The 23-Year-Old Genius Building Million Dollar Apps

okay Blake where are we at right now we are in the middle of the forest in Lake Tahoe how did we get here I think our relationship started when you sent me a Twitter DM back in December you had posted something along the lines of like just made 50,000 in two weeks this is like the second time I've done it something along those lines so I'm like okay yeah it was something cocky along the lines of 50k Mr in two weeks second time I've done this in the past six months and so I was like

all right I don't like I think I'm I'm at the point where it's like I don't actively DM people as much on Twitter now as I used to a couple years ago your DM was one of two I sent that month and then we got very close kind of like after that and it's been a very interesting come up to kind of watch you go from like 200 followers when we first met kind of like no mutuals didn't really know anyone in the space and now everyone knows you as the guy that built one app

that did something like 2 million ARR another one that did something like 6 million ARR and then I know about the other one which did a million and ARR in just like two months and we're going to be launching that I think later on this podcast yep that's right uh we're at a million ARR in about one month since real launch and so let's like zoom out and like just start from the top how did we end up here yeah I think I think that the best place to start is my childhood okay at the

age of seven I wrote an ebook titled how to make money as a seven-year-old OG course Guru OG course Guru I uh from as long as I can remember I've always been fascinated by businesses money entrepreneurship I mow Lawns I rake leaves I shovel driveways I sold candy um and that was kind of up until my teenage years where I then took it a little step further and I would manipulate video game marketplaces uh I made my first few hundred selling Madden mobile coins I boted RuneScape and manipulated you boted RuneScape yeah I uh I

was running the feather Market on a RuneScape back when I was like 13 years old I sold counterfeit NBA jerseys you were just like check buck up counterfeit NBA jerseys running $3 promos which would convert to one sale which was like $10 profit nice um I built an ethereum mining machine 16 and I scaled up a few different Instagram meme pages so this is kind of all up until the age of 18 I then went to college uh primarily to appease my parents I I don't think that I ever really thought it was worth it

but the social elements uh as well as making my family happy led me to go to school valid throughout College I honestly spent most of my time partying uh kind of took took a step back from entrepreneurship until my senior year where I built a college Marketplace app the classic so many people try to do it it's impossible to scale first time founder first time founder it was either that or a social appb right and this led to my spring semester senior year I'm about to graduate and all of my friends have great jobs paying

them six figures in New York after school meanwhile I have no plans the college Marketplace app isn't doing very well it's making zero money I've invested what little couple thousand dollars I have into it and I'm like [ __ ] I need to make money somehow or I have to get a full-time job so I had a roommate that would use dating apps a lot okay he often asked me what he should say to a girl and mind you this is a few months after chat BT came out okay so I'm like I think that

I could get chat gbt to programmatically generate responses and I decided to build an app for it I had zero software experience at this point zero doar in my bank account I move back home my family isn't doing great financially my older brother is giving me loans for groceries and then we launched and the rest is kind of history and so the first stop was RZ GPT yes it's now named plug AI but was originally RZ GPT and so after the Facebook Marketplace this was your first attempt at building in consumer social 100% although I

wouldn't say consumer social I would describe it as consumer utility interesting and this is the app that ended up doing like what was it something crazy like 2 million yeah two and a half million ARR what was the strategy like was it an accident or did you know what you were doing so I had two co-founders that I brought on that had experience doing social media marketing and mind you I had some experience from my teenage years um but hadn't really touched it in a long time so we have the app built it's super simple

you upload a screenshot of your messages and it gives you examples of what you could respond with mhm they launched it on social media on Tik Tok specifically and it was doing reasonably well but then we found this Niche this untapped niche of Riz content where people are essentially demonstrating how good they are at talking to girls I hit up these two faceless accounts $ $50 promos and overnight we exploded 200,000 downloads in about 5 days 80k Mr off the Jump and as off of a $100 off of a $100 that's insane and as I

mentioned earlier I had no software experience we didn't have notifications no reviews our pay wall was horrible the the whole thing was essentially a train wreck um but we did the most important thing was we provided value to people and we made it viral and in this space that's really all you need to get started and then why did you leave we launched start of July okay over the course of the next few months we scaled up to a little bit over 200k mrr one of the co-founders and I were kind of going head-to-head about

