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.
00:19:29 · Mina Radhakrishnan, Sachin
[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. [00:19:57] S1: Yeah. And going into your time at Uber now, I think something we've really enjoyed about talking to former people from Uber, people like Emil Michael and Casey Flint, said they always have unique learnings from Uber, something that's distinctive from other companies that have genuinely influenced them for maybe the next ten years of their career. Maybe it was about speed, maybe it was about how to work in teams, maybe it was about fundraising. Do you have a particular or a set of unique learnings from Uber that have always influenced you?
00:20:24 · Mina Radhakrishnan, Adam Miller
[00:20:24] S0: I'll tell you the biggest one that stands out for me, and this is, you know, just very directly working with Travis for so long. And it's about... You don't ask the question, can you do it? You ask the question, how can you do it? And when you start that way and you start with that mindset, you come into things where... And I think it's been a really powerful thing for me from entrepreneurship perspective. It doesn't mean you should do it, but it does mean that you don't say no first. You say yes first. And I think that is a huge thing where I was just like... I mean, random cars off the street, surge pricing, all this stuff. Like, it wasn't about, oh, we can't do that. It was... No. No. What could we do to try and do that? How how would we make it happen? Like, let let... We might not. At the end of it, it's like, actually, that's a lot of work. It's not the right way to put out resources. It's not the right way to do those things. That's okay. But we we went through the exercise of actually doing it first, and that is the thing that always stands out for me is Uber. It was like a yes first kinda policy. [00:21:19] S2: And I think there's been a lot written about Travis's intensity and and charisma. I actually spoke to, you know, a secondhand conversation about someone, one of the leading growth investors, and he's worked with almost all the generational founders. And he says Travis stands out as the most intense and the most charismatic out of that whole lot. What was it like directly working with him?
00:21:40 · Mina Radhakrishnan
[00:21:40] S0: Intense? Yeah. Was definitely... I remember, like, I was doing... I was running some experiment. I'll I'll tell you two things, like, which are, I think, both, you know, the good and the bad. I was running some experiment, and it thoroughly baked. Frankly, it was partly my fault too. So I just hadn't really thought it through. I hadn't pulled this stuff, and I was trying... I was presenting... And it was very early days, and I was presenting the numbers at our all hands. And it it... Like, in the middle of the meeting, I was like, this is dumb. Like, you don't know how to do math, you gotta go figure out, like, what it is. And it was like, god, that was very unpleasant, and that wasn't fun to do. But he was right. He was right. Could he have done it in a better way, a more tactful way? Sure. But, like, I also should have been, like, more on my game about that stuff. So that was one thing. Then the second thing I, you know, was... I'd I'd I'd written some blog posts about some special thing that we were doing and, you know, pulled pulled an experiment together for for something else. It's like it was the golden ticket. It was like a special kind of... Like, it was a... It was trying to understand how discounts should work with Uber and how much of a discount you should get. And so I... I'd run this golden thing and I... This golden ticket thing, written a blog post, built the whole thing around the concept of, like, the golden ticket. And I remember, like, walking into the office, and, like, Travis is like, he has this thing, paces the office. Right? He has this thing that he does. And he was like, who did this golden ticket thing? And I was like, oh, shit. I'm gonna get fired. I put my hand on. Was like, hey, Travis. That's Mike. He's like, I love it. This is so great. You know? And so it was one of those things where it's like you go all this way or all that way, but, like, he's really smart. Like, that's just the biggest thing. He's so smart, he's so thoughtful. And doesn't mean he's easy to work with, but, like, it was just like it pushed you. It it made me better. Like, it made me tougher, harder, better. And, you know, I I just... It was... Wow. Like, I I think it's one of those things where it's like, you kind of have to experience that to, like, to know what it feels like.