Digital Social Hour - Crowdfunding Secrets: Raise Millions in Days | Renji Bijoy DSH #1209

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

Discover the insider secrets to raising millions through crowdfunding in record time! 🚀 In this episode of the Digital Social Hour, host Sean Kelly sits down with Renji Bijoy, the genius behind one of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns ever. From raising $2 million in just 2 days to building a revolutionary AR/VR product, Renji shares the strategies, challenges, and mindset needed to turn bold ideas into reality. 🧠💡   Learn why timing, substance, and leveraging your audience are game-changers in the crowdfunding world. Plus, hear firsthand how Renji’s team is shaping the future of computing with their groundbreaking visor technology and disrupting the tech giants. Whether you're an entrepreneur, investor, or just curious about the next big thing in tech, this conversation is packed with valuable insights you don’t want to miss! 🌟   Watch now and subscribe for more insider secrets. 📺 Hit that subscribe button and join the conversation on the Digital Social Hour with Sean Kelly! 🚀   CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Intro 01:14 - How Renji Raised $20M 04:52 - Next Generation Computing 06:34 - Future of Venture Capital 09:16 - Global Power Shift 11:28 - Power of Social Media 13:53 - Managing Raised Capital 16:36 - Immersed: $8M with 8 Employees 18:56 - Immersed: $1M from Meta 21:06 - Immersed: $1M from Twitch 23:14 - Immersed: $1B from Facebook 27:45 - Starting a Company Again 29:14 - The Visor in the Wild 30:32 - Elon Musk and Tesla 31:25 - Legacy of Steve Jobs 34:50 - Competing Orthogonally 37:00 - Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin 37:57 - How Immersed Started 41:34 - Importance of Networking 43:53 - AI and Job Security 45:10 - Humanoid Robots 49:15 - AI Creating New Jobs 52:27 - Differentiate Your Podcast 54:20 - Human Relationships Matter 55:26 - Post-Trump Authenticity 57:20 - Stop Making Pennies   APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://www.digitalsocialhour.com/application BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [e-mail]   GUEST: Renji Bijoy https://www.instagram.com/renji.bijoy   LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/   #indiecomics #creativecrowdfunding #comiccrowdfunding #crowdfundingforartists #crowdfundingtactics

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but then we wouldn't have the opportunity to build a multi-billion dollar business. And so I don't want to have Twitch's story, no offense, great exit. I'd rather have the, call it the Facebook story of the first, call it two or three years of Facebook, there was no monetization on the Facebook platform.

They just built the network of friends of friends of friends of friends. And as soon as they are like, all right, now we've got to figure out monetization. All right guys, we got Renji here today from Austin. And man, you might've sold me on Austin. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, I'm glad to be here.

Thanks for having me. Yeah, I did not know that many important people were out there. Yeah, it's a good spot. I think it's kind of the new Silicon Valley. Yeah, how long you been out there for? Six years. Okay.

It's a really good spot. Yeah, I think because it has the chill vibe of like the East coast, I think more like kind of Atlanta. You can raise a family, chill out there, but also has like a tech focus, business focus. You guys like Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, the founders of like Airbnb, Palantir, a lot of people you don't realize are out there,

it's a really good networking spot, especially because it's early. I think when you're in a saturated city like New York or San Francisco, it's just hard if you haven't been there for decades. That's true, because by then people are kind of shielded with their connections and they have their circles established. Exactly, yeah, and it's like, hey, sorry, seats taken.

So I know you've raised a ton of money over $20 million, right? Was moving to Austin kind of integral to that? I would say that Austin wasn't integral for that, necessarily, because we did actually predominantly crowdfunding online. Right. Right. So if we wanted to raise more venture capital,

probably would have been better to move out to San Francisco or something, right? But I think for us, because we have sort of this army of retail investors, our users, our followers that really love our product, it's really empowered us to get the word out there. It's really sort of a viral mechanism to get more users, more investors.

I don't think we would have been able to, especially because we're focused on hardware, we're kind of building sort of this advisor type product. Because of that, it's actually easier to crowdfund and not have to go through all these hoops that venture capitalists want you to, but instead, why don't you just go to the customers who really love the product and get them to fund it.

And so very quickly raised like 2 million bucks in two days, 8 million bucks in two weeks. And I was like, man, I've done six month VC road shows before, venture capital road shows, and still come up with nothing as opposed to, you just give your audience, your customers an opportunity to invest something they believe in. Man, it really just ramps up out of nowhere.

And so I'm super thankful for pretty much everyone who's really backed us to date. I love it. And I know crowdfunding, a lot of people attempt there, right, so what do you think made your campaign so special? Cause you might have the record for most. Yeah, yeah. So I think the main thing is having something of substance.

I think a lot of people try to crowdfund with an idea on a napkin, but they haven't proven themselves yet. So for us, because we're the most used app in all of AR VR, mainly because it's kind of a work app, right? But on the headset connects to your laptop creates multiple screens. So you have kind of like a workstation with you anywhere you go portably. The main thing is we had a product that users loved. A lot of these other people who try to crowdfund, they're like, oh, hey, I have this cool idea. Will you invest in this? And then they raise like 5,000 bucks

as opposed to $5 million. So it really depends on, do you have something of substance? Do you have, so the question is, okay, well, how do you build something of substance first? It's, you need to have a genuine desire to build a product that people love. And if you don't do that, I wouldn't recommend crowdfunding, it's gonna flop.

Yeah, something they love. And also the timing is important, right? What your space is hot right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I would say that when I joined, it definitely wasn't hot. So like, I think in 2014, Palmer Lucky, the founder of Oculus sold to Facebook for $3 billion. Then 2014, 2015, 2016, all these startups

were trying to do VR this, VR that. But then by 2017, when I joined the space, because all these startups the past three years had failed, I ended up not being able to raise any VC money at all. So I was really kind of heads down focusing on living off of savings. I went through an accelerator program called Techstars, similar like Y Combinator if you ever heard of that. But what ended up happening was just heads down focus for about two or three years building this product, got our first, I don't know, 50 users. But then when COVID hit, everyone started working from home and everyone was like, oh crap, well, I can't

really bring my computer screens from the office back home. So I found this kind of headset thing. Can I use that for screens? And very quickly we became one of the top apps. And so once I realized, wow, I've been getting like 70 different texts from 70 different people saying, hey, like this virtual office stuff now makes sense

that we're working from home. Is there a way I can invest in this thing? And then I started Googling crowdfunding. I was like, mainly because most of the people texting me were not venture capitalists. They were just regular Joe Schmo, whatever. And ended up raising, yeah, two million bucks in two days, eight million bucks in two weeks.

You know, faster today, we've raised just over $20 million. And so not that that's the measure of success is how much you can raise, but what that capital does to really enable you to really get to the next level. Right, we truly wanna be, truly wanna be the company that figures out how to build the next generation of computing. Like if you think about Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, all these tech giants, they're pouring dozens

of billions of dollars into what comes after the desktop, then the laptop, then the smartphone, it's glasses. And so we believe that because we have the most used software or app in this space, we'll know how to build the next generation of hardware because people know, like we know what people actually use the headsets for. Looking for the ultimate online casino experience? Step into the BetMGM Casino app where every deal,

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with iGaming Ontario. Candidly, most people, including yourself, I assume, you don't want to wear a two pound brick on your head. No. You wanna wear something like very, very lightweight. So our visor is six ounces, very, very lightweight, and it's higher resolution than Apple's headset. And so that's coming out this year,

and actually a couple of months here. And our goal with that is to make this relevant to regular people, right? Like I don't wanna focus on the niche VR gaming hobbyist world, nothing against them. It's just, I'd rather focus on the world of everyone who uses a computer, right? So if we can become the next Facebook, the next Apple,

man, like I'm super happy that we have all of our users who invested in this thing early on because now you're gonna have one-off random millionaires who never historically had a chance to even do that before. Crowdfunding really unlocked that for the first time. I think it was like 2016. Before that, it was literally illegal for you to be able to invest.

If you weren't already rich and you weren't an accredited investor, you weren't able to actually invest in a startup before. But now finally post 2016, now you can put your money in a startup. And if that becomes the next tech giant, well, cool. Like you can be the next person who says, oh yeah, I had an early check in Facebook and that's why I'm retired. Yeah.

Because it's really hard to make stupid returns on the stock market. Exactly. Yes. 7% a year on average if the stock market is doing well, which it hasn't been for the past few years. So that's kind of why the rich has always been getting richer because only angel investors net worth over a million already were able to invest in these high return tech startups like Facebook and Airbnb

and all these companies. I wish I was one of the early, even a $10,000 check in Airbnb, but that wasn't even legal back then. Right, yeah, you had to be accredited and you had to know the right people. Exactly. A lot of hoops you had to jump through.

Exactly, whereas now with crowdfunding, you go to a website, you put in your dollar amount that you want, and then your money is now in the company. And so that's why I feel like I'm starting to see a wave of new companies who realize, I don't have to, as a founder, jump through hoops of getting venture capitalists to, I guess, be on board with whatever I want to do with my company.

Like, I could just do this by myself. I believe in my company. So does my followers, my users, and our customers. And we're just gonna do this thing, whether or not there's some VC who tries to like, I don't know, most venture capitalists, if you don't realize, like they're incentivized to plummet your company valuation

so that they own more of the company. Right, like when a lot of people ask me, oh, have you ever like been on Shark Tank? And I'm like, I feel really bad. No offense to Shark Tank, but I feel really bad for the founders who go on that show because you'll get offers like, oh, for 30% of your company, I'll give you 150K.

That means your company's worth only 450K when this person had like a million in revenue. So it's like you're giving away a third of your company. If you went just crowdfunding, you can maybe value your company at maybe 5 million, 10 million bucks, give away a smaller percentage. But at the same time, you're giving an opportunity to all these normal retail

investors who historically never had even the chance to invest in a company like yours. And if you're going to be a billion dollar company someday, well, that person's thousand bucks turns into a hundred thousand dollars. And so I'm like, man, I'm very excited about what the sort of new wave of crowdfunding and I just, I really, I don't know. I'm thankful that people can do that. I don't even know what the future of venture capital looks like anymore. I saw this chart. If you ever watched the All In podcast, for example, like Chamath, Jason Calacanis, all

these guys, they showed this chart that showed that in 2022 is kind of the peak of VC. 2023, it like chopped down to like a 10th of what the venture capital was able to pull off in previous years. And then 2024, even less. And so there's this chart where it just looks like VC is starting to die. One of the guys who's close to Elon Musk, who also lives in Austin, said to me, he's like,

dude, he's actually a VC. He said, dude, I think VC is dead. I was like, well, why do you think it's dead? He's just like, at the end of the day, I just feel like we had a really good run for the past 25 years. And I just don't think it's dead? He's just like, at the end of the day, I just feel like we had a really good run for the past 25 years. And I just don't think it's the future. I just don't think that these venture capital firms

are gonna be able to convince high net worth individuals to keep putting money into their funds because the returns are just not making sense. You have these different sort of venture capital firms who are just trying to join the club that another VC joined. All that to say, like, there's not much material, effective strategy that's happening there. For lack of better terms, it's more of like a show off

contest. And so all I care about is build a good product, build a good company, be able to ultimately give a return to the people who really believed in us. And at the end of the day, man, I'm really excited for how like the little guys, so to speak, my friends, my family, our users are now able to have a much sort of bigger And at the end of the day, man, I'm really excited for how, like the little guys, so to speak, my friends, my family, our users are now able to have a much sort of bigger return

than something they historically could only do in the stock market and only get max like 7% per year, if that. So yeah, there's a power shift happening in the investing world and in the content world. So now ordinary people, little people, like podcasters are getting more eyeballs in television shows and networks. Yeah, I think that's something,

I mean, even just this election, like for sure showed that, that like maybe you could call this the podcast election, where Trump won because he went on all these podcasts and you got to really understand who he was. It was very humanizing, right? Like I remember a couple of friends who were just like very, very anti-Trump,

and I'm not saying you have to be on one side or the other, but if you listen to him talk, you're like, oh, oh, I guess he's a human. I'm not saying you have to be on one side or the other, but if you listen to him talk, like, oh, I guess he's a human. Not just like a freaking demon. Like he's a human, look, he has struggles like you and I, he gets angry sometimes, he gets upset sometimes, he doesn't know how to respond sometimes,

sometimes he says things he regrets, he's a human. But who of us here can raise our hand and say that we're perfect? And so when he goes on sort of these podcasts, you can see a kind of another side to him, kind of the, I would say this time around, he was way more soft spoken and even he was a lot more fair than he's ever been before.

I feel like he almost learned from his previous election where he was kind of like, you know, just clapping back at Hillary saying, no, you're a puppet, you're a puppet. It's like some kind of dumb like little kid debate. But when it came to the current, like I remember listening to him on the All In podcast and you could see, you just like a lot more fair about,

yeah, there are times that I've offended people and I regret it. And then I would imagine if Kamala ended up going on these different podcasts as opposed to kind of the very tailored, doctored podcasts that were very clearly premeditated. She went on just very organic, let's just shoot the breeze, let's just have a conversation.

I feel like people would have really, she would have humanized herself and people would not really think she's BSing all the time. And I feel like she probably would have had a fairer shot. Yeah, podcasts do a great job at humanizing you and shout out to All In, cause it's four billionaires. When have you ever had that opportunity

to learn from four billionaires on a podcast? Yeah, and that's why I love living in Austin because they're there quite a bit. We're kind of in the same sort of poker game there. It's really fun to kind of see how that world is starting to really mix into, it's interesting. Austin, Texas is kind of like a melting pot, right? You have the far left, you have the far right,

you have people in the center, and everyone's like, all right, I don't really care what your background is, let's just have a relationship, let's be friends, let me hear from you, let me just be okay with the fact that, hey, we're a blue city and a red state, as opposed to just far left on it or far right in any particular state. One thing that I will say though,

as far as building a company, having social media presence, it's been really cool to see how even guys like Elon, he uses his ex account a lot. People say that he saved, what do you call it, free speech in America. And when you look at guys like Zuckerberg, he posts more on Instagram, obviously, and threads, that's his thing.

But it's been cool, like when have you ever been able to really have access to some of these people, right? Elon will tweet back to just a random Joe Schmo on X, whereas back in the day, like Steve Jobs, how could you ever really reach him, right, from Apple? It's been really cool to kind of see how social media is the great equalizer, right? It allows, it blows my mind that you just started

this podcast two years ago. 11, 11 and a half million followers on Instagram, like congrats to you. Thank you. And I think that man, this is sort of the new age of what is gonna build leverage moving forward. If you wanna build a company, if you wanna figure out how to get it funded,

if you wanna figure out how to get your product in front of customers to try it, get feedback, I would say the easiest way is social media. Like for us, the vast majority of the $20 million that we raised to date was from Instagram. I had like maybe 2000 followers when we raised $2 million in two days. It was just people from like my high school

and then our customers who followed me on Instagram. And then I ended up that, I guess my follower count grew from 2000 to like 9,000 on Instagram. And then again, these are not big numbers at all. And the 9,000, I guess the new 7,000 people came from, they heard about the $2 million round that they missed out on. And so a ton of people were DMing me saying,

hey, are you gonna open up another round? How do I get in? So I opened up another round that raised $8 million in two weeks from only 9,000 followers. So I was like, man, this is the crazy, I've just never seen anything like this before. And actually those were world records at the time. We're setting world records for crowdfunding,

the most amount of money raised in the shortest amount of time, both those times, and we continue to do that. And so I started realizing, man, social media really, really matters because it's humanizing, it gets people away to actually have direct access to you. It allows them to really better understand your heart and like your desire for your product, your company.

At the same time, like with great power comes great responsibility, Spider-Man, whatever. Just the idea that, man, like, you really need to invest in the people that you really trust. If someone follows you and they're like, man, maybe some people say that, like Logan Paul or Sean or whoever,

there's some things I don't like, there's some things that I do. It's like, well, the more content you put out there, you have more of an opportunity to kind of state your case. And man, it's been really cool to kind of see how there's this new wave of social media that really, I guess the older generation really underestimates. I think the election is a manifestation of that.

Absolutely. Yes, you are used to operating lean. What was it like just taking in all that money? Because that's where a lot of companies fail too, right? Just because you raise money doesn't mean you're going to be successful. Exactly. What's funny, I don't want to name names,

but there's a startup that I found out raised $40 million, and they burned through all of it. And now they had to do like a recapitalization. They're struggling to raise even one or 2 million bucks. I'm like, that sucks, man. What'd you do with 40 million bucks? Turns out there was a couple of kids who were just very, very young, didn't know what to do with it.

They had the cool, sexy office, all of that. They just never ended up building anything of substance. So my recommendation is build something of substance first, build a product that users love. And when it comes to raising capital, that should only amplify what you've already been doing. And so that's kind of the hard part I would say is like, for most people, like if you don't have an actual product

that users love, then don't raise money from people. Like you're just stealing, I would say. Like you're risky. Exactly, it's risky. It's almost like a guaranteed failure. For us being very lean to begin with, like again, like the first two years, I didn't even take a paycheck.

And then when I did take a paycheck, I was paying myself 45K a year, which was actually, I don't know that very many people know this. Fresh out of undergrad, well I was 21 at the time actually. My first job, I was a software engineer, right? My parents wanted me to be a doctor, but I quit med school.

I didn't go to med school. I did well in my MCATs, but I just didn't really feel like I was passionate about being a doctor. So I was like, all right, well, I love coding, I love building products, let me just do that. So my first job I was only getting paid 60K. My parents were very upset with me. But, you know, cause doctors can make hundreds

of thousands of dollars. But just after a couple of years, going from job to job to job, kind of getting a higher level position elsewhere, by the time I was 23, I was getting paid 360K a year. It was really, really good for my age. So I was able to save quite a bit of money. And then I quit that job because I realized, man,

I don't think that I want to just want to be a corporate worker. So I quit that job. I just want to build something on my own. Quit that job and I had a couple of years I could live off of savings, but you know, even fast forward to today, I don't even pay myself even a third of what I got to,

I was getting paid back then. It's mainly because the equity of what I own in the company is worth, you know, by God's grace, over a quarter billion dollars at this point, right? So for me, if we get to Lord willing sell the company someday or go public or something, for me, it's not, oh, I was able to get the paycheck that I wanted, but rather it was, I got to build a lot of equity value in the company.

And so when you look at the tech giants that price our company and are thinking about, okay, well, if we acquire Immersed, how much do we want to acquire it for? Well, I could look back and be like, oh, it was for sure worth the past seven or eight years by me not focusing on just maximizing my monthly salary or whatever, my monthly paycheck,

but instead focusing on how do I build, and you hear all the time, the way you build actual generational wealth, so to speak, is build a company, own something, and then build and amplify that. And the way you can build a company is by offering something that people actually want. So for us to raise eight million bucks,

we were only like maybe eight people at the time or 10 people at the time. How much revenue did you have at that time? So we've always been a tech IP company or an intellectual property company, meaning so there's a couple of different types of companies you could build. You could build a services-based business, right?

So pay me some money and then I'll do a service for you and then I'll just scrape some off the top so we can keep running the business for operations and stuff. Then you have a company that kind of sells a subscription. Then you have a type of company that builds very deep tech. If you think about Oculus, for example, when they got acquired for $3 billion, they had only something like 10 million revenue,

which is a 300X multiple. That's not common at all. Typically, tech companies get acquired for 10X. Services, businesses, or consulting companies get acquired for like 2X revenue. And so the fact that he sold for 300X is very clearly Facebook didn't give a crap about the 10 million bucks.

They had all the money they needed in the world. They cared about, we need that technology. Immersive is very similar. For us, the reason why we're the most used app in the world is because we built very difficult technology to pull off what we can or what we were able to. And for us, our revenue has never really gotten to the point where it's been tens of millions yet.

I think that that changes this year because we're now coming out with our own headset. Candidly, it's been very difficult to monetize. We're a productivity app subscription model on a historically gaming Oculus store. So to get children to pay for a, it's just not a good fit. It's a tough sell, yeah.

It's a very tough sell. And it's been very difficult for us, like as we've been trying to take Meta's headsets and sell it directly to enterprise companies, the main feedback we would get is, I don't want to wear this big brick thing on my head. I got one of those Oculus, right? Yeah, yeah.

And it's like a head workout. Yeah, exactly. I can only wear it for like 30 minutes. Exactly. And sweating and stuff. Exactly, so that's why I'm like, man, there needs to be a paradigm shift. We gotta build something new.

So if you go to visor.com, V-I-S-O-R, like, you know, visor.com, you'll see the headset that we built. Every time I show that to someone, they're like, holy crap, that's actually like a full featured headset. Like, yeah, I mean, we mainly focused on what core components do we actually need in a headset for regular people.

Like gaming is one thing, let meta do that. Cause candidly, the type of gaming I care about is like on my Xbox, for example, right? Not necessarily like in VR. And I wanna focus on how do I make augmented reality really like glasses someday, really compelling to everyday people. So for me, it's more how do I build a device that's very thin and sleek, very lightweight.

It's something that I just really, it's a device that I and my friends and family have always wanted. And so because of that, some of our partners are projecting that Vizor can actually sell about a million devices in the first year at about a thousand dollars per headset. It's about a billion in revenue.

That's more revenue we've ever seen in the company's history. And a thousand dollars per headset, it's about a billion in revenue. Wow. That's more revenue we've ever seen in the company's history. And so for me, it was more spending seven years building the software, the really difficult technological stuff. Actually, Meta has actually paid us nearly a million dollars to help them

with some of their technology. So I'm like, so we did some consulting for them, whatever. And then they build sort of like a clone app of ours, which is great, whatever. They have a lot of ad dollars spent towards kind of marketing their competition of our product, and it sends us users, because people don't like their product

nearly as much as ours, and they end up landing on ours. So anyways, what we realized is, seven years of just heads down focusing on really understanding a problem, building very difficult technology, and then now being able to almost like open up the floodgates,

build this product that we can finally sell on our own. It's almost like, I'm trying to think of examples of this. Like there's some companies like think about Twitch, for example, right? For the first four years, they didn't know what the crap they were doing. It was called Justin TV. If you remember that way back when there's a guy who's a guy named Justin Khan, who was just like, I guess, vlogging himself is way before logging was a thing, live stream 24 seven.

And then they realized, wait, why don't we just build this for everyone else to do it on their own? Because we don't know what people want to watch. So they ended up building this technology, which ended up being Twitch streaming. They invented the whole industry. And it's so crazy, like even by the time they ended up getting acquired by Amazon for $1 billion,

I'm guessing it was a 10x multiple, so maybe the revenue was like a hundred million or something. What's so funny is people don't know this, Emmet Shear, I guess the most recent CEO of Twitch, who obviously sold it to Amazon, he said after Amazon bought it, first off, think about how much Amazon helped Twitch, like nothing.

Amazon doesn't like promote Twitch on like their Amazon store Amazon web services or anything. Like last time you use Amazon apps, when's the last time you ever heard about Twitch on there? Never. And so he said, after we got acquired by Amazon for a billion dollars, I managed, I and my team alone managed to 100 X our revenue without Amazon's help.

So he was like, man, what if I didn't sell to Amazon? What if I kept holding on to Twitch and 100 X the revenue without their help? We could have sold for $50 billion rather than one. Wow. And so that shows you, man, if you really build a core technology, intellectual property,

that at some point you really, really kind of strategically pick your moment and that thing could fly. And so Twitch, though it was a good success, it was a positive outcome. The four founders, Michael Seibel is another founder, he ran the Y Combinator program.

Try to think who else you might know. Anyways, oh yeah, one of the guys who was the founder of like cruise automation and some of these AI companies, he ended up, they ended up building a cool technology, sold for a billion bucks, you know, great, but kind of the regret was, dang, we left a lot of money on the table because we were able to have 100 XR revenue

after we got acquired without any of Amazon's help. And so that started making me think, well, should we sell Immersed now, or should we just try to continue building up a revenue only, forget about building all this deep technology, let's just like do whatever it takes to make a quick buck. And there are times, honestly, in the company's history, where we're like, all right,

let's just try this type of subscription, let's just see if people wanna buy it. And then like it does like, okay, and it's like, man, and then like more people on the company's history, we were like, all right, let's just try this type of subscription. Let's just see if people wanna buy it. And then like it does like, okay. And it's like, man, and then like more people on the team would say, maybe we could try this type of approach or this type of approach. And it's like, man, I think that we're missing the heart of what we're trying to build here.

We're trying to build the future of computing. When did Steve Jobs for Apple ever make a monthly subscription for their computers? Never. And so when it came to now our visor headset, we could take the Apple approach of build the device for 1500 bucks and then sell it for $2,000 more than that. So 3,500 bucks for an Apple headset.

And then we take the $2,000 profit margin or, and then Meta does a different version of that, which is build the headset for 500 bucks, sell it for 300. And take a $200 hit on every headset because we make all our money from Facebook ads. For us, our approach was, okay, our headset, we could sell it for a thousand bucks and then that's all the money we'll ever see from that headset. Or let's try to figure out this model where we actually make it less expensive upfront, but a person could pay a monthly subscription to continue to have access to different features

on the headset, mainly because we want this to be sold to professionals. We want this to be sold to enterprise customers, all of that type of stuff. How do we get office workers to wear headsets? Whether or not you're working from home or if you're in the office, how do we give everyone the same uniform experience? And if everyone has their computer in their glasses,

well, I think there's a world in which this could become the next Facebook or whatever. So instead of prematurely focusing on these different business models, why don't we just really, really build really, really good hardware and then have people realize, well, I do wanna use this thing for work, but I'm not gonna buy a meta headset

because it's like a toy. I'm not gonna buy an Apple headset because after taxes, like $4,000, I can't buy that for all my team. When it comes to this visor product, it's high resolution than Apple's headset. It's 70% lighter weight, and it actually looks like a cool pair of sunglasses.

That's the type of technology that people actually now wanna buy. And that's why Qualcomm and some of our partners are like, dude, you guys are onto something crazy here. This is the headset that we believe is gonna have its iPhone moment. And that's why some of the internal projections are showing a billion revenue in the first year.

Obviously I'm trying to be more conservative, so only publicly, you know, in our filings and things like that, I'll say our goal is 70 million. So it's, you know, a 20th of what we believe we can hit. But you know, in the back of my mind and my team's mind, we're like, if we can blow through that and hit a billion the first year, we're gonna do it. Even if we hit only 500 million of that, we wanna do it.

So sure, we could have gone different paths just for the sake of making a quick buck every month, but then we wouldn't have the opportunity to build a multi-billion dollar business. And so I don't wanna have Twitch's story, no offense, great exit, I'd rather have the, call it the Facebook story of the first, call it two or three years of Facebook,

there was no monetization on the Facebook platform. They just built the network of friends of friends of friends of friends. And as soon as they are like, all right, now we've got to figure out monetization, they realized they had an insane ads platform. They're like, dude, if we have all the eyeballs in the world, we can actually have a better business model

than any of these TV commercial companies or these billboards that are out there. We have everyone's attention. People are spending four hours a day on this thing. And there are hundreds of millions of people at the time doing it. And so as soon as they turn on ads, they were one of the world's top most revenue generating companies in the world. And so good thing that Facebook didn't say early on, actually,

you know what? You know, this is year one of Facebook. We have to shove some sort of monetization model into our business. So let's like charge people $3 a month upfront to have a Facebook account. Imagine what would have happened to Facebook if they did that. That would have failed. That would have failed. have happened to Facebook if they did that. That would have failed. That would have failed. It would not be what it was today. It would be the next Friendster, MySpace, whatever.

Someone else would have figured it out. No, just get them on your platform. Wait on the monetization side of things. And when the timing is right, get the monetization in place. Right. And the fact that they ended up being able to make billions of revenue immediately,

that shows you that they figured out their moment. They had a brilliant team to do that. That's the way that we want wanna kind of take that approach. So for me, like, look, there's a world in which we never even get the opportunity to really see our revenue potential to its max, because some company might wanna make a good offer to buy us for a quarter billion, half a billion,

whatever it is. And then the offer makes sense for our investors. We sell the company and then we go build the next thing. But in a world in which we go down, I would say the IPO route, I for sure wanna maximize that. And so I don't wanna prematurely just shove something out there and then kind of be the Facebook that charged a buck a month or whatever upfront

and then never had the large user base that then became the giant that it is today. Yeah, you gotta play the long game. And it's uncomfortable too, cause you're- Cause you have a lot of stakeholders. You have a lot of people who are applying pressure, even customers apply pressure. Investors apply pressure. Your team applies pressure. I would say that's the most difficult part about

building a company is you're trying to make everyone happy. You're trying to, I guess sort of thread the needle of this triple Venn diagram, you know, like how do I make sure this group, this group and this group are all still happy? And ultimately the hard part is no matter what, if someone's on the other side of that argument, someone's going to be unhappy. And so you kind of just need to bite the bullet and be like, look, in the end, everyone will be happy. My job is to not make you happy.

My job is to make you money. And I love that line from the movie Ready Player One is funny. You know, the kind of the antagonist in that movie says that. And I think that's something that I don't know, the kind of the antagonist in that movie says that. And I think that's something that, I don't know, a lot of companies struggle to do. They struggle to build long-term value. And there's nothing wrong with that. Like again, the Twitch founders selling the company

for a billion bucks, their investors made a great return. It's better to sell early than to sell too late. Right. Right. Or not at all. Or not at all. And so I think for us, yeah, I'm more open to it than I've ever been in our company's history. That doesn't mean that we're not gonna continue

to do crowdfunding rounds, right? Like I still want the retail investor to have a good return. So we're doing one right now. So I'll continue to do that to make sure that the little guys, so to speak, or even just all the people, friends and family who love and support us all throughout the years get a good return, not just the VCs

who've also invested in our company. So I think when it comes to building companies, it's not an easy thing at all. I think if I look back on what I know now, had I known all of this and thought, okay, should I start a company? I would for sure say no. It's so difficult.

I think you need to have a level of naivety and delusion, so to speak, of like, man, I can be the next Elon Musk without realizing what you're actually asking for. The speak of like, man, I can be the next Elon Musk without realizing what you're actually asking for. The level of depression, anxiety, the war that he has in his head, having done it for 35 years, you know, it's a difficult thing to do. And even at the expense of work-life balance or good relationships with your friends and family, it sucks. But you know, people would argue he's had an insane impact, right?

So the question is what type of life do you want to live? And there's some people who, I think maybe get some guys who have a lot of money and are very happy in life, so to speak. Maybe guys like Grant Cardone, some of those guys, they kind of figured out a way to do half of that. It took a long time. Lord willing that we get to sell our company. I'm 33 now. I feel like this is a fairly young age to be able to, you know, I think Elon, when he sold one of his larger, his bigger, bigger exits, PayPal to eBay, he made $180 million out of that and he was 34. Wow. So he's a year older than I was, than I am, and he's had, you

know, 20 more years of success. And so my hope is that I can continue building companies. You know, I do someday probably want to get into humanoid robotics, like the movie I robot or whatever. I think someday probably wanna get into humanoid robotics, like the movie I, Robot or whatever. I think technology has gotten to a point with chat, GBT and all these things to the point where these technologies are now possible that weren't before. So, we'll see. I mean, I think that what we build thus far

is compelling enough if you know the space at all. It's so cool that your, I forgot your- Ty is. Yeah, Ty, yeah. He is one of our users, right? Yeah, he was actually trying to preorder the visor who we're talking about outside. And he was like, are you the, is Immersive, you work for company?

I was like, yeah, I mean, I found it. He's like, wait, what? I've used the product. It was so cool to see, it's so cool to see it in the wild where I was sharing with him before that I was playing basketball one time in like an LA fitness or something. And some guy was like, man, I just bought a Quest headset for Christmas.

And did you guys know you could like work in it? You could have screens, you could have your coworkers in there. I was like, oh yeah, tell me more, man. He had no idea who I was. After like five minutes of this guy pitching us and all of us buying headsets, I was like, by the way, I'm the founder of Marist. And he was like, oh dude, I use your app all the time.

It's so cool to see it finally in the wild. I was listening to a podcast of the Fitbit founder saying the first time it dawned on him that he's built something pretty crazy is when he was at a gas station and you saw a person checking their Fitbit. He's like, oh my God, that was the first time he saw it in the wild.

And so think about that moment of like when, I'm sure for you, when you like go to the airport, whatever people are like, oh, hey, whatever, take a picture, whatever. As you start building products and stuff and you start seeing people organically use it just cause they want to, not because you asked them to,

just cause they found it on their own and they want to. It almost like makes you extremely proud. You're like, dang, I built that and that's like my baby. And like, you love it. One last thing I want to add before maybe we could change topic is, I remember I was listening to like a quarterly earnings call with like, for Tesla.

And they were having a vote of whether or not to fire Elon. And you think about this, 95% of people said, no, no, no, keep him there. What he's the reason why it still exists. But 5% of people there were making the pitch, we should fire Elon because he is dangerous for Tesla. Think about this, that 5% of people love Tesla

so much to the point where they feel like they should remove the founder and protect Tesla from him. It's like, dang, that's some kind of love right there, right? Like they love Tesla that much that they think it's dangerous for Elon to still be there. So it shows you that he built something of such value that these people love it so much to the point where they even want him fired now. Right. It's like, cool. Dang. I built something actually of value.

Was that after he smoked marijuana on Joe? Yeah, probably. I have no idea. I have no idea of it. I mean, look how they did Steve jobs, right? That's crazy. Yeah. I know. It's so funny. It's, I, there's this YouTube playlist of, I think it was like 200 of Steve Jobs, different keynotes and talks that he did. And over the course of like three or four months,

I literally every day, morning and night would watch one of them. Wow. And not cause I, you know, his great story storytelling ability. I don't care as much about that, as far as what my learnings would be. I wanted to learn more about the tech strategy.

Why did he do what he did? As you look at it, you're like, man, this guy was brilliant as far as his approach to competing orthogonally or perpendicularly. Think about this, if Steve Jobs back in the late 1970s was going to directly compete with IBM in this parallel foot race, IBM has way more money, they're gonna crush them.

So he started thinking, how do I build something differently that IBM has not incentivized to compete in? And then eventually, you know, Apple's gonna have enough money to be able to compete with IBM who's now copying them. And so for anyone who's building a company that has large tech giant incumbents, well, you need to compete in a way that's orthogonal to them.

So think about this, the first three years of me building my company, 2017 to 2020, I was constantly banging down MetaStore, Facebook store at the time. Please let us be an app on your store. Please let us be an app on your Oculus store. And they would say, nah, it's just a gaming store. We don't do like productivity. Like it's just a gaming store. But then 2020 hit and COVID hit and everyone started working from home. And that's when Meta said, okay, well, we'll give it a shot. You'll be the first non-gaming app on the Oculus store. But make sure you do a good job.

And so by God's grace, our apps are just flying with numbers as far as number of users and the amount of usage. And then you fast forward to today, now Meta says one of the main use cases for their headset is to have screens in VR. I'm like, man, you guys were calling me an idiot back then for even doing this, but now you guys is one of your main kind of verticals.

And so what that shows you is in the early days, Metta wasn't incentivized to create that type of product, but now they are. And so every time that you're trying to build something that's innovative or new, but you have incumbents that are, they have millions of dollars, billions of dollars to compete against you,

don't be worried about their thing because you need to find your sort of niche or your twist that they're not really incentivized to copy. You look at guys like the hard part with Steve Jobs was he knew why he was doing what he was doing. But the other people around him like his board of directors didn't know why. And so because of that, he got fired twice, right?

Or not fired twice, but like fired the first time, the second time, obviously, you know, life, he had cancer and stuff. And so, you know, he was ousted that way. And so the hard part was, even when, think about this, when he created the iPod, no one really knew that the iPod, not only would be a good product in and of itself, but iTunes was the real reason why the iPod did so well.

Right, so people always talk about, oh, Steve Jobs was this genius product builder. It's like, yes, but he was also a genius marketer and genius strategist. So when he realized that things like LimeWire, FrostWire, because all this Napster, all this kind of illegal music sharing stuff, he knew there's a gap here.

If the government is cracking down on this stuff, someone's gotta create a music payment system, a music marketplace. So on this stuff, someone's got to create a music payment system, a music marketplace. So he's like, that's Apple. Apple's going to create iTunes. We're going to be the legal alternative to all this other stuff. And so when these other apps like Kaza and Frostwire, Limewire get shut down, everyone's going to be forced to use iTunes. So very quickly, they ended up becoming the app that had 150 million users on it with credit cards attached. So they were making crazy revenue

and not necessarily even just for themselves, but also for all the music labels out there. But who's the best in the world now to take over the flash player, MP3 player market? It's Apple. So when they came out with the iPod and then lo and behold, that was the predecessor to the iPhone. Because they had years of iteration

of miniaturizing all this technology, they then were able to build the iPhone. So it's crazy. He was competing in a way that Microsoft at the time who had 96% market share, Apple had four, he didn't compete directly with Microsoft. Microsoft would continue to just crush them in this parallel foot race. But when you realize, you know what, let me start with pop culture. Let me start with music, then music player, then iPhone, and then let me start talking about how computing is important and plugs all that together, this whole ecosystem. Then Then by 2010 they overtook Microsoft's market cap even though Microsoft was 25x the size

Literally just 10 years earlier. So it really shows you man like some of these founders People don't really give them enough credit they don't realize the amount of strategy and IQ that goes into And just cleverness that goes into, and just cleverness that goes into really becoming the world's best. The fact that people critique Elon and Zuckerberg, like say what you will about those guys,

but there's something crazy clever, not just building such difficult technology, but also even the business side and the PR management, or handling press and all that type of stuff, or handling users and customers,. Yeah, it's this Multi-variable problem. No one when it comes to building company. No one ever said was gonna be a single variable problem It's gonna be this crazy complex thing. It's funny. I'm someday. I'm gonna Create a shirt that says I just wanted to be a coder like all the crap

I had to deal with in the history of the company, legal, hiring, finance, fundraising, marketing, all these things, I was a coder, dude. Like when it came to investor relations, when it came to building this company and all the things necessary, you know this, building this kind of podcast, and then now I want to build a larger company. You've got to wear a lot of hats.

Yeah, you're going to do a lot more than just talk. You have so many hats. And in the end, you might be like, I just want to be a podcast. I know, I just wanted to talk to people. Yeah. I'm doing emails and yeah, eventually investor relations. Yeah, it's a full encompassing business. Yeah, yeah man.

Yeah, but that vision that you just described with jobs, man, to think that far ahead is impressive. Yeah, it's hard, yeah. I think that like, even guys like Elon, like it's funny, he and Bezos, that's another thing. When people talk about how, oh Bezos copied SpaceX with Blue Origin, it's like, I think Elon one time said in like a fireside chat,

he's like, I'm pretty sure Bezos was talking about space before I was. It's so crazy, like Bezos was talking about space back when he was in high school. Wow. Amazon was like a good business, it did very, very well, and it afforded him the ability to build Blue Origin, which is the SpaceX competitor, right? But all the while, Bezos, he was obsessed

with space. And fast forward today is actually really cool how him and Elon have become friends really just in the past couple of weeks, post Trump and all this stuff, the US space race, we're trying to get US on Mars and all of that. When you think about guys like Bezos, it's just like, man, the level of Bezos, it's like man, the level of complexity to pull off what he has, the level of complexity with Elon to pull off what he has, people don't realize there's a whole backstory to this thing. Like PayPal, Elon had, even before PayPal had Zip2 and some of these other things. When I think about us as a company, like for me, my backstory, like for me, I was pre-med in undergrad. My parents wanted me to be a doctor.

I did math, computer science in undergrad for myself because I grew up, I loved for me I was pre-med in undergrad my parents wanted me to be a doctor I did math computer science under an undergrad for myself because I grew up I loved halo I was actually you know kind of like a halo semi pro growing up and when I was 12 I really loved gaming and technology but my parents really wanted me to be a doctor you know immigrant mentality right is my parents moved here 45 years ago from India so for them the pinnacle of success is be a doctor so I ended up doing math computer science for myself I ended up thinking man I'm just gonna be a doctor. So when I ended up doing math, computer science for myself, I ended up thinking, man, I'm just gonna be a coder, man.

I don't think I'm gonna go to med school. And in hindsight, I'm glad I didn't. And I realized that everything I learned in kind of the coding world, building products, actually on the side, so to speak, I ended up doing sort of a PhD focused in computer vision and machine learning. But after about four years, I realized I'm not an academic.

I don't like writing research papers. I only do it like, I don't wanna like add a leaf to the tree of knowledge. I want to like build a whole new tree. I ended up quitting that, settle for the master's degree, then finish the PhD and then started building a Merck. And I started realizing, man, if the future of what Zuckerberg at the time

was talking about, you know, by 2020 we're all gonna be using glasses instead of iPhones. Obviously it didn't happen. It's still, you know, it's 2025, still hasn't happened yet. I was thinking, man, if that's really where the next generation competing is gonna be, I need to get involved. I need to figure out how do I get ahead of it?

There was this, what was the hockey, Wayne Gretzky hockey player talked about, I don't skate to where the puck is now. I skate to where the puck is gonna be. That's why guys like Elon and Bezos and others, they get ahead of it. Elon, back in his early days, he really just cared about electrification of,

not just cars, but like batteries and stuff. And he didn't start with Tesla in his early days, he really just cared about electrification of not just cars, but like batteries and stuff. And he didn't start with Tesla in his twenties. He started Tesla when he was like mid thirties. He was thinking, man, this internet thing is blowing up. I gotta focus on internet technology first. And I'll come back to this, you know, car stuff and the electric space stuff, whatever. Let me go build this company, let me sell it and whatever.

So if you think about how, like what's your longer term strategy? How do I get to what my ultimate goal is? Sometimes it's a little bit of a detour, but at the end of the day, like you start realizing that there's a way to enjoy the process all along the way. I'm not saying that Elon hated PayPal. I think he actually built really, really good relationships.

Another actual funny story is, it's funny. I listened to a lot of these podcasts. I start piecing together different stories from different people. You know, David Sachs, Crypto Czar, I think one time on the All In podcast, he talked about how in the early days of PayPal, actually him, Peter Thiel and some of the PayPal mafia,

they call them, they were actually kind of plotting a way to get Elon fired out of PayPal. So Elon was actually fired from PayPal. He wasn't around when PayPal got acquired by eBay. People don't realize this. Oh, you don't know this? But he still had his shares though. He had his shares.

And so anyways, David Sachs and Peter Thiel and some of these guys who were running PayPal, got, they spoke to the board. And when Elon came back from a vacation or something, which Elon really did, they ended up getting him fired. And so Elon's like, obviously they had a lot of fights and arguments, all of that.

He ended up realizing, okay, this is long-term game theory. I just need to have a good relationship with them. It's not going to help me just to clap back at them. So you ended up just saying, you know, thanks so much for the years of, you know, work and, you know, I hope I'm going to work on something else. And obviously Peter Thiel and David Sachs are brilliant guys. They ended up getting PayPal sold to eBay for, you know, 1.8 billion or whatever the number was.

Elon had 10% of that. Elon got 180 million out of it. And what was so crazy is Elon then put, I think it was like 90, 80 or 90 million in Tesla and like a hundred million in SpaceX. And both those companies were bleeding money because it's expensive to do that type of stuff. Right. And when he needed more money, he ended up going to David Sachs, Peter Thiel, all those guys who got him fired and they agreed to fund him because he kept the relationship. They're like, Elon's brilliant. He made some crazy progress. We know what he's capable of.

He's gonna get us a good return. And look, I mean, we got him fired and he's still on good terms with us. And so they gave him money and they're the people who saved SpaceX. Dude, that's crazy. That's a crazy full circle moment. Yeah, it's crazy.

Don't burn bridges is the moral. Exactly, 100%. It's so funny, like even with us, this story is like maybe three or four years old, but even when dealing with Meta in the early days, Meta has had a pattern of just trying to own the AR VR market. And people don't know this, but like they've created clone apps of some of the most popular apps on their store. And kind of like how Amazon would create clone products of other products that are successful. And then they would like run ads towards their things versus other

people's products and then create know create this monopoly and so there are a couple of other I'm not gonna name names about a couple of other apps that have been like going on this Twitter smear campaign and Now meta has blacklisted them The those those apps don't get access to early next-generation hardware all of that But for us we're still on good terms with meta even though in my head I was like this is kind of jacked the meta is creating like a clone app of ours, but whatever I was like Handicap. I'm gonna, I just need to build the best product. Even if Meta's putting tens of millions of dollars behind it,

I need to build the best product. And fast forward to today, we have way better reviews than them. No offense to Meta, but like, Meta's just not focused on work as much as we are. We're full-time focused on the work application for VR. Meta's not. And so obviously we're gonna have a better product.

And so, but at the same time, Meta's still on good terms with us. And so they've helped us in a lot of ways. Meta pushes Immersed, our app, in Japan more than we do at all. Like more than they push their own app. Like in all these different Meta conferences and stuff that they do in Japan,

they always show off our app. And I'm thankful for that. When Meta ended up having this partnership with Best Buy, I think it was like 2022, they're working on this big headset, black headset called the MetaQuest Pro, it was like a bigger, bulk, I think it was like 2022, they were working on this big black headset called the MetaQuest Pro, it was like a bigger, bulkier one, it was like 1500 bucks at the time.

And they actually had Meta employees at all the Best Buys all around the US to actually do demos for customers who walk in the door. And the demo that they were showing was the Immersed app. Wow. So we got to partner with Meta on a grand scale sort of thing. And at the end of the day,

it showed me what showed me or what that showed me or what I learned was, if I really care about winning in the end of the day, it showed me what showed me or what that showed me or what I learned was if I really care about winning in the end, what matters more is the game theory behind essentially swallowing my pride. If my goal is to win in the end, then I need to take some call it short term losses for the sake of the win in the end. Right. Game theory really really matters like if you care more about your pride and ego You're gonna get cut off and you're not gonna have the relationship again with think about Elon if you were to Fight with David Sacks and Peter Thiel in the early days He would not have been able to ultimately build what ended up being SpaceX and Tesla that wouldn't exist today Yeah, I love I like what you said about the hockey puck It reminds me of the AI space all the top guys in that space. They were working on AI for five ten twenty years Yeah, before it blew up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think that it's so crazy, this whole chat GPT moment.

Even think about Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, his whole story behind that. They were working on AI for seven years before this chat GPT moment. And what's so crazy is even the early days of this chat GPT moment, no one really know how to use it. Think about chat GPT two years ago. Your friends would say, yeah, I had to create a poem for me.

No one uses it for that today, but today everyone uses it to help them do their work and get things done faster. Um, but the point is that even Sam Altman had to figure out like his moment, right? Like they did this whole thing where they had it, um, ultimately beat all of the players and Dota and all that type of stuff, like some weird AI things. What's so crazy is people don't realize that AI doesn't have to be something that like puts you out of a job. It's something that you can leverage to make your job easier, right? Can free you up for all the monotonous daily tasks and something that can help you focus on the creative.

I think that people have a almost like a naive fear of it. If you really understand how to leverage it, it's actually something that turns you into a superhuman. So when it comes to my team, every single employee on my team, I encourage them cheat in your work, like have chat to do as much of your work as possible. So it frees you up for the actual difficult critical thinking parts. Yeah, I love that. Yeah.

I did want to end off with one thing. You mentioned humanoid robots earlier. Yeah. I was at CES, there was a humanoid girlfriend robot. I saw that. It seems like that's going to be an emerging trend, huh? Yeah, yeah. It's interesting.

Like I think that the reason why humanoids matter is because The world was shaped for humans meaning it was built Kind of all the infrastructure that we have is like kind of human shape Doorknobs are kind of at your arms, you know height this table or like, you know These microphones everything was kind of built to kind of fit humans and instead of having these one-off single-purpose robots building millions of them to do You know, we have like two arms that make you coffee, but it can't do your do your laundry you can't like you know go drive your car and go get the mail or something you need something that's more shaped like you and Finally things like chat GPT some of these types of AIs are now able to plug in the intelligence into these formally dumb

Humanoid robots if you look at some of the Boston Dynamics robots that were doing parkour and stuff But it couldn't really do anything else because it didn't know what to do. And so now you plug something like ChatTube T or Google DeepMind into it, now it knows how to do stuff for you. And so you're gonna see, and people talk about the future all the time and like, say, oh, we're gonna have humanoid robots

in like 20 years. Like now it's actually gonna be probably about two or three years. Tesla's working on their Optimus bot. So if you haven't looked that up, look it up. Another company called Figure. Another company actually based in Austin called Aptronic. These are companies who are really,

Google put in a ton of money into Aptronic. Google DeepMind's working with them. OpenAI is working with Figure. Tesla obviously has XAI. So all these companies, they're trying to work on sort of this iRobot future, not for the sake of some weird singularity moments and creepy stuff, whatever. It's more so because half of all of the world's GDP, the

world's revenue, market cap, whatever, is human labor. And as time progresses, less kids want to become, you know, tomorrow's astronaut. They instead want to be tomorrow's TikToker. I think as TikTokers, it's just no kids want to like start off as a busboy and then like, you know, being a waiter and then, you know, doing car sales or whatever. They want to just make revenue on their phone. And because of that, there's going to be a huge and still is, and currently is a huge labor shortage. Who's going to go do all the jobs that no one wants to do. Who wants to, who wants to go do construction on Mars and things like that.

No one wants to risk their life. Send a humanoid robot. And so even before the AI side of things can even plug into that, there's, I believe there's actually gonna be like physical labor remote jobs where you put on a VR headset, you're embodying a humanoid on Mars and you're helping build the different pieces on there. Wow.

Remotely, yeah. So that's kind of what I'm interested in getting into next. That's why I feel like I'm really kind of working in the VR space is because how it directly plugs into humanoid robotics. And that's why we kind of were doing this crowdfunding campaign that sort of funds the AI side of our company.

So my master's is in AI, but I haven't really touched AI for like 10 years or eight years. And so that's kind of like Elon, didn't really touch electric cars for like 10 years. He mainly focused on internet. I mainly focused on VR, because I know that Meta and Apple,

all of them are pouring dozens of billions of dollars into AR VR. And at the end of the day, because AR VR is gonna be kind of the next step to humanoid robotics, and that's the world I wanna get into. I already have the background in AI. I already understand how a lot of this kind of mechanical components work on humanoid robotics. Now we're building our own headset. All that stuff's going to really plug into people who not only have office jobs that are remote but now even physical labor jobs that are remote. Construction worker, dishwasher

at a restaurant, all these things. What that does is it actually enables people to train the neural networks on how to let humanoid robots autonomously operate on their own. Kind of like how Tesla self-driving cars started off with people driving the cars, and then Elon ultimately figured out how to get full self-driving because people were training his neural nets.

Now you have Teslas are completely driving themselves on the road. Same way, physical labor jobs are gonna be the precursor to humanoids being completely autonomous by themselves too. Crazy, when people say AI is gonna replace their jobs, I think they think they have more time. Yeah, then they really do.

You're saying two to three years for these. Yeah, because right now Tesla and figure all these companies, they're working on factory jobs, how do I take this car hood and put it onto the actual car, things like that. Stuff that you just never really would see, it's actually highly dangerous for a human to do.

So mainly focusing on jobs that people don't wanna do and dangerous jobs. Like building infrastructure on Mars. Don't send humans to do that, have robots do that. So I think that we have two to three years before we see it be more common. Maybe not two to three years before a lot of those jobs are taken.

I'd say maybe that's more like five to 10 years. But think about Uber, for example. If Tesla robotaxis end up becoming a thing, what happens to all the Uber drivers? And also Uber is partnering with Waymo for them to do self-driving and what happens to all the Uber drivers. I was talking to actually an Uber driver here in town.

And I was asking him, what's your perspective on this? He's like, dude, I don't know what I'm gonna do for a job. And I was like, well, at least you have a two or three year window where the Tesla can drive the car for you. It costs maybe like 200, 300 bucks a month to lease a Tesla. It could drive the car for you. Start, let the car do your Uber drives for you.

Just you racking the cash while you're doing another job on your phone. Right? While you're in the driver's seat. And so I was like, but it's just a two or three year window. After that, hopefully within two or three years, you could have figured out what to do next. And at least the car made you some revenue for two or three years, you could have figured out what to do next. And at least the car made you some revenue for two or three years that you haven't do any of the work. So it's really interesting to see how the world's gonna have to shift.

People are talking about like a universal basic income where the US government gives you like 10,000 bucks a year to like make sure you at least have food. But I think that at the end of the day, people need to leverage things like ChatGBT to learn things. I was sharing with the guy out here earlier that if you pick up chat, GPT, actually it literally makes you smarter.

Like I can literally ask it the things I don't know or don't understand. And it will explain it to me in a way that I can understand. I remember in all the grade school, you know, I was too afraid to raise my hand and ask a teacher question. Well, now you could just have a private tutor at all times just by yourself. It doesn't have to be chat, GPT, you can use Google Gemini or Microsoft, was it Copilot, whatever. But the point is now information

has been completely democratized and it's global. There's 6 billion smartphones on the planet. Now 6 billion people have access to infinite knowledge. So nothing is really stopping anyone from staying ahead of the curve so that robots don't automate their jobs, but they figure out a new job. Think about like even back in the day

when people would like light lamp stands, like on the kind of the road, but now we have light lamp, essentially the light poles. Well, it put them out of a job, but then they had new jobs, right? Or like people who used to ride horses and like pull carriages, well then they became like taxi cab drivers,

or that's gonna get automated, so now you get free to do something else. So AI creates new jobs also. Twitch streaming wasn't a thing like 10 years ago, 15 years ago. Podcaster wasn't even a thing. By the way, I don't know if you know this, podcasting came from iPod.

They were the first ones. Oh yeah, they were the first ones to do free live shows on iTunes. And so like NBC and all these companies would have podcasts, the first ones on iTunes. And so I didn't realize podcasting actually came from the iPod in the early 2000s. And then Joe Rogan and others started doing it

for like 10 years or whatever. And now it's everything that everyone does now, right? And it's so important, but all I have to say, it created a new job. That technology didn't put people on a job because it was so democratized. Yeah, maybe it like displaced it from like NBC and CNN or whatever to now, you guys are really the voices out there.

And honestly, you guys are the voices that will be incentivized to give the audience what they want, right? You're not necessarily a monopoly. If you want to be able to captivate the heart and minds of the audience, you're gonna have to deliver what they actually want to them. And so I feel like it's gonna be a better,

more refined version of what existed in the 90s with CNBC and all these other whatever. Yeah, the White House just opened up applications for alternative media to start. Oh really? Which is exciting. Wow. But yeah, basically what I'm getting from you

is proactive versus reactive. And even myself as a podcaster, there's some pretty advanced AI podcasts or it's actually scary. So I'm thinking of ways on how to differentiate the show already. Yeah, that's another thing. Another thing people to realize is,

maybe think about this analogy. If there was like an AI robot versus AI robot basketball game, that's gonna be the most boring thing in the world. I care about how does Kyrie Irving versus like Steph Curry, how do they like creatively find ways to get the ball into the hole? Versus like robot versus robot playing basketball is the most boring thing I think of.

So like, I don't really care about that. I think what humans are really gonna be freed up to do is to do creative, entertaining things. As opposed to robots are more so there to, you know, essentially hold down the fort for necessities. How do you make sure that like the water pipeline system is still working and we have fresh running water? Most humans don't really care about that,

how that even works. They just want water to make sure it comes out of the faucet. What I care about is, like what is Sean's perspective on things versus what does chat GBT tell me about this thing? Like, I wanna know your take. So as you get your Audience to care more about your opinion who you are when it comes to podcasting

Yeah, there are informational AI podcasts when it comes to like an actual person that I want to get to know That's one thing that robots really suck at is relationship love like now for now if for now I guess yeah I guess this this humanoid looking robots that like look like humans But I guess my point is that as people I guess the movie her right? It was like an AI that like or even yeah, yeah with Megan Fox. No, that was that's a different movie. That's a Fair those calls that you want. That's the newer one. Her was a movie where a guy was falling in love with this phone

AI there's another you've seen Blade Runner 2049 with Ryan Gosling. He had his AI wife or whatever, girlfriend. And then you see towards the end of the movie, oh, she was just an AI that like is tailored towards you and learns you, but as soon as that's crushed, well now she resets and now your wife doesn't exist anymore. So it's kind of like a sad sort of dark future. I'm not a huge advocate of that

because I think that human to human relationships really, really matter. And so at the end of the day like in my mind it's like yo if you're out there listening watching back the real people who are building real stuff I'm really excited to even brainstorm with you about like what's the future of this podcast look like or your business looks like because I think at the end of day like if you actually figure out where is the puck going and you really strategically kind of like angle yourself to make sure that you're the one that gets ahead of it.

Like even Joe Rogan, for example, talks about how he just kind of stumbled upon podcasts. He didn't think it would ever blow up. Except for the first time he did, like he actually talked about his podcast during his standup. He's like, I had no idea that many people even listened to me. He's like, oh crap, this is actually a business.

I should really, really focus on this thing. Likewise, you and I, myself, like we're all gonna figure out, wow, the stuff that we've been building, coincidentally fits really well into where the world's headed Because the fact that fact of matter is we're staying ahead of the curve Yeah, and that's why look not everyone needs to build a business But if you're not actually building a business yourself you align yourself with people who are and as long as you're in that same environment

You'll be fine. Absolutely. Yeah, it's been awesome We'll link your crowdfunding campaign and in your socials below anything else you want to close off with man I think kind of the main thing that I've been really excited about is It's been awesome. We'll link your crowdfunding campaign and your socials below. Anything else you want to close off with, man? I think kind of the main thing that I've been really excited about is what does, what do thought leaders in today's new world, what's that gonna look like? Like kind of in this post Trump world,

most thought leaders historically have sort of just been, for lack of better terms, this wayward kind of a fair weather friendly type person who only says what everyone else is saying. I care about the current thing. It's like, yeah, but you weren't talking about that a year ago, two years ago, and then tomorrow you're still not gonna talk about that.

You're just talking about right now, because everyone else is. Where, who are you really? Right, like that's why I really appreciate very straightforward type people like Joe Rogan. Um, guys who aren't afraid to say the hard thing, like Lex Friedman, some of these other guys yourself, finding authentic voices who really care about what they truly believe in as opposed to, Oh, what do people think about me?

Um, I'm very, very excited about the sort of the, the, the future moving forward because as savage as guys like Trump or Elon are, they sort of set a precedence for, Hey, guess what? Now you could just say what you really think. And we don't have to play a guessing game here. We don't have to be afraid of being canceled. Um, you know, kind of the, the woke mind virus stuff. It's like, forget all of that. Who are you really? What do you really believe?

And can we just have a real conversation? It's okay to disagree. It's okay if you're far left. It's okay if you're far right. Doesn't matter. I love you as an individual, as a human. How do I connect with you? How do we move forward as an in-house family debate, not an enemy behind the line sort of thing. So I'm really excited about what content creation

looks like moving forward of real podcasts. So it might be encouraging to you and even the audiences, forget what everyone else thinks. It's okay if you have your own perspective, just make sure that look, we're all here for max 80 to a hundred years. Who gives a crap of like what my image looks like? I really need to care about you as an individual. And then hopefully you care about what I truly believe too, because we just

want to build a better world for each other. So I'm really excited moving forward, like man, building a platform, building podcasts, doing more podcasts, talking about ideation around how do we build a better world for each other. So I'm really excited moving forward, like man building a platform, building podcasts, doing more podcasts, talking about ideation around how do we build a better future. I don't know if you saw like Elon was saying, let's just stop creating pennies because it costs three pennies to make a penny.

It's like a $170 million loss every year. Let's just stop doing that. People four or five years ago would say, don't you ever say that, this is a historical thing. But he's just like, well, it doesn't make financial sense. All right, and so literally and so now people get to just say what's on their mind Yeah, I can't wait for that new Bet MGM is an official sports betting partner of the National Hockey League and has your back all season long. From puck drop to the final shot, you're always taken care of with the sportsbook Born

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