Pivot · Jan 23, 2024

DeSantis Drops Out, Stock Market Soars, and Guest Aileen Lee

Automatic transcript of the end of the episode, from 41:50. Speakers are labeled by software and may contain errors. Highlighted passages are Scott’s predictions.

Scott Galloway · 41:50 Standing professional that is really good at what they do, but at the same time, is really inexpensive, and that's called an index and an ETF fund. So if you could get someone... You're not good at building your own home. What if you could find someone to build your home that was outstanding at building homes and was really cheap. That's called an index or an ETF fund. Don't buy a stock. Buy the market. And the temptation to believe that you're smarter than everybody and all of these... The financial industrial complex, which will teach you that this old looking guy or these... All these quant people in PhDs have some sort of special insight or they're investing in ESG, whatever it might be. Whatever whatever the branding is, they are ripping you off. They are ripping you off. So, anyways, my my recommendation on where to invest is just start investing and invest in index or ETF funds, you know, as to why. Kara Swisher · 42:39 That's the stock market. The economy... The housing market is still kind of all over the place because of the the interest rate, and the thirty year interest rate is at 6.6, higher than before the pandemic, obviously. Home prices are higher. But that's because I'm just talking to a friend of mine who's a very big realtor in DC, and she was saying there just isn't stock. People... It's in the middle area. She goes in the top area and the lesser... The the cheaper area, it's doing okay, but it's... There's no stock to sell. He... She said she didn't think people were as fixated on rates as they were. They don't wanna move because of that. You know? And and that's one of the issues is is is not having enough in the market to to to move it around. And she was thinking it was going to jump in the spring. She felt like people were just like, ugh. I feel... I'm I'm tired of waiting kinda thing or to move or to buy. But that's one area that's been sort of a laggard. — Predictions segment begins — Scott Galloway · 43:33 Yeah. One of my predictions from my 2024 deck is that housing is gonna boom, not price. What happened last year were sort of suspended that you had to spend the suspend the natural order because what we unintentionally did was created these unexplosive... You know, unexploded devices inside a home called a mortgage at two and a half percent where no one wanted to leave. That... Life is aggregating at the dam. What I mean by that? Death, divorce, disability, people having kids, people needing to move for a job, whatever it might be. All of that demand is building. And the moment I think interest rates get kinda below, the moment that people start dying and more housing stock comes available, the moment that some of the supply that's being constructed comes on the line, I think I think in q four, you had the lowest transaction in, like, decades. Kara Swisher · 44:21 That's what she was saying. Yeah. She said it's right in the middle. She said it's not at the high. It's not at the low. You know what I mean? Like, the apartments and things like that. But go ahead. Scott Galloway · 44:30 I I think you're gonna see back half of this year just a ton of people. I don't wanna say throw in the towel, but go, okay. Interest rates are below. You know, maybe I can pick up an... A mortgage with a five handle on it. We've been talking about moving home. We just had our third kid. Oh, did you hear the house down the street? Missus Robinson just died. There's a house. I just think that all of that life doesn't stop marching on. And when you think about housing, the biggest component in housing are life events, and those have not stopped the last year. They're just building up. Kara Swisher · 45:03 Which is why prices are are higher. Scott Galloway · 45:05 Are higher. Yeah. But you're seeing wages go up. You're seeing interest rates come down, and life continues to march on. I think we're gonna see an absolute boom in sales volume end of the year. — Predictions segment ends — Kara Swisher · 45:15 Yeah. It'll be interesting to see if the economy helps Biden. I think people... It may be perfect timing for him. I'll tell you that. We'll see. We'll see. Anyway, very exciting times, and and I think it is booming down. But let's bring in our friend in Pivot to talk investing is going. Aileen Lee is the founder and managing partner of Cowboy Ventures, a seed staged VC fund ten years ago. She famously coined the term unicorn, referring to VC backed startups with billion dollar valuations. She's now assessing what's happened since then and also looking at the newest unicorns in a TechCrunch piece titled Welcome Back to the Unicorn Club ten Years Later. And also, I really like Aileen. She's in my book that's coming up where I have a chapter of people I like. It's a very short chapter in Silicon Valley. You are mentioned in it very briefly. Honored. It's fine. So it's also... You're one of the few women VCs, prominent ones. Too few. Too few. But... And you worked at Kleiner Perkins, but a lot has happened since you first came up with the unicorn concept. I wanna know what jumped out of you as the biggest change from ten years ago. The number of unicorns has ballooned in the last decade going from 39 to 532, as you note. But first, say why you picked that again to remind people, and then what was the biggest change? Guest · 46:33 Yeah. First of all, thanks for having me. I'm a frequent listener, so it's fun to be on. Okay. So 2013, I had a pretty new fund. I was just getting started, didn't have a lot of portfolio companies, and so I was trying to think. And seed, there's not a lot of... There's no... These are unknown companies. They're off the radar. You know? More than half the time when we're investing, the people need the money to start the company. So no one's heard of them before. And so I basically said, let me just... If I had started ten years earlier, what are the best companies I could have invested in? And start making that list and then figure out, like, how would I have met them? Where did they go to school? What did they do before? Where did they work? Did they pivot? You know, how much did they raise? How would I have found them? Kara Swisher · 47:12 You're you're talking about sourcing, which is how VC... That's the key part of really good Right. Guest · 47:16 Yeah. Kara Swisher · 47:16 Nature. Right? Guest · 47:17 Correct. And also, yeah, just what lessons learned. Right? So basically came up with a list of 39 companies that had... That were less than ten years old and had basically grown to be worth over $1,000,000,000 in public or private markets, which... And just US because we just invest in The US. And so it's a different kind of definition than I think some of the unicorn lists you'll see out there where they basically track every company that's ever been started, and, our definition is for companies that are less than ten years old. So we found 39. And at the time, they were mostly consumer. They mostly had exited. They mostly had gone public or been bought. And, you know, Facebook, now Meta, was the big one at the time, and there's also a lot of commerce companies like Groupon and Gilt. And then, basically, the term went up taking off in a way that I didn't really expect. Kara Swisher · 48:07 Why'd you pick unicorn? Guest · 48:08 You know, it's funny. I, in writing the piece... Because there was a lot of analysis. And using the definition over and over again, like, you know, a company that's less than ten years old and had been... Had grown to be worth over $1,000,000,000. It's just a really annoying thing to have to write or read over and over again in a piece. So I tried to come up with a shortener, like home run, monster hit, and substituting it in unicorn made it so much more fun to read, but it also captured something that I wanted it to, which is that it's special. You know, it's rare. It's a little magical. Like, have to have timing and luck and a bunch of other things. Kara Swisher · 48:42 Alright. So now to fast forward. Guest · 48:45 So ten years later, we basically rebuilt the dataset, and we have grown from 39 to 532. So it's 14 x more. The pendulum shifted massively from being basically 80% of the value in the list was consumer ten years ago. It's 80% enterprise now. And enterprise companies, basically, you know, the list grew 14 x. Enterprise companies, I think, grew 26 x in terms of the number of companies. But then when you kinda look under the hood, you realize that 93 versus 66% having exited ten years ago, 93% of them are what we call paper corns, which is they are on paper only. They are still privately valued. And 60% of them are what we are calling Zerpicorns, where they basically raised their last round during the time when interest rates were basically zero. So twenty twenty ish, 2021. And so we basically... And also... So then when you look at how many of them are paper corns, how many are Zerba corns, over... Almost half of them are trading at below a billion dollar valuation in in the secondary markets. So we basically did a lot of triangulation. We said, okay. This this dataset of 532 is probably gonna shrink. You know? Because a lot of these companies are running out of runway. They raised in twenty twenty, twenty twenty one when valuations were... And public market valuations were really high, and they are burning through their cash and trying... A lot of them... There are a lot of quality companies in this batch. So we think the batch will probably shrink to about 350, and so this set will get smaller. And the other thing that we noticed is capital efficiency really tanked. So one of the positives of the 2013 batch was enterprise companies had 26 x capital efficiency. So they were worth 26 times what they had raised. The capital efficiency got a lot worse. Consumer... And they were two and a half times more capital efficient than consumer companies in 2013. This batch, across the board, whether you're a consumer enterprise, the capital efficiency on average is seven x, which is a big decrease. And if you look at how much companies like Apple or Microsoft or Salesforce have grown in the past ten years, would have been better off investing in the public markets than a lot of these companies. Kara Swisher · 51:03 But AI changed the unicorn game. You said there's also... OpenAI looks to the first super unicorn or super corn. Guest · 51:08 Super corn. So we... In the first analysis, we coined this term super unicorn, which is a company that becomes worth over 100,000,000,000 Kara Swisher · 51:15 Which would have been Facebook in that group. Guest · 51:17 Yep. Facebook was... And Facebook did it within ten years, which is pretty, unusual. But companies like Cisco or Intel, like other companies that basically kind of represent big important new waves of innovation wind up becoming these mega unicorns. So it looks like OpenAI. And also in the first batch, we only had one meta, but then three more became super unicorns over time. So OpenAI looks like it's gonna be the first one, but I think there will be many. Scott Galloway · 51:44 So really nice to meet you. I have a snarky question that's more of a comment than a question. Because just you... Listening to you speak, I had inspired three or four questions. But with respect to you were talking about your analysis around how to generate deal flow and target in on the right individuals and the right concepts, 1,700 freshmen at Stanford, 1,500 at Harvard, so so 3,200. 40% are male, so that's 1,280. 50% are white, so that's 640. Wouldn't the smartest means of establishing deal flow would just be to maintain relationships with the 640 white men from Stanford and Harvard that graduate every year? Isn't that where Guest · 52:23 about It's funny. Scott Galloway · 52:24 Isn't that where about 80% of all venture capital goes to those 640 people? Guest · 52:28 No. Not anymore. Actually, that's what's... That was, like, I would say one of the positive things that came out of the new analysis was that, yes, in 2013, a high percentage of the people went to what we call, like, top 10 schools, and a high percentage of them were technical. So as they studied computer science, that has changed a ton. So in the new analysis, I think, basically no school like Stanford that had... Stanford had the most market share of the founder set, which also went from a 100 people to 1,300 people, but it had 5% market share. So there was kind of a... There has been, it looks like, a democratization of where people went to school. Scott Galloway · 53:05 Is this the number of concepts or actual capital allocated? Guest · 53:08 Oh, no. This is in the number of the... Where the founders went to school. So if you look across the 1,300 founders Scott Galloway · 53:13 Okay. Guest · 53:13 They they they grew up in all different kinds of places. The... Actually, most of them were not technical in terms of what they studied. So... And also, they're in different geos. So in 2013, 70% of the unicorn companies were in San Francisco, and San Francisco lost market share. They're down down... It's down to 45%. New York is almost 20%. Wow. So it's almost Boston, LA, Austin, Denver, San Diego. Kara Swisher · 53:39 Which is what we thought would happen. But you did note that in terms of gender representation, you said more... There are more founders named Michael, David, and Andrew than there are women unicorn CEOs. At this rate, we won't reach gender representation until 2063 when we'll all be dead, by the way. But go ahead. Guest · 53:54 I... I'm hoping that the democratization of schools and backgrounds is the leading indicator and that gender will follow because that's definitely an area we... I would love to see more progress. Scott Galloway · 54:04 I read that 80% of all capital allocated from the venture community last year was into AI or AI related startups. Do you think there's a bubble in AI in terms of valuations in the in the venture market? Guest · 54:17 There is... I think there's gonna be a lot of change in in the next decade. I do think... What's that phrase? Like, you know, how there's... People talk about trends like long... Short term overhyped and long term underhyped? I do think that that might be the case in AI. Like, there's no question in my mind that AI is gonna be kind of under the hood of all the software we buy in the coming decades. But kinda who is building that software and short term winners versus long term winners, I think is gonna be very In the analysis, one of the things that caused this huge run up in unicorns is just how much more money went into venture capital. Funds got really big, and and they raised a lot faster than they ever have before. So they've got all this dry powder. And instead of chasing recaps, they are putting it into the new hotness. Kara Swisher · 55:06 Into the new hotness. So what what are some other sectors outside of AI where there's the most successful unicorns? What are you seeing? Obviously, enterprise is one. And... But so consumer is not as represented? Guest · 55:16 Not as represented. But we... You know, the first set was pretty, like, one size fits all products, like, you know, meta or a Workday or ServiceNow. The thing that we saw in the new set is we basically created 19 different sectors, like climate or health care or mobility or logistics. And there are now unicorns in all these different sectors. So it's kind of like tech is spreading out across all these... Learning tech, ed tech, like all these different sectors of society that that didn't exist ten years ago, which I think is pretty exciting. Kara Swisher · 55:53 Is there one that sticks out for you? Guest · 55:56 I mean, I was just kind of amazed. Like, I mean, some of it I think is a reflection of kind of free capital in this zerp period. But, you know, you've got unicorns. Like, there's a a unicorn that, sells software to parking garages to, like, map... You know, manage whether there's spots and utilization and stuff like that. So it's like there's companies that are being built at all kind of sectors. Scott Galloway · 56:17 My understanding is that the majority of returns are not only aggregated to the small number of firms, but a small number of people at those firms. That is... Am I overstating it? When we talk about income inequality Guest · 56:30 I think it's changed a lot. I mean, there's so many more firms now that, you know, it's funny when I... Kara mentioned I used to work at Kleiner, and, one of the Kleiner founders talked about the first fund. He said, basically, they made a bunch of investments and it wound up being like two peaches in a bucket of piss. Like, you know, you you basically put together a portfolio. You invest in, let's say, 20, 30 companies, and one or two of them winds up being an outlier that returns the fund or generates multiples of the fund. And I think there are so many funds. I don't think it's super concentrated anymore. It's really quite spread out where you... You're... There's gonna be a lot of funds that are pretty under the radar that wind up having... And a lot of it also is, you know, your fund size is your strategy. So depending on how big your fund is, it's gonna have a big impact on returns. Scott Galloway · 57:17 And the funds have gotten so enormous. I mean, it just strikes me that... I think I've read that General Callis is raising a $6,000,000,000 fund. I mean, that I would imagine that the ideal scenario is they want companies that would, at some point, will be very capital hungry. What is that... Do you think that's driven driven down returns, the the the impetus to put together or put to work so much capital? I mean, isn't isn't it... And then my follow on question is, one is the the torrent of capital that's coming to venture, it just seems logical it would push down returns. And two, and this is anecdotal, but it doesn't mean it's not true. I'm now getting more calls from people, trying to raise money or sell their stakes in companies vis a vis secondary as opposed to, finding fresh capital. So has capital pushed down returns, and what are your thoughts on the secondary market on these, venture backed companies? Guest · 58:18 Yeah. I think when you go beyond a billion dollars and you're managing billions of dollars, you... It's just a different business, and I think the return expectations are gonna be different. It's a different LP. Right? You've got big pensions, big sovereigns that wanna have allocation across asset classes. They wanna be in venture, but they have big checks to park. Right? They wanna park a $100,000,000, $200,000,000. Like, our whole... Our... We're a seed fund, so we're focused on a more curated strategy, investing early and generating high returns. So our fund is a $140,000,000. But if you've got a $2,000,000,000 fund, you know, when you just do the math on what's... You know, what kind of return you can generate and how many 5 or $10,000,000,000 companies are gonna be, it's just... I think it's a different return profile. But it's a different LPS think about it differently. Kara Swisher · 59:05 Yeah. So as... But in your... From your seed perspective as the head of a firm, because you went off on your own, when you looked at your analysis, where do you think about putting your money? Where do you find... Because you were in a lot of consumer. You were for a while, and you've done a lot of different things. Where do you think the opportunities are from your perspective? Guest · 59:24 Yeah. I mean, the... When you look at the companies that we've invested in that are doing the best, a lot of them are kind of what we call category creators. So its founders had an idea in a market that didn't really exist or people didn't think was a big market. I don't know if you've spent time with Guild based in Denver. It's an upscaling company that partners with enterprises to help hourly workers get an education and get skills so that they can have career evolution to a higher paying job. What they do didn't exist. There was no competition, and it was a wide open market. But there's a lot of questions about whether there was a big enough market and whether enterprises would adopt it. And it's it's going great. We're really proud and happy to... Because it's also kind of a double bottom line company where it's actually... It's good for society, and and it can be a great business. We were investors in a company called Drada in San Diego. Two brothers who didn't work in traditional tech companies, didn't work in security, and they had an idea for a better mousetrap, and they were a third or fourth player in a in a space. And they're... What they're doing at Drata is amazing, and customers love the product. But it's Kara Swisher · 1:00:34 What does that do? What what does it do? Guest · 1:00:36 They are bay... It basically builds a security and compliance platform to help enterprises get SOC two compliance or v g d... GDPR compliant or HIPAA compliant, things like that, and it didn't really exist. Like, I kind of a real time, compliance platform. They had an idea for a a new paradigm that people weren't doing it that way. Kara Swisher · 1:00:56 And what do you... What... When you when you look at things, what are you most worried about? What is the ones you're like, ugh, god. This is a problem. Guest · 1:01:03 And, actually, I just wanna go back to the... When you think about some of the companies that are most valuable today, even the consumer space that a lot of people can relate to, like Airbnb and Uber. Right? Like, no one had a shopping list for I want to invest in a company where people are renting out their couches. You know? And so I think that's what's really exciting is that you... Being open for business, meeting founders who have these, like, what seem like crazy ideas, and they wind up being huge businesses. Scott Galloway · 1:01:25 I remember when I was raising money in the nineties, and I think that's why some of my questions are probably a bit, I don't know, outdated, if you will. But I remember thinking it'd be so great to be a venture capitalist that there's just there's just more these these guys, and it was almost always guys, always win or or figure out a way to always win, and it's just so hard to start a company. I think it's entirely flipped. And I'm curious if you Guest · 1:01:49 It has. Scott Galloway · 1:01:50 The the power dynamic and the leverage. Like, you you weren't allowed to do secondary sales when I was an entrepreneur. Now now they use it as a means of differentiating their offer. They're like, we'll give you $5,000,000 to take off the table. Anyway, I get the sense, and this is... I'm giving... I'm kinda giving you a softball here. I don't think there's ever been a better time to start a company. I Guest · 1:02:08 I I totally agree. Scott Galloway · 1:02:10 Yeah. Capital. Kara Swisher · 1:02:10 I mean Scott Galloway · 1:02:11 If you're in St. Louis, it doesn't matter where you are. With the cloud, you can make... You can get to letter m for what it used to cost to get to letter b. If you get any traction, a VC will find you. I I... Make the case or tell me tell me... Validate my thesis. There's never been a better time to be an entrepreneur in America. Guest · 1:02:29 Yeah. I mean, also, if you look historically at the numbers, some of the biggest, most successful companies were starting during downturns. Scott Galloway · 1:02:36 Yeah. 100%. Guest · 1:02:37 The... You know, it's just that, you know, the scrappiness, the grit. People know it's not... It's gonna be a long game. It's a marathon. Scott Galloway · 1:02:43 Everything's cheaper. It's easier to build a company. Guest · 1:02:45 Well, I mean, money is not as cheap as it was three years ago. Scott Galloway · 1:02:48 No. What I mean is office space and people. Guest · 1:02:50 Oh, yeah. Totally. And people can be anywhere. So I totally agree. I think... And Ventura has changed a lot. You know, we... I'm part of a nonprofit called AllRays where we're, trying to change the composition and culture of the Ventura industry. And we've made some progress. Have a long way to go. When we started, women were 8% of the industry and 75% of firms had not a single female partner. Now we've almost doubled it. We're almost at 16% women, but still that sucks. So we got a long way to go. But it's changed. I think just the... There's a lot more specialists now. So if you do dev tools or enterprise infrastructure or commerce, like there are funds that just focus on what... You know, crypto, web three versus before... You're right, Scott. Like, every... When I when I worked at Kleiner, they said, hey. Your job is to do great diligence and help with post investment support. Sourcing is not part of your job because we see everything. You're not gonna get promoted for sourcing something because we we get it all. And that's not the case anymore. Kara Swisher · 1:03:54 Alright. So I have a last question for you, Aileen. If you were starting now, you know, you've been through the big firms, the small firms, what would you do right now? Guest · 1:04:02 Okay. I think a lot of people started companies because it seemed like a cool thing to do. And the people need to know, like, you know, things... Economies go in cycles. And, you know, that's funny. I used to work in the fashion business. There's lot more in common with the fashion business and tech cycles and economic cycles than I think people realize. But, you know, in the past five years, there was so much software, especially in enterprise, that we were in this best of breed zone where people could find an app that they thought was gonna make their job more effective and then bring it in house. And so then before you knew it, you had 500 or 600 different software packages inside an enterprise. And given what's happened in the economy and public market valuations and multiples, everyone's more focused on margins and budgets and security. So CFOs and CIOs and heads of engineering and CTOs are saying, hey. We need to shrink the number of people that are inside our our walls. Need to tighten up security. We need to tighten up budgets. So they're they're cutting... Budgets are tight right now for enterprise software. And so selling something new is tough. There's a lot more headwinds than there were three or four years ago. And so founders, if they have an idea and they know that they can deliver quick value, whether it's to a consumer or to an enterprise, because I think the bar is higher now. But I... Like Scott said, I think it's an amazing time in general. Like, you know, we we also looked at this thing that we call, like, the software power law, where even though we think this herd's gonna shrink, I think given how much investment's going into chips and in compute and in storage, they're... That's just gonna grow. And as a result, people are gonna be able to build more and more powerful capable software, and we're gonna have more exciting software companies in the future. Kara Swisher · 1:05:46 Oh, perfect. Alright, Aileen. Thank you. We gotta go, but you are the original unicorn. Scott Galloway · 1:05:50 Thanks, Aileen. Kara Swisher · 1:05:51 Yeah. Unicorn lad. And I wanna... You have to get credit. It was... It's been a huge term. It's been really important. Even though some things can be reductive, I thought this one was enduring. Oh, thank ten year anniversary. Scott Galloway · 1:06:02 Thank Guest · 1:06:02 you. Thanks for having on. Kara Swisher · 1:06:03 Thanks thanks, Eileen. Thanks so much. Alright, Scott. Don't you like her? She's so smart. Scott Galloway · 1:06:07 Very impressive. Kara Swisher · 1:06:08 Alright. One more quick break. We'll be back for wins and fails. [Ad break] Kara Swisher · 1:07:50 Okay, Scott. Let's hear some wins and fails. I'm gonna start with my win. I saw... I'm I'm interviewing Ava DuVernay, who I love. She's a great director. I've loved all her work. She has a movie called Origins Out that is about Isabel Wilkerson, who I interviewed at the New York Times, who wrote the book Cast, which is it removes racism from the discussions about why certain groups are pushed down by others. And it... She she made this amazing connection between the caste system in India, the Nazis in Germany, and the American South that I thought was just brilliant because she removed race from it, and she's talking about the caste system and all the different pillars of it, including controlling marriage, including inherent superiority. And it it really start. Nobody thought she could do it, and she's this Pulitzer Prize winner, a brilliant woman. And then and then Ava's done a movie about this very difficult and sometimes academic, you know, very thinky book that is wonderful because it's about Isabelle and her life and her family and her mother and her husband and and and this journey of this book. And I got it to... And they... She uses a documentary style, very up close. She takes a very difficult issue and makes it into the most wonderful of movies. And at the end, which was one thing speaking of women investors, all of a sudden on the screen, Ann Wojcicki's foundation, Lorraine Powell Jobs, and Melinda Gates are producers, which means they funded some of it. And I was like, what? I had no idea they were in it. So I was like, wow. This is amazing. It is... I am so excited to interview Ava, and it is... I I have to tell you, it is so... Such a good movie. I loved Mean Girls. I loved American fiction also, as I said, all these great movies. But this one is... I couldn't believe... I... At the end, I was turned to a man. I'm like, she pulled that off. I did not think she could pull it off. It's a it's a heartfelt movie about a very difficult issue around why we discriminate. And it was... I thought it it was... It it moved toward... Like, you were talking about solutions with people. It moved toward, let's think about this differently. And I really appreciated that from... You know, let's think about this in a more complex way. Maybe it's not just racism. Maybe it's something else that is... Racism can be part of it in certain areas that explains how we how we bring... Push people down. And last thing I'll say is there's some very difficult scenes, especially around racism that are... This little kid in a pool in Georgia... I think it's Georgia, is just so upsetting, as well as showing showing some... The way she shows the middle passage was so devastating and yet not... There wasn't a lot of it, but there was... It was it was an astonishing display of directorial skill. One of the things that it ends on, and this is a... This is not a new fresh thing, is she she somehow makes it into a metaphor about this house that's in the book too. And she says, let's not talk about how the house got this way. Let's... That's what we do a lot. Like, saying I didn't do slavery, I didn't do Nazism, I didn't do the caste system in India. Let's not talk about how the house got here, but what we're gonna do with it now. Now it's your house, so what are we... Let's not talk about who did this. We have the cracks. What are we gonna do about it? Amazing movie. Amazing movie. And the fail, of course, was Ron DeSantis. What a fail. Starting from the Twitter thing, just a terrible, terrible candidate. Deserved fail. Deserved fail. And and Donald Trump in the in the courtroom, the way he's behaving is just astonishing that he's not in jail right now for contempt. But go ahead. Scott Galloway · 1:11:37 I'll draft off your win. I liked it. My fail is... And I'm trying to put a lesson in here. DeSantis' speech where he suspended or announced he was suspending his campaign, I think there's a lesson in there, and that is people remember how you leave. You can spend ten years working at a company. You can do an outstanding job, and 51% of your brand and how people remember you is how you behave after you've decided you're leaving. And you should always absolutely resist the temptation to, you know, stick up the middle finger on the way out. You should be gracious. You should thank everybody. I mean, if they've treated you really poorly, you should lawyer up. But other than that, you need to on the side of grace and generosity. People remember how you leave, how you end a relationship. It might not be working out. You may not feel like you were treated very well, but you on the side of grace. And when he gave his speech, if he wants to endorse Trump, that's fine. Where he really blew it and what he should have done, and I'll I'll get to each of those. He said, I'm not... You know, and I don't... I'm worried about Nikki Haley's reheated corporate governance... Govern... Govern... Kara Swisher · 1:12:41 He can't stop. Scott Galloway · 1:12:42 He shitposted another Republican governor, and his brand has actually gone down. Most presidential runs enhance a person's brand just because of awareness. I mean, it was worth it for Vivek Voramoswani to run for president. Similar to Andrew Yang, he's now kind of a public figure, and he'll have influence. Where imagine... I mean, these people are just so poorly advised. Imagine if governor DeSantis had said, you know what? First, I'm gonna call out Vivek Ramaswani for injecting new ideas into the race. You know, what an impressive young man, but we haven't seen the last of him. Chris Christie says it how he, you know, says... You know, calls it as he sees it, injected an interesting voice into the campaign. And if he had said, and what a great race the the, you know, the former governor and ambassador Haley has run, I wish her the best, and I look forward to working with her. He would have burnished his brand and potentially set himself up for more success in Florida. Kara Swisher · 1:13:40 It wasn't his adviser, Scott. It was him. This is him. He has shitty advisers. Let me just say, his PR person is one of the most unpleasant. Scott Galloway · 1:13:47 Supposedly, it's... Supposedly, his adviser is his wife. Kara Swisher · 1:13:50 Yeah. I understand. But all... Everyone around him is so unkind, ungenerous, unpleasant, and really shits. Scott Galloway · 1:13:56 This is my lesson to young people. It is so easy to give into your instincts to take... Now that you have nothing to lose, to speak your mind and go after people and jab them. Don't. Don't. Real grace real grace is being magnanimous, generous. And if he had done that, it would have gone viral. It would have been everywhere, and everyone would have thought, you know what? Maybe I'll give that guy another look. Instead, he cemented his brand as an asshole. And every president that's won, maybe with the exception of Nixon, has a certain charisma or likability to them. And this was an enormous opportunity to to to be... To counter the image that people have of him on the negative side. Kara Swisher · 1:14:43 I would say yes. Anyway Be likable. Scott Galloway · 1:14:45 That's my Kara Swisher · 1:14:45 That's a good one. Scott Galloway · 1:14:46 That's my fail. Kara Swisher · 1:14:47 That's a good one. Alright. I'm glad that you dropped my mind. Again, see Origins. You should see it, Scott. You would love it. I'd love to know what you think too. Anyway, thank you so much. What a very full and rich show. And, again, we wanna thank all our questioners from last week's, all our audience who came and did questions for us in our call in. We love that. We got great reviews for it, and we're gonna do it again. But what a smart group of people listening to this show, and we really appreciate that. We wanna hear from you, as we said. Send us your questions about business tech or whatever's on your mind. Go to nymag.com/pivot to submit a question for the show, or call 85551 Scott, that's the show and a fantastic cuddly show it is. We'll be back on Friday for more. Read us out. Scott Galloway · 1:15:28 Today's show was produced by Lara Nayman, Zoe Marcus, and Taylor Griffin. Ernie Injotat engineered this episode. Thanks also to Drew Boros and Mils Severio. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media. You can subscribe to the magazine at nymag.com/pod. We'll be back later this week for another breakdown of all things tech and business care. Have a great rest of the week. [Ad break] Scott Galloway · 1:16:49 tomorrow Guest · 1:16:49 online Scott Galloway · 1:16:49 for details.