Full Transcript: Dinesh Moorjani, Managing Director of Comcast Ventures, on Sequenced
Dinesh Moorjani, Managing Director of Comcast Ventures, talks to us about investing in technology companies, building internet and software companies, and lessons learned along the way.
Prior to Comcast Ventures, Dinesh served as executive in residence at Warburg Pincus and was the Founder and CEO of Hatch Labs, where he and his team built and ran early stage companies, including Tinder.
We’ve posted complete transcript of the podcast below. You can subscribe to Sequenced on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and Google Play.
Dr. Kiki:Welcome to Sequenced. I’m Dr. Kiki, and today, I’m going to be speaking with Dinesh Moorjani, CEO, entrepreneur, and investor, and a Managing Director at Comcast Ventures. Dinesh, welcome to the show.
Dinesh:Thanks for having me.
Dr. Kiki:It’s wonderful to get to talk with you today. I was wondering if we could just get started with a brief introduction. Just can you tell us briefly about yourself?
Dinesh:Sure. Well, I spend most of my time with young companies helping them grow. I’ve been doing that as an entrepreneur with my own businesses for some time. And then I’ve been fortunate enough to do it with a number of other companies on their boards as investor. So I spend my full day as a venture capitalist and spend most of the spare time I have, when I’m not with my family, helping young companies out either on their boards or advisory boards.
Dr. Kiki:How did you get into venture capital? You started out with a science degree when you were in school, and now you’re an entrepreneur and an investor. How did you get into this?
Dinesh: Well I always wanted to understand how things worked. I was always a curious kid, and with all the experiments I had at home, whether it was building model planes or creating a mess when I was running an experiment for school, it was obvious that I was on a path to be an engineer. I was a chemical engineer at Northwestern and realized pretty quickly, through my internships that I probably wasn’t the best engineer.
But really, the catalyst was the fact that I learned that it wasn’t engineering decisions that drove the commercialization of technology, it was in fact business decisions. It was those business decisions that employed technology to bring them to bear in the market, to hopefully make society better in some capacity. I kept one foot in the door in the chemical engineering field and one foot in the door in business and became a strategy consultant in the energy space, learning business ground up. I used that as a stepping stone to stay with my experience in the business arena, but bring that to bear with respect to technology. I did that both at a startup that I joined and a startup company that I built shortly thereafter that was in Asia. Many steps later, I spent time in a set of large tech companies as well as some early startups that I had begun working on and building.
Fast forward, after being an entrepreneur for a number of years and having a couple of good outcomes, I moved over to the dark side to become an investor.
Dr. Kiki:People talk a lot about failure in the entrepreneurial world and in the investment world. You said you had a couple of wins there but were there failures that you learned from?
Dinesh:Yeah, I’ve had a lot of failures along the way. In fact, they tend to be the most memorable. When you fail at something, you always end up doing a post-mortem and trying to understand why you failed. For most of the early stage businesses, in some cases, you’re too early to the market, some cases it’s your business model, in some cases, it’s your team. But most of my failures were concentrated in a lab that I built called Hatch Labs back in 2010. We built several companies and we ended up having a couple of large successes out of that. But along the way, there’s carnage, there’s failed companies, and you take those memories with you that sort of cut deep and so you apply them to every new startup you have that collective memory becomes your kind of residuals that you bring together to hopefully increase the likelihood of success with everything else you tackle.
Dr. Kiki: So out of Hatch Labs, one of the big wins, the big successes, was Tinder. Can you talk about what problems you were aiming to address with Tinder and kind of how it started and evolved over time?
Dinesh:Sure. Tinder came out of a hackathon in February 2012. We had assembled teams. They were all full-time employees at Hatch Labs, including my colleague Sean at the time who I had just brought on a couple weeks prior to work on a local loyalty product. He was in Los Angeles, but my first hire in Los Angeles was another gentleman named Joe Munoz that I brought on as a senior back-end engineer. And because they were in the same office and I thought they’d be a good fit, I paired them together in this internal hackathon. Joe had already built something around social discovery. He had essentially built an interest graph that connected people around common interests, and it was such a natural progression to apply that to the social discovery in dating space.
So we encouraged him to do that, and coincidentally, Sean, even though he was working on something around local merchant loyalty for a new startup that we were going to embark upon, he had a passion for the social discovery space, too. It was a great fit. We ran that hackathon over 48 hours and we had several teams internally within Hatch competing, and I awarded them first prize. It was originally a concept called Matchbox, but for a lot of reasons, I forced a name change a few months later. We sort of defrosted that winning concept because it was sitting in an icebox for a few months because the team was already committed to another project, another startup. We defrosted it in late May 2012 after TechCrunch Disrupt Finals because that earlier project didn’t win the finals and we had some challenges with Apple. We redirected the team to focus on Matchbox, renamed it to Tinder, and we were off to the races when we did our public beta launch in August 2012.
Dr. Kiki:Now, I read somewhere that the original swipe right swipe left behavioral gamification that happens just came out of wanting to make this social discovery something fun. Is that true?
Dinesh:Yeah. I mean the concept was a binary decision, the one that you could take really fast, yes or no, if you wanted to take the opportunity to possibly match with somebody. The swipe is really a artistic manifestation of that. There were a lot of hands in the cookie jar that led to that. I give a lot of credit to Jonathan Badeen who ended up engineering the swipe and making it so seamless. He’s a really talented guy and still on the Tinder team. With that said, the real insight on the product was, in fact, I think not the swipe. I think Tinder could probably have been successful with just a yes or no binary, checkmark or an X to say you wanted to connect with someone or you didn’t. I think the innovation or the insight was the double-blind model, the notion that two people without taking the risk of rejection could indicate that they wanted to meet each other and then mutually match. It’s that fear of rejection that’s sort of held society back from taking the risk of showing interest to somebody else. And if you look at any other previous social discovery model or even in the dating space, that’s sort of been the holdup. So the innovation was really that double-blind model.
Dr. Kiki:Humans, like so many other animals, are risk-averse. We want to make our lives as painless as possible. But in the entrepreneurial space and also like you said, like with building these companies, there’s a lot of pain. You go through a lot of failure. How did you allocate funding and decide which startups you were going to be helping from the ground up?
Dinesh:We had a pretty rigorous process on how we recruited talent because these are all full-time employees and they had both equity in Hatch as well as equity in the prospective startup that would get off the ground. Our recruiting process by definition, incorporated the notion of what they might be working on because we’d have an investment thesis and incubation thesis because we owned each product and business 100% at the outset when we’d build it in our studio. Recruiting was sort of one of the key factors in determining if something would have the right team to merit growing it and have additional capital put into the business both by Hatch and then outside venture capital if pertinent.
But we had a few differentiators we’d bring to the table. We had a proven track record of having done this before. We had a really strong partnership and distribution network. We had really clever low-cost scalable user acquisition techniques to seed some of this great media relationships, networks with VCs, and we had a strong group of advisers. We would pull all that to bear around the concept when we’d recruit the team which was typically a tiger team of one product head, a couple of engineers and a UX and visual designer. So in the case of Tinder, that’s exactly what we had, that, you know, we had a tiger team of four when Sean and I co-founded it.
And then we had resources that we’d put to bear and that was some of the things I just talked about. And very quickly when we got to a private beta and possibly a public beta, we’d have early metrics to decide against the thresholds we had set for what would define success, whether that venture had escape velocity. We’d determine that if it’s on the right track, we’d give it more capital and let it grow before we took it outside Hatch. If it clearly didn’t, we would be pretty maniacal about closing a project or pivoting if we needed to. But if it was what we call kind of a zombie, it was moving along but its metrics weren’t stellar, we’d try to figure out if there was anything within our control to make it better. And frankly, if there wasn’t or we needed a different team, we’d sort of look at making a major pivot with the business. But ultimately, after we’ve developed it and it was out in the wild and we were getting market feedback and typically the market has all the answers. It tells you if something’s gonna be successful or not. We’d use that to validate the core hypothesis that underpinned the startup in the first place. Once it was off to the races, we’d end up growing it, scaling it, and trying to recruit and hire more resources to put against it.
Dr. Kiki: Is there any aspect of this that can be generalized to people working on personal projects, not necessarily a start-up but a business or anything that, at a certain point, you decide whether to cut yourself free from it or to really put all of your efforts into it. Do you think there are any lessons that are generalizable as advice?
