YouSaid · the spoken record

Rob Reid

lines on the record: 166
first: 2021-06-21
most recent: 2021-06-21
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

“Won't say the loss is the best part personally, but it definitely is an aspect of it. And, you know, the grief you might feel about something that's gone makes you realize what a big deal it was.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That reached people perhaps that come along and come across their ideas or their works or their stories or their aesthetic creations of other sorts long after they're dead. I think that's really, really big part of the fabric of the meaning of life. And, you know, so all these things, like, you know, love and creation, I think really is what it's all about.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Love between creatures. I had a dog for 10 years who passed away a while ago. And experienced unbelievable love with her. It can be love of that which you create. And we were talking about the flow states that we enter and the pride or lack of pride or in the Minsky case, your hatred of that which you've done. But nonetheless, the creations that we make and whether it's the love or the joy or the engagement or the perspective shift that that cascades into other minds, I think that's a big, big, big part of the meaning of life. It's not something that everybody participates in necessarily. Although I think we all do, you know, at least in a very local level by the example that we set by the interactions that we have, but for people who create works that travel far and reach people they'll never meet, that reach countries they'll never visit.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, this is where I'm going to go all hallmarking on you, but I think that, you know, there's a few things. And, you know, one of them is certainly love and the love that we experience and feel and cause to well up in others is something that's just so profound and goes beyond almost anything else that we can do. And whether that is something that lies in the past, like maybe there was somebody that you were dating and loved very profoundly in college and haven't seen in years, I don't think the significance of that love is in any way diminished by the fact that it had a notional beginning and end. The fact is that you experienced that and you triggered that in somebody else and that happened. And it doesn't have to be, certainly doesn't have to be love of romantic partners alone. It's family members. It's love between friends.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't say might. I think if you start a company that has ambitious investors, ambitious for the returns that they'd like to see. Has ambitious employees ambitious for the career trajectories they want to be on and so forth and is driven by your own ambition. There is a profound monogamy to that and it is very, very hard to carve out time to be creative, to be peaceful, to be so forth because of, you know, with every new employee that you hire, that's one more mouth to feed. With every new investor that you take on, that's one more person to whom you really do want to deliver great returns. And as the valuation ticks up, the threshold to delivering great returns for your investors always rises. And so there is an extraordinary monogamy to being a founder CEO, above all for the first few years and first in people's”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where's the end of my own life can't be solved? Well, I don't know. I mean, there's transhumanists who have incredible optimism about nearer or intermediate future therapies that could really, really change human lifespan. I really hope that they're right, but I don't have a whole lot to add to that project because I'm not a life scientist myself.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Helps us choose the right things if we're tuned to that and we're attuned to the context that mortality puts over the consequence of every decision we make of how to spend our time. That doesn't mean that we're all very good at it. It doesn't mean I'm very good at it. But it does add a dimension of choice and significance to everything that we elect to do.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It makes you realize how unbelievably rare and precious the moments that we have here are and therefore how consequential the decisions that we make about how to spend our time are. Do you do those 17 nagging emails or do you have dinner with somebody who's really important to you, who haven't seen in three and a half years? If you had an infinite expanse of time in front of you, you might well rationally conclude I'm going to do those emails because collectively they're rather important. And I have tens of thousands of years to catch up with my buddy Tim. But I think the scarcity of the time that we have.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, with respect to pondering mortality, I do try to do that as little as possible because there's nothing I can do about it. But it's inevitably there. And I think that what it does, when you think about it in the right way,”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exist, but it's highly imaginable that using Oracle networks that are trusted outside deliverers of factual information about rainfall in a particular area, you can start giving drought insurance to folks like this. The right person to come up with that idea is not a crypto whiz. Who doesn't know a blasted thing about smallholding farmers, the right person to come up with that is not a crop insurance whiz who isn't quite sure what Bitcoin is, but somebody occupies that intersection. That's just one of gazillion examples of things that are going to come along for somebody who occupies the right intersection of skills but isn't necessarily the number one person at either one of those expertise.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's, you know, I'm sure that's a big world. Crop insurance is a very, very big deal, particularly in the wealthy and industrialized world where people through sophisticated financial markets, rule of law, and large agricultural concerns that are worried about that. Somewhere out there is somebody who is pretty crypto savvy, but probably not top 1%, but also kind of been in the crop insurance world and understands that a hell of a lot better than almost anybody who's ever had anything to do with cryptocurrency. And so I think that decentralized finance, DeFi, one of the interesting and I think very world positive things that I think it's almost inevitably will be bringing to the world is crop insurance for small holding farmers. where there is no crop insurance available to them because just the financial infrastructure doesn't”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I'll give you kind of a funny hypothetical here, but it's one I've been thinking about a little bit. There's a lot of people in crypto right now. It'd be hard to be in the top percentile of crypto people, whether it comes from just having a sheer grasp with the industry, a great network within the industry, technological skills, whatever you want to call it. And then there's this parallel world, orthogonal world called crop insurance.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Finding an intersection of two things you can be pretty good at, but is a rare intersection and a special intersection is probably a much easier way to make yourself distinguishable and in demand from the world than trying to be world class at this one thing.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Worldwide Web stuff commercially for five months, you know, and then what was interesting though was the intersection of those two things, the commercial web, as it turned out, grew into an unbelievable vastness. And so by being a pretty good, okay web person and a pretty good, okay MBA person, that intersection put me in a very rare group, which was web-oriented MBAs. In those early days, you could probably count on your fingers the number of people who came out of really competitive programs who were doing stuff full-time on the internet. And there was a greater appetite for great software developers in the internet domain, but there was an appetite and a real one and a rapidly growing one for MBA thinkers who were also seasoned and networked in the emerging world of the commercial worldwide web. And so”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have unbelievably smart people at the time. It was not surprising that SGI started doing really interesting and innovative and trailblazing stuff on the internet before almost anybody else. And part of the reason was that our founder, Jim Clark, went off to co-found Netscape with Mark Andreessen. So the whole company was like, wait, what was that? What's this commercial internet thing? So I ended up in that group. Now, in terms of being a commercial internet person or a worldwide web person, again, I was, in that case, barely credentialed. I couldn't write a stitch of code, but I had a pretty good mind for grasping the business and cultural significance of this transition. And this was, again, we were talking earlier about emerging areas within a few months. I was in the relatively top echelon of people in terms of just sheer experience. Because like, let's say it was five months into the program, there were only so many people who'd been doing.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Appreciate that. It's one But anyway, so I learned the things that you learn getting a MBA from a top program. And I entered a world that had hundreds of thousands of people who had MBAs, probably hundreds of thousands who had them from top 10 programs. So I was not particularly great at being an MBA person. I was inexperienced relative to most of them. And there were a lot of them, but it was okay MBA person, right? Newly minted. But then as it happened, I found my way into working on the commercial internet in 1994. So I went to a, at the time, giant hot computing company called Silicon Graphics, which had enough heft and enough headcount that they could take on and experienced NBAs and try to train them in the world of Silicon Valley. But within that company that had an enormous amount of surface area and was touching very a lot of areas and was a”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Moment. He was, you know, one of the top three people on earth at that thing. But wow, how hard to do that. How many thousands of other people went down that path and made similar sacrifices and didn't get there? It's very, very hard to do that. Whereas, and I'll use a personal example, when I came out of business school, I went to a good business school and learned the things that were there to be learned. And I came out and I entered a world with lots of empathy. Harvard.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I mean, if you're going out there and you want to be in the top sliver 1% of Python developers, it's a very, very difficult thing to do, particularly if you want to be number one in the world, something like that. And he'll use an analogy is I had a friend in college who was on a track and indeed succeeded at that to become an Olympic medaler medalist. And I think it was 100 meter breaststroke. He Morggagged a significant percentage of his sort of college life to that goal or I should say dedicated or invested or whatever you wanted to say, but he didn't participate in a lot of the social, a lot of the late night, a lot of the this, a lot of the that, because he was training so much. And obviously he also wanted to keep up with his academics. And at the end of the day, Story has a happy ending and that he did meddle in that. Bronze, not gold, but holy cow. Anybody who gets an Olympic medal, that's an extraordinary thing. And at that moment,”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Competitive world that is so much more competitive than it was when I was coming out of school, radically more competitive than when I was coming out of school, to navigate your way to the absolute pinnacle of any domain. Let's say you want to be really, really great at Python, pick a language, whatever it is. You want to be one of the world's greatest Python developers, JavaScript, whatever your language is. Hopefully it's not cobalt.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, let's see. I mean, there's so many domains you can advise on, and I'm not going to give advice on life because I fear that I would drift into sort of hallmark bromides that really wouldn't be all that distinctive. And they might be entirely true. Sometimes the greatest insights about life turn out to be like the kinds of things you'd see on a Hallmark card. So I'm going to steer clear of that. On a career level, one thing that I think is unintuitive but unbelievably powerful is to focus not necessarily on being the top sliver of 1% in excelling at one domain that's important and valuable. But to think in terms of intersections of two domains, which are rare but valuable. And there's a couple reasons for this. The first is in an incredible”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obviously. But my understanding is they're relatively way more hands off, and that has had a demonstrable effect, because I agree. Some of the greatest, you know,”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a relative thing. From what I understand, it's a relative thing. They're interfering far, far, far less than, you know, NBC or AMC would have interfered. So it's a relative thing. And obviously they're the ones writing the checks and the other ones giving the platform. So they have every right to their own influence.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Coming out of a major studio, the average quality, in my view, is nosedived over the past decade's kind of everything's got to be a superhero franchise. But great stuff gets made despite that. But I have to assume that in some cases, at least in perhaps many cases, greater stuff would be made if there was less interference from non-creative executives.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, so that could be much more common and ultimately having the aggregate, an even bigger impact than the cancellation, let's say, of somebody who says the wrong word or voices the wrong idea. I mean, that's kind of what you have, and not kind of, it's what you have with film and TV, is that so much influence is exerted over the storyline and the plots and the character arcs and all kinds of things by executives who are completely alien to the experience and the skill set of being a showrunner in television, being a director in film that, you know, is meant to like, oh, we can't piss off the Chinese market here, or we can't say that, or we need to have, you know, cast members that have precisely these demographics reflected or whatever it is that, you know, and obviously despite that extraordinary at least TV shows are now being made, you know, in terms of film, I think the quality has nosedived of the average, let's say, say American.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Upon Spotify for permission to come into existence and is really dependent, really wants to please them to get that money in, to get that placement, really wants to be successful. Now all of a sudden you're having a dialogue between a complete non-creative, some marketing, you know, sort of data analytic person at Spotify and a creative that's going to shape what that show is.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and even if they don't stifle it, if they're providing incentives within the platform to shape, shift, or even completely mutate or distort the show, I mean, imagine somebody has got reasonably interesting idea for a podcast and they get signed up with, let's say, Spotify. Then Spotify is going to give them financing to get the thing spun up. And that's great. And Spotify is going to give them a certain amount of really powerful placement within the visual field of listeners. But Spotify's conditions for that. They say, look, we think that your podcast will be much more successful if you dumb it down about 60%, if you add some silly, dirty jokes. If you do this, you do that. And suddenly the person who is dependent upon.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And because he was syndicated on hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of radio stations at a time when terrestrial broadcast was the main thing people listened to in their car and no more, obviously. But when he decided to go over to satellite radio, I can't remember it was XM or Sirius, maybe they'd already merged at that point. But when he did that, he made totally his right to do it. financial calculation that they were offering him a nine-figure sum to do that, but his audience, because not a lot of people were subscribing to satellite radio at that point, his audience probably collapsed by, I wouldn't be surprised if it was as much as 95%. And so the influence that he had on the culture and his ability to sort of shape conversation and so forth just gotten muted.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That surprises me the number of times that I've been looking for things I don't even think are that obscure that are just it says not available in your geography period mister right so I think that that's a mistake and then the other thing is you know for podcasters and lovers of podcasting we should want to resist this wall garden thing because it does smother this friction free or eradicate this friction free discovery unless you want to sign up for lots of different services. And also dims the voice of somebody who might be able to have a far, far, far bigger impact by reaching far more neurons with their ideas. I'm going to use an example from, I guess it was probably the 90s or maybe it was the aughts of Howard Stern who had the biggest megaphone or maybe the second biggest after Oprah megaphone and popular culture.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Standpoint and simply from a humanistic standpoint do you want to bring delight to people? But it also creates an incredible opening vector for piracy. And so something that's very different from the Rhapsody slash Spotify slash et cetera-like experience is what we have now in video. You know, like, wow, is that show on Hulu? Is it on Netflix? Is it on something like IFC channel? Is it on Discovery Plus? Is it here? Is it there? And the more frustration and toe stubbing that people encounter when they are sinking something and they're already paying a very respectable amount of money per month to have access to content and they can't find it, the more that happens, the more people are going to be driven to piracy solutions like to hell with it. Never know where I'm going to find something. I never know what it's going to cost. Oftentimes, really interesting things are simply unavailable.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think walled gardens are. Really toxic to the medium that they start balkanizing. So to take an example, take two examples with music, it was a very, very big deal that at Rhapsody, we were the first company to get full catalog licenses from all back then there were five major music labels and also hundreds and hundreds of indies because you needed to present the listener with a sense that basically everything is there and there is essentially no friction to discovering that which is new. And you can wander this realm and all you really need is a good map, whether it is something that the editorial team assembled or a good algorithm or whatever it is. But a good map to wander this domain. When you start walling things off, A, you undermine the joy of friction-free discovery, which is an incredibly valuable thing to deliver to your customer, both from a business.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At his argument, he honors it. He's a very, very, you know, gentle and non-combatative soul. But then he is very good and takes great evident joy in responding to that in a way that expands your understanding of his thinking.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we're on this big flat thing for which there is a thing called down. And we all know, I mean, that's the most intuitive thing that one could probably think of. And we all know that that ain't true. So, my conversation with Don Hoffman is just wild and full of plot twists and interesting stuff.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So Don Hoffman is again some listeners probably know because he's, I think I was the first podcaster to interview him. I'm sure some of your listeners are familiar with him, but he has this unbelievably contrarian take. On the nature of reality, but it is contrarian in a way that all the ideas are highly internally consistent and snapped together in a way that's just delightful. And it seems as radically violating of our intuitions and as radically violating of the probable nature of reality as anything that one can encounter, but an analogy that he uses, which is very powerful, which is what intuition could possibly be more powerful than the notion that there is a single unitary direction called down.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that required me to learn a hell of a lot more about SinBio than I knew going into it. So there was just this very broad, I mean, I knew much more than the average person going into that episode, but there was this incredible breadth of grounding that I needed to give myself in the domain. And then George does so many interesting things. There's so many interesting things emitting from his lab that, you know, and he and I had a really good dialogue. He was a great guide going into it. Winnowing it down to the three to four that I really wanted us to focus on to create a sense of wonder and magic in the listener of what could be possible from this very broad spectrum domain. That was a doozy of a challenge. That was a tough, tough, tough one to prepare for. Now, in terms of something that was just wild and fun, unexpected. I mean, by the time we sat down to interview, I knew where we were going to go.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, this no way diminishes the episodes that will not be the answer to these two questions, but an example of something that was really, really challenging to prepare for was George Church. So, as I'm sure you know, and as I'm sure many of your listeners know, he is one of the absolute leading lights in the field of synthetic biology. He's also unbelievably prolific. His lab is large and has all kinds of efforts of spun out of that. And what I wanted to make my George Church episode about was, first of all, grounding people into what is this this thing called synbio.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've fallen off of it myself as well. I mean, when I fell madly in love with it during the aughts, it was the only thing going. They were really smart to adopting podcasting as a distribution mechanism early. But yeah, I think that maybe there's a little bit less magic there now because I think they have agendas other than necessarily just delighting their listeners with quirky stories, which I think is what it was all about back in the day and some other things.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And all in and that kind of thing. So I think it's a combination of sort of the arc and the chemistry. And I think because the arc can be so important, that's where very, very highly produced podcasts like This American Life, obviously a radio show, but I think of a podcast because that's how I always consume it or criminal or a lot of what Wondery does and so forth. That is real documentary making and that requires a big team and a big budget relative to the kinds of things you and I do. But nonetheless, then you got that arc And that can be really, really compelling. But if we go back to conversation, I think it's a combination of structure and chemistry.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. Couldn't care less about auto mechanics myself. That's right. But I love that show because the banter between those two guys was just beyond. It was without any parallel, right? You know, and some kind of edgy podcast like Red Scare is just really entertaining to me because the banter women on that show is just so good.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say two things, one of two things, and ideally both of two things. One is if something is beautifully architected, whether it's done deliberately and methodically and willfully, as when I do it, or whether that just emerges from the conversation. But something that's beautifully architected, that can create something that's incredibly powerful and memorable. Or something where there's just extraordinary chemistry. And so with all in, or go way back, you might remember the NPR show car talk.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, 1% vision, you don't want to get lose that, but execution machines, you know, people who have a demonstrated ability and a demonstrated focus on, yeah, I go from point to point to point. I try to beat and raise expectations relentlessly, never fall short. And, you know, both sort of blaze and follow the path. Not that the path is going, I mean, blaze the trail as well. I mean, a good founder is going to trust that VP of sales to have a better sense of what it takes to build out that organization, what the milestones be. And it's going to be kind of a dialogue amongst those at the top. But, you know, execution obsession in the team is the next thing.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, okay. So we talked about the founder. You were asking what makes a great startup. Great founder is thing number one, but then thing number two, and it's ginormous, is a great team. And so I said so much about the founder because one hopes or one believes that a founder who is a great hirer is going to be hiring people in charge of critical functions like engineering and marketing in BizDev and sales and so forth who themselves are great hirers. But what needs to radiate from the founder into the team that might be a little bit different from what's in the gene code of the founder? The team needs to be fully bought into the intuitions and the vision of the founder. Great. We've got that. But the team needs to have a slightly different thing, which is it's 99% obsession is execution, is to relentlessly hit the milestones, hit the objectives, hit the quarterly goals. That is”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With a good mentor, like a mentor who's mentoring you Yeah, you can a great deal, particularly if it's somebody who's been through this very process and has navigated it successfully and cares enough about you and your well-bing to give you beautifully unvarnished advice that can be a huge, huge thing that can assuage things a great deal. And I had a board member who was not an investor who basically played that role for me to a great degree. He came in maybe halfway through the company's history, though. I would have needed that the most in the very earliest days.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unbelievably. And that's the drawback. I mean, if you're a lone founder, there is no other person that you can sit down with and tackle problems and talk them through who has precisely or nearly precisely your alignment of interests. Your most trusted board member is likely an investor and therefore at the end of the day has the interest of preferred stock in mind, not common stock. Your most trusted VP who might own a very significant stake in the company, doesn't own anywhere near your stake in the company. And so their long-term interest may well be in getting the right level of experience and credibility necessary to peel off and start their own company. Or their interests might be aligned with jumping ship and setting up with another different company, whether it's a rival or wanting in a completely different space. So yeah, being a loan founder.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With the team as a result of each having that founder role. And I have witnessed over the years many, many situations in which companies have been shredded or have suffered near fatal blows because of a falling out between founders. And the more founders you add, the more risky that becomes. I don't think there should ever, almost, I mean, you never say never, but multiple founders beyond two is such an unstable and potentially treacherous situation that I would never ever recommend going beyond two. But I do see value in the non-technical sort of business and market and outside-minded founder teaming up with the technical founder. There is a lot of merit to that, but there's a lot of danger in that lest those two blow apart.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. There are lots and lots of loan founder companies out there that have made an incredible difference. I mean, I'm not certainly putting Rhapsody in the League of Spotify. We were too early to be Spotify, but we didn't awful lot of innovation. And then after the company sold and ended up in the hands of Real Networks and MTV, you know, got to millions of subs, right? I was a lone founder. And I studied Arabic and Middle Eastern history undergrad. So I wasn't very, very technical. But yeah, loan founders can absolutely work in the advantage of a loan founder is you don't have the catastrophic potential of a falling out between founders. I mean, two founders who fall out with each other badly can rip a company to shreds because they both have an enormous amount of equity and enormous amount of power in the capital structure as a result of that. They both have an enormous amount of moral authority.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it doesn't necessarily have to be the technical competence. It's got to be, in my view, just a complete immersion in that emerging market. And so I can imagine, there are a couple people out there who have started really good crypto projects who themselves aren't right in the code, but they're immersed in the culture and through the culture and a deep understanding of what's happening and what's not happening, they can get a good intuition of what's possible, but the very first higher, I mean, a great way to solve that is to have a technical co-founder and dual founder companies have become extremely common for that reason. And if you're not doing that and you're not the technical person, but you are the founder, You've got to be really great at hiring a very damn good technical person very, very fast.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But just important, a very good firer. And firing is a horrific experience for both people involved in it. It is a wrenching emotional experience. And being good at realizing when this particular person is damaging the interests of the company and the team and the shareholders and having the intestinal fortitude to have that conversation and make it happen is something that most people don't have in them. And it's something that needs to be developed in most people. Or maybe some people have it naturally. But without that ability, that will take an A-plus organization into B minus range very, very quickly. And so that's all what needs to be present in the founder.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This above things that might rationally, you know, should perhaps rationally supersede it for a period of time to just relentlessly pivot when pivoting is called for. And it's always called for. I mean, we've even very successful companies like, how many times did Facebook pivot, you know, news feed with something that was completely alien to the original version of Facebook and came foundationally important? How many times in Google? How many times at any given time? How many times has Apple pivoted? That founder energy in DNA, when the founder moves on, the DNA that's been inculcated with a company has to have that relentlessness and that ability to pivot and pivot and pivot without being worried about sacred cows. And then the last thing I'll say about the founder before I get to the rest of the team, and that'll be mercifully brief, is the founder has to be obviously a really great hirer.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The entrepreneur to be very, very deep in the technology and the culture and of the space because you need that entrepreneur, that founder, to have just an unbelievably accurate, intuitive sense for where the puck is going, right? And that only comes from being very deep. So that is sort of factor number one. And the next thing is that that founder needs to be charismatic and or credible or ideally both in exactly the right ways to be able to attract a team that is bought into that vision and is bought into that founder's intuitions being correct and not just the team obviously but also the investors. So it takes a certain personality type to pull that off. Then the next thing I'm still talking about a founder is a relentlessness and indeed a monomania to put”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had been founded for what, a year and a half, but he'd created the first one. And in Mosaic, when he was an undergrad, and the commercial internet was pre-nascent in 1994 when Netscape was founded. So there's somebody who's very, very deep in their domain. Mark Zuckerberg also social networking, very deep in his domain, even though it was nascent at the time, lots of people doing crypto stuff. I mean, you know, and 10 years ago even seven or eight years ago, by being a really, really vehement and engaged participant in the crypto ecosystem, you could be an expert in that. You look however more established industries take Salesforce.com, Salesforce Automation pretty mature field when it got started, who's the executive and the founder, Mark Benioff, who spent 13 years at Oracle and was an investor in Siebel Systems, which ended up being Salesforce's main competition. So, you know, more established, you need...”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source