March 18, 2021 • 51 mins
When Brad Gerstner, a “simple kid from Indiana” set out to build a brand-new investment firm in the swirl of the 2008 financial crisis, his friends and advisors told him he was nuts. But that company, Altimeter Capital, has become an incredibly successful vehicle-- not just for profits, but also for enabling entrepreneurs to do good. In this week's conversation, Bob learns why Brad needed to build Altimeter (it comes down to some advice from Jeff Bezos), how a conversation with his kids inspired him to establish the Board Challenge-- an initiative to quickly diversify corporate boards, and how watching his dad rally a small town to take on a goliath inspired his faith in politics. Plus, Brad shares a lesson from Burning Man... and how it changed his worldview might surprise you!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of I
Heart Radio. I'm fond of Jeff Bezos is regret minimization
framework of life. It's very simple, and I think we
all need simple heuristics at those critical moments in life,
and his is simply this, Well, I regret not having
done it when I'm eighty years old, and if the
(00:24):
answer is yes, he does it, and if the answer
is no, he doesn't. For me, the thought of not
moving forward was way more painful than the thought of
striking out on my own, and that motivated me to
jump in. I am Bob Pittman, and welcome to this
episode of Math and Match Stories from the frontiers and
(00:44):
marketing Today. We have a guest who has a number
of important lessons to share. Lessons about the power of
a vision, of a conviction, taking risk, thinking big even
when you're small, betting at all, when you have the shop,
believing in a vision, but adjusting when needed. Listen hard,
think smart. He's an entrepreneur, an investor, a thinker, a
(01:08):
thoughtful philanthropist and social engineer bridge builder. He heads his
own firm, Altimeter, with twenty billion under management, and is
in the middle of SPACs, Fun, Snowflake, the Board Challenge,
et cetera. He's brag Gershner. Brad grew up in a
(01:29):
small town in Indiana. Smart kid in a small environment,
but that small environment did not limit him. College junior
year to Oxford Law School, lawyer, Deputy Secretary of State
of Indiana. Then got off the government path and got
his NBA from the Harvard Business School, one of the
early folks at the now giant venture capital General Catalyst,
(01:50):
and ran some companies, sold them, invested for others, and
then started his own fund in one of the boldest
and riskiest ways I've ever seen. He's wildly successful in
business and gives that same time and attention and innovation
to making our society and world better too. He's wildly curious, fun,
a surfer, traveler, a good friend and Instagram seven, and
(02:14):
even a board member at I heart to welcome Brad.
That's the best introduction I've ever had in my life. Bob.
Thank you. We've got a lot to dig into today,
but before we get started, I want to explore you.
In sixty seconds. Ready, let's do it. Do you prefer
Indiana or California? California, Boston or Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley,
(02:35):
Facebook or TikTok Facebook, salty or sweet salty, I p
o or spack, Altimeter, coffee or tea coffee, Law school
or business school, business school, boat or plane, plane, window
or aisle, file, chocolate or vanilla chocolate, cats or dogs, dogs,
(03:02):
dollar or bitcoin dollar, rent or own rent, Apple pie
or Apple computer, Apple computer, It's about to get harder.
Childhood hero Warren, Buffet technology, you can't live without iPhone?
Favorite app Twitter, Most memorable place you've traveled to Nepal.
(03:25):
First shop, chief of staff to the founder of Forest River,
which ultimately sold the Berkshire Halfway, preferred beverage ve no
favorite food, fresh fish, favorite city New York? And the
final question, what did you want to be when you're
growing up an entrepreneur? Okay, let's get started to set
(03:50):
the stage for how vision, conviction and or hard work
or at the core of what you do. I want
to go back to the founding of Altimeter. Although we
weren't really close friends then, we were close enough that
I saw the story. It's one of the most inspiring
origin stories ever. So let me paint the picture a
little bit. It was two thousand and eight you decided
to leave a great role at Park Capital and strike
(04:11):
out on your own. You had an impressive track record
as an investor and had lined up some two hundred
and fifty million for your first fund. Then Lehman Brothers
goes bankrupt and all but three million of that to
fifty backs out, And clearly a three million dollar fund
is almost not a fund. You'll have to live in
your savings, You'll have to sell everything you have. It'll
(04:33):
be a struggle, and getting back to two fifty million
is almost impossible. But at that moment, who knew if
the world was coming to an end? And yet here's
the classic. You, even though you had a young family
to support and you had a lot of high paying
jobs as other options, you started Altimeter anyway with just
(04:53):
three million. Why on earth would you do that? Well?
First you were there, and I might not have done
it without you, So thank you. I'm fond of Jeff
Bezos is regret minimization framework of life. It's very very simple,
and I think we all need simple heuristics at those
(05:13):
critical moments in life, and his is simply this, will
I regret not having done it when I'm eighty years
old and if the answer is yes, he does it,
and if the answer is no, he doesn't. And I
would say I didn't know I was using that framework,
but I was. And for me, the thought of not
(05:34):
moving forward was way more painful than the thought of
striking out on my own. And I suppose a little
over confidence and the fact that I had designed my
life in a way that didn't require a lot of
resource helped. But it was really that idea that if
I didn't do this, I would regret it, and that
motivated me to jump in. So what is this say
(05:57):
about conviction and about a vision? Lots of people have
visions of things, products that could improve the world, companies
they might want to start, et cetera. The execution is difficult,
and the execution is predicated on deep conviction. I had
spent a decade preparing for that moment. I had helped
(06:19):
start General Catalyst, I had started and sold three other companies.
I had been in law school, I had practiced law,
and as you mentioned, I'm curious. I'm a student of
the game. We made our first trade on November one,
two thousand and eight, and I had studied people who
I had a lot of respect for Seth Klarman at
(06:41):
balt Post who had started in the recession of Night one,
or Paul Reader, my mentor from Park Capital, who had
started with a similar amount of capital in nine in
the SNL crisis and his first investment was into an SNL.
Or even you take somebody like Tiger Global and Chase
(07:03):
who started in two thousand right after the dot com
blow up. So there was plenty of examples in my
world of folks who started small during periods of durest,
driven by deep conviction in their own capabilities. And so
for me, it seems from the outside looking in like
(07:23):
I was crazy, but it made perfect sense to me.
What did your prism look like? How did it change
after this collapse of Lehman Brothers, Because clearly you put
the whole plan together before the collapse. Did you change
the vision? Well, I have to say I was scared.
I had just gotten married ten months earlier. I had
(07:45):
just had my first child, Lincoln. We're renting a small
basement apartment, which you remember in Boston. Michelle believed in me,
but was none too happy about the idea that I
walked away from great paying jobs with this young family
to do this and I couldn't answer the question definitively
(08:06):
as to how long this would last or whether the
world really would end. I had set up a small
advisory board, and I remember a couple of the people
on that advisory board said, you're crazy. Don't do this,
go back and get your job. And I had started
three other companies, and every time I had started those
other companies, it was just a sketch on the back
(08:26):
of a napkin. And I was by myself, and so
to me, I was familiar with that moment, the founding moment.
I had deep conviction in my capabilities, and I'm an optimist.
I didn't think the world was going to end. I
wasn't sure what was going to happen, but I thought
if it did end, this would make a good story
(08:47):
to my ending. So this is a recurring thing, but
this was one of the best examples of you thinking
big when you were really small. How did you get
yourself to think big enough? Well, if I really rewind
the clock, my dad was a dreamer, first child to
(09:08):
go to college, and he ran a small business in
a small town that made auto parts in the late eighties,
and an acquirer came along and the acquirer said, we
want to buy this company, and my dad said, well,
everybody in the town works here, and so I'm not
going to allow the company to be acquired unless you
agree not to lay off the men and women who
(09:28):
work here and not to cut their pay. And of
course the acquirer agreed to do that, and six months
later they renegged on their promise. They fired people, They
cut people's pay. In the middle of one of the
worst recessions in our country's history. Interest rates were eighteen percent,
inflation was fifteen percent. It was a dark time, and
(09:49):
my dad was devastated. You know, in a small town,
your word is your bond. He had given his word
to these people. And so I watched my dad rally
those troops and say we're gonna go start a competitor,
and everybody followed him. And it was an insane thing
for him to do. He was starting an auto parts business.
(10:11):
There was not such a thing as venture capital. He
borrowed money from the local town bank. He mortgaged our house,
put the house up as collateral, the car up as collateral.
Everything is collateral. And in the middle of a recession,
in the middle of those interest rates, and the Japanese
gutting our car industry, and he tried to make it work,
(10:33):
and he ultimately went bankrupt because the world conspired against him.
But I watched that noble fight and it was heroic,
and I was in a late elementary school, early middle school,
and I thought to myself, you know, someday I'm going
to complete that journey. I went to law school because
(10:56):
my grandfather said us kids, none of you are allowed
to be entrepreneurs. You all have to be doctors or
lawyers or architects. So I honored him. I went to
law school, but I always knew in the back of
my mind that I was fit to live out that dream.
This really is an interesting theme which I want to
go through a bit. You've built everything you've got in
very interesting ways, and we want to get into your insights,
(11:18):
lessons philosophies on everything from business to philanthropy and social action.
But let's stick with the childhood era. You were born
nineteen seventy one, grew up in Syracuse, Indiana, three siblings.
You talked a little bit about your dad, but can
you paint the picture of that place and that time
of the seventies and eighties what it felt like and
(11:41):
how that might have shaped you. Uh, it's a great question.
The place. It's a town that was three thousand people
in the winter and twenty five thousand people in the summer.
It's near the border with Michigan, and as one of
the most beautiful natural lakes in the country that I
grew up near, and so families from Chicago and Indianapolis
(12:02):
that were pretty wealthy would come to the lake in
the summertime. In fact, Eli Lilly famously made the lake
his summer retreat and had a giant estate there. So
I had this window into this world of business and
success that I wouldn't have naturally gotten from a small
farm town in Indiana. My family had no money, but
(12:24):
I never missed money. I thought I had everything. I
grew up on the water and racing sailboats and skiing
on a small icy hill in the wintertimes, and so
there was never a sense that we didn't belong or
we were lesser than. But to be clear, they were
hard economic times. It was hard on my family. It
(12:44):
was hard on my mother, who worked two jobs. But
I was deeply observant of what was going on in
the world because of this window of my dad's experience.
