From One Entrepeneur to Another - Vinod Khosla, Founder of Khosla Ventures

Thank you. At the end of a long day, I thought, and now I'm going to be conscious of everything we learned. I did have shoulder surgery about 2 weeks ago, so my— a week and a half ago, so my left arm is actually totally limp. I can't raise it above my head, but I have enough Advil in me, so I'm fine. What I thought I'd do, and this was the suggestion of some of the partners, is not really structured, it's much more anecdotal. It's how I've read what I've done and where I was with the, with a retrospective sort of look. This was something that influenced me in the early '80s. I was learning how to hang glide. I always liked risk. It was just something I'm addict— I was addicted to. And I saw this movie, which was dedicated to those who dare to dream the dreams and then are foolish enough to try and make those dreams come true. And I thought about it recently. And reflected back to 1970 or so, I was 15, and I read this old story in Electronic Engineering Times. Yes, I was 15. Usually 2-year-old copies of Electronic Engineering Times made it to India. And you could rent them by the week. And I'd always go down and rent these magazines. You didn't buy magazines, you rented them. And I remember vividly reading the story of Intel. And Andy Grove was an immigrant, and I asked myself, why can't I immigrate and start my own company? It started a dream that never left. A few years later, I joined college. As I was finishing college, I said, "I want to start my own company." And the only technology I could find— and it was a little frustrating to me that every day out of my busy routine, While I was trying to do things, I'd have to go get milk because milk didn't stay, wasn't pasteurized, so you had to go get it every day. And I'd be often the person. And so I decided that making milk or milk equivalent that didn't need to be refrigerated was a great idea. And soymilk was a technology I could find. At some institute. It was very frustrating. I decided I'd start this company. There was no venture capital, so I was going to wing it. And it didn't quite work. I went to get a phone line for this little company I was going to start. And there was a 7-year waiting list for a phone line. Hard to start a company when you have a 7-year waiting list. But it wasn't the soymilk I was in love with. I was in love with the idea of starting my own company. And I didn't really get discouraged. In fact, the best thing that ever happened to me happened out of that frustration, if I can call it that. I decided I'd come to Silicon Valley. So leaving caution aside, I decided to come to Silicon Valley. Of course, I couldn't get here. But Carnegie Mellon University decided they'd give me a scholarship. And I figured out if I apply for a NEST-ERC area, they'll pay for everything. So I applied for biomedical engineering. I was an electrical engineer. But that didn't matter. I got closer to my goal. But it was sort of the same kind of foolishness. And I've found— Foolishness is just an essential component of innovation and entrepreneurship and trying something new. And I see it in many of you. I sometimes see it in IFTTT. I wish I could explain all the things you don't know that you will discover in trying to build a company, and most of you do. It's almost impossible to explain why your case won't be that different than all the other entrepreneurs. And I think that's a good thing, because if we knew how hard some of these things are before we started, we'd never get there. Oops. And I can't see at this age without my glasses. But, you know, Failure wasn't ever bothersome to me, because I could never understand why it was a problem if something didn't work. What mattered is taking a shot at something, and if it didn't work, trying again. And recently I saw a quote by Robert F. Kennedy which sort of pointed to this foolishness question. He said, "Only those who dare fail greatly can succeed greatly." And I connected back to this. And when I see almost foolish assumptions that you can design your own nuclear reactors, or any one of your stories. I always remember that, and remember that my job is to help you get there, because without that foolishness, you wouldn't even try. The rest of the stuff that makes it more unfoolish, more practical, You can learn along the way, and my job is to help you in small doses, and my partner's job is to help you in small doses, to mentor you how to take those small steps as you run into all your crazy problems. But passion for a vision is really important. This isn't enough. I recently was fortunate enough to have— well, let me come back there later. Persistence. I was trying to get to Silicon Valley. I was stuck in Pittsburgh. So I applied to business school. Stanford Business School, the weather was nicer than Harvard, people were nicer. They turned me down. Bummer. I called the admissions director and I said, "They made a mistake." I had a huge argument with them. And explained X and Y and why I I didn't— they needed at least 2 years of work experience and all this sort of baloney. So great. I said, what if I get 2 years of work experience in 1? And he was really trying to get rid of me. He said, well, why don't you think about it, apply again after you have a little work experience. So I got 2 40-hour-a-week jobs., and I applied again. Now I was a little uncertain, and we'll get to that. So I applied to Carnegie Mellon too, where I already was, and he turned me down again the second year. I called him up again, and I insisted he'd made a mistake because I had 2 years of work to 40-hour work years of work experience. And I got obnoxious. I call it persistent. And he said, "Okay, look, we made our decisions, but I'll put you on the waitlist." And he was just going to put me off again. I said, "Good, that's a start." He put me on the waitlist, and I started waging a war on him because he wasn't going to let me in. I got to know every single person in the admissions office. I had a dream. I talked to them every week. I knew the status of every candidate who hadn't accepted or who was on the waitlist. But he kept putting me off. And I was okay. I didn't know what was the right time to make my move. Come late August, Carnegie Mellon started the day after Labor Day. He still hadn't accepted me. Stanford didn't start till the third week of September. And I said, okay, I better join Carnegie Mellon as a backup business school. But I kept insisting I wanted to go to Stanford. Didn't tell him I'd accepted at Carnegie Mellon. I started into classes, paid my fees, but I kept calling him. And then about September 10th or so, it was a week into Carnegie Mellon, I said, "This is getting late. I got to step up my war, make it much more blunt." So I actually started finding out where every single waiting list candidate was and calling him every single day. And I said, "Look, you don't have a choice." I am going to come there. Finally, I heard on Wednesday before classes started around September 22nd or something like that, that one candidate was wavering. I called him up and I said, hey, I'm coming tomorrow. I was 3 weeks into classes. I didn't have enough money to put the deposit down on my rent. And he wavered just a little bit, and that was enough. I had all the people in the office go to him and root for me. Thursday, he said, when I called him Thursday, he said, "Hey, let's talk." And that was the opening I needed. I called him a little later on Thursday, I said, "I got to make a decision, I'm coming." And he said, oh, okay. I left Pittsburgh Friday morning, packed up my bags, and I was at Stanford Business School. You know, I can think of 10 times that's happened to me, and somehow I never got the message that that's not how it's supposed to be. Another one of my favorite quotes, "Try and fail, but don't fail to try." One of the biggest moments for me, a few years later, fast forward, I was looking for a startup to do. I finished Stanford. I had a few backup jobs lined up. And— but it wasn't what I wanted. So I kept looking and looking, and close to the week before classes, Somebody mentioned to me, somebody who's the son of a venture capitalist, that there was two guys who were looking to do a business plan. I called his father up, got introduced, accepted that job that day because none of them wanted to quit their regular job, and wrote my first business plan. And got going. Nir and I got married that summer, didn't have any money, didn't have a place to stay. I— all my belongings belonged in my— were packed into my 1970 Datsun B210. It was a pretty nice car. It had free air conditioning. It had a little hole in the floor from Pittsburgh. But it was enough to get me going. But that wasn't enough. I had learned through this business school thing that you can sell your way into anything. As David sometimes says, A no is a maybe, and a maybe is a yes. For those of you who've worked with us in recruiting, I think Vikas is sitting here, back there. I think he said no to me, turned down my offer about 16 times in the month of March alone. You should ask him the story. No meant a dinner, a conversation, a meeting. It wasn't a no. And every single step, and all of you as entrepreneurs know this, it's about selling your heart out. Selling it to venture capitalists, selling it to employees you're trying to recruit, selling it to customers. I realized you can't be an entrepreneur without being a great salesperson. And you pick it up in all sorts of ways, but it is selling yourself out of impossible situations. And there is no skill as important in an entrepreneur beyond persistence than selling. That great guy, you want to get— and I do sometimes get frustrated when one of you says Hey, he doesn't want the job. That's not his choice. It wasn't Vikas's choice to say no. Yeah, he might think he says no. And he actually had some pretty good reasons to not take the job. But that wasn't an option. And others of you know this too. So I'll tell you another early story I learned. I was at Sun, I was 25, and I always shoot for too much. So one of our competitors, Apollo Computer, had hired a sales guy in Europe. They hired a sales guy. I wasn't going to settle for that. I was going to beat them at it. They started 2 years before us, and so they started operations. They were way ahead of us, and I was thinking, how do I match that? They're credible. I'm not. I had a funny accent in the '80s. Foreigner, young, just doesn't work for selling into computing systems. So I said I'd hire the guy who ran DEC. DEC was this humongous computer company. We were this tiny guy. I said I could beat Apollo if I could get the CEO of DEC Europe to run my branch office in London. And the guy actually sort of laughed at me. Because he was running about 3,000 people. We had about 30 people in our company, and I wanted him to run the London operation. I said, oh, okay, let's at least talk. I still remember I spent a week parked in the hotel Hilton outside Heathrow. I just told him I would not leave Heathrow till he said yes. A week later, every single day meeting with me after he finished work, he said yes. I won't go into all the little techniques and methods. It was all about his emotions. It was all about selling him. It made no rational sense. But it is about selling. The other story I tell is this competitor Apollo had signed up the second and third largest customer in our business. These were computer-aided design systems. There was only one Computer Vision left. They were based in Boston. Apollo was based in Boston. They had the number 2 and 3 player. I thought it was game over if they got number 1. When I thought about it, there was absolutely no reason Computer Vision should go with us because their competitors were selling Apollo. And differentiating based on their software. Computer Vision had the best software, they had terrible hardware. They could just switch to Apollo, neutralize the advantage that wasn't their business. And so they called me and said, "We've decided to go with Apollo." I said, "You don't have a choice. You should go with us." And frankly, as this happens, It was a decision made in the executive suite, communicated through purchasing to us. I heard around 3 or 4, 3 o'clock, 2 o'clock, something like that. I got our team together at 5 o'clock and I said, we've got to respond because they've said no. I think we got our FedEx out to everybody who could count. I think it was like 15 or 20 FedEx packages out by 5 o'clock. I had my wife bring my clothes, and I was on the red-eye that night in Boston. And nobody would meet with me. Because they'd already made the decision. And so I sat in the lobby. I think I sat in the lobby for 8 hours. I must have called the same people over and over again. I'd call them every half hour from the lobby. Finally, the CEO told me, look, we've made a decision, but I'll go have a drink with you. And that's all I needed. That drink resulted in him saying, "Hey, I'll meet you, but I don't want to hold any hope, and I don't want to disturb my team because we've made the decision, but I'll meet you in Chicago." This was— we're in Boston. I said, great, he was going to be there for something. I went back home, prepared all the alternatives, asked the right questions. One slide behind. And prepared for the next big thing. How could I sell this guy when I didn't think it made any sense. That brings me to the next part of this story. Since there was no rational reason they should take our technology, I sort of said, let's get irrational. No guts, no glory. When I met him in Chicago, actually just before, I said, I'm gonna make you an offer you can't refuse. Just imagine Godfather. I said, we will give you all our technology for free. That was the exact offer. There's a Harvard Business School case in it. They teach the A case, which goes up to this point before my offer. The offer is Case B. Which they don't use much anymore. And everybody looked at me and said, "It's weird. Why would you do that? Let's move on." I said, "No, I'm going to win." Because the question was important. What were we trying to do by winning? We'd been bidding against each other. There was nothing left in margins anyway. The person who got the business was probably going to lose money on it. So there wasn't really much point in winning the business. And I didn't realize that when we were in the heat of battle. We were just competing, cutting our prices, each party, and they did a great job of getting us bidding against each other. But what I realized is what was important to me was that Apollo not get the business. And that was the only thing that mattered. And that if we did that and the whole industry didn't standardize on Apollo as a computing platform, we could have a chance at a comeback. So I just wanted— and though it, it sort of was gutsy to say you can have all our technology for free, that actually I was already in a position when I asked myself, I had nothing to lose. What did I have to lose? I'd already lost. And so everything from there on was upside. And that's a really nice position to be in when you've lost on everything else. So that's the offer we made. We also had a lot of premature confidence. We said, fine, they can have this technology. Within a year we'll have the next generation. They won't be able to keep up with us. We're going to beat their pants off. So there was all sorts of overconfidence. How are we doing on time? So that was The first piece of guts and frankly overconfidence, that foolishness I talked about earlier showing through. Very soon after that, we needed money. We start talking to this company, Kodak, and They were looking at the chemical films business and how to learn about the coming digital world. And we sold them on accepting our technology, and we were all digital, we were graphic, all this neat stuff Kodak needed to learn. We sold them on the value of Sun for Kodak, and they agreed to put some money in. We roughly talked about terms, took months, roughly defining terms. Again, we said, let's finalize the investment, meet. The CEO, or the division head, I forget who it was, agreed to meet, finalize all the terms along the rough deal terms we had thought about. Great. We met. So also happened, it was in Chicago. By the way, the computer vision deal, when they met me in Chicago, I decided I wasn't going to let them leave till the deal was done. We worked through the day, through the night, and signed a handwritten contract at 5 AM. I wasn't going to let them out of the room. I also had a board meeting the next day, and I couldn't show up empty-handed. But Kodak is another interesting story. Again, you know, couple of kids in their 20s. They showed up with a whole team of lawyers and a whole team of bankers. And I didn't know what this was about. You know, it was just me and McNeely. We showed up. We already had the terms defined. And they started, and Deepak, you'll appreciate this, the negotiation. I said, we are already done. We know what the terms are. And the bankers were trying to add value. And I said, not interested. We start the meeting at 8:15, 8 o'clock. I took a break at 8:05. Me and Scott went outside, told them that they should really think about whether we were really negotiating. I talked to Scott, and Scott, I said, we can't start another cycle with these guys. We walked back in, they tried to negotiate for 5 minutes. At 8:15, I left Chicago despite desperately needing the money. I came back home. I didn't hear a word from them for a week. A week later, they called me back and said, okay, we've gotten rid of the bankers. We'll do the deal the way we had talked about it. You know, in, in frankly, in retrospect, that was definitely premature confidence. It was that foolishness showing up again. But no guts, no glory is not just a phrase. All of you face moments, and I see it over and over again, when you got to make the call whether you're going to back down or not. And there's a good time and a bad time. Sometimes— there was another story about guts I want to tell you. I was advising a young company called Excite. Netscape browser was just taking off, and they had a search button on their browser. It was probably 1995. The company had raised $2.5 million. They had about a million and a half in the bank. That button was given for free to Yahoo, just because Yahoo had been there before us. When we talked to Netscape, who we knew, and said, you really should give it to us, They said, "We're happy with Yahoo, don't want to change." I went to the team, and there was nothing we could do to sell them. I went to the team and I said, "Look, we gotta get that button, or success or failure depends on it." I said, "How about we make an outrageous offer?" And I found out that Netscape was making Maybe a couple hundred thousand to a million bucks on various things they were doing with various parties on their browser. Small company, but lots of distribution. I said to the team, let's go offer them $2 million for the button. More money than they're making, way more than we have in the bank account. You know, that, it took me 2 weeks to convince the team to put bigger offer, a cash offer on the table than they had in their bank account. But they will tell you it made a complete difference in the company. Netscape had to sit up and listen. We shocked them into listening. For 16 quarters after that, every single quarter Excite gained market share on Yahoo and gained revenue share on Yahoo. Grew faster. And that button and that one call made all the difference. And all of you face moments like this. So guts is important. So is the willingness to fail. Again, a quote from Michael Jordan that I keep coming back to. Michael says, and I'll read it, "I've missed more than 3,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times I've been handed the ball for the game-winning shot and missed." He says, I failed over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeeded. And I can tell you, failing, not being afraid to fail, is the reason you succeed. Hossein was asking me what to talk about this afternoon. And unfortunately I missed his little talk, so, but I don't know whether he followed my advice or not. But I said, it's really important to convey to this crowd, because all of you have good days and bad days. You're on a roller coaster where the highs are high and the lows are really low. And Hossein had had lows that were really low. I think his credit card was maxed out and the payroll left on his, for his company. I don't know if you talked about that. His venture capitalist wanted to shut him down. But I said, you want to take the shots where you're willing to fail at, but you don't stop thrashing. I said, explain to people how you keep thrashing, whether it's on your credit card, your lost bank account dollar. You give your— stay— keep yourself afloat giving luck a chance to help you. And I think that's a really critical part. Samir, tell me when I'm going too long. I'll stop. But the next one is fun too. You can't have a respectful attitude, you can't not have overconfidence and do something extraordinary. You can't fit into the system. Chasing goals is about almost irrational behavior. When me and my wife got married, we lived in Saratoga Apartments down in San Jose. And she wanted a dog, so I got a dog. Only one little problem, the apartment didn't allow dogs. And we got a dog and