YouSaid · the spoken record

Keith Rabois

lines on the record: 143
first: 2019-01-05
most recent: 2019-01-05
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

“Yeah, that is going to increase. Transportation, we've looked at some transportation innovation. We haven't really invested in any. There's a supersonic plane called Boom that a lot of people find very promising. But supersonic.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is more deployment. Communications and data are incredibly important to everybody from military applications to civilian applications. So it's not surprising that...”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There will be a point probably in your kids' lifetime where rockets are taking off just like we expect planes to take off. And that will change a lot of things. The cost of putting a satellite in orbit and the delay associated with putting a satellite in orbit handicaps and hampers innovation. And so when people realize that they'll be able to put a dedicated launch into orbit for less than $5 million and that they can bank on the predictability of putting that into orbit and replacing it, there's going to be a lot of innovation that can be done in space. So I think the space rate.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this one's actually, we'll put it into orbit for less than the cost of SpaceX. And the goal is to actually be putting rockets into space as frequently as we expect airlines to take off. If you think about when planes were invented, the idea that planes would be flying every hour everywhere was probably pretty crazy. Right.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've had some investments in satellites and rocket companies, one that's already sort of pretty public is Rocket Lab, which is producing very low-cost rockets that will put satellites into orbit quickly and regularly.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah Yeah, extremely unusual that the U.S. agency is more heavy-handed and more intensively regulating than the equivalent in Europe. And that was probably going on for a while, but it has been corrected in the Trump administration. So that's one of the best areas of the Trump administration, particularly vis- ⁇-vis Silicon”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's leading to positive outcomes. I mean, these are real people that need new treatments. And I think the new FDA is very consciously aware that they have to ruthlessly enforce principles, but they also should look for new ways of doing things.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, diagnostics are a good example. The treatment's a little bit more tricky. We don't do biotech per se. Like, I mean, the actual drugs we wouldn't do. There is a nice trend of using software instead of pharma, which is interesting where you can produce the same outcome by using an application to retrain your brain in different ways. And the FDA has also blessed that. So actually one of the benefits of the Trump administration insofar as the R&D, so I think most people would find that the FDA has been much more rigorous but also innovation friendly. Yeah, that's a lot of people.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, so a couple areas in healthcare, the use of data to improve outcomes is really starting to happen, where math actually does a very good job correcting for the errors and mistakes humans make. And so we're starting to see the FDA actually approve technologies and products that use math instead of humans. And that's encouraging a positive feedback loop where people are more willing to invest in companies that are going to displace human judgment and make either access more affordable or more immediate.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We see the future. And the future is great. I mean, on all kinds of dimensions, we see fascinating innovation every week. So I'm incredibly optimistic. And these companies are going to bake over the next three to five years. So what happens in January doesn't really matter to them. It's like having a baby, in a sense, it takes a couple years to grow up before you even know much about, you know, the child.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's going to be a reassignment. There's already been a 30% correction of public market prices for technology stocks, which is a reasonable amount already, but I suspect there's a little bit more there. But I'm very optimistic about the innovation in Silicon Valley, the fundamental building blocks of technology are accelerating, like the innovation at the root level is exciting. Every partner meeting on Monday, we typically have companies present. And because we invest early,”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Raising. Raising, and I think it was because people felt that the world could be changing and shifting, and they were all trying to fuel up with money as fast as possible so that they weren't caught last, you know, in the sort of last chair standing kind of problem. So we'll see what happens in January when everybody comes back to work and everybody's in the same place. But with the market turbulence, it's certainly going to exacerbate and amplify some of those feelings. But whether it's a real correction or a temporary blip, I don't think anybody absolutely knows. As Peter Teal likes to say, the only thing he really knows is we're 10 years closer to the end of this bubble. Than we were, but no one can predict the timing.