Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio)

want to hear the whole thing. Uh. He was the first outside investor into Amazon outside of Jeff Bezos's immediate family, the first non family investor. Uh. That worked out pretty well for him. Became interested in the uh Internet in the early nine nineties and and was right there. Actually, he's the guy who convinced Bezos to open up Amazon in Seattle as opposed to New York or or elsewhere. Uh.

He's done a number of other fascinating things. He's running family business that's the largest pillow and linen business in the United States. UM. He runs a venture capital shop. He also sold one of his companies, a quantive, to Microsoft for six point four billion dollars in cash. That was a pretty uh, pretty lucrative transaction. Really interesting guy, not the sort of stuff that that people um no uh know him by his name or know him by

these accomplishments A little bit behind the scenes. However, a couple of years ago, he became interested in income inequality and he wrote an article for Politico that just went completely viral and it was called to my fellow fellows, zillionaires, Beware the pitchforks are coming for US plutocrats, and it went completely viral. He ended up doing a TED video on this, which was not broadcast and not created this giant backlash, and ultimately he did a second video for

Ted that that was broadcast and that went viral. UM. I think you'll find Nick to be a really insightful, interesting guy who sees the world from a very specific, uh perspective, and it's really quite um, quite interesting, quite fascinating. I think you'll enjoy our conversation without any further ado, my conversation with Nick Hannaur. This is Masters in Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is Nick Hannaur. Am I pronouncing that right? I was, yeah, perfect?

And Nick is a very interesting guy. Let me give you the short version of his curriculum Vita University of Washington with the philosophy degree. Took over the family owned business, Pacific Coast Feather Company as chairman and CEO. This is a business that's been around for a hundred plus years, right, Well, my family has been in the business since four My my great my grandfather and my great uncle bought Pacific Coast out of bankruptcy in nineteen forty after moving from

Germany to the United States. And and you're probably best known for a couple of things. You were the first non family investor in Amazon dot com. And you founded a company that was eventually called a Quantive that was eventually sold to Microsoft for six point four billion dollars. Correct. We'll speak about both of those as well as being um a venture capitalist in Seattle at Second Avenue Partners. Correct. So let's talk a little bit about that diverse background.

So when people ask you, uh, hey, Nick, what do you do for a living, how do you answer that? Well, I mean, you know, today I devote myself to uh, you know, a lot of my time is devoted to civic issues, policy, politics, philanthropy and so on and so forth. But in my work life. I'm a serial entrepreneur and

venture capitalist. And you know, it was fortunate enough to grow up in a family business, the family pillow business Pacific Coast, and my uh my dad was a great mentor, and my dad hired another guy to run the company, frankly named Roy Clothier, who was was an incredible mentor to me and my brother, and so I had that

great experience. But but you know, my folks were very supportive, and so I started starting other companies in my early twenties, um both outside the business and and also within the business. We started diversifying and I helped to run a retail business that we ended up buying, and a bunch of other things, and so you know, at a very you know, I started working for this family business when I was seven years old. I ran every machine and the factory.

I worked all through junior high school, high school, college, and so I just had this foundation that was very, very broad. So you became CEO of the family business in the early two thousands. Yeah, I was never CEO of the family business. I became co chairman, co chairman with uh my brother who sadly passed away in a car wrect a long time ago, and um, and I transitioned out of the business when the Internet stuff came around.

I'm co chairman of the board today. So let's let's talk about how the business led you to sort of discover the Internet. Yeah, so that's a that's actually a

great question. So, um, so you wouldn't think that running sales and marketing for pillow company would lead you to the Internet, but in a very strange way, it did, because, Uh, when I led sales and marketing for the for the company, what I did is I broke our customers up into into groups, into groups of companies that had the same strategy, uh,

and so such as Hoste Yeah, exactly precisely. So we sold the wholesale club's, mass merchandiser's depart in stores, uh, specialty stores, mail order catalogs, so on and so forth. And what I did is I reasoned that every single one of those companies basically deployed a different kind of strategy to connect themselves profitably with customers. And if I customized our approach by channel, we could deliver more profit for those companies than our competitors could. And so we

stopped really selling pillows and started selling profit. And what that process did is it taught me more about the dynamics of retail than you could ever believe. And the beautiful thing about pillows is that they're little white squares. So what's happening in the retail channel really really matters. So there was a point at which I probably knew more about the competitive dynamics of retail by channel than

virtually anyone in the country. I knew how many dollars per square foot every one of those channels generated, and and and every every detail of how it worked. And so when the Internet came along in the very early nineties, I could do strategic arithmetic that almost nobody else could do, because I could compare what the Internet would become to what department stores and mass merchandisers and wholesale clubs we're doing.

And it was unbelievably obvious that the Internet was going to be an enormously powerful channel of distribution for goods and services and and you know, and so I started looking around for a way to exploit that, you know, that that awareness, and as luck would have it, uh, a friend of mine had the same insight, and his name was Jeff Bezos. Tell me a little bit about Second Avenue Partners. What do you do with that entity? Yeah, so Second Avenue Partners is an early stage. You know,

we're a venture capital business. Although although it's a slightly different from the conventional model because my partners Pete Higgins and Mike Slaide and I only invest our own money. We didn't raise a fund limited partners investor. Know, that gives you an ability to really think very long term, right,

and to do whatever we want. And what we didn't want to do is go to work for the man, which is where exactly we didn't want to go to work for the man, which is what you're doing if you're raising a pot of money from insurance companies and UH, pension funds and stuff like that. Uh. And by by only deploying our own capital, gives us the freedom to be frankly more experimental, so longer term horizon. So how

does that manifest itself with your investments? What sort of things do you in the last minute we have in the segment, what sort of things are you putting your money into? You know, a broad variety of things and and and you know, the beauty of the model is that we don't have to be we We didn't we didn't have to persuade somebody that we were experts in something and focus our attention on that. What we can

do is simply look for really, really interesting opportunities. So we've we've made investments in in U a V technology, unmanned aerial vehicles very successfully, and internet software and medical services and and you know, and all of it somehow magically works. I'm Barry Ridhults. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is Nick Hanauer. He is a venture capitalist and one of the earliest investors in Amazon dot Com. Let's let's talk just for

a moment about Second Avenue Partners. So you own such an strange and different mix of companies, some of which I assumed through Second Avenue Partners, others directly Seattle Bank, Marshacks, news Vine, q Alliance. It seems like these are wholly unrelated. Yeah, they are unrelated. And uh, you know, I can't prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is wise to invest in a broad array of uh companies and industries.

It certainly seems interesting, it's super interesting to do um and you know, My thinking about investing UH is fairly simple, and what I try to follow is what I call Nick's rule of transformational value, and that is that you know, my view is that all transactions, all consumers seek to maximize the value of the products that they buy, and value really is best understood as a ratio of the benefits the product delivers, divided by the cost, and things

that have high value have a high ratio of benefits to cost versus the alternatives. And it's been my experience that in every case where you find a breakout investment, a company that really builds an extraordinary franchise, they start with what I call transformational value, which is the ratio of the benefits they deliver the consumer to the cost is someplace between ten and a hundred times higher than the alternative, and one to two orders of magnitude higher.

So let me give you an example, So Amazon dot com. So when Amazon dot Com came along, the best way to buy a book in the world was to go to a superstore where perhaps us there were fifty or seventy five or a hundred thousand titles, and you would have to get in your car, you have to drive to that store you have to paw through that, you know,

find the right book. And so Amazon dot Amazon dot com comes along and the day we open, we we offered I'm going to get this slightly wrong, but over a million titles, so ten times the selection that you could find at the biggest superstore if you lived in a big city. We sold them for I think less than the suggested price, so almost half of what you would have to pay at a normal retail store. And you don't have to drive there, you don't have to you don't have to use your time, take your car

park and go do it. And so it was very clear that we were offering consumers who were looking for books and you know, an immense amount more value than they could get using the usual channels. And as a consequence, from the first day onward, sales exceeded our wildest expectations. That people really really appreciated the value we delivered to them and they preferred to buy books in that way,

and the rest is history. So you had mentioned earlier that when you were involved with the family business, it led you to a start exploring what was available in terms of the Internet and early nineties. You tell a story about the two jeffs and how ultimately you found Amazon dot Com. What what is the story of this?

