#7: Investor Behind 45 Exits & 40,000 Jobs — AI, Karma, and How to Sell a Startup
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The best athletes in the world that you and I know, they practice like crazy. They get up at 5 a.m., they go to the gym, they practice. To get a three-pointer right, they've tried it a thousand times before. Every day, right? So you learn so much from practice. But I believe the most you learn is from failures. Welcome to Divot, a community for people trying to make their mark in the world, where each week I'm interviewing the best minds in business, tech, sports, and entertainment to learn how they made their mark.

Go to divit.org to see all of our episodes, or you can go to X, Spotify, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts. This episode is brought to you by Google Cloud and Notion. Today, I'm chatting with one of venture capitalist top investors, Naveen Chadha, Managing Director of Mayfield Fund, a $3 billion fund based here on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley.

Naveen has been on the annual Forbes Midas list, which ranks the top venture capitalists in the world an incredible 16 times. This year, he ranks as the fourth best investor in the world. At Mayfield Fund, Naveen works with the earliest ideas, helping build teams from scratch all the way to a company's IPO. He's personally made investments in over 60 companies, resulting in dozens of IPOs and acquisitions.

Some of these companies include household names like Lyft, HashiCorp, Poshmark, and SolarCity. The companies he's invested in have created over $120 billion in equity value and 40,000 jobs. Beyond his impressive career as an investor, he was also an entrepreneur. He co-founded three startups. One was acquired by Microsoft and another went public. His insights and experience have not only shaped industries, but are helping to drive what the future will be.

Navin is one of the most connected people in Silicon Valley and he's a leader in how artificial intelligence is changing the world. Hope you enjoy the conversation. Tell me a little bit about where you grew up. Tell me about your family. How did you get to Silicon Valley? It's a story of luck. So I grew up in India. My mom

was a professor. My dad was a business executive. Grew up in Delhi. Good family values. My mom is very God-fearing. She teaches Sanskrit, which is like Latin from where of Hindi language. My dad, a very driven executive and business person. So I got good training of spirituality versus what it means to be a capitalist. And so those two together can do wonders.

I did my undergrad in India at IIT Delhi, graduated from there, was lucky enough to get a fellowship. Can you explain how important that is? I went to IIT, Indian Institute of Technology in India.

1988 and graduated in 1992, it's actually even a more difficult school to get into than Stanford. So they were, when I was growing up, there were like six IITs in India and they would take like 2000 students total every batch, but probably a million students applied. Wow. And it was a separate entrance examination. So it's like you can do anything academically. It doesn't matter.

You have to prepare up to second grade of college courses and do a separate examination. So it's, and the people who come to IIT for the undergrad, I think in their life, they've never seen what number two means. So you put these 2000 people together in the same room and

And you're studying for how long for this? Four years. Oh, before? To do the test. To do the test. In my time, we used to study for at least two years. Now kids are starting sixth grade. So it is that intense. And some kids now in India basically don't even go to high school. They just study for this thing. And...

Because you just started with IIT. Yeah. It's just the IIT test to try to get in. Correct. Like you prepare for SAT. They just prepare for this thing and do the school because the grades don't matter. Yeah. So there are like specialized institutions which have been set up for training and educating people

to study for this exam. I mean, some of the most high achieving people I've ever met have gone to IIT and it almost feels like the Willy Wonka golden ticket. If you can get it, you have to earn it. You have to really earn it. But if you can get it, it kind of seems to open up just incredible doors for this sort of people. Absolutely, right? And I think that's what led to, so if you get into IIT,

It opens up doors. Then if you graduate from there, all the foreign universities take you seriously because they have had past alumni. Many of their faculty members are from those institutions. So that's what led to I graduated at the top of the class, came to Stanford on a fellowship.

to pursue my master's and PhD from '92 to '95, and then the internet happened. Again, got lucky. I was working on video streaming and the internet happened. And venture capitalists on Sandhill approached us and said, "Why don't you start a company?" Netscape did a browser

for browsing text-based content. Why can't you do a browser for browsing video-based content? He said, "No, I want to become a professor. Why would I do it?" They said, "Just try it." So it only happens in Silicon Valley. You're on an immigrant visa. Basically, the professors convince you and the venture capitalists, "Take a one-year leave of absence. Go try a company." And I did.

They funded me. Basically, this was 96. No experience. I've never worked in any company. It only happens here. So you get lucky. Right timing, right place, right set of people. And I went into entrepreneurship. So I created my first company, VXtreme.

that got acquired very quickly by Microsoft and God was kind. We were extremely fortunate to have succeeded from a capitalistic perspective that the founders could have gone and done anything afterwards. That's when I got to know Satya Nadella. He and I were peers. So I did my first company, VExtreme, sold to Microsoft. It became Windows Media.

Then started my second company after Microsoft called I-Beam Broadcasting, which we took public. Then did a third company, Rivio, which was software development.

SaaS company back in early 2000s and that got acquired and I joined the venture capital business after doing three back-to-back startups in 2003. So I have been doing it for quite a long time and it's just been serendipity, right? You come as an immigrant, you study,

You take Stanford classes, put them on the internet. VCs come to you and say, like, start a company. You're blessed. Then you build the product. Then Microsoft comes, acquires you. So it's just a series of, it's a movie. You're giving a lot of credit to luck, but like, it seems like each of these decisions is very, very thoughtful and deliberate. And you're, you kind of picked the right decision every step along the way. And startups, I mean, you know, you're, you're,

you're kind of glazing over, I'm sure, how difficult it was and how impossible it was for you. And then, you know, it's leading to this thing in Microsoft. But, you know, for you to leave Stanford and to go do a startup, I mean, that on a visa, an immigrant from India, like, I mean, what did your parents think about? I'm sure they were just rooting for you to just quit Stanford and go do a startup. No, that wasn't the case. No, I'm sure. It took me actually...

longer to convince my parents, my sister, and my friends that I should try this thing than to actually build a product. It took me six months because they said, why would you start up? Because in India, if you can't get a good job in a well-known company in the mid-90s, you're nobody.

What do you mean? What is this startup thing? So they didn't even know. Really? In our household, for hundreds of years, everybody completes their educational degrees. What do you mean you're breaking the chain? You're breaking the chain. What does it mean?

So like when you'll grow up, so what will I tell people which company you work for? Microsoft? No, I said, I don't even know the name. The extreme. Yeah, the extreme, but there was no name then, right? That was the ideation stage. So my friends thought like I was an idiot, right? Like because it was not common. Parents were crying themselves to sleep. Probably our son, he's abandoning this incredible opportunity. And in 95, when this decision making was happening, it wasn't common, right? Like you are on an immigrant visa. They could take back your visa.

Because it takes on a student visa a year you can work, but then you need an H-1 visa. Sorry to bore you with the details. That's the worker visa. What if it didn't come? Right. What? So I essentially always look at all the data. But honestly, if conventional wisdom is saying X, I like doing the opposite of it. And that's been my mantra that...

If it is obvious to everybody the path, then I may not be taking much risk. And that's what I do in investments too, which is invest around the edge, invest in things which most people will say it won't work. That's when I start doing the work. I try to understand, is there any chance, any chance by stroke of luck that this thing will work? And that's what you become a good early stage venture capitalist for. Because when you're doing a startup,

like I was doing, most likely you're going to fail. The odds are against you. You're playing against the house. Casinos always win in aggregate. Most startups win. Right. So... Why is that? Why are startups so unbelievably hard? I think it starts with always with the right set of people. If you get the people, you need money. So if you have people and money, now you have to go build a product, whether for consumers, whether for businesses,

And you need to focus on doing one thing and one thing well, which is becoming the king or queen of some hill. Go build trenches which are 10 miles deep rather than six inches deep. And this is where most startups end up creating a product or a service which is a vitamin. It just skims the surface. It's not a painkiller. Or the number of people who want their product is too small.

And this is for startups who didn't fight with each other, where the founders aren't fighting. There's no board drama. All the extra things around it. I'm assuming all that stuff is taken out, which is you have a good idea, good people. You had the capital, but you still failed. But most of the people don't even come to the playoffs. They can't even get over those challenges.

Simple hurdles of ego, teamwork, drama. Like this can't be some flimsy thing, right? Like this is your life. So when you're picking ideas, you know, and you're laying in bed at night and you're thinking, I can work on this. I can do this. I can do that. Like, how do you know where to put all your time and energy and effort? How do you know which area to go with? Yeah, I think to me, you have to follow your gut. You have to follow your instinct, right?

and make sure you're not fixated on the result and the outcome. You're fixated more on doing your work and falling in love with it so that you even lose track of time. So if you can do that, that your heart is in it, your soul is in it, you can't even keep track of time, you forget to eat. That's what you should be doing. Because if you do all that stuff,

Good stuff will happen. It's like, do your karma. Like, why are you figuring out how big the price will be? So that's what always I feel. And even when I'm investing, if I feel with the people, I'm not going to grow, I'm not going to learn or the problem they're solving, don't invest them. It's the same thing I tell people, right? Whatever task you're taking or doing, will you do it for 10 years? Will it help you achieve your dreams? Will it help you

get the best of yourself? Does it have unbounded potential? If it does, then jump in and you will get a lot of ideas along the way. But if you ask the hard questions, will I have fun doing this for 10 years? Will I devote my life to it? The answer to 99% of the good ideas will be no. So that's how you have to think. You're in a marathon. You're not running for five minutes. To do anything good in life, thousands of hours are needed, minimum 10,000 hours.

So if you're going to do that, you better love, right? This is not a date. This is a marriage. But how do I balance is sort of my passion and the things that bring me energy and that I lean in on and that I'm excited about that keep me up late at night working on it or early in the morning versus like, I've got to build a business. I've got to feed my family. I got to help my kids.

team, feed their families as well. Like, how do you, how do you sort of bring those two things together? Yeah, I think that's where you have to have a combination of the left side of the brain and the right side of the brain, which is one side tells me, hey, I have these constraints. I need to raise money. I need to pay the bills. I have to pay the employees. And the other side of the brain tells me we need to all have fun.

And so it's a balance. So when you write the business plan of what you're going to go do, make sure both those requirements are there and constraints are good in life. So if you put both those constraints, I believe constraints lead to greatness because necessity, once you put it on the map, then you're solving that problem. If it was only about making money and you never put the constraint that I need to have fun,

I need to feel I'm getting the best of myself. You didn't solve for it. So lay the problem right at the beginning. And if you take that holistic view, what we call work-life balance, similarly for profit, not for profit, put it together and solve it. And figure out among these ideas, which ones will I love? Which ones will make money? Keep looking for the intersection. That's why it's so hard.

I remember in college, my sister said, where do you want to, where are you going to work? What job are you going to get? And I said, exactly. I said, I want to have fun. I want to do some fun. And I just remember her saying like, that's not what work's about. You're not, you're not just going to go have fun. But I thought, no, I think, I think I can. So I got a job. Well, well, my first job out of college, I went and worked for a video game company and it was really fun. But then when I quit to do my own startup and,

basically own my own time, I realized that actually the most fun creative thing you can do is to work on the things that you're passionate about with the people that you're excited to work with. Absolutely. And that leads you to doing Zoom calls at one in the morning with your co-founder or your team members or other people who are, whatever you're like, whatever who you are, you attract the people and the things that sort of magnetize to what you're

what you're wanting to get into, right? Yeah. It's always about the people. But my point is, right, you put this as a constraint and solve for it. Don't jump into something saying like, let's make money, but you hate it. Or you just love it and it's not a for-profit idea. Intersection. Life is about compromises, right? Constrain the problem. Have you had ideas that have come through to you, you've invested in

more than 50 companies. But if you had ideas that come in, you're like, wow, that is a, that is going to be a great business, but I'm just, I'm not leaning in. I'm not into, I'm not, I'm not passionate about, I'm not excited about as an investor or as an investor, do you just, do you really have to say, this is going to bring a return to my, to my investors. So I should get excited about this. Yeah. So I think to me, my job as an early stage venture capitalist is to see trends and

and ideas before they're apparent because the stage we invest at is really a paper and pencil stage, right? I'm entrepreneur is saying, I'm thinking of doing this. There's no product, there's no team. So I love making those kinds of bags, but I'm still learning after doing this business as an entrepreneur for 10 years and VC for 20 years, how to pick those ideas. It's hard.

With limited data, market doesn't exist. I'm still trying to get good at it, to pick these ideas. So I love what you said that one day somebody pitches and I just get it and invest in the best ideas. Haven't been able to do it because the left side of the brain fights the right side. So to me, I'm trying to get better at this game. Still, after 30 years in the business. What drives you to

keep digging in, even though you've already made it, you sold your company to Microsoft, your other company went public. Like you've invested in all these amazing companies that have gone public. Like you've done it. What, where does that gear come from to just continue? Yeah. So I think this is where I would say for me with my upbringing and the values, my family instilled in me, especially my mother, she taught me a life of

not live for others is not a life. And I asked her, like, why are you telling me this? Who told you this? She said, Mother Teresa. When I was growing up, she was well known that you have to

offer your life for the service of others. So when I was an entrepreneur, I wanted to build technology products which would change the way we work, live, and play as humans. That's what my first company did, We Extreme. It invented video over the internet.

So as a VC, what keeps me going is now I'm not building products myself, which can change the world, but many entrepreneurs have those ideas. So how do I service them? And in return, have the fun of going and re-imagining industry. So that's what it's making it do. But to do it well, I can't do it as a not-for-profit. So I have to do it as for-profit because to have impact, I firmly believe

Organizations, right, like have to be self-sustaining and they have to make money. So if I combine being in the service business of serving others and doing it sustainably, venture capital is the best. We provide advisory services. People come, not only do we give capital, we help them with our knowledge, with our past experience, take raw ideas and turn them into breakthrough companies, but they are in the front.

We are the coaches. We are in the back. We don't run things for them, but we have seen the movie enough. So that's what I'm trying to do. But the end product that they create for their customers just drives me. And when I see these ideas like Lyft, Poshmark, HashiCorp, Frore, or some of the other ones, I say, wow, these are profound. They will have impact on humanity. So let's help them.

The problem is I'm still trying to get better because so many ideas come, thousands of them that we pass because we don't think they'll have impact and we go wrong. That's where as a VC, you can't at the stage we invest without data, without any market size, still trying to improve in our picking ability.

everybody lives with regrets, but venture investors have this unique kind of regret because your job is to see, you need to see everything, right? When the latest hottest company comes out, you need to have seen it five years before or 10 years before. And so naturally in everyone's portfolio of wins, there's also companies that have come through the door where, you know,

They had a bad pitch. You didn't jive with the founders. The idea wasn't clear. It became only clear later. The company morphed into something else later that you never got to see because you said no to the first pitch. How does that trial and error of

You've gotten a lot right, more so than almost anyone in the world, but there must be ones that you missed. How do you overcome and not dwell on the things that you missed and focus on sort of what you can do moving forward versus the past? Yeah, so I would say the most important thing I try to do is the biggest lesson I have had as a venture capitalist, which is what Mayfield runs today on,

is invest in the people, not their idea or the market they're going after. Because if it's a big market, every big company will be doing it. So my initial errors as an investor were I was fixated too much on the idea, not on the people. But as I started gaining experience in the business, I shifted my model towards understanding the people and what are they saying.

and not getting fixated on their wedge or the initial market problem they're solving. And as an early stage investor, I won't get to see it again when it becomes something else. But they may not have figured out what this can become. But that's where just listening to them and not getting judgmental

makes us a better early stage investor. So rather than beating ourselves up on why we passed, what happened, you try to learn why did you pass? Was it the founder? Was it the product? Was it the market? And VCs, when they pass, they pass because of market size. They think the market is this, but the market turns out to be that, right?

Uber, you have heard case studies about it. When I invested in Lyft, people laughed that, hey, a normal human being will not take a cab

will have another human being drive them. Really? They won't go to a black car? Ride sharing will be a thing, right? Poshmark, the vision of the company was that we're going to have a million people or more, actually it ended up becoming more than 10 million, selling fashion from their closets. Really? Who will buy used fashion, right? So I'm just saying,

Things like this happened, but I'm guilty of passing on companies like Airbnb. I just couldn't relate to it when they started that. And that's why their first round, nobody did. There were only 20 of us sitting in a Y Combinator office. It was small in those days.

2008. And they're pitching that, hey, the basic idea of air and nobody would give them $1 million, half a million. And the basic idea they pitched is there was this concept going around then called couch surfing.

that, hey, I'll come in and sleep on somebody's couch. And you're thinking like, man, is that a Gen Z phenomenon? It was a totally sketchy site too. Exactly. Right? So for the right reasons, you don't lean forward and look what it's become. Right? And so they can be stigma, but

Sometimes you just don't get the market. But, and I've had stellar founders when I was early in my career. In the first four or five years, I got fixated on the problem they were solving. But exactly that happened. That the founder is here. They said this is what they're going to be going and doing in this general area. The general area is very interesting. But the pigeonholed them into this thing. We pass.

then they go do this in the same area and it becomes a $50 billion company. So that's what I've learned is, is the founder willing to engage in a conversation? So you're not judging that this will be the only thing they'll do. So you require time, you require nimbleness and you'll still miss. It is such a judgmental business. How do I become an expert at something? How do I become the best in the world?

That's something where I can then go take that knowledge to then go do something great, either my own company or at someone else's company. Yeah. So I have this theory, actually not a theory, this learning that I've had. How does one learn, right? So there is this rule of 10,000 hours that people often say, right? Books have been written about it to become an expert. But my belief is you can go to school and...

You can read, but you learn actually this much. And the main reason is by the time you graduate or by the time you have read, that book was written 20 years back or 10 years back. It's a new world, right? So you learn so much from theory. Where do you learn more? From practicing. The best athletes in the world that you and I know, they practice like crazy. They get up at 5 a.m., they go to the gym, they practice to get a three-pointer right. They've tried it a thousand times before.

every day, right? So you learn so much from practice. But I believe the most you learn is from failures. Failures of yours, failures of your coaches, and failures of your mentors, friends, and advisors. So to me, surrounding yourself by excellence, you cannot become an expert at everything. Experience counts for something. So if I'm trying to become a good parent, I can read,

Then I learn through parenting. But why won't I ask people who are already parented? That's what world-class athletes do. If I'm a tennis player, I have somebody who helps me improve myself. Somebody helps me improve my background. Somebody for my anger management issues, right? So I would say, learn from books. Good. You can read blogs. You can watch me. It's fine. Go practice. Make reps.

Fail, you learn yourself. But then go get advisors, go get friends, go get other CEOs, learn together, right? So to me, learning is not just through books. It comes through practice and shared experiences. So the more you surround yourself with other people, that's the best way to learn. But you have to go deep, be obsessed with it.

Well, it's painful to fail. Who wants to fail? Nobody wants to fail. Nobody starts something to fail. I think for myself, I'm like 15 years into being in my startup and I still think about the mistakes from 2010. The company I started that petered out or the big mistakes that I made along that way. I mean, it's very hard to sort of

And the older you get, I think it becomes harder. When you're young, you haven't made those mistakes. So it's kind of like, you know, the world is your oyster. You can do anything you want. And then as you make mistakes along the way, and hopefully you learn from them, but like, you know, those little seeds of doubt kind of sit in the back of your brain, in your heart. And you have to find ways to, and what I'm sort of hearing from you is like, you learn from, you have to learn from them.

So that you can get better, so that you can improve. So you can't completely push it out so that it never happened, but you also can't let that feeling and that voice overcome the things that you actually want to accomplish. Yeah, yeah. I think you have to just learn from it. I always tell myself and others, let's make new mistakes. Let's not make the same mistakes.

We're still going to make mistakes because we're all humans, because we are going after things which haven't been done before, right? I don't know what you and I are going to be discussing today, right? So let's just have fun and assemble things along the way, right? But there's enough pattern recognition and that's why I always believe

giving those 10,000 hours yourselves or listening to other people who are your advisors, parents, mentors, who have given those hours will only make you better. So listening to me, whether you listen from books, your advisors, your parents, your mentors, your board members, is a very important skill. Very important skill.

And asking for that help and, yeah, being willing to listen. I hear so many people talk about, well, I need a mentor. I need this. I need that. And it's like, I love how you said your parents. And I'm blessed to have incredible parents as you do. Not everybody has that. But, like, you have to find people, I think, that are not financially motivated in the decisions you make. Right? People that can kind of look objectively at you but still...

but still really deeply care about what you're doing. And it's, those take time, right? Those take, yep. And if you're not born with them, you need to build them. You need to build them over decades.

And that's the most important thing. Yeah. Who are your, do you have mentors? Do you have people that have mentors along the way? I think one of your, your, your professors at Stanford, he helped you get into your first startup. Right. So, uh, his name is Anup Gupta. Uh, he was my advisor and we had worked on this Stanford project, uh,

to essentially put Stanford classes on the internet. Yeah. So VCs approached us and said, start a company. And I told him, right, like, hey, we don't know anything. Neither do you. He said, no, no, let's all go together. And he gave me two words, which I still remember to this date. It's okay. Jump. I'll be your safety net. Safety net. That even if you fail, I'll make sure.

you can still be part of the PhD program. Just don't worry about it. So when you have that kind of backbone support, right? I'm going and climbing a building, I'll fall, there's a net. And you say, then it never crosses yourself. So to me, having mentors, having advisors, people who are taking an interest in you, and that's what I try to do today to people at Mayfield,

entrepreneurs outside, entrepreneurs of Mayfield, tell them, hey, your basic needs in life on the mass laws hierarchy, assume they're taken care of. Now let's talk. How do we get you to perform at the best of your potential? So that's what I think the role of advisors, mentors are. They take an interest in you. It doesn't matter. It could be a friend to what your status is. It doesn't matter how rich you are. It doesn't.

matter how much money your company will make. They're good people. Go find them. They're good people. Somebody help them. They'll help you. I mean, think about it in any context. What would have happened to the Warriors without Steph Curry? What would have happened to Apple without Steve Jobs? What you've done here at Mayfield? Yes, there's amazing people around, but there are people that are

that are sort of doing this almost exponential work and effort or impact to other people. How do I find these people? How do I get them on my team? How do I, how do I like surround myself with the most amazing people? Yeah. So I think if people make that a problem and make that an aim, most people don't, they think they know it all or they learn it along the way. If people prioritize people,

that this is what they need. These advisors, mentors are only a few degrees of separation from them. But if you don't obsess about it, don't make it a P0, it ain't going to happen. Because Silicon Valley, the network, the willingness to give back, it's available. But you have to raise your hand and be persistent like you are going after customers for raising money. Be for mentors. They're actually more important. They make you better.

because there's no economic arrangement, right? There's no financial arrangement. A customer has to pay you, so you'll build a product. VC gives you money, you have to make money. But there's enough people who are willing to lend the experience they've had, and we have to try. It is doable. I'm very optimistic that many, many people in Silicon Valley and other places help other entrepreneurs. They help other founders. But if you don't make it a priority,

They should go to places like your organization, right? Like Startup Grind has an amazing community of people where people want to give back. So if you make it a priority, it will happen.

For people that are not, who have never been here, who are not used to coming here or working here, what is the difference with the sort of the values or those expectations that you talk about of people of, you know, sort of working and contributing in Silicon Valley that makes it unique? Yeah. So I would say there is something about the culture here that I discovered coming from India. In India, you just can't fail.

you're written off. In what way? Basically, if you get a bad grade, you're done. Or if you try a comp, if you get laid off from a job, you're done. You only get one chance. When I came here, I realized, wow, such a forgiving culture. Failure is only an opportunity to do well the next time, somebody told me. I kept listening. Then they pointed me to this book of the Intel CEO. Failure is only an opportunity to improve in the next quarter.

He said, amazing. So you can do what you want to do. And a lot of time, if you look at the most successful entrepreneurs, but failed entrepreneurs or small exits before. So this is the only place where people are not measuring you on what you created. They're willing to say, okay, it was the idea. Maybe it was time. You get multiple shots at the goal. In India, where I grew up, you take a shot, miss a three-pointer, you're benched. You don't get another shot.

So you don't get the best out of people. So the culture in Silicon Valley in America about experimentation, it being okay to fail, the way the capitalist system is set up, it's just amazing. It doesn't happen. Like when I came in 92, this wasn't happening anywhere else in the world. So it was a cultural shock, but I took advantage of it, which is wow.

Right? Who told, like in my, when I grew up in India, at the age of 25, you can start your own company and you've never worked before. You go like, and is that a movie? Is that a dream? But when you live it, and this happened in December 95, January 96, when I started my first company, it wasn't that common.

Right. Like of all the Indian founders in 95, 96, I was the fifth or the sixth venture backed entrepreneur who also has never worked anywhere. So it wasn't that common. But there was a movie, right, like coming to America or it can only happen in America. So I said, oh, that's what this is. It's a dream. Right. Like remember that movie where the guy says, like when he looks at that hotel and says, like, I'll also live in it one day. It feels like somehow you have met or know everyone.

And I wonder, how do you think about building relationships? How do you think about creating value in people's lives? How do you think about getting value, you know, where you need to help you push things ahead? I would say the best way to approach these things is, as I mentioned earlier, don't look at the output of what will come, right? Just focus on

"Hey, let's do stuff together and let's grow the ecosystem." So that's how I built the relationship with Satya or many of the people in the industry. It wasn't out of like, "Hey, one day we'll become somebody." No, right? Like these are nice people. We are working on related problems. Let's just collaborate and let's just grow the ecosystem, right? So what I would say is it's the same philosophy of karma

and you invest in a relationship and don't count what will come out. But my parents taught me in any relationship, if you give 80 and expect 20, rather than giving 20 and expecting 80, or even worse, giving 50 and expecting 50, you'll be a happy man. So I always believe in a relationship, give 80. If you get 20,

I would say, great. If you get 40, what an amazing thing. Or why even think about it? And now I understand what my mom was telling me. She was telling me that if you give 80, your expectation is nothing from the other person. So that's what I was learning in a way that don't even focus on that result, what I'll get out. If it's 100 points in an exam, you do 80%. It's okay. So why think about what's going to come out? I never think that way.

Right. Let's create relationships. Let's grow the ecosystem and make the pie bigger. Is it really everything or is it just relationships? Is it is our business transactions different or do you think about it literally with everything? I think to me, a business transaction also has to be a win win. You try to understand and have empathy and compassion on what the other side is trying to do.

and look at it rationally, you can't just win everything in life, right? It's a compromise, it's constraints. And in any good business deal or business negotiation, both sides need to have, you know, some bubbles in their stomach, then that's a good deal, right? But everyone feels pain. Everybody has to feel a little bit of pain, then you know how seriously do they want this thing, right? If it's easy money,

right? Like there's no such thing, right? Like look at one of the biggest companies in the world today. Nvidia, what does Jensen say, right? Like no pain, no gain, right? The company took so long, but look what they've created, right? So both sides have to feel it, but you have to see together what the impact will be. When did you first meet Jensen? Was this decades ago, early in your... Yeah, like I think like when I was at, he may not remember, when I was at

VXtreme, we were a small company doing video streaming. Then they were a GPU company. When I ended up at Microsoft, we had interactions at the product level because Windows, the cards of GPUs used to go into Windows machines. So we have kept in touch over the years. But then over the last few years, we have gotten to know each other really well. And we didn't even know that our paths will cross again.

Because I'm saying he's, because if you're, it's, you just never know. You just never know. Versus with Satya, we've always kept in touch. Sundar and I went to school together, right? Like what sometimes happened is a bunch of us who grew up in the ecosystem in the mid-90s, 30 years later, we have all grown up, right? Like and gone to places, right?

And it was a very small community. The same thing actually happened for entrepreneurs who started in the late 70s and early 80s. The Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison. It was the PC industry. If you look at the internet industry, it was very small. When I started VX3, the community was very small. And now all those people, if you look around, they're running these mega companies.

Because it takes time. You need to have less hair, right? Like you need to have white hair like me. It's called experience. So you all are solving problems. Who knew one day my friend would be running Microsoft? Another one I went to school with and we used to cook together would be running Google. You just don't know. Well, there's some of them are and some of them aren't, right? I mean, when if you try to go back to that time 20 years ago, 30 years ago, and you think about

who they were at that time. Was it obvious to you? And what do you think people like them and yourself, what do you think you did differently from others who were in the same room pursuing the same dreams at the same time, but have ended up in not saying it's bad place, horrible place, but very different place from, from what some of you all running big organizations. I think it's very hard to predict anything. So if I go back,

to 97, right? Like my office is here. Satya's is a little bit further away from where you are. For us to think, him to think that he would be running Microsoft and I would be running a top venture capital firm. Honestly, right? Like nobody thinks that way, right? Like what you say is, I'm going to go do great things. What thing? I don't know. But you start developing some qualities along the way

that allows you the ability to become great leaders along the way, and then one door opens the other. And I would say across all these folks, just it's very clear that they have to be intellectually smart, they have to be driven, they have to be hardworking, all those things

happen. But one of the things I love about these people is they have an X factor. They have this gene called empathy and compassion. And especially for people who run big companies, that's a very important quality. Because at the end, companies are run by people. People build products, people build companies. The larger the organization, the more of a people leader you have to be.

So empathy, compassion, because you're appointed by the people. You're not the founder. But one of the traits I admire about Jensen the most is patience. Not only do they have empathy and compassion, but they also have patience. GPUs were never big, but he always had a dream that instead of the GPU hanging around the CPU from Intel and AMD, it would reverse. And that's what happened.

So he saw certain things in his vision that one day it would happen that most people did. So I think you have to go on the journey, have big dreams, but how they manifest itself, but keep doing good and good things will happen to you. Make enough friends along the way. Do good for other people. Good things will happen to you. That's what my belief always has been. There's a reason, right? When you asked if I help somebody or if I do something for the other person,

I always have taken the approach. It's okay. They may not do anything for me, but somebody else will. And it happens. It happens, right? Like in life, it's just if you think positive, positive happens. I don't like negative vibes and negative energy because then that can happen. So just think positive, keep a positive outlook and don't be coin operated. None of the people we mentioned are transactional.

They're not coin operated. They're playing a long game. They're playing a long game. And they're patient and people follow them. As a leader, the most important quality is how many people follow you when you go from place A to place B. I always look at and ask people like, man, who's your best friend? They tell me somebody who's 12 months relationship. I look at them and say, man, I don't ask them, how old are you? I'm 35.

and your best friend is only 12 months relationship, you start figuring out. Right? Because it's hard for a person to be around. I'm just saying like, for example, my best friends are people I went to school with. Sure. Right? I met them in 1988. Right? Like I'm just saying, Satya could be anybody. I could be anybody. We would still be knowing each other. Right? Right. So you don't, it's not a calculated game. It's just, it's relationships. It's like LinkedIn. You don't know who's going to do one day in life.

So you just build this spider web. It doesn't matter. Don't put it in a math equation because that'll just be disappointing. Life is anyway stuff. Let's not make relationship stuff. Everyone creates value. Everyone has something to give and something to offer. If I treat everyone equally, it may be that someday that person I help turns out to be the CEO of Google or it's just my friend. It's not, there's not any, you know, sort of thing back and forth. It's just

You know, we're just supporting each other. I'm just there. You're a human. Just be a human. Treat everyone as you want to be treated and karma will bring it back around in some way. Yeah, no, very well summarized, right? Like my point is just be a human. Yeah. The ideal self of yourself. Yeah. And if each one of us can do that, think what the world we will be in. Yeah. Well, and somebody in your situation where you are, the organization that you're running, you...

