Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - The Factors That Make or Break a Business | Ankur Jain and Alex Fiance

Episode Date: February 3, 2021

This week’s conversation is with Alex Fiance and Ankur Jain, the co-founder’s and co-CEO’s of Kairos.Kairos is focused on solutions that can help solve the affordability crisis for the everyday consumer.Alex has been leading Kairos since 2013, transforming the company from its roots as a student-run organization into its current focus on building a family of brands designed to make life more affordable.Ankur launched Kairos in 2008 as a talent incubator and has been recognized for a variety of achievements including the Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2017.You may remember Alex from the mini-series we did a few years ago called “The Process” where we learned about young entrepreneurs tackling some of the world’s biggest problems.Considering how many people are struggling to get by right now, I thought this would be a timely moment to have Alex back on, along with Ankur.I wanted them to catch us up to speed… What progress they have made? And how have they adjusted where they were wrong?Alex was early on the journey when we first chatted and now he’s earning his stripes…One of the companies we discussed during “The Process” called Rhino just announced they raised $95 million, valuing the company at just under $500 million…. a huge milestone for Kairos.In this conversation, we discuss the affordability crisis, the factors that can make or break a business, and what role luck plays in all of this._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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but you never make enough to be able to put it away and have a meaningful dent as a backup. And that rat race, I think is what causes so much anxiety and stress for everybody. And what you've seen throughout this, even this last year with COVID has just been so damn stressful because if something trips, then what do you do? So we've been talking about that stat, Mike, for four years. And the fact that COVID was this grand accelerant, this black swan that no one ever predicted. But we were already aware that the average person is hanging by a thread, which is why this has been especially scary.

Okay, welcome back, or welcome to, if you're new here, to the Finding Mastery Podcast. I'm Michael Gervais, and by trade and training, I am a sport and performance psychologist. And the whole idea behind these conversations is to learn from people who have committed their life efforts towards mastery. What does that mean? That means that we want to understand when they're looking at the frames, whatever frames of movement that we're talking about, whether it's the frames of business or the frames of parenting or the frames of sport, that they are not looking at the frames

that most of us are looking at, frame one to frame two to frame three, but they're actually looking at the space in between the frames. Now, what does that mean? It's just that they see things differently because they've spent so much time trying to understand the nuances of either self or craft. And the conversations we're most interested in are with those people who have an understanding of both. And we want to understand what these extraordinary people are searching for, how they organize their inner life and how they use their thinking, both mental skills and perspectives to be able to live in the present moment more often. Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions. In any high-performing environment that I've been part of, from elite teams to executive boardrooms,

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That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash findingmastery. Now, this week's conversation is with Alex Fiance and Encore Jane. They are the co-founders and the co-CEOs of Kairos. Kairos is focused on solutions that can help solve the affordability crisis for the everyday consumer. It's a big deal now. So their mission is so important. I really love what they're doing and the way they're going about it is atypical. And so I wanted to celebrate their insights, their path, the way that they're conducting business, and the way that we might be able

to benefit from their insights and business practices as well. So Alex has been leading Kairos since 2013, transforming the company from its roots as a student-run organization into its current focus on building a family of brands designed to make life more affordable. And then Encore launched Kairos back in 2008 as a talent incubator and has been recognized for a variety of achievements, including the Young Global Leader

by the World Economic Forum back in 2017. So these guys are on it and they talk about their journey. They are really working to make a difference in the world and at the same time, working to make a difference in the world and at the same time working to make good business. And so to me, it's like, that's a sweet spot now. And you might remember Alex from the mini series we did a few years ago called The Process, where we learned about young entrepreneurs tackling some of the world's biggest problems. And considering how right now many people are struggling just to get by right now,

I thought this would be a timely moment to have Alex back on along with his partner Encore. And I wanted them to catch us up to speed on the progress they have made and how they've adjusted and where they're going. Because business, I don't know, 18 months ago is different than it is now. And Alex was early on the journey when we first chatted. And as a venture capitalist, as a, you know, somebody who's working to find great companies and support them. And he was earning his stripes then, and he's earning them now. And it's awesome to see how he's working. And you can hear if you're familiar with the process.

And I want to encourage you to go back and listen to that. Because if you're thinking about building a business or if you're in early stages of business or you're looking for like how VCs think about things, like you'll want to go back and listen to that. It's called the process. But now when you fast forward and I listen to them now, it's like, look at the changes and the differences and the approaches. It's really cool.

And one of the companies in particular that we discussed during The Process was called Rhino. It is called Rhino. It's still the same company. And they just announced that they raised $95 million valuing the company now at right under $500 million. And it's a huge milestone for Kairos. It's a really big deal because they saw it.

They spotted it. They backed it. They believed it. Not only with money, but with processes and know-how. And so it's just a really great celebration, if you will. And so I'm fascinated by modern business. You know, yes, I like to study kind of how the bigs and the greats do, like let's call it Amazon. It's modern for sure. But some of the really big titans, I'm interested in those frames, but I'm more interested in the modern business

and how they are pivoting and adjusting and figuring things out. And in this conversation, we discussed the affordability crisis, the factors that can make or break a business, and what role luck plays in all of this. And I think that you might recognize in your life the role that luck plays. And some of us say, no, luck doesn't play a role. And some say, no, it's a big factor

and luck and timing and all of that play into it. And it's an X factor, it's an unknown. And I'm a little no, it's a big factor and luck and timing and all of that play into it. And it's an X factor. It's an unknown. And I'm a little shaky on the concept. You know, like I value, I think that luck is, it's something that we all need to pay attention to. And I get confused sometimes on my journey where I am right now. It's like, is luck what I wasn't able to quite account for? Or is luck the old adage that when

opportunity and preparation meet each other, like, you know, that's what success and luck are about. Like, it gets a little fuzzy for me as an applied scientist. I think that there's something there that we, I know that we can't quantify, but it gets a little fuzzy. So that was a fun part of this conversation. And so with that, let's jump right into our conversation with Alex and Encore. Encore, Alex, how are you guys? We're good. How are we doing? The last time we dove in to what you guys were doing, there were some fascinating companies that you were getting after. There were some problems that you guys were trying to solve. And if you could just kind of bring me up to speed with some of what we've learned since then about maybe a handful of companies that you were considering or you're investing in.

And I'd love to follow up with that. But then I want to take this conversation a step further and get into like, what are you trying to solve now? And if we go high level before we get into your genius encore, Alex, if you could just do a flyover about what your company is. And then I'd love an update on the handful of companies that we were tracking handful of companies that we were tracking from the series that we did in 2018 called The Process. And so if you just kind of

level set a little bit, I think that'd be really good. Yeah. So when we talked in, it was 2018, where we were in our journey was we had felt like the entire ecosystem of Silicon Valley was starting to fund products in search of problems and solve problems that didn't matter. So we felt like there was an opportunity to go build companies that were, from day one, addressing real unmet needs of the everyday person. And part of it was feeling like the market had gotten totally disconnected from this everyday consumer. I think part of it was a return to the roots of entrepreneurship, which is supposed to be about solving real problems. And we said, let's identify a set of problems that we think are being neglected that are also in big markets and try to prove that you don't have to make a sacrifice

between, you know, making money and solving real problems. We laid out a thesis that really tried to identify a series of problems anything from the student debt epidemic to lack of access to childcare to the ballooning cost of rent to the cost of senior care and when we started canvassing the market and trying to say hey where do we believe we can build companies in these spaces I think candidly we've had some really good wins. We've also had some realizations that, you know, unfortunately, maybe some of these markets don't have billion dollar startup solutions. And I think part of what we had to learn is that, you know, a startup can't solve

everything. And some things are government problems and some things maybe aren't ready yet for, you know technology-driven solutions. But overall, I think we've started to see some wins. And the difference between us now and two years ago is we feel like we're really close to proving this model. And some would say we've already proven it. We're not searching for new things anymore. We just want to focus and get a win. So I think what you'll sense from us

today is like we're so close to what we want as approved and we don't need to go find 10 new companies anymore. We don't need to go keep raising funds to back 30, 50 companies. We think we have what we've always dreamed of right in front of us. Okay, double click on that. What you always have dreamed about is what? Really building a company from scratch that solves a real problem at scale for the everyday consumer. So let's take a step back, right? Because I think to give some context, right? Alex and I met when we were like 18 years old. Right. So it's kind of crazy to think how life has funny moments that like can change the trajectory. And we met like, you know, through a college buddy. Collided on a cruise ship. Like life has a funny way of bringing people together.

But, you know, 10 years, 13 years ago or so when we met, I mean, Wall Street, right before that, Wall Street was the thing that every smart kid would want to do, right? It was like, you go into banking, you go into consulting. I was at Wharton. Like, I didn't realize that was a factory of taking people, putting them in a fitted suit and dress shoes that look like Ferragamo's and shipping them to Goldman Sachs, right? And all of a sudden, 2008 hits and the world of banking and corporate and all of this collapses, right? And so it was that moment as kind of Alex and I were thinking about what in the world do we do with our lives

that we realized, well, actually, this crisis is an opportunity, right? And the whole falling, the whole collapse of the business ecosystem is actually an opportunity for us to take what otherwise would have been a path everybody had to follow, including us, and kind of go down our own beaten road, right? And that was the birth of Kairos, right? I mean, Kairos literally means the right moment. And our thesis, our idea 13, 14 years ago was, hey, there are some really big problems in the world.

I'm not trying to be a nonprofit guy. Neither is Alex. I don't think that nonprofits necessarily are the right way to solve some of these big scalable issues, right? I'm also not trying to get stuck in governments with bureaucracy and politics and like talking a lot, but doing very little. And look, we do want to like build something that makes money, right? And so is there a way to kind of think about business as that approach to solving problems, right? And I know you guys have talked about this a little bit before, but you know, when Alex talks

about what we've always dreamed about, this was 14 years ago, we were 18 years old talking about this, right? And this idea that, hey, actually the biggest problems facing society are probably the biggest opportunities from a business perspective, not side issues that are kind of hindering opportunities, right? And if we could figure out how to solve these problems, they're actually $10 billion problems. And so that was the birth of Kairos at the time saying, hey, forget about putting people into banking. Forget about people going into consulting necessarily as a starting point. If you're young and you don't have that opportunity cost right off the bat,

what better way to put your skills to work than this? Both of us kind of had a split in our journeys a couple years in as Alex continued to build on this vision, and I went off to continue starting other companies right and somehow landed up at tinder after selling one of the businesses I started to the parent company running products for what somehow became the world's largest dating app now you can imagine the contrast in my brain between saying let's go solve clean water and global health care to you know how do I help people get

laid is a little bit of a different situation, different context to wake up to every morning, right? Hey, Ankur, how did you work out that dissonance? Because cognitive dissonance is one of the more painful experiences for people. And so I hear you laughing and making fun of it. And so maybe it was light. It wasn't a real dissonance and you were okay. Or maybe it was a dissonance and it was problematic.

And I'd love to, if you don't mind drilling into that just a bit. Again, you end up in this seat, which was totally unexpected, right? I mean, like, to be clear, I could barely figure out my own dating life. And now I'm running like a dating app. It's like a whole, there's a lot of cognitive dissonance going on here but at that scale don't forget tinder had single-handedly changed the global landscape of dating right we had tens of millions of users right that were swiping over a billion times a day on this product and so in some ways you

could look at that and just say, how do I take this position and just help optimize swipes, right? Which I think would have been really, really tough for me to wake up every day and get to work. Or we could say, is there some way to use this platform to go do something more interesting in the world? Because if it is going to have this kind of cultural impact, can we do something positive with it? One of the first things we did do at Tinder when I came in there was,

but prior to that, Tinder had, like it sounds simple, but it was just three, it was two genders. You signed up as male or female, looking for male or female, right? What that resulted in was the unintended consequences of people with LGBTQgbtq kind of getting on the app looking for what they wanted and getting harassed and bullied because people the other people thought they were being misrepresenting or tricking me it was a really

nasty environment and you know one of the first things we did is we actually fixed that problem opened it up and you'd be shocked Michael, at how much politics there was to just get that simple feature out. I mean, people were fretting that if we release something like that, will that ruin the app's branding for all the other users? Will they not want to be on it anymore? Will that change? Will that be like going to a gay bar instead of going to the hot nightclub if you open

that up? And like, obviously none of that ever happened. And in fact, it's totally changed the opportunities for people to participate in the digital dating ecosystem with that simple change right so I know it sounds a little silly but like it that then the exciting part I guess the way that I thought about that dissonance is you can spend 10 years working on a problem in hopes of reaching a hundred people, a hundred thousand people, a million people. When you're in a position like that, all of a sudden one change can affect a hundred million

people. And that gives you a way to think about things a little differently. So on one hand, you're helping people get laid. On the other hand, you can really change the course of someone's life. And I think you just got to decide what you're taking from it and what you're going to do with that position. So anyways, long-winded story of saying somehow I ended up from sitting with Alex at the age of 18 thinking about these problems to working on a dating app out of Los Angeles, right? I think what you got to remember too, Mike, is in between that founding story of Kairos and, you know, us talking two, three years ago, what happened was startups

got hot. It got trendy. It became the career that everybody wanted. And all of a sudden you have the reverse problem. You have 3000 startup accelerators, money's being thrown at things that never should have gotten funded. So in a sense version 2 of Kairos was in response to the opposite problem. Too many entrepreneurs throwing money at things that had no business being startups, directing attention to the wrong problems and we said wait why are you guys not looking at the cost of housing and how to make rent more affordable why are you not looking at senior care and there's a real there's a real moment behind all that right like it was after we sold tinder back to match group in 2017 we were in San

Francisco and again this is like I mean the hypocrisy I feel like you talk about this in your pockets like there's nothing worse than the hypocrisy of like saying you're changing the world. And it's bad enough when you do nothing. It's even worse when you're doing something that's actively probably bad for the world and still patting yourself on the back. And we were sitting in San Francisco and I got pitched on this company that they wanted me to come look at as a potential either investor or operator. And it was all of the messaging around it was this company is going to change the world. It was like a Silicon Valley TV show episode. And I walked in to actually understand what the product was.

I thought maybe it's about clean water. Maybe these guys have figured out how to bring educational tools around the world. Maybe they've figured out how to deal with healthcare. It was a blockchain-based sticker company that had partnered with LVMH and you could suddenly protect the uniqueness of your product purse in your digital avatar world because it was on blockchain. This is going to change the world. I mean, walking out of this meeting while they were pitching this to me, talking about how they had just raised $100 million, real money, and on Market Street in San Francisco, this

is one of the wealthiest kind of per capita cities and yet has such an income inequality that as you walk out on the main street street there was a half-naked homeless man on a bird scooter in the middle of market humping the scooter and this mind you this was a week after bird had raised 200 million dollars so we're talking about pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into scooters and blockchain-based stickers and and right outside the door of the people that are writing those checks, you have some of the worst healthcare crises, the worst financial services crises, the worst housing crises, and there's just nobody doing anything about it. And the irony of the whole thing is it doesn't, it's not like we're altruistic to our teeth,

and that's like, well, yeah, that's our bread and butter it's like people are spending trillions of dollars a year on housing and yet this is the outcome that we have like that is a failure of the market at its greatest point right i mean how can you possibly charge somebody thousands of dollars for rent and not even be able to deliver quality housing or health care to the people you're giving it to i I mean, that is just insulting, right? And then to throw $100 million at a blockchain sticker company, right? It's like, it's painful. And I think that was when Alex and I in 2017 said, like, there's got to be a way to return

to the roots of what we had talked about in 2008 and look at this crisis, which was different, and say, could we now try to solve it in a different way? And that's what Alex has been talking about with this, like, hey, a lot of these issues we're talking about are actually life's biggest expenses for people in our generation. We see it all the time. You can be killing it at the age of 28, quote unquote, making six figures even, which is crazy and still living paycheck to paycheck, much less most people who make much less than that trying to get by.

And yet you're expected to somehow have it all figured out. And if you're not below the poverty line, you should be thankful and you should be happy. It's like, when did we end up in a society where that's not possible, right? Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentous. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday, what you put in your body matters. And that's why I trust Momentous.

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X number of people are below the poverty line. X number of people have this much money in their bank or, you know, check to check. Like, I'd love to know some stats that are helping drive you in a direction that you're trying to solve. Why don't we start doing some of these stats that we see every single day, right? It's like, when you look at our generation, right, there's about $1.3 trillion of student debt. When you look at our generation, over half of people between, I guess it's now millennials or like 25 to 40, have no savings. What do you mean? Meaning they have no emergency savings in their bank. If you were to lose your job, which, by the way, we saw too much of during this last year. If you were to lose your job, you don't have any cash lying around to cover next month's rent.

Because even though you're living every month with paying your rent bills, you're paying your food bills, your transport bills, you've got enough money to go out for a drink on the side. If you lose that income stream, you have no backup. Did you say 50% between 25 and 40? Whatever the millennial demo age range is. Have zero savings. And then the other way you'll see a similar stat is the last time I've seen it, about 40% of consumers can't afford a $600 emergency expense. I've seen it at 60% can't afford a $1,000 emergency expense.

An emergency expense could be anything from a speeding ticket to a big medical bill. But some sort of moment that forces you to go into a bank account that you don't have. And all of a sudden you're taking payday loans and you go into this debt cycle. And the reason this is so important is because it's often hidden. Right. So like you don't see these issues. And I actually think probably even a lot of the folks who are listening to this podcast now experience this financial stress on a regular basis because most of our friends do. Right.

Again, you can be doing well and you can be making the cash flow needed to cover your expenses as you're making it. But you never make enough to be able to put it away and have a meaningful dent as a backup. And that rat race, I think, is what causes so much anxiety and stress for everybody. And what you've seen throughout this last year with COVID has just been so damn stressful. Because if something trips, then what do you do? So we've been talking about that stat, Mike, for four years. And the fact that COVID was this grand accelerant, this black swan that no one ever predicted, but we were already aware that the average person is hanging by a thread, which is why this has been especially scary. Like we never

in a million years predicted that there would be this massive macro event that caused the pain of this hidden issue to manifest at scale, but it did. And that's why it's been such an insane year. But I think the other data that you'd find interesting is essentially the average household income has stayed flat, but the cost of big life expenses have gone up. So even if you keep rising through the corporate ranks and your salary keeps going up, over the past 20, 30 years, the cost of housing and the cost of health care and textbooks, they've all been going up as well. So when you think about it, I know you guys talked a lot about what's made Kairos work or not work right I think it's that actual distillation of a is this a real problem that people are dealing with number one right is it a big enough problem that's affecting

both the number of people and the scale right like you can there's a lot of problems that affect a handful of people, problems that affect a lot of people in a little way, right? So is the magnitude big and the reach big? And then from there, the question, frankly, is, like, are people spending money on solving this problem? Because if they are, that's a business opportunity. Like, if people are spending money on rent and not getting value back and putting them in a hard position, like that is a private market failure.

That little insight I think is something people forget because you'll see a lot of Silicon Valley companies, even the ones who are talking about affordability or healthcare or fintech, right? And they're creating markets that people aren't looking for, right? And if you just think about it broadly, if 80, 90% of your income is already going to just cost of living, and then somebody comes up with a service that's like a new way to finance the purchase of your electronic gadgets, right? It's like, dude, I don't even have time to think about that gadget when I'm paying off my student loans. So it sounds nice in concept on a pitch, but there's a reason people aren't spending money on those gadgets right now.

We've learned this the hard way too, Mike, to be clear. We've taken some bruises. At one point, someone came to us with a concept. Hey, the pension has disappeared because people aren't staying at corporations long enough let's create a privatized version of the pension and help people retire and we're like oh that sounds amazing yeah everyone should have retirement savings it sucks the pensions are going away and then all of a sudden it hit us when we went live no one has any money to contribute to a retirement plan that Sounds nice.

Sounds amazing. But there's a reason people aren't putting their money in these plans, right? And so changing behavior, I think that's something we talk about a lot too, is as we build these companies, like, there's a great quote that I always liked that Jeff Bezos had, right? Somebody asked, they said, what do you think is going to change the most for Amazon over the next 10 years? And what he responded was, that's the wrong question. You should be asking what won't change over the next 10 years, which is human behavior. People will still be buying books, even if they're on a digital platform. People will still be buying clothing and having it, you know, whether it's

shipped to their home or they pick it up in the store, people will still be doing these basic behaviors. And look, every product that you've seen succeed is just a reinvention of something old, right? It's reinventing it, but adapting it to the kind of current difference in problems, right? Facebook is just, it started off as a message board, it started as a yearbook, then it became a message board. Today it's a media company. Google is just a library, digitized with the world's information. Airbnb is just a hotel, just with different people's properties. Everything out there is just a nothing new is new kind of thing. To give you some context on how that's actually impacted though, when you talked to Alex last two years ago, our biggest business, we were writing $250,000, raising money in $250,000 increments thinking it was the hardest and scariest or in the last two weeks, we've closed across our five brands that we've now built. Ten, ninety five, forty to two hundred and forty million dollars across across three out of our five brands.

Right. Congratulations. Ten X. Look at that. And just two years. But it's like, A, it's fucking hard. And B, we got lucky. And C, we also timed some of these things right strategically. Which is lucky. Part luck, part skill. I think that we were very early in catching an issue that people were sleeping on. Drill down into that. Which one are you talking about? And maybe it's one of the ones we talked about in our mini-series, The Process in 18.

Bring it to life. And I remember we talked a lot about the rent issue and the financial pieces. But maybe bring one of these companies to life. Obvious hidden things, right? Another product philosophy, which you'll see with Ryan, is we always say it should feel super obvious because if you're solving a problem with a solution that takes more than two minutes to explain, like you can have the best idea in the world and people won't take the time to learn about it or adopt it, right? So when we were looking at housing, everyone talks about rent.

They forget to talk about how expensive it is to move into an apartment. Just moving in, you got to pay first month's rent, last month's rent maybe, security deposit, moving costs. We just talked about 50% of millennials not having any free cash savings. And you're talking about putting up thousands of dollars just to move in? That doesn't make sense. So when we ask that simple question, we discovered that there's $45 billion of cash locked up in rental security deposits, right? That's money that's taken out of people's pockets an average of $1,400 per household, right? So again, 50% of millennials have no savings, and they've either had to borrow money or take whatever income they'd scrapped together and lock away $1,400 on average in their security deposit.

It sits there. The landlord can't use it. You can't use it, and it can't generate interest by law. Like, what a stupid concept, right? And yet, for decades, we've just done this and not thought about it because 50 years ago, rent was 150, 200 bucks, and you put up a one month deposit, it didn't really matter. But now rent has skyrocketed, taking up 40 or 50% of your annual income, one month deposits suddenly are pretty painful to deal with, right? So again, we didn't reinvent the wheel. We said, what happens

when you rent anything else? When you rent a car, you don't give Hertz $10,000 in cash in case you get into an accident, right? you pay them five bucks per day in that case to have renter's insurance right so we said why don't we do the same thing for security deposits when you rent and sign a lease for an apartment instead of paying a thousand dollars of cash why not just pay five dollars a month for insurance that protects the landlord in the case of damages or something right and that was the concept and we launched and you know it was a pain and hard to launch but once it got off the ground suddenly it became this kind of like obvious no-brainer right it's like that's now scaled to over a million apartments in the country.

Rhino. Okay. So that's Rhino. I remember Rhino. And I want to make sure that I'm understanding something from a structural standpoint. Did somebody come to you with a Rhino idea and you funded it based on your bootstraps scrapping up, you know, your fund? Or did you say, let's go find a CEO entrepreneur? Or is there a hybrid between the two that gave Rhino birth? So Kairos operates as a portfolio of brands that we start to solve these problems. With these companies, what we always do, we start with the problem first. So in this case, with the security deposits, we start with the problem first. So in this case, we looked at security deposits. We actually wrote a piece about security deposits, right? And we said, is anybody already working on something in this space or not?

If they are, come partner with us to co-found this business and let's launch it together. If no one is working on it, we'll either start it just with us or find someone to come help start it with us. And that's what happened with Rhino. So I'm the co-founder of Rhino with Parag, who's our CEO. We started this thing, launched it off the ground as a Kairos company. It's one of our five Kairos brands today. And then we kind of build out a team around it to execute. And we fund it for as long as we can. And we'll bring in outside partners if we need to kind of finance the business as it grows.

Got it. Very cool. And then do you still have a fund available for people that are, they have an MVP, they're down the path somewhere, they're in one of the sectors that you're interested in? Do you still have, I think it's the kairos 50 that you had in 2018 yeah so we have the kairos 50 as kind of like a sister entity right so it's a it is a separate company a separate group um but we we kind of support each other with thinking about ideas and problems and and talent and frankly alex has spent more time kind of yeah both than I have. It's a different model. So we spun it off. I mean, that fund is designed to support entrepreneurs under this general mission at scale. I think what we had to decide, which was challenging,

was to really focus on a much more concentrated set of companies that we actually could build and control the destiny of. And I think philosophically you have to make that call of whether you really believe you can build the company and influence outcomes or else what a lot of these funds do is they have to invest at scale. And we fortunately ended up in a position where we were able to spin off one and we were really able to focus our time on the other. So you've got some money, you've got some good ideas, you've got a sector that you want to solve and the ideas that might be able to do it. What makes your companies work? What are the crown jewels that you guys bring into the problem and the company you're trying to solve?

So the answer has been different at different stages of the business right starting getting something to get product market fit is the hardest thing anyone can do i mean it just requires again it just requires a lot of timing and luck and the right product and the right strategy all to come together right and so And so in the early days, it was essentially a hypothesis we had, which was one, can we pick these problems that we talked about earlier, right, in that way? But two, I just think that the world has become so saturated with ideas and so saturated with products and so saturated with startups that it doesn't even matter anymore if you have like a cool solution to something if people can't understand it quickly

and you don't have a distribution channel to reach people right that that whole like build it and they will come that was like popularized by Steve Jobs is just not true. And it doesn't work. And like people forget Microsoft was actually the best distribution sales company, not the best software company, right? And Masa Son from SoftBank and Steve Jobs from Apple both made money because they turned Apple

into a distribution channel with the iPhone through all these telecom companies. Right. And so what we did with Rhino, for example, is one, it was so simple. Pay a thousand dollar cash deposit or a five dollar a month insurance policy instead. Right. So that if you heard it once, you could understand it without having to be distracted with a hundred things competing for your attention. But even then, we said, what is the distribution channel?

And it was, there are 43 million apartments across the country today that require security deposits. Let's get those landlords to partner with us and offer it to you as the alternative. Now, I don't need to spend time competing with the bajillion Facebook ads that you receive every day to pay attention to this. And I think that also gives you as a business owner a way to consistently scale because as you probably have seen so many times and we've seen even with our own failures, it's like something can launch, it can look really good, you can get the press article and feel great about yourself. And then you quickly pass that

early adopter phase and you just end up in this black abyss, right? And if you have a good distribution strategy from day one, you can roll it out and continue that growth path just by executing on that distribution. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day. And Cozy Earth has become a new part of that. Their bedding, it's incredibly soft, like next level soft.

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the way you prepare for it matters. If you're looking for high quality personal care products that elevate your routine without complicating it, I'd love for you to check them out. Head to calderalab.com slash findingmastery and use the code findingmastery at checkout for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B dot com slash findingmastery. If I simplify that very eloquent path that you're talking about, I think that you guys are really good at vision. And then you're exceptional at strategy. And then you're able to reduce that down to something simple. And then I don't know if you're good at operations or not, but it sounds like vision, strategy, and simplicity are part of the crown jewels. Does that sound right to you?

I think that's how you get something off the ground, right? I think it's a very different challenge. So like someone once said to me, like, you got to be really lucky to get something to hit, right? Because to get it from zero to one is really hard and takes a lot of luck. But to get something to hit, right? Because to get it from zero to one is really hard and takes a lot of luck. But to get from one to 10, which by the way, we haven't done yet. We are working on, right? That's where you kind of separate out the operators and the people who can get stuff done

from those who just got lucky, right? You can hit the feature once, the right timing and go. Can you turn that into a sustainable growth engine? So you guys have both talked about luck a bit, and that's a psychological construct. Some might say it's mathematical, but I want to come at this from a psychological construct. What do you mean when you say luck? I'll give you an example. I mean, I think what Encore is glossing over, which is part of one of the skills as an entrepreneur is at the beginning, we talk about distribution like it's easy, but at the beginning, landlords most didn't believe us that the security deposit was a realities of the renters. And, you know, in reality, that was 10,000 failures to get to this very eloquently put strategy. But, you know, to us as entrepreneurs, we just accept that as part of the process.

And I think this is part of what we talked about two years ago. For some people, it hits really quickly. And I think it skews entrepreneurs' perception of how long something takes but really this took a lot of social proof of landlords amongst other landlords and for us I think being able to really build conviction that this was a real problem just helped us deal with all the and rejection along the way so I think when you're described as a mathematical and psychological problem I think the psychology of it is just accepting that we're going to be rejected a million times. The mathematical part was we need to talk to enough landlords to find those true believers.

And we had people like Barry Sternlich from Starwood who saw it early and really helped create that social proof and boulder rolling downhill. So I agree with everything that we're saying, that there is a strategy behind it, but don't discount how many times this guy got rejected. But I will say, when I talk about luck, you have the mindset, right? It's like, I don't know, I think that every single day you meet random countless numbers of people some more times some less time that one interaction could be meaningless or could completely change the direction

of your life if you're prepared to understand if you're in that mindset what's that saying like luck is what happens in preparation meets opportunity I do think there's a lot of truth to that. And it's like you probably could run into somebody who could maybe introduce you to your future wife. But if you weren't in the mindset to like even be social that day, like, I don't know, you missed that opportunity. Right.

And it's just like that is something that I feel like happens a lot with building companies and products. It's like, you might go down these roads that you're supposed to do, the business school path of X, Y, and Z. But like, you take that moment in time, like it's a serendipitous, like, we got to, we got, you have one conversation with the right person that you weren't even planning to have. That then opens up that door to the Barry Stern likes of the world that then can open up everything else. Right. And so, yes, you have to be persistent. Yes, you have to work really hard. Yes, you have to have the right product. But you can do all that and still not get that break. Right. OK, I mean, I think luck is one of these really complicated. I'm fascinated listening to you guys because it's a very complicated idea to me. Because at some respect, it diminishes agency. It diminishes the idea that I co-created something with others, whether it's mother nature or others. And there's a sense of agency there and all the years of preparation and all the rejections that you're talking about. I don't

call that luck. I call that work, you know, and strategic work, psychological work to be ready and open and prepared to meet the demands of this moment, whatever this moment might be. And that is flat out a psychological construct that backs into psychological training. And if you're scared or nervous or fatigued or anxious and frustrated or whatever, then you can't meet the demands of the moment because you're not fully available to it. So that's one way I think about it. And then the other way I think about it is that there's so much I don't know and we don't know. Like, how does this thing really work? And I'm talking about life, you know, like, how did humans get here?

Blah, blah, blah, blah. So without being doe-eyed or too epistemological about knowledge and are philosophical about our condition, I don't know where to hang my hat on luck. I see it in sport too. You hear coaches say, well, it's just kind of sometimes the ball bounces that way. True. True. But I think there's so many other variables. So you guys have used luck a lot. And that's why I wanted to ask you about how you think about it. I have seen it from our own, like, I mean, you relentlessly, like everything you talk about, you can be prepared, relentlessly persistent, do everything, like, but I can tell you,

like my, the company that I sold to IC, we were relentless, we did it all, like all the same things that we did this time, but like certain, it just, certain macro things hit the wrong way now could we have fought it through yeah you're then put at a disadvantage and like can you survive yes is it like can you can i guess i don't like the belief of attributing all success or failure to good luck or bad luck that That is bullshit, I think. But I think to not acknowledge that there are elements out of your control that put you, like, what set of cards were you dealt?

You still got to play it well. But to ignore that there was a set of cards. I mean, I was lucky to be born in the United States, right? Let's say luck is a variable amongst X number of other variables. What percentage of your success at Kairos do you believe is attributed to luck? And what percentage to all of the other psychological, strategic, readiness, you know, effort and agency that is required to birth something. Do you go first?

50-50. 50-50 is fair. And I also think we've been at it a while. So if our success took two years and not what Encore accurately describes as years and years and years of foundation behind it, I would have said like maybe 80-20 luck, right? But I think like part of entrepreneurship, what I described is I think a misconception that there's these overnight successes because they exist and they get a lot of media attention, but it biases you. You know, the average, you know, life-changing fund returning exit event in the entrepreneurship space actually takes about eight years.

It's getting a little faster with the current market, but really eight years. So it's almost like this thing entrepreneurs are blissfully ignorant about. I think if most people knew that the average thing will take eight years, they wouldn't start the startup they did. I think it would be constructive for more people to understand that going in, but it's kind of like, would you rather be ignorant to it and then learn it the hard way? And I think a lot of what we talked about two years ago was why mission-driven founders are more likely to stick around. The fact that we're not purely motivated by money

and we're motivated by this thesis and belief that you can solve problems and make money, I think that's helped us stick around. I think what you're saying, and maybe another way of saying it, is you can play to the luck. stick around. I think what you're saying, and maybe another way of saying it is like, you can play to the luck, I guess, how do you set yourself up to be in the best position to Not need luck.

Well, to succeed and get your outcomes in face of whatever luck you do get, right? Cause it's like like a lot of people will give up right and then they'll never get that moment because they gave up too early right um if you're not willing to keep iterating or willing to keep fighting or take that last that last meeting like is it you know you could take a it could take a hundred meetings or a thousand meetings but you know where it shows be luck, but that willingness to keep fighting is probably not luck, which is why I think it's 50-50. As an applied scientist and somebody who's dedicated really into the idea of training as a major variable for success, preparation and training. I think much of my tactical job is to

reduce luck, you know, reduce the variance of chance. So by helping people be over-prepared so that it's not left to chance, but there's a, let's call it a psychological readiness to be fully in the present moment. And then there is the frame recognition, the pattern recognition to be able to spot and know how to pivot when other people are still doe-eyed or anxious. And so both of those are trainable skills, both from a physiological and a psychological standpoint. And so I would have gone five to 10% for luck as variants. off the bat, right? The one person like my dad or my grandpa who happened to be born in like a dirt poor village in the deep suburbs of, you know, in India, where they did that situation versus like Alex and I who like forget about all the training and everything else. How do you

think about that as a determinant of success in life? And how would you actually lead that to anything other than luck? I like that you brought up the meta-analysis because that variable begs the bigger question, how did we get here? And is there a grand plan? Is God active? Is there a God? And if so, is God active or passive? And, you know, is there a grand plan? And that is a very, call it meta, but it's a very deep and rich and loaded philosophical position about the bigger issues of life. And so when I address that in the narrative that we're working through, I don't factor that. I factor it in this way, and I'll use your language, the set of cards that you're dealt.

And what you do with those is how I think about luck versus skill, if you will. It's really luck, skill, and environmental conditions. And so putting those together with the relationships that you cultivate, I think those are the variables that I start to play with. Not necessarily where you're born, region of the world, religious background, gender, ethnicity, and all of that. I'd say, however you were born, the cards that you have, wherever that might be, what do you do with those? And I like where you went. Now I understand the 50% variable better because you said, hey, there's some shit that happened before this shit happened. And I'm factoring that in. And so that's cool. I'm glad I understand that better for you that way. So I would, I would actually, I'd nod my head to the 50 50 in that vein. But if the assumption is based on the cards that you have, you know, if you are five foot 10, but you happen to be able to jump 48 inches, you, you might, if you applied yourself, get into the NBA because the 48 inches is ridiculous,

but you're going to have to work your ass off as opposed to if you're six foot seven and you can jump 48 inches. By the way, nobody jumps 48 inches, but I'm just saying maybe there's one or two people out there. There's a whole spiritual thesis or theory around this, which is basically it's a modified version of destiny, right? Which is that often people think the word destiny means you are going to get this no matter what, versus you were born with this potential destiny. And the question is, can you then be doing the right steps and putting in the work and doing the efforts to actually achieve and realize that, right?

There you go. Okay, so you're factoring that piece into the 50-50. Okay. The original reason behind us doing our first podcast, from my recollection, was you've dealt so much with things like sports that have very clear paths. And obviously a lot of variance in the advantages people have. You have Peyton Manning with the pedigree, and then you have Kurt Warner who was bagging groceries, both reaching different levels of success and that changes their stories. But, you know, we wanted to dive into entrepreneurship where there really is no path. That was the original premise of this. And I think what's interesting is we've still kind of drawn that conclusion.

Like we're not sitting here two years later saying, yeah, we really have a process or structure to build companies. Like we think we found a really interesting methodology and thesis for this moment in time. We're well aware that might not exist in three years. Or if we have had the same thesis in 2023, we might have been too late to have business success. So I do think what's interesting is

I haven't gotten any further in my thinking than when we first talked on what the process of entrepreneurship is, other than what we already said, what you said is vision. And I think that relentlessness and commitment to it, whether it takes one year, two years or 15. What keeps you guys up at night as entrepreneurs? I'm happy to share from my perspective what keeps me up at night. But what do you wake up at four in the morning? And the first thought that comes to your mind when you're anxious, what, what, what are those thoughts? What are the things you can't turn off

at night? You know, because you're trying to solve and you're, you're, you're concerned. Mine is a fear of missing something that I was supposed to have caught that will then let a lot of people down and result in layoffs or overspending and just failure. Like failure from something that I didn't know I needed to do. It's not going to be something I forgot to do. It's something I didn't know I needed to do because we're punching above our weight and growing into things that we haven't done before. So all of a sudden I'll lose sleep over what I don't know. The hard part is when you're a founder and you're working on a startup and you're like running a business, right? For everybody working with you, what you say are the goals and objectives are just taken as truth, right? It's

like we need to reach a million dollars to be successful this quarter right and everybody in the team knows that that's what they're marching towards and they have a clear sense of reality right I think the scary part is when you go to bed that night like if you're being honest with yourself you completely made there's no there is no actual answer here like you're making up the set of reality rules that everybody in your organization has to play by and they are assuming that it is a fixed truth for what that direction or that goal or that success state looks like and every day

you just for me it's like go to bed morning wondering, is that actually the right success state? Am I actually marching everyone towards the right path? Because there is a hundred variables going into this that I've just had to make an educated guess to the best of my knowledge and ability at that moment. And I've got to be willing to change it and all that stuff. But it's like that keeps you up at night. You could tell everyone could achieve it and the business could still fail if you set the wrong goal, right? And it's just, that is like the scariest thing, right?

There is no right answer. There is no clear path from A to Z in the startup world. If there was, everyone would just do it, right? Yeah, I'll share with i'll share with you mine is that people are trusting that i can guide you know that i can build and that i can help deliver against this promise that i've made for my company and for the people that are building it together and so what keeps me up is like, not as the promise, right? Not as the intent, right? But have I done everything I possibly can today? And, and that's

the part that I get, you know, like, because it's a big responsibility. And so I'm, I'll tell you guys this, this is maybe an entrepreneurial conversation or something else. I am so over the org chart. I think that the revolution is going to begin within and it's also going to stem out from businesses that are trying to do noble things like yourself to solve big problems that others can't

and the reason they can't is because of bureaucracy. The reason they can't is because of the structure. It doesn't allow for the genius of people inside of it to be celebrated and expressed at scale. So we've got this power structure that is crippling and constricting people's gifts. I think what you're describing is a leadership failure, in my opinion. And an org chart to me, I hate bureaucracies and structure more than anyone, as Alex can tell you. I would be lost without Alex's frameworks, processes, and structure.

I don't love org checks either. But I do think that the way I view an org chart, at least in our teams, is it's really about where does the responsibility lie, not where does the power lie. And that's a big difference. Yeah. So we're saying, I think we're saying much of the same thing. It's important to know who's in charge because, you know, you need to understand the weight and implications of your decisions, which is what we, you know, we're just talking about. Like, it's important for me to be aware that decisions I make really impact people's lives

and salaries. I do think that I need to be aware of that so I'm less reckless and more thoughtful. Like I think it's a good pressure. I think that's a positive pressure that leads to better decision making. But you know, you've hit on like the peak of where we are as a group right now because on one hand, nothing makes us more excited. Beyond solving a real problem and like seeing it work, I would say our second favorite thing is tackling bureaucracy. Even more on-core than me. Maybe we'll get to it, maybe it's for another day, but this guy's gotten laws passed, we've

gotten Rhino completely accepted in the real estate industry. There are a few things that we enjoy more, but we have to have some structure to be able to scale or else we can't do what we want to do at the scale that we're trying to prove. And it's a super interesting growth phase that we're entering where, you know, what's in our DNA is breaking the status quo and not accepting bureaucracy.

We need a little structure to scale and we haven't answered yet. I don't know that I have the answer. I'm just knowing, pointing out something that's maybe it's obvious that power and control is an unhealthy and asking people to not, to give up their power and control is a bit futile. You know, like that's, that's, that's a challenge against human nature, I think. And I did see that you guys got the mayor of L.A. and the mayor of Miami to work on a project together. And one's Democrat, one's Republican. I mean, nice job.

Beautiful job. Yeah, tell them about the – it's worth at least mentioning the renter's choice legislation. What is it called? We have a renter stimulus push that we've been working on. I think it's funny because to your point just a second ago, I want to just drill in here. You talk about it's very hard to remove power and control, which I agree wholeheartedly right and so i think part of the approach we've taken because we are dealing with and any business owner any entrepreneur is dealing with so many different stakeholders that all feel

the need to have their power and their control whether it's your investors your board members your like you know your partners that are paying your clients your customers the government like everybody wants their control over what you're doing, right? And that's not just limited to an org chart, right? It's limited to this, just your ecosystem, or it expands as far as your ecosystem. And I think one of the things that Alex and I have to constantly ask ourselves is, how in the world can we take what we want and do it in a way that makes it a win, win, win, win, win for all the stakeholders so that they can selfishly get on board, right? It's not about asking them a favor.

It's not about trying to force it down their throats. It's about creating that win-win. And I think that culture is what led to Rentry Stimulus, which I'll tell you about in a second, is how we run our companies. I always think we had to run it. When we were 18 years old, we were running this business for the first time. We had no money. So we had to get people to work for us without pay. And to get people to work for you without pay, you've got to figure out really creative ways to create win-wins.

We're just doing that at way bigger scale today, but it's the same concept, right? And so when we were thinking about Rhino, it was already at the very core of the product. Like you rent or save thousands of dollars, landlord still stays protected and can sign the lease at a lower friction point for you. So it's a win-win, right? But now we've got to extrapolate that out. It's like it takes a long time to scale this. It helps people put money in their pockets. Is there a way to create an even bigger win-win-win puzzle where we can then get this instead of one landlord at a time to 500,000 landlords at a time, right? And so suddenly you look at, you have real estate owners who, even if this is a nice thing to have, they don't really have an incentive

necessarily to go through the work to change it, right? It doesn't negatively affect them, but the positive may not be worth it to a small owner the way it is to a big owner who has to deal with volume leasing. So you've got that challenge. You've got politicians who are being yelled at every day for housing affordability challenges and because people need more money. But they don't want to pass a law that hurts landlords because then they can't get the donations. And if they pass something that helps landlords, the voters will backlash. So they're in trouble. Renters frankly feel like they have no power in this situation because their power dynamic is all messed up between you and the landlord and you can't really do much.

You can only vote for a politician once every few years and hope they keep their promises, right? So we came up with kind of a crazy idea which was what if we took the same concept and turned it into a policy idea where politicians can talk about unlocking 45 billion dollars or in the case of New York State 8 billion in just New York with a law that makes them the heroes to the renters, right? But the law doesn't actually hurt landlords. And for landlords, if every other landlord has to do it, suddenly the cost and time of setting it up is worth it because you're getting the benefit of not dealing with deposits, but you're not taking on a cost that puts you at a disadvantage to the other guys. For renters, moving into apartments becomes half the cost.

You're no longer paying a security deposit. And if you're already renting, you get $1,400 on average back into your pocket. It was a super complex exercise to figure out how to get all. Oh by the way if you're democrat you need to look like you're socially progressive taking on these issues for low income if you're republican you don't want government mandates so we have to make something that shows private sector innovation as the solution right and all of a sudden you have a bipartisan landlord ren-renter, public-private, kind of comprehensive solution, that over the last 12 months, we've turned into the single largest

rent relief policy effort across the country. But it was really, really hard to put those pieces together. But in the end, everybody wins. Mayor of LA wins. Mayor of Miami wins. Republican, Democrat. The biggest landlords in LA, the biggest landlords in Miami, both win. And all the renters win, right? It just took a lot of finessing on the-

And our company wins. Let's be blunt about it. And the company wins. And all we're saying is renters get a choice. They don't have to use our company. So it's commercially motivated, but there's plenty of ways this doesn't put money in our pocket. But our investors win. I mean, really, I think this was one of our favorite examples because we truly believe every single stakeholder can benefit from this. The worst thing that someone gets is optionality out of this. Right. Really cool. So you guys are able to

spot from the perch that you're on, you know, from the frontier that you've returned back from opportunities. And so last we spoke in 18, 2018, there was no social unrest. There was no COVID, there was no political divisiveness. What are you seeing now in 2021 as opportunities for the next five years, 10 years? What are you seeing? Look, I think part of this is a lot of the things we'd already been talking about are just explicitly obvious for the worst reasons right now. I mean, one of our other thematic areas that we were talking about was senior care and the aging population and the horrific quality of care in the average nursing home. I don't have to convince you why that's true right now. And it's for very unfortunate reasons, like COVID made that glaringly obvious. So I think part of this is, you know,

the only silver lining is that there's a tension to these problems now. And I think attention leads to policy, it leads to capital, it leads to entrepreneurship, which is why I think part of our luck was just that we were laying the foundation for our companies in time to actually be ready with real products. But I think that a lot of what we've already said, cost of health care, student loans, lack of savings, the only thing I think we're uniquely fascinated by is the path to homeownership. I think there's a huge misconception millennials don't want homes. It's just look at the data. We're broke.

And number two, job creation. So both of those two things, the tie to what I think is going to define the next five years, which is divisiveness. And if you look at what's happening in the world, it's been happening for the last two years, and we've talked about it, but only in one dimension. We've talked about divisiveness on the dimension of Republicans and Democrats in the United States today. It's actually becoming far more complex and messy in that we talked about divisiveness maybe between baby boomers and millennials, right? But what's about to happen is millennials are going to be more divided. There's literally two different worlds. Millennials make up the biggest consumer set in the country now, right? In any developed part of the world, right?

Millennials now are so divided. It was already bad because you had those with student loans, those with debt, those with a paycheck to paycheck versus those who had salaries and the ability to build some little bit of safety, 50-50 there, right? Then you had the wealth transfer from people who were born to wealthier parents versus not. One of the equalizing forces over the last few generations is what Alex mentioned, homeownership. Over the last few generations, access to homeownership, which is a basically massively levered investment that's protected by the government, has helped stabilize and equalize to some extent the kind of wealth gap of the middle, right? But now you have a divide so stark coming out of COVID where there are friends of ours who basically got paid a salary to work remotely from home

and are totally fine. And maybe they got a little bit of a pay cut, but generally doing fine. And there are those who just lost their jobs and they were already on the fence. And now you're talking about a whole that you know graduating in 2008 crisis you were put a little behind you worked 10 years to kind of catch up and now you're put behind but now you're 35 and you have two kids and you get there's no

way or time to catch up and you sure as hell didn't reap the benefits of the stock market over the last 12 months either right so that So that divide that, you know, and we, when people talk about inequality, you talk about the richest and the poorest, like that's not what scares me as much. Right. There's always been the Rockefellers and the, you know, the kind of homeless crisis that's been part of capitalism since the beginning. It's when the middle and just normal people are suddenly so separate where you could have done everything right, done all the things, gone to school, gotten the degree, gotten

the job, and yet you still can't even afford the basic stuff. That divide is where unrest happens and riots happen. And from a business perspective, I think you're going to start to see two very different worlds of products to these two different markets. And hopefully you can figure out a way to bring it together so that we are trying to figure out a way to create financial products that can be beneficial to the wealthy. Wealthy meaning the upper middle, not wealthy, but the like, you know, this side, but really transformative for somebody who's gotten caught on this side because it can actually give them that pathway to home ownership or to building their credit or to those kinds of things.

Right. I just worry that too many people now are going to focus on like luxury solutions. Like here's my new concierge at my new concierge doctor, my new valet on demand, Robin Hood for investing, right? And then you'll have a separate set of products in the world. And that's like, think about what you saw with like Parler versus like Facebook, where people started going in extreme ideologies. If business products and the way you shop and buy

and the services you use start getting segmented, I think there's a real risk there of unrest. Yeah, I love the dynamic nature of that because that's what you essentially have already done with Rhino is fused that gap or solved a solution around that or through that gap. I haven't thought about that framework before. Let me give you a better illustration of the gap too, Mike. So we talked about the average savings or let's say Rhino is ubiquitous and everyone gets an average of 1400 back. What's the average cost of a down payment on a home? So it depends. Five to 6%, $300,000 home between 15 and 20 grand. So it says that right there shows you how how far the gap we still have to close.

Like if you were, let's be super extreme and idealistic and say everything Kairos builds could solve that gap. We have a long way to go between that money we put back in your pocket from Rhino and that cost of a down payment on a home. And it's not to say home ownership is a guarantee of financial security. It says 2008, but I mean, it's certainly to say home ownership is a guarantee of financial security it says 2008 but i mean it's certainly a milestone and and i think that data shows how far we have to go all i can say is a

silver lining is we hope that more awareness about the data and the extent of these problems will create more people working on it like more shots on goal people who aren't us, is a fantastic outcome. It's why we still do things like the K-50. That said, you know, I hope we don't land where Encore said, which is just, you know, more divisiveness. And yeah, just one other example. You can see it in this way to avoid, right? Like China today has developed a different internet to the United States, right? The platforms are different. the information is different, the services you use are different.

It had been for the last 20 years that the world had essentially the same internet. You go to China now, the information you'll see available on the internet is just different. It's restricted, it's firewalled, it's censored. The platforms you use, they did not allow American companies or European companies to really spread. It is a different set of services and platform. The reality, which is crazy to think in a globalized world where everybody has been saying technology and the internet would flatten the world. Governments have now, I mean, literally built digital walls that are isolating us even more in these countries. And that is scary on a national to national basis.

It's, I think, disastrous and complete. It could be a fatal blow if that happens within the country, right? And by the way, in a crazy way, that divide is what China uses as their justification for controlling the internet in China, is to avoid that type of split within the country and civil unrest, right? It'll just be interesting. I don't exactly know how it manifests in a business, but I think that is going to be a defining, challenging problem. Well, we're already seeing at the micro level where based on the 16 things that I've liked on my whatever pages, then Instagram, Facebook, this, that, and the other have shaped my reality to reinforce those likes, as opposed to maybe expand them into the 16 things that I never have chosen and to see if I'd be interested

in those. Like, so that micro level, I know that you guys are well aware of that problem, but many people I think are not quite aware of how narrowing that is and how dangerous it is to reinforce the ideas that you might have just begun to explore, but the social technology giants have reinforced it ad nauseum so that you begin to adopt those ideas in a deeper level. So it is really challenging. This is what you study, obviously, so I'm not the expert here, but it's like your way of perceiving information is based on the patterns that you've historically kind of created in your brain, right? And so if the information set and the patterns and the set of things that I've built as my foundation in my mental map and I get new information, it's going to be interpreted through that set of past experiences and pattern recognition right and so you just if you let people isolate so long that that mental map becomes so defined

in a totally different way as somebody else i mean you may as well be from another planet right and i will say like to what you know to just bring it back full circle as we kind of conclude, if you look at Tinder, one of the things I am very happy and proud of that we did is dating naturally had that divisiveness and natural selection as just a function of the way people met. You would meet your significant other or the person at the country club or if you were at a dance troupe. So you tended to have a pool of people that were like you and that perpetrated for decades. And that's why you have a lot of these, like a lot of the racial riots, a lot of the kind of separation of socioeconomic. There was not much overlap there. You went to a certain school in a school district. You went to the same

restaurants, the same parties, and that was it. Suddenly Tinder, with the evolution of that, you were looking at a population set that had nothing to do with what your economic background was, what your interests necessarily were, which, you know, all these factors. And also it was just like, well, I'm going to show you 10 random people within a mile of you. Right? Yeah, but you could even change the distance. And I will say that one of the things I'm very proud of that work is Tinder has been responsible for more interracial, intersocioeconomic, intercultural type relationships and connections that otherwise would likely never have been formed, right? And so there is a way for technology to do the opposite

of what it's doing today. You guys are awesome. I love talking to you guys because the innovation, the thoughtfulness, the risk-taking, and the structure that you guys are putting together super stimulating to me. And so I want to say thank you again for sharing your genius, your passion. I hope folks that are listening can follow along with what you're doing and also support Rhino if they're homeowners or renters about it. And where can they find more information about you and your companies? Kairos HQ. So K-A-I-R-O-S-H-Q.com.

And follow us on Instagram, Twitter. TikTok. Are you on TikTok, Alex? Listen, man, we're going for the modern consumer. Alex Fiance is on dad TikTok. Yeah, I'm experimenting with, you know, what creative content means while also being a dad. We were all becoming parents and we came of age on social media. It's going to be a nightmare. Alex figured showing off his baby is a good way to get followers. I actually didn't, but I might.

Oh my God. Look at you guys. All right. Brilliant. I'm wishing you guys radical success in solving the problems that big companies and big governments and bureaucracy cannot solve. So I love that you're in the fight.

Thanks again, Michael. Thanks, Michael. All the best, guys. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves

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