Scott Kriens - Founder Juniper Networks/1440 Multiversity

Louis Goodman / Scott Kriens - Transcript

[00:00:03] Louis Goodman: Welcome to Love Thy Lawyer, where we usually talk with attorneys about their lives and careers. I'm your host Louis Goodman. Today we welcome Scott Kriens, who is not a lawyer, but is one of the most interesting people that I know. Although I've known Scott for over 30 years, most of this intro comes from his Wikipedia page.

He is one of the two founders of Juniper Networks, which he and Pradeep Sindhu started in 1996. By 2014, it had grown to revenues of over $4 billion. Scott and his wife founded the 1440 Foundation and 1440 multiversity in 2010. He's a tech and business wizard, an educator, a philanthropist and collector of cars, and perhaps most impressive to me, he's been featured on an American Express commercial as someone whose name you don't know, but probably should.

Scott Kriens, welcome to Love by Lawyer. 

[00:01:20] Scott Kriens: Thank you, Louis. Glad to be here in all anonymity. 

[00:01:25] Louis Goodman: Not saying that you're gonna be a whole lot less anonymous after we finish this podcast, and maybe that's a good thing. But you and I have really known each other for a very long time. We were next door neighbors at one time, and that's how I know you and your family. But where are you speaking to us from right now? 

[00:01:42] Scott Kriens: Yeah, I think actually Louis, it's probably been 40 plus years if we go back that far. I'm in Saratoga down in the South Bay today. 

[00:01:51] Louis Goodman: I should mention that I knew your dad, you knew my dad, I know your stepmother very well, and, and that family relationship has been something that has been really important to me over the, the time that, that we've known each other and that I've known your, your family. Can you describe the type of business that you are involved with right now? 

[00:02:17] Scott Kriens: Right now, today, not actively hands-on as I have been in those years past at Juniper and before. But we're involved in a number of different things as investors and in some cases board member, but it's really about trying to further the purposes of our, of our foundation mission and, some of that's, I'm sure we'll get into, but it has to do with trying to help us all focus and develop on the inside of ourselves. It was 1440 foundation investments, and so the investments have span a number of things over the last, not quite 20 years now, but 15 years, 20 years ago it was in the early days of meditation, mindfulness practices and the like and wearable technologies and tools and things.

It's been in trying to figure out not necessarily how to make a fortune on those things, but it's really been about trying to help some of those ideas that maybe aren't gonna make a fortune, still make an impact. Funding things that maybe if there wasn't somebody with broader interest and just money, it may never get off the ground.

That's really been where, from a business standpoint, we've been trying to get some of these ideas going. 

[00:03:31] Louis Goodman: You have made a fortune, and we'll get into that a little bit later, and I think that to some extent that has given you the freedom to get involved with things that aren't necessarily as lucrative, but are interesting and very positive for the community.

[00:03:49] Scott Kriens: Yeah, that's the hope. It's the observation I make often is usually when people pass this lifetime is they have time to reflect, before that happened, one of the things you hear most often is that what mattered most were the relationships people had. Certainly when we're born, that relationships the only thing that matters in the world with that mother and father often that that keep us alive.

And so it's the most important thing when we're born and it's the most important thing when we die and we get little or no training or practice or focus on it in the middle. And we learned science and math and law, and lots of valuable, important things. We don't learn about the thing that ultimately, in retrospect matters most.

And so a lot of our work is around that intention of how do we develop relationships? And that starts, I believe, with the inside of our own self. 'Cause the first relationship we have to have, if we're gonna have healthy relationships with others and with the planet and, and so on, is the one we have with our own self.

And, and not only do we not focus on relationship, but when we do, the one with ourself usually gets least attention. Again, we'll probably get into more of this, but that's a lot of what has our attention at the foundation and in retrospect, it's a lot of, to me, what made the difference in success in life.

[00:05:09] Louis Goodman: Where are you from originally? 

[00:05:11] Scott Kriens: I was born in Berkeley, actually. So native California, and born and raised a few years early on in dad's life on the East coast and traveling around. But really from, second, first grade, really second grade. Born and raised. Born in California. Traveled a little bit back home, and then lived my whole life here.

[00:05:30] Louis Goodman: Where'd you go to high school? 

[00:05:32] Scott Kriens: Alameda High over in the East Bay. So I'm at Alameda Hornet. I'm about to have my 50th anniversary or 50th reunion in a couple of months, believe it or not. 

[00:05:42] Louis Goodman: And then where'd you go to college? 

[00:05:45] Scott Kriens: I started out at a junior college, Merrick College in Oakland for two years, and then went to Cal State.

It used to be called Cal State Hayward. Now it's Cal State East Bay. Most of my college path was determined by the cheapest path to a degree, so I, and I never had the, I don't know what you'd call it, money perhaps, but also the attention span to make it past a four year degree. So it was in as quickly and out as quickly as possible.

[00:06:17] Louis Goodman: My office is, is in Hayward. And somehow or other I find that all roads ultimately lead back to Hayward one way or another. Who knew? Yeah. Who knew? And as we refer to it in Hayward, it's Harvard on the Hill. 

[00:06:33] Scott Kriens: Famous in our own mind. 

[00:06:34] Louis Goodman: Uh, yes. And I think that the Cal State Hayward, Cal State East Bay experience is, is phenomenal. And I know so many people, and perhaps it's just for being in Hayward who, have gotten their start at that school. What was the experience of going to college like for you? 

[00:06:53] Scott Kriens: It was a commuter experience. I went there, I stacked every class up one after the other so that I could leave as quickly as possible so I could get to the gas station to my job.

And I was fortunate in that most of what I needed to learn to pass the test. I was very careful about paying attention and taking detailed note that lecture. I did more of that than I did reading because it was enough, and what ended up being the case often enough was that what the professor tested on was what they talked on.

And so if I took careful notes on what I heard, I was usually equipped well enough to pass the class. And that was the a hundred percent of my goal. 

[00:07:37] Louis Goodman: Good advice for any student. Take good notes, 

[00:07:42] Scott Kriens: Do more than that. I don't wanna be any kind of a model for a good academic practice, but it, it was all I needed or all I did at the time.

[00:07:50] Louis Goodman: When did you first get started thinking about being involved in the electronic technology tech business, and what prompted you to start thinking about doing that? 

[00:07:59] Scott Kriens: It's a good example of sometimes fate, randomness. I don't know. When I got outta college, I went to the, at the time, literally corkboard with thumb tacks and index cards that had the jobs, and I picked up two cards.

One was to be an assistant manager and one was to be a salesperson. And I thought, I didn't go to college to be a salesperson, so I'll be an assistant manager. And I went and interviewed at a place called Levitt's Furniture. The job was assistant manager for credit collections for rental furniture. And so what I was out would've been out doing had I taken that job was presumably was repossessing furniture from people who couldn't afford to rent it.

And I went on the interview and it was such a draw, dreary old place with metal desks and unhappy people. And the other card I picked off the board was for sale in computers. I thought, I don't want to, I certainly could do better than sales. I had a very dim view of it at the time. But computers might be interesting and I went to this interview and it was, there were young people and they were well dressed and they had nice cars and they were having fun.

And so I thought that looked more fun than being at those dreary desks, collecting people's unpaid bills on furniture. So, that's literally how I got into the tech world. It was with no forethought or no deep insight. It just looked like it was more fun. 

[00:09:23] Louis Goodman: How did you get involved with Boroughs, Sperry, Unisys, these companies that I, at least I associate with the Early Tech Revolution. 

[00:09:35] Scott Kriens: That was the job at the time. It was Burrows. It had been, it ended up being acquired by Sperry, but again, it was just the random choice of it being more abundant, furniture collecting, and for bill collecting. And I did that job for a few years.

It was three years. And then when Burrows was purchased by Sperry, I switched, I left, and went to a company called Tandem Computers, which was at least a little more intentional. But the great thing about boroughs for me was it was a large company, and people who went there were not real well paid.

You developed, two things happened. One, it was in the field on the job training, and second, there were a lot of battlefield promotions because as soon as somebody got any good at it, they got hired away by a smaller company that was willing to pay more. I got the chance to do a lot of things early on in those few years, only because there was nobody else to do it.

Then I got the opportunity to go to Tandem Computers and change roles. That's when I left sales and went into actually product management and marketing, and that was really where my crossovers from computing to networking happened. 

[00:10:45] Louis Goodman: Ultimately, you became one of the founders of Juniper Systems, which is probably one of the most successful companies that's there's ever been in the United States, and I'm wondering if you could explain to me what the concept is behind Juniper. What is it that Juniper really does. 

[00:11:07] Scott Kriens: Yeah, it's, it obviously ends up getting complicated, but at the essence, just as when in the old days, we'd put our letter in an envelope and we'd put an address on it and a return address in a stamp and carry it out and drop it in the mailbox. That's basically what happened on a network.

And of course it's electronic. Somebody has to read all the addresses, know where, today, now it's in the tens of billions. At the time, it was about 7 billion. All those addresses are in the world. And then deliver the mail. And, and in the simplest terms, that's actually what, what? We don't know what's in the envelopes.

We're not part of the social media revolution. We have no idea whether it's email, TikTok, Instagram, or anything else. However, we do know where it came from and where it needs to go. And when there's now tens of billions of possible destinations and addresses, it's not a simple task. And it also has to get there fast and it has to be secure.

And so it's complicated because you have to go fast because of the volume of traffic we could imagine is in all of this. But you also have to look carefully enough to make sure that it's safe and that it's gotten there with integrity and so forth. And the difficulty is probably twofold. One, knowing where everything is, and secondly, being able to look carefully and go fast.

And the thing that Juniper was able to do was both at the same time. People could look carefully and go slow, and they could go slow and look deep, but we went fast and looked carefully. 

[00:12:47] Louis Goodman: What was so revolutionary about the M 40 router and how it dealt with information? 

[00:12:53] Scott Kriens: It was the first example of the technology that you needed to do this, and really it was the merging of computing and networking.

So the computers, you take a sort of a trickle of input into a processing engine, and then you crunch the numbers really deeply and then you give it back. In networking, you have basically, compared to deep computing, a trivial amount of information that comes in, but you gotta look really fast, get it outta there, and get the next piece in.

And it could go a lot of different places. So you needed a computer to be able to handle the speeds and the volumes, and you needed the networking software to know where everything is. And so the M 40 and the early days of Juniper were about taking the compute power of what was born as processors for computers that have been around since IBM in the forties and fifties, really when they were born and marrying it to the systems and the software that had to figure out all this complexity of getting it as not just out, but out to hundreds of millions at the time, and then billions of places.

And that convergence of computing and networking was something that nobody had done. And the internet was really born on college campuses to connect the physics department to the admin department, to the PE department. And so the volume and the scale was campus only. And you really can't used to say it's, you can't remodel a house into a football stadium.

You gotta start with knowing you're building a football stadium. And so we took all the ideas, but married it to the horsepower. Started with an architecture that said, this isn't just to get across the campus, this has to go around the planet. And we were at least one of the early companies to embark on trying to figure out how you do that.

[00:14:52] Louis Goodman: By the way, who came up with the name Juniper and why?

[00:14:57] Scott Kriens: That was Pradeep Sindhu, the founder, actually, and there's two reasons. One, because his kids liked the name. 

[00:15:03] Louis Goodman: Okay. 

[00:15:03] Scott Kriens: And second, because the address. That you put on all these envelopes, these packets, there's something called the internet protocol or ip, and Juniper has IP in the middle of it.

And so his technical mind was drawn to that, and his kids liked the word better than the other choices, and so that became the company Juniper. 

[00:15:26] Louis Goodman: Speaking of technical minds. Knowing you a little bit in having heard, you interviewed frankly on some other podcasts. My sense of it is that you were not one of these like really nerdy tech kids growing up, but rather you got to be in the right place at the right time and began to be involved in the technology world. And I'm just curious if you could comment on that and where you found this business technology genius that lives within you. 

[00:15:59] Scott Kriens: I'll tell you, Louis, one of the things I tell people often is whenever someone talks about whatever degree of success they've had, the more credit they take for it themselves, the less valuable whatever they're gonna tell you about it is.

And in my case, it was a lot of being in the right place at the right time in a lot of ways. I was born and raised in Silicon Valley in the old seventies, on through to the end of the century with the evolution of computing and the birth of the internet, it's about all of the things you could ask to have put on your plate at one place and time.

So I'm always, aware of that. There's a need for what I'd call the role of a translator. Somebody that understands enough of how things are done. Can also translate what's needed and be able to marry how you do things with what you need to do, and end up being able to set a course and speed that says, we're capable of doing this and we need to do that.

What's the difference between what we have and what we need? And there that becomes the assignment. How can we get people to take a chance on it when nobody's done it before? And that's about relationship and trust building. I wouldn't have named it in the first 45 years in my life, but end of the day, I come to believe sitting here today really, that it's actually all about building trusted relationships.

And if you do that, then people are willing to take chances. And if you get a whole team willing to take chances, you can do some pretty great things. 

[00:17:36] Louis Goodman: If a young person were just coming out of college now, I ask people all the time, would you recommend going to law school? And I get different answers from lawyers.

W what about going into the tech industry? What's, what do you think is required and would you recommend it to a young person who has an interest? 

[00:17:55] Scott Kriens: Well, this is probably an obvious thought in response to your question, but the first thing that better happen is figuring out as best we can, everybody, taking some guesses at this, what is the impact of artificial intelligence? What is AI going to do in its impact and influence, and where is it not going to be able to do what's needed without intervention? In the early days of ai, the simplest thing to observe would've been that it can process and probably synthesize what we know better than.

It has ever happened in history and more quickly, but in the advanced days coming with inference engines and so forth, at least many people believe, and I'm not in any way form an AI expert, but it's gonna be able to infer things and and create some things, not just synthesize what everybody tells. It is the simplest way to say that.

And so if I were somebody stepping out into a career today in technology. Or any fields for that matter. It would be really critical to figure out, as best I could forecast, what is gonna be the impact of AI and what's going to be needed and where is it going to take over what used to be needed at Juniper.

We need less programming skill coming out of individual people today than we did when I started, certainly, and even five years ago, because AI's able to do a lot of things so. Used to be able to say, if you could program, you had a great career in technology. That too simple a way to look at it anymore.

[00:19:37] Louis Goodman: It's rather public knowledge that the business side of things has gone well for you. I'm wondering how much you understood about business when you got started and how you learned along the way. 

[00:19:51] Scott Kriens: I knew very little when I got started. I wasn't an entrepreneur that started at bunch of things as a kid, I started a well drilling business when there was a drought in the early seventies for a summer at a paper route.

I'm not somebody that came up with a bunch of inventions in high school by any stretch, so really I learned most of it on the job, and even then, I don't think I really began figuring any of it out right away. It was just trying to get my feet on the ground trying to, and make a living. And then I guess what I'd say evolves in all of that is, is just, is problem solving. What's the problem and what's needed, whatever it is. 

[00:20:35] Louis Goodman: Is there anything that you know now that you really wished before you started down the whole tech road? 

[00:20:42] Scott Kriens: One thing I'm glad that I didn't have was any more insight, frankly, because I think some of the, things all for, maybe for anybody. I think for all of us, some of the greatest accomplishments are made possible by not really knowing how hard it's gonna be.

If I knew and realized what it was gonna take to do, even for me, so simple as getting through college, I didn't go to junior college thinking I was gonna graduate from college. I just thought I'd go for a couple years and that'd be good. So at least for this one simple mind, sometimes not knowing more than I did would be more valuable.

If I had to say though, on the other side of that answer, what would I wish I'd understood this framing of relationships and trust building better sooner than I have for all kinds of reasons. I didn't really figure that out for a long time. 

[00:21:38] Louis Goodman: In 2010, you and your wife established the 1440 foundation. Can you tell us what prompted that move and what the foundation does. 

[00:21:49] Scott Kriens: Two things, 1440, the name comes from the number of minutes in a day, and it's really relationships. One of the prerequisites is I have to be present if I'm undertaking the development of a relationship between us, but I'm not really here because I'm on my phone or I'm thinking about something else, people know that. Sometimes we think they don't or we think we can multitask and be. More than one place at one time, and it's actually apparently biologic neurologically impossible. But it's also not possible to convey that energetics sense. So 1440 is born on that premise of every minute is an opportunity to be present, be right here, not thinking about anything but this conversation we're having.

I don't claim any mastery of these things, by the way, but that's one intention. And then it aligned from a life point of view because I stepped outta the CEO role in 2009, and our kids were at the age, at that time, where Joanie, my wife, went from being the parent that the school welcomed in to help to the kids reaching sixth and grade and beyond, where I was like, okay, thank you parents.

You can leave the campus now. And so there was less every day, but really for her and, and so we were both arrived at this point where, you know what now what? And it was an opportunity to take what had been a very casual interest and formalize it and launch the foundation. And that was really the premise of it was it's about the inside of us.

It's about the rest of the person. As I mentioned earlier, it's not the science and the math and the English, it's the inside itself. And that awareness and that development and that learning for a child was where we started with the kids. And with schools and then it's grown from there. 

[00:23:44] Louis Goodman: Can you talk a little bit about how that practice is something that you, yourself buy into and that you yourself are involved in? 

[00:23:51] Scott Kriens: The practice of relationship and presence and so forth?

[00:23:54] Louis Goodman: Relationship, presence, meditation, how, however you wanna characterize it. 

[00:24:00] Scott Kriens: My awakening to these things actually happened when Dad passed and as you mentioned earlier, you knew him well and he passed in 2004 and. 

[00:24:10] Louis Goodman: Yeah, I remember that and it was a difficult thing for all of us. 

[00:24:13] Scott Kriens: It was painful as it is for us to lose a parent. And it made this break in my own life, which was, the question was what matters? And I looked around at a lot of stuff I was doing and it didn't pass the test. And I stayed in the role for another five years of being the CEO at Juniper. During that time is when I began to spend time in meditation and Buddhism and contemplative practice on retreats and journaling and books, and really at the time, looking at all the things I was focused on outside, and confronting mortality and realizing that the stuff out there wasn't really what mattered.

It was not that it evolved on a few different points of view on all that, but at the time, what I thought was, it must be what's inside then. And so that's really what led me into the contemplative practice and the mindfulness, which is something we still do every day, but the understanding of it's really evolved as well.

[00:25:18] Louis Goodman: I've talked on this podcast a little bit about my own gratitude practice and about how every morning I get up and walk my dog am consciously grateful for the fact that I'm just walking down the street under my own power and I'm basically healthy and just able to look around at the world. And the last time I saw you in person, we touched on this a little bit and I'm wondering if you could comment a little bit about your own notions of gratitude.

[00:25:50] Scott Kriens: I'm happy to, and I have strong feelings about it. I say this in the classes we teach in leadership. It's, it may not be the only, but it's the only one I know of. It's the only emotion that is guaranteed to be appropriate no matter what your situation is. Even things like joy are not necessarily the right emotion for the right time, and obviously frustration and anger and sadness and happiness and all kinds of things may be more or less well suited.

In my experience, gratitude is absolutely suited to every situation. It's a great thing to bring to difficult times. It's a great thing to bring to good times. There's three beneficiaries in gratitude practice to me. One is the person who's grateful. The second is the person for whom I am grateful. If it's a person to person gratitude thing. And the third is the person who observes the gratitude exchange between those two people. 

[00:26:48] Louis Goodman: Wow. Yeah. 

[00:26:49] Scott Kriens: So I, I have a lot of feelings. A lot of, we could say we have more time on gratitude. I think it's a hugely nourishing, energizing emotion to call on, literally for any situation. 

[00:27:04] Louis Goodman: Yeah. I agree. Can you talk a little bit about what your family life has been like and how that has fit into your life as an entrepreneur, your life as a business person, and how there's been this sort of work-life life balance across the years. 

[00:27:26] Scott Kriens: One of the things that was said to me early on that struck me was, there's no such thing as work-life balance because there's only one thing and it's life. So I didn't understand that, and I tried to be different people in different settings.

I can't say I've completely cured myself with that, but for me, trying to be everywhere all at the same time for everybody was, even though I wouldn't have said it that way, when I look back, I was trying to do that and it ends up being, at least my experience was everywhere you are, people think you're just waiting to be somewhere else.

And it doesn't really provide much nourishment. So that was a challenge, trying to be a lot of places for a lot of people at work. It made it challenging at home and I did my best, but it wasn't easy. Ayn Rand wrote a book a long time ago called The Virtue of Selfishness, and there's a need to make self a priority in the mix as well.

And I'm not saying I live this selfless life by knowing the possible imagination, but trying to show up. Really, in a way it is selfish because, at least in my experience, because I was just trying, I was trying to do it for the sake of being admired and feeding my own security needs actually, if it were to disappear into my psychotherapy.

It makes balance difficult and I actually think it's one of the things that drove us, even though I wouldn't have said even at the time, 15, 20 years ago, it's not coincidental that 1440s name for being present and the number of minutes in a day. I was not doing that very well. I was always somewhere else in my mind, no matter where I was.

[00:29:14] Louis Goodman: Yeah, 

[00:29:14] Scott Kriens: and that's not a formula for a deep connection. 

[00:29:17] Louis Goodman: What other sorts of things do you like to do? Like recreational pursuits, physical activities, what sort of things do you enjoy? 

[00:29:26] Scott Kriens: Health is a very important one. Exercise is a biggie. Then, as you mentioned at the outset, cars, old cars has always been a hobby.

A fondness of mine, well came from dad actually, he enjoyed cars and had not very many of them, but he always had an interest. And so now, today, it takes me places to go touring and to see things and Joni and I just got back from a trip to, through the Grand Canyon and through Sedona and Arizona and, and so forth.

We like. And some of those are in old a hundred year old cars. And my daughter Ellie and I just got through building an engine together 'cause she wanted to learn about how they worked. And so that's a, in the hobby space, that's certainly something that I enjoy. 

[00:30:13] Louis Goodman: How many cars do you have right now? 

[00:30:14] Scott Kriens: I try not to add 'em up 'cause it's embarrassing and then I have to admit it.

But it's the, the older cars are the ones that hold most of my attention, frankly. And by old, I mean from me. Thumb K. The oldest car we have now is a 1920, and then we have a couple from the thirties and then a few from the fifties, and we just recently had one, the newest thing we've had, which is build 20 years old.

It's a, to me, it's just a really interesting evolution from a technology or from a engineering standpoint, but also in an old car. In my experience with it is it's a full sensory enjoyment. There's the feel of the car on the road. There's the sound, there's the sight, there's the knowing of all the moving parts and what's happening.

There's the companionship of being with people that enjoy it. It's one of those, it's great to have whatever it's for all of us, whatever it may be, cars, boats, walking the dog. It doesn't matter. I it, I think it's really. Healthy, nourishing to be engaged in activities that totally consume it, where nothing else matters except paying attention to exactly what's happening in that instant.

That's a, I think that's a really rich place to spend time. And for me, taking an old car through the forest or out to the ocean and joining good friends for a sandwich and driving back is a pretty great day. 

[00:31:54] Louis Goodman: I have a few questions that I ask everybody, and one of them is, let's say you came into some real money, let's say three or $4 billion.

What, if anything, would you do different in your life? And I just wanna amend this a little bit because you are someone, I don't know if you've comment to personally come into billions, but you've certainly come into some substantial resources financially in your own life, and I'm wondering how you answer that question and how having substantial financial resources has changed your life or what you've done with it.

[00:32:34] Scott Kriens: Yeah. What I would say with all gratitude for the good fortune that I've had is that it's not all of cracked up to be. 

[00:32:42] Louis Goodman: Why isn't it cracked up to be? 

[00:32:44] Scott Kriens: At one level if you have to work your whole life to pay the bills and regardless of what you might want, there's a thing that you need, which is the paycheck.

It's a blessing and a curse. Actually, I think most everything is. The curse is that you're stuck in that cycle. The blessing is you don't have to figure out what to do otherwise. Yeah, and that probably sounds really ungrateful or un appreciative of good fortune, and I don't mean it to be that at all, but the freedom to do whatever you wanna do, also in my belief, brings with it a responsibility to do something worth doing. And that's not easy. And I think to the other half of your question, the more money, if you start out with the belief that I'm responsible to pay this good fortune forward, the more money you have, the more responsibility comes with it.

And so whatever the amount is it's not easy to make productive use of it to help people or to help the world in some way. It's easy to paste your name on the side of a building. Does that really help? I don't know. We need buildings, so it's obviously not a bad thing, but trying to figure out how to take good fortune and make the greatest impact for the greatest benefit.

I won't even measure it by number of people. Example, there's a big difference between number of people touched and the number of people helped. A lot of times we fund things for people who say, we've reached 5,000 people and what's your goal? Next year was 10,000 people. Can you pause and say what happened to the first 5,000?

There was a woman that, we were, actually, one of my sons was working with this woman who made this comment. She was trying, she was working on a program to help serve kids get through college, and they had a graduation rate of 95% and she said, my goal is to take that down to 75. What? And she said, what?

Because if 95% of the kids that I'm helping are getting through college, that probably means I'm helping a bunch of kids. That would've figured out a way anyway. And if it really falls to 75, that means I'm helping some kids who wouldn't have made it without me. That's a lot harder to do. I am enormously grateful for the timing and the good fortune and, and the things that have crossed my path.

The opportunities that it's created for me and for our family. And if you really take the responsibility seriously of paying that forward, of saying, look harder to give money away than it's to make it if you wanna do it well. So I'm grateful for that challenge and it's hard. 

[00:35:34] Louis Goodman: Let's say you had a magic wand. There was one thing in the world you could change in the tech world or just the world in general, the world of philanthropy, anything. What one thing would you wanna wave that magic wand at? 

[00:35:45] Scott Kriens: Louis because you know him well or knew him? This answer will not surprise you, but I would wish for what I really came to admire a lot about dad, which is to listen more and talk less.

So if I could wave a wand, I would cut people's talk time in half and I doubled their listening time. 

[00:36:05] Louis Goodman: Let's say somebody gave you 60 seconds on the Super Bowl, or you decided to buy 60 seconds on the Super Bowl. What, what message would you wanna put out there to this enormous audience? 

[00:36:20] Scott Kriens: That's a great question.

We'd probably say two things. One would be about gratitude, which is, I won't repeat, but it's what we talked about. The other is about listening because I think it's the greatest tool towards building relationship. The challenge with these kind of things is it's really hard to talk to somebody about doing something 'cause it's not a talk head thing. It's a body, heart feel thing. And delicate bombarded with lots of messages that are really good ideas. But do we change? Do we do anything different or better? 

[00:36:50] Louis Goodman: Yeah. 

[00:36:51] Scott Kriens: Often, mostly, nearly all the time, no. So chances are a 60 second ad would do nothing. But if I could populate it with something in a prayer, it would be listen for understanding and be grateful.

[00:37:06] Louis Goodman: Scott, if somebody wanted to get in touch with the 1440 foundation, the multiversity, what's the best way to do that and what's the best way to learn a little bit about what the foundation does? 

[00:37:21] Scott Kriens: There's two pieces to 1440. There's the Grant Making Foundation, which is separate from what we call the multiversity.

And the multiversity is a, it's a 75 acre campus in the Santa Cruz Mountain, and it's a campus that bought as an old school and built this campus, which is run under the foundation, but it's its own entity, so it's at 1440.org. For people that would have interest in either bringing a team of theirs or understanding more of what we do.

That's the place where we've set up a, as I say, a container to invite these kind of beliefs we have about relationship and trust and presence and gratitude and deep listening into a safe space where you can explore that in whatever way it lands for each person. 

[00:38:06] Louis Goodman: Scott, is there anything that you wanna talk about that we haven't touched on?

Anything at all that you'd like to mention? 

[00:38:12] Scott Kriens: I think I'd be breaking my own rule, talk less and listen more. Anything that came outta this conversation that we've had, Louis from each of us that anybody hung onto, I'd be grateful. 

[00:38:25] Louis Goodman: Scott Kriens, thank you so much for joining me today on the Love Thy Lawyer Podcast. It's been a pleasure to have you. 

[00:38:32] Scott Kriens: Likewise, Louis. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Enjoyed it. 

[00:38:36] Louis Goodman: That's it for today's episode of Love Thy Lawyer. If you enjoyed listening, please share it with a friend and follow the podcast. If you have comments or suggestions, send me an email. Take a look at our website at lovethylawyer.com, where you can find all of our episodes, transcripts, photographs and information.

Thanks to my guests, and to Joel Katz for music, Bryan Matheson for technical support, Paul Robert for social media and Tracy Harvey. I'm Louis Goodman.

[00:39:13] Scott Kriens: And then how can I, and then once I, if I can understand that, can what I need to do align with the success I'm trying to have?