Dmitry Shapiro - Co-founder & CEO of GoMeta

Welcome to the Tacos and Tech Podcast where we discover cutting edge technology and the builders making it happen. I'm your host, Neil Bloom, San Diego's tech ambassador, and together we're going to uncover what technology San Diegans are creating with our own blend of local lifestyle. This podcast episode is proudly brought to you by our friends at Cox Business, the broadband and cloud services provider to the modern tech company. As a longtime supporter of San Diego Startup Week and the San Diego startup community, Cox also puts on top Tech awards. Get started, and most recently, quick pitch with San Diego Venture Group and Techcoast Angels. Thanks again to our friends at Cox Business for their support of the community. Welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Neal Bloom, and I am here at Kogi headquarters with Kogi co founder and CEO Dimitri Shapiro. Hey, thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me.

Hey, I'm excited. We finally got to sit down. We've been trying to make this happen for a while.

We have.

And finally got to get to know you a little bit and really excited to tell the story of what you're doing now through all the things you've done in the past. So why don't you tell us quickly what Koji is?

So Koji is a platform that's trying to democratize app development. And you can look at it sort of historically, as we've gone through the democratization of various types of media, so like blogs, democratized text publishing, and then we've had all of these photo sharing services that have democratized photography. Obviously then YouTube came around and democratized video. And I competed with YouTube in a prior company. And now we're at another inflection point where sort of we think the population is ready to be able to play around with code and, and be able to create all kinds of things from code. Today, almost nobody can do that. Right. But Koji is a platform that has a bunch of helpers built into it that makes it much more accessible, easier, faster to be able to do all kinds of things.

That's awesome. I'm excited to hear how you got to that. I mean, I think the democratization of platforms sounds like it's a common theme with what you're building. So why don't you take us back? How did you even find the tech world? Do you have a computer science background yourself?

I don't. I was born in Russia, and then When I was 10 years old, we moved to Atlanta, Georgia, and I grew up in Georgia. And one day in 1984, my father who was working at a hotel as a maintenance man. There was a movie theater near the hotel, and he decided to take me to see a movie. And we saw this movie, War Games, with Matthew Broderick. And I was. I just remember sort of like immediately in the movie going, oh, wow, I want a computer, right? And we were super poor, so, like, we couldn't afford a computer. But my high school had two computers, two Apple IIs. And I walked into the computer lab, sort of not knowing anything, and met one of the guys that was in there, also a student, and just started hanging out in the computer lab and learned to program and got really, really into it fortun. Unfortunately, my mom was super overprotective, and so she never wanted me to leave the house. But instead my parents got me a computer. And so I spent my teen years staring at a monochrome screen. And then when I went to college, I thought I'd get deeper into technology. And so instead of studying computer science, I studied electrical engineering and then didn't write a single line of code throughout college, like, not one really. And then graduated and then got a job. And although not in electrical engineering, I got a job selling phone systems to businesses. I was so burned out after college from electrical engineering that I was like, I just want nothing to do with it. In fact, to this day, I've never done a day of electrical engineering. But when I was 25, I taught myself to program again. Got a job at a company called Fujitsu as an engineer, as a sales engineer. And I ended up building their web team on the side. I was building websites for all kinds of businesses or doing consulting work. This is mid-90s, this is 1995. Yeah. And then so I spent four and a half years at Fujitsu and then left to just do web consulting, and then got recruited by a San Diego company called College Club, which at that time was just starting to get a lot of traction. This was 1999. I joined college Club and worked on product and engineering. I was there just a short period of time, like 11 months, and decided to leave to start my first company. And College Club was about to go public. I thought they were going to be huge, and then the market tanked, and so College Club ended up basically going bankrupt.

Was College Club a Facebook kind of thing, or was it a closed private network? What was the emphasis there?

So College Club, this is again the late 90s when college club was around. It started off as a voicemail service for students, where students could get sort of voicemail as a service, and then over time, you know, became a web service. And it was. We called it an online community. Today it would be called a social network. It had, you know, many of the tools that we have in today's social networks, and people loved it. Now, it was focused on college students, so it was primarily college students. So we did have some sort of adults infiltrate the network. But, yeah, so I got there, it had just over 200,000 members. We, in less than a year, went up to 4 million members. So this thing had crazy growth and lots of innovation. So it was an interesting time. And so I left to start a company called Econic Systems. And my idea was that, like, this thing, these, like, online communities that we called them then, are really powerful tools. And what if we could sort of build these for brands like, let's say Harley Davidson or NASCAR or many other brands that already have a fan base? And what if we can sort of enable their websites that when people showed up to harleydavidson.com instead of sort of just looking at a bunch of brochures, they could see each other, they could see who's online, they could build relationships, they could share content and all of that. And so I did that for a year to $3 million worth of bootstrap business. We had four customers, then raised a round of venture capital. My first round of venture capital, which was $5 million.

This was after the dot com bust?

Yeah, this was in April of 2001.

Okay, so you were still able to find venture capital even because you had revenue?

Because we had 3 million in revenue. And the VCs here couldn't figure out exactly how we were doing and thought maybe we were lucky and maybe they should invest in this, I think. But it was a tough time. It took me a long time. Even with that revenue, it was really difficult to raise that round. It was led by Mission Ventures, with participation from Windward Ventures. And so we raced around. When I was on the phone and finally got the go ahead saying that they were going to fund, I cried. Literally, I just cried. It was really. It was stressful and just, like, cathartic. It was powerful.

Is that Theo Spiegel specifically that you're dealing with from.

I was dealing a bit with Leo. Less Leo. There's a lot of Robert Kibble and Dave. And Dave.

And then also Ted Alexander, Dave Titus from Windward.

Dave Titus and Peter Shaw from Windward. Yeah.

Cool names you still hear around sometimes.

Yeah, for sure.

Dave Titus, for sure. Yeah. Yeah.

And so anyway, so we raced around and then kept working. And then September 11th happened and my co founder, Adam Jacobs, he and I were up in the Bay Area, was going to speak at an event there on online communities. And then we were just getting dressed and we saw the planes hit in the morning and he actually found out that his cousin Ari was having breakfast on the top of the first tower windows on the world and died.

Wow, that's terrible.

And so we were kind of frazzled and somehow we were able to rent a car, which I think might have been like the last rental car in San Francisco. And that night we drove home. And as we were driving home, my brain kept going, you know, thinking about Ari, who I also knew and sort of the situation, and then sort of realizing that this, you know, six months to a year sales cycle that we had, and we were kind of selling this nice to have that, that was going to get super, super difficult and that we might have to pivot. And indeed we did pivot. As I kind of joke, we pivoted 178 degrees to being a cyber security company, perimeter security company. Okay. So there was a company here in town called Websense that I thought was like super FASC where they had this tool that managed employees use of web from inside corporate networks. And so IT managers could sort of specify who can access what services on the web, how much they can use it, when they can use it, et cetera. And so we built something similar, but for all the other protocols. Right. And in fact a lot of people at the time, they still do, by the time they were just starting to do it, were installing software on corporate machines themselves. Not IT managers, but employees were installing the software. And a lot of the software was specifically designed to masquerade as HTTP traffic, but it wasn't actually HTTP and Web sense didn't understand that at the time. So anyways, we built this product called EconXL7 Gateway and this little product called Rogaware that we gave out to people on this little cut CD and said, hey, go install this at the edge of your network and they'll give you a report if your employees are doing bad stuff. And so we sold over 2 million seats of that stuff. We raised in total, raised more Capital, raised $34 million for that. I convinced Peter Shaw, who was again one of our investors from Windward, to come join and become CEO. He had a lot more experience than I did and I moved over to CTO CIO position.

That's a big change up for you, CEO of the company.

Founder. Yeah, you know, I was 30 years old at the time. 31 years old. And, you know, I know a lot of entrepreneurs that have, like, a big problem stepping to the side and bringing somebody else to run a business. I've never had that issue. I've actually always welcomed it. To me, it was like, listen, if somebody can do it better and I can ride on their tail, let's do that. And so I'm always looking to replace myself, arguably. And anyway, so I. We did that, raised $34 million, and I spent almost five years with the company. And then one day, actually, I remember the day, it was November 18, 2004. I was in Hawaii on the Big island, driving down the road in a rental car, and I had this epiphany that I could make it easy for anyone to broadcast video on the Internet. This is before YouTube. YouTube launched in April of 05. This is November 18th of 04. And that I could do that and start a company doing that. So I came back and transitioned out of a conix, ended up starting this new company called Veo Networks.

Were you looking for something new after five years, or. It was just the idea was so strong. I have to chase this now.

Yeah, the idea was just so strong, where I was like, this has to be done. Yeah. And somebody's got to do it. If somebody else was doing it, I would have been perfectly fine staying where I was. But nobody was doing it, and I really wanted to do this. And I had some friends that were video bloggers. And I came back, I'm like, I'm gonna create the software for you guys. You're, gonna, like, lose your minds. It's gonna be so amazing. And so we did, and we ended up competing with YouTube. And I spent five years doing that, raised $70 million. Lots of stories there. For the brevity of time, I'm not gonna go into most of them, but ended up replacing myself there as well with another entrepreneur named Steve Mitgang, who had been at Yahoo, and by the way, still in town as an entrepreneur, got sued by Universal Music Group, which is the world's largest music company, for copyright infringement. We ended up winning a lawsuit, winning two appeals. But they not only sued the company, they sued our investors individually and basically just choked us out. And so we had a great business. We had 30 million uniques a month, which at that time was huge. Right. I mean, today we kind of laugh at that. Oh, just 30 million. But back then, that was huge. And anyway. And so I ended up having to. To basically liquidate the company, sell it in a fire sale, and then I was there after five years of. After five years, yeah. Had to lay off over 120 people. That was the hardest thing I've ever done to this.

All in one day or was it kind of?

No, it was over a few weeks, but still it was. And you know, like when you're working in startups, like you put everything into it. You know, people call it your baby. I don't know if it's your baby, but it's this relationship, right. And we had this super passionate team and it was really difficult. Now fortunately for me, the people sitting on the other side of me as I was laying them off realized that I was even more invested in this and in many ways they were like, no, no, I'm sorry that you have to do this for you. Which made it even harder. Totally. Yeah. So I did that and then I was a bit shell shocked and was being recruited by a guy named Jason Hirshhorn who was the co CEO of MySpace after News Corp had bought him and Mike Jones and I ended up going to become the chief technology officer of MySpace Music. Now MySpace Music is the joint venture between MySpace and the Record labels, the largest one being Universal Music.

The ones who just put you out of business?

Yeah, the ones that just killed my company.

They were okay with you now working for them?

Yeah, they were excited that I was then going to be CTO and run this thing and so I ran product engineering.

There was this out of LA or were you able to start sending?

No, it was out of la, out of Beverly Hills. And I was there for a year until News Corp decided to sell MySpace to the SAD Network and I didn't want to go. And so anyway, long story short, I ended up going to Google, up to the main campus. I spent four and a quarter years at Google working on the product side, worked on all kinds of interesting things.

Must have been a huge change experience going from startup life to big tech. Google Life.

Absolutely.

You spent what, 15 years doing startups and now you're working for plush Google Life.

It's super plush. Although that's like the, that's one of the least interesting things about Google Life. I mean certainly like we all see that and it's like, oh, that's got to be cushy and you get paid well. And I found the things that are most compelling about Google Life is that you're surrounded by like an elite group of people. You know, there's like 2 million people that apply to Google every year. At the time that I was There, they hired 7,000 people a year. And so somehow I slipped through. I joked that somehow I slipped through the interview process. And so I was surrounded by a talent. Yeah, a talent. You get sort of recalibrated. I remember showing off the first few days, you know, into meetings with a little notepad and a piece of paper and. And realizing there was not a single person taking any notes yet they were able to recall, like, information from two years prior that you remember on, like, November 3rd, you know, two years ago, we launched version 1.8.2, and it had these features. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, I can barely remember what I had for lunch two years ago. Features in some version anyway. But, you know, what's interesting is now I don't take notes either. Somehow by immersion through osmosis, I learned that my brain is much more capable than I thought it was and leveled up. In a sense, that was one of the most interesting things. And of course, you get to dream the biggest dreams around in technology. I mean, as a startup, you can dream of billions of people using your product and changing the world, but it's really hard to get above the noise. At Google, anything you launch is potentially like, in. In a day is gonna get a billion people. Right, Right. Although not everything. So that was super fascinating.

What'd you get to work on while you're there?

When I first joined, my boss, Bradley Horowitz, sent me an email, like, the week before I joined and said, hey, super excited to have you. Like, what do you want to work on? And I responded to him in, like, maybe 15 minutes with a list, I should find it somewhere of, like, I don't know, eight to ten things that I thought would be interesting to build. And, like, he responds five minutes later saying, yeah, these are all great, but, like, I wonder if you could do me a favor. We are trying to build a social graph for Google. Right. And for those people may not know what a social graph is. It's basically the relationships between people. How are people connected to each other? Your friend list on Facebook. Right. Or your following and follower list on Twitter, those are known as social graphs.

This isn't on a network. This is just people who have Google email addresses. Or what's the actual connection?

Well, it's for Google to understand how people are related to each other. And so, yes, it's people that send emails to each other. There's obviously a signal there that there's a relationship. Right now the signal is not if I just send somebody an email randomly, because that could be spam. But if Somebody replied. Or if somebody initiated towards me and I replied, that's a strong signal that we know each other. Doesn't mean we're friends. We could be negotiating, you know, anything. But anyways, that's one. Or people that chat with each other, or people that follow each other on Google. Google had this thing called Google Wave and Google Buzz. So Google has a bunch of social products and it was trying to sort of take all of that and normalize it into a real social graph. And it was a really hard problem. There were multiple teams spread out throughout the world of PhDs working on machine learning models to try to figure all this stuff out. And he why don't you take that over? And I was like, listen, this is fascinating. I'm not trying to do anything about that. He's like, why don't you just try?

I mean, you worked in social networks.

I did. I understood the concept, but I really sort of felt super intimidated parachuting in. There had been two other product managers trying it before. One left the company, one left the team. Everyone again I worked with were PhDs. You know, I joke, I barely got out of college with biological engineering degree. But you know what, that's actually exactly what they needed. They needed somebody to show up and say, I don't understand, please explain it to me why we're doing it this way.

Yeah. And at a five year old level, basically. Yeah.

And yeah. And in nine months I actually, you know, our team, but not just by me, ended up rethinking how we were approaching it radically rethinking it and making dramatic impact on the social graph. And because of that, I got to ride on one of the private Google jets with the SVP of one of the SVPs of Google. Who's responsible for this? Vic Bindotra. And at that time I convinced Vic to let me do a few other projects that I wanted to do. And then I ended up leaving social and going to this team called Unicorn where we worked on identity infrastructure to help Google better understand sort of the notion of a household and a family. Because today everybody's a user. So I'm a user, my wife's a user, my kids are users, but we're not. We're a family and we're a household. And as a household we share certain services and we have certain sensibilities that individual users, for example, that are living, let's say, even as roommates don't have. And if you can understand that relationship, you can better serve those use cases.

Got it. Interesting.

It was really fascinating this was your.

Own idea that you kind of.

No, there was a team that was already spun up and my former boss from Social had moved on to that and sort of tempted me into joining them. So I spent four and a quarter years to the day there and then. Anyway, so had an idea with Sean Thielen, a guy who I was mentoring who was still a college student. I met him on a site called Hacker News. He had built some stuff and asked if he could get some adult supervision, basically advice. And I met him and his partner at the time and roommate, Jonathan Miller.

They were in San Diego or were they?

No, they were at Chapman University in Orange County. Yeah. And so anyway, so we all got pretty excited about this idea and decided to leave my cushy gig at Google, come back to San Diego and start this company. That was three years ago.

So you moved back three years ago?

Yeah.

That's great. Before we jump into that real quick, I mean, you've done all your startups in San Diego now, which is really interesting. You've seen kind of big tech in the Bay. What are some comparisons you've seen over the years? One, comparisons of just startup in San Diego versus big tech. But also you've done consumer in San Diego like B2C, which actually is not a very San Diego thing. So it feels like now, I don't know, take us through a little bit of that. Like, what was it like being a startup there? Would you have wanted to start up in the Bay?

Yeah, so I considered starting this company in the Bay Area. I mean, I was up there. I mean, I did want to come back here because my family's here, my wife's family is here, we own a beautiful house here. So I wanted to be back in San Diego, but there's a part of me who was saying, well, startup is actually more important. So we think from a startup standpoint, the reason I chose to come back to San Diego and try it again here is for a number of reasons. One, in the Bay Area, you have so many startups and they're all competing with each other for talent. And yes, there is a lot of talent up there, but when you factor in the competition, it's actually much harder to hire in the Bay Area than to hire here. It's also dramatically more expensive because this competition drives everything up. There were many, many, I mean, I certainly didn't count them, but dozens of people that I worked with at Google who came from sdsu, ucsd. As we sort of got to know each other and sort of. I started Asking questions like, do you ever want to go back to San Diego? So many said, yes, I'd kill to go back to San Diego. It's just like there's nothing down there for me. And I said, well, I'm actually going to go down there and start a company. And I said, if you ever can, in a sense aff, please call me because I want to go back down to San Diego. So that was sort of like another signal of like, you might be able to actually take people from these other areas and get them to come back down here if we could actually build something meaningful here. And then I also, I really sort of love being out of the echo chamber of the Bay Area. In the Bay Area, everywhere you go, people are talking about, in a sense, the same thing. It's tech, tech, tech. And I think if you can't sort of step away from it and sort of look at it from outside the bubble, it's really hard to get perspective. And so I think we're actually really fortunate here because we are super close to the Bay Area. I go up there whenever I want. It's an hour flight. It's as long to get there as it takes to get up to Carlsbad, basically from downtown. We're close to Orange county, we're close to la. We've got reasonable home prices down here. The quality of life is awesome. Again, you don't have this bubble. If you've got a meaningful company, you can compete well. So I think San Diego is prime to be a tech hub. Now, we've been saying that for the 20 years that I've been here. So I don't know what, at the end of the day is going to spark it and make it that, but exits. Yes, exactly, exits, acquirers, more venture capital coming in.

That's awesome. See, you take the noble mission to come back to San Diego and started here. What did the company look like three years ago compared to where it's at now? And what was the vision then?

Yeah, so at the time that we started the company, Pokemon Go, like in a few months from launch to Go became huge, Right. And just really surprised everyone. Consumers, technologists, venture capitalists, People were like, wow, that's incredible. We've got this new thing, this augmented reality on phones and we've got location, we've got gamification. All of this is really powerful. And so our idea was like, well, yeah, this is exciting. Why don't we create a platform that lets more people do it? Why don't we democratize that? And my Brain is always sort of going naturally to these concepts of democratization of stuff. Right? Open source. Yeah. Well, some people like to build apps. I actually don't like to build apps. I like to build platforms that let other people do stuff. In this case, let other people build apps. Right. And so anyway, so we built a platform called Metaverse and it's got sort of two parts, Metaverse Studio and Metaverse App, which allows anyone to create Pokemon Go like things, augmented reality experiences. So it's this authoring tool that's this drag and drop thing and it's super accessible to people. There's over 20,000 teachers that are now using it in their classrooms. We've seen literally first graders create augmented reality apps, games, interactive humor, learning materials. We've seen marketers, gamify marketing. And so anyway, so that's what it was then. And it's part of a movement which is called no code or low code. This is a whole movement of platforms. They're saying, look, everybody doesn't have to code. What if we could make things so you don't have to code, but you could still create? And so Metaverse Studio is a no code, low code platform. Over the two years that we were running, it's still running, but we focused on it for two years solid. In the last year we've been focused on Koji. But in those two years we realized that which, by the way, which most of these people are going to realize, is that when you take away the code and you only allow people to use this no code sort of paradigm, there are a lot of limitations. And we were finding the edges of this platform and other people were finding the edges and we could have sort of made it more complex, but instead we said, well, why don't we sort of start from scratch and come at it from a different perspective and meet it sort of here. And that's kind of how Koji came to be, which is from the learnings we had from this no code, low code, Metaverse Studio. We said, let's still keep the goodies, which is the ability to abstract code and create controls that don't require you to touch the code, but give you access to all the code and make that much easier. It's evolved. Some people look at it and they're like, it's a pivot. And I could see them saying that. And I'm perfectly fine with that. I don't really see it as a pivot. We don't see it as a pivot. To us, it's really the same spectrum which now sort of fixing the issues with it by coming at it from a different side rather than continuing up a steep hill or going up a different thing.

Okay, so Ko G is specifically for building mobile apps, right?

Well, it's for building web apps. And those web apps are responsive and they're progressive web apps, which means that they can be installed on phones. It means you only write once and you get desktop, mobile, web, and then progressive web app, which means you can install them on your home screens on iOS and Android. Okay. And then by the way, you can run them on like I posted a video to Facebook a couple of days ago where on, you know, Facebook has this product called Portal. Right. This video product. So it's a piece of hardware with a camera.

It's like an Alexa with a screen.

Yeah, yeah. And it's got a browser. So you can run Koji apps on Portal. You can run Koji apps on refrigerators because refrigerators have browsers now. You can run Koji apps on Teslas and the screen on a Tesla because it's got a browser.

Has it been done yet with Koji?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

That's really cool.

And so now there's over 3,000 apps that have been built with Koji. They range from games to digital musical instruments to, you know, sort of enterprise Y things, to Twitter clones.

Okay.

Yeah.

And so people are paying for templates, like access to higher quality templates or how is it today?

It's all free. We launched it two and a half months ago. And so we still consider it in beta. We have not implemented monetization, but yeah, our vision is that we will allow developers that create these templates that other people can remix, that we will allow those developers to charge for those templates. Templates or give them away for free. We already allow these creators, as we call them, or makers, who are the people who are taking these templates, cloning them and then launching web apps from them to put in like paywalls and ad networks and things of that sort. So they can already monetize. Yeah, there are a number of premium tiers that we're going to introduce. It's all free to use, but there'll be some premium tiers that give you access to engineers that can help you with your code if you get stuck. Because Koji is built as a collaborative development environment, sort of like Google Docs for code. So it's really interesting. There are a bunch of technologies. Anyone can go play with it. The URL is go Koji G O K O J I.com super accessible. You watch a little 10 minute video tutorial and you should just be able to build an app and a few minutes and deploy it. And it's got bunch of like super advanced technology that feels so easy, so accessible, but yet the tech to make that work is so absurdly difficult.

Oh, I'm sure.

And so it's quite interesting to watch this dichotomy. Yeah.

And so you, I mean, you have some really interesting examples of who's building. Like your mother in law is building games. Yeah, right. Like who else? I mean, what are in the community?

Yeah. My mother in law is an English teacher in high school. She's never programmed anything. She's now built over a dozen games. There are, you know, because we have a list of teachers who are using Metaverse Studio, we sent them an email. So there are lots of teachers that are using it. There are kids that are using it to create games. There are marketing agencies that are using it to create interactive ads. And so what is this? Is this thing a game? Well, no, it's an ad because now it's like you're chasing hamburgers instead of, you know, something else. Yeah, there are storytellers using this to create role playing games and interactive stories. There are developers that are using it to create templates that they themselves then reuse that dramatically makes them much more productive when they're servicing clients. There are entrepreneurs using it to try to create their minimum viable products in a fraction of the time that it would take them in today's world. And so it fundamentally changes the dynamics of app creation. They say that on average, if you want to create some meaningful app, something that you could go and start a business with, it takes six months to a year and costs $300,000 to a million dollars. That's a long time and a lot of money. Most people can't do that. And Koji sort of turns that on its side and says, no, listen, you could actually do this thing for free and you could actually launch a really powerful app today. Certainly in a week you can do a lot. In a month you can do an absurd amount. And even if you are not a technical entrepreneur, because of this collaborative nature of Koji, that you can ask other people to come in and help you, well, that makes it super easy to do. We now have over a thousand developers that are starting to create templates on Koji. So there's a large group of people that you can sort of marshal and ask for help and they're happy to help you.

It's becoming a Little bit of a.

New GitHub, it seems like it is definitely. Yeah. In fact, it uses git and so we run our own git server, kind of like a GitHub. And yeah, people are using it in that way and sort of jumping off of it and remixing. That's the other thing that's really interesting is somebody will create a template, somebody will take that template, clone it, make it into an app, and then allow other people to remix it. You can check whether you allow that or not. And if you do, then other people can take now your app and add to it, or subtract from it and launch theirs and other people can take theirs.

Is it always being cloned or is it more like Google Docs environment of collaborating on the same thing together?

Well, if you're collaborating, you're collaborating, but if you're remixing, then you're cloning, you're making a new instance of it and you're doing it. Yeah. And we run a website called withcoji w I t h koji.com which is kind of like YouTube. It looks like YouTube. And it's a discovery mechanism where you can go and find these things that people are creating, browse around, comment on them, give them thumbs up, thumbs down. So give some feedback to the creator. And it's so interesting, the stuff that we're discovering. I mean, every day we're just fascinated by completely random, random things that people create. And what I always find is the most important signal of whether you're doing something meaningful when it comes to a platform democratization platform is when trivialities arise. Right. Like if you look at YouTube, the first videos on YouTube were trivial. They were like stupid videos. Yeah, cat videos. And America's finding some video type stuff, right? And people looked at that at the time and said, ah, this is stupid. You know, who wants this? Nobody's gonna watch this. This is junk. No advertiser is gonna advertise on. It's no business. There's nothing. But when I was looking at it when I was running veo, I was like, oh, this is fascinating. Because if it's so easy, you know, the only reason those things exist is because it's so easy to do that. You don't spend your time trying to post cat videos. You only post cat videos if it's trivially easy to do it. You only create these stupid trivialities that are on Kochi right now when it's so easy to do it. You certainly wouldn't do it if it takes six months to a year and $300,000. You wouldn't create these trivialities. Somebody created this thing called Cat Communicator, which is a soundboard. It's got, like, a bunch of, like, little squares, and it's got, like, cat images. And as you tap on each one of these or click on them, it makes some cat thing. Like, this is an app that would have never, ever, ever been created by anyone except ibam's World, maybe. Yeah, but exactly like, you'd get it, but it wouldn't have been an app in this case. Right. Because to create it would have taken a long time, cost a lot of money, nobody would have paid for it. But now, because it's so trivially easy to do, people can do that kind of stuff.

Totally.

And so it's fascinating. I Recommend going to withcoji.com and just playing around, seeing what's there.

That's really cool. So beyond the monetization piece that you plan to put in there and kind of dev team, where else do you see this going long term? What's the big grand vision that you hope for?

Well, we hope that we are able to do for this interactive content, code, apps, whatever you want to call it. The same thing that YouTube was able to do for video, which is to inspire a new generation, orders of magnitude more people to feel inspired and capable of being able to create interactive content, to solve their own problems with code, to entertain us, to create all kinds of new amazing things we would have never envisioned. Like if you would have told me when I was starting Veo and when Chad and Steve were starting YouTube, the unboxing videos were gonna be a thing. The people were gonna watch other people open up boxes. I would have said, that's just crazy. That doesn't make any sense. I don't think that's gonna be a thing. I would have been wrong. Or if you'd have told me that people were gonna watch other people play video games like they do on Twitch, I would have said, that does not sound reasonable. But yet here we are. And it's because of that, because of YouTube, that that exists. And we hope that just as many new things arise when people get comfortable with playing around with code. We can make those tools accessible and create marketplaces and create ecosystems around it. And so that's really the vision. Yeah, Koji is the YouTube of code.

Yeah, that's really cool. We're excited to have it here in San Diego, obviously, too. You've been in and out of San Diego for a long time, so you must have some favorite foods Here, we love tacos here. The tacos and tech podcast. Do you have a favorite taco place?

I just love tacos.

Very democratic guy.

You like all. You know what I like? When I was younger, I was super picky about food and I kind of had these favorites. And I'm 50 now, and I've learned over the years that the best thing is exploration. And so to me, like, if it's something new, that's what I like. But I tell you, right across the street is taco stand. And that thing is awesome.

They've nailed it.

I love it. And there's one in north park also, and it's like a tiny chain, but it's really, really good. And so, yeah, so I like that there's also. And I can't remember their name, but for my kids birthdays, we've been getting a couple to come out that got a little taco stand and they just set it up in our yard and serve tacos. And those are even better than taco stand.

Totally. That's the best way. Bring it to you.

Yeah.

I'm the same way in exploration, so I can imagine asking for a favorite is hard, but do you have go to spots for beer or breweries at all? Because we're a big beer town here.

We are. And I do love beer again, so go to spots. Not necessarily. I used to love to go to Karl Strauss in Mission Valley, but I haven't been there in a while. I've got three young kids and so most of the beer I drink is in my backyard in my house. And then, by the way, on 6th street over here, there's like this little Irish pub there. I forget its name. That's awesome. I kind of feel like I'm not holding brand names in my head very much these days. I used to not really like them, but now I've really discovered IPAs. And so anyone that's got some unique IPA, I try to order something that I haven't had before.

Cool. That's a great way to do it.

And of course, Stone is also awesome. Always a big fan of theirs.

Definitely. You recently just told me you're new to coffee. All of a sudden you found it.

True. Yeah. I found coffee in my late 40s, which is so odd, I think, especially.

Married to a barista.

A former barista. Former barista, yes. Who is. Yes, very much. You said she a coffee snob and ish. Yeah. You know, we work here. I don't know what coffee they have, but actually has really good coffee. I tend not to go to Starbucks. If I can find some kind of unique little coffee houses, I find those interesting. There's one also that unfortunately, I'm so bad with names of these things, but. But it's just a couple of blocks down over here. Starts with an A. Oh, Achilles. Achilles.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Great coffee.

Yeah. Great coffee. Yeah, yeah. Great coffee.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, it's been true. It was great getting to sit down with you, get to know what you're up to. Now we're really excited for Koji. Really excited to go make our own taco game and build the next Taco marketplace on Koji. That's what I think. I'm going to go try this weekend.

Awesome. Actually, the Brigandine for fish tacos. Dave Titus and I are big fans of this. We like to have our meetings at the Brigantine Coronado. Oh, okay.

La Mesa. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, he lives in Coronado, but he meets me at La Mesa, so I should meet him in Coronado.

It's good views over there, too.

Yeah. And then South Beach. Is that what it's called in Novi? Yep. Awesome fish taco. Yeah.

Great spot.

Yeah.

Well, Dimitri, thanks so much for your time. Appreciate it. And good luck with everything.

Thanks for having me.

Thanks for joining us on the Tacos and Tech podcast with Neil Blum. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding the reach of the San Diego tech ecosystem. This has been a partnership with the San Diego Venture Group and the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation's SD Life Changing Campaign. You can find Neal bloom on Twitter eelbloom and on LinkedIn.

Sam.