Beyond Unicorns: Kanyi Maqubela on Identity, Innovation, and the Future of Venture Capital

The most impactful people in the world that I know are the ones that are telling explicit stories about who they are. Being able to tell a very concrete story about who you are is super, super, super important because identity is going to exist no matter what. And the danger is when you have a passive unconscious identity that's driving you. And if you have a consciously constructed one that you're engaging with, I think it'll allow you to self-critique and to be more intellectually honest and to make adjustments to your mental models as you move through the world with a lot more clarity.

Welcome back to another episode of Good Work. My name is Barrett Brooks.

I'm your host, and this is a podcast made up of long-form interviews with talented people who are using their careers to make the world a better place.

My guest today is Kanyi Maqubela. Kanyi is a partner and co-founder of a firm called Kindred Ventures, which is a venture capitalist firm at the seed stage who invests in companies who are looking to tackle hard societal problems and make the world a better place, which is exactly what the show is about. He's got a fascinating story of how he came to be in venture capital, how he came to be the kind of person capable of doing the work he does today,, and I would classify Kanyi as a scholar and a teacher.

He's someone who likes to deeply research the topics that are relevant to the investments that he's making.

He likes to share that information historically through his blog at kanyi.blog, and now mostly on Twitter where his handle is a 2-letter handle @KM. But we get into everything from the family story that has shaped him being born in apartheid South Africa and moving to Botswana and then eventually to the Northeast US. Coming from a long lineage of scholars and teachers in his family, and then many of the ideas and market forces that shaped him as a founder and now as a venture capitalist. I think you're really going to love this conversation. It has depth, it has nuance, it has many different topics that I think we can all relate to. And if we can't relate to, we can definitely learn from. Kanyi is a brilliant and thoughtful person.

He's a father and a husband, someone who I deeply enjoyed spending time with. And I think you're going to love the conversation we had. So let's get to it. Kanyi Maqubela, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

I think if I had really gone all in, it would have been Kanyi Maqubela, right? Is that closer to correct?

It's closer.

It's still very far, but it's closer.

I know.

I know.

Well, I'll get to the language piece in a moment, but I thought we'd start with something a little lighthearted, maybe serious for music fans and hip-hop fans. But based on your Twitter activity, I suspect you have an opinion on this. Curious, uh, what you think about the Kendrick and Drake beef and where we're at at this moment in time in it, and if you think it'll progress from here at all.

I don't think it'll progress from here because I don't think there's anywhere to go because Drake, at least in hip-hop terms, has been, has been laid to rest and buried, and I don't foresee a resurrection. My brief take on it is that Kendrick is a rap-centered pop artist, and Drake is a rapper. That's what happens when you have a rap-centered pop artist and a rapper competing. And Drake made a grave miscalculation that he was more of a rapper than he is, A, and B, that a rap beef would stay within rap. So God bless him for that.

Yeah. Yeah. So you said you think Kendrick is a rap-centered pop artist or Drake is?

Sorry, Drake is.

Okay. Okay. I was like, that's interesting take. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Okay.

Yeah. I'm with you on that. I got way down the rabbit hole and I mean, I had been keeping up with it the whole time. I grew up in Atlanta, as I mentioned to you. And so like East Coast Atlanta hip hop is kind of like what I came up on music-wise, which is quite different from anything involved in this whole deal. But I've been having fun keeping up with it because I never get a chance to listen to new music now because I have two kids and I listen to like, you know, all the things that parents listen to. But I got way down the rabbit hole on all the latest stuff the other night on YouTube after the kids were in bed watching the Juneteenth concert and just like everything that Kendrick did too. So if you don't listen to hip-hop, okay, let me just give like a brief little history. So Kendrick Lamar, Drake, and J. Cole had kind of been metaphorically wearing this joint crown at the top of hip-hop and the general kind of cultural eyes, I guess. And Kendrick did a guest appearance on a song and basically said, I know we've been talking about this like we're all three at the same level and we're not. I'm in charge here. And that spurred this whole beef that started with all three of them. And J. Cole is like, okay, my bad, I'm just kidding. I don't want to be a part of this. And then Drake and Kendrick went at it, which is like a huge part of hip-hop culture, are these beefs over time. It drives a lot of new music and creation. So Kendrick hosted this Juneteenth concert in LA. He brought everyone together. It was like 20, 30 artists, every gang affiliation, every neighborhood, everything, and had them all in one place peacefully hanging out, all united basically against Drake by the end of the thing. And it was wild. And this— and then right after that came out with this Not Like Us music video. Where he makes it look like the whole West Coast is both metaphorically and physically standing behind him against Drake in this video. And it's just remarkable. So that's the whole laid to rest thing. That's also my opinion. I think Kendrick won and Drake made a horrible miscalculation and he needs to go back to making dance music.

Interesting aside, it's probably worth, for the purposes of your audience, distinguishing is the way that I described it was that Kendrick is a rapper and Drake is a is a rap-centered pop artist. And the way you talked about it was, you know, talking about hip-hop culture. And so it's probably instructive to distinguish between rap and hip-hop.

Yeah.

Yeah. Those aren't the same thing.

Yeah.

And rap, uh, used to be referred to as MCing, is a mechanism of poetry typically over rhythmic music that is a particular musical communication form. Whereas hip-hop is a culture and hip-hop is a culture that encompasses rap, but is not exclusively rap. And so hip-hop is a superset and hip-hop has become a mainstream culture. And so the source of the miscalculation in my assessment is that strictly with respect to hip-hop, which means all of the things that are outside of rap, Drake is a supernova, or at least he was. He, was representative of the way that hip-hop has become mainstream. And Yasiin Bey, formerly known as Mos Def, actually commented on the fact that he'd, you wouldn't be surprised to hear Drake at an Urban Outfitters if you were walking in it, you know, in a city center because hip-hop was mainstream and Drake is the center of that. But rap, which is again a subset of hip-hop, is a different thing. And a lot of the hip-hop beefs of the '90s were rap beefs because those two things were a lot closer to linked. And the hip-hop culture actually was not that much more of a subset of rap than it is these days. So you could sort of almost use them interchangeably. But today, a rap beef is a different thing. And Kendrick got the rap community to represent the sort of true home of rap. And he just out-rapped the pants off of Drake because he's a better rapper. And that doesn't mean he's the king of hip-hop because hip-hop is a different thing. And so like, anyway, it's just important to distinguish those things for the purpose of the—

This is a perfect bridge here. Number one, to the audience, thank you for indulging me. This is one of the rare cases where I find someone else that also enjoys that genre of culture and music and has overlap in startups, which is quite rare, actually. So anyways, thanks for indulging me, Kanyi. Your teaching just then about hip hop and rap and some of the history there is an example of one of the core traits that I see you show up with over and over, whether it's in coaching founders, teaching classes, or just the way that you write and carry yourself on Twitter and in public. To me, you know, I'm always trying to build like a mental model or framework for my guests on this show. It's like, what are the things that have shaped this person into who they are today? And when I hear you talk about teaching being kind of imprinted on your DNA from your family history and some of these things, I see that come out in so many different ways. I thought about maybe titling this episode something like The Scholar Who Dropped Out of Stanford. Because so many of the ways I see you communicate are in this very scholarly, like deeply researched kind of way. And when you talk about your investment activity or your personal interest or anything I see you show up with, it's usually pretty well reasoned and pretty well researched. And so I wonder if you might just share a little bit about that history of how teaching, how that scholarly aspect of who you are and research came to be a part of you today.

And it's a part of me probably at the genetic and maybe epigenetic level, because it is really a part of my mother and father and their parents, and in both cases, their grandparents, and in some cases, their great-grandparents. You know, in South Africa and in Southern Africa in the 20th century, education was one of the core career path, core mechanisms for economic uplift, mechanisms for political contribution, participation, ultimately liberation. And so I have a deep lineage of people who were teachers and readers and writers in my family history on both sides. So a guy named John Knox Bokwe, who was my father's great-grandfather, maternal great-grandfather, was a Christian scholar and he was a composer too, but he wrote some Christian hymns in our native tongue and then wrote some English translations of some Xhosa as well, which is our native tongue. And his son-in-law, Zetki Matthews, was one of the first Black graduates of a university in Africa, one of the first Black principals of a university in Africa, and Nelson Mandela's teachers and so forth. And so there's like deep, deep, deep, deep history. My parents are both teachers and my dad was in his mom's chemistry class or biology class. My mom's dad was an English teacher, so it's just like everywhere in my family. And it is important, I think, to just note that that teaching legacy is not an aberration and is not random because so few other paths were available to Black Africans in the colonial and in South Africa's case, the apartheid 20th century. That, um, for somebody who wanted to get an education and pursue whatever ideals in society, political or otherwise, education was the vehicle by which to do so. And so it was part of how the sort of liberation struggle took shape as part of where so much of the protest movement started. The youth movements in the 1970s and, and the youth movements in the 1980s were oftentimes oriented around what you were going to be taught in school and why you're going to be taught the way you were taught. Uh, so it's a really, really important part of our history. So I sort of revere the teacher and, and think about the teacher a lot. And even growing up, I was constantly adjacent to a classroom, quite literally one way or another. You know, Take Your Kids to Work Day was going down the hall to my mom's classroom or going down the hall to my dad's classroom as I was growing up over the years. So, you know, it really is, is culturally a very important part of who I am. And so as a result, You know, it's kind of in the water and I can't help but revert to that mode because of the fact that it's so deeply in my upbringing and so deeply in, you know, in the cultures that I come from on both sides of my family.

Yeah, there's so much value to that. And I can just see the value that you end up providing to your community, to the founders you work with, to the general startup ecosystem by having that, you know, that lineage that's a part of you. Something that really was interesting to me that I think is is unique based on the folks I've had on the show is the degree to which you have clearly researched and understood your family's story or the myth of your family through history, myth in a kind of aspirational and affirmative way. And it's just really clear that that heritage and that background is important to you. You talk about it often, you know it well. And part of that, you know, you were born outside of Johannesburg in South Africa, under apartheid. And as I understand, he pretty quickly moved to Botswana, and eventually your family found your way to the U.S. Yeah. And I want to ask you about some different elements of this, but a huge aspect of this that I've heard you talk about is the social activism and the history there within your family. And either your great-grandfather or great-great-grandfather was one of the authors of the Freedom Charter in South Africa. It's an example of this. So I guess my first question on this kind of like family myth is How did you come to know all of this about your family, and what role has that played in how you formed a sense of identity as an adult?

When you're a third culture kid, which is a phrase that I borrow referring to existing in a culture that is not native to your parents and is not native to the environment that you're in, you kind of have to forge an identity, hand crank an identity. And everybody needs an identity. You can't operate in the world without an identity. Identities are where your value set sits. It's oftentimes what your politics either is reflecting against or is aligning with. Your identity is your anchor. And the way people form their identities oftentimes is very passive and very subconscious because it's just in the water. And that's what happens particularly, you know, when there's a a majoritarian identity that you can just attach to. But when you have mixed identities or when you're an immigrant or when you're moving between cultures, you have to form it. Everybody forms them differently, but there's always a subset of people who will form them by going into the past. And I actually oftentimes see this within groups of siblings where one sibling will maybe attach to the proxy identity that's closest to theirs as they're growing up, and that one will become the one they will adopt, and they probably won't feel fully at home in it because so often this type of person doesn't feel fully at home anywhere. And then another one, you know, might attach to their spouses or attach to their partners or attach to someone that they met in schools. And again, it can sometimes be a little bit, a little bit random and, and, and not fully aligned and they have to spend a long time reconciling that. And then there's the one that attaches to their past and really, really, really tries to connect with their past. And so I happened to be that sibling and, you know, I, I presented as if it's 3, case studies, and I don't mean to drag my brothers into this because they don't necessarily fit into one or the other of those, but I just found that I was very interested in who I was based on who I came from. And that was going to be a helpful way for me to shape my identity as I was growing up. And so it ended up being that because of the circumstances of our arrival here, because of the circumstances of watching my parents go through their careers and their lives as, you know, as new Americans and as, you know, as young adults, you know, forming their own identities in this country, I became really curious about what they had left behind and what they were bridging from. And that bridge ended up being very helpful and anchor to me. And the truth is, and this is true again of all immigrants and, you know, first-generation immigrants and even second-generation immigrants, and I always refer to myself as a half-gen because coming here when you're very, very young, like there's what you technically are and then there's what you functionally are, right? And so it's as though I were born here and my parents were immigrants. I, you know, feel like a little bit like I'm caught between worlds and I live in that liminal space that is ill-defined and I'm spending my life unconsciously or passively or consciously and intentionally aligning my identity so that I can move through my work and move through rearing children and move through building a life with my partner in a way that is internally consistent. And so that has just helped serve as an anchor for me. And incidentally, my wife, who is of mixed heritage, has done a lot of the same for her own purposes. And so we've found shared interest in just going back into our respective cultures and learning about them and going into each other's cultures and learning about those. And it can be an anchoring force. When people talk about identity politics, it gets this, this weird negative rap. I don't think it's negative or positive. It is objective. And it is— every single person has an identity, and those identities are intensely, intensely, intensely shaping of everything else that you do. And the way that you move through the world. And better understanding those and better understanding the relationship that somebody has with their identity and how that identity has been formed can actually give you, I think, a really better sense of how to interact with that person and how to interact with groups of people. So I think identity politics is both— gets a bad rap and is a very useful way of understanding where people are at. And, and immigrants and mixed race and mixed heritage people have sort of extreme need to investigate that. And so I, I suppose I benefit from that.

The thing that comes to mind as you're talking about kind of identity politics and also just how identity shows up in every aspect of life, whether it's work, family life, as a father, which we both are, or anything else, is at least in my life, the degree to which having an explicit story about who I am has given me more sense of power more sense of agency, and helped kind of illuminate from a different angle, almost like there's another light shining in that I can now see on the choices I make, the way I engage on issues, like all of these things. So, I mean, I guess my encouragement to anyone who might be listening is the more that I have engaged in telling an explicit story about my identity, the more I've been able to actively engage with that in different areas of my life versus just having it passively dictate my decisions or topics that I'm willing to go deep on or ideas that I'm willing to consider. I don't know to what degree that's been true for you, but certainly that's been the case for me.

Not only is it true for me, I think that the most impactful people in the world that I know are the ones that are telling explicit stories about who they are. And sometimes those are just stories. And so they're choosing a story and that story isn't necessarily attached to something historically real. But I think that being able to tell a very concrete story about who you are is super, super, super important because again, identity is going to exist no matter what. And the danger is when you have a passive unconscious identity that's driving you. And if you have a conscious and, and consciously constructed one that you're engaging with, I think it'll allow you to self-critique and to be more intellectually honest and to make adjustments to your mental models as you move through the world with a lot more clarity. And so I think, I think telling those stories is really powerful and important. So I, you know, a lot of the people in the venture world, in the professional world who, who I have seen become successful, some of whom I really admire and others of whom I just have seen become successful, have very, very, very clear stories that they tell about themselves and how that story about themselves fits into their view about the world. Very clear. And it can change, but it's explicit and they're constantly retelling it and they're retelling it to the public. And I think they're retelling it to the public oftentimes as a form of accountability so that they have to commit to it on some level. They're pot committed to it, right? And so they're not, it's not just a self-affirmation in the mirror. No, this is a, this is a commitment to everybody around me that this is This is my identity so that as and when I change it, I have to do it with intention.

Yeah, there's something powerful there that there's a danger in having that really strong sense of public accountability, right, to the identity that you form, because you can get trapped in it. You can get really trapped in what you perceive to be a set of ideas that are acceptable given the identity that you've claimed. And it can make it really hard to change your mind, especially in public. And so there's this interesting interplay there You know, like, I guess I've tried to make it a part of my identity that I'll change my mind if I feel like I'm wrong. And that that's the higher principle than anything south of that, that I want to like seek truth in its various forms. But there's a danger there that you can get kind of trapped into a set of beliefs or a set, a way of being as a result of that. So there's this interplay there of like being willing to engage with ideas that actively challenge this identity you've claimed, if they're true, and what that means, you know, about shifting that over time. So I really appreciate you calling that out.

You know what's lucky about my particular line of work is one of the cultural values that in my community is espoused is flexible thinking and willingness to change your mind. It's kind of trendy. And I think it's a very, it's a very convenient, productive trend. There's a trope or an aphorism that a lot of people adopt, which is strong opinions loosely held. And you know, you're smiling knowingly because yeah, exactly that trope. Right. And I think it's actually helpful. Because it means that people feel a greater sense of being able to commit to ideas in public, even if that idea ends up bearing out incorrectly, because there is something powerful about, about standing for something with intention and explicit intention. If you are willing to, to be wrong and to be publicly wrong. And I think that being able to create protective environments for that is important. One of the things I actually think especially in the last, call it 5 to 8 years, that has become somewhat of a weakness of the technology community and, you know, and the venture-first technology community is there's a little bit more religion with a maybe lowercase r. So a set of beliefs that should be right and a point of view that this is how things should be done and how one should be approaching politics, personal politics, professional politics, business strategy, the interplay between those that, you know, to create a sort of set of high priests whose ideas you're supposed to just adopt and whose ideas you're supposed to accept because they're taken down from the scrolls from heaven rather than being able to formulate your own. And I really love and miss and almost like wistfully recall the idea of the misfits at the margins who are, who are free to think what they think. Being the sort of soul of the technology industry. You even see it on some level in San Francisco. Like San Francisco used to be the home of the beatniks and the home of the queers and the home, like these are the people who were, you know, who were cast aside outside of mainstream society, at least, you know, structurally and the home of even hippie culture. And now San Francisco is the home of the mainstream money-making tech engine. And you can feel that change in people's willingness to truly be independent thinkers and to have like random fringe thoughts, right? Now they have the fringe thought that the high priest has, which is not fringe thought, right? So I do think that there's an interesting way that as the culture evolves, it can actually affect people's safety around being who they are and being independent and thinking for themselves. Yeah.

Yeah. There's this really interesting thing going on in the kind of these spheres we're talking about right now at this moment in time as we're approaching another election year. And there are these like group chats, some of which are kind of becoming public stages for people to name and claim their belief systems. And yeah, for kind of like— I like this high priest language— the high priests of the startup ecosystem to stand on stage and proclaim what you should believe on one side or the other, you know. Honestly, I just had to leave them. I had to leave these groups because it felt so— the dynamic felt so antithetical to what I know this or what I hoped this would become as a kind of like way of being centered around founders, around helping people create lasting change that makes the world better through business and all of this that I think we're, we're aligned on. I got pretty bummed by it, to be honest. I just had to disengage because, you know, I don't want to feel like I'm supposed to believe a certain thing in order to be part of a community. And I don't know that it's net positive for the future of where we're going. In terms of just like dictating the way that we should engage on different issues and ideas. I think the debate is really what we're— we should be looking for and seeking.

Here's my hopefully optimistic take on it, which is that I think it is cyclical. And I think that the cycle goes, we are in a creative culture first, and the creative culture is typically populated by the fringe and populated by people who are oftentimes creators or creatives out of necessity, either necessity because they're spurned from mainstream society or necessity because they just happen to be interested in some fringe area. That thing becomes mainstream because creative culture is very potent so that it becomes commercial culture. And when you're in commercial culture, proximity to power, it's in the capital with the capital C, right? Like in the way you act when you're in the capital, you think of all the shows where there's quote unquote the capital. It's a very different behavior. And so then I think a whole bunch of people decamp, you know, for a place of safety from the capital. And then a new creative culture emerges. And then a new commercial culture emerges and rinse repeat. And, and I think a little bit about it in the context of like creative communities and gentrification in real estate and in cities.

Yeah. Yeah.

Like we can use like Manhattan as an example. Like, you know, the Lower East Side is, is filled with tenements and then there's all these immigrants that come and then there's another wave of immigrants that come and and there's a lot of people who are on the margins of so-called traditional society, but that creates this creative culture and that creative culture all of a sudden becomes really appealing. So then all the money comes into the creative culture, it becomes hyper-commercial. And so then they all leave, right? And then they, once they all leave, then the commercial culture becomes stale and then the real estate goes down and that's where the people want to go back in just because they're looking for cheap rent. I think there is some cyclical elements to that, which we're still coming off of the sort of absolute high points of commercial culture in like San Francisco-oriented and maybe even West Coast-oriented tech from 2000 and maybe '15 to 2022-ish that I think, you know, we're gonna cycle into a new era of creative culture that I'm really excited about. And a lot of it's going to be a rejection of, and people escaping what they feel is the cultural confines of commercial culture gone, gone too far.

I love that mental model for it. It resonates with me even just like with this project and some of the things I'm spending my time on right now. But, uh, it also makes me think about my time at ConvertKit and being so early in what we now call the creator economy. I mean, we were early enough to the point that like, I'm looking up at my shelf and at this coffee table book we made called I Am a Blogger and a series of mini documentaries about people earning their living online as bloggers and podcasters and YouTubers before, not just before people recognized that as viable or before kids wanted to be that when they grew up, but when it was like actively seen as a very, very weird decision about how to spend your time and creative talent. And the fact that most people literally did not have a person in their life they could describe the way they earned a living to and have them understand it at that time. And now, you know, we've lived through this wave of creator economy. You know, the big name, big capital names got into the game. And to your point, it massively commercialized this thing. That was previously very fringe. And it's just been fascinating to see that happen and for it really to like fractionalize the attention and where people hang out and how people get their information. And so it's, it's just interesting to be able to immediately apply the mental model to something that I've seen firsthand in that way.

I mean, influencer, influencer, I think right now is the most popular future job for the Gen Z in America. Creator economy went from, I can't describe it to anybody I know, to the number one most highly sought after job. Everybody wants to be an influencer. And I know those things aren't the same, but they come theoretically from a similar place. And even the language adjustment from creator economy to influencer economy is in and of itself symptomatic of the move to commercial culture.

Yeah. Back in 2016, one thing I noticed is that the macro level is With that creative culture changing and the way platforms have changed, I noticed that you went from really being essay and blog-centric to now being more Twitter-centric, and that's where most of your ideas get shared in the short-form format. And I've lamented publicly and privately the loss of something in that, that not for you in particular, but for culture, that the way I can sit and read an essay of yours from 8 years ago does not exist in the same way on Twitter because it's not meant for that. You know, it's just not meant for these long-form, fully shaped ideas, or what I call wisdom acquisition, and engaging in debates about substance. It's really hard to do on a platform like Twitter because it's meant for short, quippy, and even when it's trying to be long-form today, it's still hard to engage with in the same way. It's like you lose it in your timeline, you got to click through. It's just not the same. So anyways, I'll just note that maybe we can come back to it if we want to. But I was reading back through your essays is the point of this. And you wrote one right after the 2016 election. And you were talking about sitting down with a couple of founders who were really asking for your advice on how do we engage in this within our companies? What is our role as leaders, as founders, as people influencing our teams, as people with personal beliefs outside of our teams, as people with roles in our community? And you were talking about some of the advice that you gave them. And since then, a lot's changed, obviously. I mean, it's been 8 years. We're entering another election cycle. There's been this kind of backlash against woke and ESG and a lot of the things that were much more mainstream at the time. And I wonder how your advice might change, if at all, today for a founder who's engaging with some of the same inner challenges. You know, in the face of people like Brian at Coinbase being revered for the way that they've kind of tamped down and shut down these types of conversations. And I'm still trying to form my opinion on this. Like, I've gone back and forth on it myself. So I just wonder where you sit today and what advice you might give to a founder that's dealing with some of that.

I would hope my advice doesn't change too much. And my perspective is that a lot of what happened from 2019, but frankly, from the pandemic to now has been hyper, hyper, hyper reactionary. And it has been hyper reactionary with a pendulum swinging. And I don't want to sound too dramatic about it, but a global pandemic where you had literal high priests baptizing people by water gun. Broke a lot of people's brains. It really did. And so I don't place this on, you know, on Trump or on the United States narrowly. And that's a separate thing that I'll, that I'll come to. But I do think that we've been in this hyper reactionary moment. And I think that there was an element of collective insanity that drove the largest peaceful protest in American history. And I think that there was an equally strong moment of collective insanity that drove the reaction to that. So I think we are still normalizing the pendulum from the hyper-reactive moments of emotions gone wild and almost like the VIX index of culture, just going haywire whereby being able to engage in nuanced, rational thought about the issues of the day has been replaced with an extreme amount of reactionary emotion.

Yeah.

And it's my view that a lot of the language around so-called woke culture in, call it, second half of 2020 and the so-called anti-woke culture in 2021 and 2022 come from a similar emotional source. I'm less interested in, in any of that. I think that if you look at 20-year and 30-year arcs on issues of any kind, you can draw certain conclusions that can allow for more nuanced discussion and can allow for, for less reactionary opinions. And so specifically in relation to 2026 election, I'm of the belief that a lot of the structural impediments to progress on behalf of certain groups, particularly my demographic, the Black person in America, the Black American, are only making halting forward progress and need to be addressed with persistent contribution from everybody and persistent active engagement. You put that in the balance of what happened between 2020 and 2024, and it feels like something in the reactionary realm, but it's not intended as that. I'm of the view that 3% of the unicorns that have been minted in the last 14 years coming from Black and Latino founders is just, is just way too low. And we can figure out ways to make that higher. I'm of the view that a lot of the statistics that point to, you know, my demographic being consistently excluded from a lot of the economic spoils of this country is a 20, 30-year arc that needs to be addressed. And I'm happy to be consistent about that. And I think that once we start talking about the word woke as it was used starting in the second half of 2020, woke or anti-woke, I lose interest. That's not what I'm interested in particularly, you know. And so I think that there's nuanced, hard conversations about the right way to set policy, the right way to set business culture, operating culture. To balance the goals of solving for inequality and solving for equity and solving for extremely high performance and solving for dynamism at the national level, solving for dynamism at the global level and at the local level. These are rich and nuanced debates that smart, thoughtful people can and have and have continued to have. And then there are macro conversations that are fraught with emotion, that are penduluming back and forth in the midst of extreme historic once-in-a-generation psychic and quite literal physical trauma that's been put on our population.

Yeah, no, you and I occupy a similar headspace on that. You know, if I could, if I could set just one political agenda item that I wish we could focus on as a country, it would be the depolarization of everything. It would be the coming back to a smaller pendulum swing where we can debate policy, we can debate ideas, we can debate priorities. And do it without demeaning each other and without assuming that we all have ill intent and that we can hold what are seemingly opposing truths in each of our hands and say, how do we make these things both work? Because they both matter, you know.

Gerald said that's the sign of a first-rate intelligence. Yeah, you can hold opposing truths in your mind at the same time. And yeah, the Dickinson, he said, do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. And I think that that's fine. It's a complex world. And there are trade-offs all the time. And I lament the lack of nuance that so many conversations seem to fall into because of the fact that we're now living in this, in this meme era, in this ad hominem era where everything is about driving clicks and everything is about driving engagement. And we're all sort of on this memetic stage together. And we're also in the midst of, you know, this memetic stage doing it in the in the context of like these crazy world-changing health and like psychological events that, you know, that serve as the backdrop. I blame all Khan on COVID. And I think it's rational to zoom out and say like, well, gosh, you know, if you imagine there being a mass death event globally and a mass illness globally, all sorts of stuff in culture, you know, our psychologies are going to get screwy for a little bit, like, duh, on some level, right? I stay out of that. At least now, because I'm realizing that a lot of it is, is reactionary in a way that I don't feel the emotional reactions to. And I would hope that a lot of the suggestions that I gave to a leader in 2016 would be the same suggestions that I would give them now. Again, reflective of my personal views about how to diversify the halls of power, my personal view about how to balance moving forward on certain issues and moving forward on other issues, which sometimes may seem to be in conflict with each other and that other people might take a different path and that's fine. So yeah, that's how I, that's how I slice it, you know?

Yeah, no, I appreciate that. I think it's a, you know, you get these examples, reactionary examples held up to prove points about founders and the way they're approaching these things. And, you know, I think like most issues like this, the reality is that probably most founders really struggle with it and it's a really hard thing to try and answer for themselves and there's not a clear, correct way to go about it. And I'd like to create space for on this show and in the places I occupy more open conversation and dialogue about how to approach it in a way that's not either/or, you know, but that can thread needles of nuance and understanding within organizations. So that's why I asked the question. I struggle with that too, with promoting the show. You know, I have very thoughtful and deep conversations with very smart people and actively try to avoid things like incendiary clips and things like that. And it's very disadvantageous for growing audiences and the environment. So, it's just an interesting challenge. There's two places I want to go from here. One is I'd love to just get some of your reflections on not how COVID shaped culture necessarily, which we've just talked about, but how COVID reshaped the kind of venture and startup landscape. And there's not a highly elegant way to ask the question. I want to ask you about the reality that you occupy space in a system of venture capital startups and Silicon Valley, San Francisco, where you are unique by being Black. And I want to talk about the ways in which that influences your work and how you show up. And so I wonder if one of those directions feels more interesting in this moment.

We can do both. Why don't we start with COVID and VC? After the global financial crisis and the recovery where everywhere in the world there wasn't secular growth coming from the economy, central banks had to take interest rates down to zero to stimulate investment and hope that they can get that growth to induce recovery. There was a sort of reset of a cycle, and it was a half reset in the tech cycle in a sense, because the dot-com crash had happened in 2002. And so there wasn't quite time for a full reset, which is important to the story. I tend to believe that most systems that are organic systems have cyclical natures to them, and certainly markets have a cyclical nature to them. And so we ended up in a boom cycle, but because of this central bank manipulation, the boom cycle lasted so much longer. In 2013, I remember very, very smart people saying, we are in the 8th inning, the bottom of the 8th inning of this boom cycle. We might go into extra innings, but we're at the end of the game. Really smart people, macro people, venture people throughout asset classes. We didn't go extra innings. We played a whole 10, full 10 years, right? We had a whole, a whole game, right? We went to 9 extra innings. By 2016, 2017, other smart people were saying, wait, it's different this time. By 2018, people were saying, wait, the free money store is permanently open. Maybe it turns out that there is no secular growth and maybe secular stagnation, secular stagnation is a fundamental thesis of the maturing economies that we're going to have to contend with forever. And maybe there is no good place to put money except for in high-growth speculative assets forever. So what COVID did was it took us to the very, very top of that mountain because of some totally exogenous force where all of a sudden one of the more speculative parts of the economy, which is the tech-driven internet ecosystem, suddenly took center stage and the whole future was pulled forward because of the fact that we all had to do things remotely. That then sort of tipped off the asset bubble that was finally going to represent the end of that moment. And oftentimes it's an asset bubble that ends the cycle that represents the top of a cycle. It pops and then the cycle resets. But there hadn't really been an asset bubble that had sufficient— honestly, that was sufficiently, you know, speculative and aggressive and high velocity as to catalyze that. And so what COVID did that's probably healthy for the nature of markets is it gave us a chance to do the reset that we always have to do. After way too long. It was the longest boom cycle in the history of probably recorded capitalism and maybe in the history of capitalism, at least modern capitalism, right? And, you know, some people will say that in tech, you know, from 2002-ish until 2021, that's a 19-year cycle. And there's a lot of extraordinarily distorted effects that come into a market under those conditions. You know, and we can talk about those effects at Nauseam, but some of the simple ones are a lot of the market participants behave in ways that they wouldn't behave in a normal cyclical environment. So a lot of the participants became very FOMO-driven. A lot of the participants became intensely next valuation driven. A lot of the participants in the same breath became current valuation insensitive, you know, and somebody jokingly said, you know, this is a macro person, but it was true in startups too. If you had told me that in 2009, the right strategy was to find the highest priced assets and keep buying them as the price went up for 10 straight years, you would've been fired from every investment committee in the world and you would've made the most money. That's distorted. Yeah, that's clearly not normal. That's not how investing behavior should work. And I think it was a boon for technology mainstreaming globally and for internet adoption and mobile adoption, which was one of the centers of that cloud adoption, which was the other center of that, you know, proliferating across business and across consumer culture around the world. But in terms of venture culture, it created immense distortions. Some of those distortions, we are cultures that are, that are sticky. That we haven't unwound and are going to be really hard to unwind, may require another asset bubble to un— popping to unwind. And so we've got funds that are too big and stay big. We've got investors that are too valuation insensitive and too confident that there's another valuation right around the corner that they can fundraise off of the strength of. We've got so much FOMO-driven culture, so much consensus-driven culture. We have So many people that think that venture is paint-by-numbers rather than looking at technology, underlying technology, and being willing to venture, which often means cold and alone, into the future. And I am of the view that that activity is going to come back. It's not quite back yet, but it's going to come back. And COVID was the first productive reset moment. For that starting to come back. But there's probably another reset moment that's going to have to come in the future. And I don't know how far in the future. I don't want to call the bottom of the eighth inning again. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know.

So I want to, I want to know one thing as we shift, right? So let me, let me, I want to kind of wrap that one up and then I want to tee you up for the second topic. So because I did the horrible thing of asking two questions at once, but it was with the intent of offering choice and direction. After I left ConvertKit, you know, I was kind of like part of the Great resignation for reasons of burnout and leading through all of, all of this period of time. I got back into startups for a little while, cause I thought maybe, okay, maybe I'm refreshed, maybe I'm ready to go. Maybe it was just the particular circumstances of my role in the company and being in it for a long time. And I got back in and it was at a very well-funded startup that was kind of right in the middle of all of these trends. It had raised in a world where valuation didn't matter. Round size was massive and was bridging into the time of more sensitivity and those things not being a given at all times, especially in the space that we were in, more like hardware, hard tech, climate tech kind of world. And I don't know how that turned out. I'm not there anymore and I'm not sure if they fundraised or if they're in the middle of it or whatever. But it's interesting that there was a whole class of startups that were in the middle of building as that shift happened. Or as it started to happen in certain sectors of the technology space. And you're probably right that it's still there, but I do think a lot of behavior changed. There was a lot more fear-driven decision-making, maybe even more consensus-driven decision-making, it seemed like, in kind of the general venture class. It'll be interesting to see how that does change, whether there's another correction, whether there's kind of new segments of technology that take it off. Like obviously right now it's AI that's kind of everyone's consensus-driven move at the moment, which is in some ways unimaginative at this point. But anyways, we don't have to get way off into that. So it's just interesting to, to kind of hear your reflections on how it started to change and what might be to come there. So the way I wanna tee up this next topic though is one of the phrases I heard you use to reference your story throughout conversations I've listened to you have is American African. And either due to ignorance or maybe your uniqueness, I had never heard it said that way. Obviously everyone's heard African American. And I wondered if you might share some of the origins of referring to yourself as an American African and why that resonates for you. And then how it relates to this topic of being Black in venture, being Black in Silicon Valley, being Black in startups, and how you see that shaping your work right now.

Talked a lot about identity in this pod, and so I'll maybe make a quick comment about identity. There's certain traditions and shared stories and shared histories that tie identities together. And then there are ways that you fit into the world today, independently of those shared traditions and shared stories that tie identity together. So Christians, let's just say evangelical Christians fit into the world in a set of ways because of how the world is shaped for them. But some evangelical Christians are Black Nigerians, some evangelical Christians are white Georgians, some evangelical Christians grew up poor, some evangelical Christians grew up rich, right? Some evangelical Christians are descendants from kings and others descendants from slaves. And so identity has nuance, right? And there's dualities and, and beyond in what makes an identity. And so it would be inappropriate and incorrect for me to claim the African American identity because there are elements of the history, the traditions, the stories, the joys, the celebrations, the traumas of the African American in the United States going back to the 1600s that I am not party to, that are not my story, which is not reflected in my genetics and my epigenetics. You can even hear it in my voice sometimes, right? So it would be inappropriate for me to claim that identity because it isn't mine. And it's a unique one. And it's a very important one, particularly in this country. There's being Black in America, which is the identity that everybody else is going to put on me. When I'm standing on the subway in New York City, I'm Black in America. It doesn't matter who I've descended from. It doesn't matter what we cook at home. I'm Black in America. So I do think that it's constructive, and I hope that it's respectful to separate those. I also want to acknowledge that there's nuance and pain on both sides of that, because as soon as you start separating and as soon as you start distinguishing any groups, problems arise, right, and difficulty arises. But it also is the reality, some groups are different from others, right? I'm a 5th, maybe 6th generation English writer. I'm a 6th generation African who has a scholarly bent, and that makes me different than somebody who is, you know, maybe a 1st generation version of that or 2nd generation version of that. I also I don't have certain ties to the land in this country. I don't have claim to the land in this country, you know. And so in ways that are constructive and useful, in ways that are exclusionary, there's difference there. So just first that. And to tie back to Kendrick and Drake, there was a thread of Drake being of, of mixed race heritage that was part of, you know, there's a relevant vein of critique Oh yeah. And you know all about that. Like Drake didn't speak to the Black population. Drake was a culture vulture on the Black population. So stealing the parts of the Black culture that were convenient for him and leaving behind the others. At least that's how the critique went. While other people might think of it as Drake was excluded because he wasn't full Black. He didn't count, right? This stuff permeates everywhere. And so it's not unique to me or my experience, but I want to just treat it properly. So that's part of why. I approach it that way. Being Black in venture capital is relevant to that. And there's other layers too. I had the good fortune of going to a school in New England called Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, which is a lovely private school that has produced everyone from George W. Bush to Humphrey Bogart and everywhere in between. Paul Revere designed the seal, right? So again, an OG blue blood American school, which I loved. And there are as many people in venture capital who are Black from my high school as there are from public schools in 40 of the American states.

Damn.

So just pause on that for a second to give it some reflection. But what it speaks to is that who are the doors open for? Why are those doors open? And what does it mean for those doors? To be opened by the people who get the chance to is in and of itself a whole podcast. And I feel a great measure of humility and good fortune that I'm afforded these opportunities, but also awareness and self-awareness that I was given a whole set of privileges that many people haven't been given. And I sit on a bed of those privileges in my ability to even have this conversation with On the other hand, you know, I have an opportunity and a responsibility and a burden of being the only one in the room all the time. And it's an opportunity to rise above and to just kick some ass, to be honest, and to differentiate, to be honest. It's an obligation because I better kick some ass. I'm representing a demographic oftentimes whether or not I want to, you know, and it's a burden for that reason too. But it's in that order, an opportunity, an obligation, and a burden. You know, it does give me like extra cognitive work when I'm in any one of these rooms. And I gotta be thinking about all three of those things instead of just thinking about getting from point A to point B. And I gotta be translating. And sometimes I have trade-offs that I have to make around whether to take a step up the ladder or to focus on this other ladder, which had a rung that needs to be repaired, or to go down and build another rung for the ladder that I'm already on. And, you know, and these are trade-offs that, that weigh heavily and, you know, on the day-to-day from, you know, from the investment committee meeting all the way out to, you know, to the 10,000-person conference. Right. So it can be distracting. And I understand, respect, and empathize with people who want to cut that noise out and be like, I'm going to put my blinders on and I'm going to just be a VC. I'm not going to be a VC vis-à-vis my identity because that's just going to slow me down and it's just going to get in the way. I'm just going to be a VC. Back to your Brian Armstrong point. And my response to them is, no, you're not. You're just not going to consciously engage with all the parts of your identity that are inevitably going to be deeply woven in how you're making your decisions day to day.

Deeply.

And I want to do it consciously. I want to do it with intention. That's what's most important to me because I'm not going to be able to avoid it.

Yeah, it's very thoughtful. You know, you don't make it the center of any conversation I've heard you have on podcasts. You know, I don't want to say like it never happens in your life, obviously, but in the conversations I've listened in on, you know, it's not the central theme, it's not what you're showing up to do. But I also hear you talk about it in this way, that you take it seriously. You also want to consciously engage, that it is a part of how you conceptualize your work. It's like, yeah, there's an opportunity here. And I also hear, yeah, I mean, that burden, I can only imagine. I can only imagine.

Well, to be clear, the burden is the least part.

Like, the burden—

listen, I have an amazing job and I get to do awesome stuff with awesome people all the time. So I'm good. You know, like, yeah, yeah. Cry me a river on some level on the burden part, but it is distraction. And here's the, here's the difference. And here's, I think, the nuance. Maybe to come back to some of the prior points we were talking about, which is like, you can take something personally without making that thing your person. So my identity is very, very, very, very, very important to me. But that particular part of my identity isn't the only thing I have to offer.

Yeah. Yeah.

And it's not the only thing I have to talk about. And that doesn't mean that it's not the most important driver of my feelings, but it's not the only thing I have to offer. Just like nobody's identity in any one facet is the only thing they have to offer. It would be absurd for me to say, hey man, like as a guy with glasses, talk to me about anything. Right? Or as a white man, talk to me about anything. Or as a whatever, like it's just, it loses the point. Right. Like, as a person with all these interesting things, let's just have a discussion about what the hell is going on. That's the right way to engage the world. And so that's why I try to move through the world that way. Yeah, yeah.

No, I love it.

It's part of—

I mean, it's part of the intent of the show is to pick these things apart.

Right.

And like, let's, let's look at all these different aspects. Let's look at Kanyi as the investor. Let's look at Kanyi as the scholar. Let's look at Kanyi as the father. Let's look at Kanyi as the American African, like that, because it shapes this humanity and how you show up in the unique way that you view the problem spaces that you engage with through. Last week I had on a guy named Benji Backer who recently wrote a book called "The Conservative Environmentalist," and that was a unique conversation for totally different reasons, but he's dealing with these identities of being a conservative, engaging with working-class communities across the country, but doing it through the lens of reversing and halting climate change. As a conservative political person. And so it's like creates all these new and different dynamics. And this is, I guess it's like my particular either neurosis or gift is wanting to have the conversation about all these aspects because so often, yeah, it's like you get put on a stage and someone wants to say, do this version. And I don't want that version. It's like, let's do all the versions. It's why it's 2 hours, you know, because I want to be able to do all the versions.

It's like you're the unplugged stage where every other stage is like, play the hits. And here it's like, choose whichever instrument you're most comfortable with.

Yeah.

Just play the songs you want to play. And it's natural, by the way, and I don't blame any audience curator, any storytelling curator for asking their guests and asking their sources of content to play the hits. 'Cause people wanna listen to the hits. They're the hits for a reason. People understand the hits. There's this concept in design called the Maya Principle, which is like most advanced yet available. And people don't wanna go too far outside of what they already kinda already know. Like there's so much psychological and emotional and physiological comfort in the familiar. Like the brain actually like is in a safer space. Like there's less cortisol production, right? When you're in familiar territory. And so it, makes sense, and, and I, and I buy it. But the cost is that it reduces people.

Yeah, agreed. We've been ripping here, so we're a little bit past the halfway point. I want to take a moment to, uh, break here. When we come back, I want to talk about mysteries versus secrets. I want to talk about some of the things you might think are coming over the next decade in startups and venture and technology. And I want to explore just some of the other ideas you've shared in your writing, including maybe touching on another aspect of your identity that I think we might share, on Christianity and its role in your in life. So that's what we have to look forward to. And as listeners will know by now, we often don't get to all of it. So we'll see where we go. Hey, it's Barrett.

You've reached about the midpoint of this conversation. And while we take a little break for station identification, as they say, I want to tell you about two things. First of all, I write a newsletter every Saturday for founders and creators who are leading teams and companies to make an impact through your work. It has three sections in it. The first one is a mini essay from me. Based on my executive coaching work with founders and creators about how to lead well. It has 3 long-form essays or links from around the web that will help spark new thoughts to help you lead better. And it has one quote from a meaningful book that I often find myself recommending to friends and clients. All the feedback I've gotten so far is that it hits exactly on the kinds of issues that founders, CEOs, and creators are facing every day in their work.. So if that sounds appealing to you, make sure to go to my website at barrettbrooks.com and you can subscribe right at the top of the homepage. That's B-A-R-R-E-T-T-B-R-O-O-K-S.com. The second thing I wanna tell you about is that my day job, I actually do have a day job. I'm not just a podcaster yet, is as an executive coach. As I just mentioned, I work with founders of Series A startups and later, and with creators who are doing at least a million dollars as a solo founder and are now thinking about growing a team. The uniting commonality between the founders and the creators I work with is that you've reached a point in your business where you know you're gonna make it.

Actually, you're doing quite well.

And now the question is, how much do you wanna scale? And what are the leadership challenges that you're gonna face along the way? This work is based on both my training as a coach and in my work as an operator in growing my old company ConvertKit from $3 to $30 million in annual revenue. If you're a founder or creator who might benefit from coaching, or if you know someone who's looking for a coach, I'd love for you to check out my site and my coaching page at barrettbrooks.com/coaching. You can learn everything about how I work as a coach and also fill out a form to have an exploratory conversation if that sounds interesting to you. All right. That's all I got for you right now. There's no sponsors for the show at the moment, so consider me your sponsor. Let's get back to the conversation for the second half. All right.

We're back for the second half. It's probably more like the second or the last 40%. There's so much I want to get to here, but one of the things that fascinates me about you is The way that you talk about your interests and the way that you clearly dive deep into different areas depending on your investing activity, your natural draws, and any other influences in your life. And so I could come at this from a few different angles, but I actually just wonder if there are any rabbit holes that you're down at this moment in time and kind of how you found yourself there as representative of the kinds of ways you find yourself down these learning paths.

Right now I am spending a bunch of time trying to think about the intersection between neuroscience and interfaces, and I suppose neurological sciences and health. So on the former of those, we've been trapped in the pictures under glass paradigm since the iPhone 2007. So We're approaching 20 years of pictures under glass as the primary way that we interface with the internet.

Did you come up with that term, by the way? I've heard you talk about it a few times.

Brett Victor was the person I first heard use it. And I heard it in a talk that he gave and it totally stuck. I don't even know who Brett Victor is, but I loved the talk and I was like, okay, well, I don't think that that's where the road ends. I just don't think that's where the road ends. I think that, you know, I think that's where the road, if anything, begins because it was the place where computing first became truly ubiquitous because of the mobile device and the smartphone. But ubiquitous computing is the start of the computing story. So in some ways, everything up until ubiquitous computing where everybody was doing computing for more of their day than not was a prelude. But now that we're in the story, What does it mean to interface with compute? I'm really interested in the science fiction concepts of terraformation and terraformation for varieties of purposes. Terraformation in the sort of cypherpunk and the idea of creating these hypermodern but green cities is interesting to me. So like actual physical terraformation, terraformation in the in the concept of emergent intelligence in matter. And so how do you actually get the emergent intelligence in matter to emerge? And terraformation in the concept of what is our civilization going to be structured like 1,000 years from now? And I think we're just starting to scratch at the surface of a lot of those concepts. And one interesting trajectory is how do we make computing not just ubiquitous via one interface, but ubiquitous through every interface? And so I'm just thinking a lot about that. It's just got my, it just captures my curiosity and it hits philosophy and the religion and the space and the very, very long-term and cities and environment and all these things that I find to be really interesting and health. So that's one thread that has inspired my curiosity in so-called BCI. And, you know, we can go deeper into BCI if that's of interest. But the other is, is long COVID inspired actually. And I didn't have long COVID, but I was one of the people where when long COVID originally started being talked about, I cast it aside and minimized it and didn't fully believe it. And I've done a 180 on that. Fibromyalgia and these other sort of neurological conditions or neurological cardiovascular conditions that are invisible and are sort of like the body gaslighting itself are super, super, super fascinating to me. And I think increasingly that they are very, very, very, very widespread right now. So I went from thinking like, oh, Long COVID is, is not really a thing to, oh my gosh, Long COVID is really a thing and it's all freaking over. So I'm curious about more ways to, to gather data from the brain and to gather data from brain activity and to correlate it with other biomarkers in the body and to use that information to identify novel diagnoses. Mm-hmm. You know, neuroinflammation, which, you know, as the last 7 or 8 years has been getting a lot of steam in, in a lot of academic circles as being an input for a lot of disease indications down the road. Is so, so poorly understood. 10 years ago, nobody was talking about it. And so now we're at the beginning of, of researching those biomarkers. And so these things actually are all intersecting around one interesting technology area, which is like, how are we building sensors, whether they are invasive or not, to better understand our neurological states and to better modulate and impact them? And then the third leg of the stool for me is the mental health opportunity moment movement. And again, I used to be a person who was of the view that the mental health space was not that interesting of a space to be in. And I watched the talk therapy moment explode over the last 10 years, and I watched it somewhat impassively, kind of like, that's interesting, that's not for me. But I've come full circle, I've come around, and I now think that new modalities for mental health, in part because of my interest now in brain as platform has come full steam. And so I'm really fascinated in alternative modalities for mental health. I'm really interested in the ketamine movement over the last 3 or 4 years that has sort of got a good, a full head of steam. You know, the FDA just said that MDMA is actually not ready for them to sort of reclassify in the schedules in terms of controlled substances, but it's going to be brought back up again, psilocybin and psychedelic mushrooms. Are, you know, are next on the list. So I'm fascinated in that too and its impact on the brain. So that universe totally has my attention right now. It just totally has my attention. Yeah.

This came up on a couple of things on this. So this came up on a former episode. I'm not gonna remember which one, maybe a listener can tell us later, but talking about how pseudoscience or the things that get classified under pseudoscience, really interesting category of of, I'll call it culture for now, because so many things that get pulled forward often first existed in that category or were placed in that category at some moment in time. But not all things placed in that category get pulled forward and come to be proven to be accurate, true, directionally correct. And that's a really fascinating space for me because like I think about MDMA, ketamine, psilocybin, you know, there were people like your Tim Ferriss's, and then all of the people who influenced him have been talking about this stuff for a decade and were looked at as kind of wild for it. Like, look at these out-there people doing pseudoscience over here. And who knows, we're not there yet, you know, we don't know for sure in large-scale application how it plays out. And even now Tim has come back around and said, listen, there are risks here, like we do need to be mindful of some of these things. So I don't mean to get down a pathway on like, oh, we should respect pseudoscience. That's not what I'm saying. But I am fascinated by what I see as things that are formerly classified there coming back around as, wow, look at the very real applications of this thing and what we now know to be true that we didn't previously know. And some of those things becoming actual science over time. So I don't know if you have any riffs there, but I'm just kind of— it's one of those things that I play with a little bit. In my weird mind where I'm like, huh, so how does one learn to differentiate, right? How does one learn to engage with these topics that aren't yet, they don't yet have the data to back them up, but they are, I think of them almost as hypotheses. Here's a hypothesis worth testing to find out if there's data to support this. But you can also get down weird territory, right? If you're supporting things that are not yet data-driven. And so I don't know if you have any mental models for that and kind of how to assess it. Because on some level you're also making bets on these things from a financial perspective of what may come around to be data-driven and backed.

Well, what's convenient about venture capital, especially seed-stage venture capital, is I'm oftentimes investing before product-market fit, and I'm certainly investing before incontrovertible data and/or incontrovertible evidence. And so I'm paid and even economically incented to respect pseudoscience, so to speak. But even outside of my job, I think that one should respect pseudoscience. Full stop. I think that pseudoscience is the home for a meaningful portion of science. The home. Science is not attached to academia. Science is not attached to publication. Science is not attached to any institution. Science is rigorous inquiry via observation and disciplined process into areas of doubt. Into areas of doubt being the key. And the phrase believe the science is such an interesting phrase to me because it's a very double-edged sword. And it feels a little bit like, listen to the high priest. And in the history of religion, at least in the history of the religious practices that I tend to, to be drawn to Eastern and Western, there's a tension or a relationship between listen to high priest and listen to God. And those two things aren't perfectly aligned. And I think that listen to God is conduct deep and rigorous inquiry into areas of doubt. And the like trite, and it's kind of a joke, but it's also dead serious phrase is do your own research. And it's trite because do your own research is oftentimes what smart elite people look down on conspiracy theorists— for saying as their reason for arriving at utterly baffling and silly conclusions. And that's both true and the home for a meaningful portion of discovery. Not for all of it, not necessarily for the majority of it, but for a meaningful part of it. And there's a lot of trash in there. Sure. There's a lot of trash within institutions too. 60% of behavioral and social science papers cannot be reproduced.

I was just going to bring that up. You put When one of your essays, you said something to the effect of backed by research is an interesting term because what's backed by research is often backed by a replication crisis or something to that effect.

1000%. 1000%.

Yeah.

And so what that is, is backed by research there and believe the science there actually means believe the institution and believe the institution is not good advice and believe the institution is not what any one of us wants to sort of consciously build our intellectual edifices around, but that's where a lot of the culture around science has gone. And a lot of my favorite domains in scientific discovery have to do with paradigm shifts where you break everything that used to be true by virtue of what you've discovered and by virtue of what you've identified. And I, I lament the fact that we don't have almost like anti-institutional funding mechanisms for science. Because institutions do a great job at a certain set of things, but breaking paradigms that, that make all of their prior work irrelevant is probably not one of the things they're best at, right? And that's, I think, the job of a lot of good science.

This is one of the things that most, most fascinates and inspires me about the Ark Institute as an example, funded by the Collison brothers. Or backed by the Collison brothers, I should say, as at least an intent. And many institutions, as is in their name, and organizations are founded on an intent that does not come to be true. So I just want to say that too. But the intent, I think, is to break those models, to break the fundamental understanding where it serves the future of science. And I do wish we had more of that going on right now, that there was more funding for that kind of thing. For better or worse, it requires a lot of altruistic capital to enter a space with unknown outcomes, you know, and I think that that's difficult.

It's not necessarily altruistic capital. I mean, again, to the point I started with, I get paid to enter a space with unknown outcomes.

With altruistic intent, I would say, from my read of what you're doing as well.

Sure, but I think venture capital as a business, as an industry, and like another good industry for this, by the way, is political campaigns. Funding an outsider in political campaigns has immense upside. So it's not just like VC. There's all sorts of places where taking out-of-the-money risk and getting handsomely rewarded for it, not just economically, supporting an artist of any kind, a visual artist, a creative art, uh, before that artist has had the cultural impact that they can go then go on to have. Like there's, it's beautiful in art. It's beautiful in politics. It's beautiful in technology-driven business. It's beautiful in science. And so how do we protect and support and create more infrastructure to allow it? And we need to protect it in other places too. Like I totally am of the view that we gotta bring the indie, the indie record labels back and let them flourish. And that, you know, everything being run by the major labels is actually not constructive for a vibrant listening culture. And I think the same is true for like major art galleries, like the three really, really, really big galleries that that tip the scales on how art is consumed in the world and which art is consumed in the world totally needs to be rethought. So I think this is true in so many spaces. It's not unique to science. It's not unique to business. It's not unique to technology. I think it is almost my structural point of view about how, about how we should discover and reinvent and reimagine and tell more interesting, better stories about the future consistently as a culture.

Yeah, it's interesting. It gets into this idea that I think about of, um, the merits and drawbacks of kind of curatorial or algorithmic discovery and what's lost in that. You know, there's something gained in that, and that you get exposed maybe to things that you otherwise might not have, but the things that you're being exposed by are also driven by the data that you've given to the system to begin with. And so there's this— the metaphor of walking through a record store and thumbing through records to try something that's completely outside of whatever your prior taste was or whatever your prior discovery was, either through process or just general exposure, is something different from a curatorial gallery or an algorithmic feed. And I do think we've lost something in that, you know, the ability for an individual to find their own path of discovery. And that's what I see you doing on some level, is let me go down this rabbit hole on these 3 things that we just talked about, for example, because it's interesting. And let me see what's here that might not have been discovered yet by the consensus-driven machine of big venture capital. Let's call it like big VC, capital VC, for lack of a better way to put it in the moment.

I don't know.

What do you think about that?

I agree with what you're saying in principle and in practice. I look at Netflix culture and Spotify culture and what I see there that's interesting is prestige TV is more fragmented than ever. What was the most recent show that I want? Like Succession. Succession was for a certain cohort, cultural phenomenon. In terms of like Nielsen ratings, it wasn't big. It just wasn't that big.

Yeah.

You know, like your, your run-of-the-mill average Thursday on NBC was an order of magnitude bigger. You know, that's, an example of a hit. I mean, while there's tons of shows that are staples for a body politic that supports the economy of that show relatively well, that is more fragmented now than ever. And so in some ways there's a Cambrian explosion of the long tail in the ability to consume content because the algorithms are all sending people in their own merry ways.

That's true.

Right? Instead of there being one or two Walter Cronkites or one or two radio DJs who were telling us what to listen to and what to watch and what to to see. And this is true in music as, as much as it's true in film and TV. So on the one hand, I hear you. On the other hand, maybe the algorithms are allowing us to all chart our individual course and thereby for the creators and thereby for the producers and thereby for the so-called creative class to be able to find their audience better now than they ever had before without their audience having to be the whole mainstream. And I think that that's happening. And, you know, and to some degree in technology too, in ways that in science are still like being consumed by society. So this is a controversial version of it, but like the vaccine people, there was a set of things that were being said, a set of inquiries that were being run. And there was an audience that was willing to be built. And it was an audience outside of the mainstream and it became a very powerful and influential audience. Yeah, it was over the view that this is the set of things happening. And I think that one of the inputs on the anti-vax culture is this ability to do your own research, go into the wide web and use the algorithms that Google enables us, in their case, to, to find your people.

Yeah.

And to get to minimum viable scale. Now, again, it's complicated. Is that good or is that bad? Incidentally, I think that in that particular case, It is a bad outcome, but it is a good mechanism, sign for our culture.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. It sparks this thought for me of will we, and or would it be beneficial for the kind of factors feeding the algorithms to become more explicit or controllable by the user versus implicit and invisible? And there's probably a class of people that would really enjoy that. And then there's probably a whole bunch of people who like really, really don't want to have to deal with that kind of thing. I know for my particular set of neither psychology or personality attributes, like, I would really enjoy that. I'd like to know the things that the algorithm thinks that I want, and I'd like to be able to tell it otherwise if that's not the case, which there are little ways to do, but it's very difficult today, uh, for where we're at. So that's, that's interesting to me. But this all leads us back to a concept that I said I wanted to hit on, which is you wrote about this idea of mysteries versus secrets and nobody knows versus I don't know. And I don't know that you've talked about it at length anywhere yet verbally, although you have in essay form. And I just wonder if you might elaborate on that for a minute, because it felt so obviously powerful when I read it, and yet I hadn't seen it phrased or framed that way previously. So how did it come to you? How do you see it applying? Like, how do you use that as a teaching concept for founders? However you want to elaborate on it would be great.

So I stole a concept because sometimes one must steal. Um, I stole it from a woman named Dayo. Olapade. She's, uh, she wrote The Bright Continent, I think was the name of the book, um, about Africa. She's brilliant. She's a Yale Law graduate who, you know, who wrote some really interesting stuff and is a brilliant thinker. And she applied it in a very different context than the context in which I found inspiration for it. But I found inspiration for it in the context of business. At the zero to one, there is a series of problems that you have to solve. And I've always thought of zero to one as being the sort of business science phase where You're trying to get to eureka. And then once you've got to eureka, you move into the business manufacturing phase where you scale your eureka out, right? And so in business science, there is a set of things that you don't know because nobody's told you yet, but somebody knows, and maybe even large groups of people know. So how do you build a data pipeline? How do you set up a Postgres database? How do you structure a sales team for enterprise sales? How do you design a pilot? If you happen to come from a domain where you don't already know the answer to that, those are secrets. Someone knows and they'll tell you if only you just get to 'em and earn enough trust from them that they share it with you. And in some cases they're closely held secrets that not a lot of people know, but in general, these are secrets. If I do those things, will that customer love it? From your mouth to God's ears. Nobody else even has an inkling, right? Like it's a mystery. It's just, it's, it's unsolved and there's nobody you can ask who can definitively tell you. And the business science phase is identifying and distinguishing what is a mystery and what is a secret. And there are some mysteries that you shouldn't bother solving right now. And there are some secrets whose answers you don't need right now. But if you don't know the difference, you may be looking for an answer to a mystery, or you may be trying to solve a secret when you could have just asked somebody. And that's oftentimes just tactically or strategically where people get waylaid is because they miscategorize the nature of a given unknown. Because again, when you start a company, you have an infinite set of unknowns and the job to be done is actually to categorize them and prioritize them.

I was just going to say that the implicit assumption I have on the back of this, as I hear you talk about it and as I have heard you talk about it, is that you see that as part of your role on behalf of a founder, help them categorize problems so that they understand which, which they're dealing with. Is this a mystery or a secret? And you've talked about founders as needing to be kind of talent ingestion machines. And that's the secret category. It's can you locate, convince, attract, reward, engage, keep engaged a person who knows the answer to the secret? Long enough to help you solve it. And it's a really fascinating way of looking at the founder's job from a talent and strategy perspective is can you accurately categorize problems between those two things? And then do you have the capability of telling the kinds of stories necessary to go get a person to join you in revealing the answer to the secret or in going together and discovering the answer to the mystery, you know, which is something that the whole organization organism has to do on its own because there's not an answer yet.

Nabil Hyatt from Spark Capital, good friend of mine, has a different framework on mysteries. And he doesn't talk about mysteries and secrets. He talks about mysteries and puzzles. So he comes from the gaming world.

Yeah.

Right.

And there's mystery type games and there's puzzle type games and solving a mystery versus solving a puzzle is a very different set of activities. And so mystery is a, is a beautiful idea because it's representative of a thing that nobody knows, or in the case of a game, a thing that you have to solve in a very sort of freeform creative way. But there's, I think there's the same wisdom there, which is that you have to be willing to sort of, again, freeform creative, be willing to go into some uncharted waters, be willing to act probabilistically sometimes to get and get a feel and use feel to identify the solution to a mystery. Whereas puzzles and similarly secrets tend to be more deterministic. A puzzle has an internal logic, and once you identify that internal logic, you run your algorithm accordingly. And similarly, secrets have a deterministic answer. You hear the answer and then you've heard it. And so it's sort of like the, the determinate problems versus the indeterminate problems, right? Or something like that. Like not, I'm not to refer to James Kars too much, but it's like that type of thing. And, but again, distinguishing them is the first job to be done that's really important. And then once you distinguish, you have to prioritize them. And prioritizing them is also important. So I can't tell you how many founders have distinguished extraordinarily well, but are on a rabbit hole against solving the wrong mystery or solving a mystery that's not going to be sufficiently unlocking of the commercial value relevant for them being able to fulfill their mission. Or they'll go chase down a whole bunch of secrets that they just don't really need the answers to today.

Yeah.

And that's zero-sum time against focusing on solving the mystery, right?

There's this assessment that I use in my coaching practice called the Highlands Ability Battery. It's a cognitive ability battery of tests, and there's these two unique abilities that map to those things. And one is categorization or classification of problems, and one is concept organization or ordering of information. And that highlights those two things, and they're two different ways that the brain operates. And some people are naturally inclined towards one but not the other, or vice versa. And then some people can do both. And I think a big part of— it's not that you can't if you are not naturally inclined towards it, of course, right? That's not what that ever says. But it's helpful to know if your natural inclination is in one direction or the other and if you have a gap there, because that's when you can lean on someone like, you know, your investors or your board or your co-founder or your team But it takes the awareness, you know, come back all the way around to that, that explicit versus implicit identity idea as well. The more explicit these things are and the more aware you are of where the gaps fall for you, you can make up for them, right? But if you're running around improperly prioritized and wasting time, it would be a real bummer to find that out after the fact because, you know, the company died or whatever it might be.

I will also note that you mentioned the talent ingestion engine. There are countless times where somebody will hire somebody because that person knows the answer to a secret and they'll get there. And that person might know the answer to that secret, but the person is also a clue to unlock a mystery, or the person will share a clue to unlock a mystery. So part of why the talent ingestion engine is the sort of specific activity that you want to engage in is because sometimes secret keepers are also mystery solvers. And in fact, if you have a whole team of secret keepers, but you can empower them and you can allow the best ideas to flow from the, from the bottom up to our prior, to our prior commentary around the science, mysteries may get solved better, faster, in more interesting ways. And I find that the companies that allow for ideas, like companies tend to have very rigorous cultures around this, and sometimes they have to reset that rigorous culture. And so Facebook just recently dramatically reduced the number of product managers because they wanted engineers who lean secret keeping to serve the role of solving mysteries more. Amazon and Stripe both famously, and Square too, all famously have very, very rigorous writing cultures.

Yeah.

And part of a writing culture is I'm gonna write something which is a structured answer to something, but you're gonna read it And that's going to be the clues to something we haven't even solved yet is an implicit like strength that you gain from having some of these intentional comms cultures. And so this is not only Zero to One, I think this persists in those companies that continually innovate and that continually push the boundaries of what's constructively possible in their given segments are the ones that use the secret keepers to help constantly solve mysteries for them. So these things are like, are more intimately related in that sense.

Yeah, I love that. We're nearing the end here and I always, always have a couple wrap-up questions that I like to do to end. So I'm going to pick maybe just one more, even though I have so many here that I wanted to get to. And maybe I'll do selfishly, I want to hear a little bit about how you approach your role as a father. Anytime I get another parent on the show, especially one who's highly engaged in many aspects of their life, including parenting. I'd just love to share notes on, on how you approach that role because it's such a formative one, such a, you know, in terms of impact on an individual life, it's probably the largest role we play on any one life, I would imagine. So yeah, I just wonder if you have any riffs on, on how you approach parenting, how you view your role as a father, and how that fits into this broader career and life you're building.

I have a few structured thoughts. The first is most of the things I want for my kids are things I want for myself and that my kids are just the proxy for, or my kids are the vehicle by which I can express those things for myself. I want my kid to be successful. Is that really what I want for my kid, or do I want to be a parent of successful kids? Do I want that for myself, or do I want that for my kids? I want my kid to achieve X. Oftentimes it's in the vein of the achievement-related activities. So I try to keep telling myself that constantly because I don't think that is necessarily bad. I think it is just true. And I think it's bad when it's unconscious and you are screwing your kid up because you're pushing something on them that is just what you want for yourself and they are your vehicle or your tool to achieve. And again, like most things, I don't ascribe as much of a value judgment to them except that they need to be explicit because that's how they can be reckoned with. So that's my first thought is most of the things you want relating to achievement for your kid are things you want for yourself. And that's okay. But given that, what do you do? And for everybody, they do something different and that's okay too. The second is I think that the nature-nurture is a false dichotomy because I think that your kid is going to do as you do, not as you say. And they're going to mostly do the things that you do unconsciously. And so that's nature.

Yeah.

They're going to do the things that you already are, but it's also nurture because they're going to do them through observation, through silent observation. I can't tell you how often my son, like my son said yesterday, you always say, come on, man. Like I never say, come on, man. My wife was like, you always say, come on. And shit. What are all the things that I'm doing and or saying that I had no conscious awareness of that my son is just taking notes. Oh, this is how this should work. This is the rules. And the clear conclusion I draw to that one is the best way to be a good parent is to be a good person.

Hmm.

The best way to impart good values is to live good values. And so back to the first point, the best way to teach well for your kid is to treat yourself with consideration and care. When I show up as my best self, and once I show up as my most full, most engaged, most realized self, and I do that in my partnership with my spouse, and I do that in my work, and I do that in my unconscious daily habits, I am teaching my kid the things that I think I really want to teach them. When I'm telling them don't do this and I'm telling them don't do that, they are, if anything, drawing the opposite conclusion because I bet that's also hardwired for the sake of being able to learn independence from your parents. And so I have tried to let go a little bit of the conscious teaching stuff in favor more of living in balance and trying to come home complete and trying to come home cup filled and try to come home in my best energy because whatever happens from that point forward is something that I can't control and is the stuff where it's going to be really impactful almost regardless of what I say. And then the final one, which is a fun paradox, is I think that if you bring care, intention, and love to how you parent, then whichever individual decisions you make are not going to matter as much. But that doesn't mean the decisions don't matter. They matter hugely because the only thing that you will do if you— to, to like negatively impact your kid is if you don't care and if you don't bring that care, attention, and love. It's sort of like, but if you bring care and attention and love, then the details of it don't matter. But if you don't, then it really matters. So I've tried to let go of, gosh, I hope my son does X and I hope that I need to tell him why. And I need to convince my daughter to do Z. And I can't believe I'm not getting A because my A ability to impact those things consciously is hyper limited. B, the fact that I'm bringing the care and intention is getting me 95% of the way there. And C, If I'm doing that in negative energy, then that's going to be what matters. And if I'm doing that constructively and positively and in ways that are teaching them good values and how to be a good man and how to be a good human being, that's what's going to matter so much more than whatever the content is, whatever I'm harassing them about in any given moment.

It's very thoughtful. It's not at all surprising to me. It is very thoughtful. I appreciate all of that. I had heard you talk a little bit about the, the caring decisions as a form of caring and the outcome of the decision not mattering as much as the fact that you care. And I really love that, that paradigm for looking at parenting. You know, it's like, which school should they go to? The answer is not deterministic, but the fact that you care enough to ask the question may be. So my last two questions for you are, first, you know, I hear in the way you look at your work and the way you approach your work and the care that you bring to your founder relationships, your research, that there is this sense of greater purpose or mission behind what you do. I'm curious about You know, if you think of whether it's a 1,000-year horizon or a 30-year horizon or a 5-year horizon, through the work that you do at Kindred and throughout your career, what's the most beautiful version of the future you're hoping to create or influence?

Bear with me on this, but one of the quirks about evolution is that evolution holds in itself a tension between the individual and the whole. And oftentimes what is evolutionarily advantaged for the whole is not necessarily what's best for the individual in their life or in their X or Y. You can even see this in like a bubble bursting is good for the market, but it's shitty for the market's participants, right? You can apply it to all sorts of places. So I struggle a little bit with the answer of what's the best long-term outcome because so many long-term outcomes are conducting activities that are going to outlast many of the individual lifetimes that I care so much about. And it's almost like building cathedrals and pyramids is so beautiful and it's so great. And so often in history required slaves. Who had fucked up less. Excuse my French. So I do think that the most beautiful version of history is a way to resolve that tension, is a way for us to figure out how to resolve that tension, is a way for us to figure out how to evolve our species for maximum long-term thriving and longevity without it being at the expense of individual lifetimes.

Yeah. Without subjugating one another along the way.

Without subjugating, without subjugating one another. And the competitive dynamic of, you know, survival of the fittest, kill and be killed, like, again, the be killed part of that equation is a huge bummer. And so is there a way that we can build our polity and our, and our economic structure and our society so as to create enough surplus that we can minimize the be killed but still keep the survival of the fittest. Because if we can put those, if we can hold those two things in the same polity, then I think we can thrive and live. And I really want both. And maybe I'm greedy about wanting both, but I tend to see people lean one way or the other and almost subconsciously, or at least silently accept that it's at the expense of the other. Who cares about getting to Mars? What about our lives now? Who cares about our lives now? What about living forever? No, I want both.

Uh, I could share so many examples of that, but we're out of time, and I want to let you ask you the last one, which actually you gave me the perfect metaphor for, you know, the whole or society and the individual. And I'm just curious, as you do this work, as you work to bring these ideas that are intention to fruition, who are you becoming as a person along the way?

I am increasingly becoming a cooler-blooded individual who is more motivated by JOMO than FOMO. And I'm a little nervous about that. I think hot-blooded FOMO people tend to lead the armies. And so I'm trying to figure out how to fight the so-called war as a cool-blooded JOMO person. Once I figure the answer out to that, then I'll tell you who I'm becoming. But I'm in the midst of figuring that particular puzzle out right now.

Really beautiful place to end. Well, caught in mind, I wrote a short little LinkedIn post on an idea I saw that I still haven't found the etymology of. Might be the Five Rings, but, uh, it's the idea of it being more advantageous to be a warrior who gardens than to be a gardener who is called to war. And that these things can coexist within a single person, that, that you can be a peace-oriented person experiencing equanimity in your life, but who has done the training and had the experiences and knows what it takes to be a warrior, that those things can coexist within me. So anyways, I'll share that just as something that comes to mind as we wrap up here, and for everyone listening. So thanks for joining me. I really enjoyed it. Just, uh, everything I'd hoped for, and, and you're every bit as thoughtful and intentional about, um, leading life, capital, and business as I had hoped and thought. So appreciate you.

Appreciate the time. Thank you so much.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Good Work. My name is Barrett Brooks.

I'm your host.

This podcast is produced by my friends over at Podcast Royale. If you enjoyed this episode, I'd love it if you'd hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

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Apple, Spotify, or YouTube, appreciate you hitting subscribe wherever you get it. My guest today was a guy named Kanyi Maqubela. He is a venture capitalist, father, husband. He's a co-founder and partner at Kindred Ventures along with Steve Jiang. He is a prolific tweeter, zeter, what are we calling it these days? Uh, you can find him with a two-letter handle on Twitter, which is impressive, @km, and you can find some of his historical writing and ideas on kanyi.blog. That's K-A-N-Y-I.blog. If you enjoyed today's episode, I'd love it if you'd leave me a review. You can do it on Spotify with their star ratings, on Apple with a rating and a review, or leave a comment and a thumbs up on YouTube. Helps the algorithms know that you enjoy it, that you're engaging with it, and it encourages it to help other people find the show as well.

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I would really be grateful if you would go and do that for me.

Thank you so much for listening. I'm grateful for you. I know that 2 hours is nothing to sneeze at and that it's a big commitment, and I hope that I deliver a lot of value, that I share human stories of people really working to create positive change in the world, and that it resonates deeply with you. If you listen and you enjoy it, I'd love to hear from you. Tweet at me, @BaratayBrooks, subscribe to my newsletter, hit reply anytime, or drop me an email. I'd just love to hear what you think about the show, if you have guest ideas, or if you have feedback on how I can make it better. So Thanks for being here, and I'll see you on the next episode.