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.
00:24:39 · David Senra, Micky Malka
[00:24:39] S0: What else did you learn from Dee Hock? The the fascinating thing, a couple people have asked me before, because I've done like two or three episodes on Dee Hock. He wrote this this great autobiography, which is, you know, tells the story of Visa. But then when he was a much older man, he also has these two books of Maxims called The Autobiography of a Restless Mind, volume one and volume two. Yeah. Again, somebody can compress the language and and give you a lot of ideas in, like, know, a sentence or two. A lot of people have asked me this, like, why do you think, you Visa is one of the most successful companies of all time? I think one of most profitable per employee companies in history. Yep. And yet, not a lot of people talk about it. And somebody asked me one time... Or a few people have actually asked me this. Like, why do you think that is? It's like, because it's still very confusing on how he actually built it. I've read his book two times that I still don't really understand. Yep. So, like, what else do you think you learned from D Hawk? Did he influence the way you built Ribbit at all? [00:25:23] S1: Yes. [00:25:24] S0: Okay. I don't know And if want [00:25:25] S1: not only Ribbit, but my my my previous startups too. Because he he he taught me so much about how to how to get people to be the best version of themselves in in the kind of organizations that you have to have. Even my go to question on interviews, it's a question he taught me on how to ask. So, I've learned so much [00:25:48] S0: from him. What is that question?
00:25:50 · Micky Malka
[00:25:50] S1: I give people six words, and I tell them to organize them in a certain order. And then the way they walk through that order says a lot about the person. And it was a letter that Dee wrote to his team in 1972, I think, where he articulates all of this. So I learned that from him. So spending time with Dee, what you get is that he understood human psychology better than anybody in that era, in that particular space. He understood that to get bankers who, by their sheer DNA, are people that tend to be risk adverse and people that care too much about their reputation. He found a way through this model of association. His biggest success was the legal model he used. No one had ever done a company in that structure. An association model allow everybody to save face, but at the same time take the credit. And that's how he won. Because it doesn't matter who you were, which bank competed with the other one, it didn't care, because each one can compete by themselves, but at the same time, win if the brand won. That was the beauty of the... When you spend time with him, he will say, it was the model, and people don't get it. So I I find that his rest... Restless mind was alive even in his early nineties, because I would have swerved that he could have been Satoshi Nakamoto if he had if he had been 40 younger. He had explained to me blockchain and what... For him, Visa was a failure, if if you talk to him, because he only got to release the simple version of it, which was payments. He wanted to do a lot more, which looked a lot like blockchains and and smart contracts are today. But he was probably sixty years ahead of his time.