Silicon Valley OG shares crazy stories from Zynga early days + 3 business ideas

26:08And you can only search on the open web. And the more private data you can get access to, the more useful these agents become. So that's like probably the number one thing I've been thinking about. What's the name of the company that starts with an R? It's based in England. Sean, we've talked to him about a bunch. It's like an acronym. Anyway, it's an academic publishing company in England. And it's like really controversial because I think it has like the second highest profit margin of all publicly traded companies in the world behind public storage. And the shtick behind it and why everyone hates it is because researchers at universities don't get paid anything for this.

26:45In fact, oftentimes they have to pay tuition in order to even go to these places. But they take your research and they put it behind like a$30 ,000 a year paywall. And so it's a very frustrating industry. Yeah, that's the whole industry, right? Elsevier, I think, is the biggest one, and there's a bunch of controversy around that. And yeah, all of these are extremely hard on emerging businesses. They charge an arm and a leg for access. The researchers get paid nothing. The peer reviewers get paid nothing. All they're doing is just like taking the tats and copy and paste it and putting it somewhere and maybe like printing it into a journal.

27:19So how would this work? You're talking about like you told Sam Altman to say, hey, can I just give ChatGPT my credentials and then it can go log in for me and use that information when I ask it questions. So that's, ChatGPT would have to do it. How could a founder, how would a founder get around that or how would they do this? Yeah, I mean, you would need access to O3, the full model first, because that's what open research is based on. But I mean, it's not terribly difficult to create something like a deep research. There was a company called, there is a company called GenSpark. So I'm friends with the founder, GenSpark.

27:52He used to be a VP of search at Baidu, which is the Google of China. And they made a version of deep research just using a different model. And so that's relatively easy to build. I think the storage of the credentials and logging in is a little bit more tricky. Right. It also just seems like somebody could just create like Science Pal or something like that. It's like specifically for researchers. And it's a ChatGPT-like interface, but it's specifically trained on or going to access all of the journals, all of the academic research out there for you and just do like a vertical thing. Isn't there like a Google for doctors that's like this, like Lumos or something like that?

28:30There is. So there's, so I'm deep in the space. There's a company called Illicit. There's a company called SciSpace. And what they allow you to do is they let you search abstracts where available. And also you can upload individual PDFs too, which also ChatGP allows you to do. But there's nothing I've seen that lets you, that's indexed as the full text of all these journals. with your credentials. And why are you so interested in, what's all this research for? Is it your daughter? And if it is, what's the story behind that? Yeah, so my daughter was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor last September.

29:05And we've been doing everything we can to find new treatments for this because it's so rare and you really get deep insight into the sentence and the structure of the medical community. And one of the big learnings is that what is available as standard of care, meaning that's what's available if you go to a hospital or you talk to a doctor, and what is available at the frontier, there's a huge gap already. And then further, when you have a rare disease, just the amount of research and data and treatments available is also just thin because you need to have enough critical mass for the research to be worth it so they can recoup the research costs.

29:45And the other interesting thing that we learned is that the IP issues are really weird. So, for example, there's this drug that is FDA-approved, non-prescription, it's been out since the 70s, to treat Pidworms. And over the past 20 years, there's a huge amount of compelling data that this might be a pretty good treatment for different kinds of cancer. And there's been no clinical trials for it because there's no money for it because you can't patent a Pidworm drug. And so all the money, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars are going to new molecules are patentable even if things are already available and so once you get into ephodis you're like wow this is super super broken and so yeah i'm doing a lot of primary research in order to find repurposal drugs that might already exist that could treat a distillery rare brain tumor it's you know uh there's um obviously this is super serious and i'm sorry you're going through everything uh but also there's like an interesting logistical thing of like, wait, so you are able just to just research potential cures or ways to help your daughter on your own and come up with a solution?

30:52I mean, is that like what you hope the outcome is? Yeah, I mean, so there's, I'm not the first founder type who's been in the situation, right? So the co-founder of Clubhouse, Rohan, his daughter has a rangered disease. Her name's Lydia and he runs the Lydian Foundation. And he's going so far as manufacturing his own drugs, right? For very rare diseases, you can do a lot. There is other people I've met have done similar things, like end of one cures exist. And so you can go, this is what I mean. Like if you're sufficiently motivated and there's no one more motivated than a dad with a sick kid, you can go so much further than what is available as standard of care.

31:33and so even the last time we met with our primary care team they were proposing like two particular paths one involving like pretty aggressive surgery and radiation another involving this like drug i proposed a third path and they were discussing it and this is like neurosurgeons and clinicians that came back a week later it's like actually your path thinks more sets and the reason i was able to do that is like because this disease is so rare i am like more knowledgeable disease than anyone in the room because they have to like study 50 different cancers. Right. Wow. That's, that's pretty incredible.

32:09Also, my experience has been that the doctors, once you get off of the kind of standard of care, and this is maybe I'm, I'm projecting just from like, you know, I just had a knee injury and I was asking the doctor, I was like, Hey, like would PRP or stem cells? Like, is there anything, should I take, what's a peptide? Can I put a peptide in there? And he's like, you know, there's not a lot of evidence, you know, that's not part of the protocol. Right. You don't have great evidence. And he was sort of like, my hands are tied. He's an orthopedic surgeon. He's just like, you know, my hands are, I can only recommend what I can recommend.

32:41You could do those things. I don't know. And so then I felt like, you know, I'm on my own here. Have you, once you do this path, are you just outside of the medical system? So basically, are you outside of your standard chain of command with your doctors and you have to get your own system set up? That's a great question. And I've had an almost similar conversation in the last meeting I was just describing. And so I saw it play out in real time. So the neurosurgeon said, hey, when we did this operation, we did it for this reason. Do it for some other reason. It's not part of the standard of care.

33:12But our primary clinician, she is like, she runs, he's a principal investigator of one of the clinical trials. The only one of two that treats the disease. And she was like, yeah, you're right. We don't have a lot of evidence because there hasn't been a lot of research into the tumor. And so sometimes you have to argue for first principles. And if it's a fairly rare disease, they're more open to being more creative. And in our case, our clinician was able to convince a neurosurgeon this was the right path, or at least it's worth trying. And she told us she was excited to have a partner who seems well-informed and is willing to think outside of the box.

33:47And I straight up said, I do not care what the standard of care is. I think the standard of care is crap. and she basically said, yeah, I think so too. I just can't say that. Right. Dude, and that's pretty cool that you're in San Francisco too where hopefully you think that like the open-mindedness or the early adopter mindset like even trickles out to like the doctors and things like that. That's pretty cool that you're around a doctor who's like willing to try some crazy stuff or what's crazy to a lot of people. So to answer Sean's question, like if you do find your own drug, you do have to like show enough research and be well informed enough that someone is willing to prescribe it off-label on a compassionate use basis.

34:24And so you just need to convince one doctor. And so if you can't find one, you can find others who's willing to do that. And then you're in the clear. And it's a lot easier if it's like a fairly serious rare disease. Can you tell the story about you tweeted out about your daughter's condition and then this crazy crypto turn of events happened where someone created a coin and then millions, maybe tens of millions, I don't even know how much money was raised. And then people got mad at you. People were speculating on this thing. I don't even understand it. Can you explain what was going on? And also just explain, is this just, was there just degenerate gambling?

35:01Or did you maybe stumble upon a novel way that people might fund research in the future? I don't know which one of the two it is. Yeah, I think I have a better idea which one it is after some reflection on it. Okay, so explain what happened. Basically, yeah. Christmas, I was going to Japan to ski with some friends and the family. And I was on a flight, and I had a plan to start a GoFundMe for this lab, the Hankison Lab in the University of Colorado. So we were donating money to them once this happened because they were the only lab in North America that researches this particular tumor called the craniopharyngioma.

35:37And the treatment that we're on, they found. So I thought, okay, for Christmas, I thought it'd be great to do a GoFundMe, use my network, and raise some money for this lab. So I tweeted this thread with this GoFundMe link and that we ended up raising about a quarter million dollars for a lab, which is like, I think, the biggest donation up to that point. But what happened is some people started asking about, hey, can I donate crypto? And so I said, okay, I posted my ENS, right? My Ethereum name system address. And people started donating a little bit of ETH. and then some other people said hey do you have a soul address because we're on solana and i didn't have a soul address i was aware what solana is but i never touched it and so the next day once i landed i created my first solana wallet i created this address and i tweeted out and basically by the way are you big in the crypto world why were all the crypto guys doing this for you just because what's the motivation other than it's good so i i it didn't occur to me i thought it was I had like 77 ,000 followers at a time.

36:43And I'm not big in a crypto world. I've like been on and off accident crypto since 2017, but never in a major way. I'm not a crypto account that people follow. But I found out why people did this later. And this answers the question of Sean, like, is this gambling or is this something else? But anyway, I posted a soft soul address. And basically an hour later, I looked at my wallet and the wallet said$400 ,000. and it was zero an hour before. So I'm looking at what is going on and it turns out, so someone created a coin called Pump.Fun, which is a platform where you can create a coin in literally like 30 seconds.

37:24And I was on ETH, right? And I have been active in crypto. This wasn't a thing. Creating a new token on Ethereum was like a whole process. Now they shorten it 30 seconds. This is called Pump.Fun? Is that what it is? Pump.Fun, yeah. Have you seen this business, by the way? No. These guys made like$500 million of profit last year. Like more than that, I think. More than that, yeah. And so you click a button and you make your own coin. And obviously in the name, there's no hiding that the point of this is that it's a pump scheme. Pump and dump scheme, right? They made$500 million? At least. At least.

37:58That's their take, specifically. That's their take. It's just like the majority of the traffic on Solana. And so people are basically trading these new coins and trading them, trying to write it. And it's basically musical shares, right? Have you guys gone to this website? It's crazy. It looks like a GeoCity website. Like there's like flashing banners. This is insane. It's all real time. Like yesterday during the Super Bowl, somebody created, for Dave Poitner, instead of Barstool, they created Jailstool. And then Jailstool ran up to like$100 million or something like that. $200. Like he said, it's musical chairs.

38:34So you're buying, trying to catch one of these thousand X waves, but it's going to dump and you just got to know when you're going to get off the train. And then if you wait too long or you're the one who comes in late, you lose. So it's like being at a roulette table or whatever, where you're just throwing chips at the table trying to hit. Oh my God. Yeah, it's like the Trump coin, except you can create it in like 10 seconds, 30 seconds. But anyway, that's why people created this coin is because you're looking for these new narratives to gamble on, right? And the more interesting, the more viral-seeming a narrative is, the more valuable it becomes.

39:09And if you're in art early, it could really pump. So anyway, it was$400 ,000, and I tweeted a screenshot. There's a whole tweet sort of thread where I was like, what is going on? And I kept on adding this to the tweet thread with screenshots on my wallet. And so it was$400 ,000. I was like, what is happening? And people are trying to explain, someone created this coin called Mira, and there's a billion tokens and they sent me, someone bought half the supply and just sent it to my wallet. So I had 500 million tokens. And once I tweeted, then I check again and it's now$4 million. And I'm like, what?

39:46And an hour later, it's eight. A couple hours later, it became 15. And at one point it was$20 million. Just like the same day. And I got like 40 ,000. And the market cap of the whole thing, that means was 80 million. uh correct okay no no i think peak market cap was around 60 million dollars okay and you had 40 million of it yeah because i i sold 10 immediately just to like capture something and i sold a bit more in the liquidity pool so you know i got around a million dollars out but i still owned 30 of it and immediately i was i said okay i don't know what i'm gonna do with it but every dollar in my wallet is going to charity.

40:27This is a nonprofit. It's not for me. Not just charity. Going to the research lab. Going to the research lab. That's researching the potential course to your daughter's thing. Correct. So I said, hey, I'm not going to move anything without 24 hours notice. I'm going to try to be very transparent about this. And I thought about it and I said, I'm going to start selling$1 ,000 every 10 minutes until we're done because I just don't have time to run a crypto project. and, you know, like, I want everyone to know where this is going. So that happened and the price started going down. But once we got to a million, what happened in between is, because it was such a big story, a bunch of rare disease organizations started reaching out to me.

41:11And they're like, wow, this happened to you. How do we get in on this? Because... I throw the phone. They're like, did you say pump dot fund? Okay. The average budget, annual budget for one of these organizations is like$100 ,000,$150 ,000. There's like not a whole lot of money. This is like more money than the community has ever seen. There's a lot of excitement there. So I thought, well, I was talking to some crypto friends and I thought, okay, how do we make this like a thing? And maybe we can make this more sustainable, long-lasting. And this idea of turning Mira into a launchpad for other rare disease tokens, where there is a liquidity pair token was talked about.

41:53And so I thought, well, okay, that seems interesting. Before I do that, I should probably figure out how a coin works and how you launch one of these. So I went on pump.fun and I thought, okay, let's find out how one of these works. So I created a coin called Xero and I entered a description for the coin because you could do that. I said, hey, don't buy this coin. It literally says, don't buy this coin. It'll never be worth anything. I'm never going to do anything with it. It'll be worth$0. So I pressed the button. And what I didn't realize is because I was on Ethereum for a long time, but I never had a watch wallet, what happened is I was in the background the most watch-walleted crypto.

42:33So within about 100 to 200 seconds, the market cap of this coin that I told people to not buy in the description. Does a watch wallet mean that you are someone that should be monitored because you're a potential whale? Yeah, people start tracking, like, oh, what is Vitalik doing with his wallet? What is someone so good with their wallet? Yeah, yeah, yeah. People want to copy what you're doing. And they think you're the man because your wallet is old or you have a lot in it. Because I was the main character of, like, crypto Twitter for, like, a few days. Got it. Okay, understood. So there were bots, like, just monitoring what I was doing and buying whatever I was buying.

43:10And so they saw this new token. And so within 100 or 200 seconds, the market cap of this token was$3.5 million. So I was just sitting there, like, panicking. And I said, okay, I don't, this is bad. I don't want to have anything to do with this. So I had half of the entire supply and I sold it. And that was my main mistake. I should have burned it, which everyone would have been happy about, right? but because I sold I crashed the price of this token and people got very upset because it was considered a rug so now like oh my god everyone's and and when I sold I made like eighty thousand dollars because even though it's three and a half million dollars in market cap there's only about one hundred thousand dollars or so in liquidity and yeah I started a thread explaining oh my god I didn't expect this to happen I got on spaces over video just like I'm really sorry I I'm like still trying to figure out how this works.

44:13And, you know, people don't care. And what I realized is just a different community than it was when I was really active on Twitter in 2017. Like people on Ethereum, they're like very deep tech people, right? They're like nerdy. And with a Solana in 2024, I didn't realize like it's so much more mainstream. A lot of people maybe have like$50,$100, and they're just trying to turn into$1 ,000. And so the amount of emotion there is like very, very different. Crypto transitioned from neckbeards to like everybody who looks like Jack Harlow in like four years. The community, the Solana community all has like the line etched into the, into like the side of their haircut or like multiple.

