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Episode: #754: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ann Miura-Ko
Author: Tim Ferriss: Bestselling Author, Human Guinea Pig
Duration: 02:41:28
Episode Shownotes
This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited. The episode
features segments from episode #60 "Arnold Schwarzenegger on Psychological Warfare" and #331 "Ann Miura-Ko — The Path from Shyness to World-Class Debater and Investor."Please enjoy!Sponsors:AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://DrinkAG1.com/Tim
(1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.)Eight Sleep’s Pod 4 Ultra sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating: https://eightsleep.com/tim
(save $350 on the Pod 4 Ultra)Shopify global commerce platform, providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business: https://shopify.com/tim
(one-dollar-per-month trial period)Timestamps:[00:00] Start[04:08] Notes about this supercombo format.[05:11] Enter Arnold Schwarzenegger.[05:45] Where did Arnold develop his cast iron confidence?[09:15] Mastering the psychological warfare of bodybuilding.[13:58] Transferring this skill set to Hollywood.[17:13] On making millions before becoming a movie star.[19:48] Playing good bricklayer/bad bricklayer with Franco Columbu.[24:41] How Twins came together.[29:14] Meditation as one of many answers.[35:47] Enter Ann-Miura Ko.[36:14] Ann's childhood shyness.[38:14] The Japanese phrase Ann used as a hostile kid in Michigan.[40:20] How Ann overcame introversion.[43:13] Ann's first solo stage speech.[44:22] Why Ann continued with speech and debate.[45:17] Ann's love for competition.[46:54] Ann's extreme efforts for pizza.[48:57] The catalyst for Ann's debate improvement.[53:01] Debate competition format.[56:56] Ann's recommended resources for improving debate skills.[59:56] Observations on modern debate in politics and family.[1:02:01] The most important lesson from Ann's debating years.[1:04:50] Differences between debate and negotiation.[1:06:53] Ann's father's journey to America and favorite phrase.[1:10:29] Ann's world-class effort in menial job tasks.[1:13:15] How a Yale tour led to shadowing a CEO.[1:18:36] Ann's first job experience.[1:20:20] Ann's favorite office supplies.[1:21:32] Ann's cherished personal artifacts.[1:23:06] Ann's experience teaching Mayfield Fellows at Stanford.[1:24:42] A reading list and plans for Ann's Stanford startup class.[1:28:05] Spotting artificial inflation in startup valuations.[1:31:29] Why Ann changed her career path from medicine.[1:34:45] What Ann knew about herself that her parents and test scores didn't.[1:38:55] Ann's entry into venture capital and startup investing.[1:39:29] An encounter with Steve Jobs.[1:40:40] A job offer based on shared interests.[1:44:40] Ann's experience at CRV during 9/11.[1:47:55] The most expensive words in investing.[1:48:16] First principles thinking and common leadership decisions.[1:50:52] Winning strategy vs. strategy not to lose.[1:51:59] Manifestations of hedging as a defensive strategy.[1:53:46] The importance of focusing on your own race.[1:55:47] A need for aggressiveness to win.[1:56:38] How Ann met Mike Maples, Jr.[1:59:26] Ann's PhD plans and shift to working with Mike.[2:02:12] Ann's reaction to Mike's unusual proposition.[2:06:40] Ann's hectic first year at Floodgate.[2:08:41] Ann's real first name.[2:09:21] Ann's struggles and coping mechanisms.[2:14:56] Ann's superpowers.[2:18:44] Thunder lizards and Ann's pursuit of them.[2:20:20] Ann's view on AI and machine learning's impact.[2:23:11] Philosophy exercises and real-world applications.[2:24:50] Aligning collective and self-interests in problem-solving.[2:27:08] Books Ann has gifted or reread most.[2:29:09] A recent, game-changing purchase under $100.[2:30:28] Ann's billboard.[2:31:19] The meaning of Ann's Japanese name characters.[2:32:19] Ann's online presence and Floodgate's name origin.[2:34:58] Parting thoughts.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy
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Full Transcript
00:00:00 Speaker_04
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00:01:33 Speaker_04
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00:03:29 Speaker_02
At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
00:03:34 Speaker_00
Can I ask you a personal question?
00:03:36 Speaker_05
Now would've seen an appropriate time.
00:03:40 Speaker_00
What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living this year over a metal endoskeleton.
00:03:45 Speaker_05
Me, Tim, Paris, Sean.
00:03:52 Speaker_04
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss.
00:03:55 Speaker_04
Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives.
00:04:09 Speaker_04
This episode is a two for one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion downloads.
00:04:18 Speaker_04
To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes.
00:04:31 Speaker_04
And internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes, because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars.
00:04:44 Speaker_04
These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode.
00:04:54 Speaker_04
Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at tim.blog slash combo. And now without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.
00:05:12 Speaker_02
First up, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Austrian-born bodybuilder, star of Total Recall, True Lies, Twins, and The Terminator films, among many others, businessman, philanthropist, best-selling author of Be Useful, 7 Tools for Life,
00:05:29 Speaker_02
and the 38th governor of California. You can find Arnold on Twitter and Instagram at Schwarzenegger. And you can join more than half a million subscribers to his newsletter, Pump Club, at Arnoldspumpclub.com.
00:05:46 Speaker_04
I was looking at a very old photograph of, I think, your first major bodybuilding competition in Stuttgart. I think it was the Junior Mr. Europe.
00:05:55 Speaker_04
And I looked at this photograph and what stuck out to me was if we had just looked at the faces, not the bodies, it was so clear to me that you were going to win and that you knew or believed you were going to win.
00:06:08 Speaker_04
Your face was so confident compared to every other competitor. Where did that confidence come from?
00:06:15 Speaker_00
My confidence came from my vision because I am always a big believer that if you have a very clear vision of where you want to go, Then the rest of it is much easier because you know always why you're training five hours a day.
00:06:31 Speaker_00
You always know why you're pushing and going through the pain barrier and why do you have to eat more and why do you have to struggle more? Why do you have to be more disciplined? And all of those things become much more clear.
00:06:43 Speaker_00
It's not like, oh my God, I have to do another 200 sit-ups. It's more kind of like, I can't wait to do another 200 sit-ups because that will get me one step closer to have the abs that I need to win that Mr. Universe. And that's my goal.
00:06:58 Speaker_00
I see myself clearly on that stage, winning the Mr. Universe. I see myself very clearly.
00:07:05 Speaker_00
of getting the trophy, standing there with the trophy, raising it above my head, and having hundreds of bodybuilders around me, below me, on stage, looking up and idolizing me, including the thousands of people that are watching the event.
00:07:19 Speaker_00
So there was always my clear vision, and that always inspired me to go all out. And so when I went for a competition, you have to understand, I went to the Junior Mr. Europe during my time in the military.
00:07:30 Speaker_00
And so what it took for me to go and to get on that train, Personenzug, which was a people's train, meaning kind of like it was not a Schnellzug at the end of the fast train.
00:07:43 Speaker_00
It was the slow train that literally stopped in every train station to let workers off and to bring new workers on. And that's what the train was. And so with that, you went all the way to Stuttgart because it was the cheapest way of going.
00:07:57 Speaker_00
Because I didn't have much money. And you didn't get hit by any customs officers or anything like that?
00:08:01 Speaker_00
Well, we got hit, but the minute we got through it, I didn't have my passport because you have to give up the passport when you go into the military, right? You pass. I didn't even have a passport.
00:08:10 Speaker_00
Passport we got afterwards when we were finished with the military. So we got through and we got to Germany, to Stuttgart. And so there was this will there that no matter what it takes, and even if I have to crawl to Germany,
00:08:25 Speaker_00
that I will be there at that event because that was my shot when I saw the ads about this Mr. Europe Junior competition, Best Gebauter Athlet Europas in German.
00:08:36 Speaker_00
And that was my opportunity to really go and to make my first kind of entry into an international competition. And I felt that I can win it, and that's what I was there for. I wasn't there to compete, I was there to win.
00:08:52 Speaker_00
And so that's why you saw that facial expression there was a certain arrogance there there was a certain way that i post with the other competitors i always felt during the post off that i had my act together much more than the others did and then i'm gonna make them.
00:09:08 Speaker_00
feel inferior and I will win and I will look facially and physically to the judges that I'm the champion.
00:09:15 Speaker_04
So you touched on something I really want to dig into, which is the psychological warfare of bodybuilding, of life in general. I really feel, and this is a compliment, I mean it as a compliment, a real master.
00:09:26 Speaker_04
And if anyone who's watched Pumping Iron or anything, I think comes away with that as a takeaway. How did you develop that? And for instance, when you were, I guess, 17 or 18, how did you get inside the heads of those people at that point?
00:09:41 Speaker_00
I think that it came about when I trained in the gym. I always felt that people are kind of Really vulnerable in certain areas so that someone that comes to the gym and works out because he wants to have a better body.
00:09:59 Speaker_00
Did you most likely will be vulnerable that's during conversations that i discovered in munich when i was training in the gym. They were vulnerable when you said something like, you're fat. It was not like even a doubt in anyone's mind.
00:10:13 Speaker_00
If 10 people would have looked at that guy or 100 people, they all would have said that this guy is fat. But he was outraged. He said, what? Do you really think I'm that fat that you're mentioning it? I said, well, you're in the gym.
00:10:25 Speaker_00
I go to the doctor's office and say, I have a cough. I don't go and beat around the bush. I say, I have to tell him what the problem is, and then he can give me the medication. I say, and it's the same thing in the gym.
00:10:35 Speaker_00
I say, you come here because you're fucking fat. And so now let's solve the problem. And so there's no beating around the bush there either. And so I could see that they were kind of like shriveling up.
00:10:48 Speaker_00
and kind of shocked so i could see the vulnerability and then i tried different lines and people and you know we'll talk about the hair line or we'll talk about the hair color turning gray and then they would just freak out you know about little things like that so
00:11:04 Speaker_00
It was natural that with all the experience that I got now being a trainer and working with people and all this, that I learned about people's psychology and about their weaknesses and their strength and all this. How do you build people up?
00:11:15 Speaker_00
Because my whole thing was, let's first discover and talk about the weakness, and then let's go and rebuild everything.
00:11:23 Speaker_00
So that was the idea, to give this guy six pack, to make him feel great, to declare victory by next summer, that he can go to the beach and that he can go and feel proud of himself and feel great and all this, and then continue training.
00:11:34 Speaker_00
So that was the idea. So by the time I came to America and I started competing over here, it was very clear that when I said to someone, let me ask you something, do you have any knee injuries or something like that?
00:11:46 Speaker_00
And then they would look at me and say, no, why? No knee injury at all, no. My knees feel great. And they say, why are you asking? I said, well, because your thighs look a little slimmer to me.
00:11:56 Speaker_00
I mean, I thought maybe you can squat, or maybe there's some problem with leg extension. I was like, really?
00:12:03 Speaker_00
And then I saw them all for two hours in the gym, always going in front of the mirror and checking out the thighs, if the thighs still exist or something. But I mean, people are vulnerable about those things.
00:12:16 Speaker_00
So naturally, when you now have a competition, You use all this. And so you ask people, were they sick for a while? Did they look a little leaner? Or did you take any salty foods lately? And they say, why?
00:12:31 Speaker_00
I say, because it looks like you have water retention. I say, you don't look as ripped as you were like a week ago. So it throws people off in an unbelievable way. And they get defensive.
00:12:42 Speaker_00
And they walk away kind of like, oh, this didn't bother them at all. But then you can see, you watch them as they walk around the pump-up room. And then you warm up for the competition.
00:12:52 Speaker_00
And you could see them kind of thinking to themselves, kind of then going to a mural and checking it out secretly and all that stuff. So, you know, it works. I just slowly developed it because I always felt that sports are not just a physical thing.
00:13:08 Speaker_00
As a matter of fact, I felt that the mentality and the mental strength in sports and the psychology in sports is much more important than the physical thing.
00:13:17 Speaker_00
Because in reality, I mean, I see when I watch a Mr. Olympia competition or Mr. Universe competition or any of those things, they all look pretty much the same, the top five guys. But what makes one emerge is the way he acts.
00:13:31 Speaker_00
If he acts like a winner, if he seems smiling, having a great time on stage, so I felt one should use the psychology, one should use everything in as far as food supplements is concerned, use your best posing trunks, try to use the sun out there and work out in the sun so you get tanned all around, use the best posing routine, just really give me a tan,
00:13:53 Speaker_00
of everything, then you have a shot of winning. And psychology was definitely part of that.
00:13:58 Speaker_04
And you developed this arsenal of intimidation through the bodybuilding. Did you use that, for instance, in movies, waiting in line to audition against other people who were going into audition or anything like that? Did it apply to show business?
00:14:14 Speaker_00
I never auditioned.
00:14:15 Speaker_00
Okay, never it's because I would never go out for the regular parts because I was not a regular looking guy So my idea always was okay Everyone is going to look the same and everyone is trying to be the blonde guy in California Going to Hollywood interviews and then looking somewhat athletic and cute and orders Okay, how can I carve myself out the niche that is unique that only I have so I always felt like I
00:14:39 Speaker_00
really strong about, I have to get into the movie business like Reg Park did, or like Steve Reeves, or Paul Wintour, Larry Gordon, and all those guys that were in the muscle movies in the 50s and 60s, that's the way I'm gonna get in there.
00:14:52 Speaker_00
Of course, you know, the naysayers were right there, and they said, well, you know, this time has passed, this was 20 years ago, you look too big, you're too monstrous, too muscular, you will never get in the movies.
00:15:03 Speaker_00
So that's what producers said in the beginning in Hollywood, And that's also what agents said, managers. They said, I doubt that you're going to be successful in that, because today's idols, I mean, this is not the 70s, Arnold.
00:15:15 Speaker_00
Today's idols are Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Woody Allen. I mean, look at this. These are all little guys. Those are the sex symbols. Those are the hot stars. Look at you. You weigh 250 pounds or something like that. That time is over.
00:15:30 Speaker_00
But I felt still very strongly and had a very clear vision that the time would come where someone would appreciate that.
00:15:37 Speaker_00
And then sure enough, when people saw me on talk shows, they got inspired, directors like Bob Raferson, and then bought the book of Stay Hungry and had it written into a script and then did the movie with me because he believed in me that I had the personality and I had a certain strength.
00:15:54 Speaker_00
and a certain kind of a look that would be great on the screen that the camera loves me and all that and so it worked i did stay hungry at the pumping on the documentary did the streets of san francisco and work with and margaret and with kirk douglas and the villain and then all of a sudden i got the contract for conan the barbarian.
00:16:14 Speaker_00
And bang, there we were, a $20 million movie, which today would be an equivalent of a $200 million movie. And Dino Dallarent is producing, Universal Studios, an international studio, financing the movie.
00:16:26 Speaker_00
And John Milius, a first class director, directing it. So my whole plan worked. And I was so right. Even John Milius, after he has done the movie, he said, if we wouldn't have had Schwarzenegger, we would have had to build one.
00:16:40 Speaker_00
because of the body and when I did Terminator Jim Cameron said if we wouldn't have had Schwarzenegger and we couldn't have done the movie because only because he sounded like a machine Was it so believable that he actually played a machine and that's what where people bought him and he says I'll be back It's totally different than when I say I'll be back kind of thing is so so he was the greatest compliment that the very things that the agents and the managers
00:17:06 Speaker_00
and the studio executive said it would be a total obstacle, became an asset, and my career started taking off.
00:17:13 Speaker_04
The not auditioning is really interesting to me. I knew you were very successful in real estate, but correct me if I'm wrong, you had become a millionaire in real estate before your first movie, is that right?
00:17:22 Speaker_00
Not before the first movie, before my career took off. Got it. So I did not rely on my movie career to make a living, because that was my intention, because I saw
00:17:32 Speaker_00
Over the years, the people that worked out in the gym and that I met in the acting classes, they all were very vulnerable because they didn't have any money and they had to take anything that was offered to them because that was their living.
00:17:48 Speaker_00
I didn't want to get into that situation.
00:17:50 Speaker_00
I felt like if I'm smart with real estate and take my little money that I make in bodybuilding and seminars and selling my courses through the mail order and orders, I could save up enough money to put down money for an apartment building.
00:18:05 Speaker_00
And I realized that in the 70s, the inflation rate was very high. And therefore, an investment like that is unbeatable. Because buildings that I would buy for $500,000 within a year were $800,000. And I only put maybe $100,000 down.
00:18:22 Speaker_00
So you made 300% on your money. So you couldn't beat that. So I quickly developed and traded up my buildings and bought more.
00:18:31 Speaker_00
apartment buildings and office buildings on main street on santa monica and sound and investments were very good it was just one of those magic decade.
00:18:39 Speaker_00
Today you couldn't do it in that same field is another field in real estate you can do that but in this particular field, I don't think you will see those kind of jumps ever again.
00:18:48 Speaker_00
And I benefited from that, and I became a millionaire from my real estate investments. And that was before my career took off in show business, in acting, which was after Conan the Barbarian. In 1982, that movie came out.
00:19:02 Speaker_00
We shot it in 81, and in 82, it came out. So from that point on, my career took off, because people saw that the movie was successful at the box office. Then I signed a contract to do Conan number two.
00:19:14 Speaker_00
that led to a contract, you know, for Terminator 1 and then Commando, you know, then the action genre. Also, there was another fortunate thing.
00:19:23 Speaker_00
Each of those decades offered something very fortunate that was a little bit beyond my control, but I benefited from that, you know, so that there was the action genre that all of a sudden took off in the 80s with Stallone and Van Damme and all those guys coming in really was terrific and
00:19:39 Speaker_00
our salaries went, I got like a million dollars for Terminator 2, and then all of a sudden, by the end of the decade, I made $20 million. That's incredible.
00:19:49 Speaker_04
And I wanted to talk about the mail order for a second because that was done with Franco Colombo?
00:19:56 Speaker_00
No, Franco Colombo, who for those that don't know, was a European champion in powerlifting
00:20:04 Speaker_00
And also a boxing champion and then became a bodybuilding champion and then he brought him over here with joe weeders help to train with me here in america but at that point there was no money in bodybuilding that's a key thing that everyone has to understand.
00:20:19 Speaker_00
I'm like the day with the top bodybuilding champions make millions of dollars in those days there was no money in bodybuilding and so when we.
00:20:28 Speaker_00
Didn't have enough money be literally had to go to work and so frank nice and frank talent was to be a bricklayer. And does very skilled bricklayer and learn that in italy and germany.
00:20:42 Speaker_00
Be were able to go and start thinking about the idea of putting an ad in the early times creating a company. And calling it European bricklayers and masonry experts, marble experts, building chimneys and fireplaces, the European style.
00:20:59 Speaker_00
And this was also a time where everything that was European
00:21:03 Speaker_00
was huge in america so we benefited from that you know swedish massages and everything had to be kind of a foreign name or a japanese this and this so europe and japan and all these places you know were used the names were used because for some reason the other people just thought that was better and so we used that in the ad and we put the ad in the paper and literally a week later
00:21:28 Speaker_00
We had the big earthquake in Los Angeles. And I mean, the chimneys fell off, the apartment houses and all this stuff, and it cracked walls and all this. And so Frank and I, we, as a matter of fact, one of the friend of ours' wife,
00:21:44 Speaker_00
who was very smart and she worked in a supermarket. She did answering the phones and calling people back and all this just to make sure that our English doesn't get all screwed up with the talking over the phone and all this.
00:21:57 Speaker_00
And so she gave us then the addresses and then we got to do the estimates. And I was kind of like set up to be the math genius and that figures out the square footage and that Franco would play the bad guy and I played a good guy.
00:22:12 Speaker_00
And so we would go to someone's house and then someone would say, well, look at my patio is all cracked. Can you guys put a new patio in here? And I would say, yes.
00:22:20 Speaker_00
And then I would run around with the tape measure, but there would be a tape measure with centimeters. No one in those days could at all figure out anything with centimeters. And we would be measuring up. And I say, well, this is, you know.
00:22:32 Speaker_00
four meters and 82 centimeters and they had no idea what we were talking about and this is so much and then we will be writing up formulas and the dollars and amounts and square centimeters and square meters and all this stuff and then i will go to the guy and i said it's five thousand dollars.
00:22:49 Speaker_00
And the guy will be in a state of shock and he says, it's $5,000. I said, this is outrageous. I said, I mean, they didn't think that this is a, well, what did you expect the basis? I thought maybe it's like two, $3,000, but 5,000, he says.
00:23:04 Speaker_00
I said, let me talk to my guy. I said, because he's really the masonry expert. I said, but I can beat him down for you a little bit. Let me soften the meat. And then I would go over to Franco and we would start arguing in German.
00:23:16 Speaker_00
You know, this is an Schweinerei. Du kannst mich so viel verlangen. Das ist ein Blödsinn. Wir arbeiten hier in Amerika. And this would be going on and on. And he was screaming back at me in Italian and some stuff.
00:23:26 Speaker_00
And then I would be, then all of a sudden he calmed down and then I would go to the guy and say, Okay, here it is, I said. I could get him as low as $3,800. I said, can you go with that? And he says, thank you very much.
00:23:40 Speaker_00
He says, you know, I really think that you're a great man, blah, blah, blah, and all this stuff. I said, okay. I said, give us half down right now. We go right away and get the cement and get the bricks and everything that we need for here.
00:23:52 Speaker_00
And we can start working, I said, on Monday. And the guy was ecstatic, he gave us the money, we immediately ran to the bank, cashed the check to make sure that the money is in the bank account.
00:24:01 Speaker_00
And then we went out and got the cement, the wheelbarrow, and all the stuff that we needed and went to work. And so we worked like that for two years. I mean, very successfully.
00:24:10 Speaker_00
As a matter of fact, in the end, we had various different jobs where we employed like 16 different bodybuilders.
00:24:16 Speaker_00
all the laziest bastards that you can ever hire but never did because they all were interested in working outdoor and getting a tan at the same time for their bodybuilding competitions, they were not interested in working.
00:24:28 Speaker_00
But anyways, we all had a good time, we all made money and this is actually then, I did this until I started my mail order business and then that became the new source of extra income so we could afford everything and then save us some money and so on.
00:24:41 Speaker_04
I've been very fascinated to look at your film career and hear the story of twins i was hoping maybe you could tell us the story of twins twins came together.
00:24:52 Speaker_04
And how you guys structured that deal because i didn't know anything about that twins came together because i felt.
00:25:00 Speaker_00
very strongly that I had a side of me that is a very humorous side. And that if someone would be patient enough and willing to work with me as a director, that they would be able to bring that humor out of me.
00:25:18 Speaker_00
And that's something that is very difficult because you can be humorous in your private life, but cannot pull it off in a movie. There's many actors that have tried that and were not successful.
00:25:30 Speaker_00
So I felt that I should really talk to Ivan Reitman, because I really loved Ghostbusters. And I said to myself, God, it was so well-directed and all this. And I just happened to run into him when I was in Aspen.
00:25:45 Speaker_00
We were hanging out, there was Robin Williams and some other people, and we were all up there at Snowmass, and we were skiing, and then at night, and before dinner, we all had a great time sitting by the fireplace and choking around.
00:25:57 Speaker_00
And Ivan Reitman would say to me, Arnold, I listen to you and I see a side of you that has never really been on screen. And I said to him, I said, I would love to do a comedy and I would love to bring that side out.
00:26:11 Speaker_00
If it is the innocence of me or the naivety of me or the humor of me, whatever it is, I said, I would like to see that on the screen. I think it could be good. And so I said to him, I said, I want you to work with me and to direct me in a movie.
00:26:24 Speaker_00
Let's figure out what it should be. And he said, okay, I would love to do that.
00:26:29 Speaker_00
I'm gonna go home after Christmas after this vacation and I'm gonna look into and develop a bunch of ideas and then you and I get together and then pick the one that we like the best.
00:26:41 Speaker_00
He developed immediately within a short period of time a bunch of ideas. I think there was five ideas and the one that we both liked the most was called the experiment.
00:26:51 Speaker_00
Which then became twins experiment we didn't like because of my german austrian background so we thought that it would be better to call it twins and we develop that project got it written i came up with the idea then of.
00:27:04 Speaker_00
Danny devito that it shouldn't be just someone that is acting totally opposite of the way i am,
00:27:11 Speaker_00
But you should also look physically totally opposite of the way i am i even love that idea and then we went after danny devito and i remember we sat in a restaurant and we made a deal on a napkin.
00:27:23 Speaker_00
And wrote down you know this is what we do we gonna make the movie for free.
00:27:28 Speaker_00
We don't want to get any salaries and we get a big back end and they should eventually take this deal to the end with the agent to the studio and you do get the Tom Pollack was then running the universal studio.
00:27:40 Speaker_00
Tom Pollack said this is great we can make this movie for in the sixteen and a half million dollars if you guys don't take a salary. And you get a big backend. We're gonna give you 37% of whatever it was together, Danny, Ivan, and me.
00:27:55 Speaker_00
And we worked out the percentage of what our salaries are. So whatever Danny got at that time for a movie versus what I got for a movie, and versus what Ivan got for directing.
00:28:06 Speaker_00
So we worked it out percentage-wise, and that's how we ended up dividing up the part amongst ourselves. And let me tell you, I made more money on that movie than on any other movie. And the gift keeps on giving. It's just wonderful.
00:28:20 Speaker_00
And I remember Tom Pollack, after the movie came out, he said to me, he says, all I can tell you is, he says, this is what you guys did to me.
00:28:28 Speaker_00
And he bent over, he turned around, bent over, and he put his pockets out, and he says, you fucked me and cleaned me up. It was very funny. He says, I will never make that deal again. But anyway, so the movie was a huge hit.
00:28:43 Speaker_00
It came out just before Christmas. And throughout Christmas and New Year, it made every day $3 to $4 million, which in today's term, it will be, of course, double or triple. But it was just huge. And it just went up to $129 million domestically.
00:28:57 Speaker_00
And I think worldwide, it was like $260 million or something like that. So it was really very, very successful. And like I said, It ended up costing, I think, around $18 million, the movie.
00:29:13 Speaker_04
Amazing, so amazing. Now, when I hear a story like that, I think of the deal that George Lucas did for Star Wars, where the studio's like, ah, toys, whatever, sure, yeah, you can have the toys. And then they probably felt very much the same way.
00:29:25 Speaker_04
They're like, wow, we're not gonna make that mistake again. I've heard you mention transcendental meditation in passing, briefly.
00:29:32 Speaker_00
Do you meditate? I don't meditate now, but I got heavily into it in the 70s.
00:29:38 Speaker_00
And I remember there was a time in my life where I felt like everything is just kind of coming together and I did not find a way or couldn't find a way of keeping the things separate.
00:29:48 Speaker_00
So it was always when I was thinking about it, I was thinking about it at the same time.
00:29:51 Speaker_00
my bodybuilding career, I was thinking about my movie career, I was thinking about the documentary Pumping Out that we're shooting right now and the movie Stay Hungry that we just finished shooting and my investment in the apartment building and is this gonna do I get the financing from the bank and all of this kind of stuff was always coming together and at the same time I was training
00:30:11 Speaker_00
for the Mr. Olympia competition in South Africa. And I was training right here at Gold's Gym. And I remember there was all the camera equipment around five hours a day in my face.
00:30:21 Speaker_00
And then someone in the middle of squatting was trying to change the battery pack on my lifting belt and all this stuff.
00:30:27 Speaker_00
So yeah, it was like, you know, eventually I felt like I got to do something about it because I have such great opportunities here.
00:30:35 Speaker_00
And everything is happening, and everything is going my way, but I'm just clustering everything into one big problem, rather than separating it out and having calm and peace and being happy.
00:30:47 Speaker_00
And so, by total coincidence, I ran into this guy that I've run into many times on the beach, very, very pleasant man, who told me that he is a teacher in Transcendental Meditation.
00:31:00 Speaker_00
And I said, well, it's interesting you mention that, because I feel like I should do something, because I feel like I'm just overly worried, and anxieties, and all this stuff, and I feel like certain pressures that I've never felt before.
00:31:12 Speaker_00
And he says, oh, Arnold, it's not uncommon. It's very common. A lot of people go through this. This is why people use meditation, transcendental meditation as one way of dealing with the problem.
00:31:26 Speaker_00
And he was very good in selling it because he didn't say it's the only answer. He just is one of many. And he says, why don't you try it? He says, I'm a teacher there.
00:31:38 Speaker_00
up in Westwood, I would not be able to teach you since we're friends and there will be another teacher there that will give you a mantra and teach you how to do it, and then I can help you after that.
00:31:49 Speaker_00
Because I will be teaching up there, so why don't you come up on Thursday and I will be there, I will introduce you to the folks up there." And so I went up there. took a class, and I went home after that, and then tried it.
00:32:01 Speaker_00
I said to myself, I gotta give it a shot.
00:32:03 Speaker_00
And I did 20 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes at night, and I would say within 14 days, three weeks, I got to the point where I really could disconnect my mind, and as they say, the finest few seconds of disconnection and rejuvenate the mind, and also learn how to focus more and to calm down.
00:32:20 Speaker_00
And I saw the effect right away. that I was much more calm about all of the challenges that were facing me. And I continued doing that then for a year. And by that time I felt like I think that I've mastered this.
00:32:35 Speaker_00
I think that now I don't feel overwhelmed anymore. And I really felt kind of it was one of the things where in the Transcendental Meditation was kind of anxiety and pressure.
00:32:47 Speaker_00
Meeting around the corner tranquility you know this is kind of what it felt so i was happy from the point even today. I still benefit from that because i don't.
00:32:59 Speaker_00
Merge and bring things together and see everything is one big problem i take on one challenge at the time.
00:33:07 Speaker_00
And when I go and I study my script for a movie, then that day when I study my script for a movie, I don't let anything else interfere in that, and I just concentrate on that.
00:33:18 Speaker_00
So the other thing that I've learned is that there's many forms of meditation in a way. Because when I study, and I work really hard, where it takes the ultimate amount of concentration, I can only do it for 45 minutes maybe, maybe an hour.
00:33:36 Speaker_00
But then I have to kind of run off and maybe play chess.
00:33:39 Speaker_00
And I play chess for 15 minutes and then I can go back and have all the energy in the world again and jump right back and then continue on with my work as if I have not done it at all the day, right? It's like I'm fresh.
00:33:51 Speaker_00
And so that's another way I think of meditation. And then I also figured out that I could use my workouts as a form of meditation because
00:34:01 Speaker_00
I concentrate so much on the muscle and i have my mind inside the bicep when i do my curls i have my mind inside the pectoral muscles when i do my bench press so i'm really inside and it's like again a form of meditation because you have no chance of thinking or concentrating on anything else at that time
00:34:22 Speaker_00
but just that training that you do. So there's many ways of meditation and I benefit from all of those and I'm today much calmer because of that and much more organized and much more tranquil because of that.
00:34:36 Speaker_04
This whole conversation makes me want to go tackle the world. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road.
00:35:06 Speaker_04
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00:35:38 Speaker_04
Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out.
00:35:47 Speaker_02
And now, Anne Muraco, a co-founding partner at Floodgate Venture Capital Firm, a repeat member of both the Forbes Midas List and the New York Times Top 20 Venture Capitalists Worldwide, one of Forbes' Most Powerful Women in Startups, and a Stanford lecturer and member of the Board of Trustees of Yale University.
00:36:09 Speaker_02
You can find Anne on Twitter at AnneManiac. Anne, welcome to the show.
00:36:16 Speaker_01
Thanks for having me.
00:36:17 Speaker_04
So there's so many places we could start. I was hoping to humanize the ever intimidating Ann Murico, which I may only partially succeed at doing.
00:36:27 Speaker_04
But could we start with explaining why your brother used to introduce you or how he used to introduce you on stage?
