What Separates Billion-Dollar Companies From Failed Startups w/ Bill Gross | EP #105

25:06And then when you see the support from people, when people are leaning in, when people really like it, then you really know you have something. Let's for reference, if you don't mind, you're top three to five moonshot ideas that you're most excited about now or historically, what are they? Well, a moonshot idea that we had a long time ago that was a wild success was helping monetize the internet. It was a company called GoTo .com. Yes, I remember well. And that was 1998, so it was a long time ago, But it was a moonshot in the sense that it was trying to solve a very big problem of Internet monetization.

25:44It also was a moonshot of the sense that at first people didn't like it meaning it was Objected to and eventually it was actually people booed at it when I first showed it like people actually hissed When I went to show it on stage. It was at Ted in 1998 when I showed it But we really felt that it was important and sticking with something was people object to something Yeah, bidding on keywords. So bidding on keywords in search engines. This was at the time when there were barely banner ads on the web. And certainly the idea of having money involved in search was really repellent to some people.

26:14But we really felt that was the way to lead to a more efficient market where people wouldn't spam as much if they could actually bid on the things that were relevant to them. So we thought it was important. Turned out to be a very impactful company. They drove Google. Yep. We were really happy with the outcome of that. But then fast forward to today, almost on my work is on climate. So I'm really working on new ways to make green hydrogen, new ways to store energy. I think storing energy is the final frontier in the following sense. We now can get PV panels, solar panels that are basically cheaper than windows.

26:47You can buy a piece of glass that's less than a window at Home Depot that makes electricity. That's amazing. And it makes electricity cheaper than any electrons have been made in all of human history. But the problem is it's only when the sun is shining. So if we can now have storage that is cheap enough, batteries are too expensive still, but they're coming down. If we can make storage a cheap enough, then we really can have renewable energy that scales. Because people want power when they want it. They don't want power. Only when the sun is shining. The wind is blowing. How many energy companies do you have going now?

27:14We have almost 20 and an overall category of climate mitigation of some form or another. And it's really, really important to me. I think it's, well, I think it's both important for the world, but it's a huge opportunity. I mean, it was a direct correlation between the energy availability to community and its GDP and its health and its education level, everything. And look at what's happening with AI right now. Yeah. The possibilities are endless. The ability to theoretically spin up a million brains to try and solve a problem. Like a million PhD students, you could spin up on servers, but that's going to take a lot of energy.

27:48You know, one of the things I keep thinking about is when are we going to see AI come up with new physics and new chemistry. That for me, you know, when it colors between the lines and interpolates, that's going to be fascinating. I think it will. I think I think someone showed recently that AI was doing something that people thought it couldn't do, prove geometry theorems, something which is beyond just taking some stuff and putting it back stochasticly probability wise. So I think we're going to see amazing things in the next five and ten years. I tell people, maybe even the next year. Yeah, if you think it's moving fast now, we're standing still.

28:25I've never seen anything move this faster. We think back to the internet rush when I first started on D111996, but basically with the browser in 1993, Netscape's IPO in 1995, things were moving very fast. As you said, people were running around the building here, but they were not moving as fast as AI is moving right now. And that's because it's living based on the back of Moore's Law, exponentials, as you know, everything exponential. And it's demonetized and democratized access to the most powerful technology in the planet. So entrepreneurs of one, right? So, you know, I've been talking about this with folks like, we're going to see one in three person unicorns, right?

29:01And Sam Alpin was talking about that recently. Exactly. He said we're going to see the first billion dollar one person company. And it, well, you've always talked about how you can really make an impact on the world when you can touch a billion people's lives or make a billion people's lives better. The chance to reach that many people now with something powerful is insane. Think back to Leonardo da Vinci when he was in Milan, and the reach of his brain could only be as far as his horse would take him. If he could make it to Rome and among them, or he could make it to Florence, but now our brain power is not only magnified by AI, but magnified in reach to 8 billion people at an astonishing pace.

29:43So our thoughts can really make a positive difference in the world. It's amazing. Give me three of your energy moonshots right now. Yeah. So one of them is continuum renewables. We're working to store energy. Continuum? Yep, continuum. And we really want to make very, very low -cost, renewable energy storage. And it's working with a company of ours called Energy Vault, already a public company that's doing graphic short. No, the energy vault is using gravity as a storage device, which I love. Energy Vault is building buildings to lift up weights, store the energy, We continue and want to use mountains, so to take existing hills where we don't have to do on -strips.

30:17Up slopes. So if you find a steep slope, it's almost no other way to make more cost -effective stores and to take advantage of that. Amazing. This is steel on steel still. Yeah. This is interesting. The only thing cheap enough to lift to do gravity storage is either water or dirt. So anything more expensive than dirt is a little bit too expensive. We've come up with a way to compress dirt into blocks that you can lift up. Now you need to steal cable to lift them up. The runs, but on the, oh, it's... It's a steal cable like a ski lift. Okay, got it. Yeah. So you have like a gondola lift that carries a 40 -ton block up the side of a mountain.

30:51That's really, really cost effective for storage. And I'm looking to scale that like crazy. Both here in the US, but in the Middle East, in Australia, all around the world. Amazing, amazing. Talk about physical image or that's incredible. Well, it's almost like it's embarrassing that it was so simple that we didn't come up with it sooner. But the reason is again necessity being the mother of invention. If you don't have sheep renewables, there's no reason for this. But now that we have very, very sheep renewables, it's important. What's another one? So, age genium is a company we have that is doing thermochemical hydrogen production.

31:22So right now, most of the hydrogen, green hydrogen in Spain, the world is made with electricity. But if you can make a hydrogen with heat, it's even more efficient. Now, is this the company that was using focused mirrors? It could use that, but it could use any form of high intensity heat. And I think if you get water to a thousand degrees C it breaks down. You could do amazing things with high temperature in the right methodology. This particular one is using a really clever invention from Professor at Caltech, Mark Davis. He padded at Caltech. We spun it out, formed this company, and it's really, really exciting.

31:54Really think and make a big difference. And hygiene, of course, is a storage medium. People think it is a energy source, and it's a way of storing energy. What's another one? Oh, I have. I know you. One more favorite. One more favorite child. We're looking at building a new way of making buildings that both generate and store their own energy. So I want to make a building that could be a residential building. This is a new company we have called Energy Tower that I'm working in partnership with the Architecture firm, SOM, Skidmore, Owens, and Merrill out of Chicago. They have some great architects.

32:29And imagine a building that you could live in that both generates from solar awnings and from storage either gravity or other storage internally, where if you live in this building, you're 100 % renewable and there's no utility bill. Nice. And I really think that could be a new way we build our structures to reduce the carbon intensity. You know, some of the abundance 360 members have been talking about, you know, new communities that are demonetizing everything. So energy is effectively free. Education is free. Health is demonetized. Even tax is - That's a great mission. That's a great transport is free.

33:08So that you could live for hundreds of dollars a month and everything is made available. And energy is the backbone of all of that. Yeah. If civilization has more cheap, green energy at large scale, everything will improve. How cheap can it get? Where is it, you know, sort of asymptotically reached? Well, right now, there are large installations in the Middle East. I just got back from COP in December. Yeah. They announced a large installation there, where it was 1 .4 cents a kilowatt hour. For electricity. For electricity. For solar. But including storage? Not including storage. So, it will get below 1 cent a kilowatt hour soon, because of the large -scale production of solar panels around the world.

33:51So my goal is to add storage that for only a few cents more. So three cents all in? If you can get to that, that will be cheaper than burning any fossil fuels for electricity. So everybody wants to try and make the economy more electrified, both transportation, everything should be electrified. And if you have cheap electrons to power that, that would really be incredible. So be carbon free and less expensive. Speaking about cheap electrons and making things cheap, I did a calculation last week, which I'll put out a blog on this shortly. If you could take yourself, let's call you 100 kilograms around numbers, and a space suit at 100 kilograms, and you could winch yourself up to, you know, an orbit of the space station, which is MGH, and then you could accelerate yourself to orbital velocity, which is one half MV squared.

34:42And you could, I know I did the numbers for seven cents a kilowatt hour all in, and you pulled it off the grid. Any idea what it would cost you for you in your space, who'd you go to orbit? No, how much? 120 bucks. That little. 120 bucks. Of energy. Of energy. And that's a seven cents a kilowatt hour. That's a seven cents, so we have. Yeah, even less so we can do it with real passing, right? Yeah. Literally, it's the inefficiency of rockets. Yeah. Well, we need to make a space elevator. We need to do all kinds of things to try and make that more cost effective. It's an interesting reference number.

35:14Yeah. Let's jump into your DLD lessons if you don't mind. Again, I think that their backup went slide here. So these are your first 12 ideas. This is what got Ideal Lab going. Yeah, well, the story of the starting of Ideal Lab was, I was running a company called Knowledge Adventure from 1991 to 1995 with my brother. And we sold that company in 1995. And the internet was taking off like crazy. And I brainstormed what ideas I wanted to start on the internet. and we had 25 different ideas. We narrowed it down to these 12, and I was trying to pick which one to start. And then I decided, I'm gonna find a way to do all 12.

35:58And that was the impetus for IdealLab. It was, let's make a place where we can have shared resources, a separate CEO for each one of these companies. I will put in the initial capital, I will support the companies with everything I've learned about entrepreneurship, and we'll find a way to try and make all 12 of these work. Well, turned out of this first batch of 12, we gave it was a one year experiment actually. So it's 28 years now, but it was a one year experiment. We raised three and a half million dollars to do a one year experiment, a million dollars for operating expense and two and a 50 thousand dollars to put into each company.

36:32And of these 12, seven of them were able to get financing within the first year beyond the 250 that we put in. We made offers to people at the very beginning, very, very low salary offers, but high equity offers to try and take this money and make it last as far as it could. But after one year, seven of them raised additional financing, so five of them failed just by running out of money in one year. But three of them went on to go public. Amazing. So that gave us funding to continue operating after that. So we ran for a second year. More companies succeeded. Ran for third year, and then here we are now.

37:0128 years later still doing it. You know, there weren't that many venture studios or incubators back then. I don't know if there were any. So you probably the first. Maybe. Maybe. It was the first I had heard of for sure. Do you call Idealab a venture studio? I mean, what category do you put in? Really, we are a studio. It was a little bit, so Steven Spielberg was an investor in Knowledge of Incher. And I used to go brainstorm with him on product ideas for Knowledge of Incher during that period from 1991 to 1995. And I watched how he worked as a studio where he'd have multiple movies in progress.

37:35He either would be an advisor, producer, or director of them. Some he would step in and direct. Most of them he was actually a producer or advisor, or put the teams together to work on them. They came to him for advice along the way, the way, same way I wanted to be advisor to CEOs. I really wanted to emulate that. I wanted to be able to spread myself, so it was really, it was really fun. And he had a beautiful place over in Universal where I would watch how he would do that because I have my meeting with him for half an hour but I'd see the people came in waiting to go in right before. And so I really think it's like a studio.

38:05Each of these companies is like a movie or a production. And I do lab was a company that you capitalized yourself brought outside investors. There were seven investors at the very beginning who each put in $500 ,000. Like Howard Morgan was Howard Morgan for $500 ,000. Steven Spielberg, me, a bunch of people each put it Ben Rosen put in the first seven of us. Yeah. And again, that was enough for one year, but then the company success enabled us to continue. And then the business model just for folks to understand it. when you started a company, one of these companies, what was the economics there?

38:41You, I think pretty standardized, a quarter million as a capital institution. At the beginning it was a quarter million. Now what we probably do is we spend 50 researching it at first before we started the company. Then we might spend another 150 to 250 before we decide to form the company and then we might put in more money when we actually form the company. Alongside someone else's $1 million. And, you know, I don't know if it was standard but when we're doing blast off, it was 20 % or thereabouts was for the employees. I think I do. Now it's closer to 50%. 50%. Yeah. Usually we want the, not usually always, we want the team who's taking the shoulder.

39:19I should have been going to go share harder. The biggest lesson I learned along the way on this front was I'm starting out trying to take my ideas forward, but it has to become the company's idea. It has to become the CEO's idea. Now in Blastoff's case it did. It became yours. We handed it to you and we let you lead the company. There were other cases where I felt remiss that why is the CEO taking this company in a different direction than the way I envisioned originally and that I learned, no, I have to let that happen. That has to be the case. The company has to be majority owned by the people who are running the company.

39:54So I deal have almost always becomes a minority shareholder very quickly. But we like that. We'd rather have a minority piece but have the company succeed than try and have a larger ownership stake, but not have the motivation by the team. And then in this building where you're incubating these really early stage, you have shared services, which is an amazing part. Yeah, so we have 25 people sort of in the back office that helped the companies with marketing, finances, HR, we do their payroll, legal, we take care of all the stuff in entrepreneur At knowledge adventure, when I was CEO, I was remembering that about 80 % of my time was spent on things I didn't think were benefiting the product.

40:40And 20 % of my time was spent with customers and looking at the product and thinking about that. I wanted to flip that. I wanted 80 % of my time working on the exciting part and only 20%. So I tried to make ideal solve that problem for CEOs. Where when they come in, you don't have to worry about that stuff. Like I'm when you were running Blast off, we had bookkeeping taking care of for you. we had all the healthcare plans, taking care of for you, option plans, all that stuff we took care of, we took the rent, the building, all that stuff, and you... And that was buying rockets. You were off in Russia, but you were rockets.

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43:29If you're going back in time and we're starting, I deal up again. Would you do anything different? What do you learn in that 20 -something? Yeah, well probably the biggest lesson I learned, we'll talk about making bold entries. I would probably focus on fewer, bigger impact companies, which is what I do now. Now, it took me a while to learn that. I learned how hard it was to make every company succeed, so it's better to make each effort bolder, more impactful, and do fewer of them. Love it. Love it. I want to talk about one more thing that jumped at your lessons unless it's one of them, which is it must be a challenge to get the right CEO.

44:08Oh, that's the biggest challenge. Yeah, yeah, it's it's more important than well, we'll talk about Yeah, no, it's more important than anything. How do you find how do you find the CES? Are you constantly searching constantly searching? You have you have how big is your recruiting team? So we have a big recruiting team We also work with recruiters, but I go to conferences and whenever I see people that I'm excited about I just start talking about ideas When I see someone lean in the way you did on blast off We want to find someone who's gonna sell their house In a day. In a day. So, so we're looking for someone who after I told them a bunch of ideas calls me back sometime in the next week and says, I can't sleep anymore.

44:46I'm thinking about that idea so much. And if that happens, but that that takes a lot of you have to take a lot of shots on goal to find to make that happen. Because the odds of connecting with someone perfectly, the odds of them being at the right time in their life, the odds of them falling in love with with my idea and then making it theirs. But now we learn how we have to do. So ever take that make it there. So someone comes to you and say, I have this great idea. I'd love to incubate an ad idea lab. Usually we don't do that. How are you done? Well, we've done it a few times. Usually if they come to us with a great idea, which is either very close or almost exactly the same as something we also already wanted to do.

45:20And the reason is, I've already got 50 things I'm trying to do. I don't have the time to put into another one that is not one. So people want that. And there should be a company to do that, but it's not us. Right. Beautiful. Yeah, that's actually more what YC does. Of course. So VCs and YC and other incubators take inbound ideas and then pick the ones they want to work on. We are more the other way, we have outbound ideas and we pick the people who want to take them forward for us. You have 4 ,150 ideas. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a list. All right, let's go on to the first. Here. Yeah, so the first lesson of the most valuable ones I learned was a challenge in the status quo, being bold.

46:04And we've talked about that already. And what I would say, we love this quote so much from Shope and How We Have It on the Building when you walk in, that all truth passes through three stages. First, it's ridiculed, often ridiculed. Second, it's violently opposed. So when does the idea get opposed? When it starts getting some traction, and you start threatening some incumbents, your ideas often get opposed. And you have to make it through that stage. If you make it through those two stages, then your idea becomes self -evident. And then you've actually changed the world, because now you've made something happen that wasn't going to happen otherwise, because if it was first ridiculed and then opposed, it means other people gave up.

46:38And if you make it happen. So I really love when we have a contrary an idea that some people oppose, some people laugh at, but we have enough conviction that it's important that we carry forward. Go to is the example of that I told you then. But even the gravity stories that are working on now, there are a lot of people who think that's a crazy idea. Your quote, I love it. Yeah, your quote comes up to me all the time. or something is truly breakthrough. It's a crazy idea. And that's, you know, I took that from Richard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I live that. Yeah. And convincing people to follow you when it's still in the crazy idea phase is a challenge.

47:14But then when it becomes a breakthrough, people are like, oh, it always seems obvious to them after it's breakthrough. Yes, right. Success has many parents feel like it's one. And that's one of the lessons I really want, the entrepreneurs, I'll call them, the moon -challenge entrepreneurs listening, the amount of work you need to do to take on a big, bold, meaningful effort and just something to try and make money. A lot of times can be the same. It almost as always. Basically, anything is gonna have a trough of despair in the middle. We'll get to that story later. Everything is gonna be hard.

47:52Walt Disney had it hard. Steve Jobs had it hard. They've got fire, got fired, had it come back to his company. While Disney was practically broke when he was trying to make Disneyland happen. I remember that it's a famous quote. He said, I owe $50 million. I must be rich. I didn't hear that one, but that's a great one. But it's going to be hard. There's very, very few stories that are just purely up and to the right. You often hear it. It's hold that way mistakenly. Exactly. And what you don't know, it wasn't overnight success after 11 years of hard work. Exactly. So since it's going to be hard, Maynes will do something bigger.

48:25Yeah. Mayas will do something you really care about. Now, doing something you really care about, that's important, is valuable. It doesn't have to be so controversial. But making it be bold, so this is so good because making it be bold not only means you're making a bigger impact, but sometimes you actually have more success by being bold because you need to stand out anyway. Yes. So it's almost like a few haters are okay because the boldness will win people over, both recruits to your company, investors if you tell the story properly, but to make the bigger impact. So I really feel I could not agree more.

49:03You know, it's why I named my own fun capital just because after my, my book. But one of the things I realized early on is when you have an idea, and you've said this, you know, the idea, the value, the amount of work coming up with the idea compared to the amount of work it takes to actually build a six -level company. Marginalize is to zero. Yeah. Yeah. It's one percent, 99%. Not only is there 99 % of the work after coming up with the idea. And that's why I often encourage people to and people are often resistant about this. Just start telling your idea to everybody. Yes, don't keep it secret.

49:40Yeah, tell your idea to everybody. Because people will tell you fail for these reasons learn from them. Yeah. So you have to have a thick skin to take the criticism on it, but tell your idea to everybody. You don't have to worry about someone's knowing your idea. Yeah, that's the question. Now, you still should try to protect it in any way you can also, but you should worry about telling people. It's more valuable to tell people and get the lessons from that than to the risk. But definitely, it's 1 % on the idea. The reason it's 99 % after is not only all the hard work, but the iterations you're gonna make.

50:11You're gonna take a winding path and we'll get to a slide of an iteration in a moment. But your idea is not gonna be the same. When it sees the light of day, the great quote. I'm from Mike Tyson about everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. I remember when I'd be quoting Mike Tyson in the business situation, but it's totally true. Your business idea gets punched in the face metaphorically when you go out and bring it to the market, when you bring it to investors, when you bring it to customers. And that getting punched in the face is how you adjust your match, how you adapt. And adaptability is everything.

50:43It's everything, it's everything. So I wish there were a way, someone in an interview, you could just see their adaptability score right there. Like if only you had a SATs don't tell you that. Great point average when you were at school doesn't tell you adaptability. But adaptability is a very, very valuable thing. It's what allowed mammals to survive over dinosaurs. Yeah. So I use, I like in the asteroid impact, as exponential tech hitting the world right now, right? Everything's changing so fast that unless you're adaptable, you're not gonna make it. What's lesson number two? So I do have your quote in there.

51:17day before seconds of breakthrough. It's a crazy idea. I have it right there in my deck. I just love that so much. But definitely, this is just reiterating this last point. Something that's just incremental is maybe straightforward, but not gonna be as rewarding, both psychologically and probably financially, but doing something like going from vacuum to succilic, that's a breakthrough. That's a big change, a step function that really can make the world different. Yeah, the other thing which is true is when you have an idea, you gloss over the problems and the closer you get, the more you see the blemishes and the issues that you have to overcome.

51:53And it's gonna be no matter what you're doing. And so unless, when I, the terminology I use is unless it's, you know, really it's your massive transformative purpose, right? What wakes up in the morning keeps you going your captures your shower time. Yes. You're gonna give up. Yep. Cause you don't care about it enough. Yeah. So next lesson, use naysayers as rocket fuel. So this quote from Coco after she won the US Open last year, I was practically getting goose bumps when I heard her say this. She got up and the microphone mid -court and said, I really want to thank the people who didn't believe in me.

52:26You were pouring water on my fire. You were giving me rocket fuel. And you were pouring fuel on my fire. And if you're gonna do something bold, you're gonna have naysayers. Of course. So you need to find a way to turn that into positive motivation and not and not be brought down by it and I just love that because I try to live that but she said it so well Yeah, and I really got goosebumps where she said yeah, I define expert as someone who can tell you exactly how it can't be done So I just love this and and I live that I live through the dot com crash You know, I remember this. Yeah, I remember this month before the dot com crash.

53:03Yeah, yeah, so so so People were making fun of us. People were saying, Bill, you're crazy. Entrepreneurship is over. Don't you understand? Doesn't have to be entrepreneurship anymore. Like people were actually saying. And Ron overpriced us. Yep. So the arrows that were thrown at us, we had to persevere through it. And people were actually telling us, like the graph of the rise of the NASDAQ and then the crash of it afterwards. people were saying, you can't make companies anymore. No one wants those anymore. And we were saying, are you kidding me? In fact, when we looked at this, if you looked at the internet usage, minutes spent, dollars spent, all that, the line was going straight up into the right.

53:49The only thing that took a dip was valuations. So the internet was real. This was not a fad that was going away. Yes, the valuations had gone skyrocketing relative to the relative usage. But everything continued going up and to the right and it fully caught off with itself three or four years later So but those three or four years were tough to persist when no one wanted to talk about it Yeah, and I remember We had a fund a lot of our companies exclusively ourselves and that led to the lesson which is we shouldn't do that We should really get partners Even when even if we have enough money to fund them ourselves We want to have people alongside of us But it was it was hard.

54:26It was hard But that's that's where I learned this lesson to take the naysayers and use them as rocket fuel. I love that. Yeah The next lesson I gave a whole Ted talk about this And by the way if you're listening to this and you haven't seen bills Ted talk on timing I think it's about eight years ago. Yeah, yeah 2015. I think it's a fantastic Ted talk. Yeah, thanks. So this this This was a result of looking back at that time period at 20 years of companies and saying really what happened and why did the one succeed, succeed, why did the ones fail? And there's many, many reasons. Of course, they all eventually fail because they'd run out of money.

55:01But why did they run out of money? They'd run out of money because the world isn't quite ready for what you have yet. And last off is maybe a perfect example. Now that had dot -com implications and others. But the bandwidth wasn't there. The cameras weren't there. We were trying to invent so many things outside of our area that were core to our core mission, literal mission in this case. But think about some other companies. Uber succeeded for many reasons. But Uber succeeded because GPS had just become available widely in phones. I have a point of just come out. Yeah. If you try with a GPS in every unit.

55:36Yes. If you tried to make Uber two years earlier, it would not have made it. And Uber did not cause GPS to be available in everybody's pocket. Someone else did. Further, Uber succeeded really well because there was a big recession going on and they can recruit drivers very inexpensively because people needed extra money. That timing was perfect. Now they didn't make that timing happen, but they are lucky. But what you can do to make your luck better on timing is look at the world and look at where people are and look what technologies are adopted. We had a company, one of our biggest lessons, we had a company called Z .com, which we started in 2000.

56:14I remember that. And we were looking at the success of the e -commerce companies we had in the 90s and saying what's going to come online next, entertainment. And we had the relationship with Steven Spielberg. So we wanted to start a company to bring entertainment online. Because of Steven Spielberg, we got introductions to Chris Rock and Adam Sandler. I met with them personally, gave them 10 % equity in the company and a million dollars for exclusive content from them. We hired a great team from Disney. We had Mike Lang and Joe Danunzio leading the effort. We hired 70 people in the studio over in Burbank.

56:49We started putting together this great content, but there's no broadband penetration. You couldn't even watch a video in your browser without downloading codecs and doing all kinds of weird stuff. Yep, plugins. So the company grew, grew, grew, great stuff, great stuff. I went out of business in 2003. A year later, Flash comes out. And now you can at least watch a video in your browser. And a year later, we cross 50 % broad band penetration and YouTube comes out. So we almost could have been YouTube if we had waited a little bit longer. So one of the lessons I've learned, I'm curious about it in relation to this, is living long enough to live forever.

