My First Million - #45 - Drones Washing Windows, Airpod Guided Tours & Mario Kart VR with Furqan Rydhan

Episode Date: February 14, 2020

Sam (@thesamparr) and Shaan (@shaanvp) are back talking news, trends, interesting products and businesses. Today we’re joined by Furqan Rydhan (@FurqanR) who is a tech badass. He was paid $120K as a 15 year old programmer during the Dot Com Boom, made a million dollar e-com biz at 17 and was an early employee at Applovin that was valued last at $2 billion. Remember Ramon’s soap opera blog that he sold for $9M in cash? He did that through the online business broker Quiet Light Brokerage. We’ve partnered up with them to give you guys a FREE 25-point checklist to see how sellable your online business is. To receive this free guide, visit quietlightbrokerage.com/myfirstmillion. Topics for today: Our Guest’s @FurqanR Background (00:36), Funny Story about Vungle’s Jack Smith and Lance Armstrong (07:12), The Process of Brainstorming Ideas (09:36), VR/AR Experiences (10:16), Opportunities in Reviving Stale Franchises and Company Turnarounds (17:07), iPad Whiteboard Meeting Idea (22:44), Reinventing the Phone Call through Airpods (27:51), Furquan’s House Hackathon Ideas (29:49), Serialized Story Apps like Hooked (37:09), Drone Washing Windows on Big Buildings (38:38), Money Printing Mobile Apps (44:44) and What Furqan learnt being Applovin (50:20).  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Furcon is here in the house. How's it going, guys? What's up? So background, who's Furcon? Furcon is my co-founder, CTO at Bebo before we sold. And we've been working together, I don't know, five, six years now, maybe six, seven years. Yeah, it's getting towards seven, I think. It's one of those things where you just keep saying five years, you know, no matter how long it's been.

But he has an interesting background before that. Very good background. You want to give us like the, give the highlights. All right. The highlights, I grew up here in the Bay Area. I got started. Just programming those of a kid. And so I had a unique experience where I worked at a dot com when I was 15.

And that was kind of like... Were you going to high school at the time or did you drop out? I was going to high school. I had just finished my sophomore year and I was really into computers. And my dad was like, hey, I know this guy. They need to hire some people. They're looking to make like a website at the time. They had a router for hotel rooms.

So it was like hotels wanted to put in DSL and kind of like good internet. And they're like, oh, you got to, we need this interface like the, you know, links this interface for your router now. Just the HTML side of things. Yeah, and HTML at the time was really nothing. It was like, you could put some stuff. And I showed my dad how to make a menu. And he was like, wow, this is like groundbreaking.

There's no JavaScript. How much were you getting paid at 15 to do this? If I had worked the whole year, it would have been about 120K. Wow. Pretty ridiculous. So this is dot com boom. Dotcom boom, probably because they're hiring 15-year-olds. Right.

And then that happens. Then you did an e-commerce thing. Yeah, and so that company didn't work out, obviously, you know, spending money. Paying 15-year-olds, $120K? Exactly. And so I kind of was back at high school and then I'm bored and I'm really into computers and gaming. And, you know, I had this idea that like, hey, people like to kind of trick out their cars. Like they like to put lights and, you know, fun things in their car.

Like, why don't people do this with the computers? People are really passionate about it. And so I looked it up and I found some forums online. And people were doing this. It's just there was nowhere to buy things. There's nowhere to do things, especially here in the U.S. So I started an e-commerce store. Kind of accidentally, I was like, oh, like these things are really expensive.

If I buy them in bulk, I just get them cheaper. I'll sell off some. I'll have some more cash on the side. And I think we started $800 of stuff in the corner of my garage. And then within the first year, we did a million dollars of revenue. Wow. And it was like, how old were you? I was 17.

Holy shit. High school at the time. And so that was pretty crazy because it went from, you know, one corner of the garage to full three car garage to living room, family room. Like there's boxes everywhere. My parents were super supportive of this, obviously. And so that was kind of like the early days, I would say. And then we'll fast forward because there's a lot more of the story. we'll do the highlights. So if I'm listening to this, you know, when I ever ask people

with their background, really what I'm trying to say is give people a sense of who you are. And also, uh, it's kind of just like credibility. It's like, why should you be interested in what you're trying to make, you're trying to impress people. Yeah, it's like this is the time to basically brag. So I'll brag for you because you're pretty humble guy. You don't brag a lot. Uh, so the other interesting parts are took a couple years off, played poker professionally, kind of in Europe, traveling around. That was fun. Uh, when you came back, did your own startup failed. But then the next startup, which you started with Adam and a couple other guys, you guys tried and failed on a bunch of ideas.

I think probably nine ideas. Yeah, it was about nine ideas across two or three years that we tried. Kind of, of, you know, one idea would say it was real serious. We tried that for about nine months. And then you're going through like three month chunks of like really bad ideas and attempts.

And my favorite anecdote of this whole time, because I think this is very, very, you don't hear people talk about this was sometimes when you guys were in between ideas or you just were, it wasn't working, what did you do? You'd come to the office and do what?

We would just play football all day. I mean, literally... That's what you guys did at Monkey Inferno. Yeah, we would do it for like an hour. These guys were just like, that was the day. Yeah, it was like eight hours of FIFA. Oh, man, that was a tough day. Let me get back home and kind of get back to it.

And did you think that was weird? Like, Adam and those guys had had success. So part of you was probably like, look, if these successful guys think this is all right, this can't be too bad. But, like, I would be anxious if we were doing that. There was some anxiety, but they were super calm and collected. So that kind of was like, well, why am I worried? Well, so Adam was pretty wealthy.

Yeah, he previously worked on a couple of ad tech companies, and they had grown to be pretty big. I would say, like, you know, one was worth maybe $50 million and, you know, the one before that might have been in that range too. And so he had done some stuff. John, who is the other co-founder there, had worked at like VMware early and he had worked at ad products like that got bought by. And they were self-funding the company? Yeah, they were self-funding the company. I cannot believe how I would be like, no, we're getting to work. I'm self-funding my fucking money.

And I think we worked hard. I mean, the cool thing was you sat around, you talked about things. How many people? We were probably like five or six people. Got it. So it was pretty small. It wasn't, I mean, we had a good office in Polo Alto bigger than we needed, but you could tell they're not worried. I shouldn't be worried.

You sit around for a week, you get some ideas. Then you go and work on him, and it all felt pretty natural at that point. And the outcome of this was what? Yeah, so you crack the nut finally. Yeah, so we had, you know, they had a previous background in ad tech. We had made this product called App Loven. That was an app where you could see what apps your friends were using. So it was like a social network where if you're playing candy,

Oh, it says, hey, Sam's playing Candy Crush and you should play too. We're like, wow, this is pretty interesting. People really convert with this. This should just be an ad product. And then that kind of drove it and said, wait, we should just make a real network out of this. And then we sat down, we built that for a couple months, and then it kind of skyrocketed after that. And how big? How big is it now?

They're really massive now. It's been a while since I've been over there. But, you know, a couple years back, they had a big liquidity event over $1.4 billion. And I think they've probably grown in multiple since then. Yeah, I mean, I heard that it sold like only three years after it started. Yeah, it was really fast. And it was doing like six or 700 million in revenue, like some crazy number. Yeah, it was magical to see what product market fit really looks like.

Like, I always thought, oh, these things are working. No, they weren't working. And this was what working looked like. And it was probably one of the best versions of it. So maybe my view is a little skewed on that. But the first month, it was like, man, we just jump up to like 10,000 plus in revenue a day. And then you just kind of keep skyrocketing up from that. And like, it's pretty crazy.

engineered too because now your servers are being hammered you're like running around all night like pulling all nighters just because money's flowing and you got to kind of keep it up and so that was kind of crazy but fun so the the the apple oven story is four million bucks in self-funding initially then they raised a small strategic round or i don't know exactly what the total is but about five million bucks total funding right yeah i think that's exactly what it was and then uh the first liquidity event they sold a portion of the company to a chinese company for over 1.4 billion and so that's like massive capital efficiency. You were CTO kind of co-founder there. So we met after that. We started working together, became really good friends and have built a bunch of stuff together. And what I like

about you, which is why I wanted you on the podcast is not necessarily, we're not even going to talk too much about App Loven. That's just to establish who you are. You are like me, you're an idea guy. You always have a bunch of ideas. You see interesting stuff. But you're deeply technical, but then get the business side and the product side too. And there's very few people who do that. I'm definitely going to ask about App Loven in a little bit. Before we even get to the ideas, I got to tell you something real quick, because this is related. So my best friend started Vungle, which was App Loven's competitor. They raised $16 million.

When they got acquired, they had $100 million. What did it sell for? $750. Half of what you guys sold for, very successful. Yesterday, Jack was, this was after you left. So, okay, so we have to apologize a little bit. Yesterday, Lance Armstrong popped in and our episode got ruined. Kind of ruined.

Or made. Or made. Whatever. It was hectic. and we did this thing. It was cool. Sean, you left. Jack was here. It was me and Lance and Adam and Jack. Just chilling right here. And Jack's kind of Savanti. Like he's like real smart, but he doesn't pay attention to a lot of things. And we were talking about the podcast. And I was saying, Lance, how big is your podcast? He said it's like whatever 100,000 listeners. He goes, it took me a long time to build that up, you know, after I got cut out or cut off. And Jack was like, what, cut out? What happened? Like Apple, Shire. shut you down or something. He goes, no, you know, like from the incident that happened seven years ago. Like, I, like, everything dropped off. And he goes, Jack was like, what, what do you mean? And Lance looked at, Lance looked at me. And he goes, he's like, is this guy serious? I'm like,

yeah, dude, he's like a business of eyes. What happens? He doesn't know. And he goes, this is awesome. Sam, you got to, hey, bring more people like this around me. And he goes, Lance goes, Jack, I basically went from hero to zero overnight. Like, I lost everything. Yeah. And Jack was like, oh, okay. And he's like from, you know, like it was hilarious. That's amazing. That's awesome. And if you, Jack did a whole episode and you can kind of tell he's like, and the stuff he cares

about, he's so deep in the weeds. He's like Rain Man. And then other stuff he's completely oblivious to, which is awesome. Yeah, it was so funny. And Jack started your guys, or maybe they were first. I don't know, but competitors. So it reminded me of that. So what do you want to do?

I want to hear some ideas. You said you have a story. Is that the story? No, I'll tell it tomorrow. Okay, cool. So we want to have guests that come in and bring their ideas, stuff they find interesting. So either little phenomenon they've observed, ideas they've been cooking up, something off their list they have on their phone, whatever it is.

So do you have stuff like that? Do you have a list of ideas? You do or no. I wrote down some ideas for this. I usually just keep them up here and, like, you know, the important ones make their way out. Let's talk about the process. Where do you get a lot of, like, where do, when? When do ideas come to you?

Usually when I'm not trying to come up with an idea. Like in the shower or whatever. The shower, driving, just kind of around, not really thinking about anything. And then something pops up. The second one I would say is like when I'm reading online, like, if you read something interesting, you're like, wait, that's cool. But it would be cooler if it was. And then like, that's kind of where in my mind wanders.

Right. I think that the best idea is you just steal. Right. So like, it's kind of like that. You're like, oh, but what if you applied it? Like the way this restaurant industry is, this restaurant's working. They should actually apply that to like Indian food. and it would be way bigger.

Right. Yeah, it's like remixing, right? It's like, I want to sample some ideas real quick and then I want to turn into my own idea. Right. So what's you got? What's interesting to you? Okay, so I'll start with one that we went go-karting a couple weeks back.

And so I'm really into kind of VR-A-R. I mean, you know, you know, give you an Oculus just that you can, you know, feel my life. You gave him one? Yeah. Yeah, I gave him an awesome. Yeah, I was like, Sean, you got to do this. You're never going to buy one on your own.

You're going to be a skeptic forever. Here you go. Are you using it? Yeah, because he was telling me, he's like, there's this one thing. Because I was skeptical. I was like, is there any good games? Like, what am I going to do with this? And he's like, dude, you got to try this poker stars thing.

And I was like, okay, what a VR poker? Why do I need that? It is fucking amazing. Have you tried this thing? Well, I've done boxing. I've played all the games. But I didn't. You've got to try the poker one.

It's incredible. I'm going to go buy an ooculars. What's the play? Yeah, seriously, you should. They're sold out. So it's going to be tough. But, you know, maybe we can get you one too. You really can't buy one?

Right now they're out, dude. From Christmas, they just completely sold out. And then they haven't been able to refill it. They said it was January, then February, and now it's March. And then they're talking about all these delays from China. That's a good sign for VR. Yeah. I mean, they totally, it's the first device where I looked at it, and I said, I can give it to somebody

that's not a VR junkie, and they would actually get excited about it. And I think the poker one is great because you actually, people want to build these really immersed experiences like boxing. But actually, you don't really want entertainment like that all the time. I actually want more sit on the couch experience. And so, you know, some of the things I've been thinking about in VR is like, what can I build while I'm on the couch? Yeah.

And so this idea had is not about that, but that was the tentative of VR. But we went go-karting. And, you know, when you go-karting, it's really about how quickly do you make these turns, how fast are you, how good of a driver are you, you know, how aggressive are you, you know, things like that. And afterwards, we were just kind of talking about some ideas. And I was like, dude, it would be cool if we could, you know, go to a go-karting place, but it's like Mario card instead, where you have these AR goggles over your head.

And it's not about quick turns, and it's a longer track where you can kind of like have some space. But I, you know, would digitally go over this box. And I now have a weapon that I can shoot at your car. And if I hit you successful, your car kind of shuts down for a second and you're stuck. So, like, the real life Mario card. Is this like the sandbox thing? So this would be like sandbox or like Museum of Ice Cream. It'd be a place you go, put on this thing and play with a bunch of friends or strangers.

I'm big on your sandbox. Like laser tag. It's like modern-day laser tag. Do you think that sandbox is a big business? I think sandbox is fantastic. I mean, it's hard to see if it's going to be successful or not because retail has all these problems and having space has all these problems. But that's not retail. Well, yeah, it's not retail, but they're, they kind of have retail spaces, right?

Like, they want to be. Brick and border, right? Yeah, they want to be like in a spot where there's a lot of. Yeah, I mean, it's just an activity. It's just like escape room or something. It's like escape room. And I know, I know guys who own like 200 escape rooms. Are they awesome?

It's an amazing business because escape rooms are super lightweight. You don't do anything. You just have a room. You have one person. You buy the kit. And you just keep like reassembling the room. And you have these like very small footboards. How big is that company?

Well, it's not one company, but it's like like you can just own a different franchise. Yeah, but like you can own a McDonald's franchise, but they still report revenues as one. Yeah. This is private. I've never been in. I will never go to an escape room. That's my fear. I don't want to.

Is that claustrophobic? Because I'm really claustrophobic. I don't like flying. No, I will never go. In general, VR or AR experiences are going to be, I think, fantastic. And you could see theme parks go. to this. Like I heard about a theme park that has a roller coaster ride in VR where they give you goggles. You're in this kind of mechanical thing, but then you're actually in a dungeon and there's

lava and like it's a totally immersed experience. And I think that people are going to experience it first like that. And I could totally see you coming up with all kinds of different content types. And whether it's Mario Kart or Escape Room. That's a great point. So here's a cool model of this. I have a buddy who worked at this company called Two Bit Circus. Have you ever heard of them? No. So the guy, the founder, his dad started Chuckie Cheese, as Nolan, whatever the guy's name is. Atari, started Atari, started Chuckie Cheese. Now, his son started this thing called Two-bit Circus. And I love the concept.

I think the son kind of, I don't know the guy, but like my read on the situation is just sort of like, ADD wants to do a million things, not really like executing on this business as he should, but the concept is amazing. They go city to city traveling circus like Cirque de Soleil or whatever. And they pop up this thing and it's like a weekend. thing where parents bring their kids and all the attractions are like digital wonders. So it's like VR thing. How big is that? A hologram thing. And they were doing really well. Every city they were going to, they're selling out like crazy. But he was also getting distracted. They were doing things like a

company would be like, hey, we'll give you half a million dollars to do our company retreat. Yeah. And then boom, the whole company, Nick, the CEO comes in and says, hey, we had to go do this corporate retreat. And the company's just like, dude, we need like one direction. Okay, quick break. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about my Saturday morning routines. So every Saturday, I wake up in the morning and, you know, some people watch cartoons, some people read the newspaper, some people check the mail, some people exercise. I go to quietlightbrokridge.com and I check out what's for sale. So if you don't know, Quietlight is a platform where you can buy and sell online businesses.

So if you don't want to start something from scratch or you don't know if your idea is any good, you can go on here and you can see ideas that are already proven, they're already working to some extent, and you can either sell your business or you can buy a business off here and try to grow it and improve it. And so if you've been listening to the podcast, you know, one of our most popular episodes was with Ramon, Ramon Van Meir, who, you know, sold his soap opera blog, even though he'd never watch the soap opera in his life. He built one of the most popular soap opera blogs for $9 million in cash on this website. He has bought multiple businesses off Quiet Light as well. And we had Paul on here.

He sold his FBI business for seven figures on Quiet Light. So it is a fantastic place to sell your business. It's a fantastic place for me to look for businesses. Like I'm on it right now, and I see a kid's monthly subscription box. It's started in 2018, so it's fairly new. Asking price is $149,000. So you could buy this on an SBA loan. You don't have to put too much money down.

And, you know, it makes $50K a year in profit. And there's ones that go all the way up to millions of dollars in profit per year. So whether you're looking for something small or something big, Quiet Lights got a great little selection. And it's not just like everything that's for sale. They curate and they qualify only certain businesses get in and get on here. And when you're interested in something, they have all the financials in a folder organized. They have interviews with the founders that will tell you, you know, how they run their business,

how many hours a week they put in, that sort of thing. Very good business. All right. So for any listeners for the podcast, they're offering a 25-point checklist to see how sellable is your online business. So if you have a business right now that's making money and you're interested, you would love to sell it someday. Check out this thing. check out what the 25 point checklist is to see how sellable you're on their business is. To get the free guide, it's at quietlightbrokerage.com slash my first million.

Again, that's quietlight brokerage.com slash my first million. Can you look up Dave and Buster's revenue and look up Chucky Cheeses? I bet Chucky Cheez is owned by private equity. Chucky Cheez is probably makes a killing. And if you've gone to a Chucky Cheese, there's way down. They went way down to shit. Well, where I'm from in Missouri, where they were probably popular, it's like, where like like trashy poor people go.

I mean, it's pretty, it's pretty whack. Like, like, I wouldn't go there because it was famous for like the parents would fight. Get drunk and fight. Did you go get divorced? Yeah, like Chuckie Cheese. It was like pee-wee hockey and Chuckie Cheese. That's like where parents get drunk and fight. What's the number?

David Buster's 32 million and 896 million for Chuck E's annual revenue. So Dave Buster's 30 million. Chuckie Cheese almost a billion dollars annual revenue. But definitely ripe for like, something new because these things are stale. Is Chucky Cheese public? Just say it's a public company? Trying to buy stock?

Well, I want to see what the income is. Trying to buy Chuckie Cheese, you know? No, I'm into this. I think that these things are cool. I think I'm terribly into it. When I tried Oculus, I was like, I'm going to quit my company and only do this. By the way, random story, I found this YouTube channel once that was talking about all these old brands that are just gone to shit, like a Chuckie Cheese.

And he was like, this guy just short stocks. And he was like, my short pick of the. year is Tutsi Roll. And he's like, you ever met anyone who likes Tutsi Roll? I love him. He's like, people who like Tutsi Roll are all 35 and up. He's like, no kid wants Tutsi Roll. They go out for Halloween. They're a public company. If they get Tutsi Roll, they throw that shit away. He goes, Tutsi Roll has no other products. It's just Tutsi Roll and their population is dying. He goes, secondly, the owner is like some 76 year old woman who will never sell the company. So nobody can turn it around. Nobody can change it. That company is just going to die. Tutsi Roll is a

private company? Is it a public company? And so he was like, he should short the stock. So I watch this two minute YouTube video and I was like I took out a short position. It did great. It's been awesome. That's badass. Is it public? Link over here. Yeah, this guy. No. They tried to go public and it collapsed. So another thing that I would do, I love this. I would also, uh, six flags has had a hell of a turnaround. A positive. So, uh, the guy who, there's this guy named Bob Pittman and he was one of the inspirations for me starting to hustle because Bob Pittman, um, was he created MTV when he was in his 20s. And then he went and started this thing called the pilot group, which launched loads of different email newsletters, including thrillists, which is like a huge thing. It's like a

billion-dollar media thing. Anyway, Bob Pittman is now the CEO of IHeartMedia and formerly was also the CEO of Six Flags and he turned it around. And it, uh, it does, it's really good. It's been around forever, you know, and it ebbs and flows, but it's good. Yeah, I think entertainment, uh, can always level up and when you're leaving the house to go do something, the more immersed, the more exciting it is. It's like, that's what you want. Like, I can get all the rest of the stuff at home, but like, that's why I think sandbox is fantastic. Like, the only negatives I've heard is, hey, I've gone to it twice. It was similar content, but they're going to work that out.

They're going to keep growing it. I think it's going to be amazing. I love this. The spinoff of this idea for the lazy people that I have. So I was like, okay, you got to go to this place and go go car. I'm like, all right, what's the other? Yeah, why can I stay at home? Correct.

If you replace the carts with drones, and you let people sit out. at home on a controller and control these drones real life drones are flying around this warehouse and i'm fighting you and again same thing is all digital so i can hit something shoot you your drone just like flies and breaks you got to go and start over again so there's a pit of people who just go pick up okay so all right i have i can add to this there's this guy i know um i don't know if they're public so i won't i won't talk about them yet but anyway he's got what he what they did was in Vegas or in Nevada where it's really cheap, they bought something like a hundred or a thousand, a significant amount of claw machines. You know claw machines? Like for arcade machine? Yeah.

And you download the app and you pay a certain amount of money and you can you control the claw machine remotely and it picks up the item and drops it down to the thing. And then you just get huge in Japan. You just get emailed like a gift. They mail you a thing. I don't know if they, I don't know what the mailing system is. I don't know if you actually get mailed that thing or if it's a gift card that you get sent. But I saw my friend doing this on his phone. I was like, what are you playing? What game is that?

He goes, oh, there's an arcade in Japan and I'm controlling the claw. So. I was like, what? Yeah, this is crazy. We had talked about it at some point. Okay, but here's how my buddy's building this business. He's building it to be like, like, like, H. He's building it to where it's going to take off and they're going to capture all

the value and it's just going to slowly die. I guess he's a known fad, basically, is what you're saying. Like, he knows it's a fad. Yeah, which I love. I like those things. But that's always building it. You can do it on like Wish products because they're so cheap that you could kind of like have a description thing where it's like, hey, you have to get one random wish product. That's what Wish should do.

You're browsing Wish and after two minutes, it's like, enter bonus round. You have the claw in our warehouse, pick something up. I'm into this. I think it's cool. All right, what else you got? Okay. So have you guys used? Wait, hold on.

Here's what we'll do. Actually, in the next couple days, I'll come prepared with some Six Flags and Chuck and Cheese numbers. Okay, cool. I'm interested in this. I want to hear these numbers too. I want to know what the startup costs are of for sandbox VR. And I'm curious, tweet at us if you like, because we nerd out on like, I wonder how that business does.

And we go look up the numbers and figure out who this guy is, who's Bob Pittman and how much income do they make? I don't know if we're unique in that. But if you like that stuff, like either in the Facebook group, just my first million or on Twitter, tell us if that's like, just be like more of that or less of that. Just be honest. Yeah, that's great. You can get your listeners tell you what they love. We'll see what happens. Yeah.

Because that's the weird thing with podcasts. You don't know what they want. What else? So in general, like, I look at themes. So it's like, okay, Apple releases a bunch of random devices. So I'll call them AirPods, not really random, but this Apple pencil. I don't know if you guys have seen this. I have one.

Yeah, what's $125? It's expensive. And like the iPad Pro is expensive. But then I'm like, great, this new capability is there. What product exists for it? And so, you know, recently I've been kind of playing around a lot with the iPad and I'll kind of try to show you guys this. I can hold the mic. Do you use, are you one of the, like, computer, you get rid of the computer?

you get rid of a computer only use iPad? I'm... I think that's weird. I think it's fucking weird. It's... I like this in certain cases. Like, when I'm traveling, it's a lot better than me lugging around my laptop. Did work pay for that? No, this is mine. So, I just... For kind of the like to submit expenses,

like reimbursement? Like, when we sold people, how many unreimbursed things? How much dollar amount did you have? That is like the tens of thousands. Yeah, yeah. It's definitely in the five-digit range. I should be better at that. Adam did that. I had to pay him five grand not because he didn't like submit shit life has been good to me so I'm not really not stressing

anything yeah um but the general theme is like new hardware comes out what can I do with this yeah that's the general theme and so one of the things I've been playing with is this app called flow and it's basically like this kind of whiteboard app right and so it's kind of hard to show obviously but the idea for me was you know you sit in a meeting room right and you you you love the whiteboard You love getting up and move. Yeah, he does that shit all the time. You like getting up. I like to get my Steve Jobs on.

Well, he always has like analogies over shit. He's like, we're trying to build the race car, but let's start with the bicycle. Yeah, that is the analogy that we go in. And so the idea was, okay, you take this kind of experience with the iPad and pencil, but this whiteboard over here should just be digital, right? So if I want to show you something, I just heard from here, and it just shows up there. You're like, no, no. And you want to kind of feed off of it.

And like, we could just have our own. Okay. So for those who can't see what he's saying, so you've basically saying, you got a little iPad. in front of you, a little tablet, you're in a big meeting room. You should be able to quickly sketch something or write something or draw something, and it just used the whiteboard as a display like it's a TV, basically. And then it's remote-friendly, so everybody can get the same whiteboard experience, because, I mean, what happens?

If you're remote... That happened to me yesterday. I was remote conferencing in. The guy gets up, he's like, here's what this really means. He drew something on a whiteboard. I can't see. And everyone in the meeting was like, oh, yeah, that makes total sense. And you're like...

I'm just a little bit of video conference. I've talked to a bunch of people. So, do you know this guy named Wayne? I forget his last name. He sold something to Twitter. Yeah, they're doing digits now. Ma. Is it Ma?

I think it's Ma or Ha. Anyway, I was talking to him. He said they're 100% remote and I was like, how do you do that? Because we're struggling with this whole whiteboard thing. And he was like, man, there's this one app that they never update. And that's kind of what we've hacked together to use. This is a problem. Yeah, I think people are going to remote work both because there's really good talent elsewhere.

That you're like, man, this is a perfect fit, but you're not here. And that's not a good enough reason anymore. And then the second thing is just cost. Like if you're in their city, like people, they kind of don't like, you know, they don't want to pay that much for their house. So just basically making the whiteboard to work for remote workers. Yeah. Or even if you're here.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, I still want a big view of it if I'm here. Like, if we're all here, we want to get that. That's badass. I'm into it. So the pencil and the iPad, I think, is a good combination to that to where people will have that around.

I think it'll become more common. Now you can kind of connect all these groups together. Right. So last podcast, I was saying meeting tech. Stuff that makes meetings more effective and efficient because all. all like so many billions of dollars are spent in people's time in meetings. Do you know how cheap? I mean, it would cost way less than anything to make this.

You know, okay, this is a screen. This is a 55 inch. I think out there we have a 65 inch TCL 4K or no, we didn't get the 4K, 1080P. You know how much that costs? It's like $3.99 now. No, no, no. It was like $2.50 or $180.

It's like. It's probably cheaper than this white. That's the retail price. Yeah, like on Amazon, I bought it for. think for sure less than 300 maybe less than 200 yeah i believe it screens are really cheap and so where else can you put screens and i think you can actually enhance the meetings if somebody puts up slides i want to write over the slides like i i think you unlock more capabilities than just supplement what you have today and i think that that's where this will become superior than us going to the whiteboard

with you know those expo pens and kind of writing there right so meeting tech yeah meeting tech i didn't get it yesterday i mean i was but now you're getting it you i didn't have you i didn't have a good example He said a meeting in a box. Yeah, it was bad. It was bad. I liked your other idea of the meeting. You know, the ARR. I was trying to get to that, but then I fumbled the initial thing.

I said meeting in a box and it sounded stupid to me. And then Lance Armstrong showed up. Yeah, Lance Armstrong showed up, but I felt like a chump. It's a meeting in a box. That was fucking stupid. Yeah, fuck Becca. The other one I like is, so everyone has AirPods on now, right? And I think AirPods did one thing like Apple does really well is,

nobody wanted to walk around with a Bluetooth headset, right? I think we all agree you didn't look cool. You look like tacky. It was a known douchebag thing. Yeah, it was like having the cell phone on your belt. Yeah, great analogy. Perfect. And so I was like, great.

People have AirPods now. And so what else can you build with this? Again, Apple's unlocking capabilities in hardware, so what software can you build? And so there's two ideas. One's mine's one's somebody else's, but I'll take it as my right. Yeah, exactly. Whoever says it, it's theirs. Yeah.

By the way, Apple or AirPods, what did, how much? 10 million units. is the last X amount of time. So what's that? Is that $10 billion in sales? Yeah, just multiply by, let's say, $100. It's $1.00. It's a $1.00 plus in sales, right?

Yeah. Yeah, it would be a Fortune 500 company. Yeah, I agree. It's fantastic. And so one of the things I was thinking about it was great. If I have these on all day, can I just have this on kind of connected to like my wife or like somebody, right? So whether you do it for work or for a personal, you always have it on, there's no audio flowing. But then if I'm like, hey, Sean, what's up?

It knows, do you have your AirPods on? If it doesn't, it tells me, hey, he's not there. but you can record a message, you'll get it later. Right. But if you're there, you'll just hear my audio, and you still aren't on yet. You kind of opt in again to be like, yo, what's up, man? Right.

It's like, how do you take the phone call away from like that? And you're like, I'm not going to give this capability to everybody. There's a couple of calls people in my life, like my wife that I'm going to be like, great, I just want to have this on and this capability that's there. And so. It's like in the office. They do this in the TV show the office. Oh, yeah.

Jim and Pam have their thing. Just constant. Yeah, this is good because it's not, it's not on when you don't want it. So let's say I have my iPods in, you have yours in, and I'm walking around, I'm at lunch, I have this idea for the podcast. I basically just say, yo, Sam, what we should do is we should do this. And then you basically receive, but you're not sending back unless you say, whatever, the keyword, like how Alexa works, right?

Like, it's like Sean or whatever. And that's way more lightweight than me picking up my phone and starting to type or phone call, like who wants to do that, right? Yeah, phone calls feel weird 100% right now. Yeah, I'm less bullish on that than the first two Okay, okay, we'll do that The second version of this idea with AirPods was You know Farsa, right?

Yep, what is it? Oh, you're homey? Yeah, one of our friends And we're doing a small hackathon at the house And he's like, coming up with this idea again for AirPods Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, you're doing a hackathon at your home, like for fun? Yeah, just for fun Damn, maybe

You do this like every week, right? Or like two weeks? Like, so what do you guys do? Like Jake's here, Jake, did you go to the last one? Yeah, we just kind of, of sit around a table, we're on our laptop, we're talking about ideas, we come up with something and we just kind of try to make it. Usually you don't end up finishing on the first one, but then the second one you try again, the third one you try. God, fucking nerds of the best.

Jake, what'd you build? What'd you build at the last one? You want me to talk about it? Yeah. Yeah. So Jake was making this thing where he was like, it'd be cool if you could test your website from like locations around the world, but it would like video record what it looked like and how it loaded. So not only do you get this like technical Not a number. Yeah, and you can show people, this is how crappy our website looks like from some random country or in the U.S. and what it looks like for other people. And so that's awesome.

Yeah, that's really awesome. Everyone's kind of testing numbers, but I mean, we're a visual. Yeah, what you care about is, oh, look how long that took to load. Look how shitty this looks on this device. Have you heard of user testing? Is it user voice or user testing? You know user testing? That's like a $150 million of your business.

Shout out to my mom works at user testing. Really? It's huge, right? It's big. It's, they're trying to go public. So that means they're at that scale where they're doing 100, 100 million plus. Yeah. And all they do is there's someone in the Midwest who's cheap.

Screen records. He goes, all right, well, let me look at your website. Okay, I'm scrolling down. I don't really know what this means. So that's more about like confusion. This is more about performance. No, but they, but they, but they, they, they're similar. They're similar issues.

Yeah. And I think, you know, today he's looking at it like a performance tool. Like how do you kind of make it load well? But I think you could totally look at it and apply some machine learning to it where it's like, this doesn't seem to work well. It's below the fold on these devices, right? Like some of those things when you design it and then you like put it together, you're not thinking, oh, what does it look like on the iPad?

Right. And then you kind of just show it like that. And then you have a video, but also it could detect and say, man, this is like your main button. That's awesome. It's showing up down here. What are you going to do with this? Good job, Jake. I like that project.

Right here. I'll figure it up. Okay. So what were you saying this? What was the other project? So this idea was around cooking and you're like in the kitchen and you're like, oh, I want to like hear these recipes and things like that. And so, again, your hands are dirty in the kitchen.

Yeah. What do you do? You pull out your phone, your laptop. It doesn't make sense, right? Like, and so the idea was you have your AirPods on. It kind of walks you through the steps and you can go next, go back. And it's like, you know, a little recipe thing. I forgot the name that you came up with for it, but I think you could come up with a better name for it.

But, you know. Kitchen in a box. Yeah, kitchen in a box. There you go. I think you call it like kitchen pods or something. And I was like, ah, that doesn't. Right. Have you, uh, okay.

So this guy's named Andrew Mason. You know, you know that name? Yep. He started Groupon. He, a few years ago, his second act, he started this thing. Detour. Detour. There it is.

They shut it down and he pivoted to Descript. Descript, a podcast thing. Look at us. Look at us. And anyway, what was the first? Detour. It was awesome. It was so cool.

And this was before AirPods. So, explain what? Did you do one? Oh, I used to do them all the time. But I understand how it wouldn't be huge. But I was a powerful product, not a great business. Yeah. And so what it was is, you know how when you go to a,

museum and you have a guided tour that says like, all right, when you get to this point, press this thing. And then you press the button. You're like, all right. Tell you about it. You see this painting. You see there's a small little, a smudge that you'll see up left. That what happened when you got angry, he did, whatever. So what they do this, but they do it for cities. So it's guided walking tours. But you know, you know this American life. Like, you know how it's like really highly, um, produced podcasts where you can like hear noises. And they did that, but it was GP, it was work at your GPS. And what they would do is they would say, all right, walk past the street, past Bush Street, keep walking. And then it would play

music, and then it would tell when you got there. And it would say, now look down to your right. You see that hole that was there? That actually came here from this time. And it's, it's awesome. It's so cool. He shut it down. Anyway, what you're describing is almost like the cooking version of that. Right. The utility version, which would be significantly larger than the detour version, because the detour, because you cook all the time, the detour version, I would do it on like a, when my wife was out of town, I had nothing to do. And it does suck to have your hands covered in food and then be like, like, oh, let me go to my iPad or my phone and try to like scroll and click and zoom and like figure out this recipe.

How many tablespoons was it supposed to be? Has there ever been a big business built around recipes other than an ad-based media company? Not sure. There's a problem with a lot of these ideas. You start thinking too far ahead. You're like, I don't want to go do this thing because what does it turn into? But I think generally the concept, if you took guided tours like that concept and you said,

what else in my life could be guided? That's interesting. I think there's a couple of very interesting businesses there, or at least interesting. interesting products, right? Totally interesting products. Maybe interesting businesses, too. Totally interesting products. I think there's a workout version of this that's doing all right, which is like you go to the gym and it's like in your ears and it's music. It's telling you what to do. I use it all the time. I'm active. You know what that is? No, I haven't seen it. It's similar. I use it on a regular basis. I pay $100 year for.

Ethan spoke at Hustlcon, uh, tens of millions in subscription revenue. It's what you're describing, but it's for working out. So I think if you have a great product in a space where a lot of people are doing it, you can come up with the business plan, like 100 bucks a year that matches some... I agree with you. So people cook, people go to the gym, like, what else are they doing day to day? Like, I think guided meditation is another one. Oh, yeah, there's the model.

Right. And so there's probably five others in that space, but I think AirPods made it different than Bluetooth headsets and headphones, you know, like... So here's a little guided meditation one. Yeah, I know. That's why we bring him in. That's why he gets the seat. For guided, for meditation, a lot of people don't like to sit and meditate.

Like, it just doesn't do it for them. Their mind races, all this stuff. And, like, the answer right now is like, no, that's the point. Do it. And, like, sure, that might be true. But for a lot of people, what it means is like, fuck this. I'm going to do something else. And so there's all these other types of meditation, like transintendental or whatever

where you're chanting. It's like a little more active. And there's all kinds of meditation. Hiking is meditation. Exercise is meditation because you're controlling your breathing in a certain way. You're clearing your mind space. And you, you know, you're freeing your mind. And so.

I'm curious if somebody can do this sort of detour version that's about walking. And, you know, it's basically guided meditation, but it's active, not sit down on a pillow and do nothing for 30 minutes or whatever it is. Yeah, like when I would do those detours, you did them, right? I never did one. Well, we did one where I went to the Castro and it was all about the AIDS epidemic. And you got to know Harvey Snow or Harvey Snow, what's it, Harvey, Harvey Milk. You know, the gay activist that was like killed, whatever. he was a gay activist that was murdered and it was during the 80s when the whole AIDS thing was going on

and the guy talking he was like now this is the last time that I hugged Harvey before he died and then he's like now this house up here like these guys lived here and on top these guys lived here they all died and I was like so emotionally right okay that gets me thinking you know I think this would be not I don't think this would work but like you know yesterday you and Lance Armstrong were both like the podcast I like best are these true crime ones what if you did a true crime version of the detour thing where it's murder mystery kind of creeps you the fuck out as you walk around that's cool with real crimes from your city yeah or you have to so we on trends we did a report we did a report on this these app what are those what are those calls again the uh you know

I'm talking about uh give me real no uh like these serialized video apps uh that uh fucking the lady who started it she sold her thing to songify uh man I got to remember what it was anyway You get, it's like choose your own adventure app. Okay. For Thriller novels. We're watching things. Basically, we did a report on it. Our hypothesis was that actually the erotic novels, romance novels, is the biggest segment.

Oh, you're talking about Hooked. Hooked. Yeah. Yeah. Hooked. Anyway, I think it's a, I don't know if it's a great business, but it's an okay one. They scaled up revenue. Hooked was doing, I think, $20 million plus in revenue.

Yeah, but I think return was stupidly high. Yeah. Anyway, what we're describing is, And when we did the report, it was romance novels and thrillers had the highest performers. Here's a general principle, though, like, Hooked is the modern day goosebumps. So when we were growing up, we would read goosebumps books, and that was what hooked us as a kid and you love to read. And Hooked said, well, now every kid's got a phone. What if we delivered this through this kind of SMS format, but it's these like scary stories, goosebumps style.

And what you were talking about earlier with like, you know, Chuck Echee's modern day. If you're trying to brainstorm ideas, this is one format to think about. What did I love as a kid? What's the modern day version of that? That's a great framework. People's desires tend to stay the same. It's the tools, the technology that updates

and opens up new opportunities. That's a good framework. Can I ask you about App Lovin? Yeah, I got one more idea. Oh, go for it. I'll kind of plug a company I invested in two. So I invested in this company called Lucid Dron. I think I told you about it.

They basically created a drone that can window wash big buildings. And so instead of sending like a 5% crew and a scaffold and whatnot. Where did you find that? They were a YC company. So, you know, YC produces still fantastic companies. I like these guys because it was like, we got this, you know, it's not just drone tech.

God. But it's like, that is awesome. Specific application. Yeah, specific application. And then you think about it, you're like, yeah, five people hanging from a building or one guy working the drone from the bottom and washing it. Are those legal? Yeah.

And so they're out there in a couple of cities. I think there's going to be small regulations. They're going to have to go. But this makes sense. It's a lot safer and a lot better. When did they go come out of? saves you money if you're the building owner, safer than having humans up there trying to wash windows, sad way to lose a life. What a bold idea.

Great idea. And what they did is they actually stopped. So they tried to go to the building owners and they were like, oh man, the building owners are like, well, we have a service. Like, you know, it's too complicated. So they went to the guys who were servicing the building. They're like, hey, I can make your business more efficient. Instead of sending five guys out per job, you could do five more jobs. Instead of renting this crazy scaffold, you just lease our drone.

And it's like, you make their business more valuable. You're not taking their business. and then you don't have to go to all the building to building sales. Oh, my God, I love this. One way of looking at it was, oh, we're going to put those guys out of business. Instead, you're my customer. Correct. We make you more efficient.

Exactly. And I think that's some of the best tech I see is that. It's not about replacing the whole workflow. It's like, how do we make these people more efficient? How do we allow them to have more capabilities? And then they can do more. They can do a better job. And that's kind of like, I think, what I look for in the emerging tech, especially.

Lucid drones. The other genius thing about that is if you wanted to do this, you would either have to go sell every building, and that's a lot of sales, or if you go to the company, like you said, the company that already does the window washing, they might have already 50 clients.

So now one sale gets you 50. Man, that's badass. I'm big fans of boring things. Like window washing, I think that would be right at my alley. And to add this thing to it would be neat. If you told me that someone had that idea, I'd be like, what?

No. It's really interesting. And so my spin-off, the remix of their idea was, probably you guys, I don't know if you guys, you have a car, right? Yeah, I have a car. Great, you guys both have a car. So I thought maybe none of you guys would have cars out here in the city.

But I never washed my car. I never go to a car wash. Me neither. If I could just have a little drone that sits in my garage that can come up, wash my car for me every so often. Or if you're in a place where it snows, how do I pour some water in the windshield? I don't got to go do that and I can get into the car.

Like, that's what I like that. So you know this was like a huge failure cherry. But that was humans. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is a Rumba. Yeah, no, I'm not saying.

Ringo that washes your car. Totally. That failed. But I looked at like the background of why I was like, that's so stupid. Who would unearth think that was a good idea? It's a big thing in a lot of different countries. That and check this out. Bringing gas to your car.

Bring gas to you, yeah. Bring gas to you. In foreign markets, that's like the way that gas works. So car washes, I say wash funny. I always have to tell people when I say it funny, get prepared. Car washing. Can you not say wash? I can't say it's a Midwestern thing.

wash. I was like it's easier. It's easier. Car washing. Than giving the disclaimer. No, I can't say. I can't say car. I, no. You just can't do that. My mouth is like L. Now you have your interview questions. Car cleaning. If somebody says like, what's your greatest weakness? It's like, I can't say what. Ars. Rogue Ars that just make their way into my words. It's a Midwestern thing. A lot of people say it. Anyway, that's interesting. But I never would have thought. I, I, that's kind of cool. But how on earth. Could you build a machine that does it?

I mean, that's the thing. Does the drone need to be pretty smart to do that or now? You know, I think the thing I like about this technology space right now is a lot of the research work is done. And so people have made drones that can fly that can follow you. Like there's literally Skydeo. Yep. It's a thousand bucks. You go running in the woods.

That's their like demo video. And it follows you. If you haven't seen this demo video, search Skydio. Is that bullshit though? It's amazing. You literally go, you like throw the camera in the air. That other one failed. Yeah.

These guys say they can do it. How about this? Go on YouTube and look up the users who are doing this and they're recreating it. And you can see it works. Okay. And so. Like snowboarding and skiing and stuff. Yeah, snowboarding is another one.

I mean, GoPro was like one step up. But now if you got this drone that can follow it around. God, I love this shit, man. Drones and VR just. We need a drone filming this. That's just, whoever's talking,

it just turns to them and just does the cut. It just picks up the right mic and the right person. I had one of the first DGI ones and it fell out of sky at a thousand feet. It ruined it. That happens. But a lot of this technology, there's been so much research work done that's moved it forward. And I think it's at the spot now where it needs application engineers and not that same. You know, you don't need to be a PhD with computer science and all these math degrees to go create this technology.

You take the work that they've built and they've kind of established and then apply it to these things. And so flying a drone is trivial now. Building a drone is trivial now. And then the software is easy to program a drone to fly. object recognition and computer vision is easy now. And so you combine these two that's called easier technologies now because of all the research work that was done. And then you can kind of create this product from it. And so I built these small drones, they're like these little four-inch drones.

They're able to fly around. You have? Yeah. Yeah. I programmed my own flight controller. That one didn't work as well. I used the pre-programmed flight controller. That worked a lot better.

But I get really excited about these technologies when I, without a college degree, without a deep technical expertise, can go and learn about it. And I really just use Google. That's my source for everything. How old are you? I'm 35. You're one of the more interesting people I've ever met. Okay, great old. Wow.

He's blushing. He's blushing. Look at that. He's not interesting. He's cool. I mean, he's interesting, but he's bad assessing to you. He just, my interests align with yours, but he's more intelligent and more technically savvy.

And he could actually make the things that I wish I could make. Yeah. Can you talk about App Levin? is you said something. So the other day, I was talking to someone about businesses and I'm like, when it's working, do you know it's working? What's that feel like? And you made a comment earlier, like, it's the first time I've ever seen where just, this is what working feels like. Right. What, what, what was that like? It's, it's the feeling of like, like, uh, like when you, when you're, you know, slamming on your brakes in the car and the car is kind of doing its own thing.

And you're like, I'm not controlling the car. It is just flowing on its own. It's like, it's that feeling where, you know, you build all these products. And even at Apple, when we did nine ideas before that, I've done this for a long time where I'm just trying to idea after idea. I try to get people to use it. And you're looking for all these good signals and you're trying to spot it. And then when it's really working, it's not about spotting it. It's so obvious that there's no question that it's working.

And so it's all the charts are flying up. But then every day you're not even like, man, is it working? Is it not? It's so obviously, I got to do X, Y, and Z to solve, you know, these problems that are coming up kind of day in and day out. And so it's definitely a feeling where the, pull from the market is so strong that there's no middle ground. I always thought it was like, oh, I'm going to kind of realize when I'm close to it, but it's actually very binary. It's like,

you're here and it's not working and you're trying to push into the market, which you need to do. But when it happens, it just kind of takes off. And, you know, I just, I don't have really good analogies for it yet except for that. Like, it just, it's like the loss of control. The market is in control almost. And you're just like trying to catch up and like, you know, get into that mindset of like, okay, great, this is working. We're going to keep like pushing whatever we need to do. to kind of support this case. What was the revenue growth? I mean, you guys were at zero. Then was it like one month? It could have been like 20 grand. The next month there was like a million. I mean, was it that substantial? It wasn't that crazy. But I think the interesting thing that I learned was

there, you know, there were a lot of players in the market where you'd go to this weather app, right? And the weather app would do like, you know, you never realize the scale of some of these apps even at that time. It's like, man, this thing is doing 200 million, you know, impressions per day. And I'm like, a weather app? Like, really? Like, why is it so big? And then you're like, great, if we get this customer, these things can happen. And so I think, uh, a weather, the weather app is how many impressions? I think, I forgot which weather app it was, whether it was a weather bug or the weather app, but it was like, 200 million impressions a day. Like, and I was like, I was really surprised at some of the scale of some these apps. And like, you know, yes, we had the best ad platform. Yes, we made, you know, we made all

these small tweaks to the product to like make it work better. And we made our server scale and we did all these things. But I think to me, the fascinating thing was there were all these major players. You didn't actually realize how big some of these opportunities were. And kind of working at Apple Oven, I was like, wait, I want to go do this. And like, when I left there, it was like, I'm not like a huge fan of like ad products. Like, naturally, that's not the product that I get excited about. I love money. So I like, great. It's a fantastic business. I like that. And I was like, oh, I'm going to go make these apps and games that are going to go do this. And actually, that's how I ran to Sean. I think he had checked out one of my games after, I think we connected

to an angel list. Is that right? Yeah, I saw I'm on Angel's and I was like, something doesn't add up. Either this guy's full of shit, because who would leave this company that's crushing it? Like most people, when you finally hit a grand slam, you want to do the victory lap and people stay for seven years. And then they write this cheesy letter about how great the journey has been. And they're finally ready for their next chapter. He basically left after three years.

You weren't even fully vested, right? Yeah, I left a little bit on the table. Again, I'm not complaining because everything's been fantastic. But it was something counterintuitive. I was like, why would this guy leave either? He got kicked out. he got fired he's not good blah blah blah i was like or this guy's amazing he really just does love his story was like i just love startups i want to build something that consumers use not really an ad

tech platform and he was like i was interested in mobile because i saw how big these mobile apps were on our ad network so he locked himself in his bedroom and it's like i'm gonna learn mobile in the next six months and he just built a bunch of android games and then i saw him on twitter tweeting back with people who played his game and i was like dude none of my developers all the developers i have in my company that are great. None of them would ever go tweet at a customer and be like, hey, you know, I'm going to fix that bug. And I can make this better. Hey, what do you think about this? So I was like, there's something different about this guy. What apps were you shocked at how big they were? A weather app is 200. The casino game apps. I mean, that's not shocking. Is it?

The size of it was definitely shocking just because you all assumed they're big and they're addictive. But then that and then Candy Crush and their initial rise was there. the first time in the industry where I heard, like, man, like, this thing is a money printing machine. It's like, you know, they would, you know, and not all of this was at Apple and it's like, once you're an ad tech, you're like learning about the industry, you're meeting other people and you're like, hey, these guys are willing to just blanket pay eight bucks for a user in the U.S. And I'm like, okay, well, that seems pretty expensive. Like, why are they doing that? And like, how much are they making? Eight dollars is what they were spending?

Yeah, I think at that time, it was like, hey, for like a male, you know, 18 to 35 or something, It might be $8 or something like that. And then on the other side, I talked to somebody over there. And I'm like, they're like, yeah, dude, we make like 20 bucks on them like in like seven days. And I'm like, and maybe those numbers are slightly off. But like, they were making a multiple to where you were like, wait. So you just have this machine where you just press this button and you put in money and you know, seven days later, three times more money come out.

And I'm like, wow, like, how do I get that? I don't empty my bank account every single day to go do that. Well, you guys had that a little bit with Applevin. Yeah, Applevin had that. I mean, I didn't have that, right? I don't have the same mechanic. Obviously, you're at this company, you're vested, you have a shared interest in the long run. But, you know, me being me, I was like, I want that.

Like, I want the ability to have that. And then the freedom to work on things that I'm really excited about. And so I tried that. Obviously, it's a lot harder than just, you know, one person in their bedroom doing it. But what did Adam at Loveon say? Was he like this just, we had no idea or was he methodical enough to see? Adam is so fantastic at execution that it's just like, he's like a machine. It's like, you know, when, when.

the thing I really loved about him and the things I learned the most from him were like when you wanted to go do something like you know sometimes you're like oh man man this situation isn't working and Adam's the CEO of Appleovan yeah CEO of Abloven uh and you know you have these situations where it's like uh I got to go do X or you really feel like you got to go make this move this deal is bad maybe this hire was bad or this higher was good or something like that. I'll go ahead of it. I'm going to wait on it a little bit after deciding and you kind of create some time what's a good time to do it. Ramo's like okay we'll just go do this now like we'll stop it. And then you know the other things like that were you know I started there as kind of an And then very quickly, he was like, oh, you could run this team. You could manage the whole team. I was like, great. We talked. And then that's kind of always been my experience that like that never really gets communicated. And then it feels like, oh, I'm like the manager, but not. Like, I think a lot of people end up in that situation, especially in companies.

And then like the next morning, it's like a meeting with the whole team. He puts the org chart up. And then every time we changed it, it was the same situation happened. He was so clear and effective with his communication and execution that I was like, like, I really need to be like that. Like, that's what like, I think a plus execution looks and feels. like day in and day out. And it's like it's not emotional. It's very logical. It's very quick. And I think speed in these situations helps create clarity because when you or the other way around,

clarity help create speed. Yeah, or both, right? Like, you know, and I think clarity in the sense that if you delay it, your team becomes unclear. And then it gets a little muddy. And then you're like, wait, what is what's going on here? Why is this guy kind of acting like that and that person not? And I think just being very fast and quick in that execution. Once you decide, you should go and execute it. And I think that that's the thing that I learned is like how quickly can you do that and how effectively can you do that, whether it's an email. And I'm really not good at this. It's kind of one of the reasons I pointed at it because I see myself kind of like, oh, wait on this a little bit or send this email tomorrow. I don't want to open up this kind of work right now.

And then it's actually, that's the exact opposite trait. It's like, just go have a bias for action and kind of go do that. And so from him, I learned just just an amazing amount in like, How do you operate at this level? And I mean, since I've left, they've grown so much that it feels like I was only at the 1% of it. Like, I feel like I don't know 99% of the story anymore because they've grown well beyond that. They've expanded into other areas. They're really big now from the revenue side. They're really big now from, you know, what their marketplace is and they're very well known.

And, you know, I kind of get all the benefits from being there a long time ago, which is great for me. But, you know, I'm sure there are more learnings that I missed along the way. This whole monologue on App Lovin, that's going to be our clip. Nice. That was a good one. Cool. We should wrap for today. That was awesome, man.

Furcon, works with me across the street. So anytime we want to do this again, we can do it again. So we'll have people. We'll put your Twitter handle in the notes of this. And so people can follow you, get, you know, tweet at you, whatever after this as well. And we don't know. I'm so uncertain as to how many listeners we have. But I do know that last time I asked for reviews, we got a few hundred of them in a handful of

hours to 24 48 hours. So if you like this one, tweet at him. You can say your handle a second and then let us know and we'll figure out what next to do. Yeah. Yeah. My handle is Furkan R on Twitter. That's F-U-R-Q-A-N-R. Awesome. Thank you.