Why the Future of Software is AI and Human Collaboration | Steven Fabre, Co-founder and CEO, Liveblocks

22:36Turner Novak:You know what I mean? Like there's There's different, I guess, a little bit more of metadata around the information that you're getting with Google. You're getting more context before you actually click on the thing. Essentially, I never thought about it that way, but that makes sense. Yeah. Well, yeah, with ChatGPT, which is kind of the main element that I use personally, I'm always cautious about like, I think this is directionally right. But like, I don't have, sometimes it does hallucinate quite a bit, to be honest. it does tell you things that are not true. Even when you ask it for the source, sometimes it will tell you the thing, but the source is actually not a real source or whatever.

23:15Turner Novak:Yeah, and one of the things that's kind of been brought to light lately is that majority of the ChatGPT sources is literally from Reddit. And who is putting it on Reddit? It's the company saying, what's the best search engine? Oh, Google. Google's great. You should go to Google. Or like, what is the best food if you want to be really healthy? Like McDonald's has X amount of nutrients. Reddit is a big part in training the models. Like if you... I started exploring a lot like the... I forgot how you call it the AISU. GEO. GEO, yeah. One of the best practice thing you can do is actually post on Reddit.

24:01And post in a way that doesn't feel spammy, something that feels really genuine. because Reddit is actually pretty strict about that stuff. But that's how AI gets trained and that's how you show up in AI results. If a lot of people are giving your company or your solution as the solution for the specific topic people are asking for. So it's quite... Yeah, it's interesting.

24:24Turner Novak:Yeah, I mean, it's like one of those things you do want to be genuine and honest as the company and also as a consumer. You should be like... You should just understand. I personally, I think it makes it harder to vet stuff because it's hard to know who controls a Reddit account. Like didn't. Yeah, I mentioned this on the podcast, like the whole like Epstein files thing with just Lane Maxwell, his like secondhand woman. She was like a top Reddit moderator on like multiple subreddits. Did you know this? I had no idea for real. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like it hasn't been specifically proven, but there's been like the account that they thought she was linked to.

25:04Turner Novak:It stopped posting the day she got arrested and like taken into custody. And it was like a top moderator and like top poster that like basically like gatecapped Reddit. For what kind of topics like stuff related to like world news, like shaping the narrative of like how people think about and discuss just like cultural and high level political things. And so, I mean, I think Reddit is great. I use it all the time. Like for sports, I like love getting information and like seeing people discuss things. But I mean, there's, you do need to understand like a layer deeper of like what your, where your information is coming from.

25:39Turner Novak:And it's like, it can kind of be masked and, you know, the sources can be muddied a little bit. So anyways, I don't use it much, but yeah, I'm more of a Twitter guy, but yeah, it's pros and cons as well. Twitter. So yeah, I mean, Twitter is another one. It's like, you just got to know. I mean, yeah. Pretty big on Twitter, Turner. I feel like you're the meme connoisseur of VC meme. Yeah, it's a good strategy. Memes are a good marketing strategy that a lot of people, I think people know that now, but. It works. Maybe we should do this for Lifebox. I think like do a bunch of memes around. I don't know what the topic would be, but yeah, definitely works for you.

26:20Turner Novak:Yeah, one thing you've done, you've done a really good job just trying to really like marketing. I think launching products, generally speaking, you get a lot of attention, even though you're not really doing memes. I think you've gotten a number one on Product Hunt multiple times. I think we got number one once, I think, and we got, yeah, multiple times we're in the top three or top five. So what's a general framework for doing well with a launch? Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of thought about this. I think product hunt depends on your market. I've had launches where I was like, I think this was a lot of investment for not a lot of returns, but I also have had the opposite.

27:03So I think in our case, what's challenging with product hunt is that we are a dev tools company. And so developers are not necessarily on product hunt.

27:14Turner Novak:I feel like they're more hacker news. Yeah, that's more hacker news or Twitter or Reddit even. And also, developers are allergic to marketing, I think, and marketing BS. They can really smell that. But still, for us, I think it's important to be present with product people, which tend to hang out on product hunts. And so having some visibility there has been super helpful. So I think in terms of being successful on product hunts, there's a lot of things you need to do. You need to prepare a lot in advance. So you basically want to prepare what you're going to post on product hunts, beautiful images that you're going to post there, a really nice demo video that's really well designed and put together.

27:57Prepare the right content. You want to also prepare things that will create some type of buzz, especially at the beginning of the day. Because people that are listening, the thing with product hunts is that it's basically happening at midnight. Pacific time. So as soon as it's midnight, that's like the beginning of the launch and it lasts for 24 hours. And so the first four to six hours are like actually pretty critical because that's when Asia is sort of starting to vote and like, then you get it to Europe. And so you want to make sure that that initial traction is there because otherwise you're not going to be at the top of the least.

28:38Turner Novak:So you'd usually get whoever is awake at 12 a.m. Pacific. So that's like India. Is that like India? It'd be like lunchtime for them. You probably get usually what I do because for me, because I'm in Paris now, it's at 9 a.m. for us. So at 9 a.m. you typically get Europe. You also get evening time from Australia.

29:05So basically what I do, every time we launch something, I have a list of like investors or like customers that really like Liveblocks, people from our community. And like ahead of time, I actually tell them like, you probably got some of those emails to turn it yourself.

29:21Turner Novak:Yeah. Yeah. I get them all the time. I'm sorry if I've been spamming you for this. Do you set those up with like an auto sender? Or are you copy and pasting from a good Google Doc? A lot of copy and pasting, actually. I tried to automate it at some point. I tried to automate some of that stuff, but it didn't really work. Because I think when you automate things and you send actual... Then it turns into an email newsletter. And so then your email is going to be in the kind of promotion folder. Spam folder or whatever, yeah. Yeah, or spam folder or something like that. So what I've done is either you BCC people or you sort of DM them one by one.

29:59So what I've done in the last launch, and that's where we finished first, actually DM people one by one, wherever they are. WhatsApp, SMS, Slack, email. And I keep track and I literally do that with hundreds of people. It takes me an entire day to do it manually.

30:17Turner Novak:So yeah, so you have to figure out, is it worth being number one? Do you get enough to spend an entire day? The visibility you get from that is definitely there. You definitely see Mnaptic in terms of visitors and awareness. So it really helps.

30:36It depends, I think, what your space is in. I think for DevTools company, it matters probably less, to be honest, because the end users, the people that are going to actually use the product are not the people that are on Product Hunt. But for us, the people that are on Product Hunt, they adjust them to like blocks. And so they're actually pretty likely to recommend us to engineers. if you're a product person or a designer. If you see that what we push out is actually well-designed and well-put-together, I'm pretty convinced that people then talk about it. And so, yeah, I'll probably still do it, but it's definitely a lot of work and investment.

31:08There's another benefit I would say around Product Hunt is not just the amount of inbound that you get from the people seeing that on Product Hunt or social. I find it good practice to have moments and marketing moments internally because that creates a bit of urgency and momentum internally within the team to actually complete something by a specific date. And even if that is a little bit artificial, it actually enables you to move faster and also have something worth celebrating as a team once it's done. So I always try to have... I think about those things in terms of like, it's kind of like a heartbeat sort of, like you have like big launches, big marketing moments, and then like maybe you have like smaller updates throughout the year.

31:58For us, I always try to have like two, maybe three max big, what I call big marketing moments, which turn out to be like product hunt launches or like big version updates or like launch weeks. those tend to be big moments, but then you want to also have like in between those moments, you want to make sure you keep showing momentum internally. And so like having like blog posts and updates and things like that is kind of the framework I'm using internally. So I guess I'm going to do this also, but yeah, I hope that sort of answers the question.

32:32Turner Novak:I feel like you have a couple, like I think you're on Liveblocks 3.0, I think it's like 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, like how's the product kind of evolved over time? Yeah, so we started the company in March 2021. So we're getting close to five years now. Crazy, looking back. First version, so Lightblocks 1.0, chapter one, was very much focused on building a real-time infrastructure for developers. And what we offered was like fairly low-level APIs to build real-time applications, like Figma. We had pretty good traction with this, but what we've learned is that if you wanted to build a Figma-like application or Google Docs-like application on top of that infrastructure and those low-level APIs that we provided, there was still a significant amount of engineering work to do.

33:25Like creating the actual interface? Basically creating the interface and all the patterns and UX on top of that infrastructure. The infrastructure was actually just a tiny part of what made those products great. And so that was a big learning for us because while we saw a significant amount of adoption that enables you to raise more money and continue to grow the company, we actually struggled to make this a decent business. And I think there was just way too much engineering work on top of this to really build an amazing collaborative product like Figma. So then we entered chapter two and that's LiveBlocks 2.0.

34:03And that's when we started shipping pre-built components for specific collaboration use cases. So we started looking at different verticals and like, okay, what makes a great collaborative software like Figma, Notion, Linear, Google Docs, etc. And what we find is that across all those products, they all had commenting system, they all had notifications, and a majority of them had a collaborative text editor piece in them. So what we started doing is, okay, let's actually build pre-built React components for comments. Let's do the same thing for a notification inbox. Let's do the same thing for a rich text editor that feels like Google Docs.

34:46Then when we started shipping those pre-built components, we've seen a massive inflection in terms of our growth because now those components enable developers to access all the infrastructure that we have built but the time to value was just like shortened by a significant amount. And so if people were looking for like a specific use case, okay, I need a commenting system in my app with notifications so that when people are mentioned, they get notified. Or actually I need something that feels like Google Docs or Notion. That's like a text editor. When I select text, I can do annotations in context.

35:18I can do that kind of stuff. Now we sort of narrowed our ICP, but those people that needed this was like much, much easier to adopt like blocks. And so that was second chapter for us.

35:31Turner Novak:So it was like all the things that people were going to use the infrastructure for, you just built it for them so they could super easily roll out all the features instead of having to build it themselves. Basically, instead of just giving a little infrastructure, what we started doing is like actually providing the interface on top of that infrastructure, which is a bit more opinionated. you can still customize a lot of that stuff, but it's opinionated and it does one thing really well. That really helped. And so now we're entering chapter three, version 3.0 of Liveblocks. And this one is very much about leveraging all the stuff we've built to enable people to work together, but bringing AI into that story so that people can now actually collaborate with AI using very similar patterns, as I said earlier, being able to mention an AI inside a comment, and being able to mention an AI inside of a text document.

36:24When the AI is actually doing work, being able to be notified when that work is done, wherever you are, in your email, in Slack, or whatever the case might be. So meeting people where they are, sort of building that infrastructure and all the orchestration for that.

36:40Turner Novak:I mean, is that really that hard? Like, why do you need lab blocks for it? Like, couldn't you just like, it's like an ad mention for a thing. Like, I don't know, what do you guys solve that's so hard for developers? Well, I think what's really hard there is UX and making sure all the pieces work well together. Sure, you could build... For comments, for instance, you could build a pretty basic commenting system yourself. But when you think about enabling things like attachments, comments, emoji reactions, mentions, making sure that when somebody is mentioned, the system is actually aware of if that person has read that comment or not.

37:27So that when you notify that person, you actually don't spam them and you only send them when they need to actually see the notification. There's a lot of logic and things that make an experience feel really great. So when you start to add those things across comments, a collaborative experience where people can actually edit a document together simultaneously, there's a lot of complexity in those areas that basically using a tool like LiveBlock saves you a ton of time. First, when you go to market, but also the maintenance aspect of things after the fact. So, yeah, our focus is very much on making sure the orchestration is handled and works beautifully across the board.

38:11And I would say our expertise as well is around the end user experience. So we spend a lot of time looking at some of the world class tools out there, like Google Docs, Notion, Figma, trying to reverse engineer some of the patterns and things that they built. and try to make that available for other companies so that they don't have to do that themselves and spend a ton of months, a bunch of, like, could take months or years kind of doing that yourself in-house.

38:38Turner Novak:You mentioned, so it's like Q4 of 2025 right now. I know back in 2024, you kind of started to get pulled towards more of, like, enterprise customers, larger, like, more established products that were starting to use you. I remember when we first met back, you were like, oh, new startups are building online blocks. And now you've kind of evolved into, there's still that, but now there's also like, you know, I think there's a company that's like 40 years old that's a customer, right? So like what was kind of happening during over that time? Yeah, definitely. I think for the last year and a half, we've definitely seen a shift going from like indie developers and like smaller startups to bigger companies kind of starting using live blocks.

39:23that was a huge learning experience for me because I've never really done enterprise sales myself. So yeah, I really had to focus on that, learn a ton. Still very much learning, but yeah, we definitely made that shift. And so that enabled us. Basically one thing we wanted to prove is like, okay, is there a meaningful business behind Lifeblocks that can we actually sell to enterprise? And we've definitely checked that mark now. So yeah, I took an advisor on the go-to-market side, worked with him for like six to nine months, really helping me grow the revenue to, I think at the time, about a half a million dollar, which is not that much looking back.

40:10Turner Novak:Significantly larger now. Definitely larger, yes. We've grown quite a bit. Well, I think like a couple of customers you may mentioned, I don't know who you're all allowed to say publicly, but I think I'm allowed to say them. You have people like, like Cisco, PwC, Rippling. I think Magic Patterns is like a kind of like a younger starter that people probably heard of. Typeform, I think uses it, Resend. So what are like some ways, I don't know who you're allowed to like link up with the product. Maybe they can get mad at me for saying their names. but like what are some some of those maybe some of those companies some other ones like what are some things that they've kind of done that people might be interested in yeah for sure so like a good example rippling you mentioned they've recently released a one-on-one tool so basically rippling is a hr platform hr tech and so they have companies using that they're told so that their managers can handle one-on-one conversations with their direct reports.

41:12They build this tool with LiveBlocks. And so they have a Google Docs like TextEater that's real-time and multiplayer. So multiple people can edit it simultaneously and they can leave annotations and comments right there. Mention the people so that they get notifications. So they built all that stuff with LiveBlocks. Magic Patterns, they recently raised the Series A. they built the entire product foundation on top of LiveBlock. So they have, for those who don't know, Magic Patterns, it's kind of like a design, AI designing tool. AI version of Figma, I suppose. Like it's a visual creative tool to build landing pages and apps visually on a canvas.

41:54They've built this with LiveBlock. So it's a canvas where you can collaborate. You can see live cursors with people when you're together in the same file simultaneously. They also integrated comments and notifications from LiveBlocks in there. So if you have a specific feedback on a part of a design or landing page that you put together yourself, you can quickly add Turner, like, hey, can you change the color over here? And then you'll be getting a notification and you'll be able to make that change on your site. So those are just some more examples. And you can see the breadth of the kind of customers we have from early stage startups growing and also like larger established companies like Rippling.

42:36Turner Novak:So one thing you mentioned I thought was interesting that you kind of, we both kind of skipped over it, but you're learning how to do enterprise sales. I think that's a lot of things, a lot of founders, like average founders, probably somebody who's like, I don't want to do enterprise sales. Like it kind of sounds dirty. Like it sounds hard. Like it sounds like, you know, I don't, you know, it's hard to do. So like, what have you, have you kind of evolved as a founder in terms of like understanding how to do that? It was definitely difficult for me because I'm a designer and I love making stuff.

43:06And so learning how to actually make money as a business and selling is actually... Big deal. It's actually quite important as it turns out. But I think, honestly, I enjoyed it. What I love personally, as long as I'm learning something new,

43:25Turner Novak:that's enjoyable to me. Is there like a general thing that you've got, like a framework you picked up on is like, oh, this specifically really helped me learn how to sell a product to somebody? For me, I don't know if I have a framework. I'm not like a big framework kind of person, but I know myself enough that if I know I need to do something and learn something, the best way I learn is actually by doing it myself. Like I need to do it. And so I tried to put stuff in place to sort of force me to do those things, especially if those things are not things that would come naturally to me. And so in the case of like go to market and sales, to really prioritize it and treat this seriously, what I decided to do was to actually work with an advisor and like literally have somebody join all of my sales meetings for like two months.

44:19and then have like two hours a week blocked out with that person so that we could just focus on this and talk about this. And I knew that like by having a schedule in my calendar, it sort of forced me to treat the thing seriously, right? Because I knew I would have this meeting weekly. I knew I would be talking about it. And so it's like a way for me to kind of enforce that. I kind of need this enforcement sort of thing. Otherwise, sometimes I can put things aside. And so that's what I did. I worked with somebody called Dakota McKenzie. And he's really helped me join the sales calls, giving me feedback after the calls so that I could learn.

45:02And then with him, we went through different pricing changes as well. We understood some of the pushbacks that we were getting. Honestly, that helped me build a better product with the team. Because some of the feedback I was hearing helped drive the roadmap a little bit better than before. I think that before we were unconsciously sort of building something the engineers on my team wanted or something that I would feel like I would use myself. But what we found is that when you start having more conversations with customers and true enterprise potential customers, there are challenges and the things they want you to solve is, like the foundation is the same, but there's like subtleties and differences that is what's going to enable you to win some of those deals.

45:45So that's how I've learned it. And I really wanted to grow that revenue myself at first before handing it off to somebody else. And so once we got to, yeah, I think 400 or 500 ,000 in AR, I ended up hiring Stacey. And she's been amazing. She's been taking that on her plate. And yeah, I think you've talked to her briefly, but she's incredible.

46:14Turner Novak:Yeah, she actually gave me some ideas of stuff we should hit on in the podcast. So shout out, shout out Stacey, if she's still listening right now. I think she's going to listen to the whole thing. So we have at least one listener that's still... Hopefully more, hopefully more. I'll text her. Stacey, if you don't listen to that, I'll know. Slack, Stephen, right now when you're listening. Just issue the message. Well, so you mentioned, so it sounds like one of the things you learned from that, like those like two hour structures, like let's go back is almost like listening to the customers and kind of like what they wanted versus what you wanted.

46:51Turner Novak:Was there anything else that you learned that you like changed throughout this process? Like how you evolved in your like, you're like, you know, go to market motion or sales motion? Yeah, definitely. And I'm still very much learning. And I think I was giving away too much for a while. I'm just like, I don't know. I think I'm a nice person. I don't know. But I feel like because I hadn't done really sales before, my natural default was like, yeah, sure, we can do this. I was trying to be really helpful. And I thought that I was always going to come back. that's true in some ways but i do think you need to learn how to draw the line and so understanding that dynamic of like where you draw the line and like making sure people see values like i give you something you give me something like nailing that dynamic is something that it's more like an art than a science that i feel like i picked up but at the same time i would say that i've i've made some mistakes to be honest and like that's something where i'm realizing now like a year and a half later, maybe two years later at this point, is that because we focus so much on going towards enterprise, we've made some pricing changes and changing to the business model along the way that I think impacted what made us successful in the first place.

48:10And so as we went towards enterprise, we sort of made pricing changes and things that were more optimized to convert bigger customers. And I do feel because of this, there are probably some early stage companies or indie developers that maybe didn't even consider lifeblocks because perhaps they sell as small as something for enterprise or maybe pricing more than that's transparent as it should be. In retrospect, I don't think that's necessarily a mistake because we needed to do that to grow the pace we needed to grow at.

48:53Probably, yeah, I'll probably do things slightly differently if I were to do them again.

48:58Turner Novak:I don't know if that makes sense. On pricing, is it just like there's too much of a minimum kind of like check size barrier or something? Like you can't use it for free or like if you're going to pay, you got to pay at least 10 grand and... Yeah, I think a pricing model, became a little bit too pricey for some type of potential customers. And so, yeah, I would say that's the big point. That's the major kind of factor there that impacted us. But that's also what enabled us to increase the ACV on the enterprise side. And so now what we're doing is trying to shift a bit again so that we can have a really solid self-serve without losing on the enterprise side of things.

49:44And so that's a big project we're working on right now to improve pricing. Once again, I think pricing is never done, but I feel like this is something I'm quite excited about. It's really taking Lifeblocks to our roots and making sure anyone can actually use this. Whether you are a teenager messing around and building fun little side projects, or if you are a startup or a big enterprise, we want to make sure that Lifeblocks can work for you. and want to make sure we kind of have a business as well on our end so that we don't end up giving too much away for free. So that's something we're working on right now.

50:16But yeah, I'm quite excited about this, especially in this day and age. And I'm not sure, you're probably seeing this, Turner, as an investor, but the expectation now is kind of crazy. Like the growth that investors expect, I would say, when you're on the VC-backed kind of track. You see companies growing from zero to tens of millions in there or in weeks, a couple of months. So I think the expectations, when you have pretty solid growth, what would have been world class three, four years ago, now it looks kind of average. The triple, triple, double, double, whatever, that's kind of average now.

51:04And so I think it's quite important to think about this because I think historically the playbook was probably, okay, first you build a great product that people love. Maybe it's going to be for startups at first and SMBs. You probably grow the revenue to a million or two million in an hour. And from there, you're triple, triple, double, double, double. And that gets you to a hundred million. And the way you would typically do this is by scaling things up and scaling things up means, okay, you need to get into enterprise once you find product market fit. And getting into enterprise means hiring a bunch of salespeople.

51:42People that do marketing and people that do solution engineering and customer success. I feel like that has changed a little bit because that's quite a significant investment to do this. And with a lot of those native companies, what's been shown is that you can get to pretty significant growth and fairly high revenue numbers without as many people. And so that's one thing I'm focused on right now. I want to make sure that we can have a business that scales in terms of revenue without necessarily hiring a bunch of salespeople. And that means having a really solid sales server, I think is way more important now than it used to be, I would say.

52:28But I don't know. I'll be curious to see what you think about this, Turner, as an investor. I don't know if you've seen similar patterns or... Yeah, I don't know how your portfolio

52:38Turner Novak:companies are doing on that front. Yeah, I mean, I have one portfolio company that's probably... It's always going up, but he's probably around 8, 9, 10 million in revenue run rate. I don't know I don't know when exactly this will get published. And like, you could probably fact check me and I'm going to be off on this number, but it's like roughly around that. And it's just the founder doing sales. The ACVs are pretty big. Like some of the ACVs, like six figure, he might have like a seven figure ACV. I think that's kind of why the companies are scaling really quick is because you can like get a seven figure contract with someone.

53:18Turner Novak:Like someone will pay you over a million dollars to like solve this problem. And it's because a lot of the times with these like AI native product, they're like doing some work. And it's, it's almost like not just like software budget, but labor budget in a way that kind of gets like woven into the product. So you are able to basically say like, hey, existing structure, the way you do this, there's like 10 people on the team. And this is like a$10 million budget line item. but with us you only have to have two people on the team and you can instead have a five million dollar budget line item and you know some of its people some of its software or you're still paying 10 million dollar budget line but like you're we're driving so much more like revenue to you because you're using our product so like it's it's completely justified like the roi is clearly there I think there's some elements of that.

54:16Turner Novak:There's also some elements of like, we have an AI innovation, quote unquote, budget. And like, we just need to spend it. So like we have$100 million or 50 million to just like, so we'll spend 7 million or, you know, seven figures on just like AI search or whatever. You know, hopefully that's not one of the categories, but maybe it is. But there's definitely some categories like that where it's just like, we've got a budget to spend. And if you're a Fortune 100 company and you have like, you know, 50 million bucks, you just spend on AI. And if you don't spend it, it doesn't get spent. Like, you'll just spend it on stuff.

54:53We're already seeing this. Like, that's where some of the big companies are like, some of them can spend like a significant amount with like blocks. It's like, this US is like this sort of AI budget like spend. And so.

55:09Turner Novak:That's bad. You don't want that, do you? Well, I think there's a lot, like every big company, like especially the Fortune 500 companies, they have budget allocated for this because they are scared about up-and-coming startups taking their, like eating their lunch, I suppose. And so, I mean, yeah, I guess you want that. What would you want that money? I mean, you would want the money, but you want it to be tied to solving, yeah, to like solving a problem for them and their customers. It needs to be solving a problem. Sure. Yes. Okay, I see what you're saying. So you were differentiating from like pure R &D project, like burning this money, essentially, see what happens versus actually.

55:55Yeah.

55:56Turner Novak:Yeah. Like you remember with like crypto and Web3, it was like, oh, we're like, we're a concert, we're a music company. And we're going to like, instead of publishing on like Spotify, it's like an NFT. and you like listen to the NFT and like stream it. And like some company probably spent like a million dollars in like marketing, whatever. It's like, no one cares. There's probably like eight people that actually streamed the NFT music versus like the millions on Spotify. It's like, what? Yeah, I see what you mean. Okay. So yeah, I think like really to be like created during, like you want to create enduring value for your customers.

56:30Turner Novak:Like you want to be able to say like, hey, we're using live blocks to actually help you increase your revenue or make your product better. Definitely agree with this. The point I was getting at before was more like, sure, you could do this. And I think the old playbook would have been...

56:50Okay. If you want to, let's say you want to go from one to 10 million in AR, like the way you would do this three, four years ago was by hiring literally 10 to 12 salespeople, assuming a 1 million quota per sales. And that's how you would scale, right? To those revenue numbers. I do feel like the expectations now is to have more efficiency as a business.

57:15And that doesn't necessarily seem the most efficient nowadays. Sure, you still need salespeople, like depending on your business, obviously. But my take here is that while I still want to grow the go-to-market team, I'd love to get more revenue from like self-serve so that we have business that can really scale and we don't need as many people to power that business behind the scenes. So that's kind of the direction I'm taking, which I don't know, we'll see if that's the right direction, but I feel good about it. We'll see how we go.

57:47Turner Novak:One interesting direction when you kind of go from here, you're a designer. We've talked a lot about design. You've actually built some design tools multiple times throughout the years. What was it like sort of transitioning from being a designer to being a CEO? And then just like, why is design so important? It's been a learning journey for sure. And I love learning. So that's been great. Like I wouldn't trade what I'm doing now for anything else.

58:18Yeah, I love, I mean, I love building. I like making stuff, basically. That's like, if I were not working or doing anything, I'll probably still be making stuff. And I think like, I think humans were designed to make stuff. I think that's probably what makes us happy. Like when you create something for the people to consume or...

58:39Turner Novak:I think we're creative creatures. And so, yeah, I personally really enjoy making apps. And like I found a pretty sweet spot in designing and building creative tools in the past. Tools that people used to actually create something themselves. And so I found that quite interesting from a design standpoint because, yeah, those tools are quite, like they're super interactive. It's not like there's like a single flow of like you go from one page to this page to this page and there's like a few different options and that's about it. When you build a creative tool, there's like pretty much an infinity of options and states and like that makes designing those experiences quite interesting.

59:18And so, yeah, I got into live blocks sort of by accident, I would say, or not by accident, but it's basically solving a problem that I faced myself while working at InVision. Figma was starting to become very popular and I did a leading design at InVision to convert InVision Studio, which was a competitor to Figma, from a desktop-based, file-based application to a browser-based app. And that's where I learned that building collaborative apps that were super interactive, real-time, multiplayer, that was really, really complicated. And to me, it was obvious that pretty much most software moving forward should behave that way because the browser is just the best distribution channel.

1:00:02It should just be all there. And when you want to collaborate with someone, you just share your URL and you're together in the same space.

1:00:07Turner Novak:Because you can just be like, I made this thing in the software. Here's a link that I'm sending you. And you just click it and open it. Instead of like in the past, you would have to like save a file, send the file to somebody by email, sending the file can take time to upload and then for the person to download. Yeah, by the way, you got to download the software too. Yeah. Yes, exactly. And then you have this artifact that you downloaded from an email. You want to give feedback about it, change it, modify it. Then you have this dead-end entity that you created. You share it again and it creates all kinds of dead-ends.

