Furqan Rydhan, co-founder of AppLovin (which IPO’d at a $20-30B valuation), joins his former co-founder Shaan and Sam to cover the full arc from AppLovin’s scrappy early days playing FIFA in the office to its public listing, a near-miss acquisition that turned into a blessing. Furqan then takes the hosts through his current obsessions — cheap commodity hardware plus ML (think Raspberry Pi rigs and brain-computer interfaces), DeFi lending protocols, NFT infrastructure, DAOs, and vertical farming — before discussing F.Inc, his San Francisco hardware lab and incubator, and closing with advice on always picking the fun, equity-heavy path.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host), Sam Parr (host), Furqan Rydhan (guest, co-founder AppLovin, founder F.Inc)
Introduction and Episode Preview [00:00:00]
Shaan: Anyway, I’ve got one more — different space, I think Sam will love it. Sean, I told you about this book I read about vertical farming.
Sam: Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. You guys were just talking about crypto stuff and then he just said he’s got something Sam will like — farming?
Shaan: Yeah.
Sam: That big a pivot? I like it. I feel like I can rule the world.
Shaan: All right. We have a special guest on the pod today. Furqan is here. He’s my old co-founder, probably the smartest guy I know, especially tech-wise. We talked about a bunch of things ranging from his last company AppLovin, which just went public at a $20-30 billion valuation — the humble beginnings all the way to a massive IPO. What he’s doing with his money, you know, you win the lottery, what are you going to do? He talks about his new project that he’s building out.
Shaan: Then we talked about a bunch of cool things he shows me. Every week I do a call with him called the Cool Shit Hour, where I just sit there on video and say, “Hey, show me cool stuff you’re interested in,” because he’s like a total tech nut. He’s on the bleeding edge of everything, and that’s my hack to learn a bunch of things before they go mainstream.
Shaan: He talks about hardware stuff he’s really interested in — like a brainwave-measuring device he’s wearing — he talks about crypto, and then we talk about vertical farming and the future of that.
Shaan: I would say there’s some crypto stuff that might be over your head. Too many terms, too many acronyms you don’t know. Here’s my advice: two ways you can still get value even if you don’t fully get it, because I only half get it. Furqan is usually ten steps ahead of me. What I’ve learned in knowing him for almost a decade is: when he thinks something’s interesting, instead of saying “I don’t understand that, that’s weird” — lean in. Go Google it later. If I had just followed the things he was interested in, I would have made a killing investment-wise over the last decade. I’ve learned the hard way that’s what I should do.
Shaan: The second thing is he shared a bunch of general advice about how he went about his career — college dropout, choosing jobs that weren’t the highest paying and why. I thought there was some good stuff in there.
Harvard Shirts and Guest Intro [00:02:30]
Sam: So Shaan and I are both wearing Harvard shirts. I actually planned this — I saw your screenshot and I went and grabbed my Harvard shirt. I was about to go on this big “what a coincidence this is amazing” and then—
Shaan: No, I do have one that I wear, but I saw you were wearing it so I wanted to match. We normally wear black T-shirts.
Sam: And for the record, neither of us went to Harvard, but we both do this thing where we’ll wear Harvard stuff and people are like, “Oh, Harvard,” and you respond—
Shaan: “Miss that campus, love it.”
Sam: And you went on a tour and they act like they actually went to Harvard. “Oh yeah yeah yeah.”
Shaan: “Yeah, I got a GroupOn, it was lovely. They showed me around.”
Sam: Oh four, oh yeah, we almost overlapped.
Shaan: “I was just there for lunch.”
Sam: Furqan didn’t even finish college, so of all of us, he’s the smartest and most successful one. Smart enough to drop out after — what, freshman year, sophomore year?
Furqan: I was there for a couple of years. I went to San Jose State and tried to do computer engineering because obviously that would have made sense, but I was running a company at the time. Every time I was deciding between electrical physics homework or being on the phone with somebody trying to make a deal, you know which one won.
Sam: Do you want to give a background on Furqan, Shaan? Because last time he was on we were way smaller.
Shaan: Yeah. Furqan is one of my best buddies. He was my co-founder and CTO at my last company. The most common co-founder pairing is one guy who can build and one guy who can sell — that’s kind of what we were. I’m more the sales guy, he’s more the building guy. We worked together six or seven years, sold the company. He bravely made it a full year at a big corporation after the sale — I gotta give him props for that, that’s like an endurance challenge.
Shaan: Now he’s doing his own thing. He’s got F.Inc. How do you describe it?
Furqan: I just want to build cool things with cool people. That’s what I’m focused on. That’s really it.
Shaan: I’d describe it differently. Basically, Furqan is investing in himself fifteen years ago — whoever that person is. If you’re a young engineer who wants to make something happen, it’d be helpful to have somebody who’s been around the block, who’s done it, who can give you money, give you advice, actually get in the code and build with you. He’s got this Discord group. Every single company is like a 23-year-old engineer with their own channel. On some of them, Furqan’s actually the back-end engineer with them. On some of them, he’s the tough-love investor: “Dude, why aren’t you focused on growth?” And in some cases he’s literally said move to San Francisco and sleep on my couch.
Furqan: I want to spend some time discussing that because I want to reminisce a little bit.
AppLovin’s $20B IPO and the Failed Acquisition [00:06:00]
Shaan: First, we’ve got to congratulate Furqan. His last company, AppLovin, IPO’d. What’s it at now?
Sam: IPO’d close to thirty billion dollars.
Shaan: Yeah. I was going to say we have to give that part of the story — Furqan co-founded the company that is currently publicly traded at around twenty billion.
Sam: Rich is what I’m trying to say. That’s pretty important. Although, it looks like something happened today — your stock just went down a fair bit?
Furqan: Yeah, I don’t know. All tech stocks are getting ravaged right now. But congratulations, you know — that company was supposed to sell for like three billion a couple years ago and it failed, and then it turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
Sam: You should explain that — it’s a good story.
Shaan: So Furqan called me and said, “Hey, my last company is going to sell.” The value was, what, 1.4 billion?
Furqan: Yeah. I think they put a 1.4 billion valuation on it. The terms were something like a Chinese company was going to put in a billion dollars, they’d buy a majority of the company, and most early employees would have gotten liquidated. Unless you were working there, you’d have gotten new grants — which would have been an amazing outcome anyway. You built a company worth 1.4 billion, that’s a grand slam.
Sam: But then something happened.
Furqan: The company was an international company — a Chinese company — and in 2016, the election happened and politics changed a bit. It started looking like this wasn’t going to get approval in the US for a foreign entity to buy this thing. In every contract there are triggers: you have to complete by a certain date. Meanwhile, every time I talked to somebody at AppLovin, they were like, “Dude, we’re still crushing it, we’re growing, it’s still scaling up.” So the deal wasn’t happening and the company had multiplied in value during that time. Now there’s all this leverage on the company side to say, “We don’t actually need this sale.”
Furqan: I think they turned it into an investment instead — non-voting, some kind of distinction — and we ended up getting some liquidity then, over a billion dollars. Felt great. Felt like that was the exit. That changed what I could do in my life in terms of where I spend my time. But then the company just kept growing. They partnered with KKR, brought on Harold, a seasoned vet in the industry, and they just continued to skyrocket.
Sam: To dumb it down — AppLovin basically helped invent advertisements you see in the middle of iPhone games, correct?
Furqan: We started as an ad-tech platform. After that they brought in the gaming side. They have a gaming studio that generates a lot of revenue — if you think of them as almost like a first-party game creator, that’s where I think the company’s gone. They bought Machine Zone. 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.
Sam: I remember you telling me: the deal fell through, a piece of paper sat on someone’s desk, Trump came into office, anything over a billion dollars from a Chinese company needed approval, it just sat there for six or nine months — and then you came out with the best of both worlds. The buyout turned into a minority investment, you got the money but kept the free roll of “how big can we build this?” And then a few years later it goes public at basically twenty times the value.
Shaan: We skipped over something pretty amazing. You built this ad network, saw which games were doing well, and went, “We’re just going to make games like that — because we already know what’s popular before even the people making the games know.” And now you make all your revenue from making games. That’s pretty astounding.
Furqan: I saw this from the outside, but there are some key players who were really instrumental. There was this guy Rafi — when we were building AppLovin, he was this 19-year-old who wasn’t going to go to college, all he wanted to do was something big and play video games. He’d spend all day and night playing Street Fighter, but then he’d talk to every single Japanese mobile gaming company all night and just grind.
Furqan: It was an awesome environment. I’m in the office, Rafi’s in the office, we spend all night there — I’m hearing his conversations, I get pumped up about it. During the day we’re building all these things and you just saw people everywhere in the company who wanted to do something big and went and got it.
Furqan: Rafi, I think, at some point said, “I want to build games.” They had built something called Lion Studios within AppLovin. It wasn’t very big at the start, some small games, but Rafi probably gets a lot of the credit for spearheading it. When I looked at the S-1, I think it’s like half the business now, which is incredible. Started with this ad network and in two or three years you’ve built a second half of the business that’s equally massive.
The Early AppLovin Days: Nine Months on StylePage and Playing FIFA [00:13:00]
Sam: The main founder — his name is Adam, right?
Furqan: Adam Foroughi. He put in around four or five million of his own money, which gave us many years of runway. We started with one project called StylePage — kind of like Pinterest — and did that for like nine months. We very quickly realized: we’re five dudes in Palo Alto with no fashion sense trying to build a fashion website. This is not going to work.
Sam: Wrangler jeans dot com, that’s your website. You don’t need a Pinterest board to find Lee Jeans.
Furqan: Exactly. Then we messed around with a lot of different ideas. Some of them weren’t very good, and I think Sean, you dealt with this too — you get excited about something, you make it, and you’re not really confident with it before you even launch. You’re like, “This is trash, I don’t even want this anymore.”
Shaan: Yeah. One of the things worth mentioning: I remember feeling very comforted when you told me, like, yeah, with AppLovin we went through nine ideas. And in between, there were days you just came to the office and didn’t have an idea to work on, so you played FIFA for a bunch of hours, went to eat, came back, played more FIFA, then went home. There were weeks like that. I remember thinking, that’s probably not the method you’d choose — but it reminded me that success is not so glamorous. They show in the movies: I have the idea, I’m a visionary, I got it from day one, and then we work hard and it’s A-B-C-D done. That’s not how it works.
Furqan: It’s definitely non-linear. You can work really hard for a long time and feel like you’ve made zero progress even if you’re doing all the right stuff. The other challenge is you don’t get feedback right away. You get customer feedback, but you don’t get this meta-feedback that the general type of things you’re working on are going to work.
Furqan: Everything between StylePage and the AppLovin ad network was just small projects you’re not super confident about, trying to find some edge, trying to learn something. Mobile was just getting big, Android was getting big, there were opportunities there, but you just didn’t know. It’s like how VR is today — you believe it’s going to be a lot bigger in the future, but what exactly are people going to do with it? Really hard to predict. And when you tell somebody, they usually say, “Nobody’s gonna do that.” If nobody can predict these behaviors, how do you build them? You have to have this kind of blind conviction toward something and also have to get it right. You definitely need some luck.
