Oren Klaff Sample Guest Appearances

𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐝𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝 𝐜𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐑𝐚𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐂𝐚𝐩𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐥? Easy! You need a big network of potential investors with deep pockets! That's what I thought too... I was obsessed with building connections to VC's, Family Offices, high network individuals, PE firms... You name it. A couple of weeks ago in my call with Patrick McGinnis (Host of the Fomo Sapiens podcast on HBR, Creator of the word: FOMO, & venture capitalist with companies all over the world), we revealed the truth...

"- How do we shift people's minds away from... And I don't know if you're interested in partaking this, reaching out and building all this, investing all this time in these broad connections of relationships, and missing out on just forming a quality deal? - Yeah. Listen, people pitch me on LinkedIn all the time. I'm sure you get these too Oren, you get this pitch message in LinkedIn, and I'm like, "I don't know who you are. You've done no research on what I do. You've sent me a deal that I have no insight into. Why would you do that?" Right? I often- - All right Patrick. Can you hold on a second? I'm just investing in a barbecue AI company right now. This is... It just came in, I just ... "

"Innovation is not just coming from Silicon Valley. It's coming from everywhere, the heartland. It's coming from all over the world. So, I do a lot of venture capital in Latin America, and the amount of truly innovative ideas that we're seeing that we can then bring to the US is amazing. And so, I think that's important because the more entrepreneurs and problem solvers and innovators that you have in places where they didn't exist before means that you're going to have opportunities for great ideas that benefit us to flow into our culture as well. And also, you're going to have less poverty around the world, you're going to have a lot more cooperation, so I'm hopeful about the world going forward because I think that good ideas can propagate faster than they ever have before and we have much more connectivity to do that. And I also think that, I had a really awesome guy on my podcast called Sergey Young, who wrote a book called the Science and Technology of Growing Young, and it was all about longevity. And a lot of that stuff is, you know how these singularity university people are like? "Well, in three years, we'll be able to grow a new kidney in a lab." And you're like, "No, that's probably not going to happen."."

"- What happens when you get the things that you desire? Because there are really desirable things out there. They're made of dopamine. We want them, we work really hard, we get them. It's not a greater fool theory. It's not the sort of, "Beware what you what you ask for, you just might get it." What is happening in your mind? You don't have to get into biology when people are really wholesale getting the amazing things they covet. - That's good. That's what you want. I'm not saying... By the way, I have lots of nice things that I want and I enjoy. I'm not saying that's bad, obviously.

"There's a great book by Michael Porter and Katherine Gehl that's called "The Politics Industry". And I had them both on my podcast, FOMO Sapiens. And basically, they looked at the political industry in the United States from the framework of Porter's Five Forces, which is the way that we analyze competition, his famous framework. And they found that the political parties in the United States are designed to self-perpetuate and gather resources in terms of power and money. They are not designed to serve the interests of their customers, which are the people. And so both political parties are just, they're about amassing capital and power. And not letting new entrance in, which is why we have primaries where it's Democrat, Republican, then they go to the final. And then you throw in the conservative or sorry, the independent. And they have no shot. So, it's a bunch of malarkey. And so, what I am focused on in, sort of, as we think about the world we're living in today, I've gotten pretty involved in politics, not from an ideological perspective. Because I don't, people can believe what they want, it's fine by me. I don't really care. I'm more focused on how do we create a system that reflects the will of all the people so that we have outcomes, we don't have gridlock. We have bodies of government that can actually get things done that can create an environment where business is thriving, where we're competitive. Because what we know now is because our government is so broken, the US is less competitive on a global scale versus a lot of other countries. And so businesses are hobbled."

"I was reading an article and listening to podcasts about the Great Resignation. People are quitting their jobs en masse because they're like, "I work in this job, they treated me like crap during the pandemic, and frankly, I just don't care." I think that there is a general lack of well-roundedness in our educational systems now because people don't get a well-rounded education. Now we just look everything up on our phones, but at the same time, there are plenty of really smart young people that are starting businesses and doing great things. But I just think that in general, throughout lower-wage work, people just don't care anymore because they feel like nobody cares about them, and so when we complain, they're like, that could be happening, as well.

"Oh, just want to give you, which is a quick example to label set. If you're out there and you're FOMOing, fear of missing out, that all these guys are, money is raining from the sky. They've done a quick deal. This is there, oh, here's a big one, like I'm a serial entrepreneur, or this is my fifth deal. I've been in three transactions in three years. I'm going to transaction now. Say it's between $300 and $400 million. The sale has been going on for two and a half years of the company. Diligence, micropayments are going out all the time. Diligence continues every day. Even when the transaction is completely done, there are still holdbacks that are meaningful on the transaction. This is a well-known company. Internet company, you would recognize her name. You may have bought something from them, almost have $400 million in a transaction. The level of diligence, the level of scrutiny and the transaction isn't going through because of, it's sort of grinding itself to a slow halt because of government oversight, because of legal, like these transactions are very difficult to have to happen. $200 million doesn't just, sort of, people meet in a day. They agree to $200 million. You put out a press release, the press release is $200 million. Do not have a fear of missing out. I would say. And I would ask you, how many of the press releases do you think, kind of, don't actually come to fruition. They're like announcements on Shark Tank. I'll do that deal. But then they have to do due diligence. And, you know, and the deals don't go through.

"- How did you come up with the term or the phrase or the idea, FOMO. It's a major psychological lever, as I said, in everything we do. So in some ways, it was sitting there just obvious in front of you, but how did you surface and put it into the national consciousness? - When I got to business school, I found myself in an incredible choice-rich environment. So many opportunities, socially, professionally, intellectually, but mostly socially. And I would find that I was triple booked all the time. And I tried to do everything, and I was basically stressed out. It was like, I had all these good things, but I couldn't really enjoy them because I was trying so hard to get to the next thing that I could do that day. And I realized it wasn't just me. It was all of my friends, and we had not just had 9/11, but a lot of us had worked in the tech sector, which blew up in 2000, 2001. So we saw our livelihoods disappear like we've all lost a lot of money. So it was kind of like a little bit like right now where you're like, the world's kind of screwed up. I got to live for every moment. And so, I noticed it was a culture of the school that people would try to do everything and they could barely do that. So I started calling that fear of missing out or FOMO, and I wrote an article way back in 2003 in the school newspaper. 2004, excuse me, in the school newspaper called "Social Theory at HBS: McGinnis' Two FOs."

"I just had this amazing network, and I invested, oh, God, I don't want to say, you know, how many years, but years in building this network, and the net, you know, result of that was a big, f***ing donut because the deals are so specific that they don't, so say there are 350 - 400 venture firms, right, and on top of that, say there are 350 private equity firms, and on top of that, say there's, in this game maybe, sort of the Nathan Myhrvold's of the world who are billionaires but operators. Then on top of that, there's sort of 17 true billionaires, and maybe on top of that there's 60 $400 million guys kind of, in the game, but that is a very complex network of finance across thousands of firms, and so you get a deal, right? It's accounting software that uses AI to predict the likelihood of you getting an IRS audit and highlights those things so you can fix them before you file your taxes, right? Very specific thing, valuable, exciting, growing fast, but the chances that your relationship network is a solid match for that specific thing, I found to be very low. Finally, I had a partner, and he said, "You got it all wrong, Oren," and this was the big takeaway. I'll let you comment. Capital flows to deals. "

"-It reminds me a lot, right now it kind of feels that way a little, it's like people are riding the heat. I remember we had a company, and listen, I'm not being mean, but we had a company that came in the door and it was a music website, and it was started by a rockstar. A famous rockstar in Latin America, who I shall not name. And he'd never done anything in the business world in his life. And his claim to fame was that he invented internet time, whatever that is. And so he would give his pitch, he'd be like, my name is XYZ. Probably can Google this, and he's like, I invented internet time, I'm an apple master, I have this idea for a business. And he put together a round of financing and there was no business model ever. And I just remember we were just like, what? This feels crazy. Do you know what I mean? And I remember we go to our Monday morning meeting, we had so many memos. And we invested in, I don't know if you remember cosmo.com? "