Lying to the Secret Service, working for Obama & choosing NOT to be a unicorn | Dan Siroker, Co-Founder of Optimizely & Rewind AI

23:15When you build for yourself, you know at least one person wants what you want, you. You don't know for sure that other people do, but if you're working on a big enough problem, that tends to be the case as well. And it really took off. I mean, we grew incredibly quickly in the first few years, eventually grew to about $120 million in annual recurring revenue, 450 employees used by companies all around the world. Almost every major website was using it. And then we ultimately decided to sell the company. So it's still out there. It's currently, it's been combined with the content management system.

23:50They liked the name Optimizely so much that they named the whole umbrella company Optimizely. So now there's some 1 ,200 people working at this company, Optimizely. That was something I started back in 2010. And I'm really proud of it. You know, it's amazing to hear stories like your own, where you've had that experience of using Optimizely. It gives me so much gratification and satisfaction to see that how this little idea could become so ubiquitous over time. Actually, one of the hardest things that we learn when we speak to so many different entrepreneurs, you know, the letting go part can be quite difficult because the sort of brand sort of dies and gets swelled up into the bigger thing.

24:26And for you, it's actually going to be the complete opposite. The legacy of it is only going to grow and grow and keep and be maintained. So I guess I'm just curious, does that have some kind of emotional pride link to it? Or do you just never consider it? It does. But I'll tell you, it's also really strange, you know, because I don't really know that many people at Optimizely now. And it feels kind of like, it's almost like an estranged child. You know, it once was my entire identity, my entire life. I knew everyone, I interviewed the first 100 people who work there. And now to see it live on, I'm certainly proud of it and proud of what it's doing.

25:01We are now customers of Optimizely here at Rewind. So I'm very happy to see where it's gotten. But it does feel weird to now have this, you know, this child that's kind of off to its own. It's graduated. It's living its own life. And I hope it calls every once in a while. But, you know, one day maybe it goes public. Who knows? Right now, you know, I won't say it's entirely pride. It's a little bittersweet. And how did you leave? Was there a process for you? Yeah, well, we sold the company. So that was one way. I had actually, as we're marching towards selling the company, I had started Rewind, actually, but at the time it was called Scribe, but it's the same company, because I was drawn to this problem.

25:44And I felt like with the grass is greener, that was hard for me to kind of stay at Optimizely with this idea that I was so obsessed with to pursue. And, you know, and I'll be honest that the last few years at Optimizely weren't that great. You know, I felt even though the company was doing well, you know, we weren't what was in the early days. You know, we were kind of mature, big company. Every quarter was kind of a grind. And I kind of fell out of love with the idea. You know, we had sort of achieved what we had wanted to achieve, which was democratizing A-B testing. And I didn't have the foresight to think about what's next for me at Optimizely.

26:19What's going to get me excited to want to be here in 10 years? And so the combination of the company was kind of starting to slow down. I was less excited about, I sort of achieved what I had set out to achieve. And the grass is greener with this new idea made it very hard for me to stay. So that's why I ultimately decided to start what turned into Rewind the last year I was at Optimizely. What is it like as an entrepreneur to have gone through that kind of journey? And then whether or not you're motivated by money or not, having money, it changes not just you, but certainly how other people perceive you.

27:00How has your way that you think about your life as a whole had to change since going through that transition as a human being? Yeah, going through the transition of a struggling entrepreneur to selling the company and making some money from it has been quite a change for me. You know, I grew up relatively, I would say, lower middle class, probably one of the poor kids in my public school. And that gave me a sense of kind of yearning and kind of jealousy or want, seeing kids that, you know, like we never owned our house growing up. You know, we were renting from house to house and I'm kind of used to moving every year and a half.

27:36And I remember one of my friends were at their house and they had a whole room just for their Nintendo. I was like, what the heck? You like a Nintendo room? And I remember thinking to myself, why don't I have a Nintendo room? Like, this isn't fair, you know? And so I got a sense of sort of drive and desire and maybe some hedonic treadmill from that. That's probably not healthy. But I appreciate that childhood because it gave me sort of motivation and drive to try to achieve. Now that I've achieved and been successful, that hasn't gone away from me. But I do worry about the impact it'll have on my kids.

28:06I have three kids, five, three, and one and I want to make sure they grow up also finding something they're passionate about and drive. I don't want them to feel like they can go through life. I think they'd be dissatisfied and unhappy if they didn't go through life with some kind of drive or desire because one of the greatest accomplishments besides the money from selling the company is this sense of impact, of creating something out of nothing that truly is so much more gratifying than the financial outcome and I hope my kids have that also one day when they grow up. And you know, at the end of the day, where's Mr.

28:38Nintendo man now? Probably not as impressive. Not as impressive anymore. Yeah. Not as impressive anymore, buddy. Okay. So I'm really interested in the story of Rewind. Like I say, I came across Rewind sort of serendipitously on Twitter. Love the idea. I love the concept, love your approach with it. And then I started reading a little bit about your wife and it's really captivating and it's emotional right and I think it's it's really important to share that as I'm sure you're going to but I want to just take a moment to like juxtapose this like how different a moment in your life to have a real experience that creates a moment why your product needs to exist in the world which is very similar to what happened to me when I was building my my latest company Heights versus the one I talked about earlier Gravel I did which failed did a very similar thing to you which was start a business because I want to start a business.

29:33And it's just not the same. And so I think it's really important to hear how you personally have gone on that journey of entrepreneurship from just starting something for the sake of it. I want to be an entrepreneur should it failed to when there's real purpose behind a business. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. I would describe in kind of three classes of why to start a business. I think the first and worst was the one I had with my first failed company, which was, I just want to start a company. I don't know what it does. I just want to be an entrepreneur. And you sit on a whiteboard and try to figure out what you want to do.

30:07You know, that failed for a lot of reasons, primarily because I had no empathy for the problem. I didn't really know how to focus. That was carrot six. The second is my first real successful company, Optimizee, was I had firsthand experience with a problem. I was building for myself. I had tons of intuition around what mattered, what didn't. I knew at least one person, me, had that problem. So it's not like we're just inventing a problem. And so that was incredibly gratifying and satisfying for a few years. But what I'm trying to do with my latest company is achieve sort of this third level of kind of the way to think about building a company, which is a calling.

30:43It's the thing that you would do even if you knew it would fail. It's the thing you would do even if you had so many other options to do anything else. You just can't not do it. And that experience for me and how I got to that clarity for what I'm working on started in my 20s as I started to go deaf. I have a genetic condition that caused me to lose my hearing at a young age. And finally, when I turned 30, I tried a hearing aid. And it was magical. To lose a sense and gain it back again feels like gaining a superpower. And ever since that moment, I have been on a hunt for ways that technology can augment human capabilities and give us superpowers.

31:21That's our vision. Our vision is to give humans superpowers. We do that using technology to augment our natural capabilities. But we think that there's so much more that we can do. I saw this when I lost my hearing. The biggest thing I got out of that wasn't getting it back. That was magical. To get it back alone would have been magical. But is that combined with the realization of how bad it had gotten? You go through life every day not realizing your own limitations until you've had these aha moments that shows you how life could be. And that's what we want to do with Rewind. We want to be the equivalent of what a hearing aid is for hearing or glasses are for vision.

31:58We want to be the same for your mind, for your memory. We want to give you those superpowers that once you have them, you think to yourself, how can I go a day without this? And so that's what I'm passionate about. I started this idea in this company really trying to focus on a problem that I would want to do in 10, 20, 30 years. I want this to be my life's work. And I think that's hopefully where the most impact can come from is an idea that you're so obsessed with it, you'd do it even if you knew it failed. And I think one of the really interesting things that drew me to you is your narrative on Twitter around your fundraise, which was actually, you know what, why am I describing it?

32:32You describe it because it's awesome. So we're lucky that we raised money early on. And our first seed round was led by Andreessen Horowitz. We had plenty of money in the bank. And we happened to have stumbled upon this idea that people were really excited about in AI. So we were getting inundated by investors we were getting tons of inbound interest. We didn't really need the capital. And the thought dawned on us that, well, we've built a product and a company that we're really proud of. We don't think there's really that much of a competitive risk. It's just a lot of hard execution. And so the thought we considered was, why not just make our pitch public?

33:09Why not put out our investor deck, seven minutes, me talking direct to camera, just like I would to an investor, and, you know, A, save a lot of time having to meet with a lot of investors who are interested. More importantly, really build trust. You know, our product really lives and dies on the trust of our customers. We capture everything you see, say, and hear, and we sort of locally. And so for a product like ours, it's really important that users trust us. And so I thought, well, just put it out there. You know, transparency is the best way to build trust. And then surprisingly, it actually took off.

33:40You know, I actually, my biggest concern is we put it out there. It would be kind of a, no one's interested. is kind of a flop. But you know, now we're up to almost 2 million views on Twitter. We had 1000s of people reach out to invest, we just raised our series A to$350 million post money valuation, which, you know, in this in this economy, in this market is is kind of unheard of. So yeah, it turned out to be a huge win. But it all started kind of with this desire to build trust in us by our customers and our users. I do remember there was a part in your tweet storm around this where, you know, you had offers where you would have been a unicorn.

34:16And that aspect, and I can imagine it because I know how this stuff works in a hype cycle. You know, you have A16Z or Anderson Horowitz already on board. That's a massive signal. You're the founder of Optimizely. That's a massive signal. Fucking hell, this is AI. Talk about a trend. That is a massive signal. So of course you could be a unicorn out the gates if you wanted to. However, it would have come with a different time horizon for those kind of funds and a different pressure on you. I think potentially the difference between yourself and another founder is when you say, I want this to be a multi-decade journey, you mean it.

34:56Therefore, it's easy to say no to things that might have a higher valuation. They're better for the ego in the short term, and they'd have made an even more viral tweet. However, in the grand scheme of things, they don't actually help align you with where you need to go over the long term. And I think it's a really valuable lesson. You know, there's a big trade-off that happens with the short-term PR cycle of how exciting it is to have an amazing round. And even in businesses you love, like the day-to-day, as you know, as an entrepreneur has been doing this for so long as well, some days just suck.

35:26If you love what you do and you know where your North Star is and it's going to go on for long enough, you find really good motivation anyway to carry on. You've kind of just absolved yourself from having any of those practical external pressures so that you can hold completely true the vision as you see it. And that's actually a privilege, probably worth saying, you know, something that a successful repeat founder is more likely to be able to negotiate in the first place. But what I found really motivating and interesting, other than the fact it was counterculture narrative, which I really liked, is that you found funds who are happy to be on that journey over a long time.

36:05And that's feels rare. I don't know if it's rare, but it feels rare. So tell me a little bit about that. Yeah, it certainly is rooted in my experience with my first company and realizing, you know, my first company optimizer, we raised our series A from Benchmark, great fanfare, huge valuation for a series A, $28 million raise, or series B, $57 million from injuries and horses. So like, I felt the feeling you feel when you raise this big Mecca epic round. And then that feels great in the moment. And then the day after happens. And then you say to yourself, oh my gosh, why did I raise all this money, most of which I don't need, at a valuation that's insane given where we are.

36:43And it wasn't so much about the expectations. It was more around the sort of natural byproduct of going down that path. For both my A and B at my last company, we raised way more than we needed. It wasn't like some – I see a lot of investor presentations now that are like, here's our budget and here's how much we need. It was not at all that. It was like these investors all wanted ownership percentage. It was competitive. Like this was the dollar that came out of the highest valuation or some market valuation times, you know, their desired ownership. It wasn't a whole bottoms up like the budget based approach.

37:16And so what the problem was raising all that money would not in and of itself been a mistake. The biggest mistake we made, I've made now multiple times, is raising that money and then spending it. You know, it would have been fine to raise all that money. My last company, raise all the money here at Rewind and just, you know, buy T-bills, You know, interest rates are good. You know, there's no reason to go off and hire like crazy. And so that was the biggest mistake I made my last company is go off a hire because you can. And so, you know, I go now, I've learned that lesson the hard way. Today, our team is 18 people at Rewind, 18 of the most amazing individuals I've ever worked with in my life.

