Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Kareem Amin
[00:00:00] S1: Let’s take justice for a second. I want to live in a stable society that allows me to have the time and space to think of things. The world is pretty crazy. I went to see this movie called Stop Making Sense. I was downstairs in the movie theater. I had a joint that I was about to smoke and I was trying to light it up, but I didn’t have a lighter. I asked a guy who was standing there, I was like, hey, can I borrow your lighter? And he was like, sure, can I ask you a question? And I was like, yeah, of course. And he was like, what is this? And I was like, what do you mean, this whole thing? He was like, yeah, what is this? And I was like, whoa, that’s a big question. I think the world is a mysterious and amazing place. I feel like there’s so much to know. We’re just starting to make progress on how wonderfully weird it is. We should be spending more time exploring that. And to do that, we need stability. So to get stability, I think you need justice between people. There’s no stable way for some group of people to dominate others. It just doesn’t work. No matter how strong you think you are, the other person is a tremendous nuisance if they feel like they’re treated unfairly. So there’s no stable configuration around that. And if you’re thinking about the economy or countries, you can’t bluster your way out of it. You can’t say we’re the strongest. Even when I’m saying that, I have to remember: when I have power over people, you tend to think they must do what I want because I want them to, because I control this. It’s just not a stable configuration. You can get by for a little bit and then you get tremendous pushback. So with the value of justice, one thing I think about is how you treat people with respect and fairness all the time. In every situation — whether you’re hiring them or firing them or disagreeing over what they should be doing. So maybe that’s what’s fueling this democratization. People are stable in a place where they feel like they have the opportunity to get to what you’ve gotten to, as long as there’s some fair chance for that. And they’re okay with what they’ve gotten if they feel like, hey, this is what’s available to me at the moment. This is just kind of an internal thing I’ve had. I used to play soccer.
· Kareem Amin, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Even on my team — if I feel like we fouled the other team and we could get away with it — I’d have this really weird thing of integrity — this feels off. [00:00:00] S0: Do you have a sense of where that came from? Nature, nurture? [00:00:00] S1: It feels like it’s some intuitive knowing for myself that I’m a long-term greedy person. One of the things we talk a lot about at the company is, how do you be long-term greedy? And I think the only way to be long-term greedy is to stay in integrity, so people feel like there’s justice all the way along. I think it’s also just a belief in yourself. You don’t have to cheat in the short term to get something. You’re going to win. Let’s say you’re playing a soccer game, you feel like you cheated, or this wasn’t fair, and then you won. It doesn’t feel as good. I did hear your interview with Brian Chesky — the statement he made around getting to $100 billion. [00:00:00] S0: And feeling like shit.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Kareem Amin
[00:00:00] S0: And feeling like shit. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. I actually felt like I related, and we’re obviously in a much smaller spot, but even early on when we raised our Series A, I remember having that sensation of, if you’re doing this to get adulation or to get prestige or to make some money, there’s no end to that. It’s kind of like an empty thing that passes. The only judge of anything is yourself and your own self-respect. You have to be doing it so that you feel like what you’ve done is interesting and worthwhile. When you’re an ambitious person, your judgment is actually way higher than anyone else, because you know everything that you’re thinking and you know everything that you’ve done. So I know everything that I’m thinking about or doing, and my standards are higher than anyone else. [00:00:00] S0: There’s this thing I like to do where, when I spend some time with somebody, I wait an hour, and then I write down notes in my phone. I benefit from the hour. It’s like a cleansing function — whatever lasts in my brain through that hour. When we were last together, the one thing I wrote down was this notion of optimizing for self-respect over everything else, as the North Star for behaving. I’m curious how that relates back to risk and courage. Do you think those things are related? Do you think it’s possible to help people become more courageous and take more risk?
· Kareem Amin
[00:00:00] S1: For sure. In order to do that, you just need to understand your mind and your motivations more, and be more honest about them. So again, back to the saying — simple things, honestly. It’s very hard to admit to yourself why you’re doing something. Even if you look at the narratives for companies, none of them have any relation to the motivation of the founders, and we don’t talk about that in public. For me for example, it’s like, why am I building a company? Do I think that I will be more liked or loved if I do something that is a success at a world-class level? Can I get that now? I’ve had friends come up to me that are like, hey, I don’t care if you succeed or fail, I love you. And I was like, wow, that’s actually helpful. I didn’t think it would be, but it’s feeding — some part of my desire must be fueled by that, but I can get that right now. And now I can start to take real risks where I’m thinking about the business and not trying to fill this particular need. VCs have this common trope that is, hey, we invest in someone that has a chip on their shoulder, or has some kind of lack that they’re trying to fulfill. And this is common across creative work. The trope is, you’re depressed or you’re anxious or whatever, and you’re trying to fill that, and you’re actually afraid to lose that depression or anxiety or whatever it is, because you feel like you’ll be less productive or creative. Through my journey, I had this moment where I was like, you know what, I’m not going to create from a place of lack anymore. And I went around probably pretty annoyingly telling people, I have everything I need. I’m good.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Kareem Amin
[00:00:00] S0: Post-lack. [00:00:00] S1: Post-lack, yeah. It’s a great negotiation leverage, because there’s nothing you can give me. I feel great. I’m already complete. From there, you can still create. I think people are tremendously misunderstanding this, in my opinion. If we were in a post-scarcity world, no one will do anything. Everybody will just be hanging out. And I was like, have you been to Burning Man? People are still doing stuff and they have things. You can create from a place of wholeness. And in fact, you will be less destructive in the world. I think you’ll create less damage. We keep thinking here, hey, let’s think of our customers. What are we trying to give them? Why do people keep saying customers first? It’s because when you’re in a company, things start to happen where it’s like, this person’s thinking about their career, or this person wants to please this other person. They’re not thinking about the customer, they’re just thinking about the internal dynamics. The more whole you can be, I think the more risks you can take and the more courage you will have, because you have nothing to lose.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: It’s funny to me that perhaps the most interesting duo in modern business history, Jony Ive and Steve Jobs, were almost undoubtedly creating from this generative place. I don’t know if they used the same terminology or something, but you read it all — it’s all there. They’re the most adored, but maybe the least emulated. It demands the question — the things that got you to this sense of wholeness from this place of lack. There’s been much strange debate about the role of introspection in business and in general. Naively, I would say it’s introspection. It’s a key tool in the toolkit to get from one to the other. Curious what your experience has been, or what you would offer about that.