So so I talk a lot about how I became successful and stuff like that, and you know, I feel very strongly that the most you know, it's been my experience, certainly my case and in the case of almost everyone I've ever met, that the extraordinary success is usually a confluence of extraordinary skill and extraordinary luck. It's both, it's both, And there are no extraordinarily rich people who weren't also extraordinarily lucky. For every extraordinarily rich, talented person, there's another

equally talented person that just didn't have the brakes. And my favorite story to prove that point about myself is that I had this very early interest in the Internet, and I had two incredibly talented friends who simultaneously started

internet retail businesses. One was Jeff Bezos, who started Amazon dot Com focused on books, and another was an equally talented guy named Jeff Tobber, who was a divisional merchandise manager at Bloomingdale's, which at that time was the number one retailer in the country, who started in online um

uh superstore. Yeah, it was. It was an online department store and to make a very long story, short books are a pure commodity, and you know, a copy of Warren Pieces, a copy of Warren Peace, you know exactly what you're gonna get. And in the early days of the internet, Uh, people didn't trust what they'd get. So it was much easier to get people to purchase books than it was a suit or a pair of shoes

or something like that. Is that the genius of Bezos is that he came across something that everybody knew, everybody was familiar, and but there was a long tail effect that hey, we could offer you two million of these, the local stores got twenty thousand. Come shop at us. Selection mattered, but it was a pure commodity. It's a

very unusual, very unusual combination. I don't think people really perceived Amazon that way in the early days, because I remember was either my college roommate, I'm already out of school for fifteen years. My college roommate for my birthday gave me an Amazon gift certificate. And so you start playing around on the site and there are views not only from professionals but from other readers, and there's a huge juge tale of product. Plus it was music and

video and other stuff. And but we did that quite quickly afterwards, very justly. I'll never forget. We had this, remember a conversation in Jeff's office and way back up a sex. So you were on the board though, weren't you on the board of advisors? Yeah? So I was his first investor, you know, I mean, you know, when Jeff decided to start Amazon, he you know, as luck would have he was living in New York City and

he were work working at d Shaw. And I know Jeff because he was dating a very very close friend of mine named and Dinning, who was another vice president at d Shaw. And you know, he, you know, among other reasons, I suppose because I begged him to ended up starting Amazon in Seattle, and there was some very good reasons to do it, because it was close to Microsoft where there were lots of developer talent, and it was close to a large book distribution center which was

in Rosberg, Oregon at the time. And you know, so he ended up sending his stuff from New York to my house and off we went. And so I was not actually formally on the board. I was a board advisor for the first six or seven years of the of the company's exists until two thousand or something like that. So so yeah, we you know, in the early days, you know, as my friend Eric Dillon said, we Jeff would call us to decide what kind of pop to

put in the the pop machine. But you know, after after a while, Jeff is a brilliant guy, got his management legs under him, and he doesn't need a lot of help today. But but I want to emphasize something about Amazon dot com, the Amazon dot COM's success that almost nobody understands. That that that that that contributed more than anything to it, and it is something called the

negative cash conversion cycle. And what that means is that because our terms with our with our suppliers the book, the book resellers was sixty to ninety days, and because they could ship to us within a day, we could collect cash from our customers sixty to ninety days before we had to pay our suppliers. And what that means is the bigger you get, the more cash flow you have. I'm Barry Retults. You're listening to Masters in Business on

Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is Nick Hanauer, a venture capitalist, early investor in Amazon and let's talk about one of your big successes, the company you had founded called Avenue A Media. Where did the idea for that come from? Yeah, so Avenue a Media morphed into this company a quantive uh and uh, you know we had this again. This goes back to the very early days of the Internet. We had at the Pillow Company, Pacific Coast.

We had this idea that we would have a website, and um, we had the idea that we would build essentially what what we now know as a click network to drive traffic to the website. Define define click network. But basically, we we gave people an incentive to send traffic to us from their website by giving them a

commission or an affiliate affiliate network. Basically, and sort of by accident, we built an affiliate network which at one point made my company's stupid website one of the highest trafficked sites on the Internet, the pillow the Pillow Company website is in the early days, we realized that we either had to shut this thing down or go turn it into a business, and we decided to turn it into a business, and so we spun it out of

the Pillow Company. Basically, the early idea was to expand this into a into a a click network, and that didn't really work. And again, to make an incredibly long story short, we ended up being essentially an internet advertising agency.

What we did is we built one of the early web servers, and what we enabled our customers to do was to place as with a variety of publishers and then measure the relative effectiveness of those averages of that advertising quatives exactly, and and and and drive better results as a consequence. And that and that company became, you know, very successful. It was a big company when we finally sold it, generating a huge amount of cash flow. And

what sort of revenues was doing. I think it was approaching I mean, we're growing it like fifty percent a year, but I think it was approaching three quarters of a billion dollars in the real revenue and a hundred and fifty million in cash flow. Yeah. So Microsoft comes along and said, here's six point four billion in cash What was that negotiation? Like? That was a crazy negotiation. So what happened was that Google bought double Click. That was

a huge, huge acquisition. So Google bought double Click for three billion dollars and we were twice as big as as as terms of a double click. Yeah, in terms of revenues, yea A Quanti was doing double the revenue and volume. We felt double click was much better known

if it was they started before us, UM. But we had an agency business and we had a bunch of other businesses going and we were, you know, we felt like we were worth about twice as much UM but we and we had been doing a lot of strategic work with Microsoft in their in their in their ad business all along. But and when Google bought double Click, that started to make it made it made Microsoft nervous, It made Yahoo nervous, and it made a bunch of

the big agency holding company nervous. And within weeks we were in a process. Uh. And and did it come about from Microsoft directly or did you approach them? I you know, you know, did your wife ask you out the first time or did you ask her? Well? I think it was slightly more nuanced and complicated in the

case of a quantum in Microsoft. I can't remember exactly who did what first, but I think somebody asked a leading question and somebody else followed up with a leading answer, and before you knew it, we're in a process so this was pretty quick. This was well, I mean, you know, I think within sixty or ninety days or I can't remember, bere I should remember. But not that long after Double

Click was purchased. We were in a process and before you knew it, there were a lot of suitors because yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, a lot of people were very very interested, which is anyone who had a network, anyone who had an interaction with a lot of advertisers. She sat in between everybody and the advertisers, right, So it was a very stratetigue

position to be in. And uh, and the company was generating a huge amount of cash and growing like a weed, and so it was very attractive business and a very attractive strategic acquisition and uh there you know, and uh, you know it ended up as a you know, a pretty crazy bidding more uh and yeah exactly, And you know, to be honest, a lot of the Microsoft people are our friends, right, you know, I just felt like a good thing. Yeah, we we had. It was six point exactly. No, no, no, no,

it was good. Yeah, it was good. Yeah. Yeah. So how did how did that? What was that transaction? Like? When the papers are signed, where do you go for dinner that night. What the heck is that? Like? That has to be a crazy you just sold you did you say I'm going to Disneyland? How does you you respond to a six billion dollar sale for what essentially was a spin out of a click network from a pillow company. Yeah, you know, it was a great moment.

I won't lie u uh. And you know, the thing about that company was that we built, you know, it was it was really the highlight of my business career, mostly because the team that we built. Uh, it was such a great team and people liked each other and worked so well together. So just a super fun, super fun thing. I don't I can't even remember. I mean, my wife and I think had dinner with another couple who owned a little bit of the stock and they made a whole bunch of money too, And it was,

you know, it's very next thing. I'm Barry Ridhalt. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is Nick Hanauer. He is a venture capitalist and UH investor, UH and business person and also an author. So let's spend the segment talking about a very famous article you had written for Politico called a memo to my fellow fellow zillionaires, the pitchforks are coming for us plutocrats. How did that come up out? Well, you know, Verry,

I write a lot, I write a lot. Uh and uh. You know, my main area of interest is political economy and economic inequality and the connection between growing inequality and a variety of problems, including a crappy business environment. And you know, my very strong feeling is that concentrating all of the wealth and power in the hands of a tiny minority of people at the top is not going to end well, particularly for the people at the top. Well that's what history is. Yeah, you know, there are

no exceptions to France. There's a lot of a lot of beheadings back in the day. Eventually it ends badly and uh. And you know, my view is that with just a tiny bit of moderation, with just a tiny bit of policy change, we can build an economy that doesn't just isn't just fairer and work better for uh, you know, people at the bottom, but ultimately will be more you know, essentially a richer opportunity set for people

like me who build companies. You know, when workers have more money, people like me business people have more customers, and and the exactly and the worst thing about economic inequality is you're basically in the you're you're systematically destroying your customer base, which eating your seed coin. Yeah, it makes no sense. So let me throw some numbers out from your article. You noted during the past three decades, compensation for chief executive officers grew one hundred and twenty

seven times faster than it did for workers. CEOs used to earn thirty times the median wage. Now it's five hundred times and back in the top one percent controlled eight percent on the national income. Now their share is Yeah, what was that? What was the thinking behind that data? How what sent you looking for those numbers in the first place. Oh, you know, just to generalize concern about the ends and the You know this this data isn't hard to find. You can you know, you can look

it up pretty easily. And the trade you know, it's not the fact that we have economic inequality that's the problem. Some economic inequality is indispensable to having a high functioning capitalist demo economy. And the problem better because they're contributing more blah blah blah, Right, all good, The problem is increasing amounts of economic inequality over time. Right. You know, in nineteen eighty the top one percent had about eight

percent of national income. Today it's it's it's closing in on the bottom. Fifty percent of Americans in nineteen eighty shared about eighteen percent of national income. Today it's down to eleven percent, down down a third. Right, So here's the thing. All you gotta do is put that data in a in a in a an Excel spreadsheet and

just run the extrapolation out thirty years. The numbers are scary, right, because the top one percent will control in the in the mid thirties thirty seven percent of national income and the bottom of Americans will share five or six percent of national income. At that point, you don't have a capitalist democracy anymore. You have some kind of feudal system. And yeah, and and it's just not gonna work out for anybody. It's just not going to work out for anybody.

And there's no reason for it. We it's it just makes no sense. So what was the pushback that everything you're saying sounds perfectly valid. Hey, when income inequality gets to great extremes, bad things happen in society. You're not providing opportunity, you're not providing a solid education, the roads and bridges fall apart, etcetera, etcetera. So you would think there wouldn't be a whole lot of pushback to that,

but there was. Yeah, And so there there, you know, there's a lot of there's a lot of consternation and and and quite rightly, a lot of rich people don't feel like this is their fault. It feels like they're being blamed for economic inequality. And obviously a lot of rich people didn't set out to make other people poor, right And and so when you raise the issue of economic inequality of lots of rich people feel like they're being attacked unfairly. And there's a legitimate that and that

feeling is legitimate. But the simple truth is that wealth is concentrating and fewer and fewer hands and and the average family in our country is struggling more and more. And that's a consequence of a bunch of policy decisions that we have made in this country of the last thirty or forty years that we need to reverse. And give me a few examples, we have let the we have let the minimum wage fall to historic, historically low levels, right If the minimum wage had tracked inflation, it would

be ten and a half dollars. If the minimum wage had tracked productivity gains in the country, it would be twenty one dollar and seventy cents. If the minimum wage had tracked the wages of the top one percent, it would be twenty eight dollars. Instead, it's seven twenty five but two dollars and thirteen cents plus tips for tip workers. Right, and remember, most tip workers don't work in some fancy New York state restaurant where they make huge amounts of money.

Working some Sherry's or Denny's in a small town and they don't make anything in tips. And you know, the truth is that if we we need to dramatically increase the minimum wage, and if we did, not only would those workers and their families be better off, but the economy would work better because those people would now be able to afford to buy stuff from the companies that I start. Right, Which is the problem is you've got

this giant industry of free riders. Right. The McDonald's pays their workers poverty wages, and not one of the people in McDonald's can buy the products that the companies that I start products, right, all of my employees can afford to go to McDonald's every day, right, but not vice versa. All of my employees pay taxes. All the McDonald's employees they don't pay taxes. In fact, they need public services like food stamps and Medicaid that my employees pay. And

none of this makes sense. Look, when we look nationally, fairly, consistently, state by state, fast food workers or Walmart workers are consistently the biggest group getting federal aid and it's not a coincidence. They basically set their salary levels. Look, McDonald's run into a lot of heat for their micbnefits phone line where they literally were walking their employees through how to gain the system so we don't have to pay you a living wage. We'll pay you seven bucks and

you'll get another six dollars an hour. And there no earthly reason where why giant, profitable corporations can't pay their workers enough so that they can be robust participants in our economy. I want every single worker at Walmart to be able to earn enough money to buy the products that the people that I employ make. It's just not fair that their people can't afford to buy my stuff, but my people can afford to buy their stuff, and my people have to pay taxes and their people don't.

So now let's talk a little bit about how this became a TED speech that generated a little bit of controsty. So you did a TED video, did I've done too? But the first one I did on this exact subject, I mean basically it was called raise uh, you know, raise taxes on the rich to rule the true job creators. Because if you understand a capitalist economy in a twenty one century way, which you have to see, is it's really it's it's essentially an ecosystem, and it's characterized by

a circle of lifelike feedback loops. And the true job creators in a capitalist economy are consumers. When and then when the middle class thrives, people like me get to start companies and sell them stuff, and the more stuff they buy, the more people we we employ. And I gave that speech at TED some years ago, but it was before the issue of economic inequality was one that

was you know, yeah, yeah, it was. It was. It made people uncomfortable, and as a consequence, they didn't want to post the talk, and that created a lot of controversy and they chucked me out of the conference and blah blah blah blah blah. But uh, you know how

did that resolve? Uh? The beautiful news is it after a couple of years, Chris Anderson, who's a great guy, and I kissed and made up, uh because Chris is a good guy and realized that, you know, this was a very important issue and something that Ted had to tackle head on, and so he asked me to do another talk, which I did last August based on the Plutocrats piece, by the way, and uh, now we're good friends again, and I'm going to the conference and you

did you did that plutocrat video went fairly viral. I mean a lot of Ted videos go viral, but this came right time, right right actually, and it just blew up. Yeah. Yeah, and so and because this is a very important issue, and I think that uh, you know, most smart even rich people agree that the economic inequality is something that we're going to have to deal with some how. Obviously, when it comes to what to do, uh, it gets the conversation becomes more difficult because it involves trade offs

that people often don't want to make. Let me throw you a quote from Actually, my guest last week was n while you professor two weeks ago, and while you Professor Scott Galloway said, it's never been easier to become a billionaire, and it's never been harder to become a millionaire. Do you agree or disagree with that? And I think there's a touch of hyper Yeah, there's a touch there.

He's obviously being hyperbolic. But I think he's making an interesting point, which is true, that we have an economy today which in many ways is a winner take all economy and where great success really is great success where just just wildly insanely rewarded. But to be moderately successful actually is becoming harder and harder and harder because the society is bifurcating, because we're turning into a into a society and economy of a tiny number of winners when

everybody else is a loser. So, Nick, if people want to find your writings or your work, where do they go to to see you that? Just put my name into Google Nick Hannaur. There'll be a thousand links. We've been speaking with Nick Hannaur of Second Avenue Partners. If you enjoy this conversation. Be sure and check out the rest of our talk. You can find that on Apple iTunes, SoundCloud, or Bloomberg dot com. Be sure and check out my daily column on Bloomberg View dot com. Follow me on

Twitter at Rid Halts. I'm Barry Ridhults. You're listening to Masters in Business. I'm Bloomberg Radio. I'm Barry rid Halts. Welcome to the podcast half of our show. I'm here with Nick Hannaur Am I pronouncing that right? I feel like I'm saying that wrong. So let's let's get back into the finance side of things because there are so many other questions. We keep hearing all this chatter that we are in a technology bubble. What are your thoughts? Uh? Yeah,

gotta be tech tech bubble. Well, I mean, you know tech tech is everything now, right? What's not tech? Uh? Um zuber tech? Honestly, uber tech. It's a taxi service. Forgot the taxis. Taxis are free agents. Uber is a software that connects them with the ride, right, But you know it's a taxi for now the service that's going to be delivering packages or dinners or that's theoretically what they're where there, But it's different than tech was thirty

forty years ago. I mean, technology and enables so many things. My point simply is that you know, there's a whole bunch of companies out there that are valued in the billions or tens of billions, where a little tiny thing goes wrong and it's worth hundreds of millions, you know. And you know, I think we're riding the ragged edge on a lot of those valuations. So and you have this weird thing right as you know that the that the public markets and the private markets have flipped a

little bit. Yeah, where we have Uber is private. And you know, I have a ton of friends now who are who who are complaining about the fact that their companies are public because if they were private, they'd be worth twice as much as they are. Well, they chose to go public. They took the cash that wasn't not You don't get to go back in time and call

for two over. Yeah. So so when we look at other companies, let's let's look at some of the public companies, Apple, Google, Amazon, how do these line up in terms of We always hear people say Amazon is overvalued because they're not thrown

off a whole lot of profits. Yeah, you know, I'm I've all, you know, having grown up with Amazon, I'm I'm more sympathetic to their market cap than I am to a lot of companies because, um, I h I am so sure that if Jeff wanted to generate tons of free cash flow and you do it a minute, he is now and has been from the day we opened the doors, the metaphorical doors. Uh. Uh been after maximizing growth and market share, and uh, there's clearly been successful. Absolutely,

And there's a trade off between growth and profit. And if you wanted to raise the prices on every product at Amazon three percent, no one would notice, really and and he would generate a just a ton of cash flow. Uh. And so something you could do, I mean, you could literally do with the push push of the So what what is their secret sauce? What has we talked about

how they're negative cash flow, negative cash conversion cycle? Conversion cycle was really a secret weapon for them in the beginning, but they seem to be way past that now and between Amazon Cloud and there's so many different services they're offering. What is the future of Amazon look like? Where you know, I'm I you know, I'm not an authority on Amazon. I haven't been involved in the company in ten years, so you know, are you still an investor? No, I'm

not even an investor anymore. I'm not a big public company investor. I invest in private companies and when they go public, I sell my stock and I move on. So so let's let's go down that list, because you have some interest in I'm pulling up my my list here. So we talked about a quant of six point four billions of Microsoft to bowing. What did in Situ do? Oh? This is a fantastic company. So and a great story. So in Situ makes unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance and combat.

Perfect and you're happy to be right there. And yeah, and so here's the great story is that a couple of UH aeronautical engineers who were also windsurfing freaks, wind up in it in a place called bingein Washington, which is across the street from Hood River, Washington on in the Columbia Gorge on the Columbia River, which is one of the windsurfing capitals of the Earth. And they start

looking around for a thing to do. And this guy, ted Tad McGear had had been doing experiments with u a v S and these guys get together and they start building this UA V company and their early ideas that they're going to build these small unmanned vehicles with cameras on them that can help tuna fisherman find tuna without helicopters. This was our big idea. And uh so we thought that's a whole lot of battery power that no,

it's not. It's not battery power. They're little. They're just like little r C engines, right, little gas engines, right. And so they build some of these things and they and uh, you know, we had some interest in it. And then nine eleven happens and you realize that U a v s are going to be a big part of the military apparatus, and so we made this investment and uh, you know in Situ was lucky enough to grab um. Uh you know, some really really incredible managers,

some really visionary man managers. H in particular guy named Sleeve Steve Sliwa, who was one of the best CEOs I've ever come in contact with. And they built this thing into an incredible company with incredible technology. And you know that these U A these were so effective that the Marine Corps you know, through giant fits with the Department of Defense to get this stuff through the supply

chain way. Oh my god. And they were just like, no, you will do it right now, um during during exactly all that time to put around, we need it regular exactly go by this problem. So this is a ten foot wingspant third three pound plane that launches via catapult from the from the ground. You just launch it via catapult. It doesn't need an airfield the land it actually flies into a rope to land. Is totally autonomous, flying totally

invisible at three thousand feet um. And can you know, and can basically not quite read your watch, but but close enough. And just unbelievable intelligence for forward huge huge tactical, huge tactical adage. And so these and so these things, um, you know, we're really really really useful to the military, both on land in at sea. Right, these things are

now deployed all over the place. Uh. And of course Bowing can scale it up and make it exactly And so we built this just an extraordinary company, and Bowing came along, Bowing was an integration partner and came along and finally says, no, we get on it. Something about it from US so. Um, but here's the great part this dollar acquisition. Yeah, here's the Here the best part of it is that, Um, this tiny town is a

tiny it's a tiny. It was a tiny, crappy, poor town with like one sawmill, and uh it is it is I think one of the most This company has turned this county into one of the Washington State's most affluent counties today. Really. Yeah, they're like eight hundred you know, like PhD type aeronautical engineers now working in this tiny town building U A V s. And now you have all these spinoff, spinoff technology companies making wings and and the suppliers and all that stuff. And so it's just

it's an extraordinary story of economic development, you know. And this is made made over there. UM. Market Leader sold to truly million dollars. What was market Leader? Market Leader was, uh, you know, market Leader was a company that sold leads, you know, much like Zillo to to real estate agents. We were an early entrant into that business, UM and basically connected real estate agents with people who wanted to

either buy or sell their house. And uh evolved into a company that both did that but also built software uh to help age to manage their businesses and um, so truly A bought that and then Zillo bought Trulia. They described it as a merger, but well, well, well okay, uh that's what I was. Is that true? Yeah? I I always thought it was an acquisition, but you know, you never know who's got to save face for what gear dot com? What was geared? That was a great one.

So that was an earth that was a really early internet company. And we had this again, this is in the oh my gosh, it's the late nineties, right before any of the stuff really really got going, and we had this insight, which of course is true, that there was a terrific opportunity to liquidate things on the internet, to buy um, to buy over stocks and so on and so forth, and and sell them to people via

the internet. And we wanted to focus just on sporting equipment, in particular hard goods and stuff like that, reasoning that last year's tennis racket, uh as good as this year's tennis racket. But if I can buy it for twenty cents on the dollar and sell it to you for fifty cents on the dollar, everybody's happy. And so we went off to do that. Uh, but you know, like

a lot of the companies in the early days. Uh you know, it was it was tough sledding because you may forget, but it wasn't that long ago when people were like, well, I'll never I'll never send my credit card on the internet, right. I remember those days. Yeah, I'm never going to buy anything on that. I remember when my friend, my college roommate, had given me that gift certificate to Amazon, putting all that information in it,

and a box arrives in the mail. This I this was when I think we lived on less and and one of our neighbors said, what's that, Oh store online gave them your credit Yeah, it was just people were looking. Now basically everybody has everybody else's social security data everything.

It's every from from gotten over it. So when you when you when you were trying to start these companies, when only one in ten consumers had access to the internet right in the early days, right, and when only one intent of those were willing to buy something on the internet, that's amazing. It was a much harder thing to get a business up to escape velocity than it

is today. It was very difficult to scale when everyone's on the internet and everyone's willing to transact on the Internet, and so a lot of these early ideas like gear were hard to scale up, not because they were bad ideas, but because the market wasn't quite there before. How to overcome that consumer resistance people and that just took a generation.

And now it's it's part of the fabric. Nobody thinks twice exactly and and so uh so we um so we built that company into something that was going pretty well. We got a big investment actually from Amazon dot Com to scale that thing up, and then we sold it to overstock dot Com? And uh what was the sale price to that? That was the one number I didn't have come. Was that a merger or was that a sale? Now? It was a sale, I think very I can't remember I made money, I know that. Uh, I'm embarrassed to

tell you. It's been so many years. I don't that was late nineties, right, yeah, alright, so disens or something like that. I cannot well tell you what though, I bought an airplane with the money I made. Mark Cuban. Mark Cuban tells the story that he bought an airplane after we saw a soul Brookast dot Com on the Internet. It was at the time it was the biggest Internet purchase ever. Ever. It was like four million dollars or something, And now you don't even people are buying art for

a hundred millions. Yeah, I know, I bought my first airplane with the proceeds of the overseas What plane was the citation five? Okay? Not a not a bad little rode. So you had this great negotiation with um Microsoft with a quantive What was your role the quant of when this was being So you were chairman, So you're more than just an outside investor. No, no, it was chairman of the board. You have you had to be pretty

integral to the negotiation process. So the question is they used to have a Microsoft had a reputation for being a fearsome competitor, a very tough negotiator. It sounds like your deal with them was a little kindler and gentler. Then now have have they mellowed? Was this just a good fit or did all the parties sort of know each other? Uh? No, I mean it was it was a It was an arm's length deal. And you know

the old Sawberry You don't sell a company. People buy a company, right, and especially when we're talking about billions exactly. And and the truth is that there were multiple bidders. Uh. And if Microsoft hadn't bought it, then then someone was yeahoo was absolutely going to buy it. Oh absolutely. And there were two others who were in the wings. Yeah. Who else was a couple of the giant um uh advertising holding companies right, Um, I can't remember which ones

off the but Microsoft was the best fit. They were well I mean, and they were the high bidder uh and um although you know, I mean, as I recall, we could have done another round a bidding, but we felt like we had gone far enough and it was a fair price, and we just didn't want to you know, six point four exactly, Well, you weren't even that wasn't even that was more almost ten times sales, a little less than ten time sales. That's by any definition a

good sale. Prob. Yeah, it was. It was a fantastic deal. And as we I have to tell you that we were very emotional about it because you know, we had built a great company, it was growing really fast, and we felt like there was a ton of runway left. But you know, as Brian mcanders, the CEO of the time, and I you know, as he said to me at the time, well you know this is a deal good enough so that we'll have no regrets. It's not like you look back and be like, well that was stupid.

We should have kept it. Now, as it turned out, Microsoft UM is a toxic environment. It for anything that is not Microsoft, and within eighteen months they destroyed the business. Really, they wrote the whole thing off. Come on, they would have thought they integrate that into bing and that becomes they're so desperate to compete with Google at the time, they totally screwed it up. I am so shocked to hear that. I was thinking, well, it makes sense, it's

a good fit. They totally botched it. Now that was under the bomber. Yeah, it just wasn't. Pretty much botched everything. But it could have been strategic because they were rolling out well, they miss social, they missearched, they missed mobile. This looks like, all right, we gotta participate in those things.

They let's find a way to watch it. And you know what what they should have done is they should have rolled it out as a separate entity and had somebody had our team run it and and put a bunch of stuff that they were doing underneath our team, and if they had done that, they had a hell of a robust business. But inted, they tried to shoehorn it into the giant Microsoft octopus, and you know, it just didn't work. Can I tell you one of the most fascinating experiences I've had this year. So we're in

Seattle in January. We get invited to present to the Microsoft Treasury Department, which is just a fascinating group of people. It's thirty folks in the room. I almost had thirty guys, but it's women, women, and they're in a room and you're you're basically discussing just they're fielding the thrown questions at you and responding. And then we took a tour of the campus and people just forget how immense Microsoft is. So we're in building five. We see Bill Gates's original office.

They flip a panel, there's the phone he used to call in the to the board meetings, and it's just like all this unbelievable history. And then you they start walking around, We'll go to we gotta go here. So we were in the Microsoft office office. So you walk into an office and on the wall it's his Miccloft office because oh, this is where they make word Excel, etcetera.

And so you start walking. You know, they're sending you from you going here, you're going there, going around the camp this, and like you're in building three, and then you're in building twelve, and then you're in building thirty seven. And the numbers just keep going up. And how many buildings do you, guys? Go? Campus goes about four miles that way, there's a hundred and four some crazy you know, three figures. It's so big, Like I'm not used to a company town. I go to a high rise and

it's either the research department or the headquarters. To see a facility of this size was just mind blind. And when you look at the numbers, my my seven fifty million of sales or whatever it was. And it's just like it's a rounding air. And guys, as successful as Apple has become and other companies who have passed them, they're still a cash cow. There's still a behemoth. It's still the standard there. There isn't a laptop desktop tablet now.

They made Office available for all the tablets. Everybody, not even talking about the database and all the back and stuff that consumers don't see. It was just one of the wildest experiences because you forget about them. It's like I remember in the nineties, Microsoft was front page news constantly. First it was this, then it was the litigation, the anti trust suit. But now they're just a big, mature company that just prints money. It was. It was just

one of the most amazing things. Like as you look off to the horizon and that's still the campus, that building. A lot of software developers. We had called an uber to get back into town and the guy couldn't find us, like, well by building six. Well I'm by building sixteen, and now there's building three, and then it's twenty seven. Oh, well, they're not exactly in numerical order. Finds us very confusing. You've I assume you've been all over that campus. I've

been a few places on that campus. But not only am I exaggerating astonishing, right, absolutely, absolutely astonishing. Let's let's talk a little bit about about some of the early pieces that that we missed. So I mentioned, um, I didn't get to mention the han Our Foundation. Tell us what you do with that? Yeah, my wife and I do a lot of philanthropy. I would say most of

it is focused on stuff in the Pacific Northwest. How is that different from everywhere else other than the fact that you have a fifteen dollar minimum wage target and in Seattle now yeah, so so the difference is that most of the philanthropy that we do isn't sort of the traditional C three uh give to the university or whatever philanthropy. Most of the money on a building named

after you. I regret that there probably will be buildings name named after us, but but the focus of what we do is more political that if you want to create that's policy, is Paul seeing in politics? And that's where most of our civic energy and investment goes. So what are your big three focuses? Um? What political economy? Which is income inequality? And so my gang in Seattle that you know, uh, you know, a group of collaborators were behind a lot of the whole fifteen dollar minimum

wage thing, which is sales in over how long? Uh? In Seattle it scales in over five years more or less. But it passed in Seattle, San Francisco, l A. I'm actually in New York with you bury today because I was asked to testify, uh, in front of the wage board that's considering the same thing here in New York State. UH. And so you know, a lot of energy and work goes into that work. Another one of my projects right now is the overtime threshold UH, an incredibly consequential piece

of policy. What is that? What is the overtime So? So, the President UH of the United States, through a rulemaking process within the Labor Department, has has the power to change the threshold number, the salary number below which people are entitled to overtime if they work more than forty hours a week. And in the day when he let me make sure I didn't say this. So if you're making less than X a year on an annual basis and your salary, you get over time if you're work.

But what are those numbers currently? So? So today, if you earn more less than twenty three thousand, six hundred dollars, which is basically a poverty way, yeah, you automatically are

entitled to overtime no matter what. But if you earn more than twenty three thousand, six hundred dollars a year, let's say, and your employer pitches you a fake title like assistant manager, they can get they can force you to work seventy hours a week and not pay you for the extra thirty, claiming that you're now management, not labor exactly, and and uh, everyone knows that Americans are working their butts off more than almost any other It's crazy,

the most absolutely. And and you know, in fact, there was a recent Gallop poll that showed that that the average full the average American full time worker works forty seven hours. And that's not counting the email. You're doing it at midnant, right, you know, right exactly, and so and and that and so here's the thing is that in the day very when we had a thriving middle class, something like sixty three of salaried workers were entitled to overtime if they worked more than forty hours a week.

Today that number is like nine. It's some of it is the dearth of unions. No no, no, no, no no. This is all because this labor standard has been allowed to it just hasn't changed over decades. In other words, inflation is just exactly exactly, that's amazing. I just just him that was the the slow death of unions that causes that can that contributes to it, of course, And if you if you are an a union. Your your

union has almost certainly negotiated that for you. But if you're not in a union, and people in America are not in unions, UM, that means that if you earned twenty five thou dollars a year being an assistant manager for Jack in the Box or whatever it is, Uh, your employer can work you seventy hours a week and not pay you for the extra thirty that you work. And there are two there. There are a number of things that are really terrible about that. Let's start with

the fact that it recks your life. Um, we wonder why people, why why our schools struggle will when parents are working seventy or sixty hours a week, they're not helping their kids with homework, right, and so so there's the whole impact that this extra work has on the family. But the but the more insidious economic effects aren't just that you're getting cheated out of the pay of twenty or thirty extra hours of work. More particularly, what it allows people like me to do is take three jobs

and turn it into two. Because if I can get two people to work sixty hours a week, I don't need three employees. They only need two employees. Right. And what that does is it obviously softens the labor market. It pulls a job out of the labor market. And by pulling a job out of the labor market, you increase the rate of unemployment, which in turn softens wages. So we have comes vicious it's a vicious cycle, right, It's a feedback loop. And so we have this persistent

high level of unemployment. And a huge part of it is the fact that employers are using this loophole essentially to get workers to do the work of one and a half workers, rather than employing more workers to do that work. How many people in America would you gues estimate are doing this sort of excess work. Let's assume there's a hundred and fifty million plus in the labor pool. Yeah, I mean, you know half of them are, you know, sort of half of them are. If you're hourly, you

automatically get over time. And I think there's sixty or seventy million hourly employees many, Yeah, but but I mean, you know, seventy five million or eighty million full time workers in the United States. Um, you know, the vast majority of us are working overtime. Now, I don't think everybody should get overtime. Very I don't think you should

get overtime. Here's the thing, you know what. I wrote a piece that appeared in Politico a few months ago called you know, whatever happened overtime and which I argued that we should bring we we should bring the threshold back up to the high water mark, which would be sixty nine thousand dollars plus or minus today from where it once was fifty three exactly. So you're really just about the middle, maybe a touch a touch higher. So my reasoning is, look, if you earn more than two

thirds of your fellow Americans, good for you. You're on your own. But if you were in less than the top third of Americans, you're working for somebody else. They're telling you what to do. And if you work more than forty hours, you should get paid for it. Uh And and so we went on a campaign to try to persuade the Obama administration in their rulemaking process to to to to bring that threshold back up to a reasonable level. And what you say, rulemaking process. So this

doesn't require an Act of Congress. It's it's it's it's it's it's happening. And in about a week or two. Uh, the rule will be announced. Uh and um, if you just let the cat out of the bag. Uh. Well, no, there, there there. There have been some articles indicating this coming. But what does this mean for the middle class? What does this mean for that group oft in? In my opinion, a high a reasonable overtime threshold is to the middle class what a minimum wage is to low wage work.

It's an indispensable labor protection. An indispensable labor protection. You can't have a thriving middle class unless, uh, you have a reasonable overtime threshold. Otherwise you soften the labor market and you get people to work for free, and and and and both of those things are incredibly corrosive. So now, how do you how do you respond when people say, Nick, you sound a lot less like a venture capitalist and

a lot more like a labor organizer. You what I say to him is, you don't understand capitalism, right, so you want a robust middle class out buying your product, Yes, you don't understand capitalism. Being rapacious doesn't mean make you a capitalist. It makes you a sociopath and a jerk. Okay, that there's a difference. And that Twitter handle is what's that Twitter handle? Is? Uh? What your Twitter handle? Nick at, Nick Caner at Nick Hannah. So send those nasty tweets

to being rapacious doesn't make you a capitalist. Well that part, by the way, that seems perfectly reasonable, and yet you get a lot of pushback. I do, and you know I understand it. But look, here's the thing is that, by the way, let me interrupt yourself my personal beef. And maybe it's because we're in the Northeast and we have such hideous winters, especially the past two winters have

been insane. Is the gas tax has been stuck at the same level since Meanwhile, we have the price of oil dropped in half, gases a couple of bucks cheaper than it was three years ago. Just raise the gas tacks twenty or thirty cents. Pave all these roads that look like their disasters, fix these bridges that are falling down. You'll create all these good construction jobs. And you know, for people, it's a shame that two thirds of whatever the number is of the US that doesn't have a passport.

When you leave the United States and you go to Europe, where you go to Asia, it's like, oh, that's what roads and bridges were like in the nineteen fifties in the United States, after we put the equivalent of trillions of dollars of infrastructure investment. To not do that seems so Unamerican. And yet people are horrified. How can I vote to raise a tax twenty cents a gallon because you need roads that are paid Yeah, yeah, no, it's

it's it's extraordinary. And you know, the thing is is that we have this weird sort of mental disease in this country that is somehow like a whole bunch of us have confused suffocating collectivism, which is bad, with the need to solve collective action problems, which is what civilization depends on. Society exactly right, defends should we put our own fires out or should we have a fire department? Should I have to hack my way from my house to your house with a machete through the woods, or

should we build a road in between our houses? Right? Confused, I have no idea. We go from a nation that was literally the shining city on the hill, the standard for everybody else. You can't name an infrastructure that the United States forget number one, where the United States is in the top ten, Whether it's whether it's cell connectivity, broadband, high speed trains, got mass transit. Going down the list, there is nothing that forget number. We're not even in

the top ten. Yeah, I don't know. It's like this odd psycho pathology where you've got this minority of people who have convinced themselves that anything we do together is somehow is communism or a bad thing. It's just it's just for the military. Even then in Texas, the military. You must have read about this. The military was doing exercises in Texas and Greg Abbott calls out the National Guard to protect Texas against the U. S. Military or whatever it is. It's just not so just the shift.

I'll tell you what I see is that shift is someone figured out that the low information voter some people who are uninformed, ignorance, and happy. That way you could spew whatever nonsense you want to them. And you know, my favorite example of that was the sign during one of the Tea Party um before it was co opted by the existing parties, but there was a sign, keep your government hands off my medicage. Yeah yeah, wait, you

you really are the ultimate low information voters. So that so the minimum wage is a great example of that, right, the minimum wage is a way to solve a collective action problem. So from the point of view of the individual business, of course, paying poverty wages is awesome. I pay my workers nothing, my profits are high. But you have a business and you pay your workers good wages, so your workers can buy stuff from me. Now sadly, yeah, sadly, it won't work out the other way. My workers will

not be able to buy anything from you. Uh. But what do I care? If I can get you to do that deal? Right? Your workers pay taxes. My workers don't pay taxes. In fact, they food stamps and medicaid that your workers will provide. Again, So who wouldn't want that deal? But the problem with that deal, Barry, of course, is that not everybody can have that deal. Because everybody have that has that deal, who will buy the stuff,

who will pay the taxes? And the only way you can solve that problem, which is a collective action problem, is by requiring everybody to pay their workers at least enough so that they can participate in the economy and

so they don't need government services. That the way that I've outraged, the way I've framed that argument so that it was palatable for my conservative friends has been Look there, I know you don't like wealth transfers, but there's a wealth transfer going on right now, and it's from taxpayers, of which you're one. Two fast food restaurants and and places like Walmart that basically have figured out how to pay people enough, and I understand the system is there.

They're gaming it except in places where they've helped form the system them So there you can say, well, they just were confronted by a tax system and they hired an accountant to present the best tax situation. But here where they've helped form the system, they're gaming it. The bottom line is they're transferring wealth from taxpayers to themselves. Let's pull the taxpayer out of it. This is a

relationship between the customers, the owners, and the employees. And if it means that you have to charge an extra fifty cents to selling McDonald's hamburgers, perfectly, why are we subsidizing that? Exactly? That's what I don't get perfect leave Look, you could, you could charge what you want, you could do whatever you want, just leave us taxpayers out exactly.

And you know, I'm an old fashioned capitalist. I think that you know wages are the way that we do this in a capitalist system, Right, That's that, you know, Why should we have an E I T C that makes up the difference? Why should we have food stamps that make up the difference? Why can't Walmart paid to work? There's enough so that they can have healthcare and be able to buy stuff like the rest of us. There's

just no reason for it. And and and you know, and and that's why I'm in New York toify, you know, because I think it's it's so it's a it's as economically idiotic as it is morally. So here's the interesting here's the interesting development that's just taken place. There's a new CEO at Walmart, there's a new head of retail. There's a whole bunch of changes that have taken place. After their most recent quarterly announcement, the company CEO had come out and said one of the big issues that

they were having was a huge turnover. Right, they have almost two million employees in the United States and something like someway between a forty and at turnover rate and of course one and a half times the salary to actually go through that process on a on a regular basis. They started to say their their turnover rate has come down, their employee satisfaction as has improved, their customer satisfaction is

going up. So it turns out paying people a reasonable wage and we're just talking about going to I think it was a nine dollar an hour. The announcement that he made is the nine dollar now wages having the intended effect they go to ten dollars and the CEO actually said, and we expect to take it higher than ten dollars new slash. When you stop treating people like chattel, things get better for everybody. Right. This is sort of

an old lesson from humanity. You know, the better we treat one another, the better it goes for everybody in general. And again this comes back to my early statement, being rapacious doesn't make make you a capitalist, makes you a jerk. Uh And and and that's at Nick hann Hour on Twitter. So the this is your answering. The first part of what is the Foundation focus on? One thing was public policy and income inequality. What else do you guys? Look?

And I just I just want to be on this one, this one point for for a minute longer, because the pushback on this has been Uh, the so called economic theory that if wages go up, employment will go down, right and fairly thoroughly debunked. A few months ago. I had Alan Krueger, who was Obama's chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors. He did a very famous study in the early nineties with I want to say, David Card where they just happen to have two towns on opposite

sides of a state border. One raised the minimum wage, the other didn't. The impact was really modest. The takeaway is, if there's a gradual increase of modest amounts, the impact is a net positive. If you double the minimum wage tomorrow, you're gonna have a negative. It turns out that's not even true. Yeah, that's not true. So if we double in the in the in the forties, uh, late forties, we we the minimum wage went up, but it was

frozen old during the war. Okay, but it went up eighty eight percent in one year, and and and employment plummeted from like five to two percent over the next couple of years. So to be clear, to be clear, there's abundantet evidence that the more money you pay workers, the better business will be in the more workers you'll need.

But here's the point. Here's the point. Despite the fact that this has been totally discredited, it does not stop industry and political leaders from saying it again and again and again and again. If you get enough billionaires funding enough thing tanks to say stupid stuff, eventually people start

to believe right exactly. And and you know, the reason I wanted to come to New York is to make it clear that the only thing that's true about the statement, the claim when wages go up, employment comes down, is that if people like me can get workers to believe it's true, it would be very good for people like me. Then claim is a scam. It's an intimidation tactic. That's

what it is. It's a it's it's a it's a it's a way of controlling people's behavior because if I can intimidate you into believing it, if you get higher wages, I'll fire you. Then I then I you know, then I blunt the aggressiveness that you'll pursue higher wages. And that's what this is all about. In fact, in Seattle, which already pays way way we hire minimum wage uh than places like New York, any other place in the country for fast food workers. In particular, we don't have

fewer restaurants per capita. We have more restaurants per capita. We have more restaurants per capita and Seattle, Washington than you do even in New York. The only major city in the country that has more restaurants per capita than Seattle is San Francisco that pays even pays even more than Seattle. And this is because when restaurants pay restaurant workers enough so that even they can afford eating restaurants, guess what, it's pretty good. It's pretty good for the restaurant.

You know. There was a lot of pushback about Seattle about the minimum wage and restaurants where the focus, and we actually did some research and found out because people love anecdotal examples of pizza place, that was a headline. W we saw a piece of place closed in Seattle. But when you look at the numbers, but you look at the number of closings, they've been pretty steady over the past three years before the this went into effect earlier this year. The minimum wage before and after the

number of closings are the same. But more importantly, when you looked at the permits for new restaurant openings. They have been climbing steadily and they continue to climb steadily. So there is this meme out that, oh, Seattle is killing their restaurant business booming, right. And by the way we were, I was just in Seattle, full disclosure everybody.

The way I met Nick is we were meeting somebody who was a potential client and you just happened to be at that dinner and we started chatting, and I'm like, why is that name so familiar? Nick? I know I read something that he uh, I know, I read something that he wrote and it was somewhere but um, when we were in Seattle. That is a city on fire?

Is it makes San Francisco and Silicon Valley look like it's, you know, a mature, slow economy, right, And and part of the reason it's on fire is that we pay our low wage workers more than other places pay them, so those workers can participate more robustly in our economy. How's the housing market in Seattle out of control? This is the you know, but even still, I find prices in Seattle's out of even reasonable compared to you know,

NAPA and Silicon Valley. I think is insane. You guys are reasonable compared to that, compared to New York for sure, for sure, but it's still you know, the cities either grow or they shrink. If they shrink, you have one set of problems. If they grow, you have another set of those. Are that's a better, high quality set of problems,

but it is a set of problems. And affordable housing is a big challenge for a geographically kind of contained place, like two different mountain ranges, and you're sort of in the right. It's it's well, that's always the issue is when you have a limited amount of time and space, you know, there's nobody to do with that is everybody wants to come. Everybody wants to come. Well, there are a lot of jobs, there's a lot of activity. It happens to be just a lovely climate. It's very different

than we had a miserable winter this year. We had a terrible winter last year. I'm hoping that will mean revert a little bit. And you know now that I have in fact, in fact, after last winter, we moved to a new house and my driveway is this, you know, vertical snake. And I went out a lot. I got a jeep because it's the only thing that makes it up the driveway in the water. The old wheel drive.

You know, a typical oil drive car has headaches. You know, it's when when four wheel drive doesn't get up to the driveway. It's like, all right, I gotta get something. And so I found this ridiculous. I actually it's it's my favorite value investment. It was a salvage title Jeep Rubicon in Orange. I would normally never buy an orange car, but it has hell of a deal on it. Big

Beef paid half of what I figure half. I don't care if it's AREE got these big beefy not ere You're the only one in your neighborhood to have an orange Jeep. There is literally that. Not only is that true, although there are a million Jeeps in my neighborhood because of that exact reason, because of the hills. The only one that's A friend who actually had helped me do

the research on the Seattle restaurants found a website. You can punch in a zip code and it will tell you all the cars in your zip code, and you could look up car per zip code and say how many Cheeps, and you're in the neighborhood, how many Chevy Luminous, how many Bentley g T you can look it up by whatever. And it's insane because all this data is public and people get get to play with it. I'll foward you and I'll post I'll post that. So, so

we've spent time on income inequality. What else does the foundation look at before? So I go through a list. I got a list of questions. So we we've done a lot of work on gun, gun safety, gun responsibility and stuff. And how do you define gun responsibility policies that lead to fewer people getting killed with guns? Uh? And of course we have a we have a gun

safety crisis in the United States. I mean the rate at which people are killed by guns here is some type of place between ten and a hundred times higher than it is and basically any other civilized place. I saw an interesting stat I don't I don't know if you're familiar with this. You have a gun in your house and it increases the possibility of a gun being used.

What's what's the jata? I can't. It depends on the circumstance, but for sure, having a gun massively increases the risks that you or someone in your family will be killed, but with a gun. Yeah, yeah, so so particularly if you're a woman. So if you're a woman and your husband has a handgun, not a good not a good thing, not a good thing statistical statistically speaking, and you know that the you know, the the view is from a lot of people that feeling safer is the same as

being safer. I realized that there are a lot of people who own guns who feel safer, which you're actually not safer, and the and statistically speaking, in fact, you're less safe and the people around you are less safe. A huge problem, of course is suicide. And people don't realize that. If you ask somebody in the United States randomly, what are are there more homicides or suicides? Most people will say homicide was more suicides than homicide. And and

the reason that we're to do it yourself. Yeah, And the thing is is that is that having a gun within easy access, uh massively increases the rate of successful suicide because you don't miss with a gun. Um. And what people don't understand about suicide. Before I came to this work, I had really hadn't thought of it. But

suicide to most people, you know, you conceptualize. Suicide is this very very planned out, rational thing where somebody says, uh, you know, I'm done with it all, I'm going to take my life and there's nothing you can do to stop them, and nothing could be farther from the tooth. Suicide is an emotional act in the moment, impulsive, it's impulsive. Almost no one relentlessly tries to kill themselves. So if

you avoid that exactly exactly. So this is why if you put a fence up on a bridge, suicide dramatically is reduced because people get to the bridge and they're like, oh, this is too much trouble. I'm going home. I swear to god, you would think that a little fence wouldn't stop you if you wanted to kill yourself, if you're if you're gonna kill your decisions, I know, and you're like, it's too much trouble. They go home. So they've done this on the Golden Gates, You've done this in a

number of places, and it actually works. It works, it works. They don't just not jump off that bridge. They don't commit suicide because it's an impulsive decision. Somebody's having a horrible day, something terrible happens to them. They're they're chemically imbalanced at that moment, and they make this split second decision to do it. If you don't have a gun with an easy access, the chances that they're going to

actually kill themselves go down dramatically. And so that's why things like safe storage are so important, and that's why having guns laying around all over the place are terrible. Is terrible from that point of view, But you know, they're they're simply no doubt that there is a perfect statistically statistical correlation between the number of guns in the community and the amount of gun death. And we need to find ways to reduce the gun violence in our

society back to civilized levels. Uh. And you know that's just gonna take a bunch of good new policies. So when you talk about gun responsibility, you're really not saying we want to get rid of handguns, we are against the Second Amendment. You're saying we want to work with gun owners and find a way to be more like So, for instance, we you know, we we we we uh. We passed a criminal background X bill in Washington State.

And all that bill does is require anyone who buys a gun from anyone to go through the national check to find out if you're a criminal or a psychopath. Uh. Who could be against that? Who could be against that? Well, it turns out the n r A and all the people who manufactured are violently against that because it's terrible for the gun business. That that just doesn't seem to make any sense because when you see surveys of gun owners,

they're overwhelmingly in favor of nuts. It's nuts, but violently opposed to a common sense, uh, piece of legislation like that where if you're going to buy a gun, we get to check and make sure you're not a criminal or a crazy person. Uh. You know. Another piece of legislation that we're trying to pass is something called an

extreme Risk Protection Order. So this is a this is a this is a rule that allows a family to go to a judge and say, little Billy is super crazy and he's super dangerous and if somebody didn't take his guns away, he's gonna kill himself or he's gonna kill somebody else. So in a huge proportion of the mass killings that you find, the families knew, everybody knew, everybody knew what was gonna happen. There's a great case in Washington State, the Cafe Racer killings, where this kid

was backed out bonkers. His family went to the police multiple times saying please please take his guns away. Their hands were tied and they're basically the police are like, look, until he kills somebody, there's nothing we can do. So the kid went out and he killed half a dozen people, right, And so you know, this is a common sense public safety protection that you should be that reasonable people should be able to pass. But of course the gun lobby

is violently against it and away exactly. But there's just nuts, right, it's nuts to believe that we should And here's the real by the way, that's another thing that I would imagine that gun owners. You would think, you would think, but you have to remember at the gun lobby isn't about gun owners. They're gun factors, right, And that's become pretty Anyone who didn't understand that hasn't been paying attention.

It's all about how many guns can you sell. And that's a big change though from what the n r A was. Like, absolutely, it's completely different. But you know, it's just it's it's a real shame that we can't as a society, you know, bake in some of these basic protections so we'll have a safer civil society in my state. In most states today, your chances are being killed by with a gun are higher now than being killed in a traffic accident. Really, yeah, that's amazing. So

income inequality, gun responsibility. What's the huns and tons of stuff on public education policy and reform? I founded something called co founded something called the League of Education Voters in Washington State, which has pursued, you know, every manner of public education reform, funding, so on and so forth. So we're big supporters. What do you think about this national testing and the uh oh, I forget the name of other things that people complain about. You know, these

are very complic common common core. You know, these are very complicated questions, and I wish I wish I wasn't, But I am of two minds about them. I mean, on the one hand, you want to have kind You certainly want to have a national standard of what we're trying to teach and some sort of national judge about whether we're teaching it right. Just because Alabama decides to give every kid a's doesn't mean that those kids in Alabama are actually learning the math uh that they're going

to need to participate in the global economy. Uh and uh and you know, we we need to find a way somehow to decide as a country what we want kids to learn and to figure out as a country if they're learning it. Uh, and how to do that? As you know you run businesses, measuring things is very very hard because there are a lot of variables. But if you can't measure, you can't measure. So yeah, very complicated. So let's let's move to some of Um, we're just

about through the questions we missed Amazon? What made Amazon of success? We did that, we did the Ted talk. Um, let's let's go through some of my my favorite questions that I asked ask everybody. So, so, who were your early mentors? So, for sure, the guy that ran the family business. Uh, what's his name was Roy clove Here. He passed away, you know, ten years ago or so. Um, and he was an extraordinarily shrewd business person. He just was as sharp and clearer thinkers you've ever met. What

did he impart to you? What did you learn from him? You know, how to manage people, how to think about business problems, how not to over react, you know, you know that's probably understated. It took yeah, you know, like how to be strategic? Right, um uh, you know, I don't know, just a lot of a lot of great um, a lot of great lessons. You know. My dad was in many ways less strategic than Roy was, but he

was a great moral uh mentor. And you know, so the funny thing about the pillow business is that it's characterized classically was characterized by immense amounts of cheating. Really yeah, so how do you cheat in the pillow business? How how do you not cheat in it? So, so a pound of downs costs it worth about thirty bucks, but a pound of crushed feathers is worth a buck. So if I put a pound of crushed feathers in a pillow, you will barry. You would never be able to tell

the difference. Absolutely, I put him in the store, you look at him side by side, You can't tell this difference because there just is. Because there's well over time, you can tell the difference. But sitting in the store you can't tell. And and so there's an enormous temptation to put the wrong things in the pillows because obviously if you cheat a little bit, your margins go through the roof and you get a spot check and you

get people checks. No, the retailers don't check. Why don't the real tailers check because they don't give a rip. This is like tailors don't care about quality. I care about his cash flow out, So nobody checks. And so the whole industry was characterized by cheating. And many of our biggest competitors were relentless cheaters. And my dad wouldn't cheat. He just wouldn't refuse. And he just felt strongly like doing it the right way over time would be the

way to go. And did retailers recognized that? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah they did. And over time he was right. We kicked everybody's butt. Um. There was a big competitor in North Carolina or South Carolina, which was like the name brand in the space gone eventually went bankrupt. Were they were they cheaters? You know politexs to their credit where they did not cheat? So why did how did they get uh? You know, they you know, uh, they went out of they went out of business. I think just

because they overreached. They you know, they they made some bad strategic decisions and got disfocused. Um, but the cheaters largely went away. And and short termam it's an issue. It's frustrating and compete with Yeah, but long term you can't survive that way. Yeah. Yeah. And it was a great you know, it was a great lesson and um, you know, it's a great life lesson. So those are

the mentors. What investors influenced you investors? Well, you know my partners you know too, very Pete Higgins, who was one of the co presidents at Microsoft in the day with he was in the office of the President with res when when Jeff Raikes went on to run the foundation and Steve Balmer obviously uh ended up being the president. Unbelievably smart guy. And my partner Mike Slade, who went to Yeah. So Mike and Pete I believe were the

first two MBA's Microsoft hired. They went to Stanford Business School together and they both you know, got offers from Balmer together and ear no, no, early early eighties eighty one or something like that. That's crazy, Yeah, long time ago.

So both very very early Microsoft executives and Mike. So Pete stayed at Microsoft and went all the way to the top and Mike ended up running the Apple business for Microsoft, often befriended Steve Jobs, and then ended up as the vice president marketing for Next Computer I remember that right. And then after that came back and ran a big internet company, UM for Paul Allen Um one of the original oginal who left when he got a and then survived and has since become a philanthropist Flash

VC as well. And then ventures is that Yeah, And then Mike went back as a sort of a consultant Apple and was a non he was he was a member of the Apple executive committee, but as a non employee, so and so sort of stayed close to that. But anyway, they're just they're incredibly smart people and I'm lucky to get to collaborate with them. What are some of your favorite books? Um? Well, business books. I don't think he can beat Michael Porter for strategy. I think his book

Competitive Strategy is the best book on strategy ever written. Yeah, Michael Porter Competitive Strategy Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors. Um and uh. But as a student of strategy, I think that you know, I've read a ton of military strategy books, and you know everybody read yeah, and all that stuff, But there's all sorts of great stuff available. In fact, one of my favorites is the is the is the Marine Corps book uh called just called war Fighting.

It's an amazing book on strategy. Is yeah, really really fun. And then you know, I read a ton of uh I don't read much fiction, but I read a ton of nonfiction, nonfiction about the issues that interest me. And um uh you know a very interesting um ah book um that I just uh read as something called the End of Power, The End of Power moist is Nain and you know, and and and his thesis is that

basically the nature of power is changing over time. So in the in the day, some people that in the good old days, people had real power, which is you will do this or I will kill you. Okay, that's good power. Today, um, it's more like, gosh, i'd love for you to do this, and by the way, it's your idea, and won't we all be happy if we

do this together? So it's more from persuasive to persuasiveness, right, and and and and that is an extraordinarily interesting trend in terms of how we manage UH countries, enterprises, society, so on and so forth. And and and something really worth thinking very very carefully about, if you want to change, if you want to affect society, if you Since you like the military books, I'm gonna recommend an odd one

that you may find interesting. It's less than ten years old, called a Genius for Deception, and it's the history of intel and counterintell and things like camouflage and counterspying, mostly about the Brits, but the US and the Germans, which also a Genius for deception. It's really a fat One of these fastening stories tells the story during World One and World War Two, all sorts of fascinating different stories

about what happened. But there was one particular German I guess the World War One equivalent of a pans Ner panzer movement. Maybe it was early World War Two where they have these giant tarps there are three hundred yards square, and they're moving tanks and men during the so they're not seen by spotter planes. And it's how all camouflage came about. And some of the stuff is just you just it's always been here, so you assumed it's always been here, but it turns out that's not true. Some

of the stuff didn't exist a hundred years ago. Someone had created It's really it's really quite fascinating. I'll send you I'll send you a link to the book on Amazon. Um what, um, what do you like to do during your downtime? Well, I have a family and a couple of kids, and so we rip around doing fun things. You know. I live in the Pacific Northwest, so we're very outdoorsy. We ski, we hike, We my son and

I are fanatic fly fisherman. Oh really yeah, we do a lot of salmon and what else with trout and stuff like that. Um, uh and uh. I have a preponderance of boats, so we we we spent a lot of time on boat or power. I have a preponderance of boats because it turns out to be easier to buy boats than sail boats. Someone someone told me that a boater's favorite boat is his second to last boat. Maybe you should just keep working away up until you go too far. I have a little runabout. I keep

over here. I love sailing, but in this part of the country, you got again in start the engine and go yeah, no, no, for sure. But you know, I just spent a week in the Caribbean with a bunch of my friends diving and fly fishing on what we were in the exumas in the Bahamas. Yeah, and uh, then then another week with my wife and three other couples messing around, you know, seeing stuff and that that sounds like fun. Yeah, doing We do a lot of

stuff like that. So what sort of advice would you give to I keep using the word millennial, but just anybody graduating college and starting out their career, what sort of advice would you would you give to them? Today? That's a tough one people. You know what I was I was watching, uh rewatching the thing that they did on John Adams based on the David mcculloughbook. One of the guys in my office just finished it has not

stopped raving about it. And John Adams said to his children, be good, do good words to live by, not not bad advice, bad advice, Be good, do good, you know, trying to make a difference in the world, Try to make a you know, try to leave the place better than you found it. Uh. You know, I just think that you know, I have a positive impact. Yeah, I have a positive impact. So since you don't be a sociopath, could be a juror. That's a relatively relatively simple, good

advice for everybody. So you've essentially joined the VC industry twenty something years ago. So what's changed over the course of of your career as a as a venture capitalist. Well, there are a lot more people in it, uh, in various ways. You know, there's a lot more. I mean, one of the things that's happened to the world is that we we are living in an age of capital superabundance, right, Like,

so here's a fascinating thing. Very so when I when I was born, the value of the entire SMP UH to the market capital r SMP to the population of the United States was a thousand dollars to one, Right, there was a thousand dollars of SMP market cap every man, woman and child in the United States. But when I graduated from high school, it was three thousand dollars and woman and child. Today it's sixty thou dollars and women and child. Yeah, that's amazing. Now, some of that clearly globalization.

There are all sorts of factors at play, but that's that's a huge financialization of the economy of the economy, and and and and and and and that, by the way, that's just the SMP five right, that that's not the other capital available. And so what you have is an enormous amount of capital slashing around um the world uh, looking for uses for itself. And so there's a lot of people in the in the deploying capital business. And

that's a good thing in a lot of ways. But certainly um the business has become more competitive in that sense. There there people you know below you know, above you who are deploying much bigger uh slugs of capital. And there are a million people below you who will do you know, any old thing from five bucks to you know, five thousand, whatever it is. So so there's that I would say that, you know, the one really the thing that's really changed about the world, and in particularly the

internet powered world. That's a hard lesson to embed in your brain. If you started out a long time ago, which is it's so big, you'd be amazed what will work? Right? Things that twenty years ago sounded like insane tiny ideas and insane tiny niches turned into giant enterprises today because with six billion people online spending trillions dollars whatever it is, you can make a business out of the craziest stuff, and it is it never fails to surprise you what

turns into a giant idea. I mean, for the life of me, I can't figure out how Pinterest became a thing for Can you imagine the first pitch on Twitter? And I are too old? Yeah, yeah, yeah, can you imagine the first pitch on Twitter? Right now? I use Twitter every day, as do you write? Well, can you imagine the first pitch which is like, well, it's short message servicing, but we're gonna take what people send back

and forth on phones and posted publicly. Yeah, okay, thanks, next next, you know, like you know, you just and here it is, right, and now Twitter has its challenges, but it's still a twenty seven billion dollar company. It's a huge market gap, and the bed is somehow they're going to figure out how to monetize that and other than sell themselves to Google. So you often have to you know, I often have to catch myself thank you. It's the stupid tiny idea And then you think, oh

my god. You know, like who knows the Internet teaches you humility? Humility if nothing else I've heard. I've heard many of VC say that, and I forgot which fairly well regarded VC firm publishes their lists every year of here's what we said no to, aren't we dumb? And it's like we passed on Apple, but we thought Cisco

is terrible, and you know that sort of stuff. And those are real names from the list exactly, And for sure, anybody who's honest has that list, right, it's a random mass to what works and what anybody has a list of things where you're like, I passed on what, you know, like what was I thinking? Of course, because you looked at it and it sounded idiotic. And who's gonna wait, you expect people to pin stuff up that they've seen

elsewhere and somehow that's gonna make money. Yeah, and you know, let let me give you an example, so of just you know, random luck. So, so, my wife and I three years ago decided that we needed to make a significant donation to our local children's hospital because we had never done it. It's a very important civic institution, and we just do these sorts of things. We say, you know, where should we send the money? Uh, my wife's one

of my wife's very closest friends on the board. She sets us up with a meeting with the people who run research for children, including the guy in charge of cancer research. This guy makes his pitch. I see a lot of pitches buried, and I'm like, Okay, that guy is worth backing. So we give them like the it's like it's a million dollar donation or something like that.

Given the money, and I'm like, but you know, look, I'm a venture capitalist, so I gotta ask who owns the I P And they're like, well, you know, it turns out there is this entity that you could invest in. So I throw some money in, right, Why wouldn't you like, because it's ammunotherapy and this guy and the and the and and and you know, we gave him money to

pursue his research and go into human trials. But the pitch was so compelling that you were like, look, if if you're really going to your cancer here, like, surely I want to make a bet, right, So I make a bet. But I pitched this to my partners and I'm like, look, this is this thing. I know nothing about, nothing about this nothing. I've never made an investment, zero background. I really like the guy. I'm I'm making an investment. What do you guys think? They're like, you've lost your mind.

You you're an idiot. Don't do it, but I did. Fast forward. They cured cancer. Okay, now, when you say they cured cancer, so this cured a specific type of so so so Mike Jensen's research at children. They have now treated thirty kids who were on death store with leukemia. In ninety five percent of the cases, these full remission, real remission for Is it just for that one? Yeah, these kinds of a couple of kinds of leukemia, full

remission meantime. Meantime, the company gets reconstituted in this thing called Juno Therapeutics, and it's now worth six billions and your partners have no money, and well no, but they made a good They made a good they made a good venture capital decision. They have an expertise in that space. You know nothing about it. You've never made an investment in biotech. This is a random, idiotic bet based on an emotional response you had to a guy. Well, I

was lucky at random luck. That was where we began. The conversation was with combination of skill plus lot, so there was a little bit of instinct. You saw something after look the whole I'm not a I love Malcolm Gladwell's writings, but I know a lot of them come with an asterisk. This was an outlier case where you've seen ten thousands of VC pitches and here's a guy that basically, this guy seems to know it's the real deal, and you basically went with it. And so I'm an

investor in Juno Therapeutics at a very early stage. And a very early stage you may join the trace com uh you know group after all, for those of you who are in Fantasilicon Valley, it's a hilarious digression in the show. Um. And finally, my final question, which I asked all my guests, what do you know about your chosen field and let's call it investing and venture capitalist that you wish you knew when you began your career? Oh golly, uh, it's a question that provokes thought on

a lot of people. So, you know, so the economy isn't money. I wish, I wish I understood better that the economy isn't money. It's people, right, explain that a little farther. That's interesting about people. It's about human capacity

and capability, it's about human capital. Yeah, just like so you don't invest in a company, you invest in a group of human beings working together, and if you pick the right human beings who know how to work together in the right way, you know, the chances of success

are much higher. And I think that just having better people skills, being able to read people better, being able to understand people that are, being able to understand their emotions better, uh, is you know, in investing, And I think in every domain in life an enormous advantage empathy, you know, just yeah, you know, just not like, oh,

look at the spreadsheet, Look at the hockey stick. You know, the spreadsheet says it's gonna go here, but you know, but not noticing that those two hate each other, right, the two guys that just presented this plan hate each other, and they're gonna last fifteen minutes working together, like fifteen minutes after you put the three million in that they're going to be in some war and you're gonna get need to get rid of one of them, right, Like,

not noticing that bad that that is that is a challenge. Nick. I can't begin to thank you enough for your time You've been You've been so generous. Give us a once over of where everybody can find you on Twitter or your website. Yeah, I'm an hour at Nick Hannahur on Twitter. Um, I do have a website. I think it's Nick han Our. You have a dash in the middle of Yeah, I think some some some other Nick Hannaur clown took you should be buying. I should? I should track that guy down.

You should just be han out. You should? That should be your domain com. And then you know, we have my you know, I have a team of people who work on politics with me, and that entity is called Civic Ventures and it's very much like civil Ventures dot com, civic ventures dot org dot org and uh and our goal is to be do what we do in the financial in the in the in the business world, to be uh, you know, sort of disruptive in the civic sphere, right,

creative disrupt creative destruction in the civic sphere. That sounds that sounds quite fascinating. So thank you again for being so generous with your time. Thank you for those for those of you who are here with us to the ends you and you're enjoying the sort of conversation and if you've toughed it out for this whole time, you must be enjoying our conversation. Look an inch higher or an inch lower on iTunes you'll see all the rest

of our UM shows. You're coming up on a year, so you have to be like forty five or forty six on the list of shows we've done. Be sure and check out my daily column at Bloomberg View dot com. Follow me on Twitter at rid Halts, or go to my blog at results dot com. I'm Barry Results. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio