#1: John Coogan (Co-founder @ Soylent and Lucy.co)

Welcome to the Optionality Game, a conversation with successful leaders about evaluating your options, taking the right risks and creating your own luck. I'm your co host Cooper Schoenthaler. I've loved entrepreneurship since I started my first business cleaning refrigerators when I was eight years old. Now I'm a third year student at Northeastern University exploring the world of business through positions in finance and consulting.

I'm your other co host Alston Thomas, spending my weekends at garage sales. Growing up finding items to resell on ebay had instilled a love for business long before starting university. Now at Northeastern, I'm a fourth year student and have worked in early stage startups and venture capital in the past.

Each of us want to build companies that positively impact the world and so at Northeastern we became immersed in the world of business. But along the way we found that the path after graduation is not as straightforward as we originally thought.

We see people graduate picking the riskiest options possible, like starting a business and still end up making millions. We see others who work hard to graduate with a safe, steady and well paying position at the top companies but aren't left as fulfilled as they expected.

After seeing different choices result in such different outcomes, it made us wonder, should I become another 20 something just clawing their way up the corporate ladder? Do I take the path less traveled and risk my livelihood to work at a startup? Or do I throw it all away and just become a ski bum? I've honestly given equal thought to these three options as well as many others.

This podcast is our much needed exploration into the options that people choose, the choices they regret, and most importantly whether they're satisfied with how it all turned out. Lessons are best conveyed by stories and we hope to explore the career defining moments of of business leaders and change the way you think about your decisions.

So welcome to the Optionality game.

Today we're speaking with John Coogan, the co founder of Luci and Soyle. Luci is a D2C nicotine gum disruptor that is taking a fresh take on the nicotine gum business model to reduce nicotine related harm. He's also co founded the wildly successful meal replacement beverage company Soylent, which in 2017 was valued at a half a billion dollars. John, thank you so much for being on today. We're really excited to have this conversation.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Good to be here.

And so to kick things off, you've been a part of two pretty successful consumer food companies. We're really curious to learn more about your origin stories and what your biggest Influences were growing up and kind of how you were raised.

Yeah, I grew up in Pasadena, California. It's a suburb of Los Angeles. Kind of a nerdy community. Caltech is here, JPL is here. So you run into a lot of scientists. It was really great to be able to go to. I remember attending like robotics competitions at Caltech where they would basically do like Battlebots, but the engineers would build really cool stuff, so had a lot of access to computers. And my parents were both. They met in art school, but my dad went into technology during the dot com boom. Learned how to code and I picked up a little bit of that mostly from. I was really huge into Counter Strike. I don't know if you're familiar with that game. It's. It's still popular, although it's been through a couple of revision. Csgo. Yeah. So I ran a whole team, like an esports team before. There was literally a lot of money in it. Um, but we would go around to like different, different like, like competitions. But usually it was just like a couple of people at a Best Buy, like playing against each other. Um, but yeah, we. So we were just like a bunch of high school kids, like middle schoolers playing Counter strike, like obsessively, like, figuring out strategies and a big thing when you had a, like a team, like, you weren't legitimate unless you had a really cool website. Cause all the, all the great, like CS Go team or CS teams back then, this was like 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, like before source, before CS Go, kind of like 2003, 2002 era. And like all the really good teams had really slick websites. So obviously we needed a website, even though, like we were in school and this was not like that real of a thing. Um, so I figured out how to like just kind of hack together like php, HTML, CSS websites. Um, the big thing at that time was Flash intros, like Adobe Flash, which now, you know, you can do all that with just like JavaScript and like D3 or like the Dom. But we would. So what I would do is I would often like try and go and find like, like great Flash intros and like decompile them and then edit them and recompile them with like our names and images in there. Or like one time I made like a highlight reel for a bunch of people in Dave Defeat, which was kind of like an offshoot World War II themed. And I edited and I was like, yeah, I'll provide like editing services to all these like, pros, but I get to Sneak in a clip of myself, you know, like that type of thing. So. And then I was like, oh, yeah, I can provide hosting for you guys. Because back then there was no YouTube, like, you couldn't just host a video. So my dad had a server for, like, work. And he. Back then, like, now if you go on Amazon aws, they will charge you bandwidth. So, like, you put up a file, like, if it gets downloaded a million times, like, you're paying a reasonable amount of money. Like. But he just had some sort of, like, negotiated deal with a. With some, like, you know, some data center that just let him rack a server there, and they weren't charging him bandwidth fees. So I was like. So I was like, yeah, I'll host this. I'll host this, like, file for us. And so we put it out in like, the data defeat community and the csgo community or the CS community. And like, it just went like, viral, I guess, on. And this was back on like, ircas, where like, you go into, like, different channels, kind of like, kind of like Reddit, kind of like Discord, basically like Slack. And so it went viral. It got downloaded like a ton of times. And my dad was just like, what the hell did you do? Like, how did you. Like, you just blew up out the bandwidth. Now, like, now we have. Now we have to put an agreement in place because I was just using it to host, like, little websites. But, you know, it was a lot of fun and, and, and definitely, like a good combination of like, you know, hacking and just having fun as, like a kid. I feel like a lot of this is a common origin story. I talk to a lot of kids now who, you know, oh, yeah, learn to code because of Minecraft or learn to code because of Roblox. And it's kind of the same thing. Like, you know, oh, you want to install, you know, wall hacks in Counter Strike? Like, well, you better learn the command line a little bit because you're going to be debugging stuff. We, like, try and make custom maps and install, like, special sprays and all sorts of stuff. So that was kind of like the basic intro. I did a little bit of like, entrepreneurship in high school. Like, I would buy and sell like, DJ equipment. I was really into electronic music and would, like, collect vinyls and all this stuff. So I. And so I would buy, like, turntables and then I would sell them on ebay, but I would ship them anywhere in the world. So people would pay like a huge markup because the distributor doesn't maybe doesn't have a license to distribute in that country or maybe they just can't figure it out logistically. So I'm basically just acting as like a forwarding service. But when you're talking about like a $500 turntable that you're selling abroad for like $1,000, you. You pocket like 200, 300 after all the taxes and fees and stuff. So drop shipping before just like. Yeah, yeah, kind of. But like very, very small scale. Like they never got this into like a job or business. It was more just like, you know, like playing around on the Internet. But then, you know, so I graduate high school in 2007 and get to Northeastern. I was interested in Northeastern because five year program at the time, everyone was doing co ops. Like, you take a lot of time off. I didn't really know what I wanted to do professionally, so I was like, well, at this school I have an extra year to figure it out. So at least, you know, I can take a little bit more time and I'll be able to go work in real environments and figure out what I like and don't like. So I got to get to Northeastern and the financial system is collapsing entirely. Like everything's getting destroyed. Like, so, you know, obviously that has a terrible effect on my family. Like, you know, very, you know, we lose our house. Like all the, all those classic things that happen in the, in the global financial crisis. So every news story is about the financial crisis, about really complex derivative instruments and credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations and stuff. So I'm studying economics mostly because I want to figure out what the hell is happening to my life. And also it's just the most interesting stuff in the news. And if you weren't studying finance or economics, you couldn't really understand it fully. So get super into finance, study economics, do a bunch of co ops. Basically hate them all. They were all like big companies. Not a good fit for me at all. But eventually get to the later stages of economics and then you start learning econometrics and you're doing regressions and then the coding kind of comes back in because you're doing like more and more advanced Excel models. Pretty soon you're automating things with vba. Then you know, you're looking at R and Stata. And then why don't you just use Python? So I picked up this book, learn Python the Hard Way. Really great book. And just like crushed that book in like a weekend. It was like, oh, this is amazing. Like I finally get it like Python, like it's such like an elegant language, was really, really, really easy and it just like it just clicked. Everything made sense. But then I was like about to graduate and I was like, well I have all these investment banking like finance offers, like an interned at like hedge funds and like all these different funds. But like I didn't want them because I wanted to do, I wanted to work in technology. And I wasn't just going to like walk into some high frequency trading firm and be like, like make me like a programmer because they'd prefer like a PhD from MIT or somebody with like a CS degree. I was like a hacker, you know, not like a, not like a computer scientist or. And honestly most of the really, really top people, like the top career paths in high frequency trading are like physicists or mathematicians. They're not even just developers. And I'm like a hacker guy. So I was doing a part time internship at this VC fund, super, super small, like 10 mil under management. And they were kind of incubating really early stage companies, like 100k here or there. And there was this one CEO who came in to pitch his company and the leader of the fund was like, oh, this guy's really, he's doing like big data and payments and it's going to be super cool. So I went to MIT to a bunch of these meetups that they'd have where they just present technical people talking about different technologies. They're basically sales pitches for these projects usually. But to me I was like, oh, I'm just learning through osmosis, absorbing this stuff. So I learned a lot about Hadoop and big data, get into that stuff, kind of learn what the MapReduce algorithm is, which is pioneered by Google, really really groundbreaking stuff and get super into it. I'm just kind of like rabbit holing on it and then a couple weeks later meet up with the CEO who comes into the office pitching stage two of his business. And I'm like, oh, you've been talking this big game about big data. I'm super into big data. Tell me what technology you're going to use. How are you going to build this thing? I want to just vibe with you all about the tech. And he was just like, I don't know, we haven't figured it out yet. And I was like, oh, he's completely fake it till you make it. He hasn't figured this out at all. Not to throw shade at him, not that like he might not be successful. I don't actually know what happened to the company. But the important thing Was like at that point it clicked. It was like, oh, okay. There's no, like there's no secret. Like you have to learn every single thing before you start the company. Like it's okay. It gave me permission to learn as I go. So then I get super interested in entrepreneurship, start putting together ideas. None of the ideas are really good, but it's good practice. Kind of like building things. Grab a friend from high school, we move out to Silicon Valley. Apply to imagine K12, which is now part of Y Combinator. It was run by another Y Combinator partner. Basically the same kind of structure and that's like a startup school. Three months, they gave us $17,000 to live on. We just work endlessly and it's an amazing time. Had no idea about how to like build a business or like assassin opportunity, but it was just amazing for just spending as much time as I wanted, you know, buying books, reading them, developing things like hacking on stuff. Like we would constantly just like fork open source repos and like retool them and be, you know, one day I'd be writing like Ruby and Rails and then Python and then I got into Clojure and like, you know, like all these different languages. I made my co founder learn C because he just like wasn't even doing it. He's not even like a technical guy, doesn't code. But I was like, like if you're going to be, if we're going to be a tech startup, like you got to learn Python and then you have to learn C so you understand at least at the very basic level like how computers work. Because he had like no background in it. So. And that was just something that like you would, you would never get. If I had walked into Google and been like, give me a job. Like they would have been like, you don't know enough about programming to be on a good technology track. So here, take like a, take like a forward deployed salesperson who's kind of technical role and that wouldn't have been satisfying to me. So basically that company fails. We never really find product market fit with what we're building, but get pretty good at programming. And then we'd been living with another YC company. They had a little bit more money in the bank. Their company failed as well. And then out of the ashes we put together this ragtag team of leftovers. Like people like some people had gone back to school, some people had left, but there were like a couple of us who were still like, let's go, let's make this happen. Like let's make something like we're just enjoying the process at that point. Like the failure was so abject that there was no, there was no further down. Like we were already at the bottom of the pit of sorrow and failure. Like we couldn't be doing any worse. So like we weren't going to embarrass our families anymore. We weren't going to like, you know, we already were seen as like laughing stocks by like friends and peers who were like making six figures at banks and stuff. So there was no, there was no downside risk because we had nothing. So we were like, yeah, this is fun. We're having fun building stuff. So we would just throw stuff at the wall like you know, like