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Timing and Trends: Winning at the Long Game of Entrepreneurship
6 Plays1 month ago
In this episode of Voice of Growth, Manny sits down with Bob Griffin — entrepreneur, investor, technologist, and Executive Director of the McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Arizona. Bob reflects on a career that includes founding and selling multiple companies, navigating the corporate worlds of IBM and Digital, and writing prescient analysis on the AI arms race years before it reached mainstream attention.
The conversation explores why survival is the first rule of entrepreneurship, how founders misunderstand timing, and why trends matter more than tactics.
Bob and Manny also examine the psychological burden entrepreneurs carry in an increasingly politicized, technologically volatile world — and how Stoic principles help leaders focus on what they can control while staying grounded and ethical.
This episode is a masterclass in long-term thinking, pattern recognition, and resilient leadership.
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Transcript
Growth and Technology's Role in Change
00:00:04
Speaker
The voice of growth, mastering the mind and market.
00:00:10
Speaker
Develop technology that would change the world.
Luck, Data, and Business Insights
00:00:14
Speaker
Never underestimate the value of luck. I really believe in the power of big data. That's what I refer to as my half a billion dollar dinner.
00:00:23
Speaker
Oh my God, they blackened the skies with analysts to come in and do due diligence.
Entrepreneurial Leadership and Education
00:00:28
Speaker
Let's start our own fund and let's do this again. I think if we aren't leading that charge, we are going to be well behind the curve and we'll never catch up.
00:00:42
Speaker
But I'm really happy being able to impart the knowledge that I learned to the next generation of entrepreneurs. And that was my goal. There are a few things in life that you can control.
Trends, Motivation, and Corporate Experiences
00:00:54
Speaker
You know, I'm a big believer in trends.
00:00:59
Speaker
The greatest aphrodisiac outside of money is power.
00:01:06
Speaker
Failure is not death. In fact, you learn a lot from failing, but fail fast.
00:01:13
Speaker
He said, I'll give you 250 million cash
00:01:18
Speaker
Welcome to the podcast, Bob. I've really been looking forward to this opportunity to chat with you. I appreciate your insights and your experience across many levels, having worked in big corporate domains, having taken the small startup Knowledge Computing Corporation to the next level, having worked for IBM, having worked for Diamond Ventures and DVI Equity Partners, supporting tons of entrepreneurs, startups, and...
00:01:46
Speaker
Most recently, taking the helm of the University of Arizona's McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship as their executive director.
Digital Equipment Corporation's PC Revolution Miss
00:01:57
Speaker
Now, tell us, Bob, having had all that experience in the corporate domain, why the Center for Entrepreneurship? Why U of A and why now? Okay. um So I've been fortunate in my career to do a bunch of um successful and profitable endeavors.
00:02:16
Speaker
Started out my career after getting out of the s service in 76, my God. um And went to work for a large computer company called Digital Equipment Corporation. At the time it was a $13 billion, dollars guys that developed the mini computer.
00:02:33
Speaker
And I was thoroughly convinced that that that was going to be my um retirement. I was going to work there forever. I worked there for 17 years and was and said, this is this is going to be my future.
00:02:44
Speaker
um And then all of a sudden, um things started to go bad with the company. And it was because no matter how big you are, if you fail to recognize disintermediating technologies or you fail to understand the importance of cash and things like that, that um that can cause the end pretty quickly.
00:03:07
Speaker
And the disintermediating technology that digital equipment failed to recognize was the PC revolution. was that, hey, these new personal computers are are coming out and they can displace what we are doing. um And the the irony behind it is they didn't fail to recognize it once. They failed to recognize it three times because they had multiple times to make changes.
Founding and Exiting Tech Companies
00:03:30
Speaker
My last a gig at Digital, I was the CIO, and I kept raising the alarm to say, we've got to do more. We've got to take the advantage. The true irony behind it is they were actually acquired by Compaq Computer, which, as you remember, was a mini computer company, who then got acquired by Hewlett Packard.
00:03:49
Speaker
So that opened up a lot of eyes in in ah in my personal life. And I said, look, um Maybe it's time for me to kind of do my own thing.
00:04:02
Speaker
Right. i learned an amazing amount, got a great education from working there for 17 years. ah But maybe I can do something on my own. So myself, along with a good friend of mine at Boston Consulting and a third friend of ours that was also a CIO of a different division of digital, formed our first company.
00:04:19
Speaker
We raised money from Greylock and we went to ah to start and you know develop technology that would change the world. We've developed some tech around um around the first yeah ERP systems because we we were really focused on, um you know, what does what does the future look like? And we believe in the very early 90s that there was this thing coming that we all used to work on called the ARPANET that was going to become something commercial called the Internet.
00:04:53
Speaker
Yeah. And how do we take advantage of that? We said, you know what? Customer relationship management would be a great vehicle for that. So we started our first company, ended up selling it to a company called Kana. That was my first exit.
00:05:06
Speaker
I got recruited to go down to Washington, D.C. and do a company that was just acquired by Eastman Kodak around digital asset management. um I took the took the helm of that, ran that for several years, spun it out of Kodak, um eventually ah sold the company to um to a piece of it to Microsoft or Corbis at the time.
00:05:30
Speaker
Sold a piece of it off to Mark Getty at Getty Images because we did digital asset management. we were the first We created the first royalty and stock photography website on the internet. Wow. um and then we sold the the hosting services to manage people's assets long before they had cloud uh to a company called um jupy communications who you probably are familiar with yeah um that's when i decided i was going to retire and that was all of i
Returning to Entrepreneurship in Tucson
00:05:57
Speaker
think i may have been 40 41. um forty forty um
00:06:01
Speaker
ah That lasted about three weeks. And I said, I just have to do something. This is crazy. um That's what what kind of caused me to um to come to Tucson. Because we'd done it originally in Boston.
00:06:17
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And then Kodak recruited me down to Washington, D.C., My folks retired here in Tucson and I and my wife went to undergraduate school here in Tucson. and So we had familiarization. I said, you know, it's a great place to live.
00:06:30
Speaker
um We can get back there. I can kind of help work with my dad. He had just gotten sick and see if we can spend some time together. and that's what brought us here. um And I said to Kathy, I said, look, you know,
00:06:42
Speaker
i Don't need to really work. This will be great. You know, we can do all these wonderful things. can go hiking. telling you, after about 40 days of this, my wife said, get out of the house. You're making me crazy. You kind you follow me around every day.
00:06:55
Speaker
um And so I wrote a letter. to every venture capital firm in Tucson. Now, this is 25 years ago, okay? ah There weren't any venture capital yeah companies in Tucson. There was Valley Ventures, um which was a very small a venture that ah a couple of folks worked at. There was Diamond Ventures.
00:07:20
Speaker
Um, and, uh, for those of you who are familiar with Diamond Ventures, it was really more of a real estate right family office. But the interesting thing when I got to work, uh, when I got to have a conversation with Mr. Diamond, um, he explained that, um, what you really need to do is make a connection with the university because, um, that's where, that's where the business community is really kind of innovating around.
00:07:48
Speaker
So I met ah Mark Zupan, who was the dean of the business school at the time. And, um, we were having, lunch together. That's how I met him. We had lunch and he said, look, would you like to do some guest lecturing at the university? I said, yeah, that'd be great.
00:08:02
Speaker
Um, and, um, you know It was interesting because during one of our lunch sessions, Mark said, you know, I've got this professor that started this company called Knowledge Computing Corporation.
00:08:13
Speaker
He raised a bunch of money. Some of it was raised by Diamond Ventures. That was the largest investor in it. They burned through the money. They're down to just a few, um they're down to six people or so. Why don't you take a look at them and see what you think?
00:08:29
Speaker
I said, sure. Sure. So I took a look at them and I sat down with ah with the CEO of the time, the founder, and I said, look, I'd be happy to do an audit for you. I'll tell you what you got, what you don't have, give you some ideas.
00:08:42
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um After doing the audit, I came back to him. said, look, I got some good news for you and i got some bad news for you. I said, the good news is um you've got some interesting technology here around bringing disparate data sources and databases together.
00:08:55
Speaker
The problem is you're trying to do, which is typical of an entrepreneur that is a first-time entrepreneur, trying to be all things to all people. You've really got to get focused on one thing. And I was lecturing and I spoke of this company and one of the people in my class was a sergeant from Tucson PD.
Knowledge Computing and Law Enforcement Impact
00:09:14
Speaker
And he said, geez, you know, we could use something like that to help in the law enforcement sector. I said, so I've done some more investigation for you. You could build a product around...
00:09:23
Speaker
bringing together disparate databases and so forth. I said, dumb the challenges that you got is all student code. It's been written from by your students. yeah That means you've got to commercialize it. You've got to rewrite it.
00:09:38
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um From a licensing perspective, you're licensing technology from the university that you're not even using. So my advice to you is to give it back or figure out what you want to do with it.
00:09:48
Speaker
I said, um but you've got a real opportunity here and there's a big market. I said, the real bad news is the way I calculate it you can make one more payroll. and And he said, well, why don't you come along and why don't why don't you run it for us? And I said, well, I need to talk to your investors. He said well, the largest investor is Diamond.
00:10:06
Speaker
So I went off and I had a conversation with with Donald and I said, them he said, we like the idea of you guys of you running it. Why don't you go do that? And i said, I'm retired, Donald. And he said, no, no, seriously, why you run it? said, no, i' really, seriously, I'm retired. He said, no, you're not, Bob.
00:10:22
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And I said, you're right, I'm really not. He said, dumb he said, why don't you run it? I said, I'll tell you what, I would run it, but under certain conditions. And one of those conditions is, you got to give me some walking around money. I can't, I can't afford to miss payroll. yeah I said, if you're willing to do that, I said, I'm willing to ah contractually put together a plan that would work for both of us and so forth.
00:10:46
Speaker
And he said, I'll tell you what. He said, I'll give you a... How much do you think you need? I said, I need a quarter of a million dollars. I said, and I won't even take a salary until I get the company profitable. He said, okay. He said, but I want to reserve the right to put another one and a half million in at my discretion in the same terms that we're talking about today within the next 12 to 18 months. said...
00:11:06
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twelve to eighteen months i said Tell you what, as long as I'm not dilutive, I'm okay with that. And he said, that's a fair deal. So, um, uh, I set, I set out to build the technology, build the company. Um, that's what we did.
00:11:23
Speaker
We got, I will tell you, you know, never underestimate the value of luck.
Growth Through Law Enforcement Success
00:11:28
Speaker
Um, we, there was a thing, called the Montgomery, uh, the Montgomery County sniper shooting.
00:11:34
Speaker
as many of people remember, in Washington, D.C., where these two individuals were randomly ah shooting people. um And that went on for quite some time. And the whole three states, Maryland and Virginia and D.C., were really in the midst of this, um you know, incredible ah panic and siege. People were scared. Everybody was scared because it was random. There was no.
00:12:02
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So um it was interesting because some of the new people I had hired into the new company, which we were going to rename Coplink because that was the product.
00:12:13
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ah Many of them were retired law enforcement. I discovered that one of the retired law enforcement went to and NEI, which is the FBI Academy, with ah Chief Moose, who was in charge of Montgomery County. So he was the guy that was responsible for all this.
00:12:32
Speaker
I said, look, why don't we reach out to Chief Moose and tell him we've got some technology that we think can be game-changing, and we'll just give it to you for free. So we got on the phone with him, and and Chuck, is it was a super nice guy, Chuck Moose, and he said, um he said, man, I'd love to take this, but I'm not sure I'm in charge. He said, I've got, yes, I'm the sheriff, but I've got the, um or I'm the chief, but I've got the FBI here, I've got the ATF here, I've got the Secret Service here, lots of people telling me what to do. He said, I'm not sure I'm in charge. I said, i said well, why don't we work with, um,
00:13:06
Speaker
with DOJ and see if but if we can get on the ground. So he got us connected with DOJ. DOJ ah funded servers for him for us to run the technology on.
00:13:18
Speaker
And about six days later, we got on the ground. So we take these series of disparate data sources that they were looking at, um things like um record management systems from Northern Virginia, record management systems from Maryland and Washington, D.C.
00:13:34
Speaker
We looked at.223 gun owners because it was a.223 weapon that was used. We looked at vehicles. We looked at a variety of different things. And we brought these all together and and then did— The power behind the technology is we could do identity deconfliction and ah object resolution. And so that when you were ah querying the database, you were getting a complete picture of anybody that was ever involved in any of those disparate sources.
00:14:01
Speaker
And the reason that was important is the 80-20 rule. 80% of all crime is committed by 20% of the criminal population. So they're probably in a system somewhere, Right. right If you remember back to the Montgomery County sniper shooting, ah there was a lot of crowd behavior. People kept, every time there was an incident, people would say, oh, I saw two white guys in a white box truck leaving.
00:14:24
Speaker
You know, and then once somebody said that, then every shooting, people would see the same thing. Right. So just, it was just. A lot of bias. Crowd bias. So we said, well, you know, if if
Business Growth and Major Acquisitions
00:14:34
Speaker
it's people and vehicles, let's run a query that says, show me any people's people or peoples or vehicles that have contact with police on the days of the shootings around, say, 45 minutes of the shootings.
00:14:51
Speaker
The first query came back with a blue Chevrolet Capri thread with New Jersey plates on it registered to a guy named John Allen Williams. And it came back because after the first shooting, which was a shooting of um e through a window at of michael's um a store, um this blue Chevrolet Caprice was field interviewed by so ah state police in Maryland at a rest stop in Baltimore because he was he and and his compatriot were sleeping in the car, and so they interviewed them.
00:15:27
Speaker
After the bus driver was shot in in Maryland, they drove that car through Washington, D.C. to escape, and they ran a red light, and they were what they call 1029 stopped. They were stopped, looked for wands and warrants. There were no wands warrants on the car, but they were in their system.
00:15:44
Speaker
After the shooting in Spotsylvania, Southern Virginia, they were picked up along with 400 cars in a roadblock. Okay. So the question is, why is the same car owned by the same people with out-of-town plates on it being picked up within 30 minutes of the shootings on three different days in three different states?
00:16:05
Speaker
That's not an anomaly. That's a pattern. And that changed the investigation. They were later, are our database was later subpoenaed. They were convicted, as you know.
00:16:15
Speaker
um They, um ah we, and at that, and from that point on, our business exploded. i mean, you know, we were on CNN. We were on headline news. We were in the arts and entertainment section of the New York Times. Don't know why. um And ah business, I started getting inbound calls now. you know, from Boston PD. Can you do for us what you did for Montgomery County? We won Los Angeles County. We won l LAPD. i did a lot of work with Bill Bratton, and he was advertising us across all of the major city chiefs.
00:16:49
Speaker
And we went from generating about $300,000 to $30 million in the next two years um That business continued to grow. And like any other high growth business, you get people that are interested.
00:17:06
Speaker
and I got a call one day from Silver Lake and they said, um we've really been we've been following you. We really like what you guys are doing. We'd like to send one of our people out to have a conversation. And they did. and um And it was a good conversation. I liked them. They liked us. And they said, look, we'd like we think you'd be a great fit for our portfolio.
00:17:26
Speaker
So ah we put together terms, put together a non-binding term sheet. They went in do do due diligence. In the middle of due diligence, they called me and said, hey, we just bought a little company out of the UK called I2. What you do for law enforcement, they do for the intelligence world.
00:17:44
Speaker
We'd like to put the two together and have you run the whole thing. What do you think? And I said, okay. Okay. That sounds fun. So we did. um That became what is the big I2.
00:17:57
Speaker
Ran that for several years um when I got a, um when I was at the Aspen Security Forum and i was on a panel and one of my panelists came to me afterwards and said, I really like what you guys do. um What do you think, would you be interested in M&A?
00:18:14
Speaker
and I said, you know, I get those kinds of questions all the time. it's if it's something meaningful, I'll go to the board. He said, I'll give you $250 million cash. I said, that's meaningful enough to the go to the board.
00:18:26
Speaker
ah did. We went to the board and the board said, you know, let's run a process. You know, maybe we could more than $250 million. said, okay. and said okay So we put together, we hired Jeffries. We put together a process. I went off and did, it was like a road show. I did 30 presentations in 30 days.
00:18:46
Speaker
After the presentation to IBM, I get a call the next day and said, um we really liked what we heard. ah Would you be willing to fly up and have dinner with ah this this individual named Craig, who is the GM for um this particular division?
00:19:04
Speaker
um And um if there's a good chemistry there, we want to come in with a preemptive offer. Okay. That's what I refer to as my half a billion dollar dinner.
00:19:14
Speaker
um We went up, we had this nice dinner. um Craig fell in love with the product. um IBM said, let us do due diligence. They sent 175 people to do due diligence. Yes. what Oh, my God. They blackened the skies with analysts to come in and do due diligence.
00:19:31
Speaker
ah We closed in 45 days. um And it was for nearly half a billion dollars. Part of that was I had to stay with IBM for four years. That was to that was the the agreement.
00:19:43
Speaker
um After the four years, one of my one of my Silver Lake friends was on the board of another
Mentorship and Entrepreneurship Insights
00:19:50
Speaker
company. They said, would you be willing to come do a turnaround or a reboot for us here in the Silicon Valley?
00:19:56
Speaker
In the meanwhile, Mr. Diamond reached out to me because, as you can imagine, he was the largest investor and did quite well. And he said, hey, Let's start our own fund and let's do this again. i explained to Don, doesn't always work like this. you know Step away from the the casino.
00:20:13
Speaker
He said, no, no, I, I, he said, look, I make all my money in real estate. You know, if I lose it all in investing, that's okay. But I really believe in what, what we can do. And I said, okay. I said, but I've got to do this one gig first.
00:20:25
Speaker
So I did the year in Silicon Valley, turned that around, sold that company off for them. Um, And then came back and I became the managing partner of and started Diamond Venture as equity partners, which was the the investment side of Diamond Venture. What year That was 2017. And stayed there until 23...
00:20:44
Speaker
and i stayed there um until um twenty
00:20:51
Speaker
three When, um, uh, when, it became very clear after Mr. Diamond passed that they wanted to spend more time doing real estate and less time investing. I'm still a partner at Diamond. I'm still a partner at Emeritus. I still manage some of the portfolio companies that we have.
00:21:08
Speaker
Um, but there's no active investing in technology anymore. So I went to work for, uh, because I had to stay busy. I went to work as a mentor in residence at Tech Launch. um think that's where you and I first met. That's where we first met, absolutely. And I had a lot of fun with that. um And an opportunity opened up to come and become the director of the McGuire Center.
00:21:30
Speaker
And You know, your original question was why. And it's a long-winded why. and the law like the why. I like the long-winded why. Well, the the major reason why is because I've been able to, I've had successes in this world, in that space.
00:21:46
Speaker
There's a lot of lessons I've learned. I got a lot of scars. I got a lot of um history. i'm I'm in give back mode now. You know, i'm I'm not looking to do another startup. I've done six profitable exits. Don't want to do anymore. i' I'm happy sitting on boards, but I'm really happy being able to impart the knowledge that I learned to the next generation of entrepreneurs. And that was my goal.
