Reid Hoffman and Michael Tubbs | Spiderman Ethics

Hi everyone. Welcome to Grey Matter, the podcast from Greylock, where we share stories from company builders and business leaders. I'm Heather Mack, head of editorial at Greylock. Today we're sharing the audio from a virtual event co hosted by Greylock and Concrete Rose Capital. Greylock general partner Reid Hoffman spoke with Michael Tubbs, the former mayor of Stockton, California, on the role of technology in society. During the discussion, Hoffman and Tubbs talked about the ethical responsibilities of technology, the importance of weighing in on politics as a business leader, and ways for government and tech to collaborate to create a more inclusive, sustainable and functional society. The conversation was moderated by Concrete Rose co founder Sean Mindy.

Thank you everybody for joining us for today's conversation with Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs and Greylock investor Reid Hoffman. There's a lot we could cover with this pair, but today we're going to focus the conversation on tech's impact, influence and responsibility to society. I'm Sean Mendy. I'm the co founder of Concrete Rose Capital. We're thrilled to be co hosting this conversation with our friends at Greylock. Very quickly, the mission of Concrete Rose is to build a virtuous cycle of wealth and opportunity with underrepresented people of color. We're doing this by channeling financial and social capital into exceptional early stage companies led by bold leaders. Our strategic partnership with Greylock has been transformative in accelerating our mission. In addition to doing things like looking at companies together and sharing deal flow, we've committed to building a diverse community and events like today are a key part of that effort. The idea is that we want to expose our stakeholders to different ideas, intersectional perspectives that are going to equip them and their teams to solve important problems and build great companies. Michael and Reed are two human beings who I deeply admire and as visionary leaders who are playing a major role in shaping society. Reid is a co founder of LinkedIn, an early investor in companies like Facebook, Zynga and Airbnb, and Michael is the former mayor of Stockton and now founder of Mayors for Universal Basic Income. Michael is also now a teaching fellow at Harvard's Institute for Politics and today he's going to be giving his first lecture. He's come quite a long way since I met him as a junior at Stanford many, many years ago. In addition to just being two incredibly thoughtful and accomplished people, Michael and Reid are just a good time and I hope you get a chance to hear that during this conversation. Logistically, we're going to start with a moderated discussion between the two of them and then we're going to turn to questions from the audience, from all of you throughout the conversation. You can drop questions into the chat and we'll pull them up towards the end of the talk with that. Reid, we're going to start with you. A couple weeks ago, when we connected, we had a conversation where you mentioned your philosophy on what you call Spider man ethics. So I thought we'd start with you sharing more about that concept and specifically how the idea applies to tech leaders. What are the ethical and societal responsibilities of building and running a tech company at scale?

So I use Spider man, obviously, because people are familiar with it, which is with power comes responsibility. With great power comes great responsibility. And actually, this is an old idea in many cultures, Voltaire, other folks. But of course, Spider man is how we most touch it in the mainstream. And the really key thing is to think power is just not something like, look, you can earn it, you can gain it, you can work for it, you can use it in various ways. But having it also means that you have responsibilities. Having it means that the society around you is investing in you to say, okay, great, you have hopefully demonstrated some capabilities here, but we're relying upon you. We want you to use this responsibly. I think that one of the really key things is to recognize the. The depth of issues that go around power. Like another ancient Greek idea, you know, from Solon, was power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. And so you have to kind of look at this and go, look, it's difficult, and it has responsibilities. And as those responsibilities, not just entitlements, but things that I need to do. And so part of the thing that I think the tech industry is in a transformational, you know, set of moments about, especially in the last, you know, kind of three to five years, is to say, we are becoming infrastructure, we are becoming the way that we communicate. We. The way that we live and work online, especially during the pandemic. And we're not just the kind of the young upstarts, the pirates, the dynamics. We need to actually, in fact, think about, like, okay, what are we doing for society? Not just like, oh, look, our individual customer likes us. Because by the way, individual customers like cigarettes, too. And like other things, it's like, no, no, no. How do we make society healthier, more functional, and these kinds of things as well. And actually, I think part of the responsibilities that you have as a tech leader and you have to be asking yourself that question, maybe not when you're a seed series A, you know, but as you're growing and as you're really doing it, then it becomes more and more center stage until you are infrastructure and then it's critical.

Yeah, I'm fascinated with the idea of society as a customer. And actually, Mike, you were part of that Spider man ethics conversation as well. How do you think that relates to government? I mean, apply that same concept there.

