3 AI business ideas to start in 2025 - from an Ex-Zynga Exec

And they said, well, you shouldn't confuse revenue for success. So I said, well, you guys shouldn't confuse a lack of revenue for success either. And then they got like kind of upset.

Dude, this meeting, it goes in like the Silicon Valley Autistic Hall of Fame.

What's up? We got our friend Siki here, founder of Runway. Back in the day, built a company, sold it to Zynga, built another company, sold it to Hostmates has gone viral many times. And there's a lot of people in Silicon Valley who you almost, it's like a film director. It's like, oh, they're working on a new project. You really want to know what they're doing. That's you. Uh, cause you do things with taste. So excited to have you here. Do you, uh, do you have any good stories from early days of Zynga? Cause you sold a company to Zynga back when Zynga was the shit. Did you work with Mark Pincus? What's he like? Give me a good Zynga story.

Uh, okay. I have a great story actually. Uh, how I came to report to Mark Pinker is actually itself a great story. I have like so many good Mark Zuckerberg stories. So yeah, Zinga bought my second company, uh, my first company, and I joined as director of product at Under Studio.

Wait, can you give the background of Mark? So Mark's like a Silicon Valley OG. Did he help, uh, fund Facebook to get off the ground? Was that his first big thing?

He did. So, um, he and Reid Hoffman co-owned, bought the, uh, Six Degrees of Separation patent from a company called Six Degrees. And he angel invested in Facebook and also licensed a patent, I believe, for more stock into Facebook.

That patent was basically the kind of the social networking patent, right? Like how, how we're, we're connected 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon away from each other. And I think Reid, the story, some, there's some story where Reid and him realized that if this patent got in the hands of Microsoft or some big company, that they would be able to squish innovation by a startup by like holding this patent over their head. So they bought the patent, I believe, and just decided we're not going to use it to stop anybody. And then they, I think, parlayed it into getting extra shares in Facebook, which is amazing.

I think that's what happened. Yeah. Um, so when I joined, I was a director of products and my girlfriend, now my wife, who I recently met, moved to China for some job work thing. And I was like 3 months into Zynga and I was like, I'm not really feeling it. It's not that fun. So I told them I was going to resign and move to China and they said, hey, why don't we just give you this new job? Um, you know, you can report to Eric Schreier, one of the co-founders, and basically be head of product for the company. I said, nah, that sounds fun. That sounds great. So, so I did that. So I reported to Eric Schreier. He was a co-founder of Zynga. And what happened is a month into the job, Eric Schreier stopped showing up to work. Like, wouldn't respond to emails, wouldn't go to work, and I was like, what? And basically that's when I reported to Mark and I was the head of products. Uh, and later the, the, the punchline of the story is what I, the reason why he stopped showing up to work is I later found out that he decided to become a ninja.

Pretty good reason.

It's not what I thought was going to be.

He literally, he was like, he wanted to start a ninja dojo and he wanted to undergo ninja training. And so when I—

What in the Napoleon Dynamite is this story?

How's his ninja career now?

Uh, I think he started another, um, uh, social games company.

All right. So I have this notebook here and the reason I have here is I take notes whenever we have a guest, not because it's my job and I'm a podcast host, but because a lot of times what the guests are talking about, it's just so interesting to me as a human. I just want to go and like implement it in my business or my life. And the person I took the most notes for was Jesse Itzler. If you haven't heard that podcast, it's the best. Like, it legitimately changed my life. And so I thought, let's share our notes. And so with the help of the team at HubSpot, we went and took all of the notes from that episode and we turned it into a 10-page document. You can download it for free. It changed my life, that episode. I think it might change yours. So check it out. The link is below in the description. Again, Notes with Jesse Itzler down below.

So At the time, what was Zynga like? Was it like on top? Was it king of the world at the time or was it on the downswing?

