My First Million - #180 with Furqan Rydhan - What it's Like Co-founding a $20B Company, Hardware for Mind Control & Vertical Farming

Episode Date: May 12, 2021

Shaan (@ShaanVP) and Sam (@TheSamParr) are joined by Furqan Rydhan (@FurqanR). Furqan was Shaan's CTO at Bebo and previously co-founded AppLovin -- a $20B+ company that recently went public. Shaan and Furqan host a weekly "Cool Sh!t Hour" between themselves to discuss the coolest innovations Furqan's seeing. We basically took that and made it into a podcast. Furqan talks about mind-control hardware, vertical farming, and a lot of interesting crypto projects. He also talks about what it was like starting a multibillion-dollar company and his mindset around making decisions on what projects to work on. --------- * Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ * Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: https://refer.fm/million * Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas. --------- Show notes: * (5:33) Background on Furqan and his new venture (f.inc) * (7:48) How AppLovin became a $20B+ company * (24:20) The hardware Furqan is bullish on * (35:33) DeFi and borrowing against crypto * (48:38) The opportunities in vertical farming * (59:59) The power of proximity and serendipitous opportunities * (1:13:40) What are DAOs?

I got one more in a different space that I think Sam will love. Sean, I told you about this book I read about vertical farming. And, you know, basically, like, I read this book. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You guys just were talking about crypto stuff. And then he just said, I've got something I think Sam will like farming. Do you have that big of a redneck to you? I like it too.

I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like my days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back. All right, we have a special guest on the pod today. Furcon is here. He's my old co-founder, probably the smartest guy I know, especially tech-wise. So we talked about a bunch of things ranging from his last company, App Lovin, which just went public at a, I know, $20, $30 billion valuation.

So we talked about, you know, the humble beginnings of that and all the way to a massive IPO. what he's doing with his money. You know, so you win the lottery, what are you going to do? And he talks about his new project that he's building out. And then we talked about a bunch of cool things that he shows me. So every week I do a call with him called the cool shit hour, where I just sit there on video and I just say, hey, show me cool shit that you're interested in because he's like a total, you know, tech nut.

He's on the bleeding edge of everything. And so that's my hack to learn a bunch of things before they go mainstream. And so he talks about, you know, some hardware stuff that he's really interested in, like a brainwave measuring device that he's wearing. He talks about crypto. And then we talk about vertical farming and the future of that. So a bunch of cool topics on that side. I would say there's some part of the crypto stuff that might be over your head.

So too many terms, acronym, stuff you don't know about. Here's my advice. Two ways you could still get value even if you don't fully get it because, hey, I only half get it for, is usually 10 steps ahead of me. And so what I've learned in knowing Furgon for like almost a decade now is when he thinks something's interesting, instead of just saying, I don't understand that. That's weird. Lean in.

Go Google it later. Look it up. You know, if I had just followed a bunch of the things he was interested in, I would have made a killing investment-wise over the last decade. And I've learned the hard way that that's what I should do. The second thing is he shared a bunch of general advice about how he went about his career, you know, college dropout. choosing jobs that weren't the highest paying job and why he chose it, what he kind of optimizes

for, I thought there was some good stuff in there. So if you were not subscribed to this podcast, if you're just listening to this podcast, maybe your friend told you about it, you know what you need to do. Open up the podcast app, Apple, the iTunes app, or open up Spotify. On Spotify, you click follow on the Apple Podcast app. You're going to click subscribe. We are climbing the charts. I think we're number 12 in maybe business or investing category. And we're breaking into that top 10 and we're not leaving when we get there. So how do we do that? Subscribe. If you've enjoyed this podcast, you get value out of it. Just hit the button. That's all you got to do. Hit the button. Thank you. So Sean and I are both wearing Harvard shirts. I actually planned this. I saw you

a screenshot of you testing and I went and grabbed my Harvard shirt. I was about to go on this big, like, what a coincidence. This is amazing. No, I do have one that I wear, but I saw you were wearing it. So I wanted to wear the same thing because we normally wear black t-shirts. Yeah. And, you know, for the record, neither of us went to Harvard. But we both do this thing where we'll wear Harvard stuff. And then people would be like, oh, Harvard. And then you respond, you're like, miss that campus.

Love it. Love it there. And you went on a tour and they actually went to Harvard. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Got a group on. It was lovely. They showed me around.

0-4? Oh, oh, 4. Yeah. We almost overlapped. I was just there for lunch. Yeah. Oh, like, were you there at noon? Firkcon's even better.

Firkon didn't even finish college. So of all of us, he's the most, he's the smartest and most successful one, and he was smarter enough to drop out after, what, freshman year, software year? I was there for a couple of years. I mean, I tried to do, I went to San Jose State.

I tried to do computer engineering because obviously that would have made sense, but I was running a company at the time and every time I was decided, between electrical physics or on the phone with somebody trying to make a deal and you know, you know which one won. Do you want to give a background, Sean, of Furcon? Because last time he was on, we were way smaller.

Yeah, Furcon is one of my best buddies. He was the guy I started my last company with or co-founder, CTO. So, you know, most co-founder pairings, I would say the most common one is one guy who can build and one guy who can sell. And that's kind of what we were. is like I'm more like the sales guy and he's more of the building guy. And so yeah, we worked together for a six, seven years, sold the company a year and a half ago. Furkan braved it out and made it one full year at a big corporation.

So I got to give props for that. That's like an endurance challenge for you. But now he's doing his own thing. So he's got F.D. Inc., which is, how do you describe it? I just want to build cool things with cool people. So that's what I'm focused on. that's really it. I would describe it as, you know, if you're trying to start something,

you want like a third co-founder. It's an interesting emerging tech idea. That's where I get excited. And I want to put in time and money and incubate these things with you. I'll give a different description. I'll give my view of it. Sweet. Basically, Furcon is investing in himself like 15 years ago,

whoever is that person. So if you're like a young engineer and you want to make some shit happen, And man, it'd be kind of helpful if you had somebody who's been around the block, who's done it before, who can either give you money, advice, actually get in the code and build with you. And so he's got this disc, it's kind of like Ycombinator. He's got this Discord group. And every single company is like, I don't know, like a 23-year-old engineer,

they get their own channel. And then basically on some of them, Furcon's actually like the back end engineer with them. On some of them, he's like the tough love investor who's like, dude, why aren't you focused on growth? why are you talking about all this other bullshit? And in some cases, it's like, oh, you need to move to San Francisco and, like, live on my couch. I think you've done that with a few engineers of, like, literally come here, sleep on my couch. And I'll, like, not just seed fund you.

I'll, like, babysit you and incubate you literally and physically in my apartment. I want to spend some time actually discussing that because I want to, like, reminisce a little bit. But first, by the way, we got to congratulate Firkont also. So since he's come on, his last company, Applovin, IPOed, I don't know, what is it at now? It's IPOed close to $30 billion. So, you know. Yeah, I was going to say, we have to give that part of the story, which is Ferkon co-founded a company that is currently publicly traded for $20 billion.

Yeah, Ferkon's rich is what I'm saying. That's like pretty important. Although it looks like you guys, did you guys just do an earnings? Something happened today where your stock just plummeted, well, not plummeted, but went down a fair bit. Yeah, I don't know. All tech stocks are getting ravaged right now. Yeah. But, you know, whatever.

Yeah, so congratulations. Like, basically that company, you guys were supposed to sell it for also, like, a huge amount, like $3 billion or something like a couple years ago. And it failed. And then it turned out to be a blessing in disguise, it seems. Well, you should explain that. That's a good story. So we're working together. And Furcon's like, dude, like, I got some good news.

And he's like, you know, my last company, we're going to sell for, we're going to sell. They're going to sell it, and I think it's, I don't know what it was, 1.4 billion or something like that, right? That's what the original sale price was? Yeah, I think they put a $1.4 billion value. I think the terms were something like they're going to put in a billion dollars and the value would be at 1.4.4. They're going to buy a maturity of the company. Most of the early employees would have gotten liquidated unless you're working there. You would have gotten kind of whatever new grants. Which would have been an amazing outcome anyways, right? Oh, wow. You build a company, 1.4 billion. That's, you know, that's a win. That's a grand slam. But then something happened. What happened? And how did that work out in your favor? Yeah. So the company was an international company. It's a Chinese company. And 2016, the elections happened. And, you know, politics kind of changed a little bit. And I think in that process, like, it started looking like, man, this is like not going to go through. Like, they're not going to be able to get approval in the U.S. for a foreign entity to kind of buy this thing. And so that happened. And then there's some time, you know, in every contract when a sale happens,

there's like all these triggers, right? Like, hey, you've got to complete by so-and-so date. If it doesn't happen, then, you know, whatever the contract might end. And I think in that time, I mean, I wasn't at Appleau and I was working with you, but every time I talked to somebody there, they were like, dude, we're still crushing it. We're growing and it's still kind of scaling up. And so it looked like the deal was not going to happen. The company had like multiplied in value during that time.

And so now there's like all this leverage on the company side to be like, well, we don't actually need this sale, right? like we're a lot bigger than what that value was. And I think they turned it into an investment instead with like non-voting or some kind of distinction there. And we ended up getting some liquidity then, which was fantastic. It was like over a billion dollars, like felt great. I felt like that was the exit.

Felt like that changed, you know, kind of what I could do in my life in terms of where I spend my time. But then they just kept growing. The company kept building. And they continued down the path. They partnered with K. KR and, you know, brought on, I think Harold is on, you know, kind of the executive team now. He's a season vet in the industry.

And they've just continued just to kind of, you know, skyrocket. And I don't know. So to dumb it down, Apple Oven is basically like you guys helped invent advertisements that you see in the middle of iPhone games, correct? Yeah. So we started as an ad tech platform. That's when I was there. And, you know, then after that, they brought up, you know, know, kind of the gaming side. So they have a gaming studio, which generates a lot of revenue.

If you think of them as like almost like a first party game creator now, that's where I think the company is gone in the last of shares. They bought Machine Zone, right? So they acquired a bunch of studios. They have their own studio. So they're almost more a gaming company than a mobile ad network now. So that's kind of crazy. But the funny part is, I remember you telling me like, oh, you know, we kind of did this sale. Then a piece of paper is going to go sit on someone's desk. Trump comes into office. And now, you know, I think it was a Chinese company. A Chinese company is buying this, anything that's over a billion dollars. I believe there's some rule that it has to get like, you know, a certain type of approval

for the transaction to go through. And then it just sat there for like, I don't know how many months, six months, nine months, something like that. And then when they came out of that, he's like, yeah, by the way, like, we kind of get the best of both worlds. They may, you know, their buyout turned into a minority investment. So we still got the money, but we get this free roll of great, how big can we build this? And then fast forward a few years and it goes public at like.

But we just kind of skipped. 20 times the value, you know? We just kind of skipped over something pretty amazing, which is he kind of was casual about it. You guys both were. Basically, you built this ad network that was doing wonderfully, a huge company. And like, I'm going to say it in the same way.

