EP 152 - Alex Dang: Billion-Dollar Bets: Why VC’s Best Decisions Go Against the Crowd

🚀 Most investors chase consensus. The best ones? They bet against it.

If everyone agrees on an investment, it’s probably not bold enough. That’s why the greatest venture capitalists don’t just follow trends—they seek out the hidden outliers that redefine industries. But how do they spot the next Amazon, Google, or Tesla before anyone else? And why do so many leaders play it safe and miss out?

📌 In this episode, Alex Dang—former Amazon and McKinsey leader—breaks down how elite investors think, how to cultivate the venture mindset, and why risk isn’t the enemy—short-term thinking is.

🎧 Watch now to learn how to think like the world’s top investors.

🎙️ What’s in the Episode:

1️⃣ Conviction Over Consensus – Why the best decisions often go against the crowd.
2️⃣ The VC Playbook – How top investors filter out noise and double down on outliers.
3️⃣ Risk vs. Regret – The hidden cost of playing it safe.
4️⃣ The ‘Day One’ Mentality – How Amazon avoids stagnation and bureaucracy.
5️⃣ From Poker to Investing – The mindset shift that separates amateurs from professionals.

👤 About Alex Dang:

Alex Dang has lived the venture mindset firsthand—at Amazon, where he built new businesses; at AWS, where he launched cutting-edge AI solutions; and at McKinsey, where he helped Fortune 500 leaders scale transformative innovations. A Stanford GSB graduate, he’s spent nearly two decades guiding decision-makers through high-risk, high-reward environments.

💡 Quotes to Challenge Your Thinking:

📌 (01:21:31) "Conviction beats consensus. If everyone agrees, the idea isn’t bold enough."
📌 (01:49:18) "VCs don’t fear losing money. They fear missing the next Google."
📌 (00:31:08) "Home runs matter, strikeouts do not in the venture capital game."
📌 (00:58:46) "In business, like poker, fold early or double down—there’s no in-between."
📌 (00:47:00) "The moment you abandon a Day One mentality, bureaucracy wins."

⏰ Timestamps:

(00:04:58) AI's Next Big Disruption
(00:20:08) Predictability vs. Innovation in Business
(00:30:45) Venture Capital’s Risk Culture Explained
(00:38:00) How Amazon Built a Venture Mindset
(00:46:34) Day One vs. Day Two Thinking
(00:53:22) Writing for High-Stakes Decision Makers
(00:57:51) Poker Mindset in Venture Investing
(01:11:07) Why Failure Leads to Billion-Dollar Wins
(01:21:31) Conviction vs. Consensus in Investing
(01:26:46) Avoiding the Crowd, Finding Outliers
(01:32:47) Playing the Long Game in Venture
(01:54:59) Optimism in Innovation’s Unpredictable Future 

🔔 Help Us Grow

If this episode challenged your thinking, hit follow, like, and share. The bigger the show gets, the bigger the guests we can bring you—so you get even more game-changing insights.

🎧 Watch now and start making billion-dollar bets like the world’s best investors. 🚀

Transcript

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:20:09

Christian Soschner

Most people think venture capital is just about funding startups. But what if I told you that the real secret to building billion dollar companies isn't money, but mindset? We live in a world obsessed with short term wins.

00:00:20:09 - 00:00:33:13

Christian Soschner

Leaders are pressured to show results every quarter, but history tells us a different story. Amazon, Google and Tesla weren't built overnight.

00:00:33:15 - 00:00:41:13

Christian Soschner

The biggest risk, not failure, but missing the one outlier that changes everything.

00:00:41:13 - 00:00:49:01

Alex Dang

It's now kind of obvious, that Amazon or Apple or Google, where the white that's. But back

00:00:49:01 - 00:00:56:23

Alex Dang

everyone in the room agrees that this is the company to make it better, then something might be wrong with the company. Maybe that's not bold

00:00:56:23 - 00:01:08:11

Alex Dang

their main fear is not about losing money, because if you lose money, you just lose one X. If you lose Google, you lose 10,000 X. So they are their fear is to lose that potential.

00:01:08:11 - 00:01:08:22

Alex Dang

Google

00:01:09:00 - 00:01:17:17

Christian Soschner

So how do you train yourself to see what others missed? How do you make high risk bets that redefine industries?

00:01:17:17 - 00:01:44:05

Christian Soschner

Today's guest, Alex Tang, has been at the heart of these decisions as the former Amazon and AWS product leader and McKinsey partner in Silicon Valley and a Stanford GSB graduate. Alex has helped global executives build and scale transformative businesses, from artificial intelligence driven health care to digital commerce.

00:01:44:07 - 00:02:03:04

Christian Soschner

Before we dive in, a quick ask if you love recent insights from top investors and entrepreneurs, hit follow. Right now. It helps us bring even bigger guests and deliver more valuable content straight to your.

00:02:03:04 - 00:02:17:15

Christian Soschner

If you want to predict the future, look at where venture capitalists invest today. The most transformation and technology of the next decade. It's probably something we can't even name yet.

00:02:17:17 - 00:02:35:12

Christian Soschner

This conversation will challenge how you think about innovation, decision making, and the future of business. Stay with us because what Alex shares today might just change how you invest your time, money and ideas. Let's dive in.

00:02:35:12 - 00:02:40:07

Christian Soschner

See you. Where are you calling from?

00:02:40:09 - 00:02:48:01

Alex Dang

I'm calling a Christian from Silicon Valley, right down the center of innovation and venture capital.

00:02:48:03 - 00:03:05:19

Christian Soschner

Can you do me a favor at the beginning? I often hear Silicon Valley, and I use this term broadly. And when I think of Silicon Valley, I basically think of California. What exactly is Silicon Valley?

00:03:05:21 - 00:03:29:15

Alex Dang

It's actually a very good question. So it's that northern part of California, very close to the San Francisco Bay area. It's the kind of a peninsula in between San Francisco and San Jose, San Jose. What is a place where you may think of where semiconductor is on board, where, all the older technology companies. Which, where a foundation for Silicon Valley.

00:03:29:15 - 00:03:59:17

Alex Dang

That's that's why the name is Silicon Valley. And nowadays you can in the middle of it to Stanford. As well as Berkeley. And now you can see more companies in, San Francisco and headquartered there. So majority of companies that you may think of, Silicon Valley companies like Uber will be located there. But pretty much every company Apple Meta or Facebook Alphabet, they're all headquartered somewhere around where my houses.

00:03:59:18 - 00:04:08:21

Alex Dang

So, you can drive 30 minutes one way or another and you will hit, one of these phenomenal, transformational revolutionary companies.

00:04:08:21 - 00:04:17:14

Christian Soschner

That it's it's really a great area for you, generally to live. I mean, you are surrounded by the world's best wishes and entrepreneurs.

00:04:17:16 - 00:04:18:02

Alex Dang

That's right.

00:04:18:02 - 00:04:45:16

Alex Dang

And I do think that, yeah, I would definitely place interpreters first, because that's their talent, which is building the whole innovation culture. VCs are critical element of this ecosystem, because they find and fund. And nowadays all these big VC backed corporations which once were funded by VCs, are now part of this ecosystem. We can mention similar names that we just, don't mention, like Nvidia,

00:04:45:16 - 00:04:46:14

Alex Dang

Microsoft.

00:04:47:05 - 00:04:50:19

Alex Dang

Amazon, Google. They're now part of these ecosystem.

00:04:50:21 - 00:05:03:17

Christian Soschner

Yeah, that that's good. We are still at the beginning of 2025. And, it's the prediction time. And I'm curious to hear what's on top of your mind in this year.

00:05:03:19 - 00:05:04:13

Alex Dang

Look, I think,

00:05:04:13 - 00:05:28:14

Alex Dang

some topics will be very similar to your other guests, I would assume. I have an applied math and economics degree. I spend some time in computer vision as early as in 2003. And then was part of AWS AI team in 2018. So AI is certainly something that, draw my attention early on, and I felt that this will have an impact.

00:05:28:16 - 00:05:55:04

Alex Dang

Nowadays, it's pretty much a common sense that I will change the world. The question is how it will change the world. At what pace? Which industries? I'm now very excited about what's happening with the ChatGPT AI, and, I would call them into entertainment applications. But at the same time, I think the most transformational impact will be happening in more traditional industries like agriculture, manufacturing, energy.

00:05:55:04 - 00:06:27:12

Alex Dang

I think that's where the impact of AI engine AI, will be transformational. So I'm constantly thinking of different use cases. And what will be the impact that this new technology wave will bring with it. And I do think that's a wave. It's, someone who is calling from Vienna. I think you're very familiar with Schumpeter's innovation waves, and that's definitely seems like a truly big innovation wave that will change the world.

00:06:27:14 - 00:06:45:07

Alex Dang

And the world is, I think, is a critical point. I also travel a lot. I've visited many countries in the past, thanks to the book as well as to my work. And I see that, there is some expectation in that it's not going to be just Silicon Valley. People do believe that Silicon Valley found some kind of a formula.

00:06:45:09 - 00:07:11:23

Alex Dang

And there is one. But it feels like. And I think we'll we'll see more Silicon Valley in the next, maybe not next year, but in the next decade and certainly in the next generation. So we will see it, I'm pretty sure, hubs in, Berlin or Vienna, in Abu Dhabi or Dubai in Riyadh or Beijing actually will really see that, it will just have more power and more impact.

00:07:11:23 - 00:07:42:08

Alex Dang

And therefore we'll have to think about Silicon Valley or, hubs, innovation hubs in the world, with each hub potentially representing a very specific area. It could be semiconductors in Taiwan. I've just talked to a very big R&D, lab, and I do believe that Taiwan may become the semiconductor innovation hub and many, many others. So it's, another question to many leaders, would be what their help is going to be about, what is going to be the core focus.

00:07:42:08 - 00:08:10:23

Alex Dang

That's probably the second important topic. The third one is that I do feel that, many former VC backed companies will play a bigger role. They have so much they have such an access to capital. And they are profitable nowadays, and therefore they have these capital to allocate to dedicate to innovation. So to some extent, the role of VC used to be to invest in emerging new ideas.

00:08:11:00 - 00:08:35:05

Alex Dang

I think that, many corporations, especially with deep knowledge of corporations, will play that role as well, so they will not compete. I would rather say they will complement, VC invest. So these are three big topics, which are keeping me busy. I, what's going to be what's going to be the next Silicon Valley and, what's going to be the role of corporations in the future?

00:08:35:07 - 00:08:40:01

Christian Soschner

What's your guess? What will be the next Silicon Valley? I mean, the size of this Silicon Valley, what's what.

00:08:40:04 - 00:09:04:23

Alex Dang

I think will happen? I think we'll have many, because, nowadays the world is so complex and way more developed. Therefore, you will see these, spots of innovative ideas anywhere in the world. So as I'm visiting, Middle East, every single visit inspires me because I can see so many new ideas from Kuwait. And again, or from Dubai or from Riyadh.

00:09:05:00 - 00:09:27:17

Alex Dang

These companies and startups are coming here to Silicon Valley to learn. They're coming back, and now they're building their companies. The same thing happens with Europe. I think it's just more about what kind of a niche each, of these players will play in. And these niches are numerous. Now we're all thinking about AI, but what about biotech and longevity?

00:09:27:19 - 00:09:39:07

Alex Dang

What could be more valuable than, our health and lifespan? I think we'll we'll spend more time, effort, money, on our health and, I spent

00:09:39:07 - 00:09:47:00

Alex Dang

some time as, co-founder, the CEO of a health tech company, Cancer Campus. And you could see the advancement in cancer

00:09:47:00 - 00:09:51:16

Alex Dang

treatment in the past, 20, 30 years has been tremendous.

00:09:51:18 - 00:10:13:12

Alex Dang

Now I help another startup in Alzheimer's disease. I help a company in the I drug discovery. We will see a tremendous wave of new ideas. Hopefully the some of them will be funded and hopefully, and I'll kind of pretty sure that some of them will become, very impactful startups and ideas.

00:10:13:15 - 00:10:31:06

Christian Soschner

That's good to hear. The majority of my audience is from the biotech and pharma field, so they will love that. You also have some startups in, Silicon Valley, and potentially they can approach you when they want to access their ecosystem and have now another, another person, another qualified person who can deal with them totally in health.

00:10:31:10 - 00:10:33:02

Alex Dang

It's such a complex space that,

00:10:33:02 - 00:10:56:22

Alex Dang

we we'll see innovation waves across board from healthcare and, hospital networks to clinics to drug discovery to life sciences to how to make sure that we are healthy in terms of mental health. So, so there are so many aspects of, health and longevity that, there will be out lots to do.

00:10:56:24 - 00:11:07:01

Alex Dang

And, look, I mean, we're all familiar that the US is to some extent just leading the way in terms of the years spent on healthcare. But I'm not sure that many health care, many executives

00:11:07:01 - 00:11:12:22

Alex Dang

here in the US would be proud of stating that because it's also an excessively, expensive,

00:11:12:22 - 00:11:15:06

Alex Dang

trait, you know, care and treatment.

00:11:15:08 - 00:11:23:09

Alex Dang

So it's going to be and it gives a huge potential to improve the efficiency of the system. So we'll we'll see a lot. That's what I'm sure about.

00:11:23:15 - 00:11:44:00

Christian Soschner

That's true. The health care industry meets this week a little bit of, from your place in San Francisco. It's the JP Morgan health, Health Innovation Week. Before we dive deeper into this conversation, for the listeners, what are the three core messages that you would like to bring across in this episode?

00:11:44:21 - 00:12:14:00

Alex Dang

Recall messages. So first of all, Christian, thank you so much for even give me a chance to share these messages with your audience. Look, I think there are three different audiences here. So for startups, I would say if you pursue your idea and you need venture capital, try to understand how they think. That's of a critical importance to learn and know what is the mechanics behind the scenes, what is important, what is not.

00:12:14:03 - 00:12:31:04

Alex Dang

We have, written our book, The Venture Mindset. I'm not sure whether you had one. I have one right in front of me. I will show it to your audience, though. This is the okay. This is the yes version. If someone speaks Mandarin, this is the Mandarin version, right? There are so many different versions

00:12:31:04 - 00:12:32:10

Alex Dang

in Korean.

00:12:32:12 - 00:12:54:24

Alex Dang

There will be, one in Russia, and there will be a hopefully one day, one in German as well. So, my piece of advice, at least read the book, but ideally learn about the space so that you will learn how the decisions made. Because this will increase your chances to raise capital and be fit for the industry.

00:12:55:01 - 00:13:28:06

Alex Dang

For corporate leaders, I would actually recommend follow visit. My learning from my research and from, talking working with the VC industry is that, they know they predict the trends, many of their bets, they take some time to materialize into big businesses, but they're so often, our great speakers of big ideas. So if you want to know the future, probably look at where VCs invest their money now, 1,890% of these ideas will be in nonsense.

00:13:28:06 - 00:14:03:00

Alex Dang

They will disappear. They will never materialize into anything meaningful. But 10 to 20% will be these big transformational companies. So if you want to predict the future, I think that would be the best way to see the trend for everyone else. Like for general audience, for decision makers. I think the level of uncertainty is so high that I would just recommend to at least blend in a different mindset and a different toolkit, in addition to what we call a traditional toolkit.

00:14:03:00 - 00:14:31:01

Alex Dang

So the traditional set of rules, how you plan, how you make decisions, venture capitalist somehow because that's what they do for the living. They leave in this kind of an environment where risks are high, and they had to come up with some set of rules. We outlined these rules in the book. Hopefully we'll be able to cover a few, but these this is a toolkit that you may just apply in your day to day decision making, especially when the risks are high.

00:14:31:01 - 00:14:55:05

Alex Dang

When you do not know what will happen in the future, when you do not know which technology will take place, when you do not know whether that will resonate with the user or not, especially in healthcare industry, where you never know whether that clinical trial will be successful or not. And the biotech industry was built by VCs to some extent, therefore just borrow some rules from them.

00:14:55:07 - 00:15:01:22

Alex Dang

And that may help you make better decisions, not just in business, but in your everyday decision making style.

00:15:02:00 - 00:15:19:06

Christian Soschner

And we can proudly say as, as you. Oh, I can proudly say, as an Austrian, that, Eugene can I can I can stay invested in, in Genentech and, of Perkins was funded by someone who has a YouTube channel who who has, roots here in Vienna. So it's, also a great place to be.

00:15:19:08 - 00:15:39:10

Christian Soschner

Alex. Thank you very much for writing this book. It's one of the best books on venture investing. And especially in your title, the Venture mindset is just genius. I wish I had this book, 2006, when I got in touch the first time with Venture Capital, it was with innovative spin out. It was the Department of Road.

00:15:39:14 - 00:16:01:15

Christian Soschner

Novak, who later founded Crispr Therapeutics with Emmanuelle Charpentier, and I was responsible for finances. And the first time I looked at the balance sheet of, the company, I was just blown away. And for this company is just burning capital. Why do they invest in this company? Actually, we should, rather think about, declaring bankruptcy and shutting this company down instead of moving it forward.

00:16:01:15 - 00:16:24:09

Christian Soschner

But back in 2006, there was no literature out on the market that was easy, accessible here in Austria. And since then, I use venture investing and venture capital, quite proudly, as at the term, but never thought about the definition. So my first question to you is how do you define venture investing?

00:16:24:11 - 00:16:24:21

Alex Dang

I think in

00:16:24:21 - 00:16:48:10

Alex Dang

a nutshell, it's, providing early stage companies with their first or almost first capital with an expectation that this high growth startup will succeed and become a multibillion dollar corporation or a unicorn. Unicorns is defined as a company which, with a private valuation of 1 billion and above. So that's in a nutshell. What venture capital is about?

00:16:48:10 - 00:17:27:20

Alex Dang

It's primarily built startups, but more importantly, venture backed companies, which used to be venture backed 20, 30 years ago, are now to some extent a foundation of the US economy. If you think about all of the top leading companies by valuation, the US half of them are venture backed or used to be venture backed. Top seven or I would say at least top seven because, more recently, sometimes you can see nine out of ten companies are VC backed companies Apple, Google, Nvda, Broadcom, Tesla.

00:17:27:20 - 00:17:58:22

Alex Dang

All of those would not be even possible without the VC industry. So venture capital is not just the, provider of early stage capital, but to some extent, they are the foundational element of the growth of, the US economy and many other economies in the world as well. So that would be my definition of, VC. But the book that we wrote, and thank you again for mentioning it, it's, actually a book not about VC, but not for VC.

00:17:58:22 - 00:18:42:03

Alex Dang

S we decided that and we thought that that would be valuable for every decision maker, not just to learn about the VC industry, but also to learn, what are the tools, mechanisms and rules they use to make decisions in such a complex space? How do they find and fund such innovative companies so early on, before many other larger investors think of fidelity and other big investors, or even corporations which were inside the industry, which were inside this, they still missed these technology companies teams.

00:18:42:05 - 00:19:05:16

Alex Dang

But VC somehow did it. Well, how this was the key question that we asked ourselves. We combined 20 years of research of, earliest travel with a professor at Stanford who is, an expert, well known expert in VC industry. I was I'm a practitioner, so I used to be a product leader at Amazon than AWS.

00:19:05:17 - 00:19:17:16

Alex Dang

I, was a partner at key as well as at McKinsey. So having clients in the technology space. So we decided to combine our effort together to write this book.

00:19:17:18 - 00:19:18:01

Christian Soschner

You

00:19:18:01 - 00:19:42:01

Christian Soschner

mentioned that this book is not only relevant for venture capitalists and the startup world, but for every single decision maker in every field. So it's basically industry leaders, leaders of small and medium sized enterprises, politicians, NGOs. Why do you think the venture mindset is relevant for everybody today?

00:19:42:03 - 00:19:42:12

Alex Dang

Look, I

00:19:42:12 - 00:20:13:17

Alex Dang

think, the majority, if you think about the management science, it was based on, the foundation of and the belief that everything is to some extent predictable, that you have to plan ahead. The whole world, the whole the whole idea of a strategic planning or financial planning that you've just discussed, creation is about making sure that you can plan ahead five years ahead, ten years ahead, and then you analyze the market and you make a bet, then you wait and just execute on the plan.

00:20:13:19 - 00:20:37:07

Alex Dang

It's this predictability was key. We just think that that's in so many cases, it's not relevant anymore. You have to apply a different set of beliefs that the outcome is unpredictable, that when you launch a product, it's not just about the execution. You just you just can make a mistake or that that product or service may not resonate with the client.

00:20:37:09 - 00:21:06:02

Alex Dang

And you may have to close the idea and start investing in some other ideas. And that has to be the modus operandi of, of a new leader or a new kind of a decision maker. So, I would not claim that we came up with a new management theory. By no means, but we just, think that there is a set of rules and techniques or mechanisms which may help decision makers to rethink how to think about, innovation.

00:21:06:08 - 00:21:30:12

Alex Dang

I can give you a very specific example. What is important, what is more important, the size of a market and a detailed analysis of that, or a team for any VC. Now we have a very clear answer. Elias, teams surveyed all these these and asked them what was the most important factor in terms of the success for a startup.

00:21:30:14 - 00:22:04:19

Alex Dang

And he outlined a few options for. We divided that into two big categories jockey and a horse. Where a jockey represents the team and horse represents product, product market fit, total rest of the market size, etc. any VC would immediately respond that the team is the most important factor. Why? Because as you build the product, most likely the service product will fail and therefore you may want to have pivot or change your business model and find a different way to solve the same problem.

00:22:04:19 - 00:22:18:17

Alex Dang

And that would be the process that they would follow. Therefore, the teams excellence or the teams effort will be the most important factor in terms of the success for any traditional organization. And Christian, I'm pretty sure that you will agree with me.

00:22:18:17 - 00:22:26:07

Alex Dang

We spent way more time on analyzing Excel files and debating the assumptions. And then finally, after

00:22:26:07 - 00:22:33:08

Alex Dang

maybe three, six, nine months, the plan will be added or a business plan will be added to the, annual review.

00:22:33:08 - 00:22:53:19

Alex Dang

And then after the annual review, it will be added to the next year's budget. And then finally new racks or roles will be opened to finally hire the leader of the team and, the first employees of that new business. And this is exactly the opposite of what we would do. They would start with the team, not with the idea.

00:22:53:21 - 00:23:17:20

Alex Dang

It doesn't mean that they would ignore the total addressable market and other factors. The number one factor will be the jockey versus within the corporations. It will be, the horse. So this is a very specific example where a traditional mindset may lead us to wrong, decision or a waste of time, or a and a waste of resources at this.

00:23:17:20 - 00:23:42:03

Alex Dang

And there are many other examples. We actually outlined nine of them, where traditional mindset, which works perfectly well if you are building a McDonald's or a factory where you know the process so well and where it just simply fails, if you deal with anything innovation related, AI related nowadays. But it used to be not AI, but internet mob and just you list them all.

00:23:42:09 - 00:24:14:22

Christian Soschner

Now, you mentioned, I think one of the biggest misconceptions, in venture investing, that's the technology. And the market is not as important as the team. And interestingly, I work with biotech companies now since 2006. And, the majority of early stage ideas that come out of academia prioritize the science and the technology. And I can imagine when the scientists speak with venture capitalists, and the books look rather on the team structure than the technology.

00:24:15:03 - 00:24:25:21

Christian Soschner

There is, a lot of potential for misunderstanding that conflict. How do you see this intersection between, startup founders, scientists and the devices?

00:24:25:23 - 00:24:26:18

Alex Dang

Look, first of all, I

00:24:26:18 - 00:24:54:24

Alex Dang

have to make a comment, then, that Christian, it really depends on the industry. So for health tech and biotech, the ratio is a bit different. Still, team is important, but as well as patent patents and, IP and other factors because it's, way more science based and, it's, it's a lot about the small molecule or other or DNA, sequencing, etc., rather than just about the team.

00:24:55:01 - 00:25:14:24

Alex Dang

But the team still matters, again, for the very simple reason that, at early stage company or early stage corporate startup, you will you do not you cannot predict what kind of challenges you will face. You will have to overcome them all. And no excel would help you to do so. You will need a team to do that.

00:25:14:24 - 00:25:47:23

Alex Dang

And not just the founders, but the whole team has to be incentivized. And motivated to overcome those. And therefore the incentives which are backing these kind of motivation, there have to be structure it in a different way. We have to share the benefits of, if the of the game, of the potential win, which is again, a bit different from the corporate environment where, your fixed amount of salary will probably represent 80 to 90% of your compensation.

00:25:47:23 - 00:26:07:16

Alex Dang

And if you ask any sort of founder here or any startup employee or engineer, I would not say that will be almost the opposite. But to some extent, the expectation is that that a fixed salary will represent no more than 1,020%. The rest will be coming from stock vesting. And the success of business.

00:26:08:01 - 00:26:31:22

Christian Soschner

I agree to what you say. That's, science, of course, matters. That was a little bit exhilarating. But I think in my opinion, science, especially in deep tech fields, not only in biotech but also in other deep, dark areas, science is a given. I can't imagine any university, any academic institutions, tuition that brings out, produces science that doesn't matter or is, incomplete or is completely useless.

00:26:31:22 - 00:26:50:06

Christian Soschner

I mean, don't know how to do academia, but when I look at the team composer, most spin outs that I've seen here in Europe, or maybe it's different in the United States, are more or less a bunch of scientists. And when I look at biotech again, you have a lot of challenges to solve. I mean, manufacturing is one.

00:26:50:09 - 00:27:09:10

Christian Soschner

Scaling manufacturing up, to commercial level is the next one, clinical trials is the next one. Financing regulations, working with, governments. There are so many challenges that scientists can't cover. So I would also say that, even in biotech companies, the team matters a lot.

00:27:09:12 - 00:27:10:08

Alex Dang

That's right, that's

00:27:10:08 - 00:27:51:20

Alex Dang

right. And look, I mean, you know, you've just mentioned a few, not to be going too deep into health care, though. Your audience would appreciate that, that, many corporations are now building an ecosystem to help such emerging and startup startups, to survive better and to overcome these challenges because you've just mentioned, regulatory barriers or legal challenges and all of those, as a startup, you simply cannot afford, to have all these experts in your team, and you may not have enough knowledge, expertise or money to hire, distinguished lawyers and, legal advisors to help you and protect you.

00:27:51:22 - 00:28:31:04

Alex Dang

So what, many corporations and one example is JNJ labs. What they do, they, let startups be part of their accelerator program and have access to, you may call them buddies or supporters inside JNJ to help them and to navigate them through the challenges of pharma. Big pharma world. From, like you said, clinical trials and lab to legal things and challenges to distribution because, part of the game is to make sure that your drug is delivered to the patient or a caregiver or, health care provider.

00:28:31:06 - 00:28:42:08

Alex Dang

All of that is an interesting combination of this, ecosystem building. Again, like I said in the very beginning, from the corporate end to the startup world. And that makes

00:28:42:08 - 00:28:50:09

Alex Dang

the silicon Valley's ecosystem so ripe, for, startups to come and to join.

00:28:50:11 - 00:29:16:13

Christian Soschner

I think you, you brought up the correct term. I think venture capitalists are ecosystem builders at the end of the day. So when team matters, their job is to bring the right people together. Let's dive a little bit into the spirit of Silicon Valley. I'm born in Austria, and I was born in Austria in the 70s, 74 and grew up in the 80s and, was at university in the 90s, and this was in Europe, this period of 1989.

00:29:16:13 - 00:29:39:13

Christian Soschner

Cold War was over and everything was moving, integrating, the Eastern Bloc didn't exist anymore. And there was a spirit of moving forward. Although we had the internet, it was, basically an idea from CERN to put the World Wide Web into the public domain. That enabled a lot of, startup companies back then, like Amazon, that technology.

00:29:39:15 - 00:30:12:24

Christian Soschner

And I had the feeling that Europe basically was commercially and economically, even to the United States. And when we look at the GDP figures, it was pretty much the same library GDP per capita. And then the 2000 happened, 2008, a big crash, 2010 ten happened. And, Silicon Valley was just skyrocketing. You mentioned a lot of companies that were startup startups back in the 90s and 2000 who, that are now basically building the entire 40% of the S&P 500 today.

00:30:13:01 - 00:30:24:15

Christian Soschner

And my question to you is what happened in the last 15 years, 30 years in Silicon Valley that they created such a difference to the rest of the world?

00:30:24:17 - 00:30:25:20

Alex Dang

I think the title

00:30:25:20 - 00:30:50:17

Alex Dang

of our book is a good answer. It's a venture capital. So the whole development of the venture capital industry, which brought with itself, entrepreneurial spirit as well as, risk taking, mindset. That was a big driver of the success. So the companies that you've just mentioned, they would not be even possible without venture capitalists who took the risk and made the pact.

00:30:50:20 - 00:30:58:08

Alex Dang

It's now kind of obvious, that Amazon or Apple or Google, where the white that's. But back

00:30:58:08 - 00:31:14:07

Alex Dang

then it was absolutely not clear. Similar to now you may look at so many different investments from crypto to blockchain to AI to and you may just well, is it truly that important as a company? Will it really transform the world?

00:31:14:09 - 00:31:41:00

Alex Dang

So very similar thoughts. I'm pretty sure struck many minds back then. I would have to actually bring you back to one key principles of the book. We start our book with this principle. It's, home runs matter. Strikeouts do not, which are derived from a very simple business model that VCs follow. If you think about a portfolio of the regular VC, you will.

00:31:41:00 - 00:32:14:01

Alex Dang

They will make 20 bets. 20. They make 20 investments in startups, and 16 to 17 of those bets or investments will be written off. And so many people forget about that aspect of a venture capital business. They just write off all of these investments right away. And more importantly, if you compare that to private equity industry or to your traditional investing normal, you can sell these assets for something in the VC business or startups.

00:32:14:03 - 00:32:46:20

Alex Dang

The outcome will be zero. You will write off because you cannot sell your laptop or a lease in a garage, which may not even exist. So, what you will end up with is maybe 3 or 4 companies. And three of these may generate two x return for x return, which will be an amazing return for a traditional company, but not for VCs, just because that will not compensate for all the losses, will not pay off for all the losses, generated by 1617 other companies.

00:32:46:22 - 00:33:17:01

Alex Dang

And there won't be one. It'll be a single company that may generate ten x or 100 x return, and this is the one that VCs will hunt for. They will be look and search for this outlier that will define or make it or break it in terms of the venture capital industry. So this is what we refer to as a risk appetite model, when you may compare VCs in the US and the European economy, is this appetite to catch that outlier.

00:33:17:01 - 00:33:41:19

Alex Dang

And VCs were backing all of these potential and future outliers. So mean it means that and you've mentioned Amazon. It means that for every Amazon there were 19 losses. And we know actually many of them were planned and many other patterns that you name them all. Internet bust, in 2000 was for the reason so many companies disappeared.

00:33:41:21 - 00:34:12:00

Alex Dang

But back then Amazon survived. And now Amazon represents is that $1 trillion corporation representing, a backbone of, shopping and e-commerce. So you have to remember, but both parts of these stories, there were so many busts and losses and misses and failures, as well as to complement, Amazon's Googles and, matters of the world. And VCs will think about the risk a bit differently.

00:34:12:02 - 00:34:40:21

Alex Dang

Regularly, you would refer to risk as a risk of a loss. VCs would say that's you can if you invest in the wrong company, you will miss one X. But if you miss Google, you may miss 10,000 x. That would be the mindset. So the risk for a VC industry is missing a Google or missing Amazon or missing Apple, and therefore they would rather make an investment not to miss one.

00:34:40:23 - 00:35:06:19

Alex Dang

Not to to still catch that outlier because that would define the success of a fund that would define their success. And if you apply this mindset and multiply that across the economy, that might have or probably is the that creative force, that changed the economy and gave it an additional, boost and became this growth engine.

00:35:06:21 - 00:35:31:02

Alex Dang

Interestingly enough, if you think about that, that that's a macro level. If you go to the micro level and look at, say, Amazon as an example within Amazon, Amazon operates like a VC to some extent. They launched many new businesses, and I'm glad that it was part of that, had the luxury of seeing how the machine works inside and many ideas, where failures.

00:35:31:04 - 00:36:01:14

Alex Dang

We can talk more about that. But one idea became a tremendous success AWS, Amazon Web Services. It didn't exist, but Amazon was created. It was an internal startup to some extent, which now some may believe is the backbone and a source of profit for Amazon, which gave it a chance to grow beyond $1 trillion valuation. So, oh, even at the micro level, the same set of rules apply.

00:36:01:16 - 00:36:31:23

Alex Dang

It's you create these new growth engines by taking risks in a smart way. So probably Europe, if you mention Europe, is not taking enough risks. There could be very many systemic reasons for that. And I would not just blame culture or economy or rules or regulation. It's a blend of things happening. I would also highlight that many European companies are exceptionally successful in or used to be successful in finding innovative ideas like Nestlé and Nespresso.

00:36:32:00 - 00:36:41:24

Alex Dang

Could be just a simple example that we refer in the book to. Maybe we just need more of those. In our AI era

00:36:41:24 - 00:36:42:12

Alex Dang

now.

00:36:42:17 - 00:37:10:23

Christian Soschner

It's interesting. Can we stay with Amazon since the 90s? When I look at Europe in the 90s, Europe basically was leading the mobile industry and the automotive industry. A lot of innovation came out of Europe, and then the internet happened. And, with the internet, Amazon and sorry to say so, but back in the 90s, I don't think Amazon was particularly special compared to other companies.

00:37:11:00 - 00:37:33:18

Christian Soschner

In Europe, immediately, copycat companies popped up at the same time doing pretty much the same thing as Jeff Bezos did with Amazon selling books online. And in Europe, people were choking around this. I mean, why should I go online, buy a book when I can go to the bookstore around the corner and, can just pick it up anytime I want it?

00:37:33:20 - 00:38:06:00

Christian Soschner

There is no reason, you know, was sure we had like pretty much the same concept, like Amazon. Now, 20 to 30 years later, Amazon is $1 trillion company. Link doesn't exist anymore. It's, was rebranded to Tesla. And they still do the same thing selling books, but, not anywhere near to $1 trillion company. My question to you is how this venture capital or this venture mindset makes such a difference.

00:38:06:00 - 00:38:12:01

Christian Soschner

What's the what's the recipe of this mindset in the case of Amazon, how do you how would you define it?

00:38:12:01 - 00:38:13:12

Alex Dang

Look, I think

00:38:13:12 - 00:38:28:09

Alex Dang

that's the whole book is written just about that. So not I got to retell the book and I think, there a set of principles and mindset and, my only belief is that I will just quote Jeff Bezos here, that good intentions never work,

00:38:28:09 - 00:38:32:03

Alex Dang

but the mechanisms to. So it's all about a

00:38:32:03 - 00:38:33:05

Alex Dang

set of mechanisms.

00:38:33:05 - 00:39:03:18

Alex Dang

And, if you think of the outcome, it's the set of decisions right and wrong decisions, but it's a set of decisions made on the way, in terms of how you scale, what you scale, what you focus on, you've just mentioned if we just take books and say with the topic of books, which I had a chance to spend some time on building a new innovative program within Amazon, a subscription program, what do you think the goal and the pinpoint of a user is still the same.

00:39:03:20 - 00:39:22:19

Alex Dang

I want to get a book. Whether it's a, venture mindset book or any kind of book. But say, let's take this example. This one is, written in Mandarin and it's now available on Amazon. You can actually buy it on Amazon. Yes, you may have to wait for a bit longer to get one, but you still can.

00:39:22:21 - 00:39:43:17

Alex Dang

So it's all about the selection. So it's, how can I receive a book that I want to read out of millions of books available in the world and receive it as fast as possible? So one of the solutions would be to locate these books very close to you. Either it could be a bookstore or a warehouse of Amazon, but it's extremely expensive.

00:39:43:19 - 00:40:07:03

Alex Dang

If you think about the number of books that you may want to make available to readers for bestsellers like The Venture Mindset, it's relatively easy. But for, less popular books. But still, if Christian wants to read about, Ludwig von Mises history or something of that kind, it's hard. So what could be a solution is to locate it closer or.

00:40:07:05 - 00:40:27:07

Alex Dang

And then Amazon came up with a new super, very creative idea to three to print books on demand. So they have a facility. And when you Christian of places in order for a book then the book could be printed right there, right then and be shipped to you. So you don't need to store all the books in the world anymore.

00:40:27:07 - 00:40:48:20

Alex Dang

You actually can print the book whenever there is a need for. Isn't it a creative solution? It is. It's an innovative solution for the old problem. I gave the same pinpoint or a think of Kindle. That's exactly the same solution for the same problem. That's the new solution for exactly same problem. How would I get the book? I would just get instantly you place an order, you receive it on your Kindle device.

00:40:49:01 - 00:41:15:02

Alex Dang

Okay, well, maybe you would still prefer, like I prefer physical book. Can't you combine it and Amazon did that. If you place an order for a physical book today and if you own a Kindle device, I, Amazon will give you a chance to read the first chapter on your Kindle offering, because you can start reading now. And by the time when here and reading chapter one, the physical book or device or a subscription program.

00:41:15:02 - 00:41:35:15

Alex Dang

I've just mentioned that, we launched the program for kids and teens. I have a two year old, he really starts to kind of enjoy books. And, parents just simply do not know which books to buy and when to buy them. And Amazon helped them with that. They created a program for kids and teens for parents to subscribe to the service.

00:41:35:15 - 00:42:04:05

Alex Dang

I'm giving this very detailed example to demonstrate that it's not just about the let's bring books online. It's a constant creation of new ideas. It's the constant experimentation with new business models so that one day, one idea would resonate more, and that will stick and will stay there. But with these kind of myriads of different improvements and different new ideas and businesses, that's how Amazon is being built, not just Amazon.

00:42:04:07 - 00:42:29:06

Alex Dang

Think about Google or Apple or Netflix and Netflix moved from just, DVD, company to that streaming company, that, media company to some extent, because they now create their own content. It's a constant innovation. I think that's the point of a DNA. If I had to point to one, single factor with this is the fact.

00:42:29:12 - 00:42:35:22

Christian Soschner

It was this August here in the economy. It is this, this period of constant innovation.

00:42:35:24 - 00:42:40:08

Alex Dang

Was it always part of the spirit of the economy? I

00:42:40:08 - 00:43:00:16

Alex Dang

don't think so. I think it's again, a combination of, financial incentives, because we see industry in a particular moment in time in the U.S., was stimulated by regulatory environment so that, pension funds and retirement funds and other funds could invest more capital into a VC or riskier investments.

00:43:00:18 - 00:43:27:01

Alex Dang

It's also the level of, regulatory barriers. So can you actually incent to make people earn a lot? As startup founders, is it easy to structure the compensation incentives for the founding team, all of that source so that the, equals to build the ecosystem? It takes many, many different steps. And for each case, it will be a different discussion.

00:43:27:03 - 00:43:55:05

Alex Dang

But again, I'm a big true believer that, I have seen too many entrepreneurs from all over the globe coming for now, but many of them are coming to Silicon Valley to get their funding. But I'm 100% sure that many of them, either they're coming back, say from the least, that many of them come back. And if they have access to the same level of access to VC and funding, they would stay in their regions to build their phenomenal ideas and startups.

00:43:55:11 - 00:43:59:22

Alex Dang

And we'll see more of that kind of, actions and activities.

00:44:00:03 - 00:44:23:02

Christian Soschner

Yeah. Access. I completely agree. Access to capital is very often the limiting factor, and there seems to be more capital available in the United States. But when I think back to the 90s, still, to stay a little bit in this, in this era, the model I learned in school and university business school and university was that every company has a lifecycle to a lifetime.

00:44:23:02 - 00:44:49:17

Christian Soschner

So they start to mature the end and all this, companies that you mentioned, Apple, Amazon, Tesla, they seem to be evergreen. So when one of their products mature and seems to be going out of business, they come up with a new idea and come up with a new idea and how do you create such a system in a company of this constant innovation?

00:44:49:17 - 00:45:00:14

Christian Soschner

How do you create the spirit and how can you, systematically, keep the spirit in a peak organization alive? This is something that I really can't find out.

00:45:00:16 - 00:45:00:20

Alex Dang

I

00:45:00:20 - 00:45:23:00

Alex Dang

think, Christian, that is $1 trillion question. I mean, let's try to answer one. Well, first of all, let's first start with some facts. We looked at with earlier. We looked at the a fortune 500 companies and the list which was created, I think 40 or 50 years ago, the very first one and only 15%, one five, 15% of those companies still exist.

00:45:23:06 - 00:45:47:03

Alex Dang

They either were acquired or just go went bankrupt. So fortune 500 index is not that much different if you compare that to other regions. To some extent, I actually may not be surprised if, we look at the similar list in Japan that we will see more stability there. So to some extent, what you described as a life cycle of a company still exists.

00:45:47:03 - 00:46:17:01

Alex Dang

I actually would make even a comment that I think we may see more deaths of companies soon because of AI, because some business models will just simply be destroyed or be non-existent in the financial sector, in the health care sector and so many different sectors. So that's the fact number one. So I do think that companies do do die and they may actually disappear more, regularly than before.

00:46:17:03 - 00:46:40:01

Alex Dang

At the same time, we used to call that a day one and day two mentality at Amazon, where if you continue to innovate and you think as a day one as a kind of a startup, which I think is a very tough problem to solve, because as a company with 1.5 million employees, you cannot call yourself a small startup anymore.

00:46:40:04 - 00:47:06:06

Alex Dang

We have to act a bit differently. But it's kind of an interesting mindset that if you keep and preserve that day one mentality, then you have a chance to survive and you have a few more years to generate value for your users. If you switch to your day two mentality, you will become bureaucratic, you will become slow, you will become more worried about the next quarter results, rather than about your strategic positioning.

00:47:06:06 - 00:47:35:10

Alex Dang

You forget about your users, you start to focus more and, your shareholders, profit and management and politics, all of that starts to accumulate. And actually, if you do not proactively do anything about that, that will happen. So preventing this data mentality from emerging within your corporation, I think it's, a critical philosophical point that kept all of these companies reinvent themselves.

00:47:35:12 - 00:48:01:24

Alex Dang

And I think that's the word that I would use and repeat reinventing, Amazon, which we got to know in the 90s is different from 2000 and completely different from today's company. It's Amazon today is about cloud computing. It AI, telecommunication satellites, potentially healthcare. So it's it's experimented a lot. The same for meta.

00:48:02:01 - 00:48:28:09

Alex Dang

Meta is now, well known not just for their social media, but for their llama, journey AI models and models. Or take a Google. Google is now known for so many bets across, driverless cars as well as advertising. And I think they're also thinking of how to reinvent themselves. That's their challenge, because they're so dependent on their core business being advertising that they're now seriously worried about.

00:48:28:14 - 00:49:00:18

Alex Dang

Would they be able to stay still, be the leader in search, and, especially with all the AI innovation and, potential competitors from OpenAI or perplexity, a startup that didn't even exist a few years ago. So I think that's a constant, battle of your day one mentality and day two mentality. And thanks to the leadership of, Amazon, Apple and other, they managed to keep the day one mentality alive.

00:49:00:20 - 00:49:07:05

Alex Dang

Many companies did not. So they would, they either disappear or lose a battle to these new giants.

00:49:07:08 - 00:49:24:07

Christian Soschner

Yeah. That's true, that's true. They wanted that mentality. That's probably a good point. The best point to solve this problem. Alex, what inspired you to move from McKinsey and Amazon to becoming an offer writer?

00:49:24:07 - 00:49:25:07

Alex Dang

Look,

00:49:25:07 - 00:49:51:14

Alex Dang

all my work, was always focused on, finding new growth engines for my clients or building these new, great growth engines at Amazon. Internally, and finding these new businesses and launching them with my teams. And one day I met, with Ilya, and I realized that there are so many commonalities in between how we can make decisions, how these successful technology companies make decisions.

00:49:51:14 - 00:50:13:15

Alex Dang

And when we start to exchange our notes, we realized that, well, we want to share that with more companies and more clients. So we start to work together. We are running workshops and educational sessions and, strategic off sites. But then we quickly realized that if we want to truly deliver that impact, we will simply not have enough time in our lives to do so.

00:50:13:17 - 00:50:40:17

Alex Dang

So the best way to spread the word, would be probably to write a book. And that's when we decided that it would not be an academic book, will not be a textbook. It will be a book. Very practical, easy to read, easy to implement, with, anecdotes and examples, but data backed so it will not be just a set of anecdotes or beliefs or rumors.

00:50:40:19 - 00:51:09:02

Alex Dang

Alia has a 20 years of research which became a foundation for this book so that we could refer to the data, then illustrate it with a few examples that hopefully people will remember, and then give very practical set of, suggestions or pieces of advice, what you can change or do differently to apply the venture mindset. When we compare that to a traditional mindset so that was our journey to become book authors that I personally did not expect.

00:51:09:03 - 00:51:17:24

Alex Dang

I had a wish that one day I would write a book, but certainly I could not predict that I would just become a full time book author one day.

00:51:18:06 - 00:51:41:15

Christian Soschner

It's one of the best books that I have ever read, and I laughed away until I tell stories in the book, which are data packed. I have read it, now, I think for the first time. And the interesting thing, what I really like, with your social media profile, yours and ideas, is that it's a companion to the book.

00:51:41:17 - 00:52:02:15

Christian Soschner

So you present a lot of data and information on your social profiles that make better sense for someone. I think my opinion that has read the book. So it's really good to get the book to read it, and then also to connect with you and data on, on LinkedIn. My question, my next question to you is about your writing process.

00:52:02:17 - 00:52:19:13

Christian Soschner

I mean, I have now the fucking hand. And, while you were speaking, I picked it up and it's a great book. But, how do you approach such a project and how much time does it take to deliver a book like this to a reader like me?

00:52:19:15 - 00:52:19:22

Alex Dang

Well,

00:52:26:02 - 00:52:56:08

Alex Dang

and record another podcast for future book writers, because that's, that's emotional. Very cool topic to discuss. I doubt that that will attract that many attendees and attention, as a venture capital and startups. But I think it's a very, interesting and, fulfilling process at the same time to come out now with to see the book being recognized as a bestseller, as a Financial Times Book of the month, to hit Wall Street Journal.

00:52:56:08 - 00:53:27:18

Alex Dang

Now we have, different international editions, the one published in the UK and in Europe. Chinese version, Taiwanese is coming as well. Kazakh version, Russian version. Korean version. So these are the this is the an accomplishment. And certainly it took us a while to get there and the most I think the most important thing, if you want to become a book writer, is to keep the reader in mind.

00:53:27:20 - 00:53:53:19

Alex Dang

That's where you start. Who is going to be your reader? What do you want to share with that reader? For us, it was the word impact that, made it clear to us. We wanted to make sure that this book will end in hands of decision makers, but it will also be part of the, CEO's agenda so that they make they that might inspire them to make some changes and to do things a bit differently.

00:53:53:21 - 00:54:19:12

Alex Dang

We want to keep it very practical so that we would not just, refer to philosophical concepts, but to specific things that they can change tomorrow, how they conduct the meetings when they speak up, as leaders first or last, or would they ask experts first or last? What about junior employees? All of these very specific nitty gritty details that we'll learn from these in our interviews.

00:54:19:12 - 00:54:48:17

Alex Dang

And so these are, we outlined in the book, but certainly writing a book, is hard, especially if you if two people are writing the book. And I'm so glad that we were so, open to criticizing each other with Alia, as well as to finally relying on data over other opinions to make a final call. Because you may imagine that we had so many debates, throughout the book with our editors, as well as among each other.

00:54:48:19 - 00:54:52:19

Christian Soschner

What was the most challenging part in the writing process?

00:54:52:21 - 00:55:17:07

Alex Dang

I think to dedicate time to writing, because you always can find the reason not to write the book. There is always another request. I'm still a senior advisor at McKinsey, meaning that I receive on a regular basis requests from clients or from, teams to, discuss AI or digital transformation or operating models. The same goes for, Alia, but at, on steroids.

00:55:17:07 - 00:55:45:24

Alex Dang

So it's being always busy and always find a reason not to write the book because, interestingly enough, writing a book and putting, complex ideas into simple words, into simple sentences is, is very challenging, because you want to go into specifics and details and discuss some terms, and then the book becomes less and less approachable. Or you have to cut your sentences short just to make sure that, it's easy to read.

00:55:46:01 - 00:56:12:08

Alex Dang

So all of these will pick the best anecdotes that you could find, even though you have maybe five, ten examples to discuss. So finding these analogies, anecdotes, that was probably the hardest part, is just to find time to do the work to write the book. And I have to admit, and probably Christian, this will be the first time announced, on your in this interview, some part of this book was written

00:56:12:08 - 00:56:18:16

Alex Dang

in Vienna, where I wouldn't escape, when I found an escape from a busy Silicon Valley life.

00:56:18:16 - 00:56:23:00

Alex Dang

And then I just could respond to people who were sending me emails. You know what? I'm not in

00:56:23:00 - 00:56:39:15

Alex Dang

the country. I cannot accept your phone call and literally spend some time, writing a book. That was helpful. So to some extent, Vienna definitely inspired me to, write a few chapters and sections of the book.

00:56:39:17 - 00:56:42:11

Christian Soschner

Let's go to where we are now. But motivate.

00:56:42:11 - 00:57:04:02

Alex Dang

You know what I feel for? I love Yana, actually Vienna and Austrian, economist, as well as, Austrian concepts are mentioned in the book. Say the game theory is mentioned in the book. You definitely know for Neumann and for the game theory and, I'm a big fan. When I was still at my college times, I was a big fan of

00:57:04:02 - 00:57:06:00

Alex Dang

Ludwig von Mises.

00:57:06:02 - 00:57:08:12

Alex Dang

And he's very thick book, which,

00:57:08:12 - 00:57:34:15

Alex Dang

my professors back then could not understand. Why would I spend that much of attention to that book, though? I start with Hayek. But then I realized that Hayek was a kind of a was a continuation of Mrs.. His philosophy of human action. And again, that just highlights the importance of human, in this process, the team, the jockey, these are the people who are actually building things.

00:57:34:17 - 00:57:56:16

Alex Dang

But for Newman, it's definitely someone who, created the whole, gave us a nice analogy of a poker. To some extent, if you think about poker, von Neumann believed that that would be the best analogy of life globally. Why? Because if you think about a chess, this is a very predictable game. It's a very well planned game.

00:57:56:16 - 00:58:21:17

Alex Dang

And that's why when you hear the things about strategy, you would normally put a chess board, as a picture, as an illustration of that. If you think about, VCs, many, many think would think that they are gamblers. But this gambling is different because that's where you rely purely on a chance. Purely. You go to a casino and just hope that you will win something.

00:58:21:17 - 00:58:33:22

Alex Dang

So it's kind of a two opposite parts, very predictable nature of things. Chess. That's kind of a game and very unpredictable. Pure luck. Gambling. Poker is somewhere in between

00:58:33:22 - 00:58:38:10

Alex Dang

because you collect information more cards are

00:58:38:10 - 00:58:51:17

Alex Dang

open to you more you can predict what's going to be the future, and that should impact your, your behavior. And for Newman, like that specific analogy to poker game theory.

00:58:51:17 - 00:59:13:11

Alex Dang

And we like it as well, because actually books, act in a very similar fashion. And we recommend even corporate leaders and decision makers think in the same way. You double down or quit. So you collect information and you double down if you like what you see and you quit. If you think that the signal is wrong. That's what poker players do.

00:59:13:13 - 00:59:17:19

Alex Dang

We don't recommend to bluff. We recommend to. That's

00:59:17:19 - 00:59:27:06

Alex Dang

not the analogy that I wanted to make, but the double down account is the one that I think, and we think is a critical component of the venture mindset.

00:59:27:08 - 00:59:37:17

Christian Soschner

That this is a fun job that I don't don't bluff. I can I can imagine that some people say, okay, Alex plots this example of poker, so we need to bluff more in business and just,

00:59:37:19 - 00:59:43:24

Alex Dang

At least I can see if I can see that working well on social media. Hopefully you will not do that.

00:59:44:01 - 00:59:57:07

Christian Soschner

It would lead to the next arenas that have, probably, when we say a little bit of if the Austrian school. Did you understand? You right. It's the Austrian School of economics. Had an influence on the on the venture mindset.

00:59:57:09 - 00:59:57:20

Alex Dang

I would say

00:59:57:20 - 01:00:20:01

Alex Dang

it had an influence on me personally, just because it's, kind of a foundational philosophy that I think, Austrian economists, to some extent, found the way to describe the world, the way that I think is, one of the best ways to give you a framework how to think about things, how to explain things happening in the world, in the economy in general.

01:00:20:03 - 01:00:37:08

Alex Dang

Because, Austrian economists, they're not giving you very specific piece of advice. They're not telling you that the interest rate has to go up or down. They are giving you a framework. They're outlining the foundation. So to some extent, that's definitely, the foundation that helped me to understand

01:00:37:08 - 01:00:44:13

Alex Dang

the economics and the macroeconomics. But even though the I think Austrian, many, many Austrian economists,

01:00:44:13 - 01:00:55:00

Alex Dang

would immediately say there is no such a thing as macroeconomics, it's a combination of microeconomic and economic decisions which, human beings will and humans will make it.

01:00:55:00 - 01:00:56:12

Alex Dang

I would agree with that.

01:00:56:19 - 01:01:35:04

Christian Soschner

You know, requisite to have it. Yeah. Yes. I read this book recently from, it's a book by Richard Pocket. It's Vienna, and, it's basically a run through of the time of, 1880 to 1945. And the, the Austrian economists, had to flee Europe and, some of them, I think, went to the East Coast and the other parts to the West coast and in France, the little bits, the, the, the spirit of California and also the, the East coast around Boston, Massachusetts, New York a little bit, let's say.

01:01:35:06 - 01:01:57:12

Christian Soschner

And then, Silicon Valley professionalized the whole process and, moved forward with venture capital. When we go back to your analogy of poker, why do you think is poker, the mindset of a poker player, relevant in business?

01:01:57:14 - 01:01:58:11

Alex Dang

Yeah.

01:01:58:11 - 01:02:30:12

Alex Dang

Christian, I would use this, as an analogy again, to some extent. Because what poker tells you is that you should not make a decision right away if you just always say yes and never quit. And that's the path to a disaster. You have to fold in poker, folding meaning means that you exit the game, you lose whatever you invested already, but you exit the game because you feel that the chances to succeed are lower or lower than you expected, or that you should expect.

01:02:30:14 - 01:02:55:04

Alex Dang

So poker game in a nutshell, is when you have a few cards available to you, but then you open more and more cards on the table and then you make a call. Then you either stay in the game or you double down. You even increase the bet, or you exit the game. And if you think about that stage model, that's the one that we liked to explore more with.

01:02:55:08 - 01:03:19:21

Alex Dang

Yeah, because this is the one that VCs would. Follow. They would do this. Their investment in series. They would start with a seed stage, then series A and series B, C, B, C. So for your audience means that the first check that will be written to a startup founder will not be in tens and hundreds of millions of dollars could be just a few hundreds of thousands.

01:03:19:23 - 01:03:50:07

Alex Dang

To test the idea, to build a prototype, to, get the first market feedback. And then if the market feedback is positive, then you go to the series A, and you can raise more capital from the same VCs or movie seeds. Maybe new VCs will join. And definitely when you reach series C, series D, you may need more cash and more capital to say, scale the business across the world to bring Airbnb or Uber to other countries to give you a specific example.

01:03:50:09 - 01:04:14:21

Alex Dang

So VCs would do this and step by step process learning along the way. And I would say that successful corporations should do exactly the same way. When we launched right now, which is the 1 hour to 2 hour deliver at Amazon, we start with a very small sized experiment, at in a single zip code in New York City.

01:04:14:21 - 01:04:38:22

Alex Dang

So that's where Prime Now was first launched, to collect information to learn more about the user feedback. And only after the first feedback was positive. Then it started to scale to other cities and then to other countries. If you think about any but other technology corporation, that would be a typical process. You start small and then you scale fast as you learn on the way.

01:04:38:24 - 01:05:09:08

Alex Dang

But I don't want to miss one critical point that in case the feedback is not positive, then you should close the business. Then you should cut your losses. You cannot just simply keep all of them. All of your ideas stay here in the lab. Unfortunately, with, Ilya and as a consultant, I had a chance to see so many labs and, incubators where you can come and see so many ideas, all prosper, that senior leadership simply forget about their existence.

01:05:09:08 - 01:05:45:24

Alex Dang

And, all of these zombies, are still there. You have to cut your losses in order to keep the capital and your resources and your effort and your attention focused on the ones which are potentially unicorns or big ideas, which will become these ten x 100 x that's in your portfolio. That's why we use the analogy of a double down or quit, which is a combination of doubling down on winners and quitting and or killing your darlings, even though it's one of the hardest jobs, to do.

01:05:45:24 - 01:05:47:01

Christian Soschner

So

01:05:47:01 - 01:06:07:12

Christian Soschner

this means, I mean, there are two questions that I have to you. This means for the founders, I mean, there's always an in foundry ecosystem. There's always this notion of, you don't quit, you need to push through adversity, and you never quit. You just work harder and one day you will succeed. This is not the venture mindsets.

01:06:07:12 - 01:06:12:21

Christian Soschner

Then at the end of the day. So, relentless.

01:06:12:23 - 01:06:16:06

Alex Dang

So first of all, I think that the,

01:06:24:14 - 01:06:40:08

Alex Dang

it's, the pain point is the same. The way that you solve this pain point might be different. So one like, checkout system at Amazon, which we're all very much familiar with, which once was a patented solution, by the way.

01:06:40:10 - 01:07:08:01

Alex Dang

Not anymore. But that was a revolutionary idea. But is that the best way to place an order nowadays? No, because, then Amazon created this dash button. You can click the dash button and place an order instantly without even opening your laptop. The pain problem, the pain point is the same. The solution set for, Or when this then started to not be working very well, then Alexa device came up to the reality.

01:07:08:01 - 01:07:28:21

Alex Dang

And then now you can, with a voice, add something to your cart and place an order. So I'm saying that that you have to be, like you said, pushing cart, have to be resilient, have to be, suddenly focused on solving the problem. But if something doesn't work, you have to be flexible in terms of how you solve this problem.

01:07:28:23 - 01:07:52:20

Alex Dang

What would be an another experiment that you can run? Actually, I would recommend if I have a chance to talk to any founders, that you have to maximize your chances of success by running as many experiments as possible. So you are given money to run a few experiments. And if one of them would be successful, awesome. Then you can double down and then you can ask for more money, but you will have some data to prove that you're on the right track.

01:07:52:22 - 01:08:02:05

Alex Dang

So maximize the pace of your experiments by applying both agile principles as well as being flexible in terms of what kind of experiments you run

01:08:02:05 - 01:08:02:18

Alex Dang

it.

01:08:02:18 - 01:08:18:08

Christian Soschner

This means this this the shape of the mission and the vision of the company. But be flexible with the solution. If something doesn't work totally, just quickly, totally abandon it. And, try the next thing. And if that doesn't work, try the next thing. But don't get stuck with or fall in love with one solution.

01:08:18:10 - 01:08:45:05

Alex Dang

Correct. And that's that's to some extent that's the lead us, job to to some extent, stop such efforts and refocus the company on new experiments and new things to test. That's part of a job. I mean, it's really hard, especially if you are the leader of a particular initiative. It's hard to stop, such things just because you own it and you get.

01:08:45:07 - 01:08:56:04

Alex Dang

You always can find the reason that. Oh, well, if you just slightly improve here, here and there, maybe it will be successful. But unfortunately, more often than not, that's not the case.

01:08:56:06 - 01:09:21:23

Christian Soschner

You know, there is hope and shame, the emotions, at work. I can imagine when I think back to my time at big corporations, when a project or an initiative was, let's call it the baby of the CEO, it was really hard to criticize that and say, okay, it doesn't lead anywhere. And, what advice do you give corporate leaders?

01:09:21:23 - 01:09:40:12

Christian Soschner

I mean, isn't there a risk that, just because it's their project that it's just, take the employees, keep it alive and don't shut it down and, sugarcoat the data a little bit and say, okay, it's doing well, but in reality, it is not. How can it be cooperation, handle, handle emotion in that game?

01:09:40:14 - 01:09:40:21

Alex Dang

It's a

01:09:40:21 - 01:10:03:17

Alex Dang

very hard question, to and especially hard to address in the corporate environment, but, you're absolutely right. It's all about, to some extent, the word failure. If the attitude within a corporation to failure is very negative, then you may never solve this problem because, people are driven by incentives, and incentives drive behavior. Their decisions will be driven by incentives.

01:10:03:21 - 01:10:27:10

Alex Dang

And if you will, may lose your job or will not be promoted just because of a failure of your project, then, well, it's really hard to expect that, no sugarcoating would be happening because, people would be and your leaders will be making all in the world, to keep the project look alive, even though you'd rather close it.

01:10:27:12 - 01:10:47:16

Alex Dang

So to some extent, companies which managed to solve that problem by letting people fail and still keeping their jobs, as well as to continue to experiment more with other ideas. That's a critical point. Of course, you have to define similar to VCs. There is a founder problem and there is a, business idea problem. There are so many different risks.

01:10:47:16 - 01:11:12:24

Alex Dang

So in some cases, if you just, a wasteful leader or made too many wrong decisions on the way because you ignored customer need, well, such a leader has to be fired by no means. And such a founder should not be funded. But in general, the culture which will stimulate your failures in order to hunt for that outlier in order to find one.

01:11:12:24 - 01:11:44:19

Alex Dang

I think that's the culture that you may want to enforce in order to, get the success. And again, I can refer to, companies, which we already mentioned too many times in this in this interview, Amazon and Apple, Google, all of them made many bets. And some of them are so proud of these backpacks that they even created a graveyard or of ideas that we invested in, similar to think of Google, similar to Bessemer Ventures, which created the ant Portfolio page on their website.

01:11:44:20 - 01:12:10:08

Alex Dang

What does that mean? It means that you can find companies that the had the chance to invest in, but never invested. It. That's a very tough one to have a look at, but that's part of the journey they appreciate. So similar to me when I was at Amazon, I had in my office, press releases of successful projects as well as failures and some of these failures.

01:12:10:08 - 01:12:28:07

Alex Dang

I would not name them all just, you will see why? Because some of them were sponsored by senior executives as well as the CEO. So meaning that it was fine to fail even if it is inspired and sponsored by the CEO of a company.

01:12:28:19 - 01:12:49:21

Christian Soschner

By many companies I got to know here in Europe. And fire failure is the end of the career. So if someone fails with a project, the way forward is really difficult. It's really hard. I like the poker analogy analogy that you brought. I mean, I was just a combine it with Chester is I think it was, wasn't it David Sachs and Peter Thiel?

01:12:50:02 - 01:13:20:14

Christian Soschner

Peter Thiel is a very good chess player. And at PayPal, I read it in the book, about the PayPal founders. David Sacks won one day, a game against Peter Thiel in a simultaneous tournament where Peter Thiel was playing basically against, more players. And when I think about poker and say, okay, let's not think about one poker game where a player gets one hand but simultaneously that hundred hands and has a budget to allocate.

01:13:20:14 - 01:13:47:01

Christian Soschner

So if I interpret your book and what you said, they would not bet all the money on one hand and say, okay, this looks good. And they think this wins, they would spread out the money on hundred stacks, on 100 hands, a little bit on each one, and then get to the next card and then they see, okay, whereas the odds are better and double down on that hand, but fold or the others.

01:13:47:03 - 01:13:47:08

Alex Dang

Yeah.

01:13:47:08 - 01:14:13:15

Alex Dang

Absolutely right. You may think of this as traditional portfolio approach. Similar to any portfolio management, VCs will make many bets, and most of these bets will be bold, meaning that they should have a chance to become these ten x 100 x companies. They will make them small so they will not make they will not bet the FA, so will they will never invest the whole fund in a one company.

01:14:13:15 - 01:14:47:16

Alex Dang

They will spread across multiple bets, numerous pots, and then they will carefully track. If a particular bet is not that successful, they will just quit. But for the ones which are successful, they will double down. So this is exactly what you just described. It's like playing with ten, 20, 100 hands. More importantly, if you think about a corporation, that's a huge difference where the startup, a startup to some extent is a single bad thing.

01:14:47:18 - 01:15:18:21

Alex Dang

They have a particular idea, they have a particular goal in mind, and they try to solve this problem. And that's a single but game to some extent. I think it's all run many experiments, but to some extent that's the single best approach. While VCs will have a portfolio of such bets, and corporations may actually create a very similar set of bets, and they may even spread their bets across the spectrum from low risk but to high risk bets.

01:15:18:23 - 01:15:38:08

Alex Dang

And when I refer to low risk, it's about the core business. So when Amazon runs today and AB tests on its website, it's a pretty low risk for New York Times, which will experiment with headlines and, or eBay. They will just continue to experiment with something which will be part of their core, or let us speed up the delivery.

01:15:38:08 - 01:16:06:03

Alex Dang

What if we switch from two day delivery to one day, from one day to same day? Would it increase the conversion? Will it be better for customers? That's exactly the same business model sets exactly the same set of rules. So it's a low risk. But to some extent that's a core business. Back there will be some adjacent businesses think of subscription business or sampling business or other things that would complement, the current core, of the company.

01:16:06:08 - 01:16:31:07

Alex Dang

And then there will be wild, disruptive kind of bets, things outside of their core business. Think of what Alexa or fire. So for Amazon and the level of this, you can think of this as a pyramid. Actually many corporations should still continue to invest in this core element. The majority of their funds and efforts and management skills and resources.

01:16:31:13 - 01:16:55:13

Alex Dang

But some of that has to go to this inner our belief has to go to the high risk class. So you have this portfolio, and I think it's, kind of wild that, many corporations just do not do that. So they, they should, because that's the way for them to leverage their expertise, their access to a distribution network, and to many other things that small startups simply do not have.

01:16:55:19 - 01:17:00:19

Alex Dang

Small startups do not have a second chance at all, while corporations do.

01:17:00:19 - 01:17:37:05

Christian Soschner

Let's stay a bit with the corporations. I think back to my having corporations. And, the selection process was, pretty straightforward in most companies. When someone had an idea, they put together a deck, a pitch, basically, PowerPoint. Back then, 20 years ago, and, presented it to some sort of committee or supervisory board or board of directors, and then the board of directors made a wise decision and put some budget on the winner, which very often what I experienced was one winner and the rest one not mentioned any more.

01:17:37:07 - 01:17:52:12

Christian Soschner

When I apply what you wrote in your book, The Venture Mindset, it would mean not to step as a decision maker in the role of making the final decision early, but rather spreads the whole budget on our teams and just let them play.

01:17:52:14 - 01:17:53:08

Alex Dang

And

01:17:56:09 - 01:18:11:04

Alex Dang

mean, especially if you have to weigh, to weigh decision making process, meaning that it's a, not a one way you can split all the decisions one way, two way doors, meaning that, if it's a reversible decision. So if you can launch something, you can then pull it off.

01:18:11:06 - 01:18:36:02

Alex Dang

Then you definitely have to do so. Actually, I've seen so many times, with my clients, when they debate and discuss assumptions and spend months of doing so versus rethinking the model to launch a very small scale experiment and just simply launch it and test it and see the outcome. And if it works, awesome, then you can double down.

01:18:36:02 - 01:19:04:06

Alex Dang

If it doesn't, then stop. So to some extent, the, magic and the wisdom of a leader could be how you can convert this big, bold idea into a small experiment. How would you challenge the team, to launch it fast and at small scale, to test the idea and then give them very limited amount money, actually act as a VC, which will make a seed stage investment rather than commit a series.

01:19:04:06 - 01:19:15:19

Alex Dang

The amount of tens and tens of millions of dollars, you can discuss tens and tens of millions of dollars as a long term plan early on, but you have to start with the seed stage investment.

01:19:16:00 - 01:19:38:14

Christian Soschner

And come back with the data. Let's move to the next question. Decision making, very mean. It's about managing risks at the end of the day. And very often when you look at decision making, people try to manage risk in their decision making by trying to come to a, 100% consensus, in the team and say only if everybody agrees it makes sense.

01:19:38:14 - 01:19:46:18

Christian Soschner

And we limit the risk because everybody agrees. What's your take on this kind of decision making?

01:19:46:18 - 01:20:09:05

Alex Dang

Make a Christian for this question, because I think it's a critical element of, the venture mindset. VCs would believe that conviction is way more important than consensus. More importantly, if you look at the research, then VCs make the make decisions differently in different VC firms. Some of them still prefer consensus, especially for smaller VC firms.

01:20:09:05 - 01:20:31:20

Alex Dang

For some of them give a full right to a single partner to make a call. They discuss debate, and then a single partner is enough to make a decision. And then Alia's team compared the results of these firms and the ones which would prefer full consensus. Underperform versus the ones which would prefer lack of a consensus to some extent.

01:20:31:22 - 01:21:08:01

Alex Dang

So what's happening here? What's going on? Because what's the root cause of such a such an outcome? The root causes the following. If you are hunting for an outlier or a company that would perform way better than the other, a startup that will transform the world to some extent, these companies. And at the same time, you do not want to make a bet on the company, on the idea that will be a common sense, that will be everyone will better, because then typically the valuation would be too high or it will be just a symbol of a hype.

01:21:08:03 - 01:21:36:20

Alex Dang

So you're looking for kind of a very strange, type of a company. It's, an outlier, which is not yet recognized as a future winner by the other. So we should think about that. This is the ideal company that the VC would invest. So therefore, if you just simply apply these set of conditions and expect that every VC partner in the room would accept this and would agree with you, that's ridiculous.

01:21:36:20 - 01:21:40:22

Alex Dang

It's almost impossible. So actually, it's, the opposite is true, that if

01:21:40:22 - 01:21:48:19

Alex Dang

everyone in the room agrees that this is the company to make it better, then something might be wrong with the company. Maybe that's not bold

01:21:48:19 - 01:22:01:24

Alex Dang

enough. Maybe that's not risky enough. Maybe this is not the company. So to some extent, consensus would be a good symbol of that of a mis functioning or not decision making that is not functioning well enough.

01:22:02:01 - 01:22:25:22

Alex Dang

So, it's easier said than done. I mean, it's easier said that consensus is not that important. Conviction is more important. You have to start with a few set of rules in the corporate settings that so that you can implement that principle in your daily life, say the boss should be as a last to speak up. Why? Because people are very smart.

01:22:25:22 - 01:22:44:12

Alex Dang

They will look at the boss and they will look at the leader, and they will trust the leader for a good reason, by the way. And if they will hear that, oh, that's a great idea. They will all start to be in line, to agree with that opinion, if you just change the order, then the outcome might be different.

01:22:44:12 - 01:23:11:19

Alex Dang

We actually observe that with ourselves in our workshops or so you have to actually make junior speak first. Or experts speak last, because they will give an opinion that may impact everyone else's opinion or keep it in animus. And that's actually applied not just to investment practices. This could be applied for recruiting practices for promotion, benefits for HR refinement, any kind of decision making.

01:23:11:21 - 01:23:23:20

Alex Dang

If you want to make sure that the team would make, the right decision or a better decision, then you may want to change the rules or the mechanisms of how the, meeting is conducted.

01:23:23:23 - 01:23:48:19

Christian Soschner

Yeah. Okay. I mean, the thing for it, for the listeners, when we are talking about a very specific case, decision making in uncertainty where this venture mindset applies, are not talking about, changing the Six Sigma approach of, optimizing the cash cow to make it more profitable. We are talking about a situation where you don't know the outcome and have no idea of what the future looks like, but you need to make a decision.

01:23:48:21 - 01:23:49:01

Alex Dang

I'm

01:23:49:01 - 01:24:14:06

Alex Dang

so glad that you mentioned that question. That's exactly the case. So we have to clearly separate when to apply your traditional set of rules and processes and mechanisms, where process is way more important than, other elements, where process is more important than people to some extent. Again, I would just refer to, hamburger production, at fast food restaurant.

01:24:14:08 - 01:24:40:21

Alex Dang

I think you need a process there. You actually want to make sure that people are to some extent replaceable. I would be very careful in stating that because it's any business is now people focus and the impression and your attitude to your fast food chain will still depend on your interaction with the person. To some extent, you do not expect that, when you place an order for an Uber or go to a fast food, you just expect to result in the most efficient way.

01:24:40:23 - 01:25:02:00

Alex Dang

But that's not the case in innovative process. Just do not mix these two completely. Two different things. And we use an example of three M in our book, which, is still believed and was definitely one of the most innovative companies in the world. And more importantly, that's actually a very old company that's a great example of that.

01:25:02:00 - 01:25:36:21

Alex Dang

Fortune 500 companies which survived through the, different ways of, creative destruction and, lots of ways of shoot better, and innovated innovation, which happened to the world. It started as a mining and then a factoring company from Minnesota, hence the name. But, three M but now we know three M as, benefactor and creator of sticky notes, and many other, inventive ideas which are now part of our daily life.

01:25:36:23 - 01:26:10:23

Alex Dang

They actually once introduced Six Sigma and, quality controls into the system, which were brought by senior leaders from, GE, which was a leader at the time for a good reason. And, you could imagine that costs were cut and that the efficiency of the machine sorry to be way higher, but it also if you apply very similar principles to your career, if destruction process or if creative processes like innovation, then you may end up unfortunately with lower level of creativity.

01:26:11:00 - 01:26:23:15

Alex Dang

Less innovative ideas, less products that will, become your growth engines and pillars of future profitability. So to some extent, you have to be very careful when to pick which tool.

01:26:24:00 - 01:26:46:10

Christian Soschner

To check, which was extremely famous in the 90s for a Six Sigma approach with, key. And then came April and then came Amazon and came Tesla. And they have a different approach that you describe in your book. There is one component I would like, to dive deeper with you. It's, groupthink or crowd mentality, which is a human thing.

01:26:46:12 - 01:26:52:03

Christian Soschner

How does that play out in venture investing?

01:26:52:03 - 01:27:21:10

Alex Dang

Look, I think it's exactly the same, problem that we've just discussed, that if you were hunting for an outlier, then you should be very careful in terms of how you structure your decision making process. And that crowd mentality will be your enemy to some extent. The same matrix which we described is, if you in the book we outline that as that if you want to catch a true outlier, you should not be with the crowd.

01:27:21:12 - 01:27:44:02

Alex Dang

And at the same time you have to be. Right. So both factors and that's actually applied across the board. It's not as if you just for VCs that's applied to p environment or any investment. So in order to truly generate an exceptional return you have to be right. But at the same time, you do not have to be right with the other.

01:27:44:04 - 01:28:11:03

Alex Dang

You have to be right when the other are wrong to some extent or and appreciate that specific part. So that's that's the challenge. So following the crowd, could be and negative. It will will impact you negatively in terms of your returns. So you have to be, striking a very tough balance. How to pick the bad, which will be underappreciated to some extent by the other.

01:28:11:15 - 01:28:42:06

Christian Soschner

You have spoken with many weeks, during. Right. I mean, during your career and writing the book and worked with Amazon. When you think about investing on public markets, following the crowds in euphoria or newspapers, the entire internet is full with good news. And it's so difficult to then say, okay, I pulled the plug SL because everybody is talking about the company, positive news.

01:28:42:08 - 01:29:09:15

Christian Soschner

The the emotion on the internet is entirely positive. And it's a really tremendous pool effect. On the other hand, when a sector of the industry or the entire economy like we experienced in 2020, collapses, there is depression, negativity. People talk very badly about companies and, absolutely talk it down. And every company seems to be close to bankruptcy.

01:29:09:21 - 01:29:24:22

Christian Soschner

Whenever I open the newspaper. What's the recipe in the venture world to work against this human notion? To just go with the crowd and it will come feel comfortable and to work against this, this, this, this, this human nature. How do they do that?

01:29:24:24 - 01:29:25:04

Alex Dang

I

01:29:25:04 - 01:29:47:02

Alex Dang

would say that, many VCs and actually anyone, anywhere in the world, will face the same kind of challenge, because that's a human nature. Like you just said. I would just say that the word patience would be probably the one that you would not expect to hear when VC is discussed, VC industry, venture capital, industry discourse.

01:29:47:03 - 01:30:20:02

Alex Dang

But that's actually a critical part of their success. We even named the chapter that good things take time. And we're referring to the patience of venture investors. If you think about venture capitalists, they make a very early bet on a small company, and then they often have to wait for six, eight, ten years until the time when they can actually exit the deal, when the company becomes either public, i.e IPO, or they would be acquired by a bigger player.

01:30:20:02 - 01:30:41:18

Alex Dang

And if you think about that investment, it's so it has all the negative aspects of a bad investment in terms of it's illiquid, you never know what's the actual price or a value of that investment until the very end. You can still be in serious BCD and yet do not know whether that would be a successful one or not, whether there will be an exit or not.

01:30:41:18 - 01:31:10:11

Alex Dang

Some investors and space that's they're still waiting for the company to become public. So you have to be a different kind of an investor, and you have to play long in terms of your trends. And that's where they would prefer to, very simple principle that, there is typically a very short term hype. So, people would expect more from a technology to happen short term, but they underappreciated the impact of a technology mid term.

01:31:10:13 - 01:31:31:22

Alex Dang

So short term we think that everything will be changed in the world. And that's kind of a hype mentality. But same mid term we may miss some big industrial shifts or that the whole sector could be transformed by the newly introduced technology. Like I like internet, like mobile, like, semiconductor industry, like automation, robots, you name it. All.

01:31:31:24 - 01:31:35:05

Alex Dang

I can give you one example. Killer robots. Which are

01:31:35:05 - 01:31:40:22

Alex Dang

they look like Roomba, and they move shelves across warehouses.

01:31:40:22 - 01:32:01:11

Alex Dang

Now, even robots represented below 750,000, robots are in Amazon's warehouse versus 1.5 million employees. So it's kind of a single robot per two employees. And that's just about Kiva. Kiva was once acquired by Amazon is today, 2025.

01:32:01:13 - 01:32:23:15

Alex Dang

The company was founded, if I remember correctly, 2003. The first prototype was built in 2004. The first commercial deployment was in 2005. So if you think about the pace, it takes a while for technology to truly propagate. Today's world is a bit different. If you think about ChatGPT, it reached

01:32:23:15 - 01:32:26:09

Alex Dang

1 million users in, I think five days. Yeah.

01:32:26:12 - 01:32:29:05

Alex Dang

So it's one of the fastest,

01:32:29:05 - 01:32:52:10

Alex Dang

fastest technologies in the world to be, spread, across the users. But actually, if you take iPhone or Instagram, they will match to some extent their their scale, the scale and speed or pace will be, also measured in days and weeks. So this world is a bit different from the time when horse was replaced by a car.

01:32:52:12 - 01:33:20:22

Alex Dang

Or electricity became a part of everyday life, but still, thinking these long term that's a critical component of a VC mindset. So for a corporation which is making a buck today, if you your leadership expects to generate the first revenue or even profit next quarter, most likely you either will be disappointed or is not innovative enough. It doesn't mean that you should not do that.

01:33:20:22 - 01:33:48:09

Alex Dang

It's just not that kind of an innovation that, would generate you ten x 100 x return internally if you expect if you want to build internal unicorns and invest in corporate innovation, extend your timeline to 5 to 7 years, that would be a more realistic timeline for the for the business to become truly big. And if you look back at Amazon's example, yes, was a non-existent business.

01:33:48:09 - 01:34:15:01

Alex Dang

Then many years down the road that became the growth engine. The same would apply to the Amazon advertising business. Again, didn't exist, became a big one or marketplace. Initially it represented one 2% of the total business. Now marketplace items, items which are not owned by Amazon itself, but, owned by a different sellers and merchants on the platform that's now 50, 60, 70% of the business.

01:34:15:01 - 01:34:40:10

Alex Dang

And the curve took a while to get to that level. So patience. I think that would be the most important work to remind yourself. It doesn't mean that we have to be patient with bad results. Like I said, you may have to quit some businesses on the way. You have so many proxies and metrics and other mechanisms to apply, but longer term, that's the metrics that you have to keep an eye on.

01:34:40:16 - 01:34:44:14

Alex Dang

Long term impact, in the timeframe of 5 to 7 years.

01:34:44:14 - 01:35:09:08

Christian Soschner

Emotional resilience, at the end of the day, that matters. I think also when we see business, what was what was the ratio at Amazon of failure and success? You mentioned, that especially in Venture Minded that's colleges were reminded organizations like Amazon, you place at the leaders place a lot of bets on many projects. I can imagine that not every project succeeds.

01:35:09:10 - 01:35:13:19

Christian Soschner

What is the failure to success rate? Someone should expect when they think of.

01:35:13:19 - 01:35:15:01

Alex Dang

It, it would vary.

01:35:15:01 - 01:35:32:20

Alex Dang

So, I don't have any data set to refer to. I would just, keep in mind at least half of them would fail. But that failure would happen in different stages. So some of the ideas will not just work at the AB test, or the first feedback from the user will not be that positive.

01:35:32:22 - 01:36:03:05

Alex Dang

Some fears will happen down the road after the product is launched, scaled, and then you still do not see the track record. And I'm not referring just to Amazon's example. You could see so many other examples, a big investment, which is rumored to be made by Apple in cars was then closed or many Meta's effort in, meta worlds, also is I would not say downsized, but, they're not discussed that anymore because, all the effort is now shifting to AI.

01:36:03:07 - 01:36:23:22

Alex Dang

So there's so many examples are failures at different stages. The tough thing about failures is that they will not be known. Many of those will be hidden behind the scenes. And that's why I'm mentioning that many of those, many of these ideas will be closed very early on. So the ratio could be

01:36:23:22 - 01:36:25:16

Alex Dang

actually even higher than 50%.

01:36:25:16 - 01:36:30:21

Alex Dang

If you think about that. And, but you would, you should expect, very similar ratio of

01:36:30:21 - 01:36:52:24

Alex Dang

VC if I had a one in mind that 50 to 75% of the ideas that you invest in will most likely fail. And that's totally fine, especially if you take the, this risk approach. Like I said, or like Jeff Bezos said, that the scale of your mistakes should scale in line with your business size.

01:36:53:01 - 01:37:10:18

Alex Dang

And, there is some very important essence of this statement that if your mistakes are not scaling, if the size of a pain to some extent is not scaling, then probably your organization is likely moving towards the data mentality that we already discussed.

01:37:11:12 - 01:37:18:22

Christian Soschner

So this means, when the company scales, the number of mistakes should increase and also the size of the mistake.

01:37:18:22 - 01:37:37:14

Alex Dang

Should I would say the size, the number of the mistakes I think will even remain the same if you continue to experiment more. But the scale and size of these mistakes, of course. Will go up again because some of these bets will go to the, if you apply the Venture Mindset series, C series, D series E size of a mistake.

01:37:37:16 - 01:37:49:18

Christian Soschner

And then it needs, leadership, a bit of a Zen mindset to just let go, just let, the failures go. And don't, overanalyze failures.

01:37:49:20 - 01:37:50:21

Alex Dang

That's right. I

01:37:50:21 - 01:38:17:05

Alex Dang

actually have to be very, clear, open question that, I think it's not just about the failures. It's of more often than not about the number of ideas, which corporations are dealing with. So if you think about the venture capital funnel, they start with many ideas of the, look at or had the chance to analyze, and then the, drill down to the idea that they finally made an investment.

01:38:17:07 - 01:38:43:11

Alex Dang

And this ratio is about 100 to 1. So they look at 100 ideas to end up with a single bet that they make an investment on, there is a nice chart in our book, which will illustrate that funnel by stage. So more often than not, it's less about the failures. It's just about the upper size type, upper part of the funnel for corporate leaders.

01:38:43:13 - 01:39:07:09

Alex Dang

More often than not, the deal was lack of ideas to invest in, then with how we analyze and whether we have, an appetite for the risk. So often my goal and when we talk to leaders or organizations about Eylea, we build a heatmap of where VCs currently invest in, in their sectors or in adjacent sectors.

01:39:07:11 - 01:39:24:21

Alex Dang

Here are the ideas that may kill your business one day. Can you come up with a few ideas which may we call it? Postmortem analysis? Which idea could have killed you? And then we ask a very simple question could you build it yourself? Why wouldn't you invest in such a startup? Why wouldn't you build a similar service that may kill you?

01:39:24:23 - 01:39:53:02

Alex Dang

So and creating this list is a part of the exercise. And when you have many of those many ideas, then you start filtering it out. And it's way healthier when you have a competition among ideas, then you have two ideas to fund and you have plenty of budget to invest. That's kind of an opposite, situation. You'd rather have more ideas to fund and a robust process to end up with a few being funded.

01:39:53:15 - 01:40:20:14

Christian Soschner

This was an interesting part in your book. When I came across that, you wrote that VCs look statistically, on average, 800 deals to invest in one. So it's 100 companies to research and then invest in one company. This means from the founder side then, that the founders get a lot of notes. At the end of the day.

01:40:20:16 - 01:40:21:16

Alex Dang

Let's try, this

01:40:21:16 - 01:40:30:05

Alex Dang

actually is also it means that you have to train yourself as a VC who was an innovator to say no. And I will be very careful the word research here because,

01:40:30:05 - 01:40:41:01

Alex Dang

the word research implies that you spend days and weeks researching a specific company. That's not the case. They actually VCs are pretty good and say no pretty quickly.

01:40:41:03 - 01:41:12:19

Alex Dang

They apply so-called fast track mindset so that they would just use their patent recognition, model to instantly identify flaws or red flags in the company. So they would be looking for things that they do not like in the company first, so that they can filter out about 90% of the companies that comes, which come their way for the rest, for the remaining, they will spend way more time to go deeper, into the nuts and balls of a company.

01:41:12:19 - 01:41:34:22

Alex Dang

They will typically give, reference calls to their customers. They will understand the addressable market, but that will happen after they will run the majority of the butts. So if you start applying the same kind of a mindset in the corporate setting or in your personal setting, that's could be the answer. Why, there are so successful, why you may not be that successful.

01:41:34:22 - 01:42:02:19

Alex Dang

Maybe you have to stop looking at the idea and stop applying all your rigorous due diligence process across all of the ideas. But instantly refuse a few and focus on the ones which are more promising based on your gut feel, expertise, and actually training prepared mind. We even use that such a term from Louis Pasteur and from, it's not our term, but preparing your mind or training your neural network.

01:42:02:21 - 01:42:08:10

Alex Dang

Your decision making neural network is a part of the process and a critical part of it.

01:42:08:18 - 01:42:13:17

Christian Soschner

So transmitters, after all, pattern recognition and, to.

01:42:13:20 - 01:42:38:03

Alex Dang

The, the, the luck, so, so just to quote posterior to some extent, is that, the chances favor the, hard working people. So in this particular case, the prepared ones, you need to train your mind. And actually, VCs demonstrate that, so. Well, we are one example to say, Dropbox investment. Dropbox now is well known storage, shared storage solution.

01:42:38:05 - 01:43:07:07

Alex Dang

And when Samir Gandhi from Sequoia back then, he looked at the company, he instantly recognized the potential of a company, even though it was just this, two founders who were sitting in front of him with some prototypes and ideas because he met with many other, startups in that space before, in that field. And he could recognize what matters so that, no, it's not just coming from, instant no to some founders.

01:43:07:07 - 01:43:30:12

Alex Dang

It's not coming from nowhere, from Eric. It's actually coming from the experience of meeting, other startups or meeting with other industry sector leaders and, representatives or insiders. At least this is applied, to, the smart VCs, the ones who are, demonstrating systemic pitfalls.

01:43:30:15 - 01:43:56:03

Christian Soschner

Last week I had my on my podcast. She is responsible for early stage investing at Noble Holding, which is, the company that owns Novo Nordisk. And she brought up an interesting concept. We also discussed about saying no and, shutting down, and, and not investing in that. But then she said, no, it's not final. But she broke the example of one company.

01:43:56:03 - 01:44:16:04

Christian Soschner

But she said, we looked at the company for three years. Initially we said no, but then the team developed very well. They checked all the boxes. They hired new people. They met the milestones, and after three years they said, okay, now is the right time and we want to go in. I'm interested to learn from you. What does your data say?

01:44:16:04 - 01:44:29:24

Christian Soschner

What did you find out about, venture investing in regard of, recovering and know is that, common? Is that usually in the venture words that they come back to an asset, or is it more on the other side that it's final?

01:44:29:24 - 01:44:56:18

Alex Dang

So I think Christian here, it's I would just go back, just yesterday we talked to some entrepreneurs at the big AI event, with Alia. And one piece of advice from us to entrepreneurs. And we actually took part in their, pitched out competition. And, they were pitching to investors as well as you have to do the due diligence of the investor that you reach out to because funds are different.

01:44:56:18 - 01:45:30:22

Alex Dang

And some VCs, they would prefer early stage funding. Some VCs would focus on late stage funding. And the reason for that because if they apply the same 20 bats model that, we just described, the size of this bat would matter, if your fund is a size of 10 million or 100 million or 1 billion, that would clearly define set of rules and the size of an investment that this fund will make will also depend at what stage, the VC fund is, has have they just start deploying their capital or are they at the end of the cycle?

01:45:30:22 - 01:45:59:23

Alex Dang

Or maybe they have already deployed all their capital, and they have to then wait for the second, fund to be raised, the third or fourth, etc.. So we have to truly understand more about the VC that you're reaching out to. Like anywhere in the world. No one is made the same. So in this case, you may as an entrepreneur return or come back to a VC if that VC was just not the right fit at the stage when you first reached out to them.

01:46:00:00 - 01:46:24:18

Alex Dang

So that's totally fine. In some cases you may hear from a VC or get a message like please come back later when you have, a robust product, etc. in some cases, I have to admit that that's just, very nice. No, we're not interested. But while, VC are opportunistic to some extent, because, there is a very nice experiment that Elias team ran about called emails.

01:46:24:18 - 01:46:45:21

Alex Dang

And if you ask VC whether they would open a cold email and would that they ever invest in such a company, the response would be unanimous. No. However, the actual experiment that alias team ran demonstrated, no, that's not the case. They would not just open, they would even respond and ask for a meeting at a non-trivial percentage rate.

01:46:45:23 - 01:47:07:02

Alex Dang

So it means that they are opportunistic. They do believe in these. I would not call them miracles, but in these chances. So, that's why please continue to reach out to VCs. That's not the best way. We should not be the only way for you to get in touch with the VCs. But certainly this is one of the ways that you should explore.

01:47:07:13 - 01:47:28:22

Christian Soschner

Yeah, you need to play the game at the end of the day. I found this finding particularly interesting about cold emails. I learned in the last ten years there is a whole market around warm introductions, and it seems to be this mythical thing where everybody believes when they get a warm introduction, they get the investment. Can you dive a little bit deeper in this story about cold emailing?

01:47:28:24 - 01:47:33:03

Christian Soschner

Why does cold emailing matter in the VC world?

01:47:33:05 - 01:47:33:12

Alex Dang

So I

01:47:33:12 - 01:48:02:22

Alex Dang

would start with the bigger message that there is no single silver bullet for a startup entrepreneur to raise funding and to get in touch with with the investors. And that's the source from so many different, sources. They rely on the network of other investors. They, rely on the referrals from portfolio companies. And of course, that would be a probably a very good signal if a portfolio company that they would invest in would recommend another startup.

01:48:02:24 - 01:48:22:19

Alex Dang

Serial entrepreneurs may have, higher chances of being recognized by VCs for obvious reasons, because they already demonstrated a track record. However, like you said, even cold emails or direct outreach may still work. And, Elias team ran an experiment with, sending fake emails. You can find them in an article just to build that experiment.

01:48:22:21 - 01:49:00:16

Alex Dang

Fake emails were sent to, thousands of VCs, with, some LinkedIn profiles as well as with, some stories, they help these interpreters, they introduce themselves. The experiment was more about the gender and race at origin, etc.. So it was also testing other things. But, as a side effect of this experiment was that the open rate and the response rate was pretty high from 8 to 15%, which, anyone who dealt with a cold calling, would say, wow, that's an extremely, exceptionally high number.

01:49:00:18 - 01:49:12:04

Alex Dang

So that's why, that's just demonstrated that VCs do believe in these, kind of miracles, which may just hit their mailbox because they still,

01:49:12:04 - 01:49:23:17

Alex Dang

their main fear is not about losing money, because if you lose money, you just lose one X. If you lose Google, you lose 10,000 X. So they are their fear is to lose that potential.

01:49:23:17 - 01:49:24:03

Alex Dang

Google

01:49:24:03 - 01:49:31:00

Alex Dang

which might have hit their mailbox one day. Then they would just say, wow, okay, I had a chance to invest, but I missed it.

01:49:31:07 - 01:49:58:23

Christian Soschner

I mean it, I mean, it must be because if the intention is not only to make some money, which is fine for some investors, if the intention is to make 10 to 100 x for that helps. For the other investors in the fund, they need to look at places where nobody else looks when they just rely on warm introductions on the network, on their founders, they probably get, everything that's already warmed up.

01:49:59:00 - 01:50:05:13

Christian Soschner

Other people are invested, and the potential of creating a 10 to 100 x gets smaller, and it makes absolutely no sense.

01:50:05:13 - 01:50:06:10

Alex Dang

You're absolutely right.

01:50:06:10 - 01:50:27:23

Alex Dang

I would even elevate this discussion to, our everyday decision make. If you are making in your everyday decisions, only safe bets, then you may want to dial up the risk level a bit, just because you may want to dedicate some amount of time on decisions and bets, which are riskier in its nature, which are some kind of wild bit.

01:50:27:23 - 01:50:44:08

Alex Dang

You don't have to dedicate all your life or all your career to such bets, but, why not to pursue some side gig? Why not to respond to that crazy LinkedIn invitation that you've just received from someone that you do not know? Why not to accept that coffee check with someone who wanted to get to know you or why not.

01:50:44:08 - 01:51:13:17

Alex Dang

To proactively reach out to professors that you worked with or talked to ten, 20, 30 years ago. So all of these small things or small bots may could be and should be, I think, included into your portfolio and may actually have a significant payoff as a result of that, not just monetary payoff that I'm referring to, just, any kind of payoff in terms of, accomplishment or, just make your life richer in terms of your experience.

01:51:13:19 - 01:51:25:00

Alex Dang

But this is the way that not just VCs, should think. I think every one of us could leverage some tools and use some tools from that toolkit.

01:51:25:16 - 01:51:35:06

Christian Soschner

Yeah. That's right. To try to go to the conference that you always wanted to attend it but never, never did. And you might find some new ideas, some new people.

01:51:35:08 - 01:51:37:17

Alex Dang

And at the conference, don't be afraid of, reaching

01:51:37:17 - 01:52:03:14

Alex Dang

out to people and talking to people. Not from your industry, not from your sector. Because, you may know everyone within your company, but your new ideas or some interesting stuff that you may see and face, maybe coming from the industry, outside of your or interest, maybe you should, as a health care professional, go to AI conference to learn more about AI drug discovery.

01:52:03:14 - 01:52:25:05

Alex Dang

And that may hit, some ideas home. And maybe you would be invited as a co-founder of based on your healthcare or your clinical expertise. So, so many magical things may happen. Actually, they are happening right now. Because if you think about where the innovation is happening, it's not happening in a single sector. It's happening across multiple sectors.

01:52:25:07 - 01:52:44:08

Alex Dang

And that's why Nvidia's talk or Genii talk at the conference that you've already mentioned, JPMorgan healthcare conference will be, that is, the one on high demand because something, new happening specifically in that area and the intersection of technology and healthcare.

01:52:44:18 - 01:53:08:16

Christian Soschner

Yeah, I believe that innovation happens at the intersection of industries and bring people together from different industries. And there is a lot of potential. When I think back on biotech 20 years ago, the risks here in Europe mostly invested in drug development, in biotech and pure biotech. And, it was around 2013, 2014 when this digital health topic came up.

01:53:08:16 - 01:53:39:09

Christian Soschner

And it was not really AI yet, but a little bit towards, machine learning, some apps and services on the digital side said, we never want to invest in biotech. So anything that combines biotech with, the digital world is out of our scope. And the biotech investor said the same. And now, 10 to 20 years later, we have companies like in Silicon Medicine that actually combines, artificial intelligence with drug development and does so successfully.

01:53:39:11 - 01:53:48:24

Christian Soschner

My question to you is, where do you see the future of innovation the next ten years?

01:53:49:01 - 01:53:49:17

Alex Dang

It's a hard

01:53:49:17 - 01:54:10:17

Alex Dang

question just because there are so many things and trends happening nowadays. I do believe that AI trend, which is, which has emerged and it's already happening. It's not just a dream, it's already happening here. And it's been here for quite a while, actually. The first computer vision algorithm were deployed again almost 20 years ago, and I was part of that effort back then.

01:54:10:19 - 01:54:33:10

Alex Dang

I think I will be one of them and we'll see more robots like physical robots, as well as automation at what we do every day. We'll see lots of, things happening, like we discussed in longevity and in health tech and digital health space. We will have to bring more data and data driven approach to prolonging your life into making your lives healthier.

01:54:33:12 - 01:55:05:05

Alex Dang

And like we said before and discussed already, there is nothing more valuable than, our health and the trying to prolong our lifespan and healthy lifestyle. So we'll see a lot of, things in this space, but we'll see few things that we could not even expect now. So that's why my my bet. And, my suggestion is to that's why I carefully review where VCs are investing their capital today.

01:55:05:05 - 01:55:38:07

Alex Dang

And I could be a bit more skeptical about some of that, say, crypto or blockchain technologies. But I could be easily wrong. Actually, I'm already wrong by being skeptical, ten, 20 years ago. So I do accept that kind of a failure for sure. So things that, will happen in the next 10 to 20 years will surprise all of us, and there will still be some events on the way, like Covid or other crisises, which will, stimulate someone technologies like digital health, and we will see more of those in the future.

01:55:38:07 - 01:56:18:05

Alex Dang

So hopefully, we'll see a few more spikes like that, but without a negative impact of Covid or other big shocks to the economy or to, our health. Anyways, I'm a big optimist. I think, every single time when I visit entrepreneurs and I see a room of hundreds and thousands of people, I realize that there will be a unicorn founder sitting right there, a he or she just needs some support, not just from VCs with their capital, but also to explain the rules of the game and, to explain to prevent them from making unnecessary mistakes, as well as when I meet other corporate leaders.

01:56:18:05 - 01:56:42:02

Alex Dang

I think that they have so much assets and so many ways to experiment. And they have teams, they have expertise, they have, customers, they have a supply chain in place. They just have to start running experiments and learn from VCs where to make bets. And, for them, these bets are not that expensive. So I'm very optimistic on that front as well.

01:56:42:02 - 01:56:57:16

Alex Dang

So you can call me kind of a venture or Silicon Valley optimist. But I think, the most transformational technology that we will discuss ten, 20 years down the road with your question will be not the one that we could name today.

01:56:58:00 - 01:57:06:23

Christian Soschner

Yeah, totally agree to that. I remember, I think, didn't you read the comment under one of my posts that you are a huge crypto enthusiast?

01:57:07:00 - 01:57:11:12

Alex Dang

Just me. Yeah, yeah. No I'm not, I'm not, definitely not. I'm just I'm.

01:57:11:12 - 01:57:13:18

Christian Soschner

Not just joking.

01:57:13:20 - 01:57:22:18

Alex Dang

I'm definitely not a crypto enthusiasts, for for good or for bad reasons. So that's, that's why I could definitely blame myself for that.

01:57:22:18 - 01:57:52:07

Christian Soschner

I was just joking. I brought an example on social media, and I think you commented that, crypto is not so much your thing, but, you mentioned the crisis and the future and being optimistic, when you when you look back in the last 20 years, the biggest crisis, always brought forth the best companies. So when I look at our zoom call, for example, right now thinking back to zoom and the technology in 2019, I don't think that our conversation would have been possible back then with the technology.

01:57:52:09 - 01:58:22:05

Christian Soschner

The pandemic accelerated the development in the background. Now we have teams. Zoom, improved their offering. Also, anything about biotech, what the pharma industry has done during the pandemic to produce billions of doses of vaccines. We can ask whether it's necessary or not, but the the potential of the industry to demonstrate of the potential of the industry when everybody's collaborating and working together towards that goal was extremely optimistic.

01:58:22:05 - 01:58:26:05

Christian Soschner

And I hope that we keep this optimism in the future. What's your

01:58:26:05 - 01:58:26:15

Christian Soschner

I.

01:58:26:15 - 01:58:54:02

Alex Dang

Would I would agree question. I would just make one minor comment that zoom as a company got this is now well known after pandemic, but it was actually founded in 2011, so I think it's still one I applaud to the geniuses and to, to some extent, bold approach of VCs who invested back then. When zoom was clearly, not the only company in teleconferencing space.

01:58:54:04 - 01:59:24:06

Alex Dang

Skype was already there. Google still had their own solution. WebEx was present. So it's interesting to see that venture capitalists and what actually is intriguing is that they managed a specific venture capital that we tell a story about in our book on the very first pages from Qualcomm Ventures. Patrick Egan, Nebraska Sharp, these people managed to somehow see the potential of a company back then, when it was still a tiny company with a different name.

01:59:24:06 - 02:00:02:06

Alex Dang

By the way, no clients whatsoever. And just a dream of a founder with some technology and the belief that that technology will win against the other. So that this is exactly the reason why I think following VCs and learning where they make their bets, smart VCs, that's critical for everyone, not just for corporate leaders, but also for us as professionals, for job seekers or, people who are willing to be engaged in the economy in the next five, ten, 20 years and find a better, more interesting job, pay more attention to where VCs invest their money in.

02:00:02:08 - 02:00:28:01

Alex Dang

Open AI was not founded 1 or 2 years ago. It was founded back, in a spiral. And by 20 1416, I may want to. I probably made a mistake right now, but, anyways, it was made many years ago. So pay attention to where it makes invest today. That may help you to be more strategic and where you place your bets.

02:00:28:09 - 02:00:47:10

Christian Soschner

Yeah, I totally pick some examples. Very, extremely fascinating. As I said that the market was already taken. It was full back then when zoom started and now in 2020, everybody only was talking about so many other companies, Skype, even their today it is.

02:00:47:10 - 02:00:48:01

Alex Dang

I mean,

02:00:48:01 - 02:01:05:07

Alex Dang

I think you may still use Skype. I'm not a big Skype user anymore, but I still use it from time to time because some people still prefer to use Skype. But I also some clients insisted using WebEx, so I'm happy to be as flexible as possible. But my preference would be always with zoom and look.

02:01:05:07 - 02:01:20:13

Alex Dang

I mean, zoom will survive for as many days or as many years, as they will continue to be day one, they will continue to have day one mentality. So they will have to continue to innovate to become still relevant for users.

02:01:20:13 - 02:01:39:09

Christian Soschner

And it's fascinating. Conversation. I just checked the clock. We are already two hours in the conversation. It's 8 p.m. here and I don't want to hold you up. I think you have probably other meetings after this one. My two favorite questions very quickly. How can people reach out to you? What's the best way?

02:01:39:11 - 02:02:01:22

Alex Dang

LinkedIn. So, I would prefer LinkedIn messages. I do check them from time to time and I post regularly. So hopefully, that will also let us stay connected. Because what I do, I share some thoughts, ideas, insights or just experiments, which I'm running in the AI space with some of my colleagues and friends. So LinkedIn would be the best way.

02:02:01:22 - 02:02:16:04

Alex Dang

I also would highly recommend to follow Elijah's LinkedIn, where he posts regularly, about unicorns as well as about his, conferences and his most recent research. So would highly recommend to follow Elias Travel as well.

02:02:16:06 - 02:02:26:08

Christian Soschner

And finally shout, you and Ilia will be in Vienna in April at a conference. Can you tell me 30s when and where are the conferences?

02:02:26:10 - 02:02:45:21

Alex Dang

So I believe it's going to be end of April. The conference name is Alpha Omega Foundation. It's going to be the conference not just centered around two of us. It's, going to be a conference about innovation and corporate innovation as well. So I would highly, highly recommend you guys to anyone who is interested to join that.

02:02:45:23 - 02:03:08:02

Alex Dang

You can check online. Alpha Omega. End of April. I do believe that you are coming to such conferences. At least that's my learning and my experience. You're coming to such conferences not just to learn more, best practices, or learn more about specific case studies. You are coming there to get to know like minded people.

02:03:08:04 - 02:03:28:05

Alex Dang

And that network effect, with play the most important role. So if you come to the conference, just try to get to know as many people as possible. And because you guys are going to be all like minded, meaning entrepreneurial or venture minded, hopefully after our talk, that's going to be that's going to play the most important role.

02:03:28:07 - 02:03:53:07

Alex Dang

And some of these meetings I met Alia more than ten years ago as a professor. I could never imagine that I would write a book together. I met many of my mentors and, future partners, in a very similar way. And it took years to materialize into something meaningful and impactful. So please treat this event as a networking event to get to know people.

02:03:53:09 - 02:04:12:06

Alex Dang

And please join, I think some information is already available online, and you can, buy tickets to the event. It's going to be sponsored or co-sponsored by Verbund. Pretty big cooperation from, Austria. So welcome and hopefully to see you guys in person. In Vienna.

02:04:12:08 - 02:04:30:12

Christian Soschner

Alex, thank you very much for the conversation. And thank you very much for writing this book. In my opinion, one of the most important business books in this decade and probably also in the next and the coming decades worth reading for everybody who's interested in venture investing and the startup world.

02:04:30:14 - 02:04:52:07

Alex Dang

Thank you Christian. Appreciate that. Thank you for your time and thank you, the audience, for their patience. It's been probably the longest interview that I have personally experienced. I appreciate that. And, thank you, Christian. By the way, I have to admit that Christian is, an exceptional interviewer because he prepared the, a framework and the, he read the book multiple times.

02:04:52:10 - 02:04:56:16

Alex Dang

So it's been a pleasure to answer your question, Christian, I appreciate that. Thank you.

02:04:56:18 - 02:05:02:01

Christian Soschner

Thank you very much, Alex. I wish you a great day in sunny California.

02:05:02:03 - 02:05:03:14

Alex Dang

Thank you. Thank you. Christian. Bye bye.

02:05:03:20 - 02:05:04:15

Christian Soschner

Bye. Bye.

02:05:04:15 - 02:05:15:01

Christian Soschner

What separates the best investors, founders and leaders from the rest? It's not like it's not even intelligence.

02:05:15:03 - 02:05:48:07

Christian Soschner

It's the ability to spot outliers before anyone else and to bet on them with conviction. Today, Alex sheds the mindsets they've built Emmerson, the venture capital secrets behind billion dollar companies and why consensus can be the enemy of innovation. We learned that conviction beats consensus. If everyone agrees the idea isn't bold enough. Venture capitalists don't fear losing money.

02:05:48:09 - 02:05:58:09

Christian Soschner

They fear more missing the next quarter. If your leadership expects profits next quarter, you are probably thinking too small.

02:05:58:09 - 02:06:18:07

Christian Soschner

If this episode challenged your thinking, don't keep it to yourself. Like, comment and share. Because the bigger this show grows, the bigger the conversations we can bring you. And that means even more top tier guests. More insights and more game changing ideas.

02:06:18:09 - 02:06:36:05

Christian Soschner

The biggest risk isn't failing. It's playing too small. Every breakthrough, every unicorn, every industry defining company started as a crazy bet. So here's the question. What are you willing to bet on?

02:06:36:05 - 02:06:51:06

Christian Soschner

Thank you for being here. Thank you for learning with us. And remember, the future belongs to those who think like investors. See you in the next episode.