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

“Right, so you were talking about the idea of using giving people all these signals, creating a venture capital that does something much different than just selling money to them. Here, I'm Jamath, I'm smart because I did this at Facebook or Blank or AOL or whatever. But the pitch has always been. It's a knowledge.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a data-driven process of iteration. Sure. So the idea that if the best companies are doing it, it's not right for the smallest companies to me is insanity”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or, like, you know, to build on what you're saying, it's like Steve Jobs was there dropping acid, and that's how. Right, or Facebook just created itself. That's not true. It was iterated to perfection. Right, I'll give you one example. So I don't own an Apple Watch, but someone who owns the watch was telling me this story about a feature that they released because it was publicized, where they had a way to determine that sometimes the band would cause your phone to pitch and yaw on your wrist And they had a way of adjusting for it so that it didn't trick your accelerometer or whatever. The only way a feature like that ever gets to market is because it was measured. It was understood to be a problem, and then it was fixed, and then they knew that people actually latently had that as an issue, so then you marketed it.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can only do that with machine learning in data science. There's great resistance to it. The idea that these ideas are so analog that they just come out of the top of your head. You know, there is persistent.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Aggregating data deep inside the bowels of hundreds of companies, thousands of companies before you, and what that's left us with are these artifacts. It's a knowledge base that basically says when you try this, it works. When you try this, it doesn't work across sector, stage, geography. Now all of a sudden you can actually give people like a list of, literally like a punch list of things to help make their business better. But you can only do that with software. Right. You can only do that with machine learning and data science.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here's a great entrepreneur who wants to help, who wants to go and change something in the world and do something really interesting. Here we are as folks that have kind of been in their shoes at one point in the past. And at the same time, not only can we give them money, but the expertise of that, which is frankly the same, but now there's something else you can give, which is to say, hey, we've spent time deploying code.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a horrible, but that's how it's been. He said that's how it's been. But That's been the way it's been. Yeah, and very good description. Yeah, and I think that historical artifact was fine for a while, but think of now what is possible. This is what I'm saying is like, I guess you could continue to do your job that way, but that's just to me like so bland and lacks such courage because what you could otherwise be saying is the following.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you're talking about being a company yourself, not being here. I was just telling someone earlier that someone I was talking to some venture capitalists and one of them called himself a seller of money That's a horrible, but that's how it's been. He said that's how it's been, but it's not untrue. Like that's what venture capitalists have been. Like take my money over your money, over that person's money because I have this to offer. That's been the way it's been. It's a very good description. Yeah.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, my whole orientation about our organization is one where I'm asking ourselves, okay, the next generation great financial services organization, the next great form of capitalism will be folks like myself and Tony Bates and Mike Gaffari and Argent Sethi, folks that have run businesses figuring out how to put money to work backed by a deep operational understanding of how to build companies. Right. And that does not come.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we actually have an even more important job to do if the government is not going to fix healthcare, we need to fix it. If they're not going to fix education, we need to do it. So, how do you do it? My perspective is instead of teams of financial analysts, you now have to have teams of really skilled operators, people who have built companies. And instead of using Excel, you have to use the thing that other great companies use to build great outcomes, which is really now software, data science, machine learning.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So my perspective is our job is increasingly more important because at the same time as companies are more dynamic, the other side of our equation, the governance model is breaking.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the way that I think about it is, well, that was fine for the last 30 to 40 years, but now things are even more complicated. How do you excel your way to understanding, for example, a company like Tesla? It's impossible. You have to have a more profound operational sense of what they're doing, and you have to look at fundamentally leading indicators. And when you boil things down to a cell and try to get a numerical answer to really dynamic companies, you tend to have bad outcomes. So”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, but now not to take anything away from how decisions are made back then, but an investor or a capitalist could actually do their job because the complexity of the businesses and the things that they had to figure out was actually not that meaningful. These things weren't dynamic, they weren't changing. Then somewhere in 1985, like the whole world changed and capitalism completely changed. And the reason was because of this weird little tool called Excel. And if you really think about the advent of the mortgage-backed industry, the savings and loan industry, then the savings and loan crisis, then the great financial crisis, the boom in hedge funds, the boom in private equity, what is that? Well, what that was was a migration from a person to teams of people. And from paper and pencil and a calculator. Real computing to Excel.”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Often well, when they're both combined, is where you have these amazing outcomes like America. Now, the problem is that a bunch of these things are decaying. In fact, now we see both are decaying. And capitalists, I think, have a very important job to do, which is they vote with their money about what they want to exist in the future. And when they vote for rockets, SpaceX exists, and when they vote for other things that are not nearly as interesting as rockets, then those things can exist, right? The way that we do our job, though, as capitalists, despite now all of the complexity that you have to deal with, hasn't changed. So if you think about the thousands of years leading up to 19, maybe 85, you had mostly dudes making decisions with the sum total of a pencil. A piece of paper”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I Well, here's the best way, I think, to frame. Well, take a step back, right? It's like, what does capitalists, what function do they serve? In a well-functioning economy, right? You have these two things that should come together. An economic model, and you have a political model, right? And so the economic model that's worked for centuries as far as we can tell is capitalism And the pitilitical model that's worked in scale is democracy, right?”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You are one of my favorite people. Don't tell anyone else here in Silicon Valley. I enjoy talking to you about these things. There's so much to talk about. But first, let's talk about what you're doing because I've written a couple stories recently about things, changes you're making at social capital. Why don't we go over those and talk about where your company's headed?”
2017-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT