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The Flywheel by M13
The Flywheel is a podcast for founders, operators and investors building through structural change. M13 partners sit down with the founders reshaping AI, enterprise software, healthcare, commerce, and consumer technology to unpack the hard calls and inflection points as they build category-defining companies. Each conversation is designed to help listeners better understand where the world is changing, what great founders see before others do, and how enduring companies are built.
The Flywheel by M13
Dropping Out to Build 911 AI | Mike Chime, Prepared
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Why does calling 911 still mean a dispatcher typing your emergency by hand, word for word? Prepared co-founders Mike Chime, Neal Soni and Dylan Gleicher dropped out of Yale to rebuild the emergency call—using AI to transcribe, summarize, and translate in real time across roughly 80 million calls a year.
Prof G Markets cohost Ed Elson sits down with Mike Chime, co-founder and CEO of Prepared, and M13 Managing Partner Karl Alomar to break down what it takes to fix an overlooked problem: why the 911 call is still stuck on decades-old technology, how Prepared now works with about 1,000 agencies and touches roughly 80 million calls a year, and why solving a real problem beats chasing the hot trend.
Mike—who left Yale on a Thiel Fellowship—explains how the company went from a dorm-room school-safety app to being acquired by Axon. Karl, who scaled DigitalOcean to a $5 billion IPO before joining M13 and wrote Prepared’s first check, explains what made him back college students a year before there was a company.
If you're a founder, operator, student or engineer weighing whether to leave a safe path and build something that matters, this one's for you.
⏱️ Chapters
- 00:00 — Why this conversation matters more than ever
- 04:05 — What is Prepared? Fixing the 911 call with AI
- 06:20 — How Karl found Mike at Yale
- 09:26 — What made a college kid worth investing in
- 11:56 — From a dorm-room school-safety app to 911
- 14:59 — The Thiel Fellowship and burning the boats
- 16:31 — Should you drop out of college to start a company?
- 20:02 — "The 911 thing": surviving the skepticism
- 21:16 — Chasing the hot thing vs. solving a real problem
- 25:10 — What scaling taught Mike about management
- 28:12 — Has AI changed how you manage people?
- 30:43 — Taking risks and betting on yourself
- 32:21 — Advice for anyone on the fence
🚨 In this episode
- Why the 911 call is still stuck on decades-old tech—dispatchers typing what they hear, and callers who don't speak English waiting five or six minutes for a translator
- How Prepared uses AI to transcribe, summarize, and translate emergencies in real time, now across about 1,000 agencies and roughly 80 million calls a year
- The founder path most people romanticize: dropping out on a Thiel Fellowship, seven years of "the 911 thing," and the skepticism before Axon acquired the company
- Why solving a real problem beats chasing the hot trend—and how that shows up in what you build and who you hire
- Founder mode, management, and why AI changes org structure but not the need for people who believe in the mission
About Prepared
Prepared helps 911 centers handle emergencies with AI—transcribing and summarizing calls in real time, surfacing what responders need, and translating for callers who don't speak English. Learn more at https://www.prepared911.com
About M13
M13 invests early in outlier founders building at the structural shifts that create new markets. The Flywheel is where M13 talks with those founders. Learn more at https://m13.co
▶️ Subscribe for more conversations with the founders building at the structural shifts that create new markets, and follow The Flywheel on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
I remember I would go back for Thanksgiving. I dropped out of school. My mom's like, what are you working on? And my mom would tell her friends, like, oh, that's the 911 thing. And there was a lot of times where I thought, well, maybe I should just go and take the fang job that I, you know, was thinking about in in college. If you call 911 and you don't speak English, you get dramatically different service than if you do. And it's an equity issue. I don't think I could do anything else.
SPEAKER_01Hey everyone, I'm Carl Alamar, managing partner at M13. Today's conversation is with Mike Chime, co-founder and CEO of Prepared, alongside Ed Elson, host of Prof. G Markets and first-time founders. I first met Mike when he was a student at Yale. What started as a conversation after class turned into years of us working together as he, Dylan Gleitcher, and Neil Sony transformed an idea born from personal experience into a company helping modernize emergency response across the country. In M13, we invest early in visionary founders, building through structural shifts that create new markets. What stood out about Mike from the beginning wasn't just the mission, it was his ability to move from conviction to action. Every time he encountered a new challenge, he figured it out and kept going. In this conversation, we talk about dropping out, taking on conventional paths, choosing the right partners, and building a company around a future that doesn't exist yet. Let's get into it.
SPEAKER_00Good to be with you guys. Good to see you again. I've had you on my show before. You crushed it.
SPEAKER_02We didn't meet in person, though. I didn't know he was like 6'4. But it's good to see you again too.
SPEAKER_00I appreciate that. And good to see you. Good to meet you, Carl. Good to have everyone here. Everyone seems like they're in a pretty good mood after last night. I know I am. Yeah, there we go. Okay. Oh, someone's shaking his head. Not a fan. Okay, we'll send him out later. So we want to have a discussion here about your guys' relationship. You've obviously had huge success. Prepared was acquired in 2025 by Axon, which was just an incredible exit. First, though, what is Prepared and what does the company actually do?
SPEAKER_02Okay, there's a short answer and then a long answer to this, and I'll try to do the middle of the two. But Prepared helps 911 centers better handle 911 calls. And namely now through AI, but there's been a few iterations of the company over time. Pre-AI, we would help citizens better share information from their mobile device. So things like a picture or a video or a text. Now with AI, we help the operator better address the situation via improving the quality of the information. So today, if you walk into a 911 center, the call taker is literally listening to your call and then typing what they hear. They're listening and typing while someone's yelling the information. And so we have AI that sits next to that call, transcribes it in the background, summarizes it. It's purpose built for public safety, so it knows the information that's actually useful to the responder and pulls that out. Or other things like language translation. So again, not a commonly known thing, but if you call 911 and you don't speak English, you get dramatically different service than if you do. And it's an equity issue. We just think that that same taxpayer dollar, that same person that lives in our communities that doesn't speak English well, should have the same level of service. And today the process is they literally, they being the call taker, hit a button and they wait. So say the call is in Vietnamese, they hit the button, and for a bespoke language like that, you could be waiting five, six, seven minutes on a 911 call. We translate it instantly. So we know the information, we send it out to responders. Um we're deployed in about a thousand agencies across the US. We handle about 80 million 911 calls a year. There's about 250 million a year in the US, so we got work to do. That's what I hear from that number. Um but yeah, it's been it's been a lot of fun. We started the company uh seven years ago, but we're working on 911 just four years ago. So the team has made uh a lot of progress in that time. Uh saved a lot of lives, which has been cool. Uh but yeah, that's what we do.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I have a shorter explanation in just maybe five words. Uh prepared saves lives, three words. That's basically what prepared does, it saves lives. And uh I think that was probably one of the most inspiring parts of it. You know, from where I sat watching these guys build it.
SPEAKER_00So let's go back seven years. You are an undergraduate at Yale. I think you're on the football team, is that right? I was on the football team. On the football team. Uh and you start to have an idea for a company.
SPEAKER_01Let's be clear, he was a linebacker.
SPEAKER_02That's giving me more credit. I was actually a defensive lineman.
SPEAKER_01Okay, even worse. He's a defensive lineman. 290 pounds when we met.
SPEAKER_02Unfortunately, that's true.
SPEAKER_00Um, and you discover him. How did you guys meet?
SPEAKER_01Oh, maybe he discovered me.
SPEAKER_00Maybe he discovered you.
SPEAKER_02I definitely discovered Carl. I think you tell the story best.
SPEAKER_01I mean, uh, you know, you ask two people what happened, you're gonna get two totally different stories. But I will share my part and then maybe you can correct everything I get wrong. I I was invited to come and speak at an NBA class at Yale, and um uh Mike was in the class. Dylan was in the class too, apparently. I didn't find that out until about two years later, but apparently he was there too. But um at the end of the class, obviously, as it does, there was a class about scaling and culture and building organizations. And at the end of the class, uh, you know, Mike came down to speak to me, and a bunch of other people did, and Mike did the smart thing, and rather than trying to battle through and have a conversation with me there, he was like, Can I just walk you to your Uber? And I felt like, well, I'm gonna have this personal 290-pound bodyguard taking me. I feel very special.
SPEAKER_00Give you a choice, right?
SPEAKER_01A little intimidated, but yeah, I um I I walked with him, and and you guys can tell already in the first five minutes, this is a very charming, good-looking young man. Uh, not that that's what I'm looking for in life, but he he's very he's a very charming guy.
SPEAKER_00Found a quality, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I think the key thing was that um Mike was really, really able to express his passion. And I think he had a real, he has a whole backstory to this, but a real underlying passion for what he wanted to do. And at the time, the concept was more oriented around school safety um and experiences with shooters at school and kind of how to address that and how to resolve that. And that was kind of the beginning of his thinking around how he can create an emergency solution that actually saves lives. And the whole passion and the whole energy was behind this idea of saving lives. And um, you know, I I could I help myself, I took a liking to him, and I think we spent maybe almost a year from there just speaking every month, me giving him guidance and thoughts and advice and help him evolving and developing the concept. And the one thing that just really struck me is that every time we had a conversation, I would lay out a whole bunch of like fantastical things that he should do. And then a month later we'd talk again. He's like, Okay, I did all those. What do I do next? And I was like, man, this is a guy that gets, you know, mind my French, but gets stuff done. And so um, you know, I guess we can talk a little bit into what led to the actual investment, but uh ultimately over a year of knowing Mike before we actually invested, he just, you know, month over month just built more and more confidence and just saw, you know, the shining opportunity of what he could build and what he could do as an individual. And that's really what inspired me as much as the business concept itself.
SPEAKER_00I think a lot of young people who are starting companies thinking about starting companies would want to know what did Mike do in that walk to the Uber that was compelling enough that you said, yes, I'm interested, and then you were the first institution to the world. That's a good question. Like, how did he carry himself? How is it not annoying, perhaps, yeah, that he forces you to go to like we gotta walk to the government? What what was it about him?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, like the you said it yourself, like he found a trait is just this ability to one on one side have charm, and on the other side be able to express a vision in a concise, clean way. Yeah. And I think what Mike did is he he expressed such a natural human passion for what he wanted to solve in the world. And I guess maybe it was luck, or maybe just by um, you know, fate, it's something that really struck me in kind of the concept of the tragedy of school shootings, the tragedy of people dying unnecessarily, the tragedy of what happens in the world, and somebody who has such a deep passion for wanting to solve that. At the time for me, it was like an aspiring young entrepreneur that just wanted to build something. I had no idea if he had any skills or had any capability or anything, but just you feeling that energy and that passion in someone who is just so motivated to try and fix a clear problem in the world. I would say any established business person in the later part of their career is gonna be inspired by that and is gonna want to be a part of that person's journey. So at the beginning, for me, it was just like, hey, if I can be helpful, let me be helpful. It was no no more of a commitment than that. But I think that's all Mike needed. You know, all he needed was that open door, and then over the next year, we were able to build the beginnings of what's turned out to be a really amazing relationship. And uh, and yeah, he just be real, like speak from your passion. If somebody came out to me and started throwing, you know, KPIs at me and big numbers and trying to be, you know, you know, have kind of hubris, that wouldn't interest me at all. But like the mix of humility and passion and kind of commitment and dedication to his cause, honestly, it just you feel it when you if anybody here gets a chance to have a conversation, Mike, you'll feel it just in the conversation that you have with him. And I think it's a special trait.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So let's hear a bit about how you then start to build this thing. What take us through when you finally get that check from M13, and then you start to scale the company. What was the story like, Mike?
SPEAKER_02And I think building off what you said, Carl, one thing that was innate in building the company that retrospectively was quite helpful was we didn't intend it to be a company initially. You know, so I tell the story. I grew up in a town right outside where there was an active shooter event in 2012. Uh 2012, I was 13 years old. My town was very small, blue collar, neither parent graduated college. I was the first to go. And uh you just saw how that rippled. It was a catalyst for me. I went to college thinking about those types of problems. Um, and that's what we built. You know, Dylan, Neil, and I built this simple app schools would use in emergencies. And the basic idea was that it was simple. It was, hey, if you had an emergency, a school was dependent on a walkie-talkie or PA system to communicate it, it caused delays unnecessarily. We ended up with a lot of schools just giving the solution away for free. We thought it was a better way and that they should use it, et cetera. It was only by happenstance that we got connected to 911. Uh, and so I remember going to the school and saying, because COVID had happened, K-12 was out of session, my senior class is taking the year off school. And I said, School, what more can we do for you? And they said, Well, I have all this data, I want to share it with 911. How might I do that? And I'm like, I don't know, just call them. You know, wouldn't anybody just call 911? They're like, well, no, what about a picture or a video? And I just found that fascinating. Um, and I walked up to a 911 center and just knocked on the door and said, Hey, have all this data, I'd love to give it to you. I think it's lifesaving, what's the next step? Uh and then they walked me through the center and I realized the technology just simply couldn't take it in. Right? It was built on the assumption all the calls were landlines. And so, to kind of make a long story short there, it did not intend to be a company. I was just passionate about, hey, could we save lives? And so it was always problem-centric. I think one of the kind of failure modes for a company is your kind of a people talk about this all the time, but your solution in search of a problem. We we never had the opportunity to even uh fall into that trap because it was always, hey, we were out to solve a problem from the very beginning. And so that was a thing that was um always quite useful. But yeah, I forget your question.
SPEAKER_00It's just well, I I I wanted to hear more about how you then be actually become a company and start working together as well.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think I think soon enough we realized that, okay, like capital and people being excited about it, a company is probably useful to spread the idea. Uh and so when I walked into the 911 Center for the first time and saw the technology and saw how uh you know antiquated it was, uh I got passionate about building that. The thing that was was clear was that uh, okay, like we could do much better here. Um and there's a little bit of kind of context that is is useful, but I won't bore everyone with the details. But people had tried to change 911 for a long time. And this is true a lot of industries that you can just clearly go in and see the technologies pour. But they they were kind of like, hey, I've built better, go to it. And they didn't have an understanding of like how we would sequence that change over time. And so one of the things that we did that was um quite useful in retrospect was we started over the top of those core systems and we gave the technology away for free. Um we understood that working with government, the hardest thing wasn't actually getting people to pay. Like contracts were super sticky. Um it was actually getting in and showing value. Uh, and that was controversial at the time. So we started, we blitzed, we got to a thousand centers, uh, but then we just focused on solving problem after problem, right? Um, but with the mission in mind.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah, I would rewind it a little bit. I think you missed a whole chunk of the middle there. So um we knew each other for a school calendar year. The following summer, you got a Teal Fellowship.
SPEAKER_02I did.
SPEAKER_01And first kid in his family to go to college got himself into Yale and decided, hey, I'm gonna drop out after my third year. Yeah. So I'm sure his parents weren't very happy about it.
SPEAKER_02I were thrilled, right? She was really upset, my mom.
SPEAKER_01But what was amazing for me was it was the Burn the Bridges moment. It was the dedication to say, I'm in, I'm committed, I'm doing this. And that I think was the message that was like, okay, this is really happening. This guy's pretty special. Okay, we're gonna put money behind this, we're gonna support him. And um, you know, God bless Mike, he was very, very adamant to say, Carl, I really want you involved, I really want you in, I really want you in. And he was persistent about that too. So it wasn't, you know, it was a very two-way street. Like we both were kind of came to a moment of realization that this is really happening. It makes total sense to be involved, and that's really what drove our investment decision. And so through the summer, you left. I don't know if Dylan and Lee Neil left.
SPEAKER_02We all left together.
SPEAKER_01You did, okay. So you you got the teal check, but they left anyway.
SPEAKER_02So that's we put it into the company.
SPEAKER_01Okay, that's good. That's good. But um, but either way, they all left, they burned the bridges, it was a commitment, and then at that point it was kind of just the beginning of the road. And and as as Mike said, I think it was just dealing with one challenge at a time, and it was building blocks, and then just that momentum started building on each other on itself from that point forward.
SPEAKER_00What are your views, Cole, on dropping out of college to start a company? Obviously, we have a success story right here, but I think that's in a lot of people's minds is is that the right decision? Maybe it did cost you something. What are your views? And then maybe we'll hear Mike's future.
SPEAKER_01I mean, when it's the right decision, it's the right decision. Yeah. When it's the wrong decision, it's the wrong decision. You're never gonna know until they've done it. Listen, I I went to great schools. I will never discount the value of education, the value of a degree. Um, but I will say that a degree starts your career, but a degree doesn't create your career.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And so if you're truly, truly passionate and you have the backing and you and you and you have the belief, then really what you're doing is you're betting on yourself. And I think anybody that's gonna build anything really meaningful in the world has to be willing to take risks and has to be willing to bet on themselves. So that's not a promotion to say everyone should jump out of, you know, step out of college. I think you need to understand what it's gonna do for you versus what you can do yourself, and you need to really be look in the mirror and really assess like, are you willing to take that risk? Are you willing to make that decision in life? And again, being this is a much bigger decision for Mike. First kid in his family to go to school, and it's Yale of all the schools. So that's an even bigger decision than just, oh, I'm going to community college and I'm gonna drop out to go start a company. Right. But uh, but I will say that um as I said from the media, it's very difficult to tell ultimately if it's the right decision or not. But um, but I think for the right people, yes. You know, there's a handful of names we can name that definitely prove that it can make sense. Yeah um, but it's a it's a risk, and you've just got to be willing to take that risk and bet on yourself.
SPEAKER_00Good decision? I think so.
SPEAKER_02It worked out. I think if I were thinking about it.
SPEAKER_01I have a feeling you're gonna get an honorary degree at something.
SPEAKER_02Well, I just think that's gonna happen. I will take it.
SPEAKER_00Playing the long game, it's a good idea.
SPEAKER_02If if I were someone thinking about it today, the things I would think about are like one, you like this is a common trope, but people hear this all the time, you'd be really passionate about what you're doing. Um, it took a long time. And it wasn't obvious that it was going to be successful for most of it. I remember it again, it took seven years, and right now we're doing a talk, so it looks like it was great. Um, but in those seven years, like, yeah, I was doing the 9-1-1 thing. I remember I would go back for Thanksgiving, I dropped out of school, my mom's like, what are you working on? And uh my mom would tell her friends, like, oh, it's the 9-1-1 thing. It was always in air quotes. And my friends were doing the IB jobs, and and uh, you know, I was taking a 90k salary while I was working on the company. And we had some money, but it was like it was early, early days. It was not clear that it was going to be successful. Persisting through that was really hard. Um, and there was a lot of times where I thought, well, maybe I should just go and take the Fang job that I, you know, was thinking about in college. And so you have to be really passionate about the thing. And again, I think it came from this like personal experience. I really wanted it um to happen. And you have to acknowledge like there's there's no have your cake and eat it too scenario. There's really trade-offs. Like, I missed a lot of experiences in college uh that like I think I would trade them. Um but my friends were doing things, and I was working on the company in college. Uh, and I was spending nights when people were going out thinking about this thing, um, and there was a lot of that, even today, right? Like, I'm still working really hard on the thing post the acquisition. And I think um, you know, you just have to be okay with with those trade-offs. For me, I don't think I could do anything else. Um it's a lot of fun that was.
SPEAKER_01I will give you something that might make you feel better about your your mother's reaction. So I'm running DigitalOcean, we're about to go public, and my mother's still calling me, saying, Carl, I'm really worried about you. Uh, you know, I think you should go get a real job. I'm like, I don't think you realize what I'm what we're building here. So it doesn't end. It's always that's my big parenting.
SPEAKER_02My big moment with my mom. We raised our Series B. And so, like, for folks that are in startups, it was Andrew Eason that did it, and I was like, you know, super excited about this Series B. So like everybody that was my friend was like, okay, maybe they're on to something. My mom had no idea who Andrew Eason was. Um, and so uh, you know, she would still look like similar to you. Look, go on LinkedIn, look for jobs, and send me them just as a hint. Like, hey, you know, these people are hiring. I'm like, mom, we're hiring. What do you mean? Like uh our our big moment was we we got on the Today show, which was like a huge thing. Um we did this partnership with Apple where it was basically like FaceTime to 911 and it's cool, and she saw our picture. I didn't even tell her, she just watched us in the morning and she saw us on, and it was like now she's telling all of her friends. It's like the greatest thing. Uh but yeah, that's what it took, the today show.
SPEAKER_01You haven't made it until your mom realizes you've made it. That's when you made it.
SPEAKER_00And the only way to do that is to get on the today show.
SPEAKER_01So that's yeah, I didn't think of that. I should have done that a lot earlier in my career.
SPEAKER_00I think this does get at something important though, which is chasing the hot, sexy, cool thing versus going for something that maybe is seems less interesting or boring to some people, but you're quite passionate about. I mean, you were building a product that you say at the beginning you didn't think was really even going to be a business, or didn't really even have much of a business model. You were giving to the government for free. And that, I mean, right there already just doesn't sound like something that a VC would be interested in, but Carl, you were interested in it. How do you think about chasing the hot thing versus finding value in something like prepared, which is obviously a huge success now, but at the time probably seemed a little strange to people.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you know, there's a really good point that comes out of this, which is um people who are building a business for the sake of chasing the business and chasing the money are just not doing it for the right reasons. It doesn't mean they're not going to be successful, but it's just not, you know, they're doing it because they're again just chasing the rabbit. And it's not uh a way to build a really strong, long quality business. So again, some people fight through and they're great operators and they figure it out and they make it happen, they build big businesses. But I really truly believe that the best businesses in the world are the business that build out of true passion. The people who are just building something they really believe is required, they really believe has value, they really are passionate about it, and they're gonna run through walls and live on other people's sofas and do whatever they need to do to make this thing happen. And when you have that kind of passion for a business, you will fight a lot harder, you'll go through the hard times with a lot more conviction, you'll you you know, you will get take that business a lot further. And again, there's a lot of companies where you hear stories about the early days of Airbnb and the early days of seeing some of these other companies where no one believed in it, but the passion behind it is really what drove that business. So I first of all, I truly believe that you know there are massive businesses built in every edge of every space. There's like a lot, not everything in the world that is valuable is sexy. I actually think prepared is very sexy, but not everything in the world that's built is sexy. I think the way I saw it is, you know, Mike said it's kind of a bit of a tongue in cheek kind of statement to say we weren't really building a business. I think we all knew that we would build something if we were building something that was going to be truly valuable and truly designed. Disruptive to a massive category. We knew that. I think the idea, and you know, we had a lot of conversations about, you know, should we be trying to charge money and make revenue? And we had this whole debate like, no, you need footprint, you need access. If you get access, guess what? No one else is going to get that access. And eventually the value will be realized and it'll be paid for. And so this concept of we weren't really building a business was more about let's just make sure this thing is really used, because we know it's disruptive, we know it's going to change the way public safety works. And if it happens, there is great value on the back end of that. And I think it doesn't matter where you apply that. If you're building something truly disruptive that's truly going to change the way people behave or the way businesses interact or trade or work in whatever capacity that they work, that is potentially market changing. And in market change, you create great value. So I think finding those opportunities is a really I mean great investors find them all the time, and you find these businesses that who knew that these companies would be successful, but someone saw it, someone got behind it, and those businesses became, you know, deck of corn businesses.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Mike, when you start this basically when you're a college student, and then you scale it to over a hundred employees, and now within Axon, you've got even more people working under you. As you've scaled this thing, what have you learned about management, how to manage people, how to manage lots of people, and have you learned anything from Carl or the M13 uh uh team on how to navigate all of that?
SPEAKER_02I've learned a bunch from that. That was my toolkit.
SPEAKER_01That was exactly my toolkit, yeah.
SPEAKER_02It really was. And it wasn't useful until now. We're starting actually.
SPEAKER_01I'm glad I could help.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. It is helpful now, by the way. Um I think the right advice depends on your stage. Um when you're early days, it is just there's no like culture, there's no like, you know, you just do the thing and you do whatever's necessary to make it happen. And so I was like the product manager, I was the first seller, I was the first onboarding person, et cetera. I think the next stage is early management. Uh, and that's hard. I think the biggest thing when you're starting something is letting go of the thing uh and giving it up to someone. I found myself not really managing, just doing it for them. So if somebody was bad, I also am not good at I I've gotten much better at this, but in the early days I was not good at giving hard feedback. Instead of saying, hey, you're not doing this well, I would just be like, yeah, just move to the side and I would just go start doing it. Uh so I was really for a long time managing by just doing and we got far by doing that, but over time started to think like, how do I teach somebody as opposed to uh do it myself? Now the team, so to your point, like the team is almost 500 people across 911 uh that we're managing, and it's all about culture. Like, how are we setting up frameworks such that people can make decisions that are more like the decisions we'd want them to make? Um, one of the things that this again sounds like an obvious thing that I would have heard in a talk like this and probably just nodded my head, like, yes, of course. But like saying what you think and having opinions on things. When we were first starting, I remember the the common advice was know the things you're good at and then hire people that are not that are that are good at the or that are really good at the things you're not good at. Um and I did that. I would hire people that were really good at legal, I would hire people that are really good at HR. Um and what ended up happening was anything that they did, I would just completely be like, yeah, they're doing it. They're the expert. I don't really have an opinion on this. Uh and I found out that like a bunch of our company, I had no idea what was happening. Uh and so, but I had intuitions. It wasn't like I had no opinions on what they were saying. I just assumed, well, they've done it for their whole career, they must be the expert. What I missed was I have information on the whole company, right? They don't have information on what's happening in sales, they don't have information on what's happening in CS. And so like now, as I'm starting to think about building our culture, um, I'm pushing myself to have an opinion on all the things that are happening in the business. And you say, like, Airbnb founder has really gone on the founder mode thing. I think that what he was really trying to say, and which is a good piece of advice, is you need to know the details and have an opinion on those things, even if they're not your core competency. Um, and so that's been a big thing as we started to um set the culture is like, first, do I just know what's happening and how it's improving?
SPEAKER_00So, Carl, I'm gonna want to get the cliff notes on the talk you gave on management, but I'm gonna add on a question, which is has AI changed it? You gave this talk seven years ago. Um, I'm now hearing executives talk about AI being the new manager. Jack Dorsey's talking about this, saying that he wants AI to be sort of the the middle manager, and then all of the AI's report to him. What are your thoughts on management at this point and has AI changed your perspective?
SPEAKER_01I mean, there's a there's a big difference between uh project or program management and people management. Right. And um, I think what Mike's learned, uh, which is a big part of what I was talking about, was that when you're running a big organization, the running of the company is actually the easy part. The people is the hard part. And um one of the key things about managing people is what you want is you want to optimize performance of your team. So if you have people that are unhappy, they're gonna work less hard. If you have people that are not passionate about the mission, they're gonna try less hard to push the mission. If you have people that are fully dedicated, really believe the mission, really follow, enjoy their job, love being at work, then they're not gonna leave work, they're gonna stay there, they're gonna work as hard as they can. It's not gonna be anything that you have to feel like you're pushing on people. Right. It's something you the people just do. Now, I think AI changes the organizational structure. But it doesn't change the fact that you still have people. Until you literally have a one-person organization that has a thousand agents doing all the work, that might be different. But when you have 500 people with 10,000 agents, you still have 500 people. So you still have to make sure that your people believe in the vision, understand the motivation, are dedicated to the business, love the culture, like all of these things that ultimately result in better output, better performance, you know, better out better results. And so I don't think that changes. I think the human dynamic will never change when it's amongst the people. The dynamic that might change is just the structure by which everybody operates, the things they lean on, the risk resources they have access to. That evolves significantly with AI.
SPEAKER_00I think that makes a lot of sense. Uh, we'll start to wrap up here. Um, Carl, for any aspiring founders or anyone who even wants to be successful in investing or in VC, what would be your advice to young people thinking about these issues today?
SPEAKER_01Um, I mean, you you gotta, well, we live in a world where you have to be willing to take risks. I said that earlier. Yeah. Um I think there's a whole life and a whole world where people figure out a way to get into a corporate ladder and live their life in the corporate ladder. And there's a safety net in that. And I totally support that. And I think people build wonderful lives living in that world, and people have grown to be incredible CEOs going up that ladder. The world that we live in is a world where we enjoy the risk because we believe in our ability to execute within their ass, whether it's venture or whether it's actually being an entrepreneur. So my advice is um really know yourself if you want to, whatever you want to do, understand where your what your skills are, understand what your capabilities are, and build conviction in your ability to execute against those. But then also understand what your weaknesses are and build humility around your weaknesses, and then be willing to take the risk, take that step. Um you can have a very comfortable life taking an easy route, and I don't question anybody that decides to do that. You can take a very hard route, but if it's successful, for me at least, I think the satisfaction you get out of that execution and that outcome is 10x anything you get when you take a safe route. And so that's just the routes I've chosen, the routes Mike's chosen. Anyone who is an aspiring uh entrepreneur, there's a bunch of founders here that I know, they've all made that decision to take a risk on themselves, believe in themselves, and you know, go out and fight the fight to win that battle for your position in the world.
SPEAKER_00Mike, I will end with you. Your advice, same question to young people thinking about this.
SPEAKER_01His advice is to talk to me about investing in that company.
SPEAKER_00That is good. This is just to copy you and then say it again. Here we go.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, the first piece of advice I would give is first just do it. Like right now is the best time to build a company. If you think about like why does a startup win, it's often that it changes the rules in some way. You know, a com an incumbent is built on the rules of today or from the past, right? They had a lot of success in the past. And with AI, things are just changing. The way to build an org is changing, the way that technology applies and solves problems for users is changing. Um, I think startups thrive in change. If you can adapt to that change, you have such an advantage when things are changing because you can pivot so quickly. So I think from a timing perspective, it's the best time uh to go and start a company. So if you're thinking about it, I think now there's no better time.
SPEAKER_00Just do it.
unknownLet's do it.
SPEAKER_00Mike, call, thank you so much. Appreciate your time.