Well, he’s up on the bridge as you saw sort of famously with this tech meeting that Recode has been covering substantially and vigorously. But, the reality is there’s very few people in technology with access to what would seem to be the President of the United States. Most companies want that access. The larger the company, the more they want the access across multiple verticals: financial services, healthcare obviously.
Peter made one of the great asymmetric bets in history. If you think about this from a classic venture startup perspective, everybody thought he was crazy and wrong and it turned out he was right. That’s a good incentive and accumulates to a lot of money, a lot of power. This is actually a metaphor for what happened. I occasionally get accused of being part of the PayPal Mafia, and people sometimes forget the history of PayPal. All the people that worked at PayPal were complete misfits and had no establishment contacts to Silicon Valley whatsoever. Yet in about from five years from 2002 to 2007, we went to become central casting in Silicon Valley, and almost accused of being the establishment. What happened was in 2003, 2004, 2005, nobody thought that there was another wave of technology innovation coming, because there was a nuclear winter in Silicon Valley, particularly on the consumer side.
All founders who needed money sort of gravitated to Peter, Reid Hoffman, and to some extent, Sequoia and people like me, and it turns out there was another way. Some of our best turned out to be pretty good. We moved from outliers to a sort of central force in two to three years.
Peter’s bet on Trump has made him from an outlier in politics to a very central force in politics overnight. Now, he has to decide how to use that, how to leverage that, and see what happens. But it could have the same dynamic where Peter becomes a top one, two, three, four, player in politics just like he has been in technology.