A quantum view into investing and life - Leon Eisen: Entrepreneur, PhD and Investor
Leon is an incredibly intelligent and thoughtful human. After completing his PhD in Quantum Physics he went on to found Oxitone Medical. He is also a Venture partner at Network VC.
We talk about:
Intuition vs structure in decision making
The quantum world
Backwards thinking for startups and in investing
How to pick the best colleagues and employees
Transcript:
Rishad: [00:00:00] Leon, I'm so excited for this conversation. I've been looking forward to it for quite some time. To get started, let's go back to your PhD years. Tell me about why did you choose to do a PhD in physics?
Leon: Uh, first of all, I, I was interested in physics from my childhood. Uh, I am not an entrepreneur in my gene, uh, uh, I am from a professor family, scientist family.
Leon: So I consider myself like a scientist. I like it. From my childhood, I did some science all the time. So I decided not to go to, I, I just did my, uh, second degree in physics, like engineer, and decided to continue like, uh, to have PhD and, uh, you know, the difference between PhD and just having master or. As a degree is not a big difference.
Leon: Yeah, [00:01:00] the difference is how you think, because when you're doing PhD, you change your style of thinking, you change your mentality, and you learn methodology. So this is the difference, not in knowledge, not in methodology. Uh, capabilities. I know people with first degree doing things and mathematics much better than PhD.
Leon: Not, not this. It's methodology. How to learn and how to prove. This is what we, um, learned during, uh, five years in PhD. And then if somebody is going to continue in the post doctorate research, what I did as well in quantum computers and laser cooling, this is very exciting. Very exciting.
Rishad: So many of us follow our intuition and gut feeling without even pausing and thinking [00:02:00] about it.
Rishad: Talk to me about your decision making process. How much does intuition play a role? How much does structure play a role? And how does quantum science play a role in that process?
Leon: Oh, it's a very interesting question. You somehow put it in clear. Put everything, all science within one question. That's amazing result.
Leon: Thank you. What is it intuition? Yeah, first. What is it intuition? Intuition, it means you got to some field. You can, I can reference Joe Dispenza. He is great how to monetize quantum field theory, yeah? But, uh, you touch the field. Through the intuition, because the last, uh, research just proves that our brain is just portal into [00:03:00] some, something beyond, uh, beyond just structure, three dimensional structure of our world, or four dimensional if you add time.
Leon: So, that's why people, when they close their cortex, then they meditate, they got into this stage where there is no time, there is no place, and everything exists at the same time. So, tell me, uh, let me tell you a little bit more about it. So, what does it mean? Last year, uh, three scientists... Except, uh, uh, received a Nobel Prize, they just prove that the local, our reality locally is not real.
Leon: Yeah, so our world is not real locally. What does it mean? It mean, means that there [00:04:00] is interaction between entanglement object, which is immediate. No, with the velocity of, of, of light. It's immediate interaction. Independent where I located in a different. The sizes of our world, our universe, they interact immediately, and they should be intelligent for this.
Leon: So there is no time, there is no space, and Einstein, uh, just considered our world is finite because we have finite, uh, velocity of light. So it's all real. If it's real, we have finite, uh, finite, uh, velocity. You cannot move with high velocity. And they prove that we can, not we, entanglement object can move.
Leon: It means that locally our world is not real. But many people [00:05:00] like, for example, I really recommend very interesting book of Donald Hoffman. It's a, he's a researcher, professor, he research consciousness, which tells us that our three dimensional world It's just a data structure. It just was created to accommodate us.
Leon: And we got our perception to navigate our fitness function towards this world. So we somehow be built in this world, but we have, we built out of quarks, leptons, all this stuff, atoms, electrons. And you know, that matter is only 1% of everything. Yeah. So 99% is a vacuum. Because within the atom, the space between electron and atom is a vacuum.
Leon: It could be filled by [00:06:00] a wave function or something like this, but actually this is a vacuum.
Rishad: Is vacuum just another way of saying it is something that our senses cannot detect? And maybe if we had a six, seven, eight, nine, ten sense that we just don't have.
Leon: Yeah, we cannot detect because it's beyond 3D world.
Leon: This is, we call it, people call it quantum warp, some people call it consciousness warp, because consciousness was created. So just imagine that these quarks and this empty space created our brain, and our brain, I don't want to say created consciousness, because consciousness exists. Independent of our brain, and our brain is just the portal to the consciousness.
Leon: It's an instrument. And our world is just an interface. When you see in your computer, you don't know how all electrons, uh, just moving inside all these, uh, [00:07:00] uh, micro scans and all this stuff around. Yeah? Chips. You don't care about it. You cannot get in and, and, and read what happens. Uh, so this is the same.
Leon: We see it's all of reward is our interface. And then we get back to the intuition, we can come to some state where we have some access to, uh, to the consciousness field, conscious, conscious field of consciousness. And this is where I think, and I just, uh, understand that science is going this direction, that, uh, famous people like Da Vinci, like Einstein, they had access there, where everything, exist at the same time.
Leon: So, uh, usually it's called Everett words. Everett just claim that we are living in multi words, infinite world. So it's infinite quantum world. And what do we do?
Rishad: Sorry, Leon, sorry to interrupt. Define, uh, because I think myself and our [00:08:00] listeners will get confused here. Define everything. Do you mean all times?
Rishad: All spaces and because we can, we can say, you know, everything are, we can tangibly make sense of sight, sound, feel smells, but we cannot tangibly make sense of time and space because we can't really sense them given our limitations in our five senses. So define everything. What more do you mean by everything than what we can sense.
Rishad: Uh, we
Leon: cannot sense quantum mechanics, but through the portal in our consciousness, we can get there. And, uh, if you know how to ask, you know, like in GPT, if you know how to ask, you get a good answer. But your question should include half of the answer. In this case, you get the good answer. You have to learn how to ask.
Leon: So people like Einstein, they learn for all their life how to ask correctly, [00:09:00] and they got the answer. answer from this quantum field. And so What we do, what the consciousness from physicalist point of view, it's just a separation of realities. So by your choice, by your intention, you take realities what you want, because all our world is not fundamental, it's just projection.
Leon: It's just projection based on your, uh, uh, the, how deep this projection is based on your, uh, perception of this world. So as I said, perception drives our experience. So we're all built within this world based on experience, experience, and we have fitness function. So to, to feed this world, three dimensional world, and we have experience that shape us within this [00:10:00] world.
Leon: But at the same time, through the intuition, and this is what intuition, you can access to infinite world, no time, no space, everything happens there already. And, uh, this is
Rishad: what we have.
Rishad: The way to access that world, give me some examples on how we could do it. You said we have to ask the right questions. Some people would say meditation is a way to access that world. And when we talk about these things, my mind goes to some concepts that. are, are labeled as science fiction, like time travel.
Rishad: Is, do you foresee a future? And, and this may be a very stupid question because I'm not a quantum physicist, where we could travel time, where you could live in a world that is not the apparent reality for most. And if so, [00:11:00] given the state of our world in lots of ways, why don't you live in that world right now?
Rishad: Why, why do you choose to live in the present world if you have access to different worlds and some monks, um, do live in alternate realities?
Leon: You cannot choose your, uh, your fit to this world. You know, you cannot get inside the computer and, uh, you know, and do things. You need interface. And our world is an interface to get everything what you want.
Leon: And we are, you can consider ourselves like, I don't know, like an icon on this interface, you know. So, uh, There is something, uh, it's called consciousness that I think all our world actually is a conscious world and, uh, everybody has consciousness, even, you know, my, uh, my dog, [00:12:00] uh, could calculate exactly what kind of elevator will, will come, you know, she's waiting for elevator.
Leon: She knows, I know, don't know yet. She knows exactly which elevator will come. So, uh, she is aware. She has awareness. How does she know? I don't know. She has awareness. She hears and she calculates, okay, now this one, now that one, based on her experience and based on her perception. Even the first time she is in a, in some place where you have two, three, five elevators, she understands exactly which elevator will come.
Leon: How is she cannot treat numbers. She cannot treat numbers there. So she calculate based on perception. She, uh, here she look at the people, I don't know, some kind of perpe perception. Tell her what happens and, uh, give her awareness. She is fully conscious, so [00:13:00] consciousness has just different level, even urban country at some level of her access to the portal, to the another war.
Leon: We also have this. So any biological stuff has this. I don't know about non biological stuff. One electron fill another electron in a different, uh, parts of our space. Now just imagine that if we don't have space, if we don't have time, uh, if you tell, I tell you, uh, take myself like entangled to myself in two years, in five years, we have entanglement.