37:50We have incredibly high bar for hiring. We don't just fill seats. You know, we wait for the pain to feel, you know, real for a particular role. Then we fill that role. We don't just anticipate some theoretical pain. and I want to build the first multi-billion dollar public company with 50 or less people. In the world today, you don't need a whole army of people, especially in our product where it's more consumer than it is B2B. People buy it. It's not sold to them. We don't have any salespeople at Rewind. So there's no reason for us to really grow off and build a huge army. So the last point I'll make on valuation is the valuation we think is really strong.

38:26There were people who offered us much higher valuations. But I feel like I'd much rather get an investor like NEA, who has, you know, built into their mantra and their track record, long term orientation. You know, two examples of that are, you know, they have 15 year fund life cycles, most traditional venture capitalists have 10 year fund life cycles, which means basically the expectation is you get a return in 10 years. And the second is, you know, NEA is known to buy at the IPO, you know, they They bought at the IPO for Cloudflare, one of the portfolio companies. They invest, in fact, every step along the way.

38:58So I want an investor who's not just looking at this as a quick flip transactional. You know, how do I get on paper a big uptick in market value? But how do I partner with a founder for decades to build something that could be one day as big or bigger than Apple or Google or any of these other companies out there? And that's what I want to do. And so I was solving for that, not for the short term euphoria of being called a unicorn. and just just remind me like succinctly then how much did you raise at what valuation again uh so we raised about 20 million at a 350 million dollar valuation okay and allow me as a customer of rewind to explain to listeners what i found super valuable out of it so first worth saying it works as in it works what you're saying because it's interesting enough for me to be like i don't know i got a spare 10 minutes i'm willing to go in this rabbit hole to see if this bizarre promise of like a sort of what digital second brain, what does that really mean?

39:54There's so many versions of what a digital second brain is. I think one of the things that I've loved about it most of all is it lives up to the exact promise that you talk about a lot on social, which is it's like invisible. You're not doing anything. So it's weirdly, it's possible to download, rewind and use it and never even know that you're even using it. And it's so unintrusive that you have to remind yourself that it's value add. And where I've personally found it super useful is after, I don't know, I don't actually know if it works after a podcast interview. I can't remember, but because I haven't tried to access it, but after my meetings, it always pops up and says, we've just recorded your meeting.

40:33Would you like the transcript or would you like to send an email of the notes? And I think that's some, like that simplicity of understanding my common user behavior or yeah, a summary of my notes would be really helpful to email to the people that I've just had a meeting with is a great example of one of the tactical activations of what Rewind is actually doing, right? Because what Rewind is actually doing is recording everything locally on your computer that you do at all time, anytime, ever. And whilst that sounds super untrustworthy and the kind of business you hope someone that lies to the CIA would never ever do.

41:08Secret service. Secret service, sorry, even worse. My bad, my bad. Even less trustworthy. Yeah, whilst that sounds terrifying, I'd love you to actually just address that straight on because I actually know the answer to this because obviously like a rational person, I was like, hold on a fucking second. There's no way I'm giving Rewind access to all of that. And it's just brilliant how you position the product, the execution and the security risk all together to actually genuinely create a really brilliant customer experience. So inform us, what do you do that's so different there? Yeah. I mean, the biggest thing that we do that makes us unique is that we can, as you say, frictionlessly capture everything.

41:45So we want to be imperceptible in the sense that we don't hog system resources. We want to enable you to be more present in everything you do, from meetings to work, and not feel the need to take notes to try to remember. If you think about it, the idea that today, 2023, and if we want to try to remember something better, we do this kind of crazy thing. We chop down a tree, we turn it into a rectangle called paper, we take a stick with ink at the end of it and write things down. And that's like our best idea on how to remember something better. Maybe there's some digital versions of that. But at the end of the day, it's like you taking something and trying to capture it manually.

42:19And we sort of flipped it on its head and said, well, what if we just capture everything for you? And maybe you don't need the vast majority of it, but the moment you want to go back to, hey, what did Dan say in that interview? Or what was that, you know, what was that thing I read on that website one time? Or what was that tweet I saw? Those moments when you're racking your brain trying to remember something, we very much like an insurance policy, have it all for you. You know, you can go back and find those moments that you otherwise would be racking your brain trying to remember. And so in order to deliver on that promise, privacy is super important.

42:48So we've built a lot of things built in. So first of all, like you said, all the recordings are stored locally. We do not have access to it as a company. Your employer doesn't have access to it. Only you have access to the recordings that are stored locally on your machine. And we encrypt it. We encrypt the database locally on your machine. and we allow you to basically go back and forth in time without worrying that there's some sort of nefarious person or system trying to get access to those recordings. And then on top of that, we built some really amazing things. We built an integration with GPT-4, which also takes a very privacy-first approach where, you know, if you do a search with GPT-4, only the question you ask and the specific text of this moment in your past relevant to that are used to generate a response.

43:32So you're able to synthesize, you know, you can ask a very simple question that takes moments from any app you've seen for a long period of time, synthesize just the moments that you need into a coherent answer. You know, I give this example on our website of asking Rewind to write me an email to Sam Altman asking to catch up. And our product takes the moments, you know, Sam Altman was our first investor at Rewind. And it takes our history together. The fact that we were introduced by Paul Graham in 2010, the fact that he's an investor in Rewind, the fact that we just launched our GPT-4 integration, it takes all that together and synthesizes it into a beautiful email that is just ready to hit send.

44:10So that's our approach. It's a bit weird. It's a bit different. I'll admit, sometimes you first blush, it's a little creepy. But as our users have shown, they're willing to overcome that initial apprehension after having used it and seeing the magic of what it feels like to have perfect memory. Honestly, it's one of those products as well that I think it's a really interesting one to address around habits, because it is a new habit that you have to start to try and use. And like all habits, if you don't keep it up, or you're not finding enough exponential value sort of coming from it, you know, you start to find yourself using it less and less and then wondering, oh, yeah, I forgot about that.

44:47So I guess my question to you is, other than, for example, the feature that pops up after you've had a meeting, which is valuable, how are you approaching that sort of consumer psychology behavior? Because kind of the proposition is it's so invisible and unintrusive. That's kind of the beauty of it. But it can be also a built in negative aspect to your own product, right? So you get in this kind of unusual paradox. Yeah. The way I think about it is that the foundation of our product is insurance. It's the idea that even if you never file a claim, if you have, you know, homeowners insurance, you're not going to cancel it just because you didn't have a leaky faucet in the last year.

45:24Like it feels good. You get peace of mind knowing that you have what you might need backed up and recorded and captured for you in a privacy first way. On top of that, you know, there are then sort of the utilities, the things that actually are built or sort of ingrained into your workflow. You know, you're in a meeting, you're back to back meetings. You're about to go from, you know, one set of contacts to the next. Wouldn't it be great if you had an email generated right in that moment, summarizing and sharing with all the attendees? So that is an example of what you can build on top of that foundation, of that sort of insurance foundation.

45:56And so I don't see them really at odds with one another. Obviously, the summarization capability, that's all optional. If you don't want to use it, that's fine. If you want to keep it running and use it for search, no problem. But because we have this amazing wealth of data that we can now help really be kind of a co-pilot for your mind, we think we can now be a truly personalized AI. We can take the things that you're going to do, your day to day, use the context of your past to help inform your future. And those are the kinds of features that we're actively working on. Yeah. OK, that makes a lot of sense to me.

46:27What are your three favorite books that you think people should read or, you know, ones that have just influenced your life? I've had two books that have really changed the course of my life. The first was Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari. and reading that book made me realize just how much biomass exists on this planet purely for their taste, some order of hundreds of billions of chickens and huge amount of cows. And after reading this book, I had this thought that ran through my head. This was even before I had kids. And the thought was, would my grandkids come to me one day and say, Grandpa, did you all just create a lot of animals and then have them live horrible, miserable, suffering lives, kill them and then eat a small part of it just because it tasted good.

47:10And I thought to myself, yeah, that's kind of what we did. And it just made me feel really uneasy about the suffering of animals. And after reading the book, I became a vegetarian. So that was one big major life change. The other one was a book that I heard first by Nikki Glaser in an interview with Joe Rogan. The book was called, it's by David Carr, The Easy Way to Control Alcohol. And she said, you know, she was an alcoholic and she said she read this book and she, after reading it, she hadn't had a single drink of alcohol. And I couldn't believe, I thought that claim was too hard to believe.

47:43I wasn't really planning on stopping drinking alcohol, but I just wanted to prove her wrong. And so I read the book and she was right. It sort of dismantled every argument one could make for why you'd want to drink alcohol and sort of showed how a lot of societal conceptions cause us to think certain things about how alcohol can be a social lubricant when it's really not and how it can actually make you happy when it really can't. And a lot of the things that I had sort of grown up thinking and I also ever since reading that book stopped drinking. So there are things I do for my kids I would never do for myself.

48:16And I remember about actually around a year and a half ago, maybe two years ago, my oldest son, who at the time was three or four, you know, he was going to sleep. It was a little bit of a quiet time. And he turned to me and he said, Daddy, are you going to die? And it kind of surprised me, took me back. And I responded, you know, I will, but only sick people die. And then that sort of calmed him down. And he said, okay, well, Daddy, but you're really healthy, right, Daddy? And I looked at him and said, yeah, no, I'm really healthy. But then the huge pang of guilt fell on me because I really wasn't healthy.

48:48You know, I wasn't really exercising much. I was pretty sedentary. You know, I was turned my perspective, you know, the thought of my, you know, I'm not, I'm not anytime hopefully going to die, but the thought of my son growing up without a father and the disappointment of in his eyes and this sort of hope and yearning he had forced me, you know, since then I've been walking eight miles on my treadmill every day, been not drinking and just, you know, that, that catalyst from, you know, doing something for your kids that you wouldn't do for yourself was really important for me. Totally. And I lost my father at 24 from like poor health and 24, I was still, you know, an adult, but you know, at the end of the day, it was from poor health.

49:26And I, as a result from that, just became very conscious of my health. And it seems like a shame, right? So it seems a shame for that to be the catalyst. So it's awesome to hear that the general awareness that people have is making a difference in society. It's awesome. And great entrepreneurs like yourself, you know, you're going to perform better over a long time and make more of an impact in the world with better health. Like if you can't be the CEO of your body, you basically can't really deserve to be a great CEO of your company. First and foremost, right? Yeah, yeah. And I definitely see how, you know, taking control and over your body and doing the things, building the habits there, any habit you build translates from personal life to family life to work life.

50:08And, you know, I feel like as you get better at building those habits, those healthier habits, you can start doing the same and work and it translates, you know, it's It's not like it's not a trade-off. It's really a yes and between those two parts of your life. 100%. I know that you also have this Mind Emulation Foundation. And at some point, I'm going to just sound like a total Twitter creep, but very fascinated in all things brain. So that's kind of how I got there. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. So the Mind Emulation Foundation's vision is to fund and conduct research to help further the idea of taking what makes you you and emulating it digitally.

50:50You know, I'm a big believer. You know, there's a lot of, there's a whole field of philosophy on this, but I'm a believer that what makes you you is somewhere in and around where you are physically. It's likely an emergent property of your body. We typically call that the mind. There are people who are dualists who believe in the spirit and sort of things outside their physical body. I tend to believe that, you know, Science shows that most of what makes you U is over where you are physically. And the idea is that if we can emulate it in the sense that we take all of the constituent parts of what makes you U and replicate it sufficiently well, then that emulation is just as much U as you are when you wake up in the morning after having slept overnight.

51:32You know, millions of your cells die every second. Your body transforms constantly. Your mind today is not the mind it was when you were a kid. and I don't know if you know the philosophy story of the ship of Theseus, but the basic idea behind the ship of Theseus is that there's this famous, I think it was a Greek ship. It was docked in the harbor after winning some big battle and over time as it was in the harbor, the water was wearing away at the planks and so slowly the people who wanted to maintain and restore the ship would replace each plank one by one to make sure that the ship stayed and looked the same as it did when it first was docked.

52:09eventually all the planks are replaced. And you ask yourself, is that ship that was once there the same ship that it is there today, if over time you gradually replace every piece of wood? And I would argue if it has the same emergent properties, it is sufficiently enough the ship that you would consider that ship. And similar with your mind, if you think about the paradox or the analogy, let's say in 10 years from now, Dan, we figure out, wow, it looks like your vision's not going well. And it turns out there's a part of your brain that your eyes are connected to that just doesn't work quite well.

52:37So we're going to do the surgery. We're going to carve out just that part of your brain, replace it with a digital circuit that looks identical, works identically to the meats and biology of your brain as it is today. Just a small part of your brain. You'll go in for surgery, you'll come out, you'll feel exactly the same. So now you just have this tiny little part of your brain replaced digitally. Now let's say a few months later you go in and have another part of your brain replaced. Exactly one for one behavior. Eventually your entire brain or entire nervous system is replaced gradually. It's called the gradual replacement theory of mind debulation.

53:08You gradually replace everything. At what point along that journey did you lose becoming you or you are no longer you? And I'd argue you're always you. You are the same you. You were at the beginning and our vision is to do the same for the mind. So it's a long journey. It's not easy. There's a lot of science. Google's actually doing some interesting stuff in connectomics. I funded research at the Broad Institute and I think there's a lot of opportunity here to further this goal. It's still in the sort of basic science stage but maybe it doesn't happen in my lifetime but hopefully in my kid's lifetime they'll have the choice to not just believe that death is inevitable but if they wanna extend life indefinitely by emulating themselves non-biologically then I hope they can.

53:53If you think about great stories of people in the world the ones that we love the most are the ones of greatest transformation. The rags to riches is a great example. The people who start off poor and end their life poor and never change are not the ones we ever know about. The ones who actively seek out to change their life by essentially the process of neuroplasticity, some purposeful scientific manifestation, which we can just call grit and determination for the sake of a business audience. That creates a real change in people's lives, their circumstance, and they become different people. And I also often reflect on the fact that when you think of yourself as a child, you're not thinking of you as you.

54:35It feels like a separate person that you're referring to. When I was a kid, that little person feels like, well, certainly for me, when I'm thinking about that person, it feels like it's not me. I feel like I'm having a reflection of someone else entirely. And none of those things are actually that different to what you're referring to. Like fundamentally, it's all kind of a question of separation around the human experience. So Dan, what is your best piece of advice for founders that are looking to do something truly different, like unique, like Rewind? My best piece of advice, if you're trying to do something unique or different, like Rewind, is to find a problem you're so obsessed with that you can't not do it.

55:16You know, to do something that people think is impossible is hard. You know, people will tell you that it's impossible. People will convince you to do something else. And so you need at the most basic level, a deep passion and, you know, and drive that will get you through the naysayers that will get you through all the 100 people who come into why what you're doing is a bad idea. You need that deep, that's more important than anything else better than an idea and investor invest in is that deep conviction that what you want to see in the world is possible and that you can bring it to life. And to take that further, you know, most things are super hard.

55:55You know, anything that you end up doing as a founder is really hard. So you might as well try and do something exceptionally hard so long as you're passionate at it. Exactly. Totally agree. Dan, it's been a massive pleasure having you on Secret Leaders. Thank you so much for your time. It's been very inspiring. Thank you, Dan. It's been a pleasure to be part of it. Dan Soroka, who taught me a lot about following your own path, persistence, and not listening to those who doubt you. If you enjoyed this episode and found it useful, please write us a review and subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts.

56:25It makes a huge difference to us and we love reading every single review. I've been your host, Dan Murray-Serta, and we'll be back next week with more lessons for entrepreneurs and leaders. The episode was produced by Alex Graham, Ruth Edwards, and Sol Harris, and all brought together by our head of podcast, Will Stollerman. See you next time.