rap Genius or genius.com where you can annotate music lyrics. Like we built, me and one of the guys were super into classical music and have like classical music backgrounds. So we built like symphony genius where you could like annotate like open source like symphonies and music sheets and stuff and did a bunch of like machine learning and got, got really good with like image processing and wrote some like low level like image processing algorithms to detect where the bars are and where the staff is and like what key it's in to try and like, like render that and stuff. And just had like a lot of like fun like just building random stuff. Like we build like Twitter bots all the time and like this is when the Twitter API was wide open. So we just do a lot of like, just like hack projects. But then one of those hack projects was Rob, the CEO of Soylent and co founder. He was super into biology. He has a computer science background, computer engineering background. So he's very technical guy. David, other co founder of Soylent, he has a bio background. He's the non technical person that I mentioned who I forced to learn Python and C because I wanted him to get up to speed on the tech stuff. And so they were talking to each other and I think there was a little bit of cross pollination there where like every night when we'd be hanging out we'd just be like everyone would have a different background. So like I would talk to people about economics and how finance worked and then David would talk about how bio works. Basically distill everything you learned in four years of college, which is very, you know, it's not a very dense time. You know, you're taking like a couple classes a week, moving around, but just distill it all down, tell me the important parts. So you know David was talking about bio Rob is looking at it from a computer scientist position and mindset, and he starts thinking about his own body and trying to optimize that. So he starts running these experiments on himself, seeing how he can live healthier from kind of a first principles approach. And that's kind of where the idea for soiling came from. At that point, you know, we paid our rent in advance. We were living in a one bedroom apartment in the Tenderloin in San Francisco. I think we paid like twelve hundred dollars a month or something for it. For three people? Yeah, it was insane. I was sleeping on a bed in the living room next to the couch. Rob was technically in a closet because it didn't have a window. Like, it was just destitute situation. But we paid our rent in advance. We had our laptops, we could afford Internet. So we were like, it's only a matter of time. Like, it's only a matter of time. Let's just keep building things. One of these ideas is going to work and then we'll scale it, we'll raise money, and we'll be off to the races. We were like, let's just stretch our Runway as long as possible. We'll have 20 times more shots on goal. Sure, we're terrible entrepreneurs. We don't know anything, but we'll just try so much stuff that something will have to work. Nothing worked, but in an effort to extend our Runway and reduce our cost, food was one of the biggest costs. Soylent was solved that problem. It was a very cheap and effective way to get nutrition. So typically, if you're looking for food options, you got three, three factors, you know, healthiness, affordability and convenience. So if you're looking for like, healthy and affordable food, you'll grow your own food and then cook it. But we're in an apartment in the Tenderloin. You can't grow food there. And we don't really know how to cook. If you're looking for. If you don't care about cost and you just want to healthy and convenient, you'll go to a, you know, a beautiful restaurant and get a delicious meal from a, you know, natural, vegan, organic chef or whatever. That's not an option because we're broke. And if you don't care about health, you'll go and eat fast food where you're sacrificing on health, but it's convenient and affordable. And we were like, well, we honestly, we can't even afford McDonald's at this point. We were eating like, you know, leftover bread and stuff. But but even so, like, we know that, we know where that leads. Like, we're going to be wildly unhealthy and that's going to have an on our ability to wake up every day and work effectively if we're feeling like trash. So basically Soylent was a great solution to that. Rob starts blogging about it and the blog posts just get a ton of traction. He's a really, really great writer. He is extremely detailed and technical, but can still tell a really interesting narrative. And he has a really hilarious sense of humor. It's extremely subtle. Most people don't understand it. And that's great because that creates a ton of controversy. So the people who understand the subtlety and the humor, they feel like they're part of the joke and they love it and they want to share it and be a part of it. And the people who don't get the joke are outraged and they want and they're out for blood and they're sharing it as well. To be like, this is the worst thing ever. So obviously the name Soylent, you know, it's a reference to Soylent Green, the book that came before it. In the movie Soylent Green is People. It's a cannibalism joke. It's extremely dark, it's extremely sardonic. But we knew that and we were being ironic, but people didn't know that. So they would post about it and be like, I can't believe they named this thing Soylent. And that worked for us. That was extremely effective in the early days of Facebook and the Internet. Like things that were controversial, I mean, they still go viral but they're a little bit more on top of it. So we got extremely lucky with that. Huge amount of signups, huge amount of interest. Then the press started coming and we started building the company and we kind of took it from there. And yeah, you mentioned it in the intro. The company's raised a ton of money, grown really big, it's sold nationwide. And there's a bunch of different SKUs. There's a whole executive team running that company. And me and David, the bio guy I mentioned, were able to move on and work on a new project in the nicotine space trying to reduce the tobacco related harm, which is like an even bigger problem than nutrition and a much more controversial one as well. So happy to talk about that or whatever you want.

