The Pomp Podcast - #820 Building Consumer Products For Millions w/ Aarthi Ramamurthy

Episode Date: February 10, 2022

Aarthi Ramamurthy is the head of International at Clubhouse. She co-hosts "The Good Time Show" and was recently signed with WME as a creator focused on telling optimistic stories about technology. In this conversation, we talk about building technology products, connecting shared experiences globally, and Aarthi's fascinating background to get to where she is today. ======================= Mode, UK Fintech app, allows you to buy, earn and grow Bitcoin, all in one app. Not only is it a secure app to buy & hold Bitcoin, Mode allows you to pay & receive up to 10% Bitcoin Cashback from its growing list of online partner brands.   Available on the App Store and Google Play. Download Mode at modeapp.com and set up your account to be in with the chance of winning ONE WHOLE Bitcoin. Offer ends Jan 31, 2022. Only available in the UK. ======================= Fundrise is largest direct-to-investor real estate investment platform out there, giving you the opportunity to achieve upside of an asset class previously reserved for institutions and high net worth individuals. That’s right, Fundrise is making high-end private market real estate investing accessible to everyone via an easy-to-use, automated platform. See for yourself how over 190,000 investors have built a better portfolio with private real estate. It takes just a few minutes to get started with as little as $10. Go to Fundrise.com/Pomp today and, for a limited time, get $10 when you place your first investment. That’s Fundrise.com/Pomp =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Arthi Ramamurthy is the head of international at Clubhouse. She also recently signed with WME as a creator focused on telling optimistic stories about technology. In this conversation, we talk about building technology products, about bringing all sorts of different experiences to people globally and also about her personal story in the technology industry. I really enjoyed this conversation with Arthi and I hope that you do as well. Before we get into this episode, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Mode. Mode is a

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and make sure to check out the rewards tab on the app for the 30 plus brands you can earn Bitcoin cash back from. Go check them out at modeapp.com or go into the Google Play Store or the App Store and download the Mode app today. Today's episode is brought to you by Fundrise. You all know I believe that the best investors both understand and seek out extreme asymmetry. Fundrise is here to help you do just that. It's the largest direct-to-investor real estate investment platform out there, giving you the opportunity to achieve upside of an asset class previously reserved for institutions and high net worth individuals. That's right, Fundrise is making high-end private market real estate investing accessible to everyone

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Pomp. All right, let's get in this episode. I hope you guys enjoyed this one. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion.

This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys, bang, bang. I've got Arthi here with me. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me here, Pomp. I'm super excited about having this conversation because I feel like you transcend

so many different aspects of the tech industry. You transcend geographies. You've transcended so many different companies. You transcend so many different types of modalities of the delivering of these technologies to the consumer. And you've got a ton of experience. And the best way that I figured that we could do this was to start out where most people that are around mine or your age got into the Internet, which was either AOL's Instant Messenger or Yahoo Messenger. And I've been told that you and your husband Sriram actually met on Yahoo Messenger. So talk to me about the kind of experience or your memory of that specific product.

How much time did you spend on it? Why was that product so kind of important or foundational to you outside of also happening to meet Sriram? But for you personally, in terms of your journey building technology products. That's a great first question. First of all, thanks so much for having me. I'm a huge fan of the podcast and you just do amazing content work and I'm always inspired just learning from

you, Bob. So this is great. It's kind of a dream come true for me to be here. Yahoo Messenger. I want to set the scene. This is nearly 20 years ago and you're looking at dial-up connection in India, things barely working. My dad was kind of grumpy about getting our first computer and he was like, this is such a waste of time. Are you sure you want to do this? I'm like, yes. We plug in the first browser, like Netscape Navigator shows up and we think this is, this is it. This is the real deal. Yahoo Messenger, ICQ. I don't know if you remember that back then. All of these were the, you know, synchronous or async chat technologies. Then one of our friends who wanted to build this website for college kids and school kids in India, he basically found the two nerdiest

friends that he knew who could write code for this website. And that happened to be me and Shuram. And so we got connected on this Yahoo chat room and started working on this together. the project went nowhere but you know the chat app was just great for us we added each other as friends and uh six months later i'm like purging through this list of contacts that i see on like yahoo messenger and i look at uh this person i'm like who are you like i don't even remember this person so i'm like hey i'm about to like delete all these contacts i just want to make sure that i haven't made a mistake i just who are you and he responds freedom response saying oh you know we got added in this group for coding. Our first big fight was around which SQL server versus

