#86 - Jocko Willink and Mike Sarraille

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast.
Applications for the Winter 2019 YC Batch are now open. You can learn more at ycombinator.com/apply.
Today's episode is with Jocko Willink and Mike Sarraille. Jocko and Mike served together as Navy Seals, and now work together at Echelon Front, a company Jocko co-founded. We met up to talk about a new initiative they've set up called Overwatch. Overwatch is a talent acquisition firm that matches employers with veterans from Special Operations Forces and Combat Aviation. You can learn more about Overwatch at efoverwatch.com. They're also hosting an event in San Francisco called The Muster on October 17th and 18th. You can sign up at extremeownership.com.
All right, here we go.
All right, guys, well, thanks for hosting me. I'm excited to see your podcast at the Jocko Podcast Studio. For those of our listeners that don't know about you guys, I think we should start with some quick intros and then start talking about the new program you're working on. So, Jocko, why don't you start off?

**Jocko Willink** (1:03)
Cool. I was in the military for 20 years and then I retired. And when I retired, I started working with civilians primarily and teaching them about leadership that I had learned while I was in the military.

**Craig Cannon** (1:16)
And that culminated in a book? Another.

**Jocko Willink** (1:19)
That ended up kind of morphing into a book called Extreme Ownership.
And that book came out and that book's done pretty well. And that kind of morphed into a podcast. So I have a podcast called Jocko Podcast where I talk about, really talk about human nature through the lens of leadership and war and general atrocities and struggle that human beings go through. So it's a little bit of a rough podcast to listen to from time to time. But there's a lot of lessons in it.

**Craig Cannon** (1:53)
Yeah. I mean, it's, it really contrasts from the average podcast in the sense that it's sort of like you reading a book every single week or every other week and just going through, giving notes, giving notes based on your experience.
Yeah.

**Jocko Willink** (2:06)
And it's interesting too, because I get most of the books that I try and use are first-person accounts of these situations. So whether it's war or whether it's some kind of atrocity, it's a first-person account of someone that was actually there. It's not an interpretation. It's not what someone else thought that person thought. It's what that person thought.
So I think that has the ability to take you into the minds of and see some of that stuff through a better perspective. And the more different perspectives you can get other than your own, the better you're going to understand things.

**Craig Cannon** (2:36)
Yeah. Yeah. I've been blown away by like, I mean, the legs the podcast has. When you started off, I was like, I don't know if he's going to be able to find 50 books.
And now...

**Jocko Willink** (2:45)
Well, I thought that too, because when I started, there was a few books, you know, about face by Hackworth. There was three or four books that I knew I could cover that really had a big impact on me. And then I reached a little bit and I said, we know I can do this one too. And when I started reading with the thought that, what can I learn from this? Not just what do I understand about it, but what can I actually learn from this?
Then I started pulling out all these old books that I'd read with the old breed, just books that are incredible books.
And as I pulled those out, and now I realize the actual problem isn't that there aren't enough books. The actual problem is that there's no possible way I can cover all the books that exist that we can learn from and that I can learn from. So the problem ended up not being the problem I thought it initially was. There's a lot of incredible books out there.

**Craig Cannon** (3:34)
Yeah. Well, you're doing a great job.
Mike, what's your story?

**Mike Sarraille** (3:38)
Much along the same lines. First off, thanks for having me on Y Combinator is dear to my heart because I was born and raised in Silicon Valley, much like Jocko I did something uncharacteristic to a kid coming out of Atherton, California. I enlisted in the Marine Corps and then eventually became a SEAL and finished up and retired after 20 years. I was one of Jocko's guys in the book Extreme Ownership. It's all about the Battle of Ramadi. I was one of those guys that worked for Jocko and hence how we've known each other for so long.