Palihapitiya lifting ‘self-inflicted’ fear of failure from budding entrepreneurs
From lessons learned while on academic probation to his view of Waterloo Engineering as one of the top schools on the planet, celebrated alumnus and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya shared his humour, honesty and insight during a free-wheeling discussion on campus today.
Dressed in a cardigan for a relaxed, 45-minute “fireside chat” with Dean of Engineering Pearl Sullivan, the former senior executive at Facebook and current part-owner of the Golden State Warriors settled easily into an armchair in front of about 60 people at the Mike & Ophelia Lazaridis Quantum-Nano Centre.
Pearl Sullivan, Dean of Waterloo Engineering, and Chamath Palihapitiya, a celebrated alumnus and venture capitalist, discuss the details of the Palihapitiya/ Lau Venture Creation Fund and Social Capital Fellowship.
“Any fans of the Cavs can just leave right now,” he joked in reference to the Cleveland Cavaliers, who knocked off his Warriors to claim this year’s National Basketball Association championship.
Palihapitiya, who graduated with an electrical engineering degree in 1999 after coming to Canada from his native Sri Lanka as a boy, was on hand to detail expansion of an award program he began with his wife and fellow alumnus, Brigette Lau, two years ago to back students trying to commercialize fourth-year Capstone Design projects.
Two teams with a minimum of two recent Waterloo Engineering graduates in any discipline will now be selected for $50,000 each through the Palihapitiya-Lau Venture Creation Fund to work on their projects in Kitchener-Waterloo for at least four months.
Palihapitiya also talked about why he and Lau, a 1999 computer engineering graduate, launched a fellowship program through their successful VC firm, Social Capital, that pays Waterloo Engineering co-op students US $8,500 a month for placements at early-stage startup companies in its portfolio.
Primed by questions from Sullivan and students in the audience – including one who gave an impromptu 30-second pitch on battery technology he is developing – Palihapitiya also weighed in on a range of other subjects. Here’s a sample of what he had to say.
On the role his struggles in first year at Waterloo Engineering – including a bare pass in a key subject - played in his approach to co-op placements and his later business success:
“I would go to school and there were those guys who were going to get 100 per cent no matter what. It was clear I had no chance of being at the top academically – and frankly I just couldn’t be motivated to do that personally. But in work, I found a lot of confidence.”
On the aim of their fellows program to lure Waterloo students out of their comfort zone, go to Silicon Valley and do meaningful work at startups, instead of taking safer co-op positions at established companies:
“You’re going to go to Facebook, you’re going to go to Google, which I think is OK, but you’re just going to be a cog in the wheel. The problem with that is if you get co-opted mentally to being a cog in the wheel, you’ll always be this box-checker.”
“You can’t tell your parents ‘I’m going to drop out of school.’ You can’t tell your parents ‘I’m going to move to some place to start a job.’ We wanted to just create a really simple way to alleviate a lot of that pressure.”
“Now all of a sudden you don’t have to do that because you’re a ‘fellow’ – and they’ll think ‘wow. It’s a fellow. It must be important and, oh my God, you get paid.’”
“It’s amazing the number of people that have been through (the program) so far. I think in 10 or 15 years, we’ll have thousands of people who will have become fellows and have worked at what will have become some of the most interesting companies in the Valley.”
On the importance of diversity, which he prefers to view as taking an entirely open-minded approach to both life and business:
“What’s not stupid is this idea that you very inherently believe that all people are roughly equal and that you inherently believe that, independent of your economic situation, you may have an actually really good idea. It can’t just be the rich people deciding for everybody else.”
“There have to be mechanisms where at a very young age you kind of push yourself out of your comfort zone. I remember in Waterloo there were all these Indian people and all they would do is hang out with each other. I just thought it was so stupid. If I wanted that, my parents should never have left Sri Lanka.”
On the coming of machine learning and artificial intelligence as forces that will transform the world:
“We are now in the midst of completely changing how everything around us works. We’re shifting away from what is very deterministic software to what is more probabilistic software.”
“We’re now in the movement to machine learning – so, code that changes itself constantly. The notion of an application is totally different. How you interact with the Internet will be totally different.”
“That’s probably the single most important thing – machine learning. It has huge implications for society, huge implications.”
On the quality of Waterloo Engineering, and the need to let the rest of the world know just how good it is, including a marketing push and playing the rankings “game” to win:
“I’m very unabashed about this, but the smartest people I’ve ever spent time with are here – absolutely…I felt a thousand times smarter than (people from Stanford and Harvard) and I ran circles around them – and they all work for me now. It’s the best.”
“This is probably a top-five university in the world. The problem is to close the gap between perception and what is the reality.”
On the fact there really is nothing to lose by taking a risk, trying to launch a business and failing:
“I think a lot of the fear is that all of a sudden you’re going to be judged to be a total failure, but it’s not like the Globe and Mail publishes lists, like: ‘Here’s our loser list for 2016. Here are the people who tried and failed, so if you see them, punch them in the face.’ Nobody says that, right? There’s all this burden, psychological burden, around failure which is self-inflicted.”
You can watch the complete Fireside Chat here via our Youtube channel: