Keith Rabois on Miami vs. Bay Area, cognitive variety, America's self-examination & more | E1182

[Music] this week in startups is brought to you by digitalocean's app platform a new platform as a service solution to build modern cloud-native apps with app platform you can build deploy and scale apps and static websites quickly and easily use app platform for free and receive a 100 credit for any upgrade at do dot co twist that's d o dot co slash twist vanta compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business vanta makes it easy for companies to get a sock 2 report fast twist listeners can get one thousand dollars off for a limited time at vanta.com twist and masterworks the first company allowing investors exposure into the blue chip artwork asset class twist listeners can skip the 17 000 person wait list by going to masterworks dot io and using promo code twist hey everybody welcome back to this week in startups it's time for everybody's favorite moment it's our quarterly check-in we're doing our quarterly audit with keith reboy from founders fund tuning in live via the internet from miami how are you doing look at that lifestyle look how happy you are healthy you are how's miami keith lamb is amazing i'm tan rested ready we're ready to go we got like an ocean here we got palm trees here i'll show you the best conference room in america wow beautiful oh my lord you see it seems to we should start there with miami everybody was talking about florida could this become a tech hub and then let's face it you're a super router you have a lot of connections in the investment community a lot of connections uh in the startup community and you decided to move your super router to miami and uh now a lot of people seem to have followed you down there and there's a culture there now all of a sudden huh yeah we have so many people here that i'm so busy i haven't worked this hard as a vc in eight and a half years or eight plus years um because there's so many people so many interesting people in miami they all want to meet uh in florida we do real world meetings we're not locked down so i've just been scheduling from nine to nine six days a week for three months now so it's been insane i've met a wide array of interesting people a lot of people moving from the bay area and escaping jail many people moving from new york improving their lives and some people from la those are the typical you know sort of points of origin you have the usual latin american immigrants mixing in and some european escapees as well so it's created a nice cocktail brew of unique cultures unique backgrounds uh angel investors vcs partners gps entrepreneurs engineers designers i feel like noah's ark we have two of each two of those two of those and on a lifestyle basis obviously it's a great lifestyle it's obviously in some ways superior to new york in terms of weather et cetera but there seems to be this i don't say libertarian but freedom has become part of the equation here there's obviously different tax treatments but regulation and freedom seem and enthusiasm for business seem to be part of the package maybe you could speak to the juxtaposition of how toxic san francisco and how hostile they became towards capital allocators and entrepreneurs versus uh your mayor mario suarez i believe is his name uh it's francis suarez but france is sorry but but i think he represents an entire movement in florida at all levels of the political yeah square spectrum from the governor to the senators to the congressman uh to the mayor here who's been you know embracing technology they really all care about the future of their co their families their children and the future of the world is technology whether people like it or not the future of the world is going to be driven by technology industry by industry vertical by vertical there's no escape and the base the best jobs in the world the best paying jobs in the world are all in technology the most innovative creative jobs in the world or emotionally in technology and to be anti-technologies basically to be anti-progress anti-the future and basically sentencing families and kids to a draconian you know sort of desperate existence and it's refreshing to see politicians who totally understand where the world's going and want to skate ahead of other places there so they welcome and embrace technology thought leaders technology investors technology entrepreneurs technology companies we have the flexibility here to accommodate everybody we actually build housing and we build commercial real estate so if more people move here we just build more houses it's very responsive it's amazing how markets work florida is very capitalist where if there's a market imbalance we allow people to spend money to fix the imbalance it's the greatest you know poverty relief program of all time is capitalism and california seems to forgot that or intentionally um sort of match that and so all the problems in california are all funk dysfunction of government we don't have property crime issues here we don't have violent crime issues here we have a great educational system that's been open in the real world for instruction since august all kids are getting full instruction have been since august they're doing team sports and yet florida is 35th among estates ranked in terms of spread of covid among people below 18. so that's all fiction that you can't have education you can't have a performing education system they can have an open education system that kids need to be depressed isolated social socially destroyed which is really what coven lockdowns have done to kids created permanent damage we also meet new engineers here we have lots of engineering schools as mayor schwarz pointed out florida mints more miami mints more hispanic and black engineers than any city in america and there's lots of engineering talent there for the higher we have successful companies at the 40 50 billion dollar level from chewie we have database companies from citrix to modern new database companies we have latin american immigrants that are escaping bad governments um and coming here to you know for a better future for their families and so there's a lot of cultural antibodies against the worst sort of offenses of uh the left in the closed-minded nature of the lab here's someone essentially what's really most refreshing is people are happy so you can go to any bar any restaurant any coffee shop and all you do is see smiles on people's faces it's not forced it's scalable it's the first thing my friends from california when they visit notice the second thing people notice is that people have a diverse set of views you can go to any table in any restaurant and you will find people who voted for trump and you'll also find people who voted for biden you will find people who are pro-death penalty and people are anti-death penalty you'll find people who are pro-immigration reform and some people who want to shut down immigration and you have to have a dialogue therefore everywhere you go because everybody has different views they don't check when you come in the door they don't say this is the red section this is the blue section you don't have like the smoking non-smoking section you're saying adults in america have different differences of opinion but they're able to coexist in the same location not only code exists they have a dialogue you can actually talk about issues here and discuss them and it's incredibly refreshing and differentiated in the last you know 10 years in san francisco and maybe 20 years in the bay area and so partially it's because everybody knows everybody who has different views in them and so once you realize that you're always in an environment where people debate and disagree you get a energized by that but b you get actually more proficient you actually have to understand other people's perspectives the bay area no almost nobody understands a conservative perspective i don't want to say a topic because they never encounter a conservative in in that way people can move on and and focus on other things in life if you have this diversity of ideas well you're forced to think about if you're forced to accept it and then everybody can just move on and live their lives as opposed to trying to destroy anybody who happens to come in to the discussion who has a different point of view which i think you know the first person i heard say this about the bay area was our friend tim ferriss who was just like i can't believe how close-minded this place has gotten nobody can even have a different difference of opinion the reason i came to the bay area was because they accepted people and everybody have a difference of opinion and still move on and you know be friends it's weird yeah now here here people have a different different perspectives different opinion and have to engage part it's like basically anytime you're in environment or 50 of people both one way and 50 but the other roughly you're going to have to engage and not just insulate yourself incurring the model culture um people also are more tolerant because of that they realize that they have friends and family and co-workers that have different views and they know these people quite well and they realize they're not immoral or stupid and so the characters just don't work because they actually know these people for definitely have known these people family members colleagues spouses for decades and so the simple dismissals are just ineffective and so therefore no one even bothers with the simple name calling here um because it's everybody knows that it's ineffective which is also quite quite refreshing we allow people in florida to basically choose their own adventure so if you don't want to dine indoors nobody forces you to you can request tables that are outdoor only that's what i do actually i don't mean i don't go to restaurants yeah restaurants bars i don't even go to house parties if they're indoors and they're outdoors i actually believe that it's perfectly fine for someone in my situation uh risk adjusted to engage in outdoor activities and i do that but i can choose and nobody nobody dismisses me for making that choice given my circumstances and my risk profile and then there's other people who may have a different risk profile and they can choose to have indoor seating if they'd like to and so that's that's a template for how basically miami miami and the state of florida operates whereas people choose their own risk profile this week in startups is brought to you by our friends at digitalocean and their app platform this is a new platform as a service solution to build modern cloud-native apps with app platform you can build deploy and scale apps and static websites quickly and easily simply point your github repository and let the app platform do all the heavy lifting since digitalocean runs app platform on their own infrastructure your costs will be significantly lower than with any other product and no big price jumps as you scale right you're not going to get that surprise bill it's built on top of digital ocean kubernetes cooper nettie's if you're a developer or you're intact you know what that means if you don't uh look it up it's a k-u-b-e-r-n-e-t-e-s and that provides a smoother migration path so you can take more control of your infrastructure setup there are three basic tiers starter basic and professional starter is great for basic sites basic is better for prototyping apps and professional works best for production apps use app platform for free and receive a hundred dollar credit for any upgrade at do.co twist d-o as in digitalocean dot co slash twist that seems like now that we know the nature of this virus and the pandemic you can't get it outside i mean that seems to be all the science has proven outside you cannot get it and then in california we had this very weird moment where they're like we have to put police at the beach in los angeles and stop people from going surfing and it's like the beach and surfing are banned activities do you realize all that does is send people into their houses which is the number one vector of where people were getting it so literally we we held on to these really weird beliefs there is something very nice about i was thinking about when we got on this call um because at the taping of this texas just decided yolo we're we're open everybody make their own decision no mask mandate pretty controversial um and it actually to me seems like something we should have been doing earlier which is if a location wants to take a different approach one of the strengths of this united states of america not one state not one country but 50 different countries that get to deploy their own strategies is we could have been a b testing this whole time so with schools in florida nobody's uh there's no seems to be no issue in opening them and then i don't know if tex i think texas will have a spike i think more people will die in texas because they're going to go fully yolo but what if it's only a small amount of people die and the people the citizens want to take that risk just like some people want a speed limit that's 85 and some people might want it to be 55. adults can make these decisions i think a b testing is really smart especially with a novel um phenomenon that nobody knows really knows the right answer with with hindsight we're all going to say you know x policy was stupid why policy was dumb i wish we had done c uh so the benefits of having multiple data points is you can learn faster what are the right answers we for example florida has basically been an open state for months um possibly since june depends on how strict you want to be in you know in in defining open but fundamentally the state's open like people are working people are going to work people go to offices people go out they see their friends and you cannot find you know covet stats here that are worse than las and especially demographic adjusted obviously florida has older population a lot of people retire to florida historically people are not suffering through covet here or at rates greater than la and they're certainly not dying of greats greater than la you just for age at all probably much better and yet there's no loss of jobs here people are working retail hasn't shut down they're not businesses failing education kids are not falling behind they'll never catch up on they're not going to be permanently depressed and the only way we know this though is because the governor here was very smart and said actually i don't buy this stupid media hype i'm gonna actually read you know research and come up with a smart set of policies and the only way we can prove that to people is by having a differentiated approach now there's even starting to be some research that suggests like for example humidity may interfere with the transmission of airborne viruses and we obviously have some humidity here indoor air conditioning for your point about forcible indoors which is very bad indoor air conditioning actually suppresses humidity and so you make a very um volatile cocktail mix when you put people in poorly ventilated but air-conditioned environments yeah i mean it is uh very clear that just opening the doors solves a lot of uh these these problems when you look back on uh also in florida is it that people who are high risk know they're high risk and are sheltering in place i.e if you're in a nursing home if you're in a retirement community you're kind of self-aware and those folks aren't going out or doing indoor activities maybe going out and not doing it well i do think looking back way before i moved here it does seem that the policy of this you know state was to find people in nursing homes and equivalent you know demographics and try to insulate them as much as possible from coped and try to protect them unlike other states and really they prioritize as well as with vaccines that you know people about 65 et cetera and be very disciplined about that because the research is quite compelling but the people at significantly greater risk of severe or fatal impact of covet are very age stratified it doesn't mean that people below a certain age can't have severe consequences you know there is some risk to anybody but the risk profile is completely different like we're talking like order magnitude difference and the state here has always been you know conscious of that and every policy is driven by how risky is the activity i mean i think the whole point of human life is not to avoid dying like we make decisions every day they're not just about how do i not die today if you believed and you didn't want to die now you'd maximize you would never drive a car for example you certainly wouldn't get on an airplane or go to another country well airplanes commercial airplanes actually pretty safe you certainly wouldn't take a private plane um you absolutely would not drive your own car per mile for a distance yeah it's like one of the below the age of 40 like your chance of dying is almost surely driven more likely to be in a car accident than almost anything else you can do um some people make decisions i mean lots of people like to run marathons or climb out everest all of those have risks and you know people calculate those risks maybe correctly inc correctly calibrate them but people don't just sit at home all day saying how do i not die today that's like not an existence really worth living and this this past year i think and including the trump presidency for four years has kind of led to the self-examination of our operating system capitalism you know federalism versus states rights et cetera i wonder when we look back on this you know the trump presidency um and what he got right and what he got wrong now that we're out of it we're past the you know january 6th we're past the impeachment now it's biden is uh in office and we seem to be coming out of this uh pandemic i i gotta think you know based upon what i'm seeing people gonna be able to walk up and get vaccines in march and april no problem and it's to be over by may clearly biden sandbagged it saying he was going to do a million shots a day we've been blowing past 2 million now we're flooding the zone with you know twice as many vaccines we need to do maybe 4 or 5 million just to get rid of the stockpile so you believe this is over and when do you think you know full capacity miami heat game because i saw the knicks had 2 000 fans at the game last week i think we'll be in a you know intermediate zone for a while where people with vaccination cards you know may there may not be capacity constraints at all at least in some states there may be you know some risk profile like israel's had some stratification of risks over the year but i i think there's going to be you know gradual unlocking i don't think it's like a binary switch but for example the miami heat in theory could fill the arena here with like roughly 20 000 people with people who've been vaccinated and there's really no reason not to do that how do you feel about civil liberties and having to show your vaccine card is that totalitarian is it reasonable somewhere in between i think it's somewhere between i think there's you know let's start from a legal perspective first purely legal perspective there are differences between rights and privileges in the united states and um things that our privileges have historically had the ability to restrict based upon you know engaging x y or z behavior or certain criteria so i think in so far you're talking about a privilege and you can debate some things at the margin whether the right to privilege is certainly attending an nba game is privileged constitutionally um i think it's possible to easily require people to be vaccinated or show proof of prior antibody you know infection antibodies i think that's a reasonable set of criteria at some point though you can certainly make the argument you know if this was some 1980s hiv and we started asking people to prove that they were you know hiv negative or or conversely i'm not so sure that the same people would react the same way yeah you have hiv we'd like you to wear this badge on your jacket like well i've got some really dark undertones yeah so i i think there one wants to be cautious about this however i think in large groups it's reasonable like my my personal opinion let's say now is in large groups it is reasonable to require people that want to attend large groups indoors without masks to prove their prior antibodies or vaccination yeah and airplanes is one where it starts to get a little dicey because now you're restricting people's movements it does seem like it's a privilege but also i may need to see my family across the country i don't want to drive 10 days so there really aren't many other options hey everybody i thought i would bring christina cassiopo i pronounced it correct i'm hoping chris you got it yep all right you're the founder of vanta uh people have been hearing your ads on the pod for the last year and i thought it'd be fun to have you on and you to explain why you created vanta and what sock 2 is and why it's important people get it right so let's start with what is sock 2 for people who are just realizing they have to become sock 2 compliant for sure so sock 2 is at a high level it's sort of a customer asking you to prove your security so if you've heard about one it probably comes you're probably a b2b company and you're doing sales and somebody asks you hey can i have your sock 2 report or you know hey can you go through security review or usually don't phrase it like this but hey i'm going to put a bunch of data in your product and i want to know if you're actually going to be secure or leak it over the internet so they ask you to get a sock to report and these sock to reports are basically a third party saying hey you can trust this company with your data it's like a standard correct exactly yeah so a third party auditor comes in make sure you're in good shape and writes that report all right thanks again christina for explaining to us why this is so important for sas companies especially when you start getting into that sales process and you've been very generous you're making a nice offer people go to vanta com twist where are they gonna get christina they're gonna get a thousand dollars off their manta subscription um and we're a big fan of twist listeners oh thanks i know you had a great response from uh our listenership and they always tell you they found you here so yeah thanks to our twist army and uh we'll see you all next time bye-bye how do you think about travel international travel and borders because i was just thinking you know if if we had run this like a startup we would have said okay texas wants to have this level of opening florida wants to have this leveling let's just split the country into regions we'll let people you know representatives figure out what their constituents want but maybe the travel between those two places is a little there's a little more friction to it like new zealand australia canada they just closed the borders japan what do you think about closing borders and and those kind of you know restrictions it seems i think country countries are clearly going to enforce their borders this is not going to be a trump you know racist thing this is going to be common um and i think that's quite reasonable like travel as a matter of right to just go and on vacation is not you know going to be nearly the norm it's been for the last 40 years of my life you're not just going i mean there were some places you needed a visa that was not ministerial but very few i think now we're going to see a lot of countries enforcing their borders on many dimensions health being one of them i don't i don't believe though that and i think that will be more permanent than just a coveted you know issue i think people are now aware that globalization has its downsides too which is things can things can spread fairly fast and countries are going to want to control their destiny more which is a very rational decision this seems like a very a good thing to come out of this if we had had this experience then in january and february in march of 2020 we would have seen what was happening we were seeing these wuhan you know giant blowers of antibacterial you know i don't know if you remember those where people were just firing these cannons of antibacterial stuff that really was scary science fiction disturbing we just said you know what yeah i think no flights out of china to america no flights you know just everybody shut their regional borders and we would have definitely not seen the level of spread i think it would have been helpful but let me backtrack to where we started which is we'd run this like a startup what would happen well the truth is we actually had a vaccine two days after the virus first you know hit the us and if we'd run this like a startup we actually would have deployed that first moderna uh vaccine in a challenge trial yep and we would we would have with the benefit of hindsight absolutely learned one two months later that we had a magical panacea and none of these people in america who suffered would have suffered almost none because at that point hundreds less thousands of lives yeah less than a thousand people in the united states had um contracted copied and in a challenge trial you almost surely could have got too compelling given that given the level of efficacy in giving the moderate profile of side effects almost surely in a challenged trial in a month two months max would have had compelling clear and compelling evidence that this is the solution and everybody from silicon valley you know sort of gone down down that direction of every type of company but we still have a regulatory regime that is basically built in the 20th century uh which is all around you know error correction and asymmetric outside protection versus risk reward or portfolio theory it's interesting everybody's trying to this is a tall and that's completely unnecessary and you know in some ways even trump who is aggressive and pushing regulators in many many fronts on covid he actually could have ordered this too and he didn't and i don't know what the internal debates you know the fda were about this but that's his fault as well because he could have overruled the fda and absolutely said we're going to approve a challenger trial based upon you know whatever evidence the fda had at the time yeah i mean they and they are happening literally this month in the uk challenge trials have started for people who don't know what a challenge trial is that's when you give somebody the actual you give somebody the the virus you give somebody um the sickness and then you give them the vaccine or you give them a vaccine then you introduce the virus in this case right or you can do there's different ways you could do it yeah but one way or the other you didn't intentionally go faster with volunteers who are willing to take on some risk um and i think as long as you can describe the risk reasonably well i think it's fair to ask people in society if they want to volunteer you can compensate them or not there's different ways you know you can approach this in many different ways but can you find 100 or thousand people that willingly are going to take on certain risk for in the hope for breakthrough and actually personally in the hope that they actually are immunized faster and there's some downside and then the question is can you communicate their risk to a reasonable set of people i think there's no doubt that there's enough people that can understand the risk that they're taking on so for example you could have gone to the medical community and said hey doctors nurses et cetera you guys kind of understand this here's the disclosure here's what we want to do we need a thousand people of different demographics different ages blah blah easily capable of understanding the risk reward profile and we could have had challenger profiles off the ground you know in february last year trump would be president right now actually almost surely had he done 100 he would have won i mean this is the the great stupidity of trump is he didn't listen to anybody and god he was the the results of the vaccines came out two weeks after the election if they had just come out a month earlier or if he had just you know gotten people to wear masks he was so close to winning but my god that was his his strength when we look back on it is he didn't listen to anybody and his weaknesses he doesn't listen to anybody well he did you know even about kobe he did some things insightfully like so for example he pushed to close the travel to china faster than the bureaucrats enabled and really wanted him to um and he was right that that two-week delay where he's fighting the internal bureaucracy in his own administration really cost us in the world but he was on the right side of history and you know people like by they were calling him racist but it was absolutely the right substantive policy second obviously this warp speed stuff was very helpful you could argue whether it was indispensable whether it was 50 helpful but we now have multiple vaccines that were developed in one year when the history of vaccine development i believe the best ever before was five years so the the warp speed product you know development you can debate that at the margin but fundamentally it was a good idea a great idea he wrote the check and he got out of the way right he wrote a huge challenge and got out of the way it was the perfect thing to do same thing like the uh stimulus checks he did the first time it was like let's just dump some money in there and save the market from crashing and save the economy from crashing there was a brilliant move the first stimulus talking it was also turned out to be with the benefits of hindsight a quite good political and substantive maneuver um that said not embracing mass right away which would have been like a classic libertarian um reaction to lockdown saying don't listen to your stupid governors and mayors that want to lock you down and you know lock you in your home just wear a mask that would have been very effective for him politically it almost surely would have been substantively better than the policies many states adopted so he made a lot of mistakes not surprisingly you know he's kind of a golden ice kind of guy and when you roll the dice a lot you're going to get some winners and get some losers uh so even on covid even though the media covered like all's mistakes you know times a thousand he actually made some smart decisions to be covered but he also made some massive miscalculations he definitely you know should have understood the regulatory trap that the fda was and really dug into could you do challenger trials because he had the evidence of the progress on the vaccines even if he didn't have the statistical evidence he kind of knew under the hood what was kind of happening and if you think about a challenge trial the amount of risk somebody's taking by you know exposing themselves to the virus if they were a young person is incredibly low we've just gone over that yes it could be residual but they could have literally done you know when you think of cohort data hey these hundred people are gonna get exposed to this much cova these folks are gonna get 20 more at these folks another 20 more another 20 more we would have had this incredible what do they call those you know cohort charts you know the we have all the little boxes in percentages we could have just sat there and looked at like age gender race you know bmi we would have had the perfect data set to know exactly what's going on here and it's all because we want to protect people it reminds me of protecting people with accreditation laws it reminds me of protecting people with speed limits like there is some or and we also send people to war like we literally send people into war zones to drive over you know improvised explosive devices in the road in another country for you know whatever reason it might be valid on invalid you know mistakes lots of them have been made in you know our approach but this would be a lot less dangerous than the millions of soldiers we've sent into war zones oh absolutely um you know it depends whether you think about it but people use the vocabulary interchangeably that's a war on acts war on drugs and then they have different very different risk for a problem much safer than imposing a draft on you know the entire u.s population putting people into the military and deploying them across the globe uh surely um so and we do that you know when you can when you close your drought you're conscripting people at large they have no choice in the matter so we through many 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to know anything about art nope their experts will create a custom portfolio to meet your investment needs twist listeners can skip the 17 000 person wait list by going to masterworks.io and using the promo code twist t-w-i-s-t again masterworks dot io promo code twist also see important information at masterworks dot io slash disclaimer so that you're fully informed about this opportunity we never got resolution to what is going to happen with tick tock trump put his foot down and said hey we we need to um figure out this reciprocity if you're going to have your apps here if you're going to be collecting data on the location of tens of millions of americans maybe we need to be able to have twitter over there et cetera what what do you think biden's approach is going to be to china and you know what do you think our stand should be at this point because it we did have i think it was india that banned tick tock like immediately after you know having this they're not idiots they're just like wow if china is going to be an