Kevin O'Connor on backing visionaries, the future of VC, internet history and more | E1861

0:00the best line i ever heard the hardest thing about being a vc is um figure out their founder is delusional or visionary uh it's very fine line line if they're right they're right they're wrong then they're probably delusional i'm willing to beth the delusional ones for sure because if you're delusional and you say yeah you know i think there's something out there and you leave spain on a ship with some provisions yeah you got to be pretty delusional to think you're gonna hit land because you might not i like the delusional ones because if they hit land now they're visionary like you're saying well i'd say i'd put that in the visionary camera delusional are the ones that just refuse to listen this week in startups is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent.

0:39When starting your business, it's important to use a service that will actually help you. Northwest Registered Agent is that service. They'll form your company fast, give you the documents you need to open a business bank account, and even provide you with mail scanning and a business address to keep your personal privacy intact. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com slash twist to get a 60 % discount on your next LLC. Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. Twist listeners can get$1 ,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist.

1:21and DevSquad. Most dev agencies only offer developers. Why? Because product management is hard. Get an entire product team for the cost of one US developer plus 10 % off at devsquad.com slash twist. All right, everybody, welcome back to the program. Our guest today is Kevin O 'Connor. I met him 28 years ago in 1995. I was running a little magazine called Silicon Alley Reporter and kevin had just started an internet advertising company called double click you remember double click what by google eventually it was founded uh i remember going to poppy tyson on 23rd tree we talked about it the last time you were on the show kevin which was episode two three four so here we are a decade since your last appearance on this week in startups and uh i guess we're getting close to 30 years since you and i met in new york at the dawn of uh the internet so welcome back to the program, Kevin O 'Connor.

2:20It's good to see you again. It's been a long time. It's a, we see each other every 10 years. We do an episode. You know, an interesting place to start would be when you look back on what's transpired since 1995, when we were on those dial-up connections, and then we started getting T1s and ISDN lines, and the browser started supporting rich media, and you put some of the first ads on the internet. When you look back at what happened to the internet, what is the theme as an entrepreneur and now an investor that sticks with you the most? I think our original hypothesis, and when I first saw the internet, probably early 90s, I wasn't impressed.

2:542400 bond modem, the browser hadn't come out. And I was not impressed. It really wasn't until the T1 lines came out and the web browser, I said, to have a system where anyone in the world can access the world's knowledge for free, that's a big idea. It's going to be huge. I remember our original business plan. I forget what we had. I thought we forecasted something like 10 ,000 servers and maybe 100 million people would be on it in 10 years. People thought that was crazy. And it was crazy. We were way off. It's like 100 million servers or websites and a billion users online. So I think the theme is...

3:36Back in the old days, people talked about the new economy. And I always thought that was kind of BS. There was no new economy. It was just about reducing friction. And that's what I think that's been. That's been the promise. And that's what's happened. Just made things more efficient, more timely, cheaper. And when you look at that efficiency now, AI has emerged and all this information that was put online, three decades of people just pouring their hearts out and scanning every piece of information, every piece of art, mapping every nook and cranny and scanning every book and writing every comment under every video and every blog post now has resulted in.

4:15what feels like some form of intelligence or knowledge processing that could be very transformative. So what's your expectation here as we just wrap up the first year of chat GPT being a public phenomenon? Obviously, you know, 3.5 of open AI's chat GPT kind of was the starter's pistol last November. And here we are taping this November of 2023. Is this going to be a similar story or a bigger story than the internet itself well you remember back in 9500 companies were pitching ai even back then right they're going to predict everything that you're going to do and and ai faded away because it just never delivered on its promise and i don't think chat gpt the 3.5 version it was interesting you know like it was the best chatbot out there uh 4.0 blew my mind away and definitely realization that this is a fundamental shift i mean usually once every 10 years, there's some cosmic shift, whether it's EC, so network, to internet, to mobile, to SaaS.

5:16And we're due for another seismic shift. And there seems to be two camps forming on AI, as there always is with technology. It's the hand-wringers, like it's the end of the world, everything is over. Oh my God, chicken little. To the optimist, like I am, which is technology is great. What could possibly be wrong with something that can actually turn information into knowledge and make people smarter, you know, more intelligent, make better decisions. It's, it's phenomenal. And when you look at the impact you think it's going to have, we can parallel it with the internet. And I'm with you. I mean, it seems like there's a ton of upside here.

5:53There's going to be some downsides, obviously. We used to have typing pools, we used to have messengers, we used to have people sending postal mail, FedExes, a lot of those things got hit pretty hard when people got email um but you know when you look at the first year and you think hey in year two because in the first year it feels like people are playing with it and starting to implement it but in year two i think it's going to get more serious so where do you think we're going to see this land in 2024 what industries will have the most impact on well i think the surprising thing at least in my mind uh we always thought i was a i was a developer for the last 10 years and you of the computer sciences exploded over many, many years.

6:38And everyone went into it thinking that job will never be at risk. That's a safe job. Now, the safe job. And now it's like, I remember being on a call with a company. They were telling us, I do venture capital now, they're telling us how complicated and sophisticated the technology was. And I was kind of calling bullshit on them. And I asked ChatGPT to write the code of their product that I posted in our chat. I said, there's your product right there. So jobs like that where I think legal is going to be dramatically affected. I think accounting. It's so hard to predict technology. The internet everywhere back in the days, they're trying to figure out what was going to be hit the hardest.

7:21And when you look back, I'm not sure any of us predicted. None of us predicted Amazon. Amazon was a bookseller. yeah so you know it has a strange new technology has a strange way of affecting it's going to affect every industry to some point i think large language models have its place as a foundational model i think large language models are probably more like the internet it's going to be the stuff that's built on top of it or for the verticalization to highly specialized language models that are going to probably have the biggest impact yeah it's quite paradoxical if you narrow the scope of the language model to code, it does a better job.

7:58And if you point it at a code base, well, it's going to educate the new developer as to that code base. So starting day one at Slack or Salesforce, it's just you're going to get up and running so much faster, you're going to be, you know, it's going to complete half of the of the code snippets you write. And it does make sense to me that accounting and legal also fall into that there's a corpus of work that is finite that is rule-based um and that is repetitive right i mean and there is some thread here we could pull if it's repetitive and there's a finite rule set and it's there's a corpus of work it could be you know automated and ai could could do it pretty quickly huh well hollywood's going to be greatly affected right you do think that yeah this is a big debate Oh, it's going to be...

8:47I mean, think about it. It's a finite number of stories. It's the same story that came out of Greece 3 ,000 years ago. It's just being retold with different characters. The fact that any of us would be able to put that... We'll be able to build our own movie. I think then it becomes a little bit like YouTube, which is... Or Instagram, where the amount of content is exponentially increased. Most of it is just total garbage. but there's going to be that phenomenal once that sort of rise to the top that go viral same thing with music i mean music is pretty you know you can imagine i mean my prediction is that definitely within the next five years uh the number one song will be written by ai that makes total sense we've had many number one songs that were um using samples right and rehashes of old songs so if ai can interpret all of that base of knowledge yeah it's going to hit one for sure There's no doubt about that.

9:43And yeah, there's only a finite number of movie tropes, you know, quest, comedies, rags to riches, beat the monster, tragedies. It's a certain hero's journey. It's a certain corpus that, yeah, I think writers are going to become bionic when they start using this. starting a business used to be such a painful process you needed to get a lawyer there were tons of fees it was a mess but not anymore just check out northwest registered agent they're going to help you form your company fast remember speed matters and then they're going to get you the docs you need to open a business bank account instantly then they're going to provide you with mail scanning and a business address and they're going to do all that keeping your personal privacy intact.

10:30Northwest can form LLCs, corporations, and nonprofits. And here's why. Founders love Northwest. There's no hidden fees. There's no upselling. You can call them or cancel at any time. And Northwest has the best of both worlds solution. It's simple and self-serve, but they can be hands-on if you need help with their amazing registered agent service. Northwest provides everything you need to start and maintain your business. And they're giving Twist listeners a 60 % discount. For just$39 plus state fees, they'll form your LLC corporation or nonprofit. So visit NorthwestRegisteredAgent.com slash twist today.

11:07NorthwestRegisteredAgent.com slash twist. So you've recently become a venture capitalist, I understand. Congratulations. Since 1995. Since 1995, by the way. Well, I mean, I thought of you more as a company builder than a venture capitalist, but... I was both. I did the VC in my sort of spare time or in between jobs. But you are right. The last three years, first time I actually did a fund. Got it. With other people's, well, a lot of my money, but a lot of other people's money too. So why start a fund? And why do that here, you know, at this point in time? What stage you're trying to invest in?

11:43And what's the thesis of the fund? I do think that doing a startup, which I love doing, I did three of them. Let's say it's a young person's game. It takes 100-hour weeks. It takes a lot of focus. As you get older, you get more wise. And I think that's sort of... I've been doing venture for, like I said, since 1995. I've done really well at it. I love technology. So our thesis has really been on, if I had to sum it up, it would be SaaS slash AI companies with about a million dollars in revenue. So let's call it seed, sort of early A. And our specialties, we're all operators and we help these companies get to the next level, which would be sort of growth equity.

12:26So if they have a million in revenue, that's when you want to meet them or you want to put a million dollars into them? When they have a million in revenue. So we feel like the pre-seed is, I've always said ideas are cheap. There's a billion really bad ideas out there. For someone to actually get to that million-dollar level, that means they've proved product-market fit, which is a big risk. They've been able to track people, some capital. So they really de-risked it in our eyes. What they don't know is how do they take it to the next level. There's a lot of unanswered questions. A lot of this founder-led sales.

13:02A lot of it is how do I scale? How do I deploy capital efficiently? efficiently and so you know by by being operators having sort of sort of been in their shoes that's attractive to founders now they like it you know vcs a lot of vcs come from sort of the opposite extreme yeah i mean there's an argument for people who understand finance um and who haven't been in the trenches in some ways they can really have a good analysis um like bill girley of you know the marketplace dynamics they can be thoughtful about making the share price go up and then there's no substitute for people who actually have run a business right and been an operator and know exactly how hard that is and i think at our level by the way i think bill girley's always been one of my heroes i met him when he was a he was an analyst he was covering us double click back in the back in the uh the mid-90s what was he like tell me when you met him what it was like he was still he was very tall even back then still yeah he's consistently remained tall that is one thing i will say about bill girley's career you meet a lot of research analysts and most of them are good bill girley was just he was a new level he was he was the one guy that really really understood not just our business but he just he just had a great sort of macro view of what was going on and we always enjoyed conversations with with with bill where she wasn't retired is he retired i guess he's i guess that's a really interesting question because i he's theoretically not at benchmark well he's not at benchmark he's not in the new fund he's still on the boards he was on and he's still frisky and likes to hang out with founders and meet founders so i don't know that he's exactly retired and there was something about the venture community where they wanted to kind of set people out to pasture at a certain age maybe it's 60 years old etc and like hand over the firms to younger folks i think that was a key component of benchmarks philosophy is kind of forcing people out and letting young people take over but i think that for really great investors maybe sticking around would be pretty great for the founders and people live longer now and they're healthier and sharper in their 50s and 60s and 70s like no closer there he's like yeah you can basically drag me out of here i'm i'm not going anywhere but no closer yeah as active as ever so i i don't know what bill's deal is i think he should just do seed investments yeah two million dollar uh seed investments when you look at how being a founder has changed.

15:27When you and I were starting in the 90s, the idea of building an internet company was, well, you're going to have to spend a million bucks, a half million bucks on setting up your servers and hardware. You're going to need to put a half million dollars down on an office space and get a lease, put a letter of credit down. I mean, you were blowing a couple of million dollars just firing up a startup. Now, two or three people go to an accelerator, they get some free credits from Azure or whoever, and they're up and running and they build something on the weekend and get 10 customers. So it feels like many more startups are being built at a much lower pace.

16:00So how is that going to change things as we go forward here? And then it's quite possible AI makes things even faster for founders in terms of finding product market fit. I think you have two things going on. One is there was a long drought of entrepreneurs after the dot com crash, right? Everyone kind of fled to safety. And then things came back and I came back roaring with free money. And I think the venture market was oversaturated. There was just too much money. It was back in the dot-com days where people were just chasing any deal and any price. I actually think downturns like this are going to be good because there's just a lot of junk out there.

16:35And I'm amazed at what people are investing in. So I think raising money is much more difficult. Now, we've shifted, I think, more from growing at any cost, which I never understood. I think that's just where people... You take a large sum of money for a model that's not quite perfected, and you just lose more money. And I think those days are over, and it shouldn't be over. Just a bad way of doing business. But a year and a half ago, back to the age thing, one of the things you do get with age is, I have to do like four of these cycles. You know what's in the basement. You know when things go bad, they're way worse than you ever expected.

