00:18:38 · David Senra, Micky Malka
[00:18:38] S0: So I know you play the infinite game. You wanna play forever, but are you... Do you consider yourself a competitive person though? [00:18:42] S1: Define competitor. I guess the way [00:18:44] S0: I think about this internally is just like, I'm in a very positive sum industry. If you listen to my podcast today and another podcast tomorrow, I don't lose on that. But I still wake up every day trying to do the best job I possibly can. [00:18:56] S1: Yes. So if that's a competitor, yes. I try to do the best job. [00:18:59] S0: But it's not relative to other people. [00:19:01] S1: No. I don't look at other people. I don't each one is playing their own game. I have I try really hard to not have fear missing out. I try really hard to just make sure that I'm playing the best game I can to play this game until the last day I am alive. It doesn't matter if I win or lose because you will... That's not the game. You you fall behind. Actually, I will tell you that I've learned about myself, I'd rather be behind. I'm a much better person being behind than when I'm When I'm ahead, it means, oh, you guys are doing well, this is going in right direction, you were right, this happened, this played out. And immediately, immediately, my spider senses get all activated and said, okay. That means that whatever... I gotta change the rules because it's not good to be ahead. You wanna be ahead for a while, but you want the rules to change to fall behind so you can innovate again.
00:19:01 · Micky Malka, David Senra
[00:19:01] S1: No. I don't look at other people. I don't each one is playing their own game. I have I try really hard to not have fear missing out. I try really hard to just make sure that I'm playing the best game I can to play this game until the last day I am alive. It doesn't matter if I win or lose because you will... That's not the game. You you fall behind. Actually, I will tell you that I've learned about myself, I'd rather be behind. I'm a much better person being behind than when I'm When I'm ahead, it means, oh, you guys are doing well, this is going in right direction, you were right, this happened, this played out. And immediately, immediately, my spider senses get all activated and said, okay. That means that whatever... I gotta change the rules because it's not good to be ahead. You wanna be ahead for a while, but you want the rules to change to fall behind so you can innovate again. [00:19:53] S0: Yeah. This is why I said that you... There's so many times when we're talking, like, goddamn it, Mickey sounds just like the people I read books about. I just met James Dyson, who was like a personal hero of mine. [00:20:02] S1: Yep. [00:20:02] S0: And he said the exact same thing on on this podcast. He's just like losing is so much more interesting. Yeah. He's like, you just learn so much. He likes being behind. Yeah. Yeah. He just has that chip on his shoulder. Well, really, just the desire to constantly improve. He just feels you're gonna improve a lot more when you're, like, losing or you're behind.
00:20:02 · David Senra, Micky Malka
[00:20:02] S0: And he said the exact same thing on on this podcast. He's just like losing is so much more interesting. Yeah. He's like, you just learn so much. He likes being behind. Yeah. Yeah. He just has that chip on his shoulder. Well, really, just the desire to constantly improve. He just feels you're gonna improve a lot more when you're, like, losing or you're behind. [00:20:16] S1: A 100%. I'm much better when I'm behind. I learn more. I'm... I... Everything everything about it is just gives you much more energy. [00:20:24] S0: I wanna go back, because I interrupted you, I wanna go back to your idea of every company's becoming a token factory. [00:20:28] S1: Yeah. [00:20:29] S0: The only token factories that you see right now are the labs? [00:20:33] S1: No. So you're starting to see application layers that are starting to show up that are building token factories. Think about on the voice AI. Think about eleven Labs or Decagon or Sierra. They're all companies that are understanding how to they're creating their token factories. They're creating a service that did not exist before in a way that was not possible. We're going to a world where every single piece of information needs to be readable by the machine. And that's how the world will go to the next generation. [00:21:04] S0: So you finished writing the letter. What do you do next?
00:21:04 · David Senra, Micky Malka
[00:21:04] S0: So you finished writing the letter. What do you do next? [00:21:06] S1: We share with our founders, people that we work with closely, and we allow them to... And our LPs, our investors. Why? Because we want them to hold us accountable. This is our thinking. You have you have the chance. You can walk out or you can keep believing in our in in our thesis. So we we put it out there, and then we we go out. And we start talking about it with the founders that we met while we wrote it. What happens These [00:21:39] S0: are founders that you've not yet invested in? [00:21:41] S1: Most of them are founders that we have not yet invested in. Because as we write the thesis, have not invested into them yet. We're learning from them. Maybe on the way we make an investment or two, maybe. But most of the time we don't. Then after that, and what happens is some of the best founders will read and said, oh, wow. You guys really understand it. This is deep. Let's talk about it. And that's how we build those relationships that take a long time to build. [00:22:09] S0: So I know you spend a lot of time with people in their early twenties. Do you feel that this is the way they're talking... They're thinking about building companies?
00:22:09 · David Senra, Micky Malka
[00:22:09] S0: So I know you spend a lot of time with people in their early twenties. Do you feel that this is the way they're talking... They're thinking about building companies? [00:22:15] S1: Good question. I think some of them are. I think some others are not like any other generation. What believe the people in their 20s have right now is that they are the smartest, fastest learner generation we've ever had in history. They learn the fastest. And it's because they get used to listening to podcasts at one and a half, two x. They don't have to wait for the mail to arrive with an annual letter a month later. They can read it in real time. Right? So their ability to process information, it's so much faster than our brains ever had been trained for. So you can see it in the way they can process. What I think the best ones can do also is that they can articulate a vision and a story and bring people to follow them. But not all of them have those skills yet. They haven't developed them. Because that generation, as much as they're super smart learning, they're also, were not trained to be great communicators on the other side. So the few that are great communicators, I think they have it embedded in them. [00:23:20] S0: How do you think they view company building differently than somebody, let's say, ten years older than them?
00:23:20 · David Senra, Micky Malka
[00:23:20] S0: How do you think they view company building differently than somebody, let's say, ten years older than them? [00:23:25] S1: I think they look at org charts very differently. I think they look at functions very differently. They don't think the org chart structure that we inherited and that we grew up with, I I don't think it applies anymore in the same way they did. Humans are key center and they will be for as long as we are alive in lifetime. But org charts and the way they organize people, completely different. And you can see it. They are self organizing. And I love studying this because one of my mentors is Dee Hock, the founder of Visa. And I spent with him almost ten or twelve years visiting him and and talking to him. And he's a creator of the chaotic organization. He is the believer that you should never organize... The best expression of humans are in the intersection between chaos and order. If you're too orderly, you don't innovate. If you're too chaotic, you don't communicate, and you break. So chaotic is the right place to be. They're actually doing these kids are doing a great job by pure nature of how they were trained and wired with this era of technology to be in the epicenter of chaotic. So that's how they're working, and that's what's different about them.