00:36:38 Speaker_01
I had this brother, an older brother, by exactly two years. We were born on the same day. And he was one of these guys who was so confident. He knew that he wanted to study cars and airplanes from the time that I could remember him existing.
00:36:55 Speaker_01
And he was always confident with friends. And he was also confident on stage, and so as any good Asian child would do, we played musical instruments. I played the piano, he played the violin, and we would always have to perform.
00:37:14 Speaker_01
And I was painfully, painfully shy. And so I would get up on stage and I would refuse to speak. And my mother, knowing this, wouldn't let this get in the way of our performing.
00:37:27 Speaker_01
She would send my brother up on stage to help announce whatever I was playing. I have this real clear memory of being in junior high and having this happen. My brother got up on stage and said, you know, this is Anne Mira.
00:37:42 Speaker_01
She's going to be playing a Chopin nocturne and go. And I looked over and I remember thinking to myself, like the mental dialogue that's happening in a teenager's mind. This is totally ridiculous.
00:37:58 Speaker_01
Because I'm sitting there in front of a room full of people and I felt fine playing the piano, but I felt petrified speaking.
00:38:06 Speaker_01
And that's one of like the clearest memories that I have of my brother and me and the difference that we had between the two of us.
00:38:14 Speaker_04
Why were you so shy or nervous about speaking?
00:38:18 Speaker_01
I've always been an introvert, so I think it comes probably directly from that. But I was also sort of, I was a strange child, I have to admit. I had a lot of different interests, but I loved to do things by myself.
00:38:33 Speaker_01
I wasn't really that interested in talking to other people. Like one of the first things my mom actually discovered about me when I was a little kid when I was two, I only spoke Japanese.
00:38:45 Speaker_01
We were living in Michigan, and I used to be this very hostile little child. And I would walk by anyone speaking in English, and in Japanese I would say, I wish you would leave. You know, and like, I can't even, my poor mom, my poor mom.
00:39:07 Speaker_01
And so she was like, oh, we really should socialize with people who speak English. And we're living in Michigan, so there's no shortage of these people.
00:39:16 Speaker_04
Just a hit pause. Do you still speak Japanese?
00:39:19 Speaker_01
I do, so I speak Japanese to my parents.
00:39:22 Speaker_04
How do you say, I wish you would leave, just for people who want to mutter that to people in the park or wherever they might be. Do you recall or how might you have said that as a kid? Do you have any idea?
00:39:34 Speaker_01
I think I might have said, let me think about it. Atashitachi no uchi kara dete hoshii na.
00:39:44 Speaker_04
That is aggressive. That's really aggressive.
00:39:45 Speaker_01
Yeah. You know, I was like, you're not welcome in this house.
00:39:51 Speaker_04
Oh my God.
00:39:52 Speaker_01
It was like, it was, I think probably more likely it was Urusaina. Right.
00:39:57 Speaker_04
Right. Right. Oh wow. That's even worse. Yeah.
00:40:00 Speaker_01
Right.
00:40:01 Speaker_04
And so, but it was always like something that like a drunk dad says.
00:40:07 Speaker_01
Yeah.
00:40:08 Speaker_04
Yeah.
00:40:08 Speaker_01
It's kind of like, shut up.
00:40:10 Speaker_04
Yeah. You're really loud. You're really irritating.
00:40:12 Speaker_01
But like, like a little intransigent two year old saying that to a grown up speaking English in her home.
00:40:20 Speaker_04
OK, I don't want to take us too far off the rails, but we may come back to that. OK, so so we're talking about you being shy and weird. Yeah.
00:40:28 Speaker_01
And it was one of these things that I think it really held me back. And I knew I knew actually it was holding me back.
00:40:36 Speaker_01
The strange part, though, was my mom was recently talking to me about this in a few years prior to that experience where I'm in junior high and I'm on stage.
00:40:48 Speaker_01
I had actually done this other thing, which was we had this summer school program where I would go to a local community college. It was Foothill College.
00:40:58 Speaker_01
And all these schools around the area, when they let out for summer, the students would go to this community college to take math classes and writing classes and whatnot.
00:41:07 Speaker_01
So a lot of elementary school students to high school students would be at Foothill College. And so my mom said, you have to pick two classes. And one class was a math class, obviously. And she said, you could pick your second class.
00:41:22 Speaker_01
And my brother picked a normal junior high school writing class. And I was in fifth grade at the time, so 10 years old. And I picked a negotiations class. And it was not in the summer school program. It was an adult class.
00:41:39 Speaker_03
Why did you pick that?
00:41:41 Speaker_01
I picked it because I remember the book was Getting to Yes. And my mom looked at me and she said, why did you pick this class? And I said, it's because they're teaching you how to get to yes. And I want to know how to get to yes.
00:41:57 Speaker_01
And I have this incredible experience at this community college of having a class with, I imagine they were probably 30 to 50-year-old adults taking this class, and they were probably the most patient, wonderful people.
00:42:16 Speaker_01
And, you know, we had this experience where you had certain supplies that you were given on pieces of paper and then you had to negotiate. You're on Mars and you had to negotiate supply lines and whatnot and create a real society.
00:42:29 Speaker_01
And in the simulation, they're taking seriously a 10 year old kid who's negotiating for supplies. And I remember taking that experience and feeling like you know, I was taken seriously in that environment.
00:42:46 Speaker_01
But it was a great experience because it was a small class. It was like 20 people. And in that setting, I felt OK speaking up. But then on stage, I didn't still.
00:42:57 Speaker_01
And so it was sort of these small steps that felt like I was getting closer and closer to realizing Oh, I need to actually be able to speak up. I need to be able to say things in front of a large audience. And so there was this desire to face my fears.
00:43:14 Speaker_04
So what was the next step after that? How did you go about facing the fear of speaking on stage?
00:43:20 Speaker_01
I get to high school, and as every high school freshman is doing, they're looking for different activities to participate in. And I decided to dive into speech and debate.
00:43:31 Speaker_01
And speech and debate at this time at Palo Alto High School was not a very big activity. There were probably about 20 students on the team. And I found that I really enjoyed it. And it was a really great group of students.
00:43:48 Speaker_01
And then not only from Palo Alto High School, but from the local community. And I just fell in love with the idea that you could really seriously get up in front of an audience and talk about really important issues, even as a high school student.
00:44:07 Speaker_01
And so I dove into that activity, and I was frankly terrible at it. I think freshman, sophomore year, I didn't win any tournaments, didn't even come close. That was sort of the way, though, I decided I could face that fear.
00:44:23 Speaker_04
What kept you going? I mean, there's the answer that, or perhaps potential answer you gave just a moment ago, which is you really enjoyed it and you loved it, but what did you love about it?
00:44:33 Speaker_04
What did you enjoy so much that you were able to persist through failures over those first two years?
00:44:40 Speaker_01
The first thing is just the people I reflect actually on the people that I met in speech and debate, and they're doing incredible things. We have just in my, my year alone, not in my team, but in my local community professors.
00:44:55 Speaker_01
One's at Harvard in government, one's in Philosophy University of Colorado. One woman is now on the morning show on NPR. We have several venture capitalists. It was just a really interesting group of people.
00:45:12 Speaker_01
all in the same age group who wanted to talk about really interesting things. I also found that the actual activity itself, it challenged me in a way that I hadn't been challenged before.
00:45:26 Speaker_01
So I was really good at math and science, and those things really came naturally to me. But getting up on stage and speaking was not something that was natural to me. The piece that I did love that came very naturally was competition.
00:45:42 Speaker_01
And I've always been this way.
00:45:47 Speaker_04
No, I'm just chuckling because yeah, I would agree with that.
00:45:51 Speaker_01
Right? I love, I love competition. You put in points on anything and I want more. I want more than the next person. And I remember the coaches that we had, we didn't have teachers at our school who were able to coach.
00:46:09 Speaker_01
And so we had to go across the street to Stanford and find students who were willing to coach. And these kids were 18 to 21 years old.
00:46:18 Speaker_01
So they would pump us up by saying, hey, if you can get someone to cry in cross-examination, I'll buy you a slice of pizza. And so, you know, things like that were extraordinarily motivating. And if you feel like
00:46:37 Speaker_01
you know, logic and arguments could get you a step further. It was just something that, even though I wasn't good at it at the time, I just loved it. And I felt like if I could just do one more tournament, I'd become even better at it.
00:46:52 Speaker_01
And you would see that. So that's the thing that I loved.
00:46:55 Speaker_04
So do you have any memory? This seems like a very very specific example that you gave of the crying in the pizza. Did that actually happen? Did you succeed at making someone cry in cross-examination for a slice of pizza?
00:47:10 Speaker_04
Or was that just something that came... Oh, yeah.
00:47:14 Speaker_01
I feel like I'm not succeeding in my desire to humanize me and make myself seem like less of a dragon lady, but... We'll get there.
00:47:21 Speaker_04
We'll get there. But this... I want to hear this story. So, let's...
00:47:27 Speaker_01
Oh, there's several stories. So there were points in time where I remember people would cry in that they would crumble in the middle of cross-examination and run out of the room crying.
00:47:39 Speaker_01
And my coach would see that and proudly bring me a slice of pizza after. This happened multiple times. This wasn't a single tournament. And there were moments where they had courtesy points, too. So it wasn't just about winning.
00:47:53 Speaker_01
It was also whether you were courteous during that. There were rounds where I got zero courtesy points. And my coaches, they would ask why we got zero courtesy points just to really understand if we were just being mean.
00:48:08 Speaker_01
But a lot of times it was just because we were, you know, and I was particularly tenacious in cross-examination. And even at the point where I had the person stumped, I would just keep going. I would keep going, keep going at it.
00:48:23 Speaker_01
And so I remember at least four or five occasions where someone cried and left the room before the round was over.
00:48:32 Speaker_04
This was like the Cobra Kai of debating. It was like the bad team from The Karate Kid. It is.
00:48:39 Speaker_01
And it's my my my six-year-old at one point right before kindergarten said hey mama I can make people cry just with my words And I have to say it was like a really proud moment for me and then I had to course correct and talk to him about that but
00:48:58 Speaker_04
Now, for someone who is wondering what I omitted from the bio that I had in front of me, you had two years of not doing well.
00:49:09 Speaker_04
And then in the bio we have, she placed first in the national tournament of champions and second in the state of California in high school.
00:49:16 Speaker_04
And it goes on, I'll mention one more thing, it was part of a five-person team at Yale that competed in the RoboCup competition in Paris, France. All right, but let's focus on the debating. So how did you go from
00:49:26 Speaker_04
to miss, flub, whiff, not succeeding in debating to getting good at debating.
00:49:31 Speaker_01
Yeah, this is where I think it's the love of the game.
00:49:38 Speaker_04
Were your parents supportive through all of these early trials and tribulations?
00:49:42 Speaker_01
No, no. So you have to remember, I come from very traditional Japanese parents who really want me to get into a great university. And my mom at one point, right after sophomore year, looks at my record. And my parents were incredibly supportive.
00:49:58 Speaker_01
They would go and judge these tournaments every single weekend, spend so much time doing it, driving us all over the state. And my parents pulled me aside and said, you know, this isn't working.
00:50:11 Speaker_01
You have a losing record in this activity that you're doing, and you appear to be doubling down on your time with respect to this. And if you want to get into a good college, you have to perform well in whatever you're doing.
00:50:27 Speaker_01
It's not just about effort. You have to have results. And I remember my mom said to me, I've heard fencing is a great way to get into an Ivy League. And I remember looking at her and I was like, how is it possible that she's my mother?
00:50:45 Speaker_01
She clearly does not know anything about my athletic abilities if she's suggesting that I move into fencing at this moment. And so I said to them, point taken, give me the summer and I'm going to just work on it. And this is back before the internet.
00:51:03 Speaker_01
So working on it meant I was at Stanford, Green Library, reading philosophy books and reading articles about, I think they have 12 topics, 12 possible topics that they're going to pull from for the next year. And I just studied those topics.
00:51:24 Speaker_01
I lived in the library. And then I emerged that year to start competing, and when they announced that first topic, I knew that topic cold, and then I could write my cases really quickly. I had already done all this research.
00:51:43 Speaker_01
And I remember going into my very, very first round and had this deal with my parents. If I didn't win one of my first two tournaments or at least place, then I would quit.
00:51:57 Speaker_01
And I had this distinct impression walking into my very first round of debate that fall and feeling as I looked across at my opponent that there was no way that they could have out-prepared me.
00:52:15 Speaker_01
And so I knew that whatever they said, I would have five arguments against. And it was this incredible knowledge that it's not that you can be lucky and turn your luck around. You actually make your own luck.
00:52:34 Speaker_01
And for me, that was a profound lesson because I placed in that tournament and I placed in the next tournament. And it was like that, it just never stopped after that. And I had a losing record all through my freshman, sophomore year.
00:52:49 Speaker_01
And it's like, I turned it around junior year very suddenly. And the main difference was that I was willing to outwork and outdo every competitor who walked in through that door.
00:53:01 Speaker_04
For people who don't know the format, and I'll be honest, I've been surrounded by, not surrounded by, but certainly in the same universities and so on where debate teams existed, but I've never seen a debate competition. What is the format?
00:53:20 Speaker_01
It's a bunch of nerdy kids dressed in suits holding briefcases. And then maybe that's changed, but that's what it was back then.
00:53:28 Speaker_01
And then you have a resolution that's been announced nationwide, and that resolution generally has some philosophical elements to it. This is also Lincoln-Douglas style of debate, and you have
00:53:46 Speaker_04
What does that mean, if you don't mind?
00:53:48 Speaker_01
So it's one person against one person, so it's individual, and it's value-based. And so you're really debating philosophy.
00:53:57 Speaker_01
So an example of one debate that we did, the principle of majority rule ought to be valued above the principle of minority rights. or resolved that education is a privilege and not a right.
00:54:14 Speaker_01
So all of these debates are really surrounding not a specific policy, but it has some application in the real world. And what you're trying to debate is a philosophical underpinning behind that statement.
00:54:30 Speaker_01
And what I loved about debate was you were actually forced to debate both sides. So you had to have cases ready for both the affirmative and the negative. So pro the resolution and against the resolution.
00:54:45 Speaker_01
And the format is the affirmative goes up and talks about this resolution and says all the reasons that they support it.
00:54:53 Speaker_01
And then there's a short cross-examination where the negative then cross-examines the affirmative, asks questions of the affirmative.
00:55:01 Speaker_01
Then the negative gets up and talks about all the reasons that they're against the resolution and then goes point by point against all of the arguments that the affirmative made and talks about why they're wrong.
00:55:17 Speaker_01
And then there's another cross-examination of the affirmative against the negative. And then the affirmative gets up for a rebuttal, negative gets up for a rebuttal, and then the affirmative does closing arguments.
00:55:28 Speaker_01
It's sort of shorter and shorter speeches towards the end.
00:55:33 Speaker_04
And how is the outcome determined? What are the parameters?
00:55:39 Speaker_01
So it really depends on the tournament.
00:55:42 Speaker_04
Aside from courtesy.
00:55:43 Speaker_01
Courtesy points. It's all about courtesy. There's two different types of tournaments, actually, when I was debating. One was where you had parent judges.
00:55:53 Speaker_01
And that, I would say, really the style of speaking, your flair really would come into play, your sense of humor. It wasn't really just the line-by-line arguments.
00:56:05 Speaker_01
There was also places where you would go where college students were the judges or experienced coaches were the judges. And that's where really the line by line logic becomes much more important than just the style of your debate.
00:56:22 Speaker_01
So it really depends on your audience and you had to read the audience correctly.
00:56:26 Speaker_04
And did they just then say, I choose A or B, or do they have to rank sort of Olympic-style 1 to 10 in some fashion?
00:56:36 Speaker_01
So you only have two debaters that you're judging, and you vote for one of them. And in some of the rounds, you have just a single judge. And then in another, in the breakout rounds, the semifinals, you might have a panel of judges. They can't confer.
00:56:52 Speaker_01
They're just sort of voting individually on who wins.
00:56:56 Speaker_04
So you may be at a point now with debate and argument that you've reached the unconscious competency phase in the sense that in skill acquisition, one framework that one could use to think about skill acquisition is you go from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence then unconscious competence.
00:57:18 Speaker_04
So I don't know if this question is gonna be a good one, but I'll try it anyway. For people who want to get better at debating and structuring arguments and so on.
00:57:29 Speaker_04
Are there any books or approaches or resources, anything, exercises that you would suggest?
00:57:36 Speaker_01
Well, getting to yes. I thought was always really good. I actually found the philosophical texts to be extraordinarily informative.
00:57:48 Speaker_01
So anything where you have that Socratic method in a book, I found really a great way of learning how people debate the greatest philosophers, Aristotle and Socrates.
00:58:02 Speaker_01
Even when you get into more modern literature around justice, you have people like John Rawls writing. That is actually a dialogue and a real logical debate.
00:58:14 Speaker_01
And I always found those examples to be really great to read how people argue philosophical constructs. Presidential debates, to be honest, in politics aren't real debates because it's two ships passing in the night.
00:58:31 Speaker_01
and you don't have real conflict between people.
00:58:35 Speaker_01
I've also found like the British parliamentary system, if you've ever had the chance to see that on, I think sometimes it's on C-SPAN, that's actually an interesting observation of a real world debate as well because they will actually engage in dialogue around policy and it's not just ad hominem attacks.
00:58:54 Speaker_01
I find those sort of real world examples much more powerful than someone going sort of point by point in teaching you how to debate. Because I think the how is much more around how do you engage in the idea?
00:59:08 Speaker_01
How do you read and research both sides of an argument? And what do you believe on both sides? And so, you know, one way to do that would actually take a fairly controversial topic
00:59:21 Speaker_01
and then actually read a lot of literature on both sides of the argument, and then understand where actually the conflict happens. Are there definitions that people don't agree on? Are there nuances that people haven't thought about?
00:59:39 Speaker_01
Is there real conflict or are they two ships passing in the night? I think you could do that with even the gun control debate or you could do that with immigration or you could do that with abortion and really understand both sides of an argument.
00:59:52 Speaker_01
And that's the way to engage in the process of debate, I believe.
00:59:56 Speaker_04
If we're reflecting back on your Cobra Kai training for slices of pizza, I'd be really curious to know if there are any particular approaches or questions or playbooks that you find very useful in a heated
01:00:17 Speaker_04
argument and i'll give you some hypotheticals right let's say that you are on stage at an event and you are doing a q and a with the audience and you have someone who ends up being really hostile or attacks you or it could be someone on stage you're just having a contentious debate of some type i find it fascinating to see how people even with
01:00:35 Speaker_04
no real logical advantage, shut down opponents.
01:00:38 Speaker_04
And I'm not saying that's you in this case, but for instance, whatever people may think of our dear current president of the United States, I do find it fascinating how effective he has been at saying, check your facts, right?
01:00:51 Speaker_04
And it just throws enough imbalance into the dynamic where someone's like, wait a second, maybe I did miss one piece of due diligence, that they're on their heels and it opens up a window
01:01:03 Speaker_04
and creates sort of an illusion of them being stymied that is really advantageous. I'm like, wow. I mean, it's kind of gross on one level, but it's also kind of brilliant. And I also have a lot of lawyers in my family.
01:01:16 Speaker_04
So one thing that they'll do, not to say they all love arguing, but a lot of them do, you'll say something and they will go, so let me just get this straight.
01:01:26 Speaker_04
You're, so I understand, you're saying that X, and they'll kind of take your argument and like inch it a little closer to absurdity, but just subtly enough that you'll say, yeah, that's about right.
01:01:36 Speaker_04
And they'll say, okay, so really what you mean is X, right? And they start to edge you over before they even counter with an argument to make you contradict yourself or kind of seem ridiculous, and then they just have to kind of finish you off.
01:01:51 Speaker_04
I've never taken debate, but I do find this really practical and really interesting. So it's a long-winded way of introing, but what are your thoughts on any of that?
01:02:01 Speaker_01
It's funny, my husband has said to me in the past, and this is a lesson that I continue to try to learn and relearn, is that life is not a debate. And you know what he's saying, and it's funny, he was a debater as well in college and in high school.
01:02:21 Speaker_01
And we joke that I would still have beaten him in high school if we had actually gone head to head. But I think it's a really important point that life isn't about winning the argument. And he's also said to me in the past, it's not about being right.
01:02:37 Speaker_01
And I think that's so true. It's something that I'm always trying to really practice in life. And I think it's the debater in me makes it really hard.
01:02:51 Speaker_01
The things that you're pointing out are what's important about it is that people have a tendency to have an inner dialogue where they're right. And instead of really listening to the other person,
01:03:06 Speaker_01
they're coming up with the next argument that proves that person wrong.
01:03:11 Speaker_01
So if you go back to what I really loved about debate and what I felt like I got out of it, it was actually this ability to see both sides of an argument, to really delve into a topic and understand why the side that I actually naturally believed
01:03:28 Speaker_01
could actually be flipped on its head. And that was a really important skill to develop. And I think that was so much more important to develop than the skill to argue for my side.
01:03:39 Speaker_01
Because I think in the world today, what we don't see enough of is empathy for people you might even disagree with. and we get stuck in our version of truth and what is right, and we aren't truth seekers anymore as a result. were truth winners.
01:04:02 Speaker_03
That's very true. Yeah, very true.
01:04:04 Speaker_01
That's a piece that really makes me sad is that, you know, when people are like, oh, this debate skill is so great to have because now you can like ram people with your ideas.
01:04:15 Speaker_01
And I've never seen a situation where you shouted people down and convinced them you were right.
01:04:21 Speaker_01
I've seen situations where by developing true empathy for the other side, you actually create bridges and you create commonality and you create situations where you can actually work together.
01:04:34 Speaker_01
And I think that's the piece I would take away from my debate experience. I would say actually making the person cry in cross-examination probably is not the skill that I should be using in real life, although maybe sometimes I do.
01:04:50 Speaker_04
just when you're teaching your son the black magic.
01:04:54 Speaker_04
I should point out, just so people don't think I'm completely sort of drinking the Kool-Aid of the bloodlust of this potential sport, although I do find it very, very fascinating as an insight into some parts of human nature, but the book you mentioned, Getting to Yes, which is part or a byproduct of the Harvard Negotiation Project, as I recall, is not a book about proving you're right.
01:05:17 Speaker_04
It's a book about getting outcomes.
01:05:19 Speaker_01
Yes.
01:05:20 Speaker_04
And there is another book, which I believe was co-authored by one of the co-authors of Getting to Yes called Getting Past No, which I also really, really like.
01:05:32 Speaker_04
And it is about, well, both of these books, any book really on negotiation is about achieving a very particular outcome or arriving at a desired result as opposed to proving that you're right.
01:05:46 Speaker_04
So I just want to underscore that because there is a very real-world difference, as you already noted, between, say, debate and negotiation. The toolkits are very similar, perhaps, in some respects, but
01:06:01 Speaker_04
In debate, you're not gonna have to think about, I wouldn't imagine, something like the BATNA that they talk about in Getting to Yes, your best alternative to negotiated agreement, like walk-away power or what your options are.
01:06:13 Speaker_04
You don't necessarily have to go through that thought process, but when you step into the real world, you're not just trying to prove that you're right, you're trying to
01:06:21 Speaker_04
get someone to concede something and agree to a certain set of terms or a price or whatever it might be, or amicably trying to break up with someone or get together with someone or have a divorce or whatever it might be, you're really trying to manifest some type of outcome or damage control.
01:06:37 Speaker_04
It's really, really different from being a truth winner. And the world-class term that I mentioned in the intro that used a little bit of foreshadowing saying that I suspected it might come up a little bit later.
01:06:52 Speaker_04
So in doing homework for this conversation, I read, and I don't think this is a misquote, but that your dad, even when I think you were gonna be photocopying in the dean's office, would remind you to be world-class.
01:07:11 Speaker_04
And he would ask you if you turned in a calculus assignment, is that a world-class effort? Could you talk a little bit more about this? And that wasn't my experience growing up.
01:07:21 Speaker_04
My parents certainly encouraged me to do a good job, but tell us a little bit more about your dad in this particular case and how that was used.
01:07:31 Speaker_01
My dad grew up in Tokyo right at the tail end of World War II. And so one of his earliest memories actually is just planes coming across Tokyo and the firebombs. And he escaped to the countryside and then came back to Tokyo for high school.
01:07:50 Speaker_01
His father passed away when he was in college and he literally tutored kids. One guy was like the prime minister's son so that he could make enough cash to support his family. He had three other siblings. And he was one of these incredible academics.
01:08:08 Speaker_01
And so he was at the top of his class in one of the famous high schools in Tokyo, went to Tokyo University, was also then went to Toshiba, which at the time was one of these great companies to work for.
01:08:23 Speaker_01
And then he ran into a friend who told him, he was also a friend who was one of the top at his high school, who said, hey, there's great opportunities in America.
01:08:32 Speaker_01
And this person had gone off to Princeton and gotten his PhD and was at that time working in one of the great labs in IBM and was also becoming a professor. And my dad decided that he also wanted to go to the U.S. And he was the eldest son.
01:08:53 Speaker_01
And so having a mother who's a widow and three siblings, he had to take care of them until he had saved up enough. All of his siblings were married, and his mom had the courage to say, you know what? You can go. You can go to the US.
01:09:06 Speaker_01
So this is sort of the backdrop for who my dad is. He comes to the United States without speaking very much English, gets a PhD in mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering. And then is in LA ultimately as a postdoc and an associate professor.
01:09:25 Speaker_01
My mom comes to marry him and they are the only family members living in the United States. So really no support. So my dad eventually makes his way out to NASA at Moffett Field.
01:09:40 Speaker_01
And my memories of him, he was very engaged on the academics, but he would wake up at five in the morning and go to work, and he'd bring back reams of paper and would continue working late into the night. He loved what he did. So when he turned to me,
01:09:58 Speaker_01
on anything I ever did from the time I was a small, small child, I would be writing something. And if the handwriting wasn't neat enough, he would say, hey, is this world class? And I remember thinking to myself, you know, four or five year old.
01:10:14 Speaker_01
Yeah, this is world class. But he would always push. He would always say, Is this really, you know, the best that a five-year-old could ever do? And it was a constant message.
01:10:29 Speaker_01
And the story you're pointing to is one when I was in college after living through a lifetime of this, is this world-class question. I had a moment where I was starting my financial aid package included, you know, 10 hours of work study.
01:10:47 Speaker_01
And I had the opportunity to work in the office of the Dean of Engineering. And what was really funny to me at the time is since I'm leaving to go to my first day of work, I called my parents.
01:11:00 Speaker_01
My dad gets on the phone and he said, make sure you do a world-class job. And I thought, my dad thought I was like really doing something important in the office. And in fact, I was just photocopying.
01:11:11 Speaker_01
And I said to my dad, I'm photocopying and I'm filing. There's no such thing as world-class there. And he said, well, I'd still think about it. So I get to the office and I am actually just photocopying and filing.
01:11:22 Speaker_01
And I remember standing in front of this photocopy machine with a stack of papers, thinking to myself, what is world class in this situation? And I decided it was really crisp copies where you couldn't tell that it was a photocopy.
01:11:39 Speaker_01
And so I remember really trying to make, you know, the color match and everything was straight, and I spent a lot of time on the details.
01:11:52 Speaker_01
And when I was filing things, I didn't just hand write it, I got a label writer and I made sure it was printed out on labels. And I really tried to do everything as well as I possibly could.
01:12:04 Speaker_01
And I remember I was getting donuts and I would like make sure I got the fresh donuts instead of the ones that had been standing out in the basket for a while. So every step of the way it was,
01:12:17 Speaker_01
what can I do to make this experience for the dean or for his executive assistant a delight moment? And it was a real lesson for me because it was a case of real ownership.
01:12:32 Speaker_01
I felt so much ownership of the job I was doing, even though from the outside, I think most people would have thought it was just sort of a grunt job. And I think that's sort of, again, when I come back to you don't just get luck,
01:12:47 Speaker_01
You create these opportunities for yourself to me was a real learning experience Right.
01:12:55 Speaker_04
I mean you're you're looking at the potential precursors of luck and trying to set the conditions even though they might not always produce luck you can increase the likelihood of it happening which
01:13:07 Speaker_04
I think is a perfect segue to discussion about spring breaks. Don't worry, this isn't going anywhere tricky. This relates to shadowing. I'll just, that'll be my cue, which might bring you back. So, all right, where to lead into this.
01:13:25 Speaker_04
You were giving a man a tour around Yale. who is this man, why were you giving him a tour, what happened?
01:13:34 Speaker_04
And I actually don't know all the detail, I just, I found two lines in a past interview and I was like, you know what, I wanna dig into this, because I don't, there's more to this story, I know it.
01:13:43 Speaker_01
I'm a junior at the time at Yale and doing this office work. The Dean of Engineering was this older gentleman, Alan Bromley, and he had no idea who I was. I'd been working in this office for I think two years, but he barely knew my name.
01:14:03 Speaker_01
He was just like this great, he'd worked under George Bush Senior, he was a legendary physicist. And I really look up to this man. And so one day, he pokes his head out of the office, and the executive assistant was out. And he said, who are you?
01:14:20 Speaker_01
And I said, I'm Anne Meara. I'm your student assistant in this office. And he said, oh, I've heard of you. I need you to go and give this friend of mine a tour of the engineering facilities. And he's like, I know you'll do a good job.
01:14:36 Speaker_01
Sarah's told me you're great. And so I take this gentleman, and I take him on a fairly thorough tour of the engineering facilities. And we just had a great conversation. And it started off with, you know, where are you from?
01:14:54 Speaker_01
And I said I was from Palo Alto. And it turns out this guy is also from Palo Alto. And we're just sort of talking about Palo Alto and the buildings that are around us. my growing up back in Palo Alto.
01:15:07 Speaker_01
And in the middle of it, he said, hey, you know, what are you doing for spring break? And it just so happened I was going to go back home and visit my family.
01:15:16 Speaker_01
And he said, well, that's great because I'm wondering if you want to come and shadow me and see what I do for a living. In my complete self-centered moment of being a, you know, junior, I hadn't asked this guy what he did for a living.
01:15:35 Speaker_01
And so I said, well, what do you do for a living? And he said, I'm the CEO of Hewlett Packard. And I remember thinking to myself, I am such a moron.
01:15:48 Speaker_01
And I said, I think that would be amazing to be able to shadow you for a couple of weeks during spring break. And so this man, Lou Platt, invites me to just shadow him in 1997. And I am going around. He didn't have a driver.
01:16:07 Speaker_01
This was really just the Hewlett and Packard era of CEOs. He drove himself around in a Ford Focus. I remember this. We would go to different meetings, and he took me around.
01:16:20 Speaker_01
And one of the days, actually, Bill Gates came to make an announcement about .NET with Hewlett Packard. And so it was an incredible event that happened. I got to sit backstage and see everything that was happening.
01:16:38 Speaker_01
And Lou Platt then invited the photographer to come in and actually take a picture of me talking to Lou.
01:16:46 Speaker_01
And I didn't really think about it, but after the fact, I get back to my dorm and Lou Platt has sent me a thank you letter saying, thanks for coming to visit. I thought you would enjoy these photographs.
01:17:02 Speaker_01
And there's two photographs in there, I've framed them in my office now. One is a picture of me sitting on a seat talking to Lou. And then the second picture is Bill Gates sitting exactly in that spot that I was sitting in, talking.
01:17:19 Speaker_01
To me, mentorship means so many different things. I've had so many different examples of mentors, but to a junior in college who literally is a nobody, He was such an incredible example of mentorship. He never asked for my resume.
01:17:40 Speaker_01
He never asked for my GPA. He just sort of took this girl and said, you know what? You have something. I see it. And I'm going to show you something even greater. And to me, that is such a gift.
01:17:55 Speaker_01
It was so incredible because I hadn't even thought about my own personal potential ever. No one had ever described anything to me. And I came back from that with my mind completely blown.
