Monkey Inferno Failures

A story about Shaan's experience trying to build the next big consumer product at Monkey Inferno.

"At Monkey Inferno, we were trying to create the next hit consumer thing. Michael had created Bebo, which was almost like Facebook - he came within inches of creating Facebook but instead ended up in the MySpace pile. He did well financially but didn't change culture.

We thought we could change culture, so we tried everything - messaging apps, live streaming, all these different consumer things. We failed like crazy. Even the things that kind of worked ultimately weren't successful because they were so home run driven, they were grand slam driven.

I backed off that approach, maybe because I'm burnt out. Now I just want to get wins - I don't need to change culture, I just need to change my bank account and my lifestyle. I can frame it two ways: either I'm more mature because I'm not as attracted to the sexiness and just want to build great businesses, or I'm just fearful and burnt out from failure. It's hard to say. But my view has definitely changed - now when I look at that Elon path, I think 'that sounds like a lot of effort, why don't I just do this simple thing that's going to work?'"