Jan 11, 2021
Avoiding Medical School, Amazon, and Soulless Consulting
Disclaimer: This is just my opinion. It is a reflection of how I — as a human being with (relatively) little time on this earth — plan to live my life. It is not meant to denigrate other people’s “missions” in life. We just have different “missions”. That’s it :-)
I recently listened to the podcast Yang Speaks, the popular audio interview podcast by former Democratic candidate for President of the United States Andrew Yang. It was my first listen to the podcast, and the first introduction to Chamath Palihapitiya, venture capitalist, CEO of Social Capital, and minority stakeholder in the Golden State Warriors, to boot.
During part of the podcast, Andrew probes Chamath about why his fund at Social Capital has decided to tackle “thorny, difficult, and human” problems of education and healthcare. It was this part of the podcast where Chamath and Andrew seem to spiritually align, and where Chamath’s response floored me because I also felt aligned in this vision. Chamath, in a calm and direct tone, says:
“People’s own simplified incentives kick in and innovation stops.”
Wait a second: isn’t this what capitalism is all about? People following their own incentives to get what they want and leave everyone else in the dust? Chamath argues that no, we have abandoned the philosophy of capital and markets, and that is to serve others' interests for our own benefit.
The Two-Sided Equation…with One Side Erased
As the podcast proceeds, Chamath talks about how capital can be allocated to solve difficult problems, but these problems like curing cancer, fixing our broken education system, and making ethical and useful AI for all are not problems of capital per se, but rather, they are human capital problems. Chamath notes:
The single biggest thing America has going right now — going against it — is that we have four or five companies — Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Google — that sucks up all of the talented, technical human capital[…]
If you’re a smart, young kid who knows how to code or [do something unique], how do you turn around to your family and tell them you’re going to work for a startup for $80,000 a year versus getting paid $1 million a year? It’s really impossible.
Andrew kind of goofily laughs at this because honestly, he knows it’s true; he wrote a whole book about it (see here).
And listen, I get it, I have friends that work for these large companies who also didn’t come from means, but, again, to pull on Chamath’s words, “what products are they working on?” Moreover, are they making the world a better place through low prices on the largest e-commerce platform that has been known to stamp out their competition? Are they putting creative knowledge to work to help others? The short answer is no. Usually, they are funneled into careers that help the “financialized systems” (again, Chamath’s phrase) we have all come to hate. The optimization of a search algorithm or the consultation of a product pipeline. Ugh, the horror.
Why, Even with Student Debt, I’ll Choose A Startup (Or Just Build It Myself)
As I sit back and think about the people who I went to college with, an unusual amount of people are either in medical school, business school or at one of these large companies. These are extremely bright people, but they’ve settled for life in systems that are either a) broken or b) self-aggrandizing (monetarily or socially) or both. I’m personally not interested in abetting broken systems or making myself rich.
I understand that people have their own reasons for choosing the paths that they do; I personally sit on more than $20,000 worth of student debt. It is absolutely soul-crushing sometimes. But I — like the masses of people I went to school with — am also sitting on some creative thoughts. This is honestly not unique nor special.
But, what happens to those thoughts when they wither on the vine and die? They never get known; they never even have the possibility of making a difference. I would love to see other people’s ideas come to life, not just my own. And the best opportunity we have to make that happen is to leverage the extremely large amounts of capital in the market to get us there.
Let’s Build A Rocket to the Moon
Chamath ends his rant by saying that the Apollo project was a culmination of us all working together: we had sparse federal regulations on companies, a trusted public-private sector relationship, and the “ability to explore.”
He concludes that this never-ending prism through which we envisioned all the technologies that would get us to the moon actually spawned so many new ideas through many small startups. The carry-on effect has been that it got us into space, on the moon, back again, and maybe even more.
The term “rocketship” is used a lot in the startup world. But, I want to reclaim it. I hope that the days are gone where we “ride rocketships of growth” to exceedingly high evaluations, and we ride those same rocketships to exceedingly valued market solutions to things cynics and skeptics say we can never solve: cancer, education for all, and climate change. The rocketships are out there, but they shouldn’t be deconstructed before the parts have reached to the hangar.
