The Journey Part 1 | Matt Dalio

The past 5 years have been the hardest 5 years of my life. At no point have I ever questioned this thing, and never— at no point have I ever regretted this thing. Because of the fuel. What is the fuel? A few weeks ago, we announced a $79 computer that I'll show you guys. Later this year— shh, it's confidential.

Turn off the camera.

We'll launch a computer for between $40 and $50. That price point opens about 3 billion people to be able to enter the world that we have, that we're so lucky to have. That was really freaking hard. So I want to talk a little bit about the journey of that. There's 2 directions I can go in, so help me, help give me feedback. What are you guys more interested in? One is the journey of how we got here. here, and then the other one is business model and the mechanics behind it, because without the mechanics behind it, none of this actually works. Which of those—

let's raise hands— which of those would be more interesting?

Journey or the other one? So journey and business model.

OK. So I will—

Can we have both?

We're going to have both.

OK. Yeah, exactly, just start with business model. I'll start with journey because it'll help make more sense of the business model. I'll get to business model because it needs it, right? Can I ask something?

Yeah.

It includes internet because a computer without internet is like—

You just asked the most important question.

Internet, what about internet?

I will get to that in the journey. That's why I want to start in the journey.

So, wow, where do I begin? So I've taken you through about a year's worth of the journey so far, literally just to get the answer, just to get to that. I was at Stanford Business School. This is like the best prime recruiting ground in the world.

Everyone wants to be an entrepreneur and everyone wants to change the world.

I spent about a year and a half trying to recruit a single person. I came so close to recruiting so many incredible people and didn't recruit a single one. At the end of that year and a half, I knew I needed to go to Brazil.

The countries, the number of countries I had to get to just to figure out where we needed to be. Brazil, Brazil, Brazil.

Turns out Brazil was this most incredible serendipity for a bunch of reasons. It was like the perfect research and design market. I had no idea at the time. And I flew down to Brazil not knowing a single person in Brazil, but I knew 3 Brazilians at Stanford and said, introduce me to anybody you know in Brazil, please, and began the web of networking, network, but finding the thread of people who might be interested and be able to help this.

That's another sort of takeaway, one of my biggest takeaways.

I will at some point in this bring you through the— literally cross continents to get to people who are like, without that individual, we would not have a company today. And one of the people was this person who was described as this magnificent, magnificent person you must— But you can't get Marcelo. And I flew down to meet Marcelo in Parque Lage. If any of you go to Rio de Janeiro, beautiful place with Christ the Redeemer up in the background, really great place. And we sat there and we had our very fateful coffee that morning. And by sheer coincidence, the universe conspiring to help us in the way that it has 100 times over this journey, 1,000 times over this journey, He happened to need to be in San Francisco in Silicon Valley a week later. So we would meet every morning at 6 AM because it was the only time that he and I could both do, and there were 3 people in this Starbucks at 6 AM every morning, 4 people. It was the barista, Marcelo, myself, and Tim Cook. Oh my God.

So the first morning, yeah, we were not collaborating with Tim Cook, but— The first morning we showed up and Marcello grabs the coffee from the receptionist and she says, no, no, no, that's Tim's. And he turns around, Tim, who's Tim?

Tim Cook.

And so we knew that something, we were onto something. That literally is part of the reason he joined.

And then hired Naritzi, who was this incredible, incredible just like force of energy, to just make stuff happen and push this forward. Her first job was to set up our payroll, which consisted of taking me to the ATM and having me take out cash to pay her, and that's where we were as a company. Some of the coolest days.

Take lots of photos in the early days, they're lots of fun. We did jumping photos, and we have lots of jumping photos from the early days, and it's great.

And so at that point I had hired an outside contractor that did, the way I used to put it, military-grade technology, because they actually build for the military, we were very lucky to have them. And they were building an Android app that turned into a desktop computer and I was like, we have it, this is it, and we had that product in the field And that product in the field had such consistently powerful reactions. Stories like the woman who was a nurse who would bring in her other nursing friends and they would sit there as a group watching YouTube videos on dialysis in order to better understand this in rural Guatemala in the middle of nowhere. Really powerful stories like that. A teacher who would teach his whole class based off of this little smartphone that's plugged into a projector and he's teaching his class off of what I thought was a production device.

It turns out it was a prototype.

So from there, we had to do 2 things. One was we had to research this and understand whether— not people wanted it, we'd gotten that, that was rock solid.

Solid.

The question was, what do you have to build? How do you have to build it? Who are you building it for? All of the nuances. And that's where it starts to get to your question.