Oracle, which database to go use. But for me at that time, it was just amazing to have technology, like having Yahoo Messenger, as ridiculous as it sounds now, at that time, we were like, I can talk to people who are far, far away. It's not a telephone call. And we were obsessed. We were doing this like 4 a.m 5 a.m in the morning would sleep for a couple of hours then get to college or school and then rinse repeat we would get back online and this is how I met a lot of my initial set of friends and we were just super fortunate because we ended up not so much growing up with technology but you're having access to technology at the time when we really needed it and that was really great for us I think and I owe my entire career life to tech and I think

Soda Sriram. And so for us, we always see it as like, it sounds really cliche, but we are huge fans of like being optimists about technology and the future of it. And that's also, you know, I know you talk a lot about crypto and decentralization. And for us, we're really bullish on that because I feel like it's that same kind of atmosphere coming back up. And I love that. So that's our story. That's how we met. And a year later, we met in person as a part of this bot coding competition it gets nerdy it gets very nerdy well your first argument was about which database to use which already is a pretty good start yeah and uh you know i i uh take the train from my college which is this in a small town in india to shiram's college and he's built

his bot sdk and i build his actual bot and we fight like you know there are lots of other like contestants and we find it out. And mine, I think we landed like second place or something. And that's when I met Triram for the first time. I'm like, holy crap, you're tall. That's kind of how it started. And then, you know, a few years later, we ended up joining Microsoft around the same time, same manager, same team. And it just, you know, that's kind of how the whole thing started. My biggest takeaway from this is you're living in India, you're in college, kind of, you know, coming out of high school age and your experience that you just described with Yahoo messenger was no different than my experience with a well instant messenger. Right. And I was living in

the United States and this whole idea of like, you can make friends on the internet. You can communicate with people. Uh, there was this element almost of like, when you got in front of the computer, it felt like you were, uh, in this whole new world. And then you would like leave that world. And usually, uh, especially for my parents that meant, cause they had to use the phone right because it was blocking the dial-up service yes you would have to like get off the internet and then go there was no sense of like being able to bring the internet with you everywhere obviously we have smartphones today etc but it was very much like i'm opting into using this piece of technology and now i have to leave it and go and like back into my real life

um so it's fascinating that you know on two different sides of the world you have uh young people who have a very similar experience with true it's true it feels like you know i don't know if you've seen this movie ready player one where the virtual world is so much more exciting and then when they disconnect the real world is just really bad they're living in these like containers and you know it's just so it's dystopian but then the virtual world is so glamorous and it's like you can be whoever you want to be and for a brief second that's kind of how it felt even back then where and and and for me like now with pseudonymity and everything it's all coming back again and that's really exciting because you can be whoever you want to be uh this is true

meritocracy for me and it just it feels really great so that's really you know it i'm tasting that again because for many many years in between you kind of lost that with like your own identity and profiles and everything else uh but the magic of the internet then was like you could like leave your real world go into this virtual world these are like your true friends you hang out with them all night and then you build all this stuff and you talk about like i remember having a physics group and astronomy group and all of that and you just like hang out with all these people and then you can't come back to your like really boring college life and that just felt like something you tolerated until like the night time again and you could go back online and just work

on stuff yeah it's amazing uh when you went to microsoft you were working on xbox uh and one of the like classic uh narrative violations in the legacy tech world is that the xbox was cool and microsoft uh supposedly was not cool uh and so how did you feel about working at a big large kind of what many people would think as an antiquated tech company even though they're still one of the most valuable companies in the world today uh but they produced something that seems so off right or so different what they ultimately were known as um just talk to me kind of about that difference and like, is that more of just an assumption from the outside or did it feel that way internally as well? No. So I joined Microsoft in 2005, a year before I

graduated, uh, Microsoft and my college had an agreement where I would go work full-time at Microsoft, even though it would be considered a project as far as my college is concerned. So I got to be one of the richest college kids at that time, which was really cool. and so I ended up joining Microsoft and at that time you know it I didn't start out on Xbox I started working on developer tools and Visual Studio the runtime loader subsystems so you know for me it was like very this is this is my world of like deep engineering products kind of thing and so I developer ecosystem products and so I worked on that for a while and then when Xbox had an opening for a product leader who knew something about the foundations, about the

infrastructure, emulation system, multiplayer gaming, hosting. A lot of my initial products were around independent games, like indie games at that time. And indie games were always looked down upon. It was always this like, oh yeah, we had like Halo, we had all these like flagship products, but then here's this whole ecosystem of developers who are trying to build indie games. So I specifically picked like the most unsexy part of the ecosystem. But for me, Xbox had done something that Microsoft, nobody had thought Microsoft would do. It had become, it had broken out of the Windows, Office, Visual Studio, very corporate, enterprise-y, sales cycle driven kind of, you know, quote unquote, boring products to this very hip, you know, consumer centric. now we take it for granted but at that time when the first second third iterations of xbox came out

it was magical like nobody had seen anything like it here's this console you could like throw in this dvd and you know you could play this game for hours and hours uh we remember tracking spikes through christmas mornings and who gifted whom and all of that stuff and so it was just it was that really fun time that was very atypical and you could see it even within the company like the xbox people were considered cool um and they had their own kind of buildings it was all studio set up um i attribute a lot of that to jay allard who was a vp there at that time who had like was just as total visionary and came up with this whole new set of like suites of products and xbox itself um but yeah i mean i don't think it was just an external perception

even internally there was i don't think there was ever a belief that we could break out of that enterprise kind of ecosystem for me you know i'm a junior pm there i'm just trying to learn from all these people uh at that time they were just kind of conceptualizing connect which was all about like uh you know just use your arms like you know this was even i it was kind of like the we but even better because you didn't really have a controller you could just move around and it would just pick up your motion and play um i thought that was magical so for me it was a lot of it was just being a sponge and absorbing and learning and really understanding what consumer products meant because i'd never had exposure there so how to price it what does holiday season

mean what does gifting mean um what do like updates and you know i think at that time there was the xbox red ring of death fiasco so dealing with that stuff so just a lot of trial by fire just learning a lot of that and just being a sponge that was really great when you think about um, that time, um, is there one thing that you learned that you're like, you know, still to this day, I look back and this was the lesson I took away that I apply, you know, on a daily, weekly, monthly basis today. Yeah. I think a couple of things, Microsoft was our initial, you know, first foray into tech companies, getting a full-time job and the number of people who just, you know, you, now we say mentors and it means different things to different people.

So at that time, we had all these people at Microsoft who had been there for 20 years, 25 years, who would just help you. And they don't expect anything in return. They would, like, talk to you about your career, talk to you about what you want to work on. And, you know, at that time, both Sriram and I, we would randomly walk up to a vice president's office and we'd be like, oh, you know, you really need to take this technology seriously. or I think at that time, I remember walking into Scott Guthrie's office and being like, Ruby on Rails, you really have to go invest in that.

Like, I don't know how you're going to do it, but you're going to have to figure it out. And they would actually take us seriously without being like, oh, these children, so annoying, just get out of my office. And, you know, same with like when the first iPhone showed up and, you know, for us, it was,

it again sounds like such a cliche, but for sure and i this was a magical time like we were so grateful that this company had taken a chance on us uh we would work two nights three nights four nights in a row just have like sleep under uh our desk with like this mattress until the janitor one day just kicked us out saying i can't clean your cubicle can you please get out and so we would do that uh we would take the last shuttle back home we would try and like we were just so excited to be here and there were some times where we were like, you're paying us for this. Can you believe it? This is insane. And I hope when I never want to lose that feeling of just being grateful and feeling like, you know,

people are taking a chance on you. You know, I think a lot of people, especially in tech through the years, I've seen people have just gotten really cynical and jaded and they just take it for granted a lot. That's like on the philosophical side of things, but product side of things just building a really awesome zero to one consumer product when nobody ever thought you could and now everyone knows like xbox is a thing here to stay at that time it wasn't such an obvious bet so that's a lesson for me i would just take with me all along that if everyone tells you oh my god this pivot makes no sense you always did this don't try this other thing uh i think xbox for me is a great counter example where that wasn't true necessarily and they still made it

work and massively successful and still scales and does really well. So after Microsoft, at some point you get to Netflix, which also executed what at the time was a very controversial kind of strategic decision, right? For those that are listening to this and are young, younger than me, at least, you may not realize that Netflix actually started out shipping or mailing physical dvds to your mailbox and i remember as a kid uh when this first came out you would basically get it and then you would have to return it you would send it back on your next kind of order if you will within like five days or whatever it was and it was like you would go check the mailbox to see did the netflix show up or not the other thing was you had to make sure you didn't get it super

scratched up or anything because when you went to return it you didn't want to have any issues all this so when you go from that which is a kind of logistics business right of physical dvds you eventually pivot towards streaming and that was in hindsight a very smart decision some could argue that uh there are bet the company decisions this may have been a uh survive as a business at all costs decision they're still mailing dvds today i don't know if they would be around but during that time internally did people know this was a no-brainer decision or was there very much like uh hey we think this is right but like everyone is saying that we're stupid and like we may be wrong on this like how are we handling it internally yeah i i feel like i've joined all

these companies at the peak of the controversial times maybe i'm causing them or maybe just like i'm attracted to it i don't know what's going on but every one of these companies just went through this pet the company crisis right when I was there. Netflix for me, I was one of the earliest people, product people working on the Netflix streaming player. And, you know, as it wasn't really controversial at that time, but that was a time, and I don't know if you remember this, but at that time they had this quickster fiasco where they basically said the DVD business is going to become a different company and then you're going to have this other company that just does streaming we're splitting netflix into two parts and one of them is going to be called

quickster um and that became a huge controversy people were like how can you do this i really like this one brand and now in retrospect i can't even articulate what the real controversy was but at that time i remember snl sketches the steel shirt with reed hastings and just so much going on then in the company that I think the stock price went from, I could be wrong about this, from somewhere like $200 to like $70 or so in a quarter. And it was, you know, internally, I'm not going to lie, it was really crushing. Like, you know, a lot of people had joined very recently then. The company was just trying to really kick off streaming in a big way. um and it felt like what did we do here joining this thing um and uh just this moment of deep

crisis and netflix did this thing at that time where every quarter right before the quarterly results came out they would do an all hands but they would rent a local uh movie studio or movie theater and a cinema and you could go in there and that's where like you did project on this big screen. And I remember the next quarter when they'd survived the whole thing, which felt like forever. They, the first, they do a banner, like a movie poster as like an introductory poster every time. And the poster that they had chosen at that time was the comeback kids. And I'll never forget that because like the entire audience just erupted in this huge applause. It felt like we'd made it. But, you know, that was very, very stressful within the company, even though now

in retrospect, you've seen international programming, you've seen original content programming, you've seen multiple kinds of devices, like every device in the planet now has a Netflix streaming button on it. It wasn't that obvious then that the company was going to make it. One of the things that you've talked about is that Reed Hastings and the rest of the executive team there, you know, they focus on a number of different things that sounds like you learned about, but one of them was de-risking the business. And I don't remember who said this, but I've probably multiple people have talked about the fact that entrepreneurs that end up becoming great executives aren't necessarily blind risk takers. They don't just seek out,

oh, what's the riskiest thing? Let me go do that. Instead, it's the exact opposite. Identify the risk and kill the risk, right? How do you de-risk as much as possible? So talk a little bit about what you learned there around de-risking a business while working at Netflix. Yeah, I think Bezos said that too. I was attending back then, like a decade ago, an AWS conference and AWS was very new. And I think some audience question was like, how do you take these risks and how are you so bold? And Bezos was like, no, my whole job is to not take risks. I try really, really hard to not risk everything because I think people who take risks are people who don't really understand what they're losing. you really have to uh de-risk yourself as much as possible uh and that's my advice for all founders um i didn't quite understand it back then but having founded a company now i totally get it um and for me uh for reed hastings i think that was the biggest lesson where you know just thinking about it this was not something he said uh i i really like two things

about reed like his long-term very strategic thinking where he de-risks every part of the business and how good he is at storytelling. He's just incredibly good at it. To this day, it's this long-term vision that he's still able to systematically lay out and paint this picture of what the future should look like. And I'm just so jealous of that skill or both these skills. And for, you know, at that time, this is 2010 Netflix. Streaming is just about taking off. it's not a big deal yet no original content programming really not even international we are the small little office in las gatos uh way south of the bay area like we didn't even want an office in like the fancy part of bay area or san francisco uh it was just like cheapest real

estate all the way down in las gatos uh three buildings and that's basically it uh i think the entire company was about 700 people and uh but the company had gone public with just the dvd business side of things and using the dvd business and using the margins there he started out the streaming side of things effectively de-risking the whole thing but you know forging forward onto this whole new business model then came you know original content but really the way he tried original content was to renew a season of arrested development and see how it did like dipping his and that and testing it out um and once that proved to be pretty good from positive metrics impact he started like investing more in original content and you saw house of cards and everything

else much later um then country expansion we again dipped our toes in latin america tried it out lots of kinks there things were like broken especially with localization uh just people not being able to understand the content library that we had in the u.s and so just trying to fix a lot of that stuff and and so basically he just took this multi-tiered approach where without risking the entire business keeping the core business stable he just kept adding on things just removing ironing out all the kinks and keep building on top of it and you know at some point at CES you know it's like 130 countries it's all live but that didn't happen overnight it happened because there were these 20 different chess moves which eventually led to this

one moment where you had a ton of you know original content on it uh you had a lot of countries and support for countries and local language offering and all of that and this also came because we were under at that time netflix was under existential threat we had a bunch of studios threatening to pull out and not really have their content library on the platform so you could argue that there was no real choice to other than to do this but I for me it was just this master class and watching breed strategically move from one step to the other learn from the mistakes address all of them and then be really aggressive and move on and keep going and keep going and keep going and that was just great. And to this day, I still think about what a strategic mastermind that

team was, the executive team was to be able to have that happen at that time, like over a decade ago and just follow through on those steps. So great lessons there. And also Reed's a great storyteller. Like anytime you watch Reed's interview, he will make you feel like he's best friend and uh he would also talk about not competition per se but really about like you know my real competition with netflix are is people who are bicycling or watching like something else or they are going for a walk and uh just free time is basically how he perceives competition for netflix which i thought was great because nobody ever articulates it that way they're always like those two companies they are my competition kind of thing and reed doesn't do

that. He's like, you have finite amount of time. And if you're able to dedicate 30 minutes for something else than Netflix, that's my competition. And I need to figure out what we can do there. And he's just very good at just addressing it. How much of the strategic decisions that get made were on day one, you know, hey, we might never know an actual business plan, but we pretty much knew let's launch the, you know, kind of subscription service for physical DVDs, then we'll go into streaming, then we'll go into original programming versus no, you start the business. And then as you get kind of to each new level of the business, then you evaluate your decisions and you make the decisions from there. So in hindsight, it looks like genius work. But

actually, what you're doing was just kind of solving the local obstacle. Exactly. So I think that was a ladder very much. I think it was very much about, let's figure out how to unblock ourselves right now. I think what Netflix had done really well was never losing sight of the end goal. We want to be in all countries. We want to fund all these really interesting documentaries and TV shows and movies and everything else. We want to have studios come to us and bring the best content to us. That was the North Star of the vision. But if you just started with that in 2010 that would have sounded insane because you had to build so many layers on top so reed would always paint the picture of the future but basically say this is what we need to unblock

right now and the next two years is going to be this and then you know they announced a price increase which again was super controversial because everybody had gotten used to netflix at a particular price point and uh and then like you know expanding that basically saying look our catalog is so much bigger um this is what we are offering for an extra cup of coffee um and uh just being able to scale that and get more demand um and just being able to strategically do that so it was very much the ladder of what you said which is like build one on top of the other and um and but not lose sight of the north star and for me that's that's still again a great lesson i met reed many years later you know a conference or an off-site or something and i

mentioned all of this to him and he he i don't think he particularly sees it as like a very strategic thing he just sees it as like this is how you build a company this is how you scale the business and to me it's like i have all these lessons and i write about it and think about it a lot and all of that but i think for him it just comes naturally to him yeah that's a fantastic skill set for him to have for sure um at uh next after netflix uh you end up starting your own business uh and then you go on to facebook and i think what uh in in my understanding of these two experiences in your life uh one was actually you running the business so you have to have a finder's uh founder's mindset to run a business uh and that's you know kind of the best way to

actually learn about uh building businesses is to do it it's almost like if you want to be good at baseball, go play baseball. You want to be good at basketball, go play basketball. Right. Um, but also at, uh, Facebook having a founder's mindset in building products. So even though it's a big company still having that mindset, talk a little bit about taking that founder's mindset and applying it to one, your own company, but also to building products inside of a large organization like Facebook. Yeah. So I've always wanted to start a company always, always for a very very long time um i don't i think shuram has been on this show before but uh our one of our first date night movies was pirates of silicon valley and uh you know there this guy who like

this steve jobs basically has this whole monologue that says you know you you want why if you had to have it if you had a chance to make a dent in the universe why won't you take it and why won't you run with it. And, and that really struck stuck in our minds. And, you know, that's also why when we moved, we moved to the US because of Microsoft, and they were, you know, we're super grateful for them moving us over to Seattle. And then after a while, we were like, we have to move to Silicon Valley, this is really where the magic is. And when we moved, we actually found a really crappy apartment, not so far from Steve Jobs's house. Mostly because we were like, someday we'd like maybe run into him and it'll be great uh unfortunately at that time he was already really

sick and so we never got to see him uh but for us this we were obsessed about this whole idea of the silicon valley ethos and people starting companies uh making a difference making a dent in the universe so when the timing was right and you know the immigration stuff got figured out i got my green card and everything um i wanted to go start a company and so um at that time if you had asked me founder mindset I would have probably just totally bullshitted and I would have just said oh you know like ability to do specific things and whatever but now having been through the whole process starting a company was both the the hardest thing I've ever done professionally and also the most gratifying you know most learning I've ever had learning

experience I've ever had in my entire career so far. I've always had a chip on my shoulder of not having an MBA. I grew up all through the engineering track. I have a master's in computer science. And so for me, I've always thought of myself as not as polished as a Stanford GSP or a Harvard Business School person. I'm very rough, very unpolished as such. And I've always had this as a chip on my shoulder uh but then you go through starting a company and you realize that you learned so much in such a short compressed amount of time um everything was difficult when we started we applied through yc we got through um and then fundraising was super hard it took us 200 plus angel investment meetings uh we ultimately ended up taking checks from like 33 angels or so

for the first seed round and we had you know other people in my batch like DoorDash was in my batch and all these other companies were just killing it and then there was us we were definitely the black sheep of the whole batch and everything was hard hiring was terribly hard and just scaling the business talking to customers every single day would stand in line in line at a Costco waiting for a printer, tuner, and some customer called and I would like step out of the line and be like, yeah, this is low-end customer support. How can I help you? And I would just like get into the call, but you just learned so much just doing it and like meeting customers in real life and just doing the hard things over and over and over again. And once you get really good at it,

you hire the right set of people and hand it over to them and then pick the next big hard thing so the job of a founder never ends it gets even harder and uh that was great like in retrospect i would never you know trade it back for anything else just learned a whole bunch and some point i hope to do another company again um but that it just instills this mindset and the founder mindset now after going through the whole thing one is just charging through walls being able to solve any problems that need charging. I've generally been, you know, pretty aggressive kind of personality, just getting, trying to get things done. So for me, it felt like this was a really natural fit and being able to demonstrate that where it's considered an advantage, not a

disadvantage. The raw unpolished nature was actually great. Turns out that, you know, your employees, your staff, your co-founder, your investors, they all want that. They don't want super polished kind of dampened down kind of storytelling. And so for me, it worked out really well from that standpoint. We were able to set a partnership with one of the biggest retailers, Best Buy. And that, if you told me a 20, 30 person startup goes to Minneapolis and sets up a partnership with the CEO of Best Buy would have been impossible. Just stuck it out there, stayed there for a couple months, just, you know, try to like push this through and make it happen.

And we finally signed the deal. We partnered with all these retailers and gadget companies and all of that. And so lots of lessons there for me. And that for me is like truly founder mindset, like being able to run through walls and solve whatever problem needs solving and being able to take that lesson and apply it in the future and I'm hoping that I never ever lose that because I just think it's so valuable and the startups that I now invest in or advise I tell them this too it's like a big part of your job is no problem is beneath you you just have to go solve it and you just have to have that culture of everyone

just picking up the pieces and running with it and that I think was great it also helped me at Facebook later on. So when you take this mentality, one of the things that's fascinating to me is most people think about building and they think about building technology products, software, and think about building companies. But you've also built the Good Time Show, which in my opinion, I think there's a lot of similarities between building technology products or building companies and building these content, whether you think of them as platforms, whether you think of them as, uh, um, kind of, uh, specific shows or, or however you want to think about the content itself. What, what has been your experience in building it? Maybe you can tell us a little bit

about the show to start and then talk a little bit as to like how you guys have built this into what I think is probably the most popular show, if not one of the most popular shows on clubhouse. Yeah, it's, uh, it's been quite the journey. It's been a year old. Uh, so here's what happened and totally random I don't know if I've ever talked about the origin story anywhere else but last December literally a year ago I was in the shower and I'm like thinking about how it's been like over a year of the pandemic and how everything's just been terrible we haven't met our friends we usually host a lot of I get a lot of energy from meeting other founders and we haven't been able to do that and we haven't I haven't both Faram and I haven't gone back home

to meet our parents in a long time and we were like wouldn't it be nice and I'm just thinking in the shower wouldn't it be nice to just host something where these people who would otherwise show up to our house or we would go to theirs if they could just be in the same virtual space together and we would host like a virtual dinner party of sorts and that would kind of be nice be casual wouldn't it be cool kind of thing so I get out I picture around and I'm like maybe we should like think about this thing and uh start this uh uh you know show and we didn't know what to call it we called it good time show because why not like not a lot of thought went into it um and uh started this whole thing end of last year and uh you know initially it was a lot of it was about

like an advice kind of thing. We would get Mark Andreessen to come in. We'd get Steven Sanofsky to come in. All these people would just come in and just share their wisdom. And a lot of it was just a place to talk about how to hire in your companies, how to do, you know, performance reviews.

How do you fundraise? Like, you know, we just got in all these experts to come in and tell their story, give advice, that kind of thing. And then I think sometime in January, Elon Musk showed up on our show. and it just blew up like I you know we everyone knows Elon Musk is very famous but we kind of thought it would be like this segment that would be kind of fun quirky popular and then we'd move

on but you know leading up to that day was such a big deal we had I remember getting onto Clubhouse the app and scrolling through and there were all these people thousands of people being like when us a show and they were hosting all these rooms helping us prepare for what to ask Elon and that's when we were like oh my god there's real pressure we have to get this right um and uh I think the show really took off from that day uh and then right after that we got Zach on the show to talk about AR VR um and then since then you know we've hosted a ton of people from you know music fashion A lot of folks who are just getting into NFTs or who are just talking about their new company that they're setting up or, you know, I think Coinbase went public and Brian Armstrong came in on IPO day. And for us, a lot of it is about, it's so much fun to do it.

uh, I, I, I would have never estimated how much joy I derived from this because you're in this moment, you're there with these guests and they're celebrating, or they talk about the most complex challenge and you're there and you're basically this container, this vessel was basically able to like hold them and help them tell their story. And so you're really not, you know, the most important thing in this show, it's really just these guests coming in and the stories were just amazing. And you realize that across music and sports and fashion and all these folks, the creators are exactly the same, very similar DNA. And you talk to Naomi Osaka, she's very similar to, you know, somebody like Virgil Abloh or Calvin Harris or any of these

folks, they're also driven. They really want to create, they want to give back. And it's just been super inspiring to just see that whole act of creation and pump. I'm sure you see these patterns in your shows too, where you do this, you're way more prolific than we are. We are exhausted doing like two days a week. And, and for us, and the reason why we picked 10 PM PST is that's when my daughter goes to sleep and able to grab some dinner and just get on the show and do it. So we basically make it work for our convenience and i know that's not the case for you you work super hard on this uh but i've just learned so much just doing this for a year um like one i just watch how people tell their story two it's inspired me to go take some chances because here

are some like really crazy people doing outrageous things um recently we had the team of chain runners come in um and you know they'd never heard each other's voices until they were on the show together they'd all been working on this project for so long and they were like this is what you sound like and they're all like you know talking among themselves it was great and the energy was great you know the end the whole show uh with like you know hack the world and you know all of that the discord's just popping and it's great um but yeah i'm sure i'm overstating how great and positive at all is there are times when we're like oh my god can we actually sustain us and do it uh but it's just it's it's been net positive for me multiple times over and for both me and shira

so what is the number one memory over the last year when you think back you're like i cannot believe that we did that is that talking to elon is it zuck is it uh naomi asaka like what is the one either person or question or moment throughout the entire year long timeline that you've been running this show now where you're like, that was crazy. I've had a couple of those. One was definitely the Elon moment. It's hard to understand a month into this show, everyone just takes you seriously. And, you know, part of, I mentioned this way earlier in our conversation, both and i are techno optimists tech has given us everything um and we we don't see this as a way to give back or anything but for us honestly we are a little sick and tired of seeing the stories

in tech about how like how everything is negative and how you know um tech founders are vilified and i just think there is there needs to be a space for people to just tell their stories whether you agree with them or not like you don't it doesn't have to be a narrative spin but you just need a space and that's kind of what we've tried to provide and I think the Elon moment was huge because it was not just because of Elon like he brought in Vlad from Robinhood and at that time they had this whole controversy and so you know there was this whole conversation where Elon was actually interviewing Vlad and asking about, you know, the Reddit forums and everything else. So that was a great moment, which was completely unscripted, unexpected. We didn't expect Vlad

to be there. It just happened. So I will always, always remember that. Two, a few rooms that we had hosted from, you know, founders in India that I think for us was like very special. The most recent uh was girish uh you know he founded this company called fresh works and they just went public and for somebody to come from a very very humble background uh decade later you know take the company public and have this whole like nasdaq moment with we talked about like you know they come from a very similar part of india that i me both me and sharam came from and so it was i had goosebumps just getting into this show and just starting out and i was so excited about it because for me it was like just such a dream come true because these are the founders who don't

really get to tell their stories as much so we got to talk to him about milestones in his career at what point did he think the business was not going to work at what point uh uh did they think you know um this is it this is going to scale from here on uh layoffs otherwise like all of that like the entire story and uh just having space for that conversation and just going direct to the people i thought was really great so a couple of moments there it's hard to pick but elon's moment was definitely up there yeah it's so crazy to kind of hear because i can just literally see it right you're like man i really really enjoyed doing this and uh just in one year how much uh how much amazing content and experience there is uh and and then i think my takeaway kind of hearing

you talk about it is that's such a wide variety both from founders investors geography right kind of where we started the conversation of just i feel like your career has been across geographies companies modalities etc and it feels like it's kind of coming full circle now where on a weekly basis you all get to bring so many different types of people together uh in the show is uh is pretty cool. When you look out over the next year or so, what's your hope for the show? Just bigger and better or anything special planned? I think honestly, do what kind of you're doing. Just keep it consistent, like actually show up and do it. I think January, I messaged you and I was like, how do you do this? And what advice do you have for me? And you were like, just start, just do it.

And, uh, I've taken that to heart and I feel like, you know, uh, my goal for the next 12 months is not give up and keep going because I think that's most of the battle. Um, I think there are lots of positive stories to tell and it doesn't have to again, be positive spin, but tech is just so incredible as, uh, you know, as just providing a level playing field um and uh i for me it really hurts and it kind of it's not a great place to be when uh there's so much anti-tech kind of sentiment uh some of it i get uh it's deserved and i think a lot of it when you have like especially new founders starting something new um you want to give them the space because starting a company itself is so hard and you really want to be there

and help them be able to tell their story. So we're just hoping to keep this going and make it a space for people to actually share stuff and come over and tell us things. And also like for everything else, like music and sports and all of that, I, you know, we are not experts. We don't pretend to be.

We get, sometimes we get criticism being like, what do they know about, you know, tennis and Naomi Osaka? And we don't, we never pretended to know, But it turns out that we're just curious. We just want to hear what people have to say and how they got started and what do they want to do and all of that. So our goal is to just, it's not so much bigger.

It's not, hopefully it'll be better. We have a long ways to keep it improving and iterating on it, but mostly just keep it going. Yeah, it's so cool to see. where, where can we send people if they want to tune in on a weekly basis? Uh, where should they go? Yeah. So the, the shows on clubhouse, uh, and it's called the good time show. So if you search for this club called good time, that's us, we are the ones hosting it. And so you just follow the club. And every time we do a new room there, you'll get notification. Uh, we are also active on Twitter. I spam the crap out of everyone on all the shows that are coming up. We have some

good new shows that are like lining up for next week and week after um and i just do this as a part-time job like i have a day job at clubhouse and then i do this on the site to just get the guests in get them all set up um have the right questions for them like you know what do they want to talk about are they launching something announcing something uh all of that so um yeah So follow us on good time and, uh, or just follow me on Twitter and, uh, you should be able to, uh, get a notification or many notifications. Amazing. Well, listen, thank you so much for, uh, for taking the time to do this.

Uh, before we wrap up, where, uh, where should we send people to follow you on the internet? What Twitter, uh, or is there somewhere else that you want to send people? It's Twitter right now. I mean, I'm trying really hard to separate my, you know, back to the whole pseudonymity stuff. So discord is all got a different name. And, uh, so I have different identities, but Twitter is really where I am at. I'm RTR. That's my first name and last initial, uh, at, uh, on Twitter.

So that's really where to send me. And, uh, on clubhouse is the same handle. Good times, the name of the club. And that's where you can find me. So if you find me on Twitter, you'll also find a way to like reach out to me as well. You should see my email. Amazing. Well, listen, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I feel like I could talk to you forever. Uh, you have so many different ideas about kind of the technology industry.

You've had so many different experiences. Uh, and you know, frankly, I think we just need more folks like you helping to build these products and scale them because, uh, when you come from, uh, an, uh, kind of career of everything, literally from Xbox, uh, robotics, and then all the way up to, uh, to software, it's, uh, it's pretty unique. So, uh, please, please, please keep going. And, uh, I'll be cheering you along and I think everyone who's listening to this, uh, will quickly become a fan as well. And then if anyone who's listening to this has not tuned in

to the good time show, it's called the good time show for a reason. So if you want to have a good time, you better go in and tune in. But, but Arthi, listen, thank you so much for doing this. And we'll definitely have to do it again in the future. This is so much fun, Paul. Thank you so much for having me. This is just, I had such a blast and you're such a good host because now I know, now I know how terrible I am. I have to learn from you. And so this is great. Thank you so much for making time for this and making it happen. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job

in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to palmscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry. It's a three-week intensive training program with over 50 events packed into that three-week time period. Go to palmscryptocourse.com to learn more, and I'll meet you guys for the next episode.