Leon: It means everything what I do today. Immediately change my world in two years. Immediately, right? In the quantum level of field, it's immediately change. I don't have, I wait for two years, but I have sign that something will change even today. [00:14:00] I have only sign, but the world happen already around it. And about your question about monk and, yeah, it's, it's...
Leon: You have to have some tools how to get there, you know, it's it's it's not good. Uh, uh, you can work for a whole day and didn't find any solution in the morning next day or at night. You can find this solution somehow. So because during the day, you created good questions, you tune your brain and it. You got this
Rishad: answer.
Rishad: How do we get access to your dog's perception? The ability to pick the elevator which will come, which we cannot pick, our experiences, intuition, perception, knowledge, does not give us that power. How do we train our [00:15:00] brains, minds, whatever you may call it, to expand our interface?
Leon: Uh, you have to train your perception.
Leon: You have five feelings, feels, feelings, and you have eyes, so you know that people without eyes, they hear much better than we can, so they could hear. So also dog, she has much better. years, you know.
Rishad: So if you think about where we came from and say we were a single celled organism at some point, I would say we probably did not have vision.
Rishad: We did not have all of our senses. We've evolved more senses at some point in our life. Do you think in the future we will have more senses such as consciousness, time, space, and our interfaces will expand? I
Leon: don't think so. I think we will have more tools. So to get into our [00:16:00] world beyond 3D, already we can get there.
Leon: There are string theory and other theories so we can get beyond just, as we say, fundamental So The structure of our world. It's actually not fundamental and locally. It's proved locally. Not real. Maybe it's not real at all at all. It will be proved laterally. So any, any, any science works until another science will replace it.
Leon: Science is not something like ultimate solution. By the way, I'm writing an article now and I'm doing keynote speech about Usually, uh, about what AI will be, uh, how AI will, uh, approach consciousness. And people ask all the time if AI will replace us. Yes, [00:17:00] AI will replace some very low level, maybe middle, middle level of, uh, workers, employers.
Leon: But actually, AI will continuously, asymptotically,
Leon: asymptotically approach the consciousness. I call it ultimate knowledge. Somebody call it God or something like this. Yeah. I'll call it ultimate knowledge, but it will never replace consciousness. It's asymptotically, uh, approach it, but never replace. This is my understanding how it works. Uh, and now, now taking all what I said into account, we can think how we can apply a new knowledge, uh, to, to the business, why business, because we need to feed our free to, to our free dimensional world.
Leon: We have to buy something. We have to live here. [00:18:00] And, uh, knowledge should help us how to, how to better manage our world, how to improve our fitness function to, to this world. This is what our world is expecting from us. This is what consciousness is expecting from us. So if you think about future, not just visualize future, like a People do.
Leon: Yeah, I visualize this my home and future. It helps actually. But you cannot apply this for the business in a good way. If you're going to apply this to the business, I call it quantum backward thinking. You can set up your company where your company in two years, for example, if you take five years, it's difficult because a lot of uncertainties in our world could ruin a lot of black smoke could ruin all this stuff.
Leon: But if you think that there is no big risk of change of [00:19:00] our world within two years, for example, yeah, you can define the stage of your company in two years and understand exactly. And Just in detail, uh, write down what this company is doing in two years. So I call it for a coder. It's a four quadrants and conscience in the middle.
Leon: Conscience means some transformation. People should understand how to tune their perception of the world and how to, how to build intention. This is what we start from when I am working with startup on this stuff. And not only startup, but we're very well developed company as well. And, uh, and then you can have four, four quadrants, four quadrants, right?
Leon: So [00:20:00] Coder, it's a consciousness. One quadrant is opportunity. That is a context, what happens today and what will happen in two years. So like you excavate the tunnel from both directions. And then go to, uh, call it deal. So what kind of resources you, you plan to have in two years? Then you go to the product, what kind of product and what the stage of the product you should have.
Leon: And then you go to marketing and I call it, uh, right people networking, what kind of people you're going to hire, what kind of marketing you're going to make, how you communicate with your partners and customers. So all this stuff, step by step using benchmark, definitely you can build in two years and this.
Leon: It looks like you are living there, and then you can define, [00:21:00] for example, every three months, what I need to get to the next stage. Then again, what I need to next, get to the next stage. So I ask my question, if I have these resources, so what? Or you're going back to the question, why it happens? Why I have these resources?
Leon: And you can build back to point A. So it's from point B to point A. It's like Waze is working. Waze is working like this, it defines your destination and then calculates all the way back. Same way. And if you know exactly all the way back, you, you cannot go in some uncertain direction if you are doing agile.
