Brad Gerstner: belief

Transcript context

…What's different now is you can go public early. You still have Altimeter, or Benchmark, or Sequoia, or whoever as your shareholders. It's not like you have to check your hat at the door. Sure. I think we're in the early phases of industrialization. How do I score myself? Our returns for our partners. We got to deliver excellent returns for our partners. I say to my team, is our NPS score with founders higher or lower at the end of the year? That is really important to me. That's the durability of the brand. That's the love for the brand. Lots of software companies can increase revenue selling a [...][2] product with an aggressive sales force. But ultimately, that will not be a really valuable software company. You show me a software company where the product is flying off the shelves because the people on the other end really need, want the product, and love the product. That company, even it has lower revenue, deserves a much higher multiple. I think the same is true when I think about our business and what we intend to deliver. I guess this is a segue as well to a bigger issue, which is, what is this all about? We are all part of one of the most fortunate systems at one of the most fortunate times in the history of modern capitalism. I intend to use this platform to do things that matter. And I think founders care about that. I think funders care about that because at the end of the day, helping a hedge fund guy make a little bit more money or some venture capitalist make a little bit more money, it's not what gets me up in the morning. I do think that the very essence of what we do, which is increasing the velocity of innovation, allowing Moderna to build an mRNA technology that can help solve a pandemic, to transform the way software works, that is the infrastructure that powers all discovery. Those things, I think, are intrinsically good. But increasingly, what I see is people who are using these platforms to drive diversity, to use these platforms to tackle things like the wealth divide, which you know I care about with the Invest America initiative that I've talked about. The people who work here, I think if you did a survey, they would say, I work there because it's a great brand, fun, love doing venture, love doing public. But we also care about the impact of what we do, and I'm lucky to be able to lead that. I really want to talk to you about Invest America because I think it's a fascinating concept. We chatted about it when we were preparing for this. What is the idea there?…

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