#279 Ryan Beiermeister: Founders Fund's Partner on Building for Billions, Human Judgement & How Debate Changed Her Life

0:00Hi, I'm Vidit, founder and host of this podcast, The High Flyers. Hi, everyone. I'm Ryan Beiermeister. I'm a partner at Founders Fund. Ryan, I'm nervous to do this. Everyone I spoke to tells me you're just good at everything. So I'm a bit nervous. Way too kind. I am definitely bad at many things, but I really appreciate that. Thanks, friends and fam, for hooking me up. I'm excited to do this because I don't think you've actually shared your story in totality like our format. So I'll see how far I can get into it. Hey friends, welcome back or welcome to the High Flyers podcast, where we do reimagine a high flyer, showcase the brightest and most relatable role models and companies and the journey from sunrise to today.

0:41As one of the premier products in our Curiosity Center lineup, providing on-demand intelligence to help you be 1 % better every single day. I'm your host, Virita Agarwal, and let's have some fun. Our listeners have called this podcast a meticulously researched biography unveiling the extraordinary lives and decisions of the most remarkable individuals and companies from around the world. We hope you're enjoying our catalog of 200 plus episodes since we launched in 2020 with many of our guests appearing in rare public interviews. It's now time to explore your curiosity. Please enjoy. Let's set the scene with some fun facts.

1:22where were you born and where do you live now? Okay, so I was technically born in Dallas, but I'm a Houstonian. So I like to scratch that from the record. I'm from Houston. Right now I live in beautiful San Francisco. It's gorgeous outside and reminding me of why I chose to be here. And work, what was your first job and what do you do now? Technically, my first job was teaching debate at a summer debate camp for high schoolers. One of my students actually went on to be a famous novelist. So I cling credit. But my first real job was at Palantir when I was 22. And then I went to Meta and OpenAI.

1:56And now I'm a partner at Founders Fund looking at the world through an investment lens. I am so excited to unpack that career journey because you've almost like collected all the logos, right? But then your childhood was very different. So I think that'd be an interesting contrast. Definitely. I would say that my younger self were to know what my career ended up being, I'd be shocked. And I think the people around me would be shocked as well. So it's been a really interesting journey. And it's been awesome to find my footing in these spaces as someone who's a little bit different from traditional tech hires.

2:26Totally. And I think particularly Founders Fund, because Founders Fund, I think, likes people like you who've got a variety of experiences. And I think you fit right in. Totally. I've been at Founders Fund about two months now, and I have never felt so free to be myself. I feel like this job and investing, especially at Founders Fund, the goal is to be me. and I was hired because I'm me. And I think a variety of investing styles and brain styles and different experiences produce really good outcomes when you're trying to get a really diverse but concentrated fund in some of the best companies in the world.

2:58And so far, I just felt like the goal is to figure out myself as an investor versus fit any particular mold. It's been awesome. And I'm really excited as we chat today about the transition from being, I guess, an operator exec to being a VC as we were chatting the other day. That is a very fascinating transition. that people let go through. I love asking that. So I think as we chat today, we will look back that. And Ryan, as you know, the purpose of this show is to reimagine a high flyer to recognize some people beyond just their job title. Is there someone you want to call out who you know, who you feel hasn't got the recognition they deserve?

3:28Ooh, I'm going to answer with my Northwestern debate coach, Daniel Fitzmaier. So he has a PhD in political theory, and I think ancient Greek, but he is the head coach of the winningest university debate program in the country. Northwestern has won, I believe, 15 national championships and no other university. I think Harvard is second and is not close to that. And he was my first real mentor. He's mentored hundreds of students. And he didn't just help me win a debate. He helped me become a better person at a really young age and identify what matters. And also, through Aristotle, kind of taught me the value of hard work and the pride that can come from habits of excellence versus the lows and the highs and the trophies.

4:13He helped me become really proud of myself for really the first time as an intellectual and student. And the numbers speak for themselves on the champion outcomes. That is such an interesting comment. He made you feel proud about yourself. Yeah. Again, he kind of like had this phrase borrowed from Aristotle around excellence is a habit, right? So a lot of people think about excellence as the trophy you win or the pinnacle achievement. But his philosophy that really transformed me was that excellence is in the day to day. Excellence is how you carry yourself, how diligent you are, how you show up to work.

4:45Like all of those small things are something to be proud of intrinsically. And that has really guided my life. And I kind of live my principles and I live my values and I give my work my all. And so no matter what happens, I can feel confident and I feel excellent and I feel really proud of myself intrinsically. Back to the episode in a moment. Something I've heard a lot from business owners and leaders is that speed only matters if you still feel confident in the output. And it's particularly an important point in this world of AI. Zero's answer to that is accountable intelligence. AI that shows you what it's doing and works from your own real data and is designed to keep you in control before anything happens.

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6:16And that's why my show has been about like unpacking the sunrise of the person, the childhood and the early years, you mentioned Houston. Tell me about your memories of growing up in Houston. So I grew up in the suburbs, technically. It's now a big suburb called Sugarland. And I had just a really idyllic, normal childhood. I think my parents are incredibly loving and incredibly proud of me. My dad is quite analytical, charismatic, has an amazing memory, history, econ, and was a natural gas trader in Houston. And my mom is whip smart. I think she has the brain of an engineer, but she also has immense creativity and kind of joy in small things.

6:55And so I actually had a really artistic childhood. My favorite moments growing up or in the summer is when my mom taught art classes for the local kids in our neighborhoods, or we would have a birthday party where we're hot gluing and making gem kind of jewelry boxes with cheap plastic gems and gluing them. And I was a theater kid. I starred in local plays. My mom made the costumes. Like I had a really free childhood where I felt expressive and able to be myself. And I also felt really loved by my parents. They were really proud of me for both my intelligence and then also my kind of boldness as the older sister.

7:34So it was great. It was normal. And then after kind of going to public elementary school, which I loved and taught me so much. My parents knew that I was really smart and decided at great financial sacrifice to send me to a private school in Houston, which was a commute for me and one of the fanciest in town. And so that was kind of the moment coinciding with being 11 and being in middle school, where I think a lot changed for me. And I had to think about new things and new feelings of difference that I hadn't experienced before. But all in all, my childhood was one of like games and play and costumes and art and was just wonderful.

8:12I've been told about your parents' sacrifice. I think in the speech you gave recently back when you went back to your school, I think you talked about both Robin and Jeffrey, I think your dad's name and you referenced the sacrifices. How do you reflect on that now? Like I joked to the start where people look at your resume today and you've collected all the logos, right? Like Like if you were playing Pokemon, you've won the game, but you've got them all. But yeah, the reality of your childhood was quite different. Yeah, it was different. Again, I kind of grew up in a very normal middle class environment.

8:41And going to this private school, it was a really elite school. Like sixth graders are carrying Louis Vuitton handbags. Like that's outrageous. And what country club you belong to was important. And your zip code and even just living, you know, no one else lived in the suburbs. and I felt kind of a shame, a sense of shame for the first time. And I think that's always kind of given me a bit of a desire to be successful and to kind of prove all of them wrong. But what's really interesting is I feel like I have a wonderful resume. I feel like it's super successful. I feel like there's so many great things to say about it.

9:12It actually doesn't feel as good on that metric as you think it would. Like I've proven myself and I don't feel like I need to prove myself any further, but I definitely don't feel like that resume proof point has really means that much to me anymore. Like there's so much more to achieve as a human being than getting accolades. And I've reached my kinkade, you know, my dreams from that time period already. And my dreams are a bit different now. And I think contributing to the world is what I care about now versus collecting accolades that other people can understand. It's interesting. I was reflecting the other day on like some of the recent guests I've had on and for whatever reason, they've been female high performers.

9:48And they've all like had very determined high school experiences where they've been very clear. Like I had a lady come on recently and she talked about how in grade six, she wanted to go to this private school in New York and she convinced her parents to get her in and she got in and she did really well. And she now does some really cool stuff in tech actually. And then your story and others. And it got me wondering, like maybe just us as men just weren't that determined when we were kids. And there's something about females being determined because I think of my wife as well. She is just so determined and she had a very strong schooling time whereas I was like the kid who didn't focus and was very like naughty in high school.

10:23Yeah, I think we just have less options as a woman. Like I kind of feel like I have to be on paper incredibly successful and proven because sometimes I operate at a discount for the way that I look. And I think most senior executive women that I know, almost all of them, have really grinded and really done the work to get where they are versus with maybe other genders, not always like it's a little easier to kind of prove yourself in different ways or to be the ideas person or have other things about them that make them attractive in the workplace. Whereas I think most women in senior positions would agree, like we have to grind and I'm primed to do that.

11:01And I think like a lot of my career has been spent, of course, like executing at the highest level, but then also trying to deflate the part of me that is really people pleasing driven, right? Like when you're a little girl, you're literally taught how to please. And certainly there are young boys who are taught that as well. But I think the older I get, the more confident I get in myself and the more I feel like I have less to prove on paper and statistically and based on accolades other people think are worthy. And the only thing that matters is myself at the end of the day and my values and how much I live up to them.

11:33So I don't know, I love getting older, being riser and being freer is all that's happened to me. My life has gotten better year by year. And I am proud and glad and hope that continues. Tell me about sport. So So people said you are obsessed with sport and sports. Tell me how did that love start? Oh, my dad. So I was named after Nolan Ryan. So that is if any listeners confused on why her name is Ryan, it's that reason. Ship it. We'll still do that. I think like one key part of my personality is I love competition and I love play. And I feel misinterpreted sometimes that the competition and the competitive part of me is about me winning and dominating.

12:15It's actually just I like stakes. I like emotion. I like when things matter to people. And my dad is a diehard baseball fan. He grew up listening to the Tigers on radio from his bedroom outside of Detroit. And he converted to the Astros when he moved to Houston a zillion years ago. But I love watching people do what they do best. I get really emotional about it. Like a clip of a random Yankees reliever retiring can make me sob because of just how much they've achieved and how the fans are there for them. And I find it really fascinating. I also find it really joyful and really fun. Growing up, my dad would always call me into the room when a dog pile was happening on the pitcher's mound.

12:55So like some amazing save or ninth inning home run and everyone from the team goes to the pitcher's mound and clobbers the person who did something amazing. And yeah, I kind of live for those moments. And I celebrate those in other people. Like I'll watch a spelling bee. I'll watch bowling. I'll watch anything where people are doing something great and something they've worked really hard for. And I find it an amazing aspect of the human spirit and something I'm really interested in. So yeah, I grew up competitive and playful. I love sports. I love H-Town. And I feel like it's a really core part of who I am.

13:27And it's emotional for me. It's one of the greatest ways I connect with my dad and I got to be the son he never had. I mean, one of the comments that came up in my research is people said you're the Ryan GPT. That's how they would describe you, right? And I think the other side of this is debating. That's been a true line. I mean, I think you were really involved in debating for most of your life. And I think we saw that recently in some of the mafia videos that came out. That was not my interview. I had not even talked to Founders Fund yet about coming and we had been friends for years. But I love that Twitter thought, so that's how I got this job.

13:59Yeah, I would take that. Adam, it's a good perception to have. I'll take it. So again, I kind of like enter this private school. I felt pretty alien. And all of a sudden, a lot of material things mattered that I didn't want to matter. And I started debate in the eighth grade and started going to local Houston high school tournaments with my partner. It was two v two debate. I'm kind of decent at it. I'm good at it and sort of decide to double down. And my high school experience starts to open me to this community of kids all around the country. So we're going to debate tournaments in outside of Chicago, Boston, California, we're kind of going around the country to different weekend tournaments, and you make friends, and then you go to debate camp with those friends.

14:40And then all of a sudden, your social capital is a function of your intelligence and how good you are at debate. I would be cool if we read the Nietzsche critique, and I knew XYZ philosopher, or we had constructed this new argument no one had heard, or if I was top speaker of a tournament, like that was what was cool. And that was really profound for me at such a young age, kind of struggling with the doldrum of high school in general, all of a sudden, my intellectual strengths was social capital and was what made me cool. And I developed authentic friendships for the first time in a real way.

15:14So I fell in love with it with it. It was a game, it had competition. A lot of people think of debate as like purely kind of a speech activity and communicating and being persuasive really matters. but it's actually like high speed chess. There's a lot of different strategic types of arguments you make and you intersect them with others. And I just fell in love with the game and fell in love with a community that saw me for something other than my zip code. So it's so interesting because sport, there's arts, there's creativity, there's debate. These are the four things that have already come up in our conversation.

15:45I mean, we can go back and forth here, but I'm curious out of all the roles you did in your career, which role allowed you to bring all those different parts of your brain to work? I'm actually going to say my career is Palantir, OpenAI, and Meta. And I could say great things about all three. I'm going to say Meta, actually. I loved my role and work at Meta. So I was a product director responsible for a lot of social issue areas and the kind of content ecosystems that play out on Instagram and Facebook. And so that meant things like politics and elections, both integrity and safety, but also good information around elections, the health teams and COVID misinflow.

16:23I had a climate team roll up to me. And then I also did a bunch of kind of youth well being work in my last year there. And these were all heavy topics and places that the company needed to do better and also just had real meaning and import for the world and for people's lives for better or for worse, that was an inevitability. And I felt like all of my creative and intellectual talent went into finding ways to make even 1 % changes, right at the scale of 4 billion users, if you make a tiny change that makes the platform more safe or better information quality or better for communities, you're achieving a lot for the world.

16:58And I had to take these very complex, highly sensitive domains that have all these stakeholders and I had to find creative ways to make a difference within that company and to get alignment across internal stakeholders that hold a variety of different views. And so it leveraged my political science background, the substance of where my brain has been at over the last couple of years. But then also my creativity, because I was operating with incredible constraints that forced creative solutions, while also communicating and getting alignment and knowing what data science to grab and to capture to make the argument sound.

