Furqan Rydhan on What It's Like Co-founding a $20B Company

Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.

Transcript

Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.

Kind: captions Language: en anyway i got one more in a different space that i think sam will love sean i told you about this book i read about vertical farming and uh you know basically like i read that wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute you guys just were talking about crypto stuff and then he just said i’ve got something i think sam will like farming yeah that big of a ready to you i like it too i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want all right we have a special guest on the pod today fur khan is here he’s my old co-founder uh probably the smartest guy i know uh especially tech wise so we talked about a bunch of things ranging from his last company applovin which just went public at a 20 30 billion dollar valuation so we talked about you know the humble beginnings of that and all the way to a massive ipo uh what he’s doing with his money you know so you win the lottery what are you gonna do and he talks about his new project that he’s building out and then we talked about a bunch of cool things that he um he shows me so every every week we do i do a call with him called the cool [  ] hour where i just sit there on video and i just say hey show me cool [  ] that you’re interested in because he’s like a total uh you know tech nut he’s on the bleeding edge of everything and so that’s my hack to learn a bunch of things before they go mainstream and um so he talks about you know some hardware stuff that he’s really interested in like a brain wave measuring device that he’s wearing he talks about crypto uh and then we talk about vertical farming and the future of that so a bunch of cool topics on that side i would say there’s some part of the crypto stuff that might be over your head so too many terms acronym stuff you don’t know about here’s my advice uh two ways you could still get value even if you don’t fully get it because hey i only half get it uh for con is usually 10 steps ahead of me and so what i’ve learned in knowing fergon for like almost a decade now is when he thinks something’s interesting instead of just saying i don’t understand that that’s weird uh lean in go google it later look it up uh you know if i had just followed a bunch of the things he was interested in interested in i would have made a killing investment wise over the last decade and i’ve learned the hard way that that’s what i should do the second thing is uh he shared a bunch of general advice about how he went about his career you know college dropout um choosing jobs that weren’t the highest paying job and why he chose it what he kind of optimizes for i thought there was some good stuff in there so if you are not subscribed to this podcast if you’re just listening to this podcast maybe your friend told you about it you know what you need to do open up the podcast app apple uh the itunes app or open up uh spotify on spotify you click follow on the apple podcast app you’re going to click subscribe we are climbing the charts i think we’re number 12 in maybe business or investing category and we’re breaking into that top 10 and we’re not leaving when we get there so how do we do that subscribe if you’ve enjoyed this podcast you get value out of it just hit the button that’s all you got to do hit the button thank you so shawn and i are both wearing harvard shirts i actually planned this i saw you a screenshot of you testing and i went and grabbed my harvard shirt i was about to go on this big like what a coincidence this is amazing no i i do have one that i wear um but i saw you were wearing it so i wanted to uh i wanted to wear the same thing because we normally wear black t-shirts yeah and you know for the record neither of us went to harvard uh but we both do this thing where we’ll wear harvard stuff and then people be like oh harvard and then you respond you’re like miss that campus love it love it and you went on a tour and they actually went to harvard yeah yeah yeah yeah they’re like oh you’re wet like yeah yeah yeah i got a groupon it was lovely they showed me around oh four oh yeah we almost overlapped it’s like i don’t know i was just there for lunch but uh yeah oh like were you there at noon con’s even better ferguson didn’t even finish college so forgot his of all of us he’s the most he’s the smartest most successful one and he was smart enough to drop out after what freshman year sophomore year uh i was there for a couple of years uh i mean i tried to do i went to san jose state i tried to do computer engineering because obviously that would have made sense but i was running a company at the time and every time i was deciding between electrical physics or on the phone with somebody trying to make a deal and you know you know which one won so yeah do you want to give a background sean of fur khan because uh last time he was on we were way smaller yeah uh fur khan is one of my best buddies he was the guy i started my last company with or was co-founder cto so you know most co-founder pairings i would say the most common one is one guy who can build and one guy who can sell and that’s kind of what we were like i’m more like the sales guy and he’s more the building guy and uh so yeah we worked together ahead of six seven years sold the company uh a year and a half ago for kind of braved it out and made it one full year at a big corporation so i gotta give him props for that that’s like a you know an endurance challenge for you um but now now he’s now he’s doing his own thing so he’s got f.inc which is how do you describe it uh it’s uh i just want to build cool things with cool people so that’s what i’m focused on that’s really it i would describe it as you know if you’re trying to start something you want like a third it’s an interesting emerging tech idea uh that’s where i get excited and i want to put in time and money and incubate these things with you all right i’ll give a different description i’ll give my my view of it sweet basically uh fercon is investing in himself like 15 years ago whoever is that person so if you’re like a young engineer and you want to make some [  ] happen and uh man it’d be kind of helpful if you had somebody who’s been around the block who’s done it before who can either give you money advice build actually get in the code and build with you and so he’s got this disc it’s kind of like y combinators you’ve got this discord group and every single company is like i don’t know like a 23 year old engineer they get their own channel and then basically on some of them furcon’s actually like the back end engineer with them on some of them he’s like the tough love investor who’s like dude why aren’t you focused on growth why are you talking about all this other [  ] and in some cases it’s like uh oh you need to move to san francisco and like live on my couch i think you’ve done that with a few engineers of like literally come here sleep on my couch and i’ll like not just seed fund you i’ll like [  ] babysit you and incubate you literally and physically in my apartment i want to spend some time actually discussing that because i want i want to like reminisce a little bit but but first by the way we got to congratulate furcon also his he since he’s come on his last company uh applovin ipo’d um i don’t know what what is it at now ipod close to 30 billion dollars so you know yeah i was gonna say we have to give that part of the story which is fur khan co-founded the company that is currently publicly traded for 20 billion dollars yeah rich is what i’m trying to say so that’s like pretty important although it looks like you guys did you guys just do an earning so something happened today where your stock just plummeted well not plummeted but it went down uh a fair bit uh yeah i don’t know i mean all tech stocks are getting ravaged right now um yeah but you know yeah so congratulations like basically that company you guys are supposed to sell it for also like a huge amount like three billion or something like a couple years ago in it and it failed and then it turned out to be a blessing in disguise it seems well you should you should explain that that’s a good story so we’re working together and fur crown’s like dude like i got some good news and he’s like you know my last company we’re going to sell for we’re going to sell uh they’re going to sell it and i think it’s i don’t know what it was 1.4 billion or something like that right that’s what the original sale price was yeah i think they put a 1.4 billion value i think the terms were something like they’re going to put in a billion dollars and the value would be at 1.4 they’re going to buy a majority of the company uh most of the early employees would have gotten liquidated unless you’re working there you would have gotten kind of whatever new grants right which would have been an amazing outcome anyways right oh wow you built a company 1.4 billion that’s you know that’s a win that’s a grand slam but then something happened what happened and how did that work out in your favor yeah so the company was an international company it’s a chinese company and 2016 the elections happened and you know politics kind of changed a little bit and i think in that process like it started looking like man this is like not gonna go through like they’re not gonna be able to get approval in the u.s for a foreign entity to kind of buy this thing and uh so that happened and then there’s some time you know in every contract when a sale happens there’s like all these triggers right like hey you gotta complete by so and so date if it doesn’t happen then you know whatever the contract might end and i think in that time i mean i wasn’t at apple and i was working with you but you know every time i talk to somebody there they were like dude we’re still crushing it we’re growing and it’s still kind of scaling up and so it looked like the deal was not going to happen the company had like multiplied in value during that time and so now there’s like all this leverage on the company side to be like well we don’t actually need this sale right like we’re a lot bigger than what that value was and i think they turned it into an investment instead with like non-voting or you know some some kind of distinction there and we ended up getting some liquidity then which was fantastic it was like over a billion dollars like felt great i felt like that was the exit uh felt like that changed you know kind of what i could do in my life in terms of where i spend my time um but then they just kept growing the company kept building and they continued down the path they partnered with kkr and you know brought on i think harold is on you know kind of the executive team now and he’s a seasoned vet in the industry and they just continue just to kind of you know skyrocket and uh i don’t know to dumb it down app loving is basically uh like they you guys helped invent advertisements that you see in the middle of iphone games correct yeah so we started as an ad tech platform that’s when i was there and uh you know then after that they brought up you know kind of a the gaming side so they have a gaming studio which generates a lot of revenue uh if you think of them as like almost like a first party game creator now that’s where i think the company’s gone they bought machine zone right so they acquired a bunch of studios they have their own studio so they’re almost more a gaming company than a mobile ad network now so that’s kind of crazy but the funny part is i remember you telling me like oh you know we kind of did this sale then a piece of paper is going to go sit on someone’s desk trump comes into office and now you know i think was a chinese company a chinese company’s buying this anything that’s over a billion dollars i believe there’s some rule that it has to get like you know a certain type of approval for the transaction to go through and then it just sat there for like i don’t know how many months six months nine months something like that and then when they came out of that he’s like yeah by the way like we kind of get the best of both worlds they made you know their buyout turned into a minority investment so we still got the money but we get this free roll of great how big can we build this and then fast forward a few years and it goes public uh at like we just kind of 20 times the value you know we just kind of skipped over something pretty amazing which is he kind of was casual about it you guys both were basically you built this ad network that was doing wonderfully huge and like i i i’m gonna say it in the same way but basically you saw which games are doing cool and you go we’re just gonna make games kind of like that and make them popular because we already know what’s popular before even the people making the games know what’s popular and now you make all your revenue from making games that’s pretty astounding right yeah i mean um i saw all of this from the outside but like there are some key players in the company that i think were really instrumental in this there was this guy rafi he like when when i you know when we kind of created apple and we were working on the products before applovin uh this guy was just like somebody adam knew he knew his brother he had worked with them before he was like this 19 year old guy he’s not going to go to college he’s you know all he wants to do is like do something big and play video games so like he’d spend all day all night playing street fighter but then he would talk to every single kind of japanese mobile gaming company all night and he would just grind and it was an awesome environment i mean i’m kind of like the person where like if i get really excited about something that’s all i want to do that’s what i was