#1 - From making $76k at Microsoft to selling TinyCo for $100M+

just like okay i gotta move on with the rest of my life this chapter is over and the bet that we made failed so i fall asleep i wake up the next day i immediately go look at our stats and i'm like oh we just generated four hundred thousand dollars in revenue yesterday so this is working holy fuck this is actually working we're winning today we have a entrepreneur and investor sole ali he is a founder of several companies tiny which you ever played the family guy mobile game or the harry potter mobile game you were playing with his handy work he has built and sold multiple companies he's an investor in over forty companies and we're here to hear that story of how he made his first million it's a wild wacky story where we won't believe the way that you you have to hear believe is it's gonna be telling us about his first company the second company some of the investments he's made and it's an awesome conversation i'm excited for you guys this here we go alright we're rolling it this is my first million podcast where we talk to entrepreneurs investors to find out the back stories of their businesses we wanna hear the good the bad the ugly the untold stories behind how they built their fortune we have our guest here today sole ali of ali capital and of tiny c fame so you i guess the best way to describe you would be you're an entrepreneur you've started and sold multiple companies now maybe three companies invested in forty some odd other companies you're a great friend of mine and i'm glad to have you on the pod you don't usually do podcasts first question is why is that i think i'm just a little shy about talking about myself in in this public way but since you're doing it i had to get on and be supportive of what you're up to okay good and of of course this is the a podcast where i'm looking to find the back so we often hear i remember when i moved to silicon valley six years ago before then i was sitting in australia and i was reading tech crunch and i was reading books and blogs and at first i wanted to know tactics but what i realized i actually liked a lot more was hearing the back stories the failures the successes the trial tribulation that it took for people to achieve what they did achieve because everybody's story ends up being different but when you hear so many you know hundreds of stories you end up finding the commonalities the patterns and that could be the motivation for you to continue so my hope with this podcast is to find guests like you who have incredible stories hear them unwind all those stories from the beginning and let the listeners use this as motivation i don't know if you know this but there's gonna be hundreds of thousands of people who are putting in their headphones in morning listening to this on their way to work on their commute to a job that you know maybe they don't love and their dreaming of starting their own business someday and the responsibility is yours my friend to to make it worth there while and give them a little inspiration today that's great i think i can do it i remember being in that same place having a job that i wasn't excited about and feeling like i was sort of stuck on this path and so i'm really excited to share my story and hopefully that inspires people to find their own path in life alright so okay let's start there then what was what was that job and what were you doing and how'd did you get off that path so i studied computer science in undergrad at georgia tech i graduated and i was really excited about graduating i was really excited about entering the real world i interviewed at ten or twenty different companies i got a job at microsoft that was probably the best of the companies that i'd interviewed at had the hardest interview and was really prestigious at this time so i started in january two thousand and four at microsoft and i remember on my first day i get there go to the employee new training thing one of the senior vice presidents of microsoft is there introducing himself telling us his story telling us why he's so passionate about being at microsoft and i'm just so excited i then go to my office at at microsoft it's in this other building i walk there there's all these people that are young and excited about what they're doing i get to my office it's got my name on the door somebody shows up and is like hey i'm eric i've set up your computer for you this is your phone and i was like oh wow okay i'm like a king yeah i was just not expecting this kind of treatment and so i arrived and thought wow this is amazing i'm like a real professional and i've arrived and i'm getting the spec that i deserve even though i probably didn't really deserve any respect at this point i'd done nothing and the first thing i do is i pick up my office phone i call my dad and i say hey dad this is my new phone number whenever you're trying to call me call me at this number this from my office that i'm calling you right now and he says that's all great you know cool you got an office and this is all great that you're you're excited about what you're doing but really you should quit your job immediately and start your own company that's really where the action is at you know i was like my dad he's always pushing me to do this so i i kind of talk to my mom and my mom was like this is so great that you're working at microsoft i'm telling all of my friends and she was like the you know marriage proposals are just gonna start coming just from the fact that you work at microsoft and so that's kind of my first day and my first time having a a real job right and the moment you realized your your dad is gonna be hard to please yeah my dad is ins in his appetite so he's eighty now and whenever i call him or talk to him he's got new business ideas he reads all about tech and you know we'll always be asking me what do you think of uber stock price what do you think of airbnb b when is it gonna go public so he's really passionate about entrepreneurship in general his goal in life at the moment is to buy a tea garden so he had a t garden when he was younger in bangladesh and he really wants to buy a t garden because he sees that as his legacy that will own as a family for hundreds of years and it will continue to generate revenue and employ hundreds of people for hundreds of years the rockefeller of tea yeah that's the stream for sure awesome awesome and so so if we book in the story because i think what's interesting is the beginning and the end and then figuring out how how to point a lead busy z right so if the beginning is you get to microsoft your name's on the door of your office you sit down you call your dad from your office landline and you say hey this my new office number and then today you know where i met you you know one of the reasons it's called the how i got rich podcast is because it's not about money it's about sort of lifestyle of of being able to do what you want when you want on your own terms and and you are somebody who does that i see today where you start businesses you sell them you invest in you know a number of companies you're an investor in maybe twelve thirteen venture capital funds you have control over your time i you know it'll be the middle of the day and you'll be working out it'll be you know the next week you'll be in london or japan and doing something completely different and so i think it's gonna be interesting is to figure out from that first day at microsoft how did you end up getting the financial freedom to be living the life you live today so let's pick up basically you're at microsoft you were excited about the job was that just a false promise or did you actually enjoy what you were up to and then eventually decide to leave i guess how how did that go at microsoft i was really excited about my job it was working with a bunch of other people who i thought were really brilliant passionate about their work but i think after six or twelve months at microsoft i got a sense of okay this is not really where i'm gonna be able to make my mark nothing that i do will enable me to really make a mark here and why is that just a big company you know you're just a small fish and a big pond what was the reason why why'd you come to that conclusion yeah i think no matter how much i how hard i worked or the sort of quality of my work i would get promoted every six or twelve months something along those lines but those promotions didn't really do much from a sphere of influence or authors over what i got to work on and i just realized that that that was never gonna happen actually what happened for me is i started at one team and then i switched to this other team inside microsoft that was building a new product from scratch called the windows home server team is run by this guy charlie kendall who'd been at microsoft twenty five years at this point and he had a fantastic career at microsoft he sort of started three or four startups ups within microsoft and had a really good time doing that and he had joined microsoft early enough where the stock that he had was worth a lot of money he had a house on a lake and a boat and i was like wow this guy live in the life that i i wanna live but i realized that because i joined microsoft twenty years after he had there's no way i was gonna be able to achieve that same success at microsoft in the same time period that that he had so i i just felt like i'm doing good work people are valuing the work that i'm doing but i'm still stuck within a specific team at microsoft and i can't really come up with an idea that somebody at microsoft will say that's great we're gonna go fund that and i i could only work within the construct of microsoft which is you're a software engineer or a program manager on some team working on some project and i felt over