Giant Ideas

How will you be remembered? Does it matter? Last week Roman made the case for long-term thinking across society. This time he shares what it looks like in your own life. Today, we’re back with Roman Krznaric, the public philosopher and author of The Good Ancestor, to talk about his life lessons.

Roman leads a short visualisation exercise you can try at home, explains why he thinks the legacy worth leaving has nothing to do with being remembered, and argues that caring about future generations makes you happier now.

He shares:

• A live visualisation picturing a young person you love at their 90th birthday
• Leaving something for strangers in the future, not a stadium with your name on it
• Letting his 11-year-old twins take his vote
• The empty chair now set out in council meetings across Quebec
• Bill McKibben’s advice for individuals: be less of one
• Regret analysis, and how carpe diem and long-term thinking fit together
• Fearing death more with age, and what a Buddhist retreat taught him about the whirlpool of human existence...

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

How can you be a better ancestor?

Today, we're joined by Roman Krznaric, the public philosopher and author of The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World.

Roman is a former Oxford political scientist-turned-gardener-turned-writer, whose ideas have been cited by Pakistan's Supreme Court and used to frame the EU's Green Deal. Tommy Stadlen talks to Roman about why he thinks we're doing terribly as ancestors, why he argues we've colonised the future, but why he believes the capacity for long-term thinking is already wired into our heads.

He speaks about:

• The 7 trillion people who could be born over the next 50,000 years (and why that number should change how you think)
• The daily fight between your marshmallow brain and your acorn brain
• Victorian "sewer thinking" (London's sewers were built twice as big as needed, and they still work)
• How the mechanical clock sliced up time and made us short-termist
• Leaving academia to plant trees for £6.31 an hour
• Japan's orange kimonos, where residents imagine they live in 2060
• Why long-term thinking isn't good on its own
• Companies giving future generations a legal seat on the board

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

What did it take to build an $11 billion company, Airwallex?

Jack moved from rural northeast China to Melbourne at 15 and now runs Airwallex, the global payments and business banking platform.

Cameron McLain and Tommy Stadlen talk to Jack about what it took to get there: the jobs he worked to put himself through college, why he thought he'd be happy with a $100 million business, and why he turned down Stripe's $1.2 billion offer. He also explains why he believes the future of banking is agentic, and why the big banks are too far behind to build it.

He speaks about:

• What he learned about work ethic: washing dishes, bar shifts and overnights at a petrol station
• The difference between anxiety and survival 
• Running ten side businesses, and still feeling irrelevant
• The angel who wired $1 million into his personal account before signing anything 
• Pulled term sheets, and a $100 million cheque from Yuri Milner
• Being targeted as a Silicon Valley outsider (and why he thinks the facts are on his side)
• Agentic banking and the end of vertical finance software
• And lots more...

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

What did it take to build an $11 billion company, Airwallex?

Jack moved from rural northeast China to Melbourne at 15 and now runs Airwallex, the global payments and business banking platform.

Cameron McLain and Tommy Stadlen talk to Jack about what it took to get there: the jobs he worked to put himself through college, why he thought he'd be happy with a $100 million business, and why he turned down Stripe's $1.2 billion offer. He also explains why he believes the future of banking is agentic, and why the big banks are too far behind to build it.

He speaks about:

• What he learned about work ethic: washing dishes, bar shifts and overnights at a petrol station
• The difference between anxiety and survival 
• Running ten side businesses, and still feeling irrelevant
• The angel who wired $1 million into his personal account before signing anything 
• Pulled term sheets, and a $100 million cheque from Yuri Milner
• Being targeted as a Silicon Valley outsider (and why he thinks the facts are on his side)
• Agentic banking and the end of vertical finance software
• And lots more...

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

Today, we're back with Max Jaderberg, president of Isomorphic Labs, to talk about his life lessons.

After years at DeepMind working on deep learning, generative models and reinforcement learning, Max helped launch Isomorphic in 2021 to turn the promise of AlphaFold into new medicine. Cameron McLain and Tommy Stadlen talk to Max about why he rejected a consultancy contract to do a PhD at Oxford, and why he later left core AI research after writing a pro/con list on a whiteboard in his loft. He also explains how Isomorphic keeps a startup's hunger (even with Alphabet's backing), and what nearly 15 years of working with Demis Hassabis has taught him.

He speaks about:

• Deciding what "superpower" his research could create
• Whether DeepMind could ever have done it alone, without selling, and how Alphabet backs its investments
• Keeping a startup culture, with a giant's backing 
• Why Isomorphic wanted a global investor base in its latest round
• Trusting Demis Hassabis's vision (including an early Nobel Prize prediction he didn't believe)
• Rejecting a job contract to do a PhD 
• Working 24/7 in his head, but making time for Counter-Strike - and needing plenty of sleep...

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

Today, we're joined by Max Jaderberg, President of Isomorphic Labs.

Isomorphic Labs, the Alphabet-backed company spun out of DeepMind, is using AI to design new medicines, with the mission of solving all disease. 

Tommy Stadlen and Cameron McLain talk to Max about why he believes no future exists where medicines aren't designed with AI, and why he'd be "severely disappointed" if disease doesn't mean something completely different 30 years from now.

He speaks about:

• What "solve all disease" means in practice 
• How a medicine actually gets made today, and why it's "very, very fancy trial and error"
• Why earlier AI drug discovery overpromised, and what AlphaFold changed
• Why you can't download the data this field needs off the internet
• The 90% clinical failure rate 
• Bio-resilience, bad actors, and why Isomorphic keeps its models in-house

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

After more than 50 episodes interviewing founders, investors and leaders, Giant co-founders Tommy Stadlen and Cameron McLain turn the mic on themselves to ask what the best entrepreneurs have in common.

From resilience, storytelling, obsession and self-awareness, to the power of control. They speak about:

• Cameron's four founder traits, and why three out of four is the bar
• Why Tommy added control to his list (and what Alex Ferguson has to do with it)
• Producing under fire vs simply enduring
• The case for benign dictatorship in early-stage companies
• "Trauma showcasing" in pitch meetings, and what drives founders
• The four burners: what founders give up, and why the greats might not call it sacrifice
• Why intelligence might not make the top three
• Agentic founders, 16-year-olds pitching from Sweden and 10-person teams building huge revenue...

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

Today, we're joined by Steve Case, the co-founder of AOL, to talk about what the first internet boom can tell us about this one.

Steve started AOL in 1985, when 3% of people were online. He took it public in 1992 as the first internet company to list, and now runs Revolution, the firm behind Rise of the Rest and more than 200 investments across 100 American cities. 

Cameron McLain talks to Steve about why AOL raised just $10 million over seven years (while today's AI companies are seeded with a billion), why he still thinks the Time Warner merger was the right call, and why he thinks AI needs to be very carefully deployed to avoid a revolution.

He speaks about:

• The nine years it took AOL to reach a million users (ChatGPT took three months)
• Arguing with IBM and Apple about whether to build modems into computers
• Being 26 and taking on AT&T, GE and Microsoft with just $10 million
• Whether he'd do the Time Warner merger again
• The industries AI can't disrupt

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

Today, we're joined by Eric Ries, the author of The Lean Startup and the founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange.

Eric wrote the book that taught a generation of founders how to build under uncertainty, and he has spent the years since trying to fix what happens to those companies once they grow.

His new book, Incorruptible, is about a double mystery: why successful companies so often get ruined, and why a handful avoid that fate.

Tommy Stadlen and Cameron McLain talk to Eric about why he thinks the best practices of modern corporate governance destroy value, why he believes a strong founder is not enough to protect a company, and what he'd change about The Lean Startup if he could go back.

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

Today, we're back with Michael Moritz, the Sequoia investor who backed Google, Yahoo and PayPal, to talk about his family and his latest book.

Moritz has written a memoir, Ausländer, out in the US this month. It began with papers found when they cleared out their mother's house in Wales, and grew into an account of how his grandparents were murdered and how his father got out during the Nazi Regime.

We talk to him about what he found in the archives, why he thinks a stable society is a much more fragile thing than most people assume, his experience of anti-semitism, and if he thinks Silicon Valley is befriending Trump (and what he thinks of the US president).

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.