17:12You remember those days. Yeah. So getting people to cut back early and convincing them that, look, you got to conserve money. We got to trade off growth with burn. And that's okay. If you get through the cycle, it's better. I do think with the AI, the fact that any person can describe a business model at some point, not today, but can describe what they want to do and not go to expensive, often overpriced engineers to get it done. And like you said, it's all the groundwork is there, you know, putting up data centers. I don't know if you remember the data center. tyson you had one yeah and then you had the building on 32nd on the west side with the basketball court on the roof was that 32nd street or something remember it was west of them yeah 33rd 33rd west of uh madison square garden you had a basketball i remember we played hoops on the roof one time where we shot some hoops we did um double click you brought your team yeah you brought your stack west west fourth street yeah we had well you know we used to play at Chelsea Piers a bit and we had a pretty good team.

18:22They did. Listen, selling software is hard enough right now, man. It's hand-to-hand combat out there in B2B land. The last thing you need to do is slow your sales team down because you don't have your SOC 2 dialed in. So if you're SaaS or a services company and you store consumer data in the cloud, you know what you need to do? You need to check out Vanta. They're going to get your SOC 2 compliant easier and faster. And Vanta makes it so easy to get and renew your SOC 2. On average, Vanta customers are SOC 2 compliant in just two to four weeks. Compare that to three to five months without Vanta.

18:51They're going to save you hundreds of hours of work and up to 85 % on compliance costs. And Vanta does more than just SOC 2. They also automate up to 90 % compliance for GDPR, HIPAA, and more. You can't afford to lose out on those major customers, the lighthouse customers, the big fish, the whales, because of silly stuff like lacking compliance. Just work with Vanta. I'm an investor in the company. It's a great company. Get your compliance automated. get it tight, tight is right, and close those big deals. Here's the best part. Vanta is going to give you a thousand off because they love this week in startups.

19:21They love startups. Vanta.com slash twist. That's V-A-N-T-A.com slash twist to get a thousand dollars off your stock too. The key thing you did right talking about boom and bust cycles, you raised that secondary for double click. You also were able to sell some shares yourself and lock down a win. So explain how founders should ride the cycle. I am in agreement with you. the valuations I'm seeing on startups, because we do do pre-seed with our accelerator, and we do seed right around the point in time you're talking about, typically 500k, but 500 to a million is pretty close. And the same kind of thesis, right?

19:55You figured something out, you got some traction, you can't fake it, generally speaking. So this moment in time is the time to build. And there are some advantages to building in a down market. What are the advantages to building in a down market and then hey you know in another 5 10 15 years if it's a crazy up market what's the proper thing rational thing for founders to do in both markets compound question there uh i mean always like i tell ceos and everyone never your number one job is not run out of money so the three main reasons companies go to business the first one is they solve no known problem uh which i think gets back to the the the dot com as well as today where people are investing in cool technology let's say crypto or nfts exhibit you know our current examples they'd solve no known problem blockchain okay great another another ledger been around nothing new so a lot of money goes towards that so yeah i think people are focused more on you solve a problem the next reason they run they go out of business is they don't raise enough money and then the third reason is they raise too much money look at all the uh we were calling death of corns i don't know if that's a word we made up or that's a word give me that one up yeah death of corn sell okay death of corn so all these these companies that raised 100 million dollars last year they're going out of business it's like yeah what the hell kind of governance is that i i don't i don't understand yeah that's just not responsible so let's just as those are just bad you know again business doesn't change economics doesn't change and and we really push that on our on the founders you've got to build Business is really simple.

21:35You find a big problem, you solve it better than anyone else, and good things happen. People give you money. And if you do a really good job, they give you a lot of money, and then you get this thing called profit. And then once you get profitable, then you don't have to depend on anyone. But on the flip side, if you do get into a, as we tell founders, you get into the growth phase where you have a playbook, it's replicatable, and you have a high degree of conviction, then you got to use capital. A lot of people are like, well, I can borrow money. That's a lot harder these days. But the whole debt financing, debt financing of a tech company is just, I'm sorry.

22:11It's absurd. Get some debt as a sort of insurance policy. But if you got to use debt to grow an unprofitable business, you're screwed. Everyone's screwed. It was incredible. I guess in the Zerp environment, I had Series A companies that didn't really have product market fit. They were truly seed companies figuring out product market fit. but they were getting serious a evaluations and then yeah different banks were like well we have this money sitting here so we'll give you you raise 20 we'll give you 5 million you raise 30 we'll give you 10 million and then the founders just tack that on to their runway okay i have 18 months of runway i'll just you know i'm spending a million a month so i raise this 10 i raised 20 so i got 20 months and then i got 10 million in venture debt or seven that's seven more months and i say no you're not supposed to use it for that rainy day fund but don't use it as runway because then a VC has to look at your deal and say, okay, I'm paying down 7 million in debt.

23:04I'm putting another 20 million in and 7 million goes out the door to pay a bank. That doesn't make any sense. And in a down market with this globalization happening, how do you think about work moving around the planet? Because there's something unique that happened with remote work. You and I were in the in-office culture for two thirds of our career. And here we are, you know, a lot of people want to work from home. So do you believe in work from home or do you think people should be in offices? We'll start there. Yeah. I mean, I was talking to the, uh, uh, I'm going to forget his name now. He's at the Hoover institution, but he's, he's like the expert in, in sort of this whole work from home.

23:41And I was like, what, what's the answer? We just ended up a binary answer. There is no answer. I'm really torn. You know, I, I think for certain jobs and for certain types of people working at home is great. I think that it's really bad socially. And I think you get more done when you're in the office. Yeah. So for our work, I can do board meetings now with a five-minute notice. I'm in a board call as opposed to traveling for three days and wasting time. That's great. But most people aren't that disciplined. A lot of people are disciplined. They need mentorship. They need help. They need socialization.

24:14Yeah, there's a socialization part where people get weird working from home, staying at home all the time. They need mentorship. That's a lost part of this. And I'd say the top 20 % of performers are more effective at home. it's probably about another 30 that are equally effective in the bottom half are not nearly as effective as if they were in an office being mentored and part of the yeah i'm trying to reverse this at my companies and it's just incredibly hard because you have such a great talent pool of people at my venture firm with 22 people and then we can hire people faster than in silicon valley people don't want to be here anymore and it's too expensive to be here so i would get a lower quality person who wanted to be here versus this incredibly high quality person at a lower price will stay longer it's it's incredibly frustrating in some ways but it does seem to be reversing i'm curious i'm curious for you i mean you're you're a uh uh you're an opposite side of the spectrum as i am you're extroverted very extroverted yeah it's got to drive you crazy not to be it's socializing it's maddening and um i am now reversing it so i'm going to get like a space just so i could have like a co-working type space for my founders in my portfolio because I do need to be out and about.

25:25I host events. I do jam sessions. One of the things that I learned from Travis from Uber, he'd have these like jam sessions. Chris Sacco would do them too. We're just five or six founders. We get around, just hang out, have dinner, or just hang out at somebody's house and talk about their businesses for a couple of hours and try to help each other think through problems and strategies and blind spots. And so I'm sort of codifying that where I do these jam sessions every couple of weeks, bring together 20 founders. you know, go to our law firm, Wilson's and senior Femwix office, get a big conference room and just talk for four hours.

25:58And it's really, really energizing for me. And then doing the pod, you know, I get to talk to you and other, you know, investors, founders from around the world. And that does fill my bucket and give me that energy. But I think this has been great for introverts who, you know, they get to focus more and getting rid of commutes. If we didn't have the commute issue, I think this would be like people would be much more open to coming back to work here in the valley apple i think is four days a week now or four days a week in the year there might be three or four right now zuckerberg's kind of forcing people back and then roblox said either come back to the office or res you know resignation accepted um so i think they did it like a gentleman's riff basically you know we're going to reduce the force by the number of people who don't want to come back to the office so i think it'll start changing i also notice that people looking for work from home jobs are saying that they're having a hard time finding them.

26:49You know, as you get 1000, you know, 1000 applications, because anyone could be exactly that job, right? So now and then if you're a Silicon Valley person who wants to work from home, you've got the expensive Silicon Valley, but you want to work from home, you don't want to get on the bus, I understand it. But now you're competing against somebody in Portugal, argentina manila canada whatever it is and those folks are going to have a cost of living that's one-fifth one-tenth of the cost of living you have so they can accept a salary as much lower and all the management kevin have learned how to manage remote workers and that's actually the thing that is really mind-blowing to me once you learn how to manage a remote worker in south america canada portugal manila whatever it's no different it's all the same you're in a slack room you're on zoom you're doing huddles you're using notion or coda oh it's all the same so i think it also increases efficiency you could have somebody in the job in the role within two weeks whereas what would a job spec take getting somebody in new york you double click you paid people to move to new york you paid them to come out for an interview like think about those days a reload the concept of a thirty thousand dollar relocation package that was a thing right yeah danny siegel a guy I used to work with, he had a great observation when COVID first started hitting.

28:03He's called it the great reshuffling of America. And his theory was that people are going to move to somewhere where they wanted. But once that pendulum swing back, what you're going to see is that people in the office can promote it because they're there. It's FaceTime. People who are remote, you send them an email and they're gone. You have no personal relationship with them. So I think you're going to probably see a bit of a pendulum. I think a lot of it comes from the top down. You have executives who have second homes that don't want to go back. they want that we all thought commuting would be easier now that everyone works at home but turns out no one's actually working they're all driving driving around to go to go golf and do stuff we have plenty of examples in our companies that where people have multiple jobs um that's the crazy part they're not doing doing a job you know it's just it's we'll see i think it's going to swing back there's a reddit it's either overworked or overemployed and it's over employed over employed uh and if you read this reddit it is awesome because it's people trading strategies on how to fool their bosses and have two three or four simultaneous jobs there's a lot of times developers or you know marketers and they're like here's all the techniques to be on two conference calls at the same time but have the line of sight on your two laptops and i had this happen where somebody said hey um we got this great google um executive who wants to come work for us and that's great yeah he's willing to take a pay cut i'm like oh that's amazing right it's entrepreneurial so donnie wants to keep his job at google and they'll says he has 40 hours a week for us but he'll do it at like a third of his salary from google he said uh is that ethical well it's his problem not ours and i said is it because when google finds out and he's writing code for you during work hours do they own that code well there's a word for it yeah it's called Fraud.

29:52Fraud. Are you looking to build a SaaS product, but you need help on the technical side? Listen, developers, expensive. We all know this. And they're hard to find. But if you use DevSquad, they're going to help you validate your idea and bring that concept to market in three to six months. How do they do this? DevSquad is a fully managed agency that can handle product development end to end. This means you're not going to just get developers. You're going to get technical product managers, designers, and more, all for the price of just one US developer. This means you can focus on what you're good at, product strategy, sales, marketing, and they will do all the idea validation, the real user testing.

30:29And they are able to do this because there is amazing top talent in Latin America, an entire product team for the price of just one U.S. developer. Think about how much you're going to get done by leveraging DevSquad's amazing talent in Latin America. A technical product manager, that's your main point of contact, right? And then you're going to have product strategists, UX designers, DevOps, and quality assurance alongside that product manager, making sure that your product and your project is a success. So you pay month to month, no long-term contracts, no lock-in. Starts at just$40 an hour.

30:59And then they can scale depending on your needs. So I want you to visit devsquad.com slash twist. That's D-E-V-S-Q-U-A-D dot com slash twist to get more details and to get 10 % off your first month. In fact, Ivan Berkovich, one of our partners, just wrote an article on the over-employment problem. And we're getting a lot of pushback of people saying, well, that's just the employee-employee relationship is transactional now, so there's no meaning to it. So it's okay to commit fraud? What's the limiting factor here? You're stealing. The reason is you see this transaction because you're a negative, pessimistic person, and that it just becomes self-fulfilling prophecy.

31:36How can you possibly compete with a full-time employee and an equivalent full-time employee you can't yeah so you'll be the first one to go uh as they should be and they'll end up i used to say when you have two girlfriends you have zero girlfriends you know it's like it's when you have two jobs you'll end up with none yeah very very weird moment in time that yeah the the relationship between employers and employees is quite transactional and it this is one of the things that loss is loss is the culture right we the culture of companies really mattered people would stay with a company. And now switching is taking one laptop, putting it in a box, sending it back to your old company, opening up the new laptop, logging into a new Slack, logging into a new notion, Coda, Salesforce, whatever it is, HubSpot, and then just starting over.