Ilya Strebulaev | The Venture Mindset | Talks at Google

Foreign.

Hi everyone. I'm excited to introduce today's speaker, Ilya Strebilev. Ilya Streblev is an international expert in venture capital, private equity, financing, innovation and strategic financial decisions. He's the David S. Lobel professor of Private Equity and Professor of Finance at the Graduate School of Business in Stanford University where he has been a faculty member since 2004. Ilya is also a Research Associate at National Bureau of Economic Research and the Founder Faculty Director of Stanford GSP Venture Capital Initiative. Ilya's work has been widely published in leading academic journals and he has won numerous prestigious academic awards. His research has been featured by many media sources and he has also developed a venture capital class at Stanford that he has taught to over 1,000 students. He's also taught MBA, MSX, PhD and executive education participants at Stanford, over 5,000 students in total. His quality of teaching has earned him the Stanford MBA Distinguished Teaching Award and Sloan Teaching Excellence Award and the inaugural Masters in Management Best Teacher Award at London Business School. Professor Streblev has led many sessions in Innovation Trends, Venture Capital Ecosystem of Silicon Valley, Corporate Innovation, Corporate Venture Capital for business and government leaders around the world. What an impressive list of accomplishments. I'm so excited that Ilya is joining us today to talk about topics of innovation, both large companies and small and how to build unicorns, how to spot them, how to invest in them. His latest book, the Venture Mindset, digs into some of these details. This is a fascinating book. Once I started reading, I couldn't put it down. There's a lot to discuss here. A lot of it reminds me of how we used to operate at Google over the years and how great startups are built. I think it's a fascinating book and a fascinating set of topics which we'll get into now. Please join me in welcoming Ilya. Hi Ilya.

Welcome Piyush. It's a great pleasure to be here with you.

Yeah, it's a pleasure. It's all ours. As I said, this is a fascinating book. I really enjoyed learning a lot. Why don't we take some time and talk about both? How some topics here apply to large companies like the one which we are at. How does it apply to companies which are trying to innovate but are actually large and established? And also how does it apply to founders who are trying to build great companies themselves, or people who are trying to spot other unicorns out in the wild and how to invest in them. So let's take the time to cover the entire landscape. But to start with, I would love to talk about. So large companies, they always were like, they were great companies once upon a time, right? But now they're here, so what is. It's clearly, how can they benefit from it now? And what should established companies take away from the venture mindset? What should the founders of those companies, what should the new employees in these companies, what the managers of these companies, what should they take away from the book now that they have it?

