AI transcript
and they said, “Well, you shouldn’t confuse revenue for success.”
So I said, “Well, you guys shouldn’t confuse a lack of revenue for success either.”
And then they got kind of upset.
Dude, that’s meaning it goes in the Silicon Valley Autistic Hall of Fame.
What’s up? We got our friend, Siki here, founder of Runway.
Back in the day, built a company, sold it to Zynga,
built another company, sold it to Postmates, has gone viral many times.
And there’s a lot of people in Silicon Valley who you almost…
It’s like a film director.
It’s like, “Oh, they’re working on a new project.
You really want to know what they’re doing?”
That’s you because you do things with taste.
So excited to have you here.
Do you have any good stories from early days of Zynga?
Because you sold a company to Zynga.
Backman Zynga was the shit.
Did you work with Mark Pincus?
What’s he like?
Give me a good Zynga story.
Okay. I have a great story, actually.
How I came to report to Mark Pincus is, actually, it’s not a great story.
I have so many good Mark Pincus stories.
So, yeah, Zynga bought my second company, my first company,
and I joined as a director product under the studio.
Wait, can you give the background up, Mark?
So, Mark’s like a Silicon Valley OG.
Did he help fund Facebook to get off the ground?
Was that his first big hit?
He did.
So, he and Reid Hoffman co-owned,
bought the Six Degrees of Separation Patent from a company of Six Degrees.
And he angel invested in Facebook and but also licensed a patent,
I believe, for more stock into Facebook.
That patent was basically the kind of the social networking patent, right?
Like how we’re connected, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon away from each other.
And I think Reid, there’s some story where Reid and him
realized that if this patent got in the hands of Microsoft or some big company,
that they would be able to squish innovation by a startup,
by like holding this patent over their head.
So, they bought the patent, I believe,
and just decided we’re not going to use it to stop anybody.
And then they, I think, parlayed it into getting extra shares in Facebook.
Which is amazing.
I think that’s what happened, yeah.
So, when I joined, I was a director of products.
And my girlfriend and my wife, who I recently met,
moved to China for some job work thing.
And I was like three months into Zynga.
And I was like, “Oh, I’m not really feeling it.
It’s not that fun.”
So, I told them I was going to resign and move to China.
And they said, “Hey, why don’t we just give you this new job?
You can report to Eric Schreimer when you’re co-founders
and basically be head of product for the company.”
I said, “No, that sounds fun. That sounds great.”
So, I did that.
So, I reported to Eric Schreimer.
He was a co-founder of Zynga.
And what happened is, a month into the job,
Eric Schreimer stopped showing up to work.
Like, wouldn’t start on emails, wouldn’t go to work.
And I was like, “What?”
And basically, that’s when I reported to Mark.
And I was the head of products.
And later, the punchline of the story is,
what I, the reason why he stopped showing up to work
is I later found out that he decided to become a ninja.
That’s a pretty good reason.
That’s not what I thought was going to happen.
He literally, he was like,
he wanted to start a ninja, Dojo.
And he wanted to undergo a ninja training.
And so, when I…
What in the Napoleon Dynamite is this story?
How’s his ninja career now?
I think he started another social games company.
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So, give us at the time, what was Zynga like?
Was it like, was it King of the World at the time?
Or was it on the down spring?
Yeah, I mean, what’s interesting on Zynga is they
hired a bunch of people who used to be investment makers
to be product managers there.
Because it was just all about the numbers going up.
It was Heidi Analytical.
So, I went in and just the amount of like knowledge they had
about growth.
One of the things that really blew my mind to think about a lot
is when I first had a commerce with Mark Pincus
early on, I think maybe during the acquisition,
I asked him, hey, what do you think about this like industry?
It just seems really low moat.
It’s hard to have a competitive moat here
because it’s just so easy to enter or you build a new game
and for it to expand.
And how defensible is it?
And I think about his answer quite a bit
because his, I was like, no, this is great.
I wonder to be more new entrants.
Into the space because it’s free R&D for me.
And I just like, okay, that is, that blows my mind.
That is next level because he was just so confident
in his ability to execute that like anyone who’s kind of
come in with some new idea, they can just like fast follow it
and do a much better job of growing it,
which is like what they did, right?
Formula was in the first fun game.
Poker was the first poker game.
And that they work really, really well,
at least during a Facebook era.
Wait, did he have like Genghis Khan energy
where he was like, is he a conqueror?
Yeah, he did, he did.
I love that.
You know, we were working like 80, 90, 100 hours a week
at Zynga and that was kind of the norm.
It sort of seems like a waste of talent though
to have that conqueror energy
and do it in the lamest way possible.
The Farmville.
Yeah, like Farmville.
Like that’s what he’s like trying to do this on.
Like a few billion dollars, a few billion dollars.
There’s a quote by Max Levchin at the time.
Max Levchin who created PayPal is by all accounts
like a genius computer engineer single-handedly
was like fighting fraud at PayPal and like with,
as a one-man army, like withstood, you know,
the attacks of all of these sort of financial scammers
around the world.
The guy’s brilliant.
And then his next startup I think was Slide.
And it was making like widgets for MySpace and Facebook
where you’d be like slide shows or Superpoke
where you throw like chickens at your friends
when you wake up, you know, by pushing a button
and it just slaps a friend with a chicken
or something like that.
And they go, what was your takeaway from Slide?
Because Slide ultimately didn’t fully work out,
sold to Google I think for a little bit.
But he goes, be really careful what you choose to work on
because everything can be optimized endlessly.
So he’s like, once we got in that,
we could just sit there and optimize
and just get the number of chicken slap per day up.
So, you know, choose wisely.
Should I be optimizing this chicken slapping
or should I be doing something else?
And I’ve always thought about that
because I found myself falling into the same trap.
No matter what I’m doing, if I’m selling little widgets,
my life becomes about selling widgets
and I can optimize that to infinity.
And people do, if you go look at how any company works,
that’s what they’ve done.
They’ve optimized it to infinity.
Dude, when my wife worked at Facebook years and years ago,
I remember like I was talking to all of her coworkers
at a party and I was like, oh, you guys are amazing.
You guys are so smart.
What are you working on?
And they explained it to me, but it boiled down to,
they’re trying to convince Brazilians
to put more stickers on their photos.
Like the, there was like one dog that had a long tongue.
Do you guys remember that fucking dog?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like they’re trying to convince that fucking dog sticker
to put, or the Brazilians.
It was like the face,
it was like the face filter thing when Snapchat came out
and then if you opened up your mouth,
a giant tongue would come out.
Dude, I felt like, and they explained that to,
like I kind of, I was like, wait, so you’re just trying
to get like Brazilians to use more stickers
because they share more photos.
I felt like a cartoon.
It was like, I was like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
What? Like, you know what I mean?
I was like, what are you guys doing?
I also have a Max Levchin and Slides story.
This goes back 17 years,
so I don’t think I’ll mind anymore.
But when I, this is when I first moved to the city
and I had this app on Facebook that was blowing up.
And so some guy who worked with Keith’s Reboy,
Keith’s Reboy was I think the CEO of Slides at the time.
I said, hey, we like your app.
You want to meet, you know, the team.
I said, oh my God, this is amazing.
I mean, you’re out of college.
You can even have Max Levchin.
So I go in and we had a meeting at noon
and I will go to the Slides office and no one was there.
Everyone’s out for lunch.
And I talked to receptionist.
I said, hey, I’m here to meet Max and Keith.
And they’ll like, oh, they’re out of lunch.
They’ll be back in half an hour.
I said, okay, so we slipped there for half an hour.
And then they walk in.
And they act like they kind of forgot there was a meeting.
But we go to a meeting room and we just start talking
about what I wanted to do with this app by build,
whether I wanted to build a dependently
or maybe like join slide.
And they asked me how much I wanted for it.
I said, well, I have a co-founder.
So $2 million, I will probably do it.
The million dollars each, I kind of lasted the number.
I’m like, what?
Like I look for the valuation app data
and like the money we’re generating.
It’s not a huge ass, but it’s fine.
It’s too much.
My friend at Heel built Superpoke, which I recently bought.
And they said verbatim, you know, we bought Superpoke
and he’s easily the 18th or 19th most important person
company now out of a company of like 60 people.
I said, okay, that’s a compelling offer.
And then I said, and I said, yeah,
this is probably not going to happen.
And I said, you know, we’re profitable.
We were making a bunch of money from ads.
So it’s cool if you don’t want to buy it.
And they said, well, you shouldn’t confuse revenue for success.
And at this point, I was just like really upset.
So I said, well, you guys shouldn’t confuse
the lack of revenue for success either.
And then they got like kind of upset.
So then, so then it got really weird.
Oh, I forgot to mention like,
at the start of the meeting,
they said something like, hey, you know,
there’s a recession coming up to each other.
And they’re like, yeah, there’s a recession coming up.
And then he said, I can’t wait to buy all these
shitty companies for cheap.
Like, we’re in the room.
And we’re like, what the hell?
Dude, this meeting, it goes in like
the Silicon Valley Autistic Hall of Fame.
At the end, Keith was like, hey, Keith.
Hey, Max, what was your body fat percentage
in the PayPal days?
And Max was like 8%.
And I was like, yeah.
And I’m like, look, I’m not the fittest person,
but I’m not selling you my company
because he’s like, you’re fitter than me.
Like, what’s happening?
So that was like meeting with them.
But the thing that made it all make sense,
made sense is the next week,
I was talking to one of my friends,
John, who also had a company building out.
And he comes to me at some party.
He goes, Seeky, man, like,
you won’t believe this.
So I just had a meeting with Sly last week.
I’m like, really?
He’s like, yeah, it was so weird
because he started a meeting talking
about how there’s a recession coming up.
And all these companies are cheap.
I was like, oh my God, it’s a script.
It was.
In episode one of this podcast,
I think my buddy, Sully, told almost the same story.
He goes, he gets invited to slide.
He says to Max and Keith.
And what they said was they were like,
you should, we want to hire you.
And he’s like, I don’t really want a job.
Like I have my apps, good.
I thought you wanted to like maybe buy it or something.
And then he opened the door and he goes,
you see all those guys out there?
They’re going to build your app in like six days
if you don’t take this offer.
And he was like, okay, I’m not interested
in this even more now.
This is horrible.
My app is stupid.
What he said, he goes, his app at the time
was called Superlatives.
It was like, you would name your friend
like most likely to go to jail or something.
He’s like, you’re threatening me
that you’re going to take my app?
I think my app is stupid.
The fact that you think my app is cool
makes me think you’re stupid.
That’s what he thought in his head.
Siki, who did you meet?
I love talking to people who have been
around a bunch of these folks
before they kind of quote made it.
Who is a tycoon or a big shot now
that you’re shocked by because of when you knew them
when you guys were both younger,
you’re like, oh, I can’t believe they actually developed
into such an amazing business person.
I don’t know that I met a lot of people
who weren’t great other than I think were great
that were huge later.
Who’s someone you met that wasn’t huge then
but you knew and why did you know?
Oh, yeah. I mean, Drew Houston.
When did you meet him?
He started Dropbox.
10 people.
It was late 2007 or early 2008.
And we were just talking about growth.
So like they had this like college referral plan.
So Drew Houston, I mean,
Anish who’s General Permanent Andreessen,
like he was just a founder building apps on mobile phones,
right?
And he would come to my office and we’d talk about it.
Oh, probably the best one is Chris Wonstrasth.
Who’s that?
He’s co-founder of CIO GitHub.
And he was a contractor at Powerset,
which was like this job I took when I first moved to the city.
But he was actually a contractor for my first company,
Sirius Business.
He, I had him build this translation layer
between Facebook Markup Language
and MySpace Markup Language.
Just like after and he was really good at it.
And I distinctly remember that we were at 21st Amendment.
Yeah, or actually a brewery doesn’t matter.
But I gave him a full-time employee planning offer
in early 2008.
And he was considering it.
And the same night, when we’re talking about it,
he said, you know, DHH just put rails on GitHub.
And so I think I might work on GitHub full-time.
And I was thinking in my head and I was like,
the smart thing for me to do is actually shut down my
Facebook Games business and go work for you.
But I didn’t say that.
Have you had any massive angel investment wins
because you’re around the hoop for so long?
And so in early?
Yeah.
I mean, the best one by far is Amplitude.
And that one was, I was introduced through actually,
yeah, someone at Zynga, Matt Akka,
who runs Data Collective now.
And he introduced me a very first angel investment
after I sold to Zynga.
And that like 10X in like 12 months.
And so I was playing with PlayMoney up after that.
And he introduced to his team that we ended up
being the fourth customer for analytics platform.
It’s now Amplitude.
And we used it.
We thought this is great.
This is the best thing we thought we’ve seen
since the Zynga internal tools.
And I managed to get into the seed round and that IPO
that, you know, we ended up being a 400X return on that,
which is pretty great.
Amazing.
Let’s jump in with ideas, opportunities.
You’re an idea guy.
What do you think are some cool ideas or opportunities
that you would want to be working on right now?
So I built a Zapier and it’s basically categorizes my emails
with GPD4 into different labels.
So I have this very long prompt and automation.
And I also use a protocol same box,
which also does something similar to filters by emails.
But there’s been no good version of email manager software
that I’m able to customize the prompt and train it.
So I want to say, hey, here’s the things related to my kids.
And there’s no keywords necessarily.
You can, you know, have to kind of read it.
It’s like some email to my babysitter or an email from the school.
And if it’s related to my kids, I want you to put it in this folder.
And the idea is I want an inbox for like these different contexts.
And so people are doing different kinds of email categorization.
What’s missing is there’s no way to train it.
So I think building some way for you to, for a product
to understand all of the content about your life
and organize your stuff starting with inbox
will be really handy for me.
And I’ve seen at least 12 companies do this
and no one has done a really great job of it.
I just tested this product.
Have you guys heard of this?
I can’t think of the name right now.
But it was this thing where I, it sounds insane
where it recorded my screen for weeks at a time
and it would see how I’m typing what I’m saying to people.
And it would give me feedback on the productivity of my day
and how I can improve it.
Have you guys seen this?
It started with an R, I think.
Is it called a?
Elect or something?
Isn’t it rescue time?
No, go Sean, you’re right.
It’s sort of, the guy who started it’s like a,
he’s like a guy.
He’s like been around.
Yeah.
He was doing like a pendant or something, right?
At one point and then now it’s a.
Oh, rewind then.
Rewind.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rewind.ai, is that it?
Yeah, they stopped working on it.
Now it’s called limit listeners working on the pendant now.
Yes, I was tinkering with Rewind
and the promise, it’s not there yet.
But the promise of this is, was amazing.
I was like so into this.
And it’s kind of describing what you’re just explaining
because we’re having to use Zapier and OpenAI
or CHBT to like kind of duct tape this all together.
Their premise was amazing.
And that is exactly what I’m looking for.
I got a third one, which is like a lot spicier.
But you know, like this is not a ventrubacable thing,
but you know, just character AI and Chai
and all of these like chatbots.
The really people are using for sexy chats.
I think like someone could,
and these things print money by the way,
like they immediately generate millions of dollars a month.
I thought if I were just in it just to like print money,
the thing I would make is something that is kind of like tender.
But basically everything is AI generated.
So it’s not like, oh, you’re creating a robot,
but it’s a fake dating app where everyone is attractive
and is super into you.
And then you can like then you can go off of your Tinder app
and go on Instagram and there have an Instagram account
on actual Instagram is owned by the,
the person that you met on your fake Tinder app.
Siky, do you know who Tai Lopez is?
He’s like the guy who had the infomercial
that was like here in my garage.
I do know who he is, yeah.
So Tai one accused, he came on MFM years ago
and an accusation that I learned about him
based off of the comments on YouTube
is that years and years before he was whatever
he was famous for, he owned dating apps.
And the accusation was that all of the users were completely fake
and that it was guys in the Philippines like running it
and doing exactly what you’re describing.
That’s true of the majority of dating apps.
What do you mean?
That’s just like standard offer day procedure.
Like plenty of fish, you know, like a seeking arrangement.
Like that is their business model.
They’re like outsourced men acting as women.
Yeah, there’s also like the webcam industry.
Like they up until open AI,
the companies with the most advanced AI technology
is going to be one of these companies
because they are better at creating chatbots than anyone.
They have the most advanced technology.
I’m not kidding.
Like I know people who work there or run it.
They’ve just developed better chatbot technology than anyone
in GBT.
That’d be so funny if that’s where AGI starts actually.
It’s not open AI.
It’s none of these labs.
It’s like whatever.
Some of these like webcam sites.
That’s not a crazy idea.
I mean, isn’t that how it typically has been
where a lot of the like the vice industries
are the ones pushing the envelope?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, it’s transformative for only fans, right?
Like I don’t know if you read, but like there’s,
you know, you’re a big influencer on only fans
and you have an army of a hundred people
who are like typers or chatters, right?
And the funny thing about them is they’re not just chatters
that are flirting.
They’re also basically salesmen.
So what they’re doing is they’re chatting
to try to upsell you until they get by this video,
by this photo.
I don’t know exactly.
By the subscription, whatever the thing is,
but they’re not just customer support.
They’re actually sales, but they need to come across
like they’re the original person, which is just hilarious.
What do you think that office environment is like?
So I know someone who works in that and it’s just normal.
It is like the most boring, cubicle,
normal office environment that you’ve ever seen.
