WEBVTT
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[SPEAKER_00]: Hello, everyone.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to next level humanity podcast.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I have a dear guest here, Buba.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Hi, good.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Hello.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome from tenon wenshers.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And we will be speaking about the inner journey behind innovation investment and making the theme is crafting deep tech and deep trust.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome, Buba, how are you?
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm doing great.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I survived the snowstorm in Boston and the Northeast.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I've heard just how many inches up by just finished shoveling.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So we're good to go now.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's worse than it's worse than New York, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Little worse in New York.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, not not they're all pretty bad, but my daughter is in.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Nashville and there are so many trees from the ice down the ground it's crazy so I'm let them out there we we know how to deal with this no up here yeah I mean but that's a big one for happy you stay inside yes that's best advice for sure best advice yeah yeah your that spans interpreneurial success that takes strategy and now investing
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[SPEAKER_00]: Before all the titles and exists, what in our drive first push you towards creating value through technology?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Why would go back even before tech investing?
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[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I've been super comfortable with math and science all the way through school and got into MIT and excel that MIT and then during the faculty there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So my path has always been wrapped around kind of science technology and figuring out problems and engineering things.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So super comfortable with technology and investigating the unknown with technology and.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And then joining companies and doing that, and then eventually becoming a venture capitalist and working with companies to solve, I know, and probably some stuff I got is a very very comfortable transition, so it's really all from my training, from my experience in science and tech.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And you love deep tech.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I do.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I love deep tech.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I love that and you know, it's
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[SPEAKER_01]: There's like finding easter eggs.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's figuring out how to solve problems.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There's a, I'll offer a lot of words.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Investigation and exploring that I love.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And a love for building.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So it's not just science.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's actually engineering.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And if deep tech generally requires a lot of patience and also belief in the long-term game and what kind of experiences shaped
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, the investment thesis on deep tech was informed basically from my time as faculty at MIT and it's been off technologies.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I knew that was where I wanted to work and where I thought I could make the most impact and where there was a
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[SPEAKER_01]: developed in the laboratory and getting them out and to create value in the real world.
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[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of times they just die on the vine, you know, they've created some papers, but never produce any kind of real value.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I kind of gravitated that interesting aspect of developing technology, which is developing useful technology, or something that will have real impact in the world, not just on your peers, future papers.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You decided with a clear calling?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Was that a real, really true?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Two moments like that in my career as I spent through.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But they said it started academic, faculty building a big laboratory, spinning out technologies.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I had taken some time on my sabbatical.
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[SPEAKER_01]: After I got tenure than I was on sabbatical and I joined a bunch of my postdocs and students who were trying to commercialize some technologies.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I had asked for two years of leave and MIT granted it to me, but they want me back.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I could teach, start this little background noise for the moment.
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[SPEAKER_01]: my pipes, trying to keep me warm.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so they want to be back early.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, and we had a found, we found this was right at the moment when the telecom bubble was popping, 2001.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And we decided to come to telecom company and we had a venture capital company that would give us money if I stayed.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And MIT said, no, you can't stay.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You had to come back early from just a medical
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, I didn't make sense to many, and I couldn't really put, you know, 35 people in the company have a job by denying them funding.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, my career path changed, and, you know, for loyalty reasons, and started building companies and doing, you know, focusing on managers toward that, as opposed to, kind of, back a demographic research.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so I would come in the operator side, building companies, taking ideas, extrapolating and then bringing them to marketplace, creating value there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Then there was another major moment after I finished my last company, which I ended up selling gives a software company that I sold to a private equity firm, advent international.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I realized I didn't want to
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[SPEAKER_01]: kind of be on the operator side anymore.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I really wanted to be more expand my purview, get back more to kind of deep technology, helping companies bring things out of the lab, kind of that element.
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[SPEAKER_01]: of the process that I thought I could bring more to and I could have more more leverage in pretty value.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So then basically switch to becoming a venture capitalist and helping a variety of companies as opposed to focusing all my entities on single company.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Now, remember I was talking about it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You both like
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[SPEAKER_00]: being around founders and you know what to buy ideas and never boring and I think that's that's it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's never boring.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, absolutely.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's very, you know, like when I was faculty at MIT, you have amazing, amazing individuals walking across your desk and are working with you and do various investigations and a wide ranging set of areas.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's never boring and there's a lot going on and it's like a beehive, so everybody could focus there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But the venture capital isn't a lot like that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You have amazing entrepreneurs who are very talented and very capable, you know, and then you get to pick where you're going to be working with and which ones in evaluating and understanding what they're doing on a very deep level.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So it's incredibly rewarding job, you know, because especially when they, when they are incredibly capable, but they realize that they have gaps in their experience set or their understanding about how to take, you know, was an idea to accompany to kind of the next level.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And there is also the, you know, in the, in the, in the, in the, the, there's also the factor of risk.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So what initially shaped your relationship with risk, because I think that's also the part of the excitement and how has the relationship evolved over the.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's the, that's the, yeah, actually in this conversation with my wife, a little while ago, she, you guys, you know, for her perspective, I'm,
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm very risk sensitive, but that's sort of something.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm very risk-on-powerant, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I do things that prefer sense of your super-risky.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm just trying to kind of put it in context, but I'm just going to say why it doesn't appear to me to be that way.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You don't see it as a big, big, big, big.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I don't see it as a huge risk, I guess.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So all the way through my career,
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[SPEAKER_01]: essentially facing kind of the unknown answer, the, you know, how to get from point native point B, we don't know even though point B is, you know how to get there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You have to craft your own bridge over that chasm.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So that's like we're occurring a theme.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Even when you're investigating as a researcher in my team, you don't know what the answer of your research is going to be.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You just know the process.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And you go, go, go, go, execute in the process and get you to the final answer.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So that's kind of beginning, kind of trust in the process, trust in your capability of eventually getting there and knowing that
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[SPEAKER_01]: there is the there's a goal that's worth achieving so and in engineering you also extrapolate a lot to take a little bit of information and if you're okay well I have these assumptions what does that mean so you're always living in the future you're always living in extrapolation of what what you think could be created.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm very comfortable living in that kind of like, you know, world where people say, well, this means this.
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[SPEAKER_01]: If I have this new enzyme, I'll be able to create this new reaction and we'll be able to make, you know, ammonia at one fifth the energy of, uh,
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[SPEAKER_01]: of the current boss process, right, or I'm used to that kind of extrapolation and using kind of your elect to kind of put yourself in that future position.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So when you're there, you've mitigated those risks.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You've thought through, is this feasible as this real?
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[SPEAKER_01]: So you're always kind of calculating ahead to mitigate those risks.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes it makes us doesn't make any sense like now they're not going to be able to do that right there's too many things going on and use you step back away from that but sometimes you join them on the journey and you you it makes sense to you and and then you all are team together and adjust to whatever.
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[SPEAKER_01]: problems, the world stays frozen at the company.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And there's lots of them that they don't plan on, but, you know.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I think once we spend enough time in an environment in the space where we spend a lot of time or maybe deep tech and tech, you kind of like,
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[SPEAKER_00]: have what people call risky might not be risky for you because you know, more and you've been in that people.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, very popular.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This depth of wisdom and knowledge and maybe that's that's why it doesn't feel risky for you because you kind of like understand the form.
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[SPEAKER_01]: If you steer company, feel something from an idea to something that has impact in the marketplace,
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[SPEAKER_01]: similar, similar to this other company, then you don't think the company griske these because you you see them, they get there is definitely a path that they can travel and there's definitely reason to believe that this new approach is going to yield similar sorts of results.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, for familiarity with the marketplace, familiarity with the process, lowers the perception of risk or at least the ones you're aware of.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and you evaluate companies, you know,
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[SPEAKER_00]: well before the world fully understands anything about their potential, and that's also very interesting, and what are the kind of like a few evidences that you see, that you're like, okay, this company has a potential to there are going to be able to make it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Are there any kind of like,
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[SPEAKER_01]: who's representing the company.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You know, we tend to invest in companies where there's a technical founder that's come through or it's really technology-focused to start, and they might be transitioning to more market-focused or more product-focused.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But,
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[SPEAKER_01]: You know, what is the integrity of the person you're talking with across the table?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Do they have the capacity to exaggerate or to, you know, only focus on the good things or they level headed, have they thought deeply and do they have a lot of horsepower?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Do you think they, there's a reasonable belief that they can actually solve the problem or have solved the problem?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And the individuals in the company, you know, what do they have going for them?
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[SPEAKER_01]: The other is your own kind of...
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[SPEAKER_01]: perception of the technology and what it can do and is a real, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: I like to think that I can understand the technology at the level of some of these founders or maybe not as deeply, but I can get that just really pretty quickly.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So that gives me more time to kind of focus on the real problems, which might be, does the market really want this, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: As opposed to, can it actually do this, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Or how deeply have they explored what the market really wants, or the additional
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[SPEAKER_01]: requirements that the market puts on the opportunity that they haven't bought it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's got to be tiny, or it has to be below $100.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I remember I built the display company one time.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And it was right when the world was turning the smartphones.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And people are going from a couple lines of tests on their phone to one day having a QVGA display and having, you know, colorful characters.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Why would anybody want, you know, an image on their phone, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's ridiculous, you know?
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[SPEAKER_01]: But, you know,
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[SPEAKER_01]: I remember, you know, we initially went out to talk to Motorola and they, they planned our idea, because we were going to reflect it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It was going to be super low power, because power is an issue on a mobile phone.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But as you can use ambient light, this didn't know.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There's absolutely no way.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Whenever, we'll never deploy a reflective display.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We have to sell our phones in a darkened, you know, or well, well lit,
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[SPEAKER_01]: you should store, storefront, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: We have convinced somebody they want to buy it in a well-lit storefront, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: It has to be bright and beautiful, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And they're reflected display can't be nice indoors.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's not enough light, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: So head to throw it all out and turn it all around and you know by only by talking to the customers do we actually get the real requirements that would make that eventually as a success right so a lot of people forget that they really have to understand the market at the level of their customers and from experts and it's kind of like you need to be on the street.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, we tell our CEOs that you have to come to the application at the level of your customers.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They have to look to you for answers.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In the beginning, they're the experts.
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[SPEAKER_01]: By the time you're going to be selling them product, you've got to be the expert.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, you know, a lot of them take that challenge on and become, you know, it's a new learning opportunity, but a lot of them, it's outside of their skill sets.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They don't know.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, it's not a quantum chroma dynamics or whatever they're doing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's not the, you know, the deep electronics are used to solving.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's a different sort of seven problems, a different set of understanding.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And our learning experience, that's really, yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so are they capable of expanding in generalizing the kind of problem solving that they've been doing just to a new set of problems?
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[SPEAKER_00]: And when building a company versus backing one, how does the mindset shift if we set all in terms of responsibility presence, also vision?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Um, I love that question, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: So when you, when you're building a company yourself, it's all on you.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, a lot of it's on you, especially if you're the CDL of that company or when you're on the finding teams, there's huge areas that you, you're everything's relying on your execution.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Um, so, uh, I think it's a lot more pressure.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Um, I'm sensitive to that and there's a lot more things going on, there's a lot more
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[SPEAKER_01]: The environment seems a lot more constrained.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So there's so many things you have to point your time and effort and focus and attention on.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So that is, and a lot of times just spending half your time on things you don't really enjoy doing even.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Right, yeah, you're hiring.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You talk already on your CEOs and say, well, see you guys spend about half your time.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Finding that perfect team, finding those individuals you want to work with, they're not easy to find.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And you might have been a lot of your time, you know, building your team up.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I got to call tomorrow with one of my CEOs.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Youngest guy is trying to figure out, like, how do I build my team and how do I maintain culture?
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's, but it's all on him.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And it's not something he loves doing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's similar to I find it's very similar to parenting and grand parenting.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well, so on the other side, it's very, it's very, it's a good analogy from parenting and grand parenting.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's going to happen.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I say, I say it off.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You only, well, I'm not grandparent yet, so I'm just waiting that matter.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's like when you're a parent, you have all the responsibility and you do.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Things you don't want to do because it's your responsibility, but that one you're a grandparent You know, you You got to be sensitive the fact that that CEO has so many things pulling on them and so many problems Besides the one you think is the most important right now, right so it's um it is much more You know
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's much more of laying the groundwork and laying what you need to accomplish, how can I help you?
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[SPEAKER_01]: How can I help you focus on the important parts in the CEO kind of noise that you're living in?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Right, what actually has to happen.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, we do a lot of work kind of helping them formulate plans.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, so at least to go to that next stage of financing, you need to have a couple of customers at this point of development.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You've got to have, you know, this much progress.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that doesn't just happen.
