Software Misadventures - When enough was enough - practical and emotional drivers for leaving big tech to bootstrap Metacast | Arnab Deka & Ilya Bezdelev (AWS, Google)

Episode Date: November 7, 2023

Should engineers and product managers “stay in their lanes”? What big company habits should you keep vs unlearn when transitioning to working at a start-up? Could an ayahuasca retreat give you more clarity on your career goals? Ilya and Arnab join the show to share their journey quitting big tech to bootstrap a podcasting startup. Arnab and Ilya are the co-founders of Metacast. Before starting the company, Arnab was a Principal Engineer at AWS while Ilya was a Sr. Product Manager at Google and Principal PM at Amazon before that. While at Amazon, Arnab and Ilya worked together on various projects including AWS Chatbot, which they started from scratch and launched into a successful AWS service.  Show Notes: Sign-up for the podcast app that they’re launching soon: metacast.app Newsletter about their startup journey: https://www.metacastpodcast.com/ Stay in Touch: ✉️ Subscribe to our newsletter: https://softwaremisadventures.com 👋 Let us know who we should talk to next! [e-mail] Segments: [0:00:00] Starting Metacast [0:05:39] Should engineers and product managers “stay in their lanes”? [0:11:56] How to decide when to explore options vs committing to a decision [0:14:46] Do you have to be a specialist to be successful? [0:18:20] Quitting Amazon & Google [0:33:52] Spiritual retreat [0:47:09] Trying therapy [0:51:33] Orthogonal weaknesses [0:57:31] Big co habits to keep vs unlearn [1:04:32] Metacast Milestones

Welcome to the Software Misadventures podcast. We are your hosts, Ronak and Gwan. As engineers, we are interested in not just the technologies, but the people and the stories behind them. So on this show, we try to scratch our own edge by sitting down with engineers, founders, and investors to chat about their path, lessons they have learned, and of course,

the misadventures along the way. Should engineers and product managers stay in their lanes? What big company habits should you unlearn when transitioning to working at a startup? What habits should you keep? Could an ayahuasca retreat give you more clarity on your career goals? In this episode, we're chatting with Arnab and Ilya, who recently left their roles as principal engineer at AWS and senior product manager at Google to bootstrap their startup, Metacast.app. There's a lot of people that leave big tech to found startups.

But what I loved about this conversation was just how personal it was and how candid they were in sharing their struggles and learnings on that journey. Without further ado, let's get into the conversation. So both of you recently started a company. It's called Metacast. Before this, both of you worked at big tech companies. Ilya, you were at Amazon at some point, then you were working on Google Maps as a product manager. Arnab, you have been a principal engineer at AWS as well. So can you tell us more about how the two of you met and how did you think about starting Metacast? So Ilya and I worked together at AWS for like five years from 2015 to 2020. I was an SD to when he started. And I think the day

he started, his manager told him to come meet me because we'll be working together on something. And we didn't know that, like, we'll keep working together for like, I don't know, eight, 10 years after. But yeah, we had like really good chemistry kind of immediately. I love that he was in a product manager role. I love being hands-on, but I love that he loves being hands-on too, right? Like there are some product managers who are really good at their job, but wouldn't get into like the hands-on parts

or try not to understand the technology behind it and all that. And Ilya would like immediately come in and you don't have to tell him, you just point him at this is the data warehouse, go figure it out. And after like a week, he'll come up with all this analysis. And like, this is what we should be going for next, right. And so I really love that aspect. And over time, like we work together, we built like, we can talk more later on, but almost like a startup inside AWS. If you're curious, we can talk about that journey

and love that process. So when I left my job and I was kind of wandering around, hiking, figuring out what to do, it seemed like, okay, maybe a chapter two of this could be quite exciting. So that's what we went for. Yeah, so I'll have to reciprocate now

and praise Arnab, right? We can mute his audio. That's fine. Just go free, Ilya. But no, when I joined AWS, my manager gave me a list of people to talk to. And it was maybe a list of five or six people. And Arnab's name was one of them.

And he's like, yeah, meet with this guy as soon as possible. He's going to be your partner uh for many things that you'll be working on and uh I think the thing that I specifically joined to work on was uh an analytics platform and uh yeah so Arnab was already working on uh the plumbing for that kind of data warehouse data pipelines and all that stuff so yeah I think we met maybe the first day, maybe the second day, but it was definitely the first week. So that was really cool. But I think what he said about me, like, you know, going into technical stuff,

I can say exactly the same thing about him. Like, he really likes going into technical stuff, right? Nice job. I'm glad I do it as an engineer. But here's the thing. Recently, I was watching him for three days as he was giving the crash course to me in our new hire on Flutter.

Like, I would just copy stuff from Stack Overflow, paste it, see if it works. If it doesn't, like, makes a tweaks, make it work. He doesn't do that. He wants to understand how things really work. So he would click through all those methods, see how they defined, do that. He wants to understand how things really work. So he would click through all those methods, see how they're defined, all that.

Like, we don't have code. And use GitHub Copilot. And use GitHub Copilot. But he doesn't just copy-paste from there, right? He really understands what he's doing. So that's kind of a defining feature of our app. That's what I really like working with him. Because of that, he would always be... he doesn't just guess, he knows. And that's what distinguishes an amateur

from professional. And I always enjoyed that. And I also see kind of Arnab grow through the ranks from SDE2 to principal. Well, it was before he became a principal engineer, but I definitely saw the trajectory. But the other thing is that he's always deep into the product. And this is where I think we have this nice Venn diagram where I'm on the product side, he's on the engineering side, but there is this thing in the middle

where we can keep arguing about for a long time and coming to a solution that really is great, both for customers and also from a technology perspective. So yeah, I really appreciate you, Arnav, on the record. No, you said enough privately too. So thank you for saying it publicly. But I also want to add this thing where I found this screenshot in my Apple photos. I think it was 2017 or 18.

It was a screenshot from this app called Chime, which is the thing that Amazon used to use internally for chats. The shittiest chat messenger you would ever use. Yes, built by some of the greatest people on the planet. But yeah, the product wasn't good. And the message says that I think we will do something together at some point, maybe like in five years or I forgot what the timeframe was, but it was a timeframe when you would turn 45. That was the timeframe. You know, we calculated that. And yeah, and then eventually he called me up. I was living still in Seattle. He moved to Vancouver and he called me up and he's like, yeah, I'm in Seattle, let's just meet up. And then we went for a stroll in Kirkland, Washington, along the shore. And that's how Metagast was born, I think. Or the seeds of it. We didn't know we'd be going on a company yet, but yeah.

Yeah, both of us were still employed. You were still at Amazon. So it was actually about a year before we started coding it. Yeah. But, yeah. We need to really work on our meet cute story, Rannik. This has really inspired me. Rannik never says nice things about me.

So going back and zooming in on... So, Arnab, you said that one of the things that impressed you a lot was Ilya being super technical and just going into the problem. I feel like some engineers like would not have shared the same feelings about product people going into like the technical aspects. So you mean like you're not happy that product managers go into technical parts? Yeah, because I feel like some engineers see it as hey, you know, this is my lane, right? Like I'm figuring out the how and then you were

telling me the what and why so why don't we you know stick to our you know i feel like i've gotten that talk before um i was wondering if i i mean is that something that you guys have faced before i feel like this partially has to do with my personality if you look at i would say most companies they want people to stay in their lanes right so engineering stays in their lane uh companies, they want people to stay in their lanes. So engineering stays in their lane, marketing stays in their lane, PM stays in their lane. And then you have some kind of interfaces so that these people can interact within the lanes. Project managers. And things just tend to break because there are always some things that fall through the cracks

between the lanes that nobody picks up. And my personality has always been that I don't let things slide through the cracks. So I'm naturally just being all over the place. Whichever role I was in, I was always all over the place. Like inserting myself into somebody else's turf, some people would get pissed about that. And that's just part of the game. What I really liked about Amazon though is that because of this ownership mentality across the board at Amazon, people are fine with that because they know you're not doing this out of ego or spite or something, right?

They know you actually want to do things better. And then if you cross over into other function and you actually point out something that helps them or even helps you better understand what they're doing so that helps you do your job better. I think people will generally find that. If I would start to come into our nab's desk and telling him that he names his variables wrong. Or like if you come to designer and tells them that they need to use a different color, that's not okay. But understanding how things work and maybe making some suggestions as in, do we really have to do this now?

Can this wait until after? And then we can cut the scope a bit and ship the thing faster, for example. That would be one of the contributions I would make. And I think generally, engineers I worked with were fine with that, but Arnab could correct me if I'm wrong. I'll add on to this. I think it really comes down to personality types, right? Like I've worked with product managers who did not want to get inside, like trying to understand what's going on behind the scenes. I wanted to operate in the product

space and they were great product managers, right? There's like not one shape only for a product manager or an engineer. My personality type, and maybe this is why Ilya and I gel so much together, is I like to be not just in the technology side. Like I don't want to take requirements from somebody, build it and give it back to them. I actually want to be part of figuring out what to build, right? And similarly, I want the product manager to also come in and overlap into my role. And they don't have to build it, but they need to understand why we are building it the way we are building it, right? Because both of those things influence the product. And ultimately, that's what you need is a good product for the end customer. And it's not just, the product is not just the UX side, right?

It's also like, I mean, a big part of UX is performance and availability and all that. And you need to have all of those things be integrated as part of a great UX. It's not to say that Ilya and I don't have friction, right? So there are times when I feel like, just trust me on this, right? It'll save us so much time if we don't talk about it for the next three hours, right? And certainly there are probably times when he feels like, okay, just trust my instinct on this and let's go with that, right? But I feel like by talking, well, we don't spend three hours anymore because we're in a startup. We don't have three hours to spend on this, but maybe we spend 45 minutes

talking like about a critical decision, right? And at the end of it, we come out on the same page where he understands why I was going for something and I understand why he's going for. And I think that's huge for a cohesive team, whether you're in a big company or a small company. Yeah. I would add a couple of things here. So first, I think I've always had a hard time with senior people who swim in their lane. Like if you have a principal engineer who swims in their lane and they only care about engineering, I wouldn't be able to work with this person. Like I want people to really cross over, be specialists in their field, but then cross over to others as well.

And I experienced a different culture at Google where engineering tended to defer a lot to product managers. So they would just not do the thing until you get them, you know, the specs they need or some green lighting. And that often annoyed me because I'm like, you could have just either decided this yourself and maybe just showed to me the final thing before starting to do it,

or come up with options. I'm busy, I don't have time to actually answer every single small thing about the product. And some things you can just take the risk and do it. So it was a very different culture from Amazon, where people were swimming in their lanes, which I was very surprised about, because I always expected Google to be more...

Ownership-driven. Free-for-all. Yeah. I did feel like at Amazon, especially senior people, they didn't care about what role they were on, right? Especially at, like, principal level, whether it's care about what role they were on, right? Especially at like principal level, whether it's an engineer or manager, product manager, or a software development manager,

they were not confined to their roles anymore. Everybody was just focused on like the product and the customer experience. And I really liked that part of it. So you guys have written a post about this, comparing the company culture at Google and Amazon, sorry, Ilya, which went viral. And so we actually really want to get into that a little bit later. But before, I'm curious, do you see it as a skill set of being able to write it's the trade off

that you mentioned of how much to explore sort of the areas that's not in your immediate expertise and then the other part is like hey you know sometimes just gotta just trust me and then you know do it is this like a skill that you were able to develop over time and how did you go about doing that 100 it's a skill right ilia and i personally have worked with people people who maybe like they went overboard in the amount of, let's say, collaboration. That's what I'm looking for, right? But it ends up in like weeks and weeks of discussions about the same thing. You cannot come to the same page on it. And at some point, my personality type is like, let's just think long term, right?

Like, it's okay. Let's take this decision, whatever it is. There are almost no decisions in tech that you cannot reverse. And this is a principle in Amazon. I'm sure other places have called it to one-way door, two-way door kind of thing, right? Like you kind of evaluate a decision on, is this a door you can walk back through it, right? Like you kind of evaluate a decision on is this a door you can walk back through it, right? And if it is, then I would say like, yeah, it's okay.

Let's just go with what you're saying. It does definitely take a lot of work. And this is where I think as you work with various people, you'll find that you gel with the working style of some, you don't gel with yeah as far as skill and can you develop this or not it's actually hard to say because i think each of us are a

certain personality uh i don't want to say word type but we have certain traits right and um i think we often start to exhibit them from the childhood. Like some people would read a lot about different things. They would pick 20 different books on different subjects, whereas another person would pick 20 books on the same subject and they would go very, very deep. And then when they grow up, maybe one becomes a product manager and the other one becomes like a scientist or something, right? Where they continue drilling into the same thing for like 20 years, do a PhD, become a professor or something, right? Where they continue drilling into the same thing

for like 20 years, do a PhD, become a professor or whatever, right? I don't know how much of that can be necessarily trained. So for example, if you're this kind of very deep kind of person, it wouldn't come naturally to just go abroad. I mean, you can, and maybe you will find yourself that you are like happy doing that.

But I don't know if you can force this. I feel like, I think as I'm getting older, I'm almost 40 at this point, I'm coming to the realization that you should not push the river, just go with the flow. And one of the books that I read in 2020, I think, because the pandemic just started, I remember walking around the Salt Lake Union listening to that book. It's called Arrange by David Epstein. It's a book about generalists versus specialists. And he talks there that the traditional mentality in the post-industrialized world is that you have to be a specialist.

So they train you to go into a certain specialty and just drill, drill, drill, drill until you become the top expert in this field. Whereas people who just can't do that, I don't have enough attention span to do this myself, we feel inadequate because everybody around us tells us we should be doing a PhD in this thing if you want to succeed. But he makes a point that many of the high-profile specialists even, they've actually been going very broad and then converged on some subject. But also people,

there are people who never converge on anything. And then that's also fine. They just need to find that application of their personality. And maybe like an entrepreneurship thing or a product manager role could be a good application for somebody who doesn't necessarily,

who can't even focus on the same thing for a long time. So yeah, I felt like that book kind of legitimized me quite a bit. And also another book I read, it's called The ADHD Advantage. I don't know, I've never been diagnosed with ADHD, but when I was reading the book, I'm like, I'm recognizing myself 80% here. And that book

also, it talks about not that you have to treat ADHD, take all those pills and all that stuff. He's like, all of this is nonsense. You just have to master your traits that come with ADHD and write that. And it also comes down to being all over the place and finding the application for this all over the placidness in life as opposed to trying to shoehorn yourself in a you know a specific path but to be fair i don't think that's easy to do but i think if you are able to do that i think could be very powerful yeah yeah yeah i feel like i feel like maybe it's a spectrum right so maybe there are like specialists who can't really go general because it's just against the nature. And there are also generalists for whom being a specialist is like a torture, but probably most people are somewhere in between. It's probably a normal distribution curve.

And I think I'd ultimately say about coming back to this, can you learn to work with others, right? Essentially, is start with respect and empathy, right? No matter who you are working with, and try to see their viewpoint, like actually try to see why they're trying to say what they're trying to say, right? And there will be some times when you feel like, okay, you give it enough effort, and you feel like I don't want to work with this person long term, right? It's not good for me, for whatever reason. Take a different path. It's okay.

The world is full of people you can collaborate with. Yeah, that's actually a very good point, right? You should never suffer people you can't work with. Just go find somewhere else. I think it can be a bit of a trap if you work in a company like Google, for example, or Meta or Amazon, where it's like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be in these kind of companies, and then you really don't like it. And then what do you do?

And for me, it was surprising because at Amazon, I rarely saw people who were happy or semi-happy living. People would just stick with it. Whereas at Google, at least during the pandemic, I saw so many people leave. People who were successful, who were on track for achieving great things,

they're just like, nope, can't do it anymore. And they would go to startups or to other companies. It takes courage. Talking about that, being at a big company, as you said, many people think of it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Even there are some cases, when people leave, there might be cases where

they're just unhappy with what they're doing and they don't see other options, so they're going to try something else. But when you're on track to achieve something great, or you're making progress, you're getting good reviews, you're earning more money, it's like golden handcuffs of sorts. So

both of you have been at big companies, but then you decided to do Metacast. And it takes courage. You're leaving a lot of money on the table. You're increasing unpredictability and losing predictability, which not everyone can go through. So what did that decision-making process look like

for the two of you when you decided to say, you know what, we're going to leave our cushy big tech jobs, not that you guys don't work hard, but then go on this adventure and start Metacast. So how did you make that decision? Ilya, you go first. You were first. You were first to quit, so let's start.

Okay. So I started in Amazon, and I had a few jobs before, and I left Amazon, did some startups and all that. So I always had like an entrepreneurial like itch in me that I want to work for myself and things. And thankfully, for most of my time at Amazon, I was on very small teams, very, very independent teams. See, Amazon is a huge company, right? There's probably like 10,000 teams, if not more. And I can't homogenize the experience, generalize it by saying it's always like that. But the teams that I were on, especially the team that Ilya and I kind of grew from two people to about, I don't know, about 60 people today, I think, by the time I had left, very independent team, right?

And as I grew from like SDE1 to 2 to 3 and then principal engineer, luckily, I always had projects like that where I could take part in the product building and the customer experience, right, and influence it. And I loved that. At the same time as being hands-on. At some point after getting to the principal level, I was still getting to do all of those, the things that I said first, like collaborate and influence even more than before. But the hands-on part like just went away from me. I was not able to make time for it. And I actually consider it as one of my failures

is going for that promotion and getting it. And maybe we'll talk about it later on. You had a question about like most impactful failure. And I'm not lying. That is, I consider as my most impactful failure. Tell us more about that. Yeah. I mean, this may sound like fake or too privileged to some folks.

Like, I was a principal engineer at a big tech company in a space like AWS. And with the kind of influence to shape the customer experience for basically AWS customers, which is huge. That's amazing. But I think not being able to be hands-on and do the things that I love doing, that basically took the passion out of the job for me slow. And at some point, I figured out that I don't think there is a path for me here, even if I like switch to a different team. And not to say again, Amazon is a huge company. So I'm sure there are places where I could have fit in as a principal engineer and be like that. But I just didn't have enough of the passion left. And at the same time, I think building things, that's what excites me right um financially you asked about that i'm very conservative

ilia is like an insane risk taker in that space so i actually deliberated for like three four months to financial advisors to figure out like if i didn't work or didn't earn anything for the next two three years for our family my wife is a software development manager and was an engineer at Microsoft. Now she's at a smaller company as a manager. What's our ultimate financial outlook, right? How does it change? If I keep working on this Amazon job for, let's say, another 10 years, 15 years, versus I take two, three years and take a break. And if nothing comes out of it, then I try to get back into maybe a smaller company, maybe less money. I built some scenarios like that. And surprisingly, the difference came down to like less than 10% net income for the two

of us by the time we're like 75 or 80. And that kind of told me that, okay, there's like just no way I should not take a risk right now. And I decided to take. Ilya can tell you his more insane kind of like calculation or lack of calculation. This is like two-way doors again, right? Like you can always come back. Exactly. Yes, and that's an interesting, actually,

analogy here. Because as I'm reflecting on my career, I spent eight years at a big company called DHL Express, logistics company. It's more a traditional business. It used to be very entrepreneurial in the 70s and 60s when it started, but then it became just like any other big traditional company.

And I always had this thing like, I'm lucky because they let me travel a lot because I moved countries and all that. But then I remember applying to Google in 2010, I think, in Singapore. Google and Microsoft and some other companies that were in the area. No one even responded to me. And I'm like, I'm not good enough, right? So there was this thing like, I have to get in there.

And I remember riding with a colleague on the metro train. And I told him, if Google gave me any job right now, I would just take it. Kind of reflecting on that Sheryl Sandberg's quote about riding a rocket ship. You don't ask what seat you ride on. But then I did my MBA. I got to Amazon. I'm like, okay, finally, I got it. I made it, right? So I made it. I'm at Amazon, one of the big tech companies. But then I'm like, but what if I just got lucky, right? So there was more validation. Yeah. So all of this is kind of, yeah, another question because there is not enough validation.

And I really wanted to work at Google. Google for me was like the epitomized kind of success in corporate world. But I did want to finish the project that Arnav and I started with other folks at Amazon. So I didn't interview. But when we were launched and I felt like we were done, our team grew a lot. I also started to feel like I just don't like doing what I'm doing. And very similar to Arnab, I worked my ass off to get promoted to principal product manager, only to be disappointed when I got the promo. I mean, the money was good. I can't deny that. I mean, there was a significant bump in income and also the status. It felt good.

But I remember sitting in a room with, we had like an offsite in Seattle with a bunch of high level people. I think it was all like L7 plus. I was the L7 that got to L7 in like last two months. Everybody else was in these roles for much longer. And I just couldn't keep my eyes open. I was just, I was literally falling asleep. It was like the only other setting I experienced this before was in lectures, like some very, very boring lectures about probability or something that I just couldn't pay attention. So I just couldn't pay attention for two days. And then another principal engineer in our org, he came to me and he's like, dude, you just can't do that. You have to become a principal. And for me, it was

like, yeah, this is the beginning of the end. I just don't like the role I'm in right now. Wait, why? Why did that make you fall asleep? So here's the thing. Our organization was responsible for the entire user experience at AWS.

Not necessarily building the UX, but we were managing all of the, owning and building all of the platforms and component library and kind of all the chevrons in the AWS console. So basically, AWS is structured the way that, let's say, EC2 builds their own interface, but all of the components of libraries,

all of the metrics, all of the proxy servers, all of that stuff is done by that centralized organization that provides the platform. We were lucky to start our own thing called AWS Chatbot, which was a Slack integration, which is very different from everything else in the org. I think the only reason why it was part of that org

is because we were part of that org. It was user experience. Yeah. I think we retrofitted that vision later on. I think the reason was because we were part of this org. Because it was more of a DevOps product than a user experience product. So I was working on this small little thing on the fringe of the org. And then I was brought into the bigger org.

And I didn't like it. I'm like, I just don't care about all of these metrics that teams populate. I don't care about all these proxy servers. I don't care about component library. I just want to do my thing and go very deep in it. That's why I think I could have changed this if I moved to another org at Amazon. That the entire

org would be working on something more cohesive and not be on the fringe. But then I decided to just go to Google. But then what I realized at Google is that it's the same thing. It's not different from Amazon. Actually, I didn't enjoy much working at Google, to be honest. I realized it's, like, I was disappointed.

Maybe part of that was because it was during the pandemic, and we were all remote, and Google is not a remote culture. And I saw some of those things that I didn't like. And the post that went viral talks about those things. Google is too cavalier, I think, about shipping things before they're ready. And yeah, so eventually I'm like, there is no point moving to another company because another company will be exactly the same. So I had this crisis. I'm like, Google is a pinnacle of the corporate world. It's not working out. And what do I do? And then Arnab reached out and then we started talking about this.

But then I had so much fear about leaving the job and not having the income. You know, as I see Nicholas Taleb says, monthly paycheck is the most addictive drug. I think that's what he said. So I definitely experienced that. The golden handcuffs, right? With the keys and all that. But yeah, but then eventually I went on a spiritual journey and I came back from retreat and I'm like, screw it, I just can't do it anymore. And then it became a matter of planning. And then I did another spiritual retreat.

And after that, it was like, I was done. I realized I have to do what I have to do. I think it's very important to realize whatever shape or size of company you are is like, what do you like doing? How much of that you're getting to do? And especially at big tech, I think we're always chasing like the next promotion and all that. I thought I did enough homework before going for that principal engineer promotion. Like basically my manager came to me and said, hey, you're doing so many things. I think we should try to get you to principal. And then I said, first, I took a pause, said, nope,

let me think about it. I talked to a lot of like my mentors, principal engineers, kind of figured out what their day is and then decided, yeah, I think I'll enjoy that role. Right. And I went for it, took a couple of attempts. And but eventually I got promoted to like the principal engineer level. I think what I realized after that is what energizes me is when I'm talking to like other people who are at the trenches, even if I'm guiding them, helping them design something, I like talking to them way more than sitting in like decision-making things about what date we're going to launch something or not launch and coming up with like three different ways of making that date happen.

I want to make quick decisions on those things. What I saw myself more and more get involved is just those, like, what are the three options for us? Figure out what date we can meet, right? And some of the engineering manager, but this is what I said in Amazon, is engineering manager, product, principal engineer, everybody kind of morphs into the same role

at that high senior level, right? And I found myself more and more in that and talking more and more to like leadership. And that did not energize me enough, strangely. Some people would probably love that job, right? But I think the takeaway is, you have to figure out what you like doing before you start chasing like the next level and the next level and next level. Because you get enough money at pretty much any senior-ish level at these big tech companies that financial, this thing is not the only motivator. Unless you up your lifestyle. Yeah.

Buy a 4 million house in Queen Anne in Seattle, And then you can't quit your directorial job anymore. I thought that was Ilya's subtle stab at Rana, who has recently bought a house. It's not 4 million. I have a huge-ass mortgage, which I need to pay off. But yes, I don't think that's going on the record, by the way. I'm doing the editing for this episode but just to second record straight it was not a stop at your house buying I know I mean I have a huge mortgage myself so yeah but I'm prepared to lose the house so that's that's that's the risk taking that I was talking about, right? I don't want to touch my investments in the next however many years it takes to make this successful, right?

And I feel like Ilya, me and Jenny, we love working with each other. And I feel like if we need to execute quickly, figure out what works. And when we do that, we're going to start making money. But I am also like I said, financially very risk averse. I don't want to touch the investments or the long-term future of it. Whereas Ilya, on the other hand, Ilya, feel free to ask them to edit this out. But he's like, you know what? Worst case is we'll sell our house.

I'll change my kids' schools from this awesome school they go to and put them in something else. That's not a big deal. Yeah, worst case, I'll move back to my parents in Russia. So, I mean, this is the absolute worst case scenario. But it's not the end of the world. For me, going back to a corporation and suffering that misery uh and i'm not saying everybody who works in corporation suffers this but like for me personally uh like when i came back from that first retreat that i mentioned it was october last year the first meeting i was in

i saw those whatever eight faces in squares and google meet i turned off my video and i cried it was so much emotion was coming out uh Like literally, I just couldn't stop sobbing because I'm like, this is not my life. But this is kind of my life. So something is not connected here. Something is definitely wrong. It was a very, very rough integration when I came back. And it was at that point when I'm like,

how's schools, all that? It just doesn't matter to me as much as my own sanity and happiness getting that clarity is not very common actually can you can you touch on that spiritual retreat is if you don't want to share that's completely okay but is it if you wouldn't mind can you share what that was yeah so if you're really interested you can look up the netflix show called Unwell and on one of the episodes there is this person called Sasha Cobra and

or you can just search Sasha Cobra on YouTube I think the video is called How to Be a Human it's like a three to five minute video about her retreats. She doesn't do them anymore though. I was at the very last one that she did and it's just a lot of energy work it's based on kind of tantra uh but there is also

very deep discussions and all that is for 10 days you're with a group of i think about 50 people or so and you do a lot of uh practices geared towards getting the emotion out of your body so uh some very interesting experience like you would lie down with a group of people right in that uh it's called a shala it's like it's like it's like a yoga place in mexico and and then you all breathe with a certain pattern and then at some point people start crying they start shaking they start laughing and then it causes a chain reaction and you have like 50 people making all sorts of different sounds, like shouting. And it all looks like a mental house. But you come out of it relaxed, relaxed and happy and like full of life.

And for me, it was the first experience like this in my life. And I'm like, oh my God, like you really can't feel like this on a day-to-day basis. I want my entire life to feel like this, like bliss, right? And yeah, it is almost orthogonal to that meeting that I had the first day after I arrived. Thanks for sharing that.

Ilya, tell us about the Peru, the Ayahuasca retreat also. I was going to ask, was there Ayahuasca involved? So that was the first one. The Sasha Kober retreat effects, they wore off after maybe a couple of months because you have to keep practicing this

in order to maintain that state. And as I slid back into kids and work and all that, I started to feel these kind of panic attacks again, which I had about leaving my job. And then I met a lot of people who did ayahuasca in that retreat. So one of them recommended me a place. I went to Peru in February. The place is like booked like a year in advance.

And there was one place out of wait lists, like a month, like it was in January. And that place was available in February. I'm like, just screw it. I'll just go there. And I didn't know what to expect. I just booked it and just went there. And that basically shook available in February. I'm like, just screw it. I'll just go there. And I didn't know what to expect. I just booked it and just went there. And that basically shook my whole life.

It turned everything upside down. And I came back sort of fearless. And that's when I think the first week I talked to my manager. I first wanted to take like an extended break to figure things out, but they actually denied it. And when they said, no, you can't,

I'm like, okay. I'll just stick around a little longer. I mean, I didn't tell this, but it was my calculation. To be fair to them, I think they had just lost the only other product manager in that space and they needed somebody for technical reasons.

Right. That's true true but it was also like very i guess uh not like how you would see other people treated so for whatever reason right i decided okay so i'm just gonna leave but i gave myself a few more months uh and then i finally left so i went to ayahuasca in February and I left in end of May. Well, yeah. I don't necessarily want to go into the details of what happens at Ayahuasca because it's a very sacred experience. But like,

it's something that you cannot explain in words. It's something that like only when you do it, you will understand why people can't explain it because it's just something out of different realm. I think Lex has a episode where he interviews somebody about Ayahuasca, right? Would you recommend that one? So there's an episode with Paul Rosalie.

I forgot the number of the episode. It's a great episode. The whole episode is really great. But he also has a part on ayahuasca where he tells a story where he got lost in outer space. He was like flying there with planets. He was very cold.

And he felt like that was it. That is what the reality in life really is. So he almost got torn out of the matrix and put in there in that outer space. And then he said, I came back and I saw my hands and I started crying. Because I realized actually that was all not real.

That is what is real. I had something similar there. So it's like you get much darker than what he had. So you just get lost in this. You feel like you break the barrier of the matrix. And you cannot tell anymore what is reality, what is not. But when you come back, just things start to change. It's incredible

and just for the record, ayahuasca is illegal in the US and most of the world except for Peru and a few other places in South America. Where it's like traditionally they've been using it for a long time Yeah, for thousands of years It's guided to be taken under some observation

and practiced with someone who actually understands the effects of it and how to monitor it. Well, yeah, the way it works in the traditional... So I was doing this with the Shipibo shaman. So there was a group of eight, and the shaman actually sings the song for many hours. And then the song guides the experience. And also there are multiple people there, locals, who make sure that you don't run into the jungle in the middle guides the experience. And also there are multiple people there, locals who make sure that you don't run into the jungle in the middle of the night

because once you step out of that protected place into the jungle, well, you are done because jungle will just consume you. This is the Amazon rainforest you're talking about, like deep inside it. It's deep inside Amazon rainforest, yes. But I don't remember vividly that you came back from that

one in February and you immediately, I think you said, okay, I need like two, three days to like re-acclimatize to life, right? But after that, immediately when we had the next chat, you said, okay, I think I'm like leaving. I just need to figure out

how and when. Yeah, my mental state was, come what may, the path I'm on cannot continue. It's not my path. And that was this moment of clarity. I don't know if I would summon enough courage to quit my job if I didn't do that. One of my questions was how to get a co-founder. I didn't expect the answer was to send them on a plane to Peru and do an ayahuasca experience. So on the flip side of that, Arnab, has he convinced you to do it too?

This is going to be a tricky thing to answer because he has, right? Based on what he's saying, he's almost convinced me right now. So yeah, yeah. And like, I do want to go at some point, but here's what I'll say. The kind of euphoric meditative high, right? I'm not talking about the recreational high, the meditative high that he's talking about, where you get clarity.

Maybe not to that same extent, but I get through some different avenues, right? One of them is when I'm out in the middle of nowhere hiking, and there's like no connection to cities or cell networks and anything else, I get a lot of clarity. The other thing is I do play a lot of sports. And through that, there's some sort of meditative experience for me where I just get lost in the moment, right? Like there's nothing else in the world. Focus on this green fuzzy ball right now. Return it, right? And after that, I get this kind of like amazing relaxed vibe, right?

No matter what happened in the sport sport i'm not very good at it but i love playing it and i come out of with this kind of like space for the next half an hour i can i get a moment of like clarity so sometimes after playing tennis for like two three hours i'd take like half an hour to come back to my house, even though it's like seven minutes. I know exactly what you mean. Just think about things. Yeah. No, at some point I should do it. But I also tried very early on when I was like early 20s,

I tried some sort of like breeding. And the thing that you're talking about, like everybody breeds together. Now, maybe it wasn't as effectively performed or something, but I did see everybody around me exhibiting high, laughing or crying their eyes out. Right. And I just could not associate myself in there. Like I didn't feel anything. I was just observing this. Maybe I don't know how to do it well, or maybe the instructor did not figure out

how to get that into me. I want my refund. My reservation would be like, I feel like there's some kind of balance to all of this, such that I'm worried, honestly, that if I experience such an intense euphoria, I'll be really depressed afterwards in terms of like, oh man, like this is like the shit like every day.

That's so, I think that might, that's honestly my biggest reservation of like experiencing something that extreme. But maybe things, you know, change in a few years. You're not wrong, right? I mean, that is definitely a possible outcome. And Ilya told me the same thing, that you can't control what you're going to feel in these spaces, right? You may come out with a lot of darkness and negativity, but ultimately, I think you have to figure out how to use that energy to basically figure out what to do next. I'll just close this topic with saying that ayahuasca in particular is very different

from smoking weed or even breathing because they actually call it, I think the shaman called it the tool of God. It's almost like he opens a portal and ayahuasca is this kind of channel that helps God bring its hand and cure you. In Western traditions, it would be the God. In that local tradition, they're talking about the spirits of the plants. But essentially, what I realized there is we all talk about the same thing, we just use different analogies for the same, this kind of higher consciousness, right? So in ayahuasca, under supervision of a kind of light, good shaman, is inherently good for you.

It cures you. Like we had a guy who had asthma. I was recently talking to him. It's been almost a year at this point. He doesn't have asthma anymore. Like I had some physical ailments that were gone after this. So it actually changes your body. It also changes your psyche.

And this is where it could be really hard to do because it will show you things in those visions that will feel like reality, that will change you forever. In the long run, you will realize they changed you for the better. But in the short run, you feel so disoriented. It is just, it's incredibly disorienting. Somebody compare this as like being hit by a bus. And then like, how do you put yourself back together? And

I would not recommend ayahuasca to anyone who has not done psychotherapy before. People who struggled the most there in my group, they were just like, oh, I'll just go do it, right? YOLO swag. And then they're not ready to see the visions of their childhood trauma. They're not ready to live through that experience over and over and over every single night, right? You get transported into the age maybe where you were one or three years old and you had some experience with your parents, and you get to relive that there. And it feels real.

It feels very intense. So if you've done psychotherapy before, you would have gone through some of that already. It's just the level of intensity is different. But if you've not done anything like that before, and you're faced with this, basically you're faced with your worst dark sides there. That's not going to go well for you. Well, in the long run, you'll be fine. But in the moment, it is extremely painful.

So that's why I'm like, if you want to do ayahuasca, do at least a year of psychotherapy, then go there. You didn't tell me this before, though. That makes a lot of sense. Arnav is like, wait a minute. Wait a minute, yeah, he didn't tell me this before no no I've been in therapy

since age 30 so I'm almost almost 40 now so it's been for 10 years it's another thing about you know achievements right

I moved to the US I was like I'll go to this Ivy League MBA program that will make me feel good it will change my life because I'm done

with this DHL thing and I come in and a few months in I feel depressed again and like I expected this different environment will change my life because I'm done with this DHL thing. And I come in and a few months in, I feel depressed again. I'm like, I expected this different environment will change me. And that's when I realized that it's not about the environment. It's about what you have inside. And that's when I hit the bottom. And that's when I started doing therapy because I'm like, okay, so this is just not working.

Life is not working. I'm not doing something right here. That's impressive that you were like, oh, let me try therapy. Because I think a lot of people don't do that. They're just kind of, you know, try to pretend and then put on a mask and then go on with their lives. Since my wife doesn't listen to podcasts in English, I can say this here. She started doing therapy first. And then she said, like, after a few sessions, she said that I'm feeling like I'm getting off that path. And it's making me, you know, kind of feel differently and all that. If you don't do it, you will fall behind and the gap between us will widen. And I don't know if we actually will be able to be together after after that and i went to therapy out of fear but also out of that deep depression i was in so like i wasn't against it but that fear was was the final you know kick in the bus that made me do it that's really cool and for the record

my wife and i we you know we're together we have two beautiful children so it's all i made the right decision she sounds very wise based on what you just said. Oh yeah, she's the wisest in our family. Yeah, for sure. In a lot of this, I think finding the right therapist is also a key. I know our friends have tried this. They've tried a few different ones. It just doesn't work out until you find the right person. So there is some aspect of luck to an extent

and also the right amount of search that you do. I was born in Russia. I'm American now. It was a few months ago. So my first language will always be Russian. So I never even considered going to an English-speaking therapist here in the US. I found someone in my hometown who a friend of my wife was going to, and that's how we tried it.

And also, I never tried working with men. I only worked with women. For some reason, it just feels more natural to me to share something to a woman than to a man. Whereas a friend of mine, he also works with a Russian-speaking therapist, also based over in Russia, but he is based here in Florida. But he can't work with women. He only works with men. So it's just this trial and error. So I've had three therapists. My third one is I've had her for maybe six or seven years at this point, and I don't intend to change her anytime soon. But the first two, you know, after a while,

you just feel like it's not quite working out. And I think the risk there is that you just stop doing this, and then you're going to fall back to old habits. So it's important to actually... It's like a job, right? You'll end up in your offer before quitting the job. Yeah, yeah. So I'll kind of echo what Ilya said and what Ronak you're saying, finding the right therapist, right?

Because I have done some where I felt like I'm not getting anything out of it. But I'll give you one great positive experience is when we moved to Canada, my daughter, like, we were figuring out, can we move or not? Because she had already started making deep friendships and all that, right? moved she did struggle quite a lot right like fitting in to like school and everything and we tried a therapist and i think the kind of tools and framework that she gave us but also to this young child about like how to think about your emotions right like how do you categorize them like just just like you're feeling frustrated what what does that mean right and giving these kind of tools and all that that i would have never known to tell her myself yeah there is a bit of stigma still i think it's kind of gone in today's world, but there is still some stigma.

Like, why are you going to therapy and all that? But I think it's totally like, it's the right thing. I think especially among men. Yeah. Yeah. And the question of why do you need it? You seem normal. You don't need it.

And it's something wrong. You're strong. You can do it yourself. Yeah, exactly. Well, guys, honestly, we really appreciate you being so candid and it's not easy to talk about. I mean,

we are all adults and people listening to this podcast are adults too and many people know this is normal and okay, but it's still

not easy to talk about. I think this needs to be normalized more. Yeah. So I've been podcasting in Russian quite a bit and I've been talking about these topics

and I was surprised how many people would write back to me. And some of them had questions because they would be like oh, I was thinking about this for like years but now you can convince me, right? Or some people will just be like oh, that's exactly what I want to hear and it just validates their

experiences. Because I feel like stuff that is stigmatized people still have to live with it. And it's like, I don't know, we should talk more about that. So I want to go back to the founders topic, right? So I was listening to a podcast yesterday. And the guy said a very interesting thing. The interviewer asked him about finding co-founders. And he said that he read a study, which I can't validate, I don't know what study it was. He said the worst performance is when you have one founder.

Then the second worst is when you have four founders. Then the third worst is three founders. And then the best. The best is when you have two co-founders. And he said a very interesting thing he said like the best co-founders are those who have sort of different um i'm trying to translate now because it wasn't what was not in english um but like you have your own kind of weak areas so like like things that you freak out about and then he said like these should be orthogonal for these people complementary strengths yeah it's not just strengths but also like the weaknesses yeah strengths are easy to reason

about right weaknesses are harder to reason about if for example i start to freak out and arnab is this kind of place of stability for me that's good or if he's uncertain and he comes to me and i'm like yeah dude it's just all fine right so we could defer to each other in these areas whereas if we both freak out about the dude, it's just all fine, right? So we could defer to each other in these areas. Whereas if we both freak out about the same thing, it's very hard. Right. I think especially early on in a startup, you don't have the support environment of anybody else other than your co-founder. Like in a job, there are certain limits to what could go wrong, right?

And you're kind of shielded and protected from everything else outside of it. There's like leadership and management. Sometimes that's kind of why you want to break the chains and get out of it because you want to make those mistakes. But also like in a startup, you don't have that kind of support structure. Yeah. So I do think it's really important

to find that person where you could lean on. Of course. Yep. Would a hot take be that, and I think this applies to general relationships with people and also romantic relationships, right? Where I think if you focus on the strength, sure, there's a lot to admire, but it's sort of your weaknesses and having someone to accept and then to be a safe place for you, right? When you do experience those that I think necessarily like fosters like trust and which then is, I mean,

that's the key to building fostering relationships, right? So that makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah, I think the thing is, whereas it's like friendship or a romantic relationship or a co-founder, when you meet somebody, you're almost always going to focus on the positives, both of you, right? Or all of you, however many you are. It's hard to be public or open about like your shortcomings. And sometimes it's even, you don't even know what your shortcomings are, right? So it's hard to talk about it. So pretty much the only way to figure that out is to work with somebody for a while

or be with somebody for a while. Not commit too early, but also kind of figure out like, okay, I think this works together, yeah. And have you guys had that explicit conversation about, hey, like this is like, these are my pet peeves. This is like, you know, these are the situations I hate the most. Have you guys talked about that?

I don't think so. Not really. It wasn't framed this way. I mean, maybe these things came up in different discussions, but it was never framed this way. But you and I have worked together for many years. I think the biggest thing that I get confidence is, like I said, inside AWS, right?

We kind of like got the opportunity to start a startup without having to think about the funding part of it as much. We did have to think about the funding part, but not as much as we have to. Literally, it was like the two of us with help from a principal engineer at that time. And then we grew to like one more person that we, a few months later, one more person and slowly trickled until we started seeing success. And then we got the funding to like, okay, go big. Right. But I think in that timeframe, we did have our struggles.

We worked with some people that did not work out for the team or we didn't like working with each other. And I think in there, we had a lot of tough conversation, Ilya and me. And that kind of gives me the confidence that I can pretty much go to any kind of depths of despair. Yeah. Like, for a while, he was my manager, too. Right? We didn't have a software development manager. He was my manager.

And we did have, like, deep discussions about, like, I went and told him, again, like... I remember that discussion. It's been enough years. I remember what happened. You told me that, yeah, I'm too lenient. And that was a big lesson for me.

I can't work with this person, right? Yeah. Actually, it was a different conversation, but I remember that one as well, yeah. Wait, wait, wait. Tell us more about that, the being too lenient. I don't want to go too much into the details, but there was some performance issues on the team.

I see. And I think I was not taking decisive action fast enough because it's not in my nature. It's also one of the things like in a big company, you eventually have to manage people if you want to grow, right? Also a very hard thing to do. Yes. And I don't think it comes to me naturally. I mean, I can be pretty good at leading people.

But when it comes to managing people. I mean, I can be pretty good at leading people. But when it comes to, like, managing people inside of a corporation where you have processes and all the promotions and underrated attrition targets and all that shit, you know, I did not like that job. And so I guess I should have let somebody go, but I didn't. And Arnab wasn't happy about that because it was affecting the morale of the entire team. Yeah.

So talking about company building, you both came from big companies and now you're running the startup. What aspects are you consciously keeping and aspects that you're consciously choosing to not keep? I think we are making it develop organically. So we just try

to not do any extra stuff we don't have to do. But then there are some like process, for example. We never liked much process, but we also recognize that some process is important. So for example, we have a Kanban board with tasks. We have a priority rubric P0, P1, P2

that we use. We did write a press release doc, a PRFQ doc. When we first started, it gave us a lot of clarity. But we didn't polish it. So we do a lot of those things, like 80%. So Amazon would look at this and say it was not good enough to get

the principle. But for us, we just borrow enough process to make ourselves more effective. So for example, code reviews. We don't do code reviews. Well, now we've started now that we have one more person. But when it was just two make us, make ourselves more effective. So, for example, code reviews. We don't do code reviews. Well, now we've started now that we have one more person, but when it was just two of us, he would review my code, but I wouldn't review Arnab's

code, because he would just push the merge straight to main. Actually, CICD is a good example, right? We have CICD for our mobile app, because it saves us a ton of effort. By not having to build it locally, like upload all those files babysit them

it's a lot of work right so we've invested a few days yeah we use a service called Tramline there's an episode

that's coming out on our podcast with the founders of Tramline it's Arnav's friends from the past great tool saves us a lot of time

totally worth all the money we pay and all the investment of time we put into it but then Firebase, we have the backend on Firebase. Well, Arnav, tell us how you deploy to Firebase.

If you're not ashamed to do this publicly. No, I didn't get to talk about what? Firebase, how we deploy Firebase functions. Oh, we just go to our code terminal and say deploy these functions. I got the joke.

Jenny joined us last week and she comes from Amazon after like years and years. There is a senior engineer. And I told her like, okay, we don't have integration tests. We don't have like our backend doesn't have CICD. You would probably find it surprising because I was, I don't want to say the word zealot because I'm never a zealot about anything, but this was one of my main things at Amazon is like, just set this up, have the integration test, and then you don't have to think about this ever again going wrong.

And this time I'm taking a completely different path. But that's okay. That's what we need to validate the idea first before we take the time to do all these things. Yeah. One thing I think we learned, I have peak productivity at certain hours, like at work. You have a 9am, you have to be there and, you know, smile at that 9am, especially as a product manager, you have to talk a lot, right? So it can be really rough for somebody who's not a morning person. So after I left my job and started doing this, I started to force myself to start to work like at seven, at eight, at nine, to be sort of more

productive in the morning, because every book you pick, you pick productivity time is in the morning. Well, so I started to forgive myself for being unproductive in the morning. In the morning, I can do things like fill the passport forms or whatever, like go print something out. Maybe like until 10, I might not even do anything for work. And then I start doing, start getting to the groove. And then maybe around 1 p.m., 2 p.m. is when I reach my peak productivity. And then I would work until 6 and have dinner, spend time with the children. Then I would start working again at around 9 p.m., 9, 9.30. And that feels good. So my day is kind of fractured, but I'm always at my peak productivity for deep work, as opposed to being at a big company.

They don't care when your peak productivity is like everybody has to work at the same time. But it was a habit that was hard to undo at first. Yeah. I'd add on one more thing, Ronak. You asked like for the company, right? How different, what are the things that we're trying? One thing is we want North Star for us is we want to build a calm environment, right? And this is important for Ilya, me, and Jenny, our first engineer.

She kind of joined us because of that. She's a big believer in that too. Sometimes we have hard conversations about this because we are trying to get to a public release for the app. It is crazy sometimes. But I think that is one of the goals is every single meeting that we add, and we only have like one or two meetings, I think recurring, is like this needs to be a conscious decision. The other thing is, like Ilya said, it is a hard transition. But I'm finding myself that

I'm really enjoying this, like going in and out of the flow state, right? I no longer force myself or feel guilt if I have an unproductive, like completely unproductive. There are days like that, right? And you can't force yourself to be the same person every day. But then when I get into the zone, and this is happening maybe three, four times a week or so right now. But I am completely like in, in the zone churning out awesome things. And next day I'm like happy.

It is a hard transition though, coming from like, I think bigger team kind of environment where you have to be, you are working with so many people that you have to be kind of the same person every day. Otherwise it would of weird for others in the team is this influencing how you guys are shaping to build a company so as like it grows as the team grows there's more people there's more meetings are you guys thinking about maybe having things more done in writing such that people do have more sort of these blocks to kind of dictate their own schedule have you guys thought much about that yeah um for sure i think one of the things

we also recently talked about in the newsletter but just quickly talk about is um we started using slack now that we are three people right but one of the first things we did there is we named the channel Async Dev Chatter. Good one, good one. It's like there's no expectation that anybody is going to reply to anything immediately. At the same time, we did say the first few weeks, both Ilya and Jenny are kind of like coming up to speed. I'm going to be more available here, but our aim is like not be addicted. And actually this is, I think one of the things about Slack is the user experience is so good that you get addicted to it. And I feel like it's a bad

product because of that. It's a great product, but it's a bad product because it's a collaboration environment that gets you addicted. So we've been observing both of you and the progress Metagas is making from the outside since we last spoke. We've seen you posting pictures of our, like you listening to the podcast on your app with your, I think, the car screen picture that I think Arnab you posted. We see you talking to more and more popular guests like Jason Frey. And I think you had this conversation a couple months back. So from the outside, we see you making a lot of progress. And we're rooting for your success too. I want to know what have been such milestones which have kind of been influencing the trajectory of your company over, let's say, the last three to six months? So we started the podcast preemptively to build the audience and all that.

We've made a couple of pivots on the podcast already because it has not been picking up steam as much as we expected, at least in the initial version of it. So thank you guys for coming on our show when we were still in the very early days. I really appreciate that. At some point, specifically for the podcast, when we got... I think when we got Brian... So we were really lucky with our first guest.

Actually, similar to you, you guys had Helsinki Hightower. We had Brian McCullough, who is a very prolific podcaster, Take Me Right Home, Internet History Podcast. And then you name drop. Like with areas of secret episode, you name drop. They look at the list. Okay, so Jason Fried is in there.

Okay, sounds legit. So then they're much more likely to say yes. And then that's how you build that roster. As far as the app goes, we are currently in closed beta. I was in Vancouver, where our app is based, for a couple of weeks in the summer, and we worked our asses off. That's maybe what our app refers to as being intense. We really worked our asses off to get the closed beta out. We waitlisted about, allow listed, I should say. About 15 people

at this point, maybe 20. And yeah, we will be adding more and more people and we hope to launch publicly in November, maybe. We might have to do an intense sprint to do that.

Classic product manager and engineer conversation right here. I love it. Staying on brand. Very nice. Yeah, in real time.

But the thing is, if you don't launch in November, it spills into December. Then you have the holidays and it spills into January. You know how it goes, right? The big difference from the big companies

is that money runs out. Yeah. So that's a real challenge the downside is not limited it is unlimited downside so time is money in our case because we didn't take any funding we are churning through our own savings uh while doing this and so yeah it's it's it's not fun and and i think in terms of like big milestones, you called out like what you can see from outside, right? Internally, I think when we received that first email from,

actually, did we have them on our episode? No, we never had them on our episodes, but we received an email, a long email, a very emotional email. And that was like, okay, even if there's like 50 people in the world listening to us, but they're feeling these things, okay, we're doing our job, right? And that's kind of one of the pivotal moments when we decided that I think people want to hear more about the journey. And we've kind of done enough about the podcasting because there's only so many times you can talk about

like what microphone or what post-process and all that and starts to get old, you get the same old, same old feeling. Whereas the journey for every person and every human is so unique that that's been kind of amazing and people love to hear about that. It forms like deep connection.

In terms of the podcast itself, I think that's the pivot we made is we kind of think about it as our community engagement channel right now, rather than a way for us to like get big, like lots of popularity and all that, because we know that the people who are using our app and who believe in us and who trust us they're listening to it and they're getting a lot out of that and we get emotional like kind of fulfillment out of it and in terms of the app similar things i think like ilia said we've only allowed us that 15 20 people think max, because there's still a lot of like basic podcast table stakes features we are yet. Right. And forget about like integrating revenue and all that.

And we have to do that too. But every person that we onboard, pretty much every person that we onboard, we have a UX review. This is something that we also got from like the big companies. Right. have a UX review. This is something that we also got from like the big companies, right? And we go deep into try to understand why, how they use podcasts, not the apps, but why they use, why do they listen to podcasts and all that. And there's been so much learning from that. I think a few of them said like, okay, this is magical, even though there's like 15 things missing, it's buggy.

This part I really love, right? And that's what I think gives me confidence that we need to basically build all these other things that support the app, but it's on a good path. Yeah, we can't talk much about the functionality just yet, but there is a bunch of stuff that every podcast app has. You have to be able to play an audio, you have to be able to skip, you need to have speed controls.

Yeah, downloads. So all of that stuff we kind of punted on. But we really focused on the thing that makes our app magical. So that is the part where we hear from users that it does feel like magic. And that's what we wanted to validate. But now we have to build all of that

plumbing that a podcast cannot be without, right? And it's just a lot of work. But now that we have one more engineer, we hopefully will get through that much faster by November.

Good luck. Yeah, one thing I want to do. But the good thing is Ilya is coding too now. So we have like three people coding now. Yeah, and I'm like, why can't they do it faster? Figure it out yourself. I love it, I love it. Figure it out yourself.

I mean, they're much more proficient than me, so they should be doing it faster. So one thing I wanted to add is one of the decisions we made is to make our app more personal. Not as in personalized to you, which also will be part of that. But personal as in, you know, like if you go to a Walmart, like every time you see a person behind the counter, it's a different person. You never remember them. They never remember you. But like if I go to my local coffee shop, I know every single person who works there by name. They know me by name.

They start making me my drink before I even approach the, before I even pay them. They were just like, oh, usually I'm like, yes. And then by the time I pay, I already have my drink on the counter. So that's the kind of experience that we want in some way. So that podcast, that journey, we will also have release notes as a podcast. So we will have a lot of that personal touch where people can hear our voices, can hear who is behind the app, right in the app itself is one of the kind of I don't know, I guess emotional touch points which you will never get

from Spotify or Apple. Like, there's a different, let's say, assuming you get the same coffee at Starbucks and at the local coffee shop, which one would you prefer to go to? Right? I mean, I would always prefer to go to local. To support the people I know,

support the people whose name I know and all that, and chit-chat with them. Whereas to go to some random corporation, faceless. One example here is, Ilya touched upon it, so I'll talk about it a little bit. The getting started experience for apps is very important, right? Like, we're trying to do something really unique and I think experiment,

we'll see if it succeeds or not. When you start, you install it the first time. The getting started experience for our app is actually a podcast audio tour that Ilya and I walk you through it in like two, three minutes. That's pretty cool. And we haven't seen it anywhere.

We'll see if it succeeds or not, but that's the the kind of like emotion we want people to get to know us immediately and connect with us yeah like one comparison i could also do here is let's say if you take this script and squadcast the tools we are using you know for podcasting they have people who know those videos they're hosted by people who are hired to talk about the product, which is great. There's nothing wrong with that.

But then there is a podcast hosting service, Transistor.fm, and Justin Jackson, the founder of the company, he does all his videos himself. And they're just, I don't know,

it just makes me feel more connected to the product. Yeah, for sure. Well, we know we're at time at this point, a little over. So guys, thanks so much for staying over. This was an awesome chat for, I mean, I speak for Guang too in this case. And hey, Ernest Dog.

So thank you so much. He's actually part of our company. Oh, that's awesome so before we bring this to a close is there something else you would like to share with our listeners I would just say this if you basically give us a chance

we just have the landing page right now if you want to be on the beta tell us about it uh go sign up there and metacast.app you forgot to say the euro and ilia does an amazing job uh with the newsletter and i i feel like i love reading it myself we are hearing the same thing from other people too uh see if you like it give it a. And that would mean the world to us. Like basically three people

trying to do something. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. So you can find us at metacast.app and that's where you can put your email and get notified when the app comes out.

But if you do want to get on the closed beta, you can just email us at team at metacast.app. Awesome. We'll link these in the show notes and make sure people check you out. And we highly encourage people to do so too. And as I mentioned before, this has been awesome. We love chatting with you when you were hosting us on the podcast. And this was a blast hosting you here too.

Yes. And we do hope this is one of the many conversations we'll have going forward on and off the record. So thank you so much for your time, folks. This was super helpful. Or this was awesome.

It was amazing. Yeah. Thanks for having us. Yeah. It was an amazing chat. Yeah, I really enjoyed it. So, Guang,

you had, what, like eight topics? How many did you cover? That's why it's very fitting that, you know, we're going to slow trips into many conversations. But yeah, yeah, yeah. I checked off three.

Yeah, and we covered two more, I think, that were not on the list. That's how we roll as well. It's meant to be this way. That's cool. For sure, for sure. Awesome, awesome. Thanks, guys.

Awesome, cool. Thanks, guys. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Hey, thank you so much for listening to the show. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

and learn more about us at softwaremisadventures.com. You can also write to us at hello at softwaremisadventures.com. We would love to hear from you until next time. Take care.