Tony Fadell "The Father of The iPod" on Mentors

Well, thank you, Harry. You know, I I’ve been watching and and listening to all your various podcasts with my friends, and I’m like, wait a second. What’s going on here? This hairy guy, he’s really got it going on.

Well, I don’t know if I knew what an entrepreneur was at the time, but it was literally the first time I started making my own money and had it in my pocket, and my parents couldn’t tell me what to do with that money. Right? Typically, you get an allowance or whatever, and then they’re like, well, don’t do this. Don’t do that. I got my first money when I was in third grade because I had an egg route.

So I had an egg route where we’d go, we’d get eggs from the farmer, he would deliver them to our house, and I’d load them in my wagon, my blue wagon, and my brother and I would go from, my younger brother, would go door to door around the neighborhood and we’d sell eggs. And that was kind of a week or every other week kind of situation. And I got money in my hands and I was like, oh my god. I could do whatever I want when I had money.

I was like, this is kinda cool. I don’t have to ask anybody for it. I could just do it. And so that was the level of freedom that, you know, especially when you’re young, that’s really like, wow. This is cool. And then a little later, I got older, and I was starting to buy my Atari video game cartridges for my 2,600. Yes. I’m that old. And that was really, really fun too.

Oh, sure. Sure. No problem. Well, my dad, he worked for Levi Strauss. And the Levi’s were a big, big deal back in the seventies. In fact, they were traded as black market currency in Russia. So you could trade US Levi jeans to get, I don’t know, caviar. Who knows what it was in Russia? But it was literally black market currency. And so we would move all around with his job for Levi’s because he was head of sales over there. And one time he took me to a meeting, a sales meeting, and I was probably seven or eight at the time.

And I just sat there at the desk while he was talking to these people and selling them. And one of the buyers would say, I wanna buy this shirt or this jean or something. And he turned to him and said, no. I don’t think you should buy that. And I was like, what? Somebody who wants to buy something, you’re selling something, you should sell it to him. And he’s like, no. No. No. No. You should buy this. This is what I think is gonna be the most popular styles for the season.

These things, if you’re gonna do it and you wanna just buy a couple, that’s fine. But go buy this. This is what’s gonna really make your business success. And so I listened and I watched, and I was like, wow. This guy wanted to buy something, he didn’t wanna sell it to him. I’m like, why why was this? So after the meeting, I talked to my dad, I said, why did you do that? And he said very clearly, he was like, look. This is a relationship. If I make this person successful, if I tell them this, not that, he’s gonna wanna come back to me over and over and over.

If I sell him something, yes, I’ll sell him, you know, for this quarter, this garment or whatever it was, this rag, because it’s called the rag business. And he sold it and it doesn’t sell and he has to discount it and he loses money, he’s gonna look to me like, what did I do? So he said, even if I don’t have the right product, I’ll tell them where to go to get the right product they’re looking for. Or if they’re picking the wrong one, I’ll tell them, here’s the right one you should pick, because my job is to make them successful.

Because if they’re successful, they’ll come back to me year after year after year. Even when we have a down year, they’re gonna trust me, and they’re gonna come back even after a down year or a down quarter or whatever it is. And that stuck with me so deep that everything’s about relationships. Not about today, not about the transaction, but about what could happen in a year, five years, or even ten years down the line.

That is difficult. You’re in a difficult spot. If it’s not a reference, if it’s not coming from somebody, like, okay. Hey. You really need to meet this person. I take everything with a grain of salt, anybody who comes to me cold, because I’m like, they probably want something. And so through that, I try to make sure that through the network, I’m like, do you know this person? What are they about? Luckily, we have LinkedIn now. We didn’t have LinkedIn, you know, twenty years ago, but now we do.

And so we can go in and very quickly find out who they’re connected to and go, oh, this person makes sense or whatever. And I could ask a quick question. So for me, I gotta do a little bit of diligence because, you know, your time, my time, it’s so valuable. And to waste it on three or four meetings and then finally the, oh, hey, I got this pitch for you. It’s like, dude, really? You’re gonna do that to me after I invested this much in trying to build a relationship?

