I wanted the second part of this conversation to get practical. Marc’s version of leadership is not being the only visionary in the room. It is “goal cloning” so the team already has it — even at 3 a.m. on a Sunday.
We talk about hiring for vision, pulling from the future, and why pushing from the present drains everyone, including me.
Transcript
Pablos: at that moment I'm sure you got a mix of entrenched interest you thought it was a crazy vision or a threat to their business or technically impossible or something and you pray had a mix of people who are to work for you thought it was totally the right idea the The way I recruited people everybody wanted to come work It
Marc: was the best place in the valley to work The way I recruited people is I didn't want to give them a vision because they need to give the vision back. So I kind of like scratched the surface. And so did Andy and Bill with engineers And if what came out to say, yes, I've been thinking about the same thing, I said, no matter whether it was accurate or not they were already visionary passionate. you can come with
Pablos: it. Wow, that's interesting But pushing
Marc: a vision into someone is not the way you build one of these visionaries Wow, interesting It has to come from them, from the people
Pablos: I don't think I've ever heard
Marc: anyone… I was the visionary, I said no
Pablos: that's wrong. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that before Being the visionary is wrong The
Marc: vision isn't going to happen until what Alan Kay called goal cloning. Goal cloning. Which is the goals and the visions that I am having. Goal cloning. cloned cloned, and everybody has it I used to say in all hands meetings, I need to be able to it's a little cringy, but I need to be able to go into your bedroom on Sunday, 3 o'clock in the morning, fast asleep, and shake it up and say, what's our vision? And say, got your ass It's literally so
Pablos: that part of it could be described by any founder, but literally, if you went to I don't know why a commentator or just anybody in a 10 mile radius of here and asked them what a founder should do. Like one of the top three things would be like, every day they need to convey the vision to all the people again and again and again, reiterate it over and over and over again because everybody needs it in their head. But I've never heard anyone say what you said I said that yesterday
Marc: two days ago, to a founder of a very important company. I think I'm going to start working on it. So I can't just go into it. Yeah The same thing? Wow. Same reaction you had. Wow. Because I said, what's your pain point I can help with it. But he said, the biggest one is I'm pushing my people all the time and trying to sit in. This is the vision. And they kind of don't get it. Hiring their own people. This is how it is He was fascinated by that. More than that
Pablos: Do you think that, I guess you weren't at Apple early on, What made you have that sensibility I mean, you'd think I would have figured that out by now, but I didn't. But
Marc: I ask you to think, reflect on conversations where you had to push them and how you felt exhausted at the end versus the ones where there was an exchange and you were building on each other's ideas. How did that happen It elevated you Well I just took that seriously The people who are meant to be together Amazing. Elevate Elevate And that's the sign of a good relationship, both romantic and professional, and so on And if it's just hard and it brings you down, that's not the right person to be hired. To be hired in
General Magic was the absolute best place to work. Everyone wanted to be And Tony Fidel is in the movie talking about it. I banged on D. Gardetti
Pablos: He wanted to be there, and he had to bang on the door
Marc: again. We're not even talking to people That's how it works That's amazing The second thing, which is even more important is most of us are trained in a push model We go through life and we push through problems. Move them out of the way There's a lot of kinetic energy and pushing Push forward Persevere. Push push That's necessary That's not sufficient So what I just naturally do, and I don't know why I do it, but I'm sure it started in the certainly by the time my PhD was rocking that's where I was, is pulling from the future. OK Pulling from the future is a conceit It's an audacity that you have put yourself something in the
future I tend to be 30 years, and I'm better at it. I'm 10 years in the future. I'm
Pablos: trying to improve on that, too
Marc: I'm trying to get down to two or three years in the future. It's hard for me. But out there is if you have a sufficiently clear vision, knowing that it's wrong but having the conceit to say, I believe it I am lodged in that future And it's a beautiful future that I want for myself and the world. That's the future Now you stand in that future and you turn around, 180 and you look to the past And the past eventually lands in 2026 I say, okay, what has to be true to get us from 2026 to this other thing, 2036 And once you start that you realize that a lot of things fall away because they're not on the critical path
Pablos: Right. Oh, that's very eloquent. And it's a conceit
Marc: Because at the same time you're doing that you know that it's wrong Because every business plan is wrong six months after you know, you do it It doesn't matter. That gives you the clarity and the energy So what I did as a CEO and what I talked to this other CEO about two days ago, is that vision that vision thing think of it as like a torch a hot flaming torch that you're holding in your hand And if you hire people who already have the vision in their own way, it's incomplete because they're not the CEO. or you got the whole thing, they're catching up, so to speak But they recognize it, and they thrive on it, they build on it, and so on. What you've got
when you hire the right people, they have avionics in their brain, they have compute in their brain that is a heat-seeking lesson If you're the heat they move right towards the heat. And it's OK to change, but don't change. Just change it smoothly, and people just naturally flow into it and that informs them of all the decisions that many decisions every employee makes every day you can't be there to say the vision the vision the vision no you can't do that that's company do you
Pablos: think so do you feel like that I guess there must have been other attempts after general magic I don't remember what they are to employ this mindset about how to build a company and build a culture do you think that worked in other contexts as well not as well what do you think went wrong after that and you had a good good one proof point he's done that part
Marc: it's a little bit of sadness I would say that general magic was my experience and I've done another half a dozen shots yeah using the same basic mindset
Pablos: Because you didn't have the same ability to attract the people that would be a match, maybe that was the best
Marc: None of the visions that I had were sufficiently big to do that. I'll give you an example. I went to tech and when tech collapsed, my marriage collapsed, I left I had to leave. I was in Toronto and I looked for something big enough to be interesting Climate Yeah. So for 12 years I worked on climate And one of the companies I created there was a company to replace all cement Because cement is 7 or 8 percent of green On a good year Not a big enough vision
Not a big enough vision. Also with this, there was nothing like this
Pablos: Look at iPhone, yeah
Marc: and we did the iPhone And ran out of energy and money So Steve did it right 12 years later, 1995 to 2007. So that model, however, is what I teach I teach all CEOs. When I talk to them pull from the future Only bring on people who have the vision already
Pablos: And do you think you've seen that work anywhere else Did anybody else do a good job of employing that Not that I thought but I would say that It's an underutilized winning strategy Jensen you
Marc: know, Jensen, he saw something. What he saw was that this thing, this neural net thing, the way your brain works somehow matches to his dopey little video game stuff And he anchored it And it brought everyone along, and everyone now is A lot of people in NVIDIA are the visionaries good point Whether you like him or not Elon Musk does that Good point He pulls from the future. He doesn't push from
Pablos: the present. There you go
Marc: Pushing from the present is just a thing that you do But that's not the source of the end of it. Pushing from the future drains, pushing from the present is draining Pulling from the future is enlightening him or not, doesn't make any difference. But I would say Sam Altman Dario
Pablos: They're doing some version of that Zuck is a foggy version of that
Marc: He makes up shit He makes up features that don't exactly
Pablos: connect. Yeah, it's a little awkward
Marc: Tim Cook has none of that. Zero No I won't comment on Google because of my sister
Pablos: Your sister's at Google? She's president Good She's like the
Marc: president of that. and
Pablos: yeah but I see what I
Marc: mean I'm just looking around there's the great CEO
Pablos: there's in the in the startups like we work on these deep tech startups and so and some of them what one a kind of exciting thing I think for a long time founders were sort of squelched by what was happening online but The iconoclastic deep tech founders now have just decided to fuck it, I'm going all in. And so they're posting all the time about what they're doing. And so if you look at the founder of Boom Supersonic he's online all the time. He's probably getting canceled once a week But he's dogged about describing a vision for the future that he thinks matters more than anybody else's petty complaints about
tweeting or whatever. There's just one that comes to mind There's a nuclear reactor company that's called Valor and they're so good online I could argue about their reactor, but their social media game is so good, and it's good for the industry they're getting people excited about nuclear reactors It's great and they're so good at conveying that vision from the future I'm not investing in those companies, but they're just founders who I… Oh, and there's another one in East Bay called Longshot this one? Longshot is building this cannon to launch shit into space It's a 10 mile long cannon that accelerates a payload. So it's just kinetic launch into space And
