Silicon Valley OG shares crazy stories from Zynga early days + 3 business ideas

Siqi Chen

And they said, "Well, you shouldn't confuse revenue for success." So I said, "Well, you guys shouldn't confuse the lack of revenue for success either." And then they got kind of upset.

Sam Parr

Dude, this meeting goes in like the **Silicon Valley Autistic Hall of Fame**.

Shaan Puri

What's up? We got our friend Sikhi here, founder of Runway. Back in the day, he built a company, sold it to Zynga, built another company, and sold it to Postmates. He has gone viral many times, and there are a lot of people in Silicon Valley who, almost like a film director, you really want to know what they're doing. That's you because you do things with taste. So, I'm excited to have you here! Do you have any good stories from the early days of Zynga? Because you sold a company to Zynga back when Zynga was the shit. Did you work with Mark Pincus? What's he like? Give me a good Zynga story!

Siqi Chen

Okay, I have a great story about how I came to report to Mark Pincus. Actually, it's not just one great story; I have so many good Mark Pincus stories. So, yeah, Zynga was my second company. I joined as the Director of Product for the studio.

Sam Parr

Wait, can you give the background on Mark? So, he’s like a Silicon Valley OG. Did he help fund Facebook to get it off the ground? Was that his first big hit?

Siqi Chen

He did. So, he and Reid Hoffman co-owned and bought the Six Degrees of Separation patent from a company called Six Degrees. He also angel invested in Facebook and, I believe, licensed the patent for more stock in Facebook.

Shaan Puri

That patent was basically the kind of social networking patent, right? Like how we're connected—six degrees of Kevin Bacon away from each other. I think Reid [Hoffman]—there's some story where Reid and him realized that if this patent got into the hands of Microsoft or some big company, they would be able to squish innovation by a startup by holding this patent over their head. So, they bought the patent, I believe, and just decided, "We're not gonna use it to stop anybody." Then, I think they parlayed it into getting extra shares in Facebook.

Siqi Chen

Which is amazing! I think that's what happened. So, when I joined, I was the Director of Products. My girlfriend, who is now my wife, moved to China for some job opportunity. I was about three months into Zynga, and I was like, "I'm not really feeling it. It's not that fun." So, I told them I was going to resign and move to China. They said, "Hey, why don't we just give you this new job? You can report to Eric Schreiber, one of the co-founders, and basically be the Head of Product for the company." I said, "No, that sounds fun! That sounds great." So, I did that. I reported to Eric Schreiber. He was a co-founder of Zynga. What happened is, a month into the job, Eric Schreiber stopped showing up to work. He wouldn't respond to emails and wouldn't go to work. I was like, "What?" Basically, that's when I reported to Mark, and I was the Head of Products. Later, the punchline of the story is that the reason why he stopped showing up to work is that I later found out he decided to become a ninja.

Shaan Puri

Pretty good reason. That's not what I thought was going to happen.

Sam Parr

Be he.

Siqi Chen

Literally, he was like, he wanted to start a ninja dojo and he wanted to undergo ninja training. So when I...

Shaan Puri

What in the *Napoleon Dynamite* is this story?

Sam Parr

How's his ninja career now?

Siqi Chen

I think he started another social games company.

Sam Parr

Alright, so I have this notebook here. The reason I have it is that I take notes whenever we have a guest. Not because it's my job as a podcast host, but because a lot of times what the guests are talking about is just so interesting to me as a human. I just want to go and implement it in my business or my life. The person I took the most notes for was Jesse Itzler. If you haven't heard that podcast, it's the best. It legitimately changed my life. So I thought, let's share our notes. With the help of the team at HubSpot, we went and took all of the notes from that episode and turned it into a 10-page document. You can download it for free. That episode changed my life, and I think it might change yours too. So check it out! The link is below in the description. Again, notes with Jesse Itzler down below.

Shaan Puri

So at the time, what was Zynga like? Was it on top, like the king of the world, or was it on the balance swing?

Siqi Chen

Yeah, I mean, what's interesting about Zynga is that they hired a bunch of people who used to be investment bankers to be product managers there. It was all about the numbers going up; it was highly analytical. So, I went in and just the amount of knowledge they had about growth really blew my mind. One of the things I think about a lot is when I first had a conversation with Mark Pincus early on, I think maybe during the acquisition. I asked him, "Hey, what do you think about this industry? It just seems really low moat. It's hard to have a competitive moat here because it's just so easy to enter. You build a new game and for it to expand, how defensible is it?" I think about his answer quite a bit because he said, "No, this is great! I want there to be more new entrants into the space because it's free R&D for me." I just thought, "Okay, that blows my mind. That is next level." He was just so confident in his ability to execute that anyone who was going to come in with some new idea could just fast follow it and do a much better job of growing it, which is exactly what they did. Right? The formula was in the first foreign game. Poker was the first poker game, and they worked really, really well, at least during the Facebook era.

Sam Parr

Wait, did he have like Genghis Khan energy? Was he a conqueror?

Siqi Chen

Yeah, he did. I love that. You know, we were working like eighty, ninety, a hundred hours a week at Zynga, and that was kind of the norm.

Sam Parr

It sort of seems like a waste of talent, though, to have that conquer energy and do it in the lamest way possible. You know, farm bill? Yeah, like farm bill. That's what he's trying to do this on.

Siqi Chen

A few billion dollars is a few billion dollars.

Shaan Puri

There's a quote by Max Levchin. At the time, Max Levchin, who created PayPal, was by all accounts a genius computer engineer. He single-handedly fought fraud at PayPal, withstanding the attacks of financial scammers around the world. The guy's brilliant. His next startup, I think, was Slide. It was making widgets for MySpace and Facebook, like slideshows or Superpoke, where you'd throw chickens at your friends when you wake up by pushing a button. It just slaps your friend with a chicken or something like that. So, what was your takeaway from Slide? Because Slide ultimately didn't fully work out; it was sold to Google for a little bit. He said, "Be really careful what you choose to work on because everything can be optimized endlessly." Once we got into that, we could just sit there and optimize, getting the number of chicken slaps per day up. So, you know, choose wisely. Should I be optimizing this chicken slapping, or should I be doing something else? I've always thought about that because I found myself falling into the same trap. No matter what I'm doing, if I'm selling little widgets, my life becomes about selling widgets. I can optimize that to infinity, and people do. If you go look at how any company works, that's what they've done—they've optimized it to infinity.

Sam Parr

Dude, when my wife worked at Facebook years and years ago, I remember talking to all of her coworkers at a party. I was like, "Oh, you guys are amazing! You guys are so smart. What are you working on?" They explained it to me, but it boiled down to them trying to convince Brazilians to put more stickers on their photos. There was one dog that had a long tongue. Do you guys remember that *fucking* dog?

Siqi Chen

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sam Parr

Like they're trying to convince that *fucking* dog sticker to put on Brazilians. It was...

Shaan Puri

Like the face filter thing when Snapchat came out. Then, you opened up your mouth and a giant tongue would come out.

Sam Parr

Dude, I felt like... and they explained that to me. I was like, "Wait, so you're trying to get Brazilians to use more stickers because they share more photos?" I felt like a cartoon. It was like, I was like, "What? You know what I mean? I was like, what are you guys doing?"

Siqi Chen

I also have a Max Levchin and Slide story. This goes back seventeen years, so I don't think he'll mind anymore. When I first moved to the city, I had this app on Facebook that was blowing up. Some guy who worked with Keith Rabois—Keith was, I think, the CEO of Slide at the time—said, "Hey, we like your app. You wanna meet the team?" I said, "Oh my God, this is amazing! I mean, you're out of college; I could be Max Levchin!" So I go in, and we had a meeting at noon. I walk into the Slide office, and no one was there. Everyone was out for lunch. I talked to the receptionist and said, "I am here to meet Max and Keith." They said, "Oh, they're at lunch. They'll be back in half an hour." I said, "Okay." So we sit there for half an hour, and then they walk in. They act like they kind of forgot there was a meeting, but we go into a meeting room and just start talking about what I wanted to do with this app. I was considering whether I wanted to build it independently or maybe join Slide. They asked me how much I wanted for it. I said, "Well, I have a co-founder, so $2,000,000. I would probably do it a million dollars each." I kind of tossed out the number. I looked over the valuation on App Data, and the amount of money we were generating was not a huge ask, but it was fine. My friend at Heal built SuperPoke, which they recently bought. They said verbatim, "You know, we bought SuperPoke, and he's easily the eighteenth or nineteenth most important person in the company now, out of a company of like 60 people." I said, "Okay, that's a compelling offer." Then I said, "Yeah, this is probably not gonna happen. You know, we're profitable; we're making a bunch of money from ads, so it's cool if you don't wanna buy it." They said, "Well, you shouldn't confuse revenue for success."