adversary here um and they're not respecting human rights uh we there's no need for us to have this app in our country what do you think the approach is going to be here yeah two talk is clear is a national security risks the united states the the ccp is editing content manipulating content as well as collecting data that has nothing to do with reciprocity there's a separate argument about whether as a policy the united states should enable countries that ban our competitive companies from competing should react retaliate in the markets but these are somewhat different and maybe completely different concerns they get ambiguated and conflated a lot i think it's important to disambiguate them and ask because for example let's say china allowed facebook twitter et cetera to operate freely in china that doesn't solve the national security concerns it solves the reciproc reciprocal nature you know markets business interactions fairness yeah but it doesn't all that gives you all that can be solved overnight it doesn't necessarily answer the question whether tik tok is an acceptable product given where the data is used who has access to the data what data collects um there's an expose recently on uh protocol that um you've written by a to talk employee about some of the nefarious things that the ccp was ordering uh so i i think it's a very dangerous entity and a very dangerous biden's administration has a mix of people have different perspectives on china so i think on any china issue you're going to see a fair amount of debate internally you have the secretary of state's been pretty explicit that china is committing genocide and there's certainly people in the administration that really don't like the fact that he's been explicit about china is committing genocide and you know so you're you're going to see a lot of tension sometimes people use like hawks and doves and you know i'm not sure how explanatory that those labels are but there's a vigorous debate in the binding administration about threat posed by china and what to do about so how severe is a threat and then what are the right ways to react what is clear is the last 40 years of u.s policy have been a catastrophic mistake now the question is what do you do and yeah i guess the question is is what's happening with the uyghurs genocide or not and it's pretty clear that at the if it's not genocide it's torture and a really you know a giant scale i mean they're literally re-educating people forcing them to eat pork forcing them with absolutely no or perhaps they're trolling but to to have them literally picking cotton in a as a as literal slaves in the chinese economy i mean this is some really dark stuff and people seem unwilling to discuss it even in our industry in our industry supposedly with a bunch of woke you know smart people the woke people in our own industry will not call out uh mbs on the murder of khashoggi or what's happening here we we literally have a group of people who are woke and want to fight for social justice except in china they want to make money yeah they're they're like it basically comes down to that uh the nba you saw with the nba and the nba players lebron james um they're very woke this applies to us but anything that threatens them making more money they either are silent or intimidate or actually act as intimidators on behalf of the chinese regime they say i think it's incredible disney wants to make money they're willing to censor their films they're willing to do anything you know the china asks um automatic auto manufacturers in germany uh one of the reasons why merkel's been so bad and you know really had a very weak policy on china is volkswagen wants to sell a lot of cars in china and every time you know she realizes that the economy in germany depends upon other manufacturers in some sense and they sell a lot of cars in china and so she's willing to compromise the national security of the united states europe for her you know economic interests it's insane because you see how hypocritical she is um she talks all a great game about the holocaust and we've learned all these lessons and it's never going to happen again and this is so important in our heritage and then as soon as it's happening again she's the blindest person on the planet about it yeah it's it really is disappointing to watch i don't know if you saw that you know when muhammad bin salam came to the united states uh everybody and he did this tour of tech and everybody met with him and it was like are we sure this is a good idea because there's a bunch of bloggers who are being caned and a bunch of women who are driving cars who are the spouses of these leaders who are in jail like what what are we who are we cozying up to here and sure enough he blows it and dismembers that did you see the uh the documentary on it uh that just watched the documentary um it's pretty hard to watch yeah yeah trust me i don't need to watch it but um fundamentally i remember when he did that tour and several people we know well yeah including people that i know very well i met with them and i remember at the time sending them texts like free direct text like what the hell are you doing yeah like you're meeting you're meeting well not only that you're like meeting with someone who basically but government policy wants to execute gays jewish people and by government policy explicitly discriminates against all women and you're meeting with him why like what what the hell let alone companies that are taking their money you know the same thing there's a financial interest right so any people are incredibly hypocritical um when they you know point out what are almost always modest violations in the united states compared to state-sponsored atrocities um that are occurring across the globe yeah the what about ism of oh well we murder people and you know it's like well the death penalty for yeah slightly different than if you're gay you're going to be thrown off a building and if you're jewish we're going to wipe your entire country off the planet and that is the stated goal here like it really was to me gross to see that picture and a lot of our friends are in it and i too said that and you know it's just like and i was actually kind of not invited to all of it but i had been contacted hey maybe you want to come to this or that and i was just like yeah no i'm good and you know if you're a capital allocator it's quite alluring to the sovereign wealth funds of some of these company countries are extraordinarily large would make our jobs really easy to take that money but there's other money uh in the world when we look at what uh happened on the sixth i'm curious as somebody who maybe i don't know if you voted for trump but uh i won't force you to say if you did or not that as somebody who is i know is a republican had to be incredibly disappointed to see what happened on january 6 with what happened at the capitol yes well it is a complete mass um from everybody's perspective um i don't actually even understand you know what anybody hoped to achieve um on any side actually so for example let's let's i don't know what the protesters were hoping to achieve certainly wasn't going to be successful i don't know what trump was thinking but that's like neither here or there because i half the time i don't know what trump's thinking or um yeah i don't know i don't know what insofar as any republicans were supporting you know the protest i don't know what they were seeking uh to achieve and i don't know what the capitol police were thinking because it was very obvious and by the way you know at least my days on the hill the democrats on the house side actually have more oversight over the capitol police than the republicans in the senate by default like the house house sort of has typically had more oversight than the senate um so i don't know what they were thinking either um and so it's a complete unequivocal mess for everybody um i think the net effect of it is still unclear i think right now for example as another fact to show the sort of somehow unpredictable nature of politics i actually believe that for the most part there seems to be more bipartisan cooperation going on in dc now than before and so sometimes you know you have this these perverse um sort of reactions but it it and i think that's probably a healthy thing but having spoken to a fair number of republican senators in the last month or so and haven't spoken indirectly through my husband who's a you know democrat to a lot of democrat politicians there's more cooperation going on in dc right now than certainly the last five years maybe 15 because there wasn't a lot of cooperation during the obama years um so as a byproduct of something that was you know basically unprecedented um or barely i'm fairly precedented there seems to be a more healthy dialogue going on so that's actually probably a good thing does this dequeue trump from ever running again in your mind what are you i think yeah yes um not just i don't think it's just this i i think he is like one of these tv shows that get wears a little old and there's still going to be some nostalgia he'll probably not like this metaphor but um there's still some just like with an old tv show that's kind of a little bit past its prime there's going to be some nostalgia in the republican primary or primary electorate voters you know for trump or trump s stop but he's not going to be able to put the puzzle pieces back together again i believe partially also it's an age and what's which also was very obviously pure watching the trump presidency is you know he's like anybody else aging in declining in ability if you watch his interviews from the 1980s he was clearly much savvier sharper on many dimensions and probably wouldn't have committed as many unforced errors so i think there's just a you know time has passed he's passed burned a lot of bridges can be hard to put those puzzled pieces back together um so i'm not particularly stressed about it um as someone who was the original never trumper yeah on the republican side i am not super worried about that i think we'll have an open primary where a lot of different voices get to compete and we'll see where we land what do the republicans have to you know embrace to evolve the party because it's obviously on a demographic basis you know trump really did thread the needle when he did win and the electoral college the demographic show pretty clearly uh the republican party's base is changing so what do you think is their winning message because they didn't see you know i'm trying to figure out if immigration and minimum wage and some of these issues and health care that they've been maybe on the wrong side of or maybe against what people want in the country in consensus people want to see the minimum rate the minimum wage rise they want to see some reasonable amount of immigration what are your thoughts like if you were running it how could they embrace more people being part of their party i think the republicans to be successful nationally because it's somewhat different by state sure and by geographic districts whether in the senate or congress um nationally to run for president successfully and look trump barely lost by roughly 14 000 votes if you move 14 000 votes around even even with all these issues with all the people dying from covid with all the media bias against them you ship 14 000 votes and he gets real elected so i don't think you want to make radical changes to the republican party to get 14 000 more votes and that would be more likely to do asymmetric harm on the voting than upside so for example his turnout among african-american voters actually pretty good for a republican among jewish voters is that exceptional a lot of american hispanics widely reported is extremely strong particularly in florida in texas so you don't want to play with that fire that said he underperformed massively for a republican in arizona north carolina and arguably georgia so the question is why what are the root causes of what you want to do about it i think some of the root causes are i think you cannot run away from populism populism is the future of the republican party and what planks of populism do you really want to double down on and focus on i think economic populism absolutely so this is where establishment republicans always get themselves in trouble they're popular in the media they're not popular with voters what does economic populism mean like uh in this context i think well it can it can mean like supporting minimum wage stuff doesn't mean that that's the only or like the right answer but there is a divide there between establishment republicans who understand the economic logic of why minimum wage is actually increasing especially the national one is a bad idea and the popularity among rank and file potential republican voters which may be a pretty popular policy so there's a disconnect between the mitt romneys and the rank and file republican voters on that dimension another kind of issue you have to think through is things like china extremely popular across the board among republican voters being very nervous fretful and starting to take aggressive policy reactions to china's threat is very popular among republicans there's also a lot of cynicism in the republican party and potential republican party voters in populist uh particular towards elites and they mean mixing the elite media elites may be over covered but only to the media definitely and one of the reasons why a lot of voters embrace trump is they could see that the tasks that the media elite had for him and vice versa and they were actually saying yes that's what i want i want people who don't care about the media elites but also these days medical elites like if you look at the people who were most wrong about covent a lot of them were medical elites so um educational elites they'll go down there that so i think the candidate needs to be very anti-establishment with discipline so unlike trump not like a random number generator that sometimes rolls dice and comes up with something good and something comes with a little stupid ass it needs to be something more predictable but with a bias towards an anti-establishment platform uh that can also mean so for example here's another populist economics question is one of the first things the republican congress did after trump was elected is lower the corporate tax rate it's a smart policy from a substantive perspective the corporate taxes in u.s were too high vis-a-vis global competitors on the other hand totally politically bankrupt move lowering individual taxes that's a populist policy people want to keep more money for their family and yes lowering corporate taxes does indirectly create that result but it's so obscured and so in non-intuitive that it was such a dumb move especially to do for the first you know 100 days cut your into you cut individual taxes first you want to get around to cutting corporate taxes a year later that's fine but don't do that first and so i think understanding like the voters so let's talk about healthcare now i think one of the biggest mistakes of the of republicans for the last decade is to not have a market-based perspective on how to fix healthcare in the united states healthcare in the united states is broken almost everybody says that yeah all the solutions and quotes or what's called 99 of the solutions you hear about are throwing more government at fixing healthcare totally stupid direction but if you don't want people who feel something's broken and are frustrated to gravitate to the only solutions they hear you have to give them an alternative and you have to have a pretty thoughtful alternative because it's actually not that true it's not just to stop your fingers and fix healthcare we've had a decade to come up with conservative free market-based solutions to healthcare and you can barely find it and i think that is an internally sort of in internal error unforced error by republicans conservatives at the think tank level at the political level at the presidential level and there's no excuse for that so all we're going to get is more government health care because everybody proposing things is thinking more government more government more government well unless you have a alternative and a really thoughtful one you're not going to shift the debate yeah we don't have a we don't have a customer in the united states for health care therefore we don't have price discovery therefore we don't have competition and so you and i could go for knee surgery or something and pay 2 000 or 200 000 or 50 000 and we don't even have these prices published anywhere and the republican party yeah i can never make sense of their view i know the democrats want universal health care i would almost be fine with either solution at a high functioning level so if we had a base level of universal health care people could go to the hospital for this basic set of you know basic function just like we have a basic public education system i would be okay with that i would also be okay with the free market system where we watched you know a visit to the doctor go from 250 to 150 to 75 to virtual and i could get a prescription you know over telemedicine and it was a competition to see who could charge the least amount for it you know now that to me makes sense there's a lot of good ingredients there um but i think you need to put together a comprehensive plan if you're a conservative and don't want more government intervention others are just going to get more government intervention this is always the truth is like just saying no to a broken problem is eventually going to end it badly if the problem is not totally clearly broken then saying no can be smart because then people realize there's always flaws with the new proposals but when everybody sort of has a perspective that the system is broken in a particular area the no no no doesn't work and so the perception that health care is broken is very wide very deep fairly universal and so just saying no is not going to be constructive and so i think that's our obligation as republicans or conservatives to come up with and devise better solutions i know the answer of sending the dmd to run my healthcare is not a better solution but at some point people are so frustrated that they're just gonna say okay dmv whatever i just can't take this anymore yeah i mean listen it's it works in canada and a lot of other countries have universal healthcare and it works to have a free market but both of these solutions can work we just have to pick one and commit to it i think middle what how do you think about minimum wage because it does i can't figure out exactly what the right answer is here you have this national minimum wage which seems very low seven dollars an hour and but obviously the cost of living as we've had this massive discussion online for the past year is radically different and if people can move to and work from home work remote at a lower cost they're going to do it but 15 seems pretty high there's gonna definitely be a million or two million jobs that will go away seven seems too low and certainly in new york and san francisco so do you think it should just be a state issue state by state and the the idea of a federal minimum wage is unnecessary should this be something states do i think the idea of a federal minimum wage is not wise and prudent but for your point about experimentation and the local cost of livings are so radically different etc um so i don't know what problem the federal costs uh the uniform you know sort of federal minimum wage really solves the cost of living is incredibly different and the in the economic environment for businesses may be very different like real estate costs cost of goods there may be cost of shipping so i think prescribing all businesses you know adhere to some artificial cost structure is just a bad idea period whether you call it a minimum wage you have minimum rent obligation to i mean there's all kinds of things you could impose by fiat all of those are bad they're bad for business they're bad they're bad for really everybody uh so i think it's just an ideological debate in some ways uh that the people who are in left-wing states want to impose their preferences on states that are not so left-wing and i mean there's nothing stopping new york or california they can have a 20 a 20 minimum wage if they want i mean in fact that's what's happened i mean we we have 15 minimum wages in certain states and yeah it feels like some of these issues are just concessions to making things feel more fair because things do feel unfair so do you think there is a case to just split the difference between the seven and fifteen dollars and say you know what let's just graduate to eleven dollars or whatever it is and this would just at least make people feel like the the people who are at the the bottom of the socioeconomic status at least have you know some floor is there an argument for that just i think in healthcare is another one where if people felt like they had some base level of healthcare or maybe it would take away some of that fear or the unfairness of our society because we do have ginormous wealth being created on one side what do you think of that yeah but is that is the antidote to that so i don't think feelings are a good way to generate policies and in fact they almost always have unintended perverse effects that are actually worse so i think all policies should be measured by actual outcome substantive outcomes not by intended feelings um you can read thomas souls division of the anointed if you want to see a general critique on left-wing-based feelings policy and how devastating they've been to the united states over the last 50 60 70 years um it'll turn almost anybody who reads the book into a conservative overnight um because the anecdotes and data are so compelling so fundamentally so for example a minimum wage like raising the minimum wage is really going to hurt many people that's designed to help it's certainly not going gonna fix perceptions of inequality um you know raising 11 or 12 or 13 versus like some billionaire if that's the debate that's not going to change that debate i think you have to debate down a completely different basis i think healthcare is a little different because i think when people are not healthy and don't have access to healthcare there are collateral consequences to lots of people and so you can justify a more comprehensive healthcare policy than you can sort of uh like a minimum wage policy um