Transcription
When I was growing up, I really didn't have many friends. I was a very, very poor kid in a very, very rich high school, which is like the worst. And I was like an awkward-looking South Asian kid. How did the loser guy develop social skills? That's a really interesting question.
High school kind of mostly sucked. I had a few friends and I really appreciate them in hindsight. Didn't ever go out, never got invited to parties. I was a loser. I was a lizard growing up. That's okay. You know, the meek shall inherit the earth. Somebody told me and I agreed with this later. You don't want to peek in high school. You don't want to be popular in high school. When you look at the people that made it, I suspect they were not popular in high school [laughter] either. So, I'm pretty sure this is accurate.
How did the loser guy develop social skills? That's a really interesting question. One was for sure that I got opportunities. Early on, I had bosses that I worked for that really helped me. I would make presentations. They would allow me to give these presentations. So, on a very focused, intimate level of a company, I was able to get reps, low-stake reps, right? Those were very low stakes. At the time, they felt like high stakes to me because I'd never been in those environments. And it just escalated and escalated.
But there is a moment that everybody faces if you keep wanting to get to the next level where you just got to take the leap. And I remember the big leap that I took and it was like 2014 or 2015. There's a very, very prestigious investor conference called Irisone and it's run at Lincoln Center in New York. You show up and if you're accepted, it's you presenting your best idea in front of 5,000 people at Lincoln Center. I convinced them to let me do it. And you know, I'm a venture investor at the time, not really trading in public stocks. And I came and I pitched Tesla. So I think Tesla at the time was a $50 billion company. And I said, "This is going to be a multi-hundred billion dollar company and eventually a trillion dollar company." And the company we're talking about today is Tesla. Today it's a $50 billion market cap. And you look at that multiple, what you see is a business that could be worth hundreds of billions of dollars in a decade. And I think people thought I was literally one of the dumbest people that have ever walked on stage on Iris. And I was so nervous. I was like, man, what am I signing up for? But I owned the moment. Meaning, I had 20 years of reps and it led to that moment. 20 years of emails, 20 years of presentations, 20 years of much smaller stakes moments, and then I just had to stand up and deliver. And I did it. And then on top of that, I was right.
I fashioned Tesla as very being similar to Apple and I contrasted it and compared Apple's journey to Tesla's journey. Tesla had these convertible preferred bonds where you basically got downside protection and all of the upside beyond a very small premium. It was the trade of all trades. I mean, just man, next year they asked me back and I'm like, great, I'm going to shock call it again and I pointed to the stands and I'm like, Amazon's going to be a multi-trillion dollar company and justing slugged that one too and then I started to get a little confidence because I was like, hold on a second, I can really communicate these things like and I know what I'm talking about, the substance of what I'm saying is right. Yeah. That's why I had Tesla and then Amazon in a very, very public setting. And then the next year they were like, "You know what we're going to do? We're going to broadcast yours in real time while you're presenting on CNBC." Now, in this one, I completely flubbed. And no offense to my friend Aaron Levy, but I was like, I'm gonna make an AI call in 2018. Again, pick the right, I mean, I was just right there. And why I didn't pick Nvidia, I don't know. And I picked Box. Good company, but not Nvidia. But it was Simocast on TV at the same time. It's great to look back on it because this must be what an athlete feels like where at a moment they're like, I'm in such a flow state where you just see it clearly and my partners and I just saw it so clearly. We had a multi-year run that is just unbelievable. And I've been lucky where I've been a part of teams that have found that momentum and feeling, I think now three times in my career. It's unbelievable. We really flushed it. That's where I kind of started to develop real confidence where I'm like, "Okay, hold on a second. I can hold my own here." But I was lucky. I had a lot of reps. I had lots and lots and lots of much smaller stakes reps that my bosses created for me that I created for myself. I didn't beat myself up over it. I didn't think overthink it too much. Went well, good. Didn't go well, okay.
There's a part of me that really believed in myself and there's a part of me that said, "You're kind of a schmuck." And I think when I was younger, the schmuck part dominated the "I can do it." And then over time, now the "I can do it" part of me is much larger than the "I'm a schmuck." But the schmuck part is there. Everybody has this like Gordian knot which is made by some combination of them, their parents, their upbringing. And one of my goals is to untie that knot [music] because that's the knot that holds me back in some key moments. So if I think about like refining my game and my skill and getting better and better, that's probably the thing that's holding me back the most. That's where I make mistakes still. Is that Gordian knot? So what is it? It's my sense of self-worth. It's my sense of security. It's my sense of thinking that I've actually done something useful. It's this idea that I need everybody else's validation. It's doing too much to seek that validation. That's my knot. And I know it because I can see it. I can see the facets of it. And when I'm away from it in calm moments, I can see how I've made mistakes. And then I'm like, okay, I can learn from that. And now I can try to refine that for the next time because I do want to get better. And I want that error rate to just get smaller and smaller. And then hopefully maybe the wins get bigger and bigger. Now, why? I don't know. It's just a game in the end. I just want to play the game and I want to play it well. And yeah, then when it's all said and done, it's like, wow, that's good. I speed ran a lot of stuff. It's cool.
You know, when I was growing up, I didn't really have a lot of friends, nor did I value friendship. I had a few friends. I liked hanging out with them, but I just didn't understand what role they were supposed to play. And part of that is like, you know, being in Silicon Valley is kind of a tough place because everybody is a friend in a little way. Like everybody's like cooperative but also competitive. And part of it is because when you're young, being in this ecosystem here, it does feel a little zero-sum. It does feel like the gains aren't going to be evenly spread. I have this very distinct memory where a bunch of my friends worked at a high-flying telecom startup and these were friends that I went to university with, great people who I'm still friends with to this day. And I had to really check myself because when this was right before the dot-com bubble, when their private valuations were going crazy, they were all millionaires and I was still grinding away, you know, at Winamp and making 80K a year or whatever, I felt really envious. And then I think I was like a little bit jealous and I [music] was like, in hindsight I'll say this, how good of a friend was I if I was feeling those things? I don't know. So I didn't understand how to like curate good friends, have good boundaries, and that was the same problem all through my 20s, all through my 30s, mostly through my 40s. [music] And then now I'm a little bit more circumspect where I don't really talk about business. I try to minimize all of that so that we can maximize the non-business related aspects of our friendship. [music] I think it's still complicated because we overlap. We make investments together. I still think there's a little bit of competitiveness between me and my friends. It's not the healthiest thing in the world, but it's better than nothing. And in general, they're wonderful people and they're very reliable and I'm able to have friendships now that I was not able to have before. And that means [music] a lot to me. But my closest friendships, I will say, clearly, are the ones where we have the least overlap and we are the least competitive with each other. Quote unquote, they've made it, quote unquote. You know, they're doing things that are very orthogonal to me. And so, you know, we just don't compete. They're the best.
I think the maxing approach to choosing friends is great. You know, whether your friends are not good for you, just do a 360 and moonwalk away. And he's right. Eli's right. That's what you should do. I would rather have no friends than shitty friends because shitty friends are a retardant in your life. They just pull you back. It's like it's like these little hooks that are holding you down. You don't want that. If you try to find some like pathy sentence to guide you in your corporate journey, you're going to fail. You have to have situational awareness. There are times where you should be talking. There are times where you should just shut the up. There are times where you should swear in a meeting. There's times where you should be kind. There's times where you should be mean. There's times where you should say the thing that is a come-along, get-along thing, but then there are times where you should confront and create deep conflict. How do you know when you should do what? You don't. You can't go to these stupid little turns of phrase as a guide. The only thing you can go to is reps, pattern recognition, and situational awareness. That is a lived experience. [music] And the experience for me and my judgment is very different than the experience for somebody else and their judgment. And so their pattern recognition will be very different than mine. And that's okay. Just don't overthink it. Don't be in your mind with your stupid little sentence. Wait a minute. I got two ears and one leg. So let me make sure that I listen more than I talk. I guess dummy. If that sure. Yes. Do that. But you're just going to sound like a goofball. Don't be a goofball.
You know, the thing that I'm the most proud of physically is that I have incredible posture. It is a thing that everybody tells me. They tell me, "A, you're a lot taller than you look like on camera." I'm 6'2. That tilts a lot of people, but anyways. But what they say is that I have great posture. You know, I have great posture because I don't have the doom-scrolling turkey neck. I just see all these people. It comes together as a buy one get one free. Number one, you get posture and you look like a goofball because you're turkey, you're turkey-necking like this, which is horrible. And then as a result of all the doom-scrolling, you can't make eye contact. And so I just think this like double whammy. And the only reason I have good posture is honestly because I don't, I'm not doom-scrolling my phone. And then as a byproduct, I don't think I was particularly great at eye contact before, but it's just the rest of you got so bad that all of a sudden I just feel like I'm like Michael Jordan of eye contact. So what is my point here? My point is, delete the apps. Stop doom-scrolling. I think your posture gets better, you look better, you'll have more self-confidence, and then you'll make better eye contact, and other people will notice that you don't have a turkey neck. So, I don't know. I think that if you delete the apps, everything will be solved.