44:55It's very different than like the people that got me into Ethereum in the first place. Today I learned, or this month I learned. So anyway, the market got three and a half million before I sold. It dumped at 300 ,000. And as I started talking about my mistake, Like, the market cap came back. And at one point, it was like five and a half, six million dollars. Just because I was like talking about it and people were just, the more upset people were, the more the coin pumped and more money people made from the coin. So they were trying to make it like even more dramatic, which I didn't really understand at the time.

45:29I just thought I messed up and people were really upset at me. so anyway so then that was like the main villain turn on twitter and everyone was super upset at me because they saw me as a scammer so i thought about what am i going to do with this so first of all like the eighty thousand dollars within a minute i i realized this is a mistake so i bought back in into the coin and i burned it all right so i already was like neutral and i explained that no one cared because of the anonymity of crypto they thought i had like a hundred other wallets that was like, that I pumped and dumped on and I need profit there and I can't prove otherwise.

46:05So I decided like, this is really shitty and I don't want any part of it. So what I decided to do is I got some help from a friend who used Coinbase and other people who didn't want to be named to do on-chain analysis. So what I set up spaces is I'm actually just going to pay everyone back who lost money on this out of my own pocket. And I'm not even going to touch the charity wallet. so what we ended up doing is everyone who held in the first 200 seconds who owned any coins then up until the point 43 minutes later where the market cap fully recovered back to the same value if you sold and you realize loss i'm just gonna airdrop you soul and it ended up being like 140 50 000 out of my own pocket uh and i just paid everyone back which has never happened on any pump fund coin before.

46:55And maybe like 10 % of the people have heard about this. I tweeted about it. I had to like keep on responding because every time I tweet for the next like month, someone would say, oh, you're a scammer. What are you still doing here? And I had to say, no, I paid everyone back and they would just like not say anything. This is like a crypto Larry David like thing. Like it's like, this is like you're walking through Times Square and one of those fake monks put like a bracelet on your wrist and then like now expects you to give them like$20. even though we called it a free gift. Like, this is just, this is insane.

47:26So how much did you end up giving to the charity? Yeah, so between GoFundMe, so it was a million dollars from crypto. And just like, I locked a bunch of the MirrorCoin into a liquidity pool. So it's still perpetually generating. So you bought a million dollars of charity for$150 ,000, basically. That's correct, yeah. And then we, in total, was like a 1.4 million. We donated more to match the mistake, and we added a GoFundMe to it. And then the lab actually triple leveraged it up into the coin. They got hooked on Pumped Off Fund. Hey, quick message here, because you know that feeling when you send a wire and it actually works?

48:12No friction? Well, I've used Mercury for years now, and let me tell you, it just works. and that's why I use it for not one, not two, but eight of my companies. From credit cards to invoices, I have everything in one place. There's no janky dashboard. I'm never told, please visit a local bank branch. None of that tomfoolery. And a few months ago, I landed a big client. And the first thing I did, I sent them a clean branded invoice. Boom, deal closed, cash in the door. That's the kind of banking experience I want. And that's why I use Mercury. So if you're running a startup and you want banking that feels like it's built in this century, well, go to mercury.com and get started in minutes.

48:45Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Bankless services are provided through Choice Financial Group, Column 8, and Evolve Bank & Trust members, FDIC. Would you, Sean, put give back the 150 like he did? I wouldn't. Fuck that. I would not have for that situation, personally. I get why you did. It's almost just like, dude, this is crazy. All of this was unintentional. People are really mad. Okay, what's the sort of like, how can I just clear up any possible confusion? but I don't think you needed to in this situation, right? You created a coin called Zero that you said is, don't buy this.

49:18This is going to Zero. It's a test coin. And if somebody went and randomly speculated on it using their sniper bots that are trying to track your wallet, I wouldn't have given a shit personally. But then again, this community is so crazy that they'll just make your life hell on Twitter for the next five years. It might be worth it. Just to clear your own conscious, go to sleep at night. Exactly. It was for me so I could sleep all night because a lot of these people are fairly low income and the money is fairly meaningful was one reason. But another reason is like, people just don't read. Like I explained this, I mean, the coin says don't buy it.

49:56I explained this like a couple of different times. And what I realized is like, you just don't read on the internet. And as far as anyone else knows, because it makes little noise, like I, if you don't read, what it sounds like is, I created a scam coin using my own daughter's name to scam people out of mind. Right, right, right. It's crazy. Did you, in the end of this, is there anything here that's interesting for fundraising for research? Or this is just straight, like, I accidentally got into a gambling pool and kind of got some money for research, but this is not a sustainable thing for anybody.

50:31I'm still trying to figure it out. So what I'm hoping to make Nira into is, so the way this works is this is like sort of game theory around, okay, you own a bunch of this coin because this coin's narrative is attached to you, right? In the case of, you know, Dave Portnoy is doing something similar with Jailstool. And in order to turn it into real-world impact, you have to sell. There's no way around that. And so when you sell, then you're just like playing a zero-sum game against the community and they're all going to be upset. for you for sure, no matter what. And so that's a very difficult dynamic.

51:06And I think my idea here is like the only sustainable way to do this is to lock a bunch of the token into a liquidity pool. And so that when people buy in or out of it, you get to exchange, you get the fees. And that's not really like selling into your community. I think imagine a version of Dogecoin where every time someone, you know, it's like Dogecoin is like a couple of tens of billions of dollars market cap. but every time someone sells or buys, it creates like up to, could be hundreds of thousands of dollars a day in fees and which you can then use to donate. I think that might be relatively sustainable.

51:39This is insane. I don't even know what to say. Sounds like a great weekend. No, it was a month. It was the last, it was Christmas until like maybe, you know, now and it ruined my vacation. And it's been by far the most stressful time I've ever had in my life. can we do a quick detour we were at a dinner once and you talked about some i think it was a stanford class you took called touchy feely or that's the code name for it i don't know and it's something about communication and relationships and i remember you said this really great thing at the dinner but this was now many years ago and i don't remember it exactly but can you say that bit again i want to hear it again and i think a lot of people might benefit from it so by the way sicky how old are you i'm 41 i think you look like you could be 22 or 41.

52:26I have no idea. Yeah, Asian no raisin. Let's go. Yeah, so I took actually now twice, I took class again since we taught this class that was based on the Stanford Business School class called Interpersonal Dynamics, which is the highly rated and most popular class in Stanford Business School. It's taught by a professor called Carol Robbins and it's generally known as touchy-feely and it's famous for every participant at some point will cry in the class. But Carol Robbins is now a co-founder of a group called Leaders in Tech, which provides the same class for tech leaders. So one of the things that you get taught in this class is, so the purpose of the class is to teach you how to relate to people and build connections with other people because people work with other people.

53:13And one of the most useful frameworks I got from that class is how to think about your connection with other people and how to develop that connection. And so So the two frameworks to connect is one is the two tracks of interpersonal communication and the five levels of it. So when you're talking with anyone else, there is two tracks. There's a content track and there's a relationship track. So the content track is filled with facts and a relationship track is filled with emotion. and a relationship track is what is filled and what has to be filled for a relationship to get become closer and for trust to increase.

53:53And the way you fill each of these tracks is through the five levels of communication. And the idea is when you are talking to someone, there's five levels at which you communicate of increasing vulnerability and death. So level one is what's called ritual. And that is, hey, how's it going? Hey, right? It doesn't really say anything. It's just ritualized greeting. Level two is extended ritual. So that is, how's the weather? How's the game? Right? It's a longer version of, hey, how's it going? Level three is content. So these are facts. How's the project? Is it late? What are we going to do with this particular idea?

54:38Level four is emotional self-disclosure. So that is when you say something that discloses how you are feeling emotionally at the time. I feel sad. I feel angry. And there's a lot of thought about level four because people think they're doing level four, but they're not. And that's a very common thing that's unique to the English language, which we can talk about. That was a fairly interesting insight. So level five is the deepest one. And level five is mutual emotional self-disclosure. And it is when you are expressing the emotion that you have about the other person. I feel angry at you. I feel proud of you.

55:14I feel disappointed by you. That's the deepest level of communication you can have with another person. And the content track is only filled by things from level one to three. And the relationship track is only filled by level four and five. And we are taught to really not use level four and five in professional settings. But if you want to build a relationship, level four or five is kind of the only way you can do it and so a lot of the training is about breaking past the barrier the uncomfortableness of engaging level four and level five communication and you basically sit in a circle with 12 people for four days straight until you like so you can observe the impact of doing level four or five and not doing level four or five and how you are able to be closer to someone or further away from someone in emotional distance.

56:08Has this made your running a company better? I mean, I would say this is the most impactful thing I've ever done in my entire life, like out of any class. I always like, as a founder, somewhat see the company in some kind of machine and I didn't find it. I'm like, you know, mildly asked for degree. So I found it difficult to relate to people, but it's completely transformed my, all my relationships, including my relationship with my wife and so one of the ways this was even just last week we had an on-site and i was able to do a mini version of this with our customer success team we just sat or you know i did a very condensed version of this lecture and then we sat and we just talked for about four hours and the amount of closeness people got inside people got was transformative and you wouldn't normally you know sit around for a couple hours in a work setting, talk about your feelings.

57:00And it's very uncomfortable to do so. And it's intentionally so. Like, it's very uncomfortable for the first couple of, in the case of a real-life workshop, it's half a day. In the case of us, we had to, like, sort of speed run, and it was uncomfortable about an hour. But then people were really into it, and it's weird, but everyone at some point was crying about some disclosure that they heard or they've experienced. and as a result, the team got so much closer and the trust increased. That's wild. This is awesome. So how do you do this in practice, right? Because when you talk about like, you know, I feel angry at you about X or I'm disappointed about Y, I could see myself not having the skills or finesse to be able to do that and let the end result be a positive one versus we start talking, you're upset by this, well, the other person gets defensive or they push back and say, well, you did that, you know, blah, blah, blah.

57:56And so can you give me an example of a conversation that you had that like, maybe here's what I would love a conversation that typically would have gone like this or maybe been avoided altogether. And instead, here's how the actual conversation went that was useful for you as a, as a, you know, CEO, leader, friend, whatever, husband, whatever, whichever example you want to choose. Yeah. So the first one is easy, actually. So in most people just don't have the conversation, right? So the conversation wouldn't say, I'm angry. You would just be angry and you wouldn't say anything. And people can tell, is the thing, like when you feel a certain way about someone, it gets, it leaks, right?

58:35Like there's a level of, even if you're not attending passive aggressive, you're just kind of ignoring the person or it comes off like you're, it's like, oh my God, it's late again. Right. Right? Or he didn't do this. And so that's the default. And that's when you have this negative feedback cycle of, well, okay, you already felt a certain way. Then you expressed it unknowingly. And now the other person thinks you're angry at them. And now they dislike you more. And then they do things that you dislike more because they dislike you more. And it just gets worse. That's how relationships get worse.

59:07And that's like the default. And so if you know that it leaks anyway, then it becomes easier to say, I'm going to express that. And you're going to express it no matter what. your choices, do you express it with words or do you express it with not words, but just like passive aggressive behavior? And so, and then you combine that with everyone is entitled to know the things that they know, but they're not entitled to make things up about what other people are thinking. So you are entitled to seeing the same facts as everyone else, seeing the same behavior. You're not entitled to read the minds of some other person and how they're thinking and how or feeling, but you're 100 % entitled to share what you're feeling because those are facts to you.

59:53That's reality. And so the mental model isn't, and this is kind of like typical because people aren't used to expressing this. The mental model is like, oh, if I am expressing this emotion, that means I'm attacking someone. And that is true if you don't express an emotion and you're just acting it out. But if I were to say, you know, when I see you do this, the story I tell myself is that you don't respect me. And I don't know if that's true, but this is like what I'm thinking in my head. And because of that, I feel angry. And I just want you to know that because I don't know if you know that.

1:00:30I know that you probably don't because you can't read my mind, but I'm guessing you probably aren't intending to make me feel that way. And I thought it'd be helpful for you to share, for me to share that to you so that you are aware of it. I just learned that technique in therapy last week. Amazing. I seriously did. That's the nonviolent communication framework, right? It is, yeah. It's very connected to that. I literally just learned that. Yeah, you're sharing information, right? So it's not an attack. Like, if you are genuinely doing it because you understand that you can't read their mind, but other people can't read your mind either.

1:01:06And so by sharing it, you're offering them a gift of information. One question, Siki. You said something about the English language making it harder. What did you mean by that? So what you start seeing when you're in this class with these 12 people, and you start realizing that, oh, like, I really only feel closer and I get to know someone better when they say I feel emotion. I feel sad. I feel angry when this happened. And I feel distance when they're expressing that emotion but not saying it. You can tell on their faces that they're pissed off. And it becomes scarier. So then you start learning that, oh, I need to say I feel.

1:01:44the thing about the English language is that we say I feel often without expressing any emotion at all and that's some sort of a quirk that's kind of unique to English so when you say I feel that or I feel like it is actually grammatically impossible for the next word to be an emotion I feel that you're an asshole is not an emotion I feel like this is fucked is not an emotion I feel sad is an emotion I feel happy is an emotion and we're not used to saying that because the word feel is used uh is is has been you know disused misused for other purposes and so we just often is unconsciously you once you see it you cannot see it people we i ask people it's showed emotion and they say i feel like i feel that and it's never an emotion and it's very very hard to change the habit do you guys do this where like sean in particular i'm curious if you do this but do you guys do this where you like uh you get into this type of shit whatever you want to call it the touchy feely stuff and you're like this is the way and then like i get into it and then half the time i execute that poorly and all and then like the business sucks and i'm like i gotta have more patience with this person or i gotta like let them get away with shit more or whatever and then i just go right back to the total opposite end where it's like um what do they what do they call this doge where i'm like everyone has 15 minutes to fight for their job like you know like like it's like i get influenced by either side and i don't but there is no middle ground and that's like like you that the first sign of resistance i crumble sometimes so the but the version of it that happens for me is let's say i i hear this and i'm like ah Siki just taught me something this is great two content tracks five levels I'm in I got this I'm going level five baby I don't even need one through four and then I'll go have the next conversation my wife tonight and I'll give her like I feel that no no I feel upset and I know you didn't mean that I tried to do the whole thing and she's like what and then she doesn't she doesn't know all of this she didn't because she didn't go to the seminar and she didn't have the skills and the tools.

1:03:58She's like, be a man, Sean. Shut up. It's on the front of her mind. And so she doesn't play back like the role play that I had heard was. And then I'm like, well, I don't really know the next move. Okay, revert. Revert back to my old asshole self. Yeah, I mean, that's not a bad response, honestly, because I think you have to do whatever works. And the reality is to get good at this, you know, it took me, I did this four-day program twice. and every day was like 12 hours a day and you're just sitting in the circle practicing for eight hours a day. Did your wife go with you? The first time she actually did.

1:04:35Okay, so she kind of had a team. No, I kind of smuggled her into the hotel room, so she didn't go to the class. But I will say, like the second night when I went home, she was like, who are you? Because I was like, oh my god, I feel so bad, I've been such an asshole. Dude, this sounds like, have you guys heard of the Hoffman Institute? I've heard of this but I haven't been I've contemplated going to it but I think they have a variety of locations, they have one in Connecticut near me and then they have a Boston one but you go for, it's not expensive it's like$2 ,000 and you go for four days and you can't bring your cell phone you've got to be completely disconnected or maybe it's even five days, it's kind of a lot but they like everyone who I go, who goes to it they won't tell me what happens there but they all say that it's life-changing and they can now develop relationships and connections with other people.

1:05:28It's one of these really strange things that I'm so tempted to do, but the amount of time to be disconnected is very nerve-wracking or just scary. This sounds very similar. It does sound pretty similar. It's not the time to be disconnected. That's the scary part there. Yeah, it is. It might even be seven days. Could you go seven days without a phone away from your family? Away from your family is a little harder. Yeah, that's hard. like in a hotel, like it's like crazy to be disconnected. But yeah, I don't want to like, also, I don't want to like cry with a lot of strangers. Yeah, I don't want to go that deep.

1:06:01I'm like, I don't want to go to Tony Robbins. I don't want to see anyone. I don't want anyone to see me dancing and singing. Like, you know what I mean? Yeah, what's great about Leaders in Tuck is like, they're all like, you know, well-known-ish founders. It's like not cheap to go. Oh, even worse. Be around awesome people? God, I want to be my most vulnerable self around cool people. No, actually, it's really helpful because you realize that all the people that some people that you look up to, like we're kind of all the same. Like there's very similar insecurities. Whenever I hear about, whenever I hear about this stuff, I think of the Tony Soprano quote where he's like, whatever happened to the strong, silent type like Gary Cooper?

1:06:37That's like, I get, I go all down this track and I'm like, can I just say like, Hey chief, like, hi bub. I just know that person only at that amount. And just say yes or no. Siki, you have this interview question that I like. Like you said, my favorite interview question after 20 years of doing interviews with people is, what is your greatest strength that you are most worried about not coming across in an interview setting? Why that question? I think I enjoy breaking the fourth wall. And interviews tends to be so standardized and formalized that my greatest anxiety when I'm interviewing is like, I'm actually really good at a thing.

1:07:15And you're asking me to, you know, reverse a leak list or something. and it's just not coming across. What I find is that it breaks down this deformality and gets people excited to talk about something that they're really, really good at, tell me great stories. And you get to know the person just a little bit better. And I think the particular thing is, if you just ask what's your greatest strengths, it sounds really formal. But what is the insecurity that you're bringing in that you're worried about not coming across an interview setting? It changes the tone quite a bit. It's a great question.

1:07:48I'm stealing that. yeah that's a good one you know what's interesting is so you you're you're you founded runway which is like uh a very serious business like you're gonna have to hire enterprise people i would imagine um enterprise sales people uh like it's like a i'm basing like the future of my company off of some of the output that i'm going to learn from your software but you have the vibe of like an artist to me where like you you have a variety of like really intriguing projects you're like this thinker, almost like a philosopher. Is this new to be doing like, is this like a new challenge for you to be doing something so serious and regimented?

1:08:25Like, or can you still be like goofy and an artist in this B2B world? So, yeah, funny enough, he's a serious business. That was the name of my first company. And we built Fun Games. I feel like if you call it Serious Citizen, you know? Yeah, because we're a games company. Serious business, Fun Games. But, yeah, I mean, I think it's actually a pretty huge advantage, particularly for the things we consider serious. So, I mean, people have the stereotype of business and finances being super serious and super rigid. But finance, at its best, is really about creating value. It's about looking forward and thinking about new ideas about how we can push the business forward and grow faster and all these things.

1:09:09And in order for us to be creative, we have to be in flow. And things that are fun keeps you in flow. And what we actually hear from our customers, the thing that we hear quite often and we love hearing is, this software feels fun. And that's not a luxury. That is a fun that creates flow, that creates your creativity, that creates value. And when you use something that isn't fun, something that feels slow or confusing, then you're not creative and you're making worse decisions. So I don't think they're intentional with each other. I think they're quite complementary. and that is like very deeply part of our philosophy.

1:09:44Have you ever seen this? Yes. That's what made me think of that question. What's the story of this, Iki? This happened last week. Our marketing team is run by Cal Freeze, who was a YC founder of a company called Taika. He was the COO there. And we also have this woman named Julie Fritas, who was at Shopify. And I was in the office and I just saw them come out in a meeting kind of giggling and they got out this piece of cardboard and started like writing this. I'm like, what is this? Like, oh, you know how like, you know, you didn't want to do a billboard. We decided just like create a billboard ourselves and just hold on a freeway.

1:10:26And I'm like, that is such a cracked idea. Of course that's going to go viral. And I said, I'll do it. It's like, you will? I'm like, yeah, I'll do it. So they're like, okay. So we walked outside. We found a freeway entrance. And I was just holding the sign. What does it say, by the way? It says, honk if you hate your finance platform, getrunway.com. Are you the only founder? I had a co-founder, Aria Asamanfar, and he left the company about a year and a half ago, almost two years ago. Because that's pretty rare. I don't know when you launch, but I feel like you're very, very, very, very early in the period because I remember seeing you guys go on Twitter, like get popular on Twitter, that's going to be pretty different to be kind of the only founder running a company.

1:11:16That'd be kind of exciting, right? You get to do whatever the hell you want, or are you going to be lonely? I think the reason why we parted ways is things were just slower to make decisions, and neither of us were having as much fun as we wanted to. And actually, I didn't want him to leave. Like, he is, I mean, he's still on the board. I love him. He's just the most wise and high-interrupted person on Promet. He was one of Parag's peers at Twitter, and I hired him out of school, my first company. And now he works for Brett Taylor at Sierra. But things were going slower than we wanted, and he identified that it was him or our relationship slowing us down, and he decided to fire himself.

1:11:56And I didn't think he was right about that, but he was. He usually is right about just about everything, and it totally transformed the company. He also must have attended interpersonal dynamics. He did not. You talked about character AI and Chai, like some of these AI companies that are crushing it, just printing money right now. Are there any other companies that just have blown your mind in terms of how well they're doing or how fast they're growing right now? Like maybe AI, maybe not AI? Eleven Labs. I'm just following that company, but they do basically all of the audio translation, generation, sometimes D-fakes.

1:12:32And when I met them, there were like less than 10 people. They were just, they were ex-Google. They're working on the Foundation of Modern Technology. And they are now, I don't know what they last announced, but they're in the hundreds of millions they are in like a year, two, a year and a half or so. And what blew my mind is I never seen a group of very good technologists that were also so good at commercializing the technology so rapidly. They're at hundreds of millions. and... Hundreds. Hundreds. I feel like this just came out. No, no, no. We should have invested in this. It's a year and a half, right?

1:13:07They dubbed our podcast. Remember that clip where they were like, you're speaking Hindi now? And it was amazing. And I DM'd them and we were like, hey, this is really cool. Like, so stupid of us not to have pursued that more. Yeah, there's that graph, right, for Wwise and the fastest growing SaaS companies and I think Cursor is up there. I am fairly convinced that Eleva Labs is actually faster than all of them. But yeah, I think they announced some revenue milestone, but it's large. Well, when we were tinkering with them, it was borderline, this is cool, this is cute, to I can use this right now.

1:13:43It was like just there. So I guess they crossed it and people are actually using it to actually do work. Well, who are they selling to? So Apple has audiobooks. Oh, it's not a podcast, sorry. Apple audiobooks, right? Like, so previously they'd have audiobooks and, you know, you would know that a lot of this AI-generated is powered by Web of Laps. Oh, so they, and they also, they also do AI agents for customer service and support agents and things like that. So they're the back end of maybe potentially other software tools as well. Yeah, so they have all kinds of product lines. They sell the book publishers, the power agents, they do a whole lot.

1:14:18Why are they better than like what OpenAI, you know, like the risk with all these AI companies is that the general, the base models, OpenAI and Anthropic, etc., can just offer those capabilities, you know, as part of the main suite? Do they do something different? Are they fine-tuning it in some way? No, it's their own foundational models. And the quality and expressiveness is just better. And the form factor is better. So you can use it for all these different use cases. And the voice API of OpenAI is actually, like, not as good or as easily usable. Dude, you're super fun to talk to. I just like hearing all these, like...

1:14:53I feel like you're like a like a treasure box and I just like pick like I just grab something out of the toy chest like tell me the story behind this you know what I mean I think that's awesome yeah thanks for coming on dude and give people a shout out for your company and where to follow you for more yeah we're runway.com you can follow me at blader blade with an r or runway co and if you are a CFO you should use our software how much did you have to pay for that domain a quarter million dollars It's funny, Naval Ravikant named a company and suggested that we use it on the.com I think that was smart A quarter million is not a lot, I feel like Wait, what do you mean Naval named the company?

1:15:32You went to him being like, hey, what did we name this? Or he just suggested it? So when Clubhouse only had one room in April 2020 it was in the Naval app, right? I think you were on it quite a bit too And so when I was thinking about what I want to do for the next company I said I want to do a finance company and I got a great name for it, Naval call cfo.ai he's like no don't call it ai it's going to be dated in like two years everything's called ai you should just call it runway as you get the dot com and he wrote the first track into runway and that's why we got the dot com it's so funny that you said it was the nival app at the time it totally was and it was amazing it was amazing by the way i was using uh air chat like pretty religiously uh like for like two months yeah um even though i knew air chat's not going to work, I was like, oh, it doesn't matter.

1:16:20This is Naval's app. He's going to be on it 24-7. Cool. This is like, I like to hang out with Naval. I'm not going to email him like a million other people and say, hey, can we get a coffee? Just$1 ,000 a month and you can talk to Naval whenever you want. Yeah, exactly. I was like, I'm going to be on this for two months. I'm going to be a power user for exactly two months and I'm going to hang out with Naval and that's exactly what happened. I was very proud of myself for that. It was the most fun way to use that app. Yep. Dude, thank you for doing this. You're the man And we're thinking of you and your daughter.

1:16:49Thank you. Appreciate you, man. All right. See you. Thank you. That's it. That's the pod. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like my days off. On the road, less travel, never looking back.

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