My First Million - Silicon Valley OG shares crazy stories from Zynga early days + 3 business ideas

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

Episode 678: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk to Siqi Chen ( https://x.com/blader ), the founder of Runway.com. — Show Notes:  (0:00) Early days at Zynga  (14:34) Business ideas (52:18) Touchy-feely class (1:07:24) Siqi’s favorite interview question (1:12:48) Insane growth of ElevenLabs — Links: • Limitless - https://www.limitless.ai/  • Rewind - https://www.rewind.ai/  • Runway - https://runway.com/  • Hoffman Institute - https://www.hoffmaninstitute.org/  • Pump - https://pump.fun/board  • ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io/  — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com  • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies! Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

And they said, well, you should not confuse revenue for success. So I said, well, you guys shouldn't confuse a lack of revenue for success either. And then they got, like, kind of upset. Dude, this meeting, it goes in, like, the Silicon Valley Autistic Hall of Fame. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel.

What's up? We got our friend Siki here, founder of Runway. Back of the day, built a company, sold it to Zinga, built another company, sold it to Postmate. has gone viral many times, and there's a lot of people in Silicon Valley who you almost, it's like a film director. It's like, oh, they're working on a new project. You really want to know what they're doing. That's you because you do things with taste. So excited to have you here. Do you have any good stories from early days of Zinga? Because you sold a company to Zinga, back when Zinga was the shit. Did you work with Mark Pinkis? What's he like? Give me a good Zinga story.

Okay, I have a great story. How I came to a reporter Mark Pink is actually. It's not a great story. I have like so many good market biggest stories. So yeah, Zingab by my first company, and I joined his director product on her studio. Wait, can you give the background on Mark? So he marks like a Silicon Valley OG. Did he help fund Facebook to get off the ground? Was that his first big hit?

He did. So he and Reid Hoffman co-owned, bought the six degrees of separation patent from a company all six degrees. And he angel invested in Facebook and but also licensed a patent, I believe, for more stock into Facebook. That patent was basically,

the kind of the social networking patent, right? Like how we're connected, six degrees of Kevin Bacon away from each other. And I think Reed, there's some story where Reed and him realized that if this patent got in the hands of Microsoft or some big company, that they would be able to squish innovation

by a startup by like holding this patent over their head. So they bought the patent, I believe, and just decided we're not going to use it to stop anybody. And then they, I think, parlayed into getting extra shares in Facebook, which is amazing. I think that's what happened, yeah. So when I joined, I was a director of products,

and my girlfriend, my wife, who I recently met, moved to China for some job, work thing. And I was like three months into Zinga, and I was like, oh, I'm not really feeling it. It's not that fun. So I told them I was going to resign and move to China, and they said, hey, why don't we just give you this new job? You know, you can report to Eric Shai and one of their co-founders

and basically be head of product for the company. company. I said, no, that sounds fun. That sounds great. So I did that. So I reported Eric Schreemeyer. He was a co-founder, Zingha. And what happened is a month since I had a job, Eric Shimer stopped showing up to work. Like, wouldn't respond to emails, wouldn't go to work. And I was like, what? And basically, that's when I reported to Mark. And I was ahead of products. And later, the punchline in the story is, the reason why he stopped showing up to work is I later, found out that he decided to become a ninja. Pretty good reason.

That's not what I thought was coming. He literally, he was like, he wanted to start a ninja dojo, and he wanted to undergo ninja training. And so when I... What in the Napoleon Dynamite is this story? How's his ninja career now? He started another social games company.

So give us, at the time, what was Zinga like? Was it like on top, Was it king of the world at the time or was it on the down swing? Yeah, I mean, what's interesting on Zenga is they hired a bunch of people who used to be investment makers to be product managers there because it was just all about the numbers going up. It was Heidi analytical. So I went in and just the amount of knowledge they had about gross. One of the things that really blew my mind I think about a lot is when I first had a commerce view of Mark Pinkis early on, I think maybe during the acquisition, I asked him, hey, what do you do? think about this industry, it just seems really low moat. It's hard to have a competitive mode here

because it's just so easy to enter, you build a new game and for it to expand. And how defensible is it? When I think about his answer quite a bit, because his, I was like, no, this is great. I wonder to be more new intrus into the space because it's free R&D for me. And I just like, okay, that is, that blows my mind. That is next level because he would just so confident his ability to execute. that like anyone who's kind of come in with some new idea, they can just like fast follow it and do a much better job of growing it, which is like what they did, right?

Farmable wasn't a first farm game, poker was the first poker game, and they worked really, really well, at least during a Facebook era. Wait, did he have like Gangus Khan energy where he was like, is he to conquer? Yeah, he did. He did.

I love that. You know, we were working like 80, 90, 100 hours a week of Zinka. And that was kind of an norm. It sort of seems like a waste of talent, though, to have that cocker energy and do it in the lamest way possible. The farm bill? Yeah, like, Farmville? Like, that's when he's like trying to do this on. A few billion dollars, a few billion dollars.

There's a quote by Max Levchin. At the time, Max Levton, who created PayPal is, by all accounts, like a genius computer engineer, single-handedly was, like, fighting fraud at PayPal. And, like, as a one-man army, like, withstood, you know, the attacks of all of these sort of financial scammers around the world. the guy's brilliant. And then his next startup, I think, was Slide. And it was making, like, widgets for Myspace and Facebook where you'd be, like, slide shows or Superpoke

where you throw, like, chickens at your friends when you wake up, you know, by pushing a button and it just slaps your friend with a chicken or something like that. And they go, what was your takeaway from Slide? Slide ultimately didn't fully work out. Sold to Google, I think, for a little bit. But he goes, be really careful what you choose to work on because everything can be optimized endlessly.

So he's like, once we got in that, we could just sit there and optimize and just get the number of chicken slap per day up. So, you know, choose wisely. Should I be optimizing this chicken slapping or should I be doing something else? And I've always thought about that because I found myself falling into the same trap.

No matter what I'm doing, if I'm selling little widgets, my life becomes about selling widgets and I can optimize that to infinity. And people do. If you go look at how any company works, that's what they've done. They've optimized it to infinity.

Dude, when my wife worked at Facebook years and years ago, I remember, like, I was talking to all over co-workers at a party, and I was like, oh, you guys are amazing. You guys are so smart. What are you working on? And they explained it to me, but it boiled down to, they were trying to convince Brazilians to put more stickers on their photos. Like, there was, like, one dog that had a long tongue.

Do you guys remember that fucking dog? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, they were trying to convince that fucking dog sticker to put, or the Brazilian's... It was like the face filter thing when Snapchat came out. And then if you opened up your mouth, a giant tongue, would come out. Dude, I felt like, and they explained that. Like, I kind of bowel.

I was like, wait, so you're just trying to get, like, Brazilians to use more stickers because they share more photos. I felt like a cartoon. It was like, loo-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-what. Like, you know what I mean? I was like, what are you guys doing? I also have a Max Levichin and Slide Story. This goes back 17 years, so I don't think don't mind anymore.

But this is when I first moved to the city and I had this app on Facebook was blowing up. And so some guy who worked with Kitzra-Boy. Kis-R-Boy was, I think, the CEO of, slide at the time. I said, hey, we like your app. You want to meet the team. I said, oh my God, this is amazing. I mean, you're out of college. You can be Max Lepchin. So I go in, we had a meeting at noon, and I go in the slide office and no one was there. Everyone was out for lunch. And I said, hey, I'm here to meet Max and Keith. And I'll like, oh, I'll get out of lunch. They'll be back in half an hour. I said, okay, so we slipped there for half an hour. And then they walk in. And they act like

they kind of forgot there was a meeting, but we go in a meeting room. And we should start talking about what I wanted to do with this app by build, whether I wanted to build the penalty or maybe like join slide. And they asked me how much I wanted for it. I said, well, I have a co-founder, so $2 million, I would probably do it. A million dollars each, I kind of lasted the number.

I'm like, what? Like, I looked at the valuation on app data and the money we're generating. It's not a huge ass, but it's fine. It's too much. My friend at Heel built SuperPoke, which I recently bought, and they said verbatim,

you know, we bought SuperPoke, and he's easily the 8%. or 19 most important person in company now, out of a company of like 60 people. I said, okay, that's a compelling offer. And then I said, yeah, this is probably not going to happen. And I said, you know, we're profitable. We were making a much of money from ads,

so it's cool if you don't want to buy it. And they said, well, you should couldn't confuse revenue for success. And at this point, I was just like really upset. So I said, well, you guys shouldn't confuse a lack of revenue for success either. and then they got like kind of upset so then they got really weird

oh I forgot to mention like I just started a meeting they said something like hey you know there's a recession coming up to each other and they're like yeah there's a recession coming up

and then he said I can't wait to buy all these shitty companies for cheap like I were in the room and we're like what what the hell dude this meeting it goes in like the Silicon Valley Autistic Hall of Fame

And then at the end, Keith was like, hey, Kee, hey, Max, what was your body fat percentage in the PayPal days? And Max was like 8%. And it's like, yeah. And I'm like, look, I'm not the fittest person. But I'm not selling you my company because he's like, you're fitter than me. Like, what is happening? So that was like meeting with them. But the thing that made it all make sense is the next week, I was talking to one of my friends, John, who also had a company building apps.

and he comes to me at some party. He goes, Siki, man, like, you won't believe this. So I just had a meeting with Slide last week. I'm like, really? He's like, yeah, it was so weird because they started a meeting talking about how there's a recession coming up

and thinking all these countries are cheap. I was like, oh my God, it's the script. Dude, it was. In episode one of this podcast, I think my buddy sui told almost the same story. He goes, he gets invited to slide. He sits with Max and Keith. And what they said was they were like,

we want to hire you. And he's like, I don't really want a job. Like I have my app's good. I thought you wanted to like maybe buy it or something. And then he opened the door and he goes, you see all those guys out there? They're going to build your app in like six days if you don't take this offer. And he was like, okay, I'm not interested in this even more now.

Like this is horrible. My app is stupid. What he said, he goes, his app at the time was called like superlatives. It was like you would name your friend most likely to, you know, go to jail or something. He's like, you're threatening me that you're going to take my app. I think my app is stupid. the fact that you think my app is cool makes me think you're stupid

that's what he thought in his head Siki who did you meet I love talking to people to people who have been around a bunch of these folks before they kind of quote made it who is a tycoon or a big shot now that you're shocked by because of when you knew them

when you guys were both younger you're like oh I can't believe they actually developed into such an amazing business person I don't know that I met a lot of people who weren't great other than anything great that were huge later. Who's someone you met that wasn't huge then, but you knew, and why did you know? Oh, yeah. I mean, Drew Houston. When did you meet him? He started a drop box. It was

late 2007 or the 2008. And we were just talking about growth. It's like they had this like college referral plan. So Drew Houston, I mean, Anish, who's Sharon Permanentresen, like, he's, He was just a founder building apps on mobile phones, right? And he would come to my office and we'd talk about it. Oh, probably the best one is Chris Wansfroth. Who's that? He's co-founder's CEO GitHub. And he was a contractor at a PowerSet, which was like this job I took when I first moved to the city.

But he was actually a contractor for my first company, serious business. I had him build this translation layer between Facebook Markup language and my face face market language to see the GAPTA and he was really good at it. and I distinctly remember that we were at 21st Amendment, yeah, or actually the bear brewery, it doesn't matter, but I gave him a full-time employment offer in early 2008, and he was considering it. And the same night, when we're talking about it,

he said, you know, DHH just put Rails on GitHub. And so I think I might work on GitHub full-time. And I was thinking in my head and I was like, the smart thing for me to do is actually shut down my Facebook days business and go work for you, but didn't say that. But I was thinking it. Have you had any massive angel investment wins because you're around the hoop for so long? And early?

Yeah. I mean, the best one by far is Amplitude. And that one was, I was introduced through actually, yeah, someone of Zenga, Matt Oko, who runs Data Collective now, and he introduced my first angel investment after I sold to Zanga. and that like 10x in like 12 months. And so I was playing with Play Money up after that. And he introduced to his team that we ended up being the fourth customer for analytics platform. It's now Amplitude.

And we used it. We thought this is great. This is the best thing we've seen since the Zingha internal tools. And I managed to get into the C-ground. And that IPO that we ended up being a 400x return on that, which is pretty great. Let's jump in with ideas, opportunities. You're an idea guy. What do you think are some cool ideas or opportunities

that you would want to be working on right now? So I built a Zapier, and it's basically categorizes my emails with GPD4 into different labels. So I have this very long front in automation. And I also use a product called Samebox, which also does something similar to filters my emails. But there's been no good version of email manager software, that I'm able to customize the prompt and train it.

So I want to say, hey, here's the things related to my kids. And there's no keywords necessarily. You have to kind of read it. It's like some email to my babysitter or an email from the school. And if it's related to my kids, I want you to put it in this folder. And the idea is I want an inbox for like these different contexts. And so people are doing different kinds of email categorization. What's missing is there's no way to train it.

So I think building some way for a product to understand all of the concepts about your life and organize your stuff starting with inbox will be really handy for me. And I've seen at least 12 companies do this and no one has done a really great job of it. I just tested this product. Have you guys heard of this? I can't think of the name right now. But it was this thing where it sounds insane, where it recorded my screen for weeks at a time and it would see how I'm typing, what I'm saying to people.

and it would give me feedback on the productivity of my day and how it can approve it. Have you guys seen this? It started with an R, I think. Is it called a... Elect or something? Isn't it? Yeah. Rescue time?

No, Sean, you're right. It's the guy who started like a, like a, he's like a guy. He's like been around. He was doing like a pendant or something, right? At one point and then now it's a... Oh, rewind then. Rewind. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rewind.A.I. Is that it? Yeah, they stopped working on it. Now it's a cold limit. Loszinger is working on the pendant now. Yes, I was tinkering with Rewind, and the promise, it's not there yet, but the promise of this was amazing. I was, like, so into this. And it's kind of describing what you're just explaining because we're having to use Zapier and Open AI or Chachypti to, like, kind of duct tape this all together. Their premise was amazing, and that is exactly what I'm looking for.

I got a third one, which is, like, a lot spicier, but, you know, like, this is not a venture-buckable thing, but you know, just character AI and chai and all of these like chatbots that really people are using for sexy chats. I think like someone could, and these things print money, by the way, they immediately generate millions of dollars a month. I thought if I were just in it just to like print money, the thing I would make is something that is kind of like tender, but basically everything is AI generated. So it's not like, oh, you're creating a robot, but it's a fake dating app where everyone is attractive and is super into year. And then you can like, then you can go off of your Tinder app and go on Instagram and have an

Instagram account on actual Instagram is owned by the person that you met on your fake Tinder app. Siki, do you know who Tai Lopez is? He's like the guy who had the infomercial that was like here in my garage. I do know who he is. Yeah. So Ty, one accus – he came on MFM years ago. And an accusation that I learned about, him based off of the comments on YouTube is that years and years before he was whatever he was famous for he owned dating apps and the accusation accusation was that all of the users were completely fake and that it was guys in the Philippines like running it and uh doing exactly what you're describing that's true of the majority of dating apps what do you mean that's just like standard

off-ready procedure like plenty of fish you know like uh a a a seat arrangement, like, that is their business model. They're, like, and in fact, like, outsource men acting as women? Yeah, there's also, like, the webcam industry, like, they, up until Open AI, the companies with the most advanced AI technology is going to be one of these companies, because they are better at creating chatbots than anyone. They have the most advanced technology. I'm not, I'm not kidding.

Like, I know people who work there or run it. they've just developed better chatbot technology to anyone and GPT. That'd be so funny if that's where AGI starts actually. It's not open AI.

It's none of these labs. It's like whatever. Some of these like web cam sites developers in Slovenia. That's not a crazy idea. I mean, isn't that how it typically has been where a lot of the like the vice industries are the ones pushing the,

pushing the envelope? Yeah. Yeah, it's a transformative for only fans, right? Like, I don't know if you read, but like there's, you know, you're a big influence on only fans and you have an army of 100 people who are like typers or chatters.

And the funny thing about them is they're not just chatters that are flirting. They're also basically salesmen. So what they're doing is they're chatting to try to upsell you until that get, buy this video, buy this photo, I don't know exactly, buy the subscription, whatever the thing is. But they're not just customer support. They're actually sales. But they need to come across like they're the original person, which is just hilarious. What do you think that office environment is like?

So I know someone who works in that, and it's just normal. It is like the most boring, cubicle, normal office environment that you've ever seen. That's almost better. It's a job. It was weird. The other thing with the dating apps, I think, that they did was I remember seeing the study about match.com. Because if you were a guy on match.com, you would basically send out, you know, 30 messages and you'd get, you know, one back or whatever. and what they would do is they realize that a lot of guys' accounts would go inactive

because they're not getting replies. And so what they would do is they would basically send, they would show an active person 30 inactive profiles, knowing that that inactive person is not there to reply, but that that will be the notification for that person to come back and reactivate their subscription. They have to pay to go read their inbox and to be able to reply. And so it's almost intentionally a horrible experience for the person who's there

trying to find somebody in order to reactivate all the churned members. And they would basically, in the first 100 matches, they would show you, you know, something like 50, 60, 70 percent of those matches were all just inactive people. They wanted you to send a notification to it to make them come back. Das sounds like a Zinga train PM. Dude, I went to the Zinga office once back in the like heyday. It was the craziest office I've ever seen. Sam, did you ever go to this thing?

Yes. It was right. It was like it shared a building or was next door to Airbnb. and it had a huge bulldog in the front, right? And I think at one point, I think they owned the building. And I think the building was worth at one point more than the company, like, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. Why?

What did you think of the office, Sean? Well, you would go in. There's a giant tunnel, like an LED tunnel you would walk through just to enter. And then when you're there, first of all, there was dogs everywhere. And it was like everybody, it was bring your dog to work. There was just like herds of dogs running around. It was insane. And we met the chef.

and the chef, like the food operation was more sophisticated, just the cafeteria was more sophisticated than any company I'd ever been a part of. Like just the food part was better than my actual company. So like they had a staff of 60 people on the culinary team. They had a roof on the top where they were growing all the vegetables. He had like a giant fridge that was like the size of like a swimming pool you'd walk in and there was cows hanging upside down because they had their own butcher process. They didn't serve soda. They only brewed their own own sodas. Like everything was soup to nuts custom and like just so insanely sophisticated for a cafeteria program. I was like, man, if the food is like this, I don't even want to know

what the actual, you know, like teams that do the work are. And I walked into one PM thing. And it was like a stock market. Dude, his screen had so many metrics fine-tuned in real time where they were running so many tests at a time. And it was like you said, Siki, like it looked to me from the outside, like, you know, the most data-driven operation I had ever really seen. You know, I knew about what we did, but what we did look like, you know, cavemen compared to what they were doing in terms of sophistication of data. The food thing reminds you, like, I was a person we did a petition for us to serve real bacon, and after a few months, we finally started to serve real bacon because we never

had real bacon. It was only turkey bacon because, you know, Mark Pinkus didn't like to kill pigs. But yeah, like, one of the things that people did at Zinga and the product org is we have PM on call, and I've never seen this on any other organization. The PM on call for every game would daily send an analysis of what changed day over day. And so if there's a drop, then you would segment it. And so, oh my God, there's like an anonymous, like 50% drop in Mexico for Farville. And we're not sure why, because usually on Wednesdays at two, it shouldn't be like this. And it lasts a three hours long. And they would have to explain, oh, it's because the World Cup is happening. What comes first? We are with Mr. Bees a few weeks ago. And I had the same question, but he

wasn't able to articulate or answer it. What comes first when you're that data or analytic oriented? Does it, are you that way and scale comes because of that? Or are you, can you only behave that way because you have scale? So it depends on the environment. If it's a data friendly environment like Facebook is, then like Facebook platform is where virality lets you grow from zero to a billion, then data is all the matters. But you can see in the experience, Zazinga that that didn't translate to the mobile industry. Mobile was less about virality. It was just difficult to do your distribution,

a lot more of that creativity, and that's why Supercell had such a creative advantage because they actually built very fun new games. So I think it's completely dependent on environment. If it's hard to get early distribution, then scale makes data more important. But if it's quite difficulty at early distribution, then you want to be creative and innovative

and brand, then creativity matters a lot more. Do you remember any, like, random game change like color red to blue or flashing lights or whatever that just generated like $10 million overnight. I always remember thinking that like the best way to generate $30 million overnight is just to like say, hey, it's going to take you $10 just to unlock the game today. Like we could just like make a not payable and people pay. One of the more interesting ideas is this idea of crew.

So we had this idea of collecting materials and you ask people materials. One of the mechanics that we invented at Zing. is this idea of crew where you, for whatever thing you want to lock, you have to get at least like 20 people to help you, unique people. Because what that did is, what we saw in the data is that when you do materials, you ask same two people over and over again. But if we have a unique spread, then that increases this distribution. And that ended up being like a pretty large boost in the AUs.

Another thing that we saw is like just the power segmentation. And so there was this one day where our, numbers went down anonymously, and I had to figure out, is it like this channel or that channel? It turns out there was one particular typo bug in the drop rate of this particular treasure that was creating a lot of opportunities for people to share.

And so you just spend all day doing things like that. And so it's rarely something like huge, but it's all of the details added together that makes a difference. What were the other business ideas or opportunities that you think are exciting right now? Yeah, I mean, I actually asked Sam Altman to make this, but I don't know how long they're going to take. But I'm doing a lot of medical research.

What? What did you say? He asked Sam Alvin to make this product, he said. Oh, I thought you were like, oh, you had Sam Alton make a list for you to talk about. I was like, no, oh, no, no. We're not that tight. But no, I was doing a bunch of medical research, and I noticed that you can't access paywalled articles.

And so I really wish someone will make a version of deep research that lets you enter your paywall credentials, so you can get full test access. And this goes further, I think. There's just so much data behind off walls, paywalls that you can't get to, and you can only search on the open web. And the more private data you can get access to, the more useful these ages become. So that's like probably the number one thing I've been thinking about. What's the name of the company that's the company that's the same?

It starts with an R. It's based in England. Sean, we've talked to him about a bunch. It's like an acronym. Anyway, it's an academic publishing company in England. And it's like really controversial because I think it has like the second highest profit margin of all publicly traded companies in the world behind public storage. And the schick behind it and why everyone hates it is because researchers at universities

don't get paid anything for this. In fact, oftentimes they have to pay tuition in order to even go to these places. but they take your research and they put it behind like a $30,000 a year paywall. And so it's a very frustrating industry. Yeah, that's the whole industry, right? El Cévié, I think, is the biggest one. And there's a bunch of controversy around that. And yeah, all of these are extremely hard on emerging businesses.

They charge an arm in a lay for access. The researchers get paid nothing. The peer reviewers get paid nothing. All they're doing is just like taking the tats and copy and paste it and putting somewhere and maybe like printing it into a journal. So how would this work? You're talking about like you told Sam Altman to say, hey, can I just give ChatGPT my credentials

and then it can go log in for me and use that information when I ask it questions? So that's exactly right. You would have to do it. How could a founder, well, how would a founder get around that or how would they do this? Yeah, I mean, you wouldn't need access to O3, the full model first because that's what's open reach searches based on.

But, I mean, it's not terribly different. to create something like a deep research. There was a company called, there is a company called Jen Spark. So I'm friends with the founder, Jen Spark. He used to the VP of search at Baidu, which is the Google of China. And they made a version of deep research just using

a different model. And so that's relatively easy to build. I think the storage of the credentials and locking in is a little bit more tricky. Right. It also just seems like somebody could just create like Science Pal or something like that. It's like specifically for researchers, and it's a

chat GPT like interface, but it's specifically trained on or going to access all of the journals, all of the academic research out there for you, and just do it like a vertical thing. Isn't there like a Google for doctors that's like this, like LUMOS or something like that? There is. So there's, so I'm deep in this space. There's a company called Illicit. There's a company called SySpace space. And what they allow you to do is they let you search abstracts were available. And also you can upload individual PDFs too, which also chat Zip allows you to do. But there's nothing I've seen that lets you, this indexes the full text of all these journals with your credentials.

And why are you so interested in, what's all this research for? Is it your daughter? And if it is, what's the story behind that? Yeah. So my daughter was diagnosed with the rare brain tumor last September. And we've been doing everything we can to find new treatments for this. Because it's so rare, and you really get deep insight into the sentence and the structure

of the medical community. And one of the big learnings is that what is available as standard of care, meaning that's what's available if you go to a hospital or you talk to a doctor, and what is available at the frontier, there's a huge gap already.

And then further, when you have a rare disease, just the amount of research and data and treatments available is also just thin, because you need to have, like, enough critical mask for the research to be worth it

so they can recoup the research costs. And the other interesting thing that we've learned is that the IP issues are really weird. So, for example, there's this drug that is FDA-approved, non-prescription, has been out since the 70s to treat pedworms. And over the past 20 years, there's a huge amount of compelling data. This might be a pretty good treatment for different kinds of cancer. And there's been no clinical trials for it because there's no money for it, because you can't patent a pinworm drug. And so all the money, hundreds of millions, billies of dollars are going to new molecules are patentable, even if things are already available. And so once you get into it, is you're like,

wow, this is super, super broken. And so, yeah, I'm doing a lot of primary research in order if I repurpose or drugs that might already exist that could treat an Australia where a brain tumor. It's, you know, there's, obviously this is super serious, and I'm sorry you're going through everything. But also, there's like an interesting logistical thing of like, wait, so you are able just to just research potential cures or ways to help your daughter on your own and come up with a solution? I mean, is that like what you hope the outcome? Yeah, I mean, so there's, I'm not the first founder type of been in the situation, right? So the co-founder of Clubhouse, Rohan, his daughter has a registered disease.

Her name's Lydia, and he runs the Lydia Foundation. And he's going so far as manufacture his own drugs, right? for very rare diseases you can do a lot. There is other people that have done similar things, like end of one cure's exist. And so you can go, this is what I mean, like if you're sufficiently motivated and there's no one more motivated

than a dad with a sick kid, you can go so much further than what is available as standard of care. And so even the last time we met with our primary care team, they were proposing like two particular paths, one involving like pretty aggressive surgery, and radiation, another involving this, like, drug. I proposed a third path, and they were discussing it,

and this is, like, neurosurgeons and clinicians, they came back a week later, it's like, actually, your path things were sets. And the reason I was to be able to do that is, like, because this disease is so rare, I am, like, more knowledge about disease than anyone in the room, because they have to, like, study 50 different cancers, right?

Wow, that's pretty incredible. Also, my experience has been that the doctors, once you get off of the kind of standard of care, and this is maybe I'm projecting just from like, you know, I just had a knee injury. And I was asking the doctor, I was like, hey, like, would PRP or stem cells? Like, is there anything?

Should I take, what's a peptide? Can I put a peptide in there? And he's like, you know, there's not a lot of evidence, you know, that's not part of the protocol. Right. You don't have great evidence. And he was sort of like, my hands are tied. He's an orthopedic surgeon.

He's just like, you know, my hands are, I can only recommend what I can recommend. you could do those things. I don't know. And so then I felt like, you know, I'm on my own here. Have you, once you do this path, are you just outside of the medical system, basically? Are you outside of your standard chain of command with your doctors

and you have to get your own system set up? That's a great question. And I've had an almost similar conversation in the last meeting I was just describing. And so I saw it play out in real time. So the neurosurgeon said, hey, when we did this operation, when we did it for this reason, do it for some other reason, it's not part of the standard of care,

but our primary clinician, she is like, she runs, he's a principal investigator one in clinical trials, the only one of two that treats the disease. And she was like, yeah, you're right, we don't have a lot of evidence because there hasn't been a lot of research into the tumor. And so sometimes you have to argue for first principles, and if it's a fairly rare disease, they're more open to be more creative. And in our case, our clinician was able to convince a neurosurgeon,

this was the right path, or at least it's worth trying. And she told us she was excited to have a partner who seems well informed and is willing to think outside of the box. And I straight up said, I do not care what the standard of care is. I think the standard of care is crap. And she basically said, yeah, I think so too. I just can't say that. Right.

And that's pretty cool that you're in San Francisco too, where hopefully you think that like the open-mindedness or the early adopter mindset like even trickles out to like the doctors and things like that. that's pretty cool that you're around a doctor who's like willing to try some crazy stuff or what's crazy to a lot of people. So to answer Sean's question, like if you do find your own drug, you do have to like show enough research and be well informed enough that someone is willing to prescribe it off label on a compassionate use basis. And so you just need to convince a one doctor. And so if you can't find one, you can find others who's willing to do that. And then you're in the clear.

And it's a lot easier if it's like a fairly serious rare disease. can you tell the story about you tweeted out about your daughter's condition and then this crazy crypto turn of events happened where someone created a coin and then millions, maybe tens of millions, I don't even know how much money was raised. And then people got mad at you. People were speculating on this thing. I don't even understand it. Can you explain what was going on and also just explain, is this just, was there just

degenerate gambling or did you maybe stumble upon a novel way that people, might fund research in the future. I don't know which one of the two it is. Yeah, I think I have a better idea which one it is after some reflection on it. So, explain what happened. Basically, yeah, Christmas, I was going to Japan to ski with some friends and the family. And I was on a flight, and I had a plan to start to go fund me for this lab, the Hinkison Lab in a University of Colorado. So we were donating money to them once this happened because they were the only lab in North America. that researches this particular tumor called the craniopharyngeoma.

And the treatment that we're on, they found. So I thought, okay, for Christmas, I thought it'd be great to do a GoFundMe, use my network, and raise some money for this lab. So I tweeted this thread with this GoFundMe link and that we ended up to raise about a quarter million dollars for a lab, which is like, I think the biggest donation up at that point. But what happened is some people started asking about,

hey, can I donate crypto? And so I said, okay, I posted my ENS, right? My Ethereum name system address. And people started donating a little bit of EF. And then some other people said, hey, do you have a sole address? Because we're on Solana. And I didn't have a sole address.

I was aware what Solana is, but I never touched it. And so the next day, once I landed, I created my first Solana wallet. I created this address and I tweeted out. And basically what happened... By the way, are you big in the crypto world? why were all the crypto guys doing this for you? Just because what's the motivation other than it's good? So I didn't occur to me.

I thought it was people, I had like 77,000 followers at a time. And I'm not big in a crypto world. I've like been on and off accident in crypto. So it's 2017, but never in a major way. I'm not a crypto account that people follow. But I found out why people did this later. And this answers the question of Sean,

like, is this gambling or is this something? else. But anyway, I posted a soft sole address and basically an hour later, I looked at my wallet and the wallet is at $400,000 and it was zero an hour before. So I'm looking at what is going on and it turns out, so someone created a coin called on pump.funk, which is a platform where you can create a coin in literally like 30 seconds. And I was on ETH, right? And I have been active in crypto. This wasn't a thing. For any new token on Ethereum was like a whole process. Now they're shortened 30 seconds. Pump. Fun.

Is that a... Pump. That fun. Yeah. It's crazy. Have you seen this business, by the way? No. These guys made like $500 million a profit last year.

Like more than that, I think. More than that. And so you click a button and you make your own coin. And obviously in the name, there's no hiding that the point of this is that it's a pump scheme. Pump and dump scheme, right? They made $500 million. At least. At least they make a lot of money.

Specifically. That's just like the money. majority of the traffic on Solana. And so people are basically trading these new coins and trading them trying to ride it. And it's basically musical shares, right? Have you guys gone to this website?

It's crazy. It looks like a GeoCity website. Like there's like flashing banners. This is insane. It's all real time. Like yesterday during the Super Bowl, somebody created for Dave Portnoy, instead of bar stools,

a jail stool. Jail stool. And then jail stool ran up to like $100 million or something like that. Like he said, it's musical chair. So you're buying, trying to catch one of these thousand X waves, but it's going to dump. And you just got to know when you're going to get off the train.

And then if you wait too long or you're the one who comes in late, you lose. So it is a, it's like being at a roulette table or whatever where you're, you're just throwing chips at the table trying to hit. Oh, my God. Yeah, it's like the Trump coin, except you can create it in like 10 seconds, 30 seconds. But anyway, that's why people created this coin is because you're looking for these new narratives to gamble on, right? And the more interesting, the more viral seeming the narrative is,

the more valuable becomes. If you're in art early, it could really pump. So anyway, it was $400,000, and I tweeted a screenshot. There's a whole tweet sort of thread where I was like, what is going on? And I kept on adding this to the tweet thread with screenshots on my wallet. And so it was $400,000. I was like, what is happening? If you were trying to explain someone who's traded this coin called Mira,

and there's a billion tokens. and they sent me, someone bought half the supply and just sent it to my wallet. So I had 500 million tokens. And once I tweeted, then an eye check again, and it's now $4 million.

And I'm like, what? And an hour later, it's eight. A couple hours later, it became 15. And at one point it was $20 million, just like the same day. And I got like $40,000. And the market cap of the whole thing, that means was $80 million.

Correct. No, no, I think peak market cap was around $60 million. Okay, and you had $40 million of it. Yeah, because I sold 10% immediately just to, like, capture something, and I sold a bit more in the liquidity pool. So, you know, I got around a million dollars out, but I still owned 30% of it. And immediately, I said, okay, I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but every dollar in my wallet is going to charity.

This is nonprofit. It's not for me. Not just charity. Going to the research lab. Going to research lab. That's researching the potential course to your daughter's thing. Correct. So I said, hey, I'm not going to move anything

without 24 hours notice. I'm going to try to be very transparent about this. And I thought about it and I said, I'm going to start selling $1,000 every 10 minutes until like we're done because I just don't have time to run a crypto project. And, you know, like, I want everyone to know where this is going.

So that happens. and the price started going down, but once we got to a million, what happened in between is, because there's such a big story, a bunch of rare disease organizations started reaching out to me. And they're like, wow, this happened to you.

How do we get in on this? They're on the phone. They're like, did you say pump. That phone? Okay. Uh-huh. Because average budget, annual budget, for one of these organizations like $100,000, $150,000,

just like not a whole lot of money. This is like more money than the community has ever seen. It's a lot of excitement there. So I thought, well, I was signing it with some crypto friends, and I thought, okay, how do we make this like a thing? And maybe we can make this more sustainable long lasting and this idea turning Mira into a launch pad for other rare disease tokens where mirror is a liquidity pair token was talked about.

And so I thought, well, okay, that seems interesting. before I do that, I should probably figure out how a coin works and how you launch one of these. So I went on PAMDAFUN, and I thought, okay, let's find out how one of these works. So I created a coin called Zero, and I entered a description for the coin because you could do that. I said, hey, don't buy this coin.

It literally says, don't buy this coin. It'll never be worth anything. I'm never going to do anything with it. It'll be worth $0. So I pressed a button, and what I didn't realize is because I was on Ethereum for a long time, but I never had a watch wallet. What happened is I was in the background, the most watch wallet in crypto.

So within about 100 to 200 seconds, the market cap of this coin that I told people to not buy in the description. Does a watch wallet mean that you are someone that should be monitored because you're a potential whale? Yeah, people start tracking. Like, oh, what is Vitalik doing with his wallet? What is what is someone who doing with their wallet? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. People want to copy what you do that.

And they think that you're, and they think you're the, and they think you're the demand because your wallet is old or you have a lot in it? Because I was for the main character of like crypto Twitter for like a few days. Got it. Okay. Understood. So there were copy. There were bots like just monitoring what I was doing and doing buying whatever I was buying.

And so they saw this new token. And so within 100 or 200 seconds, the market cap of this token was three and a half million dollars. So I was just sitting there like panicking. and I said, okay, I don't, this is bad. I don't want to have anything to do with this. So I had half of the entire supply, and I sold it. And that was my main mistake. I should have burned it, which everyone would have been happy about, right?

But because I sold, I crashed the price of this token, and people got very upset because it was considered a rug. So now, like, oh, my God, everyone's. And when I sold, I made it. like $80,000, because even though it was $3.5 million in market cap, there's only about $100,000 or so in liquidity. And yeah, I started a threat explaining, oh, my God, I didn't expect this to happen. I got on spaces over video. It's like, I'm really sorry. I'm like, still trying to figure out how this works. And, you know, people don't, didn't care. And what I realized

is just a different community than it was when I was really active on Twitter 2017. Like, People are on Ethereum, they're like very deep tech to people, right? They're like nerdy. And with a Solana in 2024, I didn't realize like it's so much more mainstream. A lot of people maybe have like $50 or $100 and they're just trying to turn into $1,000. And so the amount of emotion there is like very, very different. Crypto transitioned from neck beards to like everybody who looks like Jack Harlow in like four years. The Salana community all has like the line etched into.

into like the side of their haircut or like multiple. It's very different than like the people that got me into Ethereum in the first place. Today I learned, or this month I learned. So anyway, the market count three-half million before I sold, it dumped a 300,000. And as I started talking about my mistake, the market cat came back. And at one point, it was like five and a half, six million dollars. Just because I was like talking about it and people were just, the more upset people were, the more to coin pump, the more money people made.

from the coin. So they were trying to make it like even more dramatic, which I didn't really understand the time. I just thought I messed up and people were really upset at me. So anyway, so then that was like the main villain turn on Twitter and everyone was super upset at me because they saw me as a scammer. So I thought about what am I going to do with this? So first of all, like the $80,000, within a minute, I realized this is a mistake. So I bought back in into the coin and I burned it all, right? So I already was like neutral. And I, that, no one cared because of the anonymity of crypto, they thought I had like a hundred other wallets that was like, that I pumped and dumped on any profit there and I can't prove otherwise.

So I decided like, this is really shitty and I don't want any part of it. So what I decided to do is I got some help from, you know, a friend he used to, or Coinbase and other people who didn't want to be named to do on-chain analysis. So what I set up spaces is, I, actually just going to pay everyone back to lost money on this out of my own pocket. And I'm not even touched a charity wallet. So what we ended up doing is everyone who held in the first 200 seconds, who owned any coins then up until the point 43 minutes later where the market cap fully recovered back to the same value.

If you sold and you realize the loss, I'm just going to airdrop you soul. And it ended up being like $140,000 to $50,000 on my own pocket. And I just paid everyone back, which is never half. on any pump fund coin before. And maybe like 10% of people have heard about this. I tweeted about it. I had to keep our responding because every time I tweet for the next month, someone would say, oh, you're a scammer.

What are you still doing here? And I had to say, no, I paid everyone back. And they were just like not saying anything. This is like a crypto Larry David like thing. Like it's like, this is like you're walking through Times Square. And one of those fake monks put like a bracelet on your wrist. And then like it now expects you to give them like $20. it says, even though we called it a free gift.

Like, this is just, this is insane. So how much did you end up giving to the charity? Yeah, so between GoFundMe, so it was a million dollars from crypto. And just like, I locked a bunch of the mirror coin into a liquidity pool. So it's still perpetually generating. So you bought a million dollars of charity for $150,000, basically? That's correct, yeah. And then we, in total was like a $1.4 million.

We donated more to match, like, the mistake and we added to go fummy to it so end up being one And then the lab actually like triple leveraged it up into the coin they got hooked pumped pumped off fun Would you Sean put give back to 150 like he did?

I wouldn't fuck that I would not have for that situation personally I get why you did it's almost just like dude this is crazy all of this was unintentional people are really mad okay, what's the sort of like, how can I just like clear up any possible confusion?

But I don't think you needed to in this situation, right? You created a coin called zero that you said is, don't buy this. This is going to zero. It's a test coin. And if somebody went and randomly speculated on it using their like, their sniper bots that are trying to track your wallet, you know,

like I wouldn't have given a shit personally. But then again, these, this community is so like crazy that they'll just like make your life hell on Twitter for like the next five years. It might be, might be worth it, you know? just to clear your own conscious, go to sleep at night, you know?

Exactly. I couldn't, it was for me so I could sleep all the night because a lot of these people are fairly low income and the money is fairly meaningful. It was one reason. But another reason is like, people just don't read. Like, I explained this, I mean, the coin says don't buy it. I explained this like a couple different times. And what I realize is like, you just don't read on the internet.

And as far as anyone else knows, because it makes little noise, like, I, the, if you don't read. What it sounds like is, I created a scam coin using my own daughter's name to scam people out of money. Right, right, right. It's crazy. Did you, in the end of this,

is there anything here that's interesting for fundraising for research, or this is just straight, like, I accidentally got into a gambling pool and kind of got some money for research, but this is not a sustainable thing for anybody. I'm still trying to figure it out. So what I'm hoping to make Nira into,

is so the way this works is this is like sort of game theory around, okay, you own a bunch of this coin because this coin's narrative is attached to you, right, in the case of, you know, day porn, pornois is doing something similar with Jail Stool. And in order to turn it into real-world impact, you have to sell. There's no way around that. And so when you sell, then you're just like playing your zero-sum game against the community and they're all going to be upset for you for sure, no matter what.

And so that's a very difficult dynamic. And I think my idea here is like the only sustainable way to do this is to lock a bunch of the token into a liquidity pool. And so that when people buy in or out of it, you get to exchange, you get the fees. And that's not really like selling into your community. I think imagine a version of Dogecoin where every time someone, you know, it's like, Dogecoin is like a couple tens of billions of dollars market cap. But every time someone sells or buys, it creates like up to, could be hundreds of thousands of dollars a day of fees. and which you can then use to donate,

I think that might be relatively sustainable. This is insane. I don't even know what to say. Sounds like a great weekend. No, it was a month. It was Christmas until like maybe, you know, now, and it ruined my vacation. And it's been by far the most stressful time

ever had in my life. Can we do a quick detour? We were at a dinner once, and you talked about some, I think it was a Stanford class you took, called touchy-feely or that's the code name for it. I don't know. And it's something about communication and relationships. And I remember you said this really great thing at the dinner, but this was now many years ago and I don't remember it exactly. But can you say that bit again?

I want to hear it again. And I think a lot of people might benefit from it. So by the way, Siki, how old are you? I'm 41, I think. You look like you could be 22 or 41. I have no idea. Yeah, Asian, no reason. Let's go. Yeah. So I took actually now 12. I took class again since we talked. This class that was based on the Stanford Businessful class called Interpersonal Dynamics, which is the highly braided and most popular class

in Stanford Business School. It's taught by a professor called Carol Robbins, and it's generally known as Tachy-Feeley, and it's famous for every participant at some point will, like, cry in the class. But Carol Robbins is now a co-founder of a group called Leaders in Tech, which provides a same class for tech leaders. So one of the things that you get taught in this class is,

so the purpose of class is to teach you how to relate to people and build connection to other people because people work with other people. And one of the most useful frameworks I got from that class is how to think about your connection with other people and how to develop that connection. And so the two frameworks to connect is one is the two tracks of interpersonal communication and the five levels of it.

So when you're talking with anyone else, there is two tracks. There's a content track and there's a relationship track. So the content track is filled with facts and a relationship track is filled with emotion and a relationship track is what is filled and what has to be filled for a relationship to get become closer and for trust increase. And the way you fill each of these tracks is through the five levels of communication. And the idea is when you are, talking to someone, there's five levels at which you communicate of increasing vulnerability

and death. So level one is what's called ritual, and that is, hey, how's it going? Hey, right? It doesn't really say anything. It's just ritualized greeting. Level two is extended ritual. So that is, how's the weather? How's the gain? Right? It's a longer version of, hey, how's it going? Level three is content. So these are facts. How's the project? Is it late? What are we going to do with this particular idea?

Level four is emotional self-disclosure. So that is when you say something that discloses how you are feeling emotionally at the time. I feel sad. I feel angry. And there's a lot of talk about level four because people think you're doing level four, but they're not. And that's a very common thing that's unique to the English language, which we can talk about. That was a fairly interesting insight. So level five is the deepest one.

And level five is mutual emotional self-disclosure. And it is when you are expressing the emotion that you have about the other person. I feel angry at you. I feel proud of you. I feel disappointed by you. That's the deepest level of communication you can have with another person. And the content track is only filled by things from level one to three. and the relationship track is only filled by level four and five.

And we are taught to really not use level four and five in professional settings, but if you want to build a relationship, level four and five is kind of the only way you can do it. And so a lot of the training is about breaking past the barrier, the uncomfortableness of engaging level four and level five communication. And you basically sit in a circle with 12 people for four days straight. until you like, so you can observe the impact of doing level four or five and not doing level four or five and how you are able to be closer to someone or further away from someone in emotional distance. Has this made your running a company better?

I mean, I would say this is the most impactful thing I've ever done my entire life, like, out of any class. I always, like, as a founder, somewhat see the company in some kind of machine, and I didn't find it. I'm like, you know, mildly asked for three, so I found it difficult to relate to. people, but completely transformed all my relationships, including my relationship with my wife. And so one of the ways, this was even just last week, we had an onsite, and I was able to do a mini version of this with our customer success team, where I just sat, or, you know, I did a very condensed version of this lecture, and then we sat and we just talked for about four hours, and the amount of closeness of people got, inside of people got was transformative. And you wouldn't normally

you know, sit around for a couple hours in a work setting, talk about your feelings, and it's very uncomfortable to do so. And it's intentionally so. Like, it's very comfortable for the first couple of, in the case of a real-life workshop, it's half a day. In the case of us, we had it, like, sort of speed running,

and it was uncomfortable about an hour. But then people were really into it, and it's weird, but everyone at some point was crying about some disclosure that they heard or they've experienced. And as a result, the team got so much closer and a trust increase. That's wild.

So how do you do this in practice, right? Because when you talk about like, you know, I feel angry at you about X or I'm disappointed about Y, I could see myself not having the skills or finesse to be able to do that and let the end result be a positive one versus we start talking. You're upset by this. Well, the other person gets defensive or they push back and say, well, you did that, you know, blah, blah, blah.

And so can you give me an example of a conversation that you had that like maybe here's what I would love. A conversation that typically would have gone like this or maybe been avoided altogether. And instead, here's how the actual conversation went that was useful for you as a CEO, leader, friend, whatever, husband, whichever example you want to choose. Yeah. So the first one is easy actually. So most people just don't have the conversation. Right. So the conversation wouldn't say I'm angry.

you would just be angry and you wouldn't say anything. Right. And people can tell, it's a thing. Like, when you feel a certain way about someone, it gets, it leaks, right? Like, there's a level of even you're not attending to passive aggressive. You're just kind of ignoring the person or it comes off like you're, it's like, oh, my God, it's late again. Right. Right.

Or he didn't do this. And so that's the default. And that's when you have this negative feedback cycle of, well, okay, you already felt a certain way. then you express them unknowingly, and now the other person thinks you're angry at them, and now they dislike you more, and then they do things that you dislike more because they dislike you more, and it just gets worse.

That's what relationship gets worse, and that's like the default. And so if you know that it leaks anyway, then it becomes easier to say, I'm going to express that. And you're going to express it no matter what. Your choice is do you express it with words, or to express it with not words,

but just like passive aggressive behavior? And then you combine that with everyone is entitled to know the things that they know, but they're not entitled to make things up about what other people are thinking. So you are entitled to seeing the same facts as everyone else, seeing the same behavior. You're not entitled to read the minds of some other person and how they're thinking and how they're feeling. But you're 100% entitled to share what you're feeling because those are facts to you. That's reality. And so the mental model isn't,

and this is kind of like typical because people aren't used to expressing this. The mental model is like, oh, if I am expressing this emotion, that means I'm attacking someone. And that is true if you don't express an emotion and you're just acting it out. But if I were to say,

you know, when I see you do this, the story I tell myself is that you don't respect me. And I don't know if this is true, but this is like what I'm thinking of my head. and because of that, I feel angry. And I just want you to know that because I don't know if you know that. I know that you probably don't because you can't read my mind. But I'm guessing you probably aren't intending to make me feel that way.

And I thought it would be helpful for you to share, for me to share that to you so that you are aware of it. I just learned that technique in therapy last week. Amazing. I seriously did. That's a nonviolent communication framework, right? It is. Yeah. It's very connected to that.

I literally just learned that. Yeah, you're sharing information, right? So it's not an attack. Like, if you are genuinely doing it, because you understand that you can't read their mind, but other people can't read your mind either. And so by sharing it is you're offering them a gift of the information. One question, see,

you said something about the English language making it harder. What did you mean by that? So what you start seeing when you're in this class with these 12 people, and you start realizing that, oh, like, I really only feel closer and I get to know someone better when they say I feel emotion,

I feel sad, I feel angry when this happened. And I feel distance when they're expressing that emotion but not saying it. You can tell on their faces that they're pissed off. And it becomes scarier. So then you start learning that, oh, I need to say I feel. The thing about the English language

is that we say I feel often without expressing any emotion at all. And that's some sort of a quirk that's kind of unique to English. So when you say I feel that or I feel like, it is actually grammatically impossible for that sort of be an emotion.

I feel that you're an asshole is not an emotion. I feel like this is fucked is not an emotion. I feel sad is an emotion. I feel happy is an emotion. And we're not used to saying that because the word feel is has been

you know, disused, misused for other purposes. And so we just often is unconsciously, once you see it, you can't unsee it. People, I ask people, it's showed emotion. And they say, I feel like, I feel that. And it's never an emotion. And it's very,

very hard to change the habit. Do you guys do this where, like, Sean, in particular, I'm curious if you do this, but do you guys do this where you like, you get into this type of shit, whatever you want to call it, the touchy-feely stuff? And you're like, this is the way. And then like I get into it and then half the time I execute that poorly and all and then like the business

sucks and I'm like I got to have more patience with this person or I got to like let them get away with shit more or whatever and then I just go right back to the total opposite end where it's like what do they what do they call this doge where I'm like everyone has 15 minutes to fight for their job like you know like like it's like I get influenced by either side and I don't but there is no middle ground. And that's like... I'm kind of like you. That the first sign of resistance, I crumble sometimes.

So, but the version of it that happens for me is let's say I hear this. And I'm like, ah, Siki just taught me something. This is great. Two content tracks, five levels. I'm in. I got this. I'm going level five, baby. I don't even need one through four.

And then I'll go have the next conversation with my wife tonight. And I'll give her like, I feel that. No, no. I feel upset. And I know you didn't mean that. I tried to do the whole thing. And she's like, what? And then she doesn't, she doesn't know all of this.

She didn't, because she didn't go to the seminar. And she didn't have the skills and the tools. She's like, be a mad, Sean. Shut up. It's on the front of her mind. And so she doesn't play back like the role play that I had heard was. And then I'm like, well, I don't really know the next move. Okay, revert.

Revert back to my old asshole self. Yeah. I mean, that's not a bad response, honestly. Because I think, I, I think you have to do whatever works. And the reality is to get good at this, you know, it took me, I did this four-day program twice. And every day was like 12 hours a day. And you were just sitting in the circle practice room for eight hours a day.

The first time she actually did. Okay. So she kind of had a team. No, I kind of smuggled her into the hotel room. So she didn't go to the class. But I will say, like the second night when I went home, she was like, who are you? Because I was like, oh my God, I feel so bad.

I've been such an asshole. Dude, this sounds like, have you guys heard of the Hoffman Institute? Have you heard of this? I've heard of it, but I haven't been. Yeah. Like, I have, I've contemplated going to it, but I think they, it's like, they have a variety of locations. They have one in Connecticut near me, and then they have a Boston one.

But you go for, it's like, not expensive, it's like $2,000, and you go for four days, and you can't bring your cell phone, you can't, you're got to be completely disconnected. Or maybe it's even five days. It's kind of a lot. But they like, everyone who I go, who goes to it, they won't tell me what happens there, but they all say that it's life-changing and they can now develop relationships and connections with other people. It's one of these really strange things that I'm so tempted to do, but the amount of time to be disconnected is very like nerve-wracking or, you know, just like scary. This sounds very similar. It does sound pretty similar. It's not the time to be disconnected. That's the scary part there.

Well, yeah, it is. It might even be seven days. Could you go seven days? Could you go. seven days without a phone away from your family. Away from family is a little harder. Yeah, that's hard. Like in a hotel, like, it's like crazy to be disconnected. But yeah, I don't want to like, also I don't want to like cry with a bunch of strangers. This is why I don't go to Tony Robbins. I'm like, I don't want to go to Tony Robbins. I don't want to see anyone. I don't want to see me dancing and singing. Like, you know what I mean? Yeah, what's great about leaders in in tech is like, is they're all like, you know, well-knownish founders. It's like not cheap to go.

Oh, even worse. Yeah. Yeah. around awesome people. God, I want to be my most vulnerable self around cool people. No, actually, it's really helpful because you realize that all the people that, some people that you look up to, like, we're kind of all the same. Like, there's very similar insecurities. Whenever I hear about, whenever I hear about the stuff, I think of the Tony Soprano quote where he's like, whatever happened to the strong silent type, like Gary Cooper. That's like, I get, I go all down this track and I'm like, can I just say like, hey, chief, like, hi, Bub. I just know that person. only at that amount and just say yes or no.

Siki, you have this interview question that I like. You said my favorite interview question after 20 years of doing interviews with people is what is your greatest strength that you are most worried about not coming across in an interview setting? Why that question? I think I enjoy breaking the fourth wall and interviews tends to be so standardized or formalized that my greatest anxiety when I'm interviewing is like I'm actually really good at a thing. And you're asking me to, you know, reverse a leak list or something,

and it's just not coming across. What I find is that it breaks down the formality and it gets people excited to talk about something that they're really, really good at, tell me great stories. And you get to know the person just a little bit better. And I think the particular thing is, like, if you just ask what's your greatest strengths, it sounds really formal. But what is the insecurity that you're bringing in,

that you're hoping to, that you're worried about not coming across an interview setting? it changes a tone quite a bit. It's a great question. I'm stealing that. Yeah, that's a good one. You know what's interesting is so you're you're you're you founded runway, which is like a very serious business. Like you're going to have to hire enterprise people, I would imagine enterprise salespeople. Like it's like a I'm basing like the future of my company off of some of the output that I'm going to learn from your software. But you have the vibe of like an artist to me where like you you have a variety of like really intro.

projects. You're like this thinker, almost like a philosopher. Is this new to be doing, like, is this like a new challenge for you to be doing something so serious and regimented? Like, or can you still be like goofy and an artist in this B2B world? So, yeah, funny enough, he's a serious business. That was the name of my first company. And we built fun gangs. I feel like if you call it serious citizen, you know? Yeah, because we're a gangs company, serious business, fun games. But, yeah, I mean, I think it's actually a pretty huge advantage, particularly for the things we consider serious. So, I mean, people have the stereotype of business and finances being super serious and super rigid.

But finance at its best is really about creating value. It's about looking forward and thinking about new ideas about how we can push the business forward and grow faster and all these things. And in order for us to be creative, we have to be in flow. And things that are fun keeps you in flow. And what we actually hear from our customers, the thing that we hear quite often and we love hearing is, this software feels fun. And that's not a luxury.

That is a fund that creates flow, that creates creativity, that creates value. And when you use something that isn't fun, if something that feels slow or confusing, that you're not creative and you're making worse decisions. So I don't think they're intentional with each other. I think they're quite complementary. And that is like very deeply part of our,

philosophy. Have you ever seen this? Yes. That's what made me think of that question. What's the story of this, Iki? This happened last week. Our marketing team is run by Cal Fries, who was a YC founder of a company called Taika. He was a CEO there. And we also have this woman named Julie Fritas, who was at Shopify. And I was in the office, and I just saw them come out in a meeting,

kind of giggling, and they got out this piece of cardboard and started writing this. I'm like, what is this? Like, oh, you know how, like, you know, you didn't want to do a billboard? We decided just, like, create a billboard ourselves and just hold on a freeway. And I'm like, that is such a cracked idea.

Of course, that's going to go viral. And I said, I'll do it. It's like, are you will? I'm like, yeah, I'll do it. So they're like, okay, so we walked outside. We found a freeway entrance, and I was just holding the sign. What does it say, by the way? It says,

Honk if you hate your finance platform, getrunway.com. Are you the only founder? I had a co-founder, Aria Asa Manfar, and he left the company about a year and a half ago, almost two years ago. Because that's pretty rare. I don't know when you launch, but I feel like you're very, very, very, very early in the period

because I remember seeing you guys go on Twitter, like get popular on Twitter. that's going to be pretty different to be kind of the only founder running a company. That would be kind of exciting, right? You get to do whatever the hell you want or is you're going to be lonely? I think the reason why we parted ways is things were just slower to make decisions and neither of us were having as much fun as we wanted to. And actually, I didn't want him to leave.

Like he is, I mean, he's still on the board. I love him. He's just the most wise and high-intuitive person of him. He was one of Parag's peers at Twitter, and I hired him out of school, my first company. And he now works for Brett Taylor at Sierra. But things were like going slower to him wanted, and he identified that it was him or our relationship slowing us down, he decided to fire himself. And I didn't think he was right about that. But he was.

He usually is right about just about everything, and it totally transformed the company. He also must have attended interpersonal dynamics. He did not. You talked about character AI and chimes. like some of these AI companies that are crushing it, just printing money right now, are there any other companies that just have blown your mind in terms of how well they're doing

or how fast they're growing right now? Like maybe AI, maybe not AI? I love a Labs. I'm just following master in that company, but they do like basically all of the audio, translation, generation, sometimes you fix. And when I met them, there were like less than 10 people. They were just, they were ex-Google,

they're working on the foundational model technology. and they are now, I don't know what they last announced, but they're in the hundreds of millions they are in like a year, two, a year and a half or so. And what blew my mind is I never seen a group of very good technologists that were also so good at commercializing the technology so rapidly. They're at hundreds of millions. Hundreds.

Hundreds. I feel like this just came out. No, no, no. We should have an year and a half, right? they dubbed our podcast. Remember that clip where they were like, you're saying,

you're speaking Hindi now. And it was amazing. And I DM them. And we were like, hey, this is really cool. Like, so stupid of us

not to have pursued that more. Yeah, there's that graph, right, for WIS and the fastest growing SaaS companies. And I think cursor is up there. I am fairly convinced

that I love a lab is actually like faster than all of them. But, yeah, I think they announced some revenue milestone. But it's large.

When we were tinkering with them, it was borderline this is cool, this is cute, to, I need, I can use this right now. It was like, it was like just there. So I guess they crossed it and people are actually using it like to actually do work. Who are they selling to? Is it? So, so Apple has audiobooks. Oh, so not podcast, or Apple audiobooks, right? Like, so previously they did have audiobooks and, you know, you would know that a lot of this AI generated is Powerbyo level apps. Oh, so they, and they also They also do AI agents for customer service and support agents and things like that.

So they're the back end of maybe potentially other software tools as well. Yeah, yeah. So they have all kinds of product lines. They saw the book publishers, the power agents, they do a whole. Why are they better than what Open AI, you know, like the risk with all these AI companies is that the general, the base models, Open AI and Anthropic, etc, can just offer those capabilities, you know, as part of the main suite. Did they do something different?

Are they fine-tuning it in some way? No, it's their own foundational models, and the quality and expressiveness is just better, and the form factor is better. So you can use it for all these over use cases, and the voice API of Open AI is actually not as good, or is easily usable. Dude, you're super fun to talk to.

I just like hearing all these, like, I feel like you're like a treasure box, and I just like, pick, like, I just grab something out of the toy chest, but tell me the story behind this. You know what I mean? I think that's awesome. Yeah, thanks for coming on, dude.

And give people a shout out for your company and where to follow you for more. Yeah, or runaway.com. You can follow me at Blader, Blade with an R or Runway Co. And if you are a CFO, you should use our software. How much should you have to pay for that domain? A quarter million dollars.

That's not bad. It's funny. NavaCont named the company and suggested that we use it onto dot com. I think that was smart. Quarter million is not a lot, I feel like for that. Wait, wait, what do you mean Nival named the company? Like, you went to him being like, hey, what did we name this?

Or he just suggested? So when Clubhouse only had one room in April 2020, it was in the Naval app, right? I think you were on it quite a bit too. And so when I was thinking about what I want to do for next company, I said, I want to do a finance company. And I got a great name for it, Naval, CFO.AI. He's like, no, don't call it AI.

It's going to be dated in like two years. Everything is going to call AI. You should just call it runway as you get the dot com. And he wrote the first track into runway. And that's why we got the dot com. it's so funny that you said it was the Naval app at the time it totally was and it was amazing it was Abol's the Al-Rabwe got it was amazing by the way I was using air chat like pretty religiously like for like two months yeah um even though I knew air chat's

not going to work I was like oh it doesn't matter this is Naval's app he's gonna be on 24-7 cool this is like I I like to hang out with the fall I'm not gonna email them like a million other people and say hey can we get a coffee just a thousand dollars a month and you can talk to Naval whenever you want Yeah, exactly. I was like, I'm going to be on this for two months. I'm going to be a power user for exactly two months, and I'm going to hang out in the fall, and that's exactly what happened. I was very proud of myself for that. It was the most fun way to use that app.

Yep. Dude, thank you for doing this. You're the man, and we're thinking of you and your daughter. Thank you. Appreciate you. All right. See you. Thank you. That's it. That's the pod. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On a road, let's travel, never looking back.

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