- When we are starting out and we have nothing,
when we feel alone and powerless,
we think getting rich is going to help.
And that's how I felt
when I was a 21 year old growing up with big student loans
and credit card debt.
And that's when I wrote this blog post in 2002.
I said, this is how 90% of my conversations
with my friends went.
Sup, nothing, you?
Nothing much.
You know what sucks?
Ugh, life sucks.
Yeah, oh well.
We enter this world full of complaints,
and this mindset, this attitude,
it didn't help me build anything.
I had to get beyond this mindset to actually build.
And in this episode,
I'm going to tell you what I did to do that.
Not just to get rich, but to actually build,
and I think you can do it too.
Let's get into it.
(upbeat music)
This was me in 2002,
I was young and about to graduate from college.
And I was absolutely full of angst.
I wanted to make a mark,
but things were starting to stack up against me.
I got rejected from the co-term
computer science Masters program at Stanford,
and I was in the dumps.
While I was complaining to my friends,
I sort of actually wasn't thinking
when I just turned down an interview at a startup
that I actually used every day,
but I didn't think it would ever make money.
I even looked at the name and the logo
and it didn't seem like a real company.
I had already secured a PM position
at what I thought was my winning spot, at Microsoft.
And yes, the company I turned down turned out to be Google.
Then Google was a pre-IPO, super fast growing startup
that had maybe only 500 employees in 2002.
An entry-level PM at that time got about 10,000 shares,
which today, 20 years later, is about $27 million.
Now this sounds crazy, but I need to remind you,
it wasn't totally clear how Google
was going to make money to us, anyway, at that time.
We all used it, we all thought,
"Haha, seems like pets.com."
The lesson is that if you're lucky enough
to have the ability to code and build software,
this kind of thing will happen to you.
And for one thing, it went to show how much I knew
as a 21 year old at that moment.
Or more so how much I actually needed to believe
in the conventional wisdom that permeated
even my own set of peers as WNCS students
at Stanford in 2002.
Way, way less.
And that brings me back to the complaining.
90% of my IM conversations were of that kind.
Life sucks, yeah, I know.
I remember these conversations vividly,
and now I realize these actually were really hurtful to me
in the short-term and the long-term.
Not only did I look for validation in others,
I found a mirror in building a shared worldview
of that kind.
Now many of us did climb out of this mindset,
and we ended up taking chances on much bigger things
that required more than just wallowing
in how much life sucks.
If you find yourself complaining like I did,
literally 90% of my IMs,
God, that makes me feel so old that I say IM,
instant message,
then see if you can swap half of that energy,
looking at the world around you,
instead of a nervous self-sorrow filled energy,
something that is more mindful.
In Steve Jobs's biography, Steve is quoted as saying,
"If you can just sit and observe,
"you will see how restless your mind is.
"If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse,
"but over time it does calm,
"and when it does there's room to hear more subtle things,
"that's when your intuition start to blossom
"and you start to see things more clearly
"and be in the present more.
"Your mind just slows down and you see a tremendous expanse
"in the moment.
"You see so much more than you could see before."
It took many years afterwards and tons of mistakes
before I really understood what Steve was talking about.
Mindstate is really important
for getting the right choices going in your life.
With an anxious mind,
every no is a shot to the center of your heart,
but with mindfulness,
you can see the opportunities you're saying no to,
which maybe, just maybe, you should be saying, "Yes and".
That's it for this week.
Hope you all had a restful break like I did.
New year, new look, new location.
I hope you are feeling refreshed and ready
for what's coming.
If you're new to this channel,
I'm a VC who runs Initialized Capital.
We have over $3.6 billion under management,
and we've funded over 22 companies
with a billion dollars or more like Coinbase or Instacart.
And while there are lots of VCs who've done that,
we're probably one of the few that have done it
for those many companies where we just funded it
with a few people and just an idea.
If you liked this video,
please click over to my channel page
and watch some of my biggest lessons,
like my $200 million mistake,
or how to create wealth instead of only getting rich.
Click Subscribe and the bell icon right now
and leave a comment too.
It really helps me figure out what you want to see next
and where you're coming from.
Tell me about you, what's going on with you,
do you want to come and attack,
do you want to start a company someday?
I'm here for all of that.
We're all going to make it.
I'll see you next week.
(calming music)