Chris Sacca on Coming Out of Retirement To Unf**k The Planet with Lowercarbon

Oh, man. Last time I saw you, we were in Stockholm sharing some Heinekens on stage at Daniel x event, which is an all time event. And so it’s really fun to key to catch up with you again, man.

Yeah. The first check for me I mean, I’ve been doing deals on behalf of Google for a while, and even before that, I had a company called Speedera. So where I was general counsel and I I don’t tell many people I’m a lawyer, so we’ll keep that between us. But general counsel and head of biz dev and corp dev and stuff like that. And so and then even before that, as a lawyer, I was adjacent to all these deals. I was watching other people do deals.

I’d be in the room taking the notes when John Doerr was receiving a pitch and stuff like that as his outside counsel. So I was always close to deals, but the very first one I did on my own was a company called Photobucket, which we ultimately sold for $330,000,000, which sounded like all the money in the world at the time. You know, Flickr had sold for, like, 25 to $35,000,000, and so to be able to 10 x that with PhotoBucket was insanity. And we felt just so lucky to have gotten that deal done.

But that check I wrote was literally a credit card check for me. I didn’t have any cash on hand. I was at Google, and I was vesting, but I hadn’t sold any stock yet. I went into that one with $50,000 of credit card checks. My second investment was Twitter, and that one was funny because Evan Williams I’d already been working with a company and helping him out, but Evan went and circled up investors for the round and he’s like, hey, I’ve got you down for 25 k, 25 k.

Good. Okay. I got you for 25 k. And I now see, you know, now that I’ve got some money and have been privileged, like why that’s kind of the baseline number that people use. But at the time, that was incredibly material for me. And I was kind of embarrassed to admit that, like, that 25 really mattered. So I’m like, oh, yeah. 25 sounds great, man. I’m all over it. I ended up having to show up to the company on a regular basis because I needed that $25 back.

And so I would just kind of invite myself to 164 South Park, let myself in and try and be helpful. That annoyed the hell out of Jack, but that was real money for me. That’s how I kinda got into this. Along the way where it really accelerated was 2005 while I was still at Google, Paul Graham invited me to speak at the first startup school. I made an impression there. It was fun. I mean, I think we really I was an answer to helping them teach this new generation of engineers who are running their own companies and didn’t have MBAs.

I was an answer to teaching them how to speak to customers, how to tell their story, how to move pixels around their front page, how to tighten up their funnels, that kind of stuff. And they were an answer to just my longing to be back involved with small companies again, you know, the excitement of that and the applicability of my talents as a generalist. And so that’s where it really started to take off. So when I left Google, I didn’t have a plan to be a VC per se, but I knew I was excited by the opportunity to hang out with Paul and Jessica and be helpful to companies.

No. I was lucky, and I’m gonna use some air quotes around lucky to have had my ass completely handed to me in the public markets before then. So I very famously took my student loan checks for law school, told the school they hadn’t shown up, cashed them, and used them to day trade in the market. And so this is one of the reasons why I get so nervous about what I see in the Robinhood phenomenon. Know, like, even as we tape this, the market’s crashing, and I worry about so many people trading on margin because I was that guy.

And at the time, they hadn’t built the margin requirements back into the online trading platforms yet. So I would take a thousand dollars worth of equity and buy a million dollars worth of stock and hold on to it for a week. And so the swings were insane. At one point, I was up $12,000,000 after about eighteen months. Along the way, you start to think you’re a genius. And then when you put your buddies into the stock, you know, they’ll come back and be like, hey. I bought a boat, man.

You’re the guy. You know? Like, you’ve got it figured out. And you really start to believe that shit. One buddy said, hey. You need to diversify. So I had two stocks that I traded, and ultimately, those came crashing down one week. In 2000, left me totally on my ass, $4,000,000 in the hole with nothing to show for it. And so I had already been stung by that idea of without that kind of quote, unquote training that came by way of tragedy, when things are going up, you tend to think it’s correlated with your genius and talent.

And when things are going down, you tend to think it’s unlucky. You learn over time to invert that curve. When things are going up, it’s lucky. And when things are going down, it’s some lack of talent that you need to double down and hustle. And so by the time I got into venture, I was very lucky that I had already had that horrible experience.

Yeah. Well, it’s kind of funny. I mean, so much of the challenge of this business is becoming internally directed instead of externally directed. And that’s a real challenge, particularly when you’re on your own and you’re getting out there and going. And the feedback loop is great and people start writing about you. Ensure you get asked to get on TV and stuff. So, I mean, that’s behind the shirts I wear is this constant reminder of not to take yourself too seriously because I think that’s one of the biggest traps.

I have this personal motto that’s, it may be lucky, but it’s not an accident. And so I have to be able to look at my life and not completely dismiss the success I’ve had, because there’s no doubt it’s correlated in multiple places with extra work, with insights I’ve had, with study, with making a commitment when other people are goofing off. But at the same time, I can also look back at my life and see dozens of single points of failure, where if somebody didn’t introduce me to somebody, that thing would have never materialized.

Or where if I hadn’t been convinced by somebody else or if I hadn’t followed my gut on something or if this company hadn’t broken. You know? Like, it’s wild how arbitrary this business can be sometimes. You know? Like, I look at TikTok. We had two other investments, Triller and Dubsmash, that were kind of the same thing. Right? And there’s no real reason that they didn’t succeed. They just didn’t. And so, I mean, every deal we go into, we have high conviction, and I can tell you why that deal is gonna change the world.

But in the end, I’m wrong a lot of the time. It’s just when I’m right, I’m really fucking right.

I mean, by the way, there’s a video of me, literally first of all, I was wearing a sport coat, which was mistake number one. But on iPad launch day, I was live on Bloomberg, and they turned to me and they’re like, what are you thinking? I’m like, I mean, it’s good for, like, movies, games, books, music. Like, how big could that ever be? Like, in this business, you get incentivized to, like, pound the table with these pronouncements from on high, and a lot of the time we’re wrong.

You know? I think the best funds are wrong more than half the time. You know, we’ve looked back and we’ve been better than that, but I’m wrong a lot. Like, I’m professionally wrong. You have to digest that.

Well, it’s funny. It was a lack of optimism that cost me some money in the beginning when I met the Airbnb guys, and and I pulled them aside and was like, look. Somebody’s gonna get raped or murdered, and the blood is gonna be on your hands. And you know what? That’s turned out to be true once they’ve had hundreds of millions of of users of the site. Yes. And people are gonna get hurt. It’s the law of big numbers. But I had let the bad case get in the way of me seeing the most obvious case.

You know, most humans are good. Most of these services are obviously gonna work. I once we were in an Uber meeting talking about how there was this you know, like, I mean, you see articles about this driver hurt somebody, and so we dug into the data. First of all, half of the time it’s passengers hurting the drivers, and so there’s this even split. But the reason those articles get written is because thanks to Uber, we know about them. We know exactly who was involved. Right? If you get assaulted by a cab driver, you’d never know.

But the other thing is just the law of big numbers. There’s so many damn drivers and passengers out there now. So many collisions between individuals is gonna lead at scale to some bad ones. I once did some math, and I can’t make it up now, but it was like Walmart employees something like 2,000,000 Americans. You know, there’s 35,000 murders in the country a year. Was like, that means on any given night, a Walmart employee murdered somebody. So we need to do something about this because Walmart is employing murderers at scale.

It sounds funny, but that’s just how the numbers work. Right? If you really run the numbers, that’s how it works.

Yeah. I think I’m lucky in that I don’t feel competitive with other investors or other rich people. So I have a lot of friends who are tortured by it. They have countless dollars at hand, but feel like they’re that the goal line’s always moving and they need to keep up with somebody else. So I certainly look at it as what can I do with the money we have? And luckily, we have all the stuff we want. You get to this point where, like, in the beginning, I made a bunch of money and I bought houses for family and multiple houses for ourselves.

And then my wife and I turned around and we’re like, fuck, we’re property managers. Like, that’s all we do now. It’s like our inbox is like, hey, this broke and this is happening and what do we do? I was like, so we’re just prisoners to our stuff right now. Again, it was lucky that I kinda got into that early and realized, like, oh my god. And then you start to realize, you know, we’re fortunate enough to go on vacations, but we don’t need to own that chateau.

