ミッキー、来てくれてありがとう。
EN
Thanks for doing this, Mickey.
デイヴィッド、ここにいられてうれしいよ。
EN
David, it's a pleasure to be here with you.
これまで何度も話していて思うんだ。歴史上の偉大な起業家の伝記を、Foundersのために何百冊も読んできたけど、ミッキーの考え方と行動は、まさに彼らにそっくりだ。共通点のひとつが、ラベルを嫌うこと。前にもそう言ってたよね。もう少し聞かせて。
EN
There's so many times in our previous conversations where I'm listening to you speak and I'm like, … Mickey really does think and act a lot uh very similar to like a lot of history entrepreneurs that I read all these biographies about for Founders Podcast and one thing that I think you have in common with them and that you said before to me is that you hate being labeled. Can you say more about that? I think it's a way of always growing up in Venezuela and all my life, you never had people being labeled. I never learned what what what that was about. And every time somebody tried to put me on a label, I fought really hard to get out of it. From hey, are you tall, so you must be play good at basketball? And my first answer is no, I suck at basketball. Just trying to get out myself out of any particular label all the way to are you an investor? Are you an entrepreneur? and say, "What about if I'm both? What about if I'm not any? Why do I need a label?" And the more you walk through life allowing things to have label, the more difficult life is because then you cannot see through it. You just see what you've been told to see. So, I think it's part of my rebel cause to never accept labels.
ベネズエラで育って、人生ずっと、人がラベルを貼られる世界を知らなかったんだ。あれが何なのか、学んだことがなかった。誰かにラベルを貼られそうになると、必死でそこから抜け出そうとした。
「背が高いからバスケが上手いんだろ？」——「いや、バスケは下手だ」。どんなラベルからも逃げ続けた。投資家か、起業家か、と聞かれれば、「両方でもいい。どちらでもなくてもいい。なぜラベルが必要なんだ？」と返す。
ラベルを受け入れて生きるほど、人生は難しくなる。見えなくなるからだ。言われた通りにしか見えなくなる。だから、ラベルを決して受け入れないことが、自分の反逆の一部だと思っている。
EN
Yeah. I think if you're labeled, it means you're kind of conforming to like an existing mold. And I think the great founders, they're inherently non-conformist.
ラベルを貼られるって、既存の型に合わせることだよね。偉大な創業者は、そもそも非順応主義者だ。
EN
Yes. And you have to be non-conformist because the world can always be better. So why accept whatever is there today?
そう。世界はいつだって良くなれる。なのに、今あるものをなぜ受け入れる必要がある？
EN
So when you just said, hey, are you an entrepreneur? Are you an investor? Maybe I'm both, maybe I'm neither. Like today, how do you how do you view yourself?
じゃあ今日、自分をどう見ている？ 起業家なのか、投資家なのか。両方かもしれないし、どちらでもないかもしれない、と。
EN
So I describe myself as an entrepreneur at heart, an investor by design. Such a general line that allows me to do anything, right? Some days I can wake up and be an entrepreneur. Some days I can be an investor. Some days I can be both. Someday I can be something completely different. But a heart means that it comes from a place from inside that if I change my heart, I can just change it. And by design means that if I learn and I keep learning how to do something, I can only get better at it. So I just allow myself to keep learning.
自分ではこう言っている。心は起業家、設計上は投資家。わざとぼんやりした言い方で、何でもできるようにしている。
ある日は起業家として起き、ある日は投資家として動き、ある日は両方やる。まったく別のことだってできる。「心」というのは内側から来るもので、心が変われば自分も変えられる、という意味だ。「設計上」というのは、学び続けて上手くなるもの、という意味だ。だから学び続ける余地を、自分に残している。
EN
So there's really no like you are completely fluid. You don't really I put like a label on yourself.
完全に流動的で、自分にラベルを貼らない、と。
EN
Correct. I don't I try and I avoid it. Uh, the only label I I want to I want to get in life is that people say I'm a great friend, I'm a great partner, and I'm a good father. And if I can get that label, that label I would love to have. All the other ones I don't care.
その通り。避けている。人生で欲しいラベルはこれだけだ。良い友人だと言われること。良いパートナーだと言われること。良い父親だと言われること。それが手に入るならうれしい。ほかは全部どうでもいい。
EN
Yeah. I'm always interested in how people think about like the their own perception of their work because I just had this great conversation with Rick Rubin and I had to like interrupt him one time because he's like, "Yeah, I kind of think of myself as a researcher." And I'm like, "What?" cuz you know people take music producer and now he's a podcaster and you know he's a contiguary to like some of the top artists in the world and he's just like I'm all day I'm just like finding what I'm intensely curious about and just researching that as far as I can
人の仕事の自己認識って面白い。最近リック・ルービンと話したときも、途中で遮ってしまった。「自分は研究者みたいなつもりでいる」と言うから、「は？」と。みんな彼を音楽プロデューサーだと思っている。ポッドキャスターでもあるし、世界トップ級のアーティストの相談役でもある。なのに彼は、「一日中、激しく好奇心を感じるものを探し、できるだけ深く調べている」と言った。
EN
and I think that's what it takes and that's what entrepreneurs do every day and that's what a great investor does every day but you don't get labeled like that but yes I will agree with you
それが必要なことだと思う。起業家は毎日そうしているし、偉大な投資家も毎日そうしている。そういうラベルは貼られないけれどね。賛成だ。
EN
question I went to your um website I've read a bunch of these like what do you call them they're not manifestos what are they essays
サイトも見た。あれはマニフェストじゃないよね。何と呼ぶの？
EN
they're essays Okay. So, I'm very curious. You've only done a handful.
エッセイだ。
EN
Yes.
本数は少ないよね。書くことが、思考やRibbitで作りたいものにどう影響しているのか、知りたい。
EN
Uh I'm very curious like how your writing shapes your not only your thinking but also what you want to build through Ribbit.
書くことがすべてだ。ここで何時間でもアイデアの話はできる。でも文章に落とそうとしなければ、その考えが本当に何なのか、どれだけ深いのかはわからない。
読んでもらっているエッセイは、だいたい最初は20ページくらいある。でも最後は、ナプキン1枚で説明できる。複雑なことをナプキンで説明できるなら、それだけ研究し、言語化できているということだ。
僕たちがやっているのは、まずエッセイを書くこと。それは、今の世界が考えていることに合わせるためじゃない。10年後、15年後の世界に自分を合わせるためだ。想像して、流して、出す。頭の中のQ&A、デューデリジェンス、通話から生まれたエネルギーを外に出す。出して、何が起きるかを見る。
EN
Writing is everything because we can sit here and talk about ideas for hours, but if you're not willing to put them in writing, you will never learn what truly they they are, how deep they are. And what I find is typically those essays that you that that you read, uh, they start by being probably 20 pages long, but I can actually get a napkin and explain to you each one in a napkin. And if I can do that, if anybody can explain anything complex to you in a napkin, it means that they have studied enough that they know how to articulate it. So what we do there is we start by writing our our essays. and our essays. What they are allowing us to do is to not conform to what the world thinks today. It's to allow us to conform to what the world looks like in 10 years, 15 years. Just imagine and let it let it flow. Let it go. Let let that energy get out there. Let that energy be taken from uh our brains and our Q&As and our diligence and our calls. Just put it out there and see what happens.
それがなぜ良いの？
EN
Why do you think that's that's beneficial? because it gives you conviction. If you cannot have conviction, then you're going to be going in mood swings with the markets up and down. If something changes, you got to be able. The only way to really have a joyful investment life or life in general is to try to play this very long infinite game. And the only way to do that well is you have to you need conviction in whatever you do. You got to be willing to be wrong for a long time. But if I write it and we put it in writing and we share it with the world and we get feedback, it allows us to make sure that the compass is in the right direction.
信念（conviction）が手に入るからだ。信念がなければ、市場の上下で気分が振り回される。何かが変われば耐えられない。投資人生——いや人生そのもの——を楽しく長くやる唯一の方法は、とても長い無限ゲームをプレイすることだ。そのためには、やっていることに信念が要る。長期間、間違っていると見られても耐えられる必要がある。
書いて、世の中に出し、フィードバックをもらう。そうするとコンパスが正しい方向を向いているか確かめられる。
EN
How long do they take to write?
書くのにどれくらい？
EN
Some of them can take us a year. Some of them can take us four or five months. But the whole process to get a thesis that we like, sit down, think about it, uh, articulate it, test it, share it, come back, work it, probably like a year, year and a half.
1年かかるものもある。4〜5ヶ月のものもある。でも、気に入るテーゼにたどり着き、考え、言語化し、試し、共有し、戻って磨く——その全体でだいたい1年〜1年半だ。
EN
I know you're a fan of Buffett. You've been a shareholder for
バフェットのファンだよね。株主歴は？
EN
all my life.
一生だ。13歳から。
EN
Yeah. Like
すごい。2015年くらいのツイートで、もう25年持ってる、みたいなのがあった。株主レターも全部読んでいる。エッセイを書き始めたのは、その影響？
EN
since I was 13.
完全にそうだ。初めてのバークシャー株は、ベネズエラで13歳のとき買った。1987年11月。
EN
That's crazy.
なぜ13歳がバークシャーに興味を持つ？
EN
Yeah.
わからない。Fortune誌でバフェットやアメリカン・エキスプレス、コカ・コーラ、いくつかのブランドの記事を読んだ。ポートフォリオのブランドが好きだった。フロートや保険のことは何も知らなかった。その線のビジネスには詳しくなかった。
当時バフェットが言っていたのは、株を買ったらブローカーに置かず、現物で郵送してもらえ、ということだった。ブローカーに置くと、他人がそれを担保にマージンをかけたりするから、と。
13歳で、87年11月にバル・ミツワーがあった。その1ヶ月前に10月のクラッシュが起きて、株は大きく下がっていた。1株分のお金が足りなくて、祖父に借りた。祖父は金利を取った。教えるためだ。1株買って郵送してもらった。ベネズエラに届いて、なくさずに済んだ。それから毎年、年次レターが郵便で届いた。
読んで、蛍光ペンで線を引き、わからない用語を学ぶために、ウォール・ストリート・ジャーナルの小さな本『Understanding Money and Markets』を買った。13歳からの学習は、そこから始まっている。
今の13歳がAIと一緒にバフェットのレターを読んだら、何ができるか想像してほしい。バフェット・パートナーシップ時代のレターまで読ませて分析させたら、とんでもないことになる。でもニュアンスの一部は失われると思う。丁寧に読むとパターンが繰り返される。学ぶべきは、彼が下した個々の決断そのものではなく、どんな環境でも繰り返される意思決定のパターンだ。AIがそれを渡してくれるかはわからない。
EN
I saw one of your tweets. I think it was from like 2015 and he was like think you were holding for like 25 years or something like that at that point. So even more now. And I know you read all his shareholder letters which I'm a huge fan of. Did that influence your decision to start writing these essays?
もう少し。
EN
Completely. So I I bought my first share of Birkshshire when I was 13 years old in Venezuela. It was November of 1987. how
1970年代のインフレのときでも、ゼロ金利のときでも、フロートの扱いについて語るときの型は同じだった。ミクロもマクロも金利環境も関係なく、お金の考え方を定義するパターンが毎回同じだった。
EN
it was my
なぜその同じパターンが特別なの？
EN
Why would would a 13-year-old be interested in in Bircher?
規律だと思う。ノイズをすべて消し、いちばん大事な3つに集中する才能がある。それは十分に研究した人にしかできない。株主総会にも何年も通って、彼に会い、あとで一緒に過ごした。総会に行くのは新しいことを学ぶためではなかった。毎年の新しい経済状況に、あの原則をどう当てはめているかを見るためだった。
EN
I don't know. I had read a few articles uh in Fortune magazine about him, about about American Express, about Coca-Cola, about a certain brands, and I love the brands he he had in his portfolio. I didn't know anything about float or insurance. I I was not very familiar with that line of the business.
リック・ルービンの話に戻るけど、ダニエル・エクが言っていた。19歳でDef Jamを始めて今60代まで、複雑なことをやってきたわけじゃない。シンプルへの愛、足し算より引き算、最高の人と働く、まず自分のために作る——アイデアは4つくらい。特別に聞こえない。でも「誰が40年、同じ4つを守り続ける？」と。それが特別なんだ、と。
EN
I would hope not. And and back then what you you what what uh he used to say was buy it and get it shipped mailed to you in physical form. Don't leave it in a broker house so people can add margin against it. And there I was I was 13. I had had my bar mitzvah in November of 87.
それが特別なんだ。僕たちの書く作業が特別なのも、そこだ。守り続けないといけない。
---
EN
Uh the crash had happened a month before the October 87 crash.
最近書いたトークンのエッセイの話をしよう。長いし図表もあるのに、「ナプキンに落とせる」と言っていた。圧縮は理解だと思う。ナプキン版から聞かせて。
EN
Stock went down a lot and I didn't collect enough money to buy one share. So I asked to ask my grandfather for a loan. asked for a loan which he charged me interest as a way to teach me and bought one share and had it mailed in the mail. It showed up in Venezuela uh luckily I don't know how I didn't lose it and and so since then every year I got the annual letters by by by mail.
考え方はとても単純だ。「トークン」という言葉は人によって違う。Visaのライアンが言うトークンと、Googleのスンダーが言うトークンと、OpenAIやAnthropicが言うトークンは違う。でも本質は同じで、機械が読める情報だ。
だから会社を「トークン工場」と呼ぶ。産業革命の工場に例えると、トークン革命の時代では、どの会社も情報・お金・知識というトークンの供給を必要とし、何かをして新しいものを届ける。
サービスでも約束でも製品でも、届けるにはだいたい3つ要る。アイデンティティを理解すること。価値を理解すること。そこに入る知性を理解すること。
今はまだ序盤だ。まず見えているのは、フロンティアのラボがトークン工場になっていること。ウェブや動画や世界中の情報を取り込み、別の人が消費できる別のトークンに変えている。原材料メーカーだ。
これから数年で、その進化はもっと深く、もっと個人的に、まだ触れていない領域まで行く。いまのトークン工場は、お金にはあまり触れていない。AIが始まって4〜5年目なのに、お金は外側にいる。おかしいよね。お金は本来、いちばん先にゲームに入るべき、代替可能なものの一つなのに。
EN
Yeah. and I will read them and I will highlight them and then I will go and learn that made me have to buy the little book from the Wall Street Journal called Understanding Money and Markets because there were terms I didn't understand in the letter and myself learning came from doing all of that since I was 13. Imagine what a 13-year-old kid could do now with AI. Like if he wanted to, he or she wanted to go through Buffett's letters. And then now it's just this like thought partner and companion compared to you having to buy a book and look at like I I I was thinking about it and I was saying if I were to do it again at 13 now with all of this, I will go to AI and tell them write do me take those letters, find me the Buffett partnership letters from before, which are very hard to find, but you can find them. read them, analyze them, come back to me, give me the like it will be in insane what you can do. Now, I think you will lose a little bit of the nuance because part of it if you read them carefully enough and you you've done it, you know that there's the pattern repeats and what you learn from it is not the decisions he makes. It's how in any environment he repeats the same pattern of decision-m process and that's the most important thing that you get from read it. I don't know if AI can give you
なぜいちばん先に入るべきなの？
EN
Say say more about that.
世界でいちばん流れているものだからだ。すべてがお金を通る。僕の学習の原動力は、いつも「流れ」を追うことだ。何も静的じゃない。お金は静的じゃない。重力みたいに落ちる。水みたいに動く。どこかへ向かっている。エネルギーも同じで、この部屋の光も、今ここで交わしているエネルギーも流れている。
それほど動的なお金が、まだAIに結びついていない。
EN
So it doesn't matter if you were in the 1970s when there was a little bit of inflation or high inflation in America compared to standards and he talked there about how he treated float and how float of insurance worked or in the era of zero interest rates on on on on and then how he talked about float and the cost of float. It didn't matter what was the microeconomic conditions of the world or the macroeconomic conditions of the interest rates. He used the same pattern every single time to define how to think about money.
どう結びつく？
EN
Why do you think that's so special that he used the same pattern?
おそらくブロックチェーンとAIの交差点だと思う。自分の代わりに動く、知的なスマートコントラクトが必要になる。すでに優秀な創業者が取り組んでいる。Stripeのパトリックたちが作っているものもそうだ。
EN
Because I think it's the discipline that he built. He just did find was amazing at taking all the noise away, cancelling noise and focusing on the three things that matter the most. And that only you can do if you study enough. what I learned and I went to the annual meetings for a number of years and I got to meet him and and hang out with him afterwards and all of that for a number of years. To me going there was not learning anything new. It was just seeing how he applied those principles to the new economic economic that every year were around.
ちょうどジョン・コリソンが同じことを言っていて、今やっているのはそれだけだ、と。エージェントのためのエージェンティック・ペイメント。
EN
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それが未来だ。RobinhoodのVladも株式側で同じ方向を見ている。資産のトークン化。知識の側は速く進んだ。お金は遅れている。それでいい。
EN
No.
昼も夜もこれを研究している立場から、この1〜2年で何が起きると思う？
EN
Okay. He's one of like the wisest people I know. And I I just did the right like a couple days after um I filmed that episode with Rick Rubin who again like I've been making episodes on Rick Ruben forever. Like I I grew up loving hip-hop. So he he found a Deaf Jam in his dorm room which is one of the most iconic uh hip-hop record labels. And so like you know for probably a decade and a half I was a fan of Rick Rubin from afar before I got to meet him. And uh then I had like probably I don't know a couple days maybe a week later I was having uh a drink with Daniel and he goes how was the your you know how was it hanging out with Rick? And I was just like what's what was fascinating to me is just like the aura is still there but if you actually analyze Rick and his career Rick Rubin and his career it's just like he had like basically when he was 19 when he started Dev Jam and now I think he's 63 he had like four ideas and these ideas are not … complicated. It's like the the adherence to the love of simp simplicity. uh reduction instead of pro production. Uh always working with the very best people you possibly can. Building the product for yourself first. He's just making literally he is the patient zero.
1〜2年はわからない。AIの速度だと12ヶ月先も読めない。でも、かなり近いうちに見えるはずなのは、特定の機能のために設計されたエージェントが、これまでにないやり方で人の金融生活を面倒見てくれることだ。
NubankのDavidはうまく言っていた。モバイルは銀行をポケットに入れる方法だった。AIは、銀行家をポケットに入れる方法になる、と。
投資の判断や提案、商取引の判断や提案、支払いの判断や提案を、エージェントが代行し始める。時間と、今は持てないアイデアが解放される。正しい方向に進んでいる信号も出始めている。
予測市場もおもしろい。ギャンブルだと言う人もいるし、24時間何にでも賭けられる場所だと言う人もいる。でも重要なのは24時間365日だということだ。エージェントには24時間動けるレールが要る。このレールが全部そろっていく。新しい会社も既存企業も、まだ経験したことのない形で機能を出荷し始めるはずだ。
EN
Y
では誰が勝つ？ Stripe、Robinhood、Nubank——大きな会社の名前が出た。スタートアップ側？
EN
I'm just building stuff that I want to see. And I was like yeah and that's it. And I was like I it's you know remarkable that those are like the components of that. And I was like it doesn't seem that special because they're just so so simple ideas. He's like yeah but who adheres to the same four ideas for 40 years?
彼ら側だと思う。まず、まだ創業者がいる。Revolutもそうだ。その創業者たちが境界を押し広げている。年齢も立場も、初日と同じ飢えを持っている。デイ・ワンのメンタリティのままで、既存勢より速い。
2021、22、23年は、既存勢が追いつくと思った時期もあった。ネオブランドと既存の金融商品に大差がないように見えた。今は違う。AIが、この系統のテック企業にとってニトロのロケットになった。また引き離せる。それが無限ゲームの美しさだ。
無限ゲームの美しさは、勝つことも負けることもないことだ。単に先にいるか、遅れているかだけだ。長く先にいた。相手が追いついた。ルールが変わる。また先に出る。あるいは相手が遅れる。でもゲームは終わらない。
僕は人生も、考えることも、決断も全部そうだ。勝った負けたは考えない。これでゲームの中で先に出るか、遅れるか。そしてプレイし続ける。
EN
Yeah.
永遠にプレイしたいのはわかる。でも競争心はある？
EN
I was like … that is what's special. It's very similar to what you just said about
競争相手の定義は？
EN
that's what's special. Yeah.
僕の業界はかなりプラスサムだ。今日このポッドを聴いて、明日別のを聴いても、僕は負けない。それでも毎朝、できる最高の仕事をしようとする。
EN
And that's why the writing is special for us.
それが競争なら、ある。最善を尽くそうとする。でも他人との相対ではない。他人は見ていない。それぞれが自分のゲームをしている。FOMOを持たないようかなり気をつけている。生きている最後の日まで、このゲームを最善でプレイすることだけを気にしている。勝っても負けても関係ない。それがゲームじゃない。遅れるだけだ。
実は自分について学んだことがある。遅れている方が好きだ。 先にいるときより、遅れているときの自分の方がずっと良い。先にいると、「うまくいっている、正しい方向だ、当たった」となる。するとすぐ蜘蛛の感覚が全部立ち上がって、ルールを変えなきゃ、となる。長く先にいるのは良くない。しばらく先にいて、ルールが変わって遅れ、また革新する。その方がいい。
EN
We have to adhere to that.
だからミッキーは本で読む人たちと同じなんだ、といつも思う。ジェームズ・ダイソンにも会ったばかりで、同じことを言っていた。負ける方がおもしろい。学ぶ量が多い。遅れているのが好きだ、と。
EN
So, do you want to talk about uh the one that you read uh you wrote recently on tokens? So, I love I love what you said like I can you read it. It's very long and there's charts and everything else, but you're like I can distill it down to a napkin. I think compression is understanding. Let's start with like the the napkin version of the token essay and then you can expand on it from there. The concept is very simple. The word token means something different to everybody. If we sat with with Ryan from Visa, the world he defines token is different than the world that Sundar has for token at at Google or the different word that OpenAI has for token or Antropic. They're all different, but they all mean the same. It's machine readable information. So if you think about companies, we call them token factories because just think about the industrial revolution example in this token revolution era where every company needs a supply of tokens of information, money and knowledge and then they do something and they deliver something new. And you need basically three components to deliver any service, any promise or any product. You're going to need to understand identity. You're going to need to understand value and you need to understand the intelligence that goes into it. And right now we're in the early innings. What we're starting to see first is the frontier labs being the token factories. They're taking all information from the web, from videos, from the world, and they're finding a way to ingest it and create a different set of tokens that somebody else can consume. So they are the raw materials providers to these factories. Now, in the next few years, we're going to see that evolution go deeper and deeper and deeper, and it will be much more personalized, and it will be much more complete to vertigo that we haven't even touched. Like today, token factories don't touch money that much. Money has been outside of AI, and we're on year four or five. It's funny because money is supposed to be one of the first most funible things that should be playing the game, and it's not.
100%。遅れているときの方が、ずっと良い。学ぶし、エネルギーも全部湧く。
---
EN
Why do you think it should be one of the the first things to playing the game? because it it's it's one of the things that flows the most in the world. Everything flows through money. Like my my whole life, the thing about what keeps my uh learning going is I follow flows. I believe that nothing is static, right? Money is never static. Money is like gravity. It always falls. It always moves. It It's always going somewhere. It's like water. It's it's never stuck. energy is flowing everywhere from the lights that we're in here, but also our own energies right now. We're creating both of energies and we're we're sharing that energy. And and so I find that um for something that is as as dynamic as money, it is not attached to AI yet on anything.
話を戻す。トークン工場は今ラボだけに見えるけど。
EN
So how does it get attached? I think it's going to be that intersection between probably what blockchains will do and AI will do because you will need to have intelligent smart contracts that will do stuff on your behalf and you can start to see great entrepreneurs and great founders working on it. You can we can talk about Patrick at Stripe and and how they're building all this
いや、アプリ層も出始めている。ボイスAIならElevenLabs、Decagon、Sierra。存在しなかったサービスを、以前は不可能だった形で作っている。あらゆる情報が機械に読まれる世界に向かっている。それが次の世代への行き方だ。
EN
literally when you were saying that um I just heard John Collison talk about this and basically he said that that's the only thing he's working on. It's like a gentic payments for agents.
レターを書き終えたら、次に何をする？
EN
Yeah. And and that's a future. You can talk to anybody in that space or Vlad Robin Hood doing the same for for equities and you can see how they're tokenizing assets and we're in the early innings but we're behind compared to knowledge. Knowledge went much faster. Money's it's behind which is fine.
親しく働いている創業者や、LP（投資家）に共有する。説明責任を負ってもらうためだ。これが僕たちの考えです。信じて歩き続けてもいいし、降りてもいい。出したあと、書いているあいだに出会った創業者たちとその話をしに行く。
EN
So explain because I don't know anything about this and you you study this night and day. So explain what you think is going to happen with this in like the next like year or two.
まだ投資していない創業者？
EN
I don't know the next year or two. It's hard to know because with the speed of AI what happens in the next 12 months
ほとんどがまだ投資していない。テーゼを書いている段階では、まだ投資していないからだ。彼らから学んでいる。途中で1〜2件投資することもあるが、多くはない。そのあと、いちばん良い創業者の一部が読んで、「本当にわかっている。深い。話そう」となる。長い関係は、そこからできる。
EN
or yeah next few months whatever
20代前半の人たちと多くの時間を過ごしているよね。彼らも会社づくりをそのように考え、話している？
EN
but what what I will say is that what we should start seeing very soon is agents that are designed for specific functions that will take care of your financial life in ways that you have never been taken care of. And some of the best founders have articulated this really well. Davidid from New Bank, David said, you know, mobile was the way to put a bank in your pocket. Uh, now AI is going to be the way to get you the banker in your pocket. So, what I expect to see very, very soon is an AI agent that can go and do all kinds of investment decisions, recommendations. He can go do all kinds of commerce decisions and recommendations. and he can start to do any kind of uh payment decisions on recommendations on your behalf and you are gonna start to see how that's going to free time and ideas that you don't have today. We're just starting the signals that this is going the right way. Signals, prediction markets, prediction markets. It's it's an interesting market. People are call it some people call it a gambling. Some people call it a place where you can bet on anything 24/7. But here's the thing. It's 247. And what agents need are 247 rails. So all of this is building the rails to allow all of this to happen. And what we expect is that we're gonna see a bunch of new companies or incumbents that are going to be shipping these features in ways that we have not experienced before.
良い質問だ。している人もいるし、していない人もいる。どの世代も同じだ。いまの20代について信じているのは、史上もっとも賢く、最速で学ぶ世代だということだ。
ポッドキャストを1.5倍速、2倍速で聴くのに慣れている。年次レターが郵便で1ヶ月遅れて届くのを待たなくていい。リアルタイムで読める。情報処理の能力が、僕らの脳が訓練されてきた速度とは違う。
いちばん良い連中は、ビジョンと物語を語り、人を連れていける。でも全員がまだそのスキルを持っているわけではない。学ぶのは超速いが、優れたコミュニケーターとして訓練されていない側でもある。その少数で、もともと埋め込まれている人が強い。
EN
That was gonna be my next question to you. Who do you think actually wins this? Because you just named, you know, three pretty big wellestablished companies. You Stripe, Robin Hood, New Bank. You think it comes from them or you think it comes from a startup?
10歳上の世代と、会社づくりの見方はどう違う？
EN
I think it comes from them. Uh because first they're still founder or Revolute also. They're still founder. Those founders are pushing the boundaries of all of this. They are at an age and they are at a place. And if you talk to them, they're still as hungry as they were on day one. They're still in that day one mentality and they're just going faster than the incumbents. For a while, I thought the incumbents were going to catch up in 2021, 22, 23. I thought they were pairing up. There was not much difference between a financial product offer from an incumbent and from a one of these NEO brands. That's different today. Uh again, AI has just become a rocket uh nitro rocket for the for these breed of technology companies to just accelerate even faster and separate themselves again, which is the beauty of the infinite game. In the beauty of the infinite game, you never get to win or you never get to lose. You're simply ahead or behind. And they were ahead for a long, long time. And then they were the other ones were catching up, but the rules change. What happens? You're ahead again or you the other ones fall behind. But the game never ends. That's the way I live my life. That's the way I think about everything I do. That's the way I make decisions. I don't think about winning or losing ever uh on anything I do. I just think about will this put me ahead or put me behind in the game and then just keep playing the game.
組織図の見方が違う。職能の見方も違う。僕らが受け継いだ組織図は、もう同じようには当てはまらないと思っている。人間が中心であることは、この生涯では変わらない。でも人の組み方はまったく違う。自己組織化している。
メンターの一人がVisaの創業者ディー・ホックで、10年か12年、通って話を聴いた。彼はカオディック組織の生みの親だ。組織化しすぎるな、という信念の人だ。人間の最高の表現は、カオスと秩序の交差点にある。秩序だけだと革新しない。カオスだけだとコミュニケーションが壊れ、崩壊する。だからカオディックが正しい場所だ。
今の若い連中は、この技術時代に訓練され配線されたおかげで、生まれつきその中心にいる。それが働き方の違いだ。
EN
So I know you you play the infinite game. You want to play forever, but are you do you consider yourself a competitive person though?
ディーから他に何を学んだ？ Visaは史上最高クラスに成功しているのに、語られることが少ない。本を2回読んでも、どう作ったのかまだよくわからない、という人もいる。Ribbitの作り方にも影響した？
EN
Define competitor.
した。Ribbitだけじゃない。前のスタートアップにも。人がその組織の中で最良の自分になる方法を、たくさん教えてもらった。面接の定番の質問も、彼から学んだ聞き方だ。
EN
I guess the way I think about this internally is just like I'm in a very positive sum industry. If you listen to my podcast today and another podcast tomorrow, I don't lose on that. But I still wake up every day trying to like do the best job I possibly can.
その質問は？
EN
Yes. So if that's a competitor, yes, I try to do the best.
6つの言葉を渡して、ある順番に並べてもらう。並べ方の歩き方で、その人がよくわかる。1972年ごろにチームへ書いた手紙で、彼が全部言語化していた。
ディーから得るのは、人間心理の理解だ。銀行家はDNA的にリスクを嫌い、評判を気にしすぎる。彼はアソシエーションという法的モデルで、誰もが面子を保ちながら同時にクレジットを取れる形を作った。それが最大の成功だった。誰もやったことのない会社構造だった。銀行同士が競い合っても、ブランドが勝てば皆が勝てる。モデルの美しさがそこにある、と本人は言っていた。人はそこをわかっていない、とも。
90代前半でも、あの落ち着かない心は生きていた。40歳若ければサトシ・ナカモトになれたんじゃないか、と本気で思った。ブロックチェーンを説明してくれた。彼にとってVisaは失敗ですらある。出したのは決済という単純版だけで、もっとやりたかった。いまのブロックチェーンやスマートコントラクトに近い。たぶん60年早すぎた。
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EN
But it's not relative to other people.
若い創業者と過ごす話を続けたい。手を汚すことを恐れない世代だとも言っていた。前の15〜20年は資本軽量、ソフトだけが正攻法だった。
EN
No, I don't look at other people. I don't I Each one is playing their own game. I have I try really hard to not have fear of missing out. I try really hard to just make sure that I'm playing the best game I can to play this game until the last day I am alive. It doesn't matter if I win or lose because you will that's not the game. You you fall behind. Actually, I will tell you that I've learned about myself. I rather be behind. I'm a much better person being behind when I'm ahead. When I'm ahead, it means oh, you guys are doing well. This is going right direction. You were right. This happened. This this played out. And immediately immediately my spider senses get all activated and said okay that means that whatever the I got to change the rules because it's not good to be ahead. You want to be ahead for a while but you want the rules to change to fall behind so you can innovate again.
そう。今の世代はアトムにも手を伸ばす。なぜかはわからない。電話とタブレットとパソコンで育ったから、ビットだけでは世界が足りないのかもしれない。
いちばん面白い質問は、「コロナのあいだ何をしていた？」だ。いちばん成功している連中は、コロナ中にYouTubeなどで何でも学びまくっていた。会社を作るとき、まず世間知らずだから何でも可能に見える。技術もあるから何でも可能。年上には知識と知恵はあるが、動機が弱いこともある。だから年上からそれを引き出す必要がある。
いちばん良い連中は、優秀な年上を自分のところへ引き寄せている。22歳が2人と、かなり年上の1人が小さなハブで組む。新しいOSの知識と、20年の経験が混ざる。
EN
Yeah. This is why I said that you there's so many times when we're talking like god damn it Mickey sounds just like the people I read books about. Uh I just met James Dyson who's like a personal hero of mine y
この先5〜10年、技術面でも巨大な優位を持つんじゃないか。僕らはAIを使うが、人生の他のことも多い。彼らは24時間そこにいられる。
EN
and he said the exact same thing on this podcast. He's just like losing is so much more interesting. He's like you just learn so much. He likes being behind.
その通り。今年は、大学の4年間ずっとAIがあった最初の学年がシニアになる。ChatGPTでエッセイを書いて大学に入った最初の世代かもしれない。
EN
Yeah. He just has that chip on his shoulder. Well, really just the desire to constantly improve. He just feels you're going to improve a lot more when you're like losing or you're behind.
30代半ばの技術リーダーが、「もう無理だ、年を取りすぎた。24歳に潰される」と言っているのを聞く。35歳で？
EN
100%. I'm much better when I'm behind. I learn more. I Everything Everything about it is just gives you much more energy.
年を取りすぎたとは思わない。自分もまだゲームをできる。でも、同じゲームを続けることはできない。20代・30代と同じプレイはできない。ダイナミクスを理解し、彼らに何を渡せるかを理解する必要がある。知恵、知識、彼らがまだ持っていない経験。
いちばん良い連中でも、まだ磨かなきゃいけないのはテイストだ。美しいものをどう作るかを言語化する力。社会が失ったものだ。シリコンバレーは長いあいだ、それを失った。この世代が、美しい体験の届け方に時間を使うことを願っている。
EN
I want to go back cuz I interrupted you. I want to go back to the your idea of like every company's becoming a token factory. Yeah.
シリコンバレーが美しいものを作れなくなった、という話をもう少し。
EN
The only token factories that you see right now are the the labs.
過去15年、成功の指標はスケール、成長、もっと大きく、もっと多く、だった。美しいプロダクトを作ることではなかった。最近、愛おしいと思えるテクノロジー製品を買ったのはいつ？ 「うわ、美しい」と思ったのは？
EN
No. So you're starting to see uh application layers that are starting to show up uh that are building token factories. Think about uh on the voice AI, think about 11 Labs or Decagon or Sierra. They're all companies that are are understanding how to how to they're creating their token factories. They're creating a service that did not exist before in a way that was not possible. We're going to a world where every single piece of information is to be readable by a by a machine. And that's how the world will go to the next generation.
答えるのが恥ずかしい。ダイソンの掃除機。
EN
So you finish writing the letter. What do you do next?
最高だ。その質問をするとダイソンはよく出る。小さな初代iPhoneも、美しかったから持つ人がいる。僕らはその能力を失った。効率とアルゴリズムと、それらの複利に報酬を与え、「どう感じるか」を脇に置いた。
テクノロジーが人生をこれまで以上に覆う世界では、その感覚がまた必要になる。テレビCMのブランドの話じゃない。本物であること、美しくデザインされていること、そばにあるときにどう感じるかだ。
EN
We share it with our um founders, people that we work with closely and we allow them to uh and and our LPs, our investors. Why? Because we want them to hold us accountable. This is our thinking. You have you have the chance. You can walk out or you can keep believing in our in our in our thesis. So we we we we put it out there and then we we go out and we start talking about it with the founders that we met while we wrote it. And what happens
今朝もジョニー・アイブの伝記を読み直していた。感じる、感じる、感じる、としか書いてない。コンピュータは醜くて安っぽいと思っていた彼が、Macに触れて「後ろに人間がいる」とわかる。ヘアブラシの再設計でも、どう感じるかを語る。それを取り戻さない創業者は勝ちにくく、取り戻す創業者が勝つ。
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EN
there founders that you've not yet invested in?
来る直前、共通の友人ニール・メータと電話していて、Revolutのニックの話になった。ニールはあとのラウンドに入っているけど、ミッキーはもっと早く入っていて、ニックをパスした話も覚えている、と。なぜニックの話をこんなに聞くのか。何が特別なのか。
EN
So I know you spend a lot of time with people in their early 20s. Do you feel that this is the way they're talking they're thinking uh about building companies?
ニックを理解するには、育ちと人間そのものを知る必要がある。おもしろいことに、ロンドンにいた頃……社名Revolutそのものが、彼が何者かを表していた。お金の世界に本当の革命を起こしたかった。中途半端はなかった。
モスクワを出てロンドンに来た。トレーダーだった。送金がどれだけ複雑で、難しく、高く、システム全体にとって不公平かに苛立ち、「ふざけんな、変える」と決めた。そのコアのDNAが初日にあった。
そして毎日、それを生きた。毎朝泳いだ。オフィスでは最初に来て最後に帰り、翌日また最初に来る。身体を維持し、ミッションを前に進めることに容赦なく集中した。そのレベルで競える人だけが残る。実行が機械で、止まらない。「このミッションを、自分の生きているうちにやらなきゃ」という状態だ。
EN
Good question. I think some of them are I think some of some others are not like any other generation. What I what I believe the people in their 20s have right now is that they are the smartest, fastest learner generation we've ever had in history. They learn the fastest and it's because they get used to listening to podcast at one and a half, 2x. They they don't have to wait for the mail to arrive with a annual letter a month later. They can read it uh in real time, right? So their ability to process information is so much faster than our brains ever had been trained for. So you can see it in the way they can process. What I think the best ones can do also is that they can articulate a vision and a story and and bring people to follow them. But not all of them have those skills yet. they haven't developed them because that generation as much as they're super smart learning they're also were not trained to be great communicators on the other side. So the few that are great communicators I think they have it in embedded in them.
機械と言ってくれてよかった。ニールは「ターミネーターだ」と言っていた。
EN
How do you think they view company building differently than somebody that's say 10 years older than them?
それは20代後半のニックだ。今のニックは10年後で、さらに良くなっている。例でリードできる。ミッションでリードできる。宣教師にもなっている。テイストでもリードできる。強い意見がある。今も直接レポートは約20人。週7で働き、何週間かごとに2週間休む。働き方の振る舞いが、今の自分に合わせてチューニングされている。
僕たちがチームを支援するときやりたいのは、創業者のDNAを理解すること、何が彼らを動かすか、どう働くかを理解すること。そしてもっと重要なのは、そのDNAがオフィスに、チームに、人に、働き方に映っているかを見ることだ。
EN
I think they look at orcharts very differently. I think they look at functions very differently. They don't think the the orchard structure that we inherited and that we grew up with. I don't think it applies anymore in the same way they did. Humans are key center and they will be for as long as we're alive in in in our gener in our lifetime. But or charts and the way they organize people completely different and you can see it they are self-organizing and I I I love studying this because one of my mentors is Dehawk the founder of Visa and I spent with him almost 10 or 12 years visiting him and and talking to him and he's he's a creator of the chaotic organization. He is the believer that you should never organiza. The best expression of humans are in the intersection between chaos and order. If you're too orderly, you don't innovate. If you're too chaotic, you don't communicate and you break. So chaotic is the right place to be. They are actually doing these kids are doing a great job by pure nature of how they were trained and wired with this era of technology to be in the epicenter of chaotic. So that's how they're working and that's what's different about them.
ニックと、いちばん時間を使う他の創業者を比べると、共通する性質は？
EN
What else did you learn from Deep? Um the fascinating thing a couple people have asked me before because I've done like two or three episodes on Dehawk. He wrote this this great autobiography which is you know tells the story of Visa but then when he was a much older man he also has these two books of maximums called the autobiography of a restless mind volume one and volume two.
みんな、自分のあり方で勝ちたい。自分に正直なら、初日に書いたミッションが今も生きている。その本物さが見えるとき、彼らは勝ち続ける。偽物で押し切って、あとで変わっていく人には、長い目で一緒にいる食欲がなくなる。
EN
Again somebody can compress the language and and give you a lot of ideas in like you know a sentence or two. A lot of people have asked me it's like why do you think you know Visa is one of the most successful companies of all time? I think one of the most profitable per employee companies in history and yet not a lot of people talk about it and somebody asked me one time uh or a few people have actually asked me this like why do you think that is like because it's still very confusing on how he actually built it. I've read his book two times and I still don't really understand. So like what else do you think you learned from Dehawk? Did he influence the way you built Ribbon at all?
それは会社のパフォーマンスにも出る？
EN
Yes.
ときにある。偽物でも巨大に成功する人もいる。確実にいる。でもどこかで、本物さが効く。自分に正直で、価値観を本物のまま保ち、なぜこれをやっているかを覚えていて、毎朝そのエネルギーで起きられるなら、大丈夫だ。
EN
Okay. I don't even know about this.
リック・ルービンが数十年使い続ける4つか5つのアイデア、という話に戻す。長く関係を築き、パートナーとして一緒にいたい創業者に求める4〜5個は？
EN
And not only Ribbit but my my my previous startups too. um because he he he taught me so much about uh how to how to get people to be the best version of themselves in in the kind of organizations that you have to have. Even my go-to question on interviews, it's a question he taught me on on how to ask. So, I've learned so much from him.
Isle of the Tiger（虎の島） と呼んでいるものがある。誰を支援し、どう組むかの考え方で、ナプキンに収まる。ナプキンに書けるということは、十分に考え抜いたということだ。
要するに、科学者のエネルギー、宣教師の信念、パートナーの心、アスリートの夢、オーナーの執着。会って時間を過ごすとき、それらがあるかを見る。あれば一緒にやりたい。
EN
What is that question? I give people six words and I tell them to organize them in a certain order and uh and then the way they walk through that order says a lot about about the person and it was a letter that he wrote to his team in 1972 I think where he articulates all of this. So I I learned that from him. So spending time with D what what you get is that he understood human psychology better than anybody in that era in that particular space. He understood that to get bankers who by their sheer DNA are people that are tend to be risk adverse and people that care too much about their reputation. He found a way through this model of association. His biggest success was the legal model he used. No one had ever done a company in that structure. And association model allow everybody to save face but at the same time take the credit. And that's how he won because it doesn't matter who you were, which bank competed with the another one. It didn't he didn't care because each one can compete by themselves at the same time win if the brand won. That was the beauty of the when you spend time with him, he will say it was the model and people don't get it. So I I find that his rest uh restless mind was alive even in his early 90s because I would have swear that he could have been sat Satoshi Nakamoto if he if he had been 40 years younger. He had explained to me blockchain and what for him Visa was a failure if if you talk to him because he only got to release the simple version of it which was payments. He wanted to do a lot more which looked a lot like blockchains and and smart contracts are today but he was probably 60 years ahead of his time.
何年かけてできた？
EN
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何年もだ。だいたい10年。ナプキンに落としたのは5年くらい前。
EN
Let's go back to um the young kids that you spend time with and the way they think about company building compared to some of your older founders.
自分は忍耐強い人間だと思う？
EN
From what sense?
思う。
EN
I think the founders moving forward like obviously they're going to be way more capital efficient.
今日の答えも「それには何年かかった」が多い。最初の会社は17歳？
EN
Uh I think they're going to own larger percentages of their companies because they're going to need to to um to raise less money. I think you use the analogy of one time if you go back and look at like some of the Robert Barren who owned like Henry Ford owned 100% of his company. Some of them would go public and they own 70 or 80% of the company. Yeah. I'm just very curious like how you think they're going to be building companies again a 21 or 22 year old compared to even like a 35year-old.
17歳。Ribbitはそれから20年以上あと。今14年目。
EN
So the the first thing about these generations they understand that if they play by the rules of of the game they will not win the rules [snorts] of society right now. They will be stuck in student debt. they will be stuck in a in a bunch of problems that they've been watching this through YouTube. They've been reading about it on on social media. They've been seeing that we have spawn an era of of Elons of innovation of Edison people mindsets that it's allowing the mind to really flow and surprisingly capital is right now historically levels of almost unlimited capital access especially if you're younger there's even more capital than before. It's a perfect scenario for this generation to really create and take risk in ways that that you cannot imagine. Funny enough, when you talk to them the most, you will find that a lot of them feel that working on software alone is boring. It's not fun. It's not challenging enough. They want to build physical objects. They want to they want to touch u materials. They want to get their hands dirty in building um stuff that will actually matter and get to our hands one way or the other which is super interesting because that was not the generation of the last 15 20 years. Everybody was trying to go capital light.
実績の話になると、「まだまだ序盤だ」と言うよね。
EN
Everybody was trying to build software only and try to go through the cycles as fast as you can. This generation is not afraid of getting their hands dirty. So it's super interesting to see the behaviors. What's the difference? Why? I don't know. Like maybe they just find that they grew up with a phone, they grew up with a tablet, they grew up with a computer. So it's not interesting enough to limit the world to just bits and bites.
まだまだ長い。すばらしい人と組めた。いいアイデアもある。まだ作っている。Walmartと会社を作ったことすらある。史上初めてのことだ。
EN
But the more time I spend with them, the the biggest thing and the biggest question that I find asking them is because the oldest of the generation are probably 25, 26, the younger are 18. You ask them what were you doing during COVID? And the that is the most fascinating question. The most successful ones right now were the ones that during COVID were learning and were on YouTube sucking information about anything and learning about everything in life. So when they go and and build companies, they find that first they're naive, so they anything is possible. Second, technology is there, so anything's possible. Third, if you're older, you got knowledge and you got wisdom, but you may not have the motivation. So, he they need to find out how to bring that from people. And so, what what you're starting to see is that the best ones are attracting some of the best older people to come join them because they feel that magnet. And
それ、共通の友人セバスチャン（元Rappi）が「Walmartのディールを聞け」と言っていた。
EN
so, the younger people are recruiting the older ones.
僕たちの価値観が少し出る話だ。サム・ウォルトンのファンで、本は全部読んでいた。ベントンビルに行ったのはここ数年が初めてだった。バフェットが一時期ウォルマート株を持って売った話で、昔その会社を知った。
2019年、サラ・フライアー（当時ウォルマート取締役、のちOpenAI）が夕食を組んでくれて、当時CEOのダグ・マクミロンに会った。コロナの数ヶ月前、サンフランシスコ。食事のあとダグが、「ベントンビルに来ることがあったら寄ってくれ」と言った。ベントンビルで何をするかはわからなかった。でもダグに感動した。話し方、マクロの理解、ウォルマートの価値観。全部が本物だった。
チームでウォルマートの店に行き、買える金融商品を全部試した。送金、プリペイド、請求書払い。バグだらけで、1990年代のフィンテックみたいだった。ベンダーもあり、パートナーもあり、自前のカードもあった。
コロナ前の1月に手紙を書いて、「ベントンビルに行けたら会いたい」と送った。OKが出た。ダグと座り、のちにCEOになるジョン・ファーナーも紹介された。二人とも17歳から約30年ウォルマートにいる。ジョンは同い年だ。別の大陸で同じ頃に始めて、同じ部屋にいる。
「金融サービスでもっと良いものが作れる。優先順位の1〜2〜3位ではないだろう。僕たちにとってはそうだ。一緒に考えよう」と言った。
彼らはこれまでやったことのないことをした。共同出資の会社を作り、新しいブランドでロックスターのチームを組み、インフラのために2社を買収した。いまオマルが率いている。OnePayだ。聞いたことのない最大級の金融ブランドのひとつだ。
オンラインの買い物カートでも、店頭でも見える。今ウォルマートでスマホ決済するならOnePay。デビットも、Klarna経由のローンも、分割も、クレジットカードも、何百万何千万のアメリカの消費者への金融はOnePayを通る。
ジョンが中国にいた期間があり、WeChat PayやAlipayのやり方を知っていたのも大きい。インドではFlipkartやPhonePeにも関わっていた。モバイルマネーで何が起きるかを見ていた。創業チームとRibbitとWalmartで、大企業としてはかなり珍しい旅を一緒にしている。
---
EN
Yes. Um, and they're and they're and they're making them work in little uh hubs of two or three with two young ones. They're pairing them
つながっていると思うんだけど。前にあなたかパートナーが南米で作った、コンビニの無店舗銀行みたいな話。ブラジル？
EN
two 22 year old kids with somebody uh much later working in teams together and they're and that's where they're jetting between their knowledge of the new ways of operating systems with the knowledge that you need from 20 years of experience.
Lemon Bankだ。
EN
If you play this out over the next like 5 10 years, don't they aren't they going to have like a massive technical advantage too? Because like me and you use AI a lot, but not we have other stuff going on in our lives where like they can live and breathe it 247.
創業者としてやって、ブラジル最大手に売った。Walmartの話は、同じアイデアを別の場所でやっているように聞こえる。
EN
Yes. And they will. And we just got what this year high school class uh sorry college class is the first one that actually went to college and had AI the four years. We just started the senior class. The rising senior of of college. It's the first class ever that probably use ChBT to write an essay to get to college.
そうだ。
EN
I keep asking questions about these the young people that you hang out with because I've had founders like literally in their mid-30s and they're the technical leaders of their these really successful companies like I don't know if I can do this anymore. I'm too old. Like what do you think you're too old? You're 35 years old. Like yeah, I think I'm going to get smoked by a 24y old.
だから忍耐や長期思考、評判の話につながる。Lemon BankとOnePayは、無限ゲームそのものだ。死ぬまでやる、と言ったのも好きだ。
EN
I don't think you're too old to be honest. And I don't feel old and I I feel I can I can I can still play the game. But you got to understand that you got to play a different game. You cannot keep playing the same game that you were playing in your 20s or in your 30s. You got to understand that the way this dynamics work and what you can bring to them is very different. What can you bring to them? Wisdom, knowledge, give them experiences, stuff that they don't understand. By the way, the best ones they still lack and they they have to refine is taste. They got to be able to articulate how to build something beautiful. That's not easy and it's something that we've lost in society is ability to build beautiful stuff. Silicon Valley has lost that ability a long time ago and we have to bring it back. I'm hoping this generation is the one that spends time thinking how to deliver beautiful experiences.
Lemon Bankは、コンビニなどの拠点に銀行を置かない形で広げた。銀行口座を持たない人たちに金融を届けた。ピークではだいたい7,000拠点、5,000万人の顧客。二度、会社を潰しそうになった。経済が思うように立ち上がらず、すべてを失うところまで行った。
でも洞察は残った。人がいる場所に金融を持っていくこと。20年後、ウォルマートという器で、またそれをやっている。
EN
Say more about Silicon Valley losing the ability to build beautiful things. So if if you if you think about the last um [snorts] 15 years, the incentive systems and every metric of success was wire on scale, grow, go bigger, uh have a more nuance, more but it was it wasn't about building beautiful products. We we have When was the last time you bought something a technology product that you loved
複利の力は社会でも友情でも家族でもいちばん大事な方程式で、毎日一貫してやれ、勝敗は気にするな、という話につながる。バフェットとマンガー的だ。マンガーは、各分野の大きなアイデアを少数学べ、それが荷物のほとんどを運ぶ、と言った。僕の版は、時間がいちばん重い、だ。良い事業にいれば、そこにい続ければ時間が運んでくれる。だから無限ゲームをやるなら評判を守れ、ともバフェットは言う。金はたくさん失っていい。評判は一欠片もダメだ、と。評判をどう考えている？ 僕が君に会いに来た理由にもつながる。
EN
that you were like, "Wow, this is beautiful."
バークシャーの株主総会には18歳から通い始めた。当時はもっと小さく、休日の金曜午後に数百人だった。大会場に移ってからは、冒頭で昔のコマーシャルやインタビューの映像が流れた。若いうちから毎年、ソロモン・ブラザーズ時代にバフェットが証言台で言ったあの一文が流れていた。脳に張り付いた。
EN
I don't even want to tell you. It's embarrassing the answer. It was a Dyson vacuum cleaner.
毎年流していたの？
EN
That's [laughter] great. But and and by the way, Dyson comes up a lot when I ask this question. Uh also the the the
毎年だ。議会での証言のあのライン。国債市場に関する件で。毎年再生されて、毎年覚えた。ああいう生き方をしたかった理由の一部は、それが自分にとって自然だったからだ。だから、評判は何よりも大事だ。
EN
air. Yeah. If you have a daughter or any women in the house like somebody obsessed with Dyson
信頼して尊敬する人は一握りで、その人たちが信頼して尊敬する人を知りたい。キャリアで大きな決断があって、情報が足りず、ミッキーがその情報を持っているとわかった。詳細は話さない。人に会うお願いをほとんどしないのに、別々の2人に紹介を頼んだ。初めて会ったとき……（以下、私的な信頼の話）
信頼は複利だ。一貫して、毎日やる。勝った負けたはどうでもいい。
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EN
product and somebody in your team here was showing us they they still carry the
Nodeの話もしたい。デジタルアートへのこだわり。
EN
given a prize and a reward for um efficiency algorithm uh compounding of those things and we have put aside how it makes you feel. In this world where technology is taking over a lot of of our lives in the way we're going more than any time in history, we're going to need that feeling back again. How it makes you feel. And it's not just the brand with a TV commercial. That's the point I'm less worried about. It's more about what's authentic, what's beautifully designed, and what does it make you feel when you are around it. It's the perfect time that you're bringing this up because right now, literally a few hours this morning. Uh, and the last few days I've been rereading this biography of Johnny IV. I think it's called like Johnny IV, the genius behind Apple's greatest products or something like that. All he talks about is feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling. He didn't think computers were for him. He thought they were ugly and tacky. He starts using a Mac. This is years before even working at Apple. And he's just like, "Oh, there's a human behind this. You can tell there's a actual human that cares behind this." And he all he talks about he's talking about redesigning hair brushes and about how it makes them feel to your point
Nodeは、デジタルアーティストのための場として作っている。次の作品が来ても、インフラは残り、アーティストがそのインフラをキャンバスとして使える。そういう場所が世界にたくさんできると思っている。美術館も変わり、進化する。時間はかかる。
EN
and I think that if we don't bring that back the founders that will do that will win and the founders that don't have that ability they don't have a chance. Right before you came over, I was on the phone with my our mutual friend Neil Ma and he keeps telling me about Nick from Revolute, right? And we were talking about some unrelated stuff and I go, "Oh, I'm about to see Mickey Mouse." He's like, "You got to ask him the conversation we had if he if he remembers because he he said you invested way before he did." I think he's done now the last like two or three rounds, but I think he remembers calling you and passing on Nick. Can you tell like why do I keep hearing about Nick and like what do you think makes him so special?
場所の選び方も、いつもの感じだ。小さなダウンタウンで、わざわざの目的地というより、近所の一部として歩いて入れる。
EN
You got to understand Nick um for how he grew up and who he is to understand who he was. Uh, funny enough, I was in London a few weeks ago because they finally got their bank license approved and there was a chancellor there and some public officials speaking and Nick was there with Vlad the co-founder and I I was looking at my phone and I was remembering when was the first time that we had we had handshake our series A
歴史を読むのは、無限ゲームの一部だ。未来に生きつつ過去を理解する。パリで、反逆者たちが美術館に受け入れられず、印象派が生まれ、この100年の美術の見方を変えたのと、そう違わない。今も同じ瞬間を生きている。おもしろいことにパリではなく、たぶんパロアルトからだ。
EN
and it was literally that same day 10 years before.
パロアルトの最初のNodeはプロトタイプ、と。
EN
Oh wow. And so I I went to them and a show on the phone and said, "Listen, 10 years ago, we were drinking vodka shots because uh to do our round." And what was it about him from day one? First, the name Revolute stand for who he was. He wanted to truly create a revolution in in money. Like there was nothing in the middle about it. He had come to London. He had left Moscow. He was a trader. He was frustrated with how complex it was to move money, how difficult and how expensive and how unfair it was for everybody in the system. And he says, "Fuck it. I got to change this." So that core DNA was there from day one. Uh and then it went he lifted every single day. He he will wake up every day and go swimming. He will work in the office. will be the first one to arrive, the last one to leave, and the first one to arrive the next day again. And he will swim and stay fit and just relentlessly focus on getting this mission moving forward. And people just either competed with him at that level because it was a performance that have a level that execution that it was just a machine. There was non-stop. I just have this mission and I have to do it in my lifetime.
