445 | Arun Gupta: Venture Meets Mission - How Mission-Driven Capitalism Can Solve Societal Challenges

Marshall here. Welcome back to the Realignment. Today's guest is Arun Gupta, the venture capitalist and CEO of the Noble Reach foundation, which brings together the brightest minds of government, industry and academia to tackle societal problems. He has a new book out this week, Venture Meets Aligning People, Purpose and Profit to Innovate and Transform Society. I've been interviewing all sorts of people on this podcast for almost five years, and more and more I've come to believe that actually solving the country's big geopolitical, technological and economic challenges actually requires different parts and actors of our society to get out of their silos and work together in a mission driven way. So Arwen's thoughts in this conversation and the book on how business, government and society as a whole can work together are right up my alley. A theme of yesterday's episode of Joshua Green about the rise of left populism was that the past decade or so in our political system have really been defined by justified anger about the status quo. Those actors and politicians most elevated by this moment have been those who are best able to channel that frustration and that feeling. My thesis moving forward though, is that this next decade needs folks who can also internalize these critiques, internalize the anger, internalize the problems that were ignored for far too long, but then actually go forward and build something to address the actual problems themselves. So moving forward in this podcast, I'll be consistently returning to this mission centric theme. Huge thanks to the foundation for American Innovation for supporting the work of this podcast. Arun Gupta, welcome to the Realignment Marshall.

Thanks for having me.

I was just telling you this before we started the recording. Your book was a instant booking for the podcast because it had the word mission in the title. And I'm someone who's actually been Ever since I started this podcast in 2019, I've been kind of searching for terms and concepts that can help us actually have a proper framework for solving issues and approaching challenges. Because I think clearly you've seen a lot of efforts, especially post 2016, at trying to kind of find that next thing, that next idea, that next movement. So I have just, personally, before I even got your booking, settled on Mission as being one that is going to be a potential game changer for folks at a leadership level. So let's just kind of start there. Like, what does the term and the title Venture meets Mission mean to you?

Yeah, well, Marshall, thank you for those comments and thank you for having me. I mean, for me, you know, Venture is about the entrepreneurial spirit, right? It is about creating it's around building. It's about taking risk, it's about testing and learning. All of that goes into the venture piece. And for me it's about partnership at the core. Right. And so as we think about building, you know, we've had probably decades where a lot of our venture community has been focused on, you know, just scaling companies irrespective of kind of what the societal impact is of those companies. And nothing wrong with that. We're a capitalist society. But I think we're, we're moving into a phase where, where and we now have early proof points where we can use that same venture mindset around more mission oriented activity. And mission in my mind is, you know, where you're able to provide real societal good. And you know, what we try to draw in the book is how do you take that entrepreneurial spirit, that venture spirit that we have in the Valley and that we have in our entrepreneurial ecosystem, but tie it to the mission of government. Right. And tie it to the mission of our country. And that could be because at the end of the day we're not going to solve climate, we're not going to solve national security, cybersecurity, healthcare, only with a startup in the Valley. And we're not going to certainly solve it with just government working on this. We need a renewed partnership and a renewed collaboration. And that was at the core of what we were trying to put out there with the Venture Meets Mission title. And as the subject line says, I think there's never been a time where you can mobilize capital around people, purpose and profit like you can today because people are seeing that you can actually make money doing good work that is around the societal good and you don't have to divorce profit, not for profit in that capacity.

Yeah. And I think I was just the perfect person to get this book pitch because a, I work at the University of Texas, so that's the academic side of things. I work at a think tank in D.C. so that's the like policy politics side of things. And then I, you know, until very recently worked at a technology company and my wife works in venture capital. So I'm actually just in my personal life intersection, I'm at the intersection of these three spaces and this why it just becomes useful because to speak to kind of the venture model, I had this experience where you know, you're just kind of reading about vc, you're reading about founders and you know, there's the pitch deck process. Right. Which I'm sure you're very well aware of. You're You're a founder trying to pitch VCs, you put together a pitch deck. And my favorite slide on the pitch deck is the problem section. Because I actually think that if we're looking at these broad societal category areas, I think we have a huge set of problems. But I don't think policymakers and actual actors in government have oriented their thinking around. Okay, Your job in this space is to think entrepreneurially, identify a problem and then articulate how your values, your ideas, your proposals actually meet that problem. Because I actually think that if we oriented our political system and the actual actors in politics around identifying these problems, it's not as if that's going to solve the culture wars or the societal acrimony, but it will actually create a bit of space where we can all just operate on the same page. I'm curious how you kind of like think about that framework because you're trying to explain to people this isn't just for a book, for people who want to launch a company or you know, be a LP or be a gp. There's actually something here framework wise that's useful.

