Mark Suster’s Guide to Becoming Successful (For Ambitious Young People)

How do you make money? You make money by believing in something that very few people believe in. Having access to people that very few people have access to. By having a thesis that you're willing to put money behind, and being right. I always say to young people, so where do we think the world's going to be 10 years from now? What can you own as a knowledge set and become known for? To be good at venture is to become known for something that when founders say, 'I want to go do X,' you're one of the five people they want to call.

That's amazing. I always start the podcast off the same way and it's really around the why. In one of your speeches you talked about the crossroads and how through life you're going to run into different crossroads and you have different paths to take. You yourself have had many crossroads from becoming a founder to a VC and you've kind of had this option, really in 2007 it's like do I go and start a new company, do I become a venture capitalist, and you decided to move into the VC world and back the future of founders and startups. I was curious like why VC? What is it about this industry and this ecosystem that made you go in that direction at that crossroad in your life?

Great. Well, thank you for that setup. Let me start by saying a belief that I have for anyone who watches this. Maybe a way to just think about life which is I at a young age heard this saying: life is 10% how you make it and 90% how you take it. And being happy in life is just understanding the blessing that life is in its own right. Lately I've been also quoting something else that just really resonates with me. The saying is 'but for the grace of God go I.' And what it really represents to me is the luck that exists to all of us in life. And if you can see life as a blessing and if you can wake up every day and focus on the positives you have rather than the things that you don't have, we can all be so much happier. And what are we here for if not to be happy in our own skin? So I was born in 1968. I grew up in the 70s and 80s in Northern California in the greatest era to live in the United States, in a time where we didn't have conflict and war. I mean, we did in the Vietnam War, I was too young to live through that. But for the most part, we've had, I'm 57 now, 57 years of relative prosperity and peace. And what a blessing. And I grew up the child of an immigrant father who moved here from Colombia, South America. His father had to escape from the border between Ukraine, Moldova in an area called Bessarabia because of the pogroms. Jews were being killed and he couldn't come to the United States because the United States didn't welcome everybody. So he ended up in South America. And I'm going to come to your quote and I know this is a long-winded intro, probably longer than you wanted, but how do I get so lucky to be born in the era where in the 1980s I became a programmer in high school? Why did I become a programmer? My brain is just wired that way. I like logic and structure and problem solving. And my mom had enough money to buy an IBM XT. It was the first IBM ever shipped with a hard drive. The hard drive was 10 meg. 10 meg. And it was a miraculous thing because we didn't have to put in floppy discs and swap them back and forth like everybody had to before then. To have a father who was mathematical, and so my brain was kind of wired that way. We didn't have a lot of money. I grew up in Sacramento. I was told I was a rich kid because I went to a public high school called Rio Americano. And that's where the rich kids went. And so my whole life I thought I was rich. I grew up and then I went to college and I realized like there were no rich kids in Sacramento. And it's kind of beautiful. Like I grew up around a lot of middle class people. We didn't have a lot of extra money. Honestly birthday dinners were at Red Lobster and a meal on the weekend was at Denny's. It was called Lyons in Sacramento, but it was the equivalent. And I didn't go on trips to Hawaii and all this. No one had money back then but we were happy. So what I spoke about in this idea of crossroads is this. Let me go back to the metaphor of my grandfather. My grandfather didn't have choices in life. He didn't have three roads to go down. His choices were this: stay in the small town that you grew up with and face Jewish oppression and be killed. His brother was conscripted into the Russian army and forced to fight in World War I against the Germans. He had no interest in that fight, but you didn't have a choice. And my grandfather wanted a better life. And he had two splits in the road. One is stay and the other's go. And as a child, he fled with nothing and ended up traveling around South America selling cutlery because that's all he could do, and he settled in Medellín, Colombia where my father grew up. Then my father was faced with one major choice. Do you pursue medicine which is what his family friends were telling him to do and try to go to America, or do you stay in Medellín, Colombia? This is before the drug cartels. But he's like okay here are my choices. It's a pretty scary thing to think I'm going to move somewhere else in the world. And by the way, it's a very different world where you didn't have airplanes and people traveling everywhere and all the time. People didn't travel as much back then. And he made that choice and he came to the United States and became a doctor. He was one of the very first non-English-speaking pediatric residents at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. And like the great story of immigration in America, he made this his home and was so proud of what he became. And he got drafted into the army and he served. He was again blessed, but for the grace of God go I, he was blessed because they needed pediatricians in the states. So they sent other doctors to Vietnam but then they had to look after all the kids that were left back in America and that was my father in America in the Vietnam war not getting deployed to Vietnam. So I grew up and I didn't have a lot of choices in life, but I just want to fast forward to one thing and then I promise I'll stop so I don't fill an entire hour. But in the 1990s, I was a programmer. My first job out of college was as a programmer. I built custom software for large corporates and I didn't think about life. I was paid $27,000 to be a programmer in 1991. I didn't have credit card to run up debt. I ate Taco Bell at the end of every month because that's all I could afford in the last four or five days of my payroll until I got paid again. I understood the value of hard work in a dollar and I feel blessed with that. So, fast forward from that until the late 1990s. Throughout the '90s, you had a bunch of people working at Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse First Boston and Morgan Stanley or whatever. And they were making a lot of money and they felt amazing and they bought their Rolex watch, paid $10,000 for it. They had the top reservations to the top restaurants in New York and they would buy $100 bottles of wine and they felt amazing, right? And along comes this new industry called venture capital. And the venture capitalists in the dotcom era suddenly had enormous wealth like nothing like these Goldman Sachs people who went to Princeton undergrad and Harvard Business School and were the top of their reflective circles or whatever. And they felt bad. And why did they feel bad? Because suddenly the best tables at the best restaurants were now occupied by venture capitalists. And suddenly instead of $10,000 Rolex, it was an $80,000 Patek Philippe. That person should have been happy in life. They are just privileged relative to 99.9999% of the world. And yet it was this chasing somebody else's status that they wanted. And so there was an article in the Wall Street Journal that really impacted me at the end of the 90s saying how are all the Goldman Sachs bankers not happy? And then fast forward, hedge funds become big and VCs don't make as much money and the hedge funds are making all the money. You can spend your whole life chasing someone else's happiness or you can choose within to look at the blessings that you have and feel grateful. And so I just go back to those two quotes. Life is 10% how you make it and 90% how you take it. On any equation I've been blessed. And you know but for the grace of God go I. So my closing statement to you is people now have crossroads. They have five different routes they could take. Should I be a VC? Should I be a founder? Should I join someone else's startup? Should I join Facebook, Google, whatever? Should I go back to school? Should I get an MBA? And it's the fact that you have choice and you fear making the wrong choice that brings so much angst and anxiety to people. And so I say make the best choice you have in life at the moment that you have it. Start down that road and never look back and be happy with the choices you make and you'll make more choices going forward. And the blessing that you have in 2025 heading into 2026 is the roads are not closed. They have more crossroads in front of them. My grandfather did not have new roads. It was one road. So life is a blessing.

In terms of venture-backed startups, just for the matter of record, Corral was the second venture-backed startup that I created. BuildOnline was the first. I would say a certain amount of it is just innate. It's the way your brain is wired. Back to but for the grace of God go I. My brain. I have ADHD and ADHD, it's a slow processing frontal cortex. I didn't know till I was 39. You became a real thought leader in actually talking openly about it. I feel like no one really took a position of talking openly. You're looking at a fellow ADHDer over here, but I found that you had a lot of writing and a lot of speaking. I read this book called Delivered from Distraction and it changed my life because it was a playbook to my own brain. And how do you end up being this relatively successful person with money and progress and doing well in life? I was convinced I couldn't have this thing that had this stigma called ADHD. And I read this book and it's like, wow, that's me. And the things that I saw as weaknesses in myself made me feel badly about myself. Why do I do 12 things 80% and finish nothing? And I learned coping mechanisms to work with other people that are really good at finishing. But the slow processing frontal cortex that is ADHD means you have a lot more creativity, a lot of energy and drive and ability. What people don't understand who don't have ADHD is it's a superpower. You can go really, really, really deep on the thing that you're passionate about. And that's what I would do. I would lose three days to programming and I'd block out everything else in my life and I wouldn't pay my electricity bill because that's kind of a boring task and eventually I guess I'll figure out how to get that paid on time, but I want to figure out this new language Java that got released and how to program in Java. And so I would go super deep. So the question is like how did this happen? I don't know. In high school I was on the basketball team. On a good day I'm 5'10" with a wind and with a little more hair. And my parents didn't say a small Jewish kid probably shouldn't play basketball but maybe focus on your soccer career. But I played on the basketball team and they closed down a rival high school and they started busing in more people and the more people who came in, I lost a starting position and I was on the bench and it was not fun anymore and I wasn't good enough and I wasn't fast enough and I wasn't tall enough. I mean, all those things are true. So, I decided not to play basketball anymore and I became a fan and we had something called the River Rats. The River Rats was, you know, American River. It's on a river in Sacramento, the American River. And this cheering section would loudly cheer for the team and do all this stuff. And I'm like, 'Hey, we need to create some symbolism here.' So, I created t-shirts. I created a rat. I stylized the rat the way that I like it. On the shoulder, I wrote 'D Some Bees,' which we told all the parents stood for 'Dunk Some Basketballs.' It really meant 'Drink Some Beers.' And so we all deed some bees before the game and I put my Slim Shady, although Slim Shady didn't exist back then. I put my gnome to partying. People used to call me Jake. I don't know, we called me Jake and my alter ego. That's how I was saying my Slim Shady. I don't know why I used to go by Jake Fuff and Wanker. It was like a joke name. It was a party name. It was a drunk name. So, I wrote Jake on the rat and I wrote D Some Bees and I did some other parent-inappropriate things on the shirt that maybe I won't mention on a podcast and I just decided to create them and sell them and market them. I wasn't thinking. And then I printed letters on the back so you could customize it and all the profit was in the letters because the shirts were like $14 or something like that but it was like $1.75 per letter and people would put their name and so my name was Dr. Seuss, you know, Mark Suster, Dr. Seuss. And so they put the letters on the back and I made $400 profit in high school at 16. And that was a lot of money back then. And not to be terrible, but my second business, I'll just admit it, I guess I can get away with it now, was a mobile keg company. So we had access to a white van. We had two to three kegs per party. We would meet on a golf course and we would sell cups for $2 to $3 a pop. It was terrible. I admit it. It was the 1980s. You wouldn't do it now. I would never ask people to do it now. But I made a lot of money in high school.

Yeah. Kegs on wheels.

But for the grace of God go I, I grew up in the 1980s. It was $500 a quarter to go to a UC school. My parents didn't have money. By the way, my parents filed for bankruptcy when I was in college. It was real. In the 1980s it was $500 a quarter. So, I had a choice of any UC I could get into. And I decided to go to UC Santa Barbara. And I went down to UC Santa Barbara to visit with my good friend Christy Burton and she had access to all sorts of fraternity people. So we went to see Otis Day and the Knights and went partying and went to frat parties and I was 17 and I was hammered the entire weekend. How did I survive? People actually die in Del Playa peeing on the edge of the cliffs and falling over. I shouldn't joke about it. It's a real thing. But that could have been me. It wasn't. And I got back and I'm like, I cannot go to UC Santa Barbara. So, I registered for UC San Diego, which was my other major choice, or UC Irvine. But I went to UC San Diego without ever visiting it. And I went to UCSD and I decided I was going to focus on my academic life. And I also worked three days a week in a computer store during college. And I had a programming job to make money. My parents didn't have money to give me and they filed for bankruptcy my junior year, so I paid for junior and my two senior years myself. In any event, I decided not to rush a fraternity in my fall and winter quarter. It's on the quarter system. But by spring, I'm like, 'God, this place is so boring. I need to do something.' So I rushed a fraternity. And the reason I mention that is I eventually became president of the fraternity. And I learned way more being president of a fraternity that set me up for life than I did in my economics courses. Economics was theoretical. It's math. It's applied math. And I was good at it. But because I have ADHD, it didn't interest me. But I learned how to run an organization. We had 80 or so people who had to pay dues. I had to plan parties. I had to plan charity events. I had to keep us out of trouble. I built a spreadsheet. I have so many stories about that. But like how to avoid liability. I would rent buses and plan parties so that people wouldn't drink and drive and then people would follow the bus with their cars and then we tried to evade them all. You just figure out life, right? And the two things I learned in college was one is how to be a leader by having to run an organization and number two is my political science classes were more valuable than my economic classes. So, I got a double major and it just taught me to ingest large volumes of information that I never had time to read everything, develop a thesis, and then figure out why I believed what I believe and create supporting arguments for it. So, I became a reasonably good writer, debater. I became interested in the world and how the world worked in geopolitics and why people make decisions. And that was like a passion for me that has continued to this day. But those are my two biggest takeaways from college. And I think we're again blessed to go to college. I mean college is almost like finishing school. I always say like people ask me should you get an MBA? And I said there's four C's related to an MBA. There's the curriculum meaning the stuff that you learn. There's the certificate, the fact that you did it. There's your colleagues or your peer group. And those are the three C's weighed against the fourth, which is the cost of doing it. And you could apply the same to college. It's the exact same equation. And what I realize now in life is that the certificate today, this is different, it's not worth as much. Like if you got in, that's the validation that you needed. The content, the stuff that you're learning while you're there. If your whole life you were interested in wood shop and then suddenly you learn economics and how math works and how macroeconomics, how the economy works and you learn about interest rates and time value of money. Okay, curriculum is more important, but the real benefit of all of it is your colleagues. It's the people you know, it's the people you meet and then you have to offset that against the cost that you have to pay. And so what did I learn? I learned how to be a leader amongst people, amongst men at the time. And that's an incredibly valuable thing that stood with me for life. And so it's life skills really.

So maybe I'll add a fifth C that I've never really thought about, but I like having a lot of C's. My grades weren't C's, but just to have a framework. Credibility, right? So that's maybe correlated with certificate. Certificate gives you credibility. When I graduated from my MBA, University of Chicago, you needed the credibility to work in investment banking, to be a CEO, frankly, to be a VC. I just think that the credibility now comes from lived experience and comes from peer groups and what you know, and I just don't think it's as valuable anymore. And I think organized education is broken and the costs are too high, the benefits are too low. Our ability to establish credibility in somebody without having to look at that exists. So I think masters are a waste for almost everybody. There are of course many exceptions. If you want to be a researcher in biology, you probably have to continue your education. You want to be a doctor, you have to. But even doctors, how messed up is our system that you're kind of like slave labor until 35, 36, drowned in debt without the income to really pay it off. And why do we want that for society? And there are places in Europe where when you go to undergrad, you can do an accelerated undergrad MD, get practical experience earlier in your 20s and start practicing earlier. I think that would be better for society. And in a way, honestly, what I really believe, and no doctor is going to want to hear this, but I think the medical system works pretty much like the education system in the United States, which is they try to control supply to keep wages high. And if you had more of a free market, we would have more doctors and more nurses. You have to have some credentialing, right? You don't want to go to someone who's never studied how the body works. But we should have a massive increase in supply. In the United States, there's about a 55,000 gap for the amount of doctors relative to what we need. And it's not decreasing. More doctors are retiring, fewer people are going into it. We don't have a system. The baby boomers who are retiring are the biggest population that America has ever seen. And the replacement population is my population, which is Gen X. And Gen X is much smaller in aggregate than baby boomers. And again, a lot of people don't think about how economies work. But you have all these people who are going to retire, no longer paying taxes, no longer investing, no longer consuming, but they're trying to make their money last throughout their life. And you have Gen X, which is now reaching our peak of earning potential and our contribution to the economy and our spend and everything, but we're smaller. And so how are you going to provide health care for people who are living longer with less taxpayers, with not enough doctors, with not enough nurses? So one way is immigration. Well, that's off the table and that's not coming back. The only way to solve this problem, sadly, I mean there are multiple ways you could solve it. The only way it will get solved in America is technology. Not just robots. Technology full stop. Like we need to innovate and automate. Robots are going to play a part. We have a national crisis around loneliness. We have a national crisis about how we care for our aging population. I lived in Europe for 11 years. In Europe, in Asia, family units live closer geographically. Family units are more accustomed to having aging parents living with them. In the United States, people generally don't live close to their parents. The parents are generally alone and lonely. And sadly what happens is, as my in-laws and my parents have gotten older, people start spending time in hospitals sucking up a lot of costs in the health care system because we're not doing preventative things. So we're looking at a lot of investments in the space right now.

I don't have a value judgment on what drives anybody. And sometimes people being driven by money is an okay ambition for whatever reason. And I'm not trying to apply some moralistic or altruistic value system to me. I'm just not driven by money. I don't care about possessions. I don't care about keeping score or keeping up with the Joneses. None of that really matters to me. I don't know. I think it's DNA. I'm an intrinsically motivated person. I like helping others. My wife got me to realize this framework, which is what causes you, any individual, to take action. And she said the model is intrinsic motivations or extrinsic motivations. Meaning, are you driven to work out every day or to program every day or to make money every day because you want things, or are you driven because you want to serve other people? And again, no moralistic judgment. I'm extrinsically driven. I don't wake up every day thinking Mark Suster needs to be better. I need to be fitter, stronger, have more money, whatever. I'm driven by not wanting to let other people down. My wife and I were talking last night about life, just coincidentally. And I was saying if there's one thing that I would define myself as, it is responsible. I don't know why I take responsibility for other people. So I'm doing my 2027 and 2028 budgeting for Upfront. 2027, 2028, 2026 I already have done and I'm saying okay what are our revenues going to be in that year? What are our costs? What are our employee levels? How much do people need to earn? How do I make sure I'm getting money into people's pockets? And what actions do I need to take in 2026 to set myself up for success in 2027, 2028, and 2029? And I think in advance about who in my firm is developing their career that I need to give leadership roles to. How am I going to have investments that are not just on paper but that pay out in cash so I can put money in people's pockets because people have young kids. It's great to in theory be worth a lot of money on paper, but paper doesn't pay for your kids' private school or saving for their 529s or whatever. You need real money. So I just wake up every day not wanting to let other people down. And the things that motivate me are how do I make sure I'm living up to my responsibilities in the world? Now, I've been blessed, but for the grace of God go I, I found myself in these lucky positions where money is no longer an issue for me. It was for a lot of my life. I want to be clear, but it's just not for me now. So, I have money for my family. I have money for my kids, for their futures. I've set that aside. So, I'm not driven by that. But at Upfront there are people who bet their careers and their career development and their families in a way on me because if I fail, I fail for all of them. So what motivates me to succeed is to make sure that they're set up for their futures for the bets that they make. And I have incredibly talented people that work at Upfront and I want the best for all of them. And that's what drives me for good or for bad.

Eve.

Yes. Eve Sister Cesterone.

My earliest mentor was a guy named Amit Shah and so I really want to give credit where credit is due. I grew up a bottoms-up thinker because I didn't understand any different. I've often suggested this book to people called The Pyramid Principle by Barbara Minto. And it's all about top-down thinking. So, let me explain. Bottoms-up thinking is I'm going to gather a bunch of data. I'm going to gather a bunch of facts. I'm going to gather a bunch of information. And I'm going to use all of that to make decisions about the world, about life, about my project, about whatever I'm doing. And that is kind of a flawed way of making decisions. And I want to explain why because it sounds like of course that's what you should do. What Barbara Minto taught was the pyramid principle, which is to start with a hypothesis about what you think the answer is. Because a smart person who has some level of experience should

Be able to make a claim that you believe to be true about the future. Now you have to have some data and some knowledge and then you create supporting thesis that support that main argument that forms the pyramid.

So Amit taught me the pyramid principle. Start with the answer, get the data, work backwards, be honest in what the data tells you. And that has just been like an unlock for life in everything that I do. So, we talked about aging populations earlier, right?

Yeah, there was. There was GRP before the firm was created in the 1980s and 1990s had backed the best retail companies in America. They backed Starbucks, Office Depot, Costco, PetSmart, PF Chens, Jamba Juice, like a bunch of brands, you know, and they were amongst the first checks and stayed through IPO. Okay, so they did incredibly well. So that led Eve to create a fund. But by the time I joined, we weren't global. We were United States. We weren't doing retail anymore. So we were partners. But here's the dumb thing. Have you ever heard of RAS syndrome?

So you know an ATM machine.

Automated teller machine.

Give me money.

Oh yes. It's stupid. That's what RAS syndrome is. RAS syndrome is repeated acronym syndrome syndrome. RA SS repeated acronym syndrome syndrome. So GRP partners actually stood for global retail partners partners, right? I'm like, that's stupid. It's dumb. Let's change it. And Eve's like, well, you're renaming my baby. And I said, 'Look, one day you're going to retire. And they're not going to say, 'There goes Eve Cesterone, the founder of GRP Partners that got renamed to Upfront Ventures.' They're going to say, 'There goes Eve Sisterone, the guy who created Upfront Ventures.' And it's true. I didn't create it. He did. All I did was rebrand. And I wanted something memorable. And so we did a branding exercise. It was hard. But we defined our values. And our values are what you see is what you get. In computing terms, when I grew up, it was called Wizzywig. What you see is what you get. And we're up front. We're like, this is who we are. We have a point of view. Your job is to run the company and make the decisions, but we're not going to shy away from having a point of view. Point of view doesn't mean you have to do what we tell you. It just means you're going to hear from us a lot. If you don't want that, we're not the right fit for you. The second thing is we're early. We don't want to build a 101 12 billion fund. There's great firms that do it. It's not who we are. We're upfront. We're early. So in a way it was a double on Tandra and I wanted something memorable and I wanted something I could own the URL for. And so we rebranded in 2012. And most people don't know we were GRP and they don't care and they're like there goes Eve Cesterone, the founder of Upfront Ventures. And next year marks 30 years since he founded it. Now I have several questions for you about how you think about investing in founders but something that I found to be really interesting is that your path to managing partner was so fast and I think that there's so many venture capital early managers people that are principles or senior like what advice do you have for the up-and-coming VC on their path to partnership? What is what does Mark Suster want to see? And you've got young guns yourself that are making a name for themselves at Upfront. Like what does it take to become a partner and what advice do you have for those seeking to be so? So, first of all, I always tell young people is know something better than most. How do you make money? You make money by believing in something that very few people believe in. You make money by having access to people that very few people have access to, by having a thesis that you're willing to put money behind, and being right. And so I always say to young people, it's much more convenient or like it's much nicer for you to go to cocktail parties with all your Stanford, Princeton, Harvard alums and say, 'I'm doing generative AI applications and legal or accounting or robotics or whatever.' But if you're chasing a trend that has existed for six or eight years and you're just entering two years from now, like I don't think that's a recipe for success. So where do we think the world's going to be 10 years from now? And what can you own as a knowledge set and become known for? To be good at venture is to become known for something that when founders say, 'I want to go do X,' you're one of the five people they want to call. And so have a domain and then control your own branding and narrative. Like be public about it. Write your thesis. Write a blog. Appear on podcasts. Go to conferences. Espouse ideas. Organize dinners. Organize breakfast. Invite founders in that category. Invite other VCs in that category. Become known. I want to point to a guy that I have a lot of respect for and his name is Mike Anuniato. Mike lives in New York. I think he's got three kids. I think he lives on the Upper East Side. Sounds kind of posh. I don't think he's that posh. Very smart guy and for whatever reason he made an early bet on space. Now space is one of the fastest growing categories of the tech ecosystem. Of all the dollars going into space, 40% of them are going into LA. It is the biggest booming market in LA right now. And people think of space, they think that means I have to compete against SpaceX. I mean there's a million things going on in space. countries in the future will compete on only a few dimensions. One of them is cyber security. One of them is shipping supremacy, the ability to move goods between multiple locations. But a major one is space, the ability to control everything that's happening on the world. Think of this. Think of GPS. There's very few countries in the world that have their own GPS system. the United States happens to be the leading player. If we shut off access to GPS to someone else, let's say Iran, and they can no longer track the movement of goods and resources and people around the world, if I can have the ability to monitor what's going on on the planet and see troop movements, if I can change the dimension of a ballistic missile as it's traveling or track it and shoot it down, that determines the primacy between countries. But then you think, let's project out three to five, maybe 10 years, the ability to mine resources from the moon, the ability to mine resources from asteroids, or let's go further, the ability to collect energy in space, to take solar, this like bountiful energy source, to capture it, harness it, and use lasers to deliver it to the planet. Now, let's go one step further. Now, let's say I can begin to build data centers on satellites in space that can do AI processing in space where you have bountiful energy and only the results have to be transferred to Earth. So, people who control space control the future and that battle's happening right now. So, I mentioned Mike Anuniato. So, there's this guy in New York and he sets up a fund. It's a little tiny fund and a bunch of his LPs are ex SpaceX people and I don't know somehow really early he corners the market on funding people coming out of SpaceX going to create their next companies. There's been something like a hundred spinouts now from SpaceX in the last four to five years that have raised in excess of a hundred billion dollars. And you know every time I see one and I'm like Mike's in that deal already and we're looking at it for the first time. I'M LIKE ANUNIATO. But I love the guy. He's smart. He hustles. He's helpful to founders. And he became known for something. Not before anyone, but before most people. And I think that's my advice to young people is pick your lane. And it's okay if you're wrong. Like you can pivot in two to three years to your next thing, but rather than doing what everyone else is doing.

Nick Kim, you asked me what advice I give people. when Nick Kim joined Upfront and you know Crosscut had a very good investment in a satellite company and also Nick Kim's mom had worked as like an engineer in like aerospace flight I forget exactly what it is but in the flight area. So like he had some familiarity with it. He had interest in it. he was passionate about it and I said to him focus pick a lane like don't do 20 things be the expert in the space national defense domain and he's like I like that and I think that would be good for me now I said success in investing and making money is knowing things better than most people never going to be the world's expert nor do you want to be and know people better than most people you're never going to know someone that no one else knows like if you know someone that no one else knows. That's probably not someone worth knowing, right? So, there's always going to be competition, but I want to compete with six or eight great people rather than 80 people. You want to go compete on generative AI deals. Right? Now, you're competing against 80 people. You're competing not just with the best, you know, Sequoias of the world, Andre, but you're competing against dumb money that bids up the price on stuff as well. So, I want to compete against six or eight people. And I said to Nick, if I were now starting my career, that's what I would do. And by the way, I am doing it. I am also making my own investments. And then Jacques Cesterone, and you'll note the last name, Jacques Cesterone, who has been one of our best young performers, who's now an investment partner, is also doing space. So, all three of us have leaned into the space and national defense category and are funding a wide range of companies in the category. for my own personal curiosity like what was your aha moment with space because like growing up you know you think of space as this like you know this thing that's happening but then like I could imagine your career like you start inching your way and you oh that was an interesting conversation oh that you know you formed a belief that who owns space owns the future like what was the moment for you when you're like holy shit like I see it

Go back to college I told you that my polyai my major was more valuable than my economics major. I just became interested in the world. I became interested in why the world works the way it works. When you look at our largest industry, like in computing, we think we're the only thing that matters. But you know, natural resources, how do you like without energy, we have nothing. So if you cut off petroleum which you know like if you want to be like a save the world I only want clean energy you will kill about two billion people in the world just by cutting off patrol. Why? Because petroleum is not only required for farm equipment to create the agricultural products and to create the meat that we need to feed the 8 billion people that are in the world. But a byproduct of petroleum is what creates fertilizer. If you reduce fertilizer in the world, you reduce crop yields. People die. So the best estimate that I read is from a guy called Vakoff Smill. He's probably the world's leading expert in oil and energy markets. And I read almost everything that he writes. And he goes through in the world what does it take because everything that exists in the world exists from the sun. The sun creates energy that grows crops. The sun creates energy that the crops that grow are eaten by animals. And then animals eat other animals or crops. And you can reduce everything to the sun coming to the planet, the amount of calories and energy that gets produced and human consumption is nothing based on it's based on nothing other than the sun and how it converts to energy. So he studies the markets for what is the most efficient way to create energy to feed the 8 billion people that we have and what if you reduce some of those supplies what would happen and he gives his predictive models. So I read a lot you know I'm reading a book for the second time now I would recommend it to absolutely everybody. It's called the splendid exchange. I think the author is William Bernstein or something like that. But he writes about why the world works the way it does. If you want to understand the world, you have to understand the dinels and the history of why the dinels matter. You have to understand the straits of Malaa and why the straits of Malaa matter. If you don't understand the Straits of Hormuz, if you don't understand the Red Sea and how that connects into the Suez Canal, if you don't understand the Panama Canal and the politics around, you just don't understand the world. So, so start with that. Read Peter Zahan, every book he's written. He wrote his first book was called the accidental superpower. Why the United States became so powerful and it's not what you think. It's not American exceptionalism and we had a better economic system. The world is based on only two things according to Peter Zahham but I believe him like I've read everything and he's been such a good predictor of the future. Number one is topography. It determines everything. Why is the United States more productive than Venezuela or Colombia or Peru? Well, let's start with