Uncapped #15 | Vinod Khosla from Khosla Ventures

33:53What could that look like? A robot that doesn't need to be programmed. It learns. It isn't programmed to do tasks. And it's a generalized, you know, maybe physical robot inner space. But the world is organized around the humanoid form factor. And so it's probably a humanoid. Humanoid is the only common enough form factor to get to high enough manufacturing volumes to get the cost down. Almost everybody in the 2030s will have a humanoid robot at home. Probably start with something narrow like do your cooking for you. It can chop vegetables, cook food, clean dishes, but stays within the kitchen environment.

34:33And, you know, if you have a pre -s it costs three, four hundred dollars a month. The robot will cost three, four hundred, three, four hundred dollars a month. It won't matter. And, you know, for anybody making more than a certain amount of money, they already have somebody helping. And so this is help. Yeah. I think that's how it'll start in the home. But factories, farms, farm workers is a massive area that's mostly underdressed. What part of the humanoid intelligent robot are we most limited on right now? Like, is it about the robotics? Is it like the intelligence? It's the intelligence. Clearly, we've seen out of China many, many hardware form factors.

35:20I'm pretty damn amazing if you see them boxing or running a race or it's pretty cool. But they're not learning robots. You change the environment and they don't do as well. Yeah. I think this intelligence that learns and adapts and doesn't need to be programmed to do a task. If you walk a human in here and say clean up, they'll know what to do. A robot needs to do that. Why is this not going to be like Apple? And I know that, like, you know, I'm not saying I think it is, but why do you think that we don't already have the sort of prototypes of this out from the biggest, most well -equipped hardware companies in the world?

36:05So I've been doing innovation for four years and innovation only. I can't think of very many large examples that were large innovation came from somebody who was large or in the business. Yeah. Can you come go through some of them? Yeah. Retailing. You know, when we invested in Amazon, I was a cleaner in 96. Nobody thought you could compete with Walmart. You'd think Walmart would in a way. Yeah. Look at media. Was it NBC or CBS or was it little things like Netflix and Twitter and YouTube and Facebook and nobody even knew they were in the media business? Uber. Did that come from Hertz or Avis, Carinal or taxi companies?

37:01No. Airbnb. They'd come from Hilton or Hyatt. Yeah. They have more rooms than Hilton and Hyatt now. Space acts or rocket lab instead of Boeing and Lockheed. You'd expect to be able to do space launches. Yeah. Yeah. You know, my own history. I got enamored with the fact that when when I was a client, they talked about Genentech started by an associate at Clientel when nobody believed biotechnology was a fear. No farmer company was doing it. Yeah. All of biotech. Yeah. We saw the cloud. We saw self -driving electric cars. Yeah. Everybody had given up on it. How about cloud actually? Because that was Amazon.

37:46So you can kind of give it up. Yeah. Yeah. A cloud is interesting. I think I should say founder driven companies have permission to try crazy things. And like Apple and Steve was there with the iPhone. Yeah. When Steve was there, they tried die -form. Yeah. And if you go back to the press in 2007, everybody said a phone at $600 or $700 that has no keyboard to dial. Right. Like order silly idea. Yeah. Right. So it's founder led companies that in a way, the way more clear, self -driving would be 15 years away. If Larry and Sergey hadn't said we're going to do self -driving at Google. Yeah. Or Elon had said, we'll I'll do electric vehicles.

38:32Yeah. Right. So. So basically Tesla should be much more likely on humanoids than Apple, for example. It is founder driven and Elon is paying attention to it. So they're definitely a good candidate. But so are a number of other companies that I have definitely a lot of faith in the startup ecosystem of founders with very creative ideas. Yeah. So that's an area of what's delving into a separate podcast somehow. But that's an example of large innovation. So no matter where I look. So the cloud definitely happened. Yeah. When I was starting Sun, everybody said there's these deck wax computers and IBM mainframes.

39:17And why don't you build a graphic terminal for them? And I said, no, I'd rather just replace those companies. Neither of those companies are in the computer business anymore. And frankly, it took five years to get deck out of the computer business into mostly a customer support business. I have to be started. Yeah. Which is pretty stunning to me as a 20 -some -year -old kid. Totally. So repeating that pattern, there's zero chance of companies like Siemens or GE could do fusion. Right. Zero chance. What's the mechanic for what I, of course, agree, but what's the mechanic that's stopping them? Is it risk?

