WARM-UP VIDEO FOR EXPRESSIONS

Instructions. Research shows that people often say frequently used expressions very fast, and so they can be difficult to catch. Listen and fill the gaps with frequently used three-word expressions.

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Exercise. Complete each gap with suitable words and expressions you hear from the video.

And then the WhatsApp deal happened. And Mark is on the board of Facebook. So I just wanted to ask you, (1) ………….. think about that deal and how are you thinking about evaluations? >> So I, unfortunately, I can't, ten years, ten years from now and I know that you all would not come visit me in jail. So I will, I will keep that one to myself. so, there's (2) ………….. big things. So, just in terms of thinking about what we've been through in the last 20 years in Silicon Valley, some people in the room are old enough, you may remember there was a bubble. and, (3) …………..fairly big deal, in sort of 1998 to 2000, and there was a very profound crash, which was deeply traumatizing, for those of us who went through it. long period of, basically, you know, years of pain followed by then, sort of, what I think of as, as very slow recovery. (4) ………….. actually been an object lesson in the psychology of markets and bubbles. I think that, people are much more highly sensitized to bubbles after a bubble. But people get highly sensitized and so there's this phenomena of, of trying to close the, the barn door after the horses have escaped. And that, that is (5) ………….. what all the bubble talk in the last, ten years has been about. And so we, we could talk at length about kinda why I think, in fact, kind of in the three phases and I think we're in the third phase now. The first phase was in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s. (6) ………….. so crazily hard. If you talk to people who were in business then or you read the stories, it was so hard to build a new tech company. make all the current, like, high octane entrepreneurs look like wusses. And the ones I'm thinking of, Thomas Watson Senior. If (7) ………….. read, like, what it's like to work for somebody who's harsh, read the book on Thomas Watson Senior. You know, he makes, he makes all And then Ross Perot is my favorite example. Ross Perot built the first great outsourcing company, (8) ………….. big tech successes in the 60s. And of course, you know, he was fantastic as a business builder when he came into contact with the American public, people went, what? So those were kinda the extreme days and then I think both VC and entrepreneurship, tech entrepreneurship, sort of professionalized, and so you had (9) ………….. VCs then. And this includes great VCs, John Doerr, Mike Morris, Jim Breyer, you know, who are business people or investors first, and, and never ran companies. You know, Mark Zuckerberg is kinda the apotheosis of kinda the, the idea that we have now. And so now what's been lost for (10) ………….. the entrepreneurs. (11) ………….. the entrepreneurs are engineers, but not business people. Now what's been lost is (12) ………….. the actual art of building a business. and, in particular, what's been lost is the art of sales and marketing. And (13) ………….. today's founders, (14) ………….. big issues we deal with is they're very technical. They're very product-centric. It's almost like a post traumatic stress kind of thing, you know, like 15 years after the crash. And so now the challenge for (15) ………….. these companies is how to take what are actually fantastic products and fantastic technology and then integrate in top-end business technical founder, CEO, when you have somebody like a Mark Zuckerberg. So that's one model that works very well. And (16) ………….. interesting things about the last five or ten years is more and more of the top end business leaders in Silicon Valley have figured this out. And, like Sheryl, have chosen to partner not as the CEO, but as and became number two at Dropbox to Drew Houston, who's another one of these guys. And so that's one model and I think that's a very exciting model and (17) ………….. working well. The other model is what you might call sort of the Bill Campbell, Scott Cook model. >> And finding a share-all isn't, isn't necessarily that easy. And you've built up a, a very disruptive model within the venture capital industry where you provide (18) ………….. value-added services including hiring and marketing, to portfolio companies. Could you talk a little about, how you came up with that disruptive fire or demote the technical founder and you bring in the professional CEO and you become a sales, sort of a sales-driven company. And so, and we, we kind of, we have (19) ………….. experience with that model. Like I said, sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. But we thought, this is, we started our firm, we planned our firm in >> That was good. >> The how do you actually identify them initially? And so (20) ………….. think are the, the traits that founders have and I'd also love to hear about some of the best and worst pitches you ever heard. >> So the, the basic math is the, so there's Failure is good, right? Failure, you guys have probably all been taught this. Heard about this from (21) ………….. people like failure is a wonderful thing, failure teaches you all this stuff, and it's great to fail a lot. Like, and we don't like buy any of that. We think success, on the other hand, is wonderful. You know, you wouldn't think that this is something (22) ………….. actually say out loud. But we, we do find it to be clarifying when we point it out. And so we are strongly biased towards people know that's the kind of thing that's not listed on a resume right. That's something that has to be deep in somebody's, fundamentally deep in somebody's character and (23) ………….. see it in their backgrounds. >> And what has been your, talking of courage, what has been your most courageous moment, and perhaps the moment of which you're most proud? second company, Loud Cloud, when, when got just taken apart. We started our second company Loud Cloud in September 1999. (24) ………….. classic, you know, we were, I mean it was fantastic. It was incredibly high rapid growth rate off of a standing start. Straight into the, you know, the the last six months of the bubble. through that kind of thing at the same time it looks like the entire world is ending, that it looks like (25) ………….. tech industry will never ever recover. I think we, the thing we are most proud of is, is, is actually working our way through that. He actually tells the story, in the book, of how we met, which is a whole story in and of itself. It involves (26) ………….. curse words. You know, we kind of describe ours, I mean we, we, we love each other and we, we, we do everything together, everything in business together. But they're there this year and they'll be there in five years, they'll be there in ten years. So you, (27) ………….. would say at this point, at this point it's troubly hard to untangle how the partnership works other than just we've been working together for so long. kind of different reference points for how we think about things. He is a far better operator than I am, so he's much better at running a business. So for example, (28) ………….. things, when we, when we used to run companies together. A big thing we'd argue about is, you know, I would, I, I, sort of I think what he would say about good idea, in practice, you'll destroy the entire company if we try that. And I'm like well, that's a pretty good point. And then, (29) ………….. argument in the other way is you know, look, I know that the organization is gonna get challenged by this and I know it's gonna be hard and we might lose people, but it's so important that we have to do this thing, that we have to really push it. And so I think (30) ………….. the theories that he and I have developed over the years about how to run companies are kind of at that intersection point of what's kind of intellectually this temptation to think there must be a magic answer. Like, there must be some stroke of genius, you know. It's almost, it's like what you, (31) ………….. . if people watch the new Sherlock Holmes, you know, TV series, which I just love. It's like, you know, Sherlock is gonna have, you And there's this really strong tendency to kind of think, that that, that that's out there. And we see (32) ………….. entrepreneurs that kind of cycle through different silver bullets, and then they don't work and they don't work and they don't work. Ben's point is always, it's probably the answer, So Monday is all day partner meeting. And all the VC firms kinda have this in common. And so, like (33) ………….. really critic, when you're starting a company, there's all these really critical issues, like what product you're gonna build. the crazy ones also seem nuts so it's a little bit of a you know they called Einstein crazy but they also called Charles Manson crazy (34) ………….. be cautious on this stuff. But, the really, really breakthrough ideas often seem nuts the first time, the first time you see them and, and it's the fact that they seem nuts, can be The entrepreneurs who really have the radical ideas are generally not in a way coachable, they generally react with hostility to being coached. And so (35) ………….. things we test for, is you know, basically say, have you thought about doing it this other way? And what we're not looking for is the, oh, that's a great idea. You know, that is a you, you know, we're just reaching the point now where we're able to apply technology to a, (36) ………….. really fundamental problems in the world, (37) …………..fundamental problems and opportunities. And so it, it, we, we just all feel or I, I feel like we have spent, we, I spent my career and then even to be like, you know, it's like you climb all the way up the hill and then you end up back at the bottom of the hill and (38) ………….. start the climb again. And so at some point you start to think, maybe there's a way to contribute. That has to do with helping people climb the And I guess if I could sum up your views, your optimistic about the prospects for journalism to thrive using a variety of business models. So I'm a former journalist and (39) ………….. the issues that you are thinking about now have been being discussed within the industry for maybe eight or ten years, a we don't really, content's not content, generally, so we don't really, we're not gonna be making (40) ………….. investments in, in media production. Just cuz it's a, it's a different field. We, we can talk more about that. with, to, to, to build, to build things like the web, it's like okay, maybe it's, maybe, maybe it's not the new technology's fault at a certain point. So my observation is, and that (41) ………….. a very interesting topic, so I think the news, and I focused on the news business, cuz that's kinda the, the, the pointy end of the spear, days, and if you extend all the way to the 1930's, the news business worked very differently. (42) ………….. very successful business (43) ………….. , (44) ………….. people were in it, (45) ………….. people made (46) ………….. money. But like, as an example this whole idea of objectivity, the journalist now take as kind of this, kind of, you know, kind of, purer concept that has to be maintained. There's a great book on the news business in the Colonial era in the US called Infamous Scribblers, which was what, (47) ………….. pejorative at the time for reporters, which could come back into fashion. and, it's a great articulation of how the news business actually grew up in the US. post World War II, and you say, well what happened. Well monopolies and oligopolies got established and so for and it, it was sort of this era of centralization in (48) ………….. parts of the economy. But it was very clear in the news business, you had, you know, you'd have one major newspaper per metro area, because of the cost of distribution. That has to do with in many cases having a very strong point of view. It has to with, not with the idea that you're gonna be the only point of view, but you'll be one of many and (49) ………….. argue things out. (50) ………….. have the right cost structure (51) …………..think about market segmentation and you have to, (52) ………….. do all the things that people do when they actually build businesses. The issue in the news business is that (53) ………….. the executives in the business did not grow up in a competitive market and and so they just don't know how to do that. people, the folks who built, you know, you see a lot of this in the tech industry, TechCrunch and all these things. You know, a, (54) ………….. these new things, they're, or, you know, what Pierre Omidyar is doing with First Look is, you're getting, now, very smart people who are coming in from And all the traditional journalists are like, oh yeah that doesn't count, but healthy business, healthy journalism (55) ………….. get the healthy business before you get the healthy journalism. And so, so then you look at market size and you At the intersection of healthcare and, and IT and software. And, actually, there's things happening, actually, on the medical side, and (56) ………….. that, it's very interesting, things now happening around genomics. And big data applied to genomics. And then there's another whole set Or they can get up to date health information, or they can educated, kids can get educated in ways, you know. (57) ………….. countries around the world like they don't have textbooks much less like modern education systems so there's just an enormous ability to upgrade modern education across the entire world. And then of course huge political change and (58) ………….. that is a consequence of people number one being able to see what they're missing and then number two being able to organize. and maybe a few, a few companies in markets like Europe. We're not really set up to invest on the ground in the developing world. But (59) ………….. the companies that we're investing in are building products that we think are going to be transformative on the ground. And so I'll just give you one example.

Key: Look at the key and say aloud the script from the video to improve your English.

And then the WhatsApp deal happened. And Mark is on the board of Facebook. So I just wanted to ask you, (1) (what do you) think about that deal and how are you thinking about evaluations? >> So I, unfortunately, I can't, ten years, ten years from now and I know that you all would not come visit me in jail. So I will, I will keep that one to myself. so, there's (2) (a couple of) big things. So, just in terms of thinking about what we've been through in the last 20 years in Silicon Valley, some people in the room are old enough, you may remember there was a bubble. and, (3) (it was a) fairly big deal, in sort of 1998 to 2000, and there was a very profound crash, which was deeply traumatizing, for those of us who went through it. long period of, basically, you know, years of pain followed by then, sort of, what I think of as, as very slow recovery. (4) (I think it's) actually been an object lesson in the psychology of markets and bubbles. I think that, people are much more highly sensitized to bubbles after a bubble. But people get highly sensitized and so there's this phenomena of, of trying to close the, the barn door after the horses have escaped. And that, that is (5) (a lot of) what all the bubble talk in the last, ten years has been about. And so we, we could talk at length about kinda why I think, in fact, kind of in the three phases and I think we're in the third phase now. The first phase was in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s. (6) (And it was) so crazily hard. If you talk to people who were in business then or you read the stories, it was so hard to build a new tech company. make all the current, like, high octane entrepreneurs look like wusses. And the ones I'm thinking of, Thomas Watson Senior. If (7) (you want to) read, like, what it's like to work for somebody who's harsh, read the book on Thomas Watson Senior. You know, he makes, he makes all And then Ross Perot is my favorite example. Ross Perot built the first great outsourcing company, (8) (one of the) big tech successes in the 60s. And of course, you know, he was fantastic as a business builder when he came into contact with the American public, people went, what? So those were kinda the extreme days and then I think both VC and entrepreneurship, tech entrepreneurship, sort of professionalized, and so you had (9) (a lot of) VCs then. And this includes great VCs, John Doerr, Mike Morris, Jim Breyer, you know, who are business people or investors first, and, and never ran companies. You know, Mark Zuckerberg is kinda the apotheosis of kinda the, the idea that we have now. And so now what's been lost for (10) (a lot of) the entrepreneurs. (11) (A lot of) the entrepreneurs are engineers, but not business people. Now what's been lost is (12) (a lot of) the actual art of building a business. and, in particular, what's been lost is the art of sales and marketing. And (13) (a lot of) today's founders, (14) (one of the) big issues we deal with is they're very technical. They're very product-centric. It's almost like a post traumatic stress kind of thing, you know, like 15 years after the crash. And so now the challenge for (15) (a lot of) these companies is how to take what are actually fantastic products and fantastic technology and then integrate in top-end business technical founder, CEO, when you have somebody like a Mark Zuckerberg. So that's one model that works very well. And (16) (one of the) interesting things about the last five or ten years is more and more of the top end business leaders in Silicon Valley have figured this out. And, like Sheryl, have chosen to partner not as the CEO, but as and became number two at Dropbox to Drew Houston, who's another one of these guys. And so that's one model and I think that's a very exciting model and (17) (I think it's) working well. The other model is what you might call sort of the Bill Campbell, Scott Cook model. >> And finding a share-all isn't, isn't necessarily that easy. And you've built up a, a very disruptive model within the venture capital industry where you provide (18) (a lot of) value-added services including hiring and marketing, to portfolio companies. Could you talk a little about, how you came up with that disruptive fire or demote the technical founder and you bring in the professional CEO and you become a sales, sort of a sales-driven company. And so, and we, we kind of, we have (19) (a lot of) experience with that model. Like I said, sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. But we thought, this is, we started our firm, we planned our firm in >> That was good. >> The how do you actually identify them initially? And so (20) (what do you) think are the, the traits that founders have and I'd also love to hear about some of the best and worst pitches you ever heard. >> So the, the basic math is the, so there's Failure is good, right? Failure, you guys have probably all been taught this. Heard about this from (21) (a lot of) people like failure is a wonderful thing, failure teaches you all this stuff, and it's great to fail a lot. Like, and we don't like buy any of that. We think success, on the other hand, is wonderful. You know, you wouldn't think that this is something (22) (you have to) actually say out loud. But we, we do find it to be clarifying when we point it out. And so we are strongly biased towards people know that's the kind of thing that's not listed on a resume right. That's something that has to be deep in somebody's, fundamentally deep in somebody's character and (23) (you have to) see it in their backgrounds. >> And what has been your, talking of courage, what has been your most courageous moment, and perhaps the moment of which you're most proud? second company, Loud Cloud, when, when got just taken apart. We started our second company Loud Cloud in September 1999. (24) (And it was) classic, you know, we were, I mean it was fantastic. It was incredibly high rapid growth rate off of a standing start. Straight into the, you know, the the last six months of the bubble. through that kind of thing at the same time it looks like the entire world is ending, that it looks like (25) (you know the) tech industry will never ever recover. I think we, the thing we are most proud of is, is, is actually working our way through that. He actually tells the story, in the book, of how we met, which is a whole story in and of itself. It involves (26) (a lot of) curse words. You know, we kind of describe ours, I mean we, we, we love each other and we, we, we do everything together, everything in business together. But they're there this year and they'll be there in five years, they'll be there in ten years. So you, (27) (you know I) would say at this point, at this point it's troubly hard to untangle how the partnership works other than just we've been working together for so long. kind of different reference points for how we think about things. He is a far better operator than I am, so he's much better at running a business. So for example, (28) (a lot of) things, when we, when we used to run companies together. A big thing we'd argue about is, you know, I would, I, I, sort of I think what he would say about good idea, in practice, you'll destroy the entire company if we try that. And I'm like well, that's a pretty good point. And then, (29) (you know the) argument in the other way is you know, look, I know that the organization is gonna get challenged by this and I know it's gonna be hard and we might lose people, but it's so important that we have to do this thing, that we have to really push it. And so I think (30) (a lot of) the theories that he and I have developed over the years about how to run companies are kind of at that intersection point of what's kind of intellectually this temptation to think there must be a magic answer. Like, there must be some stroke of genius, you know. It's almost, it's like what you, (31) (I don't know) . if people watch the new Sherlock Holmes, you know, TV series, which I just love. It's like, you know, Sherlock is gonna have, you And there's this really strong tendency to kind of think, that that, that that's out there. And we see (32) (a lot of) entrepreneurs that kind of cycle through different silver bullets, and then they don't work and they don't work and they don't work. Ben's point is always, it's probably the answer, So Monday is all day partner meeting. And all the VC firms kinda have this in common. And so, like (33) (one of the) really critic, when you're starting a company, there's all these really critical issues, like what product you're gonna build. the crazy ones also seem nuts so it's a little bit of a you know they called Einstein crazy but they also called Charles Manson crazy (34) (you have to) be cautious on this stuff. But, the really, really breakthrough ideas often seem nuts the first time, the first time you see them and, and it's the fact that they seem nuts, can be The entrepreneurs who really have the radical ideas are generally not in a way coachable, they generally react with hostility to being coached. And so (35) (one of the) things we test for, is you know, basically say, have you thought about doing it this other way? And what we're not looking for is the, oh, that's a great idea. You know, that is a you, you know, we're just reaching the point now where we're able to apply technology to a, (36) (a lot of) really fundamental problems in the world, (37) (a lot of) fundamental problems and opportunities. And so it, it, we, we just all feel or I, I feel like we have spent, we, I spent my career and then even to be like, you know, it's like you climb all the way up the hill and then you end up back at the bottom of the hill and (38) (you have to) start the climb again. And so at some point you start to think, maybe there's a way to contribute. That has to do with helping people climb the And I guess if I could sum up your views, your optimistic about the prospects for journalism to thrive using a variety of business models. So I'm a former journalist and (39) (a lot of) the issues that you are thinking about now have been being discussed within the industry for maybe eight or ten years, a we don't really, content's not content, generally, so we don't really, we're not gonna be making (40) (a lot of) investments in, in media production. Just cuz it's a, it's a different field. We, we can talk more about that. with, to, to, to build, to build things like the web, it's like okay, maybe it's, maybe, maybe it's not the new technology's fault at a certain point. So my observation is, and that (41) (I think it's) a very interesting topic, so I think the news, and I focused on the news business, cuz that's kinda the, the, the pointy end of the spear, days, and if you extend all the way to the 1930's, the news business worked very differently. (42) (It was a) very successful business (43) (and it was) , (44) (a lot of) people were in it, (45) (a lot of) people made (46) (a lot of) money. But like, as an example this whole idea of objectivity, the journalist now take as kind of this, kind of, you know, kind of, purer concept that has to be maintained. There's a great book on the news business in the Colonial era in the US called Infamous Scribblers, which was what, (47) (it was a) pejorative at the time for reporters, which could come back into fashion. and, it's a great articulation of how the news business actually grew up in the US. post World War II, and you say, well what happened. Well monopolies and oligopolies got established and so for and it, it was sort of this era of centralization in (48) (a lot of) parts of the economy. But it was very clear in the news business, you had, you know, you'd have one major newspaper per metro area, because of the cost of distribution. That has to do with in many cases having a very strong point of view. It has to with, not with the idea that you're gonna be the only point of view, but you'll be one of many and (49) (you have to) argue things out. (50) (You have to) have the right cost structure (51) (you have to) think about market segmentation and you have to, (52) (you have to) do all the things that people do when they actually build businesses. The issue in the news business is that (53) (a lot of) the executives in the business did not grow up in a competitive market and and so they just don't know how to do that. people, the folks who built, you know, you see a lot of this in the tech industry, TechCrunch and all these things. You know, a, (54) (a lot of) these new things, they're, or, you know, what Pierre Omidyar is doing with First Look is, you're getting, now, very smart people who are coming in from And all the traditional journalists are like, oh yeah that doesn't count, but healthy business, healthy journalism (55) (you have to) get the healthy business before you get the healthy journalism. And so, so then you look at market size and you At the intersection of healthcare and, and IT and software. And, actually, there's things happening, actually, on the medical side, and (56) (a lot of) that, it's very interesting, things now happening around genomics. And big data applied to genomics. And then there's another whole set Or they can get up to date health information, or they can educated, kids can get educated in ways, you know. (57) (A lot of) countries around the world like they don't have textbooks much less like modern education systems so there's just an enormous ability to upgrade modern education across the entire world. And then of course huge political change and (58) (a lot of) that is a consequence of people number one being able to see what they're missing and then number two being able to organize. and maybe a few, a few companies in markets like Europe. We're not really set up to invest on the ground in the developing world. But (59) (a lot of) the companies that we're investing in are building products that we think are going to be transformative on the ground. And so I'll just give you one example.

Sources: 

Channel: Stanford Graduate School of Business. Marc Andreessen on Big Breakthrough Ideas and Courageous Entrepreneurs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYYsXzt1VDc

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