Siqi Chen

I was just really upset, so I said, "Well, you guys shouldn't confuse a lack of revenue for success either." Then they got kind of upset.

Shaan Puri

So then...

Siqi Chen

So then it got really weird. Oh, I forgot to mention, at the start of the meeting, they said something like, "Hey, you know there's a recession coming up." To each other, they were like, "Yeah, there's a recession coming up." Then he said, "I can't wait to buy all these shitty companies for cheap." We're in a room and we're like, "What the hell?"

Sam Parr

Dude, this meeting goes in like the **Silicon Valley Autistic Hall of Fame**.

Siqi Chen

And then at the end, Keith was like, "Hey, Keith! Hey, Max! What was your body fat percentage in the PayPal days?" Max was like, "8%." And I was like, "Yeah." I'm not the fittest person, but I'm not selling you my company because he's like, "You're fitter than me!" Like, what is happening? So that was my meeting with them. But the thing that made it all make sense is the next week. I was talking to one of my friends, John, who also had a company building apps. He comes up to me at some party and goes, "Siki, man! You won't believe this! I just had a meeting with Sly last week." I'm like, "Really?" He's like, "Yeah, it was so weird because they started the meeting talking about how there's a recession coming up and thinking all these countries are cheap." I was like, "Oh my God, it's the script!"

Shaan Puri

Anyway, it was in episode one of this podcast. I think my buddy Sully told almost the same story. He goes, "I just didn't..." He gets invited to a meeting, he sits in the app, and what they said was, "We want to hire you." He's like, "I don't really want a job. My app's good. I thought you wanted to maybe buy it or something." Then he opened the door and he goes, "You see all those guys out there? They're gonna build your app in like six days if you don't take this offer." He was like, "Okay, I'm not interested in this even more now. This is horrible. My app is stupid." What he said was, his app at the time was called "Superlatives." It was like you would name your friend the most likely to, you know, go to jail or something. He's like, "You're threatening me that you're gonna take my app? I think my app is stupid. The fact that you think my app is cool makes me think you're stupid." That's what he thought in his head.

Sam Parr

Who did you meet? I love talking to people who have been around a bunch of these folks before they kind of "made it." Who is a tycoon or a big shot now that you're shocked by? Because when you knew them, when you guys were both younger, you're like, "Oh, I can't believe they actually developed into such an amazing businessperson."

Siqi Chen

I don't know that I've met a lot of people who weren't great, that I think were great, who became huge later.

Shaan Puri

Who’s someone you met that wasn’t huge then, but you knew? And why did you know?

Siqi Chen

Oh yeah, I mean Drew Houston, you know, he started with 10 people. It was February, late 2007, or early 2008. We're just talking about growth. They had this college referral plan. So, Drew Houston... I mean, Anish, who's a general partner at Andreessen, he was just a founder building apps on mobile phones, right? He would come to my office and we'd talk about it. Oh, probably the best one is Chris Wansroth.

Shaan Puri

Who's that?

Siqi Chen

He's the co-founder and CEO at GitHub. He was a contractor at Powerset, which was a job I took when I first moved to the city. But he was actually a contractor for my first company, Sirius Business. I had him build this translation layer between Facebook Markup Language and MySpace Markup Language just to look after, and he was really good at it. I distinctly remember that we were at the Twenty First Amendment... or actually the Beara Brewery. It doesn't matter. But I gave him a full-time employment offer in early 2008, and he was considering it. That same night, when we were talking about it, he said, "You know, DHH just put Rails on GitHub, so I think I might work on GitHub full-time." I was thinking in my head, and I was like, "The smartest thing for me to do is actually shut down my Facebook Days business and go work for you." But I didn't say that; I was just thinking it.

Sam Parr

Have you had any massive angel investment wins? Because you've been around the hoop for so long and so early.

Siqi Chen

I mean, the best one by far is Amplitude. I was introduced to it through someone at Zynga, Matt Ako, who runs Data Collective now. He introduced me to my very first angel investment after I sold to Zynga, and that investment like 10x'd in about twelve months. After that, I was playing with "play money." He introduced me to this team that we ended up being the fourth customer of for their analytics platform, which is now Amplitude. We used it and thought, "This is great! This is the best thing we've seen since the Zynga internal tools." I managed to get into the seed round, and that IPO ended up being a 400x return, which is pretty great.

Shaan Puri

Crazy! Let's jump in with ideas and opportunities. You're an idea guy. What do you think are some cool ideas or opportunities that you would want to be working on right now?

Siqi Chen

So, I built a Zapier integration, and it's basically categorizing my emails with GPT-4 into different labels. I have this very long prompt in automation. I also use a product called SaneBox, which does something similar by filtering emails. However, there's been no good version of email management software that allows me to customize a prompt and train it. I want to say, "Hey, here are the things related to my kids." There are no specific keywords; you just have to kind of read it. For example, it could be an email to my babysitter or an email from the school. If it's related to my kids, I want it to be put in this folder. The idea is that I want an inbox for different contexts. People are doing various kinds of email categorization, but what's missing is a way to train it. I think building a product that understands all of the content about your life and organizes your stuff, starting with the inbox, would be really handy for me. I've seen at least 12 companies attempt this, and no one has done a really great job of it.

Sam Parr

I just tested this product. Have you guys heard of this? I can't think of the name right now, but it was this thing where it sounds insane. It recorded my screen for weeks at a time. It would see how I'm typing, what I'm saying to people, and it would give me feedback on the productivity of my day and how I can improve it. Have you guys seen this? It started with an "R," I think. Is it called a...?

Shaan Puri

"Elect" or something, or isn't it "rest of mind"?

Sam Parr

No, no, no, Sean, you're right. It's sort of...

Siqi Chen

Of guy.

Sam Parr

The guy who started it is like a... he's been around. He was doing like...

Shaan Puri

A pendant or something, right? At one. And then, yeah, yeah, now it's a... oh, rewind. Then rewind, yeah.

Sam Parr

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Is it Rewind.ai?

Siqi Chen

Yeah, they stopped working on it. Now it's a call limit. Listener's working on the pendant.

Sam Parr

Now, yes, I was tinkering with Rewind, and the promise of it... it's not there yet, but the promise is amazing. I was so into this, and it's kind of describing what you're just explaining. We're having to use Zapier and OpenAI, or ChatGPT, to kind of duct tape this all together. Their premise was amazing, and that is exactly what I'm looking for.

Siqi Chen

I got a third one, which is a lot spicier. But, you know, this is not a **vulnerable** buckable thing. Just character AI, Chai, and all of these chatbots that people are really using for sexy chats. I think someone could... and these things print money, by the way. They immediately generate millions of dollars a month. I thought if I were just in it to print money, the thing I would make is something that is kind of like Tinder, but basically everything is AI-generated. So it's not like, "Oh, you're creating a robot." It's a fake dating app where everyone is attractive and super into you. Then you can go off of your Tinder app and go on Instagram. There, you can have an Instagram account on actual Instagram, except it's owned by the person that you met on your fake Tinder app.

Sam Parr

**Sikhi, do you know who Tai Lopez is?** He's like the guy who had the infomercial that was like, "Here in my garage."

Siqi Chen

I do know Tai. Who? Tai, who he is, yeah.

Sam Parr

So, Tai One accused... He came on MFM years ago, and an accusation that I learned about him based off of the comments on YouTube is that years and years before he was whatever he was famous for, he owned dating apps. The accusation was that all of the users were completely fake and that it was guys in the Philippines running it and doing exactly what you're describing.

Siqi Chen

That's true of the majority of updating apps.

Sam Parr

What do you mean?

Siqi Chen

That's just like standard offer day procedure. Like Plenty of Fish, you know, a seeking arrangement. That is their business model.

Sam Parr

They’re like.

Siqi Chen

And in fact, like men.

Sam Parr

Acting as women.

