The way that people are using their computer is changing. So I think that's probably the biggest role that AI will play in accelerating glasses. That instead of needing to sit and operate your computer all day long, AI is going to operate your computer for you. And you're going to observe AI, monitor AI, make sure it's on the right track, but generally you're not going to need to spend your life operating the computer in the same way. So I think that accelerates glasses and shifts more of that time from workstation time to being able to get out there, walk around the world, do what you love to do, and of course bring AI with you, bring your workstation with you, but not in the same way that you think about operating your workstation today. If you look at on-the-job training, if you look at the ability to use AI to actually solve problems in the real world, I think specs will be transformational. It's the best way to learn and augmented reality can help make that a lot more accessible. In our industry, there's so much excitement around AI. I think it's so important that industry leaders pay a lot of attention to the anxiety around AI because if you look at the public polling about what a broad base subset of Americans think about AI, the majority of them are very worried about it. They're worried it's going to take their job. They're worried about its impact.
Welcome to Grit. I'm Juben, partner at Kleiner Perkins, a show where we go beyond the highlight reel and explore the personal and professional challenges of building history-making companies. Today on the show, we have somebody that I don't think needs much introduction, Evan Spiegel, co-founder and CEO of Snap with special guests, Bing Gordon, live from Santa Monica in one of my favorite studios that I've ever recorded in. Enjoy the episode.
You know what I was looking up in preparation for this, because obviously you guys are doing a bunch in glasses. I was thinking about the legendary picture of Andre, John Doerr, and somebody from Google wearing the Google glasses. They went on the cover of every magazine and that was when glasses was supposed to happen. I was like, what year was that?
Yeah, but look at the evolution of mobile phones. Look at the evolution of the computer. This stuff takes time.
It's got to be a little unnerving to be like, "All right, we've been chipping away for 14 years. You've been chipping away. Snap's chipping away. Google is chipping away." How do you know when the moment is to strike?
I mean, it helps that we have been singularly focused on this form factor for 11 years. So I think if you look at Google or you look at Meta, a lot of people spent a lot of time focused on VR for the last decade, which is in our view a road to nowhere because people just don't want to wear this chunky headset all day long to access their computer.
It's antisocial to say the least.
I was pretty impressed when I saw you talking to the kids in Bing's class at Stanford about, well everybody else is doing viral, we're going to do social.
Yeah, I think everyone over rotated on VR, learned that was not a good thing, and now just in the last couple of years is trying to pivot back to glasses. But over the last 11 years, we just compounded all of our advantage.
Because the form factor that you chose was a lightweight set of glasses that just look like sunglasses.
Yeah, we believe if you want to embed computing in the world, people need to be able to see the world through a see-through pair of glasses.
When I was a kid, I thought wearing glasses sucked. And then at some point it became my new normal at age 43. But I own so many different specialized pairs of glasses. So what you want is, if you go to the trouble of putting them on, the world has to become better. So you have to see some digital artifact. You have to see some information. You have to see something. So it has to be immediately better.
And I think what you just said totally resonates with our experience, which is you have to focus on the functionality and the utility. I think a lot of people, even including us in the early days, we put a camera on a pair of glasses, but the value just wasn't there. It's not 10 times better than just taking a picture with your phone. And so I think we learned a lot about that. And I agree with you that the value has to be there. For the first time in human history, computing will be shared instead of single player. Today, every time we use a computer, we're using it alone. Every time we use our phone, we're using it alone. And I think the promise of glasses is that we can all look at the same thing, interact with the same thing, build the same thing together just like we collaborate in front of a whiteboard. And that's a big deal for computing.
Let me just follow up on that for a second. This idea of the form factor being the glasses, maybe it was never about the glasses, but the delivery mechanism for how you can get a localized model to be able to do more interesting things. To Bing's point of what are you projecting out of the glasses? We've been trying for 15 plus years to get these glasses to work. Was it maybe, I don't want to overpaint AI as the panacea to everything, but in some way wasn't that a pretty key unlock for you to think about ways that you can use this form factor that are super interesting?
I think it will add a lot of value because the way that people are using their computer is changing. So I think that's probably the biggest role that AI will play in accelerating glasses, that instead of needing to sit and operate your computer all day long, AI is going to operate your computer for you and you're going to observe AI, monitor AI, make sure it's on the right track, but generally you're not going to need to spend your life operating the computer in the same way. So I think that accelerates glasses and shifts more of that time from workstation time to being able to get out there, walk around the world, do what you love to do, and of course, bring AI with you, bring your workstation with you, but not in the same way that you think about operating your workstation today.
I've got a daughter now in her early 30s. She and her best friend, this was an aha for me as a parent. When they were both about 14 and we were on vacation together, she and her best friend were sitting side by side, both on their laptops, chatting with each other. Never turned face to face. This generation is different than mine. You say collaboration. So it's 7 a.m. You get up in the morning, your specs are sitting on the side table. When do you put them on and when do you collaborate?
Honestly, I don't think you need to put them on until you get on the train or something like that and you're on your way to work.
You stick them in your pocket and you pull them out.
You stick them in your pocket, you pull them out, and then you'll have a giant 100-plus-inch screen workstation with you on the road as you're getting ready for work. You're going to be able to multitask in a totally different way. Right now, one of the things your phone really struggles with is multitasking. It's a single app framework and that reduces your ability to get things done. So one of the reasons why desktops are still so important is that multitasking. So I think you get the benefit of that on the go in a really meaningful way. So on your way to work, you're already getting stuff done, getting your day organized. I think that's really powerful.
We know that the digital generation believes multitasking is a better lifestyle. So I've never heard anybody talking about AR as primarily a better way to multitask. That's kind of interesting. Because there's a limit to your field of view of how many different tasks you can get up there simultaneously.
Today on the phone, yeah. But with augmented reality, your workstation is essentially infinite.
So you put digital items out in your field of view and you multitask by somehow enabling each of the digital items.
Yeah, that's one way to think about it. Today people have multiple monitors on their desk because they're trying to get stuff done across a bunch of different applications. I think glasses provide a much more fluid way to do that and the ability to just pick it up and take it with you anywhere.
How many of your 10,000 employees have two monitors on their desk?
We only have 5,000 team members. We serve a community of almost a billion people. Quite a few have two monitors.
Oh, that's good. And even the people who are coding, not just artists.
Oh, for sure. At a bare minimum, one huge monitor, right? That would be impossible to take with you. That's one of the big frustrations I have. If I want to look at a piece of creative or really dig into video we're working on, to do that on your phone and expect the quality to be good from that tiny screen is almost impossible.
Evan, can I read you something?
In your annual letter, you said Snap currently occupies a unique position with significantly more scale and engagement than smaller players, but with less scale and market power than our larger competitors. Squeezed between the tech giants and smaller competitors, on the verge of greatness, we find ourselves in a crucible moment. I suppose it's a bit like being the middle child. That was just a great line. Can you explain how you see yourself in the world?
Yeah, absolutely. From a user engagement perspective, we're now one of the largest online services in the world, probably in the top five outside of China, and meaningfully bigger than a Pinterest or a Reddit or X. A fraction of Snap's scale here in the US and in many other countries around the world. But at the same time, we're towards the beginning of our monetization journey. We're about six billion in annual revenue now. That's a fraction of what Meta or Google or other trillion-dollar players have. That puts us in a really interesting strategic position where we have significantly more scale than smaller players, but that also means we have way more cost because we're supporting this huge community that's engaging and sending messages, watching videos all day long. While we're bigger from a revenue perspective than those companies, we're a lot smaller than much larger competitors. So it means we really have to work in an incredibly efficient way, innovate a ton, move really quickly to be able to continue growing in such a competitive marketplace where our competitors essentially control the market.
And the middle child analogy, can you explain that a little bit more?
Yeah. I think when you're the middle child, there's a lot of attention on the eldest child, and then everyone's always looking at the baby. "Oh my gosh, what are they doing? They're learning how to walk." And the middle child is somewhere in between, trying to determine their own identity. I think it's a funny way of describing that journey. A lot of entrepreneurs talk about the challenge of going from five billion to ten billion in revenue being a really big challenge. We're in that interesting developmental phase where we have to really break out here to become another meaningful scale player.
In the middle child analogy, is it like, "Okay, I feel like I'm cast in the shadow of the big players like Meta. I don't get to be the young, cool, innovative company anymore either." Like you're somewhere in the middle of that zeitgeist.
Yeah. I think maybe the better way to think about it is the older child is more developed, more accomplished, and the baby is growing really fast, changing really fast. I've got four boys at home, so that's how the analogy came to me. I think we're in this middle phase where we are still developing our business. We're not having the big aha moments that Snap went through 10 years ago, but we're really developing and coming into our own as a business, developing core products like specs that will define the next 10 or 20 years of the company. So I think being in that definitional phase where we haven't arrived yet like the eldest child, but we're not just still learning the basics, is interesting.
What are sons two and three going to think when they hear this metaphor?
I hope they can relate. We'll see.
Dad, how dare you. At least you didn't name my name. It's famous that you were offered a lot of money at a very young age for Zuck to buy the company, like three billion. You said no. You wanted to run independently. Is there something in you that's like, 'I got a lot of flack for that and I want to go build this thing and prove to big bro that I can make it on my own?'
In many ways, I think we proved that decision right a decade ago. We were able to stay true to our values, which is so important to us and to our community. I think Meta has revealed themselves time and time again to not care about the well-being of their community, to cut corners in ways that are very harmful to their community and to our society at large. We wanted nothing to do with that. So we've consistently tried to do the right thing, tried to serve our community and provide them an independent choice. Right now, virtually every online service that you use today is owned by Meta. We're kind of the last remaining at-scale indie player. Giving customers a choice to work with a company that respects their privacy, moderates content, and works hard to keep young people safe is really important. That motivates me and a lot of our team members who want their own kids to grow up in a world where they have the choice of using a platform like Snapchat.
Can you also make advertising a plus for your users? Well, they're going to have to see more ads or else you're going to charge somewhere. You need to make more than six dollars a year per person.
For us, it's less about the number of ads and more about the relevance of those ads and the diversity of those ads. The puzzle for us now is bringing on more advertising demand. Snap's advertising business historically was built around large customers, about 500 customers here in the United States that contributed the majority of Snap's revenue. Over the last couple of years, we've dramatically shifted our business to build that long tail of small and medium customers, which has diversified our advertiser base. They are very focused on lower-funnel goals and will increase their spend very rapidly if they see results. Most of the large players like Google and Meta derive the vast majority of their business from small and medium customers. We've been on this journey from the vast majority of our revenue coming from large customers to shifting to a much longer tail of small and medium customers. We're not done with that journey yet, but that's been the focus.
If you can find advertisers who do stuff that feels to the users like content, that's kind of a double plus.
I think that's certainly what we see. Advertisers who work with creators to make Snapchat-native content see higher conversion rates. That's quite well understood in the industry.
One of the things on the 'how do you make money' question that I thought was really interesting that you addressed head-on in your letter. One of the things you talked about was the margins question. The stat was a trillion snaps. Is it a billion? A billion snaps? Some crazy huge number last year.
I think you're referring to the number of selfie snaps. This story happened because Apple said people took more than 500 billion selfies last year on all iPhones. I saw that and sent it to our team. I thought, 'God, that seems very low.' We found out it's more than a trillion a year on Snapchat.
Over a trillion selfie snaps. Is this why the margins are what they are? What do you do with all that? That's just a lot of information flowing through the system. 5,000 people is nothing to handle that much volume.
He might be the only media company that won't sell that information to LLMs.
Yeah. Regarding infrastructure, the major drivers are the video engagement and the volume of video content people are watching. And all the infrastructure to rank that content, to personalize and rank it for our community, costs quite a bit of money.
Crazy. I have many more questions on Snapchat, but can I rewind for one second? One of the reasons why I was really excited to do this is because you don't do these things and I've been insatiable to learn more about you for a long time and it's very difficult. You're a very private person having built a public company for as long as you have. One of the first times where my curiosity started to spike was I think episode 102 with Scott Cook, founder of Intuit. Scott was telling me a story about you. He was teaching an MBA class at Stanford, talking about why Intuit did or didn't get fundraising at a certain milestone. Everyone in the class was struggling. Then this kid in the back of the class raises his hand and perfectly articulates and breaks down why Intuit struggled to fundraise. The teacher said it was Evan Spiegel, an undergrad product designer sitting in on the class. Scott wanted to meet you, invited you to shadow at Intuit. Scott said he thought you only made it to a few meetings because next thing he knew, you started what you thought was a dumb company called Snapchat. Scott said you came to him for your first fundraising round. He thought it was the dumbest idea he'd ever heard but believed in this kid and invested 25 grand. He said it was the best investment he's ever done. Is that all right?
The story you just described was one of the things that totally changed the trajectory of my life. I was really fortunate to meet Peter Wendell, who was teaching a class called 'Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital' at Stanford Business School. I now teach the class. I'm on my 11th year. As a sophomore in college, Peter gave me the opportunity to sit in on this class. Every class, amazing entrepreneurs come in, like the founders of YouTube. Scott came and visited, and my guest chair was right next to the guest lecturer chair. Meeting all these incredible entrepreneurs really changed my perspective on starting a company. It demystified it. But the thing that gave me the confidence to start Snapchat was working for Scott at Intuit. At Intuit, I was on a small team of about three people. They gave me design and UI-related tasks. The whole concept was to create something called 'Text Web' for touchpad phones, essentially allowing people in India to build little websites accessible through text messages. What I learned was that with a very tiny team, you could build and ship something to millions of people. That was an aha moment for me. I realized that with my friend Bobby, we could build a real service and share it with the world.
That's so cool. How big was the round that you raised? Do you remember?
Back then, the first round was about $485,000 at a $4.25 million valuation.
Okay, and Scott was in it?
I think so. I forget exactly which round he invested in. I do know in that first round, there was a Catholic school where the kids were using Snapchat that put in $15,000 and subsequently built a $30 million gym.
On the demystifying point, I can tell you something about Scott. I've gone through this experience myself with 260 amazing guests on this show. Scott Cook is one of the few people that was mystified to me. I remember sitting there with him and the hair on my arms was standing up for an hour and a half straight because he was this magical intersection of humility and competence in a way that I've never experienced in a leader before. He was so honest and vulnerable, telling me how he blacks out many of the memories of Intuit because it was so ups and downs. I remember thinking this dude's different. He's so special. Did you feel that?
He's an incredibly special person and very thoughtful. He learned a lot of good lessons at Procter & Gamble but didn't get tied down with the wrong ones.
My Scott story is he got into user-generated content really early and he wanted to know about games. So I did a class for his employees about it, but I called it video game design thinking. I called it gamification in the early 2000s, which is about when gamification started getting used.
That's awesome. He's such a good questioner. He listens like crazy. He's a pretty good dad, too.
Evan, can I keep pulling on this thread of the history of you from Stanford to today? The $485,000 round, you were building at home. You and your co-founder, who else was there? You were at your dad's house.
At that point, I'd gone back for my senior year of school. Bobby was out of school. Our server bills were approaching $10,000 a month and we had run out of cash. I had invested the $10,000 my grandfather left me. We'd maxed out the credit cards. We got a reach out from Jeremy Liew at Lightspeed on Facebook. His profile picture was with Obama, and this was before AI, so I thought it must be legit. We met, and we didn't have a deck or anything. We just shared the usage data. They could see easily that once people started using Snapchat to communicate, they kept using it. This was at a time when a lot of people were using the Facebook graph for viral hit apps, so there was skepticism about social apps. But because we had such retentive communication engagement, that gave Lightspeed the confidence to invest.
And you were home? Your co-founder?
So you were still at school while the usage was going crazy?
Yeah, I would sit in the back of class. We had a 'snap counter' that showed how many snaps had been sent. At the start of the school year, it was one every hour or two. By the middle of the school year, it was really getting going. We raised the money. I was in the back of my machining class checking the Wells Fargo account. As soon as I saw the $485,000, I went up to the teacher and said, 'Craig, I'm so sorry. I have to drop out. I have to focus on this.'
No way. In class. You were refreshing the app and as soon as you saw the money was wired?
And I had to go back and take that same class from Craig five or six years later to graduate, because I went back in 2018 to finish my degree.
That's incredible. Did you raise the money to keep up with the server bills or to hire people?
We had to keep up with the server bills and then off the back of that we hired two of our friends from school, and around that time we all moved down to my dad's house in LA and started working out of his house.
I saw you a couple weeks ago at the d.school 20th anniversary and the David Kelly 50th celebration. What did you take from design thinking? That was early on in Stanford's repositioning around product.
I could not believe my outrageous good fortune to have David Kelly as an adviser. I still have a screenshot of the first snap he sent me when the app was called Pikaboo. The most important thing that David teaches is that creativity is not about getting hit by lightning. There's a process you can use to be consistently creative, and it's grounded in empathy. If you can empathize with people and understand the problems they're facing, you can design solutions and iterate. David demystified creativity and empowered everyone to realize they are creative. So many people come to Snap and say they're not creative, but I know they are. Once you provide a process, people rediscover their creativity and realize it's a predictable process.
Are specs going to amplify empathy?
The way they could amplify empathy is that they will bring people together in the real world more often. Even with the huge clunky glasses we have today, when our kids use specs, they go outside and play together and run around. For me growing up, using computers in the computer lab, to watching my kids run around using a computer outside together, that's a huge shift in the way people use computers.
That's a good visual.
When you moved to LA and told your dad what you're doing and said, 'We're moving in and we're going to do it here,' did you get a positive or negative response?
I have to give my dad a lot of credit. To my face, he was very supportive. I think to his friends, he expressed some concern, which I found out later. He certainly preferred me living at home. When I was first working at Intuit, I got an apartment in San Francisco and told him I was quitting that great job to work on this thing with Bobby in the apartment. He said he didn't want to pay for my apartment if I wasn't making money. So I came back home. He actually invested $10,000 himself but then gave the equity back to the company so we could use it to provide shares to team members.
You might be somebody who actually celebrates Father's Day.
My dad has been a hero of mine since I was a kid.
When I was putting myself in your shoes in that moment, the Scott Cook reaction of this is crazy must have been more typical than atypical.
That was the default response. And that's why it was so important that we were able to get far enough to have the data to show that people were using this to communicate all day long, that it had an important role in their lives. If it was just a pitch deck, I don't think it made sense. That was a great learning experience because you could tell within three seconds of meeting a VC that there was no way they would ever invest. So I would flip it around and ask for advice on how to raise money, and I learned a lot that way.
How long did it take for you to not feel like this is dumb? When everybody else is telling you this is dumb, smart people, your business idols, it's got to feel like, 'Who's wrong here? Is it me or them?' Or did you just know come hell or high water, you're rolling with this?
I think having customers is never dumb. That was a big learning for us. Bobby and I had worked on something called Future Freshman designed to help people apply to college. We had siblings applying to college at the time and they didn't use it. The only person that signed up was my mom. It was a total disaster. To go from that to having just a few of our friends using Pikaboo and then Snapchat was huge for us. We had a service that people actually wanted to use. It's easy to ignore the narrative when you know you have a product that's making a difference.
But you seem like somebody who always found it easy to be popular. Sometimes people go against the grain, have a chip on their shoulder, they like being contrarian. You had this product before you had customers. Was that a new experience for you?
Not at all. I grew up like a total nerd loser. Later on, in high school, my parents ended up divorcing and I spent more time with my dad, so I got more freedom and started to be a little more cool. But most of my elementary and middle school years, I felt pretty isolated. Both my parents are lawyers, and my stepmom is a lawyer. There was a lot of debate at the dinner table, which helped me hang on to my point of view because I had to defend it a lot with my parents.
At what age can you win arguments with your parents?
Miranda and I will be at dinner with my dad, and she'll just say, 'Honey, you've got to stop,' because we still love a good debate.
I used to ask a lot of my guests what conversation they had at the dinner table when they were kids, because it's so formative. For me, my parents were scientists, and it was always about work. I remember thinking work is important, but it always felt like a job to them, and they spent a lot of time complaining about it. I thought, 'I don't want that.' I wanted the job part but not for it to feel like work.
It's funny you mentioned that. One of the success metrics for me with Snap's culture is whether people's kids want to work at Snap. We had 'Bring Your Kids to Work Day' and a lot of kids said they want to work at Snap when they grow up. That tells me we're doing something right. If the vibe kids get from their parents after a long day is not 'Ugh, Snap,' but 'I had a really interesting day,' then we're on the right track.
Can you filter that in recruiting interviews? Try to figure out who's going to go home and make their kids love Snap?
I think it's more about creating an environment where parents feel that even after a long day, they feel that the work was worthwhile.
Have you gotten better at interviewing and recruiting, figuring out who's going to be great?
I hope so, but it's not easy. Snap has a unique culture. We have a 5,000-person team supporting a community of almost a billion people, constantly innovating. It's so hard to set the right expectations, especially when people come from large companies. I almost try to talk people out of the job. I tell them it's going to be a lot of work, really different, and they'll be expected to be in the details. We just hired a fantastic new general counsel and he said he felt his cortisol levels were too low and he was looking for a 24/7 job. I said, 'I think this will be a good fit.'
Do you still have the juice? How old are you now?
And you started the company when you were 20. It went public at 27. It's been eight years since it's been public. You're almost at the 20-year mark of running this company. You have four kids now. If you're asking executives to make a sacrifice at home, you have to do that yourself. Can you still rev it up like you used to?
Oh, yeah. Part of what's so great about working at Snap is it gives me a lot of energy. I love what I do. It's fun to be around such brilliant people inventing new stuff that transforms our industry and the world. What could be better? I teased our kids about exploring other job opportunities, and they said, 'No, Dad, you have the coolest job.' Even though they see how hard I work and the sacrifice it requires, it's so unbelievably rewarding.
When you say sacrifice and hard work, can you give examples of what sacrifice means in your day-to-day or in a year?
For a very long period of time, I would leave our home before our kids were awake and I would get home after they were asleep every day. This was in the years leading up to the pandemic, when Snap was going through a really tough time and required those kinds of hours. I asked God to find me a path so I could actually see my kids. Then the pandemic happened, and that changed my life and my relationship with our kids profoundly.
You know, spend a lot more time with them through that really critical period of their lives. You know, when they were very young, that was like an incredible gift. And now I've tried to get a little more balanced. I wake up really early to get work done in the morning and exercise, but then I about 5:00 usually and then I take our kids to school. So I get to do school drop off at least in the morning three or four days a week.
I still get home usually after they're asleep, but some days I'm lucky.
How similar is your note giving to your employees and product teams, your note giving to your kids? I think sometimes I can be very direct at home as well and I've gotten feedback on that over the years and I'm trying to evolve. But I also think my parents were very direct with me and I think that's really important. Having those direct honest conversations with your kids are really valuable. What's so important is that they know no matter what they do, I love them completely and totally. But I think as a parent, I want our kids to grow, right? And in order for them to grow, I have to give them feedback from time to time. Do they know you want them to grow? How does that conversation and role modeling go?
I think for me it's less about wanting them feeling like I want them to grow. I want them to cultivate that for themselves, right? They have to cultivate a passion for learning. They have to cultivate a desire to grow and wanting to learn and try new things. And so it's more about just supporting that for our kids. And when I see they want to learn something, I see they want to try something new. This is another thing I learned from my parents. We just try to do that totally and completely. My mom was so good. I was like, 'Mom, I really want to learn how to play the trumpet.' This was in second grade. My mom's like, 'Whoops. Great. Okay.' Like rented me a trumpet, signed me up for class, total disaster. I was terrible. And then she didn't make me feel bad at all. She was like, 'Okay, well hopefully you find something else that you enjoy doing.' And I think we just try to have that with our kids where we try to support them when they want to do new things.
They talk you into things that you have misgivings about. Well, now our eldest is 14, so we had a long chat about the recent Halloween parties. He wanted to stay out late. And so I think he made it back home by about 11:30 on both nights. But that was a conversation.
Evan, on the leaving before they wake up in the home, people really glamorize your life, and I don't think they quite understand the tax that it takes to actually live your life. Giving examples is very useful. When the company is going through a hard time, which is why you have to leave so early and why you have to come home so late. And when you come home and your wife is asleep or in bed, everybody's asleep, the house is quiet, the business is going through the [ __ ] and you can't feel good about either of those things. Take me into those moments. What does that feel like? Does it feel that shitty? Do you even have time to feel? Do you even recognize that those things are emotions that you're experiencing in those periods?
Well, first, maybe first of all, I have been incredibly blessed, right? I have zero complaints. So even on these very tough days, I lead an extraordinarily blessed life. And I think one of the reasons why that is is I met an incredible woman who's my wife. Miranda is an unbelievable 100% support all the time. The ups and downs, that kind of thing. It's hard to find a perfect co-founder.
Yeah. And I got very lucky with Bobby and very lucky with Miranda, both of whom have been incredibly supportive. So I think even in those really challenging times, she was unbelievably supportive. And I think a lot of my job as a leader is to absorb that stress for the team. I've tried to find my own ways, whether that's exercising or going in the sauna or just taking time to meditate. Over the years, just developing my own ways of managing that stress for myself. But in my family and in my job, I want to absorb that stress, right? I don't want to unload that onto people that I care about, whether that's our team or family or my wife.
Yeah. And you just continue to absorb that until what? At what point does that tip over?
Well, I think what's helpful is when you live in that environment for such a long period of time, you just get better at managing stress, right? And so I think it just becomes more normal to live in a rhythm where there are big challenges every day. And that's okay. I think if you look at some of the science behind stress, a huge amount of it is the way that we frame it. How do we approach stress in our minds? Do we call it out as stress and something that's bad, or do we say, 'Oh, actually this is a gift, this is a learning opportunity, this is a growth opportunity'? And a lot of the science shows that reframing what could be stress as a positive actually has a huge impact on your ability to manage it. But then also, once you're just in a rhythm of dealing with stressful events all the time, it becomes very normal. Stress is about a response to something unusual. So once it becomes very normal, then you just kind of become usual.
