SPEAKER_02
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SPEAKER_01
This episode is brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. But what is the HubSpot podcast network? That's right, it's a new thing by HubSpot. They started with our podcast, and now they're branching into more and more podcasts with experts in different business areas.
So you might have a podcast about marketing, or sales, or operations, or customer service, and we're gonna go over, through the different podcasts on this network, some are more entertaining, some are more informational, some are a good mix of both. That's what we try to do here. And HubSpot's goal here is to have on-demand mentors.
So if you're an entrepreneur, you're a startup, you're scaling up, you're gonna be able to hear practical tips and inspirational stories by listening to the different podcasts on their network, which by the way, I think this is a smart idea. Too many brands just try to sell you their thing. HubSpot, I love their approach here.
They're like, let's put out great, valuable, free content, and help more companies succeed. And the more companies that we help succeed, the more we'll eventually come back to us, sort of like a good karma kind of thing. So listen, learn, and grow with HubSpot Podcast Network, HubSpot.
com slash podcast network.
SPEAKER_03
I got one more in a different space that I think Sam will love. But Sean, I told you about this book I read about vertical farming, and basically, like I read this.
SPEAKER_02
Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. You guys just were talking about crypto stuff, and then he just said, I've got something I think Sam will like, farming. Yeah, man.
I got a big of a redneck to you. I liked it too.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.
I put my all in it like the days off on a road. Let's travel never looking back.
SPEAKER_01
All right, we have a special guest on the pod today. Furcon is here. He's my old co-founder.
Probably the smartest guy I know, especially tech-wise. So we talked about a bunch of things ranging from his last company, Applovin, which just went public at a $20, $30 billion valuation. So we talked about the humble beginnings of that, and all the way to a massive IPO.
What he's doing with his money. So you win the lottery. What are you going to do? And he talks about his new project that he's building out.
And then we talked about a bunch of cool things that he shows me. So every week, I do a call with him called the Cool Shit Hour, where I just sit there on video and I just say, hey, show me Cool Shit that you're interested in. Because he's like a total tech nut.
He's on the bleeding edge of everything. And so that's my hack to learn a bunch of things before they go mainstream. And so he talks about some hardware stuff that he's really interested in, like a brain wave measuring device that he's wearing.
He talks about crypto. And then we talk about vertical farming and the future of that. So a bunch of cool topics on that side.
I would say there's some part of the crypto stuff that might be over your head. So too many terms, acronyms, stuff you don't know about. Here's my advice.
Two ways you could still get value, even if you don't fully get it. Because, hey, I only half get it. Fergon's usually 10 steps ahead of me.
And so what I've learned in knowing Fergon for almost a decade now is when he thinks something's interesting, instead of just saying, I don't understand that. That's weird. Lean in.
Go Google it later. Look it up. If I had just followed a bunch of the things he was interested in, I would have made a killing investment wise over the last decade.
And I've learned the hard way that that's what I should do. The second thing is he shared a bunch of general advice about how he went about his career. College dropout, choosing jobs that weren't the highest paying job and why he chose it, what he kind of optimizes for.
I thought there was some good stuff in there. So if you are not subscribed to this podcast, if you're just listening to this podcast, maybe your friend told you about it, you know what you need to do. Open up the podcast app, Apple, the iTunes app, or open up Spotify.
On Spotify, you click Follow. On the Apple podcast app, you're going to click Subscribe. We are climbing the charts.
I think we're number 12 in maybe business or investing category. And we are breaking into that top 10, and we're not leaving when we get there. So how do we do that? Subscribe.
If you've enjoyed this podcast, you get value out of it. Just hit the button. That's all you got to do.
Hit the button. Thank you.
SPEAKER_02
So Sean and I are both wearing Harvard shirts. I actually planned this. I saw you a screenshot of you testing, and I went and grabbed my Harvard shirt.
SPEAKER_01
I was about to go on this big, like, what a coincidence. This is amazing.
SPEAKER_02
No, I do have one that I wear. But I saw you were wearing it. So I wanted to wear the same thing, because we normally wear black t-shirts.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. And for the record, neither of us went to Harvard. But we both do this thing where we'll wear Harvard stuff, and then people will be like, oh, Harvard.
And then you respond, and you're like, miss that campus. Love it. Love it there.
Yeah. And you went on a tour, and they actually went to Harvard.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're like, oh, you wet? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I got a group hug. It was lovely.
SPEAKER_01
You showed me around. 04? Oh, 04. I was like, we almost overlapped.
I was like, I don't know. I was there for lunch. But yeah.
SPEAKER_02
Oh, it was like, were you there at noon? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
Fercon's even better. Fercon didn't even finish college. So Fercon is, of all of us, he's the smartest and most successful one.
And he was smart enough to drop out after what? Freshman year? Software year?
SPEAKER_03
I was there for a couple of years. I mean, I tried to do, I went to San Jose State. I tried to do computer engineering, because obviously that would have made sense.
But I was running a company at the time. And every time I was deciding between electrical physics or on the phone with somebody trying to make a deal. And you know which one won.
SPEAKER_02
Do you want to give a background, Sean, of Fercon? Because last time he was on, we were way smaller.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. Fercon is one of my best buddies. He was the guy I started my last company with.
Or co-founder of CTO. So most co-founder pairings, I would say, the most common one is one guy who can build, and one guy who can sell. And that's kind of what we were.
I'm more like the sales guy, and he's more of the building guy. And so yeah, we worked together for six, seven years, sold the company a year and a half ago. Fercon braved it out and made it one full year at a big corporation.
So I got to give him props for that. That's like an endurance challenge for you. But now he's doing his own thing.
So he's got f.inc, which is, how do you describe it?
SPEAKER_03
I just want to build cool things with cool people. So that's what I'm focused on. That's really it.
I would describe it as, if you're trying to start something, you want a third co-founder. It's an interesting emerging tech idea. That's where I get excited.
And I want to put in time and money and incubate these things with you.
SPEAKER_01
But I'll give a different description. I'll give my view of it. Sweet. Basically, Fercon is investing in himself 15 years ago, whoever is that person. So if you're a young engineer and you want to make some shit happen, and man, it'd be kind of helpful if you had somebody who's been around the block, who's done it before, who can either give you money, advice, actually get in the code and build with you.
And so it's kind of like Y Combinator. He's got this Discord group. And every single company is like, I don't know, like a 23-year-old engineer.
They get their own channel. And then basically, on some of them, Fercon's actually like the back end engineer with them. On some of them, he's like the tough love investor who's like, dude, why aren't you focused on growth? Why are you talking about all this other bullshit? And in some cases, it's like, oh, you need to move to San Francisco and live on my couch.
I think you've done that with a few engineers of like, literally come here, sleep on my couch. And I'll like, not just seed fund you, I'll like fucking babysit you and incubate you literally and physically in my apartment.
SPEAKER_02
I want to spend some time actually discussing that, because I want to reminisce a little bit. But first, dude, keep it.
SPEAKER_01
By the way, we got to congratulate Fercon also. Since he's come on his last company, App Lovin, IPO'd, I don't know, what is it at now? And IPO'd close to $30 billion.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I was going to say, we have to give that part of the story, which is, Fercon co-founded a company that is currently publicly traded for $20 billion.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, Fercon's rich is what I'm trying to say.
SPEAKER_02
So that's like pretty important. Although it looks like you guys, did you guys just do an earnings? Something happened today where your stock just plummeted, well, not plummeted, but it went down a fair bit.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I don't know. All tech stocks are getting ravaged right now. But whatever.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, so congratulations. Basically, that company, you guys were supposed to sell it for also a huge amount, like $3 billion or something like a couple years ago, and it failed. And then it turned out to be a blessing in disguise, it seems.
SPEAKER_01
Well, you should explain that. That's a good story. So we're working together.
And Fercon's like, dude, I got some good news. And he's like, my last company, we're going to sell it, and I think it's, I don't know, what it was, $1.4 billion or something like that.
That's what the original sale price was?
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, I think they put a $1.4 billion value. I think the terms are something like they're going to put in $1 billion, and the value would be at $1.
4. They're going to buy a majority of the company. Most of the early employees would have gotten liquidated unless you're working there.
You would have gotten whatever new grants.
SPEAKER_01
Which would have been an amazing outcome anyways, right? Oh, wow, you built a company, $1.4 billion. That's a win.
That's a grand slam. But then something happened. What happened, and how did that work out in your favor?
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, so the company was an international company. It's a Chinese company. And 2016, the elections happened.
And politics kind of changed a little bit. And I think in that process, it started looking like, man, this is not going to go through. They're not going to be able to get approval in the US for a foreign entity to buy this thing.
And so that happened. And then there's some time in every contract, when a sale happens, there's all these triggers. Like, hey, you've got to complete by so and so date.
If it doesn't happen, then whatever the contract might end. And I think in that time, I wasn't at Apple when I was working with you. But every time I talked to somebody there, they were like, dude, we're still crushing it.
We're growing. And it's still kind of scaling up. And so it looked like the deal was not going to happen.
The company had multiplied in value during that time. And so now there's all this leverage on the company side to be like, well, we don't actually need this sale. We're a lot bigger than what that value was.
And I think they turned it into an investment instead with non-voting or some kind of distinction there. And we ended up getting some liquidity then, which was fantastic. It was over a billion dollars.
Felt great. I felt like that was the exit. Felt like that changed what I could do in my life in terms of where I spend my time.
But then they just kept growing. The company kept building. And they continued down the path.
They partnered with KKR and brought on, I think Harold is on the executive team now. He's a seasoned vet in the industry. And they just continued just to guyrocket.
And I don't know.
SPEAKER_02
So now they've IPA-ed. To dumb it down, App Lovin is basically like you guys helped invent advertisements that you see in the middle of iPhone games, correct?
SPEAKER_03
Yeah. So we started as an ad tech platform. That's when I was there.
And then after that, they brought up kind of the gaming side. So they have a gaming studio which generates a lot of revenue. If you think of them as almost like a first party game creator now, that's where I think the company's gone.
SPEAKER_01
In the last few years. They bought Machine Zone, right? So they acquired a bunch of studios. They have their own studio.
So they're almost more a gaming company than a mobile ad network now. So that's kind of crazy. But the funny part is, I remember you telling me like, oh, we kind of did this sale.
Then a piece of paper is going to go sit on someone's desk. Trump comes into office. And now, I think it was a Chinese company.
A Chinese company is buying this. Anything that's over $1 billion, I believe there's some rule that it has to get a certain type of approval for the transaction to go through. And then it just sat there for like, I don't know how many months, six months, nine months, something like that.
And then when they came out of that, he's like, yeah, by the way, we kind of get the best of both worlds. They made their buyout turned into a minority investment. So we still got the money.
But we get this free roll of, great, how big can we build this? And then fast forward a few years and it goes public. But we just kind of skip- 20 times the value, you know?
SPEAKER_02
We just kind of skipped over something pretty amazing, which is he kind of was casual about it. You guys both were. Basically, you built this ad network that was doing wonderfully, a huge company.
And I'm going to say it the same way. But basically, you saw which games were doing cool. And you go, we're just going to make games kind of like that and make them popular.
Because we already know what's popular before, even the people making the games know what's popular. And now you make all your revenue from making games. That's pretty astounding, right?
SPEAKER_03
Yeah. I mean, I saw all of this from the outside, but like there are some key players in the company that I think were really instrumental in this. There's this guy, Rafi.
