Ben Casnocha

NOTABLE QUOTES:

"The people who build like the most effective networks... are people who actually are pretty organized about how they think about their network. They're pretty strategic... And yet they do so in a way that's so authentic and natural that it doesn't come off as slimy."

"Getting comfortable with the uncertainty of life, getting comfortable with the role of serendipity and just letting things unfold is a real gift." “past a certain level, the marginal point of IQ doesn’t help…but understanding the human dynamics of getting stuff done does.”

Auren Hoffman (00:00.93)

Hello, fellow data nerds. guest today is Ben Casnocha. Ben is the co -founder and partner at Village Global, a early stage venture capital firm backed by tech luminaries, including Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg. He's also the chief of staff, was the chief of staff to Reid Hoffman, and he co -authored two bestselling books with him, including The Alliance and The Startup of You. Ben, welcome to World of Deaths.

Ben (00:23.961)

Thank you so much for having me on.

Auren Hoffman (00:25.654)

Very excited. Now we're old friends, so this is going to be a really fun conversation. Just to start like, what are some non -obvious ways that people should be thinking about their careers? You're kind of a career guru. So how should people be thinking about that? Yes, for life.

Ben (00:39.727)

Well, yes, in a prior life, I spent a lot of time thinking about career strategy, learned a lot from you about career strategy. So I do want to turn the tables a little bit in this conversation, maybe when we get to networks and relationship building, because you have so many interesting views on that. But the premise of The Startup Review, which is the book that Reid and I wrote in 2012, and then we did a 10 -year anniversary edition in 2022, is that you want to think about your career like a little startup, and that you might not be the CEO of your own company, but you're at least the CEO of your own career.

Auren Hoffman (00:47.992)

I'm sorry about that. Yeah

Right?

Auren Hoffman (01:05.57)

Yeah.

Ben (01:09.935)

And so you can take a lot of the principles and best practices of how entrepreneurs manage companies and apply those very things to your life, to your career. And so one of the key principles of the book is that adaptation is really key in business. A lot of startups have an initial idea and then pivot and adapt their idea as they encounter reality. The day one business plan rarely predicts the day 1000 reality at most startups.

And so similarly, as all of us manage our careers, we, I think, have to take an approach of openness and flexibility and adaptability. We shouldn't be too rigid about goal setting or planning. And we should fully expect our lives to unfold in perhaps surprising ways.

Auren Hoffman (01:55.106)

But, and how do you think of like, when people think about optionality, some people love optionality, some people like completely hate optionality, like where does that come in? Cause optionality and flexibility are sometimes used synonymously.

Ben (02:08.173)

Yeah, indeed. we actually have a lot of the book about this point, which is sometimes closing doors in the short term is what opens doors in the long term. And so sometimes decisions that seem to reduce your optionality now will, over time, actually create many more options for you. I think a common critique of young people today, I don't know what are we calling the current people in their early 20s? Are we past Gen Z now? Gen Alpha. I think it's called Gen Alpha.

Auren Hoffman (02:33.876)

I'm not sure. Yeah. Okay.

Ben (02:37.775)

as I've heard this just in recent weeks. But a common critique levied at that generation is obsessed with optionality, wary of any sort of commitment, long or medium term commitment. And I think that critique is broadly correct. Like I actually think many great things can happen by setting up a plan or a commitment that does actually last a period of months or years. I think the key thing that we talk about in Startup View is a mistake in the old school career advice used to be,

Auren Hoffman (02:47.522)

Yep.

Ben (03:05.647)

go to college, graduate from college, set some long -term plan for your life, and then kind of work backwards. And actually a surprising number of very successful CEOs still actually give this advice to young professionals. They say, figure out where you want to be long -term, set that as your true north, and then work backwards. And the only way you'll get where you want to go is if you have that plan set out. And that's just, it goes against the reality of how most startups evolve. And it's actually, if you study

Auren Hoffman (03:13.387)

Yeah.

Ben (03:34.659)

the successful careers of people like Sheryl Sandberg, who I first saw as a teenager at one of your events, Orin, I remember being so impressed by her at one of your forums. Sheryl's career unfolded in a very surprising manner. If you had asked her when she was in her early 20s, do you think that you will someday be a tech titan billionaire? She would have said, no way, right? She was doing like public health projects in India. She working for the World Bank. She was management consulting, worked in Washington, like a very diverse.

Auren Hoffman (03:47.874)

Yep.

Ben (04:03.351)

an interesting and unexpected career that led her ultimately to Google and Facebook to become a tech titan. I think that's the case actually for many successful people and that's the kind of key insight that we all need to remember in our careers.

Auren Hoffman (04:13.88)

She wrote the book in 2012, you update in 2022. When you rewrite the 2032 edition, like what will change or how will you think you'll be updating it then?

Ben (04:25.167)

Well, there's this Jeff Bezos line about, think about the things that don't change or won't change in our business. So he has this line about, customers are always gonna want low prices. Yeah, exactly. So that is an interesting frame for careers, which is what are the timeless principles of kind of life that will still... Yeah. I think, so think, so...

Auren Hoffman (04:30.944)

Yeah. Low prices are always going to be good. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (04:41.962)

Okay, yeah, that's probably a better way of thinking about it. Yep. You just inverted my question, right? Which is good. Yeah.

Ben (04:50.223)

I have two views on this, but one I think you might disagree with, so maybe we should explore that. So the one that I think we'll probably both agree with is adaptability. think that if anyone listening to this thinks the world's getting slower, easier to understand, et cetera, they're probably mistaken. There's a lot that's happening that's changing the world of work, of course, with AI and so forth. being able to adapt and learn new skills at 10 years hence is going to be even more important than it is today.

I think the thing that I still believe, but I wonder, Orin, if you differ is on the centrality of network. You've been writing a lot recently about, you know, it's not who you know, it's what you know. And you've reflected that one of your own sort of transformations is that, you know, 20 years ago, maybe you thought network was really key and today you think it's less important. I might take the opposite view on that, but maybe share your take on that.

Auren Hoffman (05:37.04)

interesting, okay.

So you, you, sorry. And you think that would like, obviously who you know is important, but you think it, will be even more important in the future than it is today.

Ben (05:47.087)

Yeah, well, at least to be as important, maybe more important as it is today, whereas I think you've made the argument that it's kind of of decreasing importance as the world's become kind of more.

Auren Hoffman (05:50.027)

Okay.

Auren Hoffman (05:54.936)

Do you think it's more important today than it was 30 years ago?

Ben (06:00.703)

I think it is in sort of different ways. So, so obviously it's now like easy to find the names and titles of people like using LinkedIn. Like it used to be like, you had to actually physically know somebody for them to tell you, there's this dude, Oren Hoffman who runs this company, SafeGraph works today. Like I can just use LinkedIn and find like the entire directive, all, all knowledge professionals. So in that sense is less important, but also the reason why the argument I'd make for why it will be as or more important is I think we have a serious trust issue today. Like if you survey.

Auren Hoffman (06:09.686)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (06:17.943)

Yep.

Ben (06:29.971)

Americans today and their trust in institutions and the news and so forth are really plummeting. I think with the rise of misinformation, fake information, we're going to increasingly rely upon humans whose identities we can verify telling us that this person is legit, that this company is legit, that this restaurant is good. And so I actually think using, I think the centrality of network to make quality decisions in a world of misinformation, I could see that being

being really important, but what's your counter or how do you think about it?

Auren Hoffman (07:02.914)

Well, I know. I hadn't thought about that. That may change my mind on it. I think it's likely that it has been just generally decreasing of importance over the last few decades. And so like the phrase, it's not who you know, not what you know, who you know, I think was certainly true in the 80s. You know, the dominant profession were the networkers who like basically put to

what you know is together and they got a vague on the transaction. So whether it be a real estate agent or investment banker or a talent agent and all the movies were about those people essentially, right? And the investment banker was kind of the preeminent, was actually the preeminent like profession in many ways in the 80s. And then, you know, very quickly the investment banker got

got overtaken by the hedge fund manager, hedge funders, much more of a what you know type of person. And the investment maker today, like the average salary of investment maker today on like a relative basis is way lower than it was in the eighties. And it used to be, it used to go investment banker lawyer.

kind of accountant or something like that. Right. now the lawyers are making more than investment bankers. A bunch of investment bankers have, have, have, quit their job who used to be lawyers, right? They quit their job as investment bankers went back to the law firm so they can make more money. Right. You would have never heard that in the eighties of that happening. Right.

Ben (08:19.695)

It's actually a tragedy.

Ben (08:25.603)

Yeah. Right. Well, and let me just check, but I think one nuance is when you say the hedge fund person, it's a what you know, business, not a who you know, business. I'd argue that a lot of what hedge fund managers know is knowledge that's in the brains of people in their network. they're had great, great investors talk to smart people and try to understand what's in their head. So I think the what you know, who you know, distinction kind of blends where, where the, the, for a lot of these elite professions.

it's being really great at accessing the knowledge in the heads of people in your network.

Auren Hoffman (08:57.4)

Well, that's correct. I think the classically, the who you knows were what you knows because they were getting this proprietary knowledge that other people weren't getting access to. In some ways today, you know, just like we can listen to all these like amazing people on podcasts. It's like you can get, you can't get like fully in the brain of, pick your favorite entrepreneur or something like that.

today, you know, if, you, if you knew Mark Zuckerberg personally and you had a great relationship with him, yes, you can maybe get more in his brain, but like we have way more access to the average person is way more access to him than they did in the past. they can really hear what he's thinking. They can kind of like understand. And so you, you get access to at least some of like the least well thought out thoughts now than you wouldn't be for.

Ben (09:42.201)

Yeah, well, yeah, it is interesting because I think you're right. That's a good point, which is you can listen in on the sort of inner thoughts of people. And that would be argument for the network being less important. I would say, though, that we all would agree that there are things Mark Zuckerberg says in a podcast, there are things that he says private in a one -on -one dinner. And so maybe it's actually network still matters if the network's super elite and

Auren Hoffman (10:00.45)

For sure, yeah.

Ben (10:06.873)

where you really can have an edge where you're accessing the actual private thoughts of the most interesting or smartest people. But like the mass market thinking is indeed more publicly accessible.

Auren Hoffman (10:15.768)

Well, I mean, there's no doubt that who you know is, is, is beneficial, right? So it's not, it's not, so I really was just talking about the relative to the, what you know, over time and, obviously that could change. So I think maybe over the last 30 years, the, what you know, have been more emergent than they were in the past. That may, that may go down in this, as you mentioned, this era of trust is very interesting. Like maybe only trust a very small number of people. And you may just happen to trust one of the who you know, who

Ben (10:25.421)

Yeah. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (10:45.664)

who's networked to a lot of folks.

Ben (10:47.439)

Well, and maybe the what you know, like with AI and all these sorts of jobs that we didn't think would ever be AI touched, maybe the, like, hey, I have a graphic designer and I really know how to do graphic design. Like that's actually more at risk versus the, I have this 15 year relationship.

Auren Hoffman (10:54.153)

yeah, good point. Maybe the...

Auren Hoffman (11:02.996)

You know, that's a really good point. The AI could, the AI is probably going to attack the what you know is faster than the who you know. It's interesting because like technology in the, would say, let's say the social network trend attacked the who you know. Whereas the AI trend definitely attacks the what you know is faster than the who you know. So if that trend becomes more emergent, then we would.

Ben (11:12.056)

Yeah.

Ben (11:22.061)

Right, right.

Ben (11:29.345)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (11:32.326)

you would see more of a increase in the who you knows.

Ben (11:35.887)

That's a great, that's a good topic for a blog post. Okay, let's do it.

Auren Hoffman (11:37.976)

We should go right one. That's, let's, let's do it. Yeah. Yeah. This is now we also have this like rise of like gig work, remote work. Where do you see like the macro trends of that kind of happening?

Ben (11:52.729)

Well, I think it's interesting. I think obviously AI is the next sort of super cycle in terms of how it's going to shape the world of work and sort of who exactly is that threat there. The thing that I wrestle with, and it's tricky because my, default, I'm so, I default to rebellion, contrarian, try to, the, wherever everyone else is agreeing, tend to try to take a different view. And on the remote work thing, I'm not sure we've seen

I think that's still a trend that's playing out. And what's so interesting to me is like, we started with during COVID, remote works, everything. Then there's been recently the last few years of backlash, just, you know, we're recording this in late September, just a couple of days ago, Eddie Jassy at Amazon announced a five day a week back to office policy at Amazon. And that's been widely celebrated, that policy is one widely celebrated by many of the people in tech who I respect. think it's probably.

Auren Hoffman (12:23.543)

Yeah.

Ben (12:49.475)

conventional wisdom right now in Silicon Valley that you got to be in office and co -working together IRL to do to build great companies. And so we've kind of swung back to that direction. But I actually think there is really a future for remote work. think places like the Bay Area have these structural problems with housing that are not gonna be solved anytime soon. I actually, so I'm actually still bullish on remote and distributed.

Auren Hoffman (13:17.911)

Yeah.

Ben (13:18.601)

workplaces. And I just think I think that trend like it's still early days. So don't think we're we're we have sound like let's over we've all figured out I actually think that there are many, more companies that that go remote, or that do hybrid setups in sophisticated ways or different types of people. I think what I saw interesting about the Amazon announcement was this critique of somebody said, well, it's back to the office, except if you're a really high performer, in which case you go to your manager asked for an exception, an exception will be granted. And this is actually like this very pernicious.

Auren Hoffman (13:45.026)

Yeah.

Ben (13:47.235)

dynamic inside all these companies that have gone back to the offices. There's a set of elite employees that are like, fuck that. I've been working from home, you know, two or three days a week. It's much better. If you, you implement this policy, I'll leave. And now you've got this like two tier system inside the company, which is actually like worse, I would argue that, that, that a unified approach.

Auren Hoffman (13:54.583)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (14:05.164)

Well, also, mean, a lot, I have a lot of friends at Amazon, it's amazing company. And, most of my friends, their teams are, all over the, so they might be in the office. They might be in the office in Seattle, but they work with somebody in Austin and somebody else in New York and somebody else in Washington, DC. They're all in the same team. So they're, they're literally like their meetings are on video every day. Like they're actually not meeting in person with people. So like what.

Ben (14:28.899)

Right, yeah. Totally.

Auren Hoffman (14:33.206)

Like I'm not even like, yeah, it's good. Like maybe they'll actually not goof off, you know, not be on Twitter as much or something at the office.

Ben (14:42.061)

Yeah, that's a good point. have a friend too who works at a financial services firm and he lives outside of New York. He commutes into Manhattan every day to Zoom with colleagues on the West Coast. so maybe like early stage startups are like, that's a different, like there's six employees. Yes. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (14:52.306)

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Because you're literally like you can literally touch them. it's not only you're in the same office, you're in the same room. That's a different thing.

Ben (15:06.157)

Yes, yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then the problem, of course, is early stage startups can't afford the talent in the Bay Area, New York, and so forth. And so they're actually more inclined for cost reasons to try to distribute it. They can't afford office space, whatever. And so they're the ones being more remote by default. And it's the big companies have money back to office policies. But you're right. So many these big companies are working with these global distributed teams. It's stupid to spend all this time in traffic just to jump on Zoom the rest of the

Auren Hoffman (15:20.522)

Interesting. Yep.

Auren Hoffman (15:30.296)

Yeah. Yeah. And also like, even when you sometimes like, even if you're like in the same office complex in a mountain view or something, you're still often on a video call. Cause you just don't want to go spend like the 15 minutes going to the other office complex biking there or something.

Ben (15:46.007)

Yeah, or it's like four of you are in person, but there's the one colleague in Bangalore. to make it fair, equality, like best practices, let's all be on Zoom so we don't have... Yeah. But I think the meta point I just make on this, which is interesting, is I think there's... A lot of times we declare that certain trends are over before they actually are. It's kind of like, remote work, we hashed this out. Like, Merle was big and it wasn't, and now it's onto the next trend.

Auren Hoffman (15:52.344)

Correct. Yeah, it's all beyond video, right? Totally.

Auren Hoffman (16:09.494)

Yeah.

Ben (16:14.755)

And I remember Reid Hoffman saying this once about social networking, people have been declaring the end of social networking for years. It's all been settled, all the networks have been established. And frequently the game isn't over when people think it is. It can sometimes just be getting started. And so I do always appreciate thinkers or people who actually thoroughly unpack or explore the ongoing nuances. And I think this remote work thing is like, this actually could continue to be the central trend of the workplace for years to come. And there's a lot more permutations.

Auren Hoffman (16:25.238)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (16:41.08)

I mean, it would seem to me that if you're a betting person and you say, there going to be more remote hours worked in 20 years from now than there are today, it would seem likely that there will be more. And so I don't even know that that's that's controversial to make that prediction.

Ben (16:58.959)

I think so because, well, I don't think so. think the macro, the story of our lifetime is the rise of the rest. It's hundreds of millions of people coming out of poverty, getting online for the first time, getting educated, having an AI tutor in their pocket, and contributing to the global knowledge economy. And so if you think about how our company is going to source talent in the future, it seems inevitable that we're going to find incredible people wherever they are.

Auren Hoffman (17:10.753)

Yeah.

Yep.

Yeah, it's true.

Yep.

Ben (17:26.959)

And this idea that they're all gonna live in the 49 square miles of San Francisco is just foolish.

Auren Hoffman (17:32.342)

Yeah, that's a good point. You wrote this interesting blog recently about the right amount of early success, which I really liked. Walk me through your thinking there. So like a laffer curve, right? Of like the right amount.

Ben (17:41.241)

So there is a.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I came at this a little bit from the venture fund context. So the conventional wisdom would be the ideal amount of success for a fund one is maximum. It's just maximum. The LPs and GPs all want the maximum amount of success. And so let's say you raise a $5 million fund. You want that fund to be a 50x fund or 100x. 50x is better than 20x or whatever.

Auren Hoffman (17:49.591)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (17:54.942)

This is maximum. Yeah. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (18:01.58)

Yeah, you want to. 20x, 20x finders, huh? Yeah. Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've never seen a 50x, but I'm sure they exist, yeah. Good point, yeah. my gosh, that's a monster. Yeah.

Ben (18:10.255)

Yeah, yeah. Well, I Chris Sokka's lowercase capital one, I think was like a 68X or so. Yeah, Uber, Twitter, or whatever, and like a $3 million vehicle. But the problem with early success, and there's a venture fund that I won't name, but that actually their fund won was like $5 or $6 million. Today, they have billions under assets under management. And what happens with a lot of early successes, you scale up, right? You say,

I'm so I'm so brilliant or LPs tell you you're so brilliant and they and they shovel money. And and so a five million dollar fund fund to becomes a 200 million dollar fund fund three becomes a billion dollar fund and quickly you're operating a strategy that has nothing to do with your strengths or edge and market and returns really suffer. And so overconfidence, you start to you're playing in a different game, right? Like to be successful.

Auren Hoffman (18:42.967)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (18:51.159)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (18:59.864)

Because you, because they're overconfidence.

Ben (19:07.393)

as a multi -stage billion dollar fund is different than the game that is to be successful as a five million dollar seed fund, right? And so your assets haven't changed, but the competition has changed. And so you can't win in the new market. And I've of extrapolated this into a life context where you can imagine people who come out of the gate, out of college or in their early twenties as kind of superstars, and they get tons of accolades and so forth.

Auren Hoffman (19:11.648)

Yep, totally. Yep.

Auren Hoffman (19:18.626)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (19:32.598)

Yeah.

Ben (19:36.111)

And then sometimes they can peter out or burnout or bite off more than they chew. And so the question was like, is there some optimal level of success? Let's take a fund context. Of course you want the fund to be successful, but maybe like you want fund one to actually be like a 5X fund. So like definitely like a really great fund. 3X fund is actually still mostly cop quartile, cop decile, not your capital. So like a 3X fund, awesome. Every LP will want to re -up. You're going to make plenty of money.

Auren Hoffman (19:53.11)

Yeah, or a 3x would be amazing, right? Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (20:02.412)

Yep. Yep.

Ben (20:04.079)

And you can feel good about you have a confidence that's helpful, but you're also less likely to prematurely scale. You're less likely both psychologically that the effect of arrogance, but also like practically like how you set up the fund, the resources you assemble and so forth, where you spend your time. And so maybe you'll build a stronger foundation for funds two, three, four. And so that the argument would be over a 20 year period of time in terms of the long -term success of that franchise. Would you rather fund one be like a three X?

and then be better positioned for funds two, three, four, five, six to each be three, five, six X two X versus the 25 X fund one. And then all the future funds suck because of overscaling. And so I think there's, I think there's, I think there could be something to this and I'm really intrigued by, by people who have a lot of early success, but then like can't repeat it or, or, or kind of shrink under the pressure. And I'm curious if that resonates or if you've seen that play out.

Auren Hoffman (20:35.68)

Yup, yup.

Auren Hoffman (21:00.778)

Yes, you think in a career it could be similar as well?

Ben (21:04.079)

I think I would argue that, like I can make the counter argument, right? Which is like the rich get richer, there is a compounding value to network and brand and so forth. So that's like conventional wisdom, right? Which is like early advantage compound. But I think in a career context, if you were to say, if you were to tell me, hey, you've got this talented kid who's now 21 years old, what amount of success do you want them to have between 21 and 26 to set them up for maximum long -term life success? I'm not sure I'd pick maximum success for 21 to 26.

Auren Hoffman (21:07.895)

Yeah.

For sure, yeah.

Ben (21:33.423)

I would worry about sort of the premature scaling effect for that person.

Auren Hoffman (21:36.79)

Yeah. And also may like these things go to people's heads. And so, you know, if it's a little bit more gradual, it might take a little, it's like the child actor kind of syndrome where they end up on drugs or, whatever it might be.

Ben (21:48.729)

Totally.

I think it goes to, and I think like humility and a willingness to learn. mean, one thing I've always admired, I mean, you had a line Orin years ago about reaching down, not just reaching up, or I can't remember how you put it for building your network, like trying to connect with people who are behind you actually on the totem pole. Most people network by saying, yeah, yeah, it's certainly easier. Most people like, yeah, how do I meet people who are more successful? I that's the typical like networking approach, but like, I'm actually gonna try to find up and comers.

Auren Hoffman (22:07.402)

Yeah, yeah. Certainly easier to do that. Yeah, yeah. That was my strategy. Yeah.

Right.

Ben (22:20.887)

And I think that actually is grounded in a sort of humility of like, no, I can learn from everybody. And I might be like objectively richer than this person or whatever, but like they still have something to teach me. think spectacular early success causes people to not be in learning mode as much. They get into talking mode and teaching mode and that's really detrimental for long -term career.

Auren Hoffman (22:35.65)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (22:40.662)

Yeah, it's also like, feel like the people I know who got like super successful in their early twenties, obviously it's not that often that that happens, but they, they don't really know who they, it's hard to build friendships because you don't really know who to trust. Do they like me just because of my money and because of my success. And so either they go back to like very, very family relationships or they, they, they've got these kind of like very odd relationships where they're kind of their boss, but they're not kind of the friend.

And so I, it's just a harder and that's a very important time and people, you're still becoming who you are in your twenties.

Ben (23:15.639)

Yeah, that's a good point. I didn't get spot on.

Auren Hoffman (23:19.02)

the, like, is there a way to like, I don't know, is there a way to, obviously like nobody would ever like take less success though, right? Like there's no real way to think about it. and,

Ben (23:33.999)

Well, is there a way to stay grounded while being massively successful? Right? I mean, think that's the, like, if you could have the 60 X fund one and be really sober about how you plan and resource fund two, that would be the best of all worlds. And I do think, like, I think there's an interesting question for all of us to reflect on, which is like, how, what does it mean to stay grounded? What does it mean to touch grass? What does it mean to not let success and momentum get to your head? I mean, and I think I'm really intrigued by this because

Auren Hoffman (23:35.713)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (23:44.408)

Of course, yeah.

Ben (24:00.623)

If you watch any interview with a successful person, always say, luck was a big part of my success and so forth. But you're like, no, Do you really believe that? That's the kind high status answer. And in Buddhism, where I've been spending a lot of time meditating in the last 15 years, they distinguish between knowledge and wisdom, which is like, can read shit in a book. You can read about the principles of Buddhism or whatever in a book, but it comes to as knowledge, not wisdom. The only way that wisdom is gained is through

Auren Hoffman (24:07.192)

-huh, yeah.

Ben (24:29.013)

seeing the truths for yourself, experiencing them for yourself, like kind of this experiential element of understanding impermanence or not self.

Auren Hoffman (24:35.382)

And do believe that? Do you really think that's the only real way to get wisdom is by doing that?

Ben (24:39.661)

I don't think it's the only way, but I do think that when I, all of like the wisdom in the world has been written down. Like all of the best practices in business have been like more or less codified. And yet people continue to not follow the wisdom, right? Like people continue to make mistakes where it's been written down, like don't do that. This will cause you pain and suffering and people can do those things. And then they realize, yeah, I guess I should have listened to that advice. So there was a sense that, go ahead.

Auren Hoffman (24:53.399)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (25:04.408)

But mean, sometimes you just, can't like, I mean, I know I shouldn't have like 10 chocolate chip cookies in one sitting, but like every once in a while I just succumb and do it anyway.

Ben (25:14.317)

Yeah, well, and I think it's interesting. That's like the knowing doing gap or like you can have, I would argue that's like you having the knowledge that there's a certain way to be healthy, but then it's hard to actually implement behavior. I don't know if it's too cute to distinguish between knowledge and wisdom in that context. Like, is there such a thing as like health and wellness wisdom that like leads to better follow through on action? But I would just say like my observation is that I see a lot of people make the same mistakes.

and sort of ignore cliche best practice wisdom. And my takeaway is like, no, it's because they have to learn it themselves. They have to experience the mistake and the consequences themselves. And so I fear the reason why this framework around too much really success is because I fear that if you have the 60X fund or whatever, and then you go talk to 10 smart people who tell you, okay, young Jedi, don't let this go to your head. Don't overscale, whatever. Like you just.

Auren Hoffman (26:07.884)

Yeah. Yeah. You just, yeah. I feel like, of course. Yeah. You're, you're, you're, I'm smart on these guys. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. like we mentioned this kind of like connecting networking type of thing. Like how, how do you think about it? Obviously like who, you know, is still important. Like, how do you, how do you think about like how one should be implementing it or how one should be thinking about it strategically?

Ben (26:10.147)

It won't actually, it won't be internalized. I'm different. I'm the exception. Like I won't fall prey to the thing everyone else did.

Ben (26:37.857)

I think generally, I think the last word strategically is a good word. It speaks to actually the core tension of this whole topic, which is on the one hand, I think you actually want to be strategic when you think about your network, whether you're an entrepreneur running a business and think about the network around your company, or whether it is an individual running your career, thinking about your professional network, you actually want to be strategic. You want to be intentional. You want to be proactive. And yet at the same time, if you do anything that...

Auren Hoffman (26:52.695)

Yeah.

Ben (27:05.739)

makes it seem like you're being overly calculated, overly long to overly strategic, it actually undermines the entire endeavor. And so it's this very interesting tension where the people who build like the most effective networks, and I think of yourself as one of them, are people who actually are pretty organized about how they think about their network. They're pretty strategic. they make a point to spend time with interesting people and they make a point to stay in touch and follow up and all the rest. And yet they do so in a way

Auren Hoffman (27:08.896)

Yeah. Yeah, that's bad.

Ben (27:34.915)

that's so authentic and natural that it doesn't come off as slime in it. And the novelist Jonathan Franzen had this line of, people who are most obsessed with authenticity tend to be some of the least authentic people. There's this sense in which even talking about it in the way we are right now, just having the meta conversation, correct, even having the meta conversation can feel awkward. And yet,

Auren Hoffman (27:47.448)

Correct. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (27:53.004)

Right. It seems so crass. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Ben (28:02.401)

it's important still to be thinking about it strategically and intentional.

Auren Hoffman (28:06.134)

And, and, and like, how does one, think through like the serendipity? Like, you know, it's like, for somebody like you, you'd probably get so many inbound, so many people like, Hey, let's meet up. Let's chat. you know, if you, if you take every one of them, well, like, well, you just, you literally don't have the time. You can't do it. if you never take one, well, then there's like, you know, there's these gems that you find all of a sudden that, that, so like,

You just like pick out random, like how do you decide to do that serendipity side?

Ben (28:37.615)

Yeah, well, I'll give my answer that I want to hear yours. I think it's one of the things I worry about actually is I've gotten older. I used to do massive amounts of serendipity. Like almost anybody who reached out and meet with them, I would like go to events. I'd be very open -minded. And today I do much less. I'm much more filtered. I say no to almost everything. I rarely just do random meetings with people when they reach out. And even if it gets referred in, I'll usually like, do a 15 minute phone call, you know, or something like that. I, and I worry.

Auren Hoffman (28:46.135)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (28:52.119)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (29:02.188)

Yeah.

Ben (29:04.781)

that like actually I should be doing it more. The kind of the framework that I have, that I try to follow is that there are kind of different seasons of life when you want to have the serendipity spigot more or less open. So for example, I met with, I actually had coffee yesterday with a guy who I know, who I respect, who's in a career transition. And he reached out to me and he's doing exactly what he should do in a career transition, which is you really open up the serendipity spigot big time.

And you go and reconnect, you have lots of coffee meetings, you go to events, go to conferences, go to gatherings, and just sort of let stuff percolate, right? And I think there are also seasons of life where you're really heads down and super focused, right? And so to me, I'm always thinking about like, what season of life am I in between that binary? And of course it's more subtle than just two stages, but I think there are phases where maybe you're trying to figure out a new strategy, maybe you're feeling a little dissatisfied, a little burned out, and you want to introduce more randomness and serendipity.

Auren Hoffman (29:36.909)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (29:42.806)

Heads down. Yep.

Auren Hoffman (29:49.868)

Hmm. Yep.

Ben (30:01.007)

But I think what you don't want to do as you have more success or have more commitments or obligations, family, whatever, is have the serendipity spigot open constantly, sort of unconsciously, because I think that can be distracting. But how do you think about serendipity in your network?

Auren Hoffman (30:15.16)

I mean, honestly, I have the same tension that you have, which is like some of them. I mean, I remember, I mean, literally I checked my inbox before this and, you know, you reached out to me in February, 2003. I think if I remember correctly, your birthday's in March. So you're, you were about to turn 15 years old, right? you're, you know, like for some reason, and I'm much older than you. So, you know, for some reason I took the meeting. I don't even remember why I took it.

Ben (30:41.059)

Ha

Auren Hoffman (30:43.192)

You know, just cause like, you're a 15 year old entrepreneur at the time. Like that's cool. Like, I guess, I don't, don't know why I took the meeting and then we've been like good friends ever since. It's been like an incredible, like a great relationship for me personally. And I've learned a lot from you over those years. there's probably many of those that I missed. Cause I didn't take it. Right. So I've missed out on these, like maybe many, many incredible relationships that I could have had.

over the years, but of course there's, you know, I have also, I haven't done that many meetings with 15 year olds, but I have taken plenty of meetings over time where it, you know, it, it wasn't valuable for me or the other person. that's actually the most interesting thing is when the, when somebody reaches out to you for a meeting, I find that sometimes they don't get value out of meeting out of the meeting. and so it's one thing if you don't get value out of it.

But if both sides don't get value out of this is a complete waste of time. So I would at least like for them to get a ton of value. they're going to reach out to me and get a meeting with me, they should at least get a ton of value out of the meeting. They should come prepared. Here's what the here's what it is. And they should extract value out of it. Ideally they give some value back, but that would be if I'm, and if I remember going to reach out to somebody, I will, well,

Ben (31:44.526)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (32:05.76)

ensure that at least at least some one of us gets value out of the meeting for for sure. Yeah

Ben (32:10.031)

Yeah, yeah. Well, I do appreciate, I I think you were generous in not just spending time with me, but also I think when I was maybe 17 or something, you had me moderate a session on ethics and science at an event that you organized with a bunch of heavy hitters. And I remember asking you, saying, like, I don't think I'm qualified to do this. And you're like, no, no, go for it. I think you can do great. I really, people telling you that at formative ages can have a huge impact on their career. So I really am grateful for that.

Auren Hoffman (32:34.508)

Yeah, that's obviously, yeah. Tyler Cowan is great at just saying like, believe in you, right? Yeah.

Ben (32:39.791)

And Tyler Cowen did that to me as well. And I'm so grateful. People like you and him. And I feel like I should be doing that more. Like if a 15 -year -old emailed me today, I'm not sure I would actually jump on the phone. Maybe it depends. maybe that's my takeaway from the action that I'm going forward. But I think this actually speaks to a couple of things you raised that I think are important points just to amplify for folks listening here. One is I do think actually both sides benefit in some way.

Auren Hoffman (32:52.439)

Yeah.

Ben (33:07.051)

is useful when thinking about interpersonal interaction in general. And I think a mistake a lot of young people make on this is they think there's no way it could possibly help Orin. How could I possibly add value? And it's like, you can always add value. One thing I always tell young people is like VCs and people in tech and people in business, the media, everyone, we're obsessed with what are young people thinking today? And so just like, I firmly believe that anybody can get a meeting with anybody in the world if they work hard enough and they follow up enough. So like, I think you can get a meeting with Bill Gates. How do you get on Bill Gates calendar? Will you figure out some piece of information?

Auren Hoffman (33:15.017)

yeah, yeah, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (33:31.65)

For sure.

Ben (33:37.027)

that he would find valuable and information that only you have that's in your head. You got it. And maybe you'll help him or maybe you'll just show that you are attempting to help him, but that's the key versus just a one -way value extraction. I think the other thing, the other thing to say on this that's a little more subtle, but I think it's key is something I've learned in recent years on network building relationships is for really busy people, they actually don't want to do like agenda -less coffee meetings, right? They're so busy.

Auren Hoffman (33:38.4)

Yeah, some way you can help him.

Auren Hoffman (33:45.111)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (34:02.498)

Yeah.

Ben (34:04.557)

that they actually to justify like taking the time, there needs to be some transactional reason why the interaction is happening. And so I kind of think of this as like a transactional bluff, which is let's just say you don't actually have a short -term transaction and you actually want to build a long -term relationship and you don't want to come at this person's, I just want to do business with you. never talked to you again. You still for purposes of like getting on the calendar need to have something specific.

Auren Hoffman (34:21.11)

Yeah.

Ben (34:30.083)

that is the purpose. doing a podcast conversation is an example of a transaction. It's harder to ask someone to catch up for an hour than to say, hey, let's record a podcast. Similarly, it's basically we're just catching up. like, is the way that both of us could justify it being on our calendar for an hour. And then there's lots of things that you can do, I think, to come up with a transactional reason. And so I found, despite the reason this is nuanced is,

Auren Hoffman (34:33.452)

Yeah, sure, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (34:39.244)

Yeah, yeah. this is great. Like I'm glad we're catching up, you know? Yeah. Totally.

Ben (34:57.817)

The general advice is don't be transactional, be long -term, build authentic relationships and so forth. But then the nuance is you actually need to be a little bit transactional to schedule shit to get the kind of wheels turning in the relationship. And then once you're in the interaction, you don't have to be transactional while talking to the person, right?

Auren Hoffman (35:09.324)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (35:15.842)

Well, I still think it's helpful to like have an agenda like that you're going to follow like, then, okay, here's what I think is tough is like, if you reach out to somebody to meet with them, maybe some of you don't know that well or whatever, or maybe some of you don't know at all. You know, you, you, you want to be able to say, okay, here's, I have this thing I'm trying to, I'm either, I want some value from you, Ben, and I'm going to, this is the specific thing I think you could help me on.

Ben (35:18.617)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (35:44.888)

And that's because sometimes people are like, Hey, I need your help on this thing. But then you're like, well, I don't even know how I'm going to be able to help you. And, and the worst case scenarios, you, you, you talked to him for 30 minutes and you don't help them at all. so at least they should have some sort of plan and then you should be able to agree. yeah, I probably could help you there. That's great. And maybe helping him only takes three minutes of the 30 minute conversation or something. And then there's a way then there's like, okay, maybe we have other ways of doing that or Hey, I'm going to.

you know, I want to help you, Ben, and then they could show you some value as well.

Ben (36:18.723)

Yes, indeed. Well put.

Auren Hoffman (36:20.524)

Now, okay, I might be the second most famous Hoffman that you hang out with. You also hang out with Reid Hoffman, no relationship to me, unfortunately. What are some of the more counterintuitive lessons you've learned from him?

Ben (36:36.783)

Well, I spent a couple of years working on books with Reid and then a couple of years as chief of staff, sort of setting up an initial organization for him, separate from LinkedIn and Greylock to kind of advance his interest in activities across a set of things. And I learned a ton. I wrote an essay called 10 ,000 Hours with Bud Hoffman, which I document a lot of the lessons learned. So there's so many things I've learned from him. Actually, I think about this with a lot of people I've learned from, where it's like, I'm not even sure I could disentangle like,

Auren Hoffman (36:54.176)

Yeah, which I loved. Yeah.

Ben (37:05.731)

what I've learned, like it's just so deep, know, it's got a sinks in so deeply across so many fronts. It's almost like just it's pure absorption more than tactical. But if I had to pull out one thing on Reed, you know, it's something that I still need to get better at is he's very good at having people in his orbit with whom he doesn't agree fully or might not have a massive amount of overlap or or so forth. But there's an element of what they do or what they think.

that he finds really redeeming and valuable and he maintains the friendship. he has this, he actually has that, so he once told me, I once asked him like how after Microsoft bought LinkedIn, know, whether he felt sad about that. And he once told me that he thinks of emotions like an eight ball where you can kind of like turn the eight ball. Usually experiences have many emotions built in at once. And so yes, sadness was an emotion, but you can turn it and there's also excitement, there's also pride, there's also like lots of things. And so,

Auren Hoffman (37:37.506)

Yep.

Ben (38:04.267)

And I sort of, so I sort of sometimes think of him with the eight ball or like the turning of the eight ball. Similarly, in, in this regard, which is like sometimes people in your life are annoying or have some flaw or weakness. But if you turn it, if you, if you, you use you from a different perspective, you can see, actually they have this attribute or quality or personality trait or interest. That's actually really exciting or valuable or worthwhile. And so I.

my problem is I'm more inclined to like just dismiss people or or or just sort of say look you have this one flaw or problem that's so annoying to me I just like don't want to spend any more time with you whereas Reid will actually like accept quite a bit of that in pursuit of the really redeeming awesome quality yeah exact strengths that he'll he'll overlook weaknesses basically and so he has some people he works with or people you know who have like all sorts of problems and major weaknesses and some people are like Reid why are you spending time with us he's like well because

Auren Hoffman (38:41.099)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (38:46.816)

of the strengths. Yeah.

Ben (39:00.035)

their particular strength on this particular vector is so stupendous that it's worth having them in orbit.

Auren Hoffman (39:06.816)

Yeah, that's, it's interesting. A lot of successful people are like that where, you know, they, they have these people in their orbit who are, you know, quite flawed, like incredibly flawed people. but they, they, they are able to find this kind of like redeeming quality somewhere in that, in that person, because they're just so world -class at this very, very specific thing. And maybe these successful people are just good at finding that.

They're good at talent spotting in that way.

Ben (39:39.887)

Yes, and I think it's a really good insight because if it is broader phenomenon, I hadn't thought about until now, one other explanation could be that they are, because they're high status or wealthy or powerful, they're actually able to withstand the criticism that gets levied at them for affiliating or associating with this flawed person. And they can say, look, I know you don't like my friend Jane, but I don't care. And so whereas most of us, like us mere civilians,

Auren Hoffman (40:04.599)

Right.

Ben (40:08.119)

If we got a lot of criticism for being friends with somebody or having someone in an orbit who's flawed, we might say, well, I actually have to really listen to that criticism because I'm more subject. I have to justify it because I have to care more about what people think in a sense. These sort of billionaire moguls can say, I don't really give a shit. fine. You like me less. You respect me less. You don't want to give me money more. I don't care. I have all the money. I have all the power. I'm still going to be friends with this person. I think that maybe it is actually

Auren Hoffman (40:15.734)

Yeah, or just try to justify it in some sort of way.

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (40:32.032)

Yeah. Yeah.

Ben (40:36.335)

more common than I realized among these sorts of people.

Auren Hoffman (40:39.346)

Or it's hard to know if there's which correlation causation, because maybe they're successful. of the reason they're successful is because they've been able to find these like pockets of innovation that other people would dismiss. cause they don't want to associate what, you know, someone who's got, you know, like, I really hate being around people who are always late to things, but, so that for me, that's a very, like, you know, but like that's in some ways, like a very.

Who cares if that person is really brilliant at some other thing? It just rubs me the wrong way. And maybe I missed out on working on these like pure geniuses who are great at other things.

Ben (41:14.083)

Yeah, that's well put. The causality question is interesting because maybe some of the most brilliant, profound thinkers on Earth today also have these flaws that cause most people to dismiss them out of hand.

Auren Hoffman (41:28.128)

Yeah, yeah, that's right. And then even if they are, and a lot of people, it's like, even people who have like the most amazing insights, know, they, you know, it's like kind of like the people who like, you know, one of the guys who discovered DNA or something like that had some like huge, crazy flaws and other types of things. So you can be like great at one thing. And, and, and, you know, if you're, if you're friends with that person, hopefully you can filter.

You can say, okay, I'll take the DNA thing, but I won't take your like crazy other conspiracies over here or something. And you you can, you can, you can take the, know, you can try to be that filter. You don't have to take everything somebody throws at you.

Ben (42:04.014)

Yeah.

Ben (42:10.137)

Well, I think that's right. Actually, I mean, I think you do that really well. I remember having coffee with you once in San or like lunch in San Francisco years ago. And I, and I remember invoking us. I think I told you like, you know, the wall street journal recently wrote an article about X and your responses. I don't believe that, which I can't remember what the topic was, but I remember thinking, wow, that's like, like be one sign of sophistication or independent thought.

is actually evaluating every assertion individually and not just saying, well, because the Wall Street Journal asserted something, it must be true. Or because some smart, powerful person has some belief that must be the right belief. Interacting with the anatomic world of, let's look at every atomic unit and see if I agree or disagree. I think world -class people are able to look at a person and say they have 99 beliefs that are completely bogus, but this one belief is really interesting and really true.

Auren Hoffman (42:42.955)

interesting.

Ben (43:04.949)

And whereas many of us are instead tempted to wholesale accept credit, is that an outlet or a person is fully credible in everything or dismiss somebody as uncredible in everything. And I think being able to be more nuanced about it's a real superpower.

Auren Hoffman (43:18.912)

Yeah. And by the way, like most of us do that with our family members, because you can't like, you don't fire your family member. So you've got this crazy uncle Fred. He's got like, you know, he's got some serious flaws or something like that, but you still love him because he's your family member and you still, know, and he's got some other redeeming qualities out there. So we're kind of used to that with, but then like, then like, yeah, and no one will judge you. Okay. Well, you have this crazy uncle Fred, like he's your uncle. Like that's just the way it is. Right.

Ben (43:36.419)

Yeah.

Ben (43:45.091)

Right, yes, yes, that's a great analogy. think that's more people should apply that way of thinking to people in their professional life.

Auren Hoffman (43:52.792)

Yeah. Now, speaking of professional stuff on the venture capital firm, that's your full -time job. We're at a point where like early stage valuations are still like super sky high. mean, they're probably even higher than they were at the 2021 peak. And of course we have these like super giant seed rounds like Mistral or like the SSI, you know, the billion dollar valuation for the AI stuff that's going, what, like what is happening right now in the market and

Do you think this is sustainable? Do you think this is okay? Like where do you see it going?

Ben (44:26.191)

Well, I'm not sure early stage valuations are higher than the ZERP peak. think they have come down. think there is data from CARTA and so on to support the fact that they've come down. I think...

Auren Hoffman (44:30.315)

Okay.

Auren Hoffman (44:34.391)

really? Okay. Because like the YC ones still seem like they're in a different stratosphere.

Ben (44:38.767)

Yeah, well, yeah, totally. And YC has a dynamic around it. think like a typical company coming out of YC today will target raising a 15 or 20 post. And that's in part, yeah, minimum. And that's in part because of the new YC deal with the uncapped note that YC puts in that's kind of forcing founders to raise more higher prices to sort of make the dilution math work, which is an outcome that everyone anticipated when YC introduced the new deal. And I think the problem with it is the founders raised

Auren Hoffman (44:49.186)

minimum it seems, yeah.

Ben (45:08.833)

money at too high evaluation earlier in their journey, it limits their ability to raise future quality rounds. And I get that founders think this is just VCs advocating their interest, like, you know, Mark Lohr from jet .com wrote a great post and like the biggest mistake he made at JET is like raising money at too high evaluations. It can create problems down the road. So I don't think it's just VC self -interest. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (45:16.086)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (45:26.818)

yeah, creates a lot of problems. Yeah. And raising too much money. Cause often you'll still give away the same percentage. You just raise a lot more money, right? Yeah.

Ben (45:33.453)

you raise too much money. like, and again, it's interesting to circle back to our knowledge versus wisdom thing. Like, yes, you can read the article that says, don't let your burn get out of control until you have product market fit. But like the money sitting in your bank account, like no matter how you try to do it, like founders end up spending that money. Like you just, so yeah.

Auren Hoffman (45:47.096)

Yes, 100%. There's no, it's just like, it's too big of a force. You can't just like let it earn interest.

Ben (45:53.359)

Yeah, it's like burning. Yeah, exactly. So I think what we're seeing evaluations, the sort of obvious thing to point out is that there's AI, there's not AI deals. of course, everyone's, well, hey, just add .ai to your domain name and you're an AI company. But in terms of like the true gen AI kind of stuff, we're seeing in a village, lead precedency rounds of village global. We see those AI centric deals often clear in 20 post.

Auren Hoffman (46:02.71)

Yeah. So everything today is AI, right? Totally. Yeah.

Ben (46:22.831)

for pre -seed or seed rounds, even with zero attraction, no revenue and so forth. But for the non -AI deals, our average entry price will be $7 .5 to $10 million post -money valuation. we think there are plenty of those deals to do. It means that you have to be great at discovering founders at the very beginning of their journey. And that's hard to do. And so I think you have to have a strategy.

Auren Hoffman (46:25.729)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (46:38.244)

wow. Okay.

Ben (46:50.863)

of inception stage discovery to do lower cost entry price venture investing. If you don't want to have a strategy around that and you just want to play an access game, then you're going to enter at seed in series A north of 20 post.

Auren Hoffman (46:56.823)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (47:06.944)

Interesting. How do you think about like when, like in the kind of mid 2000s, like the average deal was maybe five posts or something, the average kind of seed stage deal, made it raise a million on five posts. That was pretty common back then. Maybe if you got, you're really good at your million, million and five pre or something, right. And have a little less dilution. But, you know, if you, I don't know, if you think of it, if you, if you just think like the tech world has grown,

Ben (47:30.777)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (47:36.376)

at least 10 % a year since then we're at 18 years. So that would be at least a 4X turn, right? So it'd be more than a 4X turn. it should, like, even if you just think of just normally, it should be over, like that same deal should be at 20 post today that it is that if, if, if, if that 10 % actually leads, if, if actually the value, the exit valuations are at 10%, what they were kind of in the past.

Ben (48:03.043)

Right. Yes. Well, think that's the, and actually Village, mutual friend, Mark Pinkus did a fireside chat with, with, with me and it's on YouTube. People want to watch where he talks about the early financing rounds of Zynga. And I think like the Zynga, and this was Mark was like a repeat founder. think he would take an accompany public, right? When he started Zynga. So he was not like a first time founder. And I think like the first thing, the Zynga round was like a five post or something like the seed round. And so it's completely bonkers where we are today by comparison. I think there's.

Auren Hoffman (48:22.156)

Yeah, support, yep.

Auren Hoffman (48:26.722)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (48:31.576)

Or is it? mean, I don't know, 10%. If it was 10 % a year, it would be pretty normal. Yeah, yeah.

Ben (48:32.749)

Well, this is the question.

Correct. one of two things will happen. Either the asset class will produce horribly in company messages. That's one option. Obviously, neither you nor I would believe that because we're both running venture funds or in the venture business in different ways. So what we have to believe is that exit values will be a lot higher than they used to be. That there will be more companies that exit for tens of billions of dollars to justify this higher entry price. And I think if you look at software in the world,

Auren Hoffman (48:41.378)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (48:48.246)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (48:55.82)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (49:04.088)

Because if you're paying 4x more at the entry, you got to get 4x more on the exit. But some of those venture firms did super well. Maybe you get 3x more on the exit and you still do OK or something.

Ben (49:07.023)

On the entry, you have to have 4x higher exit. 100%. Yeah.

Ben (49:16.623)

Yeah, like I have a friend who believes like, VCs just made too much money in the last 30 years. Like it wasn't efficient. you know, so, boohoo, VCs can make a little less money, you know, and, but, but, but that could happen. That could be an outcome. But I think generally it's not hard to tell a story about why there'll be larger tech outcomes in the years to come and why tech, every business is becoming a tech business, software and AI transforming every industry, blah, blah, blah. So it's, I think it's pretty credible to assert that.

Auren Hoffman (49:20.3)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (49:24.098)

Yeah, yeah, that's fair. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (49:36.556)

Yeah.

Ben (49:42.383)

there will be more value creation in the tech industry in the next 20, 30 years, which would justify these higher entry prices for VCs.

Auren Hoffman (49:48.662)

Now, one of your innovation when you guys were found in firms, kind of like pioneered this like more of a scout program or at least scaled it up more than most other firms. Like, how do you think about scaling that and what were your kind of lessons learned from that?

Ben (50:02.521)

Well, it points back to your comment on entry price and finding founders at the beginning of their journey. So the premise of scout program for adventure is that you can empower non -professional, non -full -time people, i .e. professors, other founders, angel investors, operators, executives, and you can empower them with capital to go back to their smartest friends. And what's contrarian about the strategy is most people think that the only way you do good investing is you put the money in the hands of full -time professional investors.

Auren Hoffman (50:07.628)

Yeah.

Ben (50:30.911)

But in seed stage venture, what we discovered is that a lot of founders first phone call when they're starting a company is not to the big bad VC. It's to a fellow founder friend. It's to their professors, to their former boss. And it's those are the people who are the first call. And so the idea is if you want to get in that very first round, you have to have partnerships and capital in the hands of people who are the first call angels or first call GPs. And so

Auren Hoffman (50:43.286)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (50:48.13)

Yeah.

Ben (50:58.305)

At Village, we run a somewhat decentralized network where we're working closely with people who we believe are first call for founders across different venture categories, cybersecurity, enterprise SaaS, whatever. And then it's behind, it's in partnership with their conviction that we will invest in that company. I think one of the things we've learned about managing this kind of network is people are motivated to participate in a network like ours for different reasons.

Auren Hoffman (51:08.556)

Yeah.

Ben (51:26.175)

Some of them care a lot about making money in economics. Some of them care about the status dynamics of being in an elite community. And then there's everything in between. so one of the reasons why communities and networks are hard to scale is because I do think to do them well, you have to kind of take a bespoke white glove approach to how you interact with these individual network nodes. You have to meet them where they are. Are they really keen on exclusive event invitations?

Auren Hoffman (51:33.879)

Yeah.

Ben (51:55.181)

Okay, that's what you're gonna have do. Are they keen on learning from other people? Are they trying to build more friendships? Like, what's driving them to engage in the network? It's too simplistic to think, just share carry with them or give them a spiff of cash if you do a deal and that's all that matters. Like, a lot of people who doing investing already made some money, frankly, and so there's other things that work.

Auren Hoffman (51:56.418)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (52:12.63)

Yeah.

Interesting. then, I assume, I mean, you obviously have many more, probably an order magnitude, more scouts than you have people on your team. So like, how do you manage them? Like, it like, you have like, in some ways, like a customer success person in your firm that manages them and

Ben (52:30.767)

It's a good way to think about it, or you can think about it like each of the full -time employees at Village, full -time investors will oversee a set of relationships in the community and kind of be their point of contact. So you do have to add bodies at HQ to scale a network, but obviously it's not linear. So each person can manage more than just one other relationship. And so, yes, we do work with many more people in the network than we have employees, but at Village today we have 13 full -time.

Auren Hoffman (52:40.439)

Yep.

Ben (53:00.144)

people and many of us are responsible for different cohorts of angels and other people we call our network investors.

Auren Hoffman (53:07.596)

these for these scouts that are out there, I assume like you can have a scenario where like someone doesn't refer any deals for a whole year or you know, or something like that, because they just don't see anything worth referring to you. Right. And then they like, I guess like you have to like ping them every once in a while. Like I don't even know how it works. And then of course you have one to like refer deals that are not good too, I presume.

Ben (53:18.765)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ben (53:29.517)

Right, right. Yeah. And so the way, sort of deeper way we think about it is like a lot of the people we're partnering with are experts in different product dynamics or market dynamics. And what we at Village HQ are a world -class at is founder evaluation, talent evaluation across categories, because we're a generalist fund. So our network investors tend to be people who are specialists in different categories. And then at Village HQ, we're adding a talent lens to that analysis to make together a really great investment decision.

Auren Hoffman (53:39.979)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (53:44.083)

Okay.

Ben (53:57.497)

But yeah, you have to cultivate this network and you're right, not everyone, because these are not full -time investors, often have other jobs. They're not, sometimes they won't do a deal for a long time. And of course you want to be careful that you're not like checking into them in a way that causes them to just do a deal, to do a deal. so cultivating this is actually really hard, which is why, you know, I think every venture firm says they have a network, they have a network strategy. We say village is network native because since the very beginning of the firm,

Auren Hoffman (54:10.678)

Yeah.

Ben (54:24.175)

We've been focused on doing this very subtle work of creating an ecosystem and checking in and building relationships. It's a lot harder than people think it is for a lot of these reasons.

Auren Hoffman (54:35.422)

You mentioned you're really good at evaluating the founders. Is there some sort of formula? Like how does one do that? How do you know? Because of course that is at the stage that you're investing in. It is the most important thing. You don't have a lot to go by at that point. There's not a lot of history in the company, at least. Like what do do to evaluate the people?

Ben (54:58.519)

I think it's a fascinating question. It's its own hour long conversation. And I think we, you and I both have learned a lot from our mutual friends like Tyler Cowen, Graham Duncan and others who have written, Patrick Coles and other people who have written on this topic. And I'm a student of all their work. I think here's what I'd say about talent evaluation in the venture context. A lot of VCs and investors are very sloppy and lack rigor when they do founder quality evaluation.

They apply rigor when they do market analysis, right? They'll actually like do a TAM analysis. They'll think concrete about it. They'll apply rigor when they think about product. Like they'll actually use the product. They'll rate the product and so forth. But they're very sloppy when it comes to founder quality. I was talking to a friend of mine who works at a well -known top tier venture firm. And they said the most overused word inside our firm is the word special with respect to founders. They sit around during investment team meetings. This person's a really special founder and no one knows what...

Auren Hoffman (55:28.322)

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (55:51.531)

-huh.

Ben (55:57.721)

the health special means. And so they quickly pivot the conversation back to product and market because you can kind of sound smarter with more quantitative or analytic frameworks when talking about those things. And so I think it's actually.

Auren Hoffman (55:58.146)

you

Auren Hoffman (56:03.074)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (56:07.864)

Yeah. It's also like, like, feel like you can kind of understand the company by looking at the deck and the numbers and you don't, you don't have to meet like, and so only not everyone in the firm meets the founders, but, but it's like, is there a way to understand the founders without meeting them? Like, is there a way to have that discussion? because of only, say two of the 13 of you have met the founders. Like, how do you actually have that discussion around the founders?

Ben (56:19.726)

Right.

Ben (56:34.359)

It's such a great insight, Orinach. I hadn't thought about that particular dimension to this, which is yes, like product and market information can be easily like circulated inside of a firm and everyone can kind of get up to speed. Whereas the sort of effervescent sense of founder talent evaluation is hard to kind of translate. I am hopeful, you know, at Village, we tend to record most of the pitch meetings we do with founders. They automatically get summarized. We don't actually record the video. We just get the transcript and summary. I could see a world where we record video and where with better AI editing and mashups.

Auren Hoffman (56:46.539)

Yeah.

Ben (57:02.061)

like what you could circulate is like the five minute highlight reel of the hour pitch to get all of your colleagues to sort of feel the energy, the founder, right? I do think recording meetings, every interview we do when we hire people at we use our portfolio company MetaView to record interviews. It's really game changing to get better at interviewing and having all of your colleagues on the same page about what other people have already asked them and to make sure you cover new ground or come back to delicate topics. So anyway, I think there will be opportunities to be more rigorous.

Auren Hoffman (57:04.332)

The five minute key. Okay. Interesting. that would be good. Yeah.

Ben (57:30.287)

around this particular dimension of getting people on the same page around the founder interviews. But one thing I would say just in terms of the process of evaluating founder talent is I think what we're trying to do more of at Village is develop a scorecard, write down the criteria we're looking for in founders and rate founders one through five on those criteria. not that we're like,

Auren Hoffman (57:50.454)

Yep. So on each criteria, not just overall one through five, but on each criteria.

Ben (57:56.015)

Okay, so what we do today is we actually just do overall one through five on the criteria and then we check a box on the sub criteria. So we don't actually sub rate the criteria and we do that for product market founder.

Auren Hoffman (58:03.584)

Okay. Okay. So like, is this person, you know, incredible, charismatic or so? Yes or no kind of thing? Okay.

Ben (58:11.533)

Yeah, history of incredible at iteration and moving quickly, founder market fit, are they put on this earth to work on this business? Are they obsessed with this problem area, which is distinct from your passion? They should have encyclopedic knowledge on the thing they're building. They should be teaching you constantly about every element of the thing they're working on. Do they reference well people who've worked with them well, and worked with them a lot in the past? Do they vouch for this person? So it's like looking for those criteria.

Auren Hoffman (58:20.45)

yeah, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (58:30.252)

Mmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Ben (58:41.305)

So this isn't like rocket science, like a checklist, you know, it's not rocket science, a tool of one, I wrote a great book on checklists, but like it's amazing how many VCs and investors don't actually use checklists just to like organize their thinking.

Auren Hoffman (58:50.57)

Yeah, that's a good, that makes sense. Like, okay, what are the things you think do make a great founder? Let's go through the checklist. They, don't need to have everything on the checklist, but they should have many things on the checklist.

Ben (58:57.167)

Let's go through the checklist.

Ben (59:02.095)

And like for those who haven't or aren't familiar with like a tool of a lot of his work on this, like he writes about how washing your hands in a hospital is like the most important thing doctors can do to like not spread disease. And like you can tell doctors a million times, wash your hands and people keep forgetting. And so just a checklist that doctors review before they enter like a surgical room and like step one is wash your hands. That like increases the incidence. I think similarly, like all VCs, there's nothing like super profound about how what you should look for in a founder. Like I couldn't tell you a criteria we look for at Village that you would say, wow, I never thought to think about that for a founder.

Auren Hoffman (59:09.89)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (59:19.639)

Yeah.

Totally.

Auren Hoffman (59:31.318)

Yeah.

Ben (59:31.459)

But it's like remembering to look for each of the criteria. That's the hard part.

Auren Hoffman (59:35.19)

Yeah. And then at least you can go back in time. If you made the investment or chose not to make the investment, go back in time and kind of calibrate that over, over, over.

Ben (59:45.327)

calibrate and if you have an investment team, if you have colleagues, this creates good structure for good dialogue because then you can look at your checklist, I can look at my checklist and we can say, Orin, it looks like I checked like incredibly ambitious, you dent, let's talk about that difference. Or it looks like you scored this person four out of five, I scored them two out of five, why the difference? So it kind of creates a context for structured conversation and debate internally.

Auren Hoffman (59:49.964)

Mm

Auren Hoffman (01:00:01.953)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (01:00:06.081)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (01:00:10.484)

Interesting. The, this is really helpful. No, you, you, you write a lot. mean, you've wrote like millions of words or at least over a million words on your blog. you, one blog I liked, you wrote this Goldilocks theory of building rich, where you kind of challenged some of these stereotypes of the super rich. Walk us through a couple of those.

Ben (01:00:30.681)

Well, the Goldilocks theory of wealth is basically this idea that it's kind of similar maybe to the success thing. You don't want to be too successful, at least early on. Indeed. Yeah. Yeah. And so here it's the idea that there's actually like an optimal amount of wealth that would like most correlate with happiness. And it's probably not maximum wealth. But obviously it's not.

Auren Hoffman (01:00:37.91)

Yeah, it's again, it's a slaffer curve, right? Yeah.

Ben (01:00:54.703)

It's not poverty. And it's not even like whatever the number of people say, know, above $60 ,000 of income doesn't make a difference. Like that's been disproven like million times. So, so there, but there's some optimal level and it depends a little bit on who you are and where you live and so forth. But this idea is like there that for many founders and entrepreneurs, people kind of in our orbits or, and they would, it would behoove them to sort of think about.

Auren Hoffman (01:00:55.97)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (01:01:02.294)

Yeah, yep.

Ben (01:01:17.199)

a life path relative to optimal amount of wealth because, and then I say this as a VC, we want to back people who want to create multi -billion dollar businesses and create billions, billions of dollars of exit value for everyone. But if I were to give life advice to someone, to an entrepreneur, and they were to ask me, what type of business should I build to optimize my happiness? I'm not sure the obvious answer would be go build a venture -backed startup that could become a $10 billion business where you sell most of the company to your investors and so forth.

Auren Hoffman (01:01:31.788)

Yeah.

Ben (01:01:46.671)

I think a business that could generate between five and $10 million a profit for you, a business that you wholly own, more or less, where you have this incredible lifestyle, lots of autonomy, where you're not famous, no one knows who you are. From what I understand about happiness and inner peace and from talking people, that actually is probably more optimal than people who create billions of dollars of wealth.

Auren Hoffman (01:02:08.728)

For sure. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I would. Yeah, it is. It is interesting that like most super wealthy people I know do seem very happy again. Like I haven't done like some big study, but people are like, yeah, they're so unhappy. Like I haven't found that there's like a massive happiness gap there. And I would say they're certainly happier on average than than people who are less.

wealthy. Do you agree with that or you think that is not true?

Ben (01:02:39.831)

It depends what we mean by super wealthy. So I'd probably push back. So.

Auren Hoffman (01:02:42.358)

Yeah, maybe, maybe at the very, very, maybe the Elon Musk does not seem as happy as, he, as he, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Ben (01:02:47.439)

Well, Elon Musk has said he's not happy. He said my life is like eating glass and staring into the abyss. I would say like, I would say I would challenge that in the billionaire class. I think there are a lot of billionaires who actually are, who are, who struggle within our piece, right? But in terms of like the mass affluent or kind of like Silicon Valley wealthy, know, like, hey, they started a company, they sold it for $300 million and they, you those people.

Auren Hoffman (01:02:57.346)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (01:03:03.201)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (01:03:11.703)

Yeah.

Ben (01:03:17.135)

I think they tend to be happy, I'd agree with you. I think the odds, it's very hard to do what you did with LifeRamp and so forth. Those are very unusual outcomes, right? The venture path usually doesn't end up that way for people. And usually it bifurcates into extraordinary outcome or zero. I think the path to happiness, if this is the thing you're optimizing for, which it doesn't have to be, but if you just are strictly optimizing for happiness, I think a bootstrapped business,

Auren Hoffman (01:03:35.339)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (01:03:45.037)

I agree with that, yeah.

Ben (01:03:45.219)

Or, you know, like I saw Greg Eisenberg on your podcast or and like he's big fan of this kind of stuff, like these sorts of businesses that he wholly owns. make a few million dollars a year of profit, free cashflow. You know, that's a really happy life.

Auren Hoffman (01:03:55.916)

Amazing. Yeah, yeah, I agree. Yeah. And like, there's a point where you don't have to think about money as much that that takes away a lot of stress. But then there's a point where you're just like so much in the competitive race where, you know, kind of almost adds the stress. And I don't know where and probably for everyone, that point is in a different place. Yeah.

Ben (01:04:20.921)

Well, yeah, I think that, you know, I call it my, in a different essay I wrote on, I call it the status cocaine. The status cocaine issue affects everyone on the whole spectrum, I think. Like there's always someone above you, there's always kind of this rat race feeling. And we all have to have a strategy for sort of disentangling our hearts and minds from that. But I think this idea that you don't have to worry about money, but also you're not so wealthy where how to give it away becomes like a major like topic and anxiety. And like people who are very wealthy, like,

Auren Hoffman (01:04:31.126)

Yep. Of course.

Auren Hoffman (01:04:47.863)

Yeah.

Ben (01:04:50.647)

It becomes, they get all these people pitching them to donate money. There's all this stress and like.

Auren Hoffman (01:04:53.718)

Yeah, and you also, don't know if they're your, why they're your friend, right? Yeah.

Ben (01:04:56.879)

Correct, right? Like why? And I was always intrigued. I remember George Clooney once said that he he once organized like a dinner with his 12 childhood friends and he gave them each a million dollars, like at the dinner, like he gave them each an envelope that had like a million dollars in it each. And he said this story with like great pride. I was thinking to myself, that seems like one of the worst things to do. Like you've just taken your 12, you've taken your 12 childhood friends, just each handed them a million dollars cash. And I'm sure they're grateful to you, but you've just like permanently fucked up your friendship with them the rest of your life.

Auren Hoffman (01:05:08.62)

Okay.

Auren Hoffman (01:05:14.861)

my gosh, that seems terrible. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (01:05:20.151)

Right.

Auren Hoffman (01:05:24.61)

Correct. Yeah. Yeah. I think this is a, yeah. One thing to buy your, your mom a house or something, you know? Yeah. That's a, yeah. That's really, that's weird. All right. Couple of personal questions before you leave. What, is the conspiracy theory that you believe?

Ben (01:05:30.585)

Totally.

Ben (01:05:38.371)

You know, I don't have a conspiracy theory that I can think of, so I'm curious to ask you that same question. What is a conspiracy theory that you believe in?

Auren Hoffman (01:05:46.558)

interesting. I believe a lot of conspiracy theories. I kind of like, well, whenever I see something, whenever I see somebody advocating for something, I always think who's behind that person or organization that would benefit from that advocate, advocate. Right. So anytime I see anything and someone may be advocating out of the goodness of their heart, they may, you know, whatever I I'm going to.

Ben (01:05:49.369)

So what's one of them?

Ben (01:06:03.437)

Yeah. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (01:06:13.588)

stop the pipeline or something, or I'm going, whatever, like it's, it's truly, it's truly out of the goodness of the heart, but there's often someone who might be like subtly manipulating that person for their own profit motive or for their own geopolitical motive or something. So I often will look at like who's behind that thing and what's, almost always it doesn't, it's not always the case that there is, but there's often that thing.

Ben (01:06:34.755)

Yeah.

Ben (01:06:38.201)

Did you, have you read at Glenn Lowry's new memoir? it's a must read. So Glenn Lowry, The Economist.

Auren Hoffman (01:06:40.832)

No. Yeah, he's he's yeah, he's got a great, like interesting crazy life story. Yeah.

Ben (01:06:46.167)

I mean, I mean, it's one of the craziest life stories I've ever read. mean, it's like, just when you start reading it, give yourself three hours, you won't be able to put it down. But he has, yeah, one of the great phrases he uses, he says the cover story and the real story. So he's like, the cover story was, I was like this rising professor at Harvard, but the real story is X. And I just think that frame of the cover story and the real story is very true. So I'm with you on, there's frequently some underbelly story that isn't transparent that I like you.

Auren Hoffman (01:06:53.167)

okay, I'm definitely reading this, okay.

Auren Hoffman (01:07:05.57)

Yeah.

Ben (01:07:15.745)

seek to understand.

Auren Hoffman (01:07:16.716)

Yeah, and it's like, there's a, it is a conspiracy, right? There's a conspiracy to basically change something without people knowing that you were involved in it in some sort of way. All right, last question. ask all of our guests, what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

Ben (01:07:33.423)

Well, something you told me once or that had a big effect on me was that you said something like, and you can correct this if I'm getting this wrong, something like 70 % or 80 % of achievement people are really goal oriented and 20 % of achievement folks are not goal oriented. Like they're not big on goal setting. And that made me feel good because I've never been a big goal setter. actually, certainly long -term goals I've never really

Auren Hoffman (01:07:59.202)

Yeah.

Ben (01:08:02.415)

I never had a goal when we first met when I was 15. I never thought that in my mid -30s, I want to be a venture capitalist or something. It's just, and so I just think kind of similar to how we started this conversation about career advice. think the entrepreneur, to be a great entrepreneur is to be incredibly adaptive and to seize opportunity and serendipity where it emerges. And I think conventional advice around set long -term goals, work backwards. I can see how it's valuable.

in certain contexts and it's not to say never set long -term goals and so forth, but by and large, think getting comfortable with the uncertainty of life, getting comfortable with the role of serendipity and just letting things unfold is a real gift and actually requires a cultivation. think you have to cultivate that mindset, that ability, but it's something that I try to cultivate. And when people like you told me that it was okay to...

To do that made me feel a lot better. So my message for folks listening is if you don't know what you want to do in 10 years, if you don't have a long -term goal, that's okay. It might even be an advantage.

Auren Hoffman (01:09:06.636)

Now, what do think of long -term more personal goals? Like I want to be this type of person or I want to be in a committed relationship or I want to, you know, I want to have this type of like, I want to give back in some sort of way. Like, how do you, how do you, about those types of goals?

Ben (01:09:22.391)

Yeah, well, I think it's interesting. think, you know, my friend, Cal Newport and I have talked about like developing personal principles or values, you know, and sometimes values can be aspirational. You know, I aspire to be this kind of human. Yeah, I think I'm, I'm sympathetic to that. I would like to do more of that. I don't view that as in contradiction with, with a point around sort of career milestones or life outcomes.

Auren Hoffman (01:09:32.642)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (01:09:37.985)

Yes.

Ben (01:09:50.275)

So I'm pretty, I think it's a good nuance. I'm pretty sympathetic on.

Auren Hoffman (01:09:53.72)

But what about when you're 18 and you're like, okay, one day I want to be happily married in a relationship, loving relationship, or like, you know, do you think that should be a goal that people have or, or, obviously they could change their mind later, but, or do think that is, that's, that's a limiting thing? Like that's a specific goal that you want to accomplish.

Ben (01:10:10.295)

I think it's, I think that's probably, you know, I think everyone's different and of course it depends and, but, think generally speaking, think specific outcomes like that can be limiting. and it'd be better just to stay open -minded and play the, play the game on the field that's right in front of you. So I would like, I think a long -term principle of happiness, generosity, integrity to love and to be loved, you know, however that will play out in my life.

Auren Hoffman (01:10:15.831)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (01:10:35.17)

Yeah.

Ben (01:10:40.207)

That's kind of what I would tell the 18 year old versus by age 35, I must be married to two kids. I I view that the anxiety that that tends to compound in people to be actually counterproductive.

Auren Hoffman (01:10:41.856)

Interesting. Okay.

Auren Hoffman (01:10:49.88)

especially at 33, that will start to really have high anxiety if you're not married by then, yeah.

Ben (01:10:53.423)

Totally, right? And I've been, I've known people, we both know people where just the kind of, the confidence, of trusting the process, the unfolding of life, the serendipity of the network, you know, so forth, can ultimately, like, I know people who at age 43 have fallen in love and like lived happily ever after. And so like, it can happen.

Auren Hoffman (01:11:09.377)

Of course.

Of course. All right. This has been amazing. I knew it would be amazing because while we've always had so many amazing conversations, in fact, if all of our one -on -one the conversations is the first one we've like recorded, but we've had like so many of these over the years. So I'm really excited. Thank you, Ben Casanova for joining us on world with DAS. Of course I follow you not just because you're my friend, but because I admire you, at Ben Casanova on X and I definitely encourage our listeners to engage with you there. This has been a ton of fun.

Ben (01:11:19.246)

And then.

Ben (01:11:23.695)

Yes, sir.

Ben (01:11:41.273)

Thanks so much, Arne.