So Hill. Lavinia is the CEO and founder of Gum Road, a platform to help creators create more through simple e commerce and audience tools. He is also known for insightful and refreshing points of view on Twitter and Medium to round it out. He's also a designer painter in addition to being a technology CEO and writer. So Hill and I have had similar passing creation, from tech to design toe love of art, as well as being a founder that has seen almost everything from being employee number two at Pinterest to starting his own company to coverage in just about every magazine or tech outlet in the world. Every investor in Silicon Valley wanting to be a part of what he was building to layoffs than more layoffs to then being the only person running his company bordering on depression for long stretches of time and now back to a tight knit team in a business that will bring in over five million in revenue this year, profitable and actually growing faster than ever. In addition to the experience he's had, he's also begin to articulate what it has been like and what is it has really been like as a creator, and his tweets in his essays on the topic Up There with Justin Con and Eric Reese and a handful of other guests have given people some of the most realistic glimpses of what it's truly like to be a creator. And I can't wait for you to hear this behemoth of an episode because of the thoughts that sell shares. It's open and honest. It doesn't necessarily always have the answers. But it was so much fun to chat with him about his experience.

So let's get into it. This'd is below the line. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers were drinking. Today's weird drink is recess, which has been, I think it was on Episode two, but it's near the end of the day here. And Sam, it's a scout felt like a recess. Mom. Actually, you kind of had a visceral reaction when you saw the can. Yeah, looks awesome. Have you seen it before?

No, but I love the mat.

Yeah, it's a a mat aluminum can and you've got the peach. Something flavor, I think. Peach, ginger, peach, ginger and I've got the palm hibiscus, and it's the years kind of a peach color. This isn't like a, uh like pink. It's very cool. Very cool can, and we'll see if this it's a CBD drink, so we'll see if it has an effect about 15 20 minutes. Have you ever

had a CBD drink before? I don't think I've ever had a CBD drink before. It's really weird. So I live in Provo, Utah, which does not have a lot of marijuana or any right related ah stuff. And I was in Portland and there's

like CBD everyone, which

I It's fine. I mean, I'm drinking it, but it's just hilarious. Like you go to the coffee shop and there's like, You know, do you want CBD in your lot and stuff? Right? And I just like, so foreign to me because I lived insurances. Go two and 1/2 years ago and it's here now to you. Spending a lot of police is something what happened like that was fast,

super fast and scooters. You've been Yeah, exactly. It's that happened so fast, this city bandit, it was taken over the city so quickly. The scooter's not the scooter's. Not this, even though no, it's precious. CPD know that wouldn't touch the CD, I think. And I think the scooter's back now. But, um, you're you're living in Provo, Utah,

which I think you've written about, by the way, great writer online. Um, if you wanna go follow sale, it's really great stuff. Medium and and Twitter. Um, but I think you actually wrote that Preval was the most conservative city. I read that right. Most conservative city in the U. S.

Yeah. So I wrote this piece yet from bubble to bubble. Um, yeah. Provo's the most conservative and most religious, I believe. City in America. Over 100,000 people. Um, which is crazy because it's also a college town. So, like they have a section of, like a college town, 115,000 people, super Republican and super conservative and super religious, which are connected, but not the same and sort of its own

variant of it as well. Interesting. And you and you move there from San

Francisco, right? Yeah, from San Francisco. And I remember like I did not do a lot of research on it. I kind of wanted to be surprised, and I But one thing I did look up was how many people voted for Trump versus Hillary and stuff. And in San Francisco, I think 9% of people voted for Trump. It's like 91. 89% voted for Hillary and 2% of other. And in Provo, it was something like 13% voted for Hillary and 23% or something voted for Evan McMullin. Remember

that guy? Barely. Yeah, right. Yeah. So it was the only young hold there. Yeah,

this is the only place I think he did second, Um, but it was the only place I think in America like that. Hillary did not get first your second, you know? Yeah. It was the only place I think, the only major city, the only major city. So I went from, like, sort of polar opposite, you know, two polar opposite. It was pretty, pretty crazy. I like to joke.

It took me, like, an hour flight to, you know, go halfway around the world. Yeah. You know, it's not far no

geographic. What took you there originally? So

I wanted to take a writing class. So I, uh, followed this author, Brandon Sanderson, who writes science fiction and fantasy mostly. And when gum road was sort of sort of flat lining, um, quite literally on the sort of the grafts. It was, you know, doing its thing. But it was no longer like, this is my life's work, my sort of Magnus opus sort of thing. I wanted something in my life that, like,

I felt like I could control and do really well, um, and give me a sort of a sense of stability. And so I started writing fiction and and stuff like that because it was sort of a thing that I'd wanted to do for a while. And I just saw a tweet from Brandon. That's like, Hey, I teach this class in Provo. You should, uh, apply, You know, to anybody you have to live in Provo, but anyone in the community can take it. And he's sort of one. My favorite authors.

And so I sort of submitted the first chapter of the book that I was writing, Got in, and I was like, I guess I'm moving Provo. It was I was literally like I was like, Yeah, like there's no other opportunity chance in my life. I'm gonna be able to take a writing class for four months from, like my favorite author, you know? Yeah. And what schools in Provo? BYU, Yeah, Brigham Young University, the LDS Church owned university, the Mormon Church.

And, Ah, there was

a little bit more like going into it like I really wanted to live in a conservative place. This was right after Trump won the election, and I felt like I didn't really understand why or how and not to sort of make it through a judgment call on it or anything, but just to be like I was surprised and like normally, when I'm surprised, that means I lacked, like, some information.

I'm I'm from Texas and I was surprised. I think basically every Texan was surprises that surprised it was

surprising for everybody. But I still think like they're still learning their you know, there's still a gap in everybody's someone's done right, even a their own self. And so I just knew like I was in San Francisco, I never lived in a conservative place. I don't have a conservative family or anything like that. Um, I needed that. Like, if I was gonna continue running gun murders or selling to start a new company or whatever I was going to do after that sort of transitory. Apart of my life, I wanted to know what a lot of people thought bright and 48% of the country. If I don't understand them like how? How can I build like a technology product for them? You know, right?

I think it's sort of important. You know, people talk about sort of diversity representation, and all those things are great. And for the same vein, it's like I'm building software for everybody. Ideally, Ray, a large group of people. I want to understand the broadest set, right?

Yeah, totally. It's it's and people that don't want to understand that decided things. I mean, it is it is just a fascinating side, and that side is a good word because it seems relatively balanced and understand that side, or at least going about it where you you are intrigued. Um, I want to ask more about this and curious about that side of things is especially for an entrepreneur. That's one That's soup. That's rare. Um, especially here in the city, obviously way more rare for you to make the leap and go live there. I know Sam Oldman traveled up and down the south and in middle America. Um, for I think it was maybe two months.

Just tow. Understand that part? Because it is, It is for those, um, that that don't live in San Francisco. It is a total bubble where every thought you have pretty much reinforced by a very, um, homogeneous. You know, the progeny of thought Here, it's not the most diverse place of thought. I think it is. In contrast to most of the world, it's it's freaking fantastic in terms of its progressiveness and diversity. But when you're here in the city,

it's like kind of like, Well, think one thing. We all have this block vote and you can miss out on, you know, half the world. It's kind of like a doctor for an entrepreneur wanting to build products for, you know, a diverse set of of customers is kind of like a doctor saying, like, I only want to hang out with healthy people. Not that anyone listening isn't is unhealthy and really trying to keep it a political. But

yeah, I mean, I think, And in in San Francisco, it's, you know, of course, you can find people with very different viewpoints, right? But typically, people aren't here in Sarasota, sort of our friend groups, and probably a lot of people listen to this for a reason for the industry that were in. And so it's very like we're literally here for this purpose. And so it's very hard to really, truly sort of separate yourself from that and your identity from that without just leaving, you know?

And so, like, the minute I left and went to Provo, and I applaud Sam for doing that as well, you just You're in totally different person because literally no one knows who you are, right. You like the way I think about my identity is like I am. I am who I am. But really, I just exist in everybody else's brain. Like I'm sort of a projection, right? And so I go to this new place and no one knows who I am. I can say anything and they're they're gonna believe it, You know, um and so it sort of gives you that ability to sort of say,

like, I can leave all this stuff in San Francisco. I'm not saying it's wrong. or bad or anything like that. But I don't have to make it part of who I am. When I meet somebody new, I don't have to say I'm the founder of Gum Road or anything like that. They don't They don't know what number it is. They don't know what venture capital is or anything like that, you know? Yeah. And it just allows you to be like, what do I really believe? You know, And it turns out not that much like it turns out, like when you're not in a situation like in sort of a homogenous environment that you've grown comfortable with,

like, your sort of okay, just being a person, like listening and not spending a ton of time being like, this is my belief system, you know, on whatever whatever is being discussed.

Yeah, I want to talk about your takeaways from this this the last two and half years, Um, and from, Ah, the article that you wrote. Um, but yeah, the thought that comes to mind. I think Mark Twain wrote an essay called Ah Corn Po. And it was basically tell me where a man gets his corn from and I'll tell you his, um his opinions, like it's there is this exchange and kind of economical exchange that is so that is happening subtly and social interactions that can conform your ideas on things and opinions on things to whatever I think rationally. In many ways, I can get you the most economic benefit. Yeah. And,

man, if there is, if there isn't a city days, Yeah, you are what you eat, right? And you, if you are focusing on kind of the economic exchanges in a city that is incredibly kind of dialed up on economic exchange, um, like, uh, Bay area, it's It's certainly Yeah, that's that is so interesting that you you moved away and you felt like you didn't believe in much. Tell me more about that. What do you mean by that? Yeah, well, you know, I sort of strongly

believed I guess in the beginning of, you know, software, the power of software, the power of like building products for other people. And the way that you measure sort of your impact is on how much sort of revenue that you're making typically right. And that was reinforced by a lot of the conversations people have here around. How many employees do you have? How much money have you raised? Who have you raised from? How much revenue are you doing? People don't typically ask that, because for some reason it's like on on this side that you're not. You know, it's like a cross that line, and you're not supposed to ask that. But you can totally ask how much money somebody has raised.

You can't ask the evaluation. It's kind of interesting set of unwritten rules, but yeah, you just sort of, uh you sort of just measure yourself in these sort of very objective or, you know, a subjective as they can be, like, How much? How much revenue doing a set around when you leave? And none of that matters. You can't walk into a conversation and say like, Hey, nice to meet you. You know, I have 17 employees I've raised from Kleiner Perkins Caufield buyers.

People would look at you like you're insane. Um, and so it's, you know, they have their own priorities, right? They have their own measure of off what value is to the world, right? Like, are you a member of the church where you go to church. Are you married? You have kids. The questions, I think are actually pretty similar. Even though they sound really different in terms of gauging, Like how you spend your time in the way that sort of this society has represented value and,

like, what is important, right? Are you going to church? Are you faithful? Are you sort of living the gospel? You know, um

so those are the types of questions you'd get again? Yeah. Surprised

coffee? Yeah. A lot of people like I tweeted it out like these were some of the questions that I get. And you know, people from that community like, there's no way you can question something you do. You'd be surprised. Um, there are some people that are super blunt, and sometimes I don't get those questions directly there through layers, you know, like, what's an example? Like, um, I think a pretty common one is Is where you from, Which is sort of a mask over,

Like, What are you doing in Utah? Are you a member of the church or Ling? What else brought you here is a pretty common one, right? Um,

which is totally a common question here in San Francisco. Tell like where you're from. What brought you here? That's basically like, Yeah,

what brought you here? Want you? What? Do you do it? Yeah, what do you do? But in Utah, it's not. Where do you work right? It's not like trying to figure out what what right what company you're working for. But, like, are you a member of the church? If not, like, why Utah? You know,

it's, um, various there, sort of. It happens in any homogeneous society. Excuse me when you when you have 90% of the population that you interact with, sort of believing the same thing, believing that thing or not believing that things become significant, it becomes like the statement, you know, whereas like it. For example, if everyone is wearing a red shirt and you're the only person wearing a black shirt, it's inherently interesting. You can't help but make it interesting in Utah. That would be like swearing,

you know, by swearing you're making a statement. You cannot not make a statement if you if you see, say a swear word because it's so obvious that you're breaking the pattern right and so I think it's It's sort of like that where you very quickly figure out what homogenize looks like based on a lot of those criteria. Um, be aware you from Why are you here? Um, yeah, I mean, but mostly around. Like, Like, want you value, I think, is sort of the crux of what people are asking in wherever you go. How do you spend your time?

You know, what do you believe? There is sort of the more fundamental questions that are sort of universal. But the way that we we figure out what you believe in San Francisco, what you believe, What do you believe in is, you know, how do you spend your time? Which is which company did you choose to work for? Right, Which is? And Utah. What do you believe is? Are you a member of the church? Like, Do you believe that Jesus crisis sort of our savior. And how do you spend your time is? Do you go to church?

Right. So it's interesting. It's different, but but similar. They're soft balls for you. For them, diva either realize you're part of the pattern or or breaking the pattern.

Exactly. And I think part of it is I'm instantly breaking the pattern and provokes. I'm brown you right So immediately there's something different about me, you know? Um and so it's it's sort of confirming and my pattern breaking. Or is this the pattern changing in a way that they should be, you know, familiar with all right, um,

receptive to yet does how has it on a scale of 1 to 10. How was the experience been? It's been awesome. I mean, the

so much of it, I think is internal, right? So I think if I came into it like if my parents were like we're moving to Provo, Utah, I probably would have freaked out, but because I opted into it because I was excited about the change and the uncomfortable ity of it. I was excited about these conversations because I wanted Toa have them. It was great. Um, you know, people have told me like, you know, I was raised Mormon. I was gay, and I was, like, the worst thing and I'm I'm so like you should have read this article that makes them seem like good people because they're not and stuff like that um,

was that in the from bubble to bubble? Some

of that pushback was an interesting Yeah, it's reasonable. Your people are People have different experiences and they're all valid experiences and feelings. But, you know, for me, it's like I'm here. I feel safe. I'm excited to learn people are very open. Um, about what they believe, why they believe it and they're willing to learn about. You know what? I believe what I don't believe in and and sort of, like figure me out, you know, um and sort of.

They're very true to themselves. I think you know, there's this idea. I think sometimes that there's they're hypocrites, especially religious people. I think it's here. Insist, Go Sometimes there's that sort of caricature.

But I think in general, how so was it? Tell me more character, or why that Why that word? Yeah, well, I think to me a

character is just like an exaggeration, right? And so I think there is this belief, and I I'll just say for myself that, like, I used to think that someone who's a religious is religious because they lack certain information that if they knew certain sets of information, that would no longer be religious because they'd have some ah ha moment that this thing was made up for this thing was this or whatever. Whereas when I started sort of becoming friends with religious people in like, you know, nine out of 10 people I hang out with in Provos is his religious. It's you sort of start to realize that these people I have a belief system that's not that different from my belief system, in the sense of how much of it is based on data, how much of it is based on fact, how much of it is not based on any of those things, And it's just based on how I feel and what feels great and makes me act in a certain way that I enjoy and how I don't necessarily need to As long as it's not hurting anybody I don't need to justify, You know, it's totally fine to be like This is what I do because I enjoy it and it makes me feel great,

and it gives me a framework for thinking about how I live my life, and I think in San Francisco we do that to you know there's the sort of the Steve Jobs uniform right. There's the Barack Obama either wearing a blue suit or or or a black suit. Today, these are all sort of, just like shortcuts, tradition, framework. But then, when we look at, I think religious people, sometimes it's we kind of look at it negatively, like, Oh, these people are just using this is away so they don't to think about blank. But everyone everyone does.

We're all using frameworks. Or and that's the purpose of the podcast is trying to understand. In many ways, so many entrepreneurs are creators have had to piecemeal their own framework together. Um, and and I think it's end or use ah, an age old framework but still have to piecemeal parts of it together because you knew time brand new place and it's totally we all kind of, um, at least I My experience was just like, Okay, here's the foundation. But now I'm just peace mailing these additional things, like where? The same thing every day. That is a complete framework to minimize just decision fatigue on things. Just have a very simple kind of closet, and it's you.

That's one example he brought up already? Yeah. It's a complete little addendum to a framework. Okay, keep things simple. That's the larger framework. Here is an ident. Amore. Here is a part of that. Keep things simple as a or K. I s s, as they say for creators. Keep it simple. Stupid. At a perfect example of All right, let me glove that onto my framework.

But I'm interested to hear your, um, your framework, um, and belief system we've kind of chatter about. You said, and there's there's a little bit different than yours. What is how would you describe your belief system? Yes. So I We're getting right into it, by the way. No bouncing around with, like so, what do you do in the air? Said we're getting ready. From where? What is your belief system? You just ask that, Uh um yeah, So I listen to this

talk a long time ago by Brett Victor that he gave called, creating on principle, and it really sort of gave me a framework for thinking about how he spends his time in, and maybe how I should and and he goes through a lot of his work And how a lot of his work had to do, I think, sort of instinctually at first or intuitively at first, and then became sort of sort of thing that he knew he cared about and sort of surfaced into a market like conscious decision making process. But basically, everything he built was about minimizing feedback loops. So, for example, you, you know, have a bunch of variables in some code, and then you run the code to make sure the test pass, and then you change some stuff and then you run the code and make that sure the tests pass right, And you kind of have this feedback loop to make sure you're doing the right thing.

And what he did was, for example, he wrote a piece of code editor, sort of, ah, prototype code editor that as you changed the code, it would automatically run the tests so you'd always know, with every keystroke Oh, the test or failing now Oh, they're green or they're failing the green etcetera. And so that it was just one example of sort of tightening the feedback loop. Another one would be if you're sort of an animator, game designer or something you have to, like, you know, designed the level in an editor and then,

you know, hit, compile or something. And then you play the game and make sure the thing worked, and then you'd go back and forth. And what that does is you. You miss a lot of ideas, right? Because you're you're sort of only testing out the ideas. You think you're gonna work? You're not testing out like the spectrum of ideas between that, right? You're sorry? Okay, this tower is 50 feet tall. Now it's 100 feet tall.

Does it still work? Versus, like, 50 50.1 15.2 What is the ideal? And so you built this thing where you're editing in line, etcetera and gives all these examples that are pretty inspiring. But I think there's Brett, Victor, Brett, Victor, B R E T. Victor. And he just it really just gave me, like, a way of looking at the world through a single lens, right?

He was like looking at every problem and being like, How do what? What? What are the feedback loops here Between the sort of the creative process and the sort of testing or are sort of ah, user, um, sort of you using it sort of feedback loop. How do I How do I tighten that? How do I make it? Invisible tried to make it go away entirely in design. It might be instead of designing and Photoshopped designing right in the browser with CSS or something like that. And it was just cool to see such a simple thing. Sort of. Titan Feedback Loops, right? Like apply to all of these different problem sets.

And that's kind of how I think about how I want to spend my time, which is my sort of principle, right? He calls the stock inventing on principle. My principle is, how do I get people that are creative to create more stuff? You know, it's very meta, but basically, how do I create for myself more stuff to help other people create more stuff on? If I can do that by building e commerce software or building a tool that lets people share files or whatever it happens to be, it allows me a system to sort of that if an idea is truly interesting to me because I built a bunch of stuff with no framework. And it turns out that, like all the things I like, doing this was true off and the few things I didn't like doing it was not true of. And so it kind of was like Okay,

well, if that's happening, I might as well figure out OK, that's the pattern, right? And so, like, let's just apply the pattern going forward.

And did you figure it out? Figure this out before Gum wrote. Is that obviously is perfectly aligned with gum roads Mission? Or was it three years in four years? And there were parts of

it that I think I had figured out like the the idea around democratization on dhe, sort of seeing with with Pinterest and with this thing I built called Crate and some other app side build, it was always about. There's a thing that some people can do, but it's either expensive or difficult or inaccessible For some reason, I think it would be cool if hundreds of millions of people could do this with an app on their phone. And if you can replace this with, like collect photos or upload files or share files or sell content, it fit perfectly this idea of democratization and I think personally for me over the course of working on Gum Road, I don't know if I've brainwashed myself. I think part of it is I have. I think every founder sort of needs to believe that the thing that they're doing is just so vitally important. Otherwise, it's not worth it. Franklin um, But I do think in general I just love the creative process and I love making stuff broadly, whether it's software,

paintings or or essays or books or anything like that. And I love learning about it. I love, like talking to and listening to creators talk about how they went through that process. And I think to me the sort of invention part is key as well. The inventing on principle. You're not just doing a job. You're actually trying to create new things that haven't been sort of haven't been made yet. And to me, that is like the That's sort of the pinnacle of human achievement is like taking stuff, remixing it and making things that didn't exist before, which to me, sometimes is insane. The idea that humans have been around for a long period of time. There's a lot of people that have lived many of them a lot smarter than than us, too.

But we're still doing you stuff all the time. And it's simple stuff sometimes, too, like you hear a song and and it's, you know, using the same scales we've had for a couple 100 years, at least, right? But it's and it's simple rights like the Inception soundtrack. It's simple. It's not complicated, but it's like totally new. And no one had done that specific before, even though it's

like a hammer toe. The Hans. Yeah, he's my favorite composer and, um, he and he talks about how he actually he's able to keep things simple by utilizing technology before other people do. And it just adds this tweak to the sound that keeps it knew, even if it's literally young records. But, um, I think what is injured? What was interesting about hearing him say that he utilizes technology to keep things simple was just kind of an interesting contrast. Yeah, but what it kind of, uh, said to me was he he never really cared about looking back. It was never trying to as you as you pointed out he's not trying to recreate anything,

is not trying to say OK, this is what I want to borrow from this 19 nineties movie that I loved and and put a tweak on it. It's like, All right, I'm going to just jump to the future with this device is one of the first to start using electronic equipment instead of, you know, the orchestra composition. And and he's keeping things simple. But he's like the first to use his brand new tool and then add this, you know? Ah, and this simple, uh, you know, arrangement to it and and it's, um it's interesting just within music.

You I don't know. I just thought that was so powerful, because within music, we are kind of the sophisticated approach to music is just recreate what Mozart did. Yeah, and three years going, and it's it's rarely the sophisticated approach or the exception approaches actually like do it in a way that's never been done before. And, yeah, you're gonna have a bigger impact.

I mean, a huge part of it is, I don't feel confident that I could recreate what Mozart, for example, did you know and So why Wise tries to, you know, spend 40 years of my life trying to get up to that pinnacle and maybe pastor passing it a little bit. You know, maybe versus I know I can do things no one else has done before because the tools and technology that we have today our new like no one could have done what we're doing today, 30 years ago, because of technology, because of just like everything that is different. And to me, it's it's almost like, just like a It just seems like the right thing to do. Like, why would I want to compete with a bunch of people in academics or academia that are solving crazy stuff? I'm not smart. I'm not that hard working like I'm gonna go do something that I can be the best at. And the best way to be good at really good at something is to just do something not that many people have

done yet. Yeah. Find a new game. Yeah, Yeah, I'm the bastard you're

playing this game because I made

it up. So right, Well in. And, um So how does that have to ask how that belief system would overlap with the belief systems that you would that you would hear about in and your conversations in Provo that it almost like Vin Diagram did it. Ah, Aline did it. Yeah, online. It

honestly didn't. I think not. Not that much. There are some similar to say. I think the biggest, the most striking one is the idea that is, the emphasis on creation is still pretty strong because in sort of Mormon theology, God created everything right. And so, like, the most godlike thing you can do is to create stuff typically in sort of religion. That often means Children, right? That's where the ultimate human achievement is to, like have Children and raise Children. Because that is like what God did with us. Theoretically.

Um, but I think more broadly, it means that we should be exploring our human talents are God given? They say talents, um, and and respect them and nurture them and, like, sort of utilized them because they were given to us and it would be a waste not to while we can. You know, I think that this is sort of in line. I think a big difference is the utilization of them. I think there is much more. For example, in that system. Using your talent to get to a Mozart is a great thing to do because you want to sort of maximize the ability, you know,

in that way, worse for me. I just have no interest in that. You know, like I'm not interested in being the best product designer or anything like that. I want to be good enough so that I can hire someone who's better than me when I need to. Um, and that, I think, is a pretty different, uh, sort of belief system scale in general, I think right, like the way that typically people insurances, go think about some thing is how do I get a 1,000,000 people to use it first is how do I make it really, really,

really, really great? I think in that belief system, it's more common to say How do I make this thing really great so that it helps my friends, my family, my community, my Children and if it does that, like everything else is extra. Whereas I think in San Francisco it's almost a pejorative to say Oh, you're just running a lifestyle business. You're only helping your family and your friends and your Children. And that's not enough, right? Because you have these God given talents. You should be using them to, like,

change the world, right? And so this kind of this interesting, it's it's it's similar again, like it's not that different, but in small ways it is really different. And it totally changes the way that you live your life and think about how you should be spending your time.

What would you therefore I'm I would imagine you describe yourself is a pretty creative individual. Yeah, I like the word

creative. I like the word prolific a lot because I think it sort of just signifies that I do it and I don't necessarily have to do anything. Super Well, you know, I am producing content. That's interesting. Um, yeah, like being prolific is it's sort of the quantity over quality thing. I'm I'm a vory sort of big proponent of the quantity over quality. I think I'd much rather paint 100 paintings than paint three paintings really well, right, because my interest is not in painting really good paintings. My interest is in becoming a really good painter. And the way you do that is spy painting many, many paintings because each painting is a sort of a cluster of data points. And if you're building a neuro network,

great. If you imagine like, your brain is sort of a nem ele model machine learning model, you want as many data points as possible because that's gonna teach you the patterns and what is a good painting and what is not etcetera. And so three really great paintings might resulting three really great paintings. But a model based on these three data points is pretty weak. You know. It might be able to produce a painting that looks like these three paintings, but nothing else. But if you could look at 100 paintings, couple are good, a lot of terrible, and you can build sort of a model of like, Okay, this is what makes a painting really, really good. It's a this value scheme or whatever.

Do you feel like it being a Ah ah, extremely creative and prolific person? Do you Do you feel like that has been in any way of a square peg in a round hole in a conservative city like Provo. Um, we're in may be another way of asking us. Have you felt it has helped your creativity or stifled it? Yeah, it it doesn't.

I think it stifles my my productivity and my prolific nous. Because the ambition isn't as they're a zit is in San Francisco. And I think the the sort of competitive nature of San Francisco is can be really motivating. You know, you're sort of rubbing shoulders with all these people, and you want to make sure you're at the top of your game all the time. And I think it creates lives that are really productive. Maybe too productive, almost. You know, um, people you can get really healthy and you can work a lot and you can play a lot and you're gonna have a great time. You could learn a lot, but maybe you lose out on certain aspects of life that someone might deem really important. But yeah, and Utah, you're sort of you have the freedom and the capacity because you have the space and the,

you know, rent is cheaper. But you also are sort of I need to be self motivated, right? There's not that sort of sort of that competitive nature. You're not seeing as much, um, of a cz much output from other people. And I think so much of becoming good at something. It's like constantly seeing other people and learning from them and their mistakes. While you're also learning from yours and your own mistakes. I think that's one of the reasons these incubators and sort of this batch system works. Why colleges air set up the way they are etcetera with these classes. And you don't get that as much in a city that everyone is sort of very much focused on. Like, How can I just lead a good, simple life so that I can spend more time with my, you know, my spouse and my kids and my parents, and be an act of church church member.

And there's nothing You attend church and improper.

I try to Yeah, I go almost every Sunday. Really? Yeah. What? What kind of church? The Mormon Church. Yeah. So it used to be three hours every Sunday. Now it's too. Um, but you have three hours every Sunday. Initially, it started because I wanted to learn. I considered it like gods of journalism or something where I was just like I wasn't pretending, right? It wasn't like pretending to be religious or anything.

I was like, I'm just gonna go to church because I'm living in Provo, Utah, and there's never gonna be a better time. And, yeah, I started going to church, like, literally, I think the first Sunday after I moved there, I sort of went to the local

church and had you gone to church growing up ahead of you participating

had no idea. Just traditions have grown up now. No, I had no idea anything like what to wear. And where did you grow up again? I grew up in Singapore. Okay, Yeah, to ah, family. That's sort of Muslim, I guess, Um, at least culturally, but sort of consider myself a Gnostic 16 and on, and yet it was really fascinating. I'm not sure how other congregations do it,

but in the Mormon Church there's the's three hours. The first hour is like talks and singing. And then the second hour is Sunday school, which is like Sunday school, except for adults. Basically, it's sort of like Bible study, scripture, study things like that and then the third hours were all the men and all the women separately meet in their courtrooms and sort of talk about more specific things. Um, in smaller groups so long, it's a long thing. But you learn a lot about what people care about and like, what people are dealing with, you know, because the reason to go to church is to become a better person in theory.

And that's why you're there. You're there to learn, and and so you sort of figure out Okay, this these are the issues that people have, You know, these air, the concerns that people have it would be like showing up at a City Council meeting right in San Francisco and being like, Oh, okay, These are the things that these people really care about because they've taken time another day to come here once a week or whatever and talk about it and share and try to fix this this problem that they have.

I've wanted to go to an A a meeting for similar reasons. Um, and I had 10 church each each Sunday with with my wife and our daughter as well. And, um, there's a long stint in life that I didn't, but, uh, found it therapeutic and so money ways, But also just time to not think about myself, which is a great convention within the week. Um, but the, uh wanted to do that for Alcoholics Anonymous classes and just to see what they're like, I think luckily, I've never been afflicted with addiction to substances. But I certainly have addictions and obsessions with entrepreneurship or creating or my own creations or my own Ah,

egotism that it's like is it's a true I know their principles within those walls that I could learn from. Yeah, and I'm not sure what they are, but I know that there's something that I can I feel like there's something I get borrowed from so I could totally see myself just two years in just being a a member each day. I I don't even really drink to the like, literally to that extreme we're drinking CBD Uh, no around CBD Anonymous. Exactly. It's just the other addictions, um, in life that afflicted but and Harry feeling, by the way, a few minutes in this drink, It's good.

I don't know. I don't know if I feel anything. I kind of feel like, walked down the line and see if it yeah, if I can do it

right. I don't know if I feel anything either, but, um yet at least it does. That's the best. Honestly, that's the best thing about Recess is just The taste is so good. And I mean, I would drink it if they didn't have CBD in it, too, But yeah, but it's it's fun app trucks as well. Um, the I do wanna Ah. Okay, so I wanted to ask more about that. So you've been going for two and 1/2 years about what has kept you going Problem? Yeah. And Provo past the gone Zo journalism curiosity phase. What has kept you going these three hour?

Yeah. I mean, I think, um, it's I just think there's it's good to be in a place that you're in which you're surrounded by people you normally wouldn't hang out with, and I haven't really found a way to do that outside of church. There's no other situation in which you're basically hanging out with 100 ish people that you would never want to hang out with. Outside of that room,

you know,

and I don't mean that in, like, a mean way, just like in general you're hanging out with I would be hanging out with tech people or painters or writers. Who are these people that we're hanging out for a very specific reason, right?

You're more base desires would not lead you to hanging out with. Yeah, there. The way that

they spend their free time is gonna be totally different right now. The movies, they watch the music they listen to. But they're still humans. They still live in my community and understanding the things that they deal with knowing their names, etcetera. That's really important, too. Me, I think, and like how I think about how I want to participate in my community. I remember going to Provo and having some of these interactions like I met the mayor. I just emailed the mayor, you know, 115,000 people. You can kind of do that. It was okay to move to the city from from San Francisco.

I'd love to hang out just like I would with any founder and Francisco, you know? And he was like, Cool, Like, swing by my office, you know, tomorrow. 80 and we could hang out for 30 minutes. 40 minutes. And you know, we're friends now. He's now a Congress person and the U. S. House representing that district, which is pretty quill.

Um, but I just remember sort of meeting all these people in the community, and maybe that was just because I was there for that. But I just remember thinking like, I don't know anybody in San Francisco, you know, I know tech people, but I don't know my neighbors. I don't know the people in my sort of, you know, 23 block radius. Um, it was super transactional. I came to San Francisco not for San Francisco, but because I wanted to build a tech company. I wanted to raise money.

I wanted to hire engineers, right? And so I had no association with Francisco. I have no sort of really, like, sort of loyal todo you know. And I just realize how weird that is for a lot of people, because improbable, it's you care about that stuff. You spend more time volunteering than any other city in America. Conservatives in general volunteer much more than liberals. D'oh! You know, donate much more philanthropic Lee than than liberals do because they care about their communities in a way that people that live in cities typically don't. And I'm not again not sort of making a value judgment on it, but just the way that people spend their time in the way that they deem these things important.

In San Francisco, time is super important. I'm going to spend money getting my food delivered, so I want to think about it. So not to Coker cleanup, but what that means. You don't meet people. You don't talk to the people that would have taken you from a to B your B day. You didn't talk to the person that works at the grocery store or any of these any of these things. And and as someone who wants to build things and solve problems and tell stories, those were the interactions that lead to those things, you know. And I didn't have to deal with him because I sort of came with so many already when I got here, I want to build all these things. I want to do all these things. But as I think about sort of my life,

more broadly. I think it's important to be like, Who do I want to help? Whose stories do I want to tell and which communities do I want to live in? At some point, I will want to live in a specific community that I'm sort of committed to. And if I've never done that before, it's gonna be a lot trickier to understand and figure that out,

right? What would you say? Is the character character versus the reality from your own perspective before moving there before? Yeah, this experience, I would

say my caricature was probably a lot of sort of the book of Mormon musical, you know, like this sort of like really happy super Y, very churchy, you know, says Hack and said, a hel sort of person that really just sort of, you know, nine to fives. It makes enough very sort of general family where you have the husband working the mom stay home and then you have, you know, three or four kids or something like that, and that's like the dream, you know. And it's funny because the character is not that different from what people share on Instagram. There's sort of this trope and in, ah,

that that part of the world called Happy Valley. They call it because people present themselves on Instagram and Facebook. It seems like these sorts of couples, but I think just in general I think the learning I've had is that there there's not one person in this place. There's not one family, you know. There's tens of thousands of families all dealing with their own problems and figuring life out and often being way busier with just the things that are thrown at them that they don't even have time to think about. Like, what do I want to spend my time on? They they're just They're just been inflicted with things that they're dealing with. And I think so much of life is like that. But when we look at other people, we don't see any of that. You know, we just see. Oh, you're doing your thing

great. I mean, when you say happy valley, it's like a perfect you could apply that Silicon Valley Is this totally. I think they're

more self aware about it. May be easily

maybe, but I mean it, you know, is a Ah uh yeah, Maybe they're more self aware that were less self aware. Um, just from the perspective of you and I both know and we've we've only interacted a few times over the years. But you and I both know from from being right in the center of the of Silicon Valley, it is, um, everybody's crushing and everybody's unhappy. Everyone's hiring like crazy raising, you know, raising money, right? And and, uh,

seeking therapy and or going on like ultramarathon runs because they're, uh, because they're there. So, uh, the precipice of of, you know, crisis and I it's a uh yeah, you could call this happy family. In many ways. That's that's also over generalization. But it's, um, in over a generalization. Oversimplification. But there's there's something to that.

I think it's and it's actually good. It's a good segue way to something you wrote earlier this year. Publisher layers here. I don't know how long you been working on it. Um, but he wrote and published an article this year that, um I was you titled reflecting on my failure to build a $1,000,000,000 company. And when did you When did you publish a

Yeah. I published that in February february 7th, 2019.

And how long did it did you work on that, uh, essay? I was thinking about

it for two months. I think December 31st I like tweeted being like, I want to write this story about it, about raising money, laying off my friends and all that sort of ups and downs of building a tech company in San Francisco and the whole thing. What do you want to know? What's my ask, You know, to my audience, Like what? What parts of this are interesting. Turns out basically everything that wasn't the most helpful. But

what were some of things that people? Yeah, a

lot of it was very actionable stuff they wanted to know. Like, how do I raise money? How do I figure out what to build things like that? And I sort of started sort of making a list. So I took everyone's replies and sort of made a list, categorize them and try to figure out, like, what questions does this thing need to answer? And then I tried to answer each one, and then once I had answered each one, I restructured it into a story. You know, like I took because I didn't want to make it like 30 things I learned from eight years in Silicon Valley or something like that, because I think those things are opinions and advice and they come sort of with too much directionality. And I was just like, I just want to tell my story.

That's why I want to write. This is I just need to get this set of experiences that on Lee I have felt and really dealt with. I think more people would would benefit from and maybe other people who have experienced it was in their own ways and having this thing there that they could sort of reflect on and uh, would be would be would be really nice. And so I wrote this this thing and probably, I think, intent of writing. It took around three weeks, So it's still a pretty big effort for me.

Yeah, and it and it lit. Ah, Twitter on fire. It was really, really, uh, exceptionally written. But the reception, too. It was just part in parcel to to I think, a lot of the topics that that covering then blow line is just it's just people are craving the rial. Yeah, story of of what it's like to be a founder and in your story has has it all. It's the reason. Now shut your note. It's two things that were going through my head when I shot you.

Notice. Hey, um, would you wanna come on this podcast with me And one was just our paths or so parallel. Just I don't know how much you knew about Tilt, but you're on every list early. We were, you know, in every, you know, magazine and, uh, achieve this very high valuation, which doesn't mean much and yet means so much to to a to a external perception. And it meant very little to us, but as founders,

But it meant, um it was like, Ah, a tool that you can like use for recruiting, for getting more press, for getting more more fundraising, and probably for getting customers for getting customers of your legitimate. And so did there's There's value in it. But then, um, with till we had a just complete just flew too close to the sun and, um, when it up selling to Airbnb. But, um, it was,

you know, through layoffs, through. Just I'd say in the six years I was building the company on Lee four months, I felt like we were man, we actually are ahead of the eight ball for four months of six years and that that amount of stress on the human body's is pretty, uh, can be traumatic and reading your story. Um, like Man Sale's been some been through something that I can act that I can actually chat with him about, and I want to chat with him. And then I was like, Well, obviously, let's make it a podcast. Um,

but the, um, I want to ask you why that title? Yeah, it's a good title. It is a good title. Well, and I know how much thought or sometimes no thought can go into the title. But but reflecting on my failure to build a $1,000,000,000 company.

Yeah, well, I wanted Thio start off with the $1,000,000,000 company because I felt like in the culture of Silicon Valley. But I think it's at this point probably escaped it like there's there's more people that know unicorns and this sort of the terminology that started here, I think, But there's this like, really fascinating sort of binary of, like, you're either a unicorn, a $1,000,000,000 company or you're not. And I was just sort of fascinated by that idea that in 2011 I tweeted like when I had the idea for Gum Road like, this is gonna be a $1,000,000,000 company, which in sort of a couple ways, I think it's really interesting one that I was just such a different person that I would do that, that I was, like, sort of publicly state of the world.

Like by the way, I'm building a $1,000,000,000 company and so doing, sort of putting a stake in the ground. Me, like, this is the person who I was. Now you're gonna read about like what happened and who I am now through the article, I think was like just a nice way to kind of, uh, sort of set things up. And then also I wanted to talk about almost like the absurdity of failing to do that because, you know, most people would say there's no you built a successful company. You're not a failure, right? But I'm not I'm not saying I was.

I am a failure. All I'm saying is my goal to build a $1,000,000,000 company, which is sort of public, and I put it out there and it's still there, you know, with the time stamp on it that I feel to dio and so it's sort of my reflection off. What then meant sort of why I had the school in the first place, Sort of how I set out to achieve it, failed to completely. And then how I sort of redefined, I think, success in order to sort of be in a place where I could even write the right the thing in the first place and publish it and feel good about it instead of defeated. But I think just in general I sort of wanted a title that I was just very on a very objective, you know, just like these are my reflections on building on, trying to build this thing into this thing that it did not eventually become,

and that was all baked into the title, and I felt really solid about that. They actually reflecting on it used to be called the first title I had for it was how not to build a $1,000,000,000 company. And I thought that was just a little bit too sort of too clever where people wouldn't really get, like, what what it is. And then, um, I was thinking about articles that really blew up in the in the tech community and the largest one, I think in the last couple of years was Susan Fowler's piece on the stuff that happened at Uber. And she called that reflecting on a really weird year at Uber, and I just loved the objectivity of it, just inflection, right? It was just like I mean, she went through some not great stuff and to say,

it's just a very weird year at Uber, like she just presented it like I'm just gonna tell you the fax and you can like, I'm gonna write, you know, I'm reflecting on it and you can take it or leave it. I'm not asking you for anything, you know. And so when I when I sort of re read that I was like, This is the vibe that I want. I don't want to say this is these people are evil or these people are greater or any sort of these value judgments. I just wanted to say Look, like I'm just gonna tell the story of the last eight years and hopefully is entertaining. Hopefully there's some insights in here, but my goal is not to say, Read this because you're gonna learn stuff. You know,

just read this because it's a story that you might find interesting. And and I think people did. And I think doing it in such a way, I think, allowed for people to sort of be more open to the idea. And I think also probably cause it to be a sort of shared. It was because you could share it without taking a stance on it. You know, like, venture capitalists could say, Look, read this article. It's gonna teach you about what? Raising when he means and what it can do. And the good and bad of it. Um,

founders can share it if they're venture backed by people that love bootstrapping can share it. It was just a very sort of objective sort of very ah sort of very light piece, I think in many ways. But I think as you said it, like the the reception. I think was just extraordinary because people want this and the this most significant thing about the thing. The essay was the fact that no one had written something like this before. And I think that was what was so shocking to a lot of people. Why it's sort of like gripped people was because a founder that had raised money from a sort of a top to your venture fund and a lot of really prominent angel investors and then totally failed to sort of execute on that investment but still built something that's kind of cool and then actually like that has been done. I'm sure many dozens of times. But then, for one of those people to actually go and turn this into an essay, at least to my knowledge, no one had taken the time to do.

I've, um you see a few small companies that ah, that were right about those air extremely valuable as well. But it's rare to see, like I've never heard. Um, I personally haven't heard founders like, you know, Kevin with big talk about like, what was that experience like with dick? You early and you hear a previous founder on your Ryan called back was saying, you know, you just he heard this word pivot all the time, but never ever got to read a story of what a pivot was actually like. It was always, like, you know,

slack pivoted. I was like, Well, what? That What? That is the real story. Yeah. And what was that like? How did they go through it when I feel like what were the board meetings like four months before? What was the meeting? You know, like an hour after, or it's like, Hey, we're good. We didn't build this video game,

but we are gonna become a messaging. I remember that. Yeah, it was. It's like

when people talk about having to do layoffs or firing people. You know, people say, Oh, you fire people. Here's my story of firing somebody, but it's like I don't care if I want the emotional stuff like all this stuff before that. How did you think about it? And deal with that And, like, you know, their family and the fact they moved from like Texas to San Francisco to take all these things you don't think about when you're telling the story, but because you. Maybe you forgot them or what have you? Um, but that's that's that's the useful stuff. It's not the fire fast,

but yeah, Okay, I got that. You know, it's like how, like, how do I justify even doing that right? You know, this person's life is gonna change. Unlike just telling me to do it faster is it's not useful.

Well, for listeners that haven't read the article. Do you mind giving um, you know, 56 minute synopsis of Of how you failed to build a $1,000,000,000 company Totally, or your reflections on them? How basically everyone in the world can create the story of how they did not build a $1,000,000,000 But your reflections on on us he's such a such a cool company, such a great, worthwhile product that exists in the world that may not have achieved the target you had set out in that tweet of being a $1,000,000,000

company. Yes. So I had the idea for gum road when I was still second employee at Pinterest and I had a bunch of stock, so I had built, you know, I was like, I'm sticking around this thing and Bill gum, road nights and weekends Really just one weekend. And, you know, I had the idea to sell this icon that I had designed in a photo shop for a buck on the Internet, and I felt like it couldn't have been that difficult, like, there's so many ways to share stuff on the Internet for free. But the minute I wanted to sell it, it was like, Impossible,

like there was, you know, iTunes and Amazon, like, if you really think about, you know, 2011 there just weren't a lot of options to the way that I talked about. It was I wanted a lemonade stand. I wasn't ready to commit to buying real estate and of investing in a storefront. I just wanted to see if this thing was worthwhile and there was no way for me to do that. I sort of called it a bit early for a bit. Lee, plus a credit card form, basically and built Gummer that weekend and launched it Monday morning, and it was number one on hacking, using a bunch of people saw,

and I was like, Okay, this is cool. There's something here and I just kept working on it. And it was like the first thing in a while that I had built that I just couldn't stop thinking about. It was one of those things where every meeting I had with somebody, I found some application. I was a call if Gummer was the thing like, people would be able to solve this problem or whatever and that kept happening where I was like, I need to work on this full time. And I had some conversations with with the team at Pinterest, and it was just sort of just not the best fit. And so I left, um, and started Gum Road as a company. I left two or three months before my cliff. So I gave up like a little bit of money. A few 1,000,000 bucks, at least in hindsight

and at the times Did you just Was it kind of just Ah, fictional money versus fictional money of what you'd make with gum road? Yeah, the way. The way

I did the math waas I actually valued Pinterest $8 billion at the time. It was, you know, 40 million I valued it. Eight billion did the math. I was like okay, I'm gonna have $25 million in stock. If I start, a company of government becomes, you know, $100 million company, it's gonna be worth it. And I can learn and do all these things that you can't do. It's a sort of an employer, no matter how early you are,

which is very optimistic. But, you know,

my track record was like I was in college for a semester. I dropped out, joined gum, joined Pinterest, and it was on track to be huge. Like that was, you know, So I was like, Oh, it's extrapolate out right? That's why I think I tweeted, like, had the idea for my 1st $1,000,000,000 You know, my first to write, like, not a just like my first of many, Um,

but then, you know, very traditional, like I left Pinterest and it sort of it's kind of oxy moronic, almost to have, like a traditional venture back to start it, because it's used to be this novel thing. And now it's like you come here and it's like, Oh, yeah, that's easy. You know, um, I met with a bunch of investors, raised a bunch of money. It was honestly amazing.

People always talk about how terrifying and brutal and demoralizing the fundraising experiences. And I have no doubt it is for many people. But for me, as the second employee of Pinterest could design in code. And I was for fit the mold of a founder so perfectly that raising money was awesome. It was so fun. I was meeting all these amazing people that were way smarter than me, as you said, and it was just it was just fun because I got to talk about what I wanted to do. And they were giving me money, you know, to do

that. Well, then we're before we hit record. We're sitting down and just talking about how rare it is to have a long form conversation with someone. Um, especially within the tech world. You know, you have these arbitrary our long coffees. But then you stack them, you know, three high for high in an afternoon, or or you just have that one long form conversation with someone, and then you quote unquote know them. But then you can't have the 23 hour hang out again without any agenda. And in a podcast steps. It is a great way to get that back. We're I was saying that's why I love the fundraising process with with Tilt.

Because I just no matter where every every meeting I went into, I was like, I'm winning no matter what I get to meet. Yes, more than myself that I am going to be so thankful. I got to meet them over the next 30 40 years. No matter what, it really freed me up. Thio. Just go into the meeting and be like okay, you know? Yeah, I don't need to stress Are Morty winning? Because I get to meet with so and so. And I I really loved the fundraising process.

Thio. I felt so grateful. Yeah, I was like, every day I'm meeting with the founder of PayPal and then the founder of this company and the founder of this company and then thes billionaires that backed Facebook. And, you know, it was just it was just weird.

And it's crazy. Yeah, And it was the contrast of I'd spent a year in Texas where no one would meet me, and then it's like, Oh, cool a ah social payments company of course, let's meet. And it was yet. Who's these? You know, I could barely get a meeting with a bank manager and Dallas, but I could meet with Peter Thiel. And, yeah, you know, San Francisco was very very, uh, I felt extremely grateful. Totally. So

I did that raised, um, $1.1 million seed round from those folks. Max Levchin Kriss, aka Ron Conway of all first Round Excel Partners. Wow, Collaborative. Danny Rammer from Index. Seth Goldstein from Turntable FM. All right.

Holy shit, This is Yeah, it was like the best list. It's a good last year. Yeah. Yeah, it's a

good too good list, I in hindsight, it's like only dudes, but it's better now, so I don't think I would do that again,

But it

was a good list. It was It was awesome, frankly to like, sort of have that validation. And 45 months later, I raised $7 million. He was a from Kleiner Perkins Mike Abbott lead that round. He was formerly the VP of engineering Twitter, and

it was just just for listeners. This this type of fundraising process is insanely rare, so it's ah, it is that is. Ah, good list. It could be better with more diversity, for sure. But it is a, um, but back then, I mean, this was 2010. 2011? Yeah, 2011. Like you must have been the only person you knew growing up or even from Pinterest from peripheral networks that had fun raised for a company with this type of this caliber of investors.

Yeah, pretty close. Yeah. I mean, I was 19. I was a solo founder. I had no employees. And I raised $8 million from that list by myself in, like, a few months, and I'm not saying any of this to brag like, I don't know very much. Failed to raise the Sirius B three years later. You know? So it's not like I have some magical gift of fundraising. Um, but yeah,

it was just, you know, when you have those things that people want and there's that foam. Oh, you know where I'm like being intro to a bunch of investors And, you know, there's a small chance this becomes huge, which is really the bet right that these investors are making is not Is this going to be $100 million company. Or but but rather, is there a 1% chance this is gonna be the next paper? All right. Right. And that's a much easier story for me to tell then Then the other one. And so I did that, built the team, grew the team to 20 or so people and sort of was up into the right,

you know, in in a sort of up and down. But roughly up into the right. And I thought things were going great. We had an amazing product, an amazing team and creators that use the product and made a bunch of money that loved it. And so when I went out to the Sirius B, I was expecting a little bit more than just like you're almost definitely screwed. And so I met with through the the investors that I trusted the most and sort of was most friendly with. So I felt like I could get this sort of the most frank reaction. They were all like, I'm honestly when you raise the Syria you were raising on this story you're raising on who you were. You're you were raising on this sort of potential energy. And three or four years later, you have numbers, you have revenue,

you have data, you have kinetic energy. And a lot of that potential energy is no longer there. So you're gonna have a hard time sort of selling. The vision of this is the next, the next PayPal or what have you? And so you know, I did it Anyways, I told the team January of 2015. I told the team this is gonna be tough. We're gonna try to raise a Siri's be. Hopefully, we can do it, but it's not gonna be easy. And our numbers need to be better. We just focused almost exclusively on anything that would grow.

Then move the needle. We called it, you know, anything that moved the needle, we'd work on anything that didn't we didn't work on. And how old were you at the time? I think it was 21 probably at that time. And it was, honestly, a great time internally because we were shipping superfast. There was this awesome sense of urgency that made everyone sort of super cohesive and very little time wasting. And it was It was it was good until we started me with investors again and very quickly I realized, like, this is not gonna happen. You know, you meet with the best investors,

and they say no. And then you meet with the second best investors, and they say no. And you kind of keep doing that. You get to a point where you're meeting with people you don't you don't. You wouldn't even take their money. And they're saying no, you know, and it's this weird thing that happens because typically, the people that would say yes at that point are the people that are willing to take a bet because the numbers aren't that strong and those are typically the best investors. So once you exhaust that list, I wish I think I would have saved myself a couple months of frustration if I was just like, this is not happening. You know, um

and so it was your mental state at this at this point is you're seeing this kind of writing. Well, yeah. I mean, I think it was pretty brutal because the the external,

the above the line for me was like, you know, 19 year old kid raises a bunch of money from these people. Second employee at Pinterest Like if I had been able to raise that Siri's be, I would have been, like on the path to becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg or something, you know? And when that didn't happen, I was like, all of a sudden that, like, sort of that line, just, like, immediately started diving down. And it was the first time in my life, you know,

as a pretty young kids still, like ever have that ever deal with, like the future, not looking as good as the past. And so it was difficult. And I think, you know, I had a team. So it was just me and the team working really hard and making it happen and sort of occupying myself with being busy, and so I never really sort of had a had time to sort of really think about that. But then afterwards, when when we did the layoffs, we went from, So so what happened was in November 2015 I told the team, like, you know,

we did the thing. We spent nine months trying to figure this thing out. We'd build some cool stuff. It wasn't enough. We're gonna have to do that round of layoffs that we sort of new. We're in the cards.

Did the team kind of know that that was a potential

in the cards? Usual. Yeah. I think that was one of the best things that I did was communicating that January that, like, the late Officer, That is the way that we save money and save the company. And we will try to save the company if we need to. And everyone was on board with it. No one left in that nine month period. Wow. Um,

yeah. Would you ever predicted that? You know, I was in Valley

potential? Yeah. I was expecting a few people to leave. But I think in hindsight, it's kind of like if you're fighting a war and you sort of tell everyone like, we're probably gonna lose this war, we might win. If we worked really, really, really, really hard. I think most people are going to say, Let's do it like we've gone this far.

That's such a key insight that it's Yeah. I learned from experience as well that when we we had to dio layoffs from about 100 to 70 and I just I think I worried so much, Uh, the days and weeks before about the people we're letting go, obviously, and their own life Let's being completely changed in and wrecked by mistakes that I was making a CEO. But I also felt, um, I felt one that was the right thing to do for the company into that. It was that, you know, they were gonna be able to find everyone found I was I was told this by an adviser. Everybody will find a new role within eight weeks. And I think it was like maybe every buddy but one person found new worlds within eight weeks. And the other person, I think it moved a two different city and, um and and that was comforting.

But right afterwards, I started to worry about OK, with the rest of the team. Well, how will this collect this? The collective psychology be impacted by this Might not be this rocket ship up into the right, and, um, maybe two or three people of 70 left, but Justin Kahn actually told me. He said he was like, no man looking for a job sucks. People are not if they have a chance to make their current job work and they love the company, then they're going to work on that much more than just going out for the job search. And he was totally right. He's And he said it was like,

You know, you will probably worry way too much about that. The potential for people leaving and indoor, the momentum of energy being lost and And you will worry way too much. It won't be the case. And it was totally, totally true. It's, um that was Yeah, it was unexpected.

Yeah, I know. I had the exact same experience. Actually, After the layoffs, one of our designers, Kathleen, sort of came up to me and was like, that must have been so difficult for you. And I was

like, What? Like that's what you're thinking

about. Like I just, like, have to let go of 15 people. And you're thinking about how I had to How difficult was for me to say

that it was just amazing. Our ah is a professor coordinator. Claire, who was let go, came up to me and gave me a hug. Yeah, I mean, it almost brings me to tears to think about this now because she cared so much about the people in me, and I'm racking myself for the mistakes made. You know, just it's so easy to underappreciate the propensity for people to o r town to appreciate. Yeah, the propensity for people to want to see you succeed. Yeah, even when your own mistakes have have been have led thio, uh, their livelihood being massively changed.

Yeah. Negative way. Yeah, I think people, as long as you're being honest and open about and you you you didn't do it maliciously, You know, you made those mistakes as mistakes, Not as things that you did on purpose. Like people are very forgiving. And I think, yeah, more so than I thought. Like they joined Gum Road knowing they were working for me. This kid, you know, who'd never started a company before and was figuring their own stuff out at the same time. And,

you know, I think, yeah, like they're aware of my in maturity, you know, they were aware of my maturity and they were okay with it. And I think, Yeah, I wish I sort of knew that. I think at the moment a little bit like I didn't have to censor myself. It was okay to say, like, these are the things that I'm struggling with and the reason I'm CEO and they're not. It's not because I'm sort of more mature or anything, almost the opposite. I was the ones,

sort of stupid and hoped to start the company in the first place, you know, But it's just like a a sort of a situational thing. It's not sort of an indication of anyone's true abilities or or worth anything, really

right. And so what was after that experience? Um, walk me through kind of this. The other side of the story, Yeah. Off. Um, I'm just gonna use your title over, Yeah, of failing to build another company? Yes. So at that point, that's

when it got really difficult, because I no longer had things that I was doing, you know, we done the layoffs. We were working on getting the profitable, and when we had done that, and it only took, you know, six or nine months, which is, you know, it's easy to do that when you let go 15 people out of 20. But when we When we got to that point, it was kind of like what's next? You know? And I started governed because I thought it was gonna be a $1,000,000,000 company. And that's what I wanted to do with my life because I felt like I could do that.

And if I wasn't doing that like, who else was going to do that? I just really struggled with, you know, my public identity is the founder this, like, sort of sexy teenager, metaphorically and and, ah,

you know, just let's say I'd say literally looking guy.

Thank you, man. Yeah, So I was this, you know, Founder, figuring out O. R. I was this founder that publicly, you know, had had all this quote unquote success had raised a bunch of money, and publicly I was still kind of that person. And then TechCrunch wrote this article about the layoffs, and that was super weird. Um, it was it was depressing because now a bunch of people knew that this thing had happened and I wasn't able to sort of just, like,

do it in silence and kind of hit that bottom and then go back to the top and then people can just draw a straight line. And I can pretend none of that ever happened, which I'm almost glad didn't happen because I think then I would have had this secret inside of me, you know, to this day. But it

made it weird, because do you actually, do you mind telling explain that a little bit more? Yeah. Saying right, cause I totally know that feeling, but But I, um and I love that articulation. But I Yeah, I don't know if many listeners would know what you mean. Yes, So, basically, you know you're going up into the right, and that's still the my long term was I'm still going to do that gumbo to a 1,000,000,000 possible possible. It might take a long time or I might change that 1,000,000,000 to 100 million. But it's still gonna get to that thing. And it's still a good business, right? Like the weird thing with startups is,

you have to do layoffs. You fail to raise money, you raise a lot of money. All these things happen. That sort of changed the That's sort of how well you're doing. Theoretically, but sort of the actual numbers of the product and the people using it can only change so fast. And it's relatively consistent as a as a as a market would be compared to a bunch of people in a room making it, making some decisions that dictate people's livelihoods, whether it your own or the company or your employees, you to your employees. And so I just sort of drew that line up into the right and, you know, it had tanked, right? So it was a sort of reaching the bottom, and I just kind of expected that,

you know, I would sort of rely on my profits, maybe hire a couple people more, fixed some things and eventually, like, the profits would be large enough that I could sort of build a team back, and then that line would just continue meant to the outside world. Looking back, they be like, Okay, gum. Red was doing this much in volume and this bunch of revenue, and it just kind of constantly grew. And the team, I assume, probably just grew along along with that.

But TechCrunch wrote this article, which sort of showed everyone actually gum red screwed. Uh, they tried to raise money didn't succeed. They're shrinking the team down from 20 to 5, which, when most people read something like that, they think that company is fucked, right? Like they're either going to sell it for nothing or gonna say they're gonna figure it out and then in a year, shut down and return the money to investors. And customers have to go find a new service or whatever. That's sort of that's when I read stuff like that. I'm like, Yep, that's probably what's gonna happen,

you know? And it was weird because when I had, you know, I was still in San Francisco, I was still meeting with people. It's funny. Like a few months ago, I met with someone who was like, Hey, I met you that day that you that that TechCrunch article came out, I had read it, but I didn't know if you like how, like you were acting like it didn't happen. So I just assumed I was gonna pretend it hadn't read, and it was just like it was weird.

Interesting. So it was like, this is such a weird experience, and I didn't know

until, you know, I just I was like Yeah, things are going great. We're building stuff. He's like, Where's everybody in the office, By the way, Like I read this article, I'm not gonna tell you, you know,

it's just it's weird, but that was the thing was like, this disconnect

that I I started to have with the world because I didn't want to acknowledge that this thing happened

in like any Like it. I mean, it's It's such a strange narrative here you're either succeeding and on your way to a 1,000,000,000 or you're on your way to closing doors. And in the journalistic view, it's like, Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, and you don't and it's there's nothing in between. Yeah, um, it's only one direction up or down or two directions up or down. And it's, um Did you did part of the mental consternation come from, um, wondering?

OK, did people want to be here around me as either socially or professionally as we're building number? Because of this good press, that now is no longer there were might not be there, and then that kind of ah dissonance on that level, little yeah.

I mean, that was a huge part of it. And You know, we talked a little bit about how a lot of the relationships in San Francisco, even with corn unquote friends or transactional you met because you were doing a B G deal together or partnering on something or shared investors and you ran into each other at dinner is all the time or what have you. And so when you're no longer in that, you know, you're no longer doing

that. Don't have these currency, that people are looking for

you and it's nothing short of necessarily wrong with it. It was just you realize it's like, you know, it's like being at the amusement park and like running out of tickets and you're like, I guess I don't need to be here anymore, But I can't leave. I still live in this place, you know? So I'm just, like gonna hang around and, like, hang out with friends and kind of, you know, but like, not be super open about the problems I'm having, which is my own problem, right? And I didn't really know what to Dio. And

so I was talking to anyone at the at this point. Did you have ah, executive coach? No,

I had nothing. I mean, I knew about executive coaches and therapy, therapy and things, but I never did any of that. It was one of those things that I recommended to everybody starting a company. But I never sort of took upon myself. And, you know, I found ways to justify what I was doing. Like, Oh, I'm you know, I have tons of free time now so I could just go to the gym a lot and read a lot and paint and drawn right and sort of do these things that founders can't do. So that's my way of justifying it. But just in general, I just like,

sort of disconnected and almost luckily or unluckily like the elections were happening at this time. So that was like a thing that had distracted everybody from start ups, you know? And so it was like, Okay, fine, like people are just talking about Trump in politics, whatever. Like I can live here and then trump on the election. And that's when I was like, I need to leave this place because it's only getting worse. It's like only getting more one dimensional and in the dimension

what do you mean? Don't have? What do you mean?

It just felt like every meeting I had was either It was it was about startups or it was about this world ending event of Trump winning this election. And it it wasn't like teaching me anything, you know, it was just like we're screwed and like saying that over and over again, It can only be so valuable, you know? And it just was not like a very It felt like I personally was stagnating already because my business was stagnating. I wasn't learning anything because, you know, the way you learned in the startup is often by the team growing and dealing with the scale of it and figuring out new processes. And when that wasn't happening, you know, you go learn in other ways and those ways we're now just like talking about I just think that I didn't care, particularly a lot of you know, And I was writing and and doing all these things and and that's when I was like, I need to leave Francisco. Um,

there's no reason for me to be paying two and 1/2 $1000 a month for a bedroom in San Francisco if I'm not doing any of the things that cost the price of this bedroom to be so expensive, you know? And so that's when I started looking around and ultimately decided. I'm gonna go to Provo, Utah, and take this class and learn about conservatism in a religion and disconnect from my identity as a start, a person, and just, like, hang out with random people and figure out my life without the attachment. You know, I couldn't walk into a coffee shop and not be the founder of Gumbo. You know, Ryan. So if I needed distance, like, literally, you couldn't get that here, you

know? So is the, um what are some of the things from the article and I really would encourage everybody to go read it. What are some of the two or three things that come to mind that when you're writing and when you publish it, you were thinking, you know, I've never ready. I've never read a piece like this or this is new novel, um, worded to with the two or three things that come to mind. I can think of seven or eight, but two or three had come to mind to you that you were like, I've never really read a block post or literature on this side of the founder journey, and I mean their

parts. I remember them because I remember thinking about removing them near the end of it, where it's like this. This should I put this in, like, Is this too much? You know, like there was that line, you know, that dumb bird went from 20 to 5, and then it went from 5 to 1 and even just writing it was like, exhausting where I was like, I was like, Gummer was literally just me running the whole company, processing $3 million a month, And I didn't have, like,

the guts to tell anyone. It was just me because I didn't want to scare our creators were, you know, like I don't wanna mess with water anything, and so it was like, nine months or a year or something of just me running gun road and just like it being admitting that I did that, um, I just like was so uncomfortable, you know doing that because I'm sure people have done that, you know, But like to admit to say. By the way, this piece of software that you were paying your mortgage with was run by this, like one dude in Francisco whose like, on the border of depression, like not ah, not great decision making. You know, um, how

long did you spend on that porter of depression?

I think probably like nine months or a year. And I don't I don't I sort of purpose to say the border just because I like, I don't think I've been sort of depressed, depressed, you know, And I sort of want to reserve that for people that have but definitely was not a good place with smoking weed, like every day trying to just, like, make the time pass, you know, because I saw the numbers continue to grow, you know, and I just as one person, I couldn't do that much, you know? T change that number. And so I was literally like, I just need a year to pass, and I'll have enough money coming in the bank that I could hire a couple folks and we could figure this thing out.

And that is one of the most interesting things about the story is that it just continue to grow. Yeah, with that. Yeah. How many sales people at its height?

A man, probably on the on that sort of growth team. Probably four people for five people.

Then without anyone on a growth team without any sales. Team members just kept growing and growing about its

fastest growing before. Totally, I think a little bit fast, right in the math. And that one first year of layoffs actively also grew around 15% a month. You are a year, 15% year over year, and then the next year grew 25% year over here. And this is your sense. It's ground 35%. So it's increasing and grow, but which is great and pretty exciting. But that was another line that I think I really struggled to put in there, right, because one I'm admitting they're they're weeks where I was, like, I'm not working on this more than I have to like creators that we're relying on this thing.

Sorry, I'm not putting in more than four hours of my time a week, but then also on the on the flip side of that sort of I felt like could I say this? Could I? Because I don't want to imply that, like the sales team I got word was terrible. You know that they did nothing. They did stuff for sure. We all did stuff. What I wanted to signal was like, the market is a huge part of sort of the equation on which you're growing your company. You know, it's the number one

Well, and I think, Well, I applaud you for mentioning because I think one of the it's not just, ah, you know, selfishness that keeps us from in self preservation. That keeps us from telling the truth so much, so much of the time. The real true stories don't get told because remember who was writing about this recently. But, um, it was maybe Ryan Hoover heard about courtesy bias on social networks. You just wanna be courteous. Yes. So you don't say you're really thoughts And that, uh,

you know, choosing community over or personal relationships or Kirti courtesy over truth is a very brash inal decision in many, many cases. But yeah, I had never seen essentially ah, narrative saying this was not amplified with a quote unquote growth team, which has been all the rage in silken dying last five years. It was not amplified by it, or at least the numbers don't show that it seemed to have been amplified by it and it could have grown on its own. And Jess stated on its own, um, with one person, maybe way before. Yeah,

that time. Yeah. Yeah, totally. And I think sort of admitting to that that, um that's sort of the product has had its own life. And it was doing its own thing, and it was adding the value it was, adding, regardless of what we were doing as a team and how much time I was spending on it, it just gave me it wanted. I mean, it hurt, you know, to sort of think that, like I had put in so much, that didn't matter.

But to it gave me the sense of freedom that, like, if that's the case, I can spend my time. However I want Yeah, like, what does that mean for me and gum road and how we can build the team going forward? If that's the case, you know, and I'm sure our creators appreciated all the stuff we were doing. The team's efforts were not in vain, but in terms of actually increasing the G M V off what we were doing. This sort of the number of digital products that creators were selling on the Internet, sort of growing at a relatively, you know, linear rate.

And even now, sometimes people you know, that's probably the most sort of contentious line in the whole thing on it, sort of honor advice. So to quote unquote level and people have been like, That's not true, like you can totally grow faster than your market and and all I'm saying is you should just be aware of what the market's doing and how big it ISS because it's kind of like, you know, I don't know sailing or something, you know, like you can totally sail a boat and the better you are a sailor that more. You can do what you want without listening to what the water is doing, but it certainly makes it easier if the wind or the water or in your direction, you know. And certainly if you want to build a huge company, US a $1,000,000,000 company, you need the market on your side because it's so difficult to build a company at that scale unless everything is basically going in your direction. Timing, luck and this new $1,000,000,000 company can only exist if there is a $1,000,000,000 at least market for it, and I

exist a while. I think that's such an important such an important 0.22 thoughts going through my head on the founder founder side of these things. One, um, is that it is just profound that you you could have easily just come up with a justification Thio seller to wind down and you stuck with it and you didn't see this hit and growth. Um, I think the end of the thing that's going through my head is on one level. You know, we haven't read stories about that because it's just in many ways, most people don't write down these stories, but another reason is maybe also in the the background. All of these tools are making the creation off off one person business last decade so much easier, totally toe where that just wouldn't have been possible. Definitely in the software and payment side wouldn't have been possible. 10 years ago, And now maybe it's actual canary in the coal mine for what is truly possible. It's certainly, I mean, your entire platform is yes, kind of is built to to support the of creation or solo preneurs creation.

Yeah. I mean, I think one of the reasons it also sort of got the engagement of got was was because the thing it felt so in line with what? Gummer Waas. You know, we were building a tool that helped creators run these independent businesses selling content directly to their audience, which is kind of what we were doing A czar own business. And so I think it sort of shattered the fourth wall between gum road and our user base in a way that I thought initially was gonna be not good because they were gonna be like, I'm not gonna use to start up. That's like, but actually, it's the opposite. There, like, this is amazing. I want to support people that think like me. And you are like me.

An army, you know, Rand, uh, the other story that I think is in there that a lot of people don't talk about the fact that I didn't vast any of that picture of stock, you know, because that's a thing that I mean, up until even now, probably I you know, I rustle within in different ways. You know, the fact that who knows how much money on 25 to $40 million It's the rough math, but that much money in my pocket would be pretty cool, you know, now that they've i p o But it was just to sort of admit, like house just like,

sort of like, objectively stupid, at least financially. That that decision was, you know, right at the beginning, like that's, like, the first line of the thing because I wanted to sort of set the the tone for the thing. Um, it just injured. But it just it felt so important to me because that was such a big reason gumbo needed to be a $1,000,000,000 company, right? It was this idea that I gave up this thing, and if government fails to do this, it definitely wasn't stupid decision,

you know, like maybe I can salvage it, you know? You know, maybe I can salvage that sort of the financial stupidity of that, but But then, knowing I'm not going to be able to do that as you read the thing. I think it's like one of the reasons that people really liked

a piece. Well, like any any, ah, kind of during life or kind of mid life. I don't biographical accounts me. It's still that's just the story is not over true. And I mean, it's It's interesting because you have these two contrasting financial equations in the and, um, in the essay and peace. But you have in the gun road store, you have $8 million. And when it was all gone, you had a growth graph that just continued in in the direction that you set out to crew in and no independent of 25 or 40 million. You are. You already have the living proof of how little that could make a difference in your arrival of wherever you're meant to arrive and, you know, 2030

50 years from now. Yeah, and no doubt. I think the longer the more time that passes when I'm 80 years old, I it's gonna be even smaller, you know? So even though it isn't part of my identity now and part of the chip on my shoulder. You know, it's just like so, uh, amazing. Really? When when you meet someone who has, Ah, holes, life's worth of experience. And they're like none of this matters like your kids,

your family, your relationships with people and, like, even even the gum road stuff is not gonna matter long term. According to anyone I've talked to over the age of 80

that's I I'd be willing to bet. Yeah, that's the consensus. That's a consensus for a reason. I think it is. I'd be aligned with that viewpoint as well. And, hey, you just smoke weed until you're 80 and, uh, find out for yourself with a compound interest. Yeah, just let just let the gum road growth happen. Wake up 80.

I have Ah, I have, like, the title to its the reflecting on my failure to fail to build

a 1,000,000,000 dollar company. Well, should certain it turns out I was ah, partial not because now it's a 1,000,000,000 compelling with the ah the So I mentioned. That's one reason of reaching out to you. The other reason. The other reason I e mailed you, I'm going back to, you know just the two reasons was a few years ago. I remember you writing a tweet That just kind of got stuck in my mind. This is before, um, you were this prolific Twitter author, and but I remember coming across in loving it that it was something to defective. Um, I can't wait to succeed so I can write about failure. Yeah, or, ah, there's something to that effect. Do you remember

the street? Yeah. It was something like it's pretty close. I think it was. I can't wait to be successful so that I can write about failure.

What was what was going through your head when you if you remember when you wrote that tweet and what did that mean? So that was 2000

13. So was around a year after we had raised, you know, eight million bucks from great investor list. And so I think at the time, it was sort of being in this mode where, you know, it was sort of this duality of seeing the company being a lot smaller, going through a lot less growth. I think that I was expecting and sort of the outside world seeing you know, this great sort of Wonder Kinte sort of story and having to manage those sort of two identities every day and feeling like I couldn't really talk about the failure. Nor, I think, would anyone really be interested until I was successful? And I am sure I was learning so much at that time. And I think every founder, you know,

12345 years into their companies learning so much. But a lot of that is the result of failure. And you can't really talk about that stuff sort of in the moment. Or at least people typically don't do that. And so I I think I just wanted to signal to people that, like, by the way, I am failing, you know? Sure, I raised a bunch of money and things are going great and we're growing and and all that stuff like everybody says. But there's a lot of failure here. I can't really talk about it, but just know that I'm self aware about it a little bit on that, you know, the successes is pending in my mind,

and I was able to sort of tie that back to the other tweet about you know this is my 1st $1,000,000,000 company, and I think sort of drawing this line that, like, I still believe in that potentially. But But we're not there yet, you know? And I think, um, yeah, that was sort of the gist of the tweet. And I think it's it struck a chord because I think it it sort of captured this sort of the weird paradox of of writing about failure, being in failure and sort of saying, Sorry, I can't write about this right now. Give me a few years. Hopefully I will be successful, and then I will, you know, share, share those

thoughts. What do you think pulls you towards wanting and pulls you in general towards wanting to share about failure like, kind of on the macro side, but also just even like spending your time in an afternoon to write out, away, up, on essay around around it? Yeah. I mean, I think

I have a tendency to a share in general, which is kind of weird, because I'm super introverted. Um, if you believe in that scale, Um but in general, I am like, I very much an introvert on the sort of like the super I don't know. I drained myself when I have a lot of meetings and I can't wait to go home and do nothing. But I love talking and I love sharing. I love like learning and listening. And I think that's part of the reason that I sort of love Twitter and sort of feel

like I'm gonna start a podcast. By the

way I know a podcast is, it's sort of like how it's like how to be in an extrovert for injured birds.

You know? Well, tell so many guesses. But it's true. You really should, um but yeah, it just

gives. It sort of gives me a forum toe like explore my ideas and get pushed. I think in in certain directions. And I think it's really important to share was sort of in in in a sort of in a transitory way, you know, like everything I've written so far, I sort of, and I'm trying to sort of put a stake in the ground. But say, you know, like, this isn't over yet. You know, this is part of the journey, you know. I'm 26. I have a long way to go.

Hopefully, I'm still learning like teach me, you know, And I think I think of them like opportunities for other people to chime and give their feedback. And I try to present things in general in ways that allow people to do that and feel like they can do that instead of say, this is what I believe. It's correct. I'm not a super sort of week of you strongly held type of person. I am a sort of like a strong views, weakly held like I think it's important, especially when you're the CEO of a company to present your views like they aren't that strong because I think there is already a part of dynamic there right when you have the ability to fire somebody else and they don't have the ability to fire you to make it as easy as possible to get feedback, constructive feedback because people don't share that. It doesn't matter if it's listed in an internal document that you're open to it, or that you have a company value that is open, but to actually do it and sort of asked for it and let go out of your way to do that. And I think everyone sort of I think thinks that they're open to feedback,

and I think I'm open to feedback. But then I asked people for feedback and they tell me Cool, Yeah, I'll write something up and send it to you and my fight or flight response just starts like going, You know, I kind of want to just get an apple watch just for that feature just for the heart be future. Because I could, like, feel it when that happens. And, you know, I get that all the time. I get that when I tweet sometimes sometimes I tweet. And then I put my phone on airplane mode because I'm just like I believe in this. I'm not tweeting this just to be annoying to somebody here or whatever, but I know that the reactions to this might not be sort of totally positive or totally sort of in the in the same sort of vector sort of direction that I was going for. And so I'd sort of sometimes have to put on my phone often. I will tweet before I take a shower. I will tweet and then jump in the shower

And then what's been one of your most nerve racking tweets that you sent and felt like? OK, I don't want to look at this room. Yeah, one of them.

There are few in my draft folder right now. Um, well, one of one of them was about early employees, and I tweeted something along the veins of like, you know, there are some reasons to be an early employees, like you're gonna learn a ton. And if you want to start a company, probably no better way to get that education like I did at Pinterest. But if you're evaluating being early employees as a as a financial opportunity, um, it's probably not a good idea because you're going to make a lot less money than you think. And like I think in general, if you sort of, like, do the math statistically,

I think it's unlikely that being an early employees like the best way to make money. You know, I think in terms of the risk profile, the risk reward equation, I don't think it's super strong and the hard thing with Twitter. Sometimes you don't people sometimes think that, like you think a lot about Twitter like every tweet I think about for a long time. But often it's not that. It's like I have this idea. I tweet it and then it blows up or doesn't most weeds don't write. And so I'm not gonna spend, like, 10 15 minutes like thinking about a tweet or figuring out the wording for it if it gets like, it's just not gonna do anything right. And so I try not to think about it too much. But that one started blowing up pretty quickly,

and I realized it was a lot more controversial, especially away that worded it, um, which I'm sure I could award it better about. Okay, Yeah, like if you're in early, Employee, you might feel like I'm telling you, you did something stupid. Or if your investor which I think actually, this is like the true sort of reaction. I think the true negative reaction was investors that felt like, you know, their startups are trying to hire people, and this tweet doesn't make that any easier.

Um, and I think that was sort of the cause of a lot of ah lot of the reaction on dhe. Frankly, I think if you sort of have the nuance of it like most people are like, Yeah, like being an early employees. If you're doing it purely for financial motivation on that decision and probably statistically doesn't make sense, you might make a ton of money, But often you won't veces can play that game a little bit more because they're diversified. They have optionality, you know they could double down if they want or decide not to in the next round. Employees, they're sort of stuck. Um, and I think in general what I've learned from Twitter, I think,

is that the goal is not necessarily, I think, for me to say something sort of purely logical. Like, for example, if I said less is more, there's that's not true, right? Sort of objective, universally right. I can think of quite a many examples in which more is more unless is less. I think most people believe that, But if I said less is more people get that. They know what sort of the the emotional resonance of the statement they understand sort of what I'm going for in this sort of there's like, baked in stuff that people just know, you know and I think of Twitter a little bit like that,

where I'm not necessarily sort of trying to say something sort of perfectly accurate. But I'm just trying to communicate like an emotional resurrection. Yeah, Yeah, something direction, like, you know, like in general. I think, you know, it's easy to get caught up in the hole. I want to be as early as possible in a startup, and that's you know why I want to be an early employees. Um, and then you sort of don't really think about you Don't do the math. We don't realize,

like, you know what you're saying. Oh, for necessarily isn't really employ. You're not thinking about strike prices and, um, early exercising and tax implications and all sorts of stuff. You know, that I have many friends in early employees that are sort of stuck at the company there at have been for eight years, you know, for example, and that's the directionality of it. And I think most people get that, um, in this in Silicon Valley, and a lot of people outside looking in value don't get that,

and that's our most. My audience probably doesn't live in San Francisco. and the people of Francisco maybe agree with that general directionality, but feel like No, there's nuance to this statement, and it's really important that we express it, and I don't disagree with that. But I think Twitter in general is like a pretty poor format for it.

So poor there's like, No, remember Nuan

it's not. It's just I honestly don't even think it should be. I think people that Seo Twitter is not good for conversations. If the answer is like, yeah, it's not good for conversations I don't like it wasn't really built for conversations. It's like a broadcast tool. It's closer to everybody having their own newspapers. Newspapers are not build for coming conversations. It's a very slow conversation of it happens. And they're great tools for conversations. For example, podcasts, right? Um, but I think people just need to understand a little bit. Some people do,

at least I think, need to understand a little bit more about what these tools are built for and how people are using them like one. You know, I think someone might think, Oh, so I was trying to say something that is low, logically consistent in every situation like a law physics, and I need to make sure that he knows he's he's wrong. He's actually scenario, and often I try to be pretty good about it. Like I tried to retweet people that disagree, and I tried to never say no. Basically, Um,

yeah, what is what is your below the line kind of approach to Twitter in this in the engagement that you that you build there with with your thoughts? Yeah, I mean,

I think it's it's tricky. I mean, I really enjoyed tweeting, and I think the sort of the below the line version is that I often sort of struggle with it because I'm it's It's so hard to know what people really feel and believe, and there's like a lot of imposter syndrome, I think, and also I just don't know. And part of the reason I'm excited to be out here in San Francisco. It's so like, make sure that people don't think I've turned into somebody that I'm not. You know that I want people to make like I'm I'm still me, you know, and I hope that is communicate and I think it is for most people, but you know, and I think it's healthy to be concerned. It's I would rather be concerned about something that is not a problem than not be aware of something that actually is a huge problem. And that's why I still,

like really replies and stuff like that. But I think in general I really want to use it as a tool took to share things that I think are genuinely useful to know and and and not even useful to know necessarily, but useful to just spend a little bit of time thinking about. It's not to say, Hey, you now know that you should not self reject You should not hold yourself back from an opportunity because you don't think you're qualified. They will tell you if you're not qualified. So just send the email that's not new, right? That's not That's not That's basically Nike's slogan. Just do it right It Z um, but I think it just puts a different spin on it. Don't self reject is just like a different thing that's gonna go into your brain so that maybe one day or maybe two day when you're thinking about should I apply for this job? There's No way they're gonna hire me. That design team is way too good, right?

Led them, tell you that they're way too good, like don't don't do that on their behalf. You No, no, don't take away their agency and I just try and that's I think that's the thing that I do that's relatively unique. I think hopefully is that I try to make things stake in people's heads because I try to say the things differently. I'm not. I don't ever want to. I want people to think I'm trying to be innovative or creative in, like a sort of a new way. You know, we talked about this a little bit, like it's very difficult to come up with something new in music or in art, but it's much easier to take a couple things and remix them and do something with technology that wasn't possible before. And you can go read that book that you gifted me and get a bunch tweets and aphorisms that I'm sure would do very well.

But I think I try to take things that people here might know and people outside of Silicon Valley. It's not as ingrained and just sort of like put my own little spin on it sometimes at humor, but just reverse things a little bit like, you know, like, I love rap. And I think rap does such an awesome some rap songs can take sort of very simple concepts and sort of use wordplay to make those things resound resonate in ways that linger longer than if I just said the statement in plain English, you know? And I think about that like with, Like with Twitter and frankly, like most people don't remember anything. And I try to keep that in mind. Like I believe quite strongly

do. Do you have anxiousness around things that you that you tweet? D'oh! I mean, I guess you said that you put it on. Yeah, You put it on. I do?

Yeah. I mean, I

have How many times a week do you have some kind

of at least a couple times a week? Probably. Yeah. It's like Syria. Yeah, it's it's not good. And maybe maybe it is good. I don't know, but yeah, like I have one tweet my drafts. That's about how sometimes we tell the story of founders that get into debt credit card debt or like blow through a bunch of savings. And in parallel to that, I've met lots of founders recently that have done that. They spend 10 20 $30,000 trying to build a nap, and they want to go out and raise money now because they can't do that anymore. And it just scares the crap out of me because I didn't do any of that stuff. I've never had a credit card debt.

I've never had debt in general. I've never blown through a significant amount of my savings. I left Pinterest and then immediately started fundraising because I was like I needed pain. I don't want to eat into my savings right? One of the one of the reasons to raise money is so that you don't have to do that, I think, And I wanted people to know. I want people to know that, that you don't have to do those things, and that's really dangerous and really scary, potentially, especially when they're more options out there than ever. With y Combinator and all these ways toe, you can keep your day job, figure this thing out on the side, just like Bill think about it.

A little hopeful, you know? Just be aware that blowing $30,000 in Iowa sap, that isn't done yet Really risky. And it could potentially put you in a really dark place, right, Ray? And so I have this tweet drafter that says something along the lines of I've never had credit card debt. I've never blown through a significant portion of my savings. I don't think or I don't encourage any founder to do that in order to start a company. And I just haven't tweeted yet because I think it's like I want the intent there's already knew wants right in this conversation. There's this idea that I've talked to founders, so I know this is a problem. A lot of people say this isn't a real problem. This is a strawman argument. It's like every week there are people that tell me this,

Um, I want people to know that I love things like Why See? And there's all of these. You know, I love the idea that you could go raise money and do all these sorts of things because it allows for for people that may be you could not be in a position to do that can go do it. But you know, things like starting with like I've never had credit card debt is like a very sort of privileged statement to be able to make it. I don't want to imply that, like, I'm I'm trying to do the opposite where I'm like, I never had to suffer like this. And I hope that you don't either. And don't do it unless you, you know, I kind of have to, but I'm afraid that it will come across like I'm telling people that are in credit card debt,

that they're dumb or stupid. And I had this tweet a while ago that I that talks about this concept of behavior vs intention. And it's the number one thing that I learned that I taught new people that join Gummer. What I felt the most important thing that anyone that worked at government learn and that, by the way, that's a great way to come up with a tweet, content to say Okay,

if you worked at Gun Road, these were the things that you learned. Now you

don't have to work in government to learn these things in this in this with this spin on it. And one of the things was this idea of the difference between behavior and intention and behavior is what someone is doing basically right. It is sort of an objective. Like, what are they actually doing? Intention is why they're doing it. It is the sort of the motivation or the reasoning behind something. When you judge your own actions, you're judging yourself based on your intention, right? You are aware of why you are doing something. When you judge somebody else, you're judging them based on their behavior, purely behavior. That's it. There's no way, at least currently,

T judge to know anybody's intentions. And so it's unfair. Actually, there's a double standard between you and everybody else, because when you're late, you know why you're late. You know, you didn't mean to be late. When someone else is like they're an idiot or they don't respect your time. You don't know what went through their life. And so I sort of communicate to everybody that works that gum red. You know, everybody else's behavior. You might not know their intention. Just be aware of the difference. And I don't think That's sort of like I don't think anyone heard that I was,

like, mind blown or anything. But the phrasing, the phrasing of behavior, specifically an intention explicit explicitly, I know has helped employees people tell me 345 years later, I still remember that behavior vs intention that phrase has done with me. And so I tweeted that blew up was was great. Um

and but

that's how I think about Twitter, too. You know, you could just judge me based on what I'm seeing on the right. You don't know the intention. I think my intention is good. I assume everyone that

I know where it is there that you know. But people

get angry on Twitter all the time. They think people are acting in bad faith, et cetera. But you

don't know how many angry tweets a week do You get directed your way.

It's per tweet. I think is like, probably better metric. But if I tweet something like that early employee thing, like 40 or 50 maybe it's really difficult. And I noticed this not just with Twitter. I think it applies to building products. I think it applies to press. I think it applies to almost anything that you d'oh, let's say your reviews for your podcast you might have. Ah, let's say 100,000 people that loved your thing. Let's say they they hit like or they saw your tweet or whatever whatever metric you want to use for. They benefited positively from this piece of content that you made. 15 people did not, and they express that vocally. The human brain, for some reason, sees those 15

so differently, right? So differently. And I'm sure you're aware I'm totally where I I don't want to look at the reviews. Oh, yeah, Don't do that. Remember looking early on? It was like 31 star reviews and I was like, What? I was one star like I I could totally take it. If it's like three stars but one star and uh, yeah, totally. Yeah, totally. What you're doing is you're comparing in

this sort of the best case. I think you're saying I got three negative reviews. I got 100 positive reviews, so therefore 3% didn't like it, but that's not true. A lot more people liked it. They just didn't leave a good review. I think people are much more likely to leave bad reviews than good ones. You know, I I also think I learned this with Gum Road that as you grow, the good stuff grows and the bad stuff grows and the good stuff goes from 1000 to 110,000. The bat stuff goes from 10 to 20 to 30 right? It doesn't grow as fast, hopefully, but the brain sees 10 to 20 to 30 men fixates on its worse than it's ever been because we look at the absolute number, not the sort of relative number. And so that's kind of what I try to keep in mind is the actual reason that a certain tweet well, we'll get a lot of negative comments is actually not because it's a worse tweet, but actually because

it resounded within more people. And so they shared

it more right, and so 100,000 people saw it, which led to 50 people saying, This is stupid it

right now and it's it's in. Everything is someone was recently talking. Just Everything is mediocre anyhow, and you get when you create enough stuff, you just really and you start to know enough haters. You realize? Yeah. Aerosmith. One of the greatest bands of all time. You mention it toe four people and one never listens to him one day, just like someone likes him. Okay. And one really liked frickin Aerosmith like, Yeah, and yet one out of four really, really digs it, but it's most

people won't remember. A year later, I remember thinking I just did a test with myself. I was like, Okay, let me think really hard about the best and worst tweets I saw a week ago. Can I literally can't think of a single thing? You know, um and I assume that most people are like that. They know what they tweeted, probably right? Roughly. Um, but at the end of the day, like most people have lives that don't include you most of the time. And I take great solace in that where I'm like, Look,

I'm probably 25% of my significant others life, and then it just goes down from there, you know, kind of like a a power law, too. So it's like very quickly gets 2.1% right, and just being comfortable with that right now.

Well, it's, um Well, they put a capstone on what you're saying about the founder debt. And by the way, we should just do a Ah, well, d'oh! Ah! Apart to where it's just drafted tweets. Hell was like the tweets that you drafted. People can take what you want, but you want more nuanced, very different medium toe expound on it. Um, but the, you know,

that thought on the founder, dad and was something you were saying before of just, um it made me think of you, Founder being like a sailor. And if you have wind, if you have this market, then that makes up for so much. And if you are the best sailor, you can maybe find grooves in and in any wind and the direction of the water you can you can get it going a little bit. But, man, if you could be a great sailor and off wind in your direction than it is just a vastly different story. And it one of things that that I think about quite often is, um is that maybe we got a lot of these narratives wrong that ah, Facebook didn't become Facebook because of X y Z. It became Facebook because it actually just stumbled on one of the strongest product.

Mark fits in the history of business, and it was software driven could scale close to free and was had network effects. And those three things product market fit, software scale and network effects presented this insane behemoth that when you look at like their growth strategy, or when you look at the founder, the people behind it, you learn 2% of the story. I mean, it's Facebook easily headed, the best product market fit Benny coming in last 50 years and probably instagram right behind that. And yet we don't look at that as I do not look at that as a founder trying to learn from other founders. That wasn't part of the narrative being told the narrative being told was, you know, dedication, hard work. Um was focusing maniacally,

remember just pouring over their growth playbook. Um, and and it's a ah, you could tweet out about the founder debt, and someone's going to say, you know, talk to the Airbnb founders and I know the story well. And the baseball card booklet of credit cards that they took out not and that's that is part of the story and then gets way more. That's above line version. But the little below the line version is Holy Shit. Our marketplace is driven by experiences as a budget alternative to other places to stay while traveling with the ability to graph off of Greg's list. Holy shit! Is that a powerful combination? Like those four things? The debt credit card debt? It's so not part of those four things, um, and is looking at the leaves instead of the actual roots. Yeah,

I think we as humans look for stories, we look at dots and try to force them into a line. And there's so many more coincidences and successes, despite off that the data is super dirty, you know, And it's a good plan, Issa. It's really difficult to really, I say This is why Facebook succeeded. The truth is, it's not falsify a ble. It's not scientific. You can't run experiments on any of this stuff. You can't baby test if Zuk was actually brown or black or a woman or anything like that. But you can look at a lot of examples that just almost disprove every universal rule that there is about startups. You know, I think there are people that say You must work this hard to be this successful,

and I can think of several 10 plus $1,000,000,000 companies that were built by people that refused to work more than 55 hours a week. Yes, week interest. We never worked that hard. We worked hard. We work tomorrow, but I don't think we ever did anything close to you. Know what Facebook is sort of known to do our uber. It certainly worked for them, you know, But I don't think it's sort of an A need. It's not a requirement, you know. And I think it's just, I think, good to know that.

And I was talking to someone today who said it really well, he said. We sort of obsessed a little bit over the hero warship right of these people that built these amazing things. But I think there's an argument to be made that they are actually not super mature. They haven't faced a ton of adversity. That's not to discount anything that they've done, but just to say in terms of learning from somebody, it's much more interesting, I think, to learn from someone who failed. Unfortunately, we won't because we don't know who those people are necessarily. But in general, if someone nailed every single thing that they did, I can think of one example of this basically, which is Donald Trump. It's very difficult to learn from someone like that. They don't have a lot of stuff in common with anybody else. And frankly, I think it sort of stifles someone's ability to have empathy for other people because they haven't faced a lot of the stuff that most humans will inevitably

face from varying course setting world record with with the wind in your sale, How much can you learn from that? And it doesn't become part of the narrative because it's the human spirit. We want to hear stories about not to these external factors. Yeah, helped. I think that's given outcome. That's

the other reason I think that tweet. You know, I can't wait to be successful to write about failure. I think I wanted to. It's kind of this paradox where people love reading about failure, and that's where a lot of the learnings come from. But most people are only willing to do it from people that are successful. You know, um, in general, like that essay that I wrote, 750,000 people read it, but I don't know how many people would have read it if I wasn't the second employee of Pinterest. If camera didn't raise from Kleiner Perkins or Max Left General of All Robert Kant, it came with a lot of credibility and a lot of sort of ups and downs. But, you know,

without that, I think I would have learned probably similar things. I think many people that have not done any of those things have learned that and Maura, about having to do layoffs, trying to figure out product growth, learning about all these things around product market fit and finding value in creating value and sort of being introspective. But people don't click on those things because it didn't hit. And just like products have product market fit. Articles have product market fit, you know. These are all products, right, and with that essay, I think a lot of it wasa with my tweets. I think it's similar. I think people the market is craving something I happen to be able to provide it.

But that doesn't make me necessarily better or worse than anybody else. Right? I happen to have a certain number of followers or a certain number engagement, because I happen to be the right place at the right time. Just like a boat in a specific place in the water would have done Just as well, it turns out nobody was running the thing. And I found that sort of firsthand when I had to do the layoffs, we went from 20 to 5 and then 5 to 1, and I was spending four hours a week like Tim Ferriss told me I should to run gum Road and it continues to grow with Sam Ray. And it gave me that, like, holy shit moment of, like, where am I in this story? Right? You know,

I was able to a B test. Kind of. You know what happens when I stopped working? And what happens when I start working? And it turns out the ship continued toe to sail to its

destination. Yeah, well, it's, I think I mean, this seemed to live as a quote that to be a philosopher king, I think he said it recently to be a philosopher king, be a king first and I to what you're saying, um, of experiencing success, to talk about failure. I I don't think that's I don't agree with that tweet. I think it's It is, I think we actually are. We're in this this nascent stage of distribution of content online, so having a falling today maybe helps to amplify the message. And to get that it's requires the early adoption of the technology,

things like that. But the I think that concept of we want to hear from flaws for kings, I don't think is this true is we want to actually hear from the, you know, penniless preacher, then more so than the male articulate prints we actually do want to hear from from the people that have failed with wisdom gets, and I think that's it is a I think there's there's more of, ah of an audience for that. Then we give it credit for that. Just it's just a delay before they have the microphones and or it's a delay before we recognize, like right now, you're able to write something that 800,000 people could read. That's, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago,

completely impossible unless you made it through some type of gate kept. Um, you know, garden now fast forward. Another 10 years. I think that's what we're gonna want to hear from. Is the person living on farm an hour and 1/2 outside of Omaha making $28,000 a year? That is, that is exceptionally happy with X. Y Z is as almost proof, but we want to hear how they do it. We just and there's a bit of a delay before they have the microphone. And it's not just you need to be a king before you could be a philosopher. But, you know, um,

something else I want to ask is Ah, question. Ask everybody, which is give me three stories that have helped shape who you've become. And, uh, we chatted a little bit about this, but I and and maybe we've mentioned a few of them, but you can give me two or three stories that have helped shape who you've become.

Yeah, so I'll start with something a little bit weird, which is, Ah, science fiction story called Foundation, and it's ah, set of three books written by Isaac Asimov, who's a pretty great author. And he wrote about this world, sort of in the far future. Presumably that develops this technology called Psycho history, which is this idea being that, let's see you throw a ball from one side of the room to the other roughly. You know where that ball is going. You might not know where every atom is going because the atoms are bouncing around and becoming part of the ball and no longer part of the ball and everything like that. But as the ball gets larger and larger, it's actually easier and easier to sort of,

you know, just sort of track the flight path of that, the center of gravity. I guess with that thing it's more more predictable, basically. And he so I propose is this. Humanity becomes so large trillions and trillions, hundreds of trillions of humans that that happens, that we could actually sort of, like project out humanity's path because no, Adam is strong enough. No human has enough power over this thing to, like, really change it. And so he does this. He invents this technology and he goes and presents too the power of of the of the civilization and says I did this.

It were dead. Like every everything points to the fact that this this thing that we've built humanity is going to go through a Rome went to bit went through, basically, which is the sort of the fall of the Empire, and everything is gonna get destroyed. The good news in 10,000 years, things are gonna be great. But, you know, none of us are gonna be here to see that we're all screwed. And there's gonna be a lot of pain suffering. But there are these small changes we can make in certain. We can sort of try to start directing things in certain ways so that their these pivot points these inflection points in humanity and very few people will be at that place. But if we can get those things to align and they make the right decision at the time, we can shrink that 10,000 year period of pain and suffering toe 1000 years. That's like the best case.

And it's sort of this obviously absurd sort of theory doesn't really make a lot of sense chaos theory and the Butterfly, for they're all these reasons that that thing probably doesn't make sense, which is why it's fiction. You know, what is the book holding it? It's called Foundation, and anyways, there's constant from it that I want. It just got me really into science fiction. But I think the thing that I applied to my life all the time is this idea that there is this mass that I cannot control. But there are these, like, inflection points in humanity. In this book, that sort of these three people come together and they need to make the right decision. And they thought it through enough that all the chess pieces are there and you just hope they make the right call.

And if they do, we get to the next one, and you kind of keep going. And I just like that they're called Sheldon. Crisis is crises because the guy who invented this technology is called Harry Sheldon or Hari Sheldon, probably, but and he was he didn't exist. But, um, I just love that idea of like there were these fern moments in my life that are really gonna matter, and they're gonna happen a few times, and the rest of the time I can't really control. But I can try to position myself for that future. Me is in a place to make the right decision, and I like that idea of, sort of,

like, sort of splitting myself into two. And there's like the me, and I'm sort of trying to prep myself and build a system so that when that moment happens, that person's not gonna know it's that moment. But I knew and I was thinking ahead and planning. You know, whether it be around my health and fitness or where I'm living, or the optionality that I have or the friends that I've made. I'm in a place to execute on that and move on to the next thing that will happen in another 15 years or something like that. I just love that idea, and it's one of the reasons to go back to, um, to go back to Twitter a little bit. I like it's why I love taking these normal concepts and like putting interesting spins on them because those are the things that people remember. That kind of the weird, funny things you know and That's why I love fiction, too. So that's the story that, um I just absolutely love

Interesting the future self in the current self that e I never been Your fascination and love of fiction is maybe science fiction's may be similar to mine with psychology and in psychology. It's similar to ah Young in principle of like he thought that the this the quiet voice in our head telling us what we should do guiding our ethic and moral behavior was, Was the future self trying to break through into the present state telling you what? To d'oh crazy, so crazy. So, uh, just mind bendingly insane. Another story, this one Israel. That's what's so foundation. That's really foundation. That's

another story. This one is unfortunately true is when I left Pinterest. And so I left Pinterest like three or four months three or something like that before my cliff and sort of Silicon Valley parlance, I guess, is you're Cliff is when you vest this sort of the first set of your shares. So let's say you get issued 100,000 shares a year goes by, you get 25,000 then every month after that, you get 1 48th of it until you vest your whole 100,000 shares in four years. So basically, if you stay in, you know, 11 months and 30 days, you don't get anything potentially. The company is not legally obligated to get you anything to give you anything. And, you know, I was a little bit cocky and stupid at the time.

Was that I could do this to find whatever come it will be a huge company. And this thing isn't working out as well as I thought. It's, You know, I think they're gonna do great. I thought pictures. It was easily gonna be a $1,000,000,000 company. I think today they're worth 14 billion. So I was wrong.

Really? What made you think even that? That early on it's going to do that, you know that? Well, yeah,

it's funny because a lot of investors asked me that or used to maybe like, why did How did you find pictures before any of us? And I was like, I looked at the well, Ben emailed me so I didn't find them. The you know Ben Silverman, the CEO sent me an email and said, Hey, we need help on our IOS app. Could you do this? And I said

yes. How do you know

Joe? We didn't cold email. Yeah, I had an app called data D a Y t a. That was a numerical, arbitrary numerical data logger. Basically, so you could track like, this is how many hours I slept or whatever per day. And then sort of trend, line it and sort of see if there's correlations or causation. I guess between, like, how many beers you had and how many hours of sleep you got or anything like that. I had a few 100,000 users anyways, so I posted on a hacker news. It was number one,

I think. And, you know, I can design Aiken code. I don't live in Terrence's garment. 18 year old college kid come in at USC in Los Angeles. So, you know, in hindsight, I know what that means, which is, like, I'm very hirable and probably cheaper than most talent out in the Bay Area. And so, Ben, from Pinterest,

I mean, email. And he said, Hey, Aiken, you know I'm building this thing. We have a tiny team. Um, it's called Pinterest. Helps you share organize thing and collect sort of the things that you're into. And, you know, we don't have an IOS app. We kind of need one. Or I guess at the time, an iPhone app.

The iPad wasn't out. And, yeah, you look like you've been designing code and your remote. You want to go, just do this thing. And I quoted them at 1st $4000 for pictures for iPhone. So hopefully I think they got a deal on that, um, and built it. And I ended up joining full time, and I sort of design and built a contest for iPhone and did a bunch of other stuff. It's the second employee over there, very little to my credit. But the reason I joined them was I saw the one I had honestly had such little exposure to people that liked what they were doing. Just like all my friends.

You know, we're getting degrees and Finance and International Relations and Business Administration because they wanted to make a bunch of money and I was like, tryingto make APS and even at USC, which isn't, you know, nowhere. I met one person in that semester that knew what hack unused waas you know, which blew my mind. I thought I was moving from Singapore to Los Angeles to California. And there's, you know, tech start ups and hackers or whatever. We're gonna be everywhere, you know, 9 4010 Yeah, And it wasn't the case.

And, you know, So when I met these, you know, these two guys, Ben and Paul at a coffee shop in Berkeley to talk about Pinterest. It was like these people love what they're doing. They just want to talk about product all day. That's amazing. Never met anyone. Really? You know, any team that was doing that? And I didn't really care about any anything else. It was like a tiny team. I'm gonna learn a lot.

I'm gonna be able to do a lot Seem like really nice guys, which is true, and yeah, it was. And then, you know, Ben showed me their Google analytics and it was, like, insane. It was doubling every month, and I should have learned that they were having a hard time fundraising. I don't know why. I still don't really know why I like those numbers are just like literally doubling every single month For the whole time I was there. It was crazy town. And so I just saw that. And I was like,

You know, I remember at some point we had tens of thousands of users like those air rose in our database, right? Not active users and 60 million page views a month, Just like incomprehensible engagement, just insane. And, you know, obviously talking to users and things like that. I was just like, this is easily gonna be massive. No one in Tech cares about this thing. I think the first time TechCrunch wrote about Pinterest it was because my space copied our layout. That's like how we were like the footnote.

Really? What? Why did it struggle to get notoriety within the bear if it had that much retention usage? I don't think struggle is the right

word, because that would sort of imply that they wanted it. And I think Ben was just like, why, you know, like, what's the point? A techcrunch piece? And we did frankly struggle to recruit people, so maybe there would've been validity. But I think he was right in the sense that, like the most important thing is that the people that use us mostly women, mostly in non coastal cities. I love the product, used the product, find value in the product. And that sort of singular focus I don't think has changed,

you know, 10 years later. And you know, I think things like press human today. You know, a test that I asked my friends sometimes is Can you name the sea of Facebook? Yes. Mark Zuckerberg, Can you name the CEO of Twitter? Yes. Jack Dorsey. Can you name the Sea of Pinterest? They're always, like, about to say something until they realized, like they don't actually know.

And it kind of blows their mind a little bit because everyone else painters at this point. But for the CEO of the company to be I mean, this is a sexy consumer company. People even know often. People know the founder CEO of Instagram, you know, but yeah, people don't know Ben Silverman. Sometimes people in the Silicon Valley don't which is amazing and and and maybe a bad thing. I feel like you should probably be a little bit more educated, but yeah, it's just, I think, speaks to how little he values that which I think I honestly like, respect that and applaud it sometimes because I can't I'm not been I'm I do have more of any go. There's a reason that I tweet and he doesn't tweet.

Um, partly they're probably on their quiet period. But you know, there is just such a such a singular focus on just building this great product and making sure the employees air happening. Such a genuinely modest he is, yes, and it's super kind. It's so weird. It's like sometimes I get frustrated because I'm like, I can't do that. I can't be this modest. I just I'm no, I'm not gonna pretend, but he is genuinely like like he you know, it's sort of one of those things where if I break the site, he will apologize to, you know, I'm sorry that we created this company so that you could break the site,

Something I was in the, um I don't Have you seen the new office that has a coffee shop in the lobby and was there with a friend and he came up and said, Hey, don't interrupt. I just want to say, Hey, James and the frickin CEO of the company in which we're getting coffee is we're not only kindly coming over to say hi because he's he's been really kind over the years. But the, um but also just like saying Head. And then he walked away and my friend Nate was like his house like, Very good. See

you. Yeah, I have another band story. Is it funny? There's no Ben stories also on the Internet, you know, because because, Ben, but another one is This is like, you know, I'd left pinchers. I'd started Gummer that raised a bunch of money. When this is maybe two or three years later and I'm just like walking a work, you know, it's just like 6 37 in the morning. And Ben's walking to work, you know,

And I sort of like this is I mean, this This picture, this is worth I don't know what a lot of money he has better things to do. Hundreds of employees, etcetera. So I just sort of wave at him, you know, and sort of noting in my head that I'll shoot him anymore. Okay, we should catch up. And, you know, he just like stops and says. Like you know, it takes out out of out his headphones, I think and says,

like, How's it going? What's going on? And I I'm like, Oh, yeah, things are good, Yeah, like things were great. Like, we'll catch up later and, you know, I kind of like I'm the one trying to get out of the conversation. I just feel like there's no way this person wants to talk to me And he just constantly just talks, asked me questions and it's just like, How are you doing?

Like, what's going on? How can I help? Like, you know, like very in a very sort of genuine way, you know, for like, 30 or 40 minutes in the middle of, you know, something on Seventh Street or something. And in Soma, you know, 6 30 or something in the morning, you know, it's just Yeah, it's pretty clear he's such a nice He deserves everything that he's he's gone

so far. It doesn't count as a as, ah, someone that has had a lot of wind in the in the sales that I think you would admit, just they really hit this great product market fit. He is someone that you can learn a lot from on the success side of things. Because even through immense success, he has done it in a very unique way in his own personal way that he's so he seems so balanced every time interact with him in, I think. Modestly. Yeah, um, apologetic for anything that you're not going. Yeah, yeah, we're We're not growing this fast. I want us to and end in this.

Yeah, when they're like, $5 billion company, that's just crazy. And yeah, and he's maybe it's helpful. That is his wife. Tibia is executive coach and phenomenal, um, executive coach. Maybe that's helpful. She

came up with the name, too, by the way. And painters Really pretty sure. Yeah. Oh, awesome. Yeah,

I didn't know that. Um, Also super frugal. So cost. Like a 2009 Prius. Yeah,

I remember. So I You know, I'm like, Hey, I'd love to work on this thing. This is you know, before I joined, like a you know, other companies, they're flying me out, you know, to San Francisco to interview, make me offer et cetera. And he's like, Yeah, let it let it like, let us know when you're gonna be in in the Bay Area and I'm like,

I'm a college student. And so I said, I think at this point, I'd already started working with them. But I basic a couple friends of mine were like, Hey, we're gonna go up to Berkeley toe go watch the cow game or something like that. You know, it's like I just come with and then I'll just bounce for, like, three or four hours and go hang out with these random check people in there like, Okay, it's weird, but sure, And so I just like email. Ben,

I was like, Hey, yeah, like I'll be up there. It was like, Awesome. We'll see you Sunday 11 at this coffee shop or whatever, just like, you know, and then when I, um when I went up there in the beginning, I can't remember exactly what what the reason was. But I was in Paul Otto, Um, and I just crashed on his couch, you know, or an air bed or something like that, You know, just like

there's no pretense, you know?

Yeah, I was just amazing. Yeah, yeah.

His is one of my absolute favorites. I should have. You won't do it. But I think maybe he would in this type of medium, because I know that he he also Ah ee. I think he'd appreciate the new ones that of podcasts allow but him and divvy It would be a insane episode because she is also such a smart she worked with with our executive team at at Hilton and ah, she just phenomenally smart, um, around the psychological side of creations. Well, um, so that's story number two. What story? Number three. Story number 30 man. And how If you were to predict if we were toe jump to the future, how would you predict that?

Second story? What end? 2030 40 years from now of abdicating 25? Yeah. Um, 22 30 40 years

from now. Is that story end? I mean, I think I'm optimistic I'm too optimistic. And hindsight almost always which I think is it. I rather be that than not, But I think in general, I think I'm hopeful that the thing that I built Gum Road continues to grow. You know, we're at five million yearly revenue annual revenue. You know, tiny team growing faster, actually, that we've ever grown really like three years ago, we grew 15% year over year. Two years ago, we grew 25%.

And then just like clockwork, like the market has a soul, 35%. So maybe the next year we go 45%. 85%. Who knows? Um, but I think, you know, at the end of the day, like we built something really valuable and I hope that it doesn't matter, I guess you know, I hope that I could get to a place where I genuinely don't have that attachment to that 25 to $40 million I don't talk about it a lot publicly, but I think it's there, you know, And people ask me,

Oh, how did you deal with that? Or how did you get over that? Presumably Because they have those issues in their lives, and I just tell people like, I don't get over it, you know, it still sucks not to have built a $1,000,000,000 company, like if I could, you know, Ah, stop my fingers like yeah, sure. But my path is my path, and I just have to be okay with that and sort of, you know,

just appreciate all the things that I have because of this path that I went down, all my friends, my girlfriend, all of my lived experiences and what I, you know, sort of like a time travel movie or something. Like what? I go back in time, you know, and stay up interest a little bit longer and by a little bit of Bitcoin or something like that. I think it's just a slippery slope, you know, because then you can start applying that to, you know, I did the math on if I just bought Bitcoin $5000 worth, I think I would have made way more then if I just stayed up interest for four years,

you know, and anyone could have done that. But it's the it's the exclusivity is the fact that I could have been one of, you know, that person at Pinterest Second employee done this thing. And I think, you know, I still feel like I've contributed a ton of value to that company. I

say you were still second employee

for sure. Yeah, I single handedly, basically, I mean, I did single handedly build Pinterest for iPhone, which has 300 million users a month or something like that by myself. You know, I hopefully contributed more value than I extracted from it, and it sucks to say, you know, I didn't get anything equity for that. But at the end of the equity is just money in a different form. It's sort of like delayed money or promise of money. And, you know, I just need to sort of try to keep that in mind,

you know? But also, like I think of it a little bit like meditation. Meditation is not succeeding to have, like, knowthe interesting thoughts. Meditation is failing to meditate and sort of figuring out why you failed and spending more time on those things. That's how I think about it. And that's, you know, that's how I think about this, too. Like my goal is never to sort of forget. I don't think that's necessarily possible, but just did, like,

be aware and be okay. Sit with that thought and and sort of do a little bit of the math until I don't think about it all the time. You know, there was a time where I was like, especially when Gummer, when we realized we weren't gonna raise that Sirius B and I would do a round of layoffs and people might cover it in the press that I was like, publicly a failure, you know, and I'll sort of say, going to the third story, which is I was hanging out with my mom this Christmas, and I asked her because I was I was Before that I was hanging with a bunch of high school friends, and one of the catalyst to writing this essay was the fact that no one knew. I waas like no one knew what I was doing with my time. Some people thought I was still running gun road. Some people thought government had died.

Someone had thought I'd sold the company like, you know, you know, sort of Chinese telephone sort of thing. Some people that I moved to Provo unpainted. And it's a complicated, you know, something simple. Like, I am doing this now. You're a multi hyphen. It I'm a multi hyphenated. I do many things,

lots of turns. You introduced me of doing, being able to do many things.

Yeah, doing is true. Able t Yeah, singer, song, writer, director Hyphens. ItT's such a literal word, too. It's

like, What? What Can we call this multi hyphenate? Sure. Let's go with that, right? Yeah, I kind of get that. If, like creating an identity or where that identity be

out there, Yeah, I just felt like there was a disconnect between what I thought I was relatively open about, You know, I was posting on instagram and stuff like that. I was tweeting a little bit, but there's clearly it wasn't getting through. And so I asked my mom, you know, we are So later I was like, you know, when did I tell you about this stuff? Like, you know, like the layoffs and the TechCrunch article on all this sort of stuff and going through, you know, stuff and and and And all that jazz Like when When did I tell you that?

Like, you know, I was on this crazy trajectory, and all of a sudden I was not on that trick crazy trajectory anymore. And she told me Now, now is when you told me that you've never talked to me about any of this stuff and I felt so bad because this person who loves me more than anybody else in the world My brother who loves me equally hopefully. But, you know, just I never like E. I don't know what she went through, you know? She read the TechCrunch article. She never told me she did at the time. But, you know, she keeps tabs and you know,

to just say I'm just gonna let him deal with this and never get closure. Really? It just felt so guilty. And to a lesser degree, I felt guilty about myself, about everybody else and about how I had sort of lead like this double life and never sort of given anybody the value of closure. And it was an awesome discussion that I had with her finally about all these things and my friends with all these things. And it felt so good to be okay with the story of failure and and and and and wanting that to be a part of my identity that I knew I wanted to write about it. And so December 31st 2018. And I say, you know, I tweet like, Hey, I want to write about the last eight years raising money, laying off people, product market fit all this sort of stuff,

getting a profitability, etcetera. And, you know, there was There was a lot of people that were like, Yeah, this is I would love, you know, And I asked, like, what? What would you want to know? Like what questions do you have about this stuff? And there's a ton of stuff. And, you know,

I was always, like, a pretty much pretty open pretty, you know, pretty vocal about the things that I believed in, unlike Ben. But there was that 234 year period from, you know, the layoffs and probably before the layoffs rape in 2015 all the way to 19 2004 years of sort of like, relative silence. And so I think there was all all of these questions and I turned that into this essay over the course of three weeks, and that s a sort of hit a chord and sort of change really, honestly, changed my life, you know, in a I mean,

probably in minutes. I thought it would do okay. You know, there was a lot of traction on that tweet asking for questions, and I sent it for feedback. And people are like, This piece is awesome. But they're my friends. Like you knows, you never really know. Just like the market thing, right? It's not. You can't just be a great essay. It has to hit. And it did hit.

And within minutes I was like, Holy crap like this thing is going to do a lot better And I always try to think about a little bit. About what? What is success in this case? Because if you don't do that, if you don't write it down, you're just gonna pretend that that's what you thought. You know, It's nice to know, you know, before I knew any of this data, this is what I really thought was a failure and success. Maybe that's a toxic way to think about it. But I said if 100,000 people read this ever like, that's great, I wrote this other thing.

I think 30,000 people read it or something like that. And, you know, within the first day, 117,000 people read it, and I was like Awesome, you know, maybe that you know, roughly what I've seen is in the 1st 24 hours, half the people that are ever gonna read it are going to read it. You know, I got an offer from Penguin to do a book. I was a cool Think this is I'm doing great. I'm very grateful for this. You know, I gained two and 1/2 1000 Twitter followers that day or something like that.

And, you know, it just kept going, you know, 100,000 people now, I guess you know, it's been syndicated, so who knows? And I always like when I Whenever I tell people, people read, you know, that many people read the thing, I sort of put it in quotes, air quotes, because I'm like, what is reading something mean today?

Did someone go through the whole thing? But no, probably hundreds of thousands of people had, and it was just cool to say, Wow, I just I wrote this thing not because I wanted to talk to people to read it. That would have been a nice side effect, but actually the value of it was just writing the thing, Thio to figure out if I could take the last eight years and turn it into a story. A 3 4000 word piece. Clarify. Edit my thoughts. What do I want those things to look like? Not to make them untruthful, but to just figure out what is. What is the truth?

Actually, what what? What is all the stuff that doesn't actually really matter? And what can I focus on and what can I cause, you know, a year? There's a lot of stuff that you know I didn't cover. You know, you could write 3000 words about a single day, probably. But what are the things that informed who I am and who, who I was, who I became over that time period and what are the emotional highs and lows and all of that stuff happened in the writing process in the editing process, and, you know, that was the value of it to me,

and it's not dissimilar from tweeting or anything like that, but it gives your thoughts a space. It manifests them so there, written down somewhere, you can look at them, they're outside of your body, and I think it's like, really important to do that, and I sometimes think of it like, you know, if you have a stomach flu or something, you you just need to vomit, like you just need to throw it up manned. You know, when I started having those conversations with my mom and with my friends, I started feeling that way almost literally where I was like,

I can't I need to get this thing out of my system. I didn't realize it was there, you know. But now I know. And until it's out there every single day, I was thinking about that disconnect and those stories and putting them out there in the world. And then finally, you know, hit, publish. And a few hours later, Jeff Bezos published his article on Medium about some dick pic or something. Sorry, Mr Pecker. Something like that. And I was just like,

really? Huh? It turns out I actually got more views on my post that month and bays listed, so that's kind of cool, but really, Yeah. Wow. Yeah, because, yeah, I'm sure. You know, for the first hour or two, he was killing it. But then, you know,

get syndicated on New York time, right? Yeah. Then you don't go back to the original. Which is kind of sad, I think, for medium, in a way,

when you had when you could just as easily read the original. Yeah. Yeah. New York Times just says this

happened. This happened and you're just, like, sort of paraphrasing, right? You know, the piece on medium. But it was funny, because I just remember, like, someone setting that to me and be like and being like, Sorry.

Sorry. This and, um I honestly, my life hitting published and a dude that was the wrong day

to put you know of all the days That's what a powerful story Yeah,

you will. You and you mentioned recently tweeted out stories are more construction at constructive than advice. And, uh, what was the thought behind that? Because I think that story is perfect. That's perfect proof. Have you written out? Lessons learned? Yeah. Not I wouldn't have had that residence. Yeah, I think it's

one of the reasons I love fiction. And it's one of the reasons that it's funny. I always start my essays like lists like these are the answers to these questions. I have an article from bubble Bubble about this. It was like these are the things I learned from living in a conservative city. 15 lessons, and it's good to get all those things out because then, you know, sort of what needs to be covered. In a sense, it's like making a list of all the things that need to be in a product design before you start building the product design. But I think that the day I think one of the most powerful things about an essay on article Block Post a story is that you can lead someone, threw it and provide a narrative that bring someone along on the journey in a way that a list does not do. And it's one of the reasons we switched at Gum Road from Product Management Tool with lists. Two basically ah, notion, which is just like a document.

And I mean, it doesn't want more, but we use that. Basically, it's an essay like our road map is an essay, because I found out that if I wanted to tell a story about Gum Road in the future, and what we wanted to build a piece of text of, the story is a much more effective way to do that than these were the 15 things we want to get down this year, you know?

And it speaking of something else you have in common with basis. Yeah, yeah, basically goes on and And the press releases six years before you plan on launching whenever just

Yeah, yeah, at the press room. It had super helpful. I think to think about that. You know how how it fits into everything else, right? And yes. So I think that's one of the reasons I love stories in general is because it it just It's just like, Look, I'm just gonna tell you about what happened, and it's very non confrontational because I think in general advice can be like that. Do this, Don't do this. And you know, of course, the pupil saying that don't necessarily mean you should be doing this right now.

All the time, regardless of who you are in your situation, most people don't mean that. They say the less is more right, And, um, but I think when you when you want to reach a broader audience that might not know who you are, that might not have context that might totally disagree with you on stuff. Entertainment fiction stories are a great way to say, Look, I'm not trying to convince you of anything. I'm just gonna tell you my story. A story. Hopefully, you think it's funny or entertaining, and maybe you learned a couple things,

and just like I mentioned about Twitter and how you don't really remember a lot of the things people say it's, it's still there in you. You might not be able to recall it, but it's there. It's embedded in your code. At this point, it's part of your neural network, or your data means in your in your body for lack of a better metaphor. And that's how I think about books. I don't you know, I can re read a book and be like, and it feels like reading it for the first time because I forgot in 95% of it. But the important bits that that stuff affects you and sticks in your subconscious. And you know, sure, there are this sort of the pithy lines,

and they're like, it doesn't matter how amazing your team is or how fast you ship features. The market is going to control or determine most your growth. Those things hit and they go viral or provide distribution, etcetera. But it's the more it's the narrative. It's the emotional stuff that I think isn't as quantifiable. It isn't as recall a ble. It isn't a share a ble, but someone sits with all of that stuff for a longer period of time, and they take it all in like a smoothie. And it affects your probiotic makeup in your gut, and you got, by the way, affects your decision making. That's why they say you're thinking with your gut. I got a feeling

I don't know if that's nothing but a World Network neural network. I think it's like 1/4 of the size and you've got yeah, you have any brain,

there's three. There's one in your brain and your heart, your heart get That's right. And I don't know if if we just sort of instinctually felt then. So that's why we said, you know your heart, your heart, head. Yeah. Um, my guess is that, you know, we somehow had an intuition around that, but yeah, it's it's Ah to me. That's the power of stories is that they affect your subconscious advice. Can can be actionable.

It could be implementable. We can affect your conscious now, but at the end of the day, I really believe I see this when I write. I see this when I paint. It's not an intellectual exercise. Life is not an intellectual exercise. It's, um it's a It's a physical, full body workout, and so much of it is intuition. So much of it is your subconscious, your lizard brain or whatever doing things that you don't really understand. And I noticed this specifically when I started to paint, and I've noticed it, too.

When I write that, it's just better. It's just I'm doing the same thing. I have the same goal, which is like, I have a thing that I need to communicate, whether it's a painting or or or a thought or an idea or a tweet.

But they're just better. It's just like, what's better? They're better if they have a story, but I think I'm I'm better

at getting to the point and making the point interesting at putting the words together in a way that feels just better. It's just so hard to describe, you know, I remember trying to do drawings of people's heads. And, you know, I thought I knew what I was doing. I'd looked at the thing and I measured roughly in my head. And then I did the drawing, you know, as I went and and I do the exact same thing now exact same intellectual exercise. But I'm so much better at it, and I don't even I can't even justify why I'm making certain marks the way I'm doing, especially if I'm spending two minutes on a gesture drawing or something. But they're just better. They just are, because I think I'm learning.

My subconscious is picking up things and sort of evaluating. Oh, that mark that you made on accident because you slipped your hand on the paper is actually really interesting. And so like, Let's file that in for later, and you just build up millions and millions of data points. And I think when you build a company when you do any of these things, I think at least to me and provides sort of a sense of freedom to say, Look, most of this stuff is happening because I'm made up of atoms and I can try to think about it super analytically and read books and apply them. But at the end of the day, the thing that's going to make me better is experiences. Data stories. Is training my subconscious being aware of the decisions I'm making consciously? But so much of that? I think it's just training,

training, your subconscious. I think of it a little bit like watching someone play soccer or football or basketball. And I assume that 99.9% of the decisions that Steph Curry is making on the on the court is not an intellectual decision. It's not. Those people are over there that prisons over there. I'm gonna cut through here. It just cannot be because you can't don't move that. And there's actually Ah and Isaac Asimov story about, um, and these things called I robot a robot chronicles. It was renamed after the movie was so successful, but there's this robot that they basically try to figure out if it's a robot or not based on how fast it reacts, because the instinctual stuff this, with the things that are following this zero with law of robotics are gonna be, you know,

faster way to get through that piece of code or whatever that code path and this 1st 2nd 3rd et cetera. And I think of that a little bit, like with with humans, like at the end of the day, there are certain decision when we walk those we're walking. I mean, it's insane. Like I read about how, like this sort of the the the amount of components in your body they're moving to make yourself just pick up a glass of water from an upper cupboard, for example, like insane, you know, and people do studies and they say 10% of your brain is sort of doing things consciously. And there's a you know, this huge amount of sort of basically dark matter, which actually,

I think, mimics the amount of dark matter in the universe like there's this, like, similar ratio and what we can see and observe and what we can't. But we kind of know that's there because of the writings, the majority, it's there we can observe. Yeah, yeah, and so I think I think of it similarly where, like, I I want to train kind of like how I had that sort of the duality right of now means for the future mean sort of trying to help that person. I think of conscious me as trying to help subconscious me, because subconsciously, you going to do the thin but Aiken to some of the thing and try to be really mindful and thoughtful and introspective. But a lot of that stuff is is ah,

hindsight thing. It's I can look back and say OK, I should have done this differently. I should have done that differently, but it's not advice to that person to the subconscious, because the subconscious isn't gonna listen anyways. But what I can do is feed it some data, feed it some stories, feed it some data, points hand hope that that subconscious gets better over time. And it has an every skill, whether it be going to the gym running, painting, writing, building, product,

designing, stuff, speaking, Um, I just get better when I do the thing and playing video games, you know you just get better when you do it a lot, and that the tighter the feedback loop, the sort of more accurate than that the feedback itself, the faster you improve because prolific miss your title if thickness That's why prolific this is so important to me is because I don't care about what I'm making. I care about how many times I'm able to train that neural network in my brain or in my gut, And you know that the stuff that saw Hill is gonna do and 2050 hopefully, I'm just so much more capable. So much more connected. So much more mature. Incredible. And all of these sorts of things trustworthy,

et cetera, You know, because of hopefully a past that that looks you don't like it. Um, all this stuff I'm doing now doesn't matter. It's just training, you know, it's training for a future advantage training for a hairy Sheldon crisis that I don't know about, but I'm getting ready

for Uh huh. And maybe future self is telling you to go through it whenever it comes. Totally. Um, that's fascinating. The ah, yeah, I think on the storytelling. I think it's really, um it's a great one of things that, uh, talked about with, um, with another podcast. Guest is, um he say is essentially a monk, and one of things that we're talking about is ah,

is this narrative technology that can be in rap meal with You have, ah, a religion or a philosophy or a cultural set of values. And now the Odyssey and its Ah, it is transmuted from person to person for 1000 years for 2000 years through spoken word through storytelling. Because it's like this narrative technology that can implant these principles in a way that a list just can't. D'oh can't do it for any of us, but you implant it. In this version of technology that is an improvement on a list, but it is woven within. Emotion is woven within. Our own individual may be virtual experience because it's too to another point that you talked about it. Just, um, experiential learning. It is through experience that we learned.

Yeah, there are studies that can show your practice of golf in your mind can improve your game. And so maybe there is this list of principles helpful but not that meaningful. There is the experience. The the Gnostics used to believe that you could only have a religious understanding through experience, and that was the tenant of of their views. And it was spirit was based on experience and then there's and there's something that I could not believe, Maura, of just what you're saying of Like you you learned through that you train that gut. You trained that neural network through experience, knowing what things to touch, what not to touch, what to do, what not to do. And maybe there's something in between, which is you hear a story and you imagine yourself doing it.

And it is this middle ground or this narrative technology to where you can learn it better. But because when I'm reading the story, I'm thinking about my own journey. We all are. Yeah, um, my mind of lines so nicely with years in many ways, but it's maybe more than most. But it was, I imagine everyone is thinking about their own own ups and downs and putting themselves in that place that let your list of lessons just does not for us. I think a list of

lessons is super scalable, right? You can think of the 10 Commandments and the billions and billions of people that have read them and adhered to them, and experiences are vory not scalable. Basically, every human has their own experience and stories. I would like to think, lose some of the scale, but have a lot of it and lose some of the experiential stuff, but have a lot of it. They come with some scale and they come with some amount of experience. And the way that our brains work when we read a story is basically not ah, looks good. Looks like identical Thio going through the experience. You're some of you read about a dog dying or you watch one in a movie. It has you exactly the same way as if in real life you saw your own dog, right? Way it works.

It's ah or can manifest something you would have never been ableto imagine of, uh, with the proper storytelling like Wilson and, uh, castaway frickin frickin volleyball that made me cry. Um, OK, last question. What's adopt you think a lot of a a lot about and really get a chance to actually discuss. There's so

many and a lot of it is because the nuance is hard to find in any scalable way. Um, I think a lot about gender roles and how we think about all of this sort of quote unquote new stuff that I'm learning all the time. I think about politics and religion and faith and painting. I love talking about painting and all the lessons I have from from painting, and I've talked about some of those things. But I just think in general I just like talking about this stuff that I don't understand I don't get and their offensive to people because I don't get them. And I think I just you know, it's hard to even mention some of them. But you know, generals, for example, let's go with that. I think there's so much value, too. All the genders, you know,

I think there's so much I can learn from women. I think there's so much I could learn from men. I think there's so much I can learn from every single human being. And there are things that women can teach me that men cannot teach me because they have a different life experience and it is distinct in my view. Um, every I mean everyone's life experiences fully distinct. But you know, there are certain things that I will just never be able to experience, ever like having a child come out of me. Hopefully you never know. Never know. Um, but ah, and then and then men, same thing. There's things that we sort of experience that like women cannot.

And I think that, you know, living in Provo, where generals were very real thing and I think sort of almost like very constraining, which I think could be a negative for sure. But I think that I come to San Francisco, and I think sometimes I think we don't give enough credit to you know what, someone sort of gender identity or whatever lets them be and do and fuel in ways that other people cannot. And I just wish I could, and I am learning and I am talking to people. But I think there's a huge opportunity, huge learning that needs to happen for me. T get to a place where I'm like. This is the way that we should think about gender and sex and men and women and all the people that don't identify with those two labels in a way that we could move forward and we can all learn and we can all be happy. And sometimes I just feel like when I expressed some of these things. It's very easy for no more journal error.

Yeah, it's hard, it's hard. It feels like I'm towing, you know, the tight rope. And if I say something wrong, I'm dead. And I'm

which is, which is, like, just structurally outside of this topic is structurally that's bullshit. Like to feel like you. Um, are you there? Third rails everywhere and you just don't think about that. You don't explore it. I have so many so many ideas for podcasts. Too many. One of one would be first draft Where because I think the summit verbal thinker and I think many of us are We just need to stumble through things to talk about them. Yeah, and t know what we even think and or maybe m writing. But it's through, and you can't do that. Sometimes you can't do that with,

uh, with certain subjects that I know that being of intention, I know is coming from such a great and and intended end O. R. A great intention, but also really insightful point of you, maybe knowing that you also think through verbalizing talking through a stumbling through things. Yeah, yeah, the idea. The podcasts of first draft would just be like runs is presenting the 1st 1st time they've ever talked about something so that they can stumble through it. And there's, like, this built in structural forgiveness of like, right. It's not gonna be perfectly polished. Causes the first time I've ever tried to sting the string. These thoughts together.

Yeah, I would totally listen. I think that sounds

awesome. Well, the ah, maybe that's what? Well, actually, no. I think the next thing that we should do is maybe a drafted tweets episode. Yeah. Um, and, uh, we'll do that as part to, um Well, on that note cell I am, I'm looking forward to hopefully many conversations together. And,

um and thank you so much for that. The immense, um, the immense generosity and and the time today, Thank you. So ridiculously welcome. Thank you, buddy. Friends and listeners, I hope you enjoy today's episode. If you want to hear more of these types of conversations, go over to your favorite podcast. Half and hit, subscribe or leave us Arabia. Better, bad love hearing from people that appreciate this type of conversation.

I want more of it. You can also follow us on Twitter at Go below the line as well. A CNR twitter bio. Our email address for you to shoot us a note on any suggestions of guests or topics that we should cover. I read every single one so thank you for those that are 40 symptoms. That's it for us today. We will see you next. Time on below the line below the line is brought to you by straight up podcasts.