You’re like, now you’ve really spoiled it. Right? Like, because you’re really about a transaction. They’re not trying to build a relationship. And so that’s the other thing, which is instead of relationships, there’s fake relationships to get to the transaction. It’s kind of like a ulterior sales motive, and that is not cool either. So if you are selling someone, you gotta be upfront and say, look, I’m talking to you about this. This is why I want your time. I think you could be helpful with this. But be upfront on what the game is about and what you’re trying to discuss with people.

Don’t waste my time because that’s even worse.

Mentors. Well, it’s a big topic. You know, I’m now at the stage of the career where I’m a mentor. Right? Or at least I hope I am, and I’m helping people. Right? And that’s why I’m actually doing this show. I’m not doing this show because I’m pitching something. I’m doing this show to mentor people, hopefully through your megaphone. And so on the mentor side, it takes someone who’s gonna tell you stuff you don’t like to hear. You need to get someone who’s gonna be really truthful.

And this is not life coach. It’s not that bullshit life coach. Hey. Okay. You know, if anyone has a life coach title, Jesus Christ, that’s like walk on down the street, just forget about it. Because typically, if see a life coach, they didn’t have enough experience. Right? Usually, a really great mentor is going to be highly selective. They’re gonna be like, nah, I don’t wanna work with you. They’re gonna be like, I only have so much time for people who are actually coachable. And so Bill Campbell taught me, you know, the first thing, first meeting we ever had when I first met him, this was back in early two thousands when he was, you know, on Apple board, was he’s like, are you coachable?

You just stare you right in the eye, and he he just make sure he could trust you and know that you’re, like, you’re gonna listen, and you’re not just, again, having a relationship with Bill because you just wanna say you know Bill. Bill’s there for a reason. He wasn’t there for money. He was like, I like this kid. He was also my wife’s mentor as well. I like this kid, and I wanna help him in some way. Right? And so now the only reason why I am here today is because of people like Bill and other mentors that I’ve had, it’s now time to give back.

And you get to that stage where, like, there’s no way I would have been here without them. And now I have to do the same thing for the next set of people, whether they’re, you know, teenagers or in their twenties or in their thirties. And, yeah, maybe they’ll fail along the way, but you gotta be a mentor. You’re gonna have tough love with them. You’re gonna say things that they don’t wanna hear. You’re not gonna be liked all the time. Hopefully one day you’ll be respected, if not liked.

And that’s what it means to be a mentor. And I find it incredibly rewarding to watch these individuals and the teams and the businesses they grow. It’s really fun to do, and I learn a lot. I learn a lot. And sometimes

I think anybody who’s trying to do something that the world has never seen before or trying to work with people who’ve never they better be coachable because you’re gonna be so narrowly focused. You’re gonna be so heads down. You’re gonna be on a mission that sometimes you’re blinded, and you need somebody to come from left field to go, wait a second. Dude, you’re not thinking about this right. You’re so in the weeds. We gotta pull you out. Let me give you some perspective. Let’s now they’re not gonna give you an answer, but they’re gonna give you some kind of guide rails and some perspective to help you make better decisions and pull you out of the weeds that you’re in.

Because sometimes the problems you have are gonna be about you. Sometimes it’s gonna be about the company. Sometimes it’s a macro environment problem, and you need that to pull back. And if you can’t work with a CEO who is coachable, oh my god, I have done that. Right? And it’s like they said they’re coachable. It’s kinda like the relationship we talked about earlier. They say they’re coachable, but they really aren’t. They just said they were so they could get a relationship, right, or get the money or whatever it was.

And then when push came to shove, it was like, ugh, no. These people are definitely not coachable. We need to move them aside and get it fixed. They have to be coachable.

Well, first, it’s about trust. You have to be able to have a trusted relationship with somebody. There are different ways of delivering a message. Now you can deliver a message the first time in a iron fist and a velvet glove kind of thing. But sometimes the velvet glove is gonna come off. So it depends on the level of, are you listening? Are you hearing? You know, I remember Bill Campbell telling me he would do his thing, and he would just tell me, pull your fucking head out of your ass.

