Brian Koppelman

I remember walking out the door to go meet with Steven and my son saying to me, what do you think?

He was always very interested in stuff and he was like 11 or 12 or 13.

He said, what do you think the chances are?

And I said, honestly, like 5%.

And I think I've spoken to groups of like salespeople, tech, and often before a meeting where the upside is potentially so huge, but it's a long shot, that's when sometimes we don't really do the work because we're so scared of...

of being disappointed and heartbroken.

But somehow David and I did it, all the work.

And I had so much at stake in the meeting with Steven and he was delightful.

And the fact that we were that prepared was immediately apparent because we weren't pressing or weren't pushing, but like we just had this domain expertise and he knew our work.

So there was that.

And by the end of that meeting, he shook our hands.

It was like, all right, we're doing this together.

And then, yeah, of course we were aware that with everybody else wanting to do it, if the thing didn't happen, we would have gotten blamed for it.

But you can't think about that, and we didn't.

I'll say it was like, you're aware of it.

There's a difference between being aware of something, being aware of the downsides, and focusing on the downsides.

I've heard Alex Honnold talk about it too, meaning he's aware of the fact that it'd be bad to fall.

But he's not thinking about that when he's on the mountain, right?

He's thinking about going carefully and smartly and using all his expertise and abilities.

He's thinking about climbing up.