 Many universities today are struggling to prepare their students for the kinds of broad systemic challenges that will emerge as an increasing number of scientific discoveries and technological innovations continue to surface. A central question being posed by universities is, how do we help students prepare for the changing nature of work? To cope with these challenges, we need to prepare for careers that may not exist today, but may very well exist in the future. Not only anticipate these kinds of opportunities, but play an active role in creating them. That's why we decided to create this series of talks, focus on how to invest in your skills, choose which problems faces to tap into, and ultimately create a fulfilling career path. The idea for this series emerged after my sister, Olivia, learned of 80,000 hours. It's a non-profit that aims to help individuals make the greatest possible impact through their careers. It is a website. It's housed out of Oxford. I recommend you guys check it out. We will all spend on average 80,000 hours in our career. So how we choose to spend that time is one of the most important decisions we will ever make. So the goal of this speaker series is to assist us in thinking more critically about the science and technology driven problem spaces that will demand extra attention in the coming years. And to encourage students to explore how these problems can be turned into opportunities that can transform their career paths. The Future of Work series is currently supported by the Office of the Provost and is co-sponsored by the UC Davis Library. I would like to personally thank everyone who has helped us get this series off the ground and everyone who has continued to support us in our efforts. In particular, thank you to Beth Broome, Mark Vassiotti, Mackenzie Smith, and Colin Milburn for helping us bring this initiative to life. So for each talk, we're going to pair one UC Davis faculty member or administrator with one professional from industry, government, start-ups, the non-profit sector, and have both groups interview each other and answer the same questions from different perspectives. So as this series progresses, we plan to explore topics such as data and AI, robotics, clean energy and ag tech, biotech, media, governance. You get the picture. So we hope this ongoing series will embolden you to look beyond job titles and think more adventurously when it comes to what problems you want to solve, be that they're working in entirely new industries or helping transform and modernize existing ones. We hope the students in this room will gain exposure to the kinds of exciting new careers being created in both traditional and emerging fields, learn more about the ways in which science and technology are restructuring work and reorganizing our society, and ultimately feel inspired to use their own studies to make a worthwhile contribution. Which brings us to our talk today. Rao Unava is the Dean of the Graduate School of Management at UC Davis and one of the founders of Angie's List. He joined the GSM in 2016 following 32 years at the Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business. He is also on the board of directors of the American Marketing Association and serves on the board of the Bay Area Council, the largest business centric public policy organization in the San Francisco region. Passer is an entrepreneur and venture capitalist who was born on a farm in Pakistan. He grew up in the Detroit area and after graduating with an engineering degree from Kettering University, went on to complete his MBA at Harvard's Business School. He was the co-founder and CEO of Talkbin, which was acquired by Google in 2011 before becoming the COO of Y Combinator. In 2017, he left Y Combinator to start Applied Intuition, a technology company that is building advanced software and infrastructure tools for autonomous vehicles. And if you would both like to take just a brief minute to talk about your backgrounds a bit and frame this talk that you guys are going to have? Well, thanks for having me. I think my own career has roughly been split into three categories. One, being an engineer. Two, being a founder. I've started three companies and then three being an investor. And all of those, I think, experiences have helped inform this topic of career development. How do you pick what areas you should spend your time in? And I think to the theme of this series is 100% correct. You will find that amount of time. How are you going to allocate it? I think a lot of times people really just think about titles or they go to a job fair at the end of undergrad and whatever company they coincidentally get an offer from, that's where they move to and that's where their friend group is and they find that they've been living there for another 15, 20 years without really being active. And I've tried to be as active as I possibly can in each of those chunks of my career. I'm happy to talk about that. From a background perspective, I come from India where I got my degree in engineering. After engineering, I thought I would probably branch out a little bit because I felt I was not really a good engineer. I could do well in my coursework, but my heart was not in it. I got into an MBA program, really enjoyed it and decided that that's the field I would like to spend some time on. I started working, but then at the same time I got an opportunity to teach an evening MBA program as I was working. And over a one and a half year period, I started realizing that I was enjoying the teaching part more than I was enjoying my day job. So decided to come to the United States to get a PhD because this is the place where education quality is the highest in the world. I got my PhD at the Ohio State University and continued to work there because through some strange set of circumstances, Ohio State made an offer for me to stay back in the faculty. It was an unusual offer and I decided to stay back and test it out and then just stayed back. But one of the nice things about being at a place like Ohio State and also doing an academic kind of a job is that you have a lot of freedom. As long as you do what you're supposed to be doing, publish good research, do a good job in the classroom and serve the community. If you have more time, you can do whatever you want with it. That's where I started getting the itch to start something. And that's how Angie's List actually started where I was looking for a service provider, couldn't find one because I didn't know how to find one. And then I thought wouldn't it be nice if you have a database where I can go and get somebody to take care of my service problem. We did that and then I continued to do my work. Then about 2004, again the itch started happening and started a second company, went through that process, learned a lot and then became a fairly senior administrator at Ohio State. My time was just being consumed by my administrative work. So I decided to stop the outside activities and focus more on my job because I was getting a paycheck and I felt I should deserve the paycheck every month. And then an opportunity opened up at UC Davis, they called and asked if I would be interested. I thought I'll just try it out and not before that there were other opportunities that opened up but I was not interested for some reason. Davis interested me and I applied and I came to realize that I was the only non sitting dean that they were interviewing everybody else was a sitting dean. I managed to hoodwink quite a few people on this selection committee and managed to pull a job offer out of them. That's where we started about three years ago. And I started enjoying myself being in an environment that says collaborative as this place is being able to do things that I wanted to do, but I was not able to do elsewhere just because of the kind of people that I work with here. So it's a lot of interesting stuff that we do. I enjoy my job just because of the fact that we can do so many things with the time that we have. It's an intellectual environment where I am able to talk to some people who are very high caliber individuals and learn almost on a daily basis as we go through this. And then now, you know, we have this opportunity with great undergrads organizing a program like this and giving us an opportunity to do this. So thank you very much. Thank you. I mean, thank you both for those introductions. After our speakers have finished up their 45 minute long fireside chat, we'll move on to a Q&A session powered by anonymous polling. To submit your questions, please visit this link and put in this code. We do encourage students to submit their questions throughout the talk as they learn from our speakers in real time. So with all that being said, please give a very warm welcome to Rao Nava and Kastryanis. My first question is why wasn't it called Rao's List rather than Angie's List? There's a story behind it. We were in a board meeting in November. We had just finished the