 Thanks again for joining us to this conversation with Naval Ravi Khan. My name is Joseph Ayala. I'm the co-founder and CEO of EHF. We're really thrilled to have you here with us, Naval, for the next hour. I know it's quite short to cover a lot of the conversations we have in mind, but we'll make the best of it. So thanks, thanks for joining us, Naval. Yeah, thank you for having me. So we have a number of topics we're hoping to cover here to share some perspectives and advice of where New Zealand is at at the moment, where the world is at at the moment. And we'll jump into those specific themes. I see many people still joining the conversation here, which is great. Just to give you an overview of what we're doing here. This is the digital series of New Frontiers, which is organized by the Edmund Hillary Fellowship. Our organization is focused on bringing smart and talented people to grow innovation and support the local entrepreneurial ecosystem create global impact. And Naval is one of the fellows who have come through the program and has been contributing to New Zealand and EHF for the last year plus that's how long you've been a fellow, which is incredible to see. And we have the last round of applications that is due on the 1st of June for anyone who's interested in joining EHF so check out EHF.org if you're interested in that. So let's just jump into all the first thing really curious about you. You've been tweeting out a lot on so many different topics and themes, and you have quite a unique macro view, whether anyone agrees with you or not you really bring a very unique perspective to how we think of what's happening and really curious to hear how are you making sense of what's happening in the world right now. Not just in COVID but also the massive changes that we're seeing at the macro economic lens. Yeah, I mean obviously COVID is the big topic and I'm not an epidemiologist or a virologist, obviously, but at the same time, I like to figure everything out for myself, just because somebody is an expert badge means nothing to me. I can read all the papers I can look at the science I can look at the math I can look at the data I can look at the history. Generally, people who are speaking in public have to toe certain lines right they can't always tell the truth or they get locked into their earlier public pronouncements and they can't change their mind when the data changes. My read on COVID is, you know, it's when I first saw it I was much more fearful than I am today. I still think it is it's not the flu it's it's a very nasty thing. Imagine the flu was just created and nobody had any population immunity and you know as a very, very long strain, it would hit 10 times as hard and that's kind of what code is doing. That said, I think that more of the changes that are coming are because the reaction to COVID and COVID itself in terms of the actual death rate it's not going to be even at Spanish flu levels most likely. But it's going to create a lot more lasting changes because the economy, the world that we were living in just didn't assume that anything like a real pandemic was possible. We thought as humanity that we conquered that. I think fundamentally what COVID is going to do is going to create a, it's going to accelerate the shift from the physical to the digital. So the digital digital economies doing great physical economies doing terribly. We're all using digital products and devices we're not, you know, we're under consuming kind of all the physical models that we used to it's creating a shift from the urban to the rural people don't want to live in cities anymore. They want to live locally from in office to remote people don't have to go to the office they want to work from home and once they get a taste of that they don't want to go back necessarily to the office unless they they feel like at that moment. From the global to the local where a lot of the supply chains are coming back home people know they need to be self sufficient on certain products and goods from from from great to green right we're going from concrete jungles to want to live in nature. People want to be around trees from greedy to fearful right instead of how high can my stocks go it's like how can I protect my portfolio. And I hope from hateful to grateful right where we say okay, you know, a lot of the things that we used to fight about. Like, you know what what verbiage and what what how to how to talk and how to speak and what color we are to, you know, grateful hey I'm alive, you know, and I've got food. And I think to some level from impractical to practical like our generation has not been tested in a long time and this is not a real test this is not a test like World War two with the test right don't get me wrong. But I would say it is a collective test, you know for the first time in human history, all of humanity is focused on one problem. We have one topic that we're all thinking about we have one problem that we want to solve it's like when a person gets sick. You know there's an old Confucius saying a happy man wants 10,000 things a sick man only wants one thing. And now the whole world is a sick man right the whole world is a sick world is a sick woman. So the world is sick collectively and our collective immune system is under attack and we realize that actually our immune system is collective. And so it's I think it's given us, you know, it's given us a model for how we can kind of have a shared response to things. And if we get more nitty gritty, I don't think the current set of responses are great. I think there's a set of nations that managed to completely crush the curve down to zero and New Zealand is one of the lucky ones in that regard. And I think you guys get half credit. Okay, I'll be I'll be fair about it, half credit in that sense that you acted early and it was amazing and everybody pulled together so you get half credit. The other half is you're an island that's really far away from everything, which just makes it easier. Hong Kong and Taiwan and South Korea. They were immunized by the original stars outbreak in 2003 so they had fast response teams. China is very authoritarian nation has been used to dealing with these kinds of outbreaks for a long time. Everybody else unfortunately fell into a different bucket. And I think we're all going to end up in the rest of the world in some variation of the Sweden model, which is, you know, the individuals are scared and mass gatherings are banned. But society as a whole has to kind of come out of hiding because it just can't stay shut down forever, or even economic collapse and vaccines are realistically one to two years away. And I think for places like New Zealand, it's an incredible opportunity, not just an opportunity it's going to be realized the question is how does New Zealand realize it. If you think about what New Zealand was before COVID. Before COVID New Zealand was kind of sleepy backwater that was really cool it was under Western rule of law and was environmentally naturally beautiful. But damn it it was just so far how do you get there. And so what were New Zealand's exports, it was tourism and it was agriculture. So these were like things that were you know you could do from far away was cool for like a little island nation, but New Zealand didn't was was both enabled and constrained by geography. And now the constraints of geography have gone away the enablements have come in a full force so for example, what is the new term to describe places like Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and New Zealand. It's green zone. Well, which one is actually green. It's actually the only one that lives up to that. It's