E410: How Relationships Built a $3.6B Venture Firm

26:02There's something about businesses that use Square. They just feel more put together. The experience is smoother for them, and it's smoother for me as a customer. Square makes it easy to sell wherever your customers are, in-store, online, on your phone, or even at pop-ups, and everything stays synced in real time. You can track sales, manage inventory, book appointments, and see reports instantly, whether you're in your shop or on the go. And when you make a sale, you don't have to wait days to get paid. Square gives you fast access to your earnings through Square checking. They also have built-in tools like loyalty and marketing so your best customers keep coming back.

26:33And right now, you can get up to$200 off Square hardware when you sign up at square.com. slash go slash how I invest. That's sqare.com slash go slash how I invest with Square you get all the tools to run your business with none of the contracts or complexity. Run your business smarter with Square get started today. Support for today's episode comes from Square. It's all in one way for business owners to take payments, book appointments, man staff and keep everything running in one place. Whether you're selling lattes, cutting hair, running boutique or managing a service business Square helps you run your business without running yourself into the ground.

27:07I was actually thinking about this the other day when I stopped by a local cafe here. They use Square and everything just works. Check out as fast, receipts are instant, and sometimes I get loyalty rewards automatically. There's something about businesses that use Square. They just feel more put together. The experience is smoother for them and it's smoother for me as a customer. Square makes it easy to sell wherever your customers are, in-store, online, on your phone, or even at pop-ups, and everything stays synced in real time. You can track sales, manage inventory, book appointments, and see reports instantly, whether you're in your shop or on the go.

27:39And when you make a sale, you don't have to wait days to get paid. Square gives you fast access to your earnings through Square checking. They also have built-in tools like loyalty and marketing so your best customers keep coming back. And right now, you can get up to$200 off Square hardware when you sign up at square.com slash go slash how I invest. That's S-Q-U-A-R-E.com slash go slash how I invest. With Square, you get all the tools to run your business with none of the contracts or complexity. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today. Support for today's episode comes from Square.

28:11It's all in one way for business owners to take payments, book appointments, man's staff, and keep everything running in one place. Whether you're selling lattes, cutting hair, running a boutique, or managing a service business, Square helps you run your business without running yourself into the ground. I was actually thinking about this the other day when I stopped by a local cafe here. They use Square and everything just works. Check out as fast, receipts are instant, and sometimes I get loyalty rewards automatically. There's something about businesses that use Square. They just feel more put together.

28:36The experience is smoother for them, and it's smoother for me as a customer. Square makes it easy to sell wherever your customers are, in-store, online, on your phone, or even at pop-ups, and everything stays synced in real time. You can track sales, manage inventory, book appointments, and see reports instantly, whether you're in your shop or on the go. And when you make a sale, you don't have to wait days to get paid. Square gives you fast access to your earnings through Square checking. They also have built-in tools like loyalty and marketing, so your best customers keep coming back. And right now, you can get up to$200 off Square hardware when you sign up at square.com slash go slash how I invest.

29:11That's S-Q-U-A-R-E dot com slash go slash how I invest. With Square, you get all the tools to run your business with none of the contracts or complexity. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today. And even as we think about it at our firm, we want to be contrarian and we want to have unique insight into why we're contrarian. So there is a structured thought to it. So we believe that, hey, we see a megatrend. We have what we call swim lanes. We're very deep fields of knowledge that each of us have within particular sectors. And we say, OK, given this megatrend, we think the ball is going to bounce like this in our swim lane.

29:49And therefore, we have a unique insight. So if we were going to explain it to my partner, Adam, who covers fintech for us, and I don't know much about fintech, says, hey, I'm really interested in this company. And here's what it does. And we believe in these megatrends. And I think this is going to happen in a very logically laid out way. And therefore, this might not necessarily make sense today, but we think this is an interesting contrarian bet because we have a logical framework which makes our thesis seem to make sense to everybody. If you work with people for a long time, you respect them.

30:27You're obviously willing to take the leap of faith with them. But they've also taught you over time, oh, we both agree in these megatrends. Oh, we both look at a sector or subsector like this. I believe that you really know what the stablecoin ecosystem looks like. All these little pieces have a logical framework which might result in a contrarian idea. And that's part of the beauty of the process. Give me a story about when you were contrarian and early on investment and the market did not agree with you. We were looking at Shopify years ago. The existing infrastructure for e-commerce was IBM.

31:07And if you wanted to build a website, it costs a couple million dollars and took a couple years. And you had to call up IBM. They had to build your product catalog. They had to build all your widgets. say, to build everything and deliver that experience. And that was just the way you built commerce websites. But Shopify had three different contrarian ideas that provided compounding benefits over time. First was you could deliver that as a service. You could deliver a website as a service. It shouldn't take a couple of years to get up and running. It should take a couple hours. They believed that there was going to be an increase.

31:40It wasn't going to be Macy's and Bloomingdale's as the only people selling things online. There was going to be a rise of the entrepreneur and entrepreneurs being able to sell things. And that would unlock an enormous market. Very contrarian at the time, clearly obvious today. And then their product roadmap, they don't need all their engineers providing all the feature functionality in their ecosystem. They were going to have an ecosystem of apps, which was going to be able to provide all the feature functionality you needed. And there would be a Darwinistic way that if people wanted more functionality and whether that's return software, whether that's email like Klaviyo, how do you bring those people into your ecosystem and therefore be able to solve your customers' problems?

32:23All three were very contrarian at the time where it was, here's my software stack. I'm going to build it myself. I'm going to host it on premise. Accenture or IBM is going to build out my whole product catalog and have to be a big company, even to be trusted to get your credit card from customers. All three of those were contrarian. Clearly, I'm using that example because it's clearly those things came to pass. They're incredibly conventional wisdom now. But it's a sense of how do you think about the world differently? And then how do you benefit from thinking about that world differently in retrospect?

32:58And you've also were early and contrarian to Airbnb, Pinterest, DraftKings. Riot Games and League of Legends. Biggest wins tend to be the most contrarian ones. And maybe you could give me the framework on how do you know if you're the crazy one or if the market's just wrong? Well, sometimes you're wrong. Oftentimes you're wrong. Is this just a probabilistic or you're just making a mistake? Well, you hopefully have a framework of, hey, I believe this is going to happen. I believe in StubHub that instead of going to ticket brokers, the better way to do things. And we've talked a lot about network effects.

33:32Network effects is one of my favorite topics. And we think it's the best business model in the world. And so therefore marketplaces that we've done, and whether that's Upwork or Airbnb or StubHub is one of our favorite investment themes. And so if this works, is this a better thing to do? So if you're able to buy and sell tickets online with a distributed person-to-person network, will that be a better thing that you're able to get better, faster tickets delivered to you? At the time, it was delivered via FedEx before instant ticketing. There's a million different things. Is there going to be fraud?

34:08Is there going to be abuse? Are people going to trust those things? But can you get through, is the idea itself so both different and valuable that you're able to get through all of the potential pitfalls. And what you hope is this is a power law business that one winner could overshadow a dozen losers or even more at times. So sometimes you're wrong on the customer adoption. Oftentimes you're wrong on timing and being able to say when that market adoption is going to be given the technology. But when you're right, it overcomes a lot of times you've made mistakes in the past. Have your mistakes come from underestimating the downside or underestimating the upside?

34:54Underestimating the upside and largely underestimating people because people can overcome a lot of those risks. We're talking about Brian Chesky at Airbnb, Jeff Floor at Subhub, Mark Merrill and Brandon Beck at Riot Games, and how those people, Jason Robbins who ran a hell of a roller coaster around getting DraftKings through all the regulatory things. That was my first big win in my career. It was great. He is a great entrepreneur, and he saw a lot of downs before a lot of ups, and he's been fantastic. Went after him as an individual. There's a lot of downs, but because he's an exceptional person, he's an exceptional entrepreneur, he persisted through that uncertainty, persisted through a lot of bad news to get to the other side.

35:40Backing those special people has been the greatest wins and the greatest satisfaction of my career and underestimating has been the downfall. Mention Mike Maples. He said that 70 % of his winners had pivoted. Joe Lonsdale famously said that his biggest investing mistake was not backing great founders with what he considered bad ideas. Would you back a great founder with what you consider to be a bad idea? Yes. And have you? Yes. I won't ask for examples, but how do those play out? Oftentimes they fail because the idea is just so bad. One of the things that great founders have is a doggedness that they have an idea in their head and that idea is going to work.

36:21And sometimes they refuse to give up that bone and it fails. But other times they realize, hey, you can give them feedback. I love you. I hate the idea, but I love you so much I'm going to invest. And sometimes – How do founders react to that feedback? They're unsure how to react because, again, that idea is their baby. Some people are diversified. You remember Max Levchin, when he was starting his incubator, he thought a firm was the fourth or fifth best idea. And he had other things around fertility that he really thought he was going to dedicate his time to. Kevin Ryan at Alley Corp, he had three or four ideas.

36:58MongoDB was just one of them and maybe not the most interesting out of the box in a world where it was the early riser in that. So even the best entrepreneurs sometimes have a hard time distilling at the earliest stages what the best ideas are. But they're wildly successful because when that avails itself, they're able to execute upon a great idea and make that happen. And so we've seen that. Almost all of our successful companies were very close to failing multiple times. Give me an example. Running out of money. Some of them just ran out of money. A couple of times we started doing television ads that initially were not very successful.

37:41Pinterest, we had to do a couple seed extension rounds because people didn't really get what Pinterest was going to be. And it wasn't easy to fill those seed extension rounds at the time. And that had a little bit of a pivot. Stoppub was originally liquid seats. Every company faces a time where they're almost out of money. they did something that doesn't work, but the best people say, I did this, I learned from it, and now I see it. And our job is to support them through that with not only words, but capital to get from here to there. These near-death experiences that startups have, that you've had in your portfolio, are these just part of every startup's journey, or there's something about the greatest startups having to go through failure?

38:29They're contrarian enough that people sometimes, and obviously a lot of these failure points are in the first couple of years, and then they take off and then they're able to see it. They're contrarian enough. It might take people a second to get it, and therefore the initial adoption might not be perfect. Sometimes the initial decisioning might not be perfect or execution that Riot had a hard time getting their game store to work globally was a hard problem. and they just couldn't figure out how to get that done. But then they fixed it, and we were off to the races. But people choose hard problems.

39:06People are trying to solve things that no one's ever done before, and people are doing things that are contrarian. So all those things add to it, but it's awesome. It's why we play the game. So also if you zoom out, great ideas oftentimes have this compounding aspect to it, which means they're early on. They start to build that moat early on. So they're either really early or too late where they're no longer a good idea. And maybe some of these wins are just early enough to squeeze in, but not yet late enough not to build an enduring business. They get a good idea that has some traction. Some people believe that there's a little bit of a curse of getting too much traction early because you just feel like, oh, this might be easy.

39:52And I think I figured this out. and you might not have fully figured it out before you think you figured it out. And that might limit your TAM. That might limit some ways to be a great business. I don't want to call businesses like that out because a lot of them have not had great outcomes. But having a little bit of need to pivot a little bit, keep your feet moving, show that grit, might be in the long term in the company's best interest. Seems like every couple of years, Silicon Valley changes its perspective on whether the next Mark Zuckerberg is going to be a 19-year-old college dropout or a 40-year-old third-time founder.

40:35What's the sweet spot in terms of a founder's journey and when you want to invest? That's really hard. There's no cookie cutter thing. Being in New York, I think I'm less tied into the groupthink. I think that helps. we've generally seen not not dissimilar from other people we like people that have some reps they've done something they've learned what a business is how a business works but they're still young enough they have a lot of energy and they have a lot of runway ahead of them so they're very high slope they've had some experience good and bad sacretino at row i think his first two companies failed before we backed him but he clearly is a very smart guy really understands his market, has an incredible slope, and we're always going to be an amazing, amazing company.