01:18:08 Speaker_01
I met Ann Livermore, who was an executive, and I'd never seen a female executive in my entire life. And here's someone who I could look at and see, and I can see that people around her respect her. It's a life-changing moment, and it comes from
01:18:25 Speaker_01
that first comment from Dean Bromley, who says, I've heard of you. I heard you do a great job. And that's where the opportunities opened up.
01:18:36 Speaker_04
You're the woman responsible for my fresh donuts and crisp photocopies. I've heard good things.
01:18:41 Speaker_01
Exactly. It's tucked up filing labels.
01:18:45 Speaker_04
Now, I should note, you don't have to go too deep into this, but in a way, you were perfectly primed for doing a good job with your photocopying and labeling After spending, was it summers in Kanazawa in the stationary store? Am I making that up?
01:19:03 Speaker_01
Yeah, no, my first job was literally helping my uncle and grandmother sell office supplies in Kanazawa, Japan at our store, Taikido.
01:19:15 Speaker_04
Taikido. Oh man, Kanazawa is just such, I'd never been to Kanazawa. For those people who don't know, I used to live in Japan long time.
01:19:22 Speaker_04
My first time out of the US was a year in Japan as an exchange student, which is a whole separate story, but never made it to Kanazawa until a few years ago.
01:19:30 Speaker_04
It's gorgeous and it's not that far away from Tokyo at all, but such a cute spot with so much to offer.
01:19:38 Speaker_01
Yeah, it's actually incredible because it's one of the few cities in Japan that was protected by historians in the U.S. It did not get bombed in World War II because of some of the historic elements of the city.
01:19:53 Speaker_01
So it's almost like a smaller version of Kyoto and it has a historic Japanese garden called Kenroku-en.
01:20:00 Speaker_03
Yeah, Kenrokuen is unbelievable. Unbelievable.
01:20:03 Speaker_01
It's unbelievable. So it's summers I would spend maybe like two blocks away from Kenrokuen. So it was an incredible set of summers. But yes, I used to man the cashier register at the office supply store. So I know my pens and notebooks and stamps.
01:20:19 Speaker_01
Like, nobody's business.
01:20:20 Speaker_04
Do you have any favorite go-to – well, don't worry, I'm not going to spend too much time on this – but do you have any favorite notebooks or pens or items of those types that you use today?
01:20:31 Speaker_01
Yeah. Yeah, totally. So, on pens, I love the Jusep 04.
01:20:37 Speaker_04
How do you spell Jusep? Juice Up. Oh, Juice Up, okay.
01:20:43 Speaker_01
Yeah, Juice Up 04. You can get them on Amazon. They're super thin pens.
01:20:48 Speaker_04
04, that's like 0.4 millimeter or something?
01:20:50 Speaker_01
Yeah. Yeah, okay. Yeah. And then for notebooks, it's the Nuna. It's N-U-U-N-A. Some European brand, but I like any notebook that has the dot matrix on it. The paper quality is really great.
01:21:07 Speaker_04
I see dot matrix. It's not like graph paper. There are perpendicular lines that are dotted.
01:21:12 Speaker_01
Yes. Yes. I'm very particular. I could go on and on.
01:21:17 Speaker_04
It appeals to the Dungeons and Dragons nerd in me. Anything that resembles graph paper. So the juice up 04 and the Nuna.
01:21:24 Speaker_01
Yeah.
01:21:25 Speaker_04
Definitely anything European sounding with a repeating vowel, I'll pay 40% more for. Maybe 100% more.
01:21:29 Speaker_01
Maybe 100%.
01:21:32 Speaker_04
You mentioned that you have these photographs in your office. I'm curious. You're sitting in your office right now?
01:21:37 Speaker_01
Yeah.
01:21:37 Speaker_04
All right. So what else? I'm sure you have photographs of your family, but outside of kind of the usual suspects, what are other items that you have in your office that are important to you?
01:21:47 Speaker_01
I have the original Lyft pink mustache that used to go in the front of the cars, which I love.
01:21:57 Speaker_01
I have also a picture and a set of laser etched metal plates that students gave to me that have sort of a word graph of all of the words that they thought they ascribed to me.
01:22:13 Speaker_04
Yeah. Students of what? What was the context for these students interacting with you? And what are some of the words?
01:22:19 Speaker_01
Yeah. So I teach at Stanford. So after my PhD, what I realized was I loved teaching more than anything else. And so I stayed in contact with Tina Selig and Tom Byers over at Stanford, who run the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.
01:22:38 Speaker_01
And they've given me the opportunity to teach a few different classes, but the one that I got these metal plates and the photograph from was the class of 2013 Mayfield Fellows Group. And they have words like thunder lizard, badass, inspiring, mother,
01:23:04 Speaker_01
So, you know, it's just really fun to see sort of what words they thought.
01:23:08 Speaker_04
What were you teaching these Mayfield fellows?
01:23:11 Speaker_01
We were teaching them basic concepts behind leadership and entrepreneurship. And it's sort of the first exposure that they get as juniors and seniors into really, you know, startup ecosystem. What does venture capital do within that ecosystem?
01:23:31 Speaker_01
What are the tough choices that you have to make as a leader within these types of organizations? what does growth look like in these types of organizations. So it's just sort of a startup 101.
01:23:44 Speaker_01
But what I love about it is it's only 12 students and it goes for nine months.
01:23:49 Speaker_05
Wow.
01:23:49 Speaker_01
So if you get to be involved in it, you get to really know some of the students. And I've been mentoring students and sometimes teaching some of these classes since 2008. And you get this whole arc of the career path of young people.
01:24:08 Speaker_01
And I really love it.
01:24:10 Speaker_01
I think it's just sort of, you get to see, you know, students who start off as seniors, and then they start their career, they might go to grad school, then they go back and get a job, they get married, and then I think one is now about to have a kid.
01:24:27 Speaker_01
So you just sort of see this whole arc And it's just about 10 years, 20 years behind where I was. And so I get to see this incredible progress that these students make over time. So it's something that I love.
01:24:42 Speaker_04
Anne Miriko, Mother of Thunder Lizards, aka Mother of Dragons. We're going to come back to Thunder Lizard because there's a whole lot wrapped around that, but I'm going to try to keep my brain somewhat focused here.
01:24:54 Speaker_04
Is there a reading list for that class, or do you recall anything that was on a recommended or required reading list for that class?
01:25:03 Speaker_01
Yeah, so we actually teach a, I'm starting a class today at Stanford for the new spring quarter. And in this class, what we're teaching is what I would call intelligent growth. It's a little bit different than the Mayfield Fellows.
01:25:19 Speaker_01
But my hypothesis, my belief is that just like fake news in politics, there is actually something that we would call fake growth. Lots of it. We've worshipped at the altar of growth for about five to 10 years now.
01:25:37 Speaker_01
And what I've seen is that- And this is startup growth specifically. Specifically within startups, there's so much that we see that is fake. And no one has ascribed actual adjectives to growth until now.
01:25:55 Speaker_01
And so the class that I'm teaching to engineering students at Stanford is around what is actually intelligent growth. And so you asked about the reading for it. It's all around some of these case studies that we've seen.
01:26:11 Speaker_01
A great example of that to me is Qualtrics. We're going to have Ryan Smith, who is the CEO of Qualtrics, come in and speak.
01:26:21 Speaker_01
And I think he's a great example because I think he was at $50 million in revenues before he raised a dime of venture capital money. And so as a result, he's going to own an incredible piece of his company when it exits, and it will.
01:26:36 Speaker_01
And so I love the capital efficiency with which he built his business.
01:26:41 Speaker_01
I also think, you know, one of my companies, Lyft, is a great example of having that kind of discipline early on and not just wasting venture capital dollars in the early days when they didn't have product market fit.
01:26:56 Speaker_01
So they spent two and a half years working on this platform called Zimride, knowing that they had to get to density in riders.
01:27:05 Speaker_01
And Zimride was just, it was a platform where you could find carpooling arrangements, and it was being sold to universities and companies. But we couldn't get enough density to get transactions really moving fast.
01:27:19 Speaker_01
And it was two and a half years before they launched Lyft. And in the first six weeks, you could start to see that there was a real traction there.
01:27:28 Speaker_01
And it was only after they knew what they were doing with Lyft that they went and raised a large round with Founders Fund and then an even larger round with Andreessen Horowitz.
01:27:42 Speaker_01
And that story of really, really hacking value before you go out and hack growth is something that I don't see often enough in Silicon Valley. So it's something that I'm continuing to seek.
01:27:55 Speaker_01
And I love to see companies, especially outside of Silicon Valley, that do that. And that's when we come back to hunting for thunder lizards, that's what I'm looking for.
01:28:05 Speaker_04
When you mention the case studies, do you have written case studies that you're using much like, I don't know if Stanford uses these, but much like the Harvard Business School case studies, which are these kind of three ring binder, five to 10 page cases that are published, you use those?
01:28:21 Speaker_01
So the ones that we focused on, there's a Harvard Business case on Floodgate that you can purchase off of the Harvard Business Review website.
01:28:31 Speaker_04
So anyone can purchase these. You don't have to be a student. Keep going because the format of these case studies is really interesting to me.
01:28:37 Speaker_04
And as an undergrad senior, when I took Ed Schau's class in high-tech entrepreneurship, which is how I met Mike Maples Jr., who's going to be a recurring character shortly, I remember how useful they were. So that's the only interjection.
01:28:50 Speaker_04
Sorry to interrupt.
01:28:51 Speaker_01
No, exactly. So we use that case study for Qualtrics. There is one on Floodgate. So if you go to the Harvard Business Review site, you can actually just search for Floodgate or Qualtrics and it'll come up.
01:29:04 Speaker_01
And they're somewhere between, you know, $5 and $15. So they're pretty easy to buy and download. But I think those two in particular are quite valuable.
01:29:14 Speaker_01
We have then also just people coming in and speaking about some of the things that they've learned and how to grow that business from zero to one and then one to X.
01:29:26 Speaker_01
And people like Michael Siebel, who is now a partner at Y Combinator, but also was part of Justin TV and Social Cam. We have Stephanie Schatz, who was the fearless leader on the sales side for Xamarin.
01:29:43 Speaker_01
She had 18 straight quarters of beating the stretch target. So you can only imagine how incredible she is as a sales leader taking company from zero to $50 million in revenues.
01:29:55 Speaker_01
So we have a lot of different types of people, whether they're CEOs or CROs or venture investors coming in to talk about the kinds of trade-offs they had to make and how they decipher growth to make sure that they have the real kind and not just kind that they're buying.
01:30:16 Speaker_04
Right.
01:30:17 Speaker_04
Just to elaborate on that for people who may not be in the startup world, if for instance you're sitting in on an incubator investor day and you see 12 companies in a row that have 20% month-on-month growth with very similar looking charts, there is a possibility that they have been inflating or manufacturing their numbers with paid acquisition.
01:30:40 Speaker_04
to raise funding or do any number of things, and it's relatively easy to spot once you know the symptoms, but there are, and then there are, I suppose as Richard Feynman would say, the physicist, you must be sure not to trick yourself, or fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
01:30:54 Speaker_04
You can also get very caught up with what you might consider vanity metrics.
01:30:58 Speaker_04
But let me take a step back and just ask, well before I ask, people definitely take a look at the case studies for both Harvard and if you search Stanford GSB, which is the business school case studies, you'll also find a website with these profiles of companies and not just companies but decisions they had to face generally where you can
01:31:19 Speaker_04
Determine for yourself what you would do in a given situation, then read about what they did. Whether it's MongoDB, I'm looking at this Stanford GSB site in the case studies right now, Sonos, and so on.
01:31:30 Speaker_04
How did you first become exposed to, say, venture capital, and what did you think you were going to do in college? When you were in college, junior year, what did you expect you were going to do when you grew up?
01:31:40 Speaker_01
I actually had multiple different paths. I started off when we were talking about my brother describing this kid who knew he wanted to work with cars or airplanes from the get-go. And guess what he's doing right now?
01:31:53 Speaker_01
He's in Germany working with race cars.
01:31:57 Speaker_05
Amazing.
01:31:58 Speaker_01
And I was the complete opposite. I think when I was four, I wanted to be a farmer. Then somewhere along the lines, I really wanted to be a doctor.
01:32:07 Speaker_01
And I wanted to be a doctor for a fairly long period of time where in freshman year summer, I took organic chemistry. I was in this pre-med track.
01:32:19 Speaker_01
I think sophomore year summer, you take the MCATs if you're pretty sure you want to go to medical school. And that summer, I was with my best friend who also really wanted to go to medical school. and she is right now studying leukemia.
01:32:36 Speaker_01
She's a doctor at UCSF, so she's clearly gone down that path and doubled down on it.
01:32:43 Speaker_01
But I remember going to study for the MCATs with her, and I turned to the side and I looked at her, and I had this sudden realization, which was that, and this is two days before we're taking the MCATs, I said, hey, Kathy, I hate hospitals,
01:33:01 Speaker_01
I don't like actually being around sick people. I also don't love it when people are always complaining to me. And I think that might get in the way of me being a doctor.
01:33:12 Speaker_01
And she looked at me like I was an alien and she said, why are you saying this right now? We're about to take the MCATs and we need to go study for it at Kaplan.
01:33:24 Speaker_01
But, you know, I was just constantly observing her and she is just this incredible human being and she continues to be.
01:33:31 Speaker_01
But this realization of, wow, like the actual job of being a doctor may not be something that I actually enjoy was really a hard realization when you've been all in for this long. And so it was a realization that I really had to face.
01:33:48 Speaker_01
And I knew I knew my gut that I was doing it because it was a really great path. It was a path where I knew what the next step was. I knew what next class I had to take. I knew the next exam I had to take. Then there was applications.
01:34:02 Speaker_01
Then there was school. And then there was residency and fellowship. And it just felt like a really predictable thing to do. But the actual work at the end of the day was not something I was going to love or enjoy. And that was really disturbing to me.
01:34:18 Speaker_01
And so I really screeched off of that path. And it was hard because I had actually taken all of the requirements except for biology, and the pre-med requirements did not actually overlap very much with electrical engineering.
01:34:33 Speaker_01
So I'd taken a lot of extra classes to make it a possibility, but realized also it wasn't for me. And that's where I was sort of in this state of not knowing what I wanted to be.
01:34:45 Speaker_04
And can I pause for one second? Yeah.
01:34:47 Speaker_04
So what you just described illustrates a degree of self-awareness, but also decision making that I think is rather uncommon in the sense that I know a lot of people who have gone on to become doctors or lawyers or fill in the blank that has a lot of prerequisite training and schooling.
01:35:08 Speaker_04
because of, say, succumbing to the sunk cost fallacy. Like, oh, God, I've put in so much time. Even though I have this intuitive feeling I'm not going to like it, I really should do it.
01:35:21 Speaker_04
And what was the conversation or the background that allowed you to step off of that path? And not to beat the like Asian kid drum too hard, but let's be real, right? I mean, you're also, that would be a very,
01:35:38 Speaker_04
admirable, well-respected, happy-to-share-at-a-dinner-party-with-friends type of path for your parents, I would assume, all the more uncommon that you would step off of that track. How is that the case? Why were you different?
01:35:53 Speaker_01
So I think it goes back to actually the moment in debate where my mom is telling me, you should do fencing instead of debate. There was this realization of, oh, my parents really love me, but they don't know me.
01:36:10 Speaker_01
No one really knows me in terms of my capabilities and what I feel like I can get done. No one knows that better than I do.
01:36:18 Speaker_01
It was an important lesson for me because one other fact that I didn't mention is that as a kid, there was no sign that I was special. except for, you know, these weird characteristics where I would go learn negotiations.
01:36:34 Speaker_01
But I failed the IQ test multiple times, and the school district insisted I was not gifted or talented. My mom had to fight for me to be part of this gifted and talented program.
01:36:49 Speaker_01
As a two-year-old, after I was really hostile to people who spoke English, my mom stuck me in, tried to put me into preschool to socialize me, but I ended up biting the person who was interviewing me.