Thank you, Piyush. It's really not just a great question, but I think it's a very timely question. I work with a lot of traditional companies around the world. I work with a lot of innovative companies around the world. And really the Venture Mindset book is intended for them, for those leaders who make decisions in those companies. So when I work with those leaders, many of them ask me, so what is the secret sauce of Silicon Valley? And more specifically, they asked me, why do venture capitalists manage to find and fund future giants like Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Zoom? I'm sure you can supply many other names while so many larger corporations often don't. And indeed, let's just look at a couple of facts. So if you look at the largest top 10 companies in the United States today, seven of them were venture backed, seven of them were quite recently small startups. Now, half of all the companies, every second company that went public in this country in the last 50 years were VC backed. Also, I follow every single unicorn that's a kind of a company recently founded with a reported valuation of at least $1 billion. And there are now more than 1,000 of them, more than 1,000 of those unicorns. And at the same time, up to four out of five companies, and likely more in the original Fortune 500 list are either no longer with us or no longer on the list. So too many of them have failed to produce their internal unicorns, and many of them, as a result, have not survived. So that is, I think, the worry, but also the opportunities behind the question that I'm often asked. And this is what really the book is about. If you think about this, these facts are paradoxical. I mean, they are kind of ironic because these large, established, successful companies have way more resources, more support, more funding, more experience than those small startups. So the story of Zoom, I think is quite illustrative, which is Eric Yuan worked at Webex, and some people might still remember Webex, a video conferencing company. Now Cisco, a Silicon Valley giant at the time, a very large, successful, profitable Fortune 500 member, acquired WebEx back in 2007 but Eric Johan left Cisco or had to leave Cisco after Cisco's management turned down Johan's pitch to develop a smartphone friendly mobile native video conferencing tool. Now there are lots of lessons that could be learned from this example, but just think, just think Piyush that had Cisco's management at the time acted differently, Zoom could have become Cisco's internal product. Now our life I think would be quite different today as a result of this. But more importantly, Zoom story, while well known, is not unique. So think of Airbnb, think of Salesforce, think of Tesla, think of many, many other companies that now are quite well known but used to be recently very small, completely unknown startups, all of which took on big successful incumbents even though they initially had less funding, fewer resources, less support and less experience. And I have studied dozens if not hundreds of examples when the small startups gain over largest average companies. And so this has then led me to study large companies and how they make decisions and why they so often miss the boat. Okay, so now what do I tell the leaders of these large organizations who ask me all these questions and I give them three basic answers. The first answer is a different mindset. So start with the first principle in our venture mindset book. And the first principle is home runs matter, strikeouts don't. Or put simply, staying focused on winning a jackpot is far more important than fearing losses. Now for smart venture capitalists, it's much better to make mistakes and wrong bets than to miss on one unicorn idea that could return for them their entire fund. You can also think of this principle. And in fact, if you're a leader of a large organization, I would prefer to think about this principle as 20 to 1, 21 comes from my research. Now, venture capitalists make many bets, most of which we never hear about, most of which are failures. Statistically, just about 1 out of 20 early stage VC bets result in a great success in a home run. So if you are the CEO of a large company, you should think of your organization as a portfolio of existing lines of businesses, but also portfolio of bets. And some of these bets may result in exceptional success, but more importantly, most of those bets should be unsuccessful. So if you really would like new business lines, if you really would like new successes, you have to embrace those unsuccessful ones. So the true failure is missing your internal unicorn for a large company. So the worst nightmare of a venture capitalist is to be the first investor to meet the founder of future Nvidia, Microsoft or Google and only to discard these opportunities. So that should be the worst nightmare of executives too. The second thing I tell leaders is that adopting the venture mindset is not easy. And in any organization it should start from the very, very top. Now, here's a story. Once, when I was explaining the venture mindset to the CEO of a large company and some of his lieutenants, the CEO and I will not name him or the company for the reasons that will become apparent in a moment. So the CEO was suitably impressed by my statistics about the failure of venture capitalists. And again, as I mentioned to him, as I emphasized, without understanding and embracing failure, you will not have success as well. Then the CEO turned to his right and looked at the head of his corporate innovation and he asked, so how many failures do we have in that corporate innovation unit or part of the organization? And the CEO received a very proud and somewhat patronizing reply. Almost none were doing a really good job. So if the corporate innovation or part of your organization does not experience or own up to a lot of failures, most likely its innovations are not very innovative. So the sad truth is that I think many companies, too many large established companies, for a number of reasons, are intolerant of failure. And that has led them to pursue risk averse, marginal incremental innovation. And in the course of doing so, they also have become unwelcoming to anything invented outside. They have become inflexible. And I think, like the example of Eric Yuan shows, they might have become unwelcoming to big risky projects that are being generated inside as well. So luckily there is a way out, there are ways to acquire the venture mindset. And I've seen this with my own eyes and I worked with companies that have become venture minded. So established organizations can do this. But this really means you need to reconsider your entire decision making process. You have to make tough decisions. You have to change your culture and your incentive structure as well. So what I find is that one venture mind organization after another takes risks, makes many bets, but they all do so using a three pronged approach. So kind of the way I really think about this very often is a pyramid. And you have your main lines of businesses, you have adjacent businesses, and then you have at the top of the pyramid a small, maybe small part relative to the entirety of your organization that is in charge of that innovation that might change your organization might generate those internal home runs. And that part consists of three possibilities. And some organizations use all three and some use maybe one or two. So the first approach is to design your internal innovation process, work differently and I call it, and I think this is useful. You know, jargon sometimes can be very, very useful. I call it building racetracks for your intrapreneurs. So in the book, in the Venture Mindset book, we give an example about Google, about how Gmail originated within Google. 20 years ago there was an intrapreneur, but he did not really work completely on his own. There were race tracks at the time within the Google structure that facilitated this process. Now it doesn't need to be in Silicon Valley. This is how 3M commercialized the post it notes that I think all of us use these days. This by the way, how Nestle revolutionized the coffee industry with Nespresso. It all came through the intrapreneurs, but also through the racetracks. Designing specific racetracks that allowed them to commercialize to profit from those internal ideas. Now another approach is acquiring and then integrating acquisitions in a venture minded way. The truth is that too many acquisitions fail because they are not really integrated properly. And specifically when you acquire for innovation, integrating is specifically challenging task. But YouTube, going back to Google I think would be a classical example. The third approach, and the one that is becoming really fashionable these days is building corporate venture capital unit. Cvc, corporate venture capital. And you know, my team at Stanford Venture Capital Initiative and I track CVCs, well, there are thousands of them now and we studied in depth hundreds of those CVC units. And here is my, I would say right now a sad conclusion. But hopefully that conclusion is a wake up call for many leaders. What I find unfortunately is that too many of those CVCs are designed poorly without understanding the venture mindset. And so as a result they are unlikely to have a sizable impact on their organizations, either financial, but more importantly strategic, long term impact. But this can be done. I mean large organizations should aim to become unicorn hunters, not just status quo preservers. And I actually have a great belief in the future of corporate venture capital, but only if you design properly. Okay. The final thing I tell leaders is that good intentions are not enough. Very often you hear the CEO says we are all about innovation and there's a great intention. It is not enough. You need mechanisms, specific mechanisms. In the book, in the Venture Mindset book we outline 30 of these specific mechanisms. And of course there are more that I have studied over the years. Now some of these mechanisms can be very tactical, like for example, how you conduct meetings, who speaks first in a meeting, when you discuss a project, how many people should be present in the meeting, who should they be, whether you encourage agreement or disagreement. So this seems like Very small things, but in fact they are critical, especially when you're in the world of uncertainty, in the world of disruptive innovation. Let me give you an example from my Stanford class on venture capital that we teach every year. There are a lot of students, they're very smart Stanford students and many of them would love to become founders of successful unicorns. One of the what we call the future unicorn life case study. We invite real life companies, startups that are raising money right now, so they're raising the VC jargon series a millions of dollars. And they come to students to the class and they pitch and typically we have between four and six startups and they pitch and students play the role of venture capitalist. And in their teams of six, which by the way is more or less the median number of partners in the VC firm. So in their teams of six, the students have to make a decision which startup to back. And again, there are four, five or six of these startups. Okay. And we filter them so that in fact they're all interesting startups. And of course there's a huge amount of uncertainty around them. Okay, what do we find? Oh, and by the way, let me mention there are 24, so there are 424 student led and venture capital teams making decisions. So what do we find year after year after year? Well, there are two findings that seem to be inconsistent with each other. The first one is students generally within their six team groups, six person groups agree with each other. We find that on average maybe only 10% of students, one out of 10 will tell us, I actually have a different opinion than my group. So the group comes up with, you know, we have to back this startup and we really think that that startup kind of is dumb, a dumb idea to invest in. So there is a large degree of agreement within a group. The second finding, there is a huge degree of disagreements between groups. So when we reveal the results and say that here are the students that decided to invest or give an offer to invest to this startup, then many other students, wow, why would they ever decide to do so? Because we discarded that startup right away. And of course those students decided to back startup that other students decided to discard. Discard it right away. So the one of the biggest lessons of that exercise is not which startups to back, but how do you discuss potential investment opportunities within a group. And in my experience when I started venture venture capital, the most successful venture capital firms, this is what sets them apart. It's not the amount of money that they decide that they have under their Command. And this is not even just their access to great startups. This is how they make decisions, including how they make decisions in groups. And so this is transferable, and you would think easily transferable to large companies. But when I work with large companies, I find so often that the small tactical mechanisms need to be really, really slowly understood by all the leaders around the table. Okay, so this is just one small example. And again we outlined many, many of these mechanisms and again there are many more. But I think this is where you have to start. Intentions are not enough.