41:22He's still young enough, he's going to be part of that journey for maybe decades. So we think that's kind of a key archetype. But yeah, I would probably say most of our CEOs who have gone on to run tens of thousands of person companies, maybe only, I think at one point, majority of those people never had someone work for them before they started the company. have had, before they ran a 10 or 20 ,000 person company, had exactly zero direct reports in their careers. How do you explain that? I think that they were young. They were probably running startups or part of startups. It wasn't important to them.

42:01Their job wasn't to ladder up in the federal government or ladder up at IBM, that they were taking a different path. I think part of the reason that they're able to scale to that level also is they're not stuck in conventional wisdom and thinking. And one of our jobs is to provide some insight to those startups, but maybe the more important thing to do is listen. Because these best people often have nontraditional ways to do things, to look at things, to build their organizations, to hire people. And there's a lot that we could all learn from that. It's July 2026. Today, the prevailing view is that you want to go younger with AI native founders.

42:47Do you agree with that? I do. The AI native folks are very, very good. They think about the world in a different way. We've also had a lot of success with people taking AI and applying it to a market that they really know and believe in. What's an example of that? Justin McLeod at Overtone. He was the founder and CEO of Hinge, which is probably the most successful dating app of the last 20 years. Even Mayor Moudami here met his wife on Hinge. And every time I mention in a broader group, people raise their hand. They found their spouse on Hinge. But he saw, here's dating. Here's what's going on in the world.

43:26Here's what's not working in the dating world. And here's what we could do differently. And here's how AI enables a different dating experience. And I have all this knowledge around a particular vertical, around a particular area, everything from user insights to just decades of really thinking about that. And if I can apply this new technology to a market I like, I'm really excited about it. And we think that those folks are going to be amazing. Alex Huffman from Musical.ly and TikTok and being able to provide AI to a different social experience. You don't have to be AI native and you don't have to be under 25 to be able to build a beautiful company today.

44:08Today, your$3.6 billion AUM is our success story. It wasn't always the case. In 2008, you had to raise your second fund during the global financial crisis. How did you do that? A lot of blood, a lot of sweat, and a lot of tears. How long did it take? It took about 20 months. We got lucky. We tried to raise$200 million for our first fund. After about, I think, also 18 to 20 months, we wound up at 196.6 million. We just couldn't get there. But we had some good proof points. That first fund had Pinterest in it. It had Shopify in it. It had Riot, and it had Taphead, and it had DCG, and it had a lot of amazing companies.

44:50But no one really cared. The financial crisis, it was early in that traction, and those proof points. New York was early in its journey. And so we just had to chunk it out, little by little, piece by piece. A lot of trips to meet with people for non-meetings who either didn't have money, weren't that interested, were just trying to fill their calendar, like any other entrepreneur's story. There's a lot of selling, a lot of doors slammed in your face, a lot of times where you face existential crises, but we just kept going, and we kept going, and we kept going, and we kept going, and we eventually got to our target of 225.

45:28During that time, we actually had some wins, and some of those early first Mark I companies were starting to show some traction, get markups and TVPI. We even had some DPI, which we're able to show some success, even as we're coming out of the financial crisis, and we're able to get us there. But yeah, we didn't have much luck on timing on fund one and two. Alex Hermose, who's been on the podcast a couple of times, says that you don't work on your business, your business works on you. How did that experience work on you? I was an entrepreneur before starting First Mark in post-September 11th internet time.

46:08So NASDAQ's down 40%. Everybody hated the internet and everything tied to it. I had to raise money for an internet company or we were going to go out of business. It took us 87 meetings to raise$16.7 million, which was unable to save or else we would have been out of business. It saved us the capital to get to cash flow, break even. And then we were able to compound to there to eventually get the company public and sell for over a billion dollars. Similarly, maybe having that experience steeled me to say, it's not over until you're out of cash. It's not over until you're out of ideas. And you just put one foot in front of the other.

46:49Next fundraising meeting, they were a non-fit. What did I learn from that? How do I filter out who might be a fit for us? How do I leverage my network, my friends, my relationships to be able to figure out who might be a better fit for us and continue to go forward? And again, fun, too. You're still effectively an entrepreneur. You're still trying to sing for your soup. But the prior entrepreneur experience at an operating company taught me that lesson, persisted, blood, sweat, and tears, got to a great outcome. First Mark II, blood, sweat, and tears. we got to a great outcome and we're fortunate for our LPs who backed us in that.

