Furkon's VR Commitment

Shaan shares a story about his friend Furkon's dedication to VR technology despite it not being trendy.

"Furkon has been early into a bunch of tech things. He's basically a hacker's hacker. He was really into crypto before crypto was cool. I remember literally being at the office and he was not paying attention because he was buying into the Ethereum ICO at like 17¢, and I was like 'Ethereum? Literally the dorkiest name, never gonna work.' So I didn't buy because your boy's a genius, and that's why I'm a podcaster now and he's a billionaire.

He got into crypto early, and then when Web3 happened, everybody was piling into Web3. Furkon was building a company in that space called ThirdWeb. He was really into the actual technology behind it.

The second thing he got really into was VR. He bought me an Oculus just because he was like, 'I don't want to tell you about this and hope that you go try it out. Here's the new Oculus headset, go home and put this on.' I go home, put it on, I'm blown away. Then he bought me another one when it got better.

The reason why Furkon is so great is because he doesn't pay attention when things get hot. He's in the hardcore nerd bucket where he's like, 'I pay attention because it's interesting to me. I don't care if it's popular or not, I don't care if it's hot or not. I want to be on this train the whole time.'

He would tell me like, 'We would hang out and he's like I'm working in VR today, once a week I go co-work in VR.' They went to a VR conference and this conference was like crickets basically. Our buddy Hubert who works with him goes there and wears a t-shirt, all black, that just says 'I invest in VR' huge on the front. He's like, 'Dude, it was like being the only girl at a prom. Everybody was interested in him because he's the only guy left investing in VR.'

And he's like, 'It's actually kind of working. If you look at the top 15 apps in the Oculus store, these three guys over here own three of the top 15. They're printing money right now. It's not the hot thing right now, but if you can make $10 million as a small team building these apps, and you're the front line of this, and you're the only people specializing in this technology, good things are gonna happen.'

Furkon's interest in VR is not based on popular sentiment or VCs or exits. It's just based on 'Is the tech getting better or not?' And I think that's just such a strong thing that's gonna help him be super successful."