Siqi Chen

Yeah, there's also the webcam industry. Up until OpenAI, the companies with the most advanced AI technology were going to be one of these companies because they are better at creating chatbots than anyone. They have the most advanced technology. I'm not kidding. I know people who work there or run it. They've just developed better chatbot technology than anyone in the game.

Shaan Puri

It would be so funny if that's where AGI starts. Actually, it's not OpenAI, it's none of these labs. It's like whatever some of these webcam site developers just live in here.

Sam Parr

That's not a crazy idea. I mean, isn't that how it typically has been? A lot of the device industries are the ones pushing the envelope. Yeah, yeah.

Siqi Chen

Yeah, it's transformative for OnlyFans, right? Like, I don't know if you read, but there's... you know, you're a big influencer on OnlyFans and you have an army of a hundred people who are like pipers or chatters, right?

Shaan Puri

And the funny thing about them is they're not just chatters that are flirting. They're also basically salesmen. So what they're doing is chatting to try to upsell you. They want you to buy this video, buy this photo, or I don't know, buy the subscription—whatever the thing is. But they're not just customer support; they're actually sales. They need to come across like they're the original person, which is just hilarious.

Sam Parr

What do you think that office environment is like?

Siqi Chen

So, I know someone who works in that, and it's just normal. It is like the most boring cubicle, normal office environment that you've ever seen.

Shaan Puri

That's almost better.

Siqi Chen

See, isn't it? I thought.

Shaan Puri

It was weird. The other thing with the dating apps, I think that they did, was I remember seeing this study about Match.com. If you were a guy on Match.com, you would basically send out, you know, 30 messages and you'd get, you know, one back or whatever. They realized that a lot of guys' accounts would go inactive because they weren't getting replies. So what they would do is they would show an active person 30 inactive profiles, knowing that the inactive person is not there to reply. But that would be the notification for that person to come back and reactivate their subscription. They have to pay to go read their inbox and to be able to reply. So it's almost intentionally a horrible experience for the person who's there trying to find somebody, in order to reactivate all the churned members. They would basically, in the first hundred matches that they would show you, something like 50, 60, or 70% of those matches were all just inactive people. They wanted you to send a notification to make them come back.

Siqi Chen

That sounds like a Zynga train PM.

Shaan Puri

Dude, I went to the Zynga office once back in the heyday. It was the craziest office I've ever seen. Sam did...

Sam Parr

You ever?

Shaan Puri

Go to this thing.

Sam Parr

Yes, you liked it. It was right... it shared a building or was next door to Airbnb, and it had a huge bulldog in the front, right? I think at one...

Shaan Puri

I think they...

Sam Parr

I think they owned the building, and I think the building was worth at one point more than the company. Like, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. Why? What did you...?

Shaan Puri

Think of...

Sam Parr

The office, Sean.

Shaan Puri

Well, you would go in, and there’s a giant tunnel, like a LED tunnel, that you would walk through just to enter. When you’re there, first of all, there were dogs everywhere. It was like everybody brought their dog to work. There were just herds of dogs running around; it was insane. We met the chef, and the food operation was more sophisticated. The cafeteria was more sophisticated than any company I’d ever been a part of. The food part was better than my actual company. They had a staff of 60 people on the culinary team. They had a roof on top where they were growing all the vegetables. They had a giant fridge that was the size of a swimming pool. You’d walk in, and there were cows hanging upside down because they had their own butcher process. They didn’t serve soda; they only brewed their own sodas. Everything was custom, soup to nuts, and just so insanely sophisticated for a cafeteria program. I thought, "Man, if the food is like this, I don’t even want to know what the actual teams that do the work are like." I walked into a 1 PM meeting, and it was like a stock market dude. His screen had so many metrics fine-tuned in real time. They were running so many tests at a time. It looked to me, from the outside, like the most data-driven operation I had ever really seen. I knew about what we did, but what we did looked like cavemen compared to what they were doing in terms of sophistication of data.

Siqi Chen

The food thing reminds me... I was the person who did a petition for us to serve real bacon. After a few months, we finally started to serve real bacon because we never had it before; it was only turkey bacon. You know, Mark Pincus didn't like to kill pigs. But yeah, one of the things that people did at Zynga in the product organization is we had a PM on call. I had never seen this done in any other organization. The PM on call for every game would daily send an analysis of what changed day over day. So if there was a drop, they would segment it. Oh my God, there’s like an anomalous 50% drop in Mexico for FarmVille, and we are not sure why because usually on Wednesdays at two, it shouldn't be like this. It lasted three hours long, and they would have to explain, "Oh, it's because the World Cup is happening."

Sam Parr

What comes first? We were with Mr. Beast a few weeks ago, and I had the same question, but he wasn't able to articulate or answer it. What comes first when you're that data or analytic-oriented? Does scale come because of that, or can you only behave that way because you have scale?

Siqi Chen

So, it depends on the environment. If it's a data-friendly environment, like Facebook, then the Facebook platform is where virality lets you grow from zero to a billion. In that case, data is all that matters. However, you could see in the experience of Zynga that this didn't translate to the mobile industry. Mobile was less about virality; it was just difficult to do distribution. A lot more of that creativity was needed, and that's why Supercell had such a creative advantage. They actually built very fun, new games. I think it's a completely different environment. If it's hard to get early distribution, then scale makes data more important. But if it's quite difficult to get early distribution, then you want to be creative and innovative. In that case, creativity matters a lot more.

Shaan Puri

Do you remember any random game change, like changing the color from red to blue or adding flashing lights, that just generated like $10,000,000 overnight?

Siqi Chen

I always remember thinking that the best way to generate $30,000,000 overnight is just to say, "Hey, you! It's going to take you $10 just to unlock the game today." We could just make a... not put.

Shaan Puri

A paywall.

Siqi Chen

Payable. People would pay. One of the more interesting ideas is this concept of "crew." We had this idea of collecting materials, and you ask people for materials. One of the mechanics that we invented at Zynga is this idea of crew, where for whatever thing you want to unlock, you have to get at least 20 unique people to help you. What we saw in the data is that when you ask for materials, you tend to ask the same two people over and over again. But if we have a unique spread, that increases the distribution, and that ends up being a pretty large boost in daily active users (DAUs). Another thing we observed is the power of segmentation. There was one day when our numbers went down significantly, and I had to figure out whether it was this channel or that channel. It turns out there was one particular typo bug in the drop rate of a specific treasure that was creating a lot of opportunities for people to share. So, you just spend all day doing things like that. It's rarely something huge, but it's all the details added together that make the difference, isn't it?

Shaan Puri

What were the other business ideas or opportunities that you think are exciting right now?

Siqi Chen

Yeah, I mean, I actually asked Sam Altman to make this, but I don't know how long they're going to take. I'm doing a lot of medical research.

Sam Parr

What did you say?

Shaan Puri

To make this product, he's saying...

Sam Parr

Oh, I thought you were like... well, you had Sam Altman make a list for you to talk about. I was like, that's...

Siqi Chen

No, oh no, we're not that tight. But I was doing a bunch of medical research and I noticed that you can't access paywalled articles. I really wish someone would make a version of deep research that lets you enter your paywall credentials so you can get full text access. This goes further; I think there's just so much data behind authentication walls and paywalls that you can't get to. You can only search on the open web, and the more private data you can get access to, the more useful these agents become. So that's probably the number one thing I've been thinking about.

Sam Parr

What's the name of the company that starts with an "R"? It's based in England. Sean, we've talked about them a bunch. It's like an acronym. Anyway, it's an academic publishing company in England, and it's really controversial because I think it has the second highest profit margin of all publicly traded companies in the world, behind Public Storage. The shtick behind it, and why everyone hates it, is because researchers at universities don't get paid anything for this. In fact, oftentimes they have to pay tuition in order to even go to these places. But they take your research and they put it behind like a $30,000 a year paywall. So, it's a very frustrating industry.

Siqi Chen

Yeah, it's a... that's the whole industry, right? Elsevier, I think, is the biggest one, and there's a bunch of controversy around that. All of these are extremely hard, emerging businesses. They charge an arm and a leg for access. The researchers get paid nothing, and the peer reviewers get paid nothing. All they're doing is just taking the text, copying and pasting it, and putting it somewhere, maybe like printing it into a journal. So it's...

Shaan Puri

A lot of work. You're talking about, like, you told Sam Altman to say, "Hey, can I just give ChatGPT my credentials and then it can go log in for me and use that information when I ask it questions?" So that's a question of how ChatGPT would have to do it. How could a founder, well, how would a founder get around that? Or how would they do this?

Siqi Chen

Yeah, I mean, you wouldn't need access to O3, the full model first, because that's what open research is based on. But, I mean, it's not terribly difficult to create something like a deep research. There was a company called... there is a company called Genspark. I'm friends with the founder. Genspark used to have the VP of Search at Baidu, which was the Google of China. They made a version of deep research just using a different model, and so that's relatively easy to build. I think the storage of the credentials and logging in is a little bit more tricky.

Shaan Puri

Right. It also just seems like somebody could create something like "SciencePal" or something similar. It's like a ChatGPT-like interface, but it's specifically trained to access all of the journals and all of the academic research out there for you. It could just be a vertical thing. Isn't there like a Google for doctors that's similar to this? Like "Lumos" or something like that?

Siqi Chen

There is... so, I'm deep in this space. There's a company called **Elicit** and another called **Syspace**. What they allow you to do is search abstracts where available. You can also upload individual PDFs, which **ChatGPT** allows you to do as well. However, there's nothing I've seen that indexes the full text of all these journals with your credentials.

Sam Parr

And why are you so interested in this? What's all this research for? Is it for your daughter? If it is, what's the story behind that?

Siqi Chen

Yeah, so my daughter was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor last September. We've been doing everything we can to find new treatments for this because it's so rare. You really get deep insight into the **structure** of the medical community. One of the big learnings is that there is a huge gap between what is available as **standard of care**—meaning what's available if you go to a hospital or talk to a doctor—and what is available at the frontier. Furthermore, when you have a rare disease, the amount of research, data, and treatments available is also just limited because you need to have enough critical mass for the research to be worth it. This way, they can recoup the research costs. Another interesting thing we learned is that the **intellectual property (IP)** issues are really strange. For example, there's this drug that is FDA approved and non-prescription. It's been out since the seventies to treat pinworms. Over the past twenty years, there's been a huge amount of compelling data suggesting this might be a pretty good treatment for different kinds of cancer. However, there have been no clinical trials for it because there's no money for it. You can't patent a pinworm drug, so all the money—hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars—are going to new molecules that are patentable, even if things are already available. Once you get into this field, you're like, "Wow, this is super, super broken." So, yeah, I'm doing a lot of primary research in order to find and repurpose all drugs that might already exist that could treat this rare brain tumor.

Sam Parr

It's, you know, there's obviously... this is super serious, and I'm sorry you're going through everything. But also, there's like an interesting logistical thing of like, wait, so you are able to just research potential cures or ways to help your daughter on your own and come up with a solution? I mean, is that like what you hope the outcome is?

Siqi Chen

Yeah, I mean, I'm not the first founder type who's been in this situation, right? So, the co-founder of Clubhouse, Rohan, his daughter has a radioactive disease. Her name is Lydia, and he runs the Lydia Foundation. He's going so far as to manufacture his own drugs for very rare diseases. You can do a lot. There are other people I've met who have done similar things. Like, end-of-one cures exist. This is what I mean: if you're sufficiently motivated—and there's no one more motivated than a dad with a sick kid—you can go so much further than what is available as standard care. Even the last time we met with our primary care team, they were proposing two particular paths: one involving pretty aggressive surgery and radiation, and another involving a drug. I proposed a third path, and they were discussing it. This is like neurosurgeons and clinicians. They came back a week later and said, "Actually, your path is more sound." The reason I was able to do that is that this disease is so rare, I am more knowledgeable about the disease than anyone in the room because they have to study 50 different cancers, right?

Shaan Puri

Wow, that's pretty incredible. Also, my experience has been that the doctors, once you get off of the kind of standard of care... and this is maybe I'm projecting just from, like, you know, I just had a knee injury. I was asking the doctor, I was like, "Hey, would PRP or stem cells... is there anything I should take?"

Siqi Chen

What's a peptide?

Shaan Puri

Can I put a peptide in there? And he's like, "Oh."

Siqi Chen

My God.

Shaan Puri

There's not a lot of evidence, you know. That's not part of the protocol, right? We don't have great evidence. He was sort of like, "My hands are tied." He's an orthopedic surgeon, and he's just like, "You know, my hands are tied. I can only recommend what I can recommend. You could do those things; I don't know." So then I felt like, you know, I'm on my own here. Once you take this path, are you just outside of the medical system basically? Are you outside of your standard chain of command with your doctors, and do you have to set up your own system?

Siqi Chen

That's a great question, and I've had an almost similar conversation in the last meeting I was just describing. I saw it play out in real time. The neurosurgeon said, "Hey, when we did this operation, we did it for this reason. Do it for some other reason. It's not part of the standard of care." But our primary clinician, who is the principal investigator of one of the clinical trials—the only one of two that treats this disease—she was like, "Yeah, you're right. We don't have a lot of evidence because there hasn't been a lot of research into the tumor." Sometimes, you have to argue for first principles. If it's a fairly rare disease, they're more open to being more creative. In our case, our clinician was able to convince the neurosurgeon that this was the right path, or at least it's worth trying. She told us she was excited to have a partner who seems well-informed and is willing to think outside of the box. I straight up said, "I do not care what the standard of care is. I think the standard of care is crap." She basically said, "Yeah, I think so too. I just can't say that."

Sam Parr

Dude, that's pretty cool that you're in San Francisco too. Hopefully, you think that the open-mindedness or the early adopter mindset even trickles out to the doctors and things like that. It's pretty cool that you're around a doctor who's willing to try some crazy stuff, or what's considered crazy to a lot of people.

Siqi Chen

To answer Sean's question, if you do find your own drug, you have to show enough research and be well-informed enough that someone is willing to prescribe it off-label on a compassionate use basis. You just need to convince one doctor. If you can't find one, you can find others who are willing to do that, and then you're in the clear. It's a lot easier if it's for a fairly serious, rare disease.

Shaan Puri

Can you tell the story about when you tweeted out about your daughter's condition? Then this crazy crypto turn of events happened where someone created a coin, and then millions, maybe tens of millions—I don't even know how much money was raised. Then people got mad at you. People were speculating on this thing, and I don't even understand it. Can you explain what was going on? Also, just explain, was this just degenerate gambling, or did you maybe stumble upon a novel way that people might fund research in the future? I don't know which one of the two it is.

Siqi Chen

Yeah, I think I have a better idea of which one it is after some reflection on it.

Shaan Puri

Okay, so explain what happens. Yeah.

Siqi Chen

Christmas, I was going to Japan to ski with some friends and family. I was on a flight and had a plan to start a GoFundMe for the Hankison Lab at the University of Colorado. We were donating money to them once this happened because they're the only lab in North America that researches a particular tumor called craniopharyngioma, and they found the treatment that we're on. So, I thought, okay, for Christmas, it would be great to do a GoFundMe, use my network, and raise some money for this lab. I tweeted a thread with the GoFundMe link, and we ended up raising about a quarter of a million dollars for our lab, which I think is the biggest donation up to that point. But what happened is some people started asking, "Hey, can I donate crypto?" So I said, okay, and posted my ENS (Ethereum Name System) address. People started donating a little bit of ETH. Then some others asked, "Hey, do you have a SOL address? We're on Solana." I didn't have a SOL address; I was aware of what Solana is, but I had never touched it. So the next day, once I landed, I created my first Solana wallet, generated this address, and tweeted it out. Basically, what happened next...

Sam Parr

By the way, are you big in the crypto world? Why were all the crypto guys doing this for you? Just because... what's the motivation other than that?

Siqi Chen

It's good. So, it didn't occur to me that people thought I had like 77,000 followers at the time. I'm not big in the crypto world. I've been on and off active in crypto since 2017, but never in a major way. I'm not a crypto account that people follow. I found out why people did this later, and this answers the question of Sean: is this gambling or is this something else? Anyway, I posted a soft sole address, and basically an hour later, I looked at my wallet, and it said $400,000. It was $0 an hour before. So, I'm looking on like, "What is going on?" It turns out someone created a coin called Pump on pump.fund, which is a platform where you can create a coin in literally like thirty seconds. I was on Ethereum, and I have been active in crypto. This wasn't a thing for any new token on Ethereum; it was like a whole process. Now, they can do it in thirty seconds.

Sam Parr

Pump dot fun. Is that what pump dot fun?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, it's crazy, this business, by the way.

Sam Parr

No, that.

Shaan Puri

These guys made like **$500,000,000** of profit last year. I think it was even more than that.

Siqi Chen

More than that, yeah.

Sam Parr

And so, you click a button and you make your own coin. Obviously, the name... there's no hiding that the **intent** of this is that it's a **pump and dump scheme**, right? They made **$500,000,000**.

Siqi Chen

At least, at least they made.

Shaan Puri

A lot of money, specifically.

Sam Parr

That's just...

Siqi Chen

Insane! The majority of the traffic on Solana is people basically trading these new coins. They are trading them, trying to ride the wave. It's basically musical shares, right?

Sam Parr

Have you guys gone to this website? It's crazy! It looks like a Geocities website. There are flashing banners. This is insane! It's all...

Siqi Chen

Real time.

Shaan Puri

Like yesterday during the Super Bowl, somebody created a set for Dave Portnoy. They set...

Sam Parr

A bar stool... jail stool.

Shaan Puri

And a jail stool ran up to like a hundred million dollars or something like that. But, like he said, it's **musical chairs**. So you're buying, trying to catch one of these **thousand X waves**, but it's gonna dump. You just gotta know when you're gonna get off the train. If you wait too long or you're the one who comes in late, you lose. So it is like being at a roulette table or whatever, where you're just throwing chips at the table, trying to hit.

Sam Parr

Oh my God, yeah.

Siqi Chen

It's like the Trump coin, except you can create it in like ten seconds, thirty seconds. But anyway, that's why people created this coin. It's because you're looking for these new narratives to gamble on, right? The more interesting and more viral-seeming a narrative is, the more valuable it becomes. If you're in early, it could really pump. So anyway, it was $400,000, and I tweeted a screenshot. There's this whole tweet thread where I was like, "What is going on?" I kept on adding to the tweet thread with screenshots of my wallet. So it was $400,000, and I was like, "What is happening?" If you were trying to explain someone about this coin called Mira, there are a billion tokens. They sent me a message saying someone bought half the supply and just sent it to my wallet. So I had 500,000,000 tokens. Once I tweeted that, I checked again, and it was now $4,000,000. I was like, "What?" An hour later, it was $8,000,000, and a couple of hours later, it became $15,000,000. At one point, it was $20,000,000, just like the same day, and I got lucky.

Shaan Puri

To see.

Sam Parr

The market cap of the whole thing was $80,000,000.

Siqi Chen

Correct.

Sam Parr

Okay.

Siqi Chen

No, no. I think the peak market cap was around **$60,000,000**.

Sam Parr

Okay.

Siqi Chen

And you.

Sam Parr

Had $40,000,000 of it.

Siqi Chen

Yeah, because I sold 10% immediately just to capture something. I sold a bit more in the liquidity pool, so you know, I got around a million dollars out. But I still owned 30% of it. Immediately, I said, "Okay, I don't know what I'm gonna do with it, but every dollar in my wallet is going to charity. This is nonprofit; it's not for me."

Shaan Puri

Not just charity; going to the research lab.

Siqi Chen

Going to the research lab.

Shaan Puri

Researching the potential course for your daughter's situation.

Siqi Chen

Correct. So, I said, "Hey, I'm not going to move anything with our twenty-four hours' notice. I'm going to try to be very transparent about this." I thought about it and decided, "I'm going to start selling a thousand dollars every ten minutes until we're done." I just don't have time to run a crypto project, and I want everyone to know where this is going. So that happened, and the price started going down. But once we got to a million, what happened in between was that, because it was such a big story, a bunch of rare disease organizations started reaching out to me. They were like, "Wow, this happened to you. How do we get in on this?"

Sam Parr

They're on the phone at their end. They're like, "Did you say pump fund?" Okay, uh-huh.

Siqi Chen

It's an average annual budget for one of these organizations, like $100,000 to $150,000. There's not a whole lot of money; this is more money than the community has ever seen. There's a lot of excitement around it. So, I thought, well, I was talking to some crypto friends, and I thought, okay, how do we make this a thing? Maybe we can make this more sustainable and long-lasting. The idea of turning Mira into a launchpad for other rare disease tokens, where Mira is a liquidity pair token, was discussed. I thought, well, okay, that seems interesting. Before I do that, I should probably figure out how a coin works and how you launch one of these. So, I went on Pumped Fun and thought, okay, let's find out how one of these works. I created a coin called "0" and entered a description for the coin because you could do that. I said, "Hey, don't buy this coin. It literally says, 'Don't buy this coin. It'll never be worth anything. I'm never gonna do anything with it. It'll be worth $0.'" So, I pressed the button, and what I didn't realize is that because I was on Ethereum for a long time but never had a watch wallet, what happened is I was in the background of the most watched wallet in crypto. Within about one hundred to two hundred seconds, the market cap of this coin that I told people not to buy...

Sam Parr

So, does a "watch wallet" mean that you are someone who should be monitored because you're a potential whale?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, like people start tracking, "Oh, what is Vitalik doing with his wallet?" What is... people aren't calling so good with their wallet? Yeah, people want to copy what you're doing.

Sam Parr

Doing so far, and they think you're the man because your wallet is old or you have a lot in it.

Siqi Chen

Because I was the main character of crypto Twitter for a few days, right?

Sam Parr

It’s okay. Understood.

Siqi Chen

So, there were bots just monitoring what I was doing and buying whatever I was buying. They saw this new token, and within one hundred to two hundred seconds, the market cap of this token was $3.5 million. I was just sitting there, panicking, and I said, "Okay, I don't want to have anything to do with this." I had half of the entire supply, and I sold it. That was my main mistake; I should have burned it, which everyone would have been happy about. But because I sold, I crashed the price of this token, and people got very upset because it was considered a rug pull. Now, oh my god, everyone's... When I sold, I made about $80,000 because even though it was $3.5 million in market cap, there was only about $100,000 or so in liquidity. I started a thread explaining, "Oh my god, I didn't expect this to happen." I got on spaces over video, just like, "I'm really sorry. I'm trying to figure out how this works." You know, people didn't care. What I realized is that it's just a different community than it was when I was really active on Twitter in 2017. The people aren't Ethereum enthusiasts; they're very deep tech people, right? They're nerdy. With Solana in 2024, I didn't realize it's so much more mainstream. A lot of people maybe have like $50 or $100 and are just trying to turn it into $1,000. The amount of emotion there is very, very different.

Shaan Puri

Crypto transitioned from neck beards to like everybody who looks like Jack Harlow in just four years. The community, the Solana community, all has like the line etched into the side of their haircut, or like multiple lines. It's very different from the people that got me into Ethereum in the first place.

Siqi Chen

Today I learned, or this month I learned... So anyway, the market got $3.5 million of mine, sold it, dumped at $300,000. As I started talking about my mistake, the market cap came back. At one point, it was like $5.5 to $6 million, just because I was talking about it. The more upset people were, the more the coin pumped. The more money people made from the coin, so they were trying to make it even more dramatic, which I didn't really understand at the time. I just thought I messed up and people were really upset with me. So anyway, that was like the main villain turn on Twitter, and everyone was super upset with me because they saw me as a scammer. I thought about what I was going to do with this. So first of all, like the $80,000 within a minute, I realized this was a mistake. I bought back into the coin and I burned it. I was already neutral and I explained that, but no one cared because of the anonymity of crypto. They thought I had like a hundred other wallets that I pumped and dumped on any profit there, and I can't prove otherwise. So I decided, like, this is really shitty and I don't want any part of it. I got some help from a friend who used to work for Coinbase and some other people who didn't want to be named to do on-chain analysis. So what I set up is, I'm actually just going to pay everyone back who lost money on this out of my own pocket, and I'll not even touch the cherry wallet. So what we ended up doing is everyone who held in the first two hundred seconds, who owned any coins... then up until the...

Siqi Chen

Forty-three minutes later, the market cap fully recovered back to the same value. If you sold and realized a loss, I'm just going to airdrop you. You sold, and it ended up being like $104,000 to $150,000 out of my own pocket, and I just paid everyone back, which has never happened on any pump-and-dump coin before. Maybe like 10% of people have heard about this. I tweeted about it, and I had to keep on responding because every time I tweeted for the next month, someone would say, "Oh, you're a scammer! What are you still doing here?" I had to say, "No, I paid everyone back," and they would just not say anything.

Sam Parr

Right, this is like a crypto Larry David-like thing. It's like you're walking through Times Square and one of those fake monks puts a bracelet on your wrist and then expects you to give them $20, even though they called it a free gift. This is just insane. So, how much did you end up giving to the charity?

Siqi Chen

Yeah, so between GoFundMe, it was a million dollars from crypto. I locked a bunch of the mirror coin into a liquidity pool, so we're still perpetually generating.

Sam Parr

So, you bought a million dollars of charity for $150,000, basically.

Siqi Chen

That's correct. Yeah, and then we... his total was like $1,400,000. We donated more to match the mistake, and we added a GoFundMe to it, so it ended up being $1,400,000.

Shaan Puri

Lab actually like triple leveraged it up into the coin. They got hooked on pump and dumped fun.

Sam Parr

Would you, Sean, give back the $1.50 like he did? I wouldn't... fuck that.

Shaan Puri

I would not have handled that situation personally. I get why you did; it's almost just like, "Dude, this is crazy!" All of this was unintentional, and people are really mad. Okay, what's the sort of like... how can I just clear up any possible confusion? But I don't think you needed to in this situation. Right, you created a coin called "0" that you said is "Don't buy this; this is going to 0. It's a test coin." If somebody went and randomly speculated on it using their sniper bots that are trying to track your wallet, you know, I wouldn't have given a shit personally. But then again, this community is so crazy that they'll just make your life hell on Twitter for like the next five years. It might be worth it, you know, just to clear your conscience and go to sleep at night.

Siqi Chen

Exactly. I couldn't... it was for me so I could sleep at night. A lot of these people are fairly low income, and the money is fairly meaningful. That was one reason. But another reason is that people just don't read. I explained this... I mean, the coin says "don't buy it." I explained this a couple of different times, and what I realized is that you just don't read on the internet. As far as anyone else knows, because it makes little joys, if you don't read, what it sounds like is that I created a scam coin using my own daughter's name to scam people out of my money.

Shaan Puri

Right, right. It's crazy. Did you, in the end, find anything here that's interesting for fundraising for research? Or is this just straight like, "I accidentally got into a gambling pool and kind of got some money for research," but this is not a sustainable thing for anybody?

Siqi Chen

I'm still trying to figure it out. So, what I'm hoping to make Nira into is... the way this works is, this is like sort of gang theory around. Okay, you own a bunch of this coin because this coin's narrative is attached to you. Right? In the case of, you know, Dave Portnoy is doing something similar with Barstool. In order to turn it into real-world impact, you have to sell. There's no way around that. And so when you sell, then you're just playing your zero-sum game against the community, and they're all going to be upset for you for sure, no matter what. That's a very difficult dynamic. I think my idea here is that the only sustainable way to do this is to lock a bunch of the tokens into a liquidity pool. So that when people buy in or out of it, you get to exchange, and you get the fees. That's not really like selling into your community. I think... imagine a version of Dogecoin where every time someone, you know, it's like Dogecoin has a couple of tens of billions of dollars in market cap. But every time someone sells or buys it, it creates like... it could be hundreds of thousands of dollars a day in fees, which you can then use to donate. I think that might be relatively sustainable.

Sam Parr

This is insane! I don't even know what to say. Sounds like a great weekend.

Siqi Chen

No, it was a month. It was the last... it was Christmas, up until like maybe now. It ruined my vacation, and it's been by far the most stressful time I've ever had in my life.

Shaan Puri

Can we do a quick detour? We were at a dinner once, and you talked about some, I think it was a Stanford class you took called "Touchy Feely"—or that's the code name for it, I don't know. It's something about communication and relationships. I remember you said this really great thing at the dinner, but this was many years ago, and I don't remember it exactly. Can you say that bit again? I want to hear it again, and I think a lot of people might benefit from it. So, bye.

Sam Parr

The way... Sikhi, how old are you?

Siqi Chen

I'm 41, I think.

Sam Parr

You look like you could be 22 or 41. I have no idea.

Siqi Chen

Yeah, Asian... no reason. Let's go! So, I took, actually now twice, I took a class again since we talked. This class was based on the Stanford Business School class called **Interpersonal Dynamics**, which is the highly rated and most popular class at Stanford Business School. It's taught by a professor named **Carol Robbins**, and it's generally known as "Hexy Filie." It's said that for every participant, someone will, like, cry in the class. Carol Robbins is now a co-founder of a group called **Leaders in Tech**, which provides the same class for tech leaders. One of the things you get taught in this class is the purpose of the class: to teach you how to relate to people and build connections with others. After all, people work with other people. One of the most useful frameworks I got from that class is how to think about your connection with others and how to develop that connection. There are two frameworks to connect: one is the two tracks of interpersonal communication, and the other is the five levels of it. When you're talking with anyone else, there are two tracks: a **content track** and a **relationship track**. The content track is full of facts, while the relationship track is filled with emotion. The relationship track is what needs to be filled for a relationship to become closer and for trust to increase. The way you fill each of these tracks is through the **five levels of communication**. The idea is that when you are talking to someone, there are five levels at which you communicate, each with increasing vulnerability and depth. - **Level One** is called **ritual**. This is just a simple greeting, like "Hey, how's it going?" It doesn't really say anything; it's just a ritualized greeting. - **Level Two** is **extended ritual**. This includes questions like "How's the weather?" or "How's the game?" It's a longer version of "Hey, how's it going?" - **Level Three** is **content**. These are facts, such as "How's the project? Is it late? What are we going to do with this particular idea?" - **Level Four** is **emotional self-disclosure**. This is when you say something that discloses how you are feeling emotionally at the time, like "I feel sad" or "I feel angry." There's a lot of talk about level four because people often think they're doing level four when they're not. That's a very common misunderstanding unique to the English language, which we can discuss later. - **Level Five** is the deepest level, called **mutual emotional self-disclosure**. This is when you express the emotion you have about the other person, such as "I feel angry at you," "I feel proud of you," or "I feel disappointed by you." That's the deepest level of communication you can have with another person. The content track is only filled by things from levels one to three, while the relationship track is only filled by levels four and five. We are taught to really avoid using levels four and five in professional settings, but if you want to build a relationship, levels four and five are kind of the only way to do it. A lot of the training is about breaking past the barrier or the discomfort of engaging in level four and level five communication. You basically sit in a circle with 12 people for four days straight so you can observe the impact of doing level four or five and not doing level four or five, and how you are able to be closer to someone or further away from someone in emotional distance.

Sam Parr

Has this made your running a company better?

Siqi Chen

I mean, I would say this is the most impactful thing I've ever done in my entire life. Out of any class, I always, as a founder, somewhat see the company as some kind of machine. I didn't find it... I'm like, you know, mildly asked for jewelry, so I found it difficult to relate to people. But it's completely transformed all my relationships, including my relationship with my wife. One of the ways this was evident was just last week. We had an on-site, and I was able to do a mini version of this with our customer success team. We just sat, and I did a very condensed version of this lecture. Then we sat and talked for about four hours. The amount of closeness people experienced was transformative. You wouldn't normally sit around for a couple of hours in a work setting to talk about your feelings. It's very uncomfortable to do so, and it's intentionally so. It's very uncomfortable for the first couple of... in the case of a real-life workshop, it's half a day. In our case, we had to sort of speed run it, and it was uncomfortable for about an hour. But then people were really into it. It's weird, but everyone at some...

Siqi Chen

Was crying about some disclosure that they heard or experienced. As a result, the team got so much closer, and the trust increased.

Shaan Puri

That's wild. So, how do you do this in practice? Right? Because when you talk about, like, "I feel angry at you about X" or "I'm disappointed about Y," I could see myself not having the skills or finesse.

Siqi Chen

To be able.

Shaan Puri

To do that and let the end result be a positive one versus starting a conversation where you're upset by this. The other person gets defensive or they push back and say, "Well, you did that," you know, blah blah blah. Can you give me an example of a conversation that you had? Like, maybe here's what I would love: a conversation that typically would have gone like this or maybe been avoided altogether. Instead, here's how the actual conversation went that was useful for you as a CEO, leader, friend, husband, or whichever example you want to choose.

Siqi Chen

Yeah, so the first one is easy, actually. Most people just don't have the conversation. They wouldn't say, "I'm angry." They would just be angry and not say anything.

Shaan Puri

Right.

Siqi Chen

And people can tell, is the thing. When you feel a certain way about someone, it leaks. There's a level of, even if you're not intentionally being passive-aggressive, you're just kind of ignoring the person, or it comes off like you're... So it's like, "Oh my God, it's late again."

Shaan Puri

Right.

Siqi Chen

Right, or you didn't do this, and so that's the default. That's when you have this negative feedback cycle. Well, okay, you already felt a certain way, then you expressed it unknowingly. Now the other person thinks you're angry at them, and now they dislike you more. Then they do things that you dislike more because they dislike you more, and it just gets worse. That's why relationships get worse, and that's like the default. If you know that it leaks anyway, then it becomes easier to say, "I'm going to express that." You're going to express it no matter what. Your choice is: do you express it with words, or do you express it without words, but just like passive-aggressive behavior? Then you combine that with the idea that everyone is entitled to notice things. They know, but they're not entitled to make things up about what other people are thinking. You are entitled to see the same facts as everyone else, to see the same behavior. You're not entitled to read the minds of some other person and how they're thinking and feeling. But you're 100% entitled to share what you're feeling because those are facts to you. That's reality. The mental model isn't... and this is kind of typical because people aren't used to expressing this. The mental model is like, "Oh, if I am expressing this emotion, that means I'm attacking someone." That is true if you don't express an emotion and you're just acting it out. But if I were to say, "You know, when I see you do this, the story I tell myself is that you don't respect me." I don't know if this is true, but this is what I'm thinking in my head. Because of that, I feel angry. I just want you to know that because I don't know if you know that. I know that you probably don't because you can't read my mind, but I'm guessing you probably aren't intending to make me feel that way. I thought it'd be helpful for me to share that with you so that you are aware of it. And I just learned that.

Sam Parr

Technique in therapy last week.

Siqi Chen

Amazing.

Shaan Puri

I seriously did the nonviolent communication framework, right?

Siqi Chen

It is, yeah. It's very connected to that.

Sam Parr

I literally just learned that.

Siqi Chen

Yeah, you're sharing information, right? So it's not an attack. If you are genuinely doing it because you understand that you can't read their mind, other people can't read your mind either. By sharing, you're offering them a gift of information.

Shaan Puri

One question, Suki. You said something about the English language making it harder. What did you mean by that?

Siqi Chen

So, what you start seeing when you're in this class with these 12 people is that you really only feel closer and get to know someone better when they say, "I feel emotion. I feel sad. I feel angry when this happened." You can feel the distance when they're expressing that emotion but not saying it. You can tell on their faces that they're pissed off, and it becomes scarier. Then you start learning that, "Oh, I need to say I feel." The thing about the English language is that we say "I feel" often without expressing any emotion at all. That's some sort of quirk that's kind of unique to English. When you say, "I feel that" or "I feel like," it is actually grammatically impossible for the next word to be an emotion. For example, "I feel that you're an asshole" is not an emotion. "I feel like this is fucked" is not an emotion. On the other hand, "I feel sad" is an emotion. "I feel happy" is an emotion. We're not used to saying that because the word "feel" has been misused for other purposes. So, we often unconsciously... once you see it, you cannot unsee it. I ask people to show emotion, and they say, "I feel like" or "I feel that," and it's never an emotion. It's very, very hard to change the habit.

Sam Parr

Do you guys do this? Sean, in particular, I'm curious if you do this. Do you get into this type of stuff, whatever you want to call it, the touchy-feely stuff? You know, you're like, "This is the way," and then I get into it, and half the time I execute that poorly. Then the business suffers, and I'm like, "I gotta have more patience with this person," or "I gotta let them get away with things more," or whatever. Then I just go right back to the total opposite end, where it's like, what do they call this? Dog-eat-dog? Where I'm like, "Everyone has fifteen minutes to fight for their job." It's like I get influenced by either side, but there is no middle ground. And that's like... you know.

Shaan Puri

That the first sign of resistance, I crumble sometimes. But the version of it that happens for me is, let's say I hear this and I'm like, "Ah, Seekie just taught me something! This is great. Two content tracks, five levels. I'm in! I got this. I'm going level five, baby! I don't even need one through four." Then I'll go have the next conversation with my wife tonight and I'll give her my feelings. I feel upset, and I know you didn't mean that. I tried to do the whole thing, and she's like, "What?" Then she doesn't know all of this. She didn't go to the seminar, and she didn't have the skills and the tools to be a mad Sean.

Sam Parr

Shut up, it's on.

Shaan Puri

The front of her mind... and so she doesn't play back like the role play that I had heard was. Then I'm like, "Well, I don't really know the next move." Okay, revert... revert back to my old asshole self.

Siqi Chen

Yeah, I mean, that's not a bad response, honestly. Because I think you have to do whatever works. The reality is, to get good at this, you know, it took me... I did this four-day program twice, and every day was like twelve hours a day. You were just sitting in the circle practicing.

Shaan Puri

Forty hours a day.

Siqi Chen

Did you?

Shaan Puri

Go with you.

Siqi Chen

The first time she actually did okay.

Shaan Puri

So, she kind of had to.

Siqi Chen

Okay, I kind of... no, I kind of smuggled her into the hotel room so she didn't go to the class. But I will say, like, the second night when I went home, she was like, "Who are you?" Because I was like, "Oh my God, I feel so bad. I've been such an asshole."

Sam Parr

Dude, this sounds like... have you guys heard of the Hoffman Institute? Have you ever?

Shaan Puri

I haven't heard of this, but I haven't been... yeah.

Sam Parr

I've contemplated going to it, but I think they have a variety of locations. They have one in Connecticut near me, and then they have a Boston one. You go for... it's not expensive; it's like $2,000, and you go for four days. You can't bring your cell phone; you're going to be completely disconnected. Or maybe it's even five days. It's kind of a lot. Everyone who goes to it won't tell me what happens there, but they all say that it's life-changing. They can now develop relationships and connections with other people. It's one of these really strange things that I'm so tempted to do, but the amount of time to be disconnected is very nerve-wracking or, you know, just scary. This sounds very similar...

Siqi Chen

It does sound crazy. It's not the...

Shaan Puri

Time to be disconnected. That's the scary part there.

Sam Parr

Well, yeah, it is, dude. Could I... it might even be seven days. Could you go seven days without a phone, away from your family? Away from your family?

Siqi Chen

Is it a little harder? Yeah, that's hard.

Sam Parr

Like in a hotel, it's crazy to be disconnected. But yeah, I don't want to cry with a bunch of strangers. That's why I don't.

Shaan Puri

Go to Tony Robbins? I'm like, I don't...

Sam Parr

I want to go to Tony Robbins, but I don't want to see anyone. I don't want anyone to see me dancing and singing, you know what I mean?

Siqi Chen

Yeah, what's great about leaders in Tuck is that they're all like, you know, well-known-ish founders. It's like, it's not cheap to go, so... oh.

Shaan Puri

Even worse, be around awesome people. God, I want to be my most vulnerable self around cool people.

Siqi Chen

No, actually, it's really helpful because you realize that all the people that you look up to, like, we're kind of all the same. There are very similar insecurities.

Sam Parr

Whenever I hear about this stuff, I think of the Tony Soprano quote where he's like, "Whatever happened to the strong, silent type, like Gary Cooper?" That's like... I go down this track and I'm like, can I just say, "Hey, chief," or "Hi, bub," and just know that person only at that level? Just say yes or no. Yeah, but then he goes and kills about a dozen people.

Shaan Puri

Sikhi, you have this interview question that I like. You said, "My favorite interview question after twenty years of doing interviews with people is, what is your greatest strength that you are most worried about not coming across in an interview setting?" Why that question?

Siqi Chen

I think I enjoy breaking the fourth wall in interviews. They tend to be so standardized or formalized that my greatest anxiety when I'm interviewing is that I'm actually really good at a thing, and you're asking me to, you know, reverse a leak list or something, and it's just not coming across. What I find is that it breaks down the formality and lets people get excited to talk about something that they're really, really good at—telling great stories. You get to know the person just a little bit better. I think the particular thing is, if you just ask, "What's your greatest strength?" it sounds really formal. But if you ask, "What is the insecurity that you're bringing in that you're worried about not coming across in an interview setting?" it changes the tone quite a bit.

Shaan Puri

It's a great question. I'm stealing that.

Sam Parr

Yeah, that's a good one. You know what's interesting is, you founded Runway, which is like a very serious business. You're going to have to hire enterprise people, I would imagine, enterprise salespeople. It's like a... I'm basing the future of my company off of some of the output that I'm going to learn from your software. But you have the vibe of an artist to me. You have a variety of really intriguing projects. You're like this thinker, almost like a philosopher. Is this new for you? Is this like a new challenge for you to be doing something so serious and regimented? Or can you still be goofy and an artist in this B2B world?

Siqi Chen

So, yeah, funny enough, he's a serious business. That was the name of my first company, and we built fun games.

Sam Parr

I feel like if you call it "Serious Citizen."

Siqi Chen

You know, yeah, because we're a games company. Serious business, fun games. But yeah, I mean, I think it's actually a pretty huge advantage, particularly for the things we consider serious. People have the stereotype of business and finances being super serious and super rigid. But finance, at its best, is really about creating value. It's about looking forward and thinking about new ideas on how we can push the business forward and grow faster. In order for us to be creative, we have to be in flow. Things that are fun keep you in flow. What we actually hear from our customers, and the thing that we hear quite often and love hearing, is "this software feels fun." That's not a luxury; that is a fun that creates flow, that creates your creativity, that creates value. When you use something that isn't fun, something that feels slow or confusing, then you're not creative, and you're making worse decisions. So, I don't think they're intentional with each other. I think they're quite complementary, and that is very deeply part of our philosophy.

Shaan Puri

A song? Have you ever seen this? Yes, that's... that's.

Sam Parr

That's what made me think of that question.

Shaan Puri

What's the story of this?

Siqi Chen

This happened last week. Our marketing team is run by Cal Friess, who was a Y Combinator founder of a company called Taika. He was the COO there. We also have this woman named Julie Frietas, who was at Shopify. I was in the office and I just saw them come out of a meeting, kind of giggling. They got out this piece of cardboard and started writing on it. I was like, "What is this?" They said, "You know how you didn't want to do a billboard? We decided to just create a billboard ourselves and hold it on a freeway." I thought, "That is such a crazy idea! Of course, that's going to go viral." I said, "I'll do it." They were like, "You will?" I said, "Yeah, I'll do it." So they were like, "Okay." We walked outside, found a freeway entrance, and I was just holding the sign.

Shaan Puri

And what does it say? By the way, it says, "If you hate..."

Siqi Chen

Your finance platform: **getrunway.com**

Sam Parr

Are you the only founder?

Siqi Chen

I had a co-founder, Aria Asim Anfar, and he left the company about a year and a half ago, almost two years ago.

Sam Parr

Because that's pretty rare. I mean, I don't know when you launched, but I feel like you're very, very early in this. I remember seeing you guys get popular on Twitter. That's going to be pretty different—to be the only founder running a company. That'd be kind of exciting, right? You get to do whatever the hell you want. Or is it going to be lonely?

Siqi Chen

I think the reason why we parted ways is that things were just slower to make decisions, and neither of us was having as much fun as we wanted to. Actually, I didn't want him to leave. I mean, he's still on the board. I love him; he's just the most wise and high-integrity person I've ever met. He was one of Parag's peers at Twitter, and I hired him out of school for my first company. Now, he works for Brett Taylor at Sierra. But if things were going slower than he wanted, and he identified that it was him or our relationship slowing us down, he decided to fire himself. I didn't think he was right about that, but he usually is right about just about everything. It totally transformed the company.

Sam Parr

He also must have attended interpersonal dynamics.

Siqi Chen

He did not.

Shaan Puri

You talked about Character AI and Chai. Some of these AI companies that are crushing it are just printing money right now. Are there any other companies that have blown your mind in terms of how well they're doing or how fast they're growing right now? Maybe AI, maybe not AI.

Siqi Chen

Alava Labs, that's probably a master in that company. They do basically all of the audio translation generation, sometimes deep fakes. When I met them, they were less than 10 people. They were just ex-Google, working on the foundational model technology. Now, I don't know what they last announced, but they're in the hundreds of millions of AR in like a year or two, a year and a half or so. What blew my mind is that I've never seen a group of very good technologists who were also so good at commercializing the technology so rapidly.

Sam Parr

They're at hundreds of millions... and hundreds. I feel like this just came.

Siqi Chen

Out, and yeah, no, no, no, no. It's... we should.

Shaan Puri

Have been an issue and a half, right? They dubbed our podcast. Remember that clip where they were like, "The Indian, they're speaking Hindi now," and it was amazing? I DM'ed them and we were like, "Hey, this is really cool." It was so stupid of us not to have pursued that more.

Siqi Chen

Yeah, there's that graph, right? For the fastest growing SaaS companies, and I think Coursera is up there. I am fairly convinced that Elevala Labs is actually faster than all of them. But yeah, I think they announced some revenue milestone, but...

Sam Parr

It's smart. When we were tinkering with them, it was borderline "this is cool, this is cute" to "I need this, I can use this right now." It was like it was just there. So I guess they crossed it, and people are actually using it to actually... well.

Shaan Puri

Who are they selling to? Is it...?

Siqi Chen

So, Apple has audiobooks. Oh, not podcasts—sorry, Apple audiobooks. Right? Like, previously they didn't have audiobooks. And you know, a lot of this AI-generated content is powered by ElevenLabs.

Sam Parr

Oh, so they are also publishers. They also do AI agents for customer service and support, and things like that. So, they're the back end of maybe potentially other software tools as well.

Siqi Chen

Yeah, so they have all kinds of product lines. They sell to book publishers, the power agents, and they do a whole lot.

Shaan Puri

Why are they better than, like, what OpenAI offers? You know, the risk with all these AI companies is that the general, the base models of OpenAI and Anthropic, etc., can just offer those capabilities as part of the main suite. Do they do something different? Are they fine-tuning it in some way? What's the difference?

Siqi Chen

No, it's their own foundational models. The quality and expressiveness are just better, and the form factor is better. So, you can use it for all these different use cases. The voice API of OpenAI is actually not as good or as easily usable.

Sam Parr

Dude, you're super fun to talk to! I just like hearing all these stories. I feel like you're like a treasure box. I just pick something out of the toy chest and say, "Tell me the story behind this." You know what I mean? I think that's awesome.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, thanks for coming on, dude. Give people a shout-out for your company and where to follow you for more.

Siqi Chen

Yeah, we're **runway.com**. You can follow me at **@blader** (with an "r") or **@runwayco**. If you are a CFO, you should use our software.

Sam Parr

How much did you have to pay for that domain?

Siqi Chen

A quarter million dollars? That's not bad. Naval Ravikant named the company and suggested that we use it on the .com.

Sam Parr

I think that was smart. A quarter million is not a lot, I feel like, for that.

Shaan Puri

Wait, wait. What do you mean, Naval named the company? Did you go to him and say, "Hey, what should we name this?" or did he just suggest it?

Siqi Chen

So, when Clubhouse only had one room in April 2020, it was in the Naval app, right? I think you were on it quite a bit too. When I was thinking about what I wanted to do for my next company, I said, "I want to do a finance company." I had a great name for it: NavalCFO.ai. He was like, "No, don't call it AI. It's going to be dated in like two years. Everything's going to be called AI. You should just call it Runway, and you should get the .com." He wrote the first track into Runway, and that's why we got the .com.

Shaan Puri

It's so funny that you said it was the naval app. At that time, it totally was. Yeah, and it was amazing.

Siqi Chen

Up and over to talk to an Arabica.

Sam Parr

It was.

Shaan Puri

It was amazing. By the way, I was using AirChat pretty religiously for about two months.

Sam Parr

Yeah.

Shaan Puri

Even though I knew Airchat's not going to work, I was like, "Oh, it doesn't matter. This is Naval's app. He's going to be on the call for seven. Cool!" This is just like... I like to hang out with Naval. I'm not going to email him like a million other people and say, "Hey, can we get a coffee?"

Siqi Chen

Just $1,000 a month, and you can talk to Naval whenever you want.

Sam Parr

Right.

Shaan Puri

Exactly! I was like, "I'm gonna be on this for two months. I'm gonna be a power user for exactly two months, and I'm gonna hang out with the vol." And that's exactly what happened. I was very proud of myself for that. It was great!

Siqi Chen

The most fun way to...

Sam Parr

Use that app. Yep, dude, thank you for doing this. You're the man, and we're thinking of you and your daughter.

Siqi Chen

**And hopefully, I appreciate you.**

Sam Parr

Thank you! That's it. That's the pod.