But basically, you saw which games are doing cool. And you go, we're just going to make games kind of like that and make them popular because we already know what's popular before. Even the people making the games know what's popular. And now you make all your revenue from making games. I mean, that's pretty astounding, right? Yeah. I mean, um,

I saw all of this from the outside, but like there are some key players in the company that I think were really instrumental in this. There was this guy, Rafi. He like, when I, you know, when we kind of created Applevin, when we were working on the product before Applevin, this guy was just like somebody Adam knew. He knew his brother. He had worked with them before. It was like this 19-year-old guy. He's not going to go to college.

He's, you know, all he wants to do is like, do something big and play video game. So like he'd spend all day, all night playing Street Fighter. But then he would talk to every single kind of Japanese mobile gaming company. company all night. And he would just grind. And it was an awesome environment. I mean, I'm kind of like the person where like, if I get really excited about something, that's all I want to do. That's what I was doing at the time. So I'm at the office. Rafi's at the office. You know, we spend all night. I'm hearing his conversations. I get pumped up about it. And then kind of during the day, we're building all these things. And you just saw people everywhere

in the company that wanted to do something big and went and got it. So Rafi, I think at some point in this ad network was like, I want to build games. They had built this thing called Lion Studios, within Apple oven. I don't think it was very big at the start. It was kind of like some small games, but, you know, Raffia, I think he probably gets a lot of the credit to like kind of spearheading that and like just wanting to do it. And, you know, when I looked at the S1 and kind of like dug into it, it's like, I think it's like half the business now. You know, there's obviously details on how you determine where the business is, but I think it's like half the company, which is incredible, right? Like started with this ad network and then,

you know, in two to three years kind of towards the end of this going public era, you'd have I've been to build up the second part of the business is also math. And you, and the guy who started up, Lovin, I mean, it was a few of you guys, but like the main guy, his name is Adam, right? Yeah, Adam. And basically he had like a, I don't know if it was mild or very successful outcome at another thing. And didn't you say that he put in like $4 million of his own money, which I don't know if that was a lot or a little to him, but a pretty substantial amount of his own money.

And you guys kind of like dicked around for like two years, like, twink? Like, you would say that, like, well, let's try this and it didn't work. And you're like, let's just go play video games and think about it. Or like, wasn't there like something like that? We're like, oh, we'll figure it out. Yeah, I mean, Adam, John and Andrew were like the three co-founders that like, they had worked together before. They had some done a couple of other companies that did well.

I mean, John is like, nobody knows John, but John is like, he worked on the first ad server on the internet. I believe that got picked up by double click and, you know, kind of that went on to Google. And then he worked at like VMware. He had done all these different roles. he's like technical but then very marketing focus, very product focused. And, you know, so it's like he was just an interesting person to have in the mix.

And then Adam is like, he had already kind of, you know, he started, I think, in equities trading in the Chicago Stock Exchange and then gotten into, you know, ads and marketing. And then they had built a company, I believe it was called. And I can't remember. They said Gamefly or, you know, something like that. And it was like probably a really good outcome, but then not. where, you know, it wasn't like a massive outcome where he's like, oh, I can retire forever and I can, you know, like this is all I want to do and I kind of made it.

And in the first couple conversations with him, I remember walking down University Avenue with them. And he was just like, you know, I want to make something so big that I can walk down this street and people would know me. And it's like, University Avenue in Palo Alto, for people to know you, you must have done something like really big, right? It's like every who's who and tech walks down there. And I was like, okay, yeah,

I want to kind of like take a really big shot. But them three put in the initial, funding. I think it was like around four or five million bucks, if I remember correctly, but it was a lot in the sense that it gave us many years of runway to work on whatever. We started with one project called Style Page. We did that for like nine months. That was kind of like Pinterest. We really quickly realized we're like, you know, five dudes in like Paulo Alto with no fashion sense trying to build a fashion website. This is not going to work very well. Yeah, like, you know, just Wranglerjeans.com. It's that easy. That's your website where you go to tap.

You don't get a Pinterest board to find Lee jeans. Yeah, exactly. And then we messed around with a lot of different ideas. And some of them weren't very good. And I think, Sean, we dealt with this a lot, right? Like, you get excited about something because you have to come up with an idea. You make it, you're not really that confident with it. Before you even launch, you're like, this is trash.

I don't even want this anymore to get it away from me. And so there was definitely some of that. Yeah, but you, I think one of the things worth mentioning is that you, which I think it's worth mentioning because, I remember every time I built a company, I'm always like, well, this is just how I'm doing it. It's probably real wrong, but like, I don't know, the smart people probably do it this other way. And I remember you, I remember feeling very comforted when you told me like, yeah, at Apple level, when we went through nine ideas, you know, is this, is it that, is it this, is that?

And like, you know, some false hopes of like, oh, it kind of works. Ah, no, it's not going to work out. And then in between, you were like, yeah, there were some days we just came into the office. We didn't have the idea to work on. And so we just played FIFA for a bunch of hours and we would go eat. talk, come back, play some more FIFA, then we would go home. And like, there were days, like, weeks like that. And I remember thinking,

all right, that's probably not the, like, the method you should choose, but like, it reminded me that, like, success is not so glamorous, like, you know, they're showing the movies where it's like, oh, I have the idea, I'm a visionary. I got it right away from day one. And then we work hard and we just, A, B, C, D, E, it's done, you know?

And so, I don't know, is that a fair representation of what you, what you experienced? Yes, definitely non-linear. I mean, you can work really, really hard for a long time and feel like you've made zero progress. And you could be doing all the right stuff. You could be making the right calls. And the other challenges you don't know. Like, you don't get feedback right away on the things you're doing are good.

I mean, you get customer feedback, but you don't get this kind of meta feedback that like the general type of things I'm working on are going to kind of work and hit. And, I mean, Style Page was kind of one idea that we really dug ourselves into, that everything between StylePage and then App Lovin the Ad Network was just like, you know, it's just like kind of really small projects that you're not super confident about. You're trying to find some edge.

You're trying to learn something. And, you know, mobile was just getting big. Android was getting big. There's some opportunities there, but you just don't know. You know, it's like how VR is today. You're like, I believe this is going to be a lot bigger in the future. What is exactly what people are going to do? It's really hard to predict.

And when you tell somebody, they usually go, nobody's going to do that. Like, well, if nobody can predict these behaviors, how do we build them? You have to have this kind of like blind conviction towards something and also like get that right. So it's like, yeah, you definitely need some luck. You got to pick the right thing. This guy, Adam, how do you say Adam's last name? Faroogee. So Faroogee, Adam Farooke, he's the CEO now.

And from what I've read about him, I don't know him. He seems like a wonderful CEO. Like the glass door reviews are great. He wins all these awards. He seems like a lovely guy. I've seen interviews with him. But what you're describing is a bunch of really, like, relaxed, calm people just, like, I'm kind of dismissing it, but not really.

Like, you guys are just kind of messing around and, like, trying to hope to, which is, of course, that's not the reality. But how did this guy go from being this, like, kind of relaxed, calm dude, just trying to hang out and find a hit to leading a $20 billion publicly traded company? I mean, when I look at him, he looks pretty polished. He looks like a good, good. guy. That's like a pretty amazing transformation. Yeah. And so I think Relax is probably the wrong the wrong word. I mean, we were intense. When we played FIFA, it was like, I'm going to beat you

eight times in a row. It wasn't a casual game of FIFA, FIFA. So everything was competitive. And we would play mobile games competitively. That was a lot of our interest. App Lovin, when we started, it was actually an app where you could see what games and apps other people were playing in your social network. It was like, kind of like a feed of app. That was the first iteration of App Lovin. And it was because we just wanted to see what people were playing because we wanted to kind of get those games and be competitive within it.

So he's always been competitive. I think you really see that in him. But you also used to say like, like, Furcon's work schedule is like, roll into the office at 11, lunch with the crew, catch up on what people are up to, just starts getting humming around,

you know, does a couple meetings, starts getting humming around 3,4. And then basically like, by like 8 p.m. to 3 a.m. is when Furcon does his work. And then he repeats it the next day. And so I remember in our company, there was a bunch of people who were just regular human beings that would work in a nine to five. And then they would go turn off their brain and go home. And like for some of them, it was really hard to have a boss and kind of like a leader who's on a completely alternate schedule. Some people were totally fine with it. They made it work. And then we recruited a bunch of like Rafi type dudes who were like, oh, cool, we stay up until 3 a.m.

Here. Like, great. That's my optimal schedule too. Like I'm down with that. And so. So at App Levin, you had told me that Adam was the opposite. He was coming at nine, leave at four or five, whatever. He's got like five kids, I think. And like every minute was efficient, whereas I got to say, like, the way you work, it's not that every minute is like boom, boom, boom, I'm doing this, this, this, this. Like, even at our company, we would take video game breaks every day at 4 p.m. We'd go play Super Smash Bros for an hour, right?

Like, you had very opposite styles, but you guys made it work. Yeah, I think Adam is like make every minute count. And you see that in how we like operates. why he's the CEO of a $20 billion company is because everything happens very fast, very efficiently. Like when a decision is made, the whole company knows about it. When the movement's happening, it's immediate. It's like make decisions fast, be strong with your kind of movements, you know,

outside of it, follow through with it quickly. Like those are qualities I think are really, really critical in a CEO. I mean, for me, it's like I want to make obviously every day count. Like I work a lot when I'm excited about something and the Apple 11 times was that. when something's growing, I take it seriously. But, you know, I know that creative work is like, it happens in kind of these moments of flow. If you get two or three good flow states a week,

I feel like you produce a lot. And I think most developers or creative people or builders, don't feel this. Like, not every hour is super efficient. But there's these some times where maybe it's because you did all this stuff to build up to it or you got the right conditions. But if you hit three or four of those a week, man, you're really, you know, humming.

You're producing a lot and a lot of impact. happening. And so I always focus on impact. And I think it was a good pairing because I would just work super hard to go and tackle the next technology barrier with my team. And then the next morning, Adam would just drive a bunch of traffic. By the time I rolled in at noon, it was like, we knew the test worked or not. And that was like awesome just to feel. The first time I've ever felt somebody like take control of growth and like literally say, actually, we're going to get this answer today. And obviously if you have a good bank account and you can kind of fund it, you can spend money to make your answers happen faster. We got a lot of cycles in those times when we were building these crap apps.

We didn't waste like a year building some garbage app because very quickly we knew it wasn't going to work and why. And we tried all the variance of it. And we got we had like confidence that we were done with that idea. Like, oh, we tried it. It's not going to work. We're not going to lingering about this, you know. So let's switch to ideas. So me and you do a call every week.

is one hour and it's called the cool shit hour. Every time I do it, I'm like, damn, I wish I'd recorded that for myself, but also people would love this. And so I want to do that basically now. You guys do this every week? Yeah, we've sometimes missed some weeks, but I had a kid and stuff like that. But we've been doing it pretty regularly for a couple. Ever since he left Twitch, I was like, well, I still want to hang out and keep in touch.

It's like the best part of when we used to work together was just shooting the shit about stuff that's cool. And because, in his own words, he told me this once, was like, I'm kind of in the first 10,000 people to try any new technology and like really dive deep and understand it, because he does that, he just sees a bunch of cool shit before the mainstream does. And so my hack is, well, I'm never going to be as smart as this guy. We're never going to understand technology. I'm not going to learn how to code, but I can be friends with him.

And he could like explain it to me like I'm a kindergarter, like, oh, I'm really into this right now. Check this out. Watch this demo. Here, try this out. Here, open up this website. Watch this. And so we do that.

And the thing with most of my relationships, including this podcast, I'm talking at least 50 plus percent of the time because I'm a talker. When I do the cool shit hour with forgot, I'm like, I just sit back into my desk and I like take notes as like, oh, this is cool. And I only stop to ask clarifying questions. I'm like, wait, how does that work? So I want to jump into some of those things. So we'll keep it open ended.

I have a few that I know you're interested in. I can guide us there. But let's start with open ended, which is what are some things that are just cool or interesting to you? It doesn't have to be like something you're working on necessarily. But where's Furcon's attention right now? What stuff has caught your eye? Yeah, I would say there's probably three major things. One is in the hardware space, there's just this trend that I feel like I can't get out of my mind,

which is commodity hardware, whether it's like a Raspberry Pi, kind of a simple device like that or off-the-shelf gears and things like that, plus software like machine learning equals very advanced piece of hardware. Do you know what a Raspberry Pi is? Yeah. Well, I don't know what the Alphabet. application is, but it's basically like a $50. I don't remember how much it costs now.

Yeah, it's like a $30 computer. It's like a little board. And it's important because now a developer, previously they would have had to design their own little small computer board to go build a small, like, you know, if you wanted to build a Roomba, you'd have to go design a little computer to put in the Roomba, then design the Roomba. Now you can kind of go pick up this like computer that's just a little board and you can put it into anything.

Like, you know, it took half your company away of what you needed to do. to make this happen. Who makes raspberry? It's a company called Adafruit, I believe. But they're like an independent company. They're like probably one of the biggest, obvious maker space companies around because they've, you know, I think they've sold like,

I want to say like 100 million of these devices now. So they're just crushing it. They're just, it does well. So what's an example of something that you or somebody has built with a raspberry pie just so people have a tangible example? So like there's another device of this from Nvidia. I'm using the NVIDIA.

Nvidia Jetson. It's like a little version of a GPU, but I basically have a little GPU plugged into my TV. It has a webcam on it. And, you know, we've messed around with some like pose estimation. So like, you know, you can open my TV and you could basically stand there and a little ball will come. And if you hit that ball, like it'll go blue or. God, you made like a connect, like an Xbox connect. You just made like a bootleg version of it. And then we kind of did some hand gestures where if you, you know, we basically, I think that this, this and then this, that's kind of like the three gestures, and we can kind of read that on the other side. And he basically just put up like, you put up like a one or a two or a three basically, right?

Yeah, and this was for me like, you know, I like to go and mess around with it. My idea, if I wanted to do with this as an idea, I would do like the best fitness product would be you buy this little device, it plugs into your TV because everybody has a TV on their wall. Now your TV is this awesome fitness game and you could just do like everything. I think I wanted to call it like FitCam or something like that. But instead of like that company that sold to Lulu Lemon for like 500, 600 million dollars. Yeah, exactly.

It's a huge $2,000. Right. She's a hardware for thousands of dollars that you have to mount onto your wall. Well, you already have a screen on your wall called your TV. What if you could just turn it into something smart? That's one of the, like for $30 instead of $3,000. Dude, I have a, I have like a mirror competitor called Tempo. I pay 50 bucks a month for the programming and then two grand for the machine.

Oh, yeah. And it's basically a flat screen TV with a, they don't call it a camera. because I don't want to freak people out because, like, you work out shirtless and my underwear, basically. So they don't call it a camera, but they call it a sensor. And it could, like, tell you, are your poses in good form or not good form? And it counts your pose. It counts your reps so you can compete. Pretty cool.

Yeah. And so that's one. I'm going to tell you about this other company. I invested in them, but I just really, really excited about it. So I'm going to tell you guys, this company called Neurosity, they make a brain computer interface. So this sounds like future, but it's now. It's basically a device and I actually wish I had it next to me, but you just put it on your head. You can go get it if you want.

I want to see it. If it's within the room. It's not within the room. It's in the other room. Go for it. Go for it. Go for it. It'll be good for YouTube.

Sean, you know how on talk shows, like morning shows, they have a guest come in and they're like, here's the latest products that you can buy for your kids this holiday season. And they're at a table and they go, this product is this, this, this, this. and they set it down, they go to the next one. That's what Percon is right now, basically. It's that segment where someone is just, like, has placed like eight cool things on the table, and they're just going from thing to thing to thing,

just dropping bombs. And I'm like, oh, great, cool, got it next. You know what I mean? That's what's going on right now. This is FVC. This is Furcon's QVC competitor where he just picks up objects and is like, this is a fantastic holiday gift for family.

Yeah, and so this is for, you know, kind of like developers and whatnot still, but this is what the device looks like. and I'll kind of give you guys a closer look, but you can see these little probe-looking things. So this would basically kind of rest on your head like that. And what this does is it listens to EEG waves happening in your brain. And I think there's many different wavelengths,

but these guys have identified some set of them. And so why does this kind of relate to the story we're talking about? There's a little computer that's inside here that wouldn't have been able to happen 10 years ago. And so because you could put a little computer here that has Wi-Fi on it that can take these signals in and transmit it to the internet, this device is viable now. So you wear that and it helps measure your like what focus or you're kind of, are you in flow state? It's kind of like a Fitbit in some way for your brain or what? So the device itself first takes in raw signals. So it can detect a lot of stuff.

They've added some machine learning, right? So the second part, they added software and they pre-programmed all these different. action. So there's some stuff like, are you focused right now? Are you calm right now? Kind of things like that. Are you going to enter a sleeping state? They can detect all of these conditions. But there's other things that I'm really excited about where it can detect if you think about pinching your left hand, like if you think about doing this action, but don't do it, it can pick up that signal. Or if you think about moving your hand, your right arm, it could pick up that signal specifically. And so, you know, you could think of this as both a receive state and detect things,

but also as an interface to kind of, you know, without having to move a muscle, just thinking about a muscle. Right. Change the channel. Change the channel without going and picking up the remote. So the guy who is like 17, right? For 18? I don't know his age. I think he's a little bit older than that. But yeah, you know, there's this guy, Alex, I believe he has a neuroscience background and the CEO is this guy, AJ. And you know, what's funny is I bought this device as a person, right? Like, I'm just like, I bought this device. I think I was probably in the first 100 or 200 to buy it. And then I was like, I sent him a message. I'm like, I love this. I'm like an investor. Like, can I talk to you guys? And I don't think they responded to me. And then, um, then I joined. They had, they sent a message like,

hey, do you want to schedule like a customer call? Like they were doing customer discovery. And I'm like, sweet. So I like joined this customer discovery call, do the whole thing. But then at the end, I'm like, dude, I really love this. Like, this is me. There's a bunch of stuff about me. Not some rando, but like, I'm like really excited about this. Like, I want to invest. And then he was like still kind of like, okay, like kind of like aggressive and the customer call to kind of get this. But then we followed up after I talked to him and ended up investing a little bit of money into them. But I love these devices. I love these things where it's like small piece of commodity hardware plus advanced machine learning equals potentially massive new output, right?

Like, you know, and I can go into some random ideas on how I would use this, but I'll stop there. So we got to make sure we'd let everyone know. It's called Neurosity. So their website is Neurosity. Their website is so awesome. When I'm on this, it, okay, so it's basically what this kind of looks like, it basically looks like a set of headphones, but you don't put it on your ear. You put it up on your head a little bit. It costs, I think, $900. And they claim that they manage your focus with music and that you minimize distractions and shifts your focus and hacks your flow. This is a brilliant website.

I almost would buy this just because, like, it looks so mysterious, is the right way. I mean, it's definitely something new and early. And, you know, when people say, like, hey, we're going to manage your flow state, you always, you know, what do we all do? We kind of call bullshit on it, right? And you're like, wait, like, how are you going to do that? How are you going to hack my body, right? And so you get a lot of snake oil in the world there.

But this device, it can for sure detect when I'm focused. It can detect when I'm calm in different points. And I've programmed it to basically, like, when I have it connected to my computer, I can move my desktop around or, you know, I basically wanted to like, see, can I open Brave from, right? Like, can I open an application by thinking about something? And I can do that. That's miraculous to me. Like, that's the things you, like, read about in a book somewhere, and then it was in the Jetsons, maybe, but it doesn't, it didn't really exist.

Can you really do that? So you can think yourself, like, move the cursor and it works? Do you think move it? Do you think open Chrome? What do you actually think of to get it to happen? Yeah, so basically, uh, I programmed it to these kind of thinking of motor function. So they have these pre-programmed like 40 or 80 motor functions like push, pull, move your right arm, move your left arm, move your index finger. Like, kind of, and you don't move it. You just think of it. You just think of it. about that. And then you do a little training step. So it just tells you think about moving your index finger and then stop thinking about it. And so it does like a little machine learning loop, like 20 iterations or whatever. And then, you know, again, this is a developer device still, but I can get it to run some arbitrary code when I think about my index.

Exactly. Gotcha. Gotcha. Dude, I'm so excited to give this to my dog or to like an eight. Dog, go to sleep. Boom. Well, we used to make fun of Craig Clements came on here. And he's like, best idea. He had three ideas at the end and his best idea was dog VR and we were like, that's the stupidest idea. But this is actually better because this would be like a way to communicate with a dog if you could get the dog to train it. But I don't know, that seems a little difficult. All right, for God. So that was the first one, which is cheap commodity hardware that now lets a software programmer like make hardware without having to have a lab and a physical material engineering, making motherboards and doing all that stuff. All right. That's one trend.

What are some others? So the second trend, I mean, we're all into this, but obviously the defy crypto world, there's just a lot of fun activity happening there. And I've just, you know, it's one of those things where you just see it happening and you want to be a part of it and you read about it and you're building stuff. But, you know, I was working with you and then I was working at Twitch. I hadn't really built anything in this space. And so, you know, just recently, I would say the last six months, I've just been writing,

you know, solidity code, trying to think about what kind of applications to build, what's interesting. and my entire view of everything is there is these massive hype cycles. Then these hype cycles go away, which is obviously what happens, right, when kind of this massive hype happens. Then there's a stopping point there where the real building begins and the real value would be created. And all of these kind of industries flow like that, VR, crypto, these kind of hard-bursed spaces, machine learning back in the day.

And so that's where we are in the decentralized and crypto world right now. And all I want to do is build very valuable, legitimate products that serve a real purpose and kind of go from there. And so let's talk about crypto real quick. So you can apologize now for not including me in the ether crowd sale, which I know you were on top of at the time. Did you buy in the actual crowd sale or right after? I bought a little bit after the crowd sale, but it was like single digit dollars. It was very cheap. I'm pretty sure I said it out loud at lunch. You did. I remember you saying that. And I was like, I remember thinking, Ethereum, dumb name.

Like, that's like a weird name. Normal people aren't going to want to own Ethereum. Like, that seems weird. Literally, that was my, my dumb-ass thinking. And then, like, every, you know, year since then I sort of think about, why don't I just listen to Mortifer account? Why don't I just do the things he says to stop thinking for myself a little bit? So that's kind of where I'm at.

So you initially bought some crypto. I remember sitting next to you while you were buying, you know, random ass, you know, good stuff. And then the shit coins also just fucking around. seeing what's what. And then you sort of showed me what's going on in defy. So if people who don't know, here's how I'll explain defy and then you tell me what you would say. So today there's like the normal financial system. There's a stock market. There's banks you can go drive and park and walk into. When you walk into that bank, you can say, hey, here's my money, store it safely for me,

like put it in a savings account, give me some interest maybe. Or I'd like to take a loan out. And then they say, great, let's just decide if you are credit worthy, if you can get a loan and how much you can get. So that's the traditional financial system, like in a nutshell, the simplified version. There's a parallel universe where all those same things have been built through code now instead of by law. So we used to write down contracts and lawyers would write the contracts and now programmers write the contracts. And so you could do all those same things. So you've showed me tools and got me set up where you take your crypto money and you can put it in a savings account. And you can earn 5% 10% a year of yield.

So you earn much better interest rates. You can lend it to other people or you can take loans and get loans for things. So explain kind of like maybe what part is most interesting to you or give an example of something you've done with crypto where you're actually not just like speculating in the in the defy space, but you're actually using this alternate financial system. And what's an example of what you were just saying? What's like your favorite platform for that? So Furkan showed me a couple that I like. So one is compound, right? So it's compound.

That's a website you go to. And what it says is, hey, great, you have ether. You don't want to sell your ether. So I did a very simple loan. I went to compound finance. I staked or basically like I put up ether that I own. I said, great, here's, let's say, 100 ether. And then it says, great, you can just lend that out to other people who want to borrow

ether and you can earn this percent annually. And, you know, if I go to Wells Fargo, I'm going to go get 0.001 percent, you know, a year on my savings account. Whereas with this, it was like, you can get 7 percent a year or 5 percent a year. It's like, you know, actually like a decent interest rate. Or I could say, great, I put my hundred ether up and I'd like to borrow some of this other coin. So what I did just as a test of the system, I said, can I get a loan off my cryptocurrency? So I put up ether to borrow USDC, which is a stable coin made by Coinbase, which basically is supposed to be one. USDC is supposed to always be $1. So I got USDC.

And then I went to Coinbase and I sold my USDC and I got dollars. And I said, wow, I just put up, I just like basically showed that I have this ether and I locked up ether into this account for temporarily as long as I want. And I got a U.S. dollar loan that I could go use to go buy, you know, a pizza right now if I want to. And I was like, well, that's pretty sweet. I never had to talk to a banker, fell out an application, do a credit check. I didn't have to do anything. And I was able to get a loan. And now what a lot of people do is they do that. They put ether up. They get a loan of some stable coin. They use a stable going to buy more ether or to go buy some other coin and kind of gamble, like kind of like leveraged gambling. So there's other things you can do. But I just

did a really simple one with where Furkan was shown. Yeah. And I think lending is a big part of it. I mean, lending is dangerous in many ways. Like, you know, I look at. at lending as like, this is bad. That's my first reaction to any lending thing because people do that, right? They basically take it and they leverage. If you take it and you have purpose behind it and you're a long-term holder of something, that makes a lot of sense, right? Like, you can kind of do that.

And the reason I find Defi exciting is you could take all the rules that you've seen get destroyed in like, you know, the 2008 crash or the dot-com crash, and you could put a contract where that can't happen. And so, for example, there's this, a protocol called liquidity protocol, it's a new protocol, they do zero percent interest loans on your ETH. So you can put up ETH, you take a zero percent loan, and what they've done is they've created this system where they have a stability pool that will liquidate people if they go below their collateralization ratio. And so what happens to the banks-

Explain that in simple terms. So how do I get, how do I, because they're not doing a credit check, because they're not asking for my W-2 income, how do they make sure that this loan eventually gets paid back. How do they do that? So you put in, let's say, 100 Ethereum, right? So you put in some amount that has a dollar value today. And they let you take out their token called LUSD. It's like a USD stable coin. So now you have the stable coin.

You can trade it for other stable coins or other coins or take it to Coinbase, you know, using whatever mechanism and kind of get it to dollars. What you've done is you put up your Ethereum and you have to basically maintain some what they call collateralization ratio. Like you have to be over the lending amount by at least 10%, otherwise you're going to get liquid. And the action of liquidating means somebody will go and take your Ethereum and buy it for a discount because they have to do this liquidation task.

And that's the risk. You're putting this collateral up like you would in another case. So it's like if I take a mortgage out, I can't make my mortgage payments because I lost my job. Well, the bank has my house as collateral. They can foreclose on my house. It's the same concept. but instead of a physical house, it's whatever collateral you put up initially to get the loan,

your stake. Right. And so the danger is I put up Ethereum. The price of Ethereum is very volatile. It goes down a lot. I was aggressive with my ratio and I kind of went below this number and I got liquidated. I still have my loan amount, right? So there's obviously risks with these platforms like there would be a risk of buying a, you know,

investment property and not being able to make rent on it or not be able to make mortgage. What I like about it is the underneath where, um, In 2008, the bankers just went to the government and whoever else. And it was like, we need new rules right now. We're dying. And so you kind of invent new rules. This rule is built into the protocol. If you're at below this ratio, some liquidator can come in and be the liquidator.

You don't get a choice of, hey, is this going to happen or not? It's encoded. And so when you build, you know, financial products with, you know, directly encoded values, it makes it so that it's going to happen, whether it's a good situation for, you or not, whether they like, you know, how you presented yourself or not, like, you know, and having gone through, you know, bad times as a founder and gone through bad credit, like, I don't have good credit today still. It's like, I have a lot of money in the bank. And sometimes I can't go get a credit card because, like, literally my credit still sucks from like,

whatever seven years ago or five years ago or however long ago, those problems were. And if one little things happen, like I had a small credit card that I forgot about, is literally a $300 thing. I missed some yearly, you know, payment fee because, you know, every year you got that fee, man, it showed up on my credit. Oh, that's a huge ding. Doesn't matter who you really are, what you can do. That financial system sucks.

If you have the ability to kind of do some of these actions, I believe you should be able to do them. And that's the most interesting thing about DFI is access and permissionless. So that's the general, like, that's a good, I think, general overview, because most people don't really understand what, what is even the point of this? How does this work? Let's go specific. Are you doing anything cool with defy?

Do you have any good trades going? Are you making money doing this? Are you actually doing anything in the DeFi space right now? I think Uniswap is probably one of my favorite companies in this space. And I think we've talked about this a little bit. But what Uniswap did, and I'll give you kind of the simple version of it, is usually when you wanted to trade two assets, you had to create a marketplace. So let's say I have one Sean coin and I want to sell it.

I need Sam to show up and buy that Sean coin. And if there aren't two sides and they don't agree on the price, this trade won't happen. And what Uniswap did, and I think there were some others before it, but Uniswap has become the biggest player in this space, is they created a one-sided trading market where a buyer or seller can show up. And they're trading against what's called a liquidity pool. Investors come in and put in both sides of the trade marketplace. So like one Ethereum and $3,000 would create, like, let's see, a liquidity pool. then, Sean, you can just show up and say, I want to sell. And you're going to sell against this pool.

You don't need another side. The pool is always the other side. And they've created a simple algorithm. They call it like an AMM and automated market maker where they want to keep the price close. And depending on how much liquidity there is and how much you're willing to sell, it's going to slip away from that amount. And that's where the price movements will happen. And you were in those pools.

You were saying, oh, I'm making good money by being the liquidity pool. Give us a set. What was the yield you could get? Let's say you put a thousand dollars in. What were you making being the liquidity provider? So obviously in the earlier days of Uniswap, the pool yields were very high. Like you could see 100% plus on like fairly good assets. And it's really important to think about you have two sides of this market. Right. So if you have if you're into Ethereum and US dollar pool, when Ethereum is going up, you're like losing some of it, right? Because you're giving it away. to kind of like receive basically dollars. And, you know, so if you want to hold a lot of Ethereum long run, it doesn't really make sense to be in some of these pools that are unaligned. So I always try to find things that are connected together. So like two stable coin pools, a USDC and dive pool,

that does, you know, anywhere from like 8 to 15%, and that's been like that on the low end of the spectrum for the last year plus. I mean, I'm holding effectively what, you know, we'll call it dollars on both sides of the puzzle. and people need to trade between these assets, and I'm willing to be the trade partner for them, along with a lot of other people, and you basically get a little bit of a fee, and that's where the liquidity pool makes money.

So holding dollar on this side or a dollar on this side, feels good. If there is something very well aligned with Ethereum, so do you believe Ethereum and Bitcoin will kind of together flow upwards, that could be a very good pool for you to kind of take what they call wrapped Bitcoin and Ethereum and be in that pool? And Uniswop made all this happen from the consumer side to make the one side of trade, but also as an investor to come into a liquidity pool and say, hey, I'm willing to kind of put up both of these assets.

And then I want to make some fees as people do this. Right. Okay. So that's good. I think it's a little, probably a little too complicated for the general audience at this point. I'm wearing a Harvard shirt. That's about it. Oh, sorry. My bad. He's talking to Harvard scholars. It's just a T-shirt. I got one more Anyone can buy it.

I got one more in a different space that I think Sam will love. Sean, I told you about this book I read about vertical farming and, you know, basically like I read this book. Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, you guys just were talking about crypto stuff and then he just said, I've got something I think

Sam will like farming. Is that big of a redneck to you? I liked it to you. This was one of our cool shit hours was he's like, I came in thinking he's going to tell me about you know, WBTC and I'm like, oh, fuck, I got to go look up all these acronyms. He's like, no, vertical farming. I was like, oh, brilliant.

Tell me about it, right? Because Furcon's got a wide range. Some days, I remember early on when we're working together, he was like, when Uber had just kind of was getting big, he's like, I'm thinking, he's like, I got a bunch of friends who are kind of like, you know, not doing a whole lot nowadays. I'm thinking about just renting, like, buying five cars and just having them, like, run a fleet. Like, I think I could just make X dollars doing zero work by running my own little taxi fleet

on Uber. Or he was like, you know, there's these, I forget what it was, float spas or cryotank company. What was that one that you were really into? Yeah. You know, the cryotanks or something that, you know, if you have bad joints like me, it's like a, you know, night and day difference on how your body feels. And so, you know, like, I still want to put one in. And I think in the lab that I'm spinning up over here, and we'll get to that probably at some point. But, wait, what's the, what's this, what's said lab? I'm building a hardware and robotics lab. here in San Francisco as a part of F.D. Inc. And, you know, the idea is software you can do in a coffee shop and a living room,

but you can't really build any one of these even off-the-shelf hardware products in your living room. And so what I want to do is take a lot of founders who are interested, or future founders, we're interested in building these ideas. I'm going to have a machine shop and an electronic shop and a robotic shop in this facility. It's going to be in this iconic location. And my goal is just to get like a bunch of talented, hungry people in this roof and just have It's a great energy and built together. And so you see these companies form out of universities because they have two things.

They have a shop there that you can access, mostly for free. And then they have people in the shop that turns into your community. Like, as a kid, I can just show up and stand next to you while you're doing something. And you go, you don't like give me a weird look. You go, oh, you want to, you know how to use this? No. Okay, let me show you. Like that little bit might be the difference between you willing to try and kind of get into a field or not.

Where are you something to support that? What was that? Where? Where in the city? You said it's iconic location. Can you say where? We're looking at a place at Fort Mason in San Francisco. So it's not complete yet.

But that's kind of like, for me, like the iconic locations or I can see the Golden Gate Bridge. I can be on the water. We've explored stuff on the piers in general in Chrissy Field, Fort Mason. Like these locations, when I go there, I get excited. You know, like going to Monkey Inferno was a fantastic office. But outside, it wasn't that great. Like Soma, mission, these areas, I don't get excited when I go there. I usually don't go there too much.

How much are you willing to invest to sink into this thing to make it interesting? It's going to be a lot. It'll probably cost about half a million bucks a year just to even have the base building in place. And my guess is it'll be double that just from the people that I want to bring in and kind of investments I want to do and what I want to support. I actually ran a plastic fabrication shop and a small machine shop a long time ago. And so I've done a lot of this. I've welded.

and, you know, I've worked on cars. So, like, I actually have a lot of this interest. And I'm more excited to have my own CNC and my own machines and things to work with as well. Dude, you're so cool. Yeah. So, Sam, the reason I said you're going to like this idea in companies is because I don't listen to very many podcasts, but I do listen to this podcast. This is probably the only one I listen to. This is not.

Clint is maybe. We're taking that testimonial to the mood. And I'm not even just pampering you guys. Sean, I mean, you know me. I'm not going to tell you like it is. But I really do listen to you guys. Well, I know because I'm pretty sure you didn't listen at the beginning when I was just interviewing folks. And then now that it's ideas and it's shooting the shit.

Sam's here. He's listening now. Yeah. And so you talked about like, hey, you know, you just sold the company. By the way, congratulations to you as well. And you were talking about how like you want to get your hands kind of into things. And you know, you want to like do some of that. So I was like, oh, okay, if I ever get back on the pot, I'm going to tell Sam about this idea.

And so by the way, I'm sitting here taking notes. Like, I'm writing all this down. And so I read this. book and this book was talking about vertical farming. I think, I don't know, I don't remember the name of the book, but basically, you know, the first couple of chapters, it really talks about what the major problem in the U.S. is as, you know, as you're producing a lot of food and the world, right? The world went from, I think, 3 billion people 100 years ago to like almost 8 billion now. Like, it's a pretty massive difference in like, kind of how many people are on the world. You're starting to see effects.

Like, we see the wildfires here in California. You hear about all these things. And so what's happening is as you start farming in soil, you basically destroy the soil. And after some period of time, you get no yield out of the soil. And so about 10 years ago, 15 years ago, vertical farming got very popular as a way to put food production closer to cities. Like New York City requires, you know, millions of acres outside of New York City to support it. Wouldn't it make sense for that to be in the city? But how do you do that? Well, you could put it in these buildings. You could put it under kind of UV lights and you could drive water through it through hydroponics. And it's got really popular, a lot of people invested in it.

If it's where a vertical farm is for someone like me who's zero zero nature knowledge, what would, how, to make paint a mental picture, what is a vertical farm? Bro, have you never grown weed in your apartment? No, I don't smoke weed. I never grew weed. I don't do drugs.

I don't do crimes. I don't, I don't die there, but I feel like every 16 year old has at least grown one pot plant in high school. Yeah, so you know, you think about plants in the ground because they need kind of nutrients from soil, but really they just need some of those nutrients. And you could just put them, as long as you deliver them to the roots, it's going to pull that in. And so people figure it out,

hey, you can grow stuff without soil. And that's a huge, that's just a big unlock because it doesn't have to go on the ground. So it's been to use water, right? Correct. You use water. And there's been more advances now where it's not just water, but it's like, you know, I think they call it aeroponics, but it's just misted, right? So it's kind of like more yield against the root. And, you know, you still have to power it with sunlight. So you could put it in. inside a warehouse, but you need sunlight. And so big UV lights was kind of the strategy. And so phase one of vertical farming was we're going to put them in high rises. We're going to take some floors and we're going to turn them into a farm floor and that should support the building.

And these are normally the pictures that you see what people are kind of dreaming about vertical farming. It's like a giant building where a bunch of them are farms and it looks cool. But in practice, it was like kind of a warehouse like a data center and that's where it ended up living. And I think that's fine. The reason these guys are, I got excited about, they're called Nebula farms. And what they do is they basically have direct-to-consumer lettuce, micro-greens, and tomatoes. That's what they sell you. And so, you know, they started kind of in a different phase, like, kind of like, hey,

we're building cool tech. Like, we've been in this Sean before where you're excited about computer vision and doing this thing. But actually, along the way they realized, well, we don't really want to license out our thing. We can't franchise this. We can't do like all these other ideas we had. And people actually just want this. And what if we could put up a farm near you?

And I think they have their first farm in Idaho. And they just have a monthly subscription to get lettuce and tomatoes and these things show up to your door. And I mean, today they do same day harvest and delivery because they've kind of taken the process down to this simple thing. They have this basic farm. And if you can see some of the pictures that they have on their website of what their farm looks like.

But it looks like a little data center. It's like a rack of lettuce. There's a little light that will kind of rotate and like give it sunlight. and on the top there's a mister that kind of like, you know, make sure what's this called? What's this called? Nebulum Farms. Nebula Farm. N-V-B-U-L-A-M Farms.

And, you know, like if you ever get a chance to go taste some vertical farmed lettuce, you will notice the taste difference. Like, it is not the same lettuce. You're like, wait, lettuce has taste. It is good, crispy. Like, it actually makes a huge difference in the quality of product. And I believe they can make this happen, you know, same-day harvest to delivery for a large part of America.

So they're on their website, it says less water. So you use 98% less water. And in places like California where there's like droughts, water shortages, that's a big deal. No pesticides because it's an indoor sort of controlled environment. And no soils, no bugs, right? That's why you don't need the pesticide. Right. It says less human handling.

I don't know about that. So always fresh. And basically the goal would be, hey, here's an eco-friendly thing. But also this, taste this produce. It tastes better. And you've actually had it. So what's the no bullshit? Like is it, if I didn't know, blind taste test, would I be able to tell the difference

between these two or what? Yeah. And we should do this. Like, you know, there's a couple of other brands that have gotten popular that you can pick up in stores. I think there's one called Plenty that shows up in stores. And I think there's a lot of people that have wanted to do this. But if the business isn't going to work, the tech is not going to hold it, right?

Like, that's the same thing as soft. Like, this problem exists everywhere. And so if you're building some emerging tech thing, you can't keep talking. you can't keep talking about how great the tech is. And so the direct-to-consumer angle, it resonated with me because it's like, okay, I've seen grocery delivery. I've seen some of these things where you could get like fruit in a box. Well, if you can produce the fruit yourself, like you just have a machine that can produce fruit,

that's the vertical farm. Well, why don't you become the biggest farm in America really quickly by kind of going city to city and kind of doing that? And you've seen Uber do that. Oh, this is sick. Right. You could literally invent, you know, kind of build the biggest farm in America now, right?

Sam, why did you decide it just now? The way that he was describing, I'm like, all right, they're mailing plants. That's not that. I mean, yeah, that's like, they're okay. It's like different lettuce. It's like a candle. It's like those candles that have a ring in the bottom when you melt the candles. It's like a sticky novelty type of thing.

It's cool once or twice. But the way that you're describing it now, I think, Perkan, I think what you're really good at is something I'm not as good at, which is like, you're really good at breaking your frame and like changing. I don't know if I'm even phrasing this correctly, but you're kind of changing the whole paradigm, which is like, no, no, no, we're going to build the largest farm in the world.

And now when you say that, I think, man, so you're just going to have to buy all this land and have this massive, huge feel. But you're kind of saying like, oh, but by the way, by farm, I mean, it's like these little small things in every convenience store in America. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, and that's kind of like the tradeoff here,

which is, you know, a farm that's like maybe, you know, in a 50,000 square foot building, that might be like, you know, thousands or tens of thousands of land acres that you're replacing. Because vertical farming does many things. It reduces the water, but it also compacts how much space you need to do the action. So instead of buying large masses of land produce this, you can buy warehouses or facilities closer to the city center and serve that area, right? And so if you can be near like a city like Austin or San Francisco, you can kind of serve that city kind of efficiently with kind of a smaller,

you know, kind of smaller landmatched. Yeah, that's so cool. And dude, like I think what you're really good at, like when I'm around you, I feel so inspired. And I want to bring something up in a second that's related to this. But basically, like you are the type of, I hate when we talk about San Francisco. It's this lovely place everyone needs to go. But the type of people like you, there was a large density of that in San Francisco.

go and I am not at all naturally like you, but I felt I improved and just changed my opinion on so many things after hanging out with people like you. I don't know what we call that. I think Sean is a little bit more like you than I am. But we also have a handful of friends that are like that. And they just like, you guys think about stuff in such a way where maybe it's like when I ask some, when I ask my challenge myself to come up with an idea or think about what's the possibility of X, Y, and Z. I put these constraints on where like, well, there's no way I could pull off this because that technology for this doesn't work or I'm not good enough to do this or, but it's always been done X. Whereas when you think of stuff, you're really good

at being open-minded and defaulting to like, well, actually, that is kind of interesting. Let's play that out. And you don't have these constraints of like being held back that a lot of normal people like me have, I think. Do you know what I mean, Sean? Yeah. I think it's simpler than that. I think for kind of everybody uses their own frame of reference, their own lens. and he looks at things through the lens of a technologist. So I think, and I remember sitting down next to you and being like, how did you get the way you are? And you were like, well, like, I remember when I was five.

My dad brought home like a printer and like we put it together. Right? Wasn't that the story? Like a computer or a printer when you were like five or six years old? Yes, since my earliest memories, it was an XT computer. It was kind of like, you know, not even DOS yet. It was just like a screen. And you put it together. We booted it up.

And I remember he had like a disc that had, you type like, auto-exec. I was just a kid. I knew how to type A-U-T-O-E-X-E-C. If I press enter, I get to this like simulation football game. And that's all I could do. Like, you pick a play and it runs it for you. You don't even, you don't even actually play the game. But like, I remember that as the earliest memories. And I mean, I got started really young. Like I worked at a dot-com when I was 15. And just like my, my hobbies ended up being very valuable. Like I wasn't a, you know, not a musician where, you know, I would have had and made it really big. It was like, I was into computers and programming and doing things like that.

And those things just happened to have become very valuable, especially in the Bay Area and that that kind of like landed itself to a lot of opportunity. Also, something that you're going to do with this. What are you calling your space again? We call it Founders Inc. That's like the company name. So I want to like tell a quick story about that. So back in 2000 and Sean, I can't see your face.

So I can't see if you're, I can't tell if you're on board with this story. But I hope you are. back in 2013. So basically, Sean, when did you start as the monkey inferno? Like the guy in charge? I think I joined at the end of 2012. So basically 2013 is kind of the actual beginning.

So around that time, I was working out of the, I was, I just sold something and I didn't make a lot of money, but like 100 grand, let's say. And I was looking to start something else. And I found this guy named Dave. And he had a thing called Founders Dojo, which was basically, he rented an office. I don't know. Dave had a business that probably did. half a million in sales and he probably profited $400,000. So he wasn't a rich, rich guy,

but he had this office that he could spend $3K on a month and he let me and like eight other people come and work out of his office. And we heard about it through friends of friends. Like, hey, there's a thing called Founder Dojo. They let him like people just work there. And it's a dingy office. It wasn't nice. It was maybe six, 500 square feet. And then down the street was the same thing. It was called Monkey Inferno. It was pretty much the exact same thing, but like way better. It was this guy named Michael Birch who was on the podcast. If you look up the hippie who made a billion dollars, Sean did that episode. And it was a guy who started and sold the company for hundreds of millions or close to a billion dollars. And his like project

was the same exact thing. It was nicer. You know, they had like, you guys probably had like hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of interior decorating and, uh, it was like really fancy. But it was the same thing. Basically of like nerds and like weirdos and misfits, we all would come to these spaces. And I would hang out at at monkeying for it all the time. And you guys sometimes came to our thing and we would we would dork out to the stuff that people would make fun of like Dave loved mere cat mirkat was uh basically a live streaming app which kind of like was the early technology and early behavior for even like a like a clubhouse or whatever um and he would do this thing called a mirathon he called it and he would mirror cat for 24 hours straight he would be in

the office mirror catting for 24 hours straight and he would meet these other dorks and they would come and fly into our office. And then it was just so weird. Like we did all these weird shit. One time we created this thing called, what do we call it? Coffee rush, we called it. And you click a button and you get coffee inside like 20 minutes wherever you are in San Francisco and all these just nerdy, dorky little projects. But it was like the best time of my life. And it was one of the most formative, it was some of the best experiences I ever had as it relates to business and just like becoming a man and like tinkering with all these new things and having an open mind. And I think what you're setting up for a con is like the next, obviously, this is like the next iteration of that.

And I'm so fortunate that I've had people like you and, and you guys had Birch, Michael Birch, and I had Dave Grosblatt. I'm so fortunate that people like you guys exist in this world because these little silly things that are fun and like that seems stupid on the outside. And the fact that there's these grown adults who are thankfully wealthy enough and willing to bet their money to do this stuff. It sounds outrageous and it sounds like a movie. And I'm so happy I was part of it.

And it made such a huge difference. It's like the fact of these exist, it's a movie. 100%. And those places you talk about, so I know David Grossblatt as well. And I used to go to another place growing up Hacker Dojo. It was a Mountain View. And, you know, even growing up in Silicon Valley, you didn't immediately have like a network. Like I don't know like a bunch of VCs just from growing up here.

That's actually not how it worked. My block didn't have VCs on it. It was just normal people. And, you know, you really didn't find people like yourself. And so the internet changed a lot, right? It allowed people to connect with each other and find each other. But the in-person interactions, they just operate differently. And it's a lot more ad hoc.

Like I remember you being at the Monkey Inferno and a lot of other people that we would have work out of there. It was cool because you could just walk by, break up a random conversation, talk about something. And maybe it resulted in nothing. And sometimes it would actually stick with you and it would be really important. And so at App Lovin, it felt the same way early on. When we were kind of doing these, like, you know, random ideas, it was like, we're just a bunch of misfits together here that are just going to go on this journey. And that energy is just hard to replace.

And it was really fun. And every time it's been there, it's been really instrumental for me and like learning a lot. Like conversations during the lunch table at Monkey Inferno shaped a lot about how people think, what are, you know, what are ways to conduct yourself? Like just things even outside of tech, right? Like you interact with a lot of different people and you can bring good energy to it. And I think it's really critical. And so I've been on this mission slightly before COVID to kind of like build.

this facility, but then kind of COVID happened. And, you know, obviously, like, it's good in terms of, like, new buildings, new opportunities, cheaper rent here in the city. Great. But I think this thing is kind of necessary for a lot of people who are in this builder phase, you know, like, they might not be a founder yet. They might not go raise a bunch of money. They just want to build some stuff and hack on it. And I'm willing to kind of take a bet to build that facility. And on this podcast, we talk a ton about, like, buying businesses. And we almost get to the point where it almost sounds like we're a bunch of, like, banker PE types where it's like oh this is an interesting opportunity but that coolest shit that I've ever done and the most fun I've ever done is just dorking out with like people that were

like me and just like oh this is kind of funny like this is silly like we could do that and it all starts like this is so stupid it's so fun and sometimes it like turns into really cool amazing stuff and and I think that that's fun to remember that that should that should that should be how a lot of stuff starts or maybe like maybe it's not should be but but it can be that way, which is, I think, better. Yeah, organic. Organic is awesome, right? It just means that we just kind of sat around,

we brainstormed some ideas, some of our experiences, we tried some things. You need to be able to try things. I think that's, like, really important. And if I could reduce, you know, for me growing up, I didn't have a lot of, like, people that I could lean on that's like, they had done this already or they were doing businesses.

It was just like, kind of fail as you go, take a bunch of scars. And, you know, finding, like, people like Adam and Sean, like, was critical for me in the sense that, like, I had people that I could talk to about business things that like maybe other people I couldn't interact with. And I just want to kind of, if I can take that for let's say like Sean said earlier, you know, myself 15 years ago, I could give myself some of that.

Like that's what I feel like I'm kind of building over here. Yeah. What's that cheesy phrase? That's great, but cheesy. It's like be the person you needed when you're a kid or something like that. It's one of those things that like if everybody actually did it, you know, the world would sort it would be a great place. And I think that's what in many ways you're doing.

I don't know what I needed. I sort of like had a different journey where I was like, it's kind of on autopilot for like 20 years. Didn't have an entrepreneurial bone in my body. Didn't think about stuff. I just kind of was going with the flow. It was pretty like, you know, I was trying to do good at school. But I was okay.

It wasn't the best. Wasn't particularly a hard worker. Wasn't doing anything interesting. Wasn't great, you know, socially. And I just felt like I kind of. woke up when I was 21 years old. It started, you know, when I had my first idea for a company, that's when I started to be more like me.

And so I think everybody, you know, okay, why do I do this podcast? Well, I'm not going to say I do it to give back. Like, that's not why. I do it because it's fun. But the side effect of doing it is that the person who's me when they're 18, 17, 16, 20 years old, or 30, it doesn't even matter how old. If you're kind of in that autopilot phase where you don't feel like you found your thing or you don't feel like, you know, you're excited every day to wake up.

And then all of a sudden you hear a couple guys on a podcast shooting the shit. They sound really excited about life. They got great energy. They got ideas for days. And you start to look at yourself, be like, why don't I see ideas all the time? How are these guys able to come on the podcast two times we can do it? And so what does that do? It proliferates more people that are like me.

That's what I want. I am the way I want to be. So hopefully I can like, you know, intercept a bunch of other people in their brain that maybe they can pick that up, right? Podcasts a vehicle to do that. You're doing the same thing. you know, when you were growing up, you were, you know, messing around with hardware and cars and business when you were 15, 16 years old, and you were messing around with computers.

And so a bunch of people helps you out, right? Your dad bringing home the computer or I think you told me about a guy kind of in your neighborhood who had like the car stuff that you could use to go work on cars. You didn't have that hardware. And you picked up those hobbies and you just followed those hobbies. You doubled down, triple down, even though that wasn't the common path, right? The common path was finish college, get a job. job, like get married, have kids, whatever, right?

Like, everybody has this, like, path that's kind of like your parents and society sort of throws at you. And you went off that path. I think when you went off that path, you probably didn't have as much guidance as, like, you're able to provide to that next wave where they should go on to do bigger and better things because, you know, you're able to knock down a few of those walls for them or with them. Yeah.

And I like how you phrased it. The cheesy phrase is obviously interesting, but, like, I don't think giving back is the right, that's not the right way to frame this. Because it's like, it's not charity, right? Like obviously, like, I'm building a business. I do believe in the long run, I want to make money with this business. And the things I'm going to invest in are going to, in the long run, pay off for me monetarily as well. But as a side effect, I do believe that, you know, kind of like your podcast, like, you're going to inspire a lot of people. I would love to inspire the next, like, thousand builders or founders, kind of however you want to phrase it. And I think that side

effect is fantastic. I don't think that business has to be, you know, detached from, you know, some side effect. Like, I think it's, if I wanted to make it a charity, I'd make it a nonprofit, right? Like, that would be the way to go and that would be kind of the way to do it. But I think there's a lot of benefit and a lot of people will benefit hopefully from it. And ideally not just because of me. Like, hopefully it's more like, I don't know what the Discord has become. It's like, founders helping each other. Like, that's the best version of this. And if I could be maybe the person that can first create the circle, then awesome. Like, that would be the, like, that would be the the hope. What's the biggest kind of like common mistake or trap you're seeing when you

have those kind of young entrepreneurs in the Discord working on their projects? What is the advice you keep on giving over and over again that like you feel like is the common mistakes, the common traps that they're falling into? I think it's always, you know, what are you focused on? So like if you're a builder, you're probably spending a lot of your energy on building. And if you're, you know, really most of these companies will kind of die in the market, not the tech. And there's some challenges sometimes, but even as a technology person, I would not spend too much time on technology. And Sean, you experienced this firsthand. Like, how many times do I like, we'll just hack it in? And all the engineers are like, fringe, right? It's like, well, we have to. Like, we need to go win

this market or figure out if this is real or not. If it's not real, we need to move on from this very fast because we're just wasting time, money, energy, and probably your company, if we go down the wrong path here. And so it's pretty much always focused on, you know, for me, a lot of the advice is like, Go be more aggressive on growth. Go figure out your market. Go understand your customers. Use technology as a weapon for that. It's not the purpose that you're building.

Like, you're going to sit here to build this technology. Somebody else is going to go take your market. Probably with the same technology, by the way. Sam, I don't know if you have a hard stop, but there's one other one that I think is interesting that Furkan could talk about. I don't know if you can talk about it, but PAC Protocol or, I don't know, can you talk about that? Or is either that or I think, you know, the way you're setting up the Dow or any

Dows that you're a part of, I think are interesting. So pick one of those two and then talk about that. Yeah. So, you know, Dow decentralized autonomous organization, I'll call it a decentralized org, because it's a little bit simpler to understand, is really just kind of like this thing happening in the crypto world where people are forming effectively these partnerships together. They're doing it on, you know, on chain, meaning as like an actual organization that kind of owns this code and things like that. And so, you know, let me, let me simplify. for a second. So Sam, and you started the hustle, you probably made a Delaware

C-Corp, right? So you go to Delaware, that's the rule of law. That's kind of where you're going to go write down all your articles of incorporation, and you chose C-Corp as the structure of your organization. And that lets you do certain things. You can take investment. You can do this. You can do that. And so you could do an LLC. You could do a S-Corp.

You could do it in Nevada. You can do it in California. So those are the current ways that when you have a project where you need a bunch of people to work together and be financially incentivized as a group, traditionally you would use, you know,

a Delaware, C Corp or LLC or something like that. So what he's providing, what he's talking about is an alternative that's been made. And I think, for kind of the trick here is, what do they let you do that's different than just making it? Why don't I just go to an LLC or a C Corp in Delaware?

Well, it lets you first be, you know, it lets you kind of detach yourself from the legal entity and how you were kind of like, having your stake of ownership and kind of voting and governance of the company. So, like, you know, we talked a lot, Sean, before of like, man, it kind of sucks. Companies are like top heavy and everybody's putting a lot of energy and effort.

And yeah, you might need a person that's responsible for making these choices, but wouldn't it be cool if? And, you know, a bunch of people on the internet basically took that, wouldn't it be cool if we made a company that could be owned by everybody equally and you could do things like voting or managing the treasury or issuing new, you know, tokens or share. to people, and you could incentivize them however you want it. So like if you bring on some people to help you market and like some, let's say, big celebrity, you can issue some governance to them.

Like they could be a part of this. You can align incentive between investors, founders, community, the market, whoever you want. So here's an example of one, right, that you've shown me. So there's a thing called the Lao. Have you ever heard of this, Sam? So the Lao, L-A-O. What it is is it's a venture fund, but instead of, like if you go to Sequoia,

Sequoia's got, let's say, the GPs, the general partners, and it's got the managing director maybe, and it's got then the associates and the analysts. It's like a traditional company. It's like a pyramid. At the top is the people in charge. And what the Dow is, is basically, here's a fund.

You put your money in. For however much money you put in, you get certain number of tokens. tokens are like shares. And then there's nobody specifically in charge. And the fund basically can receive proposals. so they have a website. You can pitch them.

The pitch goes in, everybody gets it in their inbox. Everybody votes yes or no. Based on how many tokens they hold, that's their vote. That's their weight. And then if the majority of the Dow has voted, yes, it gets the treasury, which is the bank account for the Lao, will pay out that project. Here's your investment. And then at any time, if I don't like the Lao, I can just sell my steak, sell it to

anybody else. They can take my spot in the Lao. And now they own, they have that chair. So it's completely liquid at all times, whether there's, maybe there's been great projects in there. And now this thing looks really valuable. These tokens look more valuable than the initial money that was put in. Well, I can sell out.

I don't have to wait 10 years for those projects to pan out. I can sell out today at double my money. Or, you know, I can say, I want to have more control. I'm going to buy out more tokens so that I have a greater say in this community because I'm going to spend a bunch of time. And I really want to make sure my vote matters. And basically it ties your vote to your vote to your, sort of your merits, how much value you put in, in this case, how much money you put into the

LOW. So they did it as an investment vehicle. Other people did it as an art collecting vehicle. Put money in, buy art, art is owned by the group, and you can sell it in whatever. So there's these headless companies. There's no CEO in a suit at the top that is telling everybody what to do and deciding who gets hired and fired. It's just a bunch of shareholders together and you vote based on your shares. It's like more like America, like a democracy, I guess. and then there's other variations of that too that I can't even wrap my head around. Those are the simple ones.

I've understood. There's others that I don't even understand yet. Yeah, and it's very complicated, very, very complex. But this simple version, I like how you phrase it, it's kind of like a democracy times a company, you know, mixed in one. And maybe companies even the wrong phrasing there. But, you know, I'm very fascinated with this.

It's a very different pattern. I don't know if it's better or worse than, you know, what we've seen traditionally, but it's definitely different, right? And I've been wanting to kind of like, you know, be a part of one, create one. And so I joined a couple, but I'm not like, you know, some meaningful stakeholder in it. But then, you know, with a lot of the work that's been going on in FTs, a lot of popularity, Topshot is just like taking over like my friend's group and very popular. And I know you're super into like BitClout and some of these other platforms.

And so I've been wanting to kind of wrap my head around NFTs. And I started talking to a lot of developers and people that are interested about some of these ideas that I had. And I found like a group of five, six people that I'm like, oh, we're all kind of really into this. Let's make a doubt. I'll like kind of put in the first amount of money. And now a couple of my buddies are also putting in some money for getting some stake in this. And the idea is we're just going to be kind of a group of people that are going to build fun projects in the NFT space. And our goal is there's a lot of hype right now. We're in that hype cycle. Hype cycle is going to go away, right? It's the same pattern that we talked about before.

well, what is the valuable things that NFTs can do? Let's go build some of these. And so, you know, we have two ideas that we're working on right now as a group. One of them is like Shopify for NFTs. Like you come in, you click two buttons and you like, you can create your own. And, you know, I'll ask you this, Sean. Like you've heard a lot about NFTs. You talked a lot about them.

Have you minted your own yet? I have not. Why not? I don't know what the hell my NFT would be. So like, for example, we have a friend Jack Butcher who has minted many. NFTs now himself. And he's a great designer. So he makes like a cool visual design.

It's like badass art. And he's like, oh, cool. Instead of just posting this for free on Twitter for likes, I'll post this on foundation and I'll sell it. And he's sold some of these for $60,000, $70,000 each. And so he's made, you know, a lot of money this year just basically selling his own kind of like his philosophies. He just makes it into a kind of a digital poster.

And he sells that digital poster to his fans. And so for me, I'm like, oh, that's cool. If I made an NFT, I don't know, I don't really have that artistic skill. I don't even know what the actual NFT would be. That's kind of my thought. But you haven't even just tried one, right? Like when you first saw Shopify, you went and created a store, right? You didn't have to start a company, you know, or sell something, but you went and do it.

One's easier than the other. One, you're typing in a fake new username and password. Yeah, exactly. If I open a Shopify store, I also need to put a product there, right? Like, I can't also have a everything. Yeah, but you could try it, right? And I think that that's the thing that I saw is like a lot of this. these worlds defi NFTs,

the dollar value is really big at the top end of it. When you go and dig underneath and you're like, ah, there's only like 5,000 users doing this. Why is it so little? Right. And there's a lot of interest in doing it really hard to do. And I believe that's like one of the biggest opportunities in NFTs is just like make it really easy for people to do it

almost as easy as creating a Shopify store. And so that's like project idea one. Like we're going to basically pay for your gas. We're going to make it so you can deploy your own contract. without ever thinking about it, you're going to just click a couple buttons and get a landing page that you can send to people and they can buy stuff digitally.

We're going to make it literally that easy as us. I think that's like accessibility really important. The second one, which is the thing you were talking about, which is the Pax Protocol. Like, you know, there's building products and then there's building protocol. And protocols are just like, here's an API to go do this thing. And NBA Top Shot, I mean, probably one of the biggest digital products

we've seen since Pokemon Go. I'll kind of call it that. Like that wave of like hype, you know, reaching some mass market, a lot of interest in it. But it's very close, right? I mean, you have to be an NBA player to get one. You have to kind of like be in the NBA. You've got to play in this whole ecosystem.

And, you know, who knows what they're going to be worth in the long run. But in the short run, there's a lot of interest there. But only the NBA is doing it. You'll see the other sports teams do it. And but the basic idea of creating a pack, with some digital items in it or potentially kind of linking to the real world, that's kind of what I got really excited about. And so we, you know, as part of NFT Labs, we created this tax protocol,

which is a protocol to create kind of a, you know, like a little loot box pack where you can put in digital items. And you could put in an image, a sound clip for like, let's say, your guys' podcast, or, you know, kind of access like, hey, here's a ticket to a VIP event that I'm going to do here. Or here's a meet and greeter. private community. And so creators are going to find a lot of ways to use this if we develop that underneath foundation that they can kind of do all of this. So Sam, does that make sense of how, so like for example, what we would do is we would say, oh, cool, these guys built the infrastructure

that makes it easy for us to do the following. We can create these little packs, meaning like a card pack or like a box, like a loot box, and basically put, it's a mystery box. You don't know what's inside. So you buy one, you open it up and you're going to get one, you know, maybe you get the crap or maybe you get the most VIP thing where Sam calls you and coaches you on your business for an hour. And what's that called? What's the domain? So NFT Labs.co is kind of like the main domain.

That's one of their projects. And so I think this is pretty cool because they're going to be able to get any like influence like us. And so there's one thing to do what Jack's doing, which is, and actually Jack did this. I don't know if you saw this for con, but he initially was selling a specific NFT. Hey, buy this thing. And then he sold three packs with. inside was a mystery NFT.

You didn't know what it was going to be. Yeah, he made many six figures, I believe. Yeah, and like this mechanic, many, many games use these like loopbox mechanics because it's fun. It's fun to go buy the thing and see, do you get the super rare valuable thing or did you get kind of the junk and, you know, so you either get, you know, 60 cents on the dollar or you get $60 for every dollar you spent. And there's like this game of chance.

And so what they're doing is they made a protocol where it's now easy for us to do that. We can make all these packs. We could put inside. hey, tickets to our live show in Austin, or you know, you get to be put into our, like, private members group, or here's a T-shirt, you know, with our, you know, here's a Harvard shirt, whatever. And so we could put any number of things, just stuff them in the boxes and assign some probability. And then it'll generate the packs for us, which I think is pretty sweet. Yeah. And, you know, like, I really just think a lot about, like, what, what's the value underneath

it? Like, we have to get to, you know, I mean, art has value, you know, obviously the person buying it, cares about it. But a lot of people look at that and go, wait, you know, these things are selling for like 50 million bucks plus and like, you know, it's just a JPEG underneath. But like, I mean, a VIP meet and greet when you guys do your roadshow, that's pretty cool, actually. And I think a lot of people would be really excited about it.

It sucks if you only option that off to the, you know, person who has the most money, right? Like, and I think these packs give kind of the, you know, creators and influencers a way to interact with their fans, kind of more broadly and say, all of you guys will get a chance and here's kind of the things of it. By the way, you know, if there were only 10 VIP meet and greets, we'll make the third party marketplace like TopShout or if somebody wants to go spend 100 grand for it. By the way,

you guys will earn a cut of that secondary sale. Plus, somebody who got that if they didn't want it and they wanted to sell it, they can kind of do that. And so you can support both sides of the ecosystem. You can make it kind of fan friendly, but then you can go kind of get a lot of value out of it too. And so I don't know, I find creators really interesting because they're kind of an analogy to founders where, you know, I don't want to go work at a fang company. I mean, you know, I made it through Twitch, but it was not, it's not the right environment for me, right? Like, it's not where I'm going to thrive.

It's not where I'm going to be excited. And I think creators have the same thing. I saw a great idea on this. The founder of Replit tweeted this out. He goes, there's a bunch of people who, engineers who work at like fang companies. They make great salaries. And they kind of want, they're kind of bored. They want to go to a startup.

But they're like, the compensation difference is pretty big. and maybe they have a family or they just, you know, it's just hard to walk away from a guaranteed, you know, $500,000, $600,000 a year to go work for one fifth that or one fourth that at a startup that may or may not make it. And he goes, somebody should just create a fund that just bridges the difference. So what it does is it basically says, great, we will even out that difference. So you get 300 instead of, let's say, 600. And it's an income share agreement, but you pay us back with stock from the startup. And so you give up a lot. And so you give up a little bit of the stock from the startup to make back the cash difference.

And in doing so, you would create a port, so you would help more people who today can't leave the salary go to a startup. You'd help the startup not have to burn more money hiring that person. And you sit in between and by providing that you would get shares in pretty much every startup that you wanted to provide this with. So if you say you thought these hundred startups are great, you could basically say, great, you're all eligible for this like kind of like income share agreement that we do, where if you hire somebody and they want a bit higher salary, we'll front that salary in exchange for

stock and hopefully bring more talent into the startup workforce. I thought that was a pretty clever idea, a way to get shares in all the companies that you want shares in that you can't go invest in directly. Yeah, that's really interesting. And I don't know, I think people should just, you know, ideally people can do the thing that they enjoy. They wake up every day, they're excited to whether they got to drive to work or work from home or wherever it is. If you can do that, like that, that's a big unlock in your life. And a lot of people don't get that opportunity. And early on in my career, I just made those trades, like, I don't know, no matter how financially painful or, you know, misguided it might have seemed at the time. But like, I just wanted to work on things that I was

excited about. And when you went to Applevin, when you went to App Loven, you had another job offer, right? What was the difference there? Yeah. So I had met this guy, Jack Levin. I think he was like, you know, very early at Google. He was responsible for. I know that guy. You know, kind of a lot of Google's infrastructure tricks early on, like how they really scaled it. And some of the ways they win is really his responsibility. And he was working on this company. I think it was called Y-Frog. It was like a photo-sharing type thing.

I think they had run another product. I think it was photo bucket. Something like that. They had done some big stuff in the photo space. They were doing really well. They needed some engineers. I was an engineer at the time. And I could basically come in and learn a lot from this very technical person.

seemed really sharp. He asked me these questions that got my brain going in a good way. Like, you know, I have very specific questions. Like, how do you set up your desktop? And, like, my desktop is very particular. And he wanted to know every detail. And I was like, ah, this guy gets it. Like, this guy gets me in the same way.

And then I met Adam. And Adam was, like, very different. Obviously, very impressive as just a CEO and a person. But, like, the conversation was different. The vibe was different. One was in, like, Los Gatos. this one was in Palo Alto, just a little bit of a different area. But when I talked to Adam, I was like, oh, this guy, I could go to a baseball game with him. I could hang out with him.

He seems cool. He seems very hungry. They don't have a clue what they're doing right now. Like, you know, they're shutting down an idea. They don't know what the next idea necessarily is going to be. I think there's going to be a lot more fun. The rate of learning is going to be really high. I might get more responsibility. But the really good, like, kind of proper choice was going to this other job offer. And Adam gave me two options. He gave me a higher salary and a low stock. a lower salary and a higher stock option. And I was like, I kind of just made the decision down to like, well, if I go with, you know, Adam, I need to take the low salary, move back in with my parents, like, take the stock because

like I'm going to be in it for the ride. But if I just kind of want to become an engineer and that's what I want my career to be, I'm going to go to this other company. I'm going to take the salary. I'm not right about the equity necessarily how big that is, but I'm just going to become a better engineer. And I kind of picked the more unknown, less polished. option obviously worked out so I feel great about it but you took the move in with the parents

option and yeah it took the move in a absurd way yeah how old are you when you started uh at 11 um let's see probably like 25 26 no 26 moving moving at home wasn't the worst but yeah wasn't good no actually maybe a little bit yeah 26 probably that's maybe just old enough where it's kind of like all right, what are you doing? Definitely. Inconvenient socially. Yeah. When you move out, right?

So you move out of your house and you move back in, it's not like a happy, like, oh, yeah, I'm winning high fives all around, right? That's not the way you do back in. It's not like you had to move in with your wife or something like that. Yeah, I mean that. Moving with your wife? What does that mean? Yeah.

Like, like, sorry. With your wife parents. Yeah. Like, no, no. I mean, like, you're like in your 30s or like you have a family. Like if you had a lot. You're like a little more established. Yeah.

Okay. 26 is old enough that it's still like you can still fuck around and maybe figure it out, which you did. Yeah. You know what I mean? You can still almost be a kid. Yeah, exactly. I think for me it was just like, I know I wanted to do this. This sounded more fun.

More fun is always good. You're going to wake up. You're going to be excited to go to work. It's not going to be a drag. Like, you know, I would tell Sean this all the time because we used to do Sunday night call, right? Where we would kind of think about the week. And it was like, my friends were always Sunday night, like, oh, man, work tomorrow, like Sunday, like,

sucks, like weekends over. And I always felt like, hey, it's exciting. Like, more stuff's going to happen. This week's going to be great. Like, and that's a big difference. If more people can do that, like that, that I think is a huge deal. When we did those Sunday calls, I remember I'd always be like, oh, like, sorry, I got to, like, I'm doing this thing with family or friends or whatever.

I'm like, I got to go get on this call. And they're like, oh, man, you have to do calls on Sunday nights. And I was like, I get to do calls. I chose this. I want to do this. I can't wait for Monday. We got to do it tonight. That was our mindset.

And we didn't have as spectacular of an outcome, but I definitely had like a spectacular time building that out and learning all the different stuff. So anyways, I think that's, if you take away one thing, like maybe you didn't understand the technology, but like the meta lesson of Furcon to me is he always picked the more fun and interesting path regardless of the financial thing. And then on the financial side, just made sure that it was a bet on himself and a bet

on equity so that if the fun and interesting thing does pan out, you actually do get paid out of it. And I've seen him make that trade of like, I'll work harder, I'll earn less, I'll move back in with my parents, all these things, right? Like he's willing to work three times as hard as long as it's three times as fun. And I think most people, at least from where I come from, they don't do that. When they make career choices, it's a rational, logical decision. And I think that gets you to a certain type of outcome. But if you hear these outcomes and you're like, how do I get some of that? I think you got to follow the irrational playbook a bit more. I mean, Sean, if you look across your journey at Monkey Inferno,

I mean, you were a 24-year-old pretty green, right? Like, I think I saw your initial video interview that you had sent in, The Monkey Inferno. And like, whether the dollar outcome was there or not, like, I would say the rate of learning, like the growth difference for you. And I know for myself, it's a massive difference. Like, I'm embarrassed at what I used to think about back then in terms of building compared to kind of after the journey.

But you'd feel like that was like a thousand X payoff and the rest of your career is going to kind of unlock because of it, right? Like I would imagine you believe that, but I'm curious how you think about that journey. Yeah, 100%. I told the guys who set up our studios this and I mentioned this on a recent podcast, but I said they came, they flew out here to San Francisco. They were like staying in a motel six type of thing. They're like, I'm going to build this out.

And, you know, they're 22, 23, 24 years old, something like that. and they had sent in a video, like kind of like a video interview to be like Sam, Sean, choose us to like, like we will help you guys out. We will come build your studio for you. They'd like did a balsy YouTube video

and tweeting at us like nonstop. Shit I used to do. I used to wait in parking lots to meet CEOs and investors I wanted to meet. Just like I could say, I've been here since 7 a.m. waiting in the parking lot for you to come out like, do you have five minutes of time, right?

I used to do all these stunts. And they were doing a stunt to meet us. And I thought that was kind of interesting. And when they were there, I was like, they kind of were like deferred. to me too much. They were sort of like, it's kind of like too much respect. And I told them, I was like, dude, you kind of want what I have. I want what you have. I want that time back.

And I want to be back where you guys are where it's four friends living in a one bedroom apartment and you're making videos and you kind of like, why are we trying to be YouTubers? I don't know. It seems fun. Let's just do it. And then like, we think these guys have a cool podcast. Fuck it. Let's fly out and meet them and help them out with their studio. And we don't know what's, you know, there's nothing clearly in it for us. But like, we'll hop on that. plane tomorrow and go make it happen. I told him, I said, that was by far the most fun time. There was the highest rate of learning. And I remember at the time feeling like, oh, man, like everything we do is so bootleg in ghetto. And like, but that was the right path, actually, for me, for a person

like me who wanted what I wanted out of life. And I said, you're going to, I remember, you know, I went to Duke. Most of my friends went to med school, law school, or banking or consulting. And so every, you know, every weekend they would post like, they're, you know, they're making six figures, they're posting themselves at a bar. They're like, I wasn't dating. I had no income. I was sleeping on an air mattress. You know, my co-founder lived in my closet, right?

So it was like, you know, it was ghetto. And so I remember thinking, well, maybe, you know, there's moments of doubt where I was like, maybe I should have gone the traditional path. Maybe I should have gone to med school after all. But it was so fun. I couldn't, you know, I didn't, that was not a real conversation in my head. What I was telling these guys was, yo, you're going to see your friends who are on the traditional path and they're going to look like they're way far ahead.

right now and there's going to be a party who feels like you're left behind. If you're like me, that's what I felt. Stay the path and just know that like, this is the first quarter. We're going to be long-term oriented. We're going to think about this like in a 10, 20-year time scale. Who do you want to be in 10, 20 years? And like, you're going to have a lot of fun now and then your rewards are going to catch up 10, 20 years from now. And if you're okay with that trade of having more fun now and rewards that are a little backloaded, this is the right path. I wish somebody had just told me at that time, guys, this looks ghetto as hell, but you're on the right path. We kind of just like, for better or worse, just stuck with it.

And I want more people to stick with it when they're in that mode. And you've done the same, traveling through Europe, playing poker to support yourself and like, moving back in with your parents. It's not an, it sounds at the time, it feels uncommon, but it's actually quite common amongst people who end up successful in entrepreneurial way. Yeah. Flipside is it's not easy, right? You're going to go the harder path.

Like, you know, I didn't have, I don't have a college degree. I didn't get that. A lot of people ask me, hey, should I go to college? Like, I have these other things going on. And, you know, like, you don't have to. You can learn on your own, especially now, but it's definitely going to be a harder path. Don't expect linear returns where if I put in a year of work, I get a year of kind of success. And then I put in five years of work. I get five years of success. It might be nothing for a long time and you might kind of get it in the end. But I don't know, the journey is very exciting. That, that to me is what you're going to do every day. You're going to wake up every day and you're going to go

do this thing. Are you excited about that? And that's kind of like critical. Yeah, thank you, dude. I always take a lot of notes. I'm taking notes now. Whenever you come, I'm excited for your success. That's so cool. I thought App Lovin was like this huge thing whenever it was supposed to sell a year or whatever a few years ago now. And then now seeing what it is now, I'm like, oh my gosh, that's, that's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, yours as well. So congratulations. That's pretty badass. And what you're building is awesome. Founders, Inc. That's badass. Yeah, sweet and appreciate it.

And yeah, no, this has been fun. I always like hearing you guys. It was kind of fun to be on as well. And I shoot the shit a little bit. Where do people find you? Founders, F-D-Inc or Founders. Dot Inc? Yeah, F-D-N-N-E-E-F-U-R. That's the website. And so that's the domain. You can find me on Twitter, Furcon, R, F-U-R-Q-N-R. So, Fur-K-R-K-N-R.

Thanks for coming. On a road, let's travel, never looking back. Oh, yeah.