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

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/2e39ec28e612bb86

And they said
Well you should couldn't confuse revenue for success.
So I said, Well you guys shouldn't confuse a lack revenue for Sisassi either. And then they got like
Kind of off that. Dude, this meeting it goes in like the Silicon Valley Autistic Hall of Fame. I feel like I could rule the world and know I could be what I want to.
I'm putting my all in it like my day song on the road, let's travel to the street. What's up? We got our friend C here, founder of Runway back in the day, built a company, sold it to Zinga, built another company, sold it to Postmates.
has gone viral many times and it there's a lot of people in Silicon Valley who you almost ha 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. Uh,'cause you do things with taste. So excited to have you here.
Do you uh do you have any good stories from early days of Zinga? Cause you sold a company to Zinga back when Zinga was the shit.
Did you work with Mark Pincus? What's he like? Give me a good Zinka story.
Uh okay. I have a great story, actually.
Uh how I came to report to Mark Pink is actually it's not a great story.
I would like so many good March Biga stories.
So yeah, is Zingabo my first uh second comp uh my first company.
And I joined as director of product on her studio.
Wait, can you give the background of Mark? So he marks like a Silicon Valley OG. I did he help uh fund Facebook to get off the ground? Was that his first big hit? He did. So um he and Reed Hoffman co owned bought the uh six degrees of separation patent.
From a company of six degrees.
And he angel invested in Facebook and but also licensed a patent, I believe, for more stock into Facebook.
That patent was basically the
Kind of a social networking
patent, right? Like how how we're we're connected six degrees of s of Kevin Bacon away from each other. And I think Reed, the stor some there's some story where Reed and him
realize that if this patent got in the hands of Microsoft or some big company that they would be able to squish
Innovation by a startup by like
holding this patent over their head. So they bought the patent, I believe, and just decided we're not gonna use it.
to stop anybody and then they I think parlayed it into to getting extra shared Facebook, which is amazing.
I think that's what happened, yeah.
So
When I joined I was director of products and
My girlfriend now, my wife.
Who I recently met.
move to China for some job work thing.
And
I was like three months into Zinga and I was like, Oh, I'm not really feeling it's not not fun. So
I
Told him I was gonna resign and move to China.
And they said, Hey, why don't we just give you this new job?
Um
you know, you can report to Eric Scheimeyer, one of the co founders, and uh basically be head of product for the company.
I said, No, that sounds fun. That sounds great. So so I did that.
So report to Eric Scheimer.
He was a co founder of Zinga.
And
What happened is a month into the job, Eric Scheimer
Stop showing up to work.
Like
wouldn't throw the emails, wouldn't go to work and
I was like what?
And
Basically, that's when I reported Mark.
Mm. And I was ahead of products.
Uh and later the the the punchline in the story is what I the reason why
He's start struggling with the work.
is I later found out that he decided to become a ninja.

Pretty good reason.
He l 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?
Uh I think he started another um uh social games company.
So give us a
At the time, what was Zinga like? Was it like on top was it King of the World at the time or was it on the downstream?
Yeah, I mean uh what's interesting on Zinga is the
hired a a bunch of people who are used to be investment makers to be product managers there.
Um, because it was just all about the numbers going up. It was highly anal analytical.
So I went in and just the amount of like knowledge I had about
Growth.
W one of the things that really blew my mind, I think about a lot.
Is when I first had a conversation with Mark Tincus.
uh early on, I think, maybe during the acquisition.
I asked him, hey, what do you think about this like industry? It just seems really low mo
Uh it's it's hard to have a
competitive mode 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 his I was like, No, this is great.
I want there to be more new entrants.
Into the space.
Because it's free R and D for me.
And I just like okay, that is that blows my mind. That is next level because he would just so confident his billy to execute.
But like anyone who's gonna come in with some new idea
They can just like fast follow it.
And do a much better job of drawing it, which is like what they did, right? Farmable wasn't the first farm game, poker was the first poker game.
And the they work really, really well, at least during the Facebook era. Wait, did he have like Genghis Khan energy where he was like he is he a conqueror?
Yeah, he did.
He did.
I mean you know, we were working like
Eighty, ninety, hundred hours a week, Kazinka.
And uh that was kinda 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. Yeah, like Farmville, like that's what he's like trying to do this on.
Like a few billion dollars, a few billion dollars.
There's a quote by Max Levchen at the time, Max Levchen, who created PayPal is
By all accounts like a genius com computer engineer.
single handedly was like fighting fraud at PayPal and 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.
And then his next startup I think was Slide.
And it was making like widgets for MySpace and Facebook where you'd be like
slideshows or superpoke where you throw like chickens at your friends when you wake up.
Uh, you know, by pushing a button and it it just slaps a friend with a chicken or something like that.
And they go, What what was your takeaway from slide? S 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. What should should I be optimizing this chicken slapping or should I be doing something else?
And I've always thought about that because I found that myself falling into the same trap. No matter what I'm doing, if I'm selling little widgets.
My life becomes about selling widgets and I can optimize 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 co workers 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 or the Brazilians. It was like the face it was like the face filter thing when Snapchat came out. And then if you opened up your mouth, a giant tongue would come out. Dude, I felt like when and they explained that to me like I kind of both I was like, wait, so you're just you're just trying to get like Brazilians to use more stickers so they share more photos. I felt like a cartoon it was like literally I was like what? Like you know what I mean? I was like what are you guys doing?
I also have a Max Levichen and slide story. Uh this goes back seventeen years, so I don't think it'll mine anymore, but
Um when I
This is when I first moved to the city and I
Had this
App on Facebook is blowing up.
And so
Some guy who worked with Keith Roboy. Keith Roboy was I think the CO of Slight at the time.
Said, Hey, we like your app. You wanna meet
You know the team.
I said, Oh my God, this is amazing. I mean you're out of college, I can be Max Lupche.
So I go in.
We had a meeting at noon.
And I will go in the slight office and no one was there. Everyone's out for lunch.
And I talked to receptionists. I said, Hey I'm here to meet Max and Keith.
And like I'll draw lunch, uh 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 kinda forgot there was a meeting, um but we go in a meeting room.
And we should start talking.
About
what I wanted to do with this app by build, whether I wanted to build it dependently or maybe like joint slide.
And they asked me how much I wanted for it. I said, Well, I have a co founder, so
Two million dollars, I would probably do it. The million dollars each. I kinda laughed at the number. I'm like what
Like I looked at uh the evaluation app data and like the amount of money we're generating. It's not a huge ass, but
Fine. It's too much.
my friend that heel built superpoke, which I recently bought.
And
They said verbatim, you know, we bought Superpoke and he's easily the eighteenth or nineteenth most important person in the company now.
Out of a company of like fifty people?
Uh I said
Okay, that's a compelling offer.
And then I said uh and I said, Yeah, but this is probably not
Again uh
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
Uh well you should couldn't confuse revenue for success.
And at this point I was just like really upset. So I said, Well, you guys shouldn't confuse the lack revenue for success either.
And then they got like
Kind of offset. So then so then it got really weird.
Oh I forgot to mention like I just started a 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 touch of coming, uh and then he said, I can't wait to uh buy all these shitty companies for cheap.
Like I were in the room. I were like what?
Yeah.
What the hell this meeting it goes in like the Silicon Valley Autistic Hall of Fame.
Keith.
Hey Key, hey Max, what was your body fat percentage in the in the when you in the PayPal days? And Max was like eight percent.
And it's like
And I'm like, look, I'm not the fittest person, but I'm not selling you my company because he's like you're fitter than me. Like what's happening? So that was my meeting with them, but
The thing that made it all make sense made sense.
Is the next week.
I'll say my.
Uh, one of my friends John, who also was on a had a company building house.
And he c comes up to me at some party, he goes
See he 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 because they started a meeting talking about how there's a recession coming up and thinking about all these countries were cheap. I was like, Oh my god, it's a script.
Uh it was in episode one of this podcast, I think um my buddy Suey told almost the same story. He goes, he gets invited to slide. He sits with Max and Kid.
And what they said was they were like, You should uh we wanna hire you. And he's like, I don't really want a job. Like I have my my app's 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. Um like this is horrible. My app is stupid what he said he goes uh 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 gonna take my app? I think my app is stupid. The fact that you think my app is cool makes me think you're stupid. That's what he thought in his head. Uh Siki, who did you meet? I I love talking to people uh to people who have been uh 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 uh you're like, Oh, I can't believe they they actually developed into su such an amazing uh business person.
I I don't don't know that I met a lot of people who weren't right uh that I think were great that were
Huge later.
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. Ten people.
It was two thousand late two thousand seven, early two thousand eight.
And we were just talking about growth.
So like they they had this like college referral plan.
So Drew Houston, I mean Anish, who's general from Andreessen.
Like he was a
Just a founder building apps on mobile phones, right? And
He would come to my office and we talk about it.
Oh.
Probably the best one is Chris Wansroth.
Who's that?
He's co founder of C of 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 MyState's markup language.
Uh, just a capture and he was really good at it.
Um and
I distinctly remember.
That we were at twenty first amendments?
Yeah, or or actually uh
The bearer a brewery doesn't matter.
I gave him an a full time employment employment offer.
Uh
in early two thousand eight.
And he was considering it.
And the same night he when we're talking about he said, you know, DH just put Rails on GitHub.
And so I think I might work on GitHub full time.
And I was thinking my head in it.
Well, it's like the smartest thing for me to do is actually shut down my
Facebook games basically and go work for you, but I didn't say that. But I was thinking it.
Have did you have you had any massive um
Uh Angel investment wins because you're around the hoop for so long.
And so and really
I mean the best
I mean th the best one by far is Amplitude. And that one was I was introduced through actually yeah, someone as Inga, uh Matt Aka, who runs data collective now and he
introduced my very first Angel of West Fent after I sold to Zanga.
Uh and out like 10X in like twelve months.
And so I was playing with Play Money up after that.
And he introduced
to his team.
Tchau.
We ended up be being the fourth customer of uh for analytics platform. It's now Amplitude. And we used it. We thought this is great. This is the best thing we thought we've seen since the Zinga internal tools.
And I managed to get into the seed round and that IPO dot you know, we ended up being a four hundred X uh
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 zap here and
It's basically categorizes my emails.
with GPD four into different labels. So uh I have this very long prompt and automation.
And I also use a protocol sane box.
Uh, 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 the 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 can s you have to kinda read it. It's like some email to my babysitter or
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.
Um and so people are doing different kinds of email categorization. What's missing is there's no way to train it. So I think building some way for you to for a product to understand all of the concept about your life and organize your stuff.
Starting with inbox.
Will be really handy for me.
And I've seen at least twelve companies do this and no one has done a really great job of it.
I just tested this product. Have you guys heard of this? Um I I can't think of the name right now, but it was this thing where I it it sounds f 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 uh
Or
Yeah.
No Sean, you're right.
It started the guy who started like a like a he's like a guy. He's like been around.
Uh
He was doing like a pendant or something, right? At one point and then now it's a Oh rewind then. Rewind. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Rewind.ai, is that it?
Yeah, they stopped working on it. Now it's uh called limitless and working on the pendant now.
Yes, I was tinkering with Rewind and the promise it
It's not there yet.
But the promise of this is is was amazing.
I like I was like so into this. Um and it's kind of describing what you're what you're just explaining because we're having to use Zapier and OpenAI or ChatGPT to like kinda 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 buckable thing, but
You know, just character AI and Chai and all of these like chat bots that really people are using for um sexy chats.
I think like someone could and these things print money, by the way, like they immediately generate millions of dollars a month.
Uh
I thought
If if I were just in it just to like tread money, the thing I would make is
Something that is kinda like tender.
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 it's super into your
And then you can like it.
Then you can go off of your Tender app and go on Instagram and there have an Instagram account on actual Instagram is that it's owned by the
The the the person that you met on your fake tender app. Sicky, do you know who Ty Lopez is? He's like the guy who had the infomercial that was like here in my garage. I do know Ty who he is, yeah. So Ty uh one accus we he came on MFM years ago and an accusation that I learned about him based off of the comments on YouTube is that
Years and years before he was whatever he was famous for.
he owned dating apps and the acquisition uh accusation was that all of the users were completely fake and that it was guys in the Philippines like running it and
Uh
Doing exactly what you're describing. That's true of the majority updating apps.
What do you mean? That's just like standard offering procedure. Like plenty of fish.
You know, like
Uh uh
A s a seeking arrangement, like
That is their business model.
Um fact source men acting as women.
Yeah, there's also like the webcam industry, like like they
Up until open AI.
The
Companies with the most advanced AI technology is going to be one of these companies. Because they are better at creating chatbots than anyone. They have the most advanced technology. I'm no no no kidding. Like I know people who
Work there or run it?
Uh they've just developed better chatbot technology than anyone and that'd be so funny if that's where AGI starts, actually. It's not open AI. It's none of these labs. It's like
Whatever some of these like web webcam site developers. That's not a crazy idea. I mean, it isn't that how it typically has been, where a lot of the like the vice industries are the ones pushing the pushing the envelope.
Yeah.
Yeah, so transformative for OnlyFans, right? Like
I don't know if you've read, but like there's you know, you're a big influencer on OnlyFans and you have an army of a hundred people who are like pipers or chatters.
Right. 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 the get buy this video.
By this photo. I don't know exactly. By the subscription, whatever the the thing is, but they're
They're not just
customer support, they're actually sales, but they need to come across
Like they're the original person, which is just hilarious.
What do you think that
Office environment is like
So I actually I know someone who works in um 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. The uh the other thing with the dating apps I think that they did was
I remember seeing the study about match.com'cause if you were a guy on match.com, you would basically send out, you know
thirty messages and you'd get, you know, one back or whatever.
And what they would do is they realize that
A lot of guys accounts would go inactive because they're not getting replies.
And so what they would do is they would basically send they would show an active person thirty inactive profiles, knowing that that inactive person is not there to reply.
But that that will be the notification for that person to come back and reactivate their subscription.
They have to pay to go read their inbox and to be able to reply. And so
The it's almost intentionally a horrible experience for the person who's there trying to find somebody.
in order to reactivate all the churned members and they would do they would basically in a the first hundred matches they would show you
You know, something like fifty, sixty, seventy percent of those matches were all just inactive people they wanted you to send a notification to to make them come back.
That sounds like a zinga train PM.
Yeah.
Dude, I went to the Zinga office once back in the like heyday.
It was
The craziest office I've ever seen. Sam, did you ever go to this thing? Yes. Uh it was right across 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 what what did you think of the office, Sean?
Well, you would go in, there's a giant tunnel, like an L E D 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 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 sixty people on the culinary team. They had a roof on the top where they were growing all the vegetables. He had like a giant fridge that was like the size of like a swimming pool you'd walk in and there was cows hanging upside down because they had their own butcher.
Process.
They w they didn't serve soda, they only brewed their own sodas, like everything was souped to nuts.
Customer.
And like 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 you know, like 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, Seeky, like
It looked to me from the outside like you know the most
data driven operation I had ever really seen. You know, I knew about what what we did, but what we did looked like
You know, caveman compared to what what they were doing in terms of
Sophistication of data.
The the the food thing reminds me, like I was the person we did a petition's grass that's real bacon.
And after a few months we finally started serving real bacon'cause we never had real bacon. It was only turkey bacon.
Yeah.
Mark Pinkas didn't like to kill pigs.
But yeah, like one of the things that people did at
Uh, Zinga and the product organs we have PM on call and I've never seen this done any other organization.
The PM on call for every game.
w would daily send an analysis of what changed day over day.
And so if there's a drop.
Then you were segmented.
And so oh my God, there's like anonymous like fifty percent drop.
Uh in Mexico.
uh for Farmville and we are not sure why because usually on Wednesdays at two it shouldn't be like this and it lasts a three hours long.
And they would have to explain, Oh, it's because the World Cup is happening.
What comes what 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 the or answer it. What comes first when you're that data or analytic oriented?
Does it
Are you that way and scale comes because of that?
Or
Uh are you can you only behave that way because you have scale?
So it depends on the environment.
For
If 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 could see in the hist in the experience of Zinga that that didn't translate to the mobile industry.
Mobile was less about virality. It was just difficult to do distribution, a lot more about creativity. And that's why Supercell.
have such a great advantage because they actually built very fun new games.
So I think it's the completely dependent environment. If it's hard to get early distribution, then scale
Uh makes it makes data more important.
But if it's quite difficult the early distribution.
then you want to be creative and innovative and brand and creativity matters a lot more. Do you remember any uh
Like random game change like color red to blue or flashing lights or whatever that just generated like ten million dollars overnight.
I I always remember thinking that like the best way to generate thirty million dollars overnight is just to like say hey
You it's it's gonna take you ten dollars just to unlock the game today.
Like we could just like make a not payable and people pay.
One
more interesting ideas is this idea of crew. So we had this idea of
Collecting
materials and you ask for your materials.
Uh one of the mechanics that we invented as in guy is this idea of crew where
You for whatever thing you want to unlock, you have to get at least like twenty people to help you, unique people.
Uh because what that did is
Well 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 uh in the AUs.
Another
thing that we saw is like just the power segmentation.
And so
There was this one day where
our our numbers went down anonymously and I had to figure out well is it like a this channel or that channel. Turns out there was a
one particular typo bug in the drop rate of this particular treasure.
There was
creating a lot of uh opportunities for people to share.
And so you just spend all day do doing things like that?
Uh and so and it's rarely something like huge, but it's all all the details together that makes a difference, isn't it?
What were the other uh business ideas or opportunities that you think are exciting right now?
Yeah. I mean I was I actually uh
asked Sam Altman to make this, but uh I don't know how long they're gonna take. But
Um I'm doing a lot of medical research.
What?
What did you do Sam Alton to make this product? He's like.
Oh, I thought I thought you were like oh you had Sam Ballby make a list for you to talk about. I was like, No. Oh no, no.

We're not that tight.
Uh.
But no, um I was doing a bunch of medical research and uh I noticed that
you can't access um paywalled articles. And so I really wish someone will make a version of Deep Research that lets you enter my your your paywall credentials.
Seeing your full task access.
Uh, and this goes further, I think there's just uh so much data behind
Uh off 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 number one thing I've been thinking about.
What's the name of the company uh that starts with an R. It's based in England. Sean, we've talked to'em about'em a bunch. It's like an acronym. Anyway, it's uh uh an academic publishing company.
in England, and it's like really controversial because I think it has like the second highest profit margin of all publicly traded companies in the world behind
Public storage.
And the shtick behind it and why everyone hates it is because
Researchers at universiti don't get paid anything for this. In fact, oftentimes they have to pay tuition in order to even go to these places, but they take your research and they put it behind like a thirty thousand dollar year paywall.
Uh
And so it's a very frustrating industry.
Yeah, it's the that's the whole industry, right? El Sevier I think is the biggest one and there's a bunch of controversy around that.
And yeah, all of these are extremely hard merchant 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, just like
taking the text and copy and paste it and putting somewhere and me maybe like printing it into a journal.
Um thing. So how would this work? You you're talking about like
You told Sam Altman to say
Hey, can I just give chat GPT my credentials and then it can go log in for me and use that.
information when I ask it questions.
So that's the T would have to do it. How could a founder well would how would a founder get around that or how would they do this?
Yeah, I mean y uh you would need access to O three, the full model first,'cause that's what open research is based on. But I mean it's not
terribly difficult to create something like a deep research. Um there was a company called there is a company called Gen Spark, so
I'm friends with the founder Jen Spark. He used to be VP a search at Baidu, which was 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.
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 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? So there's
Uh, so I'm deep into space. There's a company called Illicit.
There's a company called uh Psyspace.
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 chat GP allows you to do. But there's nothing I've seen that's lets you that's indexes the full text.
of all these journals.
Uh with your credentials. And why are you so interested in why what's all this research for? Is it for uh I I 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.
Um, and we've been uh doing everything we can to find new treatments for this'cause it's so rare and
You really get
Uh deep.
insight into the sentence and the structure of the m of the medical
Uh 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 fed.
Because you need to have like enough critical mass for
for the research to be worth it so they can recoup the uh research costs.
And the other interesting thing that we learned is that uh the IP issues are really weird. So
For example
There's this uh drug that is F VA approved.
Non prescription.
It's been out since the seventies treat ped horns.
And over the past twenty years, there's a huge amount of compelling data. This might be a
pretty good treatment for different kinds of cancer.
And there's been no clinical trials for it because
There is no money for it.
Because you can't patent a pinworm drug.
Um and so all the money, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars are going to new molecules are repetitive.
Even if things are already available.
And so once you get into Epidistry, you're like, wow, this is super, super broken.
And so yeah, I'm doing a lot of primary research.
In order if I repurpose all drawings that might already exist that could treat.
Oh, that's fairly rubber tremor.
It's it's you know, uh there's um
Obviously this is super serious and and I'm sorry you're going through everything.
Uh 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 uh hope the outcome like
Yeah, I mean so there's
I'm not the first
founder type of than in the situation, right? So
The co founder of Clubhouse, Rohan.
Uh his daughter has a introductive disease. Her name's Lydia and she he runs the Lydian 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 that have done similar things, like and have one cure is 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.
Uh you could do you can go so much further than what is available standard as standard of a care.
And so
Even the last time we met with our uh primary care team.
They were proposing like
two particular paths, one involving like
pretty aggressive surgery and radiation, another involving this like drug. I propose 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 makes more sets.
And the reason I was able to do that is like
because this disease is so rare, I am like more knowledgeable disease.
than anyone in the room because they have to l like study fifty different cancers. 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
This is maybe I'm 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 as should I take 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, the that's not part of the protocol.
Right. We don't have great evidence. And he was s it's 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.
Uh 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 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 care.
But our primary clinician
She is like she runs he's a principal investigator at one of the clinical trials.
uh 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 or more open.
To be 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 that you're in San Francisco too, where hopefully you think that like uh the open mindedness uh or the early adopter mindset like even uh trickles out to like the doctors and things like that. Uh that's pretty cool that you're around a doctor who's like willing to try some crazy stuff or
What seemed 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 a doc uh one doctor. And so if you can't find one, you can find others.
who's willing to do that and then you're in you're in the clear. And it's a lot easier if it's like a fairly serious rare disease.
Can you tell the story about
You tweeted out about your daughter's
Condition.
And then this crazy crypto turn of events happened where someone created a coin and then
millions, uh 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
Is this just
Was there just degenerate gambling, or did you maybe stumble upon a novel way that
People might fund research in the future. I I don't know which one 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
Uh Christmas, uh I was going to Japan uh 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.
uh the Hankinson lab in the University of Colorado. So we were donating money to to them uh once this happened because they're the only lab in North America.
The research is just particular tumor called the craniopharyngeoma.
And the treatment that were 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 lap.
Uh so I tweeted this thread with this GoFundMe link.
And that we end the raise about a quarter million dollars for a lab, which is like I think the biggest donation up to that point.
Uh but what happened is
Some people started asking about, hey, can I donate crypto?
And so I said, Okay, uh
Yeah.
I I posted my ENS, right? My um Ethereum name system.
Uh address.
And people started donating a little bit of eef.
And then some other people
Said, Hey, do you have a sole address'cause we're on Solana?
And I didn't have a full address.
I was aware what Solana is, but
I never touched it.
And so the next day, once I landed, I created in my first Solana wallet, I created its address and I tweeted it out.
And basically by the way, are you big in the crypto? Why were all the crypts doing this for you? Just because what what's the motivation other than it it's good.
So I I I it didn't occur to me I thought it was people f I had like seventy seven thousand followers at a time.
Uh and I'm not big in a crypto world. I've like been on and off active in crypto as soon as twenty seventeen, but
Never in a major way. Um I I w I'm not a crypto account that people follow.
Uh but I found out why
People did this.
Uh later.
Yeah.
Answers the question of Sean, like is this gambling or is it something else?
Uh but anyway, I posted a soft soul address and basically an hour later
I looked at my wallet.
And the wallets at four hundred thousand dollars. And it was zero an hour before.
Uh
So I'm looking at like w what is going on and it turns out
So someone created a coin called Pump
on pub dot fun, which is a platform
Where you can create a coin in literally like thirty seconds.
And
I was on ETH, right? I have been active in crypto. This wasn't a thing. For me, a new token on Ethereum was like a whole process.
Now they're short in thirty seconds.
Pump.
Dot fun is that fun. Yeah. Have you seen this business, by the way? No. These guys made like five hundred million dollars of profit last year.
Like more than that, I think.
More than that. Yeah. And and and so you click a button and you make your own coin, and obviously in the name, there's no hiding that the point of this is that it's a pump.
Scheme.
Pump and dump game. Right? They made five hundred million dollars.
At least.
At least make a lot of money. Specifically.
And so people are basically uh tr trading these new coins and trading them, trying to write it.
And it's basically uh 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
It's all real time. Like yesterday during the Super Bowl
Uh somebody created
And for for Dave Poitnoy instead of barstool coin created 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 you're buying trying to catch one of these thousand X waves.
But it's gonna dump and you just gotta know when you're gonna get off the train and then if you wait too long or you're the one who comes in late, you lose. So it is a
It's like being at a roulette table or whatever where you're you're just throwing chips at the table trying to trying to hit.
Oh my god. Yeah, it's like the Trump coin except you can create it in like
Ten seconds, thirty seconds.
But anyway.
That's why people uh created this coin is because
You're looking for these new narratives.
To gamble on.
Right. And the more interesting, the more viral scening the narrative is.
the more valuable becomes. And if you're in or early, it could really pump. So anyway, it was four hundred thousand dollars.
And I tweeted a screen.
There's a whole tweet sort of thread where it's like, What is going on?
And I kept on adding those to the tweet thread with screenshots on my wallet.
And so it was four hundred thousand dollars. I was like, what is happening?
If you were trying to explain someone free to this coin.
Calmeira.
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 five hundred million tokens.
And once I tweeted
Then an eye check again.
And it's now four million dollars.
And I'm like, what?
Uh and an hour later it's eight.
A couple hours later it became fifteen and at one point it was twenty million dollars.
Just
Like the same day and I think it's a little bit more. And the market cap of the whole thing, that means was eighty million.
Uh correct.
Okay. No, the I think peak market cap was around sixty million dollars.
Okay. And you had forty million of it.
Yeah, because I I sold ten percent immediately just to like capture something and I sold a bit more in the liquidity pool, so
You know, I got around a million dollars out.
Uh, but I still own thirty percent 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's not for me.
Not just charity, go into the research lab. Go into research lab. Researching the potential cures to your daughter's thing. Correct.
So
I said, Hey, I'm not gonna move anything without twenty four hours notice. Um I'm gonna try to like be very transparent about this.
And I thought about it and I said, I'm gonna start selling a thousand dollars every ten minutes.
Until like
We're done because I just don't have time to run a crypto project.
And
You know, like
I want everyone to know where this is going. So
That happened.
And
the price started going down, but once we get to it got to a million.
Uh what happened in between is because of such a big story.
Um, a bunch of rare disease organizations started reaching out to me.
And they're like, Wow, this happened to you.
Can we how do we get out get in on this because

They're like Did you say pump dot phone? Okay. Uh-huh. Average budget, annual budget for one of these organizations like a hundred thousand, hundred fifty thousand dollars, just like not a whole lot of money. This is like more money than the community's ever seen. It's a lot of excitement there.
So I thought well
I was talking to 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.
turning Mira into a launch pad for other rare disease tokens where
Mirror the liquidity, pair token.
Uh.
Uh was talked about.
And so I thought, Well, okay, that seems interesting.
Uh, before I do that, I should probably figure out
How
A coin works and how you launch one of these.
So
I when I'm Hamda Fan.
And I thought, okay, let's find out how one of these works.
So I created a coin called zero.
And I entered a description for 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 gonna do anything with it. It'll be worth zero dollars.
So I press the button.
And what I didn't realise 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 walleted crypto.
So within about one hundred to two hundred seconds.
the market cap of this coin that I told m people to not buy is watch wallet.
Does a watch wallet mean that you are someone that should be monitored because you're a potential whale?
Yeah, like people people start tracking like oh what is Vitalik doing with his wallet? What is what is so doing with their wall. Yeah. People want to copy what you're doing. And they think that you're and they think you're the man because your wallet is old or you have a lot in it.
Because I was for the main character of like crypto Twitter for like a a few days. Right. Okay, understood.
So there were copy there were bots like just monitoring what I was doing and doing buying whatever I was buying.
And so they saw this new token.
And so within t one hundred, two hundred seconds the market cap of this token
With three and a half million dollars.
So I was just sitting there.
Like
Panicking.
And I said, Okay, I don't
This is bad. I don't want to have anything to do with this.
So
I had half of the entire supply and I sold it.
And that was my main mistake.
I should have burned it.
Which
Everyone who've been happy about, right?
But because I sold, I crash
the price of this token and people got very upset because it was considered a rug.
So
Now like, Oh my God, everyone's and and when I sold, I made like eighty thousand dollars'cause even though three and a half million dollars in market cap is only about
One hundred thousand dollars or so in liquidity?
And yeah, I
started a thread explaining, oh my God, I didn't expect this to happen.
I got a spaces.
Over video. Just like I'm really sorry. I I I'm like
Still try to figure out how this works and
You know, people don't
Did it care?
Um realize is just a different
community than it was
What I was
really active on Twitter in twenty seventeen. Like people are on Ethereum, they're like
very deep tech people, right? They're like nerdy.
And with a Solana
in twenty twenty four, I didn't realize like it's so much more mainstream. A lot of people
Maybe have like fifty dollars, a hundred dollars, and you're just trying to turn into a thousand dollars.
And so the amount of emotion
There, it's like very, very different.
Crypto transition from neck beards to like everybody who looks like Jack Harlow.
In like four years. The community the Solana community all has like the line etched into the into like the side of their haircut or like multiple. It's very different than like
The people that got me into Ethereum in the first place. Today I learned, or this month I learned. So anyway, the Market out three and a half million before I sold, it dumped at three hundred thousand.
And
As I started talking about my mistake.
The Marky Cat.
Came back.
And at one point it was like
Five and a half six million dollars.
Uh, just because I was like talking about it and people were just the more upset people were, the more the coin pumped, and more peop 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
Based on me as a scammer.
So
I thought about what am I gonna do with it. So first of all, like the eighty thousand dollars
within a minute I I realized this is a mistake. So I bought back in into the coin and I burned it all, right? So I already was like neutral and I explained that.
No one cared because of the
Anonymity of crypto, they thought I had like a hundred other wallets.
That was like
Th that I plumped and dumped on a 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
Um I got some help.
uh from you know a friend he used to or Coinbase some other people who d didn't want to be named.
To do on chain analysis.
So what I
The sun on spaces is I'm actually just gonna pay everyone back a loss of money on this.
out of my own. And I'm not even touched the charity wallet.
So
What we ended up doing is everyone who held in the first two hundred seconds.
Who ha owned any coins then
Up until
Forty three minutes later, Warden Market Cap fully recovered.
Back to the same value.
If you sold then you realize loss. I'm just gonna airdrop you sol.
And it ended up being like a hundred forty fifty thousand dollars out of my own pocket.
Uh and I just paid everyone back, which has never happened on any pump fund coin before.
Uh and maybe like ten percent of the people have
heard about this. I I tweeted about it. I had to like
keep our responding'cause every time I tweet
For the next like month.
Someone say, Oh, you're a scammer, what are you still doing here? And I had to say, No, I paid everyone back. And they were just like not saying anything. This is like uh 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 it now expects you to give them like twenty dollars. It says even though we call 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.
Um, Andrew's like I locked um a bunch of the mirror coin into a liquidity pool. So we're still perpetually generating
So so you bought a million dollars of charity for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, basically.
That's correct. Yeah. And then we uh total was like a one point four million. We donated more.
uh to match like the mistake and we added a go thummy to it. So and there'd be one thing. And then the lab actually like
triple leveraged it up into the coin. They they they got hooked on pump pumped off on.
Would you Sean put give back the one fifty 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 cra all of this was unintentional.
Uh 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 isn't don't buy this. This is going to zero. It's a test coin.
And y s if somebody went and randomly speculated on it using their like
They're sniper bots that are trying to track your wallet. You know, like I wouldn't have given a shit personally. But then again
These uh this community's so like crazy that they'll just like make your life hell on Twitter for like the next five years, it might be might be worth it, you know? Just to clear your own conscious, go to sleep at night, you know?
Exactly. I couldn't it was for me so I could sleep all at night'cause a lot of these people are fairly low income and uh the money is fairly meaningful. It was one reason.
But another reason is like people just don't read.
Like I explained this I mean the coin says don't buy it. I explained this like a couple different times.
And what I realized is like you you just don't read on the internet.
And
As far as anyone else knows, because it makes little noise,
Like
I
But
If you don't don't read.
What it sounds like is
I created a scam coin using my own daughter's name to scan Pottom. Right, right, right. It's crazy. Did you um
D in the end of this, is there anything here that's interesting for fundraising for research, or this is just straight like I accidentally got into a gambling pool and kind of got some money for research, but this is not a sustainable thing for anybody.
I'm still trying to figure it out. So what I'm hoping to
Big.
near it into
is so the way this works is you're this is like sort of game 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 Port 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 player zero sum game against the community and they're all gonna be upset.
For you for sure, no matter what.
And so that's a very difficult dynamic. And I think my idea here is like 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 solely 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 millions of dollars market gap.
But every time someone sells or buys
It it creates like up to
Co could be hundreds of thousands a day in fees.
And what 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.
Uh no, it was a month. It was the last it was Christmas up until like maybe, you know, now and
It ruined my vacation.
Yeah, 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.
It's something about communication and relationships. And I remember you said this really great thing at the dinner.
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 explain, Sicky, how old are you?
Uh I'm forty one.
I think.
You look like you could be
Twenty two or forty one, I have no idea.
Yeah, Asian no raisin, let's go. Um
Okay.
Um yeah, so I I took actually now twice. I took I took class again since we talked.
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.
Uh, it's taught by a professor called Carol Robbins.
And it's generally known as Tucci Feli.
And it's nameless for every participant at some point.
Will like cry.
Uh in the class.
But uh Carol Robins is now a co founder of a uh
Uh 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 connection for 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 develop that connection.
And so
The two frameworks to connect is one is the two tracks
of com of of interpersonal communication and the five levels of it.
So
When you're talking with anyone else.
Um there is two tracks. There's the content track.
And there's a relationship track.
So the content track is full of facts.
And a relationship track is filled with emotion and a relationship track is what
Uh it's filled.
And what has to be filled for a relationship.
to get become closer and for trust to increase.
And the way you fill each of these tracks
is through the five levels of communication.
And the idea is when you are talking to someone, there's five levels at which 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.
Where sh it doesn't really say anything, we're just it's just ritualized greeting.
Um level two is extended ritual.
So that is how's the weather? How's the game?
Right. You're you're you're it's 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 gonna do uh with this particular idea?
Level four.
It is emotional self disclosure.
So that is when you say something.
Uh that
discloses how you are feeling emotionally at the time.
I feel sad.
I feel angry. And there's a lot of thought 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

Uh 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 uh 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, it's kinda the only way you can do it.
And so a lot of the training is about
breaking past the barrier or the uncomfortableness of
engaging level four and level five communication.
Uh and
You basically sit in a circle with twelve people for four days straight.
Um 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 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 asked for jury, so I found it difficult to relate to people.
Uh but
completely transformed my all my relationships, including my relationships with my wife.
And
So
One of the ways uh this was ju even just last week, we had on site
And I was able to do a mini version of this with our customer success team. We're 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 of people got inside of people got was transformative. And you wouldn't normally
You know, sit around for a couple of hours in a work setting, talk about your feelings.
And it's very comf uncomfortable to do so.
And it's intentionally so. Like it's very comfortable for the first couple of
Uh in the 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 run and then it was uncomfortable about an hour.
But then people
uh we're really into it and
It's weird, but everyone at some point.
Was crying about.
uh some disclosure that they heard or it or they've experienced.
And as a result, the team got so much closer and a trust increased.
That's wild.
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
Talk about it.
You're upset by this. Well, the other person gets defensive.
Or they
push back and say, Well, you did the you know, blah, blah, blah.
And so
Can you give me an example?
Of a conversation that you had that like
Maybe h here's what I would love.
A conversation that typically would have gone like this.
Or maybe a bit avoid it altogether.
And instead, here's how the actual conversation went that was useful for you as a as a you know CEO, leader, friend, whatever husband, whatever whichever example you want to choose.
Yeah, so
The the first one is easy, actually. So
And 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. Right. And people can tell as a thing. Like when when you feel a certain way about someone
It it it it gets it leaks, right? Like
There's a level of even you're not attending passive aggressive, you're just kind of ignoring the person, or it comes off like you're saying like oh my God, it's late again.
Right.
Right. Or he didn't do this.
And so that's the default. And that's when you have this negative feedback cycle of well.
Okay, you already felt a certain way, then you expressed it unknowingly, and now 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 at least anyway.
then it becomes easier to say, I'm going to express that.
And
You're gonna express it no matter what.
Your choice is do you express it with words?
Or to express it with not words, but just like passive aggressive behavior.
And so
And then you 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 uh
Uh
read the minds of uh some other person and how they're thinking, 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 level is like, Oh, if I am
Expressing.
This emotion, that means I'm attacking someone.
And that is true if you don't express emotion and you're just acting it out.
But if I were to say
Іно I see you do this, the story I tell myself.
is that you don't respect me.
And I don't know if that's 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 I don't know if you know that you pro you I know that you probably don't because you can't read my mind.
But
I'm guessing you probably aren't intending.
To make me feel that way.
and I thought it'd be helpful for you to share.
For me to share that to you so that you are aware of it.
Um I just learned that technique in therapy last week.
Amazing.
Nonviolent communication framework, right?
It is. Yeah. It's it's very connected. I literally just learn that.
Yeah, you're you're you're you're you're sharing information, right? So it's not an attack.
Like you if you are genuinely doing it because you understand that you can't read their mind, but other cursor can't read your mind either.
And so by sharing it is you're offering them a gift of different nation.
One question, Siki. You said something about the English language making it harder. Wha what did you mean by that?
So
What you start seeing when you're in this class.
W
These twelve 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.
And that's some sort of a quirk that's kind of unique to English. So
When
You say I feel that.
Or I feel like.
There it is actually grammatically impossible for the network to be in the motion.
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
Uh is is has been
You know, disused.
Misused for other purposes?
And so we j just often
Is unconsciously you once you see it, you can't unsee it.
people we I ask people it's 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 like
Uh you get into this type of shit, whatever you wanna call it, the touchy feely stuff, and you're like, This is the way.
And then like I get into it and then
half the time I execute that poorly and all and then like the business sucks and I'm like
I gotta have more patience with this person or I gotta like let them get away with shit more or whatever. And then I just go right back to the
Total opposite N where it's like um
What what are they what do they call this Doge where I'm like everyone has fifteen minutes to fight for their job. Like you know, like it's like I get influenced by I either side and I o but there is no middle ground and

the first sign of resistance, I crumble sometimes. So
The but the version of it that happens for me is let's say I I hear this and I'm like
Ah, Seeky 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 because she didn't go to the seminar and she didn't have the t the skills and the tools to be a mad shot. 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 I think I think you have to do whatever works.
And the reality is to get good at this, you know, it took me
I I did this.
four day program twice and e every day was like twelve hours a day and you're just sitting in the circle practicing for eight hours.
Uh the first time she actually did.
Okay, so she's not supposed to.
I kinda no, I kinda smuggled her into the into the uh the hotel room. So she didn't go to the class.
But I will say
Like the second night I when I went home, she was like, Who are you?
'Cause I was like, Oh my God, I feel so bad. I've been such an asshole.
Have you never, but I haven't been. Yeah. Like I have I've
contemplated going to it, but I think they it's like uh 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 like not expensive. It's like two thousand dollars and you go for four days and you can't bring your cell phone. You can't you're you're gotta be completely disconnected. Or maybe it's even five days. It's kind of a lot.
Uh but they like everyone who I go
Who goes to it, they won't tell me what happens there, but they all say that it's life changing and they can now develop relationships and connections with other people.
It's one of these really strange things that I'm so tempted to do, but the amount of time to be disconnected is very like nerve wracking, or or you know, just like scary. This sounds very similar.
It does feel like it's not the time to be disconnected. That's the scary part there.
Well yeah it is dude could c I it might even be seven days. Could you go seven days without a phone away from your family?
Away from family's a little harder.
Yeah, that's hard. Like in a hotel. Like it's like crazy to be disconnected. But yeah, I don't want to like
Also, I don't wanna like cry with a bunch of strangers.
I'm like, I don't wanna go to Tony Robbins. I don't wanna see anyone I don't want anyone to see me dancing and singing. Like you know what I mean? Uh uh.
Yeah, what's great about leaders in Tuck is like is they're all like
you know, well known as founders. It's like not
Cheap to go. So even worse. Be around awesome people. God. No, actually it's really helpful because you realize that.
all the people that some people that you look up to, like we're kinda all the same, like there's
Very similar insecurities. Whenever I I I hear about the stuff, I think of the Tony Soprano quote where he's like, Whatever happened to the strong silent type, like Gary Cooper.
Can I just say like hey Chief, like hi Bub, and just know that person only at that m amount and just say yes or no?
Cy, you have this uh interview question that I like. You said my favorite interview question uh after twenty years of doing interviews with people is
What is your greatest strength that you are most worried about not coming across in an interview setting?
Why that question?
I think uh
I enjoy breaking the fourth wall.
And
Interviews tend 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 uh
a a leak list or something and it's just not coming across.
What I find is that it breaks down this the formality and lets people get people excited to talk about something that they're really, really good at, telling me great great stories.
Um and you get it you get to know the person just a little bit about it better.
And I think the particular thing is like if you just ask what's your greatest strength, 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 it.
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 so you you're you're
You founded Runway, which is like
uh a very serious
Business.
Like uh you're gonna have to hire enterprise people, I would imagine, um, enterprise salespeople.
Uh, like it's like a I'm basing like the future of my company off of some of the output that I'm going to learn from your software.
But you have the vibe of like an artist to me, where like you
you have a variety of like really intriguing projects. You're like this thinker, almost like a philosopher.
Is this new to be doing s 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
B to B world.
So yeah, funny enough, he said serious business, that was the name of my first company.
Uh we built
Fun gangs. I feel like if you call it serious citizen.
You know? Yeah,'cause we're a games company. Serious business, fun games.
But uh
Yeah, I mean I think it's actually a pretty
huge advantage, uh, particularly for
The things we consider serious.
So I mean
People have the stereotype of business and finances being
Super serious and super rigid.
But finance
At its best is really about creating value.
without 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, we have to be in flow.
And things that are fun keeps you in flow.
And what we
actually hear from our customers that the thing that we hear quite often and we love hearing is
This software feels fun.
And that's not a luxury.
That
is a fund that creates flow, that creates a creativity, that creates value.
Uh and when you use something that isn't
Bun.
Yeah, something that feels slow or confusing.
Then you're not creative.
Uh and you're making worse decisions.
So I don't think they're in tension with each other. I think they're quite complimentary.
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 st what's the story of this,
This happened last week. Our marketing uh team uh is run by Cal Freeze, who is a YC founder of a company called Tyka. He's the COO there.
And we also have this woman named Julie uh Fritas.
Uh, who was at Shopify.
And
Uh I was in the office and I just saw them come out in a meeting.
kinda giggling and they got out his piece of cardboard and started like
writing this. I'm like, what is this? Like oh
You know how like
You know, you you didn't want to do a billboard. We decided just like
Create a billboard ourselves and just hold on to freeway.
And I'm like, that is such a cracked idea. Of course that's gonna go viral.
And
Uh I said, I'll do it. It's like we will? I'm like, Yeah, I'll I'll do it.
So they're like, Okay, so we walked outside, we found a freeway entrance.
Uh and I was just holding the sign.
What does it say, by the way?
It's a
hate your finance platform get runway dot com.

Are you um
Are you the only founder?
Uh I have a I had a co founder. Uh
Are you awesome on far and he left the company about a year and a half ago, almost two years ago.
Because that's like pretty rare. I mean you're I I don't know when you launch, but I I feel like you're very, very, very, very early in the period because I remember seeing you guys
Go on Twitter.

Uh that's gonna be pretty uh
different to be a kind of a the only founder running a company. That'd be kind of exciting, right? You get to do whatever the hell you want, or is it you're gonna 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 want it to.
And actually I didn't want him to leave. Like he
It is a I mean, I he's still on the board. I love him. Um he's just
The
most wise and high integrity person I've ever met.
Uh, he was one of Prague's peers of Twitter and he I hired him out of school, my first company.
And you know you works for Brett Taylor, uh at Sierra.
But
He'll we if things were like going slower than wanted and he identified that it was him
sl or our relationship slowing us down and decide to fire himself.
And I didn't think he he was right about that.
But he was. He usually usually is right about just about everything and it totally transformed the company. He also must have attended Interpersonal Dynamics. 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 uh maybe AI, maybe not AI.
Uh a lot of labs.
Um I'm small messing that company, but the it's it's they do like basically all of the audio translation.
Generation, sometimes defects.
And when I met them, there were like less than ten people. They were just they were ex Google. They're working on the foundational model 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, two, a year and a half or so?
Uh and what
What
blew my mind is I never seen a group of
very good technologists, they were also so good at commercializing the technology so rapidly.
There are uh hundreds of millions and hundreds.
Hundreds.
I feel like this just came out.
Yeah, no, no, no. We should have investment, right. They uh 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 a graph, right, for Wise and the fastest growing SaaS companies, and I think Cursor is up there. I am fairly convinced that I love a lab is actually like faster than all of them.
Um but
Yeah, I I think they announced uh some revenue milestone, but it's well when we were tinkering with them, it was borderline
This is cool. This is cute to
I need I can use this right now. It was like it was like just there.
So I guess they crossed it and people are actually using it like
Who are they selling to is it?
So so Apple has audio butts.
Oh so not podcasts, right? Apple audio books, right? Like so.
Previously did have audio bugs and you know, you would know that a lot of his um um AI generated is powered by weather labs.
Oh so they and they also they also do AI agents for customer service and support agents and things like that. So they're the back end of all uh maybe potentially other software tools as well.
Yeah, yeah. So so they have all kinds of product lines. They saw the book publishers, the power agents, they do a whole lot. Why are they better than like what OpenAI you know, like the risk with all these AI companies is that the
the general the base models, AI open AI and 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? What's No, it's their own found foundational models, um and the quality and expressiveness is just better.
And uh the form factor is better. So you can use it for all these different use cases.
And the the voice API of open AI is actually like not as good.
That where it's 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 so I can just like pick like
I just grab 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, or 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.
Uh funny, Naval Ravacant named a company and suggested that we use it under dot com.
I think that was smart. Quarter million's not a lot, I feel like for that. Hey, what did we name this? or he just suggested
When Clubhouse only had one room in April twenty twenty, um, it was in the Naval app, right? I think you were on it quite a bit too.
Yeah.
Uh
when I was thinking about what I wanna do for next company, I said I wanna do a finance company
And I got a great name for it, Nabal, CFO. AI.
He's like, No, don't call it AI. It's gonna be dated in like two years. Everything's gonna call it AI. You should c just call it runway and should get the dot com.
And he rode the purse truck into runway.
And
That's why we got the back op.
It's so funny that you said it was the Naval app at the time. It totally was. Yeah. It was amazing. It was the talk that all Rob got. It was the it was amazing. By the way, I was using uh AirChat like pretty religiously uh like for like two months.
Yeah. Um even though I knew AirChat's not gonna work.
I was like, Oh, it doesn't matter. This is Naval's app. He's gonna be on twenty four seven. Cool. This is like
Uh
I like to hang out with the fall. I'm not gonna
email them like a million other people and say, Hey, can we can we get a coffee? Just a thousand dollars a month and you can talk to Naval whenever you want. I'm gonna be on this I'm gonna be on this for two months. I'm gonna be a power user for exactly two months and I'm gonna hang out with Naval and I that's exactly what happened. I was very proud of myself for that. It was great m the most fun way to use that app.
Yep.
Dude, thank you for doing this. You're the man and uh uh we're thinking of you and your daughter.
And hopefully appreciate one too.
Alright, see you, thank you, that's it, that's the pot.
I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to
I put my law in it like my days off On a road less travel never looking back