Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Kareem Amin
[00:00:00] S1: I’m just like, why are we not talking about whether it is good to scale every business? People talk about it a little bit, in this really boring, super worn-out way of, should you raise VC capital or should you bootstrap? Completely non-interesting ways of talking about it. But it’s like, if you had a donut business, should you try to scale it? What does scaling it entail? What do you lose when you scale it? Should we, as a society, be incentivizing all businesses to scale? And we all know this problem — hey, this restaurant was really good, now it sucks. I think there’s a life cycle to things, and maybe part of this — the meditation retreat, thinking about the death thing — I’ve been thinking about, is there a life cycle to companies, and should we just be okay with that? I’ll pick Microsoft for a second, ’cause I think it’s an easy example, but hopefully they don’t hate me for this. You have an initial mission, put a computer on every desk. I remember that mission. When I was a kid, you did put a computer on every desk, but now the mission is devices and services and do cool things. Once you achieve a mission — the idea of a company, I think, started in the 1500s. I think it was the East India Company or something. So it’s, you get together for a purpose and then you do it. And then should you disband, or should you keep the minimal number of people? I think the crypto people have had some of these ideas. Okay, you built the layer, now you move on to the next layer. I do think it’s worthwhile, as all of this disruption is happening, to start thinking about the new ways of doing this. I’m curious about it. A death doula for companies is, if your company has achieved its mission, should we help it pass? Maybe it should have children, and people come out and they do cool stuff, but maybe we can institutionalize these things, rather than trying to scale things that become zombies, or become worse versions of their former selves, and then complain about it when we’re incentivizing everybody to scale no matter what. I wake up every day and I think, how do I make more Clay? I literally think about it. It’s consuming all of the CPU time in my brain. In my friend group, they’re all thinking about this because I just keep talking to them about it.
· Kareem Amin, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
So if that’s what’s happening, should we set up some kind of structures to ask, what happens when you scale everywhere? I don’t just care about scaling. I care about how this is creating value in the world. People are talking about — there’s, I don’t know, 1,500 unicorns. If some of them are zombies, how can we help them? [00:00:00] S0: Die a nice death. [00:00:00] S1: You need some grieving. You need a possibility to move on. We don’t have support for that for companies. And I think it’s because no one talks about endings. [00:00:00] S0: When you and I are together, I feel like we always talk a little bit about Clay and a lot more about even more interesting things — and Clay has been very interesting. This has been yet another example of one of those conversations. I’ve loved having it. When I do these, I ask everyone the same traditional final question. What is the kindest thing that anyone’s ever done for you?
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Kareem Amin
[00:00:00] S0: When you and I are together, I feel like we always talk a little bit about Clay and a lot more about even more interesting things — and Clay has been very interesting. This has been yet another example of one of those conversations. I’ve loved having it. When I do these, I ask everyone the same traditional final question. What is the kindest thing that anyone’s ever done for you? [00:00:00] S1: The one coming to my mind immediately, I had actually already mentioned — but it’s that a few friends came up to me before Clay succeeded and were like, hey, you don’t need to do anything. We just love you anyway. And then I realized I don’t care what they’re doing. I don’t care what they achieve. I just implicitly like this person and love them. And knowing I had that, I could give that back to myself as well, without any achievement. Because I think my childhood wounding was feeling like I must achieve in order to have care and love. And I was like, I actually don’t need that. It created a ton of clarity where I was like, oh, I’m doing things because I want to, not because I need something from it. So I think this is just the output of a lot of thoughts and things, and we’re doing it in a way where I’m not attached. I’m not attached because I don’t need anything from it. I want it to evolve the way it wants to evolve. [00:00:00] S0: Thank you so much for your time. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, thank you, Patrick.