Smash Notes
Dave Morin insights from Facebook, Path, and 250+ investments
E29: Dave Morin of Slow Ventures shares insights from 250+ investments (Slack, Pinterest, Twitter), architecting Facebook & building Path, promoting mental health with Sunrise, combatting the internet's true tax of depression & how founders can get help - Part 1
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Notes
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Dave Morin told Jason Calacanis on Angel that Mark Zuckerberg pairs wide reading with rare foresight. Morin pictured him three or four moves ahead, and on more than one board, able to see options other people miss. Zuckerberg could also write the code, which Morin said is unusual in a founder who thinks that way. The other trait is competitive will, a drive and an energy Morin called preternatural, closer to an elite athlete than to a typical executive. He also described a large heart that most people never see. Product reviews could be long. You left having argued every angle over a year of conversations, rather than taking an order the way people describe Steve Jobs.
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Dave Morin told Jason Calacanis on Angel that Facebook has moved when the public pushed back. In 2006 a beer photo could get you fired. After enough Las Vegas and golf pictures, a drink stopped mattering. He traced the same loop to Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard site Facemash: Zuckerberg got in trouble, was told to add privacy controls, and built them into the next product. A phone that can reach any country is a real gain. Twenty years earlier that took a studio. He would not flatten the verdict. Facebook Groups had more than 1.5 billion people, and Instagram was testing a version without likes in Canada. Privacy is a separate question from whether the network was worth having.
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Anxiety is the series cost of humans using technology.
There are some tricks that can make phone usage less frustrating. For example, It helps to turn off all of your notifications and to put yourself into a control of time. Also, move all your apps to the second screen of the phone, so nothing triggers an urge to use it, when you just open the phone.
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To each their own, but whether amazing professional athletes, or high performing entrepreneurs, anxiety is equally distributed.
In fact, the social stigma around it is only making it harder for people to share their feelings, leading to more anxiety.
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Number one, you should have a coach. Your health is number one. Professional athletes get coaches, and nutritionist, and so on to keep them going. It's important that founders approach their health with the same degree of importance.
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At the time when Uber was getting ready to launch. although friends with the founders, Dave was still very broke. He was focused on his job at Facebook and did not feel it was right to be diluting his attention to somewhere else.
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Dave Morin told Jason Calacanis on Angel that an angel has to make yes the default. Saying yes risks a sum you can name, on the order of $25,000 to $100,000. Saying no hides the loss. The company you passed might have become a $100 million outcome, or a billion, and you will never book that number. He called the rule hard. It came up as he described 2008, when growth at his own company had gone flat and even half a car was more than he could afford. That is when yes feels impossible, and when the unknown cost of no is largest. Investors get enough second chances, he said, that complaining is a waste of the job.
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Dave Morin told Jason Calacanis on Angel that a startup eats every free hour, so you schedule life first. Struggling founders should book yoga or meditation for an hour or ninety minutes, cut sugar and alcohol, and eat more plants. A date night is not optional. At Sunrise, which he started with Columbia neuroscientist Rebecca Brachman, they funded phase 2 trials. Ketamine, including IV trials at Stanford for people who cannot get out of bed, can ease a crisis for weeks, he said, but only with a psychiatrist. Not at a rave, and not in a clinic run like dialysis. He pointed listeners to Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind.
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