David Sacks, known as one of the best startup product strategists and operators of the last 20 years, discusses key lessons learned from his tenure in the PayPal Mafia, where he was head of product, along with key takeaways as founding CEO of Yammer and what he learned from working directly with industry greats like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.
David Sacks:
I thought it was a dumb idea. Why would you need to be money from one PalmPilot to another? We started talking about the idea of what if we could email money? And I told him, "Well, if that's what the company is going to do, then I'll quit my job Mackenzie, and tomorrow and go do that with you."
Mike Maples Jr:
That's the voice of David Sacks, former member of the PayPal mafia, where he was COO and head of product. He's also the founder of Yammer, which he ran as CEO until selling to Microsoft for $1.2 billion. This is Mike Maples Jr. Of Floodgate and it's go time with David Sacks.
Welcome to Starting Greatness, Podcast dedicated to ambitious founders who want to go from nothing to awesome, super fast. When you're a startup founder, you have to channel your inner James Bond, your MacGyver, your Wonder Woman, I'm going to help you win by curating the lessons of the super performers but before they were successful. So without further ado.
Speaker 3:
Ignition sequence start.
Mike Maples Jr:
Let's get started. David sacks is widely praised for his extraordinary operating skills and ability to hold things together, no matter how crazy they might get. And he's proven himself time and again, he played a major role in holding PayPal together during a very tumultuous time. Led Yammer to a very successful acquisition and consistently is invested in and supported startups that have achieved outsized greatness. If there's only one thing I hope you take away from this episode, it's David's perspective on how to execute at a high tempo startup and how the approach differs from operating a larger more stable company. I especially like his thoughts on startups his movements. Let's catch up with him. All right. David Sacks, welcome to the podcast.
David Sacks:
Good to be here.
Mike Maples Jr:
Yeah. So you've been involved in some pretty illustrious situations of entrepreneurship. A lot of people know you for your success at Yammer and having a greater than a billion dollar exit with Microsoft, but you go way back to the days of the so-called PayPal mafia. And so I thought maybe we'd start there. How did you decide to go to PayPal in the first place from McKinsey? That seems like a pretty separate universe from the FO's of PayPal.
David Sacks:
Yeah. Well, I knew Peter Thiel from having gone to Stanford together and we'd actually written a book together back when I was a student at Stanford and this was back in 1999. I was a management consultant at McKinsey. I just graduated from law school the year before, knew I didn't want to be a lawyer. I wanted to do business. And so McKinsey seemed like this good transition path. And then Peter called to tell me what he was working on. And it was... At that point, the company was called Confinity and it was this PalmPilot beaming, money thing.
Mike Maples Jr:
Did that make at the time, do you?
David Sacks:
I thought it was a dumb idea. I was like, "Who would want to do this?" Like, "Why would you need to be money from one PalmPilot to another?" And we talked about it over the course of several months and then the question came up, "Well, could you email money?" That seems like a much better idea because what if the other person doesn't have a PalmPilot, we started talking about the idea of, well could you email money? And I told him, "Well if that's what the company is going to do, then I'll quit my job Mackenzie, and tomorrow and go do that with you."
Mike Maples Jr:
So how long had you been talking to him about Confinity?
David Sacks:
It was over the course of several months, I think.
Mike Maples Jr:
So he was already figuring out that maybe this PalmPilot thing wasn't going to be the horse to ride.
David Sacks:
Potentially. So he and Max got together at basically the beginning of 1999, and then they raised money from Nokia ventures in summer of 99. And there was this big event at box where Nokia beamed the $3 million or whatever it was. And so, the company was still very much focused on mobile at that point. It was just one of these things that was just way too early, but it was after that, that how do we create something people are actually going to want to use, or at least I was... what I was focused on.
Mike Maples Jr:
Or that anyone can use.
David Sacks:
Yeah. That's what I was focused on.
Mike Maples Jr:
So then he talks you to join and PayPal, had you had any experience in entrepreneurship or tech startups, or was it you took the plunge because you thought Peter was a smart guy and it'd be fun to work with him?
David Sacks:
Peter said that he wanted somebody he could yell at. Peter was the smartest guy that I knew and I did think it was a great idea. I thought this idea of emailing money could just be a killer idea. Peter went to hire me and pretty much no one else did. To his credit Peter overruled everybody else and hired me anyway. He overruled them, and so he put me in this position called VP of strategy, which your responsibilities are really undefined. It's just like a license to have a lot of opinions about things. It's usually the role that's the obsolete founder gets stuck in. But anyway, so I joined the company as VP of strategy. What I quickly realized is that even though the leadership of the company had decided to focus on emailing money, that's not what the team was focused on.
There was a gap between this insight we had and our ability to [inaudible 00:05:28] that. And I see product management as the hands of the leadership in terms of implementing it's will through the organization. We had this terrific engineering team, but they were still building encryption and things that were just fundamentally interesting engineering problems. And so in very short order, what happened is, I gravitated from being VP of strategy to [inaudible 00:05:54] product because there's no one else doing it. And one of the first things I did was just drawn a whiteboard with the new UI of the website should be. Showed it to Peter and Max and we just wanted you to be able to put in your email address and a dollar amount. And then basically we surface the product hook and got all the other stuff out of the way.
Mike Maples Jr:
When you say product hook, what do you mean by that?
David Sacks:
It's the atomic unit of the product. Is the thing that's going to grab the user's attention. It's the single transaction or interaction that the user is going to want to engage in, hopefully again and again. It's the search box on Google. It's the dropping the pin on a map in Uber. It's that very simple user interaction that they're going to want to engage in. And it's a little bit like a musical hook for a song. Is that thing that grabs you. And this is especially important for consumer products, because if a consumer product doesn't have a good product hook, there's no reason to use it and adding a bunch of other things on top of it aren't going to help, because consumers don't want to graduate up to more complexity unless they're already hooked to begin with. Until you've figured out, you've nailed that interaction, nothing else really matters for a consumer product.
Mike Maples Jr:
When did you start to discover that eBay was a major way of how you're going to get distribution? So now you had an easy way to sign up to email money from person to person, but now you had to get people to do that for a reason other than the novelty of it, or just the convenience of it. So where did eBay get into this mix?
David Sacks:
Well, it's interesting. We had one customer service rep. His office was where the Coke machine used to be. And we ran out of space. We got rid of the Coke machine and put a desk in for our new customer service person. And he sent us this email that he got from a user asking our permission to take the PayPal logo and turn it into something she could append per auctions on eBay. So it was like PayPal payments accepted here. And she had taken our logo and she wanted our permission to be able to use our, I guess, trademark this way. He sent me that email not as the product person in the company, but because I had a law degree, fortunately I was wearing a product hat as well.
And the thing I realized was, "Wait a second. If she put in this much effort, first of all, of course you can do this. Of course you have my permission, but who else is doing this? And how can we accelerate it?" And so I was sharing an office with Luke Nozick at the time who was our VP of marketing. And so we went over to the eBay website and we just searched for PayPal in the search engine and up came thousands of eBay auctions that were just listing PayPal as a way you could pay. And so we're like, "Whoa," we were just absolutely away by that.
Mike Maples Jr:
So you had no idea up until then?
David Sacks:
We had no idea, eBay or auction payments was one of a number of eight use cases that we had discussed, but it was no different than splitting dinner tabs. And then we actually saw it being used organically and that just blew our minds. So then we started thinking, "Well, how do we accelerate this?" Well, first of all we had to lean into it. And so we figured, well, okay, it's pretty clear that the eBay market is perfect for us, because until that point the only way to get your items on eBay was to mail somebody a check, then they had to deposit it. They had to wait for the check to clear, make sure it didn't bounce.