57:23Yes. That's very crucial. So for me, I had a, I missed a couple of these timing wise. The last one I missed was planetary resources and asteroid mining company. Yeah. And we had an amazing team and we were, you know, Crystal Wickey, who was part of Blast Off was our chief engineer and then CEO. And you know, SpaceX was launching. We had just passed the laws to allow private ownership of Asteroidal material, which was a big deal. Together those laws changed in the US and in Luxembourg. And these asteroids are multi -billion dollar to trillion dollar assets. But the timing, and I still think it's probably another five years out.

58:13I'd love to think another shot at that. Well, what we always encourage our CEOs to do, sometimes they listen, sometimes they don't, sometimes it might not be right to listen, is take the money you have, spend as lowly so you last long enough. And Z .com, if we had taken the $10 million we raised and spent it at $2 million a year, instead of $3 million a year, we might have been there. Well, the other lesson here is building interim revenue engines, building interim products. So if you can, if as a company, you can start generating revenue and keep your extra true run away. Anything you could do to last long.

58:46So you're really at that point intercepting good luck. Yeah, absolutely. When you look at SpaceX, for example, SpaceX is exactly the story of bright timing. So Elon builds Falcon 1, failure, failure, failure, success on this fourth launch, which you had to borrow the money to make that happen. But what had just occurred was the spatial program was shut down. And because the spatial program had been shut down, they put out a RFP for crew commercial vehicles. and he won that after his fourth launch was successful and got a billion dollar contract when he was, you know, in negative cash flow. Finding any way to stay alive until your market is ready for you.

59:33So by definition, if you're doing something bold and new, you're ahead of your time. Yes. So you need to catch up, you need to catch up to the right time and by staying alive long enough, it's hard to do. It's really hard to do because you have to have the patience, you have to have the perseverance, you have to find these other revenue sources, You have to beg bar on steal for money, you have to beg bar on steal for customers just to stay alive long enough. So timing was one number one and again the advice there is Use your money wisely and start generating revenues always you can number two team and execution.

1:00:04Yeah, definitely Finding the the team like we were talking about who's passionate about it Who has the perseverance to fight through the tough times who takes the arrows in the back and turns them into motivation? because you're going to have a lot of, a lot of nose to make success. And again, the stories that you often hear sound up into the right, but it never is that smooth along the way. Yep, for sure. But the other thing that I most recommend about timing, I think now, is that you can't control timing, so just be honest about it. Like, be honest if the world is ready, I'll give you one other example from ours.

1:00:41Around 2001, I had an idea I was calling my life. And my life was going to be a bracelet that you wear that tracks all your vitals that tries to predict cancer or other disease by looking at every single weekend and doing matching between post facto doctor visits and what signals we saw months earlier. People came to me and said, I'm not going to wear something all the time that monitors signals are crazy. It's too privacy. And now look, we all have something on our... Everybody accepts that now. We were just far too ahead of the mentality of people willing to do that. Of course, 10 years later, Fitbit came out, and then that Grazzy wore people down.

1:01:18And now, if you sold something, they could say people's lives that all they had to do was wear something and say, of course, no problem. So that company failed in around 2002. We couldn't find any investors to participate and we didn't really go forward with it. But being honest about the feedback you're getting on what people really accept what you're doing is very important. Yeah, that is true. Not deceiving yourself. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So these are just a bunch of different companies where the timing was good, timing wasn't as good. This was I was actually talking about again how PV panels are now so cheap.

1:01:49The dollar cheap, the four times cheaper for a PV panel. They did a window, right? So you could buy a window with a frame that does nothing except let light in and that costs for $17 and you could buy a PV panel of the same size that costs $109 and it makes electricity. So this is another lesson from you, from exponential. When you have a learning curve to drive down the cost, you get exponential cost reductions over time. As you make things in exponentially large volume, it almost follows Moore's law kind of effect. So we don't make windows at the scale, we make TV battles. Amazing. Of the same size of the same format.

1:02:25So it really is incredible. But I was talking about how AI feels like the internet in 1995. But faster, even faster. I mean, I thought about this, Bill Gross must be having a heyday on a day generation. I would have a heyday on it, except I thought it weren't so focused on climate. So I still have a ideas, and I do them, but not one a week, like I could be. Okay, list number four, iterate like crazy. I definitely feel we talked about it earlier. It's not your initial idea, it's how you respond to the market. And you really need to be listening to customers, listening to feedback, adjusting things along the way, and I actually think you win on iteration.

1:03:07How fast you can learn per time? A agility. Really? And running experiments and actually aggressively running experiments. Remember, one of my favorite quotes from Jeff Bezos is our success at Amazon as a function of the number of experiments we run per year, per month, per week, and per day. Totally. So, I joke, I should have called it an iterate lab, not ideal lab. Yes. Interation is more important than the idea, but ideal lab sounds better, but iterative is what you really have to do. And back to the Jeff Bezos quote, I call it learning per time, turns on knowledge. Every time, if you're a startup, you're competing against a big company probably, some in common somewhere, whether it's Google, whether it's price water out, whatever, whoever you're competing with, they're better funded, they have more people, they have more brand.

1:03:55What do you have? You have agility. That's the one thing you have. willingness to fail. Both those. Yeah. I mean, one of the biggest challenges I see is the large corporations. Yeah, this is also true of the wealthiest individuals are afraid of doing anything that makes them look foolish and failing, right? And it's like I celebrate those entrepreneurs like yourself, like Elon Musk, that are willing to like just bet it all over and over and over again. And individuals who are hoarding their cash, it's like, you know, you still can't take it with you. I mean, do something change the world for God's sakes.

1:04:32Yeah. Well, on the willingness to fail, I wanted ideal lab to be a safe place for people to do experiments like that. And no matter how much you say, we want people to do that. People watch what really happens. And if they see anybody ever lose their job by taking a chance, then they won't do it. So one of the structures of ideal lab that we put in place to mitigate that was if a company fails or if a person makes an idea and a company that fails, one, we celebrate the learning, but two, if that company actually goes out of business, we try and take the best people and just put them in a new company.

1:05:05So we really want to make it safe. We really want to make it safe for people to take chances. And the only way they'll really feel that safety is if they see that they are safe. Not the words you use, but the actuality of what happens. And this sounds very much like Astro Teller at Google X, right? Yeah. I asked Astro one day, why are you so secretive at X? And his answer surprised me. He said, I want you to imagine the rate at which our companies fail here. And if the San Jose Mercury News, whatever it's called, was announcing Google fails another company, another company. But you said another important advantage.

1:05:42The startup has over a big company. A big company has a reputation to protect. And they can't announce those failures. And they can't announce them. They might leak out so they just don't take them. They don't take the chances. And maybe even the Google versus OpenAI example of recent is one example of Google sort of inventing that Technology and for years before years before yeah, but but it's a little too risky for them to release something that could damage Google's reputation, but for another startup who has nothing to lose well the other example here is YouTube in Google videos Yeah, right?

1:06:13So Google videos preceded YouTube by some time. Oh, is that true? I didn't know and and YouTube started going up into the right because Google's lawyers We're like, you can't put that on, you can't put that on. And so when Chad Hurley was allowing anybody to put any videos on their user adoption was so high, Larry Sergei had no other option to do that. Yeah, that's a perfect example. But that's why I start up, how to take advantage of that. If you have that advantage, you got to use it because that's almost the only advantage you have compared to all the other great advantages that the big company has.

1:06:44That's so true. Yep. So next one, create a remarkable offering. So this is a little bit related to being bold, but this great quote from Robert Stevens, who did Geek Squad at Best Buy. Is marketing is a tax on being unremarkable. And I love it because it really says, if you have to spend money to convince people about your product, that's the marketing dollars you have to spend. But if you just make your offering incredible in the first place, that is your marketing. And I always I love this because I'm always trying to whenever I'm pushing an idea I want the idea to stand out and sound incredible But coming up with the right way to make your offer stand out is really really important It could be anything.

1:07:29I don't know if you remember when Google first launched Gmail I think they launched it on April Fool's Day in a given year when they offered you a gigabyte of free email And that sounded like such a crazy offer. They made it sound like it was a It will fool fake, but it was real. And they made an offering that sounded so exciting that people were rushing to go try it out. And I think you need to try and do that with everything now. Of course, giving away gigabyte of email now costs nothing because storage is so cheap and now they have advertising to cover it. But the, now it's a business too. You can buy the business version of Gmail.

1:08:05But coming up with a way that your offering sounds irresistible to people is very important. Again, especially if you're a startup, you have limited funds, you have limited budget, that you have a limited way to stand out, making your offering. Signal above the noise. Are there any good examples from your recent companies that you love? I like going out and offering, we came up with an idea of offering. Whatever your cost is for energy, we'll do a deal with you that's just 10 % less. Just show us your bill and we'll charge you 10 % less. So that way it's a no risk. You're gonna save money in the first month.

1:08:35That would be an example of remarkable offering. Just coming up with anything that makes it so obvious for people to just say, wow, that's too hard to pass up. Yes, it was a stable offer. Yep. Next is being success sensitive. So we talked about this. You asked about how much equity we get out early on. And I learned that it's so hard to make a company work. And you so badly want everyone of them to work that forget about delusion, just do whatever it takes to make the thing successful. The ratio of something to nothing is infinite. So give out the equity liberally, make sure everybody wins, make sure investors get a good deal, make sure employees have a good deal, make sure everyone is aligned.

1:09:17When you have alignment, you have more success and to be so worried about each point of equity, which is hard to give up as an entrepreneur, but I learned. I could not agree more. The times that I have failed on a complications when I drove the valuation up too fast. Yes. Yes. And then you inevitably stubble because you're doing something big and bold at the heart. And then it's doing down around. So it's very intoxicating to drive the valuation up, but it's also dangerous. It is dangerous. It is dangerous. And I learned that lesson and I really try and convince CEOs. Sometimes CEOs get this offer, someone wants to offer them a little bit more money or a little bit more valuation.

1:09:58And they're grinding themselves about where they should take it. And I say, just take it. Just if that person is going to help you be successful, just do it. When's the best time to raise money right now? Right. So getting great alignment between everybody is really, really important. Beautiful. That is maturity, by the way. Yeah. That comes with maturity and experience. It's wisdom is. Yeah, definitely learn that one the hard way, but very valuable. Building a complimentary team. Definitely, I learned. It took me until I was 35 years old to learn this one. I wish I learned this when I was in college.

1:10:33I was hiring people like me. I was looking for people like you, like my brother, like other people to surround myself with people with the same view as me. But to be successful on a company, you need a whole range of people. And this chart is a good example of it. If this chart is time on the X -axis and success on the Y -axis, the entrepreneur, the E -type person, starts the company. That's the only person who can start a company. It's the person with the Druhuza dreamer, the person who's got the idea. So the company goes up and to the right for a little while, but if the entrepreneur can't get anything done can't finish can't ship a product Or can't get then the company will eventually fail now just because you're an entrepreneur doesn't mean you can't finish something like you and I both Know how to we know how to graduate college.

1:11:13We know how to get our papers And we know and we know how to build something But you eventually have to bring the P or producer skill into the company next and the P skill is the ability to to finish the product, ship the product, get in customers hands, get a customer to buy it, raise the money, pay the bills. So the P skill is necessary in a company too, but even that will only carry you so far. Eventually, if you only have E and P skill in the company, you'll fail as well. Now you need some A skill. So what's the A skill? That's the skill that I have not enough. Not only do I have not enough, I'm negative.

1:11:43I'm negative. A is chief of staff. A is chief of staff. A is the administration. A is the operation. All the operations. It's opening the bank account. It's paying the bills on time. It's making the payroll. It's getting people's healthcare plan set up. It's all the stuff We have no in no patience for well, so the you and I have no patience for but there's some people who who that's what's incredible There's people who now you have patience for it. They love that But I didn't understand that I didn't I so thought that everybody hates that I couldn't understand there were people who actually love that and I wanted to find someone like that to compliment me Yes, and I finally learned that but then even further than the a and you need the a so the a day is the person who sort of makes the trains run on time, makes everything work together.

1:12:22But even beyond that, you'll still fail because all those three person eye types, they sort of hate each other's guts. The A doesn't like the P. The P is demanding and is a bull in a china shop. The P wants to make sales and it feels like the A is holding the back. The E wants to invent new things and it feels like the P in the air holding the back. So you need I. The I is the integrator or the skill that can bring those people together and solve conflict. Now again, it doesn't have to be a separate person. It usually is. Well, they soon be an AI that's doing number -dc - Exactly. Exactly. So you need to find these other skills.

1:12:55For me, I didn't even know those existed. Let alone could I get along with them. But once I learned that there were wonderful eyes that could help me match with peas and a's, it was fantastic. And it's still hard. Like even me describing this makes it sound like I'm good at this. It's still hard. The people part of the equation is still the hardest part and the most important. Yeah, but if you can get all those skills in harmony, you have an unstoppable company. When you have all these in harmony, you have an advantage culturally over another company that doesn't. This is where culture can beat another company.

1:13:31You can win a company with IP, better business model, better capitalization, better marketing and all that, but you can also win with better culture. Because if you have all these people in harmony, you really are unstoppable. You can do things that other people can't touch. Amazing. So that's the complementary team. Be a personal growth learning machine. We talked about this a little bit earlier, but this is about getting feedback, improving yourself, learning new things, learning new skills, like me learning that there's an A, learning that there's an I type person. But I heard this one statement once, closing the gap.

1:14:07Sometimes I see people who I admire and I say, how could I be like that? Like they're exhibiting some skills that I don't know how to do that. Rather than thinking about the big leap between me and them, I think about, let me just close the gap a little bit. Let me just try and close the gap between me and that skill a little bit each week or each month. Let me just get a little closer. It was a way of me thinking about it being not so big of a chasm that I had across to get there. And what little skills could I pick up that will make me a little bit better at the things that I'm lacking right now?

1:14:37I mean, there is a school of thought that says, if you're excellent in skills, A, B, and C and don't have DE and F, double down an A, B, and C. Absolutely, but I'd agree with that. But if there are skills, DE and F that are pulling you down, that are negating you, that are hurting your other skills, you could find a way to minimize that. And that's an example of closing the gap for me. So, what? And do you do this with a mentor? Do you do this by reading? How do you do this? Mentor, coach, reading, and feedback. And understanding, well, asking for feedback, learning how to take feedback and accept it, learning how it's not personal, but beneficial, having people you trust to give you feedback that's valuable.

1:15:22What's hard? It's hard. It was in conversation at a Goldman Sachs event with the align. He said, you know, my friends tell me what's great. My best friends tell me what sucks. Yeah. So you really need some best friends. Yeah. So best friends, to tell you what sucks, and to just make some impact on closing the gap. Not eliminating it completely, it's too hard. You're not going to change yourself, and you don't want to eliminate the strengths. But finding a way to make it as an incremental improvement to be a little bit better. Did you see the movie Oppenheimer? If you did, did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs, that they spent billions on biodefense weapons, the ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their RNA.

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1:17:28You'll find it at viome .com slash Peter. Number nine, assess your commitment. You we talked about this earlier. Yeah. This is, do you wake up? I told you about recruiting CEOs. Do you wake up and say, I can't, I can't sleep over this idea. It's too important to me. So I taught a class and entrepreneurship at Caltech this last term. It's the first time I've ever done that. How big was the class? It was 31 students. I was a happy graduate. I was happy to have a good class. Yeah. Well, if we filmed that I'm going to try and get it online. But it was really, really way harder than I thought, but way more rewarding than I thought.

1:17:56It was really fun. And I taught them about these kinds of things. And I helped them create business plans, take their ideas forward, and then we're having a business plan competition that we funded so that they can get some awards to try and take their ideas forward. And when I was having them come up with 10 ideas, they're saying 10 ideas. I'm not as good ideas as you are Bill. I said, just come up with 10 ideas. They don't have to be ideas. Just even come up with 10 problem statements, meaning things in the world that you wish were better. Yeah, like I hate traffic on the 405 and I wish doors away.

1:18:27I could with anything just come up with something that you don't like Then you wish for different that that's an idea as far as I'm concerned So everybody in the class came up with 10 ideas Then I said now that that was homework assignment number one That's homework Simon you're gonna pair them down. So how are you gonna pair them down? I'm gonna give you a spreadsheet with 16 columns in it You're gonna pick any 10 of those columns and give a score So one column is what's the size of the market one column is are you capable of doing this? how hard would it be to recruit people to do it? How good would the margins be in this business?

1:18:58And you pick any of the columns you want, but I just want you to fill up a spreadsheet, a 10 by 10 matrix, just so you can figure out which of these you're gonna take forward for your business plan in this class. And one of the columns is, how committed to you are this idea? Would you spend a week on it, a month, a year? How long would you spend on it? So two people in the class came back on that column and said, I would spend the rest of my life on this. I said, you spend the rest of your life on this. So yeah, I care about this so deeply. Well, that's your idea. Forget the other nine columns.

1:19:27You don't have to worry about anything else. That's the criteria. So if you can assess your commitment to something and decide, I care about this so much that I'll go to the end of the earth for it. That's the way you should decide. Yeah, I could not agree more. You know, in the parlance of what I write and teach, I call that your massive transformative purpose. Exactly. And this is just my way of saying that same thing. But yeah, but using a how long would I be willing to commit to this as a filter for your life for your ideas is a really great one And so I think a lot of entrepreneurs don't realize it takes a decade.

1:20:03Yeah, yeah, it takes at least a decade You know point at any company You know people don't realize SpaceX is you know got 20 plus years old right now, right? Yeah, it's it does It says does take a long time. It sticks But it does take that long. You just don't know about it during its formative ages. It's formative years. Yeah, so you really have to be committed. So I'm committed to this climate work that I'm doing right now. It also happens to be the biggest business opportunity. Well, it has a few things. It's biggest business opportunity. It matches my skill, I'm a cat engineer, and I love doing things like that.

1:20:38So I'm choosing mechanical related things in the climate. But also, I work on it for my life. So it's exactly me, a secretary. I didn't even think about it that way, but it was really resonate with me when these two young women said that about their ideas in this class about being important criteria. And then finally be persistent. So this graph is so great. Every idea you start out with, like with Blastoff that we talked about earlier, but every idea I start out with, it's always, this is the best idea ever. You wouldn't start if you didn't feel that. But then after you get into it, you start learning there are challenges.

1:21:11There are roadblocks, there are things. It's harder than I thought. Reality sets in. Reality sets in. And my biggest learning over the last 25 years, over the last 50 years is that that just happens. Like that is a fact of life. That's part of the story. That's part of the journey. And in fact, climbing out that dark swamp of despair, that is the thing. Like that is the skill that makes the difference between succeeding and not. Yeah. It's the persistence. You know, for me, I remember, I mean, with X Prize launched it and came up with the I'm 94, I launched it in 96 and then you've got the Columbia accident.

1:21:45You've got, you know, 2000, you know, meltdown in 2001 and you start with people, you start with it. People literally call me saying, give up. It's never going to happen. You never did it. My other, my zero G corporation. If you flown with us and wait for us. No, I have it. I have to do. I have to come. Yeah. But I remember Howard has done it multiple times. Yeah. He's and dried it, I remember coming up with the business model and being so naive. Yeah, so naive about what it cost to operate 727s and do this and get through the FAA on this. And of course, my favorite example was going into the FAA, so confident with all my engineering done that we were going to be able to fly.

1:22:32Because NASA has been flowing people in fly people in wait list power box flights and the the associate administrators who I had in the room look at me and go you can't do this it it it doesn't allow this you're not allowed to take people out of their seat but Peter you have the naysayer gene built into you yes when people tell you that it makes you want to do it even more I told I said listen you're either gonna retire or die before I give up right well so entrepreneurs who have been successful have automatically made it through this. But if you want to bring new entrepreneurs in and they're young, or they haven't experienced this yet, to teach them that this is going to happen is eye -opening, because they so often hear stories of up and to the right where there is no swamp of despair in the middle.

1:23:20So making people understand that that's part of it. And in fact, I think this is not true only of entrepreneurship. Here on the top, it says, emotional journey of creating anything great. This is the emotional journey of graduating from college, of writing a book, of doing a play, of anything that you want to do that is an important thing. And in fact, you don't appreciate it unless you go through something like that. Yeah, it's given to you. Exactly. Yeah. So I really end on this. And the only thing I add to that is this try again, which was a great lesson I learned from Reed Hoffman. So I'm at a Lean Startup conference and Reed Hoffman is presenting.

1:23:55and he talks about how LinkedIn was his third social network. He had two failed social networks before that. I didn't know that either. And each one, he learned something that made him want to try again. And he was willing to try again because he felt, oh, now I know how to do this a little bit better. So if you fail at something and you don't learn anything new and you don't know a new way to do it, I don't recommend trying again. But if you failed at something and you learn something and you say, ah, so for example, the Z dot com, which we learned armors take of being too early. If I had known that back in 2004, 2005, I could have tried again.

1:24:32It's not appropriate to try again now. It's too late. But this lesson I took away to think of each of these things as at bats where you go at bat. If a baseball player goes up at bat and they strike out, they don't give up, they don't never play baseball again. They look at the tape. They ask their coach about what was that last pitch? What did I miss about the signal, what did I do was my swing to and you go up a bat again, you go try again. And the idea of taking a company even that it failed and doing that same idea again, but with new knowledge, didn't really resonate with me until I heard Reath Hoffman say it.

1:25:07And now I really even feel that is it? I've done that twice before, one with international space university, then singularity university, and learning from the first business model failure and creating it again. and then with human longevity and fountain life. How about yourself? Have you done that? Yeah, so I did different solar companies that I learned from, different storage companies that I learned from, and again, sometimes you missed the timing, and now it's too late to try it again, but sometimes you learn something, and now the timing is right. So I want an example. I did an energy storage company in 2013 that didn't work out, but that's because solar energy wasn't cheaper than fossil fuel at that time.

1:25:47So I knew what was going to happen, but now 10 years later 2013, for 23, now all of a sudden PV prices came down, not by my doing, by China's doing it, by Germany investing in subsidies, and other things happened in the world that I couldn't make happen. I was hoping they would happen, they took 10 years. Like you said, everything takes 10 years. It took 10 years for PV prices to come down to be competitive with fossil fuels, but that happened as an externality that now makes going back and focusing on storage valuable. Amazing. You know, Bill, to close us out here, I typically say entrepreneurship is the greatest joy.

1:26:26It is, I love it. I love the art of starting a company. You know, I'm on 27th, I know, not 150, but That's incredible, 27. But anyway, it's joyful. You know, what are your thoughts to the entrepreneur who's on the verge of taking that risk? Well, I would say it's one of the most rewarding things of all time. It's a great thing for personal growth. It's a great thing for bonding with other people. My children were in the school play in high school. I never was. And I saw the bonding and camaraderie that they had working on something together and the celebration they had when the play was done and I thought, God, I really missed out on that life.

1:27:11And I realized, no, I didn't. I did it with entrepreneurship. I make my own way of having celebration with a team. So it's a wonderful way to bond with other people, change the world, make the world a better place. And I would say over the course of my career, it's gotten easier in the sense that people understand entrepreneurship. There's way more investors available to do this now. There's way more openness entrepreneurship is celebrated in a way that it wasn't when I graduated from college. I was hiring some people after I graduated from Caltech. I had to take their parents to dinner to convince them I wasn't some pariah because they had offers at JPL and aerospace companies and here I was getting them to come to a little startup.

1:27:50Like what are you doing to my child? But now that doesn't happen anymore. And I think we're around the same age for when we were in high school into college, it was Wall Street, which was the place to be. Yeah, you would graduate, you go get a safe job at a big business. And the idea now, the other thing that's really great for entrepreneurship, especially in the United States and especially in California, but everywhere in the United States, is people who have a failure, that can almost be a badge of honor. And you learn. Yes, so I think there are some cultures that treat it a little bit more like a scarlet letter as opposed to a bargain badge of honor.

1:28:28But here, if you've learned something from your entrepreneurship, you can go do anything still, even if it doesn't work out. So the combination of the impact it can have, the camaraderie, the joy, the learning, and then the upside, of course, the upside is pretty incredible too. I mean, having an ownership stake in a company, I said it before, but I'll say it again, it unlocks human potential. If you ever got into a business where the owner is behind the counter or a hired hands behind the counter, you know the difference about when someone feels like you're in a business like they're an owner about how great the service can be, about how powerful the feeling of ownership is.

1:29:03So I love the idea of giving people significant ownership in a company and seeing what happens. It's really exciting. Bill, thank you for all that you've done. Thank you for sharing your lessons from the heart, your wisdom. Oh, thank you. I'm honored to be able to do it. And you can tell I totally believe in this. And I hope this can help other people be successful. I know it can. Check out Bill on the web, just Google, Bill Gross, and the lessons you've been putting out amazing content. Idealab .com. Anyplace else that we should send folks. Just there and at YouTube, you'll see it everything.

1:29:38Awesome. Great. Thank you, Bill. All right. Thanks.