Julian Weisser - Why ODF is on a mission of making things for people who make things!

We want to constantly be eliminating all of the barriers that are realistic barriers that are keeping people from making progress on great ideas.

True.

If you are 13, 14 years old and you're trying to build some really interesting little hardware project, right? And maybe it's not even a business idea, it's just an idea for something you want to build, right? Well, how are you going to be able to get the parts? How are you going to be able to learn about how to do it? Maybe YouTube, something like that. Aren't there other people out there who might be able to give you feedback?

Yeah.

So, so the idea is, can we just remove all of these barriers, arbitrary barriers,

right,

that prevent people from making progress, and then help them, you know, make progress and go and do the thing?

Welcome to the Undefeated Underdogs Podcast, where I unpack and narrate stories of ambitious people who turn obstacles into opportunities. My goal for this podcast is to create a platform to narrate underdog stories and maybe play a small teeny tiny role in inspiring you. I intend to highlight the underdog mentality and make authentic conversations with people who play the long game, take action with a chip on their shoulder, and convert obstacles into opportunities. Buckle up as I'll be bringing some authentic founders, VCs, community builders, and content creators who got underestimated their whole lives And yet they beat all the odds to become insanely successful. Now today, I want to tell you a little bit about our awesome sponsor, acquire.com. Selling a business is as tough as building a business. As someone who went through this process once selling my own startup, I know the pain it takes to get to the end zone. This is where our sponsor shines. Imagine this, you're a founder who's built a solid SaaS product. Acquired customers and generating consistent monthly revenue. The problem is you're not growing for, for whatever reason— lack of focus, lack of skill, or just plain lack of interest— and you feel stuck. What should you do? The story I'd like to hear is you buckle down, somehow reignited the fire, get past yourself and the clichés, and start working on your business rather than just in the business. You start building an audience, move out of your comfort zone to do sales and marketing, and in 6 months you triple your revenue. The reality isn't as simple. Situations may be different from every founder facing these crossroads, but too many times the story ends up being one of inaction and stagnation until the become business— the business becomes less valuable or worse. Worthless. If you find yourself here, or your story is likely headed down a similar road, I offer you a third option. Consider selling your business on acquire.com. Capitalizing on the value of your time is a smart move. Acquire.com is free to list, and they've helped hundreds of founders already. Go to try.acquire.com/sharath and see for yourself if this is the right option for you. Now let's get into today's episode. There are 2 founder programs that created massive ripple effects in tech ecosystem. One by YC, everybody knows that. And the other program, which I'm very a fan of, everybody also knows that it's none other than ODF by On Deck. ODF helped launch startups like Luma, Cal.com, Levels Health, Partyful, and thousands of other more startups. The founders who went to ODF raised over $2 billion in funding from VCs like Khosla, Sequoia, a16z, I can go on and on, but ODF literally changed people's life. I personally know many founder friends of mine who benefited from the program and they incredibly got into such a tight-knit network of founders and raised money and then, you know, became successful. Today I have Julian, the CEO and co-founder of On Deck. On Deck not only built one of the strongest programs in the history of startups, but also built the strongest community of incredible founders. And strongest network. Julian, welcome to the show. How are you feeling?

Great. And it's good to see you again. And it's great to be catching up.

It's been a while. Like, yeah, I think if I remember it correct, we both chatted like around 3 years ago when I was doing this side project called ShoutOut. We were kind of jamming about the ideas and we came a long way. So—

We use ShoutOut a lot. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. On Deck used to be like one of the primary customers. So appreciate you for that. We came a long way and, you know, So many things happened in between the last 3 years, but I'm very curious right off the bat. I want to start by asking you, let's go back to probably Juul in your 20s, right? Let's go back like 10, 20 years ago. The question is, where did you fall in love? When did you fall in love with startups? When did you decide like, yeah, I want to do this. I want to be a founder. And one day I want to build something that's substantial, that's going to make impact. So talk to me about the initial early days of Julian as a budding founder.

So I'm 34 now. I probably didn't really know what a startup was until I was like 19 or 20. So about 14 years ago. And the world was so different back then.

Yes.

Nowadays, all of this information is around there. It's kind of a cool thing to start startups. In fact, it's in many ways, there are classes on entrepreneurship, you know, and startups are very definitively like a career path that a lot of people think about. Many still don't pursue it, but many know that it's an option or a potential avenue. When I was growing up, that just didn't exist. And, you know, if you grew up outside of Silicon Valley and outside of computer science, You just didn't know about startups. You might have even seen things that we now look at as inspirations for startups, but not necessarily made the connection that you could yourself go and build those things. And for me, my inspiration actually came from a fairly niche aspect of something that was happening in Boston at the time when I was going to school. I was in school for music. The reason I went to school for music is because I frankly didn't know what was out there in the world for me and the thing that I ultimately wanted to spend a long amount of time investing energy and effort and really my soul into. And I went to music school because that was one of the things that I was sort of naturally drawn to and I was just naturally talented at. And when I was in music school, I was in Boston at a place called Berklee, and they had this really interesting thing that they had launched. I believe it was called the Arts Connect. It was effectively this forum that was email-gated, and the only emails that worked were for 3 universities: my university, the music school, MIT, and MassArt, which is sort of a visual arts college. It's a really great school for visual arts.

Hmm.

And at that point, I started to really see through this forum, even though there were only maybe a couple of dozen people posting any week, That there were interesting ways to collaborate with people outside of the music world and into the technology world or into the visual arts world. So I didn't just go to technology. I actually went and worked with people on animation projects as well at MassArt. But I met some people through the MIT side of it who were working on projects where they were really good technically, but pretty much everything else they needed help with. How to describe things, how to talk to customers, just generally how to communicate. And I think that one thing that I'm pretty good at, and I've gotten much better at over the years, is communication, really being able to identify with people and understand what they care about and sort of how they think about things. And that was kind of the realization that, wow, one, there's these things called startups that are really built by just 1 to maybe 5 people in the early days. And there's a lot more to startups than just building the software. And sometimes the person who's building the software can be really good at the non-software things, but other times they just want to focus on the software and they want to work with other people who have other types of skill sets. And to me, I always thought about startups at that point as sort of similar to a band, right? If you play in a band, usually you don't play all the instruments. You have other people who play the instruments. And There could be somebody who's a ridiculously good drummer, but they're maybe just a passable guitarist, right?

Right.

Or somebody who's really good at singing, but you really don't want them to try and actually play an instrument. And ultimately, I kind of took that and I said, well, gee, I guess startups are like bands. People need to have various skills, various interests, and be able to come together to make something special. So that was kind of the introduction to me, was that this was just another form of an artistic pursuit.

Hmm.

Artists, they don't want to necessarily admit it all the time, but in order to be an artist long-term, you either need to have one really wealthy patron, or you need to have people, or maybe you inherited some money, or you have people who actually care enough about what you do.

to pay you for it,

you know. So ultimately there wasn't that much of a difference in my mind between, you know, startups, bands, other creative pursuits, because at the end of the day, unless you're independently wealthy, you need to have people who actually like this stuff in order to keep going, or it's just very much a side project that you're doing for fun and you're not planning on having it be your main thing.

Yeah, I love the way you compared startups is kind of like a music band, you know, because everybody has their own roles and they have to play their own part. And sometimes they just kind of juggle between each, you know, roles exchange. But at the end of the day, they kind of produce one output and they aim to do that over and over and over and over again. It's not like they produce one song and they just sit out, right? They do it again and again and again. It seems like the product is all about its rating. The sales is all about like, you know, selling more, kind of pursuing. I love the analogy. And I think one of the curious questions I had is follow-up to that. What, in your opinion, what are some things that founders can learn from musicians or artists?

It's an interesting question. I think that it comes down to this idea that usually songs don't come out fully formed. Occasionally they do. There are all those stories of The song just poured out of me, right? The music and the words sort of happened at the same time. But then there's other stories of the songs just took a lot of time and a lot of iteration, and there was this sticking point and the song kind of got stuck for a while, and eventually it became the song that everybody knows and loves, right? There are some songs where it takes more than one person to make the song, right? It's not always a world where it's just Paul McCartney goes and he pulls out a song. You look at these songs nowadays.

Yeah.

It's a little bit easy to kind of laugh and point. You look at some songs where they have 16 songwriters nowadays.

Right, right, right. Yep.

You know, and you're like, well, it's not exactly Blackbird. Right. But, you know, it's a hit song and it took 16 people. But I think that there's this thing that songs are living and breathing things. And when you actually have a song that ends up being something that maybe people interact with in sort of a fixed format, so call it a recording or a CD or a vinyl record or something like that, a download, these are things that are sort of snapshots in time. But in many ways, that's just sort of like a snapshot in time on the Internet Archive, right? Where you go back to the Wayback Machine and you look at How things were at one point.

Yep.

And now they're different, right? And if you're an artist and you're continually changing, you're continually improving, maybe you just move on to new songs, or maybe you revisit the songs in an interesting way. There's really 2 types of people. There are the people who love Bob Dylan and sort of like the fact that he continually goes back to his songs, and every time he plays them live at a show nowadays, I think he's 80, 90 years old at this point. and he'll play a song and it'll be a song that he wrote 60 years ago, but it will almost be indecipherable unless you're a superfan in the sense that the melody has changed. Often the lyrics have changed. And for some people, they just want to hear the original version, the one that you could just go back to the Wayback Machine or to the record and you can go and listen to it. But ultimately, artists are constantly evolving and startups are constantly evolving. So I think that people think about artists as like these fixed works. It's a record and the record is the same as it always was. But also a record is interacting with time too, right?

Right.

When you interact with a startup, a startup might make a lot of sense at a certain period of time, but then it might make a lot less sense, you know, 10 years from now. Or a startup might be too early, right? Where the product actually doesn't make sense. Because the conditions, the external conditions aren't there. And similarly, some albums or some movies don't get very much acclaim or they're not very well appreciated. And it takes time for maybe the environment to change or people's minds to change, to reappraise these films or these albums, or the external conditions to change for a startup for it to become viable. There's so many times when you hear about startups that Gee, they were too early. And then also startups who were like, wow, we're too late. We got beat to the market. You know, the market no longer cares about this. So I don't know, maybe, maybe some riffs there around sort of iteration and, and sort of time.

Yeah, absolutely. And what you said is absolutely true. I think it's all about kind of the, the going back to original versus iterating and making it new. It's kind of like you pick an idea, like something that's very novel. launch it versus you kind of go back to this boring idea people have been using, they're getting tired of it, and kind of take inspiration and reinventing it. I think it's kind of like similar path of building startups, going back to like artists refining their craft. What was like your first startup? Like, what was like your— the intro was good, you know, about, okay, I want to be, or I got an introduction to this world of people building a band of you know, founders or, you know, operators coming together to build something. So what was your first hands-on experience like building something?

Sure. So couple things. The first thing that I got involved with was helping a few people who were at MIT work on an idea. I won't go too into the details about the idea, but it was a highly technical idea that had some aspects that could be sort of consumer-oriented, or at least sort of prosumer in like a Shopify sense of things oriented. And the really interesting thing that I realized was that if you had certain background or you had certain, what I call like legibility, meaning you had some sort of logo associated with your name, in this case, uh, one of the people, uh, was an adjunct at MIT. You kind of just got things given to you sometimes. When people were just judging you based on kind of the logo versus anything else.

Credentials versus—

They got into a program in Boston that they didn't even show up for the entire summer. And I was still in college at the time. I forget what year I was. I just showed up every day, even though the people that were actually the founders of this thing didn't show up ever. And I just learned so much about the Boston ecosystem, about startups in general. And I totally would have never gotten in because, one, I didn't have a startup idea at that time. And then two, I didn't have any of the background that people would pattern match to in Boston in particular. Because Boston in particular, people talk about credentialing and things like that. Boston is just so status-driven and is not meritocratic at all, at least at that time. It's probably improved because I think the world has just generally gotten more meritocratic over the last— you know, decade or so. But, um, back then it was just a terrible place, unless you had the exact sort of background. And even then,

right,

most of those people who were investors and things like that in Boston really only invested in people that they'd known for 15+ years and that they went to business school with or something like that. Very different than Silicon Valley. So that was the first thing, was I kind of just plugged into this world and started to get to learn a little bit about it. Nowadays you don't need to, like, have that permissioning. You just plug into X, you can go and read incredible blog posts. Most people are very reachable if you reach out to them in sort of a polite way without sort of asking to pick their brain or something like that. People are generally very responsive. And the transition from that to working on my own thing was really twofold. The first was that I realized that this wasn't going anywhere, but this was a great avenue for me to actually learn things and sort of plug in by essentially gaining access based off of this Legibility that these guys who were the founders of this— it's hard to even call it a company, but idea. And so I was sort of bootstrapping the Legibility. And then ultimately, once I knew enough and I knew enough people, I said, well, I want to go and work on my own idea. And that was a fairly natural conclusion to want to work on my own thing. I'd always made my own music. I'd always had my own bands. Why not work on my own business idea?

Why not?

And in terms of what I wanted to work on, I just chose to work on something that was a personal thing for me. Just like how I don't write music that isn't personal, I don't write something that I don't have some sort of resonance with. I tried to find a business idea that I had resonance with. And for me, that was that I grew up fairly unhealthy and quite seriously overweight. And The idea was, can I make it so that other people can lose weight and sort of maybe shortcut around a lot of the trial and error that I went through to go through that process? And that kind of was sort of the question that I had. And then sort of how I would actually approach that was sort of where I went next. And I tried a bunch of things. Long story short, I ended up after building a company and having customers and all of that, we can talk about it if it makes sense. I ended up going and joining a company that was a larger version of the same thing and kind of learning how a successful multi-time founder was building effectively the same business, but on a more ambitious scale. And that was a really valuable learning, but it also taught me that I didn't want to be employee 100 at a company. I wanted to continue to be like working on sort of the ground floor, really figuring things out from scratch.

Yeah. I think most of the, most of our stories are kind of overlapping on one commonality, which is we try to do things and we realized 2 things. One, we're like, yeah, we want to do this. This is what we're meant for. And the other thing is, hell no, we're never going to do that. I think your experience was like kind of, yeah, I want to be a founder. Then I went to work with this startup. I'm like never going to be like, you know, employable for someone. I love that. When did this whole, you know, the other thing I want to mention also is that you've had like familiarity with going to or attending programs like founder programs, right, from your day zero, if I'm not wrong. So I think that also kind of, I'm hoping, experience helped shaping up ODF. So talk about like On Deck. You know, if I remember correctly, it was first started as dinners, private invite-only dinners to like, you know, certain founders like gathering together. It's like very small, tiny, teeny idea. So the evolution is massive, right? So it went from that particular dinner to like where we are today. So talk to me about that inception of ODF, On Deck, to yeah, what you're doing.

You know, so it's actually worth mentioning here. It's probably the natural spot to mention that we really just call it ODF now. And I'll tell you why we call it ODF in a few minutes, but I'll answer your question first, which is sort of like, how did I think about programs and how did that influence sort of ODF? And the answer is probably not as much as you'd suspect. I had a fairly good experience with that program, though I think that a lot of the people who were in it were kind of misguided. I think that the Boston ecosystem was generally a bad ecosystem at the time. There were a handful of people who were absolutely phenomenal and are still doing really amazing things for the Boston ecosystem. Sarah Hodges and Dave Balter are 2 of my favorite startup people in general, and they're still there. They were doing such amazing stuff for the ecosystem back then. But generally speaking, I felt it was extremely weak. I think that the thing that I I'll talk a little bit about the transition from dinners to ODF, but I'll also talk about this fact that for me, I actually realized that I didn't want to be an educator in the formal sense, but I wanted to create spaces for people to learn. And I only realized this somewhat after the fact, and it's sort of connecting the dots backwards, but both of my parents are public school teachers or were public school teachers. And I really loved sort of what they did for kids. And, and I also loved that they really dedicated their lives to like helping kids. And in my mom's case, she actually was a speech-language pathologist, so she helped kids with speech impediments as well.

Nice.

And I really loved all of that, but I also felt like I didn't want to just do the same thing that they did. I think it's partially because, you know, when you're younger, you're kind of rebellious. And also I felt like they put in a lot of work to make it so that I could do whatever I wanted. And I felt like if I just did what they did, that I wouldn't necessarily be sort of taking advantage of the things that they did for me to make it so that I could do whatever I wanted.

Right? Right.

So ultimately it kind of ended up being that what I do is I create spaces for people to learn. They're just sort of alternative or adjacent spaces to a traditional education system.

Hmm.

And, you know, to answer the question about the evolution of ODF, you know, we started off by doing these dinners and happy hours. And the premise of the dinners and happy hours was creating a place for people to explore what's next. You know, everybody there was either explicitly or at least sort of like maybe quietly exploring maybe leaving their job or starting a company. And it was this really interesting space for people because typically if you go to a happy hour or dinner, they're much more generic. It's kind of like networking. It's fairly cringe. People

are

trying to get business deals or find investors. But when you kind of created this common ground of everybody here is looking for a very specific thing, they're looking to figure out what's next and almost find co-conspirators on that, it kind of created this very shared experience and people love that aspect of it. But the thing that we found was that when people did that experience, they went to these dinners and happy hours, they realized that there were so many people at the event that if they were having good conversations, they probably only met 1/3, 1/4 of the attendees. And if you're looking for co-conspirators, right, you want to find people who are a good fit for you. And what if you had the perfect person in that room and just by sheer You know, luck, you didn't end up meeting them, right? So the idea that people started floating to us was it would be really great if it wasn't just a dinner or a happy hour, but there were ongoing touchpoints between this group of people as they were making progress, as they were learning from each other. Because ultimately, again, you might not actually get to know the person in that room who's the right person for you to know as a potential co-founder. as a potential person who could give you an idea for what to work on next. And ultimately, the response was always, when people said that, could you make it more of an ongoing thing, was, well, it's hard enough to host these dinners and happy hours. I was at the company that I was working at post my own company, and that was pretty time-consuming. And I was hosting one of these a week at least. So 4 times a month, pretty significant.

Wow.

Hosting events is always very time-consuming. I think that people who don't do them Don't realize just how much work is involved, especially when it comes to being thoughtful about who attends. But ultimately, people kept asking for it, and eventually it just became clear that if we weren't doing it, we were actively not pursuing something that was valuable for the world and also that was just generally interesting. For me, there's something really special about this intersection of people and ideas and sort of actually going pursuing those ideas together. And again, I don't really constrain that to technology or to music. I think about all of these things very interchangeably. But when you have people and these ideas come together and you start working on them together, just really wonderful things can happen. And I just love the idea of creating space for wonderful things to happen.

I love that. And I think that was the reason I kind of asked about going back to where you kind of got inspired about the program, because I think you were benefited by The Boston program that invited you guys so that you were kind of paying it forward in a way. And so I don't want to like talk about the history of On Deck and the things you did. It was like, we can spend like hours here, but On Deck went on hypergrowth and then kind of went lean now. So talk to me about the transition, some lessons you learned, you know, along the way. You're still kind of pursuing, you're still providing value to founders. You're still bringing them together in multiple ways. I want to talk about Builders Who Run. That's one of the coolest things I saw on the internet. But yeah, you're still kind of doing the same thing, but in a lean, more personal way. So talk to me about going that— being that hypergrowth to now lean. More importantly, the lessons that you can share with the founders who are kind of going back and forth with

it. You know, I think there's a couple of things that— and I think it's worth sort of Telling folks who are listening to this, who reasonably should not know much about the history of On Deck, now ODF. But there was this period where we were in person, we were doing these cohorts of people who were exploring building companies called the ODF. Then the pandemic happened, as it did for everyone. The pandemic happened and it changed a lot of things. At that point, we decided we wanted to go to building something that wasn't some sort of duct-taped sort of interstitial for a world where we would eventually go back to in-person. We wanted to try and build something that was really wonderful in terms of these cohorts so that it didn't just feel like— a lot of people talked about how college Zoom university really sucked, right? And we didn't want to create sort of this crappy Zoom university. We wanted to create ODF as if it was imagined from the ground up for a digital audience. We did, and it was magical, and people loved it. And shockingly, at least for me, and I think for probably the rest of the world, the people who were paying attention, so many amazing co-founders came out of ODF during the pandemic, even though they didn't even get a chance to meet in person for quite some time. And they ended up building companies, and they're still together 5 years later. And that's just incredible to see. I think what happened at that point was we saw that there was this model that could be sort of extrapolated. From founders exploring ideas to different types of people trying to do all sorts of things. And I think that there was a desire to do that for a couple of reasons. The first one was it seemed like it was a potentially interesting business idea. But I think the other thing was that we realized that people were just super lonely during the pandemic, and we saw the amount of joy that people had in connecting with other potential founders as they were exploring this process. And it wasn't just about the going through the founder process together. It was about going through some experience together during a time that was extremely isolating. So there was this desire to try and build these other programs. And we did everything from careers-oriented things to, to things that were sector-specific. And, you know, careers-oriented, meaning we did stuff for designers and we did stuff for people in biz dev and we did stuff for engineers. And we did stuff for investors. And ultimately, those things scaled pretty quickly during the pandemic. And we had tons of sort of like programs, businesses, however you want to describe them. But a couple of things happened. One is this is just a temporary thing during the pandemic in terms of people having that strong a level of loneliness and isolation. And them wanting to spend that much time on a digital community, especially if they were mobile. Meaning, you know, a lot of the people who were in these communities, they could actually move to another city. You know, they could, they could go and be a part of something that's in person when the pandemic was lifted, you know, the lockdowns were lifted. It wasn't like, you know, say 13-year-olds who are really just restricted to wherever their parents live. Right. And they don't have freedom of movement. So there was this sort of aspect of, like, a lot of these programs were very sort of ephemeral for the pandemic in terms of the way that they operated and people's desires to participate in them. And then the other thing was that, and this is the thing where it gets personal for me, as someone who never really had a career, like a tech career, and as somebody who's never thought of— in fact, the only time that I did work at a larger company, and by larger I mean about 100 people, I hated it. So for me to think about the things that are motivating to me personally, when I want to build something, do I want to build something that helps somebody become a better chief of staff? Do I want to build something that helps somebody become a great design manager? The answer is those things could be great for a certain type of person to build, but for me to be leading a company, it needs to be something that I really care about, that I really believe in, And that I feel like I'm uniquely advantaged to go and help people with and succeed with. So when all of those programs started to happen, I realized that it wasn't something that I was particularly interested in. I was really only interested in the founder side of things, the builders, the people who were exploring ideas, maybe not founders in just the venture capital sense of founders, right? But founders who were building bootstrapped things, I mean, you know, we don't do this at ODF, but founders of bands, right? If you go to Wikipedia, it's really interesting because you go to Wikipedia and you see these articles about bands, especially like famous bands, and you actually see that the people who are the people who started the bands are listed as founders, right? Because they started something that became something, right? And for me, I really love that. I love the builders. I love the people who are like starting things and originating things. And When it came time to look at what we would do after the pandemic and what my part might be in it, I said, I really want to only focus on helping make things for people who make things and specifically for people who are originating things, people who are starting with nothing and taking nothing and somehow transforming it into something that has a lot of potential to be really impactful in a variety of ways. So that for me was kind of the transition. And that's why we don't call it On Deck anymore, because we had On Deck Design, we had On Deck Health, we had On Deck Chief of Staff, we had On Deck No-Code. Oh, and we also had this thing called On Deck Founders. It became a very small part, even though founders were the thing that we started with. It became, in my opinion, a small part of something that was much larger. And I didn't like that. I really wanted to focus on founders exclusively and these people who were exploring what they were building. And that's why we call it ODF, because ODF was always the founder thing. And by sort of dropping the On Deck, we're saying we are explicitly ODF, we are explicitly founders. Right. And then of course we do other things that are for different types of founder-esque people like Merge, and we can talk about that.

Yes.

But the general premise is get back to our focus on these people who are originators of ideas and products and creations.

And talk to me about— yeah, I love that. Love, appreciate you for sharing and being transparent in what went and kind of like what you learned. A couple of follow-ups. One is what you said is very interesting. It's kind of like you caught a wave during pandemic, which is people being lonely. And now You're being focused in person. That's what the new ODF is about. One week, high intense, like 80 to 100 people coming together, building something, launching. That's like very, very, very in person. Yeah. I'm very curious about your thoughts on building a community in 2025 where everybody's in person. And I think people are, I agree, there are some people who are lonely. That's why there are these products like friend.com and there are other things that are popping up. But there are also people who are like feeling really joyous, like just meeting other people in person. Yeah. Talk to me about your take on if you were to help other founders build a community in 2025, what would you say to them?

Well, yeah, you know, it's funny. I don't necessarily know if just being in person makes you less lonely. I think that there are so many people who are lonely today as founders. And in fact, I would say being a founder is probably one of the loneliest pursuits. And I don't mean being a founder again, from just a tech startup perspective. I mean, think about how many people are trying to start bands and they have people who just— most people just don't care. Think about the person who's trying to play at a bar and just hoping somebody will, anybody will pay attention to what it is that they're doing. Or you put something on YouTube or on Spotify or whatever and you just don't get any streams, right? You have like, you're constantly combating indifference and people who are like, Well, when are you going to get a real job? Right? Like, when are you going to give up that thing and like get realistic? Right? So, and that's before you even start sometimes. Right? And in fact, like, that might even be arguably why a lot of people don't start. Right? Because they're so worried about that external pressure. And it's easy to be very dismissive and say, oh, like, fuck the haters, whatever, like, go and do it. But I think a lot of people really, like, genuinely will make good founders or good creators, but they just need some help and they need help navigating the loneliness. And it certainly could be something that you do alone, but it certainly helps to have other people. And the way I describe ODF and in some ways Merge, we'll talk about it, but is we take something that's sort of isolating and anxiety-inducing and take it and turn it into something where you bring people together that makes it feel communal. and makes it feel invigorating, right?

Mm-hmm.

And so if we can actually bring people together and sort of help them get more excited, help them feel more like they're not alone, and they're naturally going to gravitate towards 1 to 5 people within a cohort or within the community. I'm not saying everybody's going to have the same level of close relationship where they can confide in each other, but when you find those 1 or 2 or 5 people, That is so important and so impactful for you. And that person that you can talk to and just be totally real with, that is extremely important.

And I think, yeah, let's talk about, I'm curious about Merge. It's kind of like, you know, giving you guys giving grants to these young people, out-of-the-box ideas. So talk to me about that program. It's kind of like a small extension to ODF. Right. So yeah, I would love for you to explain, you know, what you're doing, how you're excited about— not just that, before you answer, I have to mention you, I mentioned the listeners something. I think you guys are on a shipping spree, launching multiple projects, moving fast, not being— not worrying about the perfection of it, but just putting it out. Right. So we have to talk about like a bunch of other things, but Merge is one of the projects you guys launched recently alongside StampList is awesome. So yeah, we can talk about those, but yeah, talk about Merge and, you know, the grant recipients. How are you kind of approaching taking it slow? Again, it's all lean, right? You're not overpromising. You're very realistic in approaching this in a very, you know, real way. So yeah, I'll let you explain.

Yeah. You know, I think that to your point about being lean and sort of launching quickly and getting things out there, you know, I think that the name that you come up with to describe something is probably the most important thing that you can do in terms of launching lean. As long as you have a good name that clearly communicates what it is that you do, and then you, and then you follow up with some portion of the value that you hope to deliver to someone, then I think that you're already like in a really good spot when it comes to delivering and, and continuing to grow from there.

Right.

So we can talk more about names at some point if you'd like. But speaking about Merge, Merge really kind of came from a couple of insights that, that I had and that my teammate Ari had around, around grants and around supporting younger builders. And the first insight is that there, there are a lot of people who are mobile, who can move to different places. And obviously the more personal commitments you have to family, The more personal commitments you have and financially, the harder it is to do. But if you're a certain age, college and slightly older than college, you do have the ability to have usually a low cost of living and the ability to move because you don't need your parents' permission. But if you're a 13-year-old, 14-year-old, or a 16-year-old, you are much more locked down to wherever it is that your parents happen to live. And from that perspective, you can't go and join something like ODF, which is now in person. Right.

Yeah. Yeah.

And you're kind of confined to the people who are in your general vicinity unless you make sort of extraordinary effort to get in front of a different group of people online. And one thing I love to say is that I believe that San Francisco is the best ecosystem for startup founders. And then I think that the second best is the internet. And I think that maybe the third best is possibly New York City or something like that. But the real sort of punchline on that is that it's much more important to realize that anybody can be in the second best ecosystem. Anybody, it doesn't matter if you have parents who won't let you go. It doesn't matter if you don't have the money to like go to San Francisco. You can be in the second best ecosystem in the world wherever you are. And I think that's so important. And with Merge, what we're doing is we're trying to make it so that younger people who are ambitious, who are smart, who are curious, not only do they have an incredible community of other people who are like them, but they also have other things that help unlock progress for them. And I think peer group is really important and sort of like elevating your peer group. But I also think it's important to realize that While the cost of starting things has continued to go down, the cost of, you know, spinning up a server, right?

The

cost of building apps, like all of these things have gone down. There is still a pretty significant cost as it relates to, or younger people with regard to hardware. Hardware is still much more expensive than software, though it's continuing to go down, but it still has a cost. And software has a cost too. If you're, if you're a kid and you're, you're growing up in India or even just in America and you, you, you you don't have parents who have tons of money that they can give you to fund your projects, you really might be held back by $1,000. Yeah. And you might be super smart, you might have a super cool idea that you want to pursue. And our belief is that if you're super smart and ambitious and you are curious about the world, that no kid should be held back from being able to make progress because they have a $1,000 barrier.

Hmm.

We started off by aggregating kids and teenagers and, and, you know, younger adults who'd already received microgrants. And we, the insight there was we said, we want to bring all of those people together because there's a whole bunch of initiatives giving out these microgrants and microgrants for those who are listening, who aren't familiar with the term, it's non-dilutive funding, usually to the order of $100 to maybe tens of thousands of dollars on the higher end. And the idea was we wanted to bring all of these people together because we saw that there were amazing people who got a grant from, say, 1517, which are usually about $1,000 grants. And then another person who got a grant from something like Emergent Ventures, which, you know, anywhere from $1,000 to tens of thousands of dollars. And these were really awesome people who were working on things where they should totally know each other. But because each of these programs was its own thing, They didn't know each other. So our goal was to just aggregate all these awesome people together. So that's the first thing we did. The second thing we did was we realized that through having all those awesome people, we could actually make it so that people could learn about the non-dilutive grant process. So we built this thing called the Merge Microgrant Guide. And the Microgrant Guide is— if you're listening to this, the V2 is already live. And Microgrant Guide gives you extreme detail into the microgrant opportunities that are out there. for you to get funding from anywhere from $100 to tens of thousands of dollars, what the application process is like for each one. We have video reviews from multiple grant recipients for each program. We have the actual applications that were successful, so you can actually read what successful applications look like. Right. It's this crowdsourced guide of all the information about getting this funding. And then lastly, we decided we wanted to make it so that people could almost do almost do like an application similar to the Common Application, if you're familiar with that, which is this thing in America, for those listening, this thing in America where people can apply to multiple schools at the same time, multiple colleges at the same time. We wanted to try and build that for microgrants. So what we did was we made it so that people put in their information and we looked at the attributes of what they provide. And then we recommend various grant programs to them. And then we recommend various resources for them to learn about grant programs. And if it's a grant that we think that we could actually potentially give ourselves, we tell them that and we schedule time with them. Right. And then the thing that we just announced yesterday was this, this idea that we're playing with called Grantsmiths. And Grantsmiths are people who are founders who are a little bit further ahead than a lot of the people who are in Merge. And We are giving them the ability to help allocate microgrants. So that's the thing that we're trying out now. But essentially Merge's goal is to be the place for microgrants, Tom.

I love that. I think it's kind of, if you ask me to put it in a very simple way, it's kind of summer camps. Like, but young—

I think there's some truth to that. I think that the main thing is we want to, we want to like eliminate We want to constantly be eliminating all of the barriers that are realistic barriers that are keeping people from making progress on great ideas. And that's sort of a through line across everything that we do. Let me talk about that. A lot of people are like, well, who am I going to build with? What am I going to build? Who might the initial customers be? Right. And then a bunch of other questions. But those are 3 really important things. Until you figure those things out, you're really not going to be able to start a company because those are kind of like what we describe as the missing pieces. True. If you are 13, 14 years old and you're trying to build, I don't know, some really interesting little hardware project, right? And maybe it's not even a business idea, it's just an idea for something you want to build, right? Well, how are you going to be able to get the parts? How are you going to be able to learn about how to do it? Maybe YouTube, something like that. But Aren't there other people out there who might be able to give you feedback? Right. So the idea is, can we just remove all of these sort of barriers, arbitrary barriers that prevent people from making progress and then help them make progress and go and do the thing?

I love that. I think it's all about going back to the ethos of what you said is how can you empower builders, whether they're young, they're adults, they're 2-time founders, 3-time founders. I think ODF invited so many time founders back as well, you know, when they start building. So I think it's all about building. That's why I love about what you're doing, which is also the, I have to acknowledge the moving fast bit, like iterating in public by kind of moving fast. So talk to me about the other projects like Stampless. It's kind of also kind of, uh, in a way interconnected to what you're doing, which is how can operators with immigration struggles, that's another stupid barrier I came out of. It's one of the worst things that can happen to a talented immigrant to not be able to work at a startup or even build a startup because they're by law, they can't do. So that's, yeah. Talk to me about like Stampless, what you're doing there, where you're going after that. Yeah.

Yeah, sure. So Stampless is a really simple premise. What we do is we highlight what we think are breakout companies. that are looking to bring amazing people onto their team regardless of where they are in the world, meaning not remote jobs, but that they will sponsor your visa.

Hmm.

So if you're in America and you're on a visa that ties you to your current employer, these are companies that will happily sponsor a visa to make it so that you can go and work for them. If you are living abroad, let's say in Europe, And you want to move to San Francisco to work at a startup, these are companies that we think are just incredible high growth companies that are excited to sponsor your visa.

Nice.

The thing that's really interesting about this is one, no one's really highlighting those types of opportunities. So it's actually fairly opaque other than going to StampList to see that there are companies that will sponsor visas. And then 2, another thing that's really fascinating. and that we've learned recently is just how few companies understand that sponsoring a visa is an incredibly easy thing to do. It's relatively low cost when you think about sort of the value of a great teammate.

Yeah.

And they don't realize that it's something that is actually feasible. And ultimately, this makes it so that these people are able to hire incredible talent that otherwise doesn't know that they're available and that they're able to actually go and work at these companies. So it really solves problems on both sides. And then ultimately we realized that so many of these builders, these founders are looking for their first couple of hires and that this can have a meaningful impact on that. Yeah. So that's why we do it. But Stampless is actually sort of a small project Within a much larger thing that we're working on, which is called Landing Club. And Landing Club, the premise of that is to really make it so that people, when they come to San Francisco, they have the plug into everything. And the goal is to make it so that you are, if you're moving from abroad, that we handle everything from you. Nice. We help you find your people, we help you find your housing, we help you get your finances in order. We make sure that your visa is set up. And Stampless is just like a small fragment of that. And also I should mention that we work with an incredible firm called Lighthouse, which is a former teammate of mine, Min Kim. And they're just incredible at helping founders and early employees navigate the visa situation.

Yeah.

And teammates on our team have gotten visas through Lighthouse and so many people in ODF have and now Merge as well.

Yeah, yeah, no, I have to acknowledge that the awareness bit, it's 2024 and so many people don't know they can file for an O-1. They're still like kind of thinking it's kind of something that's a mirage out there and only very few people get it.

Most companies don't know that they can do that. Exactly. It's a huge hiring advantage.

Yeah, I think that's something that, you know, I've thought about it, like building something similar to what you're telling about because I came from— I saw the pain. My God, back and forth like so many times. Yeah, it's such an important thing. Let's talk about like a fun thing which you're doing, which is Builders Who Run. Talk about that club. So how did that come up and how are you doing? Like, how are you managing building everything and then running?

Yeah, I mean, I think that the most important thing— well, I guess I'll define Builders Who Run. Builders Who Run is an informal running club in San Francisco and has had sort of installments and pop-ups all over the world, probably somewhere around 8 or 10 countries at this point. The general premise of it was a person in ODF, Akshay, he wanted to host just a little run meetup for some people in the ODF community. And the first time that it happened, the first sort of iteration of it, it was on a weekday. It was sort of at an inopportune hour. And I think only like 3 people showed up. But the good news is that when you do something and you care about it, it doesn't matter if only 3 people show up the first time. Because also you could be like, only 3 people showed up, or you could be like, 3 whole people showed up.

Show up. Yeah, the perspective changes.

Like, that's amazing. People showed up. You put something out into the world and something happened. Right?

Right.

So you can look at that as a negative thing, or you can look at it as a positive thing. The next one, we said, okay, well, Weekdays doesn't seem great. Weekend seems better. And you know, this goes back to the thing I was saying earlier about putting a name on something, right? Yeah. I think that the first event, you know, was you know was posted. It was sort of like running meetup for ODF founders, right? That was the name. But when you give something a name, it takes on sort of another another level, right? And we posted about the the second run, the second week of the run. And just more people got interested in it the second time. And I texted a bunch of friends who are in SF and I said, you guys should come out. I haven't seen you in a while. It'll be really fun. And then we posted some photos after that second run. Maybe there were like 6 or so people who showed up to the second run.

Mm-hmm.

And it was fun. It was great. The people who went had a lot of fun. Again, really tiny. But then we posted about it on Twitter and somebody quote tweeted, who I'd never met before, And they said, we're going to do this in, I believe it was Toronto. We're going to do this in Toronto. And then, you know, I was like, wait a second, maybe we just started like this international running club for builders. So, so then I just quote tweeted that and I said, you know, like introducing Builders Who Run, you know, an international and decentralized running club for builders. And, you know, like it ebbs and it flows. Like I would say that like definitely San Francisco is the place that it's like most predictably happening any given week. I think we're on the 34th week in a row or something like that.

Wow.

It's really cool because you get to a stage where there are enough people who've done it now that if you're not in town for some reason, you're visiting family or something, you actually have other people who are extremely excited to, you know, co-host it.

Yeah.

And in fact, uh, this coming weekend it's going to be hosted by 2 guys who actually run Builders Who Run in Dubai who just happen to be in San Francisco. I'm going to be out and they're going to be hosting it there in San Francisco. So it's just really cool to see. But I guess the thing for me is I think more founders should be doing more physical fitness. I think that running is particularly good. I personally found that running for me has been something that whenever I'm sort of feeling blocked or tired or anything like that, going for a run actually just completely resets me. And makes it so I can go and tackle another full set of work and just thinking through the next hard thing.

Absolutely. And I think that to me is a successful community. So many founders asked me before about, hey, how do you say that a community is successful or not? What kind of metrics you measure? I think metrics are good. I think what you said is absolutely true. To me, a successful community, the way I define is if a community builder started something and it keeps on going, going, going, people start joining, new people coming in, people are meeting each other, but there will be a point, a tipping point where the actual community builder who started won't be in the next, in a particular room or necessarily be involved, but this community is still going. That to me is a successful community. I think what you're doing is something cool. I have to acknowledge that. A couple of things before we wrap up. What's next? 2025, the new year is around the corner. What you're thinking next to drop from ODF standpoint or this group of experiments, the umbrella standpoint, what is exciting to you that you're doing next or building next?

Yeah, so I think the first thing is to speak to kind of how I think about what I'm working on now versus what we were working on in the past. And what we were working on in the past was what could be described as a branded house. And in a branded house, everything kind of has the direct association by name with each other. So in the past, we were called On Deck and we had On Deck Founders, we had On Deck Health, we had On Deck Chief of Staff. We had all these things that were On Deck blank, right? And the On Deck was the thing that sort of tipped people off to this was this, there was this connection between all of them, right? And now we're doing something where we move from a branded house to what's known as a house of brands. And what that means is that each thing has its own name, its own feeling, and its own sort of connection to a group of people. And there's still this house, right?

Mm-hmm.

But, but the house is the, there's the connection between these things is a little bit, a little bit more discreet. And a little bit more subtle, and I think that that is just a beautiful thing. And what do I mean by this? We don't call it ODF for young people who can't move and who need some money, right?

Right.

We call it Merge, and the idea of Merge is to bring together all of these incredible young people who've received grants, microgrants, or who want microgrants. ODF, you know, we keep that name because we think that that's like really core to what that is. We've been doing ODF now for almost. I think six years, seven years. And you know the other stuff that we're doing: Landing Club, the place that you come when you're trying to move to San Francisco from abroad, right?

Sure.

So all of the builders who run, right? All of these things have their own name, their own flavor. They they tend to really make it clear like who they're for. And there are some people who discover ODF and participate in ODF after doing builders who run, right? There are some people who do merge and then. come to San Francisco because they're on some trip, or maybe they got a grant to come out here, or they just graduated from school and they're coming to San Francisco, and they plug into Builders Who Run after being a part of Merge. So there always is that connection. But I think there's something really beautiful about it where unlike this on deck blank, on deck blank, there's actually this almost beautiful sort of discovery phase where we're not hitting you over the head telling you that this is this is all related. You're actually able to appreciate each thing on its own. And then ultimately, when you discover that connection, you're like, that makes a lot of sense. And that's really cool. And like, I love that there are these different things that they're working on that are interconnected, but not necessarily like so interconnected that it actually creates dilution in terms of what each of them means.

I love that.

So that's, that's the first piece. And then to answer your question about like, what's next, I think it's just A lot more of that. We want to continue to improve ODF. We want to continue to improve what we do at Merge. Again, like ODF, we want to be the place for people who are exploring what's next when it comes to starting a company. These are people who are debating whether or not they want to start a company. Some people are almost 100% committed to starting a company. Other people are trying to figure out if they can find the missing pieces, if that's compelling to them. So we want to make that an even better experience. We just continue to grow. We're going to be doing our 24th cohort at the start of the year. 24 cohorts is pretty mind-boggling when you think about it. Yeah. And then, you know, on the Merge front of things, we just want to continue to build the place for microgrants online. You know, if you've gotten a microgrant, we want to support you. In fact, if you've gotten a microgrant, you should go and apply to Merge because we have access to all of these amazing perks that will save you hundreds of thousands of dollars. And you can get them just by having received a microgrant and applying applying to Merge. If you haven't gotten a microgrant, we want to be the place that gets you the microgrant.

Right.

And then once you have a microgrant, we get you into this community of other people who are pursuing really impressive, ambitious, exciting things. And then, of course, we can talk more about the other ones. But the idea here is to just continue to do more, better of these various areas that we're working in. And again, the idea is making things for people who make things. And that's sort of the through line of all of this. Many are founders or future founders, and That to me is the thing that's just highly motivating.

Yeah, I love that. I think that that one-liner is— I think that's the title of this episode. You know, I'm for sure is going to lock it up. Before we wrap up, one last thing. You've met so many founders, you've advised so many founders, and you saw so many founders going through highs and lows. In this current day and age where things are moving super fast, you blink, you miss something. Right? Somebody launched something, somebody announced their funding, or somebody hired someone. Things are moving at lightning fast pace. Talk to me about the most important insight founders should focus on right now.

Gosh. Well, first off, I want to contextualize things here and say that things are moving really fast now, but, and there, and there's definitely a sense of FOMO, but just remember that back when Web3 was sort of in its, in its like in one of its peaks during the pandemic, when you blinked, you literally would miss an opportunity to make tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, usually from like nothing. Right. And you'd see your friends, you'd always hear about your friends making money, you wouldn't hear about them losing the money. But the thing is, like, you know, we're not in that time. We're in a time that's actually much more, much more sustaining in the sense that those were sort of like these little hacks and ways to sort of get an edge and make some money flipping some meme coins, and that's still happening nowadays. Right now, I think the main thing to do is focus on things that really kind of identify and match with what you want, right? And try and figure out what you want. And what does that mean? There are some people who really want to work on a specific thing. There are other people who want to work on just like making money, right? If you just want to work on a specific thing, Don't let the people who are just trying to make money get in the way, right? Don't let them distract you. Don't be like, well, should I just be building this app that makes a lot of money because it sort of cashes in on sort of a clever use of AI in this moment in time? The answer is, if that's not actually what you want to do, don't get distracted by people who are doing that. But also don't throw shade at people who are doing that. Don't be like, Oh, that's so dumb. They should be working on something that's more meaningful to them or something. Don't be judgmental about what people want, what people want to do. But if you want to be a person who's building something just to make some money, don't get too hung up on something more idealistic at that point. Don't listen to what people are telling you when they're saying, oh, don't you want to figure out something you want to work on for the next 10 years? No, you don't have to worry about that. If you're just trying to make some money, like there are ways to build apps and like get customers very quickly. How sustainable are all of those things? Hard to say. You might end up with something that is very much a flash in the pan type thing. You make tens or hundreds or even millions of dollars. But the thing is that maybe it's not sustaining. As long as you're not trying to build something sustaining and you're just trying to make some money, it's not a big deal. Don't let other people's goals get in the way of your goals or tell you that your goals are the wrong goals. So I think that that's the main thing about being able to stay the course and not get distracted by all the stuff that's happening out there. I also think that if you have time, meaning like you have time outside of school or outside of work, you should just try and be learning and experimenting and tinkering with as much stuff as possible. Because there's just so many cool things out there. And most people don't have the freedom of time. So if you have the freedom of time, You should really be making the most of it.

I love that. I think a couple of bangers right there. The ultimate thing founders should focus on is not being distracted. I love that. Just stay in your own lane, do your thing. And I think the second factor is being curious, you know, that is, those are, I think, 2 important things. Full focus on one thing and don't, you know, don't get distracted and just be Be curious, learning about like putting it. I think the freedom of time is really important. Yeah.

I'll add just, you know, to the focus thing, it's not even just focus. I think focus is fairly obvious, like, and everybody, you know, a lot of people fail at it, but like, it's people understand that you should probably inherently focus. The thing that I think is just like the thing that people miss is that don't feel guilty about playing a different game than other people. And don't feel like your game is superior or inferior to other people's games because that just causes you to just get distracted because now you're playing a comparison game versus focusing on your thing. But when somebody's like, let's say you're trying to build something that has a really big impact on education and somebody says, oh man, you're just missing out. You should be investing in all these shitcoins, or I'm making so much money from that.

Or,

you know, or, you know, you should be doing something with, you know, with LLMs that you could just flip and make a bunch of money right now. Like, you're like, that's so cool. Like, I'm happy you're doing that. You know, like, that's interesting. Like,

yeah,

I'm super excited to see where you take things. But, you know, just put that aside and just move on and just do your thing. Right. If the opposite is true, where you're just trying to make a bunch of money and people are telling you, you know, you have to think big and you have to think long term. Just say, cool, like, I appreciate that and just move on and do the thing that is the one foot in front of the other, like make some money right now and build an app that has customers today. But I think it's like the focus is more about focusing in on the thing that like aligns with whatever you want to do versus what other people think you should be doing.

I love that. I think that is the best way to end this episode. I don't want to add any comment on that. I feel the juice of this whole episode of the conversation is you just boil down to that last thought. Appreciate it, Julian. This has been a blast. It's been fun talking to you. Yeah, so much fun. And looking forward to what you do in 2025. Here to support, here to kind of take it to the next level with you by spreading the word and whatnot. So thank you for joining.

Of course. Yeah, thank you. I hope everybody just gets into 2025 and does their own thing unapologetically and just goes from there.

That's the formula. And thank you folks. Appreciate you for listening. Stay tuned for more conversations like this. And yeah, just like how Jielen said, do your thing. The new year is around the corner, so it's your year. Cheers.