We can train AI to have taste, to have judgment, but I don't know. I don't think you can train AI to have soul.
And Ann Miura-ko is kind of a big deal. Forbes called her the most powerful woman in startups, and her firm wrote some of the earliest checks into Lyft and Twitch. Is it weird having people ask you for money all the time?
It doesn't come across that way. They're telling me their story and I'm being asked to be a co-conspirator. With AI, you're going to have so much ability to do things and the question is what do you choose not to do? Humans whose jobs right now is to take a list and just get it done, especially in a digital world, that job is threatened.
Her latest obsession is how well or not the best companies are adopting AI. How do well-established organizations make that transition? Do you think it's even possible or are we just destined to have our lunch eaten by the AI-built startup?
Ann Miura-ko, welcome to the show.
In preparing for this interview, I went very deep into the archives and they are amazing. You are amazing. But I found one incident that gave me pause. This was your first interview ever.
You were two years old. And so for the safety of me and the production team, I just have to ask outright, are you going to bite me? If you are, just tell me so I can prepare myself.
I've actually come to terms with the fact that at this point in my life, I actually don't mind people who speak English.
Back then, living in Michigan, there were some reasons why I just didn't like people who spoke English.
And is that why you bit your
There's some controversy as to whether or not I bit or just aggressively kicked.
I love that image of you and I found all these great stories of you from your childhood
just not liking people who spoke English.
Just not liking people who spoke English. But then also at age 10, how you snuck into
an adult negotiations class. Yeah.
What was behind that? How'd that happen?
So in the summer my mom, as
I'm going to stereotype, but a lot of Asian moms will just say you have to go do something academic.
And there was a program at the local community school, community college where they would take junior high school, high school kids, even elementary school kids and they had classes in math and English and other things. And so there were classes for kids and there was this class, Getting to Yes. And I was a second child and my parents were really concerned about my brother being successful and I sort of had things figured out at least for a fifth grader. So I think my parents were less worried about me and so I felt like I always had to fight for things for me and so I felt that would be a great asset for me.
God. And the strategy behind that as a kid where you're like, 'This is'
I don't think there was strategy, but more like gosh, I'd like to hear more yeses.
I'd like to hear more yeses. I mean, that's a strategy. And then you were in this class with all these adults.
We had this exercise. I think it was to go to Mars or something like that. And you had to negotiate supplies. And there was a moment where they sent me in to negotiate on their behalf. And I think about it now and if I was in a class with a bunch of my peers and there's a 10-year-old in my class, I don't know how I would take that seriously. I don't know what they were thinking, but they never made me feel smaller for it. I feel grateful for that.
Your dad was a rocket scientist. Like a literal rocket scientist.
Yeah. And in what I think in 1984, he bought you your first IBM computer.
Which you took apart and figured out how it worked. And one of my favorite details about your dad that I read was that every day he would ask you, 'Is that a world-class effort?'
Yeah. Whatever you're doing, even when you had a college job that you were photocopying and he called and said,
'Is that a world-class effort?'
Was that ever a burden? The pressure, the pressure of having the standard of perfection in everything?
I don't think it was perfection, right? Because it was the effort. It was did you do something in a way that was like the best effort you could put into it versus kind of slacking off and being kind of okay with it, right? Being okay with the photocopy that was just a little bit tilted and maybe not totally clear or being okay with a book report where you didn't take good care to write the best summary. You just kind of shot something off. And I think for that I'm appreciative because it taught me what sort of the top of my effort level is versus being kind of okay with mediocrity.
And there are plenty of times where I was and I am okay with mediocrity. You know, I'll go to sleep and like the kitchen sink is a hot mess and that's not my world-class effort. Like when I go running in the morning, I run a steady somewhere between a 9:30 and 11 minute mile. It is slow, right? And it's that pace whether I'm running a mile, three miles, or a half marathon. And I remember someone was like, 'You're supposed to run faster if it's a shorter distance.' I'm like, 'That's just not the way I run. It's not a world-class effort, right? But I'm getting exercise.' And I have to know that that's my objective.
Do you have any first principles or strategies for knowing the doors to shut?
I think in your 20s, you start to really get to know yourself. There's one of the things I really learned early on. I'm doing a PhD at Stanford and a guy joins the faculty and he moves into an office across the hall from me and I had taken five years off before I started the PhD and I realized that this guy is my age and so I'm in a seminar where he's speaking and the way he's speaking about the research, the way he can recall things, what he knows, how he communicates this research, and then the research ideas that he has is so elevated that I immediately can see, am I ever going to be that good? And I remember telling my dad, I'm like, I know I'm pretty good at this, but there has to be something else in the world where I know that I can compete at that level, and this may not be the thing. It's this process of specialization, right? Where you start out and the specialization is very coarse. It's very kind of focused on a particular activity.
it becomes more subtle and more integrated where the goal is actually to braid together different things that you enjoy and are good at that allow you to be world class.
Part of the problem is like maybe for a century jobs felt very static. Like you would go and work at Hewlett Packard in some division for 40 years, retire, and then that was what your job was. Maybe the magic of this moment with AI, with technology, is that there are so many opportunities for people to design their lives and their profession around who they are and how they want to express themselves. That I know there's a lot of worries around job loss, but I see some really interesting opportunities for true self-expression and maybe a loss in the sense of you can't just sign up for a job and have that for 40 years and that stability, but a gain in terms of self-expression and self-discovery.
So now you run the VC Floodgate which you started in 2008.
And you started this in the midst of the financial crisis. You were pregnant with your second kid.
A few months after I started.
A few months after you started.
You were also doing a PhD.
Yeah. So I had to in two May of 2008 is when we started Floodgate. In June of 2009, I graduated with my degree. But and I was defending my thesis and six weeks prior to that, I had given birth to my second child and our first was two and a half years old and actually pretty resentful of the fact that we had had a second child. And then I made my first investment into TaskRabbit in November of 2009. So 2008 to 2009 very productive years.
Wow. And Floodgate at the time was one of the first micro VCs which is a concept that now many people have copied and you went and went on to invest in as you said
Lyft, Okta, TaskRabbit, Twitch.
Twitch. Yeah. I wonder what it's like on the inside. Like do you feel like you've made it? Do you feel like you've arrived.
No, I don't think so. I mean, I think there are things that we've gotten right. Right. So, making those investments, but then you got to do that over and over and over again and now we're living in a world where you have a thousand plus seed stage firms that we're competing with. And back then I was like the young cool hip person and now I'm like literally the boomer, right? I think I had essentially a founder intimate that I was a total boomer in a call the other day.
They're like, 'Come on, grandma.' He basically said, 'Well, people our age engage with short form video like on TikTok.' Yeah. So there it's I think it just evolves, right? And now I'm competing because I'm wise.
I've seen cycles. I've seen some. You old battle axe.
Yeah, I've seen it all. Nothing will faze me. That's why you want me on your team.
I love the evolution of how people like talk about your value. Like you starting as this whippersnapper, young whippersnapper with so much
promise and energy and now you're the wise like
Totally, I'll play into that. That's what it takes. Sure.
So how do you think about measuring your success? And is there a point at which you will feel like you're done?
I don't measure my success based on work metrics. I guess there I get value from my work because well number one I do want to return great returns to my investor, right? So my limited partners I want to make them proud. We have great foundations. We have folks who use the returns that we provide them for amazing purposes, right? And so those are things that really motivate me. But again, going back to like when you're my age, I think you also realize that the purpose of all of this is maybe to make yourself a little bit better and make the world a little bit better. But really, it's, you know, at the end of the day, you're not going to say, 'Gosh, I wish I worked one more day.'
Or it would have meant so much to win one more deal or have a little bit more wealth. I think at some point you get to a point where things are okay, right? You could take care of your family and you could take care of your parents and everyone's going to be okay. And beyond that, I think it's a luxury. And so really, what are you looking for? I think you're looking for human relationships. I'm turning 50 this year.
Total boomer. I know that's what you're thinking.
What? No boomer. No. I'm like, God, you look 30.
Thank you. But I realized there were a lot of moments where I would tell friends, I can't go do that or I can't go to that dinner. I'm just too busy. And this year has been I'm just going to say yes. I'm going to say if a friend invites me to something, I'm going to do everything in my power to just say yes.
So, it does sound like you have reached a level of maybe not where it's like you've won or you know that you've reached the ultimate professional success that you can imagine. There's still deals or things that you want to work on, but it sounds like you're not driven by those as much.
I think so. A couple things. One is I'm very competitive and so it takes more effort to blunt that and so in my old age I think I try to manage those emotions right and I don't think that's gone and I still feel that like I want to find another company at the scale of I want to I feel like I see where things are going with AI and so I want to find these companies that are fulfilling that vision and to me those are all actually colliding because I have a child that's 19 who needs to go into the working world. I have one that's also going to apply for colleges next year.
And so all of this knowledge that I'm gaining is in service of my work, competing for the best and most brilliant entrepreneurs, but it's also fueling this love of knowledge and understanding. And so I think those aren't incompatible, but I'm trying to do it with this awareness of at the end of the day, what really matters is actually these relationships. It's when a friend says, 'Hey, can you come to this event?' Or another friend asks me out to dinner, I should say yes.
And those things don't have to conflict with the inherent competitive fire, too. Were you always able to navigate those tensions?
No. There was a really unhealthy thing I used to do, which was when my kids were really little, measuring the percentage of waking hours that I was there at home or to see them. That was very unhealthy. So, I don't think I got it right. And I think it's really tough to find that balance. I think a lot of people would look at me and say, 'Oh, she has it totally figured out.' And like they don't know if you like peel back the onion, you know,
her kitchen sink. Yeah. Mess.
Raccoon in there or what is it?
No, but there's a hot mess somewhere. It's like no one has it figured out and everyone's messed up at some point and disappointed someone important in their lives. And so, I think it's important to acknowledge that. I think too often we just present this really polished perfect look into our lives and yeah, I think it's really challenging.
Yeah. And it's so hard because people, you know, in preparation for this episode, you read the stories about you, you watch the interviews and the clips and looking back it all just creates this beautiful clean polished narrative and in many ways we're complicit in it because I find this with myself as well where it's like people ask to tell your story and so I tell my story and you try to make it more memorable, more evocative, always true. But you don't realize you are like polishing these edges in a way that can ultimately be doing a disservice to the friction of the journey.
When we're talking about internal and external measures of success, something that will always come up is money. I'd love to better understand your relationship with money. People are constantly asking you for money. You're hanging out with some of the richest people in the world. Like I assume you have money. How has your relationship to money changed over the course of your career?
That's such a good question. We grew up very middle class. You know, my dad worked for NASA. My mom was a stay-at-home mom, and so we were not rich by any measure, but we had a good existence. But at one point, my mom took me to this department store. It was called Montgomery Ward and there was apparently a blue and pink sweater and my mom told me to choose one and I looked at the price and I started to cry because I wanted both but I knew we couldn't have both. And later that day, I told my mom that I had a theory of what it meant to be rich. And she asked me what that was. And I told her it was when you don't have to turn the price tag over to see what the price is. And I recently went shopping with my mom and she was laughing because she said, 'I guess we're not rich yet.'
You're at the clearance rack looking at that price.
Which I thought was really funny because I was like, you know what, mom? With that definition, I don't think I'll ever be rich. But you know, I think my relationship with money has been what is enough. There was a vision for what I wanted to be able to do for family members. And so both Al and I, my husband Al, we both have family that entirely lives outside of the United States except for our moms. And so, one of the things that we've both wanted is to just be able to care for our moms without really consulting the other person. Right? If my mom needs something, do I need to go to Albert and ask him? No. Like we have enough that sharing it with our family members is not something that we think about even twice. And so I remember thinking like what is enough? And that felt like enough.
You are an expert in asking people for money and giving money away, right? It's an important part of being a VC. I'd love to hear your take on what is so broken with giving in America. There's so many well-meaning people who want to make a difference, who want to help, and yet it feels like so much of this capital is just locked away. What's your read on what is going on? Like why aren't more people giving?
Yeah, I love this question so much. When I graduated from college, I was working at McKinsey and there was a partner who took a few of us out to lunch and I'll never forget he said, 'Look, the most important thing for you to do right now besides max out your 401k is to actually have a philosophy around giving.' And he said, 'You're going to say that you want to wait until you're wealthy, that you're going to wait until you're powerful to give away your millions of dollars.' And he said, 'By then it'll be too late because you will never have developed the muscle for giving.' And that was really interesting to me. It's so interesting that it's something that I tell my students now at Stanford that this is a lesson I learned when I was young and I hope you guys do that too.
Is it weird having people ask you for money all the time?
It doesn't come across that way. Do you know what I'm saying? They're telling me their story.
They're telling me their story and I'm being asked to be a co-conspirator.
