Simon Sinek

You know, he talks about we're here to grow people so they can achieve their greatest potential.

He said, well, Bob, how do you measure success?

We measure success by how we touch the lives of people.

And he's a guy who in 2008, when the economy hit the skids and his pipeline dried up, they didn't lay off anybody, but they did do furloughs.

And what they said, the public announcement was better.

We should all suffer a little than any of us should have to suffer a lot.

And it's that kind of shared hardship.

We're not saying that companies can't go through hard times and that we have to somehow struggle.

We're not asking for the companies to give us huge bonuses when they're losing money.

But if we all share in the burden, that means we can also share in the good fortune and the wealth.

And if we take care of each other and look to each other's growth,

This is a good thing.

Venture capital screws things up because venture capitalists put pressure on all these CEOs to do things.

They promote short-termism in a horrible way.

And that's where the incentives get all screwed up.

And there's a great irony now, which is it used to be that just the public markets, if you were a public company,

would be the pressure and private was like, oh my God, you could do whatever you wanted.

And now because of the amount of VC and public private equity, the irony is, is whether you're public or private, the pressures are the same to be short-termism.

So there's not as much protection as being private as there used to be.

There's some, obviously, but it's not the same if you're venture-backed.