Like, if you’re not listening and you’re not learning, then he’s gonna be like, beat you upside the head. And you’re gonna have these modulations between iron fist in a velvet glove and then just like whacking people upside the head. And unfortunately, that’s again, you’re not always liked, you’re respected. And I’m in too many board meeting. We have over 200 investments. I’ve seen all kinds of different CEOs and different boards where the investors don’t wanna feel like they’re gonna get a bad rep because the CEO is gonna say something if they say something negative.

And it’s all this pussyfooting around. Dude, we got a mission. We have money that’s being put to work. We have a team that’s trying to build this thing, and you’re gonna worry about how your relationship is? Like, come on. Get in there and get something done right so that we’re not all frustrated and just trying to be nice and play footsies. You gotta get stuff done. That’s why we’re here. This isn’t a country club. This is about getting something done. Now it can’t be about you.

It can’t be about the money. It can’t be about ego. You gotta be about the mission, the team, what we’re trying to do here, and give bold examples of how this is done and how you’re there and seeing it done right in other companies. But, you know, at the end of day, you’re gonna have to tell the truth. That can come in all different forms, but the truth is important and you need to say it. And maybe one day it’s like, you know, Bill Campbell said, pull your head out of your ass.

Sometimes you have to say that.

I think you become more bold with success, but you’re not gonna get success unless you start making the success happen for yourself. So you have to already project a level of confidence that is backed up by real intelligence and real facts and real hard work and ethic and stuff like that. You’re not gonna just get along and then it’s all gonna be nice and then it appears and then you become bold. No, you’ve gotta be bold from the day one. That’s what it means to be a change maker.

You have to be bold. Now you gotta be within limits. And sometimes when I was younger and even today, you know, you make the slip up where it’s a little bit too ego driven or whatever else, but you gotta pull back and you gotta modulate, but you need to be bold. And that doesn’t just mean bold with words, but bold with actions and how you treat people. You know, you gotta be listening. You gotta be kind. You have to be empathetic, but you also gotta be pushy.

You gotta get people out of their comfort zones. You gotta have this full picture. It’s not always full on being absolutely emphatic about everything. People say I’m too loud, but it’s because I’m passionate. And so you need that kind of style to get things done in this world. The quiet person in the corner doesn’t typically succeed because they’re not getting other people excited and interested in what they’re saying or what they’re thinking, even if they’re the smartest people in the world.

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Look. Let me be clear. When I was in college, I had a fear of speaking. I almost pissed my pants when I was just speaking to an audience of five people. It was that bad. So, look, this is a learned thing. This is a learned skill. The way I got more bold is because, like, my ideas and the things that I’m learning and the people I’m talking to, they like what I’m saying. And I’m like, I’m building up confidence around that. And that includes, at some point, speaking ability.

Right? As speaking to a larger crowd. But you’re not necessarily born like that. You don’t have the bold gene. You grow into it over time and you challenge yourself. Right? Like, if I would’ve just turned back after that four or five person pissing my pants episode, it was all over. No. You’re like, oh, that’s a challenge. I’m gonna have to get better at it. Just practice, practice, practice, practice, practice, and hopefully, you have enough natural talent that you can take it further.

don’t know what you’re doing actually? You know what? Everyone goes through impostor syndrome. Everyone does. We all have gone through it. I go through it. Because you know what? When you’re doing stuff you’ve never done before and you’re changing the world, no one else has done it either. No one else has done it either. That means it’s okay. And I always say, if you don’t have butterflies in your stomach each day, you’re either not paying attention or you’re not pushing hard enough and taking enough risk.

Now there’s taking stupid risks versus risk mitigation and taking calculated risks. But you should always be living on the edge of pushing yourself because that’s where the growth is. That’s That’s where the change is happening. That’s where you know you’re on the leading edge. When you’re sitting back and being complacent and just, you know, whatever, there’s gonna be somebody else behind you running up past you who’s doing that, who’s taking the challenges. So if you’re feeling that, it’s okay to feel it. Just when you do make a mistake, because you will.

God knows I made so many goddamn mistakes in my career. Same thing’s gonna happen. It’s okay. Get past it. Learn from it. Hopefully, you have mentors to help you to understand what’s going on and what happened so that you can learn from it and move on. And guess what? It didn’t kill you. That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and you move on. It’s all good. That’s how our brains and our personalities work.