00:22:08
Speaker
If I can make a mark at the McGuire Center and helping them be there. I'm the first non-academic to run the McGuire Center. um So I feel, you know, honored to do that. You know, I did get my MBA from the University of Arizona. So I have a, it's my alumni. um And um I am, I'm having a ball.
00:22:28
Speaker
I'm getting too um to ah teach them all the things that I wish I had known when I started my first several companies. This is exactly why we do this podcast.
00:22:39
Speaker
If we can impart some level of wisdom to our audience that will give them information to make decisions differently and have a better outcome in the end, that's what it's all about.
00:22:55
Speaker
Yeah, no, absolutely. it's It's funny, you know, I get a lot of questions from my students right away. know, what's the most important thing? was it Because everybody wants the shortcut, right? what's the What's the single most important thing I can do?
00:23:07
Speaker
And I always tell them, said, look, the first rule of any entrepreneur, or any CEO, I said, is survival. You've got to survive to to execute for another day. I said, because you never know when that $50 million dollars contract you've been working on for six months, eight months, two years is going to finally come to fruition.
00:23:26
Speaker
ah So you got to be there to to ring the bell and to answer that. So. Yeah, no it's like it's a great time. I i love it. That's great. Yeah, I'm glad that I'm kind of involved a little bit when I can. and by the way, your involvement and others coming in to interact with the students is incredibly beneficial for them to see.
00:23:47
Speaker
ah you know, Bob talks about it this way. you know, Manny talks about it this way. ah But we all understand the thematic that runs the same it runs through it is very similar to everything. so's And we all bring our different perspectives to the to the table.
00:24:01
Speaker
Now you wrote an article. This is interesting because it's almost six years to the day that this came out in the cipher brief.
AI Development and Global Competition
00:24:10
Speaker
And um it was ah about an AI arms race. Yes. I found that very fascinating oh okay because you wrote it in 2018. Yeah.
00:24:19
Speaker
This was six years ago when AI was barely even a word for most of the populace. Give us a perspective from the six years ago to today.
00:24:32
Speaker
What did you get right? What has changed? Would you change your opinion and kind of where we're at? Give us a ah ah kind of a post-mortem, if you will. So um almost all the technologies that I've developed um have been focused in ah law enforcement or the intelligence, counter-terrorism, counter-terrorism world. Yeah.
00:24:53
Speaker
um We, when we were building out I2, we were the standard in 170 countries. We were what the five I's used every day for analysts. It was a product called Analyst Notebook.
00:25:05
Speaker
We were the standard in the law enforcement sector across the U.S., ah um So um the reason I wrote that that article was um um I have a relationship with the Daily Cypher Brief for things. I've been on panels for them and so forth. and and um ah And Suzanne Kelly, who runs the Cypher Brief, said, hey, you know, we're looking for kind of a think piece kind of thing. what do you what do you What do you think? I said, you know, there's we should be talking about artificial intelligence. um And we should be talking about
00:25:41
Speaker
what why we are potential to be behind and I got that perspective because the group of the company I was talking about earlier that I did to turn around in and in silicon valley Silicon Valley was AI company um and they had actually come out of the math department in Stanford So bunch of really brilliant people um with a really interesting idea on how to apply our artificial intelligence in the area of topological data analysis. right um
00:26:12
Speaker
What was concerning me about about AI at the time and still concerns me is my motivations to ah deliver an AI product to the market were generated by my board's requirements for us to generate a profit.
00:26:33
Speaker
So we have a profit motive, right? um it it My board of directors, just to give you um a little bit about um this Masters of the Universe concept, was Vinod Khosla from Khosla Ventures, started microsoft ah started sun Microsystems.
00:26:54
Speaker
ah Ted Schlein from Kleiner Perkins, who sits on the board of the NSA. um It is Steve Herrick from IVP who put the money into things like um Slack um and Uber.
00:27:09
Speaker
Um, it was, um, and Miraco who put the first money into Lyft, uh, also put early money into IOSD, the company that I was running. Um, and each of those had their own ideas and what their, and what the company should be and so forth. So,
00:27:29
Speaker
Strong personalities. strong personalities to say that the board was dysfunctional is an understatement and i don't mean that in any sense ah other than the fact that very strong opinion and very strong so he was a very challenging time to manage that board but but because i was driven by profit motives right?
00:27:51
Speaker
um I had a set of limitations that I could do from an artificial intelligence investment perspective, right? um Yeah, I had a bunch of Stanford PhD data scientists that were working there and so forth, but I was limited.
00:28:05
Speaker
In the meantime, The Chinese had developed a manifesto that said, we will be by 2028, I think it is, ah we will be number one in the world in artificial intelligence and the applications of artificial intelligence.
00:28:22
Speaker
And there's some great of artificial intelligence companies, as you know, coming out of China. But here's the big difference. Big difference is they're not generated by profit motive. um You know, if you've got, ah if you can throw...
00:28:35
Speaker
and numerous amounts of money at the problem and not worry about how do you recoup those funds, then we are playing at a disadvantage. And the point I was trying to make in that article about the new arms race was, um we if we don't revisit our motivations for becoming the best and the brightest at technologies that are going to change the world,
00:29:00
Speaker
we will be behind the curve and we will then be dependent upon them changing the world and us building across those applications. And from a national security and intelligence perspective, we can't guarantee um what the um what the legitimacy of anything we receive there from a security perspective is.
00:29:21
Speaker
um Because we don't know about any trap doors. We don't know about any hidden entry points and so forth because we aren't developing the code. So, um has my opinion changed on it?
00:29:33
Speaker
I think we have to continue to develop AI. um I think it is it is the new industrial revolution. It's the seventh industrial revolution.
00:29:45
Speaker
um You know, um ah barring, you know, I think when quantum comes out, it'll probably be the eighth. But this is clearly, this I believe, the seventh. um If you look at... um One of the traditional entrepreneurial um ah definitions of entrepreneurs, right? you can You can define entrepreneurial behavior across a a variety of different dimensions.
00:30:13
Speaker
One of those dimensions is a new dimension that I call technopreneur, which technology. you know, more and more people can take this new thing called artificial intelligence, start building technology capabilities on top of it that I think can just continue to change and automate. And um I think, um I think if we aren't leading that charge, we are going to be well behind the curve and we'll never catch up.
00:30:40
Speaker
ah You made it very clear. i just thought it was very interesting that you wrote that six years ago. Yes. And it's clear that We are limited in some way by the profit margins, by these boards, and they have free reign. They've got all this money from the government.
00:31:00
Speaker
um They are operating in a world with no ethics. And today, this day and age, whatever was written back back when you wrote it to now is really just amplified yeah and is going at an even further and faster rate.
00:31:17
Speaker
I do want to talk about another subject that's not really related to that, but at least in the same periphery.
Tech Leaders and Societal Influence
00:31:23
Speaker
Okay. And that is the the idea of these very powerful tech bros, the heads of these massive companies that have made billions and are throwing their weight around the government. you know, we saw Elon with Doge, Peter Thiel's getting involved in all these things.
00:31:42
Speaker
Give us a perspective without getting political. Of course, we don't get political on this podcast, yeah but at least your perspective on what they're doing, should they be doing it And just overall, what's your opinion?
00:31:54
Speaker
Well, it's interesting. ah Look, the greatest aphrodisiac outside of money is power. um When you've got unlimited funds,
00:32:06
Speaker
what's left for you to conquer so it's okay well how do i establish a power base so i can start to proliferate my thinking however that thinking is a what however it's aligned however it's defined um um it's interesting um one of um One of the adjunct professors I brought in recently who you've met is a person by the name of Matt Bogomil. Matt was one of the co-founders. ah went Went to college with Peter Thiel.
00:32:38
Speaker
I was one of the co-founders of um of PayPal. Tells me lots of stories about Elon. Tells me lots of stories about Peter. um But recently, you know, he and i we always talk about these kinds of things. And he said, he said, I can tell you that the Peter that I i talked to today is not the Peter I recognize from college.
00:32:58
Speaker
And it's like, it's natural because to some degree, because um it's difficult to be true to thy own self when you've got unlimited money and everybody wants to be your friend.
00:33:11
Speaker
Yeah. And so, okay, so how do i influence outcomes of things that I care about? And there's certainly obviously things that Peter cares about. There's things that Elon cares about. There's things that ah Bill Gates cares about.
00:33:24
Speaker
um And the list goes on and on. You know, i and it's funny. I don't think it's not to me a lot different in many ways of something like the Gates Foundation, except it's more in your face than it has ever been. You don't know a lot. Most people can't couldn't tell you five things that the Gates Foundation does, right, if you don't follow those kinds of things. But Peter can tell you what Elon does or what Peter Thiel does and so forth.
00:33:51
Speaker
You know, um up yeah I have a lot of interesting interactions with Peter and his organization over time. um And um I just look, i'm I'm incredibly comfortable and happy with them how my life has turned out. yeah um In many ways, I think I dodged the bullets by staying true to my own self.
00:34:17
Speaker
ah So, yeah, that's interesting. You know, this podcast. as much it as it is about the market trends and and strategy and all those things, the other half of it is to do with the
Philosophy, Ethics, and Timing in Business
00:34:31
Speaker
mindset.
00:34:31
Speaker
okay And you know we ascribe to a stoic philosophy where you really can't control anything really. You can only control how you react to things. You can't control the world. You can't control politics.
00:34:45
Speaker
And, and certainly that for me, the stoic philosophy was a bedrock in the rise and fall of business that I've been involved with startups in all different levels.
00:34:57
Speaker
And um I totally understand what Boogamil was saying about Peter Thiel. yes You know, I have friends in um business now that I, that I, don't really talk to a lot, but enough that I can see a fairly big difference from when I knew them in college, at least some of their value systems to now have radically changed.
00:35:19
Speaker
And of course it's evolution. People are going to to grow in their own different ways, but I totally understand what, what is meant, what, what Bogomil meant. Absolutely. I mean, look, there are a few things in life that you can control, right?
00:35:32
Speaker
But you can control your own moral compass. You can control your own your control your own ethical behaviors. um You know, you can control your own decision-making process.
00:35:45
Speaker
The problem is ah that um given all of the pressures that are on chief executive officers today, whether they're publicly traded or privately traded,
00:35:57
Speaker
um with the demand for um more and more profit and so forth, um you know, it can drive bad behavior. And, um you know, all you can do is guard against that or surround yourself with people that do guard against that. Mm-hmm.
00:36:13
Speaker
Let's talk about timing. In your role with Coplink and IBM and big corporate, your role as ah being front lines of looking at new investments for DVI, supporting tons of entrepreneurs, startups,
00:36:32
Speaker
And in the culmination of all your experiences, yes give us an idea of the importance of timing and what it really means to an entrepreneur to understand that.
00:36:45
Speaker
Yeah, no, timing can is incredibly important. um You know, you you you hear stories of, and people don't understand how that's possible, but you hear stories about, well, they were too early to market.
00:36:59
Speaker
Well, they were too early to market because the market didn't understand and wasn't willing to accept and so forth. So timing is incredibly important. ah You know, it's like the conversation earlier about, you know, luck is don't don't underestimate the value of luck.
00:37:12
Speaker
um You know, we you know If you can identify, you know, blue ocean, green fields kinds of opportunities where people are starting to recognize the need for those, then that's all about timing, right?
00:37:29
Speaker
The one thing I tell people that when I do investing and when i've when I drove and invested and built portfolios for ah other investors, you know, I'm a big believer in trends, right?
00:37:44
Speaker
um because ah ah if you can identify and establish ah the value of a trend then then I like to invest in the ecosystems that support the trend I use the analogy about gold miners right I don't want to invest in the people mining for gold because I can't make a single person that struck it rich in the 49er era all right in the California gold rush but I can name the people that surrounded and built stuff for the gold miners. I wear Levi's jeans today. I use Wells Fargo Bank. I'll occasionally have Armor Foods, right? um These are the people that supported the ecosystem around that.
00:38:22
Speaker
So... um if you can identify a trend you can start to recognize how that trend evolves based on timing right so i bel i was a big believer i'm a i don't think anybody that knows me that thinks that knows this this is a secret i'm a big big data wonk i really believe in the power of big data um and you know i fundamentally recognize that um If you're going to invest around big data as a trend, you look at the areas around big data where you can make potential investments, right? Well, what do you have to do with big data? You got to, well, you got to store it, right? So I'm a big believer in in storage technologies that are leading edge. And that's, as a consequence, why
00:39:09
Speaker
I put money into and um and I hold quite a bit of um of a stock or Diamond Ventures holds quite a bit of stock in um Wasabi. It's a hot cloud storage company, right? um You've got to um you got to analyze it, right? You got to be able to unlock the insights for the big big data, right? um I invested in some analytics companies that do that.
Big Data Investments and Opportunities
00:39:35
Speaker
Now, those analytics companies happen to work in law enforcement and intelligence because that's a sector that I'm very comfortable with, right? So, ah and you got to you got to move it, right, from point A to point B. We put some money in, in tra we'll call them transport companies, but companies develop technologies around things like 5G, right?
00:39:57
Speaker
And then lastly, ah you got to protect it. And so I have investments around um companies like AppDome, which is no-code fusion a company that develops back-end code for mobile applications. And um and they just had their two and a half billionth download. Wow. Okay. um So ah that that's the way I look at those things. Now, as I look at big data over the years,
00:40:28
Speaker
Right. Here's where the timing becomes interesting. It's like, ah I think the numbers are right. They may be off a little bit, but it's like 90 percent of all of the world's digital data has been created in the last five years.
00:40:43
Speaker
OK. The interesting thing is less than 10 percent of that's ever been analyzed. There's a timing issue. There's some insight. and So that's, to me, timing is everything. if you can If you can coordinate your solution so that it is, so that you aren't forcing the conversation, it's a natural conversation that evolves with other things that are happening.
00:41:08
Speaker
It's just that much more of an advantage to you. Yeah, you and I agree 100% on the idea of trends. What's crazy about trends is that it's it's not anything that's really taught in the same way that other things are taught in in school. I mean, I went to engineering school. I don't have a business degree.
00:41:26
Speaker
But through it all, even people that are in business school or had have had ah an MBA, It's not exactly center stage. And I worked alongside Adam Hartung at Spark Partners.
00:41:38
Speaker
He really opened my eyes to the power of trends and and why they're so important. yeah These are big tectonic shifts in the industry that a lot of us aren't aware of until we're made aware of it.
00:41:50
Speaker
And then after that, we can't put the genie back in the bottle. Our whole perspective changes and we begin to understand things in a very different way than perhaps we did before we knew about the power of trends.
00:42:05
Speaker
I'm going to ask a different question, kind of go in a different direction. If you had the opportunity to spend half a day with somebody, maybe have dinner or drinks. Okay. It could be somebody across time, could be somebody 300 years ago, somebody today, but on the other side of the world.
00:42:23
Speaker
Who would that be and why? Well, um I could do a, i could I'd look at it a couple ways. from from a um From a business perspective, I would love to have had dinner with Peter Drucker.
00:42:35
Speaker
um For those that aren't familiar with Peter Drucker, he's kind of, he's the entrepreneur's entrepreneur. yeah I mean, he is the one that that that we sent to after the Second World War. We sent him Japan to help ah create, turn the Japanese economy around and and help them with some and some um ah industrial exercises. And he helped us make them probably one of the most powerful um automation, um manufacturing
00:43:08
Speaker
or ah ah countries in the world. yeah So I would love to spend some time. And I've read all of Drucker's books. I listened to him speak once. He's passed away now, but he was um he was a fascinating person.
00:43:22
Speaker
Guy that I would love to have just sat around. He's kind of kind of picked his yeah picked his brain about. um You know, from a ah on a personal note, i um ah besides the the ranch that we've talked about that I have, I i own a recording studio I mentioned to you.
00:43:42
Speaker
um And um there are, you know, um musicians that I would love to sit down and have and break bread with and have dinner with that could, um you know, that are incredibly creative people.
00:43:58
Speaker
um And that creativity i is what stimulates me. So um I like creatives. Mm-hmm. Is there somebody in particular on the music side?
00:44:08
Speaker
You know, there are so many um people that i really like. um um I would... um I have... um I've been fortunate enough to meet a but bunch of people over the years.
00:44:22
Speaker
um But, um you know, I would love to sit down um with, um you know, um oh, let me, i'm drawing ah I'm drawing a blank on his name. ah he's um um He was kind of the the father of early jazz, Louis Armstrong.
00:44:43
Speaker
That's what I want to say. This was the guy at one point, Louis Armstrong was the most famous person, one of the most famous people on the planet. um and just to sit down and understand how did you get from where you were in life to this point and what motivated you to do that?
00:45:00
Speaker
um But more importantly, um you know, how did you overcome all of the adversity that was associated with your class in society at the time, your ethical background or your ah your ah your ah personal backgrounds and so forth. um It would be um it'd be an interesting conversation and I think it would be fascinating.
00:45:22
Speaker
So, yeah. Final a question. If you were able to somehow put some wisdom in a mantra in the heads of every entrepreneur and business person on earth.
00:45:37
Speaker
Yes. You know, what we've talked about timing. We've talked about lots of things here. What would be your message and why?
Leadership Responsibilities and Concluding Thoughts
00:45:47
Speaker
Well, i will look, i the one thing that I think that we have got to instill in our entrepreneurial students and our entrepreneurial leaders is, um It's okay to fail.
00:46:01
Speaker
um You learn more from failing this many times than you do from winning all the time. But learn to fail fast.
00:46:12
Speaker
um I see too many companies that people dig their heels in at the leadership level and say, but I know this is the right path and we're just going to keep going down this path. It's some things are going to happen. The market's going to catch up. Things are going to go on and so forth.
00:46:29
Speaker
um And then when they recognize that it is time to pivot, they look at their bank account and say, but we're out of money. Mm-hmm. And that's a very difficult conversation for you to go forward with and have with other investors. so It's difficult to go back to your original investors and say, you know, I screwed up. I should have recognized this trend early on or this pivot early on. But trust me now, now that I recognize it, I need some more money. um that's That's a hard conversation to have. So my advice is um failure is not death. In fact, you learn a lot from failing.
00:47:03
Speaker
um but fail fast. you You have to recognize that while it is not your fault necessarily, it is always your responsibility. If you fail, when you pivot and so forth, you have to be able to um have a reason, not a reason for it, but have a solution ready to go forward. all right it's it just You just can't say, well, I'm failing and that's life because um um there are The biggest responsibility for CEOs um and entrepreneurs is all the other people that depend on them.
00:47:39
Speaker
You know, um the coolest thing about building businesses is, yeah, you create wealth for wealth for yourself, but you also create wealth for other people. And those families are what kind of gets you up in the morning. You know, I always used to tell my staff, if I screw up my job or I allow you to screw up your job, we put, in the case of 600 families out of work.
00:48:03
Speaker
can't do that. Big responsibility. So, and um it's a tough responsibility, but it's fun. It is fun. It is fun. Well, Bob, this has been a very very fascinating conversation. I think we could go for another couple hours, but sure we have lots of stuff to do.
00:48:18
Speaker
Appreciate the time. Of course. The insights and looking forward the next time. Yeah. I'm sorry it took so long to get together, but it was good. Cheers. Cheers. See you.