Dinesh:Yeah. I’d say the first one is a common one that’s become sort of a mantra in society, is don’t be afraid of failing. It’s well understood that failure is part of learning, but as a human to be comfortable with the idea of failure is antithetical to how we’re taught in school. If you think about our education system, it’s designed for success. It’s designed for passing and failing and scoring. The fact is that there’s a lot of tangential benefit we get out of failing that just can’t be captured on a report card. Now, don’t get me wrong, I was a student who really focused on grades and that was evidenced by the path that I took professionally and academically, but there’s a lot captured in failure that just doesn’t get measured but it affects us as human beings.
So we have to retrain ourselves to be comfortable with failure. And that’s an unnatural act after you’ve had 15 to 30 years of academic and professional training teaching. That’s the first point, and then once you’re comfortable with failure, then you want to be able to fail fast. And if you can fail quickly and you can be able to test things and know whether it’s going to succeed, you know if you’re efficiently using resources toward that end goal. That applies to everything. It’s not just a startup, but it’s how you can live your life. It could be if you want to be Machiavellian of it about it, you could apply it to relationships. But I’d say more broadly speaking, anything you sort of take on, it’s helpful to be able to not plan and plan and plan, but rather say, “Okay, well, I’m going take a step forward and try to do it,” and learn from it. And if it works out, that’s fantastic because you took the risk to overcome, from an engineering standpoint, we call the activation energy to overcome that obstacle. It begins to set up habits where you get comfortable with risk. This is calculated and controlled risk.
But if and when you fail, it’s okay. We sort of measure ourselves by our ability to overcome adversity. So if you fall down, if you can get up again and try again, I think you start changing who you are as a person. So I think that’s generally applicable not just to startups but to everything we do as a society and as individuals.
Dr. Kiki:Rip the band-aid off at a certain point. You got to go for it. At a certain point, you decided to move on from Hatch Labs. What was it that inspired you that you said, “Okay, I’ve helped enough companies here, I need to do something else?” What was it that led you to take your next step in your career?
Dinesh:Sure. We just actually finished a case study at HBS about this on Hatch Labs and Tinder, and at the end of the case study, we’d talk about being at a crossroads. That’s really a reflection of reality which is that I had to decide if I wanted to continue building Hatch 2, the second sort of lab and an investment vehicle to incubate our new set of companies in our studio, or take the role as CEO of Tinder which the board of Hatch had asked if I want to do as we were closing our first vehicle to incubate our companies. I turned that down. I was married. I had one in the oven and it just wasn’t right for me to be running that company. I was happy to serve on the board. And then more broadly speaking, sort of pursue our next set of career endeavors. I was still close to the team and felt I could help in a lot of other ways. I had my stake in the business.
With that said, when I left Hatch, I did do a buy out of all the Hatch rights, so the trademarks and assets. So I retained the option of starting that lab again at some point in the future as part of my release from some of the investors that were in Hatch. There were two investors. One was a large public company called IAC and the other one was Xtreme Labs which is a lab and investment firm between Toronto and Palo Alto. They were supportive of that. I really wanted to take some time off because I was working 90 to 100 hour weeks. That, unfortunately, didn’t happen. I was already involved with another startup called Kleverbeast that I was the interim CEO of.
After I sold my stake in that business and exited, shortly thereafter, in my attempt to take time off, spent a lot of time with Warburg Pincus, the private equity firm. I got to know their team and really liked their approach to not only investing but from a career standpoint or an opportunity to jump into a business, instead of growing from 0 to 1, the opportunity to step in to grow from 1 to 10. They gave me the opportunity to join as an EIR, an executive in residence if you will. I joined boards of their companies, helped co-invest on deals and really enjoyed my time there. It was a chance to see a different side of the late stage startup world and get exposed to companies after they had overcome some of the challenges they face in their early days and now they were facing some scaling challenges, some of the things that actually we ended up facing at Tinder as well.
Dr. Kiki:Yeah. It is fascinating about that stage of growth where you have the early-stage companies where it’s all the excitement and there’s a few stakeholders who are making the company grow and building it from the ground up. And then it gets to a point where you start hiring on new people and the team starts to grow. And then, you go to 10 people, 20 people, and all of a sudden, you’re a 50-person company with completely different cultural issues than the original startup. Is there anything that you’ve learned about that shift between the early startup stage and then the late stage startup that could be helpful for companies making that step?
Dinesh:There’s a ton I’ve learned. I’ll divide it into two buckets. One is, there are some things that don’t change as you move from an early stage company to a late stage business. And everyone focuses on what changes and I certainly think that’s interesting and I’ll talk to some of those points. But the things that don’t change tend to be the value system of a business or a company, and also perhaps some of the DNA of the leadership that established the operating manifesto. And we had those in Hatch, for example. Our value system at Hatch was do your best, share everything, and root for others. Really simple. And that value system carried forward whether it was a seed stage concept where two people were ideating with me on what it should be all the way to when we’re spitting out a venture that has a huge tailwind, is growing at an unprecedented rate and warrants additional capital, and filling out the management team. Or before a company’s going public. The Match Tinder group went public in November 2015.
The early characteristics of what makes a successful leadership team still hold true from an early stage company to later. And some of those initial values in our operating manifesto at Hatch were operate with integrity, embrace Kaizen, the Japanese word for continuous improvement. We were always trying to continually improve everything we do, even how we run a meeting. Cultivate leaders, be a mentor, and grow personally, and professionally. Be your better self every day. Own up to your mistakes and learn from them. Recognize individual relationships can transcend institutions.
All of these…I just picked a few, but these foundational guidelines about the operating manifesto of a company don’t have to change along with the value system, but there are a number of things that ultimately do have to change. And that really has to do with how leaders grow and evolve because scaling a business at a growth equity phase is completely different than trying to grow a business that was an early stage business with very little capital. I talk about this in a post I made, you know, should founders be CEOs and why founders fail. And there’s some common things that I’ve seen.
The first is that, the world is typically colored through the lens of the CEO and they often can’t see everything because they only see what’s in front of them, the way they view the world. And if they’ve had early successes, that point of view gets reinforced. So they tend to have blinders on to what’s going on in the rest of the world or other opinions. So I think understanding the customer voice is incredibly important and staying open-minded that your view of the world has to evolve over time. It doesn’t necessarily need to have blinders on it.
The second has to do with the inability to scale in general. Some of that is based on you think you have the right person for a particular job and they were great for the first phase of the company, but they’ve become a friend and you don’t want to let them go or you don’t want to take the tough decision to bring someone over them to grow a business. This is very common when you’re moving from an early stage company and you have a Director of Finance and that person becomes your CFO, but you need someone who’s a public company CFO to take you to the next step as you prepare your company two years in advance of floating your shares in the public market. And that manifests itself into sometimes having, misguided early loyalty to employees and you’re not willing to cut the finger off to save the hand, if you will.
I think that there’s a lot of lessons to be learned as you’re scaling a company, but those are some of the ones where you do have to change as you’re growing.
Dr. Kiki:Absolutely. And so now, you still advise with Warburg Pincus, but you’re now working with Comcast Ventures. Can you talk a bit about how that work is different from what you’ve done before?
Dinesh:Sure. And just talk about moving to the dark side, really, it’s a lot of fun. I get to spend time with people smarter than me every day, and those are typically the entrepreneurs and sometimes even co-investors both on my teams as well as at other investment firms where you get to hear about the passion and the interests of an early-stage entrepreneur who wants to change the world in a particular sector. When I’m running my own company, I can really have the mental bandwidth and energy to focus on just that one company. Here I get to spread my wings a little bit and leverage my time more efficiently across a number of companies concurrently. That’s such a privilege because you get to be part of the journey of these incredibly brilliant and hardworking entrepreneurs that have sacrificed so much of their day and their nights, day after day on that tumultuous startup journey to build something big and hopefully…and at least with the investments, we focus on try to benefit society in some way, whether it’s a consumer business or an enterprise business.
The day-to-day is fundamentally different. It’s a bit more schizophrenic spending time with different company. And really focus on how you can be helpful without actually micromanaging and sitting in the driver’s seat building a company when you come from that background. The cool thing is that there’s a set of pattern recognition that you start picking up, not only from your own operating and entrepreneurial experience but as an investor where you can see what mistakes can trip up a company or you have early signals around it where you can get ahead of it with early entrepreneurs in their lifecycle and help prevent those types of issues from occurring. So it’s a really fun job, incredibly rewarding, and I’m super fortunate to be part of Comcast Ventures to do it. When I set up the LA office, I had a chance, just short of a couple years ago to get to know our partnership at a much deeper level. And the level of care that my partners and all our investors on our team place on the work that the entrepreneurs are doing and how they try to support them was unprecedented compared to any firm that I’ve spent time with professionally or personally.
And so it’s a pleasure every day because all my investors really care about the companies they’re involved in.
Dr. Kiki:People might think when they hear Comcast Ventures, “Oh, this is a giant wing of Comcast that’s doing big investing,” but that’s not necessarily true with what you’re doing. It’s much smaller scale. Can you talk a little bit more about what you’re focusing on and how your work with Comcast Ventures allows you to have a unique approach to investing?
Dinesh:Sure. We operate similarly to a lot of venture capital firms in the valley or elsewhere where we have a smart intellectually curious team that’s trying to find the most compelling companies that are going to change the world. We operate as an independent fund in terms of our approach. One, our investment committee is our partnership when we’re writing checks. We certainly are a single LP fund and we generate our capital from Comcast, but in terms of our daily operations, how we invest, how we manage our companies, we operate as an independent fund. But we’re able to pair the best resources of an independent fund with the incredible capabilities of a large technology and media company.
So whether it means Comcast becomes a customer for a lot of our businesses which is, in fact, the case, or we can lend insight into a particular sector because we have operators that are working in that field across the company, and we can beta test different products. For example, when someone on the outside might look at Comcast, they might think, “Okay, cable and media,” but the fact is we have one of the largest fleet of vehicles in the United States because of our service vans for installing cable and internet services across the country. So if you start looking at autonomous vehicles investing, or you start looking at the transportation space, or you start looking at enterprise ride efficiency, there’s all sorts of products and services that are emerging where Comcast could become a very large customer.
In addition to that, we have this incredible program at Comcast Ventures called Accelerate. And we let in a select group of typically consumer-focused companies into a program where we can get them onto TV at cost per acquisition rates that are somewhat similar in order of magnitude to digital marketing. But here they get the brand halo effect and get to start building their consumer brand on TV at often time, remnant inventory rates. At the same time, we use third-party data tracking and we have one of the best guys in the business overseeing the program that sort of serves as white glove support from developing the creative to getting our portfolio companies on TV. There’s a backlog of companies that want to participate in this program.
We do this at no cost. We absolutely don’t use this as a profit center, this is a pure cost center. It’s just a program that we have to benefit our portfolio companies. There’s a lot of differentiators. I’m picking two as an example, but there’s a lot of ways we add value to companies outside of the fact that we want to be great fiduciaries on a board and smart investors and help handhold that entrepreneur not just through when times are great, but when times are really rough. You don’t want to be fair-weather friends, you want to be supportive when they’re going through that tumultuous journey and things aren’t going well.
Over time, we’ve proven that not only do we do that, but then it’s helpful to have some kingmaker assets that can advantage companies so that they can have an unnatural advantage when they go to the market to compete and grow their businesses.
Dr. Kiki:What are some of the companies that you have invested in and that you’re really excited about seeing where they’re going to go?
Dinesh:I’m excited about my entire portfolio. But if I had to pick a few, last year, we were fortunate enough to invest in Color Genomics. This is just an incredible business that’s hopefully going to make the world not only a better place but save a lot of lives along the way. The notion of genetic testing and what’s happened in that field of science to create preventive outcomes to take decisions on for a person about their own health conditions, I think is incredible. And that just didn’t exist a decade ago.
And how Color has taken an approach of not just going directly to consumers, but working with large enterprises to get to their employee base, lets them get to population-level scale of helping people understand their genetic markers and risks of certain diseases that are affecting human society on great scale. So we were really fortunate to be part of that investment. I got to know Othman through Elad who’s now the chairman of Color. Both of them are just a dynamic duo and we’ve gotten to know some of their team and we’re just fortunate to sit in their halo and their orbit because what they’re doing is God’s work.
Dr. Kiki:That’s awesome. You’ve invested and worked with a bunch of internet companies. Can you share some of the things that you’ve learned about products that resonate well with users?
Dinesh:Sure. There’s a few ways to think about this, and it depends what sector or what the product experience is supposed to be around that audience. For example, a product that’s addressing a social networking experience is just going to be fundamentally different than a product that’s addressing the needs of a B2B user inside a large enterprise for supply chain management of data and information or an analytics package to evaluate how a marketing campaign is performing. The needs are very different based on who the actual user is, and by the way, that user oftentimes can be different than a decision maker for a particular product especially in a B2B product.
Then how that information is then disseminated within an organization if it’s a B2B product versus how it might be propagated in a consumer environment if it’s a social networking product. So it’s hard to answer it without going into a specific area, but maybe why don’t I pick the consumer sector as one area and let’s talk about a social networking or social discovery product just because we touched on it earlier.
There’s been a lot of lessons learned, but I’d say that number one is understanding the psychology of the user when they’re engaging with a product. Oftentimes, people call me up and say, “Hey, listen. I’m building this product and I want to understand how to get a lot of users and keep them engaged.” The fact is that if we always had an answer to that, I think that’s what we would be doing. We’d just be building these products, and it’s really hard to do. The way we’ve generally tackled it is instead of thinking about the feature or the product, we unravel it to the primal human experience that we’re trying to solve for.
For example, if you take something like Tinder, it might be that the swipe is a cool feature and it’s fun to kill idle time using it, excuse me, but the fact is that what is the primal human need that we’re addressing? Well, it might be companionship or dating or marriage or something to that effect, but it also might be stroking our ego. It might be the notion that you’re swiping right, and when you get a match and someone else swiped right on you, it’s that immediate gamified feedback loop where you feel satisfaction that someone also expressed interest in you. And that’s really just catering to our vanity.
So you’ve broken down a functional solution in society to do something but really to design it in a way that was compelling from a product management perspective. You had to address the primal human need you’re tackling, in this case, it was something around vanity or your ego. So if you think about product management not about features and products but think about the human condition, I think that ends up making products far more successful.
Dr. Kiki: Hopefully going to really continue to bring technology to a more and more intimate place in people’s lives.
Dinesh:I think so. I think there’s a big danger there, too. The impact of social media and how it puts us in touch with more people, and in theory, we’re more connected with them because we can reach out to them anytime we want. But the reality is we’re further apart from everyone because we rely on technology as a proxy for the attention, intimacy, and connection that we have with one another. And it’s also a heavy distraction when we’re spending time with people face to face. So I think there’s a pretty big dark side to technology. And I don’t know how far down that slippery slope we’ve already gone, frankly. I think, in fact, the TV show, “Black Mirror,” does a great job of portraying that.
Dr. Kiki:I can’t even watch that show. Too dystopian.
Dinesh:Yeah, it really is. That’s a great characterization. I think technology has done wonders for changing the world in a better place, but I think there’s probably an equally detrimental impact for society. Because of our challenges as human beings, we end up being weak to overcome some of the things that technology delivers. It’s really just not good for society.
Dr. Kiki:From your investor standpoint, from the things that you’re looking at, what are some of the big challenges that are existing in society today that you would like to see entrepreneurs address?
Dinesh:There’s a question of whether we’re more connected or not, and I think the answer is we’re less connected but we’re able to have fleeting connections, and how do we make them more meaningful? I think that’s a broader sort of social problem we’re seeing in society.
I think what we’re seeing with fake news and trying to combat that is a pretty big deal. There is no arbiter of what’s right and wrong to some extent. It’s being determined by how popular something is and how it propagates. And despite news organizations coming out and saying, “This is fact and this is not,” people live in their own echo chamber and sometimes they don’t care or they’re only being exposed to news or information that’s reinforcing their own views which may not be based on fact.
I think fake news is another one that has to be tackled. As a media industry, I’m hoping everyone comes together to begin to address that. I think there are some bigger societal problems that are happening because wealth is being generated especially in the technology field where that wealth is being concentrated among a few. As those few become more successful, there’s more wealth being generated. We’re seeing that with consolidation of certain industries as well. And then the result is that the Gini coefficient is increasing and we’re seeing more inequality in society. This is not just in the U.S. but globally. Those that are not getting the benefits of economic mobility in their countries or in ours are ending up in a place where they’re disenfranchised.
As a society, whether it’s using technology or coming together as people, we need to do a better job creating opportunities for those people, both economic prosperity and addressing basic hierarchy of needs. We do some of that through nonprofit work, but it’s just not enough because the Gini coefficient is getting worse. I think that that’s another dark side that as a society, we need to begin to address. If there are companies building solutions for that in ways that can drive big outcomes, that’s something we’re paying a lot of attention to outside of the sectors we normally focus on.
Dr. Kiki:Do you think the blockchain growing industry has any place in solving these problems?
Dinesh:I think the blockchain solves some very specific use cases, things like the immutable ledger lend themselves very well to certain types of databases or decentralized transaction tracking.
You could imagine for the art industry, for example, the ability to have…to not be reliant on someone’s proprietary database of where artwork has been exhibited, but rather all the data points around where that art exhibited and everyone contributes to that on a blockchain. I think that’s a, you know, compelling idea and a great use of the blockchain. But it doesn’t mean that the blockchain is designed to address some of the earlier problems we’re talking about. Certainly, with a little creativity and fairy dust from great entrepreneurs, I think there can be some really clever ideas that should be funded, but I’d say that there’s some unique characteristics of the blockchain that need to be applied for every business.
I don’t think it’s right to just generally apply the blockchain just like any other piece of technology or capability, you know, broadly where you’re trying to put a square peg in a round hole. I think it’s just gotten a lot of media attention. And when you look at blockchain and then the cousin around cryptocurrencies and what’s happening with ICOs, it’s sort of going through this precipitous rise and wave. But the fact is that I think there are some real businesses that can be built with the blockchain where the technology is applicable. But nowadays, we’re in sort of a hype cycle where someone announces they’re doing an ICO and the market value of their company doubles, and that just doesn’t make any sense.
So I think that we’ll come back to basics, it might just take a little bit of time to get there. But certainly, if people are applying the blockchain to solving these big macro problems in meaningful ways, you know, these are things we’re looking for.
Dr. Kiki:I’d like to look for that entrepreneurial fairy dust. I think that would be nice. But what has you most excited about technology these days?
Dinesh:What has me most excited these days is the fact that we’re not hitting some asymptote where we’ve solved a lot of problems with technology and things are slowing down because people have run out of clever ideas. It feels quite the opposite that as we have technology infiltrating society more and more, it’s actually accelerating. There are more good ideas and more problems to solve using technology in creative ways that we never had before. There’s enabling conditions in basic infrastructure. I think the existence of the iPhone and the App Store, and then what eventually led to Android, effectively created an ecosystem of smartphones around the world that unlocked a whole new source of value that was sort of the basis for starting Hatch Labs back in 2010, and even the Mobile Group in 2007 that I started prior to that at IAC. But today, blockchain’s one set of technology. There’s just a whole set of things that are being adopted that are creating the foundational building blocks to unlock new sources of value to solve bigger and more expensive problems.
And consumers’ willingness to adopt these solutions seems unbounded. So when you combine those enabling conditions with those consumption conditions, we essentially have, you know, an ongoing equilibrium of innovation. And I don’t see that stopping at any point in the future.
Dr. Kiki:I hope it continues to keep going. And I’m really glad that your particular path has led you to where you are so that you have an influence over helping some of these companies get their start. If you imagine yourself, could you imagine yourself doing anything else?
Dinesh:I don’t think I’d be good at much else. I have dreams of maybe that I could have been a tennis player, and I in LA. So I give thought to the idea that I’d love to be a cameo or an extra in a movie. But other than that, I think I’d pretty much fail at everything else. So I was really fortunate to have great mentors around me and great teams to work with so that I could learn from them and be able to do what I’m doing now.
Dr. Kiki:Is there anything else that you’d like to add before we finish?
Dinesh:No. I’d say that you talked about some of the lessons learned along the way, the only thing I didn’t mention was increasing your pain threshold along the way. I feel like that’s one of the things that’s influenced my life a lot. As listeners are building their careers or they’re in the mature arc of their career, it’s never too late to learn to increase your pain threshold because it makes everything in life you do afterwards much easier.
Dr. Kiki: Yeah. When I go through things, I think to myself, this is the time in my life when I’m just getting comfortable with discomfort.
Dinesh:Yes, that’s a great way of describing it. That is very accurate. If you can get comfortable with discomfort, frankly, that’s a cousin of being comfortable with failure, and it keeps you on your toes and it kind of helps you not get down about stuff, too. So I think it’s great.
Dr. Kiki:I think it’s great. Thank you so much for joining me today. It’s been wonderful getting to talk with you.
Dinesh:It’s great talking to you, too. Thanks for taking the time.
