#022: Seth Goldstein - The Incredible Rise of Masa Chips: 250,000 Bags In 12 Months

I was working 22 hours a day on my phone, constantly always behind on everything, had no idea what was going on. Put on 30 pounds in a year, like very painful year. So when I left private equity to do Masa, I decided a few things. One, I would sleep as much as I needed. So I don't have alarms when I wake up. I don't take meetings before 1 PM if I can avoid it. I try to go to sleep at 10 or 11, sleep 9-ish hours a night when I can. And I try to be very present. I'm now very intentional that if I'm in a place, I'm present. My phone does not exist. Everything will be there when I get back. It's fine. There are almost no crises that need to be responded to within an hour.

Seth Goldstein is co-founder of Ancient Crunch, a family of brands focused on building new-age health foods for the modern consumer. After launching in 2023, Masa chips, the company's flagship product, exploded onto the wellness scene and has already sold over 250,000 bags. In this episode, we cover Seth's personal wellness journey, why more consumers are ditching seed oils, raising capital from top health investors, and Masa's record-breaking growth to date. Welcome back to episode 22 of the Turning Pro Podcast. Today we have Seth Goldstein, who's the co-founder and CFO, the Masa Chips guy.

The Masa Chips guy. Yeah.

Thanks for joining us today, Seth.

My pleasure. Thank you for having me on. Appreciate it.

Let's jump right into it. Give us the quick backstory on, on this amazing brand that you're building right now.

Yeah, my, my pleasure. So, uh, Masa Chips is the first product of the next Froot-O-Lay. That's kind of the vision we set out. On the backstory, it's January '24 right now. Yeah, time is flying. But 2 years ago, my co-founder and I, Stephen, were in Miami. I'm hungover, it's New Year's Day, and I'm eating Tostitos, and he comes over and starts making fun of me for eating shit. So his backstory, which is pretty important, kind of a frail guy growing up, had to be careful what he ate, got really into nutrition, health, all that stuff. Summer '21, he becomes a micro-influencer on TikTok and Instagram talking about seed oils. So that was his thing, really, Tin Man. And January 1st, I'm sitting there eating Tostitos, hungover, and he comes downstairs to make fun of me saying, "That's engine lubricant. What are you eating?" And I start— we're ribbing each other and telling him like, you know, you're probably right. I'm not just agreeing on the BioCam. Like, I've not— I haven't looked into any of this stuff. I'm sure you're correct, but I'm working in private equity. I don't have time to cook everything and I don't really care, right? I'm like 24 and healthy. It doesn't matter. That conversation inspired him to go buy a bunch of tortillas, put them in beef tallow and fry them up and prove to me that you could actually have really good foods, same exact experience, if not better, but made with real ingredients. That turned into a package and really wasn't a company until summer-ish of '22. The first bag was sold in July at you know, prices that made sense from our cost structure. And from there just kept selling out. So we made a batch, sold out, made another batch, sold out. He quit his job in September of '23— of '22. I sold— I quit private equity March of '23. And up until this, it was like really his project. I was aware of it, but, you know, curious. Sometime Q1 of '23, he shows me the numbers. I started doing some data chopping in Excel, and I say that this is a great business. Like this is the one. So I jump ship in March. At that point we were doing, I don't know, maybe 10,000 bags a month. Right now we're doing about 30,000, so growing pretty fast. That's 9 months later. Supply constrained the entire time. And the vision is ultimately to be the snack that you have if you're someone who cares about what you put in your body.

Can you catch everyone up before we dive in as to why seed oils are not good for you?

Yeah, so the biochem is complex. I don't want to distill it into 15 seconds, but the core of it is that seed oils are really fragile molecules. So if you think about what your body's composed of and what a seed needs from a, um, like a biocarbon perspective, the fats you want in a seed break down very easily and they enable the energy to come out to go build the plant. For your body, most of your body fat is actually stable and should stay stable and not break down constantly. The cells that make up your body are built with a lipid bilayer, which is made of fat coming from what you eat. And so as you eat fats that are more fragile, they start breaking down more easily. The result of that is that all of your organs end up failing faster because they're made of the wrong chemicals, basically. There's a second layer of this, which is part of the obesity crisis, where seed oils don't trigger satiation. And so if you try to eat a family-sized bag of Tostitos, probably shamefully everyone's kind of been there, right? Where you're watching a game.

I can do 2 bags.

Yeah, 2. Yeah, you could do 3. But you sit down, you're watching a game, and you look down, you've eaten like a pound of Tostitos. What the fuck? How did I eat a pound of fried corn? Like, that's weird. But if you sit down with a steak, you're gonna eat a good chunk of it, but you'll feel full. Like, you will not keep eating at some point. And Steven can explain the biochem. More into that stuff. But the core of it is seed oils don't create satiation. And so you just keep eating. And yeah, using saturated fat, beef tallow in particular for masa, lets you enjoy a snack but finish.

Yeah. So Ben and I have had 20+ founders on here now.

Yeah.

I feel like everyone that walks in is in one of two camps. They're either incredibly high-strung and run in here and are responding to texts, calls on Slack, sending emails. And then there are a handful that walk in very laid back, very chill. I'm sure there's a lot happening in their companies at the time.

Sure.

But they're pretty laid back about it all. And those tend to be the better operators that I've met so far. And for context, when Seth walked in here, we had the most laid-back conversation for about 20 minutes. And so walk me through. Have you always been that way? Is this— No, this is a recent development.

This is an intentional learned behavior. So private equity life— when I got to private equity, for context, I don't know, the audience. Most people in private equity come from banking where you're in Excel constantly for 2 years straight. I came from consulting and I came from COVID consulting, so I didn't know anything. I get to private equity and private equity is always a pretty hard job as an associate. For me, it was terrible. Great experience, learned a lot, but I was working 22 hours a day on my phone constantly, always behind on everything, had no idea what was going on. Put on 30 pounds in a year, like very painful year. Glad I did it, learned a lot.

Oh, the water was an hour late. We can run that back.

Yeah, okay.

Was it really 22 hours a day?

Yeah, I would actually— I would typically work—

yeah, because we were talking about this last—

yeah, that's a good topic.

I would typically work from 6 to 4. I would rip a nap and then go back to work.

Nap in the building?

From 4 AM to 6 AM.

You were remote, so you were just—

uh, I would go in at some point. I would catch either an Uber or bus in. I'd work on the bus.

Yeah.

Oh, that was just a package.

I was like, yeah, we're all good. I was teeing you up on your— oh, that you weren't always this way.

Yeah, yeah. Uh, do you want to start with the beginning of the question? I don't know how to—

just take it. So you weren't always this way.

What?

Yeah, so, um, prior to Masa, I was in private equity, which has a big reputation. It's a hard job.

No, you started with— it was a learned behavior.

It was okay.

Yeah.