Yeah, no Marshall on that point a little bit. You know what I've learned through my own travels and career journey. Look, my father still is in Naval Sea System Command, so he's been in, you know, nav scene government for 45 years. I was a VC for 20 plus years at Carlisle and Columbia Capital and then I started teaching at Georgetown, at Stanford and have had so the government venture capital academic through line in my career. And what you realize, and I think you're touching on this is a lot of this is just understanding how the others operate right. And creating a shared vernacular and creating an understanding of how they view the world so that when you're kind of trying to collaborate, you're understanding how the other person is receiving what you're saying. And I think that was a lot of the impetus for the book was I was teaching a class at Stanford called Valley Meets Mission, which was about trying to talk to these students around. Don't waste your talents and platform you've been given. In fact, you almost have a responsibility not to go do candy crush 3.0, but to your point, let's go solve bigger problems that are out there. Right. And then. And the problem set is, are large but, but not divorce that from the sense that you can't go make money doing that. These can still be profit oriented ventures and I think we've, we've conditioned generation to think there's an artificial binary choice. They have to make right. And we use the words for profit, not for profit, very binary. We use the words public sector, private sector, very binary. So students start to think, I either have to pick one or the other, I go make money or I do good. And I would see this as students were coming into my class and office hours, but like struggling with this artificial choice. And I think what we were trying to do with the book was highlight that this isn't, doesn't need to be an artificial choice. You can go do both. This isn't an or, but it's an and function. And it's also one though that hopefully, you know, it doesn't require just government to change. It doesn't require just venture to change. It doesn't require just the academic community change. There's a little bit of change from all that needs to happen. But you know, I fundamentally believe, Marshall, that our strategic superpowers in this country and even today continue to be our higher ed system. And the way we were able to create talent and our entrepreneurial ecosystem and the ability we're able to innovate, there's nowhere else in the world that's close. And these are deeply cultural ecosystems that are hard to replicate for our adversaries. So in great power competition, if we're going to compete, we should be aligning these two ecosystems to what we're doing in a more meaningful way to help solve these. And I think we're starting to see some of that happening. And I think we're on the early innings of that, which is why we try to write the book in a very optimistic tone, which is we think this is a generational opportunity. This is an opportunity and every generation always looks for that. What's the call to action? What's a purposeful thing to go after? And I think this space around mission and venture, wherever you define it, you know, it could be food, security, it could be, as we said, climate, national security, defense, tech, health. There's a place for it. And you know, the, the amount of money coming into it is meaningful and we're starting to see the early success stories of it.

You know, something I'm really curious about is kind of interrogating your kind of pushback against the like, profit, not non profit framework. Because, you know, I'm not sure if you've read Anand Girigadis's book from back in 2017, and on the one hand I agree with what you're saying, but I actually am aware of his very valid critique, which is that, you know, we could now Attack the phrase, you know, doing well by doing good, and then we all go work at Goldman Sachs and don't actually do anything. So I'm curious, how would you like differentiate kind of the vapid 2000 and tens version, which I think Anand like very accurately critiqued from what you're articulating, which is that there actually are these big challenges and setting this up in this dichotomy is actually harmful to attracting talent, capital, energy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

The idea that you can, I think Anand's point was really more of a commentary of, let's call it the billionaire class of coming in and using their wealth now to go solve problems. What we're trying to get at here is more how do we, how do we create almost a bottom up entrepreneurial wave that is collaborating to solve these problems. Now that money can come in to support that, but it's it, you know, I think people get enamored by the capital and the technology, but at the core of it, it's about getting the right talent in. Right. And inspiring that talent in. And I don't think his critique talks about that. And you know, because at the core, that's what's necessary. Right. This isn't about just, hey, let's just throw more capital at the problem. Because I agree with them, that's not the solution. But the solution is how do you, in that process of using that capital, attract a generation to want to use their talents and their times not to go to the bank, the consulting firm, as he's talking about, but go in and actually join a mission venture that can be for profit to go solve these problems. And so that's, that's, you know, I think in many ways we're aligned in some ways, you know, there's, there's a slight difference in how we look at the world. Yeah.

And I think what I'll just add editorially to what you just said is I think at its best, the anon critique is basically the doing well but doing good. Articulation makes it very easy to justify joining up with the status quo and frame it as if you're doing something truly innovative. Because like, the example he'll give is he, he, he profiles this woman who, like at McKinsey, because, you know, she's, she's at Harvard and she sees this, she's like, oh, I'm not sure I want to be a consultant. They want to be in a nonprofit space. They're like, no, no, don't worry. There's this like, 20% time you could reconcile these things. Your point is, and this is inherent to the nature of venture and entrepreneurship, by definition, it is not status quo minded. You're launching something new. You're attacking a problem set, you're challenging a legacy incumbent. This is a very helpful way of distinguishing these ideas. So here's the next question. This is where the venture to public oriented mod becomes kind of difficult. Inherent to the venture capital model is this idea that most of these things are going to fail. But in the second or third chapter, you specifically gave this example of public private partnership as being, hey, building the arsenal of democracy. And you know, I actually host a podcast called the Arsenal of Democracy. So once again, you've written a book very personally oriented toward my interest. But the example you give is, hey, it's, you know, 1940, the US military is behind the European powers and the Japanese. And then you have, you know, Henry Kaiser with shipbuilding, Bill Knudsen With GM coming into this government space, FDR setting the mission, we're going to produce 50,000 airplanes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We win World War II and supply all of the allies. Here's the thing, we could not fail in that mission by its very definition. Yet when it comes to venture, most of these things are going to kind of fail. So I'd love to kind of help you. Kind of. I basically kind of ask you like, where are the limits of like the venture metaphor when it comes to solving societal channels Suspect. You don't think we're going to need to fail when it comes to climate change or something like that?

No, I think that's right. You know, Marshall, so you know, the book you're referring to or the reference we have in the book is to a book called Freedom Forge, you know, which, you know, I think it's a really interesting parallel to where we are today, right? Where many times people are like, our government's not operating at the efficiency we want. We don't have the talent that we need. How do we catalyze that change? I think there's very different, you know, we're in a very different environment than, you know, the example that you outlined there and that the book is about, which is now our, that innovation isn't centralized inside of government, that talent isn't centralized inside of government. Right? It's, it's decentralized. And that actually is okay. That's been the power of the US and so when we say government can't fail, you're absolutely right. But government also doesn't have the ecosystem where it can experiment. Right. So the experimentation, that's what needs to happen in the private sector. How government brings that in and scales it is where a role that they can play. But we need to have that experimentation because we don't have that experimentation. We're no longer a vertically integrated society. Right. Where you know, even think in the 60s when Kennedy says we're going to put someone at the moon. The talent, the capital and the technology is all sitting there within one department today that's dispersed. And I would argue that's okay. And that's actually been the superpower of how we've been able to innovate against our adversaries over time. Not the broken link, but the link that we haven't modernized. Marshall is building the infrastructure to connect that decentralized innovation both on the talent side and the innovation side and bringing it to government. Right. We need to create that highways and the pathways, the front doors to do that. And while we have a lot of front doors, we need to do it in a scalable way. Like we don't need just, you know, sometimes having too many front doors is almost confusing. So it doesn't help the situation. Right. We need a few ways to do this. And, and that's what we try to highlight in the book. Right. Of models that are, that have been working in that context. So look, I think you bring up a good point. This isn't about government not failing, but it, I fundamentally believe, and look, this might be my own venture mindset. Like unless you're, unless you're testing and failing, you're not innovating. And so if we want to innovate, we have to have an ecosystem that is allowed and has the agency to take those bets and misfire because that's the only way we're going to learn fast enough. And I actually think that's our superpower against our adversaries, where you have a more autocratic process because entrepreneurs are going to be more apt to want to collaborate in this kind of construct where there's trust as opposed to an autocratic environment where you don't know what happens when you actually do collaborate with government.

Yeah, and I think I want to be very precise because you go on at length about this example in the book and it may have gone over the heads of folks when you talk about government failure and the tolerance of failure, because I think the kind of perfect example of it I've never been able to get on my head of this is like, once again, as you point out in the book, if you're a vc, if things fail like that's expected, what matters is that you get the, it's the power law. You get that one thing that really like pulls everything together. It doesn't matter if you invested in nine Candy Crushes, as long as you got a Coinbase or a space SpaceX in there. But speaking SpaceX, Tesla, Elon Musk, I think we all remember how the government investment in or support of Solyndra was very, very, very controversial. This was seen as a knock against the Obama administration. And look, I think there are probably plenty of things we could critique with that individual investment. But what is often forgotten is that as a part of that broader program, there's also investment and support in Tesla. So as we're looking at government, we're not saying to ourselves, we in the grand scale of like, if we, if we think of like the Oxford History of the United States, when they write the first 25 years of the 21st century, no one is going to. There won't even be a footnote about Solyndra. Who cares? What matters is that Tesla and SpaceX exist. And that's how venture would approach. But that's not how we approach it from a governmental perspective. And just hearing that framework really shifted my mindset. Love to hear your kind of explanation of this dynamic, how you think about it.

Now look, we, we say it in the book and I, you know, I say it in my class. Like if, as a vc, if I was measured like government, I'd never raise another fund, right? Like VC, we can make 10 bets and eight of them can go awry, but if two of them end up being, you know, like an Airbnb or Google, like, I'm over subscribed to my next fund. That's just the way our industry works. I am, I am measured by my best outcomes in my industry. You know, in government, we're measured by our worst outcomes. So you use the Solyndra example. I could, you know, out of that fund, I could do 10 deals. Nine of them could be okay and collective portfolio could be fine. But if one of them is Solyndra, you're carrying that around with you for a decade. And we just have to understand that, right? Part of that is the politics that we have. But you know, one of the gentlemen we interviewed in the book, Dan Tangrilani, had an interesting idea and he's, and, and what he said is like, look, a lot of this is because, you know, every agency has a inspector general, right? And so their job is to make sure, Marshall, you're doing everything by the rules. And anytime anything happens that strays from that, you know, you could, you know, you're worried about getting called in front of a congressional hearing that has to explain why you had a failure. And so when you do that, you're going to create a risk averse environment because no one wants to get called in front of. And Dan joked around going like, you know, Roon, I actually think we should have two IGs in every agency. I'm like, two, how's that help the problem? And he goes, the other one should be called an Innovation General. And imagine now if you had an innovation general that was going to each agency and you could actually be called in front of Congress because you're not innovating fast enough because you need that tension, right? If you're only getting, if, if you're only going to get someone looking at you for the mistakes you made and no one's going to call you out for what you're not doing. Well, you know, we've created a system, you know, that's, that's going to be more risk averse. And so what we propose in the book, if we can't change the system, we need to change the way we collaborate with a system that can take that risk. Right. And, and, and that's, that's how we talk about the venture and mission piece, is that mission is still important. But if the system of the way government is set up is not allowing you to take the risk that you need because of the politics and the incentives, how you collaborate with an ecosystem that can take that risk is something we should consider. And what that renewed partnership looks like is different. And it's different than what we think about as public private partnership. Traditional public private partnership is government and big company. But when government, and this is what we talk about in the book, is really trying to collaborate with ventures that requires a different kind of arrangement, a different kind of partnership, because these aren't necessarily fully funded. They're going to pivot and they're going to change. And so how do you kind of engage in that in a meaningful way so that you're bringing the best and brightest minds and innovation into our mission ecosystem?

And this is why I'm so obsessed with frameworks. So let's do a bit of, let's do some, several thought experiments. So let's pretend I'm a newly elected member of Congress. I read your book and I sort of start delving into the, you know, venture ecosystem. I love when firms or Funds have kind of just like a thesis statement around how they're deploying their capital. So, like my favorite of these, I've had Mark Andreessen on the podcast before. I love Software is Eating the World. Just like the essay from 2011, because it just says, hey, here's what's happening. Legacy incumbents under attack because of the mobile era. Here's the opportunity, here's what we're going to do over the next 10 years really tells the story of the Valley. So if I were to say to myself, okay, I'm going to look at the United States right now and look at both the problem sets, the opportunities, the challenges, how would you kind of suggest what, what would one put and such? I don't need like the perfect paragraph, but like, what are some ideas or trends that you think would be necessary to put into that thesis statement?

You know, look, I mean, I don't want to be flipped with the software eating the world, but I actually think entrepreneurship's eating the world, right? I think the way we solve these problems are with entrepreneurs. I just, I, I do. And I, I say that, Marshall, because in any sector that you look at, whether it be healthcare, whether it be transportation, whether it be energy, whether it be climate, national security, defense, you know, I think that innovation's coming from the entrepreneurial ecosystem, right? And so if we can get comfortable that entrepreneurs are the ones that are going to lead us out of this, right? Or that are partners because they're the ones that have the mindset that's used to building the plane while you're flying it, right? We're in a world where things are changing too rapidly, right? We had a five year plan. Five years ago, it would have been meaningless because no one would have had LLMs and ChatGPT in it, right? So we need to be in a world where we're constantly testing and learning. And so, you know, I think to me it's that pivot around embracing entrepreneurship, right, As a cultural ethos. And I think America is about as entrepreneurial as it gets. That's what the founding like being an immigrant in this country is an entrepreneurial endeavor, right? We write about in the book, like raising a family is an entrepreneurial endeavor. But I think what makes this country great is because we have, you know, we were a land comprised and born of, you know, immigrants coming here, that we're intrinsically entrepreneurial, right? You're always looking for different ways to try things, do things, et cetera. How we foster that now is our competitive advantage, right? To solve These mission oriented problems. That's what I think, you know, what we're trying to get at that. I also think it's the thing that students, and that's attractive to talent. Right. Because I think, look, we've had a generation now, students that, you know, look, big institutions haven't served them well. Right. You know, I had a student tell me, he's like, look, professor, like, you know, a lot of us grew up, were born in the early 2000s, you know, when we start to kind of, you know, become a little bit more aware. You go through the financial crisis, so you lose your, you know, the institutional trust in banks and the financial system gets rocked. You know, we've gone through, you know, religious institutions that people have started to question. Our university ecosystem, you know, has had things where students are questioning that and then they thought like, big tech would save the world. And now we're kind of on the other side of that going like, oh, wait a second, maybe that's part of the problem. So these students are also looking for ways to kind of help and solve and they're realizing that, like it might be about creating the solutions that we need. Right. And I think that's the power that we can really unleash in what we're, what we're doing here and unleashing that around missions. And look, that doesn't mean everyone, that every one of those. And in fact, you know, the majority of them may not work, but you, it's okay, because that's, that's the story of venture, that's the story of entrepreneurship. Like, it doesn't need to be the first one that works, but you know, these kids will then go and do a second and third and something will work. And that's where, you know, that's where I kind of also guide my students in the classes I teach them. Yeah.

And something I want to make very clear for folks who may be kind of, you know, half listening to the podcast and kind of just hear something and just reflexively be against it. When you're talking about entrepreneurship, you're not just literally saying a kind of 2012 Mitt Romney, our job creators are going to solve everything. Like, entrepreneurship is a mindset and it's an approach. And that's the key thing. There's a reason why you were talking about the need for maybe a second person in an agency because you actually, in terms of the problem sets we're featuring, you actually need people to behave entrepreneurially. Even if you're just a GS11 in Washington D.C. and I think I did a really interesting conversation with the CTO of Palantir earlier this month. And we were kind of having this discussion where he was talking about how we need more founders to solve problems. I was kind of pushing back. I'm like, well, founder has a specific meaning and actual. And I think entrepreneur is actually a better word than founder because once again, like, you can't actually be a founder within an agency. You can't be an entrepreneur within an agency. But he then said, okay, if the word maybe isn't founder, maybe it's someone who's owning something, like owning a problem, owning a responsibility. And that synced well with a really sort of mind expanding conversation I had with a colleague at the Hudson Institute, Nadia Shadlow. She helped write the national defense strategy in 2017. And she pointed out a huge problem we have in D.C. is we kind of just will spend money, appropriate money through legislation and say, okay, we did the thing. She says, look at the CHIPS Act. We passed this massive bipartisan legislation. You all call it out positively in the book. I'm a huge Chip Acts fan. But what actual progress are we making when it comes to deploying semiconductor fabs? How is anyone who passed that legislation actually implementing and moving forward? I think most people don't actually know. I think a lot of the members who then pass that pass the legislation wouldn't actually know either. So that's another example of how if we take an ownership approach, an entrepreneurial approach, we say, okay, I mean, think about the venture version of this. To end the rant, let's say you raise $100 million fund dedicated purely to semiconductor fabs. If you were to invest that a hundred million dollar fund, we would not say that's the accomplishment, because the actual accomplishment would be that translating into company success. So I'd love to hear like, your kind of perspective on this, like, whole dynamic, because I think once again, this is why I find your work so fascinating.

Yeah, no, look, I very much agree with what you're saying. Right. We love the CHIPS act as being a legislative success. Right? You're absolutely right. Like, you know, there's still a lot to do. We're in the very early innings of that. But it was, it's interesting having spent time with Secretary Raimondo and Sri Ramaswamy, who's her senior advisor of the CHIPS act, it's interesting to parse out, like, why at least it was a legislative success because, and that is because it appealed to both the national security of our country, but also the economic security of Our country. Right. This is one about like economic resiliency, supply chain resiliency for critical infrastructure in our country against our adversaries. So that's national security. But it's also about like how do we rebuild the manufacturing base here, you know, that's been hollowed out. Like how do we use this to stir economic development. And I think we, you know, that's a, it's an interesting framework as we think about other, you know, you know, legislative processes of how do we collaborate. Now the, you know, the other piece of this is, you know, a large part of what they're looking to do is also collaborate with entrepreneurs. Like how do we get money out there in the hands of entrepreneurs to help solve some of these problems? And so, you know, that I think is the role that government can play. Again, it's basically directionally saying this is a market we care of and we'll support it. But they're not picking winners. They're not picking, you know, here's who's going to. These aren't nationalized things. And you know, that's the sound bite that people would like you to understand. But this is all about supporting a broader entrepreneurial ecosystem in a more meaningful way. And so, you know, that's how we see it and why we think, you know, we're at the very early innings of how we solve this. Right. These kinds of problems. But what you're starting to see, and I'm heartened by like in doing the book and you know, now with our foundation is, you know, you go talk to the private sector folks, you go talk to the government folks, you go talk to the academic presidents, university presidents, they recognize we need to do something differently now. Right. I'm not, it's not as much that the ideas are new that we're espousing in the book, but I think there's a will to hear them differently than there may have been five years ago or 10 years ago. And so, you know, that's. That I think is what I think is the opportunity and is what's gotten us really excited about the, the path forward.

Yeah. And just the last word on the CHIPS act is even the CHIPS act itself and just the semiconductor manufacturing challenge actually gets it. We are talking about when it comes to partnerships because you a, you need the federal government to appropriate funds and energy. That's what it can do. You need entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, companies, et cetera, to actually build the fabs. They're not government run. But then you also need academics, you need researchers, you know, like we need to make a variety. There are actually some like major scientific breakthroughs and just like manufacturing process breakthroughs that need to actually happen like either in the lab or in a research setting. And in combining these things together at a level deeper than just. Once again, to your point, the public partner, public private partnership point, because if this were as simple as like, hey, we're just going to give Intel a trillion dollars and they're going to build a bunch of fabs, we would have solved this 10 years ago. It's actually much, much, much more complicated than that. So, you know, in this, you know, last third of the episode, I'd love for you because I think you just have a very interesting vantage point from when it comes to addressing these issues because once again you're running a foundation, you've been a vc, you're talking to government people and you're like an academic, you're working in the professor space. Just love to hear a little bit about that journey. Very like, specifically because it's very, it's very interesting to me just how you're, you're combining these things together.

Yeah, look, one of my CEO, you know, CEOs I had pleasure collaborating with, Nate Fick had a quote which was paraphrasing probably Steve Jobs, but the, the notion that, you know, your career made sense looking backwards, but it never made sense looking forward. Right. And that it's actually part of what we want to also kind of highlight for folks and especially young professionals reading the book that you don't have to have had it figured out and that be comfortable and embrace a little bit of the non linear walk because it could be more exciting and more fun.

To answer your question, quick thing. I was just rudely looking to the side here because I have a copy of One Bullet Away, which was Nate Fix memoir from. He was a USMC Recon Marine during the Iraq War. So I was just sort of. Once again, this is why I like your interview style in the book. Just because you're bringing together all these really interesting people who people can model their careers after because he does the Marine Corps before 9 11. Harvard Business School, CEO of CNAS center for New American Security, goes on to actually lead a company as a CEO and now he's a US Ambassador at large in public diplomacy. So I just think that I actually just appreciate how the book offers always little vignettes of individuals who I think listeners and viewers should like try to model. Not they're literal because you can't, to your point, you can't literally Say I'm going to do what Nate ficted. Because it's not going to make sense looking backwards or looking forwards. But I think there's just like a really motivational aspect to that. But sorry, go on about your.

Well, you know, in that context, you know, I appreciate you saying that because I think a lot of what we were trying to highlight in the book, right. Is there's so much negative news out there. There's so much negative. Is to kind of highlight what we're seeing as pockets of success and people doing things in an interesting manner and showcasing it and then asking the question of like, huh, why don't we do more of this? Right? You know, it's just kind of the innocent thought bubble question of like, we have the cape because it's easy for people to say, we can't do that, people won't do that, etc. But when you actually can show, like, no, it's actually happening. We. We're not doing it at scale, but people are doing it. You know, like, it begs the question of, like, how do we encourage more of it? Right. Because it does require that. I remember Nate in chatting with him because he's a close friend and he had the pleasure of serving on his board at endgame, you know, talking about how when he was at HBS and you know, he said he was going to go to cnas, right? And you know, his friends were like, oh, okay, well, that's interesting. You know, in this kind of like condescending, oh, that's nice little buddy kind of context, right? Like, oh, you couldn't find a real job, so you're going to the not for profit world. Like, it's those little judgments that feels small, but they're actually have big impact, right?

Yeah. And because at scale, like, how many Nate. Nate Fick perseveres through that, but like, how many other Nate fics would there be if that was scaled?

Yeah, if. And you know, we talk a little bit about that. Marshall with the WI to wow reaction, right? Like, you know, two. Two Stanford CS students. One gets selected do Kessel Run, which is a, you know, prominent military software factory. She tells her friend she's going to go to government and her friends go, why would you do that? Like, why would you do that with all these other things you could do in the Valley? Her other friend selected to do Teach for America, right? And you know, the friends go, wow, that's amazing. You're going to serve, you're going to give back, and then you can go do whatever you Want. And you know, look, that paradoxical juxtaposition, you know, is interesting, right? It tells you a little bit about where our society is. Like, it's not about money. You know, like we, the cop out answer, I think many times is like, oh, the government doesn't pay. I'm like, well, no, no, it's not just about money because people are doing Teach for America in very mission oriented opportunities at half the salary that they would make in government. It, it's about something deeper, right? It's about prestige, it's about respect, it's about it being viewed as a career enhancer. Right? And that's, you know, that's some of the things that we're trying to help with, with the foundation at Noble Reach. But I mean those are the small slights, right? Because when you're 21, 22, and if you think your friends are going to go like, why the hell are you doing that? Like you're going to question your decisions. It's just human nature. But if you feel like you've got a system around you that says, wow, that's amazing, like you're doing that, like those, those first reactions matter, right? And look, you know, you hate to say, but you know, most of these academic institutions, you know, the career centers, the students aren't the customer, right? They're the product. You know, the customers are the investment banks, are the consulting firms. And so that's the funneling effect we see happening on campuses. Right? And so the, you know, the larger question to your point, and this is why your podcast is so important, is how do you get that message out there that like there's this whole other world where you can go do really cool stuff and solve really important problems and still do really well for yourself. Right? Because you know, unfortunately most of those companies don't show up on campus to recruit, so the students don't know how to find them. So, you know, that's what we're doing. Were trying to get at, you know, I diverged there a little bit. And in quickly answering your question about my background.

Tell me, tell me about Noble Reach. So like to your point, you're working to kind of like put this, tell me about like the Noble Reach stuff.

Yeah. So, you know, look, as I said, you know, my, my, my father's been in, in civilian military for 40 plus years, so it's been in our family. I was a VC for 20 plus and started teaching. So having seen those communities while we were writing the book and as we were progressing with it, I was Also on the board of a company called lmi. And essentially in, in short, we had a for profit entity as a subsidiary that we sold and you know, that put new, you know, along with the proceeds, we already had about a half a billion dollars into our foundation. So we have a half a billion dollar foundation. And we started looking at what we could go, what we could do with it. I was on the board and you know, when discussing it, I was, I was, you know, influenced obviously by the work we were doing with the book. It was happening in parallel, but you know, a good example again of like looking forward, you know, it made no sense, but like looking backwards, it all feels like it fits together so nicely. But they really were independent events. And we started to look at the principles that we write about in the book. And you know, really it starts with, you know, how do we get better talent and better innovation around government? Right. And the idea that if we're going to be competing in great power competition, we need to have better talent and better innovation. And then, you know, when we looked at it, we talk about ourselves as being an infrastructure provider. We're helping modernize the infrastructure to connect that talent to these mission oriented opportunities and we're trying to create, build that infrastructure to connect this innovation to these mission oriented opportunities and we're also building the scaffolding to support them. So specifically on the talent side, what does that mean? You know, we had a stat in the book that says less than 7% of workers. And I think this came from public partnership of public service and Max Styer, you know, less than 7% of tech workers in government are under the age of 30. And we have four times as many tech workers over the age of 60. You know, the average age at Google or in any of these big tech firms is probably mid-30s. Right. So, you know, and as, as more of our, you know, state competition now is going to be techno economic. You know, we need to, we need to get better talented. And so one of the things we're looking to do and we're launching for this summer coming up is a Noble Reach Scholars program, you know, modeled a little bit, you know, after the Teach for America idea, where we can recruit students, we're partnering with agencies, place them in agencies for one or two years. And these will be AI, ML, cyber materials, bio finance, you know, students. And you know, the idea being we're starting with a cohort of 25, but you know, we hope to scale hopefully to hundreds and if not larger and you know, in that process start to Try to create a little bit also of a movement, right. That this is important, this is a place you should start your career. But to do that, we're also creating a coalition of partners that are private sector partners, which are the investment banks, which are the consulting firms, which are the big tech players and that also want to be around this ecosystem in these students. Because then what we're doing is we're showing these students that like, hey, you can come do mission oriented work for one or two years and if you still want to go to one of those banks or consulting firms or big tech firms, you're the kinds of kids that want to hire. Right? And so, you know, we, we say like government sells careers, students are buying experiences, government sells jobs, students are buying mission. So what we're trying to do is, you know, create a program where these students will go into either, you know, mission oriented ventures that are adjacent to government or inside the government themselves, spend a year or two and we'll provide them also mentorship, you know, hard skill training modules and then also cohort based networking so that when they leave, these are their peeps. Marshall. Right? This is, this is their cadre and they go on their 25 or 30 year journey. Some of them may end up at, on Wall street, some may end up as university president, some may end up, you know, in Congress, some may end up in agencies or entrepreneurs or tech founders. But they'll have this shared experience. And the long game here is this is how you rebuild trust, right? Like trust is broken down because we've all gotten very siloed in what we do. Right. And you started this and you know, before we got on the line. I think mission can be that galvanizing framework work, right. Where if you can get students around a mission coming out of school for the first year or two and then go do whatever you want to go do. We're not going to ever mandate national service, but that, you know, our vision for noble reach is to catalyze national service around innovation Right. In this country. And, and, and use that as a, as a unifying framework.

Yeah. And I really like what you just said there because there's this kind of. I'm so glad that you said this because there's this cottage industry, it's very fashionable saying we're going to have national service. Is this kind of like fashionable? It feels edgy, but it's like not edgy thing, you know, you'll get. And you.

I've.

I'm not going to name names because this is a very like, well, trodden space. But like, you'll just get someone who says, you know, I'm going to say something edgy. You know, we need to ask people to do national service, and everyone sort of nods. But it's not actually edgy. And I think under the current framework, it's not going to happen. But I think what, once again, let's do the venture mindset. Problem opportunity. There's a huge set of problems and there are opportunities and there are ways we could get at what national service is getting at, but while not just acting as if we're going to take a New Deal era, World War II era playbook and just kind of put that there. I think people like using blanket national service as this idea because it's this convenient. This is the straightforward thing we're going to do versus the more difficult part here. And I think frankly, building spaces where people are oriented around mission are A, attractive because there's a crisis of meaning. There's a crisis of actually having something to do. And then B, I think if you just build those spaces, we'll naturally fill it. So, okay, we need to actually make semiconductor fabs work properly. Okay, how is New Mexico working on its apprenticeship programs? Okay, hey, how are the people at AAF like, working to make sure there's a partnership with the University of New Mexico, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And we kind of end up same space when it comes from an outcome perspective that we could have been if we'd magically done a National Service Program 15, 20 years ago, because that's how long people have been talking about this point. But it just kind of gets you there more conveniently.

And arguably I would contend. Look, I think that was incredibly well said, Marshall. And you know, I'd even contend, not only do we end up in the same space, I would, I think we end up in a better space because we're allowing the creative process and the entrepreneurial process to get the best ideas out there, you know, a little bit with just national service for national service sake. Right. Is it, it's just, it's, it's. I don't think it's programmatic. Right. And it, it, it, it. But it's not, it doesn't enable the idea. It doesn't enable ideation in the way that we need to solve these problems. Right. I, I like the notion of what you just said of like, you're creating these spaces.

Yes.

Can jump into and then let's let them ideate around that. But these are all mission Oriented spaces that they're ideating around. Right. And let the best ideas come out. That's great. And you know, if we can encourage students to come into those spaces for one or two years coming out of school and brand them and you know, giving them some kind of, you know, acknowledgement for having done that, it says something about you, something you carry forward with you for the rest of your career that you did that, you know, no different than when we had the Peace Corps. And you know, it said something about your value system. You know, it says something about your ability to ideate, think, take risks. And you know, firmly, like, I'll tell you, those big firms, that's actually the kids they want to go hire. Right? They want to hire those kids, not the ones that are sitting there like sitting on the conveyor belt looking at how do I get into this analyst program or that associate program.