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[SPEAKER_01]: How does that happen?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Helping them back formally a plan of action.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, it's helping them reason through those things.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And what's important, what is important, and, you know, a lot of things are just
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[SPEAKER_01]: You know, they got to do that guy that but sometimes they need a judgment call, where should they be putting their time and focus and, you know, experience and forms judgment.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So we can offer that up to many of our CEO's.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So it actually, I like that analogy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's very similar to, you know, watching someone else kid versus, you know, yes, there's this thing to get around for sure.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And it's also, you know, way, I also see it as,
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[SPEAKER_00]: found there's sometimes might lose their objectivity because they are subjective, you know, about what they're doing.
19:18.026 --> 19:26.188
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think investors, we see this, especially like yourself who have built their own companies and grown it and my existence.
19:26.228 --> 19:37.272
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, there's things like, you're kind of like bringing that over, like a more holistic approach and also an objective view where they can be very much.
19:37.332 --> 19:39.393
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, when they're being really important at the end,
19:39.753 --> 19:40.794
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
19:40.814 --> 19:47.637
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember when I was a young CEO of the startup business, this was a place where I started to pick strong as I had.
19:47.657 --> 19:52.479
[SPEAKER_01]: We had a very, very accomplished business executive.
19:52.499 --> 19:56.101
[SPEAKER_01]: Jerry fine, he was the head of hoarding for tonics.
19:56.621 --> 19:59.843
[SPEAKER_01]: So making on that fiber, you know, huge.
19:59.983 --> 20:02.184
[SPEAKER_01]: I brought him to a conference in Korea.
20:02.975 --> 20:06.637
[SPEAKER_01]: made him play economy the whole way back and forth from U.S. to create.
20:07.057 --> 20:10.378
[SPEAKER_01]: And he's had the first time in 15 years he had flown commercial, right?
20:10.438 --> 20:12.459
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you've been used to flying according to Jester.
20:13.620 --> 20:19.202
[SPEAKER_01]: But after our first war being, I was like, hitting everything, you know, I was trying to knock it on the park.
20:19.983 --> 20:21.463
[SPEAKER_01]: He said, that's very well and good.
20:21.483 --> 20:24.585
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm glad you said it, but you know, what is your cost of manufacturing?
20:24.605 --> 20:26.146
[SPEAKER_01]: How do you figure out to figure that out?
20:27.126 --> 20:31.168
[SPEAKER_01]: And seven years later, it all boiled down to what the cost of manufacturing was.
20:31.728 --> 20:34.889
[SPEAKER_01]: after we've proved down all the other things, that was the dominant question.
20:35.669 --> 20:40.451
[SPEAKER_01]: So keeping us focused on that was one of the things they helped the customer probably succeed.
20:41.031 --> 20:45.313
[SPEAKER_01]: So you get a lot of that helping them focus, help them understand what's important, what isn't.
20:46.193 --> 20:52.815
[SPEAKER_01]: Very some of the grandparents, they've raised to hit, they know it's not going to get a horrible disease by eating a hotdog right there.
20:53.965 --> 20:59.847
[SPEAKER_01]: You're not stressed out about everything with a new pair of just stressed out about everything, right?
21:00.227 --> 21:07.390
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't know, you know, you know, you know, I remember my, when I first child, they didn't any hot dogs, of course, two years, we had two food dogs.
21:07.850 --> 21:09.211
[SPEAKER_01]: I fed them and stuff like that.
21:09.431 --> 21:10.311
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, no, sugar.
21:10.531 --> 21:15.113
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, definitely the third kid we're having like chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese.
21:16.013 --> 21:17.594
[SPEAKER_01]: We weren't, we weren't ready anymore.
21:19.685 --> 21:24.008
[SPEAKER_01]: The same thing, you know, you can focus on the important things and try to help them there.
21:25.369 --> 21:41.121
[SPEAKER_00]: And as Tenon Manchers consciously bring operating experience, the operator experience to early stage investments, what gap are you trying to fill personally and also structurally in the BC ecosystem?
21:49.847 --> 21:50.767
[SPEAKER_01]: in the early stage.
21:50.787 --> 22:04.611
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's where I have been I've been mentoring in deep tax for 15, 20 years now, and it's been a long time seeing companies individuals trying to take ideas, tackle ideas, and commercializing stuff like that.
22:04.631 --> 22:13.573
[SPEAKER_01]: And while there was some money at that early stage, that first 25, 500,000 out of check, there wasn't there was a like guidance.
22:14.310 --> 22:14.630
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
22:15.711 --> 22:40.030
[SPEAKER_01]: And a lot of quite right at that moment when those companies get formed and then start setting up and trying to find their first customers and stuff like that, you get a lot of you know, a lot of people picking the wrong business model or whether you're the wrong application and then having to pick the company after a year and a half, there was a lot of time wasted time and effort because they weren't getting a proper guidance in that early stage.
22:40.511 --> 22:40.971
[SPEAKER_01]: And I mean,
22:43.678 --> 22:56.641
[SPEAKER_01]: And I really thought there was an opportunity to kind of go from my experience, and from my experience, taking technologies would find in good proper market fit and a good home and ecosystem for those technologies.
22:58.361 --> 23:08.343
[SPEAKER_01]: Helping companies navigate that cool technology that actually meaning out there and what meaning out there actually what it looks like.
23:09.583 --> 23:10.604
[SPEAKER_01]: Helping these individuals
23:12.812 --> 23:22.537
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, do that translation was, I think, where I had skills or Tony had skills and where we thought we could find the best and where there was a huge hole in ecosystem.
23:22.957 --> 23:26.960
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, there's, you know, there's company of like the engine adventure capital company.
23:28.121 --> 23:36.203
[SPEAKER_01]: by MIT, they've got five hundred million dollars thinking, right, twenty million dollar checks for check technologies to take 20 years to develop.
23:36.743 --> 23:43.145
[SPEAKER_01]: But that's only like one percent of a really good deep tech technology sauce here, right?
23:43.465 --> 23:57.708
[SPEAKER_01]: And not all, you know, 20 years to develop or new materials or fundamentally in some of them are a new catalyst that has to be explored or a new way of printing electronics or a new robotics technique that allows people to work with robots.
23:58.348 --> 24:10.475
[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of them are, you know, not 20 of times deals, like fusion energy, but might be a new, new way of modeling fusion so that you can get better control, right?
24:10.575 --> 24:17.539
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's lots of pieces of the puzzle that needed to be developed that weren't being addressed.
24:18.060 --> 24:20.941
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and I think that's a very good cap in take-tuck.
24:22.923 --> 24:27.968
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's a lot of people putting small amounts of money in place, but they have no operation like expertise.
24:28.509 --> 24:33.154
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, so it's really just money, and those companies don't need money, where they need, well, they do.
24:33.715 --> 24:34.716
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't just need money.
24:34.736 --> 24:41.543
[SPEAKER_01]: They need guidance to kind of figure out where the best place and time and the most, the best use of their time for creating value.
24:44.470 --> 24:45.251
[SPEAKER_00]: What does it mean?
24:45.471 --> 24:47.152
[SPEAKER_00]: Because you're very impactful as well.
24:47.172 --> 24:55.917
[SPEAKER_00]: What does really impact look like when a company you back skills beyond the source of vision, and you know, close, big, and makes it up?
24:57.738 --> 25:04.782
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, most of the time it means they're acquired by another company and they're working with a lot more resources, right?
25:04.882 --> 25:10.846
[SPEAKER_01]: But you know, the way it feels is sort of, I like to use the surfing analogy.
25:11.778 --> 25:26.752
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you mean you'll be out there and there's ways coming, you know, you'll you'll struggle you'll work really hard building a company working really hard to get your board out behind the waves, which is the hardest part of the thing and then and then if you're not where you have to be so you can catch one of these well.
25:27.433 --> 25:34.540
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, and so success of the companies when you actually actually find a wave and it starts caring you.
25:35.342 --> 25:35.562
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
25:35.662 --> 25:44.408
[SPEAKER_01]: And then suddenly the set of skills that you needed to bring this company home is completely different than the skills that got you out behind the waves and had catch the wave.
25:44.868 --> 25:55.495
[SPEAKER_01]: It's it's now a balance and and and and grace and and moving with the opportunity as opposed to fighting and making and improving yourself and thought it it's a whole different set of beads.
25:55.535 --> 26:02.080
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's a it's a transition suddenly you've got energy that you're you can utilize and help you with that that transition.
26:02.540 --> 26:08.462
[SPEAKER_01]: So they start rolling down hell, these things start pulling you as opposed to you just constantly question.
26:09.002 --> 26:10.623
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the, that's what I told you.
26:10.663 --> 26:14.044
[SPEAKER_01]: My, my CEO's when they asked me what it's wanted to, it's not thought what happens.
26:14.664 --> 26:14.864
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
26:15.544 --> 26:15.684
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
26:15.984 --> 26:17.505
[SPEAKER_01]: It's very, very fulfilling.
26:17.525 --> 26:24.767
[SPEAKER_01]: When you get you're circling some pole, we're some excited people who want to see this being deployed and align with your vision of how it can happen.
26:26.000 --> 26:29.801
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh wow, people actually care about this, yeah, it's not just me anymore.
26:30.681 --> 26:33.221
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's very fulfilling.
26:33.681 --> 26:34.121
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
26:35.182 --> 26:39.302
[SPEAKER_00]: If capitalism were asked to serve humanity, it'd best best.
26:39.462 --> 26:42.823
[SPEAKER_00]: What role should deep tech play in the transformation?
26:44.003 --> 26:44.683
[SPEAKER_00]: What's your role?
26:44.703 --> 26:48.784
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, if you've asked somebody who's passionate about deep tech, right?
26:48.824 --> 26:54.845
[SPEAKER_01]: So in my worldview, when I look back, all in major changes in society have happened because of technology innovations.
26:55.720 --> 27:00.244
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, you know, like agriculture, so you can now live in cities, right?
27:00.284 --> 27:12.054
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, water flow and aqueducts you can actually either bitter cities or plumbing and sewer, you know, printing press, the worldwide web, you know, it's all modes of communication.
27:12.114 --> 27:21.001
[SPEAKER_01]: Now it's, you know, transitioning to, you know, AI and how it can help people and augment them and do more productive and do great things.
27:22.342 --> 27:34.711
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's always a positive aspect of technical innovation and almost everything that you've seen, you have really been resulting.
27:34.731 --> 27:44.498
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you could explain democracy as a result of technical innovation, the city state school, because technology was enough to support larger groups of populations in one of our patients.
27:44.518 --> 27:49.202
[SPEAKER_01]: So there is a technical centric point of view, which says a lot of things happen.
27:50.242 --> 27:52.123
[SPEAKER_01]: from the development and technology.
27:52.143 --> 28:10.010
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you look at where we are right now, there's, you know, we're actually sort of tipping points that have been creeping up on us, but suddenly now, you know, you know, the cost of compute is three forwardest magnitude then it was 20 years ago, 10 years, right?
28:10.070 --> 28:14.852
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's just so much easier to do complicated compute operations.
28:15.432 --> 28:17.433
[SPEAKER_01]: And then you see the logical output of that is,
28:18.093 --> 28:28.023
[SPEAKER_01]: self-driving cars or AI, where you can have the scale of compute, then you can start doing some very interesting compute processes.
28:28.543 --> 28:31.747
[SPEAKER_01]: And that didn't happen because
28:33.157 --> 28:34.778
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to come up with a GPU.
28:34.838 --> 28:50.468
[SPEAKER_01]: It happened over 10, 20 years where people made these things more efficient, the node size scaled down, you can more transistors, and all of a sudden you can put incredible amounts of power on chips and you can connect them and make some amazing things happen.
28:50.548 --> 29:01.754
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I mean, our companies that we have that, they can do guidance based on vision, let's looking around them like you would, say, okay, I've got trees over there and I'm out and so over there, that's where I am.
29:03.617 --> 29:19.528
[SPEAKER_01]: You couldn't do that without a GPU processor, you know, not, you know, so it's a fundamental technology development has been marching along and it enables some amazing things and those are now coming to fruition in a lot of the four ways.
29:19.548 --> 29:24.571
[SPEAKER_01]: So the cost of space, I mean, I grew up where, you know, it was $50,000 to get a pound of mass into, you know,
29:27.593 --> 29:28.173
[SPEAKER_01]: in the orbit.
29:28.673 --> 29:33.835
[SPEAKER_01]: And now it's, you know, kind of now and, you know, hundreds of the value in your low, low thousands.
29:34.996 --> 29:36.076
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, things are completely different.
29:36.096 --> 29:42.818
[SPEAKER_01]: I have one company that is, it's cheaper to put a payload up in space and test it up there and do your experiment in space.
29:43.178 --> 29:45.479
[SPEAKER_01]: Then it's trying to replicate those conditions on Earth.
29:47.720 --> 30:00.230
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, suddenly the whole economic just turns around, you know, if it's this cheap to put something in orbit and you can put 20,000 satellites and suddenly you've got radio towers in space and you can talk to these radio towers with your cell phone.
30:00.751 --> 30:07.936
[SPEAKER_01]: And suddenly, you know, the whole infrastructure for way, way humans communicate changes dramatically because
30:08.877 --> 30:13.260
[SPEAKER_01]: somebody put some time in the 3D printing at engine and made it reusable.
30:14.901 --> 30:19.004
[SPEAKER_01]: So these things all interact and cascade.
30:19.764 --> 30:27.950
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm a firm believer that investing in that area and deep tech enables kind of a kind of future we're looking for.
30:28.030 --> 30:33.113
[SPEAKER_01]: Where you have instant communication, you have more resources and more
30:36.478 --> 30:47.353
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's also, it's also feels like, I mean, deep-take investments, usually for me, it feels like also, like, kind of like putting a small mark on
30:49.284 --> 30:51.646
[SPEAKER_00]: the future of the world and human.
30:51.746 --> 30:54.147
[SPEAKER_00]: It's kind of like you put a small mark.
30:54.448 --> 30:55.909
[SPEAKER_01]: It's definitely a thing.
30:55.969 --> 30:59.211
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, all technologies can be used in different ways.
30:59.631 --> 31:03.233
[SPEAKER_01]: But there's the opportunity at least to do something good with it.
31:03.334 --> 31:09.298
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, but it doesn't all have to be like long range, you know, you know, sure.
31:09.358 --> 31:10.618
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not cheering, right?
31:10.799 --> 31:15.162
[SPEAKER_01]: If you look at like deep tech investments as a venture class,
31:16.020 --> 31:21.662
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, it's doing as well as any of the other sectors, and it'd be excluding AI.
31:22.062 --> 31:26.144
[SPEAKER_01]: If you look at like capital efficiency, how much money it takes?
31:26.304 --> 31:34.267
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, if you take more money upfront to develop the technology, but once you're the technology, it doesn't take as much money to spread it out.
31:34.427 --> 31:40.770
[SPEAKER_01]: And to make it valuable, it's more of a low-cost business development process, not a market creation process.
31:41.370 --> 31:47.216
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, software companies, easy to bake, but, but hard to get a lot of people to adopt.
31:47.356 --> 31:47.776
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
31:48.237 --> 31:52.761
[SPEAKER_01]: So, it turns out that it's no more capital efficient than to exit.
31:52.821 --> 31:57.546
[SPEAKER_01]: Then then then software companies, even though it's hardware and hard.
31:57.966 --> 31:58.167
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
31:58.187 --> 32:01.490
[SPEAKER_01]: So, if you look at like, you know,
32:01.914 --> 32:13.881
[SPEAKER_01]: The percentage of companies that actually go within, you know, five-year time to, you know, real value, an accent or, or a public market, it's comfortable with the software companies.
32:14.341 --> 32:25.028
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, software companies have to be really large, whereas hardware companies tend to, exit a smaller scale by acquisition by a strategic company as opposed to having to go public.
32:25.488 --> 32:39.350
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, so there's a little, there's, there's a little, yeah, it's a different type of journey, but the, the financial performance numbers are nothing that we, they're, they're similar to investing in software companies.
32:40.845 --> 32:42.486
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, people don't really realize that a lot.
32:42.706 --> 32:46.948
[SPEAKER_01]: They think deep dick tech is like, oh, it's tough tech, it's hard, it's risky.
32:47.368 --> 33:03.334
[SPEAKER_01]: But you know, the outcome is if you put, if you took any first money into a company and you're gonna software company, a bio company and a deep tech company, your twice as likely to have the deep tech company return and exit in a great, great evaluation of it, then the other two companies.
33:04.955 --> 33:07.416
[SPEAKER_01]: they tend to grow up and exit properly.
33:08.036 --> 33:09.776
[SPEAKER_01]: It's still a five percent.
33:11.216 --> 33:15.437
[SPEAKER_01]: It's still a small percentage of all the companies, but it's way more likely than the other companies.
33:16.398 --> 33:27.400
[SPEAKER_01]: So not a bad area to work, but also you get the option to have some real impact in economic system value chain or even even the people's lives.
33:28.865 --> 33:33.909
[SPEAKER_00]: You have a lot of advantages, I think, because you can help the founders' operation as well.
33:34.189 --> 33:34.809
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the goal.
33:34.869 --> 33:39.753
[SPEAKER_01]: The goal is like, you know, we can help them avoid the kind of stakes that we have made many, many times.
33:40.854 --> 33:45.197
[SPEAKER_01]: The bad hires or the the pivot you have to make and lose two years of your company life.
33:45.257 --> 33:48.419
[SPEAKER_01]: And a couple rounds of financing to do that need.
33:48.599 --> 33:49.320
[SPEAKER_01]: Best to get it right.
33:50.422 --> 34:00.327
[SPEAKER_00]: Some investors talk about timing the market, but you talk about timing the human journey, so I think that's what you mean, right?
34:00.667 --> 34:01.307
[SPEAKER_00]: It's deep tech.
34:01.347 --> 34:02.788
[SPEAKER_00]: It's all about the human journey.
34:03.529 --> 34:12.453
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, yeah, I mean, a timing market doesn't have to work with early stage tech investing because you'll put money in now and will pop out five years from now.
34:12.813 --> 34:15.154
[SPEAKER_01]: Nobody can predict what the world's going to be like five years enough.
34:15.474 --> 34:18.536
[SPEAKER_01]: And any kind of like, with a market's going to be like, for sure.
34:19.516 --> 34:22.717
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, there's two aspects of that.
34:22.797 --> 34:23.538
[SPEAKER_01]: One is, you know,
34:24.652 --> 34:31.955
[SPEAKER_01]: You want to find the right type of founder, you know, who's on the right place and there, you know, they're they're ready to make a company.
34:32.275 --> 34:35.436
[SPEAKER_01]: They're ready to make an impact and they're ready to learn.
34:35.456 --> 34:41.158
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's there's finding them and following them in their journey as they as a great value.
34:41.535 --> 35:01.490
[SPEAKER_01]: The other system, the strategy that does, does investor, does been in this sector in this type of startup makes sense from what's going on the world and what they can actually do and what's being valued and what the companies look like and what the strategic landscape as far as
35:02.362 --> 35:14.784
[SPEAKER_01]: what companies need, what to succeed at the level of, so there's two pieces of that, the person and the human is going through and then what society is a whole, but time in the market, yeah, we don't really think we're going to do something.
35:16.685 --> 35:23.506
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's, let's come to some personal questions, a couple, we have a couple of, a couple more minutes.
35:23.746 --> 35:30.727
[SPEAKER_00]: So when uncertainty feels loud, when things go on, don't call the way you, you know,
35:32.514 --> 35:39.460
[SPEAKER_00]: thought they would, what the inner truth keeps you anchored and chuck.
35:41.402 --> 35:42.283
[SPEAKER_01]: Good, good question.
35:44.965 --> 35:45.566
[SPEAKER_01]: They're truth.
35:45.626 --> 35:56.275
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, so I tend to try, so in many aspects, I'm sort of I like being alone, which is weird.
35:56.335 --> 35:57.897
[SPEAKER_01]: That's, you know, there's
35:59.793 --> 36:01.254
[SPEAKER_00]: I can't totally connect with that.
36:01.274 --> 36:03.175
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's not weird for me.
36:03.255 --> 36:04.997
[SPEAKER_00]: I love just to speak.
36:05.017 --> 36:07.378
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I mean, I mean, I'm in a people business, right?
36:07.398 --> 36:08.919
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's networking.
36:09.120 --> 36:11.181
[SPEAKER_01]: It is talking to people stuff like that.
36:11.321 --> 36:23.810
[SPEAKER_01]: But when there's a lot of chaos and and I tend to retreat inside myself, take a walk with my dog and nature, you know, spend some time up in the cabin and kind of think through.
36:24.510 --> 36:32.655
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, the various options as dispassionally as I can, and also figuring out what what resonates with what I'm looking for as well.
36:32.675 --> 36:48.164
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I tend to, you know, I guess, fall back on myself and, and, um, and nature and kind of clarity of, you know, just, you know, being one piece of
36:52.729 --> 37:03.499
[SPEAKER_01]: I really enjoy the walks and the heights and sitting out by the water and just kind of emptying myself of the problems and seeing what actually sticks.
37:04.500 --> 37:10.405
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, I think spending time by ourselves and finding ways to center ourselves.
37:12.003 --> 37:17.828
[SPEAKER_00]: especially when the world goes insane, like coming back to our sanity, that that's a super bother.
37:18.009 --> 37:20.090
[SPEAKER_01]: And you get a lot of that right now, so.
37:20.110 --> 37:25.135
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, not many people have that, but if you don't have that, it's just a crazy race.
37:25.275 --> 37:34.424
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think we need it, and I strongly advise it to not on the investors also to found it as well.
37:34.484 --> 37:37.727
[SPEAKER_00]: So spending some time alone meditating,
37:38.167 --> 37:40.830
[SPEAKER_01]: just being in nature, meditation is being a nature.
37:40.970 --> 37:45.094
[SPEAKER_01]: I find nature very, you know, this is so beautiful, the trees.
37:45.114 --> 37:53.202
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, just looking at the way of tree figured about how to grow in a certain environment, you know, and like over that rock and around that, you know, organic nature growth.
37:53.422 --> 37:57.586
[SPEAKER_01]: I love that kind of that aspect of things.
37:58.719 --> 38:06.621
[SPEAKER_01]: He's just adapting to the world around him and growing around and still being successful but then accommodating that bulb or that course to where it all went.
38:06.721 --> 38:07.941
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, about balancing.
38:08.461 --> 38:11.802
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, nature does it very, very, ninety-story.
38:11.862 --> 38:12.262
[SPEAKER_01]: It does.
38:12.842 --> 38:15.722
[SPEAKER_01]: And people tend to fight against that when they shouldn't be fighting.
38:15.782 --> 38:17.263
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.
38:18.763 --> 38:21.203
[SPEAKER_00]: And over the years, especially now, what are you?
38:21.263 --> 38:22.064
[SPEAKER_00]: What would you say?
38:22.104 --> 38:23.684
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, tar, you can't be unloading.
38:24.463 --> 38:29.506
[SPEAKER_00]: about on to come out comes ambition, identity, business, startups.
38:31.727 --> 38:50.358
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, so, you know, the individual success has been a kind of a fall of arc I've been pushing, you know, with that MIT, that tenure, you know, reach kind of pinnacles, success kind of MIT that are moving on and building up companies, you know, trying to get individual success and building the companies have success there, financial success.
38:51.081 --> 38:54.502
[SPEAKER_01]: um, it, uh, I have been generalizing that.
38:55.282 --> 39:04.205
[SPEAKER_01]: It's more the journey that you've had, you know, it's the, you know, helping other people's chief successes, you know, and in loving that.
39:04.925 --> 39:19.190
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, sometimes, uh, I have been very goal-oriented and, uh, I'm trying to make myself more process oriented, more in love with a process and you know, you know, you know, I, uh, I find
39:21.032 --> 39:25.394
[SPEAKER_01]: I say, you know, do what you love doing, right?
39:25.554 --> 39:28.115
[SPEAKER_01]: And everything will follow, right?
39:29.255 --> 39:31.376
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, as opposed to going to do this, go do that.
39:31.456 --> 39:33.216
[SPEAKER_01]: It's going to be a better in the history.
39:33.917 --> 39:34.677
[SPEAKER_00]: And I agree.
39:35.137 --> 39:40.079
[SPEAKER_00]: It's kind of like sometimes it's kind of like sounds like cliche when people say,
39:40.641 --> 40:07.467
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's the journey, but you know, we come in the fact that when you're a venture investor, you're my carry, if you're you're helping other people, you know, so there are some derivative, you know, perform metrics and stuff like that, but but fundamentally, you know, if you help that individual somebody else, not yourself succeed, it's a it's a mentoring process is it's it's coaching them, you know, it's it's it's it's all process oriented is not kind of
40:10.908 --> 40:15.529
[SPEAKER_00]: in that, like, both the founder and the investor and with that person.
40:15.609 --> 40:19.210
[SPEAKER_01]: And you make a decision based on, you know, a lot of it's a person.
40:19.250 --> 40:23.131
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not necessarily gold, it's, it's, it's does this person have capacity.
40:23.191 --> 40:29.592
[SPEAKER_01]: Do they have, they have potential, right, in the, so a lot of it isn't the goal.
40:29.612 --> 40:36.574
[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of it's, I'm got a who do you want to travel this journey around, and I remember when it's putting 10 together, um,
40:38.991 --> 40:41.334
[SPEAKER_01]: I have an old-time partner Tony Zona.
40:41.454 --> 40:47.301
[SPEAKER_01]: So I brought him in as a CEO for one of my companies when I was building entry companies.
40:48.022 --> 40:51.265
[SPEAKER_01]: And I had that I was holding out of that company's supply.
40:51.305 --> 40:52.787
[SPEAKER_01]: I was a leader, I was a founder.
40:53.368 --> 40:55.070
[SPEAKER_01]: I was and it had this exceeding.
40:55.110 --> 40:56.752
[SPEAKER_01]: My entire financial existence.
40:57.145 --> 41:08.090
[SPEAKER_01]: was wrapped around this company and I was holding a very tight and I was going into people's offices and solving all their problems for them and the company was succeeding and in my play base was just miserable.
41:09.930 --> 41:17.394
[SPEAKER_01]: I was going into this 40 year old 40 year, you know, analog electronics designer and I'd fix a circuit design for him.
41:17.914 --> 41:22.556
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, he's like just taking everybody's the air out of the room for everybody just by just going in.
41:23.116 --> 41:27.400
[SPEAKER_01]: and just solving problems for them and, you know, just manhandling things.
41:28.901 --> 41:32.284
[SPEAKER_01]: And, and, you know, sort of, brought Tony in.
41:32.384 --> 41:38.809
[SPEAKER_01]: He had, he had basically built up the soul of the company called, called Quantum Bridge Communications.
41:38.829 --> 41:39.630
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me know Quantum.
41:40.250 --> 41:42.852
[SPEAKER_01]: But everybody knows it as, as Ryzen Vios.
41:43.112 --> 41:47.756
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the broadband fiber to the home technology that Verizon uses.
41:47.836 --> 41:49.558
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the single one broadband technology.
41:49.878 --> 41:50.718
[SPEAKER_01]: He built up.
41:51.873 --> 42:01.255
[SPEAKER_01]: So we got that religion of rise in a soul of our company and brought him in because even though they telecom bubble barbers, he still got to say, he was scrappy.
42:01.895 --> 42:08.937
[SPEAKER_01]: My one requirement for a CEO of the work with me was Eddie was scrappy or she was scrappy.
42:09.257 --> 42:15.339
[SPEAKER_01]: But he walks into this, you know, this mess that I created, right?
42:15.579 --> 42:19.420
[SPEAKER_01]: And just invested in me and training me and learning helping me
42:21.561 --> 42:29.284
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, central navigate, you know, how to manage people and create goals and create an environment where everybody can be successful and win.
42:31.024 --> 42:33.185
[SPEAKER_01]: And sorry, I wanted a time for that process.
42:33.545 --> 42:38.647
[SPEAKER_01]: And he and I worked together really closely to kind of get property with a very, very successful exit to Qualcomm.
42:39.267 --> 42:48.658
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I realized that, you know, he has skills that very different, you know, he says successful tech entrepreneur, I level mine or much more kind of
42:55.105 --> 43:14.170
[SPEAKER_01]: So he and I were working together on my last company and then we went to you know I wanted to start this venture fund and he didn't want to like get him that involved and stuff like that and I worked out for a year because I knew that I had to have somebody with a very different perspective than I, you know, helping me make decisions and working together.
43:24.559 --> 43:33.748
[SPEAKER_01]: Enjoy the process with, you know, and, you know, that investment in the team is like the number one thing that it's going to pay off.
43:33.788 --> 43:40.233
[SPEAKER_01]: So what I've been learning is, you know, just bring good people around you and let them solve the problem right there.
43:40.574 --> 43:42.415
[SPEAKER_01]: Or, you know, you don't have to solve everything yourself.
43:42.436 --> 43:48.241
[SPEAKER_01]: You can go in the process, you can trust your team, and those are very similar sort of things, you know.
43:48.993 --> 43:56.755
[SPEAKER_01]: give them good goals, let them achieve, trust in the process of creating, you know, aligned incentives.
43:59.315 --> 44:03.236
[SPEAKER_00]: But it was a wonderful chat, wonderful conversation.
44:03.436 --> 44:04.917
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm certain that anybody.
44:04.937 --> 44:05.657
[SPEAKER_01]: No great questions.
44:05.697 --> 44:06.377
[SPEAKER_01]: I appreciate them.
44:06.437 --> 44:10.258
[SPEAKER_00]: I was, yeah, they enjoyed as much as I did and I learned a lot.
44:11.069 --> 44:15.792
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I have a clear view of deep tech and deep tech investments.
44:15.852 --> 44:17.133
[SPEAKER_00]: You've got to leave you.
44:17.293 --> 44:18.514
[SPEAKER_01]: I've got to leave you.
44:18.875 --> 44:20.155
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, thank you very much.
44:20.776 --> 44:21.977
[SPEAKER_00]: And one final question.
44:22.017 --> 44:30.763
[SPEAKER_00]: If you could leave one message for founders and investors navigating the deeply unpredictable early stages of creation, what would that be?
44:34.360 --> 44:39.025
[SPEAKER_01]: And interesting, so it's investors and companies, very different skill sets.
44:39.685 --> 44:45.031
[SPEAKER_01]: And both I think you have to be very careful and pick people you really wanna work with.
44:46.092 --> 44:49.095
[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of people think that their teammates are handed to them.
44:50.287 --> 44:50.527
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
44:50.567 --> 44:52.627
[SPEAKER_01]: I've got to pick this investor because I have money.
44:53.708 --> 44:56.008
[SPEAKER_01]: But who you picked to go in the journey with you?
44:56.328 --> 44:58.629
[SPEAKER_01]: The investor you decide, do they share your vision?
44:59.449 --> 45:01.129
[SPEAKER_01]: Do they trust you?
45:01.569 --> 45:01.809
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
45:01.849 --> 45:05.310
[SPEAKER_01]: I suppose you've just given you money because of the possible outcome.
45:05.390 --> 45:08.631
[SPEAKER_01]: Always work hard that this groups people they're marching with you.
45:10.151 --> 45:13.292
[SPEAKER_01]: And investment in the team as you get the number one investment either.
45:13.812 --> 45:17.793
[SPEAKER_01]: Either doing what investors in companies or companies themselves can make.
45:20.149 --> 45:21.530
[SPEAKER_01]: Bill and Bill, the people capital.
45:26.673 --> 45:27.173
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
45:27.193 --> 45:28.594
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
45:28.674 --> 45:31.216
[SPEAKER_01]: I appreciate it just that we're going to talk for a hour.
45:31.536 --> 45:32.236
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, thank you.
45:32.256 --> 45:40.562
[SPEAKER_00]: And thanks to everyone who's watching and listening and reminding us to subscribe to our YouTube channel and Spotify account.
45:42.043 --> 45:43.043
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks a lot again.
45:43.063 --> 45:46.005
[SPEAKER_00]: And I will see you in the next episode.
45:46.665 --> 45:47.006
[SPEAKER_00]: Bye soon.
00:00.151 --> 00:00.832
[SPEAKER_00]: Hello, everyone.
00:00.932 --> 00:03.473
[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to next level humanity podcast.
00:03.633 --> 00:06.375
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a dear guest here, Buba.
00:06.936 --> 00:07.416
[SPEAKER_00]: Hi, good.
00:07.536 --> 00:07.996
[SPEAKER_00]: Hello.
00:08.076 --> 00:10.578
[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome from tenon wenshers.
00:11.839 --> 00:22.326
[SPEAKER_00]: And we will be speaking about the inner journey behind innovation investment and making the theme is crafting deep tech and deep trust.
00:22.426 --> 00:23.687
[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome, Buba, how are you?
00:24.303 --> 00:25.104
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm doing great.
00:25.184 --> 00:29.247
[SPEAKER_01]: I survived the snowstorm in Boston and the Northeast.
00:29.667 --> 00:33.189
[SPEAKER_01]: I've heard just how many inches up by just finished shoveling.
00:33.209 --> 00:34.711
[SPEAKER_01]: So we're good to go now.
00:34.731 --> 00:39.434
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's worse than it's worse than New York, right?
00:40.054 --> 00:40.935
[SPEAKER_01]: Little worse in New York.
00:40.975 --> 00:44.698
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, not not they're all pretty bad, but my daughter is in.
00:45.663 --> 01:09.473
[SPEAKER_01]: Nashville and there are so many trees from the ice down the ground it's crazy so I'm let them out there we we know how to deal with this no up here yeah I mean but that's a big one for happy you stay inside yes that's best advice for sure best advice yeah yeah your that spans interpreneurial success that takes strategy and now investing
01:10.082 --> 01:19.269
[SPEAKER_00]: Before all the titles and exists, what in our drive first push you towards creating value through technology?
01:20.630 --> 01:22.991
[SPEAKER_01]: Why would go back even before tech investing?
01:25.084 --> 01:33.371
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I've been super comfortable with math and science all the way through school and got into MIT and excel that MIT and then during the faculty there.
01:34.412 --> 01:42.318
[SPEAKER_01]: So my path has always been wrapped around kind of science technology and figuring out problems and engineering things.
01:42.378 --> 01:49.765
[SPEAKER_01]: So super comfortable with technology and investigating the unknown with technology and.
01:50.767 --> 02:08.039
[SPEAKER_01]: And then joining companies and doing that, and then eventually becoming a venture capitalist and working with companies to solve, I know, and probably some stuff I got is a very very comfortable transition, so it's really all from my training, from my experience in science and tech.
02:08.099 --> 02:09.280
[SPEAKER_00]: And you love deep tech.
02:10.221 --> 02:10.521
[SPEAKER_01]: I do.
02:10.581 --> 02:11.302
[SPEAKER_01]: I love deep tech.
02:11.542 --> 02:12.783
[SPEAKER_01]: I love that and you know, it's
02:17.143 --> 02:19.304
[SPEAKER_01]: There's like finding easter eggs.
02:19.384 --> 02:21.685
[SPEAKER_01]: It's figuring out how to solve problems.
02:21.745 --> 02:24.227
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a, I'll offer a lot of words.
02:24.307 --> 02:27.708
[SPEAKER_01]: Investigation and exploring that I love.
02:27.889 --> 02:28.909
[SPEAKER_01]: And a love for building.
02:29.469 --> 02:30.590
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's not just science.
02:30.630 --> 02:31.831
[SPEAKER_01]: It's actually engineering.
02:32.591 --> 02:32.831
[SPEAKER_01]: So.
02:33.311 --> 02:42.716
[SPEAKER_00]: And if deep tech generally requires a lot of patience and also belief in the long-term game and what kind of experiences shaped
02:49.564 --> 02:57.671
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, the investment thesis on deep tech was informed basically from my time as faculty at MIT and it's been off technologies.
03:00.293 --> 03:04.757
[SPEAKER_01]: So I knew that was where I wanted to work and where I thought I could make the most impact and where there was a
03:15.399 --> 03:19.021
[SPEAKER_01]: developed in the laboratory and getting them out and to create value in the real world.
03:19.041 --> 03:24.643
[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of times they just die on the vine, you know, they've created some papers, but never produce any kind of real value.
03:24.703 --> 03:38.470
[SPEAKER_01]: So I kind of gravitated that interesting aspect of developing technology, which is developing useful technology, or something that will have real impact in the world, not just on your peers, future papers.
03:45.406 --> 03:47.367
[SPEAKER_00]: You decided with a clear calling?
03:48.908 --> 03:51.990
[SPEAKER_00]: Was that a real, really true?
03:52.331 --> 03:54.912
[SPEAKER_01]: Two moments like that in my career as I spent through.
03:55.232 --> 04:02.057
[SPEAKER_01]: But they said it started academic, faculty building a big laboratory, spinning out technologies.
04:03.178 --> 04:05.859
[SPEAKER_01]: I had taken some time on my sabbatical.
04:05.939 --> 04:14.005
[SPEAKER_01]: After I got tenure than I was on sabbatical and I joined a bunch of my postdocs and students who were trying to commercialize some technologies.
04:15.731 --> 04:21.739
[SPEAKER_01]: So I had asked for two years of leave and MIT granted it to me, but they want me back.
04:22.901 --> 04:25.845
[SPEAKER_01]: So I could teach, start this little background noise for the moment.
04:26.958 --> 04:29.599
[SPEAKER_01]: my pipes, trying to keep me warm.
04:30.479 --> 04:31.679
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so they want to be back early.
04:32.259 --> 04:40.341
[SPEAKER_01]: So, and we had a found, we found this was right at the moment when the telecom bubble was popping, 2001.
04:41.882 --> 04:48.903
[SPEAKER_01]: And we decided to come to telecom company and we had a venture capital company that would give us money if I stayed.
04:49.443 --> 04:50.884
[SPEAKER_01]: And MIT said, no, you can't stay.
04:50.904 --> 04:52.744
[SPEAKER_01]: You had to come back early from just a medical
04:57.406 --> 05:05.174
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I didn't make sense to many, and I couldn't really put, you know, 35 people in the company have a job by denying them funding.
05:05.955 --> 05:18.549
[SPEAKER_01]: So, my career path changed, and, you know, for loyalty reasons, and started building companies and doing, you know, focusing on managers toward that, as opposed to, kind of, back a demographic research.
05:19.507 --> 05:27.731
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I would come in the operator side, building companies, taking ideas, extrapolating and then bringing them to marketplace, creating value there.
05:28.952 --> 05:38.937
[SPEAKER_01]: Then there was another major moment after I finished my last company, which I ended up selling gives a software company that I sold to a private equity firm, advent international.
05:40.517 --> 05:41.758
[SPEAKER_01]: And I realized I didn't want to
05:42.836 --> 05:44.617
[SPEAKER_01]: kind of be on the operator side anymore.
05:44.858 --> 05:52.904
[SPEAKER_01]: I really wanted to be more expand my purview, get back more to kind of deep technology, helping companies bring things out of the lab, kind of that element.
05:53.655 --> 06:02.377
[SPEAKER_01]: of the process that I thought I could bring more to and I could have more more leverage in pretty value.
06:02.737 --> 06:12.200
[SPEAKER_01]: So then basically switch to becoming a venture capitalist and helping a variety of companies as opposed to focusing all my entities on single company.
06:12.240 --> 06:13.900
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, remember I was talking about it.
06:14.120 --> 06:16.021
[SPEAKER_00]: You both like
06:16.761 --> 06:22.324
[SPEAKER_00]: being around founders and you know what to buy ideas and never boring and I think that's that's it.
06:22.364 --> 06:23.104
[SPEAKER_01]: It's never boring.
06:23.144 --> 06:25.245
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, absolutely.
06:25.485 --> 06:36.410
[SPEAKER_01]: It's very, you know, like when I was faculty at MIT, you have amazing, amazing individuals walking across your desk and are working with you and do various investigations and a wide ranging set of areas.
06:36.730 --> 06:42.452
[SPEAKER_01]: It's never boring and there's a lot going on and it's like a beehive, so everybody could focus there.
06:42.512 --> 06:46.034
[SPEAKER_01]: But the venture capital isn't a lot like that.
06:46.074 --> 07:01.140
[SPEAKER_01]: You have amazing entrepreneurs who are very talented and very capable, you know, and then you get to pick where you're going to be working with and which ones in evaluating and understanding what they're doing on a very deep level.
07:01.920 --> 07:23.516
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's incredibly rewarding job, you know, because especially when they, when they are incredibly capable, but they realize that they have gaps in their experience set or their understanding about how to take, you know, was an idea to accompany to kind of the next level.
07:25.406 --> 07:30.792
[SPEAKER_00]: And there is also the, you know, in the, in the, in the, in the, the, there's also the factor of risk.
07:31.813 --> 07:41.022
[SPEAKER_00]: So what initially shaped your relationship with risk, because I think that's also the part of the excitement and how has the relationship evolved over the.
07:41.702 --> 07:49.069
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's the, that's the, yeah, actually in this conversation with my wife, a little while ago, she, you guys, you know, for her perspective, I'm,
07:50.050 --> 07:52.691
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm very risk sensitive, but that's sort of something.
07:52.951 --> 07:56.252
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm very risk-on-powerant, right?
07:56.452 --> 08:00.273
[SPEAKER_01]: And I do things that prefer sense of your super-risky.
08:01.513 --> 08:10.096
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm just trying to kind of put it in context, but I'm just going to say why it doesn't appear to me to be that way.
08:10.156 --> 08:12.516
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't see it as a big, big, big, big.
08:12.576 --> 08:14.557
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't see it as a huge risk, I guess.
08:14.577 --> 08:17.398
[SPEAKER_01]: So all the way through my career,
08:18.953 --> 08:26.954
[SPEAKER_01]: essentially facing kind of the unknown answer, the, you know, how to get from point native point B, we don't know even though point B is, you know how to get there.
08:27.432 --> 08:30.073
[SPEAKER_01]: You have to craft your own bridge over that chasm.
08:31.113 --> 08:33.053
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's like we're occurring a theme.
08:33.333 --> 08:38.374
[SPEAKER_01]: Even when you're investigating as a researcher in my team, you don't know what the answer of your research is going to be.
08:38.434 --> 08:39.535
[SPEAKER_01]: You just know the process.
08:40.355 --> 08:45.996
[SPEAKER_01]: And you go, go, go, go, execute in the process and get you to the final answer.
08:47.156 --> 08:53.938
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's kind of beginning, kind of trust in the process, trust in your capability of eventually getting there and knowing that
08:54.698 --> 09:15.201
[SPEAKER_01]: there is the there's a goal that's worth achieving so and in engineering you also extrapolate a lot to take a little bit of information and if you're okay well I have these assumptions what does that mean so you're always living in the future you're always living in extrapolation of what what you think could be created.
09:15.882 --> 09:21.765
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm very comfortable living in that kind of like, you know, world where people say, well, this means this.
09:22.285 --> 09:31.670
[SPEAKER_01]: If I have this new enzyme, I'll be able to create this new reaction and we'll be able to make, you know, ammonia at one fifth the energy of, uh,
09:32.430 --> 09:42.073
[SPEAKER_01]: of the current boss process, right, or I'm used to that kind of extrapolation and using kind of your elect to kind of put yourself in that future position.
09:43.093 --> 09:45.894
[SPEAKER_01]: So when you're there, you've mitigated those risks.
09:45.914 --> 09:48.755
[SPEAKER_01]: You've thought through, is this feasible as this real?
09:49.215 --> 09:52.776
[SPEAKER_01]: So you're always kind of calculating ahead to mitigate those risks.
09:53.876 --> 10:10.661
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes it makes us doesn't make any sense like now they're not going to be able to do that right there's too many things going on and use you step back away from that but sometimes you join them on the journey and you you it makes sense to you and and then you all are team together and adjust to whatever.
10:14.955 --> 10:17.397
[SPEAKER_01]: problems, the world stays frozen at the company.
10:18.117 --> 10:21.040
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's lots of them that they don't plan on, but, you know.
10:21.300 --> 10:30.307
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think once we spend enough time in an environment in the space where we spend a lot of time or maybe deep tech and tech, you kind of like,
10:30.858 --> 10:38.481
[SPEAKER_00]: have what people call risky might not be risky for you because you know, more and you've been in that people.
10:38.501 --> 10:39.481
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, very popular.
10:39.961 --> 10:48.985
[SPEAKER_00]: This depth of wisdom and knowledge and maybe that's that's why it doesn't feel risky for you because you kind of like understand the form.
10:49.025 --> 10:55.007
[SPEAKER_01]: If you steer company, feel something from an idea to something that has impact in the marketplace,
10:56.007 --> 11:09.612
[SPEAKER_01]: similar, similar to this other company, then you don't think the company griske these because you you see them, they get there is definitely a path that they can travel and there's definitely reason to believe that this new approach is going to yield similar sorts of results.
11:10.212 --> 11:20.235
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, for familiarity with the marketplace, familiarity with the process, lowers the perception of risk or at least the ones you're aware of.
11:21.275 --> 11:23.356
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and you evaluate companies, you know,
11:24.085 --> 11:43.236
[SPEAKER_00]: well before the world fully understands anything about their potential, and that's also very interesting, and what are the kind of like a few evidences that you see, that you're like, okay, this company has a potential to there are going to be able to make it.
11:43.696 --> 11:45.137
[SPEAKER_00]: Are there any kind of like,
11:54.267 --> 11:55.649
[SPEAKER_01]: who's representing the company.
11:55.810 --> 12:08.349
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, we tend to invest in companies where there's a technical founder that's come through or it's really technology-focused to start, and they might be transitioning to more market-focused or more product-focused.
12:09.271 --> 12:09.411
[SPEAKER_01]: But,
12:10.367 --> 12:13.288
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, what is the integrity of the person you're talking with across the table?
12:14.708 --> 12:27.111
[SPEAKER_01]: Do they have the capacity to exaggerate or to, you know, only focus on the good things or they level headed, have they thought deeply and do they have a lot of horsepower?
12:27.791 --> 12:28.411
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
12:28.791 --> 12:33.612
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you think they, there's a reasonable belief that they can actually solve the problem or have solved the problem?
12:40.715 --> 12:44.746
[SPEAKER_01]: And the individuals in the company, you know, what do they have going for them?
12:45.528 --> 12:46.751
[SPEAKER_01]: The other is your own kind of...
12:47.681 --> 12:52.385
[SPEAKER_01]: perception of the technology and what it can do and is a real, right?
12:53.285 --> 13:02.112
[SPEAKER_01]: I like to think that I can understand the technology at the level of some of these founders or maybe not as deeply, but I can get that just really pretty quickly.
13:02.692 --> 13:09.517
[SPEAKER_01]: So that gives me more time to kind of focus on the real problems, which might be, does the market really want this, right?
13:09.537 --> 13:12.279
[SPEAKER_01]: As opposed to, can it actually do this, right?
13:12.419 --> 13:16.663
[SPEAKER_01]: Or how deeply have they explored what the market really wants, or the additional
13:17.523 --> 13:22.066
[SPEAKER_01]: requirements that the market puts on the opportunity that they haven't bought it.
13:22.106 --> 13:25.028
[SPEAKER_01]: It's got to be tiny, or it has to be below $100.
13:25.548 --> 13:28.230
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember I built the display company one time.
13:29.571 --> 13:32.733
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was right when the world was turning the smartphones.
13:34.292 --> 13:42.920
[SPEAKER_01]: And people are going from a couple lines of tests on their phone to one day having a QVGA display and having, you know, colorful characters.
13:42.960 --> 13:46.343
[SPEAKER_01]: Why would anybody want, you know, an image on their phone, right?
13:47.844 --> 13:49.546
[SPEAKER_01]: It's ridiculous, you know?
13:50.046 --> 13:51.087
[SPEAKER_01]: But, you know,
13:52.128 --> 13:59.274
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember, you know, we initially went out to talk to Motorola and they, they planned our idea, because we were going to reflect it.
13:59.294 --> 14:03.718
[SPEAKER_01]: It was going to be super low power, because power is an issue on a mobile phone.
14:03.958 --> 14:05.699
[SPEAKER_01]: But as you can use ambient light, this didn't know.
14:05.879 --> 14:06.700
[SPEAKER_01]: There's absolutely no way.
14:06.720 --> 14:09.022
[SPEAKER_01]: Whenever, we'll never deploy a reflective display.
14:09.502 --> 14:14.887
[SPEAKER_01]: We have to sell our phones in a darkened, you know, or well, well lit,
14:16.648 --> 14:18.931
[SPEAKER_01]: you should store, storefront, right?
14:19.212 --> 14:22.997
[SPEAKER_01]: We have convinced somebody they want to buy it in a well-lit storefront, right?
14:23.177 --> 14:25.340
[SPEAKER_01]: It has to be bright and beautiful, right?
14:25.620 --> 14:28.023
[SPEAKER_01]: And they're reflected display can't be nice indoors.
14:28.384 --> 14:29.786
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not enough light, right?
14:30.385 --> 14:49.808
[SPEAKER_01]: So head to throw it all out and turn it all around and you know by only by talking to the customers do we actually get the real requirements that would make that eventually as a success right so a lot of people forget that they really have to understand the market at the level of their customers and from experts and it's kind of like you need to be on the street.
14:51.908 --> 14:58.154
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, we tell our CEOs that you have to come to the application at the level of your customers.
14:58.434 --> 15:00.075
[SPEAKER_01]: They have to look to you for answers.
15:02.177 --> 15:04.079
[SPEAKER_01]: In the beginning, they're the experts.
15:04.619 --> 15:07.882
[SPEAKER_01]: By the time you're going to be selling them product, you've got to be the expert.
15:08.975 --> 15:09.856
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
15:09.916 --> 15:18.703
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, you know, a lot of them take that challenge on and become, you know, it's a new learning opportunity, but a lot of them, it's outside of their skill sets.
15:18.743 --> 15:19.244
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't know.
15:19.304 --> 15:23.948
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, it's not a quantum chroma dynamics or whatever they're doing.
15:24.008 --> 15:26.890
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not the, you know, the deep electronics are used to solving.
15:26.930 --> 15:29.933
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a different sort of seven problems, a different set of understanding.
15:29.973 --> 15:30.153
[SPEAKER_01]: So.
15:30.525 --> 15:33.107
[SPEAKER_00]: And our learning experience, that's really, yeah.
15:33.227 --> 15:39.873
[SPEAKER_01]: And so are they capable of expanding in generalizing the kind of problem solving that they've been doing just to a new set of problems?
15:41.054 --> 15:52.885
[SPEAKER_00]: And when building a company versus backing one, how does the mindset shift if we set all in terms of responsibility presence, also vision?
15:54.776 --> 15:58.078
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, I love that question, right?
15:58.799 --> 16:04.682
[SPEAKER_01]: So when you, when you're building a company yourself, it's all on you.
16:04.702 --> 16:13.968
[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, a lot of it's on you, especially if you're the CDL of that company or when you're on the finding teams, there's huge areas that you, you're everything's relying on your execution.
16:14.869 --> 16:18.371
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, so, uh, I think it's a lot more pressure.
16:19.692 --> 16:23.234
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, I'm sensitive to that and there's a lot more things going on, there's a lot more
16:24.634 --> 16:26.416
[SPEAKER_01]: The environment seems a lot more constrained.
16:27.256 --> 16:30.659
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's so many things you have to point your time and effort and focus and attention on.
16:34.282 --> 16:40.727
[SPEAKER_01]: So that is, and a lot of times just spending half your time on things you don't really enjoy doing even.
16:41.247 --> 16:43.689
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, yeah, you're hiring.
16:43.789 --> 16:47.072
[SPEAKER_01]: You talk already on your CEOs and say, well, see you guys spend about half your time.
16:48.231 --> 16:54.154
[SPEAKER_01]: Finding that perfect team, finding those individuals you want to work with, they're not easy to find.
16:55.174 --> 16:58.136
[SPEAKER_01]: And you might have been a lot of your time, you know, building your team up.
16:58.176 --> 17:00.437
[SPEAKER_01]: I got to call tomorrow with one of my CEOs.
17:01.338 --> 17:05.800
[SPEAKER_01]: Youngest guy is trying to figure out, like, how do I build my team and how do I maintain culture?
17:08.021 --> 17:10.502
[SPEAKER_01]: It's, but it's all on him.
17:11.883 --> 17:13.824
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's not something he loves doing.
17:16.757 --> 17:21.040
[SPEAKER_00]: It's similar to I find it's very similar to parenting and grand parenting.
17:21.581 --> 17:29.026
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well, so on the other side, it's very, it's very, it's a good analogy from parenting and grand parenting.
17:29.106 --> 17:30.067
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's going to happen.
17:30.107 --> 17:31.728
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I say, I say it off.
17:31.768 --> 17:34.950
[SPEAKER_01]: You only, well, I'm not grandparent yet, so I'm just waiting that matter.
17:34.970 --> 17:38.573
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's like when you're a parent, you have all the responsibility and you do.
17:39.193 --> 17:59.475
[SPEAKER_01]: Things you don't want to do because it's your responsibility, but that one you're a grandparent You know, you You got to be sensitive the fact that that CEO has so many things pulling on them and so many problems Besides the one you think is the most important right now, right so it's um it is much more You know
18:01.668 --> 18:06.694
[SPEAKER_01]: It's much more of laying the groundwork and laying what you need to accomplish, how can I help you?
18:07.255 --> 18:13.482
[SPEAKER_01]: How can I help you focus on the important parts in the CEO kind of noise that you're living in?
18:14.650 --> 18:16.211
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, what actually has to happen.
18:16.231 --> 18:19.372
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, we do a lot of work kind of helping them formulate plans.
18:19.652 --> 18:25.855
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, so at least to go to that next stage of financing, you need to have a couple of customers at this point of development.
18:25.895 --> 18:28.316
[SPEAKER_01]: You've got to have, you know, this much progress.
18:28.356 --> 18:29.636
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that doesn't just happen.
18:29.696 --> 18:30.757
[SPEAKER_01]: How does that happen?
18:31.077 --> 18:34.778
[SPEAKER_01]: Helping them back formally a plan of action.
18:35.559 --> 18:38.120
[SPEAKER_01]: So, it's helping them reason through those things.
18:38.160 --> 18:43.662
[SPEAKER_01]: And what's important, what is important, and, you know, a lot of things are just
18:44.172 --> 18:52.255
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, they got to do that guy that but sometimes they need a judgment call, where should they be putting their time and focus and, you know, experience and forms judgment.
18:52.355 --> 18:52.955
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
18:53.256 --> 18:56.097
[SPEAKER_01]: So we can offer that up to many of our CEO's.
18:56.137 --> 18:58.338
[SPEAKER_01]: So it actually, I like that analogy.
18:58.358 --> 19:05.180
[SPEAKER_01]: It's very similar to, you know, watching someone else kid versus, you know, yes, there's this thing to get around for sure.
19:05.640 --> 19:09.582
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's also, you know, way, I also see it as,
19:10.183 --> 19:17.966
[SPEAKER_00]: found there's sometimes might lose their objectivity because they are subjective, you know, about what they're doing.
19:18.026 --> 19:26.188
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think investors, we see this, especially like yourself who have built their own companies and grown it and my existence.
19:26.228 --> 19:37.272
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, there's things like, you're kind of like bringing that over, like a more holistic approach and also an objective view where they can be very much.
19:37.332 --> 19:39.393
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, when they're being really important at the end,
19:39.753 --> 19:40.794
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
19:40.814 --> 19:47.637
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember when I was a young CEO of the startup business, this was a place where I started to pick strong as I had.
19:47.657 --> 19:52.479
[SPEAKER_01]: We had a very, very accomplished business executive.
19:52.499 --> 19:56.101
[SPEAKER_01]: Jerry fine, he was the head of hoarding for tonics.
19:56.621 --> 19:59.843
[SPEAKER_01]: So making on that fiber, you know, huge.
19:59.983 --> 20:02.184
[SPEAKER_01]: I brought him to a conference in Korea.
20:02.975 --> 20:06.637
[SPEAKER_01]: made him play economy the whole way back and forth from U.S. to create.
20:07.057 --> 20:10.378
[SPEAKER_01]: And he's had the first time in 15 years he had flown commercial, right?
20:10.438 --> 20:12.459
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you've been used to flying according to Jester.
20:13.620 --> 20:19.202
[SPEAKER_01]: But after our first war being, I was like, hitting everything, you know, I was trying to knock it on the park.
20:19.983 --> 20:21.463
[SPEAKER_01]: He said, that's very well and good.
20:21.483 --> 20:24.585
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm glad you said it, but you know, what is your cost of manufacturing?
20:24.605 --> 20:26.146
[SPEAKER_01]: How do you figure out to figure that out?
20:27.126 --> 20:31.168
[SPEAKER_01]: And seven years later, it all boiled down to what the cost of manufacturing was.
20:31.728 --> 20:34.889
[SPEAKER_01]: after we've proved down all the other things, that was the dominant question.
20:35.669 --> 20:40.451
[SPEAKER_01]: So keeping us focused on that was one of the things they helped the customer probably succeed.
20:41.031 --> 20:45.313
[SPEAKER_01]: So you get a lot of that helping them focus, help them understand what's important, what isn't.
20:46.193 --> 20:52.815
[SPEAKER_01]: Very some of the grandparents, they've raised to hit, they know it's not going to get a horrible disease by eating a hotdog right there.
20:53.965 --> 20:59.847
[SPEAKER_01]: You're not stressed out about everything with a new pair of just stressed out about everything, right?
21:00.227 --> 21:07.390
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't know, you know, you know, you know, I remember my, when I first child, they didn't any hot dogs, of course, two years, we had two food dogs.
21:07.850 --> 21:09.211
[SPEAKER_01]: I fed them and stuff like that.
21:09.431 --> 21:10.311
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, no, sugar.
21:10.531 --> 21:15.113
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, definitely the third kid we're having like chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese.
21:16.013 --> 21:17.594
[SPEAKER_01]: We weren't, we weren't ready anymore.
21:19.685 --> 21:24.008
[SPEAKER_01]: The same thing, you know, you can focus on the important things and try to help them there.
21:25.369 --> 21:41.121
[SPEAKER_00]: And as Tenon Manchers consciously bring operating experience, the operator experience to early stage investments, what gap are you trying to fill personally and also structurally in the BC ecosystem?
21:49.847 --> 21:50.767
[SPEAKER_01]: in the early stage.
21:50.787 --> 22:04.611
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's where I have been I've been mentoring in deep tax for 15, 20 years now, and it's been a long time seeing companies individuals trying to take ideas, tackle ideas, and commercializing stuff like that.
22:04.631 --> 22:13.573
[SPEAKER_01]: And while there was some money at that early stage, that first 25, 500,000 out of check, there wasn't there was a like guidance.
22:14.310 --> 22:14.630
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
22:15.711 --> 22:40.030
[SPEAKER_01]: And a lot of quite right at that moment when those companies get formed and then start setting up and trying to find their first customers and stuff like that, you get a lot of you know, a lot of people picking the wrong business model or whether you're the wrong application and then having to pick the company after a year and a half, there was a lot of time wasted time and effort because they weren't getting a proper guidance in that early stage.
22:40.511 --> 22:40.971
[SPEAKER_01]: And I mean,
22:43.678 --> 22:56.641
[SPEAKER_01]: And I really thought there was an opportunity to kind of go from my experience, and from my experience, taking technologies would find in good proper market fit and a good home and ecosystem for those technologies.
22:58.361 --> 23:08.343
[SPEAKER_01]: Helping companies navigate that cool technology that actually meaning out there and what meaning out there actually what it looks like.
23:09.583 --> 23:10.604
[SPEAKER_01]: Helping these individuals
23:12.812 --> 23:22.537
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, do that translation was, I think, where I had skills or Tony had skills and where we thought we could find the best and where there was a huge hole in ecosystem.
23:22.957 --> 23:26.960
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, there's, you know, there's company of like the engine adventure capital company.
23:28.121 --> 23:36.203
[SPEAKER_01]: by MIT, they've got five hundred million dollars thinking, right, twenty million dollar checks for check technologies to take 20 years to develop.
23:36.743 --> 23:43.145
[SPEAKER_01]: But that's only like one percent of a really good deep tech technology sauce here, right?
23:43.465 --> 23:57.708
[SPEAKER_01]: And not all, you know, 20 years to develop or new materials or fundamentally in some of them are a new catalyst that has to be explored or a new way of printing electronics or a new robotics technique that allows people to work with robots.
23:58.348 --> 24:10.475
[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of them are, you know, not 20 of times deals, like fusion energy, but might be a new, new way of modeling fusion so that you can get better control, right?
24:10.575 --> 24:17.539
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's lots of pieces of the puzzle that needed to be developed that weren't being addressed.
24:18.060 --> 24:20.941
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and I think that's a very good cap in take-tuck.
24:22.923 --> 24:27.968
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's a lot of people putting small amounts of money in place, but they have no operation like expertise.
24:28.509 --> 24:33.154
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, so it's really just money, and those companies don't need money, where they need, well, they do.
24:33.715 --> 24:34.716
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't just need money.
24:34.736 --> 24:41.543
[SPEAKER_01]: They need guidance to kind of figure out where the best place and time and the most, the best use of their time for creating value.
24:44.470 --> 24:45.251
[SPEAKER_00]: What does it mean?
24:45.471 --> 24:47.152
[SPEAKER_00]: Because you're very impactful as well.
24:47.172 --> 24:55.917
[SPEAKER_00]: What does really impact look like when a company you back skills beyond the source of vision, and you know, close, big, and makes it up?
24:57.738 --> 25:04.782
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, most of the time it means they're acquired by another company and they're working with a lot more resources, right?
25:04.882 --> 25:10.846
[SPEAKER_01]: But you know, the way it feels is sort of, I like to use the surfing analogy.
25:11.778 --> 25:26.752
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you mean you'll be out there and there's ways coming, you know, you'll you'll struggle you'll work really hard building a company working really hard to get your board out behind the waves, which is the hardest part of the thing and then and then if you're not where you have to be so you can catch one of these well.
25:27.433 --> 25:34.540
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, and so success of the companies when you actually actually find a wave and it starts caring you.
25:35.342 --> 25:35.562
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
25:35.662 --> 25:44.408
[SPEAKER_01]: And then suddenly the set of skills that you needed to bring this company home is completely different than the skills that got you out behind the waves and had catch the wave.
25:44.868 --> 25:55.495
[SPEAKER_01]: It's it's now a balance and and and and grace and and moving with the opportunity as opposed to fighting and making and improving yourself and thought it it's a whole different set of beads.
25:55.535 --> 26:02.080
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's a it's a transition suddenly you've got energy that you're you can utilize and help you with that that transition.
26:02.540 --> 26:08.462
[SPEAKER_01]: So they start rolling down hell, these things start pulling you as opposed to you just constantly question.
26:09.002 --> 26:10.623
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the, that's what I told you.
26:10.663 --> 26:14.044
[SPEAKER_01]: My, my CEO's when they asked me what it's wanted to, it's not thought what happens.
26:14.664 --> 26:14.864
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
26:15.544 --> 26:15.684
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
26:15.984 --> 26:17.505
[SPEAKER_01]: It's very, very fulfilling.
26:17.525 --> 26:24.767
[SPEAKER_01]: When you get you're circling some pole, we're some excited people who want to see this being deployed and align with your vision of how it can happen.
26:26.000 --> 26:29.801
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh wow, people actually care about this, yeah, it's not just me anymore.
26:30.681 --> 26:33.221
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's very fulfilling.
26:33.681 --> 26:34.121
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
26:35.182 --> 26:39.302
[SPEAKER_00]: If capitalism were asked to serve humanity, it'd best best.
26:39.462 --> 26:42.823
[SPEAKER_00]: What role should deep tech play in the transformation?
26:44.003 --> 26:44.683
[SPEAKER_00]: What's your role?
26:44.703 --> 26:48.784
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, if you've asked somebody who's passionate about deep tech, right?
26:48.824 --> 26:54.845
[SPEAKER_01]: So in my worldview, when I look back, all in major changes in society have happened because of technology innovations.
26:55.720 --> 27:00.244
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, you know, like agriculture, so you can now live in cities, right?
27:00.284 --> 27:12.054
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, water flow and aqueducts you can actually either bitter cities or plumbing and sewer, you know, printing press, the worldwide web, you know, it's all modes of communication.
27:12.114 --> 27:21.001
[SPEAKER_01]: Now it's, you know, transitioning to, you know, AI and how it can help people and augment them and do more productive and do great things.
27:22.342 --> 27:34.711
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's always a positive aspect of technical innovation and almost everything that you've seen, you have really been resulting.
27:34.731 --> 27:44.498
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you could explain democracy as a result of technical innovation, the city state school, because technology was enough to support larger groups of populations in one of our patients.
27:44.518 --> 27:49.202
[SPEAKER_01]: So there is a technical centric point of view, which says a lot of things happen.
27:50.242 --> 27:52.123
[SPEAKER_01]: from the development and technology.
27:52.143 --> 28:10.010
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you look at where we are right now, there's, you know, we're actually sort of tipping points that have been creeping up on us, but suddenly now, you know, you know, the cost of compute is three forwardest magnitude then it was 20 years ago, 10 years, right?
28:10.070 --> 28:14.852
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's just so much easier to do complicated compute operations.
28:15.432 --> 28:17.433
[SPEAKER_01]: And then you see the logical output of that is,
28:18.093 --> 28:28.023
[SPEAKER_01]: self-driving cars or AI, where you can have the scale of compute, then you can start doing some very interesting compute processes.
28:28.543 --> 28:31.747
[SPEAKER_01]: And that didn't happen because
28:33.157 --> 28:34.778
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to come up with a GPU.
28:34.838 --> 28:50.468
[SPEAKER_01]: It happened over 10, 20 years where people made these things more efficient, the node size scaled down, you can more transistors, and all of a sudden you can put incredible amounts of power on chips and you can connect them and make some amazing things happen.
28:50.548 --> 29:01.754
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I mean, our companies that we have that, they can do guidance based on vision, let's looking around them like you would, say, okay, I've got trees over there and I'm out and so over there, that's where I am.
29:03.617 --> 29:19.528
[SPEAKER_01]: You couldn't do that without a GPU processor, you know, not, you know, so it's a fundamental technology development has been marching along and it enables some amazing things and those are now coming to fruition in a lot of the four ways.
29:19.548 --> 29:24.571
[SPEAKER_01]: So the cost of space, I mean, I grew up where, you know, it was $50,000 to get a pound of mass into, you know,
29:27.593 --> 29:28.173
[SPEAKER_01]: in the orbit.
29:28.673 --> 29:33.835
[SPEAKER_01]: And now it's, you know, kind of now and, you know, hundreds of the value in your low, low thousands.
29:34.996 --> 29:36.076
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, things are completely different.
29:36.096 --> 29:42.818
[SPEAKER_01]: I have one company that is, it's cheaper to put a payload up in space and test it up there and do your experiment in space.
29:43.178 --> 29:45.479
[SPEAKER_01]: Then it's trying to replicate those conditions on Earth.
29:47.720 --> 30:00.230
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, suddenly the whole economic just turns around, you know, if it's this cheap to put something in orbit and you can put 20,000 satellites and suddenly you've got radio towers in space and you can talk to these radio towers with your cell phone.
30:00.751 --> 30:07.936
[SPEAKER_01]: And suddenly, you know, the whole infrastructure for way, way humans communicate changes dramatically because
30:08.877 --> 30:13.260
[SPEAKER_01]: somebody put some time in the 3D printing at engine and made it reusable.
30:14.901 --> 30:19.004
[SPEAKER_01]: So these things all interact and cascade.
30:19.764 --> 30:27.950
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm a firm believer that investing in that area and deep tech enables kind of a kind of future we're looking for.
30:28.030 --> 30:33.113
[SPEAKER_01]: Where you have instant communication, you have more resources and more
30:36.478 --> 30:47.353
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's also, it's also feels like, I mean, deep-take investments, usually for me, it feels like also, like, kind of like putting a small mark on
30:49.284 --> 30:51.646
[SPEAKER_00]: the future of the world and human.
30:51.746 --> 30:54.147
[SPEAKER_00]: It's kind of like you put a small mark.
30:54.448 --> 30:55.909
[SPEAKER_01]: It's definitely a thing.
30:55.969 --> 30:59.211
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, all technologies can be used in different ways.
30:59.631 --> 31:03.233
[SPEAKER_01]: But there's the opportunity at least to do something good with it.
31:03.334 --> 31:09.298
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, but it doesn't all have to be like long range, you know, you know, sure.
31:09.358 --> 31:10.618
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not cheering, right?
31:10.799 --> 31:15.162
[SPEAKER_01]: If you look at like deep tech investments as a venture class,
31:16.020 --> 31:21.662
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, it's doing as well as any of the other sectors, and it'd be excluding AI.
31:22.062 --> 31:26.144
[SPEAKER_01]: If you look at like capital efficiency, how much money it takes?
31:26.304 --> 31:34.267
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, if you take more money upfront to develop the technology, but once you're the technology, it doesn't take as much money to spread it out.
31:34.427 --> 31:40.770
[SPEAKER_01]: And to make it valuable, it's more of a low-cost business development process, not a market creation process.
31:41.370 --> 31:47.216
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, software companies, easy to bake, but, but hard to get a lot of people to adopt.
31:47.356 --> 31:47.776
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
31:48.237 --> 31:52.761
[SPEAKER_01]: So, it turns out that it's no more capital efficient than to exit.
31:52.821 --> 31:57.546
[SPEAKER_01]: Then then then software companies, even though it's hardware and hard.
31:57.966 --> 31:58.167
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
31:58.187 --> 32:01.490
[SPEAKER_01]: So, if you look at like, you know,
32:01.914 --> 32:13.881
[SPEAKER_01]: The percentage of companies that actually go within, you know, five-year time to, you know, real value, an accent or, or a public market, it's comfortable with the software companies.
32:14.341 --> 32:25.028
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, software companies have to be really large, whereas hardware companies tend to, exit a smaller scale by acquisition by a strategic company as opposed to having to go public.
32:25.488 --> 32:39.350
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, so there's a little, there's, there's a little, yeah, it's a different type of journey, but the, the financial performance numbers are nothing that we, they're, they're similar to investing in software companies.
32:40.845 --> 32:42.486
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, people don't really realize that a lot.
32:42.706 --> 32:46.948
[SPEAKER_01]: They think deep dick tech is like, oh, it's tough tech, it's hard, it's risky.
32:47.368 --> 33:03.334
[SPEAKER_01]: But you know, the outcome is if you put, if you took any first money into a company and you're gonna software company, a bio company and a deep tech company, your twice as likely to have the deep tech company return and exit in a great, great evaluation of it, then the other two companies.
33:04.955 --> 33:07.416
[SPEAKER_01]: they tend to grow up and exit properly.
33:08.036 --> 33:09.776
[SPEAKER_01]: It's still a five percent.
33:11.216 --> 33:15.437
[SPEAKER_01]: It's still a small percentage of all the companies, but it's way more likely than the other companies.
33:16.398 --> 33:27.400
[SPEAKER_01]: So not a bad area to work, but also you get the option to have some real impact in economic system value chain or even even the people's lives.
33:28.865 --> 33:33.909
[SPEAKER_00]: You have a lot of advantages, I think, because you can help the founders' operation as well.
33:34.189 --> 33:34.809
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the goal.
33:34.869 --> 33:39.753
[SPEAKER_01]: The goal is like, you know, we can help them avoid the kind of stakes that we have made many, many times.
33:40.854 --> 33:45.197
[SPEAKER_01]: The bad hires or the the pivot you have to make and lose two years of your company life.
33:45.257 --> 33:48.419
[SPEAKER_01]: And a couple rounds of financing to do that need.
33:48.599 --> 33:49.320
[SPEAKER_01]: Best to get it right.
33:50.422 --> 34:00.327
[SPEAKER_00]: Some investors talk about timing the market, but you talk about timing the human journey, so I think that's what you mean, right?
34:00.667 --> 34:01.307
[SPEAKER_00]: It's deep tech.
34:01.347 --> 34:02.788
[SPEAKER_00]: It's all about the human journey.
34:03.529 --> 34:12.453
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, yeah, I mean, a timing market doesn't have to work with early stage tech investing because you'll put money in now and will pop out five years from now.
34:12.813 --> 34:15.154
[SPEAKER_01]: Nobody can predict what the world's going to be like five years enough.
34:15.474 --> 34:18.536
[SPEAKER_01]: And any kind of like, with a market's going to be like, for sure.
34:19.516 --> 34:22.717
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, there's two aspects of that.
34:22.797 --> 34:23.538
[SPEAKER_01]: One is, you know,
34:24.652 --> 34:31.955
[SPEAKER_01]: You want to find the right type of founder, you know, who's on the right place and there, you know, they're they're ready to make a company.
34:32.275 --> 34:35.436
[SPEAKER_01]: They're ready to make an impact and they're ready to learn.
34:35.456 --> 34:41.158
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's there's finding them and following them in their journey as they as a great value.
34:41.535 --> 35:01.490
[SPEAKER_01]: The other system, the strategy that does, does investor, does been in this sector in this type of startup makes sense from what's going on the world and what they can actually do and what's being valued and what the companies look like and what the strategic landscape as far as
35:02.362 --> 35:14.784
[SPEAKER_01]: what companies need, what to succeed at the level of, so there's two pieces of that, the person and the human is going through and then what society is a whole, but time in the market, yeah, we don't really think we're going to do something.
35:16.685 --> 35:23.506
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's, let's come to some personal questions, a couple, we have a couple of, a couple more minutes.
35:23.746 --> 35:30.727
[SPEAKER_00]: So when uncertainty feels loud, when things go on, don't call the way you, you know,
35:32.514 --> 35:39.460
[SPEAKER_00]: thought they would, what the inner truth keeps you anchored and chuck.
35:41.402 --> 35:42.283
[SPEAKER_01]: Good, good question.
35:44.965 --> 35:45.566
[SPEAKER_01]: They're truth.
35:45.626 --> 35:56.275
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, so I tend to try, so in many aspects, I'm sort of I like being alone, which is weird.
35:56.335 --> 35:57.897
[SPEAKER_01]: That's, you know, there's
35:59.793 --> 36:01.254
[SPEAKER_00]: I can't totally connect with that.
36:01.274 --> 36:03.175
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's not weird for me.
36:03.255 --> 36:04.997
[SPEAKER_00]: I love just to speak.
36:05.017 --> 36:07.378
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I mean, I mean, I'm in a people business, right?
36:07.398 --> 36:08.919
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's networking.
36:09.120 --> 36:11.181
[SPEAKER_01]: It is talking to people stuff like that.
36:11.321 --> 36:23.810
[SPEAKER_01]: But when there's a lot of chaos and and I tend to retreat inside myself, take a walk with my dog and nature, you know, spend some time up in the cabin and kind of think through.
36:24.510 --> 36:32.655
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, the various options as dispassionally as I can, and also figuring out what what resonates with what I'm looking for as well.
36:32.675 --> 36:48.164
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I tend to, you know, I guess, fall back on myself and, and, um, and nature and kind of clarity of, you know, just, you know, being one piece of
36:52.729 --> 37:03.499
[SPEAKER_01]: I really enjoy the walks and the heights and sitting out by the water and just kind of emptying myself of the problems and seeing what actually sticks.
37:04.500 --> 37:10.405
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, I think spending time by ourselves and finding ways to center ourselves.
37:12.003 --> 37:17.828
[SPEAKER_00]: especially when the world goes insane, like coming back to our sanity, that that's a super bother.
37:18.009 --> 37:20.090
[SPEAKER_01]: And you get a lot of that right now, so.
37:20.110 --> 37:25.135
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, not many people have that, but if you don't have that, it's just a crazy race.
37:25.275 --> 37:34.424
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think we need it, and I strongly advise it to not on the investors also to found it as well.
37:34.484 --> 37:37.727
[SPEAKER_00]: So spending some time alone meditating,
37:38.167 --> 37:40.830
[SPEAKER_01]: just being in nature, meditation is being a nature.
37:40.970 --> 37:45.094
[SPEAKER_01]: I find nature very, you know, this is so beautiful, the trees.
37:45.114 --> 37:53.202
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, just looking at the way of tree figured about how to grow in a certain environment, you know, and like over that rock and around that, you know, organic nature growth.
37:53.422 --> 37:57.586
[SPEAKER_01]: I love that kind of that aspect of things.
37:58.719 --> 38:06.621
[SPEAKER_01]: He's just adapting to the world around him and growing around and still being successful but then accommodating that bulb or that course to where it all went.
38:06.721 --> 38:07.941
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, about balancing.
38:08.461 --> 38:11.802
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, nature does it very, very, ninety-story.
38:11.862 --> 38:12.262
[SPEAKER_01]: It does.
38:12.842 --> 38:15.722
[SPEAKER_01]: And people tend to fight against that when they shouldn't be fighting.
38:15.782 --> 38:17.263
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.
38:18.763 --> 38:21.203
[SPEAKER_00]: And over the years, especially now, what are you?
38:21.263 --> 38:22.064
[SPEAKER_00]: What would you say?
38:22.104 --> 38:23.684
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, tar, you can't be unloading.
38:24.463 --> 38:29.506
[SPEAKER_00]: about on to come out comes ambition, identity, business, startups.
38:31.727 --> 38:50.358
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, so, you know, the individual success has been a kind of a fall of arc I've been pushing, you know, with that MIT, that tenure, you know, reach kind of pinnacles, success kind of MIT that are moving on and building up companies, you know, trying to get individual success and building the companies have success there, financial success.
38:51.081 --> 38:54.502
[SPEAKER_01]: um, it, uh, I have been generalizing that.
38:55.282 --> 39:04.205
[SPEAKER_01]: It's more the journey that you've had, you know, it's the, you know, helping other people's chief successes, you know, and in loving that.
39:04.925 --> 39:19.190
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, sometimes, uh, I have been very goal-oriented and, uh, I'm trying to make myself more process oriented, more in love with a process and you know, you know, you know, I, uh, I find
39:21.032 --> 39:25.394
[SPEAKER_01]: I say, you know, do what you love doing, right?
39:25.554 --> 39:28.115
[SPEAKER_01]: And everything will follow, right?
39:29.255 --> 39:31.376
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, as opposed to going to do this, go do that.
39:31.456 --> 39:33.216
[SPEAKER_01]: It's going to be a better in the history.
39:33.917 --> 39:34.677
[SPEAKER_00]: And I agree.
39:35.137 --> 39:40.079
[SPEAKER_00]: It's kind of like sometimes it's kind of like sounds like cliche when people say,
39:40.641 --> 40:07.467
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's the journey, but you know, we come in the fact that when you're a venture investor, you're my carry, if you're you're helping other people, you know, so there are some derivative, you know, perform metrics and stuff like that, but but fundamentally, you know, if you help that individual somebody else, not yourself succeed, it's a it's a mentoring process is it's it's coaching them, you know, it's it's it's it's all process oriented is not kind of
40:10.908 --> 40:15.529
[SPEAKER_00]: in that, like, both the founder and the investor and with that person.
40:15.609 --> 40:19.210
[SPEAKER_01]: And you make a decision based on, you know, a lot of it's a person.
40:19.250 --> 40:23.131
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not necessarily gold, it's, it's, it's does this person have capacity.
40:23.191 --> 40:29.592
[SPEAKER_01]: Do they have, they have potential, right, in the, so a lot of it isn't the goal.
40:29.612 --> 40:36.574
[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of it's, I'm got a who do you want to travel this journey around, and I remember when it's putting 10 together, um,
40:38.991 --> 40:41.334
[SPEAKER_01]: I have an old-time partner Tony Zona.
40:41.454 --> 40:47.301
[SPEAKER_01]: So I brought him in as a CEO for one of my companies when I was building entry companies.
40:48.022 --> 40:51.265
[SPEAKER_01]: And I had that I was holding out of that company's supply.
40:51.305 --> 40:52.787
[SPEAKER_01]: I was a leader, I was a founder.
40:53.368 --> 40:55.070
[SPEAKER_01]: I was and it had this exceeding.
40:55.110 --> 40:56.752
[SPEAKER_01]: My entire financial existence.
40:57.145 --> 41:08.090
[SPEAKER_01]: was wrapped around this company and I was holding a very tight and I was going into people's offices and solving all their problems for them and the company was succeeding and in my play base was just miserable.
41:09.930 --> 41:17.394
[SPEAKER_01]: I was going into this 40 year old 40 year, you know, analog electronics designer and I'd fix a circuit design for him.
41:17.914 --> 41:22.556
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, he's like just taking everybody's the air out of the room for everybody just by just going in.
41:23.116 --> 41:27.400
[SPEAKER_01]: and just solving problems for them and, you know, just manhandling things.
41:28.901 --> 41:32.284
[SPEAKER_01]: And, and, you know, sort of, brought Tony in.
41:32.384 --> 41:38.809
[SPEAKER_01]: He had, he had basically built up the soul of the company called, called Quantum Bridge Communications.
41:38.829 --> 41:39.630
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me know Quantum.
41:40.250 --> 41:42.852
[SPEAKER_01]: But everybody knows it as, as Ryzen Vios.
41:43.112 --> 41:47.756
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the broadband fiber to the home technology that Verizon uses.
41:47.836 --> 41:49.558
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the single one broadband technology.
41:49.878 --> 41:50.718
[SPEAKER_01]: He built up.
41:51.873 --> 42:01.255
[SPEAKER_01]: So we got that religion of rise in a soul of our company and brought him in because even though they telecom bubble barbers, he still got to say, he was scrappy.
42:01.895 --> 42:08.937
[SPEAKER_01]: My one requirement for a CEO of the work with me was Eddie was scrappy or she was scrappy.
42:09.257 --> 42:15.339
[SPEAKER_01]: But he walks into this, you know, this mess that I created, right?
42:15.579 --> 42:19.420
[SPEAKER_01]: And just invested in me and training me and learning helping me
42:21.561 --> 42:29.284
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, central navigate, you know, how to manage people and create goals and create an environment where everybody can be successful and win.
42:31.024 --> 42:33.185
[SPEAKER_01]: And sorry, I wanted a time for that process.
42:33.545 --> 42:38.647
[SPEAKER_01]: And he and I worked together really closely to kind of get property with a very, very successful exit to Qualcomm.
42:39.267 --> 42:48.658
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I realized that, you know, he has skills that very different, you know, he says successful tech entrepreneur, I level mine or much more kind of
42:55.105 --> 43:14.170
[SPEAKER_01]: So he and I were working together on my last company and then we went to you know I wanted to start this venture fund and he didn't want to like get him that involved and stuff like that and I worked out for a year because I knew that I had to have somebody with a very different perspective than I, you know, helping me make decisions and working together.
43:24.559 --> 43:33.748
[SPEAKER_01]: Enjoy the process with, you know, and, you know, that investment in the team is like the number one thing that it's going to pay off.
43:33.788 --> 43:40.233
[SPEAKER_01]: So what I've been learning is, you know, just bring good people around you and let them solve the problem right there.
43:40.574 --> 43:42.415
[SPEAKER_01]: Or, you know, you don't have to solve everything yourself.
43:42.436 --> 43:48.241
[SPEAKER_01]: You can go in the process, you can trust your team, and those are very similar sort of things, you know.
43:48.993 --> 43:56.755
[SPEAKER_01]: give them good goals, let them achieve, trust in the process of creating, you know, aligned incentives.
43:59.315 --> 44:03.236
[SPEAKER_00]: But it was a wonderful chat, wonderful conversation.
44:03.436 --> 44:04.917
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm certain that anybody.
44:04.937 --> 44:05.657
[SPEAKER_01]: No great questions.
44:05.697 --> 44:06.377
[SPEAKER_01]: I appreciate them.
44:06.437 --> 44:10.258
[SPEAKER_00]: I was, yeah, they enjoyed as much as I did and I learned a lot.
44:11.069 --> 44:15.792
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I have a clear view of deep tech and deep tech investments.
44:15.852 --> 44:17.133
[SPEAKER_00]: You've got to leave you.
44:17.293 --> 44:18.514
[SPEAKER_01]: I've got to leave you.
44:18.875 --> 44:20.155
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, thank you very much.
44:20.776 --> 44:21.977
[SPEAKER_00]: And one final question.
44:22.017 --> 44:30.763
[SPEAKER_00]: If you could leave one message for founders and investors navigating the deeply unpredictable early stages of creation, what would that be?
44:34.360 --> 44:39.025
[SPEAKER_01]: And interesting, so it's investors and companies, very different skill sets.
44:39.685 --> 44:45.031
[SPEAKER_01]: And both I think you have to be very careful and pick people you really wanna work with.
44:46.092 --> 44:49.095
[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of people think that their teammates are handed to them.
44:50.287 --> 44:50.527
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
44:50.567 --> 44:52.627
[SPEAKER_01]: I've got to pick this investor because I have money.
44:53.708 --> 44:56.008
[SPEAKER_01]: But who you picked to go in the journey with you?
44:56.328 --> 44:58.629
[SPEAKER_01]: The investor you decide, do they share your vision?
44:59.449 --> 45:01.129
[SPEAKER_01]: Do they trust you?
45:01.569 --> 45:01.809
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
45:01.849 --> 45:05.310
[SPEAKER_01]: I suppose you've just given you money because of the possible outcome.
45:05.390 --> 45:08.631
[SPEAKER_01]: Always work hard that this groups people they're marching with you.
45:10.151 --> 45:13.292
[SPEAKER_01]: And investment in the team as you get the number one investment either.
45:13.812 --> 45:17.793
[SPEAKER_01]: Either doing what investors in companies or companies themselves can make.
45:20.149 --> 45:21.530
[SPEAKER_01]: Bill and Bill, the people capital.
45:26.673 --> 45:27.173
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
45:27.193 --> 45:28.594
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
45:28.674 --> 45:31.216
[SPEAKER_01]: I appreciate it just that we're going to talk for a hour.
45:31.536 --> 45:32.236
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, thank you.
45:32.256 --> 45:40.562
[SPEAKER_00]: And thanks to everyone who's watching and listening and reminding us to subscribe to our YouTube channel and Spotify account.
45:42.043 --> 45:43.043
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks a lot again.
45:43.063 --> 45:46.005
[SPEAKER_00]: And I will see you in the next episode.
45:46.665 --> 45:47.006
[SPEAKER_00]: Bye soon.
