$100B Founder Breaks Down The Biggest AI Business Opportunities For 2025
AI, VR, and the Future of Work - November 26, 2024 (4 months ago) • 01:28:15
Transcript:
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Furqan Rydhan | That's the trend that I can't I can't like unsee it sometimes right | |
Shaan Puri | that's the bet you're making | |
Furqan Rydhan | that's the bet we make and so I always joke with the guys here it's like we wanna bet on negative one to 0 like peter thiel talked about these 0 to 1 companies it's like we still one step even before that | |
Shaan Puri | alright for khan we're here it's amazing | |
Furqan Rydhan | I haven't seen you in | |
Shaan Puri | a little while people don't know we used to work together maybe 5 6 years we cofounded a company and yeah launched a bunch of products and ate a bunch of shit together and here we are | |
Furqan Rydhan | fun times by the way | |
Shaan Puri | yeah I'm thinking the title of this is gonna be because applovin is now 50 $60,000,000,000 company yeah $50,000,000,000 founder tells me the next big thing in ai I'm gonna go full youtube quick bait full sense yeah yeah yeah they're great we so we used to do this thing where after we did bebo together got acquired we were there for a year or so and then we all we went off and we did different things I started the podcast and started doing my thing you started doing yours but I hit you up and I was like hey miss hanging out with you what if we did something and we we started doing this on wednesdays which is like the cool shit hour and this is amazing it's basically a show and tell where you my smartest friend would come on wednesdays and you'd be like hey have you seen this have you seen this have you seen this and I really hadn't seen any of it and you would kind of explain it and teach it to me and it was my favorite part of the week and we did that for I don't know probably like a year or something like that so I kinda want this to be like a public version of the cool shit hour where you're just gonna tell me a bunch of good things I wanna start with ai because you texted me something you said ai agents are here and you said ai is cool because a 10 person company feels like it could do the work of a 100 person company and we're using it in our company so I wanted to hear what are you doing with ai and and that's not called chat gpt | |
Furqan Rydhan | I think this word ai agent or this kind of phrase is the thing that I really can't pull myself away from like literally every night like right you know me like midnight strikes I wanna write code like the whole day is like talking to people and the night | |
Shaan Puri | is like coding yeah furcom's schedule is nocturnal so I remember we we hired you and I feel like the first day you came in at 9 am to kind of like I think I should it was | |
Furqan Rydhan | probably 10 but yeah | |
Shaan Puri | 2nd after that from day 2 onwards it was like roll in at 11 oh it's lunchtime have lunch you would talk you would do meetings and I was like but this is the sky code and then that night at like 4 am you would have built the prototype and you're basically nocturnal you you get all your shit done you like you used to tell me you used to get during the day you would just burn up your energy so you could focus at night and actually write code | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | so what are you doing with ai and how is that what is that actually in your company right now | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah and so I'll kinda tell you how I'm thinking about ai agents right and what it means to me so ai agents are using llms or ai systems right like the openai systems or cloud but then giving it reasoning loops so imagine that when you go to a human you give them something to do like hey I wanna go grow our company or do a marketing campaign they take that they plan it they come up with the steps to plan then they go 1 by 1 on the task and like solve them they release some of them and so these ai agent systems are exactly like that the first thing it does it goes what do I need to do based on your request and it'll kinda come up with a plan | |
Shaan Puri | you give it like a mission correct | |
Furqan Rydhan | so let's say I'll give you an example of something we're doing at 3rdweb which is every single sign up in our company and you know we have a lot of sign ups every week and you know a human can't really scan through them but it's it's really interesting people signing up they have interesting companies we may know them they might be a large company or a small one could be a competitor or something else and so we used to have a human go and look at everything it's like oh if it's gmail like ignore it but if it's like oh like this other company over here let's go research it right go figure out what their web products they might like what they might need to do and then you would send them an email try to customize it typically this is good sales practice you're taking your customers and delivering them to your business team and so we built an agent to do this and every sign up that comes in it looks at it it determines is it an interesting person or not it will research their website it'll research them it'll then use the knowledge it has of 3rd web products and try to figure out what it actually like what products they might need how they would use it and then it would send them an email or an upsell or something like that and we've deployed probably 8 or 10 of these throughout 3rd web to do a lot of different functions and what it feels like is a smaller company can punch above its weight so like we're like 37 people right now I I I really believe we're more like 80 people that's what it feels like with a lot of these tools and you're taking the brainpower of somebody who gets it and you're giving them that power to go and say here's the thing so so | |
Shaan Puri | in this case person comes to your site puts in their email address now you have it's one agent or it's like a series of things that pass off to each other or how do what what is it called | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah so in this case we call it the sign up agent okay and so it's one agent it creates a plan like what do I do and you know part of the plan is like the directive we gave it and I think the way to think about ai agents in general is any like clear directive problem and when I think about clear directive it's like let's go do x like sign up comes in go look at the person go research them go figure out what's their title what's their company what products do they have so that's like kind of clear what the job to do is and if it's a digital task and a clear directive all of it can be done with agents now the the technology is here it's ready and it's working and so for the 3rd web sign up agent it'll kinda come in it'll make a little plan like hey I gotta inspect the domain I I gotta go look up the person | |
Shaan Puri | and you didn't have to tell each one of those little tasks too | |
Furqan Rydhan | we gave it like kinda like one one paragraph directive and another paragraph of like how it should operate and then maybe a paragraph at the end for like the type of email or the action | |
Shaan Puri | to do and so but the end product is it's looked up the purse it basically kind of looks at the sign ups picks the interesting ones researches them you said thinks about what product of ours will suit their needs which is that's the wild step that I hadn't really thought about and then it crafts an email and then it gives it to a human or just | |
Furqan Rydhan | sends it | |
Shaan Puri | sends it okay so you have enough trust that you know you can | |
Furqan Rydhan | send it to customers we started it with human in the loop and there are still like safeguards you put in like any directive would like you don't wanna just send random emails even as a human doing the work right but I mean it's very clear what what to tell it and I think this is where the power is kinda multiplying it's like we've heard ai we've heard chat gbt if you can tune it to your problem so for example giving it the knowledge of 3rd web products is the key difference here right a generic chat gbt message when I say that they'll just invent something that's like general and generic or whatever it knows | |
Shaan Puri | and when you built this so you built this or somebody else built this on your team | |
Furqan Rydhan | I hacked it as a prototype and | |
Shaan Puri | looked at some of these things and then | |
Furqan Rydhan | I I gave it to somebody on our solutions team and within a day they turned it around | |
Shaan Puri | and when you made like a working version of this how long did that take you because it's kind of like you basically hired an employee and trained them and got them working you're not paying them a salary and you probably do the whole thing in what like a day or 2 or what | |
Furqan Rydhan | so let's say there's like a bunch of like my nights of just learning tools and getting used to it so I take that time out of it that's just time I spend anyways right now like 2 nights ago I was like really stressed like my calendars are kinda crazy some of these days and I was trying to figure out like why is it crazy where is it going it's like a really hard question to like ask like what do you do you could have an ea she can go look through it do all the stuff and I have an ea she like helps me with these things but then she sleeps over like a while I'm like you know I wanna go answer some of these questions so I probably in about 15 minutes I connected my calendar and I connected a little interface where I could type to it I started asking questions like how many hours of meetings did I have last week it was like 28 hours like way too much where did the meeting go what what were they for what were the purposes of it | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | and then the next night I hooked it up probably about another 45 minutes or an hour where I could tell it commands from my calendar like go block out monday for me or go find me like 9 hours of block time in this market block oh wow and this was like a few hours of work now that I know the tools but it's like it just works 247 now right and so my calendar my email a few other things I've started building these like personal agent or workflow type things because I know what I wanna do every time I know how to react or the decision making I'm gonna make can I just set that up so it works 247 365 and you know it's just there always and right | |
Shaan Puri | hey let's take a quick break to talk about ai we all know ai big deal you see demos all the time of people doing really cool things but as a business owner sometimes it's hard to figure out how do I actually use this what do I actually do I've been trying to use it across all my businesses you know things like making little prototype websites without needing to hire a coder or writing copy for our website or I give it a bunch of data and I ask it to analyze it for me it's been kind of amazing but the thing I always need is inspiration I know the tool can do a lot but it can almost do so much that I'm not really sure what I should actually be doing with it and so that's why I think it's great that hubspot has created a report where they surveyed 2,000 global marketing leaders and asked them what's separating the high growth and low growth businesses and what strategies they're using with ai in their business you can grab these strategies and apply them to your own business for free the link is in the description below | |
Furqan Rydhan | so if I wanted to | |
Shaan Puri | build a workflow like this okay do I you'd need to know how to code to be able to do this light coding like give me like the bullet? Version of how how you built these like where where do you even build it what tool do you | |
Furqan Rydhan | use so there's coding tools I think if you're a developer there's like langchain and autogen and crew these are like very popular very cool the openai and cloud sdks themselves are very very powerful but you're coding you're writing a little system there's probably like 1 tenth of the code you would have had to write to do something | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | so that's already better for developers if you're not a developer there's a lot of tools so like leap is a company we built here in the studio it lets you stitch together workflows so an example is like you can trigger based on a slack message so let's say you have this slack message where all your sign ups go to so now it picks up that trigger you could just put a little ai block and say okay take this email and do these tasks oh you want a web scrape go do that right or you have a little conditional loop or like repeat itself 10 times go do that and then you make a little another decisioning steps like 4 boxes but I'll put it back to another slack channel yep so you come in with your sign up channel it does this research it does all these things it does kind of whatever you want and then it could go to email it could go to another slack channel it could ping somebody on your team so you could kind of like you know these are workflows this is what they start with and an agent or can kind of take these workflows and like almost build on top of them and so I think there's these two things you could really really easily create workflows and I think everyone should be deploying them every company should have them it is a superpower it's like I can't you know it's like a feeling of almost a cloud like oh I don't need a whole data center team now and I can right | |
Shaan Puri | you know | |