17:31And I felt like there were few people in the world who could do what I was doing by the end. And I felt an obligation to that work. I've actually been told, I think a common thread in my research was, people said, social justice predates your career, like your interest in social justice. I'm curious, what was the earliest example of your curiosity about that field? Well, I think the best answer actually is literature for me. So I'm going to say that the earliest signal was just I have a lot of empathy, and I'm kind of a mush ball deep down. And my earliest memory of that, and I read a lot of fiction, and I love reading, and I'm worried about the state of reading in their world.

18:07And when I was probably 11 or so, I read this book called The Chosen, which is like a 1967 book about Jews in Brooklyn. And it's a friendship between a super Orthodox Hasidic Jew and a slightly less but still Orthodox Jewish friend. And the main character is brilliant. And I just loved him. And he kind of was met with silence from his father growing up, his father would never speak to him. And his father had like his own reasons and was an act of love is trying to teach him something. But I just remember crying and just feeling such emotion towards this character. And also, I was a kid who was dropped off at Sunday school in the middle of Texas in the suburbs.

18:47And I'm reading a book about Hasidic Judaism and trying to understand that and just feeling so much for people whose world was completely different than mine. And I say that only because, again, I think that reading has been a big part of my education, my empathy, my understanding of why life can be hard for other people. And I feel like that foundation and knowledge base makes it impossible for me not to care about others and care about improving the world for others. I'm a big fan of Rawls, the democratic theorist, and very simply kind of is like our politics should be informed by what helps the least advantaged.

19:23And if you help the least advantaged, you raise the floor, you probably make everyone's lives better. And that really sticks with me. And it's something that I'm constantly thinking about like how does my work contribute to other people and you know I've carried that throughout my career and it's something I'm really proud of and it shapes my whole interest area and focus. Yeah and I mean as we talk to your career I think we can unpack some of these interesting journeys. Tell me about when you were 18 so if I met you at that age with all these ambitions you've had and influences till that point what would I have assumed you do with your life?

19:55My parents gave me a million incredible gifts I'm obsessed with them but I was kind of in a different league at this point. I didn't have a ton of adults who were thinking or advising me to think about my career. So I wouldn't have had an answer for you. I probably would have said law school, question mark, because of my interest in politics and debate. And that seems like a natural path. But I was a kid kind of living in the moment. And I didn't have any financial literacy, for example, I didn't realize that the most important thing I could be doing with my adolescence is preparing for the journey that is a career.

20:29And I got really lucky. I focused on being smart and following my interests in the moment. And that made me really interesting and got me the job at Palantir. But I can't say that I've had a master plan besides being ambitious, caring about things, caring about myself, caring about the world, seeking success and intelligence and knowledge and right place, right time. I'm incredibly grateful for the way my career has unfolded. I'm probably not giving myself enough credit. But I also think that and I tell a lot of young people this, that my commitment to debate really made me stand out. Like I had a thing.

20:59I had a career before I had a career. I had to go through all the highs and the lows of that. I failed. I succeeded. I worked hard. I got promoted. And so 18 year old Ryan would have also said, I'm focused on winning debates. And luckily that priority and interest coincided with a career before I had a career that made me, I think, even better at my work today. So you went to Northwestern and then I I want to ask about the post-Northwestern to Palantir because Frey actually told me in the research for this that they had this experiment to try and recruit debating champions into Palantir in the early days.

21:35And it was a risk and apparently you were one of the people that worked out. Can you reflect on that? That's interesting. I think what's cool about Palantir and is very cool about Founders Fund today is that the hiring strategy is just remarkable people. And so I'm 22 years old. I have zero experience working for a tech company. I'm a political science and English person. I don't know anything about Silicon Valley or software or really much at all. But I stood out and Palantir miraculously offered me a job on the basis of my debate accomplishments. I was the number one rigged debater in the country my senior year of college.

22:11I was top speaker at the national championship, the fourth woman since 1946 on that. And that just made me stand out. And they're willing to take a bet on my intelligence and my promise versus my experience. And for what it's worth, I remember someone else starting with me who was a champion bowler. You know, like it was really a strategy of hire remarkable people and assume that they do great things. And I really benefited from that. I would say it was definitely probably the peak debate. There was a couple of other actually great debaters who went to Palantir. But I think like taking a bet on someone or like including a founder based on their intellectual caliber.

22:47And, you know, again, I had a career before I had a career. I'd worked hard before for something totally unrelated to my grades. Yeah, I was lucky to like intersect with a company that was thinking that way at that time. So you were at Palantir for seven years, I believe, or just over seven years, right? Just over seven. Yeah. That is incredible. And this was before Palantir became Palantir. Like I think when you joined, it wasn't mainstream, right? How do you reflect on those seven years? because that was also your first professional job. Is that right? 100%. How do you reflect on that? Like I love asking what were the foundational skills you developed?

23:18Because when I think of my early jobs, like I learned a ton about me, about the world, about what not to do. And like it really challenged me early on. I'm curious, how do you reflect on your first seven years at Palantir? I kind of think about it as the place I grew up, right? So obviously I've grown up before those years. We just talked about that. But it was a phenomenal place to become a real professional. And I think for a couple of reasons, I think one, it truly had the vibe of meritocracy. Like you could be a 25 year old with an incredible amount of responsibility and you got that responsibility by just being good and having that be noticed.

23:55And so for a young person where there's so much work happening, the company's growing so quickly, there's not enough people to do the things that need to be done. I was just granted a lot of responsibility young that I frankly wasn't qualified for, But it's a good feeling when you're not qualified for something because you have to rapidly learn and sink or swim. And so I just was able to kind of get exposure and real experience on a faster curve than if I had worked at a large company or even in meta and just kind of boxed into a junior role. I also think Palantir like gave me a lot of exposure to the challenges in the world.

24:28So I worked closely in my especially my first couple of years there with the Secret Service on anti money laundering work. I worked with the Department of Justice on fraud. I worked with the Securities and Exchange Commission on insider trading, the FBI on counterterrorism, actually the IRS Criminal Investigations Division on a lot of counterterrorism work as well. And then eventually also the military and intelligence agencies and the FBI equivalent in France. And I just got to see the analytical challenges in those spaces in public safety and build a Rolodex of user empathy and understanding for what people are trying to do and why that was hard.

25:07So actually, a couple of years into my work at Palantir, the CTO of Palantir at the time, Brian Schimpf, who's now the CEO of Anderol, decided that they needed to restart a lot of the core government product work in Palo Alto. We had just kind of not been innovating on the core piece of software that I was implementing on the business side. And he asked the business team, like, who's the best kind of like forward deployed person who understands users and strategy and empathy and could design a product creatively. And my name was surfaced. And so I was invited to kind of come to Palo Alto and lead a small team of some of the best engineers in the company and really zero to one prototype a new era of the Palantir Gotham product.

25:47And I learned product management. I was one of the first PMs at the company. I learned from Dan Cervelli, this wonderful engineer, I learned about taste. I learned how to connect my user empathy goals to like product UIs and design and features and testing and going to market. And that was the education and experience that changed my whole career. That's how I got into product in a really meaningful way from my kind of core creativity and user empathy skills. And then that team and that work kind of scaled and scaled. And I was leading a lot of the work for the Gotham government platform. By the time I left Palantir, I was had a huge portfolio and was trusted with that.