So I was worried about the United States, right like
most kids growing up at that point in time, you're
worried about an actual war with the Soviet Union. I
(13:05):
was worried economically for the country. And so the eighties
for me, which was middle school through college, was just
a transformational time. You were a smart kid. But how
was that nurtured and developed in a small town like
this picture you're painting. Well. First, I was the youngest
(13:28):
of four. My oldest brothers fifteen years older than me.
I had really smart siblings. I had a grandfather on
my father's side who was patriarch of the clan, you know,
on his bookcase where physics textbooks and biology and texts
on politics, and he was all self studied. He couldn't
(13:49):
afford to go to school. So study and conversation and
debate that was just part of our family. And nobody
was taking it easy on the youngest kid around the table.
And so I ended up a national debater and state
debate him it. But I'll tell you I got really lucky, Bob.
The public schools in Indiana, the small rural public school
(14:11):
is pretty damn good. I had great teachers in Indiana.
At that period of time, there was a push to
set up in the public school system gifted in the
Talented program, and this would ultimately go on to be
politically controversial at a national level. Is it right to
pull certain kids out or not? And so I'm not
on one side or the other. I'm just giving you
(14:33):
one person's experience. So in the third grade, they pulled
four of us out of the classrooms one day a week,
and they assigned us a Gift in Talented teacher named
Connie Bailey, and she ultimately became not just a teacher,
but a life coach. I went through some turbulent times,
like any teenager does. My parents got divorced, and Connie
(14:56):
was often there to challenge me, to bail me out
and to make sure that I was thinking big enough.
You went to Oxford your junior year, you graduated from
law school, You went on to be Deputy Secretary of
State in Indiana. Clearly you had aspirations to be in politics,
and then you went to the Harvard Business School. What
happened to the politics. I was always interested in what
(15:18):
was going on politically in the world. I thought politics
was a lot of the reason that my dad's business collapsed.
And so when I came back from Oxford, our senator,
great Senator for the state of Indiana, Dick Luger, who
had been a Rhodes scholar, who was a very well
known moderate Republican. He and Sam Nunn, the great Democrat senator,
(15:38):
helped to denuclearize Russia. And I wrote him a letter
and I said, hey, I just had this experience at Oxford.
I'd like to come to Washington and work with you
on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and just learned. And
he was generous enough to give me a job, and
then he would call me a couple of years later
after I was out of law school, and he asked
(15:59):
me if I would accept an appointment as Deputy Secretary
of State Indiana. And that had been a stepping stone
for Evan By to become governor, and so it was
kind of known that that was a plumb assignment and
was giving you an opportunity to become governor or whatever.
The problem was. I was poor, and I hated the
(16:20):
idea that I was going to spend most of my
time asking people for money. I felt like I couldn't
be true to my north star if I was beholdened
by that process. And so I made a really difficult
decision to leave. And I thought to myself, I'm gonna
make a million dollars and I'm gonna come back and
I'm going to run for governor. And as fate would
(16:41):
have it, I left, went to business school, and along
the way I concluded that I could have far more
positive impact on the world by doing exactly what I'm doing,
as opposed to going back and running for office. I
want to know if these things came from childhood, if
there were the seats in your childhood, what drove you
to be that person who can think out of the box,
(17:04):
take big risk, and think big even when you have
little I think they're two interrelated things. One is I'm
curious about everything. I want to know how everything works,
and I'm happy to study it. And then I like
to talk about it. I like to debate about it,
and so that's the formation of conviction, and conviction is
(17:26):
the basis for being able to think big or act big.
Because what appears crazy from the outside for the highly
convicted person. For Elon Musk, Tesla was not crazy. For
Elon Musk, SpaceX was not crazy. He was so convicted
that the world was going to electrify, right, that starting
(17:48):
a company that was going to transform the biggest industry
on the planet to electric was not crazy. And on
the second hand, it's not risky. And here's why, once
you decide that there's something more powerful in life, then
the fear of failure. Once you decide that it's not
all about the mountain of money you amass or whether
(18:10):
everybody loves you, but it's about doing the things that
make this a life that matters that when I look back,
I'm not going to have regrets. Right, so I have
maximum conviction it doesn't appear that risky, and even if
it is, it doesn't matter because the very pursuit, the
very adventure, is why we're here. And so those two
(18:32):
intersecting beliefs I think really formed the foundation. So you
finished Harvard Business School, coming out of the background you
do wouldn't naturally say you're going to go to tech,
but yet you were one of the founding group at
General Catalyst. What drove you to tech? What was the path?
In an ap English teacher named Joel Robbins. He was
(18:57):
a great teacher, and I was so blessed with so
many great teachers. But I remember Joel said that we
had to write our high school papers using this service
I had never heard of, called CompuServe, and I got
fascinated with this private computer network where I could communicate
with others and I could discover other information. Well, fast forward,
(19:19):
I go away to law school and I encountered the
Netscape browser, and I remember gathering my friends from law
school around the computer terminal. I'm telling them this changes everything,
and they all looked at me and said I was nuts.
And I graduated from law school in and I couldn't
very well find my way to Silicon Valley. But I
(19:41):
went back to this big law firm in Indianapolis. I
was the only person in the joint that knew anything
about the Internet. So they said, you're our Internet guy
and our ventor capital guy, which, trust me, in Indianapolis
in didn't mean a whole hell of a lot. But
I got exposed to all of these software on rerepreneurs
Internet entrepreneurs. I got thrown on a case in nineteen
(20:04):
ninety six seven where a domain squatter had squatted on
the domain named Indianapolis dot com. And it just so
happened that we represented the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and so
I was learning some basic things about the Internet, or
as much as I could at that point in time,
and became pretty convinced by the time I went to
(20:25):
Harvard Business School that I had to work in Silicon Valley,
and Harvard Business School was a very different place Goldman, Sachs, Mackenzie.
They couldn't even get people to show up at the
interviews in we were all doing case studies on startups
and technology, and as working with David and Joel on
(20:46):
a case study to start General Catalysts and invest in
their first company that I'd ultimately become the CEO of,
And so it was just happenstance. I graduated in May
of two thousand. Michelle decided she wanted to stay in Boston.
I decided to stay in Boston and help General Catalysts
get started. And by May, pretty much the world was
(21:08):
already melding down. None of us knew how bad it
was about ready to become and I had the good
fortune of having chosen to be CEO of an online
travel company, and that was about the only thing that
worked or survived this period, and so Expedia immediately tried
to buy that company. We ended up in a bidding
(21:28):
war between Expedia and Barry Diller and his head of
M and A at the time, Dara Kasher Shay he
now runs Uber and so Rich and Dara and I
would find ourselves in May of two thousand and one
in Barry's backyard in Hollywood, wondering how the hell we
had gotten there. But we had both just sold our companies,
Rich Expedia and me n l G to USA Networks
(21:51):
that would become I A C. It's a pretty good story,
and I want to get into the sphase a little bit.
Bloomberg actually at one point called you the online traveling
at the time a hell of a compliment. And then
you decided to go run some capital at Park Capital.
And by the way, I know because I, like a
lot of other people, tried to get you to come
run some companies I was involved with, and you decided
(22:12):
on this other path once again. You take this next
career path, it's quite different from what you were on.
Why that change? Well, you know, in those intervening years,
I thought I was going back to General Catalyst, but
a classmate of mine and I started another company called
open List that we had sell to a public company
(22:32):
in Seattle named Marchex. And then Paul, who had been
an investor in that first online company, he said, you know,
I think you would be great at this business. And
what was interesting to me because he wasn't running a
venture capital fund, he wasn't running just a hedge fund.
He was running a pool of capital, like Seth Klarman,
like David Abrahams in Boston, like Buffet before them. They
(22:54):
just invested in great companies. They didn't worry if they
were public or private. They sought them out. And I
said to Paul, the thing is, I don't really know
anything about running public money. I don't know how to
build a hedge book. I don't know the sophistication of
risk management. And Paul said, I can teach you all
of that, and I said, well, I'll do it, but
only on the deal that I work for free. Because
(23:16):
you're a legend. I don't know if I'm going to
bring you any value. I said. Part of the reason
I don't want you to pay me is because if
I like this, I'm coming in to study the hedge
fund business, the public investing business. And if I like it,
I'm probably going to start my own and I just
want to tell you that on day one, and if
you don't want to hire me, that's fine. And Paul said,
(23:37):
if I can't convince you to stay here, then hopefully
I'll invest in you and will all work out well anyway.
And that's exactly what happened. Three years later, I built
the technology practice at Park Capital. I lead the series
be venture investments and companies like Zillo, where I went
on the board. I had learned a lot about Google
and this small little company called price Line, and I said, Paul,
(23:58):
I just want to put all my money on those two.
Come Pannice, and he was fine with that, and so
I basically had a very concentrated public book. It was
a very essentialist approach to the business. And I ate
lunch with Paul every day. I picked his brain about
everything in the business. And he was the best mentor,
the best friend, the best co conspirator I could have
(24:19):
ever asked for. And I learned over the course of
two and a half years, not only did I love
the business, but I developed my own point of view
on how I would evolve that recipe and build a
firm that would focus exclusively on technologies. Well, so let's
make that jump. Then we began today talking about you
starting Altimeter, and I know it's not a simple story,
(24:40):
and I don't want to turn it into that. Give
us that really simple line of how you went in
just a decade from tiny too big and moving from
Boston to Silicon Valley along the way. Well, the vision
from the Star was to build the most important crossover
fund in the world based in Silicon Valley. By crossover fund,
(25:00):
it meant a firm that was a life cycle investor
doing both venture capital and public market investing, had a
very clear vision of what we wanted to build. And
I was lacking two things. I was lacking in two
thousand eight capital because nobody was going to give capital
to a new fund manager. I went to Morgan Stanley
and Goldman Sachs. Nobody knew if they were even going
(25:20):
to be in business, and so I went to UBS
and a gentleman named Mike TERESI said, listen, Brad, I
have no idea if we're going to survive, but I
like you, and so let's give it a go. And
he helped put us in business and enable our first trades.
The vision was very clear, from the start. I never
doubted for a second that we would get the capital
(25:43):
we needed in the fullness of time. Remember, par had
gone from three million to well over a billion, so
I had the road map as to how the power
of good work could get you there. So I just
put my head down, went to work, and we delivered
great returns in those first few years. I'm gonna make
you uncomfortable for a minute, Brat, because I think you
(26:05):
have some wisdom to impart on both the business and
personal level. And sometimes someone becomes the thing to hit
person Taylor Swift, Lebron James, Ralph Lauren, Jackson, Pollock, Steve Jobs, Oprah,
Mark Zuckerberg, Martha Stewart, all the stars aligned, and the
world notices and puts them on a pedestal to be
admired and opens all the doors for them. Now, because
(26:29):
of your modesty, you will disagree, but I want you
to indulge me just a minute. Arguably, you have hit
an IT moment, and you have this unique moment of opportunity.
So here's the question. How do you use this unique
moment for your business, the good of the world, and
for you and your family. I certainly violently disagree with
the company you put me in, but I will say this,
(26:51):
there is a lot more velocity and momentum an opportunity
coming on us today than's ever come at us. And
when you set strategy or tactics in life, you have
to decide what you're not going to do, and oftentimes
that's a lot harder than thinking about the things you
are going to do. And I think a lot of
those folks that you mentioned, all the incremental opportunities that
(27:12):
come their way that distract them, you do them, and
it dilutes your own performance, your own success. And it's
that dilution and distraction that then leads to unhappiness and
you end up doing something every day that you never
really wanted to do. Right, just think of it in
a simple model where you run a small firm maybe
(27:34):
twenty people. You love it, it's a tight knit family,
you're growing it, you're doing excellent work, and then all
of a sudden, the guns come out and now your
capital base goes up by ten acts. You go from
twenty people to two hundred people, and now you spend
your day managing people. You spend your day dealing with
human resource issues, with politics, with all of that stuff
(27:55):
rather than doing what you actually love to do, which
is meet with the world's best entrepreneurs and figure out
how to help them on their growth journey. And so
the way we've dealt with that is, first we have
a cultural north star at altimeter. It's the book essential Ism,
the art of doing less better. It doesn't mean staying small,
(28:16):
it doesn't mean refusing to innovate. It just means if
something is not a fast yes, then it's a quick no.
And I think that for me it probably was embedded
somewhere in my d n A. Maybe it's because you're
a simple kid from Indiana, but it is now a
dominant life philosophy for me, not just a business philosophy.
(28:38):
My life is predicated on friends and family and experiences
and on this journey they derive a lot of happiness
from being curious and trying to come up ways to
leave the world better than we found it. And so
the art of saying no has been a critical component
of that. When I think about how we're leveraging the
platform to do what is best, I'm incredibly excited because
(29:04):
I think there's a need in a post technological revolutionary
world to reconstruct the social contract right. We have massive
and growing wealth disparities in this country, and you know,
many people are starting to demonize capitalism. They're starting to
demonize Bill Gates. I think that capitalism has been the
(29:24):
greatest source for good in the world, and I think
it's important that those of us who have voiced, those
of us who have platforms of scale, use that to
architect the world that we all want to live in.
From issues of equity and equality, two issues of wealth disparity,
two issues of healthcare and education. And so we're going
(29:45):
to use Altimeter as an equally powerful platform to fund
entrepreneurs who in their very daily acts are changing the world,
and to speak out about the issues and to fund
the issues that we think are critical to design in
the world we want to live in. We'll be back
with more Math and Magic with our guest Brad Gershner
after this quick break. Welcome back to Math and Magic.
(30:15):
Let's hear more from my conversation with Brad Gershner. So
you invest in businesses, you coach and advise execs, you
build strategies for companies and investments. Let's get into some
of your thinking. One of our folks here at I
Heeart had a view on corporate culture. Really nice articulation
which we picked up and use company wide now, is saying,
(30:37):
the corporate culture is the operating system for a company.
If it doesn't work well, none of the programs under
it will work well either. It's really the foundation. What
do you think is essential to any successful corporate culture,
and you've seen a lot of them. How do you
build it, how do you get buy in, how do
you fix it if it's broken? Well, the number one thing,
(30:58):
I think there's consistency, taking the time to know that
corporate culture is an operating system, and then lots of
different operating systems can work. Right. Google had an operating
system based upon decentralization twenty percent time, etcetera, which really
is about empowerment and trusting the individual. But that required
(31:20):
a recruiting culture that was the antithesis of command and control,
but they made it work. There were probably command and
control cultures that worked. Certainly works in the military, and
so I don't endorse the idea that there's only a
single operating system, but I think it's essential that you
have one that everybody in the organization knows that that
(31:44):
culture and your mission and your values are lived every day,
that they see them reinforced every day, and that they
see the person or the people at the top living them,
not just talking them, but living them. And I think
if you do that, it leads to this really powerful
catalytic effect. And so you have to empower the team
(32:06):
to have an intellectual framework to be able to make
those decisions in a way consistent with the corporate culture
and values and mission without you in the room. So
I think for us, there's not a single person in
Altimats organization that wouldn't immediately say essential is M, wouldn't
tell you what it means, and couldn't apply it in
(32:27):
their daily exercise of their job. There also isn't a
person in Altimatis corporate culture that wouldn't tell you how
important having positive social impact is as part of the
fabric of our business. And you reinforce that in big
ways and small right. They know that I'm going to
give most of my wealth away during my lifetime and
(32:49):
we challenge others to do it. They see what we're
doing with the Board challenge, they see what we're doing
with invest America. They see what we're doing with lowest highest,
with give power etcetera. So they you living your principles.
You're not just talking your principles. Now, just give you
a small example. At the end of last year, we
had a good year, and just as a surprise on
(33:10):
Christmas Eve, I sent a slack out to everybody in
the organization and I said, I would like for you
all to give ten thousand dollars away between now and
the end of the year to any organization that is
meaningful in your life in any way. Sit down with
your family on Christmas Day, involve your kids, involve your spouse,
and have a conversation and then we'll get it funded.
(33:33):
And the stories that came out of that, the conversations
that it lit up around the family tables, the really
meaningful things that people did that I would have never expected,
organizations that I had never heard of. But it's reinforcing
that corporate culture in a way that is again living
it through action. So let's move from corporate culture to management.
(33:58):
If management is about getting results through others, what are
the qualities you see and managers who do that the best?
You know, it's the job of the coach or of
the CEO. The temptation is often to jump in and
do it for people. But ultimately, you have to recruit excellence,
you have to retain excellence, you have to expect excellence,
(34:20):
and then you have to inspire excellence. And so when
I'm talking to everybody, helping them understand the mission that
we're on, and the mission is not just about making
more money for our LPs, although all of that is
important and those are all enablers, but the mission is
enabling entrepreneurs to do something the world needs. Whether you're
(34:40):
funding Moderna that's developing vaccines, or you're funding Zoom, which
is developing a video first infrastructure platform that connects families
and relatives in the middle of a global pandemic, it's
way more important. And so I think you have to
set that vision, you have to inspire and then, yes,
one of the tough things, whether you're coaching an NBA
(35:03):
team or whether you're coaching an investment firm, we make
slow decisions on the B player, the B plus player,
the B minus player, and I often say to our teams,
they can be absolutely fantastic friends, but that doesn't mean
that they're the right fit for our team. And we
have an obligation to make sure that we're assembling the
best team on the floor every day to deliver against
(35:25):
the promise we're making not only to our investors, but
the promise that we're making to the entrepreneurs and the
founders and the social impact we want to have on
the world. Let's talk about the idea of change sneaking
up on big companies. I look back on the blue
chips of the eighties and nineties and compare it to
today Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, Salesforce, maybe two Telco's Facebook.
(35:49):
It's all changed. Is it inevitable? The blue chips because
they have such a huge footprint, such a big infrastructure,
will eventually be replaced as the world changes working companies
of that size pivot. Could IBM have become Microsoft? Could
hpter Nokia have become Apple? Could Walmart have become Amazon?
For a hundred years of business school history, there was
(36:13):
a law of diminishing returns that was taught, this idea
that as you get big, innovation slows down and they're
diminishing returns to scale. Over the last twenty years we
really started to question that orthodoxy, and there's a belief,
certainly at altimeter, that there are increasing returns to scale.
(36:37):
I remember when people said it was impossible, we will
never have a trillion dollar business. We have a business
today approaching to trillion. People said Microsoft was dead in
two thousands. Microsoft has been reborn in gaming, in cloud computing. Right,
the elephant can dance as a question, lou gersoner when
(36:59):
he was an IBM of no relation. So to me,
I'm a strong believer that there isn't a law of
physics around diminishing returns. There isn't a law of physics
around big companies. But those decisions that most big companies make,
command and control does break down. It does slow down innovation,
(37:19):
which is the deliberate cultural decision at Google not to
have a command and control system because they didn't want
that to happen. There. There are lots of ways to
attack that problem. But I'm a believer that innovation can
and does happen at scale. If you look at the
percentage of the NASDA represented by the top seven companies
in the year two thousand and ten, and you look
(37:42):
at that same percentage of the NASDAC represented by the
top ten companies a two and twenty, I think it's
gone up by two x, which means the big companies
took an increasing share of the pie, not a decreasing
share of the pie, because Apple continued to innovate, because
Google continue to innovate. Because Amazon, rather than resting on
(38:03):
its laurels and saying books are good enough. You know,
two week delivery is good enough, they said, no, we're
going to deliver everything and we're gonna get it there
in hours. And along the way, we're gonna transform all
of computing from data centers and client server to a
utility in the cloud. You know, I don't think the
innovation is only the domain of venture capital in small companies.
(38:25):
So you've made a lot of money for you and others.
You've come a long way from your economic circumstances in Indiana.
Let's get into personal stuff. Does financial success have much
to do with personal success? Well, you know the answer
to that one. The truth is mas laws, hierarchy. There
(38:45):
is a basic level of safety and security we all
need as a prerequisite to be happy, and that is
economically linked. For some rich person to say, like they
did when I was growing up, money doesn't matter. Money matters,
because growing up in a house with a bankrupt dad
and a mom working two jobs and losing the house
(39:05):
and losing the car sucked. It caused stress, it caused drinking,
it caused divorce. Like that's not a fun place to be.
But once you get beyond that, you sure as the
hell better figure out a definition of happiness that's not
predicated on making the next dollar, because the return on
that incremental dollar is a contribution to happiness is really low.
(39:30):
And so for me, I've kept life really simple. I've
had a couple indulgences on things that are passions in
my life, but the reality is I look to other
sources for my happiness. I'm working as hard as I
have ever worked. I have three siblings who are basically retired,
and they asked me why I work. I say, because
(39:50):
I can have maximum impact and I love what I
do every day. And so the way in which it's
changed our lives is I don't worry for myself or
my family about basic needs, and I know any friend
in need we can help, and that makes me feel terrific.
But I also feel a deep, burning passion, desire, pressure,
(40:12):
responsibility to make the most out of the privilege the
universe has dropped on us. And that's not a burden
on me. It excites me every day, but it means
that you know, that really is the source of my happiness.
It's not about going and buying yachts and spending the
whole year on vacation and doing things like this. You're
(40:32):
the founder of the Board Challenge. It's a movement to
improve the representation of black directors and corporate US boardrooms
by asking companies to pledge to appoint a black director
within the next year. That was done back in September.
So where did the idea come from? How's it going? Well,
you know, we live in a household and I give
(40:53):
a lot of credit to Michelle where issues of social
justice matter a lot. We talk about issue us and
responsibility and privilege, etcetera with the kids, and so, like
so many other people, we saw the events of Black
Lives Matter, the needless killing of far too many young
black men and women at the hands of police, and
(41:17):
so we decided that we would join in a peaceful
protest in Palo Alto. An inspiring day. The crowd was
everybody in the community. And as we're getting back in
the car as with the two boys, Jack and Lincoln,
and there's a poster about reparations. And Jack asked me
what reparations meant, and I said, you know, think about
(41:39):
the base word to repair. It's repairing past wrongs. There's
an idea that we could transfer value, we could transfer
wealth for past harms. And Jack said to me, well,
you know I haven't done anything bad, so why do
I have to pay? And his older brother, Lincoln said,
you know it was only twelve, so Jack, don't be
so stupid it. He said, there's four hundred years of
(42:02):
structural racism in this country. Somebody's got to pay. And
I would have never dreamed I would have been talking
to my kids this year about pandemics and viruses and
vaccines and four years of structural racism. It seems like
they're far too young to have those conversations, but we did.
And then Lincoln turned to me in one of those
(42:25):
moments and said, Dad, what are you going to do
about this? And it just rattled in my head and so,
as you know, Bob, I had a simple idea. I
was on a couple of boards and said, well, maybe
I should resign from those boards and asked those boards
to replace me with a black director. And then I
(42:46):
talked to a good friend, Tony West, encouraged me to
think bigger. He said, you know, you have voice, you
have standing, You're an owner, you're an investor. What can
you do? And so before we knew it, we had
forty people around the tab able and volunteers and CNBC
who wanted to help us launch this. And today we
have over seventy companies who took the pledge, you know,
(43:08):
from Salesforce to United Airlines, from Starbucks to Altimeter and
it's just incredible to see. Right, this is not a
talent problem. It's not a pipeline problem. It's a matter
of priority. It's a matter of creativity and the board challenge,
while it's focused in its first year on a black director,
is about all diversity in the boardroom. Right. We don't
(43:31):
have enough Hispanics in the boardroom. We don't have enough
women in the boardroom. You'll see this movement continuing to
expand the play we called in two thousand and twenty one,
there are nearly a hundred SMP five hundred companies a
hundred that don't have a black director. In the year
two thousand and twenty one, a hundred out of five
hundred DARVA black director and so I'm going to c
(43:54):
e O s across America and I'm asking them to
adopt two or three companies in the SMP five hundred
and helped to close the gap. I think within a year,
every SMP five company could have a black director and
we will have totally eliminated that gap. That doesn't solve
all the problems of racial inequities or inequality. It doesn't
(44:15):
solve the wealth gap, but it is a step in
the right direction. And I could turn to Lincoln and
when he said what are you gonna do about I said,
this is what we're doing about it. You're a burner
and you're part of that burning Man culture year round.
What does it do for you? What do you get
out of it? Well, I have you to thank for
(44:35):
introducing me to Bernie Man, well over a decade ago.
At this point, what I get out of it has
very little resemblance to what most people think. Bernie Man
is right. Most people will talk about the raids, the parties,
the late nights. Bernie Man is a way of thinking.
And there's a reason a lot of people in Silicon
Valley ended up at Burnie Man. There's a reason that
(44:57):
Larry Page and Sergey Brand, the founders of Google, famously
one of the criteria, and hiring Eric Schmidt as he
had been the burning Man. Right. There are these principles
of burning Man that guide the conduct of Bernie Man.
The most important one to me, and it's one I've
had to learn and one I really try to practice daily,
is no judgment. I think judgmentalism is like one of
(45:22):
the basest of human qualities, and it happens every day
all around us. And part of the reason we're all
judgmental is because it makes us feel better in our
own insecurities. And so when we restrain ourselves from making judgment,
we open our minds to the possible. And that gave
(45:42):
rise to this incredible art installation, right that's not coordinated
from the top, but this beautiful, bottoms up creation of
seventy person city in the middle of a desert with
extraordinary art that reminds you if this is possible, anything's possible.
I'm sure that's one of the things that connects the
(46:04):
dot between Ellen's out of Bernie Man, Ellen taking people
to Mars right, saving the planet through electrification. It requires
the suspension of judgment. It requires the suspension of dogmas.
It requires open mindedness, and so for me, it's a
profoundly important part of how I try to think and
(46:26):
set my compass. Every day, I miss it desperately and
hope that the community can be back out there in
two thousand and twenty one. What advice would you give
your fifteen year old self and your year old self
if you could. I just give great gratitude in my
heart that I have the time to learn every day,
(46:46):
and I challenge myself to evolve into a better leader,
a better human being, a better dad, a better friend,
and so you know, of course I would love to
transport and give some of that wisdom to those younger selves.
But you know, I don't spend a lot of time
thinking about that. I spend most of my time thinking
about how can I make the most of this extraordinary journey.
(47:08):
We're all just start us. We all suspend disbelief, right.
We don't want to think about the fact that our
days are finite, but the reality is they are, and
so I want every one of them to be a
full expression of the best version of myself. And I
certainly have bad days, but it's what I aspire to
and with friends like you, Bob, the only thing I
(47:29):
worry about is running out of time because we have
so much left to do. Mathew Magic refers to the
analytical view and the creativity that must both be present
for any successful business or marketing, and we end each
episode with our guests shout out on each because you've
seen a lot thinking about people you've seen or heard
(47:51):
of or know about. Who gets the shout out for
the best on the analytical side, the mathematician, if you will,
and who gets it on the creation of side, the magician.
I'll start with the creative side, the magician, the mutual
friend of ours who has been in my life for
twenty years, Rich Barton. He reinvented the travel industry with Expedia.
(48:14):
He reinvented the real estate industry was Zillo. He's helping
me think about how to reinvent the finance industry. And
having somebody like that who's inspired, who thinks about the
world differently, happens to go to burning Man as well.
That open mindedness, his creativity, his passion to understand the
world better in all things just really inspires me. And
(48:37):
then on the analytical side, I would give a shout
out to my mentor Paul Reader, I would have a
lot of ideas, and he would say to me, if
all of this stuff in your head isn't in your
financial model, if it doesn't show up as part of
your future forecast, doesn't show up in your assumptions, then
it's not actionable, right. And this discipline around bill any
(49:00):
framework for decision making. We all have to make decisions
with insufficient information. But really understanding the distribution of probabilities
when you can act and when you can't act was
eye opening for me and really is part of our
formula at Altimeter. And so two very important people in
my life over the course of the last twenty years,
(49:21):
and both represent the opposite sides of that equation, one
art and one math. Brad, you have had and are
having an amazing life, deep and broad your force for
positive change in business and in the world. Thanks for
all you're doing and thanks for joining us today. Thank you, Bob.
(49:42):
Here are a few things I learned from my conversation
with Brad. One essentialism is the north star of Altimeter,
which is simply the idea of doing less better. Brad
believes that accepting every opportunity without critical thought dilute your
focus and effectiveness. To Brad's recipe for thinking big is first,
(50:03):
be curious. When Brad takes hold of an interest, he
learns all he can on the subject and interrogates that knowledge.
Then he lets that research turn into informed conviction. Three,
Brad understands that leaders cannot simply dictate a corporate culture. Instead,
Brad reinforces corporate culture through living the company's values. For
(50:26):
burning Man taught Brad to suspend his judgment and be
more open minded. According to Brad, this mindset is what
has allowed innovators to unlock revolutionary ideas. And Five, According
to Brad, leaders in technology and entrepreneurship have a responsibility
to create a more equitable world. With people like Brad
at the helm, we can leave the world better than
(50:48):
we found it. Thanks for listening. I'm Bob Pittman. That's
it for today's episod old Thanks so much for listening
to Math and Magic, a production of I Heart Radio.
This show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to
Sue Schillinger for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which
(51:10):
is no small feat Nikkiatore for pulling research, Bill Plax,
and Michael Asar for their recording help, our editor Ryan Murdoch,
and of course Gail Raoul, Eric Angel, Noel Mango, and
everyone who helped bring this show to your ears. Until
next time,
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of I
Heart Radio. I'm fond of Jeff Bezos is regret minimization
framework of life. It's very simple, and I think we
all need simple heuristics at those critical moments in life,
and his is simply this, Well, I regret not having
done it when I'm eighty years old, and if the
(00:24):
answer is yes, he does it, and if the answer
is no, he doesn't. For me, the thought of not
moving forward was way more painful than the thought of
striking out on my own, and that motivated me to
jump in. I am Bob Pittman, and welcome to this
episode of Math and Match Stories from the frontiers and
(00:44):
marketing Today. We have a guest who has a number
of important lessons to share. Lessons about the power of
a vision, of a conviction, taking risk, thinking big even
when you're small, betting at all, when you have the shop,
believing in a vision, but adjusting when needed. Listen hard,
think smart. He's an entrepreneur, an investor, a thinker, a
(01:08):
thoughtful philanthropist and social engineer bridge builder. He heads his
own firm, Altimeter, with twenty billion under management, and is
in the middle of SPACs, Fun, Snowflake, the Board Challenge,
et cetera. He's brag Gershner. Brad grew up in a
(01:29):
small town in Indiana. Smart kid in a small environment,
but that small environment did not limit him. College junior
year to Oxford Law School, lawyer, Deputy Secretary of State
of Indiana. Then got off the government path and got
his NBA from the Harvard Business School, one of the
early folks at the now giant venture capital General Catalyst,
(01:50):
and ran some companies, sold them, invested for others, and
then started his own fund in one of the boldest
and riskiest ways I've ever seen. He's wildly successful in
business and gives that same time and attention and innovation
to making our society and world better too. He's wildly curious, fun,
a surfer, traveler, a good friend and Instagram seven, and
(02:14):
even a board member at I heart to welcome Brad.
That's the best introduction I've ever had in my life. Bob.
Thank you. We've got a lot to dig into today,
but before we get started, I want to explore you.
In sixty seconds. Ready, let's do it. Do you prefer
Indiana or California? California, Boston or Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley,
(02:35):
Facebook or TikTok Facebook, salty or sweet salty, I p
o or spack, Altimeter, coffee or tea coffee, Law school
or business school, business school, boat or plane, plane, window
or aisle, file, chocolate or vanilla chocolate, cats or dogs, dogs,
(03:02):
dollar or bitcoin dollar, rent or own rent, Apple pie
or Apple computer, Apple computer, It's about to get harder.
Childhood hero Warren, Buffet technology, you can't live without iPhone?
Favorite app Twitter, Most memorable place you've traveled to Nepal.
(03:25):
First shop, chief of staff to the founder of Forest River,
which ultimately sold the Berkshire Halfway, preferred beverage ve no
favorite food, fresh fish, favorite city New York? And the
final question, what did you want to be when you're
growing up an entrepreneur? Okay, let's get started to set
(03:50):
the stage for how vision, conviction and or hard work
or at the core of what you do. I want
to go back to the founding of Altimeter. Although we
weren't really close friends then, we were close enough that
I saw the story. It's one of the most inspiring
origin stories ever. So let me paint the picture a
little bit. It was two thousand and eight you decided
to leave a great role at Park Capital and strike
(04:11):
out on your own. You had an impressive track record
as an investor and had lined up some two hundred
and fifty million for your first fund. Then Lehman Brothers
goes bankrupt and all but three million of that to
fifty backs out, And clearly a three million dollar fund
is almost not a fund. You'll have to live in
your savings, You'll have to sell everything you have. It'll
(04:33):
be a struggle, and getting back to two fifty million
is almost impossible. But at that moment, who knew if
the world was coming to an end? And yet here's
the classic. You, even though you had a young family
to support and you had a lot of high paying
jobs as other options, you started Altimeter anyway with just
(04:53):
three million. Why on earth would you do that? Well?
First you were there, and I might not have done
it without you, So thank you. I'm fond of Jeff
Bezos is regret minimization framework of life. It's very very simple,
and I think we all need simple heuristics at those
(05:13):
critical moments in life, and his is simply this, will
I regret not having done it when I'm eighty years
old and if the answer is yes, he does it,
and if the answer is no, he doesn't. And I
would say I didn't know I was using that framework,
but I was. And for me, the thought of not
(05:34):
moving forward was way more painful than the thought of
striking out on my own. And I suppose a little
over confidence and the fact that I had designed my
life in a way that didn't require a lot of
resource helped. But it was really that idea that if
I didn't do this, I would regret it, and that
motivated me to jump in. So what is this say
(05:57):
about conviction and about a vision? Lots of people have
visions of things, products that could improve the world, companies
they might want to start, et cetera. The execution is difficult,
and the execution is predicated on deep conviction. I had
spent a decade preparing for that moment. I had helped
(06:19):
start General Catalyst, I had started and sold three other companies.
I had been in law school, I had practiced law,
and as you mentioned, I'm curious. I'm a student of
the game. We made our first trade on November one,
two thousand and eight, and I had studied people who
I had a lot of respect for Seth Klarman at
(06:41):
balt Post who had started in the recession of Night one,
or Paul Reader, my mentor from Park Capital, who had
started with a similar amount of capital in nine in
the SNL crisis and his first investment was into an SNL.
Or even you take somebody like Tiger Global and Chase
(07:03):
who started in two thousand right after the dot com
blow up. So there was plenty of examples in my
world of folks who started small during periods of durest,
driven by deep conviction in their own capabilities. And so
for me, it seems from the outside looking in like
(07:23):
I was crazy, but it made perfect sense to me.
What did your prism look like? How did it change
after this collapse of Lehman Brothers, Because clearly you put
the whole plan together before the collapse. Did you change
the vision? Well, I have to say I was scared.
I had just gotten married ten months earlier. I had
(07:45):
just had my first child, Lincoln. We're renting a small
basement apartment, which you remember in Boston. Michelle believed in me,
but was none too happy about the idea that I
walked away from great paying jobs with this young family
to do this and I couldn't answer the question definitively
(08:06):
as to how long this would last or whether the
world really would end. I had set up a small
advisory board, and I remember a couple of the people
on that advisory board said, you're crazy. Don't do this,
go back and get your job. And I had started
three other companies, and every time I had started those
other companies, it was just a sketch on the back
(08:26):
of a napkin. And I was by myself, and so
to me, I was familiar with that moment, the founding moment.
I had deep conviction in my capabilities, and I'm an optimist.
I didn't think the world was going to end. I
wasn't sure what was going to happen, but I thought
if it did end, this would make a good story
(08:47):
to my ending. So this is a recurring thing, but
this was one of the best examples of you thinking
big when you were really small. How did you get
yourself to think big enough? Well, if I really rewind
the clock, my dad was a dreamer, first child to
(09:08):
go to college, and he ran a small business in
a small town that made auto parts in the late eighties,
and an acquirer came along and the acquirer said, we
want to buy this company, and my dad said, well,
everybody in the town works here, and so I'm not
going to allow the company to be acquired unless you
agree not to lay off the men and women who
(09:28):
work here and not to cut their pay. And of
course the acquirer agreed to do that, and six months
later they renegged on their promise. They fired people, They
cut people's pay. In the middle of one of the
worst recessions in our country's history. Interest rates were eighteen percent,
inflation was fifteen percent. It was a dark time, and
(09:49):
my dad was devastated. You know, in a small town,
your word is your bond. He had given his word
to these people. And so I watched my dad rally
those troops and say we're gonna go start a competitor,
and everybody followed him. And it was an insane thing
for him to do. He was starting an auto parts business.
(10:11):
There was not such a thing as venture capital. He
borrowed money from the local town bank. He mortgaged our house,
put the house up as collateral, the car up as collateral.
Everything is collateral. And in the middle of a recession,
in the middle of those interest rates, and the Japanese
gutting our car industry, and he tried to make it work,
(10:33):
and he ultimately went bankrupt because the world conspired against him.
But I watched that noble fight and it was heroic,
and I was in a late elementary school, early middle school,
and I thought to myself, you know, someday I'm going
to complete that journey. I went to law school because
(10:56):
my grandfather said us kids, none of you are allowed
to be entrepreneurs. You all have to be doctors or
lawyers or architects. So I honored him. I went to
law school, but I always knew in the back of
my mind that I was fit to live out that dream.
This really is an interesting theme which I want to
go through a bit. You've built everything you've got in
very interesting ways, and we want to get into your insights,
(11:18):
lessons philosophies on everything from business to philanthropy and social action.
But let's stick with the childhood era. You were born
nineteen seventy one, grew up in Syracuse, Indiana, three siblings.
You talked a little bit about your dad, but can
you paint the picture of that place and that time
of the seventies and eighties what it felt like and
(11:41):
how that might have shaped you. Uh, it's a great question.
The place. It's a town that was three thousand people
in the winter and twenty five thousand people in the summer.
It's near the border with Michigan, and as one of
the most beautiful natural lakes in the country that I
grew up near, and so families from Chicago and Indianapolis
(12:02):
that were pretty wealthy would come to the lake in
the summertime. In fact, Eli Lilly famously made the lake
his summer retreat and had a giant estate there. So
I had this window into this world of business and
success that I wouldn't have naturally gotten from a small
farm town in Indiana. My family had no money, but
(12:24):
I never missed money. I thought I had everything. I
grew up on the water and racing sailboats and skiing
on a small icy hill in the wintertimes, and so
there was never a sense that we didn't belong or
we were lesser than. But to be clear, they were
hard economic times. It was hard on my family. It
(12:44):
was hard on my mother, who worked two jobs. But
I was deeply observant of what was going on in
the world because of this window of my dad's experience.
So I was worried about the United States, right like
most kids growing up at that point in time, you're
worried about an actual war with the Soviet Union. I
(13:05):
was worried economically for the country. And so the eighties
for me, which was middle school through college, was just
a transformational time. You were a smart kid. But how
was that nurtured and developed in a small town like
this picture you're painting. Well. First, I was the youngest
(13:28):
of four. My oldest brothers fifteen years older than me.
I had really smart siblings. I had a grandfather on
my father's side who was patriarch of the clan, you know,
on his bookcase where physics textbooks and biology and texts
on politics, and he was all self studied. He couldn't
(13:49):
afford to go to school. So study and conversation and
debate that was just part of our family. And nobody
was taking it easy on the youngest kid around the table.
And so I ended up a national debater and state
debate him it. But I'll tell you I got really lucky, Bob.
The public schools in Indiana, the small rural public school
(14:11):
is pretty damn good. I had great teachers in Indiana.
At that period of time, there was a push to
set up in the public school system gifted in the
Talented program, and this would ultimately go on to be
politically controversial at a national level. Is it right to
pull certain kids out or not? And so I'm not
on one side or the other. I'm just giving you
(14:33):
one person's experience. So in the third grade, they pulled
four of us out of the classrooms one day a week,
and they assigned us a Gift in Talented teacher named
Connie Bailey, and she ultimately became not just a teacher,
but a life coach. I went through some turbulent times,
like any teenager does. My parents got divorced, and Connie
(14:56):
was often there to challenge me, to bail me out
and to make sure that I was thinking big enough.
You went to Oxford your junior year, you graduated from
law school, You went on to be Deputy Secretary of
State in Indiana. Clearly you had aspirations to be in politics,
and then you went to the Harvard Business School. What
happened to the politics. I was always interested in what
(15:18):
was going on politically in the world. I thought politics
was a lot of the reason that my dad's business collapsed.
And so when I came back from Oxford, our senator,
great Senator for the state of Indiana, Dick Luger, who
had been a Rhodes scholar, who was a very well
known moderate Republican. He and Sam Nunn, the great Democrat senator,
(15:38):
helped to denuclearize Russia. And I wrote him a letter
and I said, hey, I just had this experience at Oxford.
I'd like to come to Washington and work with you
on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and just learned. And
he was generous enough to give me a job, and
then he would call me a couple of years later
after I was out of law school, and he asked
(15:59):
me if I would accept an appointment as Deputy Secretary
of State Indiana. And that had been a stepping stone
for Evan By to become governor, and so it was
kind of known that that was a plumb assignment and
was giving you an opportunity to become governor or whatever.
The problem was. I was poor, and I hated the
(16:20):
idea that I was going to spend most of my
time asking people for money. I felt like I couldn't
be true to my north star if I was beholdened
by that process. And so I made a really difficult
decision to leave. And I thought to myself, I'm gonna
make a million dollars and I'm gonna come back and
I'm going to run for governor. And as fate would
(16:41):
have it, I left, went to business school, and along
the way I concluded that I could have far more
positive impact on the world by doing exactly what I'm doing,
as opposed to going back and running for office. I
want to know if these things came from childhood, if
there were the seats in your childhood, what drove you
to be that person who can think out of the box,
(17:04):
take big risk, and think big even when you have
little I think they're two interrelated things. One is I'm
curious about everything. I want to know how everything works,
and I'm happy to study it. And then I like
to talk about it. I like to debate about it,
and so that's the formation of conviction, and conviction is
(17:26):
the basis for being able to think big or act big.
Because what appears crazy from the outside for the highly
convicted person. For Elon Musk, Tesla was not crazy. For
Elon Musk, SpaceX was not crazy. He was so convicted
that the world was going to electrify, right, that starting
(17:48):
a company that was going to transform the biggest industry
on the planet to electric was not crazy. And on
the second hand, it's not risky. And here's why, once
you decide that there's something more powerful in life, then
the fear of failure. Once you decide that it's not
all about the mountain of money you amass or whether
(18:10):
everybody loves you, but it's about doing the things that
make this a life that matters that when I look back,
I'm not going to have regrets. Right, so I have
maximum conviction it doesn't appear that risky, and even if
it is, it doesn't matter because the very pursuit, the
very adventure, is why we're here. And so those two
(18:32):
intersecting beliefs I think really formed the foundation. So you
finished Harvard Business School, coming out of the background you
do wouldn't naturally say you're going to go to tech,
but yet you were one of the founding group at
General Catalyst. What drove you to tech? What was the path?
In an ap English teacher named Joel Robbins. He was
(18:57):
a great teacher, and I was so blessed with so
many great teachers. But I remember Joel said that we
had to write our high school papers using this service
I had never heard of, called CompuServe, and I got
fascinated with this private computer network where I could communicate
with others and I could discover other information. Well, fast forward,
(19:19):
I go away to law school and I encountered the
Netscape browser, and I remember gathering my friends from law
school around the computer terminal. I'm telling them this changes everything,
and they all looked at me and said I was nuts.
And I graduated from law school in and I couldn't
very well find my way to Silicon Valley. But I
(19:41):
went back to this big law firm in Indianapolis. I
was the only person in the joint that knew anything
about the Internet. So they said, you're our Internet guy
and our ventor capital guy, which, trust me, in Indianapolis
in didn't mean a whole hell of a lot. But
I got exposed to all of these software on rerepreneurs
Internet entrepreneurs. I got thrown on a case in nineteen
(20:04):
ninety six seven where a domain squatter had squatted on
the domain named Indianapolis dot com. And it just so
happened that we represented the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and so
I was learning some basic things about the Internet, or
as much as I could at that point in time,
and became pretty convinced by the time I went to
(20:25):
Harvard Business School that I had to work in Silicon Valley,
and Harvard Business School was a very different place Goldman, Sachs, Mackenzie.
They couldn't even get people to show up at the
interviews in we were all doing case studies on startups
and technology, and as working with David and Joel on
(20:46):
a case study to start General Catalysts and invest in
their first company that I'd ultimately become the CEO of,
And so it was just happenstance. I graduated in May
of two thousand. Michelle decided she wanted to stay in Boston.
I decided to stay in Boston and help General Catalysts
get started. And by May, pretty much the world was
(21:08):
already melding down. None of us knew how bad it
was about ready to become and I had the good
fortune of having chosen to be CEO of an online
travel company, and that was about the only thing that
worked or survived this period, and so Expedia immediately tried
to buy that company. We ended up in a bidding
(21:28):
war between Expedia and Barry Diller and his head of
M and A at the time, Dara Kasher Shay he
now runs Uber and so Rich and Dara and I
would find ourselves in May of two thousand and one
in Barry's backyard in Hollywood, wondering how the hell we
had gotten there. But we had both just sold our companies,
Rich Expedia and me n l G to USA Networks
(21:51):
that would become I A C. It's a pretty good story,
and I want to get into the sphase a little bit.
Bloomberg actually at one point called you the online traveling
at the time a hell of a compliment. And then
you decided to go run some capital at Park Capital.
And by the way, I know because I, like a
lot of other people, tried to get you to come
run some companies I was involved with, and you decided
(22:12):
on this other path once again. You take this next
career path, it's quite different from what you were on.
Why that change? Well, you know, in those intervening years,
I thought I was going back to General Catalyst, but
a classmate of mine and I started another company called
open List that we had sell to a public company
(22:32):
in Seattle named Marchex. And then Paul, who had been
an investor in that first online company, he said, you know,
I think you would be great at this business. And
what was interesting to me because he wasn't running a
venture capital fund, he wasn't running just a hedge fund.
He was running a pool of capital, like Seth Klarman,
like David Abrahams in Boston, like Buffet before them. They
(22:54):
just invested in great companies. They didn't worry if they
were public or private. They sought them out. And I
said to Paul, the thing is, I don't really know
anything about running public money. I don't know how to
build a hedge book. I don't know the sophistication of
risk management. And Paul said, I can teach you all
of that, and I said, well, I'll do it, but
only on the deal that I work for free. Because
(23:16):
you're a legend. I don't know if I'm going to
bring you any value. I said. Part of the reason
I don't want you to pay me is because if
I like this, I'm coming in to study the hedge
fund business, the public investing business. And if I like it,
I'm probably going to start my own and I just
want to tell you that on day one, and if
you don't want to hire me, that's fine. And Paul said,
(23:37):
if I can't convince you to stay here, then hopefully
I'll invest in you and will all work out well anyway.
And that's exactly what happened. Three years later, I built
the technology practice at Park Capital. I lead the series
be venture investments and companies like Zillo, where I went
on the board. I had learned a lot about Google
and this small little company called price Line, and I said, Paul,
(23:58):
I just want to put all my money on those two.
Come Pannice, and he was fine with that, and so
I basically had a very concentrated public book. It was
a very essentialist approach to the business. And I ate
lunch with Paul every day. I picked his brain about
everything in the business. And he was the best mentor,
the best friend, the best co conspirator I could have
(24:19):
ever asked for. And I learned over the course of
two and a half years, not only did I love
the business, but I developed my own point of view
on how I would evolve that recipe and build a
firm that would focus exclusively on technologies. Well, so let's
make that jump. Then we began today talking about you
starting Altimeter, and I know it's not a simple story,
(24:40):
and I don't want to turn it into that. Give
us that really simple line of how you went in
just a decade from tiny too big and moving from
Boston to Silicon Valley along the way. Well, the vision
from the Star was to build the most important crossover
fund in the world based in Silicon Valley. By crossover fund,
(25:00):
it meant a firm that was a life cycle investor
doing both venture capital and public market investing, had a
very clear vision of what we wanted to build. And
I was lacking two things. I was lacking in two
thousand eight capital because nobody was going to give capital
to a new fund manager. I went to Morgan Stanley
and Goldman Sachs. Nobody knew if they were even going
(25:20):
to be in business, and so I went to UBS
and a gentleman named Mike TERESI said, listen, Brad, I
have no idea if we're going to survive, but I
like you, and so let's give it a go. And
he helped put us in business and enable our first trades.
The vision was very clear, from the start. I never
doubted for a second that we would get the capital
(25:43):
we needed in the fullness of time. Remember, par had
gone from three million to well over a billion, so
I had the road map as to how the power
of good work could get you there. So I just
put my head down, went to work, and we delivered
great returns in those first few years. I'm gonna make
you uncomfortable for a minute, Brat, because I think you
(26:05):
have some wisdom to impart on both the business and
personal level. And sometimes someone becomes the thing to hit
person Taylor Swift, Lebron James, Ralph Lauren, Jackson, Pollock, Steve Jobs, Oprah,
Mark Zuckerberg, Martha Stewart, all the stars aligned, and the
world notices and puts them on a pedestal to be
admired and opens all the doors for them. Now, because
(26:29):
of your modesty, you will disagree, but I want you
to indulge me just a minute. Arguably, you have hit
an IT moment, and you have this unique moment of opportunity.
So here's the question. How do you use this unique
moment for your business, the good of the world, and
for you and your family. I certainly violently disagree with
the company you put me in, but I will say this,
(26:51):
there is a lot more velocity and momentum an opportunity
coming on us today than's ever come at us. And
when you set strategy or tactics in life, you have
to decide what you're not going to do, and oftentimes
that's a lot harder than thinking about the things you
are going to do. And I think a lot of
those folks that you mentioned, all the incremental opportunities that
(27:12):
come their way that distract them, you do them, and
it dilutes your own performance, your own success. And it's
that dilution and distraction that then leads to unhappiness and
you end up doing something every day that you never
really wanted to do. Right, just think of it in
a simple model where you run a small firm maybe
(27:34):
twenty people. You love it, it's a tight knit family,
you're growing it, you're doing excellent work, and then all
of a sudden, the guns come out and now your
capital base goes up by ten acts. You go from
twenty people to two hundred people, and now you spend
your day managing people. You spend your day dealing with
human resource issues, with politics, with all of that stuff
(27:55):
rather than doing what you actually love to do, which
is meet with the world's best entrepreneurs and figure out
how to help them on their growth journey. And so
the way we've dealt with that is, first we have
a cultural north star at altimeter. It's the book essential Ism,
the art of doing less better. It doesn't mean staying small,
(28:16):
it doesn't mean refusing to innovate. It just means if
something is not a fast yes, then it's a quick no.
And I think that for me it probably was embedded
somewhere in my d n A. Maybe it's because you're
a simple kid from Indiana, but it is now a
dominant life philosophy for me, not just a business philosophy.
(28:38):
My life is predicated on friends and family and experiences
and on this journey they derive a lot of happiness
from being curious and trying to come up ways to
leave the world better than we found it. And so
the art of saying no has been a critical component
of that. When I think about how we're leveraging the
platform to do what is best, I'm incredibly excited because
(29:04):
I think there's a need in a post technological revolutionary
world to reconstruct the social contract right. We have massive
and growing wealth disparities in this country, and you know,
many people are starting to demonize capitalism. They're starting to
demonize Bill Gates. I think that capitalism has been the
(29:24):
greatest source for good in the world, and I think
it's important that those of us who have voiced, those
of us who have platforms of scale, use that to
architect the world that we all want to live in.
From issues of equity and equality, two issues of wealth disparity,
two issues of healthcare and education. And so we're going
(29:45):
to use Altimeter as an equally powerful platform to fund
entrepreneurs who in their very daily acts are changing the world,
and to speak out about the issues and to fund
the issues that we think are critical to design in
the world we want to live in. We'll be back
with more Math and Magic with our guest Brad Gershner
after this quick break. Welcome back to Math and Magic.
(30:15):
Let's hear more from my conversation with Brad Gershner. So
you invest in businesses, you coach and advise execs, you
build strategies for companies and investments. Let's get into some
of your thinking. One of our folks here at I
Heeart had a view on corporate culture. Really nice articulation
which we picked up and use company wide now, is saying,
(30:37):
the corporate culture is the operating system for a company.
If it doesn't work well, none of the programs under
it will work well either. It's really the foundation. What
do you think is essential to any successful corporate culture,
and you've seen a lot of them. How do you
build it, how do you get buy in, how do
you fix it if it's broken? Well, the number one thing,
(30:58):
I think there's consistency, taking the time to know that
corporate culture is an operating system, and then lots of
different operating systems can work. Right. Google had an operating
system based upon decentralization twenty percent time, etcetera, which really
is about empowerment and trusting the individual. But that required
(31:20):
a recruiting culture that was the antithesis of command and control,
but they made it work. There were probably command and
control cultures that worked. Certainly works in the military, and
so I don't endorse the idea that there's only a
single operating system, but I think it's essential that you
have one that everybody in the organization knows that that
(31:44):
culture and your mission and your values are lived every day,
that they see them reinforced every day, and that they
see the person or the people at the top living them,
not just talking them, but living them. And I think
if you do that, it leads to this really powerful
catalytic effect. And so you have to empower the team
(32:06):
to have an intellectual framework to be able to make
those decisions in a way consistent with the corporate culture
and values and mission without you in the room. So
I think for us, there's not a single person in
Altimats organization that wouldn't immediately say essential is M, wouldn't
tell you what it means, and couldn't apply it in
(32:27):
their daily exercise of their job. There also isn't a
person in Altimatis corporate culture that wouldn't tell you how
important having positive social impact is as part of the
fabric of our business. And you reinforce that in big
ways and small right. They know that I'm going to
give most of my wealth away during my lifetime and
(32:49):
we challenge others to do it. They see what we're
doing with the Board challenge, they see what we're doing
with invest America. They see what we're doing with lowest highest,
with give power etcetera. So they you living your principles.
You're not just talking your principles. Now, just give you
a small example. At the end of last year, we
had a good year, and just as a surprise on
(33:10):
Christmas Eve, I sent a slack out to everybody in
the organization and I said, I would like for you
all to give ten thousand dollars away between now and
the end of the year to any organization that is
meaningful in your life in any way. Sit down with
your family on Christmas Day, involve your kids, involve your spouse,
and have a conversation and then we'll get it funded.
(33:33):
And the stories that came out of that, the conversations
that it lit up around the family tables, the really
meaningful things that people did that I would have never expected,
organizations that I had never heard of. But it's reinforcing
that corporate culture in a way that is again living
it through action. So let's move from corporate culture to management.
(33:58):
If management is about getting results through others, what are
the qualities you see and managers who do that the best?
You know, it's the job of the coach or of
the CEO. The temptation is often to jump in and
do it for people. But ultimately, you have to recruit excellence,
you have to retain excellence, you have to expect excellence,
(34:20):
and then you have to inspire excellence. And so when
I'm talking to everybody, helping them understand the mission that
we're on, and the mission is not just about making
more money for our LPs, although all of that is
important and those are all enablers, but the mission is
enabling entrepreneurs to do something the world needs. Whether you're
(34:40):
funding Moderna that's developing vaccines, or you're funding Zoom, which
is developing a video first infrastructure platform that connects families
and relatives in the middle of a global pandemic, it's
way more important. And so I think you have to
set that vision, you have to inspire and then, yes,
one of the tough things, whether you're coaching an NBA
(35:03):
team or whether you're coaching an investment firm, we make
slow decisions on the B player, the B plus player,
the B minus player, and I often say to our teams,
they can be absolutely fantastic friends, but that doesn't mean
that they're the right fit for our team. And we
have an obligation to make sure that we're assembling the
best team on the floor every day to deliver against
(35:25):
the promise we're making not only to our investors, but
the promise that we're making to the entrepreneurs and the
founders and the social impact we want to have on
the world. Let's talk about the idea of change sneaking
up on big companies. I look back on the blue
chips of the eighties and nineties and compare it to
today Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, Salesforce, maybe two Telco's Facebook.
(35:49):
It's all changed. Is it inevitable? The blue chips because
they have such a huge footprint, such a big infrastructure,
will eventually be replaced as the world changes working companies
of that size pivot. Could IBM have become Microsoft? Could
hpter Nokia have become Apple? Could Walmart have become Amazon?
For a hundred years of business school history, there was
(36:13):
a law of diminishing returns that was taught, this idea
that as you get big, innovation slows down and they're
diminishing returns to scale. Over the last twenty years we
really started to question that orthodoxy, and there's a belief,
certainly at altimeter, that there are increasing returns to scale.
(36:37):
I remember when people said it was impossible, we will
never have a trillion dollar business. We have a business
today approaching to trillion. People said Microsoft was dead in
two thousands. Microsoft has been reborn in gaming, in cloud computing. Right,
the elephant can dance as a question, lou gersoner when
(36:59):
he was an IBM of no relation. So to me,
I'm a strong believer that there isn't a law of
physics around diminishing returns. There isn't a law of physics
around big companies. But those decisions that most big companies make,
command and control does break down. It does slow down innovation,
(37:19):
which is the deliberate cultural decision at Google not to
have a command and control system because they didn't want
that to happen. There. There are lots of ways to
attack that problem. But I'm a believer that innovation can
and does happen at scale. If you look at the
percentage of the NASDA represented by the top seven companies
in the year two thousand and ten, and you look
(37:42):
at that same percentage of the NASDAC represented by the
top ten companies a two and twenty, I think it's
gone up by two x, which means the big companies
took an increasing share of the pie, not a decreasing
share of the pie, because Apple continued to innovate, because
Google continue to innovate. Because Amazon, rather than resting on
(38:03):
its laurels and saying books are good enough. You know,
two week delivery is good enough, they said, no, we're
going to deliver everything and we're gonna get it there
in hours. And along the way, we're gonna transform all
of computing from data centers and client server to a
utility in the cloud. You know, I don't think the
innovation is only the domain of venture capital in small companies.
(38:25):
So you've made a lot of money for you and others.
You've come a long way from your economic circumstances in Indiana.
Let's get into personal stuff. Does financial success have much
to do with personal success? Well, you know the answer
to that one. The truth is mas laws, hierarchy. There
(38:45):
is a basic level of safety and security we all
need as a prerequisite to be happy, and that is
economically linked. For some rich person to say, like they
did when I was growing up, money doesn't matter. Money matters,
because growing up in a house with a bankrupt dad
and a mom working two jobs and losing the house
(39:05):
and losing the car sucked. It caused stress, it caused drinking,
it caused divorce. Like that's not a fun place to be.
But once you get beyond that, you sure as the
hell better figure out a definition of happiness that's not
predicated on making the next dollar, because the return on
that incremental dollar is a contribution to happiness is really low.
(39:30):
And so for me, I've kept life really simple. I've
had a couple indulgences on things that are passions in
my life, but the reality is I look to other
sources for my happiness. I'm working as hard as I
have ever worked. I have three siblings who are basically retired,
and they asked me why I work. I say, because
(39:50):
I can have maximum impact and I love what I
do every day. And so the way in which it's
changed our lives is I don't worry for myself or
my family about basic needs, and I know any friend
in need we can help, and that makes me feel terrific.
But I also feel a deep, burning passion, desire, pressure,
(40:12):
responsibility to make the most out of the privilege the
universe has dropped on us. And that's not a burden
on me. It excites me every day, but it means
that you know, that really is the source of my happiness.
It's not about going and buying yachts and spending the
whole year on vacation and doing things like this. You're
(40:32):
the founder of the Board Challenge. It's a movement to
improve the representation of black directors and corporate US boardrooms
by asking companies to pledge to appoint a black director
within the next year. That was done back in September.
So where did the idea come from? How's it going? Well,
you know, we live in a household and I give
(40:53):
a lot of credit to Michelle where issues of social
justice matter a lot. We talk about issue us and
responsibility and privilege, etcetera with the kids, and so, like
so many other people, we saw the events of Black
Lives Matter, the needless killing of far too many young
black men and women at the hands of police, and
(41:17):
so we decided that we would join in a peaceful
protest in Palo Alto. An inspiring day. The crowd was
everybody in the community. And as we're getting back in
the car as with the two boys, Jack and Lincoln,
and there's a poster about reparations. And Jack asked me
what reparations meant, and I said, you know, think about
(41:39):
the base word to repair. It's repairing past wrongs. There's
an idea that we could transfer value, we could transfer
wealth for past harms. And Jack said to me, well,
you know I haven't done anything bad, so why do
I have to pay? And his older brother, Lincoln said,
you know it was only twelve, so Jack, don't be
so stupid it. He said, there's four hundred years of
(42:02):
structural racism in this country. Somebody's got to pay. And
I would have never dreamed I would have been talking
to my kids this year about pandemics and viruses and
vaccines and four years of structural racism. It seems like
they're far too young to have those conversations, but we did.
And then Lincoln turned to me in one of those
(42:25):
moments and said, Dad, what are you going to do
about this? And it just rattled in my head and so,
as you know, Bob, I had a simple idea. I
was on a couple of boards and said, well, maybe
I should resign from those boards and asked those boards
to replace me with a black director. And then I
(42:46):
talked to a good friend, Tony West, encouraged me to
think bigger. He said, you know, you have voice, you
have standing, You're an owner, you're an investor. What can
you do? And so before we knew it, we had
forty people around the tab able and volunteers and CNBC
who wanted to help us launch this. And today we
have over seventy companies who took the pledge, you know,
(43:08):
from Salesforce to United Airlines, from Starbucks to Altimeter and
it's just incredible to see. Right, this is not a
talent problem. It's not a pipeline problem. It's a matter
of priority. It's a matter of creativity and the board challenge,
while it's focused in its first year on a black director,
is about all diversity in the boardroom. Right. We don't
(43:31):
have enough Hispanics in the boardroom. We don't have enough
women in the boardroom. You'll see this movement continuing to
expand the play we called in two thousand and twenty one,
there are nearly a hundred SMP five hundred companies a
hundred that don't have a black director. In the year
two thousand and twenty one, a hundred out of five
hundred DARVA black director and so I'm going to c
(43:54):
e O s across America and I'm asking them to
adopt two or three companies in the SMP five hundred
and helped to close the gap. I think within a year,
every SMP five company could have a black director and
we will have totally eliminated that gap. That doesn't solve
all the problems of racial inequities or inequality. It doesn't
(44:15):
solve the wealth gap, but it is a step in
the right direction. And I could turn to Lincoln and
when he said what are you gonna do about I said,
this is what we're doing about it. You're a burner
and you're part of that burning Man culture year round.
What does it do for you? What do you get
out of it? Well, I have you to thank for
(44:35):
introducing me to Bernie Man, well over a decade ago.
At this point, what I get out of it has
very little resemblance to what most people think. Bernie Man
is right. Most people will talk about the raids, the parties,
the late nights. Bernie Man is a way of thinking.
And there's a reason a lot of people in Silicon
Valley ended up at Burnie Man. There's a reason that
(44:57):
Larry Page and Sergey Brand, the founders of Google, famously
one of the criteria, and hiring Eric Schmidt as he
had been the burning Man. Right. There are these principles
of burning Man that guide the conduct of Bernie Man.
The most important one to me, and it's one I've
had to learn and one I really try to practice daily,
is no judgment. I think judgmentalism is like one of
(45:22):
the basest of human qualities, and it happens every day
all around us. And part of the reason we're all
judgmental is because it makes us feel better in our
own insecurities. And so when we restrain ourselves from making judgment,
we open our minds to the possible. And that gave
(45:42):
rise to this incredible art installation, right that's not coordinated
from the top, but this beautiful, bottoms up creation of
seventy person city in the middle of a desert with
extraordinary art that reminds you if this is possible, anything's possible.
I'm sure that's one of the things that connects the
(46:04):
dot between Ellen's out of Bernie Man, Ellen taking people
to Mars right, saving the planet through electrification. It requires
the suspension of judgment. It requires the suspension of dogmas.
It requires open mindedness, and so for me, it's a
profoundly important part of how I try to think and
(46:26):
set my compass. Every day, I miss it desperately and
hope that the community can be back out there in
two thousand and twenty one. What advice would you give
your fifteen year old self and your year old self
if you could. I just give great gratitude in my
heart that I have the time to learn every day,
(46:46):
and I challenge myself to evolve into a better leader,
a better human being, a better dad, a better friend,
and so you know, of course I would love to
transport and give some of that wisdom to those younger selves.
But you know, I don't spend a lot of time
thinking about that. I spend most of my time thinking
about how can I make the most of this extraordinary journey.
(47:08):
We're all just start us. We all suspend disbelief, right.
We don't want to think about the fact that our
days are finite, but the reality is they are, and
so I want every one of them to be a
full expression of the best version of myself. And I
certainly have bad days, but it's what I aspire to
and with friends like you, Bob, the only thing I
(47:29):
worry about is running out of time because we have
so much left to do. Mathew Magic refers to the
analytical view and the creativity that must both be present
for any successful business or marketing, and we end each
episode with our guests shout out on each because you've
seen a lot thinking about people you've seen or heard
(47:51):
of or know about. Who gets the shout out for
the best on the analytical side, the mathematician, if you will,
and who gets it on the creation of side, the magician.
I'll start with the creative side, the magician, the mutual
friend of ours who has been in my life for
twenty years, Rich Barton. He reinvented the travel industry with Expedia.
(48:14):
He reinvented the real estate industry was Zillo. He's helping
me think about how to reinvent the finance industry. And
having somebody like that who's inspired, who thinks about the
world differently, happens to go to burning Man as well.
That open mindedness, his creativity, his passion to understand the
world better in all things just really inspires me. And
(48:37):
then on the analytical side, I would give a shout
out to my mentor Paul Reader, I would have a
lot of ideas, and he would say to me, if
all of this stuff in your head isn't in your
financial model, if it doesn't show up as part of
your future forecast, doesn't show up in your assumptions, then
it's not actionable, right. And this discipline around bill any
(49:00):
framework for decision making. We all have to make decisions
with insufficient information. But really understanding the distribution of probabilities
when you can act and when you can't act was
eye opening for me and really is part of our
formula at Altimeter. And so two very important people in
my life over the course of the last twenty years,
(49:21):
and both represent the opposite sides of that equation, one
art and one math. Brad, you have had and are
having an amazing life, deep and broad your force for
positive change in business and in the world. Thanks for
all you're doing and thanks for joining us today. Thank you, Bob.
(49:42):
Here are a few things I learned from my conversation
with Brad. One essentialism is the north star of Altimeter,
which is simply the idea of doing less better. Brad
believes that accepting every opportunity without critical thought dilute your
focus and effectiveness. To Brad's recipe for thinking big is first,
(50:03):
be curious. When Brad takes hold of an interest, he
learns all he can on the subject and interrogates that knowledge.
Then he lets that research turn into informed conviction. Three,
Brad understands that leaders cannot simply dictate a corporate culture. Instead,
Brad reinforces corporate culture through living the company's values. For
(50:26):
burning Man taught Brad to suspend his judgment and be
more open minded. According to Brad, this mindset is what
has allowed innovators to unlock revolutionary ideas. And Five, According
to Brad, leaders in technology and entrepreneurship have a responsibility
to create a more equitable world. With people like Brad
at the helm, we can leave the world better than
(50:48):
we found it. Thanks for listening. I'm Bob Pittman. That's
it for today's episod old Thanks so much for listening
to Math and Magic, a production of I Heart Radio.
This show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to
Sue Schillinger for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which
(51:10):
is no small feat Nikkiatore for pulling research, Bill Plax,
and Michael Asar for their recording help, our editor Ryan Murdoch,
and of course Gail Raoul, Eric Angel, Noel Mango, and
everyone who helped bring this show to your ears. Until
next time,
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