YouSaid · the spoken record

Chamath Palihapitiya

lines on the record: 166
first: 2017-08-28
most recent: 2017-08-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And they are created because to come up with the 10,000 scenarios takes true creativity. But to really understand the psychological reaction of a consumer to it, that is what you test. It's like Apple can create a beautiful watch, but to realize that the thing shuffles around on your wrist and to adjust for the yaw. Quantitative.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this is a person who does it manually. He manually A b tests five to ten thousand jokes and skits and not just the jokes themselves, the timing, how he lands it. And when you see it up close, You think that this guy just woke up and was just funny?”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, like, look, I'll tell you some stories that are kind of crazy, but like some of the most creative people in the world, literally, I'm not going to say who he is, but he is an unbelievably well-known comedian who has landed some of the most interesting content of the last ten years.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Distract them doesn't get into a Twitter position. Away from the data, I think there is an element of creativity. You're talking with Beyonce. There's a creativity that is deep within that company, it seems like it.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then B, that they can figure out a narrative so that the public equity part of their story kind of doesn't distract them from being created.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can you have right? I mean, they've proven pretty resilient. Yeah, they are. They really are. And he seems, at least on the outside in, a pretty thoughtful, creative person. My only hope for them is, A, they get more quantitative and data-driven because I think it can help at the edges.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think the whole equity story now is a distraction that they have to overcome. Meanwhile, they have to land the next great product iteration.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think it's a really interesting business that has some great assets. And I would love to get into the bowels of that company and really figure out how to make it grow. I think we could do some pretty cool things. I've never met Evan, so I can't even say I've had the conversation.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They have to deal with this kind of distraction. So, I think the biggest takeaway to me from Snap is that the fundamental process of getting public just needs to be completely fixed because it is corrupted.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An unbelievable awareness and understanding of how to consume information. And they're going to continue to push that now. Whether that means that they'll never really get a moat because Facebook copies it, that's less of my concern. My concern more is like, how does it tax the creativity of those people”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel bad for the company. Otherwise, what they should be left to be doing, because whatever you say about that company, they have created.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, thank you. And the reason is because, you know, like what Morgan Stanley did, in my opinion, is unconscionable, which is when you spend weeks with a management team and then you come out, right? You generate a model and you put a price target and then you take them out public. You had the most access to that company than anybody in the world. And you put a price target on it, $28, $29 a share. And then they miss earnings by $4 million. And then you're like, we made a mistake. And then the price target is $16, and then it trades another fifteen to twenty percent below that price. And now I think, you know, so that to me is just like, I just like, I can't.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, in terms of like information consumption, I think it's great. I just think from a product perspective, it is now one generation behind the times. This summer, I really started to get into stories for the first time, mostly because of what Instagram brilliantly merchandised it to me. And then I would switch back and forth between it and Snap just to kind of really figure out the use case. And what I realized is like, it's just completely changing information consumption. And so the thing that Twitter has to be very careful of is all of those users are also probably Twitter users. And it's not... That complicated for you to have one or two turns of the dial, and I think discover on Snapchat shows you what that looks like, where a more visually interactive, snackable form of Twitter becomes the way. They try.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think you need to have one or two of the existing large shareholders. So what that really means is an institutional and or a steed bomber basically decide that he can, they want to participate in a strategy to fix it. Is it fixable? Absolutely. Would it be a fun thing to do? Absolutely. Would it be valuable for the world? Absolutely. Could you make a lot of money? Absolutely. But I think it requires day-to-day full-time leadership and a vision. And that probably best, in my opinion, comes from the outside at this point.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It does not make sense with respect to how you could do either a take private or a hostel yet. I think like the stock price needs to get to sort of like the $11 to $12-ish range.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Its biggest problem right now is the decay in human capital that's happening within that organization. And there are just too many other interesting good companies that one can go work at if you are a very credible, talented contributor at Twitter. And the problem is in the absence of them completely kind of like figuring out their true northern star metric and like the next version of product market fit, it's a thing that just kind of like stagnates and just kind of decays from a product and engineering talent. And then eventually that seeps into the quality of the business. Right.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ego is a very kind of thing, right? Because it can empower you to do things, but ego is a very corrosive thing, which is that it can entrench you in a set of decisions that fundamentally about outsiders perceptions of you versus your true north internalization.