where the product should go in the future we amicably decided to part ways I kept my equity and for lack of a better word I was unemployed I had some cash coming in from R GPT but I was kind of lost um my family situation wasn't great at this point in time I spent the majority of November on a friend's couch and then my brother's couch and I'm trying to figure out what to work on so I started browsing social media I was like what's Popp right now where is a space or what spaces are

currently underserved and you knew that you wanted to be in like consumer utility yeah I I figured that this had worked once and that I could do it again this time on my own terms leading the [ __ ] myself so I discovered looks maxing looks maxing is essentially men trying to become more attractive right took over Tik Tok took over Tik Tok what I found really interesting about looks maxing is that weightlifting obviously popular on social media for a long time right but the primary reason that most guys are lifting weights is so that

they can become more attractive to girls looks maxing cut right through that looks maxing is okay you want to be more attractive you want to get more girls here's how you can improve your facial Aesthetics here's how you can improve your style how you smell Etc and when I browsed social media what I found was that there were two things that people were really looking for they wanted to find out how attractive they were and how they could become more attractive at this time the GPT Vision API had just come out and so I'm like

I figure that I can just take an image of my face send it into chat GPT and get this analysis that I'm looking for but who built it I built it where did the coding experience come from so when I first ideated on Riz GPT I had a little bit of background with like python but no software experience so chat GPT essentially built it for me chat GPT was my personal tutor umax same thing run it back chat GPT did about 95% of the code for R GPT maybe around 90% for umax nice um and

so I'm starting to build this thing and I'm like okay I know that I know what strategies work on social media for distribution but what if I partner with an influencer so I brought on Sam Zia Sam Zia one of the most popping looks maxers massive audience Connections in the industry I brought on him as well as my older brother to help with the engineering side of things and mind you the entire time that I'm building this thing I'm sleeping on my friend's couch and then my older brother's couch I spent Thanksgiving alone with some

sliced turkey just coding and I think that simultaneously this month was the most difficult but also the most transformative time in my life why do you say that it was difficult because like I said my family situation wasn't great uh parents weren't doing well financially I'm sleeping on Friends brother's couch and you know I kind of felt lost I just split for my previous co-founders and you know there wasn't a clear trajectory of what the rest of my life would look like this sort of strategy had worked with Riz GPT there was no guarantee that

it would work with umax yeah and I think that that kind of brings us to the launch what went into that launch so as I said i' brought on Sam Zia and my older brother and Sam at this point like I remember when this is like around the time we had started talking you you sent me his Tik talk you were like I just partnered with this guy he's going to distribute for me and he had like 200k now I'm seeing podcast clips of him on Instagram and YouTube and has like a lot of Engagement

yeah working with Sam has been unbelievable he's absolutely blown up he's been an amazing business partner so when it comes to launch it starts off with a video of his and the video does pretty well 100,000 views we get a few thousand downloads and we're steadily tracking up uh I think in the first month we did about 100,000 in Revenue I get into hfz and I move to San Francisco and hfz is what for audience h z is a startup accelerator um they provide a small Safe Note check and then you go live in this

house for 3 months how many people I think about 20 people lived in the house nice so I get to say s Francisco and I've got this big vision of what umax is going to become this big male self-improvement uh Community with a number of different applications but the priority right now is just umax right and a couple weeks into HF zero so middle of January this copycat comes and they weren't just some other copycat that you know took everything that we did and then are trying to optimize for the App Store steal a few

downloads they copied everything everything all of the marking that we were doing all of the the exact outputs that we had the sort of metrics that we're looking for in an individual like their jawline score overall what have you and they become a threat they surpassed Us in the App Store and so I'm like [ __ ] it we need to go big now I had kind of delayed trying to go big I wanted to continue to improve the retention improve the application as a whole and within the course of 4 days I deployed over

$200,000 on influencer Partnerships which was more than all the money that we had made up until this point it was a massive gamble but then within the course of the next three days we exploded 100,000 downloads 990,000 downloads 880,000 downloads 40,000 Revenue 35 40 and that popped us up to over $500,000 in Mr and that was that was crazy that was from 150 Mr to 500 overnight just like that and so there's two things that are like you know interesting to me within that the first one is when you were starting to like roll out

influencer promos initially you were trying not to go big and one thing I've seen with consumer especially consumer social is that you want to be careful about how many people see your product before it's ready from a consumer's perspective the first time they see an app that is the only thing that will live in their head even if the app is completely different a month later if it has the same name and it looks the same they're not going to try if they didn't have a first good experience was that the same reason that you

weren't trying to launch yeah so I think it's particularly important with consumer social though elements do apply within cons these consumer utility apps right the kind of single player apps that I've been building um the way that I look at it is we didn't want to burn through the entire Forest before we had optimized the app for retention for LTV for Value add to the consumer but then this Crossroads came and I'm like okay well if we don't do it now then this competitor they don't they don't seem to care they just want to beat

us with whatever it takes they're okay with not optimizing for the user experience they just want to copy and and beat us and to me that was unacceptable I figured it was better to burn through the forest and then pursue this long-term Vision in the future rather than to allow us to be beat in the short term did you end up winning we did so when they came on the scene they had they popped off I'm not going to lie they got to the same number of downloads as us what took us a month and

a half they did it in two weeks but then from there on out I think that we Forex their downloads we're Forex their revenue and we've uh we've kind of become the name in the space why didn't you stop there because now you did an app that did a like whatever a million two million and then this one's now doing something like 100 200 500k a month why stopped there we tried we added features we we iterated but at the end of the day with the level of Revenue that we were doing we weren't comfortable

sacrificing uh the sort of core Loop of download appan Face get results uh and trying to prioritize other features that might come at the expense of the revenue knew that we were doing at the time and so it kind of became clear that especially given mine and my family's financial position that I could set us all up to do well just with umax and then I could pursue bigger Visions in the future so this is around March maybe April which is when I got in contact with these two absolute killer 17-year-olds killers and we knew

that calorie track is one of the biggest spaces in the App Store here we go but it was static they weren't applying new technologies and so our thesis was apply new AI Technologies to make calorie tracking more accurate and easier than ever before which is what led to the Advent of Cal AI we launched a little bit over a month ago we've done about a 100,000 in Revenue over the past month and it's scaling up pretty pretty well just you and two 17year olds me and two 17year olds so with RZ GPT that was like

the first time you really came onto the scene with UMX you were kind of running the ship and you had or you still had to like build the thing yourself now with CI what's your involvement yeah so I haven't done any work on R gbt in a long time I still have Equity ownership I still get paid youx I'm still heavily involved in um and I should make make it clear we are not finished working on UMX there's still a long way to go uh but it's not as 100% time consuming headp space consuming now

with Cal AI um I think there's a massive amount of opportunity here but I have some big things that I want to build into in the future and so I didn't want a commitment where you know I've got to work on this thing for 2 years 3 years four years because that's what I do view the time Horizon for this application as so I brought on these two 17-year-olds to kind of man the ship got Zach gagari as CEO Henry langmack as CTO um and they're absolutely crushing it my primary role is providing the highle

advice playbooks and keys to success that helped enable Riz GPT and umax to succeed that's very interesting so you think it's replicable like theoretically obviously I know now a good amount of like what the Strat is but if you went to some random kid that you found on Twitter and you were like here's exactly what you need to do and here's what I did I would say that this strategy is 100% replicable And if anybody wants to get involved on a project and is very skilled hit me up my Instagram Blake Anderson W Twitter is

the same shoot me a message and if you've got a good idea and you're a hard worker and intelligent maybe we can work together damn just like that just like that I know there's not a lot that we can just expose on the podcast but if we want to talk about the influencer partnership in the strp from a high level because you're you at one point you deployed what was it like 200,000 over the course of a day yeah over the course of two or three days what goes into that like what goes into deploying

it what are you thinking about who are you working with are you writing a bunch of scripts yourself like what actually goes into it yeah so I want to keep this high level um I think that there are a lot of companies and people that try to do influencer Partnerships but they don't know what to look for and so they'll shoot out 100 DMS they'll get 10 responses and they'll work with every influencer that wants to work with them alternatively they may go through an agency to work with these influencers I think that the danger

here is that through paid platform ads you can split test 100 creatives find the working ones double down on that with influencer marketing attribution is very difficult you need to have an unbelievable almost Spidey like sense of who's going to convert what sort of audiences will convert what to look for in an influencer's comment section that indicates that they have a strong community that will follow what they say when they recommend a product and so I think that the vast majority of influencers will produce negative Roi uh when a company to run an influencer campaign

with them but there exist influencers that can produce 10x rois and if you can run as many of those as possible it's extremely scalable if you were to quantify what you look for in an influencer because I think one people one thing that people don't realize about you is that your entire like background it's like very analytical everything from like the strategy games to even like in our conversations the way that you look get things in growth from like numbers so if you were trying to quantify what you look for when it comes to working

with an influencer how would you quantify that cuz I do think that's like one of the biggest differences Beyond just like the angle and the way that you put out the content yeah so I'll say this when it comes to influencer like oneoff influencer Partnerships or running a few promos you've just got to know the space you've got to like when I when I decided to build UMX the first thing I did was dive heads down into becoming someone who is obsessed with the content myself right I thought how can I become a looks maxer

and then I understand what sort of influencers looks maxers will actually listen to and those are the people who will convert now on the flip side when it comes to partnering with an influencer someone like Sam the most important thing I think is that they're hardworking intelligent and a true entrepreneur the unfortunate reality is that a lot of influencers they're Crea and they're not much beyond that and that's okay like it's a great profession but those aren't the sort of people that you want to build a business with Sam possesses all of those qualities but

with C you didn't partner with any influencers that was all just paid influencer marke C I think a key thing here is that we're going up against big incumbents right and if we're going to be able to succeed we'll succeed in a big way and to that effect any one influencer won't be able to produce outside returns to the point where we can't do that in-house ourself weight loss is massive looks maxing on the other hand not necessarily as big of a space partnering with one of the top guys confers massive benefits in terms of

taking you over the market that's very interesting and then the other thing is when you partner with someone you essentially solve the problem of not being able to convince an influencer to work with you because I've realized that a lot of the companies that my friends have started one of the biggest problems that they have from Day Zero is they'll identify an influencer that makes sense for them to work with but they have like 400 followers on Instagram and so they can never get into one person's DMS let alone 30 people even if they had

200,000 to deploy what was your in into breaking into that space yeah so Lucas pactor was the one that connected me with Sam yeah Lucas and I had met a while back uh before he really had his big blow up on social media I saw that he did a podcast with Sam Zia I hit up Lucas and I'm like yo what's up man how are you doing I'm working on this new app Lucas goes dude it looks super cool I should connect you with my boy Sam and that's kind of how I got connected there

I think a a interesting story that's kind of a tangent here but generally applicable back when we were working on Riz GPT we the the space of this Riz content consisted of a lot of faceless creators like you're saying it's impossible to get in contact with a lot of these guys similar to influencers and so the strategy that worked for me or worked for us was you don't just send a DM and then [ __ ] give up if they don't respond you send the DM and then you go DM them on Instagram so if

you start off with the DM on Tik Tok they don't respond respond you DM them on Instagram they don't respond you DM their mom you get in their Discord you spam their [ __ ] Discord until they respond you have to make yourself unignorable to the point where they will take the conversation just to get you to shut the [ __ ] up and I think that applies to influencers it applies to business too it's like there are going to be a million things that stand in your way it would have been a lot easier

when I graduated school to take a full-time job take a $100,000 salary but when you want it bad enough when you want to get connected with an influencer or when you want to be a [ __ ] entrepreneur you'll figure out the things that you need to do to make that work yeah so I think I think that's a very important lesson for any listener one of the things that we are constantly doing at F Inc is hiring and so I've been on now so I've never actually been on like the traditional recruit side where

