#19 - NIKHIL BASU TRIVEDI

Hey, Nikhil.

Hi, Jake.

Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Really appreciate you taking the time. You have a super interesting background. You're well known for your career in vc, mostly at Shasta Ventures. Recently you've been writing a lot on Substack with your publication, the Next Big Thing. Great to have you. Want to start a bit by just covering your background that I alluded to, but I'd actually like to go back even earlier. So you grew up in the UK and moved to Silicon Valley as a teen. Would love to start there and just hear what it's like to move from the UK to Silicon Valley at such a young age.

Yeah. And first of all, thanks Jake, so much for having me on. Excited to chat with you and I love these conversations where there's nothing prepared and we just dive straight in and so on. My background, yes, I moved from the UK to the Bay Area when I was 13 and it was a pretty amazing move for me in hindsight. I actually hated it for the first year and really struggled to adjust. And 13 is a difficult age to move, I think. So I missed my friends, I missed a lot of stuff that I was doing in England. But what I got was I got exposure to Silicon Valley and to entrepreneurship and to all the stuff happening here in technology when I was in high school.

And that has been an incredible benefit to my life. And so I feel really grateful for.

Having had the opportunity to move here.

And it was because of my parents.

Jobs that we came out here.

So your parents, as far as I understand, you kind of have entrepreneurship and technology in your blood. Your mother, I understand, teaches entrepreneurship directly and your father has a background. I believe it's Sun Microsystems and more recently Nvidia through their extraordinary growth over the last decade or so. Do you think that was a part of what drove you into going into the type of career that you've gone into today?

For sure. I mean, both my parents are still my heroes in so many ways. And my mom, as you said, is a professor of entrepreneurship. So you know, she started doing research around entrepreneurs in the UK back when we lived there, but those were actually non tech entrepreneurs. She did a bunch of research on restaurant owners, for instance, and immigrant entrepreneurs in Britain. And my dad had the tech background and but the thing is, you know, I used a computer, of course, in England, I played games. But it wasn't until we came to Silicon Valley, you know, came to the bay area in 2002 that I really understood, you know, what technology entrepreneurship was. And I had all these examples around me for sort of friends I went to school with and their parents. It's obviously just hard to ignore when you're in this part of the world.

And so I don't know, had we.

Stayed in England, that I would have gone into startups and venture capital. I frankly doubt that that would have happened, especially this early in my career.

Right. So growing up and getting kind of the technology bug before you really made the leap, you started off, you went off to Princeton for undergrad and studied science, specifically molecular biology. And I actually downloaded and read just a small amount of your thesis, which you wrote on basically the thousand dollar genome. I don't know how much. How fresh in mind that might be or not, but what brought you to studying molecular biology? And how has that kind of. And whether it's the thesis or just the education as a whole, how has that helped kind of direct what you've done since. I know obviously you've gone a little bit of a different direction, focusing a lot on consumer subscription businesses, but is that still a thread that's kind of carried on through your life?

Yeah. Wow. Well, first of all, I'm really impressed that you downloaded. Taking a look at the senior thesis I wrote in college, I studied molecular biology because I've always been curious about lots of different subjects. But I felt with bio in particular, if I didn't study it in school, I would never get a chance to properly learn it.

You know, I'd gotten to learn CS.

And programming and learn how to code in the classroom in high school and then out of the classroom in college.

But molecular biology felt like one of.

Those things that I had to be.

In the classroom to learn. And so that was actually part of the reason why I ended up studying it. And of course also because I was passionate about the subject, I would say, you know, I don't know how much bio I know anymore. And I've definitely forgotten a lot of, like, what we learned in organic chemistry and biochemistry and some of the classes that I didn't like as much and suffered through. But what I really appreciate about Princeton is, you know, the chance to learn how to learn and learn how to think and learn how to write. And I've applied all those things to my. My day job in venture capital since, and then in bio in particular. I think having grounding for the sciences has helped me evaluate some frontier areas. And so I have made a few investments at the intersection of healthcare and biology and computing. And I think those investments would have been harder to make as a vc Had I not had some background in the area and in the subject you.

Mentioned, learning how to think, learning how to learn, learning how to write. That's something I view as like super valuable to be conscious and careful about. But I think a lot of people just kind of gloss over it and do whatever they do. Would love to hear if you could kind of pick one of those few things, whether it's thinking, learning or writing. Would love to hear any framework or just principles that you have in thinking about those pretty fundamental things.

You know what's interesting is I think actually all three are interconnected. For me, I found that I learn and I think when I write. And so that's partially reflected in the newsletter Next Big Thing. And if you look at my Rome Research workspace, you'll see that I'm constantly jotting down thoughts about different companies and different sectors from different conversations that I've had, as well as from things that I'm reading.

And so I actually again, this is probably not a brilliant or novel insight, but for me all three are really interconnected and, you know, just building a daily habit or some sort of ritual around writing has been a huge unlock for me in learning better and thinking better, especially over the last six months.

You mentioned roam research. I wanted to tick chronologically through your background a little bit, but I'm getting distracted now. Your first post on Next Big Thing was actually about the different note taking apps and how I think you wrote about how at the time, and this was earlier this year, you had switched kind of during the heat of the pandemic and the initial shelter in place in the Bay Area, you had switched from evernote to notion, which you were really enjoying. And then you had tried roam research and you liked it, but you had just switched and it was a little bit, you know, wasn't matching up perfectly for you personally. But now I understand you're actually invested in roam research. Just the other day I saw you retweeted the founder on some positive news of their growth and how they're doing it all impressively without marketing and without even like a mobile app or anything like that. Have things changed, I'm assuming, since your initial post, in terms of what you think of Rome and how you're using Rome today?

They have.

And maybe one day I should write a follow up post to that first essay. Basically what's happened in the last couple of months for me is I really tried to apply myself to get into Rome and the reason is I was realizing a notion that I had different pages for different people and different firms and different companies, but they weren't connected together. And that's precisely what Roam solves for through the bidirectional linking system they have. And so I actually realized, like, wow, I think I need that functionality, so I need to invest the time in roaming to figure out if it can work for me. And so that's what's led me more recently to get into Rome. And now I just think it's amazing. I mean, I feel bad, actually, that I was so naive when I wrote that first essay because I hadn't properly applied myself to figure out Rome.

And so I'm delighted to be a Roam user now.

I think I'm still a noob relative to some of the power users and the cult followers of Rome who have figured out how to use it way more impressively than me. But I'm an enthusiastic user and delighted to be an investor in the company as well.

Yeah, it's interesting. I actually just started with it almost exactly a month ago because I got the email yesterday that was like. Or not the email, but a reminder that I sent myself, which was, if you don't want to use it, you need to cancel now. And I haven't myself invested the time. I think I'm probably more along the lines of the first time you tried it, where you just passively saw what it was about and tried it like you would any other Notes app. But I probably need to take the plunge, or not need to, but I think I'd be interested in the possibilities and the things that I could learn from taking the plunge. Was there anything specific in terms of resources? I know there's a ton out there, but anything that you found super useful?

I just got going. You know, I got going with square brackets for different core concepts in notes that I was taking with a conversation. And then it just started to work for me and spiral from there. And I do think a few of the YouTube tutorials are good, but I actually haven't invested that much time in them. I've just tried to figure it out by being inside of the product and using it.

Well, that works, too. So, going back to your story a little bit, you're at Princeton. You're studying molecular biology. It's around that time you started the company Artsy.

Yeah.

So what happened with Artsy is that.

Carter Cleveland, who's the founder of the company, had the idea to build a site to democratize the art world, and he came up with this idea in the fall of 2008. He was a senior at Princeton and I was a sophomore and so I actually hadn't declared yet that I was going to study more bio, even though I was taking organic chemistry that that semester for instance. And so I had a sense that I was going to study it. And I just began working with him on the idea and one thing led to another and suddenly we were working on it full time. We moved into my parents house the summer of 2009 to be in the Bay Area and focus on artsy. And so that was the initial journey there.

