Lessons from a Billion Dollar Enterprise Empire: Jon Fisher Talks About the Magic of Oracle

Welcome to Make More Marbles. My name is Brad Hart and we're here to interview the game changers, the future makers, the co collaborators and creators who are here to collaborate with one another towards a better future for all of us. Enjoy the show. We've got a great guest coming up for you right now, today. Welcome to the Make More Marbles podcast. My name is Brad Hart and today we are with John Fisher. John, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Really appreciate you having today.

Thank you for bringing me on.

Absolutely, absolutely. And we were just chatting a little bit before the show. John's a Southern California native. He lives up in the Bay Area with his family now. John, where did you get your start in, you know, just kind of understanding what you were going to be doing with your life. Like, what were some of the first inklings of what it is that you ultimately ended up having become your purpose? Because you've done a lot of different exits and things, and we'll get into that, but I want to kind of just granularly talk about maybe the first time when you were like, oh, my God, this is what I'm gonna do with my life. This is incredible.

Yeah, I was in actually 20 or 30 foot swells, and that's not an exaggeration. It was the early 90s in the middle of the South Pacific in El Nino that year. And that's for those unfamiliar. That's the air and temperature causing the ocean to tilt slightly. So that's pretty unbelievable. I'm not the greatest sailor. I was more of a stowaway, especially back then. But we were on a trip from Hawaii to Bora Bora with my best friend's family. And these were Oracle people through and through. The captain of our boat was head of North American sales. He was a real dazzler. And he reported to a gentleman named Ray Lane, who was the COO and reporting directly to Larry Ellison. And I had never heard of Oracle or any of this. My parents are college professors, and so I had a very sleepy and delightful uneventful childhood. Just, you know, kind of what we want, my wife and I, for our little girl these days. And so this is my first, you know, real exposure to the kind of life one could lead in the technology business. The captain of our boat had sold a lot of Oracle stock and all of a sudden was now sailing around the world. And this guy, Larry Ellison, kept calling the boat in the middle of the ocean. And so we're in these swells and it's my. Also my first exposure to GPS the satellite positioning, obviously, to make sure that it could be found, that technology was new enough. And I just kept hearing Oracle and Ellison and all this stuff over and over again the whole trip. And it just really kind of seared into my brain that this was just how a whole other group of people lived. And it seemed pretty exciting. So I dug into it right away and you know, if you've ever seen the movie about the. The guy that grows up in a house and he sees the railroad, the cars drive past this house, it's a rail magnet family. And so he ends up trying to marry into the family so he can get closer to the railroad dynasty. It's like an obsession. And Oracle for me came not quite that bad, but it became a really interesting fixation that, you know, all that company accomplished and what was happening. So I began and I started a technology company and that company is now owned by AutoNation. But Oracle actually took a look at it and those are the days when Larry Ellison, they were a bit smaller than would actually respond to an email himself. And he sent it to a gentleman named George Khadifa who was running the vertical that my company applied to. And they passed. But Ellison's email made it by Ray Lane. It wasn't Ray's purview, it was someone reporting to Ray. But then in my next company, I approached Ray and I said, hey, we missed you this time. And that really started up a relationship. And Ray's been my longest standing angel investor ever since. And it's just been instrumental to our career. And that's how it all started.

Right on. So I've heard a lot of stories about Oracle and the kind of beginnings. And I remember how I heard one story how Larry used to brag that he only needed one salesperson on the team because he just had head and shoulders above a better product for enterprise databases at the time. Was that true? Did you hear any of those stories kind of growing up? It's kind of an interesting thing.

Yeah. Well, first of all, Oracle, right about the time that I'm describing, had a whole series of problems, if you remember their history. And that's actually why Ray was brought in. And he's really given credit of writing Oracle in the 90s to be positioned to become what it was and what it is. That's not to take anything away from Larry Ellison's genius.

He's a brilliant man.

Yeah. And I just. So if that's his comment, you know, I for one, am a believer.

Absolutely. And you know, there's something to be said for being so far ahead of the curve, that's just like everybody's like, wait, what are we doing now? It's like we're building a whole new industry out of nothing. And, you know, there's almost no competition. So, you know, that kind of speaks to. I guess the next point is like, you've been in technology almost your whole career. Can you kind of speak to what's coming next as far as, like the next big shift? And we all talk about AR&V, you know, VR and AI and machinery and robotics and all these different things, but what do you see kind of the future being the next big blue ocean, if you will, of opportunity that entrepreneurs maybe, you know, either they're aware of it and they're not quite getting into it yet, maybe the timing is not quite right. But I have a saying, you know, it's like in order to hit a moving target, you have to lead it. What's the next thing that we have to lead to innovate in? And what would be the next big gold rush, in your opinion?