39:58Is it talent? Here's the first thing I would say. In these 40 years, in all the examples I've just cited for you. And I could give you more. None of them are done by somebody who knew the area. Experts are terrible at predicting the future. They extrapolate the past. Entrepreneurs invent the future they want. It's a best organization of an Alan cake quote. But you know, so you imagine the world and you try and make it happen. And you're not biased by what is experienced? Experience is a set of biases that prevent you from making mistakes. And that's what experts do and that's why very, really do experts innovate in their area.

40:49Yeah. Look, even the COVID vaccine came from two startups. Right. Moderna and the violent tech. You think the farmer was very quick to mobilize. Not a chance. So, you know, it's why the US has done so well. People have permission to try. And if you try and fail, it's you don't ruin your career. In a big company, you ruin your career. Right. Deal question. Right. You can't afford to fail. So you start with I can't fail, which means you can't take a large risk. My view is very simple. Most people reduce risk to increase the probability of success. I do the positive opposite. Start with, I want high consequences of success.

41:41I don't care about the probability of failure. I think that is like one of the best things about tech as an ecosystem is in, you know, I think not everybody thinks quite like what you're saying, but in general, in tech, you can fail and it's okay. And I think even another, you know, I worked in France, in New York for a hot minute and even there, it's just like, it's just how it works. Jack Dorsi is great on paper. But when we invested in Square in 2010, the following was the situation. He had just been fired from Twitter. Twitter was a tiny company just been fired and he had like four star failed startups.

42:18His history on Wikipedia. I can't afford failed startups. So, you know, traditional wisdom would say, don't back him. Was your mindset around risk always just increase the consequence of success or did that evolve over time? It was very much that from, you know, my first startup was go on, take on the computer business. Everybody big is done, which is a little bit of an arrogant viewpoint. But if he hadn't had that kind of hubris, we probably wouldn't have attempted what we attempted. So I think hubris is an important ingredient of great entrepreneurship. Yes. Will build an AGI. Right. Like that's hubris.

43:07It's arrogance. Only I can do it. So these are entrepreneurial characteristics that are very important. But also, thinking from first principles, which is why experts do poorly in their areas. Because they have too many biases of what works and what doesn't or how to do things. While somebody knew in the area, reinvent the area, they figure it out from first principles in the new environment. That's an essential characteristic. So, you know, one thing I always get asked is, what do you look for in entrepreneurs? You know, I seldom look for deep expertise in the area. I do look for people who thinking from first principles and learning rapidly.

43:56Even in YC batch, if I'm talking to a YC partner about some startup, the question that's most important to me is how much have they changed their plan over the last three months? Rapid evolution, rapid thinking, rapid learning. Is what matters? So this went into all over the map. No, it was this is I love this eddie. But I want to keep getting sort of the other areas you're very excited about. That was robotics, which I agree humongous of you know, some ways that's like that's like the final thing to figure out. You mentioned fusion as a big thing. I'm very bullish about energy. Well, certain many formats of energy.

44:38So I think there's two large formats. Fusion is one and then multiple approaches to fusion. But I'm also very excited about super hard geothermal. So again, this ties to this risk idea. In geothermal, completely un -economic business. You buy power because it's green, not because it's cheap. And people like cheap stuff. Yep. Turns out almost all geothermal in the US is at 200 degrees or 250 degrees max. If you increase their temperature to 450 degrees, you get 10 times the six to 10 times the power depending on conditions from the same well. That's surprising. For two reasons, one is carno efficiency goes up, but the heat content also goes up.

45:34So the energy content of the steam goes up and the efficiency percentage. So you get a multiplier. Don't need to get into technical details. But now it's cheaper than natural gas if you can get to 450 degrees. Nobody has to worry about super hard geothermal is green. It's just cheap. Right. And so why don't people attempt it? Because people have decided you can't drill at 450 degrees because drill bits collapse. Got it. So I sort of approached it differently. I said, what would it take to drill at 450 degrees? If I can solve that problem, everything else takes care of it. And we know there's 450 degrees.

46:22The most parts of it, it's only a matter of how deep you go. And so I set off on that problem. I think we're making great progress. So I think it's as powerful as fusion. Wow. In supplying most of Western United States. Yeah. You can get that. I have a location in Oregon. One location could you produce seven gigawatts of power. And I hope this year I can prove we can do all seven gigawatts competitive with natural gas. Well, without worrying, it works in the Trump era where he doesn't care, believe in climate change. It still works. And I love that kind of project. I'm also very bullish. Conval fusion will do well.

47:07I don't know enough about Sam's project in Hiliand, but I'm glad the worst techniques are being a lot. But both of these are areas where you're like, the science is going to work. The impact will be enormous. Yeah. Yeah. It's worth doing. Solar also is that on your radar? We are doing solar. We probably have in the Western world, the China has some great solar technologies. The next generation of solar called paraffsky, silicon paraffsky solar cells. We're working on that. But there the impact isn't as large. Yeah. Right. Right. We are in that power is already so economic that there's other uses for that power.

47:48So we are doing that. But but look, I'm relatively optimistic. I see our pack clear to getting to zero mentioned by 2050. I think most of the technologies do that will be proven in the early 2030s. Is there any sort of countervailing force with the fact that we're going to be consuming a lot more power via AI? People always ask me that. I think if you get fusion right, I think very early 2030s, we'll get our first power plants and that power curve that Boba Cobb just catches up. Yeah. So there'll be the spirit between now in 2035 and these things aren't scalable yet. Yeah. But beyond that, we should power will be cheap and plenty full and zero emissions and zero resources.

48:45By the way, if you're creative enough, you can do this in every area. We're producing cement today. We are not only don't say like environmentally is do let's go shut down cement plants every time there's one in Cupertino that the environmentalists have been trying to shut down. My approach is very simple. They are meeting carbon dioxide. Let's capture the carbon dioxide and turn it into carbonates. We get more cement out of the same amount of limestone mind at a lower cost per ton. Now, what's there not to like? Do you have to care about climate to may have that work? No. And we are in production on this now.

49:36So I'm sure cement is solved. Steel is same way. I'm pretty certain will be able to produce steel with zero emissions or low emissions initially at a lower cost or similar cost to today's steel. I'm pretty damn excited. I think this is mostly solved. So, you know, climate is a very solvable problem. Even without AI and AI will only turbocharge climate. So that's energy, generally speaking, slash energy resources, steel, cement, robotics. We got robotics. We got what else? I'm super excited. So I was mentioning this talk I did. It's called plausible tomorrow. So you can google that too. I have a dozen predictions that look really implausible unless somebody sits down with me and I walk them through each and they say I see no reason this won't happen.

50:44I think by 2050 we can replace most cars in most cities self -driving or just don't have cars. Public transit that meets the following requirements. It's over cheaper than cars and cheaper than today's public transit cheaper than today's public transit without losses for the transit agency. That's always faster than public transit because it's like Uber. It's Hailed not scheduled. It's all personal. It's two and four person vehicles, not and it fits in a bicycle. Not only, by the way, public transit, fusion, open AI, I invested in the same time frame. roughly yeah around 2018. So I'm very proud of that weight.

51:34That's a good year. But people said public transit start off you must be totally crazy. And I said Google's doing VAMO is the wrong way to do transit. Because the vehicles are too big or what? No, it just increased congestion. Okay. So what should it be? So and I think VAMO will have a great business for delivering people from transit routes to the last mile. There's only one question in a city when it comes to traffic. Can you increase throughput 10X for the same street width without redoing the street width? So we designed a public transit system of self driving vehicles in bicycle lane width.

52:20So it's easy to insert in a city has 10 times the capacity of a light rail system or or car system so more capacity than light rail system in a bicycle lane width. And it's on demand because the cars just you kill them like an Uber. So turns out every single project we have bid so far. We bid a lot for having decided we want every single one for a public transit system from a startup and the startup wasn't invited to bid on any of these projects. Nobody knew about us. Nobody invites a startup. San Jose invited 32 bidders to build a transit system from the airport to the Google campus and then to the Apple campus in San Jose.

53:13We bid over the transform because most of these bids are open and we want it outright. Think about it. So what is the vehicle? It's a little part. Think Disney World. It's like a little narrow car. Yeah. Yeah. Let me say it's in a bicycle lane. Yeah. By the way, it can fit a bottle of bicycle lane too. Yeah. Being a tricest as many as cars on a street or something like that. So turns out it has way more capacity than cars in the street or even if everybody took buses, this would have more capacity. In passengers for our given for a given street width. Are they also coordinating with each other?

53:52So the cars are closer together. Is that part of it? Absolutely. You can coordinate. Yes. Yes. So if you build a raised infrastructure, it's so simple, you can do pre -fab. Yeah. You don't have to do the Boston tunnel dig for 20 years. Right. Wow. You just do a pre -fab, put it in flies. Yeah. So that's a good one. It is thinking from first principles. Yeah. That matters. And it leads to end being ambitious. Okay. And how about medicine? Because that's like 20 % or more of GDP. That's a huge one. Yeah. I would say that's a big part of this. But you spend a time in medicine separate from AI with AI.

54:28So off, which is a big part of our GDP, a quarter of that spend is medical expertise is physical think doctors. Okay. Almost certainly that goes to zero. Can go to zero. So what are we doing? We're building AI primary care doctors, AI physical mental health therapists, AI physical therapists, yeah, oncologists, AI. You name it. Actually, maybe just just to get specific about what you mean about that going to zero. If we have for every 100 doctors per capita we have today in like 2050, do you think we have like zero or 10 or like what do you think this is? I don't know the answer. But there are some.

55:15You will always have some to learn from. Right. For the AI to learn from for the AI to learn from though the AI can boot itself to be much better. In all, give you today's data of a multi center study at Stanford. They took the best academic institutions and judged complex AI diagnosis. Physicians only and these are academic learning centers with the best physicians 73 % accuracy. So 27 % of the patients were getting the wrong diagnosis. It's like a lot. It's like one in yeah, it's a lot. It's wonderful. Think about it. And this complex means it was a serious thing. It wasn't just the flu. AI alone 88 % accurate accurate.

56:07But then they gave the AI to the doctors. The doctors improved from 73 % to 76%. The AI got degraded from 88 to 76%. That's funny. And this is a serious multi center study. I love medicine. What will happen is everybody on the planet for less than a dollar a month. We'll get a free primary care free physician. Initially called primary care, but they'll be do everything. My son's company, QRI is called multi -specialty primary care because the AI knows enough gastroenterology to provide that. Now the hard problem is the American Medical Association won't let the AI write a prescription. And so we have human physicians who approved the diagnosis and the prescription or testing recommendation or whatever.

57:01Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, if the humanoid at home plays out too, then it's probably also doing some amount. I mean, it's not a new surgery, but it might be doing some amount of giving you a physical or yeah, giving you an injection or whatever else you need. Watch your gate and say, yeah, yeah, yeah, something's up. Yeah, something's up. Yeah. So that's a quarter of medicine. What about the other three quarters? A quarter is pharmaceuticals. That we are seeing an explosion in AI in drug design. Yes. Both small molecules and are you pretty bullish on that? I'm very bullish on that. Do you think it will speed up the rate of drug discovery slash make it cheaper or do you think it's more about it will help us discover undiscoverable things?

57:48Probably a little bit of both. The hard part in that is the regulatory cycle. We have a separate effort to say, could you trust, test anything against lots of human genetics and lots of human organs? So we have an effort to do 10 ,000 tests and it could be a thousand different genetics so people and 10 organs each in one week in one untouched robot. So it just does the test, screens the drug and looks for effects and growth and all that. Maybe something like that would replace human trials. Most likely at some point soon, it'll reduce the size and length of these trials. So I think drug discovery will see not only better molecules, the bigger problem in this, the discovery is not to do what called lead compounds for a disease for a drug but to increase the probability of success.

58:55The probability once you have a lead drug candidate to actual FDA approval is so no, like out of 100 less than five will make it. So it's increasing that probability because you're starting with a better candidate and you imagine the process better. So that's a quarter. I do think there is diagnostic imaging and by the way, we have the most coolest self -driving for MRI machines so you don't need MRI machines. Now you need today technicians to run MRI machines but if you have a self -driving, you don't need that. Cardiac MRI is so specialized because the heart is moving that you can't staff centers with cardiac MRI technicians.

59:47We turn an hour and 15 minute exam into 20 minutes, single button press. You can even do it remotely because so we did the same for ultrasound, self -driving for ultrasound machines. The ultrasound machine might cost 25 grand but a technician to do a cardiac MRI will cost you 150 grand. So why care about the machine? It's the person. If you have self -driving, we had this company that G actually acquired from us. So all I'm saying is diagnostics and imaging is a quarter of the span. It'll get cheaper. I'm shocked it's a quarter of the span. I didn't realize that. Casting of all sorts. Yeah. And then a quarter is in hospital care.

1:00:33These are very rough numbers but in hospital care and that will improve too. So the net of all of this is like a multi trillion dollar retrofit. Yes. Yeah. But if expertise is free and you can give somebody 10 times the amount of care, the average US citizen gets one primary care visit to roughly in Australia. It's four or five times that. So we are poor anyway. If you provided way more group care upfront, you'd reduce disease burden downstream. Fewer people would have heart surgeries which are super expensive or emergency room visits because you took care of them at the big names of the detection of their disease.

1:01:29So whether you're every expensive disease, whether it's cardiac Alzheimer's Parkinson's, you're well on our way to discovering I'm 10 years before the symptoms manifest. So I argued a piece I did called 20 % doctor included in 2016. I said symptom based medicine will disappear. You don't detect disease from symptoms. You detect disease based on what's going on in the body. So that's medicine. Yeah. I'm pretty excited about it. The level of precision that's possible. I think in the next five years or 10 years, biological intervention will approach computer programming in being able to precisely program things, design molecules.

1:02:19So we are starting to we have a couple of startups looking to do drugs for one patient at a time. So the whole drug only applies to one patient for one genetic. Wow. And that's because that includes like the patient's DNA is factored in or something. Yeah. Their disease, their specific mutation can be addressed for them. There's also broader categories like a single shot treatment for sickle cell disease, right? Mass a problem. Yeah. If you can do a genetic treatment one shot, I think that'll happen next 10 years. As I'm listening to you talk about all of these different areas and like you think on such a grand societal scale, but you probably also have a bunch of sort of maybe seemingly boring but like good ideas kind of come through, coastal ventures all the time too.

1:03:16Yes. Do you still enjoy making those kinds of investments as well? Is that more where you have like a partnership? And there's other people on your team who are more interested in one one. There are the people in the partnership who enjoy just successful startups. Yeah. I do too. Yeah. You look, I enjoy winning. You know, when I do a GitLab, that's a win. When we do cognition, it's a win. When we do replete, it's a win. I mean, the growth rates from these companies are stunning. Shocking. Yeah. So yeah, it's still fun to be disruptive. Yeah, it's just like sort of a different bucket of enjoy it.

1:03:53It's a different bucket. Yeah. I would say in the more societally impactful technologies, I will go through actually starting the company. Like fusion, Bob was a senior fellow or a commonwealth fusion. Bob was a senior fellow at MIT Plasma Fusion Lab when I met him. And he had ideas and and I got him sort of like instigated. So yeah, he's done all the work. And then he instigated the field of fusion. So whether he succeeds or not, there's so many different startups now. One will succeed. Yeah. So commonwealth fusion or helium don't have to succeed for fusion to succeed. So I like instigating things.

1:04:42The same thing we did. Yeah, it was very profitable to make 2 ,500 times your money. Yeah. And having the world be TCP IP instead of ATM. It's interesting to look back at the press from 1996. Just assumed. Yeah. It was going to be the Internet was going to be ATM. So I'm actually, you know, I always tell the founder of that. Yeah. If we hadn't done that, the Internet wouldn't be TCP IP, which is horrific to think about. It'd be in the hands of AT &T engineering the protocols. Yeah. Which they had done. And this is why Lucent business practically. They're still around. I could tell new bridge, nor tell all the telecom players sort of gradually disappeared because they didn't win place or show in the race for the Internet.

1:05:37And the same will happen in other areas. You used the word instigating when you could have maybe used a word like incubating. I also heard earlier in the conversation. I think you, you know, you talked about like not being an investor. You know, I think also like the way that you work with founders. And I've heard you talk about not being founder friendly or that there's a different way to think about being founder friendly. What I'm curious about is there's a lot of sort of new ways to describe what VCs do and how they describe themselves and mindsets around it. Do you think that in general the role that venture investors see themselves playing?

1:06:16Do you think we're trending in a direction where it's getting better all the time? Or do you think that in any ways the industry has lost its footing on some of these concepts? Look, there's all kinds of VCs with all kinds of approaches. Some are marketing labels. Founder friendly is a real disservice to founders. It's like if you said to your kids, if you told your five year old, do whatever you want, do whatever you want. I will always say yes. Yeah. That's you want to pay the price. You want to go swimming without me? Yeah. Like whatever. Yeah. Or eat as much candy or eat as much coke. And by the way, my kids when they were growing up at age five, they could eat as much candy and as much coke as they wanted, as much junk food.

1:07:08We always had to cling around. They could, they didn't have to ask us. But we taught them how to measure themselves on how much coke they drink, whether it's good or not. So I would say we taught them control, not gave them yes, no permission. Yeah, but the most important thing is that you set those parameters for the kid. Yeah. And yeah. Right. And in literally at age 12, I thought of they can make 10 % of the important decisions. By age 18, they have to make 90. And my job is to teach them how to make the leash longer. Right. But the same is true of entrepreneurs. So a brilliant engineer from DeepMind starts a company.

1:07:56What do they know about finance? What do they know about marketing? What do they know about even hiring or managing? Our job is to teach them just like I taught my kids. By 18, my kids were pretty independent. I didn't worry about what they did in college. All four went to college five miles from our house at Stanford. Yeah. None of them had this. I want to get away because they felt they had enough leash and enough permission. They didn't need to quote and quote get away. Can I put up a like a steel man argument that of the other side to hear your reaction to it? Basically, it would be something like the sort of the strongest entrepreneurs, which is where all the returns are don't really need much help or much management.

1:08:41And so better to just invest in the people who didn't need help in the first place. I disagree. That is very much the founders fund argument. Yeah. They do very well with that. Great founders do well, whether you like it or not. Yeah. Whatever you do. Where I will disagree is they can do even better if they have a debating partner. So my view is very simple. I almost never worked at a board. So I don't even go to boards now. You won't show up. So I don't get on boards. Yeah. Basically. Yeah. And Scraze is a great example. I got off the board the week before the IPO. And everybody is like, hey, this is sexy IPO.

1:09:30Why are you getting off the board? I don't like the burden of the governance, the governance and all that. My responsibility shifted from having Jack do better to governance for the public markets. It's not very fun. It sounds glamorous, but it's not. You know, Jack and I would do a regular monthly dinners. And I'd always challenge him and always push him. And he loved that. So he took the time to do these dinners. Yeah. You talk to Max left in the phone. It's a public company we long ago distributed stock. I still do quarterly meetings and challenge him for an hour every quarter. Right. Even the strongest founders like Jack and Max and need this.

1:10:21It's like even a pro sports player has a coach. Yes. You want people to challenge you and debate you but not make decisions. I find it silly that boards want to take a war. I won't even take a war on the acquisition. I'll just say I'll support whatever management wants to do. Even if I disagree strongly. But I do want to have the opportunity to debate it with the management team. So Jigdeep Singh is a founder, one of our robotics companies. I've done six companies with him. There was a company I'm forgetting the name, like something optical company. The team wanted to sell. I only asked they give me two hours with the whole team to make and I did over the weekend the presentation.

1:11:13I gave them on why they should not sell. But before that presentation as long as I had the two hours I signed the papers and said you have my word anyway. You can choose to use it or tear it up. So I will always give the final state to the management team. But I do want to debate it. And I think every strong founder loves feedback that challenges them. Yes. And it's the only thing really valuable to a strong founder. Great founders love that. Not so great founders are so uncertain of themselves. They don't like that. And they are, I prefer to teach them how to be a great founder. But almost every strong founder loves feedback.

1:12:03I had Keith on this podcast and what you're describing is a big part of I think this, you know, what drew him back to Kosoa. Yeah. By the way, on that topic, I'm curious. I read that as one of the sort of like generationally great sort of recruiting or re -recruiting, you know, moves that has happened. And I think he's an amazing investor obviously. Did you know, for a while that you wanted that to happen? We're different kind of. And I said, earlier, we are not in, I've not called myself an investor ever. Right. I always say I'm a venture assistant. If you look at our website, since we started the firm in 2000 war, the first tagline is venture assistants.

1:12:48By the way, another phrase that has stayed on our website since 2004 is I prefer brutal, brutal honesty to hypocritical politeness. In when most VCs give polite feedback to an entrepreneur, they're doing a disservice. They're basically saying you're doing great. Don't examine anything. Makes you feel good as an entrepreneur, but doesn't help you build a better company. And the only things that make you feel better are things that change your thinking or challenge your thinking. So it's an important characteristic for founders to keep in mind, what are they looking for? The best help are just people who will go, why?

1:13:28Yeah. So it's a style that's different. We don't think of investments. We've never calculated, never means not in last 10 years. I can think of a single instance where we calculated NIRR. Not one. And investment firm that never calculates IRRs because we want to build something significant. And then the economics will work out. So that's our approach. But if we do want to make increase the probability of success of the founder, and we want to increase the magnitude of the potential success also by thinking about should you do X or Y. Founders underestimate that. So let's say a founder selling 10 % of a company, 10 million at a 100 million post.

1:14:24The founders forget they're keeping 90 % on what happens to the price per share of that 90%. Whether they give up 10 % or 12 % keep 90 or 88. Yeah. Preveal compared to the 500 % swing you can get by taking one path or a different path. That's where the opportunity for maximization is. That's where it's not about investing, but getting the best health building a company. And that's what I sort of spend all my time doing. Just yesterday I was talking to this founder. It's a very cool company, self -driving for these heavy machines, bulldozers, and loaders. And we had an interesting session. And I reframed his business from automating big caterpillar machines to I'll just rent you the driver.

1:15:23You have trouble staffing drivers. Most design, mines and remote places, equipment, a multi -million dollar piece of equipment, sits idle because you don't have an operator. I said, just do rental by the hour and guarantee you will always have a driver available. Always have a driver. This reframing dawn on front was pretty excited about it. It's the same thing, but it's not. It's a much easier cell. It's not saying change your equipment. It's saying, hey, you can't keep your equipment running all the time because you don't have operators. I'll run it for you. You're paying operators. I'll do it better, faster, more hours.

1:16:10You get more of your equipment. It's a simple framing change. But you could have a similar technology discussion too. I know you're going to have to go in a minute. I just want to ask you, there's one, I mean, there's a million more questions I want to ask, but there's one I really wanted to ask, which is you've been not just doing venture, but you've been doing it really successfully and in a super relevant way for a long time through a lot of cycles. Before we started, you said, you're turning 70 or you turned 70 this year, you feel 25. This is kind of like the dream. Do you know what you attribute all of this to?

1:16:46Very importantly, I give a talk at Stanford in 2015. Stanford Business School 2015. I said, I'm internally driven. I don't care what others think of me, so it feels obnoxious sometimes because I'll do my thing, independent of what others think. I'm doing this because it's fun. You know, I get somebody teaching me about confining and constraints and construction or self -driving and MRI machine or a big loader that the same thing. Clever ideas like public transit or can we make fusion happen? So, I'm in it because it's fun for me and most of the people at Coastal love what they're doing and would do the same thing if they didn't get paid.

1:17:40And so, we do it for a different reason than making the most money. Because we focus on larger impact, the returns really do well or take care of itself. You know, it's sort of like what's motivating you. In fact, this was conversation I had Sam and we invested in OpenAir. He knows I care about the impact. Something happened making something happen. Fusion is too important to not try. I want the impact of fusion. There's nothing I could do in making money that would impact me more saying other than saying I'd pray this tiny part in getting fusion to start and hopefully happen. Even if Commonwealth Fusion doesn't do it, almost all the companies have been enabled and investing in the field has been enabled because people look at Commonwealth Fusion.

1:18:35So, this idea of instigating change is very motivational. It's way more impactful and also fun and way more learning than almost anything else. I say I'm like totally I have one addiction which is to learning. I can't learn enough new things whether it's about biology or an AI algorithm or hypersonic flight. We are doing Mach 5 flight too and we haven't talked about national defense. We are spending a lot of time there. But all these areas are just fun. Yes. And that's why I don't mind. I still work ADRs week and I hope 25 years from now on, I'm working ADRs week, health permitting, touch wood.

1:19:22But that's I think it's a very different motivation of why we do things. I tell our LPs and probably the only one foolish enough to tell my LPs if I can have more impact and less return. I'll pick more impact every single time. As long as they get a minimum return that they're comfortable with. So they can well you seem to be getting both. Veno thank you so much this was amazing and I am super appreciative of your time and all that you've done for for the industry. Great thank you. It's a lot of fun.