the founder is a wild man And he's so good at just you know, talking about this as if it were a practical reality that I wish I had him running any of our companies, amazing founders, just because they're doing what you're describing and they're attracting all of those companies they're attracting zealots and who can probably do exactly what you're describing you know figure out their own way to describe the vision and and have it be aligned and and it's not that those guys are pushing it on their teams so yeah i think there are some there are
Marc: there definitely in deep tech Jack Hiddin
Pablos: I do know Jack
Marc: Yeah, so Jack is one
Pablos: of them. Jack is an amazing front man
Marc: He's a force of nature and I don't know if you've interviewed him
Pablos: I never have. No, I should do that I would do that. I
Marc: can recommend. I'm an advisor. Yeah, I haven't
Pablos: seen him in a couple years, but I could definitely Yeah, I know
Marc: I'm an advisor to them
Pablos: It's true. I've seen Jack is Latino He's phenomenal. There have been times when I've seen him on stage and he just has everybody rapped on his next word and the next word is like perovskites and it's amazing you can do it with anything if someone asked me to describe what I'm into, I would say, like I'm interested in getting these new technologies to come to light that can make things better for humans I mean, I don't know, I'm making this up. Some succinct version of it, that would be, like, true for me And I think for you, the word technology wouldn't have made it in. No
Marc: just flip, just take what you said and flip it. Yeah is humanity is suffering with or needs or can be radically enhanced living in a future of this sort. And when they are, these are the technologies that they need that we develop for that So am I interested in AI Of course. That's all I do. But as a technology No What happens again, sort of out there when it's actually all working properly, good and bad? Do
Pablos: you think that there's a, you know, the thing that I think, one thing that happened to me anyway is that I you know, I think, again, partly because of what the things that you were doing and other people came before me were doing I got that vision in my head that these technologies could make things better for people and that's what I wanted to do. When I got out of high school, most businesses were getting their first computers And so I thought it was an amazing deal because I would get paid $10 an hour to go buy the coolest new computer and put it to use in some business That
was a dream job for me. And at the time, universities didn't have better computers than the businesses, so I didn't go to college I just kept putting computers to use. But to do that meant that I was an 18-year-old punk going into some business to teach somebody how to do their job who's been doing it for 20 years which is a sort of unwelcome sort of setup And so I had to learn how to get people excited about these things and help them to see what I see and see the possibility that this was going to make their life better before they had any proof And so in
some sense, I still feel like I'm doing that. I'm trying to help people see and believe in the potential for these technologies Yeah, that's beautiful I love that I'm not sure that I'm you know, you could probably find someone more qualified to do it, but I am doing it out of desperation That's where I come from. I'm trying to help people see what I see Now we have a track record. We're right in a lot of ways. Computers have helped in a bunch of ways. People tend to take those for granted and fixate on all the problems that remain unsolved. But is there a, in your mind, is there a
even if you go back to the early activism and what you described about the power going to where the stories are coming from is kind of what how you described television news storytelling going on that's not working very well. People are getting all these dystopian versions of possible futures and very little
Marc: As that's my superintelligence keynote is exactly on that. I'm happy to explain to you what it is. Yeah, that'd be
Pablos: great. I'm just trying to bait you here into telling me what you see
Marc: Your interest in deep tech let's contrast that with VCs and others and many others Interested in shallow tech. Good Shallow tech is incremental. It's the obvious next thing that needs to be done as a tiny step And that's where people make money They do Shallow tech And it matches up the imagination ability of investors and the imagination ability of founders Because they only have to imagine a little bit They only have to imagine a little bit So that's not your world So to be a deep tech person the only way you can do it is pull from the future So that's why you and I like each other. There's immediate recognition
This is a person who has the interest and the courage to live in the future and pretend consciously that they see
Pablos: it. Yeah, I have
Marc: to do that. It's the real thing. Otherwise, you couldn't do
Pablos: it. All right, well, that answers that question. That's why I followed up and wanted to talk to you