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

and they said well you should couldn't confuse revenue for success so i said well you guys are gonna confuse a lack of revenue versus us either and then they got like kind upset dude this meeting it goes in like the silicon valley autistic hall of fame i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to from at all in and like a days off on a road less travel we got our friends ce here founder of runway back of the day built a company sold it to z built another company sold it to post mates has gone viral many times and it there's a lot of people in silicon valley who you almost it's like a film director it's like oh they're working on a new project you really wanna know what they're doing that's you because you do things with taste so excited to have you here do you do you have any good stories from early days of z because you sold a company to z back with z was the shit did you work with mark pink what's he like give me a good z story okay i have a great story actually how i came to portrait mark pink is actually it's not a great story i have like so many good mark biggest stories so yeah z about my fur a second comp my first company and i joined his party on his studio like can you give the background up mark so he marks like a silicon valley og i did he help fund facebook to get off the ground was that his first big he did so he and reid hoffman c owned bought the six degrees of separation pattern from a company on six degrees and he angel invested in facebook and but also licensed the patent i believe or more stock into facebook that patent was basically the kind of the social networking patent right like how how we're we're connected six degrees of of kevin bacon away from each other and i think read the store some there's some story where read and him realized that if this patent got in the hands of microsoft or some big company that they would be able to squish innovation by a startup up by like holding this patent over their head so they bought the patent i believe and just decided we're not gonna use it to stop anybody and then they i think par into to getting extra shares in facebook which is amazing i think that's what happened yet so when i joined i was record product and my girlfriend know my wife who i recently met moved to china for some job work thing and i was like three months z and i was like i'm not really feeling it's not that fun so i told them i was gonna resign and move to china and they said hey why don't we i just give you this new job you know you can report to eric sc i wanted c founders and basically be had a product for the company i said no that sounds fun that sounds great so so i did that so reported to eric sc he was a c cofounder ing and what happened is a month instead a job eric sc stopped showing up to work like orders was run the emails wouldn't go to work and i was like what and basically that's when i reported to mark and i was head of products and later the the the punch this story is what i the reason why he's thought show him to work is i later found out that he decided to become an ninja india a pretty good reason and it's not what i thought was gonna he lit literally he was like he wanted to start an ninja dojo and he wanted the gun to undergo ninja into training and so when i what the napoleon dynamite is of this story how his ninja career now i think he started another social games company so give us a at the time what was z like was it like on top was it king of the world at the time or was it on the building yeah i mean what's interesting z is the hired a bunch of people who are used to be investment makers to be product managers there because it was just all about the numbers going up was heidi analytical so i went in and just the amount of like knowledge i had about gross one of the things are really below i mind i think about a lot is when i first had a commerce mark pink early on i think maybe during the acquisition i asked hey what do you think about this like industry it just seems really low mo it's it's hard to have a competitive note here because it's just so easy to enter you build a new game and for its expand and how def defense is it when i think about his answer quite a bit because his i was like no this is great i wonder to be more new entrants into the space because it's free r and d for me and i just like okay that is that blows my mind that is his next level because he would just so confident ability to execute that like anyone who is kinda come in with some new idea they can just like fast follow it and do a much better job of growing which is like what they did right farm was in a first foreign game poker was a first poker game and that they worked really really well at least during a facebook era wait did he have like gen khan energy where he was like he is he a conquer yeah he did he did i that you know we were working like eighty ninety hundred hours a week inca and that was kinda an norm it sort of seems like a waste of talent though to have that cock energy and do it the lame way possible you know yeah like farm bill like that's he's like you try to do this on like few billion dollars a few billion dollars there's there's a quote by max le at the time max left who created paypal is by all accounts like a genius computer engineer single handedly was like fighting fraud at paypal and and like with as a one man army like with you know the attacks of all of these sort of financial scammers around the world the guy's is brilliant and then his next start i think was slide and it was making like widgets for myspace and facebook where you'd be like slideshow or super poke where you throw like chickens at your friends when you wake up you know by pushing a button and it it just slaps a friend with a chicken or something like that and they go what what was your takeaway from slide because side ultimately didn't fully work out salted google i think for a little bit but he goes be really careful what you'd choose to work on because everything can be optimized endlessly so he's like once we got in that we could just sit there and optimize and just get the number of chicken slap per day so you know choose wisely whether should should i be optimizing this chicken slapping or i be doing something else and i've always thought about that because i found that myself falling to the same trap no matter what i'm doing if i'm selling little widgets my life becomes about selling widgets and i can optimize as at to infinity and people do if you go look at how any company works that's what they've done they've optimized it to infinity dude were my wife worked at facebook years and years ago i remember like i was talking to all our coworkers workers at a party and i was you guys are amazing you guys are so smart what are you working on and they explained it to me but it boiled down to they trying to convince brazilians to put more stickers on their photos like the there was like one dog that had a long tongue you guys remember that fucking dog yeah yeah like they're were trying to convince that fucking dog sticker to put or brazilians it was like the face it was like the face filter thing when snapchat came out and then you opened up your mouth the giant tongue would come out dude i felt like and may explain that to like i kinda bow i was like you try to you're just trying to get like brazilians to use more stickers so they share more photos i felt like a cartoon it's like i was no no like you what i make i was like what do you guys doing i obviously have a max and slide story this goes back sub years so i don't think it'll mind anymore but when i this is when i first moved to the city and i had this app on facebook was blowing up and so some guy who worked with keith boy keith boy was i think a ceo side of the time when hey we like your app you wanted to meet you know the team i said oh my god this amazing mean you're out of college to be max so i go in and we had a meeting at noon and i will go to inside office and no one was there everyone's out for lunch and i talked to receptionist said i'm here to meet max and keith and lunch they would be back in half hour i said okay so he sit through for half an hour and then they walk in and they act like they kind of forgot there was a meeting but we go to meeting room and we should start talking about what i wanted to do with this ab by build whether i wanted to build a the penalty or maybe like join slide and they asked me how much i wanted for it i said well i have a c founder so two million dollars i would probably do it the million dollars each i kinda lasted the number i'm like what like i looked her the valuation on app data and like the amount money we're generating not too huge ass but it's fine it's too much my friend that he'll built super poke which i recently bought and they said verbatim you know we bought super poke and he's easily the eighteenth or nineteen most important percent company now out of a company of like sixty people i said okay that's a compelling offer and then i said and i said yeah it's is probably not gonna happen and i said you know we're profitable we were making much of money from ads so it's cool if you don't wanna buy it and they said well you should couldn't confuse revenue for success and at was this point i just like really upset so i said well you guys shouldn't confuse a lack revenue for us either and then they got like kind upset so then so then they got really weird oh i forgot to mention like i just started in a meeting they said something like hey you know there's a recession coming up to each other and they're like yeah just such should come out and then he said i can't wait to buy all these shitty companies were cheap like i we're in a room i were like what what the hell dude this meeting it goes in like the silicon valley autistic hall of fame and and keith was like hey keith hey well what was your body fat percentage in the when you in the paypal days and max was like eight percent and i was like yeah and i'm like look i'm not the fit person but i'm not selling you my company because he's like you're fitter me like what what's happening so that was like meeting with them but the thing that made to all make sense made a sense is the next week i was talking my one of my friends john who also is on i had a company building out and he coke comes to me at some party he goes see man like you won't believe this so i just had a meeting with fly last week i'm like really he's like yeah it was so weird because he started a meeting talking about his recession coming up and he can all these covers your sheep i was oh my god is a script it was in episode one of this podcast i think my buddy sue told almost the same story he goes invited the slide he's said and what they said was they were like you should we wanna hire you and he's like i don't really want a job like i have my my app i thought you wanted to like maybe buy it or something and then he opened the door and he goes you see all those guys out there they they're gonna build your app in like six days if you don't take this offer and he was like okay i'm not interested in this even more now i'm like this is horrible my app is stupid what he said he goes his app at the time it's called like super it was like you would name your friend are most likely to you know go to jail or something he's like because you're threatening me that you're gonna take my app i think my app is stupid the fact that you think my app is cool makes me think you're stupid what he thought it his head si who did you meet i i love talking to people to people who have been around a bunch of these folks before they kinda quote made it who is a ty or a big shot now that you're shocked by because of when you knew them when you guys were both younger you you're like oh i can't believe they they actually developed into such an amazing business person i i i don't joe know but that i met a lot of people who weren't great other that i think great that were huge later who who someone you met that wasn't huge then but you knew and why did you know oh yeah i mean drew houston did you him dropbox on drop ten people it was two thousand late two thousand up early two thousand and eight and we're just talking about growth so like they they had this like college referral plan so drew houston i mean a niche who's general horn like he was just a founder building ass on mobile phones right and he would come to my office and we talk about it oh probably the best one is chris once who's that he's c cofounder and he was a contractor at powers set which was like this job tu when it i first went to the city but he was actually a contractor for my first company serious business he i had him build this translation layer between facebook markup language and my space mark language just a look after and he was really good at it and i distinctly remember that we were at twenty first amendment yeah or or actually the bearer a brewery doesn't matter but i gave him an a full time employee plan an offer in early two thousand eight and he was considering it and the same night he when we're talking about he said you know dha just put rails on github and so i think i might work on github health all time and i was thinking my head and i was like the smartest thing for me to do is actually shut down my basically days business and go over for you but didn't say that they can have did you have you had any massive angel investment wins because you're around the hoop for so long and so i mean the best i mean the the best one by far is amplitude and that one was i was introduced through actually someone is ing m who runs data collective now and he introduced me for first angel investment after i sold his az z and alec like ten x in like twelve months and so i was playing with play money up after that and he introduced to his team that we ended up being the fourth customer of for analytics platform it's now amplitude and we you it we thought this is great is the best thing we thought we've seen since the z internal tools and i managed to get into the seed round and that ipo that you know we ended up being a four hundred x return on that which is pretty great easy let's jump in with ideas opportunities you're an idea guy what do you think are some cool ideas or opportunities that that you would wanna be working on right now so i built a zap and it's basically categorized my emails with gb four into different labels so i have this very long prompt and automation and i also use a product sandbox which also does something similar filters by emails but there's been no good version of email managers software that i'm able to customize a prompt and train it so i want to say hey here's is the things related to my kids and there's no keywords necessarily you can you have to kinda read it it's like some email to my babysitter center or or an email from the school and if it's relating to my kids i want you to put in this folder and idea is i want a inbox for like these different context and so people are doing different kinds of email categorization what's missing is there's no way to train it so i think building some way for you to for a product to understand all of the content about your life and organize your stuff starting with inbox will be really handy for me and i've seen at least twelve companies do this and no one has done a really great job of it i just tested this product have you guys heard of this i i can't think of the name right now but it was this thing where i it it sounds insane where it recorded my screen for weeks at a time and it would see how i'm typing what i'm saying to people and it would give me feedback on the productivity of my day and how it can improve it have you guys seen this sort with an r i think is it called like or something or isn't it yeah rescue behind no go sean right it started guy the guy who started like a like a he's like a guy he's like been around he was doing like a pendant or something right at one point and then yeah now it's a oh rewind then rewind yeah yeah yeah rewind dot ai is that it yeah they stopped working on it now it's a call limit low is working on the pendant now yes i was tinkering with rewind and the promise it it's not there yet but the promise of this is is was amazing i like i was like so into this and it's kind of describing what you're what you're just explaining because we're having to use zapier and open or boutique to like kinda duct tape this altogether their premise was amazing and that is exactly what i'm looking for i got a third one which is like lot spicier here but you know like this is not a inter remarkable thing but you know just character i and chai and all of these like chat bots they're really people are using for sexy chats i think like someone could and these things print money by the way like they immediately generate millions of dollars a month i thought if if i were just in it just to like print money the thing i would make is something that is kinda like tinder but basically everything is ai generated so it's not like oh you're creating a robot but it's a fake dating app where everyone is attractive and a super ear and then you can like that then you can go off of your tinder app and go on instagram and there have an instagram account on actual instagram is the is owned by the did the the person that you met on your fake tender app do you know who ty passes he's like the guy who had the info information that was like here my garage i do not tie who tai who he is yeah so tie one acc accuse he came on m mfa years ago and an accusation that i learned about him based off of the comments on youtube is that years and years before he was whatever he was famous as for he owned dating apps and the acquisition accusation was that all of the users were completely fake and that it was guys in the philippines like running it and doing exactly what you're describing that's true of the majority updating apps what do you mean that's just like standard procedure like plenty of fish you know like a a a seeking arrangement like that is their business model they're like and in fact like men acting as women yeah there's also like the webcam industry like like they up until open ai the companies with the most advanced ai technology is going to be one of these companies because they are better at creating chat at anyone they have the most advanced technology i'm not only not kidding like i know people who work there or run it they've just developed better chat general anyone and that'd be so funny if that's where ag starts actually it's not open ai it's none of these labs it's like whatever some of these like web webcam sites developers living that's not a crazy idea i mean it is not how it typically has been where a lot of like the vice industries are the ones pushing the pushing the envelope yeah yeah they're transformative for only fans right like i don't know if you read but like there's you know you're a big influencer only fans and you have an army of a hundred people who are like diapers or chatter right and the funny thing about them is that they're not just chatter that are flirting they're also basically salesman so what they're doing is they're chatting to try to upsell you until that get by this video by this phone i don't know exactly buy the subscription whatever the the thing is but they're they're not just customer support they're actually sales but they need to come across like they're the original person which is just hilarious what do you think that office environment is like so i actually i know someone who works in that end it's just normal it is like the most boring cubicle normal office environment that's almost better as the john was weird the the other thing with the dating apps i think that they did was i remember seeing a study about match dot com because if you're a guy on match dot com you would basically send out you know thirty messages and you'd get you know one back or whatever and what they would do is they realize that a lot of guys accounts would go inactive because they're not getting replies and so what they would do is they would basically send they would show an active person thirty inactive profiles knowing that that inactive person is not there to reply but that that will be the notification for that person to come back and reactivate their subscription they have to pay to go read their inbox and to be able to reply and so the it's almost intentionally a horrible experience for the person who's there trying to find somebody in order to reactivate all the churn members and they would do they would basically in a the first hundred matches that they would show you you know something like fifty sixty seventy percent of those matches were all just inactive people they wanted you to send a notification to to make them come back that sounds like a z train piano dude i went to the z office once back in the like heyday it was the craziest office i've ever seen same it was your this thing yes you like it was right it was like it shared a building or was next door to air airbnb and it had a huge bulldog in the front right and i think one point i think i think they owned the building and i think the building was worth at one point more than the company like you know it's hundred five hundred of dollars why what would did you think of the office sean well you would go in there's a giant tunnel like a led tunnel you would walk through just to enter and then when you're there first of all there was dogs everywhere and it was like everybody it was bring your dog to work it was just like herd of dogs running around it was insane and we met the chef and the chef like the food operation was more sophisticated just like cafeteria was more sophisticated than any company i'd ever ever been a part of like just the food part was better than my actual company so like they had a staff of sixty people on the culinary team they had a roof on the top where they were growing all the vegetables he had like a giant fridge that was like the size of like a swimming pool you'd walk in and there was cows hanging upside down because they had their own butcher process they they didn't serve soda they only brew their own sodas like everything was soup to nuts custom and like like just is so insanely sophisticated for a cafeteria program i was like man if the food is like this i don't even wanna know what the actual you know like teams that do the work are and i walked into one pm thing and it was like a stock market dude to his screen had so many metrics fine tuned in real time where they were running so many tests at of time and it was like you said zeke like it looked to me from the outside like you know the most data driven operation i had ever really seen you know i knew about well what we did but what we did look like you know caveman compared to what what they were doing in terms of sophistication of data the the the food thing reminds me like i was the person we did petition for us sister serve real bacon and after a few months we finally started for real bacon because we never had bacon it was only turkey bacon because you know mark think didn't like to kill pigs but yeah like one of the things that people did at z in the product org we have pm on call and i never seen this on any authorization the pm on call for every game with daily an analysis of what changed day day and so there's a drop than you was segmented and so oh my god there's like anomalous like fifty percent drop in mexico for far and we not sure why because usually on wednesday days at two it shouldn't be like this and then last of three hours long and they would have to explain play oh it's because of world cup is happening many what comes what what comes first we are with mister beast a few weeks ago and i had the same question but he wasn't able to articulate or answer it what comes first when you're that data or analytic oriented does it are you that way and scale comes because of that or are you can you only behave that way because you have scale so it depends on environment for if if it's a data friendly environment like facebook is then like facebook a platform is where viral vitality lets you grow from zero to a billion then data is all matters but you could see in the his in the experience of z that that didn't translates to the mobile industry mobile was less about viral morality it was just difficult to do distribution a lot more of that creativity and that's why super cell had such a to create advantage because they actually built very fun new gains so i think it's the completely dependent an environment if it's hard to get early distribution then scale makes them make it more important but if it's quite difficult at early distribution then that you want to be creative and innovative and brand and creativity that matters a lot more do you remember any like random game change like color red to blue or flashing lights or whatever that just generated like ten million dollars overnight i i always remember thinking that like the best way to generate thirty million dollars overnight is just to like say hey you it's it's gonna take you ten dollars for saw unlock the game today like we could just like make auto to pay and people would pay one of the more interesting ideas is this idea of crew so we had this idea of collecting materials and you ask people all materials one of the mechanics that we invented as z is this idea of crew or you for whatever thing you wanna lock you have to get at least like twenty people to help you unique people because what that did is well we sign the data is that when you do materials you asked same two people over and over again but if we have a unique spread then that increases this distribution and that end up being like a pretty large boost in da another thing that we saw is like just a power segmentation and so whether there was this one day where our our numbers went down anonymously and i had to figure out what is it like this channel or a adapt channel trans was a one particular typo bug in the drop rate of this particular treasure that was creating a lot of opportunities for able to share and so you just spend all day doing things like that and so and it's rarely something like huge but it's all all of the details added together that makes the difference what were the other business ideas or opportunities that you think are exciting right now yeah i mean i was i actually our asked sam alt to make this but i don't know how lender they're gonna take but i'm doing a lot of medical research what what did you sam open to make this product he's you saying oh i thought i thought you're were like no you had sam may make a list for you to talk about like that's no oh no no we're not that tight but no i was doing a bunch of medical research and i noticed that you can't access pay walled articles and so i really wish someone will make a version of deep research that lets you enter my your your pay credentials singing full tu success and this goes further i think there's just so much data behind off walls pay walls that you can't get to and you can only search on open web and the more private data you can get access to to bore useful these ages become so that's like probably number one thing i'm been thinking him out what's the name of the company that starts with an r it's based in england sean we've talked him about him a bunch it's like an acronym anyway it's a an academic publishing company in england and it's like really controversial because i think it has like the second highest profit margin of all publicly traded companies in the world behind public storage and the stick behind it and why everyone hates it is because researchers at universities don't get paid anything for this in fact oftentimes they have to pay tuition in order to even go to these places but they take your research and they put it behind like a thirty thousand dollar year pay wall and so it's a very frustrating industry yeah it's a that's a whole industry right el s i think is the biggest one and there's a bunch of controversy around that and yeah the all of these are extremely hard our merchant businesses they charge an arm in the life for access the researchers get paid nothing the peer reviewers get paid nothing all they're doing is just like taking the hats and copy and paste and putting somewhere and me maybe like printing it into a journal so so how would this work you you're talking about like you told sam alt to say hey can i just give chat gp my credentials and then it can go log in for me and use that information when i ask it questions so that's the would have to do it how could a founder what how a founder get around that or how would they do this yeah i mean you wouldn't need access to o three to full model first because that's supposed to open research is based on but i mean it's not terribly difficult to create something like a deep research there was a company called there is a coming called gen spark so i'm friends with the founder gen spark used a vp of search at bai do which is the google of china and they made a version of deep research just using a different model and so that's relatively easy to build i think the storage of the credentials and locking in it's a little bit more tricky right it also just seems like somebody could just create like science pal or something like that it's like specifically for researchers and it's a chat like interface but it's specifically trained on or going to access all of the journals all of the all of the academic research out there for you and just do it like a vertical isn't there like a google for doctors that's like this like lu like because so there's so i'm deep in the space there's is it kinda called illicit there's a company called size space and what they allow you to do is they let you search app abstracts were available and also you can upload individual pdfs too which also chat allows you to do but there's nothing i've seen that's is let's you that's indexes the full text of all these journals with your credentials and why are you so interested in why what's all this research for is if for i i is it your daughter and if it is what's the story behind that yeah so my daughter was diagnosed with the rare rain last september and we've been doing everything we can to find new treatments for this could because it's so rare and you really get deep insight into incentives and the structure of the of the medical community and one of the big learnings is that what is available as standard of care meaning that's what's available if you go to a hospital or you talk to a doctor and what is available at the frontier there's a huge gap already and then further when you have a rare disease just amount of research and data and treatments available is also just thin because you need to have like enough critical mass or for the research should be worth it so they can recoup the research costs and the other interesting thing that we've learned is that the ip issues are really weird so for example there's this drug that is fda approved non prescription a been out since seventies treat wounds and over the past twenty years there's a huge amount of compelling data this might be a pretty good treatment for different kinds of cancer and there's been no clinical trials for it because there's no money for it because you can't patent a pin home drug it's so all of the money hundreds of millions billions of dollars are going to new molecules are patent even if things are already available and so once again into antifa it is you're like wow this is super super broken and so yeah i'm doing a lot of primary research in order find repurpose drugs in might already exist that could treat a australian brain tumor it's you know there's obviously this is super serious and and i'm sorry you're going through everything but also there's like an interesting logistical thing of like wait so you are able just to just research potential cures or ways to help your daughter on your own and come up with a solution i mean is that like what you hope the outcome like yeah i mean so there's i'm not the first founder type who's been in the situation right so the cofounder of club house rohan his daughter has a a disease her name's lydia and he runs lydia foundation and he's going so far as manufactured his own drugs right for very rare disease you can do a lot there is other people have met that somewhere things like end of one cures exist and so you can go this is what i mean like if you're sufficiently motivated ed there no one more motivated than a dad with a sick kid you could do you can go so much further than what is available standard as standard of care and so even the last time we met with our primary care team they were proposing like two particular paths one evolving like pretty aggressive surgery and radiation another evolving this like drug i propose a third path and there were discussing it and this is like neuro surgeons and clinicians that came back a week later like actually ear path things were sets and the reason i was able do that is like because this disease is so rare i am like more knowledgeable about disease than anyone in the room because they have to look like study fifty different cancers yeah right wow that's that's pretty incredible also my experience has been that the doctors once you get off of the kinda of standard of care and this is maybe i'm i'm projecting just from like you know i just had a knee injury and i was asking yeah doctor i was hey like would p or stem cells like is there anything as should i take have tied can put a peptide in there and he's like no there's not a lot of evidence you know there that's not part of the protocol right don't have great evidence and he was sort like my hands are todd he's are orthopedic surgeons just like know my hands are i can only recommend what i can recommend you could do those things i don't know and so then i felt like you know i'm on my own here have you once you do this path you just outside of the medical system basically are you outside of your standard chain of of command with your doctors and you have to get your own system set up that's a great question and i've had an almost similar conversation in the last meeting i was just describing and so i saw it i'd play out in real time so the neuro surgeon said hey when we did this operation when we did it for this reason do it for some other reason is not part of standard care but our primary clinician she is like she runs he's a principal investigator one of in clinical trials the only one of two that treats this disease and she was like yeah you're right we don't have a lot of evidence because there hasn't been a lot of research into the tumor and so sometimes you have to argue for fresh principles and if it's a fairly rare disease or more open to being more creative and in our case our clinician was able to convince a neuro neurosurgery and this was the right path or at least is worth trying and she told us she was excited to have a partner who seems to well informed as only to think outside of the box and i straight upset i do not care what the standard of care is i think the standard care crap and she basically said yeah i think so too i just can't say that right dude and that's pretty cool that that you're in san francisco too where hopefully you think that like the open minded this or the early adopter mindset like even trickle out to like the doctors and things like that that's pretty cool that you're around a doctor who's like willing to try some crazy stuff or what's yeah crazy to a lot of people so to you answer sean's question you're like if you do find your own drug you do have to like show enough research and you'd be well informed enough that someone is willing to prescribe it off label on a compassionate use basis and so you just need to convince a doc a one doctor and so if you can't find one you can find others who's willing to do that and then you're in you're in the clear and it's a lot easier if it's like a fairly serious rare disease can you tell the story about you tweeted out about your daughter's condition and then this crazy crypto turn of events happened where someone created a coin and then millions maybe tens of millions i don't even know how much money was raised and then people got mad at people were speculating on this thing i don't even understand it can you explain what was going on and also just explain is this just was there just degenerate gambling or did you maybe stumble upon a novel way that people might fund research in the future i i don't know which one the two it is yeah i think i have a better idea which one it is after some reflection on it so okay explain happened yeah christmas i was going to japan to ski with some friends and the family and i was on a flight and i had a plan to start to go funny me for this lab the hi and lab in university colorado so we were donating monies to them once this happened because they only lab in north america that researchers just particular tumor called the for in the treatment that we're on they found so i thought okay for christmas i thought it'd be great to do a go fund use my network and raise some money for the slap so i tweeted this thread with this go fund link and that we end the raised about quarter million dollars for lab which is like i think the biggest donation up to that point but what happened is some people started asking about hey can i don't in crypto and so i said okay i i posted my e right my if you're a name system address and people started donating eggs a little bit of eth and then some other people said hey do you have a sole address because it were on alana and i didn't have a sole address i was aware salon is but i never touched it and so the next day once i landed i created in my first sol salon wallet i created this address and i tweeted out and basically how the way are you big in the crypto world why were all the crypto guys doing this for you just because what what's the motivation all then said so i i i it didn't occur to me i thought it was people five i had like seventy seven thousand followers at a time and i'm not at big in a crypto world i've like an on and off accident crypto it's twenty seventeen but never in a major way i i'm not a crypto account that people follow but i found out why people did this later and this answers a question of sean like is this gambling or is this something else but anyway i posted a saw sole address and basically an hour later i looked to my wallet in the wallace of four hundred thousand dollars and it was zero and hour before so i'm looking on like what is going on and it turns out so someone created a coin called pump on pub dot fund which is a platform where you can create a coin in literally like thirty seconds and i was on e right and i haven't an active and crypto this wasn't a thing ukrainian a new token on the ethereum was like a whole process now these for seconds pump dot fun is that pump not fun yeah and seen this business by the way no bet like