It’s amazing. There’s some incredible places in Europe where we love to spend time that you can rent, and then when you’re done, you walk away from them. You know, you can live luxuriously and then not have to own it. And luckily, we’re also not into big boats, thankfully. So that’s a great way to light money on fire. But for us, you know, I’m lucky that Crystal and I have been best friends since we met freshman year of college. We didn’t date for fourteen more years after that, but I’m lucky that we’ve grown up with this money together.

And the thing that we did that I think more people should do is we sat down when it became clear we were gonna make some money. And by the way, I didn’t come up with this idea. I saw Evan Williams do it. When Evan Williams saw that he was gonna make some money, he went out and started interviewing rich people and asking them for tips. And when I saw that he was doing that like, it was funny. The way I saw it once is I gave him a ride, and he had this notebook, and it flipped open to this page that just said, don’t let anyone know your home address.

I And was like, what the fuck is that? And he’s like, oh, I’ve been out trying to get tips on, you know, from rich people, and somebody told me don’t let anyone know your home address. I was like, that is fascinating. So when it became clear we were gonna make some money, we just sat down with a bunch of people who had been through that process. And by the way, not just the successful people. We intentionally sat down with people whose marriages had completely dissolved, whose lives looked like they had imploded, whose kids were assholes.

And we sat down to get the counterexamples. They didn’t know that, so I’m definitely not gonna use any names. But we were like, those people look like money fucked them up. Let’s go sit with them for a drink and ask them a lot of questions and get to the root of it.

Yeah. One of the things I think we learned was that couples that work are couples where both people are growing no matter in which vector or which direction direction, or or and and not not by by necessarily traditional, you know, business measures, whatever. They’re just growing in some way that matters to them, whether it’s artistically, philanthropically, athletically, building a startup or an organization that matters to them. You know, and that’s obviously hard in the first couple years of raising kids. And I think that’s one of the reasons why that ends up being a choke point for a lot of marriages is one spouse is off kicking ass in their career and the other one is just taking care of kids.

But I think we realized that the couples that worked were where both sides of the couple were getting better in some way, at some thing, and had some kind of pursuit that was self defining that they could chase. That said, we also learned that helping other people get out of an anxiety zone was really rewarding for us. You know, I’ve heard people wrestle with giving money to family. We gave a lot of money to family, but every time we oriented it around, so what do you owe to credit cards?

What’s your goal? What do you need? How stressed are you about your house payment? And helped get people to a place where they just didn’t freak out anymore. And I think we were very close to the time when I was just freaked out. I couldn’t think about the future. You know, I was so deep in personal debt that that anxiety was not only hurting my health, but it was dictating my choices. I couldn’t choose to do awesome things or plan ahead. And so I think when you take that anxiety layer away from people, they plan ahead and they have that optionality.

And that’s one of the things that informs our political beliefs. We’re probably some of the most progressive people in technology, and certainly we help elect candidates who are gonna raise our taxes. A lot of it is just believing that if we can really build this safety net into our culture here, then people will be able to make plans. They’ll have optionality. They’ll be able to think ahead. But we have an increasing number of Americans who are just on this this precipice. They’re living check to check, and they’re on the edge of of their lives imploding.

That sucks.

Yeah. So it’s funny. One of the things I’ve seen, and it’s a strange correlation, it’s obviously anecdotal. The less formal education some of my friends have, the more obsessed they seem to be about getting their kids into the right schools and the right enrichment programs. And so, you know, I was lucky to go to a cool university. That’s where I met my wife and study the humanities and have this incredible, you know, education in the classics and all and other cultures and got to study abroad in multiple countries.

And so I feel super lucky and privileged for that. But I definitely don’t think it’s the only way forward. I have very close and successful friends who didn’t go to college at all. I have one friend who left high school and has been a wild success. And so I think there’s countless paths to success however you measure it, you know, not just in business, but in art and philanthropy and volunteerism and stuff like that. But what I worry about is this race I see among too many of my friends to just push their kids on this path to Stanford.

They have to go to the best school. They have to start coding early. They have to take all the enrichment classes. They have to take the IQ tests. And it just gets like this it’s this fucking insane treadmill. And I also see it take over my friends’ lives, by the way, where they’re like, no. We can’t possibly leave school, you know, a few hours early to do something fun because, god, if they missed a few hours of school, their life would be over.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look. You see the same thing play out in sports, particularly in America. You know, when I was a kid, we used to just be able to play sports. Like, if it was soccer season, you know, I hadn’t really touched a soccer ball till soccer season. Our team wasn’t amazing, but we would play against other schools. And then when soccer season was over, it was over, and you picked up your tennis racket or you played basketball. You know, you ran cross country. You’re just on one of the other teams.

You know, now it’s specialization. My daughter, when she turned eight in her little soccer league, they were gonna have a draft. I’m like, you’re drafting players to teams. Like, it’s getting that competitive now. It’s crazy. You know? And our daughters are on the ski team here. We live in Wyoming and Jackson, and our daughter’s on the ski team. And, you know, the head of the ski program told me, because our daughter is just turning 10, and he said, well, now, you know, at this stage, it’s no longer fun.

I was like, wait, thank you for telling me that ahead of time because we’re gonna pull out of the ski team. But just being that candid, like, no, this is the stage where it’s no longer fun. I’m like, why the fuck would my daughter play a sport at 10 that’s just not fun? Like, that’s the whole idea behind playing sports. She’s never gonna be on the US ski team. That’s not our path. God bless everybody who’s going for that, but that’s not our path. And so I worry about this over specialization I see for kids.

And so for us, I think our kids growing up with some privilege are at higher risk for being assholes than average kids. You know, when Crystal and I look back at our life, we reflect on the jobs we had, really tough, shitty jobs early on. And we look at those middle class upbringings where we couldn’t buy all the stuff we wanted. And as lucky as we were, I think we were we both came from homes where both our parents were together and are still together, and we were lucky.

Right? Born somewhere near second base. And so our kids are at higher risk because they’ve always had the shit they wanted. You know, we have the luxury of being around, and we always often have somebody around to help out. And so we’ve overclocked raising them with a sense of gratitude and service. And, you know, our kids are now at the end of this month, they’ll be like 10, eight, and six. So they work in the stables near our house for a horse ranch. It’s illegal by Wyoming law, but they go over there and muck stables and, you know, and shovel shit and lead the horses around and deal with that.

And I’m like, that is so wildly important to Crystal and me. They work directly on our philanthropy. They work with us on particularly the ones they can wrap their heads around, charity:water and DonorsChoose, where there’s that real, like, clear connection between what we donate and the impact it has for other kids. Because kids understand fairness. They may not understand the economy and how dollars work particularly, but they get fairness and they get inequity and how it’s just unfair that other kids grew up without access to clean water or food security or housing or basic school supplies or jackets in the winter.

And so for us, you know, our goal is if my kids don’t end up at a fancy college, that’s absolutely fine with us. I think the world is suffering a shortage of awesome, well rounded people who care about others. Because look, I mean, one of the things that I see happening in tech right now is we’re all getting really good at fitness, right? Like, we know how to work out, how to eat, you know, which supplements to take. We’re getting really good at accelerating our own personal knowledge.

There’s never been more available to read, to listen to, from talks that are available online. Because back when I got in the business, the only way you could learn from a venture capitalist is if you were lucky enough to be in the room with them. Now they all blog and tweet and write and speak. You know, there’s some really great tones and great advice. Like, we’re compounding the knowledge that’s built. You’re a big part of that. Right? People come on here. They share their lessons. And young folks who’ve never been exposed to the business or folks who are in the business, but they can just compound and accelerate their learning.

And so we’re all getting better at this shit. I mean, I talked to a guy yesterday who it was a candidate. I was trying to land for a company. Was just stunningly smart about the business. I’m like, how old are you? And he was in his twenties. And I’m like, how the fuck did you learn all this already? You know? And he’s like, I just stay up all night and read and look and watch and listen, but at the same time, we’re doing all this stuff, and we’re becoming, like, achievers.

bit? Yes. That’s the point, is we’ve stopped giving a shit about other people along the way. So I believe in a meritocracy, but I believe that, you know, often, despite the circumstances people are born into, whether they’re born, you know, into extreme poverty and came from a first generation immigrant family, I mean, are inspiring stories. But I also believe that there are people who were born on third base who also have worked hard and created some of their own luck. But at the same time, I believe that, like I said, I may be lucky, but it’s not an accident.

But at the same time, friends I grew up with who just didn’t work as hard, maybe, you know, who, like, played cards on Wednesday night, you know, when I was going to university for math, They have absolutely the same fundamental human right to be happy and healthy and to have a family and to enjoy themselves right now. And that’s the fucking part that I think our culture keeps forgetting is that I love when people go on their accelerated journey. And I do believe that those people who are that fortunate should enjoy some of the spoils of life.

Like if going on a fancy vacation or drinking incredible wine or driving a super fast car is their thing, I’m actually not like a complete socialist, you know, that people shouldn’t enjoy those luxuries. I certainly fucking do. And so but on the other hand, we have to pay attention to the consequences of the economies we’re building and the consequences of our policy and who we’re leaving behind. And it’s just super fucked up. So, yes, what happens is we have this monoculture of these kids who’ve in computer science programs now, they’ve never had a job.

The toughest job they’ve ever had was being a teaching assistant for a class. And so they’ve never mowed lawns, waited tables, worked in any service industry whatsoever. And so as a result, they’re completely out of touch with the human condition. A lot of them, particularly kids from America, have never studied or traveled or worked abroad. They’ve never been exposed to people who aren’t like them. They’ve never been exposed to poor people, let alone people of color who don’t look like them. And so we build these products of monoculture, and they’re not informed by our worldly experience at all.

And so it drives me nuts. And our organization will only hire people who have had shitty jobs, who’ve had service jobs, who’ve worked extremely hard for for some point in their life, and who appreciate that the worst day of being a VC doesn’t begin to compare to the worst day of working in a kitchen of a restaurant or the worst day of being on a construction site. And so it’s not even fucking close. And so I do worry. We’ve built this culture now that’s like, hey.

Here’s the keys to unlock to get your kid to fucking Stanford and be another amazing engineer, etcetera. But they’re shitty kids, and I see it all the fucking time. I see my peers’ kids talk back to people, are entitled as fuck, don’t know the word please and thank you. You know, like, some other kid gets hurt. They don’t know how to stop what they’re doing and go check on the kid who just got hurt on the playground. They’re just assholes. And so there’s a crisis. I think we have this surplus of assholes coming down the pike right now.

quite literally was walking out of an event yesterday, and there was a mom and dad and two boys walking in front of us. And the boys were just being shitty to the parents. And the parents are like, okay. Don’t do that. You’re running across the road. And I said to the mom was kinda walking next to me, I was like, you know, some days, I just feel really blessed to have three badass girls who actually listen to directions. And she turns to me and she goes, take me with you.

Like, it’s just like that we have this crisis. And I mean, a lot of it one of my favorite books, by the way, how to raise an adult by Julie Lithgott Himes, who was both the director of admissions at Stanford and the director of freshman or the dean of freshman, as well as a parent of a young kid. And so she talked about seeing the consequences of helicopter parenting and how it’s ruining a generation of American kids. And in parallel, finding your you know, not preaching from pedestal because she found herself guilty of the same kind of parenting of her young kid.

And it’s incredible book for anyone raising kids right now, but we’re doing them an incredible disservice by bailing them out of every situation, giving them her a participation medal. Our kids do karate, and their karate instructor is like a Zen master because on the very first day, he was teaching them how to count in Japanese. And he would say, like, what comes next? You know? And they’d say, each. One kid would say it faster, and he would say, you win. And then he would go down the line and just say, you lose, you lose, you lose, you lose, you lose.

And I could see our kids squirming because nobody tells kids, you lose. And other kids would be like, fuck this and run out of the room. And, like, our kids were like, should we go back? And I’m like, absolutely. We’re going back to that class. That is the greatest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. Like, just a guy who’s willing to say to everyone, you lose, you lose. And I’ve seen it translate. Now when my kids lose a board game, they’re like, let’s play again, but nobody’s like, you know, nobody cries.

Like, they lose, and they’re like, okay. Let’s run it back. Like, I think I can beat you this time. And it’s awesome.

It’s an exceptional point, and it’s true. And one thing I wanna counterbalance it with is VCs actually have way less power than people think they often do. You know, I go back to when everyone was like, why didn’t you fire Travis? And I was like, there was no fucking way we could. You know, ultimately, we’d come up with some kind of crafty ways that we could convert our stock from preferred to common and maybe take over the board that was risky and we weren’t totally sure.

In the end, what pushed Travis out was when his team held him accountable. It was when the, you know, his 13 senior managers all wrote a letter and said, dude, you gotta stay out of the company. You know, that’s really the only force that Silicon Valley leaders are accountable to. I mean, Zuckerberg has zero fucks left to give. In fact, I think he might even derive pleasure from public criticism of him. You know, it might reinforce his worldview that the rest of us don’t fucking get it.

But when his employees start pushing back on him, that is the number one hardest resource in all of of tech is if you can’t recruit and retain good talent, you’re powerless. You know, it’ll be interesting now that Mike left. Well, let’s see what that meant actually. Was he just you know, did he wanna go hang out on a beach, or was there something greater to that? It’ll be interesting, and we’ll see if there’s more departures there. But when your employees won’t stick around, that’s the only thing that keeps you honest.

You know, Larry, Sergei, and Eric had a pretty strong compass, but there were times back in Google, and so I’m talking, like, literally o five, o six, where we had to decide what to do about China. Employees would stand up at the all hands meetings on every Friday and ask really pointed critical questions and say, look, if we’re gonna do this shit, if we’re gonna censor search results, etcetera, I don’t wanna fucking work here anymore. Anyone from the policy group could have stood up and been like, well, I mean, I think this is how we should handle it from a geopolitical perspective.

And they’re gonna say, we’re gonna be like, fuck that. But in the end, it’s the talent. If they’re like, we don’t wanna work here. We’re not gonna be proud to work here. That’s what police is that. And so, yes, like VCs, I do think are afraid of being critical, and I do think are afraid of pushing back. And there are obviously standouts. I’ve watched Bill Gurley knuckle up in board meetings and call bullshit because that’s the place it needs to get done. And if you don’t build that rigor and discipline early on, you’re not setting yourself up to be a world class company.

And I definitely, I really look up to Bill Gurley. I consider him a friend and a mentor. But honestly, I do think there’s some skittishness. And part of it’s because I think a lot of VCs are shitty managers. Know, I mean, it’s funny. Mean, Clay, our business partner and who kind of leads Lowercarbon Capital day to day on the climate side, knows that that there are days where I’m gonna call and it’s gonna be fucking harsh. I love him to death, and I couldn’t be more impressed by a single individual we’ve ever worked with.

But there are days where disappointment meter goes high, and he’s gonna fucking hear it from me. I think without that radical candor, people are setting themselves up for failure.

Yeah. So it’s actually it’s the same thing I do in parenting, by the way. So raising kids has informed how to manage relationships across the board. So I’ll tell you first, when somebody else is upset, when somebody in my org is upset, I do the same thing I learned to do with our little kids. The first thing you do, and by the way, this works in any relationship, romantic relationship you have to. The first thing you do is when somebody’s upset, you repeat back to them what you just heard them say.

And so if it’s a little kid, you’re like, Dave is upset that he can’t drag, you know, his toy car outside onto the lawn. And so you’ve heard them whining about it, they’re crying about it, and then you follow it by a sigh. And then you wait. You just sit there and wait. You let it sink in. I heard you, man. It registered, and I’m not gonna try and fix it yet. I’m just gonna sit and wallow in it with you. And sometimes when it’s a little kid, you literally crouch down to their height.

But when it’s an adult, you know, when it’s your partner, the one thing we all crave is to be heard and validated. Right? And we skip that. And particularly for technologists, entrepreneurs, VCs, you immediately jump to the solution. And that that can be a real detriment because the person just wants to feel like they were heard and validated and that you feel their pain, and so you stop and just And then the next words out of your mouth have to be a question, not a statement.

So the next words out of your mouth are, So with a little kid, I’d be like, So what do you think would happen if we drag that car out onto the lawn? And you build a hypothetical that sets them up to succeed, that sets them up to have an answer to lead them down. You may have a solution in mind, but you have to let them find it along the way. You can’t impose it. And so this is a really big deal for me. And it’s funny.

I mean, it literally came from raising toddlers, and people would be like, why don’t your toddlers tantrum? And I was like, because they start, you can see it, right? You can see that, I mean, just kids have fucking huge feelings. Like, I’m a Calabrian. You know? Like, my ancestors come from Italy. I can fucking explode on a moment’s notice. So so you get those initial big feelings, but then it’s like, alright. How do we diffuse that and make sure it doesn’t just become a screaming fit?

And no one in your life is gonna stop crying. Like, hey, shut up, stop crying. That doesn’t work. Just like no one in your company is gonna be like, stop whining. And so the same thing happens. I set that up in reverse when I wanna coach an employee. I express my feelings, and I don’t have to do it enraged. I’m just like, I express them as this is where I think we fucked up or this is the disappointment. And then I ask them, so what do you think we can do going forward?

And that gives them that sets them up to succeed. That sets them up to own the solution. That sets them up rather than like, fuck you, you fucked up. Don’t let this fucking happen again. Shut the fuck up. Look, next time, this is exactly how you have to fucking do it, so fuck you, hang up. Like, that’s the least effective way to manage ever. And so if instead I’m like, look, we obviously fucking ate this one right here. You know? And I try and say we because we’re a team, and so I don’t try and put it on somebody even if it’s clear they’re the one who fucked up.

Like, we obviously took the fucking apple on this one. And so and this is it. You know? This bothers me because it reminds me of something that, you know, means something to me personally, or I hate being in this situation. These are my feelings. And, you know, and I don’t beat around the bush. Like, these are my feelings. I feel fucking let down, or I feel like we just lost some of our competitive edge or whatever. And then what do you think we should do about it?

How do we prevent this from happening again? What should we do going forward? Then the person who fucked up owns the solution. You know? And so there’s no shortage of big feelings. There’s no shortage of rage. But now I’ve set the other person up to succeed and headed off at the past so it doesn’t happen again.

So, I mean, obviously, we have that principle, like, if it’s not a hell yes, it’s a hell no. And so when looking at deals and looking at hires If

Oh, I have no time in my life for that shit. So so I work from home. My daughter’s running and out of the room all day long. They sit in my lap often for calls. They’re not in here right now because they’re in online school. But so one consequence of that is they know how to swear when the time comes. And so it’s not something I encourage, but they’ve just learned how to do it. I was watching a episode of Ted Lasso with Roy Kent. You know, the girl he’s helping raise is swearing a little bit, and I laughed my ass off because I was like, that’s what it’s like working from home.

And so one of my daughters walked into my office recently, and she was sitting on a call with me where I was really frustrated by another investor who I thought was fucking up a situation at a company. And I hung up with them, and our middle daughter walked in and asked the older daughter, what was going on there? Like, dad sounded upset, and she goes, Oh, this guy was just being a B teamer. And I was just amazing because those words hadn’t left my mouth in that call, but my girls had picked up on this idea of like, Don’t bring half effort.

Just don’t half ass something. Be all in or all out. And so for me, the people who suck, it’s never a lack of raw talent. Like, there’s definitely people who have some raw talent and blow my mind. It’s always a lack of of effort and ownership. Like, I can’t fucking stand. We have a guy who works with us, like, on our house, and he was brand new to the job and he did not have prior physical maintenance experience. So he came into the job totally green, and he was, like, kind of reading manuals and trying to learn stuff on YouTube.

And I was so impressed with him compared with other people we worked with because he’d be like, hey, I fucked this thing up earlier, so it’s gonna be a couple more days. I got it wrong. I ordered the wrong part. Or, Hey, I do you have any idea how to fix this thing? Because I don’t. I was like, Thank you for asking me rather than fucking pretending. You know, like, Let’s figure it out, or Let’s find the gal who can. And so as a result, like, for me, ownership is everything.

Like, because I run an insanely small organization. You know, I think we’re six people now managing, you know, between the outside money and inside money over $1,000,000,000. At the height of Lowercase, we were managing $6,000,000,000 and we were three people. And so everyone in my organization has to be empowered with way insane outsized responsibility. And so we have radical transparency. Everyone sees our decisions so they can channel me or Crystal later and not have to bring that decision back up to us.

But I have to believe that if I empower somebody and treat them like an owner and give them real ownership so by the way, I mean, our comp plan probably runs six to 10 times what the industry standard is because I want everyone to materially I want this to be a life changing event. If you’re working for me in any role, I want it to be a life changing event, and you’ll fucking act like it as a result. Like, you know, Google taught me that when they would share confidential information, they would share the board deck with the entire company on Fridays.

Literally, gathered the entire company and showed them the same slides they had shown the board on Wednesday. And that meant everyone from the most senior engineer and all the VPs down to the receptionist and security guards. And so everyone shared it. And you know what happened? It was like four years before we had a leak come out of that meeting, because everyone was shown the respect of an owner, and they rose to that occasion. You know, I previously worked in a company culture where they treated everyone like children and didn’t give them that benefit of the doubt, and as a result, they acted like children, and they maintained confidentiality like children.

And so I think people rise that expectation. So for my team, we are and Clay, our partner, is one of the best hires I’ve ever met. He came out of the Obama White House, where they really did put together one of the greatest teams of all time. And Clay will spend three to four months hiring somebody, a specific person, and they’ll do some work product and they’ll collaborate on some stuff with us. And it’s it’s funny. I’m a little impatient. I’m like, we need some fucking help right now.

And he’s like, I’m working on it. But ultimately, those people who come on board could run a fucking division, you know, like and they’re in their twenties sometimes or early thirties, and they are fucking unstoppable. And so I just have no time in my life for B Teamers, let alone C Teamers or D Teamers. And, you know, I say that not from like a position of privilege or elitism, it’s just because it can be fucking anyone. You know, we have people who work for us in service jobs who just fucking bring it, who just show up and own their work and bring it.

And I mean, you can’t tell, I’m very passionate about this because it drives me crazy to see people who kind of just flop around and phone these fucking jobs in. Not only can I not hire them, I have trouble fucking collaborating with them? I can’t fucking make time for the call. I can’t make time for the fucking coffee if I see them fucking phoning it in. I’m like, if we’re gonna do this, do it all in. By the way, that’s one of the reasons I quit for a while, was I worried that, you know, the stage of life I was in, I wasn’t gonna be able to fucking bring it.

I wasn’t gonna be able to as obsessive as you need to be to succeed in this business and this industry and to be as helpful as I wanted to be. So that was one of the reasons I stepped back at probably the height of, you know, our power influence when I could have raised as much money as possible and seen all the fucking deals, I stopped because I worried I was gonna be a b teamer.

Look, the people who succeed in this business, and this is not an endorsement, this is an observation, are not normal. They don’t have incredible balance. And so they may, like, make good time for family and good time for health and working out and may put vacations vacations on on their their calendar. But their brains are obsessive. And so there is not like intellectual balance in their heads. They’re obsessive readers, listeners, askers of questions, absorbers of knowledge, tryers of new things. They’re obsessive. I know kind of most of my friends have to do something to fall asleep because their brains are racing, and so they can’t not think about things.

My family laughs at me because those ideas come to me in moments. I have to carry the notebook to write them down. Crystal will be like, are you really fucking thinking about lithium mining right now? I’m like, I can’t help it. Like, I’m just I’m thinking about I’m synthesizing this shit I read, and I can’t keep my fucking mind off it right now. I’ll say to one of my kids, hey. I have to stop to write something down. And they’ll be like, what are writing down?

I’m like, this nuclear fusion reflection I have. I have a question for one of my teams. You know, I read something, and I just wanna ask one of the teams because I’m trying to understand this principle about plasma. And so I think people in this business are obsessive. Now what happened for me was that I just wasn’t that obsessive about this shit anymore. You know, like, we had a partner who was, like, really into e gaming, and I’m like, I kinda get it, but I don’t give a shit really.

I can’t get excited about it. I’m not salting anyone else who gets excited about it. In fact, an amazing kid named Jackson who worked for us went to work in an e gaming company. He’s thriving, and it matters to him. It just didn’t matter to me. And so as a result, I couldn’t, like, do the reading, install the shit, play all the things, go to the fucking in person League of Legends events and stuff like that, and meet the players, and go to their the homes where they trained and stuff like that and did their finger exercises and shit.

Like, I just couldn’t get into it. And so I felt like if I couldn’t bring that kind of a game, I was gonna be bad at my job. And Shark Tank’s fun. Shark Tank’s real. Like, just so you know that none of that is scripted. It’s the most authentic show on television. They don’t tell us what to say or and we invest our own money. We don’t know anything about those companies before they walk in the door. And so if you see a shark fight breakout, that’s real.

You know, it’s like the only quote unquote, like unscripted show that’s truly unscripted. But the reality was, like, a kitchen gadget would walk in, and I’m like, okay. You’re convincing me on the market. I think I understand how I could make this better. You know, we have a lot of exposure to the restaurant business, particularly in Copenhagen, like, the vanguard of of food and spirits. And yet, is this really what I wanna fucking do with my life right now? Do I wanna get up and and tell my kids like, hey, I can’t play because I have to do a Zoom with that fucking gadget company?

You know, it just didn’t feel like the trade off was there anymore. And I think if your heart’s not really in it, if you really aren’t driven by it, then it’s hard to be amazing at it. Now that’s for me. Like, there are other guys who get fired up about SaaS, God bless them, and building, you know, multiple thousand person organizations. That’s not me. I remember at Google, Sundar and I were part of this group of 10 people who were tapped as, like, the maverick y future leaders, And Eric had us on a thing we don’t talk about, the secret committee we worked on.

And I remember looking across the room, and I mean, this is like ten years ago, and I was like, that guy is gonna run the company someday. And I’m on record of saying it as recently as like seven years ago, I think, where I was just like, that guy runs a tight fucking meeting. That guy knows how to manage a large group of people. I fucking don’t. I know how to throw a grenade in the room, launch some fucking crazy idea, and think in a contrarian way that’s the opposite of how everybody else is thinking.

But I can’t run a fucking meeting, and I can’t manage a huge organization. One of the reasons I I distribute management power is because I suck as a manager otherwise. And so, anyway, I just think, like, some VCs do have a passion for that shit. My friend David Yulovich is, he built OpenDNS, incredibly successful, went to Cisco and ran an org of thousands of people and was great at it, and left there to go to Andreessen, which is an org of thousands of people, I think.

It seems like it’s that big now. He’s a very talented investor. He has this combination of that entrepreneurial grit, and he knows how to find those great seed deals and take that risk and do those deals. But he’s also an incredible manager. He knows how to groom talent and how to build large organizations as well as navigate the large organization he’s part of. Like, I would drown at Andreessen. And so I would just fucking drown, like, Monday partner meetings. You know, our partner meetings happen, like, at Friday at midnight if that’s when we need to have our partner meeting.

Like, that kind of structure would fucking choke me.

Well, you know, back at Google, worked on we didn’t call it climate then. I mean, we were one of the largest energy consumers in the world. We were using more power in three US states than any other consumer power. And so thanks to Larry and Sergei, they were pioneers of like, look, we gotta make this shit green. And we worked on efficiency because you so much power that inefficiency would hit the bottom line of the company. And so back in o three, o four, I was pursuing clean power deals.

I remember doing a solar panel deal with Andrew Beebe, who’s now at obvious ventures. He was a solar entrepreneur at the time, one of the OGs of the space, a guy I really respect a lot. So we were really driven as a company to find to really push the envelope of clean energy. And so as time went on, the climate crisis was obviously increasingly apparent. I live in the mountains, which are a much more fragile ecosystem than a lot of other places. And so you see it happening between fire and melting and flooding and drought.

It’s real, you know, the migration patterns of wildlife changing, the the health of the rivers and creeks changing. So it’s right there in front of me. But as I was reflecting on what was gonna matter to me, so kitchen gadgets weren’t, but my wife and I were starting to do more stuff in criminal justice reform, sensing reform, prison conditions, and as well as clemency and restorative justice. That was one thing that mattered to us. Democracy and, like, trying to give our republic a chance of surviving that orange fuck and moving past that, you know, a fascist GOP was another obsession of ours.

And so we helped rebuild the democratic tech stack. But along the way, climate was a big deal. And so we revisited it saying, can we use the thinking we have from the entrepreneurial journey to really accelerate this space? And what’s changed? What hasn’t? Bless Door and Vinod and these guys who went into climate early, their vision was there and their passion was there, and I’m and I deeply respect that they risked so much of their personal capital. But the unit economics weren’t there yet. It was just too fucking expensive to start those companies, and they depended upon government subsidy to operate.

So at the same time that they were investing in companies, they were hiring Al Gore and Colin Powell to go to DC and try and lobby. And that was a hard road. But as we paid more attention and we started actively investing in the space in like 17, but not just actively investing, going and visiting all the labs, reading the books, then calling up the authors. And that’s one privilege you have when you’re us, is that people will return your call. And so we met with the research institutes and the people working on the philanthropy side and the activists and the regulators, and just really try to put together a picture.

And what we started to see was that the unit economics in this business had changed. It was more like what we saw with Y Combinator in o five, is that it used to cost millions of dollars to write your first line of code. Well, it used to cost tens of millions of dollars to start your clean tech startup. Now with shared bioreactors, with massive computing clusters rentable by the hour, with machine learning accelerating at the pace it is, it was just so much cheaper to start a climate company that would have massive gigaton scale impact on the planet.

You know, an example, this guy Anders came to pitch us Hart Aerospace. He’s a Swedish guy who was gonna build a 19 seat electric airplane, and we’re like, where’s your team? And he’s like, it’s me. And so we gut checked it with friends at Airbus and Boeing, and they’re literally physically impossible, man. Not gonna happen. And so we didn’t invest as much as we should in retrospect, but we invested and we stayed close to this guy. He rented a big airplane hangar, but for the first, like, I don’t know, year of the company, it was like him and, like, three or four teammates just sitting at their computers with the rest of the hangar empty because that plane was built in the computer.

Machine learning so wildly accelerated how that plane was built that it existed in the computer before they started assembling parts. Fast forward a couple years and not on the billions of dollars of investment it normally takes to develop an aircraft, but on the single digit millions of dollars in this case, and I think we just did a round in the tens of millions. And up until that round, his entire company could fit in his 19 seat airplane, but he has billions of dollars of actual cash on the barrel orders, not LOIs, but orders from the major airlines in hand for this plane that makes their routes profitable.

He has the plane in the fucking hangar. The engines operate. He has the fuselage. Like, it’s a real fucking thing. And that just wouldn’t have been possible before without billions of dollars of investment. And so we see this happen with, like, a company, SoluGen, industrial chemicals using enzymes instead of petroleum. Yes. Their first VAT cost a lot of money, but they now, you know, I don’t know if I’m allowed to say, but their run rate is ridiculous. Like, I’ll fucking say it, like 9 figure run rate.

Their margins are like 50 to 60%. It’s an unbelievable fucking business because carbon’s expensive. I mean, look, powering the economy the way we do today, we literally dig up old dinosaur bones and cart them places and burn them. That’s an insanely inefficient and expensive process. Even if you don’t give a fuck about the climate, forget all the externalities and what it’s doing to the planet. It’s just fucking costly. If you wanna make more money, it’s just cheaper to power whatever you’re doing using the sun. And I don’t just mean direct energy.

I mean transportation. I mean building materials. I mean agriculture and food. All of this stuff is just cheaper when you do it using the sun. That’s why these businesses and by the way, you know, you’re a VC, you look at that TAM, that total addressable market page, you just flip past it. Well, these are the biggest total addressable markets in the history of the fucking world. Because it turns out, like, the total addressable market is everyone who eats and everyone who wants to move their bodies somewhere around the planet and everyone who wants to live in a structure of some kind and everyone who wants to flick on a light switch.

That’s our total addressable market. And so I got really fucking excited to see, a, this is a passion area for us, b, what we do for a living makes these companies better. And as we started to get the word out there, so we were very actively investing from like ’17 till this year. And I told the team we weren’t gonna raise money if and until we had the best deal flow in the industry. And it was this year that that became apparent, that as we took our deals to collaborative investors, because this is a space where you have to be collaborative, they started asking us, where the fuck did you find this one?

