Relationships Matter

You went to Stanford. And I don’t know if you were a part of certain groups on campus, but how should mentees leverage affinity relationships around them, such as university networks, or even fraternity alumni, for example?

A lot of different groups, again, I’ll go back to my comments around relationships matter. And I was always—I value that alumni back on campus, and sometimes you don’t know, like, I had a good friend of mine that I played volleyball with in college, and he ended up being very high in running the bank. And we ended up having some opportunities to collaborate, right?
And so, we just don’t know how life turns out, and I think knowing folks, and just kind of—I don’t know, I think it’s a privilege for us to sometimes be around the people we’re around. And not letting those opportunities pass us by. Sometimes we think our time is so valuable, I mean, like, “my time is so valuable, we’ve got to be efficient, I need a person to help me with X, not Y.’ We don’t know, right? Now, you want Y and Z and not X, but you’re looking for that Y, who knows, right?
And so, now again, I want you to feel like, you know, sometimes these types of things, we again get very myopic about what we need right now. Like for example, like I said, from the beginning of this call, Kunle and I have known each other for 20 years, and SambaNova was not even, like, we weren’t even thinking of it, right? I mean, but when the opportunity came up, which there’s no doubt in either of our minds, who we needed to work with, in order to actually execute that idea.
And that’s been true for many, many things that we’ve done in this company. Nothing other than you just find these people really interesting, and they’re people that you enjoy, appreciate connecting with. Eventually, it comes back around.