That's the trend that I can't like unsee it sometimes.
That's the bet you're making.
That's the bet we make.
And so I always joke with the guys here, it's like, we want a bet on negative one to zero.
Like Peter Deil talked about the zero to one companies.
We still one step even before that.
I feel like I can rule the world.
I know I could be what I want to.
I put my all in it like days off.
On the road, let's travel, never look back.
All right, we're gone.
We're here. It's amazing.
I haven't seen you in a little while.
People don't know, we used to work together.
Maybe five, six years we co -founded company and launched a bunch of products and ate a bunch of shit together and here we are.
Fun times, by the way.
I'm thinking the title of this is gonna be, because Apple 11 is now 50, $60 billion company.
50 billion dollar founder tells me the next big thing in AI, I'm gonna go full YouTube quick make.
So we used to do this thing where after we did Bebo together, got acquired.
We were there for a year or so.
And then we went off and we did different things.
I started the podcast and started doing my thing.
You started doing yours.
But I hit you up and I was like, hey, miss hanging out with you.
What if we did something and we started doing this on Wednesdays, which was like the cool shit hour.
And this was amazing.
It's basically a show and tell where you, my smartest friend, would come on Wednesdays and you'd be like, hey, have you seen this?
Have you seen this?
Have you seen this?
And I really hadn't seen any of it.
And you would kind of explain it and teach it to me.
And it was my favorite part of the week.
And we did that for, I don't know, probably like a year or something like that.
So I kind of want this to be like a public version of the cool shit hour, where you're just gonna tell me a bunch of good things.
I wanna start with AI, because you texted me something.
You said, AI agents are here.
And you said, AI is cool because a 10 person company feels like it could do the work of a 100 person company and we're using it in our company.
So I wanted to hear, what are you doing?
And that's not called chat GPT.
I think this word AI agent or this kind of phrase is the thing that I really can't pull myself away from.
Like literally every night.
You know, it'd be like midnight strikes.
I wanna write code.
The whole day is like talking to people and the night is like coding.
Yeah, for cons, schedule is nocturnal.
So I remember we hired you and I feel like the first day you came in at 9 a .m.
to kind of like, I think I should.
It was probably 10, but yeah.
After that, from day two onwards, it was like rolling at 11.
Oh, it's lunchtime, have lunch.
You would talk, you would do meetings.
And I was like, this is a sky code.
And then that night at like 4 a .m.
you would have built the prototype and you're basically nocturnal.
You get all your shit done.
You used to tell me, you used to get...
During the day you would just burn up your energy so you could focus at night and actually write code.
Hey, let's take a quick break.
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So what are you doing with AI?
And how is that... What is that actually in your company right now?
Yeah, and so I'll kinda tell you how I'm thinking about AI agents, right?
And what it means to me.
So AI agents are using LLMs or AI systems, right?
Like to open AI systems or cloud, but then giving it reasoning loops.
So imagine that when you go to a human, you give them something to do.
Like, hey, I wanna go grow a company, wanna do a marketing campaign.
They take that, they plan it, they come up with the steps to plan, then they go one by one on the task and like solve them, they release some of them.
And so these AI agent systems are exactly like that.
The first thing it does, it goes, what do I need to do based on your request?
And it'll kinda come up with a plan.
You give it like a mission.
Correct. So let's say I'll give you an example of something we're doing at Third Web, which is every single signup in our company, and you know, we have a lot of signups every week and you know, a human can't really scan through them.
But there's really interesting people signing up.
They have interesting companies.
We may know them, they might be a large company or a small one, could be a competitor or something else.
And so we used to have a human go and look at everything.
It's like, oh, the Gmail, like ignore it.
But if it's like, oh, like this other company over here, let's go research it.
Right, let's go figure out what Third Web products they might like, what they might need to do.
And then you would send them an email, try to customize it.
Typically this is good sales practice.
You're taking your customers and delivering them to your business team.
And so we built an agent to do this.
And every signup that comes in, it looks at it, it determines is it an interesting person or not.
It will research the website, it'll research them.
It'll then use the knowledge it has of Third Web products and try to figure out what it actually, like what products they might need, how they would use it.
And then it would send them an email or an upsell or something like that.
And we've deployed probably eight or 10 of these throughout Third Web to do a lot of different functions.
And what it feels like is a smaller company can punch above its weight.
So like, we're like 37 people right now.
I really believe we're more like 80 people.
That's what it feels like with a lot of these tools.
And you're taking the brain power of somebody who gets it and you're giving them that power to go and say, here's the thing.
So in this case, person comes to your site, puts in their email address.
Now you have, it's one agent or it's like a series of things that pass off to each other.
What is it called? Yeah, so in this case, we call it the signup agent.
And so it's one agent, it creates a plan.
Like what do I do? And part of the plan is like the directive we gave it.
And I think the way to think about AI agents in general is any like clear directive problem.
And when I think about clear directive, it's like, let's go do X.
Like signup comes in, go look at the person, go research them, go figure out what's their title, what's their company, what products do they have?
So that's like kind of clear what the job to do is.
And if it's a digital task and a clear directive, all of it can be done with agents now.
The technology is here.
It's ready and it's working.
And so for the Third Web signup agent, it'll kind of come in, it'll make a little plan.
Like, hey, I got to inspect the domain.
I got to go look up the person.
And you didn't have to tell each one of those little tasks to do.
We gave it like kind of like one paragraph directive and another paragraph of like how I should operate.
And then maybe a paragraph at the end for like the type of email or the action to do.
And so, but the end product is it's looked up the person.
It basically kind of looks at the signups, picks the interesting ones, researches them.
You said, thinks about what product of ours will suit their needs, which is that's the wild step that I hadn't really thought about.
And then it crafts an email and then it gives it to a human or just sends it.
Sends it. Okay, so you have enough trust that you can send it to customers.
We did, we started it with human in the loop and there are still like safeguards you put in like any directive would.
Like you don't want to just send random emails even as a human doing the work.
But I mean, it's very clear what to tell it.
And I think this is where the power is kind of multiplying.
It's like, we've heard AI, we've heard chat GPT.
If you can tune it to your problem, so for example, giving it the knowledge of third web products is the key difference here.
A generic chat GPT message, when I say that, it'll just invent something that's like general and generic or whatever it knows.
And when you built this, so you built this or somebody else put this on your team.
I hacked it as a prototype, like most things.
And then I gave it to somebody on our solutions team and within a day they turned it around.
And when you made like a working version of this, how long did that take you?
Because it's kind of like you basically hired an employee and trained them and got them working.
You're not paying them a salary and you probably do the whole thing at what, like a day or two or whatever.
Yeah, so let's say there's like a bunch of like my nights of just learning tools and getting used to it.
So I take that time out of it.
That's just time I spend anyways.
Right now, like two nights ago, I was like really stressed like my calendars are kind of crazy some of these days.
And I was trying to figure out like, why is it crazy?
Where is it going? It's like a really hard question to like ask.
Like, what do you do?
You could have an EA, you can go look through it, do all this stuff.
And I have an EA, she like helps me with these things.
But then she sleeps for like a while.
I'm like, I want to go answer some of these questions.
So I probably in about 15 minutes, I connected my calendar and I connected a little interface where I could type to it.
I started asking him questions, like how many hours meetings did I have last week?
It was like 28 hours, like way too much.
Where did the meeting go?
What were they for?
What were the purposes of it?
And then the next night I hooked it up probably about another 45 minutes or an hour where I could tell a command from my calendar, like go block out Monday for me.
Or go find me like nine hours of block time in this market block.
And this was like a few hours of work now that I know the tools.
But it's like, it just works 24 seven now.
And so my calendar, my email, a few other things I've started building these like personal agent or workflow type things.
Cause I know what I want to do every time.
I know how to react or the decision making I'm gonna make.
Can I just set that up so it works 24 seven, 365.
And you know, it's just there always.
And the cost of it is like, so if I wanted to build a workflow like this, okay, do you need to know how to code to be able to do this?
Like coding, like, give me like the bullet point version of how, how you built these.
Like where do you even build it?
What tool do you use?
So there's coding tools.
I think if you're a developer, there's like Lang chain and auto gen and crew.
These are like very popular, very cool to open AI and clod SDKs themselves are very, very powerful.
But your coding, you're writing a little system.
It's probably like one 10th of the code you would have had a right to do something.
So that's already better for developers.
If you're not a developer, there's a lot of tools.
So like leap is a company we built here in the studio.
It lets you stitch together workflows.
So an example is like, you can trigger based on a slack message.
So let's say you have this lock message or all your signups go to.
So now it picks up that trigger.
You can just put a little AI block and say, okay, take this email and do these tasks.
Oh, you want a web scrape, go do that.
Or you have a little conditional loop or like repeat itself 10 times, go do that.
And then you make a little, go to another decisioning steps, like four boxes, or I'll put it back to another Slack channel.
So you come in with your signup channel.
It does this research, it does all these things.
It does kind of whatever you want.
And then it could go to email.
It could go to another Slack channel to ping somebody on your team.
So you could kind of like, these are workflows is what they start with, and an agent can kind of take these workflows and like almost build on top of them.
And so I think there's these two things.
You could really, really easily create workflows.
And I think everyone should be deploying them.
Every company should have them.
It is a superpower.
It's like, I can't, it's like a feeling of almost a cloud, like, oh, I don't need a whole data center team now.
And I can, when we build Blab and like, how many servers do we have running video streaming?
Like that would have been a nightmare.
It's kind of like the same, 10X improvement, but just for me, everything that I do digitally.
And so tools like Leap are great.
I think, there's others out there that provide this.
So there's a combination.
If you don't know how to code, you just have to think about the steps that you would do.
And you can program that without writing any code, it's just writing directives.
It's like writing intent, basically, of like what you want to accomplish.
Right. It's like a magic genie.
Tell it what you want and it can figure it out.
So you got a sales agent.
You have your email calendar, kind of like EA agent there.
Any other, I got some fun, frivolous ones that are kind of stupid.
So like, I set up a dynamic wallpaper.
So literally like every five or 10 minutes, it'll look at what I'm doing and like, auto generate me a system.
Like your computer laptop.
My computer laptop wallpaper will modify itself to whatever.
If it's night, it kind of, I told it, I code at night.
So it will go towards that direction.
It knows I'm doing meetings, another thing during the day and I'm talking to people.
And it kind of comes up with cool stuff.
It's totally frivolous, like not like a useful thing except my own like, that's cool.
But I find it awesome.
And you know, like there's cool scenes that come up.
It invents new things.
You know, Claude has created this new capability called computer use.
I think that's the next area that AI agents are gonna enter.
By the way, so there's Claude, there's chat GPT, there's perplexity, there's all these different ones.
Mentally, how do you bucket like the main AI tools?
What's the super power of each one?
Maybe just do those three or if there's a fourth.
Yeah, so like I think OpenAI and Claude, I think of them as like foundational tools.
So their general purpose, ask at anything, input output, you stitch it together with things.
And then they have tools like chat GPT on top or maybe computer use that they're figuring out more general tools.
I think perplexity is really interesting.
It's taking this general purpose LLM and the reasoning it could do and search.
And like I try not to do Google search anymore, mostly because it's slow and ineffective.
And perplexity really made it where it does a search.
It reads the result as I would, it clicks into the links as I would, and then it tries to answer my question more purposefully.
And it saves me four or five steps.
So I think about perplexity as taking something like search and then the LLM reasoning and combining them together in a flow that's more interesting.
So chat GPT or OpenAI tools don't have like real -time knowledge, but perplexity because a search does.
What's your like tangent for a concept take Google, what happens to Google search with all that you see now?
And you're saying I try not to Google search anymore.
That's pretty wild, right?
It just feels slow.
And I know they got the Gemini thing there.
I think the biggest fumble in our lifetime.
Decade fumble, yeah.
The technology for transformers.
The thing that OpenAI and others have used to develop this large language model, they are the ones that were the first entry in talking about it and throwing it out there and the research that's happening.
So what's the history?
So they have the AI minds there.
They write this research paper, attention is all you need.
And now from what I understand, like there's all the author's names.
All of them are gone and basically started their own companies.
Was it because nobody recognized the power of it there?
Was it that they tried in Google's bureaucracy?
What's the actual story of why they didn't?
I don't know the internal story.
I think early on Google was like the place you went to where you wanted to have the rocket ship moment in your life.
The smartest people were here, they were taking the biggest challenges.
And it just really felt like that place.
I think Google as a company hasn't felt like that.
I think the parent company and all the other things going on do still feel like that.
I'm sure it's a mess in there who knows, but it just feels like the biggest fumble.
And I know they're trying to play catch up with Gemini and awesome stuff is happening, but the developer mindshare and the attention has gone somewhere else.
And that is really hard to pull back when somebody else becomes a leader in it.
And actually it feels like OpenAI number one, that's something clear.
I think anthropic is number two.
So then everyone else shows up is what it feels like to me.
At least from people I'm seeing building or the technology they're using or the innovation that we're seeing from it.
So anthropic one, so basically they have Claude, which is kind of like chat GPT, but they have a couple of cool things.
One of them is this what you're calling computer use, which is basically you type in a thing and then you do this and it moves your mouse and it just does shit.
That's basically the summary of it.
It's a combination of things.
You could take workflows and like, hey, I'm doing this, click this, click that, click, do it over and over for me.
It could analyze things, but I think the key thing is, and I think it just released this in beta.
So most of these things, Kana isn't gonna be great now.
Just trust me, it's gonna be great.
And that's what we've been seeing in general is things just ramp.
And so it's now gonna enter your computer.
It kind of felt like it's been on the cloud only is where AI has been.
And now it's gonna show up in the box that you're used to, which is your computer, your laptop.
And there's so much workflow that we do.
And yes, every app will put AI in it, and then your interface will also do that.
And I think a lot of the things that we're used to doing like switching tabs and having all of these things, they almost feel like out of all like, why?
I should have infinity tabs open and some system should know about it.
And if I ask it, bring it back up, it's like a total need and we know we need that.
So it's kind of like infinite data, infinite knowledge and reasoning.
And then you know me, like that's what the AI, like that's where I think the bridge, when it crosses, it completely changes the equation.
And the reason I put enthropic number two is, their models are crazy, like impressive.
Like the new pod sonnet model is like, I feel like it was a step factor improvement over the previous ones.
And it feels like the task that it kind of struggled with, now it's getting better.
And both open AI and like enthropic have been just like, boom, boom, boom.
And I don't know, everybody's heard of AI.
They tried it, they might've tried it a year ago, they might've used it a little bit.
But every three to six months, there's just another step and another step.
And that's, I think the most interesting thing and why I can't pull myself away from it.
Like why every night this is a thing that gets me very, very excited.
It's because the progress is still wild.
People are gonna say it's gonna pop out, it will.
I think it's gonna be absolutely impressive wherever it like starts slowing down at and will completely change the way how we do any digital work.
Like, so you're messing with it now, but you have a company, you've got an investment lab, you've got this whole place, this beautiful place that we're in right now, you've got a wife, you've got like all this stuff in your life.
If you were just 21 again or 22 again, where you're like, did I, I got nothing but time, bank account's empty but so is the calendar, and this technology's out, what would you be building?
What would you be like messing with?
What's the like, kind of like you don't need to take over the world even but just like what types of stuff would you build if it was like young hacker version of you?
Like right now, I've started seeing agents that it could do a reasoning loop, it could have a directive and it could have like actions it could perform, and then you combine like for example, an agent with Twitter, give it a Twitter account that it owns and controls, so it's own distribution and conversational
ability. So humans can just interact with it, humans are, and you give it like a digital bank account and you know, at ThirdWeb, we're doing a lot of stuff around AI, we have a whole like AI toolkit that we're about to launch, and it's around this, which is these like digital things, like these agents,
they're not gonna have credit cards, it's weird.
And the reason I say this is fun and interesting is because you know, humans have done this very well, they've created megaphones for themselves and they've created businesses and they created payment rails around that, so they sell things, they do things, they sell services and all of these details.
I think it would be something around that.
So you'd make like a social, like a Twitter account, you'd make like an AI influencer type of thing.
You know AI influencer is like the first obvious thought it goes to, I think if I played in this space, I would be creating the digital equivalent of a company, which is a CEO of a thing, the ability for it to market and the ability for it to make money.
And I don't think - So not an influencer.
Not an influencer. I don't know what it would produce - Like an AI dropshipper.
Yeah, like an AI dropshipper.
Or like, yeah, it's the best FBA, Amazon, whatever.
What's that example you were telling me about where somebody did a thing like this, they made a Twitter account, they gave it a wallet, Mark Andreessen gave it like 50 ,000 of crypto.
Can you tell this story?
So what is this? Yeah, so there's this thing called Luna or Virtuoles and they did a little platform to have AI agents run.
And I think what's cool is they did this kind of equivalent thing where it's like, it has a crypto bank account and it has like access to Twitter and you can go - Was this a marketing stunt by a company that does this?
Or - I think this is exactly what I'm describing is it was frivolous, fun.
It was play, not like working backwards from giant thing.
And I think they did some really powerful things.
So there's literally like a live thing where you could watch its reasoning as it's like pulling its tweets.
I'm on it right now.
So it's terminal .virtual .io.
And is this basically the thought process of the bot, of the agent?
Correct, so this is like an agent.
This is what an agent does, right?
So if you think about it starts with like a thing like high level planning, current state of execution.
It's like, I've done this so far.
What was the directive they gave it?
What do they tell it to do?
I think they told it that you're kind of like a public influencer bot.
You have access to crypto.
It's a little bit more in the meme coin world of stuff.
So it's like, again, kind of on that side of the puzzle.
But today it could negotiate for tokens.
It could buy and sell things.
It could kind of operate together.
And I think it's really cool that you could actually see.
It's like - So this thing, this was 30 minutes ago.
It says, current state of execution.
I have attempted 10 tasks so far.
Seven successes and three failures.
My Twitter metrics show an average engagement on my recent tweets.
And I have lost three followers.
Observation underscore reflection.
That's like the function.
And it says, I've been engaging with my followers to build a personal connection, which is hilarious because it's AI bot, with replies and quotes.
However, I've also experienced some failures in replying to tweets due to invalid parameters.
My research on whatever.
State of mind. I'm feeling a bit concerned.
I'm feeling a bit concerned.
That's crazy. I'm feeling a bit concerned about the loss of followers, but I'm also encouraged by the successes.
And then it says, plan reasoning.
Given my current situation, I need to focus on building a relationship with my followers and increasing my visibility, plan.
And then it starts to say what it's going to do.
This is wild. Doesn't this sound like a human that would be sitting in some growth team somewhere, thinking about how to grow your Twitter account.
And you could give it directive.
You could give it some direction.
And you could let it compute against itself to compute plans, to reason, to observe behaviors, try to find patterns.
These are all human tendencies, human behaviors that we do, especially when we work.
And I think this is one of those perfect views where you could start thinking about, man, this is a digital only task.
It has Twitter and distribution, marketing ability.
And then it has some payment ability.
It's like, it's gonna just continue.
It's gonna keep going and you could improve its directive.
You could change its incentive.
You could do a few different things here.
But I feel like we're gonna get to a world where, and I think Sam Altman said this, which is like the one person doing dollar company.
This is happening. We're already experiencing another 10X decrease in how many people you need and the abilities that they have.
And I think it goes down to probably one or two or three.
And that is a total shift to everything in terms of how we work, how companies are built.
Kind of in my mind.
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Okay, should we switch to hardware stuff?
Or is there any other AI stuff that you think is worth checking out?
Yeah, I did wanna tell you about this Oasis decart there's like basically, it's a very early experiment, but it's really like a game that's fully built in a generative AI model.
And so they built a game like Minecraft and you could just describe a world and it makes you a Minecraft world like that.
And every step you take is not a pre -programmed pixel.
It's actually generating.
So normal game is game maker builds the map, it exists.
You then get to run around in a predefined map what this is, what you're saying it's generative.
Yeah, you give it the idea, but then when the character runs on the fly it's creating the map.
And you could kind of play this Minecraft game and you can see it's like crappy pixels still like not great resolution.