26:25And yeah, I think there couldn't be a better place for me to grow. And it was also a very different company at the time, right? It had wasn't public. There were a lot of the concerns that exist today weren't as weren't as obvious. I was young and it felt like a great thing to work on preventing domestic violence with the FBI. And so things have changed. But on the whole, I have a lot of respect for people who commit themselves to those types of challenges within or without or on the outside of the US government or other governments. One of the notes I took from our call the other day is I think you mentioned that you scaled really quickly in the company.

26:59I think that's one of your comments. I'm curious how you did that. Are there any particular projects you worked on? Because from my understanding, Palantir has always been a very high performance oriented culture, right? I mean, I don't think someone like Trey would put up with someone if they don't perform. So what did you do in that time that allowed you to shoot up so quickly? Again, I just started to be known for my ability to go into a new environment. Let's say it was the Securities and Exchange Commission, which was actually my favorite project. I go into the SEC and we're trying to get them.

27:28They have a pilot maybe with Palantir and the software. and we're trying to deploy that, get the investigative attorneys to really like the tool, use the tool to solve real meaningful challenges for them and then grow that at enterprise scale. And I'm a real quick study. I think debate is part of that. You just have to be able to information process really quickly and learn things on the fly. And so I would pretty quickly come to understand and empathize with what these investigative attorneys are trying to do and how they piece together an insider trading investigation. How do the phone calls line up with the emails, line up with the trades, line up with the network that we know about.

28:01And the clients really thought of me as an extension of them. And I got so much positive feedback and demonstrated really creative ways to get the software adopted in those spaces that I became known for my ability to like apply the product creatively empathize with the user and grow a deployment to much larger scale. And so again, when they were thinking about, okay, we need to redo our product suite, they wanted the person who could strategically understand what to build and why at a really high and successful fidelity and who had the creativity mixed with the analytical skills to do that. So that definitely was responsible for my rise.

28:37I also learned really early at Palantir, when you're bad at something, just don't do it. Like I was initially slotted into kind of more kind of like team management roles, setting agendas and schedule and kind of pure execution. I'm great at that now. But when I was when I was that age, I wasn't and I got early advice that like, hey, you're a strategist. You're the person who understands exactly what an insider trading investor attorney or a counterterrorism investigator does. And you're going to figure out the workflow and the product. You're not a project manager type. That's not it's not my brain.

29:08It has never been my brain, really. And so Palantir was great for me in that they encouraged me to double down on what I'm good at. And it feels hard. Don't worry about it. I don't need to be well-rounded. I just need to be me and good at what I'm good at and hone that. I asked a bunch of the Founders Fund team what's some questions I should ask you. And the most common question they said is ask about Trey's evolution from the time you worked with him in 2012 to now in 2026. Can you reflect on that for a minute about how Trey has stayed the same and changed over that time? Yeah. So Trey interviewed me again, I'm 21 or 22 at Palantir.

29:43I had never, it was my first interview ever. And I think Trey and I really connected. I mean, he was what felt like years older than me. It turns out he's probably like five years older than me or something now, but Trey is like a humanist. Like he tells stories and he has a vision and he's strategic and he's communicative. And I'm like that too. And so I think we had a real conversation. It didn't feel like an awkward interview. It felt like a foundation of a friendship. And I actually think that's one of his greatest spikes and skills is his kind of gregariousness and interest and intellectualism and conversation abilities.

30:19And so we just really hit it off. I never got to work super closely with him at Palantir. He left a couple years into me being at the job. But what I really like admire about Trey is that we've connected over having similar backgrounds, where we were kind of on our own and venturing into new places that our family lineages have never done. And he is a different type of investor. He's not quant. He's not like a couple of years ago, if you asked me, what does a VC investor look like? I probably, you know, I have the kind of central casting McKinsey MBA mentality. And Trey is not that he brings a lot of creativity and energy to the space.

30:55And he also has the level of determinism that I think I have. He's just like a great model for me on how a different creative archetype can succeed across multiple dimensions. I think maybe if I am answering the evolution question, he's probably a little crankier now. Like, but I kind of love that. Like, I just love point of view. Like Trey was rocking a meeting earlier today about why most of the other defense companies just like don't make sense as investments. And he's impassioned about it. And he was oratory about it and well qualified and analytically sound. And it's just awesome to hear someone kind of fired up and smart who speaks their mind and is credible in that.

31:32Yeah. Yeah. I don't know, Trey, as well as you do, but my reflection as an observer is he doesn't drink the Kool-Aid. I think a lot of people get into the Valley and drink the Kool-Aid and say everything's perfect, which Trey seems to be grounded, is my observation, without knowing him that well. And which I find very unique to a lot of the other VCs. That's a huge deal, right? I'm learning that as I join this industry. Most VCs, and I think Founders Fund is really special, make decisions based on the past. It's pattern recognition. It's like, oh, I mean, literally, it's one of the main techniques.

32:04You're like, compare this company to what came before, size it. We've seen founders that look like this. We've seen founders that don't look like this. And so it's really tempting to learn the playbook and fit that mold and make decisions and actually like a really framework way. And I feel agency at Founders Fund to question some of those plays and to trust myself more and to experiment. And of course, there's learning from Peter and Trey and the greatest investors on the planet. And there's so much of that that I want to emulate. But I'm also encouraged to bring something fresh to the table at the same time.

32:40And I think Trey is a really good example of that. I came across a really interesting interview, Ryan, that you did back in 2019. And I think this might talk to some of your beliefs and observations about the world. So essentially, you said that AI should remove, this was in 2019, years before any of the tools we have today, that AI should remove repetitive work, but there was no replacement for human judgment. I'm curious, seven years later, do you still believe that second half? I do, actually. Again, I'm a humanist. I think human beings are incredible and dynamic and different. There are no two human beings on planet Earth who have the same experiences.

33:14It's statistically impossible. And there is magic to the right human beings at the right moments in time. And AI is getting really good at efficiency. It's getting really good at automation. But it's also kind of regressing to the mean, right? Like the outputs of these models all look really similar. and it's going to perform the same way it performs over and over again. And it doesn't want mess and it doesn't want imperfection. It doesn't want chaos. Those are things that the models are punished for. And those are intrinsic qualities humans have. And I think that is where magic comes from and our economy and our society in terms of joy.

33:51I'm a techno optimist. I believe in AI. I think it can do incredible things for the world, but I just, in no way do I think it can replicate or replace the really special qualities about being human. And I think we We have to find ways to celebrate those qualities and bring them even more to the forefront right now. I want to come back to you, Karina, in a moment, but this is really interesting. Like, I mean, there's so much talk about AI. And one train of thought is people go, it's going to change everything. And the other train of thought is it's being oversold to us, right? Like humans, like I just hosted, we do an annual summit in Asia.