That’s almost better than if it was weird.
The other thing with the dating apps,
I think that they did was I remember seeing the study
about match.com.
Because if you were a guy on match.com,
you would basically send out, you know, 30 messages
and you’d get, you know, one back or whatever.
And what they would do is they realized that
a lot of guys’ accounts would go inactive
because they’re not getting replies.
And so what they would do is they would basically send,
they would show an active person, 30 inactive profiles,
knowing that that inactive person is not there to reply,
but that that will be the notification for that person
to come back and reactivate their subscription.
They have to pay to go read their inbox and to be able to reply.
And so it’s almost intentionally a horrible experience
for the person who’s there trying to find somebody
in order to reactivate all the churned members.
And they would do, they would basically,
in a, the first hundred matches that they would show you,
you know, something like 50, 60, 70% of those matches
were all just inactive people.
They wanted you to send a notification to,
to make them come back.
That sounds like a Zynga train PM.
Dude, I went to the Zynga office once back in the like Heyday.
It was the craziest office I’ve ever seen.
Sam, did you ever go to this thing?
Yes.
It was right, it was like, it shared a building
or it was next door to Airbnb and it had a huge bulldog
in the front, right?
And I think at one point, I think they owned the building
and I think the building was worth at one point
more than the company, like, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars.
Why, what did you think of the office, Sean?
Well, you would go in, there’s a giant tunnel,
like an LED tunnel you would walk through just to enter.
And then when you’re there, first of all, there was dogs everywhere.
And it was like everybody, it was bring your dog to work.
There was just like herds of dogs running around.
It was insane.
And we met the chef and the chef, like the food operation was more sophisticated.
Just the cafeteria was more sophisticated than any company
that I’d ever been a part of.
Like just the food part was better than my actual company.
So like they had a staff of 60 people on the culinary team.
They had a roof on the top where they were growing all the vegetables.
He had like a giant fridge that was like the size of like a swimming pool
you’d walk in and there was cows hanging upside down
because they had their own butcher process.
They didn’t serve soda.
They only brewed their own sodas.
Like everything was soup to nuts custom.
And like just so insanely sophisticated for a cafeteria program.
I was like, man, if the food is like this,
I don’t even want to know what the actual teams that do the work are.
And I walked into one PM thing and it was like a stock market.
Dude, his screen had so many metrics fine-tuned in real time
where they were running so many tests at a time.
And it was like you said, Siki, like it looked to me from the outside,
like the most data-driven operation I had ever really seen.
You know, I knew about what we did,
but what we did looked like caveman compared to what they were doing
in terms of sophistication of data.
The food thing reminds me like I was the person
who did the dishes for us to serve real bacon.
And after a few months, we finally started to serve real bacon
because we never had real bacon.
It was only turkey bacon because, you know,
Mark Pincus didn’t like to kill pigs.
But yeah, like one of the things that people did at Zynga
in the product organs, we had PM on call.
And I’ve never seen this on any other organization.
The PM on call for every game would daily send an analysis
of what changed day over day.
And so if there’s a drop, then you would segment it.
And so, oh my god, there’s like an anonymous 50% drop in Mexico for Farmville.
And we are not sure why because usually on Wednesdays at two,
it shouldn’t be like this.
And it lasts three hours long.
And they would have to explain,
oh, it’s because a World Cup is happening.
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All right, back to the episode.
What comes first?
We are with Mr. Beast a few weeks ago.
And I had the same question,
but he wasn’t able to articulate or answer it.
What comes first when you’re that data or analytic oriented?
Are you that way and scale comes because of that?
Or can you only behave that way because you have scale?
So it depends on the environment.
If it’s a data-friendly environment like Facebook is,
then like Facebook platform is,
where virality lets you grow from zero to a billion,
then data is all that matters.
But you could see in the experience of Zynga
that that didn’t translate to the mobile industry.
Mobile was less about virality.
It was just difficult to do your distribution.
A lot more about creativity.
And that’s why Supercell had such a creative advantage
because they actually built very fun new games.
So I think it’s the completely dependent environment.
If it’s hard to get early distribution,
then scale makes data more important.
But if it’s quite difficult to get early distribution,
then you want to be creative and innovative and brand
and creativity that matters a lot more.
Do you remember any like random game change,
like color red to blue or flashing lights or whatever
that just generated like $10 million overnight?
I always remember thinking that like the best way
to generate $30 million overnight is just to like say,
hey, it’s going to take you $10 just to unlock the game today.
Like we could just like make it not payable and people would pay.
One of the more interesting ideas is this idea of crew.
So we had this idea of collecting materials
and you ask people materials.
One of the mechanics that we invented as Zynga
is this idea of crew where you,
for whatever thing you want to unlock,
you have to get at least like 20 people to help you,
unique people, because what that did is,
what we saw in the data is that when you do materials,
you ask the same two people over and over again.
But if we have a unique spread,
then that increases the distribution.
And that ended up being like a pretty large boost in the AUs.
Another thing that we saw is like just the power of segmentation.
And so there was this one day where our numbers went down
anonymously and I had to figure out,
well, is it like this channel or that channel?
It turns out there was one particular typo bug
in the drop rate of this particular treasure
that was creating a lot of opportunities for people to share.
And so you just spend all day doing things like that.
And so it’s rarely something like huge,
but it’s all the details added together
that makes a difference in Zynga.
What were the other business ideas or opportunities
that you think are exciting right now?
Yeah, I mean, I actually asked Sam Altman to make this,
but I don’t know how long they’re going to take,
but I’m doing a lot of medical research.
Wait, what?
What did you say?
Yes, Sam Altman to make this product, he said.
Oh, I thought you were like,
“Oh, you had Sam Altman make a list for you to talk about.”
I was like, “That’s it.”
No, oh, no, no.
We’re not that tight.
But no, I was doing a bunch of medical research
and I noticed that you can’t access paywall articles.
And so I really wish someone would make a version
of deep research that lets you
enter your paywall credentials.
So you can get full access.
And this goes further, I think.
There’s just so much data behind
offwalls, paywalls that you can’t get to
and you can only search on the open web.
And the more private data you can get access to,
the more useful these ages become.
So that’s probably the number one thing
I’ve been thinking about recently.
What’s the name of the company that starts with an R?
It’s based in England.
Sean, we’ve talked to him a bunch.
It’s like an acronym.
Anyway, it’s an academic publishing company in England.
And it’s really controversial
because I think it has the second highest profit margin
of all publicly traded companies in the world
behind public storage.
And the shtick behind it and why everyone hates it
is because researchers at universities
don’t get paid anything for this.
In fact, oftentimes they have to pay tuition
in order to even go to these places.
But they take your research and they put it behind
like a $30,000 a year paywall.
And so it’s a very frustrating industry.
Yeah, that’s the whole industry, right?
Elsevier, I think, is the biggest one.
And there’s a bunch of controversy around that.
And yeah, all of these are extremely hard.
Our margin businesses, they charge an arm and a leg for access.
The researchers get paid nothing.
The peer reviewers get paid nothing.
All they’re doing is just like taking the text
and copy and pasted it and putting it somewhere
and maybe printing it into a journal.
So how would this work?
You’re talking about like you told Sam Altman to say,
“Hey, can I just give ChatGPT my credentials
and then it can go log in for me
and use that information when I ask it questions.”
So that’s it.
ChatGPT would have to do it.
How could a founder–
Well, how would a founder get around that?
Or how would they do this?
Yeah, I mean, you wouldn’t need access to O3,
the full model first, because that’s what OpenReach search
is based on.
But I mean, it’s not terribly difficult
to create something like a deep research.
There was a company called–
There is a company called GenSpark.
So I’m friends with the founder, GenSpark.
He’s through the VP of Search at Baidu,
which is the Google of China.
And they made a version of Deep Research
just using a different model.
And so that’s relatively easy to build.
I think the storage of the credentials and logging in
is a little bit more tricky.
Right.
It also just seems like somebody could just create
like SciencePowl or something like that.
It’s specifically for researchers.
And it’s a ChatGPT-like interface,
but it’s specifically trained on or going
to access all of the journals,
all of the academic research out there for you,
and just do a vertical thing.
Isn’t there a Google for doctors that’s like this,
like Lumos or something like that?
There is.
So I’m deep in the space.
There is a company called Ellicit.
There’s a company called SciSpace.
And what they allow you to do is they let you
search abstracts where available.
And also you can upload individual PDFs too,
which also ChatGPT allows you to do.
But there’s nothing I’ve seen that’s indexed
as the full text of all these journals with your credentials.
And why are you so interested in,
what’s all this research for?
Is it your daughter?
And if it is, what’s the story behind that?
Yeah, so my daughter was diagnosed
with a rare brain tumor last September.
And we’ve been doing everything we can
to find new treatments for this because it’s so rare.
And you really get deep insight into the sentence
and the structure of the medical community.
And one of the big learnings is that what is available
as standard of care, meaning that’s what’s available
if you go to a hospital or you talk to a doctor,
and what is available at the frontier,
there’s a huge gap already.
And then further, when you have a rare disease,
just amount of research and data and treatments available
is also just thin.
Because you need to have enough critical mass
for the research to be worth it
so they can recoup the research costs.
And the other interesting thing that we’ve learned
is that the IP issues are really weird.
So for example, there’s this drug
that is FDA-approved, non-prescription,
has been out since the ’70s, treat pedwarns.
And over the past 20 years,
there’s a huge amount of compelling data
that this might be a pretty good treatment
for different kinds of cancer.
And there’s been no clinical trials for it
because there is no money for it
because you can’t patent a pinworm drug.
And so all of the money, hundreds of millions,
billions of dollars are going to new molecules
that are patentable, even if things are already available.
And so once you get into this, you’re like,
“Wow, this is super, super broken.”
And so, yeah, I’m doing a lot of primary research
in order to find repurposed drugs that might already exist
that could treat this fairly rare brain tumor.
It’s… Obviously, this is super serious
and I’m sorry you’re going through everything.
But also, there’s an interesting logistical thing of like,
“Wait, so you are able just to research potential cures
or ways to help your daughter on your own
and come up with a solution?
I mean, is that what you hope the outcome is?”
Yeah, I mean, so there’s…
I’m not the first founder type who’s been in the situation.
So the co-founder of Clubhouse, Rohan,
his daughter has a reintroducted disease.
Her name’s Lydia and he runs the Lydia Foundation.
And he’s going so far as manufacturing his own drugs, right?
For very rare diseases, you can do a lot.
There is other people have met with that somewhere things,
like end-of-one cures exist.
And so you can go…
This is what I mean, like, if you’re sufficiently motivated
and there’s no one more motivated than a dad with a sick kid,
you can go so much further
than what is available as standard of care.
And so even the last time we met with our primary care team,
they were proposing two particular paths,
one involving pretty aggressive surgery and radiation,
another involving this drug.
I proposed a third path and they were discussing it.
And this is like, neurosurgeons and clinicians,
they came back a week later as like,
“Actually, your path thinks more sets.”
And the reason I was able to do that is because this disease is so rare,
I am more knowledgeable about disease than anyone in the room
because they have to like study 50 different cancers, right?
Wow, that’s pretty incredible.
Also, my experience has been that the doctors,
once you get off of the kind of standard of care,
and this is maybe, I’m projecting just from like,
and I just had a knee injury and I was asking the doctor,
I was like, “Hey, like, would PRP or stem cells?
Like, is there anything, should I take…
What’s a peptide?
Can I put a peptide in there?”
And he’s like, “You know, there’s not a lot of evidence,
you know, that’s not part of the protocol.”
Right.
“You don’t have great evidence.”
And he was sort of like, “My hands are tied.”
He’s an orthopedic surgeon.
He’s just like, “You know, my hands are…
I can only recommend what I can recommend.
You could do those things.”
I don’t know.
And so then I felt like, you know, I’m on my own here.
Have you, once you do this path,
are you just outside of the medical system?
Basically, are you outside of your standard chain of command
with your doctors and you have to get your own system set up?
That’s a great question.
And I’ve had an almost similar conversation
in the last meeting I was just describing.
And so I thought I’d play out in real time.
So the neurosurgeon said, “Hey, when we did this operation,
when we did it for this reason,
do it for some other reason.
It’s not part of the standard care.”
But our primary clinician, she is like, she runs…
He’s a principal investigator, one of the clinical trials.
The only one of two that treats the disease.
And she was like, “Yeah, you’re right.
We don’t have a lot of evidence because
there hasn’t been a lot of research into the tumor.”
And so sometimes you have to argue for first principles.
And if it’s a fairly rare disease,
they’re more open to being more creative.
And in our case, our clinician was able to convince
the neurosurgeon this was the right path,
or at least it’s worth trying.
And she told us she was excited to have a partner
who seems well-informed and is willing to think outside of the box.
And I straight up said, “I do not care what the standard of care is.
I think the standard of care is crap.”
And she basically said, “Yeah, I think so too.
I just can’t say that.”
Right.
Dude, and that’s pretty cool that you’re in San Francisco too,
where hopefully you think that the early adopter mindset
even trickles out to the doctors and things like that.
That’s pretty cool that you’re around a doctor
who’s willing to try some crazy stuff
or would seem crazy to a lot of people.
So to answer Sean’s question, if you do find your own drug,
you do have to show enough research
and be well-informed enough
that someone is willing to prescribe it off-label
on a compassionate use basis.
And so you just seem to convince a one doctor.
And so if you can’t find one, you can find others
who’s willing to do that and then you’re in the clear.
And it’s a lot easier if it’s like a fairly serious rare disease.
Can you tell the story about,
you tweeted out about your daughter’s condition,
and then this crazy crypto turn of events happened
where someone created a coin and then millions,
maybe tens of millions.
I don’t even know how much money was raised.
And then people got mad at you.
People were speculating on this thing.
I don’t even understand it.
Can you explain what was going on?
And also just explain, is this just,
was there just degenerate gambling?
Or did you maybe stumble upon a novel way
that people might fund research in the future?
I don’t know which one of the two it is.
Yeah, I think I have a better idea which one it is
after some reflection on it.
So explain what happened.
Yeah, Christmas, I was going to Japan
to ski with some friends and the family.
And I was on a flight and I had a plan
to start to go fummy for this lab.
The Hankison Lab in the University of Colorado.
So we were donating money to them once this happened
because they were the only lab in North America
that researched this particular tumor
called the craniopharyngeoma.
And the treatment that we’re on, they found.
So I thought, okay, for Christmas,
I thought it’d be great to do a GoFundMe
use my network and raise some money for this lab.
So I tweeted this thread with this GoFundMe link,
and that we ended up raising about a quarter million dollars
for a lab, which is like,
I think the biggest donation up to that point.
But what happened is some people started asking about,
hey, can I donate crypto?
And so I said, okay, I posted my ENS, right?
My Ethereum name system address.
And people started donating a little bit of ETH.
And then some other people said,
hey, do you have a Sol address because we’re on Solana?
And I didn’t have a Sol address.
I was aware what Solana is, but I never touched it.
And so the next day, once I landed,
I created my first Solana wallet,
I created this address, and I tweeted it out.
And basically what happened–
By the way, are you big in the crypto world?
Why were all the crypto guys doing this for you
just because what’s the motivation other than it’s good?
So it didn’t occur to me.
I thought it was people–
I had like 77,000 followers at a time.
And I’m not as big in the crypto world.
I’ve been on and off active in crypto since 2017,
but never in a major way.
I’m not a crypto account that people follow.
But I found out why people did this later.
And this answers the question of Sean,
like, is this gambling or is this something else?
But anyway, I posted a Sol Sol address,
and basically an hour later, I looked at my wallet,
and the wallet said $400,000, and it was zero an hour before.
So I’m looking at what is going on, and it turns out–
So someone created a coin called unpub.fund,
which is a platform where you can create a coin
in literally like 30 seconds.
And I was on ETH, right?
And I have an active in crypto.
This wasn’t a thing.
Creating a new token on Ethereum was like a whole process.
Now they shorten it to 30 seconds.
This is called a pump.fund.
Is that–
Pump.fund, yeah, it’s crazy.
Have you seen this business, by the way?
No, that’s like–
This guy’s made like $500 million a profit last year.
Like more than that, I think.
And more than that, yeah.
And so you click a button and you make your own coin,
and obviously in the name, there’s no hiding
that the point of this is that it’s a pump.
Scheme, pump and dump scheme, right?
They made $500 million?
At least, at least.
That’s their take, specifically.
That’s their take.
This is like the majority of the traffic on Solana.
And so people are basically creating these new coins
and trading them, trying to write it,
and it’s basically musical shares, right?
Have you guys gone to this website?
It’s crazy.
It looks like a GeoCity website.
Like there’s like flashing banners.
This is insane.
It’s all the time.
It’s all real time.
Like yesterday, during the Super Bowl, somebody created,
and for Dave Poitnoy, they set a bar stool.
A jail coin?
Jail stool.
A jail stool.
And a jail stool ran up to like $100 million
or something like that.
$200 million.
Like he said, it’s musical shares.
So you’re buying, trying to catch one of these 1000X waves,
but it’s going to dump, and you just got to know
when you’re going to get off the train.
And then if you wait too long,
or you’re the one who comes in late, you lose.
So it’s like being at a roulette table or whatever,
where you’re just throwing chips at the table,
trying to hit.
Oh my God.
Yeah, it’s like the Trump coin, except you can create it
in like 10 seconds, 30 seconds.
But anyway, that’s why people created this coin
is because you’re looking for these new narratives
to gamble on, right?
And the more interesting, the more viral
seeming a narrative is, the more valuable it becomes.
And if you’re in art early, it could really pump.
So anyway, it was $400,000.
And I tweeted a screenshot.
There’s a whole tweet sort of thread where I was like,
“What is going on?”
And I kept on adding this to the tweet thread
with screenshots on my wallet.
And so it was $400,000.
I was like, “What is happening?”
And people were trying to explain to someone
who created this coin called Mira.
And there’s a billion tokens.
And they sent me, “Someone bought half the supply
and just sent it to my wallet.”
So I had 500 million tokens.
And once I tweeted, then an eye check again.
And it’s now $4 million.
And I’m like, “What?”
And an hour later, it’s eight.
A couple hours later, it became 15.
And a one point was $20 million, just like the same day.
And I got like $40,000.
The market cap, and the market cap of the whole thing,
that means was $80 million.
Correct.
Okay.
No, no, I think peak market cap was around $60 million.
Okay.
And you had $40 million of it.
Yeah, because I sold 10% immediately
just to like capture something.
And I sold a bit more in the liquidity pool.
So, you know, I got around a million dollars out,
but I still owned 30% of it.
And immediately I was, I said,
“Okay, I don’t know what I’m gonna do with it,
but every dollar in my wallet is going to charity.
This is non-profit, it’s not for me.”
Not just charity, going to the research lab.
Going to research lab.
That’s researching the potential course
to your daughter’s thing.
Okay, correct.
So I said, “Hey, I’m not gonna move anything
with our 25 hours notice.
I’m gonna try to like be very transparent about this.”
And I thought about it and I said,
“I’m gonna start selling $1,000 every 10 minutes
until like we’re done
because I just don’t have time to run a crypto project.
And, you know, like I want everyone to know where this is going.”
So that happened and the price started going down.
But once we got to a million,
what happened in between is because it was such a big story,
a bunch of rare disease organization started reaching out to me.
And they’re like, “Wow, this happened to you.
Can we, how do we get in on this?”
Because…
They’re like, “Did you say ‘pump.fun’?”
Okay.
Because an average budget,
annual budget for one of these organizations
was like $100,000, $150,000.
It’s just like not a whole lot of money.
This is like more money than the community’s ever seen.
It’s a lot of excitement there.
So I thought, well, I was talking to some crypto friends
and I thought, “Okay, how do we make this like a thing?
And maybe we can make this more sustainable, long-lasting.”
And this idea turning Mira into a launchpad
for other rare disease tokens,
where Mira’s a liquidity pair token was talked about.
And so I thought, well, okay, that seems interesting.
Before I do that,
I should probably figure out how a coin works
and how you launch one of these.
So I went on pump.fun and I thought,
“Okay, let’s find out how one of these works.”
So I created a coin called Zero and I entered a description
for the coin because you could do that.
I said, “Hey, don’t buy this coin.”
It literally says, “Don’t buy this coin.
It’ll never be worth anything.
I’m never going to do anything with it.
It’ll be worth $0.”
So I pressed a button and what I didn’t realize
is because I was on Ethereum for a long time,
but I never had a watch wallet,
what happened is I was in the background,
the most watch wallet at crypto.
So within about 100 to 200 seconds,
the market cap of this coin
that I told people to not buy in the description.
Sorry, a watch wallet.
Does a watch wallet mean that you are someone
that should be monitored because you’re a potential whale?
Yeah, people start tracking like,
“Oh, what is Vitalik doing with his wallet?
What is, what is…”
People are copying.
Someone’s so good with their wallet.
People want to copy what you’re doing.
And they think that you’re the man
because your wallet is old or you have a lot in it.
Because I was sort of the main character
of crypto Twitter for a few days.
Got it, okay, understood.
So there were copy, there were bots
like just monitoring what I was doing
and buying whatever I was buying.
And so they saw this new token.
And so within 100 to 200 seconds,
the market cap of this token was three and a half million dollars.
So I was just sitting there like panicking.
And I said, “Okay, I don’t, this is bad.
I don’t want to have anything to do with this.”
So I had half of the entire supply and I sold it.
And that was my main mistake.
I should have burned it,
which everyone would have been happy about, right?
But because I sold, I crashed the price of this token.
And people got very upset because it was considered a rug.
So now like, “Oh my God, everyone’s…”
And when I sold, I made like $80,000
because even those three and a half million dollars
in market cap is only about $100,000 or so in liquidity.
And yeah, I started a thread explaining,
“Oh my God, I didn’t expect this to happen.
I got on spaces over video.
Just like, I’m really sorry.
I’m like, still trying to figure out how this works.”
And you know, people don’t did it care.
And what I realized is just a different community
than it was when I was really active on Twitter in 2017.
Like people aren’t Ethereum.
They’re like very deep tech to people, right?
They’re like nerdy.
And with the Solana in 2024,
I didn’t realize like it’s so much more mainstream.
A lot of people maybe have like $50 or $100
and they’re just trying to turn into $1,000.
And so the amount of the motion there is like very, very different.
Crypto transition from neckbeards to like everybody
who looks like Jack Harlow in like four years.
The community, the Solana community,
all has like the line etched into the,
into like the side of their haircut or like multiple.
It’s very different than like the people
that got me into Ethereum in the first place.
Today I learned or this month I learned.
So anyway, the markout three and a half million
before I sold, it dumped at 300,000.
And as I started talking about my mistake,
the market cat came back and at one point
it was like five and a half, $6 million.
Just because I was like talking about it
and people were just, the more upset people were,
the more the coin pumped and more money people made from the coin.
So they were trying to make it like even more dramatic,
which I didn’t really understand in time.
I just thought I messed up and people were really upset at me.
So anyway, so then that was like the main villain turn
on Twitter and everyone was super upset at me
because they saw me as a scammer.
So I thought about what am I going to do with this?
So first of all, like the $80,000 within a minute,
I realized this is a mistake.
So I bought back in into the coin and I burned it all, right?
So I already was like neutral and I explained that.
No one cared because of the anonymity of crypto.
They thought I had like a hundred other wallets
that was like, that I pumped and dumped on any profit there
and I can’t prove otherwise.
So I decided like this is really shitty
and I don’t want any part of it.
So what I decided to do is I got some help from, you know,
friend, he’s a coin base from other people
who didn’t want to be named to do on-chain analysis.
So what I set on space is I’m actually just going to pay everyone
back who lost money on this out of my own pocket.
And I’ve even touched a cherry wallet.
So what we ended up doing is everyone who held
in the first 200 seconds, who owned any coins then,
up until the point 43 minutes later,
where the market cap fully recovered back to the same value.
If you sold and you realized the loss,
I’m just going to airdrop you sold.
And it ended up being like $104,000 to $50,000 out of my own pocket.
And I just paid everyone back,
which has never happened on any pump fund coin before.
And maybe like 10% of the people have heard about this.
I tweeted about it.
I had to like keep on responding.
Because every time I tweet for the next like month,
someone would say, “Oh, you’re a scammer.
What are you still doing here?”
And I had to say, “No, I paid everyone back.”
And they would just like not say anything.
This is like a crypto Larry David like thing.
Like it’s like, this is like you’re walking through Times Square
and one of those fake monks put like a bracelet on your wrist.
And then like it now expects you to give them like $20.
It says, even though we called it a free gift,
like this is just, this is insane.
So how much did you end up giving to the charity?
Yeah. So between GoFundMe, so as a million dollars from crypto,
and just like I locked a bunch of the mirror coin
into a liquidity pool.
So it’s sort of still perpetually generating.
So you bought a million dollars of charity for $150,000 basically.
That’s correct. Yeah.
And then we, the total was like a 1.4 million.
We donated more to match like the mistake.
And we added a GoFundMe to it.
So ended up being 1.4 million.
And then the lab actually like triple leveraged it up into the coin.
They got hooked on pumped off on.
All right. I got a public service announcement
for all the tech founders that are listening to this.
Listen, job number one for you is to get customers.
And ideally the bigger the customers, the better.
And I know when I was trying to do that,
we would get somebody interested.
Oh man, there’s a big Fortune 500 company
or it’s a company that’s raised hundreds of millions of dollars.
They want to work with us.
This is so exciting.
And then we hit the wall
and the wall was the security and compliance team.
And all of a sudden we could not land our biggest customers
just because we were shooting ourselves on the foot
by not being security ready and compliant.
And so if you want to solve this, use Vanta.
Vanta is an all in one solution.
It helps you get audit ready.
And it’s quick, it’s painless, it’s easy.
They’re the number one guys doing this.
There are 8,000 companies that use them.
YC companies use them.
We use them.
And so if you want Vanta to help simplify
your security and compliance program
to help you streamline anything,
take all those manual security tasks
and automate them.
You should use Vanta.
If you listen to this,
you guys should get $1,000 off of Vanta too.
So we got a deal for you.
Go to Vanta.com/million.
That’s V-A-N-T-A.com/million.
Use Vanta.
That’s what all the cool kids are doing.
Would you, Sean, give back the 150 like you did?
I wouldn’t.
Fuck that.
I would not have for that situation personally.
I get why you did.
It’s almost just like,
“Dude, this is great.
All of this was unintentional.
People are really mad.
Okay, what’s the sort of like,
how can I just like clear up any possible confusion?”
But I don’t think you needed to in this situation, right?
You created a coin called Zero
that you said is don’t buy this.
This is going to Zero.
It’s a test coin.
And if somebody went and randomly speculated on it
using their like, their sniper bots
that are trying to track your wallet,
you know, like I wouldn’t have given a shit personally.
But then again, these, this community is so like crazy
that they’ll just like make your life hell on Twitter
for like the next five years.
It might be, might be worth it, you know?
Just to clear your own conscience,
go to sleep at night, you know?
Exactly.
I couldn’t, it was for me.
So I could sleep all night
because a lot of these people are fairly low income
and the money is fairly meaningful.
It was one reason.
But another reason is like,
people just don’t read.
Like I explained this.
I mean, the coin says don’t buy it.
I explained this like a couple different times.
And what I realized is like,
you just don’t read on the internet.
And as far as anyone else knows,
because it makes a lot of noise,
like I, the, if you don’t, don’t read what it sounds like is,
I created a scam coin using my own daughter’s name
to scam people out of it.
Right, right, right.
It’s crazy.
Did you, in the end of this,
is there anything here that’s interesting
for fundraising for research?
Or this is just straight like,
I accidentally got into a gambling pool
and it’s kind of got some money for research,
but this is not a sustainable thing for anybody.
I’m still trying to figure it out.
So what I’m hoping to make nearer into is,
so the way this works is you’re,
this is like sort of gang theory around,
okay, you own a bunch of this coin
because this coin’s narrative is attached to you, right?
In the case of, you know,
they port, Portnoy is doing something similar with Jailstool.
And in order to turn it into real world impact,
you have to sell.
There’s no way around that.
And so when you sell,
then you’re just like playing a zero-sum game
against the community
and they’re all going to be upset for you, for sure,
no matter what.
And so that’s a very difficult dynamic.
And I think my idea here is like the only sustainable way
to do this is to lock a bunch of the token
into a liquidity pool.
And so that when people buy in or out of it,
you get to exchange, you get the fees.
And that’s not really like selling into your community.
I think imagine a version of Dogecoin
where every time someone, you know,
it’s like Dogecoin is like a couple tens of billions
of dollars market cap.
But every time someone sells or buys,
it creates like up to,
could be hundreds of thousands of dollars a day of fees
and which you can then use to donate.
I think that might be relatively sustainable.
This is insane.
I don’t even know what to say.
Sounds like a great weekend.
No, it was a month, it was the last,
it was Christmas until like maybe, you know,
now and it ruined my vacation.
And it’s been by far the most stressful time
I’ve ever had in my life.
Can we do a quick detour?
We were at a dinner once and you talked about some,
I think it was a Stanford class you took
called Touchyfeely or that’s the code name for it.
I don’t know.
And it’s something about communication and relationships.
And I remember you said this really great thing at the dinner.
But this was now many years ago
and I don’t remember it exactly.
But can you say that bit again?
I want to hear it again.
And I think a lot of people might benefit from it.
By the way, Siki, how old are you?
I’m 41, I think.
You look like you could be 22 or 41.
I have no idea.
Yeah, Asian no reason.
Let’s go.
Yeah, so I took actually now twice.
I took class again as we talked.
This class that was based on the Stanford business world class
called Interpersonal Dynamics,
which is the highly braided and most popular class
in Stanford business school.
It’s taught by a professor called Carol Robbins
and it’s generally known as Touchyfeely.
And its name is for every participant at some point
will like cry in the class.
But Carol Robbins is now a co-founder of a group called Leaders in Tech
which provides the same class for tech leaders.
So one of the things that you get taught in this class is,
so the purpose of the class is to teach you how to relate to people
and build connection for the other people
because people work with other people.
And one of the most useful frameworks I got from that class
is how to think about your connection with other people
and how to develop that connection.
And so the two frameworks to connect is one is the two tracks
of interpersonal communication and the five levels of it.
So when you’re talking with anyone else, there is two tracks.
There’s the content track and there’s a relationship track.
So the content track is filled with facts
and a relationship track is filled with emotion
and a relationship track is what is filled
and what has to be filled for a relationship
to get become closer and for trust increase.
And the way you fill each of these tracks
is through the five levels of communication.
And the idea is when you are talking to someone,
there’s five levels at which you communicate
of increasing vulnerability and death.
So level one is what’s called ritual
and that is, hey, how’s it going?
Hey, right?
It doesn’t really say anything.
We’re just ritualized greeting.
Level two is extended ritual.
So that is how’s the weather?
How’s the game?
Right?
It’s a longer version of, hey, how’s it going?
Level three is content.
So these are facts.
How’s the project?
Is it late?
What are we going to do with this particular idea?
Level four is emotional self-disclosure.
So that is when you say something
that discloses how you are feeling emotionally at the time.
I feel sad.
I feel angry.
And there’s a lot of talk about level four
because people think they’re doing level four,
but they’re not.
And that’s a very common thing that’s unique
to the English language, which we talk about.
That was a fairly interesting insight.
So level five is the deepest one.
And level five is mutual emotional self-disclosure.
And it is when you are expressing the emotion
that you have about the other person.
I feel angry at you.
I feel proud of you.
I feel disappointed by you.
That’s the deepest level of communication
you can have with another person.
And the content track is only filled
by things from level one to three.
And the relationship track is only filled
by level four and five.
And we are taught to really not use level four and five
in professional settings.
But if you want to build a relationship,
level four and five is kind of the only way you can do it.
And so a lot of the training is about breaking
past the barrier or the uncomfortableness
of engaging level four and level five communication.
And you basically sit in a circle with 12 people
for four days straight until you like,
so you can observe the impact of doing level four or five
and not doing level four or five.
And how you are able to be closer to someone
or further away from someone in emotional distance.
Has this made your running a company better?
I mean, I would say this is the most impactful thing
I’ve ever done in my entire life, like out of any class.
I always like, as a founder,
somewhat see the company as some kind of machine
and I didn’t find it, I’m like, you know,
Miley asked for a degree.
So I found it difficult to relate to people.
But it’s completely transformed all my relationships,
including my relationship with my wife.
And so one of the ways, this was even just last week,
we had an onsite and I was able to do a mini version of this
with our customer success team.
We’re just sat or, you know,
I did a very condensed version of this lecture
and then we sat and we just talked for about four hours.
And the amount of closeness people got,
insight people got was transformative.
And you wouldn’t normally, you know,
sit around for a couple hours at a work setting
and talk about your feelings.
And it’s very uncomfortable to do so.
And it’s intentionally so, like it’s very comfortable
for the first couple of, in the case of a real life workshop,
it’s half a day.
In the case of us, we had it like sort of speed running
and it was uncomfortable about an hour.
But then people were really into it and it’s weird,
but everyone at some point was crying about some disclosure
that they heard or they’ve experienced.
And as a result, the team got so much closer
and a trust increase.
– That’s wild. – This is awesome.
– Do you, so how do you do this in practice, right?
Cause when you talk about like, you know,
I feel angry at you about X or I’m disappointed about Y,
I could see myself not having the skills
or finesse to be able to do that
and let the end result be a positive one
versus we start talking, you’re upset by this.
Well, the other person gets defensive
or they push back and say, well, you did that, blah, blah, blah.
And so can you give me an example of a conversation
that you had that like, maybe here’s what I would love,
a conversation that typically would have gone like this
or maybe been avoided altogether.
And instead, here’s how the actual conversation went
that was useful for you as a CEO, leader, friend,
whatever husband, whichever example you want to choose.
– Yeah, so the first one is easy actually.
So in most people just don’t have the conversation, right?
So the conversation wouldn’t say, I’m angry,
you would just be angry and you wouldn’t say anything.
– Right.
– And people can tell is the thing,
like when you feel a certain way about someone,
it gets, it leaks, right?
Like there’s a level of,
even if you’re not attending the passive aggressive,
you’re just kind of ignoring the person
or it comes off like you’re like, oh my God, it’s late again.
– Right.
– Right, or he didn’t do this.
And so that’s the default.
And that’s when you have this negative feedback cycle
of well, okay, you already felt a certain way,
then you expressed it unknowingly.
And now the other person thinks you’re angry at them
and now they dislike you more.
And then they do things that you dislike more
because they dislike you more.
And it just gets worse.
That’s what relationships get worse.
And that’s like the default.
And so if you know that it leaks anyway,
then it becomes easier to say, I’m going to express that.
And you’re going to express it no matter what.
Your choice is do you express it with words
or do you express it with not words
but just like passive aggressive behavior?
And so, and then you combine that with everyone is entitled
to know those things so they know.
But they’re not entitled to make things up
about what other people are thinking.
So you are entitled to seeing the same facts
as everyone else seeing the same behavior.
You’re not entitled to read the minds
of some other person and how they’re thinking
and how they’re feeling.
But you’re 100% entitled to share what you’re feeling
because those are facts to you.
That’s reality.
And so the mental model isn’t.
And this is kind of like typical
because people aren’t used to expressing this.
The mental model is like, oh, if I am expressing this emotion,
that means I’m attacking someone.
And that is true if you don’t express the emotion
and you’re just acting it out.
But if I were to say, you know, when I see you do this,
the story I tell myself is that you don’t respect me.
And I don’t know if it’s true,
but this is like what I’m thinking my head.
And because of that, I feel angry.
And I just want you to know that because I don’t,
I don’t know if you know that you,
I know that you probably don’t because you can’t read my mind.
But I’m guessing you probably aren’t intending
to make me feel that way.
And I thought it’d be helpful for you to share,
for me to share that to you so that you are aware of it.
I just learned that technique in therapy last week.
Amazing.
I seriously did.
That’s the nonviolent, nonviolent communication framework, right?
It is, yeah.
It’s very connected to that.
I literally just learned that.
Yeah, you’re sharing information, right?
So it’s not an attack.
Like if you are genuinely doing it,
because you understand that you can’t read their mind,
but of course I can’t read your mind either.
And so by sharing it is,
you’re offering them a gift of the information.
One question is,
you said something about the English language
making it harder.
What did you mean by that?
So what you start seeing when you’re in this class
with these tall people,
and you start realizing that,
oh, like I really only feel closer
and I get to know someone better
when they say I feel emotion.
I feel sad.
I feel angry when this happened.
And I feel distanced when they’re expressing that emotion,
but not saying it.
You can tell on their faces that they’re pissed off.
And it becomes scarier.
So then you start learning that,
oh, I mean to say I feel.
The thing about the English language
is that we say I feel often
without expressing any emotion at all.
And that’s the sort of a quirk
that’s kind of unique to English.
So when you say I feel that,
or I feel like,
it is actually grammatically impossible
for them that sort to be an emotion.
I feel that you’re an asshole is not an emotion.
I feel like this is fucked is not an emotion.
I feel sad is an emotion.
I feel happy is an emotion.
And we’re not used to saying that
because the word feel is used
is has been, you know,
disused, misused for other purposes.
And so we just often is unconsciously.
Once you see it, you cannot see it.
People, I ask people, it’s showed emotion.
And they say, I feel like I feel that.
And it’s never an emotion.
And it’s very, very hard to change the habit.
Do you guys do this?
Where like, Sean, in particular,
I’m curious if you do this,
but do you guys do this where you like,
you get into this type of shit,
whatever you want to call it,
the touchy-feely stuff.
And you’re like, this is the way.
And then like, I get into it.
And then half the time I execute that poorly.
And then like, the business sucks.
And I’m like, I got to have more patience with this person.
Or I got to like, let them get away with shit more or whatever.
And then I just go right back to the total opposite end
where it’s like, what do they call this?
Doge, where I’m like, everyone has 15 minutes
to fight for their job.
Like, you know, like, it’s like, I get influenced by either side.
And I don’t, but there is no middle ground.
And that’s like-
I’m kinda like you?
That the first sign of resistance, I crumble sometimes.
So the, but the version of it that happens for me is,
let’s say I hear this and I’m like,
ah, Seeky just taught me something.
This is great.
Two content tracks, five levels.
I’m in.
I got this.
I’m going level five.
Maybe you don’t even need one through four.
And then I’ll go have the next conversation with my wife tonight.
And I’ll give her like, I feel that.
No, no, I feel upset.
And I know you didn’t mean that.
I tried to do the whole thing and she’s like, what?
And then she doesn’t, she doesn’t know all of this.
She didn’t, because she didn’t go to the seminar
and she didn’t have the skills and the tools.
She’s like, be a mad Sean.
Shut up.
It’s on the front of her mind.
And so she doesn’t play back like the role play
that I had heard was.
And then I’m like, well, I don’t really know the next move.
Okay, revert, revert back to my old asshole self.
Yeah, I mean, that’s not a bad response, honestly,
because I think, I think you have to do whatever works.
And the reality is to get good at this.
You know, it took me, I did this four day program twice
and eat every day was like 12 hours a day.
And you’re just sitting in this circle practice.
Did your wife go with you?
The first time she actually did.
Okay.
So she kind of had a dream.
And we’re not supposed to.
I kind of, no, I kind of smuffled her into the hotel room.
So she didn’t go to the class.
But I will say, like the second night when I went home,
she was like, who are you?
Because I was like, oh my God, I feel so bad.
I’ve been such an asshole.
Dude, this sounds like, have you guys heard of the Hoffman Institute?
Have you heard of this?
I’ve heard of this, but I haven’t been.
Yeah.
Like I have, I’ve contemplated going to it,
but I think they, it’s like, they have a variety of locations.
They have one in Connecticut near me and then they have a Boston one.
But you go for, it’s like not expensive.
It’s like $2,000 and you go for four days
and you can’t bring your cell phone.
You can’t, you’re going to be completely disconnected.
Or maybe it’s even five days.
It’s kind of a lot.
But they like, everyone who I go, who goes to it,
they won’t tell me what happens there,
but they all say that it’s life changing.
And they can now develop relationships
and connections with other people.
It’s one of these really strange things that I’m so tempted to do,
but the amount of time to be disconnected
is very like nerve-wracking or, you know, just like scary.
This sounds very similar.
It does sound pretty similar.
It’s not the time to be disconnected.
That’s the scary part there.
Well, yeah, it is.
Dude, it might even be seven days.
Could you go seven days without a phone away from your family?
Away from your family is a little harder.
Yeah, that’s hard.
Like in a hotel, like it’s like crazy to be disconnected.
But yeah, I don’t want to like, also,
I don’t want to like cry with all the strangers.
Yeah, I don’t want to go that deep.
I’m like, I don’t want to go to Tony Robbins.
I don’t want to see anyone.
I don’t want anyone to see me dancing and singing.
Like, you know what I mean?
Yeah, what’s great about Leaders in Tuck is like,
is there all like, you know, well-known ish founders.
It’s like not cheap to go.
So even worse, be around awesome people.
God, I want to be my most vulnerable self around cool people.
Actually, it’s really helpful because you realize that
all the people that some people that you look up to,
like we’re kind of all the same.
Like there’s very similar insecurities.
Whenever I hear about the stuff,
I think of the Tony Soprano quote where he’s like,
whatever happened to the strong silent type, like Gary Cooper.
I go all down this track and I’m like,
can I just say like, hey, chief, like, hi, bub.
I just know that person only at that amount.
I just say yes or no.
Siki, you have this interview question that I like.
You said my favorite interview question.
After 20 years of doing interviews with people
is what is your greatest strength
that you are most worried about not coming across
in an interview setting?
Why that question?
I think I enjoy breaking the fourth wall.
And interviews tends to be so standardized or formalized
that what my greatest anxiety when I’m interviewing
is like, I’m actually really good at a thing.
And you’re asking me to, you know,
you know, reverse a leak list or something
and it’s just not coming across.
What I find is that it breaks down this deformality
and lets people, gets people excited to talk about
something that they’re really, really good at,
telling great stories.
And you get to know the person just a little bit better.
And I think the particular thing is like,
if you just ask what’s your greatest strengths,
it sounds really formal.
But what is the insecurity that you’re bringing in
that you’re hoping to,
that you’re worried about not coming across an interview setting?
It changes the tone quite a bit.
It’s a great question.
I’m stealing that.
Yeah, that’s a good one.
You know what’s interesting is, so you founded runway,
which is like a very serious business.
Like you’re going to have to hire enterprise people,
I would imagine, enterprise sales people.
Like it’s like a, I’m basing like the future of my company
off of some of the output that I’m going to learn
from your software.
But you have the vibe of like an artist to me,
where like you, you have a variety
of like really intriguing projects.
You’re like this thinker, almost like a philosopher.
Is this new to be doing, like,
is this like a new challenge for you
to be doing something so serious and regimented?
Like an, or can you still be like goofy
and an artist in this B2B world?
So yeah, funny enough, he’s a serious business.
That was the name of my first company.
And we built fun games.
I feel like if you call it serious citizen, you know?
Yeah, because we were a games company,
serious business, fun games.
But yeah, I mean, I think it’s actually a pretty huge advantage,
particularly for the things we consider serious.
So I mean, people have this stereotype of business
and finances being super serious and super rigid.
But finance at its best is really about creating value.
Let’s start looking forward and thinking about new ideas
about how we can push the business forward
and grow faster and all these things.
And in order for us to be creative,
we have to be in flow and things that are fun
keeps you in flow.
And what we actually hear from our customers,
that the thing that we hear quite often
and we love hearing is this software feels fun.
And that’s not a luxury.
That is a fund that creates flow,
that creates a creativity, that creates value.
And when you use something that isn’t fun,
something that feels slow or confusing,
that you’re not creative and you’re making worse decisions.
So I don’t think they’re intentionally with each other.
I think they’re quite complimentary.
And that is like very deeply part of our philosophy.
Have you ever seen this?
Yes, that’s what made me think of that question.
What’s the story of this, Ikki?
This happened last week.
Our marketing team is run by Cal Freeze,
who is a YC founder of a company called Tyka.
He was the CEO there.
And we also have this woman named Julie Fritas,
who was at Shopify.
And I was in the office and I just saw them come out
in a meeting kind of giggling.
And they got out of this piece of cardboard
and started like writing this.
I’m like, what is this?
Like, oh, you know how like you didn’t want to do a billboard?
We decided to just create a billboard ourselves
and just hold on to Freeway.
And I’m like, that is such a cracked idea.
Of course, that’s going to go viral.
And I said, I’ll do it.
It’s like, you really will?
I’m like, yeah, I’ll do it.
So they’re like, okay.
So we walked outside.
We found a Freeway entrance.
And I was just holding the sign.
What does it say, by the way?
It says, if you hate your finance platform,
getrunway.com.
Are you the only founder?
I had a co-founder, Arya Asamonfar,
and he left the company about a year and a half ago,
almost two years ago.
Because that’s like pretty rare.
I mean, I don’t know when you launched,
but I feel like you’re very, very, very, very early
in the period because I remember seeing you guys go on Twitter,
like get popular on Twitter.
That’s going to be pretty different to be kind of a,
the only founder running a company.
That’d be kind of exciting, right?
You get to do whatever the hell you want,
or is it you’re going to be lonely?
I think the reason why we partnered with Waze
is things were just slower to make decisions,
and neither of us were having as much fun as we wanted to.
And actually, I didn’t want him to leave.
Like he is, I mean, he’s still on the board.
I love him.
He’s just the most wise and high-interviewed person I’ve ever met.
He was one of Perox’s peers at Twitter,
and I hired him out of school, my first company.
And he now works for Brett Taylor at Sierra.
But if things were going slower than he wanted,
and he identified that it was him,
or our relationship slowing us down,
he decided to fire himself.
And I didn’t think he was right about that, but he was.
He usually is right about just about everything,
and it totally transformed the company.
He also must have attended interpersonal dynamics.
He did not.
You talked about character AI and CHI,
like some of these AI companies
that are crushing it, just printing money right now.
Are there any other companies that just have blown your mind
in terms of how well they’re doing
or how fast they’re growing right now,
like maybe AI, maybe not AI?
I love the Labs.
I’m just following that story in that company,
but they do basically all of the audio,
translation, generation, sometimes e-fakes.
And when I met them, there were less than 10 people.
They were ex-Google.
They’re working on the foundation of all technology.
And they are now, I don’t know what they last announced,
but they’re in the hundreds of millions of AR in like a year
or two, a year and a half or so.
And what blew my mind is I never seen a group
of very good technologists that were also so good
at commercializing the technology so rapidly.
They’re at hundreds of millions and–
Hundreds.
Hundreds.
I feel like this just came out.
And they’re–
Yeah, but I do know.
We should have invested in half, right?
They dubbed our podcast.
Remember that clip where they were like–
Yes, the Indian Hindi.
You’re speaking Hindi now.
And it was amazing.
And I DMed them.
And we were like, hey, this is really cool.
Like, so stupid of us not to have pursued that more.
Yeah, there’s that graph, right, for Ys
and the fastest growing SaaS companies.
And I think cursor is up there.
I am fairly convinced that I love the Labs.
It’s actually faster than all of them.
But yeah, I think they announced some revenue milestone.
But it’s large.
We were tinkering with them.
It was borderline.
This is cool.
This is cute, too.
I can use this right now.
It was like just there.
So I guess they crossed it.
And people are actually using it to actually–
Who are they selling to?
Is it–
So Apple has audiobooks.
Oh, so not podcast, sorry.
Apple audiobooks, right?
So previously, they did have audiobooks.
And you would know that a lot of this AI generate
is Power By One Labs.
Oh, so they also publishers.
They also do AI agents for customer service
and support agents and things like that.
So they’re the back end of maybe potentially
other software tools as well.
Yeah.
So they have all kinds of product lines.
They sell the book publishers, the Power Agents.
They do–
Why are they better than what OpenAI–
The risk with all these AI companies
is that the general, the base models,
OpenAI and Anthropic, et cetera,
can just offer those capabilities as part of the main suite.
Do they do something different?
Are they fine-tuning it in some way?
No, it’s their own foundational models.
And the quality and expressiveness is just better.
And the form factor is better.
So you can use it for all these other use cases.
And the voice API of the OpenAI is actually not as good.
That way, it’s easily usable.
Dude, you’re super fun to talk to.
I just like hearing all these like–
I feel like you’re like a treasure box.
And I just like pick–
I just grab something out of the toy chest
and be like, tell me the story behind this.
You know what I mean?
I think that’s awesome.
Yeah, thanks for coming on, dude.
And give people a shout out for your company
and where to follow you for more.
Yeah, we’re runway.com.
You can follow me at bladerbladewithanr or runwayco.
And if you are a CFO, you should use our software.
How much did you have to pay for that domain?
A quarter of a million dollars.
That’s not bad.
It’s funny, Nevolvicont named the company
and suggested that we use it under.com.
I think that was smart.
A quarter of a million is not a lot, I feel like, for that–
Wait, what do you mean Nevolg named the company?
Like you went to him being like, hey, what did we name this?
Or he just suggested it?
So when Clubhouse only had one room in April 2020,
it was in the Nevol app, right?
I think you were on it quite a bit, too.
So when I was thinking about what I want to do for next company,
I said I want to do a finance company.
And I got a great name for it, Nevol, CFO.ai.
He’s like, no, don’t call it AI.
It’s going to be dated in like two years.
Everything you call AI.
You should just call it runway and you get the .com.
And he wrote the first track into runway.
And that’s why we got the .com.
It’s so funny that you said it was the Nevol app at the time.
It totally was.
And it was amazing.
It was an app in the open to talking to all Rob got.
It was amazing.
By the way, I was using Air Chat pretty religiously for like two months.
Even though I knew Air Chat’s not going to work, I was like,
oh, it doesn’t matter.
This is Nevol’s app.
He’s going to be on 24/7.
Cool, this is like–
I like to hang out with Nevol.
I’m not going to email him like a million other people and say,
hey, can we get a coffee?
Just a thousand dollars a month and you can talk to Nevol whenever you want.
Yeah, exactly.
I was like, I’m going to be on this for two months.
I’m going to be a power user for exactly two months
and I’m going to hang out with Nevol and that’s exactly what happened.
I was very proud of myself for that.
It was the most fun way to use that app.
Dude, thank you for doing this.
You’re the man.
And we’re thinking of you and your daughter.
And hopefully–
Thank you.
Appreciate it, man.
–the Nevol too.
All right, see you.
Thank you.
That’s it.
That’s the pot.
I feel like I can rule the world.
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All right, back to the episode.
So I said, “Well, you guys shouldn’t confuse a lack of revenue for success either.”
And then they got kind of upset.
Dude, that’s meaning it goes in the Silicon Valley Autistic Hall of Fame.
What’s up? We got our friend, Siki here, founder of Runway.
Back in the day, built a company, sold it to Zynga,
built another company, sold it to Postmates, has gone viral many times.
And there’s a lot of people in Silicon Valley who you almost…
It’s like a film director.
It’s like, “Oh, they’re working on a new project.
You really want to know what they’re doing?”
That’s you because you do things with taste.
So excited to have you here.
Do you have any good stories from early days of Zynga?
Because you sold a company to Zynga.
Backman Zynga was the shit.
Did you work with Mark Pincus?
What’s he like?
Give me a good Zynga story.
Okay. I have a great story, actually.
How I came to report to Mark Pincus is, actually, it’s not a great story.
I have so many good Mark Pincus stories.
