SPEAKER_00: Today's episode of This Week in Startups is brought to you by InVision. Find out why so many hot startups are using InVision to prototype, present, and collaborate on design in real time. Sign up for a 90-day free trial today at InVisionApp.com slash twist. And by Squarespace, an all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create a professional website and now an online store. For a free trial and 10% off your first purchase on new accounts, go to Squarespace.com and use the offer code twist. And by AWS Activate, the Amazon Web Services Startup Program. It's easy to start and scale your business with AWS. Visit aws.amazon.com slash activate. Today's show features an exciting talk with Jason and Chamath Palihapitaya at Hack the North, Canada's largest international hackathon at the University of Waterloo. We are at TWI Startups and he is at Jason on the Twitter.

SPEAKER_03: So Chamath, really inspiring day here.

SPEAKER_11: We got to see the labs and a bunch of amazing stuff. What do you think of what we saw today? What was particularly inspiring for you?

SPEAKER_13: Probably the last meeting that we had was probably the most inspiring. We met with this great researcher, Andrew Wong, who's basically applying a lot of sort of unclassified machine learning to understanding the genome and trying to figure out. So just taking a step back, up until about a few years ago, we thought that the genome was a very kind of like linearly, easily understood problem. And then we realized, oh wait, there's all these massive dark patches.

SPEAKER_15: And in fact, what we were really sequencing was only 2%. And the other 98% we kind of ignored and threw away. As it turns out, that 98% probably is really important when you talk about the expression of disease. The problem is it's just massive data problem, just very difficult to understand. And he's trying to apply sort of computational logic. You know, I've said this before, like the scientists and the folks that figure out these crazy problems in genetics and health are not going to be biologists in the future. They're going to be computer scientists. And I think he's a testament to that. That was really amazing. And then we saw a bunch of stuff in antennas and terahertz and things like that.

SPEAKER_17: Microscopic microscopes.

SPEAKER_13: Microscopes. Yeah, really cool stuff.

SPEAKER_11: So when you look at a group like this, I'm assuming everybody here is 18 to 25 years old. And, you know, they see what's going on in Silicon Valley and the starting of companies. What advice do you give them in terms of picking a career path? Because technologists are so in demand, technical people are so in demand, that making money and finding a job is no longer a concern. And really, you're choosing between do I want to be at a big company? Do I want to be at a university? Do I want to start my own company? Do I want to go to Accelerator? What advice do you give young people you meet who are making that decision for the first time?

SPEAKER_13: Look, we're entering, unfortunately, a very mercenary culture right now in Silicon Valley. And that mercenary culture is manifested in the following example. This guy that I worked with for a lot of years at Facebook started a company. I funded it. We sold it to Dropbox.

SPEAKER_15: And he's now the VP of engineering at Dropbox. His name is Aditya Aguil. So, like, once, you know, once every six months he comes down and we have lunch and we just talk about what's going on. And I said, so what is it like in San Francisco? And he said, man, it's such a grind. It's like I interview these people right now, these engineers, and they come with spreadsheets. And these spreadsheets calculate their equity based on the imputed value of what they think this company is going to be worth, that company is going to be worth. And they'll grind me over a few hundred shares. And the problem with that hyper-mercenary culture is all of a sudden you've completely divorced yourself of any sort of passion and a reason why you want to work at a company.

SPEAKER_23: And the end result of that is that you'll not do as good of a job and, frankly, you won't make as much money. You know, when I went to Facebook, it was kind of a joke thing that people didn't totally understand. Most of my friends thought it was kind of comical that I would even go there because I didn't have to go there. But I believed in this idea at the time the way that we described it was sort of I described it as a white pages for the world.

SPEAKER_15: And it just grew and grew and grew into something that had such massive impact. And then the ramification, the end of it, was, to be very blunt, just extraordinary wealth.

SPEAKER_28: But I think if I had tried to seek it out, that's not what would have happened.

SPEAKER_29: And I worry that a lot of people are now just in the grind, you know, trying to jump into this thing, trying to arbitrage, trying to make a little money.

SPEAKER_23: I just don't think, particularly in technology, it's the goal because there's just such a vicious cycle. There's so much churn. It's hard. Most of these things don't work that if you come in motivated by the wrong things, you never achieve anything. And then you just end up jaded and disappointed.

SPEAKER_15: You know, I think, unfortunately, like, you know, like a lot of incubators are very problematic in that way because they just create a bunch of very jaded young folks who are acquisition fodder.

SPEAKER_28: But so that would be my advice is you have to take a step back and try something that's defined in one of two paradigms. One is you yourself want it.

SPEAKER_23: Madly want it, need it. Travis, you know, when we were driving, I was on the phone with TK. He started it for himself.

SPEAKER_30: Yep.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Zuck started Facebook for himself. Ev started Twitter for himself.

SPEAKER_23: Larry and Sergey started Google for themselves.

SPEAKER_29: So that's one category.

SPEAKER_23: Then there's this other category, which is there's a market-defined opportunity that's screaming for a solution. But if you can't basically jump in into something because of those two things, you're attracted by a market solution or you're attracted by a product you want to use yourself, you're just a scheme-scammy, arbitraging fuck, and you're just going to get left behind. Right. Because you're going to get found up by people like us and you're going to get fired.

SPEAKER_28: Yeah. That's raw, real advice. Don't do it. You'll make more money doing something you love, trying to have impact, than you will trying to make money.

SPEAKER_44: So let's take a step back then.

SPEAKER_11: How does one at a young age, and maybe not a ton of experience, frankly, find out what they actually love? You know, I remember when I was in college, I had so many different interests, I couldn't pick one.

SPEAKER_45: How do you refine it down, or do you just know when you find something you love?

SPEAKER_15: I think that, you know, a lot of the times people see products in the world, and that kind of is a real big trigger for themselves. Like, I remember, look, when I was in school, I was not particularly great in school. I was on academic probation. I was just like, I was just kind of bumbling along, you know, and fortunately, I was able to get into Waterloo, which allowed me to pay for school. Otherwise, I would have been really screwed, because I would have been at Queens on OSAP, and that would have been.

SPEAKER_51: I'm just kidding.

SPEAKER_52: I'm just kidding. I would have ended up at Western on OSAP. I'm just kidding. Here we go. I'm just kidding.

SPEAKER_23: No, so look, when I was here, the best thing through these co-op terms was there was a lot of things that I thought I wanted to do based on what my parents told me or based on what I thought society thought was cool. And the co-op terms are great, because I was able to calibrate and figure out that I liked them for a while, and then I became sort of intellectually bored with them. And then also, I realized a bunch of other things just didn't matter, and I just had to have the self-confidence to sort of walk away from a more traditional definition of what I should do. So simple, very simple example. When I was in the Waterloo Co-op program, the top jobs were program manager at Microsoft. This was at the time, which was a technical track, and the non-technical track was to sort of go work on Bay Street, you know, and you'd get, like, a job offer at, like, TD Securities or Bank of Montreal, and people would clamor for these jobs.

SPEAKER_15: And I ended up getting one of those jobs, the latter category. I couldn't get an interview at Microsoft to save my life. And this is why they're fucked right now.

SPEAKER_23: But I was able to get a job at Bank of Montreal, and I worked on the trading floor, and it was one of the jobs. And I thought that's what I wanted to do. And very quickly, I was like, wow, this is not what I wanted to do, even though at the time, I had to be there because I had, you know, I grew up really poor. I had to pay off my OSAP. I was able to help my folks. But the minute I could get a little bit of headway, I quit because in that time, I knew, like, this is not what I wanted. And then when I went to the Valley, I got fundamentally lucky. I applied for all these jobs on the Internet. Google, eBay, and the only company that gave me a job was Winamp.

SPEAKER_64: And for people who don't know what Winamp was, it was one of the first MP3 players. This was before iTunes.

SPEAKER_23: It was, but it was also, you know, it was also, like, one of the first consumer-facing platforms that basically, like, created a really vibrant developer community. It was a product that had 100 million. We grew it to 100 million-plus users. At the time when the Internet itself was only a few hundred million people, you know, it was sort of an exploration in sort of the new world of media and all of this other stuff. But the point was I got accidentally lucky. The great thing about Silicon Valley right now is there's a lot of companies where you can get accidentally lucky. And so I think you have to have a thematic sense of what you like. And then I think you just have to sort of give yourself one or two iterations to get to the place you want to be. While Winamp was great, I ended up at AOL for a long time, which was okay, not that great.

