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Stripe cofounder John Collison interviews founders, builders, and leaders over a pint.
John Collison
You guys should have a pub here all the time.
Toto Wolff
Yeah.
John Collison
Maybe it's a bit dangerous with all the valuable cars. You don't want anyone stumbling and falling over.
Toto Wolff
As a continental European, I never got the tradition of standing at the bar and having a pint or two or three and then having a conversation. What do you talk about?
John Collison
Cheers.
Toto Wolff
Cheers.
John Collison
Many people across many jobs are in the talent spotting business, but you're especially in the talent spotting business. How do you actually spot a Kimi?
Toto Wolff
How do I spot a Kimi? I think when it comes to spotting racing drivers, we can judge pretty early on in a kid's karting performance whether that kid has the potential to be a professional racing driver. Even with the tiny ones, you can identify the ones that are doing better than their peers, either because they are younger. If someone that's 8 years old beats the ones that are 10 in that group, you can have those very early signs of whether that kid has the potential. You can see when someone is comfortable in the kart, going at 100 kilometers an hour in the rain, and that kid does his first lap and comes across the corner sideways... "Okay, there are the ingredients for being good at it."
John Collison
How quantitative is it? In certain sports... In cycling, there's a metric called threshold power and Tadej Pogačar, the best in the world, is very clearly just the best in the world on this single metric of how much power, for your weight, can you produce. Or is there some number that Kimi and George Russell would stand out on compared to other racers?
Toto Wolff
This is what makes our sport so unique. There isn't any. With Tadej Pogačar, you can see that that threshold, watt per kilogram or VO2 max, these are things that are measurable. But, I don't know what Tadej's metrics were when he was 12. Maybe that was not best-in-class. Maybe that came later.
Toto Wolff
The ingredients of success that you can't measure personality. How resilient are you to pressure? How much can you play the team game? When it comes to racing drivers, there are obviously similar KPIs, the stopwatch. The stopwatch never lies. But put them in the same car, the stopwatch is going to decide whether you're being judged good or not.
Toto Wolff
But underneath the stopwatch, there needs to be technical ability to set your car up in the right way, interact with the engineers, have some kind of social competence of making sure you have sponsors, treat them well. There have been extremely talented kids that never went anywhere because they were just simply bad people or not intelligent enough.
Toto Wolff
Then there is the overwhelming part, and that is what we call speed. What is speed? All of your cognitive abilities and neurosensors, the sheer billions of sensors that a human has, that give you an ability that not many have. It's actually to feel what the car does underneath of you. You can see with the extraordinary drivers, they feel much more. They feel more connected to the car on the road than anybody else.
Toto Wolff
One example is an old friend and driver of mine, Lewis Hamilton. You have two axles—a front axle, a rear axle—and you have the chassis in between. When you call a car understeer, it means when you turn the wheel and it goes straight. That happens over the tires and the front axle. It's pretty normal.
Toto Wolff
But Lewis once said something when talking about the car: "The car understeers from the front axle to where I sit." That's the middle of the car. How can that understeer? The engineers couldn't really identify what he meant, but that is what his body told him or his brain told him the car is doing. If a driver is able to have that underlying layer of ability, then that becomes unbeatable. But that is genetics.
John Collison
The great drivers strap the car onto themselves. They don't sit in the car and there's a connectedness.
Toto Wolff
Absolutely. Connectedness is the right word. It's actually being one with the car and with the road.
John Collison
How did you decide that you weren't good enough to be a professional driver, on this topic of talent identification? That's one decision.
Toto Wolff
Talking about humiliation and trauma as ingredients for later success. When I was a child or a teenager, there wasn't really anything differentiating me or outstanding, be it academically or in sports or socially. When I was 18, by sheer coincidence, I ended up with a friend on a racetrack watching an F3 race, which is a junior formula.
Toto Wolff
When I stepped into this paddock, it's like I've gotten my identity. This is what I wanted to be. I wanted to be a racing driver, someone that is able to tame this machine. This is when I started... Basically my career as a driver, but I came too late to the party. I didn't have all of this karting background that teaches you the fundamentals of the physics of how to position your car in the race.
Toto Wolff
But I became a pro. I went through the various stages of junior Formula Racing into what we call GT cars, touring cars or sports cars with a certain amount of success. It is like you do about your business, I guess. What I'm doing today is I... Woke up with that desire and I went to bed with that desire. That lasted for quite a few years.
John Collison
The other, maybe less talked about part, obviously, there's a huge amount of fixation on driver selection and who will get the next seat and everything like that. Presumably, a lot of what you spend time on is recruiting the right engineers and aerodynamicists and things like that. How does spotting that kind of talent work? Are you trying to pull people from other Formula One teams or from other industries and outside? Just what have you learned about talent outside of drivers?
Toto Wolff
When you look at the Formula One team from outside as a fan, you see two drivers. You see then a guy like me who is sitting in front of a screen, and then you see the mechanics, and sometimes the engineers on the pit wall. This is what you expect to be the racing team.
Toto Wolff
But this is just the tip of the iceberg. It's about 150 people that go to the tracks, including marketing. It's 90 technical, operational people. But we are two-and-a-half thousand. Here in the UK, we have two hubs, one that does the engine, the other one, what we call the chassis. That is the works team. We are 2,500 people in an organization that is quite vast if you look at the two cars.
Toto Wolff
For me, the selection process of the people that I want to work with is the same or is similar in terms of the pattern for racing drivers. I always say there's not two superstars in the team. There's two-and-a-half thousand, and I treat all of them equally. We've learned from the All Blacks, 10 or more years earlier, and they have a saying, which is on their training ground, that says, "No dickheads." And we have continued to run that motto.
Toto Wolff
The extraordinary scientist or engineer that hasn't got the right values of humility, integrity, honesty, enthusiasm will have no future in the organization. We're trying to filter that out pretty early. Sometimes you find out later, but no place for the genius asshole.
John Collison
You're describing a lot the need for people to collaborate within the organization and the teamwork. But what's interesting is you have these different domains where you have the aerodynamics, and you have the battery systems, and you have the internal combustion powertrain and traction and everything.
John Collison
The R&D almost entirely goes towards cars where you know the rules. There isn't much room for general R&D because you just don't know. You're not going to work on batteries before you know what exactly will be permitted when it comes to batteries and things like that. You have to know the target that you're designing against.
Toto Wolff
We did it a long time ago, but Formula One introduced the cost cap a few years ago. Every resource that you deploy into engineering is being counted for in the cost cap, which is $200 million and a bit a year. Therefore, long-term R&D work, lab work, is actually, unfortunately, very limited because you need to decide between deploying compute power in a front wing that you might have in three months against some long-term feature.
