It's a hell of India. Welcome to the anti Akers podcast.

Thanks for having me. I'm excited. Be here.

You are the founder of Gum Road. You wrote a mega viral block post earlier this year called Reflecting on my failure to build a $1,000,000,000 company. So once upon a time you move to San Francisco. You were employed number two at Pinterest. You started your own company, gum road, and you raised millions of dollars from investors even tweeted about how this is gonna be a $1,000,000,000 company. Fast forward. A few years, you took a much more anti hacker approach. You moved a Provo, Utah. You bought out most of your investors. You just gotta have focused on generating revenue, not trying to get to some $1,000,000,000 valuation anymore. And what's cool about this is you doing it all at the same company. One of very few founders,

I think, to take the high growth start of approach and the indie Acker approach with the same business. So let's talk about that for a bit. What are some of the differences between these two lifestyles as a founder? And what are some of the things that have stayed the same. Yes, it is sort of

fascinating because most people, you know, when you especially when you raise venture one of the things that happens is you. You're stuck. All right. You're sort of with those people. For the rest of the journey of the company, people always joke that it's, like, harder to fire your co founder, your investors, that it just to get a divorce. And so, yeah, it's kind of this strange thing that happened to no credit my own, that I was able to sort of buy back mostly investors and sort of, like,

basically start from scratch. I think in terms of the differences, I would say the number one difference is that I do not prioritize it above everything else. So, you know, when I raise money for gum around when we started growing the team and all of that stuff like gum word was nothing in my life, right? It was the most important thing. It was probably sleep was probably number one. Government was probably number two, exercise number three et cetera. You know, in my personal life and all of those things were sort of at the bottom and even my personal life. I sort of had architected it in a way that it was meant to further Gummer, right? All of my friends meetings,

how I'd spend my time even if I wasn't at the office was all about, you know, sort of like, how'd away sort of benefit Gum road, you know, and I felt like I had a duty to do that. I'd raised a bunch of venture capital, raised $8.1 million from, you know, sort of a list of Silicon Valley angels and be season and things. And I also had built a team. And when you build a team, you have this sort of duty, but also this sort of like financial incentive toe work, super super super hard and stay super, super,

super focused. Because every hour that you put in, you know, you have 20 people that are going to see that and mimic a little bit of that behavior. So I didn't do I mean, in hindsight, sort of stupidly, I didn't do almost anything else in terms off. Had an angel invest in a friend's start ups, you know, that would have been smart, John from strike was a good friend of mine back in the day, not saying I would have been able to invest in it. But it just wasn't on my mind. I was sort of so one track, and now it's almost exactly the opposite where I am thinking about how can I build gum road in order to benefit my life?

It's sort of very selfishly, and the weird thing with that is I didn't really I wasn't really proud of doing that. You know, when I moved to Provo, I told my investors, I'm giving this thing But I wasn't, like, sort of like shouting it from the rooftops or anything. Like, I'm gonna go with a Provo and, like, learn how to write and paint. You know, that's sort of a weird thing for someone who's for his 10 million bucks at this point to do. And I sort of kept under the radar for a while. And then I wrote this post at the beginning of this year called Reflecting on my failure to build a $1,000,000,000 company because I just felt this dissidents right.

We're like I was having these private conversations, but I wasn't really reflecting that publicly. And the reception to it was like, Yeah, you gave it a shot. It didn't work out. But you built this really great thing. And you're, like, kind of like allowed to say that you did that, you know? And that really opened the door for me to be like, Hey, it's totally fine to say, Look, like I care about my my livelihood,

We call them lifestyle businesses, Right? So I'm okay. It's okay. Thio prioritize my lifestyle. And I've been up front with with my investors that have remained on board through this whole process with new employees, some of the same people that actually used to work for us back in the day. And it's surprisingly fine to do that to say, actually, Gummer, it is my last priority of the day. I want to write, I want to pay and I'm gonna go to the gym. I want to travel. I wanna hang out with people and I want to read. And if Gummer doesn't fit into that day,

that's totally fine. It turns out, I think, some one of the things that sort of gave me the freedom to do that was to look at this chart of the growth of Gun road over the last eight years, which is like, incredibly consistent, one of the most boring graphs you'll ever see. There's very little drama in it and to sort of look at it and to sort of think about while there were, there were, you know, weeks and months in that process that, you know, we had a 20% team. We were working basically all the time, all the waking time that we had. And then there were times when we had no team.

It was just me answering support emails once a week, you know, working four hours a week and same sort of growth trajectory. I think it gave me the freedom to say, Look like I'm just not that important to the operations of this company and the success of this product and the success of our creators. And so let me give myself a little bit of permission to sort of experiment and do what I want to d'oh. And it turns out that doing that actually has driven almost more empathy and Maur loyalty. So what? We're building on what we're doing this year and beyond that than ever sort of has been in the past, which is kind of fascinating.

How much of that do you think is due to you living this more relaxed, don't say self centered but focused on you lifestyle on How much do you think is attributable to you just putting in more effort to actually share your story, to write block, post a tweet more often?

Yeah, I think it's a whole host of things that all just come back to being myself and being open and transparent about what I want to do with my life and how Gum Road is a component off that and, you know, inherently. I was the founder of this company, you know. I was a solo founder. It was my thing for a little bit. There is this inherent alignment that happens, and I think in many ways I was trying to force it. I was for JJ to convince, you know, employees to join the company, you should have toe drink your own Kool Aid first before you can get anybody else to drink it. Otherwise, you're just lying, which is probably not wise.

So I was just like I think, drinking it so much that I was just, like, convinced that everything in the world was going Thio sort of get better because of gum Road and to say, Look like the world is going to do what the world's gonna do and I can have some amount of impact on it, But I'm not gonna necessarily slave over that. I'm just gonna build what I think is the right thing to build for the group of creators that we already have, which is far easier than going out in acquiring customers and far cheaper. I think people, people see that and they're like, Oh, yeah, I think people sort of respect the ability to say, Look like I am not a product visionary. I'm not see jobs. I'm not building cars.

I'm just building a fast horse and that's fine. That's what most people can do. Very few people can. You know the car was invented by one person one time, and that's about it. Yeah, I think the other thing that's sort of unique about Gum Road is that we have so much in common with our creators. And so the more that we share about well, we are actually doing which is just building a great product as you know, as much as we can. We're talking to customers were not raising money from B. C's were not having fancy dinners with other founders anymore. That's what our creators do every day, right? And so I think when they see that, they're like,

Oh, cool. Gummer is actually just like me. We're both trying to build Businesses were both building. We're creating some form of software to do that. We're selling it to our audience. And so I think when when we started becoming more open about the journey, we actually became much more accessible and much more relatable instead of this Silicon Valley startup that had raised 10 million bucks and is trying to become this $1,000,000,000 company, like most people are never trying to do that. And that's one of the things I sort of I sort of had to realize when I moved to Provo is I started talking about, you know, Yeah, I'm writing this thing. It's about my family to build a $1,000,000,000 company, and there was just like people would look at me funny, like what First of all,

you were trying to build a $1,000,000,000 company. I thought you were just oil painting. Who are you and then to like, How is that a failure? Like you're telling me you built like, this multi $1,000,000 business that you own, you know, the vast majority of and you can kind of do whatever you want. You're here oil painting with us, you know, Thursday at 2 p.m. How is that a failure, you know, And that's kind of what I wanted to talk about. What? That s and I think why it resounded so much was because even though I think intellectually, people understand that sort of the absurdity of trying to go for building this massively successful company in a way that,

like I felt like I could just do it, you know, like I tweeted like I'm gonna build this thing, it's gonna be a 1,000,000,000 bucks. It's just sort of that that's, like denialism off. Like other people's agency. Other people have to decide that you're worth a 1,000,000,000 bucks. It doesn't just happen. Um, otherwise, there would be a lot more of them in the world. Yeah, I think this so that that, like, almost like peeling back some of the absurdity and sort of the surrealism of Silicon Valley sometimes,

you know, it was almost like stating the obvious, and that's sort of what I think. What a lot of people appreciate it is that kind of I had done this thing, I was in it. I was sort of most inside of the sort of insider circle you could get and then being like, Hey, I didn't work out and that's fine. You know, there are a lot of stories like this, I think. I think a lot of I've talked to a lot of founders that have read Bunches of money that have gone through a similar journey. But people just don't talk about it. I think there's sort of a component of shame. I think there's a component of failure. I think there's a component of like my reputation is at stake here and because I think I moved to Provo and because I just sort of was able to sort of physically get that distance.

It just meant less I was gonna suffer less that people were gonna look at me and be like Wow, You made some really stupid decisions that prevented you from building a $1,000,000,000 company. The idiot, you know, I would be fine, right? Whereas if I was still in San Francisco, it would've been a very different story. I think would have been a lot more difficult for me to really have that thing go alive and feel comfortable and safe.

I had a lot of conversations in San Francisco where people don't feel safe talking about failure. They'll tell you they're killing it even when they know they're not. And in Provo, you tell people I failed to build a $1,000,000,000 company and they look at you funny and they say, just still killing it. Like I don't know why you're sad about that.

Yeah, it's funny because, you know, even in Silicon Valley, I mean, everyone talks about the failure rate, right? I don't think anyone is delusional about, you know, the percentage of startups that raise venture and fail. I mean, that's the majority of them, right? I think 70% or something. But for some reason, it's when it when it starts to happen to you, you freak out and you're like no that's not possible.

And I think that's a think. Part of it is just It's kind of like when you go when you're you know you're top. It just didn't really happen to me. But I've heard of it described as when you're sort of topped the class in high school, right? You're just like the valedictorian, and then you go to Stanford and, like everyone is, is you. And all of a sudden you're like, no longer interesting and you sort of have this existential crisis like who am I? And I think it's similar, but maybe even more pronounced. Where you go to Silicon Valley and raising a 1,000,000 bucks is nothing. I mean, you're it's meaningless there,

you know. And so you go from the top of your field or top of your your class or, you know, or all of these sorts of things. And then you start from the bottom again, and I think there is this sort of because yeah, because you're seeing all of the all of your friends and all the people you hang out with say, you know, raising Bunches of money and hiring a lot of people and you know, at these crazy, you know, evaluations and getting these crazy b d Deal's done. And everyone is sort of inflating their chest a little bit because you feel like you have to write, like if everyone is playing that game and you're not you frankly, just look like a failure out of the gate, which is it's sort of self fulfilling in that way,

right? If you're an engineer and you're looking at all these hot, sexy companies and then this one random one, that is sort of like, Hey, guys, we're failing all the time. It's great. Uh, you know, it's just not really gonna work. I like in it a little bit Thio football helmets where I think everyone kind of acknowledges that these things are not good for you, right? Like, it doesn't really make you safer. It actually is more dangerous.

But you're not gonna be the one person on the football field saying Okay, cool. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna take this off, and I'm gonna play like we actually should play like you kind of need somehow everybody toa kind of agree on doing this at the same time, right? A little. It's like a prisoner's dilemma, and it creates this sort of, yeah, this, like, unsustainable, very unhealthy environment. I think. I think everyone knows that it's broken, but I think very few people wanna want Want to say it?

I looked up some stats about Provo, Utah, and it is definitely not San Francisco. Definitely not Silicon Valley population sizes just over 100,000. It's 89% Mormon. The median household income is $32,000 a year, which would probably not get you a one bedroom apartment in San Francisco. So I imagine you stand out like a sore thumb there. What do you say to people who ask you what you do and how did they react?

Yeah, I normally say I'm learning how to paint is sort of my default. Um, I'm running out of pain and I write a little bit. Yeah, I basically might. My girlfriend used. She now is comfortable with it, but in the beginning, she was like Everyone just thinks you're the bomb. Everyone thinks that I'm just dating this weird, washed up, bearded brown dude. You know, im 26. I'm a little bit older than the average college kid, right?

So it's like that kind of guy that never graduated. And it's like, kind of for still forgetting what he wants to do and is learning how to oil paint, probably doing shrooms on the weekend or something like that. I think the vibe that I was giving off from San Francisco, et cetera. I mean, Provo is the most conservative city in America, over 100,000 people. I know no one here swears, and so it's It's sort of very noticeable, but everyone's super nice. You know what I think? I think it's It's one of the first things I noticed. Being here is how little people cared about what people did for a living. It was,

you know, the questions were always oriented. Two words you know, how are you? How's your family? Are you Mormon? You know things, things that sort of reflected their priority stack, which is what sort of so fundamentally different from mine, which was like, you know, I would ask, What do you do for work? Where do you work? You know how not how much money you make specifically, but this sort of ways to almost gauge someone's value to the society in this sort of very transactional way.

We're just kind of how everyone is here to this Go does that. You go to a house party and everyone's you know what do you wear the work? How do you know what you see? Do you Have you raised any money? Have you know, from who worked her identity and sf That's who you are? It is, It is. Yeah. And it makes sense, right? I mean, you moved. I did move to San Francisco to work at Hendrick strike, literally to work. And it's a very transactional city for a lot of people on and on,

and that's fine. It just is what it is. I'm sure New York is similar in finance, and l A might be similar in entertainment. And but in pro vote, it's just like we're on this earth. To be of service to other people and to raise a family and to be faithful and test our faith. That's sort of the literal theology of it, right? And nowhere in there is how much money you make. Nowhere in there is who do you work for and how many employees do you have. And frankly, I mean a little bit is how educated you are, but not really in any way that reflects, you know, that is used to strip,

make more money, but just to be more educated. So you conserve others. And it really just got me thinking about how you know, when you travel, people always say, opens up your mind, right? And you sort of see how different cultures solved the same problem. And the sort of one of the sort of fundamental problems I think is like, What is the meaning of life? Right? And in San Francisco, you're so in it. You're so in. Oh,

the meaning of life is to like, you know, change. The world have as much of an impact as possible, typically through scalable means, like building software and building sort of hypergrowth companies. It just is what it is. And you sort of forget that you're breathing that air. It's just everywhere, you know. And then when you move to Provo or when I moved to Provo like over months, it was like, Wow, there's a totally like the way that they think right there, what with the way that they view the world and their place in it, and their place in the universe is just so fundamentally different.

Then, uh, then I was looking at it and it took a while. You know, it traveling definitely has some of that, but it's very surface level. And when you live in a place, you know, I've lived in Provo now for two and 1/2 years, which is way longer. Then I ever thought I would live in Provo, Utah. I thought I'd last a year, but you realized sort of just how, even though the houses look the same in the streets looked the same and the traffic lights look the same, but the sort of the fundamental When people think about doing stuff right when people wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night in plan their days,

et cetera, the vory dee dee deep reasoning behind making some of those decisions is very fundamentally different than the ones that sort of feed into those decisions in Francisco. And it's almost like meditating right when you meditate, you're sort of getting deeper and deeper into your own thoughts and really figuring out why you think the way you think. And living in a place like probe was almost like an external version of meditating where you're forced to reckon with all of the ways that youth that you've lived and the decisions that you've made and you're just grappling with why you made them and realizing how relatively basis those are and how medically how, based on other people's behavior they are, which in turn are based on other people's behaviors, you know? And so you kind of are like, Who am I? Like? You use the word identity, which is like the sort of the word on the top of my mind right now, which is like, Yeah, what is my identity?

How do I define that? The weird thing to think about when you've spent eight years just being so sure what your identity was, I was gonna spend the rest of my life building software products tweeting, pity things and, ah, you know, just becoming a visa VCU. You know, whatever the track waas that I saw in front of you, right, doing what Bill Gates did just in my own way. And now I'm like, I have no idea there's not very many people that have done this sort of thing. I'm still trying to find, find those people and and learn from them.

Let's say somebody does a little bit of digging and to your business. How to explain to somebody from Provo what Gum Road is. Yeah, I say,

You know, I run a small software business called Gum Road. We helped creators like musicians, writers, artists, filmmakers, stuff software, engineer stand comedians, anyone that makes stuff on that computer. We make it really easy for them to take that stuff uploaded to the cloud and sell it directly to their audiences that might exist on Twitter, on Facebook, on YouTube, on Instagram in order for them to own the relationship they have with their customer, sort of transact directly, make the vast majority the revenue and build a, you know, earn a living doing what they really love to dio instead of maybe doing something else to pay the bills and then, you know, making music nights and weekends.

Let's do a version to imagine you were talking to a founder or investor or somebody in San Francisco. How would you explain gum road to them? Yeah, basically

say, You know, we're Shopify for digital goods. We started out being a bit lead plus a credit card for him. We wanted to democratize the ability to sell just, you know, just like you can share basically anything and and more and more people are sort of sharing directly with their audience. Instead of having to go through a middleman like Amazon or iTunes or their label or their publisher, We wanna sort of democratize the ability to sell anything you can share. And if we could do that, then all of these artists, creators, influencers, celebrities, et cetera, should be able to make a living on their own terms instead of one dictated by all of these different middlemen. And when you get rid of middlemen in general,

that means more efficient, cheaper, just better economy, that sort of serving the consumer, the creator instead of all these other people that are sort of in the middle, which is kind of actually I've never done that before, but it's profound. How different of a pitch that wasn't how many you know, it's it's that's a cool thing. I mean, it shows how much context is baked in a Silicon Valley, right? Like middleman. Democratization. All of these terms, if you said that,

too. Um, you know, one of the retired moms that I paint with, She would look at me funny. I think that I just had, like, an acid flashback or something.

It's also very mission focused when you're describing gum road to attack audience. You talked about how it was gonna change the world, right? How is going to affect the market? How is going to make the experience of being a creator different? Yeah, One

of the things I have sort of mirrored a little bit is in Sarah Sisko here. Yeah, that the way that people talking is similar in or in the way that they both want to sort of served people right. I think that's sort of we agree on that. We both want to serve the world. We're servants to humanity, et cetera. But in San Francisco, it's all about this crazy, long term mega large humanity. Sort of, you know, what is the job say, Dent Dent in the universe. Right. And in Provo, just like I just want to help people,

you know? I want to help my my neighbor on my community, my government, my family. And if I do that and everyone else does that, we're gonna be in a really good spot. And so yeah, just just the context of this scale is just so so profoundly different in the way that these these sort of groups of people think about the other approached toe actually being in service of others.

Tell us about how you first moved to the Bay Area and got involved and tech.

So I moved Appearances go to work at Pinterest. This was late 2010. Early 2011. I was a college student at USC in L. A. And I got an email. I posted some stuff on Happy news and I started commenting. That was my sort of way of trying to get into the tech community and build up my audience at the time and bend the sea of pictures sent me an email out of the blue. He saw one of the app side made on the top of Hector news and it was basically, like a way have this thing that we've been building called Pinterest. We help people collect, organize and share the things that they love. And we need an IPHONE app and we don't have one. And it looks like you're pretty competent, sort of developer and designer of APS. Do you want to help? And so I quoted them.

$4000 initially for Pinterest for iPhone. Yeah, I ended up having to double that because it was way more work than I thought, which is always the case. And then I ended up being like, Hey, guys, I started getting some fulltime offers from other startups. Would you consider making an offer? I'd love to work for you full time and sort of take a leave of absence from from USC and move up to the Bay Area. And Ben was like, Yeah, we'd love to talk about that. Look, let us know when you're in San Francisco. I was like,

I'm not gonna be in this thing, you know, like I don't have plans. Normally, San Francisco startups fly you up for the day, but they were just I mean, it was just so I think, indicative of how they thought about just they were so frugal, you know? And they were just so like, if you're If you're interested, Like letting you know, like, like drive up here yourself and come talk to us. And I was like, Okay,

so eventually, I, uh a couple friends of mine were driving up Thio the Bay Area tow watch a USC cow game, and I was gonna come up in Then I'll just bounce for a few hours on Sunday and hang out these two, these two Silicon Valley founders and and talk to them about this app that we're building together. And, uh and so I did, and my friends thought I was really weird. And then I told them I was gonna drop out of school to join the startup called Pinterest. Be employee number two, and everyone was like, Okay, I guess, um, you know everyone you know, you know?

You know, Mark Zuckerberg and on this thing and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. And you know, the stories of these of these things, but to actually do it was weird and also surprisingly uncommon. I had sort of expected it to be like, Oh, yeah, this thing that happens in the news happens all the time to everybody, right? Everyone knows someone, and then I dropped out and I was the only person for my high school that did that. You know, I was the only person basically in San Francisco, and now it's a little bit different. Software has has sort of developed and matured,

for better or worse. And the social network came out. I was considered social network, like one of the pivotal moments of Silicon Valley culture in history. But yeah, that's sort of what got me up to up to the Bay Area initially was to work at interest employee number two, building on designing Pinterest for

iPhone. What did you hope was gonna happen as a result of you making this decision? Like, what was the best case scenario in your mind? Yeah. So

the way that I thought about it Waas I wanted to get a software engineering degree. It would take four years. Then I'd work at Google, and then I worked at a small company, and then I start my own thing. And you know, when I was 35 or something like that, that was the track I think that I had imagined for myself at the time and the way that I justified leaving school to join Pinterest Waas. Well, if I want to do that right, If I think startups are genuinely like a a thing that I want to do, I should probably figure out now if that's a possibility for me. If I'm gonna be good at it if I'm even gonna like it. Otherwise I'm gonna spend 15 years and then realize I'm not made for that which I don't know if it was like a way of just deluding myself to make the jump, and I was already convinced our art or not. But that's sort of how you justified both joining interests, leaving USC and then also leaving Pinterest's to start a company,

which was I want to maybe start a company. I don't know if I'm gonna be capable of doing this thing, so I might as well try now and then. You know, if it's not the thing for me, I'll go back thio school and figure things out or or what have you? That was sort of It was like I was like, there is this potential job and career path, which is you basically get to make software, which is something I was already doing and I could get paid for and I could do it on my own terms. And that sounded amazing. And then basically, the seas would pay for me to do that, you know? And if those things are true, like,

how can I not try this thing? It just feels too perfect and too good. And so that's Yeah, that's sort of, for better or worse, what I ended up doing and lead to starting gun rope.

It's kind of funny, cause you, inadvertently and unbeknownst to you at the time, won the lottery by being employee number two at Pinterest. There's a ton of Silicon Valley companies you could've gone to work for. The vast majority of them did not become a $1,000,000,000 companies that made all of their early employees rich. But Pinterest did.

Yeah, totally. And it was incredibly stupid of me to leave with a few months left on my cliff. It was a multi $1,000,000 decision to do that, but it kind of I think if i e I think the truth is, if I if I was smart enough to stick around that interest, I would have been smart enough never to have joint, you know, like it required a certain amount of ambition and ego and ignorance, I think, to join interest. But then that was the same cocktail of things that was gonna get me to leave interest and leave all that money on the table. And I think in hindsight, I think gave me this immense chip on my shoulder where when I left, I kind of knew that they were on onto something. They were growing super fast and, you know,

we just raise the series a and it was like the largest Siri's a of the year. And it was like, This has a good shot at being really big. Therefore, gum road has to be significant because otherwise I'm gonna look like a fool, which I think happened on anyways, a little bit. But I'm still on the journey. So, you know, maybe maybe one day, But I you know, I would be remiss. I think to say that, like, I don't think about you know, what could have been right if I had stayed at Pinterest and who knows where it would be now?

Ironically, April Fool's Day 2011 you infamously tweeted just had an idea for my 1st $1,000,000,000 company tomorrow I started building it. What was going on with you energetically when you sent that tweet? I imagine you must have felt amazing to be so confident about this idea.

Yeah, I think I was home on a Friday night and I just learned I'm just learning a photo realistic icon design And I had made this pencil icon and I wanted to see if I could sell it to anybody that followed me on Twitter on dribble or something like that. Um, I had a sort of a modest audience at the time, but I didn't want to invest in, you know, building a storefront and, like, a whole website or, you know, give it, put it on some market place somewhere and then take, you know, get a tiny percentage in 60 days or something like that. So I basically what I what I called it at the time was a lemonade stand. I just want a lemonade stand. I don't I don't want to invest in,

like, a retail experience or anything like that, and it just wasn't possible. There was surprisingly difficult, just kind of this weird George Gap between selling something and sharing something in the minute you attach a price tag to something, it just became basically impossible for me to do it myself. And I just thought that was super weird. And I remember going into this sort of the opposite of a gas fire. Whatever you call that in terms of just like having all of these, like revelations about Oh my gosh, like musicians could sell all their stuff that doesn't make the album and all. You know, all these designers could sell these wire frame that mocks and you could see all this behind the scenes footage and basically, what happens when you allow all of this stuff to get monetized When you drop the minimum requirement for what is a salable thing? What can you charge money for? Could you have locked this entirely new economy that would power?

You know, all of this creative output, and I just couldn't stop thinking about it. And I was just so convinced in this that I thought I would tweet about it. And so I did. I said, Yeah. Tomorrow I start building my 1st $1,000,000,000 company, which I think it's hilarious because I said first it was like a $1,000,000,000 company. It was like, Yeah, one of seventh. I don't know what I was on at the time. I'm sure I was sort of euphoric. Probably, you know,

And then I built Yeah, Bill Gummer that weekend in it, it launched Monday morning. It was on the top of hacker news, like 50,000 people saw and I was just like it was just like the most. It was probably the worst thing that could happen and that because it totally just fed into that, you know, it was like, if this is going to be a $1,000,000,000 company, this is how that starts, you know? And I thought it wasn't, but it definitely sort of get that confirmation. Bias was was very, very strong at the time.

We talked about that movie, the social network, and how that was sort of, ah turning point in Silicon Valley, where so many people who weren't really aware of what was going on got suddenly interested and wanted to come out here and sort of write the story of their life as this billionaire tech founder. And it seems to be kind of like the way that you were writing to how old were you And when this happened when you launch scum road and it blew up over the course of the weekend.

I think I was 18 at the time. So am I was Yeah, I was super young and it was Honestly, I think that was a big component because, you know, if you imagine, like, a up this happens toa prodigies and in piano and in different skills where they have this trajectory because they're they're sort of professional. Development has taken place over very, very few years. The sort of the rate of growth looks like a rocket ship, right. But in a lot of these cases, it's sort of ass and tonic, right? So goes from 0 to 90 in three years, but then goes from,

like 92 91 in another three years and slows down. Whereas most people have a more linear growth, it basically tricks people because what people do inherently is they extrapolate, right? So I was, like, 18 at this time. I just raised when I was 19. Maybe at the time that I raised money I was, you know, I had raised eight million bucks. I was 19. I was on the front page of all these different things and and it was just like You can't help, I think project that line, sort of breaking through the chart and going into the stars or whatever and then, yeah,

totally. And at the same time, Silicon Valley was getting on the radar as a whole in pop culture because of movies like the Social Network. And I think that was such a critically important movie and time and moment because it really sort of mainstream ified mainstream fights, looking value, right? This was 2010 when you know people talk about Instagram being this massive thing. But at that point, like Instagram, I think not even sold to Facebook for a 1,000,000,000 bucks. It was, you know, which is now. If you think about Instagram being worth a $1,000,000,000 would be laughed out of the room. But you know, back then,

no one really using Scream. It was still like a relatively niche thing that, for like, photographer is now. It's just used by include Sir's and everyone to just post their their life, but I think it really what it did was it matured the industry, I think really fast. We're all of a sudden. It went from a bunch of people building stuff, and they're sort of their motivations, definitely were money related. But But, you know, we're mostly there to build things, and and truly, I think,

to use the world. And it turned into, I think, something like Wall Street, which is this is a great business opportunity. There's a massive amount of inefficiency in the world. Software is this new thing that's gonna fix a lot of that. We're gonna be able to capture a bunch of bodies by doing that so inherently attracts people that were there to make money and to and to have a career, which is totally fine and sort of necessary thing. Every industry sort of goes through that, But I think it happened so fast that it fell overnight that, like one day, it was just a bunch of people building stuff. And then all of a sudden it was like all of these people wanting to sell stuff and wanting to grow stuff and wanting to growth, hacking all of these sorts of things and it just changed. I think the vibe off of the industry,

I think, honestly for the better, I think we I think it's easy to sort of say, Oh, all these like finance Bro's came in, but at the end of the day, like I think it just it provides a mirror to what we were doing, which is at the end of the day. Tech is a great job. You get to build a lot of really cool stuff and you make a lot of money. And so I think it's sort of okay to say, Look like we are motivated by several things and not all of those things is just sort of like hippie building stuff, you know, on the peak of a mountain because we love the process of building software. At the end of the day, that's just not true.

And it's it's, I think, healthy to be like a look at the end of the day. Wall Street and the tech industry are not profoundly different. They are honestly almost identical and that's fine because most things are pretty similar and everyone's sort of have similar incentives and and things like that. There's not something so profoundly unique about software. It's just money with logic built into it or something like that.

What was this process like of you building this app over a weekend? I think most people, if they run into this roadblock, I really want to sell this thing I made online. I can't. The conclusion would be that it's too difficult to do it. And if no one else has done it, certainly you can't do it. So move on to something else. We'll give you the confidence that you could make this website, this product that would actually help people sell stuff online. And how did you build it in just a weekend? I think it was a combination of things. The 1st 1 was

because I could design in code and so that was, always think, a strength of mine. I think it's what let me getting the job at Pinterest was they could basically give this kid of really loose speck and then I could come back with a full lap. You know, I don't have to necessarily work with anybody else too deeply t get to a sort of an M V p. And it was similar, I think with with gum road where it's like, Okay, I I'm not that competent oven engineer, certainly. But I can make a crown app, which is basically what most chaps are right there. You create products, you upload files, you edit the name in the price you can delete them on, then you can tweet him out,

and then people could buy them. And I think the other thing that happened was I always try to ask myself, Why hasn't this been built yet? Like what prevented the past from making this thing? And I think that gum, right. It was this idea that, you know, people were still building up these audiences on their own on thing on social media, and it waas a relatively new thing. And so, you know, if you didn't have an audience on social media, there was no point in selling directly, right? You were gonna sell through all of these traditional means because that's how people interacted with their with their audience and with their potential customers anyway,

right through iTunes and things like that. So that was that was part one was the sort of that component off the system was still owned. I think primarily by these traditional middlemen and then the other one Waas stripe. It was so difficult. Accept payments and strike just totally changed game on that. Certainly it went from a 2 to 3 week process. Thio, you know, weekend process O R a 30 minute process. And I was sort of lucky. I think I knew John. I've met him a few months. I think before that, and I was like, Hey, John,

could could, uh, have a striped beta key. And, uh, he was like, Yeah, sure on. So I think I don't know what what I wish I could find out. Maybe you can find out for me. What? Uh what user? I d government hasn't strike, but I think we're pretty early, you know, this is Ah,

April 2011 and so that I think made the whole thing super easy was really I think, not only a proof of concept for Gum Road, I think, But a proven concept for a strike like this is the sort of thing that's now possible because of something like stripe. I think if I had used PayPal which I think was the original idea. I would have probably spent 2 to 3 weeks on it and then no longer sexy, right? Like the whole I think up a huge amount of the appeal of something like shrimp is democratizing the ability to suffer just, like, accept credit card payments. And what happens when you do that? And so, yeah, I was just think just like this. I was just so obsessed with the idea and I had this fixation with already with with building things in a weekend. I was always,

you know, when I had a full time job and so I was burnt out at the end of the day. It was gonna be hard for me to do that Monday through Friday, but to I just I really felt like there were all these ideas and sometimes people get caught up in the name or the branding or the logo or the, you know, the design and the epic you pages and all that sort of stuff and making it perfect. And I was like, I was always like, No, I just need to build stuff like I'm gonna learn. My goal is to learn not necessarily Thio build successful products at this point because I'm gonna do that in 10 years, right? That was still sort of my plan was in 5 to 10 years, I was gonna go try that. And so my goal was just to, like,

be prolific, and ship is many different item ideas as possible because my goal, my product that I was really building was like my own brain right? Was in my own ability to to build products that was more exciting to me than anything else that was Look what I have to do. I was like, I need to launch this Monday morning. I think maybe that was part of why I tweeted it. I think in hindsight, I think they're a couple sort of deep reasons. One was that was just if I told the world that I'd have to do it right to be really awkward if I treated this thing and then, you know, six months later, everyone's okay. What happened to that thing that you said you were gonna build? And then I think the other one is just I wanted to put a stake in the ground. I was so I don't know if I was confident that it was gonna be a $1,000,000,000 company,

but it was there was a high enough chance that I wanted to like I sort of I think I imagine, like the time's cover, you know, the time cover like this tweet that stupid kid in the middle of nowhere and his life tweeted this thing, and then it actually became a $1,000,000,000 company, like what the hell? That's crazy! And so I think part of it was that, too, was like just thinking about this sort of the 10 years I could look back and it would serve is almost like a time capsule of sort of my thinking at the time.

This is why I brought up the social network again, because it's the story of Mark Zuckerberg striking it rich. But everybody in SF and Silicon Valley really has its own kind of story about themselves picturing themselves on the front cover of a magazine picturing the biography that will be written about them. And I think that's also why it's so shocking to people when their companies, you know, one of the 70% that don't make it because it's contrary to tell a story that they sort of written about themselves. Yeah, and

you need that story to a degree right at the end of the day like it's not easy. It is relatively low probability. And the truth, I think, is you need tohave almost a some amount of delusion because five years in, it's, I mean, it's not nearly as fun or a sexy as the social network makes it out to be. You're sort of constantly in, like a fight or flight response with something or the other. You're building a team. There's it's really high stakes. It's a lot of stress, and there are a lot of reasons to say, Okay, never mind. But I think when you when you know if you're a basketball player like having the poster of LeBron on her wall like that super motivating,

you know, even though you might not make it. And I think you kind of just have toe, you just have to believe that you're gonna be the exceptional case, and I think what happens is you go so long believing that and seeing all of these signs that sort of our own, we raise the series A in like, six months, we raise a 1,000,000 bucks. We hired this amazing person. There are all these. You know, I'm meeting with this, you know, with the CEO of American Express or whatever whatever is happening. And they're only of these signs that are like, Oh,

that's the story, right? Like those are like, if you watch a TV show like That's the character are often happens like, yeah, he's an animal in your movie. Yeah, And then exactly. And then you get you feel like you're getting closer and closer and closer, and then all of a sudden, you just like, you know, you just hit a wall and at that point, you've sort of gone so deep into the movie. You're served just so unaware and so unprecedented in your sort of in your experience that that it's a shock and becomes a shock even though intellectually I think everyone Yeah, this is a thing.

It's a lottery timing, market lock privilege. All these things really matter. But all of a sudden, one year when you start to see these signs of success, you don't really realize that a lot of other people are seeing the same signs of success, and very few of you are gonna make it. There's actually a story that a high school teacher told me one time about a scam that happened in America. And what they did was they would mail out, let's say, 10,000 mail saying, You know, if you invest in the stock you're gonna make, you're gonna make money and then every every week they pick a different stock and they'd say, If you invest in the stock, gonna make money,

right? And there are all these people that got to the end off, you know, like to say a 12 week process and literally every single time this mail was telling them the stock that was gonna make them a bunch of money. And then on the 13th week, they get this this male, that's like, Hey, you know, we told you all of these things. It's amazing. Like stunned, you know, invest in this new thing. $50,000.10,000 dollars, whatever it is,

however much money you have and and all these people are like, Yeah, but I mean, obviously this person literally predicted the future 12 times in a row, I'm gonna give them a bunch of money. But what happens is they actually mail thousands and thousands of people that and they pick all these different companies. And then the second week, they only male the people that they were right on a smart and third week, fourth week, fifth week, etcetera. And so it's a numbers game. And so you have all these people that are like they think they're the chosen wanted sex. But actually, they're all of these people that got really close to Mount Doom and died along the way that you just never heard about. Turns out there's actually millions of hobbits or whatever,

you know. And, uh, you just what happens is you figure out which one works, and then great, you have all the footage of all these other ones. You throw the old out away, you just tell the story of this more and you just can't help but think, Oh, like I am on the track. I am. I've been right all of these different times. It's like, you know, you ever watched like a You know how to be a millionaire or whatever that game is called you know, And it's the same sort of idea,

right? Like you. You're like on the on this on the story. And you you just can't imagine not being a woman with a $1,000,000 because you're getting all of this confirmation bias all the time, and then you lose it and you can see that their faces are just like in shock out there like they couldn't even even though the chance the truth sort of. If you look at the statistics probably like, I don't know, half a percent or something get from you know, the lap, the penultimate question to the ultimate question and winning the money, it's it's sort of a fascinating. I'm sure they're mindful of that, right? Like they build the game and the story that they're telling within the episode so that people believe that they're the chosen one. They do that and then they ultimately lose. Otherwise, it would be very unprofitable for for the for the producers of the show.

I've got a ton of stuff I want to say. In response to that first note to the audience. If you guys wanna look at what gum road look like back in 2011 when saw hell first launched it. Just Google Wayback Machine and put in gun road dot com. Click back to April 2011 and you can see the home page as he originally launched it, which was super simple. I think that's why you were able to keep it just like a weekend project that you weren't trying to be super ambitious. You didn't have a katana, different pages on it. I think people could learn a lot that you can get somewhere ambitious over time. If you start small, you don't need to start super huge but back to what you're talking about. This process where you sort of have, you know, went after when success after success, but and a lot of ways that's completely indistinguishable from getting lucky over and over again. It's pretty brutal.

You actually tweeted that the best co founder is luck. What do you think? Some of the luckiest things that happened to you early on and Gum Road's history and what do you think? Some of the things that were very deliberate, considered decisions that lead to success?

Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, some of the most profound moments in my, you know, in my career and these air, you know, these are things that other founders and veces have have looked at and been jealous. I mean, they told me after I wrote that article on failure, they were like, Wow, I kind of have to apologize because I thought you were you were a dick because you were having all the success for doing absolutely nothing. But I was I was really thinking about, you know, like when I got the job at Pinterest that had nothing to do with me,

right? Like, what if Ben had e mailed to somebody else? Who knows, right? What if that post off my app on hacker news didn't make it to the top? What if he checked it 15 minutes later, right? Like, there are all these sort of things that went into that happening for me when I you know, one of the things that got me really interested in gum road and really being like, Wait, this could be a company like I can raise money for. This was investors, You know, this one invested Craig from Collaborative Fund.

She e mailed me after he saw that on a hacker news. Happy news has played a pretty phenomenal apartment life. And he just said, Hey, like, I know you're fully employed. I know your interest. If you ever decide to leave Pinterest and start this thing as a company, like, I'll send you at least 10,000 bucks. And I was like, Hey, I don't know if I'm ever gonna do that, But if you want to stand me $10,000 like here's a bank account, uh, you know,

and like, let me know and he did. He literally sent me, You know what I mean? We have some back and forth and agreed on some terms, but he sent. He sent me 10,000 bucks, and I just It just sat there in some Bank of America counter something I had made for holding company. And, you know, it was just like this insane amount of validation that I had that had nothing to do with me. It was just other people constantly and being like, Hey, you know, we think you have potential. You know,

here's some validation. Here's a contract here is, you know, some money, etcetera. And I think that played a really sort of profound role in my confidence levels at the time and really sort of was like, Wow, I am. I can do this like, this is something I could do. I, you know, had I had always just read these stories, and I'm at imagined, like Bill Gates, like as some crazy,

profound CEO founder working on a supercomputer. You know, I parked up against a wall or something, like, who knows? Like I never related to that. My I'm not nearly enough. And that really was like, No, you can do this like you are one of these people and so I think that was really important. But I think the thing that I was good at, I think one of things I will take credit for is I was always very open and very transparent. And so, you know, I wasn't just building stuff, you know,

in my dorm room, I was posting on hacker news. I wasn't just posting on hacker news. I write a block post about building this thing, and then I shared that unhappy news night tweet about it, and I think I was always really good and putting myself out there and putting my work out there and building up a reputation and a brand. And even when I raised the seed round, it wasn't just this random person raising money. It was this person who had worked at Pinter's who had this blawg that had gone back for a few years. You know, people could see that and be like, Okay, this is a reputable person. He really does care about building stuff. He didn't just watch the social Network and then moved to San Francisco and is trying to raise money and build the next Facebook right, which I think is a lot of the stuff that they probably deal with.

I think on on a day to day basis, I've always been really open about beating people. I was spending every weekend that, you know, when I was in in Paul Otto, meeting with different founders and different people from hacker news. You know, some of those founders have gone on to create a $1,000,000,000 company's John from Stripe is one of them. He reached out to me. I think back in the day, you know, we were both like 18 or 19 year old kids at the time, Brian Armstrong from Coin Base reached out to me and asked me if I would consider working with him on some Bitcoin really project. And I said, That's weird. I don't think Bitcoin's gonna work on.

Then he made ah corn base, and then I didn't even know that I totally forgot about this. But apparently the founders of Plaid, which is also, I think, a unicorn at this point, we're close. I hung out with them recently. We had a former employees go to them to leave their design. He's like we actually met a long time ago and you were giving us some advice on some stuff and I was like, Wow, that is insane But I think it's important. I think you know the best co founder is luck. But I think you know, you could definitely work on your luck, right?

And look, I think broadly means all sorts of stuff. But mostly what it means is that stuff out of your control. But you can still kind of, you know, you can, you know, like Ben sending me that e mail was out of my control. I couldn't force him to do that. But what I could do is is post my app on hacker news, email a bunch of blog's that wrote about app design and try to get them to write about it. Email. TechCrunch. Every time I built something tweet about all this stuff, have a Twitter account that people could follow. You know,

put my email in my hacker news profile. That could be good so people could reach out and grab coffee and start building up these relationships. And even, ah, I wrote this post, you know, reflecting on my failure to build a $1,000,000,000 company at the beginning of this year. And, you know, it did really want. I think it probably would have done well anyways, but I think a lot of it. I got probably over 100 people that were like, Hey, I met us like last coffee in 2013 and I just want to say I had no idea you were going through this, etcetera,

etcetera, etcetera. But there were a lot of these responses. I think that probably lead to a large amount of the success of the article because it wasn't just like, oh, this ran and founder went through this. It was this person that people had met potentially, and you know that you go to that Twitter post and you'll see the replies of it. There's like 2 to 300 replies of all these people that are all Silicon Valley somebody's. Now that we're like, Hey, we met up for this They're so cool to hear your journey and I'm glad you're doing well And it gives So I think, a depth to the article that goes deeper than just like Oh, this story that you read on on medium and it's really cool or whatever And I think that's really important because at the end of the day, if you want to raise money often the first round of funding was called friends and family around right, and that sort of implies that has nothing to do with what you built.

That implies that you built a network of people that trust you that believe in you and that want you to succeed and our sort of willing toe help. You do that and a lot of people don't have friends and family with money, and that's super notable and important to talk about. But I think at the end of the day, I spent a long period of time building that network and building that level of trust. And so when I decided, Hey, I'm gonna go start this company. I had that already going for me, right? Like when I tweeted that medium article, I think I got something like 150 retweets in the 1st 5 minutes. There's no way anyone read that article that fast, right? But I think it was like, Hey,

this person that I, you know, has helped me out. You know, somewhere in the last eight years I did the math, and I think I probably had coffee meetings with probably around 7000 people in that time. It's like, you know, hey, like he that he did. He helped me out that one time. I'll help him out this one time, right? And that boosts the post on Twitter, looks at that and is like, Hey,

like this, it's clearly this post is jiving with people like, let's let's know, the algorithm will go put that somewhere else, et cetera, et cetera. And so I think that those things add up over time. You can't control when they're gonna help. I think And of all, has some saying about that where it's basically like, you know, you shouldn't You should help people, and it will come back to you. But if you're counting, if you're waiting for it, you're gonna get pissed off.

You're gonna is it's gonna take a lot longer than you think. What? A lot of these things will come back and help you out. You know, if I was bitter about Pinterest that could have burned some bridges, that would have led to me not being able to raise money at all. Right. Um, I think I've always tried to be really, really positive about my relationships and even, you know, even even today, I thinkit's important to continue to build those relationships with people I've never met. And one of the things that I really believe now that's a relatively new realization for me is that friends take time to build. You don't become friends with someone overnight. I always used to be upset,

and I've talked about it before that you know, San Francisco is a transaction place, right? And like when I went through the layoffs and everything. I felt like my network had sort of evaporated. But the truth, I think in large part, is that these networks, like they weren't friends because we hadn't known each other long. Frey and I think friends become friends over time a don't complain about, you know, it was really hard to move to a new city and make friends, but I think part of it is, well, you know, it takes it takes years like,

you know, imagine, you know, think about who you're friends with. Who would you crash on a couch with when you're visiting a city, right? It's probably the people that you've known the longest that I've seen you drunk and through some really hard times. It's not just the people that knew you when you were the founder of Ah, you know, a venture back. Start up. And I think that's been important for me to realize, too, and something I'm actually trying to do now when I go to San Francisco is not to status, seek not to just hang out with Oh, I have 50,000 followers on Twitter and there are all these new cool people that I gotta hang out with or whatever,

but really, like, Okay, who did? I mean, over the last eight years that I really just liked that. I just think I really just want to be friends with this with these people. I don't care how many Twitter followers they have or what they're doing, but I just like them and I want, you know, I want them to succeed, and I want to help them succeed. And I just wanna spend time with them and really sort of build out those those those relationships

you talked about How so many bull came up to you and said, Hey, we had coffee. But we had no idea what you were going through. You talk about hitting a wall. You also talked about Gum Road having like the most boring upward trajectory graph with nothing really super exciting going on. So what was this wall you hit despite some road growing pretty consistently over time?

Yeah, I think the physical wall I it was just the, um, Siri's be that we tried to raise. We went out. So we had raised, you know, eight million bucks in six months with basically no team. And so we have an insanely long burn. So we went from I think we closed the Serie Zane in May 2012 on those seven million led by Kleiner Perkins. And everyone took the burrata. And so we had, I think, you know, three years basically before we had to really be like, Okay, we need to raise money.

So I think part of it was we'd gone so long without any real external pressure. I think that was a mistake in hindsight. But I basically I started talking to investors again and saying, Hey, you know, it's, you know, your for now, we're probably gonna be raising money. These are numbers. They look awesome up into the right. And the investors were like, Ah, this is not what you need to be if you're If you're gonna go out to raise a serious being on 15 2030 million bucks, sort of 100 million plus dollar valuation, you need to be going a lot faster.

Your numbers need to be a lot bigger. You're a trajectory. Your potential basically is. Just is there's none of that here, right? And I actually looked up when I was taking notes along this process and I was sharing it with the team, which is something I'm very glad that I did so It was never surprised when things got really tricky for us. One investor from from actually one of the firms that gave us, Ah, a series, a term sheet, Wah said. You know, you're growing 7% a month. You need to be growing 10 to 20% a month. Those are the types of companies that we're looking at right now,

and you were sort of in your stage. And I think that's important. Realizes when your fundraising you're not fund raising the vacuum. You're not just building a good business. You're building a business that is competing with 10 15 2050. I don't even know how many other businesses for you know, a Siri's be term sheet from less than 10 top to your firm's You know that can invest in this sort of thing. And so when when everyone else is growing at a at a certain rate, you know, 10 20% or even if just one of them is there's one spot, and if you're not that spot, you're No, you're not. You know, there's no second place, basically,

and that's the wall that we ran up against. Was we just We're not growing fast enough. And I think a lot of people, you know, and including former team members I've had conversations, what they're like, man, we could have done something differently. We could have raised money if we told a different story, but I think the truth is, and Josh Cop compliment One of our investors says there's nothing like bad numbers to f up a good story at the end of the day. I think that's relatively true, because when you raise money, you have to do it on potential. You have to do non trajectory because the numbers, frankly,

are so absurd that you can raise money based on your normal metrics, right, like you can't otherwise, you know they would go invest in like a very pouring, profitable company that had a guaranteed risk rate of return. What they want to do is investigate incredibly high risk things that have incredibly high rewards if and when they work out and when you have, you know at the time at this 0.5 years of data revenue transaction data, et cetera. And those things look show the company growing at a rate of 25 35 50% even 80% of year when the other cos they're looking at are growing faster. It's very difficult to t say look like it is growing like this, But we're still gonna be a $1,000,000,000 company because you just extrapolate and it's like, Okay, this is gonna take about 40 years to be a $1,000,000,000 company at this rate. And I think it's just important to really understand that, you know, while everyone's in it to build cool stuff and change the world,

at least hypothetically, at the end of the day, investors are still money managers, right? They have a job. It's not their money. They raised a bunch of money and they need to provide, you know, a three acts return in 10 years, and you just start doing the math on what that looks like for firms. And they need a new bird. They need a linked in they need is Pinterest. They need a slack in orderto make the fund work for them. And if you're not gonna be that and there's a lot of data that shows you're not gonna be that you have to come up with something incredibly compelling to change their mind. That's, uh I just don't know if that's

possible. It's pretty brutal as a founder to be in that situation where you're not what these investors need. You've got numbers and the numbers were basically telling investors, Hey, you're not gonna hit it out of the park for us. But the numbers are also telling you that your company's working and people like it. You know, two x a year. What are some of the things that you did early on to get these numbers to consistently go up into the right even if they weren't going up quite as fast as investors wanted them to you?

Yeah, I think one of the things that we did well waas we really built the correct product. I think we were really focused, and one of the things that I always try to do is build things that have any has had a built into a ward of mouth growth component to them because I just I'm so scared of of having Thio do that on purpose. I think it's incredibly difficult, and I have mad respect for people that figure that that part of the problem out. But for me, it's like I want to build a phenomenal product. That product, if it's great, is going to grow by itself, and then we can think about our sales funnels in our sales function as How do we just get this in front of the right people that are going to fall in love with this product? And all we're doing is raising awareness. Basically, we're not short of selling. And, you know,

we're educating somebody on a problem that they know they have. And we're just telling them, Hey, by the way, the solution exists now and I think we did. You know, that was just a lot of direct sales, basically, you know, a lot of cold emails, a lot of cold calls, you know, we try to think about Okay. These are the the you know, the aggregation points of these sorts of communities thes air. This is where all the musicians are.

This is where all the filmmakers are. This is where they hang out. You know, son bands, different talent agencies labels, et cetera, And we just really had to, like, make it happen. We had to sort of push the boulder up the hill and there's no real secrets. I think, too, that it was really just crafting, you know, personalized e mails to people saying, Hey,

we built this thing called Gum Road You know, this is what it does. It helps anyone that has content. We sort of doing all in one comers, you know, we go, we do the credit card form the payments. The marketing page to proceed the invoice saying the content delivery of Donald, the streaming rentals. Subtitles Everything need to sell your documentary, and you can take 95% of revenues home if you sell discovered. All you gotta do is have an audience, and it works. You know, I think it works. If you do that,

people are gonna say, Cool. Yeah, that's it. That's a fit for me. Most people are not at the end of the most. People are pretty happy with their lives. There's a sort of profound amount of inertia. Everyone is making things work. And so you know, I think I think there is a lesson there, which is this sort of focus on the people that already have the need. It's incredibly difficult to convince somebody that they have a problem if their life is going fine, right? Like to say, Yeah,

you're you know, you're already selling this thing on. You know, you have a deal with Netflix, for example, and you're making a few $100,000 a year as a filmmaker. You should actually stop doing that and totally change your business model. Because this new way is even better. It just doesn't work. I think the humans are incredibly fearful of risk and, you know, loss aversion, etcetera. Yeah, I mean, that was honestly it.

And even one of the things that we used to track was our organic verse sourced growth. And we had this organic curve that was almost nothing. I mean, so much of our volume in the 1st 23 years. I think over 80% of our volume. When you when we started thinking about the Siri's bees and probably even 2000 13,014. So, like 23 years in with, you know, with a full product team, et cetera, we were still mostly funnel fueled by direct sourced growth people that we reached out to it and have to teach about the product because, you know, at the end of the day, you know we're relatively young company were unknown. We have weird name.

We don't have enough S e o power. It's so difficult to build a business that's purely self serve. I think the beauty of Sass is now, for example, when we have to do the layoffs, we continue to grow because we'd invested so much in the self serve component. But the truth of the matter is 34 years in. The vast majority of the sales were coming through people that we had built relationships with. And I think this is similar even with our own creators when we see successful creators. I know Adam didn't interview with you recently. Ah, lot of that is building relationships with people. And when you're you know, that 40,000 bucks, right? Like when you're ready to go like you can see that payoff,

right? That's the version of my off. All those retweets on my medium post is really taking the time to build these really these relationships up similar with when I fund raised right it was It was mostly people that I had known before. And if it wasn't someone I'd known before, it was someone that ensured me that I had known before that was willing to vouch and put the reputation on line for me as a person. So I think that's like really, really, really important is to say, Okay, I'm building an app. You know that in the podcasting vertical, we help people. We build these ah marketing pages for for people with podcasts, that's not gonna happen organically. You can't you can build the best product, but at the end of the day,

it's and it's unlikely to happen. You're gonna have to figure out okay, who's the perfect customer for this? Okay, like go email them, go talk to them, getting insured to them and get them to use your software. And if they don't use your software, figure out why they're not using your software, and that's just kind of what you have to do. I mean, stripe is, I'm sure, the same story. Of course, now they're probably relatively self serve.

But in the beginning, you know, it was like okay. Like let's paying every single Y c company. When I was one of the first use, I was a friend of John, Right? Like these are relationships that existed off of just a purely like, you know, I Googled Sauce Dr Credit Card processing and set out he Actually, I'll sign up for this thing. I'll just give them all of my banking information and let them power. 100% of my business is revenue. That's, you know, that sounds like a great idea.

And it was a lot uglier at the time, So yeah, I think I think that's just It's just so important. And I wish more people talked about it, too. You know, people write these articles about these crazy growth hacks and and all that sort of stuff, but those things only work. What? You have your initial audience, right? Once you already have your initial set of users, then you can start messing around with stuff like that. Like that stuff works well, you know, as a multiplier on your existing growth.

But at the end of the day, you still need your existing growth to make that stuff happen and to make that stuff work out long, long term. And I think the other thing that I think sometimes we go, mrs They listen to people talk about these things, even like me, Right? You're talking to someone who did this 78 years ago, which is very different than someone doing this today, right? The markets are totally different. The way that you might get into contact with people is so s so profoundly different. I think it's really important to talk to people that are just a little bit ahead of you. They have more skin in the game to teach you and to help you out as well.

It's funny because it's so deceptive from the outside looking in like you look at stripe, you don't see sales people doing direct sales to people self stripe. You just see the sort of self serve form. You look a gun road. You don't see all of you guys working behind the scenes to get the word out to the people. You just kind of see like you're so I sent it for gum room. So I think a lot of people who want to start a company really underestimate how much. You really need to be putting in a lot of this. This work this like relationship, building this one on one sales outreach to people to really get the ball rolling.

That's totally spot on. And even when you see stories like 50,000 people saw governed in the first day or whatever, none of the people use Gummer, right? Most of them. Didn't you write like we basically had this crazy spike? And then I went back to whatever our normal growth curve balls was, which at the time was basically nothing. So I think that's another important thing to understand. Is that, you know, having an amazing run, some product that might look really sexy. But that's sort of like quitting a winning an award for a restaurant, right? Like all that says, is that your community,

your peers, think you're great, but that has nothing to do with if anyone is actually gonna eat at your restaurant long term. And so I think that's also important, understand? Is that the end of the day? Make sure you're measuring the right thing, which is how many people are actually using this software, paying you money to use this software, not just Oh, I got the number one on one product hunt. That's not typically what builds what builds great businesses.

I'm still in the Wayback machine, scrolling through different versions of what passed, and it's funny looking 2011 year to cool it on your home page from Nathan Barry. But I've also had in the spot test, and he also had a big inflection point on his business where it wasn't growing. He was super small, and then he just said, Screw it, I'm gonna start doing direct sales and like that was his breakthrough moment. I think what's remarkable about your story is you guys were doing this. You said, like the 1st 3 or four years. This is like your primary engine of growth for most people that I talk to you, they're like, Yeah, I got my 1st 100 customers 1st 1000 customers by just sending in town and e mails. But after that, I kind of took on a life of its own. When did things switch around for you guys, if ever?

Yeah. I mean, honestly, I think things switched around by necessity when we literally couldn't afford a sales team anymore. And so it was like, I remember that, actually, because the way that I was thinking about it was you know, what? We failed to raise a serious way, had all these conversations with investors, it wasn't happening. I was gonna shrink the team to talk from 20 to 5, and we did. And we got two profitable. And what I told myself was, I'm gonna run this business for a couple of years and see what happens.

And, you know, this is we have no sales team. I'm doing all the support. At this point, we basically can't ship any new features, right? We don't have enough resources to really do that. What happens to Gun Road if we literally do nothing besides the bare minimum? And that's what we did. You know, when you look at that graph from 2015 to 2018 it's It's the best part of graph, you know, it continued to grow, and so you know, it paid off.

I think we had sort of the journey down that mountain, that Boulder was gaining momentum, and we're actually growing faster. The rate of change is actually increasing of years. well, the rate of growth. But it was almost undetectable because those numbers were so small in the early days. Right? And I think the reason for that is because, you know, when we do, it's direct sales with Eminem. He does $2 million in two days, right? We're processing $20 million in 2014. I think so.

Like, you just do the math on that. It's like, you know, 1/10 of our volume from one user in two days, where, as you know, a self serve person like me is like I'm going to sell my pencil icon on gum, right, and make seven bucks like you just do the math on that. And you just what happens if it goes to that whole vanity thing? What you're doing is you're tracking all of these people that use your software like the 50,000 people, the number one on product hunt, all the accounts that are being created. But you're not tracking your revenue. You're how many people are actually making a living using your software,

which is gonna be a lot smaller. And you even look at a company like what I highly recommend a lot of startup founders do is go read the S. Once of some of these thes companies that have recently gone public. Look at slack. Look at zoom. Look, a pager duty. The number of companies that drive the majority of their revenue is often in the hundreds. Like think about that, like your slack. This is a company that basically everybody uses at this point, like you be probably surprised if you met a friend that didn't know what slack was there didn't use it for some something or the other, right? And I think something like 850 companies drive 40% of the revenue or something like that. It just is insane. Uh,

the long tail of these things. And I think if you look at the people that advertise on Facebook or Google or Twitter, you'll see a similar long tail where there are very few companies that spend an insane amount of money. You know, I think Microsoft contract was slackers, like, four million bucks a year, right? Like, think about how many gum roads you need to get paid. Four million bucks a year. You need thousands of them, right? Um or at least hundreds. And so I think often. And by the way,

Microsoft is never gonna sign up for a slack self service. That does not gonna happen, right? I'm sure if you look at stripe, you'll see a similar story where, like a huge amount of the revenue is coming from these massive marketplaces like lifter or what have you, right? And so I think part of it is just being open and honest about that internally, I think one of one of the really hard things about that is that people don't want to talk about it because it it creates this distance with why you started the company in the first place because, you know, imagine your square, your stripe, your gum road or Shopify. And you're like, Yeah, we're gonna help democratize,

right? That's the word. We're going to democratize this ability. All these people that have never been ableto monetize their content or launch a sass product are gonna be able to do this. And then you look at your numbers and you're like, Wait a second. All of our money is coming from Microsoft. I'm pretty sure they could have done this, but At the end of the day, it's just it is what it is. Uh, a lot of your a lot of your money is gonna come from these very, very few companies, even with us. You know, we have an incredibly long tail,

but even with us, like, you know, the top user on Gum Road, you know, we process $6 million a month. The top used on gum road does around over $500,000 a month. So 8% or so of our monthly volume is one person. So even when even when you look at the law sort of a product that seems almost entirely director, that the long tail, you're still having a power law within the long tail itself, right? We don't have a Microsoft doing four million bucks a year paying us four million bucks here, But we do have a creator, you know that Microsoft are in our world doing doing really, really well.

And so I think it's just important to understand that you will have a gaming. They're called whales, right? These people that spend tens of thousands of dollars a month on on Farmville and that's the majority of the revenue, and that allowed you to build software fault for all of these other people. But but I think it's important to understand that the reason your business works at the scale that it does is because you have these beasts, these these behemoths, spending a lot of money for your software. And at the end of the day, they're not going to sign up for your software organically. It's just maybe one day. But you know, for now you're if you if Stripe wants lift, there's a guarantee of these one phone call that's happened in that in that

process. So how does this affect your strategy Running gun road today? Do you spend a lot of time looking for these whales to sign them up?

We've actually done the opposite, and honestly, it's It's a tough one because I think a lot of people, including former employees, were like, Look, we should just focus on M and M right? If he makes two million bucks in two days, we get 50 of those and we're good and it just wasn't really the type of business I wanted to build. I saw you know that power law and I said someone needs to support these creators the end of the day, these independent creators, basically what happens is all of these companies go upmarket because they see what I see right these whales making the vast majority that revenue for them. And they stopped supporting these folks. And then there's a new service that is the same thing, and then they go upmarket and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And so my my philosophy now is like, we're not gonna try to build a massive company. We're not going to seek the whales. They are going to become whales on our platform. And some of them will leave unfortunately, because they need turn functionality or, uh, you know, a lower transaction fee or all of these sorts of things. A dedicated customer support person and s L. A. Some security features, et cetera, and we're just going to focus on what we call this. You're the one that people just getting started because at the end of the day, someone needs to help them,

and the amount of value being created, I think, by Gummer creators is massive. Even though we can't capture all of the value on example of this is someone you mentioned, actually, Nathan Barry, right convert get founder. He was on Gum Road. He made a significant amount of money on Gum Road selling books in software, and he used those proceeds to start convert it. And now converted is a much larger business than governess and doing an amazing amount of good for the world. And so I think for me it's tricky. Honestly, it's not easy, and I definitely am still figuring it out. But for me,

it's like I really just want to buy us towards the converted stories and biased less towards the sort of the enterprise sales model, even though it means we're not gonna build us profoundly significant of a business. We will be able to build a business that people hopefully credit with some important inflection point in their life. And then the other thing, I think is just we're gonna talk a lot about building the business and hopefully we'll be able to get some of that satisfaction not in the form of revenue or valuation or, you know, a nice bank account balance. But people saying thank you and appreciating the work that we've done similarly to a company that I like a lot is, uh, his WordPress, the automatic team. And I think, you know, they don't know. For some amount of the Internet, 20% of the Internet or something is powered by war press.

And you know, if that was the case and they had a very different model, they could be doing a lot better. They'd be a lot more famous, etcetera. But I think of the day like I think that the amount of value that word presses created for the world, the amount of value that the rails framework is created for the world, a level etcetera is in my being billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars. Maybe trillions of dollars cumulatively and certainly over time will be will be true. And none of those people are going to be worth billions of dollars or anything close to the amount of value that they've created. And I think that's fine. I think I think that's great. I think, as a society it would be cool if we recognize that a little bit more. And if if the sort of the status and the leaderboard sort of that exists in everybody's head is that the sort of the scoreboard on the on the side of the wall of the Silicon Valley basketball court is not. Revenue is not.

Valuation is not number of employees, but value creation. And we we figured out a way to measure that. I think society would just be a lot better for all this money that, you know, basically, these people become billionaires because of the status. And then that money just sits around frankly, right? Like I know some of these people, they don't even have cars like, you know, I always joke a buckle up buckle owed money. I would buy a Testa, but I could do that now. I really wanted to.

I just haven't. And so I think, yeah, I think if if, as a society, we could reward putting some of that money back into the system or or building, there are companies in a way that means we never got that money in our bank in the first place, right? But we did get some of the status, some of the credit, some of the fame I think society would be, would be better off. I think humanity would be better off. I think, uh, I think that would just be a little bit less animosity in the world towards other people if we were just a little bit less selfish about some of this stuff.