SPEAKER_65: But then that allowed me the platform to get to Facebook, and that was amazing.

SPEAKER_66: I love InVision, and I've been using it now for about three or four months, and I have a ton of designers working for me at different companies, and I need to have structured conversations with them about product.

SPEAKER_68: And as you know, we live in the age of excellence. You have to have a great product. In order to have a great product, you have to have great designers. Let's say you get through that. You have a great idea. You have a great domain name. You've got a great brand. You've got a great designer. Now you have to iterate relentlessly, and you need a tool to do that. It's not enough to be sending PDFs back and forth, or images, or screenshots. That's nonsense. Or working in a chat room. With all respect to HipChat and Slack, those are the worst places to have a design discussion. If you're going to have a design discussion, you have to take it out of a chat room. You have to get it out of email, and you have to make it structured. You have to be able to put a little crosshair on this part of your app and say, Hey, this could be better in these ways. What do you think? And CC the stakeholders and have them comment, and then click a Resolve button. That's what InVision does. And they also allow you to send a link to your phone, and then you can see natively what Inside 3.0 is looking like. And I'm going down to a conference room right after this ad read, and I'm going to be working on Inside 3.0. We're just going right to, like, this next generation stuff. And I can then leave and go to my poker game tonight, and I get an InVision when the designer's done at 1 in the morning. And I look at it, and I just have some inspiration, some notes. It has changed the way I do design. It is amazing. And it's used by over 300,000 designers, including people at Airbnb, Evernote, MTV, Adobe, Box, and Zendesk. Those are all companies much more successful than mine. So if you don't believe my endorsement, I mean, Zendesk, Evernote, Airbnb, we should all be so lucky. Go to envisionapp.com slash twist. I love it, and they'll give you 90 days for free. Unlimited screens, collaboratives, real-time comments, sketch commenting, and more. No email chains. Email chains and chat rooms are death. You do not want to use them for a design discussion. And trust me, when you hire a designer today, they're almost certainly going to say, how do you do design discussions? How do you do collaboration? And if you're a founder and you say InVision, they're going to want to come work for you. And I am having this happen to me all the time. People are now pitching me because they know my email, jason.inside.com, and they just send me an InVision. They invite me to their InVision. So now my InVision is getting filled up with people pitching me. And you know what? If you send me an InVision link for your new product as an angel investor, I'm going to click on it because I'm like, okay, you're cutting to the chase. I can tell if it's a good product or not if I can play with it. Oh, yeah, and that's the great thing. When you get an InVision link, they can map out and click on stuff. So it's almost like the app works. You don't have to have a developer make a prototype. You just make 20 screens, and then they stitch them together. And they put little hot zones. When you click, it feels like you're using an app. It's brilliant. InVisionapp.com slash twist. InVisionapp.com slash twist. I love this product. Go use it and thank them. They're at InVision app on Twitter. It's a great product. Okay, let's get back to the program.

SPEAKER_71: Let's talk about that sort of time.

SPEAKER_11: You took a gig at – you took the gig of running AIM Instant Messenger and ICQ when they were at their peak. And you rode them in your tenure into the ground, losing – literally losing millions of users a month.

SPEAKER_75: And so – and this is when you and I met because I had just sold my company, and I was coming in the revolving door, and you were leaving to go work for a second-tier VC firm where you didn't fit in, and you weren't successful. And so your career, having been so promising at Winamp, was spiraling down the hill.

SPEAKER_80: Out of control.

SPEAKER_75: It was as if you took the controls of the plane and the hydraulics stopped when your hands touched the controls. Right. And when they gave you the checkbook to then-investing companies, it was as if, like, you were just giving the checks to people who had absolutely no idea what they're doing. Right. And then you decide to go work for Facebook. Yeah. Let's talk about that period of, let's just say, like, it probably wasn't fun to go to work, and then it kind of sucked to go to work, and then it was kind of awesome to go to work. How did you manage that psychology of life-sucking for an extended period of time?

SPEAKER_15: I was really young. And the thing, the best thing that happened to me was AOL was in a period of deep decline, and they were firing everybody in sight.

SPEAKER_23: But what they would do is they would obviously fire the people that were getting paid the most, which roughly equated to the people that were the oldest. And doing the least. And doing the least. And what was left over were all these young people, and we would just get increasing responsibility because they just didn't have an alternative. And I tell people now, that was the luckiest thing that happened to me in many ways, because, look, when things work, I think a lot of people pretend that they know what happened. But you actually learn more when things aren't working. Because you know what your effort hasn't done versus what could have been a whole bunch of things has done. Was it your effort? Was it timing? Was it skill? Was it an accidental PR thing? You know, I mean, Twitter blew up, if you remember.

SPEAKER_13: I mean, literally, and no offense to Evan, those guys, not because of those guys. I mean, that team has done more to retard the progress of Twitter.

SPEAKER_15: Yeah. Right? It blew up because Fred Wilson and those guys had to blow it up at South by Southwest. Yeah. You know?

SPEAKER_104: It was sideways for at least 18 months. And, you know, we had to fail whale constantly. They couldn't keep the service up and running.

SPEAKER_105: It was infighting. So my point is, yeah, infighting, you know.

SPEAKER_23: Changing CEOs. So my point is, it's sometimes very hard to conflate. You know, all you do is really, in success, conflate luck and skill. But in failure, you learn why all of these things aren't working. You learn how to build a better team, like a small, lightweight, fast, nimble team. You learn how to try and iterate and test stuff. You learn how to celebrate failure because most things aren't working. You know? And you keep trying stuff and trying stuff and trying stuff. And you just dispense with the ego. You know? Like, I was surrounded by all these people that were just, like, credentialed. They had all these degrees. They, you know, they were just able to check all these boxes. They had a name that was pronounceable.

SPEAKER_109: Like, all this shit. And they were fucking morons. Yeah.

SPEAKER_29: You know? And it was just like, you just realize, like, that's just not what it's about.

SPEAKER_23: And when you look at this, like, I look at this and I see, you know, an unbelievably diverse group of people. You people are going to take over the world. You people are where I was 10 years ago. And there's this establishment change that is happening now.

SPEAKER_29: And so, for me, what I learned was that establishment change has to happen. And so, that's what sustained me because I was like, I'm a little frustrated, but I'm learning. And I'm getting self-confidence to realize what the old parochial white man tells me is

SPEAKER_23: not right. He don't know what the fuck's going on.

SPEAKER_116: I'm sitting right here, Chamon.

SPEAKER_118: You know what I'm saying? I do. I do. I actually don't know what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_119: So, and that's a huge realization.

SPEAKER_15: And I think, like, everybody's realizing this in their own sort of personal shape and

SPEAKER_23: form now, you know? And so, we're unlocking different parts of people's brains to be able to think that they're capable of anything. I felt that at AOL. But the problem was I didn't feel it in enough of a way. So, when I got offered a job to go and work at Mayfield, I took it because, again, I went back to sort of the same patterns that I was exhibiting when I took that job at Bank of Montreal.

Chamath Palihapitiya: It's the job that people wanted. It's what society tells you is important. It's the hardest seat to get. It's the hardest seat to get.

SPEAKER_28: But I walked in there and I thought within two months, wow, I made a huge mistake.

SPEAKER_23: And what was that mistake? I played to the rules of the man. And I didn't listen to my own gut. And I didn't have a way to tell my parents why something else that I was doing wasn't the right. You know what I'm saying?

SPEAKER_29: I'm like, that takes, look, today, it's the easiest it's ever been for you guys to be

SPEAKER_23: independent, you know, because you can point to success cases that validate the choices you're making. Six years ago, there was fewer of those. Ten years from now, there'll be even more because a bunch of you guys will just be crushing it. So it's going to get easier and easier and easier. But at the time, it was hard for me. You know, I grew up on welfare. How do you tell your parents, like, hey, listen, I had a job making a lot of money. I quit. Then I was making not that much. Then I finally, you know, get promoted at AOL. You're making a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. I quit again.

Chamath Palihapitiya: It's like every time where they're like, okay, economic, right around the corner, right around the corner, I left.

SPEAKER_126: Right. And the idea of switching jobs every three or four years to them seemed insane.

SPEAKER_29: It just seems like that's not what you do. You get in the seat.

SPEAKER_15: And for them, the idea that you're an executive, I was 27 years old. You're an executive at this company that's known. That's everything. And to me, it was nothing.

SPEAKER_23: And I just didn't have the courage to do anything about it. And then this Facebook thing was finally like, I just said, I just got to follow my gut. My instincts were telling me, this is it. Something is here. Let's talk about that.

SPEAKER_15: And I made the most important and the best investment in my life, which is I made a choice of my time. You know what I'm saying?

SPEAKER_131: To spend your time at Facebook, not being a venture capitalist.

SPEAKER_11: Exactly. Let's talk about making the decision to go there. Because when you decided to go there, you know, 10, 20 million users, it was just coming out of the EDU space. And most people believe that advertising on social networks could never work. And it did struggle for a long time until we saw, whatever, a number of years later, that mobile absolutely crushed it. So it eventually did work out. What did you see in social networking, which was considered sort of glorified chat rooms

SPEAKER_133: at the time, that made you think it's bigger than glorified chat rooms?

SPEAKER_29: So at Winamp, we had this framework that allowed people to build two different kinds, third-party

SPEAKER_23: developers, to build two different kinds of things. One was a very superficial UI layer on top of the Winamp player. We called that a skin. And the other thing was a more sort of like, you know, technical capability that we used to call a plug-in. So people would build equalizers. They would build auto-tuners. They would build kinds of stuff. And they would build really cool UI. And what I saw was this community just rally around this idea of like a shared experience.

SPEAKER_24: Then I was at AIM. And what was crazy about that was that people just loved the shared experience.

SPEAKER_23: But in that context, it wasn't the celebration of music. It was the ability to communicate in real time. And in many ways, the best businesses in the world, what they've really done is taken a very obvious offline behavior and made it just dramatically easier online. And so a lot of the chat apps, that's really what they've done. It's inconvenient and cumbersome to communicate either with a, you know, one person in real time because you have the overhead of a telephone call. The phone is ringing versus, hey, right? Just typing in something. And so I thought to myself, like, what's the next logical point on that evolution? And, you know, what I wanted to see was whether there was a way to sort of unify a network of individuals. Again, we didn't call it the social graph then.

SPEAKER_15: You know, I used to call it the white pages. You know, like, your parents probably have these telephone books in their, you know, in their homes. They're white, right? It's got everybody's name and address. You call it white pages.

SPEAKER_23: And so the idea was, can we build the white pages? And the question was, well, what does it sit on top of? And I thought the shared social experience there was a different kind of communication. And you could just see how people were interacting on Facebook, where this idea that once you know what other people are up to, you establish these relatively strong, weak ties. And so you could have many, many, many weak ties to people. And that was just a force multiplier on your ability to feel like a human. And so in many ways, it was just a bet on a psychological feeling and whether we could capture that psychology in a bottle and then exploit that psychology by bringing it to a lot of people. And it worked. I mean, it is, in my opinion, the most complicated, interesting, nuanced study of psychology and software. It's just crazy. You know, the ability that we were able to affect in all of you by programming to you things that we knew you would respond to, this picture, that status update, this link, and just understanding

SPEAKER_29: in an extremely detailed way, all of the interconnections, how when you did something, it would affect you and you and you. And what I really wanted to get was him back on the server. And you map that out, and then you scale it up.

SPEAKER_143: I think it's just something that nobody has come close to replicating.

SPEAKER_144: Oh, my gosh. Squarespace.

SPEAKER_68: What an amazing product. I use it for all of our conference sites. We've been using it for years. You can build an elegant, clean, dynamic website that works on mobile. They call that responsive and works on desktop and has e-commerce and has calendars and has all these amazing features, beautiful templates, all for starting at like eight bucks a month, which is way too cheap, but I use this all the time. And actually, I was on Google Domains. Somebody invited me to Google Domains, and after I started a website, it was like, oh, do you want to use Squarespace? First choice. So even Google in their interface recognizes, because they launched this new domain buying product, that the first thing people are going to want to do is use Squarespace. So if it's good enough for Google to recommend Squarespace number one, and I recommend Squarespace first and foremost as the most elegant, simple to use, most feature-rich content management system, what we call a CMS, is all you need to know. It's everything you need to create an exceptional website. And go to squarespace.com to try it out for free. No credit card is required. It starts at only $8 a month. And if you decide to keep your site after the trial, just use the promo code TWIST. Yes, use the promo code TWIST. And if you really are a fan of the show, please do me a favor. Say thank you at Squarespace for making a beautiful product and supporting at TWI startups. You can, they also have, by the way, new apps for Android, Squarespace blog and Squarespace note. So they've got all the apps out on Android now and iOS. So you can just easily blog. They got 24-hour support too. So if you recommend it to a family member or another business, they're not going to be like calling you up to get support. You know, dad support, cousin support, uncle support, which I get all the time, husband support. And it's what we use for all launch sites. Go to events.launch.co to see how we use it. And I was just asking somebody, Brandon, who works for me, like, hey, can you add this to the site? Add this page? Or, you know, and he's like, yeah, sure. And I watched him. Beep, boop, boop.

SPEAKER_147: And all of a sudden we had a new page on the website. Beep, boop, boop. All of a sudden, new website page. Beep, boop, boop. Squarespace. That easy and beautiful.

SPEAKER_149: Everything you need to make a beautiful, exceptional, buttery website. Thank you, Squarespace.

SPEAKER_72: I love the product. And I love that you've supported this week in startups for so many years. Thank you. Let's get back to this amazing program.

SPEAKER_11: And why hasn't anybody been able to compete with Facebook, do you think?

SPEAKER_151: Is it the network effect? Is it something about the team there in terms of their relentlessness?

SPEAKER_15: That team is the single best team I've ever worked with, I think. If you follow me on Twitter, I posted the values that I had for that team.

SPEAKER_97: And those things are like, they don't seem, in my opinion, they seem very benign. But even at Facebook at the time, people thought that they were too extreme.

SPEAKER_23: You know, things like very high IQ. And I thought, what the fuck? Like, you want dummies? Like, how do you win with dummies? It's like, you win with people that are...

SPEAKER_154: So you were prejudiced against stupid people.

David Friedberg: Well, not all stupid people. Right. We're friends. We're still here. Many of them. Many of them. Not all.

SPEAKER_158: No, but like... But it was a controversy to say, like, hey, let's optimize for the top 20% of...

Chamath Palihapitiya: We would say, you know, aggressive and competitive. People didn't like that. We would say, high quality bar bordering on perfectionism.

SPEAKER_29: But what you realize is, like, unless you believe that, then you just believe in nothing. But if you believe in that, you end up self-selecting to those folks that really believe that. And then when you go and attack a problem, you're able to work together in a way that just isn't possible. And that's what made that place special.

SPEAKER_23: And so the next great company that gets built will find a way to thread that magic together. But it's a people magic. Product market fit exists in a lot of companies.

SPEAKER_29: I wonder, like, you know, if our growth team, if we took Ray, you know, Javi, those folks, Alex Schultz, Naomi Gleit, these people are running big parts of Facebook, Uber, Pinterest.

SPEAKER_23: They're going to run the valley.

SPEAKER_101: If we took those people and stuck them on Twitter, how big would Twitter be? I suspect it'd be half a billion people.

SPEAKER_166: Ah, so there is a culture problem at Twitter, you think? No, I think there's a skill availability with those folks that is just absolutely unique.

SPEAKER_71: And what do you think the skills are that people should be focused on today?

SPEAKER_169: I mean, I would really encourage a couple things. One is, I think we all need to know how to code.

SPEAKER_15: I think all of you people just demonstrate the fact that this is the lingua franca of the 20, this is it, okay?

SPEAKER_101: Half of you can probably speak English. I mean, you don't look like you can speak English.

SPEAKER_172: English doesn't matter.

SPEAKER_52: He can't say anything. I mean, okay, there we go. He's from Quebec. We can talk, we'll talk about that in a second. But this is the lingua franca of the 21st century.

SPEAKER_23: So, knowing to code is a critical skill. Having an internal sense of confidence that the things that may have isolated you as different are now the strengths that make you powerful. Because you guys are coalescing. This is the power dynamic. This is the new establishment. You are it. You're deciding. How sick is that? I mean, that's sick.

SPEAKER_29: And so, once you realize that, I think what you have to figure out is, like, how you can now be more true to that inner voice. Right? And that's a really big challenge.

SPEAKER_183: But how do people, for folks who's maybe... But I think that's a skill.

SPEAKER_11: So, figuring out that. Being confident in your ability and your place in the world. Because 20 years ago, engineers were looked at how in the valley.

SPEAKER_45: How were software developers?

SPEAKER_97: Dispensable employee numbers.

SPEAKER_23: You were a dispensable unit of some, you know, board of directors. You were a pawn of a bunch of MBAs. And now that's just not true. And that's just amazing. You know, you're in charge.

SPEAKER_15: And you're younger than ever. You're more powerful than ever. You can attract capital easier than ever.

SPEAKER_23: You know, you're black, you're brown, you're Chinese, you're white, you're female, you're male, you're gay, you're straight.

SPEAKER_28: Fucking awesome. You know what I'm saying? It doesn't matter.

SPEAKER_38: It just doesn't matter. That shit doesn't matter. It's like, I grew up so frustrated chasing this ideal.

SPEAKER_29: And it's just like, you realize, it's just not a, it doesn't amount to much. Because once you get into the veiled curtain, you know what I'm saying? Like, it's like, okay, now I'm in this position. You get to fly around, meet anybody I want, you know.

SPEAKER_23: And so many times I'm so disappointed. Because the image of what I thought that person represented was just so much higher than the reality of what that was. And then when I come back to the valley, I feel at peace. And I feel challenged again. And I feel like these people are real. And they're trying to do stuff. When I'm here, I feel the same thing. And so that's what we all have to realize.

SPEAKER_101: This is, you people have to take over. Otherwise, the world is fucked. You understand? You have to take over.

SPEAKER_11: Let's talk about building meaningful things versus building things. How does one find something to work on that is truly meaningful?

SPEAKER_193: You know, we, you look at something like Facebook. You know, it's like, oh, it's a way to, it started as a way really for Zuck to meet girls.

SPEAKER_11: At least that's what they said in the movie, right? But it then became something incredible in terms of connecting humanity and having a major role in, you know, revolutions and communications around the world during, you know, Arab Spring, et cetera. So does your idea when you start out have to be super meaningful? Or can you just start with something that maybe is less meaningful and then build meaning into it?

SPEAKER_13: I mean, I think the, I think the prevailing wisdom is all of this, you know, blathering rhetoric about, oh, everything starts as a trivial thing.

SPEAKER_15: You know, people laugh at trivial things. I get it. But I think that's, that also, that language is, is fraught with a lot of hindsight bias.

SPEAKER_29: The reality is, I'm not sure if people are thinking whether it's trivially or not trivial. Again, I go back to someone built something for themselves that they needed.

SPEAKER_199: You know what I'm saying? Yeah.

SPEAKER_23: And it, so the language, that language is a very convenient way of trying to explain something that I think was much harder to explain and much more innate. So going back to, you know, what is like, I think you're either going to build something you really like or you should go into this other category. I transitioned myself from building something and helping build stuff that I wanted for myself to building something for the market. And the reason I did that was a very simple view that I had, which overpowered this. I felt like I had everything I needed. Okay? I didn't need anything else. Nothing was bugging you. Nothing was really bothering me, except this idea that the right people weren't getting to the starting line. And what do I mean by that? People die, and of those people that died, one of those people could have been the next Steve Jobs.

SPEAKER_29: And when you unpack why are they dying, there's many reasons that should have a reasonable explanation. Okay?

SPEAKER_23: Or people are undereducated or miseducated. You know, you need a degree from blah, blah, blah university to get in the door at blah, blah, blah place. Why? And so now you're walking and shutting people out. You're not getting money to the people that should get money to, to have the good ideas. So to me, those problems now dominated the way that I thought about what I wanted to do with my time. And so what I tell folks is, it's completely okay to build something here, but don't describe it as like, oh, we have a really grandiose ambition but a really trivial start.

SPEAKER_24: Describe it as, I'm building this because I want this. As long as that meets your bar, then just do it.

SPEAKER_23: But if that's not how you think, or if you're not really motivated by that, then there is a wealth of stuff over here that literally everything in this bucket here, especially the high order bits, health care, education, financial services, they're completely ripe for disruption. And they're multi-trillion dollar categories. Trillion with a T. Which means that, you know, when you take a 1% shot at an idea there, you could still end up with a $50 billion company. Not so true over here. Mortality rates are higher in terms of the companies. The ideas are a little bit more trivial. And then the echo chamber, it's kind of like it makes bad ideas on top of bad ideas on top of bad ideas.

SPEAKER_24: And I think that's really dangerous for all of you.

SPEAKER_23: Because what it does is you start to chase an ideal of a person and their lifestyle and manifest it in a shitty company doing a shitty thing that ends up failing. And you shouldn't do that.

SPEAKER_193: Let's talk about education, health care, and finance. Take each one of those apart. What are the opportunities in each?

SPEAKER_15: Well, let's just think about health care. So look, my dad is in renal failure. Which means he's in end-stage renal failure. Three times a week, he has to go to the hospital. They clean his blood.

SPEAKER_97: They pump his blood black into his body. This year, he's had diabetes for 30 years. He's 75. So he's had it since he was mid-40s. Ten years of pills, ten years of insulin, and now ten years of dialysis. And now he's at the end of that. And there's no solution for that. So he's going to die.

SPEAKER_15: Now, I have all this money. I have all this influence. I have all this notoriety. I can't do anything about my dad. That's really fucking frustrating. Sure. Frustrating.

SPEAKER_23: And so I started a company around diabetes. And very simple idea.

SPEAKER_29: There's been a lot of literature that says, if you can just understand the data, you can

SPEAKER_23: actually control how people's diabetes changes. Now, does anybody here have a relative or a mother, father, somebody you care about with

SPEAKER_15: diabetes? Anybody have? I mean, look how many fucking people's hands are raised.

SPEAKER_215: It's almost everybody.

SPEAKER_29: I mean, that's, like, this is an epidemic. Okay? And it has massive socioeconomic ramifications beyond the obvious. Right? Like, if you look at, like, inner city development. Like, it's like, no fresh food gets into there. You know? There's no whole foods there. There's just Chick-fil-A and McDonald's.

SPEAKER_217: And so what happens? Diabetes gets worse and worse and worse. You talk about whole swaths of populations that are held down. Right? Is that right?

SPEAKER_29: It's not fucking right. So what do you do? So what do I do? Okay, let's just start by getting the goddamn data off the glucometer.

SPEAKER_23: You get it off the glucometer. You send it into the cloud. You use some simple machine learning. You apply some heuristics. You save people's lives. And it's shown to be effective. So we do that. It takes us three, four years. It takes us five or six million dollars. So be it. But at the end of it now, that's a business that has signed contracts in the last eight weeks to take care of three million patients in the U.S. at $100 a patient a year.

SPEAKER_15: That's a $300 million revenue business overnight. That's going to be a $50 billion company. I own half of it.

SPEAKER_29: Okay?

SPEAKER_219: Yeah.

SPEAKER_29: So then I was like, fuck it. I'm going to do the same thing in asthma and COPD. I'm going to do the same thing in chronic heart failure. You know? In education. It's like, why do we celebrate these useless, you know, letters after a person's name? We should celebrate skills. You know? Ten years ago, we used to, like, the link, again, like, talk about the psychology of society.

SPEAKER_23: You used to introduce yourself in very defined ways. I grew up here. I went to school here. I did this.

SPEAKER_24: I have an MBA. I have an MBA. And I work here.

SPEAKER_23: I have a master's. Now you don't do that anymore. Or you're trending to a place. And so for education, like, I just think, okay, so we wanted to start something that

SPEAKER_29: basically started to kind of, like, rip apart society's dependence on degrees. Not that degrees aren't good. But we should celebrate skills and capability.

SPEAKER_23: Because then it's not the best talker.

SPEAKER_15: It's not the best manager. It's the best developer.

SPEAKER_29: You know? And you can demonstrate how well you can code. You should win.

SPEAKER_23: Right? So there's this great guy in the UK. He was moving back to Portland. Me and Kevin Rose did a little seed investment. It was working. I did the A. We did the B. Blah, blah, blah. Long story short, three years later, Treehouse, I would tell you, if you want to learn how to code, go there. It's 30 bucks a month.

SPEAKER_29: We have more students on Treehouse now than the entirety of every single U.S. undergrad CS department. In three years, we don't issue degrees.

SPEAKER_23: And then we put these people in jobs. And they tell people, oh, I have this certificate from Treehouse.

SPEAKER_29: And to me, what do I like? Is it that it's going to be a billion-dollar business? No, I don't care. It's the psychology of how somebody else who's been trained to ask you where you went to school and judge you can't fucking judge you. You understand?

SPEAKER_23: Because now you show up, and man, you run circles around that person, and right out of high school, you just learned to code. You know?

SPEAKER_29: How sick is that? That's powerful. So to me, I like thinking about those kinds of problems and then saying, let me go and apply my resources against that problem.

SPEAKER_15: That's fun. It makes me feel alive. It makes me feel like I'm being a productive part of the world.

SPEAKER_168: So when you talk to young entrepreneurs, and you're deciding if they should be the one

SPEAKER_71: to pursue these big visions, and you're going to write them that check, which, let's face it, is a critical piece of this, what are things that you look for?

SPEAKER_230: What are things that will knock them out of contention as well?

SPEAKER_15: You know, look, I think, like, I don't think people have to be good speakers. I don't think they have to be good presenters.

SPEAKER_97: I think people have to care about whatever it is that they're talking about that has to be demonstrable. And I think you want to see a little sense of naivety and fearlessness.

SPEAKER_15: And I think it's just about judging.

SPEAKER_234: Let's unpack that, naivety and that fearlessness. What does that mean?

SPEAKER_15: You know, so, okay, so let's look at, like, Kyle and Mike. So Jason and I funded this business, these two kids in L.A. And what they wanted to do was they wanted to build a marketplace around home health care.

SPEAKER_97: So just, again, I'll ask the question, has anybody been in a situation where your grandparents or someone that you love has had to have someone come into the home to help take care of them?

SPEAKER_238: A home attendant. A home attendant. Okay, so enough. So you guys understand this.

SPEAKER_23: So I was in this interesting situation where my assistant said to me, Chamath, I'm flying to Boston. I've got to go to Boston.

SPEAKER_15: I said, what's wrong? Well, she said, my grandparents were, my grandfather. Check, check. Check. You're on. My grandfather was pushed to the ground by his health attendant. And I'm just going to go kick some ass. I was like, see ya.

SPEAKER_97: I'm good. See you later. But it started to occur to me. And now, you know, my parents are in their 70s.

SPEAKER_169: I tried to get somebody to come into our house. My dad kicked him out. Didn't want their help.

SPEAKER_67: Anyways, I thought, what a great thing. This thing has to be solved.

SPEAKER_23: These guys show up. Yeah. And so these two guys, Kyle and Mike, they're in L.A. They were the most empathetic two people I'd ever met. But you could tell they were just like males. You know, it's like they cared about the problem. Kyle's dad had been dealing with the situation of trying to take care of his mom. And it's just like, just imagine like your parents are aging. And let's just say forget all the stuff that annoys you about them and whatever. But think about this idea that they should be able to like live in dignity the last few years before they die. Who agrees with that? We all agree with that. Exactly. They're your parents. And so why not find a simple way just to like connect great caregivers with that market? And so in that example, for me, what struck me was that's a massive, huge, multi-billion dollar revenue opportunity. Huge market-driven demand. They had a very personal thing that was driving them. And they were fearless. And what I meant by fearless was they had no shame about learning to win. What does that mean? They went to every single, so they decided to just launch in L.A. And within L.A., they just decided to launch in one specific county. But they went to every single nursing home. They went to every single shared nursing facility. They went to every single hospital. They talked to every single discharge nurse. Then they were like, well, how do I make the service better? They signed up for every single service possible to figure out how people onboard. They signed up for Uber, for Lyft, for TaskRabbit, for Instacart. And they just shamelessly did this because they were so driven by this.

SPEAKER_33: You know?

SPEAKER_23: Yeah. And they're not telling me that, but that's what I'm unpacking.

SPEAKER_248: In the conversation.

SPEAKER_23: In the conversation, in the narrative of, so, you know, because I asked, so how do you stand up an operational blah, blah, blah, blah. And they tell me about these things, and I'm like, wow, it's so, and it's, the superficial is, oh, yeah, they went to a bunch of onboardings. But that's not what, like, you know what I'm saying? Like, it takes a lot of courage and, like, you know, to, like, sit around and just, like, you know, pretend to be a Lyft driver, pretend to be an Uber driver, you know.

SPEAKER_29: I don't know, I just think, like, to me, that just speaks to a fearlessness.

SPEAKER_71: Yeah, there's definitely a hustle and a lot of knowledge coming from zero. Yeah. And their previous business. So that's an example. Another example that you had. What was their previous business? Do you know?

SPEAKER_23: It was, like, some shitty startup.

SPEAKER_252: Their previous business was they were Uber for drinks. So if you were in a bar. Oh, stop. Really? If you were over there. That's a terrible idea. And the bar was over there. You could order your drinks here, and the bar would bring the drinks from there to there. That's a bad idea. It didn't work.

SPEAKER_24: See, you know what's so sick? I never asked them that. I don't really care what they did before. Yeah. I think it's cool that they failed.

SPEAKER_15: I could not tell you where they went to school. I have no clue. Yeah. You know, I was in a meeting, so I owned, anyways, whatever. Long story short, I had a, I owned some stuff. I sold some stuff, made a bunch of money, got sued.

SPEAKER_260: Everybody can relate.

SPEAKER_15: I'm sitting with these lawyers in Toronto, and in the conversation, they start talking about schools, and my general counsel was with me. I had no idea where he went to school. He was my lawyer.

SPEAKER_262: I didn't know where he went to undergrad. I didn't know where he went to law school. You don't know if he has a degree. I didn't, I don't know.

SPEAKER_264: I mean, I'm assuming he does.

SPEAKER_15: But I don't know.

SPEAKER_23: I mean, I couldn't tell you. But anyway, so, just to speak to like, all of that superficial stuff doesn't matter. I'm trying to figure out this other stuff. Another company, Sue Kim. Yes. Brilliant. You know, Kevin worked there. This is a great story. She had this company. It was on launch. I met her on the stage of launch.

SPEAKER_15: And I asked Jason, who's the smartest person in this conference right now? He said, Sue Kim.

SPEAKER_269: There's 6,000 people there.

SPEAKER_15: Yeah. I met with her, and I said, okay, listen, let's cut to the chase. I think, and I got to know her a little bit. I think you're amazing. I think your idea's shit. I have a better idea. Let's go do it together.

SPEAKER_97: She uprooted her. She shut the company down, uprooted her whole team, moved up two weeks later. I funded it. She's raised 10 million bucks. Business is great. She's going to build a great business.

SPEAKER_274: And the business is? Explain it.

SPEAKER_97: Basically, it's building an index of human talent, human capital. And it starts in math and science. They crowdsource all this amazing content in math and science. People go and ask questions, answer questions, solve problems. But really, what they're doing behind the scenes is ranking, observing, measuring, and figuring out human potential. And then they channel that human potential to places like universities that may want great students. Companies who want to hire the really smartest kids don't care that you just have an undergrad. You know? Places that want to have solutions to problems. You know?

SPEAKER_15: I mean, it was the craziest thing. Within five or six weeks of launch, she gets a phone call from my fixer. I have this guy that fixes shit.

SPEAKER_29: And he says, yeah, I mean, you know, everybody needs a fixer. And anyways, my fixer's like, hey, listen, I need to fly Sue to D.C. And I said, all right, do it. And he walks her into the head of the NSA. And they're like, they show up a picture of this Ethiopian kid on Brilliant.

SPEAKER_169: Says, we need to know all the information about this kid.

SPEAKER_281: The Ethiopian kid.

SPEAKER_169: I don't want this kid going to Al-Shabaab and like building a dirty bomb. This kid's clearly a genius. And Sue's like, well, tough shit.

SPEAKER_65: You can pay for it like everybody else. You're leaving the fuck alone.

SPEAKER_282: Yeah.

SPEAKER_23: She's 24 years old. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. She's like a Korean-American girl that was taught to sit, you know, head down, go to school, grind it out. And here she is telling the head of the NSA to go suck it.

SPEAKER_289: Sweet. How strong is that? Very strong. She's the nuts. And she's got the database of just all the smartest people in the world.

SPEAKER_292: But that's what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_110: It's like, so she had that latent inside of her.

SPEAKER_292: Yeah.

SPEAKER_110: And now she's in this environment, this kooky, crazy place where she now feels like she can be like that.

SPEAKER_29: It's amazing. Right. So I like, that gives me so much energy, you know? Because then there's a bunch of other stuff that just completely fails.

SPEAKER_11: And how do you look at failure in your portfolio now as a VC and the amount of risk you're taking?

SPEAKER_133: Do you like things that have a majority chance of failure? Do you try to push people to go harder and to more risk?

SPEAKER_15: I live by a very simple philosophy, and it's not mine. I was flying home from Vegas with the Vinod Coastline on his jet, and VK says, Chamath, look over here. We're flying into San Jose. He says, look over this side. It's like all this land.

SPEAKER_97: He says, see all that land? I'm like, yep. And this is like, I don't know, eight years ago, 10 years ago, something. And he says, I own all that land. You know how much that land is worth? And I said, I don't know. He said, it's probably worth $200 million. And I said, okay. And he said, you know what? You know how much I'm worth?

SPEAKER_279: I don't know. He said some number, three, four billion.

SPEAKER_97: He said, I'm going to take that three or four, and it's not going to be worth 40, or it's going to be worth zero. And if it was zero, I got that. And then he went and, you know, funded alternative energy, genetics, like, I mean, just amazing,

SPEAKER_23: amazing, groundbreaking, risk-seeking stuff. I was not in a position to think or act or do like any of that until about three or four years ago. And I want to try to live like that.

SPEAKER_15: A lot of the money that I have is going to come back to this place. This place is going to be the nuts, you know? It's going to keep getting better and better and better. The rest of it's going to go into a bunch of genetics work. It's not going to my kids. It's all going to go away.

SPEAKER_23: So I feel like I'm just going to free roll it all, and I'm going to end up with a ton of it that will go back into the world to do a lot of good, a lot of it, and hopefully folks like your hands. And so that's kind of how I view it. I'm a risk-seeking individual. You know this from poker. Like, that's what...

SPEAKER_309: I have seen you...

SPEAKER_23: The best thing that my parents taught me about growing up poor is they were never ashamed about being poor. I was ashamed about being poor, but they were not. And you... At some point, the bit flipped, and I said, I'm not ashamed. Like, that's not... That's not... You know?

SPEAKER_312: I should have been ashamed because I smell like fucking curry every day.

SPEAKER_313: But not because I was poor. You know? My house stanked. Straight up stanked.

SPEAKER_315: All right.

David Friedberg: So let's talk about some very practical things. Incubator, accelerator, or not? What do you think? Because we... The best companies are not going to come out of incubators. Okay. Just not.

SPEAKER_107: That's... They have never. They never will. Dropbox, Airbnb would beg to differ. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Tesla. Uber.

Chamath Palihapitiya: SpaceX. Uber. There's a category of company for which an incubator is a wonderful smorgasbord of things.

SPEAKER_23: There's a risk that all of these incubators, or what they're really becoming, is the false signaling that Harvard, Stanford, MIT represented in our generation.

SPEAKER_15: That's the risk. Because it becomes these cookie cutter factories of people who can... Again, when you have, you know, 50,000 people applying to get into Stanford, who's getting in? A lot of the box checkers get in. So, I suspect that you have that same problem at scale for many of these incubators. That's my... That's the risk. So, my intuition, and the data, the historical data supports it, the mega, mega, mega transformational companies are founded by folks who are trying to solve a problem, or who have a defined market opportunity, and they just go out and they just do it.

SPEAKER_323: So, going to... It's not about the belts and suspenders, you know, valuations and all this other stuff.

SPEAKER_328: So, what's the good that comes out of them? Because it's great. People are coming out...

SPEAKER_15: It's a great, at its best, it's a great training platform, and it gives people a lot of confidence. And, again, it's yet another tool. Again, so this is about how you view it. Right.

SPEAKER_23: It's a great way to give you more confidence to then seek and go after your own internal sense of what you want to do. I think that... So, by no means are they bad. I just... If you're asking me, do they generate the mega outcomes?

SPEAKER_333: No. Right. Not been demonstrated thus far.

SPEAKER_23: Yeah, I'm not... You know, this is the hard part, but it's also the very clarifying part of having been

SPEAKER_15: part of a $200 billion company. My bar is high. My capital is largely infinite, but my bar is high.

Chamath Palihapitiya: So, I don't have an issue. 2 million, 4 million, 10 million, 20 million, 50 million. It doesn't matter.

SPEAKER_143: After two meetings in that fucking company. So, it's not about money.

SPEAKER_340: Yeah. Scope. You know? Scope. Ambition.

SPEAKER_23: So, lose the money. It's okay. I'm proud of you. You'll learn something from it. You'll go do something great. Travis, again... Yeah. You know, the first thing Travis says to me on the phone today, Chmoth, I'd like to...

SPEAKER_29: I want to tell you about this really great company I'm involved in called Red Swoosh.

SPEAKER_15: And the funny thing about that was that's what Travis's company was before he started here. And that's how I met Travis in the context of Red Swoosh. Same guy. But look at the outcomes.

SPEAKER_255: Yeah. 20 million, 20 billion. Yeah.

SPEAKER_15: I mean, on its way to 100 billion.

SPEAKER_255: Who knows? Yeah.

SPEAKER_15: So, my point is that I would really like...

SPEAKER_97: I'm unafraid of losing money because I don't care because I'm not going to end up with any when I die.

SPEAKER_15: So, whatever.

SPEAKER_348: So, why...

SPEAKER_15: It's a superficial thing.

SPEAKER_349: Scope.

SPEAKER_312: Ambition. Big concepts.

SPEAKER_193: Why are you not building as opposed to what you do, which is invest in many things? Like, that was a choice. Obviously, you have this big stack of chips. You could go build whatever you want. Why do 20... Leverage.

SPEAKER_47: Yeah, explain. I think, like, I've never been particularly good at details.

SPEAKER_15: I've never been particularly good at, you know, doing one thing very well. I'm always kind of a hopscotcher. So, I just wanted a platform where I could influence positively, where I think I have a very unique thing to offer the world that very few people have, which is a perspective. I have a perspective.

SPEAKER_97: You know what I'm saying? And it's not necessarily right, nor wrong, but it's my own, and I'm willing to back it up with my money.

SPEAKER_23: And when that aligns with yours, let's go. And so, that's why, for me, this platform is so powerful, because I can get anybody on the phone. Like, John Doerr and I were having lunch two Fridays ago, and we're like, somebody has to go after the electronic medical record market in a really big way.

SPEAKER_15: Let's go and take down this company called Epic, which is this massive old conglomerate. It's like the IBM of healthcare.

SPEAKER_321: So, this is what happens in the Star Chamber. Yeah. So, this is what happens in there.

SPEAKER_15: But the first two calls, you know, John could call the White House and say, guys, I need

SPEAKER_23: to see what's going on with Meaningful Use 3, which is a specific part of the ADA, the Affordable Care Act. I call the head of Mayo, and I'm like, hey, listen, I think we're going to do this thing.

SPEAKER_169: I need you to back me up and be willing to rip out Epic if we do this.

SPEAKER_362: Now, I just need an entrepreneur to go do it.

SPEAKER_364: That's the finite quantity.

Chamath Palihapitiya: But see what I'm saying? Like, we can line things up for success. Right. And now, it's like, let's go. Okay, it may take 100 million bucks. We may fail. But wow, what a great way to fail.

SPEAKER_366: All right. So, we're going to take some questions from the audience. I don't see any microphones, so I don't know exactly. Oh, there is a microphone.

SPEAKER_11: So, they're going to run around. You're going to raise your hand, and you're going to give a very concise question. Not a promo or anything like that, just a concise question.

SPEAKER_193: Not your life story, not therapy, not your first project, but a solid question. Those people got kicked out, I take it. That's good, yeah. And I'm going to ask you about the world and things outside of technology, religion and terrorism, and what's happening with ISIS, what's happening in the Middle East.

SPEAKER_166: We talk about, hey, all these people are now going to run the world. So, this is what I'm talking about.

SPEAKER_15: If we want stability in the world, we do it by giving young people opportunity. I mean, if you look at the riots that happened a few years ago in Paris, if you look at sort of like the Arab Spring and how it really started with the self-immolation of a fruit stand worker in Tunisia, this is happening because people don't have access to opportunities. So, if you go and fix the basic boundary conditions of life, your ability to just live and not

SPEAKER_23: die, your ability to have access to a reasonable set of skills, and then your ability to get enough money, the world is a different place. These people are not going and figuring out how to go and fight. They're figuring out how to go and live.

SPEAKER_28: You know, let's talk about jobs.

SPEAKER_366: I mean, we have this perpetual unemployment here in the United States. It's not going away.

SPEAKER_372: While the polarization of wealth continues and jobs keep getting eliminated because of robots, because of automation.

SPEAKER_366: Do you believe that we're going to be having less jobs in the future or that more jobs will be created?

SPEAKER_133: Or we're going to have to deal with a society that might have 20% less work to do or 30% less work to do because of efficiency? What's the truth?

SPEAKER_15: I think that at current course in speed, if we don't figure out new things, that's exactly what's going to happen. We're going to have 30% structural unemployment, and things will be in a very bad place. But what are the new things? You know, we find different forms of energy, which allows us to redefine transportation. We go to different places. We figure out different kinds of materials that didn't exist before that allows us to build different things. Those are the kinds of structural innovations that right now, we need to bend the laws of physics beyond our understanding of them. And I think that's like sort of like this first big step in kind of solving that problem. But otherwise, we will have these structural economic issues. And that's going to affect all of you guys a lot.

SPEAKER_166: And what about the polarization of wealth? I mean, people get huge... Rich people have an obligation to give it back.

SPEAKER_29: I mean, just fucking just... You know what I'm saying? You can't... By definition, you are making it off of a mass market, right?

SPEAKER_28: You don't become a billionaire by basically sitting on top of a few thousand people.

SPEAKER_23: You make it by building services for hundreds of millions to billions of people. So those same people that give you wealth, you don't think you have a responsibility to do something right by them? It's fucking crazy to me. Yeah. You know? And so it's like, it's not for me. I look at my kids and I think they're so lucky that they can be around what all of this

SPEAKER_28: is, but they're so cursed.

SPEAKER_29: Because if I did it the wrong way, they would think like they deserved it. They didn't do a fucking thing.

SPEAKER_385: You know what I'm saying?

David Friedberg: Yeah. And so I see a lot of these people... So they're not getting huge inherences. No. I mean, I would hope that they come here. You know what I'm saying?

SPEAKER_23: If they want to start a business, I'll fund it.

SPEAKER_15: I'll treat them like any other entrepreneur. Infinitely I'll fund it. But them having money?

SPEAKER_391: No.

SPEAKER_388: Okay, let's take a question.

SPEAKER_389: How's it going? So if you have a question, raise your hand. It has to be super quick. We only have a couple minutes. Up there. Yell it loud.

SPEAKER_393: Yes.

SPEAKER_398: Thank you for yelling. Great, great, great question. Okay.

SPEAKER_23: In those market-defined opportunities, there is so much information that people just refuse to lead largely out of sheer laziness. I'll give you a simple example. In healthcare, if you guys want to understand, guys, I'm telling you, you guys, individually, each of you, could build several billion-dollar companies in healthcare. The ACA, Obamacare in the U.S., has implications not just in the U.S., but in the rest of the world. We're talking about, just in the United States, a reallocation of $3 trillion of capital. If you want to understand what to do, read that act.

SPEAKER_29: And you'd be shocked at the stuff that you'd learn. And it's amazing that sometimes, like I sit with my peers, and they don't know the first

SPEAKER_23: thing because they're just intellectually lazy. But, you know, in the example of healthcare, that's what I would do.

SPEAKER_15: In the example of education, I think, like, the trends, you don't need to know much more than this. We're moving to a skill-based economy, and it's about, less about degrees and all about

SPEAKER_23: knowledge. And there's just going to be a complete reallocation of human capital. And you're talking about basically figuring out GDP. It's just...

SPEAKER_389: So, the next question is from the live stream, actually.

SPEAKER_402: What has been your biggest mistake in your career, and what would you have done differently?

SPEAKER_404: I thought you said we didn't have a lot of time.

SPEAKER_407: I mean, you know, let's get you back for the white guy comment before.

SPEAKER_408: We're very good friends. We do this at a poker table for hours a week.

SPEAKER_29: I don't know, man. I make a lot of mistakes. But to be honest with you, this may sound so sick, but, like, I don't really think about

SPEAKER_23: them that much. So, I don't have, like, that great big thing that I regret. Shit happens. So, I get a lot of stuff wrong. Most of the times, I'm wrong. Often wrong, never in doubt. That's what I say. I say to remind myself, because it's okay.

Chamath Palihapitiya: And I don't get caught up in, like, you need to be right. You only need to be right once.

SPEAKER_252: I mean, that's your career. Exactly.

David Friedberg: Exactly. And now you get to be right a hundred times, because you got ammunition. Exactly. No, you're exactly right.

SPEAKER_23: That's exactly right. And I've just, I'm not ashamed of being wrong. It's okay. So, I don't know what my biggest mistake was. I know that I made a lot of them. I should be making more in the future. If I don't, that's death.

SPEAKER_416: Okay, another question.

SPEAKER_413: Okay, we have time for, like, one or two more. So, who has the quickest question?

SPEAKER_416: We're going to do ten more. Keep going.

SPEAKER_413: Right there. Yes.

SPEAKER_416: You mentioned building something with a purpose.

SPEAKER_418: Well, what's your opinion?

SPEAKER_423: Great.

SPEAKER_424: Yeah. But again, I think...

SPEAKER_423: Can you all repeat the question real quick?

SPEAKER_193: Okay, so the question was, what about products where it doesn't have a defined purpose, but the users figure out a purpose? And you said, that's fine.

SPEAKER_15: I think that's great. But I'm saying, I'm pretty sure, I don't know this to be true, but I'm pretty sure that

SPEAKER_97: those first few folks that built Snapchat used it in that way because they wanted to use it in that way.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah. I know for a fact that with Tinder, those guys built it that way because they wanted to use the product that way.

SPEAKER_52: Now, I also sold it, but whatever. Yeah. I mean...

SPEAKER_193: Yeah. I mean, if you read Evan's emails, he was definitely looking to, yeah, trade pictures.

SPEAKER_15: I think the point is... The initial starting point is because you're using it in one way. They may show you a trail of breadcrumbs or something else. That's great. But again, I go back to, you got to start because you need it yourself.

SPEAKER_193: There's a great Canadian author, William Gibson, who said, the street finds its own use for technology.

SPEAKER_434: Let's take another question. That do with the hat.

SPEAKER_47: I think that the two most obvious things that I think will make a ton of money in Africa,

SPEAKER_15: one is just banking in general. I think banking has been defined as these regional things, United States, Canada, whatever. And through things like Bitcoin, and now, frankly, through things like Alipay even, I think all of that is up in the air. So, thinking about financial services in that community are ridiculous. Like, you can...

SPEAKER_445: Oh, yeah. The question was, what are your thoughts on Africa?

SPEAKER_446: Africa. Like, what are the kinds of things that would be interesting in Africa?

SPEAKER_23: I think financial services would be a monstrosity. M-PESA is nuts.

SPEAKER_104: People don't even know what this is, but explain what it is and why... Well, it's an entire functioning payment system that operates largely through SMS. It's a cryptocurrency before there was one, essentially.

SPEAKER_15: That's a nice soundbite. Not correct. But that's a good question.

SPEAKER_315: Okay. It was a digital currency before... There you go. Digital, because it wasn't crypto. Yeah. All right. Another question.

SPEAKER_453: This dude in the blue shirt.

SPEAKER_455: What does your startup dream team look like?

SPEAKER_13: Okay. What does a startup dream team look like?

SPEAKER_52: You need one extremely obstreperous, slightly chubby Greek.

SPEAKER_462: Around him, you... You need a really skinny brown guy.

SPEAKER_463: You need a kind of... You need a kind of... You know? Dook, dook, dook, dook, dook, dook.

SPEAKER_467: It's becoming a sitcom. It is.

SPEAKER_29: Okay. You need probably like two or three really, really, really sick developers.

SPEAKER_23: You need one quasi-developer who's more of an organizing layer. And I think you need one person who's just a maniac and just a bundle of energy. Ideally, those people are also as different as possible.

SPEAKER_471: Why?

SPEAKER_97: Because I think when you're forced to find commonalities other than by the superficial commonalities, it just creates way better teams. It doesn't necessarily mean like, you know, four guys and you need one girl or like four

SPEAKER_23: girls and you need one guy. Like, that's not... You just have to be different. Different in how you were raised.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Different in how you think. Extrovert, introvert, judge or thinker, feeler. You know, like different in religion, if that's the thing that... Like, just differences. You need differences, but commonalities. And against those kind of four archetypes. Like, I see those three or four people in any meeting. I get super excited.

SPEAKER_476: I include a designer in that team.

SPEAKER_477: So, we have a question on Twitter. It's, if a degree is less relevant in today's economy, what is the role of university?

SPEAKER_15: I think that university's job is to impart skills. And I think it's to connect the dots between theory and true knowledge.

SPEAKER_97: And so, a place like Waterloo, you learn the theory. And then in four months, you're forced to apply it and you develop knowledge. Then you learn some more theory.

SPEAKER_23: Then you apply it and you develop knowledge. And then what happens is, you know, in five years, what you're graduating is just a much more enlightened, thoughtful individual. And it's because of those work experiences that help bookend and calibrate everything you're learning every day. And in the schools that don't offer that, finding a way to seek that out, I think, is really important. But that's the role of the university. It brings different people together. It allows you to immerse yourself in different ways of thinking. Be allowed to just think so that you're not just living on your iPhone email inbox all day. So, it's about those things at the edges now, as opposed to the BASC or the PhD.

SPEAKER_366: And people are down on universities because the cost and the value when compared to skills is off.

SPEAKER_166: Is that the issue?

SPEAKER_97: So, Ryan Carson, who's the CEO of Treehouse, I mentioned it earlier, tweeted this thing out. He's like, every year, Treehouse graduates 90,000 people, total student debt, zero.

SPEAKER_15: Every year, Corinthians, which is like a big conglomerate for-profit, graduates 80,000 people, so 10,000 less, total debt, a billion dollars.

SPEAKER_11: One's a scam, one's the real deal. The dude up there has been holding his hand up between questions the entire time with the headphones on. Do it! You got it. Bring it!

SPEAKER_366: Yeah, so the question is, talking to international startups where if you lose, you are personally in debt, you personally have to pay people's unemployment, and you can be ruined for life,

SPEAKER_131: versus America, where you can fail over and over again and start over the next day and have no personal liability.

SPEAKER_446: Right, so we were talking about this in the car.

SPEAKER_15: The most important thing that is happening outside of the United States was what happened this morning when Alibaba opened, okay?

SPEAKER_28: A shareholder. And why is that?

SPEAKER_97: It's because now there's a $200 billion company grown by Chinese for Chinese in China, and

SPEAKER_15: it sends a signal to all Chinese, you don't need to go to the United States. Screw their complicated healthcare system. Screw their convoluted and racist immigration practices. Screw their idiotic foreign policy. I'm staying here.

SPEAKER_24: And as a result, an ecosystem develops. And so the long-term solution is that we need the Alibabas in as many countries as possible.

SPEAKER_23: You know, native folks from those countries that show that it's possible, and then create

SPEAKER_15: the incentives for others to support the next versions of that. You know, Canada had a few. We need the next generation of those here. You know, India needs that. Flipkart could be it, but it could be others.

SPEAKER_166: So there's, that's what we need.

SPEAKER_229: And if you're in one of those countries where they personally hold people responsible for, like, a corporation going under or make you go to court to fire somebody like France, you need to leave. You need to leave France.

SPEAKER_496: It's just not entrepreneurial. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you need to leave France.

SPEAKER_52: Just leave France. Yeah, let's not talk about France, but you just need to leave France.

SPEAKER_499: But they're just never going to create anything important. Jason says in the car, it's like, what kind of country, you know, Gerard Depardieu, the

SPEAKER_104: 78th best actor in the world. What kind of country loses their best actor? To Russia. To Russia, of all places.

SPEAKER_366: I mean, he left Paris for Russia because he didn't want to pay the taxes. Dude in the orange shirt, who won't put his hand down?

SPEAKER_15: Okay, so where are the next big companies going to get built? If you look at the percentage of the S&P that's in technology, like 12%, in my opinion. The more important question is, what is it going to be in 30 years? I think it's going to be 50, 60%. Tech companies.

SPEAKER_268: I think only half of those at best are Silicon Valley companies. And I think the rest of those are going to be from everywhere else.

SPEAKER_501: Which is an extraordinary number.

SPEAKER_23: It's an extraordinary number. When Flipkart goes public, which it will, it'll be monstrous. Alibaba and JD.com, monstrous. When Alipay goes public, monstrous.

SPEAKER_15: I mean, WeChat itself is creating an ecosystem in China that's going to support 15 to 20 billion dollar companies. It's happening. It's happening in other places outside the U.S. And frankly, it's good. Because now the challenge for the United States is like, where do we get our talent from?

SPEAKER_446: You know, there was like these crazy studies like, I don't know, like 40%. Or a third of like all engineers were Asian, South Asian in the Valley.

SPEAKER_22: Not anymore. Where are they going to be? They're going to stay in Canada. They're going to stay in India. They're going to stay in China. You know?

SPEAKER_15: So it's going to be really interesting to see how the U.S. evolves to support a more dynamic environmental ecosystem. Or entrepreneurial ecosystem.

SPEAKER_504: Guy in the back.

SPEAKER_236: The dude, the gray shirt. The gray shirt dude.

SPEAKER_506: So the question is, are university, is your time in university correlated with your ability as an entrepreneur?

SPEAKER_15: In certain aspects, absolutely. I mean, the things that we saw today, if you're trying to do something fundamental in physics, you need to have academic prowess.

SPEAKER_97: If you're going to do something in like terahertz signaling and antennas, you're going to need some level of academic prowess. My only point is, is that for all of you who are going to get a lot out of school, there's a lot of folks that you probably know who will not. And who will have benefited from a different kind of education.

SPEAKER_15: And all we needed to do was give them enough self-respect and respect to say that that's

SPEAKER_97: okay and equivalent to me, even if I graduated from a BASC in electrical engineering from Waterloo.

SPEAKER_298: So, that's all we got to do. We got to just decide that that's okay. Final question from the other chat, the other room.

SPEAKER_477: So, this is our final question from the live stream. If you don't have unlimited funds, then how do you expect to change the world on the same scale you're describing?

Chamath Palihapitiya: I mean, dude, like, I had no money. I got lucky. So, whatever. But, like, now I have this money. I'm willing to give it to you.

SPEAKER_513: Come up with a big idea. Take it.

SPEAKER_315: On that note, ladies and gentlemen. Oh, one thing.

SPEAKER_166: I just want to say one thing. Oh, yeah. What about the fellow thing you're doing? This great thing called Fellows. It's a fellowship, a fellow program.

SPEAKER_24: Fellows at s23p.com. s23p.com. Very simple proposition. It's mostly for co-ops in Waterloo. We're probably going to expand it to outside. So, just apply. You get paid a pro-rated salary that's approaching, what, 100K a year? What is it? 100K pro-rated.

SPEAKER_15: 8,500 a month. 8,500 a month you get paid. You get to go work at a bunch of really crazy, big idea startups. And if you're really good, we'll give you vested equity in that startup when you leave. And a huge recommendation. All you have to do is be able to pass the coding challenge.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 8,500 a month, vested equity, baller, Silicon Valley. How much FaceTime do they get with you?

SPEAKER_522: A fair amount. Yeah. Yeah. No, realistically, they'd be able to have lunch with you or something? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_166: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're hanging out at the office. And look, I mean, you get tickets to the Warriors.

Chamath Palihapitiya: I mean, just all kinds of cool shit happens.

SPEAKER_166: Cool stuff, man.

SPEAKER_525: That's pretty awesome. Yeah.

SPEAKER_527: All right. So, ladies and gentlemen, one more time for Chamath Palihapitiya. Thank you.