doing at the time so i’m at the office rafi’s at the office you know we spend all night i’m hearing his conversations i get pumped up about it and then kind of during the day we’re building all these things and you just saw people everywhere in the company that wanted to do something big and went and got it so raphael i think at some point in this ad network was like i want to build games they had built this thing called lion studios within applovin i don’t think it was very big at the start like it was kind of like some small games but narafiya i think he probably gets a lot of the credit to like kind of spearheading that and like just wanting to do it and you know when i looked at the s1 and kind of like dug into it it’s like i think it’s like half the business now you know there’s obviously details on how you determine where the business is but i think it’s like half the company which is incredible right like started with this ad network and then you know in two to three years kind of towards the end of this one public era you now have kind of built up the second part of the business is also math and you and the guy who started applovin i mean it was a few of you guys but like the main guy his name is adam right yeah adam and basically he had like a i don’t know if it was mild or or very successful outcome at another thing and didn’t you say that he put in like four million dollars of his own money which i don’t know if that was a lot or a little to him but uh a pretty substantial amount of his own money and you guys kind of like [  ] around for like two years like point like you would say that like well let’s try this and it didn’t work and you’re like let’s just go play video games and think about it like like wasn’t there like something like that we’re like oh we’ll figure it out yeah i mean adam john and andrew were like the three co-founders that like they had worked together before they had some done a couple of other companies that did well i mean john is nobody knows john but john is like he worked on the first ad server on the internet i believe that got picked up by doubleclick and you know kind of that went on to google and then he worked at like vmware he had done all these different roles he’s like technical but then very marketing focus very product focused and uh you know so it’s like he was just an interesting person to have in the mix and then adam is like he had already kind of you know he started i think in equities trading in the chicago stock exchange and then gotten into you know ads and marketing and then they had built a company i believe it was called ah and i can’t remember they said game fly or you know some something like that and it was like probably a really good outcome but then not where you know it wasn’t like a massive outcome where he’s like oh i can retire forever and i can you know like this is all i want to do and i’ve kind of made it and in the first couple conversations with him i remember walking down university avenue with him and he was just like you know i want to make something so big that i can walk down this street and people would know me and it’s like university avenue in palo alto for people to know you must have done something like really big right it’s every who’s who in tech walks down there and i was like okay okay i want to kind of like take a really big shot but the m3 put in the initial funding i think it was like around four or five million bucks if i remember correctly but it was a lot in the sense that it gave us many years of runway to work on whatever we started with one project called style page we did that for like nine months that was kind of like pinterest we really quickly realized we’re like you know five dudes in like palo alto with no fashion sense trying to build a fashion website this is not going to work very well yeah like you know just wranglerjeans.com it’s that easy that’s your website where you’re going to stop you know you don’t need a pinterest board to find lee jeans yeah exactly and uh and then we messed around with a lot of different ideas and some of them weren’t very good and i think sean we dealt with this a lot right like you get excited about something because you have to come up with an idea you make it you’re not really that confident with it before you even launch you’re like this is trash i don’t i don’t even want this anymore to get it away from me so there was definitely some of that yeah but you you i think one of the things worth mentioning is that you which i think it’s worth mentioning because i remember every time i built a company i’m always like well this is just how i’m doing it it’s probably real wrong but like i don’t know the smart people probably do it this other way and i remember you talk i remember feeling very comforted when you told me like yeah that love when we went through nine ideas you know is it this is it that is it this is that and like you know some false hopes of like uh kind of works uh no it’s not gonna work out and then in between you’re like yeah there were some days we just came to the office we didn’t have the idea to work on and so we just played fifa for a bunch of hours and we would go eat talk come back play some more fifa then we would go home like there were days like weeks like that and i remember thinking all right that’s probably not the like the method you should choose but like it reminded me that like success is not so glamorous like you know they show in the movies where it’s like oh i have the idea i’m a visionary i got it right away from day one and then we work hard and we just a b c d e it’s done you know and so uh i don’t know is that a fair representation of what you what you experience yeah it’s definitely non-linear i mean you can work really really hard for a long time and feel like you’ve made zero progress and you could be doing all the right stuff you could be making the right calls and the other challenges you don’t know like you don’t get feedback right away on the things you’re doing or are good i mean you get customer feedback but you don’t get this kind of meta feedback that like the general type of things i’m working on are going to kind of work and hit and uh i mean style page was kind of one idea that we really dug ourselves into that everything between style page and then app love in the ad network was just like you know it’s just like kind of really small projects that you’re not super confident about you’re trying to find some edge you’re trying to learn something and you know mobile was just getting big android was getting big there’s some opportunities there but you just don’t know you know it’s like how vr is today you’re like i believe this is going to be a lot bigger in the future what is exactly what people are going to do it’s really hard to predict and when you tell somebody they usually go nobody’s going to do that well if nobody can predict these behaviors how do we build them you have to have this kind of like blind conviction towards something and also like get that right so it’s like yeah it’s really hard yeah you definitely need some luck you got to pick the right thing this guy adam how do you sell how do you say adam’s last name furugi so farooqi adam ferugi he’s the ceo now and from what i’ve read about him i don’t know him he seems like a wonderful ceo like the glass door reviews are great he wins all these awards he seems like a lovely guy i’ve seen interviews with him and then but what you’re describing is like a bunch of really like relaxed calm people just like i’m kind of dismissing it but not really like you guys are just kind of messing around and uh trying to help yeah which isn’t of course that’s not the reality but how did this guy go from being this like kind of relaxed calm dude just trying to hang out and find a hit to leading a 20 billion publicly traded company i mean when i look at him he looks pretty polished he looks like a good good guy that’s like a pretty amazing transformation yeah and so i i think relax is probably the wrong the wrong word i mean we were intense when we played fifa it was like i’m gonna beat you eight times in a row it wasn’t a casual game of fisa fifa so everything was competitive and we would play mobile games competitively that was a lot of our interest app oven when we started was actually an app where you could see what games and apps other people were playing in your social network it was kind of like a feat of act that was a first iteration of app loving and it was because we just wanted to see what people were playing because we wanted to kind of get those games and be competitive within it so he’s always been competitive i think you really uh see that in him and but you know i used to say like like fur crown’s work schedule is like roll into the office at 11 lunch with the crew catch up on what people are up to just starts getting humming around you know does a couple meetings starts getting hung around three four and then basically like by like 8 p.m to 3 a.m is when ferkan does his work and then he repeats it the next day and so for i remember in our company there was a bunch of people who were just you know regular human beings that would work in a nine to five and then they would go turn off their brain and go home and like for some of them it was really hard to have a boss and kind of like a leader who’s on a completely alternate schedule some people were totally fine with it they made it work and then we recruited a bunch of like raffy type dudes who were like oh cool we stayed up until 3am here like great that’s my optimal schedule too i’m down with that and so but at app 11 you had told me that adam was the opposite he was coming at nine leave at four or five whatever he’s got like five kids i think and like every minute was efficient whereas i gotta say like the way you work it’s not that every minute is like boom boom boom i’m doing this this this like even at our company we would take video game breaks every day at 4 pm and go play super smash bros for an hour right like you had very opposite styles but you guys made it work yeah i think adam is like make every minute count and you see that uh and how he like operates and that’s why he’s the ceo of a 20 billion dollar company is because everything happens very fast very efficiently uh like when a decision is made the whole company knows about it when movement’s happening it’s immediate it’s like make decisions fast be strong with your kind of movements you know outside of it follow through with it quickly like those are qualities i think are really really critical in a ceo i mean for me it’s like i want to make obviously every day count like i work a lot when i’m excited about something and the apple open times was that when something’s growing i take it seriously but you know i know that creative work is like it happens in kind of these moments of flow if you get two or three good flow states a week i feel like you produce a lot and i think most developers or creative people or builders don’t feel this like not every hour is super efficient but there’s there’s some times where maybe it’s because you did all this stuff to build up to it or you got the right conditions but you hit like three or four of those a week man you’re you’re really you know humming you’re producing a lot and a lot of impacts happening and so i always focus on impact and you know i think it was a good pairing because i would just work super hard to go and tackle the next like technology barrier with my team and then the next morning adam would just drive a bunch of traffic by the time i rolled in at noon it was like we knew the test worked or not and you know that was like awesome just to feel the first time i’ve ever felt somebody like take control of growth and like literally say actually we’re gonna get this answer today and obviously if you have like you know a good bank account and you can kind of fund it you can spend money to make your answers happen faster we got a lot of cycles in in those you know times we were building these crap apps we didn’t waste like a year building some garbage app because very quickly we knew it wasn’t gonna work and why and we tried all the variants of it and we got we had like confidence that we were done with that idea like oh we tried it it’s not gonna work we’re not gonna be lingering about this you know so let’s switch to ideas so me and you do a call every week um it’s one hour and it’s called the cool [  ] hour and every time i do it i’m like damn i wish i’d recorded that for myself but also people would love this and so i i want to do that basically you guys do this every week yeah we’ve sometimes missed some weeks but you know i had a kid and stuff like that but we’ve been doing it uh pretty regularly for a couple ever since he left uh you know twitch i was like well i still want to hang out and keep in touch that’s like the best part of when we used to work together was just shooting the [  ] about stuff that’s cool and because fergan in his own words he told me this once was i’m kind of in the first 10 000 people to try any new technology and like really dive deep and understand it because he does that he just sees a bunch of cool [  ] before the mainstream does and so my hack is well i’m never going to be as smart as this guy i’m never going to understand technology i’m not going to learn how to code but i can be friends with him and he could like explain it to me like i’m a kindergartner like uh i’m really into this right now check this out watch watch this demo here try this out here open up this website watch this and so we do that and the the thing with most of my relationships including this podcast i’m talking at least 50 plus percent of the time because i’m a talker when i do the cool [  ] out with a fur god i’m like i just sit back into my desk and i like take notes as like oh this is cool and i only stopped to ask clarifying questions of like wait how does that work so i want to jump into some of those things so we’ll keep it open-ended i have a few that i know you’re interested in i can guide us there but let’s start with open-ended which is what are some things that are just cool or interesting to you it doesn’t have to be like something you’re working on necessarily but where is furcon’s attention right now what stuff has caught your eye yeah i would say um there’s probably three major things one is uh in the hardware space there’s just there’s just this trend that i feel like i can’t get out of my mind which is you know commodity hardware whether it’s like a raspberry pi kind of a simple device like that or off-the-shelf gears and things like that plus software like machine learning equals very advanced piece of hardware same raspberry pi yeah well i i don’t know what the application is but it’s basically like a fifty dollar i don’t i don’t remember how much it costs now yeah it’s like a thirty computer it’s like a little board and it’s important because now in a developer previously they would have had to design their own little small computer board to go build a small like you know if you wanted to build a roomba you’d have to go design a little computer to put in the roomba then design the roomba now you can kind of go pick up this like computer that’s just a little board and you can put it into anything like you know it took half your company away of what you needed to do to make this happen who makes raspberry uh it’s a company called adafruit i believe um but they’re they’re like an independent company they’re like probably one of the biggest obvious maker space companies around um because they’ve you know i think they’ve sold like i want to say like 100 million of these devices now and so they’re just crushing it they’re just as well so what’s what’s an example of something that you or somebody has built with a raspberry pi just so people have a tangible example so like uh there’s another device of from nvidia i’m using the nvidia jetson it’s like a little version of a gpu but i basically have a little gpu plugged into my tv it has a webcam on it and you know we messed around with some like pose estimation so like you know you can open my tv and you can basically stand there and a little ball will come and if you hit that ball like it’ll go blue or you made like a connect like an xbox kinect you just made like a bootleg version of it and then we kind of did some hand gestures where if you you know we basically i think that this this and then this that’s kind of like the three gestures and we can kind of read that on the other side and so and he basically just put up like you put up like a one or two or three basically right yeah and this was for me like you know i like to go and mess around with it my idea if i wanted to do this as an idea i would do uh the best fitness product would be you buy this little device it plugs into your tv because everybody has a tv on their wall now your tv is this awesome fitness game uh and you could just do like everything i think i wanted to call it like fit cam or you know something like that but uh instead of like that company that sold to lululemon for like 500 600 million yeah exactly two thousand dollars right here for thousands of dollars that you have to mount onto your wall well you already have a screen on your wall called your tv what if you could just turn it into something smart that’s one of the like for thirty dollars instead of three thousand dude i have uh i have like a mere competitor called tempo i pay 50 bucks a month for the programming and then two grand for the machine oh yeah and it’s basically a flat screen tv with uh they don’t call it a camera because they don’t want to freak people out because you work out like i work out shirtless in my underwear basically so they don’t call it a camera but they call it a sensor and it could like tell you if your are your poses in good form or not good form and uh it counts your pose it counts your reps so you can compete pretty cool yeah and so that’s one i’m going to tell you about this other company i invested in them but i i just really really excited about it so i’m going to tell you guys this company called neurosci they make a brain computer interface so this sounds future but it’s now it’s basically a device and i actually wish i had it next to me but you just put it on your head you can go ahead if you want i want i want to see if it’s within the room it’s not going in the room you know how you know how on talk shows like uh morning shows they have a guest come in and they’re like here’s the latest products that you can buy for your kids this holiday season and they’re at a table and they go this product is this is this and they set it down they go to the next one that’s what fur con is right now basically it’s that segment where someone is just like has placed like eight cool things on the table and they’re just going from thing to thing to thing just dropping bombs and i’m like oh great cool got it next you know what i mean that’s what’s going on right this is uh fvc this is fur khan’s qvc competitor where he just picks up objects and like this is a fantastic holiday gift for the family yeah and so this is for you know kind of like developers and whatnot still but this is what the device looks like and i’ll kind of give you guys a closer look but you can see these little uh probe looking things so this would basically kind of rest on your head like that and what this does is it listens to eeg waves happening in your brain and i think there’s many different wavelengths but you know these guys have identified some set of them and so why why does this kind of relate to the story we’re talking about there’s a little computer that’s inside here that you know like wouldn’t have been able to happen 10 years ago and so because you could put a little computer here that has wi-fi on it that can take these signals in and transmit it to the internet this device is viable now and you can so so you you wear that and it helps measure your like what focus or your kind of are you in flow state it’s kind of like a fitbit in some way for your brain or what so the device itself first takes in raw signals so it can detect a lot of stuff they’ve added some machine learning right so the second part they added software and they pre-programmed all these different actions so there’s some stuff are you focused right now are you calm right now uh kind of things like that are you gonna enter a sleeping state they can detect all of these conditions but there’s other things that i’m really excited about uh where it can detect uh if you think about like pinching your left hand like if you think about doing this actually but don’t do it it can pick up that signal or if you think about moving your hand your right arm it could pick up that signal specifically and so you know you could think of this as both a receive state and detect things but also as an interface to kind of you without having to move a muscle just thinking about a muscle change change the channel without going and picking up the remote so the guy who made this is like 17 right for 18. um i i don’t know his age i think he’s a little bit older than that but yeah you know there’s this guy alex i believe he has a neuroscience background and the ceo is this guy aj um and you know what’s funny is i bought this device as a person right like i’m just like i bought this device i think i was probably in the first 100 or 200 to buy um and then i was like i sent them a message i’m like i love this i’m like an investor like can i talk to you guys and i don’t think they responded to me and then um then i joined they had they sent a message like hey do you want to schedule like uh like customer call like they were doing customer discovery now my sweet so i like joined this customer discovery called do the whole thing but then at the end i’m like dude i really love this like this is me there’s a bunch of stuff about me not some rando but like i’m like really excited about this like i want to invest and then he was like still kind of like okay like kind of like aggressive in the customer call to kind of get this but then we followed up after i talked to him and ended up investing a little bit of money into them but i love these devices i love these things where it’s like small piece of commodity hardware plus advanced machine learning equals potentially massive new output right like you know and i can go into some random ideas on how i would use this but also this is called we got to make sure we let everyone know it’s called neurocity so their website is neurocity.com their website is so awesome when i’m on it okay so it’s basically what this kind of looks like it basically looks like a set of headphones but you don’t put it on your ear you put it up on your head a little bit it costs i think 900 and they claim that they manage your focus with music and then you minimize distractions and shifts your focus and hacks your flow this is a brilliant website i almost would buy this just because like it looks so mysterious is the right one maybe i mean it’s definitely something new and early and you know when people say like hey we’re gonna manage your flow state you always you know what do we all do we kind of call [  ] on it right you’re like wait like are you gonna do that how are you gonna hack my body right and so uh you get a lot of snake oil in the world there but this device uh it can for sure detect when i’m focused it can detect when i’m calm and different uh points and i’ve programmed it to basically like when i have it connected to my computer i can move my desktop around or you know i basically wanted to like see can i open brave from right like and open an application by thinking about something and i can do that’s miraculous to me like that’s things you like read about in a book somewhere and then it was in the jetsons maybe but it doesn’t it didn’t really exist can you really do that so you can think to yourself like move the cursor and it works do you think move it do you think open chrome what do you actually think of to get it to happen yeah so basically uh i programmed it to these kind of thinking of motor functions so they have these pre-programmed like 40 or 80 motor functions like push pull move your right arm move your left arm move your index finger and you don’t move it you just think about that and then you do a little training step so like it just tells you think about moving your index finger and then stop thinking about it and so it does like a little machine learning loop like 20 iterations or whatever and then you know again this is a developer device still but i can get it to run some arbitrary code when i think about my index exactly dude i’m so excited to give this to my dog or to like an eight dog go to sleep well we used to make fun of craig clements came on here and he’s best idea he had three ideas at the end and his best idea was dog vr and we were like that’s the stupidest idea but this is actually better uh because this would be like a way to communicate with a dog uh if you could get the dog to train it but i don’t know that seems a little difficult um all right freaking so that was the first one which is cheap commodity hardware that now lets a software programmer like make hardware without having to have a lab and you know physical material engineering making motherboards and do all that stuff all right that’s one one trend what are some others so the second trend i mean we’re all into this obviously the d5 crypto world there’s just a lot of fun activity happening there and i’ve just you know it’s one of those things where you just see it happening and you want to be a part of it and you read about it and you’re building stuff but you know i was working with you and then i was working at twitch i hadn’t really built anything in this space and so you know just recently i would say the last six months i’ve just been writing you know solidity code trying to think about what kind of applications to build what’s interesting and my entire view of everything is there’s these massive hype cycles then these hype cycles go away which is obviously what happens right when kind of this massive hype happens then there’s a stopping point there where the real building begins and the real value would be created and all of these kind of industries flow like that vr crypto uh these kind of hardware spaces machine learning back in the day and so that’s where we are in the decentralized and crypto world right now and all i want to do is build very valuable legitimate products that serve a real purpose and kind of go from there and you know so let’s talk about crypto real quick so you uh you can apologize now for not including me in the ether crowd sale which i know you were on top of at the time did you buy in the actual crowdsource right after i bought a little bit after the crowd sale but it was like single-digit it was very cheap i’m i’m pretty sure i said it out loud at lunch ever you know you did i remember you saying that and i was like i remember thinking ethereum dumb name uh like that’s that’s like a weird name normal people aren’t going to want to own ethereum like that seems weird literally that was my my my dumb ass thinking and then like every you know year since then i sort of think about why don’t i just listen to more deferracon why don’t i just do the things he says to stop thinking for myself a little bit so so that’s kind of where i’m at so you you initially bought some crypto i remember sitting next to you while you were buying you know random ass you know good good stuff and then the [  ] coins also just [  ] around seeing what’s what and then you sort of showed me what’s going on