You know, obviously it's a little bit hypocritical for me to say, I think because I certainly tried to do that and I failed and I wrote this post about it, and that gave me all of this status and on boosted my ego and and all of those sorts of things. But I see the value of that. Now. I'm like, Oh, cool, if I can If I can get that, you know, without building a $1,000,000,000 company, that's not bad. That's a pretty good, ah, pretty good place to be.

And I'm sort of trying to convince other people like, Hey, is this an accident or or is this actually thing that more people would want to do on purpose if they knew this was a possibility? Maybe you'd be able to do this without having to, you know, lay off 75% of your company. That would be ah, that would be kind of kind of nice.

It's appreciating the intangible effects of the work that you do is this is tricky. You're talking about people in Provo in the way that they live in service to each other and for kind of here and now and the people in their community. I wonder, you know, if I tell you something, like Gum Road has paid out over $200 million the creators and artists over the years. What's the emotional impact of that on you versus the emotional impact of you being able to help someone and your oil painting class, you know, reach some gold if they hadn't reached before?

Yeah, I do wonder about that. And honestly, I think it's all the same at the end of the day. Like when we sent, you know, 400 bucks toe to some creator. We have this thing that we launched called the government creators fun because we started making profits and I just didn't really know what to do with it. And so I saw these Mormons around me, tithing 10% of their church and was like, Oh, we can tie it to our creators Weaken, redirect 10% of our profits and and give back. And so we started doing that this year. And we, you know, we gave for a buck to this woman who's going to a First Nations conference and wants to bring a couple of her students,

her female students with her. And, you know, 40 bucks is not a lot of money to avenge your back company. That's nothing. And nor would they ever make this investment because it's never gonna be the thing that makes them, you know, that that really in flex their growth curve, which is typically what you're looking for because you need to raise more money, etcetera, etcetera. But it changed her life, you know, when she sent us to see to video. And it was a most super emotional for me, and it just was like,

Wow, this goes so far, you know? And I think at the end of the day, you know there's this story about the little girl with the starfish, right? Where someone someone says, What are you doing? She's doing starfish back into the water, right? And, uh, someone says, like, What are you doing? This is stupid.

Like this doesn't matter. Look how many millions of starfish you think you're really making a difference. And she says it matters for this one that matters for this one that matters for this one. And I think at the end of the day, like that's all there is. You know, the ocean is just is just made of drops in the water of water. And at the end of the day, like that's, you know, you can look at the ocean and you could say, Okay, we're gonna It's only worth solving this problem if we can move the whole ocean. But the truth is like if everyone thought smaller, I think, uh,

we would be it would be good, But I think it's sort of answer your question directly. I think, yeah, when I when I help someone oil paint or even if I'm just a little pain myself, like the emotional impact of that, the serotonin that's the dopamine or whatever that fires off of my and my brain is is larger, probably than even hearing $200 million at the end of the day were massively driven by helping other people. And by hearing these stories and these stories are not data. They're not numbers, their individual people whose lives changed because of something that you did. And that is the way that were built, I think, is to help those people to help other people. And at the end of the day, numbers are just numbers,

you know? And this is, I think, one of the sort of I think one of the reasons that actually founders that get more successful, get less happy over time is because what happens is you see the number go up like crazy, right? Because you see the 10 go 200 goto 1000 goto a 1,000,000. But then all the all the stories that you hear which are, in general negative ones because otherwise, you know, they're just going on with their life. That goes from 1 to 4 to 10 to 20. So actually is a percentage of the good stories. It's diminishing, but as an absolute number, it's growing going up over time.

And that's all your brain can process. You're just seeing all the people that are like hurting because of what you built. Their lives are worse off for what you've built, and I think that's a huge reason that that some of these, uh, some of these people go into these, these sort of depressive states, because the stories are the things that matter to our brains. I mean, you, you know, you read like a like you watch a Pixar movie and you start crying because, like, a toy can't be with the other toy. That's insane. But your brain,

like you just can't not cry because your brain perceives that story as valid and as true as anything else. But, you know, imagine if at the end of that toy story had said four million toys were not reunited with their owners, right, Like you'd be like, That's weird. But, you know, that's just the way that were built. And I think understanding and really sort of like, really gras king, like the way that we are built in ways that we cannot manipulate, cannot control. We can just sort of live within. Those things are really important to understand,

because if you want to be happy, which I think a lot of people do well, do you want that and also be in service of others, you know, work for yourself and work for other people. I think you're gonna a lot more people realize these things. You know, it's funny because I wrote this post and I came to some of these realizations, and I know that anyone that has kids goes through this too, right? Um, I've heard it so many times, but you just need to go through it yourself. You know, I tell people you're gonna read this medium post, and then you're gonna make all of these mistakes as well,

because some of these things you just kind of need to go through the motions. And you kind of your whole body needs toe need Thio realize what it's doing before before you're like, 00 that's what he meant. You know, you could read Ah meditations or by Marcus Aurelius or whatever. But at the end of the day, like it's not enough, you're not gonna truly understand what someone's been through until you've until you've been through it yourself. Yeah, And

speaking of that, speaking of not really understanding what someone spent through and tough experiences, you laid off 75% of gum roads, workforce. You went from 20 people down to a company of five and then down to a company of one. So at some point, I think it was just you back, Thio being by yourself? Yeah, just me. What was that whole process like? And how did it feel going through those layoffs?

Oh, man. I mean, it was It was tough. I mean, we knew it was coming, right? And so it was, like always there and then sort of in the distance. And as it got closer and closer, it was just It was like, I I describe it like treading water where, you know, we were alive. But certainly we were like, running out of oxygen. And at some point,

if a VC didn't come along in their boat and save us, we were going to drown. And, uh, you know, one of the decisions we made was to say, OK, we could either cut the team and 1/2 now and then have two years of runway or we can say, Look, we're gonna go for it. We're gonna keep the team the same. We're just gonna you know, we're gonna work really hard, and hopefully we can sort of inflect the numbers and we'll raise money and all will be good and it didn't happen. But I think the thing that I did really well was to communicate with the whole team the whole time that we're talking to investors was gonna be brutally difficult. And the default state was we were gonna have to do a round of layoffs.

And so when it happened, it was less like, Hey, I'm doing this. And it was more like, Hey, this thing that we already agreed upon is now happening because, you know, I'm not doing anything else. It was it was sort of the default. And so But it was so hard. And I think, honestly, one of the hardest things about it was it was the first time in a long time for me. Maybe in my whole life that I had sort of so visibly sort of contradicted that story that I had been telling myself and telling other people frankly. And the world had been telling me about building being one of these,

these people that was gonna build this $1,000,000,000 company and do do the thing and it was like I honestly, sometimes it felt like I was on a TV show or something, right? The Truman Show. It felt so perfect. And when that wasn't gonna happen, it was like, Well, it's gonna happen anyways. We're gonna raise money. It's obviously these ups and downs are also built into the TV shows. But then when we did the layoffs, it was like, Oh, okay, I guess,

Um, I guess this is it, you know, like it was just a very it was like, Imagine if you're watching some movie and then at this sort of the final battle, Fredo just gets killed by Smeagol, and then he walks away with the ring. I love these hobbit analogies, that sort of thing. But that's really how it felt. I just felt wrong. Frankly, you know, it just didn't make sense to me. And and then the thing that made it even harder was at least I felt like I could pretend that I could sort of project a different image to the world. I didn't have to tweet that this was happening.

But then the technical TechCrunch wrote about it and there was this, you know, I was on the front page of TechCrunch again for the first time in a little while. It was for the exact it was for a reason, you know, that I did not want And that that was really hard, because all of a sudden it was like it was a story that other people in you, but I didn't know how many people knew it. So I was kind of in this weird mode where people would come by the office for a meeting that I had scheduled. And Officer Beale basically empty. And maybe they'd read the technology article. Maybe they haven't. And I had forgot to play this face and basically lie, you know, be sort of dishonest. And I'm sure I was not present in those meetings to A to a large degree.

And actually, since the article came out, people have told me that they're like, I came to the office and it was a very, very good meeting. And I'm glad you're doing good now, you know? And so I wish. I think in hindsight that I had been more honest from the get go ng was like, Look, this happens. We're gonna get through it, but I think partly it was like I didn't want to tell creators. I didn't want creators to find out if they didn't need to find out because they'd leave. And who knows what would happen tomorrow and maybe would be a self fulfilling prophecy, and we go into a death spiral,

Then we die. And then that would be real failure. And so I pretended that everything was fine and it was just the worst thing ever because I was so living in San Francisco, I was still paying a lot of money and rent. I was still hanging out with all these people that were there for startups, and I suddenly like, didn't have anything to say at these parties of these dinners at the's hangouts. And I think everyone knew what was up. You know, it's like you were a friend. Go through something really difficult and you just don't even know what to say to them. And so you say nothing. You kind of pretend like everything's fine and then they they are. They're like no one cares like no one cares about this. And, you know,

like I had a friend whose whose husband passed away and she you know, she said, no one reached out to her about it. And, you know, she felt terrible. And then she all But she was like, Look, I also didn't reach out to anybody, and it was just like, this thing of no humans really know what to do in these situations. Yeah, I just I just remember feeling like, incredibly lonely. I had a support network, but I wasn't engaging with it at all.

I hung out with my mom. This, uh, most recent holiday season and and I asked her, was like, I was writing this article and I was like, Hey, like when? Uh, I was thinking about writing this article and I asked her when, You know, when I told her about all the stuff that went down and the layoffs and everything and she said, Just now, you know, you never told me and I never wanted to ask her Bug. You were,

like, you know, stress you out. And so I waited basically until today. So I was like, Okay, I need to write this one called him because if my own mom, like there's, like, how many people have thought about this and not been able to confront me or talk to me about it or how many people could learn or just feel validated or feel like they're not alone Because because everyone is too scared to talk about this stuff. And that's really one of the key moments that I think got me toe like, Okay, I'm gonna write about this. I'm gonna sort of publicly declare myself a failure. And luckily, I'm in Provo.

So if everyone thinks I'm a moron like, it's fine, whatever. I'm a painter Now, you know, I'll just fully embrace the painter lifestyle. You know, I'll be like, uh, what's another metaphor like, uh, the guy from Luke Skywalker, right? Just go to the mountains and disbanded. Let's hang out by yourself. Hang out by myself.

I'll be good. I mean, my paints. And then ah, turned out like, sort of exact opposite thing happened. And it turns out everyone wanted to hear this story and or wanted to hear a story like this because people had them and didn't want to talk about it or or whatever the reasons are. But I think people were like, I think was like cups of almost felons like collective breath of fresh air in the industry um, where it's like Cool? Yes, Like, we're not perfect. And I'm like, thanks for writing about it. So I don't have to,

you know, sort of thing, which is ah, kind of funny, but yeah, yeah, I know. I think was it

was It's not easy to pull off a good failure story.

Yeah, it's funny, because there we almost joke about them, you know, like, they're kind of a mean, like, the sort of the failure medium post. And I think I think part of it is because even in those failures, people are trying to position themselves as successes and make a point our cell, a new product or something like that. And I think with me, it was just like I have no skin in the game on At this point, I thought at least I'm just gonna write this thing. I'm not gonna make a point. I'm not gonna sell products. I'm not gonna hyper up anything else.

Oh, are you know, I'm just gonna say, Look, this is what happened. You know, like at the end of the story, I say, like, you know, I had a punchline, I think, at the end, But I removed it. And it was just like, this is mind story,

huh? You know, for better or worse, Um, take what you take. Take from it what you will and, uh, a bunch of people that were giving me feedback. You need a punch, Your ending Like you need, uh, you know, if you want this to go viral, if you want people to share this thing like you need to say, like, something controversial,

opinionated or or whatever. And I was like, I tried I had a few drafts with something like that in there, and I was just like, I can't because it's just I'm exhausted, you know, Like I just need I feel like I just need to hit, publish and tell the story. And if it's over, it's a reflection. It's not. It's, you know, I was inspired by Susan Fowler, who wrote reflecting on my very weird year at uber is what she called the post about the all the sex sexual harassment, all that stuff that happened uber and it was just like I just you know,

it was her. Just I need to get this off my chest. It's I'm reflecting on this thing. I'm not saying, you know, I'm not like, you know, uber should die, you know, or whatever. It was just reflecting on my very weird your uber like, no mention of anything crazy. And I was inspired by that was like, That's what I want to do. Like I just wantto say, Tell my story,

Get this off my chest. 90% of value was me just writing it. And if it goes, you know, well, people like it. That's great. They'll share it on, and if not, they won't. And that's fine, too, because I don't know how many people I want reading about my failure anyways. And you are, you know, it worked.

I think people people liked it. And I think people almost like it was kind of the anti article, anti failure article, too, because actually was a There was an article about success, you know, it was like I actually built this great thing. I just didn't really know it at the time, and now I do, and that's cool. And it's okay to say, Hey, look, I built something cool as well, and I think that's the other thing that I think a lot of people appreciate it. I think Silicon Valley almost has this kind of weird,

sort of self deprecating nature. It's like we can't six When we do succeed, it's like, What's the point? Because no one buys a nice car anyways, like what you don't like, I feel like, uh, it's this weird thing that happens where all these people fail. But then even the people that succeed I feel like our culture is so like we didn't do this for other for ourselves. So we can't even buy a nice car like we can. You know, I I remember meeting up with a friend who sold the company, and and he, uh, hadn't asked in Martin on another friend who had Audi R eight.

