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- [00:00]
Interviewer
So Camille, you started at Meta, where you were top AI engineer and now you run Perceptive Ventures, one of the top agentic AI seed funds in the world. Tell me about how your experience from Meta informs your day to day as a venture capitalist.
- [00:15]
Camille
It's pretty critical. And before joining Meta, my company was acquired as I was a startup founder and CEO. And both of those experiences are really critical to how I invest today. Having been a founder, I know how fast one can move and how nimble one can be. But having also been a big tech operator, I understand which large spaces big tech finds attractive and wants to move into. And the key here as an investor is making sure that we're not investing in spaces that big tech is going to dominate or be really interested in. And by the way, when I say big tech, I also mean OpenAI and Anthropic, because at this point they have sort of like a Neo incumbent power in AI.
- [00:45]
Interviewer
How do you know whether Big Tech, whether Meta, Facebook or anthropic, OpenAI is going to go after space or not?
- [00:51]
Camille
Understanding scale? You know, I ran a $10 billion product suite at Meta, which is, you know, sounds large, but in the grand scheme of Meta was actually not that. And so there are $10 billion businesses that these large companies don't really have an interest in entering or pursuing because it doesn't really move the needle when you're a multi trillion dollar company that's too small for them. But a $10 billion startup is a very interesting outcome for a venture investor like myself.
- [01:13]
Interviewer
If there's not top engineers on Meta that are going to go after a problem, you think that's a safer place to build a startup and to build something that could be dominant there versus having to compete every day against these large alums.
- [01:24]
Camille
The big problem with incumbents is that they have distribution power. So no matter how innovative your product may be as a startup and how forward thinking it is, or what well executed is, if you don't have the distribution power of these behemoths, it's quite dangerous to compete against them.
- [01:35]
Interviewer
So when you started Perceptive early on in your genesis, you made a big bet that the future of AI would be agentic. Why is that?
- [01:43]
Camille
A lot of AI outsiders I think were convinced that artificial intelligence was about building tools to help knowledge workers. But the reality is that artificial intelligence is really centrally concerned with replacing human decision making. And that has three, three components at its core, prediction, judgment and action. And these three components combined replace human decision making, which is the entire point of AI. So when you put them all together, it creates a completely agentic system. And the clearest example of that today for layman, is Waymo. When you get into Waymo, the system is performing all three functions. It predicts where other cars are going, where it is going, how objects in the environment, such as pedestrians and bikes are behaving. And that applies judgment to those predictions. It says we should do X or yeah. And then it takes action by actually moving the car in the necessary direction at the required speed based on those predictions and judgments. That's a fully agentic system. And that's exactly what's happening with software. Software is becoming agentic, which means it's not only eating software, but it's actually able to eat entire human workflows.
- [02:39]
Interviewer
So do you fall in the camp where you believe AI will destruct human labor, or do you think it's going to make things so efficient that more people will transact and there'll be more opportunities for business?
- [02:50]
Camille
I think it will disrupt and destroy a lot of industries, for sure. I think it's also going to create a lot of new opportunities. And there's a lot of jobs that are also very difficult for AI to replace. We're always going to need restaurants, we're always going to need hotels. We're always going to need plumbers and electricians. We're going to need people to service the millions and millions of robots that are going to exist in our world. So it's going to create new jobs, but it will certainly disrupt and replace a lot of human knowledge work, human
- [03:16]
Interviewer
labor, being on the inside and seeing all the disruption that's down the pipeline. What's your framework for figuring out what AI disrupts in the near term future and over long term?
- [03:28]
Camille
In the near term, it is easier to disrupt things that are less regulated. And so the thing, the areas that will be slower to change are the ones that are more regulated. Spaces like the law or healthcare, where there are merchant guilds that protect those industries and accredit and license the individuals that work in those industries, working in concert with government to license those individuals, like those things are going to be a lot slower to change, but they will eventually, as safety is proven not to be better with AI, as efficacy has proven not to be better with AI, but it's just going to be a lot slower.
- [03:59]
Interviewer
Last time we chatted, you said that there's a couple of players in the market that saw this agentic future years ago, and they have a head start. Tell me about these companies working on
- [04:08]
Camille
AI internally at Meta we knew where things were going. That's actually what led me to leave and start Perceptive. We saw that future coming because we were part of the group building our vision at the time. Even if we were to pull people internally at the company, though, would have seemed crazy. People broadly in the company might have thought that was pretty futuristic, but those of us working on these topics realized it wasn't that crazy because the models were getting there. So there is a head start that some of these big incumbents have, but it doesn't mean that this is the end all and be all. We are in the early innings of LLMs and we don't fully know if LLMs are the right architecture for developing AGI or superintelligence. So it's still a question mark if even this is the right path. Long term, it could be some other new company comes about and develops a new architecture that it's actually more efficient and better for developing AGI tbd. But certainly when it comes to the LLM landscape and the big platform models, there is certainly a head start that
- [05:00]
Interviewer
these big companies have seed stage venture capitalists in general have, and not a difficult job of predicting the future 10, 12, 14 years from now. Today that's even more difficult with the pace of AI. How do you create a framework? Investing 2026 for 2020, 2036 and beyond
- [05:19]
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- [06:45]
Camille
lot about what the world is going to look like and specific industries are going to look like and invest towards that vision of the future. We're very thesis driven and so we steer away from what seem like near term improvements in innovation. We've historically never invested in copilots and things like that because we didn't believe that copilots were the end goal. And so we try to think about like, well what does an agentic future for healthcare look like? What does agentic future for legal look like? What does agentic future look like for construction, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera and work our way backwards from that in order to say like this company fits that mold but more specifically this founder fits that mold because we have to see that that founder gets that future. A lot of founders, founders are optimizing for the next three to five years in whatever industry they're in. That's how far out they think. And they, you know, they pitch you like, hey is I'm going to get to a Series A. I don't care how you get to a Series A, I'm concerned about how you're going to build $100 billion company.
- [07:36]
Interviewer
How do you marry those two things? Which is I need to be pragmatic enough to attract the next round of funding while also not being leapfrogged by the next generation of technology.
- [07:45]
Camille
I would say it's a little controversial to say out loud, but I would say that the tier one investors in venture across stages, whether it's seats, Series A BC are very forward thinking. They are investing in very disruptive innovation whether it's Khosla or Founders Fund or Sequoia. That's how they think. And so there is an element of just being de risked because we're aligned in how we think with some of those bigger players.
- [08:06]
Interviewer
And these investors are investing at the Series A pre revenue basically they realize that gap between the future and the current state and they're willing to subsidize even from a revenue basis. They're looking for something fundamentally different in terms of milestones.
- [08:19]
Camille
Yes and no. So it depends on the industry. Right. So in B2B we've historically seen or in the last couple years that it is very easy and quick for AI companies to get to revenue quickly. So by the time they get to Series A, they're doing Substantial amounts of revenue. So from that perspective, they're de risked. But also you can look at Khozlu being the only venture investor at OpenAI back in like 2017, 2018, something like that, when OpenAI still, it was pre revenue then and it certainly still leads cash today. So there is, there are element of both of being that visionary willing to back pre revenue. But also, you know, there's a lot of companies that are getting revenue very quickly these days based on just AI.
- [08:53]
Interviewer
You're on the bleeding edge of agentic AI. As an investor, how much do you build a thesis around different parts of the market, and how much do you let your founders draw you into what they see as the future?
- [09:03]
Camille
A mix of both. You know, sometimes there are industries that we haven't sat down and thought about and fleshed out in terms of what we think that future looks like. And so we can chat with the founder about what they think is going to happen. And then we try to sit down and say, all right, does that make sense to us based on what we see happening in other industries as well? But it is often that we have already come to a place of understanding or having a general rough sketch of what we think the future is going to be for that space. It's interesting, as a former founder, you're just stuck in the weeds pretty often, and so it's often hard to see the bigger picture. So where is the founder that really understands what the bigger picture looks like and how they're going to get there?
- [09:42]
Interviewer
A lot of people have trouble conceptualizing an agentic AI future. How does that work? Let's say I'm a business owner. Do I just go in, grab my coffee, press play, and then leave, come back at the end of the day?
- [09:55]
Camille
You know, what's crazy is there's a world where AI is the business owner. You know, I've talked to really visionary founders who are working on this. You know, what is a world where AI owns property, where AI has legal rights, and if so, then they are the business owner. They can spin up businesses, which is pretty wild until we get to that sort of regulatory regime. Like, yes, I do think there is a world where, and I think it's even here now already, where you see, you know, small business owners that can, you know, press a few buttons and run a large operation because they've automated so much of it. It's pretty, it's pretty awesome to see the question again becomes like, at what point do they become replaced by an AI that owns the business?
- [10:35]
Interviewer
And I subscribe to this agentic AI future. I think it's more or less obvious if you think from first principles. What's not clear to me is a second order effects. So if I'm an investor, I'm running an endowment, how should I think about investing into other asset classes? Assuming that an AI agentic future is imminent?
- [10:54]
Camille
Every asset class is going to be touched by AI private equity. There have been some large titans in private equity who were anti AI a year ago now, but they're publicly trying to defend their portfolios because they're scared that the companies they've invested in are not going to survive the ad revolution. Every asset class is being touched by this, trying to say like think of what might not be, maybe commodities, but even then commodities. There's a lot of the AI boom has driven a need for certain kinds of commodities. So it's even impacting that space in different ways. And I think the job of allocators of LPs is going to change because the Yale model, the Yale endowment model of investing, even that could be automated. Assessing different industries, assessing different managers in different sectors can be automated. So it's, it's really going to touch absolutely everything even when we think it's not.
- [11:39]
Interviewer
How do you think about AI enabled businesses versus AI first businesses in the non venture space?
- [11:45]
Camille
It's hard to say that anything is not going to be touched by AI. So even think like you were mentioning widgets. So I like to think about industrial like legacy industry kind of businesses, petrochemicals, you name it. Like really old school stuff that requires machinery to operate, that's also getting automated. We see we get pitched ideas in those really obscure industrial areas that you would think of PE just buys that makes the widgets go faster, go you know, run with less people, the whole operation, less people. All of that is also getting automated. So even if you're lower middle market PE firm that does that and we've actually started to see this is some of those PE firms are starting to hire AI engineers or AI technologists to look at their portfolio and say like all right, how is AI going to disrupt these companies? That's the thing that people forget is like you think that just because you're not doing, it's not going to happen. But the reality is that someone else is going to try it and if they're successful they're going to beat you. So that's how, that's how we see it and we see what's happening.
- [12:39]
Interviewer
And by some accounts emerging managers and vc, there's an extinction level event happening where if anywhere from 50 to 75 some some predict up to 90% of emerging managers are on their last fund and just won't be able to raise any more funds. How are you surviving this extension level event and how are you preparing yourself for the next era of vc?
- [13:03]
Camille
One of the reasons it's occurring is because too many venture managers came out of the pandemic high when anyone with a pulse and a debt could raise a fund. Frankly, and it wasn't necessarily people who should have to be honest. There's a lot of skills required in order to raise a fund Build a
- [13:20]
Interviewer
firm and you made that distinction. A lot of funds don't know the difference between running a fund and running a firm. How are you building your firm and what lessons have you learned from building a firm?
- [13:32]
Camille
A firm is a brand and most people don't realize that you're as a venture. To be a successful venture manager, you have to be consistently marketing that brand to founders into LP founders and LPs constantly. They think that it's just a function of having deal flow and making the investment and it's not. The only reason your firm exist is because you have been able to bring LPs into into, you know, your your capital base and stewarded that capital well and then and continue to market your performance and your ability to continue doing that over and over and over again. Venture. If you look at the studies about successful venture firms starting all the way back, Sequoia, etc. They are successful today because of the success they had in the past and they continued marketing of that success. And a lot of venture managers don't like marketing and they don't like fundraising. They don't and they don't like investor relations. But that's the key to building a successful firm.
- [14:23]
Interviewer
You have some enviable LPs especially earlier on in your firm building. How are you able to secure those LPs and what are some best practices for other emerging managers that want to bring in blue chip LPs?
- [14:35]
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- [15:30]
Camille
I think the key to being a successful venture manager is having a very strong network and people think that that just means a founder network. I think that's half of it and the other half is having a strong LP network. Again, if you don't have the money, you're not an investor so you have to have a strong LP network to begin with. It just happened in terms of how my life came together, my career, that I did know a lot of LPs and I had raised money as a founder so I already knew how to do that. So I already had the network built in to go out, tap it and start my firm and from there word spreads. LPs are a very insular, talkative group of people. They like to share their deal flow in terms of venture managers that they're finding. And that's how my LP LP base was able to grow through that word of mouth with these, with these investors.
- [16:11]
Interviewer
Talk to me about these AI tools. What AI are you using internally that gives you an edge over your competitors?
- [16:16]
Camille
I believe that you can encode and build models of what a successful founder looks like in B2B startups and then also in consumer startups because I think they're actually different. And so that psychographic model I think is key. And I think it's something that's repeatable and scalable. If you look at some of the character traits that really define the best founders of, of the history of technology from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, et cetera, et cetera. They all share common things. And so I think that you can actually model this and use that model just like any other AI model. To say this is the right founder to bet on versus using just gut instinct, which is what a lot of precede and seed venture investing is a lot of gut instinct. But gut instinct is just data. It's just accumulated data in your mind and body that I think can be actually modeled
- [17:02]
Interviewer
goes without saying. AI is a hyper competitive seed market. How do you compete against other firms? And also how do you compete? You mentioned Khosla Sequoia Founders Fund. How do you compete against these multi stage platforms as well we are of
- [17:14]
Camille
the size where we don't have to compete with the big boys. We can collaborate with them, given our check size. And so we, you know, we're in deals with a lot of the big guys, Founders Fund, Kozla, et cetera. So that's. This is due to. Due to size. Where we do compete is the other precedent, seed firms. And where we win is because we are exited AI founders. We've been down the road as founders before, and in particular in AI. And so it's a very. I don't say it's easy, but it's a pretty straightforward argument to make to any founder. Like, we've just been there before. We can help you with the challenges you're facing today and we'll face tomorrow from inception all the way through exit. And so that's what really been the key for winning for us, because most VCs are run by career investors who've never built anything before. And then the firms that do have some level of operators, they tend to be operators, they're not founders. Very few firms have actually been built by former founders. Founders Fund is certainly one, Andreessen Horowitz is another. But there's actually very few. When you think about it.
- [18:09]
Interviewer
Tell me about some of the biggest misses you made as a vc, and what were the learnings from those mistakes. The most consistent logical fallacy or mistake that I see from smart VCs, and this is like a very predictable at this point, is that they really like the founder and they really hate the business and they don't invest. And they're right about both, but their decision not to invest is wrong.
- [18:29]
Camille
Right. And what you, what happens when you do make that decision or to invest or not invest, is you're saying, like, there has to be a pivot. And I'm investing with the hopes that this team will pivot. Sometimes you feel so strongly about a team that you say, I'm going to invest and they're going to figure it out. And I don't, I don't believe in this thing that they're doing right now, but they're going to figure it out. That's how we got our first check. When I was a founder and CEO, we got our first check and our investor told us they're like, we have no idea what you're doing or where this is going, but we really like you as a team. So here's a check. And that's the kind of bold investing you need to do. And that we've done. We've invested Pre idea. I met a founder who had amazing two or three exits after his belt and he was like, I don't know what I'm going to do next. And I was like, take my money. I don't know what you're going to do either, but you're smart enough to figure it out. So sometimes you just got to take that bet.
- [19:14]
Interviewer
Would you rather invest pre idea or in the wrong business model?
- [19:17]
Camille
Both are fine. I don't think there's an either or. Again, if it's the right team, it's the right team. You have to believe that they're willing to move quickly because sometimes you can have a really smart team but they don't iterate fast enough. They don't. They get caught up in sunk costs and say like, oh, we've already built all of this. Like, do we really want to pivot to something? You know, you need to invest in someone who's willing to let all that go and be ruthless with their time.
- [19:39]
Interviewer
Talked about AGI earlier. Do you lose sleep on this doomsday AI situation where there's an extinction level event not in the venture ecosystem, but humanity in general?
- [19:51]
Camille
I don't lose sleep over, but I do think it's real. I think we have to think about it. And it's unfortunately true that we have to balance it with national security concerns. So there's often this tension in the US at least of building for safety and building for speed. You can, you know, dumb it down and say synthesis, open AI, but the reality is if we don't build it, China will.
- [20:13]
Interviewer
So why even think about it? The decision is we have to move forward.
- [20:17]
Camille
There is that tension, right?
- [20:22]
Interviewer
What's a key philosophy that you've changed over the last 12 months that you now that leads you to make different actions today?
- [20:27]
Camille
One of the key things I've come to accept is that some of the best founders in the world are not necessarily always the best people to work for or to work with. There is an element of ruthlessness that's required in building generational companies that transform humanity. It's a sacrifice they are making personally, but it's a sacrifice they ask their employees to make as well and a sacrifice they ask investors to make as well. And so there's often a desire to do business with people you like, right? Like it's a common maximum in the business. And the reality in venture is that sometimes you want to do business with people you don't like because they are the best, the most extraordinary, impactful people in history.
- [21:05]
Interviewer
Reminds me of A story you told me when we were having dinner a couple months ago. Tell me about that.
- [21:09]
Camille
Yes, so it's an interesting story. So we were early in a company and the founder behaved in a certain way that was not very agreeable. And I'm trying to be careful how much I say here, he was not very agreeable. And when we talked about it in ic, one of my partners said, hey, do we want to work with this guy? You know, he seems like an asshole, he's doing kind of assholey things. And I said, actually, I want to work with him even more now because he can be an asshole to me if despite all the things I've done for him. That makes me realize like, this guy is going to do whatever it takes to build this company. And that was a wake up call for me, for our team in terms of what it takes to build a generational business and how we look for those people and back them and the compromises you have to make.
- [21:59]
Interviewer
How would you explain that? Because there's obviously the opposite is also an axiom compounding relationships, compounding reputation. But here specifically, it's almost a zero sum mentality to relationships. That was a superpower. How would you explain the mechanics around that?
- [22:13]
Camille
There's at the core a level of humility you have to have because when someone's being disagreeable or an asshole, there's an element of like, I'm offended, it's my ego that's saying like, I, I'm hurt, I don't want to be hurt. I don't want to continue interacting with someone who is hurting me. So it takes a stepping out of that and saying that doesn't matter. What matters here is as a venture manager, I'm here to make money for my LPs and is this the right person to make money for my LPs, period. So it's taking yourself out of the framework that you often are in in terms of being led by ego and about pain and whatever and hurt and saying like, what actually matters?
- [22:49]
Interviewer
Is that a specific case where you had to just burn through all your relationships in two, three years because there's a short window where, or is there some general wisdom there for highly disruptive startup founders?
- [22:59]
Camille
At the end of the day, the best founders in the world have all the leverage. You know, they can, they can choose their investors and so they will have leverage in that dynamic always. You know, once you come in, they still will have leverage over you, even if no matter how big your position is in the company, because they can always raise More from someone else. Right. So I don't think from a founder perspective, like, you just have to be conscious of that. That's the dynamic now. And that's okay. I'm not here to be in the spotlight. I'm here to support founders. I like how Vinod Khosla says he's not a vc, he's a venturous assistant. He helps founders, he assists them in a service provider. That is the role. And so you have to own that and let this ego of the VC push that aside. And it doesn't mean that your relationships are fraught. It just means that you have to be careful with those people. People who worked, I'm fortunate enough to know people who worked with Steve Jobs or were on board to Steve Jobs and they all knew you got to be careful with him. Doesn't mean that you can't have a relationship with him. It doesn't mean that he's not extraordinary. It just means you just have to be care. Yeah.
- [23:56]
Interviewer
Would that be the case if you were a customer of that entrepreneur? Clearly that would be counterproductive to scaling, but it's really your seat. You're a commodity to that entrepreneur. So he didn't find the need to use niceties and waste time with you as a commodity versus if he was trying to secure a large product or a large contract, that would be a necessary condition for him to succeed.
- [24:16]
Camille
Yeah. And again, these founders, it's not that they're perma assholes like they, they are, they're quite charismatic, very friendly people when the moment is right. And so they know how to turn on the charm when it comes to sales, when it comes to customers, clients, et cetera. And that's, that's their magic, is that they can be both. Now when I, when I look at my portfolio and we look at our top companies, top founders, the unicorn founders we backed, they all have that ability to, from one second go ruthless to the next second, be like the nicest guy in the world. And so they know that they, in order to build a massive company, they're going to have to be the nicest guy in the world where they're outselling, you know, when they're, when they're out pitching. But when push comes to shove and there is a moment that requires decisiveness, they're not afraid to pull out the ruthless side of them.
- [24:55]
Interviewer
Yeah. If you think about your energy and being nice as being highly energy consuming, they have an efficient use of their energy when it comes to different parts of the value chain. Of course, that Sounds psychopathic. But when you take away the moral frame on it and you look at what's going to lead to, if you're trying to create an entrepreneur from scratch that's going to execute at the high speed with the fewest amount of resources, that's almost like the perfect equation.
- [25:19]
Camille
Yep, exactly. And I think we like to judge, you know, even using the word psychopathic, it's like, oh man, do we want psychopathic founders. But what if that's just simply what it takes to build transformational global companies? It's some level of psychopathy.
- [25:36]
Interviewer
You could be 100% psychopathic and provide massive value to society. I'm not going to name any founders. Psychopathy is a clinical definition of not caring, having low empathy and all these things. You could literally be clinically psychopathic. And if you have the right incentives, they could end up actually carrying society forward. And you could say, that's wrong, that's bad, but on a net basis, they're actually very positive for society.
- [25:55]
Camille
We need them. Exactly. Yep.
- [26:00]
Interviewer
Last time we chatted, you said that
- [26:01]
Podcast Host / Sponsor Voice
whoever controls the computing platform controls the future. What form factor do you expect the
- [26:07]
Interviewer
future of compute to take form?
- [26:10]
Camille
Let's talk about what today's interface model looks like in these computing platforms. So we primarily use two interfaces. There's the computer, which we're chatting on a computer right now. Most knowledge workers sit at a desk looking at a monitor or a laptop. And this is interface model number one, let's call it. The second interface model is the phone. And I actually argue this is probably the most important one because most people on the planet have a smartphone, but most people on the planet do not have a desktop. In the gui, the graphical user interface that we use on laptops and monitors and phones, it's been around for 40 years and it's entirely text based, even though it's visual. I still have to read the written word on my calendar, on my emails, websites. Reading is actually not that fast. Like, it's not necessarily the most efficient way to process information. And part of the reason for this is that we developed the spoken word long before the written word. We're wired for speaking, which is why we're having this conversation by talking instead of writing back and forth to one another. So that's a fundamental principle behind these interaction models. And again, the phone follows that logic. But I think the phone is going to be the first one that breaks because it's an even more inefficient interface. People have to check their email on their phone and then wait to respond on their computer because typing on a phone is so cumbersome and we're already seeing early signs of that, that audio is faster and preferable. You see people using the dictation function to write emails and SMS on their phone. That's audio, that's a spoken word. So the input is becoming more and more audio based. So I think that's what we're going to see break first and that's going to be the platform shift that matters the most. And we've already started to see it with Humane, which came and went. But now OpenAI is going to release its own audio first device and while it may have a visual component, again, it's going to be primarily an audio interface.
- [27:33]
Interviewer
What is one piece of advice? You could go back to 2006 when you had just graduated Princeton, One timeless piece of advice that would have either helped you accelerate your career or helped you avoid costly mistakes.
- [27:43]
Camille
One thing that I wish I had done was actually work at a big tech company earlier in my career, before I was a founder. When you're a founder and you've never worked anywhere before in tech, you're really flying blind. But when you work at high talent density place like Google or Meta, you understand what the bar is across a variety of functions. So it wasn't until I got to Meta that I really understood what world class design looks like. World class product, world class engineering. I thought I knew as a founder, but it really wasn't until I got there that I understood the processes and systems that the best engineers in the world, the best designers in the world, the best product people in the world use to get the job done. And so if I was going back and talking to the younger version of myself, I would have said go learn there, go learn from them and then go out and build a company so you're not making a lot of mistakes.
- [28:28]
Interviewer
And I've only worked for three months in my life for somebody else. I worked at Jeffries for a summer, so I'm similar to you, very entrepreneurial. And when I think about these meta engineers and these Google engineers, are they the same level of talent at the high end as the top founders and they just have a different risk appetite
- [28:44]
Podcast Host / Sponsor Voice
or are founders just a different class
- [28:46]
Interviewer
of engineers, designers, et cetera?
- [28:49]
Camille
I think it's just a risk appetite question. And going back to the psychopathy, you know, a conversation, there's a different, you know, profile there. But in terms of they care too
- [28:58]
Interviewer
much about being liked.
- [29:00]
Camille
They care too much about being liked, there's yeah, they're not that. They're not the extreme of that psychographic profile that are.
- [29:06]
Interviewer
Founder, not enough trauma.
- [29:07]
Camille
Not enough trauma, necessarily. Yeah, yeah. So I think that's. Which I think are frankly the key factors, because there's tons and tons of intelligent, brilliant people in the world, but how many of them have the right. Let's call it the right trauma, the right wiring, the right psychopathy, the right, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, to be a generational founder that transforms the
- [29:24]
Interviewer
world, to play devil's advocate on you wish you would have went to Meta or Google earlier. You never know how that plays out. You could have been a lifer there. And I also. I started my career as an entrepreneur, and it's embarrassing how ignorant I was at the time, but yet I developed the skill set of being an entrepreneur in an unknown environment that if I had to pick, I'd go with that skill set versus the hard skill set.
- [29:48]
Camille
The skill set of a founder doesn't translate very well to corporate America is what I found when I got to Meta. One of the first things I told my manager was, here's a list of a dozen people I think we should fire.
- [29:59]
Interviewer
And she.
- [30:00]
Camille
She just laughed.
- [30:00]
Interviewer
Is that day two?
- [30:01]
Camille
This was like the first week.
- [30:03]
Interviewer
Day one.
- [30:03]
Podcast Host / Sponsor Voice
Yeah.
- [30:04]
Camille
I quickly could tell, like, who. Who was pulling their weight and. And whatnot, and she just laughed at me. And she said, hey, like, this is not how things work in corporate land. We're going to have to work with these people, even if they're not great to work with in terms of their efficacy. And so I have a strong bias for that action as a founder, and that doesn't always translate very well to corporate land, where there's systems and processes that slow you down and you can't just fire and hire the team that you want. So I think it really depends on what you're optimizing.
- [30:30]
Interviewer
For Emilio, this has been absolute masterclass. Thanks so much for jumping on the podcast.
- [30:35]
Camille
Thanks for having me.
- [30:36]
Podcast Host / Sponsor Voice
That's it for today's episode of How I Invest. If this conversation gave you new insights or ideas, do me a quick favor. Share with one person in your network who'd find it valuable or leave a short review wherever you listen. This helps more investors discover the show and keeps us bringing you these conversations week after week. Thank you for your continued support.