01:37:07 Speaker_01
for a preschool slot and they put me in special education. I was one of those kids who got picked up in a short yellow bus from our house and taken to a state-run program for special children.
01:37:20 Speaker_01
And I think for a long time my mom wasn't really sure what I was. But she just decided to be all in on the fact that I was gifted and talented, even if I wasn't. And she was really worried that I was one of these special children.
01:37:36 Speaker_01
And so I had sort of an environment around me way before Yale where I knew what I was capable of, even if the test score showed that I wasn't. And I knew that I knew what I was capable of, even if my parents didn't see it in me.
01:38:00 Speaker_01
And I think there's sort of this, this moment in time that people need to have where you realize that there's no test. for human potential, there's no recognition for that. It's something that you have to find inside of yourself.
01:38:18 Speaker_01
And I think for me, that one of those tests was actually going back to, am I gonna be a great doctor? And if I revisit this question that my dad had always asked me, can you be world-class?
01:38:31 Speaker_01
I knew I couldn't, because I looked at Kathy and she was gonna be world-class. She loved helping people and she loved
01:38:39 Speaker_01
helping people from that kind of caretaking perspective, which is not where I was gonna be world-class, but I felt like there was something in me where I could be great at something, that just wasn't it.
01:38:55 Speaker_04
And how did, you have all of this technical training by this point, you have the chemistry, but you certainly also have the, let's see here, at that point, the electrical engineering, probably. Yeah.
01:39:06 Speaker_04
How does finance and investing or startups, I don't know which came first, enter the picture?
01:39:12 Speaker_01
So having grown up in Palo Alto, I was actually exposed to a lot of startups. Even as a kid, I used to babysit for a serial entrepreneur, and he was always tinkering around in his garage.
01:39:24 Speaker_01
And I remember thinking to myself, oh, he works for himself, which is very, very cool. I also, on my debate team, was Lisa Brennan Jobs, who I didn't really realize she was the daughter of Steve Jobs until I was in her house.
01:39:40 Speaker_01
We were talking about debate. I was a senior at the time, and I was helping her through learning the ropes of speech and debate, and Steve Jobs sort of appeared out of nowhere. And I remember thinking to myself, what is Steve Jobs doing in this house?
01:39:54 Speaker_01
And so, you know, it was just sort of, it was all around. And so venture capital was something that actually a friend of mine had brought up when I was still struggling with this notion of what should I be?
01:40:06 Speaker_01
And he was a real finance guy and he said, you know, you're, you're really good at technology and you're now interested in business because of this exposure to Lou Platt. You know, have you ever thought of venture capital?
01:40:20 Speaker_01
And I remember kind of reading about it and having heard a little bit about it growing up, looking into it and realizing, oh, you have like all this work experience you need to have.
01:40:30 Speaker_01
I talked to a couple of former Yalies who were venture capitalists and and sort of had that in my in the back of my head. And so, you know, I went off to work at McKinsey as a consultant for three years.
01:40:45 Speaker_01
And then in the process of trying to figure out what to do next, I met a venture capitalist by the name of Ted Dintersmith.
01:40:53 Speaker_01
And in that interview with him, we spoke about, not about technology, not about the research I'd done or my work experience, but he wanted to know what books I was reading. He wanted to know about the music that I loved.
01:41:09 Speaker_01
And in that period, I was really into modern American literature, so I was really into E.L. Doctorow. There are a few books that I just absolutely loved, and we talked about that for a little while.
01:41:22 Speaker_01
And then when we turned to music, I've played classical piano since I was four, and he and I talked about the classical musicians that I really loved. And he happened to be in English lit major, along with being a physics major.
01:41:39 Speaker_01
So he loved books as much as I did, maybe even more. And then he was an opera nut. And so we had all these things that we could talk about.
01:41:49 Speaker_01
And two hours into that conversation, never having touched upon technology, he then basically said, how would you like to come work with me? And I was living out in Palo Alto at the time. This was an opportunity in Boston.
01:42:05 Speaker_01
And I remember not even hesitating, knowing that I wanted to work with this person, this human being sitting across the table from me. I jumped at that opportunity.
01:42:16 Speaker_01
And it wasn't the fact that it was in venture capital, but rather I really wanted the chance to be working around someone like Ted Dintersmith at that time.
01:42:26 Speaker_04
Let's talk about that interview for a second. So that I think would strike some people as a very unusual interviewing style.
01:42:36 Speaker_04
Do you think in retrospect and maybe you know that he had already decided you're fully capable of doing the job therefore didn't have to check that box and just wanted to make sure that he could work with you and spend time with you?
01:42:46 Speaker_04
Was it that he was using that interview to sell you so that when he made the offer you would say yes? What do you think was going through his mind before, during, or after, or I suppose before and during that conversation?
01:42:59 Speaker_01
You know, I think Ted... is a very unique human being in that I used to have this perception that networking was work in a room and like you shake a lot of hands and hold a lot of babies and you learn a few names and you move on.
01:43:16 Speaker_01
I learned from Ted that networking is actually a deep curiosity about the human being who's sitting across the table from you. So I don't think he necessarily had
01:43:30 Speaker_01
that kind of purpose in mind but that he was just really interested in what I was interested in and we happened to find commonality and he was trying to understand how my mind worked and what I was interested in.
01:43:47 Speaker_01
I've taken that as a real lesson because I love the way he would network. He learned so much about people in that process. And that's how he ministered to his entrepreneurs.
01:44:03 Speaker_01
He also was capable of providing advice at the right time because he really knew those people. And so for me, I felt like it was a really unique interview. It stood out from all the interviews I've ever had. But I think he was learning
01:44:21 Speaker_01
more about me than most other technical interviews could have gotten to. Then his other partners, I think Ezar Armani gave me more of a case study and could dive into that.
01:44:33 Speaker_01
But Ted always had a deep curiosity about the human being and not necessarily just the skills.
01:44:40 Speaker_04
What else did you learn from him or in that position, in that job?
01:44:46 Speaker_01
I thought that Ted was also an incredible first principles thinker. So my second day of work at CRV was 9-11. Oh my God. And so it was, you went from kind of a bad economy to a horrible black hole economy.
01:45:03 Speaker_01
And so it was a really terrible time for venture. And they had just raised this $1.4 billion fund. So that's, I mean, for venture, that's a huge amount of money.
01:45:17 Speaker_01
And it's a huge accomplishment to convince so many investors to invest in your venture capital firm at that amount. Then Ted took the time to actually start to do analysis with me on how much capital had gone into venture capital at that moment.
01:45:35 Speaker_01
And then the exits had stopped. There were no more IPOs. No one was acquiring companies. The economy just came to a screeching halt. And he decided, along with the other partners in this firm, to give back most of the money.
01:45:51 Speaker_01
So they reduced their fund from $1.2 billion to $450 million.
01:45:58 Speaker_01
And the reason why that's so interesting and impressive is that the way a venture capital firm makes money, the way you have any salary or the operating money that you have for the firm is a direct percentage of the fund that you raise.
01:46:15 Speaker_01
And so by shrinking the size of the fund, you're shrinking the size of the management fees that you get pretty dramatically.
01:46:24 Speaker_04
Oh, for sure. Very dramatically.
01:46:26 Speaker_04
I mean, for people who don't know, I mean, you hear very often, it's not always the case, but in venture capital, 2 in 20, 2 in 20, and that means 2% management fee based on the sort of assets under management, meaning that particular fund, and then 20% of the upside for people who don't know.
01:46:43 Speaker_01
they decided to give back those management fees. And to me, that was really, really impressive because you're facing down a really terrible economy.
01:46:52 Speaker_01
Not only are you shrinking the size of your fund to reflect that, you're also shrinking the size of your management fees and you're taking that blow. So things like that, I learned.
01:47:03 Speaker_01
I learned also how to shepherd companies through that kind of difficult time and how to be a true partner
01:47:11 Speaker_01
To an entrepreneur and so you know i think it was a really important lesson to learn because i would argue most people haven't seen real cycles people seem to think two thousand eight was a real significant dip in the economy.
01:47:25 Speaker_01
Anyone who lives through two thousand one knows that two thousand eight was a blip compared to a real downturn.
01:47:33 Speaker_01
Because we've had a raging bull market for such a long time, that memory and that knowledge of having survived 2001 as a crisis period is something that I hold with me really in my war chest.
01:47:50 Speaker_01
I know how to get through that kind of time period, and I don't think a lot of people do.
01:47:55 Speaker_04
Yeah, it makes me think of a lot of what I heard in Silicon Valley, still here, before moving to Austin, which makes me think of, I'm gonna paraphrase this, but it's a quote from Sir John Templeton, I think it is, which is the most expensive words in investing are, this time it's different.
01:48:14 Speaker_04
And it has been quite the bull run. You mentioned first principles thinking. I wanna tie that into something you mentioned related to your class, tough choices for leaders.
01:48:24 Speaker_04
What are some of the toughest choices for leaders, I suppose in this context, CEOs or high-level execs, co-founders of companies? What are some of the toughest decisions that nonetheless seem to come up fairly commonly?
01:48:40 Speaker_01
The most difficult thing for a startup founder, CEO, leader, you witness multiple phase changes in a business. And so if you imagine you're going from absolutely nothing to something, that's what I call the zero to one phase.
01:48:58 Speaker_01
You're searching for product market fit. You're trying to find the best customers. You're trying to find where your 10x advantage is truly valued. That's a very different
01:49:10 Speaker_01
business process and truth seeking, then when you're going from one to X, which is now that I know what my value proposition is, I'm going to add to that, but I'm also going to pull on some of these growth levers.
01:49:26 Speaker_01
The fundamental job of a VP of marketing who is in that zero to one phase
01:49:33 Speaker_01
changes dramatically in 1 to X. It changes dramatically for the salesperson in 0 to 1 to 1 to X. And you go through this incredible Bermuda Triangle where you have to navigate that change.
01:49:48 Speaker_01
And so what I see challenging for startup founders is actually being comfortable with your fundamental job shifting from every three months, you would have a massive shift in what you need to focus on and how you need to develop.
01:50:08 Speaker_01
And I think a company is a multidimensional thing. And in Silicon Valley, we spend so much time thinking about product and product market fit.
01:50:18 Speaker_01
that we forget that there's this huge emphasis you might want to place on the fact that a company is also an organization. A company is also a category that you're building. A company is also a business model. You know, a company is also a team.
01:50:35 Speaker_01
And so it's the skill set actually to balance all of those things
01:50:41 Speaker_01
and knowing when you fundamentally need to change out the talent in your team, knowing when you actually need to let go of a product, and knowing actually, to me, this is probably the hardest piece, knowing the difference between a winning strategy versus a strategy not to lose.
01:51:04 Speaker_04
Could you elaborate on that, please?
01:51:06 Speaker_01
Yeah, so to me, a strategy not to lose is a lot of different things. It's to not to lose to a competitor, not to lose talent, a strategy not to lose out on revenue.
01:51:20 Speaker_01
So it's all these fears that you have of captured ground or the fact that you might have someone take over something that you want to do, a competitor who's breathing down your neck.
01:51:33 Speaker_01
versus a strategy for winning is about where do you double down on, what do you do to capture ground, to be aggressive, to play offense and not defense.
01:51:45 Speaker_01
To me, that is a huge difference between that strategy of I'm going to win in this market versus I'm not going to lose. And not losing often involves a lot of hedging.
01:51:59 Speaker_01
And when you feel that urge to hedge, you need to focus and you need to be offensive.
01:52:05 Speaker_04
In what ways might that hedging manifest? What would be examples you've seen or hypotheticals of the symptoms of a defensive strategy in the form of hedging?
01:52:17 Speaker_01
It might manifest itself in, I am gonna go after two very different customer segments. One is large enterprises, the other is small-medium businesses.
01:52:31 Speaker_01
And the reason why that's really hedging is you have two completely different ways of selling to those organizations. And you're afraid to pick one because maybe you have some revenue in both.
01:52:44 Speaker_03
Right.
01:52:45 Speaker_01
But in that situation, by not choosing to focus on one group or the other, you're probably A, shortchanging your team because you don't have a specialized team to go after that opportunity.
01:53:00 Speaker_01
You're shortchanging your business model because you aren't pricing your product correctly.
01:53:05 Speaker_01
And you're shortchanging the opportunity because probably your product isn't optimized for that customer set, your customer service isn't optimized for that product set, and your team is ultimately confused because you're heading in two completely different conditions and directions.
01:53:22 Speaker_01
And so that's one of the most common ways that I see people involved in a strategy of not losing instead of we're here to win it.
01:53:31 Speaker_04
Yeah, all of those things you mentioned also contribute to lighting money on fire, right? I mean that split focus.
01:53:40 Speaker_01
The bonfire.
01:53:41 Speaker_04
The bonfire of funding or cash flow depending on where it comes from. This is really important and you know this but I want to underscore it for people listening and give a few other examples that might be worth, people might enjoy exploring.
01:53:58 Speaker_04
winning versus not losing distinction seems really subtle, but you can get an intuitive feel for it in a few different ways. One is there's actually a, I think it's a three-part miniseries podcast called The Making of Oprah.
01:54:15 Speaker_04
And it talks about the rise of Oprah. I know this seems like an odd segue. Oprah impresses the hell out of me in a million different ways. And after you listen to this, you'll understand exactly why that's the case. But she would constantly tell her team
01:54:27 Speaker_04
many of whom wanted to respond to say Donahue who was the 800 pound gorilla at the time like we need to race our own race in the sense that if you're on a thoroughbred horse and you're in a race you need to focus on your race you can't be looking side to side at the competitors the racers next year you get yourself into a lot of trouble you get really injured and the second is if people want to google Dan Gable on aggression
01:54:53 Speaker_04
There's a short video I put on my blog that hits this point exactly. I'm giving examples from different disciplines because it is cross-disciplinary. It's not just investing in startups.
01:55:03 Speaker_04
Dan Gable is the most legendary wrestling coach, certainly of the last, I would say, hundred years in the United States. Also won a gold medal in the 1972 Munich Olympics without having a single point scored on him. That just does not happen.
01:55:18 Speaker_04
And this video will show you a lecture that he's giving one of his athletes after his athlete tied. And he said, you lost to him twice before. You just didn't want to lose. He said, you never win that way. You gotta tie.
01:55:33 Speaker_04
And that's exactly why you gotta tie. And the difference is just so powerful. It's worth, I just thought, taking a second to underscore it because I think it's really a critical distinction that you brought up.
01:55:48 Speaker_01
I think about it, I love to ski, and I had this instructor once, I was complaining about going through powder, and I was saying how it really hurt my thighs. He's like, my thighs are burning.
01:56:01 Speaker_01
And he looks at me, he said, it's because you're not leaning forward. And the minute you lean forward, suddenly you're just gliding.
01:56:10 Speaker_01
And it's scary in that moment when you lean forward because you feel like you're going to fall, and yet it gives you so much more control. It's so much less effort counterintuitively. Definitely.
01:56:24 Speaker_01
And that to me is like the perfect example of, oh, like you have to actually have a little bit of aggressiveness in order to have the win.
01:56:35 Speaker_04
I think you are well suited in that respect.
01:56:38 Speaker_04
How did you meet the man who so famously tries to trick, not trick, that sounds too strong, who so commonly will say something like, well, I'm just a Southern boy, maybe you could slow down and explain that one more time, which by the way, if you ever hear anything like that, like really stop and pay attention, because you're about to be tricked.
01:57:00 Speaker_04
Misdirected. I've actually borrowed that and I use that for Long Island a lot. I'm like, you know, I'm just a slow Long Island boy. Take a second. Maybe you can explain that to me again. How did you meet Mike Maples Jr. ?
01:57:09 Speaker_01
Yeah, so this actually happened in one of the classes that I was teaching at Stanford. He was one of the mentors for a bunch of teams. So we had all these teams who were creating business plans for their own version of a startup company.
01:57:23 Speaker_01
And we had incredible mentors to each of these teams. We had, I think, someone who was the former CEO of Verisign. We had, I think, Diane Greene might have been a mentor to one of the teams.
01:57:36 Speaker_04
Can you explain to folks who Diane Greene is, for those who don't know?
01:57:39 Speaker_01
Diane Green is now the head of Google Cloud. She was also the CEO of VMware.
01:57:45 Speaker_04
Big deal.
01:57:46 Speaker_01
Big, big deal. So big deal. Big deal. And what we did was we would team up some of these entrepreneurs or people in Silicon Valley with a student team, and Mike was one of them. And for people who know Mike, he's just this charming boy from Oklahoma.
01:58:04 Speaker_01
He calls himself sometimes a washed up enterprise VC and or washed up enterprise entrepreneur, but he's not. So he came to our class and he was mentoring this team, but he was actually being too nice.
01:58:19 Speaker_01
And so this team was having like all sorts of weird issues. They were fighting and they came to my office hours and one of them started to cry.
01:58:28 Speaker_04
And spotting a theme here within proximity of right.
01:58:33 Speaker_01
I did not make this team member cry. It was, they were making each other cry. And so I was just kind of, I was really, I was kind of mad at Mike because part of the role of the mentor is to help shepherd them through this tough point.
01:58:51 Speaker_01
And he was just kind of checked out on that front. And I.
01:58:54 Speaker_01
Emails him he said oh yeah my team's doing great and i said well i kind of beg to differ they were just in my office and one of them started to cry and they're fighting and right now if they don't pull it together they're really going to fail the class and he just wrote me this message that said well i think they're going to get an a plus.
01:59:13 Speaker_01
And so I said, well, so far not tracking. And so we just sort of had this friendly banter and actually the team does turn it around and they ended up getting an A plus in the class.
01:59:25 Speaker_04
Now did Mike intervene or did he just throw some turtle shells on a desk and like divine his way to that outcome?
01:59:31 Speaker_01
I'm not really sure, but I actually take full credit for the turnaround because had I not pointed it out to Mike, then the team would have just imploded.
01:59:40 Speaker_01
So based on that interaction, a few years later, I was starting to get to a point in my PhD where I was thinking of starting my own company.
01:59:51 Speaker_01
And I had started my PhD in computer security exactly because I knew that it didn't matter when I graduated, there would be a computer security problem out there and I wouldn't be at risk of market timing.
02:00:05 Speaker_01
And it was sort of a perfect opportunity because
02:00:10 Speaker_01
Just as I was going through my research, it was from 2003 to 2007 at this point, we had transformed from this world of where security used to be a bunch of vandalism problems to now there were companies involved and like real money was being involved and so real crime was being created here.
02:00:32 Speaker_01
And then towards the end, there was really like nation state warfare starting to happen. And so my research was really in risk management of computer security. And I knew that this was becoming a huge issue.
02:00:47 Speaker_01
And so I started to think, I'm going to make a company.
02:00:52 Speaker_01
So at that moment, I turned to some of my advisors and my advisors were nice enough to say, hey, if you're thinking about starting a company, you've been in the ivory towers for literally four years.
02:01:06 Speaker_01
So you should get out of the classroom and go check out some angel investors. And then Mike was one of the first people I turned to and I asked him if I could see his deal flow.
02:01:17 Speaker_01
And he was nice enough to say, sure, why don't you just come in and take a look at my deal flow on Wednesdays. And so we would sit next to each other and look at companies.
02:01:27 Speaker_04
Deal flow means the top of the funnel companies that he's considering potentially investing in.
02:01:33 Speaker_01
Right, they would come in and pitch for between 30 minutes and an hour. And then at the end of that, I think it was March of 2008, he calls me as I'm actually going up to Tahoe to ski. He calls me to say, hey, Anne, I have this great idea.
02:01:50 Speaker_01
I just raised my first fund. It's $35 million. And I think that you should drop out of your PhD program and join me. And it's not the venture-backed startup that you've been thinking about, but it's now a backed venture startup. Let's go.
02:02:13 Speaker_04
Oh, I like that. That's really good. Now, was that an immediate yes or was it a let me sleep on it?
02:02:20 Speaker_01
I actually thought he was crazy because first of all, you know, I was literally, again, I was a nobody. I'm a PhD candidate. I don't even have my degree at Stanford. So there's like all these business school students.
02:02:36 Speaker_01
There's great, you know, angel investors milling around. The major question was like, why does this guy think that I would actually be a good investor?
02:02:44 Speaker_01
And then the second piece was there weren't a ton of venture capital firms that were being started up. So even when I went back to people who were my mentors, some of them said, why would you go to a no-name VC?
02:02:58 Speaker_01
Why won't you go and be an associate at Kleiner Perkins or Excel or Sequoia?
02:03:07 Speaker_04
Yeah.
02:03:07 Speaker_01
And I didn't really have a good answer.
02:03:09 Speaker_04
And just to set the stage for folks who don't know maybe the recent history in Silicon Valley, at the time that Mike had proposed this to you, sort of micro-cap venture capital was barely a thing.
02:03:22 Speaker_04
There are a lot of funds of all sorts of different sizes now, but at the time, this was very unusual.
02:03:28 Speaker_01
Yeah. And so it was, you know, at this point in when we get to 2018, there's probably, you know, 30 funds being pitched a week to a limited partner who invests into these venture capital firms. But back then there was very, very few.
02:03:45 Speaker_01
And so it was really a question of, is this the smart thing to do? And I think this is sort of where, you know, when you turn to an entrepreneur, this is the feeling that they get. What I sensed was there was actually a major change afoot.
02:04:01 Speaker_01
all of the students around me at Stanford didn't need $5 million to start a company. And that's what venture capital was offering to startups at that point. They would say, I will buy 50% of your company for $5 million.
02:04:15 Speaker_04
Right. It was predicated on the entry costs being very high in some respects.
02:04:20 Speaker_01
Very, very high. And like at that point, we suddenly have open source software. We really have what's starting to look like cloud computing. We have all the shared resources.
02:04:31 Speaker_01
So even though I was helping to run servers in the closet at my grad school in our lab, that was starting to become something that we didn't need. There was actually, you know, services that you can use where you could rent services. And so
02:04:49 Speaker_01
To me, there was a dramatic change that was happening, and so you had to change the financing environment. So I felt like I could see something that everyone else didn't see that Mike was also seeing. And he used to say $500,000 is the new $5 million.
02:05:05 Speaker_01
And then the second piece for me was This guy, Mike Maples, had a skill set I had never seen before, maybe in like one or two other people in my entire lifetime. But he was this incredible marketer.
02:05:20 Speaker_01
And I used to believe you either built things or you sold things. Everything else just seemed like an extraneous skill set to have.
02:05:29 Speaker_01
Mike was incredible at storytelling and positioning and strategy, like real strategy for how do you create a new category and how do you build that category and how do you create the king of that category. And as an engineer,
02:05:49 Speaker_01
I hadn't thought about what you do after you build the product. And so this magic of category creation to me was something that almost felt like magic. And so I looked at Mike and I thought, I really need to learn from this person.
02:06:08 Speaker_01
And not only is it a great skill set that I'm learning from, he is also genuinely one of the best human beings that I've ever encountered.
02:06:17 Speaker_01
And so it was just sort of this magical combination of someone whose values really aligned with me and how I wanted to build a firm and the things that I wanted to do with that and how I wanted to treat entrepreneurs.
02:06:29 Speaker_01
and a person who was a mad genius. And so that combination to me was irresistible. And so a couple months into it, I said, sign me up.
02:06:40 Speaker_04
A couple of months, all right. So question number one, just for people who are wondering, and I know a lot of people, you seem very good at avoiding the sunk cost fallacy. And this is so, so, so key, this cognitive bias. When you were looking at
02:06:55 Speaker_04
the quitting of the Ph.D. program. I don't know how it works at Stanford, but did you realize you could kind of you didn't have to quit?
02:07:03 Speaker_01
I did not quit. So so that first year and a half of my life at Floodgate was crazy because at that point I joined Floodgate and I have an 18 month old child, my daughter, Abby. And then I think it was four or five months into it.
02:07:21 Speaker_01
I am pregnant with my second child. I've promised my mother, as any good Asian daughter would, that I will finish this PhD if it's the last thing I do.
02:07:30 Speaker_01
So I'm waking up at like 4 o'clock in the morning, doing research until, you know, 7 when my daughter wakes up, then taking her to daycare, and then working from like 8.30 to 6.30 at Floodgate, and then coming back, doing dinner, and then working on my PhD again, rinse and repeat.
02:07:52 Speaker_01
And then I got pregnant with my second child a few months into that, and then decided I was gonna defend my PhD. They set the date for six weeks after I gave birth to my son. So, you know, I not only did my first set of investments, but
02:08:10 Speaker_01
also gave birth to a child, cared for another one, and managed to stay married and finish this PhD all between 2008 and 2009.
02:08:22 Speaker_01
And so, you know, to me, like, that's like the most creative and probably productive period of my life ever, and probably will be, but also showed me that
02:08:35 Speaker_01
I can actually do a lot of things that everyone around me was like, why would you do all of those things at the same time?
02:08:41 Speaker_04
This is going to seem like a non-sequitur kind of is, but how does your mom say your name? Because Anne is sort of an unusual first name.
02:08:50 Speaker_01
Oh no, but that's not my first name. My first name is Reiko.
02:08:53 Speaker_03
Reiko.
02:08:54 Speaker_01
Yeah. So how does my mom say it? She's like, Reiko!
02:08:58 Speaker_03
Reiko-chan. Reiko-chan is amazing. I can barely... That's another word everybody should look up and learn.
02:09:06 Speaker_04
S-U-G-O-I. That just means sort of awesome, impressive, a whole sort of things because I can barely manage to brush my teeth and shower on a daily basis and yet you're doing all these things simultaneously. I have to pause at this point just to try
02:09:26 Speaker_04
to fill out some of the colors of who Reiko-chan and Mirako is. What have you struggled with? Have you had any dark, really, it doesn't have to be dark, but difficult times, dark times that you could tell us about? And were you really struggled?
02:09:44 Speaker_04
Or is that not part of your sort of lexicon?
02:09:48 Speaker_01
No, I think we, we all have struggles, right? So I think even in this moment of like the PhD and caring for my kids and caring for myself and my husband and my family and trying to do a good job at work. Like, things slip, right?
02:10:06 Speaker_01
And I struggle with this still today, and this is where the darkness comes in, is like, am I doing anything well? Like, am I a good mother?
02:10:15 Speaker_01
Today, my six-year-old is on a field trip, and he asked me, why is it that you never get to come on a field trip? Like, those are all these moments where you wonder, like, am I failing at being a parent or I'm not able to get to the dishes?
02:10:31 Speaker_01
And I had a moment where my front door neighbor is actually a Japanese woman, a nosy Japanese woman. And she went up to my mother and she said, you know, your family is so strange.
02:10:44 Speaker_01
I always see the husband doing the dishes, but never the wife, never the wife.
02:10:51 Speaker_04
That is the most nosy Japanese neighbor thing to say ever.
02:10:55 Speaker_01
Instead of, like, I spent two days, like, in that front window doing dishes. And at some point, I was like, I'll screw this.
02:11:03 Speaker_01
But it's like, you know, it is this constant battle of how do I figure out what my priority is so that I have, like, minimum viable progress on some fronts, and then the thing that really matters I'm going to make massive progress on.
02:11:22 Speaker_01
That's where the darkness creeps in. I think, you know, for me, my really loser moments have been things like, early on, I just described to you early how there were tests that always said, like, I wasn't that smart.
02:11:39 Speaker_01
There were lots of examples where I wasn't good at a lot of different things that other people found very normal. Like, I was horrible at standardized tests.
02:11:50 Speaker_01
Only until I got to like senior year or junior year in high school did I finally figure it out. Like, there's so many places where so many people said, distinctly average, maybe not even that smart.
02:12:05 Speaker_01
And I think for me, it's been learning to tune out the naysayers. And knowing that there are certainly a lot of things I'm not going to be good at, but there are things that I can actually be great at.
02:12:19 Speaker_01
A really good example of that actually is my Ph.D. I remember when I got to my Ph.D. at Stanford and I'm starting
02:12:29 Speaker_01
First of all, like I took a math class and there were college freshmen in this class and it felt like the math teacher was speaking Greek and the freshmen are flying through this material because they're like little kid geniuses.
02:12:43 Speaker_01
And I remember thinking to myself, well, clearly I should not be getting a PhD in math and thank goodness this is an operations research. Then I had this second experience where the new professor came in across the hall from me.
02:13:00 Speaker_01
His name was Ramesh Johari. He was my age because I had taken five years off to start my PhD. He was literally my age and he was incredible.
02:13:12 Speaker_01
He could remember things about different papers and theorems and how they were proved from like years past, compare and contrast them. He just knew things that I struggled to remember.
02:13:26 Speaker_01
And I remember looking at him and being in one of his seminars and thinking to myself, that is world class as an academic. I'm okay at it, but I would have moments where I was like, I'm actually not even good at it.
02:13:41 Speaker_01
And then I would go to a conference, and when you compare yourself against the world of PhD students, then you start to develop a little bit more confidence. Then you go back to Stanford, and you see what world class is.
02:13:53 Speaker_01
And I was thinking to myself, this isn't the path. And there's a place where I actually can use the skill sets that I do have, where I can be really good at the things that I'm doing.
02:14:03 Speaker_01
And so if I'm sitting here saying, oh, I was always good at everything that I did, that's just not true. There are so many moments where I realize it's like being a doctor. I said, I would not be good at being a doctor.
02:14:17 Speaker_01
I would not be great at being an academic. I would not be great at a lot of different things. Just knowing and having the self-awareness of where I would double down, is I think what I was good at.
02:14:33 Speaker_01
And so it makes this emergent life where I was going from one track to another. I was going to be a doctor, and then I went to McKinsey, and then I went to VC, and then I went to get a PhD, and then I went back to VC.
02:14:49 Speaker_01
This is all self-discovery rather than a stated path that I had career planned for a long time.
02:14:56 Speaker_04
Well, it strikes me also that, and maybe I'm trying to create a narrative where there isn't one or a connection, but it seems reasonable that Mike's superpower or one of his abilities to help create categories
02:15:12 Speaker_04
and then sort of mint kings within a given category is actually a different species of something that you're also good at, which is kind of a Jack Welchian in a sense. And that is you're looking at the different paths you could take
02:15:28 Speaker_04
And if you can't be, say, number one or number two in that thing, it just gets rolled out. And you're asking this world-class question over and over again.
02:15:37 Speaker_04
And one way is to find something where you can dominate and really be world-class, and the other is to create an entirely new category, in a sense. So it seems like you and Mike are very complementary in that way, and have that shared programming.
02:15:53 Speaker_04
I've heard people describe
02:15:56 Speaker_04
you as an investor, one of your strengths is being technical, which I suppose seems self-evident given your background, but how would Mike, let's say, describe your, if I asked him, what are Anne's superpowers as an investor, there are a lot of investors out there, what is Anne's superpower or set of superpowers, what would he say?
02:16:14 Speaker_01
I think for me, the superpowers I have are a few fold.
02:16:19 Speaker_01
So one is because of the technical capabilities that I have, when someone is describing particularly anything that has to do with math, and luckily for me right now, math is having this incredible resurgence in artificial intelligence and in cryptocurrency, I can get that piece.
02:16:41 Speaker_01
I can get that piece better than I would say probably 99% of the investors out there. And so if I get a math paper, that's something that I love to dig into.
02:16:53 Speaker_01
And that technical insight is something that I think I'm better at than most other investors out there. And then from there, I can also start to piece together what that company will look like around that technology.
02:17:11 Speaker_01
And so it's not just, I'm looking for great R&D projects, but ones that are ripe to be big D and little R. And I think that's a superpower, especially at the very early stage.
02:17:24 Speaker_01
So one of the companies that I invested in back in 2010, Ayasdi, they've gone over $100 million in financing at this point. And I found them when they were, they didn't even have a business plan. They had four math papers that they sent to me.
02:17:42 Speaker_01
And so to me, that's something that I double down on and it's a part of the types of investments that I like to do. That's very different from the task grab, it's Refinery29 and Lyft that I've done in the past as well.
02:17:57 Speaker_01
I think the other superpower that is a little bit less evident is more evident as I'm working with people is I feel like I have a pretty good sixth sense about the people dynamics within an organization.
02:18:10 Speaker_01
So I can tell when there's actually infighting happening. I can sense when an executive is starting to disengage. And those are things that I work on with a lot of the CEOs that I work with.
02:18:25 Speaker_01
And then the last piece that I think I really love to engage in is the fundamental data behind the business. And so I love looking at the cohort analysis and really engaging on data.
02:18:38 Speaker_01
Because that's a piece of the puzzle that I feel like I'm also good at encoding, unencoding.
02:18:44 Speaker_04
What are you looking for now and what are thunder lizards? We mentioned hunting thunder lizards earlier and I promised I would come back to it. So maybe we define that first and perhaps you could tell us what you're looking for at the moment.
02:18:59 Speaker_01
So a thunder lizard is inspired by Godzilla. It's a term that Mike, my partner, used to always tell the story, which is that we are inspired by entrepreneurs who are like Godzilla. And so what is Godzilla like? He's born from radioactive atomic eggs.
02:19:20 Speaker_01
So the DNA of that entrepreneur is already fundamentally different.
02:19:26 Speaker_01
And then he swims across the Pacific Ocean and depending on if you're Mike or me, he lands in either the Bay Area or Tokyo and starts to wreak havoc and eats trains and automobiles and buildings.
02:19:41 Speaker_01
and then proceeds to crush that industry and creates disruption and then build something out of that.
02:19:49 Speaker_01
And so that idea of disruption is something that that I always liked that imagery of like the journey across the Pacific Ocean, born from something fundamentally different and then really starting to turn things over.
02:20:04 Speaker_01
So when we say, OK, what are we looking for right now in terms of where do we think the new thunder lizards will exist. There's sort of two different areas. It comes back to the math that I'm really interested in.
02:20:19 Speaker_01
One is I do think that artificial intelligence is about to disrupt a lot of different types of enterprise software. I think that enterprise software still sucks.
02:20:32 Speaker_01
And if we're going to be able to really transform the way a business is actually operated, we have to take the software that just basically records data and spits it back out to you into something that's actually more intelligent, that tells you something that you didn't know, that gives you superpowers.
02:20:53 Speaker_01
And I think that we're going to see more and more of that. in the industry. And so as an example, like baseline examples, why do we spend millions of dollars on Oracle or NetSuite when the CFO still has to make a budget for next year?
02:21:09 Speaker_01
Why doesn't that financial planning just automatically, automagically generate itself based on all the history that it knows, plus all the data from the external world? So I think things like that we're going to start to see happen more and more.
02:21:24 Speaker_01
I also think, fundamentally, the scientific method may also be dead. We used to have the scientific method developed in a time where we didn't have enough data, and data was actually the fundamental bottleneck in scientific research.
02:21:41 Speaker_01
Well, that's just not the case anymore. And so why is it that we form a hypothesis, then look at the data, and then come to a conclusion?
02:21:50 Speaker_01
We should have all of the data, then have an analysis of that that leads us to a hypothesis or a belief system that we fundamentally test further. So I think these massive changes are coming, and you see it even in cryptocurrency.
02:22:08 Speaker_01
There's also really philosophical, interesting debates happening around, well, you have this massive pull towards centralization, whether it's in AI and ML, where you have to have all of that data in one place in order to really train.
02:22:20 Speaker_04
ML being machine learning.
02:22:22 Speaker_01
machine learning, or in cloud computing, you're also putting it up into the data into more data centers. In cryptocurrency, we believe that there's going to be more decentralized software. And so how do you reconcile those two types of systems?
02:22:39 Speaker_01
I think there's lots of really interesting themes that are just at the start of being discovered. I'm really excited about what's going to happen with autonomous vehicles. and the technology that's going to be required to make that a reality.
02:22:56 Speaker_01
And so all of those areas I think are just fascinating. And so it feels like the period of real intellectual abundance and that we're headed into a period of real great creative energy.
02:23:12 Speaker_04
end of time where a lot of your philosophical training and reading will be put into practice in the real world, right? Where we have people can look up the trolley scenario.
02:23:23 Speaker_04
It's typically thought of as a thought exercise, but if you're programming, not take us too
02:23:30 Speaker_04
off on a tangent, but if you're programming for autonomous vehicles and there's some type of act of God, a hailstorm, a huge boulder falls in the middle of the street and the car has to swerve left and hit two school kids or swerve right and hit five geriatrics, how does it make the decision?
02:23:48 Speaker_04
What is the logic embedded into that machine. It takes a lot of these philosophy 101 thought exercises and translates them very directly into the real world with real consequences. It is a fascinating time.
02:24:04 Speaker_01
It's also like how much do you want to know, right? So in deep learning, it's actually very difficult to know what's happened inside of this black box.
02:24:13 Speaker_01
And so there's more of a demand for let's know what's actually happening inside of this black box, especially if lives are at risk or billions of dollars are at risk and we need to be able to audit these algorithms.
02:24:26 Speaker_01
I think there's real interest in new technologies now that we can actually audit and know what's going on inside the box so that If the trolley example happens, we actually know how the machines will make their decisions.
02:24:39 Speaker_01
And so I think there's a lot of work to be done, a lot of opportunity, but also a lot of thought that needs to go into how we want to regulate all of this.
02:24:50 Speaker_04
Tricky, tricky, tricky. Yeah. Well, it's going to be exciting. Interested to see how all these things coalesce, right? Also, you're looking at these gigantic companies, Facebooks, Googles, the Fangs, right?
02:25:02 Speaker_04
That are more and more so converging onto the same territory. To see how that
02:25:08 Speaker_04
resolves if it does in some fashion is also really really exciting to me or how something like Y Combinator just to do a little bit of inside baseball can say we are interested in this type of company or this particular aspect of engineering or fill in the blank and kind of steer the attention of thousands or tens of thousands of would-be entrepreneurs into a particular sector right or type of
02:25:36 Speaker_01
Project is also just really interesting to think about from the the ramifications five years down the line But anyway, maybe we have I mean like I think we have so many incredible societal problems that need to be solved and I believe that the private sector is most capable of solving these problems whether it's energy or health or
02:26:01 Speaker_01
Or the fact that we have so much trash, how do we solve that? How do we get clean water to people? It's not just about the next social network and how do we deliver better advertising to people, but the beauty of
02:26:17 Speaker_01
this type of entrepreneurship is that there are huge societal problems that still need to be solved, that I think is a really exciting opportunity also to build great businesses around.
02:26:30 Speaker_01
And so I think that's also what gets me up in the morning and makes me believe that what we're doing is important work.
02:26:37 Speaker_04
Yeah, it is important work. I don't think that sort of collective interest and self-interest have to be
02:26:44 Speaker_04
misaligned right they're not mutually exclusive um you can solve and there's a long history of solving public problems with private sector technologies and companies and let me just ask i know we uh we've gone a little bit longer than expected which i should have expected let me ask you just a few more questions and then we'll wrap up with where people can find you and learn more about what you're up to besides getting to yes
02:27:11 Speaker_04
Are there any books that you've given a lot as gifts or re-read a lot yourself?
02:27:18 Speaker_01
For me, you know, right now, there's a couple books that I think are, are super interesting. So my mentor, Ted Dintersmith, just wrote a book called What School Could Be. And this goes back to sort of education as a critical societal
02:27:39 Speaker_01
question, how do we fix education? And what he did was he went on a 50-state tour to look at schools and discover that the answers are actually already there.
02:27:52 Speaker_01
And our incredible school teachers throughout our country are already finding solutions to teaching our kids the most important skills they need to have. And I think
02:28:02 Speaker_01
Reading that book has not only given me hope, but also a desire to see real change in the public school education system.
02:28:11 Speaker_01
But I think that's a really important problem for all of us to actually engage in, and so that's one book that I would really push on to other people.
02:28:19 Speaker_01
The other one that is completely on the opposite end of the spectrum, but it is a fiction book, it is by Khalid Hosseini, who also wrote Kite Runner. He wrote this book called A Thousand Splendid Suns.
02:28:34 Speaker_01
probably one of the most beautiful books that I've read in a long time in terms of fiction writing.
02:28:40 Speaker_01
And I would encourage people to read it because it gives you a sense of Afghanistan's incredible history and the role women have played within that history. And I just loved that book because it just was eye-opening to me in a very different way.
02:28:55 Speaker_01
So two very different types of books, none of them like straightforward business books, but ones that I think are meaningful for our society to read today.
02:29:04 Speaker_04
what school could be in 1000 Splendid Suns.
02:29:07 Speaker_01
Yeah.
02:29:09 Speaker_04
Is there any purchase of $100 or less? It's kind of arbitrary, right? But just not a Bugatti or something that is most positively impacted your life or positively impacted your life in recent memory?
02:29:23 Speaker_01
A hundred dollars or less.
02:29:25 Speaker_04
Yeah, it could be. I mean, like if it's like a foldable kayak that you got for 400, that's fine too. But it could be anything. Could be $2, could be free, could be any recent addition to your life.
02:29:36 Speaker_01
Oh my gosh, so...
02:29:39 Speaker_01
It's actually a foldable chair, so I go to my daughter's soccer tournaments a lot, and there's this incredible foldable chair, I don't know what it's called, you can get it on Amazon, but it has this flip-over sunshade that goes over your head.
02:29:54 Speaker_01
And for any parent who has been at a swim tournament or anything, this is life changing because oftentimes I'm just baking in the hot sun and you can be anywhere and you have your own personal tent that like folds over your head.
02:30:10 Speaker_01
It's like saved me on multiple weekends. My husband bought two of them. I love it.
02:30:17 Speaker_04
Can you send me a link to that and I'll put it in the show notes if you can track it down? So for people wondering, I'll put that in the show notes at tim.blog forward slash podcast and you can find this miraculous foldable chair.
02:30:28 Speaker_04
If you could have a giant billboard anywhere with anything on it, so metaphorically speaking, getting a word, a quote, a message, a question, anything out to millions or billions of people, can't be an advertisement, what might you put on that billboard?
02:30:46 Speaker_01
Wow. Hmm. I wonder if it's like not losing does not equal winning. It's sort of one of my, one of my themes these days.
02:30:55 Speaker_04
I like that. Yeah.
02:30:58 Speaker_01
And I think actually finding your world-class life. is probably the other one that I would think about.
02:31:05 Speaker_03
We'll give you two.
02:31:06 Speaker_01
Find your world-class life. And I think the reason for that is, to me, everyone is capable of that, and I think oftentimes we forget it. And for every person, it's different. That's the beauty of humanity.
02:31:20 Speaker_04
What do the characters for Reiko mean?
02:31:24 Speaker_01
Oh my gosh. So it means it's a small round bell. And the reason for my parents naming me that was they were originally going to name me something more like, you know, really beautiful child or, you know, genius child.
02:31:40 Speaker_01
And my mom, my mom took one look at me when I was born. She's like, no, none of those. She said, your face was so perfectly round when you were born. It reminded me of this like perfectly round bell.
02:32:00 Speaker_01
And I'm like, mom, like all these other friends that I have, especially Chinese friends, they're like super intelligent, world class, dominating dictator for life CEO child, you know? And I'm like, small bell child.
02:32:19 Speaker_04
And where can people find you online, say hello, learn more about what you are up to?
02:32:27 Speaker_01
I think professionally the best place is to see my Twitter, which is AnnaManiac. A-N-N-I-M-A-N-I-A-C. Or on Instagram, it's A-M-I-U-R-A. You'll see more of my life there.
02:32:46 Speaker_04
Amyura.
02:32:47 Speaker_01
Yes.
02:32:49 Speaker_04
Three bays, is that what that means? Miura? Something like that, maybe. Yeah. So Twitter, Animaniac, Instagram, amiura, M-I-U-R-A. And best website?
02:33:02 Speaker_01
Floodgate. It's floodgate.com.
02:33:05 Speaker_04
Floodgate.com. Why Floodgate? What is a floodgate? Or why is it called a floodgate?
02:33:11 Speaker_01
Yeah, because we think we're at the forefront of, like, the headwaters of innovation. And it sounded, I don't know, kind of big and audacious.
02:33:26 Speaker_04
Good enough reason. Audacious. Audacious. Yes. Audacious, aggressive, but still the mother of dragons. There is a nurturing mother-like.
02:33:39 Speaker_01
There is.
02:33:40 Speaker_04
Den mother quality to Ann Murico.
02:33:42 Speaker_01
I call myself like a mama bear, you know. I'm very protective, but also I'm going to push my kids and people around me to be the best they can be.
02:33:53 Speaker_04
Just don't get in between the mother and the cub. Good guideline. And I will say for anybody who's wondering, what would it be like to just go
02:34:03 Speaker_04
sort of mano a mano with and I would say, you know, you're one of the few people I would put Sam Harris in this category where if you are willing to engage in like a public debate with either of you, you just have to make sure that you have practice defending against having your face ripped off and like the most logical complimentary
02:34:23 Speaker_04
way possible. I'm just very impressed by you, Anne, and I've really wanted to have you on the show for a long time. Thank you. And I'm thrilled that you were willing to carve out a few hours to spend chatting, and it's always fun chatting.
02:34:38 Speaker_01
It's always fun. Tim, you've been there from the very get-go. You were the person behind my very first investment in TaskRabbit, so I have a lot to thank you for as well.
02:34:49 Speaker_04
Well, the adventure shall continue and I will certainly, I'm not as involved as I used to be in the tech scene, but I'll be cheering from the sidelines. Is there anything else that you'd like to say or suggest or mention?
02:35:03 Speaker_04
Any parting words before we wrap up?
02:35:05 Speaker_01
Now I hope your audience enjoyed this and if they got anything out of it that they if they want to contact me I'm always open to more conversations and hope that some of my story shows that even if people tell you can't do something that that you can.
02:35:24 Speaker_04
You can indeed. Just got to spend the summer reading up on those 12 topics.
02:35:29 Speaker_01
That's right.
02:35:29 Speaker_04
You can't always out-talent everyone, but if you out-prepare them, you might as well have out-talented them.
02:35:36 Speaker_01
Maybe the billboard sign is, effort matters.
02:35:39 Speaker_04
Effort matters.
02:35:39 Speaker_01
Because it really does.
02:35:40 Speaker_04
It does. Well, Anne, thank you so much again. This has been such a treat and a gift. And I look forward to hearing what people have to say on the interwebs.
02:35:51 Speaker_04
And perhaps we'll do a round two in person during one of, what was the name of the, was it the Tim Ferriss Wine Hour? What was the treat? Yeah At the offices.
02:36:03 Speaker_01
They call it Ferris time.
02:36:05 Speaker_04
That's what Mike calls it Ferris time, which was the Little wine a pair of teeth just smooth out the edges.
02:36:14 Speaker_01
That'll describe He just grabs the glass. He's like, I think it's Ferris our
02:36:22 Speaker_04
I'll take it. I will take it. And Anne, I will talk to you soon. See you soon, I hope.
02:36:29 Speaker_04
And to everybody listening, you can find links to everything we discussed, the books, the fold-out chair, and much more, getting to yes and so on, in the show notes, as you can with all episodes at tim.blog forward slash podcast.
02:36:45 Speaker_04
And until next time, thank you for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday.
02:36:55 Speaker_04
Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.
02:37:07 Speaker_04
Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things.
02:37:20 Speaker_04
It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.
02:37:32 Speaker_04
And these strange, esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So, if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.
02:37:46 Speaker_04
If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by 8Sleep.
02:38:01 Speaker_04
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02:39:42 Speaker_04
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02:39:56 Speaker_04
All proceeds on my end go to my foundation, Saisei Foundation, fund research for mental health, et cetera. Anyway, Cockpunch Coffee, it's delicious. The first coffee I've ever produced myself. I drink it every morning. Check it out.
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