Yeah. And you know, last thing was saying the teacher America thing. But I actually really. So my, then we, we broke up. So I don't want to say then girlfriend makes a song. She's my now wife. Different girlfriend. She actually did TFA like back in 2015. So like I, I saw the process and it's so genius. Like they say explicitly, they're like, hey, like, do this for two years. There are deferral programs so you could get that job at Goldman. And because Goldman thinks this is so impressive, they could delay your start date. We have partnerships with like top tier graduate schools. They clearly understand that so much of this work is a social construction and you need to orient people around. I don't want to say safety because I think safety is kind of a villain in the context of the story we're telling here. But you want to basically articulate to people, hey, there's like an opportunity here. And there are just basic things you can do. The TFA has really succeeded at. And I'm glad that you're thinking about creating those equivalents in your space. So, okay, so let's just kind of. Oh, so let's, let's, let's close. Let's close here then. So I would love for you just to kind of finish with. We've kind of talked about the framework for venture and for missions and partnerships, but what would you say are just directly the mission spaces that we should be building? We've talked a bit about semiconductors and manufacturing, but just close there. Like, what are the spaces that a young listener should think, hey, if this specific topic is of interest to me, I should delve into that. And then See where I could apply and address and fit that mission set that.

Yeah. So look, I almost say any mission that the, the passion that the student has there, there's a mission space that addresses that. But if you look at, you know, where the dollars are going or where the opportunities are as you see them right now, obviously climate is, is huge and, and the amount of capital and innovation that's happening there, what's happening in the bio community around healthcare, you know, to the extent that that's of interest to students, is phenomenal amount of progress being made and activity of what we can do on that front. And I would say national security, you know, look, we almost need to revamp our defense industrial base and as we get into a more autonomous system. And, you know, I think the, the amount of work that needs to be done around cybersecurity and national security more broadly, you know, and I think also for students that really care about food, I think there's a tremendous amount of innovation going around right now to help address food insecurity and how you can use some of the breakthroughs today to come up with, you know, new products and services in a very meaningful way. So those would probably be four that I would, you know, put out there out of the gates. You know, implicit in that is also semiconductor, which I think is about resiliency and supply chain, where there's a lot of capital and a lot of innovation going in right now. And then, you know, look, when climate's a big one, because you can, obviously, you know, that could be energy that could be. But, you know, there's a lot of interesting work, you know, going on on, you know, new energy sources. Right. And, you know, to help bring down carbon emissions. And so, you know, all of those, I think, are areas that are ripe for students to care about. And I think there's never been a better time for them to be able to jump into it. Yeah.

And I think to go back to the thesis statement question I asked you, you just kind of gave the thesis statement opportunity set there, which is the United States, as was illustrated by Covid, the war in Ukraine, like all these different issue areas, the United States is not as resilient as it needs to be to face the challenges of the 21st century. So if any student, not just like I'm talking to the younger audience here, obviously, but like, you know, I'm 31, right. There's plenty of, there's plenty of energy. Even if you're like entering your 30s or in your mid-20s, have already started current category Any way you could orient your career and your focus around areas where we lack the resiliency we need to actually meet our challenges and just succeed and have a functioning society that seems to be like a logical place to focus on. Like this isn't like the 1990s. This is just a different problem set. So I think that's a great place to please.

Yeah, we close out, you know, in chapter seven with this notion of like, you know, the set, the opportunity sets. You just, you know, had us talk about, you know, is, is what it is exciting. And now what we've seen is early successes in each of those areas. Right. There's interesting companies that have now broken out in the national security realm, in the space realm. Space is an interesting area. Right, right. And you mentioned SpaceX, you know, on the, on the climate and the energy side, you know, you put Tesla in that. Right. And as we have these success stories, you know, what happens is look, the venture community follows success because you know, once they see you can make money doing something, that's when the money flows in. So now you're seeing a lot of money coming into these spaces. Once you have money coming into these spaces, you're seeing better talent come into these spaces, right? Because you're like, oh, it's not as risky as it was before, right. If you, you know, I, I can leave my job and, and go and do this and, and you know, I'm not going to be, I'm not doing this out of a garage. I can do this as a well funded startup. Once you have talent coming in, better talent coming in, the ecosystem gets stronger, right? And as the ecosystem gets stronger, that's the virtuous cycle, right? That's the virtuous cycle then of the ecosystem gets stronger, you get more success, you get more success, more capital comes in. It's the story of the Valley, right? It really is how, you know, it propagated. And so I think going back to again, a comment you made, like if you put mission as that construct in the middle of it, you know, I think we're at the early innings of that, of that virtuous cycle. I say I've got two, two boys in college, I've got, you know, obviously the students I teach, you know, I tell them like, if I was gonna advise you on a, on a place to go spend the next couple of decades, it would be in this mission venture space because you know, you'll be able to create, you'll be able to ideate, you're, you'll be able to be feel purposeful and you'll, you know, be able to make money, you'll be able to do well and it's and that's okay. And I actually believe that because I think to scale to the size of many of these problems, you need to build that for profit muscle. Right. You need to build a scalable model because as long as you're always donor, you feel like you can always just keep going to donors. There's, there's a cap on how, how.

Much you can scale 100%. This has been great. The book is Venture meets Mission Aligning People, Purpose and Profit to Innovate and Transform Society. Thank you so much for joining me on the realignment.

Thank you, Marshall. It was a pleasure being on here with you.

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