 I'm in Silicon Valley, in California right now, where I've been an entrepreneur and investor for about two decades, moved there straight out of school, started starting companies because I love science and technology, and technology is the business of science or applying science, and so I've started a couple of companies, one that made optical amplifiers, one that became what is today Google Earth, one that was called opinions when public is part of shopping.com, dozens of failed efforts, things you've never heard of, things that you might yet hear of. I started Angel List, which is the largest online platform for startup fundraising. We've now raised over a billion dollars, almost all for seed stage startups. We also operate the largest free talent startup recruiting marketplace. We're about half the startups in the English-speaking world find talent on there. We own Product which is where companies go to launch their product. We've also spun up Coin List, which is a giant well-lit regulated marketplace for crypto and ICOs. I've been an angel investor in companies like Twitter and Uber and Wish and Postmates and a bunch of others. Coauthored a blog called Venture Hacks, got a little Twitter feed and worked on the Jobs Act, which was the U.S. law that enabled crowdfunding, general solicitation, Reg A plus IPOs. I asked Naval to do that because there was no way I was going to do justice to the bio, but for those who don't know, I mean, Naval is a bit of a legend across the world now, especially in Silicon Valley. I'm curious from your perspective, Naval, what is the opportunity for New Zealand around our technology ecosystem and what constitutes the elements and the actors in a well-functioning ecosystem? So, I mean, it's a hard problem. Systems design, I think that's what Yosef was talking about. He was basically positioning New Zealand as an incubator for systems design, which is very seductive and very difficult because trying new systems means you're automatically doing things that the rest of the world doesn't want to or need to do, so it's risky. But I can throw some things out that I think are provocative and interesting. Let me just touch on two. One is digital literacy and the other is immigration. In terms of digital literacy, I think that computers are the most powerful tool ever created by humanity. They allow for infinite leverage without permission. And to me, that knowing how to be good with computers is the modern literacy. It's like the new reading, writing, arithmetic, and this will be widely accepted and acknowledged decades from now, but today we're in that transition phase where as a software engineer you're very well paid and there's no unemployment but as someone transitioning out of the old economy, you have this giant gap to jump. So I think it would be interesting, one system design experiment that would be interesting is to create an entirely digitally literate nation where everybody is facile with computers and of course not everyone's going to be a computer-related job, but just the fact that you can use this creative tool to its maximum output gives you an advantage, a leg up in every possible way. You'll make better podcasts, you'll do better, you'll be better at creating documents, you'll be better at coding up your ideas, you'll be better at even just using online banking or your storage. But just like if you understand mathematics fairly well then you don't fear science books, you can pick up anything the same way if everybody understood computers well enough they didn't fear computers at all, they would be highly leveraged. And for innovation and employment that could be a huge thing. It would also interestingly raise all the wages across the board and other professions too because there's a thing in economics called Bummel's Cost Disease where the value that you have to pay someone the opportunity cost of what else they could be doing, not necessarily what they are doing. So even if all the baristas had computer science degrees they get paid a lot more. So that's an example of something radical and interesting you could do but I don't think it's that radical. And people often would say like well why do I need to know how to code a computer, I don't need to know how to fix my car to drive my car. But it's different. The car is a utility that gets you from point A to point B and you do the same thing over and over. Whereas a computer is a creative tool in a creative process, it's not going to be automated away and every person who uses a computer it's like using a paint brush or a writing instrument, you're using it for a different thing. For a self-expression and a blank canvas of possibilities. So I think having a fully digitally literate nation and New Zealand is well positioned to do that by being English-speaking country, first world rule of law, good educational system and a fairly small enough community that you can make that kind of a push I think would be really interesting. And you also said immigration. Yeah, immigration is interesting because I think people look at Silicon Valley and they say how can we create a Silicon Valley here and that's an experiment that's been tried all over the world. But really Silicon Valley is not a place that creates entrepreneurs or wealth or technology. It is a place that attracts entrepreneurs who create wealth and technology and so it's really an attractor function. And that's true of almost any magnet place like Hollywood attracts the potential actors and artists into it, doesn't create them. Those are not necessarily all native Los Angeles, although the natives really benefit from that. So I think it's about attracting. So intelligent immigration policy is actually the largest wealth creator in the world. And it's not done that intelligently in most places. Most places it's sort of an accident, happenstance of history, like, oh, we have a technology university here, we have good weather and so on. So I think that if you look at, especially and I'm focused in technology industry, obviously you're for immigration, you can do lots of things. You can say I want to attract people who are making impact, I want to attract teachers. But whatever you're doing, you can do it intentionally. And at least in the technology industry, these people thanks to again, computers are the most leveraged people in the world. So their earning power is very high. So they actually choose to live in the nicest places. So they want to live in places with good weather and clean water and clean air and high quality of life and culture. And I think in all of those things, New Zealand scores really well. The time zone is great. The access to the Pacific Rim is great. So New Zealand to me already has a lot of the elements to use immigration policy as a force multiplier. So I think it really just comes down to both attracting and screening sort of the right people for the limited resources that you have. And, you know, I mean, look at EHF 400 visas, it's going to make a big difference. 400 is not a lot of people, right? You can fit them in one small neighborhood or one small cluster of houses, but it can in theory change things. And on the technology side, I'm curious if you could speak to the trends that you're seeing, some of the significant trends of importance and why they're important. We're actually kind of in a good phase of I think technology innovation right now. If there's a good or bad, I don't mean to judge, but we've gone through different phases where we are creating and discovering and rolling out new platforms and systems that change things. So for example, mobile phones was a platform, the internet was a platform, personal computers were a platform that changed things quite a bit. And then we go through exploitation phases on those platforms where we build lots of apps. So, you know, there was the mobile social phase where we build Facebook and Twitter and so on. And those are interesting apps, but it's kind of a lower level of innovation or equally necessary, but not as paradigm busting. And I would say now, interestingly, technology is going back into that paradigm busting phase where investors, angels, entrepreneurs are getting bold enough and emboldened and enough to take the risk to do things like hey, now we're going to develop supersonic airplanes, we're going to send rockets to Mars, we're going to send, you know, we're going to build electric cars, we're going to build autonomous vehicles, we're going to build VR and AR, we're going to get remote working rights so that it feels like you're actually there. We're going to do synthetic biology and hack humans, which is, you know, both scary and exciting. Scary first, exciting later, unfortunately that's, it's a nature of technology that the destructive power arise before the creative power. You get to have a nuclear weapon before you get to have a functioning safe nuclear plant. You get to have, you know, you get the unfortunately in social media, you get combat before you get civil discourse. So it's, even if you go back through human history, you get gunpowder before you get steam engines and airplanes. So it's just unfortunately the nature of technology that the destructive and the disassociative power arrives first. So we're going to get all the dysfunctional dystopian things, you know, maybe VR and AR is like a place for people to rally who couldn't rally in the real world or for, you know, how the internet famously adopts porn and gambling before almost any other application. But eventually you will see the fruits come out of that if we live long enough. And synthetic bio is an interesting one in that regard. AI today is going through a machine learning, machine vision revolution where computers are getting very, very good at pattern matching and problem solving of a very specific kind of problem. But it does mean that we're going to see very intelligent agents living in the network and cloud and changing how we do things. So I think all of those are really interesting. And I, and I give full credit to people like Elon Musk, who just really up the bar on what's conceivable, right? Just by doing audacious things or trying audacious things, even if they fail, even if they're not good at it, even if you have problems with the financial shenanigans, it's just at least the vision, I think inspires people to move forward. And he's not the only one. There's a bunch of entrepreneurs now who are kind of just trying to do very audacious things. And on that point, some people say, you know, we want to shift away from this cult of entrepreneurship or this worshiping the entrepreneurs. How do you feel about that? There's definitely a cult of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. There's there's kind of a hierarchy, which is like all the status derives from the entrepreneur and then it sort of filters down to the other people in the ecosystem who help make things happen. And then, of course, the users and customers and broader society that that they stand upon. I just think it's a nature of humans that you you're always going to have a little bit of hero worship. You're always going to create a cult like you go to Hollywood and there's a cult of the celebrity. I mean, there's such a cult that they give each other awards every year and then we tune in to watch it. So it's just the nature of politicians. We create a cult around the top politicians without looking at all the people that they stand on. It's just kind of how humans are hardwired. It's how we get inspired. So I think it's completely fine to use an entrepreneur as a source of inspiration. But I think it's silly to use them as a source of truth, right? Like, in fact, it's silly that I'm up here and I'm kind of giving you all this so-called truth. And really, I just have very narrow specialization and a very narrow set of things. But somehow for some reason, somebody wants to hear my opinion on everything. That's the cult of personality kind of poking through. But still, you got to pick some monkey to get in front of the tribe at various points. So that's my turn right now. And one of those things that you've been a specialist at is blockchain. And so I'd love to hear, what is blockchain? Why is it important? Yeah, I got into cryptocurrencies and blockchains back in 2013. And it was, to me, first fascinating technology solution to a very particular computer science problem called the Byzantine Generals Problem. But all you need to understand is what they'd solve is a way of getting a bunch of people who don't know each other and don't trust each other to still agree on something. And this is a much harder problem than it may sound like. You know, humans are highly cooperating, organizing creatures, much more so than almost any other species in the natural domain. And that allows us to do amazing things, like we can all get in this room and work together to what we believe is a better future. It also allows us to do terrible things, like get together in a battlefield and kill each other and name some ideology. You know, monkeys don't have Christianity or fascism. They don't come up with those ideologies, so they don't murder each other in large quantities. But that ability to unite together is both our superpower and our curse. Because when you get together, how do you operate that network of people? How do we make decisions? And historically we've had a couple of answers, and they all have different trade-offs. The old answer used to be the most brutal monkeys in charge. That used to be the king, and that's still how much of the world lives today under dictators. Then it was just the smartest and most violent few monkeys who get together are in charge. And that's aristocracies, or if it's as smart as the elites. But you have a small number of people sort of running things for society. Religion was another one. I talked to God. God gave me the answers. You listen to me. There was another model around democracy, where we're all equal. We all vote, but you also can end up with mob justice, mob rule, where the majority termites the minority. So you just have all these different systems of organizing people. And in the last few hundred years, we've created a new one called markets. And these could be markets and things you like and things you don't. But it's essentially just this idea that we can trade things and sort of self-organize it. And there's a merit model in terms of how much money I put in, or what assets I put in, what I get back. But no one's really in charge. If you look at the global credit markets, debt markets, equity markets, money markets, commodity markets, no one's really in charge. So what blockchains do is they bring the ability to have markets into any digital domain. So you can take any digital network. And there are a lot more digital networks out there than we think. So for example, Uber is actually a digital network that's routing cars around. Your local public utility is actually a digital network that's routing power around, especially if we all had solar and we were trading that power. Today, we have cell phone carriers that are top down. But actually, each of our phones, it's broadcasting Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and you could stay and we have Wi-Fi access points at home. You could stitch together a digital network. And a blockchain-based network isn't owned by anybody. It isn't run by anybody. It's sort of, I think we're sort of a temporary blip in history where all of your connections with your friends are controlled by one small set of people out of Palo Alto. Or all the digital news media in the world is run basically by Twitter and YouTube. And it's a very small number of people. So it is the nature of the current generation of technology that is a highly centralizing force. We have replaced geographic oligopolies with global monopolies. While at the same time, there's sort of this long tail of independent actors, but that fat middle that used to exist in the old world is gone. When you would have 10 e-commerce retailers and now you just have one that's kind of controlling the whole Internet retail. When you would have had hundreds of local taxi dispatchers, but now all taxis are dispatched out of San Francisco by Uber or Lyft. So that trend line is very worrying because that's not the Internet. I think we were all promised. We were promised to decentralize Internet where we kind of all collectively control outcomes. But like in any system, you have to have rules, you have to have consensus, you have to have ways of rewarding people who contribute to the network, you have to have ways of punishing cheaters who harm the network. And blockchains use mathematics, cryptography, peer-to-peer networking to create digital consensus and allow truly leaderless digital networks. And I think that is what is compelling about them. And we're starting with the financial applications because money is a ledger. It's something that we've historically had to put a king in charge for or a state. And they have a habit, you know, when you hand somebody the ability to print money, then they just print more of it. And so we find this way into their pockets and their, and their friends' pockets. And it may be not a problem in New Zealand because it's a famously uncorrupt country. But, yeah, even there, right, there's always something. But compared to other parts of the world that are outright kleptocracies, that can be problematic. So you have things like Bitcoin that essentially separate money from any individual controlling the money, and then it becomes collective money. Ethereum tries to do that for a programmable financial system. And I think you'll see as blockchains get good at tackling those problems, and they demonstrate that they can secure something as hard to secure as the ability to make an issue and transfer money, then they can be trusted in all other aspects of life. So I think it's really interesting. And people say, well, you know, the cryptocurrency market's down 90% plus in the last year. Isn't it over or was it a fad? How do you respond? Yeah, I mean, look, it's a highly speculative market. It's this weird combination of money and code and governance. And, you know, dot com went through this in 1999 2000. So I've seen this kind of movie before. And crypto is a really hard problem. Crypto, as you're basically saying, I'm going to create digital gold. I'm going to make it unhackable, even though the reward will be hundreds of billions of dollars. Trust me, I don't have a bug in this code, because if I do, you lose all your money. It's very hard to secure and transfer. It's still very, very much in development. It feels like the computers were in the 1980s, not where the internet was in 1990s, but it's moving faster. So there's still a lot of fundamental development work to be done. Crypto is not simple computer science. It is bleeding edge computer science, game theory, attack vectors, hacking. You're trying to solve some very hard problems. So it's going to take time to figure out. And today, for example, the total stock of Bitcoin in the world is valued at about $80 billion and or $70 billion. If you take into account losses and so on, the actually sorry, higher would be about about 100. But the total gold supply in the world is somewhere around seven or $10 trillion. And Bitcoin does a lot of the things that gold does, some better, some worse, better in the sense that it's digitally transmissible, easier to secure, more scarce, worse in the sense that there might be a bug. You can get hacked. You might lose your password past key, which I've seen happen to friends of mine. So it's so it's still much less certain. It's much more new. Gold's been around forever. So what you have right now is the market is pricing Bitcoin as being somewhere between one five hundredth the chance of being digital gold to one one thousand to one one hundredth. And when the market changes mind on these very little probabilities, you have these massive swings in the price. So it does end up being a very speculative instrument today. And it's like an angel investment or like an early venture investment where you can lose all your money or most of it. But and there's a lot of risk involved, but there's also a lot of reward. These are not ready for prime time yet. But we're going to go deeper on the blockchain, crypto, Ethereum and the like, I do want to just while we have everyone talk a little bit, you're famous on Twitter now. Where did this come from? You know, and if you could talk a little bit about your becoming famous in terms of talking about the inner game of entrepreneurship. Yeah, so fame is a curse. I don't recommend it for anybody. You want to be, you want to this is good, but you want to be rich and anonymous, not poor and famous. You know, because like this is the disease of social media. Everybody is getting their five seconds of fame and becoming a celebrity and celebrities are the most miserable people in the world. So it's not necessarily a good thing to go for. That said, you know, I think what happened was like anyone who's been an entrepreneur, I was running extremely high stress lifestyle. And one of the things that makes entrepreneurship especially stressful is that not only are you supposed to have all the answers, you know, you're doing very hard work, but you're supposed to never show weakness because your board members, you show them weakness, you know, they're not going to fund you, they're not going to trust you. You show it to your employees are going to run for the hills, your customers are not going to buy for your new partners are going to partner with you. So you have to show extreme stability and it's the nature of the technology business that 99 out of 100 startups effectively fail because the winners are so outsized and so rare. So most entrepreneurs walking around know that they don't have product market fit live in mortal terror of it. They're not allowed to talk about it and everyone has to pretend they're winning and crushing it all the time. And this is highly stressful. So most people, I think just melt down under the stress and they just hide it because we're not taught the modern coping tools on how to work with it and maybe ancient cultures had better answers. You know, you meditate, you walk in nature, you have closer family ties, you have bigger tribes or you're just much less likely to go from being fresh out of school to landing into running a hundred person company. So these are just very modern pressures and stresses. And just like anybody, I had to kind of work through it. And as I worked through it, I started using Twitter as my open diary on what I had learned that was useful to me. And I think if anybody else was talking about this, it wouldn't be that interesting. But because, you know, I'm in the tech business and supposedly successful and I'm talking about it, I think that gives people license to talk about it. So I just decided, you know, five or six years ago that I was done being miserable and I was going to be happy, you know. And I know this sounds easy in hindsight, but it was sort of like, well, this entire time, I've just assumed that happy people aren't successful. And if I'm going to be successful, then I can't be happy. I have to be miserable. If I'm going to make a difference in the world, I have to be unhappy along the way. And I just sort of shifted my mindset and decided, actually, I'm out of time. It's now or never. There's no future to live for. And if I don't figure out how to be happy, I'm going to die unhappy. And it's going to and I made it a discipline like and just like diet and nutrition and exercise. These are highly personal disciplines that are unique to each of us. And we have to find what works for us and nobody else can give can make your diet work for you because it's a battle that's fought every day, you know, at every meal. And no one can make your exercise and fitness routine work for you because it's not even just the half hour you go to the gym or workout. It's literally how you carry yourself, how you move, what activities you volunteer for. So the same way I think your own internal mental state is just as malleable, but just as hard and just as individual. And so I just started documenting my journey and a lot of people actually thought it was strange and I did lose some business contacts. It definitely is some business so written some people were attracted to it, but I don't but part of being happy is not caring what other people think and so I don't care anymore. So there we are. So we're going to go much deeper on this part two. We're back up here on the main stage at two thirty. So I hope to see you there and we'll open the space for Q&A as well. Please join me in thanking the ball. Robert Khan, thanks for sitting clues.