そう。名前のNodeは、ネットワーク上のノードの意味だ。ここで1年かけて技術とUIを磨き、エンジニアが従来のアートとは違うやり方で動かし、それからもっと多くの場所を開く。
EN
I'm glad you said the machine because I think that's what Neil described. He's like he's like a … Terminator.
反逆者への執着は？ サイトにも溢れている。
EN
But uh that was that was Nick in his late 20s. That was who he was then in the late 20s. Now the Nick of today uh 10 years later uh he's he's gotten better. He's gotten better because now he can lead. He can lead by example. He can lead by mission. He's a missionary also now. He can lead by taste. He has very strong opinions on how things needs to go. He still has 20 people direct report to him and he will work seven days a week and then every number of weeks take two weeks off. Like you can see the his behavior of work is fine-tuned to who he is now compared to who he was before. So consistency what what what I like to do is when we back these teams we try to understand the DNA of the founder and we try to understand what drives them and how do they work but more importantly we want to see if that DNA reflects in the offices in the team in the people in the way they talk in the way they they they move and you still go to the revolute offices which is like in now in I don't know 15 20 countries and I've been to the the one in the Middle East in Barcelona in London in the last year and a half you still breathe the that DNA still there. So that's what keeps it going. Uh it's it's a very special way that you got to understand the founder really well to know because each org is very different.
まずスター・ウォーズ世代だ。ベネズエラで育つと、生き残るには反逆者でいるしかなかった。システム、ダークサイド、カオスがそこら中にあった。その上に立ち上がらないといけなかった。
反逆者のマインドセットは、何かがもっと良くなれると、本物として本気で知っていて、そのために人生を賭けられることだ。僕にとって反逆者は在り方だ。世界の見方だ。何かを見たら、どうすればもっと良くなるか、もっと美しくなるか、何が欠けているか、を見る。もっと良くなれる、と常に知る姿勢だ。
EN
So when you say you want to understand the founder's DNA, how do you go about understanding that?
17歳で会社を始める時点で、生まれつきの反逆者に聞こえる。Ribbitを作るとき、その反逆性をどうキャンバスに落とした？ みんな偉大なVCだと言うけど、僕はミッキーをVCだと思っていない。
EN
You got to spend time with them and you got to ask them all the questions and you got to build a level of trust where honestly you don't have to talk about business that much. What kind of level of trust you got to you how do you build that trust to talk to them in a way where they feel that they can trust you back that they can call you when they cannot sleep at night. Those are the things that you got I spend most of my time in the team at Rivet spend most of the time doing which is building that level of understanding and relationship so we know how they behave. Once you know how how people behave then everything's fine because you will see consistency or they will break it. explain why it's important to you to be the person that they call when they have problems. Like you just used the example of like when they can't sleep at night
偉大なVCというラベルが貼られたら、まずラベルが嫌いだし、とても落ち込む。欲しいラベルじゃない。墓石に書いてほしいのは、彼は反逆者だった、だけだ。それがすべてを言う。子供の育て方、妻との関係、友人の扱い、ビジネスの決断、考えを変えること。違うと学べば考えを変える。それが反逆者のマインドだ。
その反対もよく知っている。「うちの子は完璧」「自分はいちばん上手い」。ああいうものからは逃げる。反逆者は常に質問している。学びたい。学び続けたい。人生のある地点で質問をやめ、説教を始める人を、お互い知っている。そこで反逆は終わる。その分岐点を、人生の最後の日まで伸ばしたい。だからすべての行動で、その原則を生きる。
いま伝統的なアートの世界に対しても反逆している。アーティストが別の見せ方で作品を出せるようにしようとしている。Ribbitの設計でも反逆している。「アーリー？」「レイト？」「フィンテック？」「防衛？」——全部「はい」。誰にも枠を決めさせない。それが反逆者のマインドだ。
EN
because all of us have something that wakes us up at night from time to time. And that that particular mind problem that you're trying to solve, it's the biggest thing that you have to get unlocked to keep being the best version of of of yourself. And when you're there, sometimes it's really hard to trust if it's a vulnerable question. Sometimes it's really uh deep and has a lot of strategic consequences and you want to be really you're you're going to your mind a lot. And if we get that phone call, it means that we did a hundred things right to deserve the right to be there to help this person think through it. Never answer the question. Just help him or her answer the question. And that meant that you were able to talk about life and family and you were able to talk about society and politics and you were able to talk about everything because that's the only way you're going to get to really help this person answer the question.
創業者として考えている。2012年に投資会社を始めた決断は？
EN
So you have a in many cases, you know, decade plus relationships with a lot of the founders that you back. How does like can you compare like Nick to the other ones? Like what what are the traits that you think they share among the people that you spend the most time with? Well, they all want to win in their own way of being. They care about if they are true to themselves, they still the mission that they wrote on the first day is still present today. And when you find that authenticity, they win. So the ones that are authentic are the ones that you can keep seeing. the ones that faked it to make it and then they change and then they move and then they those are the ones that over time you just don't have the appetite to spend time with. It's not
投資会社だとは思っていない。
EN
is it reflected in the performance of their company too?
もう少し。
EN
Sometimes you
僕にとってはスタートアップだ。会社だ。自前の技術スタックを作り、小さなチームで、自分たちを反逆者だと思っている。ミーティングはTattooingと呼ぶ。ジェダイがいて、そういう振る舞いをしている。
EN
and you have people that fake it and then they build massively successful companies. Yes, they they are for sure. But sometime somewhere somehow down the line, authenticity matters. And as long as you're authentic to yourself and you keep your values authentic and you remember yourself why you're doing what you're doing and you can wake up every day with that energy, you're you'll be fine.
本当にスター・ウォーズ好きなんだ。支援するのはジェダイ？ 自分たちがジェダイ？
EN
So if we go back to that idea that Rick Rubin has like these four handful of ideas, could be four, could be five, could be six ideas that he just used for over multiple decades. What would like be the list of traits uh that you would if I said hey list out the four or five things that you want the founders that you want to build long-term relationships with and partner with over long term to have what would those what your answer might be?
ジェダイを支援する。ウーキーもいる。ジェダイでもある。テーマが本当に生きている。本物じゃないとダメで、Ribbitで働く全員がオーナーシップとチームワークを感じている。
投資会社は多くの面でサイロだ。好きじゃない。社内でも過剰にコミュニケーションしたい。今この瞬間も、チーム全員が僕たちがここに座っていることを知っている。全員が僕のカレンダーと受信箱を見られる。メールも見られる。僕も誰のメールでも見られる。情報を全部共有して、チームとして良くなる。この環境ではかなり反逆的だ。
意思決定も個人ではやらない。グループでやる。「あの会社の担当パートナーは？」と聞かれても、「どのパートナー？」となる。創業者はミッキーにこれを、ニックにそれを、ジャスティンにそれを、と電話する。ただ一緒に働くチームだ。だから毎日オフィスに行くのが楽しい。チームといるのが好きで、一緒に楽しんでいる。
EN
We have this thing called the aisle aisle of the tiger. It's our way of thinking about the people that we want to back and how we want to partner with them and as I told you before it needs to fit in a napkin. So if we wrote in a napkin means that we've thought about it long enough that we have it right and it's basically the energy of a scientist, the conviction of a missionary, the heart of a partner, the dreams of an athlete, the obsession of an owner when we meet them and we spend time with them. We want to make sure those things are present and if they are that's going to be that we want to partner with. How long did it take you to develop? Like how many is this over several years where you guys figured out these like these reoccurring traits?
前に何社やった？ これが6社目？ 5社目までと見た目がまるで違う。5と6のあいだの洞察は？
EN
This is several years. This is probably a decade to actually we probably put it into a napkin uh 5 years ago. So yeah, it took us almost 10 years.
無限ゲームの中で、正しいやり方を学ばなきゃならなかった。今度は正しくやる。前の会社は成功し、世界中の多くの人の人生に影響を与えた。それでも自分は失敗した起業家だと思っている。
EN
Do you consider yourself a patient person?
それはおかしい。なぜ？
EN
Yes.
最高の起業家は、会社を売らなくていいからだ。
EN
Several of the questions I've asked you today is like, "Oh yeah, that took a couple years." And that took a couple years. You started your first company when you were what, like 17?
（拳を合わせる）それだ。
EN
17. And you didn't found you founded multiple companies but you founded Rivet 20 years later. More than that.
だから20年かけて、構造、文化、チーム、知識、開度、ブランドを設計し、それらの価値を複利で積み上げ、永遠に何かができる場所にたどり着く方法を学んだ。
EN
I founded Rivet uh much later. I founded Rivet uh almost third uh 20 Yeah. 20 years later.
無限ゲームだ。ニック・スリープの好きな一文がある。「最高の投資家は投資家ではない。売らなかった起業家だ」。
EN
Yeah.
100%同意する。
EN
21 years later. You've been doing it for almost what?
面白い。事実としては成功イグジットもあるのに、永遠にできる器を見つけられなかったから失敗、と。僕もここ5年くらいで外の世界が来て、周りの人を厳しく見極めなきゃいけなくなった。年上の成功した起業家たちに「気をつけろ、マンガーの言うとおり多くの人は毒だ」と言われる。会いたい相手について周りに聞くと、ミッキーの話になると「無限ゲームに取り憑かれている」と返ってくる。金はもう要らないし、もう一案件やる必要もないのに、止められない、と。
EN
14 years now.
これは喜びだ。毎日良くなって、改善し続けている感覚だ。
あるときチャーリー・マンガーと隣に座った。ウォーレンのあとの集まりで、ホッピー・ホロウ・ゴルフクラブだった。バークシャー株は1株だけ。24か25歳。彼が「この席、空いてる？」と聞いて、「どうぞ、チャーリー」と。話し始めた。部屋にはビル・ゲイツも、大企業のCEOもいた。桁違いにいちばん若い。
彼が僕を見て言った。「ここにいるってことは、相当な金持ちなんだろう」。
「いや、1株しか持ってません」。
「わかってないな。お前がこの部屋でいちばんの金持ちだ」。
「違うよ、チャーリー」。
「違う、お前だ。なぜか。時間の力がある。ここにいる僕らは最後の章にいる。お前は始まったばかりだ。これからの70年、複利が効く。今から言うルールを忘れるな。リッチになるのは一度でいい」。
それで食事を始めて、食べた。
EN
14 years.
時間は唯一の真の……
EN
Yes.
唯一の真の通貨だ。
EN
And I heard you say before it's like, well, everybody's like, well, you guys had this fantastic record. You've done all this. You're like, yeah, it's like super early.
今日、時間を割いて話してくれてありがとう。
EN
We got a long way to go.
呼んでくれてありがとう。
EN
Yeah. Uh, we found amazing people to partner. We got great ideas. Um, we're still building. Um, I mean, we build a company with Walmart. I mean, think about it. It's just, it's the first time ever that that has happened. It just speaks to a little bit of of this value system of ours. David, we had a chance to meet uh I've been a fan of Sam Walton all my life, right? Same. And I I had read every book. I had never been to Bentonville until a few few years ago, Were they selling them themselves or there was like vendors inside? operating out of all the Walmarts. I found one of my all-time favorite quotes when I was reading the book 0ero to1. The quote says, "The single most powerful pattern [music] I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places. And they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas. That is exactly what apploven [music] has done with their advertising platform. Apploven connects you with over a billion potential new customers [music] inside mobile games. Apploven allows you to capture undivided attention. Apploven ads are full screen video ads that are watched for an average of 35 seconds. That is retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water. And you can launch on Apploven in minutes. You set the goal and Apploven achieves it. There's no complex setup, no expertise needed, and Apploven scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results, have [music] scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day and increase their revenue by millions. So, you want to get started quickly before all of your competitors are on Apploven. And you can do that by going to apploven.com. That's apploven.com. What was the business that it was either you or your partner built? It was like this bank, this branchless bank in convenience stores or some … like that in South America. In Brazil. Okay. What was the name of that? Okay. Lemon Bank. Is it sounds like you almost took like an idea that worked in Lemon because you guys you were the founder of that or Yes. Okay. And then you we'll explain what lemon bank is, but then you sell it to the biggest bank in Brazil, right? Is this not the same idea but kind of with Walmart? This speaks to why keep I ask you if you're patient as you are the traits that like that you you notice in the greatest founders because I noticed them in you. So, like patience, long-term thinking, uh, reputation, which I want to get to in a minute, which is how me and you actually met cuz you helped me like I had a big decision to make in my career. And like your reputation preceded you, and I was like, I actually need to meet this guy cuz I have some some questions for him. you you you talked about the infinite game earlier. It's like, I'm going to do this to like die, which you just said, which I … love, by the way. And you're I'm hearing you talk and I knew the rough shape of the Walmart thing. I didn't know what it was called. I'm like, wait a minute. Sounds like Lemon Bank. Okay. Explain the connection between the two. When you're playing this [snorts] life game and it's infinite being ahead or behind in 2003 when we started that business in Brazil and I lived there for three years and grinded few times almost died trying this business and we almost killed the business twice along the way. I almost lost all the money I have ever made. How? Wait, we got to pause there. We're going to get to what it does. How did you almost lose all the money you ever made? You had no investors or you You put all your chips back on the table? So, wait a minute. You're a 25-year-old kid wanting to build essentially like a branchless bank. Is that how you describe it? And your idea at the time is to set these little like kiosks. What are what called? era. So we had to build all of this and run all of this. We had at peak we had 7,000 of these physical spaces all over Brazil. We were serving 15 million customers. Half of Brazil back then was unbanked. That was the opportunity to bank them. We were the first to bank them to 15 million people. So 2008 that insight then comes into play tw what is that 12 years later you're starting to talk to Walmart in 2020. no there was they public facing app it was not no customers And that's the power of compounding. Yeah. This is like a very Buffett Munger kind of thing like uh Mer has that that line where he's like you know you need to learn the big the few big ideas in each discipline. they carry most of the freight I think is the way he describes that and uh through all this reading I was like my version of that is like oh time carries most of the weight like if you're in a good business like just stay there and time will actually carry most of the weight uh to what you want to do and so that leads if you're going to play the infinite game then and you you want to do things over long term you have to protect your reputation which is another thing that Buffett would repeat in his shareholder it's like hey we can lose money we can lose a lot of money actually we can't lose a shred of reputation I want to know how you think about reputation and then I want to and then I'll talk about why it's so important, how it led me to you. So wait, they replayed it at every annual meeting. And they played it every single year and I remember it every single year. And part of the reasons why I I wanted to uh live that life is because it it was natural to me. It was the way you wanted to live life. So yes, reputation matters more than anything. It is the most valuable asset. It's the only asset we have. It's a reputation. Everything else can come and go, but that's the one thing that we have that it will always stick to us even when we're dead. No, I haven't heard him talk. It's very fascinating. So I told you right before we started recording that I got the art piece that I ordered at Node. I was I don't even know how to describe the fact like I could spend about an hour there with you. Can you just describe what the hell note is and why you're doing it? that's the one I saw. Not the art you have hanging on the walls. Yeah. And it's a place where you come and you get your hands on with the art that speaks to the future. And we put this place in downtown Palo Alto for a particular reason because Silicon Valley needs creativity. We need to bring it back. So our contribution to society is put it in a place where people can actually walk in and see it. And we've opened it five months ago. We had close to 60,000 people show up already. Every weekend we're breaking records. It's free. It's open. And people are interacting. And the most beautiful things kids are bringing their parents. So you tell me the last time you went to a museum where the kids are telling, [laughter] "Dad, let's go in." Exactly. So that is the difference. So I think we need it going back to beauty, to taste, to creating authentic stuff. And these artists are the most authentic people right now using digital tools. So let's show them, let people interact with them and let that be the driver for entrepreneurs to use it in their own practices. The location that you picked speaks to again the the like you're kind of just identifying what's the way they did it and like what's the way I should do it now where like you can walk into it. It's like in a very like small downtown area. Yes. And so you look at the the first node in Palo Alto almost like a prototype. Well, first, I'm a Star Wars generation, right? And uh I grew up with Star Wars. I'm a big fan of Star Wars. And to me, growing up in Venezuela, you the only way to survive in that environment is you had to be a rebel. The system, the the dark side was all over, the chaos was present. uh you had to raise above above that and the rebel mindset is one where you know authentically and genuinely that something can be better and you're willing to give your life for it. To me being a rebel is just a way of being. It's a way of looking at the world and when you when you see something you can always look at it and accept how do you make it better? How do you make it more beautiful? How can what what's missing? Like just that mindset of always being willing to know that better means it can still be better. Yes. Yes. If I end up being labeled as a great P. First, I hate labels and second I will be very depressed because that's not the label. I want no labels. All I want in my tombstone is to say he was a rebel. That's all I want to be said there. And that will say everything about me. The way I raise my kids, the way my relationship with my wife, the way I treat my friends, the way I make business decisions, the way I change my mind, I'm willing to change my mind if I learn something that is different. That's a rebel mindset. Everything that is the opposite is a mindset that I know too well. My kids are perfect. I'm the best at what I do. And I run away from any of those things. Actually, I I find that the rebel mindset is one that you are always asking questions. You're a rebel. You are non-stop asking questions. You want to learn. You want to keep. But you and I know a lot of people that get to a point in life when they stop to ask questions and they start to preach. That's past the rebel time. And everybody has that breaking point somewhere in their lives. I want that to be the last day of my life. So I need to live by that principle on everything that I do on every behavior on and like I'm reing now against the traditional art world. I'm trying, you know, to allow artists to show art in a different way. Uh we revel at Rivet the way we design it. We were people were asking what are you? Are you a venture guy? Are you an early stage guy? I'm like yes. Are you a late state guy? Yes. Are you a fintech guy? Yes. But are you doing now uh defense or Yes. like yes what's wrong like I'm not going to let anyone allow that that's is the rebel mindset I don't think of it as an investment firm to me it's a startup it's a company and we build our own technology stack and we have a small team and we consider ourselves are rebels and our meetings are called tattooing and we have Jedis and we behave Yes, completely. And uh and We we back Jedis. And and we have Wookies and we are Jedi. We have the whole thematic truly alive in the way we think because So like what was the insight between five and six though? That's absurd. That's what you got to say. Like why? Okay, another fist bump on that. There you go. This is the infinite game. 100% [snorts] agree. which is again when when again like um being relatively known in like this community in the last like 5 years for podcasts and I didn't understand cuz I sat in a room by myself for a decade and just talked into a microphone and read books and I didn't think about the outside world at all and then everything kind of came to me and so now I have to like constantly vet everybody around me and I get a lot of advice from like especially like older more successful entrepreneurs are like, man, you have to be so … careful with like cuz there's goes back to Charlie Mer. It's like most people are rat poison. Yeah. Yeah. But it's it's this joy. It's this thing that every day you get better and you just are improving and uh you know I sat with Charlie Mer once uh in one of after another meeting uh at the Hoppy Hollow Golf Club where Warren had this thing afterwards and I saw myself and I only had one stock of Persia. I was probably 24 years old and 25 and I sit next to him or he sits next to me. I'm sitting. He says, "Hey, is he sit taken?" I said, "No, come on. Sit here, Charlie." And we started to talk and and that room was everybody. Bill Gates was there, all these big CEOs of all these companies. And I was like the youngest guy by an order of magnitude. And he looks at me and says, "You must be very wealthy to be here." And I said, "Actually, no. I only own one share." He says, "You don't get it. You are the wealthiest guy in the room." And I said, "You're wrong, Charlie." "No, no, you are. Why? You have the power of time. All of us here are in our last chapter. You're just starting your time. You will compound for the next 70 years of your life. So, never forget the rule I'm about to tell you. You only need to get rich once and then that was it. He says, "And now I'm going to eat and just sat down and eat." It's the only true currency you have. Thank you for having me.
このエピソードが役に立ったら、購読とレビューをお願いします。もう一つの番組Foundersもぜひ。約10年、歴史上の偉大な起業家の伝記を400冊以上読み、仕事に使えるアイデアを探してきました。この番組のゲストの多くは、まずFounders経由で僕を知ってくれました。
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EN
Okay. I just heard about this. We have a mutual friend, Sebastian, founder of former founder of Rappy, and he's like, tell him about the deal he did with Walmart. but I had read everything about him and had follow and I remember Buffett owned the stock for a particular period of time until he sold it. And that was when I first learned about Walmart back in the day. And uh in 2019 through Sarah Frier who's now OpenAI but she was uh she was on the board she's on the board of Walmart. She organized a dinner where I had a chance to meet Doug McMillan, the CEO at the time and we had a lovely dinner in San Francisco a few months before co and Doug says after dinner he says listen if you ever find yourself in Bentonville come visit me and I'm like I don't know what I'm going to do in Ventville but uh so I left the dinner I was so impressed by by Doug his way of speaking his understanding about macro the world the values of Walmart everything was so present in in him at that dinner. Uh it was a small dinner so it could have been something different but it was authentic to him that uh we went as a team to couple Walmart stores. We tried every financial product we can buy. We could we did remittances prepaid car bill and we found bugs and we found all these things that looked like 1990s fintech. They had vendors and they had partners and they had their own Walmart car. It was a whatever card. So I wrote him in January before co I said listen if you're invent I'd love to go see you and lo and behold he said yes showed up sit down with with dog and he introduced me to John Ferner who's now the CEO of Walmart who's alongside with dog they were there for almost 30 years at Walmart both of them since they since they were 17. And John is my age. So we're we started at the same time in two different continents and we were sitting in the same room talking about this and I said listen you guys can build something much better with financial services here. This is not your priority number one, two or three. It is for us. Let's figure it out. And they did something that never they have never done. They created a JV a company that we both … and we went together and built a rockstar team with a new brand. We bought two companies and to build the infrastructure run by Omar is smile today and it's called Wii and it's one of the biggest financial brands that you've never heard of You will see it online on every shopping card experience on Walmart. You will see it the retails everywhere. If you want to pay with your phone today, the only way to pay at Walmart is with One Pay. If you want to have a debit card is the only way you want a loan from CLA, it goes through One Pay. If you want an installment loan, you want a credit card, it goes through one pay every single financial product to millions and millions and millions of American consumers. And the beauty of that is that with John being and this is the beauty of the Walmart culture. John had been in China for a number of years that he had learned how uh we pay worked and how Alipay did business. They were investors in India and Flipkart and Phone Pay. So then they saw what what could happen with mobile money. They have been the greatest partners to have. And so together between the founder team, Rivet and Walmart, we have built this amazing journey together that is quite unique for a big corporation like that. Tell me if I'm I'm connecting things that are unrelated or not, but I don't think I am. It was called Lemon Bank. Yes. Yes. So, this is what I mean. It's like Yes. That's a infinite game right there. You just you just said it yourself really well. Because when I when we we had sold our first uh.com company and then uh use all the proceeds to start this bank in Brazil. I move with my wife to Brazil. We were living there. No, we had no investors. It was just my business partner Wes Kazarez and myself and my All the chips back on the table. We were 25, 26. So, and almost lost everything because the economy didn't take off no matter what we did. We just couldn't, which is how you learn that macro matters. And I learned that growing up in Venezuela with hyperinflation and devaluation. But then another thing is to leave it also when all your money is on the table. Yes. They were they were there were three models. We had uh we had uh inside existing stores at checkout. We had kiosk inside stores which was a hybrid model and we had franchisee little stores that only did our our payment systems because this is before the smartphone, right? But it was mobile uh or a lot of but so we had to it was a hybrid of 2003 2007 Unbanked. So that was the opportunity. So essentially you did like the leg work for the the largest bank where now we we've attacked this customer segment that you haven't like succeeded with. We succeeded. You essentially you know rounded up a bunch of now customers for them. They want to buy you right. So you sell in what year? 2008. Yes. And that's the long game. That's the infinite game. And uh and by the way you can tie every single one of our decisions in that we've made like were big decisions like that in the Rivet life to something that happened to me 20 years before. This is really important for especially for younger entrepreneurs because you said earlier like there there's just something wrong about you know like we're optimizing for just like start scale sell right where it's like you know some of your partners you've been partners with for 20 years some of the people you've backed you met Vlad at Robin Hood when I don't even think they had a product yet there was not a an app right so your relationship with them was for like 15 years it was like I always say it's like when when I've read you know all these biograph raphies for the the other the podcast I have. It's like just stay in the game long enough to get lucky. It's like so much stuff is not predictable and I think that maximum so just stay in the game long enough to get lucky. So you built a massive business 12 12 years after you built you know a very successful business but in South America now think about the scale of Walmart. This is like not comparable to anything else. Yes. And it's compounding relationships and ethics and work and principles and love and passion and time and just don't care about the winning or losing. Just let it be because the power of compounding is the most important equation on in in society and everything on friendships on family. Just be consistent work every day. I started to go to uh the Bersa annual meetings when I was 18. And back then they were much smaller. They were on a Friday afternoon on a holiday in a couple hundred people. Uh and as soon as they moved to the to the bigger convention center a few years later, they had this movie clip playing in the beginning of the annual meeting with a bunch of TV commercials or or Buffet interviews over the years. And every time since I was a young in that age, they were playing the Buffett getting deposed when he was the chairman of Solomon Brothers saying that line that you just said. It got stick in my in my brain. Every annual meeting it was there that deposition that was that he said that line on a deposition um at Congress for something that Solomon Brothers was doing with the treasuries uh arbitring the or taking advantage of the treasury issuing market. Yeah. There's a handful of people that I really trust and admire. And then the people I trust and admire, I want to know who they trust and admire. and I had a decision I had to make and I wasn't sure how to make it. Um it was there was a lot of uncertainty. I didn't have the information I needed and realized that you were actually in possession of this information. We won't talk about like the details of this and I actually never almost ever asked to meet people and I asked two separate people. I was like do you mind making this like introduction for me and then the first time we met we actually wind up talking for like several hours which and then we like became like fast friends. But I made a big decision in my career based on how fantastic your reputation was. And so therefore almost like uh Charlie Mer has that great line where like trust is one of the greatest economic forces in the world. And it's like the level of trust that you have built up over excessive long time with people I trust made me be able to build a relationship and trust your judgment really fast that I could make a decision based on your reputation. And I think this is super important. It's also something that comes up over and over again like um I I did this episode um on Jensen. There's this book called The Nvidia Way, which is kind of like half biography of Jensen, half company history, and it talks about he pitched Don Valentine. Don Valentine's still alive, still making the investment decision of Sequoia. And Don's like, "That was the shittiest pitch I've ever heard. I'm still going to give you money because your reputation precedes you and it's so excellent. It's so valuable. You know who also shaped my thinking on this? It's like, have you ever heard Palmer Lucky talk about reputation? Have you? So, he says the exact same thing. He's like anytime he thinks this idea where like if people tried to destroy reputation, uh, like you should just, you know, rise above the phrase. It's like no, this is … because you have to fight back because the problem is it forecloses opportunities. If this person is damaging your reputation and it's not true, it's going to foreclose future opportunities. And it's not like if somebody and his whole point is like this is invisible. And I thought it was really interesting insight. He's like if some if somebody I let somebody destroy my reputation and unfairly and two years later I asked for a meeting with a guy who took that story and believes it. He's not going to tell me I'm not taking the meeting cuz your reputation sucks. He's going to make up some other story. So he's like, you have to protect it and then fight against it. I thought it was interesting. It's very like a Ben Franklin kind of idea because Franklin would nurture and then also protect and fight back against his reputation 250 years ago. I love it. I didn't know that about Franklin. I'm going to read more about that. Yeah. So, I think it's in the spirit of being a rebel. Um, so my wife and I, we love art. We find that art is beautiful. And when you find stuff that speaks to you, it has an immense value. It's been around all of us since the caves, right? It's it's always been there. And five years ago, we stumbled upon digital art for the first time. I was on Twitter scrolling and I saw an art piece that looked something very similar to a physical art piece we had from the 70s. And then we got into it and started to find other artists in digital art that were doing beautiful stuff that match something beautiful in history. So we started to pair them together and that journey took us like any journey to get to know the artists because what's the difference of these artists? They're alive and and they're all here and they all are using they all study computer science one way or the other and they just decided to be artists and tell a story in a different way. Once you start to meet them they were rebels in the complete expression of of the word the same way we were describing some of the rebels in in companies like think about right now we're running a show on people. Think about That's the one you show. So, think about people. Think about an entrepreneur who decided for 5,000 days to do an art piece every single day posted online so he can only get better. His goal was he read a book that said, "If you do something every day, you will only get better at it." And he started in 2007 sketching, 2011 started to use Photoshop, 2014 Cinema 4D. And so the software evolves and every single day posted a image online that no one bought. People paid attention and just made fun of it or congratulate him or or jump against it until in 21 he sells the first 5,000 days. What is it that 14 years for $69 million and suddenly it's like an IPO moment. No one pays attention for a long time. You sell it. What does an a real rebel do? He said, "Fuck it. We're going to double down. I'm going to build a studio. I'm going to start building a lot more stuff that I couldn't do before." And now he's one of the most prolific artists alive. All he does is work is digital. And he's not the only one. People see crypto punks and they see a JPEG. Actually, I see a movement. I see a cultural artifact. The first art onchain ever created and it happens to be portraits. Guess what? Every single art movement in history starts with portraits. They always involve the portrait. So the story is we went to the museums and we said this art should be seen because at home we post we get we put it around our house and all my kids when they were teenagers and brought their friends guess where their their attention went. It went to this. 15 20 minutes in front of it talking to it interacting asking questions. No one didn't understand. We go to the museums and they said, "Yes, we can do this 2028, 5 years from now, four years from now, and we'll have to find a curator who's going to curate what the artist wants to do." And my wife and I look at each other and said, "No … way. This needs to happen today." So, Node is the first digital art studio designed for digital artist. It is a space where the artist is his own curator because that's what rebels do. you you design how you want to show your art. You don't let somebody else tell you how you want to put your art. But this is what I meant about like you're way more entrepreneur than you are investor because you just like like when you when you start a bank for the unbanked in Brazil, you're like, well, I'm not going to open up branches. is I'm like what opportunity what's the white space that these incumbents are not I'm a rebel what is the white space that these incumbents are not attacking well you just said like the museums are like they they don't have the infrastructure to to display digital art and like me I went to node with you like the walls are like customizable the next how the people's in there for what like two months something like that yeah and then the next one comes in the infrastructure is still there but now the artist gets to essentially use the infrastructure as a canvas for his for his his or her art We think the world will have a lot of these places. Museums will change. They will evolve. It will take a while. It's not it's not like a destination in and of itself. It's something you could just it's like part of the neighborhood if that makes any sense. If you read history, which is part of the beauty of playing infinite games where you have to live in the future but also understand the past. This is not very different that what happened in Paris and in with the rebels and in their art movement when they were not accepted in the museums and this is how the impressionism came to be and all the art that was a revolution that changed the way we look at art in the last 100 years. We're living through that same moment. Funny enough, it's not in Paris. Maybe start in Palo Alto. Yes. Because the name node is meant to be a node in the network. So we were we will be learning here for the next year to perfection uh our technology, improve our our UIs. There's a bunch of engineers working at this foundation with engineers like think of how different it is to traditional art and then expanded and opening many many more other places. Another thing that I want to talk to you about, what's with your fascination with Rebels? It's all over your website. People know you talk about this all the time. I mean 17-year-old starting a company. That would lead me to believe that you had this like rebel. You were essentially a born rebel. How did you apply that? Cuz I people reference you as like one of the greatest like venture capitalist. I'm like that's not how I think of Mickey. I don't think of him as like a venture capitalist. So, like when you're building Ribbit, how did you apply like your rebel like your inherent rebel nature to you're essentially almost like you're almost like an artist in the sense of like this is the canvas that I'm building. This is how you think I should do it, but this is how I'm going to do it. How did you think about it when you started? you are a founder but you think so much like a founder so like this decision in 2012 to start an investment firm like why okay you have to tell you have to say more about this I didn't know this Oh, so you're really into Star Wars. are you backing Jedi or you have Jedi? Okay. it has to be authentic and people that work with us at Rivet, the whole team feels that ownership, that teamwork. There's investment firms are very silo in many ways and I don't love that. We want to overcommunicate even internally like right now the entire team knows that we're sitting together. Everybody can see my calendar in my inbox. They can see my emails and I can see anybody's emails. We share all the information so we can actually become better as a team. That mindset is very rebel in this environment and and and how we make decisions. We don't make individual decisions. We make group decisions. And there's no like somebody asked who's the partner responsible for that company. It's like what partner? And you as a founder said, "Oh no, I call Mickey for something. I call Nick for something. I call Justin for something." We are just a team that works together in in very different ways. So that is the joy of going to the office every day. I I love being there and spending time with the team because we just have fun together. What was the insight though that caused you to do this instead of because you started how many companies before this? This is your sixth company. Yes. Some something like that. So like but your sixth company looks vastly different from your first five. Correct. Yes. I had to in the infinite game I had just had to learn how to do it right. And this time I do it right because I consider myself even though they were successful and they created a lot of impact and changed a lot of people's lives around the world. I consider myself a fail entrepreneur. Because the the best entrepreneurs never have to sell their company. And uh so I had to learn for 20 years how to get to the point to design the structure, the culture, the team, the knowledge, the the aperture, the the brand. compound all those values to a place where we can do something for forever. Nick Sleep uh has one of my favorite lines ever. And he goes, "The best investors aren't investors. They're entrepreneurs who never sold." Yeah. So that's fascinating. Look, okay, the fact is I'm a failed entrepreneur cuz I had to exit. you had crazy successful exits too for my first five because I didn't find the vehicle in which I can do forever I'm like new to Right. And it's like and it's just like you have to like vet them in all different uh directions. But when I and even people I want to have dinner with or talk to like you, you ask a bunch of people and they're just like he's obsessed with this infinite game. This infinite game. He's like they he doesn't need more money and he doesn't need to do another deal in his life, but he just can't stop. I love that time is the only true I appreciate you spending your time giving it to us today. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast, founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders.