$100B Founder Breaks Down The Biggest AI Business Opportunities For 2025

22:25What this is, what you're saying, is generative. Yeah, you give it the idea. But then when the character runs, on the fly, it's creating the map. And you kind of play this Minecraft game and you can see it's like crappy pixels, still like not great resolution, but you can move and it can do stuff. And like, whether it's video games that take a lot of effort and time to produce or it's like, you know, content creation and videos and stuff like that, it's starting to become like way closer to like, you know, reality that a whole movie will be generated on the fly on exactly what I want. So this wallpaper thing is frivolous, right?

23:02That I was telling you about. Right. But really, like, I'm going to watch a movie someday like that. It's like the Raiders lost, and I'm going to go and watch this movie after, and it's going to have this context, and it's going to give me, like, a feel-good story. Or, like, let's brainstorm. So, like, NBA highlights. So, you know, it used to be SportsCenter, where if I didn't watch the games, I got to go to my TV, turn on ESPN, SportsCenter would start. Even if I like basketball, I got to wait until whenever basketball comes up, and then they'll have the top 10 highlights, and I watch whatever they picked.

23:33Then YouTube comes around. It's like, forget waiting, forget the TV. Just pick the thing you want. You could search anything. You could search only Steph Curry three-pointers. If someone made it, you could choose the best of that. Now, it's going to be like, I just say, I just will put on my headset or put on my glasses or whatever, and I'm just going to say, show me what happened to the basketball game. It'll just start generating a new highlight reel that nobody has ever created. It'll just make it based on my prompt. and then I might be able to say don't show me any Lakers clips only show me Warriors and it'll just auto adjust on the fly like it's going to be made for me 100 % yeah that's interesting and you know like I think it's going to be an interesting world we're going to go from human content consumption people you know humans make content we're going to like then have machines make it towards our tastes and liking and then I think there's always this worry like well what happens to all the humans then and then I think we get back to that core thing which is machines will never have true taste, right?

24:31And I think forever that creativity is going to come from humans. And there's always a new thing. There's new fashion. There's new kind of content mediums. There's new everything. Machines will learn it and lag behind or maybe get ahead of it. There's always going to be another person that shows up and does something different. So I think taste is going to be the ultimate thing that probably won't go to a machine. It could reason about it. It could try to invent it. But I think we're not that predictable as humans. Well, I want to believe you because it sounds good to me. But then I also think, well, right now, if we said taste is like, you know, what is taste?

25:07Taste is selection. It's knowing what's good and what's bad. Right? That's kind of taste. Like TikTok, which is the most popular app, most addictive app, most used app. Their algorithm is basically saying, I'll choose what's interesting for you. And it does it so well. Isn't that kind of taste also? right like it is um and it works really well they don't make the videos but they don't make the select amazingly the selection is incredible uh it probably is more like what we want than we will even admit yeah exactly you feel like i don't want this right like the other day i was oh why is it showing me this it's like because you love it that's why the other day i was talking about how like on twitter my following i love and my for you i don't right but it's like you know really Yeah.

25:52Like, wow, why did they pick this? Well, that's like a status thing to do. It's be like, I don't use the algorithms. Correct. I hand, it's like, I drive stick. Yeah. Right? I hand make things. I cook from scratch. It's like, cool, but brownies out of the box kind of work for everybody. You know? I'd love to trade algorithms. Like, I'd love to swap with you for a day and be like, yo, Sean, what are you watching over here? So I don't know. It knows you really well. But I think that's where human, like, we're not great at logic sometimes. And sometimes we have our own blind spots. I think this is one of them.

26:21things that we love or actions prove it we don't want to and it could be like bad thinking it could be like emotional thinking it could be like I don't really want to love it but I do and so there is that element that I think look machines will be great at this too they'll learn humans it might become even better than this I just feel like we're just a little bit not predictable because we'll almost make some dumb choices and that actually is part of society and just humans in general and machines try to be too perfect. It's like my Netflix thing is probably accurate for me. It's also just like, man, like, can I just mix it up?

26:58Can you just like RNG the algorithm a little bit? Because I just want some different stuff and you're kind of like driving me down one direction. And once in a while, like I want this 10, 20, 30 % thing. And I don't think algorithms do that exceptionally well. They test it, they throw things up, but they don't necessarily try to give you variants. how long until you think the number one hit song in the world will be just an AI-created song? How many months or years until we see that? If we were doing over-under 2025, I might pick the under. In 2025, that would be a good bet. Maybe this is a polymarket, another election's done.

27:35We did a new polymarket reason. It could be something like this. But a quick polymarket thing. So an election just happened. Polymarket's having a victory lap right now. You showed me polymarket, I think, like years ago and I started making a bunch of DGN bets before they blocked it in the US. It was like, it was like open for a while, right? But they were doing prediction markets. It's a prediction market, but prediction markets, a bunch of people had tried that. Do you know, like, I'm just curious your opinion. What did they do right that like Augur and these other guys who were, had the same sort of general idea that, hey, there'll be prediction markets.

28:06Yeah. Like from either entrepreneur level or product choice, any reason you think they won that you could put your finger on? I feel like timing is a big part of it. so like the sweet spot of like people are way more digital I think COVID drove a lot of people online like we just sat at home and we're like yeah what else you got 24-7 on the internet and it really exploded the internet like I think I've seen some graphs where like the internet and e-commerce and all these things were like growing and then there's like a massive jump like you know remember we were at Twitch when that happened and it was like all the growth looks amazing we're crushing all the metrics like what did you do It's like, well, we were here.

28:46We don't create the wave. We surf a wave. And a huge wave happened for Twitch. It was like Fortnite came out and then COVID happened. Two humongous waves back to back that just combined. So I think it's a combination. We're way more digital. I think you talked about this a lot as a kind of metaverse concept a long time ago. We're just way more digital now. We care more about it. I think news and where we get information from has totally changed. like online internet, even content and entertainment. Like I have a hard time going to TVs. I look at kids, they look at desktops and TVs as like ancient.

29:22Like I say, why is this thing on the wall? It's like my mom's sewing machine. It's like, oh, that's cool. What do you do with that? That's what it feels like. And so we're kind of there. And then there's a bunch of these people online that want a stake in this thing, right? Like you want to root for a team. Politics has also become very polarized, right? It's really like a team sport. Right team versus blue team. That's really what it is. And so I think it's like, what do I do with it now? How do I support it more? I give more money to it, but I can give it more attention. Right. And so I think a lot of these things are happening in polling market.

29:51Good flow, good area. Right. And then I think for the best thing probably for them is they got it right. Right place, right time. The answer was right. Like if they were wrong, let's say polling market was off. Right. Like it was, hey, the result of the election was something else. The story today would be much different, right? And then it might have just been muted. it would have been a cool thing that kind of didn't work. So you have to be right. I mean, I think people would have used that to crush, to really rip on them because like in the way that people are doing with polls, but polls kind of have this like layer of protection around them.

30:24Whereas like people want to hate on crypto things. People want to hate on betting. It's like a degenerate behavior in general. I think if Polymarket was wrong, the reaction would have been much worse than the fact that the polls are wrong, what the reaction is to the polls, you know? It would have been worse for a little while than we would have moved on from getting on about it. And by the way, You saw this thing about the French whale on Polymarket? I didn't see it. So the big whale that came in and moved. So there's like the narrative versus reality. When the narrative from the polls was, it's a toss up, razor close, 50-50 election.

30:53This guy came in and bet, I think something like 30 or$40 million on Trump. Yeah. And people were like, is this guy just trying to manipulate the market? Is he real? Is he just a rich billionaire's son? Like, who is this? And today I just saw something on my way here. I don't know the full story because it was on my phone, but it said he bet because he believed he would win. The reason he believed he would win, he did independent polling. Wow. He funded his own independent polling and felt that he was getting better data that was saying that Trump was mispriced. So he's like, I just did a logical, rational thing.

31:26I just bet where I thought an asset was mispriced. I wasn't trying to, this wasn't political. I'm French. I don't, what do I care? I just thought there was money to be made. And so he kind of went counter to narrative and he made, I think, something like$20,$30 million yesterday on that bet. The funny thing about Polymarket, by the way, it's like, we can't use it in the U.S. So there's a whole range of entertainment place to bet on our election. Right. $3 billion he got bet on. Yeah, it's like, we're the ring, right? There's two boxers going at it. There's an America. The cockfight. And then you've got everyone else betting from all around the world on who's going to win this thing, which has been kind of a hilarious thing.

31:59Yeah, that's true. You have a good contrarian opinion about VR. and in general there's probably some other technologies like this 3D printing might be one I know you're pretty bullish on too but there's these tech things like VR where I think if I walk out of here and I talk to 100 people about what are you most excited about AI whatever Bitcoin whatever it's going to be but if I said what do you think about VR it's sort of lukewarm at best in the tech industry I think most VC is sort of feels like it's kind of a dead end technology now they'll be like it's going to be glasses and smart glasses AR that's the future.

32:34But you have a different take on VR. What you've been telling me for a while, like, hey, look, Oculus sold more units. Hey, look, you can do this now. And you've been staying with it when I think interest has sort of wane. The narrative has gone against it. And that's always where there's big business opportunities. If the narrative goes one way, but the reality goes another, that's where there's an opportunity. Give me your VR take. So why is VR a sleeping giant? Yeah, I mean, so you remember 2020, I like asked you for your address and mailed you a headset. I was like, hey, this quest thing is a different.

33:04That's a real friend right there. He sends me a VR headset. He's like, yo, I know you're not going to come to the future. Let me drag you. Probably collecting dust, which is okay. But, you know, that's kind of how I think about things. And technology takes a long time. It typically takes longer to get there than we expect. Like, especially people who are early in the industry, we're really wanting to push it. I mean, AI, crypto, VR, all have the same problem, which is early on, people are like really pushing it to you. It's not ready. So it's a big hype. It crashes. Everyone moves on. So that's happened in VR a few times.

33:38And it's kind of, I would say, for most people, been quiet, not thinking about it. But I think it's a sleeping giant. And I think it's a massive sleeping giant for a few reasons. One, I see it every day here. Like here at Founders, Inc., I get a chance to, you know, one, we invest in VR companies. We're one of the few that do. Right. We have a whole corner, maybe like 12 devs that are all building different VR products. We put them all in one spot and they might be some of the most density of interesting VR projects in one place. And so what have we seen? One Quest 1 came out. It was wireless.

34:07It was kind of crappy. But man, I could sit on my couch and use it. It was cheap. Became a great Christmas gift in year two. They didn't have an inventory year one. They released Quest 2. It got even better, lighter, more powerful. Now Quest 3 is coming out. And I think they got like five to 10 million monthly active headsets out there. Right. I think that rivals consoles. And my first thought was like... How many units has it sold? I think Quest has sold... I would say 30 million is my guess, but, you know, maybe it's more. Yeah, so this is Quest... Quest has sold over 20 million units, with the majority being Quest 2.

34:44Yep. Quest 3 has currently sold a million units at the$500 price point. So I think, I mean, if you just... I don't know what the math here is, but, you know, they've done... What is that? over a billion dollars of revenue on Quest. And I believe it's outpaced... Pretty good for a failure. It's outpaced PS5 sales, for example. And so the first thought for me was like, hey, what's the first thing that's going to happen in the spatial environment? Like, what is it good for? Immersion, gaming, like, these are natural entertainment, right? These were the first few things that was natural. And you had Beat Saber, you had a few things.

35:17And that was kind of like, you know, here's the first use case. Let's try to get it out there. Let's try to make the thing happen. And then it kind of goes up, down. people get used to those first experiences. I think you played Beat Saber. Yeah, magical the first few times. Correct, and then you're like, okay, whatever. And then, you know, because it's kind of like a cheaper than PS5 unit, the Quest 2 was, it was available in Christmas a few times. It went to like, you know, kids. Like 12, 13, 14-year-old kids kind of getting this thing. Like they would be getting a PS5, and they use it, and they don't have the bias that we have of like many years of like the structures we're used to.

35:53And so a lot of games formed, and specifically social games, like Gorilla Tag. I don't know if you've heard about Gorilla Tag. No, what is Gorilla Tag? So Gorilla Tag is a social multiplayer game. It's really fun. It on App Lab did like tens of millions of dollars. They're like shoes, people tagging. Yeah, it's like a, you know, like kind of like a fun social game that you can play with a bunch of people. You go in, by the way, you go in, you're going to be like, dude, there's a bunch of like teenagers screaming at each other. But for them, this is the environment. It's a new place. And they didn't grow up with these other things.

36:20So they're starting with mobile phones, The TV feels ancient. The desktop feels ancient. And this thing on my face actually feels like more fresh, more new. So that's where it's starting. I think Gorilla Tag has done$200 million of revenue. And this is where I'm like, VR is a sleeping giant. We have a few teams here at our studio. So we have a team called Fluid that's building the kind of like best browser in VR. So you get multiple displays. You get as many kind of tabs as you want. You could customize your environment. You get AI environment. You're like, I want to be in a cave. it like makes you in a cave.

36:52Right. And then you get like social multiplayer so people can show up in your environment. And we're on App Lab, does like about 5 ,000 weekly active users still. Small team of three just like, you know, without a big burn, can just build this, grow it. We're not even in the store yet. We're in like this like, App Lab is like kind of the pre-store where we could just drive people to it, but we're not getting anything directly from the store except our own searches, right? And, you know, 5 ,000 people like go in, use a productivity thing. There's another product called Yeeps. It's like the second game behind Gorilla Tag.

37:24Small team, absolutely crushing it. Yeeps. Yeah, Y-E-E-P-S. Really fun game. You know, we should play together more at the same time. They're here. They're a team of how many people? I think they're like less than 10 people, but more like six to eight. And most of it was built with a few people. And this thing is profitable or what's the deal? Yeah, I mean, I'll let them talk about their numbers just so I don't want to say anything. But on a scale of, that's pretty good to like, wow, where is it at? Wow. It's wow. Yeah, it's wow. That's great. So what's cool about this is like supply demand, right?

37:57So like you can go be, you know, app number, you know, five million in the store right now. Or if you're talented, you could be like one of the top 20 VR apps if you put in like, you know, a year of hard work. I'm just using like kind of round numbers or whatever. But it's the same way that right now, if you're a content creator, you go post on Instagram, it's pretty tough. Post on LinkedIn, you'll get tons of distribution. if you're half decent at content because there's just no supply of quality content. So even if VR is not, you know, like 20 million units is very good, but even if it's not just like becoming this like global phenomenon, you can still put a great business.

38:35And if you just keep riding the wave, you're very well positioned to be the leader. And then everyone at that point will look back and be like, oh yeah, it's because they started five years ago, you know, when this was smaller, when it was 20 million instead of 200 million. In these emerging tech things, So everything I found out that we do is emerging tech. I think the theme of all of them is survive. If you make it to when the industry happens, you will grow with it. If you were a small percentage of the industry and the industry grows by like 100x, you grew by 100x or more. You've already been there.

39:04And I've seen a few small person teams at like 10 million plus a year, like five people. Totally profitable, totally able to do it. Is this a VC investable business? Honestly, I don't care. Like what I care about is like, this is interesting. And... can you make these bets without massive capital expenditure? If it takes$50 million to build a VR game, it's like the big, giant blockbuster movie. Those bets don't excite me. I think when it's like three to five people can be somewhere, the limited amount of money, and just them, it's like them in the hoop. The basketball analogy is like, great. We have everything we need.

39:40We have all the talent. We have all the ability. The tools are amazing now. All the game engines have perfected themselves over time. And then now the environment's forming. Meta has led it. right? So like the Quest, and this is the VR world. And then we're seeing glasses, Vision Pro, Ray-Bans. The trend is we're going to have compute in our spatial view. And I think that's the big, yeah, this is happening in VR. The Quest platform is interesting. You can build a profitable business or a fairly big game right now. Also, this isn't slowing down. Historically, Apple, when they enter an industry, they come with a unit.

40:14It's okay. It has a lot of things that got to get better. Another unit comes out and then you have Snap, you have beta with Ray-Ban. Like, I mean like... Zuck is not stopping. Zuck is not giving up. He's going to the end game here. Apple probably also won't stop. Correct. So now you have the two biggest players. They're going to keep making the hardware better. They're going to be super hungry for content. And the other sneaky thing about these, by the way, that I didn't really fully realize until I moved to Silicon Valley, which is a lot of these require like really specialized talent. So I remember when I first met you, you were like, I'm really into big data.

40:46You started saying words like Hadoop. I didn't know what the hell you were talking about. It wasn't as popular back, this was like in 2015 or something like that when you were telling me like, hey, I think this big data machine learning is really interesting. You were, again, pretty early onto that. Crypto, same thing. You were early onto that. There weren't a lot of smart contract developers. There wasn't a lot of, you know, big data people, AI. So then even if you don't have a hit product, if you just assemble like A plus talent that's super specialized, then as those platforms rise, your team itself becomes like a$100 million asset.

41:20If you built today for like, because Meadow, Ray-Bans, that product's actually a hit for Facebook and they're going to keep going with that and everybody wants to be in the glasses thing. People think Glass is the next platform. So if you build a specialized team that's good at developing for that platform, there's just not a lot of great teams that do that. That's a$100 million team, even without a hit product. How hard was it to find - With a hit product, you get a billion dollars. It was hard to find an iOS developer when we were starting to do mobile. It felt so specialized. We're going to compete at like a ridiculous level of price to go get pretty good talent in that space.

41:53I remember 2012, which was not even early, we had one iOS dev on our entire team. And it was so hard to recruit talent. It was faster to just retrain. So we just stopped working. And the iOS dev trained all of our other devs to be good enough to be dangerous because it was so scarce to get good. And iOS wasn't even that specialized compared to like either the fancy AI stuff or, you know, VR, mixed reality, all that type of talent. And so I just think that when I think about kids growing up and all the, let's say, 13 to 15-year-old kids or somewhere in the teenagers, they have a mobile phone that is attached to them.

42:28They think it's superior than a computer or a desktop because it's with them. and then we're going to take the second computing interface where we do more work or more immersive experiences and we put it around your eyes. That makes way more sense to me than TVs, desktops, and even laptops. And, you know, that was like one of the thoughts where we started Fluid. Like, we talked about this in 2020. I don't know if you remember. There's one project that we... You used to tell me, you're like, I work in VR. Correct. I did that experiment where I worked in VR for an hour a day. And then I ended up doing it for a few months, by the way.

42:58And I was like, this is great. and had been like literally sitting with me. And I think this is one of the reasons why I actually built a studio. It's like, I want to do all these ideas. I can no longer do them all. I could pick a few. I probably shouldn't even go do more, but like, I just want to find really hungry people and like match them together. Right. That's how I found John F. Fluid. It's like, he was a PhD student. He was going to go do something in like finance and high frequency trading and like whatever. And he also came to this idea of like, hey, when I was doing my like, you know, masters, whatever, I was writing this thing.

43:29I just wanted to go into a focus mode. Like, could I just go into a cave and like block out all the stuff? He's like, I had all these VR friends that had done some stuff in VR. So like, I tried to do it and it wasn't good enough. Right. And then he kind of left it at that. And then we were talking about it and he talked with Hubert and he was like, dude, you should talk to FurCop. I think he's got like five pages of like random notes and ideas around this. And then Dashwell responded. And it's like, cool. Like, we're not going to blow ourselves out. We're not going to go raise a lot of money. We're not going to go get a giant team.

43:57We're going to get three people here We're just going to grind and work hard and build and survive for when this thing happens. We'll miss some bets like that. We'll gain ridiculous amounts of knowledge of the industry. And then we find these sleeping giants, and it's like, yeah, we're going to double down. Hubert went to this VR conference, the MetaConnect thing, and he had a t-shirt, and we're like, the funny thing would be, on your shirt, just put, I invest in VR. And so he did, and it was like, wow, we found one. You're like a girl at a crypto conference. This is amazing. This is how we want to think about it.

44:29Try to be there early. Don't get too caught up with where the technology is now. Don't get too scared of how far it is. 2015, 2016, remember we heard self-driving cars are never going to happen? I don't know if you remember that. Massive push against it. Man, there's Waymos running around every day now. I see more Waymos at night driving around than regular people driving.

44:53All right, let's take a quick break because I got to tell you a story. Let me tell you about the first time I tried to run payroll for my team. I was using a traditional bank, and you know the type. It's got a janky interface. It's built like a 2002 tax form, and it was open only during business hours. And I hit send, and it froze. They flagged the transaction. They locked my account. They put me on hold for 45 minutes, and then they told me I got to visit my local branch. And that was the day I started looking for a new banking solution. After asking a few founders what they were using, I found out about Mercury.

45:19And so now my payroll is two clicks. I can wire money. I can pay invoices. I can reimburse the team all from one clean dashboard. That's why I use it for all of my companies. And so do 200 ,000 other startup founders. And so if you're looking to level up your banking, head to Mercury.com and apply in minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group, column N8, and Evolve Bank & Trust members FDIC.

45:45You've told me once before you go, I think my superpower is that I'm usually in the top, and the first thousand or 10 ,000 people to try any new technology and like understand it, be able to play with it, know it, see it, all that stuff. I remember we were at work and you were buying the Ethereum pre-sale, the ICO or whatever the pre-sale. Do you remember what you said about it? Yeah, I don't know if you remember. I just remember being like, dude, can we do some real work? Oh, what are you doing? Ethereum name, that name's never going to work. I was like, that sounds so nerdy. That'll never be a thing.

46:13I think that was a phrase I remember. I was like, I was telling you about Ethereum. I was like, dude, I stayed up all night reading this like white paper. I'm like, you were on it. I was on it. I came in, I'm like, we're strong. And I talked to him. And I tell you this. It's probably, I don't even know what I said. Who knows what. Probably through a bunch of words and you're just like, dude, I don't know what this is. We have some new relationship. And you're like, Ethereum, that name's stupid. Yeah, I wrote it off. Chalk that up for another L for me. By the way, you could have been totally right as well.

46:36So no, no. I wasn't. I think that's all that matters there. Very, very off on that one. But I think that's true. That is your superpower. And then you said another thing today, which I hadn't heard here, which is for emerging tech, there's only one rule. Survive. and that reminds me, we had, I just did a pod with Ryan Peterson. He created Flexport. He said the same principle. He goes, you know, what I realized was I cannot control the timeline. I don't know how long something's going to take to work. So all I focus on is how do I just be default alive? How do I just stay in the game? He goes, I just have the confidence that if I'm in the game, I'll just keep trying shit until it works.

47:12I just believe that by myself. I will just keep trying things until I figure out another thing to work. The only way I can lose is if I have to get out of the game, which is like, I can't, you know, usually it's like I run out of funding. I can't control my destiny. I spend too much money. I'm burning too much capital. And so he's like, that's been the name of the game for me from when he was flipping scooters on eBay to now, you know, runs a multi-billion dollar company called Flexport. And the whole time he's like, my whole thing is I can't control the timeline. So I'm going to control staying in the game because if I stay in the game, I win.

47:41Stay in the game with great talent and people that want to have this long-term mindset. it. No, you know, I think there's a lot of people that can take short-term wins and they should. Like we've done that, right? There are these short-term moments like, oh, this is great for us right now. But we're going to keep doing more. And like, I think that's the main thing for me. Technology takes a long time. When it hits though, it happens very fast. Like that's the part that I think people don't realize. They like underestimate how long it's going to take and then they overestimate how fast it's going to happen.

48:08It's like immediately going to just like happen. And, you know, I think Uber was an example like that. Like we saw it, it was black cars. It's like all this expensive taxi that nobody's going to use. And then now it's like, dude, this place doesn't have Uber. Like how am I going to move around? Yeah, I can't function. It's what it feels like that, you know? And so I think I enjoy it. There's one reason why it's like a lifelong game. I could just play technology forever. I could learn about things. I don't have a rush to be there first. I don't have a rush to be like, I didn't know everything and like do everything and raise the most money and get a bazillion people.

48:40It's more like I need a few people with me that like are really excited about this. They see it like I see it. And we're just going to go on this mission. And luckily now I have the ability to just like fund that and like create my like environment to do it. That's what this whole building is. So let's talk about this building. Because you've basically built like your dream, like man cave in a way. I think, you know, it's kind of like a founder dream, right? Like, and I want to talk about that because you had a big success with Apple Oven where, and actually kind of like felt like there was multiple moments where, you know, it was successful.

49:16At one point, it sold for like$2 billion. Yeah. It was like, oh, exit,$2 billion, amazing. And then like Trump blocked it or it was like - Didn't go through, got better. Didn't go through. But then during that, this is a crazy story. It was like, we were sitting in the office and this news happens like, dude, congrats. That's amazing, holy shit. And then like nine months goes by. The deal doesn't like fully get approved because it was such a big purchase out of a Chinese company group or something like that. And in the meantime, the business just kept crushing. So Adam, who's the CEO of that, you said he basically went back and was like, cool, we'll still do the$2 billion, but now it's for 30%.

49:54I don't know what exactly it was. Some version of that. Yeah, there was like, I don't know, like... Because you couldn't do majority deals. That was the big block. Yeah, something like that. A majority deal was going to happen. And so now, then the company eventually IPOs, you get this nest egg, right? So it's like, okay, I could do whatever. You could go retire and you could go retire You could go buy islands and cars or do rich guy stuff. Like you could do that. And instead you like chose to do something else. Can you just describe basically like what's the mindset? What's the conversation you had with yourself?

50:23Yeah. Now that you had more resources to do whatever you wanted to do. Yeah. I feel like my whole life I've just always wanted to tinker and build stuff. Like I always described it as like, I love taking stuff apart and putting it back together. It's not like some people will say, it's like, oh, you want to learn how it works. It's not that. It's more of the puzzle. How does somebody else put this like, you know, and I used to do this with cars and computers growing up. Like I would overclock my computer and I would make my car faster. And like, that was like kind of just like the mentality that I had.

50:56And then I was like, okay, well, I've got to become an adult at some point in time and do the thing. But like, hey, I like this business thing. I buy and sell stuff. It's like a way for me to hustle and kind of do more of what I want to do. and then I was like, let me just keep doing this and then maybe at some point I got to get a real job and kind of luckily like tech was really valuable and like my skill set improved, I got better at it but a lot of that early journey was like more solo than like with a bunch of people and then met the guys, Adam, before AppLovin like kind of like these other things and it was like, yo, we're like eight people in like Palo Alto, like building cool random apps Like the energy for me there every day was like through the roof.

51:38And then Monkey Inferno was like the same thing, but like even more. And I think I used to tell you, like, I want an airport hangar. I just want to put a pretty cool stuff in it. And I just think it was like that. Before I started Founders Inc. as it is, because I was at Twitch and I'm like, I got to get out of here, right? It was like the instant, instant thing. And why, by the way? I don't know. I don't think I'm a good employee. I think I'm like suited for a few roles and it's typically like doing mountain stuff without much. Was there anything that just drove you crazy about it? Was there any like, you know, we're going to do a whole nother pot on this basically.

52:08I feel like the first week or month of like, yo, let's do a bunch of stuff. And they're like, slow down. Like, why? I want to do more. Like, I want to do more things. And this resistance feeling of like, oh, we already thought about this or we tried this. Like, no, let's just go do stuff. And I never enjoyed that. And I think startups and small teams just, because you have so much to do, that's the kind of mentality. And so I talked to probably like 75 to 100 founders before starting Founders Inc. And I really wanted to learn. It's like I knew a bunch of people. I used to interact with them, even at like Bebo and Monkey Inferno.

52:42I'd have them come by and like just talk, whatever. And I really enjoyed that. That was like fun. I started angel investing a lot, which was like cool. I thought I wanted to do that, but it wasn't fun. It was like, meet great, talented people, get excited about them. And then you're like a monthly update away. Like give them the check and then that's it. Right. Damn, this has been fun. First meeting is great. It's a great first date. I walk away and I'm like, then there's no relationship. And you're like, what happened to that great first date? Exactly. And so I was like, man, I don't really want to do that.

53:13But something like this, where I could help these like early entrepreneurs, things that I've just done over and over again. I didn't have this, like what's a version of that? And I talked to a bunch of founders and they all said something to me. I was like, what do you need? What help do you need? I thought they're all going to say money and I'm going to start a fund. That's what I thought was going to happen. And they all said something different. They said something like, I need people who understand my problems. And we used to do those masterminds. And it was really about like, who do you go to for founder problems?

53:44It's like, what are your founder problems? Are you your co-founders, your employees, or your investors? So you can't go to any of these people. They might be the problem, right? And so who do you go to? Or even if they're not the problem, you need to present. You don't want to worry your employees. You don't want to worry your investors. You kind of have to maintain a certain aura of momentum and morale. So you can't just go be dumping problems on them or be like, I don't know. You're supposed to know. You're the guy. And we would go in that room, that little circle room with the circle table.

54:11And we'd be in there and I don't know what the employees were thinking. They're just like, oh man, these guys are talking again. They're going to come out with something different. But we could talk about anything and then leave the room and be like, no, we're still where we are. And I think, you know, co-founder can be that for you. A lot of entrepreneurs starting out, they don't have that. And even if they have it, there's like other things that they're experiencing. And so when we used to put these folks together and these kind of masterminds, that feeling was like awesome. And it felt like we could relate.

54:36And actually, I heard the same thing from a bunch of founders they used to talk to. And I was like, I think it's something more like this, where I could do something and put everybody in a box. And I thought it was going to be more digital. I think COVID times and, you know. Started on Discord or whatever. Started on Discord. I mean, like Farza, Ben was in these groups. Like, there's really a few others. Like, it was just people I knew around me. And kind of COVID hit. It was digital. We were talking every week. We would give ourselves these, like, accountability kind of ship it sessions. We would have an area to talk about stuff.