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everybody, I think, felt a little bit unease. So every company that could and every founder that could and every VC that could was raising money ahead of the curve before 2019 started. So typically December slows down for investors and for companies because they're sort of derivative from the venture capital schedule. I felt like December was the busiest of my venture career by far. And I in terms of investment.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interestingly enough, I think in the last month or two, it's really cooled down. I think you can see that certainly Series B and later level a fair amount of hesitation in pulling the trigger on monster investments. At the seed level, it's not as obvious how much impact we've seen in the last six to eight weeks. It's also a little difficult because venture capitalists canonically go on vacation in December. And it was very busy because a shockingly busy December. But I think that was the run on the bank sort of experience. What do you mean?”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this week is going to potentially shake things up, but I can see a little bit of nervousness on some entrepreneurial friends of mine's faces this week, the ones that are in town, and they're asking questions for the first time. The kind of questions that three years ago to five years ago, they were completely ignoring. And so I think the benefits of some experience are that you can see how the world shifts and that you can be prepared for it. But I think until SoftBank... The world of softbank goes through an evolution. I think it's going to be very hard to teach in quotes people the downsides of taking soft bank capital, which are meant to be.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“10 years of uninterrupted growth. And this doesn't make any sense to them. When you talk about, well, the world can change in”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“2000 or 2003 was like a new, it was called a nuclear winner here. And almost everybody you met didn't have a job, but they were out of work. And I think those who went through that exterior experience, and you can see it on Twitter, things that like someone like Bill Gurley tweets, it just frames. Your perspective in a way that you realize not everything is always up to the right and that you need to have control of the levers in your company and control of your destiny. So when the world does change, you're not caught blindsided. But if you've never been through that kind of experience, I work with a lot of young entrepreneurs that are basically post-2008 and they've been through.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think sometimes it takes time. It's hard. I mean, a lot of my job is really explaining things to entrepreneurs. I don't have any power. All I have is influence. And so I try to explain the trade-offs. And sometimes it just takes a cycle for people to see other people get burned by experience before things make sense to them. Even if you can explain things rationally without the emotional context. So for example, we grew up in Silicon Valley that went through 2000 to 2002. So to us,”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gasoline to an engine that works really well. But there's very few of those. Those are very rare. And so I don't think if Softbank makes 50 investments, maybe five at most are those kind of companies, the disciplined companies that really get product market fit without a lot of capital going to do better than the ones that chase hundreds of millions of dollars.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the theory does. I agree with that twofold. So I think the mentality of throwing money at companies and making them successful just doesn't work. I've never seen real examples of just you take money and you crown a winner. That's their philosophy. I don't believe that works. I think that's the whole history of Silicon Valley is that these upstarts with very limited resources and a bunch of misfits have rearranged every single industry. And they've done it over and over again. Every time someone thinks somebody in Silicon Valley is dominant, whether it's Yahoo or before that AOL or whoever. They get upended by a new startup that's a bunch of dropouts that have very limited amount of dollars. And so I just don't believe that money is the panacea and it's certainly not the keys to the kingdom. I think there are some companies, very selective few, where they have an engine that is polished and ready to wrath and you're just giving.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How was it? We raised a 50 Right. And so with the theory behind it, what do you think of this theory of just throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at the end? Yeah, the theory behind it. It does create, even if it doesn't affect you, it does create a mentality up and down the system.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Issues right away. So I think that that is likely to happen with a lot of companies that SoftBank invests in. I think they've invested in some very good companies that are clearly going to be successful. And they've invested in a lot of companies that probably have some fundamental sort of root cause problems and giving them a lot of money isn't probably going to solve them.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. I think it's deferred. Some companies' aspirations of going public. I think it's created a crutch for other companies that really don't have an economic model that's working. And it's created like a bank account that people can tap into and not have to solve their business problems. personally believe that scarcity to capital is a good thing, that desperation breeds innovation and that you need constraints to actually execute well and innovate. And if someone gives you sort of this pile of money, I think it creates a lot of excuses and soft thinking to some extent this is what happened to us at slide. We raised one of the first monster growth rounds. What was it? It was basically Fidelity and T-Row. That's right. We raised a 50. We raised a $50 million round in 2008. And that was kind of unprecedented actually for a private company from public stage investors. And I think it made us a little sloppy in several ways. And we thought we had sort of infinite resources and infinite time. And it didn't force us to solve our fundamental.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think soft banks had radical implications on the late stage, the growth round, so to speak. What we do at Kosovo is more early stage, what I think of as traditional venture capital, which is a seed financing or series A round, where obviously SoftBank's been deploying a lot of capital in big bets and mostly late stage investments. And that has had significant impact in the entire ecosystem.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, when you're thinking about sort of this scene right now from when you started to today, talk a little bit about the landscape now, because a lot of things have happened. You had Andreessen Horroz are sort of burst onto the scene, and coastline has been around for a long time, but still you had been known as a huge personality and also a huge reputation. But it was mostly business as usual until just recently with SoftBanks entrance with the giant massive fund that they brought in.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Meeting someone who's 19 years old or 25 years old or an immigrant that's never done anything and has no traditional credentials and saying, you know what, this person actually may be able to do that. And I'm going to give them my time, my money, and my credibility, lend them it, and see if they can pull it off. And I've been right, you know, somewhere between 30 to 40 percent of the time, which is actually pretty good in investing.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I do both, but I thought Yeah, sure. Well, the thing I actually have done for almost 20 years now is I invest primarily in founders. So I'm really a people-based investor. And so I'm basically assessing the opportunity that the people in front of me have of changing the world. If you think about how ridiculous Silicon Valley is in some ways, on a rational basis, it's completely ridiculous to wake up in the morning and say, I'm going to change an entire industry that's been around for centuries. But it happens all the time. Like people succeed, but it is kind of irrational and kind of ridiculous to start that way. So my core expertise is once in a while being correct about”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something to do with that No one wants to buy it. Right. So you were looking for just technical solutions versus market, but you do do investments in both things. Oh, I do. I do both, but I thought what would you say your sell to investors?”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Risk, and that was different for me, but I was excited to learn about that, and it allowed me to branch out into areas I hadn't been involved in, let's say healthcare investing, which I was really interested in, the healthcare system's complete mess in the US and probably globally. There hasn't been a lot of innovation recently. And I thought that I would want to spend the next decade of my life diving into new areas like that. And as a result, actually in the last six years, I've spent about 20, maybe 25% of my time and money investing in healthcare innovation, which is something I'd never been able to do before.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It means that the core risk is the technology. Can this actually happen? Can this be done? So, you know, like, for example, a very popular topic would be, can you build an autonomous driving automobile? That's a technical risk. The market is there. If someone could deliver for a reasonable price point in autonomous vehicle, there's definitely people who will buy that. But the question is, can you do it? How accurately can you do it? How many miles of data do you need? How many years is it going to take? What are the perverse side effects of deploying driverless cars? But 40,000 Americans die every year in automotive accidents and about 60, 40 to 60 percent are completely preventable. It's because the driver's distracted with his or her phone, with drugs or alcohol, with talking to their passenger. But there's no doubt that if the technology exists, there's something to do with it. Whereas sometimes you're taking market risk, which is it's very easy to see that the technology will work, but no one cares. No one wants to buy it. And so we take a lot of technology.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Other things. You guys are sort We are independent in many ways. We take feedback from each other and really learn a lot from each other, which is the benefits of being in a partnership. We also, though, one other distinction that I really thought would be meaningful is we like to take technical risk. So we invest as early as possible. We try to be bold in our bets as early as possible and as impactful as possible. Founded investment”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Though, what was the, there was a lot of different. This is pre soft bank, and was Andreessen Horowitz had existed, right? Yeah, interesting, I think, was started around 2008 or 2009. So as I mentioned, Vinokosla, who founded the firm, was on my board at Square, so I knew him quite well. Also, David Wyden, who's another general partner at KV today, had been on my board at Slide. So two of my three GPs really had been on my board for the last five or six years. And I think that's a very healthy way to start a venture relationship because you really need to have a lot of trust and confidence in each other. You don't see each other that much. We typically see each other only on Mondays.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so after 13 years of suffering through a crisis every single day and kind of the sine wave of emotions, I decided to be a venture capitalist, which at least smooths out those waves. It has less adrenaline and longer feedback cycles, but the day-to-day ebbs and flows are no longer your problem.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's also a vent But Jeff had this rule of thumb when he was managing people that about 1% of your employees have a crisis every day. And that could be a personal crisis, a professional crisis, a medical crisis, a family crisis. But when you're the boss, all those crises, these are yours. Yeah, everyone's so much.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I was an operator, but I was always angel investing for about a decade before, from about 2003 to about 2013. I'd probably invested in about 80 companies and actually enjoyed the process of meeting with very early stage entrepreneurs. We're talking about the proverbial two kids in a garage, found a lot of really interesting companies before other people knew they existed, developed a bit of a track record and enjoyed that, and sort of always thought that one day I'd want to be a venture capitalist and decided finally in 2013 to take the stress item my life, which when you're operating a company every day, there's a crisis. Jeff Jordan taught me a long time ago that 1% from”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were ultimately acquired by Google, but it wasn't a very successful ride after about three and a half years. I stayed at Google for about two weeks and got persuaded to join this company called Square, which I hadn't launched yet. It was about 17 to 20 employees. Jack Dorsey had founded it and then funded it and was working on launching it. And I got recruited to join, decided to do that, went through kind of a rocket ride, actually very reminiscent of my PayPal days, and then eventually joined Vinod, who had been on my board, Vinod Kosla at Square, joined him as a managing director at Kosla Ventures and believe this or not, March of 2013 to almost six years ago, which is an eternally.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it actually made some sense. We used a lot of data to program our games. The problem was we lacked a top-down vision, and I think you need both. You need data and a vision. And so we let users sort of vote with their feet, and we optimized around that. We also want... It's a bunch of comments.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is true. You wrote a great set of series of kind of gaming company. Yeah, it was a social gaming company on a platform.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About a year later, Reid Hoffman, who obviously had worked with us at PayPal, had been my first boss actually at PayPal, started LinkedIn. And from the very early days, I was interested. I invested in the company and then later joined full-time and stayed through the Reed regime. He eventually found a successor, a CEO, and I left to go join Max Levchin at a company called Slide that most people don't remember. People do remember Max, fortunately, but don't remember Slide, which eventually was acquired by Google.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Subsequently sold the company to eBay after being a public company and then rejoined Peter to help fund and start new companies in 2003 while the rest of Silicon Valley was dead and thought there was not going to be another wave of innovation and particularly the consumer internet wave was done we found some entrepreneurs that were still interested in starting things and were able to help propel them. I wound up joining LinkedIn.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did. I met him my first sort of fortuitously met him my first day of freshman year when he was delivering his alternative newspaper to my dorm room and I happened to be there and was interested and started chatting with him. In any event, I met Peter so like almost 30 years ago when he resumed the reins at PayPal he recruited me to move back out here. So I joined PayPal, which is a bunch of misfits losing a lot of money. We were burning $10 million a month actually at the time, which in 2000 was a lot of money. And we're running out of money very fast, but Peter sort of displaced Elon Musk as CEO. And in November 2000, I moved out here to join PayPal. And within a year, we were able to turn the company around, make the company actually profitable, file to go public, right, actually literally filed the day before 9-11, and still was able to have our IPO in February 2002.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. So actually, I started as a litigator on Wall Street and moved out here in 2000 when Peter Thiel became interim CEO of PayPal in September 25th, 2000.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wish I was a co-founder, though, right? Yeah, definitely a part of the mafia. Peter and Max are technically co founders with Elon.”
2019-01-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Keith Rabois · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT