"Date Night" with Cyan Banister (Investor) and Scott Banister (Founder of IronPort)

Bannister and maybe that'll make sense to why it's exciting that he's here in a moment. Yes, yeah, other than just being my husband, yes. So I'd love to get started. Maybe with quick introductions. Sometimes we ask people to give two introductions. The first introduction would be Cyan and Scott when y'all were around the ages of 18, 19, or 20, how you would have introduced yourself if you were sitting in a room like this. And a second introduction would be Cyan and Scott today.

Well, I think what would be great to start with is how you used to sneak into these rooms when you were that age.

I didn't go to college and I dropped out of high school. So when I was 18, I was part of the workforce, and even walking into this room, it's very alien to me. I was just like, wow, this is such a foreign environment, but it's exhilarating. I'm excited to be here. I'd love for you to share a little bit more about that story and how you got to where you are today from a unique childhood.

He introduced me to all these hacker computer engineer people, and they started bringing me to all of these conferences. I started realizing that that was my calling in life: working with anything and everything that had to do with computer technology. And how did the two of y'all meet?

That's great. How long ago was that?

Tell us more about that. What did you identify?

Yeah, I honestly wouldn't have considered this as a career path. I'm an accidental VC. I think that sometimes it takes somebody identifying that you have a skill and giving you that confidence that you could do that. This was long before... when I got into this, there were very few angel investors. Now there's an industry around it. It used to be that what now is considered the time when people raise money from angel investors for their seed round, sometimes even from seed funds, there was something known as the friends and family round. Pretty much everyone when they were starting a company, that was kind of what you did. There might be people in your network that might write investment checks, but it probably wasn't their identity writing checks into small companies. Then that became an industry into itself.

So you all have invested in PayPal, SpaceX, Postmates. What else am I missing? I know a bunch.

Once we have a conviction about a company, we get involved. We don't really have... I see people with their amazing spreadsheets and stuff. I mean, you have a spreadsheet, but I don't. But it's one of these things where sometimes we don't even know all the companies we've done, but there's a lot. We were with someone earlier who complimented you a lot and said you are the best angel investor, maybe you all are the best angel investors out there. Everyone thinks you're really crazy when you make an investment, but five years later they start to realize that they all were right. I'm curious, in 2028, what do you think the world will look like? What are some hot takes that y'all have?

I'm not seeing any weather signs, Scott. I mean, I guess if I'm going to put something out there, I would just say that the software industry will continue with or without AI. There will continue to be all the same sorts of opportunities that have been there for the last 20, 30, however many years. Those opportunities don't stop existing just because there's some new technological innovation. There may be really great boring pieces of enterprise software that people should still go build, whether you can put AI in your PowerPoint deck or not.

I would say I'm the optimist. You are optimistic pessimists. But I think how we work and what's beautiful about our relationship is that I like to fly by the seat of my pants and live in the moment. I like to be very present, and he enables me to do so by taking on the back office and the various functions of that role that I don't particularly enjoy, that you seem to like. So when it comes to legal documents, even thinking through some of the harder spreadsheet economic questions that I don't want to dig into... I worked at a fund where we did growth investing, and I just felt like my soul was going to die. So I really like this stage, and I like being paired with someone like Scott because I can be very undisciplined.

So you think... sometimes anything to add?

Well, I want to talk about making your own luck. You left school. What year was it when you left?

You left high school? Sophomore year?

I'd love for you to share stories back then and today on how you make your own luck, the steps you take to do that.

To be honest with you, as I get older, I've come to realize that a lot of that is false. We do make our own luck by having an optimistic attitude and a passion and a curiosity for the world around us. One of the things Scott and I like to talk about is that in order to be a really great investor, you must really care about your fellow man and woman. You have to really care about humanity. All of the investments that we've done, when I look thematically across them, they were a shift in human behavior. Like if you look at Uber, it was 'I'm going to get in a stranger's car, they're going to use this asset and drive me to another place, and I'm going to somehow trust that's all going to work out.' When we took that deal, we got a lot of feedback saying I'm not a good investor or I don't know, I won't trust my gut. You really have to, in the face of that, fight through it and maintain that curiosity and optimism. I think that's where luck lives. If you're pessimistic and you don't go out the door, it's a self-fulfilling destiny. You're basically saying 'I'm closed.' I was having a discussion with a friend yesterday about optimistic investors versus pessimistic ones. I think pessimistic ones will end up doing fewer deals but be right about them. Optimists will do more deals and be wrong about more, and they'll end up probably in roughly the same place. But I would say it's a better place to live if you're more excited about the journey.

What do you want to learn more of? Where's your curiosity guiding you?

I'm learning Morse code. I know that's weird. But I have this dream that someday I'm going to look out across the hills and there's going to be a flashing light, and I'm going to be the one unique person that responds. I've learned weird stuff like that. I don't know where it's going to lead. But if I have a curious inclination about something, I go deep down the rabbit hole. I might become a ham radio operator next. I'm always into something like baseball cards, basketball cards. Those help you make connections. If you get into baseball cards or basketball cards, you might run across a Whatnot and have to invest.

I'm curious, the room is filled with people that are just getting started on their entrepreneurial journeys, tinkering on stuff. What have you learned as the biggest mistakes that people make when just getting started?

The first one is the relationship with a co-founder. Most companies will fall apart due to lack of communication with your co-founder. If you're teaming up with a group of people, sorting out what equity ownership is... a lot of times we'll see people figure that out when it's time to raise money, and then you start thinking about value and what did you do and what did I do. How do you like to solve disputes? Who's the 51% owner or majority owner of the company that's actually going to make decisions? So I think one of the things I look for when I'm doing a pitch, number one, if they have a co-founder, how do they resolve disputes? It's amazing to me that no matter how great your idea is, no matter what great technology you have, if you can't manage people or work with other people, you're just dead in the water. So I think that's probably the number one piece of advice I would give: pick your co-founder wisely.

How do you work with disagreeable people? Same with some of the PayPal team. How do you think about that?

I've worked with a lot of the PayPal team at this point. I think being disagreeable can be a gift. It takes a certain type of culture and the type of people that you have around you for that to work. It worked at Uber until it didn't. When Travis had to fight regulators and deeply entrenched systems to rip out medallion systems from taxi drivers, that is not for the meek. That is not for someone who's just going to roll over. So you did need that aggressive behavior, a culture that was just like 'we're going to win at all costs.' But the problem was when they were nearing going public, that culture didn't adapt. Uber is still very successful and it's a great company, but I would argue that maybe Travis being at the helm might have been better. That's a management issue, and I wasn't in the boardroom. But my imagination is that he would have been. I'm a big believer that the soul of the company should stay as long as possible. When you take out the founder, the person who had the original vision, you're potentially killing what made it a golden goose in the first place. So you have to be really careful about those decisions and not make them lightly. I'm sure it was a tough decision for Benchmark to make, but Travis was absolutely the right entrepreneur at the right time.

I'm curious to touch on starting a company. It's super hard. You never know when something will start to work. How do you experience people deciding whether or not to pivot or just keep going?

The public has to be perfect. That ends up being an issue. I've seen that many times. You think you have product-market fit and you're on to something, but then there's nothing there, and not knowing when to realize that there was nothing there. For example, high-growth consumer startups. I can't tell you how many we've invested in that had hundreds of millions of users that ended up going to nothing because it doesn't have a hook, something sticky for those people to stay. Then you have the people who refuse to pivot due to sunk cost fallacy. And then there are amazing entrepreneurs who are just like, 'I really wanted to do this, but it's not working, so I'm going to do this other thing.' You have to get used to all of this. Life is not static; it's unpredictable, and startups are just as unpredictable.

I've seen people pivot too quickly. There was a period of time when it was really hot to just throw spaghetti against the wall, and if it didn't stick immediately, you built something else. They would never even give it the time of day to stick. Sometimes you need a few more weeks of that experiment, but they were just like, 'Oh, that didn't work. I don't have a million users today, so on to the next thing.' I've seen all types, and that rarely works out. But every now and then, you might hit lightning in a bottle, like HQ Trivia.

What do you all think about incrementalism for yourselves today? What game level do you want to advance to next?

I don't know. Are you into incrementalism like me?

I don't know if you want to talk more about it.

It's like trying to find a four-leaf clover. By the way, can I tell you guys how to find a four-leaf clover? If you're in a patch of clovers, of course, three-leaf clovers, you're looking for a four-leaf clover. You will look for triangles because that's what your mind thinks you're looking for, but you're actually looking for a square. I think there's something beautiful about that. If you're looking for a square but you don't know you're looking for a square, you're never going to find it. The moment you train your mind to find squares, they start appearing everywhere, and suddenly you become this magician of four-leaf clovers. It's a cool trick to play with your friends, but it's also really fun to do with entrepreneurs. I take entrepreneurs on walks, and I've started taking pitches that way. It's fascinating to see how they can go there with you. So I like to come up with fun things like that. I try to integrate my job with my passion for learning as seamlessly as possible.

What are some creative walks you've been on?

The four-leaf clover one is amazing. If you're stopping to stare at the world, the world is profoundly beautiful. It's endless. You'll run into hummingbirds, skateboarders, your neighbor that you've never met, or discover a school down the street with students in it. There's no telling where that rabbit hole goes. A lot of people look at this and wonder how it relates. I've had so many conversations where I explain how everything works in this place in the world, and that leads you to opportunities, including what company to start.

What have you all learned from each other?

So much. How to not fight. I'm just kidding. This is our date night, by the way.

What have you learned from Scott? Oh gosh, I'm always learning from Scott. Scott's like an oracle of information. We like to joke that I have a really fast processor and no hard drive, and he has a really big hard drive and a slower processor. So we sometimes get to the same answers but not on the same time scale. I'm more impulsive, so it works out. It's quite beautiful because he'll say, 'Well, what was the logic?' And I'll say, 'I don't know, I just felt it.' And he'll say, 'Well, here's the logic.' He has an amazing amount of trivia in that brain of yours. So yeah, we're always learning from each other.

That's great. I'd love to open it up to questions as well and make it interactive. If anyone has questions, I'd love for you to share maybe just a sentence on your name, if you're working on anything, and a question.

Oh yeah, thank you so much for this talk. I think it's not very traditional, the questions and answers that have been talked about, and I think it's really interesting. Yeah, I know Corey asked you about the common mistakes that early-stage founders have. I'm kind of wondering if you've seen any similarities between them or any habits or mental models that they have that have made them successful.

Ego. I see this happen over and over again. Maybe taking secondaries too soon, or always putting yourself before the company, your co-workers, and the mission you're on. It can work out sometimes, but in general, it's a path to failure. That's the one commonality I see across all of them. No matter how much I try to sit down and tell them, 'This isn't about you. If you do this, it's going to be catastrophic for these reasons,' there's always this pesky little ego in the background that says, 'I need to take my thing, I need to do my thing,' without thinking about how that impacts everyone else. Almost every time, I can't give you a real example because it's so common. I ask, 'Is this real? If you're angry at a co-worker, is that real? Is it really going to matter five years from now, this thing you're fighting about?' You've got to be really practical about this stuff.

Yeah, sorry. I'm curious about... I read an article that maybe early on in this video journey, things split or something. It's like maybe two companies. Top fans, yeah. And some of what you're talking about.

We started Zivity around the time MySpace was launched. We thought there was a movement happening where there are people with a one-to-many fan model, where models are trying to reach an audience but have no way to monetize. The only people capturing that value were MySpace and the advertisers. We also believed that subscription services hadn't really seen their time. So we were trying to build the HBO of the internet, a place where adults could be adults. It was incredibly difficult because payment processors wouldn't work with you, hosting providers wouldn't, eventually WeWork wouldn't even let me have an office there. Imagine starting a company on hard mode. I'm super excited that OnlyFans exists because it's validating to some degree, but it hurts because I get calls all the time asking how I screwed up so badly. At the same time, I feel really good that Scott and I came up with Zivity. I believe we invented crowdfunding of sorts. At the time, nobody else was doing anything like it. Then Kickstarter, Patreon, and others came along. We couldn't have an app on the App Store, we couldn't advertise. Even today, if you want to start a company in this space, I don't invest in it anymore because I know the hurdles. You can't advertise on Instagram, you can't even have your content on Instagram. Twitter is probably the last frontier for advertising this content. So it's a combination of a lot of things that went wrong. I was the CEO, I own it. You have to own all that stuff. After we went through two previous CEOs, I inherited it, but I was the founder.

On the controversial front, is there anything that you think is super controversial today that will be very normal tomorrow?

I think AI chatbots are going to take the place of even the people on OnlyFans. That's going to be very disruptive because when you can talk to somebody or something that's indistinguishable from reality, and maybe even better, you might prefer that because you don't think a human being is being harmed. The ethics of it might feel better. So I think that's going to be a really interesting space that will take off. Maybe investors will finally look at the space with some legitimacy and think there could be exits that are investable. But for the most part, there's really no one to acquire your company; it's not going to go anywhere.

It's a question over there. Two questions.

Lately, I'm trying something new. So the answer is, it's always a process. Have you ever seen a magic trick that takes your breath away, and you gasp, and they tell you how it's done, but three minutes later it's like it didn't happen? You can sit there and try to get it through to people, but sometimes it's a personal journey for everybody. Right now, I'm recommending Rick Rubin's book, 'The Creative Act: A Way of Being.' It really helps, especially to understand an artist's mind, but also to understand where an idea comes from. It challenges the assumption of the ego that we're somehow responsible for all the ideas we have. When you start realizing that you do have a purpose, you are meant to do this, but you are not the ingredient. A lot of people have this 'I gotta be Steve Jobs' sort of thing. That was a hot thing for a while, everybody was Steve Jobs. But not everybody can be Steve Jobs. I think you have to have some level of humbleness in order to be successful. So that's the book I'm recommending right now. I carry around a stack of them. If anybody wants one, I could probably get you one. I think that's the simplest, most beautiful thing. If you don't know who Rick Rubin is, he made some of the most renowned songs. He can hear change. I would argue that investing and being an entrepreneur is being able to see change. You are an artist. If you're an entrepreneur, you are an artist. So definitely read that book.

You mentioned Travis was sort of hyper-aggressive in scaling out operations. It kind of worked until it went a little bit overboard. I know it's a pretty common problem. Do you think there's some sort of balance to swing there?

Yes. The entrepreneur should match the problem. Let's take Brendan Eich, for example, who started Brave. That's an investment I've done. Brendan doesn't make eye contact, he looks at the floor. He's very quiet. He'll post something on Slack and no one was saying a thing. But why does that work? You have to ask yourself why Brendan Eich in that particular situation works, and why would Travis be a bull in a china shop? The reason it works is because he's managing engineers. These engineers are really attracted to him specifically because he is the creator of JavaScript. He has this gravitas as an engineer that people want to learn from him. He really shines when he writes code. So one of the things I look for is whether the skill of the entrepreneur is matched with the problem and the culture they're trying to create. They all come hand in hand. Yes, fighting a taxi medallion system takes a warrior, but maybe starting a boring company is better because there's an inherent moat in it. The boredom mode is basically this person will come in front of you and start talking about notaries. Pat Kinsel, I invested in Notarized, and he came in and I never met anyone in my life who was more excited about revolutionizing the notary system.

Yeah, yeah. Can I ask one more? What do you think about hardware?

Sure, follow up. I've seen the other companies. I think they're [__]. Who's really competing with SpaceX right now? Since I've seen them, hopefully no one.

I'm a founder reinvesting in the world. Was laundry? So I definitely get... Reunion about being fascinated with something that everybody thought was boring. Awesome. My question is, what have you seen the biggest factors or the biggest things that have to go right for a company to go from one million to 100 million revenue, and then from 100 to a billion?

I'm working on a content with a startup, and one is, as someone self-educated, what sort of insights do you have on how to learn, and how do you think that applies to being a founder and learning beyond just consuming knowledge through peer experience? And then secondly, in your Substack book, you talk about how you have these secret future ambitions, long-term ambitions that you're working towards. If you told anybody, they'd think you're crazy. What are some of those?

Oh dear. So as someone self-educated... Self-educated tools, okay, yeah. Everybody learns differently. I'm a visual thinker and a visual learner, so I do best when I'm shadowing somebody, or I watch a video, or I experience something. You know, other people are better at consuming novels at an astonishing rate. Some people run on their treadmill and listen to audiobooks. I am not one of those people. But I think it's more about a mentality, which is every day you're going to make it a goal or a purpose to learn something more that not only makes yourself better, but can you make the human experience better because of it? I see people that want to learn guitar, for example, but if you're not playing songs for people, why learn? Go out and make the world a better place. So I think if you could think about that, and think about like, 'I'm going to be a CEO, I want to be a really good manager, so why don't I start consuming all the management books I can possibly get my hands on, or I'm gonna go meet my heroes and talk to them and ask them questions.' But really, it's just sensational curiosity, and how you do it is kind of personalized to you. On the notion of incrementalism... Oh, I'm going to ask us to answer his question later. Sorry, I didn't forget it. Go ahead. But on the other hand, there's this notion that companies should be dramatically... To it, that's it. Yes, you just stated the answer to the question. There you go. Yeah, so you plot a point that's out here, and then once you're there, well now you're incrementally sailing a ship, right? So you don't start your ship in the same place as every other ship. You go put your ship somewhere, and then now you're incrementally sailing your ship, right? Talk to the customers over and over again, roll out a feature, see what they do with it. That all becomes very incremental. And I think what's very difficult then is when you see some of the really successful companies over time, they can kind of do those two steps repeatedly, right? They're like, throw a boat out here, that is now incremental here. Now toss a robot out there, that boat starts sailing this... My in-game goal is to be an artist, and I want to make art that matters. And I think in order to make art that matters, you have to not care about the outcome of that art or whether it's financially viable. So some of the greatest artists that you know that made an impact on the world, like if you look at Banksy, one could argue that it's obviously financially viable at this point, but you know, you have to put it out there without anyone really caring. And in order to do that, you have to have sort of a level of stability, or you just give no fucks and you just go to it. So I have a lot of plans that I would prefer to keep to myself, because I would rather surprise the world. And it's not clear that I'll seek attribution for these things or not.

Like your sweatshirt. Thank you very much. My co-founder and I are working on a conversation partner for reaching professional fluency. And regarding my co-founder, I'm curious if you have come across any habits that you can engage in together as co-founders to maintain and strengthen and improve your relationship.

I don't know that I have a hard opinion. Some VCs have... If you look at Founders Fund, they've definitely gone more to the 'you've got to be in the office and everybody has to be there.' But the pandemic definitely taught us that remote can work. I think that there are some productivity hits that people are starting to see, and so they're like, 'Come back to the office.' Right now it sort of remains to be seen. We're still in the early days of trying to figure out, like we've got this great big A/B test going on right now with the workforce of what will work. So I don't think I can say with any certainty... Elements that we're missing on Zoom. So it really just depends on what kind of leader you are. I don't think there's a right or wrong answer. It's really about results at the end of the day. Right? I read something recently that really resonated with me, which was: even if the remote employee model results in plenty of productivity and the company is successful, is the company creating success for the employees? Right? Because they're just all out in these silos. They're not interacting with each other. They're not building a lot of skills that they might have built if they were in an office together. Right? So even if the outcome of the company is the same, do those people then go out into the world and have the same follow-on outcomes? And I tend... Other people I'm trying to bring on, I really know them from past experience to learn about courses in India, and they work together in an office space for working space, building product, but under the US and the product is as the market is here. And I'm working how to keep the launch product here. So it's kind of like two spaces, so I have to switch my time. But then this is really smart talent, I can't just let go. So can you buy us on that?

Hi again. Specifically in the realm of consumer tech, I guess a lot of startups nowadays just have a very stale, weightless... Like, as an investor, what is your idealistic startup creating a pre-product hype around what they're doing?

Product, right? Without that, it can just... Something can appear and be, you know, have a lot of downloads for one day because you invited a lot of people on a waitlist, but that ultimately won't result in anything. So you know, I think hype is not a long-term value proposition. Scott mentioned that you were on the forefront of consumer apps back in the days of the early iPhone. I'm curious what you see as the frontier of consumer apps now. I am really still excited about AR, and I'm looking forward to Apple's announcement in June. And I think that, you know, I was in... We were an early... I guess because you're tricking your mind that you're walking around and there's these invisible creatures. In that sense, it kind of is. But I'm really excited about first the camera being the lens to the invisible world, and then a wearable. Now battery technology is not where I would like it, or where we need it to be. And then of course fashion is always an issue of whether or not people are going to think the glasses are cool or cool enough or not. But I think the app ecosystem on that, we have not seen the killer app for that yet. It came out with tape measures. There's been some attempts at some stuff, but it's really going to take rethinking the world and the interfaces, like the UI. And it should be seamless for every device in the world. You know, there are so many opportunities like this that don't exist. So I'm incredibly excited about that. And then of course AI, any sort of... Like a lot of these art editing apps, you know, Midjourney, all that sort of stuff, is just really fascinating to me. Did I answer your question?

Yeah, simply from consumer... Ous later. Your fin cycle hose, the ones that don't... The armpits in the focus and any characteristics of his custom scene in them?

Do we do a lot of fintech? Non-consumer fintech? Can you give me an example?

Actually, generically speaking, the engine of their product is a B2B engine, right? So they go out, they find e-tailers that want to sell products that potentially have a ticket size that the consumer looking at the product may or may not want to spend right then. And they say, 'Oh, we'll break it up into this many payments.' And so then the consumers are sort of the second user, right? The first user is the business. So I guess what's important about that is you need to really understand what problem you're solving for the business, right?

Than consumer software, which is that you can really go talk to consumers, potential customers rather, and you can really learn about their needs, and you can really try to figure out what to build in a way that maybe a consumer product from focus groups would never really get you there. It requires a little bit more just sort of intuition to create a consumer product. But I think in the enterprise, I mean, you can go interview 100 potential customers in depth, right? And potentially you could build your whole initial five million dollars of revenue off of those 100 customers, right? So there's something special about building B2B software. Entrepreneur... Foreign... Well, they pay you. I think is important, right? Sometimes you can talk to a customer and they'll say, 'Oh well, we'd like this and we'd like that.' 'Oh, okay, great. How much per year are you going to pay?' Right? And then I think there's this weird intersection which is the intuitive game that the entrepreneur has to be playing, which is: I'm hearing all these different things from all these different customers. What is the commonality? Sometimes you have to sort of lead the customers to tell you about certain sorts of things. You know, we've talked to five customers and we think there's some commonality here. So now we talk to the sixth customer. Let's guide them in the direction of the commonality, as opposed to sort of just letting them go off in the middle of nowhere, right? So I'm not sure if that answers your question, but ish. Maybe one or two more questions. Let's do it. Okay.

I was wondering, what general advice do you have for trying to hire your first few employees?

Oh, gosh. Hardest thing in the world. It is the hardest thing in the world. I would say cultural fit is important. And in order to figure out what that is, you kind of have to sit down either with yourself or with your co-founder and... Come in and join us and be part of that. So for example, when we were at IronPort, IronPort had maybe what, 10 values? They were pretty easy to recite. Okay, maybe even only five. Very, very... The other thing is that we believed in them. A lot of companies create values and then they put them up on the wall and no one can recite them and no one believes them. But one of the values that IronPort had was a speak-up culture. Obviously that could go awry if you speak up and they're like, 'Oh, don't talk, sit down.' Then obviously you're not living your culture. But at IronPort, we were encouraged to dissent. However, there was another value, which was once you've dissented, if there's someone in leadership who takes your feedback and decides to do something else, you're... Value customer service. I love being service-oriented. I love this type of culture. They're going to feel like they've arrived at home. So you have to build the container for them, the home for them, before you hire that first employee. And you may not know, but maybe that first employee is going to help you define that. But I guarantee every person you add changes your business. And you have to be careful, because culture can exist without your input. So if you don't get involved with it, it will just grow a life of its own. And then once it does and you're really big and it's not the right one, you're screwed. Blue. Oh gosh, do I have to flip a coin? Let's take both of those and then we'll be done. Okay.

I'm just curious about, you know, what the personal philosophy or what the thesis is behind that decision to not be in the public very much.

I'll chime in a little bit. I think Scott will do what's right and what's good because it's right and good, where a lot of people will do it because they want the social capital of the act. And this is a person who will never do that. And I find it very beautiful. It's actually one of the most beautiful things that I admire about this man, is that he will go out there and do things that are world-changing that nobody knows about. And it's because he wants all of our lives to be better and the world to be better, and it's not about him. So you know, I've seen times where the Wall Street Journal had him on the front page, and he wouldn't come out of the house for a week because he didn't want anybody to see it. Or you know, he wouldn't read it. I think to this day you haven't read it. So I think they're in it for a different reason, and they're successful. But you know, I think this is a much more admirable way to go. So if you're looking towards being an investor someday, or starting a company, or changing the world, you might want to ask yourself like, how will you be perceived? What is your brand? Kind of like culture, it'll exist with or without you. Thank you.

All right, last question. It's like, I guess if you're thinking like, what are some concrete ways to put yourself in that mindset of thinking about these things 10, 15, 20 years from now?

Sure. Yeah, if you can afford it, I highly recommend traveling. So one of the things I used to do was go... Around what's different than where you are. And start when Japan's particularly interesting, because like they have things like escalators that don't move unless you go near them. You know, we don't have that. So you think about that, that's energy preservation, right? Or they do things because they have a very different culture, but they have to live harmoniously within very close proximity to one another in Tokyo. Same thing in Hong Kong, etc. So I think really just putting yourself out there to where your present, you know, you're not taking phone calls, you're not on Instagram, you're not doing it for the TikTok reel or whatever. You're actually there to learn about human beings and how they operate in the world. You'll start noticing that in Japan, they adopted the QR code. I've been waiting for a day, and the pandemic was this day. All of a sudden everybody can now look at a menu, but Japan's been doing it for 15 years. They've been watching television on their phones since way before we were. And so I think, but in many ways they're living in the past. So you can say, wow, like they have these 50s cultural values, but then they solve for these density problems by living in the future. And then you can start thinking, gosh, what can one of these things could work in America or where I am? And then you start thinking about, you know, read science fiction. So that's the other thing. I feel like people don't read enough science fiction. Because if you remember when the book was written, so if you're going to read two science fiction books, I recommend Snow Crash and Diamond Age. But interestingly, science fiction predicts the future over and over and over again, and they end up becoming true. Like Neal Stephenson predicted the iPad, metaverse, VR. And the guy is a Luddite. He hates technology. He doesn't understand it. If you talk to him, he's just like, 'I don't know.' He hates his fans. It's the weirdest thing. But obviously there's some sort of... Once you get your mind tuned to that sort of thing, the ideas just start to come, and you start living in the future. That's all I can really say. And then you'll find yourself on that frontier, and it's a really fun place to be. Diamond Age and Snow Crash. Now Neal Stephenson cannot start a book. In the book, so when you read Diamond Age... Crashing. He's like, 'Well, have you read Diamond Age?' I'm like, 'No, there's this really annoying guy.' And he's like, 'Oh, he dies.' So I'm doing you all a favor. I think his name is Bud. Spoiler alert. Yeah, spoiler alert. He spends 10 pages building up this character that gets blown away, and it has stopped so many people from reading this book because he's such an annoying character and you think that he's going to be pervasive around, but no, he's dead. So he's just to establish one thing only, which is he's the father of somebody. That's it. Further spoiler alert, you really didn't need to go that far, but Darth Vader is Luke's father. But I recommend reading these types of things. What is your favorite science fiction book? Highlight? I mean, I don't know. I like a lot of them. I would hate to pick... And you know, Zero to One, but they don't hand somebody a science fiction novel. And I really wish people would do that more, because that's how you're going to start dreaming about what's possible.

Well, thank you for spending date night with all of us. Yeah, this is awesome. We've only done this three times, and twice with you. I appreciate it. So it's pretty exciting. This is rare. To your point, Scott does not make appearances very often, and we especially do not make them together. And it's actually by design, because you see his personality, you see what he likes to be like. So I'm the public face a lot of the time. But it works for us, and it allows them to conserve energy, and I get fired up.