Learning from multiple failed ideas before building a multimillion dollar business with John Coogan of Soylent

Hey, really quickly, before we get started, I just wanted to say thank you so much to those of you who've left us an itunes review or reached out to me via email or Twitter to provide one feedback or the other. I really, really appreciate it. Thank you so much. If you're listening and you haven't left the review yet, please, please, please take a few seconds, leave us an itunes review, or you can reach out to me via email or Twitter. My email is perryogwmail.com that's really one of the best ways for me to make the show better for you. So please let me know what you think. I would really, really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Enjoy today's show.

And then like eventually from there we were like, okay, well, we're running out of money. Why are we running out of money? Well, we're spending money on food. Let's think about a better solution there. And that's where Soylent came from. And then we were kind of off to the races. But there's probably five other massive failures I could tell you about, like within just that year before Soylent got going.

Hi, I'm Perry Agucha and I'm the host of Lessons from a Failed Startup. This is a show where we talk to founders of companies that have been shut down since their inception. We see what the journey was like for them and ultimately we learn from their unique experiences. I'm really excited about today's episode because we get a slightly different perspective from someone who didn't necessarily shut down a company. However, he had many, many failed ideas before his big success. John Coogan is one of the co founders and former CTO of Soylent. Soylent is a simple, nutritious, affordable drink that possesses a ton of nutrients. The basic idea behind Soylent is that complete nutrition shouldn't be difficult or expensive to afford. Before co founding Soylent, John and his co founders tried and filled with with many, many different ideas. And John and I talk about what that experience was like for them and how they ultimately were able to learn from those experiences and end up with Soylent, a very successful company today that has raised over $17 million. In his free time, John runs a YouTube channel where he creates videos and talks about things like fundraising advice or whether entrepreneurs today should be looking to move to the Bay Area or not. He also does some book reviews. So if you' enjoy any of that stuff, definitely check out his YouTube channel. It's just his name, John Coogan. That's C O O G A N. I hope you enjoy Today's episode, I have to say that out of all the guests that I've sort of, you know, that have reached out to request to be on the podcast or say, you know, oh, I love what you're doing. I. I was really surprised when I saw your name. Right. When I looked at that form, I was like, huh, that's interesting, John. Wait, did Soylent fail? Like, is there something that I don't. That I'm not aware of? But then I scrolled all the way down and looked at the comments that you made. But, no, I'm really excited to have you on and talk to you about something that you thought about doing before. Right. Saying that you wanted to start a podcast about failures and failed companies. I think your perspective is super unique, and I really am looking forward to having this conversation with you. So, yeah, thanks for being on, John.

Yeah, thanks for having me on. I'm really excited to talk to you. It's a wild story. I mean, I feel like every entrepreneur has some sort of first go at things, some sort of failure. And yeah, it's just cool to be able to explore these things in kind of a casual conversation like this and dig into some history that's less publicized.

Yeah. So I guess maybe a good place to start would be an introduction of yourself. I know that you studied economics in undergrad. Right. How did you go from there as you sort of introduce yourself, maybe talk about this a little bit. How did you go from an econ major to being the CTO of Soylent? Like, how did you make that transition?

Yeah, so I grew up in Los Angeles. My dad worked in technology, so we always had computers around. I was playing video games and building levels in Counter Strike and doing Adobe Flash stuff and just kind of generally techie. One of my first memories is needing to upgrade the RAM on this computer to be able to play this video game that I'd rented back when you could rent CDs from the video game store. This is crazy how old that was. But, yeah, so studied economics, mostly because of the Great Recession. So we went through the financial crisis, get to college hit, and the financial crisis. Like, all of the news of the day was economic news and it was all really dense, talking about derivatives and credit default swaps and mortgage backed securities. And so if you just wanted to know what was going on in America, I felt like you had to understand economics a little bit. So that kind of took me down that path. And at the higher level of economics, when you get a little bit deeper into the subject matter, you Wind up taking classes like econometrics, where you're using code to run regressions that are then kind of the jumping off point for a lot of the machine learning work that goes on. So I kind of went from Excel to Visual Basic to Python to R, and that kind of trajectory was mostly focused on statistics for economics. But then once I'd learned Python, I was thinking about, oh, I could build a website, I could build a web app, I could learn how to code a mobile app and, and go from there. And then I think by the time I graduated, I'd learned a lot about economics, but I wasn't particularly interested in finance specifically. I mean, the Great Recession and the financial crisis kind of showed that that career path is not as certain as it was in the 80s. For example, a lot of the firms are bought in a lot of the best hedge funds. There isn't really like a partnership track. You. And really all the great entrepreneurial energy in the American capitalist system is concentrated in tech companies and entrepreneurship and Silicon Valley, at least in 2012. So I started talking to one of my friends from high school about starting a company, and we moved out to Silicon Valley when we graduated, which was in 2012, and we got into this incubator that was very similar to Y combinator, called Imagine K12. It was actually run by Jeff Ralston, who was also a YC partner. And they had basically the exact same model as yc, although they didn't have the additional check that came with YC at the time. So in 2012, Y Combinator was giving out 150k, so you'd get 20k from YC directly and then 150k on a convertible note. And imagine K12 was just 17k for, I think, 6% of your company, something like that. So we move out to Silicon Valley. We have no real idea what we're doing, but we'd, we'd kind of settled on education technology as an interesting industry to work in, mostly because that was all we knew since we'd been a product of the education system for 21, 22 years. So it seemed logical that we could, you know, we didn't know anything about manufacturing, so we couldn't go to a manufacturing startup. We didn't know anything about, you know, really like, you know, enterprise software. So we couldn't go build one of those companies because we'd never worked in that industry. But we at least had been taught and experienced education. So we thought that we would at least have some experience to bring to bear there. We didn't and it was completely. It was a complete failure. And I guess that's why we're here talking about it. But it was a really fun experience. I mean, 17k is not a lot of fundraising. It's not a lot of seed capital. We were living extremely, extremely low burn, extremely frugally, and it lasted us like three to five months, I think. Got to demo day, pivoted a bunch of times, and just kind of learned the very basic ropes of what it was like to start a company and be thrust in the world where you have to get a customer, you have to build something that somebody wants. So, yeah, that's kind of a general overview. What would be most useful to dive into. I can talk a little bit more about the genesis of that company, our experience in Imagine K12, kind of what happened after and how we became Soylent. Ultimately. Whatever you think is best.

Yeah. As much as I would love to talk about all of Soylent and I mean, Soylent is a great company. When we did yc, my co founders and I, we literally. I think I said this to you in an email. We literally lived on Soylent for like a month just because grinding. And I think, like, you all shipped us a few boxes for free.

Oh, that's cool.

Did it for all, like, the YC company.

Yeah, definitely.

So, like, we had just a ton of Soylent at home and we would just drink it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And it was great. It was great. So anyway, the what I would like to, you know, do in the episode today and, you know, really is really just focus on what I'm hoping to achieve with the podcast. Right. Which is learning from failed experiences. And I want to talk about that company that you launched or try to launch while you were part of Imagine K12. Talk about some learnings that came out of that that you were able to apply directly to your Soylent experience. And how. How did you go from what you were doing in imagine K12 to partnering with your co founders and eventually starting Soylent? So maybe start with what was that company that you try to Launch in Imagine K12 and what happened there? How did that evolve and how did it ultimately shut down or not become a thing?

Yeah, we were probably one of the most early stage companies that joined the Imagine K12 Summer 2012 batch. Our idea was to do some sort of homework log, like a tracker for parents to understand how much work their kids are doing and help them incentivize their kids to finish their homework on time and really track everything. And so we developed a very rudimentary Rails app. It was very hacky. I was still really learning web app development. We didn't really have any design skills. So a lot of it was adapted from like, Michael Hartle's learn rails in 10 days book and open source libraries for everything. And, and it was. I mean, the app was a mess. But David, my co founder, was willing to. We had read enough of the Silicon Valley, like, you know, Kool Aid. We drunk enough of that to know that we had to get our product in front of people early and we couldn't just sit and polish something forever. So we basically went and tried to get like friends and family to use this terrible app and get feedback, even though it was so rough. But that was really, that was a great experience because we saw firsthand, like, okay, we're nowhere near the level of polish that we need. And we actually eventually got to a point like only like a month in, where we were like, this is just not the right thing to build. Like, no one wants this. And even though we, we could have spent years building a much more polished version, just the fundamental premise was completely malformed and it was just a non starter. So we were able to move on from the bad idea very quickly, whereas we could have easily spent all three months of the program just building that and then going to demo day with nothing. But we, you know, we told ourselves, like, we need a graph at demo day. We need a graph of users that's up and to the right. We need progress, we need people really using it. There's no way we're going to be able to raise money if we don't have users. So that's the goal. So that first homework tracker thing flops and. But the fact that we showed up to. I think what got us into imagine k12 was, was the fact that. So we showed up and we had a functional app that was like running on Heroku. It was running Rails. It wasn't crashing. Like, it, it was. It was basically just a crud app. You could type stuff in and it would save it to the database and it would show it very, very basic. So, like, I think the fact that that was like built and it wasn't just like a slide deck, we were showing them a demo was positive. It was like, okay, these guys can check that box. And then the fact that we had like, users, quote unquote, that we had like basically begged our friends and family like, please, we need you to use this. But the fact that we were willing to do that and you can See it in the way that the partners asked us the question because they were like, you have users on this app, like this terrible piece of trash, like, how did you do that? And the fact that we were able to burn bridges potentially and like just, you know, just beg, borrow and steal to get people to use this app was enough that it was the right, it was the right signal to send. It was like, okay, a team that is willing to do that aggressive of customer development on something so terrible and someone that, and at least they have a technical person who can go and build something. Like, they will probably figure something out at some point. That was the investment thesis as I reflect on it. But of course that idea failed. So we're now a month in and we need to do something else. So we start pivoting aggressively, like a new project every week. One week. We literally just found an open source version of Quora and forked it and tried to like restyle it and then try and sell it into an educational area and say like, okay, it's a Q and A site specifically for schools and this and that. And like we would just like really aggressively try and create the minimum viable prototype and then get it in front of people's, in front of people's hands so they could give us feedback. Of course, like failed wildly, very, very quickly. So eventually what we settled on for like the demo day, sprint to get to demo day was we wanted to build a something that we could use ourselves because we were sick of testing with like, we couldn't sell into teachers, like into schools. Like, the purchasing cycle was just too long. We didn't really know that many teachers. We didn't know what their problems were really. So we were really struggling with that. So we were like, okay, let's just make something that we would like to use. So we basically made like this competitive quiz game that there was a company that wound up doing something similar much more successfully than us a couple of years later called Quiz Up. And basically like, there's a series of like flashcards with, you know, multiple choice questions and you and I compete to do them like the fastest and the most accurately. So it was like a quiz game. It was broadly in the world of, of education technology, but really it was just like a game. And so we built that on the Facebook graph. It was like a Facebook app. So you log in, you challenge your Facebook friends, you play with it. And then we converted that into a mobile app using one of those cross transcoding things. It's not like we were writing like true iOS code. We were just taking like, we were wrapping it in iOS code and it was basically just running HTML. And we got that into the App Store on demo day. For some reason, because of the way the App Store works, I guess you get a little bit more featured. So we had 500 people using it and it was not that embarrassing. So we were able to get on stage and be like, we have a graph that's going on like this. Of course, if you're a free social application, you need a million users. 500 is not enough. So we didn't raise any money. The app was terrible. It never really worked that well and it didn't really solve any fundamental problem. So pretty quickly we were like, okay, well we haven't been able to raise money. We're post demo day now, we're going to run out of money. We don't really have anything to do here and we're not even that excited about this product. So maybe we should start zooming out and thinking about other things. And so David, my co founder, he had gotten into a PhD program at Caltech. So that was obviously like, well, that's a really solid track. He can go and get that degree. So he started planning to go there. I don't think he actually started classes, but he was thinking about going back and doing that. And then we were actually living in a hacker house with another startup that was a YC team that was building something else that failed, which was a wireless networking company. So they were doing like hardware stuff and we got along with them really well. Both of the companies were kind of failing. They had a little bit more money. So when David packed up to leave and go do this thing, they were kind of like, hey John, like if you just want to stay and hang out, like you can do that. Like we're not going to charge you rent and you can eat some of our food and you can just like figure it out with the rest of us. So I did that and then it just became a game of like, let's build a new thing like every week or two. So we were building all sorts of projects. There were, at that point everyone in the house was pretty technical. Even the people that were non technical, like, like, like there was, there was some point where there just wasn't enough customer development to do because we didn't have a product. And I was trying to build the product and I was like, David, like if you're going to work with me and like build like a tech company, like you need to understand code. So I made him learn Python and then I made him do a whole book on C so that he would understand like a slightly lower level of that. And he actually did the whole book and it's still like a valuable skill. He's not like a programmer on a daily basis, but like he can understand how code works, which is really valuable. So, so at this point, everyone in the house is, is, is, you know, pretty technical. There are a couple like, straight up, like, wizards. Like Rob, the eventual CEO of Soylent, he had studied computer science at Georgia Tech. We have this other guy, Hunter Scott, who is a great electrical engineer and an amazing software engineer too. So me and him would work on projects I don't know if you're familiar with, like Rap Genius, the lyric annotation site. Right. But me and Hunter were really into classical music, so we built like Symphony Genius, which would like let you annotate like sheet music. And like, it didn't have like a business, like valid, like a business case. It was mostly just really cool because we like a lot of the sheet music is like open source and you can get it and you can get these PDF scans, but they're all like slightly different scans. They're not like raw data. So you need to run like machine learning and image processing on them. So we actually implemented some machine learning algorithms and like computer vision algorithms, like at a very low level, just using like straight up, like read the pixels and do some math stuff. So it was just like a lot of fun, like building like all these crazy things like, and, and, and, and then like eventually from there we were like, okay, well we're running out of money. Why are we running out of money? Well, we're spending money on food. Let's think about a better solution there. And that's where Soylent came from. And then we were kind of off to the races, but there's probably five other massive failures I could tell you about, like within just that year before Soylent got going.

Wow, that is such an incredible story. So, wow. Where do I even start to like, ask my follow up questions?

Sorry, I'm just, I'm just rambling.

No, no, it's really good stuff. So you, you said something that really caught my attention with how you were building products and just testing it out for a week to see like, okay, is this something people want? Or like, will this. Are we gonna get traction on this? How did you go about validating those ideas that you were working on? Like, what were you looking for in terms of validation? When you built something, you put it out there. Like did you have a threshold of like, okay, we need to see X amount of users or we need to get like, I don't know, 50 bucks or something? Like what were you looking for as you were running those experiments?

I mean we were desperate. Like we, any threshold would have been fine, one person would have been good. Most of these things had zero users. Like zero. And like, I mean, so the biggest shift, the biggest shift that we were able to make that was actually valuable was we switched from trying to think of a potential market and then go and build something for that market and then find someone who needs that problem solved and then pitch them our solution to what is something that we ourselves want, because then we could just test it on ourselves. And Soylent was like literally the perfect case of that where Rob mixed up this crazy concoction, drank it for a month straight and saw the results and was happy with them. Right. But before that, Symphony Genius was a good example of that where it was just something that we thought would be fun. And I think we put it on Hacker News. I think we got some viewers and comments. We did better with that than thinking through, okay, a school has X budget and they need problem Y solved, so let's go build Z and then pitch it to them. That was not working for us at all. That can definitely work if you've worked in that industry or you have some unique insight. But it's very hard to do that if you're just a 22 year old with no world experience, no business experience, the way things actually get purchased. Just with SaaS as an example, there's a whole industry of SaaS companies where their whole value proposition is being a tool that otherwise you would have to sign a huge contract with a company too. And they make it easy to sign up with a credit card so they're able to just sneak in the back door when someone brings it in. Like, you know, Slack is a great example of that. GitHub did that really well. The developer shows up, they have a GitHub account, they put it on their corporate credit card, they didn't need to sign, they didn't need to pitch the whole organization. And all of a sudden everyone's using GitHub, right? But like that sales insight is something that you, you don't get if you don't work in an organization. Like we literally had zero people on our team had ever worked a full time job. 0. Like we had internships like I had done, I'd done a couple six month internships which are Called co ops for my school, but that was it. Like we'd never had a full time job even for a year. So the, so the life experience, the world experience is just completely missing now. Having grown Soylent at series B and 50 employees and actually managed teams, I have a little bit more corporate experience and can understand what a medium sized business goes through. But at the time we had no experience. So the only focus was would we like this ourselves. So one of the things that Rob built before Soylent that was really cool, which is actually really popular now, was basically Stadia, like Google Stadia lets you stream video games through the cloud into like basically a web browser. He built a version of that just with a local lan, like a local network operation center in San Francisco. He went and installed a server that had a great graphics card and a lot of power. And then he was able to remote into it and was using kind of like the latest, like, I don't know what you call it, like remote technology. Like he was just using like the cutting edge things to wire all that together so that he could play games there. I thought it was really cool because I was doing a lot of machine learning stuff at the time and I would always be like running out of memory or running out of. We weren't even training stuff on the GPU at the time, but just read, just straight running out of memory. Like can't load all of this into memory. Python, you know, Scikit learn like crashing. So being able to log into a different computer that has a lot of memory, instead of having to, you know, use AWS and use the command line, you could just like log straight into it. There's another company called Paper Space that does the same thing. But again, that was at least a little bit viable because it was something that, you know, Rob could use and he could be in a coffee shop on a tiny laptop and using, you know, basically a supercomputer, which was, you know, personally gratifying to him. So he got joy out of it and he liked that experience. So it was much, it was, it's just so much of a tighter development loop. You know. What, what feature is this? Miss that? Is this missing? I think, I personally think it's missing X feature. So I'm going to go build that. So yeah, I think that was like the biggest shift for us and the biggest learning. And then to this day, I mean, even the company I'm working on right now, Lucy, which is a smoking cessation product, we sell, you know, nicotine products. It was, you know, A a we sell smoking cessation nicotine lozenges to help people quit smoking. We also sell a nicotine product that's a Chew and park, which is kind of like a gum product. And that is, you know, personal experience. Like, David was trying to quit smoking and wanted a product that, you know, he would satisfy him, so he designed it himself. And that, that feedback loop is much tighter at that point when you're designing with yourself in mind.

Yeah. So that's, that's very interesting. Do you, do you think that that's generally a better way? And it's hard to make a generalization here. Right. And I realize that, but would you say that maybe that's generally a better approach to starting a company? Right. Build something that solves a problem that you have. Right. As opposed to trying to figure out, oh, like, what is missing in this space that, you know, maybe I should go build this tool for and something that you can't even relate to.

Totally.

Okay.

