Silicon Valley OG shares crazy stories from Zynga early days + 3 business ideas

0:00:03 and they said, “Well, you shouldn’t confuse revenue for success.”
0:00:06 So I said, “Well, you guys shouldn’t confuse a lack of revenue for success either.”
0:00:08 And then they got kind of upset.
0:00:13 Dude, that’s meaning it goes in the Silicon Valley Autistic Hall of Fame.
0:00:25 What’s up? We got our friend, Siki here, founder of Runway.
0:00:28 Back in the day, built a company, sold it to Zynga,
0:00:32 built another company, sold it to Postmates, has gone viral many times.
0:00:35 And there’s a lot of people in Silicon Valley who you almost…
0:00:36 It’s like a film director.
0:00:38 It’s like, “Oh, they’re working on a new project.
0:00:40 You really want to know what they’re doing?”
0:00:42 That’s you because you do things with taste.
0:00:44 So excited to have you here.
0:00:47 Do you have any good stories from early days of Zynga?
0:00:48 Because you sold a company to Zynga.
0:00:50 Backman Zynga was the shit.
0:00:52 Did you work with Mark Pincus?
0:00:52 What’s he like?
0:00:54 Give me a good Zynga story.
0:00:57 Okay. I have a great story, actually.
0:01:00 How I came to report to Mark Pincus is, actually, it’s not a great story.
0:01:01 I have so many good Mark Pincus stories.
0:01:04 So, yeah, Zynga bought my second company, my first company,
0:01:06 and I joined as a director product under the studio.
0:01:08 Wait, can you give the background up, Mark?
0:01:10 So, Mark’s like a Silicon Valley OG.
0:01:12 Did he help fund Facebook to get off the ground?
0:01:13 Was that his first big hit?
0:01:14 He did.
0:01:18 So, he and Reid Hoffman co-owned,
0:01:21 bought the Six Degrees of Separation Patent from a company of Six Degrees.
0:01:26 And he angel invested in Facebook and but also licensed a patent,
0:01:28 I believe, for more stock into Facebook.
0:01:33 That patent was basically the kind of the social networking patent, right?
0:01:38 Like how we’re connected, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon away from each other.
0:01:41 And I think Reid, there’s some story where Reid and him
0:01:45 realized that if this patent got in the hands of Microsoft or some big company,
0:01:48 that they would be able to squish innovation by a startup,
0:01:50 by like holding this patent over their head.
0:01:52 So, they bought the patent, I believe,
0:01:56 and just decided we’re not going to use it to stop anybody.
0:01:59 And then they, I think, parlayed it into getting extra shares in Facebook.
0:02:01 Which is amazing.
0:02:02 I think that’s what happened, yeah.
0:02:05 So, when I joined, I was a director of products.
0:02:09 And my girlfriend and my wife, who I recently met,
0:02:11 moved to China for some job work thing.
0:02:14 And I was like three months into Zynga.
0:02:16 And I was like, “Oh, I’m not really feeling it.
0:02:17 It’s not that fun.”
0:02:20 So, I told them I was going to resign and move to China.
0:02:23 And they said, “Hey, why don’t we just give you this new job?
0:02:27 You can report to Eric Schreimer when you’re co-founders
0:02:30 and basically be head of product for the company.”
0:02:32 I said, “No, that sounds fun. That sounds great.”
0:02:33 So, I did that.
0:02:34 So, I reported to Eric Schreimer.
0:02:35 He was a co-founder of Zynga.
0:02:39 And what happened is, a month into the job,
0:02:41 Eric Schreimer stopped showing up to work.
0:02:43 Like, wouldn’t start on emails, wouldn’t go to work.
0:02:46 And I was like, “What?”
0:02:50 And basically, that’s when I reported to Mark.
0:02:53 And I was the head of products.
0:02:55 And later, the punchline of the story is,
0:02:59 what I, the reason why he stopped showing up to work
0:03:01 is I later found out that he decided to become a ninja.
0:03:04 That’s a pretty good reason.
0:03:06 That’s not what I thought was going to happen.
0:03:09 He literally, he was like,
0:03:10 he wanted to start a ninja, Dojo.
0:03:12 And he wanted to undergo a ninja training.
0:03:14 And so, when I…
0:03:17 What in the Napoleon Dynamite is this story?
0:03:18 How’s his ninja career now?
0:03:22 I think he started another social games company.
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0:04:01 So, give us at the time, what was Zynga like?
0:04:03 Was it like, was it King of the World at the time?
0:04:05 Or was it on the down spring?
0:04:07 Yeah, I mean, what’s interesting on Zynga is they
0:04:11 hired a bunch of people who used to be investment makers
0:04:12 to be product managers there.
0:04:15 Because it was just all about the numbers going up.
0:04:17 It was Heidi Analytical.
0:04:20 So, I went in and just the amount of like knowledge they had
0:04:22 about growth.
0:04:24 One of the things that really blew my mind to think about a lot
0:04:27 is when I first had a commerce with Mark Pincus
0:04:30 early on, I think maybe during the acquisition,
0:04:33 I asked him, hey, what do you think about this like industry?
0:04:35 It just seems really low moat.
0:04:38 It’s hard to have a competitive moat here
0:04:41 because it’s just so easy to enter or you build a new game
0:04:42 and for it to expand.
0:04:44 And how defensible is it?
0:04:46 And I think about his answer quite a bit
0:04:47 because his, I was like, no, this is great.
0:04:50 I wonder to be more new entrants.
0:04:54 Into the space because it’s free R&D for me.
0:04:58 And I just like, okay, that is, that blows my mind.
0:05:00 That is next level because he was just so confident
0:05:03 in his ability to execute that like anyone who’s kind of
0:05:06 come in with some new idea, they can just like fast follow it
0:05:08 and do a much better job of growing it,
0:05:09 which is like what they did, right?
0:05:11 Formula was in the first fun game.
0:05:12 Poker was the first poker game.
0:05:15 And that they work really, really well,
0:05:16 at least during a Facebook era.
0:05:19 Wait, did he have like Genghis Khan energy
0:05:21 where he was like, is he a conqueror?
0:05:23 Yeah, he did, he did.
0:05:24 I love that.
0:05:28 You know, we were working like 80, 90, 100 hours a week
0:05:31 at Zynga and that was kind of the norm.
0:05:33 It sort of seems like a waste of talent though
0:05:34 to have that conqueror energy
0:05:36 and do it in the lamest way possible.
0:05:37 The Farmville.
0:05:38 Yeah, like Farmville.
0:05:40 Like that’s what he’s like trying to do this on.
0:05:43 Like a few billion dollars, a few billion dollars.
0:05:46 There’s a quote by Max Levchin at the time.
0:05:49 Max Levchin who created PayPal is by all accounts
0:05:52 like a genius computer engineer single-handedly
0:05:55 was like fighting fraud at PayPal and like with,
0:05:58 as a one-man army, like withstood, you know,
0:06:00 the attacks of all of these sort of financial scammers
0:06:01 around the world.
0:06:02 The guy’s brilliant.
0:06:05 And then his next startup I think was Slide.
0:06:08 And it was making like widgets for MySpace and Facebook
0:06:10 where you’d be like slide shows or Superpoke
0:06:12 where you throw like chickens at your friends
0:06:15 when you wake up, you know, by pushing a button
0:06:17 and it just slaps a friend with a chicken
0:06:18 or something like that.
0:06:21 And they go, what was your takeaway from Slide?
0:06:23 Because Slide ultimately didn’t fully work out,
0:06:25 sold to Google I think for a little bit.
0:06:29 But he goes, be really careful what you choose to work on
0:06:32 because everything can be optimized endlessly.
0:06:33 So he’s like, once we got in that,
0:06:35 we could just sit there and optimize
0:06:38 and just get the number of chicken slap per day up.
0:06:39 So, you know, choose wisely.
0:06:41 Should I be optimizing this chicken slapping
0:06:42 or should I be doing something else?
0:06:44 And I’ve always thought about that
0:06:46 because I found myself falling into the same trap.
0:06:48 No matter what I’m doing, if I’m selling little widgets,
0:06:51 my life becomes about selling widgets
0:06:53 and I can optimize that to infinity.
0:06:55 And people do, if you go look at how any company works,
0:06:56 that’s what they’ve done.
0:06:58 They’ve optimized it to infinity.
0:07:00 Dude, when my wife worked at Facebook years and years ago,
0:07:03 I remember like I was talking to all of her coworkers
0:07:05 at a party and I was like, oh, you guys are amazing.
0:07:06 You guys are so smart.
0:07:07 What are you working on?
0:07:09 And they explained it to me, but it boiled down to,
0:07:11 they’re trying to convince Brazilians
0:07:14 to put more stickers on their photos.
0:07:17 Like the, there was like one dog that had a long tongue.
0:07:18 Do you guys remember that fucking dog?
0:07:18 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:07:21 Like they’re trying to convince that fucking dog sticker
0:07:22 to put, or the Brazilians.
0:07:23 It was like the face,
0:07:25 it was like the face filter thing when Snapchat came out
0:07:27 and then if you opened up your mouth,
0:07:28 a giant tongue would come out.
0:07:30 Dude, I felt like, and they explained that to,
0:07:32 like I kind of, I was like, wait, so you’re just trying
0:07:34 to get like Brazilians to use more stickers
0:07:34 because they share more photos.
0:07:35 I felt like a cartoon.
0:07:37 It was like, I was like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
0:07:39 What? Like, you know what I mean?
0:07:40 I was like, what are you guys doing?
0:07:44 I also have a Max Levchin and Slides story.
0:07:45 This goes back 17 years,
0:07:47 so I don’t think I’ll mind anymore.
0:07:50 But when I, this is when I first moved to the city
0:07:53 and I had this app on Facebook that was blowing up.
0:07:56 And so some guy who worked with Keith’s Reboy,
0:07:58 Keith’s Reboy was I think the CEO of Slides at the time.
0:08:00 I said, hey, we like your app.
0:08:02 You want to meet, you know, the team.
0:08:03 I said, oh my God, this is amazing.
0:08:04 I mean, you’re out of college.
0:08:05 You can even have Max Levchin.
0:08:09 So I go in and we had a meeting at noon
0:08:10 and I will go to the Slides office and no one was there.
0:08:12 Everyone’s out for lunch.
0:08:13 And I talked to receptionist.
0:08:15 I said, hey, I’m here to meet Max and Keith.
0:08:16 And they’ll like, oh, they’re out of lunch.
0:08:17 They’ll be back in half an hour.
0:08:19 I said, okay, so we slipped there for half an hour.
0:08:20 And then they walk in.
0:08:23 And they act like they kind of forgot there was a meeting.
0:08:27 But we go to a meeting room and we just start talking
0:08:30 about what I wanted to do with this app by build,
0:08:31 whether I wanted to build a dependently
0:08:33 or maybe like join slide.
0:08:36 And they asked me how much I wanted for it.
0:08:37 I said, well, I have a co-founder.
0:08:39 So $2 million, I will probably do it.
0:08:41 The million dollars each, I kind of lasted the number.
0:08:42 I’m like, what?
0:08:45 Like I look for the valuation app data
0:08:46 and like the money we’re generating.
0:08:48 It’s not a huge ass, but it’s fine.
0:08:49 It’s too much.
0:08:53 My friend at Heel built Superpoke, which I recently bought.
0:08:56 And they said verbatim, you know, we bought Superpoke
0:08:58 and he’s easily the 18th or 19th most important person
0:09:01 company now out of a company of like 60 people.
0:09:05 I said, okay, that’s a compelling offer.
0:09:07 And then I said, and I said, yeah,
0:09:10 this is probably not going to happen.
0:09:12 And I said, you know, we’re profitable.
0:09:14 We were making a bunch of money from ads.
0:09:16 So it’s cool if you don’t want to buy it.
0:09:21 And they said, well, you shouldn’t confuse revenue for success.
0:09:23 And at this point, I was just like really upset.
0:09:24 So I said, well, you guys shouldn’t confuse
0:09:26 the lack of revenue for success either.
0:09:29 And then they got like kind of upset.
0:09:35 So then, so then it got really weird.
0:09:36 Oh, I forgot to mention like,
0:09:37 at the start of the meeting,
0:09:40 they said something like, hey, you know,
0:09:42 there’s a recession coming up to each other.
0:09:44 And they’re like, yeah, there’s a recession coming up.
0:09:45 And then he said, I can’t wait to buy all these
0:09:46 shitty companies for cheap.
0:09:47 Like, we’re in the room.
0:09:50 And we’re like, what the hell?
0:09:52 Dude, this meeting, it goes in like
0:09:54 the Silicon Valley Autistic Hall of Fame.
0:09:59 At the end, Keith was like, hey, Keith.
0:10:01 Hey, Max, what was your body fat percentage
0:10:03 in the PayPal days?
0:10:04 And Max was like 8%.
0:10:05 And I was like, yeah.
0:10:08 And I’m like, look, I’m not the fittest person,
0:10:10 but I’m not selling you my company
0:10:11 because he’s like, you’re fitter than me.
0:10:13 Like, what’s happening?
0:10:15 So that was like meeting with them.
0:10:17 But the thing that made it all make sense,
0:10:19 made sense is the next week,
0:10:21 I was talking to one of my friends,
0:10:23 John, who also had a company building out.
0:10:26 And he comes to me at some party.
0:10:28 He goes, Seeky, man, like,
0:10:28 you won’t believe this.
0:10:30 So I just had a meeting with Sly last week.
0:10:31 I’m like, really?
0:10:32 He’s like, yeah, it was so weird
0:10:33 because he started a meeting talking
0:10:35 about how there’s a recession coming up.
0:10:36 And all these companies are cheap.
0:10:38 I was like, oh my God, it’s a script.
0:10:40 It was.
0:10:42 In episode one of this podcast,
0:10:45 I think my buddy, Sully, told almost the same story.
0:10:47 He goes, he gets invited to slide.
0:10:48 He says to Max and Keith.
0:10:50 And what they said was they were like,
0:10:51 you should, we want to hire you.
0:10:53 And he’s like, I don’t really want a job.
0:10:54 Like I have my apps, good.
0:10:56 I thought you wanted to like maybe buy it or something.
0:10:58 And then he opened the door and he goes,
0:11:00 you see all those guys out there?
0:11:03 They’re going to build your app in like six days
0:11:04 if you don’t take this offer.
0:11:07 And he was like, okay, I’m not interested
0:11:08 in this even more now.
0:11:10 This is horrible.
0:11:11 My app is stupid.
0:11:13 What he said, he goes, his app at the time
0:11:14 was called Superlatives.
0:11:15 It was like, you would name your friend
0:11:18 like most likely to go to jail or something.
0:11:20 He’s like, you’re threatening me
0:11:21 that you’re going to take my app?
0:11:22 I think my app is stupid.
0:11:24 The fact that you think my app is cool
0:11:26 makes me think you’re stupid.
0:11:27 That’s what he thought in his head.
0:11:31 Siki, who did you meet?
0:11:34 I love talking to people who have been
0:11:35 around a bunch of these folks
0:11:37 before they kind of quote made it.
0:11:40 Who is a tycoon or a big shot now
0:11:43 that you’re shocked by because of when you knew them
0:11:44 when you guys were both younger,
0:11:47 you’re like, oh, I can’t believe they actually developed
0:11:50 into such an amazing business person.
0:11:53 I don’t know that I met a lot of people
0:11:55 who weren’t great other than I think were great
0:11:57 that were huge later.
0:12:00 Who’s someone you met that wasn’t huge then
0:12:03 but you knew and why did you know?
0:12:06 Oh, yeah. I mean, Drew Houston.
0:12:07 When did you meet him?
0:12:08 He started Dropbox.
0:12:08 10 people.
0:12:12 It was late 2007 or early 2008.
0:12:14 And we were just talking about growth.
0:12:17 So like they had this like college referral plan.
0:12:19 So Drew Houston, I mean,
0:12:21 Anish who’s General Permanent Andreessen,
0:12:26 like he was just a founder building apps on mobile phones,
0:12:26 right?
0:12:28 And he would come to my office and we’d talk about it.
0:12:32 Oh, probably the best one is Chris Wonstrasth.
0:12:33 Who’s that?
0:12:35 He’s co-founder of CIO GitHub.
0:12:37 And he was a contractor at Powerset,
0:12:39 which was like this job I took when I first moved to the city.
0:12:42 But he was actually a contractor for my first company,
0:12:43 Sirius Business.
0:12:46 He, I had him build this translation layer
0:12:48 between Facebook Markup Language
0:12:49 and MySpace Markup Language.
0:12:51 Just like after and he was really good at it.
0:12:57 And I distinctly remember that we were at 21st Amendment.
0:13:00 Yeah, or actually a brewery doesn’t matter.
0:13:03 But I gave him a full-time employee planning offer
0:13:07 in early 2008.
0:13:08 And he was considering it.
0:13:12 And the same night, when we’re talking about it,
0:13:15 he said, you know, DHH just put rails on GitHub.
0:13:18 And so I think I might work on GitHub full-time.
0:13:20 And I was thinking in my head and I was like,
0:13:23 the smart thing for me to do is actually shut down my
0:13:25 Facebook Games business and go work for you.
0:13:26 But I didn’t say that.
0:13:31 Have you had any massive angel investment wins
0:13:34 because you’re around the hoop for so long?
0:13:35 And so in early?
0:13:36 Yeah.
0:13:40 I mean, the best one by far is Amplitude.
0:13:43 And that one was, I was introduced through actually,
0:13:45 yeah, someone at Zynga, Matt Akka,
0:13:47 who runs Data Collective now.
0:13:49 And he introduced me a very first angel investment
0:13:50 after I sold to Zynga.
0:13:53 And that like 10X in like 12 months.
0:13:55 And so I was playing with PlayMoney up after that.
0:13:59 And he introduced to his team that we ended up
0:14:02 being the fourth customer for analytics platform.
0:14:03 It’s now Amplitude.
0:14:05 And we used it.
0:14:06 We thought this is great.
0:14:07 This is the best thing we thought we’ve seen
0:14:09 since the Zynga internal tools.
0:14:13 And I managed to get into the seed round and that IPO
0:14:17 that, you know, we ended up being a 400X return on that,
0:14:19 which is pretty great.
0:14:19 Amazing.
0:14:22 Let’s jump in with ideas, opportunities.
0:14:23 You’re an idea guy.
0:14:26 What do you think are some cool ideas or opportunities
0:14:28 that you would want to be working on right now?
0:14:34 So I built a Zapier and it’s basically categorizes my emails
0:14:36 with GPD4 into different labels.
0:14:39 So I have this very long prompt and automation.
0:14:42 And I also use a protocol same box,
0:14:44 which also does something similar to filters by emails.
0:14:49 But there’s been no good version of email manager software
0:14:51 that I’m able to customize the prompt and train it.
0:14:55 So I want to say, hey, here’s the things related to my kids.
0:14:58 And there’s no keywords necessarily.
0:15:00 You can, you know, have to kind of read it.
0:15:04 It’s like some email to my babysitter or an email from the school.
0:15:06 And if it’s related to my kids, I want you to put it in this folder.
0:15:10 And the idea is I want an inbox for like these different contexts.
0:15:14 And so people are doing different kinds of email categorization.
0:15:15 What’s missing is there’s no way to train it.
0:15:20 So I think building some way for you to, for a product
0:15:22 to understand all of the content about your life
0:15:25 and organize your stuff starting with inbox
0:15:26 will be really handy for me.
0:15:28 And I’ve seen at least 12 companies do this
0:15:30 and no one has done a really great job of it.
0:15:32 I just tested this product.
0:15:33 Have you guys heard of this?
0:15:35 I can’t think of the name right now.
0:15:38 But it was this thing where I, it sounds insane
0:15:42 where it recorded my screen for weeks at a time
0:15:45 and it would see how I’m typing what I’m saying to people.
0:15:48 And it would give me feedback on the productivity of my day
0:15:49 and how I can improve it.
0:15:50 Have you guys seen this?
0:15:51 It started with an R, I think.
0:15:51 Is it called a?
0:15:53 Elect or something?
0:15:55 Isn’t it rescue time?
0:15:58 No, go Sean, you’re right.
0:16:00 It’s sort of, the guy who started it’s like a,
0:16:01 he’s like a guy.
0:16:02 He’s like been around.
0:16:02 Yeah.
0:16:05 He was doing like a pendant or something, right?
0:16:07 At one point and then now it’s a.
0:16:08 Oh, rewind then.
0:16:08 Rewind.
0:16:09 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:16:11 Rewind.ai, is that it?
0:16:13 Yeah, they stopped working on it.
0:16:16 Now it’s called limit listeners working on the pendant now.
0:16:18 Yes, I was tinkering with Rewind
0:16:21 and the promise, it’s not there yet.
0:16:24 But the promise of this is, was amazing.
0:16:26 I was like so into this.
0:16:29 And it’s kind of describing what you’re just explaining
0:16:31 because we’re having to use Zapier and OpenAI
0:16:34 or CHBT to like kind of duct tape this all together.
0:16:36 Their premise was amazing.
0:16:37 And that is exactly what I’m looking for.
0:16:40 I got a third one, which is like a lot spicier.
0:16:43 But you know, like this is not a ventrubacable thing,
0:16:46 but you know, just character AI and Chai
0:16:47 and all of these like chatbots.
0:16:50 The really people are using for sexy chats.
0:16:52 I think like someone could,
0:16:54 and these things print money by the way,
0:16:56 like they immediately generate millions of dollars a month.
0:17:01 I thought if I were just in it just to like print money,
0:17:04 the thing I would make is something that is kind of like tender.
0:17:06 But basically everything is AI generated.
0:17:08 So it’s not like, oh, you’re creating a robot,
0:17:11 but it’s a fake dating app where everyone is attractive
0:17:12 and is super into you.
0:17:17 And then you can like then you can go off of your Tinder app
0:17:20 and go on Instagram and there have an Instagram account
0:17:23 on actual Instagram is owned by the,
0:17:26 the person that you met on your fake Tinder app.
0:17:28 Siky, do you know who Tai Lopez is?
0:17:30 He’s like the guy who had the infomercial
0:17:31 that was like here in my garage.
0:17:33 I do know who he is, yeah.
0:17:38 So Tai one accused, he came on MFM years ago
0:17:40 and an accusation that I learned about him
0:17:42 based off of the comments on YouTube
0:17:45 is that years and years before he was whatever
0:17:48 he was famous for, he owned dating apps.
0:17:53 And the accusation was that all of the users were completely fake
0:17:56 and that it was guys in the Philippines like running it
0:17:59 and doing exactly what you’re describing.
0:18:01 That’s true of the majority of dating apps.
0:18:02 What do you mean?
0:18:05 That’s just like standard offer day procedure.
0:18:11 Like plenty of fish, you know, like a seeking arrangement.
0:18:13 Like that is their business model.
0:18:19 They’re like outsourced men acting as women.
0:18:21 Yeah, there’s also like the webcam industry.
0:18:24 Like they up until open AI,
0:18:28 the companies with the most advanced AI technology
0:18:30 is going to be one of these companies
0:18:32 because they are better at creating chatbots than anyone.
0:18:33 They have the most advanced technology.
0:18:34 I’m not kidding.
0:18:37 Like I know people who work there or run it.
0:18:40 They’ve just developed better chatbot technology than anyone
0:18:41 in GBT.
0:18:43 That’d be so funny if that’s where AGI starts actually.
0:18:44 It’s not open AI.
0:18:46 It’s none of these labs.
0:18:47 It’s like whatever.
0:18:49 Some of these like webcam sites.
0:18:52 That’s not a crazy idea.
0:18:54 I mean, isn’t that how it typically has been
0:18:56 where a lot of the like the vice industries
0:18:57 are the ones pushing the envelope?
0:18:58 Yeah.
0:18:58 Yeah.
0:19:00 Yeah, it’s transformative for only fans, right?
0:19:02 Like I don’t know if you read, but like there’s,
0:19:04 you know, you’re a big influencer on only fans
0:19:07 and you have an army of a hundred people
0:19:10 who are like typers or chatters, right?
0:19:12 And the funny thing about them is they’re not just chatters
0:19:13 that are flirting.
0:19:15 They’re also basically salesmen.
0:19:16 So what they’re doing is they’re chatting
0:19:19 to try to upsell you until they get by this video,
0:19:20 by this photo.
0:19:20 I don’t know exactly.
0:19:22 By the subscription, whatever the thing is,
0:19:25 but they’re not just customer support.
0:19:27 They’re actually sales, but they need to come across
0:19:31 like they’re the original person, which is just hilarious.
0:19:34 What do you think that office environment is like?
0:19:41 So I know someone who works in that and it’s just normal.
0:19:43 It is like the most boring, cubicle,
0:19:44 normal office environment that you’ve ever seen.
0:19:49 That’s almost better than if it was weird.
0:19:52 The other thing with the dating apps,
0:19:55 I think that they did was I remember seeing the study
0:19:55 about match.com.
0:19:57 Because if you were a guy on match.com,
0:20:00 you would basically send out, you know, 30 messages
0:20:02 and you’d get, you know, one back or whatever.
0:20:04 And what they would do is they realized that
0:20:06 a lot of guys’ accounts would go inactive
0:20:08 because they’re not getting replies.
0:20:11 And so what they would do is they would basically send,
0:20:15 they would show an active person, 30 inactive profiles,
0:20:18 knowing that that inactive person is not there to reply,
0:20:21 but that that will be the notification for that person
0:20:24 to come back and reactivate their subscription.
0:20:26 They have to pay to go read their inbox and to be able to reply.
0:20:29 And so it’s almost intentionally a horrible experience
0:20:32 for the person who’s there trying to find somebody
0:20:35 in order to reactivate all the churned members.
0:20:36 And they would do, they would basically,
0:20:38 in a, the first hundred matches that they would show you,
0:20:41 you know, something like 50, 60, 70% of those matches
0:20:42 were all just inactive people.
0:20:44 They wanted you to send a notification to,
0:20:45 to make them come back.
0:20:47 That sounds like a Zynga train PM.
0:20:52 Dude, I went to the Zynga office once back in the like Heyday.
0:20:55 It was the craziest office I’ve ever seen.
0:20:56 Sam, did you ever go to this thing?
0:20:57 Yes.
0:20:59 It was right, it was like, it shared a building
0:21:02 or it was next door to Airbnb and it had a huge bulldog
0:21:03 in the front, right?
0:21:06 And I think at one point, I think they owned the building
0:21:08 and I think the building was worth at one point
0:21:11 more than the company, like, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars.
0:21:14 Why, what did you think of the office, Sean?
0:21:16 Well, you would go in, there’s a giant tunnel,
0:21:19 like an LED tunnel you would walk through just to enter.
0:21:22 And then when you’re there, first of all, there was dogs everywhere.
0:21:24 And it was like everybody, it was bring your dog to work.
0:21:27 There was just like herds of dogs running around.
0:21:28 It was insane.
0:21:34 And we met the chef and the chef, like the food operation was more sophisticated.
0:21:37 Just the cafeteria was more sophisticated than any company
0:21:39 that I’d ever been a part of.
0:21:41 Like just the food part was better than my actual company.
0:21:45 So like they had a staff of 60 people on the culinary team.
0:21:49 They had a roof on the top where they were growing all the vegetables.
0:21:52 He had like a giant fridge that was like the size of like a swimming pool
0:21:54 you’d walk in and there was cows hanging upside down
0:21:56 because they had their own butcher process.
0:21:58 They didn’t serve soda.
0:22:00 They only brewed their own sodas.
0:22:03 Like everything was soup to nuts custom.
0:22:08 And like just so insanely sophisticated for a cafeteria program.
0:22:10 I was like, man, if the food is like this,
0:22:14 I don’t even want to know what the actual teams that do the work are.
0:22:16 And I walked into one PM thing and it was like a stock market.
0:22:21 Dude, his screen had so many metrics fine-tuned in real time
0:22:23 where they were running so many tests at a time.
0:22:26 And it was like you said, Siki, like it looked to me from the outside,
0:22:30 like the most data-driven operation I had ever really seen.
0:22:32 You know, I knew about what we did,
0:22:36 but what we did looked like caveman compared to what they were doing
0:22:38 in terms of sophistication of data.
0:22:40 The food thing reminds me like I was the person
0:22:42 who did the dishes for us to serve real bacon.
0:22:44 And after a few months, we finally started to serve real bacon
0:22:45 because we never had real bacon.
0:22:48 It was only turkey bacon because, you know,
0:22:50 Mark Pincus didn’t like to kill pigs.
0:22:53 But yeah, like one of the things that people did at Zynga
0:22:55 in the product organs, we had PM on call.
0:22:57 And I’ve never seen this on any other organization.
0:23:01 The PM on call for every game would daily send an analysis
0:23:03 of what changed day over day.
0:23:06 And so if there’s a drop, then you would segment it.
0:23:11 And so, oh my god, there’s like an anonymous 50% drop in Mexico for Farmville.
0:23:14 And we are not sure why because usually on Wednesdays at two,
0:23:15 it shouldn’t be like this.
0:23:16 And it lasts three hours long.
0:23:18 And they would have to explain,
0:23:19 oh, it’s because a World Cup is happening.
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0:24:07 All right, back to the episode.
0:24:11 What comes first?
0:24:13 We are with Mr. Beast a few weeks ago.
0:24:14 And I had the same question,
0:24:16 but he wasn’t able to articulate or answer it.
0:24:19 What comes first when you’re that data or analytic oriented?
0:24:24 Are you that way and scale comes because of that?
0:24:27 Or can you only behave that way because you have scale?
0:24:30 So it depends on the environment.
0:24:34 If it’s a data-friendly environment like Facebook is,
0:24:36 then like Facebook platform is,
0:24:39 where virality lets you grow from zero to a billion,
0:24:41 then data is all that matters.
0:24:44 But you could see in the experience of Zynga
0:24:47 that that didn’t translate to the mobile industry.
0:24:48 Mobile was less about virality.
0:24:50 It was just difficult to do your distribution.
0:24:51 A lot more about creativity.
0:24:53 And that’s why Supercell had such a creative advantage
0:24:56 because they actually built very fun new games.
0:24:59 So I think it’s the completely dependent environment.
0:25:01 If it’s hard to get early distribution,
0:25:04 then scale makes data more important.
0:25:07 But if it’s quite difficult to get early distribution,
0:25:09 then you want to be creative and innovative and brand
0:25:11 and creativity that matters a lot more.
0:25:14 Do you remember any like random game change,
0:25:17 like color red to blue or flashing lights or whatever
0:25:19 that just generated like $10 million overnight?
0:25:22 I always remember thinking that like the best way
0:25:25 to generate $30 million overnight is just to like say,
0:25:28 hey, it’s going to take you $10 just to unlock the game today.
0:25:32 Like we could just like make it not payable and people would pay.
0:25:36 One of the more interesting ideas is this idea of crew.
0:25:40 So we had this idea of collecting materials
0:25:42 and you ask people materials.
0:25:44 One of the mechanics that we invented as Zynga
0:25:46 is this idea of crew where you,
0:25:47 for whatever thing you want to unlock,
0:25:50 you have to get at least like 20 people to help you,
0:25:53 unique people, because what that did is,
0:25:55 what we saw in the data is that when you do materials,
0:25:58 you ask the same two people over and over again.
0:26:00 But if we have a unique spread,
0:26:02 then that increases the distribution.
0:26:06 And that ended up being like a pretty large boost in the AUs.
0:26:10 Another thing that we saw is like just the power of segmentation.
0:26:15 And so there was this one day where our numbers went down
0:26:17 anonymously and I had to figure out,
0:26:19 well, is it like this channel or that channel?
0:26:22 It turns out there was one particular typo bug
0:26:25 in the drop rate of this particular treasure
0:26:27 that was creating a lot of opportunities for people to share.
0:26:31 And so you just spend all day doing things like that.
0:26:35 And so it’s rarely something like huge,
0:26:37 but it’s all the details added together
0:26:38 that makes a difference in Zynga.
0:26:41 What were the other business ideas or opportunities
0:26:42 that you think are exciting right now?
0:26:47 Yeah, I mean, I actually asked Sam Altman to make this,
0:26:49 but I don’t know how long they’re going to take,
0:26:52 but I’m doing a lot of medical research.
0:26:53 Wait, what?
0:26:53 What did you say?
0:26:56 Yes, Sam Altman to make this product, he said.
0:26:57 Oh, I thought you were like,
0:27:00 “Oh, you had Sam Altman make a list for you to talk about.”
0:27:01 I was like, “That’s it.”
0:27:02 No, oh, no, no.
0:27:04 We’re not that tight.
0:27:09 But no, I was doing a bunch of medical research
0:27:14 and I noticed that you can’t access paywall articles.
0:27:17 And so I really wish someone would make a version
0:27:18 of deep research that lets you
0:27:21 enter your paywall credentials.
0:27:22 So you can get full access.
0:27:24 And this goes further, I think.
0:27:27 There’s just so much data behind
0:27:31 offwalls, paywalls that you can’t get to
0:27:33 and you can only search on the open web.
0:27:35 And the more private data you can get access to,
0:27:37 the more useful these ages become.
0:27:39 So that’s probably the number one thing
0:27:40 I’ve been thinking about recently.
0:27:43 What’s the name of the company that starts with an R?
0:27:44 It’s based in England.
0:27:46 Sean, we’ve talked to him a bunch.
0:27:47 It’s like an acronym.
0:27:51 Anyway, it’s an academic publishing company in England.
0:27:53 And it’s really controversial
0:27:56 because I think it has the second highest profit margin
0:27:58 of all publicly traded companies in the world
0:28:00 behind public storage.
0:28:03 And the shtick behind it and why everyone hates it
0:28:06 is because researchers at universities
0:28:07 don’t get paid anything for this.
0:28:09 In fact, oftentimes they have to pay tuition
0:28:11 in order to even go to these places.
0:28:14 But they take your research and they put it behind
0:28:15 like a $30,000 a year paywall.
0:28:19 And so it’s a very frustrating industry.
0:28:21 Yeah, that’s the whole industry, right?
0:28:23 Elsevier, I think, is the biggest one.
0:28:26 And there’s a bunch of controversy around that.
0:28:28 And yeah, all of these are extremely hard.
0:28:31 Our margin businesses, they charge an arm and a leg for access.
0:28:33 The researchers get paid nothing.
0:28:34 The peer reviewers get paid nothing.
0:28:37 All they’re doing is just like taking the text
0:28:39 and copy and pasted it and putting it somewhere
0:28:41 and maybe printing it into a journal.
0:28:43 So how would this work?
0:28:46 You’re talking about like you told Sam Altman to say,
0:28:49 “Hey, can I just give ChatGPT my credentials
0:28:51 and then it can go log in for me
0:28:54 and use that information when I ask it questions.”
0:28:55 So that’s it.
0:28:56 ChatGPT would have to do it.
0:28:58 How could a founder–
0:28:59 Well, how would a founder get around that?
0:29:00 Or how would they do this?
0:29:03 Yeah, I mean, you wouldn’t need access to O3,
0:29:05 the full model first, because that’s what OpenReach search
0:29:06 is based on.
0:29:09 But I mean, it’s not terribly difficult
0:29:10 to create something like a deep research.
0:29:12 There was a company called–
0:29:13 There is a company called GenSpark.
0:29:15 So I’m friends with the founder, GenSpark.
0:29:17 He’s through the VP of Search at Baidu,
0:29:19 which is the Google of China.
0:29:22 And they made a version of Deep Research
0:29:23 just using a different model.
0:29:26 And so that’s relatively easy to build.
0:29:29 I think the storage of the credentials and logging in
0:29:31 is a little bit more tricky.
0:29:32 Right.
0:29:34 It also just seems like somebody could just create
0:29:35 like SciencePowl or something like that.
0:29:37 It’s specifically for researchers.
0:29:40 And it’s a ChatGPT-like interface,
0:29:43 but it’s specifically trained on or going
0:29:45 to access all of the journals,
0:29:48 all of the academic research out there for you,
0:29:49 and just do a vertical thing.
0:29:51 Isn’t there a Google for doctors that’s like this,
0:29:52 like Lumos or something like that?
0:29:53 There is.
0:29:55 So I’m deep in the space.
0:29:57 There is a company called Ellicit.
0:29:59 There’s a company called SciSpace.
0:30:01 And what they allow you to do is they let you
0:30:03 search abstracts where available.
0:30:06 And also you can upload individual PDFs too,
0:30:08 which also ChatGPT allows you to do.
0:30:11 But there’s nothing I’ve seen that’s indexed
0:30:15 as the full text of all these journals with your credentials.
0:30:17 And why are you so interested in,
0:30:18 what’s all this research for?
0:30:21 Is it your daughter?
0:30:22 And if it is, what’s the story behind that?
0:30:24 Yeah, so my daughter was diagnosed
0:30:26 with a rare brain tumor last September.
0:30:31 And we’ve been doing everything we can
0:30:33 to find new treatments for this because it’s so rare.
0:30:38 And you really get deep insight into the sentence
0:30:41 and the structure of the medical community.
0:30:44 And one of the big learnings is that what is available
0:30:47 as standard of care, meaning that’s what’s available
0:30:49 if you go to a hospital or you talk to a doctor,
0:30:51 and what is available at the frontier,
0:30:53 there’s a huge gap already.
0:30:55 And then further, when you have a rare disease,
0:30:59 just amount of research and data and treatments available
0:31:00 is also just thin.
0:31:03 Because you need to have enough critical mass
0:31:05 for the research to be worth it
0:31:07 so they can recoup the research costs.
0:31:11 And the other interesting thing that we’ve learned
0:31:14 is that the IP issues are really weird.
0:31:17 So for example, there’s this drug
0:31:20 that is FDA-approved, non-prescription,
0:31:22 has been out since the ’70s, treat pedwarns.
0:31:25 And over the past 20 years,
0:31:26 there’s a huge amount of compelling data
0:31:29 that this might be a pretty good treatment
0:31:30 for different kinds of cancer.
0:31:33 And there’s been no clinical trials for it
0:31:35 because there is no money for it
0:31:38 because you can’t patent a pinworm drug.
0:31:40 And so all of the money, hundreds of millions,
0:31:43 billions of dollars are going to new molecules
0:31:45 that are patentable, even if things are already available.
0:31:47 And so once you get into this, you’re like,
0:31:49 “Wow, this is super, super broken.”
0:31:52 And so, yeah, I’m doing a lot of primary research
0:31:55 in order to find repurposed drugs that might already exist
0:31:57 that could treat this fairly rare brain tumor.
0:32:01 It’s… Obviously, this is super serious
0:32:02 and I’m sorry you’re going through everything.
0:32:06 But also, there’s an interesting logistical thing of like,
0:32:10 “Wait, so you are able just to research potential cures
0:32:13 or ways to help your daughter on your own
0:32:14 and come up with a solution?
0:32:17 I mean, is that what you hope the outcome is?”
0:32:20 Yeah, I mean, so there’s…
0:32:23 I’m not the first founder type who’s been in the situation.
0:32:26 So the co-founder of Clubhouse, Rohan,
0:32:29 his daughter has a reintroducted disease.
0:32:32 Her name’s Lydia and he runs the Lydia Foundation.
0:32:36 And he’s going so far as manufacturing his own drugs, right?
0:32:38 For very rare diseases, you can do a lot.
0:32:41 There is other people have met with that somewhere things,
0:32:43 like end-of-one cures exist.
0:32:45 And so you can go…
0:32:47 This is what I mean, like, if you’re sufficiently motivated
0:32:51 and there’s no one more motivated than a dad with a sick kid,
0:32:53 you can go so much further
0:32:55 than what is available as standard of care.
0:33:01 And so even the last time we met with our primary care team,
0:33:03 they were proposing two particular paths,
0:33:07 one involving pretty aggressive surgery and radiation,
0:33:09 another involving this drug.
0:33:12 I proposed a third path and they were discussing it.
0:33:15 And this is like, neurosurgeons and clinicians,
0:33:16 they came back a week later as like,
0:33:17 “Actually, your path thinks more sets.”
0:33:22 And the reason I was able to do that is because this disease is so rare,
0:33:26 I am more knowledgeable about disease than anyone in the room
0:33:29 because they have to like study 50 different cancers, right?
0:33:31 Wow, that’s pretty incredible.
0:33:34 Also, my experience has been that the doctors,
0:33:37 once you get off of the kind of standard of care,
0:33:40 and this is maybe, I’m projecting just from like,
0:33:43 and I just had a knee injury and I was asking the doctor,
0:33:46 I was like, “Hey, like, would PRP or stem cells?
0:33:47 Like, is there anything, should I take…
0:33:48 What’s a peptide?
0:33:50 Can I put a peptide in there?”
0:33:52 And he’s like, “You know, there’s not a lot of evidence,
0:33:55 you know, that’s not part of the protocol.”
0:33:56 Right.
0:33:57 “You don’t have great evidence.”
0:33:59 And he was sort of like, “My hands are tied.”
0:34:00 He’s an orthopedic surgeon.
0:34:01 He’s just like, “You know, my hands are…
0:34:04 I can only recommend what I can recommend.
0:34:05 You could do those things.”
0:34:07 I don’t know.
0:34:09 And so then I felt like, you know, I’m on my own here.
0:34:11 Have you, once you do this path,
0:34:14 are you just outside of the medical system?
0:34:17 Basically, are you outside of your standard chain of command
0:34:19 with your doctors and you have to get your own system set up?
0:34:21 That’s a great question.
0:34:23 And I’ve had an almost similar conversation
0:34:25 in the last meeting I was just describing.
0:34:27 And so I thought I’d play out in real time.
0:34:30 So the neurosurgeon said, “Hey, when we did this operation,
0:34:32 when we did it for this reason,
0:34:33 do it for some other reason.
0:34:34 It’s not part of the standard care.”
0:34:38 But our primary clinician, she is like, she runs…
0:34:41 He’s a principal investigator, one of the clinical trials.
0:34:44 The only one of two that treats the disease.
0:34:46 And she was like, “Yeah, you’re right.
0:34:48 We don’t have a lot of evidence because
0:34:50 there hasn’t been a lot of research into the tumor.”
0:34:53 And so sometimes you have to argue for first principles.
0:34:55 And if it’s a fairly rare disease,
0:34:58 they’re more open to being more creative.
0:35:00 And in our case, our clinician was able to convince
0:35:02 the neurosurgeon this was the right path,
0:35:04 or at least it’s worth trying.
0:35:06 And she told us she was excited to have a partner
0:35:09 who seems well-informed and is willing to think outside of the box.
0:35:12 And I straight up said, “I do not care what the standard of care is.
0:35:14 I think the standard of care is crap.”
0:35:17 And she basically said, “Yeah, I think so too.
0:35:18 I just can’t say that.”
0:35:19 Right.
0:35:22 Dude, and that’s pretty cool that you’re in San Francisco too,
0:35:26 where hopefully you think that the early adopter mindset
0:35:30 even trickles out to the doctors and things like that.
0:35:31 That’s pretty cool that you’re around a doctor
0:35:33 who’s willing to try some crazy stuff
0:35:35 or would seem crazy to a lot of people.
0:35:38 So to answer Sean’s question, if you do find your own drug,
0:35:40 you do have to show enough research
0:35:42 and be well-informed enough
0:35:45 that someone is willing to prescribe it off-label
0:35:46 on a compassionate use basis.
0:35:50 And so you just seem to convince a one doctor.
0:35:52 And so if you can’t find one, you can find others
0:35:55 who’s willing to do that and then you’re in the clear.
0:35:57 And it’s a lot easier if it’s like a fairly serious rare disease.
0:36:00 Can you tell the story about,
0:36:03 you tweeted out about your daughter’s condition,
0:36:07 and then this crazy crypto turn of events happened
0:36:10 where someone created a coin and then millions,
0:36:11 maybe tens of millions.
0:36:13 I don’t even know how much money was raised.
0:36:15 And then people got mad at you.
0:36:17 People were speculating on this thing.
0:36:18 I don’t even understand it.
0:36:20 Can you explain what was going on?
0:36:23 And also just explain, is this just,
0:36:24 was there just degenerate gambling?
0:36:27 Or did you maybe stumble upon a novel way
0:36:29 that people might fund research in the future?
0:36:30 I don’t know which one of the two it is.
0:36:33 Yeah, I think I have a better idea which one it is
0:36:34 after some reflection on it.
0:36:36 So explain what happened.
0:36:40 Yeah, Christmas, I was going to Japan
0:36:43 to ski with some friends and the family.
0:36:46 And I was on a flight and I had a plan
0:36:48 to start to go fummy for this lab.
0:36:51 The Hankison Lab in the University of Colorado.
0:36:54 So we were donating money to them once this happened
0:36:56 because they were the only lab in North America
0:36:58 that researched this particular tumor
0:37:00 called the craniopharyngeoma.
0:37:02 And the treatment that we’re on, they found.
0:37:03 So I thought, okay, for Christmas,
0:37:05 I thought it’d be great to do a GoFundMe
0:37:07 use my network and raise some money for this lab.
0:37:12 So I tweeted this thread with this GoFundMe link,
0:37:13 and that we ended up raising about a quarter million dollars
0:37:14 for a lab, which is like,
0:37:16 I think the biggest donation up to that point.
0:37:20 But what happened is some people started asking about,
0:37:22 hey, can I donate crypto?
0:37:28 And so I said, okay, I posted my ENS, right?
0:37:30 My Ethereum name system address.
0:37:34 And people started donating a little bit of ETH.
0:37:36 And then some other people said,
0:37:39 hey, do you have a Sol address because we’re on Solana?
0:37:40 And I didn’t have a Sol address.
0:37:44 I was aware what Solana is, but I never touched it.
0:37:46 And so the next day, once I landed,
0:37:48 I created my first Solana wallet,
0:37:50 I created this address, and I tweeted it out.
0:37:52 And basically what happened–
0:37:53 By the way, are you big in the crypto world?
0:37:55 Why were all the crypto guys doing this for you
0:37:57 just because what’s the motivation other than it’s good?
0:38:01 So it didn’t occur to me.
0:38:03 I thought it was people–
0:38:05 I had like 77,000 followers at a time.
0:38:07 And I’m not as big in the crypto world.
0:38:10 I’ve been on and off active in crypto since 2017,
0:38:12 but never in a major way.
0:38:15 I’m not a crypto account that people follow.
0:38:20 But I found out why people did this later.
0:38:22 And this answers the question of Sean,
0:38:24 like, is this gambling or is this something else?
0:38:26 But anyway, I posted a Sol Sol address,
0:38:30 and basically an hour later, I looked at my wallet,
0:38:33 and the wallet said $400,000, and it was zero an hour before.
0:38:38 So I’m looking at what is going on, and it turns out–
0:38:41 So someone created a coin called unpub.fund,
0:38:44 which is a platform where you can create a coin
0:38:46 in literally like 30 seconds.
0:38:49 And I was on ETH, right?
0:38:50 And I have an active in crypto.
0:38:51 This wasn’t a thing.
0:38:53 Creating a new token on Ethereum was like a whole process.
0:38:55 Now they shorten it to 30 seconds.
0:38:57 This is called a pump.fund.
0:38:58 Is that–
0:39:00 Pump.fund, yeah, it’s crazy.
0:39:01 Have you seen this business, by the way?
0:39:02 No, that’s like–
0:39:05 This guy’s made like $500 million a profit last year.
0:39:07 Like more than that, I think.
0:39:08 And more than that, yeah.
0:39:11 And so you click a button and you make your own coin,
0:39:12 and obviously in the name, there’s no hiding
0:39:14 that the point of this is that it’s a pump.
0:39:17 Scheme, pump and dump scheme, right?
0:39:18 They made $500 million?
0:39:21 At least, at least.
0:39:22 That’s their take, specifically.
0:39:23 That’s their take.
0:39:25 This is like the majority of the traffic on Solana.
0:39:30 And so people are basically creating these new coins
0:39:32 and trading them, trying to write it,
0:39:34 and it’s basically musical shares, right?
0:39:35 Have you guys gone to this website?
0:39:36 It’s crazy.
0:39:37 It looks like a GeoCity website.
0:39:39 Like there’s like flashing banners.
0:39:40 This is insane.
0:39:41 It’s all the time.
0:39:42 It’s all real time.
0:39:46 Like yesterday, during the Super Bowl, somebody created,
0:39:48 and for Dave Poitnoy, they set a bar stool.
0:39:49 A jail coin?
0:39:50 Jail stool.
0:39:51 A jail stool.
0:39:53 And a jail stool ran up to like $100 million
0:39:54 or something like that.
0:39:54 $200 million.
0:39:56 Like he said, it’s musical shares.
0:40:00 So you’re buying, trying to catch one of these 1000X waves,
0:40:02 but it’s going to dump, and you just got to know
0:40:03 when you’re going to get off the train.
0:40:04 And then if you wait too long,
0:40:07 or you’re the one who comes in late, you lose.
0:40:10 So it’s like being at a roulette table or whatever,
0:40:12 where you’re just throwing chips at the table,
0:40:13 trying to hit.
0:40:13 Oh my God.
0:40:15 Yeah, it’s like the Trump coin, except you can create it
0:40:18 in like 10 seconds, 30 seconds.
0:40:22 But anyway, that’s why people created this coin
0:40:25 is because you’re looking for these new narratives
0:40:27 to gamble on, right?
0:40:29 And the more interesting, the more viral
0:40:32 seeming a narrative is, the more valuable it becomes.
0:40:34 And if you’re in art early, it could really pump.
0:40:36 So anyway, it was $400,000.
0:40:38 And I tweeted a screenshot.
0:40:40 There’s a whole tweet sort of thread where I was like,
0:40:41 “What is going on?”
0:40:43 And I kept on adding this to the tweet thread
0:40:45 with screenshots on my wallet.
0:40:47 And so it was $400,000.
0:40:48 I was like, “What is happening?”
0:40:49 And people were trying to explain to someone
0:40:51 who created this coin called Mira.
0:40:53 And there’s a billion tokens.
0:40:56 And they sent me, “Someone bought half the supply
0:40:57 and just sent it to my wallet.”
0:40:59 So I had 500 million tokens.
0:41:03 And once I tweeted, then an eye check again.
0:41:05 And it’s now $4 million.
0:41:07 And I’m like, “What?”
0:41:10 And an hour later, it’s eight.
0:41:13 A couple hours later, it became 15.
0:41:17 And a one point was $20 million, just like the same day.
0:41:18 And I got like $40,000.
0:41:20 The market cap, and the market cap of the whole thing,
0:41:21 that means was $80 million.
0:41:22 Correct.
0:41:24 Okay.
0:41:26 No, no, I think peak market cap was around $60 million.
0:41:27 Okay.
0:41:29 And you had $40 million of it.
0:41:32 Yeah, because I sold 10% immediately
0:41:34 just to like capture something.
0:41:36 And I sold a bit more in the liquidity pool.
0:41:39 So, you know, I got around a million dollars out,
0:41:41 but I still owned 30% of it.
0:41:44 And immediately I was, I said,
0:41:46 “Okay, I don’t know what I’m gonna do with it,
0:41:50 but every dollar in my wallet is going to charity.
0:41:51 This is non-profit, it’s not for me.”
0:41:54 Not just charity, going to the research lab.
0:41:54 Going to research lab.
0:41:56 That’s researching the potential course
0:41:57 to your daughter’s thing.
0:41:58 Okay, correct.
0:42:01 So I said, “Hey, I’m not gonna move anything
0:42:02 with our 25 hours notice.
0:42:05 I’m gonna try to like be very transparent about this.”
0:42:07 And I thought about it and I said,
0:42:10 “I’m gonna start selling $1,000 every 10 minutes
0:42:12 until like we’re done
0:42:15 because I just don’t have time to run a crypto project.
0:42:20 And, you know, like I want everyone to know where this is going.”
0:42:25 So that happened and the price started going down.
0:42:26 But once we got to a million,
0:42:30 what happened in between is because it was such a big story,
0:42:34 a bunch of rare disease organization started reaching out to me.
0:42:36 And they’re like, “Wow, this happened to you.
0:42:39 Can we, how do we get in on this?”
0:42:39 Because…
0:42:45 They’re like, “Did you say ‘pump.fun’?”
0:42:45 Okay.
0:42:49 Because an average budget,
0:42:51 annual budget for one of these organizations
0:42:53 was like $100,000, $150,000.
0:42:54 It’s just like not a whole lot of money.
0:42:56 This is like more money than the community’s ever seen.
0:42:57 It’s a lot of excitement there.
0:43:01 So I thought, well, I was talking to some crypto friends
0:43:03 and I thought, “Okay, how do we make this like a thing?
0:43:06 And maybe we can make this more sustainable, long-lasting.”
0:43:09 And this idea turning Mira into a launchpad
0:43:11 for other rare disease tokens,
0:43:16 where Mira’s a liquidity pair token was talked about.
0:43:19 And so I thought, well, okay, that seems interesting.
0:43:20 Before I do that,
0:43:23 I should probably figure out how a coin works
0:43:24 and how you launch one of these.
0:43:29 So I went on pump.fun and I thought,
0:43:31 “Okay, let’s find out how one of these works.”
0:43:34 So I created a coin called Zero and I entered a description
0:43:35 for the coin because you could do that.
0:43:37 I said, “Hey, don’t buy this coin.”
0:43:38 It literally says, “Don’t buy this coin.
0:43:40 It’ll never be worth anything.
0:43:41 I’m never going to do anything with it.
0:43:42 It’ll be worth $0.”
0:43:46 So I pressed a button and what I didn’t realize
0:43:49 is because I was on Ethereum for a long time,
0:43:50 but I never had a watch wallet,
0:43:54 what happened is I was in the background,
0:43:55 the most watch wallet at crypto.
0:43:59 So within about 100 to 200 seconds,
0:44:01 the market cap of this coin
0:44:02 that I told people to not buy in the description.
0:44:04 Sorry, a watch wallet.
0:44:06 Does a watch wallet mean that you are someone
0:44:08 that should be monitored because you’re a potential whale?
0:44:10 Yeah, people start tracking like,
0:44:12 “Oh, what is Vitalik doing with his wallet?
0:44:13 What is, what is…”
0:44:14 People are copying.
0:44:15 Someone’s so good with their wallet.
0:44:16 People want to copy what you’re doing.
0:44:18 And they think that you’re the man
0:44:21 because your wallet is old or you have a lot in it.
0:44:23 Because I was sort of the main character
0:44:26 of crypto Twitter for a few days.
0:44:27 Got it, okay, understood.
0:44:29 So there were copy, there were bots
0:44:31 like just monitoring what I was doing
0:44:33 and buying whatever I was buying.
0:44:35 And so they saw this new token.
0:44:38 And so within 100 to 200 seconds,
0:44:41 the market cap of this token was three and a half million dollars.
0:44:47 So I was just sitting there like panicking.
0:44:50 And I said, “Okay, I don’t, this is bad.
0:44:52 I don’t want to have anything to do with this.”
0:44:56 So I had half of the entire supply and I sold it.
0:44:58 And that was my main mistake.
0:45:00 I should have burned it,
0:45:03 which everyone would have been happy about, right?
0:45:08 But because I sold, I crashed the price of this token.
0:45:11 And people got very upset because it was considered a rug.
0:45:15 So now like, “Oh my God, everyone’s…”
0:45:17 And when I sold, I made like $80,000
0:45:19 because even those three and a half million dollars
0:45:23 in market cap is only about $100,000 or so in liquidity.
0:45:26 And yeah, I started a thread explaining,
0:45:28 “Oh my God, I didn’t expect this to happen.
0:45:31 I got on spaces over video.
0:45:33 Just like, I’m really sorry.
0:45:35 I’m like, still trying to figure out how this works.”
0:45:38 And you know, people don’t did it care.
0:45:41 And what I realized is just a different community
0:45:45 than it was when I was really active on Twitter in 2017.
0:45:46 Like people aren’t Ethereum.
0:45:48 They’re like very deep tech to people, right?
0:45:49 They’re like nerdy.
0:45:53 And with the Solana in 2024,
0:45:55 I didn’t realize like it’s so much more mainstream.
0:45:58 A lot of people maybe have like $50 or $100
0:46:00 and they’re just trying to turn into $1,000.
0:46:04 And so the amount of the motion there is like very, very different.
0:46:07 Crypto transition from neckbeards to like everybody
0:46:10 who looks like Jack Harlow in like four years.
0:46:13 The community, the Solana community,
0:46:16 all has like the line etched into the,
0:46:17 into like the side of their haircut or like multiple.
0:46:20 It’s very different than like the people
0:46:22 that got me into Ethereum in the first place.
0:46:24 Today I learned or this month I learned.
0:46:26 So anyway, the markout three and a half million
0:46:28 before I sold, it dumped at 300,000.
0:46:32 And as I started talking about my mistake,
0:46:35 the market cat came back and at one point
0:46:37 it was like five and a half, $6 million.
0:46:40 Just because I was like talking about it
0:46:43 and people were just, the more upset people were,
0:46:46 the more the coin pumped and more money people made from the coin.
0:46:49 So they were trying to make it like even more dramatic,
0:46:51 which I didn’t really understand in time.
0:46:53 I just thought I messed up and people were really upset at me.
0:46:58 So anyway, so then that was like the main villain turn
0:47:00 on Twitter and everyone was super upset at me
0:47:01 because they saw me as a scammer.
0:47:05 So I thought about what am I going to do with this?
0:47:08 So first of all, like the $80,000 within a minute,
0:47:10 I realized this is a mistake.
0:47:13 So I bought back in into the coin and I burned it all, right?
0:47:16 So I already was like neutral and I explained that.
0:47:19 No one cared because of the anonymity of crypto.
0:47:21 They thought I had like a hundred other wallets
0:47:25 that was like, that I pumped and dumped on any profit there
0:47:27 and I can’t prove otherwise.
0:47:31 So I decided like this is really shitty
0:47:33 and I don’t want any part of it.
0:47:37 So what I decided to do is I got some help from, you know,
0:47:39 friend, he’s a coin base from other people
0:47:42 who didn’t want to be named to do on-chain analysis.
0:47:46 So what I set on space is I’m actually just going to pay everyone
0:47:48 back who lost money on this out of my own pocket.
0:47:50 And I’ve even touched a cherry wallet.
0:47:54 So what we ended up doing is everyone who held
0:47:58 in the first 200 seconds, who owned any coins then,
0:48:00 up until the point 43 minutes later,
0:48:05 where the market cap fully recovered back to the same value.
0:48:07 If you sold and you realized the loss,
0:48:09 I’m just going to airdrop you sold.
0:48:13 And it ended up being like $104,000 to $50,000 out of my own pocket.
0:48:14 And I just paid everyone back,
0:48:17 which has never happened on any pump fund coin before.
0:48:21 And maybe like 10% of the people have heard about this.
0:48:22 I tweeted about it.
0:48:24 I had to like keep on responding.
0:48:26 Because every time I tweet for the next like month,
0:48:28 someone would say, “Oh, you’re a scammer.
0:48:29 What are you still doing here?”
0:48:30 And I had to say, “No, I paid everyone back.”
0:48:32 And they would just like not say anything.
0:48:36 This is like a crypto Larry David like thing.
0:48:38 Like it’s like, this is like you’re walking through Times Square
0:48:42 and one of those fake monks put like a bracelet on your wrist.
0:48:45 And then like it now expects you to give them like $20.
0:48:47 It says, even though we called it a free gift,
0:48:49 like this is just, this is insane.
0:48:52 So how much did you end up giving to the charity?
0:48:56 Yeah. So between GoFundMe, so as a million dollars from crypto,
0:48:59 and just like I locked a bunch of the mirror coin
0:49:00 into a liquidity pool.
0:49:02 So it’s sort of still perpetually generating.
0:49:06 So you bought a million dollars of charity for $150,000 basically.
0:49:08 That’s correct. Yeah.
0:49:11 And then we, the total was like a 1.4 million.
0:49:15 We donated more to match like the mistake.
0:49:18 And we added a GoFundMe to it.
0:49:18 So ended up being 1.4 million.
0:49:22 And then the lab actually like triple leveraged it up into the coin.
0:49:27 They got hooked on pumped off on.
0:49:32 All right. I got a public service announcement
0:49:33 for all the tech founders that are listening to this.
0:49:36 Listen, job number one for you is to get customers.
0:49:38 And ideally the bigger the customers, the better.
0:49:40 And I know when I was trying to do that,
0:49:42 we would get somebody interested.
0:49:43 Oh man, there’s a big Fortune 500 company
0:49:46 or it’s a company that’s raised hundreds of millions of dollars.
0:49:46 They want to work with us.
0:49:48 This is so exciting.
0:49:49 And then we hit the wall
0:49:52 and the wall was the security and compliance team.
0:49:55 And all of a sudden we could not land our biggest customers
0:49:57 just because we were shooting ourselves on the foot
0:50:00 by not being security ready and compliant.
0:50:02 And so if you want to solve this, use Vanta.
0:50:03 Vanta is an all in one solution.
0:50:05 It helps you get audit ready.
0:50:07 And it’s quick, it’s painless, it’s easy.
0:50:08 They’re the number one guys doing this.
0:50:11 There are 8,000 companies that use them.
0:50:12 YC companies use them.
0:50:14 We use them.
0:50:16 And so if you want Vanta to help simplify
0:50:17 your security and compliance program
0:50:18 to help you streamline anything,
0:50:20 take all those manual security tasks
0:50:22 and automate them.
0:50:23 You should use Vanta.
0:50:24 If you listen to this,
0:50:25 you guys should get $1,000 off of Vanta too.
0:50:26 So we got a deal for you.
0:50:28 Go to Vanta.com/million.
0:50:32 That’s V-A-N-T-A.com/million.
0:50:33 Use Vanta.
0:50:34 That’s what all the cool kids are doing.
0:50:39 Would you, Sean, give back the 150 like you did?
0:50:40 I wouldn’t.
0:50:40 Fuck that.
0:50:44 I would not have for that situation personally.
0:50:45 I get why you did.
0:50:46 It’s almost just like,
0:50:47 “Dude, this is great.
0:50:49 All of this was unintentional.
0:50:51 People are really mad.
0:50:53 Okay, what’s the sort of like,
0:50:56 how can I just like clear up any possible confusion?”
0:50:58 But I don’t think you needed to in this situation, right?
0:51:00 You created a coin called Zero
0:51:01 that you said is don’t buy this.
0:51:02 This is going to Zero.
0:51:04 It’s a test coin.
0:51:07 And if somebody went and randomly speculated on it
0:51:09 using their like, their sniper bots
0:51:10 that are trying to track your wallet,
0:51:12 you know, like I wouldn’t have given a shit personally.
0:51:16 But then again, these, this community is so like crazy
0:51:18 that they’ll just like make your life hell on Twitter
0:51:19 for like the next five years.
0:51:21 It might be, might be worth it, you know?
0:51:22 Just to clear your own conscience,
0:51:24 go to sleep at night, you know?
0:51:24 Exactly.
0:51:25 I couldn’t, it was for me.
0:51:26 So I could sleep all night
0:51:29 because a lot of these people are fairly low income
0:51:31 and the money is fairly meaningful.
0:51:32 It was one reason.
0:51:34 But another reason is like,
0:51:35 people just don’t read.
0:51:37 Like I explained this.
0:51:39 I mean, the coin says don’t buy it.
0:51:41 I explained this like a couple different times.
0:51:43 And what I realized is like,
0:51:45 you just don’t read on the internet.
0:51:47 And as far as anyone else knows,
0:51:48 because it makes a lot of noise,
0:51:54 like I, the, if you don’t, don’t read what it sounds like is,
0:51:57 I created a scam coin using my own daughter’s name
0:51:58 to scam people out of it.
0:51:58 Right, right, right.
0:51:59 It’s crazy.
0:52:02 Did you, in the end of this,
0:52:04 is there anything here that’s interesting
0:52:06 for fundraising for research?
0:52:07 Or this is just straight like,
0:52:10 I accidentally got into a gambling pool
0:52:12 and it’s kind of got some money for research,
0:52:14 but this is not a sustainable thing for anybody.
0:52:16 I’m still trying to figure it out.
0:52:22 So what I’m hoping to make nearer into is,
0:52:23 so the way this works is you’re,
0:52:24 this is like sort of gang theory around,
0:52:26 okay, you own a bunch of this coin
0:52:30 because this coin’s narrative is attached to you, right?
0:52:31 In the case of, you know,
0:52:33 they port, Portnoy is doing something similar with Jailstool.
0:52:38 And in order to turn it into real world impact,
0:52:38 you have to sell.
0:52:40 There’s no way around that.
0:52:42 And so when you sell,
0:52:44 then you’re just like playing a zero-sum game
0:52:45 against the community
0:52:47 and they’re all going to be upset for you, for sure,
0:52:48 no matter what.
0:52:50 And so that’s a very difficult dynamic.
0:52:53 And I think my idea here is like the only sustainable way
0:52:56 to do this is to lock a bunch of the token
0:52:57 into a liquidity pool.
0:53:00 And so that when people buy in or out of it,
0:53:02 you get to exchange, you get the fees.
0:53:05 And that’s not really like selling into your community.
0:53:06 I think imagine a version of Dogecoin
0:53:08 where every time someone, you know,
0:53:10 it’s like Dogecoin is like a couple tens of billions
0:53:11 of dollars market cap.
0:53:13 But every time someone sells or buys,
0:53:15 it creates like up to,
0:53:17 could be hundreds of thousands of dollars a day of fees
0:53:20 and which you can then use to donate.
0:53:22 I think that might be relatively sustainable.
0:53:23 This is insane.
0:53:25 I don’t even know what to say.
0:53:26 Sounds like a great weekend.
0:53:29 No, it was a month, it was the last,
0:53:32 it was Christmas until like maybe, you know,
0:53:34 now and it ruined my vacation.
0:53:37 And it’s been by far the most stressful time
0:53:38 I’ve ever had in my life.
0:53:42 Can we do a quick detour?
0:53:45 We were at a dinner once and you talked about some,
0:53:47 I think it was a Stanford class you took
0:53:50 called Touchyfeely or that’s the code name for it.
0:53:51 I don’t know.
0:53:53 And it’s something about communication and relationships.
0:53:55 And I remember you said this really great thing at the dinner.
0:53:56 But this was now many years ago
0:53:57 and I don’t remember it exactly.
0:54:00 But can you say that bit again?
0:54:01 I want to hear it again.
0:54:02 And I think a lot of people might benefit from it.
0:54:04 By the way, Siki, how old are you?
0:54:07 I’m 41, I think.
0:54:09 You look like you could be 22 or 41.
0:54:10 I have no idea.
0:54:12 Yeah, Asian no reason.
0:54:12 Let’s go.
0:54:18 Yeah, so I took actually now twice.
0:54:20 I took class again as we talked.
0:54:23 This class that was based on the Stanford business world class
0:54:25 called Interpersonal Dynamics,
0:54:27 which is the highly braided and most popular class
0:54:28 in Stanford business school.
0:54:31 It’s taught by a professor called Carol Robbins
0:54:32 and it’s generally known as Touchyfeely.
0:54:36 And its name is for every participant at some point
0:54:38 will like cry in the class.
0:54:44 But Carol Robbins is now a co-founder of a group called Leaders in Tech
0:54:46 which provides the same class for tech leaders.
0:54:49 So one of the things that you get taught in this class is,
0:54:52 so the purpose of the class is to teach you how to relate to people
0:54:54 and build connection for the other people
0:54:56 because people work with other people.
0:54:59 And one of the most useful frameworks I got from that class
0:55:03 is how to think about your connection with other people
0:55:04 and how to develop that connection.
0:55:10 And so the two frameworks to connect is one is the two tracks
0:55:14 of interpersonal communication and the five levels of it.
0:55:20 So when you’re talking with anyone else, there is two tracks.
0:55:23 There’s the content track and there’s a relationship track.
0:55:25 So the content track is filled with facts
0:55:28 and a relationship track is filled with emotion
0:55:31 and a relationship track is what is filled
0:55:34 and what has to be filled for a relationship
0:55:36 to get become closer and for trust increase.
0:55:40 And the way you fill each of these tracks
0:55:42 is through the five levels of communication.
0:55:45 And the idea is when you are talking to someone,
0:55:48 there’s five levels at which you communicate
0:55:51 of increasing vulnerability and death.
0:55:54 So level one is what’s called ritual
0:55:57 and that is, hey, how’s it going?
0:55:58 Hey, right?
0:56:00 It doesn’t really say anything.
0:56:02 We’re just ritualized greeting.
0:56:05 Level two is extended ritual.
0:56:07 So that is how’s the weather?
0:56:08 How’s the game?
0:56:09 Right?
0:56:12 It’s a longer version of, hey, how’s it going?
0:56:14 Level three is content.
0:56:16 So these are facts.
0:56:17 How’s the project?
0:56:18 Is it late?
0:56:21 What are we going to do with this particular idea?
0:56:24 Level four is emotional self-disclosure.
0:56:27 So that is when you say something
0:56:32 that discloses how you are feeling emotionally at the time.
0:56:33 I feel sad.
0:56:34 I feel angry.
0:56:35 And there’s a lot of talk about level four
0:56:37 because people think they’re doing level four,
0:56:38 but they’re not.
0:56:40 And that’s a very common thing that’s unique
0:56:42 to the English language, which we talk about.
0:56:43 That was a fairly interesting insight.
0:56:45 So level five is the deepest one.
0:56:48 And level five is mutual emotional self-disclosure.
0:56:52 And it is when you are expressing the emotion
0:56:54 that you have about the other person.
0:56:56 I feel angry at you.
0:56:58 I feel proud of you.
0:57:00 I feel disappointed by you.
0:57:02 That’s the deepest level of communication
0:57:03 you can have with another person.
0:57:08 And the content track is only filled
0:57:10 by things from level one to three.
0:57:12 And the relationship track is only filled
0:57:13 by level four and five.
0:57:19 And we are taught to really not use level four and five
0:57:20 in professional settings.
0:57:22 But if you want to build a relationship,
0:57:25 level four and five is kind of the only way you can do it.
0:57:30 And so a lot of the training is about breaking
0:57:32 past the barrier or the uncomfortableness
0:57:35 of engaging level four and level five communication.
0:57:38 And you basically sit in a circle with 12 people
0:57:41 for four days straight until you like,
0:57:44 so you can observe the impact of doing level four or five
0:57:46 and not doing level four or five.
0:57:49 And how you are able to be closer to someone
0:57:51 or further away from someone in emotional distance.
0:57:54 Has this made your running a company better?
0:57:57 I mean, I would say this is the most impactful thing
0:58:00 I’ve ever done in my entire life, like out of any class.
0:58:03 I always like, as a founder,
0:58:05 somewhat see the company as some kind of machine
0:58:08 and I didn’t find it, I’m like, you know,
0:58:09 Miley asked for a degree.
0:58:10 So I found it difficult to relate to people.
0:58:14 But it’s completely transformed all my relationships,
0:58:15 including my relationship with my wife.
0:58:21 And so one of the ways, this was even just last week,
0:58:25 we had an onsite and I was able to do a mini version of this
0:58:26 with our customer success team.
0:58:28 We’re just sat or, you know,
0:58:30 I did a very condensed version of this lecture
0:58:34 and then we sat and we just talked for about four hours.
0:58:37 And the amount of closeness people got,
0:58:39 insight people got was transformative.
0:58:40 And you wouldn’t normally, you know,
0:58:42 sit around for a couple hours at a work setting
0:58:44 and talk about your feelings.
0:58:45 And it’s very uncomfortable to do so.
0:58:48 And it’s intentionally so, like it’s very comfortable
0:58:52 for the first couple of, in the case of a real life workshop,
0:58:54 it’s half a day.
0:58:55 In the case of us, we had it like sort of speed running
0:58:57 and it was uncomfortable about an hour.
0:59:01 But then people were really into it and it’s weird,
0:59:06 but everyone at some point was crying about some disclosure
0:59:09 that they heard or they’ve experienced.
0:59:11 And as a result, the team got so much closer
0:59:12 and a trust increase.
0:59:13 – That’s wild. – This is awesome.
0:59:15 – Do you, so how do you do this in practice, right?
0:59:17 Cause when you talk about like, you know,
0:59:21 I feel angry at you about X or I’m disappointed about Y,
0:59:25 I could see myself not having the skills
0:59:26 or finesse to be able to do that
0:59:29 and let the end result be a positive one
0:59:33 versus we start talking, you’re upset by this.
0:59:35 Well, the other person gets defensive
0:59:40 or they push back and say, well, you did that, blah, blah, blah.
0:59:43 And so can you give me an example of a conversation
0:59:47 that you had that like, maybe here’s what I would love,
0:59:50 a conversation that typically would have gone like this
0:59:51 or maybe been avoided altogether.
0:59:54 And instead, here’s how the actual conversation went
0:59:57 that was useful for you as a CEO, leader, friend,
1:00:00 whatever husband, whichever example you want to choose.
1:00:02 – Yeah, so the first one is easy actually.
1:00:06 So in most people just don’t have the conversation, right?
1:00:08 So the conversation wouldn’t say, I’m angry,
1:00:11 you would just be angry and you wouldn’t say anything.
1:00:12 – Right.
1:00:13 – And people can tell is the thing,
1:00:16 like when you feel a certain way about someone,
1:00:19 it gets, it leaks, right?
1:00:21 Like there’s a level of,
1:00:23 even if you’re not attending the passive aggressive,
1:00:25 you’re just kind of ignoring the person
1:00:28 or it comes off like you’re like, oh my God, it’s late again.
1:00:29 – Right.
1:00:30 – Right, or he didn’t do this.
1:00:32 And so that’s the default.
1:00:35 And that’s when you have this negative feedback cycle
1:00:38 of well, okay, you already felt a certain way,
1:00:40 then you expressed it unknowingly.
1:00:42 And now the other person thinks you’re angry at them
1:00:44 and now they dislike you more.
1:00:47 And then they do things that you dislike more
1:00:48 because they dislike you more.
1:00:49 And it just gets worse.
1:00:50 That’s what relationships get worse.
1:00:51 And that’s like the default.
1:00:55 And so if you know that it leaks anyway,
1:00:59 then it becomes easier to say, I’m going to express that.
1:01:02 And you’re going to express it no matter what.
1:01:04 Your choice is do you express it with words
1:01:06 or do you express it with not words
1:01:08 but just like passive aggressive behavior?
1:01:13 And so, and then you combine that with everyone is entitled
1:01:14 to know those things so they know.
1:01:17 But they’re not entitled to make things up
1:01:19 about what other people are thinking.
1:01:23 So you are entitled to seeing the same facts
1:01:25 as everyone else seeing the same behavior.
1:01:29 You’re not entitled to read the minds
1:01:31 of some other person and how they’re thinking
1:01:32 and how they’re feeling.
1:01:35 But you’re 100% entitled to share what you’re feeling
1:01:37 because those are facts to you.
1:01:37 That’s reality.
1:01:41 And so the mental model isn’t.
1:01:43 And this is kind of like typical
1:01:44 because people aren’t used to expressing this.
1:01:48 The mental model is like, oh, if I am expressing this emotion,
1:01:50 that means I’m attacking someone.
1:01:52 And that is true if you don’t express the emotion
1:01:54 and you’re just acting it out.
1:01:58 But if I were to say, you know, when I see you do this,
1:02:02 the story I tell myself is that you don’t respect me.
1:02:03 And I don’t know if it’s true,
1:02:05 but this is like what I’m thinking my head.
1:02:08 And because of that, I feel angry.
1:02:12 And I just want you to know that because I don’t,
1:02:13 I don’t know if you know that you,
1:02:16 I know that you probably don’t because you can’t read my mind.
1:02:19 But I’m guessing you probably aren’t intending
1:02:20 to make me feel that way.
1:02:23 And I thought it’d be helpful for you to share,
1:02:25 for me to share that to you so that you are aware of it.
1:02:29 I just learned that technique in therapy last week.
1:02:29 Amazing.
1:02:30 I seriously did.
1:02:33 That’s the nonviolent, nonviolent communication framework, right?
1:02:34 It is, yeah.
1:02:36 It’s very connected to that.
1:02:37 I literally just learned that.
1:02:40 Yeah, you’re sharing information, right?
1:02:42 So it’s not an attack.
1:02:45 Like if you are genuinely doing it,
1:02:48 because you understand that you can’t read their mind,
1:02:50 but of course I can’t read your mind either.
1:02:51 And so by sharing it is,
1:02:53 you’re offering them a gift of the information.
1:02:54 One question is,
1:02:56 you said something about the English language
1:02:57 making it harder.
1:02:57 What did you mean by that?
1:03:01 So what you start seeing when you’re in this class
1:03:03 with these tall people,
1:03:06 and you start realizing that,
1:03:09 oh, like I really only feel closer
1:03:10 and I get to know someone better
1:03:12 when they say I feel emotion.
1:03:13 I feel sad.
1:03:14 I feel angry when this happened.
1:03:18 And I feel distanced when they’re expressing that emotion,
1:03:19 but not saying it.
1:03:21 You can tell on their faces that they’re pissed off.
1:03:23 And it becomes scarier.
1:03:25 So then you start learning that,
1:03:27 oh, I mean to say I feel.
1:03:30 The thing about the English language
1:03:32 is that we say I feel often
1:03:34 without expressing any emotion at all.
1:03:36 And that’s the sort of a quirk
1:03:37 that’s kind of unique to English.
1:03:40 So when you say I feel that,
1:03:41 or I feel like,
1:03:43 it is actually grammatically impossible
1:03:45 for them that sort to be an emotion.
1:03:48 I feel that you’re an asshole is not an emotion.
1:03:51 I feel like this is fucked is not an emotion.
1:03:55 I feel sad is an emotion.
1:03:57 I feel happy is an emotion.
1:03:58 And we’re not used to saying that
1:04:00 because the word feel is used
1:04:03 is has been, you know,
1:04:06 disused, misused for other purposes.
1:04:09 And so we just often is unconsciously.
1:04:11 Once you see it, you cannot see it.
1:04:13 People, I ask people, it’s showed emotion.
1:04:16 And they say, I feel like I feel that.
1:04:17 And it’s never an emotion.
1:04:19 And it’s very, very hard to change the habit.
1:04:20 Do you guys do this?
1:04:22 Where like, Sean, in particular,
1:04:23 I’m curious if you do this,
1:04:25 but do you guys do this where you like,
1:04:27 you get into this type of shit,
1:04:28 whatever you want to call it,
1:04:29 the touchy-feely stuff.
1:04:31 And you’re like, this is the way.
1:04:33 And then like, I get into it.
1:04:36 And then half the time I execute that poorly.
1:04:39 And then like, the business sucks.
1:04:41 And I’m like, I got to have more patience with this person.
1:04:45 Or I got to like, let them get away with shit more or whatever.
1:04:48 And then I just go right back to the total opposite end
1:04:51 where it’s like, what do they call this?
1:04:53 Doge, where I’m like, everyone has 15 minutes
1:04:54 to fight for their job.
1:05:01 Like, you know, like, it’s like, I get influenced by either side.
1:05:02 And I don’t, but there is no middle ground.
1:05:03 And that’s like-
1:05:04 I’m kinda like you?
1:05:08 That the first sign of resistance, I crumble sometimes.
1:05:10 So the, but the version of it that happens for me is,
1:05:12 let’s say I hear this and I’m like,
1:05:15 ah, Seeky just taught me something.
1:05:15 This is great.
1:05:17 Two content tracks, five levels.
1:05:18 I’m in.
1:05:19 I got this.
1:05:20 I’m going level five.
1:05:21 Maybe you don’t even need one through four.
1:05:24 And then I’ll go have the next conversation with my wife tonight.
1:05:28 And I’ll give her like, I feel that.
1:05:31 No, no, I feel upset.
1:05:33 And I know you didn’t mean that.
1:05:35 I tried to do the whole thing and she’s like, what?
1:05:37 And then she doesn’t, she doesn’t know all of this.
1:05:39 She didn’t, because she didn’t go to the seminar
1:05:41 and she didn’t have the skills and the tools.
1:05:42 She’s like, be a mad Sean.
1:05:43 Shut up.
1:05:44 It’s on the front of her mind.
1:05:46 And so she doesn’t play back like the role play
1:05:47 that I had heard was.
1:05:50 And then I’m like, well, I don’t really know the next move.
1:05:53 Okay, revert, revert back to my old asshole self.
1:05:58 Yeah, I mean, that’s not a bad response, honestly,
1:06:02 because I think, I think you have to do whatever works.
1:06:05 And the reality is to get good at this.
1:06:10 You know, it took me, I did this four day program twice
1:06:12 and eat every day was like 12 hours a day.
1:06:14 And you’re just sitting in this circle practice.
1:06:15 Did your wife go with you?
1:06:17 The first time she actually did.
1:06:18 Okay.
1:06:20 So she kind of had a dream.
1:06:20 And we’re not supposed to.
1:06:24 I kind of, no, I kind of smuffled her into the hotel room.
1:06:26 So she didn’t go to the class.
1:06:30 But I will say, like the second night when I went home,
1:06:31 she was like, who are you?
1:06:35 Because I was like, oh my God, I feel so bad.
1:06:36 I’ve been such an asshole.
1:06:38 Dude, this sounds like, have you guys heard of the Hoffman Institute?
1:06:40 Have you heard of this?
1:06:41 I’ve heard of this, but I haven’t been.
1:06:41 Yeah.
1:06:44 Like I have, I’ve contemplated going to it,
1:06:47 but I think they, it’s like, they have a variety of locations.
1:06:50 They have one in Connecticut near me and then they have a Boston one.
1:06:52 But you go for, it’s like not expensive.
1:06:55 It’s like $2,000 and you go for four days
1:06:56 and you can’t bring your cell phone.
1:06:58 You can’t, you’re going to be completely disconnected.
1:06:59 Or maybe it’s even five days.
1:07:00 It’s kind of a lot.
1:07:04 But they like, everyone who I go, who goes to it,
1:07:07 they won’t tell me what happens there,
1:07:08 but they all say that it’s life changing.
1:07:10 And they can now develop relationships
1:07:11 and connections with other people.
1:07:16 It’s one of these really strange things that I’m so tempted to do,
1:07:18 but the amount of time to be disconnected
1:07:21 is very like nerve-wracking or, you know, just like scary.
1:07:22 This sounds very similar.
1:07:24 It does sound pretty similar.
1:07:26 It’s not the time to be disconnected.
1:07:27 That’s the scary part there.
1:07:28 Well, yeah, it is.
1:07:30 Dude, it might even be seven days.
1:07:33 Could you go seven days without a phone away from your family?
1:07:36 Away from your family is a little harder.
1:07:37 Yeah, that’s hard.
1:07:39 Like in a hotel, like it’s like crazy to be disconnected.
1:07:41 But yeah, I don’t want to like, also,
1:07:43 I don’t want to like cry with all the strangers.
1:07:45 Yeah, I don’t want to go that deep.
1:07:46 I’m like, I don’t want to go to Tony Robbins.
1:07:47 I don’t want to see anyone.
1:07:49 I don’t want anyone to see me dancing and singing.
1:07:50 Like, you know what I mean?
1:07:52 Yeah, what’s great about Leaders in Tuck is like,
1:07:55 is there all like, you know, well-known ish founders.
1:07:56 It’s like not cheap to go.
1:07:59 So even worse, be around awesome people.
1:08:04 God, I want to be my most vulnerable self around cool people.
1:08:06 Actually, it’s really helpful because you realize that
1:08:09 all the people that some people that you look up to,
1:08:10 like we’re kind of all the same.
1:08:13 Like there’s very similar insecurities.
1:08:16 Whenever I hear about the stuff,
1:08:17 I think of the Tony Soprano quote where he’s like,
1:08:20 whatever happened to the strong silent type, like Gary Cooper.
1:08:25 I go all down this track and I’m like,
1:08:27 can I just say like, hey, chief, like, hi, bub.
1:08:30 I just know that person only at that amount.
1:08:31 I just say yes or no.
1:08:34 Siki, you have this interview question that I like.
1:08:36 You said my favorite interview question.
1:08:39 After 20 years of doing interviews with people
1:08:41 is what is your greatest strength
1:08:44 that you are most worried about not coming across
1:08:45 in an interview setting?
1:08:47 Why that question?
1:08:50 I think I enjoy breaking the fourth wall.
1:08:53 And interviews tends to be so standardized or formalized
1:08:56 that what my greatest anxiety when I’m interviewing
1:08:58 is like, I’m actually really good at a thing.
1:09:00 And you’re asking me to, you know,
1:09:03 you know, reverse a leak list or something
1:09:05 and it’s just not coming across.
1:09:08 What I find is that it breaks down this deformality
1:09:11 and lets people, gets people excited to talk about
1:09:12 something that they’re really, really good at,
1:09:14 telling great stories.
1:09:17 And you get to know the person just a little bit better.
1:09:20 And I think the particular thing is like,
1:09:21 if you just ask what’s your greatest strengths,
1:09:23 it sounds really formal.
1:09:25 But what is the insecurity that you’re bringing in
1:09:26 that you’re hoping to,
1:09:28 that you’re worried about not coming across an interview setting?
1:09:30 It changes the tone quite a bit.
1:09:32 It’s a great question.
1:09:33 I’m stealing that.
1:09:34 Yeah, that’s a good one.
1:09:37 You know what’s interesting is, so you founded runway,
1:09:42 which is like a very serious business.
1:09:44 Like you’re going to have to hire enterprise people,
1:09:46 I would imagine, enterprise sales people.
1:09:50 Like it’s like a, I’m basing like the future of my company
1:09:51 off of some of the output that I’m going to learn
1:09:52 from your software.
1:09:56 But you have the vibe of like an artist to me,
1:09:58 where like you, you have a variety
1:09:59 of like really intriguing projects.
1:10:03 You’re like this thinker, almost like a philosopher.
1:10:05 Is this new to be doing, like,
1:10:06 is this like a new challenge for you
1:10:09 to be doing something so serious and regimented?
1:10:11 Like an, or can you still be like goofy
1:10:13 and an artist in this B2B world?
1:10:17 So yeah, funny enough, he’s a serious business.
1:10:18 That was the name of my first company.
1:10:20 And we built fun games.
1:10:23 I feel like if you call it serious citizen, you know?
1:10:25 Yeah, because we were a games company,
1:10:26 serious business, fun games.
1:10:32 But yeah, I mean, I think it’s actually a pretty huge advantage,
1:10:35 particularly for the things we consider serious.
1:10:39 So I mean, people have this stereotype of business
1:10:42 and finances being super serious and super rigid.
1:10:46 But finance at its best is really about creating value.
1:10:49 Let’s start looking forward and thinking about new ideas
1:10:50 about how we can push the business forward
1:10:52 and grow faster and all these things.
1:10:54 And in order for us to be creative,
1:10:56 we have to be in flow and things that are fun
1:10:57 keeps you in flow.
1:11:00 And what we actually hear from our customers,
1:11:02 that the thing that we hear quite often
1:11:04 and we love hearing is this software feels fun.
1:11:06 And that’s not a luxury.
1:11:09 That is a fund that creates flow,
1:11:10 that creates a creativity, that creates value.
1:11:13 And when you use something that isn’t fun,
1:11:16 something that feels slow or confusing,
1:11:21 that you’re not creative and you’re making worse decisions.
1:11:24 So I don’t think they’re intentionally with each other.
1:11:25 I think they’re quite complimentary.
1:11:28 And that is like very deeply part of our philosophy.
1:11:29 Have you ever seen this?
1:11:33 Yes, that’s what made me think of that question.
1:11:35 What’s the story of this, Ikki?
1:11:37 This happened last week.
1:11:40 Our marketing team is run by Cal Freeze,
1:11:43 who is a YC founder of a company called Tyka.
1:11:44 He was the CEO there.
1:11:47 And we also have this woman named Julie Fritas,
1:11:50 who was at Shopify.
1:11:54 And I was in the office and I just saw them come out
1:11:56 in a meeting kind of giggling.
1:11:58 And they got out of this piece of cardboard
1:12:01 and started like writing this.
1:12:01 I’m like, what is this?
1:12:06 Like, oh, you know how like you didn’t want to do a billboard?
1:12:08 We decided to just create a billboard ourselves
1:12:09 and just hold on to Freeway.
1:12:12 And I’m like, that is such a cracked idea.
1:12:13 Of course, that’s going to go viral.
1:12:17 And I said, I’ll do it.
1:12:18 It’s like, you really will?
1:12:19 I’m like, yeah, I’ll do it.
1:12:20 So they’re like, okay.
1:12:21 So we walked outside.
1:12:22 We found a Freeway entrance.
1:12:25 And I was just holding the sign.
1:12:27 What does it say, by the way?
1:12:30 It says, if you hate your finance platform,
1:12:31 getrunway.com.
1:12:35 Are you the only founder?
1:12:40 I had a co-founder, Arya Asamonfar,
1:12:42 and he left the company about a year and a half ago,
1:12:43 almost two years ago.
1:12:45 Because that’s like pretty rare.
1:12:47 I mean, I don’t know when you launched,
1:12:49 but I feel like you’re very, very, very, very early
1:12:52 in the period because I remember seeing you guys go on Twitter,
1:12:54 like get popular on Twitter.
1:12:58 That’s going to be pretty different to be kind of a,
1:13:00 the only founder running a company.
1:13:01 That’d be kind of exciting, right?
1:13:02 You get to do whatever the hell you want,
1:13:03 or is it you’re going to be lonely?
1:13:06 I think the reason why we partnered with Waze
1:13:08 is things were just slower to make decisions,
1:13:12 and neither of us were having as much fun as we wanted to.
1:13:14 And actually, I didn’t want him to leave.
1:13:18 Like he is, I mean, he’s still on the board.
1:13:18 I love him.
1:13:24 He’s just the most wise and high-interviewed person I’ve ever met.
1:13:26 He was one of Perox’s peers at Twitter,
1:13:28 and I hired him out of school, my first company.
1:13:30 And he now works for Brett Taylor at Sierra.
1:13:35 But if things were going slower than he wanted,
1:13:37 and he identified that it was him,
1:13:39 or our relationship slowing us down,
1:13:40 he decided to fire himself.
1:13:44 And I didn’t think he was right about that, but he was.
1:13:46 He usually is right about just about everything,
1:13:47 and it totally transformed the company.
1:13:50 He also must have attended interpersonal dynamics.
1:13:51 He did not.
1:13:53 You talked about character AI and CHI,
1:13:55 like some of these AI companies
1:13:57 that are crushing it, just printing money right now.
1:14:00 Are there any other companies that just have blown your mind
1:14:01 in terms of how well they’re doing
1:14:03 or how fast they’re growing right now,
1:14:05 like maybe AI, maybe not AI?
1:14:07 I love the Labs.
1:14:09 I’m just following that story in that company,
1:14:12 but they do basically all of the audio,
1:14:15 translation, generation, sometimes e-fakes.
1:14:18 And when I met them, there were less than 10 people.
1:14:20 They were ex-Google.
1:14:22 They’re working on the foundation of all technology.
1:14:25 And they are now, I don’t know what they last announced,
1:14:30 but they’re in the hundreds of millions of AR in like a year
1:14:31 or two, a year and a half or so.
1:14:35 And what blew my mind is I never seen a group
1:14:38 of very good technologists that were also so good
1:14:41 at commercializing the technology so rapidly.
1:14:44 They’re at hundreds of millions and–
1:14:45 Hundreds.
1:14:46 Hundreds.
1:14:48 I feel like this just came out.
1:14:49 And they’re–
1:14:50 Yeah, but I do know.
1:14:51 We should have invested in half, right?
1:14:53 They dubbed our podcast.
1:14:54 Remember that clip where they were like–
1:14:55 Yes, the Indian Hindi.
1:14:56 You’re speaking Hindi now.
1:14:58 And it was amazing.
1:14:58 And I DMed them.
1:15:00 And we were like, hey, this is really cool.
1:15:03 Like, so stupid of us not to have pursued that more.
1:15:05 Yeah, there’s that graph, right, for Ys
1:15:07 and the fastest growing SaaS companies.
1:15:09 And I think cursor is up there.
1:15:11 I am fairly convinced that I love the Labs.
1:15:13 It’s actually faster than all of them.
1:15:18 But yeah, I think they announced some revenue milestone.
1:15:18 But it’s large.
1:15:20 We were tinkering with them.
1:15:22 It was borderline.
1:15:23 This is cool.
1:15:24 This is cute, too.
1:15:27 I can use this right now.
1:15:30 It was like just there.
1:15:31 So I guess they crossed it.
1:15:33 And people are actually using it to actually–
1:15:34 Who are they selling to?
1:15:35 Is it–
1:15:37 So Apple has audiobooks.
1:15:39 Oh, so not podcast, sorry.
1:15:40 Apple audiobooks, right?
1:15:42 So previously, they did have audiobooks.
1:15:45 And you would know that a lot of this AI generate
1:15:47 is Power By One Labs.
1:15:49 Oh, so they also publishers.
1:15:52 They also do AI agents for customer service
1:15:54 and support agents and things like that.
1:15:56 So they’re the back end of maybe potentially
1:15:57 other software tools as well.
1:15:58 Yeah.
1:16:00 So they have all kinds of product lines.
1:16:01 They sell the book publishers, the Power Agents.
1:16:02 They do–
1:16:04 Why are they better than what OpenAI–
1:16:06 The risk with all these AI companies
1:16:08 is that the general, the base models,
1:16:11 OpenAI and Anthropic, et cetera,
1:16:15 can just offer those capabilities as part of the main suite.
1:16:16 Do they do something different?
1:16:18 Are they fine-tuning it in some way?
1:16:21 No, it’s their own foundational models.
1:16:23 And the quality and expressiveness is just better.
1:16:25 And the form factor is better.
1:16:28 So you can use it for all these other use cases.
1:16:31 And the voice API of the OpenAI is actually not as good.
1:16:33 That way, it’s easily usable.
1:16:34 Dude, you’re super fun to talk to.
1:16:35 I just like hearing all these like–
1:16:40 I feel like you’re like a treasure box.
1:16:41 And I just like pick–
1:16:43 I just grab something out of the toy chest
1:16:44 and be like, tell me the story behind this.
1:16:46 You know what I mean?
1:16:47 I think that’s awesome.
1:16:49 Yeah, thanks for coming on, dude.
1:16:51 And give people a shout out for your company
1:16:53 and where to follow you for more.
1:16:54 Yeah, we’re runway.com.
1:16:57 You can follow me at bladerbladewithanr or runwayco.
1:17:02 And if you are a CFO, you should use our software.
1:17:03 How much did you have to pay for that domain?
1:17:05 A quarter of a million dollars.
1:17:06 That’s not bad.
1:17:08 It’s funny, Nevolvicont named the company
1:17:10 and suggested that we use it under.com.
1:17:12 I think that was smart.
1:17:13 A quarter of a million is not a lot, I feel like, for that–
1:17:15 Wait, what do you mean Nevolg named the company?
1:17:17 Like you went to him being like, hey, what did we name this?
1:17:18 Or he just suggested it?
1:17:22 So when Clubhouse only had one room in April 2020,
1:17:24 it was in the Nevol app, right?
1:17:25 I think you were on it quite a bit, too.
1:17:30 So when I was thinking about what I want to do for next company,
1:17:32 I said I want to do a finance company.
1:17:35 And I got a great name for it, Nevol, CFO.ai.
1:17:36 He’s like, no, don’t call it AI.
1:17:38 It’s going to be dated in like two years.
1:17:39 Everything you call AI.
1:17:42 You should just call it runway and you get the .com.
1:17:45 And he wrote the first track into runway.
1:17:46 And that’s why we got the .com.
1:17:49 It’s so funny that you said it was the Nevol app at the time.
1:17:50 It totally was.
1:17:52 And it was amazing.
1:17:53 It was an app in the open to talking to all Rob got.
1:17:54 It was amazing.
1:17:59 By the way, I was using Air Chat pretty religiously for like two months.
1:18:03 Even though I knew Air Chat’s not going to work, I was like,
1:18:04 oh, it doesn’t matter.
1:18:05 This is Nevol’s app.
1:18:06 He’s going to be on 24/7.
1:18:07 Cool, this is like–
1:18:09 I like to hang out with Nevol.
1:18:12 I’m not going to email him like a million other people and say,
1:18:13 hey, can we get a coffee?
1:18:16 Just a thousand dollars a month and you can talk to Nevol whenever you want.
1:18:17 Yeah, exactly.
1:18:19 I was like, I’m going to be on this for two months.
1:18:22 I’m going to be a power user for exactly two months
1:18:24 and I’m going to hang out with Nevol and that’s exactly what happened.
1:18:25 I was very proud of myself for that.
1:18:27 It was the most fun way to use that app.
1:18:29 Dude, thank you for doing this.
1:18:30 You’re the man.
1:18:32 And we’re thinking of you and your daughter.
1:18:33 And hopefully–
1:18:33 Thank you.
1:18:34 Appreciate it, man.
1:18:34 –the Nevol too.
1:18:35 All right, see you.
1:18:35 Thank you.
1:18:36 That’s it.
1:18:37 That’s the pot.
1:18:39 I feel like I can rule the world.
1:18:41 I know I could be what I want to.
1:18:44 I put my all in it like no days off on a road.
1:18:46 Let’s travel never looking back.
1:18:52 Hey, Sean here.
1:18:54 I want to take a minute to tell you a David Oglevy story.
1:18:55 One of the great ad men.
1:18:58 He said, remember, the consumer is not a moron.
1:18:59 She’s your wife.
1:19:01 You wouldn’t lie to your own wife.
1:19:02 So don’t lie to mine.
1:19:03 And I love that.
1:19:04 You guys, you’re my family.
1:19:05 You’re like my wife.
1:19:06 And I won’t lie to you either.
1:19:09 So I’ll tell you the truth for every company I own right now.
1:19:10 Six companies.
1:19:13 I use Mercury for all of them.
1:19:14 So I’m proud to partner with Mercury
1:19:16 because I use it for all of my banking needs
1:19:19 across my personal account, my business accounts,
1:19:20 and anytime I start a new company.
1:19:21 This is my first move.
1:19:22 I go open up a Mercury account.
1:19:24 I’m very confident in recommending it
1:19:24 because I actually use it.
1:19:25 I’ve used it for years.
1:19:28 It is the best product on the market.
1:19:29 So if you want to be like me
1:19:32 and 200,000 other ambitious founders,
1:19:34 go to mercury.com and apply in minutes.
1:19:37 And remember, Mercury is a financial technology company,
1:19:37 not a bank.
1:19:40 Bank banking services provided by Choice Financial Group
1:19:42 and Evolve Bank & Trust members FDIC.
1:19:44 All right, back to the episode.