Furqan Rydhan on What It's Like Co-founding a $20B Company | My First Million #180

Sam Parr

Anyone I got

Furqan Rydhan

one more in a different space that I think sam will love but you

Sam Parr

know sean

Furqan Rydhan

I told you about this book I read on vertical farming. You know, basically, like I read the... wait.

Sam Parr

a minute

Furqan Rydhan

wait a minute

Sam Parr

Wait a minute, wait a minute. You guys were just talking about crypto stuff, and then he just said, "I've got something I think Sam will like: farming." Am I that big of a deal?

Shaan Puri

I like it too alright we have a special guest on the pod today furcon is here he's my old cofounder probably the smartest guy I know especially tech wise so we talked about a bunch of things ranging from his last company applovin which just went public at a I don't know 20 $30,000,000,000 valuation so we talked about you know the humble beginnings of that and and all the way to a massive ipo what he's doing with his money you know so you win the lottery what are you gonna do and he talks about his new project that he's building out and then we talked about a bunch of cool things that he he shows me so every every week we do I do a call with him called the cool shit hour where I just sit there on video and I just say hey show me cool shit that you're interested in because he's like a total you know tech nut he's on the the bleeding edge of everything and so that's my hack to learn a bunch of things before they go mainstream and so he talks about you know some hardware stuff that he's really interested in like a brainwave measuring device that he's wearing he talks about crypto and then we talk about vertical farming and the future of that so a bunch of cool topics on that side I would say there's some part of the crypto stuff that might be over your head so too many terms acronyms stuff you don't know about here's my advice 2 2 ways you could still get value even if you don't fully get it because hey I only half get it furcon is usually 10 steps ahead of me and so what I've learned in knowing furcon for like almost a decade now is when he thinks something's interesting instead of just saying I don't understand that that's weird lean in go Google it later look it up you know if I had just followed a bunch of the things he was interested in interested in I would have made a killing investment wise over the last decade and I've learned the hard way that that's what I should do the second thing is he shared a bunch of general advice about how he went about his career you know college dropout choosing jobs that weren't the highest paying job and why he chose it what he kinda optimizes for I thought there was some good stuff in there so if you are not subscribed to this podcast if you're just listening to this podcast maybe your friend told you about it you know what you need to do open up the podcast app apple the itunes app or open up spotify on spotify you click follow on the apple podcasts app you're gonna click subscribe we are climbing the charts I think we're number 12 in in maybe business or investing category and we are breaking into that top 10 and we're not leaving when we get there so how do we do that subscribe if you've enjoyed this podcast you get value out of it just hit the button that's all you gotta do hit the button thank you

Sam Parr

So, Sean and I are both wearing Harvard shirts. I actually planned this. I saw a screenshot of you testing, and I went and grabbed my Harvard shirt.

Shaan Puri

I was about to go on this big like what a coincidence this is amazing

Sam Parr

No, I do have one that I wear, but I saw you were wearing it. So, I wanted to wear the same thing because we normally wear black T-shirts.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, and you know, for the record, neither of us went to Harvard, but we both do this thing where we'll wear Harvard stuff. Then people will be like, "Oh, Harvard?" and then you respond, you're like: > "Missed that campus. Love it, love it there." And you [imply that you] went on a tour and they actually think you went to Harvard.

Sam Parr

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're like, "Oh, you're wet?" Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I got a Groupon. It was lunch. They should be around 4:00. Oh, 4:00, yeah, but I was...

Shaan Puri

we almost overlapped it's like

Sam Parr

yeah oh you went well it's like were you there at noon

Shaan Puri

furcon's even better furcon didn't even finish college so furcon is

Sam Parr

of

Furqan Rydhan

all

Shaan Puri

He’s the most successful and the smartest one of us. He was smart enough to drop out after what? Freshman year? Sophomore year?

Furqan Rydhan

I was there for a couple of years. I mean, I tried to do... I went to San Jose State. I tried to do computer engineering because obviously that would have made sense, but I was running a company at the time. Every time I was deciding between electrical physics or being on the phone with somebody trying to make a deal, you know... you know which one won. So, yeah.

Sam Parr

do you wanna give a background sean of furcon because last time he was on we were way smaller

Shaan Puri

Yeah, Furcon is one of my best buddies. He was the guy I started my last company with; I was the co-founder and CTO. You know, most co-founder pairings are typically one guy who can build and one guy who can sell. That's kind of what we were. I'm more like the sales guy, and he's more the building guy. So, we worked together for around 6 to 7 years and sold the company a year and a half ago. Furcon braved it out and made it one full year at a big corporation, so I gotta give props for that. That's like an endurance challenge for him. But now, he's doing his own thing. He's got F Dot Inc. How do you describe it?

Furqan Rydhan

It's... I just want to build cool things with cool people. So that's what I'm focused on. That's really it. I would describe it as: if you're trying to start something, you want like a third co-founder, it's an interesting emerging tech idea, that's where I get excited. I want to put in time and money and incubate these things with you.

Shaan Puri

Alright, I'll give a different description. I'll share my view of it. Basically, Furcon is investing in himself, like 15 years ago. Whoever that person is, if you're a young engineer and you want to make something happen, it would be kind of helpful to have someone who's been around the block, who's done it before. Someone who can either give you money, advice, or actually get in the code and build with you. So, he's got this... it's kind of like Y Combinator. He's got this Discord group, and every single company is like, I don't know, a 23-year-old engineer. They get their own channel. In some cases, Furcon is actually the back-end engineer with them. In others, he's like the tough love investor, saying, "Dude, why aren't you focused on growth? Why are you talking about all this other bullshit?" And in some cases, it's like, "Oh, you need to move to San Francisco and live on my couch." I think he's done that with a few engineers—like literally, "Come here." Yes.

Furqan Rydhan

sleep on my couch

Shaan Puri

And I'll not just seed fund you; I'll like, *fucking* babysit you and incubate you, literally and physically, in my apartment.

Sam Parr

I want to spend some time actually discussing that because I want to reminisce a little bit. But first...

Shaan Puri

By the way, we have to congratulate Furkan. Since he's come on, his last company, AppLovin, IPO'd. I don't know what it is at now, but it IPO'd close to $30,000,000,000. So, you know, yeah.

Sam Parr

I was going to say we have to give that part of the story, which is Fercon co-founded the company that is currently publicly traded for $20,000,000,000.

Shaan Puri

yeah furcon's rich is what I'm

Sam Parr

So, that's like a pretty important... Although it looks like you guys did... Did you guys just do an earnings report? Something happened today where your stock just plummeted. Well, not plummeted, but it went down a fair bit. Yeah, I...

Furqan Rydhan

don't know I mean it's just

Shaan Puri

all tech stocks are getting ravaged right now

Furqan Rydhan

yeah

Shaan Puri

but you know whatever

Sam Parr

So, congratulations! Basically, that company you guys were supposed to sell for also like a huge amount... like $3,000,000,000 or something a couple years ago, and it failed. Then it turned out to be a blessing in disguise, it seems.

Shaan Puri

Well, you should explain that. That's a good story. So we're working together and Furcon's like, "Dude, I got some good news." And he's like, "You know my last company? We're gonna sell it." And I think it was... I don't know what it was, $1,400,000,000 or something like that, right? That's what the original sale price was.

Furqan Rydhan

Yeah, I think they put a $1.4 billion value on it. I think the terms were something like they're going to put in $1 billion, and the value would be at 1.4 [billion]. They're going to buy a majority of the company, right? Most of the early employees would have gotten liquidated unless you're working there. You would have gotten kind of whatever new grants, right?

Shaan Puri

Which would have been an amazing outcome anyways, right? Oh wow, you built the company to $1.4 billion. That's... you know, that's a win. That's a grand slam. But then something happened. What happened, and how did that work out?

Furqan Rydhan

In your favor, yeah. So, the company was an international company; it's a Chinese company. In 2016, the elections happened and, you know, politics kind of changed a little bit. I think in that process, it started looking like, "Man, this is not gonna go through." They weren't going to be able to get approval in the U.S. for a foreign entity to kind of buy this thing. So that happened, and then there's some time... you know, in every contract when a sale happens, there are all these triggers, right? Like, "Hey, gotta complete by so-and-so date. If it doesn't happen, then, you know, whatever the contract might end." I think in that time, I mean, I wasn't at Applov and I was working with you, but every time I talked to somebody there, they were like, "Dude, we're still crushing it! We're growing, and it's still kind of scaling up." So it looked like the deal was not going to happen. The company had multiplied in value during that time. Now there's all this leverage on the company side to be like, "Well, we don't actually need this sale, right? We're a lot bigger than what that value was." I think they turned it into an investment instead, with like non-voting or some kind of distinction there. We ended up getting some liquidity then, which was fantastic. It was over $1,000,000,000. It felt great! I felt like that was the exit; it felt like that changed, you know, kind of what I could do in my life in terms of where I spend my time. But then they just kept growing. The company kept building, and they continued down the path. They partnered with KKR and, you know, brought on... I think Harold is on, you know, kind of the executive team now. He's a seasoned vet in the industry, and they've just continued to kind of skyrocket. I don't know... to...

Sam Parr

To dumb it down, AppLovin is basically like... you guys helped invent the advertisements that you see in the middle of iPhone games, correct?

Furqan Rydhan

Yeah, so we started as an ad tech platform. That's when I was there, and you know, then after that they brought up the gaming side. So they have a gaming studio which generates a lot of revenue. If you think of them as almost like a first-party game creator now, that's where I think the company's gone in the last few years.

Shaan Puri

They bought Machine Zone, right? So they acquired a bunch of studios. They have their own studio, so they're almost more of a gaming company than a mobile ad network now. That's kind of crazy. But the funny part is, I remember you telling me, "Oh, you know, we kind of did this sale, then a piece of paper's gonna go sit on someone's desk." Trump comes into office, and now, you know, I think it was a Chinese company. A Chinese company is buying this. Anything that's over $1,000,000, I believe there's some rule that it has to get a certain type of approval for the transaction to go through. Then it just sat there for, like, I don't know how many months—6 months, 9 months, something like that. When they came out of that, he said, "Yeah, by the way, we kind of get the best of both worlds." They made, you know, their buyout turned into a minority investment. So we still got the money, but we get this free roll of, "Great, how big can we rebuild this?" Then fast forward a few years, and it goes public at like 20 times the value, you know?

Sam Parr

We just kind of skipped over something pretty amazing, which is... he was casual about it, you guys both were. Basically, you built this ad network that was doing wonderfully, a huge company, and... I'm gonna say it in the same way, but basically you saw which games are doing cool and you go: "We're just gonna make these games kinda like that and make them popular because we already know what's popular before even the people making the games know what's popular." And now you make all your revenue from making games. I mean, that's pretty astounding, right?

Furqan Rydhan

Yeah, I mean, I saw all of this from the outside, but there are some key players in the company that I think were really instrumental in this. There's this guy, Raffy. When we kind of created Applovin and were working on the product before Applovin, this guy was just someone Adam knew. He knew his brother and had worked with them before. He was like this 19-year-old guy who wasn't going to college. All he wanted to do was something big and play video games. So, he spent all day and all night playing Street Fighter, but then he would talk to every single kind of Japanese mobile gaming company all night. He would just grind, and it was an awesome environment. I mean, I'm kind of the person where if I get really excited about something, that's all I want to do. That's all I was doing at the time. So, I'm at the office, Raffy's at the office, and we spend all night together. I'm hearing his conversations, and I get pumped up about it. Then, during the day, we're building all these things. You just saw people everywhere in the company that wanted to do something big and went and got it. So, Raffy, I think, at some...

Furqan Rydhan

In this ad network, it was like, "I need... I want to build games." They had built this thing called Lion Studios within AppLovin. I don't think it was very big at the start; it was kind of like some small games. But, you know, Raffa, I think he probably gets a lot of the credit for spearheading that and just wanting to do it. When I looked at the S-1 and kind of dug into it, I think it's like half the business now. There are always details on how you determine where the business is, but I think it's like half the company, which is incredible, right? It started with this ad network, and then, you know, in 2 to 3 years, kind of towards the end of this going public era, you should now have built up the second part of the business, which is also Matt.

Sam Parr

And you and the guy who started Applovin, I mean, it was a few of you guys, but like the main guy, his name is Adam, right?

Furqan Rydhan

yeah adam

Sam Parr

And basically, he had like a... I don't know if it was a mild or a very successful outcome at another thing. Didn't you say that he put in like $4,000,000 of his own money? I don't know if that was a lot or a little for him, but it was a pretty substantial amount of his own money. You guys kind of dicked around for like two years. You would say things like, "Well, let's try this," and it didn't work. Then you were like, "Let's just go play video games and think about it." Wasn't there something like that where you thought, "Oh, we'll figure it out"?

Furqan Rydhan

Yeah, I mean, Adam, John, and Andrew were like the three co-founders. They had worked together before and had done a couple of other companies that did well. I mean, John is like... nobody knows John, but he worked on the first ad server on the internet, I believe, that got picked up by DoubleClick. You know, that went on to Google. Then he worked at VMware and had done all these different roles. He's technical but also very marketing-focused and product-focused. So, he was just an interesting person to have in the mix. Then Adam, he had already kind of started in equities trading at the Chicago Stock Exchange and then gotten into ads and marketing. They had built a company, I believe it was called GameFly or something like that. It was probably a really good outcome, but not where, you know, it wasn't like a massive outcome where he could say, "Oh, I can retire forever. This is all I want to do, and I've kind of made it." In the first couple of conversations with him, I remember walking down University Avenue with him. He was just like, "I want to make something so big that I can walk down this street and people would know me." And it's like, University Avenue in Palo Alto... for people to know you, you must have done something really big, right? It's like every who's who in tech walks down there. I was like, "Okay, yeah, I want to take a really big shot." But those three put in the initial funding. I think it was around $4 or $5 million, if I remember correctly. It was a lot in the sense that it gave us many years of runway to work on whatever we started with. One project we called Style Page. We did that for like nine months. It was kind of like Pinterest. We quickly realized we were like five dudes in Palo Alto with no fashion sense trying to build a fashion website. This is not going to work very well.

Sam Parr

yeah like you know just wranglerjeans.com it's that easy that's your website where you're gonna stop

Furqan Rydhan

you don't you don't need

Sam Parr

a pinterest board to find lee jeans

Furqan Rydhan

Yeah, exactly. And then we mess around with a lot of different ideas, and some of them weren't very good. I think, Sean, we dealt with this a lot, right? Like, you get excited about something because you have to come up with an idea. You make it, you're not really that confident with it, and before you even launch, you're like, "This is trash. I don't even want this anymore. Get it away from me." And so there was definitely some of that.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, but you would... I think one of the things worth mentioning is that, which I think is worth mentioning because I remember every time I built a company, I'm always like, "Well, this is just how I'm doing it. It's probably real wrong, but I don't know. The smart people probably do it this other way." I remember feeling very comforted when you told me, "Yeah, at that level, we went through nine ideas. You know, is it this? Is it that? Is it this? Is it that?" And like, you know, some false hopes of like, "Oh, it kinda works." No, it's not gonna work out. And then in between, you're like, "Yeah, there were some days we just came into the office. We didn't have the idea to work on, so we just played FIFA for a bunch of hours. We would go eat, talk, come back, play some more FIFA, then we would go home." And like, there were days, like weeks like that. I remember thinking, "Alright, that's probably not the method you should choose." But it reminded me that success is not so glamorous, like you know, they show in the movies where it's like, "Oh, I have the idea. I'm a visionary. I got it right away from day one, and then we work hard, and we just A, B, C, D, E, it's done." So, I don't know, is that a fair representation of what you experienced?

Furqan Rydhan

Yeah, it's definitely nonlinear. I mean, you can work really, really hard for a long time and feel like you've made zero progress. You could be doing all the right stuff; you could be making the right calls. The other challenge is you don't get feedback right away on the things you're doing. You do get customer feedback, but you don't get this kind of made-up feedback that suggests the general type of things you're working on are going to work and hit. I mean, StylePage was kind of one idea that we really dug ourselves into. Everything between StylePage and then Applov and the ad network was just like, you know, really small projects that you're not super confident about. You're trying to find some edge; you're trying to learn something. Mobile was just getting big, Android was getting big—there were some opportunities there, but you just don't know. It's like how VR is today. You're like, "I believe this is going to be a lot bigger in the future," but what exactly are people going to do? It's really hard to predict. When you tell somebody about it, they usually go, "Nobody's going to do that." Well, if nobody can predict these behaviors, how do we build them? You have to have this kind of blind conviction towards something and also get that right. So it's...

Sam Parr

like yeah I know a lot

Furqan Rydhan

yeah you need you definitely need some luck

Sam Parr

you gotta pick

Furqan Rydhan

the right thing

Sam Parr

this guy adam how do you how do you say adam's last name

Furqan Rydhan

farooqi

Sam Parr

So, Farooqi... Adam Farooqi. He's the CEO now, and from what I've read about him—I don't know him—he seems like a wonderful CEO. The Glassdoor reviews are great. He wins all these awards, and he seems like a lovely guy. I've seen interviews with him. But what you're describing is like a bunch of really relaxed, calm people. I'm kind of dismissing it, but not really. You guys are just kind of messing around and trying to hope to... yeah, which isn't, of course, the reality. But how did this guy go from being this kind of relaxed, calm dude just trying to hang out and find a hit to leading a $20,000,000,000 publicly traded company? I mean, when I look at him, he looks pretty polished. He looks like a good guy. That's a pretty amazing transformation.

Furqan Rydhan

Yeah, and so I think "relax" is probably the wrong word. I mean, we were intense when we played FIFA. It was like, "I'm gonna beat you 8 times in a row." It wasn't a casual game of FIFA. Everything was competitive, and we would play mobile games competitively. A lot of our interest, like Applovin, when we started, was actually an app where you could see what games and apps other people were playing in your social network. It was kind of like a feed of apps. That was the first iteration of Applovin, and it was because we just wanted to see what people were playing. We wanted to kind of get those games and be competitive within it. So he's always been competitive. I think you really see that in him.

Shaan Puri

But you also used to say that a work schedule is like rolling into the office at 11, having lunch with the crew, and catching up on what people are up to. It just starts getting humming around, you know? Then, you do a couple of meetings and start getting into the groove around 3 or 4. Basically, by like 8 PM to 3 AM is when Furkan does his work, and then he repeats it the next day. I remember in our company, there were a bunch of people who were just regular human beings that would work a 9 to 5. They would turn off their brains and go home. For some of them, it was really hard to have a boss and kind of a leader who was on a completely alternate schedule. Some people were totally fine with it; they made it work. Then we recruited a bunch of Raffy-type dudes who were like, "Oh cool, we stay up till 3 AM here. Great, that's my optimal schedule too. I'm down with that." But at Applovin, you told me that Adam was the opposite. He would come in at 9 and leave at 4 or 5. He's got like 5 kids, I think, and every minute was efficient. Whereas, I gotta say, the way you work, it's not that every minute is like, "Boom, boom, boom, I'm doing this, this, this." Even at our company, we would take video game breaks every day at 4 PM. We'd go play Super Smash Bros for an hour. You had very opposite styles, but you guys made it work.

Furqan Rydhan

Yeah, I think Adam is like, "Make every minute count." You see that in how he operates, and that's why he's the CEO of a $20 billion company. Everything happens very fast and very efficiently. When a decision is made, the whole company knows about it. When movement's happening, it's immediate. It's like, "Make decisions fast, be strong with your kind of movements." Those are qualities I think are really critical in a CEO. For me, it's like I want to make every day count. I work a lot when I'm excited about something. The app-loving times were when something's growing; I take it seriously. But, you know, I know that creative work happens in these moments of flow. If you get two or three good flow states a week, I feel like you produce a lot. I think most developers, creative people, or builders will feel this: not every hour is super efficient, but there are times where maybe it's because you did all this stuff to build up to it or you got the right conditions. If you hit like three or four of those a week, man, you're really humming; you're producing a lot, and a lot of impact is happening. So, I always focus on impact. I think it was a good pairing because I would just work super hard to tackle the next technology barrier with my team. Then, the next morning, Adam would drive a bunch of traffic. By the time I rolled in at noon, we knew whether the test worked or not. That was awesome. It was the first time I ever felt somebody take control of growth and literally say, "Actually, we're going to get this answer today." Obviously, if you have a good bank account and you can fund it, you can spend money to make your answers happen faster. We had a lot of cycles during those times when we were building these apps. We didn't waste a year building some garbage app because very quickly we knew it wasn't going to work and why. We tried all the variants of it, and we had confidence that we were done with that idea. We thought, "Oh, we tried it; it's not going to work. We're not going to linger about this."

Shaan Puri

So, let's switch to ideas. Me and you do a call every week. It's 1 hour and it's called the "Cool Shit Hour." Every time I do it, I'm like, "Damn, I wish I recorded that for myself," but also people would love this. So I want to do that basically now.

Sam Parr

do you guys do this every week

Shaan Puri

yeah we sometimes miss some weeks but you know

Sam Parr

I had

Shaan Puri

A kid and stuff like that, but we've been doing it pretty regularly for a couple of years. Ever since he left, you know, Twitch, I was like, "Well, I still want to hang out and keep in touch." It's like the best part of when we used to work together was just shooting the shit about stuff that's cool. Furqan, in his own words, told me once, "I'm kind of in the first 10,000 people to try any new technology and really dive deep and understand it." He does that; he just sees a bunch of cool stuff before the mainstream does. So my hack is, well, I'm never going to be as smart as this guy. I'm never going to understand technology. I'm not going to learn how to code, but I can be friends with him. He can explain it to me like I'm a kindergartner. He's like, "I'm really into this right now. Check this out. Watch this demo here. Try this out. Open up this website. Watch this." We do that, and the thing with most of my relationships, including this podcast, is that I'm talking at least 50% of the time because I'm a talker. When I do the "Cool Shit Hour" with Furqan, I just sit back at my desk and take notes, like, "Oh, this is cool." I only stop to ask clarifying questions, like, "Wait, how does that work?" So I want to jump into some of those things. We'll keep it open-ended. I have a few that I know you're interested in, and I can guide us there. But let's start with the open-ended question: What are some things that are just cool or interesting to you? It doesn't have to be something you're working on necessarily, but where's Furqan's attention right now? What stuff has caught your eye?

Furqan Rydhan

Yeah, I would say there are probably three major things: 1. In the hardware space, there's just this trend that I feel like I can't get out of my mind, which is: Commodity hardware (whether it's like a Raspberry Pi or a simple device like that, or off-the-shelf gears and things like that) + software like machine learning = very advanced piece of hardware [Sentence appears to be cut off at the end, so I've left it as is]

Shaan Puri

a raspberry pi is

Sam Parr

Yeah, well, I don't know what the application is, but it's basically like $50. I don't remember how much it cost now. It's a... yeah.

Furqan Rydhan

It's a $30 computer. It's like a little board, and it's important because now, for a developer... Previously, they would have had to design their own little small computer board to go build a small... like, you know, if you wanted to build a Roomba, you'd have to go design a little computer to put in the Roomba, then design the Roomba. Now you can kind of go pick up this computer that's just a little board, and you could put it into anything. So, like, you know, it took half your company away of what you needed to do to make this happen.

Sam Parr

who makes raspberry who

Furqan Rydhan

It's a company called **Adafruit**, I believe. They're an independent company, probably one of the biggest obvious makerspace companies around. They've sold, I want to say, like 100 million of these devices now.

Sam Parr

they're just crushing it they're just it it does well

Shaan Puri

So, what's an example of something that you or somebody has built with a Raspberry Pi? Just so people have a tangible example.

Furqan Rydhan

So, there's another device from NVIDIA. I'm using the NVIDIA Jetson; it's like a little version of a GPU. I basically have a little GPU plugged into my TV. It has a webcam on it, and we've messed around with some pose estimation. You know, you can open my TV and you could basically stand there, and a little ball will come [on screen]. If you hit that ball... it'll go blue or [change color].

Shaan Puri

you made like a a connect like an xbox connect

Sam Parr

you just

Shaan Puri

made like a bootleg version of it

Furqan Rydhan

And then we kind of did some hand gestures. If you know, we basically... I think that this, this, and then this is kind of like the three gestures. We can kind of read that on the other side.

Sam Parr

and he basically just put up like you put up like a 1 or 2 or 3 basically right

Furqan Rydhan

Yeah, and this was for me like... you know, I like to go and mess around with it. My idea, if I wanted to do this as an idea, I would do like the best fitness product. It would be: You buy this little device, it plugs into your TV (because everybody has a TV on their wall now). Your TV is this awesome fitness game, and you could just do like everything. I think I wanted to call it like "FitCam" or something like that, you know?

Shaan Puri

instead of like the company that sold to lululemon for like 500 600 mirror I think

Furqan Rydhan

yeah exactly mirror is $2,000 or right

Shaan Puri

Here's a piece of hardware for thousands of dollars that you have to mount onto your wall. Well, you already have a screen on your wall called your TV. What if you could just turn it into something smart? That's one of the... like, for $30 instead of $3,000 kind [of solutions].

Sam Parr

Of dude, I have a mirror competitor called Tempo. I pay $50 a month for the programming and then $2 for the...

Furqan Rydhan

machine oh yeah

Sam Parr

It's basically a flat-screen TV with... they don't call it a camera because they don't want to freak people out. Because, like, you work out - I work out shirtless in my underwear basically - so they don't call it a camera, but they call it a sensor. It can tell you if your poses are in good form or not good form, and it counts your poses, it counts your reps. So you can compete. Pretty cool.

Furqan Rydhan

Yeah, and so that's one... I'm gonna tell you about this other company I invested in. I'm just really, really excited about it, so I'm gonna tell you guys: This company called Neurocity, they make a brain-computer interface. This sounds like future, but it is now. It's basically a device, and I actually wish I had it next to me, but you just put it on your head.

Shaan Puri

you can go there if you want I wanna I wanna see if it's if it's within the room

Furqan Rydhan

go it's not in the room it's in

Sam Parr

the other room

Furqan Rydhan

so okay

Shaan Puri

go go for it being saying we'll just talk for a second yeah so it'll be good for youtube

Sam Parr

Sean, you know how on talk shows, like morning shows, they have a guest come in and they're like, "Here's the latest products that you can buy for your kids this holiday season"? They're at a table and they go, "This product does this, this, this, and this," and they set it down. Then they go to the next one. That's what Furcon is right now, basically. It's that segment where someone has placed like 8 cool things on the table and they're just going from thing to thing to thing, just dropping bombs. And I'm like, "Oh great, cool, got it, next." You know what I mean? That's what's going on.

Shaan Puri

Right now, this is FVC. This is Furcon's QVC competitor, where he just picks up objects and is like, "This is a fantastic holiday gift for the family."

Furqan Rydhan

Yeah, and so this is for, you know, kind of like developers and whatnot still. But this is what the device looks like, and I'll give you guys a closer look. You can see these little probe-looking things. So this would basically rest on your head like that. What this does is it listens to EEG waves happening in your brain. I think there are many different wavelengths, but you know, these guys have identified some set of them. So why does this kind of relate to the story we're talking about? There's a little computer inside here that, you know, wouldn't have been able to happen 10 years ago. Because you can put a little computer here that has Wi-Fi on it, that can take these signals in and transmit them to the internet, this device is viable now.

Shaan Puri

So, you wear that and it helps measure your focus or your kind of flow state. It's kind of like a Fitbit in some way for your brain, or what?

Furqan Rydhan

So, the device itself first takes in raw signals. It can detect a lot of stuff. They've added some machine learning. The second part is that they added software and preprogrammed all these different actions. There are some things like, "Are you focused right now?" or "Are you calm right now?" Kind of questions like that. They can detect all of these conditions. But there are other things that I'm really excited about. For example, it can detect if you think about pinching your left hand. If you think about doing this but don't actually do it, it could pick up that signal. Or if you think about moving your right arm, it could pick up that signal specifically. So, you could think of this as both a receiving state to detect things and also as an interface to, you know, without having to move a muscle, just think about a muscle.

Shaan Puri

Change the channel. Change the channel without going and picking up the remote. So, this is the guy who made this. He's like 17, right? Or 18?

Furqan Rydhan

I don't know his age; I think he's a little bit older than that. But yeah, there's this guy, Alex. I believe he has a neuroscience background, and the CEO is this guy, AJ. You know what's funny? I bought this device as a person. I think I was probably in the first 100 or 200 to buy it. Then I sent them a message saying, "I love this! I'm an investor; can I talk to you guys?" I don't think they responded to me. Then they sent a message like, "Hey, do you want to schedule a customer call?" They were doing customer discovery, and I thought, "Sweet!" So I joined this customer discovery call, did the whole thing, but then at the end, I said, "Dude, I really love this! This is me. There's a bunch of stuff about me, not some random person, but I'm really excited about this. I want to invest." He was still kind of like, "Okay," and a bit aggressive in the customer call to get this. But then we followed up after I talked to him, and I ended up investing a little bit of money into them. I love these devices! I love these things where it's like a small piece of commodity hardware plus advanced machine learning equals potentially massive new output. I can go into some random ideas on how I would use this, but I'll stop here.

Sam Parr

So, this is called **Neurocity**. We gotta make sure we let everyone know it's called Neurocity. Their website is [neurocity.co](http://neurocity.co). Their website is so awesome! When I'm on this, it... okay, so it's basically what this kind of looks like. It looks like a set of headphones, but you don't put it on your ear; you put it up on your head a little bit. It costs, I think, $900, and they claim that they manage your focus with music. They minimize distractions, shift your focus, and hack your flow. This is a brilliant website! I almost would buy this just because it looks so mysterious... is the right word, maybe.

Furqan Rydhan

I mean, it's definitely something new and early. When people say, "Hey, we're going to manage your flow state," we all kind of call bullshit on it, right? You're like, "Wait, how are you going to do that? How are you going to hack my body?" You get a lot of snake oil in the world, but this device can for sure detect when I'm focused. It can detect when I'm calm at different points. I've programmed it so that when I have it connected to my computer, I can move my desktop around. You know, I basically wanted to see, "Can I open Brave or Chrome? Can I open an application by thinking about something?" And I can do that. That's miraculous to me.

Shaan Puri

the thing you

Furqan Rydhan

It was something I read about in a book somewhere, and then it was in *The Jetsons*. But it didn't really exist.

Sam Parr

can you really do that so you could think to yourself like move the cursor and it works

Shaan Puri

do you think move it do you think open chrome what do you actually think of to get it to happen

Furqan Rydhan

Yeah, so basically, I programmed it to these kinds of thinking of motor functions. They have these preprogrammed like 40 or 80 motor functions, such as push, pull, move your right arm, move your left arm, and move your index finger. You don't actually move it; you just think about it. Then, you do a little training step. It tells you to think about moving your index finger and then stop thinking about it. It does a little machine learning loop, like 20 iterations or whatever. Again, this is a developer device still, but I can get it to run some arbitrary code when I think about my index. Exactly. Gotcha, gotcha.

Sam Parr

dude I'm so excited to give this to my dog or to like an 8

Furqan Rydhan

dog go to sleep boom

Shaan Puri

Well, we used to make fun of Craig Clements when he came on here. His best idea was "dog VR," and we thought that was the stupidest idea. But this is actually better because it would be a way to communicate with a dog if you could get the dog to train it. But I don't know, that seems a little difficult. Alright, forgot that. So that was the first one, which is **cheap commodity hardware** that now lets a software programmer make hardware without having to have a lab and do all that physical material engineering, like making motherboards. Alright, that's one trend. What are some others?

Furqan Rydhan

So, the second trend... I mean, we're all into this, but obviously the DeFi crypto world has a lot of fun activity happening there. I've just, you know, it's one of those things where you see it happening and you want to be a part of it. You read about it, and you're building stuff. But, you know, I was working with you and then I was working at Twitch. I hadn't really built anything in this space. So, just recently, I would say in the last six months, I've been writing fluidity code, trying to think about what kind of applications to build and what's interesting. My entire view of everything is that there are these massive hype cycles. Then, these hype cycles go away, which is obviously what happens, right? When this massive hype happens, there's a stopping point where the real building begins and the real value is created. All of these industries flow like that—VR, crypto, these kinds of hardware spaces, machine learning back in the day. So, that's where we are in the decentralized and crypto world right now. All I want to do is build very valuable, legitimate products that serve a real purpose and kind of go from there. You know?

Shaan Puri

And so, let's talk about crypto real quick. So you can apologize now for not including me in the Ether crowd sale, which I know you were on top of at the time. Did you buy in the actual crowd sale or right after?

Furqan Rydhan

I bought a little bit after the crowd sale, but it was like single-digit dollars. It was very cheap. I'm pretty sure I said it out loud at lunch, you know?

Shaan Puri

You did! I remember you saying that, and I was like, "I remember thinking Ethereum is a dumb name." That's a weird name; normal people aren't going to want to own Ethereum. That seemed weird. Literally, that was my dumbass thinking. Then, every year since then, I sort of think about, "Why don't I just listen more to Furkan? Why don't I just do the things he says and stop thinking for myself a little bit?" So that's kind of where I'm at. You initially bought some crypto. I remember sitting next to you while you were buying random stuff, good stuff, and then the shitcoins, just fucking around, seeing what's what. Then you sort of showed me what's going on in DeFi. For people who don't know, here's how I'll explain DeFi, and then you tell me what you would say. Today, there's the normal financial system. There's a stock market, there's banks you can drive to, park, and walk into. When you walk into that bank, you can say, "Hey, here's my money. Store it safely for me. Put it in a savings account and give me some interest, maybe. Or I'd like to take a loan out." Then they say, "Great! Let's just decide if you are creditworthy, if you can get a loan, and how much you can get." So that's the traditional financial system, like in a nutshell, the simplified version. There's a parallel universe where all those same things have been built through code now instead of by law. We used to write down contracts and put them in... you know, lawyers would write the contracts, and now programmers write the contracts. You can do all those same things. You've shown me tools and had me set up where you take your crypto money, and you can put it in a savings account and earn 5% to 10% a year in yield. So you earn much better interest rates. You can lend it to other people, or you can take loans for things. So explain kind of like maybe what part is most interesting to you, or give an example of something you've done with crypto where you're actually not just speculating in the DeFi space, but you're actually using this alternate financial system.

Sam Parr

and sean what's a what what's an example of what what you were just saying what's like your favorite platform for that

Shaan Puri

So, Furcon showed me a couple of things that I like. One is **Compound**. Compound Finance is a website you go to, and what it says is, "Hey, great! You have Ether, and you don't want to sell your Ether." So, I did a very simple loan. I went to Compound Finance, staked—or basically put up—Ether that I own. I said, "Great, here's, let's say, 100 Ether." Then it says, "Great! You can lend that out to other people who want to borrow Ether," and you can earn this percentage annually. If I go to Wells Fargo, I'm going to get 0.0001% a year on my savings account. Whereas with this, it was like you can get 7% a year or 5% a year. It's actually a decent interest rate. Or I could say, "Great! I put my 100 Ether up, and I'd like to borrow some of this other coin." So, what I did, just as a test of the system, was I said, "Can I get a loan off my cryptocurrency?" I put up Ether to borrow USDC, which is a stablecoin made by Coinbase. USDC is supposed to always be $1. I got USDC, then I went to Coinbase and sold my USDC for dollars. I said, "Wow! I just put up—basically showed that I have this Ether. I locked up Ether into this account temporarily, as long as I want, and I got a US dollar loan that I could go use to buy, you know, a pizza right now if I want to." I thought, "Well, that's pretty sweet!" I never had to talk to a banker, fill out an application, or do a credit check. I didn't have to do anything, and I was able to get a loan. Now, what a lot of people do is they put Ether up, get a loan of some stablecoin, and use the stablecoin to buy more Ether or to buy some other coin, kind of like leveraged gambling. There are other things you can do, but I just did a really simple one that Furcon was showing me.

Furqan Rydhan

Yeah, and I think lending is a big part of it. I mean, lending is dangerous in many ways. My first reaction to any lending situation is that it's bad. People often take loans and leverage them. Now, if you take a loan with purpose behind it and you're a long-term holder of something, that makes a lot of sense. The reason I find DeFi exciting is that you can take all the rules that you've seen get destroyed in the 2008 crash or the dot-com crash and put a contract in place where that can't happen. For example, there's this protocol called Liquidity Protocol. It's a new protocol that offers 0% interest loans on your ETH. You can put up ETH and take a 0% loan. What they've done is create a system with a stability pool that will liquidate people if they go below their collateralization ratio. So, what happens with banks...

Shaan Puri

explain that in simple terms so okay

Furqan Rydhan

so so how do I how

Shaan Puri

How do they ensure that this loan eventually gets paid back? They're not doing a credit check, and they're not asking for my W-2 income. How do they do that?

Furqan Rydhan

So, you put in, let's say, 100 Ethereum. You put in some amount that has a dollar value today, and they let you take out their token called LUSD. It's like a USD stablecoin. Now you have the stablecoin, and you can trade it for other stablecoins or other coins, or take it to Coinbase, using whatever mechanism, and kind of get it to dollars. What you've done is put up your Ethereum, and you have to maintain what they call a collateralization ratio. You have to be over the lending amount by at least 10%. Otherwise, you're going to get liquidated. The action of liquidating means somebody will go and take your Ethereum and buy it for a discount because they have to do this liquidation task. You know, that's the risk you're taking by putting this collateral up, like you would in another case.

Shaan Puri

Now, it's like this: if I take out a mortgage and can't make my payments because I lost my job, the bank has my house as collateral. They can foreclose on my house. It's the same concept, but instead of a physical house, it's whatever collateral you put up initially to get the loan - your stake.

Sam Parr

right

Furqan Rydhan

And so, the danger is I put up Ethereum. The price of Ethereum is very volatile; it goes down a lot. I was aggressive with my ratio and I kind of went below this number, and I got liquidated. I still have my loan amount, right? So, there are obviously risks with these platforms, like there would be a risk of buying an investment property and not being able to make rent on it or not being able to make the mortgage. What I like about it is that underneath, in 2008, the bankers just went to the government and whoever else and were like, "We need new rules right now. We're dying." So, you kind of invent new rules. This rule is built into the protocol. If you're below this ratio, some liquidator can come in and be the liquidator. You don't get a choice of, "Hey, is this going to happen or not?" It's encoded. When you build financial products with directly encoded values, it makes it so that it's going to happen whether it's a good situation for you or not, whether they like how you presented yourself or not. Having gone through bad times as a founder and having bad credit, I don't have good credit today. Still, I have a lot of money in the bank, and sometimes I can't get a credit card because my credit still sucks from whatever happened 7 years ago or 5 years ago, however long ago those problems were. If one little thing happens, like I had a small credit card that I forgot about—it's literally a $300 thing. I missed some yearly payment fee because, you know, every year you have that fee. Man, it showed up on my credit. Oh, that's a huge thing! It doesn't matter who you really are or what you can do; that financial system sucks. If you have the ability to do some of these actions, I believe you should be able to do them. That's the most interesting thing about DeFi: it's permissionless. So, that's it.

Shaan Puri

The general overview is a good starting point because most people don't really understand what this is. How does this work? Let's get specific. Are you doing anything cool with DeFi? Do you have any good trades going? Are you making money doing this? Are you actually doing anything in the DeFi space right now?

Furqan Rydhan

I think Uniswap is probably one of my favorite companies in this space. I think we've talked about this a little bit, but what Uniswap did—and I'll give you kind of the simple version of it—is usually when you wanted to trade two assets, you had to create a marketplace. So, let's say I have one Sean coin and I want to sell it. I need Sam to show up and buy that Sean coin, right? If there aren't two sides and they don't agree on the price, this trade won't happen. What Uniswap did—and I think there were some others before it, but Uniswap has become the biggest player in this space—is they created a one-sided trading market. A buyer or seller can show up and they're trading against what's called a liquidity pool. Investors come in and put in both sides of the trade marketplace. For example, one Ethereum and $3,000 would create a liquidity pool. Then, Sean, you can just show up and say, "I want to sell," and you're going to sell against this pool. You don't need another side; the pool is always the other side. They've created a simple algorithm they call an Automated Market Maker (AMM), where they want to keep the price close. Depending on how much liquidity there is and how much you're willing to sell, it's going to slip away from that amount, and that's where the price movements will happen.

Shaan Puri

And you were in those pools. You were saying, "Ah, I'm making good money by being the liquidity pool." Give us... what was the yield you could get? Let's say you put $1,000 in. What were you making being the liquidity provider?

Furqan Rydhan

So, obviously, in the earlier days of Uniswap, the pool yields were very high. You could see a 100%+ yield on fairly good assets. It's really important to think about the two sides of this market. If you're in the Ethereum and US Dollar pool, when Ethereum is going up, you're losing some of it because you're giving it away to receive dollars. If you want to hold a lot of Ethereum in the long run, it doesn't really make sense to be in some of these pools that are unaligned. I always try to find things that are connected together, like two stablecoin pools: a USDC and DAI pool that does anywhere from 8% to 15%. That's been on the low end of the spectrum for the last year+. I mean, I'm holding effectively what we'll call dollars on both sides of the puzzle. People need to trade between these assets, and I'm willing to be the trade partner for them, along with a lot of other people. You basically get a little bit of a fee, and that's where the liquidity pool makes money. Holding dollars on either side feels good if there's something very well aligned with Ethereum. So, if you believe Ethereum and Bitcoin will flow upwards together, that could be a very good pool for you. You could take what they call wrapped Bitcoin and Ethereum and be in that pool. Uniswap made all this happen from the consumer side to facilitate a one-sided trade, but also as an investor to come into a liquidity pool and say, "Hey, I'm willing to put up both of these assets, and I want to make some fees as people do this."

Shaan Puri

Okay, so that's good. I think it's probably a little too complicated for the general audience at this point. So, Sam, what do you think?

Sam Parr

you want to take I'm wearing a harvard shirt that's about it

Furqan Rydhan

oh sorry my bad

Sam Parr

yeah he he said he was giving you a harvard skull yeah it's just a t shirt alright

Furqan Rydhan

so I got one more

Sam Parr

and anyone can buy it anyone can buy it

Shaan Puri

I got

Furqan Rydhan

One more in a different space that I think Sam will love. But, you know, Sean, I told you about this book I read about vertical farming. And, you know, basically, I read...

Sam Parr

"Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. You guys just were talking about crypto stuff and then he just said 'I've got something I think Sam will like... farming?' That [didn't] set off that big of a red light to you?"

Shaan Puri

I liked it too. This was one of our cool shit hours. He was like, "I came in thinking he's gonna tell me about, you know, WBTC," and I'm like, "Oh, fuck, I gotta go look up all these acronyms." He's like, "No, vertical farming." And I was like, "Oh, brilliant! Tell me about it." Right? Because Fercan's got a wide range. Some days, I remember early on when we were working together, he was like, "When Uber had just kind of gotten big, I'm thinking... I got a bunch of friends who are kind of like, you know, not doing a whole lot nowadays. I'm thinking about just renting like five cars and just having them run a fleet. I think I could just make X dollars doing zero work by running my own little taxi fleet on Uber." Or he was like, "You know, there's these... I forgot what it was... float spas or cryo tanks." Yeah, what was that one that you were really into?

Furqan Rydhan

Yeah, I... you know, the cryotanks are something that, if you have bad joints like me, it's like a night and day difference on how your body feels. And so, you know, I still want to put one in, and I think in the lab that I'm spinning up over here, we'll get to that probably at some point.

Sam Parr

But wait what's the what's this what's said lab

Furqan Rydhan

I'm building a hardware and robotics lab here in San Francisco as a part of F.inc. The idea is that software can be developed in a coffee shop or a living room, but you can't really build any of these off-the-shelf hardware products in your living room. What I want to do is bring together a lot of founders, or future founders, who are interested in building these ideas. I'm going to have a machine shop, an electronics shop, and a robotics shop in this facility, which will be in an iconic location. My goal is to gather a bunch of talented, hungry people under one roof, creating great energy and building together. You see these companies form out of universities because they have two things: they have a shop that you can access mostly for free, and they have people in the shop that turn into your community. As a kid, I could just show up and stand next to you while you were doing something. You wouldn't give me a weird look; instead, you'd say, "Oh, you want to know how to use this? No? Okay, let me show you." That little bit might be the difference between you being willing to try and getting into a field or not.

Sam Parr

I'm hoping

Furqan Rydhan

to support that what was that

Sam Parr

where

Furqan Rydhan

where in the city

Sam Parr

you said it's iconic location can you say where

Furqan Rydhan

So we're looking at a place at Fort Mason in San Francisco. It's not complete yet, but that's kind of like, for me, the iconic locations are: - I can see the Golden Gate Bridge - I can be on the water We've explored stuff on the piers in general, in Crissy Field, Fort Mason... These locations, when I go there, I get excited, you know? Like, going to Monkey Inferno was a fantastic office, but now outside it wasn't that great. SoMa, Mission... these areas, I don't get excited when I go there.

Sam Parr

and I

Furqan Rydhan

usually don't go there too much how much

Sam Parr

are you willing to invest in to to sink into this thing to make it interesting it's gonna be

Furqan Rydhan

A lot. It'll probably cost about half a million dollars a year just to even have the base building in place. My guess is it'll be double that, just from the people that I want to bring in and the kind of investments I want to make and what I want to support. I actually ran a plastic fabrication shop and a small machine shop a long time ago, so I've done a lot of this. I've welded and worked on cars. I have a lot of interest in this area, and I'm more excited to have my own CNC and my own machines and things to work with as well.

Sam Parr

dude you're so cool yeah

Furqan Rydhan

So, Sam, the reason I said you're going to like this idea and company is because I don't listen to very many podcasts. However, I do listen to this podcast. This is probably the only one I listen to. This is not...

Shaan Puri

clitizen baby we're taking that testimonial to the moon

Sam Parr

and I'm

Furqan Rydhan

not even just pampering you guys sean I mean you know me I'm not gonna tell you like it is but I really do listen to you guys to

Shaan Puri

This channel, I'm pretty sure you didn't listen at the beginning when I was just interviewing folks. Now, it's about ideas and shooting the shit. Sam's here; he's listening now.

Furqan Rydhan

Yeah, and so you talked about like, "Hey, you know, you just sold the company." By the way, congratulations to you as well. And you were talking about how you want to get your hands kind of into things, and you know, you want to do some of that. So I was like, "Oh, okay, if I ever get back on the pod, I'm gonna tell Sam about this idea." And so I'm...

Sam Parr

by the way I'm sitting here taking notes like I'm just writing all this down

Furqan Rydhan

And so, I read this book about vertical farming. I think... I don't remember the name of the book, but basically, the first couple of chapters really talk about the major problem in the U.S. as well as the world. The world went from **3 billion** people a hundred years ago to almost **8 billion** now. That's a pretty massive difference in the number of people on the planet. You're starting to see effects, like the wildfires here in California; you hear about all these things. What's happening is that as you start farming in soil, you basically destroy the soil. After some time, you get no yield out of it. So, about **10 to 15 years ago**, vertical farming became very popular as a way to put food production closer to cities. For example, New York City requires millions of acres outside of it to support its food needs. Wouldn't it make sense for that to be in the city? Well, how do you do that? You could put it in buildings, use UV lights, and drive water through it using hydroponics. It got really popular, and a lot of people invested in it. So, it's kind of like the...

Shaan Puri

For someone like me, who has zero nature knowledge, how would you paint a mental picture of what a vertical farm is?

Sam Parr

bro have you never grown weed in your in your apartment

Shaan Puri

no I don't smoke weed I never grew weed don't do drugs I don't do crime

Sam Parr

I don't either, but I feel like every 16-year-old has at least grown one pot plant in bed high school.

Furqan Rydhan

Yeah, so, you know, you think about plants in the ground because they need nutrients from the soil. But really, they just need some of those nutrients. You could just put them... as long as you deliver them to the roots, it's going to pull that in. So, people figured out, "Hey, you can grow stuff without soil." And that's a huge unlock because it doesn't have to go in the ground. So, the next thing is to use...

Shaan Puri

water right

Furqan Rydhan

Correct. You use water, and there have been more advances now where it's not just water, but it's like, you know, I think they call it aeroponics. It's just misted, right? So it's kind of like more yield against the root. You still have to power it with sunlight. You could put it inside a warehouse, but you need sunlight. So big UV lights were kind of the strategy. Phase 1 of vertical farming was, "We're going to put them in high rises. We're going to take some floors and turn them into a farm floor, and that should support the building." These are normally the pictures that you see when people are dreaming about vertical farming. It's like a giant building where a bunch of them are farms, and it looks cool. But in practice, it was kind of a warehouse, like a data center, and you know, that's where it ended up living. I think that's fine. The reason these guys got excited is that they're called Nebula Farms. What they do is they basically have direct-to-consumer lettuce, microgreens, and tomatoes. That's what they sell you. They started kind of in a different phase, like, "Hey, we're building cool tech." We've been in this zone before; we were excited about computer vision and doing this thing. But actually, along the way, they realized, "Well, we don't really want to license our thing. We can't franchise this. We can't do all these other ideas we had." People actually just want this. What if we could put up a farm near you? I think they have their first farm in Idaho, and they just have a monthly subscription to get lettuce and tomatoes. These things show up at your door. I mean, today they do same-day harvest to delivery because they've kind of taken the process down to this simple thing. They have this basic farm, and you can see some of the pictures that they have on their website of what their farm looks like. It looks like a little data center; it's like a rack of lettuce. There's a little light that will kind of rotate and give it sunlight, and on the top, there's a mister that kind of, like, you know, makes...

Sam Parr

sure what's this called

Furqan Rydhan

what's this called called nebulum farms

Sam Parr

nebulum b u

Furqan Rydhan

LLA [Likely referring to "Vertical"] farms... You know, if you ever get a chance to go taste some vertical farmed lettuce, you will notice the taste difference. It is not the same lettuce. You're like, "Wait, lettuce has taste?" It is good, crispy... It actually makes a huge difference in the quality of product. I believe they can make this happen, you know? Same-day harvest to delivery for a large part of America.

Shaan Puri

So, what they're on their website... It says "less water." You use 98% less water, and in places like California where there are droughts and water shortages, that's a big deal. No pesticides because it's an indoor, sort of controlled environment.

Furqan Rydhan

and no soils no bugs right that's why you don't need the pesticide

Shaan Puri

Right, it says "less human handling." I don't know about that. So, always fresh. Basically, the goal would be, "Hey, here's an eco-friendly thing, but also this produce tastes better." And you've actually had it. So, what's the no bullshit? Like, if I didn't know, in a blind taste test, would I be able to tell the difference between these two or what?

Furqan Rydhan

Yeah, and we should do this. You know, there are a couple of other brands that have gotten popular that you can pick up in stores. I think there's one called Plenty that shows up in stores. I believe there are a lot of people who have wanted to do this, but if the business isn't going to work, the tech is not going to hold it, right? That's the same thing as software. This problem exists everywhere. So, they're building some emerging tech thing. You can't keep talking about how great the tech is. The direct-to-consumer angle resonated with me because it's like, okay, I've seen grocery delivery. I've seen some of these things where you could get fruit in a box. Well, if you can produce the fruit yourself, like you just have a machine that can produce fruit, that's the vertical farm. Why don't you become the biggest farm in America really quickly by kind of going city to city and doing that? You've seen Uber do that. You've seen all these other companies. You could literally build the biggest farm in America now, right?

Shaan Puri

so so I just started just now

Sam Parr

The way that he was describing it, I'm like, "Alright, they're mailing plants." That's not that... I mean, yeah, it's like different lettuce. It's like a candle; it's like those candles that have a ring in the bottom. When you melt candles, it's like a sticky novelty type of thing. It's cool once or twice, but the way that you're describing it now, I think, Birkhand, what you're really good at is something I'm not as good at, which is you're really good at breaking your frame and changing... I don't know if I'm even phrasing this correctly, but kind of changing the whole paradigm. Which is like, "No, no, no, we're gonna build the largest farm in the world." And now when you say that, I think, "Man, so you're just gonna have to buy all this land and have this massive, huge field." But you're kind of saying, "Oh, but by the way, by farm, I mean it's like these little small things in every convenience store in America." Do you know what I mean?

Furqan Rydhan

Yeah, and that's kind of like the trade-off here. You know, a farm that's in a 50,000 square foot building might replace maybe 1,000 or tens of thousands of acres of land. Vertical farming does many things. It reduces water usage, but it also compacts how much space you need to do the action. Instead of buying large masses of land, you can buy warehouses or facilities closer to the city center and serve that area. If you can be near a city like Austin or San Francisco, you can efficiently serve that city with a smaller landmass.

Sam Parr

Yeah, that's so cool! And dude, like, I think what you're really good at is that when I'm around you, I feel so inspired. I want to bring something up in a second that's related to this. But basically, you are the type of person... I hate when we talk about San Francisco. It's this lovely place everyone needs to go, but the type of people like you, there was a large density of that in San Francisco. I am not at all naturally like you, but I felt I improved and changed my opinion on so many things after hanging out with people like you. I don't know what we call that. I think Sean is a little bit more like you than I am, but we also have a handful of friends that are like that. They just... you guys think about stuff in such a way where maybe it's like when I challenge myself to come up with an idea or think about the possibilities of X, Y, and Z, I put these constraints on myself. I think, "Well, there's no way I could pull this off because that technology for this doesn't work," or "I'm not good enough to do this," or "But that's... it's always been done X." Whereas when you think of stuff, you're really good at being open-minded and defaulting to, "Well, let's actually... that is kind of interesting. Let's play that out." You don't have these constraints of being held back that a lot of normal people like me have. I think... do you know what I mean, Sean?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I think it's simpler than that. I think for him, you know, everybody uses their own frame of reference, their own lens, and he looks at things through the lens of a technologist. So I think... I remember sitting down next to you and being like, "How did you get the way you are?" And you're like, "Well, I remember when I was 5, my dad brought home like a printer and we put it together or something." Right? Wasn't that the story? Like a computer or a printer when you were like 5 or 6 years old?

Furqan Rydhan

Yes, since my earliest memory, it was an XT computer. It was kind of like, you know, not even DOS yet. It was just a screen, and you put it together. We booted it up, and I remember he had a disk that had you type like "auto exec." I was just a kid, and I knew how to type A-U-T-O-E-X-E-C. If I pressed enter, I got to this simulation football game. That's all I could do. You pick a play, and it runs it for you. You don't even actually play the game. But I remember that as one of my earliest memories. I mean, I got started really young. I worked at a dot-com when I was 15, and just like my hobbies ended up being very valuable. I wasn't a musician where I would have had to make it really big. I was into computers and programming and doing things like that. Those things just happened to have become very valuable, especially in the Bay Area, and that kind of lent itself to a lot of opportunity.

Sam Parr

also something that you're gonna do with this what do you what do you call in your space again

Furqan Rydhan

we call it founders inc that's like the company name

Sam Parr

So I want to tell a quick story about that. Back in 2013... Sean, I can't see your face so I can't tell if you're on board with this story, but... yeah, do it. You are... Back in 2013, so basically Sean, when did you start as the Mucky Inferno? Like, the guy in...

Shaan Puri

I joined at the end of 2012 so basically 2013 is kind of the actual beginning

Sam Parr

so around that time I was working out of the I was I just sold something and I I didn't make a a lot of money but like a $100 let's say and I was looking to start something else and I found this guy named dave and he had a thing called founders dojo which was basically he rented an office it he I don't know dave had a business that probably did half a1000000 in sales and he probably profited $400,000 so he wasn't a rich rich guy but he had this office that he could spend 3 k on a month and he let me and like 8 other people come and work out of his office and he we heard about it through friends of friends like hey there's a thing called founder dojo they're letting like people just work there and it's a dingy office it wasn't nice it was maybe 6 500 square feet and then down the street was the same thing but it was far fancier it was called monkey inferno it was pretty much the exact same thing but like way better it was this guy named michael birch who was on the podcast if you look up the hippie who made a $1,000,000,000 that sean did that episode and it was a guy who started and sold the company for 100 of 1,000,000 or close to a $1,000,000,000 and his like project was the same exact thing it was nice so you know they had like you guys probably had like 100 of 1,000 of dollars worth of interior decorating and and it was like really fancy but it was the same thing basically of like nerds and like weirdos and misfits we all would come to these spaces and I would hang out at munkingford all the time and you guys sometimes came to our thing and we would we would dork out to the stuff that people would make fun of like dave loved meerkat meerkat was basically a live streaming app which kinda like was the early technology and early behavior for even like a like a clubhouse or whatever and he would do this thing called a marathon he called it and he would meerkat for 24 hours straight he would be in the office meerkatting for 24 hours straight and he would meet these other dorks and they would come and fly into our office and then it was just so weird like we did all these weird shit one time we created this thing called what do we call it coffee coffee rush we called it and you click a button and you get coffee inside of like 20 minutes wherever you are in san francisco and all these just nerdy dorky little projects but it was like the best time of my life and it was the most one of the most formative it was some some of the best experiences I ever had as it relates to business and just like becoming a man and like tinkering with all these new things and having an open mind and I think what you're setting up for khan is like the next obviously just like the next iteration of that and I'm so fortunate that I've had people like you and and you guys have burch michael burch and I had dave groesblatt I'm so fortunate that people like you guys exist in this world because these little silly things that like are fun and like that seems stupid on the outside and the fact that there's these grown adults who are thankfully wealthy enough and willing to bet their money to do this stuff it sounds outrageous and it sounds like a movie and I'm so happy I was part of it and it made such a huge difference it's like the fact that these exist is it's a movie

Furqan Rydhan

A hundred percent. And those places you talk about, I know David Grossblatt as well. I used to go to another place growing up, Hacker Dojo, in Mountain View. Even growing up in Silicon Valley, you didn't immediately have a network. I don't know, like a bunch of VCs just from growing up here. That's not actually how it worked. My block didn't have VCs on it; it was just normal people. You really didn't find people like yourself. The internet changed a lot, right? It allowed people to connect with each other and find each other. But, you know, the in-person interactions operate differently. It's a lot more ad hoc. I remember you being at the Monkey Inferno and a lot of other people that we would have work out of there. It was cool because you could just walk by, strike up a random conversation, talk about something, and maybe it resulted in nothing. Sometimes, it would actually stick with you and be really important. At Applovid, it felt the same way early on when we were doing these random ideas. It was like, "Oh, we're just a bunch of misfits together here that are just going to go on this journey." That energy is just hard to replace. It was really fun, and every time it's been there, it's been instrumental for me. Conversations during the lunch table at Monkey and Fernando shaped a lot about how people think. What are ways to conduct yourself? Just things even outside of tech, right? You interact with a lot of different people, and you could bring good energy to it. I think that's really critical. I've been on this mission slightly before COVID to kind of build this facility. But then when COVID happened, you know, obviously, it's good in terms of new buildings, new opportunities, cheaper rent here in the city. Great! But I think this thing is kind of necessary for a lot of people who are in this builder phase. They might not be a founder yet; they might not go raise a bunch of money. They just want to build some stuff and hack on it. I'm willing to kind of take a bet to build that facility.

Sam Parr

And on this podcast, we talk a ton about buying businesses. We almost get to the point where it sounds like we're a bunch of banker-type people, where it's like, "Oh, that's an interesting opportunity." But the coolest thing I've ever done, and the most fun I've ever had, is just dorking out with people who were like me. It's like, "Oh, this is kind of funny. This is silly. We could do that." It all starts with, "This is so stupid, it's so fun." Sometimes it turns into really cool, amazing stuff. I think it's fun to remember that this is how a lot of things can start. Or maybe it's not that it should be, but it can be that way, which I think is better.

Furqan Rydhan

Yeah, organic... organic is awesome, right? It just means that we kind of sat around, brainstormed some ideas, and shared some of our experiences. We tried some things. You need to be able to try things; I think that's really important. For me, growing up, I didn't have a lot of people that I could lean on—people who had done this already or were doing businesses. It was just kind of "fail as you go," take a bunch of scars. Finding people like Adam and Sean was critical for me. I had people I could talk to about business things that maybe I couldn't discuss with others. I just want to take that experience and, let's say, like Sean said earlier, if I could give myself some advice 15 years ago, that's what I feel like I'm kind of building over here.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, there's that cheesy phrase that's great but cheesy: "Be the person you needed when you were a kid" or something like that. It's one of those things that, if everybody actually did it, the world would sort of be a great place. In many ways, I think that's what you're doing. I don't even know what I needed. I sort of had a different journey where I was just kind of on autopilot for like 20 years. I didn't have an entrepreneurial bone in my body. I didn't think about stuff; I just kind of went with the flow. It was pretty... you know, I was trying to do good in school, but I was okay. I wasn't the best, and I wasn't particularly a hard worker. I wasn't doing anything interesting, and I wasn't great socially. I just felt like I kind of woke up when I was 21 years old. That's when I had my first idea for a company, and that's when I started to be more like me. So, I think everybody... okay, why do I do this podcast? Well, I'm not going to say I do it to give back; that's not why I do it. I do it because it's fun. But the side effect of doing it is that the person who is me when they're 18, 17, 16, 20 years old, or even 30... it doesn't even matter how old. If you're kind of in that autopilot phase where you don't feel like you've found your thing or you don't feel excited every day to wake up, then all of a sudden you hear a couple of guys on a podcast shooting the shit. They sound really excited about life; they have great energy and ideas for days. You start to look at yourself and think, "Why don't I see ideas all the time? How are these guys able to come on the podcast two times a week?" So, what does that do? It proliferates more people that are like me. That's what I want. I am the way I want to be, so hopefully, I can, you know, incept a bunch of other people in their brains that maybe they can too.

Furqan Rydhan

pick that up

Shaan Puri

Right, a podcast is a vehicle to do that. You're doing the same thing. You know, when you were growing up, you were messing around with hardware, cars, and business when you were 15 or 16 years old. You were just experimenting with computers, and a bunch of people helped you out, right? Your dad brought home the computer, or I think you told me about a guy in your neighborhood who had the car stuff that you could use to work on cars if you didn't have that hardware. You picked up those hobbies and you just followed them. You doubled down, tripled down, even though that wasn't the common path. The common path was to finish college, get a job, get married, have kids, whatever. Everybody has this path that kind of resembles what your parents and society throw at you. You went off that path. I think when you did, you probably didn't have as much guidance as you're able to provide to that next wave. You can help them figure out where they should go to do bigger and better things because you know how to knock down a few of those walls for them or with them.

Furqan Rydhan

Yeah, and I like how you phrased it. The cheesy phrase is obviously interesting, but I don't think "giving back" is the right way to frame this. It's not charity, right? Like, obviously, I'm building a business. I do believe that in the long run, I want to make money with this business. The things I'm going to invest in are going to pay off for me monetarily as well. But as a side effect, I do believe that, you know, kind of like your podcast, you're going to inspire a lot of people. I would love to inspire the next 1,000 builders or founders, however you want to phrase it. I think that side effect is fantastic. I don't think that business has to be detached from some side effect. If I wanted to make it a charity, I'd make it a nonprofit, right? That would be the way to go. I think there's a lot of benefit, and a lot of people will benefit hopefully from it. Ideally, not just because of me. Hopefully, it's more like... I don't know what the Discord has become. It's like founders helping each other. That's the best version of this. If I could be maybe the person that can first create the circle, then awesome! That would be the hope.

Sam Parr

over here

Shaan Puri

What's the biggest common mistake or trap you're seeing when you have those young entrepreneurs in the Discord working on their projects? What is the advice you keep giving over and over again that you feel like is the common mistake, the common trap that they're falling into?

Furqan Rydhan

I think it's always about what you are focused on. So, like, if you're a builder, you're probably spending a lot of your energy on building. If you're in a situation where most of these companies will kind of die in the market, not attack, there are some challenges sometimes. But even as a technology person, I would not spend too much time on technology. Sean, you experienced this firsthand. How many times do I say, "We'll just hack it in," and all the engineers are like, "Fringe!" It's like, well, we have to win this market or figure out if this is real or not. If it's not real, we need to move on from this very fast because we're just wasting time, money, energy, and probably your company if we go down the wrong path here. So, it's pretty much always focused on, you know, for me, a lot of the advice is to be more aggressive on growth. Go figure out your market, go understand your customers, and use technology as a weapon for that. It's not the purpose of what you're building. If you're going to sit here and build this technology, somebody else is going to take your market, probably with the same technology, by the way.

Shaan Puri

Sam, I don't know if you have a hard stop, but there's one other topic that I think is interesting that Furkan could talk about. I don't know if you can discuss it, but PAC protocol... or yeah, I don't know if you can talk about that. It's either that or, I think, you know, the way you're setting up the DAO or any DAOs that you're a part of. I think those are interesting. So pick one of those two and then talk about that.

Furqan Rydhan

Yeah, so you know DAO - Decentralized Autonomous Organization. I'll call it a decentralized org because it's a little bit simpler to understand. It's really just kind of like this thing happening in the crypto world where people are forming effectively these partnerships together. They're doing it, you know, on-chain, meaning as like an actual organization that kind of owns this code and things like that. And so... okay.

Shaan Puri

Let me simplify for a second. So, Sam, when you started the hustle, you probably made a Delaware C Corporation, right? You go to Delaware; that's the rule of law. That's kind of where you're going to write down all your articles of incorporation. You chose a C Corporation as the structure of your organization, and that lets you do certain things. You could take investment, you could do this, you could do that. You could also choose an LLC or an S Corporation. You could do it in Nevada or California. So those are the current ways that you start when you have a project where you need a bunch of people to work together and be financially incentivized as a group. Traditionally, you would use a Delaware C Corporation or an LLC or something like that. What he's providing, what he's talking about, is an alternative that's been made. I think the trick here is: what do they let you do that's different than just making it? Why don't I just go to an LLC or a C Corporation in Delaware?

Furqan Rydhan

Well, it lets you, first, detach yourself from the legal entity and how you were kind of having your stake of ownership and governance of the company. So, like, you know, we talked a lot, Sean, before about how it kind of sucks that companies are top-heavy. Everybody's putting a lot of energy and effort into it. Yes, you might need a person responsible for making these choices, but wouldn't it be cool if... You know, a bunch of people on the internet basically took that idea and said, "Wouldn't it be cool if we made a company that could be owned by everybody equally?" You could do things like voting, managing the treasury, or issuing new tokens or shares to people. You could incentivize them however you wanted. For example, if you bring on some people to help you market, like a big celebrity, you can issue some governance to them. They could be a part of this, and you can align incentives between investors, founders, the community, the market—whoever you want.

Shaan Puri

so here's here's an example of one right that you've you've shown me so there's this thing called the lao have you ever heard of this sam so the lao l a o what it is is it's a venture fund but instead of like if you go to sequoia sequoia's got you know let's say the gps the general partners it's got the managing director maybe and it's got then the associates and the analysts so it's like a traditional company it's like a pyramid at the top is the people in charge and what the dao is is basically here's a fund you put your money in for however much money you put in you get certain number of tokens tokens are like shares and and then there's nobody specifically in charge and the fund basically can receive proposals so there's just they have a website you can pitch them the pitch goes in everybody gets it in their inbox everybody votes yes or no based on how many tokens they hold that's their vote that's their weight and then if the majority of the dao has voted yes it gets the the treasury which is the bank account for the for the for the lao we'll pay out that project here's your investment and and then at any time I if I don't like the lao I can just sell my stake sell it to anybody else they could take my spot in the lao and you know now they own they have that share so it's completely liquid at all times whether there's maybe there's been great projects in there and and now these things look really valuable these tokens look more valuable than the initial money that was put in well I can sell out I don't have to wait 10 years for those projects to pan out I can sell out today at 2 at double my money or you know I can say I wanna I wanna have more control I'm gonna buy out more tokens so that I have a greater say in this community because I'm gonna gonna spend a bunch of time and I really wanna make sure my vote my vote matters and basically it ties your vote to your sort of your merits how much value you put in in this case how much money you put in to the lao so they did it as an investment vehicle other people did it as an art collecting vehicle put money in buy art art is owned by the group and you could sell in in whatever so there's these headless companies there's no ceo in a suit at the top that is telling everybody what to do and deciding who gets hired and fired it's just a bunch of shareholders together and you vote based on your shares it's like a you know more like america like a democracy I guess and then yeah there's other variations of that too that I can't even wrap my head around those are the simple ones I've understood there's others that I don't even understand yet

Furqan Rydhan

Yeah, it's very complicated, very, very complex. But this simple version, I like how you phrase it, is kind of like a democracy times a company, you know, mixed in one. Maybe "company" is even the wrong phrasing there, but you know, I'm very fascinated with this. It's a very different pattern. I don't know if it's better or worse than what we've seen traditionally, but it's definitely different, right? I've been wanting to kind of be a part of one, create one, and so I joined a couple. But I'm not, you know, some meaningful stakeholder in it. With a lot of the work that's been going on in NFTs, a lot of popularity, Top Shot is just taking over my friend's group and is very popular. I know you're super into BitClout and some of these other platforms. So, I've been wanting to wrap my head around NFTs. I started talking to a lot of developers and people that are interested in some of these ideas that I had. I found a group of 5 or 6 people that I'm like, "Oh, we're all kind of really into this. Let's make a DAO." I'll put in the first amount of money, and now a couple of my buddies are also putting in some money to get some stake in this. The idea is we're just going to be a group of people that are going to build fun projects in the NFT space. Our goal is, there's a lot of hype right now. We're in that hype cycle, and the hype cycle is going to go away, right? So, same pattern that we talked about before: what are the valuable things that NFTs can do? Let's go build some of these. We have two ideas that we're working on right now as a group. One of them is like Shopify for NFTs. You come in, you click two buttons, and you can create your own. And you know, I'll ask you this, Sean: you've heard a lot about NFTs, you've talked a lot about them. Have you minted your own yet?

Shaan Puri

I have not

Furqan Rydhan

why not

Shaan Puri

I don't know what the hell my NFT would be. So, like, for example, we have a friend, Jack Butcher, who has minted many NFTs now himself. He's a great designer, so he makes like a cool visual design.

Sam Parr

it's like badass art

Shaan Puri

And he's like, "Oh cool, instead of just posting this for free on Twitter for likes, I'll post this on Foundation and I'll sell it." He sold some of these for $60,000-$70,000 each, and so he's made a lot of money this year just basically selling his own kind of... philosophies. He just makes it into a digital poster and sells that digital poster to his fans. So for me, I'm like, "Oh that's cool." If I made an NFT... I don't know, I don't really have that artistic skill. I don't even know what the actual NFT would be. That's kind of my thought.

Furqan Rydhan

And then, but you haven't even just tried one, right? Like, when you first saw Shopify, you went and created a store, right? You didn't have to start a company, you know, or sell something, but you went and did it.

Sam Parr

one's easier than the other 1 you're typing in a user fake your username and password

Furqan Rydhan

yeah exactly I mean if

Shaan Puri

I open the shopify store I also need to put a product there right like I I can't also have a yeah you can

Sam Parr

you can fool around

Furqan Rydhan

try it right and I think that that's the thing that I saw is like a lot of this these worlds defi nfts the dollar value is really big at the top end of it when you go and dig underneath and you're like ah there's only like 5,000 users doing this why is it so little right and there's a lot of interest in doing it really hard to do and I believe that's like one of the biggest opportunities in nfts is just like make make it really easy for people to do it almost as easy as creating a shopify store so that's like product idea 1 like we're gonna basically pay for your gas we're gonna make it so you can deploy your own contract without ever thinking about it you're gonna just click a couple of buttons and get a landing page that you can send to people and they can buy stuff digitally okay we're gonna make it literally that easy so I think that's like accessibility really important second one which is the thing you were talking about which is the pacs protocol like you know there's building products and then there's building protocol and protocols are just like here's an api to go do this thing and nba top shot I mean probably one of the biggest digital products we've seen since pokemon go I'll kinda call it that like that wave of like hype you know reaching some mass market lot lot of interest in it but it's very close right I mean you have to be an nba player to get one you have to kind of like be in the nba you gotta play in this whole ecosystem and you know who knows what they're gonna be worth in the long run but the short run there's a lot of interest there but only the nba is doing it you'll see the other sports teams do it and but the basic idea of creating a pack with some digital items in it or potentially kind of linking to the real world that's kind of what I got really excited about and so we you know as part of nft labs we created this axe protocol which is a protocol to create kind of a you know like a little loot box pack where you can put in digital items and you could put in an image a sound clip for like let's say your guys' podcast or you know kind of access like hey here's a ticket to a vip event that I'm gonna do here or here's a meet and greet or here's my private community and so creators are gonna find a lot of ways to use this if we develop that underneath foundation that they can kind of do all of this and so

Shaan Puri

So, Sam, does that make sense? For example, what we would do is say, "Oh cool, these guys built the infrastructure that makes it easy for us to do the following." We can create these little packs, meaning like a card pack or a box, like a loot box. Basically, it's a mystery box; you don't know what's inside. So you buy one, you open it up, and you're going to get one. You know, maybe you get the crap, or maybe you get the most VIP thing where Sam calls you and coaches you on your business for an hour.

Sam Parr

and and and what's that called what's the what's the domain

Furqan Rydhan

so nftlabs.co is kind of like the main domain

Shaan Puri

and so that's where

Sam Parr

this is

Furqan Rydhan

that's one

Shaan Puri

Of their projects. I think this is pretty cool because they're going to be able to get any influencer like us. So there's one thing to do what Jack's doing, which is... Actually, Jack did this - I don't know if you saw this, Furcom, but he initially was selling a specific NFT. It was like, "Hey, buy this thing," and then he sold three packs with a mystery NFT inside. He didn't know what it was going to be.

Sam Parr

he made many 6 figures I believe yeah

Shaan Puri

And like this mechanic, many games use these loot box mechanics because it's fun. It's fun to go buy the thing and see, do you get the super rare valuable item, or did you get kind of the junk? You either get 60 cents on the dollar, or you get $60 for every dollar you spent. It is like this game of chance. What they're doing is they made a protocol where it's now easy for us to do that. We can make all these packs and put inside, "Hey, tickets to our live show in Austin," or "You get to be put into our private members group," or "Here's a T-shirt," you know, "with our logo," or "here's a Harvard shirt," whatever. We could put any number of things, just stuff them in the boxes, assign some probability, and then it'll generate the packs for us, which I think is pretty sweet.

Furqan Rydhan

Yeah, and you know, I really just think a lot about what the value underneath it is. We have to get to... you know, I mean, art has value. Obviously, the person buying it cares about it, but a lot of people look at that and go, "Wait, these things are selling for like $50,000,000+." And like, what's... you know, it's such a JPEG underneath. But, I mean, a VIP meet and greet when you guys do your roadshow? That's pretty cool, actually. I think a lot of people would be really excited about it. It sucks if you only offer that to the person who has the most money, right? I think these packs give creators and influencers a way to interact with their fans more broadly and say, "All of you guys will get a chance." Here are kind of the things about it. By the way, if there were only 10 VIP meet and greets, we'll make the third-party marketplace like Top Shot or somebody who wants to go spend $100 for it. By the way, you guys will earn a cut of that secondary sale. Plus, somebody who got that, if they didn't want it and they wanted to sell it, they can kind of do that. So you can support both sides of the ecosystem. You can make it kind of fan-friendly, but then you can also get a lot of value out of it too. I don't know, I find creators really interesting because they're kind of an analogy to founders. You know, I don't want to go work at a fan company. I mean, you know, I made it through Twitch, but it's not... it's not the right environment for me, right? It's not where I'm going to thrive. It's not where I'm going to be excited. And I think creators have the same thing.

Shaan Puri

I saw a great idea on this. The founder of Replit tweeted this out. He goes, "There are a bunch of engineers who work at FAANG companies. They make great salaries, and they’re kind of bored. They want to go to a startup, but the compensation difference is pretty big. Maybe they have a family, or it's just hard to walk away from a guaranteed $500,000 to $600,000 a year to go work for one-fifth or one-fourth of that at a startup that may or may not make it." He goes, "Somebody should just create a fund that bridges the difference." So what it does is it basically says, "Great, we will even out that difference." You get $300,000 instead of, let's say, $600,000, and it's an income share agreement. You pay us back with stock from the startup. So you give up a little bit of the stock from the startup to make back the cash difference. In doing so, you would create a port. You would help more people who today can't leave their salary to go to a startup. You'd help the startup not have to just burn more money hiring that person. You sit in between, and by providing that, you would get shares in pretty much every startup that you wanted to provide this with. So if you thought these 100 startups were great, you could basically say, "Great, you're all eligible for this kind of income share agreement that we do, where if you hire somebody and they want a higher salary, we'll front that salary in exchange for stock." Hopefully, this would bring more talent into the startup workforce.

Furqan Rydhan

I thought that was

Shaan Puri

A pretty clever idea: a way to get shares in all the companies that you want shares in, but that you can't invest in directly.

Furqan Rydhan

Yeah, that's really interesting. I don't know, I think people should just... you know, ideally, people can do the thing that they enjoy. They wake up every day excited, whether they have to drive to work, work from home, or wherever it is. If you can do that, that's a big unlock in your life. A lot of people don't get that opportunity. Early on in my career, I just made those trades, no matter how financially painful or misguided it might have seemed at the time. I just wanted to work on things that I was excited about. And when you went to Applovin...

Shaan Puri

when you went to applovin you had another job offer right what was the difference there

Furqan Rydhan

yeah so I had met this guy jack levin I think he was like you know very early at Google he was responsible for you know kind of a lot of google's infrastructure tricks early on like how they really scaled it and some of the ways they win is really his responsibility and he is was working on this company I think it was called yfrog it was it was like a photo sharing type thing I think they had run another product on I think it was photo bucket something like that they had done some big stuff in the photo space they were doing really well they needed some engineers I was an engineer at the time and I could basically come in and learn a lot from this very technical person seemed really sharp he asked me these questions that like got my brain going in a good way like you know I have very specific questions like how do you set up your desktop and like my desktop is very particular and he wanted to know every detail and I was like ah this guy gets it this guy gets me in the same way and then I met adam and adam was like very different obviously very impressive as just a ceo and a person but like the conversation was different the vibe was different 1 was in like los gatos 1 was in palo alto just a little bit of a different area but when I when I talked to adam I was like oh this guy I could go to a baseball game with him I could hang out with him he seems cool he seems very hungry they don't have a clue what they're doing right now like you know they're shutting down an idea they don't know what the next idea necessarily is gonna be I think there's gonna be a lot more fun the rate of learning is gonna be really high I might get more responsibility but the really good like kind of proper choice was going to this other job offer and adam gave me 2 options he gave me a higher salary and a low stock and a lower salary and a higher stock option and I was like I kinda just made the decision down to like well if I go with you know adam I need to take the low salary move back in with my parents like take the stock because like I'm gonna be in it for the ride but if I just kinda wanna become an engineer and that's what I want my career to be I'm gonna go to this other company I'm gonna take the salary not worried about the equity necessarily how big that is but I'm just gonna become a better engineer and I kinda picked the more unknown less polished option obviously worked out so I feel great about it but you

Shaan Puri

took the move in with the parents option and then yeah

Furqan Rydhan

I took the move in with the parents option

Shaan Puri

in a absurd way

Furqan Rydhan

yeah how old were you

Sam Parr

how old are you when you started at applovin let's

Furqan Rydhan

See, probably like 25 or 26. No.

Sam Parr

26 moving moving at home wasn't the worst but yeah it wasn't good

Furqan Rydhan

that's just a little bit yeah 26 probably

Sam Parr

that's maybe just old enough where it's kind of like alright what are you doing but not quite

Shaan Puri

inconvenient socially

Sam Parr

yeah yeah well okay when you move out

Furqan Rydhan

When you move out, right? So you move out of your house and then you move back in. It's not like a happy, "Oh yeah, I'm winning! High fives all around!" Right? That's not the way you did that.

Sam Parr

it's not like you had a move in with your wife or something like that

Furqan Rydhan

yeah I mean that that move in with

Shaan Puri

your wife what does that mean

Sam Parr

Yeah, like... sorry, I mean, you're in your thirties or you have a family, you know? Like if...

Shaan Puri

you have a

Sam Parr

you're like a little more established

Furqan Rydhan

yeah okay yeah

Sam Parr

26 is old enough that you could still mess around and maybe figure it out.

Furqan Rydhan

yeah and so I mean

Sam Parr

you you know I think almost be a kid

Furqan Rydhan

Yeah, exactly. I think for me it was just like, I know I wanted to do this. It sounded more fun. **More fun is always good.** You're going to wake up, you're going to be excited to go to work. It's not going to be a drag. I would tell Sean this all the time because we used to do a Sunday night call, right? We would kind of think about the week. My friends were always saying on Sunday night, "Oh man, work tomorrow. Sunday sucks. The weekend's over." I always felt like, "Hey, it's exciting! More stuff's going to happen this week. It should be great!" That's a big difference. If more people can do that, I think that is...

Shaan Puri

A is a huge deal. When we did those Sunday calls, I remember I'd always be like, "Oh, sorry, I gotta... I'm doing this thing with family or friends or whatever. I gotta go get on this call." And they're like, "Oh man, you have to do calls on Sunday nights?" I was like, "I get to do calls! I chose this. I want to do this. I can't wait for Monday; we gotta do it tonight!" You know, that was our mindset. We didn't have as spectacular of an outcome, but I definitely had a spectacular time building that out and learning all the different stuff. So anyway, I think that's... if you take away one thing, maybe you didn't understand the technology, but the meta lesson of Furkan to me is he always picked the more fun and interesting path, regardless of the financial aspect. On the financial side, he just made sure that it was a bet on himself and a bet on equity. So that if the fun and interesting thing does pan out, you actually do get paid out of it. I've seen him make that trade: "I'll work harder, I'll earn less, I'll move back in with my parents," you know, all these things. He's willing to work three times as hard as long as it's three times as fun. I think most people, at least from where I come from, don't do that. When they make career choices, it's a rational, logical decision. I think that gets you to a certain type of outcome. But if you hear these outcomes and you're like, "How do I get some of that?" I think you gotta follow the irrational playbook a bit more.

Furqan Rydhan

I mean, Sean, if you look across your journey at Monkey Inferno, you're a 24-year-old, pretty green, right? I think I saw your initial video interview that you had sent in to Monkey Inferno. Whether the dollar outcome was there or not, I would say the rate of learning and the growth difference for you—and I know for myself—it's a massive difference. I'm embarrassed at what I used to think about back then in terms of building compared to after the journey. But you'd feel like that was like a 1,000x payoff, and the rest of your career is going to kind of unlock because of it, right? I would imagine you believe that, but I'm curious how you think about that journey.

Shaan Puri

yeah 100% I I told the guys to set up our studios this and I mentioned this on a recent podcast but I said they came they they flew out here to san francisco they were like staying in a motel 6 type of thing they're like I'm gonna build this out and you know they're 22 23 24 years old something like that and they had sent in a video like kind of like a video interview to be like sam sean choose us to like like we will help you guys out we will come build your studio for you they've like did a ballsy youtube video and tweeting at us like nonstop shit I used to do I used to wait in parking lots to meet ceos and investors I wanted to meet just like I said I've been here since 7 am waiting in the parking lot for you to come out like do you have 5 minutes of time right I used to do all these stunts and they were doing a stunt to meet us and I thought that was kinda interesting and when they were there I was like they kind of were like deferring to me too much they were sort of like kinda like too much respect and I told them I was like dude you you kinda want what I have I want what you have I want that time back and I wanna be back where you guys are where it's 4 friends living in a 1 bedroom apartment and you're making videos and you're kind of like why are we trying to be youtubers I don't know it seems fun let's just do it and then like we think these guys have a cool podcast fuck it let's fly out and meet them and help them out with their studio and we don't know what's you know there's no there's nothing clearly in it for us but like we'll hop on that plane tomorrow and go make it happen I told him I said that was by far the most fun time there was the highest rate of learning and I remember at the time feeling like oh man like everything we do is so bootleg and ghetto and like but that was the right path actually for me for a person like me who wanted what I wanted out of life and I said you're gonna I remember you know I went to duke most of my friends went to med school law school or banking or consulting and so every you know every weekend they would post like they're you know they're making 6 figures they're posting themselves at a bar they're like like I wasn't dating I had no income I was sleeping on an air mattress you know you know my my cofounder lived in my closet right so it was like you know it was ghetto and so I remember thinking well maybe you know there was moments of doubt where I was like maybe I should have gone the traditional path maybe I should have gone to med school after all but but it was so fun I couldn't you know I didn't there was not a real conversation in my head what I was telling these guys was yo you're gonna see your friends who are on the traditional path and they're gonna look like they're way far ahead of you right now and there's gonna be a part of you who feels like you're locked you're left behind if you're like me that's what I felt stay the path and just know that like this is the q1 we're gonna be long term oriented we're gonna think about this like in a 10 20 year time scale who do you wanna be in 10 20 years and like you're gonna have a lot of fun now and then your rewards are gonna catch up 10 20 years from now and if you're okay with that trade of having more fun now and rewards that are a little back loaded this is the right path I wish somebody had just told me at that time guys this looks ghetto as hell but you're on the right path we kind of just like for better or worse just stuck with it and I want more people to stick with it when they're in that that mode and you you've done the same traveling through europe playing poker to support yourself and like you know moving back in with your parents it's not an it sounds at the time it feels uncommon but it's actually quite common amongst people who end up successful in entrepreneurial way

Furqan Rydhan

Yeah, the flipside is it's not easy, right? You're going to take the harder path. Like, you know, I didn't have a college degree. I didn't get that. A lot of people ask me, "Hey, should I go to college?" I have these other things going on, and you know, you don't have to. You can learn on your own, especially now. But it's definitely going to be a harder path. Don't expect linear returns. Where if I put in a year of work, I get a year of success, and then if I put in 5 years of work, I get 5 years of success. It might be nothing for a long time, and you might kind of get it in the end. But I know the journey is very exciting. To me, that's what matters because that's what you're going to do every day. You're going to wake up every day and you're going to go do this thing. Are you excited about that? And that's kind of critical.

Sam Parr

Yeah, thank you, dude! I always take a lot of notes. I'm taking notes now. Whenever you come, I'm excited for your success. That's so cool! I thought Applovin was like this huge thing whenever it was supposed to sell a year or whatever to a few years ago. Now, seeing what it is now, I'm like, "Oh my gosh!" That's... it blew my expectations. I'm sure it is for you all as well. So congratulations! That's pretty badass. What you're building is awesome—Founders Inc. That's badass!

Furqan Rydhan

Yeah, sweet! I appreciate it. This has been fun. I was like hearing you guys. It was kind of fun to be on as well. And where...?

Shaan Puri

do people shoot

Furqan Rydhan

the shade a little bit

Shaan Puri

find you founders f dot inc or founders dot inc

Furqan Rydhan

Yeah, **f.dot.inc**—that's the website. So, that's the domain. You can find me on Twitter: **@furqanr** (F-U-R-Q-A-N-R).

Shaan Puri

so furqan thanks for coming