55:08And you could see the dots connecting. And then I got an opportunity to, like, get this space. And I had been looking for, like, something. and, you know, it wasn't like, oh, San Francisco needs a place. I'm from the Bay Area normally, so this is the best place for me. But I said, look, if it's going to be SF, we're going to be on the water. No more so bad. No more places like that. So we got this like weird opportunity to find this space and like really make a bet when like nobody else was. I think it was like late 2020 is when I approached them here. Yeah. And it took maybe like nine months to figure it all out and another three months to like renovate it and stuff like that.

55:39So it's still very much good. We got to call another call about breaking a lease. Wait, wait, he wants to sign a lease right now? Come on in. That's what it felt like here. I mean, this place, Fort Mason, has 300 events a year. They went to zero with COVID. All the places, you know, art galleries, art schools, like, what do you do? Like, you know, and this is supposed to be like this innovation place and it's a little bit older. And so we come in. That's one of your tricks is that you don't run away when the dips happen. I remember when early on, 2013, 14, something like that, we meet, I buy Bitcoin because, I don't know, you're into crypto.

56:14Some people in the office, you know, maybe I was dumb about the Ethereum idea. Yeah, PG, Pete, Pete Hicks was, you know, he's mining Bitcoin on our servers. So I buy some Bitcoin. And literally like the next week, I get like super convinced. I'm like, oh, guys, I see it. I believe. Here's why I believe I'm giving you my case. I bought. Yeah, great. Like the next week, price cuts in half. It goes down to like 300 bucks or something like that. And I came in. I'm like, oh, Bitcoin. I was, you know, whatever. That was a fun week or two. Well, you were like, oh, this is great. Because now everything's half off.

56:49You literally told me that. You believe if you buy now, you can cut your buy price. Basically, you can go down by 50%. You'll cost average in at half the amount. And I was like, oh, he's right. Because I was just riding a roller coaster of like, I was doing what a cliche person would do. When things are good, this is great. When things are bad, maybe it's not great. Whereas you were like, dude, did anything actually change? or just the external sentiment. And so I bought more. So I thank you for that. That was a very good, you know, decision at the time to go buy more when things go down. I think you've done that with other, you know, bets, whether it's San Francisco real estate during the COVID time, or it's, you know, whether it's crypto or VR.

57:30When things go out of fashion, I feel like you don't run away, which is important. I feel like there's a signal. It's like things go out of fashion and there's another place where the people who don't shape narratives, typically like I'm technical so I live in these like GitHub projects. I live where the builders are. I like engage with them. If I see that somewhere where it's like, huh, all the people talking are like against it. These people, like nobody told them yet that like it's done. Like, oh, this is dead, right? Like they're all saying it and then these guys are just shipping their code and like, hey, did anybody tell you it's over?

58:03Like, what are you talking about? I don't care. And I just think that's the perfect environment. And even if you're right one out of five times like that, you'll be right in such a big way. way that it works out. And then, by the way, for me, it's just fun. So, like, this is fun. Like, I love building stuff. I like building technology. I did a lot of software, obviously, because it's been magical to develop things and, like, distribute it to the world. We had some hardware projects. I don't know if you remember Jamie, by the way. Yeah. Yeah, we at one point in time, when we were working together, we had an idea for a...

58:34It was cool. It was like a voice control. It was kind of like Alexa. Yeah. We called it Jamie. I don't know why, but, like, that's what we built. Yeah, we like Jamie. I still like the name. That was good. And what you were saying was like, you're like, we can, instead of creating a, everyone was trying to create a device. Portal was trying to create a screen. Amazon was trying to create a screen. You're like, that makes it expensive. You're like, everybody already has TV screens in their house. Just plug in your TV. What if you just plug in like a Chromecast and now you turn your TV from just a blank screen into like an Amazon Alexa thing?

59:05Yeah. That was cool. We didn't have to do it because it was good. We sort of saw like - No, it was a huge distraction. We were like, yo, that's going to be like a brutal battlefield. When we took it to Michael and he just gave us that look like, uh, this is different. He was just like, yo, when all of the trillion dollar companies are going to go after the same prize, like, you can, but do you really want to? Like, you know, it's better to do the things they're overlooking. I just think it's probably good advice. To be fair, we also were going to do a crypto exchange when Crypto Got Hot. And he was like, for a different reason, he's like, hey, I'm already rich.

59:36I don't want to lose everything. And I don't really know what crypto is. It's 2014. like crypto might just be like super illegal and I don't want to risk it all on that if we had done that it might have been good so you have to be careful like even really smart successful people you can't like just take their word you know you gotta have the independent mindedness 100 % and I think it's fun to take shots don't get stubborn over it like man people fall in love with their ideas I think that's it took me probably like I don't know 10 years to figure that out like you have to get it like almost like you have to like really take the hits to like really like live in that of like Yeah, there's a lot of ideas.

1:00:10I may try a lot of them. My mission isn't all of them. I got to find the right ones where I can really spend the energy on. I was going to talk about one more. So we built Chatty Heads, which by the way, now in the AI world, we were fucking ahead of the time. Yeah, we were a little early. We could generate images for like, I don't know, 5 ,000. Yeah, it was like Dalis. And that's what it feels like. But I think it's like cool. It's like whatever technology you have today, go try to produce a thing. It might not be the right time. It might not be the right moment. The media might be wrong. The team might be wrong.

1:00:39Some of those you should pursue again and again, and some of those are great learning exercises to build on top of. And I got a chance to meet a lot of people who are professional athletes, and I think one thing a lot of them talk about is like, you know, basketball might end. Like, my career will end at like 35. Like, that's my game. It's done. Now what do I do? And I think what we get a chance to do, whether it's like business or, you know, content or like building stuff, like, I'm going to do this for the rest of our lives if we want. I think that's the fun part. Buffett's like, what, 90-something?

1:01:10Yeah, yeah. He's still on the top of his investing game. Exactly. And so it's like, well, what am I in the rush for? I'm not just here to enjoy the journey, but I also don't want to be like, oh, I've got to solve it tomorrow. Right. When I was young, it was like, oh, I've got to be the millionaire, but whatever. At some point, it was like, I don't know, man. I just want to keep doing this. Right. And if I need to hustle my way to it or not, it doesn't really matter. I took an Android engineer job in Monkey Inferno because I was the guy. I met you, and I was like, I want to work with this guy. Yeah.

1:01:38I think that was my worst skill, by the way. I just learned Android. Yeah, you fooled me. Yeah. So, like, I was like, I don't know, I got to get in somehow. And, like, I know I'm going to do great stuff here. I got to show it. But, like, I'm not afraid to put in the effort when you need to put in the effort. I'm also not afraid to, like, not rush to the answer. Right. And, like, you don't want to be, like, casual and, like, wait. You want to be kind of, like, in the middle there. You want to know when to attack and when to the knot. But, like, I don't know. You got to enjoy it. Otherwise, you're really good.

1:02:04Naval has the best quote on this. He says, impatience with action, patience with results. It's the unbeatable combination. If you ever go against somebody who's going to operate like that, they will win. That is a, you cannot lose if you're going to be constantly impatient with doing things. You're not going to sit back and hope it all happens. So you're impatient with action, but patient with results. The hard part is a lot of founders are impatient with action and impatient with results. Or non-founders are, you know, patient with both and then nothing ever happens. So you have to get that combo.

1:02:33So speaking of founders, you worked with Adam at Uploven. And Uploven has been like kind of a staggering company because when I met you, it was a successful company. You told me the stories about before you guys started that. You're like, we were wandering around. We tried a bunch of different ideas. We're playing FIFA because we didn't know what the heck we were doing. We were just come in, try to figure it out. If we didn't have it, we would brainstorm and go home the next day. What is special about that guy? What's a superpower from him or a story from him that you remember that, you know, I can learn from or anybody listening to this can learn from?

1:03:08Yeah, so there was this like four-year period-ish when I was there. I think three years of it was like not Apple of it. So, like most of my intersection there is like not what it is today. But I did get a chance to spend a lot of time with him and ideas. What's the cliff notes of his story so people know? Because people don't know. He's pretty under the radar, right? Yeah, I mean, his backstory, I think he did some stuff in equities or trading at some point. I think he got into ads at some point through marketing and affiliate stuff. He built a few different products. Maybe he was a key member of the team, and then he had a few companies.

1:03:43I think he had actually built up some wealth. I don't know how much it was, but it was enough where you're like, okay, this person can make this bet and fund the operations. So he was kind of self-funding. Self-funding. It was him and this guy, John. John had done a lot of stuff on the internet. He was more the technical person. Adam was more the business person. They were both uniquely, and the skills, incredible. Like, their personality is incredible. For Adam, I think the thing that I felt the most was, like, I think it's the first time in my life I was, like, man, this is what A-plus execution looks like.

1:04:15Like, this guy just hits it. Like, if we were talking about something, we made a choice within, like, it felt like within minutes that was, like, delivered to this team. And look, when you're like an eight person team, it's really easy to do it. We'll decide something, go slow. Maybe next week, oh, we'll do it later. We'll make these role changes later. We'll tell everybody later. No, it was like immediate. And when it was like moving on from something that was immediate, when it was a new idea we wanted to do, it was immediate. When it was something else, it was immediate. It was just like, it felt like this is what execution is.

1:04:45It's like, you know, think, decide, act. And like how fast you run through that depends on like the moment you decide, the delay on act is like usually a problem. I think this is where most, I'm not great at this myself, but I've gotten a chance to see that. I think it was kind of similar in a different realm when I met you. I was like, I think this person is product thinking and like ability to like unpack like a complex thing, like product or distribution or maybe team motivation or whatever. It's like you see A plus talent and you're like, you want to do it. For me, it was like 10 or 12 years, almost like a solo founder journey.

1:05:24Like I had this e-commerce company, I had these other little things, I had like a startup, I had people with me, but I never saw somebody else that I was like, yo, like I want to learn these skills. I bring something to the table that's A +, I can pair it with this A-plus person and now we're going to be like a superpower. Right. I felt that with Adam. It was very clear and obvious. You know, like the size of company, I don't want to say not a surprise, but also it's not a surprise that this kind of person would go do it. Like, it just is that. I think the same thing you're talking about, like Ryan at Flexport.

1:05:56Yeah. It feels like some people are just like, they're built for that. You still need a lot of stuff to go right and make a ton of great decisions and a ridiculous team. One thing I've come to learn is that where I think we screwed up, because we did Monkey Inferno, which was basically our little idea lab, but we had a beautiful setup. It's like, you got funding already done. you have great team. You're in San Francisco, beautiful office, really talented team. Like, you know, we're not the PayPal mafia, but like everybody's gone on to do kind of interesting shit. Everyone's, you know, I don't think we had the level of success that we could have given the talent.

1:06:35My take was, I think we were good execution, maybe even great execution, but poor project selection. Meaning we were going after these like moonshots like create the next hit social media app, which is like, you know, there's been like seven ever. There's not that many of them ever to exist. So, you know, I think we did bad with project selection. It seems like one thing that Adam did, aside from great execution, was project selection. I think you told me some story about, like, they went to some conference, you guys were working on one thing all together, and he came back and had that very quick, like, think, decide, act loop, where he's like, we're doing a mobile ad network, we're doing mobile games.

1:07:11I don't know the full story, but like, it seemed like just that one choice at that time is the make or break, you know? Yeah, huge difference. And, you know, like, I think we had many of those moments. I wouldn't trade it, by the way. I think our learnings, I still leverage them. A lot of the things that we talked about, how we ran the teams, like, they still radiate and resonate with me. And so, like, immense wealth and knowledge and, like, literally, like, experience of the thing. Right. Beyond, like, when we worked here. When we worked here. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But there were a few moments where project selection could have been massive for us.

1:07:45Yeah. that outcome. You know, like, they, you know, and we can talk about AppLov in a little bit on that journey, but like, we did Blab. It was a live streaming product, Google Hangouts, public live stream. Yeah, like, if you saw Clubhouse get really popular, we had built basically a Clubhouse before Clubhouse and it got to... I don't like what Twitch right now, like, there's a big section of this, like, just chatting, hanging out category. Right. We built an app like that. It got to 4 million users, but it didn't become the next big thing. I don't know if you remember this conversation, but we had this one time when we were deciding what to do next are we doing mobile version of this because we see other things happening or do we do the B2B version and Zoom didn't exist and we were like B2B it was so short of a conversation which was so silly we were just like B2B that's not cool it wasn't cool and it wasn't clear because if you think about this it's like 2015 there wasn't a billion B2B companies crushing it but every year since then it was like 7 or 9 because I think at that time it was only a few had really reached like it was like I don't know Box.net and Dropbox and it definitely wasn't as obvious at the same time it wasn't as hidden as we kind of made it seem we totally you know like I remember Citrix was like a multi-billion dollar product and Citrix online was the way that people did these webinars webinars and web conferencing at the time and it was so bad and their users like we were trying to make this cool social app and SAP and Oracle were using our tool just because it was better, even though it was like not meant for that.

1:09:19Why is your color like weird and purple? Why do you got this weird star thing? And instead of looking at those clues and being like, huh, maybe we could do that. We missed that project selection choice. I remember that day because that was probably a multi-hundred million dollar fork in the road moment, you know? Yeah, maybe. You still had to execute, but. For sure. I mean, we could execute, right? But did we have the right selection and could we get the right insight in our mind to Incep? Yep. It also, when we decided to end Blab, I don't know if you remember, you went to this barbecue. I forgot who you met.

1:09:49James Currier. And they were telling us, you know, you're talking about like, hey, this content network problem. Because it was like, the moment that entered our mind, it's like, oh shit, we're fucked. Like, that's what it felt like. Like, we don't have the ability to intersect these. And we kept looking at Twitch. Like, why? Okay, so we know we don't. Because people come on for an hour, they do a show. The Epic content is not on long enough for people to show up and intersect with it. How come Twitch wins? and then it turned out that, oh, people play games for eight to 10 hours. Yeah, so it didn't matter when you showed up.

1:10:17Correct. And then the context reset. So it's like, it was like, you know, the feeling a lot of Monkey Inferno to me and like the things we built was like, it's not slow down to speed up, but like look for the clues. Don't be afraid of that. And again, the eager, you know, the ego or the stubbornness of like, we want to build a giant social app. Like, I want to go somewhere around the world where somebody's using my consumer product. Like, that was a stubbornness that we - That was the driver. And it's like if we had just kind of unlocked it a little bit, there was these project selection moments.

1:10:45And so there was a lot of that. I still feel that sometimes, but I don't know, maybe it's because I'm older and I'm less willing to be nimble in that way. But I did want to talk about one more hardware robotics thing in a few minutes. And so I think this is another resurgence moment happening. For a long time, hardware has been too hard, too expensive. Software gets funded. That's the selling value motto, right? Hardware is hard. Hardware is hard. Software is easy. Software scales. It's eaten the world. Like these were all the mentalities. I think it's flipping. And I think it's a few things that have all kind of showed up together.

1:11:18So there's two types of hardware that I think are now like there and like ripe to build. Same recipe. Can small teams do it? Can you do it without a lot of funding? And then can your output be really big and like impact a lot of people? And so I think there's one around consumer products. So like the combination of Raspberry Pi and cloud AI has completely changed what it takes to build something. So there's a company in our studio, Magical Toys, they're building an AI teddy bear. We'll do a little demo of it after. We'll kind of get to that. And I think what that thing is... How old is that guy who's been that?

1:11:51He's young, right? I think Fatin's like 24, 25. And it's not like he has huge funding or a huge team, but he's able to... Look, he showed up here. I don't know how he got here, to be honest. I think many people here, they meet somebody, they attract someone. People just show up, by the way, and it's awesome. We've created that environment where it can make sense. He had done some small projects in college. he built this thing called DeskBuddy. It was a little e-ink screen with two eyes that just blinked. And that was really it. He couldn't talk to me, he couldn't do anything. It was just a little DeskBuddy.

1:12:19So you're not alone? Is that the idea? Yeah, I don't know what it was. But I remember seeing it, I'm like, that's cool. I want one on my desk. It's just fun. And they brainstormed a bunch of ideas. And the combination of like, hey, we got Raspberry Pis, we could do these little things. We could use 3D printers to build enclosures. And then now we've got this cloud AI thing that can be really powerful. and they ended up coming with this idea which was like, hey, we're going to build a toy. And first they literally made Ted. The stuffed animal Ted. They made it talk like it. I was like, oh, this is wild.

1:12:50AI could do this, but everyone's trying to make coding faster. Developer solving developer problems. And I love when somebody takes that and goes, let me go to this other place where nobody's thinking about. And he spent probably the last nine months sitting and refining. I think we sent you one of the first units. It probably broke. Yeah. First thing he gave me a teddy bear with the back. Like the whole computer was just hanging out the back, like a half done surgery. But it was interesting. I gave it to my kids. You know, I think they were probably like two years old, three years old at the time.

1:13:22And every other toy we have in our living room is pre-programmed. So it's like, this is a toy. Push this button. It'll say this thing. That's all it can do. With this toy, it was like, ignore the thing hanging out the back. it was like, hey, we love Paw Patrol. Can you ask us some Paw Patrol trivia? It's like, certainly. I can tell you Paw Patrol. Who is the red dog in Paw Patrol? It's like, Marshall. Correct. And I was like, hey, can you keep track of our points? He goes, okay. Two points. And then I was like, whoa. And my kids were blown away because now you have an infinite toy. Whereas every toy is finite.

1:13:56It can only do the things it could do out of the box. Now suddenly you have a toy that's basically chat GBT shoved into a stuffed animal. Right. And you're like, wow, now that can do anything. I could say, sing me a song. I could say, tell me a bedtime story. I could say, I can make it do many, many things now. And I think what was cool is Fateen and this little lab that we built. And the lab has some 3D printers, some electronics area. Honestly, we started with an empty room and people would come by. They're like, what's this room for? I'm like, oh, it's going to be a machine shop electronics lab one day.

1:14:26Like, oh, can I use it? I'm like, yeah, but we have nothing here. What do you need? You need tables? Great, we'll bring tables. Oh, you need a little thing? Okay, we'll add that. You need 3D printers? We'll add that. And I've seen now like tens of people come through. One person sit there, spend some time, tinker. And Fatim did that. Like he built one, he showed us, he built another, he tried different various, different versions, built new cases when he printed, buying Raspberry Pis, new software. And I think he shipped like 60 to 70 units across four to six months, which in software world, this feels like, wow, ancient like 60 users in hardware this might have cost like half a million to a million dollars i think we did that for like 50 to 100 grand right so like that difference one person 3d printers raspberry pies some ai and you could just sit there and deliver units and try it with people when we showed uber first by the way internally her was like no i don't i don't think kids are gonna do this weird his daughter used it and it changed his mind like like she changed his mind because he saw what he could do.

1:15:32But how do you get that opportunity to prototype cheap? Right. So hardware being hard, maybe hardware is not as hard as it used to be. Sam calls these inflections where something changes. There's famously an inflection where when Obamacare came out, then Oscar Health built a thing that was just to do Obamacare and became a billion-dollar company. So what are the inflections? So, oh, phones now have GPS in them. Now you can build Uber. You couldn't build Uber before because the driver and the rider needed to find each other. How were they going to do that if you didn't have phones with GPS on them?

1:16:10Phones have cameras. Now you can have Instagram, right? So it's like the technology inflection can happen. It's one type of inflection. And you're basically saying, because of Raspberry Pi plus AI plus 3D printing. Consumer hardware is very easy now. Consumer hardware is now possible. Now like... Now more than ever. Two people can actually mess around and tinker until they get something right. Kind of wasn't feasible five, ten years ago. When we built Jamie, I used a Raspberry Pi at that time, which was the first version. Raspberry Pi was thought of as this hobbyist market of tinkerers that are going to buy a few of them.

1:16:42They've sold like 60 million units or something ridiculous like that. Like$35 a pop,$60 million, there's like a few billion dollars of Raspberry Pi out there. and I think what it did is you used to have to make custom boards, custom software, and for a technical person like me, I don't want to go that far. I have certain skills that I can do really well and typically it's like read a few guides on the internet and stitch stuff together. It felt too far for even somebody like me. It felt like, man, there's really serious engineering, I need 10 people, I need millions of dollars. I got to convince somebody this is a big market and now build up this company which probably will fail because I raised too much, too much pressure, too much demand on return, etc.

1:17:23And to be the Raspberry Pi was one of the unlocks. And there's the NVIDIA Jetson now, which has like GPUs on device. And there's so much more there. So what are other things besides magical toys that you saw somebody build? Interesting things you're seeing built in the hardware robotics side. Yeah, so we have AJ who's building the Neurosity. He built that first version, which I think I've showed you before, which is a brain-computer interface. Now he has a second version that's really tiny. It's like the size of AirPods. You could put it right here, special purpose. So really, the ability to prototype, develop the thing, get hundreds or thousands of units out there, improve the design, and doing that without a giant team allows them to continue.

1:18:04We've seen a variety of things come out on that front. I think the second area that's happening is the consumer hardware, and then there's this robotics, drones, and this other world where we have so much physical equipment in the world, forklifts and lawnmowers and cars and like, you know, all these things that we do that requires either a person, like, you know, with drones, we invested in this company, Lucid Drones, which, you know, they built a power washing drone. Could go up in buildings, could power wash, you know, the glass. Instead of people hanging from the side, there's another company that...

1:18:43And is that working? Like, do people, is it like... Yeah, working very well. and, you know, like, what's interesting is there's, like, a unique business model to find here as well. And I think this is why I love, like, being in the weeds a little bit and, like, seeing it is, like, most people think you're going to build this product and then you're going to take the people that, like, manually wash a building and you're going to, like, get rid of them. What actually happens is there's, like, a team that's, like, a little, like, small business somewhere. They have, like, five people at their company.

1:19:10Dave's power washing. Dave's power washing. Windows so clear, you won't even know it's there. Amazing, right? Dave's got a great tagline as well. And, you know, people end up finding that if you just sell to those small businesses, you give them more tools, they can serve more buildings, do it more efficiently. That distribution is built in. Maybe in the long run, this starts changing. But like now there are a ton of these opportunities. I've seen one for farms and like, you know, mowing the weeds around certain fruits or kind of like inspecting them. You just send people between these things to go like do it.

1:19:43And now there's like a little like robot. and instead of the one person doing it for two weeks or two people, the one person's there monitoring it at the facility in air conditioning and like - Watching on the iPad. Watching on the iPad and it might get stuck early on or might detect something. Now they got to go fix that thing. The disefficiency I think is like massive and we're seeing it in many places. So the same thing I saw these two guys building here in San Francisco. They're like random warehouse in the back of some other store, like two dudes like literally grinding, bootstrapping, like just go in there.

1:20:14I'm like, I like these guys. They took a forklift. They automated it. They took self-driving car tech. It probably took billions of dollars to develop. And then all of that kind of flowed to like open source. And typically open source sometimes is behind than the cutting edge. But in 10 years that like normalizes. We see this elsewhere, like AI models like Llama. But like really they took cameras and some LiDAR stuff and they strapped a little computer to a forklift and they could move it around. You could talk to it. You could kind of get it to do things. And I think there's a massive resurgence.

1:20:47It's a forklift, physical thing. You took a little Raspberry Pi, internet, some cameras, some technology. Like we were doing computer vision technology to score like Fortnite games. They're using that same kind of technology to look at, oh, this is a box. This is the barcode that I picked up. Right. I can now use and figure out what's this thing. It could go walk around the warehouse and be like, oh, that pellet's in the wrong spot. How? It just scanned the barcode and detected, oh, there's this power here. It's supposed to be over there. Go pick it up, move it over there. These problems exist in warehouses.

1:21:19I mean, you know, I think you've dealt with some of those things. Yeah, I've run a warehouse. And so to me, it's like, what are the machines? What are the traditional machines we've built probably for the last 100 years that you're going to slap a little computer on it and now it's a superpower? And I think this is bringing down the cost of this robotic hardware. Building a robotic arm used to be like, like, yo, I got to be like Tony Stark and like Iron Man. I've seen two people do it in our machine shop. There's a guy here, I don't even know his company. He just had a 3D printed hand on his desk.

1:21:51And I'm like, what the hell is this? It's like, oh yeah, like I created the ability to develop a full hand with all the fingers and everything. In just this 3D printer, there's a Bamboo Lab printer, which honestly, 3D printer was great. And then Bamboo Labs took it to a whole nother level, like a little bit of AI to help self-leveling and make prints great. and like everybody loves it. And he just built his hand, pretty high quality, took a little fishing net on the inside of the hand. So like in each finger, he could like pull every finger and like do some stuff. It's like one dude, like few months hackathon.

1:22:24And like, I don't know what he's going to produce from that. But I just think you could do these things now in like weeks and months when they took years and like a lot of money. I think there's a huge opportunity here. Still going to take time to like marinate and develop. But I look at it as one of those things where like, if I was a mechanical engineer, if I liked hardware, and I've been told that it's just AI and software and your stuff isn't that interesting. It's like, no, no, this is very interesting right now. Right. You need to find a place to do it. And I'll even say, I think we're going even further for us.

1:22:54We have this base we built here. We call it the Founder Lab. This is where a lot of people come. They tinker on stuff. We have founders here. We have builders. We have creators here. We have all kinds of people doing stuff. It's a little machine shop. And that kind of pushed us to be like, wait, there's more? We're seeing more? We're talking to more people, thinking about this. And so I ended up getting this kind of industrial space. I'm going to call it the garage. It's 20 ,000 square feet of industrial space. I'll show you in a little bit. But it looks like San Francisco real estate is not the best.

1:23:21I think this is the time to make these bets. But I've talked to 25 to 50 founders in the last 12 months that need a hardware space like this to tinker, to have smart people around them, to have the machines around them, to just being able to develop it. probably for less than$100 ,000, they can go and proof of concept and prototype the thing. And look, we're seeing the hype cycle of humanoid robots. That's that hype above. I'm more excited about all these startups that are going to form. They're going to build this expertise. They're going to be$100 million teams, whether it's their product or their knowledge.

1:23:59That's happening now. And two people are doing it every single day. They're spawning these things. And so consumer hardware is one area. but I think robotics and what typically was known as like deep tech, like, oh, I need like PhDs and like stacks of them and$50 million or$100 million. That's the second one. And I think it's like, there's a few people seeing it. Maybe there are sectors like defense where it's like exciting, but like, I don't know. I think we're going to see machines everywhere and every kind of version of it. And I think I've seen people develop like cooking robots, laundry machine things, folding, drones to inspect stuff, drones to map interior spaces.

1:24:39Like Matterport is a giant company and a human goes and puts a tripod everywhere. Like there's a little drone that's going to fly through the whole house and like map it for you. And that expands that. And I just see one or two person teams able to do this faster than I've ever seen it. I feel more capable. Maybe I just really want to get into hardware again myself. And I think that's the point though. It's a lot of people would want to mess with this. And if something goes from not tinkerable to tinkerable, suddenly it's now the, like, it's kind of like before you're competing 1v1. Now it's one versus the field.

1:25:11Yeah. The field, of course, any individual thing in the field might suck. Correct. But the field overall is super powerful. And now you're saying the field is open for, you know, hardware tinkerers, which it wasn't open before. That's a big deal. Yeah, we do these, like, residencies here. We'll bring people here for a month or six weeks. We just tell them, like, here's a theme. Here's a space to go do things. When the Vision Pro came out, we did it. we had about 40 Vision Pro devs. We probably had the largest concentration of Vision Pro devs out of Apple anywhere. And the knowledge of that, look, it didn't produce some ridiculous outcome.

1:25:42We actually did invest in one or two teams from that. I think we just got a chance to see that technology deeply. We did this AI hardware one. I remember meeting this kid, and I don't know where he was in the world, and he shows me this robot. He built a humanoid. He built in his bedroom. And it's like half. He only built the body, the legs. It's like, stop where the waste was. And it was totally hand-constructed. And I'm like, yeah, this is wild. But the fact that you could bootleg this in your bedroom and it could take steps, it's crazy to me. I met these other guys from here. And the same trend in Raspberry Pi, they took that trend.

1:26:22And I mean, some of these, I just, I love it because I could jump on the video and they were up in Seattle or something. And it's like their kitchen. And I'm like, is that a 3D printer in your sink? and it's just like their kitchen is like all machines and I'm like dude you gotta get out of your house and I gotta give you a home to like do that that's what I want is like people who will just turn their bedroom into this it's like no no no you come do it here we'll give you a little bit better facilities we'll give you space you get a better place to sleep and they took this like raspberry pi trend and they're like oh people start with raspberry pi's and then they build a custom board oh we're building a modular raspberry pi thing right we take that computer next intermediate step oh you want a speaker well you can pick whatever speaker you want Just put that in.

1:27:02Oh, you want to produce 2 ,000 units now? We have the ability to scale it for you. So they took the hobbyist world and the behavior that's happening, driving it, and they started this literally in their kitchen. And I just think that, man, that's capable now. And that's the trend that I can't unsee it sometimes. In hardware, both in consumer and more deep tech hardware, drones, platform is massive, right? To be able to do things, so much opportunity to utilize that. I don't know how long it's going to take for this to become mass and mainstream, but I just keep seeing that trend right now. And I think for us, that's the bet you're making.

1:27:38That's the bet we make. And so I always joke with the guys here. It's like, we want to bet on negative one to zero. Like Peter Thiel talked about the zero to one companies. It's like, we still want step even before that. Like you're at negative one, you're wandering the forest. You need a place to tinker and like come and get the ideas to form. This is what we want to do. Right. I love it. Forgot, this is amazing. Good catching up as always. Let's go check out some of these spaces. Sweet. Let's do it. Thanks so much. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off.

1:28:10On the road, less travel, never looking back.

1:28:18All right. This episode is brought to you by Mercury. They are the finance platform of choice for over 200 ,000 companies. Shouldn't be surprised because I use it myself for not one, not two, but I have eight different Mercury accounts. I have seven for different companies that I'm a part of. And then I have my own personal account because now they have personal banking, which is a really cool feature. I highly, highly recommend it. Like I said, I use it myself. And the reason why is because the way that Mercury works is beautiful. It's very intuitive. And you could tell that it's actually made by a startup founder.

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