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.
00:27:45 · David Senra, Micky Malka
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00:29:05 · Micky Malka, David Senra
[00:29:05] S1: From what sense? I think [00:29:06] S0: the founders moving forward, like, obviously, they're gonna be way more capital efficient. I think they're gonna own larger percentages of their companies because they're gonna need to to raise less money. Think I you used the analogy of one time if you go back and look at, like, some of the Robert Barons who owned, like, Henry Ford owned a 100% of his company. Yep. Some of them would go public and they'd own 70 or 80% of the company. Yeah. I'm just very curious, like, how you think they're gonna be building companies, again, a 21 or 22 year old compared to even like a 35 year old?
00:29:35 · Micky Malka
[00:29:35] S1: So the the first thing about this generation is they understand that if they play by the rules of of the game, they will not win. The rules of society right now. They will be stuck in student debt. They will be stuck in a in a bunch of problems that are... They've been watching this through YouTube. They've been reading about it on on social media. They've been seeing that we have a spun era of of Elon's, of innovation, of Edison people, mindsets that it's allowing the mind to really flow. And surprisingly, capital is right now historically levels of almost unlimited capital access. Especially if you're younger, there's even more capital than before. It's a perfect scenario for this generation to really create and take risk in ways that you cannot imagine. Funny enough, when you talk to them the most, you will find that a lot of them feel that working on software alone is boring. It's not fun. It's not challenging enough. They want to build physical objects. They want to touch materials. They want to get their hands dirty in building stuff that will actually matter and get to our hands one way or the other. Which is super interesting because that was not the generation of the last fifteen, twenty years. Everybody was trying to go capital light. Everybody was trying to build software only, and try to go through the cycles as fast as you can. This generation is not afraid of getting their hands dirty. So it's super interesting to see the behaviors. What's the difference? Why? I don't know. Like, maybe they just find that they grew up with a phone, they grew up with a tablet, they grew up with a computer, so it's not interesting enough to limit the world to just bits and bytes. Mhmm. But the more time I spend with them, the the biggest thing and the biggest question that I find asking them is... Because the oldest of this generation are probably 25, 26, the younger are 18. You ask them, what were you doing during COVID? And that is the most fascinating question. The most successful ones right now were the ones that during COVID were learning. And were on YouTube, sucking information about anything and learning about everything in life. So when they go and and build companies, they find that first they're naive, so anything's possible. Second, technology is there, so anything's possible.