time like those were chains that wouldn't let me do something beyond that and really when i when i graduated undergrad you know you put an objective on on your resume the objective i put on my resume was to fully exploit what my mind and hands are capable of doing and i just felt like we which is just thinking about it now such a piss and arrogant thing to do for a twenty three old kid what why you say that does that sounds unusual but i'm guessing if you were reading somebody's kinda resume today if somebody wanted to work with you and they said you know i'm looking to to maximize what i'm capable of in terms of my mind and my hands what my abilities i feel like you would like that i would love that i i think one of the great things about silicon valley is it's made for people that are of that mindset and wanna be surrounded by people that are like that what i was doing was putting it on resumes and applying to microsoft national instruments right just giant companies where that isn't valued at that stage gotcha so it's it's this line of thinking that i think is the right line of thinking i wanna encourage everyone in their life to always be thinking in that way whether they're at microsoft and twenty three or google and sixty i think you should just be thinking about what what what else should i be doing what are all the other possibilities that i'm not seeking out by doing my current job and do you remember the day when you were like okay this is this is the end of the microsoft chapter for me yes i joined this team called windows home server we built a product over an eighteen month period i got to do all these things i would normally get to do at microsoft because i was one of the first fifteen or twenty people on that team the team grew to ninety five people so just for the level of experience i had i just got to sort of punch above my weight on that team and we were launching the product we were announcing the product so it was in stealth mode bill gates was doing his last keynote at ces and he announced a product as part of that keynote the whole team was down there in vegas manning the boots and talking about the product to people who are coming up at cs and asking what is what windows home server why would i want one and bill gates announces the product it is keynote we then all all go out to dinner as a team the guy who ran our product called windows server was this guy charlie kendall he gets up in front of everyone in las vegas to do a toast and he just starts crying because he's so passionate and so excited to see this baby of his born and i looked at him and was like wow this is amazing this guy is in his forties and he's crying about this product being born and i realized that even though i really loved what i was doing i didn't feel that sense of authors over the product and that i would not feel the way that he's feeling at microsoft ever so i decided then and there that i wanted to quit so when we got back from cs i went to his office and told him hey i got i gotta do what you're doing here i don't think i'm gonna be able to do that at microsoft i wanna go out into the real world and do it one of the other funny things is when you're at a at a big company you're living in this bubble inside the big company where all of your peers are talking about what's happening at the big company and all the press that you're reading all the blogs and information that you're reading is about that company i remember quitting and leaving microsoft and being like wow i was stuck inside this bubble and there's a whole big wide world out here i remember sending an email with somebody and saying wow i felt like i was a prison of my own making by being at microsoft microsoft right wow and so now you you leave microsoft you know what you're gonna do next or you just know enough that will get you started where were you at mentally at that time yeah so a lot of people i told all my peer group that i was leaving and they were like why would you leave microsoft such a cookie gig you're making so much money and you're gonna take this risk by leaving why are you gonna take that risk and i really think a lot most people overestimate the risk that they're taking when they leave their job the unemployment rate in the united states is sub four percent for people who are competent and skilled in their line of work it's easy for them to go back to their job i think if i quit microsoft started a company and failed for a year or two or three i could go back to microsoft and actually get a higher position than what i would have if i had stayed just because even microsoft values that entrepreneurial experience that that people will have so i think people in general overestimate the amount of risk so i i left i didn't really know anything about what i was gonna do except i was gonna move to silicon valley i'd been reading tech crunch and went to an event that michael eric hosted in seattle for tech crunch and was just like oh this is where the action is at i gotta be down there i just know that when i get down there i'll meet people that are like minded and figure out what to do with myself i was just so excited to do it that i just quit so i went to visit my parents in florida before moving out to silicon valley just to say hello to them after three days i was totally bored all my friends from high school had moved out of florida and i just didn't know what to do with myself so i said okay let's start working on something right now i had not done any software engineering or coding at microsoft for several years at this point so those skills were rusty i said okay let me just start working on something facebook had announced the facebook platform right when i had left microsoft the day that i left and i said okay this is something that seems really easy i can make a web app i can put on facebook and it's just a good way for me to get my feet wet and building something and learning how to code again so i did exactly that i got a friend of mine named jam jamal from georgia tech to start working with me on it and we made it together and took us about two weeks to make and we launched it our goal really was to get a hundred people to use it ever and we expected that idea of those hundred people would be our friends and and what was it at this time you you built what what was the first idea so the first app we made was called super the idea was really simple you got to pick a super and give it to your friends so we made a bunch of really funny super like most likely to wear a bunny costume for no parent reason most likely to get con by old ladies in las vegas things that we just thought were kinda off upbeat and funny that you'd would wanna give to a friend and that friend would go to the app and give one back to you so we launched on the facebook platform and within a month million people had used it and our servers were melting we didn't know anything about database architectures so our database was melting that the app was going down all the time all these friends of mine were like did you make super i love it this is amazing i love using this thing so it was just a smash hit right away and how did that feel for you well was that different than what you had been doing up till that point and i guess like what was like when you woke up that you know the first morning when it started to click what was going through your head at that time if you can go back to what you were feeling then yeah i think it was just joy pure joy and pride of this is a concept that we dreamed up we made we launched and people are using it and they like it or love it and we created something in the world that people are using so it just felt very it was a very different kind of joy than any joy experience at my microsoft right and at at microsoft i'm guessing it was more joy of i got the approval and appreciation of the kind of my boss the person above me or the peers around me versus this is almost like art it's you know the market loves what i made yeah i think at microsoft i was constantly focused on impress somebody whether that was my boss or somebody else on the team or somebody else i would go have lunch with it worked at microsoft and here i was focused on on sort of my own values is doing something that i was proud of and it's just a very different calculation that those two things gotcha so it's you and jamal now servers are melting what happens next so we very quickly learn how to make servers not melt we find people who do my sql consulting they enable us to keep our servers up and we just start making the product better and better and it's really exciting we then get a phone call from somebody who lives in silicon valley and so by the way this whole time i'm in florida and jamal is in atlanta and you're living in your childhood bedroom at time yeah i'm living in my parents house in the bedroom that i grew up in and i'm sort of keeping the the opposite schedule of them they'll wake up early and go to sleep early i'll wake up really late at like six pm and stay up all night working on the product so i get this phone call from this guy his name's novel rad never heard of this guy before and he just called you yeah actually i think we we might have initiated it we reached out to some other facebook app and said hey we have a question about facebook platform or a question about how you're growing so quickly can we talk to you and neville was a guy behind that app and he called us gotcha okay what does neville i have to say who's now you know i guess for those who don't know naval all the founder of angel one of the most sort of famous and and and respected people here in silicon valley today and at that time he was also a kind of well known entrepreneur and did you know who he was at the time so i didn't know who he was at the time he had started a angel fund called hit forge and was investing out of that fund and he was really excited about the facebook platform and was investing in companies on the facebook platform so i get on the phone with him this is the first time i'm talking to anyone who's a true silicon valley person in my life and he's like hey love what you're doing i think it can be really big i wanna meet you in person how do we make that happen and you know i'm kind of w about how to make that happen and he cuts through all the bullshit in my head and says what's it gonna take to get you on a plane tomorrow to come meet me here in san francisco and i say oh okay i can do that right and i buy a one way ticket to san francisco and come out here and meet with him his office is in soma and san francisco and it's really it's surrounded by homeless people it's non script it feels like a warehouse it's empty so i immediately get the he gb from from it he's a super nice guy super clearly very intelligent clearly got a ton of experience in silicon valley and he's got that silicon valley ethos of anybody can do anything the next person i meet might be the next mark zuckerberg building the next big thing and so i meet with him he takes me out to lunch asked me a bunch of questions those questions are really designed to get a sense of am i technical what's sort of my level of ambition and am i an entrepreneur am i sort of made of the same cloth that entrepreneurs are that he is and i think he concludes in lunch that yes to all three of those and says okay great during launch he says i wanna invest you know i'm gonna why you two hundred k well let's go back to my office and you're not even asking for investment yeah i i don't really we didn't really need investment we did actually know what we needed so i wasn't asking for anything i was just kind of like i'm here you know something i don't teach me that's kind of the way i approaching it like he was yoda we go back to his office he prints out a term sheet and he says sign it and not worry you the money right now i read the term sheet and i don't actually understand any of the words on the term sheet i don't end up signing it and don't end up sort of taking his capital but did you give them a let me think about this let me touch my lawyers or this looks like it's in portuguese to me what did what did you tell them at the time to to to exit gracefully yeah i said this is really exciting you're awesome i love meeting you i wanna work with people like you i wanna work with you i don't understand what this is it's all little too sudden for me so let me go home and kinda think about this and i'll i'll follow up and neville to his credit is when he knows what he wants is just aggressive and is like sign it right now kinda the same way he was about me coming to san francisco was like just eliminate let's eliminate all the bullshit that you've got in your head right let's sign this right now and start working together immediately i just tough first date but a great a great business man but it's tough first date there he was looking for marriage yeah i i like i really appreciated that approach and also now that i understand term sheets i went back and looked at that term sheet once it was a super entrepreneur friendly term sheet he is such a great guy for not like it was all common stock it wasn't preferred stock the term sheet is just set up in a super entrepreneur friendly way so i appreciate that he was doing that so i i have the meeting with him and then i'd set up a meeting with a slide slide was this other company that it started making facebook apps and it was venture funded run by this guy max le and this guy keith boy so i'd set up a meeting with those guys too i go over there meet meet them and they started asking me questions and i very quickly realized that oh okay this is actually an interview where they're trying to see if i wanna be an engineer or a product manager at the slide team and having just left microsoft i'm like i i don't really wanna do that and i remember this moment where keith says okay well we really like what you've built but you know he opens the door to the room we're in and he's like do you hear that that's all the engineers that i have looking at slide and it's gonna take them about thirty minutes to copy everything that you've done and integrate it with top friends their biggest facebook app and i think the biggest facebook app in the world at the time and then you're gonna be toast and i was i was like oh wow right like that's some hard love that you're you're given me here but you know for me at the time i just worked on it for a couple of weeks and it didn't mean anything to me so i was like you know if you want it you can just have this app and it's not a big deal but what you can't have is my time i'm not gonna come work for you or for slide even though i really respect what you guys are doing and you guys are really brilliant that's kinda how the meetings in san francisco went i went back to florida and i was like oh wow this is actually what i'm working on i've seen as kind of the silly trivial facebook app and i was like oh that's not what this is this is actually a business these people out there respect what i'm doing and they've got a vision for the future where people are gonna be buying airline tickets on facebook and commerce is gonna be happening on facebook so let me start buying into that vision and seeing what we can build so i moved to atlanta where i'd gone to undergrad on where jamal was we started working out of my sister's apartment two bedroom apartment took one of the bedrooms took all the living room furniture sold it and turned it into an office we put ads up on super and those ads started generating revenue we used that revenue to hire a couple of georgia tech employees georgia tech grads or georgia tech interns and we just start making super better we start making more apps super grows to about ten million users over time we make other apps that end up also getting millions of people using them and so for a couple of months we think wow we're really good at this right look at us we didn't need the money from those guys we hired all these people they work for us we're their boss we keep coming with great ideas for what to build and we launch it and it ends up being successful we just felt really good about ourselves yeah might touch at the time yeah and this was the facebook hey heyday so the the people you're talking about are you know from neville who's kind of like ill silicon valley keith and max are you know the ex paypal guys who have done amazing things you know from from slide onward really and here you are sitting in georgia in your sister's apartment and things are going well you can't you can do it no wrong at this point yeah that's certainly how it feels but we very quickly realized that oh wow we don't know what we're doing and we've made a lot of mistakes here so we realized the people that we hired actually weren't that good and we didn't know what to do about that in some cases the way our our strategy would work is i would wake up in the morning and come up with an idea and fall in love with the idea and say okay everybody stop what you're doing let's work on this idea and the idea would be a compelling sort of viral social thing like super was where you send it to your friends and then your friends login and they send it to you and then ten of their friends so all a sudden it starts growing sort of exponentially without us spending any money doing user acquisition or trying to market the product in any way so we we're really good at coming up with things like that but we didn't really have a sense of what metrics were valuable or what was the value that we were actually creating so for example today a lot of social will track things like monthly active users and daily active users we didn't track those things we just tracked how many people had ever used our app so we were optimizing for fundamentally the wrong thing what you wanna optimize for is building something that people are gonna use constantly for a long period of time frequently ideally we were optimizing for something that people would touch get ten of their friends to use but never come back to so we realized that okay this thing that we built is kind of valuable what should we do next so i came out to silicon valley and met with a couple other people and you know folks like naval keith and max left those guys are are silicon valley lu today and they were silicon valley lu then but i feel like they've sort of a hundred x from the time that i met them in terms of the clarity of who they are as individuals and the work that they like to do as individuals and you know naval all i think of as one of the preeminent philosophers of our time in the same way that people thought about russo or a con or other philosophers in previous ages we were quickly realizing the shortcomings of what we were building we came out to silicon valley to raise money we got a couple people who were like yeah i like what you guys are doing i like you guys wanna invest but we realized that we didn't really have a sense for what we should build next and we then just said okay let's try to sell this thing instead so we didn't really know how to go about selling a business so we thought okay the best thing we need to do is talk to people who are in this space go to every event and conference that's in this space and see if we can sort of catalyze a chemical reaction and or an acquisition in that way so we went to this event called graph social patterns in san diego we get there it's all people who are building apps on the facebook platform of lots of different varying levels of success and we've got sort of a middle level of success at the time there was a a website that tracked how many people