And as we racked up more and more instances that I’m like, we’re fucking going out. We have the best deal flow. We’re gonna fucking do this.

I mean, look, I’m very lucky I have lots of money, but I don’t have enough to do this all myself. I mean, to do this right is gonna take billions and billions of dollars. These businesses are the unit economics are there, but they scale faster than any businesses ever too. Look, when you and I invest in an app or a website, we can have the very best business plan with the best intentions, and we can spend a year, sometimes two years building that thing, pushing, moving the buttons around, getting excited about it.

And then on launch day, nobody gives a fuck. And it’s this very binary thing. And I mean, I get it, like, just some of this shit just doesn’t work sometimes. What we’re seeing in climate is our stuff works. And so it’s a rush to scale it, to land those customers. Like, by the time we meet with somebody, usually their science is already palpable. It’s tangible. We can touch it. And so as a result, it’s like, how do we go to market? What’s interesting is these companies are more capital intensive, but they also are able to tap project finance earlier.

They’re able to get loans and debt earlier in their life cycle than, you know, I think Uber was like a $50,000,000,000 company before they were able to borrow money instead of dilutive financing. But you need some deeper pockets to play in this stuff. You know, we’ve got basically $1,000,000,000 at work in the field right now, but that will be growing. I mean, we will absolutely be I think for US security reasons, I can’t tip what our future plans will be, but I’m sure at some point we will be bigger.

Absolutely. I’ll get way richer from this. I have multiple companies in the portfolio right now that have like, they have a trajectory to being multi trillion dollar market cap. And it’s just we are in the business of curved lines rather than straight lines. And a lot of the naysayers in the business are still extrapolating off of the straight lines. Like, look, here’s where we are today. There’s no fucking way that I’ll ever be big. And I’m like, yeah, but we are in the business of these lines that bend upward at radical rates that some of the OGs in the space just can’t wrap their heads around.

You know, like fusion. So we have a handful of companies in the fusion space. Forever, people have said nuclear fusion is thirty years off and it always will be. And so I got in a Twitter fight the other day with a guy who’s like, it’ll always be thirty years off. And I was just like, I deeply respect all the work you’ve done in the space, but you sound like someone who hasn’t visited the lab in a while. That’s not where it is, and I can’t preempt any announcements coming from any of our companies.

But I can assure you it’s fuck. I overstep my bounds in terms of what we know, but I can assure you it is much, much more near term than thirty years. Imminent. Maybe now. Who knows? But it’s been fucking fascinating to see these accelerating curves, and that’s happening across sell ag, and that’s happening across building materials. And by the way, the people we’re selling to, I mean, thesis is guilt and shame aren’t gonna change behavior at scale. The only thing that’s really gonna get us there is offering people something that’s better, cheaper, faster, cooler, sexier, easier to use, easier to maintain.

And so you’re not gonna guilt China into stopping their use of coal. Bless China, they’re an fierce competitor, but they’re also not hard to understand. If we give China a better option, they’ll fucking buy it. When I go back to SoluGen, the guys who buy their chemicals, a lot of them likely don’t vote the same way the founders of that company do, but they just ask two questions. Is it hydrogen peroxide? Is it cheaper? And then they’re like, okay, fuck it. I’ll buy it. And so that’s who I want to sell to.

I wanna sell to people. You know, they might even think that January 6 was a tourist visit to The US capital. So I wanna sell to those people because they’re acting out of sheer self interest. Because we’ve got, like, maybe a 100 to 200,000,000 people on the planet right now who think about climate when they make a purchase decision. I need to get 7,000,000,000 more of those people on board, and I’m not gonna get all these people around the planet who are living moment by moment, day to day, trying to make stretch their check to do that, to pay a premium out of just consciousness.

I just have to offer them the better product that as a result, that as like an incident to their purchase decision is has a climate friendly impact.

Yeah. It’s not discipline. Okay. I think there’s this fake discipline to these requirements that that the industry somehow thinks have been imposed by LPs, And they may have been, but any LPs who think like this are fucking backwards. And and I see this in decks. Crystal and I are LPs in dozens and dozens of funds, because that was one of the ways we paid it forward. And to help kind of promote diversity in the industry, we backed literally dozens of first time general partners who are women, people of color, and other underrepresented groups.

And so but we’d see these decks and they’d be like, okay, this is exactly how much I’m gonna own of each round. This is my deployment velocity. These are the board seats I’m gonna take, etcetera. And every time I was like, stop. Like, take that slide out. When I wrote my checks into Uber, they were too big, quote unquote, for my fund. And one of my LPs called me and I was like, look, I have conviction about some things, but this one I fucking know. I mean, so much of Uber came together in my fucking kitchen.

I’m going in. And like, if I fucking crash and, you know, and, crash and burn, then it’s on me. This one I fucking understand, and I’m betting the farm on it. And I was right. I mean, I I shouldn’t take much credit for Instagram because I kinda limped into that one because I was like, photos? How much money can be made in photos? I don’t know. I mean, we sold photo bucket for $3.30. How much money can you ever make in photos again? And that’s hilarious in retrospect.

So what I would say is have a different type of discipline. I’ll tell you my secret sauce. Make sure that the best companies in the world can and want to find me. I’ll never be big enough that I can see every deal. Maybe I could pull that off in 2005 or 2006 when there weren’t that many deals, but now I there’s just thousands of deals. So I need the best ones to know who I am and to know my reputation for being helpful and to know what I can do for them.

And by I, I mean our whole damn team. And by the way, it warms my heart when they go right past me, but they just need to know, okay, look, the very best companies in the world need to know to find Lowercarbon. From those, I need to know that we have the talent to choose the very best of those. Like, we’re very selective, obviously. We see way more deals than we’ll ever do. Then we need to be able to go in and get ourselves meaningful ownership and participation in those deals.

It sounds blunt, but I say in every deal, we have to give ourselves a chance in that one deal to get rich. And this is because I’ve did y c deals back in the day where I put 25 in, and I’d sell the company for, you know, $15,000,000. My $25 became $75. I made all the founders rich, but in the end, I’m like, by the time I give that, you know, the profits interest of that $75 back to my investors, I’ve made, like, 15. You know?

And I just spent a month of my life trying to sell them to somebody, and I netted $15. Like, I need to make sure every deal has the potential to change lives. In climate, we specifically make sure every deal, has more than a gigaton carbon removal potential. But then the last thing is I deeply have to believe that we as a team, we can materially improve the likelihood of success of that company. I’ve been a public markets trader, and I sucked at it. Like throwing darts at a board was a disaster for me.

So I have to believe that when we do a deal, the great deals find us, we know how to choose the greatest among those, We have to own enough of them that it matters, and then we have to make that company better. And so my advice to you is I’m gonna outsource that formula. Do that. So you’ve got incredible deal flow. These great people know how to find you. You’ve built a reputation of how you can be helpful. You have to be selective. The discipline is around not just doing every deal that comes your way, but then doing the deals where you personally can derisk something.

Maybe it’s moving it from 49 to 51% likelihood. You know, maybe you can’t add 20% likelihood to the success, but it’s knowing you can derisk it somehow and make it more likely to succeed. You’ll feel fucking better and you’ll make more money.

Some definitely are. Like, alright, we’ll make this the Bill Girley fan club show. But I have a very specific example that comes to mind with Bill sometimes. And by the way, there are a lot of guys like Josh Kaufman and Rob Hayes and gonna piss people off by not naming a bunch. So I’m gonna stop and just focus on Bill. We were in an early Uber board meeting once. Okay. We need a CFO, and I stop and I think, okay. Like, who could be a CFO?

I’m thinking of, like, ex old Google people who are, like, director of finance and maybe ready for a CFO. And Gurley just opens up this dossier, and it has the resumes of six public company CFOs who are vetted and who want the Uber job. And I was like, that’s what fucking Bill Gurley does. Like, that’s one of his many things. He does lots, but that guy just materially increased the likelihood of success of this company on that fucking day. I can point to it. That guy, you know, will go in.

Uber was obviously becoming a huge marketplace. That guy will go in and do a ton of marketplace analysis, connect us to other big marketplaces to understand lessons learned and things they did wrong, and he will materially move forward the likelihood of success of the company by influencing the business strategy. And so there’s no fucking doubt. I mean, I think the best VCs are great at hiring. I’m not great at sourcing candidates. I’m good at landing candidates. So if you’ve got somebody who’s stoked and they’re on the fence, I can usually convince them to join your company.

But the best VCs, like, it’s not an accident that the best venture funds keep outperforming. That doesn’t happen by accident. There’s luck around the way. We can tell these stories and they make good cover stories. Like, hey, if this guy hadn’t bumped into this guy, you know, or this gal hadn’t happened to read an article about somebody ten years ago and wanna talk to them about it. But it’s not an accident or just some mere coincidence that it keeps happening because some of these people are fucking good, and they add value every fucking time.

I think Doug was bullshitting. But, you know, like, Instagram came to me. Kevin Systrom literally said, I want three angels. You, Adam D’Angelo, and Jack Dorsey. And so he pitched me. I literally was not seeking photos. I it sounds fucking hilarious, but I thought it was spent. I thought it was done. He came and pitched me why he wanted me involved, and it was specifically because I was helpful. And it was specifically things he’d seen that I had written too that influenced him. And specifically, when he was at Google, he was kind of a junior guy who’d seen the work I had done, he’s like, so I want you in my deal.

That does happen. Like, that reputational thing matters. And by the way, to investors who are up and coming, I think you need to consistently remind other investors of how you’re helpful. You know, people are like, you know, Sacca, you’re self promotional. I’m like, fuck. Yeah. Am. That’s part of the job is I have to continually remind people why I matter because I need other investors to bring me their deals too. This is inherently collaborative business if we’re not gonna see all of them. Like, we see the most, but I’m not gonna see all of them.

I need somebody. Like, I needed someone at First Round Capital to be like, oh, this is a good deal where Sacca’s skills would be complementary to ours. And so let’s call him up and see if he wants to come into the deal. And they knew my check size wasn’t gonna displace them from their deal,

I mean, yeah, but remember, there’s part of the market that so I encourage you to kind of go back and read the success stories of people, like, when they like, read the Series B stories. Right? It’s fun to read the IPO stories, like, how did that deal come together? But to your point, those were funded in a slightly different era. So read the Series B postmortem. So, hey, how did that deal come And what you’ll see is the most selective, the best founders are still looking for quality, not building party rounds.

They may have more leverage in the situation, but they know that they want an actual helper to help them build a company. So it was interesting. We recently, in Lilac, co led around with T Rowe. T Rowe has this incredible expertise in minerals. We’re in the lithium mining business, right? Their expertise is wildly complementary to our company building expertise. And so for us, it made perfect sense to split the round with them. And the founders of the company were excited to have us come to terms with in a way that we could split the round evenly with T Rowe because it’s like, look, we can help you build out your team.

We can help you build this company from here. We can help you work on strategy. I can help counsel you on your worst fucking days, right, when it seems like your life is imploding. That’s part of our value add. But at the same time, like, these guys at TRO have such an insane in-depth understanding of the lithium market down to which ships are transporting which beads at which time. And so it’s really fucking fascinating. I think inherently in climate, like, we love doing deals with breakthrough energy.

You know, like, they have an intense level of expertise, and so we’ll do diligence and gut check our diligence with them and make sure that we leave enough room for them to materially participate. But this goes for all these fucking funds. And, I don’t wanna list them all because I’m gonna exclude somebody and hurt somebody’s feelings, but we are insanely collaborative in that space. And it’s the reason why fifty years fund will bring us a deal and say, hey. Look. Here’s one we love. And as much as Seth has every incentive to deploy as much capital as possible and get as much ownership as possible, he believes that if we are in his deal, it’s gonna be a more valuable deal.

And so that’s at the heart of all this.

Yeah. I think the number one thing is I don’t wanna get credit for that as a philanthropic investment, because in the end, I told everyone from the beginning, I was like, look, diversity in this industry, you can either hire diverse people for your firm because you’ve, you’ve acknowledged there’s been hundreds of years of systemic discrimination and women are making 72¢ on the dollar and entire races have been shut out of the industry. Or you can hire diverse team members because the data are clear that diverse teams just outperform monoculture.

Either So do it because you’re a hippie or do it because you’re a Scrooge McDuck, but either way, do it. And I have no allergy to money. And I’m like, I go into the LP situation and I say, look, we can either invest in these managers because you feel bad and you wanna do something to help the industry and you feel like you owe it as a result of your privilege, and I’m not gonna talk you out of that.

But also do it just because, you know, in a time where everyone’s chasing the same fucking deals, we’re now backing a generation of entrepreneurs, of GPs who are seeing deals that we’re not gonna fucking see, that aren’t bubbling up through our old boys network of white guys, that aren’t making it to Sandhill Road, but have massive addressable markets, massive, you know, go to markets. And so so do it because you’ll just make a lot of fucking money. And so it turns out right now, our LP portfolio of diverse managers is running about a two and a half x.

That’s fucking insane. Again, people give us a lot of credit for being charitable about it, and I’m like, I’m gonna make a lot of money doing it. By the way, you know, it’s funny. We did something else recently that I do wanna impress upon your audience. I do think it’s really important. And that is, you know, historically, colleges and universities have been shut out of high tier venture funds. And I’d read about this a few years ago, we had no intention of raising. But when we went to raise, we carved out everyone in our fund pays the same amount, by the way.

No one gets a side letter. No one gets special treatment, and I hope other VCs do that. It’s just too hard to manage. But what we said is the only people who get special treatment in our fund are as if your last name is Sacca or if you’re an HBCU. And for HBCUs, we would do no fee, no carry. So we thought we’d go one step beyond access and go no fee, no carry. And in the end, we actually found it was hard to connect to HBCUs because even in our network, diverse founders, there just weren’t decision makers on the other end of a lot of these schools.

They don’t have endowments. They don’t have investment offices. And so in an effort to try and create a culture of ownership and direct ownership and venture, because these are assets that should be one part of their portfolio and that traditionally outperform, we went to these funds and said, okay, we’re gonna give you a piece of Lowercarbon. But the condition of it is that we work through so it doesn’t go to your outsourced manager. It goes through you directly. And we work on the language of venture capital, and we find the signatory, and we build the review process.

And if we do this, then I’m going to lean on a bunch of other buddies to do the same thing. And so far, we have four other firms who are going to follow us along and start giving more access, whether it’s donated interests or it’s or no fee, no carry exposure to HBCUs to start participating in this ecosystem more meaningfully. And so it’s gonna start with money, but that’ll build deeper bridges for talent, that’ll build closer relationships. Those schools will be getting the updates from our fund and other funds that show these are the hot companies, this is what we’re up to, and understand those opportunities for their teams to join.

And so I’m really excited about it. Our initial donation is like, it’s over $2,000,000 right now. We’re still signing up a couple more schools, but I’m really excited. I’m gonna lean on other funds to do the same thing. I think they can have a material impact on these schools without even being a material donation from their end.

Alright. I’ve said this before, but it’s it’s still not Fade Away, a book of this guy well, our lives are similar. He was a ski bum who became a massive executive at Liberty Media, and right at the height of his success, found out he had incurable stomach cancer and started writing the book then, reflecting on his life, reflecting on meaning. Because I think one of these things is so easy to get totally obsessed and consumed by our industry. It’s easy to forget, and as we touched upon multiple times in this interview, that balance in life, those relationships, those friendships, that time to take care of yourself, you know, you’ll cry.

So anyway, not fade away.

My biggest strength is I’m a storyteller. So I can get whipped up into a frenzy and get somebody really passionate about something. My biggest weakness is talking too much and not asking enough questions.

Well, knowing each other since we were kids is definitely helpful. And I think seeing each other grow up at similar paces and rates in our respective fields has been incredible. You know, Crystal doesn’t take any public credit for anything because it’s just she’s just a much more balanced human who doesn’t need external validation at all. But Crystal’s been you know, she was there in the room to hear the Uber pitch and decide we should do the deal and has been an instrumental part of everything we’ve ever done at Lowercase.

And so inside of our wedding rings, we have these two things engraved. One is mutual weirdness forever. So we try and encourage each other to stay our weird selves, you know, and pursue those quirky interests and not try and smooth the edges, like, be a little rough around the edges. And then the other thing we have engraved in our rings is in violent agreement because we can really go. Like, we’re both very type A strong personalities and our kids laugh because we can really get going.

And often, you know, we’ll be like, look, we’re seeing the same fucking thing. We’re just nuancing the words right now. But I think having a dynamic, worthy, robust debating partner who has a very strong compass and can test your assumptions and call bullshit on you is one of the things I’m most grateful for in life.

Yeah, think Facebook is a cancer and they know it. Think look, here’s the thing with Twitter. Twitter was started with the best intentions. And in the beginning, you know, it was run by a bunch of hippies who loved seeing that it was used in Arab Spring, right, to help demonstrators come together to topple a regime. Biz Stone used to talk about how it amplified the world’s quietest voices, and so it was this great democratization engine. And I think it was very easy to be proud of being involved with the company at that time.

And and the employees who worked there rightfully were proud of working there. Twitter started to be weaponized, and I just don’t think the company was ready for that. You know, they didn’t evolve their policies quickly enough. On the one hand, they really worried philosophically about curtailing free speech. On the other hand, they started to see the deleterious and destructive effects of their platform being weaponized. And so, you know, I don’t know the extent to which Jack is a particularly reflective philosophical individual. In my experience, he wasn’t.

Other people tell me otherwise. But I do know that after some prodding, again, by other people in the company who wanted to be proud to work there, they really started figuring out how do we take this seriously and move to curtail this kind of speech. And, like, I am not gonna say they did a fantastic job of it, but it was clear they attempted to do something and tried. You know? And I know every day there are people harassed on the platform, and there’s still fucking plenty of Nazis and Macedonian bots and shit like that and anti vaxxers, but they’ve tried.

Facebook, on the other hand, has flaunted that they don’t give a fuck. And Facebook has, you know, just what they’re doing with their public relations campaign right now about they have the fucking data that show that they harm teenage girls, and they just don’t fucking care. And the people who still work there, I can’t imagine fucking working there right now and not constantly questioning, like, why do we work here? What are we actually making happen? Like, what is our impact on the world right now? Because they’re definitely not making it a better place.

And I’ve been in the room with Zuckerberg. I’ve watched him fucking lie to the president of The United States about what they know internally versus, like, the claims he spouts out loud. I think that guy is just is a really bad negative force for the fucking planet. There’s no doubt about it. And, like, I won’t mince any words. Like, when I see him in person, he gets a fuck you from me. And so, you know, right after the sixteen election, you know, I let him know.

I’m like, the blood is on your hands. Like, you made this happen. He’s like, no. It’s the pendulum swinging. I’m like, those are the words of one of the most privileged fucking ivory tower fucks I’ve ever talked to. And so, no, I take that guy fucking personally. And SoftBank, I mean, SoftBank is first of all taking money from fucking murderers, like literally guys who murder fucking journalists, and so and who’ve absolutely corrupted our prior regime. And they’re taking that and they’re betting across multiple competitors in mutually destructive ways.

Like, so they put money and they literally bullied their way into the Uber deal. You know, they’re just like, if we don’t do it with us, we’re gonna do it with Lyft and destroy you. And so they bullied their way into that deal. But then immediately after that deal, they went and put a $500,000,000 into DoorDash. Uber’s IPO would have gone very differently if they hadn’t have funded DoorDash. Now I like DoorDash’s management team. I think they’re a very fair competitor, and I don’t mean to throw them under the bus.

I actually own some DoorDash stock as well as some Uber stock. And so it has nothing to do with, like, Tony and the team. What happened to a little bit of fucking loyalty? What happened to a little bit of, like, we’re not just here to fucking bully our way strong our way into a deal? You know? And, I mean, like, there’s legendary tales about their guy coming into the room, spitting his fucking sunflower seeds on the floor of the conference room, you know, taking his shoes off barefoot and shit.

It’s just it’s unfucking believable. It’s a caricature of how this business gets done. And so, yeah, it bothers me. You know, like, look, ultimately, for us at Lowercarbon, we’re going to have to invest in multiple companies in the space just because there aren’t that many approaches, but it’s fun. We discuss it with our competitors. We had one guy the other day say, these are the other four companies in our space I want you to invest in because I need this field to move forward. Was like, oh my god.

Okay. That’s gone a lot farther. But I think SoftBank is just value destructive, and it drives me fucking crazy.

I mean, I never wanna run a huge org, and so there’ll be a breaking point at which when the slack gets unmanageable. You know, we’re single digit number of people right now. I think I can see hiring two or three more heads. I don’t really wanna be bigger than that. Clay’s a really good manager, and so it might be able to scale. It’s working really well, but that’s not my personal aspiration. My aspiration is just to be a big fucking lever. You know, like, I get excited when I am able to go to Goldman Sachs and say, don’t go guarantee drilling finance in the Arctic.

Instead, go do deals with us. That those guys who look. I’m close with David Solomon, the guy who runs the bank, I know he cares. He also has a fiduciary to manage money, they seek profit. And so when those guys walk away from the Arctic and instead do clean energy deals alongside us, that makes me happy. I mean, I I said this when we announced our fund. It was like that while I loved having a bunch of LPs we had, like, billions of dollars of interest for our fund in just a few days, and so that was overwhelming.

But when I we actually made room for some people who were sheer greed based investors, not just the folks who had a climate mandate. Because I was like, I want you here and I want you to put this in your for profit pocket of capital, and I wanna put up the returns for you that you no longer think about this as a charitable category or something that needs to be done out of a foundation. We’re gonna get rich, and it’s already happening. I mean, I don’t have to speak hypothetically.

We’ve been doing it for years. The multiples are already there. I think IRR is 95% right now. And so so we’re already getting fucking rich doing it. And I I want more. It’s the only time in my life I’ve invited more people into this space where I want more people to pivot towards having this impact. It’s gonna work. And the last thing I’ll say too is that we are going to transition to a clean energy economy, as well as clean building materials, clean transportation, clean ag.

It’s going to happen because just the sheer economic forces are gonna drive us there. As I said, it’s just easier and cheaper and better to do it that way. It’s just not going to happen fast enough. And so we are going to sequester carbon. We’re going to do that naturally. Know, we have in our portfolio, we have drought resilient trees. And so we are going to be able to achieve stuff that way, you know, and we’re also going to put it direct air capture back into the ground, and we’re going to do it in oceans.

We’re going to do it in soils. We’re going to it with rocks. So we are capture and sequester carbon, and we’re gonna need government help to do that. But it’s happening, and it’s easily scalable. Those two things are great, and they will get us to where we need to go, but it can’t happen fast enough. And so the one thing we absolutely have to do is research sunlight reflection. And so we have no way out of this without reflecting sunlight back into the solar system to buy us some time.

You know, when Mount Pinatubo erupted in the eighties, it probably net cooled the planet by a degree to a degree and a half Celsius because of it. It’s aerosols in the stratosphere. And so we need, you know, short of another volcanic eruption, we need to explore ways to either achieve that with aerosols, by brightening clouds, by creating clouds out in the middle of the Pacific.

But we need to do something to buy some time because otherwise, while I do believe we are going to get to the promised land of a net zero emissions economy and we will take carbon back out of the atmosphere, if we wait until those things naturally occur, we’ll lose probably a few 100,000,000 live world’s most vulnerable people, you know, particularly black and brown people living in low lying areas. And so I think the ultimate privilege right now, the ultimate ivory tower shit is to sit there and say, hey.

That’s scary. I do think it’s scary. That’s why we have to research it. And if we don’t do it, North Korea is gonna do it on their own. Some rogue state is going to launch a projectile that explodes a bunch of dust in the atmosphere, and we won’t know which dust, which altitude, the best ways to do it, and we’ll all suffer the consequences. And so it is a clarion call. Later this week, I’m speaking to, the World Bank IMF about this topic to at kind of a global scale because I think it’s an area that’s been underfunded, and we have to get obsessive about it if humanity has any fucking chance.

Alright. We gotta get together again. Let’s have Daniel invite us back to Stockholm so we can rage again. That was so fun. So