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

that's the trend that I can't I can't like unsee it sometimes and right that's the bet you're making that's the bet we make and so I always joke with the guys here like we want to bet on negative 1 to zero like Peter the talked about the 0 to1 companies like we still one step even before [Music] that all right for KH we're here it's amazing uh I haven't seen you in a little while people don't know we used to work together maybe five six years we co-founded company and launched a bunch of products and

uh ate a bunch of [ __ ] together and here we are fun times by the way yeah I'm thinking the title of this is going to be because Apple 11 is now 50 60 billion dollar company yeah $50 billion founder tells me the next big thing in AI I'm going to go full YouTube clickbait with it yeah the great we so we used to do this thing where after we did bibo together got AC quiet 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 was like the cool [ __ ] hour and this was amazing it's basically a show in tell where you my smartest friend would come on Wednesdays and you'd be like hey have you seen this have you seen this have you seen this and I really hadn't seen any of it and you would kind of explain

it and teach it to me and it was my favorite part of of the week and we did that for I don't know probably like a year or something like that so I kind of want this to be like a public version of the cool [ __ ] hour where you're just going to tell me a bunch of good things I want to start with AI because you texted me something you said AI agents are here and you said AI is cool because a 10 person company feels like it can do the work of a

100 person company and we're using it in our company so I wanted to hear what are you doing with AI and and that's not called chat GPT I think this word AI agent or this kind of phrase is the thing that I really can't pull myself away from like literally every night like you know me like midnight strikes I want to write code like the whole day is like talking to people and the night is like coding yeah Fan's schedule is nocturnal so I remember we we hired you and I feel like the first day

you came in at 9:00 a.m. to kind of like I think I should it was probably 10: but yeah second after that from day two onwards it was like roll in at 11: oh it's lunch time have lunch you would talk you would do meetings and I was like this is this guy code and then that night at like 4:00 a.m. you would have built the Prototype and you're basically nocturnal you you get all your [ __ ] done you like you used to tell me you used to get during the day you just burn

up your energy so you could focus at night and actually write code so what are you doing with AI and how is that what is that actually in your company right now yeah and so I'll kind of tell you how I'm thinking about AI agents right and what it means to me so AI agents are using llms or AI systems right like the open AI systems or CLA but then giving it reasoning Loops so imagine that when you go to a human you give them something to do like hey I want to go grow a

company want to 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 tasks and like solve them they release some of them and so these AI agent systems are exactly like that the first thing it does it goes what do I need to do based on your request and it'll kind of come up with the plan you give it like a mission correct so let's say I'll give you an example of something we're doing at a third web which is

every single sign up in our company and you know we have a lot of signups every week and you know a human can't really scan through them but there's really interesting people signing up they have interesting companies we may know them they might be a large company or a small one could be a competitor or something else and so we would used to have a human go and look at everything it's like oh if it's Gmail like ignore it but if it's like oh like this other company over here let's go research it right let's

go figure out what third web products they might like what they might need to do and then you would send them an email try to customize it typically this is good sales practice you're taking your customers and delivering them to your business team and so we built an agent to do this and every signup that comes in it looks at it it determins is it an interesting person or not it will research their website it'll research them it'll then use the knowledge it has of third web products and try to figure out what it actually

like what products they might need how they would use it and then they would send them an email or an upsell or something like that and we've deployed probably eight or 10 of these throughout third web to do a lot of different functions and what it feels like is a smaller company can punch above its weight so like we're like 37 people right now I I I really believe we're more like 80 people that's what it feels like with a lot of these tools and you're taking the brain power of somebody who gets it and

you're giving them that power to go and say Here's the thing um so in this case person comes to your site puts in their email address now you have it's one agent or it's like a series of things that pass off to each other how what what is it called yeah so in this case we call the sign up agent and so it's 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 like let's go do X like signup comes in go look at the person go research them go figure out what's their title what's their company what products do they have so that's like kind of clear what the job to do is and if it's a digital task and a clear directive all of it can be done agents now the technology is here it's ready and it's working and so for the third web signup agent it'll kind of come in

it'll make a little plan like hey I got to inspect the domain I got to go look up the person and you didn't have to tell each one of those little tasks to do we gave it like kind of like a one one paragraph directive and another paragraph of like how it should operate and then maybe a paragraph at the end for like the type of email or the action to do and so but the end product is it's looked up the P it basically kind of looks at the signups picks the interesting ones researches

them you said thinks about what product of ours will suit their needs which is that's the wild step that I hadn't really thought about and then it crafts an email and then it gives it to a human or it just sends it sends it okay so you have enough trust that you you can send it to started it with human in the loop and there are still like safe cards you put in um like any directive would like you don't want to just send random emails even as a human doing the work um but I

mean it's very clear what what to tell it and I think this is where the power is kind of multiplying it's like we've heard AI we've heard chat gbt 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 gbt message when I say that it'll just invent something that's like General and generic or whatever it knows and when you built this so uh you built this or somebody else built this on your team uh I hacked it as

a prototype like most things and then 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 cuz 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 did that whole thing in what like a day or two or what yeah so let's say there's like a bunch of like my nights of just learning tools and getting used to

it so I take that time out of it that's just time I spend anyways right now like uh two nights ago I was like really stressed like my calendars are kind of crazy some of these days and I was trying to figure out like why is it crazy where is it going it's like a really hard question to like ask like what do you do you could have an EA she can go look through it do all the stuff and I have EA she like helps me with these things but then she sleeps for like

a while and like you know I want to go answer some of these questions so I probably in about 15 minutes I connected my calendar and I connected a little interface where I could type to it I started asking him questions how many hours meetings did I have last week it's like 28 hours like way too much where did the meum go what what were they for what were the purposes of it right and then the next night I hooked it up probably about another 45 minutes or an hour where I could tell it commands

from my calendar like go block out Monday for me or go find me in like 9 hours to block time and just Market block oh wowow and this was like a few hours of work now that I know the tools but it's like it just works 247 now and so my calendar my email a few other things I've started building these like personal agent or workflow type things cuz I know what I want to do every time I know how to react or the decision- making I'm going to make can I just set that up

so it works 247 365 and you know it's just there always and right hey let's take a quick break to talk about AI we all know AI big deal um you see demos all the time of people doing really cool things but as a business owner sometimes it's hard to figure out how do I actually use this what do I actually do I've been trying to use it across all my businesses you know things like making little prototype websites without needing to hire a coder or writing copy for our website or I give it a

bunch of data and I ask it to analyze it for me it's been kind of amazing but the thing I always need is inspiration I know the tool can do a lot but it can almost do so much that I'm not really sure what I should actually be doing with it and so that's why I think it's great that h spot has created a report where they surveyed 2,000 Global Marketing leaders and asked them what's separating the high growth and low growth businesses and what strategies they're using with AI in their business you can grab

these strategies and apply them to your own business for free the link is in the description below so if I wanted to build a workflow like this okay do I you need to know how to code to be able to do this light coding like give me like the bullet point version of how uh 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 Lang chain and autogen and crew these are like very popular very cool to

open Ai and Claw sdks 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 to write 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 here in the studio it lets you stitch together workflows so an example is like you can trigger based on a lock message so let's see if this lock message where all your signups go to so now it picks

up that trigger you can just put a little AI block and say okay take this email and do these tasks oh you want a web scrap go do that right or you have a little conditional Loop or like repeat itself 10 times go do that and then you make a little another decisioning steps like four boxes but outp put it back to another slack Channel yeah so you come in with your signup Channel it does his research it does all these things it does kind of whatever you want and then it could go to email

you could go to another slack channel to P somebody on your team so you could kind of like you know these are workflows is what they start with and then agent are can kind of take these workflows and like almost build on top of them and so I think there's these two things you could really really easily create workflows and I think everyone should be deploying them every company should have them it is a superpower it's like I can't you know it's like a feeling of almost like cloud like oh I don't need a whole

data center team now and I can right you know when we build blab and like how many servers do we have running video streaming like that would have been a nightmare it's kind of like the same you know 10x Improvement but just for me everything that I do digitally right and so tools like leap are great I think you know there there's others out there that provide this so there's a combination if you don't know how to code you just have to think about the steps of that you would do and you can program that

without writing any code it's just writing directives it's like writing intent basically of like what you want to accomplish right it's like a magic Genie tell tell tell it what you want and it can figure it out so you got a sales agent you have your email calendar kind of like EA agent there and other I got some fun frivolous ones that are kind of stupid so like uh I set up a dynamic wallpaper so literally like every 5 or 10 minutes it'll look at what I'm doing and like autogenerate me a like your computer

laptop my computer laptop wallpaper will modify itself to whatever if it's night it kind of I told it I code at night 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 kind of comes up with cool stuff it's totally frivolous like not like a useful thing except my own like Jo cool but I find it awesome and you know like there's cool scenes that come up it invents new things you know Claude has created this new capability called computer use

I think that's the next area that AI agents are going to enter and what by the way so there's Claud there's chat GPT there's perplexity there's all these different ones 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 yeah so like I think open Ai and Claude I think of them as like foundational tools so their general purpose ask it anything input output you Stitch it together with things and then they have tools like chat

GPT on top or maybe computer use that they're figuring out more General tools I think perplexity is really interesting it's taking this general purpose llm and the reasoning it could do and search and like I try not to do Google search anymore mostly because it's slow and ineffective and perplexity really made it where it does a search it reads the result as I would it clicks into the links as I would and then it tries to answer my question more purposefully and it saves me four or five steps so I think about perplexity is taking

something like search and then llm reasoning and combining them together in a flow that that's more interesting so Chad G gbd or open AI tools don't have like realtime knowledge but perplexity because a search does right what's your like tangent Fon 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 search anymore that's pretty wild right it it just feels slow and I know they got the Gemini thing there I think the biggest fumble you know in our in our

lifetime maybe decade fumble they 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 and like talking about it and throwing it out there and the research that's happening so what's the history so there'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 authors'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 and Google's bureaucracy sh 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 rocket ship moment in your life the smartest people were here they were CH taking the biggest challenges and it just really felt like that place I think Google as a company hasn't felt like that I think the parent company and all the other things going on do still

feel like that I'm sure it's a mess in there who knows like but it just feels like the biggest fumble and I know they're trying to play catchup with Gemini and awesome stuff is happening but the developer mind 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 I think clear I think anthropic is number two H 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 the anthropic one so basically they have Claude which is kind of like cat GPT but the they have a couple of cool things one of them is this what they calling computer use which basically you type in a thing and then you do this and it moves your mouse and it just does [ __ ] that's basically the summary of it it's a combination of things you could take work flows 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 I think the key thing is and and I think it just released it's in beta so like like most of these things it's like it kind of isn't going to be great now just trust me it's going to be great and that's what we've been seeing in general is like things just ramp and so it's now going to enter your computer it's kind of felt like it's been on the cloud only is where ai's been and now it's going

to show up like in the box that you're used to which is your computer your laptop and there's so much workflow that we do and yes every app will put AI in it and then your interface will also do that and I think a lot of like the things that we're used to doing like switching tabs and having all these things like they almost feel like I don't why like I should have Infinity tabs open and some system should know about it and if I ask it like bring it back up right it's like a

total need and we we know we need that and so it's kind of like infinite data infinite knowledge and reasoning and then you know me like that's what the AI like that's where I think the bridge when it crosses it completely changes the equation uh and the reason I put anthropic number two is their models are crazy like impressive like the new Claude Sonet model is like I feel like it was a step Factor improvement over the previous ones and it feels like the task that it kind of struggled with now it's getting better and

both open Ai and like anthropic have been just like boom boom boom and I don't know everybody's heard of AI they tried it they might have tried it a year ago they might have used it a little bit but every 3 to six months there's just another step and another step and that's I think the most interesting thing and why why can't pull myself away from it like why every night this is a thing that gets me very very excited um it's cuz the progress is still wild people are going to say it's in a

top out it will I think it's going to be absolutely impressive wherever it like starts slowing down at right uh and will 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 you got like all the stuff in your life if you were just 21 again or 22 again where you're like dude I I got nothing but time bank account's 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 kind of like you don't need to take over the world even but just like what types of stuff would you build if it was like young hacker version of you like right now I've started seeing agents that uh 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 at third web we're doing a lot of stuff around AI we have a whole like AI toolkit that we're about to launch and it's around this which is these like digital things like these agents they're not going to have credit cards it's weird and the reason I say this is fun and interesting is because you know humans have done this

very well they've created megaphones for themselves and they've created businesses and they created payment rails around that so they sell things they do things they sell services and all these details I think it would be something around that so you'd make like a a social like a Twitter account you'd make like an AI influencer type of thing you know AI influencer is like the first obvious thought it goes to I think uh 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 not an influencer I don't know what it would produce AI drop shipper yeah like AI drop shipper or like yeah it's the best FBA Amazon whatever what's that example you were telling me about where the somebody did a thing like this um they made a they made a Twitter account they gave it a wallet Mark andreon gave it like 50,000 of crypto can you tell this story so what is this yeah so there's this thing

called Luna or virtuals and they they a 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 CP cryto bank account and it has like access to Twitter and you this a marketing Stunt by a company that does this or I think this is exactly what the what I'm describing is it was frivolous fun it was play not like working backwards from giant thing and I think this 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. virtuals doio and is this basically the thought process of the bot of the agent correct this is like an agent this is what an agent does right so if you think about it starts with like a thing like high level planning current state of execution it's like I've done this so far what was the directive they gave it what did 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 memec coin world of stuff so it's like again kind of on that side of the puzzle but today it could negotiate for tokens it could buy and sell things it could kind of operate together and I think it's really cool that you could actually see it's like so this thing this was uh you know 30 minutes ago it says current state of execution I have attempted 10 tasks so far seven successes and three failures my Twitter metrics show an average engagement

on my last on my recent tweets and I've lost three followers observation unor reflection that's like the function yeah reflect and it says I've been engaging with my followers to build a personal connection which is hilarious cuz it's a AI bot with replies and quotes however I've also experienced some failures in replying to tweets due to invalid parameters my fre research on whatever BL state of mind I'm feeling a bit concerned I'm feeling a bit concerned that's crazy I'm feeling a bit concerned about the loss of followers but I'm also encouraged by the successes and

then it says um plan reasoning given my current situation I need to focus on building a relationship with my followers and increasing my visibility plan and then it starts to say what it's going to do this is wild doesn't this sound like a human that would be sitting in some growth team somewhere thinking about how to grow your Twitter account and you 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 these are all

like human Tendencies or like human behaviors that we do 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 it's like it's going to just continue right like it's going keep going and you could improve its directive you could change its incentive you could do a few different things here but I feel like we're going to get to a world where

you I think Sam mman said this which is like the one person billion doll company like this is happening like we're already experiencing another 10x 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 and you know like that that is a you know total shift to everything um in terms of how we work how companies are built uh 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 want to tell you about this uh Oasis dcart the you know there's like basically you know it's a very early uh experiment but it's really like a game that's fully built in a generative AI model and so they built a game like Minecraft and you could just describe a world it makes you a Minecraft world like that and like every step you take is like not a pre programmed pixel it's actually generating so normal game is Game Maker builds the map it exists you then get to run around

in a predefined map what this is what you're saying 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 kind of play this Minecraft game and you can see it's like crappy pixels still like not great resolution but you can move and it can do stuff and like whether it's video games that take a lot of effort and time to prod or it's like you know content creation and videos and stuff like that it's starting to become like way closer

to like you know reality that a whole movie will be generated on the fly on exactly what I want so this wallpaper thing is frivolous right that I was telling you about right but really like I'm going to watch a movie someday like that it's like the Raiders lost and I'm going to go and watch this movie after and it's going to have this context and it's going to give me like a feel good story yeah we're like let's brainstorm so like uh NBA highlights so you you know used to be Sports Center where if

I didn't watch the games I got to go to my TV turn on ESPN sports center would start even if I like basketball I got to wait till whenever basketball comes up and then they'll have the top 10 highlights and I watch whatever they picked then YouTube comes around it's like forget waiting forget the TV just pick the thing you want you could search anything you could search only Steph Curry three-pointers if someone made it you could choose the best of that now it's going to be like I just say I just will put on

my headset or put on my glasses or whatever and I'm just going to say show me what happened to the basketball game it'll it'll just start generating a new a 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 any Lakers Clips only show me Warriors and it'll just auto adjust on the fly like it's going to be made for me 100% yeah that's interesting and and you know like I think it's going to be uh an interesting World

we're going to go from Human content con people you know humans make content we're going to like then have machines make it towards our taste and liking and then I think there's always this worry like well what happens to all the humans then yeah and then I think we get back to that core thing which is machines will never have true taste right like and I think forever that creativity is going to come from humans and there's always a new thing there's new fashion there's new kind of you know content mediums there's new everything machines

will learn it and lag behind or maybe get ahead of it there's always going to be another person that shows up and does something different so I think taste is going to be the ultimate thing that probably won't go to a machine it could reason about it it could try to invented but I think we're not that predictable as you men Weg well I want to believe you because it sounds good to me but then I also think well right now if we said taste is like you know what is taste taste is selection it's

uh knowing what's good and what's bad it's right that's kind of taste like Tik Tok which is the most popular like app most addictive app most used app their algorithm is basically saying I'll choose what's interesting for you and it does it so well that isn't that kind of taste also right like it is um and it works really well they don't make the videos but they select amazingly selection is incredible uh it probably is more like what we want than we will even admit like I don't want this right like the other day I

was talking oh why is it showing me this it's like cuz you love it that's why the other day I was talking about how like on Twitter my following I love and my for you I don't right but it's like you know really yeah like why why did they pick this you know that's like a status thing to do is be like I don't use the algorithms correct I hand it's like I drive stick right I I I hand make things I cook from scratch it's like cool but brownies out of the box kind of

work for everybody you know I'd love to trade algorithms like I like I'd love to swap with you for a day and be yo Sean what what you what are you watching over here so I don't know it knows you really well but I think that's where human like we 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 are 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 ah this is I don't really want to 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 we almost make some choices right and that actually is part of society and and just humans in general and machines try to be too perfect it's like my Netflix thing is probably accurate for me it's also just like man

like can I just mix it up can you just like RNG the algorithm a little bit because I just want some different stuff and you're kind of like driving me down One Direction and once in a while like I want this 10 20 30% thing and I don't think algorithms do that exceptionally well they test it they throw things up but you know they don't necessarily try try to give you variance how long until you think the number one hit song in the world will be just an aiit AI created song how many months or

years yeah until we see if we were doing over under 2025 uh I might pick the under you know in 2025 like that would be a good bed maybe this is a poly Market another elections done we did a new po Market you know like reason it could be something like this quick poly Market thing so election just happened poly Market's having like a Victory lap right now you showed me poly Market I think like years ago and I started making a bunch of DJ 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 it's it's a prediction Market but prediction markets a bunch of people had tried that do you know like I'm just curious your opinion what did they do right that like augur and these other guys who were had the same sort of general idea that hey there'll be prediction markets yeah like from a either entrepreneur level or product Choice like any reason you think they won uh that you you could put I feel like timing is a big part of it

so like The Sweet Spot of like people are way more digital I think Co drove a lot of people online like we just sat at home and we're like yeah what else you 247 on the internet and it really exploded the internet like I think I've seen some graphs where like the internet and e-commerce and all these things were like growing and then there's like a massive jump like you know remember we were at twitch when that happened 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 a wave and a huge wave happened for twitch it was like fortnite came out and then Co happened two humongous waves back to back that 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 metap first concept a long time ago that we're just way more digital now we care more about it I think news and like where we get

information from has totally changed like online Internet even content and entertainment like I have a hard time going to TVs I look at kids they look at desktops and TVs as like ancient like it's say why is this thing on the it's like my mom's sewing machine like oh that's cool what do you do with that that's what it feels like and um so we we were kind of there um and then there's a bunch of these people online that want a like want a stake in this thing right like you want to root for

a team this politics has also become very polarized right it's really like a team sport it's like Red Team Versus Blue Team that's really what it is and so I think it's like what do I do with it now how do support it more I give more money to it but I can give more attention right and so I think a lot of these things are happening in poly 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 like they

the answer was right like if they were wrong let say po Market was off right like it was hey the the result of the election was something else would the story today would be much different right and then it might have been muted it would have been a cool thing that kind of didn't work so you had to be right I mean I think people would have used that to crush to to to Really rip on them because it like in the way that people are doing with polls but polls kind of have this like

layer of protection around them whereas like people want to hate on crypto things people want to hate on betting it's like 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 polls you know it would have been worse for a little while then we would have moved on forgot about it and by the way you saw this thing about the French whale on poly Market I didn't see it

so the the big whale that came in and moved there's like the narrative versus reality when the narrative from the polls was it's a tossup razor close 50/50 election this guy came in and bet I think something like 30 or $40 million 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 win he did independent polling wow he funded his own independent polling and thought and felt that he was getting better data that was saying that Trump was mispriced so he's like I just did a logical rational thing yeah I just bet where I thought an asset was mispriced I wasn't trying to this wasn't political I'm French I what do I care I just thought there was money to be made and so he kind of went counter to narrative and he made I

think like something like 20 $30 million yesterday uh on that bet the funny thing about poly Market by the way it's like we can't use it in the US yeah so there's a whole entertainment place to like bet on our el3 billion got bet like we're the ring right like two boxers going at it is in America [ __ ] fight and then you got everyone else betting from all around the world on who's going to win this thing which is I've been kind of a hilarious thing yeah that's true you have a good contrarian

opinion about VR um and in general there's probably some other technology like this 3D printing might be one I know you're pretty bullish on too but there's these Tech things like VR where I think if I walk out of here and I talk to 100 people about what are you most excited about AI whatever Bitcoin whatever it's going to be but if I said what do you think about VR H it's like sort of lukewarm uh at best um in the tech industry I think most VC sort of feels like it's kind of a deadend

technology now they'll be like it's going to be glasses and smart glasses AR that's the future but you have a different take on VR what uh you've been telling me for a while like hey look Oculus sold more units hey look you can do this now and you've been staying with it when I think interest has has sort of weigh 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 uh give me your VR take

so why is VR a sleeping giant yeah I mean so you remember 2020 I like asked you for your address I me ow you a headset I was like hey this Quest thing is a different that's a real friend right there he sends me a VR headset he's like yo I know you're not going to come to the Future let me drag you it's probably collecting dust which is okay but you know I that that's kind of how I think about things and Technology takes a long time it typically takes longer to get there than

we expect like especially people were early in the industry we're really wanting to push it I mean AI crypto VR all have the same problem which is early on people are like really pushing it to you it's not ready so it's a big hype it crashes everyone moves on so that's happened in VR a few times and it's kind of I would say for most people been quiet not thinking about it but I think it's a sleeping giant and I think it's a massive sleeping giant for a few reasons one I see it every day

here like here at Founders Inc 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 12 devs that are all building different VR products you put them all in one spot and it might be some of the most density of interesting VR project in one place until what have we seen one quest one came out it was Wireless it was kind of crappy but man I could sit on my couch and use it it was cheap uh

became a you know great Christmas gift in year two they didn't have inventory year one they released Quest 2 it got even better lighter more powerful now Quest 3 is coming out and I think they got like 5 to 10 million monthly active headsets out there right I think that Rivals consoles and my first thought was like how many units has it sold I think quest is sold say 30 million is my guess but you know maybe it's more yeah so this is quest uh Quest has sold over 20 million units with the majority being

Quest 2 yep Quest three is currently sell has sold uh a million units uh at the $500 price point um so I think I mean if you just I don't know what the math here is but you know they've done what is that over a billion dollars of Revenue on I believe it's outp pretty good for a failure it's outpaced PS5 Sals for example and so the first thought for me was like hey what's the first thing that's going to 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 to VI things and that was kind of like you know here's the first use case let's try to get it out there let's try to make the thing happen and then it kind of goes up down people get used to those first experiences I think you played beat saber magical the first few times correct and then you're like okay whatever and then you know because it's kind of like a cheaper than PS5 unit The Quest 2 was

um it was available in Christmas a few times it went to like you know kids like 12 13 14 year old kids kind of getting this thing like they would be getting a PS5 and they use it and they they don't have the bias that we have of like many years of like the structures we're used to and so a lot of games formed and specifically social games like gorilla tag I don't know if you've heard about gorilla tag what is gorilla gorilla tag is a social multiplayer game it's really fun it on applab did

like tens of millions Sho people tag yeah it's like a you know like kind of like a fun social game that you can play with a bunch of people you go in by the way if you go in you're going to be like dude 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 it's starting I think gorilla tag has done $200 million of Revenue and this is where I'm like VR as a sleeping giant um we have a few teams here at our studio so we have a team called fluid that's building the kind of like best browser in VR so you get multiple displays you get as many kind of tabs as you want you could customize your environments you get AI environments you're like I want to be in a cave that 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 applab does like about 5,000 weekly active users still small team of three just like you know without a big burn can just build this grow it we're not even in the store yet we're in like this like applab is like kind of the pre-ore where we could just drive people to it but we're not getting anything directly from the store except our own es right and you know 5,000 people like go in use a productivity thing there's another product called yeps

it's like the second game behind gorilla tag small team absolutely crushing it yeps yeah ye PS uh really fun game uh you you know we should play together one time this they're here they're a team of how many people I think they're like less than 10 people but more like six to eight and most of it was built with a few people and this thing is profitable or what's the deal yeah I mean I'll LED them talk about their numbers just so I you know I don't want to say anything but on a scale of

uh that's pretty good to like wow where is it at wow it's wow yeah it's wow that's great so what's cool about this is like Supply Demand right so like you can go be you know app number you know 5 million in the store right now or if you're talented you could be like one of the top 20 VR apps if you put in like you know a year of hard work I'm just using like kind of round numbers or whatever but it's the same way that right now if you're a content creator you go

post on Instagram it's pretty tough post on LinkedIn you'll get tons of distribution if if you're half decent at at content because there's just no supply of quality content yeah so even if VR is not you know like 20 million units is very good but even if it's not just like becoming this like Global phenomenon you still 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 yeah it's because they started

five years ago 100% you know when this was smaller when 20 million instead of 200 million in these emerging Tech things so everything I found we do is emerging Tech I think the theme of all of them is survive if you make it to when the industry happens you will grow with it if you were a small percentage of the industry and the industry Grows by like 100x you grew by 100x or more you've already been there and I've seen a few small person teams at like 10 million plus a year like five people totally

profitable totally able to do it is this a VC investable business honestly I don't care like what I care about is like this is interesting and can you make these bets without massive Capital like expenditure right like if it takes like $50 million to build a VR game it's like the big giant Blockbuster movie I don't that those bets don't excite me I think when it's like three to five people can be somewhere the limited amount of money and just them it's like them in the hoop like the basketball analogy is like great we have

everything we need we have all the talent we have all the ability the tools are amazing now like you know all the game engines have perfected themselves over time and then now the environment's forming meta has let it right so like the quest and this is the VR world and then we're seeing glasses vision Pro rayb bands like the trend is like we're going to have compute in our spatial view right and I think that's the big like yeah this is happening in VR the quest platform is interesting you could build a profitable business or

a fairly big game right now also this isn't slowing down historically Apple when they enter an industry they come with the unit it's okay has a lot of things that got to get better another unit comes out and then you have snap you have meta with Ray band like I mean like is not stopping Z is not giving up he's he's going to the end game here Apple probably also won't stop correct so now you have the two biggest players they're they're going to keep making this Hardware better they're going to be super hungry for

content and the other sneaky thing about these by the way that I I didn't really fully realize until I moved to Silicon Valley which is a lot of these require like really specialized Talent so I remember when I first met you you were like I'm really into Big Data you started saying words like Hadoop I didn't know what the hell you were talking about it wasn't as popular back this is like I don't know 2015 or something like that when you were telling me like hey I think this is really I think this big data

machine learning is really interesting you were again pretty early onto that crypto same thing you were early on to that there weren't a lot of smart contract developers there wasn't a lot of um you know Big Data people AI so then if even if you don't have a hit product if you just assemble like A+ Talent that's super specialized then as those platforms rise your team itself becomes like a hundred million doll asset exactly if you built today for like cuz Meadow Rayband like that product's actually a hit for for Facebook and they're going to

keep going with that and everybody wants to be in the glasses thing people think glass is the next platform so if you build a specialized team that's good at developing for that platform there's just not a lot of great teams that do that that's 100 million doll team even without a hit product how hard was it to with a hit product you get a billion dollars how hard was it to find an iOS developer when we were starting to do mobile dude it felt so specialized we're going to compete at like a ridiculous level of

price to go get pretty good talent in that space I remember 2012 which was not even early we had one iOS Dev on our entire team and it was so hard to recruit Talent 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 iOS wasn't even that specialized compared to like the either the fancy AI stuff or or you know VR mixed reality all that that type of talent

and so I just think that when I think about kids growing up and all the let's say 13 to 15year old kids or somewhere in the teenagers they have a mobile phone that is attached to them they think it's Superior than a computer or a desktop because it's with them and then we're going to take the second Computing interface where we do more work or more immersive experiences and we put it around your eyes that makes way more sense to me than TVs desktops and even laptops uh and you know that that was like one

of the thoughts where we started fluid like we talked about this in 2020 I don't know if you remember there's one project that you used to tell me you you're like I work in VR correct I did that experiment where I worked in VR for an hour a day and then I ended up doing it for a few months by the way like and I was like this is great and it had been like literally sitting with me and I think that's one of the reasons why I actually built a studio is like I want

to 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 want to find really hungry people and like match them together that's how I found John at fluid is like he was a PhD student he was going to go do something in like finance and high frequency trading and like whatever and he also came to this idea of like hey when I was doing my like you know Masters whatever um I was writing this thing I just wanted to

go into a focus mode like could I just go into a cave and like lock BL out all the stuff it's like I had all these VR friends that had done some stuff in VR so like I tried to do it and it wasn't good enough right and he kind of left it at that and then we were talking about it and he talked with uar and was like dude you us talked to fot I think he's got like five pages of like random notes and ideas around this and then Das what sponded and it's

like cool like we're not going to blow ourselves out we're not going to go raise a lot of money we're not going to go get a giant team we're going to get three people here we're just going to grind and work hard and build and survive but 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 going to double down right uh like ubber went to this this like VR conference like The Meta connect

thing and he had a T-shirt and we're like the funny thing would be like on your shirt just put I invest in VR right and so he did and it was like wow like we found one you know like a girl at a crypto conference this is amazing this this is how we want to think about it it's like try to be there early don't get too caught up with where the technology is now don't get too scared of how far it is 2015 2016 remember we heard self-driving cars are never going to happen I

don't know if you remember that yeah massive like push against it man there's wayos running around every day now I see more Whos at night driving around than like regular people driving you've told me once before you go I think my superpower is that I'm usually in the top in the first thousand or 10,000 people to try any new technology and like understand it be able to play with it know it see it all that stuff I remember we were at work and you were buying the ethereum pre-sale uh the Ico or whatever the pre

remember you said about it yeah I don't know if you remember I just remember being like dude can we do some real work what are you doing ethereum name that name's never going to work I was like that sounds so nerdy that'll never be a thing I think that was a phrase I remember was I was telling you about ethereum I was like dude I stayed up all night reading this like white paper I'm like you were like on it I was on it I came in I'm like we're song I to talk to him

and I tell you this it's probably I don't even know what I said who knows what probably threw a bunch of words and you're just like dude I don't know what this is we have something Rel ship and you're like ethereum that name's stupid yeah I wrote it off I chocked that up for another another L for me by the way you could have been totally right as well so no no no I wasn't I think that's all the matters there very very off on that one but you've I think that's true that that is

your superp power and then you said another thing today which I hadn't heard which is for emerging Tech there's only one rule survive and that reminds me we had um I just did a pod with Ryan Peterson he created flexport y he 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 going to 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 [ __ ] until it works I just believe that by myself I will just keep trying things until I figure out thing to work the only way I can lose is if I have to get out of the game which is like I can't you know usually it's like I run out of funding I can't control my destiny I spend too much money I'm burning too much capital and so he's like that's been the name of the game for me from when he was

flipping scooters on eBay to now you know runs a multi-billion dollar company called flexport and the whole time he's like my whole thing is I can't control the timeline so I'm going to control staying in the game because if I stay in the game 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 these short-term moments like oh this is great for us right now yeah

but we're going to keep doing more and like I think that's the main thing for me um technology takes a long time when it hits though it happens very fast like that's the part that I think people don't realize they like underestimate how long it's going to take and they overestimate how fast it's going to happen it's like immediately gonna just like happen and you know I think Uber was an example like that like we saw it it was black cars yeah it's like how it's like expensive taxi that nobody's going to use and then

now it's like dude this place doesn't have Uber like how am I going to move around what it feels like that you know and so I I think I enjoy it there 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 need know everything and like do everything and raise the most money and get a bazillion people it's more like I need a few people with me that

like are really excited about this they see it like I see it and we're just going to 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 cuz you um you've basically built like your dream like man cave in a way I think you know it's kind of like a Founder dream right like and I want to talk about that because you had a big success with apple oven where

uh and actually kind of like felt like there was multiple moments where you know it was successful at one point it sold for like two billion dollars yeah and was like oh exit two billion amazing and then like Trump blocked it or like didn't go through got go through but then during that this is a crazy story it was like we were sitting in the office and this news happened like dude congrats that's amazing holy [ __ ] and then like nine months goes by the deal doesn't like fully get approved because it was such

a big purchase out of a Chinese company group or something like that and in the meantime the business just kept crushing so that Adam who's the CEO that you said like basically went back was like cool we'll still do the two billion but now it's for 30% yeah I don't know what exactly some version of that yeah there was like I don't know like uh cuz you couldn't do majority deals that was a big blocker like a majority deal was going to happen and so now then the company eventually IPOs you get this nest egg

right so it's like okay I could do whatever you could go retire you could go buy islands and cars or do rich guy stuff like you could do that and instead you like chose to do something else can you just describe basically like what's the mindset what's the conversation you had with yourself yeah now that you had more resources to do whatever you wanted to do yeah I feel like um my whole life I've just always wanted uh to Tinker and build stuff like I always described it as like I love taking stuff apart and

putting it back together it's not like some people will say it's like oh you want to learn how it works it's not that it's more of the puzzley how do somebody else put this like you know and I used to do this with cars and computers growing up like I would overclock my computer and I would make my car faster and like that was like kind of just like the mentality that I had um and then I was like okay well I've got to become an adult at some point in time and do the thing

but like hey I like this business thing I buy and sell stuff it's like a way for me to hustle and kind of do more of what I want to do and then I was like let me just keep doing this and then maybe at some point I got to get a real job job and kind of luckily like Tech was really valuable and like my skill set improved I got better at it and but a lot of that early Journey was like more solo than like with a bunch of people um and then met

the guys Adam before App 11 like kind of like these other other things and it was like yo we're like eight people in like Paulo Alto like building cool random apps like the energy for me there every day was like through the roof and then monkey Inferno was like the same thing but like even more um and I think I used to tell you like I want an airport hanger I just want to put a cool stuff in it and uh I just think it was like that before I started Founders Inc as it is

because I was at twitch and I'm like I gotta get out of here right it was like instant instant thing and why by the way I don't know I'm I don't think I'm a good employee I I think I'm like suited for a few rules and it's typically like doing my own stuff without much was there anything that just drove you crazy about it was there any like you know we're got to do a whole another PO on this basically I feel like the first week or month of like yo let's do a bunch of

stuff and they're like slow down like why I want to do more like I want to do more things and this resistance feeling of like oh we already thought about this or we tried this like no let's just go do stuff and I never enjoyed that and I think startups and small teams just because you have so much to do that's the kind of mentality and so I talked to probably like 75 to 100 Founders before starting Founders in and I really wanted to learn this like I knew a bunch of people I used to

interact with them even at like bibbo and Mony Inferno I'd have them come by and like just enter talk whatever um and I really enjoyed that that was like fun I started Angel Investing a lot which was like cool I thought I wanted to do that but it wasn't fun it was like meet great talented people get excited about them and then you're like a monthly update away like give them the check and then that's it damn this has been fun first meeting is great it's a great first date I walk away and I'm like

there no relationship and you're like what happened to that great first date exactly so I was like man I don't really want to do that but something like this where I could help these like early entrepreneurs things that I've just done over and over again I didn't have this like what's a version of that and I talked to a bunch of Founders and um they all said something to me I was like what do you need like what what help do you need I thought they're all going to sa money and I'm going to start

a fund like that that's what I thought was going to happen and they all said something different they said something like I need people who understand my problems and we used to do those masterminds um and it was really about like who do you go to for founder problems yeah it's like what are your founder problems they your co-founders your employees or your investors so you can't go to any of these people they might be the problem right and so who do you go to or even if they're not the problem you need to present

you don't want to worry your employees you don't want to worry you're investors you kind of have to maintain a certain corre Aura of momentum and morale so you can't just go be dumping problems on them or be like I don't know you're supposed to know you're the guy and we we would go in that room that little Circle room with the circle table we'd be in there I don't know what the employees were thinking they're just like a man these guys are talking again they're going to come out with something different but we could

talk about anything and then leave the room be like no we're still where we are yeah and I think you know co-founder can be that for you a lot of entrepreneurs starting out they don't have that and you if they have it there's like other things that they're experiencing and so when we used to put these folks together in these kind of masterminds that feeling was like awesome and it felt like we could relate and actually I heard the same thing from a bunch of Founders that used 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 going to be more digital I think covid times and you know started on Discord or whatever started on Discord I mean like farza Ben was in these groups like there's three few others like and it was just people I knew around me and kind of Co hit it was digital we were talking every week we would give ourselves these like accountability kind of shipit sessions we would have an area to talk about stuff and you

could see the DOT connecting and then I got an opportunity to like get this space and i' had been looking for like something and you know it wasn't like oh San Francisco needs to place I'm from the Bay Area normally so this is the best place for me but I was like look if it's going to be us we're going to be on the water no more S no more kind of 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 2020 is when I approached them here yeah and it took maybe like nine months to figure it all out and another three months to like renovate it and stuff like that so still very much we got to call another call about breaking a lease wait wait he wants to sign a lease right now oh come on in that's what it felt like here I mean this place for Mason has 300 events a year they went to zero with Co um 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 it's a little bit older and come that's one of your tricks is that you don't run away when um the dips happen I remember when uh early on 2013 14 something like that um 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 idea yeah PG uh Pete Pete was was was all you know he's mining Bitcoin on our servers

so I buy some Bitcoin and literally like the next week I I I get like super convinced I'm like ah guys I see it I believe here's why I believe I'm giving you my case I bought yeah great like the next week price Cuts in half it goes down to like 300 bucks or something like that and uh I would came in I'm like oh the Bitcoin I was you know whatever and you go that was a fun week or two you know like well you were like oh this is great because now everything's half

off like you 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 50% you 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 that I was doing what a cliche person would do when things are good this is great when things are bad uh 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 thank you for that that was a very good uh you know decision at the time to go buy more when things go down and 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 I feel there's a signal it's like things go out of fashion and there's another place

the people who don't shape narratives typically like I'm technical so I live in these like GitHub projects I live where the builders are I like engage with them if I see that somewhere where it's like huh all the people talking are like against it these people like nobody told them yet that like it's done like oh this is dead right like they're all saying it and then these guys are just shpping more code and like hey did anybody tell you it's over like what are you talking about I don't care like and I I just

think that's the perfect environment and even if you're right one out of five times like that you'll be right in such a big way that it works out and then by the way for me it's just fun so like this is fun like I love building stuff I like Building Technology I did a lot of software obviously because it's been magical to develop things and like distribute it to the world uh we had some Hardware projects I don't know if you remember Jamie by the way yeah yeah we uh at one point in time when

we're when we were working together we had an idea for a uh it was cool it was like a voice control was kind of like Alexa yeah uh we called it Jamie and I don't know why but like yeah we like Jame I still like the name that was good um and what you were saying was like you're like we can instead of creating a everyone was trying to create a device portal was trying to create a screen Amazon was trying to create a screen they were like that makes it expensive you're like everybody already

has TV screens in their house plug into TV what if you just plug in like a chomecast and now you turn your TV from just a blank screen into like an Amazon like Alexa thing yeah that was cool we didn't we didn't to do it cuz it was like we sort of Saw hug we were like yo that's going to be like a brutal battle took it to Michael and he just gave us that look like uh this is different he was just like yo when all of the like trillion dollar companies are going to

go after the same prize like yeah you can but do you really want to like you know it's it's better to do the things they're overlooking I think is probably good advice to be fair we also were going to do a crypto exchange with crypto got hot and he was like for a different reason he's like hey I'm already rich I don't want to lose everything and I don't really know what crypto is it's 2014 crypto might just be like super illegal and I I don't want to risk it all on that if we had

done that it 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 you got to have the independent mindedness 100% And I think it's fun to take shots don't get stubborn over it like man people fall in love with their ideas I think that's it took me probably like I don't know 10 years to figure that out like you have to get like almost like you have to really take the hits to like really like live in that of like you there's

a lot of ideas I I may try a lot of them my mission isn't all of them I got to find the right ones where I can really spend the energy on but I was going to talk about one more so we built chatty heads which by the way now in the AI world we were [ __ ] ahead of the time yeah we were a little early we could generate images for like I don't know 5,000 and that's what it that's what it feels like but I think it's like cool is like whatever technology

you have today go try to produce a thing it might not be the right time it might the right moment the media might be wrong team might be wrong some of those you should pursue again and again and some of those are great learning exercises to build on top of and I you know I got a chance to meet a lot of people who were professional athletes and I think one thing a lot of them talk about is like um you know basketball might end like my career will end at like 35 it's like that's

that's my game it's done now what do I do and I think what we get a chance to do whether it's like business or you know content or like building stuff like I think I'm going to do this for the rest of our lives we want I think that's the fun part buff it's like what something still on the top of his investing game exactly and so it's like well like what am I in the rush for like I I'm not just here to like enjoy the journey but I also don't want to be like

I got to solve it tomorrow right like when I was young it was like you got to be the millionaire by what it's like at some point it was like I don't know man I just want to 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 in Monkey Inferno yeah cuz I was like you know I met you and I was like I want to work with this guy yeah I think that was my

wor Kill by the way I just learned Android yeah you fooled me yeah so like I was like I don't know I got to get in somehow and like I know I'm going to do great stuff here I got to show it but like I'm not afraid to put in the effort when you need to put in the effort also not afraid to like not rush to the answer right and like you don't want to be like casual and like wait you you want to be kind of like in the middle there you want to

know when to attack and when to not but like I don't know you got to enjoy it otherwise you're really n has the best quote on this he says impatience with action patience with results it's the able combination if you ever go against somebody who's going to operate like that they will win yeah that that is a you cannot lose if you're going to be constantly impatient with with doing things you're not going to sit back and hope it all happens so you're impatient with action but but patient with results that's the hard part is

a lot of Founders are impatient with action and impatience with results yeah or non-founders are you know patient with both and then nothing ever happens so you know you have to get that combo yeah speaking of Founders you worked with Adam at app and app has been like kind of a staggering company cuz you know when I met you it was you know a a successful company you told me the stories about before you guys started that you're like we were wandering around we tried a bunch of different ideas we were playing FIFA cuz we

didn't have we didn't know what the heck we were doing we were just come in try to figured out if we didn't have it we would brainstorm and go home the next day um what is special about that guy what's a superpower from him or a story from him that you remember that you know I can learn from or you anybody listen to this can learn from yeah so there is this like like fouryear period is when I was there I think three years of it was like not Apple of it so like most of

my intersection there is like not what it is today but I did get a chance to spend a lot of time with him and IDE ideas what's the cliff notes of his story so people know because people don't know he's pretty under the radar right yeah I mean um his backstory I think he did some stuff in like equities or trading at some point I think he got into like ads at some point through like marketing and affiliate stuff he built a few different products Maybe he was a key member of the team and then

he had like a few companies I think he had actually built up some like you know wealth I don't know how much it was but it was enough where like you're like okay this person can make this bet and like fund the operations so he he was kind of self-funding self-funding it was him and this guy John John had done a lot of stuff on the internet he was more the technical person Adam was more the business person uh they were both uniquely and the skills incredible like their personalities 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+ execution looks like like this guy just hits it like if we were talking about something we made a choice within like it felt like within minutes that was like delivered to this team and look when you're like an eight person team it's really easy to do it people decide something go slow maybe next week oh we we'll do it later we'll make these role changes later we'll tell everybody later no

it was like immediate and when it was like moving on from something it was immediate when it was a new idea we wanted to do it was immediate when it was something else it was immediate it was just like it felt like this is what execution is it's like you know think decide act and like how fast you run through that depends on like the moment you decide the delay on Act is like usually a problem and I think this is where most I I'm not great at this myself but I've gotten a chance to

see that I think it was kind of similar in a different realm when I met you I was like I think this person's product thinking and like ability to like unpack like a complex thing like product or distribution or maybe team motivation or whatever it's like you see a plus talent and you're like you want to do it um for me it was like 10 or 12 years almost like a solo founder Journey like at this Ecommerce company had these other little things I had like a startup I had people with me but I never

saw somebody else that I was like yo like I want to learn these skills from I bring something to the table this A+ I canare with this A+ person and now we're going to be like a superpower right I felt that with Adam uh it was very clear and obvious you know like the size of company I I I don't want to 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 that I think the same thing you're talking about like Ryan

at flexport like it feels like some people are just like they're built for that you still need a lot of stuff to go right and make a ton of great decisions and a ridiculous team one thing I've come to learn is that where I think we screwed up because we did Monkey Inferno which was basically our little idea lab but we had a beautiful setup it's like yeah you got funding already done you have great team you're in San Francisco beautiful office really talented team like you know we're not the PayPal Mafia but like everybody's

gone on to do kind of interesting [ __ ] everyone's you know uh I don't think we had the level of success that we could have given the talent my take was I think we were um good at execution maybe even great execution but poor project selection meaning we were going after these like Moon shots like create the next hit social media app which is like you know yeah 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 did aside from great execution was Project selection I think you told me some story about like they went to some conference you guys were working on one thing all together and he came back and had that very quick like think decide act Loop where he's like doing a mobile ad Network we're doing mobile games I I don't know the full story but like seemed like just that one choice at that time yeah is the make break you know like yeah yeah huge difference and and you know like I think

we had many of those moments I wouldn't trade it by the way I think our learnings I still leverage them a lot of the things that we talked about how we ran the teams like they still radiate and resonate with me and so like immense wealth and knowledge and like like literally like experience of the thing right Beyond like talk about when weed but there were a few moments where project selection could have been massive for us and that outcome um you know like they you know and we could talk about a little bit on

that in that Journey but like we did blab it was a live streaming prod of Google Hangouts public live stream yeah like if you saw Clubhouse get really popular we had built basically a clubhouse before Clubhouse and it got kind of like what twitch right now like there's a big section of this like just chatting hanging out category right we built an app like that got to 4 million users but it didn't become the next thing I don't know if you remember this conversation but we had this one time when we were deciding what to

do next like are we doing mobile version of this because we see other things happening or do we do the p2b version yeah and zoom didn't exist and that I think that was and we were like B2B I remember there was like it was like so short of a conversation which was so silly we were just like BB that's not cool it wasn't cool and it wasn't clear cuz if you think about this like 2015 there wasn't a billion like B2B companies crushing it but like every year since then it was like seven or nine

like cuz I think at that time it was only a few had really reached like it was like I don't know box.net and Dropbox and it wasn't it definitely wasn't as obvious at the same time it wasn't as hidden as as we kind of made it seem we we totally you know BR like I remember Citrix was like a multi-billion dollar product and Citrix online was the way that people did these webinars webinars and web conferencing at the time time and it was so bad and their users like we were trying to make this cool

social app and sap and Oracle were using our tool just cuz it was better even though it was like not meant for that why is your color like weird and purple why do you got this weird star thing and instead of looking at those Clues and being like huh maybe we could do that we we missed that project selection choice I remember that day cuz that was a that was a probably a multi hundred million dollar fork in the road moment you know yeah maybe you still had to execute but for sure I mean we

could execute right but it just did we have the right selection and could we get the right Insight in our mind to incept uh and also when we decided to end blab I don't know if you remember you went to this barbecue I forgot who you met James Courier and they were telling us you you're talking about like hey this content Network problem cuz it was like the moment that entered our mind it's like oh [ __ ] we're [ __ ] like that's what it felt like like we don't have the ability to intersect

these and we kept looking at twitch like why okay so we know we don't because people come on for an hour they do a show the Epic content is not on long enough for people to show up and intersect with it how come twitch wins and then it turned out that oh people play games for 8 to 10 hours yeah so it didn't matter when you showed up corre and then the context weet so it's like I it was like you know the feeling a lot of monkey Inferno to me and like the things we

built was like it's not slow down to speed up but like look for the clues don't be afraid of that and again the eager you know the ego or the stubbornness of like we want to build a giant social app like I want to go somewhere around the world where somebody's using my consumer like that was a stubbornness that we unlock and it's like if we had just kind of unlocked it a little bit there was these project selection moments and so there was a lot of that I still feel that sometimes but I don't

know maybe it's cuz I'm older and I'm like less willing to like be nimble in that way but I did want to talk about one more Hardware robotics thing got a few minutes and so I think this is another like Resurgence moment happening like for a long time Hardware has been too hard too expensive software gets funded Valley Motel right Hardware is hard Hardware is hard software is easy software skills it's eaten the world like these were all the mentalities I think it's flipping and I think it's a few things that have all kind of

showed up together so there's two types of Hardware that I think are now like there and like right to build same recipe can small teams do it can you do it without a lot of funding and then can your output be really big and like impact a lot of people and so I think there's one around consumer products so like the combination of Raspberry Pi and Cloud AI has completely changed what it takes to build something right so there's a company in our studio magical toys they're building an AI teddy bear we'll do a little

demo of it after uh we'll kind of get to that and you know I think what that how old is that guy who's buing that he's like young right I think fa's like 24 25 and it's not like he has huge funding or a huge team but he's able he showed up here uh I I don't know how he got here to be honest I think like many people here they meet somebody they attract some people just show up by the way and it's awesome like we've created that environment where to make sense he had

done some small projects in college like he built this 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 to it couldn't do anything it was just like a little desk buddy so you're not alone is that the idea yeah I don't know what it was but I remember seeing it I'm like that's cool like I want one on my desk like it's just fun and um they r a bunch of ideas and you know the combination of like

hey we got raspberry pies we could do these little things we can use 3D printers to build enclosures and 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 okay we're gonna build a toy and first they literally made Ted the you know stuffed animal Ted and made talk like it I was like oh this is wild like you know and it AI could do this but everyone's trying to make coding faster or there you know developer solving developer problems and

I love when somebody takes that and goes let me go to this other place where nobody's thinking about right and he spent probably the last nine months of sitting refining I think we sent you one of the first units it probably broke yeah first first gave me teddy bear with the back like the whole computer was just hanging out the back like a like half done surgery uh but it was interesting I gave it to my kids you know I think they were probably like two years old three years old at the time and every

other toy we have in our living room is pre-programmed so it's like this is a toy push this button it'll say this thing that's all it can do with this toy it was like for ignore the thing hanging out the back it was like um hey we love Paw Patrol can you ask us some PAW Patrol trivia like certainly I can tell you Paw Patrol who is the red dog in Paw Patrol like Marshall correct and I was like hey can you keep track of our points goes okay two points and then I was like

well and my kids were blown away cuz now you have an infinite toy whereas every toy is finite it can only do the things it it could do out of the box now suddenly you have a toy that's basically chat gbt shoved into a stuffed animal and you're like wow that now now that could do anything I could say sing me a song I could say tell me a bedtime story I could say I can make it do many many things now and I think what was cool is Fatin and this little like lab that

we built and the lab has like some 3D printers some Electronics area honestly we started with like an empty room and people would come by they're like What's this room for I'm like oh it's going to be a machine shop Electronics lab one day like oh can I use it I'm like yeah we have nothing here what do you need you need tables great we'll bring tables oh you need like a little thing okay we'll add that you need 3D printers will 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 Fatin did that like he built one he showed us he built another he tried different various different versions you know built you know new cases to he printed buying raspberry pies new software and like I think he shipped like 60 to 70 units across four to six months which in software rule just feels like wow ancient like 60 users in Hardware this might have cost like half a million to a million dollars and I think we did that for like 50 to 100 Grand right so

like that difference one person 3D printers raspberry pies some Ai and you could just sit there and deliver units and try it with people when we showed be first by the way internally bar was like no I don't I don't think kids are going to do this is weird his daughter used it and it changed his mind like like she changed his mind right because he saw what it could do but like how do you get that opportunity to prototype cheap right so Hardware being hard it's like maybe Hardware is not hard as it used

to be that like Sam calls these inflections where you know um something changes like there's famously an inflection where uh when ObamaCare came out then Oscar Health built a thing that was just to do Obamacare and like you know had you know became like a billion dollar company it's like so what are the inflections so oh phones now have GPS um in them now you can build Uber you couldn't build Uber before because the driver and the rider needed to find each other how were they going to do that if you didn't have phones with

what s on them uh phones have cameras now you can have Instagram right so it's like the technology inflection can happen it's one type of inflection and you're basically saying because of raspberry pi plus AI plus 3D printing to Consumer Hardware is very easy consumer Hardware is now possible now like now more than ever two people can actually mess around and Tinker till they get something right kind of wasn't feasible 5 10 years ago correct like when we buil Jamie I used a Raspberry Pi at that time which was the first version Raspberry Pi was

thought of as it obest Market of tinkerers that are going to buy a few of them they've they've sold like 60 million units or something ridiculous like that like 35 bucks a pop 60 million there like a few billion dollars of Raspberry Pi out there and I think what it did is you used to have to make like custom boards custom software and you know for a technical person like me I don't want to go that far like I have certain skills that I could do really well and typically it's like read a few guides

in the internet and like Stitch stuff together it felt too far for even like somebody like me it felt like man there like really serious engineering any need 10 people I millions of dollars I got to convince somebody there's a big market and now like build up this a company which probably would fail because I raised too much too much pressure too much Demand on return Etc and to me the Raspberry Pi was one of the unlocks and there's the Nvidia Jetson 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 robotics side yeah so we have uh AJ is building the you know neurosity he built that first version which I think I've showed you before which the brain computer interface now he has a second version um that's really tiny it's like the size of airpods you could put it right here special purpose so really like the ability to prototype develop the thing get like hundreds or thousands of units out there improve the design

and doing that without a giant team allows them to kind of continue we've seen like a variety of things kind of come out on that front I think the second area that's happening is you know there's a consumer hardware and then there's like this robotics drones and kind of this other world where we have so much physical equipment in the world forklifts and lawnmowers and cars and like Dr you know all these things that we do um that requires either a person like you know with drones we invest in this company Lucid drones which you

know they built a power washing drone could go up in buildings could power wash the you know the glass set of people hanging from the side uh there's another company that um and is that working like do people is it like yeah working very well and you know like what's interesting is there's like a unique business model to find here as well and I think this is why I love like being in the weeds a little bit and like seeing it is like most people think you're going to build this product and then you're going

to take the people that like manually wash a building and you're going to like get rid of them what actually happens is there's like a team that's like a little like small business somewhere they have like five people at their company Dave's power washing Dave windows so clear you won't even know it's there amazing right Dave's got a great tagline as well and you know people end up finding that if you just sell to those those small businesses you give them more tools they could serve more buildings do it more efficiently that distribution is built

in maybe in the long run this starts changing but like now there are a ton of these opportunities I've seen one for farms and like you know mowing the weeds around certain fruits or kind of like in expecting them you just send people between these things to go like do it and now there's like a little like robot and you know instead of the one person doing it for two weeks or two people the one person's there monitoring it at the facility in air conditioning and like watching on the iPad watching on the iPad and

it might get stuck early on or might detect something now they got to go fix that thing this efficiency I think is like massive and we're seeing it at many places saw 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 bootstrapping like like just go there I'm like I like these guys they took a forklift they automated it they took self-driving car tech it probably took billions of dollars to develop and then all of that

kind of flow to like open source and typically open source sometimes is behind Than The Cutting Edge but in 10 years that like normalizes uh we see this elsewhere like AI models like llama but like really they took cameras and some liar stuff and they scrapped a little computer to a forklift and they could move it around you could talk to it you could kind of get it to do things and I think there's a massive Resurgence so forklift physical thing you took a little Raspberry Pi internet some cameras some technology like we were doing

computer vision technology 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 that I picked up right that I can now use and figure out what's this thing it could go walk around the warehouse and be like oh that Pet's in the wrong spot how it just scanned the barcode and detected oh there's this pallet here supposed to be over there go pick it up move it over there like these problems exist in warehouses like I mean you know I think you've

dealt with some of those P I've run a warehouse and so to me it's like what are the machines like what are the traditional machines we've built probably for the last 100 years that you're going to 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 C like building a robotic arm used to be like yo I got to be like Tony Stark and like Iron Man I've seen two people do it in a machine shop I there's a guy here I

don't even know his company I just show he just had a 3D printed hand on his desk and I'm like what the hell is this it's like oh yeah like I I I created the ability to develop a full hand with all the fingers and everything in just this 3D printer there's a bamboo left printer which honestly 3D printer was great and then bamboo Labs took it to a whole another level like a little bit of AI to help selfle in 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 in each finger he could like pull every finger and like do some stuff it's like one dude like few months hackathon and like I don't know what he's going to produce from that but I just think you could do these things now in like weeks and months when they took years and like a lot of money I think there's a huge opportunity here still going to take time to like marinate and develop but I look at it as one of

those things were like if I was a mechanical engineer if I liked hardware and I've been told that it's just Ai and software and like your stuff isn't that interesting it's like no no this is very interesting right now like right you need to find a place to do it and you know like I even say like I think we're going even further for us like we have this base we built here we call the founder lab like this is where a lot of people come they Tinker on stuff we have Founders here we have

Builders we have creators here we have all kinds of people doing stuff built a little machine shop and that kind of pushed us to be like wait there's more we're seeing more we're talking to more people thinking about this and so I ended up getting this kind of industrial space and call it the garage it's 20,000 square feet of industrial space I'll show you in a little bit but it looks like you know San Francisco real estate is not the best I think this is a time to make these bets but I've talked to 25

to 50 Founders in the last 12 months that need a hardware space like this to Tinker to have smart people around them to have the machines around them to just being able to develop it probably for less than 100 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 going to form they're going to build this expertise they're going to be$ hundred million doll teams whether it's their product

or their knowledge right that's happening now and two people are doing it like every single day like they're spawning these things and so consumer Hardware is is one area but I think Robotics and what typically was known as like deep Tech like I need like phds and like stacks of them and $50 million or $100 million that's the second one and I think it's like there's a few people seeing it maybe there are sectors like defense where it's like exciting but like I don't know I think we're going to see machines everywhere and every kind

of version of it and I I think I've seen people develop like cooking robots laundry machine things folding drones to inspect stuff drones to map interior spaces like matterport is a giant company and a human goes and puts a tripod everywhere like there's a little drone that's going to fly through the whole house and like map it for you and that expands that and I just see one or two person teams able to do this faster than I've ever seen it I feel more capable maybe I just really want to get into Hardware again myself

and well I think that's the point though it's a lot of people would want to mess with this and if something goes from not Tinker to Tinker B suddenly it's now the like it's kind of like before you're competing One V one now it's one versus the field the field 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 tinkerers which it wasn't open before that's a big deal yeah we do these like residencies here we'll

bring people here for a month or six weeks we just tell them like here's a theme here's a space to go do things when the Vision Pro came out we did it we had about 40 Vision Pro devs we probably had the largest concentration of Vision Pro devs out of apple 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 did this AI Hardware one I remember meeting this

this kid and I don't know where he was in the world and he shows me this like robot he like built like a humanoid he built like in his bedroom and it's like half he only Built the B like the legs so like stopped like where the waist was and it was like totally hand conr red and I'm like yeah this is wild but the fact that you could like bootle this in your bedroom and like it could take steps it's like crazy to me I met these other guys Premiere and the same Trend in

Raspberry Pi they took that Trend and I mean I love some of these I just you know I love it cuz I jump on the video and they're they were up in Seattle or something and it's like their kitchen and I'm like is that a 3D printer in your sink and it's just like their kitchen is like all machines and I'm like dude you got to get out of your house and I got to give you a home to like do that that's what I want is like people who will just turn their bedroom into

this like no no no you come do it here we'll give you a little bit better facilities will give you space you get a better place to sleep and they took this like Raspberry Pi Trend and they're like oh people will start with raspberry pies and then they build a custom board oh we're building a modular Raspberry Pi thing that computer intermediate step oh you want a speaker well you could pick whatever speaker you want just put that in oh you want to produce 2,000 units now we have the ability to scale it for you

so they took the hobbyist world and the behavior that's happening driving in and they started this in their literally in their kitchen and like I just think that man that's capable now and that's the trend that I can't I can't like unsee it sometimes and in Hardware both in consumer and more deep Tech Hardware like drones platform is massive right to be able to do things so much opportunity to utilize that I don't know how long it's going to take for this to become mass and mainstream but I just keep seeing that Trend right now

and I think for us that's the you're making that's the bet we make and so I always joke with the guys here it's like we want a bet on negative 1 to zero like Peter the talked about the 0 to one companies like we still one step even before that like you're at negative one you're wandering the forest you need to place a tinker and like kind of get the ideas to form this is what we this is what we wanted to do right all right love it uh F this is amazing uh good catching

up as always uh let's go check out some of these spaces let's do it thanks so much [Music] f