1:00:41If you think about all the different things that you have this thing that initiated here, and then a bunch of different branches have emerged from this in different areas and trying to reconcile that stuff. It's just terrible. It's just a terrible experience for people to collaborate that way. And so that's why I think tools like Google Docs, Figma, and browser-based tools in general have been really successful. They solve a lot of that back and forth. And so to me, that's how I ended up starting Lifeblocks, right? I felt like this was a big problem. Thankfully, I had met my co-founder at the time, Guillaume, amazing engineer that I worked super closely with at InVision.

1:01:17Turner Novak:Yeah, so what's the story about meeting him? I know it was a pretty... I mean, you told me the story before, but how did you guys meet? Yeah, that's funny. I mean, I had been at InVision for about four years already at that point when he joined InVision. And his first day was actually at an offsite that we had in San Francisco. And we spent the day together and eventually we figured... I think I was the only French person at the company. And Guillaume was also French, so I was picked that up pretty quickly from when I met him. But what was funny is like he asked me once, so where are you from?

1:01:53Like, where did you grow up? And I was like, oh, you wouldn't know. Like, it's a small town. Like, I grew up in the southwest of France. He was like, oh, wow, me too. I was like, which town? Oh, you wouldn't know. It's like close to Toulouse, which is like the biggest kind of main city there. It's like, oh, me too. I was from there. And then we sort of narrowed it down and we're basically like from the exact same region, which is like a super rural region of France called Aveyron. and it was funny just the fact that we came from a super tiny area of France it's pretty unlikely that you meet in San Francisco like this and we'll be on the same team and eventually go and start a company together so it makes me a good story I think we just love working together after this we often paired up on projects and so because I loved I love creative tools and that's kind of my sweet spot we ended up building or started building a presentation slash video tool.

1:02:49And we wanted to make a mix of Apple Keynote meets a video tool and make that a browser-based experience like Figma.

1:02:57Turner Novak:So it was like a slide editor with video native kind of pitch, I suppose. Yeah, that's pretty much what it was. And the idea was to facilitate people, like make it easy for people to create those kind of interactive presentations, especially in a remote context, which at a time felt like the thing that was going to stick around, especially with the pandemic that was happening, was going on at the time. But anyway, like six months into the project, we realized we were spending all of our time building the real time and the collaboration infrastructure for that product instead of the actual tool itself.

1:03:34And that's when it clicked. I was like, dang, like, we had a full team working on this for a year and a half at InVision and we couldn't pull it off. Like, we pulled it off, but like the initial version was kind of average. It didn't work exactly like we wanted. It was kind of slow and buggy. And now here we are, just the two of us, like super focused, like, and we're spending all of our time trying to figure this out again. Yeah, from scratch. Exactly. And so we're like, damn, like, what if instead of building this presentation tool, we're actually building this infrastructure that would enable the companies to build Figma-like products.

1:04:11We would have needed that at InVision. We would have needed that as we started these companies. We thought, yeah, why not? Let's go for this. That's how we ended up starting LiveBlocks. And yeah, I ended up being CEO. And obviously, I think CEO can mean a lot of different things, but I would say like an early stage company, it's probably very different than when you've started scaling, right? I think where we're at right now, we're about 14 people on the team.

1:04:41Turner Novak:Yeah, I see myself as the person responsible for really setting the vision, making sure everybody's aligned, making sure the morale on the team is, making sure we have momentum. Those are the things I'm focusing on. And I think there's a lot of similarities, I would say, between design and running a company in a way. It's like, I don't know. I think about design at its core is problem solving. And I think running a company or doing any kind of projects in life is about solving problems as well. So how do you design a solution that solves the problem you're facing? Whether that problem could be, okay, to build X, we need X amount of capital, X amount of people.

1:05:23How are we going to actually solve this? People are not really, like, the vision is not very clear for people. Like, how can I solve this? like maybe make it clear about like like my communication style, the way we communicate about it or like having some frameworks internally to make sure this happens. So like sort of designing the engine that ends up... A company is basically a tool. Like you're designing a tool that outputs something else. And so I find there's a lot of similarities. It's a bit more abstract, I guess, when you're running a company, but it's definitely interesting.

1:05:58Turner Novak:So design is not like how something looks or like does it have pretty edges or something like that? It's more so just like how does the problem get solved for the person that has the problem? It's definitely how it looks for sure, but it's mostly how it works and how it feels and the sort of problems it solves. A given problem can be solved in many different ways and design is one solution to that problem. And so designing a company is... Every company is different. Every company is designed in a slightly different way. And a lot of those decisions come from the founder and probably the first 10 hires that you have on your team.

1:06:48They really shape what the company is going to look like.

1:06:52Turner Novak:What did you learn or how did you learn how to be a CEO? kind of had some side projects over the years. I don't know if you learned things there or was just like a slap yourself in the face of like, man, I got a team I got to run. Like, what did you, what did you kind of learn? I'm not sure. I mean, I mean, always like, even when I was 15, I think I had like side businesses, like I was selling websites to people, like always liked, I like making money to be honest, from a young age. Like I like making stuff for people. And I always had a business mind, I would say. So looking back, I felt like I always knew I wanted to have my own business.

1:07:34I started multiple side projects and smaller companies in the past. So it always has this thing in me. As to learning to be a CEO, I don't know because there were still 14 people. So I think it's very different being a CEO of 14 people company versus hundreds of people or thousands of people. I try to learn a lot from the community. And I definitely have some founders I'm really close with that are maybe a year, two years ahead of me, or some of them are years ahead of me because they have much bigger teams. Just to get their perspective when there's always new challenges and things that may arise that it's pretty likely another founder has gone through this.

1:08:17So I found that having a founder community has been probably the most helpful, I would say, because those people, some of them have been going through similar challenges that nobody else really can relate to, I find. And that's something that has been difficult, actually, starting a company. People don't really, like most people don't necessarily understand what you can be going through. And sometimes things can be going poorly. Not that you have to pretend, but you... Not pretend. I think it's good to show... I actually think it's healthy to show some type of weaknesses that actually build stress with your team.

1:08:59But sometimes you... You kind of always have to be enthusiastic and like, yeah, we're going to do this. I think you need to have this mentality and that takes a specific kind of character, I would say. But yeah, having founders around has been insanely helpful. For instance, I'm working... For me, Jonathan from Maze, the CEO of Maze, has been an amazing mentor to me. Their team is probably 150 people now. And they've grown quite a bit. They raised a series a couple of years ago and they've gone through many different challenges and talking to him has been particularly helpful because he's also a designer originally.

1:09:40And so having him has been particularly helpful for me.

1:09:45Turner Novak:So it's probably most helpful to get somebody who you have some kind of a commonality with that's a couple of years ahead of you in the journey. I think you can learn from all kinds of people, but I think having somebody that has the same sort of... Somebody that cares about similar things to me makes it makes it more relatable I would say and but I've also found friends that were like very very like self-focused and I still learn a lot from them because they have like a different mindset like they don't think exactly the way I think but there's still a lot to learn there so I'm trying to apply some of those things I'm learning and like always try to be true to myself like I realize like I don't know sometimes it's easy to get caught and be like okay and And if I'm a CEO, I need to act like this.

1:10:34I need to do things in a specific way because that's what I imagine a CEO should be doing. But I don't know. The more I grow up, the more I'm like, you know what? I'm just going to be myself and I'm going to do things the way I think is right. And that tends to work out better for me, generally speaking.

1:10:54Turner Novak:Yeah. It's funny. A lot of people think of CEOs, you're in a suit, in an office in downtown New York in a skyscraper. Right. That's what I thought it was in the past 10 years ago. Yeah. It's just like on a laptop, like at a restaurant in between like meeting like a couple of random different people. Like you're trying to hire someone and you're also like in Slack commenting on like some feedback to a team member who's like working on something. And like, I don't know, you might be or you're like, it's like a Sunday morning. You're like in your underwear, like sending something. Like it's like it's like the least fancy possible thing you could imagine.

1:11:28It is the least fancy thing so far. And like, yeah, you basically, all the biggest programs go basically end up bubbling up to you, I would say. So it's like, it's... I mean, like, I don't want to over-diamatize it because for me, it's been mostly fun. But I think I've been mostly enjoying it. Like, I really like it. Like, scaling the company, designing it the way I want, like, trying to create a really good experience, hire people that I would generally love to work with than I end up working with. And I want to make sure people have... Basically trying to create a place that I would have loved to work at myself.

1:12:08That's really enjoyable to do. And seeing people... I feel good about seeing people having a good time. To me, feeling proud about the work they put out. That's something I'm quite proud about, actually.

1:12:23Turner Novak:I want to ask you about that. Just generally, team design. You guys have a remote distributed team. But one thing that you also, I feel it's kind of related to what we just talked about. There's a lot of other founders that are probably listening to this. And you talked about quite a bit. You guys had a really good relationship. He actually stepped away from the company. Maybe it was about a year ago. Which to somebody who's not a founder and not familiar with how startups work, that might sound like a death blow. Like a founder leaves, the company is over. I think it's like a little bit more common than people might realize.

1:13:02Turner Novak:And a lot of founders might, who've never gone through that before might be like, yeah, that does sound fucking brutal. Like, can you just kind of like explain what happened and just kind of like how you kind of move forward as a company? Yeah, I mean, that was honestly, I think the, probably the most difficult thing I had to go through personally. And to be honest, I think it was probably one of the hardest thing to go through for Guillaume. I can't even compare what he was feeling compared to what I'm feeling. But yeah, Guillaume was just... I think I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I think he was not enjoying it as much running a company and probably ended up doing a lot of things that he didn't necessarily enjoy.

1:13:42And so I think what he wanted to do personally versus what the company needed was getting to import where it was misaligned, even if he was actually doing a really good job. It was actually amazing at his job. And so that was difficult because it was his decision to leave eventually. And yeah, it was really hard to handle. There was a lot of things. Obviously, our relationship first is difficult. Even if we're really close, we're friends. We're still friends. We're in really good terms, which is amazing to see because a lot of founder breakups end up not in the similar spot. But there's a lot of things to handle that were quite difficult for me.

1:14:27Basically, when that happens, you have to think about the future of the company. There's an equity piece aspect of this. You're basically negotiating. You want to make sure everybody on your cap table is happy about the outcome that you end up with. one of the founders is negotiating for them. I was negotiating for the stakeholders, for myself, for the team. There's a lot of parameters there that are difficult to manage. Communication aspect, like making sure you involve investors properly so that they are aware of what's going on. Yeah, I've learned a ton. during handling this. And that was definitely not the most fun thing that I had to do, but I'm really happy with where we landed.

1:15:21And look, the company has never done as well as since he left. And I don't think that's because he left that we're doing better, but I think it was a good reset for the company and the projects that we went after and I would say the morale on the team and that actually, we tried to use this to create momentum. And yeah, so that's basically sort of what happened. Yeah.

1:15:46Turner Novak:And you, I think it took you quite a while to just like find the right fit. Like you took over engineering yourself, we're kind of leading it, but you're able to finally find someone like what's the process like of like bringing someone like that in and hiring your first kind of like new outside, you know, executive or an early company like this. Yeah, it was quite, it took some time. Like just, we actually met as the new head of engineering started a month and a half ago. So it took us nearly a year when you think about it between the time he started, this new person versus when Guillaume left.

1:16:25Well, thankfully, our team, being remote, actually, I made a conscious decision of pretty much only hiring very experienced people that most of them have worked remotely and I've I've worked with before. And because our team is very senior, and I would say the vision and where we're headed is very clear.

1:16:52Thankfully, the team has been able to continue to ship stuff. And it's not like we had to go in a completely new, different direction or anything like that, that would have created a lot of chaos. So we're able to move forward and have a really good year. with over 3x since the departure. And the team has been able to execute really well. So I think just having the right people in place and being super transparent about what happened I think really helped. I tried to be as transparent as possible with the team and tell them things the way they are. And they really stepped up. And one thing that I realized as well that I did not necessarily expect is I think when Guillaume was there, I think he was taking a lot of stuff on his shoulders.

1:17:43And by him leading, by no means at that engineering level to be able to do what Guillaume was doing. But what happened is that everybody stepped up on the team. And so even if at the beginning there were some areas where I felt like we were maybe a bit weaker than we were before, what happened is that the three most experienced people and even the rest of the engineering team, they all kind of stepped up and had to learn new things and really show up. And I think we actually became a stronger team as a result of that, which was sort of counterintuitive and not something I expected. And then finding Mathias was definitely like finding a head of engineering that really took a lot of time, especially building a DevTools company for something that's very technical and that requires a specific kind of expertise.

1:18:37Yeah, it took forever. Yeah, it was pretty tough.

1:18:41Turner Novak:What ended up working? Were you just cold emailing tons of people? Did you work with a recruiter? Did you work with Matthias in the past? Didn't work with Matthias in the past. I mostly worked closely with Alicia, our head of people at Lifeblocks. That's another thing we can dive into if you want. We hired a head of people very early, even I think we were like six or seven people at the time, which is, I think, unheard of for most companies. That was a very conscious decision. But anyway, Alisa really helped me kind of... First of all, she helped us internally understand what are we looking for.

1:19:21I had an image of what I wanted in my head. Stacy on the go-to-market side has thoughts and opinions about what we need. The engineers on the team had a specific idea of what they wanted. None of those things aligned. I mean, there was some other apps, right? But if you think for the perfect person, that person probably doesn't exist. It's like you're looking for a unicorn. It's like, I want an amazing, strong, like technical person that can do engineering work, but also want this person to be an amazing communicator and like being able to drive a vision forward. But maybe also want this person to join some sales meetings because that's something that's quite important for us as a company.

1:20:04Also, as a founder, I want to find like sort of like a co-founder, maybe, I don't know. Like there was a lot of things that like when you put it on paper, that person doesn't really exist. Or maybe it exists, but like it would be very hard to find it. And so, yeah, at least that really helped us kind of work together as a team to really write things down. What do we need? What are the priorities? And make sure expectations were aligned so that we could have a good process to then find this person. Nevertheless, it was quite difficult to find this person. And I'm really glad we landed on Matthias.

1:20:41He has a lot of expertise in AI modeling and stuff like that. Also has expertise working on collaborative infrastructure and real-time infrastructure. He worked at Sketch for a while. And yeah, Sketch was a competitor to Figma. It still is, actually. And so there was a lot of challenges that we are solving with slide blocks that he sort of had to go through himself as well. So yeah, but we talked to a ton of people to get there for sure.

1:21:10Turner Novak:One thing you mentioned right there was the importance of like finding somebody that slotted into a remote distributed team. And we talked a little bit about that before, but what have you learned running? I don't know if it's a successful team. I don't know how you define success, but it seems like it's worked to some extent of running a distributed company for multiple years that continues to have momentum. What are some best practices for people? Yeah. So first of all, I worked remotely for a while, even before doing this. and I worked at InVision, which was one of the pioneers in remote work.

1:21:49Fun fact, when I joined InVision in 2016, I was actually in Sydney, and most of my team at InVision was on the East Coast in the US. So I learned a lot of what didn't work there. I learned a lot about what worked there. And then I tried to use some of those learnings, the good and the bad, tried to apply that to lifeblocks. So, yeah.

1:22:17Turner Novak:Maybe what's the bad? What's the good? Well, the bad, I think, like some of the things I learned at InVision is like there was a couple of things that I think didn't work. Like when you work remotely, you probably want to have most of your people in a specific kind of time zone or at least have a decent amount of overlap. Otherwise, it becomes very difficult. I clearly saw that this didn't work when I was in Sydney and the rest of the team was on the other side of the world. Because you were literally like a 11 hour, 10 hour difference, something like that. It was, if I remember, I think I tried different things.

1:22:51When I joined the company, I was like, you know what, I'm going to work in the evening and like, I'm going to go to bed at 3 a.m. and I'm going to adjust my schedule. I tried this for three weeks. I was like, I can't do this. I'm going to quit instantly if I keep doing this. So I shifted my schedule to start like 5.30 a.m. or 6 a.m. Sydney time. And I remember 6 a.m. Sydney time was like 4 p.m. or 5 p.m. Eastern. Okay.

1:23:14Turner Novak:It's like it didn't even do that much. Yes. So it's like people are finishing their day in Europe. They're gone already. So you get like a bit of overlap with people on the West Coast. So anyway, I learned that that was really difficult. Another thing that I've found is that I'd envisioned everything lived on Slack. So we didn't really have a central place where work would happen or like things were documented. That was another thing. And then I would say there was not, even if there was, maybe I joined, like we were like 100 people. So maybe that was different. But I felt like there was not like, this is how we operate at Envision.

1:23:50This is our culture. This is how we do things. There were some parts of that, but I don't think it was truly, I don't, it didn't feel like there was alignment at the people that are actually doing the work in terms of how we should work and how the values that we should, you know, principles and things we should follow. So starting Lifeblocks pretty early on, I was like, okay, we need to be very clear on that stuff. This is how we work. Also knew that early on, we needed to hire somebody that would be sort of in charge. Not in charge, but somebody that would really look after the culture and the way we work together.

1:24:25And that's why I wanted to hire somebody there. And I ended up hiring Alicia. She's been amazing. I absolutely love working with her and just enforcing culture in a way that feels natural. And I don't know, it's really helping because we're very intentional about the way we work together. And so one thing that we want is that we have clear, even if we are flexible in terms of working hours, we ask people to have two to three hours of other lab of work every day. So to do this, we typically hire only in Europe and East Coast in the US. We have one person on the West Coast, Jonathan. He's in Seattle.

1:25:01I worked with him for like four years at InVision. And he works like different hours to accommodate for this. That's something that I think is very important. When you're remote, you definitely want to have some overlap every day, because if you don't, some decisions that could happen today will be made tomorrow. And that just, if you compound that over years, that kind of slows you down by a significant amount. So that's thing number one. Number two, you definitely want to spend time with people in person. So we have one offsite a year where we bring the entire company together. We just came back from Putakana, actually.

1:25:36We were there last week with the team. and we try to create a week where obviously we work in the morning and find what are the things that we cannot do remotely to align. We try to use this time to build connections and make sure people get to know one another on a personal and professional level. Because once you know the people on a personal level, it's much easier to work with them remotely. And so there's like a, I don't know, something that you learn. So that's number two. And then we also encourage people, like we actually have budget allocated for project teams if they sometimes need to meet in person.

1:26:11This is something we encourage them to do. So those are things we do. And then we're tooling. We use linear on Notion. So we try to document things as best as we can so that we can actually onboard people more easily when they join. And there's a ton of things like that that we try to follow.

1:26:27Turner Novak:So it sounds like a lot of it relies to like make sure that there's people, that there's like shared times during the day that everyone's working to just have good sync, meet your team in person as consistently and as much as you can, and just spend time getting to know each other. And then it sounds like people that are able to work autonomous. You may have mentioned this earlier, but just like... At the end of the day, that's probably the most important factor. The most important factor is the kind of people you hire. Not everybody's made for remote. and in that pool of remote people, there's probably a good amount of them that are just there to just follow the lifestyle, I would say.

1:27:12But there is a pool of people in there that are really passionate people that really want to go to work with other smart people. Those are the people you want to hire. But at the end of the day, it comes down to the people. Are they used to work remotely? Are they experienced? And that experience piece is quite important because if you just came out of college, I don't know if it's going to make sense to join a company like Lifeblocks at first because you probably need that initial experience in an office working side by side with someone to learn the dynamics of working at a company. And I don't think you get as much of that at a company like Lifeblocks.

1:27:51But if you have done this before and you have experience and you know what I want to do and you're one of the good work and you're passionate about what you do, then I think it's a good fit. Yeah.

1:28:00Turner Novak:Yeah, that makes sense. It kind of lines up with what I feel like I've learned over the years. I actually have like a completely unrelated question. I just know you like basketball. So I don't know if I've ever told you. I have season tickets to the Michigan University's men's basketball team. I feel like I have to come visit you then. How many seats do you have? It's just two seats. It's just me and my father-in-law. We actually have the woman who sits next to us, who has season tickets next to us. She has two seats. And like, I think like her sister's supposed to come. She's like an older woman.

1:28:37Turner Novak:But she, I don't think she, I've ever seen her have someone at the game. It's always empty next to us. So we talked about how we like buy the ticket from her. We've, we've, I think she's given us tickets before. But yeah, so what, what do you think is like the most underrated basketball player of all time, in your opinion? Oh my gosh. The most underrated player of all time. Yeah, because you could say like LeBron's the best or MJ is the best, like whatever. I mean, that's probably the answer to that question. But like who you think is like most underrated basketball player or like most underrated position or like skill or something like that?

1:29:12Oh, that's a tough one. I didn't think about that. I mean, I'm like, that's a tough one. I don't know if he's underrated. I'm going to be very, because I'm French. I grew up in France. I feel like a player like Boris Diaw was quite underrated. He played for the Spurs and he's so versatile. And having played basketball, like having versatile players is actually so, so helpful on your team, but also sometimes hard to fit them properly. So...

1:29:45Turner Novak:This is Boris Diaw. Okay. Is he retired? Oh yeah, he's 43 years old. He's retired at this point, yeah. He's just drinking wine somewhere in France, chilling. Who would be your most underrated player then? I'm curious. to be honest, I don't really follow NBA that much. I'm big into the Spurs right now because Wimby is just killing it. It's just having an insane season. Yeah, I follow college a little bit more just because, I mean, I'm Canadian. So I play hockey and I kind of follow hockey. Oh, I didn't know you were from Canada. Okay, nice. You didn't know this? I thought we talked about this a long time ago.

1:30:17Turner Novak:I forgot about it. No, I don't know. I'm from Winnipeg. So I follow the Winnipeg Jets. It's like Winnipeg's in the middle of nowhere in Canada. And I follow, I mean, I follow like the NFL professional and then college football. And I follow college basketball just because it's like the local sport. And I don't like going to football games. I just like, I don't like, because nothing happens. Like if you take the total time you're at a football game, it's like three hours. But there's only like four minutes of like anything actually happening. So I like watching football, but on TV, I don't. Because like being at a game is just like you just there's nothing happening.

1:30:59Turner Novak:But basketball like is intense. Yeah. And if like you look away at the wrong time, you'll like miss miss something. Right. But with football, it's like, OK, cool. There's a play that's going to happen like a minute. We'll talk somebody and then it's like, cool. Plays what happened. Two seconds. It happens. And like we get a minute to like not watch again. Right. So I'm trying to I think to your point of like. I think like big guys that can pass. So like someone like Jokic, is that his name? Jokic, but yeah. Yeah, I was thinking about him as well. I was like, he's definitely not underrated, you know, because he got MVP and stuff.

1:31:38Turner Novak:Yeah, I mean, it's why you win MVP, right? It's like, you're somebody who can block a shot, but can also sink a three and pass the ball. Like it's just well-around versatile players. Maybe like playing defense, I think is sort of underrated. just generally speaking because because like it's annoying as fuck when you're like trying to score and just like somebody just like won't give up and like there's so many guys that are just like so good at shooting like they're good at dribbling they can juke you out and pass it but like somebody who just like won't let you make take a good shot Beverly I think is one of those guys like people in the league like really hate playing against him because he's like isn't Pat Beverly you said I've heard of him yeah yeah he's just like this smaller point guard but like it seems so I would if I was that good I would hate playing against him because it's just like he's just like running and going after you and be like damn just give me a break you know but he has a reputation so because I feel like most people do not try as hard when they're playing defense like if you have the ball or you have the puck or like you're in a position to like make a play everybody's gonna try their best but I feel like most people do not give it their all when they're playing defense.

1:32:54Turner Novak:And like those people are so annoying to play against because like you're just not used to it. You're not used to somebody actually trying hard against you when they're playing deep. That's a good point. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. Well, so did you play basketball actually yourself or? No, I mean, I'm five foot six. I mean, I can't. Well, you could be a point guard. I mean, even today, no. Like it's too short. Yeah. I mean, you'd be all right. I'll tell you, you're like, are you like six foot one, six foot two? 6 '4". Oh, yeah. 6 '4". Okay. I knew you were tall, but damn, I didn't. I guess I under guessed.

1:33:28Yeah, that's probably a small point guard in the NBA nowadays.

1:33:31Turner Novak:Yeah. Anyway, I told my ACL twice, so I'm just done with that kind of sport. Yeah. Isn't that kind of how you started your first business? Like you got hurt and you had to basically... Oh my gosh, yeah. Because you were a waiter, right? Yeah. That's a good story. When I moved to Sydney, I moved to Sydney in 2011. Joined a basketball team. I didn't know. I had not started my career for real. You were playing like professional or like semi-professional basketball? Not at all. No, no. I was just playing for fun, like in the original, like pretty good level, but not like professional at all by any means.

1:34:10But when I moved to Sydney, I joined a basketball team. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with my life. I was just there to travel and have fun. And so I just worked as a waiter and making some money there. But then I played a basketball game, went up in the air. Somebody pushed me, landed awkwardly, dislocated my leg completely. And that sucked because it really hurt. And then I didn't know at the time. That was a terrible experience. But basically, because of this, then I had to, yeah, emergency car. I put my leg back in place. I had to get MRIs. I had a bunch of medical bills stacking up.

1:34:52I wasn't sure how to deal with this because I was overseas to deal with insurance and that kind of stuff. I couldn't walk, so I lost my job. I was like, oh shit, what am I going to do now? And that's actually what really got me into this career, which is surprising me. In retrospect, I'm thankful this happened in a way. But yeah, I had no money. I had medical bills laying. I was like, I don't know, I'm going to pay rent. So I ended up posting an ad on Gumtree, which is kind of, I forgot what the equivalent is. in the US. It's called... Craigslist. Craigslist, yeah, exactly. Yeah, within two weeks, I had several customers and I was making websites for them, designing websites.

1:35:27They were happy with it. I realized I was making more money when I was a waiter. And I didn't know the time that I could have occurred in this, surprisingly, because I love design and I love coding, but I wasn't sure if I was great at both. And so being that versatile person between the two, I learned I could do something there and then that's what actually got me to the startup scene in Sydney. And then from there, yeah, I ended up going from one startup to the other and starting different things. And that's what led me to eventually start Lifeblocks. So anyway, I thought that was... It really stuck at the time.

1:36:02I was like, damn, what I'm going to do? I probably had a thousand euros or thousand dollars in my bank account. And I was like, that's all I had. Yeah.

1:36:13Turner Novak:Yeah. Nothing like running out of money to light a fire and learn things. Yes. Even when you start a business, I think when you're like feeling the pressure, it actually helps you in a way. Yeah, this is a lot of fun. Thanks for coming on the show. This is a lot of fun. Yeah, that was really fun. I enjoyed the conversation. And yeah, thanks for having me on. And I hope you had fun. Thanks again to Numeral for supporting this episode. Head to numeral.com to put your sales tax on autopilot. If you missed it, make sure to check out last week's episode with Zayn Ramon at Flex on building the AI native private bank for middle market businesses.

1:36:50Turner Novak:And tune in next week for a conversation with Jason Kalkanis going inside the All In Podcast. If you like this conversation, please comment, subscribe, and name your next AI feature after me. If you don't want to miss a future episode, subscribe to my newsletter, The Split, linked in the description. Get each episode plus a transcript emailed directly to your inbox every week. Thanks again for listening. See you next time. Bye.