Furqan Rydhan | when we build blab and like how many servers do we have running video streaming like that would have been a nightmare it's kinda like the same you know 10 x improvement but just for me everything that I do digitally right and so tools like leap are great I think you know there there's others out there that provide this and so there's a combination if you don't know how to code you just have to think about the steps of the that you would do and you can program that without writing any code it's just writing directives it's like writing intent basically of like what you wanna accomplish right it's like | |
Shaan Puri | a magic genie tell tell tell it what you want and I can figure it out so you got sales agent you have your email calendar kinda like ea agent there | |
Furqan Rydhan | any other I got some fun frivolous ones that are not stupid so like I set up a dynamic wallpaper so literally like every 5 or 10 minutes it'll look at what I'm doing and like auto generate me as your computer laptop my computer laptop wallpaper will modify itself to whatever if it's night it kinda I told that I code at night right so it will go towards that direction it knows I'm doing meetings another thing during the day I'm talking to people | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | and it kinda comes up with cool stuff it's totally frivolous like not like a useful thing except my own like deal yeah | |
Shaan Puri | that's cool | |
Furqan Rydhan | but I find it awesome and you know like there's cool scenes that come up it invents new things you know claude has created this new capability called computer use I think that's the next area that ai agents are gonna enter | |
Shaan Puri | and what by the way so there's claude there's chat gpt there's perplexity there's all these different ones mentally how do you bucket like the main ai tools what what's like the superpower of each each one maybe just do do those 3 or if there's a 4th | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah so like I think openai and cloud I think of them as like foundational tools so they're general purpose ask it anything input output you stitch it together with things and then they have tools like chat gpt on top or maybe computer use that they're figuring out more general tools I think perplexity is really interesting it's taking this general purpose llm and the reasoning it could do and search and like I try not to do Google search anymore mostly because it's slow and ineffective and perplexity really made it where it does a search it reads the result as I would it clicks into the links as I would and then it tries to answer my question more purposefully and it saves me 4 or 5 steps so I think about perplexity as taking something like search and then the alone reasoning and combining them together in a flow that that's more interesting right so chat g gbd or openai tools don't have like real time knowledge but perplexity because a search does | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | what's your | |
Shaan Puri | like tangent furkant's hot take Google what happens to Google search with all that you see now and you're saying I don't you're saying I try not to Google search anymore that's pretty wild right | |
Furqan Rydhan | it's you just feel slow and I know they got the gemini thing there I think the biggest fumble you know in our | |
Shaan Puri | in our lifetime may decade fumble | |
Furqan Rydhan | they built the technology for transformers the thing that openai and others have used to develop this large language model they are the ones that were the first entry in like talking about it and throwing it out there and the research that's happening | |
Shaan Puri | and so what's the history so they're they have the ai minds there they write this research paper attention is all you need | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah and now from what | |
Shaan Puri | I understand like there's all the authors' names all of them are gone and basically started their own companies was it because nobody recognized the power of it there was it that they tried and google's bureaucracy shut the what's the what's the actual story of why they didn't | |
Furqan Rydhan | I I don't know the internal story I I think early on Google was like the place you went to where you wanted to have the rocket ship moment in your life the smartest people were here they were taking the biggest challenges and it just really felt like that place I think Google as a company hasn't felt like that I think the parent company and all the other things going on do still feel like that I'm sure it's a mess in there who knows like but it just feels like the biggest fumble and I know they're trying to play catch up with gemini and awesome stuff is happening but the developer mind share and the attention has gone somewhere else yeah and that is really hard to pull back when somebody else becomes a leader in it and actually it feels like openai number 1 that's something clear I think anthropic is number 2 so then everyone else shows up is what it feels like to me at least from people I'm seeing building or the technology they're using or the innovation that we're seeing from it so they | |
Shaan Puri | the anthropic one so basically they have claude which is kinda like chat gpt but the they have a couple of cool things one of them is this what they call like computer use which basically you type in a thing and then you do this and it moves your mouse and it just does shit that's basically the summary of it | |
Furqan Rydhan | it's a combination of things you could take workflows and like hey I'm doing this click this click that click do it over and over for me it could analyze things but like the I think the key thing is and and I think it just releases in beta so like like most of these things like it kinda isn't gonna be great now just trust me it's gonna be great right and that's what we've been seeing in general is like things just ramp and so it's now gonna enter your computer it kinda felt like it's been on the cloud only is where ai has been and now it's gonna show up like in the box that you're used to which is your computer your laptop and there's so much workflow that we do and yes every app will put ai in it and then your interface will also do that and I think a lot of like the things that we're used to doing like switching tabs and having all these things like they almost feel like I don't like why like I should have infinity tabs open and some system should know about it and if I ask it like bring it back up | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | it's like a total need and we we know we need that and so it's kinda like infinite data infinite knowledge and reasoning and then you know me like that's what the ai like that's where I think the bridge when it crosses it completely changes the equation and the reason I put anthropic number 2 is their models are crazy like impressive like the new cloud sonnet model is like I feel like it was a step factor improvement over the previous ones and it feels like the task that it kinda struggled with now is getting better and both openai and like underoptic have been just like boom boom boom and I don't know everybody's heard of ai they tried it they might have tried it a year ago they might have used it a little bit but every 3 to 6 months there's just another step and another step and that's I think the most interesting thing and why why I can't pull myself away from it like why every night this is a thing that gets me very very excited is because the progress is still wild people are gonna say it's gonna top out it will I think it's gonna be absolutely impressive wherever it like starts slowing down at right and will completely change the way how we do any digital work like so you're you're messing with | |
Shaan Puri | it now but you have a company you've got an investment lab you got this whole place this beautiful place that we're in right now you got a wife you got like all this stuff in your life if you were just 21 again or 22 again where you're like dude I I got nothing but time bank account's empty but so is the calendar this and this technology is out what would you be building what would you be like messing with what's the like kinda like you don't need to take over the world even but just like what types of stuff would you build if it was like young hacker version of you | |
Furqan Rydhan | like right now I've started seeing agents that it could do a reasoning loop it could have a directive and it could have like actions it could perform and then you combine like for example an agent with twitter give it a twitter account that it owns and controls so it's own distribution and conversational abilities so humans can just interact with it humans are and you give it you give it like a digital bank account and you know at 3rdweb we're doing a lot of stuff around ai we have a whole like ai toolkit that we're about to launch and it's around this which is these like digital things like these agents they're not gonna have credit cards it's weird and the reason I say this is fun and interesting is because you know humans have done this very well they've created megaphones for themselves and they've created businesses and and they created payment rails around that so they sell things they do things they sell services and all of these details I think it would be something around that | |
Shaan Puri | so you'd make like a a social like a twitter account you'd make like an ai influencer type of thing | |
Furqan Rydhan | you know ai influencer is like the first obvious thought it goes to I think if I played in this space I would be creating the digital equivalent of a company which is a ceo of a thing the ability for it to market and the ability for it to make money | |
Shaan Puri | okay | |
Furqan Rydhan | and I don't think it's not | |
Shaan Puri | an influencer not an influencer | |
Furqan Rydhan | I don't know what it would produce like a | |
Shaan Puri | a dropshipper like a a | |
Furqan Rydhan | a a dropshipper or like yeah it's the best fba amazon whatever | |
Shaan Puri | what's that example you were telling me about where the somebody did a thing like this they made a they made a twitter account they gave it a wallet marc andreessen gave it like 50,000 of crypto can you tell this story so what what is this | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah so there's this thing called luna or virtuals and they they're a little platform to you know have ai agents run and I think what's cool is they did this kind of equivalent thing where it's like it has a crypto bank account and it has like access to twitter | |
Shaan Puri | and you can invoice this out marketing stunt by a company that does this or what | |
Furqan Rydhan | I think this is exactly what the what I'm describing is it was frivolous fun it was play not like working backwards from giant thing I think this did some really powerful things so there's literally like a live thing where you could watch its reasoning as it's like pulling its tweets | |
Shaan Puri | I'm on it right now so it's terminal.virtuals.i0 and is this basically the thought process of the bot of the agent | |
Furqan Rydhan | correct so this is like an agent this is what an agent does right so if you think about it starts with like a thing like high level planning current state of executions like I've done this so far | |
Shaan Puri | what was the directive they gave it what did they tell it to do I | |
Furqan Rydhan | think they told it that you're kind of like a public influencer bot you have access to crypto it's a little bit more in the meme coin world of stuff so it's like again kind of on that side of the puzzle but today it could negotiate for tokens it could buy and sell things it they could kind of operate together and I think it's really cool that you could actually see it's like | |
Shaan Puri | so so this thing this this was you know 30 minutes ago it says current state of execution I have attempted 10 tasks so far 7 successes and 3 failures my twitter metrics show an average engagement on my last on on my recent tweets and I have lost 3 followers observation underscore reflection that's like the function | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | reflect and it says I've been engaging with my followers to build a personal connection which is hilarious because it's a ai bot with replies and quotes however I've also experienced some failures in replying to tweets due to invalid parameters my free research on whatever blah blah state of mind I'm feeling a bit concerned I'm feeling a bit concerned that's crazy I'm I'm feeling a bit concerned about the loss of followers but I'm also encouraged by the successes and then it says plan reasoning given my current situation I need to focus on building a relationship with my followers and increasing my visibility plan and then it starts to say what it's gonna do | |
Furqan Rydhan | this is wild doesn't this sound like a human that would be sitting in some growth team somewhere thinking about how to grow your twitter account and you know you could give it directive you could give it some direction and you could let it compute against itself to compute plans to reason to observe behaviors try to find patterns these are all like human tendencies like human behaviors that we do right especially when we work and I think this is one of those like perfect like kind of views where like you could start thinking about man this is a digital only task it has twitter and distribution marketing ability and then it has some payment ability it's like it's gonna just continue right like it's gonna keep going and you could improve its directive you could change its incentive you could do a few different things here but I feel like we're gonna get to a world where and I think sam old man said this which is like the one person doing dollar company | |
Shaan Puri | mhmm | |
Furqan Rydhan | like this is happening like we're already experiencing another 10 x decrease in how many people you need and the abilities that they have and I think it goes down to probably 1 or 2 or 3 and you know like that that is a you know total shift to everything right in terms of how we work how companies are built kind of | |
Shaan Puri | in my mind okay should we switch to hardware stuff or is there any other ai stuff that you think is worth checking out | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah I did wanna tell you about this oasis decart | |
Shaan Puri | the okay | |
Furqan Rydhan | you know there's like basically you know it's a very early experiment but it's really like a game that's fully built in a generative ai model and so they built a game like minecraft and you could just describe a world that makes you a minecraft world like that and like every step you take is like not a preprogrammed pixel right it's actually generating | |
Shaan Puri | so normal game is game maker builds the map it exists you then get to run around in a predefined map what this is what you're saying | |
Furqan Rydhan | is generative you want yeah you you give | |
Shaan Puri | it the idea but then when the character runs on the fly it's creating the map | |
Furqan Rydhan | and you can kinda play this minecraft game and you can see it's like crappy pixels still like not great resolution but you can move and it can do stuff and like whether it's video games that take a lot of effort and time to produce or it's like you know content creation and videos and stuff like that it's starting to become like way closer to like you know reality that a whole movie will be generated on the fly on exactly what I want so this wallpaper thing is frivolous right that I was telling you about right but really like I'm gonna watch a movie someday like that it's like the raiders lost and I'm gonna go and watch this movie after and it's gonna have this context and it's gonna give me like a feel good story | |
Shaan Puri | yeah we're like let's brainstorm so like nba highlights so you you know used to be sportscenter | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | where if if I didn't watch the games I gotta go to my tv turn on espn sportscenter would start even if I like basketball I gotta wait till whenever basketball comes up and then they'll have the top ten highlights and I watch whatever they picked then youtube comes around it's like forget waiting forget the tv just pick the thing you want you could search anything you could search only steph curry 3 pointers if someone made it you could choose the best of that now it's gonna be like I just say I just will put on my headset or put on my glasses or whatever and I'm just gonna say show me what happened to basketball game it'll it'll just start generating a new a highlight reel that didn't nobody has ever created it'll just make it based on my prompt and then I might be able to say don't show me any lakers clips only show me warriors and it'll just auto adjust on the fly like it's gonna be made for me | |
Furqan Rydhan | 100% yeah | |
Shaan Puri | that's interesting | |
Furqan Rydhan | and and you know like I think it's gonna be an interesting world we're gonna go from human content consumption people you know humans make content we're gonna like then have machines make it towards our taste and liking and then I think there's always this worry like well what happens to all the humans | |
Shaan Puri | then yeah and then | |
Furqan Rydhan | I think we get back to that core thing which is machines will never have true taste right like and I think forever that creativity is gonna come from humans and there's always a new thing there's new fashion there's new right kind of oh you know content mediums there's new everything machines will learn it and lie behind or maybe get ahead of it there's always gonna be another person that shows up and does something different so I think taste is gonna be the ultimate thing that probably won't go to a machine it could reason about it it could try to invent it but I think we're not that predictable as you mindwig | |
Shaan Puri | we well I wanna believe you because it sounds good to me but then I also think well right now if we said taste is like you know what is taste taste is selection it's knowing what's good and what's bad it's right that's kind of taste like tiktok which is the most popular like app most addictive app most used app yep their algorithm is basically saying I'll choose what's interesting for you and it does it so well that isn't that kind of taste also right like | |
Furqan Rydhan | it is and it works really well | |
Shaan Puri | they they don't make the videos but they select amazingly right | |
Furqan Rydhan | selection is incredible it probably is more like what we want than we will even admit yeah exactly you feel like I don't want right | |
Shaan Puri | like the other day I was why is it showing me this it's like because you love it that's why | |
Furqan Rydhan | the other day I was talking about how like on twitter my following I love and my for you I don't | |
Shaan Puri | right but it's | |
Furqan Rydhan | like you know really yeah like wow why did they pick this you know | |
Shaan Puri | well that's like a status thing to do is to be like I don't use the algorithms correct I hand I it's like I drive stick | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | alright I I I hand make things I cook from scratch it's like cool but brownies out of the box kinda work for sure for everybody | |
Furqan Rydhan | you know I'd love to trade algorithms like I like I'd love to swap with you for a | |
Shaan Puri | day and be like yo sean sean what are what are you what are you watching over here you know | |
Furqan Rydhan | so I don't know it knows you really well but I think that's where human like we we're not great at logic sometimes and sometimes we have our own blind spots I think this is one of them things that we we love our actions prove it we don't right we don't want to and it could be like bad thinking it could be like emotional thinking could be like oh this is I don't really wanna love it but I | |
Shaan Puri | I do right | |
Furqan Rydhan | and so there's there is that element that I think look machines will be great at this too they'll learn humans it might become even better than this I just feel like we're just a little bit not predictable because almost make some dumb choices | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | and that actually is part of society and and just humans in general and machines try to be too perfect it's like my netflix thing is probably accurate for me it's also just like man like | |
Shaan Puri | can I | |
Furqan Rydhan | just mix it up can you just like right rng the algorithm a little bit because I just want some different stuff and you're kinda like driving me down one direction and once in a while like I want this 10 20 30% thing and I don't think algorithms do that exceptionally well they test it they throw things up but you know they don't necessarily try to give you variance | |
Shaan Puri | how long until you think the number one hit song in the world will be just at the ai ai created song how many months or years yeah until we see that | |
Furqan Rydhan | if you were doing over under 2025 yeah I might pick the under you know | |
Shaan Puri | if you're | |
Furqan Rydhan | in 2025 like that might be a good bet maybe this is a poly market another election's done yeah we do some poly market you know like reason it could be something like this | |
Shaan Puri | but like the polymarket thing so election just happened polymarket's having like a a victory lap right now | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | you showed me polymarket I think like years ago and I started making a bunch of degen bets before they blocked it in the us it was like it was it was like open for a while right but they were doing prediction markets it's a prediction market but prediction markets a bunch of people had tried that do you know like I'm just curious of your opinion what did they do right that like augur and these other guys who were had the same sort of general idea that hey there'll be prediction markets yeah like from a either entrepreneur level or product choice like any reason you think they won that you you could put your | |
Furqan Rydhan | finger on I feel like timing's a big part of it so like the sweet spot of like people are way more digital I think covid drove a lot of people online like we just sat at home and we're like yeah what else | |
Shaan Puri | do you want | |
Furqan Rydhan | 247 on the internet and it really exploded the internet like I think I've seen some graphs where like the internet and ecommerce and all these things were like growing and and then there's like a massive jump like right you know remember | |
Shaan Puri | from like we we were at twitch when that happened yeah and it was like all the met growth looks amazing we're crushing all the metrics like what did you do it's like well we were here yeah right we are not we don't create the wave we surf a wave and a huge wave happened and for twitch it was like fortnite came out and then covid happened yep 2 humongous waves back to back that just combined yeah | |
Furqan Rydhan | so I I think it's a combination we're way more digital I think you talked about this a lot like as a kind of metaverse concept a long time ago that we're just way more digital now we care more about it I think news and like where we get information from has totally changed like online internet even content and entertainment like I have a hard time going to tvs I look at kids they look at desktops and tvs as like ancient right like I said why is this thing on the wall | |
Shaan Puri | it's like my mom's sewing machine | |
Furqan Rydhan | so yeah | |
Shaan Puri | what do you do with that that's what | |
Furqan Rydhan | it feels like and so we're we're kinda there and then there's a bunch of these people online that want or like want a stake in this thing right like you wanna root for a team this politics has also become very polarized right it's really like a team sport it's like | |
Shaan Puri | red team versus blue team | |
Furqan Rydhan | that's really what it is yeah and so I think it's like what do I do with it now how do I support it more I give more money to it but I can give more attention | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | and so I think a lot of these things are happening in polling market good flow good area right and then I think for the best thing probably for them is they got it right | |
Shaan Puri | right place right time | |
Furqan Rydhan | like they ask the answer was right like if they were wrong let's say polling market was off right like it was hey the the the result of the election was something else | |
Shaan Puri | a little bit of story today would be much different right | |
Furqan Rydhan | and then it might have just been muted it would have been a cool thing that kinda didn't work | |
Shaan Puri | so you | |
Furqan Rydhan | have to be right | |
Shaan Puri | I mean I think people would have used that to crush to to to to really rip on them because like in the way that people are doing with polls but polls kinda have this like layer of protection around them whereas like people want to hate on crypto things people want to hate on betting it's like a degenerate behavior in general I think if they were I think if polymarket was wrong the reaction would have been much worse than the fact that the polls are wrong but the reaction is to the polls you know | |
Furqan Rydhan | it would have been worse for a little while then we would have moved on for the other part and by the way | |
Shaan Puri | you saw this thing about the french whale on polymarket | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | so the next | |
Furqan Rydhan | the big whale that came in and moved so there's | |
Shaan Puri | like the narrative versus reality when the narrative from the polls was it's a toss-up razor close 5050 election this guy came in and bet I think something like 30 or $40,000,000 on trump yeah and people were like is this guy just trying to manipulate the market is he real is he just a a rich billionaire son like who is this and today I just saw something on my way here I don't know the full story because it was on my phone but it said he bet because he believed he would win the reason he believed he was winning he did independent polling wow he funded his own independent polling and thought and fit felt that he was getting better data that was saying that trump was mispriced so he's like I just did a logical rational thing | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah I just bet where | |
Shaan Puri | I thought an asset was mispriced I wasn't trying to this wasn't political I'm french I don't what do I care yeah I just thought there was money to be made and so he kinda went counter to narrative and he made I think like something like 20 $30,000,000 yesterday | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | on that bet | |
Furqan Rydhan | so the funny thing about poly market by the way tim we can't use it in the us yeah so there's a whole range of entertainment plays to like better narrow like win | |
Shaan Puri | so so about $3,000,000,000 got better | |
Furqan Rydhan | it's like wear the ring right like if there's 2 boxers going at it it's in america | |
Shaan Puri | the cock fight and then | |
Furqan Rydhan | you've got everyone else betting from all around the world on who's gonna win this thing which is I think kind of a hilarious thing yeah that's true | |
Shaan Puri | you have a good contrarian opinion about vr and in general there's probably some other technologies like this 3 d printing might be one I know you're pretty bullish on too but there's these tech things like vr where I think if I walk out of here and I talk to a 100 people about what are you most excited about ai whatever bitcoin whatever it's gonna be but if I said what do you think about vr it's like a sort of lukewarm | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | at best in the tech industry I think most vcs sort of feels like it's kind of a dead end technology now they'll be like it's gonna be glasses and smart glasses ar that's the future but you have a different take on vr what you've been telling me for a while like hey look oculus sold more units hey look you can do this now and you've been staying with it when I think interest has has sort of waned the narrative has gone against it and that's always where there's big business opportunities if the narrative goes one way but the reality goes another bam that's where there's an opportunity give me your vr take so why is vr sleeping giant | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah I mean so you remember 2020 I like asked you for your address I mailed you a headset yeah I was like hey this quest thing is a different | |
Shaan Puri | that's a real friend right there he sends me a a vr headset | |
Furqan Rydhan | he's like yo I know you're not gonna come to | |
Shaan Puri | the future let me drag you | |
Furqan Rydhan | it's probably collecting dust which is okay but you know I that that's kinda how I think about things and technology takes a long time it typically takes longer to get there than we expect like especially people who are early in the industry were really wanting to push it I mean ai crypto vr all have the same problem which is early on people are like really pushing it to you it's not ready so it's a big hype it crashes everyone moves on so so that's happened in vr a few times and it's kinda I would say for most people been quiet not thinking about it but I think it's a sleeping giant and I think it's a massive sleeping giant for a few reasons one I see it every day here like here at founders inc like I get a chance to you know one we invest in vr companies we're one of the few that do | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | we have a whole corner maybe like 12 devs that are all building different vr products we put them all in one spot and there might be some of the most density of interesting vr projects in one place and so what have we seen 1 quest 1 came out it was wireless it was kinda crappy but man I could sit on my couch and use it it was cheap became a you know great christmas gift in year 2 they didn't have inventory year 1 they released quest 2 it got even better lighter more powerful now quest 3 is coming out and I think they got like 5 to 10,000,000 monthly active headsets out there right I think that rivals consoles and my first thought was on how | |
Shaan Puri | many units has it sold I think quest has sold let's | |
Furqan Rydhan | say 30,000,000 is my guess but you know maybe it's more yeah | |
Shaan Puri | so this is quest quest has sold over 20,000,000 units with the majority being quest quest 2 yep quest 3 is currently sell has sold a 1000000 units at the $500 price? So I think I mean if you just I I don't know what the math here is but you know they've done what is that over a $1,000,000,000 of revenue on | |
Furqan Rydhan | on quest believe it's out paced pretty good for failure yeah it's outpaced ps 5 sales for example and so the first thought for me was like hey what's the first thing that's gonna happen in this spatial environment like what is it good for immersion gaming like these are natural entertainment right these were the first few things that was natural and you had beat saber you had a few things and that was kinda like you know here's the first use case let's try to get it out there let's try to make the thing happen and then it kinda goes up down people get used to those first experiences I think you played beat saber yeah few of them the first few times correct and then you're like okay whatever and then you know because it's kinda like a cheaper than ps 5 unit the quest 2 was it was available in christmas a few times it went to like you know kids like 12 13 14 year old kids kinda getting this thing like they would be getting a ps 5 and they use it and they've they don't have the bias that we have of like many years of like the structures we're used to and so a lot of games formed and specifically social games like guerrilla tag I don't know if you've heard about guerrilla tag no what is guerrilla tag guerrilla tag is a social multiplayer game it's really fun it on app lab did like tens of millions of people choose people tag yeah it's like a you know like kinda like a fun social game that you could play with a bunch of people you go in by the way you go in you're gonna be like dude there's a bunch of like teenagers screaming at each other but for them this is the environment it's a new place and they didn't grow up with these other things so they're starting with mobile phones the tv feels ancient the desktop feels ancient and this thing on my face actually feels like more fresh more new so that's where we're starting I think grolotag has a $200,000,000 of revenue and this is where I'm like vr is a sleeping giant we have a few teams here at our studio so we have a team called fluid that's building the kind of like best browser in vr so you get multiple displays you get as many kind of tabs as you want you could customize your environments you get ai environments you're like I want to be in a cave it like makes you in a cave right and then you get like social multiplayer so people can show up in your environment and we're on app lab does like about 5,000 weekly active users still small team of 3 just like you know without a big burn can just build this grow it we're not even in the store yet we're in like this like app lab is like kind of the pre store where we could just drive people to it but we're not getting anything directly from the store except our own searches right and you know 5,000 people like go in use a productivity thing there's another product called yeeps it's like the 2nd game behind gorilla tag small team absolutely crushing it yeeps yeah y e e p s really fun game you you know all we should play together one this time | |
Shaan Puri | they're here they're a team of they're here how many people I | |
Furqan Rydhan | think they're like less than 10 people but more like 6 to 8 and most of it was built with a few people and | |
Shaan Puri | this thing is profitable or what's the deal | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah I mean I'll let them talk about their numbers just so I you know I I don't wanna say anything | |
Shaan Puri | but on a scale of that's pretty good to like wow where is it at | |
Furqan Rydhan | wow it's | |
Shaan Puri | wow yeah it's wow that's great so what's cool about this is like supply demand right so like you can go be you know app number you know 5,000,000 in the store right now or if you're talented you could be like one of the top 20 vr apps if you put in like you know a year of hard work I'm just using like kind of round numbers or whatever but it's the same way that right now if you're a content creator you go post on instagram it's pretty tough post on linkedin you'll get tons of distribution if | |
Furqan Rydhan | you have | |
Shaan Puri | if you're half decent at at content because there's just no supply of quality content yeah so even if vr is not you know like 20,000,000 unit units is very good but even if it's not just like becoming this like global phenomenon you can still put a great business and and if you just keep riding the wave you're very well positioned to be the leader and then everyone at that. Will look back and be like oh yeah it's because they started 5 years ago 100% you know when this was smaller | |
Furqan Rydhan | when yeah | |
Shaan Puri | so 20,000,000 instead of 200,000,000 | |
Furqan Rydhan | in these emerging tech things so everything I found is that we do is emerging tech I think the theme of all of them is survive if you make it to when the industry happens you will grow with it if you were a small percentage of the industry and the industry grows by like a 100 x you grew by a 100 x or more you've already been there and I've seen a few small person teams at like 10,000,000 + a year like 5 people totally profitable totally able to do it is this a vc investment business honestly I don't care yeah like what I care about is like this is interesting and can you make these bets without massive capital like expenditure right like if it takes like $50,000,000 to build a vr game it's like the big giant blockbuster movie I don't that those bets don't excite me I think when it's like 3 to 5 people can be somewhere the limited amount of money and just them it's like them in the hoop like the basketball analogy is like great we have everything we need we have all the talent we have all the ability the tools are amazing now like you know all the game engines have perfected themselves over time and then now the environment is forming right meta has led it bryce like the quest and this is the vr world and then we're seeing glasses vision pro ray bans like the trend is like we're gonna have compute in our spatial view right and I think that's the big like yeah this is happening in vr the quest platform is interesting you could build a profitable business or a fairly big game right now also this isn't slowing down historically apple when they enter an industry they come with a unit it's okay has a lot of things that gotta get better another unit comes out and then you have snap you have meta with ray ban like I mean like get it | |
Shaan Puri | zuck is not stopping zuck is not giving up he's he's going to the end game here apple probably also won't stop | |
Furqan Rydhan | correct so now you have the | |
Shaan Puri | 2 biggest players they're they're gonna keep making this hardware better they're gonna be super hungry for content and the other sneaky thing about these by the way that I I didn't really fully realize until I moved to silicon valley which is a lot of these require like really specialized talent so I remember when I first met you you were like I'm really into big data you started saying words like hadoop I didn't know what the hell you were talking about it wasn't as popular back this it was like in 2015 15 or something like that when you were telling me like hey I think this is real I think this big data machine learning is really interesting you were again pretty early onto that crypto same thing you were early onto that there weren't a lot of smart contract developers there wasn't a lot of you know big data people ai so then if even if you don't have a hit product if you just assemble like a + talent that's super specialized then as those platforms rise your team itself becomes like a $100,000,000 | |
Furqan Rydhan | asset exactly | |
Shaan Puri | if you built today for like because meta ray bans like that product's actually a hit for for facebook and they're gonna keep going with that and everybody wants to be in the glasses thing people think glasses is the next platform so if you build a specialized team that's good at developing for that platform there's just not a lot of great teams that do that that's a $100,000,000 team even without a hit product | |
Furqan Rydhan | how old was it to with | |
Shaan Puri | a hit product you get a $1,000,000,000 hardly was | |
Furqan Rydhan | it to find an ios developer when we were starting to do global dude it felt so specialized we're gonna compete at like a ridiculous level of price to go get pretty good talent | |
Shaan Puri | in that space I remember 2012 which was not even early we had one ios dev on our entire team and it was so hard to recruit talent it was faster to just retrain so we used we just stopped working and the ios dev trained all of our other devs to be good enough to be dangerous because it was so scarce to get good eyes and ios wasn't even that specialized compared to like the either the fancy ai stuff or you know vr mixed reality all that that | |
Furqan Rydhan | type of talent and joe I just think that when I think about kids growing up and all the let's say 13 to 15 year old kids or somewhere in the teenagers they have a mobile phone that is attached to them they think it's superior than a computer or a desktop because it's with them and then we're gonna take the 2nd computing interface where we do more work or more immersive experiences and we put it around your eyes that makes way more sense to me than tvs desktops and even laptops and you know that that was like one of the thoughts where we started fluid like we talked about this in 2020 I don't know if you remember there's one project that | |
Shaan Puri | you used to tell me you were you're like I work in vr correct | |
Furqan Rydhan | I did that experiment where | |
Shaan Puri | I worked in vr for an hour a day | |