John Collison
For all F1 teams, one of the things the cost cap changed is speculative R&D just had to go because ultimately you have fixed dollars, and you have to put absolutely everything you can towards this season and next season.
Toto Wolff
I wouldn't say all of it had to go. You still need to find the right balance between what you think future cars are going to benefit from, value the lap-time effect it can have versus the current cars. Unfortunately, that percentage of R&D development, of science and lab work, which I love, has a more limited scope.
John Collison
You have not only the overall cost cap, but you have things like limits on the number of wind tunnel runs and CFD simulations. Isn't that a bit weird that you can't spend your R&D budget exactly as you want to?
Toto Wolff
There are two sides of that coin. The first one is to say, Formula One was always unlimited budget and therefore ultra-sophisticated machinery, which led to a situation that the big teams—Mercedes, Ferrari, Red Bull—were leapfrogging all of the other teams. Because for us, we had those big motherships behind us that benefited from either a shareholder that was extremely keen, like Red Bull, or Mercedes that said, "This is a huge branding exercise for us, and the spending is relatively low in comparison to all of our marketing."
Toto Wolff
What happened is only these three teams actually won races. So Formula One said, "We want everybody to compete on the same budgets." That was the reason why it was introduced. Now, you can see that limited very much the science aspect of Formula One, but it brought also more competition. That's one of the positive effects.
Toto Wolff
The other one is that Formula One, back in the day, Chase Carey, who was the CEO, said, "We need to protect you from yourselves." Because obviously, I was against the cost cap, because I knew that Mercedes, we had might, and that probably the worst case scenario was to lose against a Ferrari or against a Red Bull, but not against a McLaren or Williams or anybody else. He said that to me. Eventually, it was take it or leave it.
John Collison
You are investing, trying to eke out tiny advantages in the car. One of the things that's interesting is that there are the rules, there are things that are clearly against the rules, there are things that are permitted, and then there's a spectrum between those of the gray areas. One of the challenges is you defend something that you think is great and clearly allowed, but then it's banned mid-season, or it's banned in the next season. Was it really worth all that effort to get a trivial advantage? Maybe, maybe not.
Toto Wolff
I think the lesson we've learned is that it needs the dialogue with the governing body. If you feel you have an innovation that passed the first red face test within the organization, that means the leading engineers, sometimes myself on the table, we are having a mock trial. The people that have invented the loophole or the opportunity play the prosecutor, so they need to fight their own argument. On the other side, there are the engineers that defend the innovation, and then there's our general counsel, Carrie, and myself who are the judges.
John Collison
You try to see how convincing the defense is?
Toto Wolff
Yeah, exactly. How convincing is the defense, and how can you destroy the argument that is actually legal? That would be an extreme case where there's something that we struggle with in the engineering community to define. But obviously, the dialogue with the FIA is important and bring them on very early.
John Collison
If you have a very secret proprietary improvement that you don't want to unveil, it will be totally top secret within Mercedes, but you will also bring the FIA into it?
Toto Wolff
If we think it's 100% defendable, crystal-clear defendable, then we will deploy it on the car, and then we will make the argument why it's right. Normally, the FIA will say, "We don't like it." They could say, "We like it, but it circumvents the principle of the regulation, so we're going to ban it because the principle of regulation is the most equal competition." If they're fair, they're going to say, "Ban it next year." If they believe it's really very powerful, and it's not what they wanted to see or intended to define, then it could be banned much earlier. This is where the politics come into play.
John Collison
Basically, if they think it's a fair loophole, they'll give you one season of advantage.
Toto Wolff
I would say this is, call it the experience that we have because they are innovators and the engineers, too, and they will respect if something comes up like this. One example was the system that we call DAS, which was, you have the various dimensions of the steering wheel, what you do. I don't know if you heard about it. You can steer to the left, and you can steer to the right.
John Collison
That part I know. I'm with you so far.
Toto Wolff
That's like in an airplane. No, in an airplane, you can also go forward and back.
John Collison
Exactly. It's actually nothing like an airplane.
Toto Wolff
Here, it becomes interesting. What we did, we created another dimension with the steering wheel, actually to push and to pull the steering wheel in a Formula One car. What it did, it changed—
John Collison
Yes, I do remember this.
Toto Wolff
It changed the way the front wheels were operating in terms of its toe effect. What it did is we were able to turn... We created a toe effect which helped us to heat up the surfaces of the tires by basically dragging them along—
John Collison
You were running them inefficiently.
Toto Wolff
They respected the innovation. I remember the first test, Sky had an onboard and said, "What's happening here? They're pushing and pulling the steering wheel." When it was shown to me four or five months before we actually produced it, they called me to a rig in test and development, and there was the steering wheel, and they said, "Now, turn to the left and turn to the right." I was a driver.
Toto Wolff
Then they said, "Now, push it and pull it." I said, "That doesn't go." It's like I'm used to it in order to fix the steering wheel to where I wanted to have it. But it feels deeply uncomfortable actually to have this additional motion in the steering wheel. The Formula One drivers got in and said, "No, we'd like to try it." And it really worked.
Toto Wolff
Come back, I think if you want to be… You want to have the exchange with the FIA to make sure that you're not on the wrong side of the argument.
John Collison
With that, did they end up banning it, or they ended up permitting it on the team?
Toto Wolff
They banned it after a year.
John Collison
Why did they ban it after a year? Why didn't they say, "Okay, this is one of the things that F1 cars can do now?"
Toto Wolff
I don't know. Maybe we lost the political argument that it was good. Other teams said it would cost so much to replicate it, and they could. But, is that really the intention of the regulations?
John Collison
Why did you do it as a push-pull rather than a button on the steering wheel? Or why was the push-pull the control mechanism?
Toto Wolff
I think there was a regulation that allowed to have a mechanical system that was… The rule is the driver must drive the car.
John Collison
Yes.
Toto Wolff
So it needed to be deployed for the driver through a mechanical system. I believe that was the reason.
John Collison
I see. That was the best way to have it defensible.
Toto Wolff
Yeah.
John Collison
That's so interesting. Where would you categorize the compression ratio kerfuffle, ambient temperature versus measuring a temperature? Where does that fit on this spectrum?
Toto Wolff
This was just other teams feeling sore about not having read the regulations in the right way. Today, on any vehicle in the world with a combustion engine, you measure compression ratio in a cold state because how else would you measure it? What does hot state even mean at a certain temperature with other ambient factors that matter? It could be a manipulative value that you have.
Toto Wolff
The other teams said, "Quite unfair. The rules say it needs to be measured in the cold environment or cold engine. What Mercedes has done is once it's running hot, it basically grew in size and therefore extracted more power." And, we didn't confirm that.
John Collison
You had more thermal expansion than other engines did?
Toto Wolff
Exactly.
John Collison
Because you engineered in more thermal expansion.
Toto Wolff
I can't really confirm that. Sorry, I must rewind.
John Collison
Okay, but that's what people say.
Toto Wolff
That's what people say because the measurement was clearly identified to be in a cold phase of the engine. Was it a loophole? Was it a shortfall of the other teams? I think it was a shortfall of the other teams. It became quite a political argument, and then some compromise was found in how the measurement worked. Actually, the funny bit is it didn't make any difference for us. It was a months-long argument going back and forth, and we fought it for the sheer principle of innovation.
John Collison
Is it hard to keep these top-secret improvements a secret?
Toto Wolff
Yeah, it is because there is a natural fluctuation of personnel between the teams.
John Collison
Would you compartmentalize? It's like the Manhattan Project. You need to firewall things.
Toto Wolff
We firewall certain things, and I'm maybe more on the extreme side within the organization. Not everyone needs to know everything, but eventually, you will always have a group of what do you call it, 20, 25 people—
John Collison
Who need to be in the know.
Toto Wolff
Who need to be in there, and they may change teams, and then that obviously leaks.
John Collison
Can you prevent people from changing teams within a season?
Toto Wolff
There is the regulatory environment of every country. How long can you actually prohibit someone to work for another team? With our contractual frameworks and in the UK, you can do it up to 12 months. But there are countries like Switzerland, for example, where it's three months.
John Collison
You got to be careful who you hire in Switzerland.
Toto Wolff
We haven't got our Audis in Switzerland, for example. You got to be careful who you hire elsewhere. But you always need to account for the fact that people may change teams because of personal reasons. Absolutely fair argument. That's why, how can you make sure that things are not leaking too easily? But they will eventually always come out.
John Collison
If you could write the rules, how would you change them?
Toto Wolff
Well, I'm in two minds. The innovation part in me and listening to my engineers is free rein. We have a budget cap that is 200 million, and then make it as open as you want, because that would be magnificent from a scientific standpoint, an engineering standpoint. But what would happen is the best engineers with the most capability also in terms of infrastructure will come out with a car that is much superior than some of the other teams. It would create a field where the leading car could be five seconds quicker than the next one. That is not what Formula One wants. It's becoming more and more restrictive.
Toto Wolff
Is that good or bad? I think it needs to be sensible because this is still the fastest laboratory in the world. That is in our DNA, and I think that is still happening. Obviously, engineers will always say, "Well, it's not as much fun as it was in the past," but it's still a lot of fun.
John Collison
You were describing one set of risks in developing new technical changes, which is the regulatory risk. Will you be allowed to have it even for one season or certainly multiple? But the other risk is just technical risks. Will it work? I think in any R&D organization... We have this at Stripe where we only have so much time, we only have so much money. We have only so much engineers, and we need to put them... Towards the projects that are most likely to work.
John Collison
You don't know upfront what's going to work. So part of the special sauce is that ability to predict this product direction is a good one versus this one is just… It's not awful, it's just not the best. You're fundamentally playing this game of where you spread the poker chips. How do you manage technical risk? How do you think about allocating those very precious chips? Again, they're even more precious now in the new cost cap era.
Toto Wolff
So, the unfortunate part of it is that your business is far more complex, in my opinion. Why? Because you deal with the end customer or whoever the customer is, an organization, an entity, or a person. You can define technical specifications that you believe make the process better or more efficient or successful. But there is someone at the end that actually needs to buy your product, and that person or that organization is going to measure whether the humans that are actually his customers or her customers are going to like it. How can you predict that part? With us, it's all data and the simulation.
John Collison
It's much more measurable.
Toto Wolff
It's much more measurable. At a very early stage, we will define what is the lap time contribution that we imagine of that part. That all starts in the virtual world. It's all simulation, whether it is CFD, whether it's the wind tunnel in the way we measure it, or we attribute downforce and drag, or whether it is mathematical models that we have. All along the process, you continue to correlate with your expectations.
Toto Wolff
And, there are rare occasions where you believe that something eventually, when it ends up in the car, it's going to be a 10th of a second in average, over a lap, quicker, and you realize it's not, or you realize that the driver doesn't feel comfortable with it and isn't feeling safe enough to drive it. We need to consider also if the end customer, which we know exactly, you maybe not, will be able to extract from that virtual, let's say, theoretical lap-time benefit. But it's much more measurable.
John Collison
Engineers like to fall in love with their ideas and, "I just need one more simulation run," or, "I just need one more—"
Toto Wolff
We don't have that.
John Collison
But you have to kill people's ideas because they're in love with them, but they're just not going to work, or you just don't have the resources to staff it.
Toto Wolff
I think we had people like this who, if they are also forceful, they might put the organization under pressure to actually continue with the experiment beyond a reasonable point, but they are not part of the organization anymore. This is one of the personality traits that we hold dear, that it needs to fundamentally contribute to the overall target of lap time rather than what we discussed before to the department's target. There will be a decision within the group and then in the wider technical management to say, "We're stopping this now."
John Collison
If I was to talk to an engineer at Mercedes, I would find them surprisingly dispassionate and analytical where they're not falling in love with a particular technical approach, or they're not falling in love with their idea. It's either it works or it doesn't.
Toto Wolff
Exactly. You fall in love with the result. It's that these extreme emotions and gratifications that you feel when you win a race or a championship, and therefore, the rational part of the engineer, I would hope, is superior against, let's say, an emotional falling in love with your development part.
John Collison
I want to ask a bit about your investing background, because obviously, that is how you ended up in the position that you're in in racing. First off, were you a private-equity or a venture-capital investor? I've heard it described as both in accounts.
Toto Wolff
None of that, I would say, because how it all started is that when I decided to stop my racing, I had a short period of time where I was an employee in a steel manufacturing company. Didn't like that, and then ended up reading about internet companies in the US. I know you had Marc Andreessen here. One of the first companies that I got interested in was Netscape. Then you had Yahoo!, AOL.
John Collison
These were the star companies of the time.
Toto Wolff
The star companies of the time, exactly. I lived in Vienna, and I thought, "I understand now what they were doing." I looked at, let's say, the German-speaking countries to say, "Who is doing that in Austria, in Germany, and in Switzerland?" I found out that... That existed, but sometimes it was just little startups that weren't even in a legal entity.
John Collison
Yes.
Toto Wolff
Young people walking out of their children's room or kid's room.
Toto Wolff
Then obviously, the effect of the Nasdaq started to kick in with absurd valuations for no-revenue companies. In Germany, it was the Neuer Markt, which was the equivalent, but even crazier in terms of process of being able to list. There were no boundaries, you can call it like this.
Toto Wolff
I found out about all of these companies, got myself into my car, went there and said, "I like your business. I want to help you to raise some equity or list your company on the stock exchange." If it was successful with the first or the latter, I would like to have 10 or 50% of your company. That led to some shareholding because some of the people said, "Why? My business is worth €10 million." I knew it was not worth it, but I said, "If it is €10 million, and I'll raise €5 million for you, or we IPO for €20, can I have half of the company?" They said, "Of course." That was a win-win.
John Collison
You were almost like an investment banker to some of these dot-com companies. You probably wouldn't have described it that way, but you were helping them with financing.
Toto Wolff
I was wearing cuff links, a Hermès tie, and a pin-striped, double-breasted suit, but eventually... Put it in a cave and never wore it again. There was another experience. But no, it wasn't. It was actually a hybrid between sweat equity, early-stage microinvestments, and equity kicker or options related to success. That's how it worked at the beginning. Eventually, we raised capital, not fund-like structure. It was still my company, but we got two private equity, two venture capital companies that each owned 10%, so we got real money and then deployed some of that.
John Collison
You also, importantly, had good market timing, right? Because for people who weren't around, the '99, 2000 period was crazy, where, as you say, the valuations just became fairly disconnected from reality, and then they crashed hard shortly afterward. A lot of the people who did well in that '99, 2000 era were people who were optimistic enough to get into these companies, but then skeptical enough to sell some of the proceeds rather than just watching the account balance go up and then down.
Toto Wolff
And lucky. In our case, within two years, we went from actually me pitching an idea to an entrepreneur that didn't have a company around him to an IPO, which was crazy. We found ourselves in the after-IPO party, which we used to do back in the day, and we thought that had zero value three months ago, and now €100 million. One of those companies that I pitched I found out that there was a web portal, free SMS web portal. It was called sms.at. What you did, basically, you wrote your SMS on the interface at no cost. Austria back then had around nine million people, and two million were using this because SMS were expensive.
John Collison
SMS cost money back then.
Toto Wolff
It cost money back then.
John Collison
9 cents a message.
Toto Wolff
It was a lot. I found out that this was run by a teenage boy in Austria in Graz, visited him, and basically with the model, "I'm going to raise money for your company," which then was very successfully, wrapped it into a legal entity. When I said to him, "How do you do that?" He said, "I'm hacking. I'm hacking into the SMS servers of the big telcos." I said, "Okay, and then?" He said, "Well, eventually, they find out that the data volume was bigger than, let's say, on normal days, and they shut me down."
Toto Wolff
I said, "Okay, and if that happens, what do you do?" "Well, I have a plan. For example, today, I'm running on Nigeria Telecom, and next week it's going to be Norway." We put it in an entity, and I started to visit Telekom Austria and T-Mobile then, the two biggest Austrian telcos. They said, "We hate sms.at. We absolutely hate it, but we can't shut it down. What is it we can do together?" Eventually, within two years, that nonexistent company was sold for 250 million to T-Mobile.
John Collison
For 250 million?
Toto Wolff
Yeah.
John Collison
Wow! People forget. 2000. This was the year 2000?
Toto Wolff
That is obviously the… Yeah.
John Collison
It was a different era.
Toto Wolff
Different era. Maybe the 250 million today, when you look at the AI situation, that's going to be 25 billion.
John Collison
But on a relative basis.
Toto Wolff
Relative. It was unbelievable enormous money and valuation. This was the lucky moment, actually.
John Collison
They bought it to shut it down?
Toto Wolff
No. They bought a large part of it and took over the customers and integrated it in their systems. What happened is we signed the deal in Bonn, which was Deutsche Telekom back in the day. T-Mobile was a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom. I flew back with my CFO, Austrian Airlines. He was 15 years my senior and was running the M&A department of the Austrian national steel company.
Toto Wolff
We were sitting in Austrian Airlines and got a glass of cheap bubbly, and I said, "That was a good transaction." He said, "Something is going wrong here." I said, "Why?" He said, "That business with literally tiny revenue, but with a large customer base. That means with lots of potential, but no way of actually knowing how to monetize it or how to repay the CapEx investment."
Toto Wolff
There's quite some correlation to the current markets now. It was valued at this absurd amount compared to my specialized alu business that he had that was generating 30 million in EBIT. Something's going wrong. I said, "Nothing's going wrong. The internet is going to dominate," and, "Can't you see the amount of customers?"
John Collison
"It's a new paradigm. You're old-fashioned."
Toto Wolff
Exactly. He said, "No, I'm sure this is going to collapse. The valuation is absurd." Then we listed another company on the stock exchange, which was between pitching it to the bankers that scratch the eyes out of each other to do this to the day of listing in three months. He said, "I promise you we need to look at that. I don't think this is sustainable."
Toto Wolff
That impulse that he gave me from this 1-hour flight from Bonn to Vienna was enough to look at our whole portfolio of nine investments. We decided to exit all of them. That started end of '99 and went all through 2000. Obviously, when the market collapsed in spring 2000, people were still hoping for a rebound. It was just a glitch. The market never came back.
Toto Wolff
We exited all of those investments, bar one, an Israeli startup that we couldn't exit, and we were out. What remained was a skeleton of a venture capital company, very much downsized, to continue to look for opportunities whilst having the philosophical idea of this is not going to come back for a long time.
John Collison
I think this is an underrated aspect of good investors is knowing when to sell. I think there's an incentive in the investor ecosystem where they all like talking about, "We found this founder very early, and we bought the stock, and it grew and grew and grew, and we want to be on the journey forever." I think all of the myth-making tends to be about getting in early and being a very long-term partner.
John Collison
I notice a thing that doesn't get talked about but is a very common trait amongst the most successful investors is they have this spidey sense for… It's like the movie Heat. You got to know when to get out. And, a lot of the very good investors have this very commercial sense for, again, you're in this period, like '99, 2000, and it's an important moment to sell. It doesn't get talked about because it sounds cowardly, or it sounds like you don't believe in this company that you made a lot of money from because you're now a seller. But it's an interesting aspect.
Toto Wolff
I came from a very financially or generally poor family background. No money. Financial safety and opportunity was always a very strong driver for me. I owned 90% of that company. It wasn't a fund. I wasn't managing anybody else's money.
John Collison
It was a corporate entity. You had your own venture investors, but it itself was all holdings.
Toto Wolff
Yeah. It was a private limited company from which I owned 100%, sold 20% to venture-capital companies, and all of the 80% or most of it, we had some of my dear friends and colleagues had a few shares. All of it... I owned. When the opportunity came of actually exiting and generating a vast amount of money, which was life-changing, generational wealth opportunity, it became easier for me to do that because I thought, "Okay, I never had any money. Now suddenly, I was able to generate so much that I couldn't even spend it." At the time, I made the call. I think it would have been probably more aggressive if it would have been other people's money...Generating management fees, potentially carry upside.
John Collison
But the fact was your money allowed you to be pragmatic.
Toto Wolff
Exactly. And, have a certain sense of safety also... Or a desire for being on the safe side.
John Collison
What was your best performing investment before the racing era?
Toto Wolff
Mercedes, the F1 team. But before the Mercedes era, I was invested in Williams, which was pretty successful. Before that, a company that I loved forever called HWA, which was…
John Collison
Sure. These were all racing companies?
Toto Wolff
That was all racing companies. Before that, I would say probably... That, the SMS company. It was called UCP.
John Collison
Yes. SMS entrepreneur turned racing entrepreneur.
Toto Wolff
No, I was a race driver before, actually.
John Collison
Racer turned SMS entrepreneur turned racing entrepreneur.
Toto Wolff
The exact sequence is: racer turned banking intern in Warsaw, turned steel sales manager in Eastern Europe, turned venture capitalist, although it was more venture than capitalist, and then turned young driver manager once I sold all of these investments, and then I started to invest in motor racing companies.
John Collison
This is Toto's new Twitter bio, just for you guys. Obviously, that—
Toto Wolff
I have no social media.
John Collison
You have enough exposure. I think people know what you think without tweeting.
John Collison
Do you get to manage the team in a different way because, I don't know, you're less worried about job security, you can take bigger swings, or just how is Toto managing the team different from all the other F1 team principals managing the team?
Toto Wolff
I have had this opportunity, an immense opportunity given to me by the board of management of Daimler back in the day, led by Dieter Zetsche, the CEO, but actually all of the board members were very supportive of the idea. What happened is they bought a small team, Brawn, that won the championship in 2009, expecting it to be a dominant force in Formula One. It was the first Mercedes Grand Prix-owned team with its own engines and its own chassis. It underperformed. Year after year, the results were really not satisfactory. Until 2013, they won a single race only. I was at the time running Williams with the founder, and we also won a race.
Toto Wolff
One of the board members approached me and invited me to Stuttgart, and he said, "How can it be that your private little team can win a race, and we, Mercedes, we can't do any better than that?" I said, "I don't know." They gave me the opportunity to look at their setup, their numbers, and everything. I came back and said, "What is your aspiration?" They said, "Winning World Championships because we bought the team that did that." I said, "Okay, then one of us is wrong because I'm working on the same budgets, and I'm thinking about finishing in the top six." They said, "No, it's not the same budget."
Toto Wolff
"Look, we spend 100 million more." I said, "Yeah, those 100 millions, you spend on Michael Schumacher and Nico Rosberg, I have a pay driver from Venezuela," who won the race, by the way, Pastor. "That's the main difference." They didn't like that situation at all. I said, "I'm just a messenger, and I'm going to go back to Williams."
Toto Wolff
Eventually, they came back and said, "We think our model, a corporate running a Formula One team, doesn't function, because it needs to be much more entrepreneurially led, you need to be empowered to make decisions on the spot, and we want you to run this." And I said, "I need to pinch myself because being the head of Mercedes Motorsport is probably one of the best jobs in the industry, other than being the Ferrari guy."
Toto Wolff
I had to say no because I was a shareholder in Williams, and I have been always an entrepreneur. They said, "Funny that you say that because we've just bought 40% of the Abu Dhabi Sovereign Fund. We bought it back, you can buy that." I said, "I did well in my life, but I won't be able to afford it."
John Collison
But they helped you finance it, right?
Toto Wolff
Exactly. They said, "How much can you afford?" I said, "I'm always on the conservative side, I've gone through financial hardship, and I don't want to end up there." "How much are you prepared to put into this?" I said, "That's the amount." They said, "We're going to help you finance the rest." Here I was.
Toto Wolff
Until today, with the change of management now led by Ola Källenius and his colleagues, the CEO of Mercedes, they give me a framework that I can act in the best interest of the racing team outside of that corporate structure, and I couldn't wish for a better co-shareholder, partner, and brand, mighty brand that I'm associated with. The decisions that we make are quick, they are in the best interest of the team whilst thinking about the consequences for the brand, and I run it like a 20-people organization.
John Collison
How is how you run it different from just hired team principals, how they run teams?
Toto Wolff
Every team is different. For example, when you look at Ferrari, the team principal is one of 10 direct reports to the CEO, so the marketing person in the racing team is going to be on the same level that a team principal. You have other... Very much shareholder-led organizations like Red Bull, where you would have an employed team principal that's reporting to a group of shareholders. Then you have a strictly corporate structure like Audi, where you have people from the group and from Formula One are being hired to run the team, they have a salary, they might have a bonus.
Toto Wolff
That long leash that I was given. Today, there's no leash because we are partners, but the ability of taking decisions that was given to me was extraordinary because all of these people, they need to fundamentally report to someone. There's always the risk that if you take a decision without having actually escalated it through the hierarchy, you might be exposed and lose your job. Where I am, until I really badly screw up, I'm responsible for my decisions, and I'm very clear about that, but I can't be fired.
John Collison
That's what's interesting, right? You see this in Silicon Valley, where companies run by founders often have different strategic degrees of freedom available to them than other companies. You look at, say, with Meta, it's not a company that's just run by the shareholders, it's run by Mark, and he has a strong view that being on the forefront of AI is very important. There's been previous waves where he's had strong views, and now they're doing very well in the AI space, where maybe a professional management team would not have had the license by shareholders or the board to spend so much money on that, and it took a long time to prove out, and things like that. You see that effect oftentimes. Mercedes is the only founder-run F1 team.
Toto Wolff
But it's a little bit like you and your brother around Stripe. You are able to take decisions that in a dynamic environment may prove to be false or misjudged after a few years. When you look at the ability that… The way Mark Zuckerberg leads the company is quite amazing, because you can decide to pour quite some investment in a certain field, and then say, "That hasn't developed in the way I thought."
Toto Wolff
Dietrich Mateschitz, the founder of Red Bull, said something quite interesting to me one day, he said, "As an entrepreneur, you need to be like a downhill ski racer, but you need to be able to stop and walk back up the hill." I think as an entrepreneur, you can do that. You have the long-term horizon also. A manager will probably be short-term incentivized. You have a three, or you have a 5-year contract, you have stock options, you want to maximize the value of these.
John Collison
And there's a fear of failure. There's a fear of doing something that looks bad to the people who are grading you, because you're always being graded.
Toto Wolff
Exactly. That's what I meant at the beginning. My time perspective has changed, it's 10 years, it's not one year.
John Collison
People know that you're a large owner of the team. I don't think quite as many people know that Jim Ratcliffe of INEOS is also a major shareholder of the team. What's he like?
Toto Wolff
That was a real opportunity back in the day for Mercedes, and for Jim. He's built an empire of an organization. This is a chemicals conglomerate. There are three shareholders, they run it in the way they think it's intelligent. Back in the day, Niki Lauda, unfortunately, passed away, he was my best friend. And those shares went back into the pool.
Toto Wolff
Jim Ratcliffe and INEOS started to sponsor us, quite extensively, actually. We ended up sitting on the table with the CEO of Mercedes, Jim Ratcliffe, and myself talking about the sponsorship. It was just before COVID hit. Teams had no valuations, we were all loss-making, the sport wasn't anywhere near where it was today.
Toto Wolff
Jim said, "I'm prepared to commit X hundred million as a sponsorship if I can have a stake in the team." We said, "Well, that makes sense." I increased my stake a little bit, and then we were all one-third. Today, Jim is a great resource that I use if I need to have a contrarian view, someone that is highly experienced but also shrewd in the way he looks at his businesses, and a very enjoyable co-shareholder that isn't really interfering, but because I guess we do well, enjoys the ride and is a resource that we can utilize.
John Collison
F1 teams have become radically more valuable. This transaction valued Mercedes F1 at 4.6 billion pounds. And that's a 7x increase from even just a few years ago. That phenomenon has also happened in other sports like NFL, and teams like that.
John Collison
There are two explanations you could have for the increase in value. One is a monetary theory that you have more rich people who want to buy into teams, and so the businesses are the same, but you just have more demand to become a sports team owner, and more dollars chasing fewer assets. The other is that you can say, and obviously this is somewhat true for F1, they've become better businesses. The audience has grown so much, and you have Drive to Survive, and things like that.
John Collison
As you think about the increase in value in Mercedes and F1 teams, how much of it is F1 teams have become a more desirable asset, and how much is it that they're actually just very good businesses now?
Toto Wolff
When you buy a car today, you justify it with sometimes rational decisions, like lots of horsepower, or good design, or it's EV, because I want to have an efficient car. The truth is, it's an emotional decision why you buy a car. The emotional decision is how you want to be perceived. Do I want to be perceived progressive? Do I want to be perceived affluent?
John Collison
Yes.
Toto Wolff
All of this. That is going to be a longish answer.
Toto Wolff
Sports teams are scarce assets today. In F1, there's just 11 of us. You could potentially have another one that's within the regs, but nobody's really keen. It's the biggest global sport in the world today. The Olympics and the football World Championship are bigger, but they're only every 4 years. This is the biggest global sport in the world.
Toto Wolff
Then you look at the NFL, very scarce asset too. For US-American, it doesn't go any bigger than the NFL. I think, how much? Thirty-two teams or something around that. The scarcity of the asset can be a... Rational decision to own it, and hope for a value increase because of that factor.
Toto Wolff
Then there is the trophy asset angle. There's many very wealthy people that love the sport and say, "I always dreamt owning an NBA or NFL team, or Formula One team, and I enjoy going to the races, giving my input, and I can afford it now." Very valuable. It's a win-win.
Toto Wolff
But then there is the people that have so much money and feel in a way, maybe not recognized enough, because you could have earned 10 billion with a business that doesn't have as much visibility, and you're saying, "Actually, I'd spend a large chunk of money just for the courtside seat and be more prominent." It's also a decision that you can understand, maybe. That is that aspect of investing.
Toto Wolff
The other part is fundamentals. You look at the landscape, and you can say, "Do I believe that this sport is going to continue to grow? What's the demographics of the sport? How much income potential has the league? How much does the team earn?" And that today—these fundamentals have become reality.
Toto Wolff
In Formula One before, we were all loss-making. It was a marketing exercise. But today, few of us are generating very healthy profits in our business, more than 30% EBIT margin. We are distributing dividends. It's not like the US-American teams, or the tax structure where you basically live in a debt environment. We don't have a lot of CapEx, because we don't own the stadium. Obviously, also miss some of the revenues.
Toto Wolff
When you invest in a Formula One team today, you can attribute multiples to your investment decisions. When I sold part of the team last year, those multiples justified the valuation you just stated. Today, I'll probably be able to generate 30% more. But I got the right partner, so that's okay. Those multiples are also valid for most of the US-American teams.
John Collison
What are the last publicly released financial figures for Mercedes?
Toto Wolff
We're generating around a billion dollars in revenue, and 30% profit margin.
John Collison
Okay.
Toto Wolff
It's a very healthy margin.
John Collison
Sorry, 300 million of EBIT, and so the $4.6 billion valuation is 15 times EBIT multiple? Warren Buffett could underwrite this business.
Toto Wolff
Exactly. Back in the day, it wasn't a billion, and it wasn't 300 million. It was considerably less because we're growing very strong, and the sport is still growing strong. But we are Europeans, we don't talk so much about valuations and money. But as a matter of fact, like you said, these multiples are actually on the conservative side.
John Collison
Actually, that's very different from, say, an NBA or an NFL team, where I think every time one transacts, it's wackadoodle valuations that can only be justified by tax structuring, or courtside seats.
Toto Wolff
But also, when you look at the valuations of the US teams, you have fundamentals for some of the teams, but then there are some which are being dragged along that are having valuations that are not real anymore. And, if you look at Mercedes, we are probably generating, other than the Dallas Cowboys, the most profit of any sports team in the world. We have a USP in this world.
Toto Wolff
When we compare our multiples to the NFL or the NBA in its latest crazy uplift of valuation in, I don't know what the multiple is, the revenue multiple, which is crazy. I'm a fundamental guy, fundamental figures, so I would never value a business on revenues. I would value it on return on investment, fundamental cash flow, and profits. That would value us at 10, 12 billion if you look at the Lakers sale, for example, whatever else happened in this frenzy.
Toto Wolff
But that's not the point. My horizon is so long term that I'm a long-term bullish investor with all the ebb and flow that can happen in this sport, that it becomes irrelevant to actually strive for high valuation because it's just on paper. But we could value the business today much more than it was a year ago.
John Collison
It's interesting. There can be an effect in tech where, say, if you look at the AI space, some of the most enduring businesses in AI, like a TSMC or an NVIDIA, that have these very long-term advantages, actually trade at quite reasonable multiples despite the fact that they're growing very quickly. And similarly, the best team in the biggest sport trades actually at one of the most sensible multiples.
Toto Wolff
Yeah, and that's okay. We want to be perceived as the serious people in there, because we are not particularly interested in the trophy investor where we could maximize our valuation. The most important point, none of us is actually interested in selling any shares here, because we believe in the long-term development of the company and the sport, particularly in this environment of AI.
Toto Wolff
Humans watch humans, and the driver in the car is irreplaceable, not because a robot couldn't go any quicker. By the way, that's a different discussion, I don't believe in that. But because we want to go through the drama and the glory of the individual. I believe that live sports, generally are very resilient to whatever technological developments we see at the moment in the market.
John Collison
Will we see any of the F1 teams as public companies? Isn't that the next logical step? Because there are lots of people who would like to be a part of them.
Toto Wolff
I don't think... We went public with Williams, and that was not a success. Because in a way, you're reporting 20 times a year with each of the races. In this sport, it goes from mania to depression within a week.
John Collison
But that was a very different era. F1 was much smaller, it would have been a different shareholder base. Could it work now?
Toto Wolff
I don't know. If somebody wanted to monetize, or raise capital by just being public, maybe. But I don't think being public as a sports team is the right long-term structure. You want to be in control.
John Collison
Because you just get whipsawed so much.
Toto Wolff
Exactly. I would also want to be in control of that business, not because I think in legacy terms, that has no interest for me, but it's about creating the best sports team in the world in the time I run it.
John Collison
Drive to Survive has been a smashing success for Netflix, and a big success for F1, where it's brought lots of new people into the sport. People talk about women, especially… You don't associate F1 with women, but the show is very popular with them. Netflix has tried a very close copy of Drive to Survive with cycling and tennis and all these sports, and it hasn't really worked. You don't hear anyone talking about those shows. Why does the format work particularly well for F1?
Toto Wolff
There are some shows that I personally found quite okay, the cycling was okay. But why? I didn't believe it would work. Back in the day when Formula One pitched it to us, Netflix didn't really pay any money, very little. We were fighting a World Championship against Ferrari, so I sat down with my colleague of Ferrari and said, "Are we doing this?" And he said, "We are here to win a Formula One Championship and not play Cirque du Soleil." Ferrari and Mercedes decided not to participate in Series One.
John Collison
Yeah, famously.
Toto Wolff
Famously. That was maybe important for the success of the series, because it allowed Drive to Survive to look at smaller teams and less—
John Collison
It was like an underdog.
Toto Wolff
Underdog, exactly. COVID came, people stayed at home. Generations watched Drive to Survive from the granddaughter to the grandparent, grandchild to the grandparent. We started to race as the only sport because we were able to contain our traveling circus very closely. We were live for it. I think this is where we made a big step forward in terms of growing our audiences and demographics.
Toto Wolff
Why the sport is so strong today? I think it's not only because of the Netflix factor. It's also because we entertain. We have great characters that are very active on social media, younger drivers. We provide a great narrative, controversial situations, the politics outside of the sport. That is basically a 12-months live reality show. But with the—
John Collison
F1 already is a soap opera, and that's why it works well in TV format.
Toto Wolff
It is, but with a fundamental difference to other soap operas. We are credible sports. We have rules. We race based on those rules. If you win, the best car, the best machine wins. This is the fundamental base of the sport. This is why the reality show around fits well. This without that wouldn't work.
John Collison
Yes.
Toto Wolff
Entertainment follows sport, not the other way around for Formula One. We've stayed true to this DNA, and that's why we've attracted audience in sheer size that we didn't expect before. Our strongest growing demographic is young women, 15 to, I don't know what the bracket is, but 15-25 years. We have 42% female fans, which is an awesome—
John Collison
Unthinkable for a motor sport.
Toto Wolff
Unthinkable. Obviously, my wife Susie runs the female series, F1 Academy, which is going very strong with young women driving those cars. What she sees is that her demographic very much obviously buys in into Formula One's demographic, and they became an aspirational series for young women, not only that want to be racing drivers, but also engineers, or marketing people in a racing environment, or sheerly inspiration that a woman can actually succeed in a male-dominated environment. All of this universe buys into the credibility of Formula One.
John Collison
I personally find Drive to Survive a little too soap-opera. I always want more of the technical details and more of the race craft. I think maybe there will be the opportunity over time for different sub-shows or something like that because I understand why they make the choices they do. I think what they have is probably has the most mainstream appeal, but they'll probably find that there are sub-emphases that would be successful, too.
Toto Wolff
It's a good point we actually haven't thought about. Because we tried to develop, and Stefano and me, Carey, who runs Formula One, is excellent at that, to grow it in the right demographic. We are still niche in some parts of the world. We have a large group of fans in every continent. But when you look at the United States, it's very much big cities and affluence. I can see that when you go to New York, Miami, San Francisco, LA, Austin, the sport is very present. People recognize you.
Toto Wolff
I was invited to the Super Bowl in Arizona a few years ago, no recognition. We are not developed in the middle of the United States, which is NASCAR. This is very much the current demographic that Stefano is aiming at because it's niche, it's high-tech. How can I say? It's very European and glamorous to a certain degree.
Toto Wolff
We have these hardcore fans. Interestingly, many of the young ones follow free practice on Friday. They will know everything about the updates on the car, the aero updates. They also know about the WAGs, the wives and girlfriends of the drivers, and all of these influencers and blogs that are existing.
John Collison
Yes. We're getting into, what does it mean to be an F1 fan these days, because it's interesting. You have this pyramidal structure where you can be extremely engaged and follow the team around, or you can go to one race when it comes to your town, or you can watch Drive to Survive, or maybe you just come across YouTube clips in your feed occasionally. Now there are all these different layers. How has that changed from a Mercedes strategy point of view, the fact that you have so many different types of fans now versus the old paradigm of you turn up to a race, or you don't?
Toto Wolff
As a team today, we have so many different fan groups. Not only fans, but stakeholders. You have, obviously, Mercedes. What is it we do for the car's brand to enhance reputation and fundamentally selling cars? What is that? What can we do for…
Toto Wolff
I have this customer theory. A customer is someone that makes your life better. My number one customer is Susie, my wife. Whatever I will do and say is always focused on, is she going to like that or not? Because that has an effect on my life quality. My family, very important. The people that work for Mercedes, my employees, if I have them in a good space, then the car is going to go faster. The relationships matter.
Toto Wolff
Then it's sponsors and co-shareholders. What is it I need to do for them to say that this is a good investment or a good platform? You can trickle that down. It's the fans, and then it might be the social media followers. You can trickle that down. What I'm trying to do is, in my priority list of customers, to identify the objective to achieve the best outcome. That is what I've always done in any of the way of looking at a life. It sounds a bit rational and brutal, and maybe the reality is it's not like this—
John Collison
No, you're ranking who's important to you—
Toto Wolff
But I'm ranking the priorities. Exactly.
John Collison
F1 is interesting because you have the teams, you have F1, the organization, the company itself, and then you have the FIA, which people might not realize is different. What are the tensions between all of those groups?
Toto Wolff
I think tensions have been very limited... Recently, in recent times. Because there was this pressure always between Formula One as being the commercial sides of it and the commercial rights' holder, the FIA being the governing body, making the rules, policing the rules, and then the teams. There was, let's say, an umbrella contract between all three stakeholders, which is the famous Concorde Agreement, because it was signed on the Place de la Concorde in Paris many, many 10s of years before.
Toto Wolff
The teams, we don't own the league, contrary to the NFL, for example. But, we are getting quite a large percentage of the profits that Formula One does. Liberty and public shareholders, retail, or institutional investors own Formula One, and we get the profits. The FIA is being paid by Formula One for their services. But the FIA is also the one that granted the rights to Formula One in a 100-year agreement. So, they need to be respected as a stakeholder and not only as the policeman. I think that was where cracks appeared a few years ago, or even before, you must say, but today, it's more aligned. We're jailing more, the three entities for the benefit of the sport.
John Collison
But if there is a disagreement, what will it likely be about?
Toto Wolff
What could the disagreement look like? How does the profit split, for example. These contracts are being renewed every five years.
John Collison
The age-old debate.
Toto Wolff
Yeah, exactly. Or where are we? Which countries are hosting races?
John Collison
Was that new Spanish circuit that nobody likes a mistake?
Toto Wolff
I'm a traditionalist, I love going to the old circuits because they represent history for me. But also the racing is based on these. For whatever reason, the layout of the old tracks, which had vast areas, that they were available because places were not as developed as today, provide great racing. Overtaking, cars being able to go side by side.
John Collison
That's the criticism of the new Spanish track.
Toto Wolff
Exactly. That there wasn't a lot of overtaking. But. Madrid did have, and I'm not saying this to make anybody look good, Madrid as a city is spectacular. The track that is built in this area is spectacular. I must say the job that they did over the few years since they got the contract is nothing but outstanding.
Toto Wolff
But I think where it didn't work is that the track is so spectacular in terms of for the drivers and the camera positions with this long banked corner, but it didn't account too much for the new generation of cars for the difficulty to overtake. For next year already, I think they're going to change the layout of the track because it's not a permanent track to provide more straights.
John Collison
It's not a permanent area?
Toto Wolff
No.
John Collison
They can just re-jigger it?
Toto Wolff
Exactly.
John Collison
How configurable is it?
Toto Wolff
When I spoke with the CEO of the track on the weekend, and he just mentioned a few corners that he thinks can be adapted or should be adapted. They are open-minded about it.
John Collison
That's cool. There's fundamentally this tension between you're creating a destination, and you're designing a racing track, and there are some slight tensions between them. Maybe you don't have as much room as you want to work with, but you can break that trade-off a little bit where you can improve the track even once the location is set.
Toto Wolff
I don't think there are tensions. I think fundamentally, all stakeholders, including the host, wants to have a great Grand Prix, and that means having attractive racing whilst having good spots for the public.
John Collison
There's sometimes intension. Monaco, famously, you would not design it that way as a racing track, but Monaco is not going anywhere, and it's the…
Toto Wolff
I think Monaco needs Formula One, Formula One needs Monaco. But Monaco is such a traditional track that nobody actually wanted to change the layout because it's like breaking with the rules or breaking the legacy. But fundamentally, I lived there many years. I wouldn't know how to make it very different. I have some idea for a longer straight.
John Collison
Also, Monaco, they keep building new land, and so you could extend the track out into the Mediterranean.
Toto Wolff
Yes, and that has been a great commercial success. I doubt that extending a racetrack into the sea is going to generate some return.
John Collison
Last question. How do you set Mercedes up for succession? How will it work post-Toto? How can you prepare for that?
Toto Wolff
I've seen examples of entrepreneurs that were either so selfish or believed in their own... Eternity and... Forever life, that they didn't look after, not only their families, but also the company. For me, it is not important to leave a legacy and call the building the whatever, Toto building or so, which I hear some people are doing nowadays.
John Collison
You already have the toilets named after you.
Toto Wolff
Yeah, exactly. I wish I would own the call on this business. That's massive.
John Collison
Especially now with AI.
Toto Wolff
Exactly. We should ask them for sponsorship.
John Collison
Exactly.
Toto Wolff
For me, it's important to do what's best for the family and to do what's best for the team. That means looking at the structure going forward where this team can live without me. Probably it's not going to be the same because I have the credibility as an entrepreneur that's leading my own businesses, but there will be a solid management structure. I believe that my job is going to be divided between two or three people that I'm vetting at the moment that I believe are already doing a great job with all of their strengths in these various areas. It's going to be different, but it will be a successful team.
John Collison
Do you think you will set things up where maybe you move to executive chairman type of role where you don't have to be there every race weekend, you let the new person set their direction, but you can help with personnel and be there for advice? Or do you think it's important to have a clean break, and you get out, and it's their show now?
Toto Wolff
I think clean break is probably not possible if I continue to own it with my family. That executive or non-executive chairmanship is something that may happen, but it needs to happen in a very, very precise way. Because you can't be on the sidelines and interfere into the daily business. I also don't want to end up in a situation that I believe the family can run it the best way and then be just mediocre. You have to earn your spot in running it and you have to contribute. My children also don't have any interest.
Toto Wolff
I believe that if you are a chairman, non-executive or executive, you need to exactly know your role. And that doesn't mean shooting from the outside and being the one that sits on the grandstand and says, "You've screwed up, and you've screwed up, and this is how I would have done it."
John Collison
You're calling the drivers directly.
Toto Wolff
You can call the drivers directly if it's about keeping the contact, but it's not about interfering into the daily business. That's how I would aim to be in the future. But I'm still enjoying it too much running it, actually.
John Collison
That makes sense. Theoretical for now. Toto, thank you.
Toto Wolff
John, thank you for having me. Congratulations to what you have achieved. We haven't talked about it enough, but I can only take my hat off.