Many of us, are aspiring entrepreneurs, so we'd really quite like to be like you.

And, many others, would also like to pitch to you.

>> [LAUGH]

>> Actually sitting here makes me, gives me a sense of how intimidating

that must be, so, I won't, I won't wish it for much longer.

>> [LAUGH]

>> And perhaps, perhaps we could, just start by outlining

the, the three main topics I'd love to cover today.

The first is your views on tech and venture capital trends.

The second is, how you assess entrepreneurial DNA.

And the third is your views on leadership and your

leadership experiences, that, that you've had throughout your, your esteemed career.

And so, if we could perhaps start with the,

that first, tech trends, and go with something topical.

You mentioned last month at the Goldman-Sachs

conference, that tech was not in a bubble.

Rather, it was in a mature deployment phase.

And then the WhatsApp deal happened.

And Mark is on the board of Facebook.

So I just wanted to ask you, what do you

think about that deal and how are you thinking about evaluations?

>> So I, unfortunately, I can't, ten years, ten years from now

I can come back and tell you all about the WhatsApp deal, but

right now I'm on the, I'm on the, I'm on the Facebook board

and I know that you all would not come visit me in jail.

So I will, I will keep that one to myself.

so, there's a couple of big things.

So, just in terms of thinking about what we've been through in the last 20 years in

Silicon Valley, some people in the room are

old enough, you may remember there was a bubble.

and, it was a fairly big deal, in sort of 1998 to 2000, and there was

a very profound crash, which was deeply traumatizing,

for those of us who went through it.

And then we went through this extremely

long period of, basically, you know, years of

pain followed by then, sort of, what I think of as, as very slow recovery.

I think it's actually been an object

lesson in the psychology of markets and bubbles.

I think that, people are much more highly sensitized to bubbles after a bubble.

If you could be sensitized to them before a bubble, you could make a lot more money.

But people get highly sensitized and so there's this phenomena of, of

trying to close the, the barn door after the horses have escaped.

And that, that is a lot of what all the

bubble talk in the last, ten years has been about.

And so we, we could talk at length about kinda why I think, in fact,

tech is not now in a bubble and has not been in a bubble since 2000.

the, the deeper thing, the more interesting is this follows a historical

pattern, which is what I talked about at the Goldman Conference, which

is based on the, the best thinker on this topic is an,

is an economist named Carlotta Perez,

who wrote a book called Technological Revolutions.

It's probably the single best book.

Like, that book and The Innovator's Dilemma are probably the two

key books that are really critical to understanding how this industry works.

And so she describes in her book, she describes

a general model for the deployment of new technologies.

And then how technologies intersect with financial markets.

And so she's got this whole

thing, and it's basically this multi-generational process.

And there's what, it's basically these two big, sort of phases of it.

There's what's called the installation phase

and there's what's called the deployment phase.

And it turns out in every single case and

this includes railroads and, like, lots, electricity and steam engines

and lots of prior new fundamental technologies, there's always this

just gigantic bubble and then crash kind of halfway through.

And historically that marks the transition from

the installation phase to the deployment state.

The deployment stage, you could argue, is

where the actual interesting thing, things happen.

It's where all the tech-, all the new technologies actually start to work.

They actually make it into everybody's hands.

They actually become cost effective and we actually

find out how to actually use all these things.

And so that's the phase I think we're in, in now.

You know, without talking about the Whatsapp deal in particular,

it is interesting to note that the companies that people think

are overvalued today, generally either have billions of dollars of revenue,

which was not the case, in, in, in, in the 90s.

For example, Facebook, people argue Facebook as an example.

Facebook went from $0 to $10 billion of revenue in less than ten years.

And so that is definitely not what happened in the 90s.

The other thing is the companies that people debate

today, for the most part, have extraordinarily high customer, count.

user, user count.

Market sizes have expanded gigantically and so you've

got these things now that people are arguing

about that have, in some cases, a half

billion users, on their way to a billion users.

And if people want to take a position that you

can have a large scale internet service that's worth a

billion users that's not gonna be worth anything, you, you

could take that position, I'm not sure you would recommend it.

>> Yeah, no, that makes sense.

When you, as you say, when you look at the, the cost per user, it's

actually only $36, which is much, much less

than in many others for the What'sApp deal.

But another thing you, you previously mentioned was that, MBAs

flocking into the tech sector is a sign of the bubble.

So to play devil's advocate.

>> Yeah.

>> Many of the people here are flocking to the tech sector.

>> Yeah.

>> So, could that, perhaps, be a sign of a bubble?

>> So things are heating up.

And so, [LAUGH] Historically, there's actually

been, and I suspect everybody in the

room knows this, there has been a

direct correlation between, PE multiples and, MBAs.

tilting, tilting, tilting into the, tilting

into the, the tech industry, for sure.

So I think something different is actually happening.

I think something different is happening with how companies are getting built.

And maybe I can do the long version, kinda the, the slightly long version of

this, which I, I think there's actually a whole new, a whole new way companies are

being built in the last ten years and, and I think that business people and MBAs

turn out to be very central to it in a way that's different than the past.

So I kinda divide the story of

how technology, the great technology companies got built

kind of in the three phases and I think we're in the third phase now.

The first phase was in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s.

And it was so crazily hard.

If you talk to people who were in business then or you

read the stories, it was so hard to build a new tech company.

It was such an unbelievably, sort of exceptional thing to do that you,

you, you only really have these really extreme characters who, who would do it.

And there were a pretty small number of them.

And they were extreme, extreme characters, like they were, they

make all the current, like, high octane entrepreneurs look like wusses.

And the ones I'm thinking of, Thomas Watson Senior.

If you want to read, like, what it's like to work

for somebody who's harsh, read the book on Thomas Watson Senior.

You know, he makes, he makes all

of today's entrepreneurs look like cream puffs.

>> [LAUGH]

>> He would just literally sit in his staff

meetings for like five hours and just scream at his,

scream at his guys, there's just this, then he built

this astonishing company, IBM, off the other side of that.

David Packard.

David Packard, actually, was quite a character.

He, David Packard, people now remember for the HP way and for kind

of that whole warm and fuzzy, you know, kind of approach to running companies.

When, when David Packard was actually running HP, he had two nicknames.

One was Pappy, which is kind of what

people remember in a kind of paternal instinct, type.

His other nickname was the Mean One.

And he similarly would just, you know, tear people apart.

And then Ross Perot is my favorite example.

Ross Perot built the first great outsourcing company,

one of the big tech successes in the 60s.

And of course, you know, he was fantastic as a business builder

when he came into contact with the American public, people went, what?

and, you know, again this sort of extreme personality.

So you get into this, this kind of, this

sort of will to power thing that was happening.

and, by the way, the VCs in those days, I think, were very similar.

Tom Perkins, who's become re-famous again lately, you

know is, is the same kind of character.

He's, he's an ex-, he's a very, very

extreme character and, and, and he always was.

But that's what it took, you know, for him to do

what he did in the 70s, and 80s in venture capital.

So those were kinda the extreme days and then I think both VC and

entrepreneurship, tech entrepreneurship, sort of professionalized, and

so you had a lot of VCs then.

And this includes great VCs, John Doerr, Mike Morris, Jim Breyer, you

know, who are business people or investors first, and, and never ran companies.

And then you have this kind of move through the 90s where you had this kind

of default model where the one thing everybody

knew was that founders couldn't possibly run their companies.

And so you would have a founder and then you would basically promote or fire them

to chairman or CTO and then you'd put in a professional CEO as fast as possible.

And I think what happened is that model just got extreme.

And i think by the late 90s in the Valley, we were mostly building

companies that were kind of shells, or, you know, kind of like puff pastries of

companies where, you know, they didn't really

have, at the height of the bubble in

'98, '99, the products that were getting built for the most part weren't very good.

And these companies were kind of on this bomb run to get public as fast

as possible, and you had all these catch phrases, like go big or go home.

Or my other favorite one at the time which was, forget details, just do deals.

And so you have this really kinda

mercenary, hit and run approach to building companies.

And then all those companies vaporized after the crash

cuz it turned out they didn't have valuable products.

They didn't have deep engineering capability.

And then all the engineers who worked

for those companies hated working for those companies.

Cuz they were completely sales-driven, sales-led,

these kind of mercenary kind of exercises.

At, at the, at the height of, of, of how bad it got.

Now I think you've got the exact opposite thing.

I think the pendulum has swung all the way in the other direction, which is, now

we all understand and take for granted, founder

CEO, technical founder CEO is a good thing.

You know, Mark Zuckerberg is kinda the apotheosis

of kinda the, the idea that we have now.

And so now what's been lost for a lot of the entrepreneurs.

A lot of the entrepreneurs are engineers, but not business people.

Now what's been lost is a lot of the actual art of building a business.

and, in particular, what's been lost is the art of sales and marketing.

And a lot of today's founders, one of the

big issues we deal with is they're very technical.

They're very product-centric.

They're building great technology and they just don't have a clue about sales and

marketing, and what's more is they almost have an aversion to learning about it.

It's almost like a post traumatic stress kind of

thing, you know, like 15 years after the crash.

And so now the challenge for a lot of

these companies is how to take what are actually fantastic

products and fantastic technology and then integrate in top-end business

thinking, top-end sales and marketing

thinking, and top-end operational thinking.

So I think we have actually collectively have

a huge opportunity to put the pieces back together.

And I think that's what the next five years are going to be about.