32: Chris Sacca - Drifting Back to Real
Chris Sacca is an investor and founder of Lowercarbon Capital and Lowercase Capital. Prior to becoming an investor, Chris grew up in Buffalo, NY; studied around the world by way of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service; turned his student loans in $12M in the tech bubble of 2000 before losing it all and then some; and broke into Silicon Valley before eventually landing at Google, where he won the founders award. Then Chris started angel investing, which led to his first venture fund, Lowercase I. Lowercase I is one of if not the best performing VC funds ever, by multiple, at 214x, and included Twitter, Uber, Instagram, and more.Toward the end of Lowercase, I had the pleasure of working with Chris. Around that time, he was also a Guest Shark on Shark Tank. Chris was heavily involved in both Obama campaigns and was a large supporter of Hillary Clinton in 2016. When Trump won, he wound down new investing at Lowercase and "hung up his spurs" to focus on political and democracy related efforts. Then, in 2018, Chris started Lowercarbon Capital to invest in "un-f*cking the planet": carbon removal, climate science, cooling the planet, and eventually nuclear fusion.We talked about writing and storytelling, keeping people around who keep you honest, having a good taste in "weird," playing rigged games, taking the right kind of risks, and how even billionaires have imposter syndrome.
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Speaker A: I think sometimes risk is mispriced, and a lot of that is maybe rooted in narrative, rooted in fear, rooted in imposter syndrome, and underpricing the ability to actually impact the outcome. Somebody asked, so what do all your most successful founders have in common? And I was trying to find a thread. It wasn't how they grew up. There's no doubt that immigrant kids, just the things they overcome to get here and build stuff, their hustle, their desire, their focus, just is insurmountable. People who grew up with single parents have that same fire, that same adaptability and resilience.
But I kept looking, I'm like, are they scientists? Are they computer scientists? Did they all sell Blow Pops when they were kids? You know, did they have a hustle? A lot of 'em did, but not all of 'em. But the single thing I found among every one of our most successful founders is not only did they not prepare for the downside case, it just wasn't one of the options. In the math. I first sat with Kevin and Mikey who were building Instagram. I was like throwing out a product idea and they'd be like, that's a great feature for when we get to 10 million users.
And I'm like, okay, you guys, we're meeting right now in a coworking space. There are two of you. We are in the dark shadows offstage of like— Alec Anis was running some pitch event. But I'm like, what's with this 10 million users thing? But Kevin wasn't trying to sell me. He just knew it. Speaker B: Right. Speaker A: He, he literally knew it. Right. You can just tell. Speaker B: Welcome to Dialectic, episode 32 with Chris Sacca. This is a special one for me and very full circle. I worked with Chris almost 10 years ago at Lowercase Capital when I was just outta college, and I learned so much from him about risk and investing and storytelling.
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