What, what, what was it like to be in the room before anybody else knew?

Well, I, I'd like to say that I, that I am clairvoyant, but you know, no one has that, no one really has that ability.

Um, and, and I'll say that when, uh, you know, what drew me and continues to draw me to certain kinds of characters is I'm curious about new models and new approaches, and particularly ones that are gathering, um, an extensive audience, you know, an extensive, uh, response, right? And, and that's what drew me to those characters.

I will say, uh, I remember the, making the decision about putting Mark Zuckerberg on the cover at Fast Company.

You know, at that point, he was twenty-two years old.

They had, you know, I don't know, twenty million users or something like that, right? But the, the reason that we could have him on the cover was because he was viewed by other business media as, as being a dumb kid, because he had turned down these billion-dollar offers from Yahoo and Viacom, uh, just when the folks at, uh, at YouTube were sort of, quote, "smart enough" to sell out and get their, and get their money from, um, from Google.

And, uh, and that made him available.

Mm-hmm.

One of the most powerful ideas Bob shared is something that on the surface sounds simple, but it's actually foundational to building anything that lasts.

communication is very important for effective leadership and it's become more and more effective.

I was talking with someone yesterday about how some leaders and some organizations don't necessarily get this, that the story you tell about yourself is your strategy and the strategy is the story that you tell.

And those things really do need to be in concert.

It's not obviously the only thing that... that identifies a compelling CEO.

But a compelling CEO does have to have a vision of the future that they want to create through this business and with this business.

And those that tell those stories, well, they certainly tend to raise money better.

When Bob and I talked about AI, what stood out to me was not just opportunity, but the tension.

Have you come across that? And has anybody been successful with that as their strategy?

I mean, I think there are certainly founders who do that and who take the payday and move off.

They may not be household names quite the same way.

And sometimes I will say for some of them, they're disappointed with what has transpired afterwards because... for them really, it wasn't about the money.

It was about the, you know, the journey and, and the journey is a lot more fun and, you know, you have a lot more control when you're, when you're running your own enterprise.

I will say that I feel like, you know, Mark Zuckerberg's decision not to sell Facebook sort of validated and ushered in a generation of business leaders, founders who were like, it's better to not sell.

The presumption always used to be, with rare exceptions, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, that you'd start a business, it would get to a certain point, and then you'd have to bring in a professional CEO to actually run the business going forward.

So as you've had a chance to think about the impact of things like AI, what do you believe the jobs of the future are going to look like? Are they going to be these human, like you talked about, an artistic collaboration? Is that actually the future of jobs, that these will be AI collaboration between humans and maybe robots and AI intelligence? I mean,