This Week in Startups - Where early-stage founders MUST focus to success | E2244

Episode Date: February 3, 2026

This Week In Startups is made possible by:Quadratic - http://quadratic.ai/twistToday’s show: Don’t get distracted! Here are the MOST CRUCIAL aspects of running a startup, where founders need to keep their full and uninterrupted focus.- Make sure you’re saving up your cash- Why you need to just get started and build SOMETHING- Trust and reliability is EVERYTHING for new products- Why distribution should be your top priorityDownload all this practical and tactical startup advice from seasoned veterans Jason Calacanis, Amanda Bradford, and William P. Barnes in this Tokyo edition of TWiST.Timestamps:(00:00) Amanda and Will’s big takeaways from Founder U in Saudi Arabia and now Tokyo(3:19) Why cash flow management is so important before you find PMF(5:57) Why first-time founders get the order of operations wrong(6:45) Just build SOMETHING, even if it’s taped together(11:19) “Focus is everything in the early stages”(14:17) From a wedge to a bridge(15:50) Quadratic - Bringing the productivity boost of AI into your spreadsheets. Visit http://quadratic.ai/twist to sign up and use the code TWIST to get one free month of their pro tier subscription.(18:45) What to put on your “Not Right Now” list(19:11) Embracing simplicity(22:00) The importance of trust and reliability (especially for Uber!)(28:12) Why innovation needs a constraining variable(33:40) To really drive word of mouth, you have to overdeliver(36:32) Distribution is the primary job of a founder/CEO(38:19) Some of the panel’s favorite distribution hacks(45:54) Why Jason respects Japan’s commitment to excellence and competency(49:38) Looking for “high slope” in early employees(53:11) Transitioning your team from early-stage startup to growth(57:45) Whoever writes it down gets credit for the idea(58:04) Q: Has the meaning of money changed for the panel now that they’ve had successful exits?*Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com/Check out the TWIST500: https://twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp*Follow Lon:X: https://x.com/lons*Follow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm/*Follow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis/*Thank you to our partners:(15:50) Quadratic - Bringing the productivity boost of AI into your spreadsheets. Visit http://quadratic.ai/twist to sign up and use the code TWIST to get one free month of their pro tier subscription.Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/

I want you to unpack what you said before, which is founders maybe, especially first time one, have this order of operations wrong. They think they need to convince investors of their vision and land some giant amount of money and then deploy capital. Why is that wrong in 2026 as we sit here today? Well, I mean, I think, you know, you've been in the industry for a good amount of time. I think, you know, a long time ago, you would have to raise a lot of money and then build all this infrastructure, whether it's like servers, HR people, legal, you do all of those things to try and get a product out there

in the hands of a customer. And I think, you know, through a whole range of technology, you can now do a lot of that validation without needing a lot of money. And I think that's why it's kind of moved how people should approach creating an MVP. Before I even had a prototype built while that was being developed, I basically strung together screenshots that, you know,

you'd use in Figma and you can make it so that, you know, you click on a button and it opens another screenshot. So if you're showing it to a customer, it feels like the app is built. Like my mom thought the app was built, but it was really just a series of like eight screenshots hyperlinked to each other. So you can kind of do these hacky things to just initially get some, do a temperature check with people to say, hey, would this be interesting to you? Today's This Week in Startups is brought to you by Quadratic, bringing the productivity boost of AI into your spreadsheets. Visit quadratic.com slash twist to sign up and use the code Twist to get one free month of their pro tier subscription. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups.

I'm your host, Jason Calacanis. I am still in Japan and loving it. We've had an amazing time here launching Founder University. What's Founder University? If you haven't been listening to the program in the past year, where have you been? Number one, number two, it's a 12-week program that we started in the United States to help founders who are in year zero. In other words, they might not even be incorporated. That might still be building their team or finding a company.

co-founder. They're in that year zero. They know they're going to start. They're not sure when. And as part of that program in the United States, we look for companies that we might want to invest in. And then they go on to our accelerator or some of them go on to Y Combinator, Tech Stars, Antler, all these great programs all around the world, 500 global. So it's a pre-accelerator. We launched it in the fall in the Middle East, specifically in Riyadh, in Saudi, with our partner Sanobal, which is the venture arm of the PIF there, the Sovereign Wealth Fund, and now we've launched it again here in Japan with the greatest partner you could ever have, JETRO, which is essentially the economic trade group here in Japan that is supporting founders, and Japan is going through

such an amazing, amazing resurgence. Not that it ever went away, but young people in Japan are looking at startups again as a viable career path. And in a country where they have very low unemployment and plenty of jobs available. It's a very interesting moment in time when people will give up the security of those jobs to take the risk of starting a company, and that's what we do at our fund. So today we're going to talk about what should founders in year zero, the year, you know, right as they're starting to incorporate, maybe even launch their product, what should they focus on? I'm very lucky to have two great friends in Austin, to Bradford, founded the league. We met Amanda, I think, at the Sequoia Scouts program,

and you've been on a bit of sabbatical, you're non-compete or resting investing. Resting investing after selling your company to Match.com. Yes. Congratulations on that. So you've taken a company from the cradle all the way to the grave, all the way to sell. Hopefully not the grave, not the grave, but I think you get the idea. To bigger and better things, yes. To bigger better things. You did a great talk here for the founders in this program, and you also came with me to Saudi. And so we'll talk today about what people should focus on. Pretty open dialogue. Of course, one of my besties, William Barnes is here.

He was Travis's right-hand man, left-hand man, front, back, everything. You got to work with Travis in the boom years of Uber. Also got to come with me to Saudi and here. So let me start with that. You know, we've now launched the program in just five months or so in two cities. what have each of you noted about each of those cities and what founders in Year Zero are most often asking you about as mentors in our program?

Well, I think the experience in Saudi and here is the entrepreneurial spirit. It's invigorating and kind of reminds me of being back in San Francisco, you know, 10, 15 years ago, there's so much kind of opportunity. And that's very exciting. And the other thing that I've seen through the investing with my business, with my venture fund and also speaking to founders here is I think one of the things that we've seen a lot is cash flow management it's like easy to run out of money and I mean I think uh keeping a focus on keeping the burn low uh before they find product market fit I think is a is a key thing I think a lot

of people get excited they see all the headlines about you know Facebook or you know maybe one of their friends raises a series B or a C and I think they get out ahead of themselves uh trying to build a company before they found a product. And so trying to spend as little as money as possible to find some product to scale. Yeah, and we'll unpack that in just a moment. Amanda, what have you noticed in meeting the founders in Saudi in Riyadh and here in Tokyo, Japan? Well, there's tons of opportunity. I think everyone's been, but the breadth of startups, I've been very impressed with everything from healthcare to defense tech to consumer marketplaces. So I've been just impressed with the scope of what everyone's trying to tackle. I think the questions I've been getting the most, at least me,

as someone who's built zero to one, is around hiring, is around finding co-founders, when should someone be a co-founder, when should you outsource, when should you fundraise? At what point in your kind of product development process should you go and ask for capital from investors? And similar to kind of Will's point, I always recommend people get an MVP or a minimum viable product up and running and show investors that this product is going to be built, regardless of if you take money from them and show them that, you know, this, you know, this, you know, This train is leaving the station and kind of put a little bit of skin in the game yourself, whether it's using some of your own money or getting people to work for equity,

but really kind of showing a little bit of traction prior to going out and asking for money. I think that's a big... Okay. So I think we're going to start with what has come up now over and over again, which is product market fit first, product first, fundraising second. I think it's a fine way to put it. Yeah, Will? I think there's, you've got to stage it, and it depends on your life situation, whether or not you can, you have a lot of the time, you know, whether you've got some savings.

But I think there's a lot that you can do before you start spending a lot of money, or certainly before you raise money. And I think Amanda, you know, talked about that on her presentation yesterday. You can go meet customers, you can kind of understand their problems they're facing. And you can, especially in today's environment, whether it's vibe coding or having a very hacky front end and then doing things manually to try and validate whether or not you're solving a real problem. and I think, you know, evenings, weekends, and using some of the AI tools, you can get a lot done to get some signal that what you're building is valuable or useful to somebody. And you can do all of those things before you raise money. I want you to unpack what you said before, which is founders maybe, especially first time one, have this order of operations wrong. They think they need to convince investors of their vision and land some giant amount of money and then deploy capital.

Why is that wrong in 2026 as we sit here today? Well, I mean, I think, you know, you've been in the industry for a good amount of time. I think, you know, a long time ago, you would have to raise a lot of money and then build all this infrastructure, whether it's like servers, HR people, legal. You do all of those things to try and get a product out there in the hands of a customer. And I think, you know, through a whole range of technology, you can now do a lot of that validation without needing a lot of money. And I think that's why it's kind of moved how people should approach creating an MVP.

Yeah, like with my company, we would even go, before I even had a prototype built while that was being developed, I basically strung together screenshots that, you know, you'd use in Figma, and you can make it so that, you know, you click on a button and it opens another screenshot. So if you're showing it to a customer, it feels like the app is built. Like my mom thought the app was built, but it was really just a series of like eight screenshots hyperlinked to each other. So you can kind of do these hacky things to just initially get some, do a temperature check with people to say, hey, would this be interesting to you? So you can kind of.

And that was 10 years ago. Yeah. And now you can basically vibe code these now in a weekend. And you learn a lot through doing that. You're going to get feedback, yes, no, people aren't going to sign up, or they are going to sign up. And you learn things about your messaging. And we tested our onboarding for almost five months,

because that's how long it took me to develop my app. And what we learned an example for us was I had had LinkedIn. I was asking people to submit their LinkedIn to be able to apply to the league because that was how we used to kind of vet our applicants. But people got very weirded out by having LinkedIn be the first thing. No one was used to that. They were fine connecting Facebook, but LinkedIn freaked them out. So I basically, because of the focus groups, I did, I changed the order and I put Facebook Connect first.

And then by that time, the users sort of already invested in the onboarding flow. And then by putting the LinkedIn second, we had a much higher completion rate than just by putting LinkedIn first. And that didn't require you to get permission from a seed fund with a 250K check. That required you to be thoughtful and to talk to customers and to run these little experiments. Yep. And that scientific method talked about in the lean startup or the startup engine, lots of different people. My scientific method was taking women to wine night and asking, you know, give me feedback

on this onboarding. But yes, it was scientific in some respects. And those were clickable mockups and now we have vibe coding. Yep. So very important. It's a very exciting time to build right now, I will say. Yes. In year zero, you can actually build these prototypes and test them.

They don't have to be just clickable mockups. So let's go to what I think. is our second point. I think we pretty much have consensus of this. I'm going to put it a second, but we'll order these as we go. Finding those first customers, doing customer research, having met with the companies now and heard some stories about how they're doing that and our own personal experience doing it, what are the best practices front of mind for you right now, William Barnes? Well, I think this is why the cliche is still true, which is find a niche and try and go really kind of narrow. There's a variety of benefits to picking a narrow niche. You can tailor your messaging

and the MVP to that niche. So the kind of the customer profile that you're talking to, they're going to feel more special for one of a better word. And the marketing and the MVP is going to be more tailored to the problem that you're trying to solve for them. There's a higher chance that they're going to engage with you because they're going to feel like it's a specific solution to their problem. So the niching down, I think, is incredibly helpful. And you'll learn more quickly. You know, if you go and talk to, you know, 15 back offices that do importing and export exporting in Japan, you're going to learn more quickly because you're having a similar conversation with a similar customer profile. So there's kind of like two benefits there of picking that

niche. So you pick that niche. We had an interesting company yesterday that pitched. In this one example, importing of exporting of products is a lot of paperwork. And you and I were talking about it at breakfast today. What a great idea it was. The pitch was a little bit off. Yeah. the order of operations might have been wrong, but we both thought, wow, it's so messy in that back office. And if you talk to 15 of them, you say it's just for the back office, operations of an export company, what actually happens in that pit? What happens in that boiler room, that back room where it's occurring, and how much progress

can you make? Now, you might find out that there's not that much to it and you're going to very quickly solve their problems, but then you will inevitably discover more. It is good. You know, I think one of the reflections you and I had is they were kind of bundling two businesses together. There was the consumer facing part and then it was almost they were going to figure out the import-export paperwork to serve the consumer facing.

And I think what you and I talked about is maybe unbundle those two things and focused just on the kind of the workflow piece and then go and speak to, you know, a narrow set of customers all in the consumer-facing product piece, but just go and solve that one and then make that a business first and it's a more narrow niche. And dovetelling that, Amanda, with the first point we made, which is, hey, get that product really tight and the fundraising will come later, if you're going to raise money and you've got two different products and they're extremely different, you're now scaring an investor or an angel that, oh my God, you're building a consumer business and

an enterprise business at the same time. Oh, and then you're explaining the marketplace. We've never seen that. Like, Airbnb does not not have an enterprise business. Still. Still. Focuses everything in the early stages. Exactly. And if you want to, we'll get to Fugali later,

but that customer obsession seems super critical. You specialize in that. I think maybe that is your superpower. Is this customer obsession when we saw pitches yesterday and you've talked to companies here in Tokyo at Found University in Japan, what's top of mind for you thinking about maybe your next startup? And customer, don't tell anybody.

what it is, but just customer obsession and how you will go into your next startup with this new inspiration, having met so many of these companies in Saudi and here in Tokyo. What's top of mind for you? Well, I think it's super serving a niche audience, and I think Peter Thiel talks about this a lot with PayPal. It was the early eBay power users, and with Amazon, it was a bookstore. And you know, eBay, initially's eBay was PEZ dispensers, right? So it may be a market that people immediately might say that's a small tam, that's not big enough, but if you can like win that market, then there's going to be concentric markets that you can then go after. So don't be afraid to go super niche with us. You know, I was going after sort of like women who are like 28 to 34,

who are career oriented, who are struggling with the dating, current dating apps and how dating worked. And so we, you know, people called my app MBA date at the beginning because there were so many MBAs on it. And that was the demo that I knew really well as an MBA. And I said, I am going to make sure that it works for this very small audience. And then, of course, they told friends, other people, you know, we eventually were more than just a 28 to 34-year-old demographic. But we started very niche. And I had a lot of investors be like, your Tam's not big enough. So kind of don't be scared of a small market to start. Let's talk about that. Tam not big enough. There is a very simple way to address that when talking to investors. And remember, you're building

your business. You're not building a performance. to give to a venture capitalist that gets them to unlock money. You may have to do some things that are performative and answer questions, of course. But at its core, you need to have some niche audience that's willing to embrace your product, 28 to 34-year-old women who have MBAs who, you know, are desirable in market and are going to approach maybe dating differently than, you know, an average person. It's a really interesting group to start with. you know in your heart of hearts if it works for this group there's adjacencies

there's adjacencies there's a next group if it works for you know the back office it's gonna in japan it might work for the back office in india might be slightly different but they're still doing the same function which is exporting something what i've seen well with me when i get pitched this by founders is a framing around sequencing right so it's like i win this small piece of the market and then it's a wedge right it's a wedge and then i can sequence this to a bridge to a slightly bigger market. And then I really like it when founders say, well, here's the trigger for when we move to the next part.

So they're actually detailing the journey. First, like what milestones? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're going to get to the new world. Yeah. Then we're going to land and expand. Land and expand. Now, here we are.

We're in the northeast, but we're going to go figure out where are the different things we can find? There might be... And they kind of handhold me through this sequence of small, medium, and then there's this huge market that we're going to earn the right to. But we're laser focused on it. Which makes you more credible.

Yeah, 100%. And that's, I think, maybe where some founders get tripped up. They think, oh, I'm going to do this, and I'll be less credible. Oh, you can sequence it, as you're saying. When we win this war and we get the beach, then we'll go to the, you know, a little bit further. We'll secure the beach first. We got that beachhead market. That's why that term exists.

It's a military term. Secure the beachhead. Okay. When we get back from a quick commercial break, I want to talk about founders. going on the feature death march. Founders putting their head down and spending too much time building 10 or 20 features as opposed to the essentialism of finding what is the core feature loop value of my product when we get back on this week in startups. If you want to be a data-driven founder, and trust me, you do, you're going to need to spend some time in spreadsheets, building models and doing

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Now you can get insights about your business. business without fighting formulas, and you can immediately share your results with your team and all of your collaborators. No setup or payments are required up front. You can just start using quadratic right now. It's going to blow your mind. Visit quadratic.a-i-slash-twist to sign up and use the code twist to get a free month of their pro-tier subscription. That's Q-U-A-D-R-A-T-I-S-T-I-S-T-T-E-S-T-T-E. All right, we're back at this week in startups here. We're working down our list of things that founders should focus on in year zero, building the team, finding the customers.

This is before you raise money when you're kind of doing that product discovery and figuring out what your startup will be. Amanda Bradford's with me. She built the league and sold it to Match.com, and she's going to do another startup at some point. She angel invest, William Barnes from Carmen Ventures. Let's talk about founders going on that feature. death march. They can't help themselves. They love building features. They get a little too precious,

don't they, William? And customers also love giving feature requests. Yes, they do. Oh, yeah. And this is like the two things that will make founders go off track. Yeah, 100%. I think it's an expression of psychology, and I think there's kind of, there's two parts to it. There's a fear of going talking to more customers or doing more sales. It's like it's a fear of that. Like, I don't want to go and do more sales and get more rejection. So here's something I can control. And I can go and ship more product. And the other one is it's an avoidance of not having product market fit and finding one feature that really solves a pain point and the customers using a lot. There are some exceptions to the rule. Like if you're building a complex enterprise product

or like a horizontal piece of software, you are going to need to be more feature rich. But I think in general, having the discipline to find one or two features that really solve something painful and then charging for it and then doing a lot of sales around it is the prevailing wisdom. And if you do it that way, there's an essentialism. You understand and you've prioritized the feature set.

It doesn't mean that you're not going to add those features later. Yeah. Sequencing again. Sequencing again. And I had a founder who said, the way he handled it inside his startup was he said, he would say to the team members or investors or customers. It's a great idea.

I'm going to write it down so we don't forget it here, and we're going to prioritize it, and we're going to do a little research on it, and then he would tell the internal team, it's on the Not Right Now list. The backlog, yep. But Not Right Now was a very kind way of saying it to the team, and it showed leadership.

And let's talk a little bit about the simplicity of some of the most successful products in the world. Instagram, Amanda, had the most simple, I remember... Just sending postcards to each other. Essentially, you upload a photo, to the social feed, that's one function, and then you pick a filter by swiping and hit publish. That was it. They didn't even have a like button in the beginning. They certainly didn't have comments. And then those were added later. And if you open Instagram now, I feel like I am launching a rocket

ship. I mean, there are so many features. When you swipe left, am I doing a story? Am I doing a post? A real? I mean, I don't know the difference between any of these things. And then there's a bunch of buttons and you can do filters, and there's thousands of lenses, and you put music behind it. It's so convoluted, but still growing. When you started thinking about your first product at the league, what was the analogy there? Oh, it was simple A.F, I would call it.

Basically, it was five at five. You get five daily prospects at 5 p.m., and that was it. You could message them. Nothing else. We didn't even monetize for about two years, so especially in your consumer, I always say, make sure you're actually building something that people want before you start charging them.

And so we did kind of a smoking mirrors implementation where I wanted to be able to tell my investors that I do have people willing to pay. You know, we were servicing a high net worth demographic. So I actually created a fake button where users could say I want to upgrade. We knew that about 10 to 15% of people would click that button. And then we actually gave them the feature, but we didn't actually charge their card. Because I wanted to be very simple and very focused on just let's make the basic free product amazing. and know that we had a 10 to 15% conversion rate, but not actually get distracted dealing with monetization,

with billing, with refunds, which happens in consumer. And so that's like an example of kind of how you can sort of hack your way into building a little bit of features, so you know there's a demand without ruining your focus. But so elegantly simple, yeah, complex. Five matches, five p.m. Yeah. I mean, you say smoke and mirrors.

I say essentialism. Yeah. It gives you exactly what you're looking for. 15 would be overwhelming. Now it's a chore. Five? Yep. Sounds like it takes five minutes. Our whole thing was quality over quantity, right?

So that was our main message. That's how we differentiated from Tinder, from all these other apps out there, was just you're going to get five good prospects a day at 5 p.m. Which we'll get into a minute in our discussion about trust. But let's keep talking about like this feature essentialism and avoiding the feature death march. What was it at Uber? I mean, I have my own ideas, but you were inside that. I mean, obviously with a high-frequency consumer product, you are inundated all week with people.

people making feature requests or suggestions. And as the team got bigger, people were constantly making suggestions to Travis. I mean, Travis was relentless about focusing on reliability. As you can imagine, if you take Uber to travel from your office or your home to somewhere in the city and you take it there on a Friday or Saturday night, and then it gets to the end of the evening and you want to go home and it doesn't work, you're not going to use Uber again. This is in a world and in many cities, unlike Tokyo, where the tax is not reliable. So you can quite literally be stranded.

And so we focused a lot in the early days on making it reliable. And I think to say yes to reliability, we had to say no to a lot of other things. Because for that reliability, took a lot of operational and engineering resources. And so we were pretty obsessive about completed to requests, ETA, which is like the time it would take to complete a request and the driver rating. And we knew we had a product that had product market fit. So we were just very, very focused on making the thing that already had product market fit work really, really well. So our first item, hey, let's get that product right first, and we'll worry about fundraising down the road. Which means you have to be our second point, customer obsessed, really understand the customers which costs zero dollars.

That's one of the beautiful things. And then today with vibe coding, even doing product first and these little experiments, also $0. $4.3. We want to avoid that death march with features. You really want to focus on what's essential. Now we're going to open up our fourth point today of what founders should focus on in Year Zero, which you did a perfect transition to, which is trust. Relentless focus on trust and reliability. Trust and reliability. Amanda, in dating, this is incredibly important as well. Trust is everything. Yeah. So tell us about that and how much it costs to do that, the resources it took and how you think about it sitting here today, looking back on that decade-long journey

to a very successful exit, and then carrying that into whatever your next product will wind up being, and are you choosing between three or four ideas? One of which you got inspired by here on the trip, but we won't say. A lot of ideas. A lot of domains in my GoDaddy shopping cart right now. Yeah, so for us, trust was, you know, can you trust that this product is going to serve you prospects or dating candidates, should you say, that you want, that, you know, fit your preferences and for us I actually vetted every single applicant manually so you know

eventually we did transition to using algorithms and machine learning and all that fancy stuff but at the beginning it was literally me Amanda looking at everyone who applied and saying you're you're accepted and you're rejected and people downloaded the league and joined the league because of that you know reliability or trust that the people are going to be high quality vetted they're going to have six photos they're not going to do gym selfies they're not going to be wearing sunglasses in their pictures or they would be rejected and so for us specific things you did no gym clothes no oh yeah we had a whole rules of you know eventually I trained people to do this I wasn't always the the one

accepting all the the candidates but eventually you know we found we had almost a 50% acceptance rate as far as when people get a prospect we call them prospects in their batch 50% of the time they liked them which you know if you've been on any a dating app today you know usually it's probably like one out of 20 that you're gonna be swiping right on and so get you know getting a 50% acceptance rate was sort of unheard of and it's still unheard of today. And so that was because we spent, you know, a lot of, we did a lot of things that didn't scale.

That was what I was doing didn't scale. And then we also did customer support. So I had a human, that was me at the beginning too, the concierge. We had a concierge that would answer every question from a user, regardless of if they paid us or not, helped them with their profile. We said, hey, your third photo is actually better than your first. I went ahead and swapped it for you. And I would actually go, I remember before we launched,

guys in particular are very bad at curating their photos. So I would go and take, find the best photo of the six they put and put it first. And then I turned everybody's photo black and white because everyone looks better in black and white. So we did a lot of these things that just made things, you know, made people trust the product and want to come back. In the case of Airbnb, they said the photos were critical.

And there's this famous story that the founders always tell of, you know, talking to Paul Graham at YC about getting the professional photos. And he says, well, and he said, hey, and the most demands in New York, he says, so why aren't you in New York with cameras taking pictures of the best places? and hiring photographers. And they were like, oh, because we're startup founders and we want to focus on anything that's not the most essential thing.

And that's what great mentors, great investors, or great programs like YC or hopefully ours, can help you do, which is get to that essential, important thing. And those photos build trust. If you're going to stay somewhere and the photos look like a serial killer's apartment, you're not going to book it. But if it looks like the Amman Hotel or it looks, like the Ritz Carlton, okay, yeah, maybe I will stay there,

which is why, William, when you look, they almost have a playbook of what the kitchen should look like, and they have a neon sign, and then they have the pods. They've literally figured out, when you hear Amanda talk about it, it seems obvious, but each of those nuances builds trust. Yeah. What I hear when Amanda tells that story is somebody that is obsessed about making the core value proposition reliable.

She's obsessively betting everybody. She's committed to five matches a day or like five offerings a day. And she's handholding the kind of what she's serving up. And she's saying no to all these other features. And I think that level of obsession and not using tech necessarily in doing something that doesn't scale is a way to do that. Okay, we've gone through four really important things that founders should focus on in year zero. We've got three to go.

First up, hey, let's get focused on that product. worry about fundraising. Number two, customer session, number three, feature death march, feature creep, just staying really focused on making the thing, the thing. And of course, fourth, working on that reliability and trust in your

product, these are really important things to think about right now in year zero. And if you're listening to this and you're thinking about starting a company, you can go to founder.comiversity, apply for the U.S., Riyadh, or coming to Tokyo, and everybody can apply to all three. It's competitive to get in.

Let's talk about constraint. There's this expression that great art is driven by constraint. Innovation is a constraining variable. Yeah. And they asked Bob Dylan, one of my favorite artists of all time. My favorite album happens to be Blood on the Tracks. And they said in this Rolling Stone interview, my gosh, this is my favorite album. It starts talking about all these incredible songs.

What was the inspiration for this album? And Bob Dylan said, well, you know, I owed the, I owed Columbia record. it's a picture, I owed them an album, and they would wait in a long time, and they said if I don't get it to them by the state, they would sue me to get the advance back, and I didn't have any money, I'd just been through a divorce. And this poor interviewer was crushed that this album that meant so much to them, when I read it, I was crushed, that the inspiration of the album was the divorce and not getting sued to, because he was broke. That was the inspiration. There was a limiting factor.

When you're making a movie, you have a certain number of days to shoot. With a startup, you have... You can drag it out if you want, but you have the gun against your head of your burn rate, like how much money you have left. And I think cash flow management is the most important thing when it comes to managing a startup. Like running out of money means the game's over. One thing I've seen time in time again, I get hundreds of investor updates is

you have some founders that I think get attracted to, company building. They want to play company building rather than finding a product that works and then testing and improving that they can scale it in an economically rational way where the unique economics makes sense. I think David Sachs came out with this term of burn multiple. For every dollar that you spend, what's the incremental revenue that you generate? There's a constraint. Yeah, there's a constraint, right? And I think for, I defer to David on this one, But I think for a lot of SaaS metrics, under two is a good signal, and over three is a bad thing. So you spend $2 million, you make a million.

Totally fine. You spend $3 million to make a million. Okay, that's not super efficient. What's going on here? And are you going to catch up next year? Yeah, exactly. And so there's a certain group of founders where you get the investor updates, and they're being very disciplined about how they start to increase spend.

And again, it's sequencing. It's like do they feel like they're really starting to solve a company? customer problem. Have they then been able to prove that they can start scaling that through sales or, you know, SEM? And only then do they start to increase the spend relative to how much money they have in the bank. Signs or thoughts about constraint, you tipped us off to a little bit of it, constraint, five at five. Five at five. I mean, we also only launched in San Francisco. We were only in San Francisco for the first two years, so we made sure we really understood that market and had a good product in that market prior to expanding. I think the other piece for me was time. I don't know.

A lot of founders are wired like me where perfection is the enemy you have done, I always say, and it's easy to just sit and spin and want to keep perfecting things. So by setting a launch date and saying we are going to launch on this date and telling your customers that that forced us to actually get the product out or else I could have tried to make it perfect forever. So I always say to founders, give yourself a deadline, however you want to do that, whether it's telling your customers when you're going to launch. But I know that's what got my butt into gear. So you have geographic.

You have financial and timelines. You have the ratio of spend to revenue. Yeah, you also have maybe a wait list. Yep. And limited availability. You then have a social contract. There's a contract. Yeah.

We were talking about a really interesting, beautifully designed app about helping people find friends and get out in the real world. And you and I were brainstorming about it. And I said, you know, I wonder if, you know, there is a possibility of having two day parts, the brunch lunch period and nighttime. So that means seven days, there's 14. It's a lot of liquidity to manage. To fill.

Yeah. 14 events occurring. I wonder if you took the peak loneliness, which probably occurs for people on Friday and Saturday night, it's not Amanda, incredibly popular, but for you and I, we're sitting home Friday and Saturday night, like, we're losers, and we taxed each other and get a drink or should we go get some sushi? We're losers no more. But I wonder if they just focused on.

Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday brunch. And that would be three of 14. And just nailing that, selling it out, and creating pent-up demand, that would work so much better than this open platform where everything can occur at any time and then nothing occurs. I think what you're saying is you're touching on several points we've talked about, which is what you're doing is you're niching down. And so now your marketing communication and how you pitch you to people can be more narrow. So it's easier for them to understand because it's constrained and then your ability to serve that product is easier because you've got more narrow scope so you're going to spend less money and make it easier for you to deliver on the promise.

When you put all that together, you don't need as much money, your ability to execute because you've narrowed the constraint, you don't have to spend as much time so you can get customer feedback quicker. Yep. And you can nail the product more easily. Correct. Because it's not, I don't think you can just like do a good job. You have to absolutely. you nail it and like over deliver. If you want to drive word of mouth. So those five people, Amanda, have to be really high quality. In your example, in this example, just that came up in two different conversations,

just, hey, what if there was only four events on the weekend with only eight spots each? Now you've only got to fill 32. And you're going to crush them. And just make each of them so wonderful and great. And it also prevents, like, for us, you know, as a consumer marketplace, you're going to have the cold start problem. So I knew from the get-go, I was like, I'm not going to have nearly the liquidity that someone like Tinder does.

And so by limiting that, by only showing you five, people don't have to know that maybe there's only 15 people total. You know, you buy yourself, you buy yourself a couple days to give them, you know, give them your full set of inventory. So they don't have to know how small the pool is at the beginning. I've been thinking about that myself, reflecting on Founder University. In the United States, it was getting popular and popular. And I said, hey, listen, there's no cost to accepting more people.

We should be just able to scale this. We did 350 people the last time. And then what we found out was, because we had 10 pods, there was 35 people in each pod. The great founders would skip the pod because the pod was being filled up with questions that were so rudimentary from the people who were just very early

or neophytes or maybe not even cut out, let's be candid to be founders. And I said, huh, did we know that coming in and we're like, we kind of knew that some of them weren't ready. Maybe we were just being a little... It's your version of the gym selfie dudes. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Like maybe just too many people and are trying to do more. So I asked the team, hey, can we do less? And your team is now spending less time with the best people, right? Because they're more distracted. Because they're more distracted with the squeaky wheels who get the most grease. And so in Saudi we did 60, here we did about 30 in Founding University.

And then that makes the pod smaller. So then we had a really interesting. What's the optimal number of founders to be in a pod every Thursday night, talking about their startups? And we came to, well, two or three is probably too small. 30 is way too big. So between those two numbers, we think the right number is. It might be 15, it might be 10.

It could wind up at 20, but it's enough that everybody gets to participate and there's no cameras off. So the number's probably 8, 9, or 10, is my guess. But we don't know. We'll figure that out. But we are enforcing constraint, which I think is pretty interesting. Next up, we want to talk about distribution. We're cooking with oil right now.

First up, we talked about product first. Let's put the fundraising down the road. and we're going to keep that burn rate low in order to do that. Customer obsession and meeting with customers and understanding them, that cost you $0. Most founders are too scared to do it. If you're too scared to do it, you can't be a founder. You should quit now. Number three, feature creep, death, March, doing too much.

And why are you doing too much? Well, maybe you don't want to focus on your customers or build the product. Trust is just so critical, reliability. And then constraints, our fifth item. Now we're out, distribution. How did you handle distribution, Amanda? And how do you think about distribution today? When's the right time to be thinking about distribution?

And I'll include virality there. I'll include paid. I'll include social. I'll include everything. Just distribution as a concept. Some people might refer to it as go-to-market. Some people might call it growth hacking. But just getting distribution for your product.

Distribution is everything. So that is your main primary job as founder and CEO is to figure out if there are distribution hacks for your product and you've got to go find them. So if you're not the one doing marketing, you should be at the very early stages. For us, you know, we found a combination of doing events, inviting press to events, and then pitching press were actually our biggest levers, and they were all somewhat free because the events didn't end up costing that much money. We were able to get bars and restaurants to sponsor or to say,

hey, you can do this for free if you bring X number of people to our bar on a Monday night when they don't have anyone. So we were able to kind of find hacks to get that initial, you know, a couple thousand people in the database. And then we found a playbook. So what we found is that as we went to cities, we would get local press. So, you know, Dallas Morning News, San Francisco Chronicle, you get these local publications to write, you know, for us, the tagline was, tender for the elites, is coming to your city. And so we would run that play over and over again for each city we went to, and press was our best friend. And it was controversial. Oh, 100%. And you don't be afraid to push against, you know, you actually agitated it. You knew it was coming.

and you said, hey, this event is only for people who can get into the league, and it's elite, and they were like, oh, my God, we're going to count the demographics, and we're going to write these, and you can go look up these pieces on. Yep, we were the first ones to reject people from a dating app, so it was a controversial concept at the time. Which makes it worth writing about. So you figured out how to hack local PR and national PR. Journalists were our best friends today in today's era. That would probably be influencers.

You know, if you can find people with distribution on Twitter, on Instagram, on TikTok, if they're going to be talking about your product for free, that's amazing. You can get people to just try it. So inviting those people to events, those kind of things. Zillow. Business Insider was our best friend. Yeah. They were doing link baiting and all of that just got people to know the domain name.

Zillow did something similar. They created a very controversial device, not, you know, applied to become part of this dating site. It was the Zestimate. this is our estimate of the cost of your house. People got really upset. You're estimating the cost of my house. It's wrong. My house is worth more.

Everybody thinks their house is worth more. Right. You want to see what your house is valued at, right? It plays into vanity. Plays, yeah. And if something's wrong, people want to fix it. The same thing the Wikipedia had, which was sometimes the China page originally

when I first started using Wikipedia was one paragraph. And people were so upset that they're like, this is the largest country in the world, and it's one paragraph. This is an embarrassment. and they said, okay, hit the edit button. And they were like, okay, the population of China is. And like, then the next person was like, okay, you don't have anything about X, Y, and Z.

Let's add that. And Zillow then made local reports about the zestimates of the local and the national. And then to this day, they send out reports every week a different city or geo gets sent out so that their team can rotate from, you know, Arizona to Texas, to New York, really amazing way to get distribution. Give to get worked pretty well for Uber, perhaps too well, yeah? Yeah, definitely at times. There were groups of people that were hacking it.

They would create landing pages and then drive SEM traffic against it to sell them. They would buy ads to go to a landing page. In fact, my friend, who I introduced Uber to, he bought, my friend Nick, bought ads on Google. that said, Uber is now in Los Angeles, click here to get a free ride, to get $25. Oh, I remember this guy.

And it was $1 or $2 per click. Yep. He converted like every other click, so it's $4. And every time he got $25 credit in his account, he got to like three or 400 rides. And he's like, it got turned off. I lost all the things, but he spent all this money. Can you get Travis to undo it?

And I was like, yeah, let me bother Travis with you hacking the system against the terms of service. Yeah. No. But give to get. Yeah. That was of the moment. It was definitely of the moment.

I mean, and I think the specific example, which you can turn into generalized advice, is that your existing power users or people who love the product, are the people that are most likely to be able to talk to and find other people that can love the product. They're advocates. Yeah, you can turn them into advocates. If you have a customer that loves your product and is using it a lot, it's worth spending time with them and incentivizing them to find other people in their life that are like them.

There were, I think there was a moment of time where people were building tools to take their eBay listings or their Airbnb listing and get it onto Craigslist. And they built tools to just have that happen automatically and happen in different cities. Then it was like a little cat and mouse, Craigslist trying to do it. But building these little tools that help people move inventory from one place to the other was enough to just make this work. And the people who had Airbnb's, well, they would set up their own. landing page and send people to Airbnb. I mean, it's, I think it's a pattern that I'm guessing all three of us have seen is, you know, 10, 15 years ago building the technology was equally, if not the hardest part of the start.

That took six months. Yeah, it took six months. And I think with, you know, I think the term that all VCs like to throw around is Javon's paradox, you know, that's something, Jeffon's. Jevon's paradoxes. Things get cheaper, people use them more. And I think that's definitely true with AI and Vibon's. codeing and so the product piece is getting easier I mean obviously truly

brilliant products are still hard but it is easier to build product now and so I think there is more and more value being created in distribution and so that can either be you know the obvious example is influencers people with podcasts yeah dropbox is a great example where you know you're sharing with a friend and then they have to create an account yep yep to do docisein the classic docuSign is the best one if you do doccian it's like We can say, this is saved in your locker. Yeah.

If you ever want to look it up again and then you're like, yeah, I've got to get that document. Is it still in my locker? Yeah, don't write something your locker. But distribution can mean different things, right? So the obvious one is, you know, an influencer, somebody with a big audience. But distribution at an early stage can mean other things, like access to customers, you know, an industry insider, somebody that's worked inside an industry. Hiring someone with a Rolodex? Yeah, hiring somebody with a Rolodex, an advisor, an early,

angel that has got deep relationships in an industry that you want to go and sell into so they can help you go and find customers to go and do customer discovery with is another good example and the other one is a design partner a design partner is you know kind of an anchor customer that's going to allow you access to their workflows their data they're essentially saying like hey you're building a product I will let you use my data I will I will kind of commit to giving you feedback and having access to for testimonial right yeah exactly So they're different forms of that distribution. And that product council is what it used to be called, the enterprise software.

Yeah, customer council, yeah. Customer Council, product council. It's like people would, I remember when I was inside Sony for 18 months, one of the few jobs I was able to hold. It was 14 months now that I think about it. Anyway, I got asked to be on like the Cisco one or this one, and all it was was a local sales rep, just trying to figure out how to take us out to more lunches. and bond with us so they could sell us more stuff. But we got to say that and put it on our resume.

So my resume, I had, oh, I was part of this council, that counts, and that counts. And oh, tell me about that when I go to my job. It's like, oh, well, they both so highly of me. I got to see their new products first. Yeah. This is really amazing. And we want the relationship, right?

And so if they're trying to find, with Sony you were working at. Yeah. Yeah. So if they're trying to sell into Sony somewhere, they're going to ask you for an introduction. Of course. They're going to, if they find a route into a decision maker, they're going to ask you to afford an email. They literally ask me for the corporate directory.

Yeah, exactly. I was like, I don't think I can give that here. Like, yeah, no, we've got it many times. Yeah, exactly. I was like, okay, yeah, I guess maybe I could. What are you looking for? They're like, well, we need somebody in Jersey, you know, who does this thing. My God, we're having a great time in Tokyo.

This is our second time as a group here. William, I took you last time. It was your first time coming here. So. Great French toast. And karaoke. And pizza. Continue.

Go ahead. And sushi, of course. And. Wild Boar and Bear. Yeah, a smash burger. The smash burger was exceptional. Wagu Mafia. Wagu Mafia was great.

Tonkatsu, pretty great. Pretty much all the food here. Wagu Mafia was quite expensive, but... I gave you that bill. We thought it was in yen, but it was dollars. Yeah, it was pretty deserving. It was the one I decided to pay for it. Amanda's like, Jake Howe, you're paying for everything.

I'll pay for Wagu Mafia. I was like, okay, it's just a Wagu Sando. And they charged her $350 for a sandwich for gold leaf and cabriot. times three, so she got hit with a thousand dollar wago bill. It was very yummy. It was very yummy. But I always love introducing people to the culture here because, gosh, the commitment to excellence.

It's wonderful. It's just wonderful to see people take the donut as seriously as the car, as seriously as the consumer electronic device, as serious as the hotel, as serious as when we lost our bags, Amanda. And we were frustrated. and then we had this moment of like, okay, let's put our entitlement aside. If we were in America and we had lost our bags, we would be in a 12-person line

with a woman behind the counter was extremely upset at us for having... For being there. For existing. A lady with my son name, she had my name on a sign. She went to find you knowing your bag didn't make it, and they asked you to describe your bag.

What color is it? In detail, in a lot of detail. What size? Does it have a zipper? Does it have a lock? Does it have the code? What material is it? Very meticulous.

And then William and I started joking. What were the next five questions you could ask? Is I was like, are you happy with the bag? Have you considered other bag options? When did you first meet the bag? And we were just like, wow, this woman cares so much about getting a man to her bag. J. Cal didn't get a sign. I didn't know Japan that well.

I'm not going to pretend to know the culture that well. My second trip, so I'm now an expert. It does seem that unlike in the United States, in the United States, there is social status associated with the job itself, like what job you're doing has social status. My limited observation here is that there seems to be social status not about the job, but how well you do the job.

Correct, and that is pretty. Your competency, yeah. Yeah, your competency and the detail and your enthusiasm for pursuing excellence. And in order to do that, leads us to our seventh point. which is the team and team building. What did you learn, Amanda, in your years of team building and tell us the mistakes? So many mistakes.

I've been a different podcast probably. But team is everything. Yeah, okay. Great. Everything is everything. Products, everything. Distribution is everything. We always say everything's everything.

Well, I was just saying, for me, it was the hardest thing to learn, and it's easy to ignore it at the beginning. You're so focused on the marketing and the product. And, you know, those are kind of the glamorous things front of the house, and then actually building and retaining and hiring and firing if people aren't working and being able to fire fast when it when it doesn't work. Those are actually what really should be taking almost 30% of your time in this zero to one stage and it's easy to ignore it and spend maybe 10% of your time on that. Where did you find great people and how did you assess their greatness and potential?

Well my favorite story is my first employee Meredith had to email me I think five times because I'm not great at responding to emails all the time and so she learned quickly that She needed to follow up with me, and she was one of the few candidates that followed up enough to get the job. So there's founder candidates. Persistence, grit, not being offended because someone didn't write you back. I've had people like that. No, I understand that the founder's busy, and they're going to go the extra mile and step up to, you know, get the job done. And so I think people that are willing to raise their hand and, you know, go the extra mile.

Well, and what have you learned over the years in terms of talent and finding great talent, inspiring great talent, and maybe cutting talent that isn't going to do their best work at your company. I mean, I think hiring for, depending on if you're talking about hiring an early stage company or a lot of, we're talking about early stage here. Early stage. So let's just say first two years. Yeah, then I would focus heavily on generalists that have incredible attitudes and like high slope. Yeah, that was my first hire.

Yeah, yeah. Let's define and unpack high slope. High slope is somebody that you think has kind of the, they're open-minded, their high-minded, they're highly conscientious, they're low on neuroticism, and it's the type of person that you can throw it at multiple problems, and they're just going to go and figure it out. They're not necessarily going to be a domain expert and become like a VP of engineering,

but for the years where you're early and you're trying to find out solutions to random problems, and there's pivots and there's chaos, and you're working late, and there's psychological drama. No, there's fear. The company can go out of business, it's not working. Most really good founders are pretty obsessed and they can have quite sharp elbows

and you need people around that founder. They can handle that. And that's why low neuroticism is helpful because they're not going to get derailed by those things and they're pretty steady and they're highly conscientious and they can grow into solving different problems. You know, I know this. They can juggle.

And they can juggle. And they're high energy. Yes. People that are like intrinsically high energy. and they're like learning machines. And they're not going to get frazzled when you say, hey, we're going to Tokyo. Yeah.

And we need to find an AV crew to record the episodes, and we need to get really unique food, and I want to do some swag. And they're like, they don't say, I don't do that. Yeah, they're like, oh, okay. Well, let me ask Chatibati and Google and Gemini, and like, how would I do this? If this is going to be true, what would need to be true?

Yeah, I think there's a fearlessness to certain individuals who, if they're built for a startup culture, we call them Jack of All Trades or Jains of All Trades in the United States, but it's somebody who will understand, hey, we're a five-person company, there's eventually going to be 20 people here doing 20 different jobs, but right now there's five people doing four jobs each. And maybe, at best, we each know two of those jobs,

but we're going to on-the-fly figure out paid marketing. On the fly, we're going to figure out how to find the restaurant and how to do PR, because I assume, when you did all this great stuff on PR, you didn't have a PR firm advising. No, I figured it all out, and then I gave it to Meredith once I figured it out, and she would go. And Meredith was an assistant to you, like your ad-man? She was everything from an executive assistant to doing customer support, to doing marketing, to sending emails to our customers, to doing Facebook ads, to talking to, you know,

part in restaurants and bars to get an event done. She did everything that I did to her. So that's not always true, but I have seen time and time again, someone very young. Yeah, she was. Somebody very young. A couple years out of school. Yeah, they have come from a flyover state, and they have made their way to L.A., New York, or San Francisco. Interesting archetype.

They didn't. They didn't necessarily go to Nively School. Their parents definitely didn't go to Nively School. So they're hungry. They probably had jobs in high school and certainly worked in college. Working class, blue collar. And they played sports in college. So discipline with the sports.

Yeah, and they're very competitive. And you were one of those people. They hired you as, you were from the flyover state of London. Yeah, exactly. The back water. It is now. It's now London has kind of devolved into a flyover. It's like we're going to Paris or Germany.

We're going to Dubai. I don't know if you want to get to Paris or Germany. No, we're just going right to, right to UAE. Yeah. Yeah, we're not sending our students to London. It's too radicalized. Yes. It's the greatest headline ever.

Amazing. My parents, yes, I sent that to my parents. It took me three times to read that to understand what I was reading. Yeah. The world's changed. It looked like an onion headline. Well, I mean, and in all honesty, those kind of people are just so valuable to the company, especially early on.

Later on, they get called special projects. Yes, because as the company gets bigger. Or fixers. Yeah, as the company gets bigger, you know, for better or worse, you get specialization. And you have to take things away. Yeah, you have to have people that are okay with giving away some of their power and not taking that. Yes. Personally or, you know, wanting to keep their power base.

Go ahead and tell me how you would say that to Meredith. Hey, we're taking PR away from you. did it, you had this great success. Well, she was great at that. So I put her in that, but I took her away. So you specialized her to that? Yes, that's where she ended up staying, but like at the beginning she was customer support. She was doing our mail because I hated checking the mail. She actually sent the mail to my mom. So when you did that, obviously the mail, she probably wasn't bummed out about it, but she might have loved customer store. How do you say, hey, we're taking this away from you. You didn't do anything wrong. Yeah. Well, there's this actually great first round capital

article called Giving Away Your Legos, and so I had everyone on the team read that, and it's just about, as you scale, you are going to have to give away parts of your job. And that's a good thing. That's not a bad thing. In fact, a great founder is literally trying to get to the state where there is nothing, they come to the office on Monday. There's nothing left that they have to do. That's when you actually know you're successful, I think, as a founder, is that when you take a week off, the company does as well or better than if you were there. What I've seen work well in terms of taking projects or scope away from people is, first of all, understanding what, what their kind of career goals are.

Do they want to stay a generalist and stay early stage? And if they do, then it's time to get off the train and I'll help you find something. We have a four-year vest for a reason. Yeah. And if you do want to specialize, which I would say 70 to 5 to 80% of the time they want to specialize,

okay, which area do you want to specialize in? Okay, so this, okay, well, my job is to go and find an expert with much more experience than you. They're going to come in over you, and their job is going to be to mentor you and help you achieve their career path. And I'm not going to be able to do that because I'm not a 15-year marketing expert. But my job is to find someone that you find inspiring.

And if I don't hire that person, you've got every right to turn around and tell me I'm an idiot and I'll help you find another job somewhere else. Yeah. And the good ones will stay and the bad ones, that'll make them leave because some people don't want to get hired over and those are not the people you want on your early stage. Because they're delusional. Like if you think, you know, you're four years out of college and, you know, you're going to become a CMO of a series.

Happened to me on a board. I was on a board and they said, we want you to be on the audit committee. And I looked at the founder and I was like, I've never done anything like that. He's like, yeah, I just think it's an opportunity for you to learn. And then, you know, whatever, you know, fast forward two years, I learned how the audit works. I learned how to interface with the accountants. And I was like, got me. It's exciting stuff.

I see that as your superpower. It was the worst two years. When I think of you, I think auditing. It's the worst thing I had to go through. But I was like, you know what? If this is what the founder of that company in New Hampshire, Dynne wants me to, to do, I'm going to be loyal to him and suck it up and do it. This is 20 years ago, but I said, okay, you gave me a board seat.

I'm doing it. I'm going to make this work. And that's not one of the points here, but just learning to delegate as a founder. I know I struggled with that. I kind of liked owning things and I wanted to do it, and you have to really learn to give work away and be okay with the fact that maybe it won't get done exactly as you would have done it, but 80% of the way is actually good enough in the startup world. And so you have to learn how to delegate.

One of the great things about delegating professional development that I've learned is it will lower the anxiety in the organization of if this person leaves the company's hit by the train issue this is all coming off the rails so what we do is I will say well okay you're running founding university until this date six months later you're going to work on the syndicate six months later you're to work on the fund six months later you're going to go work on first calls with founders and running that department so there's your 24 month experience jeez to do this and I rotate and we do professional professional development.

And when the person hands it off to the next person, I say, do a Zoom call, record it, put it into our Notion database, and make a document with all the instructions, use AI to summarize it. Now when we've done the first handoff of, hey, you're handing Founder University off and you're going to work on the Accelerate. Now you're leaving the Accelerator, you're going to go work on the syndicate. Each time you hand that off, now we've done it two times or three times. Now there's two or three calls, Zoom calls.

on that page now. Yeah. The first time we're handed up, the second time, the third. So the next person who gets handed off, who can watch all three of those. It forces documentation. Yeah, exactly. Which is right first culture, is how we say it, how Amazon says.

That is one of our values. Write it down. Whoever writes it down gets credit for the idea. It is a cornet. It is true. All right, listen, this has been over an hour. What an amazing episode. We will take two questions.

So there are a lot of folks in this room who will make money, some who won't. All three of you've gone the process of making money. Yeah. I'm curious, how has the meaning of money changed in your life? Has you recruited more? Money, I mean, you're both going to laugh at me for this. Money has a nonlinear value.

Each incremental dollar you get, it becomes worth less than the one you had before, and there's probably some step function, depending on your lifestyle needs. Money solves money problems, and it just allows you to have more time to worry about other things or focus on things that I think are more valuable.

I think having money is a bit like debt, it creates massive leverage. And so it amplifies the type of person you are. If you're the type of person that wants to spend lots of time with your family, you make a bunch of money and then you're like, oh, I'm going to spend a bunch of time with my family now. If you like lots of external validation from playing social status games, you are now going to do that more. So it's an amplifier.

I think people need money, obviously. But once you hit a certain threshold, acquiring more money is not about the utility provides it's about kind of the psychology of it. A lot to impact. I guess I would say it allows you to think bigger. I think at least for me with the league, you know, that was sort of like all my net worth was tied up in this company. And so if the company, I don't know, all of a sudden had a class action lawsuit and we were sued out of oblivion or all of a sudden, I don't know, a new competitor comes out and wipes this out. I was nervous that like all my work would go to zero. And so I think, you know, by selling it and by earning enough to sort of have a nest egg,

I now feel like I could swing and I could probably take more risk. So, you know, J-Cal's just waiting for me to pick a big idea to do that with. She guaranteed I'd be the first investor. William would be the second. I've not said that. To William. She hasn't said it to William. She said it to me this morning.

But, yeah, I think it kind of allows you to get to whatever, you know, that ability to then sort of think bigger and think what would I do if money was no issue, right? And think about solving those kind of problems versus like how do I make X amount of money in my life? Definitely, when you hear that term, FU money. Some people I find they get the money and it makes them. No, I'm kidding. No, it makes them more guarded, more anxious. It becomes a distraction for them.

And then some people, a smaller group of people, it does actually give them the ability to say, I'm going to do things and pursue them the way I want to with my vision. without compromise. That's what it did for me. It just gave me the freedom to say, I'm going to use my own chip stack. I'm going to do it the way I want to do it. If anybody doesn't want to do it that way, I totally understand, but I'm doing it my way. And, you know, this purity of vision, I think, is very freeing. When you have a bunch of investors, when you have a board, you know, you have to build consensus. And that's good when you're young, because you're going to learn a lot. And then there's a certain point where you're like,

I think I know the playbook and I know what works for me, this has now given me the freedom that I don't have to compromise the vision. And so that can send you up the rails. Francis Ford Coppola just did a film. Megalopolis that nobody has seen, and he stole his watches and his vineyard, and he made this perfect vision for him at the age of 80 or whatever. There's a documentary about it.

And it's been a complete flop or whatever, but he wanted to make it. It made him happy. He's not going to be here for much. longer, okay, more power to him. But there are other people who also, you know, they started to get a taste of that money and all of a sudden 20 years of their life went to a Marvel franchise or a Star Wars franchise and George Lucas said he always wanted to make small, intimate films and then he just, Star Wars.

Not like addicted to the money train? And it just became bigger than him, right? And he never, who knows, who can tell me a George Lucas film that is not Star Wars? American Griffey. After Star Wars. Sorry. Tell me a film he made after Star Wars. He had a really hard time doing that, so it became a burden. So sometimes the success can then be a burden. I have that now.

I mean, the podcasting I do is so successful, and Tim Ferriss has been going through this. Lex Friedman went through it. The podcasts that they did became so successful. They had a hard time having other things in their life that they wanted to pursue. So Lex was telling me he wants to do a startup. I think he's been pretty public about that. and he's trying to balance being a famous podcaster, making tons of money from the ads and doing that.

Tim Versa, so I just tweeted, do you want me to do more podcasts or do you want me to do less podcasts with higher video production? And, you know, when I was going to text him, I'm going to text him. Do what you want, Tim. I want you to do what you want. Now, I want you to do more audio once because I don't care about video. But he's looking at all the other podcasters who came 10 years after him

and did this high production value. I think he's got knocked off his game where he's like, what do I need to do here? You need to do what you enjoy. Do what you love, right? That's the freedom it gives you. And you don't have that early in your career. I don't want to presume the question behind the question,

but if you read biographies of successful entrepreneurs who have made a lot of money when they're much older, they all say, I miss being young and building something, and I miss building something with a group of people. And not having the resources. Yeah, and like the money. Obviously, it's a luxury statement to say, say they don't care about the money because they're very wealthy so they don't have to worry about the money.

But they do, they all say the same thing, which is like building something with a group of people that you enjoy spending time with is the thing they miss more than anything else. Here's the other thing I'll tell you. I realize this, after a couple of friends of mine passed away, me going skiing on the mountain, me owning a ski house. I own a really nice ski house. I can ski in and ski out of Lake Tahoe. And I ski 20 days a year in Lake Tahoe.

And then there's somebody else who does 50 days a year. and they're broke. They bought the same epic pass I did for $800, you know, season pass. And they get twice as many days as me, three times as many days as me. I'm jealous of that person. They get to ski three times as much. And I was trying to explain this to somebody like, when I go to dinner with Elon myself and then somebody who's broke and then somebody else, the steak that we order tastes the same

to everybody. and there is an upper bound in almost all of these things that you can buy. And we both drive the same car, a Model Y, because it has full self-driving. It's the best car ever made. But he also owns a really nice Porsche, and I'm buying this super nice Corvette hyper car. And it's like... That's over money. Well, no, I'm just like...

But I'm not going to drive it. So I talked to him about his Porsche. That was his dream car, and you're selling it now. And so that tells you everything you need to know. It's like... 15-year-old me is very pleased that I bought the Porsche. Yeah. And now 46-year-old me is like, okay, done.

Done. Hit the checkbox and you move on. It's a great question. Another amazing episode. Thank you to William Barnes. Thank you to Amanda Bradford. Thank you to our friends at JETRO. And congratulations to all of the great founders in the first cohort of Founder University.

If you want to learn more, go to founder. Dot University. You'll see a link for Saudi, Tokyo, Japan, and the U.S. programs. Apply. What do you got to lose? Maybe you'll be the next founder that changes the world and that we invests. and hopefully we can join you on that journey. See you next time on the Swing Startups.

Bye-bye.