YouSaid · the spoken record

Max Chafkin

lines on the record: 104
first: 2021-12-23
most recent: 2021-12-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Exactly. And that's the loophole. And we've seen that structure now has become very popular in Silicon Valley. Like other people have, you know, this is a thing that wealth managers have made into a little cottage industry. And we even saw, you know, when this first came out, so it was kind of heartbreaking to me because this was in the book, which was in a galley at that point. But ProPublica broke this story. And the way the spin that you heard from some folks was not like, oh, what an outrage. It was like, how can I do that? And which I understand, because, I mean, everyone wants to pay less in taxes, but it really is quite a perversion of the original intent of the law, which was, again, to help basically like lower and middle income people and not to just deprive the U.S. government of a huge amount of tax revenue.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has effective control. He does not have legal control because there's an independent board of directors. He only owned 20 or 30 percent of the company. So it's a very, very aggressive interpretation of these statutes because effectively the CEO of a venture-backed tech company has a lot of influence on the stock price, you know, on the share price of these companies.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah. And so what Teal figured out is that you can put in, you can, you can. Teal's Roth IRA had something like $6 billion in it. Now, stock market's done pretty well since then. And particularly technology companies, particularly the kinds of companies that Peter Thiel invests in. So my guess is that is his Roth IRA his tax-free account is in is maybe around $8 billion, something like that now, maybe a little more. And again, it's this amazing kind of, it's not really, I guess it's a loophole. I don't know what to call it. It was just a very aggressive tax strategy. Now, the thing about this is, and if you, depending on who you get your tax advice from, they might advise you not to do this because there is a specific rule that says you cannot buy shares and companies you control. So you can't, if you own a restaurant, you can't like put the restaurant inside of the Roth IRA. That's self-dealing. The great thing about these venture-backed tech companies is although somebody like Peter Teal has”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so there are some really important. Once it's in there, it's tax free, no limitation. They did try to have some limitations on how much you could put in. The original contribution limit was $2,000. I think it's about $6,000. Now, they're pretty low income caps. I think around, it's a little higher now, but it's around $100,000.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm glad we moved to the service portion of the show. So Roth IRA, this was created in the 90s. It was designed as like a middle class thing for the lower middle class. The idea is you put after tax dollars in and anything you make on your inside of your IRA, your Roth IRA, is tax-free. And they did this because they were trying to.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And so, and I wanted to, you know, obviously both those stories have truth to them, and I think understanding where they come from is really interesting. But I wanted to do something that hopefully complicated both stories and got actually at the real person. And Teal, I think, is really, you know, has really invested in his own mythology. And at times, I like them.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I mean, I just wanted to look. I wanted to, you know, there had been Tial's an interesting guy because there's sort of two myths around him. One is like a villainous right-wing billionaire that's kind of like the left-wing view. And then the right-wing view is that he is this, and the view that's kind of common in Silicon Valley is that he is basically this libertarian hero. He's like, you know, combination of Ayn Rand and an Ayn Rand character. He's an intellectual and a builder.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, he really wants to play this behind the scenes role. He really doesn't like scrutiny of any kind. He does talk to the press. He actually appears. He does speeches sometimes, but it's almost always in front of basically a friendly interview or somebody who's not going to kind of push him on some of these kind of further out ideological things or push him on some of the business practices that his companies have been involved with, some of which are pretty questionable. And of course, I wanted to go there.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No. Early in the process, I, as one does, when you're doing a journalistic project such as this, in addition to talking to former employees, friends, colleagues, classmates, you know, or whatever, I also approached Teal and had a series of meetings with his PR people and ultimately an off the record meeting in LA with the man himself.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, no, he didn't cooperate, but he also didn't, you know, he wasn't helpful. And at times, I think he was a little bit unhelpful. But he didn't really, he also didn't try to stop me. He didn't block it.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the CEOs of basically all of the big technology companies Tim Apple's there, right? You know, Microsoft CEO, Google founders, and basically the representatives from the nine largest tech companies, which of course, that's like most of the big tech companies in the United States, are all there, and they're all basically trying to work. And I think Teal, I mean, he literally organized that meeting, but I think he also helped create the conditions that allowed that to happen. And I think you have to say Trump maybe didn't do that much with that. And, you know, those relationships were short-lasting, but it definitely brought a bunch of people who had before that been very critical of Trump to the table.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I think it very much helped shape public opinion. He actually cribbed it from an Atlantic story, so he probably should give credit to that. But in any case, it definitely helps shape opinion around Trump. And I think it helped not only help Trump kind of write the ship, but then post-election, we saw actually a lot of business leaders kind of participate in the honeymoon. They said, you know what? Let's give this a shot. And there was, there were a handful of meetings, you know, probably most famously this meeting of tech leaders in mid-December that teal arranged where you had basically posted.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always gotta give props to them. And the second thing was Peter Thiel, instead of running away, ran towards this and he makes a big donation $1.25 million, which of course Chump changed for Peter Thiel, but in political terms is a significant sum. And not only that, but gives a speech where he defends Trump. And he says, listen, I'm not going to defend the comments, but overall you got to look at the big picture. And he says, we need to take Trump seriously, not literally. So don't listen to the literal comments. Look at the broader image. And I think that who are you going to believe?”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And two things happened, one of which was WikiLeaks happened, and that I think had changed the media cycle and helped Trump.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and but and so I think Teal's presence helped bring around some of that like the donor class, some of the kind of mainstream support. And the other thing is, so at the convention, of course, Teal gave what I think was really a historic speech. I think it was a”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, you had like Chachi from Happy Days. You had like a bunch of guys, a bunch of real estate guys, like a bunch of whom are now indicted or, you know, have like serious”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Victory? I think if you include, if you throw in the wide network, I think the answer is 100% yes. I mean, Trump has said, like, I don't think I would have gotten elected without social media. But I think if we'd narrow it, right, just to teal, I think Teal had a big impact. And I don't know if you can say, you know, I think it's always hard to say like one to narrow it down to one person. But I talk to people who had been involved at the Trump campaign. Teal was very valuable to them. And the reason he was valuable is because, you know, Trump obviously had a lot of energy. There was a lot of kind of grassroots type support, he had a lot of fans. He's a celebrity. But he hadn't attracted kind of the sort of establishment, credibility, like real businessmen. If you think back and business people, if you think back to the RNC, the 2016 RNC, like who else spoke besides Peter Thiel?”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Facebook. I mean, I think the alt-right was really, and the alt-right, I think, propelled Trump was it was a social media phenomenon, and they saw that, and Teal saw that, and that's part of the reason he was supportive of that role.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think that was part of it, but I also think because the mainstream left embraced Zuckerberg and embraced Facebook, I think that may have sidelined the kind of far. Basically, the mainstream is always going to be lamer than the crazy people. In Facebook world. And so what you really had was on Facebook, you had the kind of mainstream left arguing with the crazy right. And when that's happening, the crazy people are always going to be more interesting. These kind of center left people like the Obama types are just going to be not as fun as Dan Boncino, who is, you know, obviously, as you say, he's an extreme character, but he is a character, right? He's an entertaining and he generates outrage. And I think that also kind of perpetuated this kind of outrage cycle that allowed, you know, Republicans to, and not just Republicans, sorry. I mean, far right, you know, conservatives to, you know, make such hay with.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Problem is, and again, I'm just kind of speculating, but you know, the mainstream left really embraced Facebook. A lot of this stuff back in like 2008, a lot of the sort of stuff that Trump was doing in 2016 in terms of like this really specific targeting on Facebook and, you know, that stuff was kind of pioneered by Barack Obama and the kind of group of tech workers who were.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. Trying to make sure that these important voices, you know, as Facebook saw it, didn't get silenced. You know, the other thing is money. And I think a lot of people have spent a lot of time, including me, trying to figure out, okay, like, what does Mark Zuckerberg really believe? It's an important question because, you know, Mark Zuckerberg has as much power as arguably anybody in human history. And it's like not clear what he believes. It kind of seems like to me, like he just believes in Facebook and Facebook's bottom line. And these guys, you know, Shapiro, Bonjino, they are very good for Facebook's bottom line. And having this, you know, rabid outrage cycle, of course, is great news for Facebook. And so I think that's part of it as well. And I think a third component is probably failure on the left to kind of come up with any kind of answer to this stuff. I mean, probably part of the...”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. That's what I was going to say. Well, I think so it is a handful of things, like one of which is ideological and to the extent to which Zuckerberg, I think, has been pushed to the right by Peter Thiel. And you saw reporting by Bloomberg and others during that time where you had folks like Shapiro running afoul of Facebook's rules and Facebook stepping in to say,”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100% and the phrase that was used in this conversation that I reported on was state sanctioned conservatism, the idea that Facebook would basically promote these guys, Ben Shapiro, Bonjino, and so on. Now, the thing is, okay, so Facebook, we have to say, first of all, Facebook denies this.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, he gives his speech at Georgetown where he basically says, we're not going to regulate political speech. Politicians can lie. It's okay because it is not our job as a private company to do that. And the truth will out, right? And now that, okay, so that was kind of an explanation and a defense. And I would argue a kind of signaling of intention. And then he, you know, later on in this trip has a meeting with, you know, Donald Trump and Melania and Jared Kushner.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stuff up about Hunter Biden. There were these videos of Nancy Pelosi that had clearly been doctored to make it look like she had some kind of drunk. Yeah, yeah, yeah, some kind of neurological problem. And there was real energy on the left to do something about this. He had Elizabeth Warren and AOC saying, you know, Facebook is out of control. And Zuckerberg, you know, flies to Washington, D.C. This is right when he was promoting Libra, you know, which is another kind of crypto. Crypto thing that is connected.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Teal is there to kind of help Zuckerberg navigate that world. And the most important thing is, you know, anytime Zuckerberg is accused of being a liberal shill or whatever because he was in favor of increased immigration, he started this pro-immigration group. You know, Zuckerberg can say, look, look at this guy on my board member. He's the longest serving board member. He's one of my close friends. He's not just Rhino. He's not just a Republican. He is a hardcore Steve Bannon, Donald Trump Republican. He has real credibility with Trump world. And that was like the most important thing, I think, that Peter Thiel gave Facebook, which is allowing it to be somewhat insulated from attacks from Donald Trump. Now, in 2019, Trump and his campaign were running these ads where they were kind of like they were really crossing the line factually, right? They were claiming.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the right wing media establishment, Teal was a sort of broker there where Zuckerberg said, look, I want to hear you guys. We are going to be unbiased. And over the next five years, Teal plays this role where when Facebook is under fire, either from the right-wing press or from Trump,”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Behind the scenes. Tell us about that. And I think people, so you know, there's on the right over the last five to ten years, there's been a realization that, first of all, Silicon Valley is very powerful, which is true, and that a lot of liberal people work at these tech companies, which is also true. And so what they've done is kind of taken the playbook that is often used against the media companies in the New York Times. Work and refs. Yeah, they're working the refs. Exactly right. And so that pressure has been coming for a long time. It really bubbled up in a big way before the 2016 election. There was this sort of mini scandal. I talked about this in the book. There was like a mini scandal involving Facebook trying to kind of promote stories that the New York Times and CNN and such were publishing. And Zuckerberg basically had to have a peace summit with all these key members.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What the hell do we do with it? Yeah, and Palantir was more or less just, yeah, you know, an elevator pitch that was like directly aimed at that. And it took them, you know, a decade or so to kind of actually find a business. So in a way, Teal is good at spotting these trends and sort of seeing the ways that the herd is moving and then finding ways to maneuver so that he can profit from that movement. And I think the sort of Trump thing is another would be another instance of that where Teal was really early now, of course we could talk about the ethics and morality or whatever of this, but just from a sort of cold calculation, Teal was very early in seeing that there was movement against kind of globalization, that there was the rise of this really hardcore right wing, especially on the internet. And he saw Trump before many, many other people realized that this.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or big data mining firm, and it really grew out of Teal's insight after 9-11 that Silicon Valley had something to sell, the US government, because the U.S. government was really interested in data mining, doing a better job of kind of”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Finding areas of disagreement in job interviews, he asked people, you know, what is the thing that you believe that no one else believes, right? He's like really interested in kind of breaking the norm and interested in this as a life philosophy. The funny thing is, right, for somebody who's all about being different. And I think this is related. A lot of what he's done is actually sort of sell into bubbles rather than betting. He sometimes has bet against bubbles, especially when he was running his hedge fund in the 2000s, but often it's more like he sees something that's hot and he figures out a way to make a play. So PayPal was certainly one of those where there's this huge boom and teal was an outsider and he kind of finds his way to this brilliant coder Max Levchin and the rest of history. Same thing with Palantir where Palantir is this today government contract.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know the teal approach you can obviously see why it's useful in the world as a technology investor because VCs make these high risk, high reward bets. And so you don't really want to bet on the consensus, right? There's low upside. But also, you know, Teal thinks it's more than that, right? Teal thinks this is like a potential life philosophy and that sort of”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So, I mean, you can go way back. I mean, so his basic idea, you said contrarianism, right? And it's really that the majority is often wrong. That's his idea. That like when you have these things that we as a society have agreed on, a lot of the time we're making those assumptions, we're making those decisions based on sort of faulty assumptions. We're agreeing with things because we want to make our friends, neighbors, and colleagues happy. And Teal thinks we make mistakes that way. I think you go way back. You know, he was bullied as a child. He bounced around a lot. I think it was always kind of him against the world as a kid. But also it goes to this French philosopher that he's really into, Ren ⁇ Girard, who basically articulated a sort of philosophical version of contrarianism that Teal has really bought into. And what's interesting, so I think...”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. First outside investor. I mean, he came in at the same time as Reed Hoffman, who's another one of his buddies. But he made the first significant investment in Facebook, $500,000. If you've watched the social network, there's a scene where Sean Parker or the Sean Parker character played by Justin Timberlake and Jesse Eisenberg playing Mark Zuckerberg meet with this kind of suit VC who tells them to change the company structure to fire the other guy Eduardo Savrin and that is Peter Thiel. I mean that's that that that character who just appears for about you know 15 seconds is Teal because Teal was the outside money and Teal helped set in motion this chain of events that allowed Zuckerberg to restructure the company so that he would be you know in control not just in control then but you know in control today”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But as they saw it, Moritz was kind of, and the kind of sequoia way was about preserving sequoias, you know, internal rate of return. It wasn't about helping the entrepreneur. And they were going to be different. And the Founders Fund approach, which, again, they really marketed it as like the opposite of Sequoia, which at the time was and still is, you know, one of the big venture capital firms. As like, we are going to let you do what you want. It's your company. We will never fire a founder. Hence Founders Fund, and hence Mark Zuckerberg ending up as like, you know, the absolute dictator of this trillion dollar company, Facebook.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As an operator, not as a real entrepreneur, until sees Moritz as basically a sharp elbowed guy who's just trying to get his. And that becomes a conflict that helps set up Teal later in his career because when Teal started a venture capital fund, the Founders Fund, the whole idea is like, we're different from the Sequoia way. You know, Mike Moritz will fire founders. He doesn't let founders, you know, run the company. This is not an entirely fair critique, although there.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But of course, that creates some, I think, bad blood. And then there's a further amount of bad blood where Teal, you know, people think of Teal as this sort of Silicon Valley guy, as being, you know, big visionary. But his involvement with PayPal originally was as an investor. He had started a hedge fund. And he kind of approached the management of the company like a hedge fund guy. So he almost the entire time he's running PayPal, he was trying to sell. He recognized that the company was on uncertain footing. They were losing money. It had a lot of value. He wanted to sell a company. Morris did not, because of course, for a venture capitalist, once you have a hit, you really don't want to sell early because your entire portfolio is kind of dependent on that hit, you know, going as big as possible. So that was a second way that they butted heads where Moritz, you know, kind of comes to see Teal as this.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Moritz had, and I think has, a kind of a more conventional view of what a startup is and what a Silicon Valley founder is supposed to be like than Peter Thiel. And so part of what happened is that the two companies merged. Musk became CEO and Teal basically got bounced out. And six months after that, Musk goes on his honeymoon. And while he's away, Teal and some of these friends who had started the company with him basically engineer a coup. They marched to Mike Moritz's office on Sandhill Road and they present him with letters of resignation for most of the executive team and say you got to fire everybody and replace Elon Musk and bring in Peter or we're all going to walk. And Moritz agrees because basically had no choice.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, we're Yeah, well, so Moritz is and was one of the most famous legendary, right? You know, he had close relationship with Steve Jobs when he was a journalist. I'd written this book about Apple and it had gone on to become an investor, invested in Google. Moritz, so there were so many payments companies back then. And that's a thing that we've sort of all kind of forgot, right? You just think PayPal, wow, what a revolutionary idea. But it wasn't really a revolutionary idea. There were, you know, like dozens of these things. Every major tech firm had a payments thing. Every bank had a payments thing. And there were a bunch of independent startups, one of which was started by Elon Musk, which is called X.com, and Mike Morritz was his investor.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They want, you know, teal and his crew, like, they're really invested in the idea of kind of overturning everything about Meg Whitman's world, the world of MBAs and, you know, kind of normal Wall Street finance and normal business practice. They thought they were getting rid of all that or revolutionizing all of that. And the fact that they...”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And his peers saw it, you know, kind of a square. And they saw themselves as being, you know, the rebels. You know, they had been involved in this conservative newspaper at Stanford. It was all about kind of sticking it in the eye of the establishment. And Whitman, of course, is not politically, you know, not that far away from Teal. She's kind of center-right or whatever. But, you know, they are just, but they just totally different sort of personalities. Generation.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, with teal, right, there's always a kind of a business dimension and an ideological dimension. Business dimension PayPal was growing quickly and in some ways was a threat to eBay because like if all the transactions are happening in PayPal that that's going to conceivably hurt eBay in the long run but of course eBay has a lot of power over PayPal because at any point eBay could just try to shut it off. eBay had a competing payment service at the time so there's this kind of tension that you often see in these tech businesses where you have a platform and then a company that's kind of ascendant within that platform so that was going on but but of course there's a there's another dimension which is that Whitman was kind of a conventional business figure, right? I can't remember, I think she has an MBA. Her big success before that was at Hasbro. She's not a technologist, right? She's somebody who's kind of like a normal business as Teal.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a social good, as something to be proud of, and kind of gets folded into this sort of imperial capitalism, which again, I think we see most clearly with Facebook, where the company just is this gigantic company swallowing competitors, trying to get huge, you know, getting enormous, and then, you know, attempting to just sort of dominate. And so that view of technology as both rule-breaking and kind of monopolistic, that comes from Peter Thiel. And of course, it's not a totally, you know, it's a controversial vision, right? Because I'm not sure we want to have these giant tech monopolies, or, you know, obviously once companies like Facebook get as big as they are, then that propensity for rule breaking becomes a potential problem.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can thrive or will do best is if they try to get basically as big as they can, as fast as they can, and if they are constantly trying to overturn norms. And in other words, in this view, right, it's really important to sort of break with the herd. And so it's not just that if you're a startup, it's good to sort of break the rules. It's okay to break the rules. That's not what this says. What Teal thinks is that breaking the rules and kind of changing norms, changing perceptions, even, yeah, like even getting into a little bit of trouble is a social good. And that's kind of how progress happens. And we see that with Facebook, right? The Facebook model motto was move fast and break things, right? Like the idea of disruption, we normally, I think conventionally have thought of disruption as being like, you know, bad thing. It's the thing you yell your kids at for. But teal kind of rebranded it.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's kind of the cool thing. What was attractive to me about writing about Teal and about the book is that Teal, his influence, of course, he has the money, the kind of conventional. He was an investor in the first outside investor in Facebook, co-founder of Palantir, co-founder of PayPal. But then there's this ideological thing where Teal is kind of different from a lot of these other guys in that he had a very clear sort of idea and then ability to articulate a vision for technology and for politics. And that idea, which is probably best kind of laid out in Teal's book, Zero to One, but which you can find in YouTube videos and things like that, is more or less that technology companies are the best hope for the future. They are the things that make the future happen. They're going to save the world. And that the way that technology companies”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The possibilities that are created by technology many of them very conservative. You know, Teal comes out of this kind of politically activist background. A lot of the early PayPal mafia guys worked for this newspaper that Peter Teal started at Stanford, the Stanford Review. So it's this kind of ideological venture capital network where they're investing each other's companies. You have employees who bounce from one company to the next to the next. If you want to like make your career in Silicon Valley, one way to do it. It's not the only way is to kind of get in with this group of people.”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the YouTube founders are members of the PayPal Mafia. You also had a couple of VCs who are not super well known, but are pretty important. One is Keith Raboy, who's been involved in some of Jack Dorsey's Square, Jack Dorsey's company. Raboy, I think, was an executive there and has kind of been in the fintech world in a big way over the last decade. David Sachs, another kind of well-known venture capitalist. You had, who am I forgetting? Oh, the founders of Yelp. So it was like a Max Levchin who started a firm, which is this another kind of fintech thing that I think they went public in the last year. So yeah, these guys who were all really successful, really smart, were very much very similar, kind of a lot of ideological alignment. And there are some exceptions. Teal and Musk disagree with each other on a lot of things. But for the most part, these guys are really into the future and sort of the...”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he left the day that Meg Whitman took the keys. Thial was out the door. And so he had this kind of behind the scenes thing where he was sort of secretly this really influential guy this sense in Silicon Valley, especially in that period from like 2005 to 2016, where kind of, you know, the game, you know, six degrees of Kevin Bacon or something. But every startup one way or another pretty quickly comes back to teal. And the way it came back to him was through this thing called the PayPal Mafia, which probably a lot of people have heard of, but I'll just summarize real quick. It was basically just this gang of folks who had been involved in the early years of PayPal. They were all sort of working together and making investments early on, including in Facebook, but also LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman was a server. So I was going to say,”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it was a hobbyist project, essentially, that he was trying to turn into something much bigger. And he also had this crazy rocket thing. And that's when I talked to Teal for the first time was just like a very quick interview about what's up with this guy, Elon Musk. And I counted him, I guess, basically a handful of times in the years that follows. The funny thing about him. Most people in Silicon Valley know who Peter Thiel is, but I think most Americans and even a lot of people who are involved in business are not super aware of him because he was this behind the scenes player. He was not the front man, not the guy. He only ran, he was the CEO of PayPal, but it was a pretty short tenure just to...”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was trying to think about this, and I think it was, it's either 2007 or 2008. So I was writing a story about Elon Musk. Elon Musk at the time was kind of famous, but not that famous. He had started a company during the dot-com boom that had been sold for like 300 million bucks. He was like one of the early kind of dot-com kids. And that's when he first encountered Teal. They met one another at PayPal and they had this kind of very difficult kind of the relationship, they're like frenemies or something. Get into that. But in any case, I was doing a story about Musk who was distinguishing himself at the time because he was involved in this company Tesla that nobody was taking seriously because they were trying to make an electric sports car kind of”
2021-12-23 · Masters in Business · Max Chafkin on the Social Good of Tech Companies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source