different than a lot of my peers in product design as well.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll roll all the way back to my childhood.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: And my background is that my father has a PhD in electrical engineering from UCLA, and so he's very much heavy on the quantitative side.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: He worked as a research scientist, but also as a tinkerer building things.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I inherited a love of math, science, and technology from my father.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, my mother has a master's degree in library science from USC, focused on children's literature.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so I grew up in a home that also featured many of the great books and the books of children's literature that were considered the best at the time.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so I had this dual set of inheritances from the two different parents, the two different sides of my family, around the scientific side, the math side, the quantitative side, and the literary side, the qualitative side, the emotional side.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so I always had both of these going on.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: And that's reflected in the fact that I studied product design engineering, which is still engineering, still requires you to go through the full engineering core, learn electrical engineering, civil engineering, industrial engineering, all that sort of thing, along with creative writing, which is an emphasis within English.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: So that reflects that same split proceeding and going along.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: Now that meant that, interestingly enough, most of my colleagues in product design were very much more on that innovation emotion side.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: So they would struggle with the quantitative curriculum of product design.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: Their biggest issue was how do I avoid flunking out as I'm studying mechanics and fluid dynamics and advanced calculus and all these different things?
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: Because what I really want to do is to get into the shop and begin working with my hands and build something of beauty.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: So that was an interesting thing.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I also was interested in the artistic side, so I didn't feel out of place doing all those things.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: But it was interesting that I had the quantitative side that many of my classmates did not.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: And that ended up being reflected, and the reason, you know, Phi Beta Kappa, you mentioned it's an honor society, essentially, for people who are great achievers in the field of quantitative study and things like that.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: So it's an honor to be Phi Beta Kappa here in the United States.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: If you say you're Phi Beta Kappa, it's kind of like Magna Cum Laude or what have you.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, oh wow, this guy must be really smart.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: So it's kind of cool.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: It hasn't actually done that much in my career.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: I get like a newsletter from Phi Beta Kappa every year.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: They don't really have a lot of events or anything like that.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: But it's a nice distinction.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but I also, when I was in Stanford, graduated with distinction in product design and graduated with distinction in English.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: And that just means that you're a great academic achiever in those.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I was in fact the only member of my project design class to graduate with distinction.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: It was not because I was the greatest designer.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's simply because most of the rest of my classmates were struggling to actually pass their classes on the quantitative side.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so, therefore, since I was doing fine on the creative side and was the only person doing well on the quantitative side, I was the only person with distinction.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: So, Chris, uh one of the things uh that you will see uh with Indian engineers, if we were to look at it out of uh out of India, uh, not the ones who come to the US, uh a lot of uh you know technical uh skills is what they look at.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: But clearly, from what I can see from what you're saying, the importance of design thinking, the importance of storytelling, the importance of arts and design is so critical.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, how critical do you think is for an engineer to have these skills?
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's an interesting thing because it ties in with another element of my background.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I am a big believer in the power of storytelling in its various forms.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: So obviously, as somebody who studied English and literature and creative writing, I was really studying storytelling in the written form.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: But I also studied it in more the verbal communication side as well.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: So when I was at Stanford, one of my activities was improvisational comedy, which is performing without a script.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: And that means that you have to get very good at being able to adapt quickly.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: It also means you have to get very comfortable being on stage.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: And moreover, uh, it's very it's hard enough to be on stage for most folks.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine being on stage without a script, without any notes, without anything to go on other than whatever your wits can dredge up.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: So that was a great experience for me.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then in addition, Stanford recognized that it was really important for its engineering students and graduates to actually develop these storytelling and communication skills.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: That was the big complaint coming from the various companies.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, your graduates are brilliant, but we can't understand what they're saying.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: We need them to be leaders instead of just people who are individual contributors.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so the engineering department established the technical communications program to teach engineers public speaking, and the rest of the school as well.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't just engineers who took the class, it became a very famous class, and so many of the business school students would also take it because they recognized immediately, hey, this is something that I should get formal training in.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I took that public speaking class.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: I was an engineering student, so I was given preference, but I just took it because I wanted to.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: I thought it would be useful.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: And at the end of the class, which I thoroughly enjoyed, the teachers came to me and said, Hey, we think you have a real talent.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: Would you be interested in teaching the class?
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, Wow, that's really flattering and sure.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so I ended up taking another course, learning how to teach the class, and I taught public speaking at Stanford for a while as well.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: It was a much better student job.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: At the time, they paid the extremely generous sum of$9.50 an hour.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: And this is when the minimum wage was half that.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: So I felt like I was doing great, right?
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: I if you worked in the food service handing out food to other students, you get like four or five dollars an hour.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: Here I was again fifty.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: My gosh, I'm rolling in it.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: But that was why I but I did it because not just for the money, but because I thought it was really important.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I actively worked to develop my skills as a storyteller, as a communicator, and then I helped other people develop those skills.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that it is really critical.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: There are only so many things that you can do as an individual.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: Some of them are quite remarkable, right?
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: If you are Albert Einstein and you're working on the special and general theories of relativity and the photoelectric effect, or if you're Da Vinci and you're scribbling away in your notebooks, that's remarkable.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: But most of the large-scale endeavors that we go into require us to work with other people.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that means we have to be able to communicate this beautiful vision in our brains to other people and convince them, inspire them, get them to really jump on board.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the reason why you know I read that uh when uh you know founders come and pitch, when you take the other side, you do a better job by explaining their concepts hundred times better than what a founder does.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: I presume that's the skill that probably uh you know these acting classes gave you from Stanford, right?
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a combination of things.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so what you're referring to, I think, is something that I do that is very popular uh when I do it as part of a workshop or when I do it as part of an accelerator program, which is one of the very first things that will happen is we'll ask people to give us their brief pitch, their one to two minute pitch, and then I'll take a few notes and then I will pitch it back to them.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: And almost invariably, not always, sometimes they do such a great job that it doesn't really need me to pitch, but usually I can pitch it and improve it greatly, like 10X.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: X, 15x, whatever, just make it much better using the techniques I have.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what are the techniques?
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, first of all, the willingness to do something quickly like that is comes as something that comes from the improv background.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: The willingness to be on stage, the willingness to feel comfortable without necessarily having known all the material in depth, right?
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: So that is part of it.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: Just being willing to do it at all is a reflection of that improv background.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: But then the way I will tend to pitch, many, much of it is a reflection of the public speaking background, because what we teach in public speaking is the importance of creating a very simple structure and making sure that you convey that structure to people.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: So structuring your points, having specific bullets that you're going to hammer, the things that are going to stand apart, that's really part of the public speaking training.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then, of course, there's just the classic notion from Anders Erickson, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, of having the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: Having been in the startup world for so long and heard so many pitches and made so many pitches myself, there are just a lot of tricks and techniques I've picked up along the way.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: I feel very comfortable doing it.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's relatively easy for me to say, well, I think that this point is really going to cause you to stand out and emphasize that.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: So it's something that I like to do and uh been it's been very effective over the years, and a lot of entrepreneurs, it's made a big impression on them.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_03: So I think I would like to add one more layer to what we just discussed.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_03: So it's it's uh almost uh there is an element of playfulness that is very that's very much required, right?
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_03: Because even um it's it's one thing to be technically competent, uh to be very skillful, to be somebody who pursues the craft, uh, but it's also another thing to have a bit of a rebellious streak in you, right?
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_03: And uh um and I think to a large extent, uh the fact that you're coming from Stanford makes it even more fascinating, right?
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_03: Because Stanford has a history of faculty members who've been uh a little rebellious in how they actually view things and do things.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_03: And uh uh since we even spoke about David Kelly, I remember many years ago I watched a talk that he gave uh where he said that one of the best things that he designed.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know if I'm getting the phrase right, or but he said one of the things that he's most proud of was uh he gifted a phone uh to his then girlfriend who went on to become his wife, if I'm not mistaken.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_03: And he said, This is a very cool phone, and I want you to have it.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_03: And it had a um number pad on the holder, and the the trick in that product was she can dial whatever number she wanted, but it would always end up calling David.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_03: So there is there is this element of playfulness that also needs to be encouraged uh as um people are going ahead and um really striving to not just be contributors but also leaders.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_03: So, what is your take on the importance of playfulness in both uh somebody who's learning and somebody who's teaching and mentoring?
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_03: So, what's your take on that?
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think it's really essential for two primary reasons, and one is internal and one is external.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: The internal reason is that to get very good at something, to see results in any initiative usually requires you to be pretty persistent and perhaps even persistent beyond the point of reason, right?
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: Whenever we get started with something new, most of the time it's not gonna be very good.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so every bit of feedback is gonna be coming back and saying, stop, don't do this, go back to what's tried and true, right?
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: This is what the voice in our head, it's the voice that most people listen to.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: And having a sense of playfulness, of saying, hey, you know, I'm gonna have fun along the way.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to improve and iterate and get better.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: There's that design thinking again.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm also going to do it in a way where I'm going to enjoy the process that gives you a way to persist.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that increases the chances that you'll stick with something long enough to actually produce something of value.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then once you produce something of value, once you produce something great or innovative, all of a sudden the feedback might turn positive.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: And then it's much easier to keep going from there and to build on that success.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the internal side of it.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: The external side, when it comes to storytelling and communication, is just if you have a sense of playfulness, if you have a sense of fun, it's a lot more interesting.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: Many people in the United States can remember the classic movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: You may have seen it as well.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: And in it, uh an actor, actually an economist who people pulled out, uh the director saw and just said, Oh, this guy, I want to have him in my movie doing this, is a guy named Ben Stein.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: And in it, he is the most boring teacher imaginable as he's calling off the name role of the students.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, Bueller, Bueller, Bueller, and in this sort of monotone and very slow and very boring.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_00: And it's actually the way he talks.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: It turns out that he wasn't playing a character.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's actually kind of the way he is.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but that is terrible, right?
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: Who's going to pay attention?
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone's going to fall asleep.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: They show like, you know, students lying asleep, drooling, et cetera, et cetera.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: You have to bring that sense of playfulness to teaching.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, some of it is just instinctive, but some of it is just your attitude towards life.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: If you look at life with a sense of amusement and wonder and joy, then generally that gets conveyed to other people.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: If, on the other hand, you view life with a sense of grim determination, well, that's also going to get conveyed to people, and it's probably not going to seem very fun.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_03: So thank you.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you so much for that, uh, Chris.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_03: So just moving ahead uh into our career, um, you mentioned that you went to work for D.E.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_03: Shaw, right?
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_03: And very interesting, very interestingly, and this is going to be a very selfish uh selfish question.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_03: Because uh so I'm currently working as a product manager, and based on my research, uh way back in the 90s, uh 95-ish uh time period, if I'm not mistaken, you two were a product manager at DESHAW.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_03: Like you said, you went on to work uh to build their internet business, etc.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_03: So could you talk a little bit about what it was like to be a product manager back then and uh and be um what prompted you uh to uh leave de eShaw and go to Harvard Business School?
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, I think that the job of being a product manager doesn't change that much, although I would say that over the intervening years, product manager has become so much more prestigious.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: I wish that I were a product manager in this day and age, as opposed to back then when people weren't as certain about what it was.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: But really, especially in a technology business, the role of the product manager is to bridge the gap between the business side and the engineering side.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, these are two worlds which often don't speak the same language.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I, having an engineering background and having worked in the trenches, in the machine shops, coding and doing all these various things, could understand much of the perspective of the software developers and engineers.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then at the same time, having come from this background, now this was prior to business school, but a background of communication, of talking, of being able to write essays and things like that, then I also had a much better understanding on the business side.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: And even on the business side, there's a quantitative side involving spreadsheets and the like.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: And because I was very good at math, I could manage that as well.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so what I was doing at DSHA was acting as a translator and as a way of bridging the gap between the two.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: And this came out in several ways.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: So, for example, one thing I always remember was this we were building an online brokerage application, an online brokerage uh app that people would actually use to invest and everything like that.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: I was pioneering and all that, but we had a problem.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: And the problem was that the application process was a 17-step process.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: People had to go through 17 steps filling in information, and it was an accurate, faithful rendition of the actual paper application, which was really, really long.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, This will not do.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, what on earth is going to get people to persist through 17 pages of this stuff?
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I mentioned it to the VP of engineering who I had a good relationship with.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Well, Chris, this is this is what it is.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, take a look.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: We've done our best, and we have the application, the paper application, we've translated it, this is what it ends up being.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Okay, all right.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: But so I didn't argue with him then.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: What I did instead is I went away and I created a giant flow chart of the entire application and examined it, and then I said, I believe that it could be reduced to these four pages because I mapped out the dependencies and let me show you.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I showed him the big diagram of the existing application, and I showed him an app a diagram of what I believed would be a new application that would be much more streamlined.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, Ah, no, no, no.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: And then he began looking at it and looked at it carefully, and we looked at it together for about half an hour, and he said, You're right.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then what he did was he assigned one of my friends who is one of his top engineers to looking at it, and this guy being somebody who had an EECS degree from UC Berkeley, who was obviously a much better software developer and engineer than I was, and he figured out how to reduce it to three and implemented it.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: But that is a great example of saying, well, you know, I'm gonna take a different approach.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna look at this in a different way.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna look at it from the perspective, again, first and foremost, of the consumer and the user, and saying, oh my God, I don't know what to go through 17 pages worth of this stuff.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: But then also, you know, the key was not just saying, hey, 17 pages is too much.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: You guys got to figure out a way around it.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: It was also being willing to roll up my hands and at least demonstrate, hey, there is an approach that will work here.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: I may not be the best person to do it, but I'm gonna do this to demonstrate that it can be done.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then the people who are really good at this will figure out a way to actually make it happen.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so you can think of that piece of paper that I created as a prototype, right?
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_00: If we think about design thinking and rapid prototyping, I created a rapid prototype, and that was able to convince the VP of engineering to actually devote resources to doing something.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_00: And being a product manager is a challenge because you do not have complete authority over everyone.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: What you are trying to do is you are trying to persuade the various factions, the various entities, the engineering team, the marketing team, the sales team, and all these other folks to get on board with your vision.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so your ability to be a storyteller, to persuade, to convince, to get them to buy into your vision is critical to success.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why I think it's great training for eventually becoming a senior manager or even a CEO.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, historically, that's who becomes CEO in technology companies, the product managers.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: And that was one of the reasons why I went down that path, because I could foresee the rest of my career, and I said, you know, this is the thing that is going to be my competitive advantage, and this is what's going to allow me to eventually be a CEO and lead a company.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's a fantastic uh insight.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Chris, uh Chris, uh, your body of work in uh Blitz Scaling uh is something that's probably all over the net, and the book is phenomenal.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, some of the concepts that you talk there are pathbreaking, so to speak.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I want to kind of uh ask you a question.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh, you know, when you really look at uh Blitz scaling as a concept, uh what I could see is an inherent contradiction between uh you know uh a fundamentally uh you know uh basic science innovation?
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_01: Say, for example, let's take semiconductor as a business or uh or uh basic science as an innovation, the time it takes for adoption in a society is fairly long.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_01: So uh so does blitz scaling uh apply to certain businesses where the technology is mature and there's strong adoption versus where where there is fundamental innovation and behavioral change that's required, uh blitz scaling needs to be done very differently.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, no, you're absolutely right.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, in my own investing practice, I have a firm called Blitz Scaling Ventures that invests in blitzscaling companies.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: One of our rules is what we call no science experiments.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: And what we mean by that is that our value add in terms of being able to help companies succeed centers around helping them figure out their go-to-market strategy and how to build their product so it's going to have the appropriate network effects to really generate a winner-take most market dynamic.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_00: It is not around the question of, well, how do I get this particular molecule to cure cancer, or how do I get this particular bit of hardware to defy gravity, or what have you?
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: Like nuclear fusion is a great example, or supersonic jet liners.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: These are areas where people are investing.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, my co-author, Reed Hoffman, has invested in both nuclear fusion and supersonic jet liners.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: But he is a genius and has a very long-term point of view.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I am a humble guy who is just trying to figure out how to best take advantage of his ideas.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_00: And from my perspective, it's just too difficult to commit to the 10 to 20 year time horizon when running a venture capital fund with a 10-year life.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so, as a result of that, and by the way, Reed's investments in those are personal investments as opposed to venture capital investments because he can have that long-term point of view.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_00: He's really focused on how do you build incredible businesses over time and he's willing to wait.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: So, from my perspective, you know, we do focus on companies and technologies where there is either demand in the marketplace or we believe there will be demand in the marketplace once the marketplace becomes aware of it.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's okay for the marketplace not to be aware of it.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, part of what we're doing is we are making predictions about the future and predicting that something's going to be a big market, as opposed to saying that it is a big market today.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_00: Because everyone thinks it's a big market today.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone's going to go after it.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: There's going to be so many competitors, it's going to be very hard to be the one winner.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so we are making predictions about the future, but on the other hand, we are not making predictions about when a technology is going to be ready.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_00: So let me give you an example of how I applied this even before writing the book.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_00: One of the companies I was involved with, and one of my wins, I suppose, is Ustream, which was a live video pioneer.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: It rose up at the same time as Justin TV, which became Twitch, and the two companies really pioneered the notion of live video on the internet.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_00: And ultimately, Ustream was successful.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: It sold to IBM for$130 million, and so it was a good outcome for investors and shareholders and everyone.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_00: So that's all wonderful.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things that happened is when we looked at it, we had to make predictions about the future.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: And there were two predictions I made about the future.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: The first is I believe that live video is going to be a significant component of people's consumption of content.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I believe it's going to be significant because there's a tremendous power to live to begin with.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_00: Many people will go to a music concert or attend a sporting event.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's great.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_00: Or they'll watch a sporting event on TV or what, but they will never go tape a sporting event and then watch it, you know, two days later.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because what's the point?
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_00: And there are concert albums, but for the most part, people don't view those as a substitute for going to the concert.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: Being there live creates a kind of emotional dynamic that's just very different than having something that's recorded.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_00: So that was point number one.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: Point number two was an economic point, which is the reason why people have been dissuaded from doing this before is that it is very expensive.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_00: Live video is more expensive than recorded video.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_00: And to at the time make it work, you had to buy a bunch of Adobe Flash media server licenses and they were expensive.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then you would have to try to make up money with advertising and sponsorships, and that money really wasn't there.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the question would become, well, how is this going to work?
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Well, we're going to go ahead and aggressively go after it now, even though the unit economics don't work.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: And people are like, Well, why?
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_00: What's going on here?
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Well, it's very simple.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_00: There are two things that are very predictable.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: The first is an ironclad rule of media that Mary Meeker actually established, which is that over time, the amount of advertising dollars flowing into a medium is going to be proportional to the amount of time being spent consuming that medium.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_00: So in the early days, people said, oh my God, online advertising rates are so low.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_00: But people like me were like, yeah, but it will be there someday.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_00: Because right now, internet advertising represents 30% of consumption, but 5% of dollars.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_00: And someday it's going to represent 70% of consumption and 70% of dollars.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_00: So over time, we're actually going to be improving faster than just the growth of the internet itself.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: And the same thing applied to live video.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, listen, this is going to be something that people are going to consume and eventually the advertisers will catch up.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a question of timing.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_00: And the other factor that meant that we could succeed is that Moore's law applies to the cost of providing the bandwidth as well.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm like, listen, the cost of providing the service is going to fall by 50% every 12 to 18 months.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_00: And we can predictably say that within two years, this, thanks to those two trends, will be an economically viable business.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the trick is because there's a two-sided marketplace element of broadcasters and viewers, you need to get to scale faster than your competitors.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_00: So we, by understanding where the direction is going to go in the next couple of years, are going to aggressively go after it now, even though that means we will need to finance this company through some lean times, because that will allow us to be one of the market leaders when it actually becomes economically viable.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_00: And sure enough, these are all the things that actually came to pass, and that's the reason why the company was able to sell for$130 million.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_03: Since you brought up the topic of having a vision of the future on which you're going to bet in which direction the company should go, uh, one of the things that commonly comes up uh comes up in these sort of circumstances are disagreements.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_03: So I would like to know what methods or tactics that uh you use uh when there is a disagreement uh from both as a from an investor front and from a uh founder operator front as well.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_03: And what are some uh common patterns that you have seen very smart people fall into and make mistakes when they're actually disagreeing with somebody?
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_00: And this is something that you know I still deal with on a daily basis, right?
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_00: This is part of human nature.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_00: We see things differently, we disagree.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_00: And the thing to remember is I always tell people listen, people are disagreeing for good reasons.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_00: Their perspective is what it is, and they are trying their best for the company, just like you're trying your best for the company.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not that they're your opponent or your enemy, they just have a different point of view, and it's entirely possible that their point of view is right and your point of view is wrong.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody is right a hundred percent of the time.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_00: So having a degree of humility about these things is always very important.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_00: But that's just you know, background, that's not actually a technique for fixing it.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's just you know necessary for everyone to sort of respect each other and understand that people are doing this for rational reasons, they're not irrational, there's always a reason behind things.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_00: So, what are the specific techniques?
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_00: The first is to be very precise in your language and make sure people spell out the assumptions they're making.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_00: Because an engineering team, an engineering leader will say we can't do that.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: And that doesn't mean this is impossible to do.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: What it may mean instead is because of the current data structures in how we are storing our data, this will prove very difficult.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_00: The specific the specific implementation you're suggesting will be very difficult.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_00: But if you take a step back and you explore those assumptions, you know there's two assumptions being made.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: One is that there is a particular way that this is going to happen.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_00: And the second is that this is the only way that this can happen.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, if the business side and the engineering side are going to be able to trust each other and collaborate, then on the business side, you could say, look, here is what we're trying to accomplish.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_00: We want to offer the following things to the user, and here's why we believe this will be helpful.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the evidence that the user will actually adopt and respond to this.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then on the engineering side, the engineering leader can say, Oh, well, if that's what you're trying to do, actually we can do something very similar if we do the following.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_00: And that doesn't require us to completely change our data structure, and in fact, we can get this to you in two weeks from now.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a conclusion that they would never reach if they were just dug in and saying, Well, why are you telling me that just can't be done?
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you just can't just say no all the time.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_00: And on the other hand, the engineering leader says, Well, you keep asking for the impossible.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_00: You don't understand what I'm facing.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_00: That kind of conflict happens all the time in these companies, and a lot of it is because they're not taking a step back, looking at the underlying assumptions.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: And operating in a collaborative way.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: So that's one very important thing.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_00: The other very important technique is that people will go ahead and have these different arguments of various kinds.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_00: And if you are like me as a product manager or as a CEO trying to mediate these kinds of debates, part of what you need to be able to do to mediate the debate is to really say, well, let me make sure I understand what you're saying and restate it and make sure that the way you restate it actually reflects what they think.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_00: And this process is tedious sometimes because they'll say, no, that's not actually it.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's actually this.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, okay.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's try this again.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_00: And it's only when you're able to articulate one side's thoughts effectively that you've truly understood them.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then when you've done that for both sides, then you'll have a deeper understanding and you'll be able to more effectively act as that translator so that each side can understand the other.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not just a question of having the right attitude, it's a question of putting in the work to deeply understand what is actually being said.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_00: Because far too often, whether it is in English or Hindi or whatever language, no language is as precise as code.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_00: And even code can be written in multiple ways.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, is there only one way to write that particular function or class or method or what have you?
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_00: No, there's many ways to do it.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so even though code is the most precise form of language, it still has imprecision involved.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so we must work to understand what's actually being said and you know give each other some slack along the way because everyone is trying to do the right thing.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's just everyone has a different set of starting points and assumptions.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_03: And the next thing that really struck me when I read Blitzcaling was yes, there are multiple examples within the American and to a certain extent European uh entrepreneurship context, where there has been a history and a tradition of applying these techniques and seeing rapid and massive growth.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_03: But to a certain extent, if you really assess it, these are very these are mature markets.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_03: These are countries with a deep history of entrepreneurship, technical leadership, etc.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_03: So from where we are sitting in India, India is at a very interesting stage where it is entering that stage where it's looking to build massive companies, it's looking to grow very fast, and the companies are also exceedingly ambitious because they're being led by exceedingly ambitious individuals and teams.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_03: So my question to you is when you're looking at a developing or a adolescent economy, if I may use that term uh in terms of entrepreneurship, uh there is a certain skepticism that certain people might have towards the tactics of blitz scaling.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_03: So, could you talk a little bit about how should companies which are growing in these geographies think about blitz scaling uh a little differently than the standard US uh case studies, so to speak?
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_00: And this is one of the important things to note about blitz scaling.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's a general set of principles that needs to be adapted to the context in which it's being applied.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_00: And we specifically speak about blitz scaling in markets outside of the United States and Europe, primarily the United States, that's where most of our experience lies.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_00: Because in many cases there will be less infrastructure, the market will be less developed.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_00: Not always, right?
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I often tell people you'd be surprised by how poor the infrastructure in the United States is in many ways.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_00: We are behind on internet access, we are behind in many ways on some of our mobile services.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_00: If you've ever traveled to the United States, you know that our airports are a disgrace.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so there are many ways in which the United States can actually be behind as well.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_00: There's no reason to believe the United States is always in the forefront of things.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_00: Nevertheless, when you are blitz scaling in an environment where you don't have as much of the infrastructure, let's call it the delivery infrastructure, the payment infrastructure, the human capital, then what you need to do when you're blitz scaling under those circumstances is to build much of that infrastructure yourself.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_00: And this causes blitz scaling in emerging markets or developing markets to be slower because there is more that you have to do.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_00: Or you cannot just plug and play into existing infrastructure.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_00: You may have to develop it yourself.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so over in China, Alibaba has to develop its own logistics infrastructure.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_00: It can't just tap into UPS like you would in the United States.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_00: Alibaba has to tap and develop its own payments infrastructure.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_00: It can't just use the Visa or MasterCard network because people are not banked and they do not have those accounts.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so these are things that the Blitzscaler has to take into account.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_00: However, if you are able to build that infrastructure, then that becomes a powerful competitive moat that allows you to fend off competitors and it becomes a foundation on which you can build.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_00: So in many ways, what happens is there is a longer startup period for blitz scalar in a developing market.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_00: But then once it gets close to scale, it often accelerates and is growing faster than a Blitzscaler in an established market like the United States, because it now has massive competitive advantages over its competitors.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_00: And we saw this in China with Alibaba, we saw this in Brazil in Latin America with Mercado Libre, and we see it playing out in India as well.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_00: If you were able to build the infrastructure, and then you were able to really be much more effective.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_00: And there are times when the government can come in and actually help.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_00: One of the markets that we operate in is called Brazil.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_00: And Brazil is obviously like India, it's part of the BRICS.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_00: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and I can't remember which the S stands for.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody will remind me at some point in time.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_00: But Brazil recently introduced, just a year or two ago, something called PICS, which is a payment system sponsored by the government.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_00: Usually the governments are not very smart.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_00: They don't do this, right?
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's up to the private sector to create a payment system, and that can result in very valuable companies in the United States, a company like PayPal, for example, or a Stripe.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_00: And over in India, with some ups and downs, but a company like PayTM, for example, you know, providing payment infrastructure can be very powerful.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_00: In Brazil, the government actually created a payments infrastructure PICS that made it very easy for everyone in the country to do payments online.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_00: And because it was a government offering, the government could say you need to pay your government bills with this.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_00: So it gives it an inherent customer that everyone has to deal with.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so that helped create the conditions for new businesses to arise in Brazil.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_00: So this kind of infrastructure is the big difference.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_00: The other big difference, as you sort of intuited, but one which India is well positioned to deal with, is the human capital side.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_00: So on the human capital side, it is really challenging to grow if you do not have people with some experience with growth.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so the Silicon Valley of the United States has a tremendous advantage because for decades people have been growing these companies.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's just much more human capital available here per capita than just about any other place in the world.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_00: However, a place like India, which of course has the world's largest population, which has a fantastic higher educational system.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, you know, there are I'm very familiar with the various IIT campuses because we would always try to hire as many of those graduates as possible, whether it was at DESHA or any other company.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_00: But then, of course, there are plenty of other great institutions as well.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_00: There are so many smart people in India that you have a lot of that human capital, but you have to find it.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_00: You might also, as a nation, tap into the brain power of the diaspora.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_00: So many people of Indian descent have traveled to and been enormously successful in Silicon Valley, and at least some of them feel the tug of home and want to return and bring their human capital back with them.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_00: So, in many ways, I feel like India is really well positioned.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_00: Broadly speaking, India has great demographics.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's got an enormous population and a big emerging middle class.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_00: Demographically, it's not sitting on a time bomb like China is in terms of an aging population yet.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_00: So there's still a lot of demographic dividend yet to come.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_00: India has fantastic leading educational institutions, great ties to the United States.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that English is one of the primary languages of the country, it's really an enormous set of advantages.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, there are disadvantages in terms of some of the elements of infrastructure and the federal system of governance and all that sort of thing.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_00: And there can be there can be various things that hold things up, and maybe there are sectors of the economy that are too dominated by the existing players.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_00: But that being said, all told, if I were looking for opportunity in this world, I would say India is one of the best places to find it.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_03: The Contraminds podcast is available on all leading podcast players.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_03: And if you are interested in revisiting past episodes or taking a look at our show notes from this episode, please visit us at www.contraminds.com forward slash blog.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_03: And now back to the show.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_01: So uh Chris, when you're really talking about blitz scaling and human capital, uh there is uh one um you know uh chapter that you talk about management innovation, right?
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_01: So the people who are the guys who are at uh you know stage where you are uh at you are like a village when you move to a nation, the kind of people that you actually need to scale the company are very different.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_01: And uh while we have human capital, uh which is really uh you know intelligent, a lot of technical skills are there, uh, one of the challenges is the fear of failure.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_01: One of the challenges is really ambition.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_01: One of the challenges that I see is uh, you know, how do I really uh you know, do I go to a sexy company and do the job and earn money versus you know, let me kind of take up something very innovative.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_01: And if you want the next next Microsoft or a Google to come and come out of India, you would need a different mindset.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_01: So, what do you think are the fundamentals that probably need to be done by this kind of a human capital?
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_01: And what do you think are critical to look at and actually practice through what I call as deliberate way of thinking, doing, and having a certain discipline?
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_00: So the big advantage of Silicon Valley is the density of connections.
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_00: There are many things that people look at with Silicon Valley.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, great school, so many smart people.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_00: This is true of a lot of places.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_00: The thing that really sets Silicon Valley apart is the density of the connections between people.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_00: And that makes it easier for human capital to be allocated.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it's really a much better place at allocating human capital than anywhere else.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_00: So, what are the key elements to that for Silicon Valley?
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the first thing is there is a distributed sort of awareness of which companies are doing well and which companies are not.
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that extends not just on the publicly traded side, but on the private side.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_00: There's constant flow of information back for, hey, which company is killing, which company is doing well.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of sophistication on the part of the people who are migrating between companies in terms of how they make their decisions.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_00: They're looking at the investor syndicate, they're looking at evidence.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh engineers themselves are doing the kind of due diligence that a venture capitalist would do because they're not investing money, but they're investing their time.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_00: And they're probably giving up the ability to make an enormous amount of money working for Google or Facebook or one of those places in exchange for the upside.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so that system of allocating human capital essentially looks like the venture capital system.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_00: And people are allocating based on promise, people are allocating based on their belief in the future, and so there's this extreme future orientation.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_00: And the other side of the venture capital mindset is also the willingness to understand that failure is the default outcome.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_00: Venture capitalists famously will make investments and only about 10% of them will pay off, at least at the early stages.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_00: And the same holds true for the employees.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_00: So what's happening is that this distributed method of decision making really resembles the venture capital decision-making model.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_00: People are making bets on the future, making bets with their own time on what company is going to be successful.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_00: And they're using all the same tools.
• 57:23
  SPEAKER_00: They may be looking and doing due diligence, like a venture capitalist.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_00: They'll look at the strength of the syndicate, and all of these things help human capital to be allocated to the highest possible uses, at least from an economic standpoint.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_00: There can be a broad debate over whether or not we are allocating too many of our brightest minds to developing consumer software, for example, versus basic research and building flying cars.
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_00: This is a common lament that goes on.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_00: But the fact is that these are economically rational decisions that are being undertaken by a distributed network of people.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_00: So that mindset of looking for opportunity also means embracing the fact that most investments don't work out.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_00: 90% of venture capital investments fail.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_00: And when you are an individual employee investing in a company by choosing to spend your time there, many of the times it's going to fail as well.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_00: And the secret is not in being so loyal that I'm going to go down with the ship.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_00: The secret is in saying, when this does not look like it's going to work, I'm going to honorably try to find the next opportunity.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't mean leaving founders in the lurch or abandoning people, just suddenly showing up one day and saying, hey, I'm gone, but does mean saying, hey, I don't think this is going to work out.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to start looking.
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_00: Let's figure this out.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_00: And being as open and honest as possible.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that the mindset is going to develop in India.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_00: I think that there is a very sophisticated venture capital industry.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_00: I think people are becoming more aware of venture capital.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_00: And certainly, you know, here in the United States, people were not as aware of venture capital and its dynamics 20 to 30 years ago.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that there is an education process.
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_00: But thanks to the internet, that education process takes place faster than ever before.
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_00: And hopefully, this mindset will spread because it is a better mindset for allocating human capital.
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_01: As a follow-up, uh, how important uh is ambiguity and managing ambiguity in a technical person uh critical to building this kind of a uh you know capability?
• 59:24
  SPEAKER_00: So you mentioned something that's very important, right?
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_00: Ambiguity, uncertainty.
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_00: The fact is these things are always present when you're trying to do something new.
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_00: The fact is, if you're doing something new, then other people haven't done it before.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_00: There's no proven playbook, and there's going to be ambiguity and uncertainty.
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_00: People will say, Well, is this gonna work?
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I say, I don't know.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_00: We just think that's that that's the wrong question.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_00: The right question is, is this the highest probability action we can take, or is this the best expected value action we can take?
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_00: And therein lies the mindset shift that you want to make, which is to say, I'm gonna get comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty around outcome.
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_00: But what I'm also going to do is I'm going to look at the expected value of this action.
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm also going to look at what is going to be enabled if we're successful, right?
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_00: In many cases, success comes from compounding, from building on one success with another success with another success with another success.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_00: And compounding creates exponential growth, and that's what we're really after.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so having a mindset where you're not just measuring yourself on what percentage of your initiatives succeed, but rather on whether or not you're making the right expected value choices and whether or not you're looking out into the future and making choices based on what's going to open up new possibilities as well.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_03: So, Chris, just a final question before we go into the rapid fire segment.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_03: Um while researching for the episode, um I I heard that um you have a personal mission statement, and do correct me if I'm getting this wrong, which is helping interesting people do interesting things.
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_03: So my question is how did you come up with this mission statement?
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, this personal mission statement, and what might have been some uh other iterations that it must have gone through for you to come down and say, hey, this is it, and this is my personal mission statement.
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_03: So could you talk a little about that?
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_00: So the there are obviously two parts to it, right?
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_00: There is the helping other people and there's the interesting things, interesting people and interesting things.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I would say the interesting part is probably the part that developed first.
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_00: As somebody who was growing up who really enjoyed being entertaining and who enjoyed being entertained, I really had a focus on interestingness.
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_00: And in many ways, when I was at Stanford, I was making choices based on what was interesting.
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_00: I thought creative writing was interesting, I thought product design was interesting, not just to me, but to other people as well.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_00: I enjoyed standing out and being unusual.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_00: I enjoyed being someone that people would remember.
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so that was the interesting part.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_00: But it was primarily an individual focus.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_00: And probably like many of you and your listeners who are high achievers, when I was young, I would resent group projects.
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I resented them because it meant I was being slowed down by working with other people.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_00: And really, if they just let me work on this by myself, I'd do a better job and faster, and it'd be so much easier, anyways.
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_00: And those are all typically true.
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_00: I often tell founders, I said, listen, you know, the reason you're a founder is that you are really talented and intelligent and hardworking, and you are probably better than everyone at your company at everything, with the possible exception of maybe some highly technical things if you're non-technical co-founder and you have an engineering team.
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_00: But there's only one of you.
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_00: And there's only so much you can do as a lone genius in this world, and you really need to be able to figure out how to work with others.
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that was the lesson I gradually learned as I grew older and matured.
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_00: I realized, hey, you know, being an incandescent individual genius is fine, but it only extends so far.
• 1:03:22
  SPEAKER_00: And really, in order to get things done, you have to work with others.
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's where doing things like being a product manager really come into play, right?
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_00: That is a question of influence.
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_00: And even though when I was young I resented having responsibility without authority, I eventually realized that's the nate the basic natural state of life.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody's a dictator.
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone's got to persuade other people into doing other things.
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_00: And what I realized over time is I was more interested in being involved in the most interesting things than I was in being the headliner, the person who got all the credit for it.
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_00: Because it was my observation that when something is enormously successful, there's plenty of credit to go around and everyone benefits.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_00: And moreover, if you focus just on the things you do yourself, you're very limited.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_00: You can only do one or two things at a time.
• 1:04:13
  SPEAKER_00: And it really felt to me like I could have a lot more impact in the world by helping other people, by helping other people who are tightly focused and who are going to carry this project through to make their project more effective, to gently shape it and influence it.
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's how I came up with my mission statement.
• 1:04:32
  SPEAKER_00: I gradually realized that my natural personality was not such that I had to obsessively be in charge of something and get all the credit for it, but rather that I just wanted to touch as many interesting things as possible and have as large an impact as possible.
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_00: And by helping others, I could gain leverage and have a much bigger impact.
• 1:04:50
  SPEAKER_00: And whether that is by working them with them directly, one-on-one, as in a mentorship relationship, or whether it is working on a one-to-many basis by writing a book or giving a talk at a conference or something like that, those are the things that I want to devote my time to because I thought those were the best use of my time and best fit with what I actually wanted out of life.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much for that answer.
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you so much, uh, Chris.
• 1:05:15
  SPEAKER_03: And uh let's get into the rapid fire section.
• 1:05:18
  SPEAKER_03: So we're going to throw a couple of fastballs, curveballs at you.
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_03: So uh do be uh prepared to be a little surprised with this is where that improv training comes into play.
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_00: You nothing that's in the past week has surprised me.
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh however, I will warn you that I will not do anything to incriminate myself.
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_03: Nice.
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_03: So, first question.
• 1:05:42
  SPEAKER_03: Um, what are some of the books that have influenced you the most over the course of your life?
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_00: So there are a couple of books that I will cite and mention.