He like, when we created Apple Oven, when we were working on the product before Apple Oven, this guy was just like somebody Adam Mew. He knew his brother. He had worked with them before.
It was like this 19-year-old guy. He's not going to go to college. All he wants to do is like, do something big and play video games.
So like he spent all day, all night playing Street Fighter. But then he would talk to every single kind of Japanese mobile gaming company all night. And he would just grind.
And it was an awesome environment. I mean, I'm kind of like the person who were like, if I get really excited about something, that's all I want to do. That's all I was doing at the time.
So I'm at the office. Rafi's at the office. We spend all night.
I'm here in his conversations. I get pumped up about it. And then kind of during the day, we're building all these things.
And you just saw people everywhere in the company that wanted to do something big and went and got it. So Rafi, I think at some point in this ad network, was like, ah, I want to build games. They had built this thing called Lion Studios within Apple Oven.
I don't think it was very big at the start. It was kind of like some small games. But Rafi, I think he probably gets a lot of the credit to kind of spearheading that and just wanting to do it.
And when I looked at the S1 and kind of dug into it, it's like, I think it's like half the business now. There's obviously details on how you determine where the business is. But I think it's like half the company, which is incredible.
Like, started with this ad network. And then in two to three years kind of towards the end of this one public era, you now have been built up the second part of the business. It's also mad.
SPEAKER_02
And the guy who started Apple Oven, I mean, it was a few of you guys. But the main guy, his name is Adam, right? Yeah, Adam. And basically, he had a, I don't know if it was mild or very successful outcome at another thing.
And didn't you say that he put in $4 million of his own money, which I don't know if that was a lot or a little bit him. But a pretty substantial amount of his own money. And you guys kind of like, dicked around for like two years.
Like, you would say that, well, let's try this. And it didn't work. And you're like, let's just go play a video game to think about it.
Or like, wasn't there like something like that? Or like, we'll figure it out.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, I mean, Adam, John, and Andrew were like the three co-founders that like, they had worked together before. They had some done a couple of other companies that did well. I mean, John is like, nobody knows John, but John is like, he worked on the first ad server on the internet.
I believe that got picked up by DoubleClick and kind of that went on to Google. And then he worked at like VMware. He had done all these different roles.
He's like technical, but then very marketing focus, very product focus. And so it's like, he was just an interesting person to have in the mix. And then Adam is like, he had already kind of, he started, I think, in equities trading in the Chicago Stock Exchange.
And then gotten into ads and marketing. And then they had built a company, I believe it was called Gamefly or something like that. And it was like, probably a really good outcome, but then not where, it wasn't like a massive outcome where he's like, oh, I can retire forever.
And I can, this is all I want to do. And I kind of made it. And in the first couple of conversations with him, I remember walking down University Avenue with him.
And he was just like, I want to make something so big that I can walk down this street and people would know me. And it's like, University Avenue in Palo Alto, for people to know you, you must have done something really big, right? It's like, every who's who in tech walks down there. And I was like, OK, guy wants to kind of like take a really big shot.
But then three put in the initial funding. I think it was like around $4 or $5 million, if I remember correctly. But it was a lot in the sense that it gave us many years of runway to work on whatever.
We started with one project called Style Page. We did that for like nine months. That was kind of like Pinterest.
We really quickly realized we're like, five dudes in like, Palo Alto with no fashion sense trying to build a fashion website. This is not going to work very well.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, like just WranglerJeans.com. It's that easy. That's your website where you go to the top.
You don't need a Pinterest board to find Lee Jeans. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_03
And then we messed around with a lot of different ideas. And some of them weren't very good. And I think, Sean, we dealt with this a lot, right? Like, you get excited about something because you have to come up with an idea.
You make it. You're not really that confident with it. Before you even launch, you're like, this is trash.
I don't even want this anymore. I want to get it away from me. And so there was definitely some of that.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think one of the things worth mentioning is that you, which I think it's worth mentioning because I remember every time I built a company, I'm always like, well, this is just how I'm doing it. It's probably real wrong. But like, I don't know, the smart people probably do it this other way.
And I remember feeling very comforted when you told me, like, yeah, that's what we went through, nine ideas. Is it this? Is it that? Is it this? Is it that? And like, some false hopes of like, it kind of works. Oh, no, it's not going to work out.
And then in between, you're like, yeah, there were some days we just came into the office. We didn't have the idea to work on. And so we just played FIFA for a bunch of hours and we would go eat, talk, come back, play some more FIFA, and then we would go home.
There were days, weeks like that. And I remember thinking, all right, there's probably not the method you should choose. But it reminded me that success is not so glamorous.
They show in the movies where it's like, oh, I have the idea. I'm a visionary. I got it right away from day one.
And then we work hard and we just, A, B, C, D, E, it's done. And so I don't know, is that a fair representation of what you experience?
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, it's definitely non-linear. I mean, you can work really, really hard for a long time and feel like you've made zero progress. And you could be doing all the right stuff.
You could be making the right calls. And the other challenge is you don't know. Like, you don't get feedback right away on the things you're doing are good.
I mean, you get customer feedback, but you don't get this kind of made up feedback that the general type of things I'm working on are going to kind of work and hit. And I mean, StylePage was kind of one idea that we really dug ourselves into, that everything between StylePage and then AppLove and the Ad Network was just like, is just like kind of really small projects that you're not super confident about. You're trying to find some edge.
You're trying to learn something. And Mobile was just getting big. Android was getting big.
There's some opportunities there, but you just don't know. It's like how VR is today. You're like, I believe this is going to be a lot bigger in the future.
What is exactly what people are going to do? It's really hard to predict. And when you tell somebody, they usually go, nobody's going to do that. Well, if nobody can predict these behaviors, how do we build them? You have to have this kind of like blind conviction towards something and also get that right.
So it's like, yeah, you definitely need some luck. You've got to pick the right thing.
SPEAKER_02
This guy, Adam, how do you say Adam's last name?
SPEAKER_02
So Ferugui, Adam Ferugui. He's the CEO now. And from what I've read about him, I don't know him, he seems like a wonderful CEO.
Like the Glassdoor reviews are great. He was all these awards. He seems like a lovely guy.
He interviews with them. And then, but what you're describing is like a bunch of really like relaxed, calm people. Just like, I'm kind of dismissing it, but not really.
Like you guys are just kind of messing around and like trying to hope. Which isn't, of course, that's not the reality. But how did this guy go from being this like kind of relaxed, calm dude, just trying to hang out and find a hit to leading a $20 billion publicly traded company? I mean, when I look at him, he looks pretty polished.
He looks like a good guy. That's like a pretty amazing transformation.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah. And so I think relax is probably the wrong word. I mean, we were intense.
When we played FIFA, it was like, I'm going to beat you eight times in a row. It wasn't a casual game of FIFA. So everything was competitive.
And we would play mobile games competitively. That was a lot of our interest. Like app loving when we started was actually an app where you could see what games and apps other people were playing in your social network.
It was like kind of like a feat of app. That was the first iteration of app loving. And it was because we just wanted to see what people were playing.
Because we wanted to kind of get those games and be competitive within it. So he's always been competitive. I think you really see that in him.
SPEAKER_01
And you know, I was just to say like, like Furkan's work schedule is like roll into the office at 11, lunch with the crew, catch up on what people are up to. Just starts getting humming around. Does a couple of meetings.
Starts getting humming around 3, 4. And then basically like by like 8 PM to 3 AM is when Furkan does his work. And then he repeats it the next day.
And so I remember in our company, there was a bunch of people who were just regular human beings that would work in a 9 to 5. And then they would go turn off their brain and go home. And for some of them, it was really hard to have a boss and kind of like a leader who's on a completely alternate schedule.
Some people were totally fine with it. They made it work. And then we recruited a bunch of like raffy type dudes who were like, oh, cool.
We stay up till 3 AM here. Like, great. That's my optimal schedule too.
Like I'm down with that. And so at 11, you had told me that Adam was the opposite. He was coming at 9, leave at 4 or 5, whatever.
He's got like five kids, I think. And like every minute was efficient. Whereas I got to say like the way you work, it's not that every minute is like boom, boom, boom.
I'm doing this, this, this, this. Like even at our company, we would take video game breaks every day at 4 PM, we'd go play Super Smash Bros. for an hour, right? Like you had very opposite styles, but you guys made it work.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, I think Adam is like make every minute count. And you see that in how you like operate. And that's why he's the CEO of a $20 billion company is because everything happens very fast, very efficiently.
Like when a decision is made, the whole company knows about it. When a movement's happening, it's immediate. It's like make decisions fast.
Be strong with your kind of movement. You know, outside of it, follow through with it quickly. Like those are qualities I think are really, really critical in a CEO.
I mean, for me, it's like I want to make, obviously every day count, like I work a lot. When I'm excited about something, and the Apple event times was that, when something's growing, I take it seriously. But you know, I know that creative work is like, it happens in kind of these moments of flow.
If you get two or three good flow states a week, I feel like you produce a lot. And I think most developers or creative people or builders, they'll feel this. Not every hour is super efficient.
But there's these some times where maybe it's because you did all this stuff to build up to it, you got the right conditions. But if you hit like three or four of those a week, man, you're really humming. You're producing a lot and a lot of impact's happening.
And so I always focus on impact. And I think it was a good pairing because I would just work super hard to go and tackle the next technology barrier with my team. And then the next morning, Adam would just drive a bunch of traffic.
By the time I rolled in at noon, it was like, we knew the test was correct or not. And that was like awesome just to feel. The first time I've ever felt somebody take control of growth and literally say, actually, we're going to get this answer today.
And obviously, if you have a good bank account and you can kind of fund it, you can spend money to make your answers happen faster. We got a lot of cycles in those times when we were building these craft apps. We didn't waste a year building some garbage app because very quickly, we knew it wasn't going to work.
And why? And we tried all the variants of it. And we got we had confidence that we were done with that idea. Like, oh, we tried it.
It's not going to work. We're not going to be lingering about this.
SPEAKER_02
All right, everyone. Today's episode is brought to you by Imperfect Action, hosted by Steph Taylor. It's a podcast on HubSpot's podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals.
Imperfect Action is a bite-sized online marketing podcast for business owners. So join Steph Taylor as she answers all your business marketing questions and deep dives into the nitty gritty of online marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, and marketing for strategy for business owners. A few recent episodes include some of the biggest mistakes you can make with your launch.
Another one is why growing your audience feels so hard in 2022. And another one is five ways to make content creation less consuming. So check it out.
It's called Imperfect Action. You can look it up wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_01
So let's switch to ideas. So me and you do a call every week. It's one hour.
It's called the Cool Shit Hour. And every time I do it, I'm like, damn, I wish I'd recorded that for myself, but also people would love this. And so I want to do that basically now.
SPEAKER_02
You guys do this every week?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. We've sometimes missed some weeks, but I had a kid and stuff like that. But we've been doing it pretty regularly for a couple.
Ever since he left Twitch, I was like, well, I still want to hang out and keep in touch. It's like the best part of when we used to work together. We were just shooting the shit about stuff that's cool.
And because Furgon, in his own words, he told me this once, was like, I'm kind of in the first 10,000 people to try any new technology and really dive deep and understand it. Because he does that, he just sees a bunch of cool shit before the mainstream does. And so my hack is, well, I'm never going to be as smart as this guy.
I'm never going to understand technology. I'm not going to learn how to code. But I can be friends with him.
And he could explain it to me like I'm a kindergartener. Like, ah, I'm really into this right now. Check this out.
Watch this demo. Here, try this out. Here, open up this website.
Watch this. And so we do that. And the thing with most of my relationships, including this podcast, I'm talking at least 50% plus percent of the time because I'm a talker.
When I do the cool shit out with Furgon, I just sit back into my desk and I take notes as like, oh, this is cool. And I only stop to ask clarifying questions of like, wait, how does that work? So I want to jump into some of those things. So we'll keep it open-ended.
I have a few that I know you're interested in. I can guide us there. But let's start with open-ended, which is what are some things that are just cool or interesting to you? It doesn't have to be something you're working on necessarily.
But where's Furgon's attention right now? What stuff has caught your eye?
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, I would say there's probably three major things. One is in the hardware space, there's just this trend that I feel like I can't get out of my mind, which is commodity hardware, whether it's like a Raspberry Pi, kind of a simple device like that, or off-the-shelf gears and things like that, plus software like machine learning equals very advanced piece of hardware. Sandwich, what a Raspberry Pi is?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. Well, I don't know what the application is, but it's basically like a $50. I don't remember how much it cost now.
It's incredibly expensive.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, it's like a $30 computer. It's like a little board. And it's important because now a developer previously, they would have had to design their own little small computer board to go build a small like, if you wanted to build a Roomba, you'd have to go design a little computer to put in the Roomba, then design the Roomba.
Now you can kind of go pick up this computer that's just a little board, and you could put it into anything. It took half your company away of what you needed to do to make this happen. Who makes Raspberry Pi? It's a company called Adafruit, I believe.
But they're like an independent company. They're probably one of the biggest obvious maker space companies around because they've sold like, I want to say like 100 million of these devices now.
SPEAKER_02
So they're just crushing it. They're just doing well.
SPEAKER_01
So what's an example of something that you or somebody has built with a Raspberry Pi, just so people have a tangible example?
SPEAKER_03
So there's another device of this from NVIDIA. I'm using the NVIDIA Jetson. It's like a little version of a GPU.
But I basically have a little GPU plugged into my TV. It has a webcam on it. And we messed around with some like, pose estimation.
So you can open my TV, and you could basically stand there, and a little ball will come. And if you hit that ball, it'll go blue or pop by way.
SPEAKER_01
You made like a connect, like an Xbox connect.
SPEAKER_03
You just made like a bootleg version of it. And then we kind of did some hand gestures where if you, we basically, I think that this, this, and then this, that's kind of like the three gestures. And we can kind of read that on the other side.
And so.
SPEAKER_02
And he basically just put up like, you put up like a one, a two, or a three basically, right?
SPEAKER_03
Yeah. And this was for me, like, you know, I like to go and mess around with it. My idea, if I wanted to do this as an idea, I would do like the best fitness product would be, you buy this little device, it plugs into your TV, because everybody has a TV on their wall.
Now your TV is this awesome fitness game. And you could just do like everything. I think I wanted to call it like fit cam or something like that.
SPEAKER_01
But instead of like that company that's sold to Lulu Lemon for like $500 or $600 million,
SPEAKER_03
I think. Yeah, exactly. Mirror is like $2,000.
Right.
SPEAKER_01
It's a hardware for thousands of dollars, you have to mount onto your wall. Well, you already have a screen on your wall called your TV. What if you could just turn it into something smart? That's one of the like for $30 instead of $3,000.
SPEAKER_02
Dude, I have a, I have like a mirror competitor called Tempo. I pay 50 bucks a month for the programming and then two grand for the machine. Oh, yeah.
And it's basically a flat screen TV with a, they don't call it a camera because they don't want to freak people out because like you work out, like I work out shirtless in my underwear basically. So they don't call it a camera, but they call it a sensor. And it could like tell you if you're, are your poses in good form or not good form.
And it counts your pose, it counts your reps so you can compete. Pretty cool.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah. And so that's one, I'm going to tell you about this other company I invested in them, but I just really, really excited about it. So I'm going to tell you guys, there's a company called Neurostity.
They make a brain computer interface. So this sounds like future, but it's now, it's basically a device and I actually wish I had it next to me, but you just put it on your head.
SPEAKER_01
You can go get it if you want. I want to see if it's within the room.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, it's not within the room. It's in the other room.
SPEAKER_01
OK, go for it. Ben Sam will just talk for a second. Yeah. It'll be good for YouTube.
SPEAKER_02
Sean, you know how on talk shows, like morning shows, they have a guest comment and they're like, here's the latest products that you can buy for your kids this holiday season. And they're at a table and they go, this product is this, this is this. And they set it down, they go to the next one.
That's what Furcon is right now, basically. It's that segment where someone has placed eight cool things on the table and they're just going from thing to thing to thing, just dropping bombs. And I'm like, oh, great, cool, got it, next.
You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_01
That's what's going on right now. This is FVC. This is Furcon's QVC competitor where he just picks up objects and is like, this is a fantastic holiday gift for the family.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, and so this is for developers and whatnot still, but this is what the device looks like. And I'll kind of give you guys a closer look. But you can see these little probe looking things.
So this would basically kind of rest on your head like that. And what this does is it listens to EEG waves happening in your brain. And I think there's many different wavelengths, but these guys have identified some set of them.
And so why is this kind of relate to the story we're talking about? There's a little computer that's inside here that wouldn't have been able to happen 10 years ago. And so because you could put a little computer here that has Wi-Fi on it that can take these signals in and transmit it to the internet, this device is viable now. And you could.
SPEAKER_01
So you wear that and it helps measure your focus or your inflows state. It's kind of like a Fitbit in some way for your brain or what?
SPEAKER_03
So the device itself first takes in raw signals. So it can detect a lot of stuff. They've added some machine learning, right? So the second part, they added software.
And they pre-programmed all these different actions. So there's some stuff like, are you focused right now? Are you calm right now? Kind of things like that. Are you going to enter a sleeping state? They can detect all of these conditions.
But there's other things that I'm really excited about where it can detect if you think about pinching your left hand, if you think about doing this actually, but don't do it, it can pick up that signal. Or if you think about moving your hand, your right arm, it could pick up that signal specifically. And so you could think of this as both a receive state and detect things, but also as an interface to kind of, without having to move a muscle, just thinking about a muscle.
SPEAKER_01
You can change the channel. Change the channel without going and picking up the remote. The guy who made this is like 17, right? Or 18?
SPEAKER_03
I don't know his age. I think he's a little bit older than that. But yeah, there's this guy, Alex.
I believe he has a neuroscience background. And the CEO is this guy, AJ. And what's funny is I bought this device as a person.
Right? I'm just like, I bought this device. I think I was probably in the first 100 or 200 to buy it. And then I was like, I sent him a message.
I'm like, I love this. I'm like an investor. Can I talk to you guys? And I don't think they responded to me.
And then I joined. They sent a message like, hey, do you want to schedule a customer call? Like they were doing customer discovery. And I'm like, sweet.
So I joined this customer discovery call. Do the whole thing. But then at the end, I'm like, dude, I really love this.
This is me. There's a bunch of stuff about me. Not some rando, but I'm really excited about this.
I want to invest. And then he was still kind of like, OK, kind of aggressive in the customer call to kind of get this. But then we followed up after I talked to him and ended up investing a little bit of money into them.
But I love these devices. I love these things where it's like, small piece of commodity hardware plus advanced machine learning equals potentially massive new output. Like, you know, and I can go into some random ideas on how I would use this.
But I'll stop there.
SPEAKER_02
So this is called, we got to make sure we let everyone know. It's called Neurocity. So their website is Neurocity.
co. Their website is so awesome. When I'm on this, OK, so it's basically, what this kind of looks like, it basically looks like a set of headphones.
But you don't put it on your ear. You put it up on your head a little bit. It costs, I think, $900.
And they claim that they manage your focus with music. And then you minimize distractions and shifts your focus and hacks your flow. This is a brilliant website.
I almost would buy this just because it looks so mysterious. Is the right word, maybe.
SPEAKER_03
I mean, it's definitely something new and early. And when people say, hey, we're going to manage your flow state, you always, what do we all do? We kind of call bullshit on it, right? You're like, wait, how are you going to do that? How are you going to hack my body, right? And so you get a lot of snake oil in the world there. But this device, it can for sure detect when I'm focused.
It can detect when I'm calm and different points. And I've programmed it to basically, when I have it connected to my computer, I can move my desktop around. I basically wanted to see, can I open Brave Chrome, right? Can I open an application by thinking about something? And I can do that.
That's miraculous to me. That's the things you read about in a book somewhere. And then it was in the Jetsons, maybe, but it didn't really exist.
SPEAKER_02
Can you really do that? So you can think to yourself, move the cursor and it works?
SPEAKER_01
Do you think, move it? Do you think open Chrome? What do you actually think of to get it to happen?
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, so basically, I programmed it to these kind of thinking of motor functions. So they have these pre-programmed like 40 or 80 motor functions like push, pull, move your right arm, move your left arm, move your index finger. And you don't move it.
You just think about that. And then you do a little training step. So it just tells you, think about moving your index finger.
And then stop thinking about it. And so it does like a little machine learning loop, like 20 iterations or whatever. And then, again, this is a developer device still, but I can get it to run some arbitrary code when I think about my index finger.
Exactly. Gotcha, gotcha.
SPEAKER_02
Dude, I'm so excited to give this to my dog, or to like an ape.
SPEAKER_03
Dog, go to sleep.
SPEAKER_01
Well, we used to make fun of Craig Clemens came on here. And he's like, best idea. He had three ideas at the end.
His best idea was dog VR. And we were like, that's the stupidest idea. But this is actually better because this would be like a way to communicate with a dog if you could get the dog to train it.
But I don't know. That seems a little difficult. All right, for God's sake, that was the first one, which is cheap commodity hardware that now lets a software programmer make hardware without having to have a lab and physical material, engineering, making motherboards, and do all that stuff.
All right, that's one trend.
SPEAKER_03
What are some others? So the second trend, I mean, we're all into this. But obviously, the DeFi crypto world, there's just a lot of fun activity happening there. And it's one of those things where you just see it happening.
And you want to be a part of it. And you read about it. And you're building stuff.
But I was working with you. And then I was working at Twitch. I hadn't really built anything in this space.
And so just recently, I would say the last six months, I've just been writing solidity code, trying to think about what kind of applications to build, what's interesting. And my entire view of everything is there is these massive hype cycles. Then these hype cycles go away, which is obviously what happens when this massive hype happens.
Then there's a stopping point there where the real building begins and the real value would be created. And all of these industries flow like that. VR, crypto, these hardware spaces, machine learning back in the day.
And so that's where we are in the decentralized and crypto world right now. And all I want to do is build very valuable, legitimate products that serve a real purpose and go from there.
SPEAKER_01
And so let's talk about crypto real quick. So you can apologize now for not including me in the Ether crowd sale, which I know you were on top of at the time. Did you buy in the actual crowd sale or right after?
SPEAKER_03
I bought a little bit after the crowd sale. But it was like single digit dollars. It was very cheap.
I'm pretty sure I said it out loud at lunch. You did.
SPEAKER_01
I remember you saying that. And I was like, I remember thinking, Ethereum, dumb name. That's like a weird name.
Normal people aren't going to want to own Ethereum. Like that seems weird. Literally, that was my dumb ass thinking.
And then every year since then, I sort of think about, why don't I just listen more to Furicon? Why don't I just do the things he says and stop thinking for myself a little bit? So that's kind of where I'm at. So you initially bought some crypto. I remember sitting next to you while you were buying random ass good stuff and then the shit coins also, just fucking around, seeing what's what.
