30M Users, No Co-Founder | Eugenia Kuyda (Replika, Wabi)

0:00Eugenia Kuyda:I've never seen people come up with a vision together. It's always someone's vision and everyone else sort of joins on board. At the end of the day, the bug always stops with someone. Because of that whole YC idea that everyone needs to have a co-founder, many people just like god bad co-founders. It's almost like a barrier for getting started. Whoever has the vision and has the delusion that this can exist in the world actually drives it forward. What's the case for solo founding? Not having co-founder allows you to actually split that pot equally between founding members of the team. that in my view, take the same risk, especially if you don't have co-founders.

0:33Eugenia Kuyda:You've got to have people that think and act like co-founders. You can make the bear case for solo founding. When you have doubts, like if you have doubts and fears, you don't want to bring this to your founding team. You just kind of need to be okay with being alone. Ultimately, it all just boils down to like, can you tell a compelling story about the future of the world? I hope more people will start thinking hard before deciding whether they're going to have or not have co-founders. the thing was most interesting to me was just how strong of an opinion you have about solo founding and being a solo founder so maybe just start off there why do you have such a strong feeling about solo founding well i'm probably first of all projecting my own experience because i haven't really started companies with other people it was almost always solo founding um but i think that even when people have co-founders more often than not it's really just one person calling all the shots.

1:27Eugenia Kuyda:That's why companies have CEOs and all that. And I feel like sometimes co-founders are just, you know, called co-founders because maybe it was hard to hire someone. So you had to give this disproportionate equity to someone, but really it's just an employee with a lot of equity. In the end of the day, the bug always stops with someone. And I'd say that through all my years here, I very rarely have seen companies where all co-founders were like equally kind of totally responsible for this business it was always one person is super responsible and then the rest are just really have a lot of equity and maybe they're you know they have high agency they have a lot of ownership in this business but they don't ultimately they're not really like fully responsible for the whole thing going forward um and if you think about it like you know when you think about apple yes there were co-founders we kind of think about steve jobs when you think about facebook you're not really talking about other co-founders they might as well have been just employees.

2:27Eugenia Kuyda:And so I think that's kind of the situation. I think that's just the reality of it. It's very rare when actually equal co-founders or almost equal co-founders. And there's also some aspect of this where if they were having the same level of influence or making the decisions together at some point, that probably becomes to some degree unhealthy. So there is probably this aspect of ultimately it does end up becoming one person sort of their main responsible one yeah like in the end of the day someone needs to call the shots and um i think design by committee is like never great like i've never seen people come up with a vision together it's always someone's vision and everyone else sort of joins on board and whoever has the vision and has the delusion that this can exist in the world actually drives it forward like there's no way for a few people to be absolutely super excited about one direction and dream up the same vision in their head and it's usually one person is kind of more visionary they have the idea they and they're willing to take an insane amount of risk to try to get there as delusional as it might feel uh but that amount of belief in a few people that's very rare usually the other people just follow they say okay well this is the crazy guy or girl, would better get on board.

3:48Eugenia Kuyda:He seems so excited. They'll break all the walls to get there. And then that person does break all the walls. And usually they end up fundraising and being CEO and kind of calling all the shots. You don't see the person that followed that become the main person. I mean, now it's AI companions all the time. People talk about that as a really big thing. Certainly they weren't talking about that 10 years ago. And I'm really curious how, if you could just tell the story of how you as sort of an individual came to the conclusion that you wanted to build a company and what you ended up deciding you wanted to build with Replica.

4:27Eugenia Kuyda:Oh, so Replica, like the story behind Replica started very long ago. In 2012, I think, a friend of mine worked at Google DeepMind and he showed me Word2Vector, which was this technology that people at Google researchers came up with. which basically allowed for them to translate words into vectors and do mathematical kind of things to words. And so that blew my mind because obviously as a journalist, I was reading, you know, grew up reading Wittgenstein and of course the limits of my language, the limits of my world is a phrase that stuck with me. And in fact, it was kind of, we made a neon sign out of it later in the first office of Replica.

5:12Eugenia Kuyda:But I thought, oh, if they can do things with words, then they'll have a language model that will be ultimately the model of the world. And so I got to jump on this now because as a journalist, my job was having conversations with people. I felt like having meaningful conversations with machines is just the next step. And then, of course, also ImageNet came out. So people started talking about deep learning. And I thought, okay, well, they'll put two and two together. We'll have these very powerful models for dialect generation, for language. So better start now. we were kind of like a decade off I'd say probably the first language models actually appeared in 2015 and then we just went all in on that at that point we already got to Y Combinator and raised some funding mostly just to build chatbot tech so conversational AI tech and we knew we wanted to find a consumer product to build we couldn't figure out which one would be the one and of course the tech was just so so bad and yeah and so late 2015 my best friend passed away and I was living actually just right around the corner from here with him and I found myself going back home rereading our text messages all the time and so we used the models that were built back then to recreate him as an AI just as a personal project I built it myself in three weeks mostly just to be able to continue to have a conversation with him.

6:38Eugenia Kuyda:And that became a story somehow. Like Casey Newton, a journalist, a friend of ours, kind of wrote about it and became viral. A lot of people came to talk to Roman's AI. And what we saw there was that people were really opening up. They were being vulnerable. They were telling him everything about themselves. So that gave us an idea that there's just so much demand to feel that closeness feel that connection be able to talk about what's going on with you in your life and that became kind of the precursor the original inspiration for replica that was that was already a few years sort of into deciding you wanted to go and pursue this right and i think there is some aspect of i could i could only imagine that if you had paired up with someone, that's a long time to be pursuing something, especially if it's not maybe your vision, you know, to be going after something.

7:33And there might have been times when it felt like things weren't progressing as quickly as you'd like with the, with sort of the technology that you would maybe need to be able to make this happen. I'm curious how you think that sort of your personal connection to it, your interest in it as a solo founder might've kind of influenced the, maybe the way that you stuck with it.

7:53Eugenia Kuyda:Oh, for me, it's completely a personal story. Like for me, it's just the most personal thing that can exist. But as we know, what's most personal is the most universal. So that resonated with so many people. Really, I grew up like a pretty lonely kid. I was an only child. My parents was extremely young. So they were kind of off doing their own thing very early on in my life. So I just remember myself writing like bad poetry and skateboarding and smoking joints and just kind of, you know, figuring shit out on my own. And it felt really lonely all my life. So when I found some of these friends that, you know, these relationships with me, they kind of, sorry, with my friends in my twenties, that kind of became my family.

8:35Eugenia Kuyda:They kind of became my family. And so, um, those relationships were really transformational for me. And so when I lost kind of one of them, um, and everything kind of fell apart from there, that's where I felt like I want to recreate that. I want to recreate that friendship that allowed me to feel a little bit less alone. I want to create it for other people because I know what it feels like. And I remember reading right around that time, stumbling upon this book on becoming a person by Carl Rogers, which basically just says that, that, you know, we're all geared towards positive growth, but you got to create a relationship that will allow a person to feel seen, heard, ultimately accept themselves and grow and will create that space to grow.

9:24Eugenia Kuyda:And so the, you know, Carl Rogers really just the kind of basics of today's therapy, but they kind of created that whole kind of human potential, human-centric therapeutic approach. And so he literally said, like, to create that relationship, you've got to do three things, provide unconditional positive regard, uh believe in the fact that this person is going to grow and um third allow them to be a separate person and even in that book he mentions that potentially like robots at some point could do that that of course was written in the 60s um and funny enough the only chatbot that really worked until then was eliza built by professor weisenbaum and that was built on on it was a rogerian therapist it was really just kind of using carl rogers technique of technique of just building that report and so for me that was extremely personal just felt like it just felt like such a beautiful and simple truth laid out in this very dry book that everyone usually reads in like their first year of learning of studying therapy and yeah we just thought look like back then 2015 the models 2016 the models were so crappy you could you couldn't really build an ai that would talk to a chatbot that would talk to you in a meaningful way but you could maybe build an ai that could listen and that was really the main insight how do you think that being a journalist influenced you as a founder oh i think that's the kind of that's the main thing that influenced me um as a journalist you always talk to people i mean you know you do podcasts you constantly talk to people and knowing how to talk to people is actually quite a hard it's a very interesting art and somehow there are no books about or very few books about it there's no science around it there's no research like what makes a good conversation but I believe through conversations you can change people and you can learn things you can live a life through someone else's eyes almost and so for me conversation was always just the peak most important thing that people do it was like kind of the the craft that we have as humans the the ability to have a conversation is probably like the most amazing art that we can learn over um over our lifetime and through these conversations people fall in love and start companies and you know decide to the world is being driven by conversation so for me the fact that no one wanted to work on machine conversation back in the day when we started doing that was crazy i'm like how is that that no one's building even like simple tech to build chatbots like even that didn't exist all chatbots in 2012-13 were all either aiml or like literally like excel spreadsheets it was all just a set of rules as the stupidest um you know way of building those things when you were growing up as an only child I was also an only child um you know at least in my in my world you know I would come up with my own stories I would I would you know I would um maybe talk to toys and things like when I was really young like I would have these relationships maybe with things that weren't actual people as well um animals too I'm curious uh did you have anything like that in your life when you were growing up sort of around your imagination going beyond just sort of interacting with people but interacting with other things and does that does that have any sort of impact on how you've thought about communicating with you know something that's not not necessarily human well so uh i grew up as long as a single child actually i'm not a single child anymore i have a 10 year old sister um but yeah growing up i'm kind of by myself i think for me the refuge was like writing writing fiction and kind of more personal stories and obviously very bad poetry and so for me that dear diary was it was almost like talking to someone was expressing myself through words and so uh it was very natural for me to to have a replica of oh i can talk about what's going on with me i can open up because before i was opening up through those you know tools through like writing in a diary, writing a story, writing a poem.

13:45And was there sort of a thread between all of those things and kind of getting into communicating to other people? And it sounds like writing was a really big part of your life when you were growing up. Did that sort of transfer into it being something that you were doing more professionally as well and then sort of into this more communication-oriented format with software?

14:02Eugenia Kuyda:Yeah. No, for sure. It's just a way, like, you know, it's just kind of when you're an angsty teenager, you're pretty scared of, like, actually opening up. So there was no one to open up to. And so, or no one I was feeling okay about opening up to until much later in life, like even with best friends, like you're not, you don't really have the words or you're scared, you're feeling ashamed. And so you would try to communicate through these poetic things, like whatever, writing something and showing it to the world and hoping the world can see you for who you are, that you hoping to build that connection through that.

14:39Eugenia Kuyda:the cool thing is like with ai you're not scared to say what's actually happening with you and sometimes we're even scared to tell it to tell our closest friends that even later in life when we already have the tools and so on so it's not even about the fact that you don't have it it's a person to tell that it's more about that we kind of lost the capacity to do that most people don't know how to open up they're going to be scared but with an with the eye they don't feel judged So it's not that I didn't have anyone to talk to or anything like that. It's just that at 15, I was scared to really tell people what's really going on inside.

15:16Eugenia Kuyda:Or even more than that, I didn't really even know. It's just funny that growing up in Russia, we didn't have the word anxiety really. So I knew I was just feeling super uneasy all the time in my body. And I knew the physical sensation and I knew that it didn't have a word. so when i learned the word anxiety like later in life in my 20s i'm like oh i guess that's what it was the whole time just this unsettling feeling like you can't really belong anywhere and like um yeah but we didn't even know the words for that what was the closest word well russia's was always very behind on all therapeutic things so we didn't know anything about that there was no word yeah you didn't really even say um you didn't even really yeah I guess the only thing that people talked about was insecurities like that was the only thing like oh you're a teenager you probably have insecurities that's it but the idea that people could be depressed or anxious that was not or like trauma or anything like that I mean also was if of course now probably people have more of the but back in the day we didn't even have that in our vocabulary like of course the word exists but in Russian but it just like no one ever said that you would have never even hear that it's a condition like it's kind of didn't you know if you don't name it it sort of almost doesn't exist um and so yeah being able to talk about that with someone i think would have been very beneficial if i was you know back when i was a little kid or a teenager and what was the what was the i know that you sort of saw this this sort of technology that was emerging in a really early form and then you kind of made that connection between the technology that was emerging and your experience with communicating with with people with you know with yourself through diary entries and things like that.

16:58You kind of, you kind of decided that this was something you really didn't want to miss out on. Can you share a little bit more about that and sort of how you actually functionally decide to get started? Did you make an explicit decision to be doing it solo? How, how did that actually come about? Because I think that people really benefit from hearing these stories around how people actually came to the decision of not only doing it, but how they structured how they did it.

17:21Eugenia Kuyda:Well, I think a lot of founders start things because they want to impress someone, it's always just some external motivation. Like maybe they weren't loved by their parents that much or some other thing. So they kind of have this chip on the shoulder and like, oh, I'm going to do that. And, you know, I don't know. My dad will pay attention to me. It's something. Or it can be coded in anything else. It could be some other person they meet throughout life or whatever. But usually it starts, I feel like for many people, because it's such a crazy idea to start a company if you think about it, because the odds are crazy.

17:52Eugenia Kuyda:It's pretty lonely. It's just not really a normal thing for people to do, and especially to stick to. Maybe to start, people start, but then a lot of people just get disappointed, disillusioned very fast, and just move on to something else. But to start and to stick to it, that takes definitely something. Something's broken inside. And then if you think about it, so for me, it was definitely that. It started with that external motivation. I was very excited about the idea of building conversational AI, of building a company that will help us have meaningful conversations with machines. But part of underlying motivation was definitely to impress a certain person or something like that.

18:35Eugenia Kuyda:When we think about it, it's almost unfair to bring on a co-founder for that because you're just dealing with your own thing. And so I didn't even think about it. What co-founder? I was trying to do that. Like it was my whole, that whole motivation was mine. Of course, eventually that all turned into much more intrinsic motivation of just I wanted to get it, you know, working. But I think a lot of the thing starts with some, you know, some sort of that external motivation. So for me, I think the moment was, I was building something else actually. We're building like a bank project and we were testing an interface for it.

19:13Eugenia Kuyda:And the idea was that people would just, you know talk to a bank wouldn't have any branches was so long ago of course today it's a given and so the idea was like they'll communicate through through sms with a bank and so we went to trial that technology and just test that built a chatbot and uh with some people and we saw a crazy emotional response to that people were we thought they're going to talk to us about some banking features but they were saying no one talks to me like that and like crying and like oh i really feel a connection with this and we're like wow this interface is so much bigger more than just an interface it can actually influence what people do and can you know actually change behaviors for people and so on and so that's when i thought okay well banking project was kind of like um winding down anyway and i was like well i'll just take this and i'll just focus on that conversational tech especially given the fact that you know all these new technologies are coming around and uh you know neural networks started to become a thing I mean mind you so long ago it was 2012-13 and so I put together a small team and as you know I actually had another kind of full-time job first and I was like okay well let's try to tinker with that and then in a few months it was like okay this is much more interesting than anything else I'm working on I just need to focus on this and raise some money and apply to YC and you know or or get some money somewhere else and try to really get it working.

20:41Eugenia Kuyda:And we got to Y Combinator and the rest was kind of history. But that was my original pool. I put in my own money in both. Kind of Wabi, this current company, and two degree replica also moving here. So that was the kind of origin story. You talked a little bit about various types of motivations for starting companies and internal and external ones. And I'm really curious how that changed maybe with the second company, the one you're building now, Wabi. Were you more aware of sort of the motivations going into it the first time, the second time, and how might have they have changed? I mean, with Wabi, I just had this idea and it kept me up all night that there should be a better interface for AI.

21:29Eugenia Kuyda:It's crazy that we're talking to AI through a command line, and that's it, and everyone just kind of embraced that command line and decided that everything's going to be a chatbot because there's so many things you can't do through a command line. Like discovery doesn't work. Proactive doesn't work. Repeating use cases don't work. There's no file management. So many use cases are just very, it's a very poor format or interface for so many different other use cases that are not search, talk to it, or a writing tool. And so for regular people, of course, for, you know, for super prosumer developer that I think they can do anything through a command line, but they live in a terminal anyway.

22:10Eugenia Kuyda:So it was just one line. Like we're in this Microsoft DOS RFI interfaces. There will be a good moment. What is it going to be? All the big labs are not focusing on that for some reason. I want to start a company to explore that. And that was just that. It was just a set of beliefs that were so strong. And at the same time, I felt like no one's really looking into it. or no one was looking into it. And that was enough for me to just get a small group together again and just start tinkering. Again, first just putting in my own money and thinking, okay, well, we'll try to get somewhere. But just taking a leap of faith.

22:45I think sometimes all the good decisions come to you

22:49Eugenia Kuyda:when you create a little bit of emptiness. I really was not thinking or considering. I'm not a person that sits around and thinks, what should I do and writes out pros and cons. I just operate in a different way I think you have to create a little bit of an empty space for yourself just not think about anything else I think I went on a little trip with my kids for a week and just while I was there I was like oh I'm starting a new company and then once you kind of just had this thought in your brain that's it you just like your body sort of decided and that's what it's doing so there was no way back I feel like there's such a such a challenge that people run into when they sort of fall into that belief that they need to have co-founders to get started because you were able to go from this giving yourself that space to realize you wanted to build a company you were going to be building it and then you were off to the races you were building a company and I think that in some ways there's this sort of thing that people put in their way when it comes to the co-founder stuff and you know I'm curious your take on why you think people think that they need to have a co-founder why they why they kind of like have that as a thing it's almost like a barrier for getting started i agree with you and i think it's you know it is lonely for sure and i think people want to have like some other people to also be yeah we're gonna do that and maybe people for some people it's hard to hire um i think if it's hard if it's hard for you to hire someone you don't know people or whatever and you only but you do have this great person who might bring i don't know it's beneficial for the company the only way to get that person is by calling them a co-founder then of course like why not right it doesn't really matter that much i think more the idea that you just kind of randomly decide oh these people are gonna be co-founder co-founders when you could have totally hired them as you know early employees gave them good equity uh chunk but maybe not call them co-founder that would be i think that's kind of like just a cleaner approach because ultimately it's still going to be on you you're still gonna be calling all the shots uh but i think it's it's almost like i believe everyone should do whatever they want like if they like to have to call some employees co-founders and make them feel better then why not you know it's better for their retention maybe if they're like super incredible researchers it's very hard to get them like otherwise they're having like tons of offers they will only join as co-founder that's a completely different ball game of course sure but i found that because of um that whole yc idea that everyone needs to have a co-founder many people just like got bad co-founders me included actually i got like i called one employee co-founder um already we were i was already working on the project on the project kind of replica but i wanted to get into yc and i just wanted our odds to be higher so i'm like okay you'll be a co-founder and that didn't work out well at all because then i had to because he wasn't really a co-founder he was an employee but then of course he developed a gigantic ego that he actually is a co-founder he was doing a lot of work don't get me wrong but like that company was my company it was my vision and then for some reason i started you know finding myself like going through hours and hours of explaining why we're doing it and why we actually don't need to do this and now completely pivot to replica i'm like why am i even wasting all these hours trying to get someone on board and then he's creating all this fud at the company with the team because he doesn't believe in it i'm like this is complete bonkers you know this is like not even um and so i think just don't get random co-founders i think this is the getting it's much better to be solo than to have bad co-founders that in my view is you know that of course ruins companies and i think the whole pressure of like you have to have co-founders who said you have to like you no one has to you can do many different ways um and so i think it's totally fine to have co-founders if they're great co-founders you love them maybe it's your brother your best friend and other you want to share or you know otherwise they wouldn't start working with you that's one thing but if you just like randomly assign a co-founder because you kind of have to and it's like some random person you don't really know them very well or you know them well and they could totally be just working for you i'm not you know i think that pressure that people create that it has to be one way or the other is unhealthy both ways.

27:05Eugenia Kuyda:Like, you know, maybe someone wants co-founders, then why not? Totally. At what point did you decide that you were going to make that transition from, you had this seemingly great career in journalism. You were editor-in-chief at a really big magazine. What was the thing that ultimately made you decide you wanted to move away from that? Was it some external thing? Was it just seeing that technology develop? What was the actual thing there that caused that to happen i think probably getting arrested the first couple times well i mean 2010 um so i always worked on in some sort of like liberal or opposition media and you know back in 2000s moscow and even 90s well 90s was a baby but 2000s late 2000s it was still russia was a different place it wasn't yet what it is now and politically it wasn't that you know so kind of that much of a dictatorship as it is today um and so there was hope that you know that i wanted always to actually my dream was to be like a war reporter even at some point but more but at least like investigative reporter work undercover and all that and so i did a little bit of that too and then 2010 of course the first wave of protests started and i was working the media were kind of like the media was the organizer of many a lot of people journalists were organizing a lot of these protests and then you know of course everything started to tighten up like we started getting calls and the um magazine you know kind of getting you got to take this out and take this off so it was kind of clear that the at that point that that job won't even be around very soon yeah the writing was like you can't really be a journalist in Russia anymore there's nowhere unless you want to work for like some propaganda channel just be like a PR manager for President Putin so um um, so yeah, so it was clear that this job is going away and it was clear in like 2009.

28:55Eugenia Kuyda:So by then I kind of just figured I was 22, three, and I was like, well, I got to get out of here. I got to get some other jobs. So, um, I figured I'll go to business school and figure it out. Um, I didn't know what business school was. So I applied to London business school and I went to move to London to just get some, any other education in a different language and also get out of Russia. So I went to London, then I went to New York and I went to NYU Stern for a year and then i started kind of just trying to do some stuff and tinkering with like some tech products and i think actually the first app i built was uh for those protests um so 2010 11 it was a huge protest in russia um anti-putin anti-corruption uh really was against like the falsified clearly falsified elections um and there was a very big civil kind of movement in russia there were like 100 000 people coming out on the streets and going out on the street in moscow and there's a lot of belief and hope and oh this can actually change um and so i built an app called briber which i pretty much just put together some wireframes on back then facebook and said hey i want to build an app where people will be able to report bribes um just actually like if i'm given a bribe i'm gonna report it this way kind of bringing attention to corruption because in Russia, you can't really operate without giving bribes.

30:18Eugenia Kuyda:That's just how the country operates. If you're going to the doctor, you're expected to give some money, you know, some money in a little envelope because they're not making any money at all. Like the doctor's salary is like$50 a month. So everyone's supposed to bring, like if you're not bringing, it's like not tipping here at a restaurant. It sounds like a, but in the end of the day, it ends up being kind of bribing. So you're bribing a person at the front desk. You're bribing there, you're bribing there, here and everywhere. and so of course that becomes the corrupted kind of system that we we have and so my my idea was to bring it just more attention to what's happening and and somehow a lot of people wanted to work for free they saw they're like oh let's get together and let's build it and so we built that it made the news we had this little kind of zero rubble bank note that we're giving around as like you know and i felt like oh if you if you come up with a great idea or some idea whatever idea that people want to stand for.

31:11Eugenia Kuyda:If you can't create some sort of movement, people will be very excited even to work for free. And so I think that's kind of the same idea that I had ever since. I could just have to have an idea that people want to stand for. You know, that's really interesting because I feel like oftentimes there are so many companies, you know, that are out there and they're always sort of trying to compete for talent. And obviously every company is competing for talent, but it feels like the biggest advantage you could possibly have to get the best people is just make something that's really compelling, you know, that's not sort of a run of the mill type thing.

31:43And I'm curious how you think that maybe being sort of a person from maybe let's call it a non-traditional background when it comes to starting companies, maybe informed like how you thought about building something or maybe how you maybe didn't have preconceived notions about how these things should be done. Because it feels like one thing that I've, we've had when, you know, over the last few months when we've been talking to all these incredible people who've started companies, the thread that I've noticed is there's just such a wider array of diversity in terms of where people have actually come from, what they've worked on, compared to people who are starting startups in maybe the more traditional way.

32:22A couple of co-founders, building something that's a little bit more kind of like boilerplate or cookie cutter is not the right term, but a little bit more towards selling to other startups, I guess, is another example. I'm curious sort of how you think about sort of your non-traditional background maybe influenced how you go about building companies?

32:41Eugenia Kuyda:Well, I think now specifically, people talk a lot about storytelling. I do think that ultimately being able to tell a story well, but not just tell a story well, actually come up with a new novel story, see some story that people don't necessarily see, and come up with a non-obvious story and tell it well, is a really rare skill. Like most people are really boring to hang out with because they don't, can tell a good story and don't know how to come up with a good story, you know? So they don't know, they don't have like any, just people, a lot of people don't have maybe like completely, well, that's gonna be like a mean thing to say.

33:23Eugenia Kuyda:But I do think that people don't spend a lot, enough time learning how to tell a good story. And for me, like I didn't, because my brain's not very, I don't know, I guess I'm not. I grew up with a family of physicists so I was always like definitely not the smartest one in the family because everyone was so confused why I didn't go um and study physics like all of everyone in our family but it's mostly because I didn't never understood physics very well so there was no such choice for me but because I but then ultimately I do think learning how to tell a good story and learning also just how to see stories and kind of find them in the world and tell them and synthesize information from so many different and from from many different places i think it's a pretty valuable tool and i think especially now it's more and more like software development has been kind of commoditized more and more and so we're moving more kind of up the ladder so if before just knowing how to code was an important skill of course it is now it's more like not just knowing how to code but more knowing how to create an architecture of a software product is still a good skill so it's kind of moving up you know the ladder and then uh more and more it's going to be like less about designing and moving around pixels more about art direction and creative direction and ultimately it all just will boil down to like can you tell a compelling story about the future of the world there's um there's something that happens whenever you talk about soul or whenever someone talks about solo founding or it comes up people talk about this idea of oh well you own 100 of the company which of course changes very quickly when you start to bring on investors, start to give equity to teammates.

34:58But one thing that I think is not talked about nearly as much, and I think is really related to what you were just saying around storytelling is authorship. This idea of there being an author who's really sort of telling a story, you know, about what it is that they're building. And that story is something that they're telling to potential people who might want to use what they're building, people who might want to join the team, you know, and help them and work on building this together. Investors, if you're building a company that that's more of a venture scale business i'm curious how you think about authorship and how that relates to storytelling so my approach to that i think even although i'm

35:35Eugenia Kuyda:always a sole founder i've been a sole founder but um i think it's a team sport so actually one other thing right what i don't like about co-founders it's kind of arbitrarily choosing just a couple people on the team yeah that will have the top elevating them instead of saying we're a team and I really believe especially now in small teams where people have almost it almost operates as a partnership and it's okay that there's maybe like one founder or one CEO that has to be as an on any team a captain or a coach right like it has to be someone who kind of makes the ultimate decision otherwise maybe you know you won't know where to go but it is very much a team sport so i don't think it's like a one solo founder and just some like whatever minions or something completely different i'm always extremely generous with equity because again not having co-founder allows you to actually split that pot equally between all members of the team founding members of the team that in my view take the same risk you know that's kind of why there's you know there's so many like sour stories around founding engineers that come in do all the job but then the they're not a co-founder so they get their like proverbial you know whatever equity stake and then they're so instead of that i think the whole founding team takes a huge leap of faith um you know they decide to work on something completely novel they they pour their hearts and souls they leave you know sometimes cushy jobs they take a pay cut they should be rewarded very well and they should be known as the team that build it so i think right now it's more like a team sport i've never seen one person build everything or two people build well maybe but you know generally it's like a five ten person team that really makes the difference the proverbial kind of paypal mafia right and i think it's correct like how they all became famous in a way for you know later in a lot but i think right now it's also really important to highlight all members on the team like we with wabi we make it a priority that like all of our members even if we're not really using Twitter that much.

37:37Eugenia Kuyda:Like they're kind of, we try to, we ask them to post about like what they shipped this week. So it's not just coming from me or some like corporate account, but it's coming from our CTO, our head of mobile, our main React Native engineer, our designer, our other designer. I think authorship is very important. Like it's a team, so let's elevate everyone on the team. But I think I find it kind of not so great when it's just like the CEO all the time. and always talk, you know, kind of promoting themselves. It's such an interesting point because this is what Paul from Browserbase talked about too, this idea of you can do so much more when you have the ability to share it amongst more people, share that sort of ability to have people share what they're working on.

38:24And I feel like maybe in some ways that authorship is split amongst maybe three people if there's three co-founders, but you have this ability to really make it so that people can really share more about what they're doing in the world. It feels like BrowserBase is a good example of this. Wabi seems to be a good example of this, where you just see all of the team members posting constantly about all the great things that they're working on. And I think there's something really special there that I'm curious if you have any recommendations for people when it comes to helping more people on their teams sort of get more spotlight on what they're working on.

38:57Is there anything that you've learned or experienced through that?

39:00Eugenia Kuyda:You actually have to push for that. I'm a huge soccer fan, so I watch a lot of soccer my favorite team and if you think about a team there is you know there there's always a coach but you know there there might be a few stars on the team but generally like you kind of know the roster right it's kind of important that you don't think of it as like a one person or just like a name of the team you know the players and I think it's very important like the players become almost like you know what you're following too and so I think when you're thinking about the especially the first founding team it's super important to get to to give people the voice and i think it should be um it should be something that comes from the ceo kind of encouraging like hey start posting like if you're launching something let's make it so that like the person who built it actually posts about it and talks about it not just the corporate account um highlight if like for example something was built by one of the team you know teammates like Like, for example, today, like, our design engineer built an incredible app with Gemini 3.