Steven Bartlett

The key thing to answer your question is a company by definition of the word is group of people. So for me, when I got to the point in my life where I had the leverage, the resources to hire exceptional people and delegate, that's when I knew I could do more than one thing.

And Richard Branson, who I met in New York and I went to an event with him and then I interviewed him for a couple of hours, is the absolute master of this. He said to me, because he's dyslexic, so he struggles with reading and he's not particularly good at maths in his own words. He said to me, I've always had to ask who, not how. And this is like, my girlfriend started a business.

It does like breath work and meditation. And I remember walking in the front room and watching her for seven hours try and figure out how to build a website. And that for me is almost a metaphor from what I see from entrepreneurs. They spend so much time, they waste so much time doing things that they are not good at. What Richard Branson taught me is business is about effective delegation.

Richard Branson, in his 50s, ran one of the biggest groups in Europe, right? And he told me about a meeting he had, at 50 years old, runs one of the biggest groups in Europe, where he sat in the meeting and his CFO says, Richard, do you know what's going on? He goes, he's like, no. His CFO takes him out of the room, draws a picture of an ocean,

and then draws a picture of a net in the ocean and then puts some fishies in the net and goes, Richard, this is what net profit is. Net profit is the fishies here in the net. At this point, Richard is running one of the biggest groups in Europe and he doesn't know what net profit is.

Because he's been such a good delegator for his entire career that he doesn't really need to know a bunch of stuff. He's so good at finding people and giving them responsibility. In this season of my life, that is what I'm doing. I'm finding exceptional individuals. I'm spending about 20 hours a week of my time on recruitment and I'm empowering them to start companies.

Again, I've researched this really, really deeply. I've interviewed Walter Isaacson, who followed Elon Musk for two years, and he followed Steve Jobs pretty much until the day he died. And I asked him, I said, what's their secret? He said, specifically in the case of Steve Jobs, he said, you know, Steve, I was in the backyard with Steve Jobs before he died. And I asked him a question.

I said, what's the best product you ever built at Apple? Steve turned to me and went, the team. He goes, that's the most important thing. He goes, the iPhone's great, the Mac is great, but the best product I ever made at Apple was the team. By definition of the word company is group of people. And if you play out this thought experiment, if any of you had managed to hire Elon Musk,

and get the best out of him, you would be the benefactor of trillions of dollars. So I think through that lens, my job is to find the next A player. And that's why I went from spending one hour a week of my time on hiring and recruitment, now I spend 20 hours of my week. All of you, both personally and professionally, are in the recruitment business.

It is going to be the single biggest defining factor of where you end up personally and professionally.

The big professional regret I have is knowing that someone was wrong for my company or team and taking too long to make a decision about it. Because, again, I wrote about some of the research in my book, but the impact that a negative member of your team has is three to four times the positive impact a good member of your team has.

And a nice thought experiment for you guys to think about when you're trying to understand if an existing member of your team is good or when you're hiring someone and you're trying to figure out if they're a good team member, is ask yourself this question. If everyone in the team was like them in terms of attitude, cultural values, i.e.

alignment with the company culture, would the overall average be raised, maintained, or lowered? Both me and both Amazon have a policy which we call bar raises. Every single person that we hire should raise the bar. They should raise the average.

Now think about one person you work with professionally and ask yourself the question, if everyone in your company was like them in terms of attitude and cultural values, I'm not saying lived experience, we need diversity, attitude and cultural values, Would the average be raised, maintained, or lowered? If it would be lowered considerably, you should get rid of that individual.

If it would be maintained, maybe that's a case to train the individual. If it would be raised, that's the type of individual you need to promote. Because companies don't have one culture. They typically have as many cultures as they have managers. So in my previous business, we probably had about 30 or 40 managers, and we had 30 or 40 cultures, really.

Because I remember one day speaking to Jason's team, and they're all so happy. Best company they've ever worked for. Then I spoke to a team that sat next to Jason's team, and they're all on their way out the door. They're about to quit. So you want your best people, the real sort of cultural disciples, as high as you possibly can in the organization. And that's what we call the bar raiser test.

I think, and I've done a lot of research on this, you can correlate someone's success in life to one metric more than others, and that metric is their personal and professional failure rate. If you want to increase your chance of success, you basically have to increase your rate of failure.

And I've studied many a great entrepreneur, from Jeff Bezos to Thomas Watson from IBM to entrepreneurs that I know and have interviewed, like the founder of Airbnb and Daniel Ek, who's a good friend of mine, the founder of Spotify. What they all share in common is they understand that failure is feedback, and feedback is knowledge, and knowledge is power.

So when I think about my own life and I reflect on my own failings, or my own experimentation rate, leaving school at 16 years old, quitting university after one lecture, starting a company and resigning after two years, starting another business and resigning after five years, I have a very fast rate of experimentation, and that means that I think I've managed to acquire a lot of information very quickly.

And that's reflected in the companies that I build. So in the companies that I build now, we have a head of failure. We have a head of experimentation. And I think there's probably some background context I need to give you here, which is the world is going to change at such a quick rate.

You'll see this when you walk around here and you get to see some of the technology, that your question as an individual, but also as a company should be, how am I going to acquire information quickly? And how am I going to acquire valuable information quickly? It's not going to come from books.

If you listen to the futurists, they'll tell you that in the 21st century, we'll experience a rate of change that is 20,000 times the previous century. So the way that you acquire information, whether you're an individual or a company, is you increase your rate of experimentation. You conduct more experiments.

And so for something that's easy to understand, like a podcast, that means we conduct 30 or 40 experiments every week on everything, on the title, the length of the title, different colors, adding an exclamation mark, adding quotation marks, the temperature of the room, the amount of CO2 in the room when you do an interview.

We take this absolute scientific approach to finding the answer, which is accelerating your rate of failure. And if you speak to Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, he'll tell you the same thing. He says, Amazon has to be the best place on earth to fail. Nine of those failures will end up in the graveyard. But the one that is successful, the AWS, will pay for the entire graveyard.

And the world we're moving into, it's going to be increasingly more important that your team is set up to conduct fast experiments.

Yes. So in our portfolio, so Flight Group is our holding company. We have 41 different companies. And I'd say we have significant operational involvement in about five of them. But there's 41 in total. Some of them are more passive investments. Some of them we might have a 20 or 30 percent stake in. And then some of them we have a majority position in.

I've never actually said this before, but when I got my student loan, I took half of it and I bet it on a football game.

It wasn't a good game. But it was just, it was Stokes. I didn't even like the team.

So interesting. I wish all parents did that. Because I was thinking about what's actually going on there. And what he did is he pulled back the curtain on how the system works. He gave you certainty through information on how this thing called money operates. The opposite approach is what I experienced, which is... Total uncertainty. And there's nothing humans hate more than uncertainty.

Money was this person in my life that was stood behind the curtain wreaking havoc. I didn't know who he was or who she was or what she was doing, but I could see the consequences of her. And I didn't have a relationship with her.

Your dad pulled back the curtain and gave you a direct relationship with money as if you think of it like a person and showed you how they operate, how they think and what they do. And that kills the uncertainty so you can be at peace with this thing. Whereas I didn't know. I could just see the downstream consequences in my everyday life. I could see the argument. I could see the stress.

There's a few things that sprung to mind when you asked the question. The first is at 18 years old, when I dropped out of university, my friend had given me this diary. And I'm alone in this room in a place called Moss Side slash Rush Home in Manchester. And I write in the first page of my diary, my goals before I'm 25 years old. Number one. I'm going to buy a Range Rover Sport, right?

Bear in mind, I'm stealing Chicago town pizzas to feed myself at this point. Number two, I'm going to be a multimillionaire. Number three, I'm going to get a six pack. And number four, I'm going to get a girlfriend. That was my entire orientation in life. And I thought if I achieve these four things, I would achieve happiness. And again, if we look at this list,

seeing the insecurity of my mother's and father's relationship. That's why probably number four was there. I was always the smallest of my siblings. I was always a small kid growing up as well. I had a bit of a growth spurt. I couldn't drive. All of my rich white friends could drive. I was the youngest in my year, roughly. So I got my driving license.

I would be eligible for a driving license latest if I could even afford one. So I'm always in the back of my friend's car. And of course, the issue of money. So my list was a list of my own insecurities. And then I spent the next five years making sure that by the age of 25, I ticked off everything on the list. And I did.

And upon the day when I bought the Range Rover as my first car, and I had a girlfriend, and I had worked on my body and all these things, I felt a tremendous sense of anticlimax because someone had lied to me. And the person that had lied to me was myself and my own insecurity.

So sometimes in life, it's not a popular answer, but you have to have your BS fail you for you to realize that it's BS at all. Right. And sometimes our own self-story is so strong and our insecurities are so strong that it's not until we confront them by accomplishing the thing it told us to confront that we realize that it was lying to us the whole time.

And at that point, I could reorientate my life towards something else. And I could say, what actually matters? What I found really interesting about her question was my brain has this orientation that I've learned over time, which is to focus on the other part of debt and wealth, which is wealth creation, which is how can I improve my financial situation by first increasing my income,

And the second part of that is reducing my overheads. And I want to say this because I don't think enough people are talking about it. And I think this is a great platform to talk about it. The world in front of us is changing extremely quickly at the moment. This thing called artificial intelligence, I think is going to have a profound impact on...

so many industries, so many lives in so many ways. I spend so much of my time obsessing about this. It also presents us with this generational opportunity to build a new type of wealth and to build wealth. And that opportunity will be captured as it was across history from the industrial revolution to the dot-com boom by those that focus on filling that first bucket at this moment in time.

And that bucket is of knowledge and skills. And the other sort of really important point of context in my life is my parents weren't around. So my mother was running a restaurant, which went from... afternoon till 2, 3 a.m. in the morning. My dad would leave his job when I was about 10 years old, and he would just go straight to her restaurant, help her clean up and everything.

So by about 10, when I woke up, they weren't there. When I went to bed, they weren't there. If you imagine the context there, you've got a kid that's desperate for stuff to fit in. Then you've got this void of independence. And in that void of independence, the kid runs experiments. He starts selling things. He starts trying to make a website so he can sell

Japanese clothes to the UK market and fails at that. He finds things in the house and goes and sells them on the playground. And then he gets the full feedback loop of getting money in his hands and going, oh, now I can buy things. I got the feedback because there was this void of independence. It built this wealth of evidence in my head.

And I think confidence, self-belief, and really any belief is a question of what stack of

irrefutable evidence is greatest in your mind and for me my parents i think somewhat accidentally taught me that you can have an idea and then you there's nothing between you and the execution and realization of that idea this was this parasitic like life-changing realization i was given at 14 years old you can have an idea and then you can make the idea a reality i didn't i'm not good at maths yeah i still can't spell was never particularly good in school

But this one macro tailwind of this thing they call self-belief, which came from this void of independence and the ability for me to fail, means that you persevere in the face of not having money or not having a degree to the point that you get feedback. And feedback becomes knowledge and knowledge becomes your power in life.

It crossed my mind.

It crosses your mind. And I now fully understand how people end up making those kinds of decisions. Because when you feel the pain in your stomach of not eating for a couple of days, And you can't see a clear path out of the situation you're in. You weigh up your options. And if you have a clear understanding of consequence, like I did, thank God. Thank God, yeah.

You make a different set of decisions. But I have complete empathy and understanding for how one ends up choosing another path, especially if they don't have role models around them, which is a form of consequence. Yeah.

It also makes me realize, as you speak, how important the safety nets were that I didn't even realize were there. And in the UK, we have an NHS, we have a healthcare system.

Which is just inconceivable to me. Yeah. Growing up in the UK, it's inconceivable that I could get sick and it could cost me money or make me bankrupt because I got sick.

and if you think about my story there were so many safety nets I had a house with parents that I could have ran back to that creates a psychological safety that I could retreat backwards we also have benefits in the UK and I remember the day where I printed off the we call it job seekers allowance forms which would have given me some money I never submitted them but I was at a point where I'm weighing up my options here and then the safety net of our healthcare which is I did know that I was playing on a solid foundation and that allows you to take those risks you know

The second thing I was thinking about is something I learned. The question said, what do wealthy people know that I don't know? They know something about sweating the small stuff and the compounding returns you get from that. The richest investor in the world, I think he's the fourth richest person on earth called Warren Buffett, says that compounding returns is the eighth wonder of the world.

Now, compounding returns are essentially what happens when you have an obsessive focus on small, marginal improvements in our money, in our finances, in our savings, and how that then starts to build over time. The reason why it's eighth wonder of the world is it's slow, then it's fast. If I think about how my podcast grew... Mm-hmm. For the first three years, no one's listening.

And then it's incredibly fast. When I think about how my investments and my net worth grew, it was slow and incredibly fast. When you think about something like your teeth, if you don't brush your teeth today, fine. No one's really going to know. If you don't brush your teeth every day this week, you're probably still going to get away with it.

But if you don't brush your teeth for five years straight, you're in a dental chair and they're ripping the molars out of your mouth. The same applies for your skin, your hair, your relationships with others, and your relationship with money. This idea of out-obsessing others on the small stuff is for me, is much of the game of both business, life, money, relationships.

And we have like two phrases in my company that are the most popular. The first is failure, which I talked about. And the second is 1%. It's, you know, you can stand at the foot of Mount Everest and look up and you'll be daunted and anxious and intimidated. So you'll bury your head in the sand. Or you can say to yourself, how do I move this one pebble in front of me?

And actually, when I studied how great things are built, how people become wealthy like Warren Buffett, it's not by making some gargantuan, intelligent decisions. financial decision that changed their life. Great businesses aren't built by some great stroke of innovation. You feel like you are going somewhere. And that is a motivating force.

And the last point I'll add to this is, in business, in life, and in our finances, when we set about to accomplish great things, to climb the Mount Everest, we experience that cognitive dissonance, that psychological discomfort, which often forces us into a form of paralysis. But if we break it down into what is the small thing, what is the 1%,

Not only does that feel achievable, which starts that momentum, but that 1% really, really, really matters. It's ultimately why someone like Warren Buffett was able to be so successful outside of his other forms of privilege was because he started investing at 11, his pocket money, 11 years old.

And now by the age of 80, that compounding graph, which is slow, then it's fast, has compounded in its favor. The problem is we don't think that small things matter.

I give them examples from their own life. This is why I always talk about people's teeth. Yeah, the teeth, that was a good one.

When did it happen? So if we talk about the example I gave of five-year tooth decay, when did it happen? It happened today. It happened today with a decision, and this is always the case with small things, that is both easy to do and also easy not to do.

In fact, every small decision in our lives, saving a dollar or not saving a dollar, brushing our teeth or not brushing our teeth, the problem with the small decisions is they are easy to do and easy not to do. So it almost has to become a somewhat religious belief in the power of compounding returns. But when you say like, what is the 1% gain that I can make today?

And can I make that again tomorrow? And how does that look when we zoom out on a graph over the course of five or 10 years? It is profoundly pivotal.

So, you know, as an 18-year-old, your knowledge, of course, is going to matter. So I would read 10 pages of a book a week, a place to start there. And that will compound. The books will get increasingly more difficult and increasingly more challenging as you get off to the races. And you'll feel accomplished. You'll have that progress principle. You'll feel like you are making progress.

On skills, this is quite an interesting one because the thing that ends up making an 18-year-old valuable in the economy and in the working market is... and this is kind of paradoxical, isn't if they go and get common skills. Crazy thing about life is it doesn't necessarily reward you for common skills. It rewards you for having a rare and complementary skill stack.

So when we think about an entrepreneur, we think they have the skill of entrepreneurship. No, they have 10 underlying skills, which made them successful at entrepreneurship. And actually in life, the people that become number one in an industry aren't necessarily the best at any individual underlying skill, but they have the right set of rare and complementary skills.

If you're training to be a lawyer at this moment, instead of tripling down on law, what I would highly advise you to do at that age is to think about the rare and complementary skill that this industry is going to value over the next 10 years. I would recommend that you go and do one semester or one course on large language models and artificial intelligence. Because the lawyer that has that

isn't paid the same as the lawyer that's even 10% better at law. They are paid hundreds of percent more in terms of value if they have rare and complementary. The best football player in the world, Cristiano Ronaldo, that played at Manchester United, as you'll know, he's not the best at any individual skill.

He's not the best runner, not the best penalty taker, not the best... I'd go on and on and on. He's the best player in the world. The reason for that is he has the right set of rare and complementary skills that aren't often found in one person. Right.

So again, going back to this point of skills, I would tell April to think about the rare skill that's going to be complementary that her industry values and start compounding there. Number three was network. So this is every conversation you have. You don't realize at 18 years old that every conversation is a seed you're planting that may blossom in the next decade. 5, 10, 20, 30 years.

I had a conversation in a queue as a 14-year-old with a guy. And at 18, his dad hit me up four years later, having not spoken to me and was the first investor in my company. It was a conversation I had in a line. Every conversation is a seed that will blossom.

So I would tell her, which is quite uncommon for young people these days, to get out and speak to people face to face and be polite on every interaction because you never know when those seeds blossom later. And fourth is your resources, which comes back to what we're saying about saving, you know, learning a more secure relationship with your money.

And the fifth is your reputation, which is simply just how you treat people. All of those things will compound over the next 5, 10, 15 years of your life and they will be slow. And then they will be fast.

In the same way that I met that kid at 14 years old, Jay, and then all of a sudden I'm at his father's mansion in London and his father is saying to me, we want to give you your first $10,000 for your business. It's slow, then it's fast. Those that focus on what they can give and what they have to offer end up getting what they want. But those that focus on what they want

Never give enough to get what they want. And so it's this reframing, and this is why I start with these five buckets, because they orientate you to becoming a valuable person in the world. And I believe that the downstream consequence of you building up your own personal value, which is your own knowledge, your own skills, your own relationships, is wealth.

So the orientation needs to be an internal locus of control. What can I control? And how can I make the world reciprocate with value, which is what we end up calling wealth. And it's a slow approach, but in life, the slow way is the only way. And every fast way that they try and sell you on some course or some ad is actually the extremely fast way because there's no such thing. So, patience.

Nearly every trauma, small t trauma that I overcame in my life actually came from writing. Okay. Because writing is this remarkable thing where you put down how you acted, your behavior, how you feel onto a piece of paper. And it gives you this almost, third person view from 30,000 feet as to the patterns and cycles in your life.

So when I think about my avoidance in romantic relationships, it wasn't until I started writing about it that I understood myself. And I deeply believe that self-awareness is one of the other powerful approaches to overcoming some of these things, because you can read as many books as you like, but you will never learn a thing until you start learning about yourself.

And I don't think most people have a practice for this kind of sort of self-awareness. For me, for mine was writing. Funnily enough, at the age of, I'm going to say 19, 20 years old, I made a commitment. Every single day, I would write a tweet and I would post it.

And I thought it was a, you know, looking back on it, it was probably the single most important thing that helped me to develop my sort of personal wisdom, my self-awareness, my articulation.

there's so many things that come to mind i think when the economy is uncertain i think it's the word that i'd use it both in the uk and in other markets around the world because we are in a global economy i i do think i think you have to do a bit of a pre-mortem and what this means in terms of finances is you have to play out the scenario now that your income your job um

Your financial situation was at risk and you have to plan accordingly. A pre-mortem is something we often do in business where we imagine the business has failed. And then from today, we ask ourselves why it failed and what we should have done today to sort of preempt or anticipate that moment. So this is why having a bit of a rainy day fund is highly advisable if you're able to build that up.

And in uncertain markets, start thinking a little bit about your spending strategy. But the most important thing and my unwavering bias is always to try and advise people on wealth creation in these moments as well. Because that is the life raft, that is optimism and that is longevity.

