Leap Academy with Ilana Golan - Siri Co-Founder: Adam Cheyer on Innovation, Persistence, and Timing Big Wins

Episode Date: August 6, 2024

Feeling creatively stifled in his stable but unfulfilling job, Adam Cheyer pursued entrepreneurship, even with his limited business knowledge. He co-founded Siri to realize his dream of a voice-activated assistant and the project was so promising that Steve Jobs called out of the blue. Despite initially turning down his offer, Jobs persisted. Today, Siri is integrated into billions of Apple devices. In this episode, Adam shares the key moments and mindset shifts that turned his vision into reality. Adam Cheyer is an inventor, entrepreneur, and VP of AI Experience at Airbnb. He has founded multiple successful startups, including Siri and Change.org. In this episode, Ilana and Adam will discuss: - The emotional drive behind leaving a stable job - Challenges of starting a business in his forties - The exciting story behind creating Siri - The unexpected call from Steve Jobs - Adam’s process for timing new innovations - How visualizing success boosts motivation - The power of being first in new markets - Maintaining perseverance as an entrepreneur - The evolution of AI - And other topics…   Adam Cheyer is an inventor, entrepreneur, and engineering executive, recognized for his pioneering work in AI and human-computer interfaces. Throughout his career, Adam has co-founded or been a founding member of multiple successful startups, including Siri, Change.org, GamePlanner.AI, Sentient, and Viv Labs. Currently, he serves as the VP of AI Experience at Airbnb, leveraging generative AI to transform the platform into an intuitive travel concierge. In addition to his technology work, he is also an award-winning magician and a member of the prestigious Magic Castle in Los Angeles. Connect with Adam: Adam’s Website: http://adam.cheyer.com/site/home  Adam’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamcheyer/  Resources Mentioned: Change.org: https://www.change.org/

Was Steve Jobs calling us? He said, hey, it's Steve. What you doing? Want to come over to my house tomorrow? Like Steve Jobs is calling us? How did you get this number? Adam Shire, co-founder of Siri. I had no idea what I was doing,

but I put it out there and I went after it. It's not the success that drives me. It's not the money that drives me. It's the goal. that drives me. It's not the money that drives me. It's the goal. Don't give up. Just show up every day and try something different if it's not working. Adam Shire, literally a rainmaker, co-founder of Siri, which was sold to Apple, Change.org, which I think has, what, half a billion members, VivLabs, that was sold to Samsung, Sentient, which is sold to Cognizant, Game Planner AI, which is acquired by Airbnb. Adam, take us back in time

to when you were just getting started with Siri. Who are you and what does it look like? I had been dreaming about and working on Siri-like visions for many, many years. My first version of Siri was in 1993, which was the year before I saw a web browser. This was pre-web. Someday, I said, there will be content and services on machines around the world, beyond the PC that you have on your desk, and we'll need some interface to interact and discover that content and services. So that was always my dream. In a sense, it was my conception of the web or the internet before the web came along. I thought everyone would have an assistant and you would just say, I want to know this or I want to do that. And the assistant's job would be to understand your request, break it into pieces, route

that sub-request to the right machines around the world, aggregate the results, present them to the user. So that was my dream from the early 90s. I built it, a prototype of it, where you could use speech recognition, you could use handwriting recognition, you could use graphical interfaces, mixes of all of this on a little, almost like an iPad-like tablet running on a much, much slower bandwidth and memory and compute. But that was just me dreaming and playing. So the start of Siri as a company didn't happen until 2007. So 14, 15 years later. I knew nothing about entrepreneurship.

I never took a class like yours. I don't have an MBA. I was just a technical engineer. So I did not know what I was doing, but I was frustrated in my life. I had a fine job, but I was feeling two emotions. I felt stifled. Like I had all these ideas that I couldn't manifest. So I was being held back creatively and I just couldn't make things happen.

And so I got the idea, maybe a startup would be the right path for me. And I ended up connecting with two who ended up being my co-founders, Dag Kittlaus. He's a Norwegian-American. He was running the X Products group at Motorola. And he saw, with the iPhone coming out, he saw that Motorola may have challenges in the future. And my other co-founder was Tom Gruber. He's an expert in AI and an incredible designer. And the three of us got together and started talking about, should we do this as a company, as a spin-out of SRI, where I was working

as a researcher and Doug was an entrepreneur-in-residence. So that was the very first germs of what became Siri. So you have this big vision, which you're clearly playing with it and you're geeking out, right? But from that to actually leave a comfortable paying job is a big difference. Like a lot of people have ideas, but they don't necessarily have the, call it courage or call it craziness or whatever it is, to actually step out and create that into a reality. What do you think is the difference, Adam? For me, I have this process I use in my life. I call it verbally stated goals, but I generally treat life like a book. We're only here for a short time and the time we're here is the most precious and valuable thing we have. So I feel everyone is obliged to try to make the most out of their life. But what does that mean? What is a most valuable life? And I think everyone gets to define it for themselves. And at different phases of their life, they will be different people.

Obviously, I'm the same person, but when I was 20, when I got married, when I needed money to have a house or a child, there were all these feelings. And here I was frustrated. I had a good job. It was well-paying and I liked it, but I felt stifled and not making impact. And for me, what I do is during these times when I know I'm not satisfied in life fully, I say, don't get stuck where you are, make a change. And that's very important to me. It's probably the most important thing that I, if I look back at anything I think has been successful, it comes from this process. And what I do is I say, at this point, I know a change is coming. I have to change. I'm not satisfied. I'm not fulfilled. So what am I feeling? At this time, it was stifled and what I was working on wasn't going to impact anyone

so I take those emotions I turn it into words and I said in 2007 I will do five projects that can impact users so that was my statement and it was because I had all these ideas and I wanted them to be worth something. So I made this crazy goal and then I had a follow-on goal, one major, one minor. My idea was I would build five things that I thought could be valuable and then I would take the best two

and start them as companies. And by calling this a verbally stated goal, once I came up with those words, five projects that can impact users in 2007, one major, one minor, I would tell everyone I met. And that, by verbalizing it, putting it into the world with commitment, I said, I'm going to do this. You have to. I had no idea how I was going to do this, but I kind of said, I'm going to do this. And that drove me to take that leap because I had just told a hundred people that I was going to do these things. Now you better. Now I better. And two things happen. It commits you to it by

telling people you start to, I don't even have five ideas. And then I know I'll see them soon. And they'll ask me how they're coming. And the second thing is people start to, I don't even have five ideas. And then I know I'll see them soon. And they'll ask me how they're coming. And the second thing is people start to help. If you say you're going to do something, you really want to achieve something. People say, oh, I know this person you should talk to, or have you thought about this? Or have you read this book? And so those two things, by putting it into the world, it gives you the conviction to pursue it. Even if you have doubts, and I had so many doubts. I had never started a company. I'm in my 40s. I don't know what I'm doing, but people help you. That's what got me started. And the last piece, so it wasn't even a reasonable goal

because I said five projects to impact users and then one major, one minor. Every entrepreneurship book says focus, focus, focus. Just do one thing. I didn't even know that. So I started three companies at the same time. So I did one major, one minor, and then a side project. So Siri was my day job. Sentient was my night and weekend job.

And change.org was like my side project. While I had my day job. Sentient was my night and weekend job. And change.org was like my side project. While I had a day job, I had a day job. So, you know, it was not reasonable. And yet, if you look back, it all worked out. Like change.org is the world's largest petition platform with, as you said, more than a half a billion users. And Siri's been on billions and billions of devices. And Sentient was the first large-scale machine learning company right at a time when deep learning was just getting there. So they succeeded. They're important.

They're satisfying in certain ways, even though I had no idea what I was doing. But I put it out there, and I went after it. So you know, to some extent, that you're a fraction of what you could be. And I absolutely agree that different phases in our life, different things will be important for us. So we need to define it and go for it, which is a big focus for us. So now you're starting Siri. Well, also, I want to talk about change.org because that had also really interesting pivots as well. But you're starting Siri. How does and start a company. We had the support of SRI International, which is a research institute. And so we went to talk to VCs. Siri, we actually had a very clear plan about what we were going to do, what it was going to be. Took a little bit longer than we drew up on paper. Good thing for entrepreneurs. When you raise money, take a little bit extra because money translates into time. And for whatever reason,

things always take a little bit longer than you expect. But we basically had a pretty clear picture of what we're going to do. It was an app. We were building an app called Siri that on February 4th, 2010, we launched into the App Store. You could use three modes to interact with it. So it was a little different than the Siri that came out on the Apple inside the iPhone later.

With the original Siri, you could type, tap, or talk. And you had about 50 different service providers. OpenTable, MovieTickets.com. You could call a taxi, no Uber. There was no Uber back in 2008, 9, 10. But you could literally say, Siri, get me a cab, and it would show up. So kind of Uber before Uber. Book tickets. And there was a dynamic ecosystem of services that would compete and cooperate. So if you asked a request, find me the best French restaurant for Thursday night at eight, you'd have OpenTable providing the time, Gaio would give reviews, Yelp would give ratings, restaurant.com would look up deals and discounts all aggregated around each restaurant.

And it was very open. It was an ecosystem. It was meant to be like the internet, but an internet that you could talk to and interact with. So we launched a free app. Two weeks later, we get this phone call, absolutely unannounced. We see it. It actually says Apple Cupertino. And this was iPhone. We're like, Apple's calling us. Swipe, swipe. We're like, I hope we didn't do something

wrong. We launched this app. Swipe. And we would have to swipe to answer and it wasn't picking up. We're like, come on, answer, answer, answer. And then we hear a voice and it was Steve Jobs calling us. He said, hey, it's Steve. What you doing? Want to come over to my house tomorrow? I'm like, Steve Jobs is calling us? How did you get this number? Was the first question we asked, because we had no website. Siri means, many of your listeners may not know, Siri means secret in Swahili. That's one of the meanings. And we were a stealth company, you know, stay low, move fast. We had this ninja logo. But Steve Jobs somehow got our phone number on no address, no website, said, come over to my house tomorrow. And he said he wanted to buy the company. He said, thank you. We're flattered, not interested. Goodbye. And we left. Obviously, it was not the end of the story, but we worked for about two

years, launched a free app. Two weeks later, Steve Jobs is calling us, which is like for an entrepreneur, it's like, there's a miracle. Insane. And he wants to buy your company and we politely turned him down and left. So you're literally launching this thing. And I will also say, you know, with a little bit of brackets, I think what was really interesting for people who don't know and don't realize, you guys needed to be really on the forefront of technology. You needed to know that the iPhone will make it. There was a lot of rumors that they have no shot, that it's going to be only phone companies. So you guys needed to also bet on the trends and technologies there. That's a great, great point. If you notice my companies, one of the things that

really made me successful is I got there first. I talk about it very much with a surfing metaphor. If you're on your board in the water and the wave breaks too early, you don't go anywhere. If it breaks after, you don't go anywhere. But if you time it just right, you can go on a really good ride. So I say that there were no voice assistants before Siri. Alexa came a few years later, Cortana, Google Assistant, all later. There were no voice assistants before Siri. There were no social networks before change.org for social change, social networks for social change. There were no large-scale machine learning platform companies

before Sentient. So every time I try to time it, and so how do I do that? I actually have a process. I call them trends and triggers. The trends are I take an open question. There's some activity and thoughts, but it's not mainstream. Crypto has been sort of like that. And NFTs came out and this and quantum computing. They're all like here a little bit, but they're not mainstream. And I would ask a question like, is crypto going to replace money? Or how's the world going to be in the future? And then I do research and study it and I form an opinion. And that's my picture of the trend. I believe the world is going to go in this direction. Is augmented reality going to take off mainstream? It's not today.

That's why we're here and not on, right? Well, virtual took off, but not augmented. And so once I have these ideas, in 2004, for example, it was the 10th anniversary of the web. I did a presentation. I did a lot of research and made 10 predictions for the next 10 years of the internet. I had a lot about data moving to the cloud and everything being digitalized and organized and all of this kind of thing. Remember back then in 2004, Netflix shipped DVDs by mail. Email was something that was on your machine, not in the cloud and all this. And I said, it's all going to move to the cloud. I said, once the data gets into one place in the cloud,

machine learning will finally be able to take off. So I had predictions around machine learning. I also said, the companies that organize the information, the Googles, the Amazons, they're not the best interfaces to it. So I said there will be a revolution at the interface that happens. And these were all predictions. So I've got these views, these predictions, and then I look for trigger moments. The craziest one, in 2004, I said social networking is going to go mainstream. Now, Facebook was just starting at a university. I'd never heard about it. The craziest one, in 2004, I said social networking is going to go mainstream. Now, Facebook was just starting at a university.

I'd never heard about it. LinkedIn was around, but kind of niche just for business. Friendster was the largest with 13 million users, but it wasn't that big. I go, social networking, and I had all these reasons for it. So the trigger moment for me on social media, I saw MySpace became the number one trafficked website. Wow, okay, in the US. Here it comes. There are going to be social networks for everything.

2006, this was. It's time to start change.org, social network for social change. When the iPhone came out, as you said, many pundits said, oh, this is going to fail. This is just a fad. It's a flop. Only a phone company can make something as complicated as a phone. Apple makes this little iPod music player. It's not at all the same. I looked at it and said, this is exactly what I've been waiting for, an innovation at the interface

to access all the content and services, this is going to be huge. And in fact, in two years from now, every handset manufacturer, think Motorola, every telco, Verizons, and AT&Ts, they'll all be desperate to compete with this iPhone, because this has just flipped the game. So then, with that, I have a trend, I have a trigger. Now's the time. I know where the world is going. I see something that no one else sees yet, because I've been thinking about it for a while.

What will be needed? And I said, the iPhone's going to be huge, but what could a competitor want from the iPhone that would be better than the iPhone? I said, the flaws of the iPhone is one, the screen is small, it's hard to type, no hard keyboard like a BlackBerry, and bandwidth was so slow. You would click on a link in a web browser, it would take a minute round trip on 3G. A minute. I go, if you're going to buy something, that takes 10 clicks, 10 minutes. No one will do that. I said, what if you could

take the Siri idea and in one round trip with no typing and a small screen say, get me two tickets to the Warriors game tonight. And it did. Click, one click, one round trip. That would be better. So we built and started Siri with that in mind, really intending to build this for the competitors of Apple so that they could one-up the iPhone. And of course, the irony is Steve Jobs, super intuitive, he's on it. He saw it first and grabbed it before any competitor could. Incredible. And you have a beautiful story of how you went to an Apple store and used visualization. You kind of visualize yourself there. And I want you to tell maybe that story because I think visualization is a really powerful tool.

But also that day when Siri was actually launched on the phones. the funds? As I said, I'm a big fan of envisioning the future through predictions, committing with verbally stated goals. And so I always tell entrepreneurs, try to visualize success. And you have to ask yourself, I'm doing this thing. It's taking all my time and energy. It's hard. What keeps you going? You have to imagine what would success look like and ask yourself that in the early days. I remember we had just started Siri. We were like five people. I walked into an Apple store and this was just after the iPhone, early 2008. So the app store had just emerged. And Apple had on its wall all the icons of the apps of the biggest, most powerful companies in the world. There was Google. There was Skype. There was

Pandora, Facebook. These are like serving billions of people. These are companies with tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of employees. We were five, six people. And so I'm like, here we are doing this thing. And I summoned up all my gumption, just to even think it, took gumption, cojones. I said, someday, right here on an Apple store wall, next to the other 50, 100 big players, there's going to be a Siri logo. And I visualized it. I pictured in my mind, I could see it, even though it seemed crazy. And I'm like, there's Google. You know how many PhDs they have? You know how much infrastructure? How many customers? We have nothing. And I pictured it. And so fast forward, I said, Steve had wanted to buy the company. We turned him down. He's actually a very, was a very persistent man. So he called us 30 days in a row. He would not accept no for an answer. And eventually he convinced us we should sell to Apple and we could change the world and impact the world more with Apple than just as an independent startup. So we went. We worked for 18 months. So from April 2010 to

October. So October 4th, 2011 is when the iPhone launched. Steve died the very next day. He was so passionate. His admin wrote and said, Steve was literally clinging to life, holding on to life itself to see the launch of Siri, which gave me chills when I heard that. But right after, right after that, I had to go to an Apple store to see, it's launched, are people trying it? Do they like it?

What's the vibe? And as I approached that same Apple store, they have like this open front door, like a wide door. But right next to it, right next to the door, there was a giant plasma display made up to look like an iPhone, running Siri use cases on a loop with a sign above it saying, introducing Siri. And I just got emotional. I got chills. I still do. Crazy. Because I wanted to be one little icon out of a hundred in the corner wall. And I thought that would be impossible. And I held that picture. And now I walk up and we are the front door. I'm like, what is this? And that has happened. There are more instances of that for other things I've imagined where you dream and you're like going after it so hard and it seems so impossible.

And yet the reality often it's like life reaches out to tweak your nose and go, remember? Gotcha. I got one up to you even more than you could dream. And that's happened to me multiple times in my life. So for me, it's the fun part in entrepreneurship is visualize success, go after it. And more often than not, things happen and you can put the two images side by side, the pictures you've held in your mind side by side, and it's the best feeling. That's incredible because the story gives me chills. Is this also what keeps you going? Because entrepreneurship, let's be real, Adam, sometimes it sucks. It can get really, really, really hard. Is it those visualizations that also keeps you going? Is it something else?

What keeps you going when things get hard? And I think I want to also tie it to change.org a little bit because you guys needed to look for market fit for a while. It's not the success that drives me. It's not the money that drives me. It's the goal. It's the pursuit of the goal. And I just have this personality. My wife thinks I overdo it too much. But this year, I'm in my high 50s. I said, you know what would be cool? 30 years ago, I ran the Beta Breakers race, which is a race in San Francisco, 12 kilometers, goes up a giant hill and down the other side. And I had this time, I wonder if I could beat it. It's a stupid little random idea. I'm going to try. I take that goal. And then even if it's impossible, 30 years, you need to slow down a little bit in

30 years. And I just started, I put out a goal and I just showed up every day. I did the work. I got a coach and trainer and he says, science can predict exactly how fast you're going to run based on your heart rate and training data. I'm like, am I going to beat my goal? He's like, no, you're not. You're going to miss it by a minute and a half. But you just needed to train more. You didn't have enough time. I'm like, yeah, but I beat the goal. I went out there and I did it. I just like to pick something I'm curious in. And this Siri idea, 1993, I'm still pursuing it. People will talk about chat GPT and all of this. Isn't this incredible? I'm like, yes, it's incredible. And they're like, isn't it done? I'm like, no, it's only half of what I imagined 30 plus years ago. I'm still frustrated that

the Siri I did was a step towards it, but it's not what I wanted. It's not open. We can talk about all the things AI today is not where I want it to be. And so it's more like I have this random curiosity goal that I think this should be true or I'm interested in it being true. And I just keep working on it

and keep showing up and trying and everything else falls out as a side effect. You know, never wanted to sell a company, but I wanted to explore this idea and I just kept doing it. Do you think there's connection between like a race, sports, and your chase chasing entrepreneurship? Or is there always just a persistency that is aligned? There's some quote, I don't know who said it,

it's inspiration and perspiration kind of thing. You know, it's 99% perspiration. I'm curious. I'm interested in things. Sports, you know, is part of it, but... You just don't stop. I like to dream of all sorts, all sorts of things. And then I'm like, why not make that come true? And it's not going to be an easy road. It's not going to be an instant road.

But I find it worthy, especially if I commit myself to do it. If I get to the point where I say, I'm going to do this, I try. And I also, I don't define failure as many do. People say, oh, Siri must have been your greatest success. I'm very proud of what we did. But it failed in so many ways. I wanted so much more. So it's both my greatest success maybe and my greatest failure, but it was an important stepping stone to the next thing. So yeah. Let's go there, Adam, for a second, because again, most entrepreneurs will fail, but for

real, and usually they're just not going to find the market fit or they're not going to find a way to monetize or it's just not going to be at the hands of so many people. So how do you find the market fit? Are you just listening more? Are you experimenting more? Are you not afraid to try different things? What do you think is the secret? Well, first of all, I never call anything I do a failure. Even startups, I say you only fail if you stop trying. So even if in some form, this particular startup ran out of money, say, and had to shut down.

So was it a success? Was it a failure? Well, from the investor's point of view, it's to shut down. So was it a success? Was it a failure? Well, from the investor's point of view, it's probably a failure. From your point of view, it's probably a valuable learning experience and you got to try and explore. And if you hold on to the goal and pick it up in a new form, and maybe you try it in a different startup, it's not a failure. It's a stepping stone. When I did Siri, for instance, Siri's great,

but it only did a little piece of what I wanted it to do. It was missing so many of the core ideas that we had done actually in earlier versions of Siri, never made it to market in the Apple version. So I declared success. I don't use the word failure. I left Apple at a time when Siri was exploding. I walked away from a team I love, millions of dollars, to go try again, start a new company, to focus on what I wasn't able to do at Apple on Siri for various reasons.

So I didn't give up. I tried again. So was Siri a failure? No, it was a success in some ways, a failure in some ways, but it was a stepping stone. And as the goal that I was trying to get to, if I don't give up, it's not a failure. It's only a failure if you give up. That's the way I think about it. In terms of product market fit, I don't have any magic answers. Some of it's luck, some of it's I surround myself with great people. I'm good at painting the vision. I point to the vision of this is what we want to achieve and why. This is where we want to get to. But all the nuances of does it go to market and how it's work and iteration, and sometimes you hit it and sometimes you don't. I've been extremely lucky.

Let's use the change.org example. With Siri, we had a very clear roadmap. We knew exactly what we were built. We came in on day one with a VC. We built what we said we would do. We launched it, and it was pretty successful. Change.org, we must have done 50 versions, maybe more. It was not sent out to be a petition platform. Petition was a tiny little feature. So we launched a website, a social network for social change. We had everything. First, we powered nonprofits. So you could give $100 to a nonprofit through change.org, and then you would post it

socially, and then your friends could chip in. So it would have a snowball effect, that viral giving approach. Then we had a gifting platform where you could give one square meter of rainforest saved or one carbon emission. We had the largest job board in 2009 when the economy crashed. Don't go back to just go back to work, go back to work at a social impact kind of place. We tried a million things, but what we did well is that we instrumented every aspect of our website and we followed the data. We had our ideas about where this product would go and what the product market fit was, but we tried a hundred things. Rapid iteration, but we instrumented everything. And this little petition feature seemed to do relatively well. So we

started moving it a little bit more and more central, made it a little bit bigger, simplified, got rid of some other things. And it literally, if you chart the growth of change.org over years, year one, rounding up to the nearest million, we had 1 million users rounding up. Generous. Year two, 1 million users. Year three, 1 million users. Year four, 1 million users. You could say this is a failure. It's going nowhere. In four years, we couldn't get product market fit. Then we went from 1 to 10, 10 to 25, 25 to 50, 50 to 150, and up. And today it's over half a billion members and growing fast. And so it showed persistence, willing to try different things, iterate, look at the data,

and just keep going. Don't give up. Just show up every day and try something different if it's not working. Do you think there's something that people maybe don't necessarily know about you that built you to who you are today? That's an interesting thing. I guess I would, so I have a hobby, which you may have seen about me. I love magic now at this phase of my life. And when I was 10 years old, I grew up in a boring, small town, no stoplight in the entire town. We did have a black and white TV. I was allowed one hour a week of TV time. So there was a lot of boredom. And I say,

what are kids missing today in their growth and education? I don't think they have time to be bored. They've got so many activities and sports and classes and crazy homework. And I had to make things up and dream and build and be creative. And I'd build stuff out of cardboard and I'd read these magazines about Magic Castle and Hollywood. Magicians for me at the time were real-life superheroes. They could fly, cross the stage. They could disappear, but they did for real. And they were creative and inventive. Magic is an inventive hobby.

So I love the storytelling, the creativity, the dreaming of the impossible and desirable. And I say that magicians and entrepreneurs are exactly the same. The hard part is to figure out what is the vision? What is this thing that's missing in the world that's really cool if it existed? And magicians do that all the time.

It's not just impossible. It needs to be impossible and kind of cool. Like you can read your mind or you could, you know, whatever it is, whatever superpower you'd want. And once you have the vision, you then take that and you work backwards and you figure out the math and science to make it come real. And whether it's Siri, 25 years ago, if you said there's going to be a device you can

pull out of your pocket, it knows who you are. You can just ask it things and it'll talk back to you in a conversation and do things for you, buy and book and reserve. You'd be like, that's magic. That's science fiction. Science fiction equals magic. And yet, you know, if you have a clear enough vision of it, you can actually start to architect it and build it. I think I shared right before we started that I had to binge watch some of your magic shows because you have this really beautiful combination. It's funny, but it's also a TED talk together with a magic show. I thought that was incredible. And you use Siri a lot with it, which is just a beautiful way to close the loop. And one of the things that we usually like to do in this show is

if I take you back in time to that kid that is building things or whatever, what would be an advice that you'd give to your younger self? I would just say to enjoy fully the moment and the phase where you are. I was lucky that I figured this out pretty early. Right at senior year in high school, I remember talking to my best friend at the time, and he was in school and working a job and saying, oh, when I get to college, it's going to be so much better.

I remember saying, are you happy? I don't have time to be happy. When I get to college, I'll be happy. He was always looking forward to this beautiful thing. And I go, you know, you'll never be 18 again. This is a special time. Squeeze the juice out of it. And that led eventually to my verbally stated goal philosophy. The way to have a successful life is if every moment along the way, you fully appreciate it. College will be great, but let me make the most I can out of this special time, high school, whatever it is. How do I have the most fun? So I would say that advice of being present in the moment, not rushing. If you're in a good place, really appreciate it. Express gratitude, enjoy it, soak in it, live it, get the most out of it. Because life's going to change.

Life comes in chapters. There'll be some point where this nirvana ends and you're now frustrated or something's changed or you graduated and now you're forced into this new chapter of college or whatever. And that'll be great too. But make the most out of each chapter. And then when a new chapter comes, then it will be time to dream. At age 10, I don't think any kid really knows how to appreciate how special every moment is. They take it for granted, but that's a lesson, I think, even at any age, it's always good to have a reminder of. I think that's a really, really important reminder because sometimes we live in the when I will, if I will, then I will be happy, or then I will be accomplished, or then I will be proud of myself. And I think also as parents, sometimes we like, oh, when they kids grow or when, you

know, balance, it doesn't really exist. You're trying to have it all at the same time. And it's like, you can have it all just not at the same time. Let's focus what's really important for you. And I think that being present is important. I've seen it a lot in entrepreneurship. There's a trap, a mindset that many people say, oh, if I could be a billionaire, then I would be happy.

They set this false goal in the future, and then they achieve it, and they're still not happy. And whenever I see someone setting this goal, if I got there, then I would be happy. I'm like, wait, wait, you're always looking forward to something else and you're wasting, you're not happy now. And if you do that all the way across your life, you'll get to the end and you've never been happy. So for me, every moment, in fact, you should always be monitoring, am I in a good place? Am I satisfied? Am I fulfilled? Great. Let's keep this going as long as I can. If you're not, you have an obligation to change it. Don't live in a situation where you've really got something, either a need or a desire.

You know, if you need something, not on a local everyday level, but you've gone for some time and you're not happy, change. But know how to extract the goodness of the now. Amazing. We have one life to live. Let's have some fun, right? That's have some fun right that's it amazing adam thank you so so so much for this super super inspiring story what you achieved is seriously incredible and i can see that was your personality there's a lot more coming but

thank you so much for your time adam yeah thank you so much for your time, Adam. Yeah, thank you so much.