Jean Luo

I mean, that's certainly the case, obviously, with the latest breakthroughs in LLMs, right?

decades of research to get to that point.

Or the smartphone, for example, which everyone views as an overnight success.

But the iPhone was shipping hundreds of thousands of units in its first year.

And that was building on so much progress that Apple had made over the prior decade.

So I think it's always really easy in technology to look at these developments and call them overnight successes.

But I think

the folks who really inspire us, the Jensen's of the world, or you look at what Bezos was able to accomplish, or look at Elon.

I mean, he saved Tesla from bankruptcy not too long ago.

And so I think it's really easy for folks to forget that the defining characteristic of all these incredible entrepreneurs is actually that their pain tolerance was incredibly high.

I mean, people were just constantly criticizing and ridiculing Jensen or Jeff or Elon for their vision and what they were trying to accomplish.

And so I think that's part of building something for the long term.

That's part of innovating.

Acknowledging that upfront so you're not surprised when people are criticizing you or calling your idea stupid.

That's really important because you have to be able to build the resilience to execute through all that sort of doubt or public pressure or short-termism that pervades public markets today.

I mean, you know, it's funny.

I think back to the early days of Snapchat.

Nobody thought Snapchat could work.

I mean, our early investors we went to talk to were like, yeah, good luck.

You know, try competing with Facebook.