First, thanks so much for having me. It's funny, when I someone mentioned the Spider man thing earlier, I had no context. So thank you, Reid, for. I think it goes back to sort of what I learned in Sunday school growing up, that everyone has a responsibility to be a good person. But if your actions meaningfully impact people's lives, that's even more responsibility to be very intentional about how you act. So I don't think it's a different responsibility in terms of what it takes to be a good person, but the impact of said action makes the consequences much more impactful, which I think again calls for more intentionality and again for government. The reason why I went into government is because it's scale, it's ultimate scale. And the folks who are sort of bear the brunt of bad decision making, bad policy decisions are folks that grew up like me. So that's what really drove me to government was this idea that this entity that we all buy into through a social contract affects everyone at scale, but particularly those who are most marginalized. And I think we've seen, particularly the last couple of years, the impact of not really thinking about sort of what you. Not just what you do, but what you say, what you value, what you elevate, how you discuss things, the impact. We had a down hours long Senate trial yesterday about sort of leaders not understanding the impact of their words, of their actions, of the signals they sent. And I think absolutely, government has to do a better job of elevating what's good in our society, but also really calling us all to account towards how do we act among our shared values. Whether you're a tech company, whether you're a small business owner, whether you're essential worker, whether you're a popcorn or football coach, that's saying those things are all mutually exclusive, but that we do all have a responsibility to be like Spider Man.

And actually one thing just to build upon Michael's point there, which is you have more impact. So you actually not only have to be more intentional, which is 1000% correct and good in emphasizing, but part of that intentionality is go out and ask other people to do you think you're doing enough? Do you think you're doing the right thing? Are you making the right decisions? Don't just kind of sit there by your gut and kind of go, well, I think it's fine, or I think it's good and so forth. No, no, no, go, go talk to people. That's the best way you can both learn and also cross check. Are you doing the right things?

I think what Reid said is so telling because those with the most power are oftentimes most removed from the consequences and most removed from the people who bear the brunt of those consequences. So I think that the notion of kind of society as a customer and making sure where we're listening to and thinking about extreme users in terms of like just regular people who could be impacted by the unintended consequences of the technology creating the things we do is super important. And I don't think that's emphasized enough. Like, you're in a. Like everyone on this call isn't the sum total of people impacted by said decisions. There's actually billions of other people who we may not be in relationship with naturally, because of the way social networking works in our society who are impacted and how are we intentional about hearing from them and understanding sort of how our actions and things we're doing are impacting their day to day.

If you could say more just about how that actually goes into then designing the actual product. So making sure that you're hearing from a diverse set of stakeholders, but talk about the actual design of technology products using society as a customer.

So ideally you've thought about it a little bit. Even when you're kind of at the back of the envelope, kind of doing your napkin in your garage or whatever the particular thing might be, what happens? You say, okay, obviously you can't focus on it because your first thing like consumer Internet is how do I get my first hundred users? First thousand, and there's so much noise and how do you do it? So you really focus on that versus society and being good for magical and delightful for your customers. But then at X point we will be part of infrastructure. Like a lot of these things have a goal to have 100 million people, 500 million people, a billion people. And you say, well, look, at this point, look, think of how many people might be relying upon you. Think about how you might be affecting their lives. Think about how you might be affecting how they interact with each other, how they share information and emotions and perspective and knowledge or whatever the particular thing might be. And then say, okay, well what would in addition to the individual value proposition, the why an individual member, customer, user might be engaging, right, with my product? What is also the dynamic that's happening with a group of them? And what are my responsibilities as a group? And that's part of the kind of society as a customer. And let me start tracking resources against that. Because one of the things that happens as you're scaling, and this is part of the thing in blitzscaling, obviously, and there's a chapter on responsible blitzscaling. And what you do is you say, as we begin to multi thread the organization, start having someone's job, who it is to say, what do we do? Like how do we handle our responsibilities at scale where we might have big risks or downsides, how could we mitigate that early or in advance where we have opportunity where we could do something pretty magical and additive to society, and how would we invest in that and what would that look like? Because you might find that sometimes that is some kind of trade off against some individuals, but that the net thing for society is all the better because just because an individual is complaining doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. It's kind of, well, what are they complaining about? How does it affect them? How does it affect society? And that's the thing that you need to kind of track. And so you need to start adding that in as a thread. And the key thing as you begin to grow your organization is there's got to be some person whose responsibility it is, right, who's the CEO of that. And then all the rest of the details fall from that in terms of how you structure your organization and, and how do you have exec contention and all the rest of that. But that's, I think, the very key thing.

Mike, before I kind of take us away from this topic, any reactions to that? You never run a tech company of scale, so I don't expect you to have a very detailed answer other than a city.

I think there's so many similar parallels and I think the point around sort of the squeaky wheel or the loudest person, or just because someone's complaining doesn't mean something necessarily wrong in terms of maximize it for utility. That's why I was smiling, because I remember during council meetings there's this thing called public comment where people could come up for three minutes to just yell at you essentially. And some of my colleagues would just get so uncomfortable during public comment. I'm like, let's just say if there's 15,000 people, these 10 people matter. But I'm not sure it's because they're angry about this one thing, that we should change our priorities for the whole. And it's constantly reminding people that you listen to people who are speaking for sure, but that oftentimes that voice of dissent, while valid, may not necessarily reflect the consensus in terms of actual harm to maximizing for utility.

Great points. Shifting gears a bit, Reid, You've been one of the more outspoken leaders in Silicon Valley on societal issues. I know you don't expect everyone to think and be exactly like you, but can you talk a bit about, you know, when and why technology leaders should weigh in on social and political topics that may not, you know, relate directly to their core products, but have broader societal implications?

Part of the reason I started speaking out on that topic was that there's a classic common wisdom in American business that business is about business. It needs to be inclusive. So, you know, you don't want to be on one side of the political aisle or the other or one religion or another and so forth. And so you basically kind of park all of that at the door. And by the way, that inclusiveness is obviously super important, right? It's important not just obviously in religion and political things, but also in all other aspects that matter, gender and race and all the rest. So you got to say, okay, we have to figure out how to be an inclusive place of those. And by the way, being tolerant of those points of view, sometimes it's easier on a contrasting point of view to say, hey, look, in our business, your views on gun control don't really matter, right? So park at the door. Don't bring it up as a point of contrast and tension, because we're focused on a mission for what we're doing here in the company and what we're building for the world. And that was something, when I was off kind of campaigning a lot on why it was that, you know, kind of Trump was such a disaster for our country and not just the pandemic and everything else. And people said, well, no, no, no, that should be divorced from the business world. And look, there are people who are business people who feel uncomfortable about you talking about this, and that's wrong. And I said, well, actually, in fact, it's what you're doing. Like, if I'm doing, if I'm advocating politics because it's like lower taxes or higher taxes or other kinds of things that are specific positions within society, then that's a reasonable thing to say. You should be much more careful about that within a business context. But the things I'm talking about are things like the importance of democracy, the integrity of the system, rule of law. It's a small thing, you know, which, by the way, like, on that level, both as a business leader and as a leader in society, both of those things are things that you need to come out and speak about. You can say, like, for example, Jeb Bush is a friend of mine. Like, I have friends who are Republicans, who I respect deeply, who I think have done great things in education and immigration and other things and are really amazing. I'm not making a anti Republican comment, right. I am making a. It's important. And that's, you know, you finally saw it a little bit towards the end in the whole, like, I frankly think, criminal thing about questioning the election results when literally you had people like Barr going, I'm going to resign rather than be pushed into, you know, questioning the election results and people continuing to do that, which is erosive of democracy, erosive of the rule of law. And you say, look, speaking up on this is not a question about making your environment inclusive. It's about leadership for a healthy society. And a healthy society is both good for you, good for the citizens, and good for business. It is actually, in fact, a pro general business topic to do it. And that's what I think you finally saw some more and more business leaders coming out and saying, look, vote red, vote blue, whatever, elections, democracy, rule of law, anti corruption, you know, these are things that are quintessentially important for us as Americans and as business people and as citizens.

Mike, you know your reaction to that. And then also similar question for you, kind of the flip, you know, when should government officials weigh in on issues that impact private tech companies? Is the second part of this.

I think what Reid's speaking to is sort of. So to give context, in Stockton, I had four Republicans and two Democrats on my city council. So as radical and as crazy as I am, I had to find a way to language and speak about things in a way that didn't feel like an identity attack or a partisan attack. I really centered most of our conversations on values like these divorce from politics. These are the things we all care about. We care about democracy. So of course we want everyone to vote that's in line with our values. We care about families, so of course we want our immigrant families to stay together. And I was. I saw that we were able to make traction and get things done, at least as a council, when it became about, no, these are things. Let's start foundational with what we value. And I think that's exactly what we're speaking to. And insofar as in our political system, a party or a party's leadership seeks to deviate from values that it is appropriate to call them out, but not on a partisan basis, but on these are these widely held values in terms of what we value as a society, what makes a good society. And then I think the other thing that we talked about that really resonated with me was this notion that like you can't divorce tech from society. So a society where more people are educated, where more people have expendable income, where more people are healthy, is actually really good for business. A society that has such savage inequality. And I think it's also about being. Having a long term 100 year view. And I think that the best business case or the best case scenario is to live in a society that, that truly has a lot of opportunity. Right. Because I think what I've been talking to my political friends about, it's not that tech creates, in my estimation, tech innovation doesn't necessarily create new problems. I think it exacerbates existing problems and policies in our social safety net, et cetera, that they aren't dealt with. The pace of innovation in tech is far outpacing the rates of innovation in terms of our policy responses. And that's creating these moments of tension and fighting between sort of government and tech because tech's all the way out here and they're not creating problems and oftentimes they're not solving for said problem, but they're building something else on top of a shoddy foundation that becomes more exacerbated. I think we saw that most recently because it's fight around Prop 22 in California that I doordash probably too often. I don't like leaving my office too much, especially after losing. I was so sorry for you. But in absence of universal health care, in absence of portable benefits, et cetera, just created this tension that became a fight between government and a couple of tech companies. When the real fight is about the civil society as a whole and what is the policy infrastructure we need in place to really allow innovation to do its thing. So to answer the second part of your question, Sean, I think that the job of government is to set guardrails, right? I think government just has to set the guardrails because I don't want Mark Zuckerberg making free speech policy. Actually I think that's a bad thing. I don't. Interests are also divorced, right? Like government's interest is sort of greater good, irresponsive of who makes money. And as a CEO, your responsibility is to society, but also your shareholders. Right? So I think that government has to appropriate guardrails and has to be nimble enough to kind of iterate with sort of new things. Because again, we don't like when the horse and buggy was a thing, we're gonna have a bunch of traffic rules and we had to create traffic rules because the car came. I think we have to keep that spirit of innovation because I don't think the tech city ideas in Nevada, I think that's, that's terrifying to me. Like, what the hell is a tech city? Like, what is that? So I think that government has to do a better job of asserting its role, but not to be over barely regulatory to slow things down or just. No, I don't want to see anything but to be nimble enough to say, well, look, these are the parameters we have. This is the existing framework and this is how this might apply to this new technology. And let's be willing to iterate and figure it out so we don't have to stop sort of progression because we can't think of the right law today.

You talked about kind of the pace of innovation, Mike. I mean, do you think, well, let's say you're advising Joe Biden, let's say hypothetically, what would you be telling him to do to make it so that government was actually equipped to be able to keep up with that pace of innovation? And you know, you watch a hearing in Congress and it's kind of painful to listen to folks ask tech CEOs questions about their products. Any advice you would give him, I.

Would say you should set up some sort of team of like philosophers and ethics and technologists and policy people, like a working group. And their job is to kind of think of sort of with innovations that at least we know of. Where are some of the guardrails? And I think one of the first things would be sort of, what do we do about disinformation and social media and algorithms and really having a team of folks whose job is. Because the thing is, it's going to take sort of thinking and bringing things together. So I think it has to be a team of folks who are like, deeply rooted in philosophy, deeply rooted in ethics, Interagency strike team that's just focused on these Tech Policy Council, which I think you may have. I think part of it is having conversations with some of the leaders in some of these emerging technologies. Like, for example, one thing in the pipeline in the next 10 years will be a discussion about sort of autonomous vehicles. What are the rules, what do we do with drivers and stuff. I think having a team thinking about it before it becomes a crisis gives us the better opportunity to have chances to get it right. Because what I found as being mayor is that the worst decisions we made were always when we were reacting to a crisis and people were upset and we're like, we have to do something. And the best decisions were where we had a little bit of run room to really think about. Okay, before this becomes crazy crazy, what can we do to begin to think about where we want to go? Because I think governments are really good at making new rules in crisis. They're just responsive to like anger. And I think these questions require a forethought and intentionality.

I don't know if you're suggesting that Reid be, you know, philosopher in chief to Biden's administration, just given his background in philosophy, but Reid, I think you'd be a great candidate for that. And Mike, you actually touched on kind of the next session where I want to go a two part question. And I'll start with you, Reid. Just what major shifts do you see? Mike mentioned autonomous vehicles being something that's coming. You know, what major shifts do you see happening over the next five to 10 years? And then Mike would be interested in your ideas on the ideas that Reid puts forward and how government and tech should be playing together to make sure that we get positive outcomes in the face of all these shifts.

So good news, bad news, accelerating tech. And I think it's overall good news, but by the way, challenging. You have to manage it because one of the ways I describe myself as, I'm a techno optimist, not a techno utopian. It's not just because the technology happens, everything happens, that's great. But you actually can shape it for great outcomes. And so you go it actively and people's mistakes usually, and Mike was referring to this about slowing it down or trying to stop it, which is a mistake, especially in a global context. But generally speaking, the solution is technology. So how do you shape it? How do you accelerate the right future towards utopia is the right outcome. So I think autonomous vehicles are really important one. At Greylock, we've invested in a few of those companies, Aurora, Neuro and so forth, because we're, you know, it's kind of like we, we see line of sight to that. And I think that's going to be a really important transformation. And by the way, we do think about ways that the labor force can evolve and Change. I do think that one of the things that people sometimes overly panic about the speed of it is, is if we had all the right tech today and all of the OEMs started manufacturing only AV cars today, you know, it'd still be five to ten years before you'd have tons of AV cars on the road. So you do have some kind of timeframe. And we're not at that point yet, but still Mike is exactly right. This is a super important issue. The transition, just like the transition between agriculture to industrial is going to be painful and can be painful. And so we need to navigate it. And the people who it impacts most are the people who are not around the table making these decisions. And so you need to do everything you can for them. And I think he's 1000% to be, you know, shining a light on that. Other technologies, AI, I think, is going to affect all industries. One of the things that I frequently tell any leaders that if you have a 20 person or larger organization, which of course includes governments, but everything else, you should have a technology strategy that does not a Mac or a PC strategy. That's a, you know, what is AI, what is synthetic biology, what is crypto, what is, et cetera, et cetera going to be affecting cloud, mobile? Because we're still by the way, very much in the first inning of the cloud and the mobile transformations and these things. What is going to happen with Internet of things and the fact that Moore's Law is more or less kind of over unless there's a massive new invention in semiconductors for desktops and servers. But it's actually in full force in the Internet of things, in the cameras and sensors that are going to be everywhere in terms of how we're operating. You know, what does this mean obviously for data and the applications that come out of that. About 10 years ago, the speech that I gave at south by Southwest was that data is going to be the basis for Web 3.0 and through AI and machine learning and all the rest of that. And by the way, this is what's thing is, I've been rattling off technologies at this speed. I haven't even gotten all of them. I haven't talked about space, I haven't talked about synthetic biology and the details of what's going on there, or the MRNA stuff and you know, Moderna and the other vaccines that are now going to be so much faster and more developed, what's happening and even more. And so it's like it's a time of great technological acceleration, Mike going To solve all that.

What's your reaction to all that re just laid out?

I think it's a call to action. So one of the things we did that didn't get as much kind of attention as it should have is that we actually had an AI strand. I actually worked with my brother in law who's like an AI, AI ethic, whatever. He's like a very smart person who thinks about AI and ethics. Together he and Oxford Insights for the AI strategy for Stockton. And what was telling to me was again how AI had some positive things will have all types of consequences, particularly for the city of Stockton without sort of action now because we found that since so many of our labor force today are in kind of jobs that will be replaced in the next decade, whether it's truck driving, AG workers, et cetera, and that technology is going to come and make things more efficient. But what we're going to do with those 50,000 people who are already struggling and already face these other sort of systematic barriers. So we try to educate industry and we try to get the University Pacific involved and try to get people to understand that it's not inevitable. I think that's part of it as well. And I think the one thing the tech sector has which I appreciate is a sense of agency, the sense that like actions matter. But I don't think that same feelings of agency and ownership happen either at the government or at the community level where folks just think, okay, technology just happens to us. So I think part of it is understanding what the trends are and again understanding that the trends are the trends. But we can change the impact if we do some foundational things now. And I think that's why the guaranteed income experiment we ran in Stockton with so many because it was about sort of paying homage to folks like Dr. King and about the foundations that are working now. But it was also about let's get the foundation right. So when the future happens, it happens in a way that is good or is net positive. So I think AI is a big one and I think a lot of it's just about not the could we talk about the future of work so much, but we're really talking about the future of people, the future of humans. And the state had a future of work commission. And I said the same thing. I'm saying now that what will be a pity would be that we have all these new ways of working but not new ways of being as a society. That the only innovation and the only change happens in sort of people's relationships to jobs. But not in terms of how we relate to each other or how we honors people's contributions, et cetera. So all that to say we need guaranteed income. And we also need some thinking around sort of, how do we not reproduce some of the power hierarchies? How do we not reproduce some of the gender disparities in the future? How do we not reproduce some of the racial disparities in the future? And the last thing I'll say, Shawn, is again, because those things aren't inevitable either. Those are based off inputs and design. So I really do believe with that same level of focus, we can create new systems that keep a lot of what's working today, but leaves everything that's not and really provides springboard opportunity for all people. But, I mean, we just have to start yesterday. Like, we're already behind because the tech is moving like this.

Yeah. And thinking about something that needed some solving yesterday and something that we're all kind of experiencing now, that's also exacerbating a lot of the gaps that you touched on, you know, the pandemic. What's the opportunity? Or looking back, what would have been the opportunity for tech and government to work more closely together to face a crisis like this? That's a question for both of you.

Look, I think one of the things that is insufficiently commented on is, to some degree, while obviously the pandemic has been horrible, suffering and has been mishandled, it gives us a bunch of lenses for what? A dry run for what? A more deadly disease pandemic that had the same kind of characteristics of having asymptomatic carriers, long incubation periods, you know, off the map for not easily. Like, you have to spin up very quickly on a new set of detections and vaccines. And like, all of that, part of the thing I think we missed in this was the pharmaceutical companies, I think, did a magnificent job, typically. And this is kind of part of. Kind of the benefit of globalization, which is, you know, typically, vaccines have been years in development. These were months. Right. And actually, in fact, they would have been deployed much earlier, except they were being very careful about safety. And part of. Of course, one of the things to learn is how to bring in the safety. Like, be as careful about safety, but as opposed to N months, see if you could do it in less than n, in kind of future circumstances. But the thing we missed was, okay, what about governments going, all right, what are the other things that we can do with tech? Like, could we innovate on masks? Could we innovate on PPE manufacture really, really quickly. And get that, hey guys. Right, I want to hear what you can build right now to help us. Because by the way, the tragedy of the pandemic is that people it most hurts are the three quarters of the society that are not in the top part, whether it's schooling and the food and the lunches that happen with a lot of folks. I was just talking to a friend of mine about how a bunch of the kids who go to New York school, city schools, get their three meals a day there because they're kind of either families or homeless. And you're like, well, just shut down the school. You're not just like having a whole social and school impact. You're having health outcomes and food outcomes like me disastrously. And what do you do about that? And so the call to action that we must act now and how can tech help us with that is I think one of the things we missed because one of the things I think that not illegitimately the tech companies I think are like, well, what do you want us to do? And part of leadership is to say, please do this. Get us a bunch of PPE stuff. Now what I found myself doing because the tech companies had kind of seen it going, had went and bought a bunch of PPE stuff, you know, to kind of be ready because they understand exponential curves. And I was calling them going, hey, you know, this hospital could really use it. And they're like, great, we'll send it to the hospital. I mean that was, that was like what March looked like, you know, and April looked like. Because it was like me calling them and you know, okay, okay, this is the kind of thing that they could do. And hopefully the next go round is a long time in the future and we've learned a lot. But where like government could be doing things.

Yeah, no, it's hilarious, Reid, because California, there's a group called Big city mayors in the top 13 cities. Stop. December 13th. We snuck in there. We would meet every day on zoom from like 8:30 to 10 to talk about this and like, hey, what company do you know? So we're like texting our friends in VC and companies to get, in absence of a federal strategy to get masks set up testing sites. I remember we had a couple calls with curative. One of my friends from Stanford worked there. So I was like, hey, what are you doing with. It's sad that we did it one off but I think it's also encouraging to see how tech can be used for good. And as Reid mentioned, part of it was if we had a government federally that kind of convened all the tech people and say, hey, we need quick testing, we need masks, we need this. I'm sure everyone had risen to the occasion because they were doing it one off so easily and so wonderfully. I've had tech friends getting masks from China. It was kind of bootlegged the way we were doing it in the month of March and April, but it's all we had because it was, it was new. We were caught flat footed as city government, partly because county and federal governments usually handle these things. And the tech really actually did help us find resources, be creative and set up things while we waited for a more coordinated government response. So thank you guys. I think a big part is figuring out this vaccine thing and how do we get people signed up for vaccines. And part of it, I mean there's my friend Vineet, has an app he started that seems to work with reminding people to take their medicines because a big part of it is trust, right? And how do we use sort of of text and platforms people are familiar with to build trust in the vaccines, remind people to get vaccines, et cetera is probably the biggest thing. And then also this figure out this education thing. The kids were already two years behind, literally were not in school for a year. Like I don't care what anyone says, if you have three siblings in a two bedroom house with terrible Internet, you did not learn as much as you should have this past year. I don't care if you logged in. I used to teach like there's no way I'm hungry, your parents are stressed, et cetera. So I think really thinking about what tech tools can we give kids when schools open back up to kind of make up for this learning gap would be huge.

One of the things that I had unfortunately kind of trying to work. I hadn't anticipated that post November 3rd. I would be working so much on rule of law, safety and everything else. But one of the ideas we didn't get to is trying to create a Hamilton rap battle on why to take your vaccines and why vaccines are important because we did it with crypto to kind of understand crypto versus central banking.

And that's what I learned about crypto. Reed, remember you sent it to me. That's literally, that's my whole knowledge of crypto, which is limited, comes from that. So thank you.

But doing more of that. And I hadn't realized that the federal government literally had no plan. I mean I should have expected it given how much effort I was putting in. But I was like, oh my God, we've been working, getting them, distribute them effectively.

Well, Tubbs, return the favor to Reid though. I know you've got some Hamilton connections, so maybe you can get him some talent to actually produce this video. You know, there's a ton of questions from the group, but I did want to ask one more particularly to you, Michael. You know, given what we experienced leading up to the Trump administration in 2016 and then all the way through the 2020 election cycle, what do you view as the role technology should be playing in helping to restore stability and preserve a functional democracy? What's the tech industry's obligation to society and democracy?

As Reid mentioned, there's no growth, innovation and no sort of wealth building long term without a functioning civil society, without a true democracy. Because in the absence of that, you have sort of oligarchy, plutocracy, et cetera, which is not what anyone wants, Right? So I think tech has an opportunity and I think it's not fair because of government for a reason. But even when government's not behaving as it should, I think tech has to be sort of long term thinkers and rational actors and say, well, hey, I could exploit this rule and gain a competitive advantage today, but what would the impact be 10 years from now when folks are using said platform to organize an insurrection on the country? Or folks are using said platform to depress confidence in the vaccine, which is a necessity for us to get back to where we need to be as a high note. And I think that's a huge part of it. I think also in this moment post Black Lives Matter and everyone cares about racial equity, especially because Black History Month, so everyone at least cares for the next 25 days. But in all seriousness, I think tech has a role and I think I love the work you're doing, Sean, as well and showing that what's progressive, just equalizing opportunity, like talent and intellect are universal, resource opportunities are not. So as much as we could diversify some of the type of companies we invest in, who's investable, but also who's investing, I think is also important because the more you bring not diversity for diverse diversity's sake, but diversity because the world is more than just like white boys that went to Stanford and they're great, a lot of them are my good friends. But there's a big world of other brilliant people with other brilliant ideas and figuring out ways and you're not losing in doing so. Right, like we all lose in the long run when access is so tight because we're not getting the full potential of everyone's contribution. So to answer your question, I think disinformation is a big one. Like, how do we honor free speech, but also understand that there has to be some mechanism where bad actors or nefarious actors are held to account for not just dissenting viewpoints, not just disagreeing from the norm, but for having an agenda to undermine what's necessary for the health of all of us. Right? And I think that's a line that has to be drawn. I think government has to make the decision because we're actually bullied on by people. But tech has to be part of the discussion to actually lead the way. Like, if I was in a hire executive office, I would say, well, hey, look, you guys, you guys built the technology. Give me what makes sense for you all in terms of these are the values I care about, the people I like, me, care about, what reasonable restraints should we put on you and your technology? And of course, folks ain't gonna say everything. And of course it probably won't be strong enough, but it's something that then I could take to my brilliant lawyers and folks like, this is what they're thinking about, what's missing here. And then I think that's because right now we're just blank slate and arguing. I think someone needs to come out with the first like, well, this is our draft. This is our set of values for free speech and tech, and this is what we like your response. And then do that dance that way.

Two ads. First one is obviously part of Mike's initial comments are precisely the reason why, Sean, the work you're doing with concrete roads is so important. So, you know, call out and truth there. And then the second part is, in addition to exactly what Mark's talking about is this is actually one of the things I think the universities could be good conveners on. So as he was talking about, kind of like, look, how do we get some philosophers and some government people and some tech people and come together in a venue that is, well, what are the real issues for the complete set of stakeholders here? It's one of the things that I've been kind of nudging Stanford and MIT and Harvard, but I think all of them could do to kind of say, hey, go do this. Because then those drafts aren't just drafts of, well, here's what is the most convenient industry? Because by the way, that's nice and important to know which things are doable and what the expense line is, but also what's important to society and all of its constituency, like the fact that all of society participates in government, which is not true of how these companies work in various ways. And so how do you get those, how do you actually have thoughtful consequences long term and playing in technology and the globe, all that kind of stuff. And so that's the reason why I've been trying to nudge that along in mostly university context, related to some of.

The comments that you just made. Mike and Reid, you touched on it as well. John Russell asked for Reid. What are your thoughts on how we expand access to the thriving VC and VC backed startup space for underrepresented communities?

Part of what we've been trying to do at Greylock is essentially broaden the network because the proximity to the network is the thing by which this thing really actually happens or doesn't happen. Everything else I think is a second order effect. We're obviously working with you management leaders tomorrow, other places where we go, okay, who has actually already been working on the network problem, whether it's job pathing in a VC availability to access for capital and for founders. I've actually also been doing it with Endeavor, which has been doing various cities around the country, including Atlanta and Detroit and all these others. So it's kind of how do you do it there as well? So that's kind of the really key thing. And obviously we'd love it if we could say, hey, it'll all be done next year. It's obviously harder than that. One of the key things that is kind of a thing is don't just do it as an announcement, as a press release, hold up dashboards, numbers. We move the needle. Because if you move the needle every quarter, every year, then eventually you get there. But you have to make sure that you're like, just like business, you're tracking numbers and you're moving on it and you're making it happen. And it's a, it's a strategic objective that you know, for example, we have a diversity group that reports back to the partnership that's composed of partners. You know, at Greylock, that's like, okay, what are we doing? What are we doing with our portfolio? What are we doing with Greylock? What are we doing with our partners, you know, concrete rows, management leaders tomorrow, et cetera. And how do we then move the needle more? How do we take the game to the next level? And we meet regularly and people propose ideas and we say, we heard this, we support this person, we do this as our own work. And that's essentially the work and always cram for new great ideas, by the way.

I know that because the things that I throw out are actually acted on. And I think that's exactly the right approach just given we're solving a 400 year old problem that has just been compounding, you know, for centuries. And so setting big goals but not expecting to achieve them overnight and actually being intentional is I think, totally. Vicki, I agree with you there. This is from Kerrianne Nadeu of Loop Insurance, the Concrete Rose portfolio company. Carrie Ann is brilliant and is asking a question I would not have thought of. But all models have bias. How can these companies that are using ethical AI anticipate a critical response of equity advocates and manage market reputation?

One of the things that I've been trying to push, like Stanford Human Centered AI, the UK's Turing Institute and Oxford AI Ethics Institute, is to say, look, part of what you can do to catalyze industry is to make sure that the data sets are well formed, right? So the classic canonical one people have been talking about for two years is the facial recognition stuff works on, you know, the white people, but not the others. You're like, what the. Maybe it's a feature in some ways, but not good. Like, let's make sure the data set looks good. And that's one of the things I think universities can help with because obviously they can't generate the data, but they can say, we can be a good repository and we can be a good cross checker. And you can say, hey, you're building your AI set, whether it's parole, finance, credit score, other kinds of things which are infrastructure and can institutionalize systemic bias in disastrous ways. Hey, here's a way you can go cross check that data set. You can make sure the data set works, is inclusive. You can even say, hey, look, for example, a classic one on policing is because the black community is policed at a multiple of the white, like, oh, we have all this data, right? It's like, okay, well that's a problem even in the data set. So what's the society we should be getting to? And how should we be modifying and cross checking that data set in order to make it happen? It's one of the reasons why I've been saying, hey, universities convening along with government and industry has been the pattern that I've been trying to do for this kind of question.

Last question and then we're going to wrap up. This is from Deny Sterental Culture partner at Concrete Rose. This is for you, Reid, but actually, Mike, you'll have a view on this too, if we wait until we're infrastructure, it might be too late to then backpedal and undo harm that's created. So what signals and cues should we be tracking as we build?

Well, the specific thing that I wrote in blitzscaling and I'll hand it over to Mike, is as you're growing your organization, that's usually before your infrastructure and you're beginning to get to multi threading, hire someone whose job it is to start asking that question before your infrastructure. Like what are the opportunities and challenges or opportunities and risks so that that can be understood by the organization even as you may be blitzscaling moving super fast and with that Mike over to you.

That's absolutely right. I mean if you're already infrastructure, it's too late because your infrastructure. So I think part of it is hiring someone, but also as sort of the leader of the company, just making sure you have very clear values. Because again, I think one of the biggest things I learned from Mayor is that I'm sure it's the same thing in tech, but so many of these challenges, there was no playbook like there was no playbook for COVID 19 and Black Lives Matter protests at the same damn time. It's unprecedented. And part of it was just using values as a compass in terms of okay, well and I think that same would apply sort of in building a new technology or innovation. Other technology is having really clear values because those things are kind of helpful point and will help infuse from the beginning, from the roots ways that you build will have a net positive impact on society. And if it deviates, at least you have something to go back to as a benchmark and say, well, how we deviated from what we set out to do in terms of not just make money, but just the type of impact we want to make. This is the type of company we want to be. And then hiring someone whose job is to be the gatekeeper and as Reid said, the CEO of that want to.

Thank both of you for doing this. I want to thank both the Greylock team which carried the load on running this event. We greatly appreciate them. Everybody who joined, we're going to continue the networking afterwards. If you want to stay on for another 30 minutes or so, we'll do the one on one networking. Reid, Mike, anything you want to say to sign off before we let you go?

Well, the only thing I would add, because I want to give Mike the last word is kudos to everyone who's here. This is the kind of problem that if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. And so great that you're here. And let's get everyone else who's not here in it as well.

First of all, thank you, Reed. Thank you, Sean. I mean, thank you to the back end team. I'm sure I drove them all crazy this morning. But I'm here in the technology working. Let me also say I think it's easy to become paralyzed with how big the societal problem is or the problems are. And I think the approach sort of everyone on this call has taken with their companies, it's the same kind of approach we have to take with these societal issues and that we own what we own. Well, we're not. We're going to iterate. We're going to not get it right the first time, but we're committed to doing it because the vision of a society we all deserve to live in is worth the sacrifice, the hustle, the hours. And then the second thing I would say is that it's an exciting opportunity because we haven't done it yet. And I think in many ways the same things that make people successful as innovators in tech are kind of the same, at least principles that make folks successfully innovating in terms of the society the tech operates in. So again, we all have a responsibility as citizens and human beings in this country. But I would say those of us, again with the most power and the most influence have a greater responsibility because the consequences of a misstep, the consequences of, of not being intentional, are greater. And just because it's already bad doesn't absolve you of making it better.

That was beautifully said and I'm not going to be able to top that, but I'm smiling because it reminds me of our friend Teeth Choppa from Stanford, who's now in bc, who told me a story about your very first campaign event, which I think was in a community gym, and a woman stood up and said, is you the one? And your response was, was no, we are the ones. And I think that's the spirit that we want within this concrete Rose Greylock community. And I think it's totally consistent with what both of you just said. So thank you both for being one of many that are going to solve these problems. Keep doing what you do. Keep being you. I appreciate you both. Thanks all for joining TALK Soon.

That concludes this episode of Gray Matter. If you enjoyed this interview and want to hear others, please hit subscribe. You'll get new episodes delivered directly to you and you'll also be able to catch up on old episodes you may have missed, like Reid Hoffman's recent interview with Uber CEO Dara Khosh Rashahi, which was the first event in our new virtual speaker series, Iconversations. You can subscribe to grey matter@soundcloud.com greylockpartners or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find new episodes and blog posts every week on greylock.com, and of course you can follow us on Twitter reylockvc. I'm Heather Mack, and thanks for listening.