So I'm curious to understand, I know that you were behind a lot of the tech that ran Soylent and the E Commerce Fulfillment. How do you go about bringing this from Just a company that had a Kickstarter has this cult following into an actual sustainable business.

Yeah, I mean, it's a couple things. I mean, E Commerce is really old, so we weren't doing anything like revolutionary on the E Commerce side. We were just one of the first companies to take being direct to consumer first very seriously. So there was Warby Parker and then there was Dollar Shave Club like a year before us. So the subscription model had kind of been. We saw that and we were like, that's interesting. And so Matt, one of our co founders, was like, we got to do subscriptions. This is a subscription product. Product. Like we consume this product every day. We want it to be in stock. It makes perfect sense. Let's do it. And I hadn't considered that. So I was like, that sounds awesome. So we went and figured it out. At the time, there was no recharge. There were no like really great plugins. We used a couple things. Some of them were really bad. We wound up having to build a lot of our own tools. Now the tools are much better, so it's much easier to spin these up. So, you know, that's a little bit of a differentiator. But yeah, I mean the move from early stage market entry to long term, kind of like consumer packaged goods powerhouse moves something like this, like in the early stages market entry. So it's all about telling the story. The blog posts, the press. We got amazing press. We were in the New Yorker. Rob was on the Colbert Report. Like Vice wrote it. Vice did a whole documentary about us, like 30 minutes long. It was crazy. And that was all came down to the authentic ness of that story. We didn't make it up. We never had a meeting saying, you know what would sell really well, Like a stress test where the CEO lived on it for 30 days straight. No, Rob just did that because he thought it would be interesting to do. And that authenticity really spoke to people. And it was extremely controversial because, you know, who gave him the permission to do that? No one. But that's kind of the point. So in general, you know, the market entry, we got extremely lucky there. None of us have marketing backgrounds. Now I've read Ogilvy on Advertising, the seminal marketing textbook, and I recognize that that market entry strategy is literally one of the 10 or so that he identifies. His example is of a stress test. As he puts it, is if you're trying to sell glue, which is a very boring product, no one wants to buy glue, how are you going to make it look good? It's not attractive. It's just something that people buy out of utility. You know, they go to the hardware store because they need some glue. They buy whatever is there. Well, he said you need to stress test it. You need to show people how effective it is if they're trying to fix a broken wooden chair. You want to glue a car to the wall. So you take a massive car, Ford F150, and you glue it to a skyscraper, and it's just hanging there, like up in the air. Could fall at any minute, but it doesn't. And the reason it doesn't is because your glue is the one that glued the tires to the wall. And everyone looks up at it, you catch their eye, and then they see the ad for your glue and they recognize it's an effective glue. If it can hold that car against that wall, it can definitely fix my wooden chair. We didn't know any of that, but that's kind of what we stumbled into. If this tech guy in Silicon Valley can live on this for 30 days straight with nothing else, I can probably drink a glass of it and see if I like it. You know, it's breaking down the barriers now. A lot of customers were like, I want to do the 30 day challenge. It became kind of a meme that's good for sales in the short term, but honestly, for the long term, like, the best way to enjoy silent is like, have it for breakfast a couple times a week. That's where it saves you the most time, the most effort. Like, you can do the more aggressive stuff and fortunately it's safe to, which is awesome. But it's not a great experience. People would always say, like, like, you're trying to kill Thanksgiving. And it's like, no, we're not trying to kill Thanksgiving. Like, we're going to have Thanksgiving. I don't think we skipped a single Thanksgiving the entire history of the company. Like, enjoying food is great. And for us at the time, like, spending less money on those nonsense meals Monday through Friday gave us the permission from a health perspective, from a financial perspective, to go and, you know, have a sushi dinner on the, on Saturday or something, you know, so, but, but, but balance doesn't really sell. You know, extremism sells, like, and we've seen that politically over the last couple of years. So, you know, people want a villain. People want a, you know, a caricature. And Rob is extremely good at delivering that. So, so that was what was, you know, super effective. And then, and then kind of like morphing out of that. It becomes, you know, DTC best practices. So a healthy mix of brand and direct acquisition advertising. Don't spend it all on Facebook. Don't spend it all on Google. Use YouTube podcasts, different channels, so you're diversified. Make sure your cacti ltvs are correct. Make sure your NPS score is effective and high, and then iterate on the product. Make sure you have a product portfolio that can speak to a lot of people. Make sure it's in retail stores, because 90% of those stuff still gets bought in retail. Even though E commerce is growing, it's not growing fast enough to be 100% of the market in any reasonable timeframe. So you have to go into retail eventually. And that's why you see all of these DTC companies eventually go into retail, even though they all say, we're a DTC only company at the very beginning. But then, of course, eventually they're like, oh, we're in Target. Because people shop in Target and you're leaving money on the table and your competitors won't, so you'll lose.

I always remember watching that Vice documentary of Soylent.

I think back when.

Back when it was first starting and thinking, these guys are crazy. I live to eat.

I could never do that.

And then going to 711 and seeing it in the store, is that mind blowing?

Yeah, but you talked.

You talked earlier about this whole, like, this concept of the unsexy glue sticking it to the skyscraper. Could you talk about how you applied a similar concept in Lucy and kind of the founding story behind that with the whole.

So we definitely did not do that with Lucy, and we would never do that because there. There are acute risks to using too much nicotine. Like, if, if you were to take, like, nicotine can kill you if you take enough of it. So there's no, like, stress test. And that's not our value proposition. Like, our value proposition. Isn't this, like, crazy new weird thing? Um, so, yeah, I mean, if we went out and we were like, oh, I'm healthy as an ox and I can take a thousand milligrams of of nicotine, um, and then someone else went out and did that, like, they could legitimately, like, stop their heart, right? Like, that's not good. It's a stimulant. You know, you wouldn't. You would never do that for a caffeine company. You know, like, people legitimately drink too much Red Bull and die. Like, it happens. So, like, it would be a terrible idea. That's why Red Bull's marketing strategy is like. Is like, no one's drinking Red Bull at any of those events. Like they're, they're jumping out of the, you know, out of the edge of space and parachuting down, setting records and flying things and skydiving into planes and doing backflips and stuff. But they're not overdosing on caffeine when they do that. They're probably drinking water. In fact, little known fact, whenever you see all those, all those energy drink brands make a sku called tour water, where it looks exactly like a monster energy or it looks like a Red Bull can, but when you open it up, it's just water. So then they can give it to musicians when they're on tour and they can be drinking it on stage and partying with it. And they look like they're being very aggressive, but they're not because no one can drink, you know, 2,000 milligrams of caffeine and operate like you'll, you'll be too jittery. So. So, yeah, I mean, different product requires a very different marketing approach. We are a little bit more thoughtful about it now. I mean, we're still figuring it out. But I think the things that we did take from Soylent and brought to Lucy were, you know, a human story. You know, David, the CEO of Lucy, was a cigarette smoker. He wanted to quit smoking. He did a bunch of research, found Nicorette to be a safe but unsatisfying option. It was an effective but unsatisfying option. It wasn't available online at the time. The packaging was a little bit difficult to work with. He didn't like the flavor or texture. And when you pull out Nicorette, everyone just goes like, oh, you're a smoker, you have a problem, you're sick. It's a medicine. So we wanted to rebrand that really, really make something that could speak to people as like, on their own terms and not the way we think of it is like, there's self help and then there's stealth help. So self help is I tell you that you have a problem and I tell you that I have the product to fix it. And that's every late night weight loss miracle cure, 90 day transition thing. That's extremely scammy. And then there's stealth help, which I think of Tesla's stealth help. So instead of saying like, look, global warming is real. Gasoline cars are the main cause of that. You have a responsibility to drive an electric car. And it doesn't matter if it's slower, it doesn't matter if it's Ugly. It doesn't matter if it's expensive. You have to do it morally. It's important. They tried that, they tried that with the EV1. It was a massive failure. There was a huge marketing push. A lot of celebrities drove them, but they never took off because at a 30 mile range it looked really dumb. And it wasn't a fun car to drive. It didn't make sense. Instead, Elon gives you the sexiest car that's super fast, best technology, it's got the best self driving and it's at a pretty reasonable price. And he just wins. And that's why car and driver gives him the awards and he's the top car. And then, oh, by the way, we're succeeding in our mission of transitioning from combustion engines to electric engines. So you always, I feel like to be really successful and have a real impact in any anything you have to play the game that's already being played in the market. I feel like that's why a lot of these social impact companies and social impact venture funds feel like they've been underperforming. I don't have any real data, but I feel like you look at what's the best education technology company of all time? Probably Microsoft, because everyone got a computer. They learned to type, they could access things like it's got to be up there. It's got like the computer has got to be one of the things. But nobody thinks of them as an education technology company. But without the Internet or Google is incredible for education, right? You search and you get answers. It's not an ed tech company, but they've had a profound impact. So I think that it's much better to look at a problem and then go and solve it on, on the terms of the market itself as opposed to try and try and run like this preachy, moralistic argument for why the customer has to sacrifice. Just go and figure out how to make something where they don't have to sacrifice. And that's what Tesla has done. So that's what we tried to do with Lucy. We tried to create a product where the customer didn't have to sacrifice and they didn't feel like they had to be guilt tripped into using our product. They're still, the end goal is still for them to not use cigarettes and that's a win. Like every cigarette not smoked is a huge win for us. We've gotten a lot of smokers off of cigarettes and that's something I'm very proud of. But we never want them to say the reason I use this product is because I am afraid of cigarettes. We want them to say, the reason I use this product is because it's better than cigarettes in every single way. There are. There's no competition. Doesn't matter what the rubric is. Five stars for us, less stars for cigarettes. And that's hard because cigarettes are incredibly addictive. They've been around for a very long time. Like, people love their brands, they like the flavor. Like, you might think the smoke smells gross, but to a smoker, they love it. So. So there's a whole, there's a whole host of issues, but that's what we've been working through.

Well, I love that idea about extremism that you mentioned. And I can tell you from experience that my brother actually went across the country and he was very much on that same page because he had, as he biked across the country, he had about three Soylents a day or sometimes more. So I. Yeah, so I have a little bit of family experience there. But I'm curious about. You're almost like a serial option creator and I think that's so interesting that you and your co founders just churned out ideas in that apartment and eventually one worked. And I'm curious about whether Lucy is an example of that same sort of sticks to the wall phenomenon or was it an idea that you knew was going to be successful from the start.

No, it's the opposite. There was the period where we were doing the think about what sounds like a good startup and then go and test it and then try and just test it really quickly. So we would have a theory for some abstract theory for this sounds like a good startup. And then we would try and go and build it as fast as possible and launch it in two weeks and then it would fail. That was the wrong model. The right model was look at a problem that we ourselves have and then go and solve that problem. So huge shift. And this is the backbone of Y Combinator. Build something people want. And the easiest way to do that is to build something that you want. And so with Soylent, it was something that we needed. And then it turned out that there were other people like us. And that's the same thing with Lucy. David was a smoker. He made something that satisfied him. And it turns out that there's a lot of smokers that are like him. Very, very different from abstractly hypothesizing about, about. So now I only. I mean, there are definitely exceptions to this because there are some people that are very good about thinking about, like Abstract, like, things that they want. But I feel like when you get down to a lot of these things, you know, it's like, it's like, why is Elon building this crazy, like, Mars mission? It's because he really wants to go to Mars, like, personally, like, like, it's not like he thinks that there's demand there and he's. And he would never go himself, and he thinks that the demand is diluted, but he's going to take advantage of it anyway. No, definitely not. He absolutely wants to go. Same thing with Tesla. Like, wants a cool car. He owned a McLaren and he's really into cars. So, like, he just wants an amazing car and then he wound up building it. You know, like, it's very hard to build something. Like, you see this a lot with people that are like, you know, abstractly, like, like, if, like non smokers who are building things for smokers almost always fails because they're not building it for themselves. The same thing goes with, like, people that look at, like, statistics about trends and they see, like, okay, you know, millennials aren't getting married as frequently, so I'm going to create some solution to that. But then they're married themselves or something like that, so they don't have any personal experience. It's very hard for them to empathize with the consumer and really understand what they're going through. So that shift happened, like the moment that Soylent went like, quote, unquote, live and Rob put up a landing page and we got like 10,000 signups in a week. It was crazy. And everything else we put out, we promoted and put out to our friends, and we'd get like, like dozens or hundreds of signups. Like, very, very few. Like, there was no, no growth with anything else. And it was just complete binary. And since then, I've never. I've, like, I've never thought of startups the old way. I've only thought of them in the new way of like, of like solve a problem that you personally have.

I love that idea of building a solution for a market instead of finding a market to build a solution to. And it definitely makes sense that I don't think I could build a product for a market that I wasn't interested in either. And that's a great example with Tesla. One thing I wanted to ask you is about the difference between execution and ideas, because there was already Nicorette gum and there was already meal replacements in the past, albeit not quite the same level, I would say, but I just would like to hear about your view on that?

Yeah, I don't exactly know because like every example is probably both like Google executed phenomenally well, but they also had a different idea in that page. Rank is a different algorithm and that's kind of an idea. So the line between idea and execution feels very blurry to me. But you know, ideas are maybe like the differentiating factor at the start. Like you know, some fundamental change in the way we're thinking about it. Like with, with the meal replacements, you know, they were very like high sugar, very high carb, very focused on sustaining life in a medical environment, usually in a hospital. Whereas we wanted something for you know, like a growing 22 year old guy who needs to burn. I burned like 3 or 4,000 calories a day. So it needs to be like very calorically dense but high protein, like very like healthy. And it needs to have all the micro macronutrients because I wanted the full stack, you know, so we had a different idea and that idea was a hundred percent of your daily values for everything. So when you look at the back of the package, it's just a hundred percent all the way down, very clear. And then the execution maybe is like, you know, the part of like the, the, the, you know, the D2C strategy. But again like is the D2C strategy in the idea camp or in the execution camp? It's kind of in both. I mean like we had the idea to do it and then we executed it well. So those two words feel a little bit conflated. I don't know. I definitely, I would say to any entrepreneur who's kind of like wrapped at that, like definitely don't get stuck in the pattern of like spending a lot of time on ideas, like thinking of ideas and thinking that ideas have any like real value you. Because they don't. Like you need to go build something. It's very rare that like an idea is valuable on its own. You have to go and build and test and sell and build the whole and make it real. Basically at this point it feels like, yeah, no NDAs, just go and build something, make sure you're solving a problem for someone and make it real. And then you'll probably need to come up with more ideas to, to flesh out like what the company is and then you'll have to go and execute. But yeah, I mean it's both of those words are kind of like loaded and they get used all over the place. So.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I mean that's a great fresh perspective because it's something I see Entrepreneurs post on Twitter all the time. But you're right. I mean, I guess there's kind of a blurry line between those two things, but just. Cause we're sort of wrapping up here. Almost running out of time. Don't want to use up too much of yours, but. But I did want to ask the question we like to wrap up with, which is just during your time at Soylent and at Lucy or even before that, what is the closest that you ever came to giving up?

I don't know. I legitimately can't think of time. Mostly because there was no. Like, what would giving up look like? Just, like, dying?

Like, like the momentum was too strong?

No, no, no, no. I mean, like, literally dying. Like, physically dying. Because, like. Like what, What. Like, if I gave up, what would I. How would I eat? Like, I had. I didn't have anything. I had no money. No housing, no, like, there was no money. I was literally, like, in debt. Like, bank account negative. Like, all the bank accounts negative. There was no place to give up and go back to. It was not like I could go get a job or anything, or at least it didn't feel like it. Maybe I could have, but it definitely didn't feel like it. So it didn't really cross my mind because it didn't seem like an option. It felt like the only way. The only way forward is through. Like, we had truly done the. Like, the Cortez landing in South America of, like, burning the ships. Like, make yourself as unhirable as possible. Like, be a weird tech person who blogs about insane things online and just tinkers with a million different technologies. Total jack of all trades, master of none. Like, like, who's going to want to hire that person? Like, no, but perfect for entrepreneurship. And then it's just like, keep putting one foot in front of the other every day for a decade. And now I just feel like I'm an entrepreneur and it's my career and I wouldn't really do anything else. Like, I feel like if I went through, like, a career setback now, I would still be an entrepreneur. I would just start another business or figure it out, you know, like, because I can start a business with. If I can start a business with negative $5,000 in my bank account, like, I can start a business now after something blows up, you know, like, there's nothing that stops me. So, yeah, I don't think there was ever a time that I considered that there probably, like, other sub. There might be other good sub. Examples of, like, specific strategies that we had to abandon. But I'd have to do some real thinking about it.

So what are you hacking right now? What are you doing? Are you working on any side projects or anything? Just for fun?

Outside of Lucy?

Yeah, I mean, so I have a YouTube channel where I post, I try and do like video essays. It's less of a vlog, it's rarely about me. It's more like I just did one on Chamath, Polypidia and social capital, like his whole story. So I try and tell stories about things that are going on in the world of tech and entrepreneurship and startups and investing, where I find myself going down a rabbit hole, like reading the whole Wikipedia, reading all the sources and just learning everything about so and so or some issue. And then usually I'll find some crazy like insane thing that I never would have heard of in the mainstream press. I don't know if you guys heard about the Solar Winds hack, but it's like this major, major breach of all these government systems. And I found a video clip of the founder of the company who sold the company for billions of dollars and is worth hundreds of millions of dollars on Shark Tank after he sold the company, pitching a $500 camping cooler. Because he's just like a crazy tinkerer who's like, so it's just like a hilarious. And the shark said, no. They were like, no, we don't want to invest in this. It doesn't make sense. So it's just like the greatest refutation of the billionaire entrepreneur being untouchable, right? So I try and find these interesting stories that relate to things that are going on that people are talking about like Solar Winds, which is a very, very impactful thing you should learn about. So I try and take like, it's edutainment, right? So I try and take something that's like educational, informational and then make it really entertaining. So that's been like a fun project. And then like on the actual hacking side, I spend a lot of my time on visual effects and motion graphics. So a decent amount of time in Cinema 4D. This, it's like a 3D rendering software. Do a lot of Houdini, which is a really cool visual effects tool that's used in Hollywood for like smoke simulations and water simulations. Fire, like used in all these big, big, big time movies. It's a very complicated tool, takes a long time to learn, but it has multiple programming languages built embedded in it. But it's really cool because it's super visual. So if you write some cool, you get Like a beautiful flower that's like evolving or something. Or like you get some crazy come some crazy abstract art that like you wouldn't be able to produce everywhere. And like I'm not an artist so it's really cool expression of like code turning into art and visual stuff. It also has a super practical implication because we do a lot of our ads in computer software and a lot of our ads are CG and rendered. So that's been, that's been fun. The but in 2019 I really spent my time. 2018 was mostly like Cinema 4D After Effects. 2020 was like Houdini. I really wanted to learn Houdini because it was super hard. And now I'm trying to learn Unreal Engine because you can do everything real time. The graphics are just as good now. My goal is to make basically a fully real time rendered ad for my company in Unreal Engine like by the end of the year. So bring the assets over of like the gum, make some cool stuff, simulate it and stuff and then, you know, save it out. But don't have to wait all night to render, which is like I'm literally going out of town this weekend and I have to set my computer to render like, you know, 600 frames of ads that I'm going to run. And my, my Nvidia cards just have to cook all weekend. And with Unreal, it's all real time, so you don't have to do that. So very excited to get into that. But it's a new tool and you know, it takes time and you got to, you know, figure out times to watch tutorials and hack on this stuff.

John, thank you so much for coming on. This was a ton of fun and I know I learned a lot and I'm sure Cooper, you did as well.

Awesome. Yeah. So anyone listening? Go, go. Follow me on YouTube. It's YouTube.com John Coogan/ because I used to have Google back in the day, it's linked to that. But yeah, a lot of fun stories on my YouTube, so check them out.

Well, yeah, thank you for coming in. This was really insightful. I learned a lot and hope to see you next time.

Awesome. Yeah, talk to you later.

Thanks for listening to the first episode of the Optionality Game. We will be releasing new episodes every other Friday with more founders, investors, thought leaders and everyone in between. You can find us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram under Alstontomas and Cooper Schoenthaler. Feel free to DM us with any comments, questions or connections. See you in two weeks.

LA.