· David Senra
[00:00:00] S0: You just did live what you do in your pieces. Listen to the Founders episode I just did on Mark Zuckerberg on your piece. I know it just came out today when we're recording this, so you haven't heard it yet. But I say in the episode, so we started with the Holocaust, then we went on this tangent, we started talking about it, and then you brought it right back around to the Holocaust where you forget where it started. You do this in writing that's really, really good, and you did it when you started with sitting with his parents, Zuckerberg, and then you go on a tangent, you go bring it back, and you close the loop on his parents. When he starts fighting, you forget that the scene that you laid out was, "We were fighting," and then you go into all these other details and you're fascinated. Then I was like, "Oh, shit." Then Jeremy brought us back to the fact that, no, we're in here. Why is this guy choosing to wake up every day and beat the shit out of people for two hours? It's a very fascinating thing the way you do that. I want to go back to the Rick Rubin thing because he came on this show, and what was also interesting is tied to what you and I were just talking about is like, how do people think about what they're doing? And it was like, "Oh, Rick Rubin's a producer. He's in the music business. He founded a record label." And he's like, "I just think of myself as a professional researcher. Every day I just get up and research intently about what I'm most interested in at that point. And sometimes it's music, sometimes it's podcasts, sometimes it's different people I'm talking about." He's like, "I'm just researching all day long."
· Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S1: That's really interesting. I sometimes think, especially the way a lot of VCs discuss it, is like one thing they look for in a founder is that the kernel of their inspiration to build their company is traceable back to some early thing in their life, or they like it when the idea for the company came as early in their life as possible. And I understand that because it suggests quite a lot of discipline and commitment to a single idea and pursuing it ruthlessly. But there's a flip side to that, which I also think is really interesting in a lot of these people that you interview and that I've interviewed, is I often like it when- A lot of these things end up just being a lot more contingent, and I think you end up with a lot more people who are not motivated primarily by money per se, and the idea of building a company or becoming an investor only actually occurred to them much later after they were just pursuing their actual interests and spending time with the people that they really liked and cared about for their entire adolescence and even part of their adult life. And ending up at building a company or becoming an investor was kind of like the logical endpoint of all these other things. But I guess it's all to say, I think there's actually value in a lot of people who come to this world a little bit later than maybe some of the Zuckerbergs of the world who had this one idea when he was very, very young and will never do anything else.
· David Senra, Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S0: Something just popped in my mind that I'm very personally curious about. So the same way that Josh Kushner goes to Rick Rubin for advice or counsel, whatever you want to call that, do you have anybody in your life that plays that role for you? [00:00:00] S1: When I was growing up and I was a little kid, it was my older brother, Josh. When I was in college, it was my Russian professor, whose name was Natalia Olshanskaya. I now have a one-year-old daughter who's named after her. She was the biggest person in my life, and she was this kind of very classically Soviet grandmotherly woman who was very good at pointing out all of the ways in which I was an idiot and I was making bad decisions and destroying my life and not thinking about the future and- [00:00:00] S0: Wait, how old were you when you met her? [00:00:00] S1: Eighteen years old. [00:00:00] S0: And she had such a profound impact on your life that you named your daughter after her?
· David Senra, Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S0: And she had such a profound impact on your life that you named your daughter after her? [00:00:00] S1: Yes. Yeah. The basic story there is I did so badly in high school Spanish that I could not place out of the freshman year language requirement that my college had. So I knew they were going to make me take a language for a year, so I just decided to pick the kind of weirdest sounding thing that I could suffer through for two semesters. So I picked Russian. It ended up completely changing my life. I fell in love with it. It was my major. I decided to spend a year and a half of my four-year college experience living and studying in Russia. And she, I spoke to, I think, every Sunday for the entire year and a half that I was there. And then she unfortunately died a few years later. But I think for that whole kind of part of my early adult life, she was definitely my Rick Rubin figure. [00:00:00] S0: What did you learn from her?
· David Senra, Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S0: What did you learn from her? [00:00:00] S1: She taught people have a gift. This is something I write about in the Scott Wu piece, that if people have a gift, then they have an obligation to that gift. And if they do not do everything in their power to share and exploit that gift, then they're actually sinning against themselves and against God in an important way. And I think I was very fortunate that she saw something in me, and she thought that by behaving and acting the way I did that part of my life, which involved too much drinking and too much drugs and not enough focusing on my work and my future, that I was not just being an idiot, but I was actually sinning against my own future. And- [00:00:00] S0: That's fucking incredible thing to tell a young 18, 19, 20-year-old kid with a lot of potential, though. [00:00:00] S1: It completely changed my life, and it changed how I think about other people. I've never thought about this before, but now that we're talking about it, I think it's probably why I'm interested in a lot of these people that we've been talking about during this conversation. And it's also just, it's now the lens that I can bring to the people I meet, that I become friends with, that I work with at Colossus. I would say up until that point in my life, it was the single biggest thing that anyone did for me. [00:00:00] S0: Did you keep in touch with her after college? [00:00:00] S1: I worked for a year after college, and then I joined the army, which she was very, very upset about. [00:00:00] S0: Why?
· Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S1: She had her own harrowing story about escaping the Soviet Union, which took decades for her to be able to do. She left just with her infant daughter, made it to America. I think in her mind is, if you are born into circumstances of safety and comfort, then it's idiotic to choose something as kind of physically risky and dangerous as joining the military. It's like throwing away the most precious thing that you could have in life. Which I think for her made a lot of sense, and for me, it didn't make sense at the time, and I was kind of searching for something else. I joined at an interesting time. It was during the late Obama administration, during sequestration, which was kind of gutted the Defense Department budget. One of the consequences of that was when I signed my contract to go to basic training, the way it ordinarily works is a couple days or a couple weeks later, they ship you off to basic training. But when I did it, there were so few slots available because so much of the funding had dried up that I had an eight-month period between when I signed the contract and when I actually went to boot camp. And for those eight months, she and I talked all the time. And she died of Lou Gehrig's disease in 2015. So I kept all of the voicemails that she left me from that period of time on my phone, and I still have them, and I've uploaded them to various cloud accounts to make sure if one of these companies implodes, then I don't end up losing any of those recordings. Yeah, we kept in touch, and I wrote her. In basic training, they take your phone away, and you can only communicate with the outside world still by writing letters by hand. And so the two people I wrote to were my girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife, and Natasha, who was the person I kept in contact with while I was there.