had ever used one of your facebook apps by company and we were in the top ten companies there so we go to this event we meet this guy she pic and he says i love what you guys are doing wanna buy you guys so let's go to lunch and talk about it we go to lunch super accomplished yeah just met guy who wanted to buy the company yeah it's crazy it's a crazy story so we we meet this guy goes to lunch with us it's sort of again test us in the same way neville all did of are you technical are you entrepreneurial what's your level of ambition and says okay i wanna do this deal he writes a number she has a a real flair for the dramatic in the best kind of way so he writes a number on an app in turns it over slides it to us we look at it and we immediately say okay let's do this deal so it was a two million dollar number on the napkin and we'd started the company sort of nine months so what could he have written on that napkin that you would have said yes to was that like you know was that your minimum there or had you written two hundred thousand would you have also said sure take it yeah we would have probably said yes to any number frankly so at the time when i was at microsoft i was making seventy six thousand dollars a year so you offered us two million dollars for nine months worth of work and really nine months worth of work where we felt like we just made a ton of first time entrepreneur mistakes so we felt really good about the two we felt overjoyed over the moon about the two million dollar number i think we would have probably had the exact same feeling if the number was two hundred thousand right okay so he slides over the napkin do you even look at jamal or are you both you both just say yes without even having a to consult each other yeah that's that's the weird thing is it's like we i think we probably looked at each other for a second and immediately said yes so we didn't negotiate in any way and yeah we just said yes immediately and and i remember when you first told me this the story that not in so much detail but there was sort of a string attached of it wasn't just buying you he's was rolling up a couple companies so you had a little bit more work to do at the at this conference is that correct yeah so what she was doing was a strategy that's called roll up so you get somebody to back you and give you a a big check in this case he'd gotten venture capitalist to give him fifteen million dollars he's gonna use that fifteen million dollars to buy up the top five players in the space combined them all together with a goal of you know that cost ten million dollars but creates fifty million or a hundred million dollars of value and that's what his goal was and so he went on to at that conference and bought a couple other companies as well gotcha you've now gotta win under your belt you don't have to go work there or did you spend a little bit of time at that company as well yeah so we moved the whole team out to palo alto which is where the company was called s she is based we stay there for a couple of months and i moved to new york city because i've always wanted to live in new york city and i just wanted to start a new company and it was a great way to sort of leave s g by moving across the country gotcha and so that was maybe you know baseball analogy that was the single and then here come the home runs and and so you don't like to brag about it but i'll i'll i'll brag for you a little bit so here's the spoiler the next couple chapters for you were huge hits you built a company that got backed by mark andre and jason h one of the top firms in the world at mark was on your board i think you took that company you ended up selling it for let's say many buckets of money many more than the first company and then you did with your brother you built a company called native which for anybody out there who's looking for deodorant no better deodorant in the world than native which you sold to pro and gamble and so so many big hits were to come so let's jump through those real quick about how you you know how you took that first win the small win and par into bigger wins yes so i felt really good about the win and it definitely immediately felt like a win and i said okay this is good but let's take all of the lessons that i learned the first time and apply them and try and build a company that's ten x more valuable or a hundred x more valuable and i immediately sort of got the entrepreneurial bug and said okay i'm gonna do this for the rest of my life and by the way what was your dad saying you know dad who was like hey you gotta get out of microsoft you needed need to go start a business at this point what was dad saying kind of after the first fit facebook app the super did he even see that as a business or was he like you're wasting your time with this you know who which of my friends are gonna wear a bunny suit game yeah so my parents are really funny they and no matter what business me or my brother start are really dismissive about it and they say oh this isn't a real business until we sell the business and then when the business is sold they're like oh i knew the whole time that you were gonna win with this business i love this business the whole time so i think for my parents when the company sold they were like oh wow mom was like i can now have a new story to tell about you which is your entrepreneur you started and sold the company so she she was feeling pretty good and i think my dad was like okay my son is now following in my footsteps of starting companies and trying to create value on his own as an entrepreneur so i think he was also proud gotcha okay so so you wanted to start a new business you decided to stay on the facebook platform is that right that's where all the action was or what was the thought process there yeah so actually i got together with a friend of mine from high school named iain sp in new york city we started jamming together at cafes and in new york city just trying to come up with ideas for what to work on so we go start working together and spend about twelve months working on a bunch of really bad ideas what what's what sort of bad ideas there's a company called daily candy which was a a newsletter for women that comcast bought for four hundred million dollars so we were like the newsletter business we've gotta be in this newsletter business we thought that green energy was a big deal so we thought we gotta be in the green energy business in some way so you launched a green energy newsletter yeah we launched that's exactly what we did we want really we launched a green energy newsletter and very quickly we realized oh we don't know anything about the newsletter business we should stop doing this altogether one of the other ideas we had was building twitter for colleges so we felt like college you're talking to and meeting all kinds of new people and instead of using twitter which is this generic platform we could build sort of a local twitter which tells you about parties and events and and things that are happening on the college campus we've worked on that for about three months before we kinda gave up and said oh you know what twitter for colleges is just twitter or actually it ended up being just facebook so we kinda stopped working on that idea and then we kinda came back to the facebook platform because we felt like we had had enough failures where we wanted something that was that we felt like it was more likely to succeed and where was your confidence at at this time were you sort of humbled okay you know you know the last few ideas are not taken off like i hoped you know where was your confidence levels at because i think that's always interesting right like as an entrepreneur you some people are blessed with this confidence that's un unfavorable and it it just never wave and we hear about that a lot what but i think in reality most people have confidence of sort of ebb and flows sometimes dependent on the traction sometimes dependent on really small things like you know one specific investors confidence in you or you know something you you know your mentor tells you and so yeah give me a give me a sense of your psychology at that time what what were you thinking and how are you feeling yeah i would say i always have this weird level of confidence that whatever i'm gonna work on i'm gonna will to success so i that's sort of this confidence that is this this sort of omni present confidence that applies to anything that i work on there have definitely been times where i realize oh what i'm working on is not a good idea and i just wasted six months of my life and the life of my colleagues and then i i sort of realize that i'm maybe i'm not actually very good at entrepreneurship or building companies or building products so i would say there's definitely this ebb and flow based on when i start a new idea i have a lot of confidence and excitement for it as i build it that confidence sort of builds as i launch it generally when you launch something you're met with resistance so i expect some amount of resistance and that resistance dramatically decreases my level of confidence right and then over time i just end up sticking with something and per and focusing on willing it to success and that ends up leading to growth and success over time and as that happens my confidence sort of increases gotcha and so okay so you'd decide to go back in the facebook with platform and so just talk a little bit about what was tiny there's a story within the story there you know there was what was tiny and then what happened so i wanna get to the what happened but first let's set the stage what was tiny and how did it even become tiny in and i started a company called tiny we started making games on the facebook platform the iphone launched in two thousand eight and then in two thousand nine they launched the app store with in app purchases so we said oh wow this is actually an amazing platform nobody else is on it and we start a company called tiny that made mobile games for iphones and so why was it called tiny by the way we were looking for domain names that were really cheap and fun and tiny we bought for seven hundred dollars all the other domain names and ideas that we had were very expensive so that's how we arrived at the name tiny one of our engineers bo came up with the name gotcha okay and then i have a a quote somewhere here so this is the quote from i think it's ben h woods he's riding on the entries h blog about tiny so he the blog title was a big opportunity for tiny coat and he says you know he describes the company and at the andy he says you know despite terrific early traction and what appears to be a massive market it would be too early for us to invest in this type of company unless we believe that the entrepreneur behind it was so skilled determined and talented that he would build the team that wins the market that's pretty good yeah that's amazing how does that feel feels good drinks that one in yeah so to print that out and put it in my room every time i argue with my girlfriend i'm gonna like give this time i almost printed that out that's my friend that they're talking about over there so okay so you know you get this backing and you're in this market that everyone thinks is maybe at this time you know the the sort of forward looking people are thinking hey mobile gonna be big mobile games could be big and and you're in that space and so what happens does it take off right away like the first idea or were you met with a lot of resistance we get immediate traction when we launch our first mobile game so the first game was called tap alert we launch it we do a a marketing partnership with a friend of mine from microsoft named lee lin he'd started a company called tap joy that's a mobile ad network wherein tap promotes our game tap resort and by promoting it they push it in the top five free apps on the iphone app store so we get hundreds of thousands of downloads immediately and those downloads are turning into revenue so in the first month of launch we generate five six hundred thousand dollars of revenue not bad so we immediately are like oh wow this is successful and working we had a couple other side projects or sku works projects that we were working on and we say let's immediately stop working on those and focus on making mobile games because we think this is a place where we can win and so you start building mobile games like tap resort and i guess take me through because there's a butt that comes up so things are going well but what happens things are going well we launched tap resort generates five hundred thousand in revenue the first month and sort of keeps doing that in subsequent months we launched another game and now are generating another four five hundred thousand dollars a month in revenue from that game so we're a ten eleven million revenue run rate per year a bunch of vcs notice us and say love what you guys are doing we wanna meet with you we take one of the meetings and they say we wanna invest in your company we really believe in the mobile game space and we wanna be investors in in this space so we take the meeting and you know our intent initially is not to raise venture capital we like the fact that we own the company and that we haven't raised in the outside capital but the venture capitalist capital firms start asking us questions that make us realize wow these guys know what they're doing and are asking questions that are gonna guide us in a way that we're not gonna be able to guide ourselves so we decide okay we do wanna raise venture capital money so they give us a term sheet we then take that term sheet and go up and down sand hill road and pitch to a bunch of other vc firms so end up getting a handful of term sheets the one that we like the most is in recent h recent h just their process is really different for evaluating an investment than most of the other firms they ask us a bunch of questions that are specific to our business and as we talk to them you can sort of see the gears turning where they're connecting the dots and realizing how big an opportunity title coke could be so we end up taking money from ind injuries h eighteen million dollars first money into the company mark andre joins the board and we say great we're gonna take this money and and put it to work so we start doing that we hire a bunch more people we grow the team about eighty people we make a bunch more games we take that money and start spending it to do customer acquisition and that's all working and working really well so we end up growing revenue to you know twenty million in the first year and then forty million in the second year and we're at about breakeven you know again we're feeling really good about where we're at and the humbling events are are yet to come and a bunch of companies are coming to us and say we love what you guys are doing we wanna acquire you and we say okay we're not ready for an acquisition we we see the future to be bright rosie what ends up happening is we run into this giant brick wall that we foolishly didn't see coming we would spend about a dollar acquiring a customer and we generate about two dollars and fifty cents in net revenue from that customer a bunch of japanese mobile gaming companies were making so much money in japan but kinda sat that market and there was no more growth left there for them so they were moving to the united states opening up offices in san francisco and saying okay we're gonna become dominant mobile game companies in the united states and they drove the cost of customer acquisition up from a dollar to four dollars and then to six dollars and eventually to nine dollars for for the games that we were making in a matter of six months so that took our unit economics and turn them upside down that meant that every time we were spending money acquiring a customer we were actually losing more money instead of making money so that ended up being a giant problem for us and i can imagine yeah we went out to go raise new money and every time you raise a new round of funding i would say it becomes ten times to fifty times harder to raise the next round of funding you need better product market fit better unit economics more clarity on how you're gonna grow the company ten times bigger than wherever you're at the moment and so the the guys were meeting us the series b and saying okay we really like you guys we like the business you've built but it looks like the unit economics are kind of falling apart so we don't wanna invest so that becomes this real problem for us because we haven't been profitable we haven't been running the company on profit because of these japanese mobile gaming companies spending so much money on customer acquisition we start losing money every month so instead of being breakeven first we're losing two hundred thousand dollars a month then five hundred thousand dollars a month and those numbers become pretty significant pretty quickly as the months go by so you know i i think that one of the things you need to do as an entrepreneur is never lie to yourself about reality it's very easy for an entrepreneur to lie to themselves about reality especially when they've got investors that they always wanna say that the nice thing to are the right thing to especially when you've got employees and you always wanna be your employees to be excited about your business and where you're going so i definitely see as i've invested in companies now that entrepreneurs will lie to themselves about the reality of the market that they're in and kind of fumble the ball as a result of that so i'd say one of the strengths of our team at the time was that we realized that okay the reality that we're living in is not the same reality we were living in twelve months ago so we're not gonna exist twelve months or now unless we do something dramatically different and we do it immediately with reckless abandon and you've told me this before and it stood out to me and ever since i've asked myself this question other companies that i'm investing in i try to get a sense of is the founder looking reality in the face or is reality in the room and they're just looking around they're looking away from it and the weird thing is that this even happens to really smart people really talented people there's sort of no correlation between just sort of intelligence and talent and this ability to look reality in the face go more into detail next i think this is super super important and can really this can tank years of effort if you do this wrong and so it seems like something worth double clicking into yeah i think it's really easy to get high on your own supply it's really easy to look at the numbers and just look for the the places where you've got traction and evidence that things are working you wanna succeed you wanna find evidence of that success and as you're talking to your friends your parents your investors your employees you also want to be successful so it's very easy to sort of seduce yourself into thinking that things are working when they're not and there's so many outside external factors that help people think they're successful even when a business is failing so raising a new round of funding and those investors now believing in you're planning on doing over the next twelve months getting press and press talking about your company in this fantastic way meeting with friends and only telling them about the things that are going right those are all the things that make it really easy to to lose sight of reality so so do you have some checks and balances do you have a question you ask yourself or a tactic that sort of prevents you from doing that because that seems like the natural way that'll happen by default so you need to fight the default do you have something you do or is it just sort of inherent to you yeah i'm just constantly paranoid and i try to look for metrics that prove that the business is not working or that the business is degrading or the unit economics are degrading i think about what are all of the things that could be a meteor that take our business out and i sort of lean into those things and say okay i'm gonna proactively identify and try to resolve those problems one thing i heard keith boys say once is when you start a company you should think about all of the reasons that it's not gonna work and all of the reasons that it's gonna fail and you should start with that list make a prioritized list and try to prove that these aren't things that are gonna make your company fail and you wanna do that as the first thing and whereas i think it's very easy for people to do that as the last thing where they start by getting their cofounder and their friends to start working with them they start working on the product they launch the product and only then do they start asking themselves those questions you wanna start asking yourself those questions upfront before you've written a line of code i think it's really worthwhile to make a a deck or a memo that describes what your business is why it's gonna work why it's not gonna work and try to dis disprove all of the reasons why it's not gonna work it makes sense and so you're having that meeting now at tiny c you in a handful of trusted folks i guess you sorta of see the writing on the wall hey if we don't turn us around this company not gonna exist in twelve months and that eighteen million bucks they put into us down the drain this is not gonna be pretty and so what happens yeah it's really hard time at the company because i realize this is happening and i think nobody else in the team is quite realized it i think they realized it six months later and so i i immediately start thinking about what do we do to change our business and i get this guy andrew green who's our head of business development and i can fight in him and i say okay together you and i are gonna figure out how to turn this business around and we come up with a long list of ideas and then we say okay that's not not gonna work that's not gonna work that's not gonna work one of the ideas that we come up with is licensing brands from giant media companies and making games using those brands the number one problem we have the existential problem we have is we can't find a way to get forty million people to download our game without spending sixty million dollars or hundred million dollars to get forty million people do to go download it and so that's a problem we wanna solve we wanna not have to rely on paid user acquisition to get customers into our games so you wanted to leverage the existing brands out there like the the way that you know kim kardashian put puts her name on a game that game gets a pop and and markets itself because her name carries that way you wanted to to do that yeah exactly and you saw this working or this was just a brilliant idea out of nowhere you saw somebody else doing it or how did you get this idea and why did you think it would work yeah so a lot of mobile games so this was new in the mobile games space a lot of console games do this all the time and a lot of the games i played as a kid growing up do had have been had been doing this for generations i think we just realized that oh we can apply that playbook to the mobile game world people aren't already doing that it's a huge wide open opportunity for us to go do it apple will be really excited our consumers will be really excited our employees will be really excited this is gonna work love it and so how do you do it so we make a list of brands where we think this brand is so powerful we're gonna be able to get forty million people to download the game just based on the fact that i have this brand in the app store one of the brands that we come up with is family guy so there'd been a simpsons game launched and the simpsons game was beginning to do well and we said okay what's like the simpsons family guy let's go try to get the family guy license and make a game using that brand so we go through these her efforts to get in front of the fox team who is actually coincidentally right now in the process of deciding to license family guy and whom to license it to so we realized wow this could actually work we then kinda andrew and i kinda of bet the farm on making this deal happen so we stopped working on andrew and i stopped working on the other games we just spend eighty percent of our time trying to close this family ideal we make a pitch deck that is our concept for the game we go down to la we pitch it to them they love the concept that we come up with it's the exact game that everybody who loves the tv show family guy wants to see as a family guy mobile game the guys that meet us at fox realize wow these guys are really passionate about family guy they have the right idea for what the game should be should we bet on these guys and so we're competing directly with ea fox had just done a deal with ea on the simpsons and that's beginning to show that it's gonna be successful so they're kind of the incumbent and the team that team and company that fox is leaning towards going with already z shows up and also wants to license the family guy game so we're kind of the smallest company of the three that's competing for it but we're the ones that need it the most and we're ins about making this happen so we pitch the idea to them they love it we then go back to san francisco and we say okay how do we get this deal we come up with all of the reasons for why ea is not the right partner for making the family guy game and we send that to them and we say let's do a call we wanna talk to you about why we're the right partner in ea is not they read it and they they think start thinking okay wow these guys are right there are some problems with ea being the company that we go with we then say okay that's good we're doing great but that's not enough we didn't close the deal let's do more so every day i i'd go to andrew and say what more can we do to get the deal done today and he was like there's no more i have nothing there's nothing we can come up with and i was like no we need to come up with something more mark is on our board so call him up and say hey we need your help how do we get this deal done and he says oh coincidentally i'm friends with this guy tom ro who used to work at fox call him up we call tom ro up tom ro is this amazing hollywood guy who's been making films for decades he's like okay coincidentally the guy who is making this decision was my pro j at fox so let me call him and tell him that they should go with you i'm also gonna call we asked tom ro can you join our board and call this guy tom ro is an incredible human being where he just says look i'm happy to join your board but let me call this guy first and see if it's gonna make a difference he calls this guy and says i love the tiny team i vouch for them i want you to go with him these guys are the best guys to make a family guy mobile game wow what a break yeah amazing moment that he does and i think so that's amazing but then like i remember when you first told me the rough outline of the story the thing i took from it was he came into the office every day and was like how do we get this deal you don't ever wanna kind of bet the farm on one partnership that's kind of unlikely to come through but you know the situation called for it where you really didn't have another choice and i think that asking that question every day you would never got to that answer had you not just persistent annoying and almost man asked that question every day is that is that right yeah absolutely we did all these things that nobody else in our position i think would have done and in fact when we got the deal done with fox they said we had to give the deal to you because we were afraid of who else was gonna call us if we didn't do the deal with you guys we were afraid of what else you might do next if we didn't give you the deal gotcha okay so you end up getting the deal through through you know tom's nudge but this isn't all you know it's not it's not rainbows in and dolphins and in sunshine here you you have to you had a problem that came up after this tell tell the story about that problem because this is my favorite part this is when i scheduled this podcast it was because of this story i think this is an incredible moment that that is inspired me and i think when it's inspire many other people but the only the inspirational moments only come when you're really at rock bottom so so what happens after this after you get the deal yeah so you know we're really excited that we get the deal the company is still failing there's still no clear path to actually succeeding as a company when we sign the deal with fox we signed a deal that says that we're gonna pay them ten million dollars for the license and that we're gonna pay them ten million dollars within thirty days we have two million dollars in our bank account so the first thing we need to do is go convince somebody to give us the money to pay fox we go to silicon valley bank and say hey we're making this game we have all of these other games that are generating all of this revenue will you give us a loan and through tremendous amounts of c controlling by us and by mark andre at nor again mark mark really comes through in making the family guy deal happen and he really comes through and getting sv to step up and give us a loan so they give us a loan of about ten million dollars we give ten million dollars to fox and we've got a couple million dollars left go make the game so that was our first major existential problem after signing the family guy game at the time have about a hundred and sixty people at the company and we realized that that's too many people for where our business is at we realized that we're not we're gonna run out of money unless we trim unless we sort of decrease the size of the team and decrease our burn rate we realized that while we're doing the family guy deal while we're trying to get that deal done and we also realized while we're trying to get the family deal done that we wanna lay off significant portion of the company but we can't do that until after the deal is signed by fox right so deal gets signed we pay them ten million dollars then we say okay we need to take the team which is about a hundred and fifty hundred and sixty people and trim that to about ninety people so i get up in front of the whole company one day and say hey guys today we're gonna lay off about eighty seventy people and then we go through that process and it takes us the whole day we take each person that we're gonna lay off one at a time and talk to them and say hey here's you're being laid off here's what's happening we're really sorry about this you know that's a really unpleasant experience to this day whenever i'm walking around san francisco i'll see somebody that i've laid off on that day and you know that person will not look we'll pretend they don't see me or cross the street and not walk by me and you know i totally understand that i think it's definitely a failing of mine to have gotten us to this point and so it's it's a reality that i i sort of live with every day in a way so anyway we lay off about eighty people that day some eighty people then we come back the next morning and say okay guys yesterday really sucked but today is the beginning of a new era at tiny we're gonna build this game this game is gonna get forty million downloads because of the family guy brand here's all of the marketing ideas that we have that are free and that are gonna get us to forty million downloads we are gonna focus on profitability and we're gonna make this game be profitable and we're gonna be profitable off of this game and it's gonna take us about the ten to twelve months to finish making this game each of you is necessary to finish making this game please stay with the company and please help us some people buy in to the vision and then what starts happening is every week we get somebody new coming into to me and saying hey i'm sorry i've decided to leave the company i'm gonna work on some somewhere else that was because morale was down after the layoffs or they just didn't believe what was the what was the core reason there both those things so i think morale was down people felt like this is a sinking ship i better get get off of it immediately instead of waiting for it to completely go under and even this this guy who was my right hand guy who re led our product management team raj na paul was like i don't believe in the strategy this isn't gonna work i'm out and so he quit over over this sort of at this time right one of the i i love marvel one of the my favorite movies is iron ironman and in iron ironman he's got sort of this artificial heart that's keeping him alive and i felt like during this whole time period the only thing that was keeping the company alive was people see me in the office people seeing the level of conviction that i had and that if my heart stopped beating for one beat the company would die and everyone would quit and give up wow and so you put on a face every day and went in yeah regardless of how you actually felt yes so no matter of what level conviction i actually had which varied from moment to moment i went in the office every day and said we're gonna win this battle this game is gonna launch it's gonna be successful and we're gonna do this and so you fast forward you guys build the game but you don't build the game in time what happens yes so we have two million dollars to finish making and launch the game nine or twelve months have gone by and all that money is gone we've spent it building the game we were supposed to have launched the game by now but it's not quite finished and funny things happen start happening like creditors come to our office there'll be somebody that we're supposed to pay but we don't have the money to pay them so they knock on the office and try to meet with me or somebody else and say hey tiny is unpaid bill of twenty thousand dollars you know it's supposed to been paid two months ago what's going on when are you gonna pay me so that's also a really difficult period of time you're just pretending not to be there or how are you dealing with the with this creditor at the door yeah so we have this person named susan steele who's steel will that's where she got her name i think she goes and us sort of deals with all of that and creates this artificial brick wall and she does a really good job of figuring out which people do we need to pay right now which ones can we sort of pay thirty days sixty days ninety days a hundred and twenty days from now so she really handles that for us actually gotcha and so you get to the end but i do remember one person quit and he quit because he was like i'm quitting because i signed this contract that says we were gonna pay them and you have not paid them and i don't wanna be at this company anymore right fair yeah and totally fair legit thing to do the the guys are really great outstanding human being i really like him and i've worked with him since then yeah and and this is the thing i mean success is not always pretty right there is a not just difficulty but there's just ugly patches where you do something wrong and then there's consequence of doing it wrong or you come short now you don't have the money to pay the creditors and so this this goes all the way to the end where you guys basically run out of money and they're not able to ship the game but what what happens there what happened yeah so we run out of money i tell in recent h and i tell silicon valley bank and both of them are kinda like look we're not gonna put any more money into this company and i say okay fine totally understand it i'd get that i missed the deadline that i created for myself i had invested in this company called mop pubs sorry by this guy jim payne and i'd invested a hundred thousand dollars into it it got acquired by twitter in that hundred thousand dollars turned into a million dollars so i said okay i just made this million dollars i'm gonna go put that money into the company and that million dollars is gonna be behind the ten million dollars of debt that we've got from silicon valley bank and recent h also says okay for every dollar you're putting in we're gonna put in a dollars so they put a million dollars as well so now we've got two million dollars so you're putting your personal net worth basically into the company in a spot where it's behind all this other debt so you at this time do you think you'll ever see this money again or what was the thought process because yeah my my thought was this money is never coming back to me there's no way that we're gonna be able to pay off silicon valley bank and then be able to pay me off and financially i felt like it was the wrong decision to make but emotionally i just felt like i need to see this through i got come this far just need to see if this game is successful when we launch it and i can't give up and if what it takes is me putting this money in and losing it to find to turn that card over and find out whether there's an ace in the hole or not i gotta do it unbelievable and so you you do it you put the money in stomachs and knots i'm assuming and does the company even know that you're putting your own personal net worth into the company at this point or is this a sort of your your secret yeah so it's it's something i keep secret only me and susan seal know and our investors in silicon valley bank now the last thing you wanna do is tell your team that okay we've we've ran on money yesterday there's there's nobody backing us but except for me right that's not a good thing to tell anybody so i can keep that to myself gotcha okay so you you end up shipping the game off this sort of bridge that gives you how many months that gives us the time that we need maybe another sixty days or so or ninety days to finish and so we launch it and you know our goal was to get the the top spot in the app store featuring we spent sort of six months talking to apple and woo them and telling them about how great the game was and all of the marketing that we were doing to support it fox does ads on television andrew green and mike san come up with this great marketing strategy where we have an event in la that all these press show up to that get everyone who's a family guy fan to be amped up about it so i come into the office the day that we launched the game we see that the apps are featuring is bad and i think oh fuck this company just died what do you i mean it's bad what's bad it's not there or it's just it's not the is we expect that the featuring is gonna drive tens of millions of downloads over the next seven days and the featuring spot that apple gives us is bad so it's not gonna do that so i come in the office see that and say okay this company it's over this is not gonna work and i leave the office at noon when i see this featuring and we we just launched the game where did you go i just went home and watched netflix for two hours and fell asleep because i was so tired and i just like okay i gotta move on with the rest of my life this chapter is over and the bet that we made failed so i fall asleep i wake up the next day i immediately go look at our stats and i'm like oh we just generated four hundred thousand