0:01[music] Hello Tony, welcome on Kids Versus Founders. How are you doing?
0:09That's great. Thanks for having me, Landra. I really appreciate it. Looking forward to just talking to you and seeing how might be able to give you some some advice. You know, I've been doing this a long time.
0:21Okay, so let's go to the first questions. So, you helped make products like the iPod, the iPhone, and Nest, of course. So, do you have a mistake in one of those projects that taught you more than a success?
0:34Well, yes, failures always teach you more than successes. And so, you know, there's those three projects that you talked about and those were successes.
0:44So, there's some learnings there, but really the learning that I had where I had the biggest failure was at a company called General Magic. And General Magic was creating the iPhone 15 years too early. So, it was the team that created the Macintosh went to go and create an iPhone just 15 years too early. And there's a whole documentary about General Magic and the failure and everything we learned there. It's called General Magic the Movie. And I suggest
1:12that you and all your viewers, especially your age, watch it because what it shows is I was more your age than I am now when I was at General Magic. And it showed that we had a tremendous, tremendous failure. We learned all kinds of things about how to structure a team, a project, how to define a product, all kinds of things.
1:30And it's a really, really instructive documentary. But it also shows that even through failure and all the people who were at the company, myself included, we took that failure and we learned from it and we created things like the iPhone, we created Android, we created all those things. So I suggest that you guys watch that General Magic movie and you can really learn a lot more about failure and how you learn.
1:55I will. So you are now you're doing something called Build Collective, right?
2:00And so Build Collective says you guys invest money and time into startup, but what does the time part actually look like when you help a founder?
2:10Right. So for us because we invest in deep technology that's technology that's you know like semiconductors and materials and chemicals and and things that can really dramatically change the world we see. So what we do is those technologies those new breakthroughs they can be applied to many different products many different industries and what we do and our team there's Anton and Elise myself we go in with the
2:40companies that we invest in and help them translate their breakthrough technology into applications into words so they just don't go oh look at this great breakthrough. It's like what does it mean for a general person? Like how is it going to change their life? How is it going to make things better on the planet? How is it going to make better things in health? So what we do is we help all these incredible engineers and researchers basically do marketing to communicate what it is they do. And so
3:09that's the time that we spend. And then we also help them with like hiring and help them because they're because they're entrepreneurs and maybe a lot of them are firsttime entrepreneurs. they might not know what an org chart looks like or how to do legal or patents or how to do certain financing. So, we have a lot of experience on those things to be able to help and and and give advice to, you know, hopefully get them to be more successful.
3:34And do do you guys also like help them find like hire people or is it more like sometimes marketing? Sometimes if we have somebody if it's in our if it's in our expertise like let's say it's certain engineering or manufacturer marketing maybe um and maybe we have names of people because we have large networks now that because we've been in the we've been in the industry 20 30 years you meet a lot of people and maybe we can help with people we know.
4:03Yeah. And so building things like one of the most important skills is of course curiosity and love for mostly for builders. So, do you think AI will make the next generation more curious or less curious?
4:18I think it's going to do both, but it's a great question. So, people who really learn the material that they're learning in school and then taking the test. And there's other people who they do the homework, but all they do is they just look in the text and then they just write down the answers. And so, that's really the same. You only learn if you have a productive struggle through learning. And so those people who use the tools to help them learn and learn more deeply and learn more details and
4:46really get beyond maybe what you're getting taught in school. If you're able to use those tools to help you learn, that's great. If you're using the tools to replace learning, to replace research, to replace you thinking and thinking critically about things, and it gives you the answers, right? AI should be in service to help you do research to find new answers to problems who've never been, you know, have never been thought about as opposed to just answering things, right? It's kind of
5:15like it's just testing cheating on a test, right? That's not that you can you could get a grade and you can pass, but does that really help you advance with your whole career?
5:26Yeah. So, it's basically do you use AI to help you or to give you the answer?
5:31Correct. And so kids my age when they think about a lot of founders, they think about people with a lot a lot a lot of money. But do founders actually have that much money or make that much money?
5:44Okay. First, you hear about these companies raising billions of dollars now cuz that's what AI needs. They're billions of dollars and everything. Like look at these people. They own 10% of this company that's worth a billion dollars. So they're worth a hundred million. But really that's just paper. It's just all value that's on paper.
6:00They can't go take that to a bank and then get money for it. And a lot of times when you see all these startup companies and startup, they're living in in small houses. They're driving themselves to work every day in their old car that they had from college or whatever. They do have money in the bank, but they're using that to build the company that they're trying to do.
6:21And if and only if they are successful and they have an exit which means a company buys their company they have a you know an IPO where they go to the stock market and sell their shares typically they won't see any money and that that's just because they raise money doesn't mean they have money and if I know I remember myself and many of our entrepreneurs they're not making incredible salaries either for the the startups they're making you know some
6:49modest amount for what it is. They can't be making a lot because the the cash has to be preserved, the investment has to be preserved to build the company, not to pay exorbitant wages to everyone. So, no, you know, most founders, most startup people, unless they have an exit, they don't have a lot of money.
7:07I was lucky that you sent me your book, Build, and you wrote after we met last year at First Minute Capital. And in that book, one chapter stood out to me.
7:17It's the chapter, you only have one customer. So in that chapter you say that the company they need to choose between B2B or B2C and all those other and so right now with open EI you know they're very good at B2C and entropic and B2B do you think one will be able to achieve both so very big companies let's say it's Microsoft Microsoft has lots of BTOC businesses Microsoft Word office but it
7:45also goes to some consumers okay but they also have Xbox And that's only consumers. That's not business, right?
7:52And so if you're a very very large company, you could have multiple things. Apple has a lot of business sales, but at the end of the day, Apple is a consumer company. Microsoft is more of a B2B company than it is a consumer company in a way, right? And so if you're really big, you can be both, but you can't start that way. So if you're a small company, you have to pick a lane.
8:14Now over time, maybe it happens, but it takes years. Microsoft wasn't a consumer company for I think you know until 1995 really and they started in 19 I think 76 or 75. So that was 20 years before they were able to do both. When you're small and you're a startup you need to pick one or the other because the nature of your company and what you do is defined by one lane or the other and they're very different in how you set up your company and how you sell and how you
8:44make your products if you're a B toC versus a B2B.
8:47Yeah. But just like when you're on the road and then there are more lanes, but at the first you need to choose and then you get on the mega highway because your company is very big and then you can change lanes and but you still have to have focus in each lane. You got to have focus, right? And so it's it is a challenge though, you know, to run two units. And you can see today in Microsoft really they're almost almost entirely a B2B now to tell you
9:15the truth. And then they just have Xbox. They don't have a lot of other consumer things. They don't sell Windows anymore, Microsoft Word or Excel. You can use, you know, Google Sheets and Google stuff. So you don't need anything. So really Microsoft is almost all businessto business. And in this case, it's also cloud business.
9:33And do you think open air already does both and anthropic?
9:36You hit it right on the head. You're very observant. Anthropic is clearly B2B.
9:42Yeah, they're doing a they're doing a great job of understanding who their customer is, selecting and building products for various B2B companies, right? B2B. Open AAI doesn't know who their customer is.
9:57Open AI. They started as a technology research lab and then they said, "Oh, we have a chatbot and now we're going to do Sora and they c k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k killed that. And then they said they were going to do x-rated chat bots and then they said they were going to do financial services and then they're going to do coding and they're going to do ads, too. They don't know who they serve. They really don't know who they serve yet. and they're watching Anthropic and copying Anthropic now because Anthropic's figured it out. But
10:24they they still have these vestigages of consumer cuz at the end of the day, I don't think that most consumers will pay for these tools. They're going to come for free.
10:35So consumers are not going to pay for AI tools, but businesses will. And I think all these very expensive AI tools are going to only be afforded by businesses cuz people are not going to be able to justify the expense. So actually the lesson is you need to choose your lane.
10:50You need to you need to choose your lane even if you have billions of dollars because open AI is still a startup. They need to choose their lane. And now they're saying they're doing a consumer hardware and they're doing this like they're just too much cash, no focus, and they're burning a lot. So we'll stay tuned and see what happens.
11:07And now we'll continue to the final and last question. Do you have any final advice to give a 13-year-old who likes to build things, companies, products, a bit of everything? But what's one advice you can give every 13-year-old watching this?
11:21Learn, learn, learn, be very curious, ask lots of questions, and find a mentor. Someone who might be a little older than you who've done it. Like they could be maybe a big brother or a big sister, and they can help you as you go through puberty and adolescence and everything. Well, if you're trying to start a company or you want to have big ideas, find somebody. Maybe it's a teacher, maybe it's someone else who can help you to to grow in the way you want
11:50to grow in terms of building whatever it is you want to build. So stay curious.
11:54Know that you can build things. I had my first startup company in second grade, but I had my first technical startup company when I was in high school, right? And so not much older than you. I was, I don't know, 16 or so. So you can have it. You can do these things and don't just think you need to be an adult and you have to have certain experience or whatever else or I have to have a degree from this certain university.
12:16Just be curious and build and don't worry about failing. You're going to learn through failure and it's okay to fail as long as you keep going. If you fail and you give up, well, that's failure. But if you fail and you learn and you keep going, that's the best way to find success. Because the first 10 years of my career was all failure. like General Magic was the first one, but it ended up with the iPod and then iPhone and so on. So don't be discouraged if you fail. That's the way you learn. Just
12:45like how you learn to walk. When you learn to walk, you failed at walking a thousand times before you were able to walk and then run. Well, that's how life is as well. Don't just think that you need to get an A+ on every test and then life will be success. That is not a guarantee of success at all. All right, so that was the last question. Thank you so much for being here.
13:06Do you have anything you want to say?
13:08Just say, "Hey, go build everybody. Go build. Build your dreams." All right. And I wish you only the best of luck cuz it's it's an incredibly fun experience to be able to build your own things and change the world. So, go for it.
13:21This was Kids Versus Founder. Have a good time. Bye-bye. [music]
