Reid Hoffman | Planning for Volatility

Hi, everyone. I'm Heather Mack with Greylock Partners. You're listening to Grey Matter, where we share stories from company builders and business leaders. This episode features a portion of a virtual town hall held in May with Greylock general partner and LinkedIn Co founder Reid Hoffman. The session was moderated by Greylock general partner David Thacker. Portfolio company founders joined the session to hear Reid's thoughts on investing and entrepreneurship within the current economic, political and public health landscape. David Thacker opens the discussion.

The underlying theme, of course, is the pandemic and how that's impacting things. But we want to talk about investing in this environment, building a company in this environment, blitzscaling tech trends. So with that, I want to turn over the first question to Reid, which is about investing, which is what do you think about investing in this environment? You know, what changes do you see coming to the, to the VC industry as a result of this? And is there any changes to you personally as an investor?

You know, obviously there's a bunch of things around uncertainty and liquidity and all the rest and everyone understands all that. It's still, of course you're broadly speaking trying to do contrarian and right and right changes. It changes because there's a general presumption in society the market's pricing this way. It's kind of crazy that, you know, in x months 1 to 3 things will return to some version of normal. And they think normal is going to be kind of like okay, a recession state that you'll be growing back out of. And the most classic kind of question is this, you know, like what does the recovery look like? Is it an L, is it a U, is it a V, et cetera. And actually in fact I think the much higher truth is volatility and that volatility will affect across the entire front, including the greater likelihood than less likelihood is that in the way the states are opening up that we'll get a second wave of COVID how big it will be if it's a little small bump doesn't really matter. If it's really big, it does matter. So you have to roughly say what I am planning on some volatility. Now the way that changes patterns, whether it's patterns and investment thesis either as an investor or as a as a company, is to say that it's much harder to say look, I prove X in a product market fit and now that just I scale it and that works and so forth is a almost like a, a little bit of a set of proofs as to what you're doing as you're adjusting and finding your product market fit and your product market fit to scale and the parts of your investment thesis that go into that volatility means that that changes. It isn't as reliable or as stable. So Greylock, we've already, you know, last couple months we've done some series A's. I think series A's are still going. You tend to want to have a longer trajectory to get into the B. And when the B happens as part of it, investing in new things continues. I think investing in new scale things is obviously much rare, but I think that you still have essentially a very similar pattern to investing before at the kind of the macro level, which is what is it? What is a 10 plus year view? What is a macro of change of industries? What are new technology and platforms that open up that don't kind of start saying oh, because it's Covid, we now do X because the details of because it's Covid are going to change a lot over the next year. And investing in a year doesn't really, doesn't really give you anything other than philanthropic response. On the other hand, the volatility is very new. And the question about how you take measurement to fact in the learning journey that is a startup and is investing is going to be very different. And the problem about saying it's going to be exactly X is that. No, no, precisely. The whole point is it's not going to be exactly X. It's going to be volatile. And so you have to be, you know, kind of tap dancing a lot more and adjusting a lot more. It's much more like a constant and immediate dogfight.

Right. And so that's the investor perspective. What about your portfolio companies? What advice are you giving them? And there were a lot of questions about balancing the short term and serving in terms of preserving cash balance sheets, you know, revenue generation versus the long term of investing and hiring engineers. How do you balance those trade offs and what are you telling your portfolio companies right now?

Well, the rough trade, a little bit like we said, is you say, well typically call it a year ago and the last decade of bull market and everything else. It's how to figure out what the product market scale fit is and then apply as much rocket to it as possible. And you go, great, I've got a line, let's go to scale. And then you adjust as you need to, whether it's into new markets or new verticals or new product offerings that are adjunct to what you're doing. And that's that's kind of the playbook that over the last few decades has really been played up in the Valley. That's of course not false like in the new environment. But the major thing that's added to it is opposed to a pure focus on rocket ship. It's a focus on adaptability because given a bunch of different changing circumstances, a predictable overall circumstance that you can basically measure and drive predictions in, it's much more volatile. Doesn't mean 100% volatile. There is still predictability. It doesn't mean 0% predictability. It means a broader range within the predictability. And I think it changes your timeframes a little bit. Even though you, like all great companies, have a kind of a polestar and a true north about this is the change in the world that we see coming, that we are a transformational part of that we are assisting. That's still there. But, but the timeframe about like, okay, should I be doing a three year plan now? If it's a three year plan? Because I'm doing the whole build and three years from now is when I pull back the curtains. Okay, that can still work because you don't. Volatility means you don't necessarily really know and you're still taking that hypothesis. But if you're doing the okay, I'm in market, I'm quarter to quarter, you know, you may be, as opposed to three years, you may be saying, okay, look, I've got a, and that may have been a, a 50% focus. Now maybe that's a 30% focus and there's a, that additional 20% goes into, you know, kind of what is this quarter and what's going on. And I think that's the environment that we're all in. And I think one of the things that'll be frustrating about it, we say, okay, what's the new normal? What's the new normal? What's the way we start building the scale? What's the way we like, you know, use the word blitzscaling in order to go. And actually, in fact, and you know, by the way, it's still good goals. It's not wrong in that. But it's like, okay, presume that it just that everything's a little bit noisier. And it's not just noisier in epistemology, noisier in measurement, but actually noisier in principle. And that kind of thing will happen. You know, for example, it's like, well, one of the things that's going to happen over the next year is you Have a general collapse of a bunch of SMBs as much as we all try to for societal reasons to support them. Well okay, that's one market. But then what happens to supply chain? What happens in real estate? What happens in all these things underneath that? And you can make some predictions like are the kind of the move, the more move to cloud and digital services and a bunch of other stuff, the drive in E commerce. Those kinds of things will in fact actually in fact be drivers in this. But and you say okay those are macro things but a lot of the micro stuff you don't know what the second order effects are going to be. And so you have to measure and replan and replan and replan on a more lightweight basis than you had to before. Great.

And I wanted to touch on one of the things that you mentioned which is just B2B sales. So for startups selling into enterprises, a downturn like this is a time when companies start to become much more conservative. They cut budgets, cut capital budgets. They're less willing to take risks on new unproven technologies. So do you have any advice that you give to your companies about how to maintain sales momentum and selling into these companies in a time like this?

Well, one super hard problem right there isn't a easy like you know, take the blue pill and it all works or take the red pill and it all works. And so it means that it's a lot harder, takes a lot more work. I think in general you need to deploy your the network network to measure what's going on and network to help connect cause it's just gonna move slower. The natural retrench in uncertainty is everyone kind of pulls back some all of us as business leaders, that's our natural impulse to go okay, make sure I get enough powder, make sure I keep the powder, make sure I'm ready, you know, have insurance. And so with. Well that's going to also be true for these businesses. And so what you need to do in kind of navigating them is have that even a closer set of connections and you have to use the network around it in order to make that happen. Like the influencers who know about the company or talk to the company. And it isn't just raw influence on it, it's awareness of it. It's this co investment of like look, this is really important to you and your future and so forth. So I think that's probably the most baseline principle. But a lot of it's going to be specific, a lot of it's going to be ad Hoc, you know, in your B2B sales to the obvious little bit is like, well, if you're selling into travel oriented companies, you just hosed. I mean, they're hosed. There is no silver lining for the travel industry within this. And so you go, okay, fine, and that I just have to adjust off that. But then on the other is the question as well, which one is it and which dynamic? So if you go say, well, actually in fact, passenger fleets, you know, Lyft, Uber, et cetera, may be, you know, severely decline in various ways over the next X months, but actually delivery fleets are kind of way up. And so, you know, you say, okay, well how do we retool as much for that if that's right within the time frame? Because if your time frame is three plus years, then it's like, okay, well that, that doesn't really matter. If your time frame is the next year and companies in the next year, then that does really matter. And that's what I mean by kind of specifics within this arena for how to look at it.

Do you have any guidance on how companies can leverage the crisis to basically strengthen their position in the market? I mean, if you look at the history of downturns, whether it's the Internet bubble In the early 2000s popping or the Great Recession of 2008, there were a number of tech startups that were able to leverage that to really grow their company and emerge much stronger.

So obviously there's a bunch of things that become challenges, but also in this disruption, it also changes the entire market. Landsc it can open up new opportunities. So sometimes, you know, this is all like, these are the general principles, but the details are very specific to each, you know, kind of company or market or product or service. So you've got the, you know, one thing is, you say, okay, well, harder to raise capital, harder to recruit certain ways, harder to operate depending on what the company is, et cetera. But on the other hand, that's true for your competitors as well. The nature of what the competitive game is actually shifts you because you say, okay, was there ways that I can use this dislocation to actually get a much better position? Another one that you frequently look at, you should always be looking at opportunities, not just offensive game, not just defensive game. But you kind of say, okay, well is my game a longevity game or is my game a gold rush game? Right? Because actually, in fact, in a bull market, a longevity game is very rarely, not zero, but much more rarely the right strategy in a volatile and recessionary market, sometimes well, actually, our competitive advantage is we have the. We can play the long game, right? We think that what's going to happen is it's going to be a drought, right? And we can get through the other side of the drought much better than everyone else. And so that's what we're going to do. So you have to make that evaluation, that macro strategic evaluation, specifically to the landscape that you're in relative to the market, relative to the competitors. And then you have to think about, like, okay, what are the other places that I can do that I can play my unique edge out, given how things are changing. For example, some companies and some founders are in better positions for fundraising. Well, that's a different market where you say, okay, I'm playing out capital as an advantage. And I do that in order to make that. In order to make that play. The. The macro principles are the same, but the details get widely changed and changed across all aspects of business. Because something that's as big as an impact as the pandemic and the recession that comes from it touches every aspect of business, right? Touches capital, touches the employees, touches the customers, and market touches the competition. And so each of these. Well, now you have volatility and uncertainty of an increased dimension, not to 100%, but of increased dimension across all of this. Then you say, okay, well, I'm going to still have to make some working theories and working assumptions across it, but I also need to measure it a little bit more, and I also need to be willing to get back in measuring it if I need to. And that's the baseline of adaptability.

Let's go back to the topic of blitzscaling. Do you have any examples of companies that you think are doing this well right now in this current environment that you've seen? And can you blitzscale if your industry or market is in the middle of this and facing really significant headwinds?

Obviously, the degree to which the raw blitzscaling of you get way out over your skis because you're predicting success, you much more rarely do that in this environment. It's not zero. So, for example, you know, we're all on the zoom call. Zoom, right? And video conferencing and products that range from, you know, G Suite to Coda to Figma and all the rest. Go, go, go, go, go, go. Right? Because the market demand, as we can see in all these companies, is massively picking up because of the environment we're in. And so that's still blitzscaling. That's still the. Here we are These are super important. They're shown to be two years now more important in the market than they were already because of the way the businesses are operating. But the vast majority of companies that aren't kind of in the obvious spot. And by the way, it's not just work, everything transformed in this, but it's also you get to places where you go, well, okay, I've got some advantages and some disadvantages. I'm sorting it out. You may still be blitzcaling because you're moving faster than your competitors, but the true north of blitzscaling is the first mover to scale is what wins. And so being the first to scale is what really matters. And then the sub goaling of the principles of how you do that, well, those change bull and bear markets and they change volatile. And so you say, look, I'm still trying to be the first there, I'm still trying to move faster. But that might be as per earlier, it's like maybe playing the long game, maybe playing the, you know, the go through the desert and the drought game and. And you have to make that decision specific to your market. Then there's a set of businesses obviously like travel, say, okay, Airbnb and travel, right? You go, ooh, travel difficult, painful. When does international travel open up? But on the other hand, and this is part of the startup and this gets part of the blitzscaling is Airbnb still can actually, in fact blitzscale a readaption because it has a network and the network has a bunch of different kind of entrepreneurs who are all like, each of the hosts is kind of their own different entrepreneur. And they can say, well, what's the way I can offer a product that could actually adapt to the new market? And they can do that much faster because they have this network of entrepreneurs, a platform, a marketplace, than other instances in the travel industry. And so they can go, okay, well, maybe what's going to happen is much less international travel for vacation, but maybe people will actually in fact say, look, I still need to go do something. And as long as the product has the right kind of biosphere safety, which may be better in every circumstance in a hotel, because it's not like a hotel is much more like a stadium event and I can still go and do the travel that I need to do, whether it's for entertainment, for work, or maybe there's certain kinds of use of the space that now a new marketplace becomes available to, where having a network of hosts helps you. So even within the travel space, there is that startup and Innovation clock that still plays within the blitzscaling landscape.

Got it. And within that, how do you determine if something just a temporary change in the way the industry is working or the preferences of consumers or businesses, or if it's actually going to be something that's long term and sustainable post crisis, post pandemic.

Well, the good news, entrepreneurship is the thing that's going to take us out of the recession. The society needs to be a thousand x behind entrepreneurship because precisely what entrepreneurial skill is, is predicting future product market fit. It takes work per area and you sometimes paper test things and you sometimes develop a good theory and test against smart people and sometimes you develop the product maybe in an MVP way, maybe in a full way in order to test it. But the answer of the changes, the high level, fairly obvious, which is now what's going to happen is by force majeure, a bunch of people have gotten exposure to a bunch of things they hadn't done before. So let's take a microcosm of events which is before people say, hey, come join the video event people like ah, wait for the real person eventually. I like seeing people in person. I'm familiar with it, I know how it fits within my schedule. And so I'm not going to bother trying to figure out these virtual events. Well now basically all these events are virtual events. Here we are, right? As opposed to like having a dinner evening at the Rosewood where everyone's at the dinner table and we're having this fireside chat while above that and then all the rest we're doing this on a, on a zoom call, making this work. And what happens is looking at these things and saying, well, okay, these behaviors are gonna stick and these behaviors are not gonna stick once the force majeure backs off. And it will back off and will back off eventually to 90 or 100%, it may slowly back off for the next few months. And you say, well which of these things stick and which of them don't? And I think like some of the things like when I kinda look at it is I think we're gonna have a lot more virtual events. I think we're have a lot more, you know, virtual education. I think these things people are going to say, well actually that worked. I actually think we're going to have patterns where distributed work works within companies a lot better. And so I've been studying a bunch more distributed work. I've been looking at these things saying, okay, that's going to be a, you're going to be more advanced in that pattern. Doesn't mean that all work's going to be distributed. The classic Silicon Valley is like, oh, because this happened, it's all going to be there. It's like we're all going to be in virtual worlds. Like no, but it's going to have advanced in that direction and it's going to be sticky to being shifted in that direction, like a color shift in that direction. That's going to be much more part of everything. And so those things I think are pretty obvious and pretty predictive. But then there's all bunch of other things which are kind of uncertain. Like for example, I could tell a story which in three years from now travel is back to 70% of what it was. And I could tell you a story that three years from now it's at 20% of what it was. And where it is in that range, I don't know. And what the growth curve from that will be, I don't know. How does that all play out? I think is what the specific entrepreneurial package is. And that's one of the reasons why network of entrepreneurs and working at this is part of what society needs. And then of course we're doing it.

Specifically per business you mentioned earlier, we're not sure whether it's going to be a V shaped recovery or L shaped or U shaped recovery. But are there certain green shoots or signs of optimism that you would look for in certain markets or industries to know that things are really, really coming back?

Look, a bunch of the weirdnesses in the next year are going to be like, I think the government has. Governments have learned not to do austerity measures to try to fix things. Like they're going to be applying stimulus until the electric shocks are going to be coming out of the body of the economy. And so what does that mean and how does that distort it and which things does that allow to go? I'm not by no means expert at predicting that, but I think that's something you will see. Generally speaking, people prefer to kind of be optimistic. They prefer to be working towards the future. And so you're going to be measuring where the green shoots are. And I think the green shoots probably are pretty similar to what they were before, which is like you see a pickup of engagement, you see a pickup revenue as per area. I don't know if there's any principles of measurement of when we're back to kind of some areas growing versus dying, you know, kind of like the frost is melting that I would offer specific kinds of measurements. There may be Some second order, as opposed to the first order effect of like you've just got engagement. It's like, okay, the general capital markets are flowing well again in terms of investment. And then that will probably mean that there's a bunch of employment and there's a bunch of, of other kind of things that go downstream from that. I wouldn't necessarily use the public market, which I think is misleading in volatility as it is now, but like kind of general capital flows and investments, that might be a weird measurement that might tell you there may be certain kinds of engagement or the patterns of change, how engagement changes, that may show green shoot. Generally speaking, I've been solving this on a company by company basis versus a general principles basis. But now I'll start thinking about if there is a general principle and I'm super curious if anyone has one.

Yeah. And do you think, you know, assuming we see the green shoes, things are starting to come back. If we got a therapeutic or a vaccine much faster than anticipated, would you expect certain sectors of the economy or industry to bounce back really fast from this? Or do you think some of these things, like travel for instance, will still be a delayed recovery?

For sure. On the vaccine, I think there's probably two, like, oh gosh, we're going to recover a lot faster than we thought one would be a vaccine. And there's a lot of work and shots on goal. But you know, by the way, the question is like, how good is it? And then can you get it to scale manufacture and a bunch of other things and then also by the way, reliable, better therapeutics that could be delivered on mass scale, that's another version within the vaccine side I think also like hope is not a plan. And you know, that seems to be what a lot of governments are doing and they're kind of get back to work and kind of economy side, which is, you know, disappointing. But you know, roughly speaking, one of the things that the experiment we're going to run this summer is, you know, and already a bunch of states in the US are already kind of saying, hey everyone, get back to work, let's go back to the bars and blah. And it's possible we will discover that the disease has already got a much more widespread basis that actually the more people are exposed and the denominator on the symptoms is lower and so the recurrence blip is small and that will be kind of equivalent to a similar kind of thing of oh, okay, we're not as continued to be a desperate risk. We are. And then I Think a whole bunch of things will open up because of that. Now that being said, I think right now planning for volatility is much smarter than planning for certainty that either of those two circumstances is there. Because some things, by the way, take years. And by the way, the micro things on the disease, like I was just doing some calls on this this morning. It's like, well, we don't even really know that this is the kind of disease that you actually can easily get a vaccine for relative to mutations now anyway, because you need a certain mutation rate and a certain kind of thing in order to have a reliable vaccine in order for that kind of thing to work. And we think we can, but again that's a probability of knowledge. Going back to volatility and planning.

How do you see the world economy changing over the next decade? I mean there's, there's a massive amount of stimulus going in the economy right now from the US government, other governments around the world. There's probably more, trillions more coming. What is this debt going to do for the economy and for the US Long term?

Well, we're certainly going to be testing a number of what were thought to be tried and true, like absolute truths within the economy. And we already started doing it a little bit. Like you start seeing negative interest rates and other kinds of things which you're like for anyone who's got a background in economics and probably everyone that's calling you can scratch your head and you look at it and go, that can't exist, that can't work, that can't work for any kind of time what's going on. And to some degree we're going to be testing those theories and hopefully not to our, to our extreme displeasure. You know, the obvious kind of things is I do think that trillions of dollars of stimulus is going to cause certain kinds of big shifts within the financial system. Now one of the things I was validating about a month or two ago, I actually don't think the dollar is going to lose soon the reserve world currency status. I think too much of the rest of the world still wants to invest in like have a reservoir currency and it's still the best thing to do. Despite all of the other things I do think you will see in different areas inflation. Will you get inflation? Yes. Will you get hyperinflation? I don't think in the dollar or in kind of the major world currencies. I do think what you'll see is a general distribution of a light flattening and devaluation of assets. Across the board, generally. Although averages can be misleading, because just look at the stock market today, you look at the tech companies, and they're valued at these strong rates. And that's because people say, well, whatever the future is, they're going to probably hold value. And that's one of the reasons why we in the Valley and we on this call are fortunate to be in the tech industry, because I think that will continue to be a place that will go, okay, those will be where growth is, those will be where your value is. Even though you say there's this flattening of the average, the tech industry will still generally do quite well. But the notion of we're bringing forward the clock where you say, well, how much debt can we load up in a way, and what happens with the fragility of the system with loaded debt? And does it become more fragile? Are there other things we need to do in order to become more antifragile? Anyone who says, I know for sure it's gonna be X, okay, there's no for sure.

What's your advice for the employees that are going through whiplash right now with changes in priorities, layoffs, changes in strategy, which may continue. Right. Given the uncertainty and the volatility as companies try to evolve to this situation. Any advice that you would give to founders on how to navigate that?

That's a great question. I mean, one of the reasons why Chris and I wrote Blitzscaling was because, you know, part of what happened in Blitzscaling, there's a lot of chaos within the organization. And one of the ideas was to have a book. There were multiple ideas how to do the strategy. What do we learn from Silicon Valley? How to do it ethically and responsibly with the right kinds of impacts on the society, but also to have something that you would pass out to employees and say, look, this looks chaotic. And here's the kinds of chaos that are actually good and predictive of success, and here's the kinds of chaos that are bad and unpredictive of success. And my guess is right now we need a similar kind of parallel, which is, obviously, it's not just that all chaos is good. Chaos is disorder and a bunch of other things that we need to pull together, have priorities, work well. But in volatility, you have a different form of chaos that you need to have a higher level of tolerance for. You need to build that into the organization and the work processes in order to operate. So employees need to understand, okay, this isn't crazy. I understand there's a Little bit more chaos, a little bit uncertainty. This kind of chaos is, okay, here's how I help, here's how I contribute, here's how I operate well. And then these kinds of chaos we need to drive out. And that map is probably different than the blitzscaling map. Doesn't mean it's antithetical or like counter, you know, like noise predictive. But there's a different kind of expectation and those kinds of things need to be there. Now, some of the obvious things that are true is that I think leaders need to spend more time leading. They need to be weirdly intimate. Like for example, when you say, well, we're doing these zoom calls, I need to be more personal even when I have 700 people on the call, and be more that way. Because you need to have more of that. You need to project more for the emotional connection, for the things that people do need to know to feel confidence in where the group's going and where the organization's going in order to drive that. I think those kinds of things are obvious things that are important in this arena that may not be as obvious in the, well, let's make sure that we are writing down things and we're doing good distributed tools and we're allowing for the fact that people are home with their families will mean uneven work schedules throughout the day. And how do you make that work in setting priorities and staying there? And how do you make the organization more adaptive when priorities may change back and forth somewhat more than you would otherwise want or fear?

Next question is just about. For a lot of people, especially children or people newly entering the workforce, like recent college graduates, this COVID pandemic is pretty traumatic, pretty disruptive. And so, and I'm sure they'll of course remember it for the rest of their lives. Are there any changes you see to behavior consumption patterns over time or these people's lives based on this experience?

Well, over time is hard to predict. Ultimately, things equilibrate to where the incentives and economic, like the over time incentives go. And if you can have a kind of free market entrepreneurial ecosystem working generally, that should lead to economic growth and that should lead to a bunch of different things. Now, I did publish a graduation speech for college grads, although it kind of applies to everyone. And roughly speaking, the high lines of what I said in the speech relative to college graduates and so forth, and this plays out is to say when you look back, classes that graduate in recessions versus classes that graduate in a bull market, class of the graduate in bull markets do A whole lot better. And it's literally can be a one year difference. And that's just true so far in history. And my guess is that it is what it is. And what I think that means is that current graduates need to say, well, what are the things to do that create that long term? Compounding that I have to spend extra hard work to lean into to make happen. And obviously one of the things that I was emphasizing was how do you build your network so that you have opportunity flow, so that you have intelligence flow about what's going on in terms of what are the new growth industries and so forth, and so that you stay adaptive to moving to where the industry flows are going to go. Like when is, what's the next Internet, what's the next migration to the cloud, what's the next these kind of things so that you can use that network both to get a good sense of it, get a good sense relative to you, and then move towards it. And one of the things about graduating in the pandemic is that it is very network squashing. The kind of things that people naturally do to build network is to all go certain kinds of schools, or all go to certain kinds of events, or all go to certain kinds of launcher companies and other kinds of things. And those all become much harder. So you have to invest a lot more work in doing that. And what's more, you have to be creative and think about how to do that. And so that was the essence of the speech, which is how to be optimistic in terrible times. Because by the way, reality does bite, but that doesn't mean it's game over. That just means you have to play smarter, play harder.

You've done a lot of investing in the frontier space, frontier areas. Consumer seems to be having a bit of a resurgence. If you could start one company now, Reid, what would you do? What space would it be in?

Well, like if I was a new entrepreneur looking at this space, all the same principles apply, which is you want to build companies that last decades to hopefully centuries. Decades is obviously the kind of target you can focus on given change and volatility, even over that time frame. And you want to see what give you one of the metaphors that I sometimes use for this. Marines take the beach, army takes the country, police governs the country. Country is a market as a way of doing this. And so you can look at, you have to look at like this is this could be a great country and this is a on beach approach doing it. Because by the way, if you don't have the on beach approach doing it, then you can never get to the country. So you have to kind of look at those three phases. We go, I have a strong polestar and I have a on beach approach as a way of getting there. And you know, and some of the same principles apply, which is we're in, you know, like massive shifts still to Internet and AI and cloud and data. And I gave a speech a decade ago at south by Southwest. The data was the web 3.0, not video as people were suggesting at the time. And I think a bunch of those pieces are still true. There's obviously a bunch of stuff coming in in synthetic biology and the translation of biology into bits and so forth. Not just physical atoms to bits, but also biological atoms and chemicals into bits. And you know, how does that matter? And that's interesting. Within the emerging tech, the purest thing is to still do a software startup, because software still has the right kind of capital allocations, whether it's consumer, enterprise, the purest small amount of capital in being able to product, market, test, grow to something that's really valuable. I don't want to discourage people from doing all the atoms and blended atoms and bitstarms because those are really important for society. But if you said as an entrepreneur, for an impact and a risk adjusted and an economics adjusted, I would do that probably right now. Bizarrely, it would either be this new world of, of productivity, the things like Figma and Coda and so forth, or games. Maybe Roblox is one thing. Not Roblox obviously, but that kind of arena. Although there's also communications. One of the funny things that I've noted over the last few decades is everyone goes, oh, all the communications tools are all done. And then it's like five years later, here's a new one. Because there is always an open space for new communications, whether it's it's enterprise or consumer as a way of doing it. And those would almost certainly be the areas that I'd be operating in collaboration, games and communications.

Yeah, interesting. Thank you so much, Reid. This has been really great. I hope you all stay safe and healthy in this environment.