How to Think Big with David Friedberg, Founder of Cana

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
All right, there's this amazing book called Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got. I read it a few years ago and it changed my life.
And the reason I loved it was because it basically talks about how to get and make more money using things that you already have.
Coincidentally, today's podcast is brought to you by Business Made Simple. It's a podcast by Donald Miller, who I'm gonna tell you about in a second, but he has this amazing episode that's all related to this book and the things that I learned in this book. It's called How To Make Money With What You Already Have. It's an incredible episode. Talks about all the stuff that I learned in this book. The host is Donald Miller. I didn't know who Donald Miller was up until recently, but over the last 12 months, this is totally by coincidence. It was all separate people. They said you have to check out Donald Miller. He's amazing. So I'm happy that he's part of HubSpot's podcast network. You can check it out, Business Made Simple Podcast. It's where he coaches you on how to build your business like an airplane, where the cockpit is your leadership, the body is your overhead, the right engine is your marketing, the left engine is your sales.
You have to check it out. This guy's amazing. It's called Business Made Simple with Donald Miller.

**David Friedberg** (1:02)
All the work we do at TPB is oriented around how do we change systems of production on planet earth so that we can make things using less energy, less land, less natural resources.
I'm a big believer that sustainability in the 21st century does not arise from convincing consumers to consume less. I think sustainability arises from building technology-based solutions that let consumers consume more and dropping the price and dropping the environmental impact. And that's what technology allows us to do. So if you go back to the industrial revolutions of the 19th and 20th century, we built factories, right? We put all this technology in a big machine and a big facility and we used it to make stuff over and over again and that dropped the price for consumers because we automated it in a big factory. Turns out that the technology of that factory, as all technology does, shrinks, gets faster, gets cheaper, gets better.

**Shaan Puri** (2:01)
Let me brag about you for a second, because you're a very humble guy. You're not a very brag worthy guy.
When I first started hearing you talk, which was not on the All In Podcast, I went on YouTube and I heard you give a talk back when you were doing Climate Corporation.
And I remember thinking, this guy's pretty smart. You were giving a talk at some school, I don't know what it was, and I started Googling you then and saw, wow, this guy's actually, he did that, and then he did some impressive stuff since then. So let me just brag on you for a second. So you were at Google 2004, 2006, some range like that. So fairly early at Google, I think that's around the IPO time. That's just post IPO, is that right?

**David Friedberg** (2:39)
I joined probably seven months before the IPO. So yeah, we were working on the IPO, or just started working on the IPO when I joined.

**Shaan Puri** (2:48)
And then you do Climate Corporation, sell that for like a billion dollars to Monsanto. You do Metro Mile, which is a pretty cool insurance company that's backed, and then I think ultimately ended up selling for a little bit less than it's back for to Lemonade. And then you have this thing called TPB, so the production board. And in that, you're basically, what do you call it? A studio or what do you call kind of TPB?

**David Friedberg** (3:11)
Well, yeah, we're technically a holding company and we're a foundry. So we spend time kind of doing R&D and research and founding or building businesses. So we kind of call it a foundry.

**Shaan Puri** (3:23)
And I feel like people know you now.

**David Friedberg** (3:25)
We do some investing as well, but really our focus is on foundry work.

**Shaan Puri** (3:29)
I wanna start with this. You are known for being a sort of a scientist or a science guy, but I looked at your LinkedIn and your first job was investment banker. So where did, how did you go from investment banker to as you're called on the all in pod, the Sultan of Science?

**David Friedberg** (3:44)
Well, I went to school at UC Berkeley. My major was astrophysics. I spent some time as an intern at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, which is a department of energy physics lab up the hill from UC Berkeley. And I spent a lot of time doing mathematical modeling of stuff in a basement and generally found it to be pretty disparaging in the sense that you could spend years working on a project that never sees the light of day. At the same time that I was at school, the.com bubble was kind of blowing up all around me. I mean, there was even a kid in my dorm who started a company selling DVDs online and sold the business for a million bucks. And that was such an amazing thing to happen. I was mostly making money by playing poker and working jobs around school and getting paid for my internship and stuff. So, it was extraordinary kind of seeing just in the Bay area of the world changing because of the internet. And so I got really kind of inclined and interested in not going to grad school and really gonna go work in Silicon Valley.