Leon: If you're, it's a, I call it back in jail, backwards in jail. If you're doing a jail, you do these, then you, you, every time you have to, to make your new strategy. Yeah. And new strategy based on decisions and decisions based on your [00:22:00] perceptions and perceptions based on level of consciousness. And usually you make mistake.
Leon: Yeah. So this is what happens. But if you go back from the future, it's like everything happens already. You know exactly each point what you have to do at each point in your life. And even if some black swan happens, you know how to avoid it. Like a traffic jam, yeah? You know exactly how to overcome it. So, and usually, uh, when my students go to raise money, One investor called me, why did you send this guy to me?
Leon: He raised already money. He doesn't need any money. He has everything. I said, no, he doesn't have anything. Oh, he pitch like he has everything. It was a so strong pitch. Like he was living for this already because [00:23:00] emotions, they don't care about past, future, or current. They are emotions. You can create same emotions, just thinking about future.
Leon: and emotions create your experience. So if you in detail, uh, design your future, you design your emotions in the future. Emotions like billionaire. I want to be billionaire. It's my goal. And I have emotions created like a billionaire. So today you go to the investor, you go to the customer. You position yourself in a totally different way.
Leon: You position yourself like a successful, uh, person. And this is accepted in a totally different way. You can get the deal. Usually I, people ask me, so how, how to understand this just by, by hands? Uh, [00:24:00] if you, for example, going to, you want to go to the cinema tomorrow. To the theater. You check the tickets. And you have only one chair left, only one place.
Leon: You don't have any, uh, free will. You have to take what is left for you. This is usually what people do all the time. If they don't have intention, they take everything what's left for them. And other people who have intention, they did it before. But if you're gonna buy this ticket in a year, You buy it today for the future in a year.
Leon: You can choose any place you want. Any place. You can be everything what you want. And you buy it today. And you keep your ticket in your pocket today. For the future. For your future created today. And this is what we're talking about. [00:25:00]
Rishad: This is incredibly important. And the details here are everything. When people think about that, they, they often jump to, you can manifest your future, and I would say you can, if you have a very detailed plan, now you're at a risk of over planning and Mark Andreessen famously says, strong ideas, loosely held, you're at the risk of having strong ideas, strongly held because you devote so much time into the planning.
Rishad: And you're, you, you. you are prone to being stuck with your plans. So I'll, I'll say two phrases and I want you to tell me if you agree with them and why and why not. So the first one, a strong idea is loosely held. And the second one is our successes are external. Our failures are internal. Repeating success is almost impossible, but avoiding recurrent failures is simpler.
Rishad: All the
Leon: time. I'm not sure [00:26:00] it's possible to avoid failures. It's possible to avoid the same failures, yeah. Do not, uh, do the same mistake twice. But our world is, uh, based on failures. I know people who built a good company. They sold this company. They created another company. Very, very quickly. They built very quickly.
Leon: They sold very quickly. And then they start another company and they, uh, just, uh, start with some problem and they didn't have experience of failure and they don't know how to work on these problems and they fail and fail dramatically because they fail from much higher position than they were before.
Leon: So it's very important. Uh, it's, it's a Silicon Valley, uh, style. Try to fail as soon as possible, and do not be afraid to fail, because in this case, to learn. [00:27:00] Uh, kids, kids learn how to be healthy through being sickle. I was ill all the time when I was a kid, and then I became... So it looks like I took all, uh...
Leon: All the viruses existed in our world when I was a child, and, uh, and for the last, uh, 30, 35 years, I almost do not take any flu or something like this. So, it's very important. This is, this is how our world just works. So, it's very important to fail in the beginning, to learn from failure. Otherwise, I am sure, 100%.
Leon: that people who did even billion very smoothly without failure and never met some failure, lose company or something [00:28:00] like this, you can put them in the beginning and they won't be able to succeed anymore. So it's very important to learn how to fail, not to specifically to learn how to fail. To be prepared for this, because if you do not know how to fail, you do not, uh, you, uh, you do not get details of failure.
Leon: I can share with you, for example, uh, how did I learn during my PhD. Uh, before I didn't do it. And I spent a lot of time on, um, on these, um, exams and all this stuff. And during my PhD, I accepted a totally different approach that helped me to go through very tough courses and to save a lot of time. Because...
Leon: I [00:29:00] came to the lecture prepared, all students come to the lecture and learn from lecturer and they get out from the lecture maximum 10 20% they take out of them, right? And then they go to the cafe, so in a day they lose everything. And then they have to go back to learn from the beginning, and if they have any questions, nobody can answer.
Leon: But if you learn before the lecture, you come to the lecture with all questions, you can ask these questions, and you can, uh, raise your, uh, understanding of the subject 50 60%, up to 60%, for example, because you're ready. And you come to the lecture not to hear some new stuff. You come to lecture to [00:30:00] cement what you know.
Leon: And this is very important in business as well. You have to understand detail. That's why you have to learn before.
Leon: This
Rishad: goes against somewhat the strong bias to action that is touted in Silicon Valley. Adam Grant talks about this in his book Originals and he concludes moderate procrastination is the way to success. Not to start right away and not to wait forever, but let the idea... incubate in your brain. Do you agree with that statement?
Rishad: And what percent, and I want you to give me a number here, Leon, of your success is luck?
Leon: Uh, first of all, let's start from the second question. There are three elements of success. In the first place is luck, maybe 50%. [00:31:00] 30% is intention, and 20% is connection, or maybe 30% is connection, 20% is intention. Doesn't, not a big deal.
Leon: But lag plays. A huge role, but not like coming from their, uh, uncertainty like coming from the potential to different. Again, we're talking about quantum mechanic work because quantum mechanics is talking about potential and probability and probability, this potential and even probability zero has some potential if you're talking about rational, uh, numbers.
Leon: So your luck is your potential. And your potential is based on your intention. And your intention is based on your understanding and fitness to this world. [00:32:00] And what does it mean, fitness to this world? It means connection. For business, it means connection. You know how to build connections, you know how to talk to people, you know how to sell.
Leon: Uh, and, uh, this is what really works in our world. So three things, very important, not only luck, because luck taking itself has no meaning, no meaning, but it should be based on your potential. And what was the first question?
Rishad: In Silicon Valley, uh, people tell to just get started. A strong bias to action is looked at as a great thing and a strong bias to planning, waiting it out is looked down upon almost.
Rishad: I just wanted to get your thoughts on that. My own views are moderate procrastination. My own views is don't get started right away, plan a little bit, wait a little bit, don't wait forever. [00:33:00] And the, the most successful people know when to launch and know what the appropriate amount of planning is. So I wanted to get your thoughts on the Silicon Valley mantra, just, just get started.
Rishad: And this is Charlie.
Leon: Yeah. Very interesting question. Again, we cannot think in a planner way. Our world is three dimensional as you told even beyond. Uh, so if procrastination based on your fears. This is a bad thing. If procrastination is based on your wisdom is a good thing.
Rishad: That makes sense. I think, um, the, the, the quantum science background you have is, I can see how it's contributed quite a bit because it, it almost forces you to dig deeper [00:34:00] and to get to the real truth.
Rishad: Whereas a lot of people would stop. I wanted to talk to you about team building. This is something I struggle with quite a bit. My, for those. Interested in my Myers Briggs personality is INTP, which means I'm an introvert. I don't like managing people. I'm happy to give them tasks and give them all the freedom to do however they desire.
Rishad: In my experience, that does not work. It just fails because People crave structure. They want me to guide them along the way and they want me to give them more specifics. Talk to me about your vetting process for working with people and how do you keep them motivated, give them the freedom, but also provide them with structure.
Rishad: And if you could give me some benchmarks to use specifically, that would help me a lot in my vetting journey.
Leon: Yeah, I would love to, uh, to share my, uh, approach. Yeah, usually I hire very good people, [00:35:00] very good people. And, uh, in my companies, uh, very rarely people leave my company. Uh, because my approach is, uh, uh, fundamental, I would say.
Leon: I know exactly, for example, if I'm looking executive, I'm looking the,
Leon: uh, person, person, uh, to the position. Not position, uh, second, I am looking for position to the person, not person to the position. If I am looking for some low level employer, I am looking for person to the position. There are two different approaches. So, for example, uh, if I, uh, if I build new company, for example, and I need sales manager for the new company, whom I am going to hire?
Leon: Am I going to hire somebody who played music during his childhood? [00:36:00] I'm going to hire players also, forward, who know exactly who is there and can calculate immediately his next action. Definitely, this is whom I'm going to hire. I'm going to hire
Leon: some people or some person who is rebellious, who is against everything. Maybe it should be asshole, because he should go through the walls. This And maybe I'm ready to, uh, to, to accept that he's asshole and he will say everywhere that he sold everything, not me. And he was working for some idiot who is CEO or founder of this company.
Leon: And he did, he built all this company. I don't care about it. I care about performance [00:37:00] because I need sales for this company. But it never goes beyond one year. So for the one year, this guy should build sales. And then if everything is smooth, whom you're going to hire? Player music, just smoothly, walk with customers, you know, step by step.
Leon: So all the time when you consider home to to hire, you should build archetype. of the person you are going to hire. There are four different people, people's archetypes, even more, and you should know exactly whom you are going to work with and how much you are going to suffer from this. So if you know exactly which archetype you're going to hire, you're ready to deal with this type of archetype.
Leon: And a black swan doesn't happen. Everything goes [00:38:00] smoothly, okay? If you are not ready to deal with people who, who just position themselves very good during interview, you hire them very nice and they start working, they become asshole. It means you missed some kind of archetype. So you can build a questionnaire to recognize this archetype.
Leon: Okay. For example, you should again, pay attention to the details, how he's talking about his previous war, previous boss, how he's talking about the team he was working before. So all details, you should just, he's talking, not you. Okay. He's talking to you. He's telling himself to you. If he's talking, you can have just.
Leon: infinite information from him about himself. And [00:39:00] if you know how to read details. You know exactly who we are dealing with.
Rishad: Let's talk about decision making in a board or in a team capacity. I'm running a pitch competition right now. The results actually might be out by the time this podcast is released.
Rishad: I'm deciding how to select the winner. What people are naturally drawn towards is everyone, every investor gets one vote. I don't think that's a fair process because I don't I think there's tension between an idea of democracy and an idea of meritocracy. The best ideas are not the most popular ones. A weighted voting process with people who are more experience knowledgeable in what we're voting about should get more votes.
Rishad: And people who are less knowledgeable experience should get less votes. This inherently gets a lot of pushback whenever I bring it up because everyone's like, just give everyone one vote and that's fair. And I actually don't think that's a fair process. I'd love to hear your opinions and thoughts about it and say, there's a board.
Rishad: And [00:40:00] one, one person on the board, you know, has deep financial background. The other one is an industry expert and say it's a med tech device and they're a mechanical engineer. If you're talking about finances, the mechanical engineer should get half a vote and the finance person should get four votes. Uh, and I'm just using some extreme examples, but I'd love to get your thoughts is not how the world is designed, but I think this should, this could be, I think you're
Leon: too serious about it.
Leon: Okay. I think you are too serious about it. I think it's, uh, everything is the game. It's the game. Finally, you decide whether you're going to invest in this company or not. You cannot rely on people with biases based on their perception of the world we were talking about. Everybody has his own perception or own fitness function to this world.
Leon: And you're going to rely on this. Now, if you have statistics thousand, you bring in the board thousand people and they decide even thousand is not enough because [00:41:00] each people has a, every, every guy has such a huge bias that you cannot just average all these biases, even 1000, taking 1000, uh, people. for statistics.
Leon: So it's a game, no statistics. You cannot decide based on their decisions. So play the game, give everyone Uh, one word, uh, word is it's totally fair because everyone thinks he's a good financial guy, thinks he's good in engineering, engineering guy thinks he's good in finances, uh, this is what happens usually, uh, and they belong to different quadrants of whole brain thinking.
Leon: There is a very interesting theory about whole brain thinking, how they manage to, uh, to, to work with each other. For example, some interesting story. If. I'm like a founder. I'm going to the Venture Fund. [00:42:00] I am engineering founder. I'm Visioner. I'm Steve Jobs, I'm Visioner. I don't know so much engineering. I know vision.
Leon: I know what I'm going to build and I cannot play with numbers. All this stuff. Analytics, I come to Venture Fund whom I meet. So I tried to tell them about my vision, wow, I'm building this, it will change the world. And he's looking at me without understanding any word I'm talking about. It's not his style to understand.
Leon: He's thinking by, so he can, uh, he asked me. Okay, good. So where is your proof? Where is your clinical trials? Where is this? Where is that? How many people? Where is statistics? Where is financial? Financials? I don't know what to say. And now, just imagine, I go to the, I come to the partner of Venture Fund, [00:43:00] who was previously entrepreneur, and he is visionary as well.
Leon: And I talked to him. He said, wow, that's amazing. Very good. Now let's go to my analytics for the numbers. So this is, this is how it works. So all, everything is just the game and don't take it seriously.
Rishad: In your experience, who is more likely to be successful in the visionary or the operator?
Leon: Definitely visionary.
Leon: The real surgeon will never be successful. Interesting.
Rishad: So one thing I wanted to get into is decentralization and how that will play out in the current global macro environment. Governments continue to protect themselves and their self serving interests to an extent, and there is an unwillingness to an extent for them to work with each other.[00:44:00]
Rishad: The location of your startup has been critically important because if I'm investing And certain emerging markets, government interference, tax rules, there's too many unknowns and I would rather put my money in countries which value and incentivize innovation and startups and angel investments. What is your thought process on is the location, is it much harder to build a successful startup in, in Lagos, Nigeria, compared to San Francisco or.
Rishad: Is there some, are things changing there?
Leon: I'm not sure there is a big change. Location is very important. Uh, but at the same time, it depends on your connections. Again, you can live in San Francisco. You're, you're introvert. You don't know how to make connections. [00:45:00] This location doesn't have any meaning for you. Maybe you better go to the village and start business there because in the village, you can just meet in the club with all the people, build connections and become somebody there, but you cannot do it in a very crowded place.
Leon: Again, it's very individual, but for me, if I'm going looking for to do business, I would because I'm not, I am between introvert and extrovert. I told all my life I'm extrovert, but finally understood I'm introvert. So I'm somehow in between. So I usually, uh, I know three best places where I want to be to build the business.
Leon: It's, it's a. United States, specifically Silicon Valley or Boston. It's Israel and it's Singapore. So these three places, [00:46:00] just amazing places for people like me to build business, to create connections and to have a very good perspective. Uh, if definitely if you build in, uh, no, Nigeria has a very good perspective as well, a lot of capital coming there.
Leon: And again, it depends how market is crowded. How much capital capital coming there? What kind of culture behind the venture ecosystem? For example, uh, a lot of, uh, companies could, uh, could be created, uh, you know, I don't know in Arab Emirates, but in our Emirates, usually different type of financing is the family offices.
Leon: It's offices. It's not venture capital. So you have to learn something different, how to manage, [00:47:00] uh, getting capital from the offices. Uh, again, everything is very individual, and you should just understand what is better for you. Definitely, if you go to, to, to, to, to study in Harvard, in Harvard, uh, Harvard, you have much better future.
Leon: If you study in, I don't know, in some places, uh, well, In Africa, okay? Or in even in Asia. So in any case, nobody, nobody just cancel location.
Rishad: That is a very actionable answer. Thank you for those insights, Leon. I'll ask you one last question because I know we have a hard stop. What is one piece of advice you would give yourself if you 10 years ago? [00:48:00] Uh, one piece
Leon: of advice. To, to learn how to pay attention on detail, everything, you know, the devil in detail.
Leon: Uh, I, I, I did a lot of mistakes and failure happened because I didn't account some details and just, you know, there are three levels of thinking of vision of the things. You can have some deep thinking, deep vision. It means. You can, uh, go deeper and deeper into detail. This is in one direction. So it's some three dimensional space.
Leon: Another space is integral vision, or vision from the top. It's like, you know, like a door. You can [00:49:00] see all these stuff at the same time, but you don't see the time. And it could be vision in time, whom I am going to be in a year and two years, again in detail. So in this scale of time. So it's three dimensional vision.
Leon: Which everybody who you should use to decide I built my decision. I would say like this. I do not decide Unless I have vision in all these three dimension. So I call it, you know, like so it's like
Leon: Optics you can see far away. You don't have to details you flip it and you can see immediately what you have here. And you can have a time
Rishad: like, uh, Gail, that resonates with me so much . That is [00:50:00] advice I would give myself as well is plan more, act less, and that someone who has a very strong bias towards action.
Rishad: I jump into products, uh, projects without planning and it has hurt me quite a bit and it's something I'm actively not doing anymore. Thank you for this, Leon. This has been amazing. And I can't wait to do a part two, hopefully soon.
Leon: Yeah, that's amazing. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. And I wish you a great, great, uh, future like investor.
Leon: And I know you, you moved from a medical field to entrepreneurial and investment field. And it's, it's not easy. And I wish you just success there.
Rishad: Thank you.
