Elevate Classics: CEO Arun Gupta on Mission-Driven Leadership

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You're listening to the Elevate Podcast and I'm your host, Robert Glaser. Join me as I talk to world class performers about how they build their capacity and reach greater heights in leadership.

Business and life and how you can do the same.

Welcome to the Elevate Podcast. Our quote for today is from Arnold Glasgow, make youe Life a Mission, not an Intermission. My guest today, Arun Gupta, is a mission driven Leader. He's the CEO of NobleReach, a venture capitalist active in the emerging technology, entrepreneurship, public policy and venture finance communities. He's also a lecturer at Stanford University and a professor at Georgetown University where he inspires students to pursue mission driven entrepreneurial endeavors. Arun is the co author of a new book, Venture Meets Mission, which is now available wherever books are sold. And on a personal note, Arun was actually my first boss outside of college and an incredible mentor to me, so we'll let him share some of those not so glamorous stories. Arun, welcome. It's great to have you join us today.

Bob, it's great to be with you and to kind of Come full circle. Having collaborated with you back probably now close to 30 years ago.

Yeah, now I'm quoting things in decades. Somewhat sad. So as I said, we met at a company called Arthur D. Little. It was my first job outside of school. But we never talked a lot about kind of what you did before adl. And I've often found that's the can be the source of passion. So growing up, like were there experiences that led to your passion for mission oriented leadership and entrepreneurship?

Yeah, thanks, Bob. Look, I think it's for myself it starts I was first generation here. My dad immigrated from India and I think immigrants just the act of immigrating is a fairly entrepreneurial exercise in itself. But he was a civilian and still is working 40 years later at the U.S. navy. So government's always been in our family and has shaped thinking about ways to serve. I went away to school, joined Arthur D. Little after undergrad. And then when I went to business school, I went with R30 little to open up their office in India. And I think for me, even though I was at a consulting firm at the time, it was really my first foray into doing something really entrepreneurial, landing in a different land. Although it was my heritage, I grew up in the US and it helped you really reconcile who you are. Many times I would have that dual identity sense of, you know, when I'm here, am I more Indian or I'm more American? And I think living in India for a couple of years really highlighted for me that at the core, as far as my values and the I viewed the world and what I how I wanted to raise my kids, I was very American in those values. And so when I came back in 97 after having been out there for a couple of years and had just been newly married to my wife Anjali, who we're now 27 years into being together, I think a very just clarifying experience on the idea of both the desire of wanting to have entrepreneurship play some role in my life going forward, being here in the US and then being able to tie that to what my father was doing as far as government service goes in some way, shape or form.

Yeah, it's interesting how it's like Steve Jobs talks about the dots come together kind of later on, even if you don't realize it. So as you mentioned, you and I met at Arthur D. Little in 1998. Ostensibly at the time ADL was a top tier strategy consulting firm. And I remember this interesting dichotomy. Right. I think there was a group of people, maybe manager or below that we worked with, that have all gone on to do kind of amazing things at the same time that the management of the management consulting firm sort of ran it into the ground, which we got to watch kind of during our time and after. I mean, I took some lessons from that. One of the things I saw was I think there were some people who really focused on having high internal value but had very low external value. Kind of like, oh, just master the politics and that'll keep me in a job forever. And that just kind of drove out all the people who had high external value. But what did you learn from sort of the irony, I guess, of working at this strategy consulting firm that probably needed some real strategy consulting at the time?

Yeah. Look, what you take away from it is the environment and structures that you're put in matter. Right. It's not just the people that you're with and what are the incentive systems that are put in place. Look, I felt like some of the people I worked with, you know, yourself included, Bob, were some of the most talented people that I've had the pleasure of working with. Having said that, I think we were put in an environment and a cultural environment which was not necessarily incenting innovation and definitely not rewarding it. And without that, it becomes tough to kind of not only retain those folks, but continue to have that vigor to want to kind of test and try new things. And so I think that cultural dynamic is what I really take away from that experience. And look, I think it speaks loudly when you look at our cohort of folks that were above us, our cohort, or even those younger than us, how well they've done when they've gone and been put themselves in the environments that they're in. And so. And look, there's a broader comment there too. Like, I think the systems that you place matter, that you are placed in matter. And again, going back to my own father, it's why I think there's a deep gratitude for this country. I think the system and the life that we're able to lead and the things that we were able to accomplish, yes, it's hard work. Yes, it's all of those things, but it's also a system that's been established here that allowed us to try new things and flourish accordingly.

Yeah, I mean, recruiting great people is half the equation, I guess. If you can't keep them motivated and give them things interesting to work on and have them move up, they will leave, which is what a lot of our contemporaries did at the time. So I somehow the Company did a great job recruiting, but then again, if you were super innovative, it probably wasn't the place to stay, which is the other half of the equation. Well, there were a couple other lessons I learned during that time. We worked and kind of the last thing you know, we worked on this incubator and I remember worked with this company, I won't remember the name. This company had such an early lead on this technology kind of in the Internet, and we had taken some equity in them and they just wouldn't launch. The product was never perfect. It was engineered. And again, because this was the dot com boom, they just gotten it out, probably worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but they just. It was never perfect until the end. And I'm sure that's something you've. You've seen throughout your career as well.

Yeah, I mean, look, I think that was the first foray, having not been a VC yet, appreciating that people matter more than tech. I think we get enamored many times by technology. And one of my friends has a saying, and we actually, I think use it in the book, that technology is easy. People's the hard part. Right. And, you know, that was a great example. I think we were all enamored with the tech. Like, the tech was phenomenal. It was way ahead of its time. But the hard part was like working with a founder that really didn't want to launch and wasn't really thinking about taking feedback, wasn't thinking about go to market. And all those things deeply matter and people matter. And I teach an entrepreneurial finance class and you know, I say it's finance with a lowercase f because, you know, entrepreneurial finance is more about people than it is about finance. I mean, I think that carries forward with tech as well.

Yeah. My other memory very specifically. And I think, like, I think mentors who give tough love are more effective mentors. I remember you. I mean, I was very ambitious coming out of school, worked together on a project. You kind of called me in your office and kind of gave me a whole lecture. And I don't remember this. I can remember exactly where I was sitting. I remember the office. And you were like, look, I appreciate that you're ambitious, but you tell me that something's going to be done on Wednesday and then you get it done on Thursday. Frankly, I wasn't expecting it until Friday. So just tell me you're going to get it done on Friday and give it to me on Thursday and then I'll be happy and not annoyed. And that was my first lesson on sort of expectation setting in the real world.

Look, I think life is all about expectation management. Right. And so under promise and over deliver, and we say that to our CEOs as well, are the best ones. It's the ones that kind of over promise and then under deliver and usually look, as long as someone has visibility and clarity around when something's going to happen and people are usually fine with it. It's just the surprises that tend to untether things.

Yeah, there's a baseline set of expectations that would be too low for anyone to be excited about. So you're trying to find. It's finding that sweet spot. But yes, overpromising. I have never seen have any positive outcome. So you shifted from adl, you shifted, went into investing for several decades, particularly on software, right through the dot com boom. I'm curious, I'm sure there was a lot of ups and downs and pains. How did you develop? You said people. But your kind of rubric on whether what was worth investment? Was it the idea, was it the team, was it the industry? Where did you sort of lean on? And as you looked at hundreds of investments over years.

Yeah, look, I wish I could say we had it figured out when we started this business. And I think that's why they call venture very much of an apprenticeship business. And you kind of learn the hard way because someone can just tell you what you're supposed to do would be a lot easier. So unfortunately. So after adl, when I got into venture, you are enamored a bit by tech still. You're still enamored by the idea of big markets and the ease of being able to kind of grow things and you see things kind of multiplying on a month by month basis in some cases. But what you underestimate many times is again the people. And it unfortunately takes being around folks that lead to suboptimal outcomes for you to realize like, oh, this is what a good VP of sales looks like. The only way you know what one looks like isn't by getting characteristics, it's by having been around 10 bad ones and then you can start to pattern match. And I think there's so much of that in venture today. Right. So I think that was an important lesson and you know, one that took time. You know, look, I think the other we were all young right at the dot com time so you don't have real heuristics to look back to and think about. And in those times it's easy to get caught up in the moment and also get caught up in basically underpriced risk because everything feels like it's going to go up and to the right over time. And even if things go sideways, you don't expect 2001 to happen. Right. Like, you know, it's marginally sideways and things of that sort. Those are really career defining, personally shaping events. One really needs to start thinking about how do you incorporate that into your heuristic of what you work towards. The common piece that you learn when you go through it, it is about people. Because what you can't control is the market. What you can't control is what the environment's going to be like. What you can control are the characteristics of the people that you're going to invest in and that they will demonstrate the resilience, the tenacity based on what the environment requires. So I think, look, there's a lot of lessons learned there. But if I were to simplify it, it would be find great people in great markets and then let the rest figure itself out. I think when you're young, you're so focused on feeling and wanting to show how smart you are and you would have figured out the business model and I'll do the models and the financial cash flows and this, that the other, and kind of project out what the next three or four years looks like. Every one of those models was always.

Wrong and the business shifted.

Right.

The business is never what it started out to be. So I think the people that could fit.

Yeah. And you don't appreciate that when you're starting off in the business because you actually think there's a science to it. As you're in it, you realize it's an art. And that's how we started to define what we did. But again, it takes time. It takes time to appreciate that. And along the way there are mistakes made. And you're just hopefully fortunate to be around folks that can provide you the training wheel so that you don't do anything catastrophic.

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So related to that, in the last decade you've really moved into education as a lecturer and professor. So some people think of business more as a science. So it sounds like as you're teaching, are you teaching more of an art? What are the core tenets you kind of want these aspiring entrepreneurs to to come away with?

Yeah, it's a great question, Bob. And the answer is exactly that, is that I want them to realize that this is about people. When I sat through one of the class first classes just to see how it was being taught, I noticed a professor kind of doing a whack calculation for an investment memo for a venture firm, an early stage venture firm, right? And all the students put their hand up and they're like, you ask them like how many of you would do this deal? And they everyone's hand goes up and they're like, why? And they're like, well, I did the calculation, and the calculation showed that we'd get a 17.4% IRR over the next five years. And people kind of, you let them talk for a while about this, and then you realize, like, you ask them the basic question of, like, who put these financial models together?

Is this person a criminal in their past?

Right? And they were like, the founder. I'm like, okay, so what's the founder's incentive? Right? Like, is the founder going to put low numbers or high numbers? And then they start peeling it back and you start going like, all right, well, what about this year? What numbers does he have in place? And they're like $5 million revenue. I'm like, all right, what time of year are we in? Or like, well, we're in the fall. Does he have a product out yet? No. So what you realize very quickly, and then you realize, well, how much faith did I give you in the numbers for this year? Not much. Well, then does that influence how you think about everything else going forward? And I give you that example, Bob, because what I realized is that, like, when you focus so much on the numbers and the science of the process, the students lose the big picture. And the big picture is like, take a step back and go, like, do you trust this person? What in this case gives you an idea of, do you trust this person? And if you see enough things there that you feel like you trust them, that's great. What are those things you should be looking for? And so we really spend a lot of time. And that's why I realized, like, even the way we teach doesn't bring the human element to bear with all these investment decisions. Right. Investment is a psychology. There's a psychology associated with it. Right. Again, we don't talk about that piece of it. And so these students are great at kind of doing very sophisticated models for issues that need to be. The first lens, needs to be basic behavioral trust.

Yeah. I can tell you I have not done a lot of direct investing, but over the last couple of years, I've done some private investing in funds, you know, some real estate or private equity or otherwise. And I wrote. I wrote this somewhere last year. What I noticed, particularly as it's been a rough things, is that the correlation between the communication and reporting and the performance is almost 100% across these things, where I found that the managers and the people who communicate incredibly well, send these detailed reports are thoughtful. When the whole Silicon Valley bank that came out, all the top, like, within an hour here's our exposure, here's our risk, here's what could go wrong. Other people who I think had serious on Monday might have been out of business. You know, we're not going to share any of that. And so, and a couple of things that have gone really wrong, it's always been the integrity of the people or they disappeared or they can't be found or otherwise. So, yeah, I've seen, I've seen that movie personally. And as much as people say it, and I think it is an age thing, you know, falling in love with the idea when people say, should I do this job or that job if they're 20 years old, it's like, maybe the idea that's exciting at 40, I'm like, I think you should focus on the people and the team. And when you want to be in that foxhole, if those are the people that you want to be with.

Absolutely. And that's the exact advice, Bob, I give my students. I give them the advice that at the end of the day, pick your first job not based on that starting salary, not based on what you think you're going to make in year two or year three. Pick it on the people you're working with. Right. Pick it on quality of the management team, the quality of the mentor that you're going to have because ultimately that's what's going to decide your success 100%.

So let's shift to the book which has just come out and congrats on the early success. Venture meets mission. Can you share a little bit about how the book came together and sort of who it targeted towards?

Yeah, my latter half of my career investing was really around investing in mission tech and entrepreneurship and, and I was investing in the early days of cybersecurity and govtech. And you know, what you saw was the magic when you could tie the entrepreneurial ecosystem to solving larger government problems. But you also saw the challenges. It's hard. And so when I retired and was started to teach and was focusing on some of our own family philanthropic work, class I started teaching at Stanford was called Valley meets Mission. And it was really to kind of talk to these students about the idea of let's not use your talent. And more importantly, this incredible platform that you've been given to go create Candy Crush 3.0. Like, you know what, there are bigger things out there to go. In fact, you almost have a responsibility not to go do that, like use your talents to go solve big problems. But the caveat was, look, in doing that, that doesn't mean it needs to be a not for profit. Like you can do this in a for profit way. It's okay for you to go make money. And how do we create for profit businesses that help solve big problems for the common good? Right. And how do you harness the entrepreneurial velocity of innovation, but then kind of combine that with the scale of government to help you solve big problems? We're not solving climate with one company in the Valley. We're not solving national security or cyber or healthcare. There still requires some appreciation of government. And that's a lot of what we try to talk about.

It's funny, I had a question to ask you which was how do we change the incentives and we don't get our smartest people working on games, time wasting app, crypto, nft, Ponzi schemes and things like that. So you listed a couple of those because to me that is the problem. Like we have some brilliant people working on stuff that just doesn't matter and we have some real difficult problems, like you said, like climate change or otherwise, where. But there's a lot of money in those problems. Are people going into that? Is it the money or is it, my son would probably say the flex. Like is it. That's because what the culture rewards versus it's the money. Like in terms of the smartest person going to do candy crush 3.0.

Look, I think there's a little bit of both. I think that it's culturally what we reward, right? The person that gets rich quick. And I think that has been part of the issue. I think also, and I do think we've been through a generational phase where our values were more about the material things that we kind of gathered and external validation of success. And what we write about in the book is I think we're seeing a shift. I see it in the students I'm teaching post Covid, post Ukraine with the continued climate concerns in look in great power competition with our adversaries, students are concerned. Students feel like this is a time they want to be doing something purposeful. They want their job to mean to have real impact. And look, call spade to spade. They also feel like, look, our generation probably is leaving them with a number of problems and they want to be there to go start fixing them. And so I think that's the call to action right now. That's slightly different than previous generations. And I actually think this generation is more mission oriented. People will highlight many times that I think they get a bad rap for being wanting to work from home or not wanting to come in and not work hard. And the caveat I put into that is they don't want to work hard on things that they don't feel matter. But I think if you can tie it to purpose and mission, they're all in. They'll run through a brick wall. I think previous generations would run through a brick wall as long as they got a big bonus check at the other side of it. And there's nothing wrong with that. But I'm just saying that I think that's the change that we're having right now. And I think each generation has their moment, and I think there is a generational moment here to try to inspire these students to think about how can they serve and tie that to entrepreneurship. And I think entrepreneurship's also gotten much more appealing because there is an immense distrust in institutions. The idea of large institutions always being stable, taking care of you. They've lived through the financial crisis. Right. They've lived through various episodic periods where that's just not the case.

Yeah. And there's so much creative destruction these days, that stable can quickly become irrelevant overnight. Well, this gets to the core of what you were just saying, but I think a big emphasis on the book is that collaboration between entrepreneurs and government. These aren't natural collaborators historically. I know, in some areas, maybe in defense. But like, where had trust broken down before those two groups, and how do you recommend that they kind of come back together? Because one of the things, whether you're pro or con, the vaccine, I think it's a great example where government and private, like, work together in record time, got something on the market. So there's some. I think we have some cases of some wins. But as you talk about in the book, it's not the first place that most entrepreneurs think about going.

Look, I think the trust has been slowly degrading over decades. I don't think this is an overnight phenomena. I think it starts as with a phenomena of, like, you know, we want government out of our system. You know, we want government out of our way. But when you ask someone like, what does government mean to you? Right. That's a harder question to answer. Right. Because government's an organization that's made up of individuals that are arguably trying to do their best. And I noticed this in the class I was teaching, right. When I would bring in former CA director, like a Mike Morell, and I'd bring in folks from the defense establishment, I'd have a number of students borderline hostile and some of their questions, because, you know, they think of them as nefarious act. But I will tell you, like to a t, at the end of every one of those classes, those students left feeling like these are true patriots in a way that they were also. It's a curated list. But these are people that are purposeful. There's a level of humility. They were willing to admit when they were wrong and they were willing to say, look, we don't always get it right, but understand that our intent was positive and we make mistakes. And I think that was a little bit of the light bulb that went off with watching that interaction and the idea of like, we talk about this in one of the chapters, humanizing government for folks. I always say, like, it's easy for people to have biases or discriminate against large groups. It's harder to do it with, with individuals. Right. So the more you can humanize it, the more I think people start to understand it and we've lost that piece. But the flip side is true too. Like I'd bring in entrepreneurs and people would feel a level of like, oh, this is billionaire class folks. And you know, these guys are entrepreneurs, they're just greedy pigs. But then you bring in these entrepreneurs that have created these mission oriented companies that are, yes, worth are very valuable. And I think what the students realize is that they actually started with mission in mind. The money followed them, but that wasn't what they were chasing. The mission of what they were doing was what was important to them. And Mike Morrell would say it. Well, he's like, what I love about your class, Arun, is 40% of the class hates government. The other 40% hates entrepreneurial capitalism. And you're trying to land the plane by the end of the course that we're going to need both if we're going to solve big problems.

And the other 20% just hates everything.

Exactly. Right. But I mean that really was it, right, was try to land a plan that we're not going to solve big problems without entrepreneurship and an appreciation of government. And how do we create a new renewed partnership there? And look, I think we talk about this in the book. It's the superpower of this country. Two superpowers of this country, I think, are our abilities to create talent, especially our higher ed system, and our ability to innovate through our entrepreneurial ecosystem. I mean, there isn't a place in the world that's close. And you can tell because this is the place that people come to to do both. The market speaks now kind of always had a letter, thousand flowers bloom mindset. But if you can start to take those ecosystems and at least create more modern infrastructure to connect them around government and social issues, I think that's our differentiator and how we compete over time.

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A two part question which you can break it down however you want. If you double click on. For people who might not see this connection, like, why do entrepreneurs and government need each other? Why do entrepreneurs need government? And why does government need entrepreneurs? And maybe more on the government side, what are some of the things that people don't see or the innovations that they enjoy on the entrepreneurial side came from government roots or funding or stuff that they may not even realize?

Yeah. So let's start with the latter question. Look, Mariana Mazzucotto, in her book, writes about how every significant part of the iPhone was actually rooted back to government research. Right? What we don't realize, or we forget many times, is the Silicon Valley was rooted in government research. Right. Defense research, more specifically. And so the government's been at the core of a lot of this research and development, having said that, basically lost the ability to collaborate in a meaningful way. And some of this is cultural, Right? We've got this. Amy Zegart writes about, like, a hoodies versus suits culture when the Valley tries to collaborate with government. Right. So some of this, again, honestly, Bob, gets back to people, right? It's basic, you know, having strategic customer empathy, not coming in, saying, like, oh, you guys don't know what you're doing. Let us tell you how it needs to be done without really understanding what the folks are doing that you're trying to sell products to, and vice versa. Right. And underestimating what new products can be about. And so I think for government, the need to be connected to the entrepreneurial ecosystem is that it is our core engine of innovation. It is where our best and brightest innovate. And it's also because back to the point we talked about earlier, systems matter. So what do I mean by that? You know, I joke around that as a vc, if I was measured like government, I'd never raise another fund. Because if I did as a VC, if I did 10 deals, eight of them could go south. But if two of them were Google and Airbnb, like, I'm oversubscribed in my next fund in government, you can do 10 deals, and nine of them were okay, but one of them is Solyndra. You're carrying that around with you for the next decade, Right? So we have systems that have different incentive structures to them. Now, that doesn't mean you're going to be able to change the incentive structure completely, but it does then beg the question of, like, how do we create a renewed partnership? Understanding what those incentive structures are like to harness the best innovation that we have, but also to be able to leverage the scale that government has at the end of the day, again, going back to the really large problems again, climate and health care and food, look.

There'S climate's a problem, but energy independence, which everyone seems to want given the geopolitical, it seems like a massive multi trillion dollar opportunity. I mean, it doesn't seem like, you know, nonprofit work in any way.

Not at all. Right. And it needs to be thought of that way. And look, I would argue now, having for a year been around the not for profit piece, I actually now start and really believe that the people that can solve these social problems are the for profit entrepreneurs. Right. Because you have to build the muscle to sustain yourself to scale as opposed to being feeling like you can always be donor led and not build that muscle. And if you're going to scale to the size of the problem, there needs to be some self sustaining business model associated with that.

So if you could wave a wand, what's the one thing you could fix right now? Or maybe one or two things that would just unleash this torrent of entrepreneurial government activity that would solve all the, all of our big problems or put us on the path to doing that? What's the thing that's still broken today? Is it the cultural piece? Is it a perception piece? Are there specific systems and logistics and incentives? Or is it both?

So I think there's two aspects to this. As much as I want to bring more innovation into government, I think you have to recognize before you even get there, you need to have people inside that can receive that innovation. So I think the first piece would really be how do we rebuild the infrastructure to get our best talent going into government. And that starts at our top tech students coming out of school or even our top business students coming out of school. And that's a bit of what we're trying to work on with the foundation that we have now at noblereach. One of the things that we write about in the book is less than 7% of tech workers in government today are under the age of 30. Right. We have four times as many folks over the age of 60 in tech and government. So we're upside down. Like the average age of Google is in the mid-30s. Right. Yet we want to go compete in what is now is an increasingly digital battlefield with our adversaries. And even when we're solving problems, whether it be again, climate, these are all science and tech problems. So we need to first start with like, how do we open up the avenues to make it enticing for some of These folks to come in.

So how do you get a Harvard or Stanford MBA to be excited about going to take a government job?

Yeah. So our theory on the case on this is the following. One could look at that data of less than 7% of people under the age of 30 are going into government and think one of two things. You can either say, hey, kids under the age of 30 just don't care. They don't want to do this, or you can have the theory on the case that, like, people do care, but the infrastructure to connect them to these opportunities is outdated and needs to be modernized. Our theory on the case is the latter. So how do you get them to care? We galvanize around this notion of why to wow. Vignette of two CS Stanford students. One was selected to do Kessel Run, which is a military project, and goes to her friends and says, I'm going to go do this. And her friends go, why would you do government when you can do all these other opportunities here in the Valley? Right. Her other friend says she's going to go teach third grade math, but do what we teach for America. And all her 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 it's that paradoxical juxtaposition that I think we need to get at, which is it's not necessarily only about the money. It's about recreating a sense of prestige, respect around the job that you're doing, but also being able to have it be viewed as a career enhancer.

Yeah, I was just going to say it seems like a learning, a special program. People that go into this are recruited for a business school or whatever it might be.

It needs to mean something right now, if you go in, what keeps many people on the sidelines is not knowing, like, you know, how will I be received when I come back out? Like, will people value that experience? Does it put me behind and creating programs to enable that? That's what we're trying to do. And there are others that are out there, but doing this at scale, right? So you can create that social movement, right? Because look, it's not about the money in this example because a Teach for America person is probably earning half as much as a person starting in government. So it's about something more meaning, deeper. And I think this goes true as well. I mean, there's a marketing exercise here. I think the way we talk to students and talk to this generation needs to change. I say Government sells careers where students are buying experiences, government sells jobs and students are buying mission. Right. What students want to hear is that like they'll do something mission oriented for a short period of time, all day long.

It's not right. This is not a lifetime commitment.

Doesn't need to be a lifetime commitment.

Seems like they also just. I'm thinking about on campus recruiting drove so much. And you don't think about the government showing up up on campus recruiting, right? Yeah.

Well, you just hit the other issue, Bob, is that like, you know, on these campuses there's two dynamics. One, in the engineering schools and the business schools, there's no faculty that's ever been in government. So there's no one telling you like, hey, this was a great experience and a formative experience in my life and here's why. You should at least go do it for a period of time. And then the second is what you just highlighted, which is these people aren't showing up on campus because every agency can't show up on 50 campuses. They don't have the resources. So you centralize everybody to something called USAjobs. And for kids that are living in an iPhone 15 world, that's like sending them back to DOS, right? They're just not going to do that. And so we just lose people. And so we shouldn't be surprised at the outcome when we look at the infrastructure that we've created and not invested in. And so I think that's the first part that you have to fix. I think the second is for later stage career folks as well. I'm making it easier for folks to be able to come in into government and provide their services in some capacity. Can go a long way. You can get into things about clearance processes and things of that sort of. So there's a lot of tactical things that are important that also need to get fixed. But before you get into bringing innovation into government, you've got to get the right people into the ecosystem because they're the ones that have to receive that innovation. Right. They're the ones that have to be able to understand it, appreciate it and want to interact with it. And actually I think that goes a long way to building the bigger question with the entrepreneurial community, which is trust. Right. When you see people that you've worked with before now on either side of the table, you implicitly build customer empathy. There's a shared vernacular, there's a shared understanding. Even if someone goes into government for a couple of years, I think Jen Easterly says it very well. She's like, look, I want people coming in here for only two or three years.

Right. By the way, no one thinks they're further than that anyway anymore. So yeah, right.

But I want them to go out and be forward deployed CISA folks, like, I want them to end up at the big tech firms and then it's.

Like hbs, they will hire from that program, which makes that program then really desirable to get into as a feeder towards something else.

Right, and that's exactly right. Right. And so look, these models exist. I mean, let's think about it. This is how banks and consulting firms hire. They don't say like, hey, come here and spend the next 15 years with us. They say, come do a two year analyst program and then you can go do whatever you want. And you would have learned so much.

So do those programs need a rebrand?

Like, do they just need to be.

Absolutely. Well, I think they need to be rebranded. But you also need to augment it, right? The programs. You need to provide a level of mentorship. You need to provide a level of like hard skills that can take place around the experience. And you also want to be able to provide a level of cohort networking. Right? That's what grad school is great for. You don't want to just get to get a top AI student and drop them into an agency by themselves. That's a recipe for a disaster. Right. They're going to probably have a suboptimal experience. They'll go tell their friend it sucked and then no one wants to go back. You put a cohort in there, you create a cohort experience where they're able to interact with other peers at other agencies and that becomes a much more interesting experience. And along with that, you provide the mentors of people that have been in government that can help them through both the good and the hard times. And those mentors then are really the folks that set you up for your next thing.

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So how do these two groups find each other? Let's say I'm a student listening to this. I'm super passionate about climate and otherwise and I want to take something and I market it and commercialize. And then there's someone in the government who's broken some basic research thing around climate and they're like, this is amazing, but I don't know how to market it or sell it or like, where do they meet? Where's the bar where they meet?

Well, you've hit on the problem. There really isn't one. There isn't a natural meeting place. And it's a bit of what we're trying to build and use the Noble Reach foundation to help solve is like, how do you connect the talent with the innovation to go build it? How do you. Just this morning we had a meeting talking about building an entrepreneur identification platform at a national level. Right. So that when you find deep research in core areas, you can start to think about like, who are some of the top entrepreneurs that you should be talking to and make that connection to. Likewise, when you're recruiting for students, you know, how do you get onto university campuses and make sure they are aware of these kinds of opportunities? You know, we're currently doing a lot of commercialization with DARPA and NSF of taking climate at Tech, AI Bio and commercializing that out. We would love to be out there telling students, hey, these are opportunities that are here for you. The other place that you're starting to see is some curriculum that's starting to get created. There's a program that's been very popular now called Hacking for Defense. Started at Stanford, but they're now trying to expand out into hacking for climate and hacking for other areas. And the idea is like to teach entrepreneurial pedagogy around social problems. Right. And so Steve Blank's lean startup methodology and how do you get to a solution can all become places that you create the pipeline of students that are showing an interest around mission driven problems? Yeah.

All right, Arun, this last question for you, this is multivariate, so it can be singular, repeated, or personal or professional. But what's a mistake that you've made that you've learned the most from?

I think the mistake I've made where I've learned the most is to think you can change people as a VC. Meeting with CEOs, sometimes you find yourself in this confirmation bias that I really like this market, I really like this product. Yeah. That doesn't feel like the right person. But look, over time, we'll be able to figure it out and we'll get the right people around them and they'll want to. And what I think come to learn is changing people is hard people's behaviors. Look, my wife's a psychiatrist, as you know, Bob. And so I many times joke around that she's probably more well equipped for my job as a VC than I was, because really, it was around assessing people. Right. Like, what is someone's real motivation? Is it to make a lot of money or is it to be kind of like being king of the turf? Those aren't necessarily completely aligned all the time. Right. What makes someone tick and, you know, what's their ability to take feedback, what's there and will they take it? If they're not taking it now, will they take it later? And I think early on, I would err on the side of, like, you can change people, and through some hard times, you realize that that's harder to do. And so I think the biggest learning for me, and look, I think this is true even in my personal life, social, the friends I pick now as well, if it doesn't feel right at the beginning, it's not going to get better. It's not going to get better and just cut bait. Right.

And the one asterisk I'd say is I think that if people want to change, they can change, but that needs to come from them, not from you.

Yeah, that's exactly right. I think that's a really good point, Bob, is that change is possible, but the agency resides with them. It doesn't reside with you. And so if I need to tell them or explain to them or show them how to change, it's not going to happen. Right. And so, you know, I think for me, that's been the biggest and hardest lesson learned, is that it's not easy to do. But I will say, look, in a weird way, I think Covid kind of allowed the ability to kind of cleanse some of that. Right. For a lot of people. And so now you. You're around people that give you positive energy and you know, you kind of the ones that don't, you just kind of let those kind of go by the wayside and keep moving forward. And I think that's true as well with building companies on the professional side, 100%.

Well, Arun, thank you for joining us today. As you said, having been a mentor for so many years, this feels like a full circle moment. I'm super excited for you to take all this dear life's work, the last decade or two and turn it into this book and sounds like it's on its way to being a huge success.

Well, Bob, I just want to thank you. Look, I couldn't tell you how proud I am of the stuff that you've done since we first worked together at adl, what you've gone on to achieve. And it really is a privilege and an honor to to be on your podcast to have this discussion because it brings back a lot of memories and fond memories at that of us collaborating together. And look forward to this at the beginning of a lot of new collaborations.

Likewise, and thank you. All right, to our listeners. Thanks for tuning in to the Elevate podcast today. We'll include links to Arun's info and Venture meets mission on the detailed episode page@robertglaser.com the book is available anywhere books are sold. If you enjoy today Today's episode, make sure to follow the show to be notified about new episodes and have them downloaded automatically to listen. If you're listening in Apple Podcasts, simply hit Follow on the show overview page or the three little dots in the upper right corner if you're on an individual episode page and then hit Follow. And you can also hit Follow on Castbox, Spotify, Pandora, or your favorite podcast player. Thanks again for your support and until next time, keep elevating.

Sam.