So I was not always this way. Very much a learned behavior, a choice and intention to change the way I am. Prior to Masa, I was working in private equity, and when I got to private equity, I got my ass kicked. Most people who do private equity do 2 years of banking and they're working 18 hours a day, really hard, learn Excel really well, learn Outlook, all of the core office tools that you need just to function in a corporate environment in like a consulting, banking, private equity. Context: I did consulting, which is a lot less Excel, and I did it during COVID which meant you didn't work half the time. So I got to private equity with really not the skill set you need to be an associate in private equity. Got my ass kicked, worked 6 a.m. to 4 a.m. for months on end, put on 30 pounds in a year. I just didn't have the skill set to start, and that sucked. Didn't want to do that again. So when I left private equity to do Masa, I decided a few things. One, I would sleep as much as I needed. So I don't have alarms when I wake up. If I have a flight or something, I'll set an alarm, obviously. But I don't take meetings before 1 PM if I can avoid it. So it's exceptional if I take a meeting at any time AM. I try to go to sleep at 10 or 11, sleep 9-ish hours a night when I can. And I try to be very present. So I had a really bad habit. This was both work and my personal life where I'd be on my phone mid-meal and you know, you're with someone who wants your attention and you're texting somebody else and you're looking at memes or whatever. And it just, when you process how shitty that is, and sometimes people force you to process how shitty that is, I think it's a big wake-up call, was for me at least. And so I'm now very intentional that if I'm in a place, I'm present, my phone does not exist. Everything will be there when I get back, it's fine. Like there are almost nothing, there are almost no, crises that need to be responded to within an hour. They happen once a year, but like, they don't, right? So I'm very, very intentional that if I'm in a place where I'm supposed to be present, my phone is away. I'm there with the people I'm with and in the moment.

I'm so fascinated by this because, look, I never made it into the corporate world. So there's a part of that that I can't really relate to.

Sure.

I think I hear my banker friends tell me I work 22 hours a day, and in my mind I'm like, how is that even a thing? But it is a thing. I think it's, it's way easier to hear someone say it than to be like, no, come sit in the office with me for 22 hours for a week straight and see what this is like. The part that I'm curious about as a founder, I feel like you are your backdrop, right? When you're in private equity, someone else is paying your bills. So I, in my mind, it's all the more reason to be more high-strung, more stressed out when you're your own backdrop. So I, I'm fascinated by the fact that you had this like this switch. Once you actually put more pressure on yourself in regards to now you're betting on yourself, there's no one else there to pay your bills, yet that was the moment that you now were able to genuinely be okay with yourself waking up, you know, later than you did before, not taking meetings. I still think it's something I'm working on every day, is like, understand that not everything needs to be done yesterday. There will always be more to do.

Yeah, I think a part of that for me is a lot of clarity on how the universe pays you as a founder, as opposed to how your employer pays you as an employee. So somebody in every organization has a vision for what needs to actually happen. That vision then gets translated down through the organization into all the execution work. And your execution, as long as the output is decent enough quality, if you're willing to work 22 hours a day, I should stuff you with work, right? So if I just say press that button and I get paid for every time you press the button, I'm paying you a salary, I want you to press the button as many times as you will. At the founder level, at the executive level, whatever, however you want to frame it, um, and I think it's really about the executive function, your job is to figure out what to do. And so it's not like you can press buttons repeatedly and get rich. If you're a founder, doing more work is not necessarily translating to value creation. It's about having insights, relationships, connections, the things that have needle-moving impacts. For Masa, for example, we're going to do $3 million or so in meta spending this year. If I can find ways to acquire those customers and save $1.5 million on meta spending, that is worth a lot more than sending one more email about procurement for this thing or design or whatever. So in my opinion, figuring out how you change your P&L in a fundamental way and then making that happen is where value is created. And it's just very decoupled from linear execution of pressing buttons.

So you said something else yesterday, actually, when we were at dinner. Because we were talking about the fact that you don't take meetings before 1:00. And the comment you made to me was that you value your time at $10,000 an hour.

Yeah.

I want you to dig into that a little bit. And is that something you've always carried or is that more when you became a founder? And then I would love to just know the mindset switch when you started to just enact that thought on your day to day.

Yeah. And so this is kind of a weird topic and it's good to unwind. Like, it's not that I'm pricing out like, is this friend worth the time or whatever, but especially when I think about how do I create value for the business. There are things that might save me $200, which is nice, right? But if it's gonna take me 3 hours, I should just not do it. It's not worth the time. My time is worth more than that. And there are things that have a probability of making me $10 million, right? And so when you think through how do I allocate scarce hours to creating value, you have to create some anchor for where you just say no to all the things that are below that line. For me, $10,000 an hour is a high enough anchor where it's a little absurd, right? Obviously, but it tells you for all those little things that are not going to move the needle, you can say no and you have a structure that enables that. I think there are founders who do this wrong. Like they do that too early when they don't actually have a business to go fix. They're still trying to create a business and they should be doing more execution because they have no capital. But as your business grows, you can hire out and delegate more of the work to people who are willing to get it done. Saying no to lots of things and keeping your plate clear for things that matter, I think, is really important.

I think it also should be divided into phases of the business, probably like pre- and post-product market fit. I think the pre-product market fit, I remember when Verbatim was first going through that the first year, it was very important that in some way I was stressed and I was running around and I was trying to fix things inside the business. And I think that stress actually led to a lot of good things because you're constantly trying to solve little problems and little problems and little problems.

Yep. I, I'll disagree with you a little bit. I don't know if I'd use the word stress. I think motivation is important.

Yeah.

And for me, the way I feel motivated is I like cracking problems, puzzles, whatever you want to call it. I, um, I played this game Civilization as a kid.

Oh, I put my hours in on that game.

I think, uh, Steam tells you how many hours you played. I think I played 2,000 hours in high school, which is a crazy amount of time for a game.

Steam, what a throwback. Yeah.

But I love that game. And for me, when I'm thinking about work or whatever, it's all empire building. It's how do you like line up the right investments today to create these like beautiful scaled outcomes that pay off down the road? It's fine. But it's like very fun to build the empire correctly with the right, like, you know, laying the groundwork correctly to start. So I don't experience that as stress, actually. I experience that as motivation. But I agree with you, motivation is really important.

I think it's the constant kind of like running around and trying to fix things. Again, it can stem from motivation. But I'm curious, was there a specific phase of the business where you can call it product market fit, or once you hit a certain revenue threshold that you were able to transition into a different kind of operator or a little bit more higher-up problem solving?

Definitely. I think we have— we're a D2C business today, basically. I think there are 3 things that matter on the D2C side. One is customer acquisition, two is retention, and three is production.

And four is conversion on your e-commerce storefront.

And Platter. Shout out Platter. Shout out Platter. But I think those are the three things, right? Make chips to sell, find customers to buy them, and keep selling those same customers chips by keeping them happy. The manufacturing side, my business partner fortunately basically owns. The acquisition side, we figured out through a couple agencies. Create content. Put it behind Meta ads, it's working. And retention is basically solved on email marketing. And so by structuring where revenue comes from and breaking it down into actual customers, I've talked to some people who have revenue, but they have no idea where it comes from. It's, you know, Shopify pays me, it's great. I think having clear structure on where revenue comes from, what drivers do you control, what you need to do to control those things, and then delegating the actual execution of that out to people, you end up with not a ton to do. It's kind of nice. You know, so I think it's just like creating structure and then delegating execution out to the right people.

So my word of the year is simplify.

Yeah.

And that is what I'm hearing from you is something— one of your superpowers is just taking complex problems and then spinning them back to someone to make it sound like a 6-year-old can understand what you're trying to do.

I appreciate it. Yeah, I'll take that.

Is that— I want to dig into the reason we call the podcast Turning Pro Podcast, which By the way, take a look at that sign. It's the first episode. First episode with the sign. But I'm curious to know, in your mind, what was that turning pro moment for you where you realize you're playing at a whole new level than what you maybe were before that?

I think with some time in private equity, I— so the way a team works in private equity, some context. A deal comes in. It's some business that someone, one of us built, right? And it's doing $100 million in revenue or whatever. And the founders kind of fried, they're ready to hang up the cleats and sell it. And they'll go to a bank. The bank will make a pitch deck saying, this is a great asset, it's the best thing I've ever seen. You should pay us $1 trillion for it. And that'll get sent down to someone like me, an associate at a PE fund. They're 24 years old, Harvard, Goldman, all the fancy credentials, and they'll start chopping it up. That work is not that insightful. It's a lot of translating their pitch deck into something more credible. You have to be bright enough, but it's not rocket science. You could do it sleep deprived. It's a lot of formatting and getting formulas in Excel and doing reasonable enough customer calls and things like that. That work gets fed up to your deal lead, who's a principal or managing director, and then they ultimately lead the discussion with the fund manager, the GP, saying we should do this deal. This is what it looks like. This is what we have. We structure it with the banker and the seller and the credit guys and blah, blah, blah. And then the GP looks at it and says yes or no. So it's— they actually don't do that much work at the GP level if they want to. Their fundamental decision is to take all the work done by the deal team and say, yes, we're doing it, we're not doing it. My view was that I was really good at that job, actually. So I—

being the MD as an associate is how you described it.

Yeah. My nickname in private equity was Seth MD, which was like kind of an insult, kind of a compliment.

I took it.

I enjoyed it. But I was really good at just saying, this is the thing that matters and this is the decision we should make as a function of this information, which I know not everyone has. I'm glad to have it. It's a nice skill. And so I started thinking at that point, like, I should really be running a fund. I don't— I'm not actually that good at details. I fuck up in Excel all the time and my PowerPoints are all ugly and I really don't care about things that I decide don't matter. And I think I have a good filter on whether or not things matter or not. And so I'm in the wrong role. Like I should not be a junior at a fund. It's a really bad fit actually. So that insight was kind of there and that looped in with this insight that every organization is vision. So someone who actually makes decisions about what should be done, feeding down into execution at the bottom of the pyramid, and that feeds back up, and there's an iterative process. And I basically just said, I need to be here. Like, I'm really bad actually at being an execution guy. I will get details wrong, and I will not believe you often if I'm supposed to report to you and you tell me to do something. If I think you're wrong, like, and we don't have the relationship that allows feedback, I'm just not gonna do it, or I'll do a poor job, 'cause I think it's a waste of time. And so I decided, with that, I need to be in that like executive function. And then Masa kind of blew up and became the opportunity to go do it. But yeah, I think for me it was realizing where in that pyramid I function really well and then making sure I ended up in a seat that enabled it.

I would define that from my lens, getting to know you as soft-spoken conviction. So you're someone who's like, you're not like loud and in your face. But you're so firm. And when you speak, like, you're very firm in your beliefs and you very rarely waver from it. I think, like, the fundraising is something we've talked about a lot, but you're able to do it in, like, a playful, respectful way, even though you can take someone else who will regurgitate the same exact words that come out of your mouth with a different tone of voice and you would sound like an asshole. No, really, I think there's— it's, it's a, it's a superpower, really.

Appreciate it.

Um, to be able to instill that conviction and truly believe yourself when you say things. And so people around you believe what you have to say. And it's not that you're bullshitting them, it's that you, you sometimes have very aggressive stances, but they're very easy to digest from the other side. So I actually think it's really fascinating to watch you build this.

Appreciate it. Thank you.

So you went to Penn for undergrad.

Yep.

You did consulting and then you're in private equity.

Yeah.

How has your circle changed outside of your family and like your really close friends and your team?

Sure.

How has your circle changed? Because I'm sure the Penn consulting private equity crowd you're going for drinks with is very different than hanging out with Ben or people in the DTC space. So walk me through that transition.

Yeah, I think the biggest transition socially has been from people who are very W-2-oriented and they want prestige and they want safe income and they're really excited to show like, I'm a third-year associate at blah, blah, blah, towards people who are looking to build things. And there's a lot of buzzwords that go around the startup world like builders and founders, and I think it's all kind of bullshit, but There is a mentality in the growing part of my social world that you can build an enterprise, you can build a business, you can, like, do fun things, and that prestige is not really actually prestigious or good. So I found that I am distancing myself from people who are eager to, like, get their third master's degree and tell you that they're getting another, you know, stamp from Harvard, and towards people who are just working on fun projects and excited to be doing that.

Is it the energy? Is it the optimism? Is it the ambition? What about them?

I think the third master's degree from Harvard crowd is really insecure and really eager to tell you, I got another gold star and you should be proud of me and impressed by me and feel intimidated maybe. And then the builder crowd is like, this is fun. This is great. What a cool project. And they want to explain it to you and they want to get your perspective on how to build it better. It's almost like, I don't know if this is a good analogy, but I'm thinking of a kid who builds a really tall Lego structure to go make everyone else feel bad about their lack of Lego structure versus the kid who's like, yeah, what a cool project, but what would you add? And they're like excited to build the outcome, but it's not about their Legos. It's like, this is such a cool project. How exciting is this? And it's a lot more collaborative and like maximizing the outcome-oriented as opposed to asserting like, I have an ego, I made it, I won, I'm better than you. And I think the— not everybody, but there, there is enough presence of that kind of mentality in the pen consulting private equity world that I'm glad to shift away from.

What about in terms of any correlation you might see from the perspective of mindset and habits and like choices of activities like hobbies?

Paul Graham has this cute essay. He has a lot of great essays. One of them is called Playing House, I think, or it's about playing house. And it's the idea that the Harvard Golden KKR crowd wants to be a founder. And so they start doing the things they think is what a founder does. You have to get a pitch deck together, you have to raise money, you have to go to all these meetings and conferences. I do actually see that as the unifying thing in the founder world of like, everybody's doing cold plunging and everybody's doing sauna. And I think these are not bad, sorry, not bad habits at all. I enjoy all that kind of stuff too. I think there is like a bit of fitting in in the founder world on the Habbit side. There's a lot of fitting in in the KKR golden crowd where it's like you have to go to the right bars and restaurants and you have to go to Patagonia and tell everyone it was life-changing because you had 4 days on a llama or something. So it's not that that is not extremely present in this driver world. But I think the kind of funny— that doesn't bother me too much, but there's like a funny like trend in the founder world of you need to be waking up at 4 AM and you need to be listening to this part of Huberman and whatever. Um, and, uh, yeah, it's, it's funny to watch.

I actually love, I'll be the first to admit that when I first started, I was trying to check all those boxes. Sure. And I've definitely become more realistic and I think it's helped me substantially. There's certain things that I'll do for me, cause I actually enjoy them. But yep. You know, you read all these things, it's like, oh yeah, I was successful, but that's because I woke up at 5 and journaled and ran and cold plunge and meditated and blah, blah, blah.

Yeah.

But I love there, there are successful people out there who are like, You just need to like build shit that people want. And the difference between success and failure is not if you woke up at 6:00 AM and did all these things. Sure, there's incremental benefits, but don't believe everything that you read out there, which I think is a huge— it's an important learning lesson for early founders who their first thing they're going to do is look around them at their peers, like you said, or in terms of fitting in. You're successful. What are the things you're doing? Okay. That probably means I should be doing those things also. Which is not the case at all. And I think it's, it's on you to figure out how fast you can learn that.

Yeah, I think with building a business, it's make something somebody wants and then figure out a way to distribute it, right? Like, it's a simplification or whatever. Um, like, building a business is not about having crazy discipline or cold plunging or running 80 miles a week or whatever it is. It's make something people actually want, find a real problem that people have Go fix it for them and then distribute that to all the people who might be interested in that. I try to be helpful when people are playing with a new product and they want to get feedback. So I take calls every week or so from, you know, so I'm usually a pen guy who, or person who's looking to launch a business and often they'll bring a product or a Figma for a product and we'll start going through it and I realize almost always like actually unidentified a problem. They have identified what they think might be a problem. And instead of just calling people and getting research done to figure out like what problem actually is here, they'll start building a product because that's what founders do, right? You have a product and you have like a brand behind it and you can go market it. But I think just relaxing on the what do founders do and doing the how do I build a business logic, it ends up with a lot better results.

Classic Pen guy mistake.

Classic. Yeah.

Classic.

Classic.

It was funny this morning before coming here, I had like a 2-hour block and I had to finish some client deliverables and then we're launching some new products. Ben and I will have updates on that soon. But I basically was looking at this 2-hour block and I could either do these things, work on product, work on some distribution like you're saying. And then I also in my calendar, I swear to God, I had meditate, read, and red light. This is on my calendar from today. And I was, and I was doing work and I kept looking at them. I was like, that looks really fun. Yeah. And I almost like slapped myself in the face. I was like, what are you doing, man? Take that off your calendar. There's no need to do that.

I hand up, I, I've, I've done all the same things and I've, I've stripped it back now. So now the only thing that I have on there, there's two things. The first one is, uh, go comment on two LinkedIn posts and two tweets.

Yep.

It's like a 10-minute block.

Content 101.

Um, and then the only other one that I have is sit still. As crazy as it sounds, right? I'm— and that's in the evening, it's at 9:45, because I'm someone who always— we talked about this, but I always see chaos. I'm always with people or around things digitally, and I, I'm someone who has to make a conscious effort to be like, okay, just be with yourself for a minute and take a deep breath. But I've had to get rid of— I used to, because it would stress me out, I'd be like, oh, I just don't like answer these emails and do these things. But my calendar says it's time to go sauna and red light. I'm like, I can't do that right now. And then you don't do it and you feel like you actually failed at something. It's like, why are you using a calendar if you're not actually following the calendar?

I think one thing I want to be clear about in this conversation, I don't think any of these are bad habits, right? It's not like I think sauna and cold plunging, red light and meditation are bad things. I think there are a lot of people who do them because they see them as like the things that a founder does. Personally, I do think self-care, to borrow some language, is actually really important. Building a business takes time. It's stressful. You're going to burn a ton of money. You're going to have a lot of people trust you to like be responsible and have good outcomes. And I think burning out in that environment's very easy. I've felt it kind of coming on at times. I'm sure everyone has, right? And so I do think it's really important to create a lifestyle where you can watch tons of money get lit on fire. You can have problems happen. You can have to fire people. You have to make commitments. All that stress has to get resolved and you have to be able to contain it for long enough to build an actual enterprise. So I think making sure your life enables that is really important. I just think it's kind of funny that like the ways that people approach self-care tend to be like, what does the founder do? But I don't think these are bad habits. I think meditation seems to work for a lot of people. Red light works for a lot of people. Sun works for a lot of people, right? So they're good habits. It's just, it's kind of funny.

I'm curious how you think about building a culture with Masa, with your employees, because you came from the 22 hours a day mentality. You are now in the mindset of high impact all the time, and it's not counting how many hours I'm contributing to the business. Just thinking strategically.

Yeah.

And then it's how do you take a healthy mix of the two with your employees for them to understand what is, you know, the gold standard here?

Yeah. Big learning curve. So managing people in general is hard. You now have a different person with thoughts and feelings and a personal life that you want them to do things for you that are never perfectly translated. I personally have gotten feedback from my employees that I'm too vague, which is on brand.

Big about what they should be doing?

Instructions, yeah. So I'll send an email, for example, one of our investors is a big guy in food distribution. And he asked to get a bunch of product to two of his houses, one in Chicago and one in Florida. And so I looped in someone on my team to help get the product sent over. And I said, send this person a bunch of product. Which in my mind is like, I don't really care how much you send. Send them whatever sounds like a lot to you. I'm not gonna check, I don't care. For this person, that was a very stressful experience. It was like, I don't know what a lot is, and I don't wanna fuck up and send 12 bags if you meant 8, and oh God, what do I do? And an experience I'm not familiar with, this person felt very uncomfortable asking questions. So I've never felt ashamed to ask questions. I am happy to say, I don't know what that means, please tell me. I found out literally this morning that's an uncommon experience. Most people find asking questions uncomfortable. They feel like I'll look stupid or, you know, it's whatever. So big learning for me on how that works. On the broader point of building culture, I think there has to be a lot of intentionality. Stephen and I, my business partner, are pretty direct. There's not a lot of ego. There's not a lot of I need to be right or whatever. It's just let's figure out truth and then act on that. So our calls often sound like a fight. I've had conversations with him on the phone where someone's in the room and they're like, is Masa over? Like, what's going on? And I'm like, no, we just solved it. What do you mean? Like, what's the problem? And in contrast, most people don't work that way. The JPMorgan point, right? And so there's a lot of incorporating small talk more intentionally, asking how that thing is going and not just going through the motions, but actually meeting them where they are and what they need out of that working relationship, which is a relationship. And so Steve and I have been very intentional about that, but it's hard. Yeah.

It's funny, during the day, not during the day, but every week I have one-on-ones with kind of key team members. And I was telling Karina about this, my girlfriend, that half of the team members actually want all those 20, 30 minutes just to talk. It could be about their day, it could be about their week, it could be completely unrelated to work, but that really matters to them. Yep. And then I have some that I have one-on-ones with that every week we just cancel them because we'll check in for like 30 seconds and she's like, yeah, I'm good. We don't need to talk, man. And then we'll just get back to work. But it is important because for a little while I was thinking about removing all those one-on-ones from my calendar. I was like, well, I don't need these. But it's important to really be mindful and actually go through every single person and think through what is their working style? What do they need from me as a leader, as a founder? And then making sure they have that.

Yep.

That's the challenging part though, is, is you scale a team, it's what is the culture you want to build and are you trying to find people who share similar values or behaviors? And then of course there's gonna be the dissimilar ones because if you're hiring an engineer versus a marketer or a salesperson, it's going to be different.

Mm-hmm.

But I think something that we've spent a lot of time talking about as co-founders, because we're starting to scale our team more now, is the culture piece of it. Right. There's certain components that certain employees have from a characteristic perspective where I'm like, this kind of isn't what we really need right now. Uh, but it's something we learned and now we need to keep an eye out for this later on in the screening process. I mean, you learn at an early stage of a startup, one bad hire can really affect you.

Totally.

And it's really frustrating.

Yeah. Yeah. We, um, hiring is really hard. I, we have, we're still struggling to figure out how do you find the right people. I've heard from friends who are farther along their founder journey, whatever you want to call it, that friends of good employees tend to be good hires, which sounds like a good rule of thumb to me. But it's really challenging to screen people up front. You don't want to hire people that aren't a fit. You have to let them go. And then you've disrupted their life, right? So like it's bad for you, it's bad for them. It's like not a good outcome for anybody. It's bad for the team because now everyone's worried, like, am I going to be let go? So, yeah, hiring is really important and really hard. One thing we've tried, which seems to work, is to have, like, short-term contract or part-time setups to start. And those things almost always evolve naturally into full-time roles within, like, 2 weeks because they're great. You send them work, it gets done well, and you're like, I should keep sending you work. Or it's not a fit, and then it's a softer transition out because the contract ran up and it's okay to move on. So we're playing with that as a mechanism. It's functionally an internship. But yeah, hiring is really hard. And having to let go of people who are not a good fit— not bad people, but just not a good fit for the team— is also just unpleasant for everybody.

How do you structure those? Are they 30-, 60-, 90-day sprints on 1099?

We haven't structured them, is the honest answer.

Simplicity. Working through it. I send them a task. They either send it back or they don't. There's no— doesn't matter.

Kind of, yeah. I mean, we basically do— We'll start you at 10 hours a week at, you know, like pay that no one's excited about. But if you want to be here, it's, you know, interesting enough to go prove whatever is working. And then in theory, we probably should structure it more and say it's like an 8-week contract. We may or may not renew. We don't do that. We should. But in my experience so far, by week 2 or week 3, it's pretty clear like this person is a great fit. When you send them problems, they go away. Awesome. Or they're not a good fit and you send them problems and they get buried and then they don't ask questions because they don't know what to do. And then that just doesn't work.

But what do you think about the fact that a lot of the best operators are probably full-time employed, say, at other brands that you want to go hire them and you can't start them at like, hey, we'll pay you for 5 hours a week.

Yeah, we've been pretty intentional about getting agencies for roles that would be expensive hires and we'll get that. We'll cross the bridge when we get there. But we have a good media buyer. We have email guys, we have content creators all outside the organization. So contracting out to agencies for us has worked pretty well to start. The things that we've hired for internally are not like you need the— my team's great. This is not shitting on anybody, but like, I don't need somebody who like built Harry's to come work at Masa. I can take someone who's 24, ambitious and excited to go do good work and plug them in on the stuff that we need and they can figure it out. So we— the way we've built the company so far like we can take people who are generally talented, who don't have a decade at Harry's, that can get plugged in and be fine.

Who are freelancing or between jobs.

They're between jobs, they just finished college. Maybe they're open to 10 hours a week because like, fuck it, it's a few hundred bucks to spend on beer money or whatever they do. And then after a few weeks in or a couple months, whatever it is, you're like, hey, you're great, we want you on full-time, here's an offer. And they're like, sure, I'm excited.

Yeah, so you'll go agency for a couple months to get learnings. See what best in class looks like, hopefully, fingers crossed, best in class.

Yeah.

And then based on those learnings, start to scope out a role for like a young hustler.

Um, no, not really how we're doing it. So agencies for us are— we've had our email guys, for example, for a year and a half now, and they're great. I don't really plan to replace them. They're not too expensive and they work. So it's not like everything needs to be in-house. If I can have a cost item that is totally fine and work that's good, I'm fine with that. I don't need them to be on my payroll directly. So I don't have a big preference to in-house work unless the savings would be pretty material. And none of our— like our media buyer, we pay under $10K a month, right? And so if you're going to find someone in-house who's going to be as good, they're going to be around that cost. Right? Like maybe save $3,000 a month, but it's not going to be a needle mover. You know, this is $50K back every month. So we're not in a situation where our agencies cost us so much that it would make sense to insource, honestly. And it's a lot harder to hire for specialized things versus general wholesale support or customer service support, which you can figure out pretty quick.

Yeah. You're hiring a bunch right now. So walk me through how you're thinking through different roles, agencies, contractors, full-time.

Um, we, everything on the engine product and engineering side is full-time. Uh, I think we're, it just doesn't make sense for our business where you're like bringing in, you're plugging in pieces. Like I would, we would never work with a development agency to come like build a part of our product. I think we have used an agency for some content creation stuff. We've used an agency for some automation work, ops focused. So I'd say maybe like marketing ops, we're more open to it depending on what it is. But we're a software company and majority of our team, like, you know, we're 12 full-time and 4 part-time right now. And our full-time employees, like 3 of them aren't technical, right? So it's predominantly engineers and product people, which all of those people are full-time. So I think it's maybe different for software. Uh, I could be wrong about that, but I think the only area where we're interested in agency unless there's ad hoc work, right? So like we're using someone to make an animation video or we went through a rebrand, we use an agency, but ongoing it's only been like ops and some content stuff.

Yeah, that checks out. I'm curious, over the past 6 months to a year, essentially once Masa really started to take off, um, what are some of the coolest experiences, coolest people that you've gotten to meet, or just like coolest rooms that you've been able to get into that you wouldn't have had access to before? Including this one.

Yeah. Oh, so this is number one, obviously. Turning pro is a very rarefied space, but, um, out of cool places, I now get inbounds from VCs every day or so. So if somebody wants to meet me wherever, um, our lead, uh, the family fund, uh, for our seed round is in California. So we got, uh, went out to Ojai, which is about an hour north of LA, stayed at this like beautiful resort for 2 days, got to pitch to their LPs, and then Their keynote speaker, who's now an investor as well, basically said, here's all the trends in food. This is all the stuff that's trash. Don't worry about it. This is how you're going to make money. And then pointed Steven and I out and said, give these guys money right now if you want to make money. Wow. So that was a cool moment.

VCs are just the best, man.

They're awesome, yeah. But we really had a key opinion leader in the better-for-you food space give a 20-page presentation about all the trends in food over the next 5 years. And the like climax of the speech was pointing Steven and I out in the audience saying, these guys are the best investment in this room. Give them money right now if you want to be here. And that helped, which was nice. So he brought in a bunch of money, which was great. But that's probably the coolest offhand. The other thing that comes to mind is I've become friendly with Joe Disegna at Spartan.

Yeah.

So I met him in Fenway. In Boston for a race and become good friends with him and an advisor in a lot of ways. And his network is phenomenal as well. And so there's a lot of like, I think as a, like as a founder, executive, whatever you want to call it, there's just a level of legitimacy you have where people like take your opinion seriously and want to talk to you. I think a lot of the things I would say today are things I would have said 3 years ago. It's not like I've had some transformative experience that led to insights that I couldn't have gotten to 3 years ago. But I think being, um, an employee somewhere versus building your own thing just changes what people react to and relate to.

What's the worst advice you've ever gotten?

Oh, so much.

Fuck. Uh, most of it.

I love— Seth is opinionated, so I think it's important to ask questions like that where people just drop the hammer.

Yeah.

Um, and name who gave you the advice.

Uh, that, that, that I will pass on. Um, Bad advice I've gotten. I've gotten a lot of people who are eager to hire lots of expensive people. So it's, I think this is like a ZIRP bubble thing, but a lot of VCs who want you to go hire like 5 or 10 people from McKinsey to go make more PowerPoint slides for you in-house. So bring them in for ops and strategy. And back to the simplification, we do 3 things. I make chips, I find new customers, I sell them more chips, right? It's like not a complicated business. And so I think being slow to hire expensive people is really good for us. Maybe I'm naive and there are other businesses where it's great, but for us, that's been really solid. I think people who, we got one piece of advice that I think is actually not terrible advice, but given context, it can be. Which was when you get the money, when money's available, you should take it. I think for us, that was probably needed advice. I ran the business very lean for about a year because I wanted to grow it before taking in more money, just multiples, blah, blah. But I think for a lot of startups, especially during the bubble, they took in crazy amounts of money. They had no discipline at all on how to build the business. They didn't know what building the business meant. They just were playing house. And they would burn tens of millions of dollars, which You know, even if it's not your money, you should feel bad about that. Somebody's money is being burned. Um, and so I think for a lot of people, the fiscal discipline that being poor builds is a really good experience to start at least. Um, we probably should have taken more money earlier, but I think that is bad advice for a lot of people. Um, the last thing that comes to mind for bad advice is grow revenue at all costs. So I love people who talk, and this is back to needle moving, but they'll talk about like fringe things that don't move the needle. You can change this slight package design thing, or you can get into this other store, like fringe things that are not worth the time, or scaling things that aren't working. So you can build top line a lot of ways. I can go sell you stuff. I can sell you money, right? I can buy $100, give you $100, I can call that revenue. That doesn't create value for anybody. And so making sure that unit economics are like attractive and scalable before putting effort into them, I think is really important.

I'm curious, you've probably met a lot of the big names or influencers in paleo biohacking.

Yeah, health and wellness.

Health and wellness.

Yeah. And I follow a lot of— I think it's a lot of guys specifically on like weird Twitter circles. Yeah. Like Solbra or Carnivorous Aurelius.

Yeah.

And I love all their content. Yeah, but I'm curious to get your take because I'm sure you've talked to a lot of them because half the stuff I see they advise, I'm like, that's really good advice. Like, you should probably use a filter on your tap water or maybe don't use fluoride in all your toothpaste or don't have too many seed oils.

Experts love fluoride. I don't know what you're talking about.

I'll stay out of this. But at the same time, then I see some of their stuff and they're like, eat steak with every meal. And I'm like, that's horrible for your cholesterol. You shouldn't do that.

Yeah.

And so are there any hot takes or things that you've experienced that you're like, this is a little too deep?

My hotter take actually is that most of the stuff doesn't matter very much. Like, I think if you talk to doctors— not that I'm— that's another conversation, but—

not medical advice.

Not medical advice. But I think the thing that matters, the things that matter most are like sleep enough, don't be obese, don't drink a bunch of alcohol, don't smoke. And your life expectancy is basically as good as it's gonna get. If you enjoy these habits, like I, when I was in California, I ate, I was keeping kosher and it's hard to get kosher meat in the Bay Area. And so I found I didn't feel great when I was eating a pescatarian or vegetarian diet. And so I could feel an impact on how I felt generally. So I think there are impacts from these things, but they're broadly overrated. It's kind of cult-like. Um, again, not like individuals be whatever, but like, if these things are fun hobbies for you, that's enough to justify doing them. If you think that taking one more supplement is going to change your life, don't, you know.

But you should have masa chips.

You should have masa chips. Absolutely. Yeah.

Um, what about the 3 most common traits in high performers? That's my favorite question, by the way, to ask on the podcast.

I'm gonna start stealing it on this podcast.

Yeah, it's my— it's my— I love the answers.

Uh, intelligence, structure, and listening skills.

Unpack those.

So intelligence is just horsepower. Can you process reality? Can you process what people are talking about? Um, structure is taking things and creating enough structure to then apply that processing. So you can solve a math problem, but do you know what problems to solve and in what order and for what purpose? And listening skills are the thing I think is what lacks, is most lacking in collaborative context. So people don't know what other people are talking about. They're waiting for their chance to respond. They're really excited to get their point in. They have a zinger, they've gotcha, whatever it is. I think to be a high performer, you have to understand where other people are. And what is important to them. Taking this in a business context, I think performance is broader than business, but in a business context, you have to get— I will have to get 1,000 people to like me and do something that I need them to do over the next 2 years. Making up numbers, obviously. If you don't know what people care about and what motivates them, you can't be helpful for them. You can't be a good friend. You can't be a business partner. You're just demanding stuff and hoping they give it to you. And so I think to be competent in a business context, you have to understand what motivates the people you're talking to and how you can be helpful. Do your best to be helpful, and things flow back.

What have you had to sacrifice as you've, I guess, experienced your own kind of like turning pro journey over the past year or two?

Yeah.

Is it social time? Is it maybe time with your family? Is it time for yourself? What have you given up?

I've been pretty intentional about not giving things up. I also— my baseline coming into this was private equity hours, and so I didn't have a lot of work-life balance. So that hasn't really been an issue for me. I actually— I grew up in New Jersey. My family, most of my friends are all here. And so moving back to New York when I quit PE from California, I actually got back a lot of family time and a lot of friend time. So that hasn't been a trade-off for me. The biggest trade-off was before Masa, I was a 26-year-old vice president at a $5 billion fund. That feels good. Yeah, like objectively, I'll make fun of the Harvard, Goldman, KKR kids all day long. But being in that context feels nice, right? It's nice to be able to say I have all these credentials and you should be impressed by me. I went from vice president at a $5 billion fund to I have a food company you've never heard of. I sell tortilla chips. And at this point in my life, it's in the business journey, whatever you want to call it. It's legitimate enough that it does feel good again. And so I feel proud to say I'm a co-founder, owner of Masa, and this is the business. And the energy is kind of back to feeling good about talking about what I do. But the first, I don't know, 3 months probably from March to maybe June of 2023, super awkward. You're like, I have a fake business because you've never heard of it. And if it was real, you'd have heard of it. And, um, that kind of sucks, you know.

Is that driven by insecurity?

Um, probably. Uh, I, I don't call that insecurity. I think like as monkeys we all kind of enjoy status. Like it feels good to be impressive and do cool shit. Um, I think I'm a pretty secure person generally speaking, but it feels bad to lose the thing that you got to feel good about before, you know?

We call that the golden handcuffs.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not taking a salary for 9 months, also painful.

But I think it depends on the context of like the people that you're around though.

Also true.

Because I remember when I tried to start a company before I launched Verbatim and I was in San Francisco and me tinkering on the side nights and weekends building a stealth company. All my friends were investors and founders out there and they were like, keep going, man. That's so exciting. I can't wait. Once it launched, I lost any clout that I had building a stealth company. But for my buddies back home that I went to college with or high school with, they're like, what are you doing? And I'm like, oh, I'm trying to do this content thing. Yeah, yeah. And they're like, were you in venture, man? That sounds so much cooler.

Yeah.

And yeah, I think it really depends. Like if you're hanging out with us and you're starting your company, we're like, hell yeah, man, that's exciting.

Yeah.

Versus private equity.

But there's a reason that most people don't make it that far because you have to see the vision before anyone else does and you have to be willing to stick with it. When you have those conversations with someone's like, dude, you're making chips. Like, what are you talking about? Go to the convenience store. There's plenty of chips. You don't need to make me another bag of chips.

Yeah.

Can you withstand that and overcome it?

Right.

I think that holds true to 99% of businesses. You look crazy until you don't.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a really funny— when I first had the idea, it's like spring '22. It's a concept. We're going to make the best tortilla chip in the world and we're going to you know, have this whole lifestyle brand around it. And I was telling people in my network, like, yeah, that's dumb. Don't do that. It's a waste of time. And then as numbers start coming in and repeat spend starts coming in and we're scaling it, those people all became investors. And so it's been kind of fun. I don't fault them for it, but it's been kind of funny to watch, like, that beginning stage holding to some thesis you have. It's a bet, right? You're going to try it out, burn $5-10K to, like, see if this thing is worth doing. and you have to endure. A lot of people are like, that's— they'll openly make fun of you. You know, like, it sucks. It's awkward.

Do you, um— oh wait, I lost, I lost my train of thought. I was, I was curious about, uh, like when you think about evolving as a business, do you have any sense of like, how do you think about relationships with people who are like that who then want to come back to the table like later on? Is that something that—

I, I don't burn bridges.

Not burn bridges. Let me make sure I'm clear.

I'm not bothered.

I'm a huge advocate advocate of don't burn bridges. I 100% agree with you. But is there any sense of like, if someone doesn't believe in you at a certain point and then they come back later on, like, are you— do you have any sort of like—

no, I have no issue with that. Um, and I, I think there are characters who I've met that I don't want to deal with. I think they have bad intention, bad energy, whatever you want to call it. Um, so there are people who I will choose to not take meetings from. I'll tell them we're actually totally full on cash, we're not fundraising. We're always fundraising. But for certain folks, they—

I'll get that text tomorrow.

Do so.

We had a good conversation.

I can take a safe note in. I don't really care. So I'm always going to take in a $5K, $10K check, whatever. But all conversations where it kind of ends with like, yeah, no, we're good. We're actually not at the moment. But for someone who says, based on the data I have, it just doesn't seem correct to me. That's a totally fair opinion. I have no— You don't have to agree with me. And if, if that's the basis of it, like you think I'm incorrect, that's fine. So I don't take offense to it at all.

And then the one thing you just alluded to, which, you know, I'm so fascinated by, which I think people listening to this could benefit from, is just the art of fundraising. Yeah, I, I don't know how aggressive I'm allowed to get on this because, you know, I have a very strong stance. We've talked about this at length with what you've been able to pull off. Is that— am I okay to like— not—

we could chat the topic.

It's, it's basically that like I cannot believe the valuation that he was able to pull from his raise. And no, I actually—

it's a compliment.

I invested, I invested in it because of how strongly I disagreed with it, how much I couldn't believe that he got full buy-in. And I was like, you know what, this, this guy's— I'm going to get back more than I put in this. I know I will on the basis of this. And I know it goes against like core principles, but it's really been fascinating what he's been able to, to do. So I, I, I don't know, maybe you can just speak to some of the things to do versus not to do as founders listening, trying to raise their own money.

Yeah.

So just for context, he raised at a very impressive valuation, uh, relative to what's going on in just capital markets. And so he clearly knows a thing or two about storytelling.

Yeah. So the— there's a lot to unpack here. Um, first laying the ground on what capital markets are. There are three kinds of businesses. There is venture, which is early stage. Is there a business here? There is growth, which is, in my opinion, totally uninvestable, makes no sense. And there's late stage, which is basically real estate. My first job in investing was late stage. So you're finding things that are stable. You don't know— it's not a big bet on where revenues and cash flow is going to be 5 years from now. And you're just underwriting what yield am I basically taking on my bond, right? It's this thing is going to print $20 million a year. I'm willing to take a 10% yield and so I'll pay $200 million for it.

Right.

It's like pretty simple math. Venture as a sector is, is there a business here? If there is, it's going to be a winner. You want in. If there's not, it's a loser. You don't want to get in. Valuation, in my opinion, should never be the deciding factor for an investor. If you're talking to someone whose deciding opinion is valuation, they're going to lose all their money very quickly. And I would not give them money as an LP. Growth in in my opinion, just to round out the conversation, we'll jump to storytelling, is basically all investible. It's all about valuation. And because the businesses are growing so fast, valuation is impossible as a process. And so I don't think you can price a growth asset and investing in them is crazy. So for me as an investor, which is my prior training before Masa, it's either venture or it's late stage. That's investible and storytelling. For venture fundraising, the entire thing's a story. Nobody gives a shit that you made $1 million last year in revenue. That's not interesting. It's not a business, right? There are Taco Shacks down the road that sold $1 million in top— like, that's not a business. The story has to be 5-ish years from now, what can this thing be? What are the— back to the structure side— what are the specific controllable drivers that I see, have control over, and I'm executing on? Between now and then to achieve this outcome? What is that outcome worth? And what is fair compensation for you today based on that outcome? What I see people doing in venture is, as founders, is looking backwards. They'll say, I did $2 million in revenue last year. What's that worth? And if you're an investor, you'd say, I don't know, multiples, 3x, and so I'll pay you a $6 million valuation. If you're doing $1 million next month, that's extremely important information. If you're going to be at $100 million in 2 years from now, That's extremely important information. And so backwards-looking fundraising doesn't understand what you're selling the investor, which is where will you be when they exit, when they get paid? What is that thing worth and how does that translate to fair compensation? And to the confidence issue, I think a lot of people feel like they're lying when they express confidence. Like if I tell you— and tell— fact-check me on this. I think I'm pretty honest with people. This thing could go to zero, right? It's a venture bet. And also, I fully believe this is the outcome we're going to achieve. I quit a 7-figure job in finance to go do this thing. This is the structured way we get from here to there. And this is why all the data says we're going to continue and get there. And so I think being honest about how confident you are while still having a view and saying like, this is what I expect, is how you should storytell. And yeah, That's a little bit rambly, but how I think about it.

No, I think the key differentiator that you just said is you actually believe everything you say.

Totally.

I think it's very easy to look at a founder who's raising, who's saying something, and I'm like, I don't actually know if you even believe that. So I don't know why you think I'm going to believe that.

Yeah.

And I think that actually is why you've been able to do what you do is because when you say things, you're so brutally honest and you genuinely think that you're not bullshitting yourself, so you're not bullshitting other people.

Totally. And I think structure is how I get really confident on things. So I am totally fine saying I have no opinion on that, or I don't know. I don't feel the need to have an opinion on everything. But for things that I form an opinion on, I have structured reasons to believe them. It's not I feel good or bad and therefore. So I feel very confident on the things I have. And I think structuring what has to literally happen between now and then for you to get there can give you that confidence and you should believe it. The other thing I think founders fuck up with is they think of the journey as too far out. And what I mean by that is if you're pre-product or pre-problem or wherever you are really early, you actually are not on the leg of the journey to go to scale. You don't have a thing to go bring $200 million. You have a thing to go to $1 million. And so I think thinking about the process of building a business as a series of bets I have to go prove this thing. And when I do that, I'll unlock value. Valuation is up. You got some intermediate return as an investor. And I now have a higher probability of getting to this ultimate end stage thing is a better way to build a business. So if you're pre-problem or you're pre-product or pre-scaling or whatever, I think identifying that as the thing that you need to go solve, the cash you need to go prove it or fail, which is totally fine, is the right way to storytell. For us, we basically self-funded until we had product market fit and were scaling. So Stephen and I, um, I worked in finance, Stephen came from Facebook, had a little bit of personal savings. We put in about a quarter of a million of our own money, which allowed us to get way farther along before taking in material outside capital. If you're in that position, that's fine. Capital markets exist to give you that equity capital. Um, but understand what are you proving in the next leg? And like tell that story as part of the context. I think if you don't have a prototype and you're selling this $100 million a year vision, you're bullshitting, right? Like you're not there yet. And so you have to calibrate correctly on how big of a story do you actually think you will achieve? Why are you risking your time and reputation to go do this thing? And then tell that story accordingly.

Before we wrap, can you walk us through that? Maybe not that whole story, but the 4 or 5-year vision? That you are pitching in a live conversation.

Totally. So the vision for—

Adrian will decide after this if he's investing or not.

Yeah, perfect.

Would you like $500?

We actually— our check cap is $250. Sorry. So the vision for Masa, the vision for Ancient Crunch, which is really the business, is to make the perfect version of Froot-O-Lay. So Froot-O-Lay sells all your favorite crunchy junk food. You want a potato chip, a corn chip, a pretzel, or whatever. What we want to do is replace all the seed oils with animal fats, replace all the carcinogenic pesticide-laced corn and wheat with, you know, real high-quality inputs, brand it beautifully, and then offer that in venues where you, you kind of are shopping intentionally. So the vision for Ancient Crunch is that if you are the kind of person who cares about what you put in your body and you wanna enjoy your crunchy carbs, or you're not on a keto diet or a water fast or whatever, the carb of choice, if you're gonna have a crunchy carb, is Ancient Crunch. So we're gonna have tortilla chips, which is masa chips. We have a potato chip coming Q3-ish, which will be fried in duck fat, different brand called Vandy Crisps. We'll have a cheese cracker, pretzels, et cetera. That's the, like, V1 of Ancient Crunch. The story we're now playing a little bit with internally is actually becoming a kind of curated platform for all of the best versions of things you want. And that's a little bit tricky. So to break it down, this summer, for example, we're going to launch a swimsuit. And we're going to have like 500 units, not a ton. But if you go to buy a swimsuit today, you will almost certainly find that you have to wear plastic. And that sucks. People want to wear cotton or linen or wool or whatever. My business partner was on his honeymoon in Greece, and he happened upon this boutique swimsuit shop somewhere. And they had an all-cotton bathing suit, dries very quickly, looks great, just perfect. Super high-quality product. And so there's a version of Ancient Crunch that turns into Ancient Life or something, where we also become a reseller for— we're not gonna take on more manufacturing, but become a reseller for other curated, super high-quality, best in class, best in world, things, lotions and potions and clothing and whatever else. But the core vision today is that we are the Frito-Lay killer to take some founder language.

Oh yeah, I'm in. Let me know what to sign.

$250? Yeah.

Done.

Perfect. Cool.

Awesome, Seth. Well, this has been a lot of fun. I appreciate you coming on.

Yeah, appreciate having me on. It's always a good time.

Where can people find you? Where can people go to shop?

Can look at you.

Shout out for Masa Chips. So easiest is masachips.com. get you a discount code or something in the link for people to use. If you're in LA, we are fucking everywhere in Erewhon, so great place to buy us. Um, Bristol Farms, Fountain Blue as of today, so it's a big win. But, uh, yeah, easiest is just to go on masterchips.com.

Oh yeah, thanks for coming on, man.

Yeah, thank you guys, appreciate it.

Awesome.