David Senra
00:25:25 · Scott Kupor
And we started that in 2019, we brought him in a guy named David George from GA, General Atlantic who had been doing this, he was great. And so I basically started working with David and carved out more of like doing stuff on the healthcare side. So by the time I left for government, I had about 15 companies that I had invested in, about 10 of which that I was sitting on the board of. But doing stuff where the evaluation of the company was more about the operational successes and kind of the opportunity for the company from, like, one to infinity as opposed to the zero to the one side of investing, which I just didn't feel like I had the right skill set to do.
00:25:56 · David Senra, Scott Kupor
[00:25:56] S0: Deel is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade. And one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority. A players recognize other a players, which is why top companies like Ramp, Shopify, ElevenLabs, Uber, and DoorDash all use Deel. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deel after using their product. And what they discovered is that Deel is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deel will help your business hire, pay, and manage any worker anywhere in the world so you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers. The founder of ElevenLabs has a great description of the value Deel can give your company. He said, we built ElevenLabs to break down language and communication barriers, With Deel enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere, we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories, and ideas to every corner of the world. Deel is trusted by over 40,000 companies and growing fast. Learn how they can help your business by going to deal.com/senra. That is deal.com/senra. So you just mentioned it, then you decide to leave after sixteen, seventeen years, and you're... You take a hard turn [00:27:15] S1: You think so? [00:27:16] S0: I sure think so. Into government. Why?
00:27:16 · David Senra, Scott Kupor
[00:27:16] S0: I sure think so. Into government. Why? [00:27:20] S1: Yeah, my wife asked me that a lot too. So look, this seems to [00:27:24] S0: be a reoccurring theme with your My wife questioning
00:27:26 · Scott Kupor
[00:27:26] S1: wife your is way smarter than I am and her job is mostly yes to question like what the hell am I doing? So the historical reason was I had literally done policy stuff starting in literally in high school, actually, I worked for a group back in high school that used to do healthcare policy research. So we were trying to figure out like, because we were doing like breast cancer screening stuff, right? You know, like what do the economics look like? And then when I went to Stanford, I worked for a professor, this guy named Alan Garber, who's actually now the president of Harvard, doing stuff around prostate cancer, right? Which is okay, like, does it make sense to screen large populations of men for prostate cancer? And I won't go into details, it turns out there's these weird nuances of prostate cancer. The basic answer is most men die with some form of prostate cancer, very few men die of prostate cancer, and so screening broad populations can be problematic because you will catch a lot of stuff that never would have actually had health outcomes. Anyway, so I'd been doing that, and then when I went when I went to Stanford through law school, I actually worked for another guy who... His name is in the news today, guy named Jay Bhattacharya who now runs the NIH, if you follow that. Jay was a researcher at Stanford, I was his grunt, I used to do like modeling for him for this policy group that worked on. So I always had these like interests in policy and then whatever life kind of intervened and ended up obviously going in a different path and going to the private sector. But at some point in my bucket list I always thought I'd do policy stuff. The reason now was really a couple of things. One was just from a personal perspective like it was the right time in my life to do this so my kids were all out of the house at this point in time. Marc and Ben were incredibly gracious and said, hey look, if this is what you want to do, like we're happy to support it, know, you know, they were, they enabled me to kind of transition my stuff off and you know, gave me the freedom to do that. And obviously I've been very lucky just financially along the way to have the means to be able to kind of take a break from the business.
00:29:10 · Scott Kupor, David Senra
And then the second thing was, look, I really believe that what I learned in venture capital might have some applicability to what I would do in government. So the job I have is this, I run this group called the Office of Personnel Management. Essentially, could think of us as we are the HRtalent agency for the 2,000,000 civilian federal employees. So we are responsible for, like, making sure we have the right people coming into government and then all the policies that govern talent essentially in in the government. [00:29:35] S0: And why did you think those... They were skills transferrable from your previous job to this one now?
00:29:35 · David Senra, Scott Kupor
[00:29:35] S0: And why did you think those... They were skills transferrable from your previous job to this one now? [00:29:39] S1: Because what I learned, and particularly, through all the stuff I've done with working for Marc and Ben in companies and managing people, is something very simple, which will sound like so obvious, but I think it's really true, is, look, organizations are pretty simple. It doesn't matter if you're a government organization or a private organization or a not for profit, they're all the same, which is all an organization is, it's a collection of people who are just aligned around a similar set of objectives. Like it's no more complicated than that. The question is like, do you have the right set of objectives? Do you have the right people? And then do you have a set of incentives that track to those objectives so that when people do the things you want them to do, they get rewarded and recognized and you can then kind of do 10 more great objectives or when they don't do that, do you have a mechanism to either correct that behavior and or remove them to the organization? And so when I looked at that, was like, okay, I'm gonna come to government and it's a totally different set of objectives, which I agree, but the fundamental question is like, do we have the right people and do we have the right incentive structure to actually enforce the behavior we want? And the short answer, particularly on the latter side is like the incentive structure is completely screwed up from my perspective.