What's, what's interesting is that, and I, having spent some time around you, I know you, you deeply believe these things. None of this is fake and you, you can hear it. You can feel it. You can feel it. People listening to this will, will see it and feel it. Um, but you know, a lot of people we see, they sometimes get to the top by just, you know, punching everybody out on the way there and just, you know, honking their horn and, you know, ramming their way in. And, um,

some of the very most successful people I've met have done it the way you're describing it. And it's kind of, it's a little bit counterintuitive. It's a little bit like, no, you got to fight for everything you get. And it's like, actually, like it can work out for you if you're just a good person. And if you, if you work hard and, you know, and play the game the right way, like it can swing back around. And I think Silicon Valley for me, having been here for 20 years,

So many people have helped me that never needed to, they had no business helping me. And I could, I could go down the list of naming people who, who have helped me. And, you know, and, and I, I've tried to, I'm not nearly as helpful as those people were to me, to other people, but I try to say,

You know, if you have that mentality of when you meet somebody of just like, how can I help? How can I help you? How can I help first? And you can't help everyone, but you can help a lot of people. It will like it gets in the pool like opportunities happen.

opportunity is not a like a finite resource and it it's like I see it as like a well that just constantly is overflowing with water and you can you can take your bucket and the person that you don't know next to you can take the bucket and your competitor can take their bucket and you know sometimes there's a few elbows there but you know you can also help people along the way there's gonna be plenty of water left of opportunity left for you yeah I agree with that wholeheartedly but also

different day, different topic, right? Like, my belief is at the end, we enter the world as humans, empty handed. And one day we're going to leave this world empty handed. So what are we fighting for? It'll all be left behind, right? All this wealth, money, fame will be gone. Has it not brought you more? Are you not more happy because you're wealthy? Are you not more happy because you're famous? It hasn't mattered to you? The main reason is, right? Like,

If I get onto that trap, then you'll never be happy. That's not the cause. My cause is, my impact is how I'm impacting the lives of others. I'm measuring myself on that. How many entrepreneurs did we touch which ended up becoming great? How many jobs did they create?

how many end users of their products there were, right? So it's a different game because what I've realized is your impact is servicing others. That's what people will remember. How does it matter whether I die with $100 or $1,000 or $10,000 or $100,000? It'll all be left behind. It's material, right? Like, look, Mother Nature always wins what's happening in Southern California. Life is so unpredictable.

that you're going to come empty-handed, you're going to go empty-handed. So why have like sharp elbows and get materialistic things along the way? Well, yeah, it's hard. It's hard not to think about those things when you don't have those things. And I think now with the climate that we're in and you can see what everybody's doing and some of it's, a lot of it's fake and some of it's not. But one way I've heard it said, which got me to think about it differently is,

Are you really going to let your happiness be dependent by having an extra zero in a database somewhere in some bank? Like that really is your... And actually, it's not. It's not the thing that brings you the type of deep happiness that we all yearn for and search for. Yeah. And sometimes, right, like I've noticed coming from India, people...

who have even can only afford one meal a day, they're actually happier than the richest of the richest. So happiness has nothing to do with money. If you tie happiness to money, then you're a very unhappy person in my mind because, you know, it goes up, it goes down. When you're happy, it's a constant state of mind, right? You have to be at peace.

It can't fluctuate every second because wealth fluctuates like this every second. And if you get fixated to that, it's a problem. It's a problem. Yeah. Because you're just on this boat that's just, I mean, it's... Yeah. I think there is the saying, right? Like, does the dog wag the tail or does the tail wag the dog is the same, right? Like, who's the jockey? Who's the horse, right? So...

You have to drive the way money moves. Whatever you have, it could be $1, $10, $100. It can't be the other way because you will miss everything. This life is about relationships. It's about giving to others. It's about taking from others experiences, love, respect, friendship. If you don't cherish those things, the rest of the stuff, what are you going to do with it?

I might be different, but I truly believe in it. Yeah. You're a uniquely positive person. I feel this every time I'm around you. I feel when I watch things that you, talks that you've done, um,

What drives that positivity? Because you're in it, you're in almost a uniquely negative business. You're saying no to things 99.99% of the time to your whole incredible investor career. You've invested in 50 or 60 companies yourself, but everything else is...

you know, it's, hey, sorry, like it's not a good fit. Right. So how do you, I don't know, where does that positivity, where does that energy come from? How do I get some of it? I need some of it. I'm still trying to figure that out. Right. I think it's just the way of life that you figure out what your scorecard is and what's giving you happiness. And once you define that not star, you just go do things. Right. So for example, you are absolutely right. I,

personally invest in say a couple of companies a year, one to two, but probably I say no to a couple of hundred. But I'm not measuring it because you don't know when you are investing or not investing in the company, is it going to become great? What I want to make sure is the entrepreneur who spent time with me, did they get something in return? Of course, they'll get the world if we invest. If we don't, that half an hour spent with us

15 minutes spent with us and hour spent with us. Did we make them better? Right? So I'm looking at this because money is not the issue. Time is the issue. So did the other person benefit? And we get these emails from people. Thank you. And they've been on the record that the feedback you gave us made us better.

made us better. Even though you didn't invest, but we give them reasons. We don't say valuation is high or this is wrong or that is wrong. You sit down with them because we owe it to them. What is wrong? What didn't we get? And maybe it's our fallacy. We didn't just get it. But hearing that feedback helps other people. Yeah. And I firmly believe, right, like if one feels, hey, a flu is going on, I'm going to fall sick, you're actually going to fall sick. I don't want to fall sick. So

You don't think about flu? You don't think about getting sick? I didn't even have COVID, right? My only point is, protect yourself. But if you think it'll happen. It's coming for you. Because your body gets weak. Why? So just keep a positive spirit. If you keep a positive spirit, just positive things will happen. It changes your outlook. I think business, sports is more of a mind game than it's a physical game.

Because you can work eight hours, you can work 10 hours, you can work six hours, you can work 15 hours. The point is, are you working with a positive mindset, with positive energy or not? There's no need for negative energy. I tell people, if you have negative energy, please leave the room, go for a walk, take a fresh breath of air, and then come back. Do you see what I'm saying, right? Like positivity playing, no negativity, even half the time can do wonders.

Yeah. I think if you could like bottle that and put it in like a fragrance or something, and I could just spray myself with it every morning, that would be, I don't know what it's called. It's maybe it's, you know, Naveen something. I don't know, but it's really, it's, it's powerful, but it's, it's hard. It's hard with everything. It's hard with all the nose. It's hard with all the rejection. It's hard with the world, you know, being in a difficult state. Um,

It's hard when you see the bills going up, like these things, they, they like, it like compounds negativity. It compounds things on top of you. And then you, you have to, you have to, I think you're right. Like you, you have to focus your mind to get to a place. And I tell my kids the same thing. I tell exactly what you're saying. I tell them sometimes I, I was like, I got to live it. I got to live it more than what I'm saying. But it's like, you can do anything you want.

But you've got to, it all starts right here. And if you don't think you can do it, if you don't think you're going to be successful, your parents will still probably believe in you. Maybe one of your sisters, you know. But if you don't believe it, like, how can, like, you got it. That's the first place. It's got to be right here. It's you. Right? And if you don't even try, what's the point? Yeah. Right? What will happen at most? You'll fail. You'll get a no. You'll get rejected. At least you tried. Right?

So what is better? Right. And then, right, like coming from a poor country, it has gotten better in there. Right. Like life can be worse. Right. Like what ends up happening is especially sitting in Silicon Valley. I call it a pond. Right. Like we are disconnected from reality. And then America being one of the richest countries, we are disconnected from reality. When I look around and people say, man, life stuff, I said, no, man, you don't know what life is.