It took about two weeks for you to get your stuff. But with PayPal, it was just instant. And so we knew we had a perfect value prop for that market. And we also knew it was highly networked because you had this tight knit community of eBay buyers and sellers. And so whoever could get to critical mass first on the eBay platform would become the auction payments mechanism. And so right away, we identify that as our beachhead market that we had to win. And so we basically went all in on winning the eBay market.
Mike Maples Jr:
So we haven't really talked about Elon yet. PayPal and X.com merged. And next thing you know, it's like you got Peter Thiel and Elon Musk at the same company. Did you envision him one day having the success he ended up having, or did that surprise you?
David Sacks:
Well, Elon always thought bigger than everybody else. He always thought that PayPal could be a hundred billion dollar plus company. Think to his credit, he didn't really want to sell and you'd have to say probably on an expected value basis, he was right. Because, PayPal today is worth over 200 billion. It's basically the same product and we sold the company for one and a half billion.
So if there was even a 1% chance of being successful as a standalone company, then you would say on an expected value basis clearly. I think he was probably right on that basis that we shouldn't have sold the flip side of it is that selling the company set everybody up for the things you're able to do next. And so he was able to do Tesla and SpaceX and Peter was able to fund Facebook and I went off and did Yammer. And so on that level, I think the deal made sense, but Elon always, I think thought bigger than the rest of us and had very big ambitions and had ideas that were just much more ambitious than other people.
Mike Maples Jr:
If my memory serves, the PayPal had a pretty good exit, eBay paid a premium and has over a billion dollars acquisition. So how did PayPal convince eBay to pay such a high price when they were so completely dependent on?
David Sacks:
Well, it was always a weird conversation with eBay because eBay realized the strategic threat and they felt like they had to do something about it. And so the conversation with PayPal was always marry us or we're going to kill you, which it's a very weird place to be. You're either going to get married or you're going to end up going to war, and that was the conversation. I think eBay had a couple of false starts in terms of trying to buy PayPal. They tried a couple of times before we went public, but there were never was agreement around price because it was... no one really knew how to value this company and so we move forward with IPO in early 2002, and once the company was public, then you had a price, you knew what it was worth.
And so then it just became about, "Well, what's the premium going to be." And so then eBay offered something like a 20% premium over the then market price and the deal got done. 18 years later, I think we could debate whether that was a wise decision or not. But at the time we did feel like they had tremendous leverage over us. And we felt a little bit compelled to do a deal.
Mike Maples Jr:
And so like, when you think back now on PayPal, you've got some time in perspective. What are some of the things that you learned from the situation or from Peter or the rest of the team that you think helped you become a better entrepreneur that you think other ambitious founders could learn from? And what are the things that you thought weren't so great that you tried to fix the next startups you did.
David Sacks:
We've talked about a couple of the learnings. I always try to figure out what the product hook is and what the distribution trick is going to be, because it's the combination of those two things that gives you product market fit. You have to create a product that people want to use and more specifically in initial interaction that people will engage with, because again, layering on the complexity doesn't really help you if you don't have that starting point. And then you need to figure out the distribution trick, which again, is some unfair advantage, some way of rapidly gaining traction in the marketplace. Because in order to create a billion dollar plus company in a venture timeframe, which would be like five to 10 years, that's a tremendous amount of value creation in a really short amount of time.
The only way to do that is to grow really fast. And so you typically have to figure out some way to get distribution, and of course every distribution channels, so crowded, because everyone else's you're competing with. So unless you innovate on distribution account with some distribution track, some new innovation no one unseen before you're unlikely to grow that fast.
And I think the thing that I saw to correct perhaps with Yammer is just, a lot of those mistakes that we made of inexperience. I think Yammer as an organization was perhaps more harmonious. I think the thing that people don't know about that PayPal mafia founding era, was just how frictional it was inside the company. You had all these founder personalities and founder types. It was... it's incredible, right?
You could have a dozen people who went on to create unicorn companies after PayPal. And just to have that many founder personalities under one roof is actually a tough thing to manage. By the time I got to Yammer, I thought I understood how to organize and manage or startup better. And so EMR felt very charmed by comparison, everything just fit into place. And we were playing organizational Tetris where we were creating the teams that we needed just as we needed them and sliding them into place. And the whole thing just felt like very fluid.
Mike Maples Jr:
I've heard you describe a startup as a movement before. What do you mean by that? What way is to startup a movement?
David Sacks:
Well, I usually discuss this in the context of trying to explain to founders what earned marketing is. So there's paid marketing, which is buying distribution, Google ad words, Facebook ads, things like that. But then there's earned marketing, which is everything else. It's PR, it's communications, it's branding, it's content, it's word of mouth. It's all the things that make you who you are, which is very hard to quantify, but is undeniably important. And so a lot of founders are a whiz kid who, A, sees the math portion of the SAT and then flunks the verbal, like they're very comfortable with stacking up quantifiable wins on paid marketing. But then when it comes to earn marketing, they just don't know how to present what they're doing to the world in an interesting way. This is where this idea that your startup is a movement in order to make your startup interesting to the world, it has to be a movement for change.
And I think the best startups are movements for change. They want to change the world in some way, they diagnose something that's wrong with the world as it stands today, and they want to move the world to a better place. And so they're constantly evangelizing for the change they want to make. Almost like a political leader or the leader of a political movement and so that's why I encourage founders to do now. So if you look at the very best, I'd say founder CEOs, they do this. Marc Benioff with Salesforce or Elon Musk with Tesla or Steve Jobs with Apple. All think about a cause that's much larger than themselves, or even the company they're creating right? With Benioff, it was about moving software to the cloud, moving business to the cloud. With Elon, it's about moving the whole world to sustainable transport and then sustainable energy.
And with Steve jobs it was about, making the computer more personal, like a bicycle for your brain. There was always this much larger vision associated with the company. And when you listen to these movement founders talk, they're not talking about the specifics of their company as much as they're talking about this movement they're creating. And that just up levels it and makes it so much more interesting. So even if you're just going to view it as like a tactic that you might want to use, it's a smart thing to do because you'll get more earn marketing for your company. But I also just think that just beyond the level of tactics, there is something to this idea that I think they're really great founders. See their startup as a movement, not just like a company.
Mike Maples Jr:
Yeah. And the other reason I like that as a notion is that, very often people when they talk about startups, they talk about startup markets the way they talk about big company markets, and a startup market is zero a lot of times at first. So it can't be mapped and segmented sub-segmented and on some level the market emerges as a result of a movement, where you get people to join one at a time and it's the size of the gathering movement that defines the market that one day becomes company.
David Sacks:
Totally. And that's the thing that actually struck me when I was doing Yammer is, I was constantly having to evangelize for all of these ideas that were really bigger than EMR. First of all, we had to evangelize for the cloud. This product looks interesting, you just burn a copy on [inaudible 00:19:26] it's all line or firewall. No, no, no, you don't understand our product doesn't work that way. It's multi-tenant SaaS. So in order to even get them over that objection, we had to evangelize for the cloud and why multitenant SaaS was a better architecture. But then we also had to evangelize for this idea of freemium and because we were being accused of blackmailing IT, and so we had to evangelize for this like, no, no, no. You don't understand, why would you want to buy software, that could be shelfware, that your employees aren't going to use?
It's a good thing that your employees are adopting the software virally because they're de-risking the purchase for you. And so we ended up evangelizing for freemium and then we'd be evangelizing, then we'd run up against this objection that, we don't want organizations to become too transparent. And so we literally had to evangelize for the idea of having a more open, transparent company and way of working, and so what we found is that we up-level the conversation and talked about these bigger ideas, we did better and so this is... I guess, when the thought occurred to me that the best startups are a movement for some larger change that they want to create in the world.
Mike Maples Jr:
And then when you launched Yammer, did it take off right away or did it take some time for it to find it's footing? Did it just immediately take off or did it-
David Sacks:
It pretty much immediately took off by enterprise standards, because enterprise adoption is maybe one 0.1th or 0.01th of what a successful consumer product would be. We never quite knew how good it was. This whole idea of consumerized enterprise software was so new. We didn't have any benchmarks. We didn't know how well it was doing, but it definitely pick up right away. We launched it on stage at the tech crunch 50 conference in 2008, I believe. And we got about 10,000 users on the heels of that. And then it started spreading into fortune of 500 companies.
Mike Maples Jr:
So, I guess it ended up also being fortuitous that you applied the notion of a product hook in a distribution trick. Because it would have been easy to say at the time, well, doesn't jive do this or name your B2B enterprise vendor, but you came from a completely bottoms up approach. And this is before GitHub was a thing and this was before, Slack wasn't even a gleam and Stewart Butterfield, and there weren't... now people take for granted the idea that there's several bottoms up sales motion companies, where the product does the selling and then the salespeople come in later but it's hard for me to recall a company before Yammer that did that.
David Sacks:
No, we were really the first ones that attack the enterprise in this consumerized way. And the trend eventually got a label, the consumerization of the enterprise. I guess, to use the Peter Thiel framing. What do we believe that nobody else believes? The thing we believe is that enterprise software shouldn't be different than consumer software, but you got to remember that back in the early to mid 2000's, enterprise software, consumer software were these very different things. Mostly because enterprise software was installed behind the firewall. It was on premise and because of that, you had to go through IT. And so therefore it was just a whole different development methodology that you obviously weren't doing rapid releases. You might release a new version of your software once a year. The whole thing had to be sales driven because you have to convince those IT people to buy you and then install you that you were safe.
And so it required this whole different set of competencies than consumer software did. But the thing that we believed is that once enterprise software moved to the cloud and we could already see that happening, that it shouldn't be different, that the software should be deployed in the same way that consumers offers deploy, which is you do rapid releases. You can do AB testing and once you do that, well, why can't we make it viral? And so we had this idea from the beginning that we could create viral enterprise software and no one had really done that before. And so critical to that was the idea of a freemium model and I think this was pretty new to that. We wouldn't charge the end user. We would just let them start using it.
We'd let them start... because we wanted them to start creating content, start creating the network effect, start spreading it virally. And then once we got a critical mass of adoption in a company, then we would go try and sell to them. And we'd go knock on the door of IT and say, "Hey, do you know that you've got a thousand employees using Yammer? Do you want to have control over this?" And they're like, "Wait, wait, wait. What are you talking about?" And that whole idea of shadow IT, and then that's where that came from.
Mike Maples Jr:
The other thing that strikes me is something that went your way was the adoption of mobile. And so I don't remember the exact year, but I want to say it was maybe 2009 when the number of iPhones started to surpass the number of new windows machines sold. And so, one of the theories is that Microsoft went from being a monopoly supplier of the employee desktop to being 50% at best. And now employees were bringing in their smartphones and soon their tablets. And before we had smartphones, IT attitude was, "That's not your computer, that's my computer, right? I own that computer. I get to decide what's on it."
But now all of a sudden people were coming in to work with their smartphones and asking when a guy put apps on my phone. And there's a part of me that thinks that the cloud and smartphones bring your own device. It was like two bombs that dropped at the same time almost.
David Sacks:
Right. Yeah, IT control over the technologies that their employees were using was clearly slipping and that was a good thing for new vendors like us, because you're right, Microsoft, until that point we had stranglehold of IT. And Microsoft had it's competing on premise products that IT by itself left to it's own devices. It would have been perfectly happy to stay with, and not pay extra money for this crazy EMR thing. It's like, "Hey, we got SharePoint. It's not necessarily what the employees want to use, but who cares? We've already paid it for it's part of this bundle we get from Microsoft." I think they would have been very happy not to pay for Yammer, but because the employees could vote by with their usage, they could just bring us into the organization. It showed IT, "No look, obviously the tools that you're providing aren't sufficient because otherwise your users wouldn't be using us."
Mike Maples Jr:
Earlier you've talked about the notion of having a product hook and a distribution trick. I've also heard you say kind of explode. And I guess on some level product hook in a distribution trick or a multiplier effect that's the nitrous oxide poured onto the flammable mixture, but are there any other things that you think are relevant to the question of whether something can... do you have to answer questions other than product hook and distribution trick to get a sense of comfort that something can explode?
David Sacks:
The product hook in the distribution trick give you the initial wedge into the market, but you're by no means finished once you have that, that's really just a starting point. And with respect to SaaS or enterprise software, I think a major difference between enterprise and consumer were like call the race to completeness where enterprise buyers want to buy a complete product. Something that solves the problem that they're paying for, that they're paying to solve. And so, whereas a consumer product can remain extremely simple, like Twitter basically hasn't changed much in a dozen years and that's fine, people don't honestly want to mess with. Enterprise products are constantly in this race to be more feature complete, than their competitors. And because part of the sales process is, you'll be in a bake-off against some competitor and there'll be feature checklists that the buyer has.
And you'll have your battle card of you versus a competitor and checking more boxes than the competition is a real thing. And so the product hook in the distribution trick are really just about getting that initial wedge into the market, but then you need to race to get to some idea of a complete offering before your competitors just assimilate, whatever little tricks you've figured out. And so just having the product in distribution tricks, isn't enough. You've got to solidify that in order to figure out what is a complete offering well, you've got to have some sense then of what is your market? I think one of the things that's really hard about consumer products is that the average user doesn't have that much value, because either because it's an ad supported model, these are not paying you directly, so they're indirectly monetized, or maybe they're paying for the product, but they have high churn because consumer services too, they have very high churn.
So either way this is not a huge long-term value associated with any particular user. And so if you're paying for users, if the only distribution you can get is through paid channels, those businesses just tend not to work. They tend not to get to very big scale. It's just prohibitively expensive to buy that distribution. Enterprise software, SaaS is different because the customers have a lot more long-term value, assuming churn is low, you might keep that customer forever. And then there's this beautiful dynamic with cohorts where, okay, there may be some logo churn, but seed expansion from the customers who stay with you might offset that logo churn. So your cohorts just keep compounding every year. And so the longterm value of these customers is huge and they're willing to pay, they paid for the software, it can pay out-
Mike Maples Jr:
And potentially their switching costs are higher-
David Sacks:
Their switching costs, yeah.
Mike Maples Jr:
You get integrated with all their other stuff.
David Sacks:
Right. Exactly. So, it's why SaaS is really a beautiful model. You have all these customers who stay with you forever. They're willing to pay a lot and they're willing to increase with their contract values every year. And as a result of that-
Mike Maples Jr:
It's not their money.
David Sacks:
It's not their money. And because of that you can actually afford to spend a lot on distribution. And that's why a sales team pencils for an enterprise software company is you can actually afford to pay people to go on and knock on doors. And that was the thing about Yammer that really appealed to me even back in... what was it like 2008, 2009. Is the idea of just getting users to... or getting companies to pay for it. That to me seemed like this really novel idea back in those days. And so, yeah, it turned out to work pretty well.
Mike Maples Jr:
And so, now you invest in startups. So what do you look for in the best startups and how is it similar or different from your own lived experience of being a founder or part of somebody else's startup?
David Sacks:
I guess I got to the point where I just wasn't interested in running or operating startups anymore. Yeah, been there done that.
Mike Maples Jr:
It takes a lot out of you.
David Sacks:
It a lot out of you. It is a little bit like being an athlete. You get to a certain age and you'd rather be a coach than a player I think. And then it was starting to feel a little bit repetitive and I think one of the things that a good entrepreneur has is just a single-minded focused, just an obsessiveness about the company they're creating the product they're creating. It's harder to have that as you get older, you're... when I do think that when you're younger, it's easier just to be obsessed about the one thing and I got to a point where I just had broader interests. And, but I still love tech and new products and working with founders. And so for me creating this fund was very much about going from player to coach.
Mike Maples Jr:
So somewhere out there's a lot of ambitious founders throughout the world, we now have 155 countries listening to this. What other advice would you give founders that we haven't really talked about?
David Sacks:
Yeah, I call it the wilderness period. Because... and you never know how long the wilderness period is going to take, that's the thing that's scary about it. And I talked about in the context of SaaS, because that's... I'm probably most focused on SaaS right now as an investor. The wilderness period ends when you cross the penny gap and the penny gap is when you get the first revenue for the company, but it's got to be repeatable revenues. So certain kinds of revenue don't count.
The deal that you sell, because you get your friends to buy it or your classmates at YC, I would say maybe it doesn't count, because it's not clear you can repeat that outside of YC or if it's a deal that's coming to you really through any affiliated revenue, it doesn't count. If it's a deal that you got, because you basically promised a bunch of custom work that you're not going to be able to repeat for other customers that doesn't count. So, getting that first penny of repeatable revenue is really the critical first milestone for a SaaS company. And it's quite hard to figure out exactly what it is that's going to sell. What new market can you create with a new product that people are actually going to be willing to spend money on? And that's one of the toughest things.
Mike Maples Jr:
Yeah. And I've seen people make the mistake in both directions. I've seen them get false confidence because they got revenue. But to your point, it wasn't a legitimate penny. It was an illegitimate first set of pennies, maybe is even a illegitimate first dollar or hundred dollars.
David Sacks:
It's certainly possible to fake this idea of traction. And especially now that everyone knows, what the metrics are that a SaaS company is supposed to hit, but long-term it doesn't do anyone any good to fake that sort of revenue.
Mike Maples Jr:
Yeah. We have this saying, we like to say that a fake growth is as prevalent in startup land as fake news and politics. It's the thing that's hidden in plain sight. It's not that every company is fake growth by any stretch, it just not all news is fake news, but it feels like there's a whole lot more fake growth than people would acknowledge.
David Sacks:
Right. Well, I would trust the demo days of various accelerator a little bit more, if every single startup that presented didn't present a chart that was showing growth, that was up into the right. I think it'd be nice if some stars went up and say, "Sorry, it's just not growing. It didn't work. We're going back to the drawing board." But-
Mike Maples Jr:
Oh yeah, we're still in zero to one phase. We're not in growth phase, but boy are we solving a hard problem.
David Sacks:
Right, right. Exactly. But it's like every single company gets up there and shows a hockey stick and it's like, "Really every single one. There's not one that-"
Mike Maples Jr:
Aren't that amazing. All right. Hail, thanks for taking the time David, I know you're super busy so.
David Sacks:
Yeah, absolutely happy to do it, it was fun so.
Mike Maples Jr:
Okay. Good luck. I'll see out there.
David Sacks:
Thanks Mike.
Mike Maples Jr:
Thanks for listening to the starting greatness podcast. If you've enjoyed this episode or you're new to the show, I hope you listened to our past interviews with legendary founders like Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen, the Instagram founders, and Keith G. Roy. I'd love to have you subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. So you don't miss an episode. And if you like the show, I'd be grateful if you leave us a review on Apple podcasts, you can also follow me on twitter@m2jr and subscribe to our news letter for exclusive content and event at greatness.substack.com until we catch up again, I hope you'll never let go of your inner power to do great things in whatever matters to you. Thank you for listening.