I'm Kent Lindstrom, co-founder of Apex Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that invests in the software startups of the future. We focus on AI, cybersecurity, and fintech. I'm going to take you behind the scenes in Silicon Valley. This is the Something Ventured podcast.
All right, welcome back. This is the Something Ventured podcast. I am Kent Lindstrom. I am your host. My guest today is Mark Suster. How are you doing?
I'm doing great, Kent. Thank you for having me.
Thank you so much for doing this. The AI told me definitively when I asked that your name is pronounced Suster. And it gave me a little pronunciation guide. S U S T E R S U S S. And I thought to myself, that seems like kind of a shifty AI there. I'm going to go check myself. So, I know it's Mark Suster.
I appreciate you saying that. You're in rarefied air of people who get it right first time. So much so that I was actually surprised. I was like, 'Wow, well done you.' I usually tell people it's like my mom's name, which happens to be Sue. And she owned a bakery, which is also true. And she likes to stir things. It's Suster.
That's so funny. It's funny. I went on YouTube to find, you know, hoping to find you say somebody saying, 'Hey, here's Mark Suster. He's my guest today.' I must have seen 10 videos, and people are so adept now at chopping up videos, so they start with these cold opens. So, none of them had your damn name at the beginning.
It's funny. I never correct anybody, so you could never know for sure. Over the years I've learned most people get it wrong, so who cares?
I did.
Nobody in venture goes to UCSD, but I guess two of the best guys in venture went to UCSD.
I mean, you may know this, but it has one of the top computer science programs in the country. It's incredible on sciences. We're one of the top medical undergrads in the country. We're very good on pre-med, on sciences, on AI. So it's a wonderful academic university. When I went there, which was '86 to '91, so I'll let people do the math on whether I got out in 4 years or not. When I went there, it was a kind of a stress box. People don't understand that UCSD is the same thing as Berkeley and UCLA. It's part of the UC system and they just immediately think San Diego State, which also is a good university. But UCSD highly academic and when I went there, it had one of the top suicide rates in the country just because it was a super grinding kind of university. I was not that student.
Kind of like Cornell. Did you mistakenly think it was a party school before you went there?
No, it was the opposite. In fact, I just spoke to this lady last night. Her name is Christie Burton, a long time super close friend of mine from high school. And we went on a trip. We knew we had to go to the UC system because back then it was $1,500 per year. It was state-subsidized. My parents didn't have a lot of money despite my father being a doctor and my mom being an entrepreneur. So I had to go to a UC system because they were cheap. So I had my pick of which one to go to, and I decided on UC Santa Barbara. And Christie and I in high school drove down to UC Santa Barbara, and we just partied the entire weekend, including going to see Otis Day and the Knights who were playing at a fraternity party. I'd never been to a fraternity party. And at the end of that weekend, I chose to go to UCSD without ever visiting it. And I never told Christie, and she signed up for UCSD for the exact same reason. So we ended up in college together.
That's funny. So for those of you around the world listening, UCSD University of California San Diego is in a town called La Jolla, California.
It used to be called UCLJ actually when they first started but nobody knew where LJ was. And you would think it's a path block from some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. You would think that would be a college town, it would be a beach town. It's not. It's an incredibly hard academic biotech good theater program too, but it's mostly this biotech thing and engineering. So my wife went to Brown undergrad, and when we first visited La Jolla and I showed her my campus and my dorms, I was ninth floor of Tioga Hall, ocean view from my dorm. And she simply said one thing to me, she said, 'Why didn't my parents tell me this existed?'
That is so funny. So man, Elad Gil, what are the odds? I always joke with people on this podcast that every venture capitalist went to Harvard or Stanford, and then they always say they fell into venture. They've no idea how they did it. Harvard, Stanford, and then sometimes Princeton. I went to Northwestern. I'm like nobody went to Northwestern. There's actually like over a hundred venture capitalists who went to Northwestern, but UCSD rarefied air. So, you become a venture capitalist. How do you kind of make that transition? Because most venture capitalists have not been founders. And this is something I've looked at for a while cuz I'm a founder turned venture capitalist. There's a lot of people in the category where they call themselves operators, which means they've worked somewhere, and that's great. But if you actually look at people like Marc Andreessen, who built companies and then became venture capitalists, it's a little more rare than you think. How did you make that transition? They're very different jobs.
Yeah. It's funny you say so. The world has changed a dramatic amount, Kent, as you know. I would start by saying my first job out of university was as a computer programmer. Again, I was talking with Christie about this last night. She didn't know this about me, but from 1987 to 1991, I worked in a computer store in Sacramento, California. And I taught programming in high school.
Well, the big thing was my parents got an IBM XT. I also had access to Apple IIe's and then Apple Mac. But my parents had an IBM XT. The really big innovation of the IBM XT, circa 1985-86, was that it had a 10 megabyte hard drive. So you no longer had to swap two floppies. By the time I got to work in the computer store, I was able to afford to build my own computer from a brand called Leading Edge, and it had 30 meg, and I just couldn't believe I had 30 meg to play with. Mostly what I did was I built macros. I learned how to program in Lotus 1-2-3 macro language. Then my professor showed me if you did it in an independent language and used a compiler, you could publish a program. So all throughout high school and then throughout college, three days a week I worked in a computer store and had a programming job in college despite studying economics and political science. So when I graduated I was first a programmer. I did programming in COBOL on mainframes and then moved into database design DB2. And then moved into an area that was not really important in the early 90s: middleware. Middleware was if you had a client and a server, a desktop and a mainframe, the middle of the transaction had to handle things like what happens if the connection goes down, what happens if the database goes down, what happens if we write a record into a database but then the network goes down and the client never knows. So we built these layers called middleware and it was around the time Tibco became popularized. My point being, in the lead up to the internet, the network and the middle component became the most important thing. That led for me. I moved out to Europe and lived there for 11 years. For the first part, I worked with large telcos on launching internet offerings starting in 1995 through 1999.
Do you think I try to explain to people these periods in time when things became cool? I wonder if we've become too abstracted from things. Like yeah, there was a time when if you had a computer, you might have just gotten out of a soldering iron and put some parts together and learned how to do a power on self-test. And when the internet started, you would get on a modem and log into the Minnesota library or whatever it was. And today, you've got whatever the max RAM is and you just talk to your computer and it does whatever. You're so abstracted from what was actually happening. It just seems interesting to me.
That's why I love initiatives like Raspberry Pi and people building things again. When my kids were younger, I have a 20-year-old and a 23-year-old, I had them assemble computers. I had them play with Raspberry Pis to learn what a CPU was, what a GPU was, what a motherboard is. Being tangible really matters. But I'll say this. When I graduated high school, I read a quote. People list their senior quotes and a guy named Bobby Earnsdorf wrote, 'Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.' Having read that, my first thought was, 'What the f*** does that mean?' The fact that it stuck with me since 1980, he graduated, I think, two years before me in 1984. I looked it up before our call. I always said, 'Nonconformity is the highest form of social attainment.' Maybe that's what he wrote. I think being nonconformist is important, and it's important in venture. It's important as a venture capitalist and as an entrepreneur. If you're funding what everybody else is talking about today and you have a really easy time at cocktail parties, you probably missed the trend by three to five years. The stuff I'm talking about at cocktail parties bores people because I become really fascinated with the topics where I think the world is going. Usually it's not what anyone's talking about, and that doesn't mean I'm always right, but if I'm right, those become the kind of bigger outliers.
