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The Bigger Why is a long-form podcast exploring meaning, growth, mindset, purpose and the decisions that shape a life and drive behavior.
Hosted by Sam Weber, the show features unhurried conversations with founders, CEOs, authors, creators, artists, actors, investors and thought leaders about focus, ambition, failure, regret, triumph, philosophy, personal growth and the stories behind success, sacrifices made, lessons gleaned and wisdom embodied along the way.
One of the things that I mentioned, the benefit of boredom and spending all this time sailing and, you know, allowing my brain to sort of be generative in this really unstructured way. One of the things that became clear to me was that, you know, I have, uh, I have kind of a personal mission statement and it's, it's like, it's kind of cheesy, but it's really about helping people make time for the things that matter to them. Parker. Three. Two one. We live in a world with more technology, convenience, and connection than ever before, yet many people feel more distracted and disconnected from what actually matters. My guest today has spent years thinking deeply about that problem. John Zeratsky is a designer, investor, and best selling author who helped create the Google Ventures Sprint process and co-authored the books sprint, Make Time and Click. Alongside his fellow GP, Jake Knapp. But beyond productivity and systems, John's work asks a deeper question what is truly worth our attention? In this conversation, we explore focus, creativity, technology, ambition, and how to live more intentionally in a world designed to distract us. We, of course, talk about venture capital through his work in venture capital at Google Ventures and now at his own firm, Character Capital. John has also helped some of the world's most ambitious startups solve critical business and product challenges, giving him a unique perspective on innovation, decision making, and the pressures that come with building high growth companies. This is the bigger why. And I'm Sam Weber. As a reminder, this discussion is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial or investment advice. Figure why is not sponsored by or affiliated with any company or other outside interests. Any statements made by me or any guests on the show are made in their personal capacities only. Additional information please check out our website at sam dot com. Thank you so much for listening. How many of these have you recorded? Um, I want to say maybe five or six. Okay, cool. Um, and each one has been a unique and good learning experience. Yeah. Um, the first couple that I did, I flew out to the guest and set up tripods, set up, did all your own gear, the whole nine yards. Yeah. And in every single one of them, something went wrong. Every single one. One of them. One of the cameras. I didn't hit record on one of them. The gain on my mic clipped one of the game. One of them, the gain on my mic was off. At a certain point. I said, you know what? Let's actually have the professionals handle this stuff. Totally. Um, which is why we are now in this fancy studio. Yeah. Um. All right. So John, when you think John Zeratsky, is he an author? Is he a systems creator? Is he a venture capitalist? Is he a writer? Is he a a sailor? What? What is your like? How do you identify yourself? I guess in your own mind you can be a lot of things. And you've done a lot of totally. Mostly a person who likes to help other people figure things out. And. Venture capital is the best business model I've found for doing that. It's the the most fun. It's got the the best alignment of incentives. It's got the most economic upside for me. Um, it allows me to do that work across a lot of different kinds of companies working on different things. Um, and yeah, and I think everything else except for the sailing maybe kind of, well, maybe the sailing too, because I, when I was young, I used to teach sailing when I was a teenager and in my early twenties I taught sailing. So even that it's, I, I love this, this activity of helping people figure something out. Um, and, you know, not necessarily as a teacher, but something closer to a coach and bringing some frameworks and methods and tools, but also then occasionally jumping in and doing it myself, you know, as a way of maybe demonstrating something or just keeping my, you know, head in the game or keeping my skills sharp or whatever. And so growing up, were you somebody who did really well on exams, had everything in order? Yeah. Constantly getting good grades. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Because I feel that, you know, there's a lot of people who are somewhat more they have the vision, they have an idea. But then when it comes to execution, they can't follow through on execution. And it's not necessarily that they don't want to or they don't have the drive. It's just they get tripped up in not having the right processes in place. Yeah. And then vice versa. Sometimes people can get bogged down in the process where it seems like it's too complicated, too convoluted, and get lost in the forest. Right. So being able to bring your skill set to a founder who might be more of a visionary, I imagine, leads to them having better outcomes. Yeah. I mean, there's, there's a bunch of things to dissect in, in what you just said, like, I think that I'm not the most creative person, you know, probably more creative than many people. But, but, you know, even on our small team at character, the four of us, there's, you know, my, my colleagues are, are more creative than me in many ways. So, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm not spiking on that end of it. It's sort of the sheer, you know, creative horsepower. I would love to see by spiking. Yeah. Right. But it's but it's, it's kind of like enough of that. And then the real superpower, I think, is how do we, how do we make that happen? And how do we figure out what, you know, how do we answer the big questions and address the risks and validate it? And I think a lot of founders, um, you know, they, They typically decide to start companies for a couple of reasons. One is that they. Well, a lot of people try to do it because they want to get rich, which is a perfectly fine motivation. But, you know, generally not the the most successful people usually didn't start because of that reason, but usually it's because they just they love the act of making things. So, you know, they're, they're sort of obsessed with, in our case, making software, making software products and, or they are obsessed with solving some problem. They've seen something in the world either through their personal experience or those around them that there's like, this sucks and I got to make it better. Um, and so yeah, I think that, you know, we've, you know, our team and me personally have worked with those kinds of people throughout my whole career. I was the first employee at a startup in the early two thousand that was acquired by Google. And then I worked on a bunch of teams inside of Google and Google Ventures, investing in companies and helping them. And now what we're doing a character And in all those settings, it's like, okay, you have that, that raw horsepower of, of making stuff and solving problems. And then what can I do to help you be as successful as possible? And I think, you know, a lot of people who are doing similar work, their framework is about telling people what to do. It's like, here are the lessons I have learned. Here are the things that worked for other teams that I want to give to you. And my focus is really on how how should you do it? How should you go about answering those tough questions and navigating the unknowns of building something totally new? But anyway, those long, long response to what you said, which which I totally agree with, that's exactly how I like to operate. And we're like, when is the typical point in which you guys will get involved in a company? Yeah, from an investment standpoint, it is in the first, let's say, year of the life of a company. And we are oftentimes the very first investor. It's not uncommon for us to, you know, commit to investing in a company. And then the founder says, okay, let me let me get the corporation set up, and then I'll open a bank account and then I'll come back to you when I have the wire info, and then we can wire the money. So sometimes it's that early. Um, we don't do what's known in, in the venture world as incubation. So if we had somebody who said, you know, I really want to be a startup founder, but I don't have an idea. We wouldn't work with that person. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just, I think not in the in the sweet spot for where we can be really effective. And then it's as late as, you know, maybe the, the first or second round of financing that that company is raising, but usually happens within that, that first year. And that's kind of the, the intersection between where we can invest in a way that makes sense in the context of our portfolio construction, the size of our fund, the number of investments we want to have, and the, the expertise that we bring and the frameworks that we have that we think can be uniquely helpful to that founder. And from your perspective, I'm sure you get hundreds of ideas pitched to you and hundreds of companies. How do you differentiate one where you think, well, this maybe, you know, has some potential, but it's not really going to have the upside that we need versus one where you feel more confident, like, hey, this is work because you're going to put a lot of time, not only money, a lot of time and effort behind these founders. So how do you differentiate or know, you know, what's what's one to go after versus one that may not be worth your time? Yeah, we, we review about fifteen hundred companies per year. I think last year, twenty twenty five, it was, it was about sixteen hundred and some. I just, I have to check check the database recently. And we invest in maybe thirty or forty each year. Um, and so yeah, we, we look at a lot of things and it's really, it's really hard to know which ones are going to succeed. Like, I mean, in venture capital, people talk about the four verbs, which is sourcing. So learning about opportunities, uh, picking. So deciding which ones to invest in winning or earning the opportunity to invest and then supporting, helping the founder. Um, and those steps are all really hard. Uh, picking is, is the one that I think a lot of investors like to focus on because it's where you get to feel really smart and you get to talk about your when it goes well thesis. Yeah, exactly. And, and, oh, here's my vision, here's why we made that investment. Here's what we saw at the time, and look how well it worked out. One thing that I've observed is that if you are, is that if you're really good at sourcing, everything else actually gets easier. Think of it. If you if you see, you know, one hundred companies a year versus a thousand companies a year, it just becomes that much easier to tell which ones are really special because you have a larger sample size of the market. And it's super important because unlike the stock market, there's no list of all the companies, right? And you know, when you want to invest, you can't go and just buy shares on an exchange. You have to get close to the founder. You have to convince them to work with you to take your money. So, um, you know, we, we, we try to focus on, on sourcing first and say, how can we know about as many companies as possible and then be really systematic and rigorous about the process that we use to review those opportunities so that we can hopefully pick out the best ones. And the way that we do that is through this structured scorecard process. So, um, one of the things that's kind of baked into all these, these sprints that we do is kind of an obsession with cognitive biases and decision making science, behavioral science, those types of things. Is this amongst your own internal team like we need to on paper? Yeah. To get rid of our own assumptions. Yeah. So a lot of what we're doing with our sprints is like, how do we help the teams we work with make good decisions, uh, acknowledge their assumptions so that they can test those and validate those. And so we turn that on ourselves too. And so going all the way back to our time at Google Ventures, I started there in twenty eleven. My co-founder, Jake Knapp, started there in twenty twelve. And starting at that time, all the way through today, a character we have been trying to figure out how do we make the highest quality decisions possible? And the specific way that we do that with investments is through these scorecards. We have we have two of them. One is, uh, it captures our subjective evaluations, our judgments of what we're seeing in this company. The other one captures the objective features of the business, which is everything from characteristics of the founders. So where did they work? Where did they go to school? But also characteristics of the business. How fast is the revenue growing? Or users growing or that sort of thing. And what about market sector? Is it almost all in technology? It's all software. So we're only investing in software businesses. But what's really interesting is because of AI, the the capabilities of software have expanded so much. There are things you can now do with software that you couldn't do three years ago, five years ago. So drug development, inventing new chemical compounds, um, certain types of business automation and operations that just weren't possible to do a handful of years ago that you can do now. So the market segment has, has expanded a lot. And within that, that subjective scorecard we're looking at, I think it's twenty five different criteria and they are categorized into, um, into opportunity. So that's, that's, uh, like the market size, you know, how bad is the customer problem then the company's approach to solving it. So what is the product strategy? What is their go to market strategy? The team. So we have a bunch of questions that we ask ourselves about the team, like how complete is the team? How uniquely qualified are they to solve this, this problem and be successful? And then success? How much success have they had so far? What is the evidence that they're going to be successful? And so if you if you were following its o a t s so it's oats. So we call that scorecard oats. And what we're doing is every time we meet a new company, we, we meet with the founder individually. So we don't, we don't do a, you know, a big pitch meeting where we're all sitting around a table hitting them with hard questions. We meet with them individually, which is one important way to reduce cognitive biases. And then after we meet, we're individually completing the scorecard. So I'm saying, without talking to my partners, without doing anything, I could, you know, do some research, do some reading, you know, whatever. I can do whatever research I want to do to make myself smarter. But but I'm completing the scorecard on my own. And so I'm going through each of those questions. And the ranking system is zero through three. Three is the highest, zero is the lowest. And so what I'm doing is producing a score. And the score is a quantitative representation of my qualitative judgment. And this is another thing from decision science is if you can standardize and quantify people's judgments and people's decisions, then you can create consistency not only between within the team, but, but over time. And so we do that. We produce those scores. If the scores are high enough, then we'll, we'll sort of, you know, talk internally about do we want to move forward? What are the next things we need to figure out? But at the heart of it is this this really unique scoring system that we. And what if you feel really strongly about one. But Jake is giving you the opposite score. Yeah. So we have a single, uh, a single trigger model with a single veto. So what it means is that any one person on the team and there's three there's three general partners. It's it's Jake Knapp, Eli Goldman and myself. Any one of us can say, you know, guys, I'm really fired up about this company. I've got super high conviction. I think we should do it. And and then we'll go ahead and do it. And at the same time, if any one of the three of us says, you know what I, I really there's something that seems super off about this, then we won't do it. We won't go ahead. That last part is somewhat unique in the venture world. And for us, it's really important because we work in a really collaborative way. And oftentimes we're spending time as a team with the founders. We invest in running sprints with them, supporting them. And so there needs to be some kind of minimal level of team buy in. But we never want to dilute the decision making so much that we have to have consensus. You know, we want to always be able to take those really kind of risky edge bats that come from one person pounding the table and saying, you know, I think we should do this. And, um, from the companies that you work with, all of them are losing money, right? They're not in a position where they're presumably, um, revenue positive. So, um, when you look at a company, is it, you know, we're hoping to align our interests and the goal here is, you know, we're going to take the riskiest bet on this company with hopefully down the road. We're in this for the long haul with the exit of IPO or sell to a PE. Yep. Uh, shop. Like what's the usual like when you're underwriting it? How long in your mind are you in this investment for? Yeah. Um, up to ten years is kind of the, the nominal time frame. And most venture funds are structured as a ten year vehicle with the option to extend, you know, a couple of years, in some cases, is potentially up to five. But, you know, we usually think of it as kind of a ten to twelve year investment vehicle. And that's how long we need to be prepared to, you know, be owners of a company to be partners to that founder as the company grows. And, you know, the companies that still exist at year eight and nine and ten tend to be the ones that are doing well, right? And so as those companies grow, you know, they're going to have different needs from their investors than they needed when they were, you know, one month old. You're not necessarily doing sprints exactly five, six years. I mean, sometimes we might be. And we certainly at Google Ventures, we invested in some later stage companies where, you know, we were helping them with more kind of mature, grown up company problems. And so it's something we can do, but it's not our bread and butter. So yeah, we're looking at this and, and yeah, the time component is absolutely one of the things like, you know, can we see ourselves being investors in this company for, for a decade. Um, can we see ourselves partnering with this founder, these founders, the CEO, these people for ten years talking to them, you know, at least once a month, maybe more often than, than that, you know, getting their phone calls, their texts, you know, helping them out, you know, being close to them. Um, we are trying to look at the, uh, you know, sort of the economic context that they operate in. So one of the proxies that we use is, okay, what's the problem that this company is solving? And then how much money and time do people currently spend to solve that problem? And the reason we, we frame it that way is that a lot of the companies we invest in, they don't have direct competitors. So imagine that, you know, some piece of enterprise software, CRM or something. You know, most big companies who need a CRM, they have a CRM, right? And so if I were starting a new CRM company today and I was pitching investors, it'd be really easy for me to to tell them what the market size was. I could just say, look, there's X billion dollars spent on CRMs today. We're going to go in, we're going to disrupt that market, those those incumbents, and we're going to we're going to get all that spend. They're going to spend all that money with us. Most of the companies that we're investing in are not like that. They are things that are kind of building at the frontiers of what software can do. And so, you know, to give you one example, we have an investment in a company that uses AI models. They built their own AI models to develop pesticides. And so we're not looking at, well, what is the market for pesticide companies buying software? Because they're not selling software to other companies. They're developing pesticides and selling those to, you know, the world, to farmers. And so the market size there is, well, how much money do people spend today to kill pests in their fields? And and that's a very different number than, you know, how many software companies. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So we're looking at that. We're trying to look at the sort of the economic context and say, you know, is this a big enough problem that people are currently willing to spend money on it? And do we think we can we can capture that, spend that economic value? Um, and then, you know, we're looking at the strategy of the company and this is where our experience as product designers and marketers comes in, you know, helping build products over the last couple of decades, having done this work with over three hundred startups is like, do we think their idea makes sense? So you've done three, you've done three hundred plus sprints. Uh, yeah. Yeah, we've worked, we've done sprints. We've worked with more than three hundred companies. Um, you know, looking back across, uh, yeah, Google Ventures character and then, you know, the other companies and teams that we've been involved in. Wow. That's a lot of tours of duty. Yeah. It is. Um, I imagine each one is its own whirlwind fun, crazy. It's so fascinating. I mean, it, it Especially because like all of us on the team, you know, we're software guys. Like this is what we've spent our career on. And you know, when we started, software could do certain things. And then over time, it could do more things and more things and more things. And especially today, it's like the most fun time ever to be in software because now we can design pesticides with software. Now we can hopefully cure diseases with software. We can, you know, eliminate, uh, drudgery from work. And it's just like all these things that we can do now that you couldn't do before. Um, and so it's, uh, yeah, it's super fun. Is there anything that's not going to be upended by AI? Where are we going, John? Where are we going? I mean, I, I don't know exactly where we're going. I think that everything will be touched by affected by AI in some way. I don't know, just like, you know, everything's been affected by the internet. Everything's been affected by electricity. Everything's been affected by the automobile. I think this is kind of sort of the right level of abstraction to think about AI, but has everything been upended by it? I don't know. Um, will, will everything be upended by AI? Probably not. I mean, I think that, um, what we're seeing so far is that the, the work in the fields that are most affected tend to be sort of knowledge work that are types of knowledge work that are very data centric and that involve a highly structured type of, of content or language. So, you know, software development, software engineering is, is, uh, one of the first fields to really be, I think it would be fair to say upended by AI. And that's because, you know, the, the language of software, the source code is incredibly structured. There's really great representation of that data that the AI models have been able to use to train on. Um, and it's this intense sort of knowledge work where the intelligence, the cognition of the person behind the keyboard. Has been incredibly valuable. I mean, that's why tech companies pay their software engineers so much is that that's that's super valuable. So that's kind of the perfect place to apply AI. And then you see it tangentially in these other fields. Like, you know, it's, it's certainly affected writing certainly affected content. It's affecting software science in a lot of ways too, because you have sort of a similar dynamic. You have like all this data, you have to do all this hard thinking work and this processing and this analysis and, you know, produce new reports and new conclusions and that sort of thing. Um, you know, seeing it in the legal field in a lot of different ways because you have lots of data, you have structured language, you have this very valuable knowledge. Well, that's why I'm a podcaster now. Yeah. My job is going to be. Yeah, exactly. So then that leads me to kind of where my, my thinking goes next, which is, well, what's not going to change? And it's probably, it's probably two people in a room and certainly there could be, you know, AI avatars of of the two of us in a room. Right. And, you know, there are podcasts that have AI hosts that does exist. Totally. Yeah. But it's not quite the same. Right. And, and I think whether it's that or whether it's music or whether it's food and wine or travel experience, can you say experiences? Is that totally. I think human things that are very humanistic and things that are experience based. I think they will all be affected by AI, but I don't think they will be upended. And in fact, I think that they will inherently become more valuable. We're already seeing this. You know, back in the sixties, seventies, musical artists would tour to sell records. That was the business model. It was pretty cheap to go to a concert, and it was promotion for the record, because that's where they made all their money selling records, right? That model was completely flipped. Now it artists make streaming is free. Yeah. Artists make very little money in streaming. But you know, you look at the top artists in the world, their concerts are incredibly expensive to go to. I mean, you never like, you know, our parents generation, they never talked about, hey, I had to, you know, save up for, for a year to afford a ticket to a concert, right? That just wasn't a thing that happened. And it very much is now. And so I think that's kind of the early that's an early example of this shift of where we place value as a society. So I asked this question to Christopher Allen. Zook was off mic because it was afterwards I said, what should I tell my kids to go into? Because I honestly don't, I don't really know. Um, and he gave me a pretty good response, which was, I think the only thing we can be certain of is uncertainty and that there's going to be change. So getting them comfortable at adaptability. Yeah. And, um, just this nature of evolution and being able to constantly iterate is probably an important skill set to have. But being stuck to any one thing. Yeah. Which can get completely upended. I think those days might be done. I don't know, what's your. Yeah. This is not something that I thought deeply about, in part because I don't have kids. So I'm not I don't feel the same level of urgency of trying to figure it out for them. Um, I mean, I think that a fluency in problem solving and in, you know, the types of, of thinking work that will be really hard to replicate. So, you know, uh, innovation, um, you know, true creativity, those things I think are, are very important. So putting people putting themselves in contexts where they can really develop those skills and optimize for those skills. I think that, or you go totally in the other direction and you go toward, you know, things that are very difficult to automate. Like we were talking about, you know, you go into the world of hospitality, the world of, um, of experience of, of travel, of, of food, of, you know, if you assume that those things are going to become more valuable, certainly it can be difficult to build a career in those industries. But if you assume that that, that those industries become more valuable than perhaps there's going to be, you know, greater economic benefit, uh, available to the people who, who focus there and participate in those. Yeah, it kind of reminds me of like the Yuval Harari sapiens thing where it's kind of like, well, in writing, we were able to take this skill of organization and we can only keep track of so much. So we sort of, and this is what we were talking about before, how you could like sort of you have all these ideas in your head and you could move them and now you don't have to think about them. Yeah. And it's almost like, well, until now, you couldn't separate the intelligence. And the consciousness of those two things were inherently intertwined. But now we have the ability to separate the consciousness from the intelligence. And like, you don't need to be conscious to have intelligence. So you have all these intelligent beings, so to speak, who can do stuff. They can think way better than us. Yeah, but they can't have experiences or at least as far as we know. Yeah. So the one thing that's sort of we're left with is those experiences, right? Totally. Yeah. And I, I heard a phrase last weekend on a, on another podcast that I loved, which was, it was about the difference between intelligence and Intel. And Intel, of course, is short for intelligence. So what side sidebar. But one of the things that's so interesting about the world today is how we're, we're grappling with language at the same time that we have these these large language models, they're forcing us to rethink what words mean. But their point, I thought was really good, which was if I say the word Intel to you, okay, what is that? What is that? Yeah, I think intelligence, I think intelligence, I hear Intel like, okay, it's info. It's yeah. Info or intelligence, something like that. Yeah. Their point was that Intel is about the things that are not readily available. You know, you think about, um, gathering Intel, you know, it's about going out into the field and whether it's, you know, primary reporting as a journalist or whether it's about, uh, you know, doing sort of, um, you know, deep analysis on a, on a stock or on a company or it's about, you know, the, the spy agencies, right. And being out in the field, right. You know, those are the things that are uniquely valuable because the, you know, what we now think of as intelligence, you know, AI models, large language models, all of that so-called intelligence is based on the data, the information that is already readily available. It's, it's, it's, there's no, um, there's no scarcity, there's no premium on that information. And so their point was that Intel, the stuff that's not already in the training set that that becomes really, really valuable. But here's the tricky thing, like even the Intel, the stuff that we consider as facts, like there's like there, there might be some consensus, but I feel like there's little consensus on a lot of stuff. So it almost becomes imperative as to like, what are you training these LMS on? Totally. Whose set of reality is getting trained on? Yeah. Um, and in a way, like some of like some of the good feelings I get from doing any kind of content creation is like, hey, I'm putting my little stick right in the fire. No, this should be incorporated. Like obviously it's a tiny little drop, but like, please incorporate this, putting your finger on the scale, just a little, a little, a little, a little nudge. Yeah. Um, so I think that gets me a little bit worried. Where. Right. Especially now we're in such an environment where there seems to be a lot of differences in opinion. Totally. It's almost like harder to say, like we agree on these, even these basic facts. Yeah. And, you know, I was thinking recently about, um, useful parallels for thinking about AI and people like to debate, at least in the tech world, people like to debate. Well, is it, is it a is the innovation is the the paradigm shift, is it the size of the internet or is that too big? Is it the size of maybe the mobile phone or is that way too small? Maybe it's the size of electricity? And I was thinking, actually, maybe the automobile is a good a good parallel. That's a good, you know, we can think about the introduction of the automobile and how that influenced, you know, changed the world in so many unexpected ways. It, uh, you know, eliminated a lot of jobs, but it created opportunities for a lot of new kinds of jobs that allowed the economy to expand in ways that nobody anticipated. Um, and, and similarly, there were, there were thousands of automakers, um, in the first couple decades of, of the car being a thing. There were tons of different companies that were making cars. And today, how many are there? What, three, four, five, something like that. And so similarly in AI, we just see this proliferation of just thousands and thousands of different companies. But perhaps we'll end up with with great consolidation in the end. And then energy relates to that for sure, because I think as much potential as AI has, at least my understanding and you know, this better than I, is that there still needs to be a lot of improvement for the energy to support the usage. Yes. Yeah. And that is the reason I thought of the automobile. And it's totally relevant with electricity as well, is that, um, you think of the debates that had to happen when cars were first on the roads, right? Right. It was like, you know, who's liable for what. Um, should we use public resources to build smoother roads? Because before the automobile roads were, they were like gravel and stuff, you know, or they were, they were maybe they were cobblestones, right? Because you were not going very fast. And it was okay if it was a little bit bumpy. So then we had all these debates and then, well, should you, um, should you have to wear seatbelts? I mean, even when I was a kid, I remember my grandparents. They said, you know, when you're in our car, you don't wear a seatbelt. Because they had been raised at a time when seatbelts were perceived as actually dangerous. It was it was not clear that seatbelts not at least in their mind, it was not clear that seatbelts were a universal good, as we now know that they are. And so we're having these same debates right now. We're having debates about, well, what data are large language models trained on, and how do we know that that data is representative of truth, of, of facts? And we're having debates about electricity. Should the data centers simply be. And who's paying for them? Yeah. Should data centers simply be another market participant, another buyer in the energy market? And you know, if that increases demand prices go up for everybody. That's how markets work. Or are they a special kind of buyer. And are all the other market participants special kinds of buyers that are subject to different rules? Um, there's just so many. I think if you assume that AI is closer to like an automobile sized thing or an internet sized thing than like a mobile phone sized thing, then there's a lot of really deep and unfortunately, very difficult debates that we need to have as a, as a society. Yeah. And, um, are people still debating the, you know, I know in the earlier days, people were debating like, is this something we're going too fast on? There were two schools of thought where I think one school of thought was, hey, let's slow down. We need to sort of think about the long term effects of this. And the other school of thought was, this is happening, like whether or not we're on board here. Yeah. From a global perspective. So we might as well hit the gas pedal because otherwise we're going to get left behind. Like is that debate died down at this point? I think so. One of the things that was really unique about the, the, you know, let's say twenty twenty three, Twenty twenty four. ERA of AI was that it was one of the only times when the participants in this revolution were were sort of consciously questioning whether they should keep doing it right. They were like, were we screwing this all up? Yeah, they were doing it. I mean, they were they were devoting their life to it. They were they were spending tons of money on it. And then at the same time, they were like, should we stop? Like, what has that ever happened before? You know, like, uh, you know, usually it's other people are saying, no, you should stop. But the people are like, should we stop? Um, and I think that, I think that there are still some people who are having versions of that debate. But, but for the most part, not, I think like, um, you know, the, the, you know, the new administration, you know, Trump administration that started in early twenty five. And I think the, the, the results and the progress that we've seen from other countries from, from China, from certain pockets in Europe have given um, you know, if I can generalize, have given the AI industry in the US sort of this, this uncomfortable consensus that we need to keep going fast and that it's going to happen and that, um, all things being equal, it would be better if, if, you know, we were in the driver's seat, or at least we were, you know, one of the leaders in, in this, uh, this paradigm shift. And do you have any thoughts on, I know over the last week or so, there's been like a pretty large sell off of like, yeah, public stocks relating to AI or industries that people thought were safe from AI then getting upended. Like, do you worry that it creates, um, like, because people don't really know how to deal with it or the impact of it. Um, do you worry that this could have a broader cascade effect, um, than the true like meaning maybe the impact is not as big as we think. And we're all, you know, reading gloom and doom stories and people are ready to. Like, you know, throw the books at right out the window. Yeah. I suspect that the impact will be bigger than we expect, but also slower, slower than we expect. Um, you know, this is stuff that we get to see up close, um, you know, investing in companies that are building software products or building their own software to sell products and services to the world. It's just that it's, it's really hard to change human behavior, especially inside of big organizations. And so, you know, just to kind of be very practical and plain about it, you know, what happened recently in the stock market is you had, um, a few different categories of companies that were, you know, viewed as at risk of disruption from AI sell off in pretty dramatic fashion, and the one that I think caught most people's attention, at least, you know, sort of tech adjacent was, was the legacy SaaS companies. So companies like Salesforce or HubSpot. And if we just think about it, you think about a big business and they've got a contract with HubSpot, they're, they're paying HubSpot, you know, whatever a couple million dollars a year to use their software. Um, how does that get disrupted? Concretely, you know, like what, what happens? Um, do we believe that all of the employees at that company are going to start using cloud code instead of HubSpot, right? Probably not. That seems a little far fetched. Far fetched. Do we believe that the IT department at that company is going to say, hey, cancel the HubSpot contract, we're going to write our own. Right. Certainly they're capable of doing it, but that would go against the trend over time, which is that businesses have outsourced progressively more and more and more of the software that they use. So I find that a little bit hard, fat, far fetched. Um, you know, maybe the argument is that HubSpot will be disrupted by a competitor to HubSpot that is, you know, born of the AI era, that's AI native that is able to produce faster, cheaper, better software in a fraction of the time. Um, and that seems believable, but those are the kinds of changes that happen on, you know, five, ten year cycles, not, not five to ten month cycles. So, um, you know, I, I'm not sure exactly what to make of it, but I think that, um, you know, it just takes a long time for people to sort of rip out and replace software that they've been happy to pay for. That's been working just fine for them to retrain, to retool, to make those shifts, unless there's some really, really compelling reason for them to do it. And on top of it, you know, I think the software companies that have been sold off in the market, you know, these are not like, um, they're not asleep at the wheel for the most part. Right? Like they know what's coming. They know what's coming. They're all making huge investments in AI. They have great teams of people working on AI. Like they are. I mean, Salesforce, they, they're constantly talking about, about, you know, their, their agents, you know, uh, you know, product agent force, like presumably you would make the product better is what I would exactly what I would say. Yeah, you have the market share, you make the product totally. And yeah. And I think it's, um, you know, I was talking through this with one of our LPs the other night who's a, um, a very successful public markets investor. Um, and, uh, and we were talking about Google versus Microsoft. And, you know, Microsoft has owned the sort of office, you know, enterprise productivity suite for decades. And I don't know what the market share is exactly, but clearly they're dominant, right? You walk into any office in the United States, probably going to be some Microsoft products running on those computers, Microsoft Word, Excel, etc.. Google, you know, probably one of the best business models of all time, just generates insane amounts of cash, has some of the smartest and best software engineers, the best product designers and product managers, you know, anywhere in the world. And, you know, they came out with gmail in two thousand and four, I think. And then a few years later they decided, hey, let's have, um, let's take on Microsoft, let's have a spreadsheet product, Google sheets, let's have a word processing product, Google Docs, let's take on PowerPoint, let's have Google Slides. Let's build an entire suite. Google workspace, I think is what it's called. And we use it. A lot of small businesses use it. A lot of big businesses use it. But that started twenty years ago. And the most profitable, smartest, most ambitious, most incredible company. I'm biased because I worked at Google, but like Google has not been able to unseat Microsoft after twenty years of doing this, of making it a focus. So I think it's, um, that's a great example. It's not trivial to say it's not, it's not trivial for, you know, a new company starting today to, to go and disrupt and unseat HubSpot, Salesforce, you know, dot com, you know, whatever the business is that's been affected. So comparing like a place like Google versus a startup, like what are the because, you know, sometimes as companies get bigger, yeah, it becomes, you almost like lose the magic. Yeah, totally. Yep. Um, like, at what point does that happen where the company starts evolving from this was like a forward thinking, fresh ideas driven to like, okay, now we're going to almost play defense, right? And then the danger of that is you become effectively a dinosaur at some point. It can happen within a couple of years, to be honest. Like, you know, we've seen we've seen startups who things start to go really well. They raise a big round of financing. They hire a ton of people. And suddenly, instead of being this nimble team of five or fifteen or fifty, now suddenly they have two hundred people. They might have multiple offices. They're spending relatively more of their time on coordinating the team. It's work about work instead of the work itself. So it can actually happen really, really fast. Um, and certainly it can happen when you get to the scale of a, of a company like Google. Um, you know, a couple of things that I think work well, are, are one to, um, to acquire companies and to bring in, you know, good examples of that startup mindset. When I was at Google, I worked at YouTube for about a year and a half. And YouTube, I forget exactly the timing of when it had been acquired, but it was a relatively new acquisition by Google, and it was still run completely as a separate company. YouTube had. We had our own office. We had our own CEO. We had our own reporting structure. There was a sort of a thin line to the rest of Google. But, you know, Google said, okay, we're going to not only buy this great product, but we're going to bring this in and, and, and maintain it. Hold it as an example of, yeah, of this, this unique way of working that startups have. So that's one thing you can do. Um, the other thing that you can do is to just be really intentional about how you structure the organization and say, we're going to really try to have a flat organization, we're going to have, you know, as few layers of management as possible. And we're going to, even if these weren't acquisitions, we're going to sort of push down and say, you know, this is a this is an organization of relatively small teams who are all working on different things with some thin layer of connectivity. And in the era that I was at Google, which was Two thousand and seven through twenty eleven, and then at Google Ventures after that. That was kind of the model then is you had, you know, things like back end infrastructure, you know, storage and databases, and you had the authentication layer for users to sign into Google products. Those were all shared resources. But a lot of the product teams, they were kind of functioning on their own, and they could do things that didn't necessarily make sense to the other teams. And that causes some, some churn and some problems too. Um, and then, you know, the other thing that happens is, uh, companies get scared. There's some external event that happens that scares them. It can be a sell off of the stock. It can be, you know, a macro factor, like a recession or, you know, terrorist attack or act of God or something like that. Um, force majeure. Yeah, exactly. Or it can be, you know, it can be, um, you know, perceived threat from a competitor. And this also happened at Google. So right after ChatGPT came out, Google got scared and they made a whole ton of changes. They, you know, laid off a whole bunch of people. They hired a bunch of other people, they reorg some stuff. Um, and they very quickly went from being seen by customers and by the market as being behind in the AI game to being right ahead or at least tied, uh, you know, depending on the day. And these things do often change day by day. Um, so I think it's possible, you know, with good leadership, with good incentives, with good governance, I think it's possible for companies to, to adapt and, and maintain some of that entrepreneurial energy. But there's also a lot of ways that it can, can go away. And so for you personally, how has this shift been from going on the product design side of things or the development side of things to the investment side of things? Yeah. Um, when you were at Google Ventures, were you in a similar role to as you are now, where you're kind of diligence and underwriting and sourcing? Or was it a different kind of role? So if you think about those four verbs that I mentioned, sourcing, picking, winning, and supporting at Google Ventures, I was almost entirely focused on supporting. So after the investment going into our portfolio companies, helping them with product design, with marketing, but I was also focused on sourcing because a big part of my energy at Google Ventures was about how do we build a brand for Google Ventures? What do we want to be known for by founders in the market? What is the content that we're producing? You know, our first book, sprint, was a part of that effort. It was like, we've got this framework that we've been using internally with our portfolio companies. What if we share that with the world? Could that become a magnet for founders to come and raise money from us, rather than going and raising it from from somebody else. So I really feel like I've had the perfect kind of like three act career so far, which is that, you know, the first act I was, you know, purely, you know, pure operator in house working on product design marketing. I was at a startup, I was at Google. And then the second act, I was at Google Ventures, where I was in the context of a venture capital firm. I was, you know, a partner in those funds. I was compensated like a partner, but I was still mostly focused on, you know, what goes on inside our portfolio companies. And now in the third act, I'm able to kind of widen the aperture a little bit more. And now, you know, continue to do the things that I've done, but also, you know, put my money where my mouth is and be responsible for making investment decisions, be responsible for how these things all fit together at the firm level. So it's almost this perfect transition in a way, because you've seen it from all different angles and all different phases. Yeah. Um, and I think that to do, you know, from a, from a macro view, when you're looking at these, these VCs, these prospective portfolio companies, it's like, you know, what it takes from the operations side as well. Yeah. So that helps you in the diligence thing, like really knowing like, does this team have what it takes? Yeah. You know? Yeah. And there's a couple of really unique things that come from the way that we work with portfolio companies that, that, that influence our investment decisions. One is that just what you said, you know, does this team have what it takes? And, and it is very, very hard to learn that when you are sitting across the table from a founder and, um, they're pitching you ideas are so easy to say. The pitch books are so easy. And even if you've invested and then maybe you have an update call with them once a month and you say, hey, how's it going? And see how things are going great. Or they say, no things. You know, things aren't going so great. I've got this problem, whatever. But you're always you're always at arm's length, you're always a bit removed. And when we run sprints with founders, we, we collapse that distance and we get to see really up close, you know, certainly not the same. I don't want to pretend that it's the same as being a founder, but we're a hell of a lot closer and we're really able to see how they behave, how they act, how they make decisions, what they do in those challenging situations. And I think that that gives us a unique type of insight that we can use to inform not only our next new investment, but our follow on investment decisions in that company. And then similarly, when we're working in those sprints with founders, it also collapses the distance between us and their customers, because one of the key ideas of the design sprint is that you are going to build something that's real, or kind of a realistic fake of something, and you're going to put it in front of real customers and you're going to see how they react. Are they excited? Are they confused? Are they annoyed? Do they have questions? You know, how much how valuable is it to them? And we get to actually see those customer reactions. So that also allows us to stay kind of closer to the ground truth of how our customers are thinking about, you know, these new technologies. How are customers actually reacting to the premise of, you know, adopting AI in their business? And I think that that's something that's really hard to, to get access to, to get a feel for in, you know, in venture capital, generally speaking. So you're saying the filter out. Yeah, exactly. And so it's about, I think, just collapsing that distance between us and the founder. And then the customer that that founder is building for. So at the point where you're doing a sprint, are you already invested or that's part of the diligence. So we are always, um, we only run sprints with companies that we've invested in, but, one of the things that we do is. We have a program called Character Labs, which is basically a startup accelerator where we'll make a relatively small investment into a company, and then we'll start to work with them. We'll run sprints, and then and then we're in the position to invest more into that company. You know, if if things are going well, right? So then you could get more a better feel. Yeah, exactly. Um, so just pivoting for a minute to, to make time. Yeah. Um, I really, I really liked that book because, you know, as a, as an attorney, you know, I mean, the, the inbox and the, and the to do list is, is a never ending, uh, you know, a never ending cycle. I feel like people can be busy forever and never really make time for other things. Yeah. Um, so I don't know, give me a sense. Give me, just talk to me about like when you did sprint. Yeah. Um, that kind of blew up. Yeah. And Did you say? Now, let me, uh, sort of take that playbook and apply it to something like nonfinancial or non-business or kind of how, how did the idea come about? Like this is something that I want to focus on. Yeah. Well, sprint came out in twenty sixteen and we had been running design sprints at Google Ventures since twenty twelve. And Jake had originally created the design sprint method at Google in twenty ten, I think two thousand and nine maybe, but years before that, Jake and I, we didn't know each other, but we were both independently interested in productivity, for lack of a better word. Sort of, you know, how, what are the techniques and the tools that we use to, you know, make the best use of our time to focus on the right things, to get things done efficiently and so on. And so when we met and we started working together, the kind of canvas for our work was these sprints that we were running with portfolio companies. But we also kind of had this, you know, side quest where we were like, hey, you know, by the way, I just tried this new thing. Like I, I, you know, like, you know, one weekend he like deleted all the apps off of his phone. So his phone only had like, you know, the basics, like he could listen to music, he could like do calls and texts and stuff, but like he couldn't check his email. He couldn't check Twitter, you know, he couldn't do all these, you know, what we now call infinity pools. You know, he didn't have any. So and then I'd say, you know, oh, I, hey, Jake, I, um, I'm trying a new schedule this week. You know, I'm waking up super early and I'm, you know, working for three hours before I check my email. And we would, we would, we would trade notes on these things. And so this was kind of a background thread. And the design sprint was like a laboratory where we got to bring some of those ideas and ideas that we had taken from elsewhere and like test them out, you know, for lack of a better phrase, on the founders that we were working with like, hey, let's try to do it this way. You know, you know, the, the design sprint method didn't come into the world fully formed, right? It was, it was something that we had to iterate on and improve. And so we had this laboratory and, um, and, and after sprint came out and yeah, the book was well received and we were still having a lot of fun running those sprints. We just, you know, we were when the dust cleared a little bit, we were like, hey, remember all those like fun personal experiments that we've been doing? And, you know, maybe this is an opportunity to bring some of those into the world. Um, and so we'd been talking about, uh, make Time, the original working title for it was today. Okay. We've been talking about today, meaning don't push off the thing you want to do, just do it. And the whole book was going to be structured around one day. Like, these are the things you do in the morning. These are the things in the middle. These are the things in the afternoon. Okay. And so we've been talking about that book actually from before sprint came out. And then, um, kept talking about it and talking about it. And, you know, um, even even we're guilty of procrastination. So it wasn't happening. And then, um, in, uh, my wife and I had decided that, that we were both going to leave our jobs in late twenty seventeen and go on a travel sabbatical, sailing, sabbatical. And so that was for one year. It ended up being for about eighteen months. But but when I told Jake about that, he was like, oh, we have to write the book. Like, we have to write this book before you leave. Um, because it's just going to be harder for us to have so much time on the boat. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I did end up, you know, having, you know, working on, on the book, but it was, we, we, we, we used that as kind of our trigger to say like, it's go time. Like, let's do it. So we wrote make time. Um, predominantly in, in twenty seventeen, kind of had the first manuscript ready. I left in late twenty seventeen and then through, through early twenty eighteen, working on editing and production and marketing and launched it in late twenty eighteen. Do people tell you what their favorite. Um, I don't call them hacks, but their favorite tip. Oh yeah. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. And so like, you know, make time. As you know, time is kind of structured like a cookbook where there's eighty seven different. We call them tactics in it, in it. And we don't expect anybody to do all of that. We don't expect anybody to read it cover to cover, but you can kind of pick and choose the things that, that you like. Um, and, uh, yeah, so we're always super interested in the, the ones that resonate for people. We encourage people to run their own experiments to try things and then take notes on how it goes. Um, and people also create their own people have created their own tactics and sent those to us. Oh, really? You know, some of you guys do the addition and addition number two. Yeah, totally. Yeah. We actually originally had over one hundred tactics and we, we trimmed it back. So we somewhere we have those in like a PDF as a bonus. Yeah. Um, but the ones that to your question, the ones that like really, really resonate for people are, um, uh, creating barriers to distraction on your phone and your computer. So we call this changing the defaults. You know, when you get a phone you set it up. By default, notifications are on. You got an email account, you've got a browser. You've got all these infinity pools. So you can. You don't have to go cold turkey like Jake and remove all those things. But by identifying what's your Kryptonite? What's that one thing that is really hard for you to sort of control and respond to? If you can just remove the stimulus, you know, delete that app from the phone or sign out of that website on the computer or use a, you know, a website blocker that limits your access to that particular site. You change the defaults and you really create barriers to getting sucked in by that thing. That's one that resonates with a lot of people. Um, Jake created this really awesome, uh, sort of to do list format that he calls the burner list. And the, the concept of it is that there's a front burner and a back burner and, you know, just like on a stove and, you know, you should only have one thing on the front burner and you can have a couple little things on the back burner. But only one thing really can command your attention at any time. I really like that. People love that visual. Yeah, exactly. That really helped me because it's like you have the front burner, you have the back burner. Then you have like all the stuff that's kind of just like in the cabinet. Yeah. And then there's the empty space. Totally. People don't realize how important that empty space is. Like, my son was making French toast this morning. Yeah. And he didn't have the empty space and he almost burnt down the house screaming. Oh, the tissue caught on fire. You gotta have the empty space. You gotta have the empty space. People also like, um, we have a couple of dueling tactics. I'm more of a morning person. Jake is more of a nighttime person. And so we have some tactics about how to. You didn't start off as a morning person. That's true. Which I find the most impressive. Yeah, I think what what I, you know, having now thought about this for many years, I think that, uh, everybody has a what's called a chronotype. And that's not a word that we used in the book because I don't think we knew it at the time. But, we now know that everybody has a chronotype, which is a natural sort of inclination toward a morning person or a night person. Um, I think that I probably always had more of a morning person chronotype, but I hadn't designed my days to take advantage of that because I hadn't necessarily recognized it. And so I think that was like the insight, the breakthrough for me. Um, with that, once you shifted, it was easy for you to. Yes. It was like, you know, the pieces were just like they snapped into place when I did that versus Jake tried it and it did not, they did not snap into place for him. But then he realized, hey, actually, maybe what I should be doing is, is I should be, I should, my day should be inverted from, from Jay Z's, from Jon's, from mine. And like, I should do like meetings and little stuff during the morning when I'm sort of booting up. And then in the afternoon, in the evening, that's when I should get my big chunky blocks of, of focus time. Um, so people love those tactics. Um, and then the other thing that I think people really like is, um, we have a section in the book called energize. And what we tried to do was, um, kind of humanize and demystify a lot of the advice that you hear about, about health, you know, about how to eat and sleep and exercise. And there's just this ridiculous, like, you know, the wellness industrial complex, you know, of, of gurus and, you know, thought leaders and influencers and sort of sketchy supplements and products and all these things. Um, and, you know, we studied that stuff a bunch and we said, you know, this stuff, it totally matters to your ability to focus and your ability to make time. But most of it is not as complicated as you think it is. So here's what we found to be kind of the essential building blocks of energy. And people really appreciated that. We kind of broke it down and simplified it in that way. Are you still doing the intermittent fasting. Uh, no. I'm not. No, I've, uh. I eat breakfast now. I've retracted that. Yes. Yeah. There's actually a whole bunch of stuff that I, you know, I that's different now. Like, um, one thing that I wrote about in the book was basically like, um, DIY fitness, like not going to a gym, not working with a trainer, not doing like fitness classes. And I started a couple of years ago working with a personal trainer for, for the accountability, but also for the expertise of just having somebody that's going to be able to really kind of tailor my workouts to specifically what I need. And that's been a huge positive for me. So, um, you know, also in the second edition, we'll have to include some of our own revisions of things that we've about walking. Are you doing a lot of walking? Yes I do. I think walking is the most underrated thing. Totally. Yeah. And it's, you know, walking is super interesting and it's really good for you. But you can also use it in so many different ways. You can use it as a productive time. So, you know, especially now with voice transcription with LLMs. A lot of times when I'm walking, I'll be I call it vibrating. So instead of vibe coding, vibe writing, I'll be vibe writing something that it's, you know, a new article or, you know, a proposal or an analysis for something. Um, you know, I'm not trying to transcribe it perfectly, but I'm trying to just capture my thoughts. Um, but other times and your mind is kind of freer when you're totally, it's like a walking meditation. Yeah, yeah. Other times I will, um, I'll just use it to, you know, listen to a podcast or listen to music. But then the other thing you can do is you can, you know, leave the headphones at home, right? And like leave the phone at home and just be totally like, when else do you have, you know, no stimulus other than sort of what you're seeing and hearing in the world. Like that is really healthy too. That's when your brain can heal, when you might have some of your most important insights or ideas. I would say my favorite one, which was also the most jarring, was I think it was like, be bored. Yeah, totally. Yes. It's like, wait, what's the problem? I'm nothing to do, right? Well, then, there you go. Yeah. When, uh, when my wife and I were on our our big sailing trip, boredom played a huge role in that because, you know, when we were sailing from place to place, you know, oftentimes at night, um, you know, somebody had to be awake being in charge of the boat, sailing the boat. And, you know, it's like, and so you can't really be doing other things. It's not really safe to be like watching a movie or something because you got to pay attention. But so the brain is just like, now what? You know, what are we, what are we thinking about? Um, and I, and so, you know, it was probably in the course of eighteen months, really only, you know, a dozen, you know, maybe twenty nights when I had that experience, but those sort of three hour chunks of time, you know, fifteen nights, you know, over the course of whatever, like that was really, I don't want to say productive, but really important and generative time for me to think about what I cared about and what I wanted to do with my life next. And I really think it's yeah, it's it's jarring, like you said, and super underrated, um, to, you know, put yourself in a situation where you can be bored and see what happens. Are you a meditator? I'm not actually, no. Me neither. I've never been able to do it. I've tried it a few times, but for some reason I just can't get through it. Yeah, I've, um, I've tried it as well. And for me, I think I probably it wasn't that I couldn't get through it. It was that I didn't immediately have a big impact, or at least I didn't perceive a big impact. And perhaps I should have stuck with it for longer. I think you and I suffered from the same word immediately. It was like I didn't immediately say, yeah, exactly doing nothing. So I was like, this is useless. And all the meditators out there are probably like, guys. That's the whole point. Yeah. Um, so we don't have that much time left. I just wanted to pivot to click for a moment. Yeah. Um, so you in the book sprint, you kind of address the notion of, well, what if we're sprinting on these ideas? But the entire idea is the wrong idea. Right. Um, and then you say, well, maybe we can build out a sprint on the construction of the hypothesis itself. Yeah. Um, so now when you do the design sprints, are you almost always making sure you incorporate this foundational sprint in advance to make sure you're not going in the wrong direction? Yeah. We are. Yeah. And, um, a couple things happened. A couple of things have happened in the last few years for us in terms of how we work with founders. So one is that at Character Capital, we're investing much earlier stage on average than we did at Google Ventures, Google Ventures, especially now. But even, you know, when we were there, very, very large funds and, you know, when you're trying to find places to invest, you know, three hundred, five hundred million dollars a year, you can't do that one million dollars at a time into tiny little companies. You need to, you know, make some chunky investments. And so, you know, we would work with companies like Slack at their series B, um, or we would work with Uber, you know, around that, that same phase where we could invest a lot. We could, you know, help them with whatever was important to them at that time. Now we're almost exclusively working with companies who were in the first year of their life. And so the needs are a little bit different. Um, when we looked at the companies, we're working with a character and looked at the sprints we were running with them, we were trying to basically figure out like, what is the missing piece? Like, what determines whether this sprint is going to really have a big impact for this company. And so we did a lot of like kind of reverse engineering, trying to look back across what's gone well, what hasn't gone well. And what we realized was that the companies at Google Ventures, when a design sprint was, was highly effective for them. They already had what we now call a founding hypothesis. They already had this really clear understanding of who's our customer, what's the core problem we're solving for them? What is our solution? You know, what is fundamentally the thing we sell them? And how is it different and better than what exists today on the market, whether that's a direct competitor or some sort of workaround or substitute. And everybody on the team knew it, knew what it was. Everybody more or less agreed about what it was. And, and, but we never we never wrote those things down. So it was just a given. Yeah. The team at Slack, they had that. And so when we were doing design sprints with them, it was on um, marketing and onboarding for new customers. How do you explain what Slack is to somebody who's never heard of it before? We were building on this foundation, hence the name, the foundation sprint of this real clarity of what was true of what they believed to be true. And so then it was like, you know, character capital. Years later, we work with a team and we'd say, let's do a design sprint. And it was like, you know, sometimes, sometimes it worked beautifully, but other times it was like building a house on a shaky foundation or on no foundation at all. It's like, well, why didn't that work? It used to work so well. And so we realized there was kind of this missing piece. You know, one of the things Jake and I debate is like, he calls the sequel to sprint, but I say it's the prequel because it's like the thing that you actually need first, like we wrote it later, but you actually do it first. And there's just so much value for a team to sit down and be like, okay, what do we believe is true? Like, what do we think? What's our claim? What is the claim that we're making? What's our opinionated point of view on this business that we're building? And we know we don't have all the details figured out, but let's align on that and then we can go and find out if that's true and get into this really clean kind of iterative cycle of, um, test it. Okay. We're wrong. Okay. Tweak it. Test it again. Okay. We're wrong again. Tweak it. Oh. Now we're right. But this other thing is wrong. Let's tweak that. Let's test it again. Um, and we've just found that it enables teams who are at the beginning of a big new project. It enables them to move so much more quickly with so much more clarity and ultimately, we think improves the chances that they're going to be successful because they're building on, on a solid foundation. I actually think if you take these three books combined, you could run it on almost anything. Yeah. Including like mapping out where to put your efforts and energies. Yeah. That's right. Because in a way, like this podcast was a ton of different sprints, which I won't go into and a ton of foundation sprints. Yeah. And then making time like, like all that stuff is complete. Like if I would have had this playbook, I could have probably saved a couple. Yeah. And that's how we think about it. I mean, it's, we have our, the business that we're in. Is venture capital. And so that's kind of, you know, what's right in front of us. But, you know, part of why we put this stuff into books is that we want anybody to be able to, you know, pick these up and read them and, and benefit from them. And we've, there's some awesome stories that we've heard. Um, you know, Jake has a version of the foundation sprint that he calls the, the Wayfinder sprint, I think, which is about kind of personal decisions. Like, you know, not to make it sound too grandiose, but like, what should I do with my life? Right. And, you know, a lot of the same principles apply. Um, my wife started a business recently and it's not a tech business. It's not a startup. It's, you know, it's a, it's a travel business and it's just her, but we ran a foundation sprint like, okay, there's a lot of, you know, travel advisors out there in the world, a lot of people who can help you plan a trip. What's unique about you? What's unique about this business? Who are you really competing with? How are you different from that? Um, and so yeah, this stuff works in a lot of different domains. Pretty cool. So if there's any one takeaway you want to give to people. Um, I know that's a big open question. What would that be? Oh man. Um. I mean, the, I think the I'll share two if that's all right. Yeah, sure. The first one is that I think that, um, so often when we try to do big new things, whether they're in business or in our personal lives, um, part of why we find it hard to move forward is that we, is that we're unsure, we're uncertain about what's going to happen. And so we either plow forward without resolving that uncertainty, or we let the uncertainty keep us from ever starting. And so, you know, one of the things that that is really important to me and, you know, hopefully we've been able to have a bit of, you know, an effect on improving what the books is, giving people some concrete tools that they can use to navigate that uncertainty, to say, hey, what's the first thing we need to figure out? What's the first question we need to answer the first risk we need to address. Because ultimately, you know, sure, if it helps a business be more successful, it helps us be more successful as investors. That's all great. But I think, you know, bigger picture, if it helps somebody feel like they're able to do the things in the world, in their, their life that they care about, that they, they want to see happen and we can unblock them in any way. Um, that's, that's really important to us. So hopefully people will take that away. And then the other thing I'll say is like, um, you know, one of the things that, you know, I mentioned the benefit of boredom and spending all this time sailing and, you know, allowing my brain to sort of, uh, be generative, um, in this really unstructured way. One of the things that became clear to me was that, you know, I have, uh, I have kind of a personal mission statement and it's, it's like, it's kind of cheesy, but it's really about helping people make time for the things that matter to them. And I, I get a lot of satisfaction about kind of the, the service aspect of doing that. And I think that the, you know, if I may be so bold, the purpose of life is for us to find ways to be content in, in serving others. You know, that's whether it's in a commercial setting or a personal setting. That's the sort of the engine that continues to turn over and over, that keeps the world going. Um, and so, uh, you know, hopefully that comes through and hopefully people are able to find kind of their own, their own version of whatever that that service might be. And just to say for anyone who's only listening and not watching like I do see it in your face, in your eyes, like you just light up talking about this stuff, which is amazing. And you also have a certain calm about you, which I think you have to have in the space that you operate in because it's so high risk. Yeah. Um, it's almost like the difference between the quarterbacks who are like really great and the ones who are not so great is like panicking in the pocket when the game's on the line, right? Like you watch the greats and they're just like, they're able to just do their thing, take advantage of opportunities that are there versus the ones who don't have that experience, like throw up the quail. And that's when bad stuff happens. Yeah. So you have like a certain calm about you. And I actually felt that in your writing too, going from, uh, sprint to make time to click. Like there's a certain confidence that I think you now speak with and you now write with, which, um, I think comes through all the years of experience and the stuff that you have done. Um, so for anyone who just is listening or doesn't actually see it, I'm just mentioning that. Yeah. Cool. Thanks. Um, well, thank you for giving me the time. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. This is great. All right. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe to our channel and visit our website, the bigger Sam dot com. Thank you.