Alexa Binns 00:02
Officer of Primativa Global, a family office that’s investing in AI deep tech and early stage ventures. She’s trained, she’s trained as a physicist from Cambridge. She’s a software engineer, she’s been an equity research analyst, and she’s been a teacher operator in startups. So this woman has seen things from every point of view. She shares with us today her unique investing approach having a foot in both Silicon Valley, Hong Kong and Shanghai. She also shares with us her impossible triangle theory on AI progress, which is fascinating, and the patterns that she’s found in her best emerging managers. Welcome J

we start at the very beginning of this family office. Your mom was a web 1.0 entrepreneur in the 1990s How did that shape your world view?

Jay Rongjie Wang 01:19
Yeah, so, like, obviously, super proud of my mom as a woman. I think the first thing that was special was her courage. Because before she started her first company, she was working for an oil company, you know, those large conglomerates, super stable jobs. You could retire from it, and then you can, there’s only one way your position can go, which is up. And by that time, she was already a very capable engineer and an executive. She built, you know, prior to her first tech venture, she built a port, essentially in Shanghai. She was the, would you call it, the overall project manager for that project, but still, I think at the time, everybody told her not to do it. Everybody was like, first of all, nobody understood tech. It was a year when none of my classmates had a personal computer at home. And she was like, I’m going to go build a tech business. And so obviously, very few people would understand what it was. People would think that is totally crazy, and especially in context of what she already had, you know, she just finished a great project. She was probably about to be promoted, and then she probably had, you know, she, there was so much to lose. And then back in the 90s, in Shanghai, you know, like you, your companies really take care of you. Like the house that we were living in was given by the company, right? They give you houses. They give you everything. So it’s so that the contrast made it, I think, you know, in irregular terms, pretty hard to make that jump, but she was so strong headed and determined that she did it anyway. So I think, like the lesson taken from there. I mean, obviously, just growing up with that energy and that, you know, sort of authenticity had a lot of influence, but retrospectively, you know, my mom and I still talk about it to this day, it’s like, it really, it really takes a lot of stubbornness to stay true to who you are, but it’s really worth it, and it pays to not listen to people. It pays to be contrarian. So I think that was the number one thing I observed from my mother. I think growing up with that also had a very concrete implication of how I experienced childhood and life as well. When I was somewhere around 1112 years old, because my mom was doing what she was doing, I ended up spending a lot of time playing computer games, mm, RPG. And what that meant is that, like, I was the only child probably in the game, and then you would interact a lot with people from, you know, all walks of life. And same thing, my mom taught me how to build personal websites at the time. It was very archaic technology from today’s perspective, but I built what I did. I did not only build my own website and made a lot of friends from it, but I just became the go to person for website building, like, for my for, like, Anime Club of my school, and like, reading club from my school newspaper of the school. So because I was the only one who knows how to do it and actually, like, take a site online.

Earnest Sweat 09:11
clearly your mom’s influence as an entrepreneur on your life has had an impact on life, increasing creativity and community for you. But curious how impact of like your association with risk, because you meet a lot of entrepreneurs like kids who had entrepreneur parents. It can go either way on how they feel about race, so curious on how it impacted your life.

Jay Rongjie Wang 09:51
I think for me, it was a very humbling experience actually growing up with that because you. The best product at the time, you know, was the kids community website. It was, it was so well run. It was run by a bunch of people who love kids, and they make it so colorful and native for, for the kids. You know, people say, like an AI native these days. But that website was a kid’s native and but it didn’t survive. So, you know, that’s the number one best product. Doesn’t make it a best startup. And so I think it just makes me, like, Uber aware of how challenging it was to succeed and how many components I didn’t have. I actually don’t know the cause of it, like, I don’t know if it’s being a girl, being, you know, East Asian, or it’s just being me. I don’t know if it’s genetic. But like i i tend to focus on what I don’t yet have, and don’t yet know it, as you can imagine, it can be advice a lot of the times, but as a result, like a lot of my early career, I would say, especially those like personal choices and in the first 10 years of my career, was around maximizing my chance of success instead of actually going to try and success. Succeed. So as an example, I figured, I mean, again, it was just so deeply ingrained that when I was a teenager, I already knew every time every company was going to be a tech company, every single company. So I was like, Okay, if my aspiration is to be a business owner and found my own company. I need to do software engineering, a software software engineer like I needed to understand how code works. I needed to understand how computers work and systems work. Which was what motivated me to take my graduate job right, right out of college, to be a software engineer, a software engineer, and then, and I was like, okay, that’s like, one of the many components. I was like, another component was, in order to run a good business, you need to understand, like, you need to be able to tell good businesses from bad businesses. You need to understand the constituents, components of a good business. And that’s why I kind of did a very hard pivot from software engineering to equity research for investment funds and then I was like, Okay, it’s not enough to just intellectually understand good businesses from bad businesses from an analytical perspective. Because as equity research, researcher, equity analyst, see you, you talk about margin expansion, or, you know, like, revenue expansion, and then, and I was very curious, okay, like, if you project yourself, you know, to the CEO of like Airbus, or whoever you’re, like, Okay, what do I exactly need to do to make that margin expansion. So I mean, I mean that that’s why I figured, like, Okay, I just need to do it. And that’s why I, again, made a very harsh pivot into the startup world and became a product person and a growth person, an operation person. And then, and then, and then lastly, I was like, Okay, it’s not just enough to understand, like software, like, I need to see how goods are built and shipped, which was why I kind of wrapped up that journey with a stint managing a hardware company. So as you can see, like, it’s just this sense of not being ready, and again, like, I don’t know what it is. I think, statistically speaking, being a female has a little bit to do with it. I had this so, you know, I was a physicist at Cambridge, and then I was talking to there are girls colleges in Cambridge. So they’re like 30 something colleges, and then most of them are co Ed, but then they’re girls colleges, and each college would have a Director of Studies. And then I was talking to the director of studies of Muriel Edward, which was a Girls College at Cambridge. So he’s a, you know, he’s a star physicist, but he’s a man, right? So I was like, over your career, what do you notice about the girl physicists and the boy physicists? And he said that, like, girls never feel ready before an exam until she is 120% prepared. Wow. I mean, again, it’s over generalization, but that’s what he shared, and that is so true. So before the exam, when you talk to the voice, like, okay, like, how’s it going, right? Like, how, you know, how, how’s the state going, and they’ll be like, yeah, like, you know, I kind of got it. Like, if they’re like, 70% Prepared, they will feel 70% prepared. You talk to a girl, right? If they’re 70% prepared, they feel they’re 0% prepared. They’re like, Oh my god, I’m gonna fail the exam. So So I think like this over prepared kind of certainly carries into my career choices a lot, and now I understand, right, like the alternative approach is to do and fail a bunch and learn all the way and until you succeed, instead of, you know, almost trying to create a 10 year boot camp for you to prepare for your success.

Earnest Sweat 21:36
Where do I go from there? Hot Seat question, everyone, everyone name their most hated sign go, no joking. So Jay, you talked about these life patterns, and as you know, at your firm, you do both directs and invest in funds, funds as well, for the fund managers, what traits have you seen that really indicate not only a fit for you or somebody to partner with, but someone you believe is going to produce alpha?

Jay Rongjie Wang 22:15
There’s the metaphysical answer and there’s the practical answer.

Jay Rongjie Wang 22:25
I think the metaphysical one, I look for congruence. I think because the business model of VC is very undifferentiated from each other, relatively speaking, compared to other industries, right? The product is very similar, the way you make money, the pricing, its commodities, the business model itself that creates a commodity. So then, especially in our world, with emergent VCs, emergent and a lot of them are so low GPS, it really is a person that I yeah, I believe that congruent people are more likely, or had a higher probability, of producing outstanding results. What that means is that there’s more than one way to win in anything, in investing, in sports, in business building, but you just need to be very truthful to yourself, the way you approach business, the way you hire, the way you set your vision, the product that you Make, the kind of things. So in the context of emerging GPS, like the kind of things that we invest, are you a people person, or are you a tech person? If you’re you know, if your energy naturally goes toward reading people, then, does that? Does your underwriting process and what you say reflect that, if you make up your mind relatively quickly and binary about people, does your process, does your process stay truthful to that? So I think it is true on so many levels, by the way, like we, you know, we look at large organizations with 10s of 1000s of people, and they are producing similar things, and why some of them succeed and some of them fail. Think what we call like those, organizational congruence is also very important. For example, people debate like, what’s the right culture? Right? What’s the right culture is it like creativity, high trust, like non hierarchical versus dictatorial, like one boss says everything, and like strict or rule based process? Co. Come out, work at come and work on time. Like, which one’s better, right? You would see outstanding results produced by both set of beliefs. But then the question is, does everything else work with it, are you congruent? So for example, the product that you make, the industry you’re in, the leadership, personalities, the pay that you give people, do they? Do they match these different sets of beliefs? And are they pointing in the same direction? And it’s the same thing. I’m using an analogy there, but I like the same thing with the GPS. It’s like, does that? Does your portfolio construction and the way you source, the way you underwrite your LP base, all point to the direction which is the easiest for you to execute as an individual, because it’s just such an uphill battle to pretend to be who you are not.
Alexa Binns 26:47
There’s an element of flow there. Exactly. There was a cool congruence. Is such an awesome term. We haven’t, nobody has mentioned that at all, in terms of what they look for in GP today, which is so cool, Charles Hudson just did a piece. That was on how, in instructing his chat, GPT, he has had to have these conversations with himself that are reflective, like in order to give clear instructions to have his own AI trained on how he thinks he’s having to become more familiar with how he thinks, yeah. And so he realized some of the things he’s been saying about what he thinks and does yeah aren’t actually what he’s doing. Yeah. Fascinating. Yeah. So what cool should you be looking to try to hone your own pitch and get better at congruence. I think some of those working on AI Ops are weird, like a helpful tool to do that.

Jay Rongjie Wang 27:50
Yeah, that’s a very good tip.

Alexa Binns 27:52
Okay, you said the metaphysical and then you said, there, you know, there’s sort of two plant planes on which you are viewing GPS. What’s the practical sort of Cliff Notes?

Earnest Sweat 28:06
Yeah? Because, because that metaphysical DDQ looks, I’m just envisioning it. It looks intense, yeah.

Jay Rongjie Wang 28:14
So this one, so this is the trick, right? You don’t ask about it directly. You, you, you look for, okay, so this is how we do it again, like this. This is where I think, like the metaphor, the metaphysical level, like I, I stand behind firmly. I think this is almost universally true. And I would be very interested to find a conquered example, if anybody has one, but I think on the practical level, again, because congruence, like it applies to such a wide range of things, I think it’s very hard for me to say, like, Okay, this is what you look for. But, but I can, I can share kind of the framework that I used to look for Congress and, and, and, and, you know, then different different ways that people demonstrate congruence can pop up along the way. So like the first conversation, we always look for what we call winning energy. And internally we call it like this winner test, actually, and again, that can manifest itself in very different ways. If you look at our portfolio funds, there are GPs who present themselves very aggressively, and there are GPs who are just Zen, like totally Zen, with, with, with very few words so to speak. So again, like winners, I think this is another thing I appreciate about life, is that winners can take many different shapes or forms hard to articulate, but for people who have the energy, I think by the end of the second. Conversation, we usually have an investment thesis already. We usually have an explanation to if this person were to weigh why, okay, like, you know, it’s not, it’s not, oh, sourcing advantage. Or it’s not, it’s actually not those, like regular VC narratives, but we look for something specific about this person that can explain the final victory of him or her. And then the rest of the three to six months and is kind of looking for affirmation to that theory. We have a theory already, and then, and then we look for affirmation. And then this is where, usually the GP opens up the database. Then we look at the sort of data room, and then, and then we look at the memos, the the investment schedule, and then try to see if it challenges our theory, or does it affirms our theory. So for funds that demonstrate higher congruence, it’s actually easy to see affirmation, because this is they’re truthful to how they do business and why they believe they should win. And same thing with when it comes to References, which we do quite heavily as well, on list and off list again, usually the ones that leads to a very firm yes demonstrate, you know, every founder I talk to would tell me something about this GP that is congruent with the thesis that we already have about this. GP, yes, yeah, we

Alexa Binns 31:43
had a family dog that everyone would describe as handsome. Your dog is so Wow. And you’re like, why does that word just keep coming out of every stranger walking down the street? This is this. Why does every reference say this person is so, you know, committed, or whatever it is, the one like, they keep saying the same,

Jay Rongjie Wang 32:04
This is a good thing. And it means, like, every comment is pointing to the same, same direction, right? It means at least if there’s a page in or, you know, that he’s a very highly winner, right? Or, or if there’s like a dog for, like, love, at first sight, dog contact, then there, you know, then, then you know, like again. Another example might be, I just use a random like, maybe, maybe elk, because everybody knows what he’s like, right? If this is, this is the point like, there is no, there’s no right or wrong way to do business. But if your theory about him is that, you know, like, just his ruthlessness explains the success of just because he prioritizes everything right to pay it to him, the priority is very clear, right? Everything that propels my vision to this, like I do, everything else doesn’t matter. That doesn’t matter if it hurts or feelings, whatnot, and if you believe that is correlated to success, then it’s very easy to look for affirmation to that trait. Actually, everybody will tell you the same thing. Everybody who works with him would say something that was like, yep, that adds up. And then he’s just being honest to himself. He’s not trying to pretend to be nice or who he’s not, right? And there’s the added benefit of saving energy to produce success, because then you are not fighting that internal battle of pretending to be who you’re not.

Earnest Sweat 33:51
Now we’re going to take a quick break to speak with our sponsor.

Alexa Binns 33:55
Today. We have industry experts Iran net sir and Jason crop partners at Sibley are fast growing emerging companies and venture capital practice. Is there specific regulation that you all are tracking closely for your VC clients, that our audience should also be tracking?

Idan Netser 34:13
Ooh, so there’s, there’s one again that gets me excited. It relates somehow to tax, surprisingly, but the tax treatment of carried interest is capital gain versus ordinary income, has been in discussions for many, many years now, and there’s always a lot of pressure on whether or not carried interest will continue to be taxes capital again, that is a major, major issue and a huge incentive for funds to to be structured the way they are. The rules have changed a number of years ago, and there are new requirements, well, that are slightly getting older, but there are a few years in the play now, which means these folks need to hold their interest for a number of years before they can benefit from long term capital gain treatment. I would say, keep on track. Keep track. Keep tracking those developments. Because there’s, again, there is a lobby. Is out there trying to get that eliminated. We like that. Obviously, we think it’s a good incentive for funds and fund activities. So that’s one. And the second one is, as we mentioned, qualified Small Business stocks, which is a huge benefit from a federal tax standpoint, as well as some states which conform with federal and you can get essentially tax free distributions on earnings from small businesses and most of the startups that we deal with, at least at the beginning of their lives, qualify, right? So understanding Q’s base is absolutely crucial. And if you don’t know what that means or exactly how that plays, you should go and read some of the materials. There’s plenty of stuff out there. Read through it. So Q’s base is one of them. Not all companies qualify as Qs based, and that’s another thing to understand. So depending on the type of investments, I would urge GPS to try to steer their investments towards businesses that do qualify, just because that tax advantage is meaningful. But if they don’t, that’s okay, as long as you know it, as long as you understand that you’re getting into an investment that will not qualify in the

Alexa Binns 36:04
future. Yeah, I’ve definitely been put in that position where the founders legal team won’t tell you if it qualifies or not, and you’re like, well, that you did just tell me. Thank you. If you’re not writing something down in an email to confirm this, then I know the answer.

Idan Netser 36:22
So the market practice on this is for companies to make the determination and provide the assurance to their investors and, in fact, to their stockholders. Generally speaking, that includes employees as well, by a way of issuing what we call a determination letter that says, hey, you should know that, assuming nothing else happens, and you hold the shares for five years, those shares qualify for QPS, because that’s the only tax record that folks would have when they take the position on their individual tax returns. That is absolutely the market standard by now. It’s not an expensive thing for the company to do. It’s a good service to its stockholders, and there’s absolutely no reason not to do it, especially if you’re qualified.

Jason Kropp 37:03
On my end, you know what I do a fair bit of life science, is biotech and med device work. And so the changes at FDA over the last few months have been particularly notable for a number of the clients that I work with, and the investors in those clients. First of all, there’s a tremendous amount of expertise here at Sidley with respect to that world, and it’s one of the reasons that I came here recently. But, setting aside that expertise, it’s just notable that there’s a lot of uncertainty around drug pricing, around the ability to get through FDA processes and the like. What I’ve been hearing from colleagues here is that, fundamentally, the FDA is still open for business. The FDA is doing its job. Responses are coming back, but having an understanding of how the FDA thinks about things, and how the FDA will will deal with certain questions and how companies ought to be dealing with with inquiries from the FDA is more important than

Alexa Binns 37:59
ever. Thank you for joining us on the show. If you are an LP GP or founder interested in seeking Sidley’s expert advice, you can find each partner’s contact on Sidley’s website. And now back to our LP interview.

Earnest Sweat 38:15
You’re giving a lot of wisdom and Zen that I got in the first in our pre conversation, but I’m glad the audience is getting it too. And this idea of like congruence, I think, is just, it’s, it’s a lot, and it’s, I just finished a book that is really relevant now, but it came out in 2003 called The Power of full engagement. And its whole kind of thesis is not about time management for success, especially to have our performance, but it’s really energy management. And this is knowing about like, you know yourself, not only at a physical state, emotional state, but kind of your mental focus. And then what drives you as far as, like a spiritual or values based approach, all those things matter, and so it’s about conserving and giving you more energy.

Jay Rongjie Wang 39:07
Yes, yes, I totally agree. I think that what I call mental capacity, or executive energy, is the, is the, is the most scarce resource of a founder or a leader, that that basically dictates how much you can output. Yeah, and, and this is why it’s so critical. I think the most draining, like I was, I was talking to a portfolio GP the other day. I was like, What is the most draining thing for you, like, what do you notice that drains your energy? I think it’s a very worthwhile conversation to have for everybody, because you kind of want to, you know, it’s not that you’re not smart enough or you’re not doing the right things. Everybody in this industry is a hustler. It. Really is like how much mind space you are preserving for yourself, and how much inner energy you are preserving to make the right decision when it really, really matters.

Earnest Sweat 40:13
Yeah, Jay, because we put it in the intro, and I was so, I know, so impressed by your intention when you go into new subjects and go digging. I wanted you to share with the audience about your impossible triangle concept and framework around AI. And so share that, and, you know, explain what it means and how you use it as an investor.

Jay Rongjie Wang 40:46
So it came out of the research we started doing in 2023. I feel like everybody’s doing it, because at the time, essentially, we are trying to answer the question, what is the most certain implication of LLM. I mean, LLM has a lot of implications. This is, you know, there are hundreds of posts that we scroll through LinkedIn and social media and newsletters trying to answer similar questions and making predictions. But for us, we’re looking for foreign investors. You are playing the odds of probability. So, like, relative certainty is important for us, right? Like, things can float around for a while, but we are looking for like, okay, like, what is, what is directionally right? And in order to find that certainty, we feel like the next level question to ask that will lead to that certainty is what is stopping us from achieving AGI overnight? Like, why is AGI not here yet? We’re trying to find that delta, and whatever works toward that delta is certainty like, right? Because that is just what people will work on to bring us to AGI. And then one of the again, there are many angles you can dice that question, but one of the things, again, obviously, in hindsight, is one of the things we found is that for AI to do its job incrementally better, and the reason why we are not in AGI today is like the performance is not there, but for but can it perform better? Yes, it can, but for AI to do marginally better, the cost and latency, just the sheer amount of time that it will take to finish the task and the compute resource and cost it will consume goes exponentially higher. And whenever I post this theory, people counter with, oh, but like, compute cost is reducing very roughly. And like, Yes, I know it’s reducing very roughly, but any given time the area of the triangle is fixed. So if you have performance slash efficacy, cost and latency, any given time, like, in this second, this is how much humans can do right to because every time you make this better, this is going to go worse. And when we say, oh, but the computer cost is going down, is declining, it means like we are constantly expanding the triangle as time progresses. And this is, this is a this is the direction that we want to bet on, is like stuff that will expand the triangle, because it will expand because, you know, it’s going to happen. Well, with 99.95% of so. So this is, this is what we mean by the impossible triangle. And then what that means is that it gives us, it gives us again, it’s one of the cues we use to filter, filter signals. For example, earlier this year, we saw a company actually, interestingly, when we were doing due diligence of a merger manager, one of the companies that he did seed investing in was a GPU company that is more efficient for inference native use cases. So it is, you know, for inference use cases is not only cheaper, but also more energy efficient. So, so, because we had that impossible triangle theory up front, and we paid attention to this name, and in the end, participated in the series A of the company, direct and. Uh and and the hat, and started to have a somewhat strategic relationship with the company. And this is, I guess, this is a, this is a very good example of how research can help investing and we’re very proud of them. Like not only the team. Is the team Great? Their series A was led by some of the best semiconductor investors. Businesses are progressing really well. We bumped into them in TED AI last week in SF because they were invited to speak. So, yeah, just a very helpful framework, I would say, Yeah, another. Another example that came out of this theory was, there’s, there’s a company that makes that builds data, data center in space, basically to expand like it’s seeing the tremendous compute demand, yeah, and, and say, okay, where, you know, where’s the future of this going to be? And, this is another company that we invest in today. So

Alexa Binns 46:25
it’s cool to hear how those examples reflect the theory, how you’ve applied them you were talking about having just been in San Francisco. A lot of our guests are Bay Area based. You all are between Silicon Valley, Hong Kong and Shanghai. Can you share with us any trends specifically in either Hong Kong or Shanghai that would be helpful to hear either from the GP or LP perspective, that you can teach us all.

Jay Rongjie Wang 46:59
I think what’s most valuable about GPS is actually, I’ve noticed very successful fundraising stories from outside of us. Sorry, excuse me, from outside of us. So I’ll say the sentence again, I noticed the very successful fundraising stories for GPS from outside of the US, from Europe, Middle East, Hong Kong, like we there was a GP we were doing due diligence on, and they have a really robust AI thesis, very, very decent, Very decent background as well. So we introduced them to several LPS in Hong Kong when they were visiting, and he said that Hong Kong is the first place where he closed an LP on the first meeting or something like that. Like, so, not, not, not gonna lie, like every geography is hard, like fundraising is hard. It doesn’t mean that you show up in the Middle East or in Hong Kong, whatever, like money will just flow at you, like that. That’s not what I’m trying to say. I’m trying to say that in every other geography I have seen very successful fundraising stories. So like the GP, if the GP is doing something right, and there is a ready audience to commit and to invest. Relatively speaking, I would say information is still relatively asymmetric outside of us. Relatively speaking, right? If you’re in a Bay Area, you’re inundated with opportunities. People who say, in London might not feel the same way. So I think, like the people who executed really well, are the people who really understand their audience. They understand what these LPS want. And again, it’s like, you know, every single conversation is strengthening that message of, I can give you what you want. I think, I think a lot of the emergent GPS assume like performance is the only thing that people want, and I think they use the narrative that used to assess them in institutions to tell the story, which don’t really it’s not a tailored message right to to that particular LP,

Alexa Binns 49:28
well, what else might be interesting, like compared to an institutional investor?

Jay Rongjie Wang 49:33
What else is an example? One example is when a second gen from overseas actually told me this. He wants bragging rights among his friends, among his second gen friends, right? So as a result, he needs to be able to somehow show his muscles to look like I have. Good connections in Silicon Valley. Yeah. And now the GP, who was having a conversation with this potential, LP, happens to not be sitting in Silicon Valley. And, I mean, there are remedies to it, right, like, you have Venture Partners, you can, you can, like, I mean, the point being that the GP does have goods, very robust network in Silicon Valley. But, like, if you don’t know the motivation, you’re not selling it, like people in this LP circle, like, so if he wants to have bragging rights among other families, he’s like, you know, we don’t care about New York, right? So, like, they want, they want to show, like, his accent. He wants to show it through this investment. He wants to show his connection in Silicon Valley. But the GP doesn’t know it. He told it to me, but he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t say that to GP, like, I’m investing you for bragging rights. No, he’s not gonna say that, right? Yeah. So, yeah. So, it’s, it’s all about

Earnest Sweat 51:09
one tension I want to get your advice on for other fund managers and investors is, how do you balance the constant curiosity that you have with your ability to dig down deep. And I think that’s going to be an extreme, like your ability already to do that, to go from that, you know, one extreme, to that next, I think, will be extremely valuable in an AI over a data driven world with so much noise. So what advice do you give for managers who may have difficulty in that?

Jay Rongjie Wang 52:10
The question is, how to balance constant curiosity with focus? Yes. Okay, several things. The first is, definitely embrace your curiosity. I think the best of the best are very curious. Steve Jobs, elk, Moscow, Warren, buffet, Charlie Hunter, they’re like, I mean, yes, they focus, but they also they’re, they’re, they’re insanely curious about a lot of things, like, they’re, they know, and the end, they learn and their their reach for subject matters is like a lot wider than maybe you like we appreciate. So don’t criticize your your appeared lack of focus. I think a lot of narrative is retrospective, like if the GP is uber successful, that all of a sudden you’re like, a focus is not a problem anymore. So it’s very results oriented. Right before you, before you actually make it, before you run like, a 10x fund, you’re always gonna feel like, I’m like, It’s wrongly attribute, like it’s wrongly attribute sort of lack of immediate success with two lack of focus. I simply don’t think that’s true. I’ve seen like when you look at those huge results that are made in their early days that will try, like a bunch of very different things, is very common. So, okay, that’s number one, number two. And sorry, just one more thing. This also goes back to who you are, right? Like just by people who actually ask this question, you are already a very curious person, perhaps a polymath, already. It’s just like, This is how you if you were to succeed. This is how you’re going to succeed. You’re not going to be sick. You are not going to succeed by focusing, like naturally focused people don’t ask this question, right? So then you’re wasting like 70% of energy trying to succeed in a path that is not natural to you. Look okay, just think DaVinci, when you’re really struggling. It’s just like, it’s possible, right? You’re just like, it’s possible. It’s not. Don’t, don’t, actually, again, don’t wrongly attribute the lack of immediate success by the methodology. The methodology works. It’s just we haven’t executed it yet, right, or we haven’t had the right opportunity, or we are not executing it right, or the timing hasn’t come, or, you know, you belong to a different path. There are many other explanations to it. No. About the methodology itself. And then the second thing I would say is how to actually make this what, like, you know, sort of wrongly categorize weakness, to your strength, is to create your own focus with a very diverse set of interests.

Alexa Binns 56:42
So the Venn diagram you never thought you

Jay Rongjie Wang 56:46
I would see exactly, but this is actually a very common trick in social media, in order to stand out, it’s no longer interesting just to be a yoga instructor or plaster worker, you need to always find an interaction of two or three things and make that your specialty. So, like the older, diversification is the new focus, right?