then figured out what to do. Well, what to do was an eviction notice. But, you know, that didn't stop me from breaking the rules. I don't know what I was thinking. This was month-to-month rental because we didn't have enough money to pay the deposit for a longer lease. Well, we got kicked out. I called McNeely and said, "I don't have a place to stay." He called his dad. He got a place, we shared it with him. But you don't have to figure it all out before you jump in. In fact, mostly you don't have it figured out. That's not to say ignore the things I talked about earlier today. But I think culture and attitude are far more important than the process stuff I talked about earlier. So uncertainty, it's a natural part of what we do. We jump into things we don't know how to get out of. I'll tell you a funny story. None of this, none of this success comes from knowing what you're doing. It's having hunches about what you're doing, and guessing, and figuring it out. I'll give you a sunny, stunning story. I thought Google was a good idea. Larry and Sergey were PhD students at Stanford. I met them, liked the guys. They explained their algorithm. I said, neat idea. I was on the board of Excite. We'd been pretty damn bored. In bidding for that Netscape button a few years earlier, it was a successful company. It was maybe 300, 400 people and maybe more by 1998. It had gone public, done well. Going public is another story. Bankers said it couldn't be done. We went from no staff, not even a CFO, to an IPO in under 90 days. Everybody said it wasn't possible. It wasn't possible for other people. But Larry and Sergey, I talked to them, said, hey, the Excite guys, in conventional wisdom, 1997 was everybody done search, such search was a generic platform, it didn't matter much. Nobody really wanted to do what Larry and Sergey were doing. So I said, "Hey, why don't you sell your search algorithm to Excite?" After much talking, and I really liked the two guys, they agreed. Sergey now says it was a million bucks. It was actually $200,000 or less. But I'll grant him his million bucks. It's still a cheap price for Google. I got them to agree. And the Excite guys weren't clear how this was going to be relevant and refused to buy it. Made 5 attempts till the CEO said— I was on the board, I was the largest shareholder. Tried really, really hard. Fifth time he threw me out of his office and said, we've made a decision. He said, we have a process, went through our team with this process. And the team decided. By the way, that team now tells me I'm not forceful enough. So when some of you— they blame me for not pushing him harder. So when some of you feel a little pressure, I hope you'll recognize that once in a while there is another side. But they turned it down, which is very fortunate because that let Kleiner Perkins invest, and we did very well with it. Our most successful investment ever. But it— uncertainty is just a natural part, and I'm never sure what I'm doing. Even when I'm talking to you about what you should do, I can't tell you in my gut I'm 100% certain. So Joe Krause, who's the founder of Excite, started using a trick question on me. He started asking me how certain I was. Because he told me if I was very certain, he'd go with me, but if I was sort of certain, then he wouldn't. And that's a tough question because I had to be honest with him, and that's a little trick I shouldn't tell all of you, but I did. But nothing happens without big, hairy, audacious goals. When we started Sun, there was a company called Lexidata. They built these neat graphic terminals added on to DEC computers, and everybody told us we should become a great successful workstation add-on to DEC machines, really graphics terminals. And Scott and I said, hey, moon or bust. We weren't going to be an add-on to anybody, we were going to displace DEC, which is pretty damn audacious and very naive. If I knew then what I know today, I probably wouldn't have attempted it. It's roughly the equivalent today of saying we'll take Chevron out of business. It was very similar. They were the number 2 player in the worldwide computing business. We decided to take them on head-on. And that's why this foolishness is important, but big, hairy, audacious goals— again, I quote Robert Kennedy, unless you try greatly and fail— are willing to fail greatly. We always said being in a rocket is no fun till you reach orbital velocity. Doesn't matter how high you go till you reach orbit. And so we were going to reach orbit or splash. And if we tried harder, it'd just be a bigger splash. Didn't matter. The same thing was true when we started Juniper. I talked to all the customers. This is a really important lesson. There was one guy I worked with for 6 months, Pradeep Sindhu, trying to build a business plan because the internet was going to take over the world. Then we talked to all our customers, and everyone said they'll never adapt internet protocols for telecommunications networks. They had lots of good reasons. We started the company anyway and said, let's ignore the customers. And I think that's an important lesson, because if we start fitting into expectations, you fit into the existing model. I go back to change the rules and break the rules, if you get evicted, figure it out. That attitude is an essential part. You can't fit into somebody else's model, because then you're starting to play with their rules. You want your own rules, you want your own goals, and you want your own approach for it. That's not to say ignore the other stuff, the tactical stuff you have to do. But at the meta-level, you don't lose these characteristics. So we built this company, and I think Jagdeep Singh talked to you about Infineon. It was the same kind of big, hairy, audacious goal. But point of view is also important. And I'll— since we're running, running longer than I planned, I'll give you two examples of point of view. About 8 or 9 years ago, I took my kids to this village in India where my father grew up, went to the house where he grew up. In 2001, 2002, I forget which year it was, it was still a mud house, still had no running water. There was one electric bulb strung in the middle of the room. And while most people were talking about You know, there was still a buffalo in the middle in the courtyard. It was still the center of life. My dad remembered this. While we were looking at it, my other daughter, Anu, said, "Dad, isn't it amazing that in one generation you can go from this to the life we live with our iPods and iPhones and all that other stuff?" And that flipped my mind and reminded me that no change is impossible. That point of view has stuck with me, and this will happen again and again and again the next 10 and 20 years as you do your thing. And as hard as it is, you can't forget that this change happens routinely. Just have to look at it with the right eyes. I also want to give you another example. '93, I was starting to look at what's interesting. I get bored very easily, ADD. Me and my wife, Neerush, decide, while the kids were young, to move to India. Wanted them to know their cousins, their grandparents, So we spent '93 to '95 in India, took our dogs, everybody, except I kept my job here at Kleiner Perkins, and I'd commute from India to here. I'd come here every 6 weeks for 6 weeks and then go back. And there was lots of reasons, personal reasons to do that. But we started looking seriously having sort of felt I had done everything I really wanted to do about starting things in Silicon Valley, we were starting to look at what impact we could have in India, social impact. And the more you look, the more hopeless you feel, unless you approach it with the right attitude. We, we actually came back in '95, I kept studying the problem of poverty, but didn't really see an answer. But Professor Yunus did. When I saw and first met him and saw his point of view, and some other entrepreneurs, this company called SKS, and I was really hoping the founder could be here, but I'll tell you why he can't be here. There was a guy, worked for McKinsey in Chicago, decided to leave, same kind of thing I was looking at, how do you make a difference? Moved to India, just outside Hyderabad, started a little microfinance operation, trying to have the right impact. While I had given up and felt hopeless, he, looking at what Professor Yunus was doing in Bangladesh, figured it out. In 2004, I think, I agreed to give him a couple of million dollars because he was getting started. The reason he can't be here is he's filed an IPO. Bankers are telling me the expected market cap is between $1 billion and $2 billion. That's why he can't be here. So out of that hopelessness that I saw and had the wrong point of view on, he saw the exact opposite. That few million bucks I gave him, which I'd sort of written off as charity, is now a company with most companies in this room. And point of view matters, so never stop asking questions. Finally, don't dare to be great. Juniper, I talked about it earlier, one of my largest successes came from the fact that when Juniper was getting ready to ship its product, 1997 or so, '98 maybe, a number of large telecom companies like Lucent and Alcatel and Nortel got interested in IP suddenly. The same technology 3 years a go, every customer had said they would never adopt. By the way, I don't know if Tony— Tony— is Tony Bates here still? Oh, he left. Okay. He was at Cisco. The CTO of Cisco was a guy called Ed Cozzell, and he told me they would never do an IP router above a certain data rate, which is really low, OC-12, really slow data rate. And one of these large telecom companies called me and said, would you sell Juniper for $1 billion? No revenue, no product, no customers really who wanted it. We said no. You have to dare to be great. We made eventually $7 billion on that investment, probably $7 to $10 million. Daring to be great, and many of you face this, is an important characteristic. And, and so let me end With people, and my last perspective on this. My first company I started sitting at the business school, I didn't go into that story much, was called Daisy Systems, CAD Systems. It was the wrong people. They had the wrong philosophy. They didn't care about people, and I decided I didn't want to stay there, I didn't want to work. There. Today, the thing I look at when you come pitch your plan to me is, is this a team I want to get in trouble with? That probably is my single biggest criteria. Will they figure their way out of trouble? Will they let us help them if they run into trouble? You know, almost all startups run into trouble. The team you want to get into trouble with is a really important component of the team you want to build. Because when you're in trouble is when team— the team counts. Also, and I talked about gene pool engineering early on today. I had a bullet, I don't know how many of you noticed, under people that I didn't talk about. It said something that one of my partners asked me to take out of my slides, but I didn't. Sort of obstinate. It said collecting people. I have a habit of collecting talent. I'm never satisfied with the people in a company. If you find an exceptional person, you hire him, relevant or not to the company. I can tell you, in 25 years of doing this, it has never led me astray. So if I look back at Sun, you know, Eric Schmidt running Google was one of our early hires. Carol Bartz, running Yahoo, was one of our early hires. If I go down the list, and I couldn't finish the research, there's probably 20 companies worth tens of billions of dollars started out of the first 15 people or 20 people we had. And I, one of these days, want to get all the exact numbers. Why was that? Because we hired excellent people. We hired a guy in databases that we never expected to do databases. That's why you see me arguing with you about these functional hiring, right? Great people find great solutions. They have great thought processes. And collecting great people is the biggest asset, whether you have the budget for it or not. Whether you need it functionally or not. Great people is the single biggest thing you can collect. So let me finish with probably the last slide on my perspective on this. Despite everything we do, all our ambitions,— and many of you will be on the wrong side of what I'm about to say. You have to decide what's most important to you. And I will tell you, I've talked to lots of successful CEOs, lots of successful people. If I ask somebody, 10 years after they finish whatever job they're doing, 10 years later, with the perspective of history, the one answer I keep getting consistently is, "I wish I'd paid more attention to family." And so most of you were there last night when I told the jelly bean story. I urge you to not ignore that part of it. Thank you all very much. Thought I was free. I talked too long. Yes. How do you deal with that? Is it just— Well, life's never clean. You're always making trade-offs. You just accept it. You know? I probably told you 6 contradictory things here and 6 contradictory things earlier. And every situation's a little bit different, and the same rules don't always apply. But the same process almost always applies. You think through. Make the trade-offs, be very explicit what your goals are. So let me give you an example that I found through most of the last 15 years has been very valuable to me. I sort of decided I don't mind working 80 hours a week, 100 hours a week. I never minded that. I still do, always have, because I enjoy what I do. But the one thing I decided is, oh, probably around 1993 or something, '95, somewhere around that, that I would have dinner with my kids 25 nights a week, right? 25 nights a month, sorry. I told my assistant, here's my priorities. One of those was 25 nights a week. And then, here's the things I wanted to do with my time. She started tracking my time in 20 categories and tracking in a separate line how many nights I was home for dinner. I got a report on all 21 items every month. She was authorized to move me from a regular flight to a red-eye if I exceeded my travel quota, my dinner quota. Made it a quantitative process. Also made sure I spent my time on the right things. If I wanted to focus on helping companies I was working with, then I didn't want to do too many press meetings. Once I had a quota for the press, Everything else, every new press request after a certain number fell off the table. So you are making compromises. You can make them explicitly, or you can let it happen to you. And I suggest don't let these things happen to you. Maybe one more question before we break. So? So we can all probably do a decent job finding— You talked about the great ones, particularly the 15 that you talked about. In retrospect, what do you think the one thing is that you saw? You know, first you go for exceptional people. And not all exceptional people fit in. I would say I don't judge people functionally. But I do judge people in how they think about things. And I spend an awful lot of time trying to judge their thought process, their openness to ideas. I often throw crazy things at them, sometimes contradictions. See, if they want to agree with me too much, they're wrong people. If they disagree with me and stick with their opinions, they're wrong. And so, you know, Samir knows When I interview, sometimes I'll do 3, 3-hour, 4-hour interviews, each time testing a different thing in a fairly explicit way in my mind, but in a disguised way to the other party. But I look at their thought process and how they think about things, and critic— how critically they think, how logically they think, how open-minded they think. And then, of course, their depth of knowledge. What do they do when they don't know the answer? Do they give me an answer? Do they think about it, call me back later, send me an email later? There's 100 little things. In fact, one of the sessions I wanted to do this year, which I couldn't, we couldn't find the right person, was interviewing skills, hiring skills, and hopefully we'll do that next time. Thank you all very much.