$100B Founder Breaks Down The Biggest AI Business Opportunities For 2025

that's the trend that i can't i can't like un see it sometimes and right that's the bet you're making that's the bet we make and so i was yoga with the guys here like we wanna bet on negative one a zero like peter the deal talked about the zero to one companies like we still one step even before that i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off a road less travel never lived back con 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 c founded a company and yeah launched a bunch of products and ate a bunch of shit together and here we are on times by the way yeah i'm thinking the title of this is gonna be because eleven is now fifty sixty billion dollar company no fifty billion dollar founder tells me the next big thing in ai i'm gonna go full youtube quick yeah yeah they're great we so we used to do this thing where after we did be together got acquired we were there for a year or so and then we all 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 we started doing this on wednesdays which is like the cool shit hour and this is amazing it's basically a show and tell where you my smartest friend would come on whiz and you'd be like hey have you seen this have you seen this have you seen 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 probably like a year or something like that so i kinda 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 ten person company feels like it can do the work of a hundred person company and we're using it in our company so i wanted to hear what are you doing with ai and and mh that's not called chat gp i think this word ai agent or this kind of phrase is the thing that i really can't myself away from like literally every night like right you know what me like midnight strikes i wanna write code like the whole day is like talking to people when the night is like coding yeah for comes schedule is nocturnal so i remember we you know we hired you and i feel like the first day you came in at nine am to kind of like i think i should it's probably ten but yeah after that from day two onwards where it was like roll in at eleven oh it's lunch lunchtime have lunch you would talk you do meetings and i was like this is this guy code and then that night at like four am you would have built the prototype and you're basically nocturnal you you get all your shit done you're like you used to tell me you used to get during the day you just burned up your energy so you could focus that night and actually write code yeah so what are you doing with ai and how that what is that actually in your company right now yeah and so i'll kinda tell you how i'm thinking about ai agent right and what it means to so ai agents are using l m's 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 our company or 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 is 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 a third way which is every single sign up in our company and you know we have a lot of signup ups every week and you know a human can't scan through them but truly interesting people signing up they have interesting companies we may know them they might be a large company or a small one it could be a competitor or something else and so we would used to have a human go and look at everything it's like obviously the gmail like ignore it it's but if it's like oh like this other company over here let's go research it right school figure out what they're web products they might like what they might need to do and then you would send him an email try to customize it typically this is a good sales practice you're taking your customers and delivering him to your business team and so we built an agent to do this and every sign that comes in it looks at 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 if 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 ten of these throughout their 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 thirty seven people right now i i i really believe we're more like eighty people that's what it feels like with a lot of these tools and you're taking the brain power or somebody who gets it and you're giving them that power to go and say here's the thing so so in this case person up 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 how do what what is it called yeah so in this case we call it the sign up agent okay so which one agent it creates a plan like what do i do and you know 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 what i think about clear directive is it's like let's go do x like sign up 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 kinda 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 there the technology is here it's ready and it's working and so for the third web sign up agent it'll kinda come in it'll make a little plan like hey i gotta inspect the domain gotta go look up the person and you didn't have to tell at each one of those little tasks too we gave it like kinda like a one one paragraph directive and another paragraph of like how i should operate right 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 purse it basically kinda of looks at the sign ups picks the interesting ones research 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 cracks an email and then it gives it to a human or just sends it send it okay so you have enough trust that you can send because started it with human in the loop right we're still like safeguards cards you put in like any directive wood like don't wanna just send random emails even as a human doing the right but i mean it's very clear what what to tell it and i think this is where the power is kinda multiplying it's like we've heard ai at we've heard chat eb if you can tune it to your problem so for example giving it the knowledge of third web products is the key difference here right a generic chat gb message when i say that don't just invent something that's like general generic or whatever it knows and when you built this so you built this or somebody else built this on team i hacked it as a prototype like some things and i 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 and what like a day or two or yeah so let's say there's like a bunch of like my nights of just learning tools and getting used to it i take that time out of it that's just time i've spend anyways right now like two nights ago i was like really stressed like my calendars are kinda 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 could you do you could have an ea she can go look through it do all of stuff and have an ea she's like helps with these things but then she sleeps with her like a while like like you know i wanna go answer some of these questions so i probably in about fifteen minutes i connected my calendar and i connected a little interface record type to it i started asking questions like how many hours of meetings that i have because like twenty eight hours like we two where did the meeting go what what were they for what were the purpose of it right and then the next night i hooked it probably about another forty five minutes an hour where i could tell it commands for my calendar like go block out monday for me we'll go find me like nine hours of block time in this market block oh wow and this was like a few hours of work now that i know the tools but it's like it just works twenty four seven now right and so my calendar my email a few other things i've started building these like personal agent or like workflow type things because i know what i wanna 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 twenty four seven three sixty five and you know it's just there always right the cost of it is like so if i wanted to build a workflow like this okay do i you'd need to know how to code to be able to do this light coding like give me like the bullet point version of how how you built these like where 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 laying chain and auto gen and crew these are like very popular very cool to open ai and claude s sdk themselves are very very powerful but you're coding you're writing a little system it's probably like one tenth of the code you would have had a right to do something right 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 during the studio it lets you stitch together workflows so an example is like you can trigger based on a lock message so let's get this lock message or all your signup go to so now picks up that trigger you could just put a little ai block and say okay take this email and do these tasks oh you want a scrape go do that right oh you a little conditional loop or like repeat itself ten times go do that and then you make a little another decision steps like four boxes but i'll put it back to another slack channel yep so you come in with your sign up channel it does this research it does all these things it does kinda whatever you want and then it could go to email if could go to another slack channel to thank somebody on your team so you could kinda like you know these are workflows is what they start with and an agent or can kinda 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 you know it's like a feeling of almost a cloud like i don't need a whole data center team now and i can right you know when we build blah and like how many servers do we have running video streaming like thought would've a bit of nightmare it's kinda like the same you know ten x improvement but just for me and everything that i do digitally right and so tools like leap grade i think you know there there's others out there that provide this and so there's a combination if you don't know how to code you just have to think about the steps of the that you would do and you can program that without writing any code it's just writing directive it's like writing intent basically of like what you wanna accomplish right it's take a magic genie tell them tell tell what you want and they can figure it out so you got sales agent you have your email calendar kinda like ea agent there any other i got some fun frivolous ones that are stupid to like i set up a dynamic wallpaper paper so literally