the only one that has incredibly huge green spaces and it's so environmentally conscious not over urbanized. In fact, I would argue that New Zealand has suddenly become the most desirable green zone on the planet. The long flight has gone from being a liability to being an asset. The isolation is now an asset. So I think New Zealand is the huge winner here. There is one very, very critical piece to this and by the way New Zealand is one of the few green zones that is food sufficient. Unlike Singapore doesn't rely on the Malaysian border to bring in food. You know it's so New Zealand is kind of a microcosm. New Zealand suffers from two problems actually one is its economy is still too dependent on tourism agriculture and sort of this physical infrastructure moving around across borders. But that will resume coven's not going to be around forever that'll be around for a year or two. The other piece that New Zealand kind of kind of benefits from and suffers from is it's too small of a market. So you can't be fully self contained to some level you have to be plugged to the outside world. Otherwise your businesses are always going to be sub scale businesses, whether it's actually making food, growing food or whether it's building a digital product your sub scale if you just sell to New Zealand. And even some to Australia is not quite enough. You're still too sub scale. You need to get out to the rest of the English speaking world. So what can conquer those two issues for New Zealand. And it's the same in both cases which is having a digital export economy. The tech workers are the most leveraged people in the world. They're leveraged through code, they're leveraged through content, they're leveraged through capital they're leveraged through community. So they can live anywhere in the world they choose to live in Northern California because of the critical mass and it's got warm dry coastline, and it's a gigantic market and accepts immigrants. So, if you move to a model where New Zealand now is accepting skilled immigrants has beautiful coastline has the benefit of being a green zone being very far away from everything. And now you can start legitimately attracting the top workers in the world there and also a lot of California companies going remote now. A lot of my portfolio started to talk to say, we're going remote, we don't want to come back, we're going to stay remote. I wouldn't be surprised if more than half the barrier companies go remote and stay remote after this. This is a massive opportunity for New Zealand. It's the number one green zone in the world. If I was running New Zealand, which obviously I'm not, I would wave the magic wand. I would issue visas to tech workers to relocate here tomorrow. I would set up a giant startup style park in some university town outside of Auckland, and I would import the best and brightest in the world. They'll pay taxes, they'll pay income, giving work visas. It's an amazing place to work from and quarantine them all at the border for 30 days so that nobody brings COVID inside. But this is the opportunity, like if you were startup, if New Zealand was thinking like a startup, this is the time to take the market. This is the time to gain market share. Two years from now, that opportunity will still be there, but it'll have mostly passed because there won't be that pandemic rush. But if I controlled New Zealand today, if I was thinking of New Zealand, that's what I would do. I would take all the best and brightest on planet Earth and bring them to New Zealand on my terms. Those are definitely ideas that have been thrown around in New Zealand and really fascinating time for a small island nation and you're right, we've been quite ahead of the curve in the response. How about advice to entrepreneurs who are actually New Zealand at the moment, who've been building companies? How should they be thinking about this period and this era that we're in? Those who are fundraising, those who are trying to scale their software businesses and export to international markets? Well, I think the good news is that COVID and isolation have accelerated digital adoption by five years. Every company that's selling a purely digital good has seen a number spike in the last two months, unless it was somehow specifically COVID impacted. But everyone from Netflix to Amazon, all the public stocks or tech stocks are doing great. And the private companies are doing even better. A lot of them, basically their cost of customer acquisition has dropped to zero. And usually the people who are the slowest to adopt, which are the older generation, have not been forced to adopt. They're online just like the younger generation. So I think that's great. So for a software entrepreneur, this is the time to gain market share. If you haven't shipped your product yet, do whatever it takes to get into market right now. You have a very small window of time. If you're growing, you know, don't scratch your head in disbelief, go and grow, go and grow as much as possible to capture this market share. It's a good time for small companies to be hiring because the large companies are having big layoffs with anyone with a bloated cost structure suffering. The good news is if you're in New Zealand running a tech startup, you didn't have the luxury of getting a lot of venture capital. So it's very unlikely of a bloated cost structure to begin with. The challenge for you, of course, is the same as always been, which is reaching outside of the New Zealand or Australian market. You don't want to be trapped in a sub-scale market. So how do you take a New Zealand company and how do you compete toe-to-toe with a Bay Area company? Well, first, you need access to the same market. And second, you need access to the talent. Access to the market hasn't changed. It hasn't gotten worse. It hasn't gotten better. It's the same things you were going to do before. Access to talent has gotten better because even the Bay Area companies are going remote and the good people are now willing to work remotely. It used to be the case that if you were a top tier engineer, you kind of already went all in by moving to the Bay Area. And even if there's a great company based out of New Zealand or Australia that you want to work for, you didn't want to go outside of this network. Because you were like, actually, I want to be plugged into the Facebook network, the alumni network going to stay local. So it's kind of strange working for a foreign company. But now every company is a foreign company. So that's changed. So I think it will get easier to recruit top-flight talent. I think also as part of this, this trend has been happening for a while. VCs have become slowly more and more open to investing in remote and foreign countries and companies. That still isn't changing as quickly as you want as much as you want. But I think that trend will get slightly accelerated. But there's no question about it. It's still hard to raise money for a company that's in New Zealand or Australia. The bar is so much higher. You have to be so much further along. But that's part of what I hope to do with VHF over time. Kind of help narrow that gap. No one person can close it. But to the extent that I can, I would like to reduce it. Yeah. That's something that I hear many startups thinking about right now where you cannot travel. So you can't go meet with potential investors. But now investors will invest over Zoom. So investors don't expect you to travel anymore either. So I think the investor expectations have shifted. I've probably invested in 15 companies in the last three months and obviously with no physical meetings. That's great. And so how are you thinking about also raising capital in a time of recession? Is that changing quite a lot? Is it the same? What are the different patterns that you're seeing at this time? Yeah. Sorry. Give me one second. I got an interruption here. No problem. Thanks. Just my three-year-old. Yeah. I mean, in terms of capital raising, I think so the VCs have frozen up for a brief moment in time where they're sort of waiting to see how things shake out. Some of them are still investing for hot deals. They're still getting done. Angels are still active. I think if anything, I'm seeing more and more people waking up to the realization that actually technology is where you're supposed to be at. So a lot of money that before would have been slow to come into tech is coming to tech much faster. It might take another three months for this realization to play out, but I actually think the capital market, the capital raising market for companies will be strong. Now, that doesn't mean that a company that couldn't have raised capital before can suddenly raise capital. There's no miracles and no shortcuts. But if you had kind of a growing company that had good numbers or good product, good prospects and strong people, it was a kind of company that could have raised capital before. You'll be able to raise more capital now in stronger terms probably by the end of the year will be my guess. But that's a guess. Obviously, the pandemic can play out many different ways. There can be horror stories. It can mutate, you know, the IFR, CFR could move around, people can go back into hiding, etc. But overall, I think like, you know, people don't view the expenditures that are doing a digital as expensive. The truth is that most digital goods are much cheaper than the physical or old world equivalents. Netflix is cheaper than cable TV. Spotify is cheaper than having to buy CDs and rip albums. You know, social networks are basically free. You're being sold off for ads as a product. Shipping from Amazon is usually cheaper than going to your local store like it or not, right? Yeah, so I think the shift to digital works even the recession. It's pro recessionary. Yeah, and going back to talent, which is a big driver of the digital economy. How do you think about the lots of people who are losing their jobs and livelihoods as a result of COVID? You know, we're seeing it in New Zealand with so many people who are hired by the tourism industry. What are effective retraining programs that you've seen to get people into technology in this time? Yeah, so I mean, there's the governments are reacting in one or two ways. You know, one is either they're leaving their economies open like Sweden and to some extent I think the Netherlands and Japan have done and they kind of stumble along. They're still massively reduced because people are hiding out just through normal everyday rational fear. But most of the economic damage is being inflicted by enforced government shutdowns. Now, New Zealand's a unique case because there's an agricultural and tourism economy that relies on exports or in case of tourism requires imports, that's going to suffer. As long as New Zealand wants to remain a green zone, I just don't see how tourism comes back until there's a vaccine. And that could be a year from now, that could be two years from now. So there's no short term miracles there. It's not like, let's just wait it out for three months and then the rest of the world is going to be a green zone. It's also possible the rest of the world could get there based on herd immunity, where the virus just burns to their population and then you have herd immunity for the most of the world by this time next year. But even that doesn't allow New Zealand to open up because New Zealanders won't have herd immunity. So there is actually a model here, there's a scenario where in, you know, let's say that there's an uncontrolled burn of the virus through the west and the United States and other large countries and Europe end up with herd immunity around November, December, January, but the green zones are still locked down and have to continue being locked down. And then the rest of the world can start trading with each other, but the green zones have to stay locked down. So that might be a real possibility. So I don't think it's wise to bet upon tourism reemerging. And that may not be what your politicians can say publicly, because you know they have to kind of just keep kicking the can down the road. But if I were in the tourism industry, I would be extremely concerned. I think you have to literally survive for 18 months or more. Could be wrong. Maybe there'll be a miracle treatment around the corner, or the virus turns out to spread a lot more than we thought. So the IFR is miniscule and everybody admits they were wrong and opens the doors, but I don't think that's that likely. So I think it's it's much more likely that New Zealand has been locked down for two years to tourists. So the only kinds of tourists you can let in are long term tourists, right, because who's going to sit through a 14 day quarantine, or 30 day quarantine, they're only coming to visit 14 or 30 days. So you need a different kind of tourists. And so that's why I think this idea of like stealing all the remote workers is actually not a bad one for the locals. I think this is a time to put them through good retraining programs. If you want to be a country that exports digital assets, digital goods, then train everybody and then to school them all. Let them to school the entire set. Let them to school everyone will go for them to school is my euphemism for ISA based education. We just have to be ISA based income share agreement. It could just be the government subsidizes it. You can we can reeducate people online. There's this very pernicious myth that adults can't be reeducated. So whatever job they're born in, they have to die in. And that's nonsense. I mean, people can remake themselves. They just have to be willing to. So if it's tied to an incentive program, like for example, if your unemployment benefits were doubled or have based on whether you were doing retraining or not. I think that would get people on board. What if your unemployment benefits be a bonus based on did you pass computer science, you know, class within with a or whatever. I say all the people are going to work in computers. They're not. They're not all going to work with the digital economy, but even having a digitally literate workforce. It's like the difference between having a literate workforce and an illiterate workforce. Even if not everybody is a writer. It's the economy still so much better off that everyone is literate the same way just because not everybody's a programmer. The economy is still better off because everyone's digitally literate. They can at least use no code tools like use Excel that use online banking and so on. And that is so attractive to employers. It is so so attractive to employers. You know, so becoming a digitally literate nation, I think is a worthy goal. It shouldn't cost that much because most of this can be delivered to computers and tablets and phones. And it's a good way to sort of help transition the economy because tourism is going to take a while. You have tourism between the green zones, but I don't know how big that is honestly. I haven't done the math and the next one tourism, which seems more limited to me. Well, you mentioned the term green zone quite a bit here and I read some of your tweets on it. I'm not sure everyone here might have. Can you explain a little bit what you mean green zones and red zones and how that framework. The green zone red zone is just a quarantine delineation is basically who's got the virus under control and who doesn't. And green zones kind of have the virus under control so they can kind of communicate with themselves and trade with themselves and visit between themselves and red zones have to be closed off. Otherwise, it's like George Carlin said about smoking in restaurants. It's like having a peeing section in the swimming pool, right? If you have a peeing section and non-peeing section in the swimming pool, it doesn't work. If you have a smoking section in a restaurant or in an airplane, it doesn't work. The smoke spreads everywhere. So green zones have to self isolate. Right now, obviously, it's hugely advantageous to being a green zone. Suppose the virus goes out of control and there's no vaccine and it burns through and immunizes the population in the current red zones. The red zones will actually switch the new green zones in a way. They won't be green because they're necessarily safe, but they're green because they're done with the problem, right? They're over the other side. So this could flip on you. But yeah, it's just shorthand for communicating whether something still has an uncontrolled outbreak of the virus or not. Yeah, and for that reason now, New Zealand has become a very attractive place for lots of people and the value of entry to New Zealand has just gone up significantly. And so what advice would you have to governments and people even working in immigration around a pack of talent to help them rebuild an economy in some of the directions you're talking about? Yeah, I think there's, you know, let me give you the basic strategy, which I think the government will follow and it's politically palatable. I'll give you the one that's kind of advanced and would require very aggressive and forward thinking government. And then I'll give you the crazy that would probably cause a revolution getting the thrown out of power. Right. So let's explore the space. I think of the basic strategy. It's fostered things like EHF, which is the smartest immigration program in the world. Look how much value it creates for, you know, 400 immigrants in exchange for 400 visas or permanent residencies. So smart immigration programs like EHF I think can be super helpful where you just kind of attract the best and brightest you run them through a filter you make sure they're contributing heavily to work in New Zealand. In the middle, I would just expand it out to giving work visas to any tech worker who comes in and will pay a certain level of taxes and, you know, has a certain level of behavior and I would steal all the best people from all the best companies around the world because now they can work remote. And so they can work here once they're here, they'll naturally just spill over and start creating a tech ecosystem infrastructure that will create, you know, a backup Silicon Valley for the world that could be extremely valuable. The easy one is you could securitize citizenship. You could basically give every New Zealand citizen an extra passport, an extra blank passport, and then you can auction these off on the world. And of course you would have other criteria you have to make sure people were kind and smart and didn't have a criminal record and all that and interesting for you have all the other criteria to, but you're basically selling off extra space because you have it. And then as those people integrate the value of the extras passport that each person holds goes to the roof. So New Zealanders can basically retire. If you're willing to double the population of New Zealand, you can literally let the current, you could give all the social programs you ever needed to. You could basically give every New Zealander a massive salary, free healthcare for the rest of your life, pay off their house and if you retire, obviously it's a crazy one. I actually have it on my blog I wrote this article 10 years ago called Securitized Citizenship. And it's tongue in cheek, but it basically talks about this idea. And it actually aligns a lot of incentives. Now, if a government is doing bad governance, you'll see the value of the citizenship fall, you'll see the passport value fall. Maybe if they're destroying the environment, the passport value goes down. Or if they're cracking down their people living civil liberties, less people want to come into the passport value goes down. Think about the feedback that creates. I'm not being 100% serious with this idea, but I'm just basically just saying how much value controlled citizenship programs can create. If you had a high quality enough integration program, you can literally make everybody in the country wealthy. That is definitely a revolutionary. Yeah, it'll cause a revolution maybe of the wrong kind, where, you know, people get the guillotine. Yeah, I mean, it's such a fascinating time, because it forces us to think about borders and nationality and movement in a very different way, and probably gets this question and thinks that we haven't had the chance to question previously. Yeah, I mean, it's, everything goes up for grabs again, right, you can you can revisit things you can reopen topics you can reimagine things. But I think in a way it's good because people are now very practical. It's like when your life is in the line, you suddenly get very practical, it gets it gets rid of all the illusions about what you thought was important. And going back to the startup world and building startup ecosystems in a place like New Zealand. One of the challenges that we've had is not having the generation of smart capital that has kind of been reinvesting back in the ecosystem like you have in Silicon Valley. How would you tackle that gap in a place like New Zealand, especially at this period of time. Yeah, that's a tough one. Normally the way startup funding ecosystems develop is they develop backwards. People think it starts the angel investing and then VCs and then no it actually the ecosystem actually develops backwards what happens is in some location the founders of some company will manage to get bootstrap it all the way and then take it public and they'll make a lot of money. And then they will start investing in companies right before those companies go public because they'll see that window. The problem with starting out angel investing in an area or series a investing like at the beginning, when there's no subsequent funding ecosystem is that those companies run out of cash, even though they might be doing fine there's no later stage VCs or investors there to support them. So that has traditionally been the problem. I think now you can bridge some of it because people can travel, you know, let's say post COVID and also because of zoom and remote and general remote investing. But it's it's ultimately a hard problem until New Zealand kind of creates its own first native unicorn that would seem like a difficult solve. I think EHF can solve this problem. I think the government could solve it through smart integration and having high investment requirements into the local, you know, ecosystem. It's something that I want to look at solving like, you know, when I come to New Zealand like that is kind of what I want to focus on. I don't want to spread myself thin on, you know, 10 different projects or 10 tiny investments. I actually want to see if I can plan to seed or the acorn that would grow into the oak that could long term solve this problem, but it's not an it's not an easy problem to solve. You can even look at Y Combinator for example which started in Boston was then forced to move to Silicon Valley, you know they couldn't even make it work in Boston and Boston is known as a tech hub. So I don't think it's an easy problem to solve but I think I think it requires some level of partnership with EHF and the government to do it. I don't think it's something that any one company or one accelerator or even like a purely private consortium could solve on its own. This has a little bit of the Manhattan project feel to it, right, or putting a man on the field to it where you need everybody working together. And, you know, I don't mean that in some dubious collective I'm taking the can down the road sense. I mean the very practical sense I mean like EHF would say okay, we're bringing on these 100 investors and they've committed this amount of capital. And the government say okay, we're bringing in 2000 tech workers and as part of that Google and Microsoft and Apple and all these startups and so on to also meet the right to follow checks to build this technology campus. Right, and then real estate developers like okay we've got this tech campus that we're building out in their space and all these tech companies are going to be in one area right and that's the kind of thing that attracts investors, investors follow the talent at the end of the day. So if you can get the talent, you'll get the money the tech industry is backwards that way everyone says, everyone thinks they're talented and they're just lacking money. It's not true. I'm sorry I'm sorry to burst your bubble, the money follows the talent. So if you can suck in the talent in large enough quantities, the money will show up right now what scares in the world. What's abundant capital, the governments are printing unlimited money. So capital is abundant risk capital is abundance talent that scares now it has to be branded time as we recognizable time. There's a lot of talent in New Zealand just someone who's far away can't recognize it. That's where universities come in. That's where companies come in right senior engineer Google tells you a certain level of talent. A senior product manager Facebook tells you a certain level of talent, you know degree and XYZ from university ABC tells you a certain level of talent. So I think if you pull in the talent, the money will follow. Yeah, that's definitely been one of the main arguments that each of at least has been making in the local ecosystem is is get the talent and grow the talent. And there's a lot of talent here in New Zealand as well that are trying to attract more talent to scale the businesses and more capital to scale their their their ventures. If you are a local investor in New Zealand and trying to make sense of this time and and rethink about the investment pieces what advice would you have in terms of what types of opportunities to look for in the next 12 to 18 months and where to put their money to to entrepreneurs. Yeah, I think I think as an investor, obviously right now you want to think about things that are digital and can scale globally. Digital plays are going to do better than physical plays and things that can scale globally are going to be things that are stuck to local scale. It's the unfortunate fact of the internet and digital systems that many of the businesses are winner take all businesses, which may seem terrible because you don't want to live your life under two or three or five monopolies. But it's actually not that bad because now every business can go around the entire world and hit every customer could possibly have so a lot of businesses that would have been too niche to consider before can suddenly become quite large. In fact, Australia's most recent native unicorn canva is built on that it was something that people thought was too niche and too small but it turned out to go global with that market that gets huge. So, I think the opportunity is to look at businesses that can scale to the whole planet. And there's a lot more of those than you think businesses that can attract great talent and not because they're remote. I would be less worried about the financing side subsequently than I used to be just because I think if the company has good numbers and has good product. Now VCs will invest in companies that are far away. That's becoming just a lot more real. It's still not easy. It's still not the as easy as it's going to be for Silicon Valley based company, but that gap just closed by a lot. Yeah, interesting. When you talk about a lot of companies kind of aggregating into fewer companies that are ruling the industries they're in. One area that you're involved in is crypto, which has got quite a strong decentralized lens to it. How are you seeing that whole industry developing at the moment and what are the opportunities that you see during and post coded for for crypto and blockchain entrepreneurs to really step up. Yeah, I actually became less interested in crypto in 2017 2018 and I went through a hype cycle to attract a lot of fraudsters and money people. It's got boring. It was all about like token ICO. But I think now I'm starting to see the first crypto applications emerge that are super interesting and not just about money transfer, or rather say Bitcoin, which is wealth storage. You know, Bitcoin is an electronic Swiss bank account decentralized sovereign resistant electronic Swiss bank account. And for what it is, it's amazing and it works incredibly well. But the question is, what else is there? Like, are we going to live in a world where everything is dominated by Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Microsoft, you know, and small Uber, whatever small number of players who run our lives. I hope not. And the opportunity there's in blockchains and we're starting to see a little bit of it emerge. It's coming in two areas. One is decentralized finance. So you have things like Uniswap and Compound and Maker where you're getting stable coins that can trade like the US dollar does but they're decentralized or you're getting lending and borrowing or speculation or things of that nature or decentralized markets and exchanges. So that's interesting because that can be a big part of the economy. In fact, it's the Wall Street casino being recreated but now it's online 24 seven trustless available to everybody. And without, you know, people in suits sitting on Wall Street taking their cut. So I think that's really interesting. There's a second class emerging that's even more interesting but I would put this at just like the most basic green shoots are springing up. And this is plumbing infrastructure for next generation web development for non crypto companies but it's built on top of a crypto platform. For example, Filecoin and IPFS with the Interplanetary File System where you can distribute storage or there's companies coming up in authentication where you can do your user credential storage online encrypted and secured but completely decentralized. It's backed up on the blockchain. That's how you log into the site but to an end user looks like normal username password email whatever but you know that's secured in the blockchain and you're not giving up your identity in your browsing history and patterns and control over what site you go into. You're not giving that up to Google or Apple or Twitter or Facebook or one of the classic login or a lot of providers or Apple. So I think that because when you when you look at crypto, if you look at Bitcoin, for example, Bitcoin isn't is keeping track of debts and credits right it's keeping track of who paid whom how much and implicit in that is keeping track of identity who right before you can keep track of who paid whom you got to know who who is what do I mean by who. So it keeps track of identity. But if you look at the web today identity is tracked by these big providers, like I log in via Facebook login via Google login via Apple login via Amazon, create a new identity on each website. Then I got to remember the password and login for different websites and, you know, and it's not under my control that data is not under my control that developer might get hacked. And then my private information is leaked, or the developer might, you know, take advantage of my information some way that I don't I just want to be I just want my privacy. I think crypto is going to solve that because Bitcoin's already solved the whole problem crypto's already solved the whole problem we just need to port it into the into the rest of the world infrastructure. So I think that is the first place where we're going to see crypto kind of attack the real world and I think I think it's coming the next few years we'll see it developing. Also the online wallets are getting a lot easier to use. Like now you like brave has a built in crypto wallet so you can go on to these these crypto, even like the hardcore crypto products and your browser can automatically do the payments, it can automatically do micro payments and you know automatically do programmatic payments. You know where crypto really excels in payments is it does really well for tiny tiny little payments, I want to pay a fraction of a cent. You know, you can't do that to the normal banking system. It works really well for massive payments. I want to send a billion dollars very hard to do through the classic banking system without lots of lawyers and escrow agents and people involved. It excels on programmatic payments. So this piece of code wants to pay that piece of code. And it exists and of course it's good for permissionless payments, which is, I don't want anybody to get in the way of a payment but that's a different story. So I think from all of those things crypto is really going to excel over the next few years. How would a technology founder who's not working in crypto. How should that person be thinking about the blockchain opportunity in terms of where their work can overlap with this space here. Yeah, blockchain and crypto are not for the light of heart. It's not for the faint of heart. They're extremely complex systems to understand, you know, I still find people. I still have misunderstandings about basic crypto and basic blockchain. I could spend the rest of my lifetime learning about them will build something larger than, you know, it's like the macro economy or this is one of those things that's just too large for any single human to figure out. So we're always going to be no person, no single person can even keep up with crypto. Even Vitalik Buterin, you know, or Nick Sabo or one of these legends in the crypto community or an atom back. These people are still not aware of everything that's going on. There's just too much happening. It's too complex. You've got this intersection of very complicated math, combined with technology combined with governance. These are completely different fields. There's again law, contract law. So it's just a very difficult field to figure out and follow. So unless you're really passionate and gung-ho about it, you're not going to excel in it, right? It's one of those things that requires all in. It's like if I told you that like robotics has made some basic breakthrough or genomics, right? And you're non-genomics entrepreneurs think, well, how do I think about genomics? Like, you really can. It's too complicated. So the only way it's going to work is if you're passionate about it, right? If someone on your team is incredibly passionate about crypto, that person is your crypto person. And it doesn't matter what their background or expertise or even their knowledge level is. If you're passionate about it, they have a chance of figuring it all out. But there's so much to learn and so new and you got to separate so much of the hype from the reality and that only a passionate person will be able to do that. Yeah. I've been trying to learn about it over the last few years and you feel all the time you're just crushing the surface. Yeah. It's growing faster than you can keep up. Yeah. Do you see such an opportunity? But I think that's an opportunity too, right? Whenever there's a field where the edge of knowledge is expanding unevenly and quickly, it's like an ecosystem that's changing because say like a new river came in and flooded lands. And so then forests before that weren't usable or certainly usable as farmland, but you know some mountain turned into an island. Like the landscape is changing, right? And it's generally changing for the better. Like there's more of this resource available. But you need a very fast moving entrepreneur who can adapt. So for people who are looking for opportunity and looking to adapt, it's wonderful. But you have to commit fully to it. It's like an immigrant, right? Any immigrant anywhere is also an immigrant from somewhere else. And an immigrant takes massive risk to take their life into their own hands. They'll leave their family and their loved ones, leave the culture that they know, the people who look like them, the food that they like, the language they speak. They give up everything and they go to a foreign place. But what they get in exchange for that is they get to choose where they land roughly, right? They get to like pick a place that in theory is a better standard starting ground. There's this old mountain climbing algorithm in computer science that I love because it talks so much about human nature. And the way it works is that basically if you're climbing a mountain, let's say you're trying to get to the top of the mountain where you pick a path. There's many paths at the bottom. You don't map. You don't know what goes where. You pick a path. And let's say the path gets you halfway up or two thirds of the way up. Well, most people will stop there. They're stuck. They'll say, well, I'm not going to go all the way back down and look for another path to go to the top. But in exchange, they're never going to get to the top and it's just got to be okay with that, which is fine. That's where you want to be. It's a good enough view, good enough spot. You can stay there. But if you want to get to the top, you have to go back down to the bottom. And that's basically what immigrants do. Immigrants are people who are stuck somewhere in the mountainside and they look up and they look down and you know, say, you know what, I'll go back down. I'll see what happens. I'll go see if I can find a path to the top. It's a huge risk. Same thing if you're going to go into crypto. Absolutely. And you're talking about risk and when I talk to other entrepreneurs in New Zealand at the moment, it's, you know, many people who are navigating through such a massive transformative time that might not have been through in the past, and are just wondering, how should I best navigate this period of time? What are the things that I should do in a time of crisis? What are the things I shouldn't do in a time of crisis? And I'm hearing you in some areas take bigger risks in some areas be more conservative. How should an entrepreneur be balancing some of these different voices that you have around you to determine the best way to build your company and venture? I think the way to think about it is take the maximum risks you can that doesn't cause you to go to ruin. That doesn't cause you to fail. Like for example, when you're driving a car along the road, let's say that there's like a big divider and then on the other side there's an open lane. An automaton like my Tesla automatically stays in the center of the lane. It stays just as far from the divider as it does from the next lane, which is dumb. The next lane is empty. It has no cars. A human driver will wander closer to the edge of the empty lane and further away from the divider because the human driver knows that hitting that divider is catastrophic. That's the end of the game. So I think the same way do whatever it takes to not hit the divider, right? You don't want to lose your company. Don't go out of business. Don't ever risk your business. You can't recover from zero. Any evaluation multiplied by zero is zero. So don't go to zero. Don't even chance going to zero. But within that envelope, take as much risk as you can because this is the time to build digital products. This is the time to increase market share. This is the time to recruit the best and the brightest. This is the time to go get customers because all your customers are sitting at home in most of the world. And they're basically saying, okay, I'm ready to try anything new. Yeah, I think that that'll be very relevant for many QB founders and I don't know if you're aware, but 89, almost 89% of the New Zealand businesses are considered to be small and medium sized enterprises. They're not going to build to be next unicorns in the way that in other environments, think of them. What advice would you have for people who are not trying to build something that's going to grow to be a billion dollar company? How they can navigate the next phase as well? Yeah, I mean, one of the unfair things about the world that you learn later on, and there's no fair, so it's all unfair, and it's all fair at the end, who knows. But one of the things that seems categorically unfair is it takes the same amount of work to build a small business as it does to build a large business. Jeff Bezos doesn't work any harder than the guy running the convenience store. You know, he's working the same hours per week. In fact, possibly less. It's how you apply it, right? So I basically, the way I decided to give back a few years ago, it wasn't even a decision, it just kind of happened, was when I was a kid, you know, I grew up with no money. And I had my face pressed against the glass, looking through the window and wanting that. And so I just came up with a systematic approach to making money. I got an attack because I love science. I wanted to be a scientist. And I like tech because it combines science and business, but it's important for me to make money. But at the same time, I'm not obsessed with making money. At some point, I'm like, okay, I have enough. Any more money I'm going to have to give away. I don't care about the scorecard. And if you told me the only way for me to make money was to be in a business that I don't want to be in, that I didn't particularly care about, I just wouldn't do it. It's not that interesting to me. The money was the goal. Once you get the goal, you're done. And I'm not going to kill myself after that. But what that meant was I couldn't fail. I couldn't leave myself the option of failure. And of course, there's always luck in the world. So you do have to, even then I had to make luck work for me. So I had a framework that I sort of pieced together when I was young, and it was, it was implicit. It wasn't like I wrote it even wrote down, but I kind of understood the principles of how to make money over the long term in a reliable way and to have success in the business because the business is a long, long term in a reliable way, because I didn't have an option. I couldn't afford to fail. There's no safety net. So I tried to open source that I wrote a tweet storm on Twitter, and it's painted the top of my Twitter profile. And I put it on my blog, and I did a podcast around it. I've got a three and a half hour podcast. It's got a clickbait title is called how to get rich without getting lucky. And there's an entire transcript, you can read it, you can listen to it, everything I know about how to build a business is in there at a very high level, but it applies to small businesses, midsize businesses, large businesses. Obviously, I know tech business is the best. So, you know, the advice will skew by default to that but the principles I talk about like leverage accountability and specific knowledge. You know, these apply to all kinds of businesses, they apply to real estate businesses, they apply to groceries, they apply to all kinds of things. You know, I'm probably wandering out of my field to start talking about non tech businesses and I don't want to, I don't want to be that guy who knows very less about them than many business owners and then tries to give advice, especially for a place like New Zealand, where so much of the market is local. So, you know, at the end of the day, those business owners will know best but what I do know that I think is timeless and generalizable is at that is in that podcast. So, the URL is nav.al slash rich, just go there, and it's all there. Awesome. And one of the beautiful things that has also happened in New Zealand is, is an organization called monarchy that basically created a platform for different entrepreneurs and investors to make time for local business builders to get advice and support through this period of time so if you're a small business and looking for advice you can go to monarchy and and get advice from local entrepreneurs. So, you've got a lot of different perspectives that you shared here on a micro level what are things that the government can do cannot do. If you were in the shoes of the Innovation Minister for New Zealand. What are the ways that she could invest her time and energy that can have the highest impact to build a digital based economy in the country and anything else that you haven't shared earlier that she could be thinking about. Yeah, I would just combine a few of those things. Number one, I would import the best and brightest, not just entrepreneurs but just workers right smart people who can build product that can be globally accepted. You've got one year before COVID is behind us with a vaccine or herd immunity. And so during that one time, no one can compete with you. It's like, it's like Netflix versus, you know, movie theaters right now, like literally that's the difference. That's the advantage you have so I would take advantage of that to bring in, not just, not just entrepreneurs not just each fellows I think that's just the beginning. I would go the next level and I would go as quickly as possible and snatch up those good people. Secondly, I would bring in investors, but I would bring in investors with large minimum investment requirements like no you don't get to just wander in you've got to invest serious money into local companies. So I would attach dollar figures to those investments, I would be very concrete, and I would be very hard-nosed about it. And then, I think thirdly, I would, and maybe this is part of what also those remote those workers that you're tracking those investor tracking part of what they do is maybe they just come in and they pay it into a general fund. And that fund goes towards digital literacy for as much of the New Zealand populous as possible. Every kid, every adult who's got six weeks or eight weeks to kill should be able to take an online digital literacy program, or a class or you know go take MOOCs or some or maybe the local university convention. That one give a little bit more time for but not a ton because I don't think the tourism industry is coming back anytime soon. So, I think that those are the kinds of things I would work on, but these all require speed, and they require making hard decisions quickly and putting together programs quickly and that's not something that at least the governments I'm familiar with are known for. And New Zealand did react faster than most of its most other governments New Zealand move quickly on the pandemic. So if New Zealand can. So I would say New Zealand move quickly to protect itself, right and moved quickly to secure itself. That's actually an easier job than not taking advantage of the opportunity created. If New Zealand can move equally quickly to take advantage of the opportunity that was created by being a safe zone. And that will pay off in spades but you've got one to two years not only not to decide, but to execute all the way through. And that is a short window. Yeah, I agree with you speed of execution is key at this time here. What about any other advice that you like to share with key entrepreneurs and founders for different stages of their set of journey those were right at the beginning and those are trying to scale their ventures. The bad news is by playing in New Zealand you're playing on hard mode, right just because you're far away from everything the good news is you came in ready to play on hard mode and came medium mode. It's not going to be easy, but at least the game shifted one level in your favor because now remote work is acceptable remote investment is acceptable. And so things that move in your favor so you're probably used to playing a lot more defense. Don't hit the guardrail, don't hit the divider as I said earlier, but maybe now you can play a little bit more. Got it. And earlier kind of mentioned some of the ideas that you had in mind to do things in New Zealand. If you're to come to New Zealand tomorrow, if orders are like to do so, what are the things that you'd want to invest your time and energy towards what are some initiatives you'd be excited to get involved in. Yeah, I don't I don't like to spread myself then so I'm not going to be the person that comes in invest in like 20 different little things and sits on a few different advisory boards and gets involved in like lots of little ways. I like taking responsibility for something and having one big thing that either works or fails. And I think what New Zealand needs is it needs a powerful attractor it needs to be a sync that attracts the best and brightest from around the world. It attracts money, it attracts talent, it attracts passion. And to me, EHF is a seed of that. So I would want to build the equivalent for EHF that is very brutally economically focused because EHF has a very broad mission. You're trying to bring in diverse thinkers, you're trying to bring in change makers, you're trying to bring in everything from artists to farmers to entrepreneurs to investors, you're doing kind of the whole set. I would want to build an institution that could be a catalyst for attracting lots of money and lots of talent. And that doesn't need to do a lot of people, but it needs to be a lot of impact, but I would want to measure that in economic impact. So that could be helping like one of the accelerators here that's already exist to become a global beacon, or creating a new one, or it could be creating a fund of some kind or be creating an online platform of some kind, or it could be something brand new. And I have some ideas around that. But I would probably focus myself down on one thing and one thing only to put together a beacon or a signal flare. And those things take time to develop. It's like planting a seed, and you got to wait for a garden. That could take decades. But I would be much more interested in doing something like that and sort of coming and speaking at a lot of conferences and being a bunch of advisory boards and running a few small checks and then kind of winning it out. This is not my style. Well, that'd be fantastic to see it in action and and I'm sure there'll be a lot of people who'd be interested in being part of such an initiative. Yeah, I would want to local partners absolutely because I'm not that operational anymore I would need, you know, people who are like, high energy, hungry, ready to go. That said, greatness, great things don't get built by committees. Right. At the end of the day, like one or two individuals have to take responsibility for it. Ideally, I would find a partner someone who is just on the ground, incredibly hungry committed to New Zealand smart driven. And I would help provide resources guidance support and all of that so that even if I'm not in New Zealand 24 seven, I mean I can spend time, that's fine I'm very flexible but my life is still very much in the United States. So I just can't be 100% New Zealander like this person could, but if I could find my partner and do it, that would be incredible but I would probably just pick one or two I wouldn't. I don't think I don't think this this court sort of thing can be done by like a big group. Right. I mean, obviously takes a group to build anything but still it's a founder mentality. Just like you at the end of the day are taking responsibility day to day for EHF. There's no way around it right there's accountability, the weight of EHF hangs on your shoulders. And that's just what it requires. So I would want to find someone like that to partner with like Matthew and Brian did with you, and to create something that can then just be a huge generator in economic engine for New Zealand. That's exciting of all any last words you want to share before we finish the session. I'm just sorry winning. We don't have the ability to go through his chat question because we took a lot of chat questions early on and that's kind of how we collected them. But I'm always on Twitter, as at the wall so you can always tweet with me there. I do occasional periscopes if you have that app installed. Sometimes I'm in clubhouse, I got a podcast so I'm kind of out there. You can always find me. Thank you very much everybody. Thank you all for sharing your perspectives here. And thank you all for joining us today. My colleague Paula has just been sharing the feedback form so if you can give us feedback in the session that'll be fantastic. And we have a number of online workshops and series happening over the next few weeks and months so feel free to check us out on EHF.org slash new frontiers. Thank you all for this session and for sharing your ideas. And if anyone is interested in EHF, the last deadline is the first of June to apply for COVID so check out our website for that. Yeah, I would say applying to EHF is probably right now the most valuable program in the world. Like, there's no, there's no Harvard PhD you could go get that would be more valuable than going to EHF not just because the people you get exposed to but also of course the entry to amazing country that is now a green zone. So you're going to be inundated you're going to have too many people and I would what I would say to the applicants is, you know, don't come for a lousy visa. If you're going to go to EHF you're going to get sucked into a bunch of people who want to make a huge difference. And one way or another you get sucked into making a huge difference so I would say apply for EHF if you're serious about New Zealand. If you're serious about doing something that has an impact. And if you are that I think EHF would welcome you otherwise I think, you know, each is incredibly desirable but it's not for everybody, you have to make a commitment to doing something big. And what better time to do it than this time of transformation and change that is going through and it is a challenging time for the country and for many people. And I think this is time for entrepreneurs to rise up and be building. And just want to say thank you all for submitting your questions online in advance which was super helpful to curate the set of questions to Naval. Thank you. All right, take care.