00:50:47 · Joon Sung Park
[00:50:47] S1: So for me, the people I respect the most and I love the most in my career actually were people with two traits. One is, are they the common denominator of success? Are these people who, in different era of their career, who stood up to basically say, I will make this successful no matter how everything else goes. I will be the reason why this will be successful. That always for me demonstrated their ability to reinvent themselves and take deep ownership. And the other one is people who have superpowers but two superpowers that's really not supposed to coexist in the same person. These are people who I sometimes describe, one of my cofounders Michael this way, where he is a very mature scientist, understands all about the scientific methodology and so forth, but at the same time he's a child who gets excited by creating game demo. Or Laini Allen who is deeply paranoid on day to day basis that we have to do everything right now and really make sure that we do everything we can to make this successful, but at the same time deeply religious that believes that no matter what happens we will win and we will succeed. Those kind of tension I found to be particularly beautiful. And of course Percy, famously within the Stanford community, my last co founder, he's a pianist, but he's also one of the most well known AI researchers. Amazing combination. So these people really do inspire me. And for people who are the common denominator of success, you can see that. You can feel in their behavior, in their career. I was actually recently coming back, from a workshop and I happened to sit next to a scholar named Sandy Pentland. He used to be at MIT Media Lab as a professor for a long time, actually trained many of the most brilliant minds in my field and in the computer sciences more broadly. He also has had this kind of amazing career, and this is somebody that I always look up to, where he had many generations, where there was an era where he was a physicist. There was an era when he was an AI researcher and ended up training some of the most well known AI researchers of that generation. There was an era when he was a computational social scientist. And in each of the era, you could see that Sandy was such an influential character. That's always an amazing power to observe.
00:53:21 · Molly O'Shea, Joon Sung Park
[00:53:21] S0: And what makes that up? Like, how did those people become that different person in each era? It's just extreme commitment and durability. Like, what is it? [00:53:30] S1: I think it's extreme commitment, stamina, the ability to continuously get excited. And these are also people who are looking... Who's in the game so that they can play the next game. These are people whose greatest prize in winning the current game is gaining the right and invitation to play the next game. That's what makes them special. And, also, that's something that we try to emulate. [00:53:58] S0: If those are the traits of success, what are the traits of failure? What causes people to fail?
00:53:58 · Molly O'Shea, Joon Sung Park
[00:53:58] S0: If those are the traits of success, what are the traits of failure? What causes people to fail? [00:54:04] S1: You know, think as they say, every family that doesn't work out have their own reasons. I think every failure can look slightly differently. But I think the reverse of what I said, I think can sometimes be modes of failures, that you're trying to overly optimize for that one particular outcome. One thing that I often saw was there is that one particular fundraising you want to run. There is that one customer that you're trying to run against. There is that one best paper that you want to win, and you win it. And you go, now what? And they lose interest. And this is where I've seen so many institutions, individuals who have achieved incredible things at some point in their career and then lose interest and over time disappear. And whether that is failure or not, that's not for me to say. In many of those cases, I think it could actually be seen as an amazing success. But for those who want to play this game for a long time and have impact across many generations and many eras, that is a failure mode. [00:55:08] S0: So it's the difference between short term thinking and long term thinking. Fascinating. [00:55:12] S1: And why are we doing this? Yeah. Are we doing this so we can have an exit tomorrow? Or are we doing it because we want to fundamentally reshape how our society operates for the better? [00:55:25] S0: So what happens if someone comes to you and offers you $15,000,000,000 to sell your company?
00:55:25 · Molly O'Shea, Joon Sung Park
[00:55:25] S0: So what happens if someone comes to you and offers you $15,000,000,000 to sell your company? [00:55:32] S1: Well, if I have every right, every reasons to believe that there is an ambitious idea that only a simile can pursue, then we're going to pursue that. [00:55:42] S0: Okay. Well, June, this was such a fun conversation. Thank you very much, and I appreciate you answering my silly questions. [00:55:49] S1: Thank you for having [00:55:50] S0: Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email, and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today, and don't forget to subscribe to podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.