guys made like five hundred million dollars of profit last year like more than that i think i'm more than that yeah and and and so you click a button and you make your own coin and obviously in the name there's no hiding that the point of this is that it's a pump scheme mh pump and dump scheme right they paid five hundred million dollars at least at least a lot of money specifically that's just way the majority of the traffic gon and so people are basically trading these new coins and trading them trying to ride it and it's basically musical shares right have you guys gone to this website it's crazy it looks like a geo city website like there's like flashing banners this is a insane top it's all real time like yesterday during the super bowl somebody created and just for for dave fortnite this instead of bar jail stool jail and then jail stool ran up to like a hundred million dollars or something like that but a hundred like you said it's it's musical chairs so you you're buying trying to catch one of these thousand x waves but it's gonna dump and you just gotta know when you're gonna get off the train and then if you wait too long or you're the one who comes in late you lose so it is a it's like being at a ro table or whatever where you're you're just throwing chips at the table trying to trying to hit oh my god it's like the trump coin except you can create it in like ten seconds thirty seconds but anyway that's why people created this coin is because you're looking for these new narrative to gamble right and the more interesting the more viral seeming narrative is the more valuable becomes after in aren't early it could really pump so anyway it was four hundred thousand dollars and i tweeted a screenshot is there's a whole tweet sort of thread where was like what is going on and i kept on adding this to the tweet thread with screenshots on my wallet and so it's four hundred thousand dollars i was like what is happening if you were friend explain someone traded to this coin called mir and there's a billion tokens and they sent me someone bought half to supply and just send it to my wallet so i had five hundred million tokens and once i tweeted then an eye check again and it's now four million dollars and i'm like what and an hour later it's eight a couple hours later it became fifteen and at one point was twenty million dollars just like the same day and i got cap and the market cap of the whole thing that means was eighty million correct no i think peak cap was around sixty million dollars okay have you had forty million of it yeah because i i sold ten percent immediately just to like capture something and i sold a bit more in the liquidity pool so you know i got around a million dollars out but i still owns thirty percent of it and immediately i was i said okay i don't know what i'm do with it but every dollar in my wallet is going to charity this is nonprofit not for me not just charity go into the research lab going to research researching the potential course to your daughter's thing correct so i said hey i'm not gonna move anything with our twenty hours notice i'm gonna try to like be very transparent about this and i thought about it and i said i'm gonna start selling a thousand dollars every ten minutes until like we're done because i just don't have time to run a crypto project and you know like i want everyone to know where just going so that happened and the price started going down but once we get to it got to a million what happened in between is because there's such a big story a bunch of rare disease organizations started reaching out to me and they're like wow this happened to you can we how do we get out get in on this because throw the people they're they're like did you say pumped dot fun okay u it's an average budget annual budget for one of these organizations of like a hundred thousand a hundred and fifty thousand dollars just like not a whole lot of money this like more money than the communities ever seen it's been a lot excitement there so i thought well sign of crypto friends and i thought okay how do we make this like a thing and maybe we can make this more sustainable long lasting and this idea turning mirror into a launch pad for other rare disease tokens where mirrors is a liquidity peri token was talked about and so i thought well okay that seems interesting before i do that i should probably figure out how a coin works and how you launch one of these so i when i'm pumped off fun and i thought okay let's find out how one of these works so i created a coin called zero and i entered a description for coin because you could do that i said hey don't bite this coin it literally says don't bite this coin it'll never be worth anything i'm never gonna do anything with it it'll be worth zero dollars so i pressed the button and what i didn't realize is because i was on a theory for a long time but i never had a watch wallet what happened is i was in the background the most wash wallet crypto so within about one hundred two hundred seconds the market cap of this coin that i told people to not watch wallet does a watch wallet mean that you are someone that should be monitored because you're a potential whale yeah like people people start tracking like oh what is metallic doing with his wallet what is what is people are calling story with their yeah you wanna copy what they think there's your parts and they i think you're the man because your wallet is old or you'd have a lot in it because i was referred a main character of like crypto twitter for like a few days right got it okay understood so there were copy through a bots like just monitoring what i was doing and doing buying whatever i was buying and so they saw this new token and so within one hundred two hundred seconds a market cap of this token was three and a half million dollars so i was just sitting there like panicking and i said okay i don't this is bad i don't want to have anything to do with this so i had half of the entire supply and i sold it and that's was my main mistake i should have burned it which everyone who'd been happy about right but because i sold i crashed the price of this token and people got very upset because it was considered a rug so now like oh my god everyone's and and when i sold i made like eighty thousand dollars because even those three and five in market cap is only about one hundred thousand dollars or so liquidity and yeah i started a fred explaining oh my god i didn't expect this to happen i got a spaces over video just like i'm really sorry i like so try to figure how this works and you know ke don't did it care and wanna i realized it's just a different community than it was what i was really active on twitter twenty seventeen like people are on the ethereum they're like very detect people right they're like nerdy and with a sol salon in twenty twenty four i didn't realize like it's so much more mainstream a lot of people maybe have like fifty dollars a hundred dollars and just trying to turn into a thousand dollars and so the amount of emotion there is like very very different crypto transition from neck beards to like everybody who looks like jack harlow in like four years yeah community the salon lot community all has like the line etched into the into like this side of haircut or like multiple that it's very different than like the people that got me into ethereum in the first place today i learned or this month i learned so anyway the market out three a half million voice sold it dumped at three hundred thousand and as i started talking about my mistake the market cap came back at at one point it was like five and a half six million dollars just because i was like talking about it and people were just the more upset people word the more to the coin pump that more people money people made from the coin so they were trying to make it like even more dramatic which i didn't really understand the time i just thought i messed up and people were really upset me so anyway so then that was like the main villain turn on twitter and everyone was super upset at me because based on me as a scammer so i thought about what i'm gonna do with this so first of all like eighty thousand dollars within a minute i i realized this is a mistake so i bought back in into the coin and i burned it all right so i already was like neutral and i explained that no one cared because of the anonymity of crypto they thought i had like a hundred other wallets that was like though that i pumped and dumped on a knee profit there and i can't prove otherwise so i decided like this is really shitty and i don't want any part of it so what i decided to do is i got some help from you know friend he's or coinbase based some other people who didn't wanna be named to do on chain analysis so what i sun off spaces is i'm actually just gonna pay everyone back to lost money on this out of my own pocket and i've even touched the cherry wallet so what we ended up doing is everyone who held in the first two hundred second who owned any coins then up until the point forty three minutes later were the market cap fully recovered back to the same value if you sold and you realized loss i'm just gonna air drop you sold and it end being like a hundred four to fifty thousand dollars on a my own pocket and i just paid everyone back which has never happened on any pump fun coin before and maybe like ten percent of people that have heard about this i i tweeted about it i had to like keep our responding because every time i tweet for the next like month someone wanna say oh you're a scammer what are you still doing here and had to say no i paid everyone back and they were just like not saying anything right is like a crypto larry david like thing like it's like this is like you're walking through times square and one of those fake monks put like a bracelet on your wrist and then like now expects you to give them like twenty dollars it says you though we called it a free gift like this is just this is insane so how much did you end up giving to the charity yeah so we've between doing go find so as a million dollars from crypto and andres like i locked them a bunch of the mir coin into a liquidity pool so sort of still perpetually generating so you bought a million dollars of charity for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars basically that's correct yeah and then we and his total was like a one point four million we donated anymore to match like the mistake and we added to go funding to it so ended being one the lab actually like triple leveraged it up into the coin there they they got hooked un pump pumped off on would sean put get back to one fifty like he did i wouldn't fuck that i would not have for that situation personally i get what you did it's almost just like dude this is create all of this was unintentional people are really mad okay what's the sort of like how can i just like clear up any possible confusion but i don't think you'd needed to in this situation right you created a coin called zero that you said is don't buy this this is going to zero it's a test coin and if somebody went and randomly speculated on it using their like their sniper bots that are trying to track your wallet and know like i wouldn't have given a shit personally but then again these of this community is so like crazy that bill just like make your life hell on twitter for like the next five years it might be might be worth it you know just to clear your own unconscious go to sleep at night you know exactly i couldn't it was for me so i could sleep all a night because a lot of these people are fairly low income and the money is fairly meaningful it was one reason but another reason is like people just don't read like i explained this i mean the coins says don't buy it i explained this like couple different times and what i realized is like you you just don't read on the internet and as far as anyone else knows because he makes little joys like i the if he don't don't read what it sounds like is i created a scam coin using my own daughter's name to scam your bottom right right right it's crazy did you at the end of this is there anything here that's interesting for fundraising for research or this is just strength like i accidentally got into a gambling pool and kind of got some money for research but this is not a sustainable thing for anybody i'm still trying to figure it out so what i'm hoping to make near into is so the way this works is you're this is like sort of gangster theory around okay you own a bunch of this coin because this coin narrative is attached to you right in the case of you know the port port is doing something similar with jail stool and in order to turn it into real world impact you have to sell there's no way around that and so when you sell then you're just like playing zero some game against community and they're all gonna be upset for you for sure no matter what and so that's a very difficult dynamic and i think my idea here is like only sustainable way to do this is to lock a bunch of the token into a liquidity pool and so that when people buy in or out of it you get to exchange you get the fees and that's not really like selling into your community i think imagine a version of dos coin where every time someone you know it's like coin is like couple tens of billions dollars market cap but every time someone sells or buys it it creates like up to cook could be hundreds of thousand dollars a day of fees and what you can then use donate i think that might be relatively sustainable this is insane i don't even know what to say it sounds like a great weekend no it was a month it was a last it was christmas until like maybe you know now and it ruined my vacation yeah it's been by far the most stressful time ever had of my life can we do a quick detox we were at a dinner once and you talked about some i think it was a stanford class you took called touchy feely or that's the code name forward i don't know and it's something about communication and relationships and i remember you said this really great thing at the dinner but this is now many years ago i don't remember it exactly but can you say that bit again wanna hear it again and i think a lot of people might benefit from it so by the way sick how old are you i'm forty one i think you you look like you could be twenty two or forty one i have no idea yeah asian raisin let's go yeah so i i took actually now twice i took i took class against as we taught this class that was based on the stanford business whole class called intra dynamics which is the highly rated and most popular class in sanford business school it's called by a professor called carol robbins and sterling notice touchy actually feely and it's famous for every participant at some point will like cry in the class but carol robbins is now a cofounder founder of a group call leaders in tech which provides the same class for tech leaders so one of the things that you get taught in this classes so the a purpose of classes is to teach you how to relate to people and build connection for up people because people work with other people and one of the most useful frameworks that got from that class is how to think about your connection with other people and how develop that connection and so the two frameworks to connect is one is the two tracks of con of of interpersonal communication and the five levels of it so when you're talking with anyone else there is two tracks there's a content track and there's a relationship track so the content track is filled with facts and a relationship track is filled with emotion and a relationship track is what is filled and what has to be filled for a relationship to get become closer and for trust to increase and the way you fill each of these tracks is through the five levels of communication and the idea is when you are talking to someone there's five levels at which should be communicate of increasing vulnerability and death so level one is what's called ritual and that is hey how's it going hey right which it doesn't really say anything where just it's is a ritual greeting on level two is extended ritual so that is how's is the weather how is it gain right you're you're you're it's it's a longer version of hey how's is it going level three is content so these are facts how's a project is it late what are we gonna do with this particular idea level four is emotional self disclosure so that is when you say something that disclose how you are feeling emotionally at the time i feel sad i feel angry and there's a lot of talk about level four because people think they're doing level four but they're not and that's a very common thing that's unique to the english language which we talk about that was a fairly interesting insight so level five is the deepest one and level five is mutual emotional self disclosure and it is when you are expressing the motion that you have about the other person i feel angry at you i feel proud of you i feel disappointed by you that's the deepest level of a communication you can have with younger person and the content track is only filled by things from level one to three and the relationship track is only filled by level four and five and we are taught to really not use level four and five in professional settings but if you want to build a relationship level four and five is kind of the only way you can do it and so a lot of the training is about breaking past the barrier or the uncomfortable of engaging level four and level five communication and you basically sit in a circle with twelve people for four days straight until you like so you can observe the impact of doing level four or five and not doing little four or five and how you are able to be closer to someone or further away from someone in emotional distance has this major running a company better i mean i would say this is the most impactful thing i've ever done my entire life like out of any class i always like as a founder some see the company in some kind of machine and i didn't find it i'm like you know miley asked dr so i found a difficult relate to people but to completely transformed my all my relationships including my relationships to my wife and so one of the ways this was just even just last week we had a on and i was able to do a mini version of this with our customer success team we're just sat or you know did a very condensed version of this lecture and then we sat and we just talked for about four hours and the amount of close as people got inside of people got was transformative and you would normally you know sit around for a couple hours and work setting talk about your feelings and it's very con uncomfortable do so and it's intentionally so like it's very comfortable for the first couple of in the in the case of a real life work workshop it's half a day in the case of us we had like sort of speed and it was uncomfortable about an hour but then people were really into it and it's weird but everyone at some point was crying about some disclosure that they heard or or they've experienced and as a result the team got so much closer and a trust increase that's wild with you so how do you do this in practice right because when you talk about like you know i feel angry at you about x or i'm disappointed about why i could see myself not having the skills or finesse how to do that and let the end result be a positive one versus we start talking you're upset by this we'll the other person gets defensive or they pushed back and say well you did that a blah blah and so can you give me an example of a conversation that you had that like maybe here's what i would love a conversation that typically would have gone like this or maybe been avoided altogether and instead here's how the actual conversation went that was useful for you as a as a you know ceo leader friend whatever husband whatever whichever example you wanna choose yeah so the the first one is easy actually so in most people just don't have the conversation right so the conversation wouldn't say i'm angry you would just be angry and you were say anything right and people can tell is a thing like when when you feel a certain way about someone it it it it gets it leaks right like there's a level of even you're not attending you passive aggressive you're just kind of ignoring the person or it comes off like you're says like oh my god is late again right right or he didn't do this and so that's the default and that's when you have this negative feedback cycle of well okay you already felt a certain way then you expressed it unknowingly and now other person thinks you're are angry at them and now need this like you more and and then they do things that you just dislike more because they dislike you more and it just gets worse that's what relations relationships get worse and that's like the default and so if you know that at least anyway then it becomes easier to say i'm going to express that and you're gonna express it no matter what your choices is do you express it with words or to express it with not words but just like passive aggressive behavior and so and then you can combine that with everyone is entitled to notice things so they know they're not entitled to make things up about what other people are thinking so you are entitled to seeing the same facts as everyone else seeing the same behavior you're not entitled to read the minds of some other person and how they're thinking and how they're feeling but you're are one hundred percent entitled to share what you're feeling because those are facts to you that's reality and so the mental model isn't and this is kind of like typical because people aren't used expressing this the mental model is like oh if i am expressing this emotion that means i'm attacking someone and that is true if you don't express an emotion and you're just acting it out but if i were to say you know when i see you do this the story tell myself is that you don't respect me and i don't know if it's true but this is like what i'm thinking me hud and because of that i feel angry and i just want to know that because i don't i don't know if you know that you i know that you probably don't because you can't read my mind but i'm guessing you probably aren't intending to make me feel that way and i thought it'd be helpful free you to share for me to share that to you so that you are aware of it and i just learned that technique in therapy last week amazing i i seriously did nonviolent found communication framework right it is yeah it's it's very connected to that i literally learned that yeah you're you're you're you're you're sharing information right so it's not an attack like you if you are genuinely doing it because you understand that you can't read their mind but other person can't read your mind either and so by sherry it is you're offering them a gift of information one one question you said something about the english language making it harder what did you mean by that so what you start seeing when you're in this class with these tall people and you start realizing that oh like i really only feel closer and i get to know someone better when they say i feel emotion i feel sad i feel angry when this happened and i feel distance when they're expressing that emotion but not saying you you can tell under faces that they're pissed off and it become scarier so then that you start learning that oh i need to say i feel the thing about english language is that we say i feel often without expressing any emotional at all and that's some sort of a quirk that's kind of unique english so when you say i feel that or i feel like there it is actually dramatically impossible for the next where to be in the emotion i feel that you're an asshole is not an emotion i feel like this as fucked is not an emotion i feel sad is an emotion i feel happy is an emotion and we're not used to saying that because the word feel is used is is has been you know misused misused for other purposes and so we just often is unconsciously you once you see you can see it people we i ask people to show emotion and they say i feel like i feel that and it's never in the motion and it's very very hard to change to habit it do you guys do this where like sean in particular i well curious if you do but do you guys do this where you like you get into this type of shit whatever you wanna call it the touchy feely stuff and you're like this is the way and then like i get into it and then half the time i execute that poorly and all and then like the business sucks and i'm like i gotta have more patience with this person or i gotta like let them get away with shit more or whatever and then i just go right back to the total opposite end where it's like what one what do they call do where i'm like everyone has fifteen minutes to fight for their job like you know like like it's like i get went by i either side and i but there is no middle ground and that i'm kinda like you that the first sign of resistance i crumble sometimes so the but the version of it that happens for me let's say i i hear this and i'm like sneaky just taught me something this is great two content tracks five levels i'm in i got this i'm going level five baby i don't even need one through four and then i'll go have the next conversation with my wife tonight and i'll give her like i feel that don't no i feel upset and i know you didn't mean that and i tried to do the whole thing and she's like what and then she doesn't she doesn't know all of this she didn't because she didn't go to the seminar and she didn't have the the skills and the be a mad shot she shut up it's on the front of her mind and so she doesn't playback like the role play that i had heard was and then i'm like well adam don't really know the next move okay revert revert back to my old asshole self yeah i mean that's not a bad response honestly because i i think i they have to do whatever works and the reality is to get good at this you know it took me i i did this four day program twice and eat every day was like twelve hours a day and you're just sitting in this circle cold practice did eight hours with you the first time she actually did okay so so she close assume i kinda no i kinda smuggled her into the into the the hotel room so she didn't go to the class but i will say like the second night when i went home she was like who are you because i always like oh my god i feel so bad i've been such an asshole did this sounds like have you guys heard the hoffman institute have you perfect but i haven't been yeah like i have i've contemplated going to it but i think they it's like they have a variety of locations they have one in near me and then they have a boston one but you go for it's like not expensive it's like two thousand dollars and you go for four days and you can't bring your cell phone you can't you're you're gotta be completely disconnected or maybe it's even five days it's kind of a lot but they like everyone who i go who goes to it they won't tell me what happens there but they all say that it's life changing and they can now develop relationships and connections with other people it's one of these really strange things that i'm so tempted to do but the amount of time to be disconnected is very like nerve wracking or or you know just like scary this sun's very similar it does be stop time to be disconnected that's the scary part there well yeah is dude could you i it might even be seven days could you go seven days without a phone away from your family away from family's a little harder yeah that's hard like in a hotel like it's like crazy to be disconnected but yeah i don't wanna like awesome i don't wanna like cry with what the strangers i open to around that deep i'm like i don't wanna go tony robbins i wanna see anyone i don't wanna what see me dancing and singing like you what i mean yeah what's great about leaders in tech is like is there all like you know well known ish founders it's like not cheap to go so even worse yeah around awesome people got wanna be my my most vulnerable self around cool people no actually it's really helpful because you realize that all the people that some people that you look up to like we're kinda all the same like there's very similar at securities whenever i hear about whenever i i i hear about the stuff i think of the tony sop quote where happened to the strong silent type like gary cooper that's that's just like like i get i go down this track and i'm like can i just say like hey chief like high up i just know that person only at that amount it just say yes or no si you have this interview question that i like you said my favorite interview question and after twenty years of doing interviews with people is what is your greatest strength that you are most worried about not coming across in an interview setting why that question i think i enjoy breaking the fourth wall and interviews tends to be so standardized formalized that what my greatest anxiety when i'm interviewing is like i'm actually really good at a thing and you're asking me to you know you know roberta a leak list or something and it's just not coming across what i find is that it breaks down this the formality and lets people gets people excited to talk about something that they're really really good at tell me great great stories and you get you get to know the person just a little bit about better and i think the particular thing is like it just ask what's you're greatest strengths it sounds really formal but right what is insecurity that you're bringing in that you're hoping to that you're worried about not coming across the interview setting it changes the tone quite a bit it's a great question i'm still at yeah that's a good one know what's it's interesting is so you you're you're you founded runway which is like a very serious business like you're gonna have to hire enterprise people i would imagine enterprise salespeople people like it's like a i'm basing like the future of my company off of some of the output that i'm going to learn from your software but you have the vibe of like an artist to me where like you you have a variety of like really intriguing projects you're like this thinker almost like a philosopher is this new to be doing like is this like a new challenge for to be doing something so serious and regiment like and or can you still be like goofy and an artist in this b b world so yeah funny enough if he's a serious business that i was the name of my first company and we built fun games i feel like if you call it sirius citizen you know yeah because we're were a games company serious business fun games but yeah i mean i think it's actually a pretty huge advantage particularly for the things we consider serious so i mean people have this stereotype of business and finances being super serious and super rigid but finance at its bus is really about creating value what's without looking forward and thinking about new ideas about how we can push the business forward and grow faster in all these things and in order for us to be creative we have to be a flow and things that are fun keeps you in flow and what we actually hear from our customers that the thing that we hear quite often and we love hearing is this software feels fun and that's not a luxury that is a fund that creates flow that creates creativity that creates value and when you use something that isn't fun if something that feels slow or confusing that you're not creative and you're making worse decisions so i don't think they're intentional with each other i think are quite complementary and that is like very deeply part of our philosophy i song you ever seen this yes that that's what made me think of that question what's the what's the story of the this happened last week our marketing team is run by health freeze who was a yc founder of like company called ty i he's a coo there and we also have this woman julie f who was at shopify and i was in the office and i just saw them come out in a meeting kinda giggling and they got out his visa of cardboard and started like writing that i'm like what is this like oh you know how like you know you you didn't want to do a billboard we decided to just like create a bill for ourselves and just hold on a freeway and i'm like that is such a cracked idea of course that's gonna go viral and i said i'll do it it's like a re renewal i'm like yeah i'll i'll do it so they're like okay so we walked outside we found a free entrant and i was just holding the sign what does it name by the way it says it's just give hate your finance platform get runway dot com are you are you the only founder i have a i had a c founder are you awesome on far and he left the company about a year and a half ago almost two years because that's like pretty rare i mean you're i i don't know when you launch but i feel like you're very very very very early in the period because i remember seeing you guys go on twitter like get get popular on twitter that's gonna be pretty different to be a kind of a the only founder running a company that'd be kind of exciting right you get to do whatever hell you want or is it you're gonna be lonely i think the reason why we parted our ways is things were just slower to make decisions and neither of us were having as much fun as we wanted to and actually i didn't want him to leave like he is i mean he's still on the board i love him he's just the most wise and high integrity person med he was one of per peers to twitter and he i hired him medical of school me first company and he know you works for brett taylor at sierra but he'll we if things were like going sore wanted and he identified that it was him or our relationship so down inside decided to fire himself and i didn't think he he was right about that but he was he usually usually is right about just about everything and it totally transformed the company he also must have attended interpersonal dynamics either not you talked about character ai and chai like some of these ai companies that are crushing it just printing money right now are there any other companies that just have blown your mind in terms of how well they're doing or how fast they're growing right now like maybe ai maybe not ai a eleven of labs that company but the it's it's they do like basically all of the audio translation generation sometimes he fix and when they met them there were like less than ten people they were just they were ex google they're working on the foundation technology and they are now i don't know what they last announced but they're in the hundreds of millions as they are in like year or two a year and a half or so and what what blew my mind is i never seen a group of very good technologists that were also so good at commercial the technologies so rapidly they're at hundreds of millions and hundreds hundreds i feel like this just came out yeah no know it's we should have an half right they they dubbed our podcast remember that clip when they were like the you're speaking hindi now and it was amazing and dm them and we were like hey this is really cool like so stupid of us not to pursue that more yeah there's a graph right for wise and the fastest growing saas companies and i think cursor is up there i'm am fairly convinced that a level labs is actually like faster than all of them but yeah i i think they announced some revenue milestone but it well we were tinkering with them it was borderline this is cool this is cute to i need i can use this right now it was like it was like just there so i guess they crossed it and people are actually using it like to to is it so so apple has audio but also podcast podcasts or apple audio books right like so previously did have audiobooks and you know you would know that a lot of this ai generated is power by weather labs oh so they and and they also they also do ai agents for customer service and support agents things like that so they're the back end of maybe potentially other software tools as well yeah yeah so so they have all kinds of product lines they sell the called the shares the power agents they do why are they better than like what open ai you know like the risk with all these ai companies is that the the general the base models ai open ai and and and etcetera can just offer those capabilities you know is part of the main suite do they do something different or are they fine tuning it in some way what's no they their own sound foundational models and the quality and expressive is just better and the form factor is better so you can use it for all these river use cases and the the voice api of open ai is actually like not as good that is easily usable dude you're super fun to talk to i just like hearing all these like i feel like you're like a like a treasure box so i just like pick like i just grabs something out of the toy chest but like tell me this story behind this do you know what i mean i it's awesome yeah thanks for coming on dude and give people a shout out for your company and where to follow you for more yeah runway dot com you can follow me blade blade with an r or runway c and if you are cfo you should use our software how much did you have to pay for that domain quarter million dollars that's funny named the company has suggested that we use it on dot com i think that was smart cl million not a lot i feel like for that wait what do you mean vol named the company like he you went to him being like hey what did we name this or he just suggested when club only have one room in april twenty twenty it would in the naval app right i think you're on quite a bit too yeah so what i was thinking about what i wanna do for next company i said i wanna do a finance company and i got a for it naval nepal cfo dot ai he's like no don't call it ai is gonna be dated in like two years everything we called ai you should just call it runway as you get the dot com and he wrote the first truck into a runway and that's why we got to back com it's so funny that you said it was the naval all app at the time it totally was yeah it was amazing it was happened open to talk to an rob guy it was it was amazing by the way i was using air chat like pretty religiously like for like two months yeah even though i knew air chad not gonna work i was like oh it doesn't matter this is neville app he's gonna be the four seven cool this like i i like to hang out with the fall i'm not gonna email him like a million other people and say hey can can we get a coffee just a thousand dollars a month and you can talk to naval vault you want right exactly i was like gonna be on this i'm gonna be on this for two months i'm gonna be a power user for exactly two months and i'm gonna hang out the neville vault and i exactly what happened i was very proud of myself for that it was great the most fun way to use that app yep dude thank you for doing this for the man and we're thinking of you and your daughter and hopefully we appreciate you too alright see thank you that's it that's a pod i feel like got could rude where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on go less travel never looking back but