00:32:23 · Eric Newcomer, Aydin Senkut
[00:32:23] S1: How do you stay on top when other people come to your strategy? Obviously, founders being king, you know, is consensus now at this point. You're certainly way ahead on that, but the rest of the Valley has come to it. I mean, literally, I think today Sequoia gave up their London office. [00:32:38] S0: It's like [00:32:38] S1: they're saying, Oh yeah, we could invest anywhere from California. So it sounds like what you were just saying. Like how you stay differentiated when people respond to competition and try to match what
00:32:50 · Aydin Senkut
[00:32:50] S0: I you're think the most important thing is the number one value. It's so important that we actually put in all our conference rooms is learning and adapting rapidly. So reinvention is the biggest thing. In fact, one of the things that I saw, especially when human beings are most successful is when they're most vulnerable because that fools our brain to think something works so great, don't change anything. Like something like we had a dog in the room, right? Like you were wearing the cerebral valley hat and you were wearing these great glasses and you had a beard. Like don't change anything. Like don't shave. Like you should stay exactly the way you are. And in some ways the things that makes technology really interesting has this kind of like backside of like, wow, like you know like the reason why these things happen is because they're going to get disrupted again. And the only way to get ahead of it and not be surprised or shocked by it is to reinvent yourself and preempt the disruption before the disruption hits you and you're surprised. Right? So that's why I'm like religiously obsessed with I mean I read 20 fourseven. I literally like try to go out of my way to talk to very interesting people and that goes back to the emergent list. Don't always ask the obvious people. Ask different people. Ask experts. Ask the demand. Where is demand going to come from? And that informs where the growth is going to come from which then informs where the value is going to come from. So I think the most important thing is like go around and wonder, like do the not obvious thing and pick the unconventional way because with the right amount of bravery and a little bit of consistency, it can take you to
00:34:24 · Eric Newcomer
[00:34:24] S1: great places. The weird point is that I'm only really going to change if I'm in sort of a high pressure situation where I have to like, oh, I'm not comfortable. It's like when you're comfortable, you sort of stay static. And when you're not, that's when you change. That's when you sort of create a great startup. Is that that was sort of the point you
00:34:41 · Aydin Senkut
[00:34:41] S0: made I don't know. I think that's the founder journey. I just don't know how to do it except being absolutely relentless. Right. Relentless is another one of our core values. All the founders that I met, I mean, there is this intrinsic thing about them that just drives them. It's like a nuclear engine. Know, like the reason why we like nuclear is because the energy is so abundant like just keeps going for like years and years. And like I remember like this, like I didn't realize this in the beginning but later I found out like CEO of Adyen was a cancer survivor and climbed Everest. Toby at Shopify was a savant programmer at age 15 at Siemens and I think the person who mentored him told him a lot about programming and also just what matters in the world. So each one of these founders had this very quirky way of getting to excellence. And other people look at that as like, Oh, that doesn't fit my standard formula. And having worked for Larry and Sergey who are PhD students that never in a single day in their life worked for corporate and made better decisions and created a company that was 10 times more valuable than any like in corporate America. What I basically learned is like greatness never comes if you're copying others. Greatness comes if you're original, if you're unconventional and more importantly if you relentlessly move forward even if you're like hitting like wall after wall or increasingly like taller mountains and all you can say is, I'm going to conquer the next mountain and then the next one and the next one after that. And never stop. And I think only that keeps you going. And in the beginning of our conversation you mentioned like it's not enough to do something great. I think Bezos said this but maybe if you repeatedly done it a 100 or thousand times, now we can start talking that maybe you're starting to get on the edge of greatness. Not once, but at least a 100 or thousand times. So it's an inspiration for me, even though I never worked for him. It's just one of
00:36:35 · Eric Newcomer
[00:36:35] S1: the dogmas that drives me forward. The mood in the venture business right now is for the multi stage funds, right? It's like the big are getting bigger, raising huge amounts of money. It's sort of a two part question. Like, do you feel the pressure, I guess, to get bigger and bigger to match this sense that the light speed general catalyst of the world, multi strategy, huge, or you don't want to do that? And then on the other end, what do you feel for the emerging managers, the people who are much earlier than you that feel like totally squeezed out of the business even by 4,000,000,000 funds? And so I guess the first part of the question is like, what's your approach to the situation where mega funds get bigger and bigger? And then what advice and thought do you have for the emerging
00:37:21 · Aydin Senkut
[00:37:21] S0: I mean, look, in every situation people only see one side of things and you need to look at it from multiple sides. Like you can say, well, these four largest firms are doing something very interesting but you also have to realize that comes at a cost. Do you want to manage like 600 people? Do you want to manage like dozens of funds? Like how many LPs do you want to manage? Will the capital raising continue? Now you're so giant that giant entity basically drives what you do and it's no longer about the pureness of I just want to back founders like Eric or I want to back founders like Walter at Fractal or a couple at Supabase. It's basically what the machine dictates. You just look at the numbers and like, well, the way these numbers are, I need to basically write even $100,000,000 checks is not going to move it. I need to write billion dollar checks. And how many companies in the world can absorb billion dollar checks and produce businesses that are worth trillion dollars? Now, it's exciting but there are no like 100 or 1,000 of them yet. I ran the numbers like in 2006 there were no trillion dollar companies. Now we have fifteen trillion dollar companies but I'm not sure if 15 is going to be 1,500. So look, the way that I think about it is the most important thing that everybody has to ask whether they're giant or they're micro is that you got to be authentic to yourself. I think in Silicon Valley there is one thing that I observed that a lot of people, even managers, they want to be something what people tell them to be. You know what? You're this. You should do this. Or this is your background. This is what you should be doing. And to me the thing that I've done all my life is to never ever go into a box people tell me. Always make my own box. Transcend what people tell you. And so look, I don't know what the right answer is yet. I think it's really important to have enough capital because especially in this world the three areas we talked about biology, physical world and robotics and AI infrastructure unlike twenty years ago when I started where software companies didn't need a lot of capital, we're in a new world where there was a lot of capital spend and CapEx spend because you're building something durable and deep moats. The dark side of it is it requires a lot of CapEx.