Recognize Your Limitations

You've been enormously successful, but I would imagine there were also some failures along the way. We all have them. What would you say is your single biggest failure, something where you had a chance to later on cherish it because it taught you a really important lesson?

Yeah, no, I think Prosper, I chalk up as a failure because we had a big vision, we've seen, okay, the whole idea there is that money lent to individuals would come from individuals, so you'd be disintermediating the capital markets fundamentally, and it was actually built on a Vietnamese lending system, Hui, I know I'm not going to say that right.

Hui, yeah.

Okay, yeah, I'm terrible at that. So, it's based on a system that's worked for eons but also brought in the idea of kind of broad markets, right? So, the vision was really powerful, and then we just got hammered through, I think, both kind of regulatory limitations, which I think, like, we could've approached it differently, but yeah, the vision really never got to gel to its stage, and I blame that on my lack of discipline, inability to take it to that next level. Again, great start for two years, all the good stuff, stuff I'm pretty good at but wasn't able to lead it through those tough phases, so that feels like a pretty big failure. And then, it got, along the way, lots of failures, that autobody thing, I did a lot of work where I didn't collect from other high school students that I was doing jobs for, so Ð

You ended up working for free, essentially.

I did a lot of work for free on that one, yup, but you learn.

So, what would you say is your single biggest takeaway from the various failures?

Well, on Prosper, it was recognizing, like, what you're able to do, what you're not able to do, and just face up to that. You're going to have to face up to it sooner or later, so try to do it before there's too much damage or before you can't, there's a point where it's so far deteriorated, you can't really bring it back.