• 1:05:49
  SPEAKER_00: I think all books are influential.
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_00: I think that one of the benefits of reading books is being able to draw lessons from them, and that includes fiction as well.
• 1:05:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I still draw lessons from fictional books all the time.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_00: To drawing lessons from nonfiction.
• 1:06:02
  SPEAKER_00: But we're going to focus on the books that have had the greatest influence.
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, book number one I'm going to mention is Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.
• 1:06:10
  SPEAKER_00: A big part of my maturation, as you heard, was learning to go from an individual contributor to somebody who influenced others.
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously, a book that's called How to Win Friends and Influence People is all about that.
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_00: And reading that book was very seminal in sort of understanding how to better have an empathetic point of view and to get the most out of working with others.
• 1:06:30
  SPEAKER_00: So that was definitely a big, big book for me.
• 1:06:33
  SPEAKER_00: Another book that was really influential for me and for many other people is the combination of Crossing the Chasm and The Innovator's Dilemma.
• 1:06:44
  SPEAKER_00: And these two books really kind of summarize what's really important when it comes to the startup industry.
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_00: Crossing the Chasm, of course, is by Jeffrey Moore, and it talks about how the big challenge for startup companies is to cross the chasm between early adopters and the mainstream and establish things like the beachhead strategy, which again you could see play out over and over and over again.
• 1:07:07
  SPEAKER_00: A company like Airbnb establishes a beachhead in being able to provide shared rooms and apartments, eventually branches out, has tree houses, castles, and everything, right?
• 1:07:16
  SPEAKER_00: So the crossing the chasm strategy remains so important to this day.
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_00: Innovators Dilemma similar, which basically says this was by the great Clay Christensen.
• 1:07:26
  SPEAKER_00: The late great Clay Christensen, who is an amazing guy, did have a chance to work with him a little bit when I was at Stanford.
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I have friends with a number of his proteges, and they say amazing things about him.
• 1:07:37
  SPEAKER_00: Great human being as well as a brilliant thinker, one of the most influential management thinkers of the past 50 years.
• 1:07:42
  SPEAKER_00: But with Innovator's Dilemma, what he said very specifically is the disruptive technologies do not look like they're going to dominate the market at first.
• 1:07:51
  SPEAKER_00: They're at the low end, they look like toys, they have very limited applications.
• 1:07:55
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, you see the tie between the two because those limited applications are the beach head.
• 1:08:00
  SPEAKER_00: And then they gradually get better and better.
• 1:08:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the key is their rate of improvement is greater than the rate of improvement of the existing incremental established technology.
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is another way, another lens of understanding how the entire startup world works.
• 1:08:14
  SPEAKER_00: We're constantly disrupting from below.
• 1:08:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's always what's going to happen.
• 1:08:19
  SPEAKER_00: And understanding these two books and their principles has been critical to my success in the startup world.
• 1:08:25
  SPEAKER_00: Great.
• 1:08:25
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Chris.
• 1:08:26
  SPEAKER_00: My next question is what does success mean to you?
• 1:08:31
  SPEAKER_00: So success is a combination of things.
• 1:08:33
  SPEAKER_00: People will often say, well, it's not about the money.
• 1:08:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, money is still very important.
• 1:08:37
  SPEAKER_00: I can tell you that.
• 1:08:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I often say, I've tried rich, I've tried poor.
• 1:08:41
  SPEAKER_00: Let me tell you, rich is better.
• 1:08:43
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not something where even just becoming rich allows you to stay rich because there's expenses and other things and people adjust over time.
• 1:08:52
  SPEAKER_00: So money is still important.
• 1:08:54
  SPEAKER_00: Traditional markets of success like reputation are still important.
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_00: Those are absolutely essential things that you should try to achieve.
• 1:09:01
  SPEAKER_00: And you should not feel ashamed of saying, I want money, I want people to respect me, I want fame.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_00: Those are all things that it's okay to want, but they are not the most important things to want, right?
• 1:09:12
  SPEAKER_00: Because our study of human psychology tells us that, in fact, the very wealthy tend to be less happy than the rest of us.
• 1:09:19
  SPEAKER_00: And this is not just sour grapes, right?
• 1:09:22
  SPEAKER_00: The incidence of divorce, the incidence of substance abuse, all these things rise dramatically.
• 1:09:27
  SPEAKER_00: There was a study that was done just of people who are private jet owners.
• 1:09:31
  SPEAKER_00: And the rates of all these negative things was enormously higher for them.
• 1:09:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that's true whether they were male or female, by the way.
• 1:09:38
  SPEAKER_00: The women who were extremely wealthy were also just as likely to get divorced, have substance abuse problems.
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_00: Oftentimes people blame this on men.
• 1:09:45
  SPEAKER_00: Not true.
• 1:09:45
  SPEAKER_00: It is a product of the environment.
• 1:09:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's important to remember what actually makes people happy, and what actually makes people happy are a couple of specific things.
• 1:09:55
  SPEAKER_00: These are drawn from a great book called Why We Do What We Do by Edward Decchi, who's an academic writing in the field of psychology.
• 1:10:03
  SPEAKER_00: And this is really a book about motivation.
• 1:10:06
  SPEAKER_00: And what the book says is that there are extrinsic motivations I just described.
• 1:10:10
  SPEAKER_00: I want to be rich, I want to be famous.
• 1:10:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then there are intrinsic motivations.
• 1:10:15
  SPEAKER_00: And the intrinsic motivations are the ones where if you follow these motivations, you will be happier, you will be more productive, you will be more of a help to the people around you.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_00: And that's because the key intrinsic motivations are to have good relationships with the people you care about, to experience personal growth, ongoing personal growth, however you define it, and to be a part of something bigger by giving back to the community of people around you.
• 1:10:45
  SPEAKER_00: And these are things that are non-competitive.
• 1:10:47
  SPEAKER_00: All of us could do all those various things, right?
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_00: When we say rich and famous, it's always a question of being relatively rich or relatively famous.
• 1:10:55
  SPEAKER_00: I want to be richer than the other people.
• 1:10:56
  SPEAKER_00: I want to be famous.
• 1:10:57
  SPEAKER_00: And there's studies that show that people would rather be twice as rich as their neighbors and yet than be half as rich and yet be much, much richer on an absolute scale.
• 1:11:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's a comparison.
• 1:11:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I believe it was Theodore Roosevelt who said comparison is the thief of joy.
• 1:11:14
  SPEAKER_00: In contrast, the intrinsic motivations I'm talking about, you're not competing to say my relationships, my loved ones are better than your relationships with your loved ones.
• 1:11:23
  SPEAKER_00: All you care about is that you have good relationships.
• 1:11:25
  SPEAKER_00: Your personal growth is like I'm growing faster than you know.
• 1:11:27
  SPEAKER_00: I'm growing relative to myself.
• 1:11:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm giving back and taking part in something.
• 1:11:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so those intrinsic motivations are so important.
• 1:11:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I think when you want to define success, success means all the traditional markers of success, but the ones that will bring you true happiness and make you a better member of society are those intrinsic motivations, which again are good relationships with the people you care about, a sense of ongoing personal growth, and giving back and being a part of something bigger than yourself.
• 1:11:54
  SPEAKER_03: I I just want the listeners, if you're listening to this on audio, to know that I have a giant smile going from one end of my face to the other because I love this answer so much.
• 1:12:04
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you so much for that, Chris.
• 1:12:05
  SPEAKER_03: My pleasure.
• 1:12:06
  SPEAKER_03: My next question to you is if you could invite four guests for a dream dinner, who would they be and why?
• 1:12:12
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a fascinating one.
• 1:12:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I've answered the question to a certain extent in my book, The Alliance.
• 1:12:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna cite that just so people want to say, hey, you're stealing from yourself.
• 1:12:23
  SPEAKER_00: So in my book, The Alliance, along with my friends Ben Kaznok, and Reid Hoffman, we write about one of the ways to figure out what your key priorities, aspirations, and values are, is to ask yourself who are the people you really admire, heroes that you could uh you could model yourself on.
• 1:12:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that conveniently enough gives me three people that I would automatically invite, and I just have to pick a fourth.
• 1:12:47
  SPEAKER_00: So the three figures, and they could be any figures, from historical figures to fictional figures.
• 1:12:53
  SPEAKER_00: And the three figures I cited are, first of all, Abraham Lincoln, uh, 16th president of the United States of America.
• 1:13:00
  SPEAKER_00: Many people consider him America's greatest president.
• 1:13:03
  SPEAKER_00: He led the country through its most difficult time, was also perhaps the greatest writer and orator of any of our presidents, and that's saying something because we had some pretty good ones along the way.
• 1:13:14
  SPEAKER_00: And somebody who rose, uh, really the quintessential American story, rose from nothing, from a poor background, no education, to become the president of the United States and the most revered person in this country.
• 1:13:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it was due to several things.
• 1:13:29
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, his innate talent.
• 1:13:31
  SPEAKER_00: He was immensely gifted, incredibly intelligent.
• 1:13:35
  SPEAKER_00: Physically, he was basically an action hero, right?
• 1:13:38
  SPEAKER_00: He could, uh he was stronger and taller and faster.
• 1:13:42
  SPEAKER_00: It almost seems like he's not human.
• 1:13:43
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, there is a uh there is a comic book series called Invincible, which Amazon made into a television animated series where there is somebody named the Immortal.
• 1:13:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it turns out the Immortal was Abraham Lincoln and many other figures throughout history.
• 1:13:58
  SPEAKER_00: Somehow he's just lived forever and he he pops up in throughout history as someone when he's needed, who is literally a superhero.
• 1:14:06
  SPEAKER_00: But, anyways, Abraham Lincoln.
• 1:14:08
  SPEAKER_00: So obviously, I would love to be a superhero.
• 1:14:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not.
• 1:14:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I like to think I'm fairly intelligent.
• 1:14:14
  SPEAKER_00: But the key to Abraham Lincoln's success was not just his intelligence, but that orientation towards others.
• 1:14:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like there's a famous story.
• 1:14:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Edwin Stanton became Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of War.
• 1:14:26
  SPEAKER_00: And Stanton was a rival of Lincoln's, and had also, even more incredibly, treated him very shabbily earlier in their career.
• 1:14:36
  SPEAKER_00: So Lincoln was a lawyer, and Stanton was a very famous lawyer, much more famous than Lincoln.
• 1:14:41
  SPEAKER_00: And his firm had hired Lincoln to be a part of a case.
• 1:14:45
  SPEAKER_00: And basically it was just because they needed to have someone local.
• 1:14:47
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't want to do anything, they just needed him to be there, and he happened to be a member of that particular bar or that particular location.
• 1:14:55
  SPEAKER_00: And they didn't want him to do any work.
• 1:14:57
  SPEAKER_00: But Lincoln being Lincoln had carefully researched the case and come up with all these things and provided this whole brief, and here's all the information you need to know.
• 1:15:04
  SPEAKER_00: And Stanton basically said, listen, we didn't hire you for your brain.
• 1:15:07
  SPEAKER_00: We hired you because of where you are, and he threw it in the garbage.
• 1:15:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so Stanton really treated him quite shabbily.
• 1:15:13
  SPEAKER_00: And then, of course, later on, they were both running for president, and Lincoln ultimately won.
• 1:15:19
  SPEAKER_00: But he saw the incredible capability of Stanton.
• 1:15:23
  SPEAKER_00: He was willing to overlook the slights and the various criticisms that Stanton had leveled against him and all these different things because he was focused on what's going to be best for the United States of America, what's best for the country.
• 1:15:35
  SPEAKER_00: I need the very best people.
• 1:15:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so he made Edwin Stanton his Secretary of War, and the two of them worked together side by side, endless hours in the telegraph rooms following the progress of the war.
• 1:15:46
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, they ultimately won that war.
• 1:15:48
  SPEAKER_00: And when Lincoln was assassinated very tragically after the end of the war, Stanton was heartbroken.
• 1:15:55
  SPEAKER_00: And he is the one who said when Lincoln was dying, he said, now he belongs to the ages.
• 1:16:01
  SPEAKER_00: And he became the most admired, most beloved figure in Stanton's life.
• 1:16:07
  SPEAKER_00: Now that is a sign of the character of Abraham Lincoln, and one of the reasons why it would be so incredible to get a chance to talk to someone who's so intelligent, so wise, so remarkable in so many ways.
• 1:16:21
  SPEAKER_00: The second person I would mention, and I do want to choose someone from the world of business, because too often the world of business gets short shrift when it comes to these things, is a figure who I think really created the original soul of Silicon Valley, and that's David Packard of Hewlett-Packard.
• 1:16:37
  SPEAKER_00: Hewlett-Packard, of course, one of the great corporations of the 20th century, still around, still very valuable, but not quite as prominent as it once was, as it was under Bill and Dave, as they were known, pioneered all the good things of Silicon Valley.
• 1:16:51
  SPEAKER_00: Pioneered broad ownership of stock options and bonuses and profit sharing.
• 1:16:58
  SPEAKER_00: Pioneered a more humane management style.
• 1:17:01
  SPEAKER_00: They came up with management by walking around.
• 1:17:04
  SPEAKER_00: And there were very there were a lot of famous Bill and Dave stories of how they helped other people and how they were always looking to really help their employees.
• 1:17:13
  SPEAKER_00: There's a famous example of how over one weekend, you know, Bill Healett came into the office.
• 1:17:21
  SPEAKER_00: He discovered that one of the supply cabinets had been locked.
• 1:17:24
  SPEAKER_00: And he was irate.
• 1:17:25
  SPEAKER_00: And he found a pair of bolt cutters and he cut the lock off the cabinet because he was looking to get some components, do some tinkering.
• 1:17:31
  SPEAKER_00: And then he put a note there saying, never lock our supply cabinets.
• 1:17:35
  SPEAKER_00: We trust our people.
• 1:17:37
  SPEAKER_00: And if they need something, they have a good reason for it.
• 1:17:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the kind of person that Bill and Dave were.
• 1:17:42
  SPEAKER_00: Dave was actually the CEO and sort of the leader.
• 1:17:45
  SPEAKER_00: Bill was also the spiritual leader.
• 1:17:46
  SPEAKER_00: I had to pick one.
• 1:17:47
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't pick them both at once, although I suppose I could cheat and say just invite both of them to the dinner.
• 1:17:52
  SPEAKER_00: But I won't do that.
• 1:17:54
  SPEAKER_00: And this ethos in Silicon Valley of collaboration, working together, treating people the right way, trusting, this was known as the HP way.
• 1:18:05
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a way that, you know, tragically has been a little overlooked now because of a figure that they actually helped.
• 1:18:15
  SPEAKER_00: So here's another fascinating intersection.
• 1:18:17
  SPEAKER_00: And you know what?
• 1:18:18
  SPEAKER_00: I might as well pick this guy as number four because I can only imagine.
• 1:18:23
  SPEAKER_00: I've only had a chance to be in a room with him once, and I would love to do it again.
• 1:18:27
  SPEAKER_00: And that is Steve Jobs.
• 1:18:29
  SPEAKER_00: So Steve Jobs, I think, is very clearly the greatest businessman of all time and has revolutionized more industries than anyone else.
• 1:18:37
  SPEAKER_00: And people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos look up to him and envy him for what he's accomplished, right?
• 1:18:43
  SPEAKER_00: This is guy, this guy is clearly the greatest of all time, the Michael Jordan of the business world.
• 1:18:49
  SPEAKER_00: And there's actually an interesting intersection between him and Hewlett-Packard.
• 1:18:54
  SPEAKER_00: When he was a young guy, just starting out, he and Steve Wozniak were trying to figure out, hey, you know, we want to build something.
• 1:19:03
  SPEAKER_00: And Waz actually worked for HP at the time.
• 1:19:05
  SPEAKER_00: Steve Jobs somehow found Bill Hewlett's telephone number and called him up.
• 1:19:11
  SPEAKER_00: And Bill Hewlett talked to this young kid.
• 1:19:14
  SPEAKER_00: No reason to do this.
• 1:19:15
  SPEAKER_00: He's already one of the most famous, wealthiest men in the world.
• 1:19:18
  SPEAKER_00: And he talks with this young kid that nobody knows and ends up like giving Steve Jobs a bunch of hardware and stuff to allow him to pursue his entrepreneurial endeavors.
• 1:19:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I just feel saddened that Steve didn't learn more from Bill and Dave about how to treat people because Steve, he, there were many good things about Steve, but he did not treat people well in many cases, whether it's his family members, his uh, his executives, his business partners, what have you.
• 1:19:49
  SPEAKER_00: He people often took the wrong lesson away.
• 1:19:51
  SPEAKER_00: They said, Yeah, you have to be ruthless like Steve Jobs.
• 1:19:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, no, you don't get it.
• 1:19:55
  SPEAKER_00: Steve Jobs was an overwhelming genius.
• 1:19:58
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason he got away with being a dick to people was because he was such a genius that people would overlook those things.
• 1:20:04
  SPEAKER_00: The lesson is not to be a dick, the lesson is to be the greatest genius the world has ever seen.
• 1:20:09
  SPEAKER_00: And then when you have that, you could do a lot of things.
• 1:20:11
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, of course, many of these great geniuses, like I said, Abraham Lincoln, despite being superior to us in every conceivable way, still had humility and grace and all these things, things that alas, Steve Jobs did not.
• 1:20:25
  SPEAKER_00: But it's still such a fascinating figure that I would absolutely invite him to dinner.
• 1:20:29
  SPEAKER_00: He might dominate the discussion, but I'd like to believe that Abraham Lincoln and David Packard could help rein him in.
• 1:20:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then I'll bring in the final figure, perhaps the polar opposite of Steve Jobs in almost every way, except for being, again, a great genius.
• 1:20:46
  SPEAKER_00: And that is Fred Rogers, known as Mr.
• 1:20:48
  SPEAKER_00: Rogers here in the United States, beloved children's performer and entertainer, but really educator.
• 1:20:55
  SPEAKER_00: And with Fred Rogers, if you just have to read the stories, this guy was the closest thing you can imagine to a living saint in terms of his approach to the world.
• 1:21:09
  SPEAKER_00: And he wanted everyone to feel loved.
• 1:21:11
  SPEAKER_00: He wanted everyone to feel accepted.
• 1:21:13
  SPEAKER_00: And it didn't mean that you shouldn't try to change, but it did mean that people should know who you are and say, hey, I'm proud of you.
• 1:21:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I love you.
• 1:21:24
  SPEAKER_00: And the kinds of things that he did in his life, I mean, you can go onto YouTube.
• 1:21:28
  SPEAKER_00: There's this amazing video of what happened when in the 1970s, I believe it was, they were looking to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Public Television here in the United States.
• 1:21:42
  SPEAKER_00: And Mr.
• 1:21:44
  SPEAKER_00: Rogers went out and gave this speech to Congress.
• 1:21:47
  SPEAKER_00: And they were looking to defund.
• 1:21:48
  SPEAKER_00: And Mr.
• 1:21:49
  SPEAKER_00: Rogers gives this speech, and he talks about the importance of the work and how it's reaching children.
• 1:21:56
  SPEAKER_00: And at the end of it, the chairman of the committee just says, the guy who was trying to defund it, it's like, well, I think we're going to give you your money.
• 1:22:02
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, not only did they not defund the corporation for public broadcasting, they increased its budget because after Mr.
• 1:22:09
  SPEAKER_00: Rogers spoke, they're like, oh my God, we need more of this.
• 1:22:12
  SPEAKER_00: There's another thing, he was honored, I don't remember whether it was by the Academy or by the Emmys or sort of the entertainment world.
• 1:22:20
  SPEAKER_00: And he was receiving an honorary award.
• 1:22:24
  SPEAKER_00: And he goes up to speak.
• 1:22:26
  SPEAKER_00: And again, you can find this on YouTube.
• 1:22:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's incredible.
• 1:22:29
  SPEAKER_00: And he speaks and he says, you know, I want you to think about, you know, some of the people who've been really important in your life, some of the people who loved you and supported you.
• 1:22:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I want you to just take a moment to think of them and think of the gratitude you feel and think of the love that you feel for them.
• 1:22:44
  SPEAKER_00: And the entire room goes silent.
• 1:22:46
  SPEAKER_00: And eventually you can start to hear people crying.
• 1:22:49
  SPEAKER_00: This is like the most cynical group of people in the world.
• 1:22:52
  SPEAKER_00: And he has reduced them to sobbing children because of the great purity of his vision and the way that he really got to fundamental human emotions.
• 1:23:02
  SPEAKER_00: So those would be the four, like I said, three from the Alliance.
• 1:23:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's Abraham Lincoln, David Packard, and Fred Rogers, and we'll tack on Steve Jobs as the fourth.
• 1:23:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that would be fascinating, uh, a set of contrasts, right?
• 1:23:15
  SPEAKER_00: People from very different worlds.
• 1:23:18
  SPEAKER_01: So I must tell you, Chris, that as you did the storytelling, I was around the dinner table in the restaurant.
• 1:23:28
  SPEAKER_01: I was kind of dreaming all these images.
• 1:23:32
  SPEAKER_01: So it was a brilliant storytelling of the dinner itself.
• 1:23:36
  SPEAKER_01: So it was such a brilliant thing.
• 1:23:38
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks a lot for uh you know putting the story so beautifully.
• 1:23:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, my question, my next question to you, Chris, is uh what would be the advice that you would give to an 18-year-old in a university today?
• 1:23:52
  SPEAKER_00: So, what I would tell to an 18-year-old in the university is I would give that 18-year-old advice for both their time at the university as well as for afterwards, because now is the time that they could do a lot of things.
• 1:24:04
  SPEAKER_00: So, in their time at the university, I would advise them to make sure that they try as many different things as they can, given the constraints, whether it's financial or the curriculum that they have to try, take.
• 1:24:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because what I would tell them is there will never be an easier time for you to try new things, to experience new things.
• 1:24:23
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone believes that this is the reason why you're at college, and all these opportunities are being served up to you on a silver platter.
• 1:24:30
  SPEAKER_00: It will never be as easy to meet remarkable people, it will never be as easy to try a new activity, and you should take full advantage of that.
• 1:24:37
  SPEAKER_00: Don't just spend all your time taking classes doing problem sets.
• 1:24:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, that's important, but you can do that on your own if you really need to.
• 1:24:44
  SPEAKER_00: And part of that, what goes hand in hand with that, and again, this may or may not be true in all countries, but in the United States, one of the things that students completely fail to take advantage of for the most part is the fact that their professors have office hours.
• 1:25:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this is a remarkable thing.
• 1:25:02
  SPEAKER_00: These professors, these folks who at Stanford University are the leading figures in their industries, are forced to sit in a room for a couple of hours a week and whatever students show up, get to talk with them.
• 1:25:14
  SPEAKER_00: And what I would tell people is in many cases, depending on which department, like in my case in the engineering department, these are people who would be charging a corporation thousands of dollars for that time, and you, because you've paid the cover charge of your tuition, get to use it as much as you want for free as long as no one else is there.
• 1:25:31
  SPEAKER_00: And very few students take advantage of this.
• 1:25:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so one of the reasons why I developed these relationships with advisors like David Kelly and John LaRaw and relationships with other professors that I actually studied with is because I would go to office hours.
• 1:25:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't go to office hours because I had a whole bunch of questions, although I would bring questions with me.
• 1:25:51
  SPEAKER_00: I went to office hours because it was a chance to get to know them.
• 1:25:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I got to know them as human beings in a way that most students don't.
• 1:25:58
  SPEAKER_00: Students just are like, oh, professors, godlike figures.
• 1:26:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, no, they're just people like you and I.
• 1:26:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to learn more about them and get to know them and develop a relationship with them.
• 1:26:07
  SPEAKER_00: And that's something that I was able to do that most other people don't do as an undergrad.
• 1:26:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I strongly urge you to do that.
• 1:26:15
  SPEAKER_00: The last thing I would say is there are two things that you should be doing to really invest in yourself.
• 1:26:22
  SPEAKER_00: And those two things are, first of all, to begin investing financially.
• 1:26:26
  SPEAKER_00: At the age of 18, if you can begin investing, by the time you reach retirement age, whatever tiny amount you've set aside will have compounded to an enormous level.
• 1:26:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a lot easier to get started early and develop the habit.
• 1:26:39
  SPEAKER_00: And as I mentioned, money, while it is not the most important thing in the world, is still really handy to have.
• 1:26:45
  SPEAKER_00: And you should probably make sure you set yourself on the path to having it.
• 1:26:49
  SPEAKER_00: The second thing, and this is advice I give to people all the time, is you know, try to meet as many smart and interesting people as you can, and then also stay in touch with them.
• 1:26:58
  SPEAKER_00: And many people forget that second part, right?
• 1:27:00
  SPEAKER_00: You need to stay in touch with folks.
• 1:27:02
  SPEAKER_00: And even today, people will say, Chris, how do you know so many famous, interesting people?
• 1:27:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I say, well, because I got to know a lot of unfamous, interesting people, and I stayed in touch with them.
• 1:27:12
  SPEAKER_00: And they later became famous and important and prominent over the years.
• 1:27:16
  SPEAKER_00: So just to give you an example, some of the classmates that I went to school with who are doing interesting things today, you know, maybe a month or two ago I had lunch with my old classmate from elementary school, Massi Oka, who went on to become a very famous actor.
• 1:27:32
  SPEAKER_00: He was in the television series Heroes in the last decade.
• 1:27:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now he's on the production side.
• 1:27:36
  SPEAKER_00: He's actually bringing the movie Akira.
• 1:27:39
  SPEAKER_00: He's Japanese American, so he brings Japanese IP to the United States, Akira being one of the most famous manga and then animated uh animated programs ever.
• 1:27:48
  SPEAKER_00: And he's going to bring a live action version of it to the United States.
• 1:27:51
  SPEAKER_00: Well, he's doing fascinating things in Hollywood.
• 1:27:53
  SPEAKER_00: One of my friends from Stanford, Michael Green, uh, is also involved in Hollywood.
• 1:28:00
  SPEAKER_00: He was the screenwriter for Logan, right?
• 1:28:03
  SPEAKER_00: The Wolverine movie.
• 1:28:04
  SPEAKER_00: He's nominated for Academy Award, is involved in all these other fascinating things over the years.
• 1:28:09
  SPEAKER_00: Also Green Lantern, we don't mention that as much.
• 1:28:11
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, these are all people where it's if I set out, you know, I would like to go ahead and meet a famous Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, or I would like to go and meet the producer of Akira.
• 1:28:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that would be very difficult.
• 1:28:24
  SPEAKER_00: But if I knew them when they were seven years old or 18 years old, it's a lot easier.
• 1:28:30
  SPEAKER_00: And if you are in an elite educational institution, a Stanford and IIT or something like that, the chances that people are going to go on to become enormously successful is pretty high.
• 1:28:41
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, you won't necessarily be able to predict who's going to be the most successful and what they're going to be successful in.
• 1:28:48
  SPEAKER_00: But if you stay in touch with smart and interesting people, good things will happen.
• 1:28:52
  SPEAKER_03: So, Chris, I'm I'm pretty sure you're going to be familiar with this next question because it's from uh your neck of the woods.
• 1:28:58
  SPEAKER_03: And uh here it goes.
• 1:29:00
  SPEAKER_03: So can be something that you believe in that nobody else agrees with you on.
• 1:29:04
  SPEAKER_00: Ah, yes.
• 1:29:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, maybe not nobody else, but very few people agree.
• 1:29:08
  SPEAKER_00: So one of the things I firmly believe is that we are sort of at the leeches and bloodletting stage of understanding how to optimize our lives as human beings.
• 1:29:22
  SPEAKER_00: And not from a quantified self-perspective.
• 1:29:25
  SPEAKER_00: That is easy for people to get into because they're like, yeah, you know, I wear wearables, I have measures, I have hardware.
• 1:29:31
  SPEAKER_00: This is something that people, especially in my neck of the woods, feel very comfortable with.
• 1:29:35
  SPEAKER_00: Let me buy some computer electronics and hardware and attach it to my body, and it will magically make me better.
• 1:29:42
  SPEAKER_00: This is very standard.
• 1:29:45
  SPEAKER_00: What I'm saying instead is we have this entire field of positive psychology, which is in its infancy, where we are studying how we can actually live better lives.
• 1:29:55
  SPEAKER_00: What is it that actually allows human beings to flourish?
• 1:29:58
  SPEAKER_00: And it's astonishing to me that we do not teach people how to be happy, how to have good relationships, how to relate to other people when it is the most important thing in the world.
• 1:30:09
  SPEAKER_00: Like, yeah, I don't know if either of you are married.
• 1:30:12
  SPEAKER_00: You guys can raise your hands if you're married or not.
• 1:30:14
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 1:30:15
  SPEAKER_00: So, Swami, you're married.
• 1:30:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, did you go to any classes to teach you how to be a good husband?
• 1:30:22
  SPEAKER_00: No, not really.
• 1:30:23
  SPEAKER_00: Not really.
• 1:30:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's atrocious, right?
• 1:30:24
  SPEAKER_00: This is one of the most important things you could possibly do in the world.
• 1:30:27
  SPEAKER_00: We don't do anything.
• 1:30:29
  SPEAKER_00: At least we offer some classes on parenting, but I personally found those parent those classes to be largely useless as well.
• 1:30:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that there is a huge opportunity in what I call the human science, the science of being human.
• 1:30:42
  SPEAKER_00: We should be doing more of it.
• 1:30:43
  SPEAKER_00: We again are at the leeches and bloodletting stage right now.
• 1:30:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's just astonishing.
• 1:30:47
  SPEAKER_00: Hundreds of years from now, people will look back and say, how could they have been so crazy as to focus so much and develop all these amazing technologies and yet completely fail at figuring out how to actually live their lives in an effective way?
• 1:31:01
  SPEAKER_01: So my question, uh Chris, is uh having had such a phenomenal career and met so many people, uh what's one best piece of advice that you got and that you carry till date?
• 1:31:17
  SPEAKER_00: Ooh, that is a good one because there's been so much good advice I've received over the years.
• 1:31:25
  SPEAKER_00: But I want to tie it back to the product design thinking and uh the design thinking that we talked about earlier.
• 1:31:34
  SPEAKER_00: And when I was in product design and I was starting just starting out, taking the first class, one of the people who was one of my instructors, not a professor, but one of my instructors who helped David teach the class was a guy named Peter McDonald.
• 1:31:50
  SPEAKER_00: And he expressed it in a way that other people have said, but he was the first one who said this to me.
• 1:31:56
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, Quantity has a quality all its own.
• 1:32:00
  SPEAKER_00: And it is a great way of summarizing the design thinking mindset, which is uh, and many could call it the Nike mindset, the just do it mindset, which is you should be doing and trying because most of the things you do and try are gonna fail.
• 1:32:18
  SPEAKER_00: And that's okay because it's a part of the process.
• 1:32:21
  SPEAKER_00: What is important is that we continue to do, to try, to achieve, to get the things that we want, to make the world better, to improve the lives of people around us.
• 1:32:31
  SPEAKER_00: Keep trying.
• 1:32:32
  SPEAKER_00: Don't just give up.
• 1:32:33
  SPEAKER_00: Don't just lay back and say, you know what, I'm just gonna do what comes easy, and I'm just gonna do what I've already done.
• 1:32:41
  SPEAKER_00: That is stagnation.
• 1:32:43
  SPEAKER_00: And inevitably, it's going to lead to your downfall because the world does not stay in place, and the rules that you came up with and you follow so assiduously are going to no longer apply at some point in time.
• 1:32:54
  SPEAKER_00: So quantity has a quality all its own.
• 1:32:57
  SPEAKER_00: Always be trying, always be doing.
• 1:32:59
  SPEAKER_03: Chris, my final question to you is now that you've had uh the chance to spend an hour and a half with us, and we are so thankful for you even giving us the opportunity to spend this time with you.
• 1:33:13
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, my final question to you is based on the experience that we've shared over the last 90 minutes, who do you think might be somebody uh we should invite as a guest going forward in contrament?
• 1:33:27
  SPEAKER_00: Well, so first of all, it has been a fantastic experience.
• 1:33:30
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason I agree to do things like this is because it actually helps me think as well, right?
• 1:33:37
  SPEAKER_00: And the process of the questions you ask and the way the conversation goes, I will see connections that I didn't previously see, even though this is my life we're talking about.
• 1:33:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I've spent all this time thinking about it.
• 1:33:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so having this interview is valuable to me, even if it never goes out into the world.
• 1:33:56
  SPEAKER_00: But of course, we want it to go out into the world.
• 1:33:58
  SPEAKER_00: We want as many people as possible to listen to it.
• 1:34:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that you know it really comes down to who is a very interesting person that you might want to talk with, who has done interesting things in their life and whose story would be fascinating.
• 1:34:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to cite two people.
• 1:34:18
  SPEAKER_00: I cannot guarantee that they would have time to do this, but I will cite them anyways, because I think that they would be fascinating.
• 1:34:26
  SPEAKER_00: I would love to hear the various things you pull out because it's very clear that you guys do deep research and deeply understand the people that you're talking with.
• 1:34:35
  SPEAKER_00: Something that's so rare in a world where people just ask the same standard questions over and over again.
• 1:34:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I really appreciate that.
• 1:34:41
  SPEAKER_00: So the two people I'm going to name, because I can't stop with just one.
• 1:34:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to give you two, like a bonus, right?
• 1:34:47
  SPEAKER_00: So the first is my friend Peter Sims, who is an author and an entrepreneur.
• 1:34:53
  SPEAKER_00: He co-authored a book very famous called True North with Bill George of Harvard Business School.
• 1:34:57
  SPEAKER_00: At the time, Bill was at Medtronic, and another book called Little Bets, which really ties in well with the design thinking we're talking about.
• 1:35:04
  SPEAKER_00: And Peter runs an organization called The Black Sheep, which is an organization that brings together artists and entrepreneurs and people from the business world and other worlds.
• 1:35:15
  SPEAKER_00: And it is so fascinating to me.
• 1:35:17
  SPEAKER_00: I meet so many of the most interesting people in my life through my friendship with Peter and by helping him with the various things he does.
• 1:35:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm just so impressed by what he's done, especially with the black sheep.
• 1:35:30
  SPEAKER_00: And he really has this tremendous focus on being human.
• 1:35:33
  SPEAKER_00: He believes that so many of us are insecure overachievers in this world where we are beholden to the societal values that sort of we've taken in from conventional wisdom.
• 1:35:47
  SPEAKER_00: And really, we need a revolution of people being truly themselves, being truly human.
• 1:35:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I think he would be fascinating.
• 1:35:54
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how much time he'll have available.
• 1:35:56
  SPEAKER_00: He recently broke both of his arms in a scooter accident, although it looked like he was okay.
• 1:36:00
  SPEAKER_00: I saw him yesterday via Zoom.
• 1:36:03
  SPEAKER_00: He might have time, but he would be a fascinating, fascinating individual to have on, and highly recommend him.
• 1:36:09
  SPEAKER_00: Another person that would recommend, again, maybe very busy, but you know, worth talking with if you can get him, is my friend Daniel Epstein, who I'll be seeing next week.
• 1:36:19
  SPEAKER_00: Daniel Epstein is the founder of the Unreasonable Group.
• 1:36:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the Unreasonable Group is an amazing organization I've been a part of for over a decade, probably close to a dozen years now, that is a social impact accelerator, and they help entrepreneurs who are making the world a better place and seeking to make a profit in return for their entrepreneurs, further investors.
• 1:36:38
  SPEAKER_00: He helps them scale.
• 1:36:39
  SPEAKER_00: And that's one of the things that I come in.
• 1:36:42
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a mentor, and I come in and I help them understand the Blitz Scaling Framework and how they can scale.
• 1:36:47
  SPEAKER_00: And it is just an amazing organization and an amazing experience.
• 1:36:51
  SPEAKER_00: We'll get together, in this case, we're going to be gathering together at a biodynamic farm in upstate New York, and I'll be able to spend a couple of days meeting these entrepreneurs and spending time with my fellow mentors who are, again, some of the most interesting, amazing, intelligent, accomplished people in the world.
• 1:37:06
  SPEAKER_00: And it is just amazing.
• 1:37:08
  SPEAKER_00: And the most amazing thing is you would think, oh my gosh, wow, Daniel Epstein started this.
• 1:37:12
  SPEAKER_00: He must have been a very successful entrepreneur, made a billion dollars, was able to fund this and out of his own pocket and make it happen.
• 1:37:20
  SPEAKER_00: No, Daniel and his co-founders started this when they were just graduating from college at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado.
• 1:37:28
  SPEAKER_00: And they began just with a local program in Boulder, Colorado, but with a big vision and the willingness to reach out to people all over the world and eventually built this whole international global organization working with great sponsors like Pearson, Johnson ⁇ Johnson, Fossil, Accenture, and the like to do this important work.
• 1:37:48
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a great example of entrepreneurship.
• 1:37:50
  SPEAKER_00: There's no reason why a couple of undergrads from the University of Colorado should be able to build a global organization, especially from Boulder, which again is a wonderful place, very entrepreneurial, but a very small place.
• 1:38:02
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, they're having global impact.
• 1:38:04
  SPEAKER_00: And he is just a great speaker, a great person, and would also be wonderful for this podcast.
• 1:38:10
  SPEAKER_00: Fantastic.
• 1:38:11
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks a lot, Chris.
• 1:38:13
  SPEAKER_01: This is one of the most uh I would say uh enriching conversations that we've had, uh, deeply reflective, uh, something that uh we will cherish.
• 1:38:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we will go back and keep thinking about the points that you said.
• 1:38:29
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of learnings and brilliantly uh you know told the story was told beautifully, and uh it is something that was fantastic, and thanks a lot for spending your time, and this is absolutely brilliant.
• 1:38:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Swami and Vignesh, thank you so much.
• 1:38:48
  SPEAKER_00: This was a fantastic experience for me as well, and I really appreciate the amount of work that you've put into this, the the amount of your own hearts and emotions and meaning that you've imbued this with, and this has been a wonderful experience.
• 1:39:04
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much, Chris.
• 1:39:05
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much.
• 1:39:08
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening to this episode.
• 1:39:11
  SPEAKER_01: For selected links and detailed show notes, visit www.contramines.comslash blog.
• 1:39:19
  SPEAKER_01: Follow Contraminds on social media and let us know who you would like to see next on the podcast.
• 1:39:25
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• 1:39:30
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• 1:39:33
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• 1:39:36
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• 1:39:43
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening and stay safe.