47:30And I think that that will continue to be the case. There's going to be tough times. There's always, as much as you say, every, depending on who you're talking to, seven or 10 or 15 years, there are these great times where there's great liquidity. It only means that there's also going to be some tough times. And my dad always had what was called the wave theory of life, that you're moving waves and it's never as great as you think when you're on the crest of the wave and it's never as bad as when you're in the trough of the wave. And you have to just realize that this is just the way the world works and you're going to have to continue to work hard, have ideas, be a good person and persist through.

48:08During these waves, what's the best way to approach them? As stoically as possible. Both up and down? Both up and down and not personalize it. At times you think, oh my God, this guy must've really hated me. I spent all this time with him. He didn't invest in my company or my fund or whatever it is. Don't take it personally. Have a stoicism to it that you understand what's going on and even the successes. We're trying to celebrate more successes at First More. We've had a lot of success in the past. I think it's good for you and good for the team to celebrate those successes and not being too stoic about that, But being able to separate what might be a decision, which you might not have any bearing on from what's going forward, and maintaining optimism and maintaining a positive outlook because dwelling doesn't help at all.

48:57And you mentioned you did all these meetings and you would constantly evaluate the meetings and try to get feedback and try to improve. One of the difficult things for GPs to do is to get feedback from LPs. More than any other customer, I find LPs. What's your secret to that? I really push people, whether it's LPs or anybody else. And we've been in business for over 20 years. You have some LPs who are friends and are long-term relationships, and you've had a lot of success together. And if you had to do a SWOT analysis on First Mark, what would that look like? And, of course, initially they're like, you guys are awesome.

49:35You guys are so good. Great. Here's the wire information. You guys are so good-looking. You're so funny. All that stuff. Well, even the guys who invest, if you're an LP who's investing, you're still writing a memo to your committee. You're still talking to your partners about why we're upping or re-upping in first mark. And there's some things of, hey, here's some weaknesses. Here's some threats. Here's what we don't like about Rick or here's what we don't like about the partnership. You try and pull it out. It's awkward and weird at times to be like, what don't you like? Tell me what you don't like about me.

50:08and people don't feel as comfortable, especially if they're existing, right? You don't want to say, well, I really like you. I'm re-upping. I'm putting more money in your fund. But what I really don't like about you is all these other things. It's an unnatural occurrence, but you hope you build a good enough relationship that you do that and you hope you're honest with yourself that you say, okay, that's good feedback. How do I take that feedback and work on my weaknesses and continue to play to my strengths? To me, it's also framing questions. How do you frame the question? I use the question, if I put a gun to your head and force you to give me one piece of feedback, what would that feedback be?

50:46You could say, what do you think other LPs, what do you think their feedback would be to our stat? That's a great question. I've asked that question. It's kind of these referencing. Or even the Andy Grove thing. I try to be the Andy Grove. If I fired myself and walked back in through this elevator tomorrow, what would I do differently as the new leader? I would push that on and say, hey, if we switch jobs and you walked into my office through this elevator tomorrow, what would you do differently? And that is empowering. It's open-minded. You let people think about the world differently. Obviously, Andy Grove was a great entrepreneur, so you want to be compared to that.

51:24But if you were king of the world, what would you do? If you were whatever it is, what would you do? if you were going to introduce me to your best friend who's an LP and say, hey, I want to introduce you to FirstMark. And they said, yeah, but hey, this is all great stuff, but how would you think about some of the risks in the investment? Can you tell me that? You spoke earlier about relationships compounding. Skills also compound, specifically fundraising skills. You've been at it now for 20 years, just in the venture seat. How have your fundraising skills compounded? You try to be crisp. You try to be able to answer the question and you try to be very factual.

