"I lost $35 million, which is which then was a lot of money. Next, yeah, the next note. Um, and I had to call my mother you know, and say, "Mom, I lost $35 million." And of course, being a Russian immi..."

"for people trying to make their mark on the world where each week I'm interviewing some of the best creatives in business, tech, sports, entertainment to learn how they made their mark. You can watch ..."

"it. Tell us about this amazing space. Where are we? Well, you're at KN&S Ranch halfway between Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz. Uh it was part of an original Mexican land grant land grant. for I guess th..."

"California is pretty unique. And and this part, this 45 air miles or 45 miles between Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz doesn't have a single stoplight. Yet 8 million people live 15 air miles away but only..."

"still looks undeveloped. Now the bad news is that makes it the socialist state of of of California because anywhere else in the world you could extract maximum economic value of whatever you own and b..."

"that. No, of course it wasn't intended that way. It was intended like I I just um you know one of the things when I retired was a set of conscious decisions and a set of unconscious. The conscious dec..."

"was uh was pretty important. How do you figure out when enough is enough? You know, for me, enough was to be comfortable to, you know, my my test was being able to afford to buy any library book or an..."

"I'll disagree because the to me the founder personality is closer to an artist than any other profession. Why is that? If you think about artists artists see things that other people don't, right? The..."

"confused that for decades thinking, oh you're kind of like a business person or you're like an accountant. You know teaching entrepreneurship is like teaching income statement, balance sheet, and cash..."

"accurate description of what it is. I mean think about it unlike bank loans or anything else where people want those guarantees. They want to see your P&Ls and they want to see you know whatever and d..."

"a year we give away. How much fraud is there at least on the front end of thanks for the check, I'm going to some country you never heard of with the money. I mean read about it a lot. It happens. But..."

"allowed entrepreneurship to be everywhere. One was this notion of Amazon Web Services. Computing as a utility. So if you want to build software, you no longer needed a computer. You just needed a lapt..."

"still a few places. Let's talk about that customer development work and methodologies and the the thing that you figured out is you sort of put the pieces together of what is the equation towards havi..."

"companies execute known business models. Startups search for business models. And no one had ever articulated that distinction between search and execution. We had built a hundred years of tools and t..."

"people in a garage be? And then I realized we're in two very different worlds. I had just spent 20 years with six people in a garage and they had never left the building. And and by the way, that's no..."

"years is is what you talked about in the language. It it's really put sort of made a way of of this sort of black magic of hey I'm going to do a startup and hey I'm going to build something new and yo..."

"sometimes you think you Oh, we had a great meeting. Well, did I buy anything? No, they said to come back, you know. No, you were thrown out politely, right? I mean, they didn't say your baby's ugly, b..."

"pretty good set of steps. And AI is going to change that. We could talk about that later, but AI is going to rapidly change this as well. Um, it is that is and that's the beautiful thing about buildin..."

"impedance mismatch with the with with what the finances and the and the business model of VCs. So number one is I realized there's a taxonomy of entrepreneurs meaning in Silicon Valley we're looking f..."

"limited to what the law allows you to do at least, until, this, January um which we can or cannot talk about. But but but my point and then there's nonprofit entrepreneurship. So the first thing I now..."

"we hear a lot of really smart people talking about how companies of the future are going to be run could be started and run by a single company the billion dollar company of the future there's so much..."

"I start at what kind of business I want to run or do I start at what kind of life do I want to have? Because as I as I hear you talk about Oh, well I I mean you did eight companies IPOing many acquiri..."

"available. I mean, back then, no one would think about writing millions of dollars to a 20-year-old. Um, you know now, like, of course. Um, so the first question is, what's your risk profile? you know..."

"I could blame my co-founder but at the end of the day if I like was really acting on my beliefs and then it was like okay resignation and and then it was like a period of introspection but the thing t..."

"without that failure. Um but again back to your point anybody says failure in entrepreneur is like a thing you ought to do and whatever. No no but you will fail. Again it's the back to this artist thi..."

"just would raise my hand for things that people went are you out of your mind? I mean I volunteered to go to Southeast Asia. I volunteered to you know work some extra things to do here. And I got noti..."

"to be not because you think it's cool or or whatever. And it doesn't have to be that little light bulb goes on in your 20s. It wasn't until I had practiced a bit with lots of others that I said "Oh, I..."

"And it was like it was like nothing I'd ever experienced, you know, being my own boss and and having the artistry, having being able to creatively do anything I want all day, every day. What is that w..."

"um is changing everything defense business intelligence business everything depending on what tools you're using and how it's how it's focused I mean who ever thought programmers would be out of out o..."

"went and couldn't get out of bed for three weeks and then somebody gave me your book four steps to the epiphany and I'm reading this book and I'm turning the pages and I'm just like smacking my head a..."

"said people were doing but it never had the words or language to describe them and then about five or maybe seven years later followed it up with a startup owners manual which was actually a a playboo..."

"business. One time I came up here and uh I had this great idea for a business and I called you and I was like I got to come show this to to Steve. He's going to just think this is the greatest thing h..."

"checks. I didn't even get one check. And so we didn't do it. Or you could have asked the next question. I forgot. I forgot to tell you the next question. What would be worth $1,000 a month? Right? Bec..."

"excuse for attention deficit disorder. That is you don't want to run back in the building and say here's what I heard. We need to change our strategy. You want to have enough evidence. So, I call this..."

"signs and you can recognize how people write in an email about if they really have the problem, how they respond, how they think about it, how they talk about it, how many people they put in the meeti..."

"then of course the first time I suggested it she kind of laughed six months later she said Steve we fired all the salespeople and and so now so I basically did three or four more of these but I didn't..."

"video of a customer. And that could be an investor, that could be a potential team member. And and with software today, you I mean, everyone records every sales call. It's so easy, right? And then I'v..."

"organization at scale. That organization early on is why we think of startups as scrappy and agile and whatever because they're doing different things. They're searching, not executing. Eventually you..."