at d5 so if people don’t know here’s how i’ll explain d5 and then you tell me what you would say so today there’s like the normal financial system there’s a stock market there’s banks you can go drive and park and walk into when you walk into that bank you can say hey uh here’s my money store it safely for me like put it in a savings account give me some interest maybe um or i’d like to take a loan out and then they say great let’s just decide if are credit worthy if you can get a loan and how much you can get so that’s the traditional financial system like in a nutshell the simplified version there’s a parallel like you know a parallel universe where all those same things have been built through code now instead of by law right so we used to write down you know contracts and put them in you know lawyers would write the contracts and now programmers write the contracts and so you could do all those same things so you’ve showed me tools and had me got me set up where you take your crypto money and you can put it in a savings account and you can earn five percent 10 a year of yield so you earn much better interest rates you can lend it to other people or you can take loans and get loans for things um so explain kind of like maybe what part is most interesting to you or give an example of something you’ve done with crypto where you’re actually not just like speculating in the in the defy space but you’re actually using this alternate financial system and so what’s an example what what you were just saying what’s like your favorite platform for that so furcon showed me a couple that i like so um you know so one is compound right so it’s compound dot finance is a website you go to and what it says is hey great you have ether you don’t want to sell your ether but so i did a very simple loan um i went to compound finance i staked or basically like i put up ether that i own i said great here’s let’s say 100 ether and then it says great you can you can just lend that out to other people who want to borrow ether and you can earn this percent annually and you know if you go to if i go to wells fargo i’m going to go get 0.001 you know a year on my savings account whereas with this it was like you can get seven percent a year or five percent a year it’s like you know actually like a decent saving a decent interest rate or i could say great i put my 100 ether up and i’d like to borrow some of this other coin so what i did just as a test of the system i said can i get a loan off my cryptocurrency so i put up ether to borrow usdc which is a a stable coin made by coinbase which basically is supposed to be one usdc is supposed to always be one dollar so i got usdc and then i went to coinbase and i sold my usdc and i got dollars and i said wow i i just put up i just like basically showed that i have this ether and i locked up ether into this account for temporarily as long as i want and i got a us dollar loan that i could go use to go buy you know a pizza right now if i want to and i was like well that’s pretty sweet i never had to talk to a banker fill out an application do a credit check i didn’t have to do anything and i was able to get a loan and now what a lot of people do is they do that they put ether up they get a loan of some stable coin they use a stable going to buy more ether or to go buy some other coin and kind of gamble like kind of like leveraged gambling so there’s other things you can do but i just did a really simple one with where furcon was showing yeah and uh i think uh lending is a big part of it i mean lending is dangerous in many ways like you know i look at lending as like this is bad that’s my first reaction to any lending thing because people do that right they basically um take it and they leverage if you take it and you have purpose behind it and you’re a long-term holder of something that makes a lot of sense right like you can kind of do that and and the reason i find defy exciting is you could take all the rules that you’ve seen get destroyed in like you know the 2008 crash or the dot-com crash and you could put a contract where that can’t happen and so for example there’s this protocol called liquidity protocol it’s a new protocol they do zero percent interest loans on your ease so you can put up ease you take a zero percent loan and what they’ve done is they’ve created this system where they have a stability pool that will liquidate people if they go below their collaterization ratio and so what happens with banks explain that in simple terms so okay so how do i how do i get um how do because they’re not doing a credit check because they’re not asking for my w-2 income how do they make sure that this loan eventually gets paid back how do they do so you put in let’s say 100 ethereum right so you put in some amount that has a dollar value today and they let you take out their token called l usd it’s like a usd stablecoin uh so now you have the stable coin you can trade it for other stable coins or other coins or take it to coinbase you know using whatever mechanism and kind of get it to dollars uh what you’ve done is you’ve put up your ethereum and you have to basically maintain some what they call collateralization ratio like you have to be over the lending amount by at least 10 percent otherwise you’re going to get liquid and the action of liquidating means somebody will go and take your ethereum and buy it for a discount because they have to do this liquidation task and you know that’s the risk you’re putting this collateral up like you would in in another case now so it’s like if you know i take a mortgage out i can’t make my mortgage payments because i lost my job well the bank has my house as collateral they can foreclose on my house it’s the same concept but instead of a physical house it’s whatever collateral you put up initially to get the loan your stake and so the danger is i put up ethereum the price of ethereum is very volatile it goes down a lot i was aggressive with my ratio and i kind of went below this number and i got liquidated i still have my loan amount right so but there’s obviously risks with these platforms like there would be a risk of buying a you know investment property and not being able to make rent on it or not be able to make mortgage what i like about it is the underneath where um in 2008 the bankers just went to the government and whoever else and was like we need new rules right now we’re dying you kind of invent new rules this rule is built into the protocol if you’re at below this ratio some liquidator can come in and and be the liquidator you can’t you don’t get a choice of hey is this going to happen or not it’s encoded and so when you build you know financial products with you know directly encoded values it makes it so that it’s going to happen whether it’s a good situation for you or not whether they like you know how you presented yourself or not like you know and and having gone through you know bad times as a founder and gone through bad credit like i don’t have good credit today still it’s like i have a lot of money in the bank and sometimes i can’t go get a credit card because like literally my credit still sucks from like whatever seven years ago or five years ago however long ago those problems were um and if one little things happen like i had a small credit card that i forgot about it’s literally a 300 thing i missed some like yearly you know payment fee because you know every year you got that fee man it showed up on my credit oh that’s a huge ding doesn’t matter who you really are what you can do if that financial system sucks if you have the ability to kind of um do some of these actions i believe you should be able to do them and that’s the most interesting thing about d5 is so that’s permissionless so that’s the general like that’s a good i think general overview because most people don’t really understand what what what is even the point of this how does this work uh let’s go specific are you doing anything cool with d5 do you have any good trades going are you making money doing this are you are you actually doing anything in the device space right now i think uh uniswop is probably one of my favorite companies in the space and i think we’ve talked about this a little bit but what unit swap did and i’ll give you kind of the simple version of it is usually when you wanted to trade two assets you had to create a marketplace so let’s say i have one sean coyne and i want to sell it i need sam to show up and buy that sean coin right and if there aren’t two sides and they don’t agree on the price this trade won’t happen and what uniswap did and i think there were some others before it but uniswap has become the biggest player in this space is they created a one-sided trading market where you know a buyer or seller can show up and they’re trading against what’s called a liquidity pool the investors come in and put in both sides of the trade marketplace so like one ethereum and three thousand dollars would create like let’s say a liquidity then sean you can just show up and say i want to sell and you’re going to sell against this pool uh you don’t need another side the pool is always the other side and they’ve created a simple algorithm they call it like you know an amm and automated market maker where you know they want to keep the price close and depending on how much liquidity there is and how much you’re willing to sell it’s going to slip away from that amount and that’s where the price movements will happen and you were in those pools you were saying i’m making good money by being the liquidity give us a sec what what was the yield you could get let’s say you put a thousand dollars in what were you making being the liquidity provider so uh obviously in the earlier days of unit swap the pool yields were very high like you could see 100 plus on like fairly good assets and and it’s really important to think about you have two sides of this market right so if you have if you’re in the ethereum and us dollar pool when ethereum is going up you’re like losing some of it right because you’re giving it away uh to kind of to kind of like receive basically dollars and you know so if you want to hold a lot of ethereum long run it doesn’t really make sense to be in some of these pools that are unaligned so i always try to find things that are connected together so like two stable coin pools a usdc and dipole that does you know anywhere from like eight to fifteen percent and that’s been like that on the low end of the spectrum for the last year plus i mean i’m holding effectively what you know we’ll call it dollars on both sides of the puzzle and people need to trade between these assets and i’m willing to be the trade partner for them along with a lot of other people and you basically get a little bit of a fee and that’s where the liquidity pool makes money so holding you know dollar on this side or a dollar on this side feels good if there’s something very well aligned with ethereum so if you believe ethereum and bitcoin will kind of together flow upwards that could be a very good pool for you to kind of take what they call rap bitcoin and ethereum and be in that pool and uniswap made all this happen from the consumer side to make a one-sided trade but also as an investor to come into a liquidity pool and say hey i’m willing to kind of put up both of these assets and then i want to make some fees as people do this right okay so all right so that’s that’s good i think a little probably a little too complicated for the general audience at this point so i’m wearing a harvard shirt that’s about it oh sorry my this was one of our cool [  ] hours was he’s like i came in thinking he’s going to tell me about you know wbtc and i’m like oh [  ] i got to go look up all these acronyms he’s like no vertical farming i was like oh brilliant tell me about it right because furcon’s got a wide range some days i remember early on at when we were working together he was like when uber had just kind of was getting big he’s like i’m thinking he’s like i got a bunch of friends we’re kind of like you know not doing a whole lot nowadays i’m thinking about just renting like five by five cars and just having them like run a fleet like i think i could just make x doing zero work by running my own little taxi fleet on uber or he was like uh you know there’s these i forgot what it was float spas or cryo tank yeah company what was that one that you were really into yeah uh you know the cryotanks are something that you know if you have bad joints like me it’s like a you know night and day difference on how your body feels and so you know like i still want to put one in and i think in the lab that i’m spinning up over here we’ll get to that probably at some point but wait what’s the what’s this what’s said lab i’m i’m building a hardware and robotics lab here in san francisco as a part of f dot inc and you know the idea is software you can do in a coffee shop and a living room but you can’t really build any one of these even off-the-shelf hardware products in your living room and so what i want to do is take a lot of founders who are interested or future founders we’re interested in building these ideas i’m going to have a machine shop and an electronic shop and a robotic shop in this facility gonna be in this iconic location and my goal is just to get like a bunch of talented hungry people in this roof and just have a great energy and build together and so you see these companies form out of universities because they have two things they have a shop there that you can access mostly for free and then they have people in the shop that turns into your community like as a kid i can just show up and stand next to you while you’re doing something and you go you don’t give me a weird look you go oh you wanna you know how to use this no okay let me show you like that little