YouSaid · the spoken record
Mark Leslie
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- 2022-07-21
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- 2022-07-21
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“I think there's a difference between being humble and being indecisive. And I think it's a question of making that decision. You know, when Abraham Lincoln finally drafted the Emancipation Proclamation, the majority of a cabinet didn't want him to publish it, didn't want him to release it. And yet he knew that that was the moment, that that was the time he had to do it, that he had to make that decision and move forward. And I think that kind of decisiveness is crucial. So you've got to take responsibility for making the decision and moving forward, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't gather all the inputs and be open. If you're humble, then your staff, your team can come up and say, you know what, Hennessy, that's a really stupid idea. And if you do that, it's going to come out bad. Then you say, okay, well, you're probably right. I need to rethink this. That's fine.”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you can succeed while being humble if you're also ambitious at the same time. Classical person who's humble and ambitious is Abraham Lincoln. He's just got to maneuver things over an extended period of time. He has to go to war, but he was a very humble person. I mean, and I think that combination, what humility does for you is it removes the barrier to asking for help, to admitting that you've made a mistake, which for many people, that's a fundamental thing. Look how many of our leaders won't admit that they made a mistake, right? And won't ask for the advice of others.”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, exactly I agree. And I know this sounds so hokey, but I'm going to say it because I don't think people really appreciate how unique it is, the generosity of mentorship. And a big theme of your book is about mentoring and molding the next generation of leaders. So let's transition to talking about what some of that mentoring and molding principles are. So each chapter is devoted to a specific principle. Humility, empathy, honesty, transparency. There's different levels of that. But there are things that everyone say about leadership. So I'm going to challenge you to convince me what is the nuance take on why humility matters. And by the way, on that one, especially, I don't know that many humble leaders, quite frankly, that are really successful.”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great argument. I remember a startup founded at Marx Alma Mater University of Illinois. And great group of people, they could hire great young engineers because it's one of the best engineering schools in the country, but they couldn't get the kind of middle and upper level management there. Right, exactly. And so they ended up moving the company to the valley because there was lots of depth there. If you look over history, I mean, Heulit Packard was there, then talent from Ulett-Packard helped build Sun, talent from Intel, helped build the first generation of fabulous semiconductor companies. And that spread out over time. And that's one of the great things that happens in the”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think when I see a lot of the startups coming, I mean, that's what they're doing. They go rent a house and squeeze more people into it than you ever thought were possible, right? But it doesn't matter because they're working 60, 70, 80 hours a week.”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As sort of this private tunnel, right? It's like a patch, exactly into this public infrastructure. The newest trend that I've seen, because I'm friends with a lot of 20-year-olds, they are doing a lot of co-housing arrangements where they're all renting big houses with like 20, 15, 10, 8 people. And our friends would never have thought of doing that when I was in grad school and undergrad. It would have been like two roommates at most.”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we are. Our cities and the state have such dramatic issues. And yet you pull out the high tech sector. I mean, the state and the city of San Francisco will collapse. So we've got to think about it. And it really, you know, the younger generation moved to this area, but without that kind of suburban dream of, oh, I need the large house for the law. I mean, they'd rather have something maybe a little smaller, not have the big yard to have some nice parks, have some open space, and by the way, be able to walk to three restaurants and a movie theater. And that's a different view than the valley grew up doing. Then you've got to figure out how to make the transportation network. It may be that rather than rely on government, we've got to get the companies to play a much bigger, forceful lead in pushing governments to do the right thing.”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We may be the victims of our own success given land and traffic and cost of housing. We may be laying the foundation for some other Silicon Valley area. But it's got to be a place where people want to live. And that helped bootstrap it. And so we should be looking and thinking, where is that going to happen next? Where is that a kind of opportunity?”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know that there are 80 or 100, so it is going to happen in China. I have no doubt about it. The government is pouring enormous amounts of money into building their top half dozen research universities. The people are very entrepreneurial. There's a lot of risk capital available. There may be some issues around liquidity and exits that are a little difficult, but they'll work that out over time. It surprised me that nobody in the U.S. has built a real competitor. In fact, just the opposite has happened over the years.”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, build some great universities because they are a center of innovation. And many of the ideas which build not just a single niche company but help transform an entire industry and create an entire industry come out of universities, build the rest of the ecosystem out. I mean, the fact that Venture was out here and people were comfortable with it, the fact that you had legal firms who knew how to work with startups and make that work. But risk tolerance is a big part of it. You can fail in the valley provided you had a reasonable strategy and a reasonable set of goals and reboot. And it works okay. That's not true in many parts of the world”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you're a young person, you've got multiple faculty offers, you might be interested someday in taking your technology out. Where's the place to come? Well, it's pretty obvious where the place to come is, and that's a big benefit to the university in terms of recruiting people.”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there's also some presumably benefiting the place where people feel like they have a lot of flexibility, where the place that encourages creativity, the place that encourages ventures, that presumably will play a role in attracting”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A good question. I think we're in a tricky position right now, especially around the machine learning AI area, where there are lots of faculty who are leaving. And that will hurt the industry in the long term because that means we're eating the sea corn. I'm a great fan of faculty members who go out, commit themselves to a company for some period of time, but say clearly that their long-term goal is to go back to the university. That works well. I think if all the faculty leave, then we will have a problem long-term.”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mark has the great experience in doing this, but my view of people think of their technology licensing office as extracting blood, as opposed to being partners with their entrepreneurs. And the purpose of technology licensing from a federal government's viewpoint is the university should get their technology out there. If they focused more on that, that would be great. And be more flexible with respect to faculty. My experience is the faculty members I know at Stanford have gone out and started companies. They're better researchers. They're better teachers. They're all round better because they have a wider range of experience. And most of the students we educate, they're not going to become future academics. They're going to go work in industry. So a faculty member that has experience from that is actually a better teacher.”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two part time professors. I mean, here's the reality startups require a tremendous amount of work and effort and time. And you make real commitments to customers and teams and investors. And early on, while you may have a great idea, the investment is in you. And so there's really a mismatch and expectations between someone giving you money, a team coming to join you if you're not going to be there long term. So we like to know if we're investing in someone, whether they come from academia or not, that they're going to stay with the company for the duration of kind of the team and the investment. Now, that doesn't mean that a part-time professor doesn't come in and help out, right? I had two, and they helped out a tremendous amount. But what we like to see is someone that is fully committed.”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think even in complex organizations, universities like to have a very slow, deliberative process. But in a complex organization, all decisions are gray when they get to the top. And so you've got to get comfortable making decisions, making calls in that situation. And I learned that in the startup environment. And I wouldn't have learned it would have taken a long time to learn in a university.”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's interesting. Even enterprise companies now are having this type of characteristic. So it used to be the case you're like, oh, consumer company, it's kind of a popularity contest. You'll have three companies that all look the same. One will get adopted, two won't. But the enterprise was kind of Cortech, and then you could actually talk to the buyer, and then you could predict somewhat whether it's going to do well or not, or at least whether a category is going to do well or not. But what's happening now is especially because developers are so influential in the enterprise and developers are also kind of fickle and they have their own philosophies and so forth, whether or not a company is going to do well is somewhat independent of technology often and someone independent of the approach they take. And it's more like, you know, do they become the popular one that they use? So I think this is something we see across the industry.”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think probably one of the biggest shifts the space of startups has changed dramatically. You know, when we were starting, our goal was to build a product that was more efficient, that solved some particular problem. Now with so many software companies, the whole big question is, you know, will the dogs eat the dog food? I mean, is it really going to get traction? Is it going to go viral? I think that's a very hard thing to predict ahead of time. I mean, look, I was sitting at Google when Facebook came along. Nobody foresaw how big social media. I mean, some did. Mark did clearly a few other people. But most of us didn't see how big it was going to be. And that happens all the time.”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, for me, it was if you have a crisis and you've got to take a tough step, do it quickly, get it over with, and move through, reset the clock so you can then charge ahead. And that turned out when the financial crisis hit, you know, Stanford lost billions of dollars of its endowment. About 28% of the endowment vaporized in a six-month period. So there was no way we could continue to spend money the way we were. We were going to have to go through that process again. I realized, you know, that's going to lead to five or ten years worth of small budget cuts that are going to not be very efficient and we're going to not be able to do anything new. So we sat down and said, we need to do this quick.”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we had a situation where we had probably expanded a little bit fast and the first CEO, remember this is a bunch of three technical founders. We didn't know anything about really running a company. He had expanded too fast on the evidence of the first customer, and we had too many people. And we were about to run out of cash. So we had to kind of do a reset on that. We had to go through a layoff, which was a really tough situation, 120 people. You got to lay off 40 of them. You know everybody. And then the CEO asked me to get up at the Friday TGIF and give the rally call for the company how we were still going to be a great company. And this was a small hiccup on it. But I had to learn from that process and re-energize the company.”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know what, Nicera, and before you guys were acquired by VMware, I remember you wrote about how you guys actually had some early adopters, but then you had sort of a hump. And you talked about too, how you had initial fasts and then you kind of stall. And so one question I have is like when you get to that moment coming out of academia and then into industry, what sort of tipped you over to sticking it out and then figuring out how to get over that hump”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This actually happened to me twice where I'm like, oh, like the paper's done, the research is done. I'm going to do the next thing. Now I want someone to adopt it and I have the conversation. And then they won't put the effort or whatever. And in both cases, I ended up just selling it them. And in the cases of companies. And I think it does two things. One of the things it does is actually just qualifies because if you ask somebody for money, like if they're actually not interested, they'll say no. And the second one, if you get a transaction to happen, you actually have some skin in the game. You actually have something behind it. And so I actually tell this to a lot of academics coming out of industry now, like, listen, like, it's hard to give something away. It's much, much easier to sell it, especially if you want to have impact afterwards. Well, and I propose, I propose the third rule from that, which is the more you charge, the more successful the implementation, because the more painful it's going to be for them to write it off. They have to commit.”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you have paying customers, you do end up having to do a set of things that are not. What I always thought was really interesting. And so my experience was very similar to yours, which I have these academic papers, the academic community liked it, industry hated it. And I found out it was actually much easier to sell somebody something than to give it away. And I don't know what the psychology is about it.”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There were two things that happened. One is when we were at Illinois, we started actually getting people actually using our software, and then we ended up getting lots of customer support calls. And so we applied for an NSF grant to staff a customer support operation. And be very nice people in the National Science Foundation explained to us that that was not actually the purpose of Exotech Carefunded Research, which was a gift in retrospect and that catalyst us in parts to start a company. But then the other thing was we actually rewrote. You rewrote everything, Mark. And actually, I think Nasira, you guys did something very similar. Yeah, yeah. And so you do end up in the cold. You end up.”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's probably a whole lot easier to transfer a software product than it is to transfer a hardware product. Software now, students are incredible programmers. I mean graduate students and you can really build something. That's pretty good shape. I mean, when both Yahoo and Google left the Stanford Labs, they were pretty good pieces of software. They weren't yet scaled up to deal with millions of users that once, but they were pretty impressive.”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's interesting that you said that it was like a prototype, like research. Do you think that's changed today where because of all the systems that we have available to us, you know, AWS, all these different things where you can essentially prototype in the cloud, do you think that people now have more, when they're in a university or research lab, is there stuff more immediately and more easily transferable because it's more pre-industry scale or production ready?”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's an old Latfreet who said it's an old line in the industry, which is everybody worries about protecting their idea. But if your idea is actually any good, you're going to have to bludgeon people to adopt it.”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Said to me once, I mean, what's the difference between you and somebody else who's read about technology? I said, well, the people who've worked on it, they see the glass as half full, not half empty. People said to us, well, that's a nice academic experiment, but you'll never be able to make a real product out of it. It'll lose all its advantages when you try to engineer the rest because we had built a university prototype. It wasn't a commercial product.”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We needed to do was find people who were, you know, companies are always a little reluctant to take a risk on a startup, particularly with something like a new architecture, which really is a long commitment. So what you had to do was find companies who felt like they needed a leg up over the other players in order to advance themselves. And that helped, we found a few players like that early on.”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in fact, Digital Equipment Corporation actually had a research lab out here that took some ideas, some of the people who worked with us and worked on technology, but they couldn't sell it back east. And that's where the headquarters of the company was. You know, IBM canceled their project several times. So eventually what happened was a famous early computer entrepreneur, Gordon Bell had been one of the people that built digital equipment corporation, came to me and said, you know what, if you want to get this technology out, you're going to have to go start a company. And eventually he convinced me, although I have to say I was the technical entrepreneur that didn't know the first thing about running a business, not the first thing.”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Never connected those two dots. Back to Mark's question, though, what do you think made risk tip? Yes, it took a long time, but how do you think, especially because in that time you founded a startup, MIPS Technologies, to bring it to market, you could have just left it as a paper and expected the industry to adopt it.”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why was the games like the breakthrough that? And the reason I think about this is because I think about what happened with GPUs and NVIDIA and how it then became the enabling for artificial intelligence. Right. More parallelized computing. So I was just trying to figure out what the parallel was with the risk. So one of the reasons”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I worked for years under Pat Gelsinger at VMware, who was the GM of the 486 at Intel and a longtime proponent of CISC. And he still maintains that CISC was the right architecture and dollar value. It's still the predominant market or whatever. Are these different problem statements or do you think it's still just dying a slow death and we just haven't got there yet? And we should know Cisk stands for complex instruction. So it's the opposite of risk. And the classic Intel model. Exactly. Yeah.”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I just think it's a great example of these things are generational, the really, really big things do take a very long time. But then when they tip, right? How many risk chips do you think are globally today?”
2022-07-21 · a16z Podcast · From Research to Startup, There and Back Again · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source