Columbus market. We were going to Cleveland and then we were going to go to Indianapolis. We were calling it United Neighbors of Columbus. And then when we started the Cleveland organization, we would call it United Neighbors of Cleveland. At the Indianapolis stage, we thought this doesn't make any sense because there's no branding. Every place is a different name by itself. And Angie was an intern in the company. She was there in the board meeting. And that was the year that Bill Clinton actually got elected. And most people said the reason was because he was endorsed by a lady called Emily and she had an Emily's List. And she endorsed Bill Clinton saying, here's the person who actually will be able to fight for women's rights. And I advise all the women in my list to vote for Bill Clinton. Well, we were thinking what should we call this company and we have to have a brand. And somebody looked at Angie and said, how about calling it Angie's List? Obviously, there was one person who had no objection to that Angie. And so it became Angie's List. That's a great story. That's an interesting story. And that brings me to you. I see the fantastic career paths that you have gone through. You have tried out so many things, which is actually unusual for many people. And as you do that, sometimes people worry about the risk they're taking. They switch careers when they go from a steady job that you had in Intel, I suppose, to start-up mode and whatnot. How did you make those decisions and how did you evaluate your risk in those things? Yeah, I think one of the, I would say, most common mistakes that people make is risk assessment just in life. It's not something you really learn explicitly, but it's probably the thing that you use on a daily basis. And so there's all this intuition you've built for risk assessment. And it's really anchored in survival rather than the environment we live in today, which is we're fed, we're closed. We generally have shelter. And so for me, I think I've always been oriented towards taking as much risk as possible. And so that's also not really true if you know me, because I don't drink, I don't do drugs, I don't drink. You wouldn't think I'm a risky person in that sense. So really probably the most specific thing is I take calculated risks. And so then the question is like, how do you know what's a calculated risk versus just an uncalculated risk? I think it really depends on the context of the situation. So for me, for instance, the first company that we started, I just waived my background. I just grew up poor and my parents were not educated or didn't have a lot of money. And so we came to the States, obviously it's the reason why we're here. And so for me, like starting a company was initially motivated just by, it's like, I have kind of a weird name. And as an immigrant, you kind of have this sensitivity towards being a little bit of an outsider, whether it's warranted or not. And I kind of saw my dad get kicked around a lot and I thought, okay, well, if I start my own company, they can't kind of kick me around. And I think that was the most primal view. But you know, if you know South Asian households are very much oriented towards big companies, General Motors, Bosch, you know, brands that you can kind of hang your career on. And I think at some point I just realized if you just stay working at these companies, you're just destined to be an employee. And I think for me, I mean, realization was wealth creation, wealth is not accumulated by being an employee. It's accumulated by being an owner. And to me in Detroit, that was like a really abstract thing. I think in Silicon Valley, in California, more broadly, entrepreneurship is just so much more part of the culture. And so for me, that first risk assessment was, okay, how do I make that transition into even getting into a company? And that was frankly speaking, was saving money. I spent a bunch of years, ultimately saved $30,000. And that was enough for me to pay for myself for one year to start a company. And I think most people just don't think of those tactics. And so they just think broadly, well, there's all this risk of starting a company. Well, if you have money saved up and it's allocated for this purpose, and my view is at the end of the year, if I can't put together a team, I can't get an ID off the ground, we can't get funding, then I'll go back to a big company. And that's the calculated aspect of it. And I think people are just, they just have a very binary view. And they view like, well, you got to go all in, you got to max out credit cards, you got to, or you have to stay at a big company for your whole life. And it's much more nuanced. And so that company didn't work and did that, rinse and repeat, did it again, worked at a big company coming out of business school, saved money, did it again, moved out to California, the second company ultimately was acquired by Google. And I can't really complain about being poor because I made some money in the process. And so I think the most recent transition I had from YC to the startup was also, I think, a risky one in the sense of it was a great job. And it's, I mean, frankly, easy. It was in a very difficult job. And I think another way that people misallocate risk is the more successful they get, the more risk averse they get, which is actually incorrect. The more educated you are and the more experience you have, the more you can put all the chips on the table. Because if it doesn't work out, you're not going to be homeless, right? You have all of, you have a network of people, you have a reputation, you can get a job almost immediately. And at some point in your career, for most people, you will acquire enough skills that you can basically get a job, period. Like, and so that's when you can really put everything on the table. And I think it was, I think it's a really important lesson, that the more successful you are, the more aggressive you should be with risk taking. And so if you're fortunate enough sitting in the room today, or if you're a student and you do have family who can provide or you have a scholarship and you don't have debt coming out of school, that's the time to take risk. There isn't, there isn't, now that's not true if you don't have those factors. And so it is a nuanced answer. And so my general view is I think most people will miss assess risk and think about it in very binary terms rather than a very nuanced approach. And so yeah, I would really push on people to, and I think the 80,000 hours, or I've always thought of, I did a talk a while back where if you're 30, it's like 400 months you have left in your career. Like, that's not much. 80,000 hours is a little hard to understand. 400 months, very salient. Like, you can remember 24 months ago. So 400, that's a big chunk of that 400. And you're like, oh, well, 400 is not a lot. And so I think for me, I've always thought about risk in the term of I won't get this time back. You can get brands back, you can get money, you can get all these things, you can't get time back. And so the earlier you can take risk, the better because then the positive outcomes last you a longer time. If that makes sense. Absolutely. Yeah. It sounds interesting because as I see students over the many years, 30 years of teaching that I have done, there is a significant amount of individual difference variables that explain that not everybody is made for this and they should not just become an entrepreneur because they should become one. Yeah. The way you code risk is built into you somehow. Of course, there is learning that happens along the way. And somebody who feels that they may be not wanting, they don't want to take that kind of risk and still be very entrepreneurial in the company that they work in and rise to the top in that company just because they have been innovative and created some opportunities for themselves. But the whole idea is just to not be worried about failure. Yeah. Because the reason why people think it's risky is because they think we may fail and that failure and the consequences of failure are coded differently by different people. One framework I think about, we were often recruiting for our company and there's a spectrum of your career. On one end, you have being a founder starting a company and on the other end, you have being a part of a large organization, a Google or something like this. And within the spectrum, there are pros and cons. And I think folks, they want the pros on one side and the pros on the other side and they want none of the cons of either of them and that's not how it works. And so the question then becomes, okay, what are the pros and cons of being on the one extreme versus the other extreme with the spectrum in the middle? So if you're at a five-person company, you see some of the founder risk but not all of it. If you're at a thousand-person company or maybe more like Google but not completely, that spectrum is roughly, and big companies you pay, they're suffering almost in everything. So you have to figure out what type of suffering is palatable to you. And so in a big company, suffering is through frustration. You're not control of your own career. You're not control of the projects you work on. You're not a dominion. You don't have agency over what you do. I mean, at Google, I mean, we would often have situations where thousand-person projects would get summarily, you know, just turned off. And there's Googles talking. Literally, it heard me and the phone started talking. This is modern technology. And then on the other side is being a founder the way you pay for it, or being in a really small company, you pay for it through fear. So you pay frustration on the big company side and the small company you pay with the fear. And you just have to be, okay, which side am I willing to take? And I think for me, this is very personal, I think a lot of the growing up in the situation that I grew up in, fear I think wasn't really there because I was like, you're almost starting kind of literally at a lower level. And so frustration was somehow bigger, a bigger issue to me. And so I think I do have issue when people say everyone should be a founder or everyone should work at a big company. It's just what are you willing to take? And so if those are the negatives, frustration on big companies, fear on small companies, what are the positives? One of the positives in a big company is, you know, when you wear that Google hoodie at the airport, people, there is like a social, you know, acknowledgement that, hey, you are a person in society which is valued because of some things, because of what that brand says on your collar. And on the, but you're just an employee. And on the founding side, you have agency and you have dominion. And you have the small chance of having an outsized wealth outcome. But that's very small. A vast majority of companies don't have that outcome. And so instead of on the founder side, people think of tech startups, I think of more like a laundromat. That's probably a more accurate understanding of what starting a company is like. Super glamorous or sexy. So it's kind of a good sense. So it's like, do you want to own a laundromat or do you want to be a grunt at Google? And I think that's a more accurate, you know, cost risk assessment. And of course there's a lot of nuance here among the spectrum, but I'm just trying to highlight the contrast of the, I mean, I think being an academic is slightly different. I wonder what your view of the spectrum is. It's actually a very nice description that you gave us. One of the things I have observed is, based on what I see with people around me and then my own career as I look at it, the goal actually has been more of what makes me happy. Rest of the things follow themselves. You don't really have to work for anything as long as you know that you're doing something that will make you happy. So I was brought up in an environment where very similar in some respects, we didn't have enough money in the family and my mom was giving tuition to students to make some extra money. And in my fifth grade, I would assist her by teaching first and second grade students who would come to our house to pay extra money to my mom for getting tuition. So I was doing this education thing from my fifth grade and it made me happy. And I knew that that's where I will end up ultimately and the rest of the stuff will take care of itself. So a lot of people again are trying to figure out whether they want to do this or that from an outsider's analysis but they should probably look more inward to see what makes you happy and when you do that, success seems to happen naturally because you're doing what you are best at. You're motivated internally because that's what makes you happy. Yeah, I think so I basically discounted happiness for the vast majority of my life. So whether that's positive or negative is probably for another time and I do though now I feel like I'm very happy at the work that I'm doing and I reflect on the many years I was unhappy but was just doing it for like the professional claim or whatever it is. It's absolutely true. If you enjoy what you're doing you can do it for a long, long time and if you don't it's just like it's like eating medicine or something you're just getting through it and you're never going to be at peak performance doing things you don't like. So out of just pure pragmatic reality if you just do things that make you happy you're probably going to be more successful and I think it's not obvious. I think it wasn't obvious to me when I was younger. See that I'm not as young as you are. So as you start thinking about the future things are changing rapidly around us. What are the opportunity areas that you're seeing given you have been with the combinator and then you have started companies, you've been in the Silicon Valley what would be some things that we should look forward to? Yeah, so I think so now we're going to talk specifically about high growth ventures and so this is different from the laundromat. This is a subsection of business which is businesses that scale very large and I think the reason Silicon Valley is known almost globally I was in Nigeria a couple years ago and I remember the driver had what's happened in Google Maps. I worked in Google Maps for a bunch of years and I know the WhatsApp guys really well and it's like you're halfway around the world and the shadow of Silicon Valley is quite huge. So it's what I'm attracted to is that there's a huge impact. So within that subsection of business when we were starting this third company Peter Ludwig, my co-founder and I we had a very methodical approach so this wasn't our first time doing this and I think any time folks say that there's one path to starting a company or understanding what the future potential of some market is it's just not correct. I wasn't like when I was a little boy I thought I'm going to build a simulation company but that's what we're doing. We're doing this very obscure infrastructure product that though is needed and so our rough path in finding out what are the growing markets is we first looked at anything and everything that's interesting that's happening in high growth software businesses. So from enterprise to consumer markets to social media to hardware and we ultimately whittled that down to four markets we thought had the feature that they were growing significantly which means by significantly like 100% year of year that was autonomy, self-driving cars, cryptocurrencies, voice, and ARVR of all the markets that existed and that created a smaller group a smaller area for us to look for opportunities in. Peter's also from Detroit also comes from automotive background and it's funny we were working on a voice thing basically an Alexa for kids teaching kids when they can't actually use a computer and how to interact with a computer and we were doing this we built a demo, my kids were using it and then we're like what are we doing? We're like auto guys, we know autonomy and I think that ultimately led us to autonomy but that framework of identifying growing markets and then working in those markets I think is fundamentally a better view than joining just any market that exists and so let me give another framework here which is if you look at the history of the US there are these epics almost in business and so fur trade starts off you have steel, rail, oil, automotive, ultimately there's all these industries that emerge and they have these peaks, these extreme growths and all of these historically very successful names like Carnegie and Rockefeller all come from these individual industries the Macy's of the world and the retail giants like Sears and so when I was at Harvard Business School Professor Tedlow he made this point that it's better to be mediocre in a high growth market than to be great at a flat market and I think that's always stuck because I think in my heart of hearts know I'm mediocre so I want to just get as much as I can in my back in my sales and so just out of pure tactics of how to make your life easier you go to growing markets and the reason growing markets are really advantageous especially if you're younger is there are no real experts in those markets like even in autonomy maybe seven years are the deepest experts there's not a lot of expertise and so you don't have a real fundamental disadvantage also it's kind of like the analogy I think of if you go to a concert on a side of a hill if you show up early you can put your towel anywhere and get the best spot you show up late you might not have a place to sit and that's kind of the way markets work and so if you show up early you might actually be in the wrong spot but you can move around you might literally start in the autonomy business and sales and might not like sales but since a business is growing you have all these opportunities to move around and try these other areas now if you're in a market that's going through that's getting ground down and getting smaller and smaller where even competent people are losing their jobs then you're in a more difficult position so I think for me first it's identify the market then try to figure out how to make roads into that market and I think that's worked well historically through my career my last company was in mobile, same thing this is 2010, mobile is going to grow we don't know in which way we couldn't have imagined I mean even in 2010 people thought mobile was going to be big but not to the level it is now and it's not that long ago so that's probably been an important important kind of filter it's actually a very interesting lesson from what you just said and sometimes we miss it and I want to emphasize that and again ask you the same question again one of the things that I was talking about was how he went through all the market segments and isolated it to four segments and then ultimately came to one segment that he wants to pursue so one can look at it that way but you can also look at it as he has decided and has the courage to say no to the other segments that takes a significant amount of willpower because you're tempted as an entrepreneur or as anybody who's doing stuff when there are multiple opportunities it's very hard to say no to anyone that's a sure way of failing because you are now a nobody because you're just catering to too many people it's confusing so that lesson of zeroing on one thing and as you said if you're flexible enough that you can move if the market is not going as expected because you're one of the earlier people in there but the courage to say no is one of the most important attributes I believe for the success of almost any individual and that seems to be something people have difficulty in as an entrepreneur I think also if I was sitting if it was me sitting in the audience 12, 15 years ago I would have thought well, I have no idea how to even get to those four the next best thing you can do is to be around people who know those answers and so life really is about the adage of the five people you spend the most amount of time with that is who you are and it's really, really true so if you want to be in a high growth market but you don't even know what that is go to areas like Silicon Valley there's others, New York is another one where lots of these kind of things are happening and you'll start learning yourself okay, well, how did these people figure out what were I do if you talk to enough founders of successful companies and you ask these questions patterns emerge these are not random big companies are not built randomly they're built actually structurally and that's why the same investors tend to make money again and again because there are frameworks that actually work otherwise it would be a random distribution of returns across investors and that's certainly not the case so, yeah and in my experience as I finished my engineering and then ultimately ended up in the business school the first class I took was a class in organizational behavior I was fascinating I was one of the most interesting classes that I had taken in my educational experience and then we continued with some of the classes I took actually a seminar in Indian ethos and how you should apply those principles from whatever the scriptures were to running your life and so on and I was thinking, huh you know I went through this entire engineering degree and never had a chance to take these kinds of courses when I came here I was gratified when I saw the way the university system works here there is a two year general education curriculum that students take where they actually sample a lot of liberal arts kinds of curriculum before they get into whatever it could be a liberal arts degree it could be an engineering degree but there is a significant exposure to the liberal arts side of the equation and when I talk to my MBA students who are out for 10 to 12 years they say, well if you really ask me the most important course for me was the organizational behavior course that I took because that told me how I should actually run my organization and so on so what have you seen in terms of liberal arts social sciences kinds of people and their contributions to what goes on in this industry yeah I think I mean I think every successful company has to think about these things being organizational behavior fundamentally all a company is when you strip away the brand and you strip away the office it's just a collection of people who are trying to, who are talking about what are things they can build together and the core of that is people and so people dynamics end up dominating companies and sometimes people call that culture, sometimes people call it like a certain aesthetic a company has or a set of values that the company has so I think if you're a non-stem major who wants to go into a stem field there's definitely opportunities also there's just businesses that lend more to humanities curriculum like if you work in consumer goods being an engineer at Pepsi is not as valuable as being a behavioral scientist or being a marketer or somebody who understands the way that consumption happens differently globally versus how it happens in the West for instance and so I think it's a mix of some of the things we talked about earlier which is what are your strengths what are you trying to get to, what makes you happy, what are growing markets and then putting that all next to what opportunities exist in front of you and I think the one way that I again think about this is if you take that mix of whatever your skills and interests are and say their acts each company has a heart so the heart of Google is fundamentally engineering so it's I think unrealistic to be a marketing person who believes that you will one day run Google Google is run by an engineer and product person and that's the case for Google so let's take another company like Bank of America what's the heart of Bank of America on the retail side it is actually a consumer retail experience and on the investing side it's investing so if that matches what you like to do that those are the types of companies you should go to so it's finding out what the heart of that organization is and most closely matching to the heart of that organization that doesn't mean no salespeople should work at Google because Google is only an engineering company there's other reasons to work at Google but if you're trying to maximize and optimize your humanities degree or your non-stem degree you don't have to go to a stem company like that's an important kind of distinction there are super high growth companies that are not software companies so I think that's like a really important point to understand I mean if you look at like I was recently reading shoe dog Bothell Knight the growth of Nike I mean that's not about engineering so when you say that you started another company what are the motivational factors that make you want to go do that know that you have spoken a little bit about it but when you get up every morning what is it that excites you that says okay this is exactly where I would be happy yeah I think fundamentally between investing and being in a company the fundamental difference is investing is a lone wolf sport you do it alone and to some degree the loners actually do the best investing is like that and building a high growth company is a team sport the lone wolves don't do well in that and I think I just enjoy the team sport and I think that it took me 35 years to realize that and I think that's ultimately what motivated me to say hey listen I can always invest also like specifically venture investing it's a great last job because it is easy I don't think it's very difficult and I felt like a little bit of a coach on the sideline at YC and I love YC and still very close to them and I still do angel invest once in a while but I just felt like I was I wasn't using my skills to my full capacity and so that got me back I was like a gambling addict I was leaving the casino and I just have to play one more hand but I enjoy it I really fundamentally enjoy it and again I think once you get to a more successful part of your career you're less and now I have some team members here if this company goes to zero I would definitely be sad but if it went to zero it's not the end of my life and certainly the team is such a capable team so it's almost work for like sport and I think that's a fantastic way to live where you're doing it for enjoyment rather than like you just feel like I got to do this because I need a job and it's a real privilege and I think we're going to open it up to student questions that's right just slide on in there yes having a third panelist here and we have a lot of really great questions I'm actually not sure how to pick but I suppose we will start at the very top the one that was upvoted the most which is and it's a heavy one we are hiring applied.co slash careers well then I'll field it to you first what are your thoughts on widespread automation this is a big one I mean it's such a huge topic I think the underlying the underlying point there is does widespread automation equal job loss and are we going to live in some dystopian future where our computers are overlords and we just exist to make them happy I don't think that's the future any let me talk first abstractly about technology progress in society and then very specifically about automation that's happening right now specifically let's say in truck driving or in like ride sharing broadly speaking no period in human history as new technology has been introduced have there been less jobs it's always been net net creative and so there's many many reasons there are jobs that don't exist today which were very much common jobs 100 years ago the average examples are elevator operators was I think the biggest job in America at a certain point as a single job code nobody here thinks that America is worse because we don't have elevator operators we don't even think about it that is an automation the elevator is moving you without a human being in the loop and you can really go down you can just go to your local grocery store and see automation has heavily already taken place not only self-checkup but everything that's happening in the back inventory management goods being moved automation exists everywhere already so it's not this every man of robots will come and take our jobs and it's a really strange narrative that currently exists that that's going to happen but there's no evidence ever in history of that happening when we get more time as humans get more time we do more things actually there's always this view that humans as we had things automate for us we would become lazy beings and we would just lay at home consuming content and that's just not what has happened every time we've gotten more time and we've gotten more calories we've gotten more security we actually become more productive and I think that's a very very important high level point about technology progress specific in automation in terms of self-driving vehicles there is a very very important fact when you read job reports and it says like if President Trump says something like hey we just had 500 100,000 jobs created or 250,000 jobs decreased in the last quarter those are net changes there's actually millions of jobs that are actually created and destroyed every quarter in America so that's only the net change so when you look at any job code within America including the big job codes like self-checkout or truck drivers there's millions of them but not tens and hundreds of millions and America is just a 300 million person country and so there's jobs being destroyed every quarter, every month and every week and it just happens below the surface so what's happening those people are not out on the street they are finding other jobs that doesn't necessarily mean what I'm not implying is we shouldn't look at implications of you know how do you retrain people and how do you take folks my father worked in factories how do you take folks who are working in factories and repurpose them I think that's a real question and I think we have to figure out but low on my list is robots taking over jobs and us just kind of hands and pockets wondering what we're going to do next that's just not how society works I think the bigger problem that probably exists and will continue to exist is wealth inequality and that's a very different problem everyone can be employed and there can be huge wealth inequality and so that's a very different problem and that is around policy taxation capital gains versus income and that's a very different topic and sometimes those things are conflated that automation equals a few people being very rich and I don't I think those are intellectually two separate topics I agree with a lot of things that you're talking about the way I look at it is when automation happens where judgment is not required human judgment is not required there's a lot of routine tasks that are out there that can be done more efficiently and therefore with judgment actually comes one more quality which is a bias a bias based on our experiences our learning what we know about it and sometimes it's a good thing say that that person somehow has a knack of seeing something in the future that I'm not able to see that bias that comes with that individual's knowledge is something we care about we want it in what we do if you take a look at what is being automated most of the time it's stuff that is routine it's stuff that can be made more efficient it's stuff where I don't need judgment that's the kind of job now the other point that Kassar was making which is very interesting and the reason for that is we have never satisfied with what we have as human race that's the secret behind why this is not going to be a problem because I'll give you the example of MBA programs just gives you an example of what I'm thinking about if I go back 25 years to MBA programs we would have a curriculum that we will teach and maybe a small career management unit that will help people find jobs or whatever now the MBA students demand so much more so we have leadership programs and ethics programs and values based curriculum and more electives than we offered ever before and there is a lot of recruiting effort that we put into things we have student experiences we have gatherings every week for our students because they want to have networking opportunities it's just so many things that we have to do for the same MBA students which means that the desire of wanting more is what is going to propel the human race for so there is quite a bit of automation if there is actually autonomous cars driving us everywhere we want to go and then a lot of other stuff is mechanized it doesn't mean that our desires as human beings will be staying at the level that they are today we'll want more and more things we are living longer which means the older people will need more things to take care of them there are individuals who are saying I need more types of entertainment than what we have today so it's just a bunch of other things that we are not even capable of dreaming about today will become the reality later somebody has to make them and they cannot be made by automation it has to be individuals who are seeing the need coming up with those kinds of products and so on so automation will be something that we have to accept and live with because technology is allowing us to do things that we are not able to do before for example in the supermarket setting I remember coming here and the checkouts that we are talking about in the supermarket only happened in the 70s until then we didn't have them so we are talking about progress that we have made the checkouts didn't change anything it's just that we are doing it faster and we are so unhappy if we have only two items in our hands and there is three people in the checkout line we had to put self-checkouts for us so there is always something new happening because our desires are going to increase it's a really great point I remember a long time ago I was traveling in Vietnam and we are in this village and I met these Italian backpackers and they said oh isn't it such a shame that all these were tourists isn't it a shame that all these tourists are going to come and destroy this quaint village and I said you know it's not a shame for them they are doing this because they want air conditioning in their house because it's absolutely awful to be here in the summer without air conditioning so we sometimes project these moral views on other folks and other people which so what I am trying to say is everyone individually is making the decision so if you really do want to checkout and do everything manually you can there is a reason we go towards phones and not writing hand writing every letter it is totally an option for everybody to write hand write every letter and mail it in the mail why don't we do that because it's slower and less efficient so we choose to use phones and so I think that's why capitalism fundamentally works in all these diverse geographies and different cultures and socioeconomic realities is capitalism is basically focusing that desire that human desire into some version of progress for either the individual or the group in some structured monetary fashion that's why it works and I think that's why it will continue to work I have a lot more faith in human beings and humanity and us generally if you look at the broad stroke of humanity we have moved consistently towards a better existence it is way better the good old days were not good to be very clear it's way better I mean you live better than even a royal family would live a hundred years ago not a thousand a hundred years ago like you have complete climate control all the time you wear super comfortable clothes that are basically tailored to your side I mean this is a reality that vast majority of humanity has never experienced so I think a lot of times we think about the negatives of technological progress while we use our phones to tweet about it we are adopting this technology that we are grappling with and the answer isn't well let's reject the technology the answer is these new problems that have emerged how do we deal with them there will always be problems and there will always be suffering I think this is a view I have the question is how do you make the best of it it's great we are going to get like two answers in these 45 minutes well it's good answers though the next question that's been stuck at the top for quite a while now it shifts gears into education and early career preparedness is how important is your first job out of college I suppose for laying the foundation of the rest of your career and I suppose how bad is it perhaps if you feel like you've screwed up how much is riding on it everything and you'll never get another chance again now the it's funny we're in new grad recruiting cycle right now for our company and so I'm talking to new grads basically two to three times a day trying to convince them to take applied or assessing them in an interview context and when I was in those shoes I had a manager who told me your first manager and your first job is hugely important because it basically sets your expectations and I do think that's kind of true like the first two or three years of your personal career are almost like the benchmark of which you always will associate all of your other jobs against and so I would think about it in that context not necessarily that it's your destiny but it's your benchmark and so the more the higher that benchmark can be and higher again is defined in very different ways for different people the more impactful that first job will be in terms of putting you into a long term path that you ultimately fulfill and success out of so I wouldn't think of it so much as the most important job it's just that this is a benchmark job and what we see the first job as is a place where you learn a lot because until then you have been in the classroom listening to probably some exposition of a theory and how things work but in your first job is where you start applying some of the things that you have learned it's not like you take a model that has been discussed in the class and apply it there's a lot of learning that happens in a university that what we call is incidental learning it's all around you and people are saying things and you process them and you store them away and it becomes tacit knowledge that you just go and apply wherever you go now given that for what we tell our students at least is that the first job and it's a very interesting perspective you shared because not only is it a benchmark it's also an opportunity for you to train yourself for what comes later and in those days where the carriers were mostly corporate carriers we would normally advise students to go to the bigger companies because they have better training programs because there are some people who would say well can I start in a startup or something other because they're interested and we would tell them no you can always go back in those days and they start out there because the IBM sales training program was one of the best in the world and if you ever want to have a career in sales start at IBM if you can get in because that training is going to take you very far in life you can go anywhere you want to go after that says people make a lot of money that's the career you want to go into so the first job is going to be an important job in terms of what you can learn from it you have to be very confident to know that that may not be your final job and so you don't have to worry about it there is something interesting going on where you feel that you can extend your college education through your first job take it yeah I think you can almost guarantee that I really don't know anybody mid-career who is doing whatever they did first so you can have some confidence that whatever you do first is probably not what you're going to do so that's I mean it just says a lot right it's like that means you are going to change and I do think the economy has changed and I do think what is like for instance for me learning you learn a lot more I think in a small company there's just so much more weight put on you right and with a big company it's like this preset cogs and you're just one cog in this thing and you're not really exercised a lot and the way I always think about like how you make an impact in a company is you're the numerator the denominator is the number of people so if it's a huge company you're just not going to make a huge impact because there's just one 200,000 people of impact so yeah I think the first job is important it does set a benchmark, it does set a trajectory, it is where you learn skills but I wouldn't go don't become one of these people like me and become super neurotic about how the first job is the most it's just not frankly not the one thing I would say is along five people that you kind of spend most time with are who you become be very thoughtful about where you live that's really hard to change once you tend to go, if you go and move to LA you basically set your roots there that's where you build your personal and private relationships and you're just less likely to move so that's something that I've always stuck with me at a professor at Harvard who said that like pick your location before you even pick anything else and then after that it's like who are the type of people I want to be around and then try to figure out what the job gets you around those people yeah, well there are two questions vying for the top spot now that are both geared more towards concerns, experiences but there's a third that I will ask first because it fits in with this theme of preparing for the start of your career quite nicely and I think it speaks particularly towards Dean Nava's experience which is the university has one of the most conservative, risk diverse cultures what needs to change to encourage calculated risk taking by students and administrators I think probably that was true I would say 5 to 10 years ago but today we see a lot more risk taking that's happening within universities one example that I find fascinating is if you go back about I would say 10-12 years and you looked at how many incubators were actually in universities it's about 20% of the total incubators in the country were in the universities today it's 50% of the incubators are in the universities and there is a reason why that happened many universities have been funded by state and therefore their responsibility was to take care of the state's mission and provide education the way they were supposed to now there is a saying in educational circles that we were started out as a state university then we became a state supported university and now we are a state located university there's barely any support that comes from the state if I look at UC Davis budget you're talking about 9%, 10% of the money that's coming from the state the rest of the money is what we come up with so when you have that kind of pressure that's put on the university you start taking risks because you have to now get the money that you need to make that mission happen and I always remember and I'm saying this because I remember in 1999 I was actually helping my friend pitch an idea to a venture capitalist and they were quite happy they said they would be willing to put in 3-5 million dollars and then they looked at me and said so what is your role going to be and I told them I'm a consultant for my friend I'm going to go back to Ohio and do what I do there and they said we would like for you to be a part of the marketing group and I said okay if that's the reason why you wouldn't fund this I would obviously be happy to do that let me go back and apply for leave at Ohio State and the gentleman said no because when you apply for a leave after 2 years if this fails you have something to go back to I will fund this company is if you resign from Ohio State because I want the fear in you that your family will be on the streets if you don't succeed I think we are all going through that stage now as universities where we say we don't have the money and we have to educate the people that's a mission of this university and so we actually are taking more risks than before we have a venture catalyst as part of UC Davis we have the Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship there's a whole pipeline of companies got started last year from UC Davis so that type of activity is more and more and more the case in universities research funding is coming in big numbers UC Davis in the top 10 in terms of the amount of research funding that they are bringing up faculty are starting companies so there is a whole lot of activity even in an environment like UC Davis that was probably more conservative 15 years ago so you will see even more of that happening in the future because universities have to support themselves can't rely on the state anymore so that start the image of a conservative institution will not be true anymore because universities will be quite a bit there right there out there making things happen that's probably going to be the model that we will follow in this country as a whole previously companies would fund a researcher to do some research and then they will take the result and make money and that won't happen as much anymore these next two questions are geared towards Kesser and the first one is what are the top 5 metrics for showing the success of a corporate incubator what is the goal of an incubator and what are the differences between tech incubators versus biotech incubators a lot of questions there there were 3 and 1 so I'll try to hit them all first and foremost when I describe an incubator I'm talking about a private entity so not a public incubator in my answers for a private funded venture capital incubator it's very very simple it's to make money this is the goal of these organizations to be very clear sometimes people don't state that because it's in a lot of language about missions for innovation and all these other things fundamentally they're essentially venture capital organizations they're kind of set up in different ways there's two types sometimes people confuse incubators and accelerators incubators at least in my mind roughly are where they're actually coming up with ideas with founders and being housed in like one area and they're literally working together where an accelerator is more like a seed investment through some program that usually typically ends in some version of a demo day or some investor meetings so both of those though roughly still have the same objective which is they give you the entrepreneur money and in return you sell them some stock of your company private shares and then they hope one day that those stocks will be worth a lot of money and they can sell to another entity and investor public markets whoever and then they can get more money than they actually paid for the stocks initially so a pretty straightforward model in terms of the difference between an incubator and a biotech incubator there are you could say called vertical incubators there's crypto incubators and there are biotech ones there are real estate ones that are just saying hey we're not going to do all types of companies we're going to do a specific type of companies and then the entrepreneurs or the investors or the advisors all have a domain experience that they can share with each other my personal view is I'm not sure those are more successful there isn't a lot of market evidence that they're more successful you would think they'd be more successful because it makes a lot of logical sense but what tends to frankly happen is good ideas tend to just go to the best branded investors regardless if they're vertical or just a general investor so YC gets a huge benefit it's Y Combinator gets a huge benefit of this is generally they're considered to be the best in incubator accelerator whatever you're going to call it that's just because YC's had the most amount of financial success so there's a huge number of companies probably now I think 15 that are worth in the multi-billion dollars of each that YC was the first money in and bought 7% of that company for $150,000 which is a great return I mean if you look at an Airbnb which is worth 30-40 billion dollars owning 7% of that I'm not a PhD in math but it's more than $150,000 in value and so I think people the reason you had this huge explosion in incubators I think in the last 10 years is people saw the YC model being very successful and they're like holy crap 20 grand got a billion dollars on the other side let me write a ton of $20,000 checks and see if I can catch an Airbnb or a Dropbox or a cruise or a Stripe or a Reddit or one of these you know Twitch or one of these companies that came out of YC so I think that's also part of it and the stage market seems to have a lot of ideas and people are willing to give up 7% of their equity for $20,000 and so that means the market's in balance therefore there's going to be a lot more incubators and accelerators that existed but in terms of the metrics the first question of like what is success the only metric that matters is return on capital everything else doesn't matter these incubators and accelerators they're not fundamentally social organizations they're just they're like investors and sometimes people like to classify Silicon Valley investors as somehow like really good guys and New York investors as really bad guys and maybe that's switching but generally they're all the same guy they give you money and they buy your shares and they hope that the shares are worth more in the future it's not more complicated than that I think what's nice as a first time founder about an accelerator incubator is it can give you some of the like paint by numbers of how to start a company and just the concept the aspect of starting a company is itself a skill like it's separate it's orthogonal to like having a good idea and having technical skills to build a product there's like a whole aspect of starting a company which is like you know how do I recruit my office what type of culture am I setting up do I file the right tax forms that I you know all this all the just crud of having this organization and incubators and startups can really help with that so you can focus just on the technology for example so that's the reason to do it I think more today when I was leaving YC I did a little talk for the partners and one of the biggest pieces you know near the top of the list that I feared for YC is there are actually lots of pre YC institutions now almost every university has funding vehicles almost every affinity group has you know has investment vehicles there's just a lot more early stage capital whereas when I was our company was a Y Combinator company 10 plus years ago when we started a company we didn't know where we had to go to get money from going to Sequoia or going to Dresden was such a big jump that we couldn't even get the meetings and so YC was this nice like step stool into the startup world but now lots of steps tools exist so if you're a Y Combinator you got to make sure that people are still taking your step stool which is they're still giving you 7% of their company for $150,000 because they're just a lot more capital provided so I think the entire incubator or accelerator space is fundamentally different than 10 years ago and there are thousands of incubators and accelerators now around the world and so that's good I think that's net positive I'm squarely in the camp of like a capitalist economy where it's heavily dominated by small companies there's nothing that says Google's and the GM's are truth or the IBM's are better for society you can actually have so what does the more fundamental question what does Google have that small companies don't have well they share resources across lots of teams they have one HR team that's across everybody they have one marketing team that all the products benefit from they have one server farm that all the individual products benefit from so if a lot of small companies that are loosely associated they actually get the benefit of a corporation which is literally a cooperative in some sense but not having some of the downsides of one behemoth organization that has almost like an empire like desire to exist almost at the cost of society and so I'm not in the camp that large corporations are necessarily the best thing for society I do believe corporations are very good for society but not necessarily large corporations and so incubators I think are the early in the pure abstract theoretical academic sense the early views of I think another version of capitalism which I think will exist which is owner operated societies where more ownership happens at the lowest levels and maybe the old Karl Marx socialist view that everyone ultimately owns something will become true but in a capitalist framework not in a socialist framework where you have a central state controlled entity we're getting very abstract here but something to think about well your brutal honesty is much appreciated which is perfect for this next question at the top which is a little bit more personal which is how many of your investments would you say failed during your time as a venture capitalist and most importantly can you share some insights into why you think they didn't work out it's that's an easy question very few succeeded so I can tell you the ones that succeeded of the hundreds that have failed why do companies so companies succeeding and failing are kind of like families like families that are dysfunctional all kind of look boringly similar and families that are dysfunctional are like dysfunctional for many different reasons and so it's like the same with companies it's like the ones that succeed they all look boringly similar and the ones that are dumpster fires are like dumpster fires for a thousand I mean I can tell you every version every variable in a company and there's hundreds that can go wrong I've seen go wrong founders that are lazy investors that are you know being too dogmatic about a market the market not emerging the market fundamentally changing the technology not working there all of these reasons have killed companies probably top of the list number one is founders not getting along and their relationship then destroys the foundation upon which the company is built there's a great Paul Graham essay which I would highly recommend probably the only piece of tech writing I would say if you're ever going to read one piece of tech writing I'd read it during October 2006 it was called 18 mistakes that kill startups and it's just I think and Paul basically Paul Graham is a founder where I culminated basically wrote this post he said if you avoid these 18 mistakes you probably have a good chance of making a company and like number one is like single founder number two is like bad location I won't go through all that it's a good it's a good post to read I still believe 13 years later it's pretty accurate so let me talk about the companies that succeed and what and what the characteristics that are that that seem to be common across them the thing the companies that succeed tend to be led by people that people want to be with they want to work for for a bunch of reasons because fundamentally a company is allocating resources so the founders have to have the ability to allocate capital and have to allocate teams and so good companies tend to have the ability to do those things and so what's underlying below those two things of allocating capital and teams is they have good ideas and the founders and the leadership are specifically targeted to build in that market and and I think that's pretty common other other kind of common things across companies is that succeed they tend to be in a growing market you rarely see really huge companies that are in a stagnant market that's what that's why you don't see like many new nikes or you don't see many new what's a stagnant industry like you know sweetened beverages you'll still have some vitamin water merges and few others but at a whole most of the pie is pretty stagnant and there's just few entrants whereas if you look to like ride sharing everybody's new because that market just literally didn't exist and so companies that tend to be successful tend to be in brand new markets and they tend to just they when they get something working they just keep it just keeps working probably one of the most counterintuitive things I learned about companies that work is I've been around probably at least five companies in the high end of ten companies that have become from you know two or three people to worth a billion dollars or more a thousand employees and just seeing them go from two people to a thousand people which is just a really fascinating experience just a witness door dashes in this checker is in this get lab is in this categories in these categories cruise twitch little teams that ultimately became huge they every time I would see them they would just be growing they would just be growing like heller high water summer winter fall always growing and so the truth is the team and the founders are only impacting so much of that growth fundamentally wants that product so in all of the most important things of successful companies is the market has to demand your product this is the most important thing this is the underlying double stars around the market doesn't like the product the company will not be successful and all of these other things founders all this stuff is trying to get to that to that reality of what general people call product market at PMF but yeah so so the consistent I'm not talking about the failures the ones that succeed is they find product market fit and I guess you could say the ones that fail never find product market fit but honestly I've seen good ideas in good markets get destroyed by bad teams so that's why I wouldn't say it's just about product market sorry a little all over the map there but I am quite sad myself that we will not be able to go through all of the questions because it's looking like we only have time for one more before we close up the evening into our last minute wrap up but I do have one more question I'd like to ask both of you and it's and if you could distill it into sound bite I guess the question is what can we do as university students to prepare ourselves for being entrepreneurial because the system is not necessarily set up to prepare us for that so hustle jab in there somewhere but why but you know I think the first thing I would say to anybody is that if you are blaming somebody else for not being entrepreneurial then you're starting at the wrong place that's not how things work it means you just don't have it in you to face the impediments that are being so being entrepreneurial is a curiosity that you develop in you to do something new every day you are not happy with the way things are you always want to tinker with things and see if there's a better way of doing it you don't walk back to your house the same road you just take a different road just because it's going to be fun to see what happens it's just a whole bunch of things that you that you seem to do every day that will actually start giving you some idea of the fact that you are entrepreneurial coming from India I recall in my second grade the teachers would demand they would tell you here is a question and here is the answer for that question and then there will be an exam and I have to write back exactly the same answer which means you have to by wrote and spit it back on the exam that's how they trained us in my second grade and the teacher wrote a comment and sent it back to my house saying we got a problem here with your son my parents received it he is writing the answer but he is writing it in his own words he is not following what we are telling him so it's something where you just don't want to accept what is being given to you and you want to do something so as long as you have it and you are giving you nothing really can stop you from doing it and if you have a passion for that and you do it right more opportunities start opening up for you just because people start seeing you as a reliable like investments whom do you invest in somebody who is being repeatedly successful and is able to see opportunities that I am not able to see so you have to demonstrate that starting a company and taking it all the way to a thousand employees and maybe an IPO is not an easy process becoming a successful entrepreneur in whatever you are doing is not an easy process there will be quite a bit of times today I was talking to our CFO saying man for every one good week there are 9 bad weeks around here kind of thing so it's just you have to go through that and I don't think the university is stopping you at all I think the university is actually providing you with a very fertile environment in ideas, in people in the networks that you create for yourself I have personally benefited just by being at UCDL let me give you an example I taught what is called promotional strategy for 28 years at Ohio State which is how can you promote your product and now I thought I was an expert at this point I'm doing a good job in my classroom I spent 3 years at UC Davis and for the first time I started questioning am I selling the right product is this the right thing to do for the society where did I get that idea from it's from the people around here and now I'm totally different in my thinking about certain things that I'm doing but that's because of the community around you and not being very aggressive or whatever I learned from them because they are the people speaking this kind of values every day in this university so my view is it's not the university, it's you if you can't make it I'm loving the honesty I think I would just start if you're interested in entrepreneurship you can start actually starting at school is not a bad thing because you have this huge safety net here and you have a lot of resources around you in the world who are pushing forward I do agree with some part of the agency aspect a founder is somebody who is obsessed with Dominion agency and the world is not going to create an environment for you to start a company so it's like all creative processes that requires inspiration from yourself and the best time is today this is the time to do it because whatever you learn you'll have more years to apply those learnings from so if you're interested in being a founder just do it now there's no better time literally and yeah this was a great Q&A session before we move on to the last things can we all just give them a round of applause and that concludes our evening thank you all so much for coming