So, yeah, Zynga bought my second company, my first company,
and I joined as a director product under the studio.
Wait, can you give the background up, Mark?
So, Mark’s like a Silicon Valley OG.
Did he help fund Facebook to get off the ground?
Was that his first big hit?
He did.
So, he and Reid Hoffman co-owned,
bought the Six Degrees of Separation Patent from a company of Six Degrees.
And he angel invested in Facebook and but also licensed a patent,
I believe, for more stock into Facebook.
That patent was basically the kind of the social networking patent, right?
Like how we’re connected, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon away from each other.
And I think Reid, there’s some story where Reid and him
realized that if this patent got in the hands of Microsoft or some big company,
that they would be able to squish innovation by a startup,
by like holding this patent over their head.
So, they bought the patent, I believe,
and just decided we’re not going to use it to stop anybody.
And then they, I think, parlayed it into getting extra shares in Facebook.
Which is amazing.
I think that’s what happened, yeah.
So, when I joined, I was a director of products.
And my girlfriend and my wife, who I recently met,
moved to China for some job work thing.
And I was like three months into Zynga.
And I was like, “Oh, I’m not really feeling it.
It’s not that fun.”
So, I told them I was going to resign and move to China.
And they said, “Hey, why don’t we just give you this new job?
You can report to Eric Schreimer when you’re co-founders
and basically be head of product for the company.”
I said, “No, that sounds fun. That sounds great.”
So, I did that.
So, I reported to Eric Schreimer.
He was a co-founder of Zynga.
And what happened is, a month into the job,
Eric Schreimer stopped showing up to work.
Like, wouldn’t start on emails, wouldn’t go to work.
And I was like, “What?”
And basically, that’s when I reported to Mark.
And I was the head of products.
And later, the punchline of the story is,
what I, the reason why he stopped showing up to work
is I later found out that he decided to become a ninja.
That’s a pretty good reason.
That’s not what I thought was going to happen.
He literally, he was like,
he wanted to start a ninja, Dojo.
And he wanted to undergo a ninja training.
And so, when I…
What in the Napoleon Dynamite is this story?
How’s his ninja career now?
I think he started another social games company.
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[Music]
So, give us at the time, what was Zynga like?
Was it like, was it King of the World at the time?
Or was it on the down spring?
Yeah, I mean, what’s interesting on Zynga is they
hired a bunch of people who used to be investment makers
to be product managers there.
Because it was just all about the numbers going up.
It was Heidi Analytical.
So, I went in and just the amount of like knowledge they had
about growth.
One of the things that really blew my mind to think about a lot
is when I first had a commerce with Mark Pincus
early on, I think maybe during the acquisition,
I asked him, hey, what do you think about this like industry?
It just seems really low moat.
It’s hard to have a competitive moat here
because it’s just so easy to enter or you build a new game
and for it to expand.
And how defensible is it?
And I think about his answer quite a bit
because his, I was like, no, this is great.
I wonder to be more new entrants.
Into the space because it’s free R&D for me.
And I just like, okay, that is, that blows my mind.
That is next level because he was just so confident
in his ability to execute that like anyone who’s kind of
come in with some new idea, they can just like fast follow it
and do a much better job of growing it,
which is like what they did, right?
Formula was in the first fun game.
Poker was the first poker game.
And that they work really, really well,
at least during a Facebook era.
Wait, did he have like Genghis Khan energy
where he was like, is he a conqueror?
Yeah, he did, he did.
I love that.
You know, we were working like 80, 90, 100 hours a week
at Zynga and that was kind of the norm.
It sort of seems like a waste of talent though
to have that conqueror energy
and do it in the lamest way possible.
The Farmville.
Yeah, like Farmville.
Like that’s what he’s like trying to do this on.
Like a few billion dollars, a few billion dollars.
There’s a quote by Max Levchin at the time.
Max Levchin who created PayPal is by all accounts
like a genius computer engineer single-handedly
was like fighting fraud at PayPal and like with,
as a one-man army, like withstood, you know,
the attacks of all of these sort of financial scammers
around the world.
The guy’s brilliant.
And then his next startup I think was Slide.
And it was making like widgets for MySpace and Facebook
where you’d be like slide shows or Superpoke
where you throw like chickens at your friends
when you wake up, you know, by pushing a button
and it just slaps a friend with a chicken
or something like that.
And they go, what was your takeaway from Slide?
Because Slide ultimately didn’t fully work out,
sold to Google I think for a little bit.
But he goes, be really careful what you choose to work on
because everything can be optimized endlessly.
So he’s like, once we got in that,
we could just sit there and optimize
and just get the number of chicken slap per day up.
So, you know, choose wisely.
Should I be optimizing this chicken slapping
or should I be doing something else?
And I’ve always thought about that
because I found myself falling into the same trap.
No matter what I’m doing, if I’m selling little widgets,
my life becomes about selling widgets
and I can optimize that to infinity.
And people do, if you go look at how any company works,
that’s what they’ve done.
They’ve optimized it to infinity.
Dude, when my wife worked at Facebook years and years ago,
I remember like I was talking to all of her coworkers
at a party and I was like, oh, you guys are amazing.
You guys are so smart.
What are you working on?
And they explained it to me, but it boiled down to,
they’re trying to convince Brazilians
to put more stickers on their photos.
Like the, there was like one dog that had a long tongue.
Do you guys remember that fucking dog?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like they’re trying to convince that fucking dog sticker
to put, or the Brazilians.
It was like the face,
it was like the face filter thing when Snapchat came out
and then if you opened up your mouth,
a giant tongue would come out.
Dude, I felt like, and they explained that to,
like I kind of, I was like, wait, so you’re just trying
to get like Brazilians to use more stickers
because they share more photos.
I felt like a cartoon.
It was like, I was like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
What? Like, you know what I mean?
I was like, what are you guys doing?
I also have a Max Levchin and Slides story.
This goes back 17 years,
so I don’t think I’ll mind anymore.
But when I, this is when I first moved to the city
and I had this app on Facebook that was blowing up.
And so some guy who worked with Keith’s Reboy,
Keith’s Reboy was I think the CEO of Slides at the time.
I said, hey, we like your app.
You want to meet, you know, the team.
I said, oh my God, this is amazing.
I mean, you’re out of college.
You can even have Max Levchin.
So I go in and we had a meeting at noon
and I will go to the Slides office and no one was there.
Everyone’s out for lunch.
And I talked to receptionist.
I said, hey, I’m here to meet Max and Keith.
And they’ll like, oh, they’re out of lunch.
They’ll be back in half an hour.
I said, okay, so we slipped there for half an hour.
And then they walk in.
And they act like they kind of forgot there was a meeting.
But we go to a meeting room and we just start talking
about what I wanted to do with this app by build,
whether I wanted to build a dependently
or maybe like join slide.
And they asked me how much I wanted for it.
I said, well, I have a co-founder.
So $2 million, I will probably do it.
The million dollars each, I kind of lasted the number.
I’m like, what?
Like I look for the valuation app data
and like the money we’re generating.
It’s not a huge ass, but it’s fine.
It’s too much.
My friend at Heel built Superpoke, which I recently bought.
And they said verbatim, you know, we bought Superpoke
and he’s easily the 18th or 19th most important person
company now out of a company of like 60 people.
I said, okay, that’s a compelling offer.
And then I said, and I said, yeah,
this is probably not going to happen.
And I said, you know, we’re profitable.
We were making a bunch of money from ads.
So it’s cool if you don’t want to buy it.
And they said, well, you shouldn’t confuse revenue for success.
And at this point, I was just like really upset.
So I said, well, you guys shouldn’t confuse
the lack of revenue for success either.
And then they got like kind of upset.
So then, so then it got really weird.
Oh, I forgot to mention like,
at the start of the meeting,
they said something like, hey, you know,
there’s a recession coming up to each other.
And they’re like, yeah, there’s a recession coming up.
And then he said, I can’t wait to buy all these
shitty companies for cheap.
Like, we’re in the room.
And we’re like, what the hell?
Dude, this meeting, it goes in like
the Silicon Valley Autistic Hall of Fame.
At the end, Keith was like, hey, Keith.
Hey, Max, what was your body fat percentage
in the PayPal days?
And Max was like 8%.
And I was like, yeah.
And I’m like, look, I’m not the fittest person,
but I’m not selling you my company
because he’s like, you’re fitter than me.
Like, what’s happening?
So that was like meeting with them.
But the thing that made it all make sense,
made sense is the next week,
I was talking to one of my friends,
John, who also had a company building out.
And he comes to me at some party.
He goes, Seeky, man, like,
you won’t believe this.
So I just had a meeting with Sly last week.
I’m like, really?
He’s like, yeah, it was so weird
because he started a meeting talking
about how there’s a recession coming up.
And all these companies are cheap.
I was like, oh my God, it’s a script.
It was.
In episode one of this podcast,
I think my buddy, Sully, told almost the same story.
He goes, he gets invited to slide.
He says to Max and Keith.
And what they said was they were like,
you should, we want to hire you.
And he’s like, I don’t really want a job.
Like I have my apps, good.
I thought you wanted to like maybe buy it or something.
And then he opened the door and he goes,
you see all those guys out there?
They’re going to build your app in like six days
if you don’t take this offer.
And he was like, okay, I’m not interested
in this even more now.
This is horrible.
My app is stupid.
What he said, he goes, his app at the time
was called Superlatives.
It was like, you would name your friend
like most likely to go to jail or something.
He’s like, you’re threatening me
that you’re going to take my app?
I think my app is stupid.
The fact that you think my app is cool
makes me think you’re stupid.
That’s what he thought in his head.
Siki, who did you meet?
I love talking to people who have been
around a bunch of these folks
before they kind of quote made it.
Who is a tycoon or a big shot now
that you’re shocked by because of when you knew them
when you guys were both younger,
you’re like, oh, I can’t believe they actually developed
into such an amazing business person.
I don’t know that I met a lot of people
who weren’t great other than I think were great
that were huge later.
Who’s someone you met that wasn’t huge then
but you knew and why did you know?
Oh, yeah. I mean, Drew Houston.
When did you meet him?
He started Dropbox.
10 people.
It was late 2007 or early 2008.
And we were just talking about growth.
So like they had this like college referral plan.
So Drew Houston, I mean,
Anish who’s General Permanent Andreessen,
like he was just a founder building apps on mobile phones,
right?
And he would come to my office and we’d talk about it.
Oh, probably the best one is Chris Wonstrasth.
Who’s that?
He’s co-founder of CIO GitHub.
And he was a contractor at Powerset,
which was like this job I took when I first moved to the city.
But he was actually a contractor for my first company,
Sirius Business.
He, I had him build this translation layer
between Facebook Markup Language
and MySpace Markup Language.
Just like after and he was really good at it.
And I distinctly remember that we were at 21st Amendment.
Yeah, or actually a brewery doesn’t matter.
But I gave him a full-time employee planning offer
in early 2008.
And he was considering it.
And the same night, when we’re talking about it,
he said, you know, DHH just put rails on GitHub.
And so I think I might work on GitHub full-time.
And I was thinking in my head and I was like,
the smart thing for me to do is actually shut down my
Facebook Games business and go work for you.
But I didn’t say that.
Have you had any massive angel investment wins
because you’re around the hoop for so long?
And so in early?
Yeah.
I mean, the best one by far is Amplitude.
And that one was, I was introduced through actually,
yeah, someone at Zynga, Matt Akka,
who runs Data Collective now.
And he introduced me a very first angel investment
after I sold to Zynga.
And that like 10X in like 12 months.
And so I was playing with PlayMoney up after that.
And he introduced to his team that we ended up
being the fourth customer for analytics platform.
It’s now Amplitude.
And we used it.
We thought this is great.
This is the best thing we thought we’ve seen
since the Zynga internal tools.
And I managed to get into the seed round and that IPO
that, you know, we ended up being a 400X return on that,
which is pretty great.
Amazing.
Let’s jump in with ideas, opportunities.
You’re an idea guy.
What do you think are some cool ideas or opportunities
that you would want to be working on right now?
So I built a Zapier and it’s basically categorizes my emails
with GPD4 into different labels.
So I have this very long prompt and automation.
And I also use a protocol same box,
which also does something similar to filters by emails.
But there’s been no good version of email manager software
that I’m able to customize the prompt and train it.
So I want to say, hey, here’s the things related to my kids.
And there’s no keywords necessarily.
You can, you know, have to kind of read it.
It’s like some email to my babysitter or an email from the school.
And if it’s related to my kids, I want you to put it in this folder.
And the idea is I want an inbox for like these different contexts.
And so people are doing different kinds of email categorization.
What’s missing is there’s no way to train it.
So I think building some way for you to, for a product
to understand all of the content about your life
and organize your stuff starting with inbox
will be really handy for me.
And I’ve seen at least 12 companies do this
and no one has done a really great job of it.
I just tested this product.
Have you guys heard of this?
I can’t think of the name right now.
But it was this thing where I, it sounds insane
where it recorded my screen for weeks at a time
and it would see how I’m typing what I’m saying to people.
And it would give me feedback on the productivity of my day
and how I can improve it.
Have you guys seen this?
It started with an R, I think.
Is it called a?
Elect or something?
Isn’t it rescue time?
No, go Sean, you’re right.
It’s sort of, the guy who started it’s like a,
he’s like a guy.
He’s like been around.
Yeah.
He was doing like a pendant or something, right?
At one point and then now it’s a.
Oh, rewind then.
Rewind.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rewind.ai, is that it?
Yeah, they stopped working on it.
Now it’s called limit listeners working on the pendant now.
Yes, I was tinkering with Rewind
and the promise, it’s not there yet.
But the promise of this is, was amazing.
I was like so into this.
And it’s kind of describing what you’re just explaining
because we’re having to use Zapier and OpenAI
or CHBT to like kind of duct tape this all together.
Their premise was amazing.
And that is exactly what I’m looking for.
I got a third one, which is like a lot spicier.
But you know, like this is not a ventrubacable thing,
but you know, just character AI and Chai
and all of these like chatbots.
The really people are using for sexy chats.
I think like someone could,
and these things print money by the way,
like they immediately generate millions of dollars a month.
I thought if I were just in it just to like print money,
the thing I would make is something that is kind of like tender.
But basically everything is AI generated.
So it’s not like, oh, you’re creating a robot,
but it’s a fake dating app where everyone is attractive
and is super into you.
And then you can like then you can go off of your Tinder app
and go on Instagram and there have an Instagram account
on actual Instagram is owned by the,
the person that you met on your fake Tinder app.
Siky, do you know who Tai Lopez is?
He’s like the guy who had the infomercial
that was like here in my garage.
I do know who he is, yeah.
So Tai one accused, he came on MFM years ago
and an accusation that I learned about him
based off of the comments on YouTube
is that years and years before he was whatever
he was famous for, he owned dating apps.
And the accusation was that all of the users were completely fake
and that it was guys in the Philippines like running it
and doing exactly what you’re describing.
That’s true of the majority of dating apps.
What do you mean?
That’s just like standard offer day procedure.
Like plenty of fish, you know, like a seeking arrangement.
Like that is their business model.
They’re like outsourced men acting as women.
Yeah, there’s also like the webcam industry.
Like they up until open AI,
the companies with the most advanced AI technology
is going to be one of these companies
because they are better at creating chatbots than anyone.
They have the most advanced technology.
I’m not kidding.
Like I know people who work there or run it.
They’ve just developed better chatbot technology than anyone
in GBT.
That’d be so funny if that’s where AGI starts actually.
It’s not open AI.
It’s none of these labs.
It’s like whatever.
Some of these like webcam sites.
That’s not a crazy idea.
I mean, isn’t that how it typically has been
where a lot of the like the vice industries
are the ones pushing the envelope?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, it’s transformative for only fans, right?
Like I don’t know if you read, but like there’s,
you know, you’re a big influencer on only fans
and you have an army of a hundred people
who are like typers or chatters, right?
And the funny thing about them is they’re not just chatters
that are flirting.
They’re also basically salesmen.
So what they’re doing is they’re chatting
to try to upsell you until they get by this video,
by this photo.
I don’t know exactly.
By the subscription, whatever the thing is,
but they’re not just customer support.
They’re actually sales, but they need to come across
like they’re the original person, which is just hilarious.
What do you think that office environment is like?
So I know someone who works in that and it’s just normal.
It is like the most boring, cubicle,
normal office environment that you’ve ever seen.
That’s almost better than if it was weird.
The other thing with the dating apps,
I think that they did was I remember seeing the study
about match.com.
Because if you were a guy on match.com,
you would basically send out, you know, 30 messages
and you’d get, you know, one back or whatever.
And what they would do is they realized that
a lot of guys’ accounts would go inactive
because they’re not getting replies.
And so what they would do is they would basically send,
they would show an active person, 30 inactive profiles,
knowing that that inactive person is not there to reply,
but that that will be the notification for that person
to come back and reactivate their subscription.
They have to pay to go read their inbox and to be able to reply.
And so it’s almost intentionally a horrible experience
for the person who’s there trying to find somebody
in order to reactivate all the churned members.
And they would do, they would basically,
in a, the first hundred matches that they would show you,
you know, something like 50, 60, 70% of those matches
were all just inactive people.
They wanted you to send a notification to,
to make them come back.
That sounds like a Zynga train PM.
Dude, I went to the Zynga office once back in the like Heyday.
It was the craziest office I’ve ever seen.
Sam, did you ever go to this thing?
Yes.
It was right, it was like, it shared a building
or it was next door to Airbnb and it had a huge bulldog
in the front, right?
And I think at one point, I think they owned the building
and I think the building was worth at one point
more than the company, like, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars.
Why, what did you think of the office, Sean?
Well, you would go in, there’s a giant tunnel,
like an LED tunnel you would walk through just to enter.
And then when you’re there, first of all, there was dogs everywhere.
And it was like everybody, it was bring your dog to work.
There was just like herds of dogs running around.
It was insane.
And we met the chef and the chef, like the food operation was more sophisticated.
Just the cafeteria was more sophisticated than any company
that I’d ever been a part of.
Like just the food part was better than my actual company.
So like they had a staff of 60 people on the culinary team.
They had a roof on the top where they were growing all the vegetables.
He had like a giant fridge that was like the size of like a swimming pool
you’d walk in and there was cows hanging upside down
because they had their own butcher process.
They didn’t serve soda.
They only brewed their own sodas.
Like everything was soup to nuts custom.
And like just so insanely sophisticated for a cafeteria program.
I was like, man, if the food is like this,
I don’t even want to know what the actual teams that do the work are.
And I walked into one PM thing and it was like a stock market.
Dude, his screen had so many metrics fine-tuned in real time
where they were running so many tests at a time.
And it was like you said, Siki, like it looked to me from the outside,
like the most data-driven operation I had ever really seen.
You know, I knew about what we did,
but what we did looked like caveman compared to what they were doing
in terms of sophistication of data.
The food thing reminds me like I was the person
who did the dishes for us to serve real bacon.
And after a few months, we finally started to serve real bacon
because we never had real bacon.
It was only turkey bacon because, you know,
Mark Pincus didn’t like to kill pigs.
But yeah, like one of the things that people did at Zynga
in the product organs, we had PM on call.
And I’ve never seen this on any other organization.
The PM on call for every game would daily send an analysis
of what changed day over day.
And so if there’s a drop, then you would segment it.
And so, oh my god, there’s like an anonymous 50% drop in Mexico for Farmville.
And we are not sure why because usually on Wednesdays at two,
it shouldn’t be like this.
And it lasts three hours long.
And they would have to explain,
oh, it’s because a World Cup is happening.
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All right, back to the episode.
What comes first?
We are with Mr. Beast a few weeks ago.
And I had the same question,
but he wasn’t able to articulate or answer it.
What comes first when you’re that data or analytic oriented?
Are you that way and scale comes because of that?
Or can you only behave that way because you have scale?
So it depends on the environment.
If it’s a data-friendly environment like Facebook is,
then like Facebook platform is,
where virality lets you grow from zero to a billion,
then data is all that matters.
But you could see in the experience of Zynga
that that didn’t translate to the mobile industry.
Mobile was less about virality.
It was just difficult to do your distribution.
A lot more about creativity.
And that’s why Supercell had such a creative advantage
because they actually built very fun new games.
So I think it’s the completely dependent environment.
If it’s hard to get early distribution,
then scale makes data more important.
But if it’s quite difficult to get early distribution,
then you want to be creative and innovative and brand
and creativity that matters a lot more.
Do you remember any like random game change,
like color red to blue or flashing lights or whatever
that just generated like $10 million overnight?
I always remember thinking that like the best way
to generate $30 million overnight is just to like say,
hey, it’s going to take you $10 just to unlock the game today.
Like we could just like make it not payable and people would pay.
One of the more interesting ideas is this idea of crew.
So we had this idea of collecting materials
and you ask people materials.
One of the mechanics that we invented as Zynga
is this idea of crew where you,
for whatever thing you want to unlock,
you have to get at least like 20 people to help you,
unique people, because what that did is,
what we saw in the data is that when you do materials,
you ask the same two people over and over again.
But if we have a unique spread,
then that increases the distribution.
And that ended up being like a pretty large boost in the AUs.
Another thing that we saw is like just the power of segmentation.
And so there was this one day where our numbers went down
anonymously and I had to figure out,
well, is it like this channel or that channel?
It turns out there was one particular typo bug
in the drop rate of this particular treasure
that was creating a lot of opportunities for people to share.
And so you just spend all day doing things like that.
And so it’s rarely something like huge,
but it’s all the details added together
that makes a difference in Zynga.
What were the other business ideas or opportunities
that you think are exciting right now?
Yeah, I mean, I actually asked Sam Altman to make this,
but I don’t know how long they’re going to take,
but I’m doing a lot of medical research.
Wait, what?
What did you say?
Yes, Sam Altman to make this product, he said.
Oh, I thought you were like,
“Oh, you had Sam Altman make a list for you to talk about.”
I was like, “That’s it.”
No, oh, no, no.
We’re not that tight.
But no, I was doing a bunch of medical research
and I noticed that you can’t access paywall articles.
And so I really wish someone would make a version
of deep research that lets you
enter your paywall credentials.
So you can get full access.
And this goes further, I think.
There’s just so much data behind
offwalls, paywalls that you can’t get to
and you can only search on the open web.
And the more private data you can get access to,
the more useful these ages become.
So that’s probably the number one thing
I’ve been thinking about recently.
What’s the name of the company that starts with an R?
It’s based in England.
Sean, we’ve talked to him a bunch.
It’s like an acronym.
Anyway, it’s an academic publishing company in England.
And it’s really controversial
because I think it has the second highest profit margin
of all publicly traded companies in the world
behind public storage.
And the shtick behind it and why everyone hates it
is because researchers at universities
don’t get paid anything for this.
In fact, oftentimes they have to pay tuition
in order to even go to these places.
But they take your research and they put it behind
like a $30,000 a year paywall.
And so it’s a very frustrating industry.
Yeah, that’s the whole industry, right?
Elsevier, I think, is the biggest one.
And there’s a bunch of controversy around that.
And yeah, all of these are extremely hard.
Our margin businesses, they charge an arm and a leg for access.
The researchers get paid nothing.
The peer reviewers get paid nothing.
All they’re doing is just like taking the text
and copy and pasted it and putting it somewhere
and maybe printing it into a journal.
So how would this work?
You’re talking about like you told Sam Altman to say,
“Hey, can I just give ChatGPT my credentials
and then it can go log in for me
and use that information when I ask it questions.”
So that’s it.
ChatGPT would have to do it.
How could a founder–
Well, how would a founder get around that?
Or how would they do this?
Yeah, I mean, you wouldn’t need access to O3,
the full model first, because that’s what OpenReach search
is based on.
But I mean, it’s not terribly difficult
to create something like a deep research.
There was a company called–
There is a company called GenSpark.
So I’m friends with the founder, GenSpark.
He’s through the VP of Search at Baidu,
which is the Google of China.
And they made a version of Deep Research
just using a different model.
And so that’s relatively easy to build.
I think the storage of the credentials and logging in
is a little bit more tricky.
Right.
It also just seems like somebody could just create
like SciencePowl or something like that.
It’s specifically for researchers.
And it’s a ChatGPT-like interface,
but it’s specifically trained on or going
to access all of the journals,
all of the academic research out there for you,
and just do a vertical thing.
Isn’t there a Google for doctors that’s like this,
like Lumos or something like that?
There is.
So I’m deep in the space.
There is a company called Ellicit.
There’s a company called SciSpace.
And what they allow you to do is they let you
search abstracts where available.
And also you can upload individual PDFs too,
which also ChatGPT allows you to do.
But there’s nothing I’ve seen that’s indexed
as the full text of all these journals with your credentials.
And why are you so interested in,
what’s all this research for?
Is it your daughter?
And if it is, what’s the story behind that?
Yeah, so my daughter was diagnosed
with a rare brain tumor last September.
And we’ve been doing everything we can
to find new treatments for this because it’s so rare.
And you really get deep insight into the sentence
and the structure of the medical community.
And one of the big learnings is that what is available
as standard of care, meaning that’s what’s available
if you go to a hospital or you talk to a doctor,
and what is available at the frontier,
there’s a huge gap already.
And then further, when you have a rare disease,
just amount of research and data and treatments available
is also just thin.
Because you need to have enough critical mass
for the research to be worth it
so they can recoup the research costs.
And the other interesting thing that we’ve learned
is that the IP issues are really weird.
So for example, there’s this drug
that is FDA-approved, non-prescription,
has been out since the ’70s, treat pedwarns.
And over the past 20 years,
there’s a huge amount of compelling data
that this might be a pretty good treatment
for different kinds of cancer.
And there’s been no clinical trials for it
because there is no money for it
because you can’t patent a pinworm drug.
And so all of the money, hundreds of millions,
billions of dollars are going to new molecules
that are patentable, even if things are already available.
And so once you get into this, you’re like,
“Wow, this is super, super broken.”
And so, yeah, I’m doing a lot of primary research
in order to find repurposed drugs that might already exist
that could treat this fairly rare brain tumor.
It’s… Obviously, this is super serious
and I’m sorry you’re going through everything.
But also, there’s an interesting logistical thing of like,
“Wait, so you are able just to research potential cures
or ways to help your daughter on your own
and come up with a solution?
I mean, is that what you hope the outcome is?”
Yeah, I mean, so there’s…
I’m not the first founder type who’s been in the situation.
So the co-founder of Clubhouse, Rohan,
his daughter has a reintroducted disease.
Her name’s Lydia and he runs the Lydia Foundation.
And he’s going so far as manufacturing his own drugs, right?
For very rare diseases, you can do a lot.
There is other people have met with that somewhere things,
like end-of-one cures exist.
And so you can go…
This is what I mean, like, if you’re sufficiently motivated
and there’s no one more motivated than a dad with a sick kid,
you can go so much further
than what is available as standard of care.
And so even the last time we met with our primary care team,
they were proposing two particular paths,
one involving pretty aggressive surgery and radiation,
another involving this drug.
I proposed a third path and they were discussing it.
And this is like, neurosurgeons and clinicians,
they came back a week later as like,
“Actually, your path thinks more sets.”
And the reason I was able to do that is because this disease is so rare,
I am more knowledgeable about disease than anyone in the room
because they have to like study 50 different cancers, right?
Wow, that’s pretty incredible.
Also, my experience has been that the doctors,
once you get off of the kind of standard of care,
and this is maybe, I’m projecting just from like,
and I just had a knee injury and I was asking the doctor,
I was like, “Hey, like, would PRP or stem cells?
Like, is there anything, should I take…
What’s a peptide?
Can I put a peptide in there?”
And he’s like, “You know, there’s not a lot of evidence,
you know, that’s not part of the protocol.”
Right.
“You don’t have great evidence.”
And he was sort of like, “My hands are tied.”
He’s an orthopedic surgeon.
He’s just like, “You know, my hands are…
I can only recommend what I can recommend.
You could do those things.”
I don’t know.
And so then I felt like, you know, I’m on my own here.
Have you, once you do this path,
are you just outside of the medical system?
Basically, are you outside of your standard chain of command
with your doctors and you have to get your own system set up?
That’s a great question.
And I’ve had an almost similar conversation
in the last meeting I was just describing.
And so I thought I’d play out in real time.
So the neurosurgeon said, “Hey, when we did this operation,
when we did it for this reason,
do it for some other reason.
It’s not part of the standard care.”
But our primary clinician, she is like, she runs…
He’s a principal investigator, one of the clinical trials.
The only one of two that treats the disease.
And she was like, “Yeah, you’re right.
We don’t have a lot of evidence because
there hasn’t been a lot of research into the tumor.”
And so sometimes you have to argue for first principles.
And if it’s a fairly rare disease,
they’re more open to being more creative.
And in our case, our clinician was able to convince
the neurosurgeon this was the right path,
or at least it’s worth trying.
And she told us she was excited to have a partner
who seems well-informed and is willing to think outside of the box.
And I straight up said, “I do not care what the standard of care is.
I think the standard of care is crap.”
And she basically said, “Yeah, I think so too.
I just can’t say that.”
Right.
Dude, and that’s pretty cool that you’re in San Francisco too,
where hopefully you think that the early adopter mindset
even trickles out to the doctors and things like that.
That’s pretty cool that you’re around a doctor
who’s willing to try some crazy stuff
or would seem crazy to a lot of people.
So to answer Sean’s question, if you do find your own drug,
you do have to show enough research
and be well-informed enough
that someone is willing to prescribe it off-label
on a compassionate use basis.
And so you just seem to convince a one doctor.
And so if you can’t find one, you can find others
who’s willing to do that and then you’re in the clear.
And it’s a lot easier if it’s like a fairly serious rare disease.
Can you tell the story about,
you tweeted out about your daughter’s condition,
and then this crazy crypto turn of events happened
where someone created a coin and then millions,
maybe tens of millions.
I don’t even know how much money was raised.
And then people got mad at you.
People were speculating on this thing.
I don’t even understand it.
Can you explain what was going on?
And also just explain, is this just,
was there just degenerate gambling?
Or did you maybe stumble upon a novel way
that people might fund research in the future?
I don’t know which one of the two it is.
Yeah, I think I have a better idea which one it is
after some reflection on it.
So explain what happened.
Yeah, Christmas, I was going to Japan
to ski with some friends and the family.
And I was on a flight and I had a plan
to start to go fummy for this lab.
The Hankison Lab in the University of Colorado.
So we were donating money to them once this happened
because they were the only lab in North America
that researched this particular tumor
called the craniopharyngeoma.
And the treatment that we’re on, they found.
So I thought, okay, for Christmas,
I thought it’d be great to do a GoFundMe
use my network and raise some money for this lab.
So I tweeted this thread with this GoFundMe link,
and that we ended up raising about a quarter million dollars
for a lab, which is like,
I think the biggest donation up to that point.
But what happened is some people started asking about,
hey, can I donate crypto?
And so I said, okay, I posted my ENS, right?
My Ethereum name system address.
And people started donating a little bit of ETH.
And then some other people said,
hey, do you have a Sol address because we’re on Solana?
And I didn’t have a Sol address.
I was aware what Solana is, but I never touched it.
And so the next day, once I landed,
I created my first Solana wallet,
I created this address, and I tweeted it out.
And basically what happened–
By the way, are you big in the crypto world?
Why were all the crypto guys doing this for you
just because what’s the motivation other than it’s good?
So it didn’t occur to me.
I thought it was people–
I had like 77,000 followers at a time.
And I’m not as big in the crypto world.
I’ve been on and off active in crypto since 2017,
but never in a major way.
I’m not a crypto account that people follow.
But I found out why people did this later.
And this answers the question of Sean,
like, is this gambling or is this something else?
But anyway, I posted a Sol Sol address,
and basically an hour later, I looked at my wallet,
and the wallet said $400,000, and it was zero an hour before.
So I’m looking at what is going on, and it turns out–
So someone created a coin called unpub.fund,
which is a platform where you can create a coin
in literally like 30 seconds.
And I was on ETH, right?
And I have an active in crypto.
This wasn’t a thing.
Creating a new token on Ethereum was like a whole process.
Now they shorten it to 30 seconds.
This is called a pump.fund.
Is that–
Pump.fund, yeah, it’s crazy.
Have you seen this business, by the way?
No, that’s like–
This guy’s made like $500 million a profit last year.
Like more than that, I think.
And more than that, yeah.
And so you click a button and you make your own coin,
and obviously in the name, there’s no hiding
that the point of this is that it’s a pump.
Scheme, pump and dump scheme, right?
They made $500 million?
At least, at least.
That’s their take, specifically.
That’s their take.
This is like the majority of the traffic on Solana.
And so people are basically creating these new coins
and trading them, trying to write it,
and it’s basically musical shares, right?
Have you guys gone to this website?
It’s crazy.
It looks like a GeoCity website.
Like there’s like flashing banners.
This is insane.
It’s all the time.
It’s all real time.
Like yesterday, during the Super Bowl, somebody created,
and for Dave Poitnoy, they set a bar stool.
A jail coin?
Jail stool.
A jail stool.
And a jail stool ran up to like $100 million
or something like that.
$200 million.
Like he said, it’s musical shares.
So you’re buying, trying to catch one of these 1000X waves,
but it’s going to dump, and you just got to know
when you’re going to get off the train.
And then if you wait too long,
or you’re the one who comes in late, you lose.
So it’s like being at a roulette table or whatever,
where you’re just throwing chips at the table,
trying to hit.
Oh my God.
Yeah, it’s like the Trump coin, except you can create it
in like 10 seconds, 30 seconds.
But anyway, that’s why people created this coin
is because you’re looking for these new narratives
to gamble on, right?
And the more interesting, the more viral
seeming a narrative is, the more valuable it becomes.
And if you’re in art early, it could really pump.
So anyway, it was $400,000.
And I tweeted a screenshot.
There’s a whole tweet sort of thread where I was like,
“What is going on?”
And I kept on adding this to the tweet thread
with screenshots on my wallet.
And so it was $400,000.
I was like, “What is happening?”
And people were trying to explain to someone
who created this coin called Mira.
And there’s a billion tokens.
And they sent me, “Someone bought half the supply
and just sent it to my wallet.”
So I had 500 million tokens.
And once I tweeted, then an eye check again.
And it’s now $4 million.
And I’m like, “What?”
And an hour later, it’s eight.
A couple hours later, it became 15.
And a one point was $20 million, just like the same day.
And I got like $40,000.
The market cap, and the market cap of the whole thing,
that means was $80 million.
Correct.
Okay.
No, no, I think peak market cap was around $60 million.
Okay.
And you had $40 million of it.
Yeah, because I sold 10% immediately
just to like capture something.
And I sold a bit more in the liquidity pool.
So, you know, I got around a million dollars out,
but I still owned 30% of it.
And immediately I was, I said,
“Okay, I don’t know what I’m gonna do with it,
but every dollar in my wallet is going to charity.
This is non-profit, it’s not for me.”
Not just charity, going to the research lab.
Going to research lab.
That’s researching the potential course
to your daughter’s thing.
Okay, correct.
So I said, “Hey, I’m not gonna move anything
with our 25 hours notice.
I’m gonna try to like be very transparent about this.”
And I thought about it and I said,
“I’m gonna start selling $1,000 every 10 minutes
until like we’re done
because I just don’t have time to run a crypto project.
And, you know, like I want everyone to know where this is going.”
So that happened and the price started going down.
But once we got to a million,
what happened in between is because it was such a big story,
a bunch of rare disease organization started reaching out to me.
And they’re like, “Wow, this happened to you.
Can we, how do we get in on this?”
Because…
They’re like, “Did you say ‘pump.fun’?”
Okay.
Because an average budget,
annual budget for one of these organizations
was like $100,000, $150,000.
It’s just like not a whole lot of money.
This is like more money than the community’s ever seen.
It’s a lot of excitement there.
So I thought, well, I was talking to some crypto friends
and I thought, “Okay, how do we make this like a thing?
And maybe we can make this more sustainable, long-lasting.”
And this idea turning Mira into a launchpad
for other rare disease tokens,
where Mira’s a liquidity pair token was talked about.
And so I thought, well, okay, that seems interesting.
Before I do that,
I should probably figure out how a coin works
and how you launch one of these.
So I went on pump.fun and I thought,
“Okay, let’s find out how one of these works.”
So I created a coin called Zero and I entered a description
for the coin because you could do that.
I said, “Hey, don’t buy this coin.”
It literally says, “Don’t buy this coin.
It’ll never be worth anything.
I’m never going to do anything with it.
It’ll be worth $0.”
So I pressed a button and what I didn’t realize
is because I was on Ethereum for a long time,
but I never had a watch wallet,
what happened is I was in the background,
the most watch wallet at crypto.
So within about 100 to 200 seconds,
the market cap of this coin
that I told people to not buy in the description.
Sorry, a watch wallet.
Does a watch wallet mean that you are someone
that should be monitored because you’re a potential whale?
Yeah, people start tracking like,
“Oh, what is Vitalik doing with his wallet?
What is, what is…”
People are copying.
Someone’s so good with their wallet.
People want to copy what you’re doing.
And they think that you’re the man
because your wallet is old or you have a lot in it.
Because I was sort of the main character
of crypto Twitter for a few days.
Got it, okay, understood.
So there were copy, there were bots
like just monitoring what I was doing
and buying whatever I was buying.
And so they saw this new token.
And so within 100 to 200 seconds,
the market cap of this token was three and a half million dollars.
So I was just sitting there like panicking.
And I said, “Okay, I don’t, this is bad.
I don’t want to have anything to do with this.”
So I had half of the entire supply and I sold it.
And that was my main mistake.
I should have burned it,
which everyone would have been happy about, right?
But because I sold, I crashed the price of this token.
And people got very upset because it was considered a rug.
So now like, “Oh my God, everyone’s…”
And when I sold, I made like $80,000
because even those three and a half million dollars
in market cap is only about $100,000 or so in liquidity.
And yeah, I started a thread explaining,
“Oh my God, I didn’t expect this to happen.
I got on spaces over video.
Just like, I’m really sorry.
I’m like, still trying to figure out how this works.”
And you know, people don’t did it care.
And what I realized is just a different community
than it was when I was really active on Twitter in 2017.
Like people aren’t Ethereum.
They’re like very deep tech to people, right?
They’re like nerdy.
And with the Solana in 2024,
I didn’t realize like it’s so much more mainstream.
A lot of people maybe have like $50 or $100
and they’re just trying to turn into $1,000.
And so the amount of the motion there is like very, very different.
Crypto transition from neckbeards to like everybody
who looks like Jack Harlow in like four years.
The community, the Solana community,
all has like the line etched into the,
into like the side of their haircut or like multiple.
It’s very different than like the people
that got me into Ethereum in the first place.
Today I learned or this month I learned.
So anyway, the markout three and a half million
before I sold, it dumped at 300,000.
And as I started talking about my mistake,
the market cat came back and at one point
it was like five and a half, $6 million.
Just because I was like talking about it
and people were just, the more upset people were,
the more the coin pumped and more money people made from the coin.
So they were trying to make it like even more dramatic,
which I didn’t really understand in time.
I just thought I messed up and people were really upset at me.
So anyway, so then that was like the main villain turn
on Twitter and everyone was super upset at me
because they saw me as a scammer.
So I thought about what am I going to do with this?
So first of all, like the $80,000 within a minute,
I realized this is a mistake.
So I bought back in into the coin and I burned it all, right?
So I already was like neutral and I explained that.
No one cared because of the anonymity of crypto.
They thought I had like a hundred other wallets
that was like, that I pumped and dumped on any profit there
and I can’t prove otherwise.
So I decided like this is really shitty
and I don’t want any part of it.
So what I decided to do is I got some help from, you know,
friend, he’s a coin base from other people
who didn’t want to be named to do on-chain analysis.
So what I set on space is I’m actually just going to pay everyone
back who lost money on this out of my own pocket.
And I’ve even touched a cherry wallet.
So what we ended up doing is everyone who held
in the first 200 seconds, who owned any coins then,
up until the point 43 minutes later,
where the market cap fully recovered back to the same value.
If you sold and you realized the loss,
I’m just going to airdrop you sold.
And it ended up being like $104,000 to $50,000 out of my own pocket.
And I just paid everyone back,
which has never happened on any pump fund coin before.
And maybe like 10% of the people have heard about this.
I tweeted about it.
I had to like keep on responding.
Because every time I tweet for the next like month,
someone would say, “Oh, you’re a scammer.
What are you still doing here?”
And I had to say, “No, I paid everyone back.”
And they would just like not say anything.
This is like a crypto Larry David like thing.
Like it’s like, this is like you’re walking through Times Square
and one of those fake monks put like a bracelet on your wrist.
And then like it now expects you to give them like $20.
It says, even though we called it a free gift,
like this is just, this is insane.
So how much did you end up giving to the charity?
Yeah. So between GoFundMe, so as a million dollars from crypto,
and just like I locked a bunch of the mirror coin
into a liquidity pool.
So it’s sort of still perpetually generating.
So you bought a million dollars of charity for $150,000 basically.
That’s correct. Yeah.
And then we, the total was like a 1.4 million.
We donated more to match like the mistake.
And we added a GoFundMe to it.
So ended up being 1.4 million.
And then the lab actually like triple leveraged it up into the coin.
They got hooked on pumped off on.
All right. I got a public service announcement
for all the tech founders that are listening to this.
Listen, job number one for you is to get customers.
And ideally the bigger the customers, the better.
And I know when I was trying to do that,
we would get somebody interested.
Oh man, there’s a big Fortune 500 company
or it’s a company that’s raised hundreds of millions of dollars.
They want to work with us.
This is so exciting.
And then we hit the wall
and the wall was the security and compliance team.
And all of a sudden we could not land our biggest customers
just because we were shooting ourselves on the foot
by not being security ready and compliant.
And so if you want to solve this, use Vanta.
Vanta is an all in one solution.
It helps you get audit ready.
And it’s quick, it’s painless, it’s easy.
They’re the number one guys doing this.
There are 8,000 companies that use them.
YC companies use them.
We use them.
And so if you want Vanta to help simplify
your security and compliance program
to help you streamline anything,
take all those manual security tasks
and automate them.
You should use Vanta.
If you listen to this,
you guys should get $1,000 off of Vanta too.
So we got a deal for you.
Go to Vanta.com/million.
That’s V-A-N-T-A.com/million.
Use Vanta.
That’s what all the cool kids are doing.
Would you, Sean, give back the 150 like you did?
I wouldn’t.
Fuck that.
I would not have for that situation personally.
I get why you did.
It’s almost just like,
“Dude, this is great.
All of this was unintentional.
People are really mad.
Okay, what’s the sort of like,
how can I just like clear up any possible confusion?”
But I don’t think you needed to in this situation, right?
You created a coin called Zero
that you said is don’t buy this.
This is going to Zero.
It’s a test coin.
And if somebody went and randomly speculated on it
using their like, their sniper bots
that are trying to track your wallet,
you know, like I wouldn’t have given a shit personally.
But then again, these, this community is so like crazy
that they’ll just like make your life hell on Twitter
for like the next five years.
It might be, might be worth it, you know?
Just to clear your own conscience,
go to sleep at night, you know?
Exactly.
I couldn’t, it was for me.
So I could sleep all night
because a lot of these people are fairly low income
and the money is fairly meaningful.
It was one reason.
But another reason is like,
people just don’t read.
Like I explained this.
I mean, the coin says don’t buy it.
I explained this like a couple different times.
And what I realized is like,
you just don’t read on the internet.
And as far as anyone else knows,
because it makes a lot of noise,
like I, the, if you don’t, don’t read what it sounds like is,
I created a scam coin using my own daughter’s name
to scam people out of it.
Right, right, right.
It’s crazy.
Did you, in the end of this,
is there anything here that’s interesting
for fundraising for research?
Or this is just straight like,
I accidentally got into a gambling pool
and it’s kind of got some money for research,
but this is not a sustainable thing for anybody.
I’m still trying to figure it out.
So what I’m hoping to make nearer into is,
so the way this works is you’re,
this is like sort of gang theory around,
okay, you own a bunch of this coin
because this coin’s narrative is attached to you, right?
In the case of, you know,
they port, Portnoy is doing something similar with Jailstool.
And in order to turn it into real world impact,
you have to sell.
There’s no way around that.
And so when you sell,
then you’re just like playing a zero-sum game
against the community
and they’re all going to be upset for you, for sure,
no matter what.
And so that’s a very difficult dynamic.
And I think my idea here is like the only sustainable way
to do this is to lock a bunch of the token
into a liquidity pool.
And so that when people buy in or out of it,
you get to exchange, you get the fees.
And that’s not really like selling into your community.
I think imagine a version of Dogecoin
where every time someone, you know,
it’s like Dogecoin is like a couple tens of billions
of dollars market cap.
But every time someone sells or buys,
it creates like up to,
could be hundreds of thousands of dollars a day of fees
and which you can then use to donate.
I think that might be relatively sustainable.
This is insane.
I don’t even know what to say.
Sounds like a great weekend.
No, it was a month, it was the last,
it was Christmas until like maybe, you know,
now and it ruined my vacation.
And it’s been by far the most stressful time
I’ve ever had in my life.
Can we do a quick detour?
We were at a dinner once and you talked about some,
I think it was a Stanford class you took
called Touchyfeely or that’s the code name for it.
I don’t know.
And it’s something about communication and relationships.
And I remember you said this really great thing at the dinner.
But this was now many years ago
and I don’t remember it exactly.
But can you say that bit again?
I want to hear it again.
And I think a lot of people might benefit from it.
By the way, Siki, how old are you?
I’m 41, I think.
You look like you could be 22 or 41.
I have no idea.
Yeah, Asian no reason.
Let’s go.
Yeah, so I took actually now twice.
I took class again as we talked.
This class that was based on the Stanford business world class
called Interpersonal Dynamics,
which is the highly braided and most popular class
in Stanford business school.
It’s taught by a professor called Carol Robbins
and it’s generally known as Touchyfeely.
And its name is for every participant at some point
will like cry in the class.
But Carol Robbins is now a co-founder of a group called Leaders in Tech
which provides the same class for tech leaders.
So one of the things that you get taught in this class is,
so the purpose of the class is to teach you how to relate to people
and build connection for the other people
because people work with other people.
And one of the most useful frameworks I got from that class
is how to think about your connection with other people
and how to develop that connection.
And so the two frameworks to connect is one is the two tracks
of interpersonal communication and the five levels of it.
So when you’re talking with anyone else, there is two tracks.
There’s the content track and there’s a relationship track.
So the content track is filled with facts
and a relationship track is filled with emotion
and a relationship track is what is filled
and what has to be filled for a relationship
to get become closer and for trust increase.
And the way you fill each of these tracks
is through the five levels of communication.
And the idea is when you are talking to someone,
there’s five levels at which you communicate
of increasing vulnerability and death.
So level one is what’s called ritual
and that is, hey, how’s it going?
Hey, right?
It doesn’t really say anything.
We’re just ritualized greeting.
Level two is extended ritual.
So that is how’s the weather?
How’s the game?
Right?
It’s a longer version of, hey, how’s it going?
Level three is content.
So these are facts.
How’s the project?
Is it late?
What are we going to do with this particular idea?
Level four is emotional self-disclosure.
So that is when you say something
that discloses how you are feeling emotionally at the time.
I feel sad.
I feel angry.
And there’s a lot of talk about level four
because people think they’re doing level four,
but they’re not.
And that’s a very common thing that’s unique
to the English language, which we talk about.
That was a fairly interesting insight.
So level five is the deepest one.
And level five is mutual emotional self-disclosure.
And it is when you are expressing the emotion
that you have about the other person.
I feel angry at you.
I feel proud of you.
I feel disappointed by you.
That’s the deepest level of communication
you can have with another person.
And the content track is only filled
by things from level one to three.
And the relationship track is only filled
by level four and five.
And we are taught to really not use level four and five
in professional settings.
But if you want to build a relationship,
level four and five is kind of the only way you can do it.
And so a lot of the training is about breaking
past the barrier or the uncomfortableness
of engaging level four and level five communication.
And you basically sit in a circle with 12 people
for four days straight until you like,
so you can observe the impact of doing level four or five
and not doing level four or five.
And how you are able to be closer to someone
or further away from someone in emotional distance.
Has this made your running a company better?
I mean, I would say this is the most impactful thing
I’ve ever done in my entire life, like out of any class.
I always like, as a founder,
somewhat see the company as some kind of machine
and I didn’t find it, I’m like, you know,
Miley asked for a degree.
So I found it difficult to relate to people.
But it’s completely transformed all my relationships,
including my relationship with my wife.
And so one of the ways, this was even just last week,
we had an onsite and I was able to do a mini version of this
with our customer success team.
We’re just sat or, you know,
I did a very condensed version of this lecture
and then we sat and we just talked for about four hours.
And the amount of closeness people got,
insight people got was transformative.
And you wouldn’t normally, you know,
sit around for a couple hours at a work setting
and talk about your feelings.
And it’s very uncomfortable to do so.
And it’s intentionally so, like it’s very comfortable
for the first couple of, in the case of a real life workshop,
it’s half a day.
In the case of us, we had it like sort of speed running
and it was uncomfortable about an hour.
But then people were really into it and it’s weird,
but everyone at some point was crying about some disclosure
that they heard or they’ve experienced.
And as a result, the team got so much closer
and a trust increase.
– That’s wild. – This is awesome.
– Do you, so how do you do this in practice, right?
Cause when you talk about like, you know,
I feel angry at you about X or I’m disappointed about Y,
I could see myself not having the skills
or finesse to be able to do that
and let the end result be a positive one
versus we start talking, you’re upset by this.
Well, the other person gets defensive
or they push back and say, well, you did that, blah, blah, blah.
And so can you give me an example of a conversation
that you had that like, maybe here’s what I would love,
a conversation that typically would have gone like this
or maybe been avoided altogether.
And instead, here’s how the actual conversation went
that was useful for you as a CEO, leader, friend,
whatever husband, whichever example you want to choose.
– Yeah, so the first one is easy actually.
So in most people just don’t have the conversation, right?
So the conversation wouldn’t say, I’m angry,
you would just be angry and you wouldn’t say anything.
– Right.
– And people can tell is the thing,
like when you feel a certain way about someone,
it gets, it leaks, right?
Like there’s a level of,
even if you’re not attending the passive aggressive,
you’re just kind of ignoring the person
or it comes off like you’re like, oh my God, it’s late again.
– Right.
– Right, or he didn’t do this.
And so that’s the default.
And that’s when you have this negative feedback cycle
of well, okay, you already felt a certain way,
then you expressed it unknowingly.
And now the other person thinks you’re angry at them
and now they dislike you more.
And then they do things that you dislike more
because they dislike you more.
And it just gets worse.
That’s what relationships get worse.
And that’s like the default.
And so if you know that it leaks anyway,
then it becomes easier to say, I’m going to express that.
And you’re going to express it no matter what.
Your choice is do you express it with words
or do you express it with not words
but just like passive aggressive behavior?
And so, and then you combine that with everyone is entitled
to know those things so they know.
But they’re not entitled to make things up
about what other people are thinking.
So you are entitled to seeing the same facts
as everyone else seeing the same behavior.
You’re not entitled to read the minds
of some other person and how they’re thinking
and how they’re feeling.
But you’re 100% entitled to share what you’re feeling
because those are facts to you.
That’s reality.
And so the mental model isn’t.
And this is kind of like typical
because people aren’t used to expressing this.
The mental model is like, oh, if I am expressing this emotion,
that means I’m attacking someone.
And that is true if you don’t express the emotion
and you’re just acting it out.
But if I were to say, you know, when I see you do this,
the story I tell myself is that you don’t respect me.
And I don’t know if it’s true,
but this is like what I’m thinking my head.
And because of that, I feel angry.
And I just want you to know that because I don’t,
I don’t know if you know that you,
I know that you probably don’t because you can’t read my mind.
But I’m guessing you probably aren’t intending
to make me feel that way.
And I thought it’d be helpful for you to share,
for me to share that to you so that you are aware of it.
I just learned that technique in therapy last week.
Amazing.
I seriously did.
That’s the nonviolent, nonviolent communication framework, right?
It is, yeah.
It’s very connected to that.
I literally just learned that.
Yeah, you’re sharing information, right?
So it’s not an attack.
Like if you are genuinely doing it,
because you understand that you can’t read their mind,
but of course I can’t read your mind either.
And so by sharing it is,
you’re offering them a gift of the information.
One question is,
you said something about the English language
making it harder.
What did you mean by that?
So what you start seeing when you’re in this class
with these tall people,
and you start realizing that,
oh, like I really only feel closer
and I get to know someone better
when they say I feel emotion.
I feel sad.
I feel angry when this happened.
And I feel distanced when they’re expressing that emotion,
but not saying it.
You can tell on their faces that they’re pissed off.
And it becomes scarier.
So then you start learning that,
oh, I mean to say I feel.
The thing about the English language
is that we say I feel often
without expressing any emotion at all.
And that’s the sort of a quirk
that’s kind of unique to English.
So when you say I feel that,
or I feel like,
it is actually grammatically impossible
for them that sort to be an emotion.
I feel that you’re an asshole is not an emotion.
I feel like this is fucked is not an emotion.
I feel sad is an emotion.
I feel happy is an emotion.
And we’re not used to saying that
because the word feel is used
is has been, you know,
disused, misused for other purposes.
And so we just often is unconsciously.
Once you see it, you cannot see it.
People, I ask people, it’s showed emotion.
And they say, I feel like I feel that.
And it’s never an emotion.
And it’s very, very hard to change the habit.
Do you guys do this?
Where like, Sean, in particular,
I’m curious if you do this,
but do you guys do this where you like,
you get into this type of shit,
whatever you want to call it,
the touchy-feely stuff.
And you’re like, this is the way.
And then like, I get into it.
And then half the time I execute that poorly.
And then like, the business sucks.
And I’m like, I got to have more patience with this person.
Or I got to like, let them get away with shit more or whatever.
And then I just go right back to the total opposite end
where it’s like, what do they call this?
Doge, where I’m like, everyone has 15 minutes
to fight for their job.
Like, you know, like, it’s like, I get influenced by either side.
And I don’t, but there is no middle ground.
And that’s like-
I’m kinda like you?
That the first sign of resistance, I crumble sometimes.
So the, but the version of it that happens for me is,
let’s say I hear this and I’m like,
ah, Seeky just taught me something.
This is great.
Two content tracks, five levels.
I’m in.
I got this.
I’m going level five.
Maybe you don’t even need one through four.
And then I’ll go have the next conversation with my wife tonight.
And I’ll give her like, I feel that.
No, no, I feel upset.
And I know you didn’t mean that.
I tried to do the whole thing and she’s like, what?
And then she doesn’t, she doesn’t know all of this.
She didn’t, because she didn’t go to the seminar
and she didn’t have the skills and the tools.
She’s like, be a mad Sean.
Shut up.
It’s on the front of her mind.
And so she doesn’t play back like the role play
that I had heard was.
And then I’m like, well, I don’t really know the next move.
Okay, revert, revert back to my old asshole self.
Yeah, I mean, that’s not a bad response, honestly,
because I think, I think you have to do whatever works.
And the reality is to get good at this.
You know, it took me, I did this four day program twice
and eat every day was like 12 hours a day.
And you’re just sitting in this circle practice.
Did your wife go with you?
The first time she actually did.
Okay.
So she kind of had a dream.
And we’re not supposed to.
I kind of, no, I kind of smuffled her into the hotel room.
So she didn’t go to the class.
But I will say, like the second night when I went home,
she was like, who are you?
Because I was like, oh my God, I feel so bad.
I’ve been such an asshole.
Dude, this sounds like, have you guys heard of the Hoffman Institute?
Have you heard of this?
I’ve heard of this, but I haven’t been.
Yeah.
Like I have, I’ve contemplated going to it,
but I think they, it’s like, they have a variety of locations.
They have one in Connecticut near me and then they have a Boston one.
But you go for, it’s like not expensive.
It’s like $2,000 and you go for four days
and you can’t bring your cell phone.
You can’t, you’re going to be completely disconnected.
Or maybe it’s even five days.
It’s kind of a lot.
But they like, everyone who I go, who goes to it,
they won’t tell me what happens there,
but they all say that it’s life changing.
And they can now develop relationships
and connections with other people.
It’s one of these really strange things that I’m so tempted to do,
but the amount of time to be disconnected
is very like nerve-wracking or, you know, just like scary.
This sounds very similar.
It does sound pretty similar.
It’s not the time to be disconnected.
That’s the scary part there.
Well, yeah, it is.
Dude, it might even be seven days.
Could you go seven days without a phone away from your family?
Away from your family is a little harder.
Yeah, that’s hard.
Like in a hotel, like it’s like crazy to be disconnected.
But yeah, I don’t want to like, also,
I don’t want to like cry with all the strangers.
Yeah, I don’t want to go that deep.
I’m like, I don’t want to go to Tony Robbins.
I don’t want to see anyone.
I don’t want anyone to see me dancing and singing.
Like, you know what I mean?
Yeah, what’s great about Leaders in Tuck is like,
is there all like, you know, well-known ish founders.
It’s like not cheap to go.
So even worse, be around awesome people.
God, I want to be my most vulnerable self around cool people.
Actually, it’s really helpful because you realize that
all the people that some people that you look up to,
like we’re kind of all the same.
Like there’s very similar insecurities.
Whenever I hear about the stuff,
I think of the Tony Soprano quote where he’s like,
whatever happened to the strong silent type, like Gary Cooper.
I go all down this track and I’m like,
can I just say like, hey, chief, like, hi, bub.
I just know that person only at that amount.
I just say yes or no.
Siki, you have this interview question that I like.
You said my favorite interview question.
After 20 years of doing interviews with people
is what is your greatest strength
that you are most worried about not coming across
in an interview setting?
Why that question?
I think I enjoy breaking the fourth wall.
And interviews tends to be so standardized or formalized
that what my greatest anxiety when I’m interviewing
is like, I’m actually really good at a thing.
And you’re asking me to, you know,
you know, reverse a leak list or something
and it’s just not coming across.
What I find is that it breaks down this deformality
and lets people, gets people excited to talk about
something that they’re really, really good at,
telling great stories.
And you get to know the person just a little bit better.
And I think the particular thing is like,
if you just ask what’s your greatest strengths,
it sounds really formal.
But what is the insecurity that you’re bringing in
that you’re hoping to,
that you’re worried about not coming across an interview setting?
It changes the tone quite a bit.
It’s a great question.
I’m stealing that.
Yeah, that’s a good one.
You know what’s interesting is, so you founded runway,
which is like a very serious business.
Like you’re going to have to hire enterprise people,
I would imagine, enterprise sales people.
Like it’s like a, I’m basing like the future of my company
off of some of the output that I’m going to learn
from your software.
But you have the vibe of like an artist to me,
where like you, you have a variety
of like really intriguing projects.
You’re like this thinker, almost like a philosopher.
Is this new to be doing, like,
is this like a new challenge for you
to be doing something so serious and regimented?
Like an, or can you still be like goofy
and an artist in this B2B world?
So yeah, funny enough, he’s a serious business.
That was the name of my first company.
And we built fun games.
I feel like if you call it serious citizen, you know?
Yeah, because we were a games company,
serious business, fun games.
But yeah, I mean, I think it’s actually a pretty huge advantage,
particularly for the things we consider serious.
So I mean, people have this stereotype of business
and finances being super serious and super rigid.
But finance at its best is really about creating value.
Let’s start looking forward and thinking about new ideas
about how we can push the business forward
and grow faster and all these things.
And in order for us to be creative,
we have to be in flow and things that are fun
keeps you in flow.
And what we actually hear from our customers,
that the thing that we hear quite often
and we love hearing is this software feels fun.
And that’s not a luxury.
That is a fund that creates flow,
that creates a creativity, that creates value.
And when you use something that isn’t fun,
something that feels slow or confusing,
that you’re not creative and you’re making worse decisions.
So I don’t think they’re intentionally with each other.
I think they’re quite complimentary.
And that is like very deeply part of our philosophy.
Have you ever seen this?
Yes, that’s what made me think of that question.
What’s the story of this, Ikki?
This happened last week.
Our marketing team is run by Cal Freeze,
who is a YC founder of a company called Tyka.
He was the CEO there.
And we also have this woman named Julie Fritas,
who was at Shopify.
And I was in the office and I just saw them come out
in a meeting kind of giggling.
And they got out of this piece of cardboard
and started like writing this.
I’m like, what is this?
Like, oh, you know how like you didn’t want to do a billboard?
We decided to just create a billboard ourselves
and just hold on to Freeway.
And I’m like, that is such a cracked idea.
Of course, that’s going to go viral.
And I said, I’ll do it.
It’s like, you really will?
I’m like, yeah, I’ll do it.
So they’re like, okay.
So we walked outside.
We found a Freeway entrance.
And I was just holding the sign.
What does it say, by the way?
It says, if you hate your finance platform,
getrunway.com.
Are you the only founder?
I had a co-founder, Arya Asamonfar,
and he left the company about a year and a half ago,
almost two years ago.
Because that’s like pretty rare.
I mean, I don’t know when you launched,
but I feel like you’re very, very, very, very early
in the period because I remember seeing you guys go on Twitter,
like get popular on Twitter.
That’s going to be pretty different to be kind of a,
the only founder running a company.
That’d be kind of exciting, right?
You get to do whatever the hell you want,
or is it you’re going to be lonely?
I think the reason why we partnered with Waze
is things were just slower to make decisions,
and neither of us were having as much fun as we wanted to.
And actually, I didn’t want him to leave.
Like he is, I mean, he’s still on the board.
I love him.
He’s just the most wise and high-interviewed person I’ve ever met.
He was one of Perox’s peers at Twitter,
and I hired him out of school, my first company.
And he now works for Brett Taylor at Sierra.
But if things were going slower than he wanted,
and he identified that it was him,
or our relationship slowing us down,
he decided to fire himself.
And I didn’t think he was right about that, but he was.
He usually is right about just about everything,
and it totally transformed the company.
He also must have attended interpersonal dynamics.
He did not.
You talked about character AI and CHI,
like some of these AI companies
that are crushing it, just printing money right now.
Are there any other companies that just have blown your mind
in terms of how well they’re doing
or how fast they’re growing right now,
like maybe AI, maybe not AI?
I love the Labs.
I’m just following that story in that company,
but they do basically all of the audio,
translation, generation, sometimes e-fakes.
And when I met them, there were less than 10 people.
They were ex-Google.
They’re working on the foundation of all technology.
And they are now, I don’t know what they last announced,
but they’re in the hundreds of millions of AR in like a year
or two, a year and a half or so.
And what blew my mind is I never seen a group
of very good technologists that were also so good
at commercializing the technology so rapidly.
They’re at hundreds of millions and–
Hundreds.
Hundreds.
I feel like this just came out.
And they’re–
Yeah, but I do know.
We should have invested in half, right?
They dubbed our podcast.
Remember that clip where they were like–
Yes, the Indian Hindi.
You’re speaking Hindi now.
And it was amazing.
And I DMed them.
And we were like, hey, this is really cool.
Like, so stupid of us not to have pursued that more.
Yeah, there’s that graph, right, for Ys
and the fastest growing SaaS companies.
And I think cursor is up there.
I am fairly convinced that I love the Labs.
It’s actually faster than all of them.
But yeah, I think they announced some revenue milestone.
But it’s large.
We were tinkering with them.
It was borderline.
This is cool.
This is cute, too.
I can use this right now.
It was like just there.
So I guess they crossed it.
And people are actually using it to actually–
Who are they selling to?
Is it–
So Apple has audiobooks.
Oh, so not podcast, sorry.
Apple audiobooks, right?
So previously, they did have audiobooks.
And you would know that a lot of this AI generate
is Power By One Labs.
Oh, so they also publishers.
They also do AI agents for customer service
and support agents and things like that.
So they’re the back end of maybe potentially
other software tools as well.
Yeah.
So they have all kinds of product lines.
They sell the book publishers, the Power Agents.
They do–
Why are they better than what OpenAI–
The risk with all these AI companies
is that the general, the base models,
OpenAI and Anthropic, et cetera,
can just offer those capabilities as part of the main suite.
Do they do something different?
Are they fine-tuning it in some way?
No, it’s their own foundational models.
And the quality and expressiveness is just better.
And the form factor is better.
So you can use it for all these other use cases.
And the voice API of the OpenAI is actually not as good.
That way, it’s easily usable.
Dude, you’re super fun to talk to.
I just like hearing all these like–
I feel like you’re like a treasure box.
And I just like pick–
I just grab something out of the toy chest
and be like, tell me the story behind this.
You know what I mean?
I think that’s awesome.
Yeah, thanks for coming on, dude.
And give people a shout out for your company
and where to follow you for more.
Yeah, we’re runway.com.
You can follow me at bladerbladewithanr or runwayco.
And if you are a CFO, you should use our software.
How much did you have to pay for that domain?
A quarter of a million dollars.
That’s not bad.
It’s funny, Nevolvicont named the company
and suggested that we use it under.com.
I think that was smart.
A quarter of a million is not a lot, I feel like, for that–
Wait, what do you mean Nevolg named the company?
Like you went to him being like, hey, what did we name this?
Or he just suggested it?
So when Clubhouse only had one room in April 2020,
it was in the Nevol app, right?
I think you were on it quite a bit, too.
So when I was thinking about what I want to do for next company,
I said I want to do a finance company.
And I got a great name for it, Nevol, CFO.ai.
He’s like, no, don’t call it AI.
It’s going to be dated in like two years.
Everything you call AI.
You should just call it runway and you get the .com.
And he wrote the first track into runway.
And that’s why we got the .com.
It’s so funny that you said it was the Nevol app at the time.
It totally was.
And it was amazing.
It was an app in the open to talking to all Rob got.
It was amazing.
By the way, I was using Air Chat pretty religiously for like two months.
Even though I knew Air Chat’s not going to work, I was like,
oh, it doesn’t matter.
This is Nevol’s app.
He’s going to be on 24/7.
Cool, this is like–
I like to hang out with Nevol.
I’m not going to email him like a million other people and say,
hey, can we get a coffee?
Just a thousand dollars a month and you can talk to Nevol whenever you want.
Yeah, exactly.
I was like, I’m going to be on this for two months.
I’m going to be a power user for exactly two months
and I’m going to hang out with Nevol and that’s exactly what happened.
I was very proud of myself for that.
It was the most fun way to use that app.
Dude, thank you for doing this.
You’re the man.
And we’re thinking of you and your daughter.
And hopefully–
Thank you.
Appreciate it, man.
–the Nevol too.
All right, see you.
Thank you.
That’s it.
That’s the pot.
I feel like I can rule the world.
I know I could be what I want to.
I put my all in it like no days off on a road.
Let’s travel never looking back.
Hey, Sean here.
I want to take a minute to tell you a David Oglevy story.
One of the great ad men.
He said, remember, the consumer is not a moron.
She’s your wife.
You wouldn’t lie to your own wife.
So don’t lie to mine.
And I love that.
You guys, you’re my family.
You’re like my wife.
And I won’t lie to you either.
So I’ll tell you the truth for every company I own right now.
Six companies.
I use Mercury for all of them.
So I’m proud to partner with Mercury
because I use it for all of my banking needs
across my personal account, my business accounts,
and anytime I start a new company.
This is my first move.
I go open up a Mercury account.
I’m very confident in recommending it
because I actually use it.
I’ve used it for years.
It is the best product on the market.
So if you want to be like me
and 200,000 other ambitious founders,
go to mercury.com and apply in minutes.
And remember, Mercury is a financial technology company,
not a bank.
Bank banking services provided by Choice Financial Group
and Evolve Bank & Trust members FDIC.
All right, back to the episode.
Episode 678: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk to Siqi Chen ( https://x.com/blader ), the founder of Runway.com.
—
Show Notes:
(0:00) Early days at Zynga
(14:34) Business ideas
(52:18) Touchy-feely class
(1:07:24) Siqi’s favorite interview question
(1:12:48) Insane growth of ElevenLabs
—
Links:
• Limitless – https://www.limitless.ai/
• Rewind – https://www.rewind.ai/
• Runway – https://runway.com/
• Hoffman Institute – https://www.hoffmaninstitute.org/
• Pump – https://pump.fun/board
• ElevenLabs – https://elevenlabs.io/
—
Check Out Shaan’s Stuff:
Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd
—
Check Out Sam’s Stuff:
• Hampton – https://www.joinhampton.com/
• Ideation Bootcamp – https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/
• Copy That – https://copythat.com
• Hampton Wealth Survey – https://joinhampton.com/wealth
• Sam’s List – http://samslist.co/
My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano
