Talent to the Mafia, Update
This week, Shyam Sankar, Jeff Li (co-founder of Paraform ), and I hosted forthcoming Stanford grads for some good ol’ fashioned barnstorming and bay flights out of Palo Alto Airport. KPAO was a fitting finale to the Stanford DEFCON conference: the shortest, busiest towered runway in our country, it’s like landing on an aircraft carrier.
“Putin and Xi are Founders. They have founder mentalities; we must keep that in mind when dealing with them.” Shyam said that three years from now, “we will look back on today and realize it was the start of a new Cold War. But a really F* hot one.”
I recruited Shyam off the Stanford campus 20 years go. We’ve both invested in Paraform, and when Jeff and I asked him what he’s learned about recruiting, he said, “It doesn’t scale. People aren’t cattle. You can’t processize it.”
Admiral Rickover, who I’ve written about in the past, was the father of our Nuclear Navy. He personally interviewed over 14,000 captain candidates. Elon might be the father of our hardware economy today, and like Rickover, he was known to both protect and drive his engineers hard.
Shyam reminded us that Elon’s progeny are doing the insane, even if they fail: “After watching his team run in circles over-thinking scenarios for a self-landing rocket, Elon insisted that his team just go try it.” The first attempt failed. But it gave them the information to succeed.
“There are things that are really just painful. What we need are four more SpaceXs”
