Naval 谈新西兰：数字素养、移民、区块链与幸福

00:04I'm a certain Valley in California right now where I've been an entrepreneur and investor for about two decades moved there straight out of school started starting companies because I loved science and technology and technology is the business of science or applying science and so I've started a couple of companies one that made optical amplifiers one that became what is today Google Earth one that was called opinions when public is part of shopping comm and dozens of failed efforts things you've never heard of things that you might yet Europe I started angel list which is the largest online platform for startup fundraising we've now raised over a billion dollars almost all four seed stage startups we also operate the largest free talent

00:50startup recruiting marketplace we're about half the startups in the english-speaking world find talent on there we own product hunt which is where companies go to launch their product we've also spun up coin list which is a giant well-lit regulated marketplace for crypto and I cos I've been an angel investor in companies like Twitter and Oberer and wish and post mates and a bunch of others co-authored a blog called venture hacks got a little Twitter feed and the JOBS Act which was the US law that enable crowdfunding general solicitation regulus IPOs yeah so I asked I asked involved to do that because there was no way I was gonna do justice to the bio but for those who don't know I mean

01:34involves a bit of a legend and across the world now and especially in Silicon Valley and so I'm curious from from your perspective navall what is the opportunity for New Zealand around our technology ecosystem and what constitutes the elements and the actors in a well-functioning ecosystem so I mean it's a hard problem systems design I think that's what USF was talking about he was basically positioning New Zealand as an incubator for systems design which is very seductive and very difficult because trying new systems means you're automatically doing things that the rest of the world doesn't want to or need to do so it's risky but I can throw some things out that I think are provocative and interesting let me just

02:16touch on two one is digital literacy and the other is immigration you know in terms of digital literacy I think that computers are the most powerful tool ever created by humanity they've they allow for infinite leverage without permission and to me that knowing how to be good with computers is the modern literacy it's like the new reading writing arithmetic and this will be widely accepted and acknowledged decades from now but today we're in that transition phase where as a software engineer you're very well paid and there's no unemployment but as someone transitioning out of the old economy you have this giant gap to jump so I think it would be interesting in one system design experiment that would be interesting is

02:56to create an entirely digitally literate nation where everybody is facile with computers and of course not everyone's gonna be a computer related job but just the fact that you can use this creative tool to its maximum output gives you an advantage a leg up in every possible way you'll make better podcasts you'll do better you know you'll be better at creating documents be better at coding up your ideas you'll be better at even just using online banking or your storage but just like if you understand mathematics fairly well then you don't fear science books you can pick up anything the same way if everybody understood computers well enough they didn't fear computers at all they would be highly leveraged and for

03:34innovation and employment that could be a huge thing it would also interestingly raise all the wages across the board in other professions too because there's a thing in economics called bamos cost disease where the the value that you have to pay someone their opportunity cost of what else they could be doing not initially what they are doing so even if all the baristas had computer science degrees they get paid a lot more so that's an example of something radical and interesting you could do but I don't think it's it's that radical and people often would say like well why do I need to know how to code a computer I don't need to know how to fix my car to drive

04:08my car but it's different that the car is a utility that gets you from point A to point B and you do the same thing over and over where it's a computer is a creative tool in a creative process it's not gonna be automated away and every person who uses a computer it's like using a paintbrush or or writing instrument you're using it for a different thing for self-expression a canvass of possibilities so I think having a fully digitally literate nation and New Zealand is well-positioned to do that by being english-speaking country first world rule of law good educational system and a fairly small enough community that you can make that kind of a push I think would be really interesting

04:44and you also said immigration yeah immigration is is interesting because I think people look at Silicon Valley and they say how can we create a Silicon Valley here and that's an experiment that's been tried all over the world but really Silicon Valley is not a place that creates entrepreneurs or wealth or Technology it is a place that attracts entrepreneurs who create wealth and technology and and so it's really an attractor function and that's true of almost any magnet place like Hollywood attracts the potential actors and artists into it doesn't create them those are not necessarily all native Los Angelenos although the natives really benefit from from that so I think the it's it's about attracting so intelligent immigration policy is actually

05:27the largest well creator in the world and and it's not done that intelligently in most places most places it's sort of an accident happenstance of history like oh we have it we have a Technology University here we have good weather and so on so I think that if you look at especially in the and I'm focused in technology industry obviously your for immigration you can do lots of things you can say I want to attract people who'd make an impact I want to attract teachers but whatever you're doing you can do it intentionally and at least in the technology industry these people thanks to again computers are the most leveraged people in the world so their earning power is very high

06:02so they actually choose to live in the nicest places so they want to live in places with good weather and clean water and clean air and high quality of life and culture and I think in all of those things New Zealand scores really well the timezone is great the access to the Pacific Rim is great so New Zealand to me already has a lot of the elements to use immigration policy as a force multiplier so I think it really just comes down to both attracting and screening sort of the right people with for the limited resources that you have and you know I mean look at the hf 400 visas it's gonna make a big difference before it is not a

06:36lot of people right you can you can fit them in one small or one small cluster of houses but it can in theory change change things and on the technology side I'm curious it could speak to the trends that you're seeing some of the significant trends of importance and why they're important we're actually kind of in a good phase of I think technology innovation right not there's a good or bad I don't I don't mean to judge but we've gone through different phases where we are creating and discovering and rolling out new platforms and systems that change things so for example mobile phones was a platform the internet was a platform personal computers were a platform that changed things quite a

07:14bit and then we go through exploitation phases on those platforms when we build lots of apps so you know there was the mobile social phase where we built Facebook and Twitter and so on those are interesting apps but it's kind of a lower level of innovation or it's equally necessary but not as paradigm busting and I would say now interestingly technology is going back into that paradigm busting phase where investors angels entrepreneurs are getting bold enough and emboldened and enough to take the risk to do things like hey now we're gonna develop supersonic airplanes we're gonna send Rockets to Mars we're gonna send you know we're gonna build electric cards we're gonna build autonomous vehicles we're gonna build VR and AR

07:54we're gonna get remote working right so that it feels like you're actually there we're gonna do synthetic biology and hack humans which is you know both scary and exciting scary first exciting later unfortunately it's the nature of technology that the destructive power arrives before the creative power you get to have a nuclear weapon before you get to have a functioning safe nuclear plant you get to have you know the you get the unfortunate in social media you get combat before you get civil discourse so it's it's even if you go through back to human history you get gunpowder before you get steam engines and airplanes so it's just unfortunately the nature of technology that the disruptive that disassociative power arrives first

08:39so we're gonna get all the dysfunctional dystopian things you know maybe VR and AR it's like a place for people to rally who couldn't rally in the real world or for you know how the internet famously adopts porn and gambling but almost any other application but eventually you will see the fruits come out of that if we live long enough and synthetic BIOS is an interesting one that regard AI today is going through a machine learning machine vision revolution where computers are getting very very good at pattern matching and problem solving if a very specific kind of problem but it does mean that we're gonna see very intelligent agents living in the networking cloud and changing how we do things so

09:21I think all of those are really interesting and I and I give full credit to people like Elon Musk who just really upped the bar on what's conceivable right just by doing audacious things or trying audacious things even if they fail even if they're not good at it even if you have problems with the financial shenanigans this is just at least the vision I think inspires people to move forward and he's not the only one there's a bunch of entrepreneurs now who are kind of just trying to do very audacious things and on that point some people say you know we want to shift away from this cult of entrepreneurship or this worshipping the entrepreneurs how do you feel about that

09:54there's definitely a cult of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley there's there's kind of a hierarchy which is like all the status derives from the entrepreneur and then it sort of filters down to the other people in the ecosystem who help make things happen and then of course the users and customers and broader society that that they stand upon I just think it's a nature of humans that you you're always gonna have a little bit of hero worship you're always going to create a cult like you you you go to Hollywood and there's a cult of the celebrity I mean there's such a cult that they give each other awards every year and then we tune in to watch it so it's it's

10:25just the nature of politicians we create a cult around the top politicians without looking at all the people that they stand on it's just kind of how humans are hard-wired it's how we get inspired so I think it's completely fine to use an entrepreneur as a source of inspiration but I think it's silly to use them as a source of truth right like in fact it's silly that I'm up here but and I'm kind of giving you all this so-called truth and really I just have very narrow specialization in a very narrow set of things but somehow for some reason somebody wants to hear my opinion on everything that's the cult of personality kind of poking through but still you got

11:00to pick some monkey to get in front of the try bit you know at various points so this is my turn right now and one of those things that you've been asked that is bak chain and so I'd love to hear what is blockchain why is it important yeah I got into cryptocurrencies and block chains back in 2013 and it was to me it first fascinate is its technology solution to a very particular computer science problem called the Byzantine generals problem but all you need to understand is what they'd solve is a way of getting a bunch of people who don't know each other and don't trust each other to still agree on something and this is a much harder problem

11:34than it may sound like you know humans are highly cooperating organizing creatures much more so than almost any other species in the natural domain and that allows us to do amazing things like we can all get in this room and work together to what we believe is a better future it also allows us to do terrible things like get together in a battlefield and kill each other name some ideology you know monkeys don't have christianity or fascism they don't they don't come up with those ideology so they don't they don't murder each other in large quantities but that ability to unite together is both our superpower and our curse because when you get together how do you operate that network of

12:09people how do we make decisions and historically we've had a couple of answers and they all have different trade-offs the old answer used to be the most brutal monkeys in charge that used to be the king and that's still how much of the world lives today under dictators then it was just the smartest and most violent few monkeys who get together are in charge and that's aristocracies or if it's the smartest as the elites but you have a small number of people sort of running things for society religion was another one you know I talked to God God gave me the answers you listen to me there was another model around democracy where we're all equal we all vote but you

12:46also can end up with mob justice mob rule where the majority turn turn eyes the minority so you just have all these different systems of organizing people and in the last few hundred years we've created a new one called markets and these could be markets and you know things you like and things you don't but it's essentially just this idea that we can trade things and sort of self organizes and there's a merit model in terms of how much money I put in or what assets that put in what I get back but no one's really in charge if you look at the global credit markets debt markets equity markets money markets commodity markets no-one's really in charge so what blockchains

13:21do is they bring the ability to have markets into any digital domain so you can take any digital network and there are a lot more digital networks out there than we think so for example uber is actually a digital network that's routing cars around your local public utility is actually a digital network that's routing power around especially if we all had solar and we were trading that power today we have cell phone carriers that are top-down but actually each of our phones it's broadcasting Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and you could stay and we have Wi-Fi access points at home you could stitch together a digital network and a blockchain based network isn't owned by anybody it isn't run by anybody it's sort

14:00of I think we're sort of a temporary blip in history where all of your connections with your friends are controlled by one small set of people out of palo alto or all the digital news media in the world is run basically by twitter in youtube and it's a very small number of people so it is the nature of the current generation of technology that it is a highly centralizing force we have replaced geographic oligopolies with global monopolies well at the same time there's sort of this long tail of independent actors but that fat middle that used to exist in the old world is gone when you would have 10 ecommerce retailers and now you just have one that's kind of controlling

14:36the whole internet retail when you would have had hundreds of local dispatch taxi dispatchers but now all taxis are dispatched out of San Francisco by uber or lyft so that trend line is very worrying because that's not the internet I think we were all promised we were promised to decentralize Internet where we kind of all collectively control outcomes but like in any system you have to have rules you have to have consensus you have to have ways of rewarding people who contribute to the network you have to wait have ways of punishing cheaters who harm the network and and blockchains use mathematics cryptography peer-to-peer networking to create digital consensus and allow truly leaderless digital networks and I think that is what

15:15is compelling about them and we're starting with the financial applications because money is a ledger it's it's something that we've been historically had to put a king in charge for or a state and they have a habit you know when you hand somebody the ability to print money then they just print more of it and some of you find this way into their pockets and their and their friends pockets and it may be not a problem you Zeeland because it's a famously uncorrupt country but yeah even there right there's always something but compared to other parts of the world that are outright kleptocracy z' that can be problematic so you have things like Bitcoin that essentially separate money from India from

15:53any individual controlling the money and then it becomes collective money if theorem tries to do that for a programmable financial system and I think you'll see as block chains get good at tackling those problems and they demonstrate that they can secure something as hard to secure as the ability to make an issue and and transfer money then they can be trusted in all other aspects of life so I think it's really interesting and people say well well you know the cryptocurrency markets down 90% plus in the last year isn't it over or was it a fad or how do you respond yeah I mean look it's a it's a highly speculative market it's it's this weird combination of money and code

16:33and governance and you know calm went through this in 1999-2000 so I've seen this kind of movie before and crypto is a really hard problem crypto is you're basically saying I'm going to create digital gold I'm gonna make it unhackable even though the reward will be hundreds of billions of dollars trust me I don't have a bug in this code because if I do you lose all your money it's very hard to secure and transfer it's still very very much in development it feels like the computers were in the 1980s not where the internet was in 1990s but it's moving faster so there's still a lot of fundamental development work to be done crypto is not simple computer science it is

17:12bleeding edge computer science game theory attack vectors hacking you're trying to solve some very hard problems so it's gonna take time to figure out and today for example the total stock of Bitcoin in the world is evaluated about eighty billion dollars and or seventy billion dollars if you take into account losses and so on the the actually the actually sorry higher it would be about a hundred but the total gold supply in the world is somewhere around seven or ten trillion dollars and bitcoin does a lot of the things that gold does some better some worse better in the sense that it's digitally transmissible easier to secure more scarce worse in the sense that there might be a bug you can

17:49get hacked you might lose your password passkey which I've seen happen to friends of mine so it's if so it's still much less certain and it's much more new goals been around forever so what you have right now is the market is pricing Bitcoin as being somewhere between one five hundredth the chance of being digital gold to one one thousand two one one hundredth and when the market changes mind and these very little probabilities you're these massive swings in the price so it does end up being a very speculative instrument today and it's like an angel investment or like an early venture investment where you can lose all your money or most of it but and there's a lot of risk

18:28involved but there's also a lot of reward these are not ready for primetime yet but we're gonna go deeper on the blockchain crypto theory and the like I do want to just well we have everyone talk a little bit you're famous on Twitter now where did this come from you know and if you could talk a little bit about your becoming famous in terms of talking about the inner game of entrepreneurship yeah so Fame is a curse I don't recommend it for anybody you want to be you want to know this is glib but you want to be rich and anonymous not poor and famous like this is the disease of social media everybody is getting their 5 seconds of fame

19:03and become a celebrity and celebrities are the most miserable people in the world so it's not necessarily a good thing to go for that said you know I think what happened was like anyone who's been an entrepreneur I was running extremely high stress lifestyle and one of the things that makes entrepreneurship especially stressful is that not only are you supposed to have all the answers you know you're doing very hard work but you're supposed to never show weakness because your board members you show them weakness you know they're not gonna fund you they're not going to trust you you show it to your employees they're gonna run for the hills your customers are not gonna buy for your no partners I'm

19:38gonna partner with you so you have to show extreme stability and it's the nature of the technology business that 99 out of 100 startups effectively fail because the winners are so outsized and so rare so most entrepreneurs walking around know that they don't have product market fit to live in mortal terror of it they're not allowed to talk about it and everyone has to pretend they're winning and crushing it all the time and and this is highly stressful so it most people I think just meltdown or under the stress and they just hide it because we're not taught the modern coping tools on how to work with it and maybe ancient cultures had better answers you know you meditate you walk

20:14in nature you have closer family ties you have bigger tribes or you're just much less likely to go from being fresh out of school to landing into running a hundred person company so these are just very modern pressures and stresses and just like anybody I had to kind of work through it and as I worked through it I started using Twitter as my open diary on what I had learned that was useful to me and I think if anybody else was talking about this it wouldn't be that interesting but because you know I'm in the tech business and supposedly successful and I'm talking about it I think that gives people license to talk about it so I just decided you know

20:51five or six years ago that I was done being miserable and I was gonna be happy you know and I know this sounds easy in hindsight but it was sort of like well this entire time I've just assumed that happy people aren't successful and if I'm gonna be successful then I can't be happy I have to be miserable if I'm going to make a difference in the world I have to be unhappy along the way and I just sort of shifted my mindset and decided actually I'm out of time it's now or never there's no future to live for and if I don't figure out how to be happy I'm gonna die unhappy and it's going to and and I made it a discipline like in just like diet and nutrition and exercise these are highly personal disciplines that are unique to each of us and we have to find what works for us and know nobody else can give you can make

21:34your diet work for you because it's a battle that's fought every day you know at every meal and no one can make your exercise and fitness routine work for you because not even just a half-hour you go to the gym or workout it's literally how you carry yourself how you move what activities you volunteer for so the same way I think your own internal mental state is just as malleable but just as hard and just as individual and so I just started documenting my journey and and a lot of people actually thought it was strange and I did lose some business contacts it definitely some business over it some people were attracted to it but I don't but part of being

22:09happy is not caring what other people think and so I don't care anymore so there we go so we're gonna go much deeper on this part - we're back up here on the main stage at 2:30 so hope to see you there and we'll open the space for Q&A as well please join me in thanking the Balrog account thanks for sitting