Charlie Songhurst

And the West Coast, maybe it's sort of part of a California hippie cultural tradition coming in, has this very high sense of trust.

And if you look at sort of the convertible note, if you look at sort of letting the founder make decisions below supervision, these things only emerge in a very high trust culture.

I'm not sure you can build trillion dollar market cap companies without that high trust culture.

I think if you don't have it, you end up building something worth a billion dollars and then arguing over how to sell it or how to optimize it.

And you don't get that sort of aspiration that you see in all the trillion market cap companies, all of which are on the West Coast.

And then I think there's some interesting little sort of cultural foibles, possibly with an actually dressed by the East and West Coast, but more by the nature of investing, maybe what people do as analysts between the age of 21 and 23.

So if you spend your time between 21 and 23 building Excel models, you tend to think more about numbers.

And so you tend to have a much better intuition for margin economics.

And so where is the East Coast off tonight over the West in the way they look at businesses?

It's they collect to identify businesses with shaky unit economics, but fast revenue growth and good product market fit.

And they're like, look, you have product market fit, but only because you're giving away $100 for 90.

So of course, you've got good product market fit.

I'll give you some counterpoint where West Coast investors do very well, is when you have a product leap that doesn't get evinced in the numbers immediately, but is such a sort of tactile and visceral experience when you use it, you have to make an imaginative leap to turn that into numbers.

And there are two examples.

One is the early iPhone, and I was doing some investigations for Microsoft at the time, and it was always easier to talk about competitors than to talk about yourself because you're less likely to say something you shouldn't.

So you're always trying to steer the conversation onto talking about Apple or Google or something.

And one of the things you realized is there was a bunch of investors that sort of thought Apple was overvalued when it was sort of

100, 200 billion market cap because they took the tam of Nokia and said, even if they take all Nokia's market share, this business can't be big because phones only sell whatever it was back then.

And they couldn't intuit the increase in pricing power that you were going to get from turning the phone into a computer.

And the West Coast VC community immediately intuited that.