34:21And I hosted that yesterday and I'm traveling through at the moment. And we had all the big labs speaking and they said, we've got kids and we don't know if our kids are just going to be all using AI. Like these are the application layer, this was LMs. I'm curious, what is underappreciated about AI today that someone like you who is so well read, well researched that you think about that we as a society just aren't thinking about? I think a lot of people are thinking about this, but maybe not as many that should. And that is the developmental impact of interaction with these models. So I got kind of deep at meta and open AI on teens and their uses of technology and both the opportunities and the risks.

35:02And this is a really big experiment the world is running. It's beyond one lab or one company. And we don't really understand yet how a really personalized AI model is going to change the human brain for better or for worse. But it certainly is like an incredibly material change in the way that human development has happened for eons. And so I think that maybe folks feel like it's impossible to know what to do because we don't have the systemic data or understanding to even work on this. But I think we have to try. And to their credit, a lot of labs and companies are working on this. But I'm kind of worried about the human brain.

35:38And I'm worried about replacing incredible teachers that teach you. I'm sure you feel the same. like you have an amazing teacher. And what's amazing about that history teacher, the person who really changed you was not the history. It was something more personal and experiential and something they said to you about you or something they shared in context, the way they open your mind to new ways of thinking and efficiently trained LLMs are not going to do that. And they're also not going to push back right now. So like there's a really big challenge in AI because, you know, what is the model's goal?

36:11It's, you know, it makes sense. You make the user happy and like help them achieve their dreams. And but what happens when the real health of a person and their development is actually dictated by conflict and pushback? And again, the great teachers I've had in my life would tell me like, no, that's a terrible research topic. You're too smart to do a biography of Jackie Kennedy for your eighth grade history project. Do a ran contra instead. And that type of pushback and friction is actually really important to the human experience and to human dynamism. And I worry about that. And I know a lot of researchers and academics beyond just AI are worried about that too.

36:45But it's something that deserves, I think, even more attention before it's too late. And I'd say also we as humans are flawed, right? Whereas AI sometimes can, like even we talked earlier about like debating and writing and literature. I mean, a big conversation point I have with my friends today is if you use AI, everything looks perfect. But you and I and most of the human world is not perfect. And the way we write and the way we think and the way we talk is not perfect. Yeah, that's what's amazing about us. And it's something that can't be lost. And so many anecdotes of inventions that happened by accident or detours made in a career.

37:21AI is not going to take a detour. It's not going to just doodle for the sake of it in the moment. It's not going to understand connection across two people that have totally dissimilar backgrounds. And I think as we make AI amazing and hopefully make it positive impact on the world, we also have to find and celebrate what's amazing about humans and cultivate that and protect that and ensure that's almost a guardrail in this AI conversation. So like, I don't know, one of my favorite questions that I ask my friends is because of my experiences, like if you could design a middle school and you get ownership over the curriculum and also the culture and the structures, like what would you do?

37:55And one of my main answers is like empathy training. I read books about people to understand history and the world. And that provides so much more color and empathy for me when I, you know, as opposed to just reading about the Chinese Cultural Revolution. I read an amazing book a couple years ago on four people all in different sides of the conflict and different economic statuses and their experience from childhood to adolescence, some of them fleeing Shanghai. And it was a wonderful way to learn history, but I did it in a way that I felt deep empathy for all sides. And I think that's an example of something only really a human can feel.

38:29And so can we more directly cultivate that in each other and in children? Yeah, it's something I get asked a lot about. As you know, I do a lot of research for every episode I do on the pod. And often people will say, hey, why don't you just use one of the LLMs? Like you can ask all the questions. And I go, I could, but it doesn't give me body language and it doesn't build trust. Exactly. By me speaking to people that know you, that builds a level of trust with you and I that an LLM will not give me. It might give me really smart questions. And then also it doesn't tell me body language. I think that's something we don't appreciate as much.

38:59Like you would know this as a debater. It's often not the spoken word. It's the eye contact and like is someone taking a gulp? and there's someone like looking down and not looking at you it's stuff like that that tells you more than the spoken word yeah i i couldn't agree more and i used to give lectures to high school students in debate about just like projecting confidence even when you don't have it like here are the ways and the tricks and eye contact and yeah don't take that gulp like take a confident gulp of water but uh i think a lot of those intangibles matter and our brains are constantly reading that in other people so yeah i agree wholeheartedly i also think i mean ai could has the potential to do amazing things.

39:34I think it has potential to do very scary things. And it's all about the people who create it and use it and the incentive structures and how we collectively as a society approach, not just making sure AI gets it right, but also how humans continue to get it right and strengthen our skillset and our health as a society to be able to take a shot to the system and make good out of it. Let's come back to your career because I also want to spend a bit of time on Founders Fund. I think some of your observations are really interesting but take me into 2020 so you had been a volunteer seven years and then you decided to move on you decided to go somewhere else yeah so what i decided to do is i took a role at meta leading and then then it was still facebook leading a bunch of product work for the 2020 election and in particular on the safety side and i actually had a lot of people who thought this was a crazy decision i'm super i'm 29 i'm super high up at palantir by this point i'm reporting the C-suite.

40:31And so I basically don't even have a boss, although I loved my boss. He was just over everything. And I could also at any point kind of decide I wanted to build a new product. I was in France for a year building a new crisis response tool for European governments. I'm doing counterterrorism work and I had it really good. But I think in the back of my mind, I knew I was too young to have it good. And I stopped learning because I was kind of on my own. And I think I was craving closeness, like working for someone really close who was better than me. Like I felt too young to be like the leader in the room.

41:06And I'd been there forever. It's where I grew up. I knew I didn't know anything else. So it felt like a divorce to lead. But when Meta offered me this specific role on elections and safety, I just felt the mission call. You know, I had been working for really intense public safety spaces, building software for users in the basements of the Pentagon. And this felt even more meaningful, actually, because I thought of my mom, I thought of my family, I thought about society, I thought about why this is after 2016, when foreign interference happened on the platform, I just thought about the importance of democracy and families and communities.

41:41And it really moved me to have the chance to work on that. And so I took a leap and went to meta, I forewent my title at Palantir, I entered as a really senior product manager PM, but I certainly nowhere near the kind of like internal status and responsibility that I had at Palantir. And it actually turned out to be one of the best things I ever did to the surprise of a lot of people. I think Meta connected me to a lot of purpose and like social impact that I could have and achieve. So my first year there, again, I was working on election integrity. And in particular, I was doing a lot of work around violence and mobilization in Facebook and in Facebook groups, a lot of dangerous organization work, a lot of counter terror work, and kind of just ways that this very powerful technology could be used to mobilize bad actors.

42:28And like I was reducing the risk of people dying with that work. And I felt purpose on a scale that I've never felt because it was direct. It wasn't indirect. It wasn't like I was building cool software that someone would use and someone would use and then something good would happen in the world. It was kind of like if I don't figure out how to approach this or make a difference here, no one else will on this very specific kind of arena. And that type of pressure was harrowing. And it's, but it also produced the greatest work I've ever done in my entire life. I will never be prouder of anything I achieve.

42:56It's hard to imagine than that year at Meta. And then for the remainder of my time at Meta, I got more responsibility and I got to see and work closely with VPs and execs who were really good and really better than me. And so I leveled up as a leader and a builder tremendously by having exposure to the elite executives at Meta who, like it or not, have to be exceptional at their jobs. You don't survive and get paid that much and get that much responsibility at a company like that without being incredibly, incredibly good. And so I learned more directly on how to grow my skills and become the leader I was meant to be with that exposure and those types of challenges.

43:33Palantir set me up amazing, but I think you hit diminishing returns when you're a kid and you've been at a company for seven years. I just had too much of a long leash and it was the best career move I ever made. So I spend a lot of time thinking about But what's a catch-all question for the three companies you worked at pre-Founders Fund? And I feel maybe this is it. What have you learned about the difference between what a product is designed to do and what millions of people eventually do with it? Oh, I love this question. Okay, well, I'll tell you, I just talked about kind of the Facebook group ecosystem around 2020.

44:04And I was focused on this very small sliver of kind of violent, dangerous organization, malicious activities. And so I left that first year of my work at Meta. the really bad opinion of Facebook groups. There wasn't enough guardrails, like they could be really bad for society if put in the wrong hands. Like when you spend a year focused on kind of toxic spaces that could produce real world harm, you emerge with an opinion. And then I kind of got a broader portfolio. And that portfolio was the health team. And it was not just about mitigating harm. It was about like helping good civic engagement or good health information to flourish on Facebook and Instagram.

44:43And I found this paper, I kind of love to read academic papers for inspiration. And I would read some about social media. And this paper went into rare disease health groups. And I clicked around in some of them. And these groups maybe have 200 members. And there's 200 people in the world with this particular type of like lung issue. And they're some of the most beautiful demonstrable aspects of humanity that I've ever seen. It is like people around the world being like, I know no one with this condition. I'm scared. I'm afraid to get this treatment or like try this drug and they get support and help and love from total strangers.

45:17And to me, that just really poignantly put into relief that like the Facebook group is not the problem. The problem is how people use it. And it's a capability and that capability can be used for tremendous good or tremendous harm. And it is up to the platform or the lab to ensure the incentives are there for good people doing good things or even just joyful and entertainment things to flourish and that the product incentives and there's intentionality and why bad people, the very narrow section of bad people, there aren't that many bad people in the world, but the 1 % of really bad actors need friction.

45:50And that's a product design question. It's a monitoring question. It's a, the way you build features, what are they incentivize question? And just building a capability and putting it out there without thinking about this question, I think is quite negligent and putting it out there and being really responsible and thoughtful about those incentives and help good users flourish, help bad actors in no way is possible. That requires deliberate investment. And there's nothing that kind of gets me more than people who imagine building a technology and throwing it over the wall and seeing what happens.

46:20I want to come to Founders Fund because I'm consciously not spent a whole bunch of time on it. I mean, you're a few months into the role, but tell me when did Trey first suggest the idea? Because if someone looks at your resume, they'd go, this is very left field. Like, why would she go into investing? Tell me about the early conversations you and Trey had about Founders Fund. It was a couple of years ago. So I also thought I would never go into investing. I'm a builder. I'm a doer. I love achieving material things through especially positive impact with a user base. And I'm brave. I'm a good leader.

46:50Like everything in my career has led up to me not being an investor. But a couple of years ago, Trey started talking to me about his interest in me joining Founders Fund. And that was largely because Trey wanted to hire some kind of creative, non-obvious, really talented people. Very kindly told me that he wanted creative people who were incredibly intelligent, who could communicate, who could reason. And he could think of three people. And I was one of the three people on that list. And I started trying to sell me on investing. And I held off for a long time. It's not a traditional thing for me.

47:27It's, again, I'm creative. I like doing. I like building and it is hard to be a little more indirect. But when I left OpenAI and we did the mafia thing, and then later Trey reached out, I started to think about how like it across my career, I've deployed so many different types of levers to achieve change. So that could be really strategic product features or policy changes or programmatic investments, or I have such a rich playbook of things to do within these large organizations to achieve change. And I'm kind of tired of some of those levers. It's hard to swim in those directions sometimes.

48:05And I just started to think about deploying capital as a lever I'd never tried, an advantage that I've never had. And I'm here to make great investments and find generational companies that generate great returns. But every investor has interests. And my interests are in the spaces that are hard and meaningful for society. Fortunately, those are also spaces that can produce amazing companies. But I think life should be a little bit more experimental. And I haven't treated it that way at all times. And so why not take one of the most amazing jobs in the world, see a totally different vantage to technology, see cross cutting themes and deploy capital and spaces that that matter and are really hard.

48:43So it just sounded like it would expand my horizons and hone a new toolkit for me with the same level of meaning and mission. So you have this time at Meta, clearly very formative. You had a Palanty experience and you had a Meta experience. You continue to collect logos. You then went to OpenAI. Tell me about how that transition happened. Yeah. I mean, again, I absolutely loved my job at Meta. I was working with social scientists. We were theorizing about the preconditions for democracy and how we could objectively increase and measure the quality of someone's feed with regard to those preconditions.

49:21It was like an incredible we're running experiments on whole country populations to figure out if we could move the needle on safety. Like it was an incredible job. But when OpenAI senior leadership reached out, I felt the mission call because of the importance of AI and how new and different that is and was and all of the questions it espouses that are slightly different than old school social media. And I wanted to work on the thing that matters for society. And this was an amazing place, you know, leading place to do that. So it felt like something I had to do and had to explore. I built a team out at OpenAI.

50:02We worked on all of the questions surrounding misuse of AI and what harmful use of AI looks like, what kind of neutral to good use of AI looks like, and then how can we build an apparatus that monitors for that misuse and forces upon it and kind of complements a lot of the core model safety work at the company at that time. So my criteria is like, can I apply my skills in a way that is important or feels like I'm contributing to something greater than myself. And it met that criteria. And I'm really proud of a lot of the work and leadership at OpenAI in terms of safety and user research and working with a lot of teams to increase the power of the safety teams and multiply our strategies beyond the kind of traditional pure model level work.

50:48So you're a couple of months into Founders Fund. Tell me your early observations, because I feel you're the kind of person who would have come in with a plan or you would have done like a lot of reflection that as you know, VC like changes every hour. What are your early observations? Yeah, I mean, one of the interesting things my brain has had to go through is I've been an operator, I've been a leader, I've been an executive my whole career, or, you know, recently in my career, at least. And one thing about investing that's important is I kind of have to I had to course correct my mental model in my first two weeks and take myself out of things more.

51:21I think I'm used to like people have any idea. And like I workshop that idea with them in real time. I give them risks. I give them ideas. Like I'm a leader. I'm helpful to you. Like, let's figure out how to make this happen. And with investing, the goal is kind of to see the raw data. Like, can this person get to these ideas themselves? Or do they know what the risks are? And it's less about coaching and helping as a leader like it was in my roles at Opening Eye and Meta and Palantir. And it's much more about detective work and evaluation. And so I had to kind of come to a realization that I had to stop imagining myself working with this company day to day and kind of neutralize my own sense of self almost to really give to get better, richer signal.

52:01I do think on the spectrum, like I love being helpful. And I think a lot of the founders I work with, I will be so happy to help. But these are not problems for me to solve and me to jump in and coach and all that jazz. Like I'm kind of need to look a little more neutrally and more inquisitively. So that's been pretty interesting. I think Yeah, I think it's been a realization that my goal again is to be me and to figure out what sings for me and my uniqueness is actually what's important versus fitting into a standard playbook. I want to learn from that playbook and I am humble enough to know there's a lot of stuff that I don't know and need to figure out.

52:37But I also at the same time need to kind of trust myself and be unafraid to question or to interrogate why is this kind of the dogma or the rule and are there exceptions to that rule. So I think building confidence in that has been great. And then I actually really intellectually interested in the work. You know, I again, I have this very specific expertise, I'm known in the trust and safety community, I could carve out that as my full career for the rest of my life. And maybe I will go back to that someday. But the opportunity to think in silence, and develop my own opinion and learn is incredible.

53:14I mean, day to day as an operator, especially in the kind of complex spaces I was operating in, it's a crisis of the day. Like I sit down on my computer and I kind of put the tunnel vision on and the week's agenda is dictated by whatever crisis hits my eyeballs via Slack. And this opportunity to be exploratory and creative and play and learn. And you know, I decide one day I'm really interested in women's health tech and I can read everything about the space and email people and talk to them. Like that's a really cool, rare, incredible opportunity. And I'm sure my schedule will eventually not afford much of this opportunity.

53:51So I'm reminding myself to enjoy it and to be really curious and explore curiosities and so many things that I've never had the time to think about. Two comments I always hear from operators when they become VCs is one is they didn't appreciate how salesy the job is. Like it's kind of a glorified DD manager. And two is the context switching. Like you're literally going from a IC meeting to a first meeting to a diligence call to a event where you're speaking. What is your approach? Because I think as any, I mean, again, you're early into it. So over time, you'll work it out. But every VC kind of has their approach.

54:25Like some go on Twitter and they post every day. Some go on podcasts, some write long form, some go to every co-working space and they find their people. How have you found your people so far? Well, I will say that's another really surprise. is like my network has been great so far. And I'm sure that that peters out at a certain point or becomes less frequent, but I was anxious about this coming into the job. And in actuality, I'm able to reach out to a ton of amazing people and I get a ton of amazing people reaching out to me. I just made my first deal and sent my first term sheet today. And one of the ways I connected with the founders was they knew me and my reputation and from one of my previous companies from OpenAI.

55:07And so I'm still kind of riding that wave. I intend to do some more proactive stuff. I traditionally haven't in my career, mostly because it can feel a little cheesy and self promotional. But the really interesting thing about VC is like, I have a direct incentive to go to events to network to put myself out there. And that incentive is the quality of the work. There's like a through line there versus something way more indirect, which has been my experience so far. So I don't present as an introvert. I am deeply an introvert. And it's actually helpful that putting myself out there psychologically is no longer an awkward thing to do.

55:42It's actually an imperative because it's how I'm going to find amazing people. So that has some wind in my sails for sure. But yeah, podcasts, I'm probably not going to be your Twitter influencer. I don't like that form. I'm more nuanced than that. I love mentorship. I love being supportive. And I hear the point around sales. But my strategy there is to be myself. one thing I love about myself is I'm really excitable. I can get really into things and just like kind of hope that the strength of my personhood is what makes people want to work with me. And obviously the strength of Founders Fund and all of it's achieved.

56:18But so far that's working out. And I think I'm different than even most of the partners at Founders Fund right now. And everyone's different in their own ways. But I think there are people that hopefully are attracted to the freshness that I bring and just the different style, my own style. Totally. I mean, the line I always talk about is be the signal and the noise. Don't be more noise. Totally. And I think VC has a lot of people that try and be someone else, something actually you just being yourself. And founders can see through that. I mean, that's something I think VCs forget is like, founders can see through people very quickly.

56:53And they want someone who is you and they want to work with the real Ryan, not the Ryan they see online. So I would say just lean into being you. Yeah, I agree. I think authenticity is the most important thing to me. And it's was really was my tremendous style at all of my press jobs as a leader. I will also say too that like I'm kind of honing a thesis that a lot of people really like and appreciate my background on things like privacy and safety and product strategy, B2B product strategy at Palantir, like, of course, like operating and scaling a team, shifting to billions of users. Like there's a lot about my work that I think is quite relevant.

57:29Again, for any startup doing something hard, these types of questions come up. And I have really enjoyed kind of finding companies that want what I bring to the table. And again, my interest is in hard things. And so that generally intersects with really hard operating environments, like really shifting terrains, regulatory environments, privacy questions, safety questions, and also built and deployed some of Palantir's biggest products to like triple revenue around the world. So I have a kind of good combination of different types of experiences, hiring and building out teams that I think can speak for themselves.

58:03But to your absolute most important point, I just want to be me. And I love that I have the freedom to be me as I get older and as I'm in environments like Founders Fund. And I think just like I want to work with authentic human beings. And I think anyone who chooses to work with me probably feels the same. Yeah, I am so excited to like have this chat in six months or a year and see how you grow and we can like reflect back on on this moment in September 2026. I think that'd be fascinating to just see your journey. I will say that like I haven't done a really hard pivot like this in a while. And what the human brain is capable of is amazing.

58:40I literally just use anyone who's gone into a new job or like pivoted a little bit. You start from very little. And then in a couple months, even what your brain is able to achieve and absorb and learn and reflect on. It's so cool. And it's so cool to like witness myself almost. And I would imagine most people in my position feel the same. And again, like I think that's worth celebrating about us. Like how cool is it that our brains can learn this quickly and compound and you wake up and you know nothing about X, Y, Z. And by the end of the day, you can have a conversation on it. Like that's so cool to almost like witness and be a part of.

59:12And I think you're the second person at Founders Fund after Trey, who didn't have a direct investing background. I mean, his career has worked out pretty well. So you should have good footsteps to follow in. I think so. I think this job is all about people and ideas and intelligence and reasoning. And yeah, I'm excited to be a part of it. And I hope that I can help some and empower some really amazing founders to change the world. I am keen to move into the Rapid5 final sprint. before I do is there anything I haven't asked that you want to touch on I think we crushed it I feel okay how about done by the way have I asked you some good questions you have I really appreciate your cluster research too like it's so sweet you talked to my mom I loved it I I love that like like people think that's a bit weird but I find that like fascinating like family I thought it was wonderful and as I was telling you like my mom is like deep down my motivation for everything I do.

1:00:02I think she experienced a lot of sexism and didn't get a great shake. And it's almost like an honor for you to talk to her. And like, I wouldn't be who I am. And I wouldn't be driving towards what I'm driving towards without her as a presence and motivation. So that means a lot to me, actually. Yeah, no, thank you for trusting me. I think it means a lot to me as well. Rapid Fire Sprint, is there one non-work investment, ideally of time and energy? Is there a hobby or a course or a holiday you've enjoyed the most? I am always doodling and painting and experimenting with art supplies. So I actually just recently painted with gouache, like a friend's wedding invitation.

1:00:42I actually painted a t-shirt for a kid in my neighborhood for school spirit day recently. Like I'm always playing with materials. I have a very like tactile drive. I need a pen in my hand at all times. And I invest a lot of time in kind of just doodling and painting. And it's a very like meditative and important primal need that I have. So yeah, that and reading are kind of my and crossword puzzles, play, learn, empathize, experiment, and color and fabric. And I got from my mom just like a love of like beauty and aesthetics and the ability to find joy in very small things just have a lot of wonder in me.

1:01:20Is there a book you've read recently that you'd recommend? Well, I just read, I read earlier this year, Say Nothing by Patrick Reddenkeith, the book about the Irish troubles. And it was phenomenal and important. I highly recommend that. My kind of favorite all times are like Marquez novels. I just like the real understanding and depth of which explores humanity with the magic and the wink, I think is so profound and beautiful. so someone gave me as a gift actually like every an original copy of every Marquez work and it sits proudly at my house so that's one of my favorites in the fiction realm I read James last year the Pulitzer Prize winner I thought it was fantastic I have a couple books up here I have Cat's Cradle Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow Middlesex Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay and The Goldfinch and Poverty by America which is a sociological book by Matthew Desmond those are the ones I have on my shelf.

1:02:13I'm in office right now. I don't know if this is rapid fire, but where do you find the time to read all these books? Listen, I just read an hour before bed. If I want to go to sleep at 11, I get in bed at 10 and I read and it's just so ingrained in me and my partner, my wonderful fiance, Jesse, he reads as much, if not more than I do. And we just, that's what we do for the last 40, you know, 30 to an hour of our day. And you can read a lot of books that way. Highly recommend. that is such a good one and i need to get better i mean it's actually so easy i associate it with sleep i associate it with getting ready for bed if i forgot my kindle on a trip or something i'd be lost you know it's just how i go to bed is i read and then fall asleep yeah that is so good i've got a very sad bedtime routine of finishing work and like checking emails and doing it actually i look forward to it feels like my time again like time is owned by me yeah do it i can feel I can feel relaxed already.

1:03:09It's important too. It's important. Reading is declining. It's a thing we have to keep alive as a culture. Totally. Is there one thing you want to learn in the next six months? Oh my gosh, I have so much to learn. And this doesn't have to be work. It could be parts of work as well. That's a good question. I just signed up for a class on gouache illustration. So like doing kind of more, I do a lot of flowers and powders and abstract things. and I kind of want to learn whimsical illustration techniques and was researching this incredible illustrator of fantasy children's books. So that has been on my mind recently.

1:03:44I would also like to get good at portraiture. I've never felt the need to be realist with any of my creative endeavors. Like I'm the first to color the thing that should be brown, hot pink. And so, and I've never taken like real formal art classes. So I'm interested in doing that as just a skills development, even though it doesn't light me up intrinsically. We got all of my answers in this space are going to be arts and crafts. And my mom is an incredible seamstress. So I just had the best costumes growing up. And as I think about having kids, I'm like, I have to pass that down. I have to give my kids someday like what I got in terms of rad costumes.

1:04:17And so I think it's time for me to learn how to sew. So that's also top of mind. Very good. Last two, one pet peeve. Like when people hover over you, like I get really anxious when people kind of hover over my desk or hover behind me or like for some reason hovering drives me crazy and then maybe like when my lovely fiance snores at night it's not his fault who's the best he's the best not his fault but i'm a grouchy sleeper sometimes yeah i mean the hovering line is fun well you mentioned snoring mine is actually if i'm really stressed i will sleep talk so that's why they're reading this actually connects to the reading and this is very topical it's a conversation joe my wife and I've been having where she goes, she goes, you're coming to bed and you're like doing work literally just before you brush your teeth.

1:05:01This is not healthy. Like you need to get away. And maybe it's just the reality of me being a founder of my own business. I'm like, my identity is completely tied up in my business for the last many years. But she always tells me, she's like, you need to read, you need to meditate, you need to just slow down. Everyone tells me this too. And reading is the only thing I'm good at. But I do think breaks, like psychologically, like when I worked from home at Meta for four years, I didn't have a commute home. And so I went to bed so anxious, the day blurred together. This is the experience of so many people.

1:05:33And the simple act of driving home from work kind of resets my brain. And so if you're doing all of your work at home, I think you have to artificially construct something that just transitions you into a different state. Because yeah, I used to be in the exact same boat and still am often. Yeah, that for me is, yeah. I mean, but pet peeve for me would be more, I mean, simple things, like I'm a really tidy person. So if people like don't fold their clothes and don't set things out, that bugs me to no end. I'm the worst combination of it. I have very high standards and very little dopamine to be clean, but I really want it.

1:06:06And so I'm a bit of a nightmare on this because I want it to be perfect, but I don't have the energy to make it so. Right, yeah. Last one, is there one question you'd recommend then I ask the next guest. Of course, you don't know the person, but anything I should include? One thing I like to ask people, well, I have two kind of funny interview questions that I came up with that I kind of like. One is just because I want to know them. Like if you are on Jeopardy and you get to create a character, you get to create and seed a category before the game, obviously you want to win. Like what's the category you put on the board?

1:06:36I just think that's an interesting way to get to know someone's interest or areas of expertise. And then one other question I like, and I still ask a lot to people, even in conversation is just Like imagine you are co-founding a company perhaps and or you're getting married or you get to divine and craft the perfect compliment to you out of clay. So that co-founder is strong and interested in things you're not you don't perceive to be strong and interested in. They'll give you space on the things that you love and think you're good at. And I kind of think it's a really interesting way to get someone to think about themselves in relation to other people and compliments.

1:07:10and you get a richer picture of how that person perceives themselves or what they've been told about themselves and their strengths and weaknesses. So that can kind of be interesting. Like what is your perfect compliment? Maybe co-founding is easier than like romantically as a tool to get to understand that person on a, on a different level. So I should have asked you for these questions before we recorded. My Jeopardy category is like 90s, 2000s food network shows. And we don't need to get into my perfect compliment. Yeah. But I mean, founders are going to love the first meetings they're going to have because the questions you'd ask, I think would be so interesting.

1:07:50But I'd be interested in people. Yeah, you're great at this too. Like it's a really great asset to be interested in other human beings and for that to be genuine and also to celebrate them. I just love remarkable people and celebrating them. So thank you for your work in that vein. No, thank you. That brings us to the finish line, Ryan. Thank you so much. I am deeply grateful that you did this because I know you haven't done many of these and hopefully I lived up to the expectations. So thank you so much. I think what an authentic conversation. That couldn't mean more to me and there's few that would approach this like this.

1:08:21So really appreciate it. Really enjoyed the time. Look forward to connecting again soon. That's a wrap. So if something in this episode sparked a thought, send it to a friend or colleague. And if you're curious about partnering with us at the Curiosity Center, whether it's this podcast, to our reports, events, and more, and join the ranks of existing commercial partners, including Google, KPMG, Vanta, the University of Melbourne, and others, my details and the show notes. Until next time, I'm Vidit Tagawal and this is the High Flies Podcast.