like every five or ten minutes it'll look at what i'm doing and like auto generated me like computer lap my computer laptop paper will modify itself to whatever if it's night it kinda i told that i code at night right so it will go towards that direction it knows i'm doing meetings another thing during the day i'm talking to people right and it comment comes up with cool stuff totally frivolous like not like a useful thing except my own like this that's cool but i find it awesome and you know like there's cool scenes that come up it invent 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 and what by the way so there's claude there's chat there's perplexing there's all these different mentally how do you bucket like the main ai tools what what's like the superpower of each each one maybe just do do those three or if there's a fourth yes look like i think open ai and claude i think of them as like foundational tools so their general purpose ask hit anything input output you stitch it together with things and then they have tools like chat gp on top or maybe computer use that they're figuring out more general tools i think per complexity is really interesting it's taking this general purpose l and the reasoning it could do and search and like i tried not to do google search anymore mostly because it's slow and ineffective and per complexity really made it where it does a search it reads a result as i would it clicks into the links as i would and i tries to answer my question more purposefully and it saves me four or five steps so i think what per complexity is taking something like search and then the ll reasoning and combining them together in a flow that that's more interesting right so chad g tb or open ai tools don't have like real time knowledge but complexity because a search does right what's your like tangent fe hot take google what happens to google search with all that you see now and you're saying i don't you're saying i try not to google searching where that's pretty wild right it it just feels slow and i know they got the gemini thing there i think the biggest fun will you know in our in our lifetime decade fumble yeah built the technology for transformers the thing that open ai and others have used to develop this large language model they are the ones that were the first entry like talking about it and throwing it out there and the research that's happening and and so what's the history so they're they have the ai minds there they write this research paper attention is all you need yeah 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 accuracy shot what's the what's the actual story of why they didn't i i don't know the internal story i i think early on google was like the place you went to where you wanted to have the rockets 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 messing there who knows like 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 minds share and the tension has gone somewhere else yeah and that is really hard to pull back when somebody else becomes a leader in it and actually it feels like open ai number one that's something been clear i think optic 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 they and t one so basically they have claude which is kinda like chat but the they have a couple of cool things one of them is this way they 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 like the i think the key thing is and and i think it just released this in beta so like like most of these things like it kinda isn't gonna be great now just trust me it's gonna be great right and that's what we've been seeing in general is like things just ramp and so it's now gonna enter your computer it's khan felt like it's been on the cloud only is where ai been and now it's gonna show up like in the box 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 like the things that we're used to doing like switching tabs and having all these things like they almost feel like out of all why like i should have infinity tabs open and some systems should know button and if i ask it and bring it back up right it's like a total need and we we know we need that and so it's kinda 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 in inter topic number two is their models are crazy like impressive like the new claude son it model is like i feel like it was a step factor improvement over the previous ones and it feels like the task that it kinda struggled with now it's was getting better and both open ai and like another optic have been just like boom boom boom and i don't know if everybody's heard of ai they tried it they might have tried it a year ago they might use it a little bit but every three to six months there's just another step another step and that's i think the most interesting thing and why why i can't pull myself away at like why every night this is a thing that gets me very very excited is because the progress is still wild people are gonna say it's gonna a pop out it will i think it's gonna be absolutely impressive wherever it like starts slowing down at right and we'll completely change the way how we do any digital work like so you're you're messing with it now but you have a company you've got an investment lab you got this whole place this beautiful place that we're in right now you got a wife if you got like all the stuff you're like if you were just twenty one again or twenty two again when you're like dude i i got nothing but time bank account empty but so is the calendar this and this technology is out what would you be building what would you be like messing with what's the like kinda 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 its own distribution and conversational ability so humans can just interact with it humans are and you give it you give it like a digital bank account and you know a third way we're doing a lot of stuff around ai we have a whole like ai toolkit that we're about to launch and is around this which is these like digital things like these agents they're not gonna have credit cards it's a weird and the reason i say this is fun and interesting is because you know humans have done this very well they've created mega phones for themselves and they created businesses and they created payment rails around that so they sell things they do things the sell services and all of these details i think it would be something around that so you'd make like a a social like a twitter account you make like an ai influencer type of thing you know ai influencers 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 okay and i don't think not an influencer and you're got an influencer don't know what it would produce like had drop shipper a drop shipper or like yeah it's the best fba amazon whatever what's that example you're telling me about where the somebody did a thing like this they made a they made a twitter account they gave it a wallet mark andre gave it like fifty thousand of crypto can you tell this story so what what is this yeah so there's this thing called luna or virtual and they the little platform to you know 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 use this a marketing stunt by a company that does this or i thing this is exactly what the what i'm describing is he was frivolous fun just play not like working getting backwards from giant thing i think this is 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 dot virtual dot 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 is charged with like a thing like high level planning current state of executions 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 going 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 this was you know thirty minutes ago it says current state of execution i have attempted ten tests so far seven successes and three failures my twitter metrics show an average engagement of my last on my recent tweets and i've lost three followers observation underscore reflection that's like the function yeah reflect and it says i've been and engaging with my followers to build a personal connection which is hilarious because it's the ai bought with applies and quote however i've also experienced some failures in replying to tweets due to invalid parameters my research on whatever law state of mind i'm feeling a bit concerned i'm feeling a bit concerned that's crazy i'm feeling a big concerned about the loss of followers but i'm also encouraged by this successes and then it says but plan reasoning given my current situation i need to focus on building relationship with my followers and increasing my visibility plan and then it starts to say what it's gonna do this is wild doesn't this sound like a human they'll would be sitting in some growth team somewhere thinking about how to grow your twitter account and you know 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 like human tendencies is like human behaviors that we do right especially when we work and i think this is one of those like perfect like kind of views where like 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 like it's done not just continue right like it didn't keep going and you could improve its directive you could change his 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 h said this which is like the one person doing auto company mh like this is happening like we're already experiencing another ten x decrease and how many people you need and the abilities that they have and i think it goes down to probably one or two or three in you know like that that is a you know total shift to everything right in terms of how we work how companies are built kind of in my mind 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 d card the you know there's like basically you know 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 my craft and you could just describe a world and it makes you a minecraft world like that and like every step you take is like not a pre programmed pixel right 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 generative you want yeah you you give it the idea but then when the character runs in on the fly it's creating the map and you can kinda play this minecraft game and you can see it's like crappy pixels still like not rate 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 exactly what i want so this wallpaper thing is frivolous right that i was telling you about right 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 yeah we're like let's brainstorm so like it'd be a highlights so you you know used to be sports center yeah where if if i didn't watch the games i gotta go to my tv turn on espn sports center would start even if i like basketball gotta wait till whenever basketball comes up and then they'll have the top ten highlights and i watch whatever they picked then youtube comes around 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 it on my headset or put on my glasses or whatever and i'm just gonna say show me what happened in the basketball it'll it'll just start generating a new highlight reel that didn't 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 lakers clips only show me warriors and it'll just auto adjust on the fly like it's gonna be made for me ninety percent yeah that's interesting and and you know like i think it's gonna be an interesting world we're gonna go from human content and consumption people you know humans make content we're gonna like then have machines make it towards our tastes and liking and then i think there's always this where like what happens all the humans end yeah and then i think we get back to that core thing which is machine 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 right kind of oh you know content mediums there's new everything machines will learn it and lagged 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 you mentioned we well i wanna 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 does taste taste is selection it's knowing what's good and what's bad it's right that's kind of taste like tiktok which is the most popular like app most addictive app most used app yep their algorithm is basically saying i'll choose what's interesting for you and it does it so well that isn't that kind of taste also right like it is and it works really well they don't make the videos but they don't make the amazing the selection is incredible it probably is more like what we want than we will even admit yeah exactly you think like i want this right like the other day was why is this showing me this it's like because you love it that's 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 right but it's like you know really yeah like wow why do they pick this well that's like a status thing to do to be like i don't use the algorithm correct i hand i it's like i drive stick yeah right i i i hand make things i cook from scratch it's like cool but brownie is out of the box kinda work sure for everybody you know i'd love to trade algorithms like i'd like i'd love to swap with you friday and it's gonna go sean what do what do you what do you watch it over here right so i don't know it knows you really well but i think that's where human like we 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 we love or actions prove it we don't we don't want to and it could be like bad thinking it could be like emotional thinking could be like oh this is i don't really wanna love it but i i do right and 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 almost make some dumb choices right and that actually is part of society and and just humans in general and machines try to be too perfect like my netflix thing is probably accurate for me is also just like man like can i just mix it up can you just like right rng g the algorithm a little bit because i just want some different stuff and you're kinda like driving me down one direction and once in a while like i want this ten twenty thirty percent thing and i don't think algorithm do that exceptionally well they tested to throw things up but you know 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 a ai ai created song how many months or years yeah until we see we we're doing over under twenty twenty five yeah i might pick under you know right twenty twenty five like right a good bed maybe this is a poly market none election done yeah we just see the market you know like reason it could be something like this public like think poly market so election just happened poly markets having like a a victory lap right now you showed me market i think like years ago and i started making a bunch of d gen bets before they blocked it in the us it was like it was it was like open for a while right but they were doing prediction markets or is it's a prediction market but prediction markets a bunch of people i try that do you know like i'm just curious opinion what did they do right that like au and these other guys who were had the same sort of general idea that hey they'll be prediction marcus yeah like from a either entrepreneur entrepreneurial level or product choice like any reason you think they won that you you could put your like timing is 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 twenty four seven on the internet and it really exploded the internet like i think i've seen some graphs where like internet and e commerce and all these things were like growing and then there's like a massive jump like right know like we at twitch when that happened yeah and it was like all the met growth looks amazing we're crushing all the metrics like what did you do it's like well we were here yeah right we are not we don't create the wave we surf wave and a huge wave happened at after for twitch it was like fortnite came out and then covid happened yep two of human humongous back to back that's just combined yeah so i i think it's a combination we're way more digital i think you talked about this a lot like as a kind of med first his concept a long time ago that weird 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 go to tvs i look at kids they look at desktops and tvs as like ancient right like i said why is this thing on the like my mom's sewing machines yeah that's cool yeah what do you do what it feels like and so we're we're kind there and then there's a bunch of these people online that want or like wanna stake in this thing right like you wanna root for a team this politics has also become very polarized right it's really like a team sport it's like right team first blue team that's really what it is yeah and so i think it's like what do i do with now how do i support it bar get more money to do it but i can give you more attention right and so i think a lot of these things are happening in poll market good flow good area right and then i think for the best thing probably for them is they got it right right place right time the the the answer was right like if they were wrong let's say poly market was off right like it was hey the the the result of the election was something else there will be a story today would be much different right and maybe might has been muted it a bit a cool thing that kinda didn't work so excuse to me right i mean i think people would have used that to crush to to to really rip on them because like in the way that people are doing with polls but polls kinda have this like layer of protection around them whereas like people want to hate on crypto things people want to hate on bedding i think it's a degenerate behavior in general i think if they were i think if poly market was wrong the reaction would have been much worse than the fact that the polls are wrong what the reaction is to the poles you know it would've have been worse for a little while then we wouldn't moved on for us and by the way you saw this thing about the french whale on poly market that was so the the big will 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 fifty fifty election this guy came in and bet i think something like thirty to forty million dollars on trump yeah and people were like is this guy just trying to manipulate the market is he real is he just a 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 i was on my phone but it said he bet because he believed he would win the reason he believed he was when he did independent pulling wow he funded his own independent polling and thought and felt that he was getting better data that was saying that trump was mis priced so he's like i just did a logical rational thing yeah i just bet where i thought an asset was mis price i wasn't trying to wasn't political on french i don't what do i can i just thought there was money to be made and so he kinda went counter to narrative and he made i think like something like twenty thirty million dollars yesterday yeah on that bet us the funny thing about pulling broke by the way to if we can't use in the us yeah so there's a whole entertainment place like better nor like right so three billion dollars out there i was like we're the ring right like two boxer going out here was it america cock fight and then you got everyone else betting from all around the roland and who's gonna win this thing which is been kind of a hilarious day yeah that's true you have a good contra opinion about vr and in general there's probably some other technologies like this three d 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 talked to a hundred people about what are you most excited about ai whatever coin whatever it's gonna be but if i said what do you think about vr it's like sort of loop lukewarm yeah at best in the tech industry i think most vc it 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 what you've been telling me for a while like hey look oc sold more units hey look you can do this now and you've been staying with it when i think interest has has sort of weighing 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 yeah that's where there's an opportunity give me your vr take so why is vr sleeping giant yeah mean you remember twenty twenty i like ask you for your address and mailed you a headset yeah i was hit this quest is a different that's a real friend right there it sends me vr headset he's like you know i know you're not gonna get come to the future let me drag you it's probably collecting dust which is okay but you know i that that's kinda how i think about things and technology takes a long time it typically takes longer to get there than we expect like especially if people were early in the industry we're really wanting to push i mean ai crypto vr all have the same problem which is early on people before like really pushing it to you stop ready so it's a big hype it crashes everyone moves on so that's up in vr few times and it's kinda i would say for most people who've 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 like i get a chance to you know one we invest in vr companies we're one of the few that do right we have a whole corner maybe like twelve devs that are all building different vr products we put them on one spot and that might be some of the most density of interesting vr projects in one place until what have we seen one quest one came out it was wireless it was kinda crappy but man i sit on my couch and use it it was cheap became a you know 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 coming out and i think they got like five to ten million monthly active headsets out there right i think that rivals consoles and my first doll was i mean units has it sold i think quest is sold let's see thirty million is my guess but you know maybe it's more yeah so this is quest quest has sold over twenty million units what the majority of being quest two yep quest three is currently sell has sold a million units at the five hundred dollar price point so i think i mean if you just i i don't know what the math here is but you know they've done what is that over a billion dollars of correct revenue on and i believe it's out pretty good for a failure out taste ps five sales for example and so the first thought for me was like hey what's the first thing that's gonna happen in the spatial environment like what is it good for immersion gaming like these are natural entertainment right these were the first few things that was natural and you had beat saber you had a few things and that was kinda like you know here's is the first use case just was try to get it out there i was trying to make the thing happen and then it kinda goes up down people get used to those first experiences i think you played beat saber yeah you the first retirement right and then you're like okay and then you know because it's kinda like a cheaper than ps s five unit the quest two was it was available in christmas a few times it went to like you know kids like twelve thirteen fourteen year old kids kinda getting this thing like they would be getting a ps five and they use it and dave they don't have the bias that we have of like many years of like the structures were used to and so a lot of games formed and specifically social games it's like gorilla tag i don't know if you've heard about gorilla what is gorilla gorilla tag is a social multiplayer game really fun it on app lab did like tens of like juice people text yeah it's like a you know like kinda like a fun social game that you can play with a bunch of people you go in by the way you go in games they do there's a bunch of like 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 we're starting i think grow load tag is a two hundred million dollars revenue 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 kinda like best browser in vr so you get multiple displays you get as many kinda tabs as you want you could customize your environment you get ai environment you're like i wanna be in a cave it like makes you in a cave right and then you get like social multiplayer so people can show up in your environment and we're on apple app does like about five thousand weekly active users till 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 five thousand people like go in use a productivity thing there's another product called y it's like the second game behind gorilla tag small team absolutely crushing it jeep yeah y e e p s really fun game you you know we should play together this time they're here they're are team how many people i think they're like less than ten people but more like six to eight and most of it was built with a few people this thing is profitable or what's the deal yeah i mean i'll i'll let them talk about their numbers just so you know i don't wanna say anything but on a scale of that's pretty good to like wow where is it at wow it's wow 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 twenty 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 pretty tough post on linkedin you'll get tons of distribution if you if you're half decent at a content because there's just no supply of quality content yeah so even if vr is not you know like twenty million into units is very good but even if it's not just like becoming this like global phenomenon to put a great business and and if you just keep riding the wave you're very well positioned yeah to be the leader and then everyone at that point will look back and be like oh it's because they started five years ago under you know when this was smaller right yeah so there's twenty million dollars this instead a two hundred million in these emerging tactics so everything i found if we do is emerging tech adding 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 the industry grows by like a hundred x you grew by a hundred x or more you've have already been there and adding i've seen a few small person teams at like ten million plus a year like five people totally profitable totally able to do it is this a vc invest business honestly i don't care yeah like what i care about is like this is interesting and can you make these bets without massive capital like expenditure right like if it takes like fifty million dollars to the la game it's like the big giant walk blockbuster from movie i don't that those best don't wanna excite me think one is like three to five people can be somewhere the limited amount of money and just them 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 perfect themselves over time and then now the environment for me right meta has led it bryce like the quest and is the vr world and then we're seeing glasses vision pro ray bands like the trend is like we're gonna have compute in our spatial view right and i think that's the big like yeah this is happening in vr the plus platform is interesting you could build a profitable business or a fairly big game right now also this isn't slowing down and historically apple when the enter industry they come with the unit it's okay has a lot of things that gotta get better another unit comes out and then you have snap yeah bet with ray band like i mean like duck is not stopping he's z is not giving up he's he's going to the endgame here apple probably also won't stop correct so now you have the two biggest players they're 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 i didn't really fully realize until like 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 start saying words like hadoop i didn't know what the hell you were talking about it wasn't as popular back this is like a twenty fifteen or something like that when you were telling me like hey i think this is real i think this big data machine learning is really interesting you were again pretty early onto that crypto same thing you're early onto that there weren't a lot of smart contract developers there wasn't a lot of you know big data people ai so then if 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 a hundred million dollar asset exactly if you built today for like cosmetic meadow ray bands like that product's actually hit for for facebook and they're gonna keep going with that and everybody wants to be in the glasses thing people think glasses 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 now horn was it where the hit product you get a billion dollars already was fund ios developer when we were starting to do mobile dude phil special we're gonna come that like a ridiculous level of price to google get pretty good talent in that's space i remember twenty twelve which was not even early we had one ios dev on our entire team and it was so hard to recruit talent it was faster to just retrain so we used 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 i wasn't even that specialized compared to like the either the fancy ai stuff or you know vr mixed reality all that that time so i just think that when i think about kids grown up and all the let's say thirteen to fifteen year old kid 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 because 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 be than tvs desktops and even laptops and you know that that was like one of the software where we started fluid like we talked about this in twenty twenty i don't know if you remember there's one project that used to tell me you you're i work in vr correct i did that experiment where i worked in vr or hour a day and then ended up doing it for a few months by the way like and i was like this is great and it had been like literally sitting with me and i i think this is one of the reasons why i actually built a studio i was 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 right that's how i found john flew is like he was a phd student he was gonna go do something in like finance at high frequency trading and like whatever and he also came to this idea like hey and i was doing my like you know masters whatever i was writing this i just wanted to go into a focus mode like could i just go into a cave and like lock clock out all the stuff he's they got all these vr friends that i had done some stuff in vr so like i tried to do it and it wasn't good enough right and he got left it at that and then we were talking about it and he talked to uber bear and i was like dude you talked to for cup i think he's got like five pages of like random notes and ideas around this and then that's what was 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 right like uber bear went to this like vr conference 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 invested in vr right and so he did and i was like wow like yeah i found one you know be like a call crypto conference amazing does this is how we wanna think about it is like try to me there early don't get too caught up with where the technology is now don't get too scared of how far it is twenty fifteen twenty sixteen remember we heard self driving cars are never gonna happen i don't know if you remember that yeah yeah it's massive like push against it man there's way running around every day now i see more way at night driving round than like regular people driving you've told me once before you go i think my superpower is that i'm usually in the in the first thousand or ten thousand people to try any new technology and like understand it be able to play with it no see all that stuff i remember we were at work and you were buying the ethereum pre sale the ico or whatever the person you said about it i don't know if you remember i just remember being like dude can we do some real work what do you the ethereum name that name never gonna work i was like that sounds good so nerdy that'll never be a thing i think that was a phrase i remember i was i was tell you about ethereum i was like dude it i'm not reading this is like white paper i'm like you were like on it that was on i came in like we're song talk to him tell you this it's probably i don't even know what i said we know what probably threw a bunch of words in you're just like dude i don't know what this is we have something leadership and you're like ethereum that stupid yeah i wrote it off outside chalk that up for another another l for me the you could've have been dueling right as well the new new guy wasn't and i think that's all the batteries there and very very off on that one but you've i think that's true that that is just your power and then you said another thing today which i heard 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 flex yep she said the same 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 the 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 about myself i will just keep trying things until i figure out the thing to work the only way i can lose is if i have to get out of the game yeah which is like i can't you know usually it's like i run out of funding i can't control my desk destiny and i spend too much money and 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 run the multi billion dollar company called flex port and the whole time is like my whole thing is i can't control the timeline so i'm gonna control staying in the game because if i say in the game i win stay in the game with great talent and people that want that 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 was these short term rumors like this is great for us right now yeah 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 still 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 me 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 thought it was black cars yeah it's god it's like expensive taxi that right nobody's gonna use and then now it's like dude displace doesn't have uber like how gonna move what it feels like that you know and so i i think i enjoy it as one reason why it's like 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 do everything and raise the most money and get a ba brazilian 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 but 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 because you you've basically built like your dream like man cave in a way and i think you it's kinda like a founder dream right like and i wanna talk about that because you had a big success with app love where and actually kinda like felt like there was multiple moments where you know it was successful at one point it sold for like two billion dollars yeah it was like oh exit two billion amazing and then like trump blocked it or i was 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 it holy shit and then like nine months goes by the deal doesn't like fully get a proved because it was such a big purchase out of a chinese yeah company group or something like that and in the meantime the business just kept crushing so adam who's the ceo of that like you said like basically went back was like cool we'll still do the two billion but now it's for thirty percent yeah i don't know what exactly version of that i like there was like i don't know like because you couldn't do majority deals that was a big block it's like something from majority deals was gonna happen and so now then the company eventually ipo 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 was 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 wanna learn how it works it's not that it's more of the puzzle hey how does somebody else put this like you and i to do this with cars and computers growing up i got over overload my computer and i would make my car faster and like that was like con just like the mentality that i had and then i was like okay well i've gotta be 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 kinda do more of what i wanna do and then i was like let me just keep doing this and then maybe at someone point i got get a real job and kinda 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 so low than like with a bunch of people and then met the guys adam before loving like kinda like these other other things and it was like y we're like eight people and like palo alto like building cool random apps like the energy from 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 just tell you like i an airport i just wanna put cool stuff in it and i just think it was like that before i started founders inc as it is because i was a twitch and i'm like i gotta get out of here right it goes like in the instant instant thing and why by the way i don't know i don't think i'm good employee i think i'm suited for a few and it's typically like good mountain stuff without much was there anything that just drove you crazy about it was there any like you know we gonna do a whole another part on this basically i feel like the first week month of like you'll let's do a bunch of stuff in the next slowdown like why i wanna do more like i wanna do more things and this resistance feeling of like we already thought about this or we tried this like no just go do stuff and i never enjoyed that and i think startups and small teams just because you have so much to do that's the kind of mentality and so i talked to probably like seventy five to a hundred founders before starting founders inc and i really wanted to learn like i knew a bunch of people i used to interact with them even at like be and mu fur i'd have them come by and like just turn talk whatever i'm and i really enjoyed that that was like fun i started enjoy 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 then you're like a monthly update away like if you on the check and then that's it right damn this is been fun first meeting is great it's a great first date i walk away i'm like then there's no relationship and you're like you have like great first date exactly 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 have 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 do you need like what what to help do you need i thought they're all gonna save money and i start to fun like that that's why i thought wasn't happen and they all said something different they said something like i need people who understand my problems and we used to do those mastermind mines and it was really about like who do you go to for founder problems yeah it's like what are your founder problems they're your c founders your employees or your investors so you can't go to any of these people there might be the problem right and so do you go to or even if they're the problem you need to present you don't wanna worry your employees you don't wanna worry your investors you kinda have to maintain a certain great or of momentum in morale so you can't just go be dumping problems on them i'd be like i don't know that you're to know you're the guy and we used yeah we would go in that room that little circle room with the circle table but we've been there and i don't know what the employees were thinking there like matthew he's guys talking again they're gonna come out with something different but we could talk about anything and then leave their room be like now we're to where we are yeah and i think you know c cofounder founder can be that for you a lot entrepreneurs starting out they don't have that and even if they have there's like other things that they're experiencing and so when we used to put these folks together in these kind of mastermind minds 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 talked 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 gonna be more digital i think covid times and you know started on discord whatever i started on discord i mean like far up ben was in these groups like just re few others like and it was just people i knew around me and cut covid hit it was digital we were talking every week we would give ourselves these like accountability kinda ship sessions sessions we would have an area to talk about stuff and you could see the dots connecting and then i got an opportunity to like get this space and i've been looking for like something and you know if it wasn't like oh san francisco gonna needs some place i'm from the bay area normally so this is the best place for me but i said look if it's gonna be a effort we're gonna be on the water no so glad nowhere kind places like that so we got this like weird opportunity to find this space and like really make a bet when like nobody else was i think it was like late twenty twenty is when i approached them here yeah and it took maybe like nine months to figure it all out and know we months to like renovated it and stuff like that so it's still very much i we gotta call another call about breaking at least wait he wants to sign a lease right now oh and come on in yeah what it felt like here i mean this place for mason has three hundred events a year they went to zero with covid all the places you know art galleries art schools like what do you what do you do like you know and this supposed to be like this innovation place and a little bit older and yes least what that's one of your tricks is that you don't run away when the dips happen i remember when early on twenty thirteen fourteen something like that we meet i buy bitcoin because i don't know you're into crypto some some people in the office you know maybe i was dumb about the ethereum of by idea right yeah pg pete pb was was was all you he's mining bitcoin on our servers so i buy some bitcoin and literally like the next week i i forget like super convinced i'm like 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 three hundred bucks or something like that and i came in i'm like oh la vehicle i was really at whatever and it a fun week or two you know well you were like oh this is great because now everything's half off like you you literally told me that you go you believe if you if you buy now you can cut your buy price basically you can go down by fifty percent you'll you'll cost average in at half the amount yeah like and i was like oh he's right because i was just riding a roller coaster of like you know but i was doing what a cliche person would do yeah 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 the external sentiment and so i bought more so i think you were that was a very good you know decision at the time to go buy more when things are done i think you've done that with with other you know bets whether it's san francisco real estate during the you know covid time or it's you know whether it's crypto or or vr when when things go out of fashion i feel like you don't run away which is feel 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 like engage with them if i see that somewhere where it's like all the people talking are like against it these people like nobody told him me yet that like is dumb like oh this is dead right like they're all seeing it and then you guys are just shipping more code or like hey it anybody tell you it's over like what you talking about don't care like and i i just think that's a 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 if it works out and then by the way for me is just fun so like this is fun like i love building stuff like building technology i did a lot of software obviously because it's been magical to develop things and like distributed to the world we had some hardware projects i don't know if you remember jamie by the way yeah yeah we at one point in time when we're were when we were working together we had an idea for a this it was cool it was like a voice controls is kinda like alexa yeah we called it a jamie and know why but like yeah we like james i still like today that was good and what what you were saying was like you're like weekend instead of creating everyone was trying to create a device portal was trying to create a screen amazon just trying to create a screen you're like that makes it expensive if you're like already has tv screens in their house right just plug into tv if you just plug in like a chrome cast and now you turn your tv from just a a a blank screen into like and amazon like alexa thing yeah that was cool we didn't we didn't do it because it was gonna like we sort saw like huge was just we're were like yeah that's gonna be like a brutal battlefield took get michael and he just gave us a look like this is he he was just like y when all of the like trillion dollar companies are gonna go after the same price like yeah you can but do you really want to like you know it's it's a better to do things they're overlooking i don't think it's probably good advice to be fair we also were gonna do a crypto exchange with crypto hot and it was like for a different reason he's like pam already rich i don't wanna lose everything and i don't really know what crypto is twenty fourteen like crypto might just be like super illegal and i i don't wanna risk it all on that yeah if we had done that i might have been good so you have to be careful like even really smart successful people you can't like just take their word you know you gotta have the independent minded ness hundred percent know and i think it's fun to take shots don't get stubborn over it like can people fall in love with their ideas is i think that's it took me probably like i don't know ten years to figure that out like you have to get it like almost like you have to like really take the hits yeah to like really like live in that of like yeah there's a lot of ideas i'd i may try a lot of them my mission is in all of them i gotta find the right ones where i can really spend the energy on but i was gonna talk about one more so we built chat heads which by the way now in the ai world we were fucking ahead it we were early we could generate images for like i don't know five thousand i like golly yeah and that's what it 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 medium might be wrong the team might be wrong some of those you should pursue again and again and some of those great learning exercises to build on top of and i you know i got chance to meet a lot of people who are were professional athletes and then one thing a lot of them talk about is like you know basketball my end like my career will end at like thirty five it's like that's that's my game is done now what do i do i think what we get a chance to do whether it's like business or for you know content or like building stuff like i think gonna do this for us of our lives one i think that's a fun that morph buffett like what ninety something here yeah yeah it's still all the top of his game exactly and so it's like well like what am i in the rush for like i i not just here to like enjoy the journey but i also don't wanna be like i gotta solve it tomorrow right when i was young i was like i gotta be the millionaire by whatever it's like at some point i was like i don't know man i just wanna keep doing this right and if i need to like hustle my way to it or not like it doesn't really matter like you know i took an android engineer job at monkey inferno yeah because i was like i you know i met you i was i wanna remember with this guy yeah think that was my worst skill by the way i just learned angry android fooled me yeah so like i was i gotta get any somehow and like i know i'm gonna do great stuff here i gotta show it but like i'm not afraid to put it in the effort we need to put in the effort i also not afraid to like not rushed to the answer right and like you don't wanna be like casual and like wait you'll you wanna be kinda like in the middle there you weren't to went to attack and went to a not but like i don't know you gotta enjoy it otherwise you're has the best quote on this he says in patients with action patience with results yeah the un unbelievable combination if you ever go against somebody who's gonna operate like that they will win yeah but that that is a you cannot lose if you're gonna be constantly impatient with with doing things you're not gonna sit back and hope it all happens so your patient was actually but but patient the results yes the hard part is a lot of founders are in action and patients were results yeah or non founders are you know patient with both and then nothing ever happens so you you have to get that combo yeah speaking of founders you worked with adam at and has been like kind of a staggering company because you know when i met you it was you know a a successful company you told me the stories is about before you guys started that you're like we were wandering around we tried a bunch of different ideas we're playing fifa because we didn't have we didn't know what the we were doing we were just come in try to figure it out if we didn't have it we would brainstorm and go home the next day what special about that guy what's a superpower from him or a story from him that you remember that you know yeah i can learn from or you anybody to listen to this can learn from yes there was this like four year period ish when i was there i think three years of it was like not of it so like most of my intersection there is like not what it is today but i did get a chance spend a lot of time with him and i need ideas what's the cliff notes of his story so people know because people don't know who he's pretty under the radar right yeah i mean his back story 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 story having at it actually built up some like you know well if i don't know how much it was but he was enough where like you're like okay this person can make this bet and like funded the operations so he he was kinda self funding self funding is was hammond and his 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 it's it like if we were talking about something we made a choice within like it felt like within minutes that was like deliver to this team and look when you're like an eight person team it's really easy to do it to decide something go slow maybe next week almost we'll do it later we'll make these roll changes later we'll tell everybody later know it was like immediate and when it was like moving on from something it was immediate when it was a new idea we wanted to do is was immediate when it was something else it was immediate it was just like it felt like this is what execution is is 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 were most i i'm not great at this myself and i've done a chance to see that i think it was kinda 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 or maybe team motivation or whatever it's like you see a plus talent and you're like you wanna do it for me was like ten or twelve years almost like a solo founder journey like at this e commerce company at these other little things i had like a startup had people with me but i never saw somebody else that i was like you're like i wanna learn these skills i bring something to the table this a plus i could pair with this a plus person and now we're gonna be like a superpower right i filled out with adam it was very clear and obvious you know like the size of company i i i don't wanna say not a surprise but also it's not a surprise that this kind of person would go do it like like it just is dad i think the same thing you're talking about like ryan netflix flex sport yeah like it feels like some people are just like they're built for that you still need a whole 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 ideal lab but we had a beautiful setup was like you 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 ever going on to do kind of interesting shit everyone's 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 i meaning we were going after these like moonshot to create the next hit social media app which is like you know no there's been like seven ever it's there's not that many of them ever to exist so you know i think we did bad with project selection it seems like what one thing that adam data 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 or he's like we're doing a mobile ad network we're doing mobile games i i don't know the full story but like yeah see like just that one choice at that time yeah is the make rates you know like yeah a huge difference at 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 red resonate with me and so like immense wealth and knowledge and like like literally like experience of the thing right beyond like we're talking about when we worked when we were exact but there were a few moments where project selection could have been massive for us yeah that outcome you know like they you know and we could talk about a little bit a little bit on that in that journey but like we did blog it was a live streaming bought of google hangouts public livestream stream yeah like if you saw a club house get really popular we had built basically a club house before club house and it got like what twitch right now like there's a big section of this like just chatting hanging out category right built an app like that i got to four million users but it didn't become next one i don't if you remember this conversation but we had this one time and we were deciding what to do next i we doing the mobile version of this because we see other things happening or do we do the p b version yeah and his zoom didn't exist and that i think that was we were like b b i remember if there's like it was like so short of a conversation which was so silly we were just like baby that's not cool it wasn't cool and it wasn't clear because if the only thing i was this like twenty fifteen there wasn't a billion like b to b companies crushing it yeah but like every year since then it was like seven or nine like i think at that time it was only a few had really reached like it was like i don't know box dot net and dropbox and it wasn't it definitely wasn't as obvious at the same time it wasn't as hidden yeah i should we kind of made scene we we only you know like i remember citrix was like a multi billion dollar product and citrix is online was the way that people did these webinars 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 in oracle we're using our tool just it was better even though it i was like not meant for that your color like weird and purple why do you gotta see we're dorothy thinking instead of looking at those clues and being like maybe we could do that we we missed that project selection choice i remember that day because that was a that was a probably a multi hundred million dollar fork on the road moment you know yeah maybe do you still had to execute but for sure i mean we could execute right but it is did do we have the right selection and could we get the right insight in our mind to inc it also when we decided to end blob i don't know if you remember you went to this barbecue i forgot he you mad james k yeah they were telling us you you're talking about like hey this content network problem because it was like the moment that entered our mind like oh shit reflect that what it felt like like we don't have the ability to intersect these but we kept looking at twitch like why okay so we know we don't because people come on for an hour to 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 game for eight to ten hours yeah so it didn't matter when you showed up crap and then the context we reset so it's was like i have it was like you know the feeling a lot of monkey inferno to me and the things we built was like it's not slow down his speed up but like look for the clues don't be afraid of that and again the eager you know the ego or the stubborn is of like we wanna build a giant social app like i wanna go somewhere around the world where somebody's using lies consumer like that was this stubborn ness that we that was the driver hawk yeah and it's like if we had just kind of unlocked it a little bit there was these project selection moments and so there's a lot of that i still feel that sometimes but i don't know maybe it's was because i'm older and i'm like less willing to like be nimble in that way but didn't wanna talk about one more hardware robotics to give me a few minutes and so i think this is another like resurgence moment happening like for a long hardware has been too hard too expensive software gets funded that's same motto right hardware is hard hardware is hard software it's easy software scales it's eating the world like these are all the mentality i think it's flipping and i think it's a few things that have all kinda 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 pie 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 after we'll kinda get to that and you know i think what that how old does that guy who's been that he's like young right i think what teams like twenty four twenty five and it's not like he has huge funding are a huge team but he's able showed up here i i don't know how he got here to be honest i think like many people here they meet somebody the attracts mood show up by the way and it's awesome like we've created that environment where makes sense he had done some small projects in college like he built his thing called desk buddy it was a little like e ink screen with like two eyes that just blinked and that was really it he couldn't talk you couldn't do i think it was just the glow test buddy you're not alone is that i idea i know what it was but don't seeing it in like that's cool like i want one on my desk like it was fun and they brainstorm from a bunch ideas and you know the combination of hey we got raspberry pies we could do these little things we could use three d printers building closures and then now we got this cloud ai thing that like can be really powerful they ended up coming with this you know idea which was like here we're gonna build a toy and first they literally made ted the you know stuffed at adam him little ted and made a talk like it i like go this is wild like you know and it ai i could do this but everyone's trying to make coding faster but they're you developer solving developer problems that i love when somebody takes that and goes let me go to this other place where nobody's thinking about right and he's spent probably the last nine months of sitting refining i think we sent you one of the first units it probably broke yeah first first he gave me a teddy bear with the back like the whole computer was just hanging out the back like 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 pushes this button it'll say this thing that's all i can do with this toy it was like ignore the thing hanging out the back it was like hey we love paw patrol can you ask us some paw patrol trivia like certainly yeah i can tell you pop patrol who is the red dog and paw patrol was like marshall correct and i was like hey can you keep track of our points it goes okay two points and i was well and my kids were blown away because now you have an infinite toy whereas every toy is finite i can only do the things it could do out of the box now suddenly you have a toy that's basically chat gb shoved into a stuffed animal right and you're like wow that now now that can do anything i could say sing me a song i can say tell me a bedtime story i can say i can make it do many many things now and i think what was cool is the teen and this little like lab that we built and the lab has like some three d printers some electronics area honestly we started with like an empty room and people would come by there like what's this room for i'm gonna be a machine shop torrance lab one day like can i use it i'm like yeah we have nothing here what do you need any tables great we'll bring tables hell you need like a little thing okay well add that you need three d printers we'll add that and i've seen now like tens of people come through a you know one person sit there spend some time tinker and fat team 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 when he printed buying raspberry pies new software and like i think he shipped like sixty to seventy units across four to six months which in software rule this feels like wow ancient like sixty users in hardware this might have caused like half a million to a million dollars i think we did for like fifty to a hundred grand right so like that difference one person three d printers raspberry pies some ai and you could just sit there and deliver units and try it with people when we showed do bear first by the way internally it was like no i don't i don't think it's you're gonna do this it's weird is dollar use it and it changes his mind like like she changed his mind right because he saw what it could do but like and how do you get that opportunity to prototype cheat right so hardware being hardware it's like maybe hardware is not as hard as it used to be that like sam calls these inflection where you know something changes like there's famously an inflection where when obamacare came out then oscar health built a thing that was just to do obamacare and like you know how to you know became like a billion dollar company it's like so what are the inflection so oh phones now have gps in them now you can build uber you couldn't build uber before because the driver in the writer needed to find each other how are they gonna do that if you didn't have phones with with gps on them 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 pie plus ai plus three d printing to consumer 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 right kind of wasn't feasible five ten years ago correct and when we build jamie i use a raspberry pie at that time which was the first version raspberry pie was thought of as this hobby market of tinker that are gonna buy a few of them they've they've sold like sixty million units or something we ridiculous dissect that like thirty five bucks a pop sixty million there's like a few billion dollars yeah of raspberry pie 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 wanna 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 i was like really serious engineering any ten people three millions of dollar i convinced somebody this is a big market and now like build up this a company which probably will fail because i raised too much too much pressure too much demand on return etcetera and to me the raspberry pie was one of the unlocks and there's the nvidia jets now which has like gpus 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 of robotics size yeah so we have a aj who's building the you know neurology he built that first version which i think i've showed you before which a brain computer interface now he has a second version 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 giant team allows him to kind of continue we've seen like a variety of things kinda come out on on that front i think the second area that's happening is you know there's a consumer hardware and then there's like this robotics drones and kind of this other world where if so much physical equipment in the world forklift and lawn mower and cars and like you know all these things that we do that requires either a person like you know with drones be invest in this company lucid drones which you know they built a power washing drone could go up in buildings get power wash to you know the glass set of people hanging from the side there's another company that and is that working like do people is it like yeah working very well and you know like what's interesting is there's is like a unique business model to find here as well and i think that's is why i love like being in the weeds a little bit and like seeing it is like most the think you're gonna build this product and then you're gonna take the people that like manually wash a building and you're gonna 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 wash dave power window is so clear you won't even know it's there amazing right dave's got a great tagline on to smell 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 them 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 kinda 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 there monitoring it have the facility inner air conditioning and like watching on the ipad watching on the ipad and then it might get stuck early on or might detection something now they gotta go fix that thing inefficiency i think is like massive and we're seeing it in many places so the 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 boots bootstrap 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 they probably took billions of dollars to develop and then all of that kind of flowed to like open source and typically open source sometimes it's behind than the cutting edge but in ten years that like normalize we see this elsewhere like ai models like llama but like really they took cameras and some lidar stuff and this dropped a little computer to a forklift and they could move it around you could talk to it could come get it to do things and i think there's a massive resurgence and so forklift physical thing you took a little raspberry pie internet some cameras some technology technologies like we were doing computer vision technology to score like fortnite games they're using that same kind of technology to look at oh this is a box this is the barcode code that i picked up right i could now use and figure out what's this thing it could go walk around the warehouse and i'm like that pellets in the wrong spot oh it just scan the bar code and detect others is this pallet supposed to be over there go pick it up move it over there like these problems exist in warehouses like i mean you know right i think you've dealt with some of pick 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 gonna slap a little computer on it and now it's a superpower and i think this is bringing down the cost of like this robotic hardware like building a robotic arm used to peel like y i gotta be like twenty stark and like ironman i seen two people do it in a machine shop i there's a guy here i don't even know his company show he just had a three d printed hand on his desk and i'm like that was this say go yeah like i i i created the ability to develop a full with all the fingers and everything in just this three d printer there's a bamboo printer which honestly three d printer was dr and then bamboo labs took it to a whole another level like 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 hand so like you know in each finger he could like pull every finger and like do some stuff like a one dude like few months hack and like i don't know what he's didn't produce from that but i just think you could do these things now and like weeks and month when they took years and like a lot of money i think there's a huge opportunity here still gonna take time to like marinate and develop but i look at it as one of those things we're like if i was a mechanical engineer if i liked hardware and i've been told it it's just ai and software and like your stuff isn't that interesting like no is very interesting right now like right 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 base built here we called the founder lab like just where a lot people come the tinker on stuff we have founders here we have builders we have creators here we have all kinds of people doing stuff put a little machine job 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 so i ended up getting this kind of industrial space and call it the garage it's twenty thousand 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 twenty five to fifty founders in the last twelve 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 right that's that like hype above i'm more excited about all these startups that are gonna form they're gonna build this expert expertise they're gonna be a hundred million dollar teams whether there's their product or their knowledge right that's happening now and two people are doing it like every single day like there's pho these things and so consumer hardware is is one area but i think robotics and what typically was known as like deep tech like oh i need like phds and stacks of them and fifty million dollars or 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 gonna see machines everywhere and every kind of version of it and i i think i've seen people develop like cooking robots laundry machine things folding drones to inspect stuff drones to map interior spaces like matter is a giant company in a human goes and puts a tripod everywhere like this is a t little drone that's gonna 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 wanna get into hardware again myself and i think that's the point though it's a lot of people would wanna mess with this and if something goes from not tinker to tinker suddenly it's now the like it's kinda like before you're competing one v one now it's one versus the field yeah the field and of course any individual thing in the field might suck correct but the field overall is super powerful and now you're saying the field is open for you know hardware tinker which it wasn't open before that's a big deal yeah we do these like residences here well we'll bring people here for a month or six weeks we just tell them like here's a theme here's this space to go do things when the vision pro came out we did it we had about forty vision pro we probably had the largest concentration of vision pro out of apple right anywhere and the knowledge of that like 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 is ai hardware one i remember meeting this this kid and i don't know where you was in the world and he shows me this like robot he like built like a humanoid he built like in his veteran and it's a half he only built the body the legs so i stop like where the race was and it was like totally hand constructed and i'm like yeah this is a wild but the fact that you could like boot like this in your bedroom and like it could take steps it's like crazy to me i met these other guys premier and the same trend in raspberry pie they took that trend and i mean i some of these i just you know it's i love because i could jump on the video and they're they were up in seattle or something and i took they're kitchen and i'm like so three d printer in your sink and it's just like their kitchen is like all machines and i'm like dude you gotta get out of your house and i gotta give you a home like do that that's what i want is like people who will just turns their bedroom into this it's like no you come to it here give you a little bit better facilities we'll give you space you get a better 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 between that compute next intermediate step oh you wanna speaker well you could pick whatever speaker you want just put that in oh you wanna produce two thousand units now we have the ability to scale it for you so they took the hobby world and the behavior this happening driving it and they started this in they're literally in their kitchen and like i just think that had dash capable now and that's the trend that i can't i can't like un it sometimes and right in hardware both in consumer and more deep tech hardware a drones platform massive right to be able to do things so much opportunity to you utilize that i don't know how long it's gonna take for this to become massive and 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 yoga with the guys here it's like we wanna bet on negative one to zero like peter liu talked about the zero to one companies like we still one step even before that like you're at negative one you're wandering the forrest is need a place to tinker and like come and get the ideas to form dis we will this is will we wanted to write alright i love it forgot this is amazing good catching up as always let's go check out some of these spaces so we let's do it thanks so much i feel like got rude work i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a goal travel never looking back but