Yeah, I have a comment on that in just a moment, if you don't mind. But to put it in context. Yeah, I just think, you know, for your younger listeners, something that's interesting. Oracle is, you know, in 400,000, 500,000 of the largest enterprises in the world. And they've got their complete screws in these organizations where Oracle is not going anywhere. And to see the market caps of the Facebooks and the Googles and the others of the world. Let's take a look to see what happens during the next economic catastrophe. And I submit that Oracle will get hit, but it will kind of be right there and the big hits will be taken from other spaces. And that's exactly what we saw in the year 2000 and of course 2008. So Oracle is a very powerful enterprise concern, including what's next and what's really hot and what's to lead. I've always been a fan of the enterprise space. I think it is something that is difficult to build, but once you start getting there, it's much more difficult to go away. And to answer your question about what's next, I think real world context, I think understanding what devices, what people, what machines are doing in the real world. Every company on earth has the location of devices. My particular company is working on where those devices are aimed in common, the focus of the devices as one, you know, sort of small example of, I think, the big picture that I'm trying to describe. But you know, you're seeing a launch of drones and autonomous vehicles and all kinds of, you know, robotics, as you mentioned, whether it be on the assembly floor, the hospital, or, again, operating in the real world, and the convergence of, you know, what these. An understanding of what's happening in real time and what these devices are doing and what our experiences are, whether it's AR or VR versions thereof or artificial intelligence. I think this is a really, really big thing. I started my current company because I wanted to be able to. The aim my phone, this was 2011, aim my phone in the real world to get information about objects, specifically, we're both. It sounds like both sounds like we're ocean people, to get information about a boat moving across the water. And so I wanted to teach a machine to find that boat in real time and give me information. And, you know, the ability to be able to do things like that that's coming up is going to make it a whole different world to live in.

So you're almost talking about a prelude to the Internet of things, in which case, you know, the listeners aren't familiar with it. It's essentially a networked set of sensors so that your toaster could communicate with your computer could communicate with your phone, with the lamp, with this, with that. You essentially have a smart environment that's not only gathering data, but also taking input and cues from what your preferences are and learning about you over time so that it can create a better environment and also gather data for others as well. Is that kind of accurate?

Yeah, you said it very well. And that's. And I'm glad you said it because that's the preface to, you know, something interesting, I think, to mention for your, for your viewers and listeners that we just did a really interesting partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise in IoT, where we're teaming up with their integrated servers and technology and our technology to do some really incredible things at the edge in real time. So the proliferation of everything I was describing and under the wrapper of IoT, which means different things to different people these days, and IoT is actually struggling in some of the best enterprises on Earth and flourishing others. But that's the wrapper that I agree is used to describe some of these things that we're talking about in the real world.

Got it, got it. And then where do you see this kind of going? Like, if you could describe or paint a scene of life in the year 2025 or 2030 in the not too distant future, you know, we're kind of pedaling along we're making our doubles and triples. You know, we're kind of on an exponential curve right now towards the singularity, as Peter Dumandis or Rick Kurzweil might describe it. You know, what do you picture a day in 2030 to be like with regard to the devices and the infrastructure around you?

Well, you know, there's the, as we see it now, there's a dystopian version of that. The privacy is completely gone, if it isn't already. And, you know, a company that I eventually did sell to Oracle and had the pleasure of going to work there as a, as an exec for a stint, was in the online security business, actually, still is. That acquisition was 10 years ago and it's still a standalone product for Oracle. So some guys change the world by building things that are really large and absolutely all power to them. The team and I would have been together for decades. We try to contribute in the world, building something smaller, good company, and then we trade it to a great company, right? And then you get the reach, you get the contribution that way. So it's kind of a path of least resistance. But, you know, the version of the future would be everyone can see everything in real time, faces and whereabouts and, you know, part of this whole real time IoT existence is going to be an information transfer the likes of which would give us, you know, a nosebleed today, I think. But the trade off, if we're trading security and we're trading, you know, some semblance of a, of a quieter society, I think the trade off is when disasters strike, when people need assistance, we're going to be able to get resources to them, you know, orders of magnitude faster than we can now. We're going to be able to direct, you know, drones with interfaces. We're going to wear smarts in our glasses and not just in our phones that can, you know, move, move mountains, right? We're actually going to start to have some superhuman capabilities because of all of the machines at our disposal that we're going to be able to wield by, by just looking in directions, by just thinking in directions, and by also working with each other. And one, one quick thing to think about. Glasses are a little strange right now. You wear them and people are wondering if you're recording someone. And I get it, you know, you don't want to walk into these things in a bar. But in five, 10, 20 years, when we have the same horsepower in our glasses or better than we have in our phones, imagine the notion of contextual cueing Imagine learning from the mistakes of the thousand people that have come before you, who's walking or running in your direction. Right. You can be smarter and superhuman that way because the exit of the stadium is a path that's not less traveled. It's traveled every day. And you can learn through your glasses what everyone else has learned. Things that sometimes technology divides us. And I have a vision of the future with all these gadgets where things will be even more inclusive because we'll be more dialed into each other.

That's fascinating. Well, if you're anything like me, you look at the future and you see a lot of opportunities, right? You see a lot of disruption, but that's always opening and closing different opportunities and different windows for the people who are like the creators, the makers, the movers and shakers. What do you perceive, John, to be like? Some low hanging fruit that might be really interesting to go after because, you know, I'm sure you're a guy with a ton of ideas. I have a ton of ideas. But you can only focus on so many things. And I'm sure your team is focused on the, on the ideas that make sense for your strengths and your abilities and your lanes that you want to swim in. But what are some other ideas that you may never pursue, but you'd really love to just, you know, kind of see come to light and fruition that are like low hanging fruit or the next steps towards that vision of the future?

Well, the way I started this company is something that has, you know, blossomed in different directions. You got to sort of go with the, with the flow, flow, as they say. But you know, just to change the direction of your phone is a broad and really interesting opportunity. What I mean by that is your phone is in your pocket or your phone is being used to navigate or correspond, or you're literally reading it. But as I said, to use your phone to survey your environment and all the different experiences and all the different value points and companies literally that are being created to do that. You're aware of the Pokemon.

Yeah, Pokemon Go. Amazing.

Yeah. I mean, this stuff is, you know, we thought some of the games of yesteryear were viral. And you're seeing the experiences that are created by, you know, using your phone as a lens to see the world and see it differently. So I think it's a whole new universe. It's using your phone or using another piece of hardware to see the world a bit differently. And you can call that ar, you can call it VR, you can call it artificial intelligence, but you know, our daughter is seven. If she was, you know, 12, 13, 14, just a little older, you know, we would be advising her to really focus on this stuff, to hit the ground running out of engineering school or whatnot to. Because I think there's going to be. Yes, I think some jobs are going to be eliminated by robotics, but I think there's going to be orders of magnitude offsets with the amount of. Of functionality and the amount of need that's being created by seeing the world in a completely new way that doesn't come along every generation.

Right. We have a huge opportunity. It's incredible. Nothing changed. Nothing changed. Nothing changed. The growth curve was so small as to be unnoticeable for thousands and thousands of years. Now all of a sudden, here we are in the last hundred years, we went from, you know, three months across the country and people would die along the way. Now it's six hours and we have supercomputers in our pockets and eradicated a lot of major diseases and life expectancy is doubled. It's just an incredible time to be alive. I'm very grateful to be a part of it. I'm sure you share that, and it's just fascinating. You wake up every day and the world's different.

Absolutely. I'm 45 and I always thought I'd love to have seen the 60s, and I stand by that. But these are equally interesting times in a very different way. Except that with all the discussion of gadgets, I wish that the young generation would also put them away and worry about white tablecloths and meeting people the way that we all used to. I think there's something very important about that. But that's another show.

Yeah, agreed. So you mentioned your daughter kind of coming up in a world where I was kind of the last generation that understands a world without cell phones. And now she has devices 24 7, I'm sure, access to. I don't know whether you allow her to do that. But what skills, besides, like you mentioned, soft skills and some engineering skills, do you believe will best prepare people in that age group. Right. Like young teenagers to young adults to really thrive in the next kind of things to come? Series of events like, is it coding? Is it manufacturing, Is it. What is it going to be?

Yeah, I think it's an excellent question. Instead of, you know, talking to that as a genre, at least. Some of the work that I'm focusing on now is I try to exist in our daughter's tinker lab, as they call it in their school, as much as Possible just the place where they can go during the lunch hour or thereabouts and just build things and fiddle around with things. And so it's not so much an area of expertise, but one thing I'm really trying to drill into our little girl is an idea is a beautiful thing that need not be operationalized. You come up with an idea and you're surrounded in a world trying to figure out, well, what's that good for? Or what can you build with that? Or anything else? And just the. The process of exchanging ideas and believing in them again, there's a lot of people try to encourage inventorship and entrepreneurship by rewarding failure or saying that there's nothing wrong with failing. And I'm not so sure if that's the right angle. I think it's the. If you can hesitate to operationalize it, you can hesitate to try to turn an idea into a company or a nonprofit or a day job. If you just reward yourself with the idea and, you know, talk with it with your friends and believe in it, I think that's an excellent place to start in a world where inventorship and entrepreneurship is going to be how most jobs are created. Right. And I'd like her to be comfortable with. With that. She'll likely have to create her own job. And that's not a bad thing. That's where both of her parents have been all their lives.

That's fascinating. And you're talking kind of about the validation process, right? Anytime we bring a company or an idea or product to market, I want to do it in the least technical, least capital intensive, least risky way possible. And that's just having learned after 10 years of starting a lot of different companies and having a lot of them fail. And some of them did pretty well too. But, you know, a lot of them, I fell flat on my face. You just get better at just managing risk. Right. It's like you don't plant one tree and say, here's my orchard. You know, you plant a lot of trees saying, okay, I don't know which of these are going to live or die, but at least I'll have a thriving orchard if I plan enough. So in a way you're kind of saying, like, spend some time working the idea out in reality, working with people. And ultimately that's what all businesses exist, to serve as people. So if you don't start there, you're going to be setting yourself up for a big fall.

Yeah, well said. I do want her to place bets, but I believe in, absolutely in spreading it. I mean, I don't want to turn this into a venture capital discussion because I've got. No, of course not that stuff, you nor I want to turn it into.

A venture capital conversation.

Yeah, it's like, you know, I was just talking over coffee the other day, you know, Friendster, for your listeners who don't remember or don't know, I mean Friendster was Facebook two years before Facebook. And you know why Facebook won and Friendster lost is again discussion for other people in another program. But Friendster made a huge contribution and you know, I submit we may want to revise our definition of winning and losing. I mean Friendster really did, you know, pioneer or at least co pioneer the entire social space. And because they didn't become, you know, the richest people in the world because of it. I'm not so sure if that's, you know, the right message to be sending that. That's, that's a reason that they lost now, you know, Facebook.

Yeah. You know what I really love, that's kind of a bounce around terminology wise lately. Maybe you've heard of this, you can speak to it is this idea of a unicorn, which is what you're describing, like the Facebooks that take over the world, versus a zebra, which is a more sustainable customer focused, long term vision company. Instead of just every quarter or the big exit, they're trying to build something for the long term, which I've always been a proponent of. Why just throw a bunch of money at something to a charity where maybe 15, 20% of it will actually get to the people who need it. Why not build assets in society that can stand the test of time through irrevocable trust. That can be. You can utilize these legal and managerial methods that have stood the test of time, keeping families like the Rockefellers more and more wealthy instead of like the Cornelius Vanderbilt who were shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. So building is something that's sustainable, that has cash flow, that feeds itself and that doesn't go away just because you have some spendthrift managers or incompetent even worse. Right. That can stand the test of time. What do you think about the kind of unicorn versus zebra model?

Yeah, I think. Well said. I don't invent or lead unicorns and I'll tell you, I don't invent or lead zebras either. We call them cockroaches. Right. We. Interesting finance. Yeah. We're financed to the tune of being able to, you know, run and withstand, let's say, economic catastrophe. But the point is we're scurrying we're picking and rolling. I mean there's, there's a time and a place for every startup. And if you really are trying to build something big, I submit all power to you. But that's also the biggest reason that you fail by cliche. Swinging for home runs. So you know, you, everyone comments about you sold your company for this, but you have to really be in this game and be sophisticated enough to know that selling your company for X is meaningless. How much of that company did you own? The difference between ROI and irr, meaning the difference between overall return on investment and a return on investment that includes a time calculation. So I submit the average venture backed successful company, right, is sold for approximately 30 million every quarter every year since this business began. A lot of people don't appreciate that. And so when I see these $30 million Series A rounds, meaning a group of guys are already, you know, swinging for the fences just with that single financing. And just take a look at how long it takes to become a public company, about 10 years and what the average founder ownership of that is. And you know, what about trading your company? What about selling your company inside of six years or even three years or whatever it is with a much larger ownership stake? And you do the math and it's pretty startling. And I get a lot of open mouths and business school lectures because it's just data. And again, you can't take anything away from the people who are literally driving society forward. And if those people had thought like this, I think we'd be in a lot more trouble as a society than we are. But I just am not playing that game. I want to put, you know, my family first, I want to put my employees and my life first. And I want to innovate and I want to build something. But on the odds and on the data you have to build and I think a very specific way to play this other than a game of a casino, and that's just not fair to investors or your employees.

I really like that, that frame too. It's like you know what game you're playing and you're okay with, with that, right? You've decided you have certain amount of time, certain amount of energy, money, attention, what have you, these, these kind of finite resources, right? Well, maybe money is a little bit more fungible, you can always find more money, but you know, your time, energy, attention is very much limited. You got to decide what game you're going to play and what your outcome's going to be. And you got to go after you got to be okay with leaving some of the other outcomes on unrealized, you know, and, and like you said, you know, nothing against Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos or somebody. That's mission is to change the way the game is. There's more power to them. But for every one of those people, there's 200,000 other entrepreneurs that didn't even come close, you know, and we love to tell the stories of the ones that made it and did really well. And that's what kind of eggs people on. And that's just, you know, how humans are wired. But at the same time, I think it's telling a damaging story. And it's also kind of missing the mark on the sense of how many people employed, you know, how many people who are customers, how many people who are investors were needed. You know, we all want to like laud the individual's accomplishments, but how many people were really involved in that vision? Sometimes hundreds of thousands, if not millions, to create a billion dollars in value or more.

Yeah, and that's exactly to the tune of the follow up discussion that I usually have with the business school students. I say, look, you want to change the world and you're socialized to do so, and the venture capitalists are throwing in their lot to try to convince you to do so. I get it, I get it. But think about your colleagues down the proverbial or literally down the hallway that are studying medicine and the law, they work hard and they are handed the keys to the kingdom pretty regularly. And I submit that, you know, being an entrepreneur, being an inventor need not be this, you know, exotic exercise. We don't have to have Eureka, you know, moments in the lab followed by a lifetime of pain. I don't think that makes any sense. Entrepreneurship is every bit of profession as anything else. And if you're going to go into this, so many articles and so many descriptions are you have to be a risk taker and you have to be crazy. I mean, some of the best entrepreneurs in the world. There was a great piece out a couple years ago talking about how, you know, every aspect of some of the great entrepreneur in the world have been, as I said, operationalized. They have been calculated for risk. Ted Turner, you know, Richard Branson, advertising. Exactly. All these guys, yes, they're brash, yes, they built something great. But step by step, it was really calculated. And for the 200,000 others who you put it are either crashed against the rocks or barely making it to fuel a market economy where a couple do, that's A sham. And people should at least bake into their forecast. Entrepreneurs and inventors bake into their forecast. The most likely outcome. Just keep it in your. In your mind. If not on your books, and if you widely exceed your expectations, great. But if you are building a company to wildly exceed all expectations, the 99%, the outcome is you'll fail. And why not go to Vegas and take your 48% chance?

That's a good way to put it. I really like that. So what do you think, John, about how we did risk this situation for society? We're moving into this entrepreneurial society. Entrepreneurs are going to be more of a thing, or entrepreneurs, you know, people who pick up their head and look around and say, all right, what problems am I going to solve? What value am I going to create? How am I going to get leverage and help more people and create wealth? Right. How do we de. Risk that situation? Or should we de risk that situation for people? And what are some of the ways that we might be able to do that? Like, people are throwing away ideas like universal basic income, you know, covering people's basics at a very food, energy, water and shelter level. We're going to have the ability and maybe the responsibility to do that. Pretty soon. We're coming into an age where the cost of living is going to be driven down to nominal amounts of money. And we're going to realize that the way we're spending on bureaucracy and red tape and substance programs just maybe isn't going to hit it anymore. We're going to have to change the whole game around. And that also might open opportunities where people can go into this and say, all right, well, my basics are covered. My ceiling, or rather my floor is known. I can only slip so far without going into poverty or be on the street or dying of ill health or whatever. Maybe there's now a new world where we can be more creative and unleash a lot of opportunity because we're not just spending all of our time just surviving. Right. How many people in the world today just spend all their time and energy and attention to make enough money just to survive and have nothing left at the end of the day, creatively or otherwise, to offer?

Yeah, I read you. I think that's a tough one. I mean, one small idea that sounds, you know, unlike something that at least someone in my line of work would support is more of a government and believe it or not, venture capital partnership. And I know we saw some of that in the previous years in the cleantech space, which didn't go so, well, but I'm talking about the entire industry. So you saw the government partner with banks during the last financial calamity. And I thought that was a terrible, terrible mistake. I think we as a society may never recover from too big to fail. And how disastrous some of that stuff proved to be the moral habit.

Well, and all the printing that's happened and. Yeah, just the crazy amounts of money that's now flush into the system as well.

Exactly. So you sound like you're there too. So I think that is hugely problematic. But some sort of partnership with the institutions responsible for innovation. So that, I mean, if there were only 25 major venture capital houses that were making money 10 or 15 years ago, that might be only 10 or 12 of them now. We'll see again, Social has done very well to be explosive for a few of them as well. And there have been some companies that are growing faster than any time in history, but there are a few of them now. We're getting the lemons again, right? The $400 million deals for technologies that don't work or that you don't need the machine for anything else. And those are coming and we know what comes next. But if the government can step in and take the venture capital model just down a slight notch, and I'm not talking about socialism or taking over, but just partnerships in new funds where companies can get more time and be reasonable in expectations rather than everyone swinging for the fences. In a traditional VC portfolio, nine fail, one wins, justifying the rest. If we can just change that model a little because I don't think it's working anymore. I also don't think it's working that some guy has $50 billion and as you said then, 50% of our cities are in poverty, but that's even more controversial. So I think the government is, you know, should stay out of a lot. I build from zero. And I think I have a right to say that making your own, your destiny, your own future, if you will, is important. But something has to happen on the regulatory side to say the way that we are building and the way we're using money and the way we're printing, as you just said, is becoming so toxic that now that we really don't have the either equity or the fuel that we had to defend against the last crisis. Right. We used all that up by printing and everything else. What's going to defend us against the next one? And that may be the big one, that may be the reset. I'm not trying to, you know, but it no you have to be reasonable.

And everything will shift, right? And that'll create a new opportunity of cryptocurrencies coming out, although they're still exceptionally small. People are like talking about Bitcoin and Ethereum. I'm like, guys, it's like the whole market cap for that is like the size of a small cap company on the nasdaq. It's not big at all, but one day it might be, you know, like, we just don't know. And it's fascinating to see just how, you know, smart people are getting together and saying to themselves, all right, well, what, what does solve this problem, right? Because it's not up to the elites and the, you know, the Federal Reserves of the world and the world banks and these, these various organizations to determine any more. The, the course of, you know, we're becoming decentralized in our power structure. I think we need to, we need to start sharing some of the weight and the burden of power and freedom to act with the populace in order to make better decisions for humanity overall. Because it's moving too fast for any one human or set of humans to do it.

Yeah, no, I read you and you mentioned the currencies, and I agree they're small and they're esoteric now, but I think it was just today that I read that Bitcoin had traded over 1600 or at 100 for the first time. And I think I read that one of the earliest guys in, if I think with Snapchat, who's also apparently a big bitcoin guy, is talking about Bitcoin value at $500,000 by x number of years and just talking about, you know, the same growth. If you've added 50x users since inception, you know, and you add another 50x users in this many years and the math checks. So all that kind of stuff, I think is beyond the range of my thinking. Not big or small, just a different purview. But yeah, you'll have just like we're talking about IoT devices, you have this proliferation of completely new things. And to get in on the relative ground floor of that stuff, you know, our children, our 7 year olds will ask, you know, what were you doing when you saw the first drone fly around? And why didn't you get into, you know, a drone business? Everything else? Well, there are, you know, a thousand of them now and a bunch of bankruptcies and, you know, it's tougher said.

Than done to start out with. The first time I heard him, I thought it was a flock of bees coming after Me, I'm like, oh, my God, am I about to get stung?

Exactly. And it's tough. It's tough to know where we're going. I mean, I joke that my parents should have bought their first house for $30,000 in 1972. Not in San Mateo, but in Atherton. You know, how did. How did they know? So it's exactly.

Even eight years ago, I had a. I was making apps at the time, and apps were the hot thing. You'd code an app for 300 bucks that was like, you know, nonsense. And sell for $2 all day long all over the world, and you get checks. It was like. It was magic. It was printing money. So I did that two or three times. I turned around to the developer and I said, hey, you know, if I g unlimited money, what would you build? He's like, I would build a bitcoin trading app. And mind you, since 2009, I'm like, what the heck is bitcoin? And I was like, all right, I looked into it. Sounds cool. You know, go ahead and build a bitcoin trading app. So you got halfway through the money. I think he spent like 2 or 3 grand. He's like, I can't do this. It's too complicated. I'm sorry. Here's the rest of your money back. I failed. Had I just taken John that $5,000 and put them into bitcoins, assuming I could get the liquidity. Yeah, I was looking at 5 cent bitcoins, 5 grand, 100,000 bitcoins. You know, I'd be worth today $160 million as of today. So I always laugh a little bit. It's like, always invest in the underlying. That's the lesson. But I wasn't stupid twice. I did 7 or 8x my money in a theory on this time around. So that's not bad.

You know, I'm not bad at all.

Yeah, it's not bad, right? So you catch the ones you catch. And I think you have to be able to put an amount of money and be able to plant a lot of seeds that are small enough so if they die or never go anywhere, you're not hurt. Like, you know, I wouldn't. I wouldn't advise people put their kids college tuition money, but if you got a little extra cash kicking around, stick a grand here, stick a grand there. Again, this is big disclaimer. You know, I'm not giving you financial advice, all that good stuff, but, you know, that's kind of my strategy is like, I want to plant a lot of seeds where I think they might grow in fertile soil. And maybe in 50 years I might be a genius, but maybe not, right? I just don't know. But I know what my cash is doing for me right now. The purchasing power and getting crushed and no interest and you know, you got to go after high risk to get that. I'm like, well, a thousand bucks or so. And Ethereum doesn't sound like a bad idea. And that's where you win.

Yeah. And people should appreciate whether you're in the financial side or the entrepreneur side, as you just mentioned, I mean you do you deliver 6, 7, 8 x pretty much over a reasonable amount of time. You can do anything you want. And we're so, you know, socialized to think of 100x or huge returns or anything else. But on the, on the averages, if you look at a whole portfolio or anything else and you know, my last venture returned, it returned 6x approximately to preferred in three years. I mean, could we have done better? Of course you can always do better. Could we have built a rocket perhaps. But that's, you know, you get invited to a lot of Christmas parties when you, when you deliver that right, you know, it's a lot of people are happy. And there's something to be said for every partner and every employee and every investor you work with if you build this way and you're successful at the gate, winning versus a Twitter, I mean, what a profound impact they've had in society, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. GoPro, another kind of really cool company doing these really cool gadgets, which is talking about Internet of things. But can you imagine, and no offense, these are better inventors and better executives than I am. But could you imagine the hot seat in either of those companies where daily you're probably taking calls or through intermediaries from Iowa who people who are $50 a share underwater. You know, it's just that that's not. Something doesn't make sense about that. Both, you know, trading below their, their IPOs and everything else. And so I just a model that states that you should endeavor to go ring the, the bell at New York Stock Exchange. I've never done it, you know, I can imagine. But you know, that's just raising money. Let's not forget that it's just another financing and you know, the IPO is not the end of your responsibilities the way an acquisition is short of making sure your products integrated, making sure you stay at that company. You want to stay. I've got, you know, engineers at the with the Oracle transaction that I mentioned, that are still there, that are there 10 years later, they don't want to go do what I'm doing anymore. And that's fine. Let them enjoy the cafeteria and the, and the culture, everything else, all power to whatever you want to do. But if you've built something great and then there are thousands upon thousands of people that have lost tons of money or more because of the public markets taking your company for a ride, I don't think that's the answer either.

And I think that that really sums it up nicely. You know, it's like, where do we find that balance as a society between, you know, the oldest human emotions, right? We got fear and greed, we've got, you know, power and love, we've got freedom and whatever, right? Responsibility, if you will, like two sides of the same pendulum. I don't think any extreme is a good thing. You know, any extreme carries away the consequences. When you start to find that middle way, you know, you start to build more sustainable, beautiful living. I think that's, you know, you having lived as long you've lived. And, you know, I'm a little bit younger, but what I've seen in life, or what life has taught me is that anytime I'm out of balance, it shows up and kicks me in the head and I have to direct course, right? It's like I can argue with reality as long as I'm willing to be wrong 100% of the time. That's how.

And it's in our blood. Yeah, it's in our bloodstream. I mean, you put that very well, but it's in our DNA to, I think, find balance. You know, the fight or flight risk is. Sometimes that manifests literally as goosebumps. I mean, sometimes you. That's why the hair stand up on one's body, because you can't decide if you're going to run or you're going to, you know, put up your gloves and I just, you know, entrepreneurship, inventorship, working with teams, building. This can be something that really is a lot of fun. You can walk into any room that you want to. It can be war veterans, it can be notable academics, it can be your daughter's friends, you know, graduating class. I'm doing a, you know, a speech this year in a couple weeks, and it's, it's. You are welcomed if you have a good idea to share. I mean, it is a contribution to talk about your ideas, regardless of how much money, regardless of what's going on. That's not a rationalization to contribute, to have lived, I think involves putting forth good ideas.

That's a beautiful sentiment. Thank you, John. So, one last question. I want to tie this in because you've been a future predictor in the past, in the sense of around 2010, you had a really accurate and keen insight into the job market. What are some other things that you're kind of perceiving that are changing now or about to, you know, maybe swing the other way? You know, maybe some we've talked about, maybe we want to dive into more, maybe some we haven't even touched on. Like what would you want people to know is coming and why do you think it's coming?

You know, it's. Some of the forecasting I was doing in a previous existence was to make better sense of whatever landmine was in front of me while I'm running a venture. I mean, you can be as good as you try to be, you do all the right moves and all of a sudden the sky falls in and you don't want to be on the wrong side. That. So I got into forecasting to try to be more aware of economic cycles. Unfortunately now, and I know this sounds a bit dark, I think there's been so much printing and so much ridiculousness that forecasting has also been. I mean, you see all these hedge funds exploding, right? All the smartest and most connected guys, you know, with their information, presumably it's proper information and even they can't get it right. You know, the guy who's the Clinton son in law, I assume he's a good guy, but I mean, how can you bet that wrong if your parents are parents in law? Are those people right? Can't you get Greece on the right side if that's your whole charter for your fund? And I'm not saying anything wrong, it's just that if those kind of guys with their connections and their smarts are not being able to figure out the world. I think forecasts have been thrown through the loop when contract law is negated, you know, what we did to the GM bondholders. When is it just today that the largest government in history has filed for bankruptcy protection? And what, the market's down, you know, 19 points? I mean, it's, it's, you know, why did the market trade down futures 700, 800 points when it was confirmed we had a new president. And then the rationalization is. All he had to do is make a mellow speech the next day and the markets rallied. I mean, that kind of stuff just doesn't make any sense to me anymore. And that's one reason why I'm not in a financial guy. But to forecast and figure out what's happening when we are living in such a crazy environment. Be good to your wife, marry the right person, be good to your family, spend enough time, my daughter, in my case, try to build something of value. Try to file your patents and do something interesting and keep your head down. I used to say keep your head up. But maybe it's too crazy to pay attention to everything I used to pay attention to. Right?

I think Goldman Sachs put it really well. It's like we don't want to predict the future. We just want to be ready for any scenario so that we can be the first one off the starting line when the gun fires. Right? So they kind of run the odds on all these different things and they know, okay, this could happen, this could implode, that could be an opportunity, this could be an opportunity. And they're not necessarily acting on any of them, but they're in this state of readiness and they got their playbook so that when it goes they're like, alright, cool. And obviously for the individual it's almost impossible for, for us to do that. So I don't worry about like kind of like I gave up on trying to trade inside the margins on options like the hrts are going to eat your lunch all day long. You know, I'm not playing their game. However, I can start to play with some trends and take a longer term perspective and be more like a Warren Buffett, but with a new age. Right. I don't have to dabble where he dabbles necessarily in these bigger companies. You know, I can be the guy that comes in and just says, all right, I'm going to make my bets and I'm going to plant enough seeds and, and eventually I'll have a thriving orchard, if you will. Yeah, that's a really fascinating way to put it. I really appreciate your insight, John. You're obviously. Well, you think about this stuff a lot and I don't know if you have too many outlets to describe these types of things, you know, outside the academic world. So it's a real pleasure to have you. I want to end with one thought and I want to get your opinion on it because I'm a big, you know, get leveraged kind of person and the way I do that is through people, right. And I want to enroll people in my vision. I want to lead people and I want to help people have the resources and tools and support that they need to do their best work so I can get the heck out of their way. And I know you've led a really talented team of highly technical, highly intelligent engineers over many decades now. And I would love for you to, if you can, if you would just maybe share two or three main key things that you've learned about leadership and about managing a team and doing so successfully for so long.

Thank you. Yeah, I think authenticity is important. I always, if I'm going to spend an hour on the phone with anyone or in person with anyone, I'm going to try to insert an opinion that is real. So sometimes leadership is described as, you know, being calm at sea. But I'd much rather my team appreciate what I'm really thinking, how I'm really feeling about the world and about our condition. And so they believe it. And so when they're at their own dinner tables and updating their own families, they are led by someone whom they think is authentic. That's one piece. Another is my father's thesis advisor when he was at Stanford Getting his PhD in physics was Dr. Arthur Shallow. This is the co inventor of the laser. And then another quasi advisor was gentleman Felix Block. And when Stanford was dedicating the building to Block, my dad was actually called to make a comment. And Felix Block's advisor was the great Heisenberg. I mean, you think about where my father's been and just in that ecosystem. He now teaches physics over at Stanford as well. I mean, to be surrounded by these unprecedented geniuses. You know, he taught me from an early age try to appreciate and find and respect talent. And that's not a cliche. I mean, I've got some really smart people to do what we do around me. Some of them have really unconventional CVs that, you know, may not make sense to those in the outside world, but we fit in, you know, very well together. And just growing up in such a, you know, an academic family, especially that kind of family, my father would used to go out to run late at night and I thought that meant running, you know, around the track. He was going to run small particles at flack. He was just a, yeah, a little bit of a crazy, crazy family. But you know, I learned, I think, to seek out and respect talent. I've got a guy on my team who was a former football player, 49er, also with the New Orleans Saints. And he's one of the few ballplayers in history to also get a medical degree while playing. Not a lot of NFL players get a medical degree. And he also has a Stanford law degree. So just an individual like that is really interesting. And this particular company, the first venture we've worked together, we met on a nonprofit board, but we're doing all kinds of work in sports and medicine. So think of an executive with that kind of, you know, transitional power. So that was a really interesting hire, even though most wouldn't recognize, you know, what. What exactly we were doing there. So authenticity, appreciate talent. And I think the last part is it's not so much humility that sounds loaded, but the humility to not reverse engineer one's career or even one's progression in a company. Of course, a lot of luck has to do with it, but I often am asked where good ideas come from and whether in the shower or whether through a more complicated process, I really just try to explain what's. What's happened. And, you know, back to Friendster Facebook that we launched with, I mean, I think Zuckerberg, with all that he's done and he's accomplished, I think he could do, you know, very well as well to pay it forward and really, you know, start talking about how it really happened, especially in the early days when Friendster might have acquired Facebook, or if, you know, if Zuckerberg turned down a billion dollars from Yahoo with which is widely reported, why was he even considering in the first place? And if so, let a Yahoo poke under your hood to make that kind of offer. You're in a process or you're in a condition. So to say that I started the company and never wanted to do this and to grow into this unbelievable mammoth. There are ways to things that happened. And I was really excited to see the Google founders get up at Edino Cosa's conference just last year or the year before to really talk about what happened between Excite and Google. And it's just so that this next crop of inventors and entrepreneurs can. Can build in a reasonable way and not be, you know, so influenced by the ridiculousness of chance and all the intangibles that go into anything. So authenticity, respecting talent and the humility manifests as really telling it the way it is as a little bit to do with authenticity, but also in retrospect, how did this venture really happen and what's happened in one's life?

I love it. I love it. Thank you very much. That was very succinct and I can tell you thought a lot about this and really thank you. So, last thing, I want to just give you the stage for a moment and ask how the community, how myself, how Anybody listening to this can A get in contact with you and also what are you guys looking for to increase either your flow or your capacity? I have this saying like, you know, you can, the flow is out there, you can tap into it. You may have too much where you can't even receive it all. But you know, I think both are necessary in balance and lockstep in order to create a bigger pie for everybody. And we, you know, as marble makers, if you will, we want to create more for everybody. So how can we help you to go out and do that? And how can people get in touch with you?

Yeah, I appreciate it. As far as getting in touch, my email address is Fisher John B. Roudoptic. That's Fisher with no C and John with no H and B as in boy at crowd like a crowd of people and optic like I dot com. I love to hear ideas. I love to hear from everyone. And regarding our flow, as you put it, I have issued patents in, in China for example, but I have almost no operational experience in China or Singapore or some of these places. I've done a lot of business in Europe, India and other places in previous ventures and we've got a lot of activity, you know, headed that direction now. So it's really interesting that the Chinese traffic police are using our technology, the largest police force in the world. And we're now in a bunch of, you know, connected city experiences and bids in Singapore. So I just thought I'd mention those two areas of the world as places that we could certainly use expertise and help and vision it in terms of what's going next. You know, we actually start the team and I just as it happens, this is venture number four. We start each venture in a new market. I guess we're solving problems and trying to do things and it just so happens that we're in a different space each time. And while my wife really respects that, you know, she thinks it's. It's likely pretty hard to be able to do that. There is a trade off that you don't get the proficiency that one might get by being in the same market all these years. Maybe you get a little bit more excitement the way we do it. But acknowledging that this is a completely new one, the last one was. So that area of the world is really interesting and I'd love to just throw a shout out to any with, you know, greater expertise.

It's funny you mentioned that because we literally just had a 50 entrepreneur group go to the product fairs out in Canton and we went to Hong Kong. I'm sure we have a few people out there that will hear that and be like, oh, I know somebody that could probably connect you with whoever. But yeah.

Oh, that's great.

Connections, political. Otherwise, just people who understand what's going on technologically in China would be super useful. Or Singapore or anywhere around there. Got it. Okay, cool. Thanks. Right on.

Thank you. Yeah.

It's been a pleasure having you on the show, John. Thank you so much. You guys can find John all over the Internet. He's done amazing work over the years. Thank you, John, for contributing to the, to the audience today and to sharing your gifts and just a little bit about yourself. And we really appreciate it.

Thanks very much for the insightful questions. I appreciate it was nice talking with you.

My pleasure. Thanks so much for listening to the Make More Marbles podcast. For more tips, hacks and strategies to create an amazing, abundant life in your health, wealth and relationships, whatever that means to you, head on over to makemoremarbles.com, check out our cool explainer video about what we're about, and join our community of entrepreneurial game changers. We want to help you level up your life in every possible way. And don't forget to subscribe to us on itunes, Stitcher, or Google Play wherever you listen to your podcasts. And please do leave a review. Thank you so much and we'll see you on the next podcast.