Vinod Khosla, MBA '80: Failure does not matter. Success matters.

hi everyone came thanks for being here today welcome back to gsb oh it's always fun to be here and it's so much better than when i was here yeah i've heard it quite a lot today since the previous class is here i'm delighted to have this conversation. I'm told you schedule your time in 15-minute slots, so we're taking up four of those slots right now, so I'll get to work. I have some questions here centered around three. things, your leadership and management journey, your thoughts on investing in entrepreneurship and then a few questions about your personal life and your legacy, after that we'll take a few questions from the audience and from Twitter, as Dean Selona mentioned that you He was the founder and the first CEO. at sun microsystems about a year after starting he found out that some microsystems were going to be excluded from a key sale when he heard this took a flight arrived at the customer lobby and made phone calls refusing to leave until he met the team where he came from this perseverance and conviction well um so i have a philosophy in life whatever i think i need to make happen it's that simple and if a customer is making a mistake the customer is not always right trust me and if you want to make great products don't listen to your customers by the way lots of bad lessons in business school i used to give a talk in the 80's about why not listen to your customers and maybe someone will ask me a question where's the story actually , there was a contract signed with a competitor.

I stayed in the lobby all day at 6pm and got a red eye out and parked in the lobby. I met with the CEO of the company mainly because he wanted me to leave at nine o'clock I had convinced him to meet me in chicago with his team the next day because he didn't want to be seen negotiating with us the next morning the day next at 5 a.m. he signed a handwritten contract because he wouldn't let him go this was the CEO o For a large computer vision company on the east coast, we signed a handwritten contract and life was good.

The point is that if you really believe in something, you do everything you can to make it happen. It

does

n't always happen, but it

does

happen most of the time. most of the business school entry story is also true. In fact, I heard someone had withdrawn, so I showed up and one of the nice ladies from the business school office put me in her living room much to the chagrin of her husband. She was very nice to me, but things work. if you process not always but i like to say

failure

doesn't

matter

what

matter

s is

success

and no one remembers what you feel so everyone remembers son does anyone know a company?

I've been researching you for a while. What do you think the company is? Was the data down? Pretty close together, but my point is that people don't remember your

failure

s and I like to say that my willingness to fail is what gives me the ability to succeed. I think most people are so afraid of failing that they don't try to do the things they do. things that would. Being important enough to do anything worthwhile is hard, which is why you've spoken in the past about the importance of failure, or the lack thereof. He started his first company at the age of 20 in Delhi, which did not work out as expected.

I didn't actually start I was told it would take seven years to get a phone line how did you react to that honestly you know I was 19 or 20 and they told me it would be a seven year waiting list to get a landline I picked up and i went to carnegie mellon how was that like moving to the usa you know look it was easy i wanted to be in silicon valley i knew i would get here i had no way to pay for it so i had to figure out how getting someone to pay for it in the end cmu biomedical engineering department i agreed to pay for it so i went there and i was very interested in biomedical engineering so i did that and then i immediately applied to stanford and you've heard the rest of the story, i got rejected a few times but you know the funny thing is with enough persistence most things that seem impossible become possible.

It always amazes me how often you can change things and people take no for an answer too easily. school or my green card was the same way i quit the job that had sponsored me but still got my green card even though no lawyer would take me became my own lawyer got my green card without working while in school business and I did it perfectly legally my strategy was if I couldn't convince immigration I would confuse them and I did and they gave me my green card well I just want to ask you what are some other early influences did this person do this to you high perseverance and high conviction well i was always like that i didnt grow up in this environment no one around my father was in indian army since he was 16 so he joined the ranks of indian army and when he was 16 i was sent to egypt to fight for the British so I grew up in a very different environment but I was always of the opinion that if I determined something was right I was going to make it happen and this is because e to that one approach. of this conference is leadership.

I am amazed at how few people have a belief system. What do they really believe? Um, me and yeah, it's okay to offend you, 90 of you will do what's expected of you instead of what you want to do. and you know even when i arrive at an event like this i say why am i here why would i bother taking an hour of my valuable time? no it's true i have to have a purpose my goal is very simple if i can convert one of you there are probably 400 500 people here if i can convert one of you to follow your belief and have the guts to follow your belief i will have i will think about the time i eat well spent but i always say what i am trying to do and why i dont talk because someone you know i will write nice things about it.

I always have a purpose, but I have a belief system and most people are even

success

ful companies and have big problems with Fortune 500 CEOs. I can speak to very little leadership. I don't have an internal compass of what they believe is what others expect you to know when I graduated I went into entrepreneurship no one went into entrepreneurship outside of business school and people said why wouldn't you work for Goldman or McKinsey and I said why would you want me to? I don't understand why you would want to do that job well. By the way, I still can't for those of you who go to such places and I'm sure there are a lot of them.

I'm probably not the right person to talk to you. I don't even care to talk to all of you others I think there's something wrong with anyone who basically wants to go work for one of the consultants or the investment banks today in this part they don't understand how the world will work in the future , but my point again is to have a belief system, to follow that compass. and I'm exaggerating it a bit, so there may be some hope for those of you going there, but it's just a bit of an exaggeration. Let me go back to this issue of Fortune 500 CEOs.

I've talked to many over the years if a New York Times writer writes an article. They want to change his strategy. They want to answer. How silly it is that an English major who has never had a business job can determine the strategy of a Fortune 500 company. Why. Because they care about what is written, not what. His belief system is do you know what elon musk would say to that writer go get a real job? what would jeff bezos say? r make it better or make it look good for someone else, be it your friends, your boss or shareholders and frankly look at all the companies that languish in the valley, the older companies usually don't have a system of beliefs.

I usually try to hit some quarterly target without saying this is how we'll be different and this is how we'll do it Apple languished for 10 15 years and then Steve Jobs came along with a point of view and created the most valuable company in the world. world did irrational things if you go back to january 2007 january 1 everyone was saying nobody wants a phone without a keypad nobody wants a phone that costs 6.99 i can continue with the litany those were all english majors writing articles i got this beef anti racing of English, not all English majors are bad, but most of them at Stanford are undirected and do not have a goal or purpose.

Well, they just didn't get the right guidance and ended up in the wrong place. Anyway, I like education with a purpose. I'm sorry. No, absolutely, this is, it's actually interesting. I make up better questions than usual. gsbbfttt but i want to ask you about this you are known for being a bit blunt for not finding a better word well your website says we prefer brutal honesty to hypocritical courtesy what are the pros and cons of doing this right there are many pros and cons but i be very clear again you know it started earlier in my life i was very successful even before i started sol i started a company like daisy which made me more money which was only a million dollars back then or a little more than that my dad had done cumulatively in his career so he was in a completely different place and i said the only thing i will do is not do what others want me to do or be polite which usually means dishonest there is a great book by sam harris, which he is a professor on the other side about lying i recommend everyone to read sam harris book online and why we all lie too much and too often put this kind of catchphrase p i refer brutal honesty to hypocritical politeness on our website because its a real disservice to people huh you dont have to be offensive to be honest when i dont like someone i cant offend but overall you can be constructive and very honest and i prefer that brutal honesty because it has a purpose the recipient can do something about it if it is constructive criticism if you get a hypocritical courtesy you could lose a lot so again it's about being confident enough to say that the someone else will eventually appreciate it and that logo tagline came about after i was working on a venture with another major venture firm and i didn't think their plan would work they had 45 50 million dollars in the bank account so everybody was comfortable too comfortable in my opinion i talked to the founder that's why it wouldn't work what were my concerns the other vcs agreed c With me at the board meeting they said all these polite things, you know, so 40 engineers wasted three or four years of their lives because no one was willing to tell them the honest truth about what they really thought and I swore I would never let anyone wasting his life to at least give them the best advice he had to give them and tell them I may be wrong but I'm not going to say something I don't believe in I just won't and that's extremely valuable to the other thing but to be honest look So, there are situations where you maintain that it offends people and I offend people often, but it helps if they're really introspective, right?

I just had a candidate from Howard Business. i walked into school and interviewed for a job and half an hour after the meeting i said you know you're no match for us this is what i would do and i spent the next half hour i said i literally told him if i'm going to waste the next half time of my life talking to you I'm g I'm going to give you my best advice on what to do with your career, which I did. She didn't love it. She sent me a nice note a week later, but it's very precious, but the real fact, the honest truth about why I like that is once. i was in a position where i didnt need a job no one could fire me i never actually worked for anyone so its actually a nice thing i felt like it was an indulgence or a luxury i might enjoy some people if they get it financial freedom i could buy a Yacht I bought myself the freedom of brutal honesty and it's an indulgence I can do things others may not be in a position to do there's a downside to others but I think overall constructive honesty and constructive criticism hypocritical courtesy will serve well to other people that founder by the way in that company called me four years later after this company this company was sold for three million dollars for three and a half years four years later um sad story and he called me a year after that he said I just w I want to work with you on my next adventure because I wish someone would have told me that you mentioned briefly talking about the capita l risk as it stands now.

I just want to go back to that specifically, how does it compare to 1982 when you were starting some microsystems? And what are the main differences you see? It's much more popular now, it's much more accepted, it's much more accepted to do new ventures, so for those of you who are so inclined, it's much easier to go that route. So,the risk of going the corporate route was much higher if you rented a company and it didn't work out. if it failed, in fact, i would prefer you to someone who spent two years in ge is not 100 percent true, but in general, the learning experience of a start-up, whether successful or not, is recognized as extremely valuable and the cultural formation of th is something that everyone is striving for because I am amazed at the people who pass through Silicon Valley.

It feels like a tourist stop like Fisherman's Wharf. It used to be all the Fortune 500 CEOs who come here to hold board meetings here because they want to learn the culture and I think that becomes a real career enhancement for those of you who do that now I'm not a big fan. from career planning and much more about driving for the things you want to do and doing them and that's about entrepreneurship what about venture capital? he said in a famous techcrunch interview 95 VC has no value and 70 percent had negative value all my VC friends loved that statement but I'm telling you they know there was a major company.

I called someone there and said this guy is destroying this. company right it happens all the time look venture capital has become big business it didn't used to be back then it was a specialized art form there were a few companies and most of them sequoia was started w With Don Valentine, if you know Don, was an operator. but this issue is important these guys earned the right to advise an entrepreneur meaning they had been through the battles they had experience in when a unique situation arose and the entrepreneur wanted advice they had actually been in the line of fire to viscerally understand how to give them advice, most vcs have not earned the right to advise an entrepreneur but feel free to do so in their ignorance and i think you should have gone through a start or at least some experiences significant and are good exceptions to this rule for really advising entrepreneurs on how to build a company and most vcs haven't done that so they give stupid advice you know if you got out of business school and joined a company from vc and you grew up and then eventually became a partner, you haven't learned what it's like to be in a startup, so at our firm we have a rule, you can join, uni rse for three or four years, then you have to stop working at a startup before you come back and I can actually get it, I'll give you the responsibility of advising entrepreneurs.

People get frustrated that their peers at other VCs are sitting on boards and advising entrepreneurs, but you know that's authority rather than influence because you have credibility with the entrepreneur most of the time. I don't sit on boards, I only advise entrepreneurs, and frankly, being on the board is irrelevant on that issue. You have a unique strategy between vcs. You said that I am only interested in technologies that have a 90 chance of failing, but if they succeed, it would change the infrastructure of society in a radical way, how did you come to adopt this particular strategy?

So that's not exactly accurate because we don't care about low-risk technologies. is, we invest in that too but what i mean is venture capital if you think about it it's not it's not a business irr you take any of the greatest hits google facebook twitter you can't predict you know camera like gopro can you predict the capitalization of market can't and can do spreadsheets so we don't allow any irr calculations in our company no one does them no one looks at them when making investments we never calculate an irr because calculating an irr in my opinion is creating the illusion of knowing how big companies are too good for you change any assumptions i made enough business plans to know i can make the business plan do whatever i want or the spreadsheet you know reality is different i dont even think you can plan new companies so , business plans are largely irrelevant, other than bringing key issues to light, the entrepreneur is thinking about how thorough his thinking is, how There's the quality of his thinking, that's the only thing he used, a business plan, so what he's doing. we are really doing an option value investment if you want a financial term if you lose you lose once your money if you win you win 10 times your money your downside is limited to your investment so any time we make an investment I assume we lost it and then there's only one silver lining as soon as you write it in your mind there's only one silver lining that's how I see the world and then you try and take the highest risk and there are times that won't invest with us because they feel that we we take too much risk which is ok there is room for every vc signature style ours is different its all about taking higher risks and a bigger upside 90 chances to fail isnt a problem if its 10 chances out of a hundred times your money if it's the only thing. that worked so you're in pretty good shape and that's not the only good strategy private equity works great with spreadsheets and i just have no interest in spreadsheets so we're not good at it so we know what we do the bad thing is when people who come from that world want to do this type of investment, there can be a mismatch of their personality with the type of investment, but those are all good scenarios and some of them are even better scenarios for irr that what we do i'm sorry i mentioned in your you mentioned just now about getting other vcs to invest with you um and throughout your investing career you had a strong streak of going against the conventional wisdom next juniper generation um i'm curious how you get others to buy into your convictions uh sometimes they do it after the fact sometimes they don't sometimes they don't really know any better so they're confused didos which is nice uh all that stuff happens look there are a lot of really good vcs but there are an order of magnitude more bad vcs.

It's that there are probably half a dozen people that I respect in the vc business and probably the vast majority of them I don't know personally so I won't judge them but out of all the people I know in the vc business 90 don't really add value and really I think 70 percent of them reduce the potential of a company. I could, I could keep asking you investment questions, but I really want to, but this is the right thing to do. 90 chance to fail. you're likely to get that option on a very big play and that's a particular segment of the venture capital business or investment business it's not all segments capital preservation is important in other segments it's just boring to me it's much more exciting to be on a roller coaster where the ups and downs are high and the lows are low so risk taking is absolutely essential now as a pro tip to all of you most can make money and good status and all of that in the regular big companies there's very little that's really interesting the things you can do in big business is shocking, it's shocking to people, but it wasn't walmart that invented retail reinvented, it wasn't amazon that reinvented media, it wasn't nbc, it wasn't youtube that reinvented ed space lockheed was spacex was hard pressed to think of one thing that had come out of a large company in the last 20 30 years that was a materially changing the landscape and the reason is very simple and this is all interesting things have happened at the edges of the system that don't happen in the solid core and all you have to do where things are blurry unclear uncertain if there is a forecast of the market is not at the edge of the system if any analyst has a report it's not worth going to that area right i have a matter about analysts we can get there let's talk about it ok so i wondered afterwards to finish this thinking at the edges where things are uncertain is where all the evolution is and where interesting changes happen in business or society and unless you're there and you learn fast from being there and you're not too arrogant to believe that you know what's going to happen you're not going to be on that learning edge of the wave where new things are happening and as a pro tip i say and that's where failure happens you often want failure to be small and success is very large which is the feature of option value you lose option price but you get option value if successful it all happens in edge in automotive i guess there was a ceo of Uh, actually, I've had three CEOs from the 10 biggest auto companies come in in the last six months and I said I wouldn't worry about building a better car almost certainly 10 years from now, a Volkswagen or a toyota will be a financial entity, not a car manufacturing entity, there will be no notion of marketing to consumers, the auto industry as we know it, i think will go away, go away in the sense that ibm mainframes still exist.

It's still a business. They are relatively static. They are filling an old need, but the number of cars produced 10 years from now will almost certainly be less than half of what is produced today for sale to consumers. Now we haven't had enough for a long time. it's time to explain why i believe that almost certainly and i mean it i gave a talk at stanford med school and said if i wanted to be a good doctor in 15 20 years i wouldn't go to med school if i wanted to be a good doctor i would go to the math dept almost certainly everything they are learning about medicine will be obsolete in 15 years so you can join medtronic or ge medical and do incremental stuff or you can try to learn at the edges where your probability of failure is much higher but the consequences of success are really important and most people in your life in your business reduce risk to the point where the probability of success increases but the consequences of success are inconsequential instead of reducing the probability of success and increasing the consequences of success, which is kind of my life philosophy, believe me, it's a lot more fun than spending 30 years at Goldman, Clark Goldman, you know it's a m fascinating world. w but i really want to ask a question so let me be back ok i just have currents of thought but you asked me to talk about the analysts and the experts yes the experts so professor tetlock when he was at berkeley did research on experts opinion all analysts you read all the mckinsey reports huh and by the way bain and pcg are no different and followed all their forecasts for 20 years 28,000 individual forecasts from 250 experts where when the forecast was made ranked what would be a hit what would be a flop and the book is called expert impeachment so all these great studies that Mckinsey did for 10 years for millions of dollars for at t on what would happen to the cell phone business is a funny story through of 28,000 individual forecasts in 84,000 possible scenarios the average accuracy of the top experts if it was henry kissinger tom friedman mckinsey your forecast favorite budget or average accuracy was about the same for using his w commands like monkeys throwing darts so if you want to base your life on these forecasts and create the illusion of knowing very well do so you will be following a path that others will reinforce because you can give them a data search study or a doom forecast or you can discover the edges where things are happening and changing knowing you don't know and really changing the world now again bringing leadership back is about having a point of view it's about of having an internal compass this is a great point in your life to decide which one you have a belief system, you are going to do what others tell you to do, whether it is written in the new york times, it was written by someone who You don't understand the context, whether it's a McKinsey report. or a ge forecast or a goldman analyst or you are going to do what you believe in and sadly very few of you will. of people is all it takes to be remotely innovative to change society.

I once looked at all the social changes, not just business, I looked at a decade and said for people born between 1940 and 1950 or 1950 of all the people burned on this. planet, if you take the top 10,100 areas and define them, could you find a hundred people in each of those areas from that decade, that generation that influenced change, it didn't matter if it was music, arts, social science research , technology, invention, business? You can't find a hundred areas and you can't find a hundred people who excel in each of these areas in any given decade, so less than ten thousand people born in this decade will influence everything that society thinks happens.

I would like to say that you should try to be one of those people and none of those people will follow any forecast from the analyst they will have an internal compass they will be confident in a belief system and they will make change happeni'm passionate about this because frankly it only takes a few people to change the direction of any industry or any social track you know i think this might be a good time to open up the discussion to questions from the audience so we have caroline and ryan on either side with mike please keep your hands up so one of them can spot you you can also tweet your questions using gsb vft and michelle here will ask you a question actually let's start with the twitter question and i want to apologize , I have to leave shortly after this but my email address is vk Coastal Ventures.com.

If it doesn't answer your question, feel free to submit it. my rule on email i try to judge how thoughtful someone was in sending the email yes sorry ok there are a lot of very thoughtful questions on twitter regarding your belief system can you talk about what exactly is your core belief system and how do you foster that in your team and in your company i know so i decided very early i wanted to work on cool stuff its not very well known but i started the first program programming class at any iit in 1971 we formed a hobby club of four people to learn programming and that was the first instance I know of. from a programming class at any iit a few years later i got interested in biomedical engineering and i was 16 when i started the programming club at iit delhi a few years later we started biomedical engineering program which we just convinced a professor with for us to work and there were three or four of us, so I was in the habit of saying what I want to do and how to do it well, but the core belief system I have is that I want to work on interesting things that I don't want. to bore me and it applies to what I'm doing today.

What I've learned since then is that it's nice to do that, but it's even more rewarding to do interesting things that have a big impact, which is why I measure impact a lot. probably the only vc company that at the first fundraising slide deck we said we care about our ambition which is irr but we care just as much or more about our ambition our mission which is to make positive change and i told my lps if you get a lower rate of return but higher impact will probably pick that because i'm much more interested in that than feeding a pension fund uh slightly higher rate of return as long as it crosses a bar it's very clear to me, so it was kind of cool and interesting at first.

I have no perspective as a 20 year old and over time I said it's much more fun to work on things that make a difference so I just do that we had an investment and someone will tweet this and I'll get in trouble. we're looking for an investment in a company called teespring that's doing extremely well and the partner that's doing it and i said you know you want to invest in these cool teesprings or tees don't expect me to waste time i'm not into tees i'd rather working on a h healthcare solution and that's it again i'm going to emphasize that it's a luxury that i've earned so all of you don't have that luxury and you're not in the same place and i recognize when other people aren't in the same place i never cared what people thought so i had that luxury very early in my life mainly through my attitude which was much more belligerent when i was young but now i can honestly say we built a new building a few years ago and I said as long as health allows I've really enjoyed this and the area I'm working in keeps changing every few years because the nature of venture capital and technology I'm going to do this for the rest of my life. but only do things that really make a positive difference, but also every time you make a difference, you make money and I think when you make money as a consequence of trying to build interesting companies, it has a much bigger impact than if you do it as a transaction of buy sell kind of thing actually if i get a plan business plan that talks about exit on the first few pages i hardly ever read the rest it's good advice can you hear me i'm alina and i actually work for start up medical attention, but I have a direct question about you. i am very impressed by the confidence you exhibit and you obviously have reason to be some people call it arrogance um my question is when you were a child did you get the support from your family that made you feel as confident as you are right? now you know first it's hard to remember i always did my thing i always did things most kids didn't and my parents always think support is probably the right word indian family is very different you never you never did things your parents i really objected , but I tended to do some of that, but I always had a great dialogue with my parents and they actually accepted me very early to be out of bounds for those of you interested in my attitude and those of you who may have children. uh I was a I asked to give a talk at the Harker school here in Saratoga so I gave a talk to the high school kids and I did a presentation and my first slide was something like why you should only color outside the lines.

My second slide was why you should ignore your teachers, my third was why you should disobey parents, um, and yeah, it was kind of funny and the kids loved it, but I'm serious, I'm serious, in fact I believe that instilling an attitude of exploration, not confirmation of a limited set of limits set by others, is what creates this internal compass and belief system and self-confidence again, I say 90 of you will do what What's expected, they know after this, they'll be motivated and then they'll come back and say Oh, that Goldman job pays more. of a tech bubble here In your opinion, are we in the middle of a bubble?

If so, when do you think it will break out? Thank you. Don't know. I know I don't know the answer. yeah thanks thanks for your chat uh pablo fuentes nba 10. um so i think your swashbuckling style is particularly effective if you show some vulnerability so i'll be your friend and let you tell us a story about a time when you crushed me someone's brutal honesty and what you did with it um so look it would take an hour to talk about all my mistakes actually let me put it this way in the last 15 years only once in my life have I called someone and I told him that I would like to speak at this conference and that it was not a popular conference it is something small in a hotel room in San Francisco and it was called fail with where all those who had failed came from and I wanted to talk about this topic of failure there so much bullshit you know the ipad i is so popular we tried to make it probably one of my big mistakes in the late 80's huh and i can go into detail and i'll make it short what i would say is i'm never ashamed of my failings and, therefore if you search the web for my failures you will find many of them and you will find me talking about them it is important because given my philosophy where i screw up it doesn't matter because it is a long list in fact it is a longer list than my successes but how i started with no one remembers the data dump here everyone remembers sun right the number of ventures where i made stupid mistakes i will tell you one of my biggest failures so if you go back to sun 1980s logo or sun model under the logo was the network is the computer and this couple of people started this software program that did routing of ip packets so network traffic was the beginning of cisco now when you say network is the computer and you do these arrogant marketing lines and you forget that routing is the key element and cisco was born as an application on sun and we didn't see it and i thought to myself how stupid i was to not see it when it was happening even when i saw the app, a router was an app on a sun machine we missed the biggest opportunity sun could ever have i can find a hundred such examples the point is to try and fail but be sure to try my other favorite quotes along those lines as we are coming to the end of our time um robert f kennedy said only those who fail a lot can be very successful the classic example of that is elon musk true he said forget supplying batteries to gm they are too slow to make change happen you know i was talk about selling amazon no walmart youtube no nbc think gm or tesla gm spent way more money than tesla space nasus and lockheed spent way more money than spacex i can go on and on every major change so fail try and fail but don't let to give it a try naseem talib in his antifragile book e i recommend everyone read if starting a career as a personal philosophy mine matches and im not talking from black swan but his book called anti-fragile i always love to end with a good red book recommendation i think that's important so i'm not ashamed of my stupid mistakes.

I mean, I think that's the difference. I don't know if I answered your question. When did brutal honesty crush me? show I won't go into detail because a public company or two public companies are involved but I was on a panel with the CEO of this public company and I basically told them how stupid they were and then there was revenge in a roundabout way and that really hurt this other company and literally almost killed the company, sadly because they are public companies. I won't go into details, so that's one example where brutal honesty really hurt me.

Many things occur to me. of people Please look, there are a lot of people in the vc business who don't like me because I tell them they're worthless, but again that's an indulgence on my part, the really good people I don't say that to If I don't know someone well enough, I won't tell them that, but if I do know for sure, I make sure to tell them, more importantly, I tell employers what I think, and often they tell the vc that It's part of life, you know? I want to make sure we have time for one more question, actually a quick announcement before the Roanoke friends of the class of 2010 are welcome to join their family backstage after the event is over to share stories and reminisce. , so this question has become something like that from a view from higher tradition um and all stanford gsb applicants are asked this question on their application however you were not asked this question in 1978 because this question it didn't exist in 1978 it started in the 2000s so this is your chance to answer this question what is most important to you you and why do you know I think it's kind of and I won't phrase this in a benevolent way and I don't mean it that way, I just find it cool to interrupt things for the better and then when I say impact.

I feel like I'm being a troll in various industries and it's a luxury I've earned because I don't need to pay my mortgage and I like to take on new things. enough people are mad at me for saying we don't need doctors i actually don't think we do but we need a different kind of doctor to do a different kind of thing and i wouldn't go to stanford med school to get the best doctors i i would go to ucla film school because the human element of care is important then acting becomes important and that's where most of our doctors will come from in 15 years because of the human element of care and people hate it Doctors hate it when I say that to make the most of the human element of care, you need the most humane human beings and that's not the high IQ people who got into stanford med school actually but what I would say is Knowing that I can make a difference in industries where things are positive is very rewarding and let me end on the note that I actually like working in cos ace my four kids would be proud of me working well and there's this question all of you will face about work life balance so let me end on that note working on great stuff excites me keeps me motivated i like to say that you retire you get old when you retire not you you don't retire when you're old and as long as you're stimulated and excited and whatever your passion is and it may be what I do it might be I want to train them well I think it's a really hard task it's a tough challenge for yes on its own, maybe it won't have a huge impact on society, but I actually love that example of if I got passionate and did that and it's a really hard thing to do, it would be exciting to go for it, so I like challenges hard i like hard things i like to work against the o dds and that brings out my comparative spirit and now i limit it to areas where i think i can make a positive impact or, but not so much on the do-gooder, it's a luxury I can afford, it makes my kids feel better, so Let me end up there for the whole 90's when my kids were little.

I had a rule. This 15 minute time management thing came from the following. I realized that it was easy for everyone to say things and then mean them and not stay. faithfulto them, the most important family, they all say the right words, they are not governed by them, so what I decided to do is get a monthly report of each category of the time I spent, it could be working with entrepreneurs evaluating new companies. be polite talk to reporters be polite because someone said hey my son wants to talk have a conversation i classified my time into 20 categories one of the most critical lines was the number of times i had dinner with my kids at home and set an impossible goal 25 tim is a month and it took me a year or so but I finally made it but more importantly every month I had a report on whether I believed or not.

I believe that the balance between work and life is possible. I wasn't going to the pub well anymore, even though I wasn't playing baseball with friends anymore, I was just doing it with my kids or my son, I decided what my priorities were explicitly and then measured them to fit the bill. own priorities and measure them thank you very much to all of you