And it goes back to what we were saying earlier about how to make yourself valuable in an economy that is shifting quickly and is uncertain. And the great thing about the internet now is we don't need the mentors that we once used because in the palm of our hands, we have...

you know the entirety of the world's information if we know it's there we know the value of it and we have the sort of proclivity or we have the mindset to lean in and to mess around and that is the game just mess around learn use your weekends on youtube learning stuff self-educate in that regard education and information has been democratized yeah but we don't necessarily act like it has been so that would be my like overarching message for april

Amen. So I'd say to April to understand what her limiting beliefs are through journaling, and then to run an experiment of stepping over a couple of them and doing it anyway. And it's remarkable how that will just compound your life in the most unbelievable direction.

Good. Amen. Good.

I hope so. Oh, here we go. As your attorney, you don't have to ask questions. We're trying now. So yeah, we're trying to have kids. I hope to have many kids. I hope to have four children, but you know, one would be amazing.

I would do exactly what your father did, which was I would invite money into the room and I'd sit them down at the table and I'd explain to my children exactly where money comes from, what it does in the world. And then also some of the great things that you said, Michelle, where you talked about actually what matters more than that.

This idea of being a valuable person and cultivating worth and value in yourself so you can pour it out for other people.

Thank you. And thank you for changing mine.

Oh, good to have you here.

Oh, wow. That's my area. That's my old stomping grounds.

Are you a football fan?

First and foremost, thank you for having me. It's a real honor in so many ways. But to answer your question, I was born in Botswana in Africa, moved to the UK when we were very, very young. There's four of us, four siblings in my family. My mother's Nigerian, my dad is English. And this is important context because...

You know, having two parents with two different ethnicities plays a role in shaping how you understand yourself. We moved to the southwest of the UK in a place called Plymouth, which was predominantly white. In fact, I didn't know another black family in the area. And it's interesting listening to your upbringing, where you had this healthy, stable, secure attachment to money.

I think I very much had the opposite, because in life, generally, we understand the value of things by the context in which we see them. Yeah.

so if you go to you know they've done the studies if you go to a restaurant and there's three steaks on the menu we use the expensive one and the cheapest one to make the decision that the middle one is the right one and if you remove one option we make a different decision it's context that helps us to put value in perspective and in the case of my life i we were the black family in a middle class area that ended up losing our money remaining in the middle class area um becoming the poorest family in the area and the black family in the area so at a very young age i internalized this belief that i was less than

And I believed, which I heard you talking about money a second ago, I believed that money was the antagonist in my life. So, you know, I always think that the things that invalidate us when we're younger end up being the things we seek validation from when we're older. And for me, money was one of those things.

I had an unhealthy relationship with it because it was the reason why my parents were screaming. It was the reason why I had so much shame every day going to school. It was the reason why I didn't tell my friends where I lived because if they saw my dilapidated house and the smashed windows and the high grass... it was already hard enough to fit in.

And that would just exacerbate the massive further. So that was my context.

Yeah, so my dad had a good job and we'd moved into this area. And my mother got into business. And she left school when she was extremely young in Nigeria. Five, seven, ten years old, roughly. She didn't get an education. So when she... And in Africa, business is, in my mother's village, is... put out a stall and sell everything you have. Business in the UK was different.

So she really, really struggled to adapt. She hadn't learned to read or write. So that was an exacerbating factor. And all of that meant that the family money was invested into the businesses, the businesses

failed they failed they failed they failed they failed and that kind of took the money out of our home and it was kind of a downward spiral from there until you know properties we had our stuff repossessed at one point and it was a downward spiral from there

As I was listening to you talk backstage about your relationship with money and the lessons that your father taught you, I was thinking to myself, money is this other person in the room for our entire childhood. And just like we're developing a relationship with people and other things, we're developing this really clear, explicit, emotional relationship with money.

In the same way that we talk about attachment styles, we say you're an anxious attachment style or you're secure or you're avoidant.

In my household, I learned to be both anxious and avoidant with money. And you can see that in me as an adult, avoiding bills, hiding bills, not looking at my banking app. Because as a young age, my relationship with money, which is also kind of a proxy for your relationship with yourself, was that this person, this second person in the room, which I'm going to call money...

isn't around enough and its absence is making me feel insecure. And this is a bit more sort of esoteric, but when you think about the concept of wealth and money, it isn't something that our prehistoric human brain knows anything about. We had tribes. We didn't have wealth. It was what you could carry back then. We had food. We had love. We had tribe. We had status.

That was a really important thing. And money.

But money is this alien thing to the brain that we still have today. So it's actually just an emotional proxy for how you feel about yourself and that early context of love, attachment, abundance. And I think if you see it as a person in the room, and then you ask yourself the question, how did that person treat me growing up? Did I have that secure attachment to it? Were they absent sometimes?

Was there a longingness to be closer to them? Then it helps you to understand the relationship you have today.

For many, many reasons. The reason why I ended up in debt was because of my unhealthy relationship with money. Essentially, my spending is very, very simple. My spending was higher than my revenue, but I also didn't understand this thing called credit because nobody had told me. I didn't have financial literacy at all.

When I was 18 years old and I started working in call centers and I got my own money, When I got my paycheck, I would go and buy a plasma screen TV, the biggest one I could possibly buy. And get this, I'd put the plasma TV up like that. I couldn't afford cable to actually. And then a week later, because I couldn't pay my rent and I couldn't feed myself, I would sell the plasma TV.

This was a cycle. Wow. I had all kinds of really unhealthy, toxic relationships with this thing called money. I've never actually said this before, but when I got my student loan, I took half of it and I bet it on a football game.

It wasn't a good game. But it was just... It was Stokes. I didn't even like the team. But it was... I was so... It goes back to what I said earlier. The thing that invalidates you when you're younger is the thing you end up seeking validation from when you're older. So... The dopamine hit I could have got from winning would have filled some kind of hole in my insecurities.

I had destroyed my credit rating by the time that I figured out what it was. No one told me what a credit score was. And I had four credit cards that I'd been given because when you're a student, they just want to give you these cards. I went out, I spent the money. And then someone explained to me that you have to pay it back.

I had no money. And because I then dropped out of university, my parents didn't want to speak to me because that's complicated. And I was the only child in my family that left university. So I'm hundreds of miles away from home. I have managed to achieve these two CCJs, which is a county court judgment where the court comes for you because you've not paid any debts back.

I've dropped out of university. I'm shoplifting food to feed myself at this point. I can't call my parents and ask them for anything, not that they would be able to help me in that situation anyway. And I've destroyed this credit rating that apparently is really important and that nobody told me was critical. And that's the situation I found myself in at 18, 19 years old.

Because a lot of founders would gaslight their partner there and say, you don't understand. You don't get it. I'm doing this for you. This is for us.

You hate my work.

Yeah. Yeah. And I guess the communication is at the very heart of that, right? Yes. Reid, we are all very excited for your next book, which you said is coming out in January. January, yeah. End of January. It's a book called Super Agency. What could possibly go right with our AI future? Co-written with Greg Beato.

Beato. What could possibly go right with our AI future?

An optimistic take about AI? Yes. Why should someone and who should read that book?

That's refreshing.

I'll link it below for anyone that wants to pre-order it. But I highly recommend everybody goes and checks out your books, which are iconic because they've shaped the thinking of founders across the world. And even if you're not a founder, the startup of you is for everybody, regardless of what you're doing. It helps you navigate both building a business, but also just your career generally.

And also Masters of Scale, which is an iconic podcast that many of us listen to here. where you sit down with some of the greatest founders of all time and understand how they've scaled and built their companies. It's a podcast that I know Jack is a massive fan of and one of the first podcasts they ever got listening to as well. Highly recommend it.

I also have the book there and I'll link all of this stuff below. Reid, thank you. It's a pleasure. I look forward to the next one. Thank you so much. It's been such an honor. So wonderful speaking to someone that has such diverse, contrarian at times, opinions, but is willing to stand by them irrespective of whether they are...

believed or accepted or politically correct with the dominant narrative at the moment. And that comes from having such a wealth of experience, but being fundamentally well-intentioned, I think. So thank you, Reid, for the time. I really appreciate it. It's an honor to get to meet you. Thank you. And thanks for creating LinkedIn. I fucking love LinkedIn. I think they sponsor this podcast.

I didn't even know that. Oh, really? They do, yeah. So thank you so much, Reid. Appreciate it. Isn't this cool? Every single conversation I have here on the Diary of a CEO, at the very end of it, you'll know, I asked the guest to leave a question in the Diary of a CEO.

And what we've done is we've turned every single question written in the Diary of a CEO into these conversation cards that you can play at home. So you've got every guest we've ever had, their question, and on the back of it, if you scan that QR code, you get to watch the person who answered that question. We're finally revealing all of the questions and the people that answered the question.

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Is there any such thing as an entrepreneur in the sense of, you know, people always ask me, they say, can anyone be an entrepreneur and a founder? And there's so many different types of companies one can start these days that it's a quite tricky question to answer.

But do you think anyone, because there's going to be people listening to this now that are in their managers and companies that, you know, that they're working in a law firm or whatever, and maybe they've got an idea. I mean, everyone's got an idea. And they don't know if they're the type of person that should pursue it or not. Is there a framework one can run through to decide that?

We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show. Thank you. Thank you so much. Back to the episode. Reid, as I read through your life, it's remarkable in... It's almost impossible that one individual could be involved in so many companies that have had such a big impact on society.

but at the same time, someone being able to seemingly see the future over and over and over and over again. So because, as I read through your life, I thought this can't be one individual, this can't be one lifetime, it begs the question to me, what is, in your view, the causal factors that set you up for such a life?

So with your analogy of evading the beach, how do you know what beach to invade? Like, how do you know if you've got a good idea and how do you know what a good idea is? Because most people, as I said, listen to this, they've got a business idea. Yeah. And how do they know if it's good?

And part of the issue they often have is they've heard anecdotally or they've seen that someone else is already doing it. So they go, oh gosh, it's already been done.

So it looks like they're shopping because, I mean, for most people that use LinkedIn now, you don't see it as I'm looking for another role. Exactly. But back then people did. 2003.

I was going to say, so if everybody thinks it's a good idea, it's probably not a big idea.

It's much more challenging to be a big idea. Interesting. Really interesting.

Because it's funny because when people pitch to you, they say, I've asked everybody and everybody thinks it's great. Yes. So that's probably an indicator that it's probably not big or they're bullshitting.

2003.

2000, 2003, and then really- May 5th, 2003 is when we turned it on.

Wow. And back then, was it a social network as it is now, where there's a news feed and people talking to each other? Or was it more of a-

Okay, interesting. So the network effects were slightly less important than the model is today because a lot of people today are using it not to search for a job or a professional, but to...

it didn't really, really matter if anybody was chatting to you about what they ate for dinner that day. So a new network could penetrate the market that was less dependent on the like social networking component. Because if I go in there and make a profile and put my CV up, It doesn't really matter if I don't come back for four days.

Because I can get an email that will bring me back in saying, oh, there's a job here. But once my profile is up and ready, I'm now giving value to the rest of the network just by being there. Yes.

Yeah, I could never understand how LinkedIn did that, but now it makes sense to me. Yes. Because I always think, God, building a social network is asking for, like, hell in your life.

Oh, I didn't realize you were going to invest in Friendster as well.

were part of what they call the PayPal mafia. I know you use a different term.

But mafia is cool as well. Yes, yes. People love the term mafia. And through that time, you worked with the likes of Elon. You knew Peter Thiel from your days at university. I mean, everybody asks this question about PayPal. And why it was so successful, but also why so many of the alumni of PayPal went on to become multi-billionaires.

I think seven people that were part of that sort of early PayPal founding team went on to create Tesla, YouTube, Reddit, SpaceX, LinkedIn. Was it talent density? Was that what made the PayPal Matthew?

I often hazard a guess at what the fundamental game of business is for a startup founder. And I've hazarded a guess before that it's recruiting the best group of people you possibly can, binding them with a culture that gets the best out of them, and setting them a vision that's worthwhile. But from reading your work, there's a couple of things.

So when I say sales, I actually mean like selling to employees.

100%.

This one here, you probably remember this. Yes, I do remember that. Right, and the name's on the cover. Borderlands. What age were you when you started playing RuneQuest? You were very young.

Yeah.

And if I was a young entrepreneur telling you, right, I want to be better at pitching my vision so I can get world-class people to join me, world-class investors, partners, is there any advice you could give me on things I should and shouldn't do? Oh, yeah, absolutely.

And what is the link between the life you lived and the board games you played as a 10-year-old?

Yeah.

Because there's only going to be a couple of winners.

An insane learning curve. By that, you mean someone that's rapidly learning, self-teaching?

Okay.

Interesting.

When you look at your portfolio of investments and the entrepreneurs you meet, do you think young entrepreneurs realize how significant hiring is to their eventual outcome? Because they tend to focus on like how good the product is or sometimes capital.

But just looking at my own portfolio, I often find myself like feeling like an old man because I'm telling them that like spend more time hiring, not just hiring your friends because they're willing to come work here.

That's great. You need the others too. I think when I was young, when I was 18, 19 years old, I somewhere in my brain thought my outcomes were going to be determined by how hard I worked and how good my ideas were. And it wasn't until I accidentally hired someone fantastic that I realized the absolute tremendous impact that an A player can have on everything.

And that was just such a mental shift for me.

Okay, yeah. Yeah. When you're a young founder, you're somewhat insecure, though. You think, oh, God, why would that person want to come work here? Or I can't afford them.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's my experience that young founders don't really think about that. Because they're also insecure. So they think, I can't manage that person.

Like, just go! Right? And is there anything practical about hiring? You know, people say, like, hire slow, fire fast, or other sort of, like, cliche advice around hiring that matters. Like, how important is it that they're culturally aligned?

You were part of what they call the PayPal mafia, who went on to create Tesla, YouTube, Reddit, SpaceX, LinkedIn, and become multi-billionaires. And so I've got so many questions. Let's do it. What are the key factors of a great entrepreneur's mindset?

Right? Yeah. Got some ammo, and they can't then say, oh, no, I've never seen that. They'll probably give you a little bit more context. Yes. On all these great people you've worked with, specifically, you know, during that PayPal period of your life, Mm-hmm. One of the things I was reflecting on is they're all independently successful people, but they're all very different people.

And that in and of itself is evidence that there's not one version of success. There's many different types of success. Presumably there's many different types of entrepreneur, leader. Give me a flavor of the different types of entrepreneurs you've worked with. Because I sat with Walter Isaacson, and he talked to me about Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, et cetera, and he was like,

Steve's really great at hiring people. Elon's not as good at the people team building part, but he's better at this part.

He pitched it to you as an investor? Yes. Yeah. At what point was SpaceX at when he pitched it? That was before he started it.

Really? Well, yeah. Of course you would, yeah. My friends said that to me. I think I'd make a couple of calls just to check in. You know what I mean? Like, is Elon doing okay? He just told me about this turtle. Yes. It's like, that's not a business. Has your opinion of him changed over time in terms of his potential and ability as an entrepreneur?

Of course. If you get one that's big, that's fine. On the hiring side, is he up there with the best? Or is he not a direct hire of people like Steve Jobs was?

What's interesting is I think these strategies fundamentally come down to what you think matters in life the most, because you could optimize, even you could optimize more for, building more companies or something at the expense of something else. And it's a trade-off of something else. Like you could go harder, but there's a trade-off happening here.

And we often, because Elon's done these crazy things like the cars and the Neuralinks and there's tunnels and now the AI and the X and the spaceships and stuff. We go, oh my God, that's so amazing. And I do that as well as an entrepreneur. I go, one person can do that much. But we almost never talk about the trade-off.

And this goes back to the point about self-awareness. It's so tempting for the brain to go, oh my God, I want that. That's what I want. Because you're not seeing the trade-off. You're not seeing the darkness.

Because there's a lot of entrepreneurs that are coming, rising through the ranks at the moment that have kind of been raised on the Elon philosophy of do shit tons of things, do them intently, do them with less of a regard for the, I guess, the human consequence. Do them with less of a regard for work-life balance.

If you say that today, though, you're toxic.

I mean, the people that say it's toxic are often those that have never had to do it.

Is there a way to build a startup, in your opinion, where you have work-life balance? I define work-life balance maybe as being able to see your friends often, spend time with your family often.

Okay, right. Right. An ice cream van in a village.

Keep working. To some people, this does, it sounds somewhat toxic, right? It sounds like, oh, God, but that's not what life's about. This is like capitalism. This is people just wanting to make loads of money.

Not for you. I think the important thing, which I see some companies doing well, is just to be honest about that when you're onboarding people and don't shy away from the fact. Yes, exactly.

Which is a trade-off that was clearly worth making. You stepped back as CEO after four years when you were at LinkedIn, right? Yes. Why did you do that?

And is your work still in here today?

So you stay close, but you... Again, this is another point of self-awareness, which a lot of founders don't have. But the great founders that I've met and interviewed, whether it's, I don't know, Brian Chesky, or whether it was some founders from the UK, like Bennett Jim Shark and Julian from Huel. One of the things that really defined them was they did a...

So edits that you made to this game are still in here? Yes. At what age? That was 12. Wow. That's incredible. And how much did he pay you?

low ego move to move out of that CEO role, which is typically associated with like the glitz and the glam because they knew that their skill set was in branding or marketing or something else, or just vision for the future of the company. A lot of CEOs don't do that because the CEO title comes with a certain esteem.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a big difference. Yes. LinkedIn went public in 2011 with a $4.3 billion valuation, and then Microsoft later paid $26 billion to buy LinkedIn. At the time, it was reported you owned about 11% of the company, which made you a multi-billionaire. How does life change when one becomes a multi-billionaire?

associated with the left side of politics. Your parents were very left-leaning, to say the least.

Okay, so that's in your DNA. Yes. The thing about being on the left is it's typically the left that have an opinion of billionaires that they're evil.

I mean, you're one of the few people that's still a billionaire and on the left, it seems.

In the valley, especially in this election cycle. It's the public-facing people that we see on the podcasts and stuff.

And what were your dreams at that age? What did you think you were going to be when you were older, sort of 12, 13, 14 years old?

You must spend time at night thinking about what that might be. Because if I would.

You're not planning on leaving the U.S., are you?

Because Mark Cuban was the same, right? Mark Cuban was very public and vocal. He's a billionaire. He was very pro-Karmel Harris, very anti-Trump through the cycle. He took a lot of flack as well.

I mean, I follow everybody on Twitter, so I watch it play out. And it was kind of like he was stood in no man's land, just taking shots from everywhere. Yes. And you were kind of in the same category.

Would have been much easier for you to just shut the fuck up or fall in line or something.

Can you see any redeeming qualities in Trump? I know you're pro-Kamala Harris.

Do you think it's a good time for entrepreneurs to be building companies with Trump coming into power?

One of the things that is very different, I think, in this administration with the people he's appointed is there seems to be quite a few entrepreneurs being appointed to fairly important high roles.

Potentially. I was referring particularly to Elon Musk, David Sachs. I think he's doing AI and technology. I think there's another guy who looks like he's built a business before.

You work with both at PayPal, right?

On this point of speech as well, obviously there's quite a big shift in speech that's happened in the last, I'd say, two years, really from Elon buying Twitter as well. I saw a drastic shift globally in what we think is okay and not okay. What's your thoughts on the change in speech? Good, bad, positive, negative?

Do you think you'll be penalized? Yes. And direct on you? And direct to me. You're not planning on leaving the U.S., are you?

What's the difference in the design of the platform that results in two different types of behavior there?

So on the Twitter example, what Elon said is that if it's legal, then it's fine. But is there an upside to having an environment where people can anonymously say what they want within the constraint of the law?

So on this point of the vaccine, so just to clarify my position, I think vaccines are a wonderful invention that have saved a lot of people's lives. So that's my position. But I want to interrogate a little bit. With the vaccine rollout in particular, there's a lot of things that we didn't know at the time, right?

So the lab leak thing, I had Boris Johnson sat here and he said, oh yeah, we think it's a lab leak. If I had said that on this podcast a couple of years ago, I would have been kicked off YouTube. And so having a forum where you can even entertain ideas that are contrarian. Yes.

And being born at Stanford Hospital is pertinent as well. I don't think people in the UK and around the world necessarily know the significance of that. But can you explain why that's important?

I also think people shouldn't be deplatformed or canceled because of their speech, even if you disagree with it, providing it's in the constraints of the law.

Okay, yeah, I agree with that. You shouldn't be threatening anybody with violence. Yes. I sat with a, I'm going to say astrologist. I don't even know if that's the right word. It's not astrology, was it? Cosmetologist.

And he told me the story of Galileo discovering that the world was round and Galileo basically being threatened by everybody because it threatened, I think, the Catholic institution at the time.

Yeah. And so that's a cautionary tale, although it's a long time ago, in there are always going to be strong forces that are heavily incentivized around some kind of ideology. Yes. And I mean, that does happen today. Yes, 100%. And these forces are powerful forces. So allowing dissent, even if it's coming from someone who is not credible.

It's interesting because the human brain, when we think about it from an evolutionary standpoint, wasn't designed to deal with a thousand people tweeting at you that you're an arsehole. And as a podcaster, as someone who's in the public eye yourself, who is a podcaster but also a famous entrepreneur, you have to deal with that.

Like you have to deal with that in a way that's just, we weren't designed to. And I struggle with it. I struggle with when I first came into the public spotlight, when I started doing Dragon's Den, the shark tank in the US, opening my phone and being exposed to just a barrage of like noise on the brain. Now, Whose responsibility is that? Is it my responsibility to delete the app?

Or is it the platform's responsibility to moderate people expressing their innate human jealousy, whatever it is?

Right. One of the theories I had many years ago, and I don't actually think this theory was based on anything other than I read it and it sounded good, so I used to say it, was that over the next 10 years, and I used to say this about six, seven years ago on stage, social network working would become more and more siloed into these smaller interest-based networks.

And I was thinking the other day in the taxi, I was like, oh my God, that's actually happening now. You're having like blue sky and threads and you've got your Instagrams and your rumbles and we've got more and more social networks that are more like... centered around different pockets of people. What is your theory of social networking over the next decade, two decades?

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I've spoken to lots of different... I know you know Mustafa because you invested in his company, right?

Ah, okay. So you co-founded Inflection, which then sold to Microsoft. Yeah.

Oh, okay.

And how should we be thinking about it? How should Dave and Jenny, the average person with, you know, working in a company or building a small startup, think about AI?

There's a lot of gloom around AI as well. There's fear all the time with new technologies. Is any of that gloom warranted?

The first is... And then, how do you know when to quit the job? What's your view on work-life balance? And if you were advising anyone to build wealth in 2025... What would you say? Here's some simple tips.

When I think about AI in simple terms, the way that I've... been thinking about it, and this is not a perfect analogy or whatever, but it's just a simple way to think about it, is if there was one Stephen Bartlett here that has an IQ of 100 and there was another one sat next to me that had the IQ of 1,000, what would this Steve do and what would that Steve do?

Is that an apt analogy? Is that somewhat an interesting one?

And also you think... I also need weapons that are sufficiently advanced at attacking my enemies. And everybody globally is thinking that. China might be thinking about the West, and the West are thinking about China. Russia are thinking about this person, this person. The Middle East are probably thinking about a couple of people.

So with all developing weapons or defense systems, they're going to probably make those robots you talked about, the Terminator robot that can go to the battlefield, and that's super smart. They're going to probably make some cyber weapons as well.

So those things end up existing, and then they're in the wrong hands, a mistake happens.

Is this technology different, though? Because there's been comparisons to the printing press electricity. But is this any different?

Right. For the average person out there, I know they might be working in a hospital or might be a lawyer or a doctor, whatever, just someone with a job that's heard this term AI and they're seeing chat GPT, is there anything that they should be doing on an individual level to make sure that they can capitalize on the opportunity that AI presents?

So what would you say then? Because there's people that listen to the show all around the world, right? we just Spotify Raptors came out and globally we have quite an extensive audience. It's funny.

It's funny that it's so globally distributed, but I think a factor of being on YouTube and speaking English, what would you say to people that are born in, we've got an audience in Cape town and Indonesia and Australia, New Zealand. What would you say to people in those parts of the world? Can you still be quote unquote massively successful? Yes.

Should entrepreneurs be – thinking about building companies in the field of AI at the moment. You know, as an entrepreneur who's like roughly 30 years old, I look back and go, gosh, I wish I was of entrepreneurial age when the dot-com boom came around because everyone became billionaires. And is this that moment in time? Yes. The short answer is yes. Okay, so I'm an entrepreneur.

I'm 30-odd years old. I've got disposable income. I'm financially free.

I'd love to take part in the next revolution. Should I be flying out to San Francisco and building an AI, joining an AI startup out there?

Interesting. What's the best way for someone to go and learn about AI right now? Because going to university feels like it would be... Start using it.

So for someone like me who's built my career in building teams, marketing, social media, content, media, those kinds of things, who is really interested in AI, should I go and do you think I should go learn AI now and start trying to be a technical person? Too slow. Okay, yeah.

You invested in OpenAI almost a decade ago before everybody was talking about it. What did you see in that company?

People had said the word AI for a long time and it had never manifested in it.

On that point of people, how important, if you're trying to be successful as a young entrepreneur, is networking?

There's so many obvious things that people talk about when they're describing what makes an entrepreneur successful. They say hard work. They say have a big vision. But is there anything that's really underappreciated? Like when I say this, I'm talking about being a nice person or being etiquette or politeness or manners.

Are there any things like that that you think make a big difference but people don't appreciate?

Just like bullshit to get people to feel something.

Do you need the BS in that context? Do you need to end it with, I'm going to change the world?

Because, you know, like a fizzy drinks company conglomerate, even they try and end their value proposition with we're going to change the world.

And you know it's bullshit. It's a public company. They've got shareholders who want to return. Yes. But even they, I guess, have to do it. On the mindset front, what is the mindset, the factors of a great entrepreneur's mindset? What are the key things that you look for when you're investing in one?

No one is. Does it help if they've been through some difficult things in their life?

If you were advising a young person on how to build wealth in 2025, And when I say young, I mean 18 years old. Yeah. And you had to plan out the roadmap of their life. Can you walk me through how you'd be thinking about those seasons of life, like 18 to 30, 30 onwards, et cetera?

I read a book and in the first chapter, I was trying to figure out what this platform is for young people. And the way that I kind of described it is these five buckets. The first one being knowledge. And then when knowledge is applied, it becomes a skill. And the good thing about these first two buckets is they're the only two that no one can ever really empty. Yes. What you put in there. Yes.

The next one I posited was. me trying to remember my own book, was your, I'm going to say network, then your resources, then your reputation. Now anyone can take these last three. Like life can happen. You can get fired. You can lose your friends, whatever.

So am I right in thinking that the knowledge and skills part is really the critical thing to prioritize when you're... Yeah, well, this is part of what we did in Starview.

So it's short term versus long term. Yes. So soft assets are longevity.

And the hard assets, I guess, are short term. Yes, immediate. Is there a different game you play when you hit your 30s, do you think?

And then you have kids. Yes. Did you have kids? No. Because I'm in that region now where I'm thinking about having kids and I'm just, I'm wondering how disruptive it's going to be. It's another startup.

Which, do you think lowers your chance of being successful at a startup? Because doing two startups is more difficult than doing one.

Yeah.

how did you have happiness wrong when you were younger?

Not okay for me. And love. How does love come into all of this? You have a long-term life partner. Yes. In Seattle. What role has that played in your happiness and your professional success?

If two entrepreneurs come to you and they pitch the exact same thing, but one of them is in a long-term marriage, what is the difference between those two entrepreneurs in terms of how they'll show up in business in your view?

Okay. So it's somewhat evidence that there.

Not worth the headache. Yes. When I was reading Blitzscaling and I was watching the videos that you did, you've done several talks on it. I've seen pretty much all of them over the years. One of the questions I had as an investor myself is my early stage companies that aren't in the consumer internet space, they're selling, I don't know, they might be selling a drink in a supermarket or something.

Should they all be pursuing this idea of blitzscaling where you go lightning fast to building a massively valuable company?

This is some of the techniques that you need to do. If AI is going to be so transformative, when you think about a country like the UK, where we don't have the blitzscaling advantages as entrepreneurs and founders that you guys have in Silicon Valley, if you were the prime minister of the UK...

100%.

What would you do to give us a shot at getting some of the value that's going to accrue because of this AI opportunity?

I've got an example I want to give you. I invest in a matcha company. They make matcha, like the green tea. And they've grown very, very quickly. They're called Perfect Ted, hashtag ad. I'm an investor, et cetera. I'm a new investor in a company, I think. And I was wondering, they've grown so quickly. So they've gone from, I don't know, zero to they'll probably do maybe 30 million pounds next year.

And they've done it in a couple, could be measured in months, really. And I wondered, I was like, matcha is this trend that's coming into shore. Everyone's drinking matcha now. Every coffee shop you go to has matcha. Should they be blitzscaling to capture the opportunity globally?

This is what you're doing. Quick one before we get back to this episode. Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us. And this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place.

You could argue yes.

In the case of matcha – There is a role of brand being the moat a little bit.

And on that point that I asked earlier about, if you're the Prime Minister of the UK, you'd start enabling some of our companies in the UK to, like, have more capital, give them access to capital. Do you think... One of my fears is that AI is such a big opportunity. It's going to revolutionize everything. And it's basically going to be owned by America and China.

One of my fears is like, fears as someone that lives in the UK, that we're going to, your economy in the US is going to have such a huge upswing in productivity.

Good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what gives me hope.

Okay. What's the most important thing we haven't talked about for entrepreneurs that we should have talked about? I'll give two.

How do you know when to quit? And I'm saying this in a professional context as well as an entrepreneurship context.

Okay. So you've tried something else that's also messed up.

Okay. And in a professional context, how do you know when to quit the job?

There's an element of self-awareness required here. And it's funny because when I was younger, I certainly didn't have that self-awareness. I thought that I could start a social network from my bedroom without ever doing it before. And I wasn't necessarily thinking about the geographical situation or Silicon Valley. How important is self-awareness as an entrepreneur?

What's really interesting about the LinkedIn story, I've got the deck in front of me here from August 20, 2004.

And what's pretty remarkable... By the way, Matt Kohler helped me create that deck.

I mean, it's a pretty good deck for a Series B, especially back then. It's very simple, I'd have to say. Simple is good. Very, very simple.

One of the things that really struck out to me is on this page here, which is the sort of opening, I guess, vision mission statement, whatever you want to call it, is it's find and contact the people you need through the people you already trust. And what's quite remarkable, although this was written 20 years ago, this is still very much what LinkedIn is about. Yes.

And usually when I see these decks, they started as, I don't know, hot or not. And now it's like Facebook and Instagram. Whereas this is still so close to what the vision was.

As in like... If you're trying to build a long-term company from the outset, what are you thinking about?

And what do you think of LinkedIn today? Because people use it in such a surprising way. I mean, people are building their personal brands on it. It's like a social network.

Really?

And how does one cultivate it to know what challenge is actually befitting of their skills?

Are you still interested in building companies in terms of like being a CEO and founder again?

Hmm. Hmm. Yeah, I think that's the season of life I'm in. I don't want to be a CEO anymore, which is unfortunate because I named the podcast I am a CEO when I was one. But I just think there's an element of self-awareness, which I think has really – and for me, the older I've gotten, the more I'm orientating everything towards being happy.

And for me, it's hard to be a CEO and as happy and free as I want to be.

Yeah. That's basically what I do now. So the companies that I've described, the software business, the media company we have here, there's people that are designed and built and much better CEOs than me. Do you care about legacy?

Are there any unchecked boxes in your life?

Any major ones?

your assistant we spoke to your assistant ahead of this conversation today and she said that friendship and connection is a major part of your focus at the moment yes always but it always has been now

Are you still friends with Peter Thiel? Yes.

You have a lot of disagreements in terms of politics.

But you still are able to be friends.

We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for. Oh. And the question that's been left for you is a very interesting one. Okay. What are the two things you want your life partner to know about you that they do not know or do not understand about you yet?

What's her name? Michelle. Yes.

I still think there's things about my partner that she doesn't understand about me. Or misunderstands about me, and I misunderstand about her.

So founders you're investing in that are in a stable, solid relationship before they start the startup.

And then they go on this crazy intense journey. Do you ever give them advice on relationships and how to manage that? Because I have so many founders come to me and they're like, I think she's going to break up with me or he's going to break up with me because I'm just, I'm absent in my head, in person.

Did you let her down a little?

In terms of making a plan, making a day? Oh, we had multiple plans that got...