Sam: This guy Adam — how do you say his last name?
Furqan: Foroughi.
Sam: From what I’ve read about him, he seems like a wonderful CEO. The Glassdoor reviews are great, he wins all these awards, he’s great in interviews. But what you’re describing is a bunch of relaxed calm people just kind of messing around. How did this guy go from that to leading a twenty-billion-dollar publicly traded company?
Furqan: “Relaxed” is probably the wrong word. We were intense when we played FIFA — I’m gonna beat you eight times in a row, it wasn’t a casual game. Everything was competitive. We played mobile games competitively, that was a lot of our interest. AppLovin when we started was actually an app where you could see what games and apps other people were playing in your social network — kind of like a feed of activity. That was the first iteration of AppLovin, because we just wanted to see what people were playing so we could be competitive within it. So he’s always been competitive.
Shaan: I used to say that Furqan’s work schedule was: roll into the office at eleven, lunch with the crew, catch up on what people are up to, starts getting humming around three or four, does a couple meetings, and then basically from 8 PM to 3 AM is when Furqan does his work. And then he repeats the next day.
Shaan: At AppLovin, Adam was the opposite — coming in at nine, leaving at four or five, five kids, every minute was efficient. You had video game breaks every day at 4 PM to play Super Smash Bros for an hour. Very opposite styles, but you guys made it work.
Furqan: Adam is “make every minute count.” You see that in how he operates, and that’s why he’s the CEO of a twenty-billion-dollar company — everything happens fast and efficiently. When a decision is made, the whole company knows about it immediately. Make decisions fast, be strong with your movements, follow through quickly. Those are qualities I think are really critical in a CEO.
Furqan: For me, I work a lot when I’m excited about something, and I know that creative work happens in moments of flow. If you get two or three good flow states a week, I feel like you produce a lot. Most developers or creative people don’t feel like every hour is super efficient, but if you hit three or four of those a week, you’re really humming.
Furqan: It was a good pairing because I would work super hard to tackle the next technology barrier with my team, and then the next morning Adam would drive a bunch of traffic. By the time I rolled in at noon, we already knew if the test worked or not. We got a lot of cycles in those early times. We didn’t waste a year building some garbage app — we knew very quickly it wasn’t going to work and why, and we tried all the variants and we had confidence that we were done with that idea.
The Cool Shit Hour: Commodity Hardware + ML Trends [00:21:00]
Shaan: You and I do a call every week — one hour, called the Cool Shit Hour. Every time I do it I’m like, “Damn, I wish I recorded that.” We’ve been doing it pretty regularly ever since I left Twitch. I was like, “I still want to hang out and keep in touch.” That was the best part of when we used to work together — just shooting the shit about cool stuff.
Shaan: Furqan, in his own words, is “in the first ten thousand people to try any new technology and really dive deep.” My hack is: I’m never going to be as smart as this guy, I’m never going to understand technology the way he does, but I can be friends with him and he can explain it to me like a kindergartner. When I do the Cool Shit Hour, I just sit back and take notes and only stop to ask clarifying questions.
Shaan: Let’s jump into it. What are some things that are cool or interesting to you right now? Where is Furqan’s attention?
Furqan: There are probably three major things. One is in the hardware space — there’s just this trend I can’t get out of my mind: commodity hardware, whether it’s like a Raspberry Pi or off-the-shelf gear, plus software and machine learning, equals a very advanced piece of hardware.
Sam: Like a Raspberry Pi?
Furqan: Yeah, it’s like a thirty-dollar computer — a little board. A developer previously would have had to design their own small computer board to go build something. 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 just pick up this board and put it into anything.
Sam: Who makes Raspberry Pi?
Furqan: There’s a company called Adafruit — they’re one of the biggest maker-space companies around. I think they’ve sold something like a hundred million of these devices.
Sam: What’s an example of something you or somebody has built with a Raspberry Pi?
Furqan: I’m using the Nvidia Jetson — it’s like a little version of a GPU. I have a little GPU plugged into my TV with a webcam on it, and we messed around with pose estimation. You can stand there and a little ball will come and if you hit it, it goes blue. We kind of made a bootleg Xbox Kinect. We did some hand gestures — basically you show one, two, or three fingers, and we can read that on the other side.
Furqan: My idea for a product: the best fitness product would be this little device that plugs into your TV — because everybody has a TV on their wall — and turns it into an awesome fitness game. Instead of that company that sold to Lululemon for five or six hundred million with a two-thousand-dollar mirror you have to mount on your wall, well, you already have a screen on your wall. What if you could turn it into something smart for thirty dollars instead of three thousand?
Sam: Dude, I have a Tempo — a Mirror competitor. I pay fifty bucks a month for the programming and two grand for the machine. It’s basically a flat-screen TV with a sensor — they don’t call it a camera because you work out in your underwear — and it can tell you if your form is right, count your reps.
Furqan: Exactly. That’s one. Now let me tell you about a company I invested in. It’s called Neurosity — they make a brain-computer interface. It’s a device you just put on your head.
Shaan: This is Furqan’s QVC segment. He just picks up objects — “This is a fantastic holiday gift for the family.”
Furqan: So this is what the device looks like — you can see these little probe-looking things. It rests on your head, and what it does is it listens to EEG waves happening in your brain. There’s a little computer inside that wouldn’t have been possible ten years ago. Because you can put a little computer in here that has Wi-Fi and can take these signals and transmit them to the internet, this device is viable now.
Sam: So you wear it and it measures your focus? Like a Fitbit for your brain?
Furqan: The device takes in raw signals and they’ve added machine learning on top. You can detect: are you focused right now? Are you calm? Are you about to enter a sleeping state? They can detect all of these conditions.
Furqan: But here’s what I’m really excited about. It can detect if you think about pinching your left hand — not actually doing it, just thinking about doing it — and it can pick up that signal. Or if you think about moving your right arm, it can pick up that signal specifically. So it’s both a receive state that detects things and also an interface where, without moving a muscle, just by thinking about a muscle movement, you can change the channel.
Sam: Can you really do that? You think “open Chrome” and it works?
Furqan: I programmed it to map to motor functions. They have these forty or eighty pre-programmed motor functions — push, pull, move your right arm, move your left arm, move your index finger. You don’t move it, you just think about it. Then you do a little training step: it says “think about moving your index finger” and then “stop thinking about it,” does about twenty iterations of machine learning, and then I can get it to run some arbitrary code when I think about my index finger. I can open an application by thinking about something. That’s miraculous to me.
Sam: I’m so excited to give this to my dog.
Furqan: The website is Neurosity.co. The device looks like a set of headphones but you put it up on your head. Costs around nine hundred dollars.
Shaan: This is brilliant. It looks so mysterious. “Manage your focus with music. Minimize distractions. Hack your flow.” I almost want to buy it just because of the website.
Furqan: You always call bullshit when people say “we’re going to manage your flow state,” right? There’s a lot of snake oil out there. But this device can for sure detect when I’m focused, when I’m calm. The key thing is: commodity hardware plus advanced machine learning equals potentially a massive new output.
DeFi and the Parallel Financial System [00:33:00]
Furqan: The second trend — we’re all into the DeFi crypto world. There’s just a lot of fun activity happening there. I was working with you and then at Twitch and hadn’t really built anything in this space. But in the last six months I’ve just been writing Solidity code, thinking about what kinds of applications to build.
Furqan: My entire view is: there are these massive hype cycles, then the hype cycles go away, and that’s when the real building begins and the real value gets created. That’s the same pattern in VR, in crypto, in hardware spaces, in machine learning back in the day. That’s where we are in the decentralized world right now. All I want to do is build very valuable, legitimate products that serve a real purpose.
Sam: Let’s talk about crypto. You can apologize now for not including me in the Ethereum crowd sale, which I know you were on top of.
Furqan: I bought a little bit after the crowd sale, but it was single-digit.
Sam: I’m pretty sure you said it out loud at lunch. You did. I remember thinking: “Ethereum, dumb name. Normal people aren’t going to want to own Ethereum.” That was my dumb-ass thinking. Every year since then I think about why I don’t just listen to Furqan more and do the things he says.
Shaan: So let me explain DeFi and then you tell me what you’d say. Today there’s the normal financial system — the stock market, banks you can walk into, you put your money in a savings account, earn a little interest, or take out a loan. That’s the traditional financial system.
Shaan: There’s a parallel universe where all those same things have been built through code. Instead of lawyers writing contracts, programmers write the contracts. You can take your crypto money, put it in a savings account, and earn five or ten percent a year. You can lend it to other people or take loans.
Shaan: Here’s an example of something I actually did. I went to Compound Finance, staked my ether as collateral, borrowed USDC — a stablecoin by Coinbase, always worth one dollar — then took that to Coinbase, sold it, and got actual US dollars. I basically put up ether as collateral and got a loan without talking to a banker, filling out an application, or doing a credit check. That’s pretty sweet.
Furqan: Lending is a big part of it. Lending is dangerous — people use leverage in a lot of ways. But the reason I find DeFi exciting is you can take all the rules that got destroyed in the 2008 crash or the dot-com crash and encode them so they can’t happen. There’s a protocol called Liquidity Protocol — they do zero percent interest loans on your ETH. You put up ETH, you take a zero percent loan, and they have a stability pool that will liquidate people if they go below their collateralization ratio.
Sam: Explain that in simple terms.
Furqan: Because they’re not doing a credit check, how do they make sure the loan gets paid back? You put in, say, 100 ethereum, which has a certain dollar value. They let you take out their LUSD token, a stablecoin. You can trade it for other stable coins or take it to Coinbase and get dollars. But you’ve put up your ethereum and you have to maintain at least 110 percent collateralization — like a mortgage. If the price of ethereum drops a lot and you were aggressive with your ratio and you go below that number, you get liquidated.
Furqan: The difference from 2008 is: in 2008 the bankers went to the government and said “we need new rules right now, we’re dying.” This rule is encoded into the protocol. If you’re below the ratio, some liquidator can come in — you don’t get a choice, it’s encoded. Having gone through bad times as a founder and bad credit — I literally have a lot of money in the bank and sometimes I can’t get a credit card because my credit still sucks from five or seven years ago, from some three-hundred-dollar card I forgot about — if one little thing goes wrong, it shows up on your credit. DeFi is permissionless. If you have the ability to do these actions, you should be able to do them. That’s the most interesting thing.
Sam: Are you actually making money in DeFi right now?
Furqan: Uniswap is probably my favorite company in the space. What Uniswap did is: usually to trade two assets, you need both a buyer and a seller who agree on the price. What Uniswap created is a one-sided trading market where you trade against what’s called a liquidity pool. Investors put both sides in, and then you can show up as just a buyer or a seller. The pool is always the other side. They use an algorithm — an automated market maker, or AMM — where the price moves based on how much liquidity there is and how much you want to sell.
Furqan: I’ve been in those pools as a liquidity provider. In the earlier days the yields were very high — a hundred percent plus on fairly good assets. It’s really important to think about what’s aligned. If you’re in an ETH/USD pool while ETH is going up, you’re effectively selling ETH as the price rises. I always try to find things that are connected together: two stablecoin pools — USDC and DAI — that do anywhere from eight to fifteen percent. I’m holding effectively dollars on both sides and people need to trade between these assets. You get a little bit of a fee and that’s where the liquidity pool makes money.
Sam: All right, that’s probably a little too complicated for the general audience at this point. So I’m wearing a Harvard shirt, that’s about it.
Shaan: I came in thinking he was going to tell me about WBTC and I was like, “Oh shit, I’ve gotta look up all these acronyms.” And then it was “vertical farming.” I was like: brilliant.
Commodity Hardware and the Fitness TV Idea [00:44:00]
Furqan: Early on when we were working together, you were saying things like: I’m thinking about renting five or so cars and just running a fleet on Uber. Make some money doing basically nothing. Or you were into cryo tanks.
Furqan: Cryotanks are something — if you have bad joints like me, it’s night and day on how your body feels. I still want to put one in the lab I’m spinning up.
Sam: What’s the lab?
Furqan: I’m building a hardware and robotics lab here in San Francisco as part of F.Inc. Software you can do in a coffee shop or a living room, but you can’t really build any of these off-the-shelf hardware products in your living room. What I want to do is take a lot of founders who are interested in building these ideas — I’m going to have a machine shop, an electronic shop, and a robotic shop in this facility, hopefully at Fort Mason in San Francisco. It’s not complete yet, but that’s kind of like the iconic location for me — I can see the Golden Gate Bridge, I’m on the water.
Sam: How much are you willing to sink into this?
Furqan: It’ll probably cost about half a million a year just to have the base building in place. My guess is it’ll be double that from the people I want to bring in and the investments I want to make. I actually ran a plastic fabrication shop and a small machine shop a long time ago. I’ve welded, I’ve worked on cars. I’m more excited to have my own CNC and my own machines to work with.
Vertical Farming and Nebulum Farms [00:47:00]
Shaan: Sam, the reason I said you’d love this — I read this book about vertical farming.
Sam: I literally have zero nature knowledge. Paint me a mental picture.
Furqan: So you know how plants need nutrients from soil — but really they just need some of those nutrients delivered to the roots. People figured out you can grow stuff without soil. That’s a big unlock because it doesn’t have to go in the ground. It uses water — hydroponics. There have been more advances where it’s not just water but aeroponics, where it’s misted, so more yield at the root. And you still need light, so you put big UV lights in a warehouse.
Furqan: Phase one of vertical farming was “put farms in high-rises, take some floors and turn them into farm floors.” Those are normally the pictures you see — a giant building where a bunch of floors are farms. In practice it ended up living more like a warehouse, like a data center.
Furqan: The company I got excited about is called Nebulum Farms. They do direct-to-consumer lettuce, microgreens, and tomatoes. They started with the classic “we’re building cool tech” angle, but along the way they realized: people just want this. What if we put a farm near you and do same-day harvest to delivery? They have their first farm in Idaho, they have a monthly subscription, and you get lettuce and tomatoes delivered. Same-day harvest to delivery.
Furqan: Their website says: ninety-eight percent less water, no pesticides because it’s an indoor controlled environment, no bugs, no soil, always fresh. And the goal is to serve large parts of America near city centers — serve Austin or San Francisco efficiently with a smaller footprint. Instead of buying large masses of land, you buy warehouses closer to the city center.
Sam: No shit — if I did a blind taste test, would I be able to tell the difference?
Furqan: Yes. If you ever get a chance to taste vertical farmed lettuce, you will notice the difference. You’re like, “Wait — lettuce has taste?” It’s crispy, it’s good.
Shaan: You’re really good at something I’m not as good at, which is breaking your frame and changing the whole paradigm. I was initially thinking, “They’re mailing plants,” like a novelty. But you’re saying: we’re going to build the largest farm in America — and now I’m thinking you have to buy all this land and have these massive fields. But you’re saying, “No, by ‘farm’ I mean little small things in every convenience store in America.” A farm in a 50,000 square foot building might replace thousands or tens of thousands of land acres.
Furqan: Exactly. Vertical farming reduces water, but it also compacts how much space you need. You can buy warehouses near the city center and serve that area efficiently.
Founders Inc, the F.Inc Discord, and Hacker Culture [00:54:00]
Sam: Dude, I think what you’re really good at — when I’m around you I feel so inspired. San Francisco had a large density of that type of person, and I am not naturally like you, but I improved and changed my opinion on so many things after hanging out with people like you. When I challenge myself to come up with an idea, I put all these constraints on: “There’s no way I could pull this off because that technology doesn’t work,” or “It’s always been done X way.” Whereas you default to: “Well, that is actually kind of interesting, let’s play that out.” You don’t have those constraints that hold a lot of normal people back.
Shaan: I think it’s simpler than that. Furqan looks at everything through the lens of a technologist. I remember sitting down next to him and asking, “How did you get the way you are?” And you told me about when you were five or six and your dad brought home an XT computer — not even DOS yet, just a screen. He put it together, booted it up, had a disc where you typed “autoexec” and got to a football simulation game where you pick a play and it runs for you. You don’t even actually play, but that was your earliest memory.
Furqan: I got started really young. I worked at a dot-com when I was fifteen. My hobbies ended up being very valuable — I was into computers and programming, and those things just happened to become very valuable, especially in the Bay Area.
Sam: Something you’re going to do with this space — what are you calling it again?
Furqan: Founders Inc — that’s the company name. I want to tell a quick story about that. Back in 2013, I was looking to start something after selling a company for around a hundred grand. I found this guy named Dave Grossblatt who had a thing called Founder Dojo — he rented an office, probably did half a million in sales and profited four hundred thousand, and he let me and like eight other people come work out of his space. Dingy office, maybe five or six hundred square feet.
