Silicon Valley OG shares crazy stories from Zynga early days + 3 business ideas
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And they said, well, you shouldn't confuse revenue for success. So I said, well, you guys shouldn't confuse a lack of revenue for success either. And then they got kind of upset. Dude, this meeting, it goes in the Silicon Valley Autistic Hall of Fame.

What's up? We got our friend Siki here, founder of Runway. Back in the day, built a company, sold it to Zynga, built another company, sold it to Postmates, has gone viral many times. And there's a lot of people in Silicon Valley who you almost, it's like a film director. It's like, oh, they're working on a new project. You really want to know what they're doing. That's you because you do things with taste. So excited to have you here.

Do you have any good stories from early days of Zynga? Because you sold a company to Zynga back when Zynga was the shit. Did you work with Mark Pincus? What's he like? Give me a good Zynga story. Okay, I have a great story. How I came to report to Mark Pincus is actually, it's not a great story. I have like so many good Mark Pincus stories. So yeah, Zynga was my first company.

And I joined as director of product owner studio. Wait, can you give the background of Mark? So he marks like a Silicon Valley OG. Did he help fund Facebook to get off the ground? Was that his first big hit? He did. So he and Reid Hoffman co-owned, bought the Six Degrees of Separation patent from a company called Six Degrees.

And he angel invested in Facebook and also licensed a patent, I believe, for more stock into Facebook. That patent was basically the kind of the social networking patent, right? Like how we're connected six degrees of Kevin Bacon away from each other. And I think there's some story where Reed and him realized that if this patent got in the hands of Microsoft or some big company that they would be able to squish Facebook.

innovation by a startup by like holding this patent over their head. So they bought the patent, I believe, and just decided we're not going to use it to stop anybody. And then they, I think, parlayed it into getting extra shares in Facebook, which is amazing. I think that's what happened. Yeah. So when I joined, I was a director of products and my girlfriend and my wife, who I recently met, moved to China for some job work thing. And

I was like three months into Zynga and I was like, oh, I'm not really feeling it. It's not that fun. So I told them I was going to resign and move to China. And they said, hey, why don't we just give you this new job? You know, you can report to Eric Scheinmeier, one of the co-founders, and basically be head of product for the company. I said, no, that sounds fun. That sounds great. So I did that. So I reported to Eric Scheinmeier. He was a co-founder of Zynga. And

What happened is a month into the job, Eric Schreimer stopped showing up to work. Like wouldn't respond to emails, wouldn't go to work. And I was like, what? And basically that's when I reported to Mark and I was the head of products. And later the, the, the punchline of the story is what I, the reason why he stopped showing up to work is I later found out that he decided to become a ninja. Pretty good reason. That's not what I thought was coming.

He literally, he was like, he wanted to start a ninja dojo and he wanted to undergo ninja training. And so when I... What in the Napoleon Dynamite is this story? How's his ninja career now? He started another social games company.

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So give us, at the time, what was Zynga like? Was it king of the world at the time or was it on the downswing? Yeah, I mean, what's interesting on Zynga is they hired a bunch of people who used to be investment makers to be product managers there because it was just all about the numbers going up. It was highly analytical. So I went in and just the amount of knowledge they had about growth. One of the things that really blew my mind, I think about a lot,

is when I first had a conversation with Mark Pincus early on, I think maybe during the acquisition, I asked him, hey, what do you think about this industry? It just seems really low moat. It's hard to have a competitive moat here because it's just so easy to enter. You build a new game and for it to expand. And how defensible is it? And I think about his answer quite a bit because I was like, no, this is great. I want there to be more new entrants into the space because it's free R&D for me.

And I just like, okay, that is that blows my mind. That is next level because he would just so confidence ability to execute that like anyone who's going to come in with some new idea, they can just like fast follow it and do a much better job of growing it, which is like what they did, right? Farmable was in the first farm game, poker was the first poker game. And they work really, really well, at least during the Facebook era. Wait, did he have like Genghis Khan energy where he was like, is he a conqueror?

Yeah, he did. He did. I love that. We were working like 80, 90, 100 hours a week at Zynga. And that was kind of the norm. It sort of seems like a waste of talent, though, to have that Cocker energy and do it in the lamest way possible. The Farmville. Yeah, like Farmville. That's what he's trying to do this on. A few billion dollars, a few billion dollars. There's a...

There's a quote by Max Levchin at the time. Max Levchin, who created PayPal, is by all accounts like a genius computer engineer. Single-handedly was like fighting fraud at PayPal and like with as a one-man army, like withstood, you know, the attacks of all of these sort of financial scammers around the world. The guy's brilliant.

And then his next startup, I think, was Slide. And it was making widgets for MySpace and Facebook where you'd be like, slideshows or SuperPoke where you throw chickens at your friends when you wake up by pushing a button and it just slaps a friend with a chicken or something like that. And they go, what was your takeaway from Slide? Because Slide ultimately didn't fully work out. Sold to Google, I think, for a little bit. But he goes...

be really careful what you choose to work on because everything can be optimized endlessly. So he's like, once we got in that, we could just sit there and optimize and just get the number of chicken slap per day up. So, you know, choose wisely. Should I be optimizing this chicken slapping or should I be doing something else? And I've always thought about that because I found myself falling into the same trap. No matter what I'm doing, if I'm selling little widgets online,

My life becomes about selling widgets and I can optimize that to infinity. And people do. If you go look at how any company works, that's what they've done. They've optimized it to infinity. Dude, when my wife worked at Facebook years and years ago,

I remember like I was talking to all of our coworkers at a party and I was like, oh, you guys are amazing. You guys are so smart. What are you working on? And they explained it to me, but it boiled down to they're trying to convince Brazilians to put more stickers on their photos. Like the there was like one dog that had a long tongue. Do you guys remember that fucking dog? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like they're trying to convince that fucking dog sticker to put Brazilians. It was like the face. It was like the face filter thing when Snapchat came out. And then you opened up your mouth, a giant tongue would come out.

Dude, I felt like when they explained that, like I kind of both, I was like, wait, so you're just trying to get like Brazilians to use more stickers because they share more photos. I felt like a cartoon. It was like, I was like, what? Like, you know what I mean? I was like, what are you guys doing?

I also have a Max Levchin and Slider story. This goes back 17 years, so I don't think it'll mind anymore. But this is when I first moved to the city and I had this app on Facebook that was blowing up. And so some guy who worked with Keith Reboy, Keith Reboy was, I think, the CEO of Slider at the time, said, hey, we like your app. You want to meet the team? I said, oh my God, this is amazing. I'm a year out of college. I could be Max Levchin. So I go in.

We had a meeting at noon, and I go to the slide office, and no one was there. Everyone was out for lunch. And I talked to receptionists. I said, hey, I'm here to meet Max and Keith. And they're like, oh, they're out of lunch. They'll be back in half an hour. I said, okay. So we sit there for half an hour. And then they walk in, and they act like they kind of forgot there was a meeting. But we go to the meeting room, and we just start talking about what I wanted to do with this app I built, whether I wanted to build it independently or maybe like join slide.

And they asked me how much I wanted for it. I said, well, I have a co-founder, so $2 million, I would probably do it. $1 million each. I kind of laughed at the number. I'm like, what? Like, I looked at the valuation app data and the amount of money we're generating. It's not a huge ask, but it's fine. It's too much. My friend at Heal built SuperPoke, which I recently bought. And they said verbatim, you know, we bought SuperPoke and he's easily the 18th or 19th most important person in the company now out of a company of like 60 people. I said,

Okay, that's a compelling offer. And then I said, and I said, yeah, this is probably not gonna happen. And I said, you know, we're profitable, we were making a bunch of money from ads. So it's cool if you don't want to buy it. And they said, well, you shouldn't confuse revenue for success.

And at this point, I was just like really upset. So I said, well, you guys shouldn't confuse a lacquer revenue for a CISACI either. And then they got like kind of upset. So then it got really weird. Oh, I forgot to mention, like at the start of the meeting, they said something like, hey, you know, there's a recession coming up to each other. And they're like, yeah, there's a recession coming up. And then he said, I can't wait to buy all these shitty companies for cheap. Like we're in a room. And we're like, what?

What the hell? Dude, this meeting, it goes in like the Silicon Valley Autistic Hall of Fame. And then at the end, Keith was like, hey, Max, what was your body fat percentage in the PayPal days? And Max was like 8%. And I was like, yeah. And I'm like, look, I'm not the fittest person, but I'm not selling you my company because you're fitter than me. What is happening? So that was my meeting with them. But

The thing that made it all make sense, made sense is the next week I was talking to my, one of my friends, John, who also was, had a company building apps. And he comes up to me at some party. He goes, Siki, man, like you won't believe this. So I just had a meeting with Sly last week. I'm like, really? He's like, yeah, it was so weird. Cause they started a meeting talking about how there's a recession coming up and thinking all these companies are cheap. I was like, oh my God, it's a script.

uh it was in episode one of this podcast i think uh my buddy sui told almost the same story he goes he gets invited to slide he says oh my god and what they said was they were like you should uh we want to hire you and he's like i don't really want a job like i have my apps good i thought you wanted to like maybe buy it or something and then he opened the door and he goes you see all those guys out there they they're gonna build your app in like six days if you don't take this offer and he was like

okay, I'm not interested in this even more now. I'm like, this is horrible. My app is stupid. What he said, he goes, his app at the time was called like superlatives. It was like, you would name your friend most likely to, you know, go to jail or something. He's like, you're threatening me that you're going to take my app. I think my app is stupid. The fact that you think my app is cool makes me think you're stupid. That's what he thought in his head. Siki, who did you meet? I love talking to people.

to people who have been around a bunch of these folks before they kind of quote made it. Who is a tycoon or a big shot now that you're shocked by because of when you knew them when you guys were both younger, you're like, oh, I can't believe they actually developed into such an amazing business person. I don't know that I met a lot of people who weren't great other than I think were great that were huge later. Who's someone you met that wasn't huge then but you knew

And why did you know? Oh, yeah. I mean, Drew Houston. When did you meet him? Dropbox was like 10 people. It was late 2007, early 2008. And we were just talking about growth.

It's like they had this like college referral plan. So Drew Houston, I mean, a niche who's general partner in Andreessen, like he was just a founder building apps on mobile phones, right? And he would come to my office and we'd talk about it. Oh, probably the best one is Chris Wansfroth. Who's that? He's co-founder of CEO GitHub. And he was a contractor at PowerSet, which was like this job I took when I first moved to the city. But he was actually a contractor for my first company, Serious Business. He,

I had him build this translation layer between Facebook markup language and my space markup language. I just took after and he was really good at it. And I distinctly remember that we were at 21st Amendment. Yeah, or actually the bear brewery doesn't matter. But I gave him a full time employee planning offer in early 2008. And he was considering it.

And the same night when we're talking about it, he said, you know, DHH just put Rails on GitHub. And so I think I might work on GitHub full time. And I was thinking in my head and I was like, the smart thing for me to do is actually shut down my Facebook games business and go work for you. But I didn't say that. But I was thinking it. Have you had any massive angel investment wins because you're around the hoop for so long?

And so, and really?

that we ended up being the fourth customer for analytics platform. It's now Amplitude. And we used it. We thought this is great. This is the best thing we've seen since the Zynga internal tools. And I managed to get into the seed round and that IPO that we ended up being a 400x return on that, which is pretty great. Let's jump in with ideas, opportunities. You're an idea guy. What do you think are some cool ideas or opportunities that

that you would want to be working on right now? So I built a Zapier and it's basically categorizes my emails with GPT-4 into different labels. So I have this very long prompt and automation. And I also use a protocol SaneBox, which also does something similar to filters by emails. But there's been no good version of email management software that I'm able to customize a prompt and train it. So I want to say, hey, here's the things related to my kids.

And there's no keywords necessarily. You have to kind of read it. It's like some email to my babysitter or an email from the school. And if it's related to my kids, I want you to put it in this folder. And the idea is I want an inbox for like these different contexts.

And so people are doing different kinds of email categorization. What's missing is there's no way to train it. So I think building some way for a product to understand all of the concepts about your life and organize your stuff, starting with inbox, will be really handy for me. And I've seen at least 12 companies do this, and no one has done a really great job of it.

I just tested this product. Have you guys heard of this? I can't think of the name right now. But it was this thing where I... It sounds insane. Where it recorded my screen for weeks at a time. And it would see how I'm typing, what I'm saying to people. And it would give me feedback on the productivity of my day and how I can improve it. Have you guys seen this? It started with an R, I think. Is it called a...

Isn't it? Yeah. No, Sean, you're right. It's sort of the guy who started. It's like a, like a, he's like a guy. He's like been around. He was doing like a pendant or something. Right. At one point. And then now it's a rewind. Rewind. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Rewind. AI. Is that it? Yeah. They stopped working on it. Now it's called limitless. And there's working on the pendant now. Yes. I was tinkering with rewind and the promise. It,

It's not there yet. But the promise of this was amazing. I was so into this. And it's kind of describing what you're just explaining because we're having to use Zapier and OpenAI or Chachapiti to kind of duct tape this all together. Their premise was amazing. And that is exactly what I'm looking for.

I got a third one, which is like a lot spicier, but you know, like this is not a venture backable thing, but you know, just character AI and chai and all of these like chatbots that really people are using for sexy chats. I think like someone could, and these things print money, by the way, like they immediately generate millions of dollars a month.

And I thought if I were just in it just to like pred money, the thing I would make is something that is kind of like Tinder. But basically everything is AI generated. So it's not like, oh, you're creating a robot, but it's a fake dating app where everyone is attractive and is super into you. And then you can like...

that then you can go off of your Tinder app and go on Instagram and have an Instagram account on actual Instagram is owned by the person that you met on your fake Tinder app. Siki, do you know who Tai Lopez is? He's like the guy who had the infomercial that was like here in my garage. I do know Tai, who he is, yeah. So Tai, uh,

He came on MFM years ago. And an accusation that I learned about him based off of the comments on YouTube is that years before he was whatever he was famous for, he owned dating apps. And the accusation was that all of the users were completely fake and that it was guys in the Philippines running it and...

doing exactly what you're describing. That's true of the majority of dating apps. What do you mean? That's just like standard off-radiate procedure. Like plenty of fish, you know, like a seeking arrangement, like

That is their business model. They're like outsource men acting as women? Yeah, there's also like the webcam industry. Like they, up until OpenAI, the companies with the most advanced AI technology is going to be one of these companies because they are better at creating chatbots than anyone. They have the most advanced technology. I'm not kidding. Like I know people who work there or run it.

they've just developed better chatbot technology than anyone. That'd be so funny if that's where AGI starts, actually. It's not OpenAI. It's none of these labs. It's like...

whatever, some of these like webcam sites. That's not a crazy idea. I mean, isn't that how it typically has been where a lot of like the vice industries are the ones pushing the envelope? Yeah. Yeah, it's a transformative for OnlyFans, right? Like, I don't know if you read, but like there's, you know, you're a big influencer on OnlyFans and you have an army of 100 people who are like typers or chatters.

And the funny thing about them is they're not just chatters that are flirting. They're also basically salesmen. So what they're doing is they're chatting to try to upsell you until that get by this video, by this photo. I don't know exactly by the subscription, whatever the thing is, but they're not just customer support. They're actually sales, but they need to come across like they're the original person, which is just hilarious. What do you think that office environment is like?

So I know someone who works in that, and it's just normal. It is like the most boring, cubicle, normal office environment that you've ever seen. That's almost better than if it was weird. The other thing with the dating apps I think that they did was, I remember seeing this study about Match.com. Because if you were a guy on Match.com, you would basically send out 30 messages and you'd get one back or whatever. Yeah.

And what they would do is they realized that a lot of guys' accounts would go inactive because they're not getting replies. And so what they would do is they would basically send, they would show an active person 30 inactive profiles, knowing that that inactive person is not there to reply, but

but that that will be the notification for that person to come back and reactivate their subscription. They have to pay to go read their inbox and to be able to reply. And so it's almost intentionally a horrible experience for the person who's there trying to find somebody in order to reactivate all the churned members. And they would basically, in the first hundred matches that they would show you, something like 50, 60, 70% of those matches were all just inactive people they wanted you to send a notification to to make them come back. That sounds like a Zynga train PM. Yeah.

Dude, I went to the Zynga office once back in the heyday. It was the craziest office I've ever seen. Sam, did you ever go to this thing? Yes. It was like it shared a building or was next door to Airbnb and it had a huge bulldog in the front, right? And I think at one point, I think they owned the building and I think the building was worth at one point more than the company. Like, you know,

hundreds of millions of dollars. Why? What did you think of the office, Sean? Well, you would go in, there's a giant tunnel, like an LED tunnel you would walk through just to enter. And then when you're there, first of all, there was dogs everywhere. And it was like everybody, it was bring your dog to work. There was just like herds of dogs running around. It was insane. And we met the chef and the chef

Like the food operation was more sophisticated. Just the cafeteria was more sophisticated than any company that I'd ever been a part of. Like just the food part was better than my actual company. So like they had a staff of 60 people on the culinary team. They had a roof on the top where they were growing all the vegetables. He had like a giant fridge that was like the size of like a swimming pool you'd walk in and there was cows hanging upside down because they had their own butcher kitchen.

They didn't serve soda. They only brewed their own sodas. Like everything was soup to nuts custom and like just so insanely sophisticated for a cafeteria program. I was like, man, if the food is like this,

I don't even want to know what the actual teams that do the work are. And I walked into one PM thing and it was like a stock market, dude. His screen had so many metrics fine-tuned in real time where they were running so many tests at a time. And it was like you said, Siki, it looked to me from the outside like the most data-driven operation I had ever really seen. I knew about what we did, but what we did looked like cavemen compared to what they were doing in terms of

sophistication of data. The food thing reminds me, like, I was the person who did a petition for us to serve real bacon. And after a few months, we finally started to serve real bacon because we never had real bacon. It was only turkey bacon. Because, you know, Mark Pincus didn't like to kill pigs. But yeah, like, one of the things that people did at Zynga and the product org is we had PM on call. And I've never seen this on any other organization. The PM on call for every game would daily send an analysis of what changed day over day.

And so if there's a drop, then you would segment it. And so, oh my God, there's like an anonymous, like 50% drop in Mexico for Farmville. And we're not sure why, because usually on Wednesdays at two, it shouldn't be like this. And it lasts three hours long and they would have to explain, oh, it's because the World Cup is happening.

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What comes first? We were with Mr. Beast a few weeks ago, and I had the same question, but he wasn't able to articulate or answer it. What comes first when you're that data or analytic oriented? Are you that way and scale comes because of that? Or can you only behave that way because you have scale? So it depends on the environment. If it's a data-friendly environment like Facebook is,

than like Facebook platform is where virality lets you grow from zero to a billion, then data is all that matters. But you can see in the experience of Zynga that that didn't translate to the mobile industry. Mobile was less about virality. It was just difficult to do distribution a lot more without creativity. And that's why Supercell had such a creative advantage because they actually built very fun new games. So I think it's the completely different environment. If it's hard to get early distribution, then scale makes data more important.

But if it's quite difficult to get early distribution, then you want to be creative and innovative and brand and creativity matters a lot more. Do you remember any like random game change like color red to blue or flashing lights or whatever that just generated like $10 million overnight? I always remember thinking that like the best way to generate $30 million overnight is just to like say, hey, it's going to take you $10 just to unlock the game today.

Like, we could just, like, make it not payable and people would pay. One of the more interesting ideas is this idea of crew. So we had this idea of collecting materials and you ask people for materials. One of the mechanics that we invented at Zynga is this idea of crew where you, for whatever thing you want to unlock, you have to get at least, like, 20 people to help you, unique people. Because what that did is, what we saw in the data is that when you do materials, you ask the same two people over and over again.

But if we have a unique spread, then that increases the distribution. And that ended up being like a pretty large boost in the AUs. Another thing that we saw is like just the power segmentation. And so there was this one day where our numbers went down anonymously and I had to figure out, well, is it like this channel or that channel? It turns out there was one particular typo bug in the drop rate of this particular treasure that was creating a lot of opportunities for people to share.

And so you just spend all day doing things like that. And so it's rarely something like huge, but it's all the details added together that makes a difference, isn't it? What were the other business ideas or opportunities that you think are exciting right now?

Yeah, I mean, I actually asked Sam Altman to make this, but I don't know how long they're going to take. But I'm doing a lot of medical research. What? What did you say? He asked Sam Altman to make this product, he said. Oh, I thought you were like, oh, you had Sam Altman make a list for you to talk about. I was like, that's interesting. No, oh no, no.

We're not that tight. But no, I was doing a bunch of medical research and I noticed that you can't access paywalled articles. And so I really wish someone would make a version of deep research that lets you enter your paywall credentials so you can get full-time access.

And this goes further. I think there's just so much data behind auth walls, paywalls that you can't get to and you can only search on the open web. And the more private data you can get access to, the more useful these ages become. So that's like

Probably the number one thing I've been thinking about. What's the name of the company that starts with an R? It's based in England. Sean, we've talked to him about him a bunch. It's like an acronym. Anyway, it's an academic publishing company in England. And it's really controversial because I think it has the second highest profit margin of all publicly traded companies in the world behind public storage. And the shtick behind it and why everyone hates it is because...

Researchers at universities don't get paid anything for this. In fact, oftentimes they have to pay tuition in order to even go to these places. But they take your research and they put it behind like a $30,000 a year paywall. And so it's a very frustrating industry. Yeah, that's the whole industry, right? Elsevier, I think, is the biggest one. And there's a bunch of controversy around that.

And yeah, all of these are extremely hard margin businesses. They charge an arm and a leg for access. The researchers get paid nothing. The peer reviewers get paid nothing. All they're doing is just like taking the text and copy and pasted and putting somewhere and maybe like printing it into a journal. So how would this work? You're talking about like you told Sam Altman to say, hey, can I just give ChatGPT my credentials and then it can go log in for me and use that information when I ask it questions.

So that's exactly what you would have to do it. How could a founder, how would a founder get around that? Or how would they do this? Yeah, I mean, you would need access to O3, the full model first, because that's what open research is based on. But I mean, it's not terribly difficult to create something like a deep research. There was a company called, there is a company called GenSpark. So I'm friends with the founder, GenSpark. He used to be the VP of search at Baidu, which is the Google of China.

And they made a version of deep research just using a different model. And so that's relatively easy to build. I think the storage of the credentials and logging in is a little bit more tricky. Right. It also just seems like somebody could just create like SciencePal or something like that. It's like specifically for researchers, right?

And it's a chat GPT-like interface, but it's specifically trained on or going to access all of the journals, all of the academic research out there for you and just do like a vertical thing. Isn't there like a Google for doctors that's like this, like Lumos or something like that? There is. So I'm deep in this space. There's a company called Illicit. There's a company called SciSpace.

And what they allow you to do is they let you search abstracts where available. And also you can upload individual PDFs too, which also ChatGP allows you to do. But there's nothing I've seen that's indexed as the full text of all these journals with your credentials. And why are you so interested in, what's all this research for? Is it your daughter? And if it is, what's the story behind that? Yeah, so my daughter was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor last September. Okay.

And we've been doing everything we can to find new treatments for this because it's so rare. And you really get a deep insight into the sentence and the structure of the medical community. And one of the big learnings is that what is available as standard of care, meaning that's what's available if you go to a hospital or you talk to a doctor and what is available at the frontier, there's

a huge gap already. And then further, when you have a rare disease, just the amount of research and data and treatments available is also just thin because you need to have like enough critical mass for the research to be worth it so they can recoup the research costs.

And the other interesting thing that we've learned is that the IP issues are really weird. So, for example, there's this drug that is FDA approved, non-prescription, it's been out since the 70s, treat PED warns. And over the past 20 years, there's a huge amount of compelling data that this might be a pretty good treatment for different kinds of cancer.

And there's been no clinical trials for it because there is no money for it because you can't patent a pinworm drug. And so all the money, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars are going to new molecules that are patentable, even if things are already available. And so once you get into eFIT as you're like, wow, this is super, super broken. And so, yeah, I'm doing a lot of primary research in order to find repurposal drugs that might already exist that could treat

an Australia-rural brain tumor. It's, you know, there's... Obviously, this is super serious, and I'm sorry you're going through everything. But also, there's, like, an interesting logistical thing of, like, wait, so you are able just to just research potential cures or ways to help your daughter on your own and come up with a solution? I mean, is that, like, what you hope the outcome is? Like... Yeah, I mean, so there's...

I'm not the first founder type who's been in this situation, right? So the co-founder of Clubhouse, Rohan, his daughter has a rare genetic disease. Her name's Lydia, and he runs the Lydia Foundation. And he's going so far as manufacturing his own drugs.

Right. For very rare diseases, you can do a lot. There is other people I've met have done similar things like end of one cures exist. And so you can go. This is what I mean. Like if you're sufficiently motivated and there's no one more motivated than a dad with a sick kid, you could do you can go so much further than what is available as standard of care.

And so even the last time we met with our primary care team, they were proposing like two particular paths, one involving like pretty aggressive surgery and radiation, another involving this like drug. I proposed a third path and they were discussing it. And this is like neurosurgeons and clinicians that came back a week later. It's like, actually, your path things were set.

And the reason I was able to do that is like, because this disease is so rare, I am like more knowledgeable about disease than anyone in the room because they have to like study 50 different cancers. Yeah. Right. Wow. That's, that's pretty incredible. Also,

My experience has been that the doctors, once you get off of the kind of standard of care, and this is maybe I'm projecting just from like, you know, I just had a knee injury. And I was asking the doctor, I was like, hey, like, would PRP or stem cells, like, is there anything? What's a peptide? Can I put a peptide in there? And he's like, you know, there's not a lot of evidence. You know, that's not part of the protocol.

We don't have great evidence. And he was sort of like, my hands are tied. He's an orthopedic surgeon. He's just like, you know, my hands are, I can only recommend what I can recommend. You could do those things.

I don't know. And so then I felt like, you know, I'm on my own here. Have you, once you do this path, are you just outside of the medical system? Basically, are you outside of your standard chain of command with your doctors and you have to get your own system set up? That's a great question. And I've had an almost similar conversation in the last meeting I was just describing. And so I saw it play out in real time. So the neurosurgeon said, hey, when we did this operation, when we did it for this reason, do it for some other reason. It's not part of the standard of care.

But our primary clinician, she is like, she runs, he's a principal investigator at one of the clinical trials, the only one of two that treats this disease. And she was like, yeah, you're right. We don't have a lot of evidence because there hasn't been a lot of research into the tumor. And so...

Sometimes you have to argue for first principles. And if it's a fairly rare disease, they're more open to being more creative. And in our case, our clinician was able to convince a neurosurgeon this was the right path, or at least it's worth trying. And she told us she was excited to have a partner who seems well-informed and is willing to think outside of the box. And I straight up said, I do not care what the standard of care is. I think the standard of care is crap.

And she basically said, yeah, I think so too. I just can't say that. Right. Dude. And that's pretty cool that you're in San Francisco too, where hopefully you think that like the open mindedness or the early adopter mindset, like even trickles out to like the doctors and things like that. That's pretty cool that you're around a doctor who's like willing to try some crazy stuff or what's crazy to a lot of people.

So to answer Sean's question, like if you do find your own drug, you do have to like show enough research and be well informed enough that someone is willing to prescribe it off-label on a compassionate use basis. And so you just need to convince one doctor. And so if you can't find one, you can find others who's willing to do that. And then you're in the clear. And it's a lot easier if it's like a fairly serious rare disease.

Can you tell the story about you tweeted out about your daughter's condition and then this crazy crypto turn of events happened where someone created a coin and then millions, maybe tens of millions. I don't even know how much money was raised. And then people got mad at you. People were speculating on this thing. I don't even understand it. Can you explain what was going on? And also just explain why.

Is this just, was there just degenerate gambling or did you maybe stumble upon a novel way that people might fund research in the future? I don't know which one of the two it is. Yeah, I think I have a better idea which one it is after some reflection on it. So explain what happened. Yeah. Christmas, I was going to Japan to ski with some friends and the family. And I was on a flight and I had a plan to start a GoFundMe for this lab.

the Henkison lab in the University of Colorado. So we were donating money to them once this happened because they were the only lab in North America that researches this particular tumor called the craniopharyngeal. And the treatment that we're on, they found. So I thought, okay, for Christmas, I thought it'd be great to do a GoFundMe, use my network and raise some money for this lab.

So I tweeted this thread with this GoFundMe link and that we ended up raising about a quarter million dollars for Lab, which is like, I think the biggest donation up to that point. But what happened is some people started asking about, hey, can I donate crypto? And so I said, OK, I posted my ENS, right, my Ethereum name system address.

and people started donating a little bit of ETH. And then some other people said, hey, do you have a Sol address? Because we're on Solana. And I didn't have a Sol address. I was aware what Solana is, but I never touched it. And so the next day, once I landed, I created my first Solana wallet. I created this address and I tweeted it out. And basically what happened... By the way, are you big in the crypto world? Why were all the crypto guys doing this for you? Just because... What's the motivation other than it's good? Well, I had...

So it didn't occur to me. I thought it was people. I had like 77,000 followers at a time. And I'm not big in a crypto world. I've like been on and off active in crypto since 2017, but never in a major way. I'm not a crypto account that people follow. But I found out why people did this later. And this answers the question of Sean, like, is this gambling or is this something else? But anyway, I posted a soft soul address. And basically an hour later,

I looked at my wallet and the wallet said $400,000 and it was zero an hour before. So I'm looking at like what is going on and it turns out, so someone created a coin called on pump.fun, which is a platform where you can create a coin in literally like 30 seconds. And I was on ETH, right? And I have an active in crypto. This wasn't a thing. Creating a new token on Ethereum was like a whole process. Now they shortened it to 30 seconds. This is called,

pump.fun. Pump.fun. Yeah, it's crazy. Have you seen this business, by the way? No. These guys made like $500 million of profit last year. More than that, I think. More than that. And so you click a button and you make your own coin. And obviously in the name, there's no hiding that the point of this is that it's a pump scheme. Pump and dump scheme. Right? They made $500 million. Yeah.

At least. At least they make a lot of money. That's their take, specifically. It's just like the majority of the traffic on Solana. And so people are basically trading these new coins and trading them, trying to ride it. And it's basically musical shares, right? Have you guys gone to this website? It's crazy. It looks like a Geocity website. Like there's like flashing banners. This is insane. It's all real time. Like yesterday during the Super Bowl,

uh, somebody created, and it's for, for Dave Portnoy, this sort of barstool, jailstool, jailstool, and then jailstool ran up to like a hundred million dollars or something like that. But like he said, it's, it's musical chairs. So you're buying, trying to catch one of these thousand X waves, but it's going to dump and you just got to know when you're going to get off the train. And then if you wait too long or you're the one who comes in late, you lose. So it is a, it's like being at a roulette table or whatever, where you're, you're just throwing chips at the table, trying to, trying to hit. Oh,

Oh, my God.

the more valuable it becomes. If you're in art early, it could really pump. So anyway, it was $400,000 and I tweeted a screenshot. There's a whole tweet sort of thread where I was like, what is going on? And I kept on adding this to the tweet thread with screenshots on my wallet. And so it was $400,000. I was like, what is happening? And we were trying to explain someone created this coin called Mira and there's a billion tokens.

And they sent me, someone bought half the supply and just sent it to my wallet. So I had 500 million tokens. And once I tweeted, then an iCheck again, and it's now $4 million. And I'm like, what? And an hour later, it's eight. A couple hours later, it became 15. And at one point, it was $20 million, just like the same day. And I got like 40,000. And the market cap of the whole thing, that means was 80 million. Correct, correct.

No, I think peak market cap was around $60 million. Okay, and you had $40 million of it. Yeah, because I sold 10% immediately just to like capture something and I sold a bit more in the liquidity pool. So, you know, I got around a million dollars out, but I still owned 30% of it. And immediately I was, I said, okay, I don't know what I'm gonna do with it. But every dollar in my wallet is going to charity. This is nonprofit, it's not for me.

Not just charity, going to the research lab. Going to research lab. Researching the potential cores to your daughter's thing. Correct. So I said, hey, I'm not going to move anything without 24 hours notice. I'm going to try to be very transparent about this. And I thought about it and I said, I'm going to start selling $1,000 every 10 minutes until we're done because I just don't have time to run a crypto project. And, you know, like...

I want everyone to know where this is going. So that happened, and the price started going down. But once we got to a million, what happened in between is, because it was such a big story, a bunch of rare disease organizations started reaching out to me. And they're like, wow, this happened to you. How do we get in on this? Because... They're like, did you say pump.fun? Okay. Uh-huh. Yeah.

The average budget, annual budget for one of these organizations is like $100,000, $150,000. Just like not a whole lot of money. This is like more money than the community has ever seen. It's a lot of excitement there. So I thought, well, I was signing up some crypto friends and I thought, okay, how do we make this like a thing? And maybe we can make this more sustainable, long lasting. And this idea of turning Mira into a launchpad for other rare disease tokens where Mira is a liquidity pair token.

was talked about. And so I thought, well, okay, that seems interesting. Before I do that, I should probably figure out how a coin works and how you launch one of these. So I went on Pum.Fun and I thought, okay, let's find out how one of these works. So I created a coin called Xero and I entered a description for the coin because you could do that. I said, hey, don't buy this coin. It literally says, don't buy this coin. It'll never be worth anything. I'm never going to do anything with it. It'll be worth $0.

So I pressed a button. And what I didn't realize is because I was on Ethereum for a long time, but I never had a watch wallet, what happened is I was in the background the most watch wallet in crypto. So within about 100 to 200 seconds,

the market cap of this coin that I told people to not buy in the description. Sorry, a watch wallet. Does a watch wallet mean that you are someone that should be monitored because you're a potential whale? Yeah, people start tracking like, oh, what is Vitalik doing with his wallet? What is... People are copy trading. People want to copy what you're doing. And they think you're the man because your wallet is old or you have a lot in it.

Because I was sort of the main character of crypto Twitter for a few days. Got it. Okay, understood. So there were bots just monitoring what I was doing and buying whatever I was buying. And so they saw this new token. And so within 100, 200 seconds, the market cap of this token was $3.5 million. So I was just sitting there panicking. And I said, okay, this is bad. I don't want to have anything to do with this.

So I had half of the entire supply and I sold it. And that was my main mistake. I should have burned it, which everyone would have been happy about, right? But because I sold, I crashed the price of this token and people got very upset because it was considered a rug.

So now like, oh my God, everyone's. And when I sold, I made like $80,000 because even though it's three and a half million dollars in market cap, there's only about $100,000 or so in liquidity. And yeah, I started a thread explaining, oh my God, I didn't expect this to happen. I got on spaces over video. Just like, I'm really sorry. I'm like still trying to figure out how this works. And, you know, people don't, didn't care.

And what I realized is just a different community than it was when I was really active on Twitter in 2017. Like people on Ethereum, they're like very deep tech people, right? They're like nerdy. And with a Solana in 2024, I didn't realize like it's so much more mainstream. A lot of people maybe have like $50, $100 and they're just trying to turn into $1,000. And so the amount of emotion there.

There is like very, very different. Crypto transition from neckbeards to like everybody who looks like Jack Harlow.

In like four years. The Solana community all has the line etched into the side of their haircut, or multiple. It's very different than the people that got me into Ethereum in the first place. Today I learned, or this month I learned. So anyway, the market cap was $3.5 million before I sold. It dumped at $300,000. And as I started talking about my mistake, the market cap came back. And at one point it was like $5.5 million, $6 million. Wow.

Just because I was like talking about it and people were just the more upset people were, the more the coin pumped and more money people made from the coin. So they were trying to make it like even more dramatic, which I didn't really understand at the time. I just thought I messed up and people were really upset at me. So anyway, so then that was like the main villain turn on Twitter and everyone was super upset at me because they saw me as a scammer.

So I thought about what am I going to do with this? So first of all, like the $80,000, within a minute, I realized this is a mistake. So I bought back in into the coin and I burned it all, right? So I already was like neutral. And I explained that no one cared because of the anonymity of crypto. They thought I had like 100 other wallets that was like, that I pumped and dumped on a neat profit there and I can't prove otherwise.

So I decided like, this is really shitty and I don't want any part of it. So what I decided to do is I got some help from a friend who used Coinbase and other people who didn't want to be named to do on-chain analysis. So what I said on Spaces is I'm actually just going to pay everyone back who lost money on this out of my own pocket. And I'm not even going to touch the charity wallet.

So what we ended up doing is everyone who held in the first 200 seconds, who owned any coins then, up until the point 43 minutes later where the market cap fully recovered back to the same value. If you sold and you realized loss, I'm just going to airdrop you sold. And it ended up being like $140,000 to $50,000 out of my own pocket. And I just paid everyone back, which has never happened on any pump fund coin before.

And maybe like 10% of people have heard about this. I tweeted about it. I had to like keep on responding because every time I tweet for the next like month,

Someone would say, oh, you're a scammer. What are you still doing here? And I had to say, no, I paid everyone back. And they would just like not say anything. This is like a crypto Larry David like thing. Like it's like this is like you're walking through Times Square and one of those fake monks put like a bracelet on your wrist. And then like now expects you to give them like $20. It says even though we called it a free gift. Like this is just this is insane. So how much did you end up giving to the charity?

Yeah, so between GoFundMe, so it was a million dollars from crypto. And it's like I locked a bunch of the mirror coin into a liquidity pool. So it's sort of still perpetually generating. So you bought a million dollars of charity for $150,000, basically.

That's correct. Yeah. And then we, and the total was like a 1.4 million. We donated more to match like the mistake and we added a GoFundMe to it. So it ended up being 1.4 million. And then the lab actually like triple leveraged it up into the coin. They got hooked on pumped off fun.

All right, I got a public service announcement for all the tech founders that are listening to this. Listen, job number one for you is to get customers. And ideally, the bigger the customers, the better. And I know when I was trying to do that, we would get somebody interested. Oh man, there's a big Fortune 500 company, or it's a company that's raised hundreds of millions of dollars. They want to work with us. This is so exciting. And then we hit the wall and the wall was the security and compliance team. And all of a sudden, we could not land our biggest customers just because we were shooting ourselves in the foot by not being security ready and compliant.

And so if you want to solve this, use Vanta. Vanta is an all-in-one solution. It helps you get audit ready and it's quick. It's painless. It's easy. They're the number one guys that are doing this. There are 8,000 companies that use them. YC companies use them. We use them. And so if you want Vanta to help simplify your security and compliance program to help you streamline anything, take all those manual security tasks and automate them, you should use Vanta. If you listen to this, you actually get $1,000 off Vanta too. So we got a deal for you. Go to vanta.com slash million. That's

V-A-N-T-A dot com slash million. Use Vanta. That's what all the cool kids are doing. Would you, Sean, give back the $150 like he did? I wouldn't. Fuck that. I would not have for that situation, personally. I get why you did. It's almost just like, dude, this is crazy. All of this was unintentional. People are really mad. Okay, what's the sort of like...

How can I just like clear up any possible confusion? But I don't think you needed to in this situation, right? You created a coin called zero that you said is don't buy this. This is going to zero. It's a test coin. And if somebody went and randomly speculated on it using their like their sniper bots that are trying to track your wallet, you know, like I wouldn't have given a shit personally. But then again,

this community is so like crazy that they'll just like make your life hell on Twitter for like the next five years. It might be worth it, you know? Just to clear your own conscience, go to sleep at night, you know? Exactly. I couldn't, it was for me so I could sleep all night because a lot of these people are fairly low income and the money is fairly meaningful was one reason. But another reason is like people just don't read. Like I explained this, I mean the coin says don't buy it. I explained this like a couple different times and I

what I realized is like, you just don't read on the internet. And as far as anyone else knows, because it makes a lot of noise, like I, the, if you don't, don't read what it sounds like is I created a scam coin using my own daughter's name to scam people out of. Right, right, right. It's crazy. Did you, in the end of this, is there anything here that's interesting for fundraising for research? Or this is just straight, like, I,

I accidentally got into a gambling pool and kind of got some money for research, but this is not a sustainable thing for anybody. I'm still trying to figure it out. So what I'm hoping to make Nira into is... So the way this works is this is like sort of gang theory around, okay, you own a bunch of this coin because this coin's narrative is attached to you, right? In the case of, you know, Dave Portnoy is doing something similar with Jailstool. And...

In order to turn it into real world impact, you have to sell. There's no way around that. And so when you sell, then you're just like playing a zero sum game against the community and they're all going to be upset for you for sure, no matter what.

And so that's a very difficult dynamic. And I think my idea here is like the only sustainable way to do this is to lock a bunch of the token into a liquidity pool. And so that when people buy in or out of it, you get to exchange, you get the fees. And that's not really like selling into your community. I think imagine a version of Dogecoin where every time someone, you know, it's like Dogecoin is like a couple of tens of billions dollars market cap. But every time someone sells or buys, it creates like up to,

could be hundreds of thousands of dollars a day in fees and which you can then use to donate. I think that might be relatively sustainable. This is insane. I don't even know what to say. Sounds like a great weekend. No, it was a month. It was the last. It was Christmas until like maybe, you know, now and it ruined my vacation. And it's been by far the most stressful time I've ever had in my life.

Can we do a quick detour? We were at a dinner once and you talked about some, I think it was a Stanford class you took called touchy feely or that's the code name for it. I don't know. And it's something about communication and relationships. And I remember you said this really great thing at the dinner, but this was now many years ago and I don't remember it exactly, but can you say that bit again? I want to hear it again. And I think a lot of people might benefit from it. So by the way, Siki, how old are you?

I'm 41. I think you look like you could be 22 or 41. I have no idea. Yeah. Asian, no reason. Let's go. Um,

Yeah, so I took actually now twice. I took class again since we taught this class that was based on the Stanford Business School class called Interpersonal Dynamics, which is the highly rated and most popular class in Stanford Business School. It's taught by a professor called Carol Robbins, and it's generally known as Hachifili. And it's famous for every participant at some point will like cry in the class.

But Carol Robbins is now a co-founder of a group called Leaders in Tech, which provides the same class for tech leaders. So one of the things that you get taught in this class is... So the purpose of the class is to teach you how to relate to people and build connections with other people because people work with other people. And one of the most useful frameworks I got from that class is how to think about your connection with other people and how to develop that connection. And so...

The two frameworks to connect is one is the two tracks of interpersonal communication and the five levels of it. So when you're talking with anyone else, there is two tracks. There is the content track.

and there's a relationship track. So the content track is filled with facts, and a relationship track is filled with emotion, and a relationship track is what is filled and what has to be filled for a relationship to become closer and for trust to increase. And the way you fill each of these tracks is through the five levels of communication.

And the idea is when you are talking to someone, there's five levels at which you communicate of increasing vulnerability and death. So level one is what's called ritual. And that is, hey, how's it going? Hey, right? It doesn't really say anything. We're just, it's just ritualized greeting.

Level two is extended ritual. So that is, how's the weather? How's the game? Right? It's a longer version of, hey, how's it going? Level three is content. So these are facts. How's the project? Is it late? What are we going to do with this particular idea? Level four is emotional self-disclosure.

So that is when you say something that discloses how you are feeling emotionally at the time. I feel sad. I feel angry. And there's a lot of talk about level four because people think they're doing level four, but they're not. And that's a very common thing that's unique to the English language, which we can talk about. That was a fairly interesting insight. So level five is the deepest one. And level five is mutual emotional self-disclosure. And it is when you are expressing the emotion that you have about the other person.

I feel angry at you. I feel proud of you. I feel disappointed by you. That's the deepest level of communication you can have with another person. And the content track is only filled by things from level one to three. And the relationship track is only filled by level four and five. And we are taught to really not use level four and five in professional settings. But if you want to build a relationship, level four and five is kind of the only way you can do it.

And so a lot of the training is about breaking past the barrier, the uncomfortableness of engaging level four and level five communication. And you basically sit in a circle with 12 people for four days straight.

until you like, so you can observe the impact of doing level four or five and not doing level four or five and how you are able to be closer to someone or further away from someone in emotional distance. Has this made your running a company better? I mean, I would say this is the most impactful thing I've ever done in my entire life, like out of any class. I always like, as a founder, somewhat see the company in some kind of machine and I didn't find it. I'm like,

you know, mildly aspergery. So I found it difficult to relate to people. But it's completely transformed all my relationships, including my relationship with my wife. And so one of the ways, this was even just last week, we had an onsite

And I was able to do a mini version of this with our customer success team. We just sat or, you know, I did a very condensed version of this lecture. And then we sat and we just talked for about four hours. And the amount of closeness people got, insight people got was transformative. And you wouldn't normally, you know, sit around for a couple hours in a work setting talking about your feelings. And it's very uncomfortable to do so. And it's intentionally so. Like, it's very uncomfortable for the first couple of hours.

in the case of a real life workshop, it's half a day. In the case of us, we had it like sort of speed running and it was done kind of about an hour. But then people were really into it and it's weird, but everyone at some point

was crying about some disclosure that they heard or they've experienced. And as a result, the team got so much closer and their trust increased. That's wild. This is awesome. So how do you do this in practice, right? Because when you talk about like, you know, I feel angry at you about X or I'm disappointed about Y, I could see myself not having the skills or finesse to be able to do that and let the end result be a positive one versus...

We start talking, you're upset by this. Well, the other person gets defensive or they push back and say, well, you did that, blah, blah, blah. And so can you give me an example of a conversation that you had that like, maybe here's what I would love. A conversation that typically would have gone like this or maybe been avoided altogether. And instead, here's how the actual conversation went that was useful for you as a CEO, leader, friend, whatever, husband, whatever, whichever example you want to choose.

Yeah. So the first one is easy, actually. So in most people just don't have the conversation.

Right. So the conversation wouldn't say I'm angry. You would just be angry and you wouldn't say anything. And people can tell is the thing. Like when you feel a certain way about someone, it gets, it leaks, right? Like there's a level of even you're not attending to passive aggressive, you're just kind of ignoring the person or it comes off like you're like, oh my God, it's late again. Right. Right. Or he didn't do this. Right.

And so that's the default. And that's when you have this negative feedback cycle of, well, okay, you already felt a certain way. Then you expressed it unknowingly. And now the other person thinks you're angry at them. And now they dislike you more. And then they do things that you dislike more because they dislike you more. And it just gets worse. That's how relationships get worse. And that's like the default. And so if you know that it leaks anyway...

then it becomes easier to say, I'm going to express that. And you're going to express it no matter what. Your choice is, do you express it with words or do you express it with not words, but just like passive aggressive behavior? And so, and then you combine that with everyone is entitled to know the things that they know, but they're not entitled to make things up about what other people are thinking.

So you are entitled to seeing the same facts as everyone else, seeing the same behavior. You're not entitled to read the minds of some other person and how they're thinking and how they're feeling. But you're 100% entitled to share what you're feeling because those are facts to you. That's reality.

And so the mental model isn't, and this is kind of like typical because people aren't used to expressing this. The mental model is like, oh, if I am expressing this emotion, that means I'm attacking someone. And that is true if you don't express an emotion and you're just acting it out. But if I were to say, you know, when I see you do this, the story I tell myself is that you don't respect me. And I don't know if this is true, but this is like what I'm thinking in my head. And because of that, I feel angry.

And I just want you to know that because I don't know if you know that. I know that you probably don't because you can't read my mind, but I'm guessing you probably aren't intending to make me feel that way. And I thought it'd be helpful for you to share, for me to share that to you so that you are aware of it. I just learned that technique in therapy last week. Amazing. I seriously did. That's a nonviolent communication framework, right? It is. Yeah. It's very connected to that. I literally just learned that.

Yeah, you're sharing information, right? So it's not an attack. Like if you are genuinely doing it because you understand that you can't read their mind, but other people can't read your mind either. And so by sharing it is you're offering them a gift of the information. One question, Siki, you said something about the English language making it harder. What did you mean by that? So what you start seeing when you're in this class with these 12 people and you start realizing that, oh, like,

I really only feel closer and I get to know someone better when they say I feel emotion, I feel sad, I feel angry when this happened. And I feel distance when they're expressing that emotion but not saying it. You can tell on their faces that they're pissed off and it becomes scarier. So then you start learning that, oh, I need to say I feel. The thing about the English language

is that we say I feel often without expressing any emotion at all. That's a quirk that's unique to English. When you say I feel that or I feel like, it is actually grammatically impossible for the next word to be an emotion. I feel that you're an asshole is not an emotion. I feel like this is fucked is not an emotion.

I feel sad is an emotion. I feel happy is an emotion. And we're not used to saying that because the word feel is used, has been disused, misused for other purposes. And so we just often, it's unconsciously, once you see it, you can't unsee it. People, I ask people, it's a showed emotion. And they say, I feel like, I feel that. And it's never an emotion. And it's very, very hard to change the habit. Do you guys do this where like,

Sean, in particular, I'm curious if you do this, but do you guys do this where you get into this type of shit, whatever you want to call it, the touchy-feely stuff, and you're like, this is the way. And then I get into it, and then half the time I execute that poorly, and then the business sucks, and I'm like...

Like, I got to have more patience with this person or I got to like let them get away with shit more or whatever. And then I just go right back to the total opposite end where it's like, what do they call this? Doge? Where I'm like, everyone has 15 minutes to fight for their job. Like, you know, like... It's like I get influenced by either side, but there is no middle ground. I'm kind of like you, that the first sign of resistance, I crumble sometimes. So...

But the version of it that happens for me is let's say I hear this and I'm like, ah, Siki just taught me something. This is great. Two content tracks, five levels. I'm in. I got this. I'm going level five, baby. I don't even need one through four. And then I'll go have the next conversation with my wife tonight and I'll give her like

I feel that I feel upset. And I know you didn't mean that. I tried to do the whole thing. And she's like, what? And then she doesn't, she doesn't know all of this. She didn't, cause she didn't go to the seminar and she didn't have the skills and the tools. She's like, be a mad Sean, shut up. It's on the front of her mind. And so she doesn't play back like the role play that I had heard was. And then I'm like, well, I don't really know the next move. Okay. Revert, revert back to my old asshole self.

Yeah, I mean, that's not a bad response, honestly, because I think you have to do whatever works. And the reality is to get good at this, you know, it took me, I did this four-day program twice and every day was like 12 hours a day. And you're just sitting in the circle practicing for eight hours a day. Did your wife go with you? The first time she actually did.

Okay, so she kind of had a stream. No, I kind of smuggled her into the hotel room. So she didn't go to the class. But I will say, like the second night when I went home, she was like, who are you? Because I was like, oh my God, I feel so bad. I've been such an asshole. Dude, this sounds like, have you guys heard of the Hoffman Institute?

I've heard of it, but I haven't been. I've contemplated going to it, but I think they have a variety of locations. They have one in Connecticut near me, and then they have a Boston one. But you go for... It's not expensive. It's like $2,000. And you go for four days, and you can't bring your cell phone. You've got to be completely disconnected. Or maybe it's even five days. It's kind of a lot.

But everyone who I go, who goes to it, they won't tell me what happens there, but they all say that it's life-changing and they can now develop relationships and connections with other people. It's one of these really strange things that I'm so tempted to do, but the amount of time to be disconnected is very nerve-wracking or just scary. This sounds very similar. It does sound pretty similar. It's not the time to be disconnected. That's the scary part there.

Well, yeah, it is. It might even be seven days. Could you go seven days without a phone away from your family? Away from family is a little harder. Yeah, that's hard. Like in a hotel. It's crazy to be disconnected. But yeah, I don't want to...

Also, I don't want to cry with a bunch of strangers. That's why I don't go to Tony Robbins. I'm like, I don't want to go to Tony Robbins. I don't want anyone to see me dancing and singing. You know what I mean? Yeah, what's great about leaders in tech is they're all well-known-ish founders. It's not cheap to go. Even worse. Be around awesome people? God, I want to be my most vulnerable self around cool people. No, actually, it's really helpful because you realize that

all the people that some people that you look up to like we're kind of all the same like there's very similar insecurities whenever i hear about whenever i i hear about this stuff i think of the tony soprano quote where he's like whatever happened to the strong silent type like gary cooper that's like i get i go all down this track and i'm like can i just say like hey chief like hi bub i just know that person only at that amount and just say yes or no

Sikhi, you have this interview question that I like. You said, my favorite interview question after 20 years of doing interviews with people is, what is your greatest strength that you are most worried about not coming across in an interview setting? Why that question? I think I enjoy breaking the fourth wall. And interviews tends to be so standardized or formalized that

What my greatest anxiety when I'm interviewing is like, I'm actually really good at a thing. And you're asking me to, you know, you know, reverse a leak list or something, and it's just not coming across. What I find is that it breaks down this deformality and lets people gets people excited to talk about something that they're really, really good at telling me great, great stories. And you get it, you get to know the person just a little bit better.

And I think the particular thing is like, if you just ask what's your greatest strengths, it sounds really formal. But what is the insecurity that you're bringing in that you're hoping to, that you're worried about not coming across the interview setting? It changes the tone quite a bit.

It's a great question. I'm stealing that. Yeah, that's a good one. You know what's interesting is you founded Runway, which is a very serious business. You're going to have to hire enterprise people, I would imagine, enterprise salespeople. I'm basing the future of my company off of some of the output that I'm going to learn from your software.

But you have the vibe of like an artist to me where like you, you have a variety of like really intriguing projects. You're like this thinker, almost like a philosopher. Is this new to be doing? Like, is this like a new challenge for you to be doing something so serious and regimented? Like, and or can you still be like goofy and an artist in this B2B world?

So, yeah, funny enough, you said Serious Business. That was the name of my first company. And we built Fun Games. I feel like if you call it Serious Citizen, you know? Yeah, because we were a games company. Serious Business, Fun Games.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's actually a pretty huge advantage, particularly for the things we consider serious. So, I mean, people have this stereotype of business and finances being super serious and super rigid. But finance at its best is really about creating value. It's about looking forward and thinking about new ideas about how we can push the business forward and grow faster and all these things.

And in order for us to be creative, you have to be in flow. And things that are fun keeps you in flow. And what we actually hear from our customers, the thing that we hear quite often and we love hearing is, this software feels fun. And that's not a luxury. That is a fun that creates flow, that creates your creativity, that creates value. And when you use something that isn't fun, something that feels slow or confusing, then you're not creative.

and you're making worse decisions. So I don't think they're intentional with each other. I think they're quite complementary. And that is like very deeply part of our philosophy. Have you ever seen this? Yes, that's what made me think of that question. What's the story of this, Iki? This happened last week. Our marketing team is run by Cal Fries, who is a YC founder of a company called Taika. He was the COO there. And we also have this woman named Julie Fritas.

who was at Shopify. And I was in the office and I just saw them come out in a meeting, kind of giggling. And they got out this piece of cardboard and started like writing this. I'm like, what is this? Like, oh, you know how like, you know, you didn't want to do a billboard. We decided just like create a billboard ourselves and just hold on a freeway. And I'm like, that is such a cracked idea. Of course, that's going to go viral. And I said, I'll do it. It's like, you will? I'm like, yeah, I'll do it.

So they're like, okay. So we walked outside, we found a freeway entrance, and I was just holding the sign. What does it say, by the way? It says, honk if you hate your finance platform, get runway.com. Are you the only founder? I had a co-founder, Arya Asamanfar, and he left the company about a year and a half ago, almost two years ago.

Because that's pretty rare. I don't know when you launched, but I feel like you're very, very, very, very early in the period because I remember seeing you guys go on Twitter, get popular on Twitter. That's going to be pretty different to be the only founder running a company. That'd be kind of exciting, right? You get to do whatever the hell you want, or are you going to be lonely? I think the reason why we parted ways is things were just slower to make decisions, and neither of us were having as much fun.

As we wanted to. And actually, I didn't want him to leave. Like he is, I mean, he's still on the board. I love him. He's just the most wise and high integrity person I've ever met. He was one of Parag's peers at Twitter. And I hired him out of school, my first company. And now he works for Brett Taylor at Sierra.

But if things were going slower than we wanted, and he identified that it was him or our relationship slowing us down, he decided to fire himself. And I didn't think he was right about that, but he was. He usually is right about just about everything, and it totally transformed the company. He also must have attended interpersonal dynamics. He did not. You talked about character AI and chai, like some of these AI companies that are crushing it, just printing money right now.

Are there any other companies that just have blown your mind in terms of how well they're doing or how fast they're growing right now? Like maybe AI, maybe not AI? I love Elapse. I'm probably not sure in that company, but they do like basically all of the audio translation generation, sometimes you fix.

And when I met them, there were like less than 10 people. They were ex-Google. They're working on the foundation of all technology. And they are now, I don't know what they last announced, but they're in the hundreds of millions they are in like a year or two, a year and a half or so. And what blew my mind is I never seen a group of very good technologists that were also so good at commercializing the technology so rapidly. They're at hundreds of millions? Hundreds. Hundreds.

I feel like this just came out. No, no, no. We should have invested in this. They dubbed our podcast. Remember that clip where they were like, you're speaking Hindi now. And it was amazing. And I DM them and we were like, hey, this is really cool. Like so stupid of us not to have pursued that more. Yeah, there's that graph, right? For Ys and the fastest growing SaaS companies. And I think Cursor is up there. I am fairly convinced that Eleva Labs is actually like faster than all of them.

But yeah, I think they announced some revenue milestone. Well, when we were tinkering with them, it was borderline. This is cool. This is cute. I can use this right now. It was like just there. So I guess they crossed it and people are actually using it to actually do work. Who are they selling to? So Apple has audio buds.

Oh, it's not a podcast, sorry. Apple audiobooks, right? Like, so previously they didn't have audiobooks and, you know, you would know that a lot of this AI generated is powered by web apps.

Oh, so they also do AI agents for customer service and support agents and things like that. So they're the back end of maybe potentially other software tools as well. Yeah, so they have all kinds of product lines. So the book publishers, the power agents, they do a whole... Why are they better than like what OpenAI, you know, like the risk with all these AI companies is that the general, the base models, OpenAI and Anthropic, et cetera, can just

offer those capabilities, you know, as part of the main suite? Do they do something different? Are they fine-tuning it in some way? No, it's their own foundational models. And the quality and expressiveness is just better. And the form factor is better. So you can use it for all these different use cases. And the voice API of OpenAI is actually like not as good or as easily usable.

Dude, you're super fun to talk to. I just like hearing all these, like, uh, I feel like you're like a, like a treasure box. And I just like pick, like, I just grabbed something out of the toy chest and be like, tell me the story behind this. You know what I mean? I think that's awesome. Yeah. Thanks for coming on dude. And, uh, give people a shout out for your company and where to follow you for more. Yeah. Runway.com. You can follow me at blader blade with an R or runway co. Um,

And if you are a CFO, you should use our software. How much did you have to pay for that domain? A quarter million dollars. That's not bad. It's funny, Naval Ravikant named a company and suggested that we use it on the .com.

I think that was smart. A quarter million is not a lot, I feel like, for that. Wait, wait, what do you mean Naval named the company? Like, you went to him being like, hey, what should we name this? Or he just suggested it? So, when Clubhouse only had one room in April 2020, it was in the Naval app, right? I think you were on it quite a bit, too. Yeah. And so, when I was thinking about what I want to do for the next company, I said, I want to do a finance company. And I got a great name for it, Naval, CFO.AI. He's like, no, don't call it AI. It's going to be dated in, like, two years. Everything's going to be called AI. Okay.

You should just call it Runway and you get the .com. And he wrote the first track into Runway. And that's why we got the .com. It's so funny that you said it was the Naval app at the time. It totally was. And it was amazing. It was amazing. By the way, I was using AirChat pretty religiously for two months. Even though I knew AirChat's not going to work, I was like, oh, it doesn't matter. This is Naval's app. He's going to be on it 24-7. Cool. This is like...

I like to hang out with Naval. I'm not going to email him like a million other people and say, hey, can we get a coffee? Just $1,000 a month and you can talk to Naval whenever you want. Yeah, exactly. I was like, I'm going to be on this for two months. I'm going to be a power user for exactly two months and I'm going to hang out with Naval and that's exactly what happened. I was very proud of myself for that. It was the most fun way to use that app. Yep.

Dude, thank you for doing this. You're the man. And we're thinking of you and your daughter. Thank you. Appreciate you, man. All right. See you. Thank you. That's it. That's the pod.

Hey, Sean here. A quick break to tell you an Ev Williams story. He started Twitter and before that he sold a company to Google for $100 million. And somebody asked him, they said, Ev, what's the secret, man? How do you create these huge businesses, billion dollar businesses? And he says, well, I think the answer is that you take a human desire, preferably one that's been around for thousands of years, and then you just use modern technology to take out steps. Just remove the friction that exists between people getting what they want and

And that is what my partner Mercury does. They took one of the most basic needs any entrepreneur has, managing your money and being able to do your finance or operations. And they've removed all the friction that has existed for decades. No more clunky interfaces. No more 10 tabs to get something done. No more having to drive to a bank, get out of your car just to send a wire transfer. They made it fast. They made it easy. You can actually just get back to running your business. You don't have to worry about the rest of it.

I use it for not one, not two, but six of my companies right now. And it's used by also 200,000 other ambitious founders. So if you want to be like me, head to mercury.com, open up an account in minutes. And remember, Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank and Trust members, FDIC. All right, back to the episode.