The billion people can't even get one meal a day. So life can be tougher. So it's all relative, right? Right. There are people who can't even get water to drink, right? My parents just came after visiting India. The air index here is two. In India, it's 400. You can't even breathe, right? This is Delhi. Almost every day. Every day in the winter, right? Like basically, it's...

you are essentially inhaling poison in one of the wealthiest cities in the world. Right. So how bad can it be? Yeah. Sometimes when it gets really, when I hear that versus a flu, I say like, well, sometimes when it gets really tough, sometimes I say like, what's the hardest thing that you've gone through? Like take, like where, where is that? And you know, uh,

when I was in high school, both my grandparents who were like my second parents, they both died in the same week of completely different things. And, or I think about, I was in the South Pacific and I was sleeping on a mattress doing, you know, kind of service work. And I was alone and for months and with no letters or anything. And, you know, and, and my, I kind of, I think about those moments and I think I, I got through that, right? Like I, I,

you know, or, or, you know, it's my grandparents, my mom got through that with her parents or whoever. And like, well, I like, this isn't that bad. Like you said, like if you've traveled the world, you, you see this, the moment you step off the plane in almost any other country. And when we lived in growing up, we lived in Europe. Uh, and when we would come back, I mean, Europe's

basically like America. But when we'd come back, we would kiss, we would get off the plane on the tarmac and we would kiss the ground. Like we were just so, like it was so obvious even from Western countries, how amazing it was. We're so blessed. And then you travel beyond that and you see like, and also as you see, and people are still happy in those environments, even with nothing. And they'll give you whatever they have. They'll give you out of just happiness

the same thing of kind of what you're saying. Like I, you know, and, you know, and, and it's just that perspective of where we are in the, in the West, the United States and how blessed we are and, and how much we have, um, and sort of getting so sort of distracted and caught up in the, in really little, really little things. What's the hardest thing you've been through?

So what I would say is being a people person and having gotten lucky so many times, this was my third company review. The first company got acquired in 18 months by Microsoft. Second company went public. Third one, we got caught in the downturn, the dot-com crash. And at the end of the year 2000... You'd just gone public, right? No, this is the third company review. Okay, yeah. Second company which went public,

was acquired and I wasn't running it. The third one, I was the CEO called Rivio, which was a SaaS company, software as a service company back then. They had to reduce the operating burn. And somebody, I was 30-year-olds as the CEO. First time, I had to go layoffs. These are people, not one, 40, 50 people had followed me. The company was 150 people.

growing very nicely, but the reality changed. What do you do now? Now, the real test of leadership comes. You have been selling dreams to people, to these employees. Some of them are on immigrant visas. Some of them are on other things and say, sorry, we cannot carry the weight of everybody. Some of you have to go. It hurt me. We did. We were always ahead. The company is still around. It's called CPA.com.

And, but we had to go through multiple layoffs and didn't go well with me. And it took me a long, long time to get over it. Months? Years? Years, right? Like I took it personally that how could I come up with an idea? How could I not see that I was over hiring? How could I not see the world could come to this? And...

The person who helped me the most was my mentor. He used to be at SoftBank Venture Capital called Mobius Venture Capital back in the early 2000s, Gary Richelle. And he says, have you read the book Titanic? I said, no, I haven't. He says, there was no movie. Maybe it was other things. I said, man, I don't have time. Can you tell me the gist of it? He says, the ship you're on is going to sink. It can't carry the weight of everybody.

Do you want to start letting off some people and say, even though I know we're in the middle of the ocean, either you sink everybody or some people on lifeboats, you have cash, give them six to eight weeks of severance and start weaning them off. I didn't understand it, what he's saying, but I just did it. But that was the first time something I touched didn't work according to plan. And it was gut-wrenching.

So overcoming that failure made me a better entrepreneur, better person, and a better investor. When I realized failure was just part of life. You can't take it personally. Plan for the best and leave the rest as it plays out. But it wasn't easy. It wasn't easy. But when that happens now with companies and stuff, I just look at it. Hey, it's just business.

things didn't pan out. But when you have to do it as a founder, stand up, these are the people you brought in, they work together, and you have to let your best friend go because the role they're playing is... You have to be honest about who... It's the role, it's not them. Depersonalizing that stuff is never, never easy. So I would say...

That's the hardest thing, right? Somebody who's never gotten a B grade in his life. Somebody, it's just, I just couldn't take it. 30, how did this happen? Forbes is putting you on magazine covers. Fortune is putting Wall Street Journal. You were like, how did I do this? How did I not see the world will crash? Yeah. So this can happen. So that since then, right? Like I realized that,

When you get that, nobody had seen it. You were just caught. You were just caught in the thing. But it was hard when you're in the moment. You have high expectations. People have high expectations. And to go deliver that speech is not easy. Yeah. It's not easy. Have you, 25 years later, do you see like,

the benefits of what you learned from that in other things? Absolutely. Do you now look back on that with gratitude that it was something you had to go through? Everything. That experience, as I said, you learn the most from failures, transformed me. Now I try to figure out and think through that scenario also, which is...

I'm not thinking negative that we're going to fail. As you make a plan, right? Like basically you should know if I jump from that floor, how many bones I'm going to break or make sure you have a parachute or a safety net along with you. So I always tell people when they do a company, it's great. We're going to go execute this. When are we going to raise the next round of money? Okay. You think you'll raise here. I want to see six to nine months of extra runway, just a safety cushion.

Yeah. Assume you never had that money. So everything I do now is not to run to picture perfectness. It changes. And it also allows me to learn along the way that if businesses can be built in a certain way, don't assume they can be built overnight. That's what was happening in the year 99, 2000. And history repeats itself. So as a firm, we kept ourselves out of trouble from

the go-go years of the COVID era, we didn't do any of those mistakes. Same thing was happening in the social era where businesses were going to get built overnight. Billion dollars was like 100 million, right? Like we went through it. We're going through it again. So you keep saying and say, I've seen the movie. Yeah, right. Maybe a black swan will be worth 100 billion. Everything won't be. So you just get realistic, still positive, but you start taking risks.

experienced vets, right? And that's where it helps a lot. Venture capital is really this game for most firms and people. It seems like, hey, I'm going to invest in 10 companies and hopefully one or two of them go big and a bunch of them are going to go out of business. But with you, of the 60-ish companies that you've invested in, you've had 18,000

I believe, go public, you've had 27 be acquired. This is almost like a, almost a, you know, a hundred percent hit rate of, of some sort of outcome, positive outcome. I know that there's all sorts of varying levels of, of outcomes with acquisitions, but I wondered if you could just talk us through, like, how do these deals happen? If, if I'm, you know, sitting in a company and I'm thinking, look, if I'm taking money

I have to get an exit. I want to get an exit, right? Or I shouldn't raise money. So how should I think about getting even like where to begin on an acquisition? What do I do? Do those people come to me? Am I going to them and building relationships? Like how does it, where does it start? Yeah. So I would say both IPOs and acquisitions are stops along the way.

So I always advise entrepreneurs that, hey, if you're thinking of an IPO, it's a financing event in which you're raising more money for your business to go places. But along the way, some of your existing shareholders can sell their stock to new shareholders. It's not the end game because the

It's not the day you just do the performance, ring the bell. You can't exit. It takes a long time to sell your shares in that stock, right? Right. Similarly, you don't plan for an M&A. The best companies are bought. They're not sold. So never in your mind, you should have that, hey, I'm building a company because I'm going to sell it. There's no such thing. Go create a company which has real customers, solves real pain points,

and is on track to make money and be a self-sustainable business. If that's the case, IPO is an option for the company. Some of the biggest companies in the world don't sell. They don't go public. You're self-sustaining, right? You can keep going, but that's not that common. That's a black swan event. So there are two options eventually for shareholders. One, in which everybody exits. That's called an acquisition. M&A, 100% of the stock, gone.

Maybe it's 51%, that's also considered an acquisition. Or your IPO where you're selling 10-20% of the company. But you try to build a business which is a great business, has happy customers, great culture, and is on path to be self-sustaining and making money. Now along the way, you could have built relationships with certain other companies who could start as partners,

that together you could build a bigger business. So that's how the best acquisitions have happened. You're not for sale, but one of your partners essentially realizes the value and forward pays you three, four, five years for what you're going to become. And the companies which say, hey, I'm for sale, they never get the best outcome, right? Like who wants to? If you're hard to get to,

You get like more money. Like you're a real business, then everybody wants it. If you say I'm for sale, okay, $10. Right? Like it's just, have you ever had that kind of offer before? No. And I'm just saying like, you can't just do that. Yeah. Right? Like VCs, we are backing companies, hopefully, which are creating unique products, unique services, have high gross margin. They should be aligned. We have to create product like Michelin stars.

The product our companies create have to be Michelin star quality that there's a line of people who want to get that product. Yeah. Because you're a startup. So you better create something unique that very few places in the world offer that. It's also scary building these relationships because if this big company that could someday we could be a good fit with, like...

I might get concerned or nervous that like, Hey, if I, if they, if I go shine a light on what I'm doing to try to work with them, like, you know, they might just put a bunch of resources to it and, you know, squash whatever we're doing or come up with, you know, their own version of that, which we see all the time of big companies copying startups, or they try to buy a startup and then they go and build the equivalent oftentimes doesn't work, but sometimes it does. Um,

Should I have any apprehension towards like building these relationships, building these partnerships in advance? Yeah, I think to me, I would say the companies which are acquiring are well-meaning companies. That's where you need advisors. The topic you and I were discussing before, board members, in general, keeping a positive outlook, right? Like we have to assume the best from others.

And since these acquirers are known companies, you have to just make a few calls or talk to a few people. You'll know what their intention is. So if they're in that category. Who's making those calls? I mean, you make that sound so easy. No, calls means. Is that the investors making those calls? No, not to the acquirers. What I'm saying is the reputation of the buyer. Yeah. So for example, if company A is looking at acquiring my company as an entrepreneur,

I can go look online which are the last 20 companies they've acquired. Go talk to those founders and say, were they fishing around? Were they serious? Did they hardball? Do your research. Reach out to people. Like we tell our entrepreneurs, right? Like, hey,

do A/B testing, do focus groups, get data to make a decision. So a lot of this stuff with the internet, with AI, with LLMs, you can figure it out or go ask other humans, right? And the reason you need advisors, board members, VCs is the number of acquirers is finite in tech. Actually, the number of VCs is much more. There are not 6,000 acquirers.

I think the venture capital firms last I heard were like 5,000. They're not 5,000 tech acquirers. So number of VC firms is more than the acquirers. Most of the acquisitions are done by 20 companies. And like a VC and board member better know that. Yeah. Right. So I think to me, this is the,

inner circle, inner game, surrounding yourself with people who have that track record helps increase your probability of success and the prize you're going to get from them. Because they know, right? Like if you go and getting a diamond gift for or gold gift for your or whatever you're doing, right? Like they know if there's certain class of venture firm is involved, must be high quality and the tag is going to be expensive.

Yeah. So that's where having- That's where a brand actually does matter with who you've raised- Relationships, right? Like have they sold to them before? It's just- Was the outcome of that other acquisition positive? Did they- Correct. All things being equal, people are looking, it's more experience. Do they have experience with that acquirer? Yeah.

And that is also a trust-based thing because an acquirer, the last thing they want is, we are only thinking of the entrepreneur. What if they pay 200 million and it was garbage? What are they going to say to their board? So the entrepreneur is only one who sells, but a VC they know has been around or will be around for future deals too. So this is all trust acquisitions. There's both sides trust. It's relationship. It's a trust-based business.

Yeah. And that's why it's delicate. Well, too, you sometimes probably have investors who

don't want a company to get acquired by a big company for a small amount because they might want to prepare for something bigger with that person later? I mean, can they kind of look, I mean, that's where you could get potentially. It happens, right? But my point always is you have to decide, are you just going to build a business on your own? And some entrepreneurs don't even want to have those discussions, right? They'll say, I'll either after venture rounds become self-sustaining

and I'll IPO. Then don't talk to any of those people, right? Some people are saying like, hey, I don't think this is an IPO-able company, so I should take an off ramp. Or this is not a business. It's a feature. Then you have to become part of somebody else's product, if you will. Or it's just a bad idea. I need to do an acqui-hire. If a partner approaches me with an offer to buy, to acquire my company, and I don't know the other

I don't have partner relationships with these other companies. Can you still get them to the door? Can you still get them involved or is it too late? Do you really need those relationships all at that moment? It's never late. It depends who's on the driving seat. As in the CEO of the other company or who do you mean? Yeah, no. Is the buyer in control or is the seller in control?

If I'm a hot company, right? They say, hey, here is a term sheet. I can say, yeah, sure. I need to run a process. They know that. I need to talk to others. Or Derek is on my board. I need to talk to Derek, right? Like, so you can buy time. They know, right? Like if you are, and if you don't do that, honestly, and tell them, they'll realize they're the only buyer. Then they will not give you what you can get.

So they know if a company is an important company, if it's an important asset, if it's an important product, it's an important technology, multiple suitors will be there. So even if you don't have them, you have to create the impression that's the case. How do you do that? You have to play the game. That's where you need advisors. That's where you need board members, right? Like you have to make yourself appear. Like you don't have to lie. That's the worst thing you can do.

Just say, my board has told me I can't just accept this thing. I have to run a process. That message is enough. Now the process can be run how? You don't have to call them. Your board or investors can call. Or you can get a financial advisor who can go make those calls.

And it's just professional. It's like what people do to me, right? As a VC, they're pitching to us, they're pitching to other people. You ask them, hey, what price do you think you'll do a deal at? I don't know. That's the answer they say. Market will decide. Or who are you talking to? And it's like, well, everyone. Exactly. All the best. Or all the Sandhill firms. Everyone up and down the road. All the best firms.

So I'm saying entrepreneurs know how to do that. And the other side, it's a capitalistic world out of respect. Understand that they have choices, you have choices. And if you don't have choices, trust me, they won't even come. They've already done their work. Do you see a lot of deals that happen with a company and then it doesn't go through and then later down the road, the partnership continues or whatever, and it happens later? Is it where it's like,

Those sort of conversations can speed up and get serious and then slow down and then they can materialize later or? It happens or it doesn't happen. So I would say in some cases, what I've seen is it could be too early. Company wants X, the buyer wants to pay you one third of that because you haven't grown into that. Then you say, okay, let's agree to a go-to-market partnership and see what it is.

And then over time, what the company, the seller wants, the buyer is okay with it. So you don't know which direction or what form it ends up taking. Sometimes you say no, the acquirer gets mad. They walk away. They don't even partner with you. What do you do? I want to talk about artificial intelligence. You've spoken a lot about this. You're at the forefront of this. How?

Set the stage for us. How big is artificial intelligence going to be? My belief is, first and foremost, this is the biggest disruption we are seeing in the information technology industry.

and it's going to be like 10X bigger than anything else we have seen before. Every time there's a change, the PC industry to the internet industry to the mobile and cloud, it was a 10X. This is again going to be a 10X. So the market gap of companies and the wealth that is going to get created will be 10X of the last iteration. So when, if you look at in the last few years, what's happened with the AI native companies,

They've all grown from half a trillion, one trillion to three, four trillion dollars. So the amount of these numbers were unimaginable. A company like Nvidia has grown 10x in the last four years. It's massive. So this thing from capitalistic impact, impact on humanity is a 10x force from the last wave.

Every technology wave is a 10x force. This is a 100x force. So the impact from mobile and cloud is going to be 10x and the reason is for the first time humans and machines will work together and we are entering an era of what I call collaborative intelligence where I'll be able to get help from AI as a human to allow me to become a superhuman. So everything we do will happen faster

It'll happen better. And we'll get the super reasoning power. So our day-to-day tasks will be done by AI. It will automate things. It will accelerate our productivity. A lot of our capabilities will get augmented. So we'll be able to really focus on things we want to do and amplify our creativity. So where will AI get the most traction is things we don't want to do.

Nobody wants to wear pagers at night to answer hate mails from customers. Your site is slow, reboot it, do those things, right? So jobs we don't want to do. Second, jobs we can't do. So if machines can come do those things, things I don't want to do or things I can't do, life's good. And then there's so many unmet jobs in many, many professions that AI can come there. So I look at AI as a buddy

as somebody who's going to be around me, whether it's my tutor, mentor, advisor, friend, will allow me to do things in a team-oriented setting that weren't possible before. And everything we know and touch is going to get reimagined. So I believe we are in the golden era of venture capital. We are in the golden era of startups.

And there is like endless potential. The opportunities are unbounded. It's what one can create. I think if somebody that got to the Valley after the dot-com crash in 2005, you know, and seeing then we kind of had like this web 2.0 and then we had mobile and then we had, you know, there's cloud and there's these other waves that have come. Sometimes we look back at like

the mid-90s as somebody that wasn't there, but to say like, wow, you could just do anything and you could start a company and doing anything and it had the chance to be successful. It's so blue ocean. It's so open. And I think now being in the moment, it's easy to look back and say that, right? You were there. But looking in the moment now, how would you compare now to say like

when websites were just showing up in the dot-com era? How is it? I think it's similar. Right now, the only thing I would say is the GPU AI ML processors are theirs. Some of the startups have become really big on the models layer, but everything above that is greenfield, right? You're going to have AI-based workers in everything we do. So for example, at work,

I need a sales engineer to do demos if I'm a sales rep. AI can do that part for it. I want somebody, I used to draft mails, respond to RFPs, RFQs. Machines are going to do that work. I'm going to have, like right now, I can do chat GPT for research, get answers. Tomorrow, we'll have a

a travel agent which will do my bookings for me. I'll say complex things like, "Hey, I want to go to Hawaii. There'll be seven people, two elder parents who need a kitchen. We have our dog. We have this thing. Please plan a vacation for me." So AI is going to go do things

That will just make us better and free up time so that we can do things we love doing as humans. So productivity will improve. More money will get created. As a result, more jobs will get created. The pie is only going to get bigger. So my belief is, right, like if I play it out 10 years later, the world will get equalized and people will have access to things. And it will be a net positive things with more jobs,

more opportunities, things which we can't even imagine today. So it's the right time for people to jump in and figure out what's their ad going to be in this new revolution. And what it is, nobody knows. Nobody knows. Is every tech company an AI company now? Are you Mayfield only funding AI companies? Or can you still exist as a solution to a problem and not really leverage AI technology

to fully solve that problem? I would say, right, like most companies now, whether tech or non-tech, are going to be AI-enabled or AI-native. It's like saying, I run a business and don't have a website. Nobody will see AI, but it's going to be an ingredient thing that you use. Can you imagine a world without smartphones? 10 years back, right, like if somebody told me, what will be the penetration of iPhones?

or smartphones, right? Like we won't know. So this thing now 7 billion people in the world have smartphones. Similarly, AI will be in every application, every business you won't even know. For example, restaurants, booking. AI is going to do that stuff. I'll call, the booking will happen that way. Or I call up a plumber. They're busy doing the work. You can't even reach them.

So they will be 24-7 business. So you just don't even know where these technologies are going to get used. So customer service, you won't be sitting on frustrating lines with your travel agency online, refund my bill, airlines. A lot of that stuff is going to change. It's going to change for the better. What if I'm not running a tech company? What if I'm running a real estate company or I'm running a retail store? Should I still be...

Bringing in AI to my business? Absolutely. We are going to announce an investment in a company which is doing something very good for the real estate industry. They are going to allow real estate agents to mine their existing relationships and just help them market to them better because they have to hire people to even do a follow-up email. There's no time. They're doing showings or they're going to properties. But a lot of the work...

that B2B world has on relationship-based marketing, account-based marketing doesn't just exist. So you can have a digital worker who can do things which you could never imagine hiring somebody to do. So I think this is going to be

pervasive, whether it's real estate, plumbers, they're going to be endorsing these technologies without even knowing it. It's like Yelp. As a consumer to discover a local handyman, they had no presence. Nobody goes to their website. They go to Yelp. Similarly, how these people will even use these ingredient technologies, we can't even imagine.

Some startups are working on this stuff, right? Like they're helping dental offices. They're helping medical practitioners. It's just going around. Companies have been created. That's what I assume. And I think it's happening. And yes, some of the jobs are going to be replaced, but you feel like the pie will get so much bigger that-

It always is the case, right? Whenever tech happens, when computers came, people were worried about like, hey, I take notes on a typewriter, I'll be out of jobs. No, no, no, no. More people could write. Jobs actually go up. When spreadsheets came, accountants thought their job is over when Excel happened. It's actually like thousand X more number of people who do accounting today using those tools. Same thing is going to happen here.

Because humans are smart. They're not a machine. We created these models. We will use them to our benefit. And now you'll say again, Naveen has a positive outlook. And I mean it, right? Like humans are the jockey. They're not the horse. This is just a technology. We'll never allow it to become bigger than us. Humans are stop. We can stop it. I won't spend money on GPUs. You're going to take over my job. I won't just use it. So we are going to decide

as a society, as a business, what we want this technology to do, right? And that's how humanity progresses, right? Humanity progresses. And you just become more efficient, you get better, and you do things which weren't possible before. So we're going to grow the ecosystem. We're going to make the pie bigger. And when the pie gets bigger, everybody wins.

Everybody wins. And I think this is going to be the great equalizer. So, for example, if you look at education, tutors are only available to the rich. Using AI, everybody will be able to have a tutor. Khan Academy is already making it possible. So that's what this technology is going to do. Mayfield has a front desk. It's a venture capital firm. Our handyman doesn't. But now AI can be their answering front desk.

You call the 800 number. Sorry, we are busy. Can you make me an appointment? What time would you like? So they don't need. But they didn't take anybody's job. The poor person couldn't even afford a receptionist. Now AI can fill that job. So AI is going to go in first. Those will be the most successful companies. Go after places where somebody has money, but a human can't do that job at that money. Do you see what I'm saying? Right? Like basically...

In AI, the business model is also beautiful. I only pay for this receptionist, AI receptionist, when it takes a call. They don't need office. They don't need anything. So now 30 million small businesses can also employ digital workers. They don't even have an office. They never thought about it. They can grow their business. They can serve their customers better. And I think there might be a day where we might have one or two people companies which manage billions of dollars. I've been thinking about it.

Just one person, can they build a billion-dollar company? I think they can in financial services. Wealth management, it could happen. So this is going to create, I would say this is going to be a boom for solopreneurs. Small companies are going to get bigger because for the first time, AI is going to make affordable to them things which only the big companies could afford.

So I'm like very, very bullish on what the outcome of this would be for the world. We're not too late. The game is just starting. Yeah. This is in March of 2000. The game is just starting. Because right now people have only done training and we can do chat. It's endless opportunities, right? Like you look at anything, financial advisor,

Is there an AI-based version of it? No. AI travel agent? No. AI sales engineer? No. Yeah, we have some people who do software coding. Just look around. Every physical category became E. Similarly, it'll become A. There will be an AI version of something or the other around us. And the whole plumbing layer to make it happen is up in the air. So industries are going to get reimagined.

Technology stack is going to get reinvented and entrepreneurs should just figure out if they have domain experience in an area, how do the AI enable it? That's what the e-business and the e-commerce internet era was about. I'm a physical media company. I become online. I'm a physical retailer. So can you reimagine a business? Tech, non-tech. What does it look in this AI era? So my feeling is the AI

Opportunities are endless and it's an era of limitless potential. Any of us should not get shackled. It's a time to unleash our creativity and to just make the leap to do something big. Your best advice for overcoming difficult things? How hard can it be? If you could implant a single idea into everyone in the world, what would that idea be? The people first. If when you die, you meet God, what is the first thing

That you hope he would say to you. You're a good human being. And how do you measure your life? How much impact I'm having on others in achieving their dreams. Thanks so much. Yeah, no, awesome. Thank you very much for spending the time with me. Give it. On next week's episode. Why does this life sometimes bad stuff happen? The question is, is how do we respond and what does it turn us into? And hopefully it...

kind of refines us in a way. It refines our character, it refines our traits, it brings good things out of us that make us more patient, more caring, you know, more eager to help those that are in need because you can now sympathize because you've been in a place where you were in need.