bit might be the difference between you willing to try and kind of get into a field or not and uh where are you going to support that what was that where where in the city you said it’s iconic location can you see yeah we’re looking at a place at fort mason in san francisco so it’s not complete yet um but that’s kind of like for me like the iconic locations or i can see the golden gate bridge i can be on the water we’ve explored stuff on the piers in general uh in chrissy field fort mason like these locations when i go there i get excited you know like going to monkey inferno was a fantastic office but now outside it wasn’t that great like soma mission these areas i don’t get excited when i go there and i usually do there too much how much are you willing to invest in to sink into this thing to make it interesting it’s gonna be a lot it’ll probably cost about half a million bucks a year just to even like have the base building in place and uh you know my guess is it’ll be double that just from you know the people that i want to bring in and kind of investments i want to do and what i want to support uh i want to like i i actually ran a plastic fabrication shop in a small machine shop a long time ago and so i’ve done a lot of this i’ve welded and now i’ve worked on cars so i actually have a lot of this interest and uh i’m more excited to have my own cnc and my own machines and things to work with as well so dude you’re so cool yeah so sam the reason i said you’re gonna like this idea in companies because uh i don’t listen to very many podcasts but i do listen to this podcast this is probably the only one i listen to this is not maybe we’re taking that testimonial to the moon and i’m not even just pampering you guys sean i mean you know me i’m not going to tell you like it is but i really do listen to you guys i know because i’m pretty sure you didn’t listen at the beginning when i was just interviewing folks and then now that it’s ideas it’s shooting the [  ] sam’s here he’s listening now yeah and uh so you talked about like hey you know you just sold the company by the way congratulations to you as well and uh you were talking about how like you want to get your hands kind of into things and yeah you want to like do some of that so i was like oh okay if i ever get back on the pod i’m gonna tell sam about this idea uh and so i’m by the way i’m sitting here taking notes i’m just writing all this down and so i read this book and this book was talking about vertical farming i think i don’t know i don’t remember the name of the book but basically um you know the first couple of chapters it really talks about what the major problem in the us is as you know as you’re producing a lot of food and the world right the world went from i think 3 billion people 100 years ago to like almost 8 billion now like it’s a pretty massive difference in like how many people are on the world you’re starting to see effects like we see the wildfires here in california you hear about all these things and so what’s happening is as you start farming in soil you basically destroy the soil and after some period of time you get no yield out of the soil and so about 10 years ago 15 years ago vertical farming got very popular as a way to put food production closer to cities like new york city requires you know millions of acres outside of new york city to support it wouldn’t it make sense for that to be in the city well how do you do that well you could put it in these buildings you could put it under kind of uv lights and you could drive water through it through hydroponics and this got really popular a lot of people invested in it uh so it’s kind of like a particular time it’s for someone like me who’s zero zero nature knowledge what would to make paint a mental picture what is a vertical farm bro have you never grown weed in your in your apartment no i don’t smoke weed i never grew weed i don’t do drugs i don’t do crimes i don’t i don’t die there but i feel like every 16 year old has at least grown one pot plant at red high school yeah so you know you know you think about plants in the ground because they need kind of nutrients from soil but really they just need some of those nutrients and you could just put them as long as you deliver them to the roots it’s going to pull that in and so people figured out hey you can grow stuff without soil and that that’s a huge that’s just a big unlock because it doesn’t have to go in the ground so it’s going to use water right correct to use water and there’s been more advances now where it’s not just water but it’s like you know i think they call it aeroponics but it’s just misted right so it’s kind of like more yield against the root and you know you still have to power it with sunlight so you could put it inside a warehouse but you need sunlight and so big uv lights was kind of the strategy and so phase one of vertical farming was we’re going to put them in high rises we’re going to take some floors and we’re going to turn them into a farm floor and that should support the building and these are normally the pictures that you see what people are kind of dreaming about vertical farming it’s a giant building where a bunch of them are farms and it looks cool uh but in practice it was like kind of a warehouse like a data center and you know that’s where it ended up living and i think that’s fine the the reason these guys i got excited about they’re called nebulum farms and what they do is they basically have uh direct to consumer um lettuce micro greens and tomatoes that’s what they sell you and so you know they started kind of in a different phase like kind of like hey we’re building cool tech like we’ve been in this sean before where you’re excited about computer vision and doing this thing but actually along the way they realized well we don’t really want to license out our thing we can’t franchise this we can’t do like all these other ideas we had people actually just want this and what if we could put up a farm near you and i think they have their first farm in idaho and they just have a monthly subscription to get lettuce and tomatoes these things show up to your door and i mean today they do same day harvest to delivery because they’ve kind of taken the process down to this simple thing they have this basic form and you can see some of the pictures that they have on their website of what their farm looks like uh but it looks like a little data center it’s like a rack of lettuce there’s a little light that will kind of rotate and like give it sunlight and on the top there’s a mister that kind of like you know make sure it’s called what’s this called nebulum farms nebula b-u-l-l-a-m farms and you know like if you ever get a chance to go taste some vertical farmed lettuce you will notice the taste difference like it is not the same lettuce you’re like wait lettuce has taste it is good crispy like it actually makes a huge difference in the quality of product and i believe they can make this happen you know same-day harvest to delivery for a large part of america so what they’re on their website it says less water so you use 98 percent less water and in places like california where there’s like droughts water shortages that’s a big deal no pesticides because it’s an indoor sort of controlled environment and no soils to know bugs right that’s why you don’t need the pesticide right uh it says less human handling i don’t know about that uh so always fresh and basically the the goal would be hey here’s an eco-friendly thing but also this taste this produce it tastes better and you’ve actually had it so what’s the no [  ] like is it if i didn’t know blind taste test would i be able to tell the difference between these two or whatever yeah and we should do this like you know there’s a couple of other brands that have gotten popular that you can pick up in stores i think there’s one called plenty uh that shows up in stores um and i think there’s a lot of people that have wanted to do this but if the business isn’t gonna work the tech is not gonna hold it right like that’s the same thing as software like this problem exists everywhere and so if you’re building some emerging tech thing you can’t keep talking about how great the tech is and so the direct to consumer angle it resonated with me because it’s like okay i’ve seen grocery delivery i’ve seen some of these things where you could get like fruit in a bar well if you can produce the fruit yourself like you just have a machine that can produce fruit that’s the vertical farm well why don’t you become the biggest farm in america really quickly by kind of going city to city and doing that and you’ve seen uber you know kind of build the biggest farm in america now right now the way that he was describing i’m like all right they’re mailing plants not that i mean yeah that’s like it’s they’re okay it’s like different lettuce it’s it’s it’s like a candle it’s like those candles that have a ring in in the bottom when you melt the candles it’s like a sticky novelty type type of thing it’s cool once or twice but the way that you’re describing it now i think precon i think what you’re really good at is something i’m not as good at which is like you’re really good at breaking your frame and like changing i don’t know if i’m even phrasing this correctly but kind of changing the whole paradigm which is like no no we’re gonna build the largest farm in the world and now when you say that i think man so you’re just gonna have to buy all this land and have this massive huge feel but you’re kind of saying like oh but by the way by farm i mean it’s like these little small things in every convenience store in america do you know what i mean yeah and uh that that’s kind of like the trade-off here which is you know a farm that’s like maybe you know in a 50 000 square foot building that might be like you know thousands or tens of thousands of like land acres that you’re replacing because vertical farming does many things it reduces the water but it also compacts how much space you need to do the action so instead of buying large masses of land to produce this you can buy warehouses or facilities closer to the city center and serve that area right and so if you can be near like a city like austin or san francisco you can kind of serve that city kind of efficiently with kind of a smaller you know kind of smaller brilliant yeah that’s so cool and dude like i think what you’re really good at when i’m around you i feel so inspired and i want to bring something up in a second that’s related to this but basically like you are the type of i hate when we talk about san francisco it’s this lovely place everyone needs to go but the type of people like you there was a large density of that in san francisco and i am not at all naturally like you but i felt i improved and just changed my opinion on so many things after hanging out with people like you i don’t know what we call that i think sean is a little bit more like you than than i am but we we also have a handful of friends that are like that and they just you guys think about stuff in such a way maybe it’s like when i asked some when i asked my challenge myself to come up with an idea or think about what’s the possibility of x y and z i put these constraints on where like um well there’s no way i could pull off this because that technology for this doesn’t work or i’m not good enough to do this or but that’s it’s always been done x um whereas when you think of stuff you’re really good at being open-minded and defaulting to like well let’s actually that is kind of interesting let’s play that out and you don’t have these constraints of like being held back that a lot of normal people like me have i think do you know what i mean sean yeah um i i think it’s simpler than that i think fer khan is you know everybody uses their own frame of reference their own lens and uh he looks at things through the lens of a technologist so i think and i i remember sitting down next to you and being like how did you get the way you are and you’re like well like i remember when i was five my dad bought home brought home like a printer and like we put it together right wasn’t that the story like a computer or a printer when you’re like five or six years old yeah since my earliest memories it was an xt computer it was kind of like you know not even doss yet it was just like a screen and uh he put it together we booted it up and i remember he had like a disc that had you typed like auto exec i was just a kid i knew how to type a-u-t-o-e-x-e-c if i press enter i get to this like simulation football game and that’s all i could do like you pick a play and it runs it for you you don’t even you don’t even actually play the game but like i remember that as the earliest memories and i mean i got started really young like i worked at a.com when i was 15 and just like my my hobbies ended up being very valuable like i wasn’t a you know not a musician where you know i would have had it made it really big it was like i was into computers and programming and doing things like that and uh those things just happened to have become very valuable especially in the bay area and that that kind of like lended itself to a lot of opportunities also something that you’re gonna do with this what do you what are you calling your space again uh we call it founders inc that’s like the company name so i i want to like tell a quick story about that so back in 2000 and sean i can’t see your face so i can’t see if you’re i can’t tell if you’re on board with this story uh you back in 2013 so basically sean why didn’t you start as the monkey inferno uh like the guy inside joined uh at the end of 2012 so basically 2013 is kind of the actual beginning so around that time i was working out of that i was i just sold something and i didn’t make a lot of money but like 100 grand let’s say and i was looking to start something else and i found this guy named dave and he had a thing called founders dojo which was basically he rented an office it would he i don’t know dave had a business that probably did half a million in sales and he probably profited 400 000 so he wasn’t a rich rich guy but he had this office that he could spend 3k on a month and he let me and like eight come and work out of his office and he uh we heard about it through friends of friends like hey there’s a thing called founder dojo they’re letting like people just work there and it’s a dingy office it wasn’t nice it was maybe six 500 square feet and then down the street was the same thing but it was far fancier it was called monkey inferno it was pretty much the exact same thing but like way better it was this guy named michael burch who was on the podcast if you look up the hippie who made a billion dollars that sean did that episode and it was a guy who started and sold the company for hundreds of millions or close to a billion dollars and his like project was the same exact thing it was nicer you know they had like you guys probably had like hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of interior decorating and uh it was like really fancy but it was the same thing basically of like nerds and like weirdos and misfits we all would come to these spaces and i would hang out monkeying for it all the time and you guys sometimes came to our thing and we would we would dork out to the stuff that people would make fun of like dave loved meerkat meerkat was uh basically a live streaming app which kind of like was the early technology and early behavior for even like a like a clubhouse or whatever um and he would do this thing called a marathon he called it and he would meerkat for 24 hours straight he would be in the office mere catting for 24 hours straight and he would meet these other dorks and they would come and fly into our office and then um it was just so weird like we did all this weird [  ] one time we created this thing called uh what do we call it uh coffee coffee rush we called it and you click a button and you get coffee inside like 20 minutes wherever you are in san francisco and all these just nerdy dorky little projects but it was like the best time of my life and it was the most one of the most formative it was some of the best experiences i ever had as it relates to business and just like becoming a man and like tinkering with all these new things and having an open mind and i think what you’re setting up for con is like the next obviously this is like the next iteration of that and i’m so fortunate that i’ve had people like you and uh and you guys have birch michael burch and i had dave grossblatt i’m so fortunate that people like you guys exist in this world because these little silly things that like are fun and like that seems stupid on the outside and the fact that there’s these grown adults who are thankfully wealthy enough and willing to bet their money to do this stuff it sounds outrageous and it sounds like a movie and i’m so happy i was part of it and it made such a huge difference um it’s like the fact that these exist it’s a movie 100 and uh those places you talk about so i know david grossblatt as well and uh you know i used to go to another place growing up hacker dojo it was mountain view and uh you know even growing up in silicon valley you didn’t immediately have like a network like i don’t know like a bunch of vcs just from growing up here that’s not actually not how it worked my block didn’t have vcs on it it was just normal people and uh you know you really didn’t find people like yourself and so the internet changed a lot right like it allowed people to connect with each other and find each other but you know the in-person interactions they just operate differently and it’s a lot more ad hoc like i remember you being at the monkey inferno and a lot of other you know people that we would have work out of there it was cool because you could just walk by break up a random conversation talk about something and maybe it resulted in nothing and sometimes it would actually stick with you and it would be really important and so um at applovin it felt the same way early on when we were kind of doing these like you know random ideas it was like oh we’re just a bunch of misfits together here that are just going to go on this journey and that energy is just hard to replace and it was really fun and every time it’s been there it’s been really instrumental for me and like learning a lot like conversations during the lunch table at monkey inferno shaped a lot about how people think what are you know what are ways to conduct yourself like just things even outside of tech right like you interact with a lot of different people and you can bring good energy to it and uh i think it’s really critical and so i’ve been on this mission slightly before kova to kind of like build this facility but then kind of covet happened and you know obviously like it’s good in terms of new buildings new opportunities cheaper rent here in the city great but i think this thing is kind of necessary for a lot of people who are in this builder phase you know like they might not be a founder yet they might not go raise a bunch of money they just want to build some stuff and hack on it and i’m willing to kind of take a bet to build that facility and on this podcast we talk a ton about like buying businesses and we almost get to the point where it almost sounds like we’re a bunch of like uh banker pe types where it’s like oh this is an interesting opportunity but the coolest [  ] that i’ve ever done and the most fun i’ve ever done is just dorking out with like people that were like me and just like oh this is kind of funny like this is silly like we could do that it all starts like this is so stupid it’s so fun and sometimes it like turns into really cool amazing stuff and and i think that that’s fun to remember that that should that should that should be how a lot of stuff starts or um maybe like maybe it’s not should be but it can be that way which is i think better yeah organic organic is awesome right it just means that we just kind of sat around we brainstormed some ideas some of our experiences we tried some things uh you need to be able to try things i think that’s like really important and if i can reduce uh you know for me growing up i didn’t have a lot of like people that i could lean on that’s like they had done this already or they were doing businesses it was just like kind of fail as you go take a bunch of scars and uh you know finding like people like adam and sean like was critical for me in the sense that like i had people that i could talk to about business things that like maybe other people i couldn’t interact with and i just want to kind of if i can take that for let’s say like sean said earlier uh you know myself 15 years ago i could give myself some of that like that’s what i that’s what i feel like i’m kind of building over here yeah there’s what’s that cheesy phrase that’s great but cheesy it’s like be the person you needed when as you know when you’re a kid or something like that uh it’s one of those things that like if everybody actually did it you know the world would sort of be a good great place um and and i think that’s what in many ways you’re doing uh i don’t know what i needed i i sort of like had a different journey where i just kind of on autopilot for like 20 years uh didn’t have an entrepreneurial bone in my body uh didn’t think about stuff i just kind of was going with the flow pretty like you know i was trying to try to do good at school but i was okay it wasn’t wasn’t the best wasn’t particularly a hard worker wasn’t doing anything interesting wasn’t great you know socially and i just felt like i kind of woke up when i was 21 years old it started you know when i had my first idea for a company that’s when i started to be more like me and so i think everybody you know okay why do i do this podcast well i’m not going to say i do it to give back like that’s not why i do it because it’s fun but the side effect of doing it is that the person who’s me when they’re 18 17 20 years old or 30 doesn’t even matter how old if you’re kind of in that autopilot phase where you don’t feel like you found your thing or you don’t feel like you know you’re excited every day to wake up then all of a sudden you hear a couple guys on a podcast shooting the [  ] they sound really excited about life they got great energy they get ideas for days and you start to look at yourself like why don’t i see ideas all the time how are these guys able to come on the podcast two times we can do it and so what does that do it proliferates more that are like me that’s you know what i want you know i i am the way i want to be so that hopefully i can like you know incept a bunch of other people in their brain that maybe they can pick that up right podcast a vehicle to do that you’re doing the same thing you know when you were growing up you were you know messing around with hardware and cars and uh business when you were 15 16 years old and you were just messing around with computers and so and a bunch of people helped you out right your dad bringing home the computer or i think you told me about a guy kind of in your neighborhood who had like the car stuff that you could use to go work on cars if you didn’t have that hardware and you picked up those hobbies and you just followed those hobbies you double down triple down even though that wasn’t the common path right the common path was finish college get a job like get married have kids whatever right like everybody has this like path that’s kind of like your parents and society sort of throws at you and you went off that path i think when you went off that path you probably didn’t have as much guidance as like you’re able to provide to that next wave where they should go on to do bigger and better things because you know you’re able to knock down a few of those walls for them or with them yeah and uh i i like how you phrased it uh the cheesy phrase is obviously interesting but like i don’t think giving back is the right that’s not the right way to frame this because it’s like it’s not charity right like obviously like i’m building a business i do believe in the long run uh i want to make money with this business and then things i’m gonna invest in are gonna in the long run pay off for me monetarily as well but as a side effect uh i i do believe that you know kind of like your podcast like you’re gonna inspire a lot of people i would love to inspire the next like thousand builders or founders kind of however you wanna phrase it and i think that side effect is fantastic i don’t think that business has to be you know detached from you know some side effect like i think it’s if i wanted to make it a charity i’d make it a non-profit right like that would be the way to go and that would be kind of the way to do it but i think there’s a lot of benefit and a lot of people will benefit hopefully from it and ideally not just because of me like hopefully it’s more like i don’t know what the discord has become it’s like founders helping each other like that’s the best version of this and if i could be maybe the person that can first create the circle then awesome like that would be the hope over here what’s the biggest kind of like common mistake or trap you’re seeing when you have those kind of young entrepreneurs in the discord working on their projects what is the advice you keep on giving over and over again that like you feel like is the common the common mistakes the common traps that they’re falling into i think it’s always you know what are you focused on so like if you’re a builder you’re probably spending a lot of your energy on and if you’re you know really most of these companies will kind of die in the market not attack and there’s some challenges sometimes but even as a technology person i would not spend too much time on technology and sean you experienced this firsthand like how many times was i like we’ll just hack it in and all the engineers are like cringe right it’s like well we have to like we need to go win this market or figure out if this is real or not if it’s not real we need to move on from this very fast because we’re just wasting time money energy and probably your company if we go down the wrong path here and so it’s pretty much always focused on you know for me a lot of the advice is like go be more aggressive on growth go figure out your market go understand your customers use technology as a weapon for that not it’s not the purpose that you’re building like you’re going to sit here build this technology somebody else is going to go take your market probably with the same technology by the way sam i don’t know if you have a hard stop but there’s one other one that i think is is interesting that uh furkan could talk about i don’t know if you can talk about it but pac protocol or yeah i don’t know can you talk about that or is either that or i think you know the way you’re setting up the dow or any dowser you’re a part of i think are interesting so pick one of those two and then talk about that yeah so uh you know dow decentralized autonomous organization i’ll call it a decentralized org it’s a little bit simpler to understand is really just kind of like this thing happening in the crypto world where um people are forming effectively these partnerships together they’re doing it on you know on chain meaning as like an actual organization that kind of owns this code and so so let me let me simplify for a second so sam and you started the hustle you probably made a delaware c-corp right so you go to delaware that’s the rule of law that’s kind of where you’re going to go write down all your articles of incorporation and you chose c-corp as the like structure of your organization and that lets you do certain things you could take investment you could do this you could do that and so you could do an llc you could do a s-corp you could do it in nevada you could do in california so those are the current ways that you start when you have a project where you need a bunch of people to work together and be financially incentivized as a group you you traditionally you would use you know a delaware c-corp or llc or something like that so what he’s providing what he’s talking about is an alternative that’s been made and i i think forgot the trick here is what do they let you do that’s different than just making it why why don’t i just go to an llc or a c corp uh in delaware well it lets you first be um you know it lets you kind of detach yourself from the legal entity and how you were kind of like having your stake of ownership and kind of voting and governance of the company so like you know we talked a lot sean before of like man it kind of sucks companies are top heavy and everybody’s putting a lot of energy and effort and yeah you might need a person that’s responsible for making these choices but wouldn’t it be cool if and you know a bunch of people on the internet basically took that wouldn’t it be cool if we made a company that could be owned by everybody equally and he could do things like voting or managing the treasury or issuing new you know tokens or shares to and you could incentivize them however you wanted so like if you bring on some people to help you market and like some let’s say a big celebrity you can issue some governance to them like they could be a part of this you can align incentive between investors founders community the market whoever you want and so here’s an example of one right that you’ve showed me so there’s this thing called the lao have you ever heard of this sam so the lao lao what it is is it’s a venture fund but instead of um like if you go to sequoia sequoia’s got you know let’s say the gps the general partners it’s got the managing director maybe and it’s got then the associates and the analysts it’s like a traditional company it’s like a pyramid at the top is the people in charge and what the dow is is basically here’s a fund you put your money in for however much money you put in you get certain number of tokens tokens are like shares and uh and then there’s nobody specifically in charge the fund basically can receive proposals so there’s just they have a website you can pitch them the pitch goes in everybody gets it in their inbox everybody votes yes or no based on how many tokens they hold that’s their vote that’s their weight and then if the majority of the dow has voted yes it gets the treasury which is the bank account for the for the for the lao will pay out that project here’s your investment and uh and then at any time i if i don’t like the lao i can just sell my steak sell it to anybody else they could take my spot and allow um and you know now they own they have that chair so it’s completely liquid at all times whether there’s maybe there’s been great projects in there and now these things looked really valuable these tokens look more valuable than the initial money that was put in well i can sell out i don’t have to wait 10 years for those projects to pan out i can sell out today at two that double my money or um you know i can say i wanna i wanna have more control i’m gonna buy out more tokens so that i have a greater say in this community because i’m gonna spend a bunch of time and i really wanna make sure my my vote matters and basically it ties your vote to your sort of your merits how much value you put in in this case how much money you put into the lao so they did it as an investment vehicle other people did it as an art collecting vehicle put money in buy art art is owned by the group and you could sell in in whatever so there’s these uh headless companies there’s no ceo in a suit at the top that is telling everybody what to do and deciding who gets hired and fired it’s just a bunch of shareholders together and you vote based on your shares it’s like you know more like america like a democracy i guess and then yeah there’s other variations of that too that i can’t even wrap my head around those are the simple ones i’ve understood there’s others that i don’t even understand yet yeah it’s it’s very complicated very very complex but the simple version i like how you phrase it is kind of like a democracy times a uh you know mixed in one and maybe companies even the wrong phrasing there you know i’m very fascinated with this it’s a very different pattern i don’t know if it’s better or worse than you know what we’ve seen traditionally but it’s definitely different right and uh i’ve been wanting to kind of like you know be a part of one create one and so i joined a couple but i’m not like you know some meaningful stakeholder in it but then you know with a lot of the work that’s been going on in nfts a lot of popularity the top shot is just like taking over like my friends group and uh very popular and i know you’re super into like bitcloud and some of these uh platforms and so i’ve been wanting to wrap my head around nfts and i started talking to a lot of developers and people that are interested about some of these ideas that i had and i found like a group of five six people i’m like oh we’re we’re all kind of really into this let’s make a dow i’ll like kind of put in the first amount of money and now a couple of my buddies are also putting in some money for getting some stake in this and the idea is we’re just going to be kind of a group of people that are going to build fun projects in the nft space and our goal is there’s a lot of hype right now we’re in that hype cycle life cycle is going to go away right it’s the same pattern that we talked about before well what is the valuable things that nfts can do let’s go build some of these and so you know we have two ideas that we’re working on right now as a group one of them is like shopify for nfts like you come in you click two buttons and you like you can create your own and you know i’ll ask you this john like you’ve heard a lot about nfts you’ve talked a lot about him have you minted your own yet i have not why not uh i don’t know what the hell my nft would be so like for example we have a friend jack butcher who has minted many nfts now himself and he’s a great designer so he makes like a cool visual it’s like badass art and he’s like oh cool instead of just posting this for free on twitter for likes i’ll post this on foundation and i’ll sell it and he sold some of these for 60 000 each um and so he’s made you know a lot of money this year just basically selling his own kind of like his philosophies he just makes into a kind of a digital poster and he sells that digital poster to his fans and so for me i’m like oh that’s cool if i made an nft i don’t know i don’t have that artistic skill i don’t even know what the actual nft would be that’s kind of my thought and then but you haven’t even just tried one right like when you first saw shopify you went and created a store right like you didn’t you didn’t have to start a company you know or sell something but you wouldn’t do it one’s easier than the other one you’re typing in a user fake new username and password yeah exactly i mean if i open the shopify store i also need to put a product there right like i can’t also have a yeah you can you can try that’s the thing that i saw is like a lot of this uh these worlds defy nfts the dollar value is really big at the top end of it when you go and dig underneath and you’re like ah there’s only like 5 000 users doing this why is it so little right and there’s a lot of interest in doing it really hard to do and i believe that’s like one of the biggest opportunities in nfts is just make make it really easy for people to do it almost as easy as creating a shopify store so that’s like project idea one we’re gonna basically pay for your gas we’re gonna make it so you can deploy your own contract without ever thinking you’re gonna just click a couple buttons and get a landing page that you can send to people and they can buy stuff digitally okay we’re gonna make it literally that easy so that’s i think that’s like accessibility really important um second one which is the thing you were talking about which is the pax protocol like you know there’s building products and then there’s building protocol and protocols are just like here’s an api to go do this thing and nba top shot i mean probably one of the biggest digital products we’ve seen since pokemon go i’ll kind of call it that like that wave of like hype you know reaching some mass market um a lot of interest in it uh but it’s very close right i mean you have to be an nba player to get one you have to kind of like be in the nba you got to play in this whole ecosystem and you know who knows what they’re going to be worth in the long run but in the short run there’s a lot of interest there but only the nba is doing it you’ll see the other sports teams do it and but the basic idea of creating a pack with some digital items in it or potentially kind of linking to the real world that’s kind of what i got really excited about and so we you know as part of nft labs we created this axe protocol which is a protocol to create kind of a you know like a little loot box pack where you can put in digital items and you could put in an image a sound clip for like let’s say your guys podcast or you know kind of access like hey here’s a ticket to a vip event that i’m gonna do here or there’s a meet and greet or here’s my private community and so creators are gonna find a lot of ways to use this if we develop that underneath foundation that they can kind of do all this and so so sam does that make sense of how so like for example what we would do is we would say oh cool these guys built the infrastructure that makes it easy for us to do the following we can create these little packs meaning like a card pack or like a box like a loot box and basically you put it’s a mystery box you don’t know what’s inside so you buy one you open it up and you’re gonna get one you know maybe you get the crap or maybe you get the most vip thing sam calls you and coaches you on your business for an hour and what’s that called what’s the what’s the domain so nft labs dot co is kind of like the main domain so that’s where that’s one of their projects and so i think this is pretty cool because they’re going to be able to get any like influencer like us and so there’s one thing to do with jax doing which is and actually jack did this i don’t know if you saw this uh furcon but he initially was selling a specific nft hey buy this thing and then he sold three packs with inside was a mystery nft he didn’t know what he was gonna he made many six figures i believe yeah and like this mechanic many many games use these like loot box mechanics because it’s fun it’s fun to go buy the thing and see do you get the super rare valuable thing or did you get kind of the junk and you know you so you either get you know 60 cents on the dollar or you get 60 for every dollar you spent and there’s like this game of chance and so what they’re doing is they made a protocol where it’s now easy for us to do that we could make all these packs we could put inside hey tickets to our live show in austin or you know you get to be put into our like private members group or here’s a t-shirt you know with our you know here’s a harvard shirt whatever um and so we could put any number of things just stuff them into boxes and assign some probability and then it’ll generate the packs for us which i think is pretty sweet yeah and uh you know like i really just think a lot about like what what’s the value underneath it like we have to get to you know i mean art has value you know obviously the person buying it cares about it but a lot of people look at that and go wait you know these things are selling for like 50 million bucks plus and like what’s the you know it’s just a jpeg underneath but like i mean a vip meet and greet when you guys do your road show that’s pretty cool actually and i think a lot of people would be really excited it sucks if you only auction that off to the you know person who has the most money right like and i think these packs give kind of the you know creators and influencers a way to interact with their fans kind of more broadly and say all of you guys will get a chance and here’s kind of the things of it by the way you know if there were only 10 vip meet and greets we’ll make the third party marketplace like top shop or if somebody wants to go spend 100 grand for it by the way you guys will earn a cut of that secondary sale plus somebody who got that if they didn’t want it and they wanted to sell it they can kind of do that and so you can support both sides of the ecosystem you can make it kind of fan friendly but then you can go kind of get a lot of value out of it too i don’t know i find creators really interesting because they’re kind of an analogy to founders where you know i don’t want to go work at a fan company i mean you you know i i made it through twitch but it was not it’s not the right environment right like it’s not where i’m gonna thrive it’s not where i’m gonna be excited and i think creators have the same thing i saw a great idea on this uh the founder of ripplet uh uh tweeted this out he goes there’s a bunch of people who engineers who work at like fang companies they make great salaries and they kind of want they’re kind of bored they want to go to a startup but the like the compensation difference is pretty big and maybe they have a family or they you know it’s just hard to walk away from a guaranteed you know five hundred six hundred thousand dollars a year to go work for one-fifth that or one-fourth that at a startup that may or may not make it and he goes somebody should just create a fund that just bridges the difference so what it does is it basically says great we will um we’ll even out that difference so you get 300 instead of let’s say 600 and it’s an income share agreement and but you pay us back with your with stock from the from the startup and so you give up a little bit of the stock from the startup to make back the cash difference and in doing so you would create a port so you would it would help more people who today can’t leave the salary go to a startup you’d help the startup not have to burn more money hiring that person and and use it in between and by providing you would get shares in pretty much every startup that you wanted to provide this with so if you say you thought these 100 startups are great you could basically say great you’re all eligible for this this like kind of like income share agreement that we do where if you hire somebody and they want a bit higher salary we’ll front that salary in exchange for stock um and hopefully bring more talent into the startup workforce i thought that was a pretty clever idea a way to get shares in all the companies that you want shares in that you can’t go invest in directly yeah that’s really interesting and uh i don’t know i think people should just you know ideally people can do the thing that they enjoy they wake up every day they’re excited whether they gotta drive to work or work from home or wherever it uh if you can do that like that that’s a big unlock in your life and a lot of people don’t get that opportunity and early on in my career i just made those trades like kind of no matter how financially painful or you know you know misguided it might have seemed at the time but like i just wanted to work on things that i was excited about and when you and everyone went to loving when you went to top 11 you had another job offer right uh what was the difference there yeah so i had met this guy jack levin i think he was like you know very early at google he was responsible for um you know kind of a lot of google’s infrastructure tricks early on like how they really scaled it and some of the ways they win is really his responsibility and he was working on this company i think it was called why frog was it was like a photo sharing type thing i think they had run another product i think it was photo bucket something like that they had done some big stuff in the photo space they were doing really well they needed some engineers uh i was an engineer at the time and i could basically come in and learn a lot from this very technical person um seemed really sharp uh he asked me these questions that like got my brain going in a good way like you know very specific questions like how do you set up your desktop and like my desktop is very particular and he wanted to know every detail and i was like ah this guy gets it like this guy gets me in the same way um then i met adam and adam was like very different uh obviously very impressive as just a ceo and a person but like the conversation was different the vibe was different one was in like los gatos one was in palo alto just like a little bit of a different area but when i talked to adam i was like oh this guy i could go to a baseball game with him i could hang out with him he seems cool he seems very hungry they don’t have a clue what they’re doing right now like you know they’re shutting down an idea they don’t know what the next idea necessarily is gonna i think it’s gonna be a lot more fun the rate of learning is gonna be really high i might get more responsibility but the really good like kind of proper choice going to this other job offer and adam gave me two options he gave me a higher salary and a low stock and a lower salary and a higher stock option and i was like i kind of just made the decision down to like well if i go with you know adam i need to take the low salary move back in with my parents like take the stock because like i’m gonna be in it for the ride but if i just kind of want to become an engineer and that’s what i want my career to be i’m gonna go to this other company i’m gonna take the salary i’m not worried about the equity necessarily how big that is but i’m just gonna become a better engineer and uh i kind of picked the more unknown less uh polished option uh obviously worked out so i feel great about it but you took the move in with the parents option and yeah it took the move in with the parents in a absurd way yeah how old are you when you started uh at app11 um let’s see probably like 25 26 no moving moving at home wasn’t the worst but yeah it wasn’t good maybe a little bit yeah 26 that’s maybe just old enough where it’s kind of like all right what are you doing but definitely not quite inconvenient socially yeah okay when you move out right so you move out of your house and you move back in it’s not like a happy like uh yeah i’m winning high fives all around right yeah like no no i mean like you um you’re like in your 30s or like you have a family like if you’re happy you’re like a little more established yeah okay yeah 26 is old enough that it’s still like you can still [  ] around and maybe figure it out which you did uh yeah and you know what i mean you know i think you’ll almost be a kid yeah exactly i i think for me it was just like i know i wanted to do this it sounded more fun more fun is always good uh you’re gonna be you’re gonna wake up you’re gonna be excited to go to work it’s not gonna be a drag like you know i would tell sean this all the time because we used to do sunday night call right where we would kind of think about the week and it was like my friends were always sunday night like oh man work tomorrow like sunday like sucks like weekends over and i always felt like hey it’s exciting like more stuff’s gonna happen this week’s gonna be great like and that’s a big difference if more people can do that like that that i think is uh when we did those sunday calls i remember i’d always be like oh like sorry i gotta like i’m doing this thing with family or friends or whatever i’m i gotta go get on this call and they’re like oh man you have to do calls on sunday nights and i was like i get to do calls like i’m i chose this i want to do this i can’t wait for monday we got to do it tonight you know that was our mindset you know we didn’t have as like spectacular of an outcome but i definitely had like a spectacular time building that out and learning all the different stuff so anyways i think that’s if you take away one thing like maybe you didn’t understand the technology but like the meta lesson of furcon to me is he always picked the more fun and interesting path regardless of the financial thing and then on the financial side just made sure that it was a bet on himself and a bet on equity so that if fun and interesting thing does pan out you actually do get paid out of and i’ve seen him make that trade of like i’ll work harder i’ll earn less i’ll move back in with my parents i’ll you know all these things right like he’s willing to work three times as hard as long as it’s three times as fun and i think most people at least from where i come from they don’t do that they when they make career choices it’s a rational logical decision and i think that gets you to a certain type of outcome but if you hear these outcomes and you’re like how do i get some of that i think you got to follow the irrational playbook a bit more i mean sean if you look across your journey at monkey inferno i mean you’re a 24 year old pretty pretty green right like think i saw your initial video interview that you had sent in uh through the monkey inferno and like uh whether the dollar outcome was there or not like i would say the rate of learning like the growth difference for you and i know for that for myself it’s a massive difference i’m embarrassed at what i used to think about back then in terms of building compared to kind of after the journey but you’d feel like that was like a thousand next payoff and the rest of your career is gonna kind of unlock because of it right like i i would imagine you believe that but i’m curious how you think about that journey yeah 100 i i told the guys who set up our studios and um i mentioned this on a recent podcast but i said they came they they flew out here to san francisco they were like staying in a motel six type of thing they’re like i’m gonna build this out and um you know they’re 22 23 24 years old something like that and they had sent in a video like kind of like a video interview to be like sam sean choose us to like like we will help you guys out we will come build your studio for you they’ve like did a ballsy youtube video and tweeting at us like non-stop [  ] i used to do i used to wait in parking lots to meet ceos and investors i wanted to meet just so i could say i’ve been here since 7 00 am waiting in the parking lot for you to come out like do you have five minutes of time right i used to do all these stunts and they were doing a stunt to meet us and i thought that was kind of interesting and when they were there i uh they kind of were like deferring to me too much they were sort of like it’s kind of like too much respect and i told him i was like dude you you kind of want what i have i want what you have i want that time back and i want to be back where you guys are where it’s for friends living in a one-bedroom apartment and you’re making videos and you kind of like why are we trying to be youtubers i don’t know it seems fun let’s just do it and then like we think these guys have a cool podcast [  ] it let’s fly out and meet them and help them out with their studio and we don’t know what’s you know there’s no there’s nothing clearly in it for us but we’ll hop on that plane tomorrow and go make it happen i told him i said that was by far the most fun time um there was the highest rate of learning and i remember at the time feeling like oh man like everything we do is so bootleg and ghetto and like but that was the right path actually for me for a person like me who wanted what i wanted out of life and i said you’re gonna i remember you know i went to duke most of my friends went to med school law school or banking or consulting and so every you know every weekend they would post like they’re you know they’re making six figures they’re posting themselves at a bar they’re like like i wasn’t dating i had no income i was sleeping on an air mattress you know my my co-founder lived in my closet right so it was like you know it was ghetto and so i remember thinking well uh maybe you know there was moments of doubt where i was like maybe i should have gone the traditional path maybe i should have gone to med school after all but uh but it was so fun i couldn’t you know i didn’t there was not a real conversation in my head what i was telling these guys was yo uh you’re gonna see your friends who are on the traditional path and they’re going to look like they’re way far ahead of you right now and there’s going to be a part of you who feels like you’re you’re left behind uh if you’re like me that’s what i felt um stay the path and just know that like this is the first quarter we’re going to be long-term oriented we’re gonna think about this like in a 10 20 year time scale who do you want to be in 10 20 years and like you’re gonna have a lot of fun now and then your rewards are gonna catch up 20 years from now and if you’re okay with that trade of having more fun now and rewards that are a little back loaded this is the right path i wish somebody had just told me at that time guys this looks ghetto as hell but you’re on the right path um we kind of just like for better worse just stuck with it and i want more people to stick with it when they’re in that mode and you’ve done the same traveling through europe playing poker to support yourself and like you know moving back in with your parents it’s not a it sounds at the time it feels uncommon but it’s actually quite common amongst people who end up successful in an entrepreneurial way yeah flip side is just not easy right you’re gonna go the harder path like you know i didn’t i didn’t have i don’t have a college degree i didn’t get that a lot of people ask me hey should i go to college like i have these other things going on and you know like you don’t have to you can learn on your own especially now but um it’s definitely gonna be a harder path don’t expect linear returns where if i put in a year of work i get a year of kind of success and then i put in five years of work i get five years of success it might be nothing for a long time and you might kind of get it in the end but i don’t know the journey is very exciting like that that that to me is what matters because that’s what you’re going to do every day you’re going to wake up every day and you’re going to go do this thing are you excited about that and that’s kind of like critical yeah thank you dude i always take a lot of notes i’m taking notes now whenever you come i uh i’m excited for your success that’s so cool i um thought app 11 was like this huge thing whenever it was supposed to sell a year or whatever a few years ago now and then now seeing what it is now i’m like oh my gosh that’s that’s it’s it’s blew my expectations i’m sure it is uh yours as well so congratulations that’s pretty badass and what you’re building is awesome founders inc that’s badass yeah sweet no appreciate it and uh yeah no this has been fun uh i always like hearing you guys so it’s kind of fun to be on as well and where do you shoot the [  ] a little bit where do people find you founders inc or founders.inc yeah f dot inc uh that’s the website and so that’s the domain uh you can find me on twitter fur con r are f-u-r-q-a-n-r [ __ ] on thanks for coming what i want to i put my all in it like no days off on the road less travel never looking back