that said i still think it would be better to experiment on health care as well versus a one-size-fits-all mandate but i i get because to some extent you have cost subsidization going on all across health care different people with different risk profiles different people family profiles people with you know rare unexpected conditions my personal view is i think most people should have a minimum viable health care plan and then have a high deductible policy basically um so that insurers against catastrophic health care expenses and then they have a very minimal base level service but part of the problem with health care is 70 of the costs there's some real fundamental problems in healthcare 70 of the costs are fundamentally the last six months of people's lives and unless you're willing to kind of address that issue you're not really fixing any of the root causes you're just moving puzzle pieces around that's not really emotional discussion it is but that is that is like where we spend the money the other thing that people don't want to address is approximately 70 of like the chronic kinds of things people confront in their lives are a function of lifestyle decisions yeah and we're getting better at tying the data to prove and validate that and by time you know i have kids and by time they grow up we'll have perfect data that shows your risks of cancer your risks of heart coronary diseases your risks of alzheimer's etc are a lot of function of decisions you made about sleep nutrition you know et cetera exercise all that stuff so i think when you layer those two things together you you really are moving rearranging a lot of deck chairs on the titanic unless you're willing to address those two things 70 or so is a function of personal decisions and what are you going to do to make people accountable for their own decisions and how to encourage them like tighten the feedback loop educate people show them the connection between a and b but also you have to impose costs to making poor decisions we're going to get you're going to subsidize failure and then secondly a huge fraction of health care costs are people at the end of their lives whether it's the last one month to six months and unless you fix those two things you're fundamentally not really changing the areas that are causing the biggest problems in the united states yeah see this is the thing when when founders capital allocators you know startups entrepreneurs look at the problem you get to the heart of it where are we spending all our money oh it's people who are suffering from diabetes obesity uh self-inflicted you know uh health care issues around smoking alcohol or obesity and then at the end of the life so basically means can we build incentives into the system for people to be healthier which would basically mean to not be as fat like that's really the certainly one big driver i mean if you look at the last 40 years we basically made america obese by by poor advice some of it from the government directly which one of the reasons i don't like experts the nutritional diet recommended by the government pyramid was the food pyramid was designed based upon like we we we're good at producing bread eat more bread yeah pretty soon we're also going to understand how the fill sugar is yeah uh there would not shock me if we wake up one day and say oh my god i can't believe we banned cigarettes but we tolerated sugar like you're going to see almost sure more evidence that sugar spikes you know insulin spikes cause more damage and we're starting to get to the bottom of that now you know you see people walking around with these anomalies yeah you probably have a level understanding so much more about myself i'm not using levels i'm an investor in nutrasense and i've been using them and like i really have been it has changed my blood sugar forever because i used to love you know sugar combined with flour so like oh my god that's put these two together it's going to take 10 years off your life just those two things i just i love a piano shock a lot and now it's like you know i love donuts you know what that's a one time every week for me thing not a twice a day thing now that's it yeah so we're starting to understand this connection in an empirically quantitative way that will affect behavior because you'll be able to connect the dots for people and that will may not shift everybody's behavior but you also have to incentivize it to some extent so if you're going to eat sugar and donuts why should i pay for your health care costs like there's a serious argument that i should not be subsidizing your sugar you know addiction i would i would love the fact if my health care was based upon my bmi i would be thinner in my life and i wouldn't worry about that earlier i would actually embrace that when my friend said j cal you're getting fat i lost 15 pounds because i just at the poker table chamath and saks were like my god you're so [ __ ] fat jake how you have to lose some weight and i was like thank you please ride me for this because i don't have self-control the one part of uh most people don't in different parts of their lives one of the reasons why this is great social research of basically on almost any dimension you're the average of your five closest friends like the five people you spend the most time with you're the average of so their behaviors you're gonna replicate so if you wanna be healthier just find five people spend your time with that are healthy and your habits will change if you want to be smarter you know or more successful whatever find five people are very successful and spend time with that for me that's what we like to talk to you on the phone right now yeah why do you think i do this podcast i hang out with i've actually always been consciously aware of how do i invest my time with who and you pick up the behavior habits of the five people you spend the most time with and you cannot fight it it's like you're the average of the five so be very judicious about what habits you want to have in your life and calibrate who you spend your time with and that will change almost anything there's a reason why the company you keep is our parents kept telling us that the company you keep is super important somebody actually dunked on me on twitter and was like you know you're the least successful and smart of all of your besties on the all-in podcast and i was like thank you that is a compliment that all the people i hang out with are much more successful they're pulling me up thank you i know i mean when i play basketball i want to play with people who are better than me or younger than me and taller when i play tennis i prefer to play with people who are better than me when i when i you know optimize my like uh rest your heart rate and my two minute recovery and do all these high intensity training i'm always almost always competing with people who are you know roughly half my age that's very intentional yeah i mean if you run with people who run faster then you you will run faster you don't want to be the fastest person in your running group all right let's talk about real estate here congratulations on opendoor obviously this has been a huge success the company's worth i think today 16 17 billion dollars you founded it um what are you seeing in the data about housing i've been trying to figure out do i leave the bay area do i go to austin do i go to miami what what is my future and then i'm watching these migration patterns what was the migration pattern during the pandemic and then what do you think it will look like as we come out of this you know in the second half of 2021 um so i think people you know realize that space matters open space outdoor space space for a home office and you know the dense dense impact urban environments became a lot less attractive because of that secondly the people they spend their time with at home matter more because we're locked at home with people that they probably in many cases may not have known that well their roommates maybe even random roommates you know kind of assembled together so i think that's shifted some desire to live in more of a suburban environment using you know jargon or you know it's kind of buzzword but more more less urban less dense to more suburbia uh with because of the premium on space even a premium on home gyms like things like that on weights you need space for that it's difficult to do that in a tight new york city apartment or you know san francisco so i think that shift is moderately permanent that people are dispersing plus the ability to work in a hybrid or remote model where you can choose where you want to work from as a top-level filter not always just where is the job there's more flexibility whether we have complete remote flexibility which i don't really believe will be true but there's definitely more flexibility let's say let's say the companies i worked with before coveted maybe 10 were fairly flexible postcode i suspect at least 30 percent are going to be fairly flexible on how people work only 30 i would think it would be like 100 are going to be forced to or 90 like how do you compete for talent if if jack says hey square and twitter you can work from home and then zuck says you know what you got to come to the office now and read hastings says you got to come to netflix's office as he's been pretty public about what happens then like who gets the talent well i think there's different talent i think some people want to be with their colleagues and i think of as you see you like sports there's people who play individual sports and people who play team sports i prefer team sports i need to be in an office with people or i have no teammates and because the bundle of work is not just how productive you are for a lot of people let's say leaving college let's use a classic example leave college move to a new city for a job they don't know many people well they go to facebook and they meet people that have similar ambitions similar experiences similar goals in life similar backgrounds similar habits and that's how they become friends they meet their friends there sometimes they meet their spouses there if you take that away in a remote environment you just focus on uh productivity people may be productive but they're not going to be happy or at least a large segment of people i see this in some of our best companies a lot of our best companies have performed extremely well during covid so really really really really well what are you attributing they're they're well they were more decisive in reacting and i'd encourage that became a positive feedback loop where they realized that controversial difficult decisions were something they could embrace first be afraid of because they were confronting this abyss and they said oh shoot we got to change this gotta stop our market we gotta move that we gotta fire these people we got to lower our costs over here we gotta you know plan for scenarios so never waste a crisis kind of situation yeah so they learn to be much more disciplined thoughtful and decisive and those are habits that yield better companies now the interesting part of that though is they are shipping and some of them are shipping more rapidly and arguably even better products than they did before march however interesting in