00:13:18 · Mina Radhakrishnan
[00:13:18] S0: And, like, so the... These are the ways in which I've made these decisions, you know? And, like... And I I went to another start up, which didn't do all that well. And then I was like, I really love start ups, but this isn't quite the right start up. It was more of like a... It was an e commerce startup, marketing, merchandising, fashion e commerce. And I was like, oh, I feel like I've come full circle. Haven't gone to a tech company again. I need to find a really, really real tech company. And it's also the Dawn of Mobile, I gotta find a mobile tech company. And I remember my mom being like, she's just gotten used... Because there's a certain amount of immigrant parents. They're like, Oh yeah, Goldman. Great. Okay, Google. Great. I'm like, Oh, I'm going this little company you never heard of. Then it's like, Oh, I'm going this other little company that you've never heard of, and it's even smaller. It's like a black car company. She's like, A black car? You know, and that's what that's what Uber was when I when I joined in 2011, and then it was 20 people. Like, there was nothing. It was it was crazy. So I think it's been more about, like, what drives me? Like, what is it that I think is interesting? Where am I gonna find joy in work? What do I think is gonna be interesting to do, and where do I think is gonna move forward? Has really been the the guiding point in my career versus, like, I I just don't think you can... I've been very fortunate in that, yes, I have been to high status places, and I I hopefully, like, from the outside, have a great resume and stuff, but it's it's not the the status or the image that drives it. And I think if you try and chase that, it's too much about external validation versus internal validation.
00:14:40 · Sachin
[00:14:40] S1: Yeah. I think I can see there's a very natural line of curiosity that took you from job to job. And before we sort of double click into Uber, the thing I'm really interested in understanding... So I read all of your blogs, like I said, last night, and I feel like I was taken on a bit of a history of, you know, Silicon Valley and tech over the past ten years. And I was sort of just seeing how the dynamics and the perspectives of the tech world have changed so much. And you've seen you've seen New York, you've seen Silicon Valley, Sydney, Google, Uber, all these companies. How has your view of the tech and startup industry changed from when you're in the sort of twenty tens to where we are now? Because I feel like we're in a really different world when it comes to tech, and we're having a bit of a conversation before the episode about this, about how tech and politics is so intertwined. Maybe a little bit more cynicism or negativity towards it. What... What's your sort of viewpoint of it?
00:15:29 · Mina Radhakrishnan
[00:15:29] S0: Yeah. I I think it's interesting. Right? Because tech wasn't... It wasn't the it wasn't the man, you know, like, wasn't the establishment back in... It because when did, like, Facebook IPO, what, 2007, Google IPO, 2004? Like... And I was right there just as these things were happening. It wasn't such a huge thing. Right? Like, it was... Yeah. We had, like, intel and stuff, but it wasn't in the in the day to day consciousness of how we run our lives. And I I genuinely... Like, what changed all of that is is mobile. Right? In '20... Once the iPhone got introduced and we all walk around now with these computers in our hands and we're just tied to them, like, our lives are so inextricably linked with tech. We cannot take them apart. It was different. We had cell phones, but our cell phones were for calling people, connecting. They weren't a way of disconnecting. Right? Whereas now, think if you think about a smartphone, a lot of people consider it disconnection. And so I think that was the starting point around is this huge optimism around what tech can do and where it can go. And I still have a ton of optimism around it. But because it such a it is, as you say, very deeply, it is both deeply tied with our intimate day to day lives, and it's deeply tied with politics. And politics is so polarizing that I think there's a huge aura of negativity around it. And of course, are things like AI is coming for your job. Like, there's a scary, scary bits of stuff around it. And and we really just have to, I think, peel back from from that a little bit. Because I think, like, when you think about what it was back in 2010, it it wasn't as big and as involved in our day to day lives as it is now. And so when is that big and that involved in our day to day lives, we have to really consider what parts of it do we like, what parts of it do we not like. I think the power of it is we get to choose. We get to choose how we spend our time doing those things and where we want to go with it. And we just have to be a lot more considered about what our approach to tech is.
00:17:26 · Adam Miller, Mina Radhakrishnan
[00:17:26] S2: I think something that I think about a lot is I think things shift in 2016. There was this innocence around tech. And then when it came out that, you know, Facebook's involvement in the US election in 2016, I think the innocence was originally that people saw San Francisco Silicon Valley as these black T shirt nerds that were just building things. Right? And I think there was this idea that these nerds would be different in the way they approach power than, like, the Wall Street elites in New York. And, actually, what we find is that incentives always drive human behavior and, you know, the same maybe quest for power are just done in different ways. And the same kind of, you know, ways that elections are... I don't wanna say interfered with but like political influence and things like that are just done in different ways and I think people started to wake up to that and I remember that was kind of around when Zuckerberg had a really bad image for like, you know, three or four years, and he was almost seen as a poster boy of, like, tech influence could actually be, you know, not that positive all the time Yep. [00:18:24] S0: And then [00:18:24] S2: kind of swapped around a little bit with the PR campaign. But I think there was this innocence with it for a while that these people may be a little bit different, but then I think it's just yeah same same incentives different kinds of people. [00:18:36] S0: Yeah I mean look power changes people and like tech has had a huge amount of power which I don't think it necessarily did maybe ten fifteen years ago.
00:18:36 · Mina Radhakrishnan, Sachin, Adam Miller
[00:18:36] S0: Yeah I mean look power changes people and like tech has had a huge amount of power which I don't think it necessarily did maybe ten fifteen years ago. [00:18:44] S1: Yeah. And I think one of the problems that people often conflate tech and startups together, you know, big tech companies are very different to startups Yeah. And you can level criticism onto big tech, corruption, whatever you wanna say, but running a small startup is totally different. But you can still have that sort of optimism towards the startup. [00:19:00] S2: And you're just on that point, we talk about this a lot is that places like Y Combinator have become the new McKinsey or Goldman Sachs in the sense that they're now very high status. Like tech isn't this weird esoteric thing on the outskirts now. Now it's a very conventional path to get a high paying job if you're in big tech or if you're in startups get something that's very high status with actually not as much risk associated with it. Because if you do Stanford CS and you drop out and you go to Y Combinator, that's almost equivalent of, like, probably when you went to university and go to Goldman Sachs.
00:19:00 · Adam Miller, Mina Radhakrishnan
[00:19:00] S2: And you're just on that point, we talk about this a lot is that places like Y Combinator have become the new McKinsey or Goldman Sachs in the sense that they're now very high status. Like tech isn't this weird esoteric thing on the outskirts now. Now it's a very conventional path to get a high paying job if you're in big tech or if you're in startups get something that's very high status with actually not as much risk associated with it. Because if you do Stanford CS and you drop out and you go to Y Combinator, that's almost equivalent of, like, probably when you went to university and go to Goldman Sachs. [00:19:29] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, because the the thing is, like, it's about being successful onwards. Right? And and whatever that definition of success is, whether it's money, whether it's building a company, what... Whatever those things are, the question is how you achieve it. And I think you don't have to necessarily follow the same traditional path of, go to university, get this degree, go to this place, go to this job. You can you can do it in many other ways. And and and that's been enabled by tech, frankly. It's a reason we can do those things.