And then you sort of showed me what's going on at DeFi. So if people don't know, here's how I'll explain DeFi. And then you tell me what you would say.
So today, there's the normal financial system. There's a stock market. There's banks you can go drive and park and walk into.
When you walk into that bank, you can say, hey, here's my money. Store it safely for me. Put it in a savings account.
Give me some interest maybe. Or I'd like to take a loan out. And then they say, great, let's just decide if you are credit worthy, if you can get a loan and how much you can get.
And that's the traditional financial system in a nutshell, a simplified version. There's a parallel universe where all those same things have been built through code now instead of by law. So we used to write down contracts and put them in.
Lawyers would write the contracts. And now programmers write the contracts. And so you could do all those same things.
So you've showed me tools and got me set up where you take your crypto money and you can put it in a savings account. You can earn 5%, 10% a year of yield so you earn much better interest rates. You can lend it to other people.
Or you can take loans and get loans for things. So explain kind of like maybe what part is most interesting to you or give an example of something you've done with crypto where you're actually not just speculating in the DeFi space, but you're actually using this alternate financial system.
SPEAKER_02
And Sean, what's an example of what you were just saying? What's your favorite platform for that?
SPEAKER_01
So Frickon showed me a couple that I like. So one is Compound. So it's compound.
finance is a website you go to. And what it says is, hey, great, you have ether. You don't want to sell your ether.
So I did a very simple loan. I went to Compound Finance. I staked or basically like I put up ether that I own.
I said, great, here's let's say 100 ether. And then it says, great, you can just lend that out to other people who want to borrow ether. And you can earn this percent annually.
And if I go to Wells Fargo, I'm going to go get 0.0001% a year on my savings account. Whereas with this, it was like you can get 7% a year or 5% a year.
It's like actually like a decent saving, a decent interest rate. Or I could say, great, I put my 100 ether up. And I'd like to borrow some of this other coin.
So what I did just as a test of the system, I said, can I get a loan off my cryptocurrency? So I put up ether to borrow USDC, which is a stable coin made by Coinbase, which basically is supposed to be one USDC, is supposed to always be $1. So I got USDC. And then I went to Coinbase and I sold my USDC and I got dollars.
And I said, wow, I just put up, I just basically showed that I have this ether. And I locked up ether into this account for temporarily as long as I want. And I got a US dollar loan that I could go use to go buy a pizza right now if I want to.
And I was like, well, that's pretty sweet. I never had to talk to a banker, fill out an application, do a credit check. I didn't have to do anything.
And I was able to get a loan. And now what a lot of people do is they do that. They put ether up.
They get a loan of some stable coin. They use a stable coin to buy more ether or to go buy some other coin and gamble, kind of like leveraged gambling. So there's other things you can do.
But I just did a really simple one where Furkan was showing.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah. And I think lending is a big part of it. I mean, lending is dangerous in many ways.
I look at lending as like, this is bad. That's my first reaction to any lending thing, because people do that. They basically take it in the leverage.
Now, if you take it and you have purpose behind it and you're a long-term holder of something, that makes a lot of sense. You can kind of do that. And the reason I find DeFi exciting is you could take all the rules that you've seen get destroyed in the 2008 crash or the dot-com crash.
And you could put a contract where that can't happen. And so for example, there is this protocol called liquidity protocol. It's a new protocol.
They do 0% interest loans on your ETH. So you can put up ETH. You take a 0% loan.
And what they've done is they've created this system where they have a stability pool that will liquidate people if they go below their collateralization ratio. And so what happens to banks?
SPEAKER_01
Explain that in simple terms.
SPEAKER_01
So how do I get? Because they're not doing a credit check, because they're not asking for my W2 income, how do they make sure that this loan eventually gets paid back? How do they do that?
SPEAKER_03
So you put in, let's say, 100 Ethereum. So you put in some amount that has a dollar value today. And they let you take out their token called LUSD.
It's like a USD stablecoin. So now you have the stablecoin. You can trade it for other stablecoins or other coins or take it to Coinbase using whatever mechanism and get it to dollars.
What you've done is you put up your Ethereum. And you have to basically maintain some what they call collateralization ratio. You have to be over the lending amount by at least 10%.
Otherwise, you're going to get liquid. And the action of liquidating means somebody will go and take your Ethereum and buy it for a discount because they have to do this liquidation task. And that's the risk.
You're putting this collateral up like you would in another case.
SPEAKER_01
So it's like if I take a mortgage out. I can't make my mortgage payments because I lost my job. Well, the bank has my house as collateral.
They can foreclose on my house. It's the same concept, but instead of a physical house, it's whatever collateral you put up initially to get the loan. Your stake.
SPEAKER_03
And so the danger is I put up Ethereum. The price of Ethereum is very volatile. It goes down a lot.
I was aggressive with my ratio. And I kind of went below this number. And I got liquidated.
I still have my loan amount. So there's obviously risks with these platforms. Like there would be a risk of buying an investment property and not being able to make rent on it or not be able to make mortgage.
What I like about it is underneath where in 2008, the bankers just went to the government and whoever else. And it was like, we need new rules right now. We're dying.
And so you kind of invent new rules. This rule is built into the protocol. If you're at below this ratio, some liquidator can come in and be the liquidator.
You can't. You don't get a choice of, hey, is this going to happen or not. It's encoded.
And so when you build financial products with directly encoded values, it makes it so that it's going to happen whether it's a good situation for you or not, whether they like how you presented yourself or not. And having gone through bad times as a founder and gone through bad credit, I don't have good credit today. Still, it's like, I have a lot of money in the bank.
And sometimes I can't go get a credit card because literally, my credit still sucks from whatever, seven years ago or five years ago, however long ago, those problems were. And if one little things happen, I had a small credit card that I forgot about. It's literally a $300 thing.
I missed some yearly payment fee because every year you got that fee. Man, it showed up on my credit. Ah, that's a huge ding.
Doesn't matter who you really are or what you can do. If that financial system sucks, if you have the ability to do some of these actions, I believe you should be able to do them. And that's the most interesting thing about DeFi is access and permission less.
SPEAKER_01
So that's the general, like that's a good, I think, general overview because most people don't really understand what is even the point of this. How does this work? Let's go specific. Are you doing anything cool with DeFi? Do you have any good trades going? Are you making money doing this? Are you actually doing anything in the DeFi space right now?
SPEAKER_03
I think Uniswap is probably one of my favorite companies in the space. And I think we've talked about this a little bit. But what Uniswap did, and I'll give you kind of the simple version of it, is usually when you wanted to trade two assets, you had to create a marketplace.
So let's say I have one shancoin and I want to sell it. I need Sam to show up and buy that shancoin, right? And if there aren't two sides and they don't agree on the price, this trade won't happen. And what Uniswap did, and I think there were some others before it, but Uniswap has become the biggest player in this space, is they created a one-sided trading market where a buyer or seller can show up, and they're trading against what's called a liquidity pool.
The investors come in and put in both sides of the trade marketplace. So like one Ethereum and $3,000 would create, like let's say a liquidity pool. Then, Sean, you can just show up and say, I want to sell.
And you're going to sell against this pool. You don't need another side. The pool is always the other side.
And they've created a simple algorithm. They call it like an AMM and automated market maker, where they want to keep the price close. And depending on how much liquidity there is and how much you're willing to sell, it's going to slip away from that amount.
And that's where the price movements will happen.
SPEAKER_01
And you were in those pools. You were saying, oh, I'm making good money by being the liquidity pool. Give us a sec.
What was the yield you could get? Let's say you put $1,000 in. What were you making being the liquidity provider?
SPEAKER_03
So obviously, in the earlier days of Uniswap, the pool yields were very high. You could see 100% plus on fairly good assets. And it's really important to think about, you have two sides of this market.
So if you're in the Ethereum and US dollar pool, when Ethereum is going up, you're losing some of it, because you're giving it away to receive basically dollars. And so if you want to hold a lot of Ethereum long run, it doesn't really make sense to be in some of these pools that are unaligned. And so I always try to find things that are connected together.
So two stablecoin pools, a USDC and dive pool, that does anywhere from 8% to 15%. And that's been like that on the low end of the spectrum for the last year plus. I mean, I'm holding effectively what we'll call dollars on both sides of the puzzle.
And people need to trade between these assets. And I'm willing to be the trade partner for them, along with a lot of other people. And you basically get a little bit of a fee, and that's where the liquidity pool makes money.
So holding dollar on this side or dollar on this side feels good if there is something very well aligned with Ethereum. So if you believe Ethereum and Bitcoin will kind of together flow upwards, that could be a very good pool for you to kind of take what they call RAP, Bitcoin, and Ethereum, and be in that pool. And Uniswap made all this happen from the consumer side to make one side a trade, but also as an investor to come into a liquidity pool and say, hey, I'm willing to kind of put up both of these assets.
And then I want to make some fees as people do this.
SPEAKER_01
OK, so that's good. I think it's probably a little too complicated for the general audience at this point.
SPEAKER_02
So Sam, what do you want to do? I'm wearing a Harvard shirt. That's about it.
SPEAKER_03
Oh, sorry. My bad.
SPEAKER_02
He's talking to Harvard scholars. It's just a t-shirt.
SPEAKER_03
I got one more. Anyone can buy it. Anyone buy it? I got one more in a different space that I think Sam will love.
But Sean, I told you about this book I read about vertical farming and basically, like I read this book.
SPEAKER_02
Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute.
You guys just were talking about crypto stuff. And then he just said, I've got something I think Sam will like, farming. Did I make that big of a redneck to you?
SPEAKER_01
I liked it too. This was one of our cool shit hours was he's like, I came in thinking he's going to tell me about WBTC. And I'm like, oh, fuck, I got to go look up all these acronyms.
He's like, no, vertical farming. And I was like, oh, brilliant. Tell me about it.
Because Furkan's got a wide range. Some days I remember early on when we were working together, he's like, when Uber had just kind of was getting big, he's like, I'm thinking he's like, I got a bunch of friends who are kind of like, not doing a whole lot nowadays. I'm thinking about just renting like five by five cars and just having them like run a fleet.
I think I could just make X dollars doing zero work by running my own little taxi fleet on Uber. Or he was like, there's these, I forgot what it was, float spas or cryo tank. Yeah. What was that one that you were really into?
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, the cryo tanks are something that, if you have bad joints like me, it's like a night and day difference on how your body feels. And so I still want to put one in. And I think in the lab that I'm spinning up over here, we'll get to that probably at some point.
SPEAKER_02
But what's this what's said lab?
SPEAKER_03
I'm building a hardware and robotics lab here in San Francisco as a part of F dotting. And the idea is software you can do in a coffee shop in a living room, but you can't really build any one of these even off the shelf hardware products in your living room. And so what I want to do is take a lot of founders who are interested or future founders who are interested in building these ideas.
I'm going to have a machine shop and an electronic shop and a robotic shop in this facility going to be in this iconic location. And my goal is just to get like a bunch of talented, hungry people in this roof and just have that great energy and built together. And so you see these companies form out of universities because they have two things.
They have a shop there that you can access mostly for free. And then they have people in the shop that turns into your community. Like as a kid, I can just show up and stand next to you while you're doing something and you go, you don't like give me a weird look.
You go, oh, you want to you know how to use this? No. OK, let me show you. Like that little bit might be the difference between you willing to try and kind of get into a field or not.
And where are you sending us that? Support that. What was that?
SPEAKER_02
Where? Where in the city? You said it's iconic location. Can you say where?
SPEAKER_03
So we're looking at a place at Fort Mason in San Francisco. So it's not complete yet. But that's kind of like for me, like the iconic locations or I can see the Golden Gate Bridge.
I can be on the water. We've explored stuff on the piers in general, in Chrissy Field, Fort Mason. Like these locations, when I go there, I get excited.
You know, like going to Monkey Inferno was a fantastic office. But now outside, it wasn't that great. The SOMA mission, these areas, I don't get excited when I go there.
And I usually don't go there too much.
SPEAKER_02
How much are you willing to invest in to think into this thing to make it interesting?
SPEAKER_03
It's going to be a lot. It'll probably cost about half a million bucks a year just to even have the base building in place. And my guess is it'll be double that just from the people that I want to bring in and investments I want to do and what I want to support.
I actually ran a plastic fabrication shop and a small machine shop a long time ago. And so I've done a lot of this. I've welded and I've worked on cars.
So I actually have a lot of this interest. And I'm more excited to have my own CNC and my own machines and things to work with as well. So.
SPEAKER_02
Dude, you're so cool.
SPEAKER_03
So Sam, the reason I said you're going to like this idea in companies because I don't listen to very many podcasts, but I do listen to this podcast. It's probably the only one I listen to. This is not.
SPEAKER_01
Clint, maybe we're taking that testimonial to the moon.
SPEAKER_03
And I'm not even just pampering you guys, Sean. I mean, you know me. I'm not going to tell you like it is, but I really do listen to you guys.
SPEAKER_01
Well, I know because I'm pretty sure you didn't listen at the beginning when I was just interviewing folks. And then now that it's ideas and it's shooting the shit, Sam's here, he's listening now. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03
And so you talked about like, hey, you know, you just sold the company. By the way, congratulations to you as well. And you were talking about how like you want to get your hands kind of into things and you want to like do some of that.
So I was like, oh, OK, if I ever get back on the pot, I'm going to tell Sam about this idea.
SPEAKER_02
And so by the way, I'm sitting here taking notes. So I'm writing all this down.
SPEAKER_03
And so I read this book and this book was talking about vertical farming. I think I don't know. I don't know the name of the book, but basically, the first couple of chapters, it really talks about what the major problem in the US is, you know, as you're producing a lot of food and the world, right? The world went from, I think, three billion people a hundred years ago to like almost eight billion now.
Like, it's a pretty massive difference in like kind of how many people are on the world. You're starting to see effects like we see the wildfires here in California. You hear about all these things.
And so what's happening is as you start farming in soil, you basically destroy the soil. And after some period of time, you get no yield out of the soil. And so about 10 years ago, 15 years ago, vertical farming got very popular as a way to put food production closer to cities.
Like New York City requires, you know, millions of acres outside of New York City to support it. Wouldn't it make sense for that to be in the city? Well, how do you do that? Well, you could put it in these buildings. You could put it under kind of UV lights and you could drive water through it, through hydroponics.
And it's got really popular. A lot of people invested in it.
SPEAKER_01
So it's kind of when vertical farming is for someone like me who's zero, zero nature knowledge, what would help to make a paint a mental picture? What is a vertical farm?
SPEAKER_02
Bro, have you never grown weed in your in your apartment?
SPEAKER_01
No, I don't smoke weed. I never grew weed. I don't do drugs.
I don't I don't die there.
SPEAKER_02
But I feel like every 16 year old has at least grown one pot plant at high school.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah. So, you know, you know, you think about plants in the ground because they need kind of nutrients from soil, but really they just need some of those nutrients and you could just put them as long as you deliver them to the roots, it's going to pull that in. And so people figured out, hey, you can grow stuff without soil.
And that's a huge that's just a big unlock because it doesn't have to go in the ground. So it's going to use water, right? Correct. To use water.
And there's been more advances now where it's not just water, but it's like, you know, I think they call it aeroponics, but it's just misted, right? So it's kind of like more yield against the root. And, you know, you still have to power it with sunlight. So you could put it inside a warehouse, but you need sunlight.
And so big UV lights was kind of the strategy. And so phase one of vertical farming was we're going to put them in high rises. We're going to take some floors and we're going to turn them into a farm floor.
And that's just support the building. And these are normally the pictures that you see what people are kind of dreaming about vertical farming. It's like a giant building where a bunch of them are farms and it looks cool.
But in practice, it was like kind of a warehouse, like a data center. And, you know, that's where it ended up living. And I think that's fine.
The reason these guys got excited about, they're called nebulum farms. And what they do is they basically have direct to consumer lettuce, microgreens, and tomatoes. That's what they sell you.
And so, you know, they started kind of in a different phase, like kind of like, hey, we're building cool tech. Like we've been in this show before where you're excited about computer vision and doing this thing. But actually along the way they realized, well, we don't really want to license out our thing.
We can't franchise this. We can't do like all these other ideas we had. People actually just want this.
And what if we could put up a farm near you? And I think they have their first farm in Idaho. And they just have a monthly subscription to get lettuce and tomatoes. And these things show up to your door.
And I mean, today they do same day harvest and delivery because they've kind of taken the process down to the simple thing. They have this basic farm. And you can see some of the pictures that they have on their website of what their farm looks like.
But it looks like a little data center. It's like a rack of lettuce. There's a little light that will kind of rotate and give it sunlight.
And on the top there's a mister that kind of like, you know, make sure it grows. What's this called? What's this called? Nebulum Farms. Nebulum Farms.
N-V-B-U-L-L-A-M farms. And, you know, like if you ever get a chance to go taste some vertical farmed lettuce, you will notice the taste difference. Like it is not the same lettuce.
You're like, wait, lettuce has taste. It is good. Crispy.
Like it actually makes a huge difference in the quality of product. And I believe they can make this happen, you know, same day harvest to delivery for a large part of America.
SPEAKER_01
So what they're on their website, it says less water. So you use 98% less water. And in places like California where there's like droughts, water shortages, that's a big deal.
No pesticides because it's an indoor sort of controlled environment.
SPEAKER_03
And no soils to no bugs, right? That's why you don't need the pesticides.
SPEAKER_01
Right. It says less human handling. I don't know about that.
So always fresh. And basically the goal would be, hey, here's an eco-friendly thing, but also this taste, this produce, it tastes better. And you've actually had it.
So what's the no bullshit? Like is it, if I didn't know blind taste test, would I be able to tell the difference between these two or what? Yeah.
SPEAKER_03
And we should do this. Like, you know, there's a couple of other brands that have gotten popular that you can pick up in stores. I think there's one called plenty that shows up in stores.
And I think there's a lot of people that have wanted to do this. But if the business isn't going to work, the tech is not going to hold it, right? Like that's the same thing as soft. Like this problem exists everywhere.
And so if you're building some emerging tech thing, you can't keep talking about how great the tech is. And so the direct to consumer angle, they resonated with me because it's like, okay, I've seen grocery delivery. I've seen some of these things where you can get like fruit in a box.
Well, if you can produce the fruit yourself, like you just have a machine that can produce fruit, that's the vertical farm. Well, why don't you become the biggest farm in America really quickly by kind of going city to city and kind of doing that. And you've seen Uber do that.
SPEAKER_02
You've seen kind of all these other things.
SPEAKER_03
Sick. Right. You could really invent, you know, kind of build the biggest farm in America now, right?
SPEAKER_01
So, yeah, just now.
SPEAKER_02
The way that he was describing, I'm like, all right, they're mailing plants. That's not that. I mean, yeah, that's like, it's they're okay.
It's like different lettuce. It's, it's, it's like a candle. It's like those candles that have a ring in the bottom when you melt the candles.
It's like a sticky novelty type of thing. It's cool once or twice. But the way that you're describing it now, I think, I think what you're really good at is something I'm not as good at, which is like, you're really good at breaking your frame and like changing.
I don't know if I'm even phrasing this correctly, but you're kind of changing the whole paradigm, which is like, no, no, no, we're going to build the largest farm in the world. And now when you say that, I think, man, so you're just going to have to buy all this land and have this massive, huge field, but you're kind of saying like, oh, but by the way, by farm, I mean, it's like these little small things in every convenience store in America. Do you know what I mean?
SPEAKER_03
Yeah. And that, that's kind of like the tradeoff here, which is, you know, a farm that's like maybe, you know, in a 50,000 square foot building, that might be like, you know, thousands or tens of thousands of like land acres that you're replacing because vertical farming does many things. It reduces the water, but it also compacts how much space you need to do the action.
So instead of buying large masses of land, produce this, you can buy warehouses or facilities closer to the city center and serve that area. Right. And so if you can be near like a city like Austin or San Francisco, you can kind of serve that city kind of efficiently with kind of a smaller, you know, kind of small land.
SPEAKER_02
Brilliant. Yeah, that's so cool. And dude, like, I think what you're really good at, like when I'm around you, I feel so inspired and I want to bring something up in a second that's related to this, but basically, like, you are the type of, I hate when we talk about San Francisco, it's this lovely place everyone needs to go.
But the type of people like you, there was a large density of that in San Francisco, and I am not at all naturally like you, but I felt I improved and just changed my opinion on so many things that they're hanging out with people like you. I don't know what we call that. I think Sean is a little bit more like you than I am.
But we also have a handful of friends that are like that. And they just like, you guys think about stuff in such a way where maybe it's like when I ask them, when I ask my challenge myself to come up with an idea or think about what's the possibility of X, Y and Z, I put these constraints on where like, well, there's no way I could pull off this because that technology for this doesn't work, or I'm not good enough to do this, or, but that's, it's always been done X. Whereas when you think of stuff, you're really good at being open minded and defaulting to like, well, let's actually that is kind of interesting.
Let's play that out. And you don't have these constraints of like being held back that a lot of normal people
SPEAKER_01
like me have, I think. Do you know what I mean, Sean? Yeah, I think it's simpler than that. I think for kind of, you know, everybody uses their own frame of reference, their own lens, and he looks at things through the lens of a technologist.
So I think, and I remember sitting down next to you and being like, how did you get the way you are? And you're like, well, like, I remember when I was five, my dad bought home, brought home like a printer and like, we put it together, right? Wasn't that the story like a computer or a printer when you're like five or six years old?
SPEAKER_03
Yes, in spite of earliest memories, it was an XT computer. It was kind of like, you know, not even DOS yet, it was just like a screen. And you put it together, we booted it up.
And I remember he had like a disk that had, you type like auto exact, I was just a kid, I knew how to type AUTOEXEC. If I press enter, I get to this like simulation football game. And that's all I could do.
Like you pick a play and it runs it for you. You don't even don't even actually play the game. But like, I remember that as the earliest memories.
And I mean, I got started really young, like I worked at a DockCon when I was 15. And just like my, my hobbies ended up being very valuable. Like, I wasn't a, you know, not a musician where, you know, I would have had to made it really big.
It was like, I was into computers and programming and doing things like that. And those things just happened to have become very valuable, especially in the Bay Area. And that kind of like,
SPEAKER_02
rendered itself to a lot of opportunity. Also something that you're going to do with this,
SPEAKER_03
what do you, what are you calling your space again? Call it Founders Inc. That's like the company name.
SPEAKER_02
So I want to like tell a quick story about that. So back in 2000 and Sean, I can't see your face. So I can't see if you're, I can't tell if you're on board with this story, but Yeah, do it.
