Monkey Inferno Startup Studio

A story about Shaan Puri's experience running a startup studio called Monkey Inferno, where they missed several key opportunities despite having significant funding.

"I ran an idea lab for 5-6 years. I had a blank check and an awesome team, and I could pursue not just any idea, but many ideas at the same time. I could go from meeting to meeting and have all these amazing adventures and challenges and ups and downs. I felt like I got 20 years of experience in 4 years, but notice that I said experience instead of success.

We burned about 3-4 million a year in funding. We tried to create hit social apps because the main investor had previously built Bebo, a social network they sold for $850 million. Facebook went on to become worth $850 billion, and there was always this 'shoulda woulda coulda' mentality.

What we should have done was build tools for startups or tools for developers because we knew the pain points of early-stage startups. We had 18 developers. We had three big missed opportunities:

1. User testing - I used an early prototype of UserTesting.com and suggested we build something similar. They eventually went public.

2. Crypto - In 2013, our system admin was mining Bitcoin on our servers. Our CTO wanted to build an exchange or financial services for cryptocurrency. But our lawyer worried it was for drugs, and our investor didn't want to risk his billion-dollar fortune on regulatory issues.

3. Blab - We built a video chat product that got to 4 million users. It was like Clubhouse or Zoom today. Tony Robbins was using it, famous bands were using it, the UFC was using it. But we should have pivoted to B2B instead of trying to build the next big social app.

These were all giant mistakes, but that's what happens when you try to do parallel entrepreneurship instead of focusing on one thing."