I'm trying to go get a job but I've for the last two years been on the side of like there is not enough talent in the world I need to find an engineer I need to find a growth person I need to find even a filmmaker and it just seems like it's impossible to find someone which is inherently like it feels wrong because I know for a fact that like there are like all of social media is filled with people all of LinkedIn is filled with people trying to find jobs but it seems like me

and all of my friends all have the problem of not being able to hire someone and if I look back at like what the hires that we made that actually panned out were it's like the kid in Germany that reached out on Twitter and on Instagram and sent me an email and then followed up and it was very apparent in the way that he reached out that he knew who I was and he had done his time and he had taken his time doing the research to actually figure out what message he should write such

that I would reply to him and it's like so many people when they're trying to get a job or they're trying to get a partner or they're trying to get in contact with someone or an archetype of a person they'll try to go as WI as possible they'll try to send 100 DMS 200 DMS 300 DMS kids in college who go on simplify and apply to like 500 jobs a day thinking that that's how they're going to get an internship whereas in reality a lot of the time if you really just focus that effort into

one dm or one Outreach or one person a day the likelihood of success in getting the outcome that you want like 10 X's just by really taking the time to show someone on the other end of the line that you actually know who they are and you put the effort in to get to know them 100% I could not agree more I think one of the highest signal things I've seen from cold Outreach people hitting me up on social media is when someone takes the time to provide something thoughtful and insightful um rather than just

asking me hey can you provide me advice on X they'll say hey I love that you're working on why hear some of my thoughts and then I'll take the conversation with them provide them Insight on X um or people that DM on Twitter and Instagram and and Linkedin and email and it's like if I see an if I see a message from somebody on one platform the probability that I don't respond is very high if I see a message from the same person on four platforms the probability that I respond [ __ ] skyrockets even

if it's the same message takes 2 minutes to go send that message across all platforms honestly there's a way to do it that's spammy and annoying but if you slide in with good valuable insight you do it across multiple platforms you're not going to get ignored there's like a level of entitlement I think that comes with people that say you should never do free work and I say that because I built my entire career off of doing work for free to prove to people that I was better than they maybe thought I was and so

a lot of the times when we've hired designers or when we've hired Engineers or when we've hired um specifically like people in like the growth marketing space it's always people that reach out with free work because I will get 50 to 100 DMS in a week of like can I edit for your podcast or can I join F in or I'm looking for a gig in marketing and that's all the messages but I'll also get a couple DMS a week where it's like hey I think the podcast clips that you post out are horrible I

just re-edited one and I think it's much better and here's what I did to make it differently and it's like here's the hook and here's the font and here's why I chose the font because I saw this tweet that you made three months ago where you retweeted versel thing and I think that this would make sense and when I see that I'm like oh I absolutely want to work with this person and in fact I would probably pay them more than whatever budget I put internally on our hiring doc just because they took the extra

few steps to show that they are intentional about wanting to work with us absolutely I think the key lesson here is quality over quantity this kid Zach that I'm working with right now he hit me up when he was 16 years old he slides in my DMs and wants to give me advice on UMX something along the lines of like hey you're doing X you should be doing y and I'm like damn that was actually a good Insight so I hop on some calls with him and before long I'm working with him as an equal

partner he's now 17 years old I'm working with two 17-year-olds just because they showed at the age of 16 17 what the majority of people at our age in their 20s aren't able to do which is they took the time to provide some value before asking for anything in return and there's like an interesting recurring theme in a lot of the conversations we've had that also comes up in the conversations that we have at FH in which is that this is something fan told me he's like there are a lot of good ideas that exist

and inherently anyone can come up with a lot of good ideas and even you you might have a lot of just good ideas but what is that one idea that is actually great and it's like if you can work on anything for the next 5 years especially once you've done your first thing or you've gotten some you know credibility or built a little bit of momentum the purview of your opportunities just like is insane like it's infinite almost almost you can work with anyone you want you can work on any space you want and like

if you really try hard enough you feel like you can make anything happen so then it's like what do you want to double down on and what is the single highest leverage thing that you can work on that fits you and that fits the things that you care about yeah I think that we've spoken about it before um I I agree with that I also think that there's an element of stepping up bigger and bigger plays um this was kind of my idea behind building Riz GPT it wasn't that I was going to work on

RZ GPT for 5 years but my successes with Riz GPT or relative successes with Riz GPT and umax are what will enable me to spend years working on the things that I care about building out the bigger Vision in male self-improvement where I'm not prioritizing short-term profits and short-term cash flows but prioritizing actual value that I provide to people and to men and leveraging those early success which I think is something that you did fantastically well too yeah I think like when I first joined Fay it was interesting because when I joined Fay at that

point I wasn't actually looking for any opportunities I was in my first year of school can you describe what Fay is and yeah so basically Fay was a crypto stable coin raised 20 million from a16z with no seed or preed and we went through you know quite a large merge the same year that we started um and it was well known in like the crypto space couple bad stuff happened after I'd left left by then maybe we won't talk about that part um but at the point where I joined it was the first couple months

of the company starting and I was literally going to a blockchain at Berkeley event that my friend had dragged me to and there's this guy his name is Joey he was a CEO he was talking about like what makes their protocol cool and like his story and whatnot and I go up to him after it I'm like hey by the way you don't have any marketers on your team I think this is really cool what you're building can I get your phone number and he gave me his phone number I stayed up that night till

like 4:00 a.m. and I made a pitch deck on canva explaining all of the work that i' done in the past that at that point was cool to me and hindsight you know wasn't actually that interesting um like I had worked with penny boards and Lexus and I had a marketing agency and I had a podcast and I had a clothing brand all things that were just interesting to me in the moment when I did them in high school or after high school um but it created the story of like I know how to make

things go viral or I know how to drive traffic to something and I was like here's how I would do it for Fay and up until 4:00 a.m. I was like here's what a YouTube channel would look like here's what a Twitter strategy would look like here's what a Discord Community would look like if it was done the right way here's everything that you're doing wrong and how I would do it better um and I walk into the office the next day and by the end of that conversation it was supposed to be a 15-minute

talk we're both sitting in this one room and it's a giant bean bag and nothing else both of us are just sitting on the bean bag and uh we're talking and I walk out of that you know I walk out of that room he'd offered me a salary five times higher than what I thought I was going to get away with and he gave me the job title of CMO I actually don't think I've told the story in the podcast before but that was quite literally me taking all of the things that I had kind

of thought were cool and kind of worked on in the past packaging them together in a way that made sense and told a story and was very targeted towards the person that I wanted to work with and then now beyond that you know with f Inc it was like look what I did at Fay and everything else and for cont took the BET um but yeah I mean it it it is really interesting just to kind of like think about the fact that all the things that we're talking about are inherently like nothing is new

all of these concepts are things that have existed for the last 20 30 years and will exist for probably forever yeah I think that there's it's honestly somewhat of a shame that we've kind of distilled communication down to like the simplest possible form where people are just copying pasting spamming messages cross platforms where they aren't optimizing for conversion they're optimizing for the number of shots and like taking these shots is great but when you're copy and pasting your [ __ ] [ __ ] B2B SAS or agency that's providing where you don't actually give a

[ __ ] about the value that you provide either all that you care about is getting new clients and getting paid it I I think it's a poor strategy for the long term as well as the short term term as evidence by you going working on Fay that wasn't you just shooting out a th000 DMS on LinkedIn right that was you going and taking the time to form this connection with this person and showing what you can provide absolutely 100% yo I see a bear yo yo video I think it's behind the trees yeah yo

uh to give some context there is a [ __ ] Bear right now about 200 feet away while we are filming this podcast um they often walk down right by here so we may need to run I guess walk away slowly this is the benefit of filming in nature yeah you get to see Bears during a podcast so not everyone has a summer house in Tahoe to film at the bear is moving towards us holy [ __ ] famous last words all right maybe we should walk it's not that big we could I take it

okay grab the chairs okay we've lost site so on a real note you have all these ideas it feels like all of your ideas hit how do you come up with ideas because it's not just the marketing that works you are actually coming up with ideas that lend themselves to your distribution strategy yeah so there are two things that I want to touch on here uh one is the opportunity that exists right now I think that so when we speak about mobile apps because that's the space that I work in since the Advent of the

App Store in the late 2000s there have been no really Paradigm shifting Technologies nothing that fundamentally changed the way that people interact with machine there improvements to ml Vision or optical character recognition but nothing Paradigm shifting with the Advent of AI through large language models we've kind of seen this set of possible applications expand massively and so that's number one I think that the the number of different tools that can be built right now has just exploded it's cheaper than ever to build tools I think for example I built my first two applications entirely using

chat GPT anyone can do it um so that's on one side and then in terms of coming up with the individual idea there's this concept that if you do what everybody else does you'll get the same results as everybody else now I think that this also applies to ideas if you think and say the same things as everybody else you repeat the public dialogue maybe it's an SF maybe it's just culture as a whole um then you're going to come to the same conclusions as other people but if you really want to come to novel

ideas um something like working on a looks maxing app I think that you need to orient your life in a way different from most people you need to try to read between the lines and I think that you'll be in a position for these ideas to come to you it's interesting to see people who are able to accurately decide fors whether or not something is interesting to them because it's interesting to them or whether it's interesting to someone else and therefore they think it should be interesting to them and what I mean by that is

there's like an interesting example that I I I had seen online and it was a guy he was talking about the fact that he had a pool and his friend was like why do you have this pool I feel like you never go swimming and he was like what do you mean I have the pool so I can look at it five times a day it serves its purpose it gives me all the value I bought it for and inherently there's something that goes around maybe it's just the bubble of Twitter that I'm on but

it you definitely see aspects of like group think even within emerging Tech where it's like everyone's landing page looks like linear all of the GPU companies kind of look alike in a certain sense invariably I think it becomes an echo chamber where you have a hundred different companies building B2B CRM management powered by AI or uh you know autonomous agents to manage your email inbox right shout out Ultra there are just so many people that are building the same things and I don't think it's a sustainable path to success nor and you know you can

debate that but personally I think it's a less fun way to live your life you're you're going to be in bloodbath competitions you're you're just going to be going head-to-head with people and I like the uh the Peter teal quote I believe competition is for losers absolutely now I know this may be somewhat hypocritical given that I'm building an AI calorie Tracker app um but you know I think that it's a good framework to live by as a whole it's very interesting when you came to SF initially you didn't have that many connections our Twitter

mutuals was like zero well it was zero and I've kind of watched as you know people start recognizing you as at the office you start showing up on podcasts um people start talk bringing up umax as like a case study for Consumer apps when you're not around how has your Social Circle changed cuz that's also very interesting that's a [ __ ] great question um There's No Malice here no no bad blood but I've drifted away from a lot of my high school and college friends um that kind of pursue the traditional path of get

a full-time job go to New York Chicago whatever it may be and I think that I'm still looking for that sort of group of like-minded entrepreneurs now that said um as an individual I do think that I thrive on keeping a tight-knit group of a small number of people that are close to me I like living out here in Tahoe for the summer right getting away from all of it my in terms of SF my plan was always from the start go there few months make my Splash in the tech scene such that when time

comes to raise capital people will hopefully know my name um but yeah I don't I don't like living in these sort of big metropolitan areas uh specifically uh where it's kind of like there's no work life balance I I hate the idea in SF and the tech world as a whole that you shouldn't have work life balance I absolutely fundamentally reject that um I don't think that you need to work 16 hours a day if you're passionate about it and you want to great I don't think that there's any shame in wanting to spend time

outside working out hanging out with friends going out like those are things that bring me a lot of joy in life and I think also enable me to be more productive when I am working that's interesting I think that's one of the places where we kind of differ in terms of like philosophy I think we do you know me it's like my entire house everyone around me we're all working on something together brain doesn't really turn off except for like maybe 4 hours a week and that's how I like it so I rarely get burnt

out you met all of my friends now or almost all of my friends all of us are working on something together even like with effing it's like almost like all consuming from like a work perspective where it's like the things that I'm working on now even with ol if it's like if I'm not work thinking about one thing I'm thinking about the other even when there's downtime in one project there's hundred things to do on the other one and like that is where I realized I thrive whereas when I was growing up it was like

a couple like very like you know small disjointed groups where we were all kind of friends but I never really felt like it there was never that like um like I always had a sense of community just from like growing up religious and going to the musjid or like the mosque um very frequently so I never felt isolated in that sense but one of the highest like quality of life improvements came for me over the last two or three years where I Not only was able to work with my friends that were say you know

more experienced than me but from the things that I've started to learn over the last few years I've been able to work with my friends and almost bring them up with me people that have finished college or dropped out of school didn't really know what to do after and now it's like we work together and they all make good money and we all make good money and we all we're talking about work when we hang out we're talking about work at the gym talking about work at the sauna like that was what really worked for

me 100% I mean I think I totally agree with that latter philosophy of bringing up the people that want it and you know have the facilities or capabilities to thrive in this sort of Entrepreneurship environment I've got my brothers here with me right now working on consumer apps and so yeah I think that there's a lot of value in uh bringing the people that you have those long-standing relationships with because you know that you can work well with them you trust them you know that they're capable it's like if I'm going to anything I work

on now is something that I'm going to work on for the next 5 10 or 50 years and so inherently I would rather work with someone that I trust someone that is almost like family to me instead of working with some dude I met on LinkedIn cuz they were networking absolutely I do think though there's some of those LinkedIn people that slot him with those high value messages hey if if you're an engineer if you're an engineer and you want to work on something with either of us hit us up drop a DM if you

had to like sum up actually everything that you learned in the last year into like a few core learnings what would the biggest ones be whether it's social or a growth tactic or just like the way you live your life no so I think this is an interesting question because what I have learned is not necessarily applicable to others okay right um I think that and throughout this podcast I'm sure that there are things that I've said that may seem like they're universally universally applicable when in reality they're probably just applicable to me I would

say that the number one thing that I've learned um uh friend SL Mentor um was telling me about how Peter teal does not give advice right he rarely gives advice on what you should do certainly I think that the lesson here is that I don't think he doesn't give advice CU he's not intelligent and because he hasn't learned a lot himself obviously but because advice is rarely applicable to the masses um things that I've learned that have worked for me will not necessarily work for other people and now you take this on the flip side

things that people tell you to do and things that people say will work for you will not necessarily work when I was graduating from school working on Riz GPT everyone was like dude what the [ __ ] if you're going to pursue entrepreneurship build something big build something cool I rejected that and thankfully it ended up being a good decision um and I think that people and Society friends family will tell us things that we should do because they want the best for us they truly do but it doesn't mean that they're right and it

doesn't mean that what worked for somebody else is going to work for you and I want to apply that back to everything that I ever say if I State something matter of factly forgive my arrogance I'm stating it because it worked for me that doesn't mean that it will work for other people that's very true actually and even to add on that I've noticed with a lot of the times that people gave me advice very strong and felt very strongly about the advice that they gave me a lot of the time I think they turned

out wrong especially when it came to like leaving school or picking the school that I actually went to um or some of the other kind of like career SL like life decisions that I've made in the last you know year I think you know some of the things I'm talking about um it's very easy to like say something you strongly believe that is best for someone else and then when you see the complete opposite working out for them saying you know what you were always right like I see how that worked or it would have

it would have been that like that for me or like I wanted the best for you dude the the number of people and I'm sure you've experienced this too the number of people that are like I always knew it would work out for you I always believed in you but then you're like [ __ ] when it wasn't really working out you were encouraging me to go the safe path and not to take the risk that ended up having the big returns and once again it's not because these people it's not because they're haters a

lot of the time it's not because they don't want you to succeed or they're scared of seeing you succeed it's because they don't know you like you know yourself and if you know that you've got that [ __ ] dog in you then you've got to take the big shots I'm not even going to ask the last question that was a good way to wrap things up hell yeah