David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…That's true, and it goes back to this, ‘we are creating something.’ We are creating something, and you all know this better than anyone in the number of founders that you have interviewed. Founders, especially the best founders, are so obsessed with that creation story, even the incentives that are used to align people on the mission. That's more what I meant when I said equity and what is the currency. What is the thing that is traded that makes the system go? It is equity. But why people come here, it is so much more driven to create something real. It's usually driven to right the wrongs of whatever you've experienced in a previous industry. That's so much of what is driving people. One of the things I've been pleasantly surprised with in an ecosystem like Miami is that people are not ashamed to be successful. I do think that that is a uniquely kind of American Dream part of what Silicon Valley should be, and what it is, and what it historically was. It's that people were really proud of what they've achieved, and the number of people they're employing, and what they're building. Weirdly, I think Washington, in some corners, has moved away from that story of creation. Let's talk about what I think is probably now another huge mega trend to come for the decades ahead, the exporting of Silicon Valley to the rest of the country and the rest of the world. You've been talking about it. You're there in Miami. You're not here in California anymore, or Seattle, or the West Coast. How is your personal experience been over the past two years with that? This is a core part of the American dynamism thesis. Maybe talking through a couple of companies that explain this trend will make it clear. We've talked about kind of your atypical founder, someone who came from different industries who felt like they were unable to build a company. That's happened, and a lot of those people felt like they were forced to move to Silicon Valley or maybe in some cases, New York. What I'm now seeing and what we're seeing in our own portfolio is that those people can build from anywhere. What that means for the country, it is an extraordinary thing that Silicon Valley could be exported to the rest of the country. That will be game-changing when you think of just post war. There was this myth that if you were someone who was high achieving or someone who wanted to have a career, you had to go to certain universities. You had to leave your state, and then you had to go to one of a handful of cities. The impact that has had on the country has been very detrimental. There is brain drain from certain states that has benefited places like San Francisco and New York. If we're telling the story 50 years from now, and we're looking back on what happened, the thing that will come out of Covid is that people have now said, I do not need to be in San Francisco. I can be anywhere in the world and anywhere in the country. I can be in my hometown building something, and there's enough talent there to do it or there's enough talent around the country that can do it remotely. I'm incredibly bullish that American dynamism will not only be companies that are built around the country, but it will also be just different types of problems, because founders who wouldn't have gone to San Francisco are now building for their hometowns. I'll give a perfect example of this because I think this is one of my favorite examples in our portfolio. There's a company called Flock Safety. That was a YC company built in Atlanta by second-time founders Garrett Langley, an extraordinary founder. He had just built a small company before and said, I want to go after one of the biggest problems, what do I want to do? He's like, why is it so hard to eliminate crime? Most crimes are done with a car, whether we're talking about petty crimes or things like Amber alerts, child kidnapping. Why is it so hard in the era of software and of cameras around the world? Why is it so hard to solve crime? He built a very small camera, license plate reader, realizing that so many of the license plate readers around the country were very expensive, built by legacy systems, and in some ways, public safety contractors. He started selling them to homeowners associations, selling them to neighborhoods, saying, put up this camera and we'll be able to track cars, not people, which was very important to him. With a network of cameras, maybe we can solve crime.…

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