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, yeah. I remember when I kept saying it, but over here, and then I realized they liked wearing their suits and their cars, and they just liked it and they weren't going to change. And they spots put their names on it”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, yeah, you know, to be a producer meant something. And then here you have this company of like a few hundred people, now a few thousand people who are like, yeah, I'm just going to charge eight bucks a month and I'm just going to completely fucking blow it up. And so when it happens, it happens fast. And maybe we're the version of the $8 a month.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hollywood is a perfect example, right? You had a bunch of people unbelievably ego driven, ego-ridden, ego-filled, right? Power brokers, power mongers, betrayers, cajolers, like all of these people. sitting on top of what really wasn't a huge industry. It's kind of a meh industry. But it had like a lot of social capital.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the way you make your decision about your careers like the following, I suspect, which is Well, listen, you know, my kids are in grade eight, grade nine. You know, I got five or six more years. I still think the industry is going to be reasonable by then. You know, I'll get to where I need to be, and I don't really have to contemplate career change. And I can kind of live the lifestyle I want for the rest of my life, pay for my kids to go to college. There's like all these other things that come into decision making. A version of that, although a much higher class problem exists among these VCs, which is why they just don't need to. They're going to bide their time, and then they're going to get”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's like I said, it's easier if you are five, six, seven, eight, nine guys sitting around a table making millions of dollars a year to not fuck with what's working. And really think about it in the following way, Carol. If you're an ad salesperson back in the early 2000s, you could probably see that your ad sales job was probably going to get impacted by Google and then ultimately Facebook, et cetera. Like let's just say you were selling yellow pages.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's all these things that go into building a good organization. We do it. Well, we try to do the best we can internally and then separately. So we try to go outside of Silicon Valley to find these entrepreneurs we can celebrate externally.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we really are. And also, like, you know, we check ourselves Like when shit goes south, or there's behaviors that we don't like, we get together, we talk about it, and we fix it. And that's also hard. You know, we do these all hands and it's just like they're complicated because we get into these deeply nuanced decisions. For example, like our decisions are really important because the knock-on effects are huge. Oh, well, here's this great business. And we've decided that actually it went from great to not so great. And we had tried our best and we couldn't support them. And what do we do in these situations? These are complex things and we have to explain to our team why, right? The why of how you make these decisions is critical.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I just think that's like just to know that. It's not, we're never going to have to do it, but to know it's like, okay, what else will they do that I can count on them to do? One of them is mentorship and guidance. And so we as an organization are actually like pretty cool. Like we're good people.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tony Bates. Tony Bates, Mark Masvinsky, you know, Mike Gafari, Argent Sethi. If we had to make sacrifices in compensation to bring somebody in, I think we all would have won would do it instantly.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's tough to do. And I have found that having other operators who have Gone through this process, empathize with that struggle, and then they take more care. And they're willing to make sacrifices so that at the edges, you know, like me, Tony,”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and so you learn things from them. They have a certain kind of humility about them. That's really helpful. And then they're more open-minded about the types of people that they're willing to coach and mentor. And then you have a different class of young people that you can bring in and bring into the organization. You know, we just hired this. We just had this amazing data scientist. Her name is Kelly Zhang. And she was at Sanford and she was graduating. And she kind of had her pick of jobs and she was going to go back and do a lot of nonprofit work in Africa. And she had done some amazing work. And she's data scientist, like a star. And we were able to convince her, like, hey, give us a shot. And, you know, what we'll be able to do is you'll be able to come and again help build this knowledge base that helps all kinds of entrepreneurs, including these entrepreneurs in Africa. But in order for her to be successful here, we had to onboard her in the right way. We had to give her the right mentor. We had to give her the right visibility. That's tough to do.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then separately, what we do is internally within our organization, we really try to gut check who's at the table. And so, what does that mean? Like, for us, we love operators. We love folks that have kind of been in the grind doing stuff. We also love folks who have warts. Who have gone through, like, you know, they have lashes on their backs. It didn't all work.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're living Westeros. Yeah, exactly. Every startup looks great. I've heard of every mission statement possible. You become fatigued, right? And you become a little cynical. And so one of the things we do is we try to go outside because you can find all these really interesting people. And if you can celebrate them, and there's like ways in which I think we can do that, which would be really interesting at some point to talk to you about.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go Essentially, well, one of the things that we really believe strongly in is sort of the power of entrepreneurs outside of Silicon Valley. So everything that happens here is magical. And we're all lucky to kind of be a part of it. But the reality is the people that are not here tend to be dramatically more earnest and open-minded.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that's what it really speaks to in the valley, which is that at the end of the day, once these businesses become commercial enterprises, they're like every other business. Right. And they effectively do decay, which is what causes them to eventually be decay.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're at best 10% or 20% aligned And what that speaks to is the fact that you just have really a very difficult way of having operational control over values and culture at scale. That's really what it speaks to. And so, you know, you start things, for example, like the 20% time was probably for like Georges Harrique, who if anybody knows, is an absolute genius. He is a superstar of superstars. It probably was like where George was like, you know, one day a week I'm going to quote this other thing that also changed the world for Google. By the 75,000 employee 20% time is kind of like, oh, you know, I'm going to write memos, I'm going to build. I mean, so I think there's a decay that just naturally happens in organizations. And it just takes a very special kind of discipline and focus to want to fix it.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. But then as you hire more and more people, you basically have less and less aligned people. And then that thousand ring, which is your 75th,000th employee.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I've always equated sort of what I call alignment to a tree, right? Alignment in a company is like rings of a tree. So if you cut down a huge redwood, what you notice is there's many thousands of rings. And that pretty much sort of embodies how a company works, which is we're at the center. You have the founders and the core sort of like 100 or 200 zealots. And they are 100% aligned, right? And when you think about that original group at Google, what a master class of technical, just, I mean.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I guess it's fairly interesting, but how many people came to his defense about that was interesting. And I was sort of like, you can say that on the corner on Charleston Road, but not right inside of Google. It was interesting. It was an interesting thing how much support he did have until he went sort of alt-right. And then it went off the rails.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They do. They just get pretty nut Yeah, I agree on that. To be honest, I have less of an issue with you saying it. It's just kind of where's the operational control so that you can just bumble around for months working on some random memo. Right.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know. I get it. I know. No, but they have like nine places for people to do this stuff. They do. They just get pretty nutty. They get to say whatever they want at any time they want. And now they're used to it. And when you actually say, oh, by the way, you can be fired for some of it.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This reminds me of when at Facebook I took four months off and I wrote my unified theory of relativity and no one read it”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, because Google's been one of these places where people just get to say what they want all the time. I mean, I've been in meetings where they discuss Sergei's shirt and insulted. So, you know, I've been in those early.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you can tell me if this is true. And I mean, I'm not completely up to speed on this. I didn't read it, but my understanding is that he was part of a group where Google actually asked him to write this thing. Is that true?”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. What's interesting is they become real hot button issues. Like, look what's happening at Google with James DeMoor and who keeps saying one appalling thing after the next every time he's interviewed.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Will somebody else thoughtfully and say, hey, listen, just FYI, blah, blah, blah, and then you learn, and then in the same way you repay that favor in a way that's non-threatening.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the question is can we all now become a little bit more empathetic and say, you know what, we're all going to find ourselves where against something or somebody or some group of people, we all have and carry a latent bias.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But there's so many great people who don't believe like that's a great fit for them, right? So, you know, do we need other forms of that? Absolutely. Should they be by definition more inclusive? Absolutely. Should they include people that are not necessarily CEOs so that you get a more inclusive group? Absolutely. These are like obvious things, right? And so if you have that, you have like a mechanism now to actually support people. And then you have a mechanism to teach people. And then separately, like when you find like these small edge cases, it's just so easy to let it go the way that somebody says something, the way that somebody does something. And we all do it.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, how do you overcome that? Well, one is you have to have people that give a shit. And when you see it, you root it out. Fast and you act decisively. It does not matter how important that person is, how they've behaved in the past, how much money they've made you. You put them on ice and you put them on a path to get better or you kick them out. Period end of story. Number one. Number two is then on the other side of that you have to have a support infrastructure that creates a different way of giving these people an outlet so that they feel supported. So for example, you know, there are so many great people in YPO.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's all of the conscious and unconscious bias. It's all the little snide remarks. It's all the ways people are included and excluded. That's the stuff that's super corrosive”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that there's a couple things. One is when these things happen. So I actually think I don't know. I hope that this first wave of the obvious stuff, I mean, this is a terrible way to describe it, but the low-hanging fruit of sexual harassment. Okay, great. Maybe we've dealt with that. Here's what's much more insidious that we now have to.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think men have a very kind of like a very hierarchical way in which they impose power. So it's kind of hard power. And I think they love the bravado of that idea of like, oh my gut told me. Listen, I do believe that your limbic system is a very powerful.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's the quote? It's like, you know, it was a billy bean quote, we're not hiring these guys how they fill out their genes, we're hiring them for a bunch of statistical things. Why does that?”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT