Thank you for joining me in Nepal, and of all Ravi
cot founder and former CEO of AngelList and currently doing all kinds of amazing things. But involve the reason that I want to have you on today is because you've done something that I think is remarkable and unique. And it's not starting Angel list and it's not starting coinless. It is the fact that you had a company that you started that was doing. Well, you were
willing to step down as CEO and
watch that company do even better. And frankly. There's so many people. I know who aren't enjoying.
In their role as CEO, but they feel like they have to keep doing it and they're just too afraid to walk away. And so they end up living these, not fully fulfilled lives. And the company doesn't do as well as it could. And you stepped out of that Circle, you were willing to. Can you tell us what
actually happened? Yeah, so I'm going to go through the best of my recollection. As to why, and how it happened, but I'll tell you, there's no single overarching pithy wisdom that I have here. There's nothing tweetable here. It's going to be a lot of details and
Many of them are idiosyncratic to me. So firstly, I think of a CEO has at least three jobs, and those three jobs are raise money and keep cash in the bank set and communicate the strategy and recruit and retain the team. But then, on top of it, you're so product CEOs. Also, provide product Vision. You also have sales CEOs will also provide sales leadership. It's daunting. It's quite the burden on your back and you're usually bearing it alone. You can't confess to your board of directors or they will lose faith in you and fire, you eventually. And you can't confess to confess your employees. They'll stop following you and even your co-founders can help.
You to some level but hey, you're the CER. You're the one in charge. You took that on. It's an incredibly lonely job and I've done it for a long time and I was burning out. I also think like a lot of being a CEO is frankly being the company psychiatrist, you know, you're always dealing with people issues. That's really what it is. Any company of scales up, you're dealing with people and good people in trying to figure out how to make them effective and collaborate with you and listen to you and grow with you. But it is a heavily people management role and I'm kind of an introvert. Actually. I don't enjoy interacting with people Beyond a certain point. I get burned out and I had been lucky or unlucky.
Enough to have been a CEO of a company when I was 23. So, this was much later in my career. So I already knew that it's kind of a booby prize, and that's something to be envied and somewhere in the middle. I've been investor for a while, which is quite the retirement job, you know, you kind of just run around and bet on other people and you get massive intellectual stimulation, but you don't actually have to do the people management part and you don't actually have trouble sleeping at night. So to me, that's a job and I'm an intellectual for me. I want to use my brain to think my way through problems and the moment of thought of the solution, as far as I'm concerned, it's done. The problem is
It. And then I get impatient as to why it's not solved and it's one of the reasons why I made a lousy CEO because it doesn't have the patience for operations to me. CEO was a high-stress people management job that you did because you had no other choice because you wanted to make your baby successful. You wanted to have your dream come true. And so you're obsessed with it and you couldn't trust anybody else to do it. Did it because you had to not because you enjoyed it because I didn't necessarily enjoy the job itself. Other than the brainstorming strategic Parts. I wasn't very good at it. And I knew that. So I was honest with myself at the parts where I
Good at it. I didn't pretend like I was good at it and I brought in people who were good at it like you and you were the first one who kind of really showed me that. Like, here are the things you need to do to be a CEO. You made it as methodical as anyone could, I mean, there's obviously an art to it. So when you came to me and you said, well, here's a methodical way to run a company and you spelled it out as well as you could in your book, which was incredible. I looked at it. I was like, this is the right Manuel. Here's a really smart person who's figured this out and systematize it as much as possible and looked and I was like, I don't want to do this and because I don't want to do this. I'm not going to be great at
It's not my zone of Genius. It's going to be a slog. I just don't want to do it. And I think this is where the zone of Genius concept, really comes in. And it's it's so important if you are, the founder of a company, you're probably world-class in something. Right? And it's sometimes can be hard to identify what that is. You basically want to spend all your time on that thing and everything else is a necessary evil. That should be outsourced. And the beauty is there is someone out there who is world class at the thing that you don't like to do and if there's a zone of Genius, so it really ends up being a recruiting
Problem, not a execution problem. There's a corollary to that don't hire good people who make you miserable. So very often we hire people who are good at what they do. They're in their zone of Genius, but somehow they make us miserable. It's like a hard hard for us to work with them. Get rid of those people immediately because their cost is not that, you know, there's a little bit of conflict doing them. In other people. The cost is, they're going to cause you to burn out before me. Like, figuring that out was also really, really important. And when I step back as CEO, one of the big issues is, you can't imagine somebody else running the company. Like you do the
Even for that is because who else is going to have founder mentality? Founder mentality is someone who will just do whatever it takes to get the job done. They'll do customer service. They'll do recruiting. You'll stay up all night thinking about it. And so they say, how could I possibly recruit another founder in to run the company? It turns out that there are ways around this. There ways to do this. Now, you could acquire a company. So, that's a common thing. So, you acquire a company that comes with the founder CEO. Maybe that person steps in, but you got to make sure that person isn't burnt out because a lot of times their son, their company because they're burnt out as a Founder. They didn't bring in a CEO when they should have.
Here they are instead selling their company, but one hack that I found, that has worked really well for me is to recruit in Founders who have failed through, no fault of their own. And this is a hard one to figure out, but a lot of times you'll have good Founders who will start a company in a space where the whole Space doesn't work. So for example, at coinless, we recruited Paul Davidson, he'd done a company before called highlighter, highlighter was tracking your friends on a map in real time and there was a bunch of competitors in the space and they all failed because it turns out people don't want to be tracked even by their loved ones all the time.
The time. And so the whole category of failed, Paul had the best executed company, the space and even that failed. But Paul went on and he, you know, he had a chip on his shoulder. He was now a senior guide Pinterest who had bought the remnants of highlighter, but he was looking for something new to do. So, we recruited him in and he was see of coined this for a while. He was amazing guy. He actually left to Star club house which obviously huge success. So that is an example of someone who failed through no fault of their own have locally who are recruited for a all venture. He had done a social network for a lawyer's, you know, hadn't worked. But none of these vertical social networks had
You've done what I thought was the most brilliantly, executed cleaning service out there fairy, which didn't do that. Well, but none of them did that whole category turned out to be a miss. So when you find a Founder who fell through no fault of their own, the whole category, fail, you've got founder mentality. You've got a person with a chip on their shoulder. They have operating experience and at the same time, you know, that didn't bungle it in some obvious way. And those are really good people to take a bet on and the way to recruit those people and it's frankly acknowledge them is Pierce. Give them an opportunity acknowledge them as being your intellectual.
Actual and capability equals be very, very generous with Equity more so than, you know, the standard BC, Playbook would advise you and recognize that you're recruiting in a partner, who's still very high energy who wants to win and can take this to the next level
that is phenomenal
advice. I had a very good CEO. Oh, Kevin laws, who took over and Shepherd at the company for a while, but what really made it happen was we recruited in the sky. I will Coley into running AngelList Venture who turned out to be the right, see over the business and meanwhile, I got freed up men.
Lisa, I was no longer burdened with back-to-back meetings or having to deal with people issues over to solve fundraising problems, or customer service problems or even day-to-day product meetings. And I got time to think and companies exist because the founder had a burst of creativity and then executed around that creativity and that creativity started with having an empty calendar, but over time, the calendar gets filled up and it gets replaced with a busy calendar. And a busy calendar is a death of creativity. It might be good for productivity if you're completely in
In mode. But no company these days can afford to rest on his Laurels, disruption is becoming more and more frequent the lifespan of a company's going down. And so it's very important that you're always being creative. You're always, Reinventing yourself and companies that succeed in today's environment unless they get lucky and stumble into a natural monopoly and product-market fit at the beginning. And those are largely apocryphal. They have to constantly keep Reinventing themselves and have to constantly keep creating products and the founder is the best position for creativity. So even when I was CEO, I would do this thing where I would carve out two days a week with no meetings.
My Tuesdays and Thursdays no meetings. No calls. Nothing scheduled. And even then like one thing would show up and you know, destroy one of those two days. So I would get reduced down to one day per week, that was free. But that day was the only day of the week. We're even had a chance to address all the actual problems facing the company in order of their actual priority as opposed to the order in which they landed in my inbox, or the order in which, like somebody else had decided. They were urgent. It related to this is, you know, the practice of meditation. One of the reasons why people don't like meditation or find it hard to meditate. It's because when
You first sit down all of your unaddressed problems that you may ignoring come barreling up to the service and assault you. And some of these have been sitting there for a decade waiting for you to address them while you've been busy, busy busy, busy busy. And I think the same thing applies in the business context. Like, if you get busy busy, busy busy. What happens is the real nagging problems. Are you like, are we actually building the right product that I actually recruit the right team? Oh my God. I raised money from the wrong investors. You're not addressing those problems. You're running from them. You just hopping from meeting to meeting to meeting. So just picking the right direction to go and is way more important than how hard you work. Because there's only eight.
Hours in the week. And so by stepping back, it gave me time to be creative and it took a while it took about a year, but then, you know, we came up with rolling funds and I think that was partially because I was on the beach with a shower thought and then I got to recruit in people who I think are very creative as well and kind of pushed them to be creative. It gave me the distance and the time to sort of look at the company more objectively and to engage at a higher level. And so now the partnership that I had with a bloke who's running AngelList Venture is incredible. He is also very creative individual, but I can usually come up with the full list of
Divide e has I can turn them over in my head for days at a time. Then I can pitch him on a bunch of them. He can push back where appropriate or except where appropriate and then we can think about them and then maybe a week little come back and say now, you know what? You've got enough going on that's too much to do or let's just focus on this at the high level and that works really well because my zone of Genius is much more in strategy and sort of high-level sales and recruiting. And I get to focus on that while I've looked as everything else and we also still have great overlap and at the same time like I have all this free time now, which is incredible. So for example, in 2013,
Teen. When cryptocurrencies were taking off. I knew they were going to be huge. I was mentally ready for them. But I was busy with AngelList. So I didn't even get around to focusing on them until much later in the cycle. When most the returns were gone. And if I had been free of mind and free of time, I would have probably invested a lot more in that ecosystem. At that time. Now, I'm kind of playing catch-up. So Travis kalanick is an interesting case study. He had this company called red swoosh for a long time. There was a peer-to-peer file-sharing Network. It didn't go anywhere. He kind of sold it. Maybe got his investors, their money back a little bit, but it wasn't a success. And then he literally hung.
Around for a decade, in Silicon Valley talking to everybody chatting with everybody, going to barbecues tinkering on side projects. And I think a lot of people were like, is this guy ever gonna make anything of himself? You always just seem to be showing up at founder events and he's just free. Well, I mean to his credit, he basically kept his nose in the ground. He was always open and engaged, but he didn't commit, and because he was free when the right thing came along which was Uber. He kind of started that with Garrett camp. But even he had Garrett, didn't know how big it was going to be Garrett state of stumbled upon Travis was an adviser to the company that hired a CEO and CTO to run. It was only once I started taking off.
Travis at the free time that you could just jump in and be CEO and help make that company. Great and obviously earn a much bigger outcome for himself and everybody else. Finally, I would add that if you look at any company that really, really succeeds over the long term and I'm talking about over decades and these are just like Microsoft Apple. Amazon one consistent factor is that the core founder stayed engaged the entire time. And that doesn't necessarily mean they were engaged as CEO, but they were engaged at least at the board level. They were on the ball. They were watching out for the company. And so you can very easily put yourself in a situation.
Ation, where you work, 80 100 hour weeks in a company. You can't step aside a CEO. You do jobs, you don't like and you burn yourself out. And then the way that manifests itself is you completely crash and run away or more likely you sell the company, you exit early. Because you can't see doing this for the next 30 Years or the next 40 years. Look at Warren Buffett. He's 88. He's playing bridge. He's still running, but Berkshire Hathaway. And now he's not running a day-to-day, but he's still overseeing it. Why? Because it's not miserable for him. He set it up in such a way that he enjoys what he does. Like he says he skips
To work every day because of that, he can sustain it for a long time at all the returns and life, whether in money, or relationships, or friendships or colleagues or whatever or product development is compound interest. It happens at the end. The most money you make is, at the end of the curve. The biggest impact is, at the end of the curve, the largest customer base at the end of the curve. So you want to go as long and as far as possible. And that's only going to happen. If it's sustainable. It's only sustainable if you enjoy it. So, I don't think it's bad to quote unquote. Walk away as CEO. I think you just basically say, hey, I'm going to stay engaged at a certain level. On the things that
I'm great at for me, that was creativity. Fundraising high-level sales product creativity and some recruiting. And I'm going to take the stuff that I don't enjoy doing and I'm going to give that to somebody else and that way, I'm going to be more effective on the things that matter. And I'm gonna be able to sustain this for decades. It's not going to burn me out and therefore the company will go much further.
The Vol. You just did something that no one else on this planet that I know
of could do you just on one prompt wrote a book it? What you
just said right now is a publishable as a book and it will be very popular because
Is excellent,
please. Please edit it a little bit because I think it may have
been it, whatever part. But that alone was remarkable. Now, it doesn't surprise me because I've heard you speak like this before, but each time I hear it. I am awed. Once again now there is something else. I do want to ask you though, because what you described is a perfect and logical justification for why someone who's not enjoying being CEO. Should let that title go. Become chairman recruiting an amazing operator and they can still be
The Strategic brain and product Visionary. Imagine there are many, people fact. I know this. There are many people who are in that position and think. Yeah, but and they're feeling fear and they're feeling anxiety. And so, I'm going to take this down one level and of all, because you also were feeling fear and anxiety. The same fear that they're feeling right now. You talked about the success of AngelList now, but there's also your personal life and you talk about what you're doing, but not how it feels. So I want to talk about how it felt beforehand. Like, when you were your CEO of a
List and not wanting to be there. How was your life? Then, we're going to talk about the fear that you felt of leaving. And now I want to talk about what is life like for you. Now, we know AngelList is doing even better. You've created all these other entities would have created, you know, massive amounts more value. But what's your personal life? Like, I'm talking zero to ten zero, being couldn't be any worse. 10 being it couldn't be any better. So let's go through that transition. Your CEO being Angel list. You're not enjoying it 0 to 10. How is your
life three out of ten? Two out of ten, some days, / before I got a
Duuuuude a
perfect. So then you and I get together. I remember you came to my house. We sat down we talked for about an hour and a half. Your issue is Matt. I don't enjoy being CEO but I have to be, I've all these investors who invested in me. I'll believe in me. I'm frankly sort of the famous one in the company. I'm the one that's attracting. All the capital, all the deals without me, the whole thing falls apart. So I can't leave. I said, whoa, no ball, wait, wait, wait, that's a big assumption there. I don't agree with that assumption. And then we talked about you actually leaving her like, oh my gosh. It's actually possible to still.
It Was Fear of again, as you mentioned if I walk away it crumbles or even worse, if I walk away
and it doesn't
crumble then, did I add no
value? That second one didn't matter to me as much. Okay was more, just the fear of it. Falling apart, fair enough. My ego can take it if the thing works on its own, that's even better. That means I engineered something that works. I'll take credit anyway, but you know, here at falling apart, I absolutely did feared falling apart. Absolutely, because for a long time, you know, is being held together. I felt like the force of will of the founder that
That's definitely true for a lot of companies at earlier stages until they find product Market fit and it was still scary even for a year to a year and a half. After I was gone. I don't think we had much in the way of like, true product Market fit, real product Market, fit for the company arrived in the last two years and it was actually directly traceable due to recruiting and creativity that I got to exercise after I've been out for about a year. So there was still a year of here and there but I would say like today if I could articulate how good my life is they would have to lock me up because you can't have people this.
Be running around in society. My life is a 10 out of 10 across the board. It is perfect. It is fantastic. And it's because I got to engineer my life exactly. The way that I want to with no compromise. It's none not in terms of who I spend time with, not in terms of where I live, not in terms of what I do. Not in terms of when I wake up like terms of when I go to sleep. I only do things I find enjoyable at this point, that's it and not even just enjoyable in the abstract. I mean, enjoyable in this moment if it's not enjoyable in this moment, I just walk away and when you walk away, at least from a long-standing commitment, you have to something where there's a lot of eyes.
Eyes on you and you've a lot of fear. It actually gives you the ability to walk away from anything. Most of us, at least, in some part of our life. We're stuck in something. We don't want to be stuck in. And so, walking away is not such a bad thing. Either to give you an idea of how my life is right now. I don't keep a calendar.
Wow. I had no idea. That's an amazing feat of right
on. Yeah, now, I'll set alarms and reminders for myself, for things that I want to happen, that are really important and I do have an assistant will text me, you know, reminders for things that are really important. I check email now once every couple of days. I don't even check it every day and that's how sort of calm.
Life is that said? I'm busy all day long from the moment. I got up this morning to now. I've been crazy busy. I haven't had a chance to meditative today. I skip my workout so far. I haven't had a meal. I grab a coffee on the go. How did I get this busy? Because I've always got stuff I want to do and there's always a thousand things to do. But now I'm prioritizing based on whatever, feels both important and right in that moment, but you can't live that kind of a lifestyle unless you're willing to disappoint people's initial expectations of you. I can't emphasize this enough. People don't understand the
Value of free time for a creative and productive person. Now, certainly like, if you're working at Starbucks, right? You need to be at a certain time and they need you to be there at a certain time, but in the creative job, which is really what technology is, which is really what high-tech startups are. These are all creative jobs having control of your own time. Assuming yourself, motivated is the ultimate hack it. So at least for me I prefer to live the unschedule life and that way, even when I'm doing the things that are less Pleasant. I'm doing them in a moment where I don't find them as unpleasant as if they were thrust upon me and not keeping a calendar.
Is a great way to do that, but people say to me like, hey, let's talk tomorrow. I'm like great just text me whenever you want to talk. They'll say well, you know, how about 11 a.m. Like, I don't keep the calendar. They're like, okay, 11 a.m. I'm like, I don't keep a calendar. Feel free to text me at 11 a.m. It always works out. Yeah,
I think you said earlier boredom leads to creativity, and I think that's absolutely right. You have to have distraction-free mind in order for the creative thoughts to Wella
creativity comes out of. You've turned some problem over in your head for a long. Long long, long time, you've seen
In it from every angle, you have other things to connect the dots to and then you just wait and then your subconscious mind does the processing. But if your subconscious mind is constantly being interrupted as constantly being stopped because somebody just stopped in to your office. A text message has arrived and emailed us arrived. What you'll find is, most of the times when people schedule a call with you, they don't actually have an agenda. They don't, they don't really need to talk to you. It's the easiest way for them to kind of check the box and get the current problem off their desk and turn into a future problem.
Yeah. That's exactly right. I'm going to throw something at you in the vault.
Add into your when someone says, hey, will you talk to me? Here's what I do. I respond back. Can you give me a little preview of what we're going to talk about and then they send me the preview and that is answer the question and we never have to get the phone at
all the previous good. Yeah, I usually I guess mine is a little more rude, which is I say, hey, can we try and handle? It's an email first. I don't do calls on a cyst
or a job. That's Direct. That's perfect. That's not rude.
That's correct. No, but I like I like the can you give me a preview? Because you're right. Usually this is just the preview, right? Exactly. Another.
One of things you taught me, by the way that I've been validating in so many other contexts when you want to find the answer to something like a reason why somebody is doing something like that. This is somebody says no you do a sales call or try to recruit someone and they say no, and you ask them. The reason they'll give you a reason and then you ask them like, well, are there any other reasons, right? You can ask them the same question again, and they're different ways to do it, but then they'll give you a second reason. The second reason is usually the correct one. I found that to be true across the board in almost everything about human relations. They're holding it back because they're nervous. They
Admit it themselves. They're embarrassed, whatever it is, but usually if you want to get the truth out of somebody in almost any context asked it a couple of times or find out a couple of times. Usually, whatever the last thing they say is is the real
truth. Well, as you do with most things in of all you took something I did and you describe it in a way which sounds even better. So I appreciate that and sort of tip to put a bookend on it. Nepal. You share with us the very compelling version of why. If you're not enjoying CEO you shouldn't be there in the first place.
And then you went deeper and shared the fear that you had, what your life like was before, which is 3 out of 10. You didn't fully say it, but you did say, it's maybe even 11 11 out of 10, your life. Now and now people have your example. Again, Alex McCall went through this same exact thing about a year ago. And when I shared with him, your examples, like, oh, but that's Nepal. Nepal is unique. No, you know, no one else is like Nepal. And then finally, he took the plunge and now his life is a 10 out of 10. So now we have two examples. This is a trend. I think the next
And doesn't have the excuse that. These are unique in individual situations. They're not. This is just the opportunity to go. Have your cake and eat it too. And of all life that you've done a yourself, an incredible service, but in doing so you've done the world an incredible service in creating this example. So thank you very much and my God, thank you for coming here and explaining it. The way you do is just so fun to listen to your words. It just so happens that the words are actually really interesting and create a lots of learning but just on their own the way you speak is so compelling. So thanking of all this
was thank you. Boss. You're very you're very kind.
Kind only, you could have done this map because most exact coaches get brought in by the board. And the last thing they're going to do is convince the co to quit or they'll never get called in by the board again, and they put themselves out of a job in the process. But because of your very unique and idiosyncratic style where you really actually just trying to help people, you can tell them the truth, which is, sometimes it's not the best job for them, and they're meant for something bigger and better. Thank
you. Well, the reason is Duvall is, you know, because I'm only doing things that I have fun with. So, I'm not doing this job. I'm doing this because I fucking love it. Exactly. And if I,
Myself out of a job with you. There's a hundred other people that I can go play with. There's unlimited again. You've got
infinite, you know, it's my number one intro request is. Hey, can you introduce me to Matt majority? I'm like, no, I think he's busy
Neva. This was freaking awesome. Thank you. My man. That was you know way more than I could have imagined.