52:07So I think I've gotten better at those things over time. The other thing is, in general, we try to convert and not try to convert people. Early and maybe early in the cycle or if I'm at a conference and talking to LPs, If someone decides, hey, I think venture is wrong or I think it's the wrong way to go and I'd rather just own MAG7s all day. Maybe at a conference, if you're sitting there having lunch, you could push them a little bit on, hey, do you know these facts? Because the only way to change people's mind is provide a new fact set, not argue the existing fact set. You know these facts and let them go.

52:47Maybe earlier in my career, I would have taken that as a challenge. I can convert this person. They don't know the facts. And if they hear the facts, I tell them the facts. I'd love to get their money and convert them. Usually that doesn't work. And if it does, it's incredibly hard. Maybe the better thing to do with that lunch would have been to turn from my left to my right and talk to the person on the other side. I just started. I'm a new CIO here. I love venture capital. I'm looking to build my book. Oh, it's great. Can I tell you about what I think the next 10 years of venture capital will look like and what we're doing at FirstMark, which might be interesting to you?

53:21So that's much easier. You're beating your head against the wall a lot less and maybe a better way to do it. The people that you have been able to sell, the non-converts, the ones that didn't like venture capital, are they the first ones off the boat as well? They're actually not. We've done right by them by producing returns. But once, if you convert them, I think they're converted and they're on the boat with everybody else. We've seen the people off the boat tend to be less of people, but people changing the seat. Hey, there's a CIO who was there, who believed in growth, had a very growth mindset of venture capital and growth and liked illiquids.

54:04There might be a new CIO. So name on the cap table, new CIO hates the foundation, has a liquidity issue. They're liquidity focused. They want to get rid of all the illiquids. And their background is in real estate debt. And they think that's the greatest market in the world. There still is enough involved there that you want to tell them why that might not be the perfect way to position the entire portfolio. But sometimes you can't convince it to change everyone's mind. How many of the times when the individual left their seat and went into a new seat, did they reinvest into FirstMark? Often. We're small and we don't have a huge database or an IR team that could track those things.

54:47But if you build a personal relationship with someone, I think we have one person that's invested with us amazingly in four seats. They've gone from actually different buckets, all institutional, different buckets of a large state pension plan to a corporate pension plan to a multifamily office to a single-family office. It's invested in, of our six funds, four of the six funds have signed the documents with a different title and a different entity underneath them. Now that you're at$3.5 billion, how do you manage all the relationships? It's hard. Especially if you might have started off small and you build a relationship with a small LP, you still have that personal relationship.

55:27I think you owe it to the people who've been with you for a long time to still maintain that relationship. I have a great LP. It's been with us since the beginning. Small, but a great Philly sports fan. I'm from Philly. And anytime anything goes right, even the Nova Knicks, there's a handful of emails. So you want to be thoughtful about making sure you're kind and thoughtful to the people who got you there. You also have to be kind and thoughtful to the people who are your biggest LPs. I've learned over time that it's worth investing in those LP relationships. It seems obvious. And it seems like a miss not to, but at times you're like, okay, I'm not fundraising.

56:10I'm going to focus on these other relationships. And when I have to fundraise again, I'll relight up those relationships. I think the important thing, like any other relationship is maintaining a continuity and not being transactional in that relationship. So being able to build that relationship off cycle, thinking about that person off cycle. If you're in the city they're in, making time for them. If they're in the city you're in, making sure you can make time for them in a time where you're not asking for capital, a time you're not fundraising, so you could build that human connectivity even outside of work.

56:46And everyone says relationships are not scalable, but if I put a gun to your head, like we were talking about earlier, and I made you tell me some ways to scale your time and your relationships. How would you answer that? I think relationships are scalable. You can build a bigger, broader network. And I think it might sound trite, but just being conscious of those and thinking about people and when you're acting, right? If you're on X or if you're on Instagram and you see a meme that makes you think of somebody, send it to them. And whether that's, hey, they're a huge Indiana Hoosiers fan, or whether you knew they were an early investor in SpaceX.

57:27Hey, I just saw this meme, this hysterical thing that Elon said about SpaceX. Congratulations on the IPO. You guys must be thrilled. Love to catch up the next time I'm in DC. And amazingly, that morning of the SpaceX IPO, I had friends there who were executives, I had friends there who were early investors, I had friends there who were later investors. the five minutes as I'm walking to work to say congratulations and not a congrats exclamation point sent the most right thing hey congratulations Justin Wolfson who runs 137 fantastic guy one percent position in SpaceX never sold never sold a million dollar position report early was kind of based his I knew him when he was a founder's fund fantastic guy based a lot of his fund on that.

58:16I saw him at a conference last year and we caught up and obviously he was excited about it, but hey, you know, love talking to you about that at the conference. I know you based your firm on this and it must be amazing for this all to come to fruition today. You know, thinking about you, that's great. And that's really a personal message. And it shows that, you know, you authentically, I was authentically happy for him. I was excited for his success. and I thought about a 20-year relationship at that moment and being able to share that was great. He was texting me back from the floor in NASDAQ.

58:53I only realized this a couple of years ago. I wasn't born with this envy gene. I genuinely am happy for people and I just always assumed that everybody was like... Great piece of luck to not have that. Same thing. Eric Tornberg told me this. He said, your superpower, who started this podcast with me, Yeah. You said your superpower is you're always happy for people. And I didn't realize there was another way. You're so super lucky. That is a superpower. Yeah, I see things and it's awesome. Like you saw the memes on SpaceX. All these VCs are sitting whipping themselves if they're not in SpaceX. I'm like, I just spent my entire walk to work texting my friends who were early and congratulations.

59:35That's awesome for them. It's actually extremely rational to be happy for others, not just because it's, quote unquote, the right thing to do or just because you actually even care about that person. It's just what is predictive of your success is the success of your network. So you should be celebrating that. For a very rational perspective, yes, but from a very human perspective, these are your friends. You're excited for them. They made maybe an irrational bet 10 years ago. It's paying off for them and their family. And they're going to have a great day and they're going to be super happy. They're going to be maybe super hungover the next day, but don't worry about that.

1:00:11That's awesome for them. Be happy for them. I can't imagine another way to be. You mentioned earlier you're learning to celebrate wins. I see this among some of the most successful people. They're hard on themselves. That's why they've become successful. How have you incorporated that into your life? Arthur Brooks calls people like that strivers. So I'm a striver that, you know, if you went back and said, hey, 20 years ago, if this would have happened, how happy would you be? And you'd be like, oh, 11 out of 10. But then you might wake up in the morning and say, oh, no, no, I want to do this other thing.

1:00:41I'm a 5 out of 10 because I want to achieve. You're moving the goalposts on yourself constantly. And first thing is understanding that, hey, this is my thing. I'm a striver for all these reasons, and it's worth watching or listening or reading about Arthur Brooks because I'm sure there's a ton of people that are watching and listening now that have the same good thing. Good thing is it helps you be successful. Bad thing, there's always a shadow to every personality trait. So that's a key thing. So, A, you recognize that's your personality type. You understand what the good aspects and bad aspects are.

1:01:18and you can take time to reflect and appreciate that what your five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago self might not be as hard, knowing where you are today might not be as hard on you as you're being on yourself right now. Also paradoxically for me, celebrating ironically that part of me that doesn't celebrate and accepting that part of me has allowed me to celebrate more. That self-acceptance. I think that's great. I've seen the same thing. I think that's incredibly insightful that you just recognizing something unlocks your ability to both do that thing and enjoy that thing more if you go back 21 years ago when you were just starting first mark and you could just give a younger rick just one piece of timeless advice what would that be buy spacex uh now going back and if i had my time machine going back 20 years i would say double down on those relationships.

1:02:18We talked a lot about relationships today and how those relationships are important, not only to your success, but your happiness. At times you're like, am I spending too much time on it? No, double down on those relationships, double down on the people you think are excellent and double down on the people that treated you well. From a professional perspective, I think the key thing is it's all about people. So whether that's people that walk in the door every day at first mark or the best entrepreneurs. A lot of people have said that, that, you know, you say, hey, this company is great, but the price is too high, but it's not exactly what we do.

1:02:55There's always a reason not to do something. But the best reason to do something is they're exceptional people doing great things. On that note, absolute masterclass. Thanks so much for coming. Thank you. This was awesome.