Yeah. I don't think it's the only way. There are certainly exceptions, but if you just look at like the stories of like Zuckerberg and Uber, and a lot of these companies have that kind of same story where the person wanted something themselves and built something that they could enjoy. Personally, I think it does shortcut things. There's probably an exception for people who are later in their career, 40, 50, and lots of experience, and they just understand an industry really, really well. But certainly for consumer products, you know, how are you going to design something if you don't consume it yourself? Like, it'd be very hard to start the next Starbucks if you don't like coffee. Right. And it's a pretty low, it's a pretty low bar, you know, to just like try, try your own product. It would come off as very inauthentic to not use your product. But yeah, I mean, I definitely think that that's a good model to stick with unless you know that you're the counter case and you have more experience for some reason.

Right. So let's go back to your story of trying many things that failed before you landed on Soylent. When you, when you and your co founders at the time started Soylent. And by the way, the co founder who left, did he want to come back after he realized that Soylent was now within?

So yeah, so David went to, he was going to do his PhD program, was working in the lab, taking courses, getting prepared for that, and then Soylent started taking off. We were raising money and things were going really well. So then he deferred his PhD program and came on full time. And then he deferred it another year. And then eventually, you know, he just never went back.

Got it.

Okay. So, yeah. Yeah, it worked out really well.

Yeah, that's awesome that he, that he came back. Okay, so when you had started Soylent, I guess what was the. When was the moment when you realized that, okay, maybe there's something here, maybe we're onto something that's different from everything else that we've tried before?

Oh, it was so obvious. Like it was night and day. I mean, you know, typical, typical product launch for us would be, you know, two weeks Sprint, maybe maybe even a month coding and put it on hacker news, get 10 upvotes, 2 comments. And Soylent was like hundreds, hundreds of upvotes, hundreds of comments. Like, put an email capture form. I mean we had email, we had all the standard email capture forms, you know, login. I think the highest we ever got with any other product was probably in like the hundreds. And Soylent had 10,000 emails signed up in like a month. So it was just night and day. Nothing could compete. And at the time we were, there were a few of us who were pretty deep in this. Are you familiar with Buffer, like the social media management tool? It basically lets you schedule your tweets. And we built one that it did tweet scheduling, but it also would recommend content that would be on brand for your corporate Twitter account. So you could kind of have like white labeled content used like natural language generation, like way precursor to GPT3. But it would read an article and say, okay, you're a shoe company. So we found a bunch of articles about shoes and here's a summary of this article. So you should tweet this link and you should use this hashtag and it would kind of generate stuff like that automatically for you. And I really liked that problem. Like, I loved the technology that we were building, but there was really no demand. And so it was kind of weird to be like, okay, well I moved out to Silicon Valley to do like a traditional tech startup. I'm getting deeper in that. Like I'm doing all of the coding as well as the machine learning stuff. And I can see the trend lines in machine learning. It's really strong, there's definitely something here, but I don't have product market fit on that at all. And then this other thing, which isn't a trend at all, like food was not a trend in 2013, and certainly consumer packaged goods, even direct to consumer startups, there was warby Parker. That was it. Those weren't trends, but we had product market fit. So it took me a while to be like, okay, I need to fully buy into this. But the evidence of the product market fit was undeniable. It was night and day.

Wow. Wow. That is. I mean, I guess. How much did you have in the bank before you. Before you sort of landed on Soylent? How much Runway did you all have?

Not a ton. So the. At that time, YC was giving 170k. So we had 17. The other team had 170. Our 17 ran out really fast. They're 170. They were very good about controlling costs. So no salaries whatsoever. Just Costco, Ramen, and, you know, basic soups. Like, we were making our own bread. Rob was making bread, which is kind of a funny precursor to Soylent. Like, I hadn't put that together at the time, but, you know, living in absolute squalor. Like a. You know, the pool in the back was completely filled with algae. Like, it was just a disgusting living situation. So I think we probably had about 100k left. And then we moved to San Francisco. Really kind of narrowed down the team even further. There were only three of us at that point. We paid our rent a year in advance because we didn't really have any credit. And we figured, like, okay, well, at least buy us a year of Runway. So then we had our laptops. We only had to pay for Internet food, and that was it. And we had a year because we already paid for the rent. So we were like, as long as we can stretch this out, because this was common YC advice. Just don't die. If you don't die, you will, by definition, eventually be successful. And you see that with a lot of companies. So we were really focused on that. Don't die. And so, yeah, just kind of went from there. But, yeah, I think probably the lowest bank account was probably like, 50K and, like, three people. There was a very. There was an interesting point when we. When we did the crowdfunding campaign. We. We. We successfully funded it that day. I remember we went and we upgraded our laptops because we were running really old, like, MacBooks, and. And I just remember Matt, the co founder, being like, man, this was close. Like, because at the start of the summer, we had two teams, two different Y Combinator, two different incubators going almost 200k between the two companies. There were six people living in the house, with a seventh who was, like, kind of coming in and out, and we were down to 3 people and 50k. And we turned it around and kind of pulled out of that nosedive and we, I mean, I think we generated 200k on the first day of the crowdfunding. So it was like, wow, okay, this is a thing like this is going to go. And that was just a really exciting moment. It was wild.

Wow. So, John, you have a really unique experience in the sense that, like, you tried many different startups, you tried many different ideas. Maybe not startups, but you tried many different ideas that didn't work out before you sort of landed on Soylent, which was, which was extremely successful. Right. I mean, Soylent has raised over what, $70 million as we speak, and they're doing millions of dollars in revenue. Right. Every year. And a lot of people who I've talked to on this show have, especially the ones who have kind of not wanted to appear as guests on the podcast, have felt that in many ways, because they haven't yet done the thing that's successful as far as starting the company goes, they don't feel like they have the credibility to offer advice. Right. Or even speak about their experience. What would you say to a founder who has done a failed startup but is yet to, you know, do the one, you know, have their one success? Right. As far as, you know, them feeling okay speaking about their field experience?

Yeah. So there's two things. I do have some advice, but first, I do think we need to address the elephant in the room, which is Silicon Valley has completely fetishized failure. And I'm right now a case study in that, in the sense that you want to. This happened with failcon and a couple other failure focused events where eventually the. The only people that were speaking were ones that had moved on from their failures and wound up succeeding. So I want to acknowledge that and be like very cautious with that because, like, is it a true failure if I didn't have to like leave the industry entirely, even though I moved from basically doing like true software development startups to a completely different industry, but it's still startup, so maybe it's not. But I do think that there is a risk of fetishizing failure, having all these people speak about how there's this terrible example. I need to plug this book, what Tech Calls Thinking by Adrian Daub. It's a really good book and it has a whole chapter on failure and kind of the culture of failure in Silicon Valley. And it cites this quote that it took Beyonce 50 singles in order to get her first hit or something. But most people who write music, it takes way more than 50 singles. So it's not really that impressive. And it's like for every person that you have on the podcast that spends a year doing failed startups and then is successful, there's plenty of people that spend decades and get nowhere. So the risk of the fetishization of failure is the negative externality that comes from that is that you will attract people who see failure as not a bad thing and then they might actually spend a decade in doing something that they don't actually enjoy or they never have a chance of succeeding in. So I think the important takeaway is if you're, if you're doing a startup or if you're in the entrepreneurial space and you're not finding success, you need to check in with yourself and make sure that you're enjoying what you're actually doing on a day to day basis. What made all that failure tolerable was that I was obsessed with coding and I just really enjoyed programming. And only in a startup could I have the opportunity to, to do what I was doing. It was impossible because so I didn't go to an Ivy League school and I didn't study computer science, so going to Google or going to Facebook was not really an option. And I didn't have any experience as a software engineer in any professional capacity. So it wasn't. There was no viable path for me to explore this new topic that I really genuinely enjoyed. So doing a startup was really, it allowed me to scratch that itch. And I think that if you don't enjoy the process of what's involved in doing a startup, you're going to have a really rough go of it. And it might be correlated with success. I imagine that it's highly correlated with success. I don't know. But I imagine that people who don't like the work involved in starting a company don't do very well. So you need to really check in and make sure that you love whatever your startup requires you to do. Sometimes that's sales. I hate sales. So I would never start a company that was super sales driven where I had to be the sales leader. Fortunately, my co founder of all three of the companies that I mentioned is a great salesman and he loves hanging out with people and loves talking to people and he's super social and so he is a great complement to that. So I can go rabbit hole on some technology problem or work on something new that's a little bit more quantitative. Like I love the finance side of the business, I love the operations side of the business. I love the marketing design side of the business, I'm just not that excited about being on phone calls all day, basically. And so you need to really like, failure is fine if you're enjoying the process. If you hate the process, it's going to lead you nowhere.

Yeah, that's really good. Very well said. I feel like we've maybe touched on this a little. But if you look back at your experience with the ideas and the company that you try to start through Imagine K12, or with Imagine K12, you kind of look at all the weeks and months of the different things that you put out to validate and none of them working out. If you could draw sort of one piece of advice from that experience. Right. And I think in your case, maybe look at that experience and compare it with like the success that you experienced running Soylent. Right. If you could draw like one piece of advice that you would offer to a founder, just someone who's looking to start a company or someone who's already running a company, what would that piece of advice be?

I mean, I think pretty much all startup advice in Silicon Valley boils down to some rephrasing of Paul Graham's Build something. Build something people want. Right. There's so many different ways to transform that phrase, but that's really all it is. You know, if you want to boil it, if you want to expand it into like three things that you should be doing, it's, you know, make your customers happy, grow the customer base every month and make sure that there are a lot of potential customers so that you don't cap out. Like, you need a big market if you're going to be a really big company eventually. But you can be successful in a small market and live a wonderful life and pay yourself a million dollar salary if you just have a couple people that are really excited about what you're doing and love your product. There's plenty of examples of that with the lifestyle business crowd. But yeah, it's just build something people want. And if you don't have a good idea of what people want, build something that you want. Right. So that's probably like the biggest overarching entrepreneurship takeaway that keeps coming back in pretty much everything that I read. But I mean, there's a lot of like, smaller details, but they're all much less important than that main abstraction.

Yeah, build. Build something that you want. I really like that. And this is. I'll probably end with this question. So in 2017, you put out a statement about moving on from Soylent. And this is just for my own curiosity and selfish purposes. But I'm curious to know why you left Soylent.

Yeah, I mean, the biggest thing was that we were going into retail and as I mentioned, I'm not a huge. I don't really love that type of sales. I'm much more interested in technology, e commerce, online marketing, stuff that's highly quantitative. And retail sales is none of those things really. It's all relationship based. It's all figuring out incentive structures with the sales teams, managing a lot of people. So there wasn't as much opportunity for me. We'd done very well on E commerce. We'd grown the business significantly and I felt like I had done basically all. I'd learned everything that I. That I wanted to learn. So going and starting a new company with my co founder, working on a new challenge in a more regulated space, like the tobacco and nicotine space is highly regulated. But there were still some very interesting opportunities in E commerce and technology that was very exciting to me. So yeah, it was just, it was just the right time. We'd been with the company for I guess, five years and it was just exciting to start working on something new.

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, John, thank you so much for being on. It's been a pleasure talking to you and just learning about your experience. I'm sure this is going to be new to a lot of people because I don't think very many people know what you did before Soylento.

Definitely. I don't think I've ever talked about it publicly. Normally the stories start with Soylent day one, basically.

So I'm really excited to put this out and see what people think about your experience before Soylent. So thank you so much for being on. John, it's been a pleasure.

Yeah, awesome. Thanks so much.

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