Was that a formative experience for you as an entrepreneur? Obviously you went on and pretty quickly shifted to vc, but I don't think that necessarily tells that it wasn't a great experience for you.

It was a super formative experience for me on a number of dimensions because we really struggled to find product market fit in those early days. And so I think still today, having the empathy of a founder and what, what a founder goes through to sort of get something from 0 to 1 is something that I'm lucky to have from those days. The other thing that was so formative about it is I met a lot of people in the venture world and in the broader entrepreneurial ecosystem just that summer of 2009 who have remained colleagues and friends and collaborators to this day. And so.

You know, again, this was.

Not intentional at all.

But artsy and the journey there has.

Really benefited me, as you alluded to. I realized about a year later that art was never going to be my life's work and that actually the light bulb had gone off for me when we were pitching investors that at some point I'd love to be on the other side of the table, which is what sparked my interest in ventures specifically as well.

And so credit to Kada and the.

Rest of the team who took artsy forward and have built it to where it is today. But I feel very lucky for the time I had there and then I got to go down this venture path.

So you spent the better part of the last decade at Shasta Ventures. Before that you did a short stint at Insight Venture Partners. You know that that's a long time to be in vc. I know people obviously do it for, you know, the course of their careers, but it's a very long term interest industry. And so you came out of college, which I think is rare, to go right into VC from there. What kind of, you know, you hinted at kind of what got you into it at the fir in the first place in terms of your interest. But what kept you there for 10 years?

Yeah, I mean, I just still to this day absolutely love meeting entrepreneurs. And I think it's very hard to do venture for a long time if you don't enjoy getting to spend time with founders, hearing their stories for the first time and letting yourself have the chance to get really excited about what they're doing. And so fundamentally, I absolutely love that aspect of the business. And I also love the sort of thrill of the chase when I get excited about a company and know that I want to invest, to sort of hunt it down and make sure that I get to.

And then finally, I also really enjoy the, the post investment journey of getting to spend time with these founders as a board member, as a close investor and getting to really be in the sort of front row seats to that business. And so what's kept me, and again, when I joined Insight, I think if you told me you're going to do this venture thing for the next decade, I would have said no bleeping way is that going to happen? But what's transpired is I just absolutely love this job every day and I feel like it's a calling for me and I also think it is a profession where at some point, of course, there are diminishing returns, but I feel like I'm still on the upswing in terms of the amount that I still have to learn and the amount of sort of repetitions that I get to have to improve my ability to find and decide and win and help the next great company.

Yeah, well, what's cool is that from my perspective, you're very young and like I said, you got into venture capital very young and so it's kind of accelerated everything for you where I doubt there's too many venture capitalists with the track record that you have at such a young age to be able to then continue to evolve and see where that, that drives you. So after several years at Shasta, I imagine that was part of what was coming to your mind is like, what's the next step for me, quite literally, you started writing about searching for the next big thing, but what went into your considerations? I mentioned briefly that I quit my job, investment banking after a couple of years without a definitive idea of what I was going to do next. What was kind of going through your mind through the decision making process?

Yeah, I know that I want to keep investing, as you can tell from my love of the day to day. And so the key decision for me over the last many months has been.

Who do I want to work with.

Every day as a partner or as Partners and. And in what format as well. And what I realized pretty quickly is who to work with is the most important decision.

In our entire business. Unless you want to be a solo capitalist or a super angel, an operator angel, where you're practicing investing on your own, your partners are going to be the most important thing related to your success in our industry. And so the journey that I've been on for the last many months is figuring out who I'm aligned with on principles and values, but who's also different from me and complementary to me in skill sets such that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. If we were to think about partnering to build a firm, and that's been my North Star as I float through.

This next chapter, that makes sense. You mentioned in your response the term solo capitalist, which I'm not sure everyone listening knows you basically coined in a blog post on NBT that went somewhat viral within the VC and tech world a few months ago. Maybe. Having said that, you basically identified the trend towards people being able to use their individual brand, which partners at various firms are using anyway, to make founders interested in letting them into the round or letting them lead the round and wanting to work with them in general. Having said that, and obviously coining the term yourself, you talk about the importance for you of finding a partner who aligns on values and who aligns on principles. What do you think a random guess might warrant to. To say that you would be interested in doing a solo capitalist type of thing? What do you think are the key strengths of having a partner that you're aligned with that make you interested in going that route instead?

Yeah, and again, part of what I've done in my writing is tried to learn in public. And the piece about the rise of solo capitalists was in part for me to write down my thoughts on the subject and to think through is this a path that I want to go down? I think when I. When it came out, people naturally assumed that I was going to go down this path. And to be completely honest, I was figuring it out and writing the piece sort of helped me figure it out. I think at the end of the day, the solo capitalist path is very attractive to a certain set of people. And. And to me, it's actually much more attractive for a lot of people than being in a partnership, because so many partnerships are dysfunctional. They're actually not greater than the sum of the parts. There's really one partner driving the partnership's success. And so I think what's compelling about.

The silver capitalist model is that you can just do it on your own. You're the sole general partner of your fund, you're the only member of the investment team, and that more and more of these folks are able to raise bigger funds, to invest in bigger rounds and to lead rounds of financings. In today's environment, LPs are more amenable to this setup than ever before, it feels. And so my perception is that actually a lot of people should be going down the solo capitalist path. But I still believe that the best partnerships and the best teams can out compete and outperform solo capitalists, because if the ingredients are right, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And I actually think there are very few firms in the market today that are like that. And I can point to a few examples that, that I think are actually like that, but there are very few.

I don't know if you were being, like, literal, but if you do have, like, a few examples in mind, could you talk about them and what you think makes them special from your perspective?

Well, I look up to USV a lot. For instance, which is a small partnership. Each of the partners at usv, Rebecca Caden, Fred Wilson, Andy Weissman, Albert Wenger and others there have their own brands. They all sort of write, they all promote the firm in various ways through their outbound efforts. Each of them has led a couple of great investments, if not more for usv. And so. And the impression that I have from the outside looking in is that it's a truly collaborative partnership where each of these people is actually quite different as people, but the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

And I think that's the kind of.

Magic secret sauce that very few firms have. But USV is one that I point.

To that I think does have it right.

And you talked about the branding, but they've also been pretty. I've read some stuff that they've either talked about or I've read some stuff that they've written about or heard some stuff that they've talked about in regards to, you know, putting a lot of attention on the shift of power within the partnership from Fred and Brad to people like Albert and Andy and alike. That was something that you talked about in your series that started with the rise of the solo capitalist, but then had a few articles thereafter on general shifts and trends that you were seeing in the VC space. Is this something that you would think about in your own investing endeavors to create something that could be lasting even beyond yourself?

Absolutely. And frankly, that's the most powerful motivator for me to have a partnership and a team from day one versus be solo. There are examples, of course, Don Valentine is the most famous one of someone who started a firm in Sequoia on their own, and that firm now lives beyond them.

But I think those are fewer and farther between than the sort of foundation of a partnership from day one. And I think the chance for the firm to live beyond you, if it's not just you at the beginning, is higher. And I'm obviously particularly sensitive to this given that I'm young and have sort of seen the dynamics at a couple of different partnerships. But that's a very powerful motivator for me. And the sort of challenge and I.

Think the opportunity is that there are.

Actually very few firms that have figured out how to do even one generational transition well, let alone multiple. You know, the list that's done multiple.

Is.

Benchmark Sequoia and very few others. And so, you know, when I look at the next, you know, 40 years, I'm 31 now, you know, I hope that part of my legacy in this industry can be building a firm that lasts and that lasts beyond me.

That's great. And I think, you know, everyone wants to create something and have some lasting impact. And in vc, there's a particular set of challenges that come along with that, just as has been shown by kind of the proof of the fact that so few have. But I think it's an ambitious goal and certainly people have done it successfully already. It doesn't mean it can't be done successfully in the future. So moving on to talking about more so the types of industries or companies that you focus on and that you spend a lot of time thinking about and learning about. There's a couple of different angles I could take here. One is going through your newsletter, the next big thing. You've talked about your obsession with consumer subscriptions. You've talked about the combination of consumer and enterprise businesses, the blurring of the line between the two, and also businesses in a box, I think you called them, where companies like Shopify basically are enabling people to come on and create their own business with minimal friction. Then on the other side of that, I have a post that I flagged from 2016 that you wrote, I think, on Medium, which lays out several different specific industries or just subjects that you're interested in. So again, not sure how fresh of mind that might be, and I can certainly rattle off the subjects, but which angle do you think you want to take? You want to start with the newer stuff or the older.

No, let's do it. Let's go back to 2016 and revisit that post. I think that post was called something like, what's Next? Here are eight trends that I'm excited about in 2016.

Exactly. Yeah. So I'll just take it from the top in terms of ones that stood out to me. There's eight like you mentioned. The first one that I took note of was Sleep, something that I've become like, if you look at the trend line of my interest, it would be pretty flat for a long, long time. And then just recently had a huge spike. I read Matthew Walker's book why We Sleep, talked to Matteo Franceschetti from eight Sleep, and then just got an OURA ring as well. So I read your piece from back then and you actually mentioned eight Sleep, which was like a shell of what it is today, and you mentioned a number of other companies. I think market mapping is something that, as far as I've seen, you do super well. So would love to hear basically your thoughts on sleep in general, but in terms of the industry, how it's evolved since then, and kind of where your interests lie today.

Yeah, and I'm so glad we're talking about this. This is one of the amazing things about writing is you can actually look back and see, hey, here's exactly what I was thinking in this moment in time several years ago, and can sort of do the postmortem very accurately as a result. So I think that post about what's Next was followed up with a post in 2016 about sleep technology. And for a while, if you googled sleep technology that term, you would actually find my essay as the number one result. So I went really deep on this category back then, and I felt that there was a huge opportunity because humans spend about a third of our life sleeping and yet we spend actually very little money against that and making it better. And I think in the four and a half years since that post, people's sort of understanding of sleep has improved and it's been much more in the conversation than it was back in 2016. I actually have made no investments in the space. And that's the biggest disappointment, if I reflect on the last four and a half years, that despite having met with a ton of companies, I didn't make an investment around it. I think the most interesting ones that I spent time with were eight Sleep. For instance, I went to Matteo and the team's office multiple times. I tried the product. It was very early, and I think it's taken four and a half years to make the product a lot better. And I think what they're doing now is interesting. And then probably the couple companies that have done the best in this category since have been ura, as you referenced earlier, which didn't exist back then, but with the ring form factor as a way to very easily track sleep because people can just keep wearing the ring while they're sleeping. I think Whoop has also done a good job and I spent a bunch of time with Will back in the day. I'm really impressed by how he and that team have executed across many years. It's been a long journey to get to where they are today at Woop. And then finally I think Apple with the watch is a key player here, but to me there's still so much opportunity to help people sleep better, help people fall asleep in the first place as well, help people feel better when they wake up. And so I still think we're just scratching the surface. And perhaps companies like OURA and Whoop and the Apple watches, they as they get more adoption are going to be enabling technologies for a whole bunch of other applications within sleep technology.

Is it still something that if you found the right company, you're still tracking this sector as obsessively or you think it's hit a point where some of the players are a little bit more established and you're not as interested for your type of Series A stage investing?

Yeah, I still very much am. And again, the players that I think have actually done well thus far have all been physical products and hardware. One of the reasons that I didn't get involved in any of these companies is I've tried to shy away from hardware investing as much as I can just because much higher upfront capital costs and less capital efficient than a pure software company, perhaps. Again, I was trying to get at this with my last comment. Now that some of the hardware is more out there and a bunch of people have been exposed to tracking their sleep, there's a bigger software opportunity in the years ahead than there were in the last four and a half years.

Yeah, it's interesting, like you said, the tracking is more prevalent now and hopefully and probably will become more so in the years to come, but there's actually not a whole lot to do. Like I was talking to a friend about the aura ring and he was like, all right, so like how does that actually help you sleep more? And I was like well it just shows me, you know, shows me the quality and then I have to kind of work with that myself. And he's like, okay, like, you know, you have to be motivated and you have to do your own research now for the most part. But I could certainly see a future where there's something that's like a, you know, a sleep trainer of sorts and that can be provided via software with relatively low, like, human touch. That could really help a lot of people just get educated.

Yeah. I mean, I think, I hope that one day we get to a point where a lot of what we're doing is being tracked and all of us.

Our lives are getting improved by.

The.

Sort of learning that, hey, we're spending too much time on screens and we should shut off at this time to get sort of much better sleep or.

We should read such a thing or.

Listen to such a thing to perform better the next day. You know, I think we're going to live in a world where because of all the data that we're just starting to capture right now, you know, we'll be like that.

Yeah. And just hearing you speak, I can hear you've written or spoken in the past about being an optimist and how core that is to kind of who you are. I share that characteristic myself. One of the areas that I think I'm optimistic in, that sounds crazy to a lot of people, is the extension of health span that I'm not necessarily expecting to see, as if it's an inevitable thing, but I think that people are drastically underestimating the possibility that people may live much longer than 100 or even 120 years old people in my generation and yours. And a big part of that is being able to learn more about who we are as humans. And so going back to your thesis, and you mentioned this as a category in the post in 2016, would love to hear about genomics. You have an investment in the category? I believe so. We'd love to hear your overarching view there.

Yeah.

And again, in this what's Next piece in 2016, I think I talked about genomics as being an area of interest to me. Have invested in a few companies related to genomics, such as Color Genomics, color.com, which does genomic testing for consumers. I've also invested in a company called AllStripes, formerly known as RDMD, which is helping patients that have rare diseases sort of aggregate their data, including genomic data, to help find diagnostics and treatments for these rare diseases. You know, I think again, here we are just scratching the surface of what's possible. And, you know, a number of consumers have been made aware of genomic sequencing. We're using sequencing in a number of ways, but there's still, I think, a ton that needs to happen for the sort of usefulness of genomics based on the analysis of genomic data to be more widespread.

So in that thesis you wrote, it's going to be maybe funny looking back, because that was in 2010, I think. But you wrote about the impressive acceleration of sequencing and how cheap it was getting relative to the past, and quick. But you wrote that the real revolution you expected to be more so in the 2000s or even beyond. Is that still something where you think we're on pace to see meaningful leaps forward over the next decade?

I think so. I mean, look, I think actually what I got wrong to a certain extent in my senior thesis at Princeton in 2010, 2011, was it wasn't third generation sequencing technologies that were the big unlock, it was second generation, what we call next generation sequencing technologies, primarily by one company, Illumina, that blew open this market and that made it a viable category. And then other companies such as 10X Genomics, have sort of capitalized on that opportunity. But the analysis of genomic data is still, is still pretty rudimentary in my. Again, I'm not an expert on this anymore, but as I follow the space, it still feels like computational analysis of genomic data is actually pretty early. And, and so I think as computing becomes more and more powerful, as we get more and more genomic data, as that data becomes more accurate, the possibilities are endless in how we use it.

So another one you wrote about back a few years ago was self driving cars, which has become a bit of a hot button topic just because people, I think on the one hand they're expecting them to become really popular and all over the streets, you know, tomorrow, figuratively. And then on the other hand there's a segment of people who are like, yeah, that's just, you know, that's just, that's all talk and that's not actually even coming. I have a lot of interest in the space. I think it's, you know, this is just my personal view, but I think like the government should be doing more to encourage self driving cars. It's a, you know, it's the third leading cause of death in the United States overall. First from people like ages 5 to 30. I think it is. And it's killed, you know, I've been following as a way of kind of putting Covid into perspective. I've been following on a global scale how road traffic accidents have correlated with, not correlated, but how they've tracked against COVID deaths. And it's been, I just checked actually in advance of this call and for the first time, Covid has killed more people this year than road traffic accidents, but it's about equal. So I think it's like a highly underestimated cause of death and that's ultimately what we should all be trying to beat. Do you have an Updated view from 2016 on self driving cars and where you think they could go?

Yeah, I don't have a nuanced opinion right now. I think actually the technology is further along than a lot of people think. And even if.

If any of your.

Listeners have driven a Tesla, with the latest software updates for Autopilot, it's pretty amazing what these cars can already do, especially for freeway driving and automatic lane changes and automatic parking and automatic summoning. So I actually think you're right that the technology is pretty far along for something like self driving. But the barrier is policy and the barrier is all of the systemic changes that need to happen to enable a self driving world because they're pretty significant. And there's also a lot of competing forces against having that world happen because of the potential ramifications for jobs. Right. And for instance, the trucking industry is just taking one example for what a lot of people fear about a self driving world and what it would do to certain jobs.

I think One thing that COVID 19.

Has revealed, hopefully for everyone who's following, is there's a lot of things that technology alone can't solve. And I think this year for me and hopefully for others, has been a sort of rude awakening on the importance of policy and technology. You know, government and tech working together to tackle something like a pandemic, to tackle something like the climate crisis to enable a self driving world. And the two have to be able to work together for these things to actually happen.

Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned Tesla and the progress they're making. I've been basically a Tesla fanboy shamelessly for the last, really since 2014. I think in my gap year I stumbled upon them as an investment from someone who is more familiar. But Q3 last year there was a one sentence in their earnings that I didn't think got nearly enough attention, which was basically saying that their autonomous driving technology, as is for when people could put it on autopilot Mode, had basically a 9x less accident rate versus the human error average of people driving manually in the United States. And I thought that was amazing and totally would never have guessed that if not for the publication of it. And granted they're not dealing with some of the more complex driving cases yet. There's certainly some nuances there that make it maybe not as stark as it seems, but that to me was super optimistic about where we could be headed in the short term.

Totally. Yeah.

That's wild. It's amazing.

I know we're coming up on time here. Want to give you the last word to tell people where to follow you and find your substack and things like that. But before we get there, last question, what are you spending your days doing a lot of these days? You made a pretty unique and I think very bold move to leave what was a very comfortable career where you kind of see the future. And it looked good probably. And now you're following your passions a little bit more, I assume. How are your days taking shape?

Yeah, I'm spending most of my time with partners for this new firm, both general partners and limited partners, and I'm really plotting out what this next 20 plus year chapter is going to look like. I've wanted to follow the path of my heroes such as Don Valentine and Andy Ratcliffe and Fred Wilson and Josh Koppelman who have built firms that either already lost beyond them or they will. And so I'm spending all my time sort of thinking about that and making things happen to set that up. And then I'm also spending a bunch of time still meeting with entrepreneurs I've made. I think it's 11 investments now since July 1st since I left Shasta. And finally I'm writing and I'm trying to write something every week still. And so the thing that I need to do this evening after our episode here is write the latest post for tomorrow morning.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for giving me some of your valuable time today and sharing it with everyone who tunes in to listen. Want to give you the last word, like I said, to point people to your substack or just talk about anything that we didn't get the chance to cover. But thanks again Nikhil for coming on today and wish you all the best with everything moving forward.

Thanks so much Jake for having me. And I think the best way to reach me is, as you did on Twitter, where I'm just btmyinitials and also would love for you to read and engage with my writing@nbt.substack.com.