YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Fenton

lines on the record: 60
first: 2023-11-28
most recent: 2023-11-28
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

“Me, the first thing that comes to mind is my daughter, Natalie, after a really tough day of parenting where you feel completely unseen and unappreciated This was Easter three years ago. Sits down with me. And I'm doing my best to hide it. And she put her arm on me and she said, I know it was really hard for you today, but we love you completely. Was really a great day in the grand scheme of things, and sometimes kids they should never be parents to us because we have to have a certain degree of, but I come back to that moment in the grace of that human being at that point in time. And I think most parents can relate to having a moment like that in their life.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This relatability, that feeling of being defeated and dispirited is all part of the adventure. And yet on the other side of it, as you go through more experiences, you can put it into context. And I think that a lot of times decisions that you're making in those troths become fatal for the company because you're just at that point where you got nothing left.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oftentimes founders are on a journey that can go to some very unexpected and traumatic places. It's unfortunate because there's a moments when they feel most alone. And I think a lot of people have gone through that post-COVID because there have been major headcount reductions. And it feels laid bare, defeated, beleaguered. And one of the really alarming things to me when I bring it up is I said, oh, one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our life, Mark Benioff went through a few seasons of those things where there were discussions about does he stay an independent company or not? And people are like, he did.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About the choices we make when we fund them and how they get built. This is not to say they should all become non profits. I actually think the recursive success of a profitable company is you get more resources and it's the system works. I agree with you. I'm a capitalist. But whenever you go into this train, you can come across as being sanctimonious. And so I'm very humble to not get there. But I do think the thing we haven't talked enough about in the industry is broadly in the category of mental health. We brushed on it today, but it is behind the greatest forms of suffering in the internal lives of entrepreneurs, but also in the external lives of the companies that are getting built.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's such an interesting question. My sense is that one of the major future not yet founded companies is going to end up addressing the pathologies that experience anyone who's on TikTok or Instagram 20, 30, 40 minutes later, they don't feel so good at the end of that. And so I think relatedly going to be more aware of the sources of human flourishing in the ethic of the companies we're building and how we”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You always tilt towards can I recognize it more clearly when I see it, which is the next great company and entrepreneur and founder. And so much of this is outside of our control. And so you sit there and you wait for the perfect pitch. Buffett has said this. We don't have to swing. And part of not having a $3 billion of assets under management, we stay really patient. But we also care about working and being relevant in a way that we don't accept that. This year, guarantee there's a company that is going to get founded that's going to break through $10 billion of market value. The probabilities is you start in any calendar, you're really low that you're going to be the partner to that entrepreneur. And that provides a source of endless healthy anxiety.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Joy that comes out of those relationships for me and for the counterparts. And we're blessed because it's not just the founder, it's the company, it's the customers that they serve. So it scales in a way, but it didn't need to for me because it ultimately resolves down to the relationship I have with Victor. Knowing that in relation to life, there's always a higher level of flourishing possible, I would score myself if I were being brutal on a scale one to 10 is having gotten above a five in full potential, occasionally I get to an eight or a nine, but boy, nothing feels better when it's really working. And that requires me to continually grow as a human being. Nothing's made me better in the job in the last decade than being a parent to five kids. It's not that different. You start with connection. If you don't have connection with your children before you try and correct them, good luck. Really internalizing our role not as in a power structure, but as a relational partner. And then maybe that's one point. The second is, yeah.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that I have infrequently had full potential relationships with founders. I look back over a 25-year career. I know what it looks like and what it feels like. And I know it's possible. And to say I can activate that now every day when I get up. It will be measured in the depth of impact and the meaning that”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doing a job now for 25 years. In my case, you burn off motivational systems that are easily satiated. What does that mean? Well, from my standpoint, it was, first of all, not failing. That was a motivational system. And maybe I still can pull that off. I still have some time left on this earth as a venture capitalist. Then there's a motivational system of being decent in my peer group. The motivational system that now is at the center comes back to this earlier conversation about generative purpose. And I think what I feel like I'm still learning and where I have humility is”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. And so you have this sense of this explosion of content. If there's an explosion of games to be played, then there becomes this discovery problem. And then certain aspects of games that are going to carry through, okay, free to play, but business model dimensions that have a structural network effect. And that seems like it's inevitable, but the form that it takes will recognize it after it happened.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Victor says something to me would really stuck, which is it's not hard to make a game that's really compelling. It's really hard to make a game that's compelling in long duration.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As an observer of the gaming market, it's got its own challenges of incumbency. I think the industry really suffered as a result of the moves on do not follow. Say acquisition engines are sputtering, the growth rates are elusive, and they're still giant businesses, but it doesn't feel like people always feel like, hey, you know, remember we were growing 80%, not 150% a year, and you were growing at 7% to 10%. And that there's a sense of it needs to be disrupted because mobile has become congested. There's this question of okay, well, and I'm curious, guys, my partner, I could ask this question, do you think there'll be a company founded in the next two to three years that will pioneer a new business model? Or do you think it's going to be a version of free-to-play and that that's a fixed constant now because that's the nature of distribution?”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, that's the hope. We have to believe that. I know the entrepreneurs didn't stop being manifest in the social emotional landscape of humanity. So they may be unhappy right now relative to, say, 2010.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where it happened. Now, what are the companies? It's not so easy because of the nature of crypto. I think if you look at large language models and use of transformed technologies, is it the incumbents game, this is where we all energies come back to, where is their distribution disruption? Think you're going to find that there's a consumer experience that those incumbents aren't well suited to go create, that they don't have in some whiteboard today? Maybe there's someone there that is frustrated who quits and goes and does it. But for reasons that relate to their own capture and their internal atmospheric of the bureaucracy, they'll suffocate it if it comes out, or they'll do something grandiose that just flops. And on the other end of the spectrum, you think you have the enterprise where I think this nature of people are buying work and not software. Totally different.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos wouldn't work for one of those companies, and I adore them as people. They've built great cultures and great companies, but we still have our primary source material, which is a founder that is typically disagreeable, truth-seeking, and non-conformant, and doesn't like to go get a cookie in someone else's system. Those people exist in a almost fixed ratio of humanity. And our belief is they just need the right substrate in which they can work. And so you wait. And crypto was a place you could have gone. There was definitely a lack of incumbency there. In fact, incumbents were structurally disadvantaged there. I think we'll probably see, as we look back in the course of time and 10 years, that we can't deny the fact that Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, collectively created over a trillion dollars of today's sustained market value. Okay.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gets back to looking for disruptions in distribution because one of the struggles that we've had in our industry is that they're compounding network effect businesses. And that network effect winner takes most concentration of wealth, concentration of users, concentration of forward investment capital and resource allocation makes whole segments uninteresting. When I joined the venture business, Microsoft had its space that you do stay away from. And it was the Death Star. And you said, if Microsoft's your competitor, now if IBM was your competitor, morality. But now it's like, yeah, you've got at least three, possibly four or five Death Stars. There are two or three things that give me optimism. One is that the nature of an entrepreneur”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That will launch the biggest returns probably of my venture career and been doing it for 25 years. And is it possible that we've gotten it all wrong? Yeah. I mean, there's definitely a worldview. It's a possibility. Is this crypto all over again? And we don't need to know the answer to that. It sounds weird, but it's not our job to decide if this is right or wrong. It's to be hopefully redundant to partner with the best entrepreneurs in this segment that best is defined by the ones with the maximum generative drive, hyper curiosity, hyper-competitiveness. And if it's wrong, the great ones reinvent themselves, then they become discord.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Foundation model company, a benchmark, and I think our view is that, first of all, it doesn't really fit with our model of we like to back a small team investing in companies like Instagram and Snap when they had less than 10 people. And they didn't have a plan to go hire 300 people. They had a plan to get to a billion active users. But we start there. And that tends to be where we can take advantage of lack of a better term of this is a thermonuclear force, this capital that's gone into buying equipment, NVIDIA processors combined with putting that online, making it available. And so that last mile lighting up of a developer ecosystem that's happened, I think it gives us such optimism that even in spite of all the sclerotic issues of the COVID overcapitalization of the industry, both the funds and the companies, this is right now broadly defined. A million plus developers”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does it become commoditized likely? We're radical believers in open source in that that force will be unstoppable here. It has a number of interesting, not at all well understood ethical implications for these models and what the forces towards open might lead us to. And I don't think any of us have a, again, this is a case where we have loosely held beliefs that we're constantly trying to update and make sure we're not missing something. But I think as a result of the million plus developers that are accessing transformer-based models, there will emerge from that mass empowerment of creativity the next three to five half a trillion dollar market cap companies. Maybe it's one to three, but it is the substrate in which I think those companies will be born. Is it one of the existing companies? Is it Open AI? I don't know. We do not have an investment in a fund.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like when we get pitched, anything for anybody, we are skeptical, register gets activated. And Adam Bosworth, I don't know if you've met Adam in the past. Said something to me about startup companies like, you guys, your only startups use the word platform. A platform is a company that has a million developers. When you have a million developers, you can call yourself a platform. Before that, I don't really know. So I think this reality is going to be that there will be over a million developers that are writing to large language models. And you assume that is the foundational quote unquote platform.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We get pitched a lot of companies that use that word platform. It seems to have any meaning. Well, I was going to say, it becomes one of those.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Often a key ingredient in some explosion of great ideas, applications, whatever. Sounds like basically you were building a platform at Wildlife. I would love to hear both Riff on the role that this concept plays in your investing, in the technology, and what makes you excited and whether it will be different this time.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the public market, there's a lot of companies that got left behind post their COVID. So somewhere in there, we're missing something. And if I was looking systematically, where are we in the recovery? I think it's inevitable look back. There's more than a few 10xers sitting right now in the one to five billion dollar market cap in the public sector. The statistical probability to pick one of those and getting 10x is much greater than picking one of the late stage private companies that raised it a bloated valuation that's somewhere between one to five billion if I was a shrewd investor i'd say we're probably in a maybe it's six months maybe it's three years chance to get the 10x in the public market in a not overly priced software business how do you think about the notion of platforms and platform businesses in this new era it seems like platforms there's the disruption in distribution is one aspect of what's driven some of these explosions some new platform also is off”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Disruption that's not just well, we talk to company X that we're buying from today, and they told us what it meant. Microsoft told us it means this, Salesforce sells us. No. There's a distribution disruption on people's ability to bring in new technologies and take risks. Okay, so weird things are going to happen. There's going to be some epic failures. There already have been some. The other distribution model disruption, I think, is pricing. And the way that people think about buying software will change. To me, that changes the distribution model because I'm no longer licensing or renting, but I'm consuming a completely different experience on the other side. And I think that's probably true from the way we experience applications, meaning we train this whole ecosystem on look at a screen and go like this. And I think the primal acts for AI may be different. We're not investors in any of these equipment companies. But yeah, what are the downstream? Is there stuff and we ask this question in part because we like to fancy ourselves intelligent about the growth company?”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Technology build a new continent of software application companies whose business models will not be selling seats. It'll be selling work. If you're buying work, your operating expenses is what you're looking at. Where's the OpEx going? What could I buy? Totally different framework than the history of software, which is like, I'm going to buy a tool and then make my current work more efficient versus like getting rid of whole swaths of your OpEx. And so to me, those forces are a debate we've had internally is AI a distribution disruption or technology disruption and I think many smart people would say, no, it's really a technology disruption. So therefore it advantages the incumbents because it's the same distribution model. I think that's wrong in two ways. There's a demand disruption, meaning I think every single company I'm involved with, but I imagine the large global companies have the same top of mind question of how does this apply to our business.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm predicting that there's a sub 30, probably sub 25 year old founder that is imagining in a generative sense a experience that is deeply missing today around human connection, that the use of these technologies will fill that void. And it's going to happen. Our industry will see it in a way that we experience it and feel it before we think about it. So if I'm projecting and all that, what do I know? And to steal Matt Kohler's claim, our job is to see the present most clearly. And I think we're at risk of missing and not paying attention to the bubbling up, the inevitable bubbling up of a technology in the hands of somebody whose generations younger than many of the people using these technologies today. And I think that that's an inevitability. In the same way that I think we're going to see the use of large language models combined with core enterprise.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People feel comfortable being vulnerable. And the biggest pathology that emerges in a board dynamic is absence of vulnerability. It's happened, and I'd say a third of the boards I worked on, which is gone. And it starts with the CEO, but then the VPs that come into the room, and there's just a big defensive shield that prevents a real discussion because if they're not going to be vulnerable, then they're not going to listen. There's not a dynamic of dialectic that can push because they're defending a position. And if they did let themselves be vulnerable, my God, the cultures in these companies that go wrong that way eat you alive. But the CEO has to be the one modeling that behavior. It's one of the things you and I talked about when he was the CEO. I said, listen, there are some communications to the team. I thought, it doesn't seem as vulnerable as it might be. And then he overcorrect and he was so vulnerable.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You come back to that guiding principle, and does it work every time? No. And it's really challenging. And we obviously have had some very public examples of this with Uber, and we work as a partner to the people going through it. I can just say how profoundly challenging that was from a human standpoint. There were no certainties beyond this faith that there's a better company that could be built. Whether that's true or not, one never knows there's not a parallel universe where you get to run an A-B test. And so, but what I have found is that There's a decency that's available to everyone I've worked through in the most difficult situations and the drama, the human emotional roller coasters. There's a decency beneath it all that comes back to this business exists. I don't know that I can, I don't want to say to make money, but to serve a customer. And the outcome of that is that we all get the ability to have capital to do it at a greater scale. Going in, I think, you know, I always put a ton of weight on creating a condition of safety, which is the”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That it is profoundly difficult. There are no single sources of truth. Everyone needs to lighten their grip on their certainty that they know the right outcome and to have a lot of humility. And when unfortunately you do get to a place where it's really fallen apart, you need something to come back to guide you. And I think that historically for me has always been the purpose of the company. Beneath every business, there's a customer, or above every business, there's a customer. There are competing points of view on the best way to serve that customer's need and to fulfill your purpose, good. But when an individual or a collection of stakeholders has put their interest in front of that purpose, it's a good way to come back to truth as you see it in the relativist sense. And so I think what I found is invariably, it could be a founder who can't keep a management team or has done something that undermines the ability to have trust in safety inside of the company.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like, yeah. And if someone's doing that in a threatening relationship, you get defensive. You can't hear it. It doesn't work. I think that ultimately if you ask the question of benchmark, why don't we start a growth fund? Why don't we? Yeah, it really feels like it goes right against our core value.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I do know that when they start to go down the path of consuming those gains, personally, historically, it has really undermined their capabilities as great founders and as great leaders. One of the people whom I most admire in our entire ecosystem is Pavel at Telegram. There's so much that can be learned from a company that has close to a billion monthly active users and 30 employees. He's an aesthetic. The idea that he would indulge himself with the largesse of his wealth, he contributed out of his own pocket to the bulk of the funding of Telegram with no revenue model. And you feel from him, this is one of those things you just get somewhat decent at identifying characters, people, aspects where it's infinite and not in some false way, but the purpose that the really great founders feel has a sensational aspect, and yet we're all humans. We have these meaningful vulnerabilities. And for the vast majority of us, we get caught. And if you have a good partner, they're going to.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If the objective function financially were to be made explicit, it's cash and cash multiple. And so when we're doing pro rata, we're lowering our multiple. Now you can say what you're putting in that company versus the company that'll lose you money. So it's like, yeah. So the answer to the question of a larger and larger fund undermines the purpose. It increases the pressure on the financial transaction side of the relationship. We come back to the mission, and I remember Jack had challenged the discussion of mission and said it should be about purpose, not mission, because missions can be accomplished. And I think there's truth in that. When I joined the venture business, Kleiner Perkins was saying, we want missionary founders, not mercenary founders. This is not a binary state. I think it's an interesting concatenation of motivational forces. Many of the great entrepreneurs will say that the financial rewards are fueling the continued, sustained generative drives of their business. Perhaps the rationalizing it.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not by our relationships, but to earn them, that it keeps it clean. I don't know. It sounds maybe naive, but if we're Over the three to five rounds that are done prior to IPO involved early, what we found is that the founders experienced significantly less dilution because benchmark, thanks to our former partners, some of the existing partners have a track record that allows the next round to have a lower risk to getting done at a higher price. This analysis recently, thanks to Victor, asked the question, the average founder who takes money from us is going to have a six to seven X increase in value over five years post-investment. That's average. So there's ones that are way above. Of course, there's failures. In a way of establishing relationship that puts the primacy of that on the partnership and not on the capital, we preserve the ability to raise lots of money downstream. We're not competing. Very often we take much less than pro rata. People Miles came in and was like, that's crazy. Question a protest? I'm like, we're not trying to maximize absolute cash returns. We're trying to, in a way, maximize.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe the lone partner who thought, why don't we raise this fund that's half as big because it'll force more discipline on us. Establish the basis of the relationship in a non monetary form. Venture's a hack. It came from other investment models that tried to do this upside sharing. How do you deal with risks that are asymmetric models from oil well development were applied? And it's this weird hack where it's like, I'm going to be your partner in the fullest sense, but I'm also going to buy the relationship. And by the way, once we invest, there's a bunch of my friends you'll never meet her that are going to move into your cab table and they run pension funds and they deal with large institutions that you'll never see and they'll never lift a finger to help you and they're going to own more than your VPS sales. And you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Let me understand that. And so I think by forcing the structural discipline to”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this is such a deep insight This idea that the background waters you're swimming in, which I think this is felt to me acutely in San Francisco and the Silicon Valley, if you were to include the areas around Stanford and Berkeley, it yanks you back. Into the generative drive. If you try to pursue pleasure, you get alienated. Okay, you can hang out with different people, and then quickly find that the system and the reinforcement loop around the generative drive. I don't think that's true in Sao Paulos. I didn't know that he did the 1% thing. At some point, you relax that constraint.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, but a lifestyle that would for the average pleasure seeking human being be more than enough to swallow you whole. And it wasn't to say you were going to parties and things like this, but it was wealth that would have very easily. And I imagine that this is a challenge with your teammates who have experienced this wealth. Like, why are we working so hard? Hey, man, we...”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The premise of the book, I think, is it gets back to a mental health observation, which is that when you're in the infinite game where there's the company is a manifestation of what you want to contribute to the world and you're letting these talents work through you as opposed to grabbing them and only then beating, then there's never enough. It's the cliche. It's the happiness of pursuit versus the pursuit of happiness.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then we open up a real conversation. And I said, that is not a purpose that's going to satiate your team and make them feel connected to the purpose of your business. Let's work backwards. Winning mean in a way that's not at the loss of someone else. There was a week about three years ago where Patrick Collison and Toby both indirectly, actually somewhat directly in the case of Toby, said, you got to go read this book Infinite and Finite Games.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Training as a psychotherapist. It was from the lived experience of seeing these people who might admire and adore get off of that vector of growth and generative drive. And then saying, okay, what might be behind that? What could I have done differently in my own sense of being a pardon to them? And I'd tell you, as a young venture capitalist, I was not good at it because I just took this aggressive notion of sometimes my CEO say to me. And I've had a few experiences COs I'm lucky to work with. We just want to win. I thought, oh, win what?”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“you can be there and I don't mean that in some transactional way it's weird that we're on the board it's weird that we have power you put that to the side and you start with how is mental health and making it the number one priority of the relationship and I don't think I could stress that enough and if you're not starting there and ending there you're putting yourself into a risk zone where somebody ends up going off the mental health into the ditch that's on either side of them as they're building their company and they may never come out in the form that is recognizable to be the leader of that business so if you're aware of that my experience there didn't come from some”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These are some of the things that Victor and I talked about. We, as an industry, have systematized and scaled transactional relationships. And I think one of the core values is to let go of the transactional relationship model and replace it with a deep concern, and you talk about the importance of people, a deep concern for relational well-being and mental well-being, which is not transactional. So the mental challenges that you were going through, and I bore witness to as you transition your business model, Victor and I would always try, I said, how you doing? I'm doing good. I'm busy. No, he'd say, I'm not doing great. As a partner, you have to create a lot of space for that and say, oh, tell me more. What's most important is in those moments that my experience, the entrepreneur who's going to go through these challenges doesn't feel alone. It's the most lonely position at the top of a company carrying all the embedded stress of your employees, of your external constituencies, of your customers.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Prefer, I think, understandably, I think, for some people that don't want to make the sacrifice that's required to really keep your generative drive at peak levels. And one of the most important things we do as partners to founders is to nurture that, protect it. How?”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With this entrepreneur, and I've worked with some amazing people who took advantage of the tailwind of the shift to cloud, and then they arrived at this continent of wealth, who am I to judge? The pleasure drive took over. There's a lot of things people.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unfortunately, we always want more. And then there's a generative drive. Generative drive is this thing that you would describe as being able to create, serve, contribute, build. And in an entrepreneurial journey, and I think this is true in any tailwind sector, there's entrepreneurs that, and I think are iconic names, Brian Chesky comes to mind as having a super high generative drive, also very aggressive and competitive because you had to be to compete and win you're going into really difficult regulatory dynamics and obviously competing for capital for team members and all that but in these cycles where you have a disruption of distribution i think there are a few entrepreneurs that come out that have had protected their generative drive protected their curiosity their creativity as they manifest their aggressive drive and they didn't let their pleasures and their enjoyment of success corrupt them in a way that took their eye off the ball but i think those three different drives end up explaining a lot of what we see in the primary data of what's going on”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are in the same phenotype. But they're another type of entrepreneurs that come in these cycles that are more their primary drive is more generative. There was a really interesting podcast with Andrew Huberman and Paul Conti, and I've been studying Paul Conte's work for a while, but he disambiguates these three different drives. I heard it. I said, this maps completely and directly onto the entrepreneurial framework. And I think as an investor, it's actually really well served for you to think about that, which is there's a primal aggressive drive that we all have, and I'm sure it's set up in our measle-limbic reward pathway to win, outcompete. And that aggressive assertive drive is innate. And I don't think it's not healthy to try and suppress it to the point where it doesn't come out. There's a pleasure drive, which is this notion of think about food, sex, all the things that people do to experience that rush. It has the problem, of course, of being, you have”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My view of this, we see openings in distribution end up creating an explosion of momentum in areas that you have high consumer demand. This is what I'm most interested at the moment, at least in AI, which is where's the distribution dislocation? And I don't see it in the way that I think I did, say, for example, we did a mobile with the early internet with social inside of that you have people. And so they're enjoying these forces that are out of their control by definition. And you get types of entrepreneurs in tailwinds. There are the hyper competitive entrepreneurs that care about winning at all costs. And that can serve you really well in a high disruption of distribution because you gain share. And sometimes that is the game on the field. I would say that was a defining attribute of Travis more than any human I'd ever met. Possibly the few others running large companies at the moment.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Journey you're on if you're a founder for a decade, you have every next milestone of success, the devil's temptations to degrade into somebody who became too interested in the vanity, too interested in just winning or whatever it might be. That's the probability set because the numbers can get through to that pick your measure of radical success What always struck me about Mark Zuckerberg is that he kept it fresh. And I think he's done with Mark today. You see the same dynamic energy matured that we saw when we were at Excel in 2005. Some people either don't grow and evolve and that's one of the traps for founders. They just say rigid in their place. Others mature out of the generative place that led to the company start.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To call it, but is it the epicenter of benchmarks relationships with founders? If we don't have that, we're useless. This question, I'm going to go back to life's work. We had dinner with a founder last night of a company that's public and very successful. Things I'm about to say probably prevent me from saying his name, but oftentimes when we're working with founders, that life's work gets occluded. It clouds over and gets oxidized. And we can see this person who was nothing when we met them in terms of extrinsic rewards, accolades, fame, wealth, none of it. And then as they move through these seasons, they can become loaded up with the bureaucracy of a company, with the trappings of wealth, with the distractions that come with success. And I say a lot of what we end up doing on the life's works category is deoxidizing, polishing, bringing to the surface the most creative generative capacities they have. And know that the”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Acts of love they don't resolve to rationality. If they're really pure, then they form their own logic. And I think the feelings we had towards Victor, and we got to have dinner with him and some of these founders. I'm trying to remember all these different interactions, but we sat a large surface area of how Victor interacted with other entrepreneurs. And we said, there's a right answer here, which is that if he's the person that we have this residence with as a partner and that resonance comes from his capacity to build deep, trust-based relationships with great founders. When I and Bill and I and others have benchmark recruited Matt Kohler out of Facebook, that's what stood out. He'd done that with Reed Hoffman. He did that with Mark Zuckerberg to a degree with Peter Thiel. And I said, the rest of it, we can figure out. Who's the first phone call on a bad day? And my guess is that Victor's the person, the team at Brex will call first. And Kohler was the person that read or suck. And so to me, that is an exceedingly rare talent gift, whatever you want.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a way that isn't fake, and I saw that with you, which is there's sort of a disarming nature of I'm not here to judge. You've got some issues, and I saw you do this with people and situations that an average person that's more self-interested doesn't have the consideration of really thinking about and perceiving what is that other person going through right now. And so I got to watch Vector do that time and time again. So we're always recruiting a new partner, and we're recruiting, and we this weird place where we said, gosh, the person whom we most want to work with is the CEO of one of the companies.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source