They're the only, like, two nice cars ever seen. And you, like, apologized. T I was like, Hey, could you like, draw me like he's like, How you gonna get home? I got us calling numbers. I'll drop you off, But just like please don't tell anyone I own this car And I saw him like, do this car sick, like,

What are you talking about? He's like, Yeah, I know it's a Saudi are a stupid but like I've always wanted. You don't have to upon, you know,

that's the culture was like it was just a different culture.

It is. But then

it's like, what? You're not doing it for yourself.

But then it's like it's like it's, like, so wrong to admit that you are, you know, to some degree, you are doing this for yourself. What? You are doing this because you want fame. You want status, You want to build something. We want people to say, Wow, you're actually pretty good at what you do. I just think it'd be healthier. Everyone kind of just was like, Yes, it's OK,

It's OK to sort of be who you are. And it's almost the opposite effect where people can detect that too. You know, it's like I think people obviously don't don't like when people are pretending to be better than they are. But the same goes, I think the other way around. And it's okay to be like, Yeah, we worked really hard and and we want and you know, obviously there are a lot of signals and a lot of factors and and we're grateful for all of them. But, you know, part component of that was, you know, being smart, working hard and doing the thing and giving it a shot.

And I think it's okay or at least should be OK, I think to say that, you know, But you're right. It is sort of the culture of Silicon Valley. It is to sort of like except no reward. The evaluation speaks for itself, and that's that's all. But I don't I don't think that's true. You

tweeted about a week ago that life is a series of distractions from existential dread. Is that what come road is for you? Yeah, well, it was a little bit of Ah, hopefully

a little bit of ah, sarcastic sort of tweet. But I think I think it is true in a large sense that like at the end of the day, the problems that plague us have plagued humanity since before technology in before software and probably before money and writing on those problems will stay the same and and be the same. Even when we have, like a Dyson sphere around some star and we're all you know, we have invented teleportation and stuff like we're still gonna be like crap. What are we doing? What? What's the point of all of this crap? But I think that's yeah. I think it's just sort of this acknowledgment that, like we all suffer from sort of the same demons, that we all deal with the same rough problems and and, you know, we can distract ourselves and it's okay to call them distractions because I think they like, you know,

gum Road, an Apple and Microsoft and Facebook are all just tiny, tiny, tiny things in the in the span of the universe, or the multi verse or whatever scientists have discovered so far. And to me, it's It's a sense of freedom to be like it lowers the stakes in some sense, and it lets me kind of do what I feel like doing instead of trying to, like, solve the world's problems. And, you know, I'm sure some people disagree with that, but I think for me at least, it's like, look like we can really get riled up about all of the the things that plague our society and spend every waking second trying to fix that and getting everybody to vote and doing all of these sorts of things.

But I think at the end of the day there's like I think it's important to recognize that, like the world looks the way it looks and it will roughly look the way it looks 50 years from now. And these things will change, certainly. But I don't know. I feel like we have a lot less impact on them. From then we think I think Steve Jobs didn't mend the iPhone. Someone else would have been like We can care about these problems, what we should care about them and work towards them in a way that helps ourselves and like, makes sure that we are just feeling fulfilled and happy and and doing things for our own sake as well, because everything is a distraction. I think from the shore of the core lived experience, which is happening on our deep sort of subconscious. I think we're not that different from ants in that sense, like we look at Anson, sure they're doing stuff,

but like they're sort of playing a role in a larger thing, and I think the thing that they like humans, humans believe that, too, and and I think. Actually, one of the That's one of the things I really picked up. I think living in Provo, which is, you know, as you mentioned, 89% Mormon and even they believe, sure, you know, like they believe and actually much more significance to the mortal realm because they believe it has, like,

a very important purpose in the grand scheme of things. But also they believe in the insignificance of it. Because if you think of eternal life like this 70 80 90 years you have on this planet, it's gonna be nothing. I mean, compared to any of that stuff, you know? And so I think it. I think I copied a little bit of their perspective to which is, like, you know, do the best you can and hopefully there's something on the other side and that side is going to be way better than anything we have here. It doesn't mean you should just, like, sit around and wait to die or something like that. But,

you know, it's like do what you can and do what you feel is right when you're conscious, approves off, and if we all sort of do that I think the world's gonna be as good as it can be. But, you know, true, killing yourself over something is gonna do. Not much more, you know. So if you want to kill yourself over something because you want to learn a lot or because you want to really help somebody, that's great. But just sort of, I think, just for me it was it was about perspective, Um is about yeah,

I can totally kill myself, but but it's it's really important to just yeah, too. Keep everything in perspective as well and be present in the moment and and, Ah, and take a break and, like, you know, not over optimized every single thing that I do with my life. It's okay to just watch Netflix for an hour or two. This, you know, it's another distraction. You know. Everything is distraction. I think it sort of levels the playing field.

It's not like going to the gym versus Netflix versus doing a startup, and I have to priority stack everything. These are all just the same sort of thing. There are a lot closer together than we think we just are. So that's all we see on DSO. They look really different, but if you start expand your mind a little bit, I think they're there. They're all basically the same. It's

funny, because business and a lot of ways is one of the ultimate distractions. As a founder, you have a 1,000,000 different things you can do in any point in time and take out pretty much your entire life. Like you said when you're in SF like work was your number one priority. Besides sleep just really like Not even. It's not optional. You also tweeted something recently. I'm just reading all your tweets at this point, you said startup shouldn't be scary are they? Should be scared. Shouldn't be dangerous, right? Scary is all the sort of things you have to do is a founder that air and hair really hair raising, right, pivoting when things aren't working, getting feedback,

managing people who are smarter than you but the dangerous stuff. That's where you sort of take this start up. It's a distraction too far where you're racking up credit card debt as you said, where you're sacrificing your health and your well being. And I think you know, if you if you get to that point. We were literally killing yourself for this business. And I think you are. You've got to the point where you're missing the point.

Yeah, No, I think that's spot on, I guess because I said it e, uh, agree with the out with myself, but, uh, no. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Like, I think it's it's it is scared, just like roller coasters Air scary. They're triggering like a very primal sort of fight or flight response within us when we do them and we do it for the thrill. But we acknowledge kind of what we're doing, and we have good bounds.

And if they actually let too, a lot of death would probably stop doing them. And I think I think the same goes with anything else. Um, you know, you could do them. You could do them for the thrill. You could do them for the personal growth or just because it's fun or just because it makes you not think about something else, which is a lot scarier. But yeah, I think at the end of the day, like it is important to consider if you are taking it too far. And if you are sacrificing your life for this thing, that is relatively insignificant, you know, And and,

uh, yeah, I think exactly exactly what start ups are. I think sometimes people conflate scary and dangerous. You know, people say, Oh, is that is a dangerous time like it's on dangerous. It shouldn't be dangerous. It's just a start. It's just a tech business. You're sitting on a laptop in an air conditioned room. It can't be that bad. But some people do take it really, really, really far.

They, you know, I'm gonna founder. Just this week that said, he sleeps on average four hours today and I said, You're basically killing yourself slowly. You might not think that, but you know, there's a good chance that you that's what you are doing. You should go read this book and maybe you'll change your habits. But yeah, I mean, you can totally do it, but yeah, I think of the day like you know, you have one life.

You can decide Thio to go, you know, crazy with it and do all sorts of stuff. But at the end of the day, like everyone has roughly the same amount of time roughly the same amount of happiness I think generated, regardless of your position in society. And you should work, tip, toe, improve your life in a way that also improve other people's lives. And I really do believe that, like in the same thing similar Provo learning, I think, is that if everyone did that, if everyone was really focused on, just like being better,

better people it's a very sort of conservative approach, I think. But everyone is just better on a local level on being a better version of themselves and helping other people truly helping other people and start treating others like they want to be treated etcetera. There's a great line I heard the other day, which is like, Treat treat your Children like how, how you wish your parents treated you, you know, just sort of passing of the torch passing of humanity to the next version of humanity to the next person humanity. Like if we pass on really good positive energy, we're certainly not gonna fix every problem in a single generation. I think things take a lot longer to fix them they than they do to break. But that is ultimately the way that we will move forward as a society and we need to weigh need to do that. And then also just, you know, treat ourselves pretty well,

too, because I don't know what's the point. What's you know, if you if you work here, you're Asafa, you're not even going to see the for you. The universe stops existing. The second guy, right, So, like, What's the point? I think there should be some some selfishness. I think for me it's it's it's aligning selfishness with selflessness. It's figuring out what can I do that makes the world better but also makes me happier. And that's where Gummer it is now.

And you know things like that in this podcast. It's like, Look, it's selfish for me. I got a basically rant on all these things. I love doing that. I gotta talk to you. That's awesome. I get to, you know, basically produce content that like a lot of people are going to listen to. But, um, it's also good, and I think it's also valuable for the world, and I think people can sort of like,

align themselves with each other in a way that does that that's fulfills themselves and helps their own communities and broader society. I think if we could do that better is a system. I think we made it really easy. You know, for someone who isn't aligned with their surroundings to move, then you know, we we would be in a pretty pretty solid place. The free market, I think, would would do some really cool stuff.

We started this interview by talking about the differences in your life is a founder of a high gross startup and as a founder of gun road ism or any hacker type business. So why don't we in the same way what is on the top in your mind today? What do you think about in regards to growing an improving gum road? And how, if it all, is that affected by the fact that you are more independent business than you ever were in the past?

Yeah, honestly, it's similar in many, many ways. Someone asked me this where they're like, Are you happier now? You seem happier. You're not working 60 arms a week anymore, but I think you know, as I said, like, it's just I've replaced a set of distractions with another set of distractions, and I feel like in general, my happiness level is pretty close. Long term. I think the rolling average is probably pretty similar. It's probably less spikey,

But yeah, I think in general, the way I think about Gum Road is is how can we create the maximum amount of value in the world and how little do I have to do to make that happen? Like, can I find someone who's incredibly self motivated and knows what they want government to do? Maybe they're a user of the product themselves and pay them money to go do that thing. And I sort of wanted all mostly detach myself and my identity from government as much as I can, because I think ultimately that will lead to better decisions for the company and because I'm making them where the company is like the sort of allowing itself. I'm allowing the company to make its own decisions. And so a big part of that is hiring a different type of person, giving them no equity. So I'm like, Hey, look, we're not selling this thing. We're not selling the vision of this thing to you.

You want to work on this thing. You get paid pretty well for you. Got sort of have an incredible amount of impact in self direction. That's interesting to you. Like Gummer might be a great fit. Otherwise, it's probably not. And that's okay. And that's you know I can. I'll tell the team Hey, like I gotta run. I gotta do this speaking thing in Denver or whatever and like, I'll be gone for two days and that's fine. I don't have to be on all the time. I'm not trying because everyone no one has that could be the company. It's not like,

Oh, so I was gone. Therefore, my equity is gonna be worth less, you know? Yeah, there's this almost like freeing sense of it where people someone asked me like, Do do Do you think people are have less ownership, right? Like, how do you solve that problem now that you don't have equity? And I'm actually like they actually have more ownership over the product. They have less ownership over the company, but now they're focused on Just look, if they get paid 100 bucks an hour, 200 bucks an hour to do whatever they want in general,

if we hire the right type of people like they're gonna do what's actually most beneficial the creators, because that's why they're working on Gum Road and actually not what's most beneficial for their stock price because they don't have it. And so, actually, we've seen, like, almost Maur more selfless, I think, direction to the product. And I think strategically and this, I think, is almost a necessity Just because of the way that we're building product right now is we're just helping our current creators. We're not. I do know sales. I do. I don't talk to prospective customers anymore.

I just say, Hey, look like I'm My focus is on people that or to use the platform, all you got to do is make one sale and now your current customer and I'm having to talk to you. But, you know, when we went through the down and out phase of gum road like these people stuck with us and we're just gonna build stuff for them, we're gonna fix basically everybody they report. We're gonna make the site as performance as speedy as possible. We're going to ship features that they've asked for for a long period of time, and that's it. And we're profitable. So even if none of that leads to growth, we're still gonna be profitable. And the long term hope is that actually really just focusing on our existing created based on being really public and an open and transparent about that is going to lead to more growth, more sustainable,

long term, organic, where the mouth growth than ever before? That's the dream. And then the other thing, I guess the last point is I'm constantly trying to figure out how Gum Road can create value that has nothing to do with revenue. So we're gonna do a series of animated shorts on YouTube for kids. We're going to release a comic strip. That sort of is all about the suffering, the problems and suffering the creators face. I wrote this post on medium that did really well. We opened up our financials. I'm probably going to start doing open board meetings so people can start seeing what that looks like for a start up. What are all the ways that we can create value for creators and everybody else, too? Because we can because we're profitable and we don't need to grow,

and we don't need to raise more money. And if we stay the same size, but we we double the amount of value that we're creating the world like that's better than, in my opinion and growing the company's revenue by 10% and growing that valued by, you know, it's

pretty cool to hear everybody has their own sort of anti hacker dream. You know, if they run a profitable business and they could do anything, what do you do? I tweeted about this yesterday, you know? Do you retire? You started the company. Do you keep working on your same company? And it's It's cool hearing how you're making these decisions about Gummer that, quite frankly, I never hear the typical venture funded companies making these decisions. Everybody sort of building for the hypothetical, marginal next customer. Everybody's Yeah, they're trying to figure out what's gonna inflict their growth curve and get them to the next level one. If that means neglecting the current people s o B. It. So despite the similarities, that sounds like there's a lot of differences as well.

Yeah, I mean, there's that I think. I mean, there's not a problem necessarily with that approach, and certainly many people do that, and I'm jealous sometimes of their success, but it never ends. I think for me that the important part about where I'm at is actually a government creator told me this. You said, enough is the decision, not an amount. And I really thought that was pretty profound because that's, you know, I am apt enough. I'm good. Like I'm happy with the creative that we have.

And I'm just gonna make their lives like I'm basically the way that I pitch it Thio the team and two friends and two other people. I talked to him. I want to do things that are so good that it just makes no sense, literally makes no money, no sense, but also makes no comments like, Why would we do this? You know why would be open source cover? That has literally, because it makes no sense, which is why I want to do it like I want to do things that, like they're so outside the realm of what normal businesses do, and that's sort of what makes it interesting. And that's what makes it makes sense is because that's the stuff like, you know, people don't get it,

so they share it and they appreciate it, and that's why I'm gonna do it. I think we'll see. We'll see how it goes. But I think you had to that point. Also, if if enough is a decision on the amount when you are seeking that, when does it end? You know, like you on. And I think there is this this loop that happens and you just can't escape it like I'm surprised. Frankly, sometimes when I see what some of these large tech companies are doing, like uber and Facebook now is in the news a lot, and Google is in the news a lot as well for doing kind of these shady things, and I don't know necessarily.

I think part of it is like their evaluations are just are so high, and they have no sort of grounding in their revenues and their actual trajectory. Amazon is the only one this x 70 x, you know, whatever earnings per share something and like they have to just keep growing because they know that's why the revenues are so high And so you just get trapped in this loop where you're just like we need to just keep it. It's the it's the football helmet. If everyone was like, Hey, like we're not gonna play this game anymore, we're gonna just go back to doing awesome stuff within reason. Great. But the problem is, everyone's playing this game and and frankly, at the end of the day, if you're a public company, you're competing with everybody,

every other public company and actually every other possible type of investment. And so you just kind of get on the hamster wheel. And to me, it's like if I didn't build a $1,000,000,000 company and then I p o I would still be on that game today, I'd still be doing that thing. I just be, you know, trying to rape run as fast as possible. Grow the company hires many awesome people. It's possible ship is many things go global go international like build a massive sales team because when I mean I generally don't know where this goes because we've never been here before as a society as humanity and it's like it seems clearly unsustainable to me, but it's been set up. You know, been like this for five plus years, and I think no one I've talked to really knows what's going on. So people are like, OK,

what? It's fine. Let's just keep going. I don't wanna be the one that, like, spots out and then, you know, gets gets destroyed by this. I think there's a big reason that Bitcoin is doing as well as it is right now, which is people are scared of the traditional system. No one really knows what the heck is going on. And so everyone's like, Well, we might as well head back on this whole system and get some of this script of money. But, uh,

yeah, it's a weird. It's a weird thing, and that's the other thing that makes me really content with where I am is because I know if I go back on that path, you know, people have asked me, would you raise money again? I just know where that goes. I've done that before, and I know how much of a drug it is to get into that mode, and there's no escape from that mood. Like Show me the escape. I don't I haven't seen it yet, but he's offices. I mean, the one example I have seen of it actually is Bill Gates,

who I mentioned in my post like he figured it out. He got out of the system, and now he does this amazing stuff, and I'm sure his wife played a huge role in that. And I'm sure he's more fulfilled in happier than he's ever been. And his bank, his bank account, is just dropping like nobody's business, right? He's just giving it all away, and I'm sure he's just the serotonin dopamine. Firing off in his head is, is just awesome. I I think he just he I think he got it, you know? And then you have Warren Buffett who,

like I generally don't know what the hell that guy's doing. I have a massive amount of respect for him. I know it's almost blasphemy to say anything negative about him, but what what's the point? I don't generally would love to be like Dude, what's like Maybe he's just so fulfilled by that and that's great. I think there's nothing wrong with that, but it just it just it just kind of crazy you know he's like late

eighties partner Charlie Munger is like 95 stuggling to the shareholders, running their business the same

way pretty still drinking Diet Coke, you know? Oh my gosh, it's It's it's Ah, it's I mean, you know, one, you know, one of the best system that I think that there Ah, there's one example of this. Also, I think it's figured out, which is George Washington, right? He got to the peak and then he was like, I'm good. Like,

I'm just gonna retire. I'm gonna smoke weed on my cherry farm or whatever he does or did. And next dude couldn't deal with. Done. Unfortunately, the next dude has, you know, for since now, hopefully next woman soon. But yeah, it's just crazy. It's just Ah, and I think that opting out is I mean, think about how rare that is. Like that's like, the most significant thing he did was,

you know, was was not do anything anymore. And, uh, yeah, I think I think people would think if there are more people doing it would be it would be pretty, pretty awesome. You make space for more people to do their thing. Unemployment rates are like a record low, and everyone is unhappy and making no money somehow. So maybe the answer is like all the people that are making money and, like, just buy a nice house and chill out for a bit. It makes face for the other people that could make more money,

you know? Well, the show happens to be listened to you by a lot of people who are ambitious. You have. You haven't started yet, and they want to get started doing something. They're not quite ready to call it off is they haven't done started yet. I've surveyed the indie actress audience quite a lot in recent months. They're mostly developers, really struggle with coming up with ideas or once they do, how to get traction and how to grow on. Most of them have no interest whatsoever and raising any sort of money they're very dialed in to I wanna start a business to improve my life and the lives of people around me and perhaps my employees and customers. What's your advice for somebody just getting started on this path today?

Yeah, I mean, I think the most important thing is to build stuff to salt, start small and figure out what you want to build and and honestly, a lot of people aren't gonna know what they want to build. So just like build something as small as it is. And maybe don't even build something. Just ask the people that you love and your community that communities that you care about, how you could make their life better if you know how to code. I mean, that's that's a superpower. You could build stuff you're gonna automate, stuff that people are doing manually. So just ask them, like, What are you doing manually like, Are you spending 30 minutes a day like dealing with Excel,

Excel spreadsheets to calculate blank like are you you know, going on yelp like trying to find a restaurant to eat, and you kind of go through the same process every single time. Automate the boring stuff is a term I've heard, and I like it. Forgot what you can start building. And I think once you start building stuff's similar painting, where, like some days, you're like I don't know we're writing. I have no idea what I want to paint right. But then the you know, I'm like driving down the down the highway like looking at spot feeling okay? What do I want to pay and like, Fine, I'll just pay.

That's to be barred. Whatever. And then I'm driving home, and every single thing looks like a painting like the same stuff I was looking at before. And so I think a lot of it is just like you prime your brain for that process. That creative process, which is what building products is it's a creative process, and then all of a sudden you're gonna have more and more and more ideas. But if you just sit around, you're like, I'm just gonna sit down and stare this piece of paper and come up with ideas. I guarantee who tends the absolute worst way to do it. Go for a run, go for a walk, hang out some friends and just live your life, and you're gonna have those ideas eventually,

and then you're gonna build one of them, and then you're gonna figure out your brain's gonna click and your observation skills when you get better at painting, What you're really doing is your training, your offers, observation skills. You're not really training your hand. You're not really learning anything about how paints mix. The vast majority of the learning is happening in your ability to observe a disconnect between your painting and what you're seeing and fixing that. You just fix it over and over again until you have a really great paintings, basically, and so it's kind of the same goes, I think you just train your brain and your brain is sort of a muscle in that way. You just have to train it, make it stronger, and we'll get better at those things. So that's like the big thing,

I think is like build stuff, built a lot of it. I really like the weekend project thing because it keeps the steak super low and and also is a really great constraint. I think when you're like I need to build something, I mean anything, looks like you know, like that thing. But if you if you constrain yourself, you're like, I'm only gonna build things that used the, um, zoom a P I because that's a new thing. I feel like it's underserved. Maybe there's something there. Focus on that. Really think about that.

Look through there a p i n points and just prime your brain. You know, for that for that thing. And then as you live your life and you'll be like all crap, wouldn't it be cool if I had, like, a little box that I could invite to every single call that I'm on And it would just transcribe the notes? Or it would tell me how many times I said the F word or whatever, you know, like something like that. And then, you know, you can figure out what you want to build, but unless you start, it's so difficult to really start moving. Actually,

the, uh, the Mormon faith says, I think something like you know, faith is like is like walking in the dark like you have to take one step at a time, and over time you'll build your faith and and the room will light up and things like that I kind of like that metaphor because it's true and products right. It's like you have no idea what, like you can't build anything like you look, I mean, you look at the home page of Gummer of the home page of Netflix, the home page of Yahoo, the homeboys. Maybe Google is the same, but Amazon et cetera all right, like when they first launched like, it's totally different.

And you just have to start and then you'll you'll learn and you're iterating your build and 99.9% of a product is built post launch. And so get to the launch as soon as you can again. That's why I like the weekend thing. And, yeah, just like think a small as you can. And also, the other thing that I did a lot was like, I didn't have ideas in the early days, and so I just was, like for hire. You know, I just built APS and designed and developed for other people. And eventually you will have your own ideas because they're gonna be okay. You should build this and you're like, Cool.

Yeah, what about it? Actually like, this is a really weird to think about it. What have you thought about this? And they're like, Oh, yeah, that's better. Do that, you know, and you'll start basically getting paid. Be bit, be paid to ah Tau, learn on the job, and then you can always you know,

branch out, and I guarantee you're gonna start having your own ideas. I mean, experienced founders and product folks that I've talked to you like they have too many nts of this point. They have. You know, they they have more ideas than they can. They can even write down because they train their brains so much that everything, everything in their life is a problem In some. I remember I had dinner with Johnny, I from Apple or used to be from Apple. And one of the things he said someone asked him was a group dinner, and someone asked him about Yeah, just like Does he obsess over things, right? Is it a problem?

Basically, that he's like, this is under this is not designed this not designed, This needs more aluminium. And, uh, and he was basically like, Yeah, like you train your brain to such a level toe. Sort of like point out. Any inconsistency, anything that could be improved. And everything starts to look like a problem waiting to be solved. You know, the end soap dispenser, the soy sauce container,

paper plates, blenders. You know everything. You can't. You can't help it because you just like you've trained your brain and your brain is like Okay, cool. I have the skill now and therefore it requires energy to maintain the skill. And clearly, like I learned this, go for a reason related to my survival. And so I need to, like, use it as much as possible. This is gonna go away. And, you know,

I think that's kind of what happens. I don't know, maybe some some evolutionary science is going to get upset at me, but I think that's how I think about it, you know? And so if you want to get good at something, you just have to figure out a way to do it, and you will get good at that thing. That is just how our bodies work.

I love that advice. Make a lot of stuff, build a lot of stuff, starts small and just try to get the momentum going. And you could sort of trust that your brain will follow at what it's best that it just adapt to whatever the needs are that you place on it and it's like you're saying the goal really is to basically become the sort of person who has ideas rather than just, you know, sitting down staring at a blank sheet of paper and just hoping that you have ideas today.

Uh, yeah. I just gotta train your brain. And if you do get into that habit, you know, if you if you come up with a few code every day from 4 to 7, like you're gonna start, you know it's gonna be, like 3 40 and you're gonna, like, have all of your brain just gonna get into it. It just it just knows. It's just it's it's much smarter than you are on much more powerful. If you if you train it, I think of the right way.

Well, that seems like a great place to end the episode. It's been two hours, So hell, thanks for coming on. Give us a ton of your time. Share the story of Gum road and all the things that you learned about how to build a company that makes you happier and more fulfilled. As a founder, he tell us an angel. Then go to learn more about you. And also about what's up with gun road nowadays is definitely check

out gum road gamma rho dot com. And then the best place to see what we're up to all the time is to follow us on Twitter at at Gum Road and then to follow me on Twitter if you want, which is at S h l Just where I tweet basically everything that I think of a simple way. Um, and all the weird

ideas I'm up to and and yeah, that's that's pretty go thanks again sought help for coming

on the show. You're very welcome. Thanks, Family court.

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