Okay, that's fascinating. I also want to discuss, like how can startups really build themselves into very valuable companies and investing. But just to recap what you said, for large established companies, it's almost a matter of survival in the long term for them to continue to produce unicorns internally. And for that they have to empower the entrepreneurs inside. And they have to have a mindset of taking risk, not count the failures and shutdowns, but look at the wins and really increase the home runs. And if they don't see a lot of failures, they're probably being too cautious. And in order to do that, I think you said like three different things. One is create the racetrack for these entrepreneurs. Second is if you are setting aside some funds, have a venture mindset in deploying those funds as opposed to not having one. And the third is really the culture of the group and the company has to be one, which results in a venture mindset, kind of like, you know, innovative environment. A classic example you gave was like how not to do group think and like, you know, be able to disagree and debate things. Right? So this is fascinating. I really appreciate, I think a lot of large companies out there and you know, I'm sure many of myself and our peers also will look at this and like, oh yeah, we can see positive examples when we have taken this and we have produced good things and the times when we could have done better. This is fascinating. Well, you mentioned over there, right, that you have studied like almost every unicorn which is out there. So maybe we can shift gears a little bit and talk about unicorns. You know, a lot of us, especially in the tech industry are like, you know, entrepreneurial in nature, want to go and build new solutions to problems which we see out there. But building a unicorn is a non trivial thing, otherwise, you know, everybody would be doing one. Right. So the question really is maybe it's two parts. What does it take to go build a unicorn? If I'm a founder today, what should I keep in mind? If I want to build a very valuable company today, and from an investor point of view, if I am an angel, if I'm a, you know, a seed investor, how do I spot in the wild that these companies are likely to become like that highly valuable, the 1 out of 20 you were talking about compared to the others. So how do you, what is your advice on these two particular situations?

Yes, Piyush, you're right. Because not surprisingly, this is the question that I'm asked all the time by investors and by founders and investors is, well, how can I identify the next Amazon, Google, you know, doordash and so on when there are still very small companies and aspiring founders, of course always ask me, so what should I do? Or can I do anything to increase my chances of founding and then building a unicorn? Okay, just to, just to step back for a second. Indeed, my team and I follow every single unicorn. But more importantly, what we do is we compare these unicorns to startups that had a chance but did not become unicorns. And then for every unicorn we study, we also study their founders. And for every unicorn founder we take a founder of a startup that had the chance but did not become a unicorn founder. And by the way, as a result of this simple fact, most of the future trillion dollar companies that already exist today that will make a generational impact likely already in my database of either unicorns or non unicorns. So what do we find? Well, there are many, many insights. Okay. And I will not have time to discuss all of them, so maybe let me concentrate on five. On five insights. By the way, I post all these findings on my LinkedIn profile. It is my LinkedIn profile, but those are the findings of my team and also I publish the unicorn report so that you can in fact see hundreds of factors that we study at play in one document. And we update this all the time. So some of these insights are just confirmations of what many people already know, but while others are surprising and could be counterintuitive. And also if there are insights that you already know, sometimes the quantification of those insights and ranking of those factors is I think important. Okay, so I think I promised five. So the first one is most of successful startups are venture backed and by the way, many of them are backed by angels before they're backed by venture capitalists. So first of all, for founders out there, bootstrapping is a great idea to start, but unless you are willing to take on investors, the probability of building a unicorn is very low. And the question really for you becomes is what kind of investors to take on, because we do find that the identity of investors is important for increasing the chances of which company would eventually become a unicorn. Now, venture fundraising, in fact, it takes these companies on average five rounds of funding, five rounds of venture funding before they become a unicorn. As I tell my Stanford students in the VC class, many of whom of course would love to, and many of them will become founders, you are constantly in the fundraising mode as startup founders. That's what I tell them. So you know, when a former student, actually it happened just yesterday when a former student pings me to say, you know, I've just closed series A, which is the first, typically the first or the second venture round, my reaction is always the same. Congratulations. Start thinking about raising Series B right now. And series B in the VC parlor is the next round of funding. So these companies raise funding all the time. On average, they raise the next venture round in 14, 15 months. So you're constantly in the fundraising mode. So if you're a founder, if you're a founder, unless you're prepared to dilute yourself by getting on board investors, it's unlikely you will become a founder of unicorn for investors, I think look at with whom you're investing. If any of your core investors already backed a unicorn, your probability suddenly goes up. The second insight that might be not surprising, but with a lot of surprising themes, is that geography is destiny in the world of innovation. Now, it is true that many unicorns, most unicorns right now in the US are based in California. Okay? But more importantly, you as the founder and you as an investor really have to be in a, what I call innovation cluster or innovation hub to have high chance of becoming a unicorn. Okay? So by the way, a cool fact, California is not the number one state when it comes to the probability of becoming a unicorn. If you're a VC backed startup. This only belongs to Utah and Utah is quite ahead of California. But our evidence shows that there's a growing number of clusters in the US and also around the world. In fact, my conjecture, piyush, is that the future will likely be shaped by a bunch of such innovation hubs that will emerge over the next five to 10 years. So founders, you have to bring your startup to an innovation cluster, like you to Silicon Valley or California, but not necessarily. And investors maybe in fact investing outside traditional innovation classes such as California increase your chance of finding a unicorn if you find your way inside that innovation cluster. The third insight is that the single most important factor behind both success and failure of startups is the startup team. And note by the way, that I said team, I didn't say founders. Of course, team includes founders for early stage startups. So most companies scale and become successful because they can attract talented employees and they do so early in their life. In fact, Even though many VCs that I talk to have their own secret sauce about how they try to filter through the startups, how they do due diligence, etc. One common thread I noted is that they always analyze the team behind the founders. And this by the way, I think is useful also for seed investors, for angels, for pre VC investors, because they tend to meet only with founders. But I think very often thinking about, or trying to meet the team, thinking about how those founders will build the team is very important. So VCs try to analyze, try to see the team. Because at the end of the day, if the founders do not have an impressive team, if the founders cannot attract the team exactly the time when they're at their most vulnerable, they have no resources, they have no product, they have no customers, it is unlikely that they can win. Let me give you a quick example about the team which I find fascinating, but again, let me preface by saying it is not unique. Okay, so about maybe 12, 13 years ago, Andrew Bradshaw, who is a partner at Excel, a well known venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, invested in a gaming company called Tiny Spec. And unless you read the venture mindset book or unless you're a historian of the, of the venture capital industry, you unlikely to have ever heard about Tiny Spec. So Tiny Spec was a gaming company. They developed a game called Glitch and kind of, to pun a bit, you know, Glitch was Glitchy, was an unsuccessful company and effectively one day the company founders told their investors that, you know, we have bad news and good news. And the bad news is Tiny Spec failed. We're going to close the shop, we're going to lay off employees. The good news is that we still have some money left on the banking account and so we will kind of send you the money back. And if you look at the investment memo that Andrew Brucha shared with his partners at Excel, you'll find out what he said about the team, is that the team of Tiny Spec is our main bet. They have failed together, they have succeeded together and everything in between. And I think I more or less quote from that investment memo. And so Excel and some other investors told Tiny Spec founders, we do not want your money back. By the way, thinking back to large organizations, how often do you think an executive would tell so to an underling who just would come to you and say, I failed the project, but I still have a couple of million dollars on my balance sheet. And the founders of Tiny Spec and the remaining team sat around and sat together and they asked the question, so have we learned anything from this failed game that we built? And it turns out that what they've learned is not about the game, but how they communicated with each other. Because at the time it was very difficult to communicate if the people were on time at different times of the day, they were traveling and so on. So they had to create their own tool to effectively communicate as a team. And they had this idea, why wouldn't we try to see whether we can interest other organizations in this tool? And peyush, this is how Slack was born. Slack was born out of a failed gaming company and it was born because the investors refused to take the money back. And why they did so is because not that they believed that the company would generate another idea necessarily, but because the bet was on the founding team. So I think that this is a great lesson for investors. And again and again, very often in the early stage VC world, even though I hear this all the time, you know, it's all about the founders very often I think when it comes to making decision, the founders or the team plays less than all the important role. Now talking about founders, fourth, founder education does matter. There is no doubt about that. In my data, for example, founders with Stanford education do have a 60% higher chance to found a unicorn if they start a VC backed company. I'm not really sure whether that is a surprise to anybody or whether 60% chance is a surprise because that is a quantification. But are there surprises in my data? Yes, a lot of surprises. For example, the US University with the highest likelihood of unicorn creation is not Stanford, is in fact the University of Cincinnati, followed by the University of Utah. So just to avoid any confusion, Stanford graduates do produce many, many more unicorns than graduates of either University of Cincinnati or the University of Utah. What I meant was that conditional on founding a venture capital backed company, the likelihood of a graduate of those two universities making it to a unicorn status is in fact I think more than double that of a Stanford graduate. And so there are a lot of interesting insights definitely for investors and perhaps for for those who really would love to become a unicorn founder. And fifth, given that it is a Google talk, let me talk about the work experience. So work experience matters too. In fact, former Google employees founded more unicorns in my data set than those of any other company. I exclude universities here more than any other company. In terms of odds, I believe a founder with a Google work experience has approximately 2.5 times larger chance of founding a unicorn compared to a random sample of other venture backed founders. Okay, so those are five insights. So check the unicorn report for the list of many other employers. There will be some surprises. But also it's now becoming an unwieldy 300 I think page document with all those statistics and all the insights I think is very useful for founders and for investors and also I think for executives of large companies.

Yeah, actually fascinating. I mean just listening to you today, I was able to like, you know, I was surprised by some of the insights that you talked about. I have one last closing question. A little bit maybe controversial to set something up, but just to recap what you said, that there are five distinct things which people should look at. Those are the traits of unicorns, both whether you are founding one or you are investing one. The first is obviously it is venture backed is more likely to become a unicorn. You should always be funding, never run out of capital. The second is that there are innovation clusters which you should actually pull yourself into if you're not already there because they increase the chances of you making a highly valuable company. Similarly, as a VC you should be investing in them or try to get into one of those. You know, surprisingly like you said, Utah being more breeding ground for unicorns than California was a little bit of a surprise. And the third thing was team matters. You know, not just the founders, the team actually the overall team matters. And look for the team, build a great team and look for the great team. Fourth was the educational background matters of the founders. And the fifth was what is the work environment? How does this team work? How do these people work? That matters. I'm very happy to hear that. Google is a great example of a work environment which produces more of such valuable companies forex Googlers. And that's fascinating. But that is our cue to maybe this question. You know, we talked about corporate innovation and how large companies, they cannot really afford to not really build internal unicorns. And we talked about startups, right? And this has been the age old debate like you know, who's going to win over here? Like is corporate innovation the way that innovation you think will happen as we understand the mechanics of some of these things or you think that startups are the way to innovate in the world? How do you compare and contrast these two?

Yeah, that's a very interesting question. Piyush okay, let me try to be a little bit provocative. Well, let me start by saying I think it is a very dangerous business to predict the future. But still, here are my three predictions and let's get together in five years and see whether I'm, I'm on the right path or not. My first prediction is that I have seen with my own eyes how the venture mindset can change large organizations. It does work. Now it does not work all the time and most of the time it doesn't work because it is not given a chance because the top brass either doesn't really understand the venture mindset doesn't know. But still, I think what I predict is as the venture mindset becomes more widespread, especially in large organizations, more unicorn scale ideas will be developed within those large organizations. And by the way, not only in tech, but in healthcare, agriculture, defense, in many very traditional industries, and not only in publicly traded companies, but also in family run businesses and government organizations and nonprofits. So I predict, maybe surprisingly for somebody who is studying venture capital, is that I think that venture capital backed startups will have more competition from large organizations or from those large organizations that will be able to adapt, will be able to acquire the venture mindset. So that is first. Second is that continuing this discussion of California and Utah and Cincinnati, et cetera, I think that the future unicorns will not be constrained to Silicon Valley, but I think they will emerge in a number of new innovation hubs and not just in this country, but around the globe. Now how to build these hubs is another story. Maybe we should have another Google talk about that. I've also been studying this and I feel that right now too many leaders around the world are charging ahead because it's fashionable without really the benefit of fully appreciating what it takes to build such an innovation app. It definitely requires the venture mindset as well, but more than that, but I think one factor is clear, is that future unicorns in those hubs will still be backed by venture capitalists. I'm going to bet on that. So the future unicorns will either come from within those large organizations that will become successful, they're adapting the venture mindset, but also venture capital backed companies from the innovation apps that will be able to become successful. The third one, and maybe the most provocative, is that I expect more wild swings and reshuffles coming back to my statistics about Fortune 500 companies, that very few of them survived, you know, the past 50 years. I think that many more Fortune 500 companies that are successful companies today will disappear will fail to their nimble competitors leveraging AI, automation and likely something else we are not even fully aware right now. And that is because these large organizations would pursue status quo which is a wrong strategy and they will not pursue the venture mindset that I think is the only possible long term strategy. So to conclude that is my maybe last insight or last thought for leaders of these large companies. Ask yourself the following question. What is the rate of change within your organization? If the rate of change within your organization is slower than the rate of change outside, you are in for a surprise.

Thank you. That's a very well said conclusion which definitely will be a wake up call to a lot of people who are inside large companies. And also probably telling entrepreneurs that don't take startup success for granted in face of large competitors because if one shifts their mindset, there is a chance that it'll be harder for startups when they compete against a company which has shifted its mindset. Well, thank you for taking the time. Ilya. This has been fascinating. It has been. You know, I've read your book, I've learned, loved it. And yet like just talking to you about it, I was able to not only refresh some of the great stories you talked about, but also like these insights which, you know, sometimes they don't always stick, but it's fascinating the depth of, you know, the gems which you have shared with us today. Really appreciate it and thanks for coming to the talk.

Piyush thank you. The pleasure has been mine. Sam.