their employment satisfaction surveys employees are not as energized with morale as decayed even though the company has done phenomenally well the productivity is up but they don't have the the water cooler gossip right uh osmosis-based learning so another thing that's extremely difficult in in a remote environment is osmosis learning so structural learning you can definitely recreate maybe even even more easily remotely but a lot of the best learning is osmosis which is a very unstructured dialogue let's say so i would go to a board meeting with one of my colleagues let's say a junior colleague and after the board meeting we'd jump into an uber classically yep and you know this person would ask uber what about you yeah why this why that you know et cetera and that's where you know he would like someone like my chief of staff or someone like a principal would learn the most is well why was that important or why did this person do that the debris was kind of those kind of well no debriefs work remotely what does doesn't work is a structured unstructured so debris can be structured but it's these random questions like well why did that person say this or why did you think that was a good idea or god why did this board member say that so they're not you can't put them on an agenda that's the um the constructed what do they call that the connecting tissue between the structure those moments the walk to the coffee store the running into somebody in the elevator those kind of ad hoc collisions uh those things matter and they're really important especially for learning and so you know i worry about this in the venture world because a lot of the best way to learn venture is to shadow people who know what they're doing and you know develop some habits and then devise your own strategies and that's really hard to do like i can have my colleagues join a zoom call but unless they're sitting next to me and they can debate the call after the the formal dialogue of whether you should invest or not is interesting but a lot of the best learning doesn't come from that it's like watching my face even in interviewing somebody like the people who know me well at founders fun can tell what i think about you know some interview because they know me well enough to read my face but they can't really do that on you right yeah zoom is just i am exhausted from this at this point so is the bay area ever going to be able to solve housing or is it too uh the nimbyism and the the ability to fight to be anti-development just too strong here and that becomes the real reason this is going to all come apart putting aside like the cancel culture here and the and the anti-business anti-venture capitalist anti-wealth anti-founder you know sentiment that started that seems to me that that would not be as acute if we were building so much housing that people didn't feel like you know they have to live two hours away from their teaching job or working at a you know a grocery store or a fire department or whatever can it ever be solved here or no it would definitely feel less zero sum right it wouldn't feel like these people are taking away something i want distribute inventory that's what we're doing in miami we just build stuff there's 21 skyscrapers being built in miami just in 2021 half residential half commercial the mayor has said to me like this city is about about 20 to 25 built up and we're just build it's like when people want to move here we're just going to build new supply we can build offices we can build houses it's not like a rocket nobody tr and nobody tries to stop it nope because people understand like in a non-zero sum environment everybody can be a winner um so that i think the bayer is going to have to suffer through a more catastrophic crisis before the politics that allow for a blocking building change now i want to end with a new special feature for our quarterly update with keith this is our quarterly check-in and this is a new feature we call heath dunks just the best dunks from keith since we last spoke to him one of my favorites here tennessee this is so good uh teddy schleifer is that his how you pronounce it he's um i think a trust fund kid he's my understanding uh and he writes about wealth and uh he is super woke and he's a journalist and he always asks me can i say something off the record bad about my friends that's all the dm's he said to me and then i tell him teddy here are three companies that are doing great things in the world can we talk about these three not robin hood's mistake or you know uber's mistake but no he always wants me to sell out my friends and my investments which i don't know why you keep asking me to do that teddy and teddy says imagine being a resident of miami during an economic crisis and a global pandemic and your mayor is taking a moment to brag about his twitter engagement because mayor francis suarez sorry for getting his name wrong earlier shared just how much engagement he's had he added 50 000 followers i think this is a great sign that the mayor actually wants to connect with their constituents and keith comes in from the baseline like john starks and he sees elaine and here it comes the dunk imagine being a snarky journalist who has no clue what his constituents want boom next tweet i love this one i mean this is this is late stage journalism at its best it's just they're so anti-capitalism so anti-progress so anti-entrepreneurship and progress they they look for every chance to dunk on people and my god you destroyed them here's my next favorite we have so many good ones this is a great one uh eric vaughn runs a uh he run i think he runs the hustle fund and he says psa no one cares where you live are moving to in the midst of keith and other folks talking about how great miami and austin are and he says it's it is only the topic at double asterix every single board meeting let alone most dinners from keith and eric says i'm sorry to hear that he throws some snark he throws a little elbow in the paint and keith decides well i'm gonna have to muscle this kid well each of these companies is more successful than anything you've ever worked on eric falls down blood in his mouth you're probably right thank you for speaking your truth tries to put a little jab in there uh eric with a fraction of the success of keith and keith decides there is only one truth it is the best ceos on the planet who are debating this not the mediocre ones game over savage so savage next one these are just so good keith parker pt decides he wants to get in on the smoke and he keith continues the discussion i serve on 16 boards and at least half the companies are seriously evaluating planning to move this is true every single board i'm on i'm getting ceo saying are you staying in the bay area should i move here what's the talent like in salt lake i mean and you have no choice but to talk about this because your employees have left parker says i have a portfolio company real-time data on real estate sales they live in realtors in boxes it may be demand increases in the future smart people make reasonable arguments there but it's bonkers today keith says wrong i know more about residential real estate than probably any one person in the u.s which if you built the 17 billion dollar company under what was that open door was five years six years six six from launch six from launch to 17 billion i i'm gonna go ahead and say keith knows what he's talking about when it comes to writing also for also forced the only other company in this space to completely redo their entire business model and fire their ceo um to try to compete oh which company is that you might have heard of zillow someone's heard of it all right next these are just so great my man zach coleus this miami beam is becoming moronic miami has literally no check of any storage you guys really must understand network effects that badly rich faces moving there to avoid taxes does not do it for someone who has neither funded or created any network effect businesses you are quite confident so that that required you to look up on the crunch base if zack had been an investor in facebook or something i love that one uh but no my i mean how much of the this migration patterns do you think is taxes because 15 savings taxes material but not so it's it's really right on the border of being material i don't think this is primarily a tax thing for people well it's it's it if you talk to people who are actually who have actually moved to miami ceos angel investors venture capitalists it's almost never taxes taxes are certainly an ingredient that clarify how intellectually bankrupt as well as financially bankrupt california is however taxes in california actually haven't gone up meaningfully recently at all and everybody's escaping now so that's one but exactly if you just interview people here you'll see it's all about the happiness like the happiness and joy on people's faces the ability of their kids to get a good education by going to school with real world instruction the ability to avoid uh sort of the closed-minded monoculture of the bay area that's by far more important than any tax savings that said you know there's no reason to artificially subsidize the government's bankrupt policies yeah i mean it that when i talk to people about how they feel uh about the taxes it's not so much paying the taxes it's what i got for them right like did i did it feel equitable to if and then if san francisco wants to give a one percent tax if you sell a home that's over 10 million bucks and then they want to charge one percent for this and a 1 wealth tax for that while they hate you while they say to zuckerberg thanks for donating money to this hospital we want to take your name off of it and it's like oh my god can you imagine if your mayor got zuckerberg to put it to give tens of millions of dollars to a hospital in miami i mean every mayor in the united states would love that situation only in san francisco when people dunk on zuckerberg's name being on it that to me was the one where i was like oh god if you're punishing people back to teddy if you're punishing people for giving their money away what do you think that's gonna do they were literally criticizing bezos when he made the 10 billion dollar climate pledge that he didn't give away the 10 billion dollars it's like well do you realize that's an extraordinary unprecedented amount of money to give away you might want to think about what do you think of bezos retiring or moving on from ceo yeah i mean i don't think that's shocking to you um no i mean if you look at how long you know basically roughly 25 years you know i think everybody has new challenges they want to embrace at some point in their life and 25 years of massive success leads one to think is there anything else i want to accomplish and um now is a pretty good time where he still is young enough energetic enough sharp enough to look at other things he might want to do before you know he retires very common if you look at when you know bill gates stepped down et cetera um zuckerberg was quoted a long time ago maybe a dec saying he doesn't actually envision running facebook for his whole life so i think it's a very normal thing for people who are successful to challenge themselves again go back into another area another field and you know try to try to change the world from a different direction oh we have one more here in high school i had nightmares of forgetting to do my homework in college had nightmares of oversleeping to find him as a founder i have nightmares of replying wrong to one of my tweets and ruining my twitter career it is like a great white you're kind of like a great white shark on twitter it's like we know you're under the water but we don't we don't we just want to pretend you're not there and then if you do happen to take somebody out it's like well i we still want to enjoy being on twitter i've been on this crazy fool's errand um i'm trying to correct everything that's wrong on the internet which is ins you know talking about fool's errands uh so that was the that's been the problem is for the last six seven years or eight years i've known this crusade of there's something stupid on the internet i'm going to fix it yes but let's be honest it's not it's your past time it's a hobby yeah no i'm trying to get me i'm trying to get out of that like i don't have enough time anymore to fix everything wrong on the internet plus inside this game work more things like anymore you have to reframe you have to reframe this as recreation this for you is like uh some people like to go out and go hunting some people might like to go scuba diving or spear fishing uh whatever it is this is for you it's like you're this is like a little fun hobby for me i have a similar one when i find people who are taking advantage of founders like these fake coaches who are selling twenty thousand dollar systems it makes me mental and i feel the need to be the police officer of the internet and stop them and call them out tell me about these two no i think that's right it's very similar because i'm afraid that someone's going to read some stupid ass advice and follow it and ruin their career ruin their company unnecessarily so at least by correcting it they can at least see it's like a change log or whatever you can kind of see that oh maybe i shouldn't really pay attention to this weird advice um so i'm trying to save people from you know unnecessary mistakes but it is time consuming and i have too many other things i need to invest in this year i'm starting a company for scratch again i'm going to teach you something oh my gosh wait wait wait whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa i'm going to teach some berries i'm going to teach the various camp classes too you're going to teach and sign up oh i can't talk hold on a second i've taught two but i'm going to teach one regularly now so if you come to miami you come to miami we'll definitely crack you up and get you i can't wait better than you'll be in better shape than chamach when i'm done with you so you saw that chamath thirst trap did you think about taking off your shirt and uh taking out a snap no no no no really wow okay wow i think it's good for deal flow i just want to you know i do that there's another person starting a new company i am starting a new company in miami you have to move if you want to join i have to get my beak wet can you just take 500k for me now i've been having you on the pod regularly i'm good for promoting can i just ship 500k right now no we're trying to be disciplined truthfully the real answer is um i don't like the idea of over funding a company obviously there's a lot of people that want to invest in this company i think there's cultural issues when you over fund a company and i really prefer that the first financing be actually quite small um we can we can work out and give everybody honey come on this is great for our connective tissue i just ship a quick hundy and then we talk about the product and the journey uh tell me about run the world two companies i think you invested in that i thought were very interesting i don't know if team rotary is an investment or just something you're a fan of no team roger is an investment we're really excited about it here give me a give me a plug-in for this because this looks so team lottery had this great idea which is like we need to have programming that replaces the traditional off-site traditional learning development budget and the traditional bonding that isn't occurring because people are working more remotely so what can we do tied to traditional academic research that shows efficacy so they create programs for managers and team leaders to work with their team uh to encourage creativity to do goal setting to bond but with academic research academic research backing it up to show the efficacy it's not just a random offset that's just drink wine you know the classic default but in the modern world where people are working more remotely either by government fiat or because of new employee preferences as you're alluding to this is even in more demand than ever before so the company really just launched in september it was done phenomenally well if i showed you the logos of the companies adopting this company i've never seen anything like this in the enterprise world in my life wow the quality of the brands that have embraced this product are like fortune 500 on down tech non-tech vertical doesn't matter everybody needs this and we're building more and more programming building more and more academic research that supports the the real the results of the programming on the team on the company on the performance of the team so this is a great company pay attention to uh if anybody wants to try it for their own team you can sign up now and use it for your own team test it out before you you know sort of get the whole company on t-e-a-m-r-a-d-e-r-i-e and it reminds me of the five dysfunctions of a team and all that um lansoni research where people sharing and doing creative things together can help them bond and you know help them when they go take on all the challenges and it is definitely a thing i'm seeing my teams are 25 more effective but i think people are maybe 50 more lonely depressed anxious et cetera we need something to do together and i love this idea of doing uh coffee tasting or poetry reading to help engage people and to connect people because i have people who i've hired who i haven't met i've invested in 50 60 companies this year i've never met any of the founders it's so weird okay now run the world tell us about this one this seems like a brilliant idea too yeah so run the world was founded by um x facebook engineering manager instagram engineering manager um both uh you both actually had been initially funded by andreessen horowitz and we call that cersei and the basic value proposition is how do you connect through online activities in a way that you traditionally would go to and forced to attend a conference for so people would travel around the world spend massive amount of money leave their families behind go to some foreign city for two or three days of programming but what they really were getting out of conferences was not the programming usually it was the connections the forging unique new connections of interesting people with interesting insights into your industry and so what the world aspires to do is to recreate that bonding among people who have a similar connection in a similar field but without having to travel around the world and so you know for example one of the founders parents is a physician i believe in um maybe hong kong or taiwan and he would have to travel to the u.s to say like medical conference which is you know two to three days of travel let alone you know missing business meetings missing patients et cetera back home and being away from the family for you know maybe three or four interesting connections could that be done you know in a different way and so that's what we do is we connect people to similarly like-minded people that have professional interests or potentially even um non-professional interests that are common like people do go to conferences around hobbies baseball card collecting music etc so we do that as well so that's the vision of the company feel free to try the product with your own you know and also both fema i just followed both founders both female founders we're seeing a lot more diversity in founders a lot more female founders founders of color been fantastic to see that change over the last decade now well we you know at founders phone we don't track the demographics so i think that's a interesting observation but i i don't know um i'm not i actually learned a lot about our founders because we usually work together for five to 15 years so by the time the end of the journey in the company we know each other really really well but um i'm less knowledgeable about the backgrounds of a lot of our founders when we start the journey together there's certain things obviously i care about and i'm using you know to gauge the team and their dna and all those other dimensions but it's only like with the hindsight of 10 20 years of working together that really understand their whole history and perspective so we across founders funds portfolio work with a wide variety of backgrounds but we don't actually try and empirically survey it track it that's not what we're in the business of we're in the business of finding their heroes they want to transform an industry or transform the world they're what we call no one companies like no one there's one elon to drive tesla forward there's not a lot of people that would have been possible to fund that to drive that company forward period spacex maybe no one at the time now there's more other companies that are competing and doing really well in space but at the time it might have taken there might have been one to five people on the planet that could pull that off so the only question we ask a founder's fund is does this person these people have an irrationally high odds irrationally high odds probability of succeeding in changing the planet all right so this wraps up our q1 we've learned a lot about the world politics tech startups cities uh journalists and dunking thank you again for coming on keith for the quarterly we'll see you in q2 for our update and remember most importantly you and i have been building this relationship now for a couple years it's time to consummate the relationship with me getting my beekwet and just getting that yum yum a little 50k and a keith for boys seed round my lps are going to love me for getting that little 100k in early oh let's make it happen keith come on now let me wet my beak get that logo get those get you know oh it's gonna be so great keith when i'm gonna you and i are collaborating on a project together it's gonna be great come visit you in miami we do a walking talk maybe hit up a little nobu outside uh no but um the criteria here yeah is um if you have an office in miami we're taking investors um we're not taking investors that don't don't work yep you have to work here i'm getting uh i'm getting an office in miami that's it i gotta get out of this country okay then we have a deal all right all right great keith for boys thanks for watching 2021 we'll see you in q2 bye bye awesome

Channel: This Week in Startups

Views: 16,733

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Id: OS1pTrH7VaM

Length: 91min 44sec (5504 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 05 2021