Solving The Student Debt Crisis with Amira Yahyaoui and Deena Shakir

Hey everybody, it's Eric Torenberg, co-founder, partner of Village Global, a network-driven venture firm. And this is Venture Stories, a podcast covering topics relating to tech and business with world-leading experts. Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Village Global Venture Stories. I'm here today joined by two very special guests, Amira Yahyaoui and Deena Shakir. Amira, Deena, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you.

Thank you, Eric.

Great to be here.

So, uh, Deena, this is your, your returning guest, but for people who aren't familiar, why don't we start with introductions? Uh, you both have non-traditional, uh, backgrounds and, and you're somewhat outsiders to tech. Now you're insiders, but you came as outsiders. Why don't you give brief introductions, uh, into how you broke into tech and how you both ended up, uh, working on this company together?

So, as you alluded to, very nonlinear background for somebody in venture. It certainly wasn't something I thought I was going to end up doing earlier in my life. I am a Bay Area native, born in Mountain View, born to immigrants from Iraq, and studied on the East Coast. Always had an orientation around impact and specifically around building bridges with the Arab and Muslim world. Coming of age in high school during 9/11 and the war in Iraq was a really pivotal experience for me and one that sort of helped shape that ambition. So that's what I studied both in undergrad at Harvard and grad school at Georgetown and what my career, my early career aspirations were oriented towards. Thought I was going to do a PhD in anthropology, briefly had a foray in journalism, and actually was interning with the BBC covering President Obama's speech in Cairo, which Amira will remember very well, and I'm sure many others listening will as well, in which he talked about new beginnings with the Muslim world, about employing technology, education, and entrepreneurship as a way of building bridges. And that was another pivotal moment where I knew I didn't want to be just writing about this moment in history. I wanted to be a part of it. And so I joined the Obama administration out of grad school, worked at USAID, in Secretary Clinton's office specifically on the initiative that came out of that speech, which became known as the Cairo speech, and the work became the post-Cairo portfolio. And that included putting together the first Global Entrepreneurship Summit in 2010. And was in government when the Arab Spring, as we've come to call it, sort of started to unfold. Being in the U.S. government as an Arab American and Muslim was another very interesting time. You know, we were beginning to see what's now called the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the way that technology was changing the way we do everything. And I was specifically just fascinated by how, at the time, social media platforms were enabling organizing and grassroots efforts and literally toppling regimes in ways that I didn't think would be would be possible in my lifetime. And that's ultimately what motivated me to come back to my childhood birthplace of Silicon Valley and at the time join Google and actually work on civic tech products, including Google's election, elections tools, and then made my way into venture after half a decade at Google working on moonshot products. I came to the conviction that most of these really groundbreaking innovations were unlikely to happen in big tech. I was finding amazing entrepreneurs, people like Amira, who were doing things better, faster, more impactful. And that's sort of how I landed at GV and then at Luxe.

Awesome. Amira, can you give a bit of your background? You were an activist and now you're running a venture-backed company taking on student debt. Why don't you tell that story a bit?

Yeah, listen, when I have this question of you have a non-traditional background, I actually, when I remember when I set foot in San Francisco starting Moss, which was my first day, I started meeting people and my first reaction was like, I actually do have a very traditional background, which is I'm an immigrant. I come from a very low-income family. Life has not been very, very easy to me. And I've been just obsessed with everything online since very, very young age. And I mean, what is non-traditional? Maybe is like my life before, before Moss. I was, so I was born and raised in Tunisia. I'm from the south of Tunisia, the desert. I grew up in a family, like first, my parents were first gen college, whatever. And I actually thought that my life will be about science. I was obsessed with science. I wanted to become an astronaut. And that was, is the only thing I was thinking about my whole life. And when I was 12, my father came to see me because he was really obsessed with my green passport, which allows you to do nothing in the world. And he said, unfortunately, with this passport, you're not going to be an astronaut, but you can be everything else. And so it's like, you know, like childhood trauma. And I kept being very— I understood that maybe I will not go into space, but I probably go to another space that was like starting then, which is like online and a different space with other rules, completely different from planet Earth. And became really obsessed with it, like, but that was my life. I was I was, yeah, coding, hacking, doing stupid shit online. And then grew up with a lot of philosophy and reading around me and understood very quickly that I was born in a dictatorship and that I was living in a dictatorship. And that just, has never been acceptable to me. So when I was 14, I decided, because I read online that people protest, so I decided to just go and protest and was not super welcomed in Tunisia, which was a police state, very, very hardcore dictatorship. Yeah, my body was broken from like from head to toe basically, and was sent to the hospital. Couldn't talk or move for months. And the only thing I think that was not damaged was my brain, which is the only thing that was really important. And then, you know, I recovered during like many months. And then when I recovered, when I started walking and moving and talking again. I went back to the street and did another demonstration. I was sent back to the hospital with less damage this time. And then I went back again the third time, and then they couldn't touch me because it just became a big deal to touch me. And since then, like, never stopped. I was very active on many topics. You know, when it's a dictatorship, you basically asking for freedom. But I was also very active on like the freedom of internet and the anti-censorship, online censorship movement at the time. And we were that generation that used technology like against dictatorship and against government, the first like Facebook and Twitter accounts on those, you know, subject matters when at the time having 200 followers on Twitter was like, I was like the most influential Twitter account in the Arab world. So when I had like 18, I was banned from the country. So from Tunisia, lived stateless for many years in Europe, in France. And there it was another interesting life because France was very close to all the dictators. They are still close to all the dictatorships. France was very close to the— I mean, France thinks that Arabs deserve dictator. French government, not French people, obviously, and not only them. And so basically France would not recognize me as an asylum seeker because recognizing something, someone as an asylum seeker means you recognize that the country has a problem. So I was basically just one of those illegal immigrants in France. The, what is called the sans-papiers, no papers, and lived there for many years, 2 years of them homeless. And I was not allowed to go to college because illegal immigrants are not allowed until today to go to college in France. So I was not allowed to go to college, but obviously, I mean, I had a fake ID, went to a lot of colleges. Like I had an education, I just don't have a college degree. And there I had this double life. Where during the day I was just like an illegal worker in every shitty work job you could imagine. I did everything. And then at night I was this famous blogger who writes about human rights and was like very respected, whatever. So it was like famous online and I was nobody offline. But I was also stateless offline, like I had no ID, no nothing. Like you are, you're just deleted from the database of humans. Like you're an extra body in the world who doesn't belong anywhere, which is just insane. There are actually right now 50 million people living like that in the world. But online I had a cool nickname and I had an identity, like everyone knew who I was. So lived like that for many, many years, very active still writing. And then, you know, the revolution started in Tunisia and I was one of those very outspoken people. And because I was outside, I was able like to sort of be— not that there was— there were no spokespeople. Person to the revolution or anything, but I was like one of those who sort of became the faces of it. Although like it is like really a group thing, it's not one person, say the Tunisia. And then yeah, and then went back to Tunisia, created an NGO. My life completely changed, you know, like we became the winners and people love winners. So I just You know, I probably met every single president in the world, went to every single big event, big whatever, had a ton of awards, stuff like that. But what was amazing in my life is that I'm one of those people in our generation who were able to shape their country's constitution. And that was dope. You know, that was a big deal. That was— Incredible, incredible. So when Tunisia voted the constitution, for me, I was like, now I'm allowed to have a normal life. And decided that, you know, I have a passport and ID now and I can move in the world and I can do anything I want. And I think of myself as still doing exactly the same thing. But in different places.

So how did you get from there to MAS? Like, trace the, the journey of why, you know, you could have, I guess, had a potentially a very— a career in government or just going up. You just mentioned the Constitution. Like, how did you sort of focus on student debt?

Yeah, so my first colleague at MAS, Alex, always warn me from saying this in any podcast or anything. I don't believe in government. It's not that I don't believe in government. I think government will disappear in some hundreds of years and the way governments work and all of that. So I just don't want to live in the past. In terms of Moss, I think if there is something that can really define me is my obsession with the concept of dignity. And like, you know, like with everything that touches moral history, Kant and all these theories about what is dignity, you know, and which is still debated until today. But my whole, my obsession is like people and dignity and how do you create actually dignity and how do you bring it to life and how do you How do you make it owned by people versus given? And that was like from the beginning what I wanted to do and what I have been doing my whole life and what I will be doing my whole life. I know it already. And so MAS's mission is to tear down all financial barriers to opportunity. And this came from the story, I mean, the whole Arab Spring started for financial freedom and economic rights and social rights. It was not for freedom of expression or gender equality. It was really about that. And I was struck by it for someone who really did it. I mean, put my life on the line for it. I was surprised that that was the reason why tens of thousands of people took a bullet in their chest and not something else. And so I knew that I wanted to do, like, to solve that problem of, like, how do you tear down financial barriers to people and create opportunity? And that basically means everything and nothing, but I'm a very practical person too. The idea of Moss was very clear from the beginning. What was not clear is And then what? What, what? Like, is it an NGO? Is it something else? What is it? A product? What are you doing? What you're not? And I had the— I got very lucky. I had an intro to Garrett Camp, the founder of Uber. And there's no surprise that Garrett like had the idea of Uber because he just have those kind of ideas with no limits. So I was bubbling my story and I want to do this, but I have no clue what to do. And he bet on me. He was the first bet. But Garrett, and I will be always grateful for him for this, he said, "You should move to San Francisco. You should come here. You really should move to San Francisco, do it here," although we met in New York. And I just said, "Okay." So I moved. And then the story of Moss is why Moss is solving the problem of accessing education, college, and solving this debt crisis is something else. It was really about— when it started, it was very agnostic about what to start with and try to put myself aside and my story aside to what really matters, what is the problem, and interviewed a ton of people. And this is a whole, a whole story. But when you are your first day of adulthood, adulthood in the world is defined by a lot of things, drinking, partying, driving, a lot of things. In the US, it's the only country where the first day of adulthood is defined by how much loans are you taking? What is the mountain of loans you are going to take? And how are you going to ruin your future? And I always joke about this, like nowhere in the world, an 18, years old would be allowed to take more than 10K. No, like, it's just not allowed. Like, you cannot get it. And here it's completely different. And coming from Tunisia, and this, Deena Shakir, I'm sure you can talk about this, when you come from the Arab world, our relationship with the US is that the US comes to teach us, like, here's how we do things. And the US actually funds a lot of education programs around the world.

Public diplomacy and colleges, higher education, and kids, and kids need to go to school, and girls need to go to school, and then mistreating your own people, you know, and your own taxpayers, and, and having this model that is absolutely absurd was, um, yeah, fun for me to If I could just add one thing, Eric, you know, I, I've heard now the story and told the story of Amira and Moss so many times, but I still get so emotional every time I hear it. Because, you know, for me, I, I was born in Mountain View, I played T-ball, you know, I, I, my parents fled Iraq and experiencing what it was like to have I don't know if guilt is the right word, but the sort of serendipity of my existence, just how close I was to living or maybe not living through that. And that's sort of what motivated me all along. And Amira lived it. She literally had her life on the line. I mean, she represents in many ways almost like a parallel universe version of like what very well could have been me. And so Again, the serendipity of us coming together, which I have to give credit to another amazing Tunisian woman founder, our friend Emna, who connected us, was just incredible. And not only because of that journey, because of everything she embodies about what I've come to believe over time through some very odd experiences about the potential for technology to really fill this gap, but even on a totally personal level, And she and I had joked about this. It's actually my mom who reminded me about this, believe it or not. After I met Amira, I was gushing to my mom on the phone, and she reminded me that this idea of streamlining access to aid and helping to connect private and public funds to students is something I told her that needed to be created when I was in high school. And the reason I said that is because I actually paid for college by myself in fear of that debt. We weren't eligible at the time for financial aid, but we had personal issues in our family and it was going to be challenging. And so I literally like cut clips from newspapers, applied for these random like Air Systems, Inc. air conditioning scholarship and larger ones like Coca-Cola. And then I ended up amassing enough to pay for college myself and then started teaching others how to do it and thinking there has to be a better way. There has to be an easier way. Over a decade later, seeing what Moss is doing, like, it's just extraordinary.

Wow, that's inspiring. Amira, let's get into the product. How does Moss work? And what sort of gap did you fill within the market? Because there are lots of, you know, other startups in the past that have tried to do certain things in this space. How did you see it?

Yeah, how does Moss work? Actually, we really do what everyone wanted to be. Which is I want to go to college. I don't have money to pay for it. And there are reasons. It's not like I want to keep my money in my bank account and put it on Robinhood. Like, I really don't have money, right, to pay for it. I should somehow still deserve an education. And my choice should not be to ruin my future, my financial future. There is a ton of money out there. I actually, I mean, was talking about like how the US mistreats its own people, but it's actually the US is the country with the highest budget to fund education in the world and higher education. So there are $135 billion of like financial aid given by the federal government and even more given by states. But here's the problem. It is unfair because no human can know everything that is out there, and almost every student can leave money on the table because just, it's impossible. There are tens of thousands of programs, there are tens of thousands of rules, like, just like no human can know. And even the best financial aid advisor and the best college in the world doesn't know everything. You just can't. And this is really an absurd technological problem. You know what I mean? It's just the basic technology. Like, you need to figure out a way where you streamline it from, this is who I am, this is what I match with, you know, like Google. So we decided to build it. We decided to build it. Today, already, Moss is the highest bank for money in any education thing, you know, for it to pay for college. We have every single, every single dollar the government gives on a federal, state, county, whatever level. And what is absurd and terrible is that no one in in America has our database, including the government itself. Because the way the country works, the state, the federal country works, what happens is that California will never ever have the same rules and regulation like Texas, and Texas will never ever have the same as Idaho. It is by design made to be complicated and bureaucratic. So, but as if you are a student, you might want to go to a school in Texas and consider one in California, but you are from Idaho, and if both don't accept you, you will stay in Idaho, right? So what we did was a lot of like understanding the system. I remember when we started MAS, I was talking to a friend, I mean, an investor of ours, Ryan Panchasteram, who was one of Barack Obama's deputy CTOs, and who's a partner at Kleiner Perkins. And Ryan, I talked to Ryan and talked about that, and he was like, we've been trying to do this for the two terms. And it's just like impossible. It is for me, like the most challenging pitch ever was with Ryan because he really knows what I'm talking about. Like, I can't, I can't, I can't just pitch, you know. And then 2 months later, Ryan was like, okay, so how's it going? And I said, yeah, we're, we're almost like finished. And he's like, yeah, that's gonna be amazing. So you're almost finished with California? I'm like, no, with the 50 states. It's like, what? How? You know. Working with dictators helps you really understand how bad policy can be, and evil policy, and hiding stuff from people works. So we had all the tools about how do we understand how it works. And of course, the US has nothing to do with the Tunisian dictatorship. So we did that. Today, we are putting every single dollar from scholarships around like every single scholarship you can imagine, and also every single college, because colleges have a lot of money themselves. And as a student, you don't know what, what they have. So we will be starting with making, uh, public colleges' money more transparent, and then private, and then it's all of it. We are already, as I said, like the highest. So for a student, how does it work? Or a parent. They come to Moss, they fill one application which has all the questions we need, and they don't need to also answer like questions that, that doesn't apply to them. And then we match. They get paired with an advisor, with the financial aid advisor, which is this advisor— like, the power of this advisor is that, yeah, there is a human but powered with incredible technology that knows like everything, like a huge wiki, imagine, and from beginning to end we just follow them the whole year until they get their financial aid offer. Once they get the financial aid offer, how it works unfortunately is that most students get less in their financial aid offer than what they are eligible for because colleges will keep the money, so because we know exactly how much they are entitled to, we appeal that and they cannot like say no. So they end up getting way more than if they just applied and accepted an offer. So that's how we do it. And it is a very simple solution when you see it and very complex on the background when you have to do it. Yeah.

And, and And Deena, I'm curious for the investor perspective here. This, you know, edtech or fintech isn't normally what we think of when we think of a Luxe company. What was the thesis here from you and the Luxe team?

I would say the thesis, first of all, was Amira, and exactly the type of founder who represents for me personally why I do what I do. You know, as we were going through the process, I literally wrote her an email which was called a love letter. You know, I mean, the process of getting to know her and Moss Moss truly was that. It was intoxicating. It was romance. It was incredible. But also, we have a thesis around the transformative potential of AI, of technology, to break down really anachronistic analog industries and spaces. And that's exactly what Moss does. And so, you know, although it's not what, you know, the satellite or rocket launcher that one might normally think of. It's very much in thesis and aligned both for me personally and for Lux, and the entire partnership was equally intoxicated.

What does this look like at scale? Like, who pays you? Or like, how does this become an enormous business?

Yeah, so students, students or parents pay us. So they pay us $149. It's a 1-year membership. They have to do it every year. And if they don't get 5 times what they paid for, we just refund them. But that's like the first product. We— tearing down financial barriers is an infinite problem. And it's an infinite financial problem. I believe that the future of financial solution is not going to be a bank with a cooler app plus like a cool 10% on McDonald's. You know, I think like, yeah, it's cool. Like we're putting it on an app that works and it's amazing and it looks good. Then you have a credit card that is like yellow and whatever. That's cool. But that's not the future of fintech. The future of fintech is going to be to completely transform the life of a person, the financial life of a person. Through technology. And for us, solving the first problem puts us in the best position to solve all the other problems.

Why didn't a company like SoFi do this before? Talk about the ecosystem around student debt outside of Moss and why it took you to introduce this.

Yeah. No one believes, I think, I mean, what I was shocked by. I remember when I started Moss, I was like spending— when we decided to do this, I spent like nights and days Googling that probably this thing might exist, you know, like for sure. Like, how come? Like, this is a problem that has been there for 50, 60 years, and, and for sure someone tried to, to solve it. And it was interesting, I think that there is a big— the way we solve it is probably the hardest way to solve it, which is one, really not try to give them better loans, you know, but that gives completely something different, like make the loans disappear for many students. And second is our client is the student. We are building for the student. We're not trying to convince colleges or corporations or whatever. This is a B2C. And this was very contrarian when we started. And I remember like, wait, like students don't buy this, or why don't you do loans? That's where the money is. Or all of that. And fine, I mean, the SoFi, et cetera, make a lot of money and good for them, but I think millennials, and I am a millennial, we were easier to fool. And this generation is way, way more awake and aware and clear about their rights and about what they want. And you cannot fool them with baby pink and fluffy cards. "You can do your platinum card." They are taking debit cards, not credit cards. They are very different. You cannot fool. So that way of building products that look cool and make the problem a little bit less bad is done. No one buys into this.

Makes sense. Talk about how COVID has impacted— obviously, it's impacted higher education a lot, Talk about how it's impacted MAS and what it means for just financing going forward.

Yeah, I mean, COVID impacted mostly colleges. I don't know if you've read the Andersen's book that is now called like The Emperor's New Clothes.

No, I haven't read it.

No?

Should I?

Okay, so it's basically this emperor, everyone is like, it's an emperor, everyone is impressed with this emperor, And so he has new clothes and no one can say anything to this emperor because he holds so much power. And then some people put on him, like, actually, they say that these are new clothes from Paris, going to wear them. And it's actually transparent clothes, which is no clothes. So this emperor starts wearing the thing and he sees himself naked. But everyone is applauding this emperor. And the emperor is like, I'm clearly not seeing the clothes, but Clearly, there are clothes on me. And then there is a kid, a baby, who's like— who bursts and says, oh my God, the emperor is naked. And that's how we know that the emperor is naked. Basically, colleges are naked. How the college system works is like the emperor is naked. This is what COVID did. It really showed and amplified everything dysfunctional. And, and on the financial side, even more, I would say. So what isn't— but what I disagree with is like the whole like debate happening now about it, where I think we're missing the point a little bit. Like there is a ton of innovation that needs to happen, especially like in learning. But I think we are missing the difference between learning and higher education. When you are 17 years old, you don't go to college because you want to do Maths 101. That's not the only motivation, but apart from some people, okay? But 99% of college students are going for the experience, for a delay on adulthood for years before having to have a job and a responsibility, for creating your first network, for a lot of other things than learning. And I would say learning is a small, really small piece of it, of the whole thing, of what college means for a student. But what COVID did is that it reduced college to learning. You go on Zoom, you learn. And then it became irrelevant because other people do it better. MasterClass doesn't. Better already. And for many students, they decided therefore to either not go that year and wait for it to come back. And second, it made it also very absurd to say that I'm paying $40,000 for this. It's not enough, you know. I'm not getting enough. This is not why I wanted to take on loans or spend a year or all of that. So that's like the big, I think, impact of COVID is that you really need to understand why your product is popular, you know? And you need to also price it better because your pricing is completely off. So for us, it was, I mean, it was incredible in terms of we had to exist, you know? Like we, had students in deep trouble coming to us, parents in deep, deep, deep trouble coming to us, and we were the advocate for it. So it amplified even more our mission as a company, you know.

And, you know, 20 years from now or a decade from now, how do you think— how do you think this conversation is going to be different? Do you think ISAs are going to proliferate as an option? Do you think there's going to be some other sort of monumental change that we might see, or what would you expect?

Yeah, I think 20 years from now, not 100 years from now. 20 years from now, we can— you cannot imagine again talking about the education of 18 to 23 or 22. The 18 to 20 years old education be fully online because it is about like the human relationship, but it can be a billion times better with certain things online. So I think there is, like, I would say another, if I could do another company right now, I would just go buy some incredible cheap real estate and build the university of the future, but this would still be a building, I think. In 100 years from now, we would have solved real human connection online, which we are very far from, very, very far. We're in the beginning of, like within the stone age of human connection online. Once we solve that, then education would be completely online.

What does the university of the future look like? If you bought that land, the cheap real estate, what would be a real differentiated We have some higher education entrepreneurs who listen to this. What could you expect?

I'm not going to tell them. You're crazy. I'm not. Why? You see it on my deck.

Okay. Amazing. Deena, how has COVID— you came on earlier this year and talked about how COVID has impacted healthcare. How else has it impacted what you're looking for or where the white space or opportunities are for you.

Yeah, it's interesting. I feel like that podcast was just yesterday, but it was really only a few weeks into shelter in place and still very, very relevant. And I think healthcare is one of the more obvious examples of sort of a forced virtualization of care and acceleration that we're now seeing in public markets and M&A in terms of those companies. But education absolutely is, is one of those, as Amira alluded to. And it's interesting because many of these online universities or novel engagement platforms for both professional vocational training as well as higher education, they've been around for a while, just as these telemedicine companies have been around for a while. But there hasn't historically never been such a widespread crisis to impel forced and force behavior change in such a way. And to Amira's point, point, it kind of sucked being online all the time. In fact, I think it was just yesterday or the day before that I read a really powerful article by The Guardian about the loneliness that many college students were experiencing. I think I sent it to you, Amira. And that informs another thesis of mine, which is within health care, but in particular around mental health. And so it's interesting to see these sort of different industries or sectors that I'm looking at, but they all inform one another. And they all have to do with not just filling the gap on what COVID has taken away, but I think ultimately deep consumer and customer enterprise behavioral change that'll be here to stay. And those are the types of opportunities that I'm looking at. Awesome.

I want to return to a topic we were discussing earlier. We were talking about governance, basically. And Amir, you mentioned you don't want to live in the past. And we were talking about how technology has changed governance. I sort of want to analyze on two axes and get your perspectives. So one is there is sort of a narrative that basically— this is a very simplified narrative— but that the US is sort of like, you know, rebuilding democracy in the Middle East didn't work everywhere. I'll just sort of simplify it as that. And I'm curious, like, how you respond to that narrative. And of course, And of course, the implication isn't necessarily, okay, we should go back to what was before. It's not just dictatorship or democracy. There are other methods of governance. And similarly, in the private sector, big companies are effectively run by dictators. And a lot of things that were inspired by the crypto movement were decentralizing governance. And what they learned is that that's actually really hard. It's hard technologically, but also hard culturally to create productive projects. They've gone away from that in some ways. I'm curious how you respond to any of that or what you picked up, Amira, on principles of governance or where you see that going and how you see technology intersecting with that. That's obviously a big topic. Feel free to take it anywhere you'd like.

Absolutely. Deena, why don't you go first? Actually, I'm very curious to hear her because it's like Oh, we have 7 minutes?

That was a big old question, Eric.

Wow.

There's a lot there.

And you just sort of slid in tech companies run by dictators. Did I hear that correctly?

Well, it's effectively right. It's, you know, yeah.

Yeah. Okay.

Well, gosh, let's start with the first part of it, which is around sort of— and this is a topic for a thesis, not, you know, not a quick answer on a podcast, but on American intervention in the Arab world. And yeah, that is, I think there's deep post-colonial implications there. There's obviously economic reasons and allyships and so much more. And so that's a really, just a really big, I think, topic to discuss.

And we can dive into that.

But maybe to tie that back to your other point, just probably more relevant to most folks listening here around governance and tech. I think, ultimately, the principles that we've seen come to light have been around transparency, around equity, and around fairness. There have been a few controversies of late, really in the last in the last few weeks even with midsize and large companies that we can speak to. And I think, you know, the leadership of those companies are themselves probably grappling with what the right answer is here. It's always more complicated than it seems from the outside. 2020 has been such a hard year. We just talked about the pandemic, of course, but racial tensions coming to a head, folks losing their livelihoods and so on. So there's really a lot at stake here. And it has shown both at the local level, certainly at the federal level, and even so in the private sector at the leadership level, just how complex and challenging governance is these days. It's a tough task to take on and something as an investor that I spend a lot of time talking with my CEOs about. And with that, I would love to hear Amira's perspective.

Listen, I mean, very short on the US's intervention in the Arab world. I mean, total failure, obviously. I mean, go ask McChrystal or Petraeus and tell them that they are proud of their work. It's just like so dumb, so much money wasted. It is impressive how people can go to Harvard and end up with that kind of policy. Always baffles me. It's just like basic dumbness, you know.

And you know, and these, remember?

Yeah. And to be honest, like, you cannot force the masses, you know. You can, you can, you can do propaganda for the masses, you can muzzle the masses, you can abuse the masses, but you can For the masses to build, they need to feel ownership. And they need not to feel it, to have it, actually. Let me correct that. Not to feel it, to have it. And so, and also you cannot have dual language. You cannot be friends with some dictators and against others. You cannot shut up on Khashoggi but talk about freedom of expression in Morocco. You can, like, you just cannot. And in this world, and thanks to technology, it's even more impossible. You just, nothing is forgotten. Nothing goes unnoticed. So I'm very looking forward to what the policy is going to be with the Biden administration. I mean, I love Barack Obama and everything he did for his country, but honestly, in the Middle East was not impressive. In terms of companies, it's super interesting, actually. I remember reading that blog post that the CEO of Coinbase have written, Brian Armstrong, and it just reminded me of Ben Ali in Tunisia. If you read it, yes, we are here, the country is super important for the country that we focus on economy, we have to be successful, what matters really is roads and education and all of that, so shut up. And you just can, you can and you can for a while, but you will not, this way, like asking people to shut up is done. We just need to live with it. And asking people to have the same opinion is done in every single way. I'm not saying like have the opinion of being pro-Joe Biden. I remember talking to my team at Moss and saying that we cannot make any real decisions because we're not diverse enough. And until we have clear Trump supporters, like your opinions don't really matter. You know what I mean? It is about time that we just accept it, that humans are born free and are made to be free and made to be different and made to not agree with each other and made to not have only one solution to things. And there is no right solution to everything. We just need to be okay with it and move on. And then it becomes interesting. What is really frustrating is, especially for someone like me who came to San Francisco and the future, I feel honestly living in the past when it comes to philosophical questions. And I think it's because people don't read. I really think because people don't read. If you're only reading marketing books, that's not gonna build opinions about the world and business books, right? So unlike the tyranny of the CEOs, and you're right to call it that way actually, and founders or whatever, or companies, it is going to change. Like there is always in history something new that, what is it like the Hannah Arendt has this amazing quote that I'm probably going to butcher, which is all revolutionaries become conservatives once they are in power. And even this movement of creating the future with technology, et cetera, is becoming old and becoming in the past and becoming super conservative, not conservative in terms of like Republican or Democrat, like how they think. And there will be other generations that will change this. Like this is just how life evolves. It's just that I feel like now we are on the top of conservative. You know, like, I think we are touching a level of old thinking that is so boring first, but also we're talking, we're doing this podcast while DoorDash and Airbnb are doing their IPO. It's like incredible those things that were like such big revolutions. And at the same time, we're stuck in things where it is really disappointing that tech might become finance in the '50s or '60s, you know? And I actually love this challenge, and this is something with other founders, we talk about it a lot, like with people like Deena Shakir, like how to make sure that we look at ourselves and criticize ourselves and not fall into the trap that everyone before us fall into.

Well, I was just gonna say, I love that. And I think it really speaks to why I profoundly believe that the successful founders of the future are not just going to be the ones that look like, you know, what we've seen in the past. And it's not necessarily gonna be a CS degree from Stanford. And so on. It's going to be those who've lived and experienced and who are generalists, who have studied philosophy. It is so much more complicated to lead now and in the future than it was before. And so, you know, I want to see a lot more Amiras.

That's a great place to wrap. Amira and Deena, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

It was so fun. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Eric, for having us.

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