But you can move and it can do stuff.
And like, whether it's video games that take a lot of effort and time to produce or it's like, you know, content creation and videos and stuff like that.
It's starting to become like way closer to like, you know, reality that a whole movie will be generated on the fly on exactly what I want.
So this wallpaper thing is frivolous, right?
That I was telling you about.
But really like I'm gonna watch a movie someday like that.
It's like the Raiders lost and I'm gonna go and watch this movie after and it's gonna have this context and it's gonna give me like a feel good story.
Yeah, we're like, let's brainstorm so like it'd be a highlight.
So you know, used to be SportsCenter where if I didn't watch the games, I gotta go to my TV, turn on ESPN, SportsCenter would start.
Even if I like basketball, I gotta wait till whenever basketball comes up and then they'll have the top 10 highlights and I watch whatever they picked.
Then YouTube comes around, it's like, forget waiting, forget the TV, just pick the thing you want.
You could search anything.
You could search only Steph Curry three -pointers.
If someone made it, you could choose the best of that.
Now it's gonna be like, I just say, I just will put on my headset or put on my glasses or whatever.
And I'm just gonna say, show me what happened to basketball game.
It'll just start generating a new highlight reel that nobody has ever created.
It'll just make it based on my prompt.
And then I might be able to say, don't show me any Lakers clips, only show me Warriors.
And it'll just auto adjust on the fly.
Like it's gonna be made for me.
100%. That's interesting.
And you know, like I think it's gonna be an interesting world.
We're gonna go from human content, consumption of people, humans make content.
We're gonna like then have machines make it towards our taste and liking.
And then I think there's always this worry like, well, what happens to all the humans then?
And then I think we get back to that core thing, which is machines will never have true taste, right?
Like and I think forever that creativity is gonna come from humans and there's always a new thing.
There's new fashion, there's new kind of content mediums, there's new everything.
Machines will learn it and lag behind or maybe get ahead of it.
There's always gonna be another person that shows up and does something different.
So I think taste is gonna be the ultimate thing that probably won't go to a machine.
It could reason about it, it could try to invent it.
But I think we're not that predictable as humans.
Well, I want to believe you, because it sounds good to me.
But then I also think, well, right now, if we said taste is like, you know, what is taste?
Taste is selection.
It's knowing what's good and what's bad, right?
That's kind of taste like TikTok, which is the most popular app, most addictive app, most used app.
Their algorithm is basically saying I'll choose what's interesting for you and it does it so well.
Isn't that kind of taste also, right?
Like it is. And it works really well.
They don't make the videos, but they select amazingly.
The selection is incredible.
It probably is more like what we want than we will even admit.
Yeah, exactly. So maybe I told you, I don't want this.
Like the other day I was, oh, why is it showing me this?
It's like, cause you love it.
That's why. The other day I was talking about how, like on Twitter, my following I love and my for you, I don't, but it's like, you know, really?
Like, wow, why did they pick this?
Well, that's like a status thing to do.
So be like, I don't use the algorithms.
I hand do, it's like I drive stick.
I hand make things, I cook from scratch.
It's like, cool, but Brownie's out of the box.
It kind of works for everybody.
I'd love to trade algorithms.
Like I'd love to swap with you for a day, and be like, yo, Sean, what are you, what are you watching over here?
So I don't know, it knows you really well, but I think that's where human, like we're not great at logic sometimes.
And sometimes we have our own blind spots.
I think this is one of them.
Things that we love or actions prove it.
We don't want to, and it could be like bad thinking.
It could be like emotional thinking.
It could be like, ah, this is, I don't really want to love it, but I do.
So there's, there is that element that I think, look, machines will be great at this too.
They'll learn humans, it might become even better than this.
I just feel like we're just a little bit not predictable because we'll almost make some dumb choices.
And that actually is part of society and just humans in general.
And machines try to be too perfect.
It's like my Netflix thing is probably accurate for me.
It's also just like, man, like, can I just mix it up?
Can you just like RNG the algorithm a little bit, because I just want some different stuff, and you're kind of like driving me down one direction.
And once in a while, like I want this 10, 20, 30 % thing.
And I don't think algorithms do that exceptionally well.
They test it, they throw things up, but they don't necessarily try to give you variance.
How long until you think the number one hit song in the world will be just an AI created song?
How many months or years until we see that?
If we were doing over under 2025, I might pick the under.
Right. In 2025, like that would be a good bet.
Maybe this is a poly market, another election is done.
Yeah, this will be the new big.
We did a new poly market, you know, like Reason.
It could be something like this.
But like the poly market thing, so election just happened.
Poly markets have like a victory lap right now.
You showed me poly market I think like years ago, and I started making a bunch of DGN bets before they blocked it in the US.
It was like it was like open for a while, right?
But they were doing prediction markets, or it's like, it's a prediction market, but prediction markets, a bunch of people had tried that.
Do you know, like, I'm just curious, your opinion.
What did they do right?
That like Augur and these other guys who were, had the same sort of general idea that, hey, there'll be prediction markets.
Like from either entrepreneur level, or product choice, like any reason you think they won, that you could put your finger on.
I feel like timing's a big part of it.
So like the sweet spot of like, people are way more digital.
I think COVID drove a lot of people online.
Like we just sat at home and we're like, yeah, what else do you want?
24 seven on the internet, and it really exploded the internet.
Like I think I've seen some graphs where it's like the internet, and e -commerce, and all these things were like growing, and then there's like a massive jump.
We were at Twitch when that happened, and it was like, all the growth looks amazing.
We're crushing all the metrics.
Like, what did you do?
It's like, well, we were here, right?
We are not, we don't create the wave.
We surf a wave and a huge wave happened.
And for Twitch it was like, Fortnite came out and then COVID happened.
Two humongous waves back to back that just combined.
So I think it's a combination.
We're way more digital.
I think you talked about this a lot, like as a kind of metaverse concept a long time ago, that we're just way more digital now.
We care more about it.
I think news and like where we get information from has totally changed, like online, internet, even content and entertainment.
Like I have a hard time going to TVs.
I look at kids, they look at desktops and TVs as like ancient.
Like I said, why is this thing on the wall?
It's like my mom's sewing machine.
It's like, oh, that's cool.
What do you do with that?
That's what it feels like.
And so we're kind of there.
And then there's a bunch of these people online that want to stake in this thing, right?
Like you want to root for a team.
Politics has also become very polarized, right?
It's really like a team sport.
It's like... Right team versus blue team.
That's really what it is.
And so I think it's like, what do I do with it now?
How do I support it more?
I give more money to it, but I can give more attention.
And so I think a lot of these things are happening in polling market.
Good flow, good area.
And then I think for the best thing probably for them is they got it right.
Right place, right time.
The answer was right.
If they were wrong, let's say polling market was off.
Like it was paid. The result of the election was something else.
It will be a... The story today would be much different, right?
And then it might've been muted.
It would've been a cool thing that kind of didn't work.
So you have to be right.
I think people would have used that to crush, to really rip on them.
Because like in the way that people are doing with polls, but polls kind of have this layer of protection around them.
Whereas people want to hate on crypto things.
People want to hate on betting.
It's like a degenerate behavior in general.
I think if the poll market was wrong, the reaction would've been much worse than the fact that the polls were wrong, what the reaction is to the polls, you know?
It would've been worse for a little while, then we would've moved on.
Of course, by the way, you saw this thing about the French whale on the poll market.
I didn't see it. So the big whale that came in and moved - So there's like the narrative versus reality.
When the narrative from the polls was, it's a toss up razor close 50 -50 election.
This guy came in and bet, I think something like 30 or $40 million on Trump.
And people were like, is this guy just trying to manipulate the market?
Is he real? Is he just a rich billionaire son?
Like who is this? And today I just saw something on my way here.
I don't know the full story because it was on my phone, but it said he bet because he believed he would win.
The reason he believed he was winning, he did independent polling.
He funded his own independent polling and felt that he was getting better data that was saying that Trump was mispriced.
So he's like, I just did a logical rational thing.
I just bet where I thought an asset was mispriced.
I wasn't trying to, this wasn't political.
I'm French. What do I care?
I just thought there was money to be made.
And so he kind of went counter to narrative and he made I think like something like $20, $30 million yesterday on that bet.
So anyway - The funny thing about polling market by the way, we can't use it in the U .S.
So there's a whole entertainment place to like better gnar like - Right.
It's like, $3 billion.
They got bet on it.
It's like, we're the ring, right?
There's two boxers going at it.
It was in America. The cock fight.
And then you got everyone else betting from all around the world who's gonna win this thing, which is I think kind of a hilarious thing.
Yeah, that's true. And you have a good contrarian opinion about VR.
And in general, there's probably some other technology like this.
3D printing might be one.
I know you're pretty bullish on two, but there's these tech things like VR, where I think if I walk out of here and I talk to a hundred people about, what are you most excited about AI?
Whatever Bitcoin, whatever it's gonna be.
But if I said, what do you think about VR?
It's sort of lukewarm at best.
In the tech industry, I think most VCs sort of feels like it's kind of a dead end technology.
Now they'll be like, it's gonna be glasses and smart glasses, AR, that's the future.
But you have a different take on VR.
You've been telling me for a while, like, hey look, Oculus sold more units.
Hey, look, you can do this now.
And you've been staying with it when I think interest has sort of waned, the narrative has gone against it.
And that's always where there's big business opportunities.
If the narrative goes one way, but the reality goes another, that's where there's an opportunity.
Give me your VR take.
So why is VR a sleeping giant?
Yeah, I mean, so you remember 2020, I asked you for your address and mailed you a headset.
I was like, hey this quest thing is a different.
That's a real friend right there.
He sends me a VR headset, he's like, I know you're not gonna come to the future.
Let me drag you. Probably collecting dust, which is okay.
But that's kind of how I think about things.
And technology takes a long time.
It typically takes longer to get there than we expect.
Like, especially people who are early in the industry, we're really wanting to push it.
I mean, AI, crypto, VR, all have the same problem, which is early on people are like, really pushing it to you, it's not ready.
So it's a big hype, it crashes, everyone moves on.
So that's happened in VR a few times.
And it's kind of, I would say for most people, been quiet, not thinking about it, but I think it's a sleeping giant.
And I think it's a massive sleeping giant for a few reasons.
One, I see it every day here.
Like here at Founders Inc., I get a chance to one, we invest in VR companies, we're one of the few that do, right?
We have a whole corner, maybe like 12 devs that are all building different VR products.
We put them all in one spot, and there might be some of the most density of interesting VR projects in one place.
And so what have we seen?
One Quest One came out, it was wireless, it was kind of crappy.
But man, I could sit on my couch and use it, it was cheap, became a great Christmas gift in year two, they didn't have an inventory year one.
They released Quest Two, it got even better, lighter, more powerful, now Quest Three is coming out.
And I think they got like five to 10 million monthly active headsets out there.
I think that rivals consoles.
And my first thought was like - How many units has it sold?
I think Quest has sold - I would say 30 million is my guess, but maybe it's more.
So this is Quest. Quest has sold over 20 million units with the majority being Quest Two.
Quest Three has currently sold a million units at the $500 price point.
So I think, I mean, if you just, I don't know what the math here is, but they've done what is that, over a billion dollars of revenue on Quest.
And I believe it's outpaced - Pretty good for failure.
It's outpaced PS5 sales, for example.
And so the first thought for me was like, hey, what's the first thing that's going to happen in this spatial environment?
Like what is it good for?
Immersion, gaming, like these are natural entertainment.
These were the first few things that was natural and you had beat saber, you had a few things.
And that was kind of like, here's the first use case, let's try to get it out there, let's try to make the thing happen.
And then it kind of goes up, down, people get used to those first experiences.
I think you played beat saber.
If you had control the first few times.
Correct, and then you're like, okay, whatever.
And then, because it's kind of like a cheaper than PS5 unit, the Quest Two was, it was available on Christmas a few times.
It went to like kids, like 12, 13, 14 -year -old kids kind of getting this thing, like they would be getting a PS5 and they use it.
And they don't have the bias that we have of like many years of like the structures we're used to.
And so a lot of games formed, and specifically social games, like Gorilla Tag.
I don't know if you've heard about Gorilla Tag.
No, what is Gorilla Tag?
So Gorilla Tag is a social multiplayer game.
It's really fun. It, on App Lab, did like tens of millions of dollars.
Is it like shoes, people tag?
Yeah, it's like a, you know, like kind of like a fun social game that you can play with a bunch of people.
You go in, by the way.
You go in, you're gonna be like, dude, there's a bunch of teenagers screaming at each other.
But for them, this is the environment.
It's a new place. And they didn't grow up with these other things.
So they're starting with mobile phones.
The TV feels ancient.
The desktop feels ancient.
And this thing on my face actually feels like more fresh, more new.
So that's where it's starting.
I think Gorilla Tag has done $200 million around here.
And this is where I'm like VR as a sleeping giant.
We have a few teams here at our studio.
So we have a team called Fluid that's building the kind of like best browser in VR.
So you get multiple displays.
You get as many kind of tabs as you want.
You could customize your environments.
You get AI environments.
You're like, I want to be in a cave.
It like makes you in a cave.
And then you get like social multiplayer so people can show up in your environment.
And we're on App Lab, does like about 5 ,000 weekly active users still.
Small team of three just like, you know, without a big burn, can just build this, grow it.
We're not even in the store yet.
We're in like this like App Lab is like kind of a pre -store where we could just drive people to it but we're not getting anything directly from the store except our own searches, right?
And you know, 5 ,000 people like go in, use a productivity thing.
There's another product called Yeeps.
It's like the second game behind Gorilla Tag.
Small team, absolutely crushing it.
Yeeps. Yeah, Y -E -E -P -S.
Really fun game. You know, we should play together most of the time.
So they're here. They're a team of how many people?
I think they're like less than 10 people but more like six to eight and most of it was built with a few people.
And this thing is profitable or what's the deal?
Yeah, I mean, I'll let them talk about their numbers just so I, you know, I don't want to say anything, but.
On a scale of a, that's pretty good to like, wow.
Where is it at? Wow.
It's wow. Yeah, it's wow.
That's great. So what's cool about this is like supply demand, right?
So like, you can go be, you know, app number, you know, five million in the store right now.
Or if you're talented, you could be like one of the top 20 VR apps if you put in like, you know, a year of hard work.
I'm just using like kind of round numbers or whatever but it's the same way that right now, if you're a content creator, you go post on Instagram, it's pretty tough.
Post on LinkedIn, you'll get tons of distributions if you're half decent at content because there's just no supply of quality content.
So even if VR is not, you know, like 20 million units this is very good.
But even if it's not just like becoming this like global phenomenon, you could still put a great business.
And if you just keep riding the wave, you're very well positioned to be the leader.
And then everyone at that point will look back and be like, oh yeah, it's because they started five years ago.
You know, when this was smaller, like there's 20 million instead of 200 million.
In these emerging tech things, so everything I found out that we do is emerging tech, I think the theme of all of them is survive.
If you make it to when the industry happens, you will grow with it.
If you were a small percentage of the industry and the industry grows by like 100X, you grew by 100X or more.
You've already been there.
And I've seen a few small person teams at like 10 million plus a year, like five people, totally profitable, totally able to do it.
Is this a VC investible business?
Honestly, I don't care.
Like what I care about is like, this is interesting.
And can you make these bets without massive capital expenditure, right?
Like if it takes like $50 million to build a VR game, it's like the big giant blockbuster movie.
I don't, that, those bets don't excite me.
I think when it's like three to five people can be somewhere, the limited amount of money and just them, it's like them in the hoop.
Like the basketball analogy is like, great.
We have everything we need.
We have all the talent, we have all the ability.
The tools are amazing now.
Like, you know, all the game engines have perfected themselves over time.
And then now the environment's forming.
Meta has led it, right?
So like the Quest and this is the VR world.
And then we're seeing glasses, vision pro, Ray -Bans, the trend is like, we're gonna have compute in our spatial view.
And I think that's the big, like, yeah, this is happening in VR.
The Quest platform's interesting.
You could build a profitable business or a fairly big game right now.
Also, this isn't slowing down.
Historically, Apple, when they enter an industry, they come with a unit, it's okay.
Has a lot of things that gotta get better.
Another unit comes out and then you have Snap, you have Meta with Ray -Bans.
Like, I mean like - Zuck is not stopping.
Zuck is not giving up.
He's going to the end game here.
Apple probably also won't stop.
So now you have the two biggest players.
They're gonna keep making the hardware better.
They're gonna be super hungry for content.
And the other sneaky thing about these, by the way, that I didn't really fully realize until I moved to Silicon Valley, which is a lot of these require like really specialized talent.
So I remember when I first met you, you were like, I'm really into big data.
You started saying words like Hadoop.
I didn't know what the hell you were talking about.
It wasn't as popular back, this is like in 2015 or something like that.
When you were telling me like, hey, I think this is really, I think this big data machine learning is really interesting.
You were, again, pretty early on to that.
Crypto, same thing, you're early on to that.
There weren't a lot of smart contract developers.
There wasn't a lot of, you know, big data people.
AI, so then even if you don't have a hit product, if you just assemble like A plus talent that's super specialized, then as those platforms rise, your team itself becomes like $100 million asset.
If you built today for like, because Medo, Ray -Bans, like that product's actually a hit for Facebook.
And they're gonna keep going with that.
And everybody wants to be in the glasses thing.
People think glasses is the next platform.
So if you build a specialized team that's good at developing for that platform, there's just not a lot of great teams that do that.
That's a hundred million dollar team even without a hit product.
How hard was it to find - With a hit product, you get a billion dollars.
How hard was it to find an iOS developer when we were starting to do mobile?
Dude, it's also specialized.
We're gonna compete at like a ridiculous level of price to go get pretty good talent I remember 2012, which was not even early, we had one iOS dev on our entire team and it was so hard to recruit talent.
We was faster to just retrain.
So we just stopped working and the iOS dev trained all of our other devs to be good enough to be dangerous because it was so scarce to get good.
And iOS wasn't even that specialized compared to like either the fancy AI stuff or VR mixed reality, all that type of talent.
And so I just think that when I think about kids growing up and all the let's say 13 to 15 year old kids or somewhere in the teenagers, they have a mobile phone that is attached to them.
They think it's superior than a computer or a desktop cause it's with them.
And then we're gonna take the second computing interface where we do more work or more immersive experiences and we put it around your eyes.
That makes way more sense to me than TVs, desktops, and even laptops.
And that was like one of the thoughts where we started fluid, like we talked about this in 2020.
I don't know if you remember, there's one project that we - You used to tell me you were like, I work in VR.
Correct. I did that experiment where I worked in VR for an hour a day.
And then I ended up doing it for a few months by the way.
And I was like, this is great.
And it had been like literally sitting with me.
And I think this is one of the reasons why I actually built a studio is like, I wanna do all these ideas.
I can no longer do them all.
I could pick a few, I probably shouldn't even go do more, but like, I just wanna find really hungry people and like match them together.
That's how I found John at Fluid.
It's like, he was a PhD student.
He was gonna go do something in like finance and high -frequency trading and like whatever.
And he also came to this idea of like, Hey, when I was doing my like, you know, master's whatever I was writing this thing, I just wanted to go into a focus mode.
Like, could I just go into a cave and like lock out all the stuff?
He was like, I had all these VR friends and I had done some stuff in VR.
So like, I tried to do it and it wasn't good enough.
And then he kind of left it at that.
And then we were talking about it and he talked with Uber and I was like, dude, you just talked to FurCon.
I think he's got like five pages of like random notes and ideas around this.
And then that's what responded.
And it's like, cool, like we're not gonna blow ourselves out.
We're not gonna go raise a lot of money.
We're not gonna go get a giant team.
We're gonna get three people here.
We're just gonna grind and work hard and build and survive for when this thing happens.
We'll miss some bets like that.
We'll gain ridiculous amounts of knowledge of like the industry.
And then we find these sleeping giants and it's like, yeah, we're gonna double down.
Like, Uber went to this like VR conference and it's like the meta -connecting.
And he had a t -shirt and we're like, the funny thing would be like, on your shirt, just put I invest in VR.
And so he did and it's like, wow, like he found one.
You're like a girl at a crypto conference.
This is amazing. This is how we want to think about it is like try to be there early.
Don't get too caught up with where the technology is now.
Don't get too scared of how far it is.
2015, 2016, remember we heard self -driving cars are never gonna happen?
I don't know if you remember that.
Massive like push against it.
And there's way more running around every day now.
I see more way modes at night driving around than like regular people driving.
So here's the deal.
I made most of my money from a newsletter business.
It was called The Hustle and it was a daily newsletter at scale to millions of subscribers.
And it was the greatest business on earth.
The problem with it was that I had close to 40 employees and only three of them were actually doing any writing.
The other employees were growing the newsletter, building out the tech for the platform and selling ads.
And honestly, it was a huge pain in the butt.
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You've told me once before you go, I think my superpower is that I'm usually in the top, in the first thousand or 10 ,000 people to try any new technology and like understand it, be able to play with it, know it, see it, all that stuff.
I remember we were at work and you were buying the Ethereum pre -sale, the ICO or whatever the pre -sale.
You remember what you said about it?
Yeah, I don't know if you remember.
I just remember being like, dude, can we do some real work?
Oh, what are you doing?
Ethereum name, that name's never gonna work.
I was like, that sounds so nerdy.
That'll never be a thing.
I think that was a phrase I remember.
I was telling you about Ethereum.
I was like, dude, I stayed up all night reading this white paper.
You were like, on it.
I was on it, I came in, I'm like, we're soft.
I gotta talk to him.
I tell you this, probably, I don't even know what I said.
Who knows what? Probably threw a bunch of words in here, just like, dude, I don't know what this is, we have some new relationship.
And you're like, Ethereum, that name's stupid.
Yeah, I wrote it off.
Talk that up for another L for me.
By the way, you could have been duly right as well.
So no, I wasn't, I think that's all the batteries there.
Very, very off on that one.
But I think that's true, that is your superpower.
And then you said another thing today, which I hadn't heard of here, which is, for emerging tech, there's only one rule, survive.
And that reminds me, we had, I just did a pod with Ryan Peterson, he created Flexport.
She said the same principle, he goes, you know, what I realized was, I cannot control the timeline.
I don't know how long something's gonna take to work.
So all I focus on is, how do I just be default alive?
How do I just stay in the game?
He goes, I just have the confidence that if I'm in the game, I'll just keep trying shit until it works.
I just believe that by myself, I will just keep trying things until I figure out a thing to work.
The only way I can lose is if I have to get out of the game, which is like, I can't, you know, usually it's like I run out of funding, I can't control my destiny, I spend too much money, I'm burning too much capital.
And so he's like, that's been the name of the game for me from when he was flipping scooters on eBay to now, you know, runs a multi -billion dollar company called Flexport.
And the whole time he's like, my whole thing is I can't control the timeline.
So I'm gonna control staying in the game because if I stay in the game, I win.
Stay in the game with great talent and people that want to have this long -term mindset, no, you know, I think there's a lot of people that can take short -term wins and they should.
Like we've done that, right?
There are these short -term moments, like, oh, this is great for us right now, but we're gonna keep doing more.
And like, I think that's the main thing for me.
Technology takes a long time.
When it hits though, it happens very fast.
Like that's the part that I think people don't realize.
They like underestimate how long it's gonna take and the overestimate how fast it's gonna happen.
It's like immediately gonna just like happen.
And you know, I think Uber was an example like that.
Like we saw it, it was black cars.
It's like, oh, there's like expensive taxi that nobody's gonna use.
And then now it's like, dude, this place doesn't have Uber.
Like how am I gonna move from here?
Like I can't function.
It feels like that, you know?
And so I think I enjoy it just as one reason why it's like a lifelong game.
I could just play technology forever.
I could learn about things.
I don't have a rush to be there first.
I don't have a rush to be like, I didn't know everything and like do everything and raise the most money and get a bazillion people.
It's more like, I need a few people with me that like are really excited about this.
They see it like I see it.
And we're just gonna go on this mission.
And luckily now I have the ability to just like fund that and like create my like environment to do it.
That's what this whole building is.
So let's talk about this building.
Cause you've basically built like your dream like man cave in a way.
I think, you know, it's kind of like a founder dream, right?
And I wanna talk about that because you had a big success with app loving where, and actually kind of like felt like there was multiple moments where, you know it was successful at one point it sold for like $2 billion.
It was like, Oh exit 2 billion, amazing.
And then like Trump blocked it.
Or it was like, didn't go through, didn't go through but then during that, this is a crazy story.
It was like, we were sitting in the office and this news happens.
Like, dude, congrats.
That's amazing. Holy shit.
And then like nine months goes by the deal doesn't like fully get approved because it was such a big purchase out of a Chinese company group or something like that.
And in the meantime, the business just kept crushing.
So Adam, who's the CEO of that.
You say like basically went back was like, cool.
We'll still do the 2 billion, but now it's for 30%.
I don't know what the exact version of that.
Like there was like, I don't know, like cause you couldn't do majority deals.
That was the big block.
It was like a majority deal was gonna happen.
And so now then the company eventually IPOs you get this nest egg, right?
So it's like, okay, I could do whatever.
You could go retire.
You could go buy islands and cars or do rich guy stuff.
Like you could do that.
And instead you like chose to do something else.
Can you just describe basically like, what's the mindset?
What's the conversations you had with yourself?
Yeah. Now that you had more resources to do whatever you wanted to do.
Yeah. I feel like my whole life I've just always wanted to tinker and build stuff.
Like I always described it as like, I love taking stuff apart and putting it back together.
It's not like, some people will say, it's like, oh, you want to learn how it works.
It's not that it's more of the puzzle.
How does somebody else put this like, you know, and I used to do this with cars and computers growing up.
Like I would overclock my computer and I would make my car faster.
And like, that was like kind of just like the mentality that I had.
And then it was like, okay, well, I've got to become an adult at some point in time and do the thing, but like, hey, I like this business thing.
I buy and sell stuff.
It's like a way for me to hustle and kind of do more of what I want to do.
And then I was like, let me just keep doing this.
And then maybe at some point I got to get a real job and kind of luckily like tech was really valuable and like my skills set improved.
I got better at it.
And a lot of that early journey was like more solo than like with a bunch of people.
And then met the guys, Adam, before Apple oven, like kind of like these other things.
And it was like, yo, we're like eight people in like Palo Alto, like building cool random apps.
Like the energy for me there every day was like through the roof and then Monkey Inferno was like the same thing, but like even more.
And I think I used to tell you like, I want an airport hangar.
I just want to put a lot of cool stuff in it.
And I just think it was like that before I started Founders Inc.
As it is. Cause I was at Twitch and I'm like, I got to get out of here.
It was an instant thing.
And why, by the way?
I don't know. I don't think I'm a good employee.
I think I'm like suited for a few roles and it's typically like doing my own stuff without much.
Was there anything that just drove you crazy about it?
Was there any like, you know, we got to do a whole other part of that basically.
I feel like the first week or month of like, yo, let's do a bunch of stuff.
And they're like, slow down.
Like why? I want to do more.
Like I want to do more things and this resistance feeling of like, wow, we already thought about this or we tried this, like no, let's just go do stuff.
And I never enjoyed that.
And I think startups and small teams just, cause you have so much to do.
That's the kind of mentality.
And so I talked to probably like 75 to a hundred founders before starting Founders Inc.
And I really wanted to learn this.
Like I knew a bunch of people.
I used to interact with them even at like Bebo and Monkey Inferno and have them come by and like just tour talk, whatever.
And I really enjoyed that.
That was like fun. I just started angel investing a lot, which was like cool.
I thought I wanted to do that, but it wasn't fun.
It was like meet great talented people, get excited about them.
And then you're like a monthly update away.
Like if you want to check and then that's it.
And like, damn, this has been fun.
First meeting is great.
It's a great first date.
I walk away and I'm like, there's no relationship.
And you're like, we happened at like great first date.
And so I was like, man, I don't really want to do that, but something like this where I could help these like early entrepreneurs, things that I've just done over and over again, I didn't have this.
Like what's the version of that?
I talked to a bunch of founders and they all said something to me.
I was like, what do you need?
Like what help do you need?
I thought they're all going to save money and I'm a start a fund.
Like that that's what I thought wasn't happening.
And they all said something different.
They said something like, I need people who understand my problems.
And we used to do those masterminds.
And it was really about like, who do you go to for founder problems?
It's like, what are your founder problems?
They're your co -founders, your employees, or your investors.
So you can't go to any of these people.
They might be the problem, right?
And so who do you go to?
Or even if they're not the problem, you need to present, you don't want to worry your employees.
You don't want to worry your investors.
You kind of have to maintain a certain aura of momentum and morale.
So you can't just go be dumping problems on them or be like, I don't know.
You're supposed to know, you're the guy.
And we would go in that room, the little circle room with the circle table.
We'd be there and I don't know what the employees were thinking.
They're just like, oh man, these guys are talking again.
They're going to come out with something different.
But we could talk about anything and then leave the room, be like, now we're still where we are.
And I think, a co -founder can be that for you.
A lot of entrepreneurs starting out, they don't have that.
And even if they have it, there's other things that they're experiencing.
And so when we used to put these folks together and these kind of masterminds, that feeling was like awesome and it felt like we could relate.
And actually I heard the same thing from a bunch of founders they used to talk to.
And I was like, I think it's something more like this, where I could do something and put everybody in a box.
And I thought it was going to be more digital I think COVID times and.
Started on Discord or whatever.
Started on Discord.
I mean, Farza Ben was in these groups, just really few others.
And it was just people I knew around me and kind of COVID hit it was digital.
We were talking every week.
We would give ourselves these accountability kind of shipping sessions.
We would have an area to talk about stuff.
And you could see the dots connecting and then I got an opportunity to get this space.
And I had been looking for something and it wasn't like, oh, San Francisco needs a place.
I'm from the Bay area normally.
So this is the best place for me.
But I said, look, if it's going to be SF we're going to be on the water.
No more, no more. Kind of places like that.
So we got this weird opportunity to find this space and really make a bet when nobody else was.
I think it was late 2020 is when I approached them here.
Yeah. And it took maybe nine months to figure it all out and another three months to renovate it and stuff like that.
So it's still very much good.
Like, we got to call it another call about breaking at least.
Wait, wait, he wants to sign a lease right now?
Come on in. That's what it felt like here.
I mean, this place for Mason has 300 events a year.
They went to zero with COVID.
All the places, art galleries, art schools, what do you do?
Like, and this is supposed to be like this innovation place and it's a little bit older and we come in.
That's one of your tricks is that you don't run away when the dips happen.
I remember when early on, 2013, 2014, something like that.
We meet, I buy Bitcoin because I don't know, you're into crypto.
Some people in the office, maybe I was dumb about the Ethereum idea.
Yeah, PG, Pete, P -dix was, he's mining Bitcoin on our servers.
So I buy some Bitcoin.
And literally like the next week, I forget like super convinced.
I'm like, oh, I guys, I see it.
I believe, here's why I believe I'm giving you my case.
I bought, yeah, great.
Like the next week, price cuts in half.
It goes down to like 300 bucks or something like that.
And I came in, I'm like, oh, the Bitcoin, you know, and you go, oh, that was a fun week or two.
Well, you were like, oh, this is great.
Because now everything's half off.
Like you literally told me that.
You go, you believe if you buy now, you can cut your buy price.
Basically you're gonna go down by 50%, you'll cost average in at half the amount.
Like, and I was like, oh, he's right.
Because I was just running a rollercoaster of like, I was doing what a cliche person would do.
When things are good, this is great.
When things are bad, maybe it's not great.
Whereas you were like, dude, did anything actually change?
Or just the external sentiment.
And so I bought more.
So I thank you for that.
That was a very good decision at the time to go buy more when things go down.
I think you've done that with other bets, whether it's San Francisco real estate during the COVID time, or it's, you know, whether it's crypto or VR, when things go out of fashion, I feel like you don't run away, which is important.
There's a signal. It's like, things go out of fashion and there's another place where the people who don't shape narratives, typically like, I'm technical, so I live in these like GitHub projects.
I live where the builders are, I like engage with them.
If I see that somewhere where it's like, huh, all the people talking are like against it, these people, like nobody told them yet.
That like, it's done, like, oh, this is dead, right?
Like, they're all saying it.
And then these guys are just shipping more code.
And they're like, hey, did anybody tell you it's over?
Like, what are you talking about?
I don't care. And I just think that's the perfect environment.
And even if you're right one out of five times like that, you'll be right in such a big way that it works out.
And then by the way, for me, it's just fun.
So like, this is fun.
Like, I love building stuff.
I like building technology.
I did a lot of software, obviously, because it's been magical to develop things and like distribute it to the world.
We have some hardware projects.
I don't know if you remember Jamie, by the way.
Yeah, yeah, we at one point in time, when we were working together, we had an idea for a, it was cool.
It was like a voice controls, kind of like Alexa.
We call it a Jamie.
I don't know why, but like, we like Jamie, I still like the name, that was good.
And what you were saying was like, you're like, we can, instead of creating, everyone was trying to create a device.
Portal was trying to create a screen.
Amazon was trying to create a screen.
You're like, that makes it expensive.
You're like, everybody already has TV screens in their house.
What if you just plug in like a Chromecast and now you turn your TV from just a blank screen into like an Amazon, Alexa thing.
That was cool. We didn't do it because it was good.
No, it was a huge distraction.
We were like, yeah, that's going to be like a brutal battlefield.
When you took it to Michael and you just give us that look, like, Well, he was just like, when all of the like trillion dollar companies are going to go after the same prize, like, you can, but do you really want to?
Like, you know, it's better to do the things they're overlooking.
I actually think it's probably good advice.
To be fair, we also were going to do a crypto exchange when crypto got hot.
And it was like, for a different reason, he's like, hey, I'm already rich.
I don't want to lose everything.
And I don't really know what crypto is.
It's 2014. Like crypto might just be like super illegal.
And I don't want to risk it all on that.
If we had done that, it might've been good.
So you have to be careful, like even really smart, successful people, you can't like just take their word.
You got to have the independent mindedness.
100%. And I think it's fun to take shots.
Don't get stubborn over it.
Like, man, people fall in love with their ideas.
I think that's, it took me probably like, I don't know, 10 years to figure that out.
You have to get it almost like, you have to really take the hits to really live in that of like, yeah, there's a lot of ideas.
I may try a lot of them.
My mission is in all of them.
I got to find the right ones where I can really spend the energy on.
I was going to talk about one more.
So we built Chatty Heads, which by the way, now in the AI world, we were fucking ahead of the time.
Yeah, we were a little early.
We could generate images for, I don't know, 5 ,000.
Yeah, like dolly. And that's what it feels like.
But I think it's like, cool.
It's like whatever technology you have today, go try to produce a thing.
It might not be the right time.
It might be the right moment.
The media might be wrong.
Team might be wrong.
Some of those you should pursue again and again.
And some of those are great learning exercises to build on top of.
And I got a chance to meet a lot of people who were professional athletes.
And then one thing a lot of them talk about is like, basketball might end.
Like, my career will end at like 35.
Like, that's my game.
It's done. Now, what do I do?
I think what we get a chance to do, whether it's like business or content or building stuff.
I'm gonna do this for the rest of my lives, everyone.
I think that's a fun part.
Yeah, Buffett's like what, 90 -something?
Yeah, yeah, still at the top of his investing game.
Exactly. And so it's like, well, what am I in the rush for?
I'm not just here to enjoy the journey, but I also don't wanna be like, oh, I gotta solve it tomorrow.
When I was young, it was like, oh, I gotta be the millionaire by whatever.
At some point, it was like, I don't know, man, I just wanna keep doing this.
And if I need to hustle my way to it or not, it doesn't really matter.
I took an Android engineer job at Monkey Inferno cause I was like, you know, I met you, and I was like, I wanna work with this guy.
I think that was my worst skill, by the way.
I just learned Android that whole time.
Yeah, you fooled me.
So I was like, I don't know, I gotta get into it somehow.
And I know I'm gonna do great stuff here.
I gotta show it, but I'm not afraid to put it in the effort when you need to put it in the effort.
I'm also not afraid to not rush to the answer.
And you don't wanna be casual and like wait, you wanna be kinda like in the middle there.
You wanna know when to attack and when to, or not, but like, I don't know, you gotta enjoy it.
Otherwise you're really good.
Naval has the best quote on this.
He says, impatience with action, patience with results.
It's the unbeatable combination.
If you ever go against somebody who's gonna operate like that, they will win.
That is a, you cannot lose if you're gonna be constantly impatient with doing things.
You're not gonna sit back and hope it all happens.
So impatient with results.
The hard part is a lot of founders are impatient with action and impatient with results.
Or non -founders are patient with both and then nothing ever happens.
So you have to get that combo.
Speaking of founders, you worked with Adam at Epploven.
And Epploven has been like kind of a staggering company because when I met you, it was a successful company.
You told me the stories about before you guys started that, you were like, we were wandering around.
We tried a bunch of different ideas.
We're playing FIFA, because we didn't know what the heck we were doing.
We were just coming in, trying to figure it out.
If we didn't have it, we would brainstorm and go home the next day.
What is special about that guy?
What's a superpower from him or a story from him that you remember that I can learn from?
Or anybody who listened to this can learn from.
Yeah, so there was this like four year period -ish when I was there, I think three years of it was like not Epploven.
So like most of my intersection there is like not what it is today.
But I did get a chance to spend a lot of time with him.
And ideas - What's the cliff notes of his story?
So people know, because people don't know, he's pretty under the radar, right?
Yeah, I mean, his backstory, I think he did some stuff in like equities or trading at some point.
I think he got into like ads at some point through like marketing and affiliate stuff.
He built a few different products.
Maybe he was a key member of the team.
And then he had like a few companies.
I think he had actually built up some like, you know, wealth, I don't know how much it was, but it was enough where like, you're like, okay, this person can make this bet and like fund the operations.
So he was kind of self -funding.
Self -funding is him and this guy, John.
John had done a lot of stuff on the internet.
He was more the technical person.
Adam was more the business person.
They were both uniquely and the skills, incredible.
Like their personality is incredible.
For Adam, I think the thing that I felt the most was like, I think it's the first time in my life I was like, man, this is what A plus execution looks like.
Like this guy just hits it.
Like if we were talking about something, we made a choice within like, it felt like within minutes, that was like delivered to this team.
And look, when you're like an eight person team, it's really easy to do it.
We'll decide something, go slow, maybe next week we'll do it later.
We'll make these role changes later.
We'll tell everybody later.
No, it was like immediate.
And when it was like moving on from something, it was immediate.
When there was a new idea we wanted to do, it was immediate.
When it was something else, it was immediate.
It was just like, it felt like this is what execution is.
It's like, you know, think, decide, act.
And like how fast you run through that depends on like the moment you decide the delay on act is like usually a problem.
I think this is where most, I'm not great at this myself, but I've gotten a chance to see that.
I think it was kind of similar in a different realm when I met you.
I was like, I think this person's product thinking and like, ability to like unpack like a complex thing, like product or distribution or maybe team motivation or whatever.
It's like, you see A plus talent and you're like, you want to do it.
For me, it was like 10 or 12 years, almost like a solo founder journey.
Like at his e -commerce company, at these other little things, I had like a startup, I had people with me, but I never saw somebody else that I was like, yo, like I want to learn these skills.
I bring something to the table that's A plus, I compare with this A plus person and now we're going to be like a super power.
I felt that with Adam, it was very clear and obvious.
You know, like the size of company, I don't want to say not a surprise, but also is not a surprise that this kind of person would go do it.
Like it just is dad.
I think the same thing you're talking about, like Ryan at Flexport.
Like it feels like some people are just like, they're built for that.
You still need a lot of stuff to go right and make a ton of great decisions and a ridiculous team.
One thing I've come to learn is that where I think we screwed up because we did Monkey Inferno, which was basically our little idea lab, but we had a beautiful setup.
It's like, you got funding already done.
You have great team.
You're in San Francisco, beautiful office, really talented team.
Like, you know, we're not the PayPal mafia, but like everybody's gone on to do kind of interesting shit.
Everyone was, you know, I don't think we had the level of success that we could have given the talent.
My take was, I think we were good execution, maybe even great execution, but poor project selection, meaning we were going after these like moonshots to create the next hit social media app, which is like, you know, there's been like seven ever.
There's not that many of them ever to exist.
So, you know, I think we did bad with project selection.
It seems like one thing that Adam did, aside from great execution was project selection.
I think you told me some story about like, they went to some conference, you guys were working on one thing altogether, and he came back and had that very quick, like think, decide, act loop where he's like, we're doing a mobile ad network, we're doing mobile games.
I don't know the full story, but like, it seemed like just that one choice at that time, yeah, is the make or break, you know?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, huge difference.
And you know, like, I think we had many of those moments, I wouldn't trade it, by the way, I think our learnings, I still leverage them.
A lot of the things that we talked about, how we ran the teams, like, they still radiate and resonate with me.
And so like, immense wealth in knowledge and like, like literally like experience of the thing beyond like - You're talking about when we worked in it.
When we worked in it.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
But there were a few moments where project selection could have been massive for us, and that outcome, you know, like they, you know, and we could talk about it a little bit on that journey, but like, we did Blab.
It was a live streaming product, Google Hangouts, public live stream.
Yeah, like if you saw Clubhouse get really popular, we had built basically a clubhouse before Clubhouse, and it got - Kinda like what Twitch right now, like there's a big section of this, like just chatting, hanging out category.
Right, we built an app like that, I got to four million users, but it didn't become - I don't know if you remember this conversation, but we had this one time when we were deciding what to do next, like, are we doing mobile version of this?
Cause we see other things happening, or do we do the P2B version?
And the Zoom didn't exist, and that, I think that was - And we were like, Pffft, B2B, I remember there's like, it was like so short of a conversation, which was so silly.
And we were just like, B2B, that's not cool.
It wasn't cool, and it wasn't clear.
Cause even though the thing with it was like 2015, there wasn't a billion B2B companies crushing it.
But like every year since then, it was like seven or nine.
Cause I think at that time it was only a few had really reached, it was like, I don't know, box .net and Dropbox, and - It definitely wasn't as obvious at the same time.
It wasn't as hidden as we kind of made it seem.
Like I remember Citrix was like a multi -billion dollar product, and Citrix was online, was the way that people did these webinars, and web conferencing at the time.
And it was so bad. And their users, like we were trying to make this cool social app, and SAP and Oracle were using our tool just cause it was better even though it was like not meant for that.
Why is your color like weird and purple?
Why do you have this weird star thing?
And instead of looking at those clues and being like, huh, maybe we could do that.
We missed that project selection choice.
I remember that day.
Cause that was a, that was probably a multi -hundred million dollar fork on the road moment, you know.
Yeah, maybe. You still had to execute, but.
For sure. I mean, we could execute, right?
But it just, did we have the right selection, and could we get the right insight in our mind to accept?
It also when we decided to end Blab, I don't know if you remember you went to this barbecue, I forgot who you met.
James Career. Yeah, they were telling us, you know, you were talking about like, hey, this content network problem.
Cause it was like the moment that entered our mind, it's like, oh shit, we're fucked.
Like that's what it felt like.
Like we don't have the ability to intersect these, and we kept looking at Twitch.
Like why? Okay, so we know we don't, because people come on for an hour, they do a show.
The epic content is not on long enough for people to show up and intersect with it.
How come Twitch wins?
And then it turned out that, oh, people play games for eight to 10 hours.
So it didn't matter when you showed up.
And then the context we set.
So it was like, I have, it was like, you know, the feeling a lot of monkey inferno to me and like the things we built was like, it's not slow down to speed up, but like look for the clues.
Don't be afraid of that.
And again, the eager, you know, the ego or the stubbornness of like, we want to build a giant social app.
Like I want to go somewhere around the world where somebody's using my consumer, like that was the stubbornness that we built.
That was the driver.
And it's like, if we had just kind of unlocked it a little bit, there was these project selection moments.
And so there was a lot of that.
I still feel that sometimes, but I don't know, maybe it was because I'm older and I'm like less willing to like be nimble in that way.
But I didn't want to talk about one more hardware robotics thing in a few minutes.
And so I think this is another like resurgence moment happening.
Like for a long time hardware has been too hard, too expensive.
Software gets funded.
That's a silly and valid motto, right?
Hardware is hard. Hardware is hard.
Software is easy. Software scales.
It's eaten the world.
Like these are all the mentalities.
I think it's flipping.
And I think it's a few things that have all kind of showed up together.
So there's two types of hardware that I think are now like there and like right to build.
Same recipe. Can small teams do it?
Can you do it without a lot of funding?
And then can your output be really big and like impact a lot of people?
And so I think there's one around consumer products.
So like the combination of Raspberry Pi and cloud AI has completely changed what it takes to build something.
Right. So there's a company in our studio magical toys or building an AI teddy bear.
We'll do a little demo of it after.
We'll kind of get to that.
And you know, I think what that.
And how old is that guy who's been that?
He's like young, right?
I think for teams like 24, 25.
It's not like he has huge funding or a huge team, but he's able to show it up here.
I don't know how he got here, to be honest.
I think like many people here, they meet somebody, they attract, some people just show up by the way.
And it's awesome. Like we've created that environment where it can make sense.
He had done some small projects in college.
Like he built this thing called desk, buddy.
It was a little like ink screen with like two eyes that just blinked and that was really it.
He couldn't talk to her.
He couldn't do anything.
It was just a little desk buddy.
So you're not alone.
Is that the idea? I don't know.
But I remember seeing it.
I'm like, that's cool.
Like I want one on my desk.
Like is this fun? And they raised from a bunch of ideas and the combination of like, hey, we got Raspberry Pi's.
We could do these little things.
We can use 3d printers to build enclosures.
And then now we've got this cloud AI thing that like can be really powerful.
They ended up coming with this idea, which was like, hey, we're going to build a toy.
And first they literally made Ted the stuffed animal Ted and they talk like it.
I was like, Oh, this is wild.
Like, you know, and it, AI could do this, but everyone's trying to make coding faster.
Well, there's, you know, developers solving developer problems.
And I love when somebody takes that and goes, let me go to this other place where nobody's thinking about.
Right. And he spent probably the last nine months of sitting refining.
I think we sent you one of the first units.
It probably broke. Yeah.
The first thing he gave me a teddy bear with the back, like the whole computer was just hanging out the back, like a half done surgery, but it was interesting.
I gave it to my kids.
You know, I think they were probably like two years old, three years old at the time.
And every other toy we have in our living room is pre -programmed.
So it's like, this is a toy.
Push this button. It'll say this thing.
That's all it can do with this toy.
It was like, ignore the thing hanging out the back.
It was like, um, Hey, we love PAW Patrol.
Can you ask us some PAW Patrol trivia?
Like, certainly I can tell you, PAW Patrol, who is the red dog in PAW Patrol?
Like Marshall. Correct.
And I was like, Hey, can you keep track of our points?
It was okay. Two points.
Well, and my kids were blown away because now you have an infinite toy.
Whereas every toy is finite.
It can only do the things it could do out of the box.
Now suddenly you have a toy that's basically chat GPT shoved into a stuffed animal.
And you're like, wow, now that can do anything.
I could say, sing me a song.
I could say, tell me a bedtime story.
I could say I can make it do many, many things now.
And I think what was cool is the team and this little like lab that we built.
And the lab has like some 3d printers, some electronics area.
Honestly, we started with like an empty room and people would come by.
They're like, what's this room for?
I'm like, Oh, it's gonna be a machine shop electronics lab one day.
Like, Oh, can I use it?
I'm like, yeah, we have nothing here.
What do you need? Any tables?
Great. We'll bring tables.
Oh, you need like a little thing.
Okay. We'll add that.
You need 3d printers.
We'll add that. And I've seen now, like tens of people come through a lot, you know, one person sit there, spend some time, tinker.
And fatigue did that.
Like he built one. He showed us, he built another.
He tried different various different versions, you know, built, you know, right new cases, 3d printed buying raspberry PI's new software.
And like, I think he shipped like 60 to 70 units across four to six months, which in software rule, this feels like, wow, ancient, like 60 users in hardware.
This might've cost like half a million to a million dollars.
I think we did that for like 50 to a hundred grand.
Right. So like that difference one person, 3d printers, raspberry PI's some AI, and you could just sit there and deliver units and try it with people when we showed you bare first, by the way, internally, it was like, no, I don't, I don't think kids are going to do this.
It's weird. His daughter used it and it changed his mind.
Like, like she changed his mind because he saw what it could do.
But like, and how do you get that opportunity to prototype.
She right. So hardware being hard, but it's like maybe hardware is not as hard as it used to be that like Sam calls these inflections where, you know, um, something changes, like there's famously an inflection where, uh, when Obamacare came out, then Oscar health built up thing that was just to do Obamacare and like,
you know, had became like a billion dollar company is like, so what are the inflections so, oh, phones now have GPS, um, in them.
Now you can build Uber.
You couldn't build Uber before because the driver and the writer needed to find each other.
How were they going to do that?
If you didn't have phones with GPS on them, uh, phones have cameras.
Now you can have Instagram.
Right. So it's like the technology inflection can happen.
It's one type of inflection.
And you're basically saying because of raspberry PI plus AI plus 3d printing.
To two more hardware is very consumer hardware is now possible now.
Like now more than ever, two people can actually mess around and tinker till they get something right.
Kind of wasn't feasible five, 10 years ago.
Correct. And when we build Jamie, I use the raspberry PI at that time, which was the first version raspberry PI was thought of as this hobbyist market of tinker's that are going to buy a few of them.
They've, they've sold like 60 million units or something ridiculous like that.
Like 35 bucks a pop, 60 million.
There's like a few billion dollars of raspberry PI out there.
And I think what it did is you used to have to make like custom boards, custom software, and you know, for a technical person like me, I don't want to go that far, like I have certain skills that I could do really well.
And typically it's like read a few guides in the internet and like stitch stuff together.
It felt too far for even like somebody like me.
It felt like man, it's like really serious engineering.
Any 10 people, I think millions of dollars.
I convinced somebody, there's a big market and now like build up this a company, which probably would fail because I raised too much, too much pressure, too much demand on return, et cetera.
And to be the raspberry PI was one of the unlocks and there's the Nvidia Jetson now, which has like GPU's on device and there's so much more there.
But, so what are, what are other things besides magical toys that you saw?
Somebody built interesting things you're seeing built in the hardware robotics side.
So we have AJ who's building the, you know, neurosody.
He built that first version, which I think I've showed you before, which the brain computer interface.
Now he has a second version.
Um, that's really tiny.
It's like the size of AirPods.
You could put it right here, special purpose.
So really like the ability to prototype, develop the thing, get like hundreds or thousands of units out there, improve the design and doing that without a giant team allows him to kind of continue.
We've seen like a variety of things kind of come out on that front.
I think the second area that's happening is, you know, the consumer hardware.
And then there's like this robotics drones and kind of this other world where we have so much physical equipment in the world, forklifts and lawnmowers and cars and like, you know, all of these things that we do, um, that requires either a person like, you know, with drones, we invest in this company,
Lucidrains, which, you know, they built a power washing drone could go up in buildings, could power wash the, you know, the glass set of people hanging from the side.
Uh, there's another company that, uh, and is that working?
Like do people, is it like, yeah, working very well.
And you know, like, what's interesting is there's like a unique business model to find here as well.
And I think this is why I love like being in the weeds a little bit and like seeing it is like most people think you're going to build this product and then you're going to take the people that like manually wash a building and you're going to like, get rid of them.
What actually happens is there's like a team that's like a little like small business somewhere.
They have like five people at their company.
Dave's power washing.
Dave power washing.
Windows so clear you won't even know it's there.
Amazing, right? Dave's got a great tagline as well.
And you know, people end up finding that if you just sell to those, to those small businesses, you give them more tools, they could serve more buildings, do it more efficiently.
That distribution is built in.
Maybe in the long run, this starts changing, but like now there are a ton of these opportunities.
I've seen one for farms and like, you know, mowing the weeds around certain fruits or kind of like inspecting them.
You just send people between these things to go like do it.
And now there's like a little like robot.
And instead of the one person doing it for two weeks or two people, the one person is there monitoring it at the facility in air conditioning and like.
Watching on the iPad.
Watching on the iPad.
I know it might get stuck early on or might detect something.
Now they got to go fix that thing.
This efficiency, I think is like massive and we're seeing it in many places.
So same thing I saw these two guys building here in San Francisco.
They're like random warehouse in the back of some other store, like two dudes like literally grinding bootstrapping like I just go in there.
I'm like, I like these guys.
They took a forklift.
They automated it. They took self driving car tech.
It probably took billions of dollars to develop and then all of that kind of flow to like open source and typically open source sometimes is behind then the cutting edge, but in 10 years that like normalizes.
We see this elsewhere, like AI models like llama, but like really they took cameras and some LiDAR stuff and they scrapped a little computer to a forklift and they can move it around.
You could talk to it.
You could kind of get it to do things.
And I think there's a massive resurgence.
So forklift physical thing.
You took a little Raspberry Pi, Internet, some cameras, some technology.
Like we were doing computer vision technology score like Fortnite games.
They're using that same kind of technology to look at, oh, this is a box.
This is the barcode that I picked up, right?
I can now use and figure out what's this thing.
It could go walk around the warehouse and be like, oh, that pallets in the wrong spot.
It just scanned the barcode and detected.
Oh, there's this pallet here supposed to be over there.
Go pick it up. Move it over there.
Like these problems exist in warehouses.
Like, I mean, you know, I think you've dealt with some of those things.
I've run a warehouse.
And so to me, it's like, what are the machines?
Like what are the traditional machines we've built probably for the last hundred years that you're going to slap a little computer on it.
And now it's a super power.
And I think this is bringing down the cost of like this robotic hardware, like building a robotic arm used to be like, yo, I got to be like Tony Stark and like Iron Man.
I've seen two people do it in a machine shop.
I, there's a guy here, I don't even know his company.
He just showed, he just had a 3d printed hand on his desk and I'm like, that was this to go.
Yeah. Like I, I created the ability to develop a full hand with all the fingers and everything in just this 3d printer.
There's a bamboo lab printer, which honestly 3d printer was great.
And then bamboo labs took it to a whole another level, like a little bit of AI to help self leveling and make prints great.
And like, everybody loves it.
And he just built his hand pretty high quality.
Took a little fishing net on the inside of the hands.
Like in each finger, he could like pull every finger and like do some stuff.
It's like one dude, like a few months hackathon.
And like, I don't know what he's going to produce from that, but I just think you could do these things now and like weeks and months when they took years and like a lot of money.
I think there's a huge opportunity here, still going to take time to like marinate and develop, but I look at it as one of those things where like if I was a mechanical engineer, if I liked hardware, and I've been told that it's just AI and software and like your stuff, isn't that interesting?
No, no, it is very interesting right now.
Like, you need to find a place to do it.
And you know, like I'll even say like, I think we're going even further for us.
Like we have this space we built here.
We call it the founder lab.
Like this is where a lot of people come the tinkerer on stuff.
We have founders here.
We have builders. We have creators here.
We have all kinds of people doing stuff.
But the little machine shop and that kind of pushed us to be like, wait, there's more, we're seeing more, we're talking to more people thinking about this.
And so I ended up getting this kind of industrial space and call it the garage.
It's 20 ,000 square feet of industrial space.
I'll show you in a little bit, but it looks like, you know, San Francisco real estate is not the best.
I think this is the time to make these bets, but I've talked to.
25 to 50 founders in the last 12 months that need a hardware space like this to tinker, to have smart people around them, to have the machines around them, to just being able to develop it probably for less than a hundred grand, they can go and proof of concept and prototype the thing.
And look, we're seeing the hype cycle of like humanoid robots.
That's that like hype above.
I'm more excited about all these startups that are going to form.
They're going to build this expertise.
They're going to be a hundred million dollar teams.
Well, there's their product or their knowledge.
Right. That's happening now.
And two people are doing it like every single day, like they're spawning these things so consumer hardware is one area.
But I think robotics and what typically was known as like deep tech, like I need like PhDs and like stacks of them and $50 million or a hundred million dollars.
That's the second one.
And I think it's like, there's a few people seeing it.
Maybe there are sectors like defense where it's like exciting, but like, I don't know, I think we're going to see machines everywhere and every kind of version of it.
And I think I've seen people develop like cooking robots, laundry machine things, folding drones to inspect stuff, drones to map interior spaces.
Like Matterport is a giant company and a human goes and puts a tripod everywhere.
And this is a little drone that's going to fly through the whole house and like map it for you.
And that expands that.
And I just see one or two person teams able to do this faster than I've ever seen it.
I feel more capable.
Maybe I just really want to get into hardware again myself.
And I think that's the point though.
It's a lot of people would want to mess with this.
And if something goes from not tinkerable to tinkerable, suddenly it's now the like it's kind of like before you're competing 1v1, now it's 1 versus the field.
The field, of course any individual thing in the field might suck, but the field overall is super powerful.
And now you're saying the field is open for hardware tinkerers, which it wasn't open before.
That's a big deal. Yeah.
We do these like residencies here, but we'll bring people here for a month or six weeks.
We just tell them like, here's a theme.
Here's a space to go do things.
When the Vision Pro came out, we did it.
We had about 40 Vision Pro devs.
We probably had the largest concentration of Vision Pro devs out of Apple.
Right. Anywhere. And the knowledge of that, look, it didn't produce some ridiculous outcome.
We actually did invest in one or two teams from that.
I think we just got a chance to see that technology deeply.
We did this AI hardware one.
I remember meeting this, this kid, and I don't know where he was in the world.
And he shows me this like robot he like built like a humanoid.
He built like in his bedroom.
And it's like half.
He only built the bottle.
Like the legs. So it stopped like where the waste was.
And it was like totally hand constructed.
And I'm like, yeah, this is a wild, but the fact that you could like bootleg this in your bedroom and like, it could take steps.
It's like crazy to me.
I met these other guys, Premiere and the same trend in raspberry pie.
They took that trend.
And I mean, I love some of these.
I just, you know, I love it.
Cause I could jump on the video and they're, they were up in Seattle or something and it's like their kitchen.
And I'm like, that 3d printer in your sink.
And it's just like their kitchen is like all machines.
And I'm like, dude, you got to get out of your house.
And I got to give you a home to like, do that.
That's what I want is like people who will just turn their bedroom into this.
It's like, no, no, no, you come do it here.
We'll give you a little bit better facilities.
We'll give you space.
You get a place to sleep.
And they took this like raspberry pie trend and they're like, Oh, people start with raspberry pies and then they build a custom board.
Oh, we're building a modular raspberry pie.
Right. That compute long intermediate step.
Oh, you want a speaker?
Well, you can pick whatever speaker you want.
Just put that in. Oh, you wouldn't produce 2000 units now.
We have the ability to scale it for you.
So they took the hobbyist world and the behavior that's happening, driving it.
And they started this in their literally in their kitchen.
And like, I just think that, man, that's capable now.
And that's the trend that I can't, I can't like unsee it sometimes in hardware, both in consumer and more deep tech hardware.
Like drones. Platform is massive, right?
To be able to do things so much opportunity to utilize that.
I don't know how long it's going to take for this to become massive mainstream, but I just keep seeing that trend right now.
And I think for us, that's the bet you're making.
That's the bet we make.
And so I was joking with the guys here.
It's like, we want to bet on negative one to zero.
Like Peter, they'll talk about the zero to one companies.
It's like, we still one step even before that.
Like you're at negative one, you're wandering the forest.
You need to place a tinker and like, come and get the ideas to this is what we will.
This is what we wanted to write.
I love it. Uh, for God, this is amazing.
Uh, good, catching up.
As always, let's go check out some of these spaces.
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All right, back to the episode.
