Product Hunt LIVE with Kanyi Maqubela, Partner at Collaborative Fund

Fund is actually that the intersection of good and profit is a potentially very profitable intersection point. And it's our belief that young, super energetic, really inspired founders, and frankly even, you know, of, of what, of whatever age, are increasingly finding that meaning matters and mission matters just over money narrowly, that purpose matters and that passion matters more than just profit narrowly. And so we think that it's a thesis that actually ends up being really good marketing for us as a firm, for companies. We think it actually ends up being a competitive advantage if you're leading with values and your competitors aren't. So we think it's actually a really good way to create value. And so we don't think that you have to compromise on returns over the long term. I think that's an easy proposition. Over the medium term, I think it's a reasonable proposition. And over the short term, there's a question, and that's the question we're trying to figure out.

Awesome.

Cool.

Thanks.

Thanks for your question.

What's up?

How you doing, Eric?

All good. All good. We're gonna give it another minute, and then we are gonna get started. Okay.

Sounds good.

Guys on the right, I would— everyone watching, I would encourage you to ask questions. I'm going to be reading from the left. And we'll start momentarily.

Sounds great.

Cool, cool. I'm not gonna call on people to ask, you know, ask in person. I'm gonna call on— I'm just gonna read them and give credit to the people who asked. So before we start, kind of a funny question. What did you think of Drake's Hotline Bling music video?

Oh brother. I thought it was good. I thought— It was hilarious. I thought Drake was trolling all of us extremely successfully. The dude is on top of his game, and so he doesn't care right now. And I think that's really cool. So I've got a lot of respect for him.

There is kind of an art to the troll.

Such an artful troll. Such an artful troll.

It really is. All right, let's get started. Kanyi, it's a pleasure to have you on. Kanyi Maqubela, partner at Collaborative. And if you remember, and I know you do, You know, a couple years ago, when I was— or even before, when I was running Wrapped FM, we met. You remember this?

I do.

That's when I first met you. You know, it was— you were at Collaborative, and we had a sort of pitch meeting. I was showing you what we were up to, and you knew there was no way in hell it was a venture-backed little business, but you sat with me for over an hour and gave me great insights and was very helpful. And I have been appreciative ever since.

Hey, man, I'm glad to see you're here. This is an awesome organization. You're in a really cool seat. You guys are doing fun stuff, so I'm just happy to be here.

Well, one of the good guys in the business. I wanna start just broadly with the idea that, you know, you're VC, but you're also, you know, your parents are teachers. You're also a writer. You know, you're very interested in economics, academics, intellectual thought. And you kind of, you know, also taste and culture, you kind of sit in different worlds and can overlap a bit. I'm curious on a broader level, what do you think, you know, ties those interests together? What's the thread? What motivates you? What guides you to do what you do?

Well, the first level of answer there is that a lot of VCs, if not all of them, are jacks of many trades and masters of few. And so part of being a VC is, is having really, really, really broad interests and maybe having very thin insight in each one of those. So I admit of being guilty of that myself. I have lots and lots of things I'm interested in. There's nothing I am not interested in. And so that's point one. Point two is I think that there's something in the water with culture. And I really think that that thing in the water, which I was just describing to Mitchell, is one where values and purpose and passion and mission and impact are extremely important characteristics of building sort of defensible value creation in, in the future. And so that means that being somebody who has taste and who understands culture and being somebody who's interested in those things, being somebody who is following the macroeconomic trends towards decentralization, I think these are all pointing in similar directions and in coherent directions. And that's how we're trying to create our investment thesis. And I can't imagine doing it without having some sort of a point of view about all of those things. So I'm very glad that we do.

Let's talk more about culture.

You hear people like—

Is there an echo on your end?

Nope.

Okay, one sec. Let me just cut— There is on my end.

Hold on.

Yeah, you hear people like— When you talk about culture, the intersection of tech and entertainment, is it what Troy Carter is doing at Smash Labs? Is it Tristan Walker tweeting about the Meek Mill Drake beef? Really got their, their eye on the ball in terms of what's happening, in terms of how tech is intersecting with the rest of the world?

Oh, that's a really good question. It's honestly, it's one of those things where the most successful founders and the most successful creators and entrepreneurs all have it in some way. And the ones who can seamlessly intersect their interests in culture with their interests in business, the ones who can seamlessly intersect their values with their tactics are the ones that are super successful. And so, you know, you and Ryan, I think most people who follow you guys have a pretty good instinct about the fact that Ryan likes music festivals and electronic music and that you like hip-hop and like rap because those things are very naturally integrated in how you go about your business. You're a full person when you bring your whole self to the table. And I think that's increasingly a piece of what is valued in And you think of John and Logan at Lyft, those guys are full people. You think of Travis, Travis is a full person and he's bringing his whole self to his business. And so I don't think there's a particular rule around it so much as a shift whereby culture and the personality and purpose and values and the point of view about those things is core to how we do business.

Let's take it back to the beginning a bit. How did you get your start in venture capital? How did you become a partner at Collaborative?

I met my partner Craig, who was the founder of the fund, gosh, years back now, but Craig was president of GOOD Magazine. GOOD Magazine is a media property whose tagline back in the day was "For people who give a damn." And the idea was just that they were trying to capitalize on what they saw was really a real trend in the zeitgeist towards being more oriented around making the world a better and more interesting place. And so when Craig was there as president, he was really attracted to that idea. And the folks who had founded GOOD were very close friends of mine from growing up. So we had mutual friends and one thing led to another and we agreed to start working together on a very casual basis. We got together at some café in SoHo like 5 years ago really and really hit it off and we were like, you know what, we gotta do something. We just gotta jam. And so we just started jamming and it turned into a real relationship.

I know that, you know, you've been really good at cultivating mentors. To what do you credit your ability to do so? And tell me about the role some of them have played in your career.

That's a great question. So mentors are an interesting thing because mentors, just like any relationship, can't and shouldn't be a coin machine or a candy machine where you put in a coin and get out your candy. They're relationships. And so you've gotta give and get. And that means you've gotta give advice and get advice. You've gotta give feedback and get feedback. You've gotta give love and get love. What a lot of people don't necessarily realize is that even if relationships are professionally asymmetrical, people are ultimately still people and they need to be interacted with and treated as full people rather than just as a set of a resume or a set of relationships or something in one dimension. And so some of the mentors who have actually guided me even into thinking about that are people who I would even call friends. And so, you know, Andy Weissman at Union Square Ventures is a buddy and it's just because he listens to me and he tells me how he really feels and I tell him I really feel. And so it's really valuable mentorship. David Hornick at August Capital is another one who's just so giving of his person, and it feels like we have a relationship rather than we have a transactional interaction. And that's what I think is the most important thing in finding mentors. And to actually get that started for people who are looking to build mentorship, you got to go out and give to people, you know, you got to pay it forward, you got to start by being the giver. And that's when you start to get stuff. Stuff, you know?

Yeah, a lot of these, you know, David, Andy, uh, like yourself, they're deep thinkers. And earlier you mentioned that, you know, uh, in VC you got to be good at a bunch of different things. Do you ever worry that you spread yourself too thin and you're not a specialist in one, or is your specialist a sort of, you know, generalist philosophy? How do you think about in terms of your own skill and career development?

Somebody said that, that VCs are either failed philosophers or failed academics, and I think that's, that's pretty funny because we We try to be deep thinkers, but we're— we have to be opportunistic. And so we kind of have to be reactive on some level. Part of being opportunistic means being reactive, and being reactive means you gotta allow for any possibility, and you allow for every and any idea to come through and to, and to be one that you have to address. But that means that sometimes you think, oh my gosh, wireless power is so freaking interesting, and next thing you find that you're in on-demand grocery delivery, and you're thinking, where the hell did that come from?

From.

And so as a result, I always feel, and one of my biggest pieces of FOMO is I've spread myself too thin. I'm not creating really deep fundamental insights in any one place. I'm not single-tasking, which is the most important way to create insight. And that frustrates me a lot.

You know, a lot of your work centers around, you know, for-profit, but also doing good. Do you ever get disillusioned that a lot of the things that are, you know, obvious, you know, look like they're doing good, either are not doing good or don't make money, or just that there are trade-offs in the career route you've chose that, you know, you can't have the impact you wanna have necessarily.

Tell me more about this. The head of the Mulago Foundation out in the Bay Area made a very interesting comment, which has stuck with me and which I've been thinking about for a while, which was that, impact and impact cases, uh, are a result of market failure. So it's where supply and demand aren't naturally meeting and where somebody who ought to be consuming some good or consuming some service has been left out of it. And his provocation was where that is an extreme case, it is fundamentally unprofitable to resolve that, or else the market would've done it. And cuz it's a market failure almost by definition. And when I first heard that, I was like, oh, interesting. So impact is a market failure, meaning you can't do it profitably. But what I've realized is that's actually just a design challenge. And it's not that different of a design challenge than when somebody says industry X is broken. And one of the things I was actually thinking about this morning is what industry isn't broken? And is it even folly to suggest that an industry isn't broken? Aren't all industries broken and always constantly in, you know, there's always an opportunity for reinvigoration and reimagination of any given industry. Industry. And so that means that I'm actually inspired to believe that you can create positive impact in any manner of industries. It's just a design challenge, and that there's no industry and there's no place where you can't do it profitably. And it's just a matter of timescale, and it's a matter of ingenuity, and it's a matter of how innovative you are. And which is why I've been so grateful to discover some of the stuff that I've discovered along the way, which I never would have thought of or imagined as impact categories, but which have found sort of really incredible growth as a result.

Impact investing, you know, has got very popular a few years ago. Tell me about the current state of impact investing and where it's going.

It's growing super fast. Cambridge Associates a couple weeks ago released a report saying that impact investor returns have been exactly competitive with the status quo, and they actually haven't underperformed. And so one of the things that I've found to be really frustrating when I think about impact is that people say, oh, it's blended returns, so you're giving something up to get— and I think, no, it's just value alignment. You're aligning solving problems with making money. And if you align interests and you align values, you can do this type of thing. I don't know if you can see this, but yeah, yeah, absolutely. You align self-interest with the greater interest. That's what, that's what my partner Craig drew, you know, when he was, was messing around during one of our meetings. And that's one of the most powerful things you can do That's one of the most profitable places you can be over the long term, right?

Mm-hmm. When should, you know, something be a nonprofit versus for-profit?

Hmm. I don't have a view on whether or not something should be a nonprofit. I think that if it has a business model and there's a way for it to make money, then it should— it could be either. It's a matter of your taste. It's a matter of your access to capital. It's a matter of your network. There's plenty of really interesting business models that are nonprofit, and there's plenty of really bad business models that are for-profit. So I don't think that there's a hard set of rules around that, personally. Got you.

What for-purpose, you know, for-profit institutions are you most, or organizations, are you most excited about right now?

Am I allowed to mention stuff in my portfolio?

Of course, please.

I'm really excited about a company called InVenture. They're down in Los Angeles. Actually, Mazio and the lowercase guys are also investors there. They're doing financial services for the underbanked and the unbanked. And so thinking about what it means to have a credit score on the basis of what your text messages look like, but also on the basis of what your real-time transactions look like, because they're using mobile money in Kenya through M-Pesa, which I think is really freaking interesting. We funded a company here called Exo, which I'm really inspired by just because it's, it's a little bit quirky and a brain bender, and they're making protein bars that use cricket flour, literally cricket flour. And the idea with cricket flour is it's dramatically more sustainable than the status quo, but it's still freaking delicious. And so they're trying to hack that culture there. Will be interesting to see how they do. Buffer is another company that we've invested in that I think is pretty fabulous. Buffer is a social media management tool, but they've got every freaking piece of their company open to the whole internet. And what does that mean for their ability to be a defensible business? What does that mean for their ability to be competitive? I think that's a fabulous question that they're asking of all of us, end of themselves, which I think is neat. So, I mean, the list goes on. There's so many cool ones. And then outside of our portfolio, I love Kiva, Pencils of Promise, which are both nonprofits. I think that, oh man, there's really a long list and I admire a lot of them.

Mazzio, the other day, called you the happiest guy in tech. Do you connect with that? Does that resonate with you?

I mean, I'll take it. I appreciate it. Thanks, Masi. You know, I'm happy because I'm one of the luckiest guys on the planet. I spent about a half decade being an entrepreneur, and I was a somewhere between mediocre and bad one. You know, I'm an entrepreneur and early employee. I worked at a number of places that a lot of people haven't heard of. I, you know, didn't come from a huge pot of wealth, and I've landed in one of the most amazing jobs I could ever freaking imagine. So why would I not be happy every day I wake up? You know, it's, it's one of those things where I, when I think about it for a half second, I realize, oh my gosh, my life is freaking sweet. So I'm really grateful, and gratitude is a really good way to be energized about life.

But were you always like that, even when you didn't have you know, everything you have now? Because you strike me as someone who was.

I'm a pretty energetic dude. Yeah, yeah. Wake up ready to go.

But let's go back. You know, you were an entrepreneur. You also worked in the Obama campaign. Uh, you know, you went to Stanford. Uh, what were you thinking you were gonna do after graduating? How did you think of your career, you know, at that point?

Well, my career started before I graduated because I dropped out at first.

You dropped out? Tell us more. Why did you drop out?

I dropped out, being completely candid, because I was emotionally compromised. I didn't love college. I wasn't connecting with people. I didn't feel like I had a community. I felt as though I was isolated. I was directionless. I was a 20-year-old who had a lot more emotion than I had capacity for. Were you depressed? That's in the eye of the beholder. Right, so, but you know, but I, yeah, but I dropped out for those reasons. That said, in the course of dropping out, it being Stanford, I immediately sort of slid into this project that was being developed by some guys in Formations and Ventures, which is this class at the GSB there. And it was a project basically trying to create liquidity in the online job search space, because finding a job online is such an unsolved problem, which is weird because it's the thing we do all day and the internet solves all problems.. And so we were trying to figure out how to make sense of that. And it ended up being a rollercoaster ride that took me a number of years. And so I actually sort of stumbled into entrepreneurship and then even stumbled into this industry on the basis of it being something that I was lucky, you know, to have been placed at Stanford for. And so the funny thing too about these, the funny thing too about these pathways and these lives that people retroactively construct for themselves is so often they're just random and they're just luck. And I just fell into stuff, you know? But when I got there, I was engaged. I was enthusiastic. Enthusiastic, I was learning, and so it was something that I turned into a career.

Do you think that— I know you're a thinker and a writer, as well as a doer. Do you think that you might get into academia at some point?

Yes. I, gosh, I was— I actually gave a guest lecture at NYU yesterday, which was a ton of fun, and I'm going to be doing more of that this spring. But the interesting thing about academia just, you know, and this is mostly an internet audience, I assume, is that it's changing so, so, so, so fast. And what it means to be a learner 10 years from now may look so different than what we thought of as what it meant to be a learner, that I hesitate to say academia in the traditional frame, because I don't really know. Am I going to be a coach on a peer-to-peer platform that represents the future of higher education on the basis of my narrow interests, you know, in a real-time video chat? Maybe, you know. Am I going to be a tenured professor? Probably not.

So it's interesting, you know, I have this friend who's a teacher right now at Harlem School, you know, Charter Academy, or one of the best schools. And, you know, she really wants to make a dent in education over the next 20 years. And one argument I'm making— I don't know if it's correct, let me know— it's kind of that education is gonna look so different, that just so radically different from what she's doing right now, that it might be best to come in without having that kind of prior bias towards what we're doing. You know, what do you think about that?

I love the beginner's mind concept applied to all manner of innovation. And the number of, you know, when you think about the most incredible technical transformations and mathematical innovations and moments of clarity of thought that have happened throughout our history, there's plenty of examples, if not a majority of them, that have happened between age 18 and age 30 from people who came from the margins and who weren't actually at the center of a given industry. I'm already over the hill there, so you can expect none of that moving forward. But the point being that if you don't know what you don't know, then you might discover things that everybody else thought they knew that were actually not true, or the opposite, right? And so I think that's awesome. And as an example of that within our portfolio, Max Ventilla at AltSchool, He's building a private school literally from scratch, physical, in-person, K-12, and he had never spent a day in education in his life. And it's sort of like, what in the world are you thinking? And the truth is he's thinking things that probably a lot of people within the education sphere aren't thinking. And so that's super interesting.

Right. Tell me more about K through 12, and then we'll get into higher education. Where is it going? Is it able to change at all due to government or due to kind of the restrictions they're in? Where do you see that? And at what timeline do we see radical change?

Faster than most people think, slower than the early adopters want, as with everything. And the signs in my mind that we're in the midst already of a dramatic transformation in K-12 is just, one is just the absolute explosion, Cambrian explosion even, of technology that teachers are increasingly bringing from a pedagogical standpoint to their craft. And Clever is a company which I super admire that has basically made a way to tie all the school information systems in the country to one, to one interface such that they can, you can push a piece of technology to any school district in the country. And those types of pieces of infrastructure are starting to come together. I've seen some really interesting companies that are thinking about how to actually make sense of scheduling as it relates to the day because figuring out ways to flip the classroom and figuring out ways to bring in new learning modules is really hard just from a complex coordination standpoint, 'cause you need to figure out teachers' schedules, you need to figure out where students are gonna be at what time and how to fit in all the stuff into the hours that have been allotted for them. And so a lot of those are basically just information challenges that can happen at the superintendent level and below. So I think there's a ton of opportunity there in the private school movement. There's a number of charter school or public school movements, excuse me, There's a number of charter schools that have been doing really interesting work, from Rocketship in the Bay Area, I mean, all over the country, frankly. And then the private schools are in varying ways innovating at scale. And I hesitate to speak too much about them because, you know, my family's in private school, K-12 education. So I don't want to upset my dad. I'm on his turf now.

