People who had the most stress in their life live the longest. The more stress you embrace, the better you perform. If you only have one signal about a human and you want to project how long they're going to live, it's your VO2 max that you want to know and improve every day. Infallibly, I have at least 10 grams of creatine. I do red light therapy. I do cryotherapy every day.
You read the encyclopedia from cover to cover.
Well, the president of the United States has time to read an hour a day. I have time to read an hour a day. One of my heroes growing up was Margaret Thatcher. She says, 'I could assess any minister in like 30 seconds.' If she can do it, why can't I?
Keith, welcome to the show.
You have been dubbed as having one of the most strategic minds in venture capital today. And I think about this a lot that some of the most successful people in the world in the tech and investing space consider themselves elite athletes. So, let's flip the script right now and talk a bit more about longevity. I want to know about how Keith treats himself as an athlete. So, you've been following me, which I'm so happy about on X for quite a while. I think you actually found me back in like 2021 when I was like prolifically tweeting about sleep and maybe...
I probably favored a bunch of your tweets.
Yeah. Maybe like who is this girl? And when I found out you followed me...
Who's this random guy favoriting tweets?
And I loved that, which showed me that you were, hey, you were one of the few people who were treating their brain like an athlete. So, you were sleeping well. Now Elon doesn't sleep. He's not really into sleep. And then I do see other successful entrepreneurs and investors who are treating their bodies like athletes. So I want to completely dissect you right now from the head to the toe and let's talk about blood work. For example, you've gone off and done a whole range of longevity workshops.
Yeah. Yeah, I try to find people who are at the edge, the cutting edge of research but very credible.
And you know, see what I can learn.
And it's intellectual curiosity applied to basically your body and brain and life.
So I follow people on Twitter. I read their stuff. I read studies and then if I find someone who has a program that I can participate in, I'm likely to opt into it. The benefit, you know, of having some schedule flexibility and some resources like money is you can opt into doing some of these programs. So for example on the purely sports side but it involves recovery more than actually training. In 2010 I started doing this training program with a firm called Exos where basically anybody in the NFL trains there. Lots of World Cup winning soccer teams including the Germans train there. And I started doing this sort of for fun, mostly to learn about how do elite athletes train and how do they recover and what's the latest sort of research and techniques and then I started bringing friends along actually. So now I did the first trip myself for a week and just read, you know, in between sessions and then I started bringing friends and made it like a group experience.
So I've been going back, you know, for like 15 plus years. So, I learned, you know, some techniques about training, like literally training. Also, I had some fun, like I remember there's a funny anecdote when I was trying to do these drills and Colin Kaepernick was laughing at me because I wasn't doing them. I was not performing them that well.
Well, 2010, I'm guessing you weren't doing, were you doing VO2 max testing back then?
Um, they did do old school VO2 maxing. Um, they didn't know, you know, it was more for athletic purposes than now. You know, one of the things I've learned in the last two years and really started to appreciate is how if you only have one signal about a human and you want to project how long they're going to live, it's your VO2 max that you want to know and improve. And so, but back then when we started doing the VO2 max, it was more for improving performance, let's say, on a soccer field or basketball court than it was for life. Now, it's more about health.
So, I'm obsessed. I ask all my friends like, 'What's your VO2 max?' I ask founders, 'What's their VO2 max?' And if I don't think the answer is like age appropriate, I'll be like, 'You need to change this.' I've been having this dialogue with one of my partners at KV.
You've got your graph memorized.
Yeah, I've got the graph, but it is amazing. And I highly recommend anybody at least get it tested once a year. I think once you get it tested and have a real baseline, you can use things like your Apple Watch or whatever. They're not super accurate, but they'll give you a relative feel if you're improving or regressing. But you need to get the canonical test done, which unfortunately mostly like a treadmill with an unpleasant mask. But it's incredibly accurate at predicting how long you're going to live for high performance people that have goals in life that they want to achieve in a competitive field.
You're talking about performance. So it's like performance optimization versus illness and they almost like they drew a spectrum, yeah, distribution. Performance optimization is like one tail and then when you're sick and unfortunately if you're very ill, you're on the other tail. And so the medical profession is great at dealing with this tail and almost nobody in the medical profession is really expert at how do you optimize your performance. Eventually I think those will get synced together. That's why I wind up going to almost two different like professions actually and then unfortunately they'll share some blood tests but they usually want their own panels too.
But the thing is anyone can take your blood, right? Anyone can, a phlebotomist takes your blood, right? It takes a very specialized person to be able to interpret it and when you're looking at this, a very good person is going to look at your blood work and base it on two things: trends and ratios based on your age, sex, and end goals. You and I right now are optimizing for something completely different.
No, that is very true. So the trends fortunately I started working with like a concierge doctor in 2003. Yeah. So I have, you know, 20 plus years now of trends which is very helpful especially when something goes wrong by the way. It's easy to isolate like what is unique to me as a person versus like no, there's some very aberrant behavior, circumstances here. On the performance side, I think you really do because the reference ranges are all wrong. So this is where you need to go to a performance specialist is anything that looks like a normal result is almost surely not the right answer if you're trying to optimize certain things. So every reference range will come back like fine, fine, fine, fine, fine and a really good performance specialist like Dr. Galpin will be like I don't care where the performance range is, you need to be like 20x better over here. Like VO2, we can even talk about this way, you do not want to be in the middle of the current bell curve for VO2 max.
It's probably 60, which for my age is actually pretty good.
That is phenomenal. That's in more than the elite group.
It's probably even a little higher because actually, like many people, I hate the test. And so I kind of give up a little early knowing I have a little bit more bandwidth, but I know I'm already like past whatever threshold they want me at.
I was like a kid like that in school. Like when I was young, I have this problem. If you give me a goal, once I hit the goal, I get a little lazy. So, like when I'd get an A on a test, I would just turn it in and like just want to be done with it versus trying to get a better grade.
Yeah, it's... No, though I don't wish that test upon anyone. However, if you do do it once a year, it's phenomenal.
If you do it once a year, it's great. And the reality is you can probably get a pretty good proxy in about six minutes.
But also, it takes about eight months of pure real training to change that.
To change it. Yeah, so here's the debate is what are the best ways to train it because depending upon... this is where it gets interesting is depending on what your baseline is. So if you're out of shape, you can make massive gains really fast. You know, go to Barry's boot camp class, you know, do sprints outside your house or something and you'll see gains. Now, the issue for a lot of my friends is their results are mediocre, but they're actually training a fair amount.
That takes like a very thoughtful, calibrated approach. You know, if you're a proficient runner, if you play sports and you be able to max this load, that actually is a signal that you might actually have like real health issues, too. So, actually, I've had this happen twice in close friends of mine where either their VO2 max was off or the resting heart rate was off, but they were young and in pretty good shape. And when they showed me their data, I was like, 'You need to talk to a real doctor like right now.' And it turns out probably both of them actually had substantive issues that would not have been caught by any standard medical test for a 30-year-old.
You're not wearing an Oura ring.
I don't wear Oura. I wear this infallibly. Like I actually have this other quirk that if I don't wear my watch and I do a workout, I have this mental block that the workout doesn't count.
So, I'm the same. I wear a Garmin and a heart rate monitor and if I don't wear that I go absolutely crazy. Psychologically, like once a year something happens and like my battery dies and I have to do a workout before I can find a way to recharge it and it drives me insane for like 24 hours only because I don't know what my heart rate is and I've just been doing this for the past 10, 20 years. I just like to track year-to-year progress and stuff like that. And so if I'm not wearing it, it messes up my ability to see whether I'm improving, whether I'm dialing in different zone things or I want a different type of workout. Like I have changed, you know, some of my goals and edit that. But yeah, this is with me once I wake up. I don't wear it at night. Actually, I use the Whoop sleep track. But once I wake up until when I go to bed, this is definitely on me. And anytime I go to the gym, do anything athletic, even if I'm like dancing, I probably have it on and it picks up as a workout.
Yes, it does. I want to close that loop. I asked you if you're taking any more supplements other than creatine.
Most of the supplements I take actually would probably surprise you how vanilla they are. Like it's omega-3, you know, it's like a standard multivitamin. I do take NAD plus supplementation, which we could talk about. Very almost nothing I take is what I would call exotic. The closest to exotic would be two things. Tally Health, that is, you know, a product produced by David Sinclair, has a couple of different versions of supplements. I do take some of his stuff and I have a couple little quirky things that Dr. Galpin added to my regimen but they're pretty boring actually. Honestly, I don't take like peptides or anything like I don't do anything that would seem unusual. I take green tea which is, there's a lot of good evidence actually, benefits of green tea, omega-3, like this stuff is very... omega-3 is part of my top tier and whey protein. I take vitamin D. When I was living mostly in Miami it was easier to get vitamin D naturally. New York it's a little harder and more difficult but I take vitamin D supplementation. I've got pretty convinced that turmeric is magic. Cinnamon and turmeric but again they're pretty vanilla. Turmeric, I actually did injure my back once a few years ago and I had the benefit of seeing two very, very good specialists, one in SF and one in New York. And the New York one convinced me that rather than do all these crazy things, I should just take turmeric. And so I've been addicted to turmeric since.
Yeah. I think for that the mechanism of action is in curcumin and the substance in that. So what that does is it's able to block this inflammatory biomarker called NF-kappa B. We don't have to go into that, but it is wonderful from a clinical perspective. I do want to argue the... we don't have to go into it, but we can argue the NAD if you...
Yeah. I've seen some recent research about that. It's not... it's not effective.
Yeah. So, I found it to be like potential upside, very little downside. I read all the studies about cancer. I understand them. It doesn't cause cancer is the most important thing. That's like fake news. But if you had cancer, you would not want to take it. But that's a different, you know, set of circumstances. You do a lot of things differently. I do do non-supplement based stuff. I do red light therapy. Very addicted to that. I try to do it every day. I do cryotherapy. I try to do that every day.
You've got red light panels at home.
I have red light panels at home.
Yeah. Me too. Which makes it easier. You know, like a lot of things in life, if you want to do it regularly, you want to make it so convenient that there's no excuses. So, I have red light at home. I don't have cryo at home. Fortunately, there's cryo within walking distance, you know, at least in New York. And so, I try to do that almost every day, too.
You are very interesting. You're treating yourself like an athlete and yet you are one of the best investors of our time. So, on that, okay, predicting how long you're going to live is one thing. And it's one of the strongest predictors of both health span and lifespan.
So, for example, one of the arguments Dr. Galpin made to me, those of you who follow him on Twitter, was a certain percent improvement of your VO2 max is more important or will have less effect or whatever than quitting smoking. It's like that's the order of magnitude correct impact of shifting from like, you know, 20 or 50th percentile to top 10 or 25th percentile. And so that's pretty eye opening when you realize like how much time public education money has gone into anti-smoking crusades and campaigns which has been effective I think but fundamentally when someone's like, you know, if you just improve your VO2 max by like five points it's as impactful as not smoking, your eyes like light up and then they show you the graphs that prove this it's actually true.
By the way I've never smoked so...
Me either. How does increasing and optimizing your VO2 max make you a better investor?
So, here's where it gets a little bit complicated. I can take it at a high level and then try to build it up bottom up. One of the things that's challenging about being a VC as you get older is many things about being a VC do not age gracefully. Building companies is kind of a young person's game in many ways. You can debate exactly how young. It's a little bit like professional sports. And staying relevant as decades go by, technologies change, founders, you know, grew up in different generations using different technologies, different techniques, different cultural norms. Even staying relevant is really difficult. So, I think one way you do that is you just keep your body and brain to be very young, very intellectually curious, very sharp. I actually have some fun now. I get to occasionally spend time with professional athletes who've been able to perform at a high level at, you know, more like an advanced age like 40 or like DJs is a good example where DJ being a professional DJ at the high end of the profession it's typically a very young person's game for lots of reasons but there's a few. Tiësto is basically my age, Armin van Buuren is basically my age and so when I get to meet up with them I'm more curious not about their music, but about how they stay at the top of their game at roughly my age. Because if they can do it against the up and coming 21-year-old DJ, then I should be able to do it, you know, against the up and coming VC and stay relevant to the up and coming founder.
Yeah. Is there something that you've noticed against all of these athletes, entrepreneurs who are nearing the 40 zone in age and something that they do differently that others don't?
You know, the funny thing is 80% of this stuff is basic common sense. They optimize their sleep. It's like they take their sleep seriously. They try to avoid alcohol. Like some of the people I named completely off alcohol, but it's like sleep and alcohol are just like inversely correlated in many ways. Quality of sleep, depth of sleep, all that stuff. That stuff is fundamental. Like I saw Brian Johnson's on this crusade where it's, he's right. You know, 80% of what you can do is like get high quality sleep consistently and then yes you can tune other things but the fundamentals trump a lot of the advanced stuff. So just start. So like back in the day one of the first investments I made when I became a VC was Eight Sleep. It was intuitively obvious to me...
It was intuitively obvious to me that the best way to improve people's life, health, professional performance was better sleep. And in 2013, was there any product on the market that would improve your sleep? Blackout shades, you know, air conditioning, but not really. And then I met these founders and they talked about how if they showed me studies that if you lowered your core body temperature, you induce more deep sleep. I was like, perfect. Now you have to build a product that does that. But connecting the dots seemed easy. Interestingly enough, the way I met the founders is kind of an interesting story. So, I had a friend that was a successful tech person in the Bay Area and he was terrible with his sleep. He was very smart and very successful, but he would like not sleep, go out all night, like whatever, but I would always be yelling at him, admonishing him that he has to sleep more and stop going out and stop doing these crazy things. Anyway, about eight years go by and he emails me and said, 'I found the perfect company for you. It's about improving your sleep.' And so it was all because I'd been admonishing him while we were working out about his need to sleep that he remembered me. And then as soon as I found it and they showed me the study, I was like great, we can connect the dots and productize it and that became Eight Sleep. So I led the seed round and then led the A for that company. You know, I prioritize sleep all the time. I probably purchased more than many like every place I stay has an Eight Sleep. Like I go stir crazy if I have to travel and can't get my hands on an Eight Sleep. It is really effective.
Yeah, Eight Sleep was my very, very first sponsor back in 2021.
They are. They obviously have taste. They believed in me and I believed in them. I'm up to the Pod 5 now. So, I love my Eight Sleeps.
Yeah. I want to stay on this because one of the best things you can do for your brain and to become, you know, cognitively acute and be able to make the best decisions is resistance training. And I'm guessing you're doing that.
Like, well, let's put it this way. There's things that clearly have some potential upside and that have no downside. So, sleeping better, all upside, hard to measure exactly how much it improves things, how much it expands your lifespan, but it clearly has no downside and the lack of sleep definitely has significant downsides that are very empirical to validate. Same thing is a little bit like creatine.
I started taking creatine three years ago. There's clear evidence that it improves cognitive function. I used to resist it for like aesthetic goals for a variety of reasons we can talk about. I got comfortable that that was no longer a major concern. But as soon as I started reading the cognitive research every day infallibly I have at least 10 grams of creatine at least. Some of the research on the cognitive stuff is actually maybe you should be even pushing the dose of that up. But right now I'm on the 10 to 15 grams program.
Why are you taking between 10 to 15? When do you take 15?
Well, so for aesthetic purposes, five grams is probably the right amount. But if you look at the cognitive studies, you could argue it's 20 to 25, but that feels like a lot. Because there is processing with your liver and stuff, and I don't think you want to push the envelope there. But the cognitive studies are very compelling. Now, there's like 3 to 5 years worth of them. You know, this was three or four years ago. There's only one or two, I think. So, it was like it's pretty novel, but I'm completely convinced that it's a good idea for almost anybody to be on creatine.
Yeah. Do you feel the difference?
I actually don't. Although I do. There are some research studies about if you have poor sleep, that if you take 15 grams, you can suppress some of the symptoms for at least that day. It's not a good idea to rely upon creatine to avoid sleep. But on, you know, like anybody, I have days I don't sleep perfectly. I wake up in the middle of the night, have to travel across time zones. On those days, I will take another incremental five grams. And I do think it has some impact.
It does. It does. There was a recent study within the last year that showed that you can offset some of these symptoms of sleep deprivation if you have around 15 grams of creatine. Likely if you go and do a bout of high-intensity exercise after sleep deprivation which consists of around 6 hours I would say then you can also offset the...
Well so I do that too again I'm going to do the high-intensity exercise anyway but if I have had poor sleep the first thing I will do is go right to the most high-intensity exercise I can tolerate. The first eight minutes is usually very painful mentally and physically if you can get past that endorphins, adrenaline kick in and you know the rest of the class or whatever is easy, but it does have an adrenaline sort of power refresh, you know, sensation that does avoid or mitigate some of the effects of poor sleep.
What are the other supplements that you're taking? Because we mentioned earlier offline that you did a whole range of biomarkers. So, you've tested your blood aggressively. I'm guessing you've done around 22 vials of blood.
Yeah. It's not particularly fun.
No, you almost pass out. But if you can get a thousand biomarkers tested and then optimize from that...
I kind of split into two worlds. So I do this with like my physician and medical team and they're looking for mostly different things than like someone like Dr. Galpin would. There's some overlap. So I do both.
One thing I've noticed is that the men that I work with are incredibly intentional about what they eat. They know about their protein, their creatine, their supplements, but very few of them know about what they're putting on their bodies every single day. And this is why I've started recommending Based Body Works. Now, it's not for me, but it's a men's grooming company built around clean plant-based formulations without sulfates, parabens, or endocrine disrupting chemicals. But the products still perform exactly the way you expect it. I always tell my girlfriends who are trying to conceive to get their partners on this. So the endocrine disrupting chemicals in other products doesn't disrupt their conception process. You know, I tell them just switching from your shampoo or your body wash is one of the easiest upgrades that you can make. So if you want to get some of this, then use code neuro for 20% off at basedbodyworks.com. Rather than taking the approach of how do you take a company to exit, I want to know about the brain behind these strategic decisions. I remember a story that your mom tells a lot which is that at the age of four you read the encyclopedia from cover to cover and that is very interesting to me. So tell me have you always been intellectually curious?
Well I guess, you know, I started at four reading the World Book Encyclopedia cover to cover. I don't think it's changed much since then. It's probably a good predictor of who'd be a good venture capitalist because basically the job is to learn new things every hour every day. I like to joke that venture capital is the only job where you get paid to learn new things. Journalists are supposed to learn new things, but they don't get paid. But we actually get paid for learning new things. So, I've always been that way. You have to be a little bit ADD, too. Like intellectually curious is the more pleasant way to say it. ADD is a little bit more reality, too.
Yeah. I think when I hear this story, it kind of reminds me of Elon. He did the same thing. He ran out of books. He read the encyclopedia, ran out of books in the library, and he was just hungry for more. And it makes me think that are all of the greatest minds in history and even if you read the Walter Isaacson Jobs autobiography, it says the same thing.
Voracious readers. I've noticed that it's not the only signal that predicts success, but many if not most, if not virtually all of the most successful people in fields I've worked in, politics, law, tech, are voracious readers. Patrick Collison's a voracious reader. And as you probe into people's history. You know, my parents incentivized it too. I grew up in like a middle-class household and, you know, we definitely had scarce resources. We couldn't just spend money frivolously, but I had an infinite budget for books. As long as I read the book, I could buy as many books as I wanted. And so what did I do? Since I had limited budget for clothing and limited budget for other things, I substituted into reading and it worked magically. So I would just take a trip to the bookstore and then I'd go to the... we fortunately had a public library with two public libraries that were pretty approximate and very nice. And so I would show up at the public library and probably check out 40 books. And then actually read them all and then go back a week later and get a new 20.
And it became like addictive to you. And that's what...
Oh yeah. I love to read. I started, you know, maybe interestingly enough I didn't start with non-fiction. I actually started with fiction for the most part. I used to read these classic spy novels like thrillers like John le Carré and Frederick Forsyth and later Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum and that made me a proficient reader. I enjoyed reading so I just read more and then over time read more and more non-fiction and substituted now to be 90% non-fiction actionable things that, you know, sort of are productive and that I can leverage versus fiction I rarely read. Now, I try to occasionally when I go book shopping find a new piece of fiction, but it's... I sort of have to force myself. It's like eating your vegetables.
It's very fascinating to me that somebody like you with where you're at right now in life and in business has even time to read.
Well, you sort of force it. So, one of the books I read when I was growing up in high school or maybe junior high school was one of the books Richard Nixon authored, which is one of my favorite books of all time. It's called Leaders. And it's a profile of like the most important 10 people like that like different countries in his career. The two chapters though that are most fascinating are the introduction and the whatever epilogue or something. The introduction he talks about when he was in the White House as president of the United States. He forced himself to read an hour a day. And I just woke up and said, 'Well, if the president of the United States has time to read an hour a day, I have time to read an hour a day. Period.'
What's your thoughts just on that subject? I saw not long ago a graph, I think it was around three months ago that was publicized that showed that 100 million Americans don't even meet a fifth grade level reading. And that's because of AI. How do you feel about that?
Well, it's sad the way... if you learn... I have a simple philosophy in life. If you learn to read, write, and basically perform math at a high level, you can do anything you want. Like you have the raw ingredients to teach yourself to succeed and so I'm adamant about you must learn to read, must learn to write and must learn to do math. Period. Everything else is optional.
Yeah, it's interesting the math and the logic behind... I think that we're losing this now even just because of the advent of ChatGPT and artificial intelligence. It's so easily becoming something of the past. You know, I was a mathematician before I got into this and I remember being able to do sine cosine just with my hands and now I'm working out 20% of a check after dinner and so it's quite scary to see that kids are going through this life not knowing how to do basic arithmetic. But on this level of reading, I was doing a lot of preparation for this podcast. One of the things that kept coming up, one of the themes about you was that you are able to form very high performing teams, being able to really look at people, restructure and look for intelligent outcomes in people. Do you think you got that? Was that a gut instinct?
No. Unfortunately, you know, I get asked this question a lot about how do you get better at this? Let's say for founders, other investors, even politicians or hiring staff and people like that. And as far as I can tell, there isn't any great book on this topic that's very actionable. I'd say the best book is there's a book called Who and it's got some subtitle that's pretty good, but it's not awesome. And given how important this is, like building a team, hiring, assessing people. You would think that there should be some library somewhere of insights that you can read. And I have not found it. I've tried. I keep trying. Every time I go to the bookstore, I look for something. I scan books. I've read many. Nothing that I find exciting, interesting, actionable, unfortunately. Maybe one day I'll have to write it myself. But so, the way I've had to learn this is like many other skills in life, trial and error. It's like a muscle. You kind of have to interview people, assess people, hire people, learn from your mistakes, and learn from your successes. What worked, what didn't. You learn hacks and techniques of shortcutting. Right now, I'm very proficient at like I can look at like a LinkedIn profile and immediately sort into yes, no, maybe. And just being able to sort that fast. The may take study, but the yeses and nos are pretty quick. And so that allows you to move very rapidly. I also learned this another one of my heroes growing up was Margaret Thatcher and also in high school I read her... let's see, I read her autobiography. First, her first volume of her autobiography was amazing. And I remember reading it and in there there's a sentence where she says I could assess any minister in like 30 seconds. She might have said three minutes. It's either 30 seconds, three minutes. And I was like, boom. That's my goal is I need to be able to learn to assess people in three minutes or 30 seconds. And if she can do it, why can't I? And so that was always the goal. I think I actually can do it now most of the time pretty damn well. And it's very relevant and very useful as an early stage investor, but it took, you know, years to practice that craft, devise insights, edit the insights. It's still fraught with error like there's definitely a high variability there. But being able to know when someone has very high potential very quickly is extremely valuable as a VC.
I mean I love what you said about being able just to go onto LinkedIn and being able to specifically look at that. What is it on LinkedIn? I've never heard anyone say that.
So there's several things. One is like you're looking for and, you know, some of this will be let's say mundane and but it's worth restating. You know sometimes restating the obvious is useful and then there's something that's a little more subtle. So one is just simply like is there a trajectory of success like have you broadened yourself? Do you get increasingly asked to take on more difficult challenges? What kinds of challenges are you usually assigned or what do you gravitate to? There's a lot of signal in there. A little bit more subtle is depending upon the pool of people that you were working with at various places on your LinkedIn profile. There are things about that pool that probably apply to you. So for example, let's say, you know, in my generation, you worked at some prestigious high-profile investment bank, you probably have the capability for pretty high work ethic. Like young investment bankers, you know, in my era easily work 80 hours a week, easily. And so if you thrived at Goldman Sachs plus or minus 20 years from like when I grew up, there's no way that you don't have the ability to work hard if you want to. Period. Just there's no way you could have survived two years even as an associate there or like, you know, there's places that are notorious for IQ. Like there's just no way to get a role and succeed for years and get promoted without pretty high intellectual horsepower. So if you know something about the pool, the hardest thing about LinkedIn is when there's some role and responsibilities that you don't have any familiarity with. So I see a company I've never heard of. I don't know how to sort of triangulate or normalize against that. But for companies that I've worked with, for companies I know, people I've worked at, companies, you know, that I understand their hiring process, it's fairly easy to detect a lot of things. And then what I do with that is when I do interview a candidate, I skip over the things that I already pretty confident that the candidate will be good at. So if I think you have strong work ethic, I won't ask any questions about it. I'll only ask questions about things that I'd be more concerned about. Like so I might be concerned about creativity. So they'll just probe on that. So it makes the interview that scarce time that 20 minutes, 40 minutes, 60 minutes, two hours, whatever it is, be highly productive, high leverage because I'm only trying to learn things that I can't learn from paper.
Do you remember the day that you met the founder of DoorDash?
And how did you look at him and think this is the one?
Well, so he was an intern at Square, so it was actually pretty easy. So I had a lot of experience. I remember the day when I first met him...
When there was a VP named Alyssa at Square who wanted to hire him as an intern, and I had never approved a business intern before. I only believed really in design interns and engineering interns. So she knew I'd be somewhat critical of the idea. So she's like, you need to meet this guy. And his profile was actually even back then pretty interesting. First of all, he did really well in math at Berkeley, like 4.0, which Berkeley back then did not have great inflation and certainly not in math. So that was impressive. Secondly, he had, while he was working, managed to navigate an internship at a VC, or maybe even a more formal title, I think maybe associate at a pretty good VC fund. Those are not easy roles to get your hands on. And then he had worked with Alyssa at eBay, PayPal. So I remember meeting him in the conference room. I remember exactly what conference room we were in. And he basically talked me into the role.
But then by the time he was leaving to start a company, he went to GSB. I tried to convince him not to leave to go to business school, he didn't listen. But when he finally found, you know, what he wanted to do, he used the time at GSB to network actually with CS grads and CS students. So he had co-founders, which he actually wound up working with two that he met who were undergrad CS students. And then by the time they had an idea, specific idea, he came by my office and I was pretty sure I wanted to invest. But that was easy because of the prior history. The hard assessing. So actually this is a good point. I found the first thing to learn and get really proficient at is assessing people you know well.
People you've worked with, people you've grown up with, people you went to school with. Lots of data points. The most difficult thing about assessing is random stranger acts where you have no context other than maybe a LinkedIn profile and you meet them for the first time and you have to make a judgment call. Should I hire this person? Should I fund this person? That's an order of magnitude more difficult than assessing people you worked with. I actually sort of point out, you know, to my colleagues all the time that anybody who I worked with, I need to make that call as a VC 90%, 99% correctly. Like there's no excuse for being wrong about that because I have enough data points that I just need to be able to draw the line of this person's potential and, you know, really shoot myself if I'm wrong. Random strangers. If you're really good at early stage investing, if you get those calls right 30, 40, 50% of the time, that's like hall of fame level because you just have so few data points. You geometric point, you can draw an one data point, you can draw an infinite number of lines through. You have two data points, there's only one line you can draw.
Yeah. It's interesting because you said that in the earliest days of PayPal there was about three to 400 of the best tech employees in the world and there was only about 17 barrels.
So a barrel is a person who can basically take an idea at a pretty conceptual level and just make it happen.
