TSP031 | Mike Edelhart – Transcription
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John Livesay:
Welcome to The Successful Pitch podcast. Today’s guest is Mike Edelhart, who is the lead partner at Social Starts. They’ve been investing in really big hits such as Pinterest and Boxed, which is Costco on your phone. Mike has so many great insights. He talks about hunting beyond the unicorn and that there are really four other types of animals to compare yourself to. There’s the rabbit, which goes very fast; think Vine. There’s a tortoise, which takes its time to become successful; like LinkedIn. Then there’s a bear, which can hibernate and go away, they had a company they invested in called Beacon Reader that did this and finally, there’s the hawk, which attacks really fast and that’s what Pinterest did.
He goes on to tell us what Pinterest used to look like when it first started and how they wanted to digitize the concept of magnets and pictures on you’re refrigerator and nobody cared. It wasn’t until people could follow the image of others that Pinterest really became Pinterest. Mike says that there’s so many ways to define an entrepreneur, but his favorite way is a socially accepted for of mania. I love that, but you don’t want to be narcissistic and you don’t want to be fear-based. You want to be right smack in the middle where you’re calm and confident and clarity is the key to being successful. Enjoy the episode.
Hi and welcome to The Successful Pitch podcast. Today’s guest is Mike Edelhart who is the lead partner for Social Starts Moment-Of-Inception investment fund and CEO of the Tomorrow Project. Mike has such an amazing background. I’m thrilled to have him on the show today. He’s involved with so many incredible startups that you’re very familiar with. We’re not going to talk about on the intro. He spent 13 years at Ziff Davis and he knows everything from how to analyze your handwriting to how to analyze whether a startup is a good pitch to fund. He’s the author of literally 22 books. I’ve never had anybody on the show with that much background. Mike, welcome to the show.
Mike Edelhart:
Thanks, great to be here.
John:
You have so much interesting insights and a great blog that I highly encourage everyone to follow, but I would love to hear, how did you go from running Ziff Davis to deciding to get into the Venture World and start Social Starts.
Mike:
Sure. Well, just to be perfectly accurate. I never actually ran Ziff Davis. I came in as an editor off the original executive editor of PC magazine and the editor of a lot of business publications and at the time the Ziff family sold, I was the executive VP. So, I’m a nerd. A nerd before it was fashionable to be a nerd and just happened to be fortunate enough to be in the science and writing about science at a time when science became much more essential to society and business than it ever had before and Ziff was, Ziff looked like a publishing company to the outside world and we published magazine, but inside it was a data-driven company determined to be at the center of the PC revolution, so we had those well-known magazines, but we also had the dominant research products in the market.
We owned C-Bold and Interop and conferences that were centered to the market, so we essentially were a partner to the PC revolution and all of us there. Jim Louderback who is part of our fund, myself, all the editors at Ziff got extraordinary experience of evaluating technology. We literally tested every single product and we created the basis for testing all the products, all the testing software, the methods, so we’ve learned a lot over that period of time about how technology actually works, how it’s spread out.
When the Ziff family sold a guy named Masayoshi Son from Japan bought Ziff and he bought Com, he actually bought all kinds of things and he took the money from all those companies and plotted in to the initial investment in a whole range of internet businesses and that’s how I got involved in technology just through interest.
I studied it in school and I always wanted to write about it. I got kind of involved in the tech scene through Ziff and then got involved in funding startups through Softbank and then started sitting on startup boards and came off some of those boards to run some startups and wound up as a partner in a big venture firm called Red Leaf here on the go and so I’ve really been doing this kind of work all along and our current fund, Social Starts is something Bill Lohse who worked along side me at Ziff and at Softbank was the original publisher of PC magazine, the president of Ziff when I was EVP.
John:
Wow.
Mike:
We felt that this revolution, the social mobile revolution would be by far the biggest scene. If you think about it, back in the day, when the PC first emerged, hardly anybody cared. The original circulation of PC magazine was 75,000 and back the point of view in the general population toward PCs was, that’s a curious weird thing and those sorry, you know, pretty much all guys, hanging out at the Trenton computer fair trading chips, you know, holding soldering guns, they can’t get dates, so this – and then think from that small population of weirdos what impact PCs had over the next couple of generations.
Same thing with the internet when the internet first emerged from Darpa and all the sort of university stuff to being the transport mechanism for distributed consumer computing. The world of folks who understood it were really part of a very small and very weird, those IETF – beads and sandals, hair down to their knees, strange guys.
Same thing, think about the impacts over the last couple of decades an now think about this revolution where right from the beginning it presented a human form. You want to gossip more? You want to date more? You want to get in touch with grandma and millions and billions of people care of this revolution from the beginning so we felt the impact would be absolutely extraordinary and wanted to be helpful so we created this fund as what we thought would be a natural sort of mechanism for a group of us in the later stages of our career to be helpful to the young teams creating the future.
John:
I love that. What I really think is interesting is the long term relationships you have from your Ziff Davis days, from the president and you being the EVP to now starting Social Starts with that same team. It just goes to the never ending, can never saying it enough, the importance of the team and the people you work with and who you start startups with, because Social Starts is in its own way is a startup.
Mike:
Well, it is, for sure. It’s very much a startup. The fund is only four years old and we agree affirmatively with you about the team. I talk to startup groups. I often point out that we could take, we’re the first investors in Boxed, which is essentially Costco on your smartphone and Chieh has done an incredible job there and we could take Chieh’s plan for his company and all of its details, those secrets, and we could give that plan to a hundred teams and 99 of them would fail.
John:
It’s all about the execution, isn’t it?
Mike:
Yeah and it’s not just about the execution. If a team decided that they were going to revolutionize bananas. Their bound by the fact that only so many people on earth eat bananas and as much as they might revolutionize how bananas are grown or transported or whatever. That’s still sort of a natural curve to certain behaviors that changes very slowly and that’s something we learned. An extraordinary entrepreneur going after a small idea can extract as much from it as possible, but it’s still a small idea. So, it’s that mix of, is this a great idea? Does it have big impact? Is this the team that understands this idea, loves one another in a fundamental way, and is capable of extracting value that’s there. So, we’re big on the team.
John:
So, would you say what makes the team at Boxed so successful is the culture they create and the ability to get along really well and be much more productive than another team would be?
Mike:
I think it’s not so much about sort of the kumbaya of we’re all friends here. I think the heart of it is clarity. What we’ve seen in the startups and we invest had what we call the moment of inception. We use that language to make it very clear that we want to be there at the beginning and not sort of floating around like a lot of early-stage, air quotes here.
So, at the early stage, the super early stage, one thing we know from experience is that most of what the team believes when they first talk to us will turn out not to be true and I think it was patent that the best-laid plan of the military survives until it encounters the enemy and that ‘s the same sort of thing with startups. When they hit the market, they find out what’s actually true and so they go through changes.
We call our conference Pivot for a reason and what’s critical is two things. One, that the team is always very clear about what the company is about and two, the leader is capable of taking that team through unexpected and sometimes radical changes. So, the company isn’t always about the same thing. Pinterest was on its third go to market when it really found what made it Pinterest and it wasn’t even called Pinterest when we invested at the beginning. So, the great teams follow their leader with discipline, but not with rigidity.
John:
I like that.
Mike:
Always know what they’re about and there are always about one thing, so I think if you took everybody in Boxed from Chieh through the most lonely employee and said, ‘what are we about’, you get the same story.
John:
I love that. Everybody singing from the same song book, basically, right?
Mike:
Everybody singing from the same song book and even if the hymn may change, everybody switches at the same time. I saw Zuckerberg do this at the latest FA conference and even at scale. I was very impressed by how he got up and said, last year Facebook was about this and now to a much greater degree, Facebook is going to be about that and everybody who follows me is going to show you how we’re now going to be about that and it was clear to that audience of developers what Facebook was saying and offering and expected from them and I think that kind of thing is how companies create value, create joy for themselves, which we think is really important. Teams that just love working together and get great joy from what they’re doing. They’re much more likely to succeed.
John:
So, there’s a little kumbaya in there that you have passion for what you do, basically.
Mike:
Yeah. Here’s what I said, well, a couple of things. One is that, and I’ve been doing this a long time, I’ve never yet worked with an entrepreneur whose stated motivation was to make money who succeeded.
John:
Great.
Mike:
And so what’s important for entrepreneurs to remember all the time that being a unicorn, becoming wealthy, getting a private plane, these are outcomes, these aren’t causes, these are effects and they’re controllable effects. So, if you go in with the expectation of I’m going to hit a home run every time I swing the bat. All you’re going to do is wrench your back, tear up your shoulders.
John:
What a great analogy. You said a couple of things Mike that I really want to hammer home for our listeners one is that you need to find CEO or a founder that has discipline without rigidity. We’re going to Tweet that out. That’s a great line. I love that line and that you’ve summed up the two things of success are clarity and having a leader that has unexpected and radical skill sets to change if need be.
Mike:
Right. It’s listening. I mean, so if you think about startups. I say often and I’ll say it here that being an entrepreneur is a socially acceptable form of mania.
John:
Great line.
Mike:
It’s not a normal behavior and if you woke up in the morning and felt like you were a normal person, you go get a job. So, everybody who is an entrepreneur has some drive inside that says, I’m different and I’m going to change the world. Now, there are very positive roots for that drive and there are some very negative roots for that drive, so on the one hand you can have narcissistic who are, I’m going to change the world because I’m the only person on earth who matters and I’m always right, and on the other hand you can have folks who are driven to succeed by deep fears and neuroses and both of those can lead to rigidity. I’m always right, so I don’t have to listen to the market.
We hear this all the time. They’re wrong, I’m right. I’m always right. I’ve always been right and those are companies that will often raise too much money, they’ll react too slowly. We’ve seen a few in the last week companies that are just suddenly cratered, because they resisted all signals from reality about what they ought to do and On the other side, the fear-driven CEO is a afraid to change.
John:
Oh got it.
Mike:
Can freeze between someone who feels they’re different, but that comes from a place of confidence and the team can feel it and they can feel it. They listen to the market and that doesn’t scare them. We were wrong. Now we’re going to do it again.
John:
Right. So, this entrepreneurship is a socially accepted form of mania is really I think one of the best lines I’ve ever heard. We’re going to tweet that out for sure and that you’re really saying that’s, you know, that mania can’t be narcissism, where you think you’re always right and you won’t listen to the marketplace or our investor nor can you come from a total place of fear all the time. You have to be in that happy medium space where you still have confidence to listen and adapt and pivot.
Mike:
That’s correct and if what it produces in the leader, the CEO, is calm. If you really, you know, in the dark of the night, when everything is going wrong and all of your presumptions, things you’ve said out loud and you raised money on turned out not to be true. If you can still believe in yourself and believe in your ability and your ability with your team to find a way to win, you’re relaxed and they look at you and go, the leader is fine. We’re fine. We’re all going to be fine and they’re relaxed.
John:
Right. It trickles down.
Mike:
Yeah.
John:
Well, this great blog you wrote. ‘Hunting Beyond the Unicorn’ is what I really want to dive into, because it’s got so many wonderful images. Talk a little bit about what the unicorn is and what it looks like, but you know, just the fact that you and Social Starts were one of the first investors in Pinterest is a topic that we could spend a whole podcast on.
We want to talk about that, but just to give the audience the other four animals besides the unicorn. There are rabbits, tortoises, bears, and hawks. So, let’s take a minute and go through what each one is and what you say here about sizing isn’t what matters, only return matters. Can you talk a little bit about that and being one of the first investors in Pinterest, you alluded to it earlier, so I just want to dig in a little bit, because everyone is fascinated that Pinterest wasn’t Pinterest. So, if you could tell us what it looked like in the beginning.
Mike:
Sure. Well, let me respond first to the question of size doesn’t matter, only returns matter. We’re a small fund. We’re a moment-of-inception fund. So, we’re there at the very beginning and a unicorn is a very rare, you know, I point out that unicorns are mythological. I think it’s after the seventh raise is the median for when companies get to being a unicorn.
So, that’s years and years and years and years away and hundreds of millions of dollars will be raised to cause that to happen, so it’s a very rare outcome and a very far away, almost unpredictable outcome in that sense. Somebody’s going to win the lottery, but the chances of you winning the lottery are functionally zero. It’s about the same thing. I think I saw in some report that it’s .068% of startups become unicorns.
John:
Wow. Okay.
Mike:
So, if all we did was try to get unicorns, we’d be in a state of shock all the time, because it’s impossible and Pinterest is a good example, so we invested in a company called Cold Brew Labs. It was three very young, very bright fellows who were working and sleeping in a seedy little pool house behind kind of derelict old office building in south Palo Alto and they were toying around this notion that so many people put visually oriented magnets and little pieces of paper and photos on the refrigerators that it must mean something. So, they were going to replicate that behavior digitally and see what happens and when they did it at first, nothing happened. Nothing happened. Here you can now do this –
John:
Nobody cared.
Mike:
The reaction of the universe was complete indifference and Guy Kawasaki, one of his good lines is, the enemy of startups isn’t the competition, it’s indifference. The entire world wakes up in the morning and goes, we don’t know you exist and if we did know you exist, we wouldn’t care to exist. Life is fine without you and overcoming that tremendous weight of indifferent is what companies have to do and so, you know, Ben and his co-founders. They have that characteristic.
So, they tried it and it didn’t work, but is there anything they could learn from that and they just kept experimenting with it and looking at different aspect of it and then this notion emerged of not just being able to pin the images, but essentially being able to follow the images of others and then all hell broke loose, because it turned out what really mattered was not just those shoes, but that the woman I most want to be, the queen of the church ladies wore those shoes or an Olympic athlete wore the shoes or a Kardashian wore those shoes and the capacity of these images in aggregate to basically be a picture of the inside of someone else’s head and the aspirant desire. I want to be like her.
That’s when Pinterest became Pinterest, but it was the third sort of version of it that began and to his credit, when he saw that effect, watching the numbers, this behavior started to deviate he jumped on it and with everything. No doubt, no – well, we should know. We found it, that’s it, we’re going for it and that openness to the market and experimentation and charge and not panicking, not giving up, not spending a lot of money, being willing to be nobody has ever heard of them until there’s a real belief that they’re on to something and then taking great risks to seize the opportunity.
That’s how Pinterest became Pinterest, but he wasn’t trying to become a unicorn. He was trying to solve a problem and take this approach as far as he could take it and it turned out he was fortunate and got a hold of almost limbic access to consumers in a way that it had never been done before and it turned out to be very valuable and he’s still doing it. The way they’re generating revenue is very careful, very controlled, really almost studious. They’re not going to run off half-cocked and do anything and that group has been like that since the beginning.
John:
They’re just now starting to take advertising or experimenting with advertising, correct?
Mike:
Turn out with revenue generation. I think, from all you heard, it’s tilting toward commerce.
John:
Shoppable pins.
Mike:
Yeah, because of the way Pinterest works and because it’s had such power, a driving, of consumers into retail sessions. There’s sort of obvious opportunity to say, you know, if you want to buy that, we can make that happen.
John:
You can. Make it easy. What was it about him at the very beginning when he just said, you know, let’s figure out a way to digitize the concept behavior of putting images and magnets on people’s refrigerators. What was it about him or the idea that you guys said we want to invest in this in the beginning?
Mike:
Right. Well, so I want to be really clear. My partner Bill went out a lot. We look a lot smarter than we actually were in this. So, we didn’t invest in Ben saying, ah. Well, there’s the unicorn of the future. We’ve done just under 200 investment in the last five years and this was actually before we set-up the current fund. So, probably go back to them, we’ve done maybe 230-240 investments and we believed in all of them, but what came through in Ben, I think, was that even though he was quite young of being very serious, very numbers driven, very calm, and not afraid.
So, we’ve felt that this was a really interesting idea. We had felt those of us from media for a while that what we call the visual vocabulary would matter that if images hit human beings at levels. Words do not and the capacity to start up moving images around in new ways was like to have a tremendous amount of power, because just the nature of images and so we were wide open to teams that were experimenting there.
John:
Well, for the listeners. You just gave some really great information on the impression that an investor like you needs to have when you’re pitching. Be calm, be serious, know your numbers, and don’t be afraid. In other words, be competent. Those are four key things that are huge for everyone listening trying to figure out how do I pitch something and be a successful as Pinterest ideally, but at least how do I get in the door that what makes people want to say yes. So, let’s dive into these animals. So, we all know what a unicorn is. The rabbit you talk about is startups that sprint to success. They get acquired too quickly and you were giving Vine as an example.
Mike:
Not too quickly, but they get – so, we’re investors and I think one of the particularities is somebody’s whose team will touch 3,000-3,300 companies this year. We see a lot of startups that teams that are obsessive about their customers if you ask an entrepreneur, tell me about your customer, they go on for hours. They act as if all investors are the same and all money is the same.
They don’t do their homework and they aren’t really thinking about who they’re talking to and just blast out what their, how they’re going to change the world and never even ask, “Is this what you people do?” And so for example, we’ve never invested in hardware. Period. We just too small. So, you can talk about hardware all day long and it doesn’t matter how interesting or fascinating, we’re just aren’t going to do it. So, you can save yourself lots of time just by doing your homework.
So, recognizing that there’s a human being on the other side of the table and that human being is doing investing for some reason on behalf of some group and who is that group? Rich family? Russian oligarchs? And in our case, we have a history of doing this well for a long period of time for better of worse. Part of our sort of standard line on the fund is among our team we’ve added at least one unicorn in each decade since the 1980s, so that’s good, but that means folks expect big returns from us. So, looking for significant returns. So, you know, 8x, 10x, more.
So, when of those – when you’re talking to me, when you’re talking to any of the Social Start partners and in the back of our head it’s always, ‘how could this produce a really big return, because that’s what our investors expect from us. Now, one way to produce a big return is become Pinterest, become worth billions of dollars and that’s kind of obviously if that happens, but another way to produce big returns is to raise four million dollars and sell your company for 100.
John:
Hello, yes.
Mike:
And so in the case of rabbits, if you happen to either buy a dint of brains or just luck or good timing, get on to an idea at exactly the moment it takes off. The market may wake up to you very quickly. Meerkat and the other real time streaming companies Periscope and all that are good examples of that that they came into awareness and created value almost instantly because the market interest and the technology sort of happened right on top of another. That’s where rabbits can happen.
John:
Got it. Love it. So, let’s talk about tortoises for a second. Obviously the opposite of a rabbit and you used LinkedIn as an example of a tortoise. Define what a tortoise is and how that fits LinkedIn if you would.
Mike:
Sure. There are a couple of tortoises in there as well. LinkedIn is pretty simple. LinkedIn was around for years, years. Eight years, nine years as this kind of redheaded step-child among the startups. It’s growth curve is a classic power curve that sort of goes slowly and then it starts to slope up. So, it was anything but an overnight success and yet, I haven’t double checked these numbers lately, but as of last summer, LinkedIn was by far the most efficient user capital among any of the startups.
In other works, the original investors in LinkedIn made more money on their money than the original other startups because they didn’t rush. They took their time and it’s a network effect, so they basically had to have everybody before it became very valuable and so there’s nothing they could do about it. If they tried to make LinkedIn overnight, it would have collapsed. You couldn’t do it that way and so they were – their growth was very appropriate to their idea. So, some ideas just take a long time.
John:
Yeah, you have to be patient. Now, the next animal is a bear, which you talk about much like spring and winter and you have an example that you at Social Starts have invested in called Beacon Reader, the original idea wasn’t going so well, they pulled back on expenses, literally took themselves into Y Combinator and re-focused. I’m really interested in that because so many founders say I’m too experienced, I’m not going to go to an accelerator. I’m not going to start all over again. So, I love to hear your definition a little bit of a bear and what Beacon Reader, why Beacon Reader is a good bear.
Mike:
Sure, absolutely. So, the idea of a bear, again, there are a couple of aspects to it. One is sometimes and relatively often the ideas the team has when it starts aren’t true. They turn out not to be right. So, sometimes those pivots are challenging. You have to completely re-think the assets, what the team is going to do, the market, maybe you’ve run through your initial money and so the only way to survive long enough to have an opportunity to win in those cases is to pull back, go into the cave, to cut back calories, to conserve energy and then the other scenario is external, so tech revolutions go through, it appears, the ones we have all seen have all had these patterns, kind of predictable patterns of something new happens technologically. It is now possible to do VR without wearing a headset, it isn’t, but let’s say two years from now.
John:
3D without the glasses almost.
Mike:
3D without the glasses where it’s almost 2.2D without the glasses right now. When that happens, there are all kinds of writing about it, everyone gets excited, There’s an initial bloom of user acceptance because the folks that have been waiting for this for a long time jump on it. There’s a hit or two and based on that, all of a sudden all kinds of money flows in and there’s a 100 companies doing it and there’s this spring of all kinds of activity and everybody’s writing about ‘it’s here, VR is the new thing. It’s the VR universe. It’s the VR century. VR America.’ and that goes on for maybe a year and then the early companies either get bought by bigger players or go under some of the pioneers frustrated and tired, because it’s never as easy as they think and then there’s this winter of discontent where suddenly there are a lot few companies and the Wall Street Journal is writing about, why don’t investors care about instant VR anymore? And you’ll get this knee jerk, oh, that happened and it was over, but,in fact, it’s not over, because what comes out of those winters of discontent is a long summer of success.
So, if you go back to, oh, the time where everybody was writing about the internet, advertising is dead in the 2000s, but everybody who bought into companies at that point, every company that survived that period of kind of disinterest is worth of a lot of money now. The investors of the company. So, that’s the idea of a bear. It can see that’s coming, you pull back, you get rational, you take in one dollar more than you spend, so that you can still be around when the market turns and when it does, you’ll suddenly start accumulating value, so it’s husbanding your resources, because you need to to find an idea that’s going to work or because you need to survive until the market comes back around.
John:
And then your fourth and final animal is a hawk, which attacks with total ferocity. Remember the team behind Tote? Well, that’s what became Pinterest and we’ve talked a lot about Pinterest. So, take a minute and say what is the hawk as compared to the rabbit, tortoise, and bear.
Mike:
So, the idea behind the hawk is and again, this isn’t really entirely – it’s emissary, mutually exclusive. One thing can turn into the other; is about this suddenness of attack. The, let me see if I can describe this right. When you realize – so ideas tend to come up – as smart as entrepreneurs are, it’s very, very rare to find an entrepreneur who is uniquely smart. So, what that means is ideas tend to pop up like mushrooms more a less at the same time in multiple places. So, here’s a team on the east coast that suddenly realized you can do real time streaming and here’s a team on the west coast and here’s a team in China and there’s three guys in Poland.
John:
It’s like The Tipping Point in Malcolm Gladwell’s thing, right? Mass consciousness.
Mike:
Yeah, exactly. So, that means unless it’s extremely rare circumstance, you’re going to have competitors and one of the other areas where startups sometimes kind of fall down in their analysis is they under recognize both the importance of and the impact of competitors. So, they’ll say we don’t have any and as experienced folks we’ll say, yes, you are. If you don’t that’s not a great sign and they won’t be idiots and they won’t be terrible and your success will attract them. So, given your success will attract competitors, the degree to which you can get radically big, radically fast relative to your opportunity is really important.
John:
That’s great. I mean, for me that’s Uber versus Lyft which is the classic example of that, right? So, let’s just recap really quickly. So, we have the obvious unicorns that everybody knows about. Uber I would say is a unicorn and then we have Vine as the rabbit, which is quick to market and then we have the tortoise.
The example there is LinkedIn taking their time and then the bear is someone who hibernates for a while and comes back like Beacon Reader did and then finally is the hawk, which is the classic example of Pinterest. This has been so useful and so helpful. I can’t thank you enough for giving us your brilliance, Mike, on all these great images, and it allows all of the founders listening to figure out what animal am I and who am I talking to when I’m pitching that and what references can I give. Mike, how can people follow Social Starts, follow your amazing blogs, etc?
Mike:
Sure. Everything we do and my blog is up at SocialStarts.com and we put it out through our social challenges, so follow Social Starts pretty much anywhere and we will get it to you and we love hear from folks. So, we welcome input companies and you can tell us about yourself on the website or link to me or one of my other partners. We invest on both coasts and even in some companies origin outside of the US when they’re coming to the US or world market. So, if there are folks out there – and in social/mobile, again, look at what we do. Media analytics, mobile, commerce, internet of things, software, and work platforms. In any of those areas we would love to hear about.
John:
Terrific. Since you’ve written so many books yourself and I know you referenced Guy’s great quote earlier, but is there one book or one philosophy that you would want to leave the listeners with that you would say, you know what, read this book or here’s my big piece of advice?
Mike:
Well, it’s not a current book and its sort of hard reading, it’s all about human beings. There’s only one set of human beings on the planet. Every success on earth is trying to get a little slice from the behavior of human beings and one of the more extraordinary books I’ve ever read about the behavior of human beings in society is called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds. It was written in the 19 century about the overarching exuberance of those times. The fads, the coffee fad, and it’s really useful to understand how people behave in groups and then how it’s possible to be calm, more logical, and actually see the truth that tulips aren’t actually valuable no matter what is causing folks to act.
So, look at that. Think, find ways to think is what I’d say. If you can think clearly and have clear ideas, you can act clearly. So, all these sort of business books and the business tidbits, they’re fine, but read some philosophy. Find some clarity. My partner is a practicing zen Buddhist. His calm is illuminating for us as a fund. So, I think it’s much more about that than it is about any particular listicle about 12 things you should do to succeed. That’s your best option.
John:
That’s great. I can see why you recommend that book because it really ties into what you’ve been saying the whole interview, which is the more calm and logical you are as a founder and the more clarity you have, as you said, think clearly and act clearly, the more successful you’re going to be. Thanks again Mike for joining us.
Mike:
My pleasure. Thanks a lot.