dollars in revenue yesterday so this is working holy fuck this is actually working we're winning i run to the office and like rally the team and say wow this is working we did it guys and it's just an amazing moment of joy and pride for the whole team so many people work so hard and i was really glad to see it work amazing and so that game takes off you guys have since gone on to build you know the family guy games the harry potter games i mean that's incredible you got the license to that that huge franchise and so where did the company go from there just kind of get to the kind of the the the sort of the end of the tiny chapter for you yeah so the day we launched the family guy game it's about seventy five people we grow the team about a hundred and fifty people we launch a marvel game we sign a harry potter deal and we're working on a harry potter game the family guy game goes on to do more than a hundred and fifty maybe two hundred million in revenue at this point we again offered to buy the business we hire an investment banker this guy named dick filipino needed who helps us get a couple more offers we sell the business the year that we sell we do we're doing about eighty five million dollars in revenue fifteen million dollars in eb about a hundred and fifty people at the time amazing and so you've since you sell you sell tiny and you've since gone on to do a couple other interesting things you you and your brother started company called native native deodorant it's a all natural deodorant that you know started in a bedroom and is now sold in target it was bought by pro and gamble and so i wanna just wanna get your take on i guess like how do you even think of your own story since tiny like what what do you what jumps out to you as the highlights of what you've been up to since then and we'll get into where you wanna go from here yeah i think one of the highlights is definitely working with my brother on native so we are living together at the time and what he does is he goes and buys deodorant from etsy and we test it at home so we put some of the deodorant that we bought from ats etsy under each of our arm pits we go run a mile and then we sniff each other's arm pit to see it is this deodorant actually good a highly scientific totally un scientific but also very effective effective and we eliminate all these terrible deodorant from etsy that are not effective and we find one that works and he takes that and brands it native and starts marketing it over time he changes the formula and makes the product better and better did you think it would be big at that time or are you just happy to run a mile and be a guinea pig with different deodorant under your own or did you see like yeah this is gonna be gonna end up being huge because i remember when you first told me about it it sounded like a cute business it sounded you know cool niche but you know it didn't really get a sense that it would get to the size that it did and eventually you know pro and gamble sees this as something that it has to buy in a sort of nine figure transaction i mean that's not that wasn't obvious at the beginning yeah definitely not obvious at the beginning that you can build a meaningful business selling twelve dollar deodorant rent over the internet like you know my i think my brother had the faith i didn't have the faith in the business but i had the faith in him and i'd say the the sort of greatest joy of my career has been you know working with him and seeing him succeed and helping native succeed one of the weird things i find about working is i remember when i was graduating i was like you know i wanna be rich i wanna be successful and over time it's been really surprising to me how much more joy and pride i take when other people are successful and when other people's careers sort of leap frog because they worked at tiny c or at native or anything that i've worked on so yeah i think that it was really great to work with him on native and really he started the business and ran it i provided some advice brother lee advice and helped him sell the business i love it and so and then you kinda went back to the old formula went back to your parents house just to visit got bored spun up a new business i know we can't talk too much about it because it's in a stealth mode right now normally stealth mode is like a pre like a lame thing i when when most people come to me with a stealth idea they're afraid to even talk about it because they don't even know what they're doing they're so insecure about it that they don't wanna talk about it and they really haven't done anything yet but this is different this is the companies up and running it's generating a ton of revenue you're keeping it quiet totally respect that so we won't go into what it is and how it works maybe for you know the future podcast when you and you when you come back you can tell the story of of what's going on here but you did go back to that formula so i wanna take the last ten minutes here and do rapid fire questions so first thing that comes to mind first answer is a best answer of a couple of random off the wall questions so let's take a little sip of water get get to get to the to the rabbit fire okay so if you were twenty one years old today you know same same view but you you just graduated today from college what do you think you'd work on so i think that i would work on something in the biology space on genetics or bio engineering i think in the last twenty years what we've seen is the internet revolution the computer revolution the mobile phone revolution i think the next twenty years is gonna be out hacking our bodies hacking genetics being able to sort of design babies before they're born eliminate disease at the genetic level that kind of thing you've heard the peter till question of you know what's something that you believe to be true that few others would agree with you on one of the things i believe is that engineering is becoming a commodity in silicon valley and that the next generation entrepreneurs are gonna be not necessarily technical but people who are more well rounded in their skill set if you could buy a a billboard you know on the one zero one here in san francisco and you got tens of thousands of people who are driving by it every day it's just a blank billboard and you could write any one message that whole bunch of people would see every day would you write on that billboard i think it's two things one for people who don't live in silicon valley and have never lived in silicon valley i would say move to silicon valley it will improve your life and you'll be better off ten years from now because i think the culture of silicon valley is really positive in making you realize that you can sort of will your hands in mind into making things that matter in the world and that anybody can do it with any skill set any experience everybody in silicon valley is treats everyone else like they could be the next mark zuckerberg and i really like living in a place where you're almost afraid to be mean to somebody because they could end up being successful and powerful here it doesn't matter what your last name is it doesn't matter your age it doesn't matter your resume doesn't matter you're the school you went to everybody even you know you see somebody with a hoodie on in a in a bar hoodie and flip flops and sort of hear the default assumption is that that might be that might be the next set right and so you don't sort of judge the book by their cover here you wait to see what are they working on what are their ideas and what are they capable of so my last one is something that you know i believe an important question everybody should ask themselves the question is what's something that comes easily to you that you see is quite difficult for others i i say this is an important question you know while you think of your answer because for most people we spend a lot of time doing things that we're really bad at trying to get better at them because we think that that's what we'll improve things but often it's better to figure out what's something that comes really easy to you something you're really good at or you don't mind doing the other people seem to mind doing or other people really struggle with because that can be sort of the foundation that you use so i'm curious for you what's something that comes easily to you that you notice does not come so easily to t others i think it's faith i think that lot of people i i sort of just believe that whatever i'm working on is gonna succeed over time and i think i see a lot of people that kinda lose faith in what they're working on too quickly or they'll have faith or lose faith on a regular basis so i think for me it's having faith and having a sense of urgency like i wake up every day and run to the office and say you know how can we win today what do we need to do to win today those two things just come really easily reason and do you have the opposite something that you noticed comes easily to others but you find really difficult for yourself to be able to do discipline for other people it seems to me like they can be really disciplined about their schedule and time in like it's my goal to work out every day and i probably work out about fifty percent of days at best and other people will say i need to work out every day and they'll just be able to do it nice and last question when's our next workout let's go right after this okay fantastic alright sully it's been amazing having you here i knew you'd be an awesome guest for the podcast even though you don't like to do you don't like to talk too much about yourself but think this is this is an episode i would wanted to listen to so i thank you for coming my pleasure i think you're gonna do a great job i'm so excited to see who else you have on on the podcast