What do you think, I mean, broadly— well, let's go to higher education then. What does it look like there?

So higher education, I have extremely strong feelings about. And the first feeling is that there's higher education and there's higher education. And what probably most people in, who are listening here may sometimes forget, or even if you know it, is that community college, that is a 2-year program, and/or for-profit college where graduation rates are less than 25%, are—

is college.

That's what higher education is today in the United States. Okay, it's not Harvard, it's not, you know, it's not Berkeley. And in that world where there's incredible, extraordinary, crippling amounts of student debt, I think there's about to be an explosion if there isn't one already. And the fact that loan sharks and, and, and debt collectors are increasingly moving into the higher education, the for-profit higher education field shows to me that the sort of credit is completely off there and that there is a legitimate higher education bubble, like a real bubble that's going to pop and there's going to be a crash. And then with the type of higher education that, you know, the so-called elites have been participating in, there's, you know, there's an interesting other set of challenges where there's a tension that I'm still trying to make sense of, but there's a tension between going to school so you can learn how to be a learner, and going to school so you can learn sort of the great ends and the real business of living, so to speak, and then going to school so you can get a job, you know, and going to school so that you can be— you can be— get an engineering training that's basically vocational school so you can pop right out into Facebook right afterwards, right? And there's some tension between those because the implications of how you design a pedagogy on the basis of those are pretty complex and, and are unsolved, and there's a lot of market pressure to push vocation, vocation, vocation. But then there's a lot of people who got broad-based humanities education that are pushing in the opposite direction. And it's hard to know what the right answer is. As somebody who studied philosophy, I have my biases, but I see both sides. And so I think that's interesting. But I think the more urgent challenge is the fact that we're taking a ton of really bad debt, and we're allowing a ton of people who are in very vulnerable positions to take on that debt at massive scale. Without preparing them for anything. And we're doing that at massive, massive, massive scale. And that makes me really nervous.

Yeah, it feels like colleges should be way more honest about, you know, hey, this is, you know, this is the humanities portion. This is just because it's good for you and you should think about these things. And then, hey, here's the part where this is how we, you know, we help you get a job. And they either like are in the middle and they do none of the above, or they do them both poorly. But they should just kind of I guess, be honest. And I know there's a lot of internal politics about departments fighting for funding, and, uh, that's hard.

That's hard too, man, you know, because the, the, the classes I took that were the most vocationally relevant to me were the humanities classes, because my—

tell me more about—

well, because in my current job I spend a lot of my time reading and writing. And so even though I actually took computer science, and so I, it— I haven't used it. And computer science for me was actually less a matter of, you know, learn how to— it was less a matter of learn how to get a job at Facebook, and it was actually learn how to learn. Because computer science for me was more of the sort of just the, the very broad William Der Schuysk-esque build character thing. It was like, take an engineering class or a series of engineering classes and learn how to just get through a ton of material and bully your way to understanding. And that was something that I really appreciated.

So I have a friend in policy who tells me that people in tech are kind of missing opportunities because they don't know how policy works or how government works, and that some of them would actually be better suited working in policy or government where there are big opportunities for change, as opposed to just everyone flooding, all the ambitious people flooding tech. Are you sympathetic with this view? What is the role of policy as it relates to tech or just impact broadly?

It's critically important. And a friend of mine says that one of the most important opportunities of our time, now that we've got so much better information and now that communication costs have become so cheap, is to map the world's most well-equipped and well-suited people to the right opportunities and really find that matching and find a way to make that really efficient. And we should do that in policy, we should do that in tech, we should do that in nonprofit, we should do that in the public sector, private sector, et cetera. So I don't think any one of us one of these sectors is better than another one. And I think it's a little bit narrow-minded, at least for me, to think of it that way, because each one of them is so powerful from the perspective, from the internal perspective, and maybe is either imposed or thinks it's way more powerful from the other perspective. And so I think that there is a role for policy without a doubt. And you think about, you know, Marc Andreessen has spoken eloquently about this. You think about the impact of Obamacare on the freelance and the on-demand economy. Without Obamacare, the ability for the likes of Uber, Lyft, Postmateship, and so forth to be in the position that they're in right now is a really interesting question. You think about the regulations that are coming down the pipe for the autonomous vehicles, and flying or on the ground, and whether or not the regulators are gonna be ready for that, and how to make sense of that. You think about the academics who are trying to put the right nuances on what it means to have some algorithmic morality in a self-driving car that's trying to decide between two really morally hard choices, right? So all of these pieces have to come together and none of them exists in a vacuum.

This concept of morals is pretty interesting because it's not something we think that much about, or the market forces us to think that much about. Is it something you think a lot about? And you study philosophy. If so, you know, kind of what moral framework guides you or guides your choices, whether it's on the micro level or the macro level, as you think about, you know, should I invest in this company? Is this good? Because impact a lot of times is subjective, right?

Well, I, yeah, I think about morality every time I look at an investment. And if it doesn't pass my personal moral sniff test, which is totally subjective and thereby unfair, but whatever, then I move on. But your personal moral sniff test, it's sort of Man, it's like a Rorschach blot, so you're always seeing different things in it. But my view is, are you finding ways to use technology to create access? And so are you finding ways to map supply and demand in ways where that supply had not previously reached the demand? Are you finding ways to empower individuals to take more control over their destiny? So in giving people the opportunity to level up on the basis of their skills. And so I think that equality of opportunity is so so freaking important and we're still so far from it and technology can do such a good job in leveling the playing field there. And so if I, and then also I actually personally look at the aspiration around brand. And so if I see a brand and I think, wow, this brand is really cool and not just cool like Nike or Supreme, 'cause I think that cool is important too, but cool like I'm really proud of what they're doing, then that's also a really important feature. But as it relates to morality, here's the thing actually that I wanna, put out here, which I think is interesting, which is this notion of algorithmic morality, right? And algorithms are amoral, but if you make— if you put an algorithm that's got a whole bunch of machine learning and you actually replace the traditional diagnostic process of a clinical situation, so you take out a human and you put in an algorithm that has been, you know, a whole bunch of data has been put into it, then where does the culpability lie and who is responsible? Because the whole point of morality on some level is doing the right thing, but it's also a matter of when the wrong thing happens, you can figure out whether somebody's responsible and who and how and why. I think in the medical field, there's some really interesting implications. In terms of search, right? The Google search algorithms, like, are those moral? Are they amoral? What does it mean for— and I think this is going to make so much more of a difference when we really get software and algorithms into the physical world. And so when we have self-driving at scale, when we have robots, smart medical devices, which are almost already ready, when we've got a synthetic bio that is putting sort of algorithmic data-driven ways of learning and machine learning into our bodies, like that's when morality as it relates to algorithm design is going to be critically important because this is a culture thing, right? And regulatory bodies and finding the nuances around that is gonna be so important.

You're a Christian, right?

Yes.

What role does religion play in your life?

Oh, it plays a huge role. Gosh, it is my personal framework for navigating hard problems. So everybody has frameworks for navigating hard problems, and I don't think any framework is better than another. It's just a matter of how consistently effective your framework is. My framework, and this particular framework, has been consistently very effective. Active for me. And it just, it reminds me of a set of things that, you know, that my parents taught me. And, you know, and we were, and we were raised, you know, in the church, but we weren't actively religious growing up. But they raised me to be humble. They raised me to be a giver. They raised me to be a listener. They raised me not to lean just on my own abilities. They raised me to serve others first. And I think those are things that are so important when I, when I get down and I think, oh, well, what if I just help somebody else? And all of a sudden I get lifted up where I say, gosh, I feel so Gosh, this negotiation with this entrepreneur is really frustrating me because of this. And like, you know, this is really a helpful framework. And it's something which increasingly these days, people are cool with, like, cool, man, you do what you do. And I'm like, yeah, you do what you do. And I find that's cool. And it makes me feel proud that I can sort of be fully open about all the different things that I have from a value standpoint and how I bring them to bear.

You strike me as someone really motivated by a sense of honor, a sense of duty, a sense of responsibility. And it's not something you see that often in tech. Does that frustrate you sometimes? Or tell me more about how the sense of duty, if at all, takes a role in your life. Hmm.

Well, it doesn't frustrate me that much in tech because I think it is there in space. And just in DC, for example, I have a duty to my partners who trust me to say things that are reflective of them because they've tied their— they've hitched their wagon to me just like I've hitched my wagon to them. I have a duty to my LPs because they've trusted me to, you know, to be a good fiduciary and to be responsible with how we spend their money and to, and to, you know, and to do things that reflect what we said we were going to do and to be honest about that. I have a I have a duty to the community. I have a duty to entrepreneurs and to be upfront with them, to be direct with them, to tell them what I'm good at, what I'm not good at. If I say I'm going to do some shit, to do it and vice versa. I think that duty is a key component of being successful here. Those people who shirk their duties to each other in this business are the ones that struggle.

Do you believe in heroes or role models? And if so, you know, who are yours?

Yes, mom and dad.

Yeah, that's good. Tell me more about that.

Uh, I'm gonna get personal, but that's fine. My parents were South Africans and were born in the heart of apartheid and were part of the armed resistance against apartheid. And so they were activists and they went into exile and they, you know, came to New York with us and no money and they did food stamps and shelters and just sort of really worked hard to fight for freedom, really worked hard for their country, for their people, really worked hard to fight for the right to an education. And they both got, you know, graduate degrees up there, you know, up there out of their ears. And, and so the set of challenges and opportunities that they were faced with, like, I'll never be able to even tell half a story about over the course of my life. And so That is a humbling thing to me because it's like my life is pretty darn easy. It's also a motivating thing because it's like, "Yo, people have gone way further with way less resources, so let me get my hustle on." Yeah.

It's interesting. When I also think about you and hang out with you, you don't seem to be susceptible to a form of hedonism, like excessive partying or too much. You seem to be really grounded. Is that a correct reading? I mean, I know you have a good time, you're always smiling.

That's a correct reading right now, but you know, I'm a little older now. I've got responsibilities now.

You don't have a kid yet, right?

No, I don't have a kid yet.

Are you gonna have a kid anytime soon? Pass. Okay, I just became an uncle, so I'm starting to think about it. When you think about the term fulfilled, someone who fulfilled, who's the first person that comes to mind and why?

When I think about the term fulfilled?

Yeah, someone who is fulfilled, someone who is having a sort of fulfillment that you aspire to have or do have.

This might sound like a strange answer, but I think of somebody like Travis Kalanick.

Wow, I thought you're gonna say Charles Manson when you said strange answer. I'm just kidding. Tell me about Travis Kalanick.

Why? Because I get the sense, and I don't know Travis, so, so this is really just from the outside in, that that dude wakes up in the morning filled with purpose. He has a reason to get up every single morning, and he doesn't want to go to sleep because there's so much more to do. And that is one reading of being fulfilled that I aspire to. If I ever don't want to wake up or if I ever really want to go away, then I think that joy is an abundance of meaning. I don't think that joy is simply pleasure. I don't think joy is really short-term satisfaction either. It's just when you feel like your life is worth something and you've got something to do and it's really worth doing. Gosh, is that guy not an incredible example of that?

That's interesting. We've talked about Travis a few times. I don't know him either, obviously. Well, not obviously. I could know him, theoretically. We post Uber sometimes. Joking aside, when people critique Uber and him as well, what's your response to that?

We make our own bed. We've got to sleep in it. And I think that that company is doing really, really interesting, exciting, morally confusing things on the basis of how fast they're going, on the basis of how driven they are, on the basis of the scale of their ambition. I have some personal views by virtue of being an investor in Lyft, which, you know, which, which result in having a bias against some of the things that they do versus others. But I can't knock the hustle, man. Yeah, grinding.

Do you identify as a stern, uh, or stern believer in capitalism with like a capital C?

As a philosopher, it's really hard to, to be a stern believer in anything, but, but I do think that capitalism is an extraordinarily effective tool And it's an extraordinarily effective tool that can be good for people and that can be bad for people. It's, it's sort of like transparency. Transparency isn't good. Transparency isn't bad. Transparency is powerful. And ditto capitalism. And so capitalism with a dose of values, capitalism with a dose of love, with a dose of humility, a dose of honesty, transparency, I think can be fabulous, can be one of the most powerful tools in the world. And so I wouldn't be doing this if I weren't a capitalist, right?

Well, it's interesting. I mean, when Adam Smith, you know, uh, wrote The Wealth of Nations or whatever he wrote, he wrote that it needed to be guided by a system of ethics, which he defined as religion. But now that it seems amidst the, the people who are building, you know, the owners, that religion plays less of a role, it's interesting to see if something will fill its place in terms of the system of ethics, whether it will be kind of a whether religion will be modernized, maybe it is already, or whether new forms will take its place. Do you think about this at all, or have any thoughts about that?

Yeah, I think about that a lot, particularly as if you look maybe a decade, maybe sooner, maybe longer into the future, where there's a lot more decentralized systems, there's a lot more decentralized platforms, where the notion of democratic and self-organized and self-governed systems is much more ubiquitous, because I think that's going to be true. I think that, you know, that the sort of real-time markets where peers are freely interacting among each other are going to be represented in all type of industry. And, you know, in the way— if you imagine like a trading floor from Trading Places, but put that into any single type of industry and make it all digital and make it all immediate, then I think that's going to I think that's going to be the future environment that we live in. And so what does it mean to have democratic systems that are stable? What does it mean to have decentralized systems where there isn't a central authority that can make the rules, but they still work? I think those are some of the ethical frameworks that we're going to have to spend a lot of time really building. And like, what does it mean for there to be governance in a world of self-governance? I think Reddit has started to be an interesting early case study of that, you know, because like, what does it mean for there to be a mob? And what does it mean—

Lord of the Flies.

Lord of the Flies. Yeah.

Like, what does it mean to put order around the mob?

And how do mobs— and how do mobs evolve in time? And how can mobs be, you know, and how can they be self-organized in ways that are effective? You look at Anonymous and you look at the fact that there's— and open source and the open source community. And I feel like that type of value creation is really going to dominate. And so I think that that type of ethical framework is really going to need to mature quickly.

Do you believe in charter cities?

I think they're interesting. I think they're super interesting. I think that, gosh, you look at some of what Estonia is doing with their e-government and in, in different countries and in different municipalities, which I think are increasingly gonna become important to our economy. You, you see that, Some people are making decisions about turning their area into a little bit of a sandbox where they can experiment with stuff. And where you can experiment is where I think you can make leaps and leaps and bounds. And so the funny thing about self-driving cars, for example, is the critics say the government is never going to allow that. And I say, which government? If a government allows it and it takes off, then it's going to be super hard to stop. And so I think that that charter cities maybe as a narrow concept are interesting and, you know, we'll see how those go. But I do think that municipal and in general local governing bodies can have undue influence all over the world right now in pushing technology forward and in pushing culture forward along with it.

Okay, I'm gonna say a thinker and you're gonna tell me where you fundamentally disagree with that. And if you don't fundamentally disagree, then just say next. Okay, and of course I'm assuming you agree with them on a bunch of things as well. Mark Andreessen.

I agree with a lot of what Mark Andreessen says. What are some places where I don't agree with Mark Andreessen? You know, I— one, right now Mark Andreessen seems like he is— and even though he's been very eloquent on the fact that if you've got a lot of burn, you're going to vaporize— but it seems like he's been a lot more on the bull case than on the bear case about, uh, what some of the so-called unicorn valuations are going to do right now. And, and particularly with the unicorn valuations, I'm on the bear case right now. Peter Thiel, uh, brilliant, but I disagree with him on a lot of things.

All right, talk about it.

Long list. He has a really interesting thesis on why technology stopped and why planes stopped moving faster and trains stopped moving faster. And he pegs it somewhere around the 1970s. And he has a really interesting view on how when there's a neoconservative world where we're doing arms races, that drives innovation from government. And when there's a totally free market and there are bubbles, that drives innovation from the markets. And in absence of sort of an opportunity for either one of those things, innovation stops. And I think he's flat out wrong about why technology slowed down, or at least the progress of it slowed down in the '70s for two reasons. One, I think that distributing technology from zero to end rather than from, from, uh, from zero to one, as he describes, and as is the name of his book, is as transformative and as important as, as going from, from zero to one. And as an example of that, when we brought mobile phones to the whole world, East Africa invented mobile money and like transformed what we can think of in terms of how we can transact and how we can underwrite data and how we can do et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And there's, and there's all sorts of other examples of that. So one, I think that zero to N innovation is as powerful as zero to one. And then two, Gosh, what happened in the '60s and '70s? Mao died and dozens of countries in Africa were decolonized all in one, which meant that there were 2 billion new people entering the global economy. Those are 2 billion hungry people, all of whom were becoming dramatically healthier, dramatically wealthier, and wanted resources. And so, and so, you know, why did the United States stop innovating? Because the whole world was changing in a really profound way. And so I think that there's maybe— there may be some blind spots in his thinking around those two things.

Uh, David Brooks.

David Brooks. Uh, I, I think that David Brooks sometimes brings a paternalistic attitude to describing the plight of people of color. And tries to be a moralist where he thinks he knows what's best for other people in ways that I don't find fully appropriate. But I actually tend to think that his view on morality is a really powerful one and a compelling one. But I don't like the moralism. I don't like this sort of curmudgeonly thing that he kind of—

Lawrence Lessig.

I hope he runs for president.

Yeah. Larry Summers.

He's way too smart for me. I mean, they're always— they're all way too smart for me, so it's hard. You know, I don't know.

Krugman.

Krugman. Krugman has been beating the drum of the fact that the stimulus should have been bigger for a long time, and it seems like at least from a, from the right angle that he's been validated in that. But I've increasingly heard some fairly compelling arguments that the left and right pressure that resulted in the stimulus being right-sized as it was, was actually really important. And if the stimulus had become too big, we actually would've had a hard time growing enough to sort of overcome the debt overhang that would have resulted in it. So I think that maybe, maybe a little bit of move towards the center on that one is, is where I might sit, but I don't know. I'm not a Nobel-winning economist.

Kanye West. Obama.

Let's go back. Let's go back to Kanye West. Uh, Kanye West. Made a very provocative statement which resonated with me, but which I think needs a— he needs to slow down on, which was that the, you know, which was basically that there wasn't actually a real systematic racism issue in the United States, but that it was a class issue, and that class is the new racism. And I think that the reason why that's really profound on the one hand in a good way is that class gets not nearly enough attention and isn't nearly thought of enough. I worry about there being a missing middle where if you're lower middle class, it's really hard to get loans to go to school because you're not at full scholarship stage and you can't just pay for them yourself. And I think the same— and that's just one example, but I think there's tons of examples of that. There's, you know, the inequality thing in the United States is really challenging and doesn't make a ton of sense. And universal basic income is is a really interesting concept that I would love to see more attention around because I think it can be a provocative way to start to counteract some of that. But there is systematic racism. Kanyi, you're wrong on that. Come on, dude.

What's the celebrity effect? Is the celebrity effect in terms of the ability for people like Kanyi, like Lil Wayne or Nicki Minaj or whoever to influence young people, Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, in terms of behaviors, morals, what they aspire to be. Is that celebrity effect underrated or is that overrated? Because it's not something that the market internalizes in any way.

I think it's pretty well rated. I do think that it is somewhat underrated in the sense that a lot of the people who are celebrities are celebrities on the basis of having a unique ability to draw the right resources around them. And so I think it would be fun to deploy them in different ways. And I think it is something of a shame that Kanyi's creative output was somewhat curtailed, for example. But I think the market, I think the market is, I think the market's pretty good on celebrities actually.

How about, let's go back to Obama.

I have nothing to say against him.

Donald Trump, although I'm sure you agree with everything he says.

I think that Donald Trump is the candidate that we were asking for, and I think that a sort of reality TV-fueled culture will result in a reality TV president, or at least presidential candidate and potentially president. I don't think it'll happen, but potentially president. I think that he is the candidate that we deserve. I think that he is an absolute A+ troll, and he's trolling the absolute piss out of the political system. And so I actually take some pleasure in that because I think that's just fun to watch, even though it's a little bit like watching a car crash. And in terms of his views, I'm not sure what his views are. They change a lot, and I think that he He'll say whatever he needs to say to get attention because he's fundamentally an entertainer. And I, and I, and I understand that. And so I don't think that having a sort of serious policy view on him is appropriate.

Where is the, um, uh, the political system, where does it fundamentally need to change? In what aspect?

My, my biggest one is, I think, campaign finance. I think that the Supreme Court decision around around that was such a bummer, really such a bummer. I think we need to be a democracy and we're not trying, or at least a republic, right? A representative democracy. And when you allow the interests of those at the top to disproportionately affect the outcome, then that's actually less of a representative democracy. So that is a real big bummer to me.

What's something that you used to sternly believe that now you believe as fundamentally misguided?

That having a really big advisory board is good for early-stage startups. When I first started in this business, it's just like, oh, like, let's get as many advisors as possible and give them free equity because it'll give us credibility, it'll give us intros, it'll give us access. And now as a VC, whenever I hear an entrepreneur go to their advisory board slide and start bragging about that, I at best switch off and at worst discount them.

When you think about, again, bringing back the capitalism for a second, when you think about, you know, where is your stance in terms of regulations or in terms of, you know, social, you know, democratic capitalism or just kind of modified, or what's it going to look like in the future? What should it look like?

I think that there shouldn't be any regulation on the market if you start at the very beginning of the market when everybody was equal.

So how do you reconcile—

but that's not where we are, right?

So how do you reconcile that?

And the people who are sort of narrowly for equal opportunity tend to be people who already have a lot of structural advantages. And so I think that regulation is useful in getting us to a fair playing field and an equal playing field. And once we get there, and that's an interesting and a hard question to figure out when and under what circumstances we've gotten there, then I think regulation needs to get out of the way. But I do think that regulation is key for us getting there. There.

Do you think— this is kind of a side question— but do you think affirmative action has been, uh, overall a boon to the African-American community?

Complicated. On balance, yes. On balance, yes. Uh, in, in some ways I have some apprehension about it, but not because of the reasons why affirmative action opponents are against it. I actually think that one of the things that I found to be really sad is that the, you know, I think that desegregation has been complex because watching white people move out of a city because Black people are coming in, watching Black people move into the city because white people and then white people moving out because— and watching people who are actually going out of their way to block people of color out of land all in the name of integration has been really, really interesting. And you think about Harlem pre-desegregation, and you think about some of these communities in the Deep South, particularly pre-desegregation, where there were doctors and there were lawyers and there were at scale with a real, real, real rich density. And then you think about it now, where it's integrated and it's complex, and not all that complexity is good. So I think that's a little bit confusing. That's not quite affirmative action. In terms of affirmative action, where I think that the two of those things come together is— I worry a little bit when I feel as though I want what a white person has.

And money, status.

No, no, no, money and status, yes, I want, but I worry about what— or yes, I think are good to want, but I worry about what a white person has in the sense of I worry about trying to be like a white person rather than just having opportunity and be like a Black person. That's actually the thing that makes me a little uncomfortable. And I want people of color and Black people particularly to be comfortable in their own skin and to be all about themselves for themselves. And I worry a little bit that some of the language and some of the implication is, if I sound white, I'm better off, or if I act white, I'm better off, if I dress white, I'm better off. And that's where I feel a little uncomfortable, and I'm having a hard time parsing that.

But tell me more about that. When is that tension most strong, you know, strongest for you?

Uh, when I leave my house and until I get home. Yeah, I hear you.

What did you think about the, uh, the Fast Company article? Uh, it highlighted kind of African Americans in tech and you and your buddies Tristan Walker and a bunch of others.

Oh, I mean, it was a conversation and they just sort of took the transcript and put it on there. And so I thought that was cool because that was actually what we talked about.. And I think it is, I think it's hopefully refreshing to my people who were my intended audience to know that I'm hearing them. And that if I instinctively bias somebody because they are Black, that's not, that doesn't, that's not reverse racism. That's that's life, and that's what white people do to white people, you know, those types of things. And so I think it was cool to see a good dose of honesty about what the challenges we face are and what some of the coding language and what some of the, the uncomfortable language we've, we've been trying to navigate means to others in our field and means to some of our peers.

That was really a cathartic experience, and so I hope that it felt like that Yeah, you know, Tristan obviously started Code2040, you know, very passionate about getting, you know, more Black people coding and in technology. You're a big supporter. Is there anything that you fundamentally disagree on with Tristan?

In life?

Yeah, or as it relates to the cause, or just in general?

I think he overrates the Bieber Christmas album. To be honest. He needs to chill on that. It's all about Mariah Carey's Christmas All I Want for Christmas Now.

I feel you.

No, I think Christian's doing great work. And I, you know, I think that every— from Kimberly Bryant at Black Girls Code and, oh my, I mean, the list is so freaking long. But Kathryn Finney over here in New York. There's so many people who are doing incredible work. In Mitch and Frida Kapoor, Charles Hudson, you know, who are doing incredible work in focusing on really attacking this issue from all angles. And I will never publicly disagree with those people around these things.

Do you see yourself, you know, starting your own organization around a cause in the future, or is it best to kind of support the ones that, you know, your friends are already doing?

Maybe. I don't think that— just the same way that, you know, I don't necessarily see myself as a founder for founder's sake. I would only see myself as a founder if there's a problem in the world that I have to solve, or if I can't get a job otherwise, you know. And so, and so ditto, I don't really think that there's an organization out there that I have to solve for the sake of it, and there's nothing that speaks to me. And there's really amazing work being done. Detroit Water Project, is so cool, you know, I should just support that, right?

So yeah, how do you think of, uh, of legacy or the idea of legacy for yourself?

I want my wife and, and eventually if I have— I think I've done a job I think of great companies that push the world forward, that make LPs a ton of money, because those are things that make me happy and those are things that I'm here to do. But I want to make them proud, which is why I, I try and keep it more simple, and because they can be a true north for me in a way that almost nothing else can.

You mentioned in your bio, uh, that, you know, something you think a lot about is navigating personal failure.

Sure. In short, somebody said earlier today when I was telling them about how I had this failing experience or that, they said, "It's okay, failure is good." And I said to them, "No, failure is not good. Failure is bad. Failure is prison. Failure is death, despondency, loneliness." It's like all these bad things. Overcoming failure is good. Overcoming failure is fabulous, right? But overcoming failure is one of the components of success. Success is good. And so I think that the gospel of failure is a mistaken gospel. I think that it should be the gospel of success. And I think that for the people who fail the most and who fail the most systematically and who disproportionately fail, Saying to them that failure is good isn't all that helpful. It's saying to them that you will eventually succeed, failure is okay, I think is critical, right? And the difference between failure is good and failure is okay is an inch and an ocean. And making failure okay and realizing and allowing people to overcome when they failed and allowing people to end up on top and Giving people the confidence that they will end up on top is what I'm most excited about. That's what I'm most passionate about in the context of failure.

I could talk to you forever, but I do want to be respectful of your time.

I see somebody called in here. Should I pick up the phone?

Do you want to?

It's up to you. You're the boss.

No, I think we're all set. I want to respect that you might have to go into another meeting at this point. Kanyi, you are a gentleman, you are a scholar, you're one of the best guys in the business, your friend. Thank you for taking the time today. Everyone, please give a lot of Blab hand claps to Kanyi, and thank you. It's been an honor.

All right, take care.

Have a great day.

Talk to you soon, Kanyi.

Bye, everybody on Blab. Thank you for joining us. If you have any more feedback for the next session, let us know. This has been awesome and Kanyi is one of the best dudes on the internet. So follow him at— I'm gonna get his Twitter handle really quick. Follow him at @km. Great guy, super nice guy. Where do you send feedback? Email me at erik@producthunt.com. E-R-I-K at producthunt.com. Or better yet, tweet me @ericthorenberg and @ProductHunt. Who do you want to see on Product Hunt Live? What can Blab do better? I feel ridiculous. I feel like I'm on a television show. This is awesome. See you guys next time.