Look, it’s do, fail, learn. Do, fail, learn. There’s no such thing as learn and then you’re gonna do. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. When you really learn in life is after you’ve tried to do it. I think college and our education system is entirely backwards. You sit here and you go, you go learn something and you learn for years and years and years, and then you’re told to go do. And it’s like, no, no, no, no. The way that I learned was from my grandfather and everything was, we go do some stuff and then we’ll figure it out as we go along.

You know, we didn’t learn to go build a bridge and then build a bridge. The first bridges in the world were built without any books. Right? The first boats, when were they built? Somebody built it and tried it, and then it failed and sunk and people drowned or whatever it was, and they built a better boat. There was no books. There was no one to teach you that stuff. This is how we do and change the world is through the same method, is that we go do, and then we fail, and then we learn from that, and then we do again.

I do wanna move to

Like, how are you thinking about that? Well, Future Shape is really a way for me to not drive my wife and kids crazy being retired and drive myself crazy being retired. I tried retirement. It sucks. Why does it suck? Is it boring? Or Because if you have a curious mind, and I’m sure your listeners all have curious minds, that’s why they’re tuning in, is because to me, new things, new ideas, new people, new technology, they’re oxygen for your brain. And as soon as you starve it of that oxygen, you start going, I’m dying.

I’m dying. I’m dying. Right? And so I need, and I think most curious minds need oxygen. And that means interactions and learning and learning and devouring new information and trying to make sense of where things are headed. That’s what I think. So that’s first. So Future Shape was all about taking the experiences that I had, the finances that we have, our family has, and combining them to help other entrepreneurs. We’re not a VC. We’re not an angel. We call ourselves mentors with money. And the reason why we’re mentors with money is because we can write $100,000 checks or whatever it is, but we can also write tens of millions of dollars of checks and everything in between.

And we have done that. And so what we wanna do is find the entrepreneurs doing the hardest things that are going to help the environment, help society, help our health, and help them to succeed with their mission. So we wanna go and mentor them, make sure they’re coachable, work on technologies and things that are interesting to us, but we think are incredibly important for the world. And we wanna just help out and be part of the team. We rarely take board seats, rarely. We don’t lead rounds.

We’re just there to be on the side of the entrepreneur, on the side of the team to help them. Now, of course, when things are going awry or whatever, we’ll have to step in and take more of a engagement. But at the end of the day, we’re there to help the entrepreneurs succeed with their mission that we think is very, very valuable. Just like other people helped me when I was younger, same thing goes there. Luckily, now we just have the financial resources to put our money where our mouth is instead of just going, yeah, we’ll advise you.

Advice when they’re not, like, putting money behind it and, like, truly working on it. That’s usually just somebody trying to make some consulting dollars. I

Easy. Cannabis. Why? Cannabis is actually medicinal and it’s a vice. It’s both. And so when you can have those two dynamics together, when you can actually help people, whether that’s recreationally or medically, and you can have all of the uplift of the recreational side for the medical side, you’re gonna see that. And the other thing is there’s so many hypocritical investors or LPs out there who are like, I can’t go invest in cannabis. So it’s actually better because most people aren’t investing in it. So you can get in there and you can make the money so that I can then invest that money that was the gains into things like e bikes and plastics and all the other things we do.

So to me, it’s a great thing to get into that game and to help because we can help so many other things through that, both people with the actual product, whether that’s medicinally or recreationally, and then also take that money and put it into other places because it is really truly growing like crazy and it’s gonna grow even more.

Well, plastics, you know, when you live in The US or The UK, plastics are all around you. And you have a recycle bin, and you’re like, oh, yeah. It’s all taken care of. So it just looks great. But if you look closer, and my eyes have totally changed now, because after living in Indonesia for almost two years and seeing what plastics are like there and what happens in Southeast Asia and the rest of the world where there’s not recycling. Recycling, we’ll get into that in a second.

You start to learn about how plastics are so prevalent, they’re so cheap, and they’re so pushed on us by the fossil fuel companies. And I was on beaches, beautiful beaches, all around Southeast Asia, and they were littered with plastics from everywhere in the world. And some of the text on the plastics came from Europe, some of them came from The US. So literally, it was the dumping ground for all of this plastic. And I’m like, what’s going on? Oh, we just have to get recycling, that’ll be better.

So then I dig into recycling, and I find out, oh my god. We either bury or burn almost all of it. Nothing is really recycled. Why? Because plastic is so cheap, and the petroleum companies just wanna sell you more and more virgin plastic. Nobody wants to recycle it because it’s not worth anything to them. So we go and burn it, and there’s all these toxic fumes that come off. Or we bury it, and it sits there for five to seven hundred years, and these microplastics are getting into our bloodstreams.

They’re literally been found in the placental walls of humans and mammals. And we see all the stories about whales or dolphins and all these things choking on it and everything else. We are literally going to drown in plastics if we keep this up. And I was doing that in Indonesia. You don’t see it in The US, The UK, or whatever. But if you actually walk into something like a Sainsbury’s or a Marks and Spencer or if you walk into a Walmart or something, if you go in there, it looks like a sci fi movie from 2001.

Everything’s in plastic. It’s wrapped in plastic, and we are buying so much stuff in plastic. Now if you go into a farmer’s market in UK or The US, or you go into just general shops in Southeast Asia, you see, oh my god. This is how food is normally prepared. This is how it’s normally bought and sold. It’s not in all these hermetically sealed packages that are gonna be around for five hundred to seven hundred years and only degrade into something that’s gonna actually poison us and poison the biology around us.

So you start going, there’s something really wrong here. And we have to rethink our relationships with plastics because it’s not about recycling. Because recycling is basically a bunch of bullshit, especially when it comes to single use or low use plastics versus durable use plastic. Help me out. Why is recycling bullshit? Well, because for the fact that most recycling either ends up burned or buried for one. And then the recycling, only about five to 7% of only certain types of plastics are actually recycled. And when they’re recycled, they’re almost always down cycled to something like an ugly chair or road material or something like that.

You know, we’re now just starting to see if we can make more bottles with it, but they still mix in a ton of virgin plastic into it. So there’s never been a real economy around recycling. And when I grew up in Detroit, in the seventies, they put a 10¢ fee on every bottle and can that was sold with, you know, soda or, you know, various other drinks in it. It was 10¢ in the seventies. When I was, like, running down the street, we would pick up that 10¢ can wherever we were, and we would take it in.

We could make five, ten bucks really fast. The streets were clean in Detroit for all of these cans and bottles. We need to do the same thing for plastics. It’s amazing to me that we were so far looking in the seventies back then with 10¢. Just think about it. The 10¢ recycle fee was probably worth way more than the crap that was inside of it, you know, sugary water or whatever it was. And so you’re just like, why can’t we do that again? And until we come up with an economy like that around plastics and we hold people to it, you know, the petroleum industry just tries to lobby that stuff away.

Right? Now we’re seeing it with single use plastic bans and stuff like that, but we need an economy around it. Once we get an economy around it, we’re gonna see more technology, and we’re gonna see much more upcycling of plastics into things. That said, recycling should be only for one kind of use of plastics, which is durable plastics. Think of car bumpers. Think about the plastics like, you know, real dishware and things like that that we have.

Those are durable applications, but we should not be using single use, non home compostable plastics for forks and, you know, all of this stuff at Starbucks and all these other things that we know are gonna just end up being burned or buried or just littered and go into the environment. We need to think of new plastics and new ways of either reducing, stop using entirely, or changing out the materials for all these single use kind of areas. Can

wanna say that this is for waste in general. This is not just plastics. We need to transform our economies into circular economies, not this extract, use, and then trash. We need to make it fully holistic. And there’s so many businesses about closing that loop or changing the loop that are going to be created and are being created now. And so an economy is not just one of the materials usage, but it’s also about the money that flows for both at the time I don’t know about The UK, but in The US, most places have tire recycling fees.

So car tires, you pay 2 to $5 per tire so that when the time you buy something new, that debit is put into a bank somewhere so that when the tire gets out, there’s money there to recycle that tire and find new uses for the materials inside of that tire. That is an economy. Right? So that the trash can turn into treasure again for someone else. And so we need more of that to happen around the world. That’s the same thing with the carbon economy. Right?

We’re trying to do cap and trade and carbon pricing so that if people are emitting something that we don’t want, other people are incentivized to get rid of it or to recycle it or do something with that. So we need a circular economy in all these things because we have to reuse all of the different things we have extracted over the years. We have gold mines sitting in landfills all around the world. We just need to extract it. And so we’re finding at Future Shape all kinds of businesses that literally go and mine urban mines.

Instead of mining the earth, let’s go mine the stuff we’ve already extracted and get it out of those things into valuable mineral streams again so we can reuse them. And literally, it’s just sitting there. Nobody wants the stuff. It’s great. So there’s lots of innovation to be had there. Can

I’ve always thought, like, we are too myopic in the investment community of, like, oh, I just don’t need to see the next return. Like, we forget that the computer industry took decades to take off since the seventies, and venture capital was about long term ten, fifteen year kind of returns. We’ve gotten so hooked on the drug social mobile from 2008, 2010. Oh my god. Eighteen months, thirty six months, then the rise of China and all this stuff, and now we’re doing it again with SPACs.

Everybody wants fast money, but we’re gonna find out the only way we are going to fix this planet and the problems we’ve created because of fast money over the years is to take these long term, long term being seven to twelve year kind of initiatives, and investing in them because those are the ones that are going to actually make sure we have a healthy planet, so we have healthy customers to keep a healthy economy going, to make sure that investors and businesses can stay operating and continue to bring in returns over time.

We can’t just keep trashing the place. So people are going to learn. Investors are gonna learn, and we’re seeing that now with the big banks, with ESG goals. We’re seeing that with governments now incentivizing. We’re gonna go back to a real atoms based economy because the infrastructure around us is gonna entirely change. We’re seeing mobility change right in front of our eyes. It’s all turning electric or hydrogen powered or what have you across the board. All those gas stations you see everywhere, those are gonna be gone.

That’s new infrastructure. We’re seeing all kinds of robots manufacturing equipment or blast furnaces for making steel, cement, all of these different things. Almost every piece of infrastructure around us is going to change in a dramatic way with Adams over the next ten to twenty years. All these people who’ve been talking software, software, software, guess what? It’s not gonna be about electrons that fix this planet. It’s gonna be about atoms plus electrons and great financing and great economies that are gonna make this thing happen. We are gonna need tons and tons of atoms to fix the problems we’ve created.

And you know what? Everything old is new again. And, yeah, that was the industrial era of a hundred, hundred and fifty years ago. We’re gonna go back through that same era, and we’re in at the beginning of it right now. And it’s amazing to be with these companies that we’ve been supporting for five, seven years now. And all of a sudden, people are waking up to all these ESG goals and investors are, and they’re like, calling us. You know, I can’t tell you how many calls I’ve got.

I got a SPAC. What do you have with ESG goals in your portfolio? Every day because nobody cared about it. Now all of a sudden, everyone cares about it. My whole career has been always zigging while other people are zagging. And they always end up coming this way because, you know, everything works in a way. So I just stay on the track, and sooner or later, it’s berated. It’s like Fadell. You’re crazy. You’re doing the wrong thing. You’re on the wrong track. This is not where everyone’s going.

Go against the herd. Go with what you think is right. Go with what you believe in. And that’s what’s always led me down the path even though it’s taken ten or fifteen years. Fast money means you’re chasing it as opposed to building something new and something important. And so

Absolutely. I love the fact that we’re in the Tina era. There is no alternative. We’re in Tina right now. Like, literally, everybody’s rushing to go find companies that have great technology, great things that they can bring to market. A lot of it’s around COVID or health and stuff like that. We’re finally understanding that software doesn’t eat the world unless you got hardware that’s attached to it and changing it. Okay? So we’re all about systems thinking. Systems, systems, systems. And if we always have a negative view and we always take a negative view about this, we’re never gonna get and fix the systems that we have with new system.

And so you heard Chamath say, Chamath’s very clear. He’s like, the first trillionaire in the world is someone who’s gonna fix climate change. It’s true because it’s gonna be all about atoms, and it’s gonna be about changing the infrastructure around us. So you have to be hopeful. If you’re not hopeful, don’t have kids. Don’t be on this planet because the only way we’re gonna stay and be here and be healthy is if we’re cautiously optimistic and we invest in the right things and understand that this is a twenty to thirty year game and there is going to be a ton of opportunity, but just do the right thing.

And yeah, the money will come. I’ve always found it. The money will come.

Absolutely. You see people going, well, they talk about end of life. What’s gonna happen with the product at end of life? They talk about the customer journey. They talk about how they’re going to build a platform over time. Now what happens typically is that they first, because most investors get scared off, because if somebody has a really big vision, investors like, no. Just do this one little thing. That’s gonna be successful. And then these entrepreneurs, they pitch their much bolder vision of where they really wanna take things.

You know, like, look at Elon now. But if he was pitching that, what he’s doing now fifteen years ago, people would go, no way. A few people like Jervisin and others were like, yeah, sure. Okay, great. But very few people would get behind that huge boldness. So what they do is, and this is what I’ve had to do is, you know, we had bold visions for startups we’ve done, and we’d start and we’d just pitch just the simple, what’s the next three to four years look like?

And never tell anybody about the big picture because you scare most people off. But what I have is I’m like I say to them, I’m like, yeah, that’s really interesting. But you think about years five, seven, and ten, here’s what I think this is gonna be. And then all of a sudden, you see their eyes light up. And they go, yes. Because we don’t normally talk about it because it scares people. I’m like, scare me. Come on. And they tell me this stuff, and I’m like, yes.

Now you’re thinking big. Now you’re thinking bold. You’re thinking much broader about the holistic circular vision or systems thinking vision that it’s gonna take to build something great that’s gonna be legacy, and it’s not just a flash in the pan.

Absolutely. So what we’re seeing, we’ve done a bunch of agriculture technology investments, ag tech investments, and weather tech and climate tech, and amazing technology. But at the end of the day, when you went to that customer, they were worried about just making ends meet. Like, think about farmers today. Most of them, unless they’re the real big ag guys, they’re incredibly suffering, and they’re suffering around the world. Almost no farmer, they do it because they love to do it, but they don’t really make a lot of money.

And so when you bring technology to them like, I see all these farming robot companies. I’m like, guys, yes, it’s cool, and we think it’s cool, but these people can’t afford it. And until you figure out how to get it financed, they want the technology. Don’t get me wrong. There’s lots of early adopter farmers out there that want the technology. They just can’t afford it if you can make it affordable. So most of our ag tech companies are fintech companies first. So we take the technology, and this is a perfect example, a company called Expert C.

Expert C has figured out how to turn fish farms with real hard data, with their technology they created over the last five, seven years, to help get better financing rates for farmers to grow their shrimp or their other aquaculture crops so that these people can make cleaner, more environmentally friendly crops, make more money at it using technology, but it’s all financed properly so that they don’t have to worry about whether you’re gonna go bankrupt because they overextended themselves buying new technology. We are going to have to finance so many things.

And this is where the finance industry can make a ton of money if they start looking at these small, medium sized businesses and start looking at the technology that they could adopt if they were financed properly. And there’s a lot of money to be made there, a ton of money to be made. And all of these early adopters in many, many fields will take to it very, very quickly if they know they’re not gonna use their last dollar to buy tech. That may or may not work well.

Yeah. You know, it totally changed. You know, to be honest, I always knew that, you know, when I was younger, when I was in my teens and my twenties, I always said I would never get married until I was financially stable enough so that I could have a family. Because I knew that money problems were the number one cause of most marital issues and most family issues. So I said I was not gonna get married till after I did that. So I was focused on that in a positive way, right?

Because I was like, okay, great. And then ultimately being in Silicon Valley and all this stuff, you start seeing all these other people running around with money and all this stuff. You go, you want more of that? You want more of that. I’ve been lucky enough to go through many, many different stages of finances. Right? I haven’t gone all the way, not, you know, Bezos or Elon or whatever else, but I can see it. And I’ve been hanging on around with people who have it at that level.

Whatever level you’re at, there’s always a level above you. I’ve always seen a level above you. And you’re like, when is enough is enough? And I have, like, literally over the last four or five years gotten rid of stuff. Like, I haven’t driven a car in over a year. Like, I sold a bunch of cars. I’ve sold house. I’m like, you don’t need all this stuff. Like, you think you get there and then you’re like, wow, I’m here, but that’s not fun. This isn’t great. I got all this stuff I thought I wanted.

And then, you know what, we even bought a house because we could. And then I was like, oh, we don’t need that house. Get rid of it. Right? Like some things are just because you think you want it. And then when you get it, you’re like, oh, that’s just a bunch of headaches. And you get rid of it. So my relationship to money now is like, that’s just a means to make change happen. And so literally for me, I could just have a backpack, my computer, my phone, my, you know, what have you, a couple of roller bags with my clothes, and that’s enough to live life with my family.

I don’t need all this other stuff. And COVID’s even taught me that, right, like even further. So for me, money is just a means to get things done. If it’s trying to define you, if you’re trying to make a lifestyle out of it, if you’re always like, I gotta have champagne and caviar every day, it’s like, yeah, that’s kinda not the person I wanna hang around with.

Yeah. And people don’t understand the responsibilities once you have it. You don’t know how much time and energy you spend, like, figuring out what to do with it, both philanthropically and also just managing and making sure you do the right things with it. It’s not like freedom. And then what else comes with that? And we talked about this at the beginning of the conversation. All these people wanting to be your friend when that’s not what they wanna be. So yeah. Okay. Great. But focus on something else.

You know? I’m just in a T shirt now. I’m not, like, sitting here wearing diamonds and all those other stuff. No. I’m with you. It’s

What must I read? I’ve said this many times, but Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman is one of the best. And I just got the galleys for his new book, Noise, that he did with a couple collaborators. I just got it, so I’m gonna read it. But I’m assuming Noise is gonna be even better than that. But Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman is incredibly important because it teaches you so much about how people think and why we’re in the political situation we’re in, how social networks work, how you make decisions, why the crazy stock market is the way it is now.

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. What do you believe that most around you disbelieve? I think we discussed it. You gotta be nice. You gotta be liked. It’s like, no. No. No. No. You gotta be respected, and you gotta speak your mind. And be damned if people don’t like you for a little while. Typically, they’ll come around and respect you. So it’s like, say the tough things because we’re only on this planet for so long, and stop all the niceties, and let’s get to business because that’s what we do.

So stop everyone’s like, I gotta be liked because if if I’m not liked, my business dies. It’s like, no. Be respected, and then you’re gonna have more business lined up than you could think. And the people who you want to like you, probably the wrong people. Important one for me, and I love this one. What three traits would you like your children to have? Hard work for the right reasons. Work hard for doing something that’s meaningful for the world. Beyond yourself, don’t focus on the money.

Be kind, but be direct. Be fair. Be ethical. Be moral in all the things that you do. And then the third one is take risks and understand with risks, you’re gonna have a roller coaster ride. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes not, but take risks. Have those butterflies in your stomach. Penultimate one, and this is a tough one, but it’s just me and you, so it’s totally fine.

Official board member, I would say, would be Randy Komisar. Randy Komisar, he’s straight. He and I both had Bill Campbell as a mentor. He saw things that other people didn’t see. He backed you up. He stood behind you. He told you when you were screwing up. And he let you make mistakes too. He let you make mistakes, But he was always there, and he still is there. So, yeah, Randy. Love that one. So

follow my gut. I follow my nose. So that’s how I’ve been for all my life. It’s just I would have never believed I would have been living in Indonesia. I don’t try to predict where things are going. I just follow my nose of what I’m curious about. And so I can’t wait to see the dramatic things that are going to happen on this planet in a good way with amazing entrepreneurs and the teams around them, both inside the company as well as the investors and financiers and everyone.

We’re gonna see a tremendous set of companies that are going to actually do really great things for the planet. And I am so ready to see that. You know, there’s self driving cars and self flying planes and all that stuff. Yeah. Whatever. I care about the stuff that my kids and my grandkids and my great grandkids are going to need. And that is gonna be really, really, really rewarding.

No worries, Harry. And, you know, hopefully, we’ll talk in five years or maybe sooner about the future, and maybe we’ll even have even better things to say. But let’s be hopeful, let’s be cautiously optimistic, and let’s make the future happen. So thanks, Harry, and thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.