Sam: Down the street was the exact same thing but way fancier — Monkey Inferno. That was Michael Birch, who was on this podcast. He started and sold a company for close to a billion dollars and his project was basically the same thing — nerds and weirdos and misfits all coming to these spaces.
Sam: Dave loved Meerkat, which was basically a live-streaming app, the early behavior that led to things like Clubhouse. He’d do a “Marathon” — Meerkat for twenty-four hours straight. He’d meet other dorks, they’d fly into the office. We did all this weird stuff. We made this thing called Coffee Rush — you click a button and you get coffee inside twenty minutes anywhere in San Francisco. Just nerdy, dorky little projects. But it was the best time of my life and some of the most formative experiences I ever had.
Sam: What you’re setting up, Furqan, is the next iteration of that. I’m so fortunate people like you and Michael Birch and Dave Grossblatt exist. These grown adults who are thankfully wealthy enough and willing to bet their money on this stuff — it sounds outrageous and it sounds like a movie, and I’m so happy I was part of it.
Furqan: Growing up in Silicon Valley, you didn’t immediately have a network of VCs. My block didn’t have VCs on it. The internet changed a lot — it let people connect and find each other. But in-person interactions operate differently. They’re more ad hoc. I remember you being at Monkey Inferno, and other people who would work out of there — you could just walk by, break into a random conversation, talk about something. Maybe it resulted in nothing and sometimes it would stick with you and be really important.
Furqan: At AppLovin it felt the same way early on, doing these random ideas — just a bunch of misfits together on a journey. That energy is hard to replace. And every time it’s been there, it’s been really instrumental for me. Conversations at the lunch table at Monkey Inferno shaped a lot about how people think, ways to conduct yourself, things even outside of tech.
Furqan: I’ve been on this mission since slightly before COVID to build this facility. COVID happened, obviously, so that got paused — but actually there are new buildings, new opportunities, cheaper rent here in the city. I think this thing is necessary for a lot of people who are in the builder phase. They might not be founders yet, they might not go raise a bunch of money, they just want to build stuff and hack on it.
Shaan: On this podcast we talk a ton about buying businesses, and it almost sounds like we’re a bunch of banker PE types. But the coolest stuff I’ve ever done and the most fun I’ve ever had was just dorking out with people who were like me and going, “This is kind of funny, this is silly, we could do that.” It all starts with “this is so stupid, it’s so fun” and sometimes it turns into really cool, amazing stuff. Organic is awesome. You just sat around, brainstormed, tried some things. You need to be able to try things — that’s really important.
Furqan: For me growing up, I didn’t have a lot of people I could lean on who had done this before. Finding people like Adam and Shaan was critical — I had people I could talk to about business things. If I can give that to, as Shaan said, myself fifteen years ago, that’s what I feel like I’m building over here.
Sam: There’s that cheesy phrase: “Be the person you needed when you were a kid.” If everybody actually did it, the world would be a great place.
Sam: I think everybody — okay, why do I do this podcast? I’m not going to say I do it to give back, because that’s not why. I do it because it’s fun. But the side effect is: the person who’s like me at eighteen or twenty or thirty, in that autopilot phase where you don’t feel like you’ve found your thing, you’re not waking up excited every day — they hear a couple of guys on a podcast shooting the shit, really excited about life, great energy, ideas for days. And they start to look at themselves differently. That proliferates more people who are like that. You’re doing the same thing.
Furqan: Yeah. Giving back isn’t the right framing. It’s not charity. I believe in the long run I’m building a business, and the things I invest in are going to pay off monetarily too. But as a side effect, hopefully I inspire the next thousand builders. The best version of this is: I don’t know what the Discord has become, it’s like founders helping each other. If I can be the person who first creates the circle, that’s the hope.
Common Mistakes Young Founders Make [01:04:00]
Shaan: What’s the biggest common mistake you see when you have those young entrepreneurs in the Discord working on their projects?
Furqan: It’s always: what are you focused on? If you’re a builder, you’re probably spending most of your energy on the technology. But most of these companies are going to die in the market, not at the tech level. Even as a technology person, I would not spend too much time on the technology. Shaan, you experienced this firsthand — how many times was I like, “We’ll just hack it in”? All the engineers cringe, but the point is: we have to go win this market or figure out if this is real. If it’s not real, we need to move on very fast because we’re just wasting time, money, energy, and probably your company.
Furqan: The advice I keep giving is: go be more aggressive on growth. Go figure out your market. Go understand your customers. Use technology as a weapon for that — it’s not the purpose of what you’re building.
DAOs: Decentralized Organizations and the LAO [01:07:00]
Shaan: Sam, I don’t know if you have a hard stop, but there’s one other thing I think Furqan could talk about — DAOs. Or the PAX protocol. Pick one.
Furqan: A DAO — decentralized autonomous organization, or decentralized org — is just this thing happening in the crypto world where people form effectively these partnerships together, doing it on-chain as an actual organization that owns some code.
Furqan: Let me simplify. Sam, when you started The Hustle, you made a Delaware C-corp, right? You go to Delaware, that’s the rule of law, you write down your articles of incorporation. You could also do an LLC, an S-corp, in Nevada, in California. Those are the current ways to start when you need a bunch of people to work together and be financially incentivized as a group.
Furqan: What a DAO provides is an alternative. It lets you detach from the legal entity and how you have your stake of ownership, voting, and governance of the company. Wouldn’t it be cool if a company could be owned by everybody equally? People on the internet said, “Yeah — let’s make a company owned by everybody, where you can vote, manage the treasury, issue new tokens or shares, and incentivize however you want.” You can align incentives between investors, founders, community, the market, whoever. And you can issue some governance tokens to a big celebrity you brought on, make them a part of it.
Furqan: Here’s an example. There’s something called The LAO. It’s a venture fund, but instead of Sequoia’s general partners and managing directors and analysts — a traditional pyramid — the LAO is: here’s a fund, you put in money, you get tokens proportional to what you put in, and there’s nobody specifically in charge. The fund receives proposals via a website, everyone gets them in their inbox, everyone votes yes or no based on how many tokens they hold, and if the majority votes yes, the treasury pays out that investment.
Furqan: And at any time, if I don’t like The LAO, I can just sell my stake to anybody else on the open market. I don’t have to wait ten years for projects to pan out. These tokens are completely liquid at all times.
Furqan: There are also headless companies — no CEO in a suit at the top telling everyone what to do and deciding who gets hired and fired. Just a bunch of shareholders together, voting based on their shares. More like a democracy. Other variations that I’m still wrapping my head around.
Shaan: It’s like a democracy times a company mixed into one. Very fascinating. Very different. I don’t know if it’s better or worse than what we’ve seen traditionally, but it’s definitely different.
NFTs and the PAX Protocol [01:14:00]
Furqan: So I joined a couple of DAOs. And with a lot of activity in NFTs — NBA Top Shot just taking over my friends group — I started talking to developers about some ideas I had. I found a group of five or six people who were really into this, and I said, “Let’s make a DAO. I’ll put in the first amount of money.” Now a couple of my buddies are also putting in some money. The idea is: we’re going to be a group that builds fun projects in the NFT space. There’s a lot of hype right now, we’re in that hype cycle — it’s going to go away, same pattern as before. What are the valuable things that NFTs can actually do? Let’s go build some of those.
Furqan: We have two ideas we’re working on right now. One of them is like Shopify for NFTs — you come in, click two buttons, and you can create your own. One big thing is accessibility.
Shaan: Shaan, have you minted your own NFT yet?
Shaan: I have not.
Furqan: Why not?
Shaan: I don’t know what the hell my NFT would be. We have a friend, Jack Butcher, who’s minted many NFTs. He’s a great designer, so he makes a cool visual, posts it on Foundation, sells it. He sold some for sixty thousand each. He’s made a lot of money this year basically selling his philosophies as digital posters to his fans. For me, I’m like: cool, but I don’t have that artistic skill and I don’t even know what my NFT would be.
Furqan: But you haven’t even just tried one. When you first saw Shopify, you went and created a store — you didn’t have to start a company or have a product. You just tried it.
Furqan: A lot of these DeFi and NFT worlds — the dollar value is really big at the top end but when you dig underneath, there are only like five thousand users doing this. Why so few? It’s really hard to do. That’s one of the biggest opportunities in NFTs: make it really easy for people. Almost as easy as creating a Shopify store. So that’s project idea one — we’re going to pay for your gas, make it so you can deploy your own contract without thinking about it, just click a couple buttons and get a landing page where people can buy stuff digitally.
Furqan: The second one is the PAX protocol. NBA Top Shot is probably one of the biggest digital products we’ve seen since Pokémon Go — that wave of hype reaching mass market. But it’s very closed: you have to be an NBA player to get one, you have to be in their ecosystem.
Furqan: The basic idea of creating a pack with digital items and potentially linking to the real world is what I got excited about. As part of NFT Labs, we created this PAX protocol — a protocol to create a loot box pack where you can put in digital items: an image, a sound clip from your podcast, access like a ticket to a VIP event, a meet-and-greet, a private community. Creators are going to find lots of ways to use this.
Furqan: So for you guys: you could create these little packs. It’s a mystery box — you don’t know what’s inside. You buy one, open it up, and 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. The domain is NFTLabs.co. You can get any influencer to use this.
Shaan: Jack Butcher did something like this — he sold three mystery packs and made many six figures.
Furqan: Right, and this mechanic works because loot boxes are used in many games. It’s fun to buy the thing and see: do you get the super rare valuable item or the junk? You either get sixty cents on the dollar or you get sixty for every dollar you spent. There’s this game of chance.
Furqan: What they’re doing is they made a protocol where it’s now easy to do that. You stuff things into boxes, assign some probability, and it’ll generate the packs for you. And there’s a third-party marketplace — if somebody wants to spend a hundred grand for a VIP meet-and-greet, you earn a cut of that secondary sale. The person who got it but didn’t want it can sell it, too. You can support both sides of the ecosystem: fan-friendly on one side, and creators get a lot of value out of it too.
Furqan: I find creators really interesting as an analogy to founders. I don’t want to go work at a FAANG company — it’s not where I thrive, not where I get excited. Creators have the same thing.
Furqan: I saw a great idea from the founder of Ripple. He tweeted: there are a bunch of engineers at FAANG companies making great salaries — five or six hundred thousand a year — who want to go to a startup but the compensation difference is big. Maybe they have a family, it’s just hard to walk away. He said someone should create a fund that bridges the difference: “We’ll even out to, say, three hundred thousand instead of six hundred, it’s an income-share agreement, and you pay us back with stock from the startup.” That would help more people leave their salary to go to a startup, help the startup not burn as much hiring that person, and the fund gets shares in basically every startup they want. That’s a clever way to get shares in companies you can’t invest in directly.
Shaan: That’s really interesting.
Early Career Advice: Fun Over Salary, Bet on Equity [01:24:00]
Furqan: Early on in my career I just made those trades — no matter how financially painful or how misguided it might have seemed. I just wanted to work on things I was excited about.
Sam: When you went to AppLovin — you had another job offer, right?
Furqan: Yeah. I met this guy Jack Levin, who was very early at Google and responsible for a lot of Google’s early infrastructure. He was working on a company in the photo space. He asked me these questions that got my brain going in a good way, very specific, very technical. I was like, “This guy gets it.”
Furqan: Then I met Adam. Very impressive as a CEO and as a person, but the conversation was different. The vibe was different. One was in Los Gatos, one was in Palo Alto — just a little bit of a different area. But when I talked to Adam, I thought: I could go to a baseball game with this guy, he seems cool, he seems very hungry. And they don’t have a clue what they’re doing right now — they’re shutting down an idea, they don’t know what the next idea is. It’s going to be a lot more fun, the rate of learning is going to be really high.
Furqan: Adam gave me two options: a higher salary and low stock, or a lower salary and higher stock options. I basically decided: if I take the lower salary, I need to move back in with my parents. I’m going to take the stock because I’m in it for the ride. If I just want to become an engineer, I’ll take the salary at the other company and not worry about equity.
Sam: You took the move-back-in-with-parents option.
Furqan: Yeah. In a somewhat absurd way.
Sam: How old were you when you started at AppLovin?
Furqan: Probably twenty-five or twenty-six.
Sam: Twenty-six is old enough that it’s kind of like, “All right, what are you doing?” But definitely still young enough that you can mess around.
Furqan: I know I wanted to do this. It sounded more fun. More fun is always good. You’re going to wake up, you’re going to be excited to go to work. It’s not going to be a drag. I used to tell Shaan this all the time because we would do Sunday night calls to think about the week. My friends were always, “Oh man, work tomorrow, Sunday sucks, weekend’s over.” And I always felt: it’s exciting. More stuff’s going to happen. This week’s gonna be great. And that’s a big difference.
Shaan: When we did those Sunday calls, I’d always be like, “Sorry, I gotta get on this call.” My friends were like, “You have to do calls on Sunday nights?” And I was like, “I get to do calls.” I chose this, I want to do this, I can’t wait for Monday. We’ve gotta do it tonight. That was our mindset.
The Right Path Looks Ghetto at First [01:29:00]
Shaan: If you take away one thing — maybe you didn’t understand the technology, but the meta lesson from Furqan is: he always picked the more fun and interesting path regardless of the financial thing. And on the financial side, he made sure it was a bet on himself and a bet on equity, so that if the fun and interesting thing does pan out, you actually get paid.
Shaan: He’s willing to work three times as hard as long as it’s three times as fun. Most people, at least from where I come from, don’t do that. 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?” — you’ve got to follow the irrational playbook a bit more.
Furqan: Sean, if you look across your journey at Monkey Inferno — you’re a twenty-four-year-old, pretty green, right? Whether or not the dollar outcome was there, the rate of learning, the growth difference — I’m embarrassed at what I used to think about building back then compared to after the journey. It was like a thousand-times payoff, and the rest of your career unlocks because of it.
Shaan: A hundred percent. I told the guys who set up our studios — they flew out here to San Francisco, staying in a motel-six type place, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four years old. They sent in a video like a job interview, like “Sam and Shaan, choose us, we will help you build your studio.” They made a ballsy YouTube video, tweeting at us non-stop — I used to do that, I used to wait in parking lots to meet CEOs and investors just so I could say “I’ve been here since seven in the morning, do you have five minutes?”
Shaan: When they were there, they were deferring to me a lot, too much respect. I told them: “You kind of want what I have, and I want what you have. I want that time back. I want to be where you guys are — four friends living in a one-bedroom apartment making videos, thinking ‘why are we trying to be YouTubers, I don’t know, it seems fun, let’s do it,’ and you see these guys have a cool podcast, fuck it, let’s fly out and help them with their studio. Nothing’s clearly in it for us, but we’ll hop on that plane and go make it happen.”
Shaan: That was by far the most fun time and the highest rate of learning. At the time I felt like everything we did was so bootleg and ghetto. But that was the right path. Most of my friends from Duke went to med school, law school, banking, or consulting. Every weekend they were posting themselves at bars making six figures. I had no income, I was sleeping on an air mattress, my co-founder lived in my closet. I had moments of doubt: “Maybe I should have gone the traditional path.”
Shaan: What I told these guys was: you’re going to see your friends on the traditional path and they’re going to look way further ahead of you right now. There’s going to be a part of you that feels left behind. Stay the path. Just know that this is the first quarter. Think about this on a ten, twenty-year timescale: who do you want to be in ten or twenty years? You’re going to have a lot of fun now and your rewards are going to be back-loaded. If you’re okay with that trade, this is the right path. I wish somebody had just told me: “This looks ghetto as hell, but you’re on the right path.”
Furqan: You’ll go the harder path. I don’t have a college degree. A lot of people ask me: “Should I go to college?” You don’t have to — you can learn on your own, especially now. But it’s definitely going to be a harder path. Don’t expect linear returns: one year of work equals one year of success. It might be nothing for a long time and you might get it in the end. But the journey is very exciting — that’s what matters. Because that’s what you’re going to do every day. You’re going to wake up every day and do this thing. Are you excited about that? That’s the critical question.
Closing: Where to Find Furqan [01:37:00]
Sam: Thank you. I always take a lot of notes whenever you come on. I’m excited for your success. I thought AppLovin was this huge thing when it was supposed to sell a few years ago, and now seeing what it is — it blew my expectations, I’m sure it blew yours as well. Congratulations. And what you’re building with Founders Inc is awesome.
Furqan: Appreciate it. This has been fun. I always like hearing you guys, so it’s kind of fun to be on as well. Where do people find me? You can find me at f.inc — that’s the domain — and on Twitter: Furqan R, F-U-R-Q-A-N, R for Rydhan.
Shaan: Thanks for coming on.