I hope you are. Back in 2013. So basically, Sean, when did you start as the Mucky Inferno? Like the guy in charge?
SPEAKER_01
I think I joined at the end of 2012. So basically 2013 is kind of the actual beginning.
SPEAKER_02
So around that time, I was working out of that. I was, I just sold something and I didn't make a lot of money, but like a hundred grand, let's say, and I was looking to start something else. And I found this guy named Dave and he had a thing called Founders Dojo, which was basically, he rented an office.
I don't know. Dave had a business that probably did half a million in sales and he probably profited $400,000. So he wasn't a rich, rich guy, but he had this office that he could spend three K on a month and he let me and like eight other people come and work out of his office.
And he, we heard about it to friends of friends like, Hey, there's a thing called Founder Dojo that'll let him like people just work there. And it's a dingy office. It wasn't nice.
It was maybe six, 500 square feet. And then down the street was the same thing, but it was far fancier. It was called Mucky Inferno.
It was pretty much the exact same thing, but like way better. It was this guy named Michael Burge who was on the podcast. If you look up the hippie who made a billion dollars, that Sean did that episode.
And it was a guy who started it and sold the company for hundreds of millions or close to a billion dollars. And his like project was the same exact thing. It was nicer.
You know, they had like, you guys probably had like hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of interior decorating. And it was like really fancy, but it was the same thing basically of like nerds and like weirdos and misfits. We all would come to these spaces and I would hang out at Munky Inferno all the time.
And you guys sometimes came to our thing and we would, we would dork out to the stuff that people would make fun of. Like Dave loved Meerkat. Meerkat was basically a live streaming app, which kind of like was the early technology and early behavior for even like a like a clubhouse or whatever.
And he would do this thing called a mirathon, he called it. And he would meerkat for 24 hours straight. He would be in the office meerkatting for 24 hours straight.
And he would meet these other dorks and they would come and fly into our office. And then it was just so weird. Like we did all this weird shit.
One time we created this thing called, what do we call it? Coffee, coffee rush, we call it. And you click a button and you get coffee inside of like 20 minutes wherever you are in San Francisco and all these just nerdy, dorky little projects. But it was like the best time of my life.
And it was the most, one of the most formative, it was some of the best experiences I ever had as it relates to business and just like becoming a man and like tinkering with all these new things and having an open mind. And I think what you're setting up for a con is like the next, obviously this is like the next iteration of that. And I'm so fortunate that I've had people like you and you guys have Birch, Michael Birch and I had Dave Grosblatt.
I'm so fortunate that people like you guys exist in this world because these little silly things that like are fun and like that seems stupid on the outside. And the fact that there's these grown adults who are thankfully wealthy enough and willing to bet their money to do this stuff, it sounds outrageous and it sounds like a movie. And I'm so happy I was part of it.
And it made
SPEAKER_03
such a huge difference. It's a movie. 100%. And those places you talk about, so I know Dave Grosblatt as well. And I used to go to another place growing up Hacker Dojo.
It was Mountain View. And even growing up in Silicon Valley, you didn't immediately have like a network. Like I don't know like a bunch of VCs just from growing up here.
That's not actually not how it worked. My block didn't have VCs on it. It was just normal people.
And you really didn't find people like yourself. And so the internet changed a lot, right? Like it allowed people to connect with each other and find each other. But you know, the in-person interactions, they just operate differently.
And it's a lot more ad hoc. Like I remember you being at the Monkey Inferno and a lot of other, you know, people that we would have work out of there. It was cool because you could just walk by, break up a random conversation, talk about something, and maybe it resulted in nothing.
And sometimes it would actually stick with you and it would be really important. And so I love it. It felt the same way early on when we were kind of doing these like, you know, random ideas.
It was like, oh, we're just a bunch of misfits together here that are just going to go on this journey. And that energy is just hard to replace. And it was really fun.
And every time it's been there, it's been really instrumental for me and like learning a lot like conversations during the lunch table at Monkey Inferno shaped a lot about how people think what are, you know, what are ways to conduct yourself like just things even outside of tech, right? Like you interact with a lot of different people and you could bring good energy to it. And I think it's really critical. And so I've been on this mission, likely before COVID to kind of like build this facility, but then kind of COVID happened.
And, you know, obviously, like it's good in terms of like, new buildings, new opportunities, cheaper rent here in the city, great. But I think this thing is kind of necessary for a lot of people who are in this builder phase, you know, like, they might not be a founder yet, they might not go raise a bunch of money. They just want to build some stuff and hack on it.
And I'm willing to kind of take a bet to build that facility.
SPEAKER_02
And on this podcast, we talk a ton about like buying businesses. And we almost get to the point where it almost sounds like we're a bunch of like banker PE types where it's like, oh, that's an interesting opportunity. But that coolest shit that I've ever done and the most fun I've ever done is just dorking out with like people that were like me and just like, oh, this is kind of funny, like this is silly, like we could do that.
And it all starts like, this is so stupid, it's so fun. And sometimes it like turns into really cool, amazing stuff. And I think that that's fun to remember that that should, that should, that should be how a lot of stuff starts, or maybe like, maybe it's not should be, but it can be that way, which is I think better.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, organic organic is awesome, right? It just means that we just kind of sat around, we brainstorm some ideas, some of our experiences, we tried some things. You need to be able to try things. I think that's like really important.
And if I can reduce, you know, for me growing up, I didn't have a lot of like people that I could lean on that's like, they had done this already, or they were doing businesses, it was just like, kind of fail as you go, take a bunch of scars, and, you know, finding like people like Adam and Sean, like was critical for me in the sense that like I had people that I could talk to about business things that like maybe other people I couldn't interact with. And I just want to kind of, if I can take that, for let's say like Sean said earlier, you know, myself 15 years ago, I could give myself some of that. Like that's what I feel like I'm kind of building over here.
Yeah, there's what's that cheesy phrase that's
SPEAKER_01
great, but cheesy. It's like, be the person you needed, when you're a kid or something like that. It's one of those things that like if everybody actually did it, you know, the world would sort of be a great place.
And I think that's what in many ways you're doing. I don't know what I needed. I sort of like had a different journey where I was like, it's kind of on autopilot for like 20 years.
I didn't have an entrepreneurial bone in my body. Didn't think about stuff. I just kind of was going with the flow.
It's pretty like, you know, I was trying to do good at school, but it was okay. It wasn't the best. It wasn't particularly a hard worker.
It wasn't doing anything interesting. It wasn't great, you know, socially. And I just felt like I kind of woke up when I was 21 years old.
It started, you know, when I had my first idea for a company, that's when I started to be more like me. And so I think everybody, you know, okay, why do I do this podcast? Well, I'm not going to say I do it to give back. That's not why I do it because it's fun.
But the side effect of doing it is that the person who's me when they're 18, 17, 16, 20 years old, or 30, it doesn't even matter how old, if you're kind of in that autopilot phase where you don't feel like you found your thing, or you don't feel like, you know, you're excited every day to wake up, then all of a sudden you hear a couple of guys on a podcast shooting the shit. They sound really excited about life. They got great energy.
They got ideas for days. And you start to look at yourself like, why don't I see ideas all the time? How are these guys able to come on the podcast two times a week and do it? And so what does that do? It proliferates more people that are like me. That's you know, what I want.
You know, I am the way I want to be. So hopefully I can like, you know, incept a bunch of other people in their brain that maybe they can pick that up, right? Podcasts, a vehicle to do that. You're doing the same thing.
You know, when you were growing up, you were, you know, messing around with hardware and cars and business when you were 15, 16 years old, and you were messing around with computers. And so, and a bunch of people helped you out, right? Your dad bringing home the computer, or I think you told me about a guy kind of in your neighborhood who had like the car stuff that you could use to go work on cars if you didn't have that hardware. And you picked up those hobbies and you just followed those hobbies, you doubled down, tripled down, even though that wasn't the common path, right? The common path was finish college, get a job, like get married, have kids, whatever, right? Like everybody has this like path that's kind of like your parents and society sort of draws at you.
And you went off that path. I think when you went off that path, you probably didn't have as much guidance as like you're able to provide to that next wave where they should go on to do bigger and better things because, you know, you're able to knock down a few of those walls for them or with them.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah. And I like how you phrased it. The cheesy phrase is obviously interesting, but like, I don't think giving back is the right, that's not the right way to frame this because it's like, it's not charity, right? Like obviously, like I'm building a business.
I do believe in the long run, I want to make money with this business and the things I'm going to invest in are going to, in the long run, pay off for me monetarily as well. But as a side effect, I do believe that, you know, kind of like your podcast, like you're going to inspire a lot of people. I would love to inspire the next like thousand builders or founders, kind of however you want to phrase it.
And I think that side effect is fantastic. I don't think that business has to be, you know, detached from, you know, some side effect. Like I think it's, if I wanted to make it a charity, I'd make it a nonprofit, right? Like that would be the way to go and that would be kind of the way to do it.
But I think there's a lot of benefit and a lot of people will benefit hopefully from it. And ideally not just because of me, like hopefully it's more like, I don't know what the discord has become. It's like founders helping each other.
Like that's the best version of this. And if I could be maybe the person that can first create the circle, then awesome. Like that would be the hope.
SPEAKER_01
What's the biggest kind of like common mistake or trap you're seeing when you have those kind of young entrepreneurs in the discord working on their projects? What is the advice you keep on given over and over again that like you feel like is the common mistakes, the common traps that
SPEAKER_03
they're falling into? I think it's always, you know, what are you focused on? So like if you're a builder, you're probably spending a lot of your energy on building. And if you're, you know, really most of these companies will kind of die in the market, not the tech. And there's some challenges sometimes, but even as a technology person, I would not spend too much time on technology.
And Sean, you experienced this firsthand, like how many times is like, we'll just hack it in and all the engineers are like, fringe, right? It's like, well, we have to like, we need to go win this market or figure out if this is real or not. If it's not real, we need to move on from this very fast because we're just wasting time, money, energy, and probably your company, if we go down the wrong path here. And so it's pretty much always focused on, you know, for me, a lot of the advice is like, go be more aggressive on growth, go figure out your market, go understand your customers, use technology as a weapon for that.
It's not the purpose that you're building. Like you're going to stay here and build this technology, somebody else is going to go take your market, probably with the same technology, by the way. Sam, I don't know if you have a hard stop, but
SPEAKER_01
there's one other one that I think is interesting that Furkan could talk about. I don't know if you can talk about it, but PAC Protocol or, I don't know if, can you talk about that? Or is either that, or I think, you know, the way you're setting up the DAO or any DAOs that you're a part of, I think are interesting. So pick one of those two and then talk about that.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah. So, you know, DAO, Decentralized Autonomous Organization, I'll call it a decentralized org, it's a little bit simpler to understand, is really just kind of like this thing happening in the crypto world where people are forming effectively these partnerships together. They're doing it on, you know, on chain, meaning as like an actual organization that kind of owns this code and things like that.
And so, you know,
SPEAKER_01
Okay, let me simplify for a second. So Sam, you started the hustle, you probably made a Delaware C Corp, right? So you go to Delaware, that's the rule of law, that's kind of where you're going to go write down all your articles of incorporation. And you chose C Corp as the, like, structure of your organization.
And that lets you do certain things, you could take investment, you could do this, you could do that. And so you could do an LLC, you could do a S corp, you could do it in Nevada, you could do it in California. So those are the current ways that you start, when you have a project that where you need a bunch of people to work together and be financially incentivized as a group, you, traditionally, you would use, you know, a Delaware C Corp or LLC or something like that.
So what he's providing, what he's talking about is an alternative that's been made. And I think for kind of the trick here is, what do they let you do that's different than just making it? Why don't I just go do an LLC or a C Corp
SPEAKER_03
in Delaware? Well, it lets you first be, you know, it lets you kind of detach yourself from the legal entity and how you're kind of like having your stake of ownership and kind of voting and governance of the company. So like, you know, we talked a lot, Sean, before of like, man, it kind of sucks companies are like, pop heavy and everybody's putting a lot of energy and effort. And yeah, you might need a person that's responsible for making these choices, but wouldn't it be cool if, and, you know, a bunch of people on the internet basically took that, wouldn't it be cool if we made a company that could be owned by everybody equally, and you could do things like voting or managing the treasury or issuing new, you know, tokens or shares to people, and you could incentivize them however you wanted.
So like, if you bring on some people to help you market, and like some let's say big celebrity, you can issue some governance to them, like they could be a part of this, you can align incentive between investors, founders, community, the market, whoever you want.
SPEAKER_01
And so here's an example of one, right, that you've shown me. So there's this thing called the Lau. Have you ever heard of this, Sam? So the Lau LAO.
What it is, is it's a venture fund, but instead of like, if you go to Sequoia, Sequoia's got, you know, let's say the GPs, the general partners, it's got the managing director maybe, and it's got then the associates and the analysts, it's like a traditional company, it's like a pyramid at the top is the people in charge. And what the Lau is, is basically, here's a fund, you put your money in, for however much money you put in, you get a certain number of tokens. Tokens are like shares.
And then there's nobody specifically in charge, and the fund basically can receive proposals. So there's just, they have a website, you can pitch them. The pitch goes in, everybody gets it in their inbox, everybody votes yes or no, based on how many tokens they hold, that's their vote, that's their weight.
And then if the majority of the DAO has voted yes, it gets the treasury, which is the bank account, for the, for the, for the Lau, will pay out that project. Here's your investment. And then at any time I, if I don't like the Lau, I can just sell my stake, sell it to anybody else, they can take my spot in the Lau.
And, you know, now they own, they own, they have that share. So it's completely liquid at all times, whether there's, maybe there's been great projects in there. And now this thing's looks really valuable.
These tokens look more valuable than the initial money that was put in. Well, I can sell out, I don't have to wait 10 years for those projects to pan out, I can sell out today at double my money. Or, you know, I can say, I want to, I want to have more control.
I'm going to buy out more tokens so that I have a greater say in this community, because I'm going to spend a bunch of time and I really want to make sure my vote, my vote matters. And basically it ties your vote to your, sort of your merits, how much value you put in, in this case, how much money you put into the Lau. So they did it as an investment vehicle.
Other people did it as an art collecting vehicle, put money in, buy art, art is owned by the group and you could sell it in whatever. So there's these headless companies, there's no CEO in a suit at the top that is telling everybody what to do and deciding who gets hired and fired. It's just a bunch of shareholders together and you vote based on your shares.
It's like, you know, more like America, like a democracy, I guess. And then there's other variations of that too that I can't even wrap my head around. Those are the simple ones.
I've understood. There's others that I don't even understand yet.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, it's very complicated, very, very complex, but this simple version, I like how you phrase it, it's kind of like a democracy times a company, you know, mixed in one, and maybe company's even the wrong phrasing there. But, you know, I'm very fascinated with this. It's a very different pattern.
I don't know if it's better or worse than what we've seen traditionally, but it's definitely different, right? And I've been wanting to kind of like, you know, be a part of one, create one. And so I joined a couple, but I'm not like, you know, some meaningful stakeholder in it. But then, you know, with a lot of the work that's been going on in NFTs, a lot of popularity, the top shot is just like taking over like my friend's group and very popular.
And I know you're super into like BitCloud and some of these other platforms. And so I've been wanting to kind of wrap my head around NFTs. And I started talking to a lot of developers and people that are interested about some of these ideas that I had.
And I found like a group of five, six people that I'm like, oh, we're all kind of really into this. Let's make a doubt. I'll like kind of put in the first amount of money.
And now a couple of my buddies are also putting in some money for getting some stake in this. And the idea is we're just going to be kind of a group of people that are going to build fun projects in the NFT space. And our goal is there's a lot of hype right now.
We're in that hype cycle. Hype cycle is going to go away. Right. It's the same pattern that we talked about before. Well, what is the valuable things that NFTs can do? Let's go build some of these.
And so, you know, we have two ideas that we're working on right now as a group. One of them is like Shopify for NFTs. Like you come in, you click two buttons, you like, you can create your own.
And you know, I'll ask you this, Sean, like you've heard a lot about NFTs, you've talked a lot about them. Have
SPEAKER_01
you minted your own yet? I have not. Why not? I don't know what the hell my NFT would be. So like, for example, we have a friend, Jack Butcher, who has minted many NFTs now himself.
And he's a great designer. So he makes like a cool visual design. It's like badass art.
And he's like, Oh, cool. Instead of just posting this for free on Twitter for likes, I'll post this on foundation and I'll sell it. And he's sold some of these for $60,000, $70,000 each.
And so he's made, you know, a lot of money this year, just basically selling his own kind of like his philosophies, he just makes it to a kind of a digital poster. And he sells that digital poster to his fans. And so for me, I'm like, Oh, that's cool.
If I made an NFT, I don't know, I don't really have that artistic skill. I don't even know what the actual NFT would be. That's kind of my thought.
SPEAKER_03
And then, but you haven't even just tried one, right? Like when you first saw Shopify, you went and created a store, right? Like you didn't, you didn't have to start a company, you know,
SPEAKER_02
or sell something, but you went and did it. One's easier than the other. One, you're typing in
SPEAKER_01
a fake username and password. Yeah, exactly. If I open a Shopify store, I also need to put a product there, right? Like I can't also have an.
Yeah, you could fool around. You could try it, right?
SPEAKER_03
Right. And I think that's the thing that I saw is like a lot of this, these worlds, DeFi, NFTs, the dollar value is really big at the top end of it. When you go and dig underneath and you're like, Ah, there's only like 5,000 users doing this.
Why is it so little? Right. And there's a lot of interest in doing it, really hard to do. And I believe that's like one of the biggest opportunities in NFTs is just like make, make it really easy for people to do it.
Almost as easy as creating a Shopify store. And so that's like project idea one, like we're going to basically pay for your gas. We're going to make it so you can deploy your own contract without ever thinking about it.
You're going to just click a couple of buttons and get a landing page that you can send to people and they can buy stuff digitally. Okay. We're going to make it literally that easy. So I think that's like accessibility really important.
Second one, which is the thing you were talking about, which is the Pax protocol, like, you know, there's building products and then there's building protocol and protocols are just like, here's an API to go do this thing and NBA top shot. I mean, probably one of the biggest digital products we've seen since Pokemon go. I'll kind of call it that like that wave of like, I, you know, reaching some mass market, a lot of interest in it, but it's very close, right? I mean, you have to be an NBA player to get one.
You have to kind of like be in the NBA. You got to play in this whole ecosystem and, you know, who knows what they're going to be worth in the long run, but the short run, there's a lot of interest there, but only the NBA is doing it. You'll see the other sports teams do it.
And, but the basic idea of creating a pack with some digital items in it or potentially kind of linking to the real world, that's kind of what I got really excited about. And so we, you know, as part of NFT labs, we created this Pax protocol, which is a protocol to create kind of a, you know, like a little loot box pack where you can put in digital items and you could put in an image, a sound clip for like, let's say your guys's podcast, or, you know, kind of access like, Hey, here's a ticket to a VIP event that I'm going to do here, or here's a meet and greet, or here's my private community. And so creators are going to find a lot of ways to use this if we develop that underneath foundation
SPEAKER_01
that they can kind of do all of this. And so, Sam, does that make sense of how, so like, for example, what we would do is we would say, Oh, cool, these guys built the infrastructure that makes it easy for us to do the following. We can create these little packs, meaning like a card pack or like a box, like a loot box.
And basically put it's a mystery box. You don't know what's inside. So you buy one, you open it up and you're going to get one, you know, maybe you get the crap or maybe you get the most VIP thing where Sam calls you and coaches you on your business for an
SPEAKER_03
hour. And what's that called? What's the, what's the domain? So NFT labs.co is kind of like the main
SPEAKER_01
domain. And so that's one of their projects. And so I think this is pretty cool because they're going to be able to get any like influence like us.
And so there's one thing to do with Jack's doing, which is, and actually Jack did this, I don't know if you saw this for Khan, but he initially was selling a specific NFT, Hey, buy this thing. And then he sold three packs with inside was a mystery NFT. You didn't know what it was going to be.
Yeah, he made many six figures, I believe. Yeah. And like this mechanic, many, many games use these like loot box mechanics because it's fun. It's fun to go buy the thing and see, do you get the super rare valuable thing? Or did you get kind of the junk and, you know, so you either get, you know, 60 cents on the dollar or you get $60 for every dollar you spent.
And there's like this game of chance. And so what they're doing is they made a protocol where it's now easy for us to do that. We can make all these packs we could put inside, Hey, tickets to our live show in Austin, or, you know, you get to be put into our like private members group, or here's a t-shirt, you know, with our, you know, here's a Harvard shirt, whatever.
And so we could put any number of things, just stuff them into boxes and assign some probability. And then it'll generate the
SPEAKER_03
packs for us, which I think is pretty sweet. Yeah. And, you know, like, I really just think a lot about like, what's the value underneath it? Like we have to get to, you know, I mean, art has value, you know, obviously the person buying it cares about it. But a lot of people look at that and go, wait, you know, these things are selling for like 50 million bucks plus and like, what's the, you know, it's just a JPEG underneath.
But like, I mean, a VIP meet and greet when you guys do your roadshow, that's pretty cool, actually. And I think a lot of people would be really excited about it. It sucks if you only option that off to the person who has the most money, right? Like, and I think these packs give kind of the, you know, creators and influencers a way to interact with their fans kind of more broadly and say, all of you guys will get a chance and here's kind of the things of it.
By the way, you know, if there were only 10 VIP meet and greets, we'll make the third party marketplace like Top Shot where somebody wants to go spend 100 grand for it. By the way, you guys will earn a cut of that secondary sale. Plus somebody who got that, if they didn't want it and they wanted to sell it, they can kind of do that.
And so you can support both sides of the ecosystem. You can make it kind of fan friendly, but then you can go kind of get a lot of value out of it too. And so I don't know, I find creators really interesting because they're kind of an analogy to founders where, you know, I don't want to go work at a fan company.
I mean, you know, I made it through Twitch, but it was not, it's not the right environment. Right? Like, it's not where I'm going to thrive. It's not where I'm going to be excited.
SPEAKER_01
Dude, I thought I saw a great idea on this. The founder of Replet, tweeted this out. He goes, there's a bunch of people who are engineers who work at like fan companies.
They make great salaries and they kind of want, they're kind of bored. They want to go do a startup, but the like, the compensation difference is pretty big and maybe they have a family or they just, you know, it's just hard to walk away from a guaranteed, you know, $500, $600,000 a year to go work for one fifth that one fourth that at a startup that may or may not make it. And he goes, somebody should just create a fund that just bridges the difference.
So what it does is it basically says, great, we will, we'll even out that difference. So you get 300 instead of let's say 600 and it's an income share agreement. And but you pay us back with with stock from the, from the startup.
And so you give up a little bit of the stock from the startup to make back the cash difference. And in doing so, you would create a port, so you would, you would help more people who today can't leave the salary, go to a startup, you'd help the startup not have to burn more money hiring that person. And you sit in between and by providing that, you would get shares in pretty much every startup that you wanted to provide this with.
So if you say you thought these hundred startups are great, you could basically say, great, you're all eligible for this, this like kind of like income share agreement that we do where if you hire somebody and they want to hire salary, we'll front that salary in exchange for stock. And hopefully bring more talent into the startup workforce. I thought that was a pretty clever idea, a way to get shares in all the companies that you want shares in that you can't go invest in directly.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, that's really interesting. And I don't know, I think people should just, you know, ideally people can do the thing that they enjoy, they wake up every day, they're excited to do whether they got to drive to work or work from home or wherever it is. If you can do that, like that, that's a big unlock in your life.
And a lot of people don't get that opportunity. And early on in my career, I just made those trades like, I don't know, matter how financially painful or, you know, you know, misguided, it might have seemed at the time, but like I just wanted to work on things that I was excited about. And when you went to Apple oven, when you went to Apple oven,
SPEAKER_01
you had another job offer, right? What was the difference there?
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, so I had met this guy, Jack Levin, I think he was like, you know, very early at Google, he was responsible for, you know, kind of a lot of Google's infrastructure tricks early on, like how they really scaled it. And some of the ways they win is really his responsibility. And he was working on this company, I think it was called YFrog, it was like a photo sharing type thing.
I think they had run another product, I think it was photo bucket, something like that. They had done some big stuff in the photo space, they were doing really well, they needed some engineers. I was an engineer at the time, and I could basically come in and learn a lot from this very technical person.
Seemed really sharp. He asked me these questions that like got my brain going in a good way, like, very specific questions like, how do you set up your desktop? And like, my desktop is very particular. And he wanted to know every detail.
And I was like, ah, this guy gets it. This guy gets me in the same way. And then I met Adam, and Adam was like very different, obviously, very impressive as just a CEO and a person, but like, the conversation was different.
The vibe was different. One was in like Los Gatos, one was in Palo Alto, just a little bit of a different area. But when I talked to Adam, I was like, oh, this guy, I could go to a baseball game with them, I could hang out with him.
He seems cool. He seems very hungry. They don't have a clue what they're doing right now.
Like, you know, they're shutting down an idea, they don't know what the next idea necessarily is going to be. I think there's going to be a lot more fun. The rate of learning is going to be really high.
I might get more responsibility, but the really good, like kind of proper choice was going to this other job offer. And Adam gave me two options. He gave me a higher salary and a low stock and a lower salary and a higher stock option.
And I was like, I kind of just made the decision down to like, well, if I go with, you know, Adam, I need to take the low salary, move back in with my parents, like, take the stock, because like, I'm going to be in it for the ride. But if I just kind of want to become an engineer, and that's what I want my career to be, I'm going to go to this other company, I'm going to take the salary, not rate about the equity necessarily, how big that is, but I'm just going to become a better engineer. And I kind of picked the more unknown, less polished option.
Obviously worked out, so I feel
SPEAKER_01
great about it, but you took the move in with the parents option. And yeah, I took the move in with the parents option in an absurd way. Yeah, exactly.
How old are you? How old are you when you started
SPEAKER_03
at 11? Let's see, probably like 25, 26, no? So moving, moving at home wasn't the worst, but
SPEAKER_02
yeah, it wasn't good. Yeah, 26. That's maybe just old enough where it's kind of like, all right,
SPEAKER_01
what are you doing? But definitely inconvenient socially. Yeah, okay, when you move out, right?
SPEAKER_03
So you move out of your house and you move back in, it's not like a happy like, oh yeah, I'm winning high fives all around, right? That's not the way you do that. It's not like you had to move in with your wife or something like that. Yeah, I mean, that's like, yeah, like, like,
SPEAKER_02
yeah, like, no, no, no, I mean, like you, you're like in your 30s, or like you have a family, like if you had, you're like a little more established. Yeah, okay, yeah. 26 is old enough that it's still like, you can still fuck around and maybe figure it out what you did.
Yeah, and you know, I mean, you know, I think it'll almost be a kid. Yeah, exactly. I think for me,
SPEAKER_03
it was just like, I know I wanted to do this, it sounded more fun, more fun is always good. You're gonna be you're gonna wake up, you're gonna be excited to go to work, it's not gonna be a drag. Like, you know, I would tell Sean this all the time, because we used to do Sunday night call, right, where we would kind of think about the week.
And it was like, my friends were always Sunday night, like, oh man, work tomorrow, like Sunday, like sucks, like weekend's over. And I always felt like, it's exciting, like more stuff's gonna happen this week should be great. Like, and that's a big difference if more people can do that, like that, that I think is a huge deal.
SPEAKER_01
When we did those Sunday calls, I remember I would always be like, oh, like, sorry, I got to, like, I'm doing this thing with family or friends or whatever. I'm like, I got to go get on this call. And they're like, oh man, you have to do calls on Sunday nights.
And I was like, I get to do calls like I'm, I chose this, I want to do this. I can't wait for Monday, we got to do it tonight. You know, that was our mindset.
And like, you know, we didn't have as like spectacular of an outcome, but I definitely had like a spectacular time building that out and learn all the different stuff. So anyways, I think that's, that's, if you take away one thing, like maybe you didn't understand the technology, but like, the meta lesson of Furkan to me is he always picked the more fun and interesting path, regardless of the financial thing. And then on the financial side, just made sure that it was a bet on himself and a bet on equity.
So that if fun and interesting thing does pan out, you actually do get paid out of it. And I've seen him make that trade of like, I'll work harder, I'll earn less, I'll move back in with my parents, I'll, you know, all these things, right? Like he's willing to work three times as hard, as long as it's three times as fun. And I think most people, at least from where I come from, they don't do that.
They, when they make career choices, it's a rational logical decision. And I think that gets you to a certain type of outcome. But if you hear these outcomes and you're like, how do I get some of that? I think you got to follow the irrational playbook a bit more.
I mean, Sean, if you look
SPEAKER_03
across your journey at monkey inferno, I mean, you're a 24 year old, pretty, pretty green, right? Like I, I think I saw your initial video interview that you had sent in to the monkey inferno. And like, whether the dollar outcome was there or not, like, I would say the rate of learning, like the growth difference for you. And I know for that, for myself, it's a massive difference.
Like I'm embarrassed at what I used to think about back then in terms of building, compared to kind of after the journey, but you'd feel like that was like a thousand next payoff. And the rest of your career is going to kind of unlock because of it, right? Like I would imagine you believe that, but I'm curious how you think about that journey. Yeah, 100%.
I told the guys
SPEAKER_01
who set up our studios this and I mentioned this on a recent podcast, but I said, they came, they, they flew out here to San Francisco. They were like staying in a motel, six type of thing. They're like, I'm going to build this out.
And you know, they're 22, 23, 24 years old, something like that. And they had sent in a video, like kind of a video interview to be like, Sam, Sean, choose us to like, like, we will help you guys out. We will come build your studio for you.
They'd like did a ballsy YouTube video and tweeting at us like nonstop. Shit, I used to do. I used to wait in parking lots to meet CEOs and investors I wanted to meet.
Just like you say, I've been here since seven AM waiting in the parking lot for you to come out. Like, do you have five minutes of time? Right? I used to do all these stunts and they were doing a stunt to meet us. And that thought that was kind of shitting.
And when they were there, I was like, they kind of were like deferring to me too much. They were sort of like, it's kind of like too much respect. And I told them, I was like, dude, you kind of want what I have.
I want what you have. I want that time back. And I want to be back where you guys are, where it's four friends living in a one bedroom apartment and you're making videos and you kind of like, why are we trying to be YouTubers? I don't know.
It seems fun. Let's just do it. And then like, we think these guys have a cool podcast.
Fuck it. Let's fly out and meet them and help them out with their studio. And we don't know what's, you know, there's no, there's nothing clearly in it for us, but like, we'll hop on that plane tomorrow and go make it happen.
I told him, I said, that was by far the most fun time. There was the highest rate of learning. And I remember at the time feeling like, oh man, like everything we do is so bootleg and ghetto.
And like, but that was the right path actually for me, for a person like me who wanted what I wanted out of life. And I said, you're going to, I remember, you know, I went to Duke, most of my friends went to med school, law school or banking or consulting. And so every, you know, every weekend they would post like, they're, you know, they're making six figures.
They're posting themselves at a bar. They're like, like, I wasn't dating. I had no income.
I was sleeping on an air mattress. You know, you know, my, my co-founder lived in my closet. Right. So it was like, you know, it was ghetto. And so I remember thinking, well, maybe, you know, there was moments of doubt.
And I was like, maybe I should have gone to traditional path. Maybe I should have gone to med school after all. But, but it was so fun.
I couldn't, you know, I didn't, that was not a real conversation in my head. What I was telling these guys was, yo, you're going to see your friends who are on the traditional path and they're going to look like they're way far ahead of you right now. And there's going to be a party who feels like you're locked, you're left behind.
If you're like me, that's what I felt. Stay the path and just know that like, this is the first quarter. We're going to be long-term oriented.
We're going to think about this like in a 10, 20 year timescale. Who do you want to be in 10, 20 years? And like, you're going to have a lot of fun now. And then your rewards are going to catch up 10, 20 years from now.
And if you're okay with that trade of having more fun now and rewards that are a little back loaded, this is the right path. I wish somebody had just told me at that time, guys, this looks ghetto as hell, but you're on the right path. We kind of just like, for better or worse, just stuck with it.
And I want more people to stick with it when they're in that mode. And you've done the same traveling through Europe, playing poker to support yourself and like, you know, moving back in with your parents. It's not a, it sounds at the time, it feels uncommon, but it's actually quite common amongst people who end up successful in an
SPEAKER_03
entrepreneurial way. Yeah. Flipside is, it's not easy, right? You're going to go the harder path. Like, you know, I didn't, I didn't have, I don't have a college degree.
I didn't get that. A lot of people ask me, Hey, should I go to college? Like I have these other things going on. And you know, like you don't have to, you can learn on your own, especially now, but it's definitely going to be a harder path.
Don't expect linear returns where if I put in a year of work, I get a year of kind of success. And then I put in five years of work, I get five years of success. It might be nothing for a long time and you might kind of get it in the end, but I don't know, the journey is very exciting.
Like that, that's, that to me is what matters, because that's what you're going to do every day. You're going to wake up every day and you're going to go do this thing. Are you excited about that? And that's kind of like critical.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. Thank you, dude. I always take a lot of notes.
I'm taking notes now. Whenever you come, I, I'm excited for your success. That's so cool.
I thought app lovin was like this huge thing whenever it was supposed to sell a year or whatever, a few years ago now. And then now seeing what it is now, I'm like, Oh my gosh, that's, that's, it's, it's blew my expectations. I'm sure it is yours as well.
So congratulations. That's pretty badass. And what you're building is
SPEAKER_03
awesome. Founders Inc. That's badass.
Yes. We appreciate it. And yeah, no, this has been fun.
I always like hearing you guys. It's kind of fun to be on as well. And where do people, where do people find your founders? F dot ink or founders dot ink? Yeah, F dot ink.
That's the website. And so that's the domain. You can find me on Twitter, Furcon, our F U R Q A N R.
So Furcon,
SPEAKER_00
thanks for coming.