Chasing that next BIG thing (Interview)

29:33Oh, before there was layers? Oh, my gosh. Can you imagine that? No, I cannot imagine that because I don't think I've ever worked in Photoshop before layers. So I've only ever known layers, Drew. Yeah. So it's just like a bunch of years. Like, for example, I wanted to start a bank. And I didn't know anything about banking. I didn't know anything about finance. At that point, I think I had just started investing in stocks. I didn't really – can you imagine that? In 2018, I was barely aware of stocks. So I started a bank and I was like, well, I guess I'm going to be a banker. And I was like, I guess I need to go for these – like there's these accreditation tests and these different certificates you can get.

30:23So I started studying for that, thinking I needed this. But it turns out, oh, just one person on my team needs to have that. My CFO already had that. So I was like, okay, I don't have to go take this test. My co-founder and I were all set to go down and take this test that we just crammed for in a week. Normally, people spend months on this thing. We just went through it crazy. We're going to go take the test. But when was this? This was right around COVID. And so the government testing facility was shut down because of COVID. We're not going to open for months. I'm like, oh, crap. And that's when I found out I actually don't have to have this certificate.

31:03But anyways, so then I learned a ton about banking in general. I just went on LinkedIn when I knew I wanted to start this company. And I hit up all the banking CEOs in the San Diego area. And one of them got back to me about like, hey, can we get lunch? You don't know who I am, but why don't you just get lunch with a stranger? And he's like, sure. So we went and had lunch for like two hours and chatted about all things. And I learned a ton about banking through him. And then we just went around to different banks around the country and tried to find a partner. We ended up finding one through a banking platform, went through like three different banking platforms, helped a new banking platform.

31:43It's called unit.co. We were like their first big customer, built a lot of security stuff ourself because they didn't have any at the time. They modeled after what we did. And yeah, like now I know a ton about banking in case that's ever useful and about finance. And so that's how it happens. You know, you just go on these tangents here, there, and the other. I'm not sure that's how it happens, Drew. I'm really just not sure that. I'm not sure that's how it happens. Okay. Let me give, let me clue you into something that's a truth that I believe is a truth. I think these things happen to you. I don't think these things happen to other people generally.

32:23Can they? Yes. Is it possible? Yes. I'm not denying that. But I think only someone like you, and what I know of you at least, is to say, you know what? I've got an idea for wealth management, for high net net worth owners, you know, folks out there. And I got this idea for a bank for them. And I'm just going to start designing screens and flows and whatever it is. That only happens to you, Drew. And only to you do you have to learn banking, having never even touched or knew much about stocks in 2018, to then create letter. Even if it defunct, I'm really curious about this. What did you learn? Have to what did you have to learn about banking to make letter possible?

33:06Like, where did you begin? It blows, dude. It sucks. Banking sucks big time. FinTech sucks big time. FinTech seems like this place that would be an absolute gold mine. Right. But it just isn't. It just absolutely is not. The way the banking is set up is that in the US and in most places, it's a government regulated business type. And the reason they regulate it and banking super heavily is because they cannot afford to have banks go under. You can't just fail. Like a startup can just fail and no one gives a crap. Maybe some investor who overextended themselves on your round will care, but nobody else will care.

33:52A bank can't fail and it costs a lot of money to a lot of different entities if a bank fails. And so they highly regulate what you can do, what products you can offer, what prices you can offer them at, what sorts of verticals you can go into so that you will not fail. As a bank, you can't just be like, oh, wouldn't it be cool if we could offer this sort of loan and just offer it? No, you have to get approval for that kind of stuff. Really? Yeah. How do you get approval for like, give me an idea for a loan. You may have had this idea for a loan. Did you have this idea? Was this your thing or? Yeah, a new type of lending product, which would originate loans, right?

34:33Right. To do a new type of lending product, if you're a federally chartered bank, meaning you can operate in any state in the U.S., the OCC is going to be your regulator and you have to go through them. Now, this is if you're a bank. To get to be a bank is a huge deal. The U.S. stopped issuing bank licenses from the year 2007 to the year 2017 because of the banking crisis. And a bunch of the little banks got bought up by larger banks. Just to give you an idea, like your average mom and pop bank, which barely exists anymore. I mean, they're technically considered, financially considered a small business.

35:11They're making like a million dollars a year. It's nothing big. Yet you would think, oh, it's a bank. They're making tons of money. No, they're not. If they're one of the big ones, they absolutely are. because with banking, you can't make big revenues because you're regulated against this idea of loan sharking or charging too much money. You literally cannot make a lot of money in banking unless you have an enormous amount of customers. That's just how it works. What's enormous? And it will never change. Millions and millions of customers. We're talking like Chase size, Wells Fargo size, or some of the new startups that have gotten there.

35:54who can now become profitable. So like, what's the one with the gold card? Like Robin Hood's getting into banking. And what's the other R1? Revolut. Even Monzo, who was doing really well in the UK because they hand out banking licenses called these e-bank licenses really easily, was doing really good over there. Couldn't make it in the US. The regulations are just too stiff. And you got to have way more money than what they have. So banking is a very difficult – I mean, even Silicon Valley Bank failed, right? Banking is a difficult industry to be in, especially the one I jumped in. I jumped in thinking like, wow, there's nothing new and modern for high net worth individuals.

36:40Let's do something there. Well, it turns out if you want to get into that space, you have to go through money managers, wealth managers. because the wealthy people don't give a crap about who's managing or about where their money is. They just want their manager to deal with it. They're like, yeah, you deal with it. You deal with it. You figure out what's best. I don't really care. And so it's very difficult to do a B2C play in that arena. Yeah, definitely challenging. So what made you – where were you at, I suppose, in your life to make letter even an idea? Not even possible, but an idea. Yeah.

37:20So what happened to me was I had sold my company, Plazo, to GoDaddy. And it was like literally a dream scenario, like an all-cash deal with the option to jump on as an employee and get like a good paycheck and additional payouts if I stay on, right? So I stayed on there for like two years. But with that initial cash sale, I paid back my investors plus some because they made money on the transaction. And then paid some of my employees that had equity. I made sure everyone who worked with me had equity. So folks made money. And then I had money. And I had never had money before. As a matter of fact, in order to get PLASO to where it was, I had to take out a bunch of loans on the same day so they would not know about each other and they wouldn't show up on the FICO score thing, the credit report.

38:20So I took out a bunch of loans the same day just to keep the company going. I was making it up for myself, but that's it. And I needed these other employees to help sell the thing. And so I took on massive debt, like the amount of debt that would take me my entire lifetime to get out of if things didn't work out. And so, yeah, I took on that debt. But then just as I had to fire my last employee being like, sorry, I don't have any money. That literally that was on a Friday that was their last day. I came into the office on a Monday and there's an email in my inbox from GoDaddy saying, hey, we'd love to talk about partnering.

38:58and you know acquisitions always happen under the guise of partnerships i didn't know that um and then three months later i had sold my company a little over three months but it was like it to me it was like 10 years of my life it was just like so exciting and at the same time so like it's like a roller coaster of emotions because things are going your way not going your way is it going to happen it's not going to happen it's going to happen oh man and i didn't have anybody else it was just me i was the only person doing negotiations there was no advice giver on my end. No lawyers, nothing. It was just me doing it all.

39:34And so it was a great experience. It was a great experience. The company acquisition team at Good Eddie is super nice. So it was cool. Got through it all, made some money. Then I was like, well, I've never had money before. What the crap do I do with money? And I'm like, there's got to be a site somewhere before. I was like, there's got to be a site that says like what to do. I'm like, look around. I'm like, oh, there's no site. The closest you'll get is like the points guy kind of stuff. But that's like a totally different scale. And so I'm like, what the heck do I do? I have no idea. I'm like, I'm sure other people are in this situation.

40:09Maybe I should build an app for them, like to help them manage their money and have this like, you know, advisor here with you all the time that you don't have to interact with personally because no one wants to pick up the phone and call someone. So that was kind of the idea behind Letter. And that's how I arrived at that idea. And I was like, I should make a bank. No one's making banks. I could make a bank. I can make a bank. There's just a bunch of old people making banks. Is this literally right after the acquisition timeframe? Like the three months are over, the acquisition goes through, all cash, you're an employee, then letter?

40:46Or is it like a year down the line? Like, I don't understand that compressed time. It's all at the same time. So I could be very optimistic. As an example, when I was going through the transaction, this was not a done deal. But in my mind, I'm like, I could see this totally being a done deal. And we're still like a month and a half out of what would be the end date. The thing is, you don't start a process, like an acquisition process, knowing when the end date is going to be. And you don't really, it's not till you're like a week or so out that you know, like, okay, this is when it's happening.

41:22So this whole time, it's just like, could go either way. But I'm like, yeah, it's going to go my way. And so I'm looking at this house that I live in now. And I'm like, I have no money, right? I have no money. And my wife and I are going around, we're looking at homes like, yeah, let's take this one. This one's like a very expensive house. And they're like, okay, cool. If you want this house, you know, put in the application or whatever. So I put it in and they're like, we need a good faith deposit. It's typical in America to put down a little bit of money. And the deposit they wanted, like I just flat out didn't have.

41:59So I'm like, so I'm like, they wanted like, basically like, I don't remember. It was like 20 or$40 ,000. And I'm like, will you take a thousand?

42:12i'm like i promise i have the money to buy this house and i have to show them financial statements and it shows no money and i'm like i promise i promise it's there i have no idea why they just like we're like okay sure okay sure but they took the thousand bucks and they took that and i was able to get the house and it came down to the point where okay now you got to pay for the house and like, I just need like another week. And they're like, okay. And that week's coming. And I emailed them like, I know I said another week, but I'm going to need like one more week. And they're like, and they're like, okay, fine.

42:52And then that week happens. And literally like a day or two before I needed the money, I got the money myself and was able to give it to them. But so that's how optimistic I can be. So when I'm trying to remember your original question, but when the, I think it was around, yeah, letter when I started. So that kind of shows you my mindset. So I got the house. I'm an employee of the company now. I'm working at GoDaddy. I think it was probably six months or so before I came up with the idea for the letter. And I wanted to just chill out and not like work on anything other than this one thing I was doing.

43:32And so I got through that initial launch. It took me like six months to get the product out the door at GoDaddy. We got that out. And I think it was right around then when I was like talking to another buddy of mine who worked at GoDaddy that I had met there who had sold his company to GoDaddy the year before me. And yeah, I was just thinking more about finance about what I should do with the money. And there was really nowhere to turn. And I didn't want some 20-year-old kid working at Wells Fargo deciding what to do with my money who's never had money himself. No. So, I had a financial advisor who was my CFO, who ended up being my CFO at the bank.

44:11And even still, it's like, this is so manual. Everything's a phone call. Everything takes forever. It's like, it's got to be a faster way. So, that's how I came up with the idea for Letter. And what's funny is I started the company and let it end up – originally, we were going to be a bank – banking as a platform. So, like purely a code thing. And then we turned into this more like branded bank sort of thing. And I applied to YC. It took me four tries to get in. And that YC calls me and is like, hey, we think we want you in, but we're not sure. So, we're going to have another partner talk to you.

44:47Are you available in the next two minutes? Yes. they call me i pitch them and they're like okay okay okay i'm not sure and then like 10 minutes later we're gonna have you talk to another partner they're not sure talk to another there's four times four times i had to talk and finally they're like okay okay we'll let you in uh what was the pitch i don't want to i do want to hear this pitch if you can like maybe even earmark that i want to hear whatever the pitch was to these four people or some version of it to be honest i have no idea. It's been so long. I don't remember if I pitched them the banking as a platform or if it was at that point, the branded bank.

45:28I think it was the branded bank and the pitch was just like high net worth individual. Okay. So high net worth individuals are 2 % of the population. They make up 98%, 97 % of the dollars in the US. And all of these other startup banks are going after two or 3 % of the money. Whereas I'm saying, I'm going to go after this pot of like 90 plus percent of the money. Maybe it was 70%, 80%, 90%. I can't remember the numbers. It's been so long, but it's an enormous amount, vastly outnumbering everybody else on the planet. And I was like, there's a huge market here. No one's going after this. We're going to go after this and we're going to, you know, we're going to win because we're modern.

46:14We'll have an app. Literally, even now, other than later, that doesn't exist. There's a reason why is because like I said, that demographic just doesn't care. But yeah, so that was the, that was the pitch they bought into it and they're like, sweet, let's do this thing. So I got into YC. What's funny is I was in YC for three months while working at GoDaddy and I had a huge team at GoDaddy. It built up the payments team. I think we were at 16 people was my team at that time. And then plus other teams, you know, assisting us. And then I'm doing YC at the same time. And then demo day is going to come up and I've got to like schedule my GoDaddy meetings to have these gaps where I can do demo day and investor meetings.

46:59And like, I think it was like a day or two before demo day. My boss is like, hey, do you got a second? And I'm like, yeah, sure. He's like, oh, how's it going? He's like, I'm in a screen share. He's like, so I was going through this website and he has YC's website pulled up. I'm like, oh. And he's like, and I scrolled down and I saw this person. And it was a picture of me. It's a picture of me and the company. I saw this guy. And he's like, so what's going on? I'm like, yeah, I'm probably not going to stay for here forever. And so my plan was I was going to get NYC, raise money, finish up the last bits of stuff.

47:37I had to do a good adding. That's right. But he preempted that. And so then at that moment, I had to be like, yeah, I'm probably not going to stay. Sorry. Well, that was only a few months after the acquisition. Didn't you say you had a stand as an employee for a bit? No, yeah. So this was so I came up with the idea maybe six. Yeah, maybe six months or so after. and then there was a whole bunch of rigmarole about figuring out how to set up the bank what to do started the company ran the company i think for like a year before we jumped into yc um or something like that so yeah there there was about a year and a half in between in between that and then what was the company doing for like you know while you were preparing for yc like what was the company running the company so it was building the product um Um, like I said, at first we thought we were going to be a banking as a service kind of provider, but then ultimately decided we didn't want to do that.

48:36There's already a couple of the players in the space. It seemed horrible to do, and it is, and you'll talk to those companies. It's horrible. Um, and, uh, as a matter of fact, there was another banking as a service provider in YC, in my group, a guy named Dara Buckley. He was the second hire at Stripe. Um, super cool guy. We almost we're talking about merging our companies uh at one point um but uh he was doing that and um so yeah we decided not not to do that uh yeah so we were in the middle of building out this idea of a banking as a service provider and then we switched and we're like okay we're going to be the retail bank because what we were going to do is build banking as a service provider and then have our own pretend sort of active, sort of not retail bank to give people an idea of what you could build on our platform.

49:30And then we decided, let's just build that retail thing. That'll be way better. It's not really way better. Well, so hindsight on that, I mean, so letter didn't succeed long-term. I'm assuming, I don't know why it didn't succeed. Why did it not succeed? Why did it work? Ran out of money. Ran out of money. That's the practical reason. The We approached the market incorrectly and we didn't have the cash to correct, right? By the time we learned how to correct, and anyone who's in that industry, they know this stuff just takes forever. These feedback cycles take forever. So if we had landed our series A, we would have been good.

50:17So we raised a pre-seed and then I raised a seed round. And then I ended up spending all my money, way too much money on this bridge round, essentially. It wasn't really a bridge round. It was more just an open access to Drew's bank account to pay for the company to try to get to this A. So what we did is we had this investor who, a super cool guy, became a billionaire a couple of years before we started to the tune of like$4 billion. bucks and had a bunch of money, started buying up all this Western-themed stuff. And by Western, I mean like horses and cowboy stuff. So, he bought up Country Magazine, all the country stuff.

51:02He bought up all the American rodeos. He bought up all the cable programming for Western-themed stuff, was building a Western-themed movie studio because he's a former movie studio exec. and so somehow I got to be on a zoom with him and pitched him what we were doing and he was into it and wanted to invest mostly because he wanted to create a western themed bank under the brand name that he's buying all this other stuff under so we're like yes we'll do that we'll white label letter and we'll have this you know other thing for you too so that was the deal he was running it all himself. And then he brought in a team to run that brand that he had made because he didn't want to run it anymore.

51:52And the team he brought in was headed up by the former CEO of Hulu, the guy who sold Hulu to Disney. And so, then I was interfacing with him and his team. and their idea was to create an Apple TV Plus or a Disney Plus, but for Western-themed content. Well, it turns out they couldn't secure anything, literally anything. They couldn't secure anything. So he's like, hey, Drew, we don't know what we're going to do here at this brand, but we do know that it's not going to involve a bank if we can't figure out how to make money. so sorry we're no longer going to fund uh your bank and so this was me like trying to get this deal across the line for like seven or eight months uh and it was just like it was always right there just like we had paperwork sent to them they would revise send back and just like i'm like that's so close just sign the freaking paper but then then it never happened and that was early 2023 when they pulled out.

52:59That is the exact same. The same month they pulled out, it's the same month that Silicon Valley failed and everybody started pulling money out of there. And we felt that at our startup bank too. Folks weren't super comfortable with the startup bank anymore and moved their money around. So yeah, we got kind of hosed there. But we did get to use that guy's money to lend to people. And we create our own in-house lending platform where you get a loan in a few seconds. And it was a hundred percent programmatic, meaning there was no humans in the loop at all, which is crazy. And I don't know of any other thing or program that's done that, but we did that, which was fine.

53:40So that's why it didn't work. What in the world is involved in building this? I mean, I just look at you. So I don't want to downplay you. I don't want to say drew his just but just for the sake of just this conversation you're the person who taught yourself how to design in photoshop before there was layers and it's not saying that you can't learn but you're somebody who came from literally a zero in terms of like knowledge you didn't have the design skill you gained the design skill you didn't have the engineering skill because because you didn't really want it. You weren't interested in it.

54:16You gained that. And now here you are creating a freaking bank. Like, come on, Drew. People always get hung up on the bank thing. They think it's so impressive, but I don't know. It's just another business. It's just another business, huh? It's regulated. It's more regulated. It's just highly regulated. It's just unlike that. Let's say that's the reason why it's so remarkable is that it's so unlike, like, I don't know anybody who's created a bank besides you. You're the only person I know. And you're the only person I know that – what I think is actually strange now that I'm realizing my words that I'm putting out there is that you're the only person I know that created a bank and you're the person I thought would never create a bank.

55:01And then the same person. I don't understand that. Yeah, I don't think I ever had bank on my bingo card either. Yeah. Well, really the reason I wanted to do it is I'm like, no more making little apps. I'm done. I've done that to the nines. Right. Yeah. I just want to do something like big that could become a big company. Yeah. And so that was my big swing. Since then, I've come to realize that, you know, having a big win is such a – financially, it's so different than having a large cash flow. Having a big win means you can go out and buy a big house and do a bunch of cool stuff and get all this kind of crazy stuff going on and invest in these properties and do that.

55:47It's like it's what you would think of as wealth. That doesn't happen when you have a huge amount of cash flow. If you make$2 million a year, you literally can't do what I just said because you don't make enough money, even though you're making$2 million a year. It's just so different. But if you don't have cash flow, you can't do anything. You can't control your own destiny. You can't work for yourself. So having like a cash cow, like an app that's like just killing it, you know, on a small scale that lets you not have to work somewhere, that lets you get to experiment and do whatever you want.

56:26That is like the idea that is the successful life idea, right? That's not the successful finance idea. That's a successful life idea. And to be like the ultimate goal for a lot of people who are very ambitious is to have both of those. You have this windfall so you can do a bunch of cool stuff, but then you also have this cashflow. I gave away my cashflow when I sold my company. I was too inexperienced to know all this at the time. But I did get the windfall, which was great. But now I need the cash flow. And so, learning all these things that I've learned, there's always so much more to learn.

57:10And so, I got to get myself another cash cow and then I'll hopefully be, hopefully I'll consider myself set. But until then, I can't stop the doing of the things. um yeah i don't know where i'm going with that but there i said words you said words well i think okay so from plaso you had a windfall right you said it was an all cash deal you were able to take care of your investors plus so they were able to make their money back plus a percentage or an x well how do you want to frame that you paid the employees you paid early folks who had you know sweat invested into you with their loyalty and their abilities and their friendship and their whatever however you want to frame that then you obviously had your own money that was from that you took on it sound like some massive debt just to keep the company going i assume that cash you know took care of that debt no problem boom shabam but then you said in that story and tell me if this is the treacherous moment or if you're still okay, is you said that for a bit there to fund letter, it was an open, the bridge loan scenario, that letter had open access to, in your own words, Drew's bank account to make things go.

58:30Did you lose a bunch on letter or did you just, did you kind of come out even? Pure loss, pure loss. No, no, no. We made money in that there were people paying us money and money went to our bank account, but we were not profitable. So I lost a lot of money. More than. Like millions, thousands, hundreds of thousands. Millions of dollars. Millions of dollars. And this is your own cash. Yeah. For me, it was like the decisioning was like, well, if I stop Letter now, it's going to take me four years to get to the point with any other company where I'm at right now with Letter. So I may as well just keep funneling my cash into this thing and try to make it work since we've already gotten so far.

59:23And that was kind of the reasoning behind it. Had Letter worked out, everyone would have said that would have been the greatest decision you ever made. That's the best investment you ever made, Drew. But if it doesn't work out, you probably should have cut your losses earlier. You know? That's right. Yeah. How do you know in the moment? You don't, right? You don't, yeah. And so, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Actually, let me rephrase that. You always lose and then sometimes you win. Yeah. You're usually losing and then sometimes you win. And so, yeah, it makes the wins all the more sweeter when they happen.

1:00:00For sure. But at some point, you know, I'm noticing I'm 41 now and, you know, you just get sick of it. You just get sick of writing code. You just get so sick of having to design another freaking page. It's like, gosh, dang it. It's just, I'm so sick of it. Like I've designed every kind of page so many times. I've written every kind of code so many times. all the languages all the sdks all the from scratches all the things like i freaking built a a css interface to your database with fire rift back in 2009 oh my gosh like tailwind is the only thing close to that now just doing absolutely insane stuff with the class name stuff don't get me started there uh but you like that or is it a bad thing i don't want to offend anybody but no i don't like it.

1:00:54So, I don't know. Like, he just, you know, it just gets old. It gets really old. Like, all these people are 20 and I see them like, oh, just raise money through YC. I'm like, dang, you look like you're a baby. And I'm like, well, you know, it makes sense. You know, they're young and hungry. I still feel hungry, but I'm not young. And, you know, my big attempts, you know, overall turned out well, but they were never like big, big. So, I still am after my big, big one. You know, like I have these ideas. I'm like, gosh, dang it. There's someone out there making supersonic jets. Gosh, dang it. There's someone out there making robots.

1:01:36Why can't I freaking do that? I want to. but I feel in my mind that there's just this massive gap between what my ideas are and what I gravitate towards versus like what some of these guys are doing when they're making robots and stuff like my mind gravitates towards solving problems that are in front of me not towards you know problems that plague earth 100 years from now right and so I've come to the grips with the fact that it's probably how it's always going to be for me. And so my next thing I want to do is I want to build something that has an enormous cash flow, but is like we never take VC and it's just me and somebody else.

1:02:24And I think... I think I'll actually be like satisfied with that which will be cool because I've always wanted to be the person that builds the big company but I just never could figure out how to get there. yeah so i've always known you as a i would kind of classify as an inventor in a way not like a literal like you made something but you've definitely like picked us was not something and then you know creating uh icon libraries became a thing the way you engineered to deliver that initially i mean like you invented all these things to make something very simple that didn't have to be that simple i mean it could just simply you could give me some pngs or some svgs now or whatever like it could just be like thank you drew but no you went and made it you know api accessible or interactable and like all these different things we picked us over the years you're an inventor i would classify as that yeah and and i've always been disappointed in myself for not having the ability to to i could think larger i could think of things that i want to do that would be big, but I just don't have the ability to do it.

1:03:32And I've always, practically, it's broken down to the fact that I don't have the network to do that, right? And so part of me doing letter was like, ooh, especially like in YC or meeting these like IronNet with people, hopefully that will change things for me. And in some ways it has, but I just need to go even deeper there. Like that piece, those people that are creating those large companies are usually super well connected right um and that's kind of why that stuff happens practically that's why it happens that's why i like movies that get made you know you're always seeing the same people making these movies well it's because they have a network because like it's very hard to break in unless you unless you have that um so network is required you're right i mean you can't just have the the skills and the ability and the drive you have to have the other people yeah to offset like the cfo with the license for example you know so you don't have to go and do that yourself cram for a week you're your co-founder and go do that yeah if you know um the yeah one of my big stretches though in that uh i want to be a part of something very large is this thing called cortical labs i don't know if you've seen that but i just i just launched the new site there so i'm on the team there as well um doing design so it's cortical labs.com how do you spell that And C-O-R-T-I-C-A-L, cortical.

1:05:00Labs.com. And so what we've built is the very first commercially available biological computer. An actual human brain inside of a computer, and that is the CPU. That is the only, you know, CPU. So it's pretty rad. We could take a prick of your blood or sample your skin, regress that down to a stem cell, put it into the proper environment to then grow it into a neuron, put it on a chip. It'll expand and grow into multiple neurons. That chip that we have is specially designed by us. And on the bottom of it are a bunch of electrodes. So essentially, the neuron is growing on a floor that is made of electrodes.

1:05:48And then we have a bunch of connectors to that electrode. and you can program, you can write code and you can have the neurons do things for you, right? And you can receive signal back from them. And the thing that we've built is the thing that translates your code into electrical impulses to the neurons. Also, the computer, the CL1, has a bunch of hoses in it to feed the brain essentially electrolytes because brains make their own electricity through a chemical process where they break down electrolytes and sodium to convert that into electricity. So you can have this computer that virtually takes zero power, just the LCD screen that we have on there is the only power, and the pump, the little teeny pump that pumps the fluid in and out and cleans it.

1:06:42And so you can have a neuron growing in there for up to six months, or a set of neurons. So you can We have in the past, in 2021, they gave it the rules around Pong and the neurons taught themselves how to play Pong. So you could watch them playing Pong on a screen. The idea is that instead of artificial intelligence, it's actual intelligence. And where artificial intelligence is trying to get to, they're trying to get to AGI. So then you can prompt it and it can like think like a human. That thing starts at a human. It's already there and it already thinks like a human. And so it's a different approach.

1:07:22what we're building now is like an AWS server farm, you could think of it like. But instead of a bunch of computers and hard disks, it's a bunch of these CL1s stacked on top of each other. So you can access a brain computer through the cloud instead of having to have one. So you can either buy one and develop on it locally or you can develop through the cloud. Well, now I'm angry with you because you just dropped this massive conversation here in front of us. It was not part of my plan, Drew. This was not part of my plan. Cannot ruin an interviewer's plan. Brains. I'm just kidding with you. This is wild.

1:08:03And so what role do you play for Quarter Call? So I'm the designer there. And I saw a video on Twitter by Robert Scoble a year and a half or more ago. where he interviewed Han, who is the CEO at Cortical and the founder. And he was up in Han's hotel room. Han was there for like a trade show of sorts. And Robert met up with him and like filmed what he's working on. I was watching this thing. I'm like, this is freaking crazy. And it's all the stuff that I've been thinking about in my mind about how things are going to go in the future and where they're going to end up. And I was like, I have to get a hold of this guy.

1:08:46So I asked Robert, I'm like, dude, I'm like, can you get me in touch with this guy? I'm a designer. They need design help. And he's like, I think it's too early for that. And so he wouldn't put me in contact. So I was like hitting up Han on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on all the ways I could find. Eventually he responds to me and we meet up. Conversation goes well. They're not totally sure they need a designer or anything like that. And I ended up talking to him for like a year. And finally he's like, all right, cool. We need a designer. Jump in. And so I got to join the team in like December and then quickly built out this website in January and launched it in early February.

1:09:25And then had a little bit, I was able to change some of the colors on the CL1, but didn't have any influence on the way that that thing looks. I will on the next iterations. And then now working on, going to be working on the cloud interface. So when you log in, you can, you know, get yourself set up on coding against one of these brains in the cloud. Brains in the cloud. I love it. Okay. So let me zoom out then like this. Who was this person again at GoDaddy that pulled you aside and was like, I was on the YC website. Who is this person here? Like, I kind of feel like that person in this moment here.

1:10:05Was that person again? Was he your manager or was it? Yeah, he was my manager. Your manager. so here you are clerk and i know clerk because they've sponsored our show before uh met ceo great team there super cool where they do auth i mean very focused on next and the front end kind of things for when it comes to authorization and this whole entire ui kit so here you are you're working at clerk you are you i i don't know what you're doing honestly you got a job you got several jobs? How do you be a designer for Cortical, Clerk? How are you doing all this? Yeah. So at Clerk, I'm actually on the leadership team there.

1:10:51And I am the head of design. So I've got a team of like, I think there's 12 of us now designers. And then I'm also the head of commerce and billing, which is our new product, which has a very large team right now as we're getting prepping for launch in the next week. So yeah, lots of responsibility there. That is, that is like pretty much all that I work on is, is clerk. The reason I can work on cortical and clerk at the same time, cortical's designs needs are, you know, vastly less than, you know, what clerk needs. And there's not a team essentially that I have there. It's just me. so it's way easier to manage um also uh it's not like a paid job i mean i have equity but it's not a paid job or making a salary or anything and clerk is also cool with people doing side projects like a lot of people to come in and do side projects um and have side businesses so as long as it's you know not interfering with work and you're not doing it during you know times that you need to be at work then you're good to go and uh so that's that's my situation there but i just really wanted to be a part of cortical like to say that this is i'm not kidding man it is literally the first commercially available biological computer and i freaking designed some of it i mean i wasn't the guy who came up with the idea or anything like that but i designed the whole site and helped design a little bit uh and it's cool to be to be a part of that and um it there's a lot of good that can come out of that technology.

1:12:30Personalized medicine being one of them, you can take your skin cells, literally Adam, you can have your skin cell turn into a neuron, put into a CL1 and instead of testing, let's say you have some brain disorder or some chronic disorder that you're trying to get rid of, epilepsy, cerebral palsy, there's a bunch of stuff. Let's say you you want help, but here's these drugs that were developed and they could be fatal. Like there could be all these risks. You take that thing, that's your one shot, right? Well, let's say you could just put that thing, drop it into your other atom, your mini atom, your brain, and see how it responds, right?

1:13:13How does it affect that? If it dies off, you're good to go. It didn't affect you at all, right? There's just so many cool things that can come about. And then as a drug manufacturer, where you're like, how do I test this in people? Well, you can't. You have to get all these approvals. You have to first do mice, then monkeys, then this, then that. And it takes a freaking decade by the time you get to people. And then so with this, you can just start testing it right away. There's just so many cool things that can come out of that technology. It's very nascent. So folks don't know exactly how it's going to be used, what it's going to be used for.

1:13:47But there's just so many potential use cases. and then clerk separately is a freaking awesome company the thing i like about clerk is that if i were to run a company it would be very similar to how clerk runs so i feel very at home at that company which is really cool and you know there are a couple they're like a step or two beyond what i what i was able to get to with my companies clerk is essentially plaso what i my My old company 2.0. It's the exact same thing. Embeddable auth, embeddable billing. That's exactly what Plasso did back in 2014. And Clerk is the same thing, just the React way, right?

1:14:24The newer style. And so it's cool in some ways. I have a lot of experience with that stuff. So it ends up working out. What made you, this might show some of your cards a little bit, but like hearing your story, I suppose, in this conversation, and then being aware of what you've been doing for the last decade, let's just say. To me, I wouldn't think that you would need a job. That you would just have enough wealth and you could just do whatever you want. What makes you take on this job? You would be wrong, Adam. Am I way wrong? You would be wrong, Adam. Oh my gosh. Yeah, yeah. Sadness. No, it's not sadness.

1:15:06It's not sadness. It's great. Yeah, let me rephrase that. It's sadness that that was wrong, not sadness that that's true. Yeah. I invested a lot of money smartly. And I used a lot of that money for letter. So I made like in the span of between 2018 and 2022 or three before the market crashed, I made a lot of money. And I like built this huge office and addition and movie theater and all this kind of stuff in my house. So like my house is like this premium playground. And then I spent all the other money on the letter, which wasn't my intention.

1:15:52And so a lot of that extra money that I was counting on to have long term, I made the decision to like spend it. And I was like, well, if it doesn't work out, I'll just get a job. I'll still be able to maintain the lifestyle I have if I can just get a job. And I should be able to get a job fine. So, obviously, ideally, I didn't want to have to get a job. But the play with letter didn't work out. And so, I did have to. And so, that's where I'm at. But what's cool is like the investors who invested in letter were all like, we've never seen anybody do this. So this is really cool that you're doing this, you know, taking on this risk.

1:16:34And, you know, most of them said you shouldn't put your own money into your own company. That's what investors are for. But they all appreciated that I was right there along, you know, with them. so that even though the transaction didn't work out for them financially i think for me it worked out and that they have more respect for me and so should i raise money for something in the future i think they'll you know their walls will be faster opened to me than maybe previously so yeah yeah exactly exactly you win some you lose some man you do win some you lose some you know I'm way better off than when I started, though.

1:17:13So it's not like I took any steps backwards. It's definitely, it was like, you know, 100 steps forward and some steps backwards. Well, don't let this seem like I'm judging your, this is not a report card for Drew, okay? Yeah. It's not me examining your English and your social studies and your gym, because gym is always a class, too. You know, I'm not examining those things and saying, okay, great. You've, you've passed the sixth grade. You can go to junior high kind of thing. That's not what we're doing here. Yeah. But I think we're peeling back the layers a little bit to just understand like the reasons for the move.

1:17:46So it sounds like it's something you got some equity in quarter call. The CL one sounds super dope. I mean, I'm not even talking about it. Not because I'm not interested because I just know it'll take over the whole thing. And so like, I'm not even going to go there yet. and then you have obviously value con so you brought this back after what you said it hasn't happened for seven years it's been a big deal for a lot of folks you know you're bringing back the conference um what can we expect i suppose there what can we expect with clerk what kind of uh other good next moves do you have in you yeah i would i would suggest if you're listening go check out valuecon.com sign up come out hang out it's going to be a good time i've got a lot of cool speakers.

1:18:33They're going to be there. A couple that I'm just waiting on the final, like not actual signature, but final go ahead. And then they'll be up on the site too. But it's going to be a good time. It's like a vacation. So if you want to like get away, bring your family. If you don't have family, just bring yourself. Come hang out, hang out with old friends, meet new people. It's right on the beach. We do s'mores on the sand. We all get lunches together. It's a good time. There's one track. so everyone's in the same room at the same time um and you end up making a lot of friends folks really love their experience at value con have done it for like i said six years and then there's a break so um lots of good things that people have said about it um so come out value con would be a good time if you're in design in engineering and tech at all like uh there's going to be a ton of stuff that you can learn from it one of the other focuses of value con is giving people who don't normally speak at conferences, a chance to speak at a conference.

1:19:35And, you know, if they're doing something really cool, I want to feature them. I want them to, you know, have a platform to talk about what they're doing. So, that's also another focus on value con is getting folks who've never spoken to come talk about what they're doing. So, yeah, definitely come out for that. What's new in Clerk is we are right on the cusp. I mean, maybe when this thing, I'm not sure when this episode will go out, but maybe when this episode go out, Clerk Billing will have launched. Should have it next week. Yeah. Clerk.com slash billing is where you'll go for that page. And what's really cool about Clerk is that it makes authentication super easy.

1:20:14Kind of like Stripe did 15 years ago or whenever they started, they made this pitch that, you know, we want to own the credit card data at your company and you're no longer going to have ownership of it. We're going to own it, but we're going to build some really cool software around it to make it really easy to use and build in a bunch of fraud and safety and monitoring protections for you. And they actually won that argument. People stopped using whatever they were using to reconcile credit cards on their own. And they gave all that data to Stripe. And Stripe built some really cool APIs and stuff around it to make it really easy and actually easier to access than if you'd done it on your own.

1:20:56And so Clerks doing the same thing with the user table, which is for a lot of engineers a harder thing. But as we scale engineering and as it goes downstream into less and less technical folks with AI is now happening, they don't really care. they are happy to give up their user table to clerk to say you handle the user record because you're going to build this amazing software around it these cool apis these cool uis they're just going to make it where i don't even have to think about this stuff right so clerk's done a really good job to date on that argument and winning folks over and showing how much better it can be to build your app on clerk than not build your app on clerk the next major step to that user from a company perspective is like, I want to make money off this user.

1:21:47And so that's where this new product billing comes in. So it's really the second product that Clerk will have ever offered. They have off and now they have billing. And so we're going to, everything that we're building at Clerk in terms of billing is all native to Clerk. So we're not actually using Stripe's billing product. We're just using Stripe for payments and eventually PayPal for payments. And you'll be able to pick between them. And for right now, though, all of the recurring billing logic, all of the invoices, the payment attempts, the emails, all that stuff is native and built into Clerk.

1:22:24And what that means is we can tailor these plans that you create, these subscription plans you're going to create to SaaS, right? And we don't have to account for every other type of business like Stripe has to. So we can get very narrow focus to make the UI and the UX way better. Then separately, there's this idea of entitlements. Okay, someone signed up for a bronze plan, and this is a person who signed up for a gold plan. Well, what do they have access to? Well, usually if you're using Stripe or some other program or system, you've got to then build out these entitlements in your app internally.

1:23:00And you have to somehow reconcile them and keep them in sync with the plans that they're signing up with. And you have all these if statements all over your code saying, if bronze plan and if has this feature and if that entitlement do this, that, and the other thing, but if this, blah, blah, blah, blah. So it gets crazy. And so at Clerk, what we're doing is we're merging those all into one thing. And so when someone signs up or when you're creating your plan, you can assign features to it and entitlements and you can set the parameters on those. And you can have them be the same on gold and on platinum by just adding the features to both of them.

1:23:32or you can slightly tweak that feature to have this number of credits versus that one has this number of credits. You can do all that right from the UI inside of Clerk. And then in your code base, you just use our has function, auth.has, the name of the feature. And then it will automatically check to see who are they logged in as. And if you're in an organization situation, because Clerk also supports orgs where you have roles, this has function will automatically look at the role this user is logged in as. Are they logged in as an admin or a member? And maybe admins have the thousand credits and members only have the 50.

1:24:13And it will just automatically figure that out for you. So then the entitlement scenario on actually building out your app becomes way easier than it ever would anywhere else. And I mean that sincerely because that is the truth. so it's just it ends up becoming just a way better experience as an engineer and you can get to like making money so much faster just yeah so this is the goal right yeah i mean uh when i recall some of the details behind clerk was like it was really great uh i think they were struggling with migration from other auths but like really great for green if you build here It's amazing because you don't have to backpour all this cruft that you are used to building.

1:25:00You could essentially just start green and use the has function and other things that are available to Clark to make it more of a clean flow into what you're building versus migrating from something else like Auth0 or whatever that might be out there. Yep. Yep. I think that's accurate. We are working right now on migration tooling and improving that stuff. That's like a separate team working on that stuff right now. So it'll all get better in the future. And what's cool is like the reason Clerk is called Clerk is because we want to take on the boring administrative duties that you don't want to deal with.

1:25:39And to start with, to actually do that, you know, all software, if you think about it, all software is just decoration on top of a user record. Every single piece of software is that. And so you got to start at the user record and then you can build out these other products like Auth and like a number of other things that we're going to launch in addition to Auth. And we're going to move into other business verticals, which is going to be great. So what's crazy is if you look at Auth, it's like a 10 plus billion dollar industry. I don't know, tens of billions of dollar industry. But if you look at payments and you look at commerce, that's a multi-trillion dollar industry.

1:26:14It's like a whole nother scale. And so the way I see it is that our billing product will become the breadwinner, not overnight, but decently quickly within a couple of years at Clerk and will outpace in terms of revenue all the businesses that we launch by a factor of many, which is great. We help people make money. So it'll be good. It'll be good. What else? What is left? We got a few more minutes to chat, about three-ish from my examination of the clock here. What else is left unsaid? What else is left? What's the next big idea? Can you tease your next big thing? So I'm working on something.

1:27:04And when I say that, I mean that very loosely. Every week, I get like an hour. It'll slow down soon for me after launching everything. But I'm barely working on a thing called Opacity. And this comes from my experience working with teams. And I've teased Opacity on my Twitter account, but I don't really have a website or anything for it yet, though I do have an entire product designed in Figma. And we're working on the engineering side of it now. So this is something I'm working on with Michael Jackson. So in our spare time, he created React Router and Remix. And he and I, we live very close to each other.

1:27:48Our daughters are friends and we see each other all the time. So we've always wanted to build something together. And so we're working on this now together. And so Opacity is, it's a way for designers and engineers too, but mostly designers, to build and maintain components, right? So the idea of building a web interface, not a marketing site, but like a web app, components are the way forward. And people have known that for a while. You don't really build things willy nilly anymore. You build via components, whether you're choosing React or web components or whatever the crap. You have this idea of this isolated set of functionality based on UI, right?

1:28:36And since that is what everyone's doing, and that's the way forward, there hasn't really been a tool yet to make that happen in an easy way. If you look at Figma, you can build a component, you can drag things out and create instances. But then when you actually want to turn that into code, they have this thing called dev mode. And the idea of dev mode is a mission that says we will never be able to make these things, the idea of a design and the coded version, be the same. The fact that there is a dev mode toggle means we have resigned to the fact that they will never be the same. If they could be the same, there would be no need for a dev mode.

1:29:16They would just be the same. Figma's canvas is not a DOM. it is a giant WebGL thing, right? So they can never match the same. As a matter of fact, if you look at the way they do blurs, if you look at the way they do drop shadows, they're never one-to-one with what you see in code. They're bordering. All that stuff works totally differently because it's not the way the DOM works. Not that one's better than the other, it's just it's not how the DOM works. So you can never visually get one-to-one. and they always have to build all these features like auto layout and this and the other thing just to try to like match the dom and so what opacity is is a canvas that is the dom and you drag and drop just like figma you build boxes uh and and the boxes that you build and the inputs that you put in there everything is all actually just dom and so you can style and design it and you can create a component and then you can go to the pages tab and like build out a whole page where you're creating instances of those components, dragging them, dropping them.

1:30:22But the thing is, everything that you're doing is actually code. And so the export of opacity is a NPM package. It's a package that you can include into any of your projects that is essentially all of your components coded out. You don't have to care what we use to style it in CSS. you don't have to care about any of that stuff. All you have to do is like, okay, export this thing. And by the way, there's full, like, it looks like GitHub. It's like full version controlled and everything. Because that's the other major piece I want is like, there has to be, like in Figma, if you change something, you don't know who changed it.

1:30:57When did it break? How did it break? You just destroy everything just by one click. And there's no rollbacks, nothing. Like opacity has all that. Opacity is like GitHub and Figma combined. But the export is an NPM package. and then you have all these props that you set up in opacity. So you could say, okay, the title color can be this, the text size can be that. You can set up any props you want and then you can expose those. Let me rephrase. You can set up any variables you want and then you expose those variables as props. You can choose which variables you want to expose and which you don't.

1:31:33And then those props are now available in code. So when you're including my cool new checkout component, all these props that you said you have, you can include them in code. And as you know, with any prop, like any component-based system, you can actually extend props. So if you have your business logic that you want to add to these components, then you can. You can create a, you know, an actual checkout is the name of the component, which is really a wrapper around the checkout component, right? And it has all your business logic in it. And maybe you really just use the actual checkout component throughout your code base.

1:32:12So you can attach these other props to it, but that's, you know, that's up to you. That's how, that's however you want to do it. We're, we just care about the look and the feel and also the, some of the eventing there's events built in. So you can like have click events, have hover events, all that stuff that is just like not going to change. Maybe you want a hook for the click event and we, we, we give you a way to do that. So it's the idea of like, if you were to build actual products visually, like this would be the ideal way to do it. And that's what opacity is. Eventually a Figma killer or a Figma acquisition.

1:32:50Could this be your, could this be your whale? Maybe. We don't want to take any investment. We just want to build it ourselves and build a company. Yeah. Cashflow company. It's not saying we would never sell. I'm not saying that whatsoever. But I don't think it would be a Figma killer in that people would use this in place of Figma. Because if you're designing a website that's not an app, you're going to probably want to use Figma. It's built for that sort of thing. But if you're going to build a UI, I would think that hopefully most people will be moving off of Figma and onto Opacity for that.

1:33:31That's kind of the goal. As a matter of fact, one of the things you get whenever you create a new project in Opacity, you ultimately create a set of components in that project. And you can share that. And you can spread that out on the web to anybody you want. And when they click to go to view that page, they don't have to have an Opacity account login or anything. They're viewing essentially a storybook. Are you familiar with React Storybook? so you see your components visually and you can like see the props and like change them and edit we're not using storybook we're using our own thing but it's essentially storybook and you can see all the components and like mess with them and um so when you think about it that way that's that's what we're building and that's like that's what you would want to see if you're like here's our design system oh just use this link it's already built for you this is exactly how everything works and and here it is all visually um what's crazy is this product doesn't exist anywhere.

1:34:33Yet it's like the thing that everyone would want. So it's cool. So all you got to do is get more random hours over the next, however long to do that. Yeah. Well, I'm sure that I'm sure this next big idea will come to fruition because you're Drew Wilson. That's how it works. At least in my experience with you, maybe your own version of your own path is a little different. But my, for me, outside looking into your world, that's how it seems. It'll happen. You got to add an extra F in there. It comes to fruition and failure. That's usually what happens. Ah, yes, yes. Well, I mean, there is no sweet unless you've got some bitter, right?

1:35:18The bitter is never as bitter unless you've tasted the sweet. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Cool. Well, I'm sure we could talk for longer. It's been awesome having you back on the pod. It's been way too long. If this didn't, you know, cover everything you wanted to, I'm happy to have you back on and dig even deeper. I mean, we barely scratched the surface of things I think we could talk about, but it has been. Dude, I'm totally down. It's fun chatting with you. I've missed this. It's been great. I mean, if folks don't know, we used to run a podcast together called The Industry. Oh, my gosh, man. Back in 2012.

1:35:55Yeah. So it's been a while. It has been a while, man. It's always fun. Jared Arondu, me and you, the industry. Yep. The random show. Yeah. The days, man. The days. And yet, we've never met face-to-face. I've never been to ValueCon. We've never shaken hands. Yep. Dude, the internet's crazy. You could do stuff like that. Yeah. You could be a founder, co-founder situation with a buddy. and never really meet them. It's wild. And I realized in this conversation, in the first few minutes of it, was that you were the person I think I'd learned or heard the phrase more frequently than I ever have before called, what the crap.

1:36:42That's one of your phrases you like to say, because I'm sure you like to cuss a lot. So I'm sure you say what the crap instead of something else. Yeah. And I think I began to say what the crap, because I'm also like that. I like to just cuss less. I'm just not much into profanity. Although I do do it. Just don't do it publicly a lot. You know, stub my toe. I'm going to say a bad word. I'm not going to say what the crap. Yeah. But on a podcast, it's what the crap, you know, kind of thing. Yep. Dude, I hear you. I hear you. Yeah, it's good. Like my kids now are old and grown. Almost all of them are teenagers now.

1:37:24and you gotta watch yourself they like to do what you do they do and they emulate you even if you don't want them to if you're like don't do what I do they're like listen my default my default gear is dad or mom gear like wherever they're going I'm going that direction so it has been fun Drew thank you so much for sharing your journey again and getting into some details and we'll see if I can get you back on man yeah dude it's been great thanks again for having me and uh we'll chat later all right man

1:38:01well friends i hope you enjoyed this episode it was very much to me like a behind the scenes look in a way you know drew and i are friends and i i felt like this was very much a conversation between he and i and we just happen to share it with the world you know drew's one of my favorite people out there he's always been on the cusp of what's next he's always had a good opinion a good take on what's worthy of your attention what's worthy of your time and where the industry is going and on that note we produced the podcast the industry radio show it's not on the internet anywhere whatsoever to see it was a fun time and i hope you enjoyed it of course a big thank you to our sponsors of this episode heroku love the next generation of heroku coming out retool big fan of retool as you know and recently became a big fan of depot what would you do if your bill was 10 times faster that's the question depot.dev and of course break master cylinder those beats are banging got a new album out there after party check it out changelaw.com slash beats see all our albums okay that's it the show's done we'll see you on friday

1:39:17Thank you.