Furqan Rydhan | and then I ended up doing it for a few months by the way like and I was like this is great and it had been like literally sitting with me and I I think this is one of the reasons why I actually built a studio is like I wanna do all these ideas I can no longer do them all I could pick a few I probably shouldn't even go do more but like I just wanna find really hungry people and like match them together right that's how I found john at fluid it's like he was a phd student he was gonna go do something in like finance and high frequency trading and like whatever and he also came to this idea of like hey and I was doing my like you know masters or whatever I was writing this thing I just wanted to go into a focus mode like could I just go into a cave and like lock out all the stuff he's like I had all these vr friends that had done some stuff in vr so like I tried to do it and it wasn't good enough | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | and then he kinda left it at that and then we were talking about it and he talked to the uber and I was like dude you just talked to furkah I think he's got like 5 pages of like random notes and ideas around this and then that's what responded and it's like cool like we're not gonna blow ourselves out we're not gonna go raise a lot of money we're not gonna go get a giant team we're gonna get 3 people here we're just gonna grind and work hard and build and survive for when this thing happens we'll miss some bets like that we'll gain ridiculous amounts of knowledge of like the industry and then we find these sleeping giants and it's like yeah we're gonna double down | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | like hubert went to this like vr conference like the meta connect thing and he had a t shirt and we're like the funny thing would be like on your shirt just put I invest in vr right and so he did and he was like wow like yeah we found 1 you know | |
Shaan Puri | they're like a call at a crypto conference this is amazing this is | |
Furqan Rydhan | this is how we wanna think about it it's like try to be there early don't get too caught up with where the technology is now don't get too scared of how far it is 2015 2016 remember we heard self driving cars are never gonna happen I don't know if you remember that yeah yeah massive like push against it man there's waymos running around every day now I see more waymos at night driving around than like regular people driving you've told me once before | |
Shaan Puri | as you go I think my superpower is that I'm usually in the in the first 1000 or 10000 people to try any new technology and like understand it be able to play with it know it see it all that stuff I remember we were at work and you were buying the ethereum presale the ico or whatever the presale | |
Furqan Rydhan | you said about it yeah I don't know if you remember I | |
Shaan Puri | just remember being like dude can we do some real work oh what are you doing ethereum name that name's never gonna work I was like that sounds so nerdy that will never be a thing | |
Furqan Rydhan | I think that was a phrase I remember it was like I was telling you about ethereum I was like dude I stayed up all night reading there's like white paper yeah I'm like you were like | |
Shaan Puri | pawn it | |
Furqan Rydhan | I was on it I came in I'm like where's sean I'm gonna talk to him | |
Shaan Puri | and I | |
Furqan Rydhan | tell you this it's probably I don't even know what I said who knows what probably threw a bunch of words and you're just like dude I don't know what this is we have some new relationship and you're like ethereum that name's stupid | |
Shaan Puri | yeah I wrote it off chalk that up for another another l for me | |
Furqan Rydhan | by the way you could have been totally right | |
Shaan Puri | as well so no no I wasn't I think that's all that matters there very very off on that one but you've I think that's true that that is your superpower and then you said another thing today which I hadn't heard you which is for emerging tech there's only one rule survive and that reminds me we had I just did a pod with ryan peterson he created flexport | |
Furqan Rydhan | yep | |
Shaan Puri | he said the same same principle he goes you know what I realized was I cannot control the timeline I don't know how long something's gonna take to work so all I focus on is how do I just be default alive how do I just stay in the game he goes I just have the confidence that if I'm in the game I'll just keep trying shit until it works I just believe that about myself I will just keep trying things until I figure out the thing to work the only way I can lose is if I have to get out of the game yeah which is like I can't you know usually it's like I run out of funding I can't control my destiny I spend too much money I'm burning too much capital and so he's like that's been the name of the game for me from when he was flipping scooters on ebay to now you know runs a multibillion dollar company called flexport and the whole time he's like my whole thing is I can't control the timeline so I'm gonna control staying in the game because if I stay in the game I win | |
Furqan Rydhan | stay in the game with great talent and people that want to have this long term mindset no you know I think there's a lot of people that can take short term wins and they should like we've done that right there were these short term moments like oh this is great for us right now yeah but we're gonna keep doing more and like I think that's the main thing for me technology takes a long time when it hits though it happens very fast like that's the part that I think people don't realize they like underestimate how long it's gonna take and they overestimate how fast it's gonna happen it's like immediately gonna just like happen and you know I think uber was an example like that like we saw it it was black cars yeah it's got this like expensive taxi that nobody's gonna use and then now it's like dude this place doesn't have uber like how am I gonna move from yeah | |
Shaan Puri | I can't imagine | |
Furqan Rydhan | what it feels like that you know and so I I think I enjoy it there's one reason why it's like it's like a lifelong game I could just play technology forever I could learn about things I don't have a rush to be there first I don't have a rush to be like I didn't know everything and like do everything and raise the most money and get a bazillion people it's more like I need a few people with me that like are really excited about this they see it like I see it but we're just gonna go on this mission and luckily now I have the ability to just like fund that and like create my like environment to do it that's what this whole building is so let's talk about this building | |
Shaan Puri | because you you've basically built like your dream like man cave in a way I think you know it's kinda like a founder dream right like and I wanna talk about that because you had a big success with applovin where and actually kinda like felt like there was multiple moments where you know it was successful and at one. It sold for like $2,000,000,000 | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | it was like oh exit 2,000,000,000 amazing and then like trump blocked it or | |
Furqan Rydhan | it didn't go through didn't go through | |
Shaan Puri | but then during that I mean this is a crazy story it was like we were sitting in the office and this news happens like dude congrats that's amazing holy shit and then like 9 months goes by the deal doesn't like fully get approved because it was such a big purchase out of a chinese yeah company group or something like that and in the meantime the business just kept crushing so adam who's the ceo of that so you said he like basically went back and was like cool we'll still do the 2,000,000,000 but now it's for 30% yeah I don't know what exactly it was version of that | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah there was like I don't know like | |
Shaan Puri | because you couldn't do majority deals that was a big block | |
Furqan Rydhan | it was | |
Shaan Puri | like yeah | |
Furqan Rydhan | something like that | |
Shaan Puri | a majority deal was gonna happen and so now then the company eventually ipos you get this nest egg | |
Furqan Rydhan | right | |
Shaan Puri | so it's like okay I could do whatever you could go retire you could go buy islands and cars or do rich guy stuff like you could do that and instead you like chose to do something else can you just describe basically like what's the mindset what's the conversations you had with yourself | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | now that you had more resources to do whatever you wanted to do | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah I feel like my whole life I've just always wanted to tinker and build stuff like I always described it as like I love taking stuff apart and putting it back together it's not like some people will say it's like oh you wanna learn how it works it's not that it's more of the puzzle okay how does somebody else put this like you know and I used to do this with cars and computers growing up like I would overclock my computer and I would make my car faster and like that was like kinda just like the mentality that I had and then I was like okay well I've gotta become an adult at some. In time and do the thing but like hey I like this business thing I buy and sell stuff it's like a way for me to hustle and kinda do more of what I wanna do and then I was like let me just keep doing this and then maybe at some. I gotta get a real job and kinda luckily like tech was really valuable and like my skill set improved I got better at it and but a lot of that early journey was like more solo than like with a bunch of people and then met the guys adam before applovin like kinda like these other other things and it was like yo we're like 8 people in like palo alto like building cool random apps like the energy for me there every day was like through the roof and then monkey inferno was like the same thing but like even more and I think I used to tell you like I want an airport in here I just wanna put a really cool stuff in it and I just think it was like that before I started founders inc as it is because I was at twitch and I'm like I gotta get out of here right it goes like instant instant thing | |
Shaan Puri | and why by the way I don't know | |
Furqan Rydhan | I'm not I don't think I'm a good employee I think I'm like suited for a few roles and it's typically like doing my own stuff without much | |
Shaan Puri | was there anything that just drove you crazy about it was there any like | |
Furqan Rydhan | you know we're gonna do a whole another pot on it basically I feel like the 1st week or month of like yo let's do a bunch of stuff and they're like slow down like why like I wanna do more like I wanna do more things and this resistance feeling of like oh we already thought about this or we tried this like no let's just go do stuff and I never enjoyed that and I think startups and small teams just because you have so much to do that's the kind of mentality and so I talked to probably like 75 to a 100 founders before starting founders inc and I really wanted to learn it's like I knew a bunch of people I used to interact with them even at like bebo and mcinferno I'd have them come by and like just a tour talk whatever and I really enjoyed that that was like fun I just started enjoying investing a lot which was like cool I thought I wanted to do that but it wasn't fun it was like meet great talented people get excited about them and then you're like a monthly update away like give them a check and then that's it right damn this has been fun 1st meeting is great | |
Shaan Puri | it's a great first date | |
Furqan Rydhan | I walk away and I'm like you're chill | |
Shaan Puri | relationship and you're like what happened to that great first date exactly | |
Furqan Rydhan | and so I was like man I don't really want to do that but something like this where I could help these like early entrepreneurs things that I've just done over and over again I didn't have this like what's the version of that and I talked to a bunch of founders and they all said something to me I was like what do you need like what what help do you need I thought they're all gonna save money and I'm gonna start a fund like that that's what I thought was gonna happen and they all said something different they said something like I need people who understand my problems and we used to do those masterminds and it was really about like who do you go to for founder problems | |
Shaan Puri | yeah | |
Furqan Rydhan | it's like what are your founder problems they're your co founders your employees or your investors so you can't go to any of these people they might be the problem right and so who do you go to | |
Shaan Puri | or even if they're not the problem you need to present you don't wanna worry your employees you don't wanna worry your investors you kinda have to maintain a certain correct aura of momentum and morale so you can't just go be dumping problems on them or be like I don't know it's like you're supposed to know you're the guy and we used to | |
Furqan Rydhan | we would go in that room that little circle room with the circle table we'd be in there and I don't know what the employees were thinking they're just like oh man these guys are talking again they're gonna come out with something different but we could talk about anything and then leave the room be like no we're still where we are yeah and I think you know cofounder can be that for you a lot of entrepreneurs starting out they don't have that and even if they have it there's like other things that they're experiencing and so when we used to put these folks together in these kind of masterminds that feeling was like awesome and it felt like we could relate and actually I heard the same thing from a bunch of founders they used to talk to and I was like I think it's something more like this where I could do something and put everybody in a box and I thought it was gonna be more digital I think covid times and you know | |
Shaan Puri | started on discord or whatever | |
Furqan Rydhan | started on discord I mean like farzah ben was in these groups like there's 3 few others like it was just people I knew around me and kinda covid hit it was digital we were talking every week we would give ourselves these like accountability kinda ship it sessions we would have an area to talk about stuff and you could see the dots connecting and then I got an opportunity to like get this space and I've been looking for like something and you know it wasn't like oh san francisco needs a place I'm from the bay area normally so this is the best place for me but I said look if it's gonna be a step we're gonna be on the water | |
Shaan Puri | no more solar no more kind | |
Furqan Rydhan | of places like that so we got this like weird opportunity to find this space and like really make a bet when like nobody else was I think it was like late 2020 is when I approached them here yeah and it took maybe like 9 months to figure it all out and another 3 months to like renovate it and stuff like that so it's still very much | |
Shaan Puri | like we gotta call another call about breaking a lease wait wait he wants to sign a lease right now oh come on in yeah what it | |
Furqan Rydhan | felt like here I mean this place fort mason has 300 events a year they went to 0 with covid all the places you know art galleries art schools like what do you what do you do like you know and this is supposed to be like this innovation place and it's a little bit older and yeah it's a little bit | |
Shaan Puri | that's one of your tricks is that you don't run away when the dips happen I remember when early on 2013 14 something like that we meet I buy bitcoin because I don't know you're into crypto some some people in the office you know maybe I was dumb about the ethereum | |
Furqan Rydhan | idea right | |
Shaan Puri | yeah pg pete p vixx was was was all you know he's mining bitcoin on our servers so I buy some bitcoin and literally like the next week I I forget like super convinced I'm like guys I see it I believe here's why I believe I'm giving you my case I bought yeah great like the next week price cuts in half it goes down to like $300 or something like that and I came in I'm like oh the bitcoin I was really whatever and you go | |
Furqan Rydhan | that was a fun week or 2 you know well you were like oh this is great | |
Shaan Puri | because now everything's half off like you you you literally told me that you go you believe if you if you buy now you can cut your buy price basically you can go down by 50% you'll you'll cost average in at half the amount yeah like and I was like oh he's right because I was just riding a roller coaster of like you know I was doing what a cliche person would do yeah when things are good this is great when things are bad maybe it's not great whereas you were like dude did anything actually change or just the the external sentiment yeah and so I bought more so I thank you for that that was a very good you know decision at the time to go buy more when things go down I think you've done that with with other you know bets whether it's san francisco real estate during the you know covid time or it's you know whether it's crypto or or vr when when things go out of fashion I feel like you don't run away which is important | |
Furqan Rydhan | there's a signal it's like things go out of fashion and there's another place where the people who don't shape narratives typically like I'm technical so I live in these like github projects I live where the builders are I like engage with them if I see that somewhere where it's like all the people talking are like against it these people like nobody told them yet that like it's dumb like oh this is dead right like they're all saying it and then these guys are just shipping more code and like hey did anybody tell you it's over they're like what are you talking about I don't care like and I I just think that's the perfect environment | |
Shaan Puri | and even if you're right one out of 5 times like that you'll be right in such a big way that it it works out | |
Furqan Rydhan | and then by the way for me it's just fun so like this is fun like I love building stuff I like building technology I did a lot of software obviously because it's been magical to develop things and like distribute it to the world we had some hardware projects I don't know if you remember jamie by the way yeah yeah we at one. | |
Shaan Puri | In time when we're when we're working together we had an idea for a this is it was cool it was like a voice controls kinda like alexa yeah we called it jamie | |
Furqan Rydhan | and I don't know why but like that | |
Shaan Puri | yeah we like jamie I still like the name that was good and what what you were saying was like you're like we can instead of creating a everyone was trying to create a device portal was trying to create a screen amazon was trying to create a screen you're like that makes it expensive you're like everybody already has tv screens in their house right | |
Furqan Rydhan | let's plug into your tv | |
Shaan Puri | what if you just plug in like a chromecast and now you turn your tv from just a a blank screen into like an amazon like alexa thing yeah that was cool | |
Furqan Rydhan | we didn't we didn't have to do it because | |
Shaan Puri | it was gonna like we sort of saw like | |
Furqan Rydhan | it's a huge distraction | |
Shaan Puri | we're like yo that's gonna be like a brutal battlefield | |
Furqan Rydhan | we took it to michael and he just gave us that look like this is well he | |
Shaan Puri | he was just like yo when all of the like $1,000,000,000,000 companies are gonna go after the same prize like yeah you can but do you really want to like you know it's it's better to do the things they're overlooking I just think it's probably good advice to be fair we also were gonna do a crypto exchange when crypto got hot and he was like for a different reason he's like hey I'm already rich I don't wanna lose everything and I don't really know what crypto is it's 2014 like crypto might just be like super illegal and I don't wanna risk it all on that yeah if we had done that might have been good so you have to be careful like even really smart and successful people you can't like just take their word you know you gotta have the independent mindedness | |
Furqan Rydhan | 100% yeah and I think it's fun to take shots don't get stubborn over it like damn people fall in love with their ideas I think that's it took me probably like I don't know 10 years to figure that out like you have to get like almost like you have to like really take the hits | |
Shaan Puri | yeah | |
Furqan Rydhan | to like really like live in that of like yeah there's a lot of ideas I I may try a lot of them my mission isn't all of them I gotta find the right ones where I can really spend the energy on but I was gonna talk about one more so we built chatty heads which by the way now in the ai world we were fucking ahead of the day | |
Shaan Puri | yeah we were a little early | |
Furqan Rydhan | we could generate images for like I don't know 5 5,000 | |
Shaan Puri | yeah it was like golly | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah and that's what it that's what it feels like but I think it's like cool it's like whatever technology you have today go try to produce a thing it might not be the right time it might be the right moment the media might be wrong the team might be wrong some of those you should pursue again and again and some of those are great learning exercises to build on top of and I you know I got a chance to meet a lot of people who were professional athletes and then one thing a lot of them talk about is like you know basketball might end like my career will end at like 35 like that's that's my game it's done now what do I do so I think what we get a chance to do whether it's like business or reading out content or like building stuff like I'm gonna do this for the rest of our lives if you want | |
Shaan Puri | I think | |
Furqan Rydhan | that's the fun part | |
Shaan Puri | buffet's like what 90 something he's still on the top of his investing game | |
Furqan Rydhan | exactly and so it's like well like what am I in the rush for like I I'm not just here to like enjoy the journey but I also don't wanna be like oh I gotta solve it tomorrow | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | like when I was young it was like oh I gotta be the millionaire by whatever it's like at some. I was like I don't know man I just wanna keep doing this right and if I need to like hustle my way to it or not like it doesn't really matter like you know I took an android engineer job at monkey inferno yeah because because I was the guy you know I met you and I was like I wanna work with this guy yeah I think that was my worst skill by the way I just learned android | |
Shaan Puri | yeah you fooled me yeah so like I was like | |
Furqan Rydhan | I don't know I gotta get it somehow and like I know I'm gonna do great stuff here I gotta show it but like I'm not afraid to put in the effort we need to put in the effort also not afraid to like not rush to the answer right and like you don't wanna be like casual and like wait you'll you wanna be kinda like in the middle there you wanna know when to attack and when to not but like I don't know you gotta enjoy it otherwise you're really | |
Shaan Puri | naval has the best quote on this he says impatience with action patience with results | |
Furqan Rydhan | oh yeah | |
Shaan Puri | it's the unbeatable combination if you ever go against somebody who's gonna operate like that they will win yeah but that that is a you cannot lose if you're gonna be constantly impatient with with doing things you're not gonna sit back and hope it all happens so you're impatient with action but but patient with results that's the hard part is a lot of founders are impatient with action and impatience with results yeah or non founders are you know patient with both and then nothing ever happens so you know you have to get that combo | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | speaking of founders you worked with adam at applovin and applovin has been like kind of a staggering company because you know when I met you it was you know a a successful company you told me the stories about before you guys started that you're like we were wandering around we tried a bunch of different ideas we're playing fifa because we didn't have we didn't know what the heck we were doing we were just come in try to figure it out if we didn't have it we would brainstorm and go home the next day what is special about that guy what's a superpower from him or a story from him that you remember that you know I can learn from or you anybody to listen to this can learn from | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah so there was this like 4 year. Ish when I was there I think 3 years of it was like not apple of it so it's like most of my intersection there is like not what it is today but I did get a chance to spend a lot of time with him and idea ideas | |
Shaan Puri | what's the cliff notes of his story so people know because people don't know who he's pretty under the radar right | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah I mean his backstory I think he did some stuff in like equities or trading at some. I think he got into like ads at some. Through like marketing and affiliate stuff he built a few different products maybe he was a key member of the team and then he had like a few companies I think he had actually built up some like you know wealth I don't know how much it was but it was enough where like you're like okay this person can make this bet and like fund the operations | |
Shaan Puri | and so he he was kinda self funding | |
Furqan Rydhan | self funding it was him and his guy john john had done a lot of stuff on the internet he was more the technical person adam was more the business person they were both uniquely and the skills incredible like their personality is incredible for adam I think the thing that I felt the most was like I think it's the first time in my life I was like man this is what a + execution looks like like this guy just hits it like if we were talking about something we made a choice within like it felt like within minutes that was like delivered to this team and look when you're like an 8 person team it's really easy to do it we'll decide something go slow maybe next week oh we'll do it later we'll make these role changes later we'll tell everybody later no it was like immediate and when it was like moving on from something that was immediate when it was a new idea we wanted to do it was immediate when it was something else that was immediate it was just like it felt like this is what execution is it's like you know think decide act and like how fast you run through that depends on like the moment you decide the delay on act is like usually a problem I think this is where most I I'm not great at this myself but I've gotten a chance to see that I think it was kinda similar in a different realm when I met you I was like I think this person's product thinking and like ability to like unpack like a complex thing like product or distribution or maybe team motivation or whatever it's like you see a + talent and you're like you wanna do it for me it was like 10 or 12 years almost like a solo founder journey like at this e commerce company at these other little things I had like a startup I had people with me but I never saw somebody else that I was like yo like I wanna learn these skills I bring something to the table that's a + I could pair it with this a + person and now we're gonna be like a superpower | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | I filled out with adam it was very clear and obvious you know like the size of company I I I don't wanna say not a surprise but also it's not a surprise that this kind of person would go do it | |
Shaan Puri | like | |
Furqan Rydhan | like it just is that I think the same thing you're talking about like ryan at flexport yeah like it feels like some people are just like they're built for that you still need a lot of stuff to go right and make a ton of great decisions and a ridiculous team one thing I've come to learn | |
Shaan Puri | is that where I think we screwed up because we did monkey inferno which was basically our little idea lab but we had a beautiful setup it's like | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | you got funding already done you have great team you're in san francisco beautiful office really talented team like you know we're not the paypal mafia but like everybody's gone on to do kind of interesting shit everyone's you know I don't think we had the level of success that we could have given the talent my take was I think we were good execution maybe even great execution but poor project selection meaning we were going after these like moonshots like create the next hit social media app which is like you know no there's been like 7 ever it's not there's not that many of them ever to exist so you know I think we did bad with project selection it seems like what one thing that adam did aside from great execution was project selection I think you told me some story about like they went to some conference you guys were working on one thing altogether and he came back and had that very quick like think decide act loop where he's like we're doing a mobile ad network we're doing mobile games I I don't know the full story but like | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | so seemed like just that one choice at that time yeah is the make or break you know like | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah yeah yeah huge difference and you know like I think we had many of those moments I wouldn't trade it by the way I think our learnings I still leverage them a lot of the things that we talked about how we ran the teams like they still radiate and resonate with me and so like immense wealth and knowledge and like like literally like experience of the thing right beyond like no | |
Shaan Puri | you're talking about when we worked it when we worked it yeah yeah exactly | |
Furqan Rydhan | but there were a few moments where project selection could have been massive for us and yeah that outcome you know like they you know and we can talk about uploading a little bit on that in that journey but like we did blab it was a live streaming part of Google hangouts public live stream yeah | |
Shaan Puri | like if you saw clubhouse get really popular we had built basically a clubhouse before clubhouse and it got | |
Furqan Rydhan | kinda like what twitch right now like there's a big section of this like just chatting hanging out category right | |
Shaan Puri | we built an app app like that it got to 4,000,000 users but it didn't become the next one thing | |
Furqan Rydhan | I don't know if you remember this conversation but we had this one time when we were deciding what to do next like are we doing mobile version of this because we see other things happening or do we do the p to b version | |
Shaan Puri | yeah | |
Furqan Rydhan | and zoom didn't exist and that I think that was | |
Shaan Puri | and we were like b to b I remember there's like it was like so short of a conversation which was so silly and we were just like baby that's not cool it wasn't cool | |
Furqan Rydhan | and it wasn't clear because if you have anything with this like 2015 there wasn't a 1,000,000,000 like b to b companies crushing it yeah but like every year since then it was like 7 or 9 like because I think at that time it was only a few had really reached like it was like I don't know box.net and dropbox and | |
Shaan Puri | it wasn't it definitely wasn't as obvious at the same time it shouldn't have been as hidden as yeah yeah should have gone we kind of made it seem | |
Furqan Rydhan | we we totally you know brushed it | |
Shaan Puri | like I remember citrix was like a multibillion dollar product and citrix's online was the way that people did these webinars webinars and web conferencing at the time and it was so bad and their users like we were trying to make this cool social app and sap and oracle were using our tool just because it was better even though it was like | |
Furqan Rydhan | not meant for that color like weird and purple | |
Shaan Puri | why do | |
Furqan Rydhan | you got this weird star thing | |
Shaan Puri | and instead of looking at those clues and being like maybe we could do that we we missed that project selection choice I remember that day because that was a that was a probably a multi $100,000,000 fork in the road moment you know | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah maybe | |
Shaan Puri | but you still had to execute but for sure | |
Furqan Rydhan | I mean we could execute right but it is did we have the right selection and could we get the right insight in our mind to incept and then also when we decided to end blab I don't know if you remember you went to this barbecue I forgot who you met | |
Shaan Puri | james currier yeah | |
Furqan Rydhan | and they were telling us you know you're talking about like hey this content network problem because it was like the moment that entered our mind it's like oh shit we're fucked like that's what it felt like like we don't have the ability to intersect these and we kept looking at twitch like why k so we know we don't because people come on for an hour they do a show the epic content is not on long enough for people to show up and intersect with it how come twitch wins and then it turned out that oh people play games for 8 to 10 hours yeah | |
Shaan Puri | so it didn't matter when you showed up correct | |
Furqan Rydhan | and then the context reset so it's like I have it was like you know the feeling a lot of monkey inferno to me and like the things we built was like it's not slow down to speed up but like look for the clues don't be afraid of that and again the eager you know the ego or the stubbornness like we wanna build a giant social app like I wanna go somewhere around the world where somebody's using my consumer pot like that was a stubbornness that we built to talk yeah and it's like if we had just kind of unlocked it a little bit through these project selection moments and so there's a lot of that I still feel that sometimes but I don't know maybe it's because I'm older and I'm like less willing to like be nimble in that way but I did wanna talk about one more hardware robotics thing | |
Shaan Puri | that's gonna be in | |
Furqan Rydhan | a few minutes and so I think this is another like resurgence moment happening like for a long time hardware has been too hard too expensive software gets funded that's certainly | |
Shaan Puri | a value model right hardware is hard | |
Furqan Rydhan | hardware is hard software is easy software scales it's eating the world like these were all the mentalities I think it's flipping and I think it's a few things that have all kinda showed up together so there's 2 types of hardware that I think are now like there and like right to build same recipe can small teams do it can you do it without a lot of funding and then can your output be really big and like impact a lot of people and so I think there's one around consumer products so like the combination of raspberry pi and cloud ai has completely changed what it takes to build something right so there's a company in our studio magical toys they're building an ai teddy bear we'll do a little demo of it after we'll kinda get to that and you know I think what that and how old | |
Shaan Puri | is that guy who's building that he's like young right | |
Furqan Rydhan | I think fatim is like 24 25 | |
Shaan Puri | and it's not like he has huge funding or a huge team but he's able | |
Furqan Rydhan | to showed up here I I don't know how he got here to be honest I think like many people here they meet somebody they attract someone they just show up by the way and it's awesome like we've created that environment where it can make sense he had done some small projects in college like he built this thing called desk buddy it was a little like e ink screen with like 2 eyes that just blinked and that was really it he couldn't talk to it he couldn't do anything it was just like a little desk buddy | |
Shaan Puri | so you're not alone is that the idea | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah I don't know what it was but I remember seeing it I'm like that's cool like I want one on my desk like it's just fun and they brainstorm a bunch of ideas and you know the combination of like hey we got raspberry pis we could do these little things we could use 3 d printers to build enclosures and then now we got this cloud ai thing that like can be really powerful they ended up coming with this like you know idea which was like here we're gonna build a toy and first they literally made ted the yeah you know stuffed animal ted they made it talk like it I was like oh this is wild like you know and it ai could do this but everyone's trying to make coding faster or they're you know developers solving developer problems and I love when somebody takes that and goes let me go to this other place where nobody's | |
Shaan Puri | thinking about | |
Furqan Rydhan | right and he spent probably the last 9 months sitting refining I I think we sent you one of the first units it probably broke yeah first thing first he gave me a | |
Shaan Puri | teddy bear with the back like the whole computer was just hanging out the back like a like a half done surgery but it was interesting I gave it to my kids you know I think they were probably like 2 years old 3 years old at the time and every other toy we have in our living room is preprogrammed so it's like this is a toy push this button it'll say this thing that's all it can do with this toy it was like ignore the thing hanging out the back it was like hey we love paw patrol can you ask us some paw patrol trivia I was like certainly I can tell you paw patrol who is the red dog in paw patrol | |
Furqan Rydhan | I was like marshall correct | |
Shaan Puri | and I was like hey can you keep track of our points | |
Furqan Rydhan | he goes okay two points | |
Shaan Puri | and then I was like woah and my kids were blown away because now you have an infinite toy whereas every toy is finite it can only do the things it it could do out of the box now suddenly you have a toy that's basically chat gpt shoved into a stuffed animal right and you're like wow then now now that can do anything I could say sing me a song I could say tell me a bedtime story I could say I can make it do many many things now and I | |
Furqan Rydhan | think what was cool is the team and this little like lab that we built and the lab has like some 3 d printers some electronics area honestly we started with like an empty room and people would come by they're like what's this room for I'm like oh it's gonna be a machine shop electronics lab one day like oh can I use it I'm like yeah but we have nothing here what do you need you need tables great we'll bring tables oh you need like a little thing okay we'll add that you need 3 d printers we'll add that and I've seen now like tens of people come through a lot you know one person sit there spend some time tinker and fatim did that like he built one he showed us he built another he tried different various different versions you know built you know right new cases to be printed buying raspberry pis new software and like I think he shipped like 60 to 70 units across 4 to 6 months which in software rule this feels like wow ancient like 60 users in hardware this might have cost like half a1000000 to a1000000 dollars I think we did that for like 50 to a100 grand | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | so like that difference one person 3 d printers raspberry pis some ai and you could just sit there and deliver units and try it with people when we showed hubert first by the way internally hubert was like no I don't I don't think kids are gonna do this it's weird his daughter used it and it changed his mind like like she changed his mind | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | because he saw what it could do but like how do you get that opportunity to prototype cheap | |
Shaan Puri | right so hardware being hard where it's like maybe hardware is not as hard as it used to be that like sam calls these inflections where you know something changes like there's famously an inflection where when obamacare came out then oscar health built a thing that was just to do obamacare and like you know had you know became like a $1,000,000,000 company it's like so what are the inflections so oh phones now have gps in them now you can build uber you couldn't build uber before because the the driver and the rider needed to find each other how were they gonna do that if you didn't have phones with with gps on them phones have cameras now you can have instagram right so it's like the technology inflection can happen it's one type of inflection and you're basically saying because of raspberry pi + ai + 3 d printing to consumer hardware | |
Furqan Rydhan | is very easy | |
Shaan Puri | hardware is now possible now like now more than ever 2 people can actually mess around and tinker till they get something right kind of wasn't feasible 5 10 years ago correct | |
Furqan Rydhan | and when we built jamey I used a raspberry pi at that time which was the first version raspberry pi was thought of as this hobbyist market of tinkerers that are gonna buy a few of them they've they've sold like 60,000,000 units or something ridiculous like that like $35 a pop 60,000,000 there's like a few $1,000,000,000 yeah of raspberry pi out there and I think what it did is you used to have to make like custom boards custom software and you know for a technical person like me I don't wanna go that far like I have certain skills that I could do really well and typically it's like read a few guides in the internet and like stitch stuff together it felt too far for even like somebody like me it felt like man it's like really serious engineering I need 10 people pay 1,000,000 of dollars I have to convince somebody there's a big market and now like build up just a company which probably will fail because I raised too much too much pressure too much demand on return etcetera and to me the raspberry pi was one of the unlocks and there's the nvidia jetson now which has like gpus on device and there's so much more there but so what | |
Shaan Puri | are what are other things besides magical toys that you saw somebody built interesting things you're seeing built in the hardware robotics side | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah so we have aj who's building the you know neuropathy he built that first version which I think I've showed you before which is a brain computer interface now he has a second version that's really tiny it's like the size of airpods you could put it right here special purpose so really like the ability to prototype develop the thing get like 100 or thousands of units out there improve the design and doing that without a giant team allows them to kind of continue we've seen like a variety of things kinda come out on that front I think the second area that's happening is you know there's a consumer hardware and then there's like this robotics drones and kind of this other world where we have so much physical equipment in the world forklifts and lawnmowers and cars and like you know all these things that we do that requires either a person like you know with drones we invested in this company lucid drones which you you know they built a power washing drone could go up in buildings could power wash the you know the glass instead of people hanging from the side there's another company that you | |
Shaan Puri | and is that working like do people is it like | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah working very well and you know like what's interesting is there's like a unique business model to find here as well and I think that's why I love like being in the weeds a little bit and like seeing it is like most people think you're gonna build this product and then you're gonna take the people that like manually wash a building and you're gonna like get rid of them what actually happens is there's like a team that's like a little like small business somewhere they have like 5 people at their company dave's power washing | |
Shaan Puri | dave power washing windows so clear you won't even know it's there amazing | |
Furqan Rydhan | right dave's got a great tagline as well and you know people end up finding that if you just sell to those to those small businesses you give them more tools they could serve more buildings do it more efficiently that distribution is built in they maybe in the long run this starts changing but like now there are a ton of these opportunities I've seen one for farms and like you know mowing the weeds around certain fruits or kinda like inspecting them you just send people between these things to go like do it and now there's like a little like robot and instead of the one person doing it for 2 weeks or 2 people the one person's there monitoring it at the facility in air conditioning and like right | |
Shaan Puri | watching on the ipad | |
Furqan Rydhan | watching on the ipad and it might get stuck early on or might detect something now they gotta go fix that thing this efficiency I think is like massive and we're seeing it at many places so same thing I saw these 2 guys building here in san francisco they're like random warehouse in the back of some other store like 2 dudes like literally grinding bootstrapping like I just go in there I'm like I like these guys they took a forklift they automated it they took self driving car tech they probably took 1,000,000,000 of dollars to develop and then all of that kind of flow to like open source and typically open source sometimes is behind and the cutting edge but in 10 years that like normalizes we see this elsewhere like ai models like llama but like really they took cameras and some lidar stuff and they strapped a little computer to a forklift and they could move it around you could talk to it you could come and get it to do things and I think there's a massive resurgence and so forklift physical thing you took a little raspberry pi internet some cameras some technologies like we were doing computer vision technology to score like fortnite games they're using that same kind of technology to look at oh this is a box this is the barcode that I picked up | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | I can now use and figure out what's this thing I could go walk around the warehouse and be like oh that pallet's in the wrong spot how it just scan the bar code and detected oh there's this pallet here supposed to be over there go pick it up move it over there like these problems exist in warehouses like I mean you know right I think you've dealt with some of those things | |
Shaan Puri | I run a warehouse | |
Furqan Rydhan | and so to me it's like what are the machines like what are the traditional machines we've built probably for the last 100 years that you're gonna slap a little computer on it and now it's a superpower and I think this is bringing down the cost of like this robotic hardware like building a robotic arm used to be like yo I gotta be like tony stark and like iron man I've seen 2 people do it in our machine shop I there's a guy here I don't even know his company he's just chilling he just had a 3 d printed hand on his desk and I'm like what the hell was this to go yeah like I I I created the ability to develop a full hand with all the fingers and everything in just his 3 d printer there's a bambulab printer which honestly 3 d printer was great and then bambulabs took it to a whole another level like little bit of ai to help self leveling and make prints great and like everybody loves it and he just built his hand pretty high quality took a little fishing net on the inside of the hand so like you know in each finger he could like pull every finger and like do some stuff it's like one dude like few months hackathon and like I don't know what he's gonna produce from that but I just think you could do these things now in like weeks months when they took years and like a lot of money I think there's a huge opportunity here still gonna take time to like marinate and develop but I look at it as one of those things where like if I was a mechanical engineer if I liked hardware and I've been told that it's just ai and software and like your stuff isn't that interesting so no no this is very interesting right now like you need to find a place to do it and you know like I'll even say like I think we're going even further for us like we have this base we built here we call it the founder lab like this is where a lot of people come they tinker on stuff we have founders here we have builders we have creators here we have all kinds of people doing stuff put a little machine shop and that kind of pushed us to be like wait there's more we're seeing more we're talking to more people thinking about this so I ended up getting this kinda industrial space I call it the garage it's 20,000 square feet of industrial space I'll show you in a little bit but it looks like you know san francisco real estate is not the best I think this is the time to make these bets but I've talked to 25 to 50 founders in the last 12 months that need a hardware space like this to tinker to have smart people around them to have the machines around them to just being able to develop it probably for less than a $100 they can go and proof of concept and prototype the thing and look we're seeing the hype cycle of like humanoid robots | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | that's that like hype above I'm more excited about all these startups that are gonna form they're gonna build this expertise they're gonna be a $100,000,000 teams whether it's their product or their knowledge right that's happening now and 2 people are doing it like every single day like they're spawning these things and so consumer hardware is is one area but I think robotics and what typically was known as like deep tech like I need like phds and like stacks of them and $50,000,000 or $100,000,000 that's the second one and I think it's like there's a few people seeing it maybe there are sectors like defense where it's like exciting but like I don't know I think we're gonna see machines everywhere and every kind of version of it and I I think I've seen people develop like cooking robots laundry machine things folding drones to inspect stuff drones to map interior spaces like matterport is a giant company and a human goes and puts a tripod everywhere | |
Shaan Puri | and like | |
Furqan Rydhan | this is a little drone that's gonna fly through the whole house and like map it for you and that expands that and I just see 1 or 2 person teams able to do this faster than I've ever seen it I feel more capable maybe I just really wanna get into hardware again myself and yeah | |
Shaan Puri | I think that's the? Though it's a lot of people would wanna mess with this and if something goes from not tinkerable to tinkerable suddenly it's now the like it's kinda like before you're competing 1v1 now it's 1 versus the field | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | the field and of course any individual thing in the field might suck | |
Furqan Rydhan | correct | |
Shaan Puri | but the field overall is super powerful and now you're saying the field is open for you know hardware tinkerers which it wasn't open before that's a big deal | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah we do these like residencies here where we'll bring people here for a month or 6 weeks we just tell them like here's a theme here's a space to go do things when the visionpro came out we did it we had about 40 visionprodevs we probably had the largest concentration of vision pro devs out of apple | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | anywhere and the knowledge of that look look it didn't produce some ridiculous outcome we actually did invest in 1 or 2 teams from that I think we just got a chance to see that technology deeply we did this ai hardware 1 I remember meeting this this kid and I don't know where he is in the world and he shows me this like robot he like built like a humanoid he built like in his bedroom and it's a calf he only built the body of the legs so it stopped like where the waist was and it was like totally hand constructed and I'm like yeah this is wild but the fact that you could like bootleg this in your bedroom and like it could take steps is like crazy to me I met these other guys premiere and the same trend in raspberry pi they took that trend and I mean I love some of these I just you know I love it because I could jump on the video and they're they were up in seattle or something and it's like their kitchen and I'm like is that a 3 d printer in your sink and it's just like their kitchen is like all machines and I'm like dude you gotta get out of your house and I gotta give you a home to like do that that's what I want is like people who will just turn their bedroom into this like no no no you come do it here we'll give you a little bit better facilities we'll give you space you get a better place to sleep and they took this like raspberry pi trend and they're like oh people will start with raspberry pis and then they build a custom board oh we're building a modular raspberry pi thing right keep that computer module | |
Shaan Puri | that's an intermediate step | |
Furqan Rydhan | oh you want a speaker well you could pick whatever speaker you want just put that in oh you wanna produce 2,000 units now we have the ability to scale it for you so they took the hobbyist world and the behavior that's happening driving it and they started this in their literally in their kitchen and like I just think that man that's capable now and that's the trend that I can't I can't like unsee it sometimes right in hardware both in consumer and more deep tech hardware like drones platform's massive right to be able to do things so much opportunity to utilize that I don't know how long it's gonna take for this to become mass and mainstream but I just keep seeing that trend right now and I think for us that's | |
Shaan Puri | the bet you're making that's | |
Furqan Rydhan | the bet we make and so I always joke with the guys here it's like we wanna bet on negative one to 0 like peter thiel talked about these 0 to 1 companies it's like we still want to step even before that like you're at negative one you're wandering the forest you need a place to tinker and like come and get the ideas to form this will this is what we wanna do | |
Shaan Puri | right alright love it forgot this is amazing good catching up as always let's go check out some of these spaces so let's do it thanks so much |