Transcript

Lots of founders, investors look up to you and your ideas. Who, who do you look up to and how do you make sure your ideas are actually, like, continue to be good? Yeah. So, so I'm a big fan of history. So there's a sort of a classic cliche in the Valley, which is like, we don't respect history very much. And a lot of people who visit the Valley for the first time, that's their impression because they obviously people have had this experience. First Valley. It's like, I want to, OK, I want to see Silicon Valley, want to drive around Silicon Valley. And it's like, good luck with that, right? Like, OK, there's a freeway. There's a strip mall. It's an office park. There's a security guard who won't let me in the office park. Like there's no physical history here, right? Really. And then and then in the conversations, I mean, we're all about the future. We're building the future. And so I think there's this natural tendency to assume that the past isn't very relevant. And I actually think I actually criticized a little bit. You know, there's sort of the Elon school of thought now, which is very strong in the Valley, which is sort of think everything through from first principles, which has its huge strengths for sure. But it does kind of dismiss the idea that people who came before us had anything to teach us. And my general view is the people who came before us had a harder time doing what they did than we do because the world was in a more immature state. Like they didn't have all the, they didn't necessarily, you know, startups started before 50 years ago didn't venture capital, right? They didn't have, there's a lot of things that startups for 20 years ago didn't have the Internet. Things were harder in the past. And so the people who were successful in the past, I think were often better than we are because they had to be because it was harder. And so I like going in the in the past in the tech industry. And I'll just, I'll recommend a few books. So I think the origin, the origin stories of companies. There's a fantastic book about Thomas Watson, senior who built IBM by Kevin Maney. And if you think that Steve Jobs is rough, was rough on people. He had nothing on Thomas Watson Senior. There's the book is the book has transcripts of the executive staff meetings at IBM in the 1930s and 1940s. And let's just say he was an absolute terror and built an extraordinary company. And so he's a real role model, not the terror part. Be careful, this is all interpretive. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, Michael Malone wrote a great book called Bill and Dave talks about how HP got built over the course of 30 or 40 years by Bill and Dave. And then I like going back further. So I like Edison. I like what was called the second industrial revolution a lot where like you got electricity and you got cars. So there's a great Edison book called The Wizard of Menlo Park. It's really good. There's a great Ford book called I Invented the modern Age. And if you go back and read the history of cars 100 years ago, Detroit 100 years ago was a lot like, was a lot more like. Silicon Valley today than I think people people don't understand. In fact, Henry Henry Ford, like Ford Motor Company was not his first company, right. And so there's there's, there's all these very interesting back stories. And then I think you can go back even further. I like going back and this is not to compare us to this, but just as inspiration and role models. Florence, you know, with at the time of the Medici, Leonardo da Vinci. I just got this great book called Da Vinci Robots. And it turns out Da Vinci, while he was doing everything else that he did in life, he was also designing robots. And in his, you know, sketchbooks, there are fully fledged designs for like everything on mechanical, you know, all the Boston dynamics. He was like trying to invent all that stuff 500 years ago. Didn't quite have the, you know, didn't quite have the technology to be able to pull it off. Couldn't quite, you know, go to, couldn't go to TI and get the microcontroller. So he had some issues, but. You know, he's an inspiration. There's another great book called The Lunar Man about something called the Lunar Society, which was in England about 250 years ago. Like James Watt invented the steam engine and all these other guys who were doing this kind of thing back then. I'll work together is kind of, they had kind of a wise they think going back then. And so and it's all basically it's just you know, what it is you're trying to look for. OK, The world is, you know, the points in time, the world is the way it is. Everybody takes it for granted. And then there's a person or some setup, usually a set of people. Who think, no, no, there's a better and, you know, different and better way to do things. And then just all the practical challenges involved in causing that kind of change to happen and trying to build, you know, whether it's a new company you're trying to build, a new movement of some kind, or a new kind of art. And I think there's all kinds of lessons to be drawn from all that.