Yeah, I mean, what's interesting on Zynga is they hired a bunch of people who used to be investment bankers to be product managers there. Um, because it was just all about the numbers going up. It was highly analytical. So I went in and just the amount of like knowledge they had about growth. One of the things that really blew my mind, I think about a lot. Is when I first had a conversation with Mark Pincus, uh, early on, I think maybe during the acquisition, I asked him, hey, what do you think about this, like, industry? It just seems really low moat. Uh, it's, it's hard to have a competitive moat here because it's just so easy to enter, you build a new game and for it to expand. And how defensible is it? And I think about his answer quite a bit because his, I was like, no, this is great. I want there to be more new entrants. Into the space because it's free R&D for me. And I just like, okay, that is, that blows my mind. That is next level because he was just so confident in his ability to execute that like anyone who's going to come in with some new idea, they can just like fast follow it and do a much better job of growing it, which is like what they did, right? Farmville was in the first farm game, poker was the first poker game. Um, and they work really, really well, at least during the Facebook era.

Wait, did he have like Genghis Khan energy where he was like, is he a conqueror?

Yeah, he did. He did. I mean, you know, we were working like 80, 90, 100 hours a week at Zynga and, uh, that was kind of the norm.

It sort of seems like a waste of talent though to have that conqueror energy and do it in the lamest way possible. You know, like, yeah, like FarmVille. Like that's what he's like trying to do this on.

Like a few billion dollars, a few billion dollars.

There's a, um, There's a quote by Max Levchin at the time. Max Levchin, who created PayPal, is by all accounts like a genius computer engineer, single-handedly was like fighting fraud at PayPal and like with as a one-man army, like withstood, you know, the attacks of all of these sort of financial scammers around the world. The guy's brilliant. And then his next startup, I think, was Slide, and it was making like widgets for MySpace and Facebook where you'd be like slideshows or Super Poke where you throw like chickens at your friends when you wake up. you know, by pushing a button and it just slaps your friend with a chicken or something like that. And they go, what, what was your takeaway from Slide? Slide ultimately didn't fully work out. Sold to Google, I think, for a little bit. But he goes, be really careful what you choose to work on because everything can be optimized endlessly. So he's like, once we got in that, we could just sit there and optimize and just get the number of chickens slapped per day up. Um, so, you know, choose wisely. What should I be optimizing this chicken slapping or should I be doing something else? And I've always thought about that because I found myself falling into the same trap. No matter what I'm doing, if I'm selling little widgets, my life becomes about selling widgets and I can optimize that to infinity. And people do. If you go look at how any company works, that's what they've done. They've optimized it to infinity.

Dude, when my wife worked at Facebook years and years ago, I remember like I was talking to all of her coworkers at a party and I was like, oh, you guys are amazing. You guys are so smart. What are you working on? And they explained it to me, but it boiled down to they are trying to convince Brazilians to put more stickers on their photos like there was one dog that had a long tongue? Do you guys remember that fucking dog? Yeah yeah they were trying to convince that fucking dog sticker—

It's basically like face filter thing when Snapchat came out and then if opened up your mouth a giant tongue would come out!

Dude I felt like what... And they explained it too but I kind of boiled down "Wait so you're just tryna get Brazilians to use more stickers because share more photos?" I literally feel like cartoonish blblblbl What?! Like y'know wot imean?? Wut u guyz doin'?

I obviously have a Max Levchin and Slide story. Uh, this goes back 17 years, so I don't think they'll mind anymore. But, um, when I— this is when I first moved to the city and I had this app on Facebook that was blowing up. And so some guy who worked with Keith Rabois— Keith Rabois was, I think, the CEO of Slide at the time— said, hey, we like your app. You want to meet, you know, the team? I said, oh my God, this is amazing. I'm a year out of college. I get to meet Max Levchin. Um, so I go in and we had a meeting at noon and I go in the Slide office and no one was there. Everyone was out for lunch and I talked to receptionists. I said, hey, I'm here to meet Max and Keith. And they're like, oh, they're at lunch. Uh, they'll be back in half an hour. I said, okay. So we sit there for half an hour and then they walk in and they act like they kind of forgot there was a meeting. Um, but we go in the meeting room and we just start talking about what I wanted to do with this app I built, whether I wanted to build it independently or maybe like join Slide. And they asked me how much I wanted for it. I said, well, I have a co-founder, so $2 million, I would probably do it. The million dollars each. I kind of laughed at the number. I'm like, what? Like I looked at the valuation on AppData and like the amount of money we're generating. It's not a huge ask, but it's fine. It's too much. My friend, Natil, built Superpoke, which I recently bought. And they said verbatim, you know, we bought Superpoke and he's easily the 18th or 19th most important person in the company now, out of a company of like 60 people. I said, okay, that's a compelling offer. And then I said, and I said, yeah, this is probably not gonna happen. And I said, you know, we're profitable, we were making a bunch of money from ads, so it's cool if you don't want to buy it. And they said, well, you shouldn't confuse revenue for success. And at this point I was just like really upset. So I said, well, you guys shouldn't confuse a lack of revenue for success either. And then they got like kind of upset. So then, so then it got really weird. Um, oh, I forgot to mention, like at the start of the meeting, they said something like, hey, you know, there's a recession coming up to each other. And they're like, yeah, there's a recession coming up. And then he said, I can't wait to buy all these shitty companies for cheap. Like we're in the room and we're like, what? What the hell?

Dude, this meeting, it goes in like the Silicon Valley autistic hall of fame.

And then at the end. Keith was like, hey Keith, hey Max, what was your body fat percentage in the PayPal days? And Max was like 8%. And it's like, yeah. And I'm like, look, I'm not the fittest person, but I'm not selling you my company because he's like, you're fitter than me. Like, what is happening? So that was my meeting with them. But the thing that made it all make sense is the next week I was talking to one of my friends, John, who also had a company building apps. And he comes up to me at some party. He goes, Siki, man, like, you won't believe this. So I just had a meeting with Slide last week. I'm like, really? He's like, yeah, it was so weird because they started the meeting talking about how there's a recession coming up and they can buy all these companies for cheap. I was like, oh my God, it's the script.

Uh, it was in episode 1 of this podcast. I think, uh, my buddy Suli told almost the same story. He goes, he gets invited to Slide. He sits with Max and Keith. And what they said was they were like, you should, uh, we want to hire you. And he's like, I don't really want a job. Like I have my apps good. I thought you wanted to like maybe buy or something. And then he opened the door and he goes, you see all those guys out there? They, they're going to build your app in like 6 days if you don't take this offer. And he was like, okay, I'm not interested in this even more now. Um, like, this is horrible. My app is stupid. What he said, he goes, his app at the time was called like Superlatives. It was like you would name your friend most likely to, you know, go to jail or something. He's like, you're threatening me that you're going to take my app. I think my app is stupid. The fact that you think my app is cool makes me think you're stupid. That's what he thought in his head.

Uh, Siki, who did you meet? I love talking to people, uh, to people who have been, uh, around a bunch of these folks before they kind of quote made it. Who is a tycoon or a big shot now that you're shocked by because of when you knew them when you guys were both younger? You, uh, you're like, oh, I can't believe they, they actually developed into such an amazing, uh, business person.

I, I, I don't, don't know that I met a lot of people who weren't great, that I think were great, that were huge later.

Uh, who's someone you met that wasn't huge then, but you knew, and why did you know?

Oh yeah. I mean, Drew Houston.

When did you meet him?

Dropbox.

He started Dropbox.

10 people. It was 2000, late 2007, early 2008. And we were just talking about growth. It's like they, they had this like college referral plan. Um, so Drew Houston, I mean, Aneesh, who's general partner at Andreessen. Like he was a, just a founder building apps on mobile phones, right? And he would come to my office and we'd talk about it. Oh, probably the best one is Chris Wonsroth. Who's that? He's co-founder, CEO of GitHub. And he was a contractor at PowerSet, which was like this job I took when I first moved to the city. But he was actually a contractor for my first company, Serious Business. He, I had him build this translation layer between Facebook markup language and MySpace markup language. just to get captured. He was really good at it. Um, and I distinctly remember that we were at 21st Amendment. Um, yeah, or, or actually, uh, the Bear Brewery, doesn't matter. But, um, I gave him a full-time employment offer, uh, in early 2008, and he was considering it. And the same night he, when we're talking about, he said, you know, DHH just put Rails on GitHub. And so I think I might work on GitHub full time. And I was thinking in my head and I was like, the smart thing for me to do is actually shut down my Facebook Games business and go work for you. But I didn't say that, but I was thinking it.

Have you had any massive angel investment wins because you're around the hoop for so long? And so, and early?

Yeah, I mean, the best, I mean, the best one by far is Amplitude. And that one was, I was introduced through, um, actually, yeah, someone at Zynga, uh, Matt Okko, who runs Data Collective now, and he introduced me to my very first angel investment after I sold to Zynga, uh, and that like 10x'd in like 12 months. And so I was playing with Play Money Up after that. And he introduced me to this team that we ended up being the fourth customer of, uh, for analytics platform. It's now Amplitude. And we used it. We thought this is great. This is the best thing we thought we've seen since the Zynga internal tools. and I managed to get into the seed round and that IPO that, you know, we ended up being a 400x, uh, return on that, which is pretty great.

Amazing. Let's jump in with ideas, opportunities. You're an idea guy. What do you think are some cool ideas or opportunities that, that you would want to be working on right now?

Um, so I built a Zapier and it basically categorizes my emails. With GPT-4 into different labels. So I have this very long prompt in automation. And I also use a product called SaneBox, which also does something similar, filters my emails. But there's been no good version of email management software that I'm able to customize the prompt and train it. So I want to say, hey, here's the things related to my kids. And there's no keywords necessarily. You can just, you have to kind of read it. It's like some email to my babysitter or, or an email from the school. And if it's related to my kids, I want you to put in this folder. And the idea is I want an inbox for like these different contexts. And so people are doing different kinds of email categorization. What's missing is there's no way to train it. So I think building some way for you to, for a product to understand all of the content about your life and organize your stuff, starting with inbox, will be really handy for me. And I've seen at least 12 companies do this and no one has done a really great job of it.

I just tested this product. Have you guys heard of this? Um, I can't think of the name right now. Um, but it was this thing where I, it sounds insane where it recorded my screen for weeks at a time and it would see how I'm typing, what I'm saying to people, and it would give me feedback on the productivity of my day and how I can improve it. Have you guys seen this? It started with an R, I think. Is it called, uh, Lectr or something?

Or isn't it, uh, RescueTime?

No, no, Sean, you're right. It started with a guy. The guy who started, it's like a, like a, he's like a guy. He's like been around.

Uh, he was doing like a pendant or something, right? At one point. And then now it's a Rewind.

Rewind. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Rewind.ai. Is that it?

Yeah. They stopped working on it. Now it's called Limitless and they're just working on the pendant now.

Yes. I was tinkering with Rewind and the promise, it, it's not there yet, but the promise of this is, is, was amazing. I like, I was like so into this. Um, and it's kind of describing what you're, what you're just explaining because we're having to use Zapier and OpenAI or ChatGPT to like kind of duct tape this all together. Their premise was amazing. And that is exactly what I'm looking for.

I got a third one, which is like a lot spicier, but you know, like this is not a venture backable thing, but you know, just Character AI and Chai and all of these like chatbots, they're really, people are using for, um, sexy chats. I think like someone could, and these things print money, by the way, like they immediately generate millions of dollars a month. Uh, I thought if, if I were just in it just to like print money, the thing I would make is something that is kind of like Tinder, but basically everything is AI generated. So it's not like, oh, you're creating a robot, but it's a fake dating app where everyone is attractive and is super into you. And then you can like, then you can go off of your Tinder app and go on Instagram and have an Instagram account on actual Instagram. Is owned by the, the, the person that you met on your fake Tinder app.

Sikhi, do you know who Tai Lopez is? He's like the guy who had the infomercial that was like, here in my garage.

I do know who he is.

Yeah, so Tai, uh, one accusation— he came on MFM years ago, and an accusation that I learned about him based off of the comments on YouTube is that years and years before he was whatever he was famous for, he owned dating apps. And the accusation was that all of the users were completely fake and that it was guys in the Philippines like running it and, uh, doing exactly what you're describing.

That's true of the majority of dating apps.

What do you mean?

That's just like standard operating procedure. Like Plenty of Fish, you know, like, uh, uh, a seeking arrangement. Like, that is their business model.

Um, they're like— and in fact, like, um, men acting as women.

Yeah, there's also like the webcam industry, like Like they, up until OpenAI, the companies with the most advanced AI technology is going to be one of these companies because they are better at creating chatbots than anyone. They have the most advanced technology. I'm not, I'm not kidding. Like I know people who work there or run it. Uh, they've just developed better chatbot technology than anyone. And GPT—

that'd be so funny if that's where AGI starts. Actually, it's not OpenAI, it's none of these labs. It's like whatever, some of these like webcam sites developed by Slovenia. That's not a crazy idea.

I mean, it is not how it typically has been where a lot of the, like, the vice industries are the ones pushing the, pushing the envelope.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So transformative for OnlyFans, right? Like, I don't know if you've read, but like there's, you know, you're a big influencer on OnlyFans and you have an army of 100 people who are like typers or chatters. Right.

And the funny thing about them is they're not just chatters that are flirting. They're also basically salesmen. So what they're doing is they're chatting to try to upsell you until they get you to buy this video. Buy this photo. I don't know exactly how to buy the subscription, whatever the thing is, but they're, they're not just customer support. They're actually sales, but they need to come across like they're the original person. Um, which is just hilarious.

What do you think that office environment is like?

Uh, so I actually, I know someone who works in, um, that and it's just normal. It is like the most boring cubicle, normal office environment that you've ever seen.

That's almost better. The, uh, the other thing with the dating apps I think that they did was I remember seeing the study about Match.com, because if you're a guy on Match.com, you would basically send out, you know, 30 messages and you'd get, you know, 1 back or whatever. And what they would do is they realized that a lot of guys' accounts would go inactive because they're not getting replies. And so what they would do is they would basically send— they would show an active person 30 inactive profiles. Knowing that that inactive person is not there to reply, but that that will be the notification for that person to come back and reactivate their subscription. They have to pay to go read their inbox and to be able to reply. And so the, it's almost intentionally a horrible experience for the person who's there trying to find somebody in order to reactivate all the churned members. And they would do, they would basically in a, the first 100 matches that they would show you, you know, something like 50, 60, 70% of those matches were all just inactive people. They wanted you to. Send a notification to, to make them come back.

That sounds like a Zynga train PM.

Dude, I went to the Zynga office once back in the like heyday. It was the craziest office I've ever seen. Sam, did you ever go to this thing?

Yes. Uh, it was right, it was like it shared a building or was next door to Airbnb and it had a huge bulldog in the front, right? And I think at one point, I think they owned the building and I think the building was worth at one point more than the company, like hundreds of millions of dollars.

Why?

What, what, what did you think of the office, Sean?

Well, you would go in, there's a giant tunnel, like an LED tunnel you would walk through just to enter. And then when you're there, first of all, there was dogs everywhere. And it was like everybody, it was bring your dog to work. There was just like herds of dogs running around. It was insane. And we met the chef and the chef, like the food operation was more sophisticated. Just the cafeteria was more sophisticated than any company that I'd ever, I'd ever been a part of. Like just the food part was better than my actual company. So like they had a staff of 60 people on the culinary team. They had a roof on the top where they were growing all the vegetables. He had like a giant fridge that was like the size of like a swimming pool. You'd walk in and there was cows hanging upside down because they had their own butcher process. They, they didn't serve soda. They only brewed their own sodas. Like everything was soup to nuts custom and like, like just so insanely sophisticated. For a cafeteria program. I was like, man, if the food is like this, I don't even want to know what the actual, you know, like teams that do the work are. And I walked into one PM thing and it was like a stock market, dude. His screen had so many metrics fine-tuned in real time where they were running so many tests at a time. And it was like you said, Siki, like it looked to me from the outside like, you know, the most data-driven operation I had ever really seen. You know, I knew about what we did, but what we did looked like you know, caveman compared to what they were doing in terms of sophistication of data.

The food thing reminds me, like, I was the person who did petitions for us to serve real bacon. And after a few months, we finally started serving real bacon because we never had real bacon. It was only turkey bacon because, you know, Mark Pincus didn't like to kill pigs. But yeah, like, one of the things that people did at Zynga in the product org is we had PM on call, and I've never seen this done in any other organization. The PM on call for every game would daily send an analysis of what changed day over day. And so if there's a drop, then you would segment it. And so, oh my God, there's like an anonymous, like 50% drop in Mexico for FarmVille. And we are not sure why, because usually on Wednesdays at 2, it shouldn't be like this. And then last 3 hours long and they would have to explain, oh, it's because the World Cup is happening.

What comes— what comes first? We are with MrBeast a few weeks ago and I had the same question, but he wasn't able to articulate or answer it. What comes first when you're that data or analytic oriented? Does it— are you that way and scale comes because of that, or are you— can you only behave that way because you have scale?

So it depends on the environment. For if it's a data-friendly environment like Facebook is, then like Facebook platform is where virality lets you grow from 0 to 1 billion, then data is all that matters. Um, but you could see in the, in the experience of Zynga that that didn't translate to the mobile industry. Mobile was less about virality. It was just difficult to do distribution, a lot more of that creativity. And that's why Supercell has such a great advantage because they actually built very fun new games. Um, so I think it's completely dependent on environment. If it's hard to get early distribution, then scale makes it, makes data more important. But if it's quite difficult to get early distribution, then you want to be creative and innovative and brand and creativity that matters a lot more.

Do you remember any, like, random game change, like color red to blue or flashing lights or whatever that just generated like $10 million overnight?

I always remember thinking that like the best way to generate $30 million overnight is just to like say, hey, it's going to take you $10 just to unlock the game today. Like we could just like make it not available and people would pay. One of the more interesting ideas is this idea of crew. So we had this idea of collecting materials and you ask people for materials. Uh, one of the mechanics that we invented at Zynga is this idea of crew where you, for whatever thing you wanna unlock, you have to get at least like 20 people to help you, unique people. Uh, because what that did is, what we saw in the data is that when you do materials, you ask the same 2 people over and over again. But if we have a unique spread, then that increases the distribution and that ended up being like a pretty large boost in the, uh, use. Um, another thing that we saw is like just the power segmentation. And so there was this one day where our, our numbers went down anonymously and I had to figure out what is it like this channel or that channel? It turns out there was one particular typo bug in the drop rate of this particular treasure. That was creating a lot of opportunities for people to share. And so you just spend all day doing things like that. And so it's rarely something like huge, but it's all, all of the details added together that makes a difference, I think.

What were the other business ideas or opportunities that you think are exciting right now?

Yeah, I mean, I was— I actually asked Sam Altman to make this, but I don't know how long they're going to take, but I'm doing a lot of medical research.

What? What did you say?

He asked Sam Altman to make this product, he's saying.

Oh, I thought, I thought you were like, well, you had Sam Altman make a list for you to talk about.

I was like, no. Oh no, no, we're not that tight. Uh, but no, um, I was doing a bunch of medical research and, uh, I noticed that you can't access, um, paywalled articles. And so I really wish someone would make a version of Deep Research that lets you enter my, your, your paywall credentials. So you can get full text access. Uh, and this goes further. I think there's just so much data behind, uh, auth walls, paywalls that you can't get to, and you can only search on the open web. And the more private data you can get access to, the more useful these agents become. So that's like probably the number one thing I've been thinking about.

What's the name of the company, uh, that starts with an R? It's based in England. Sean, we've talked to him about them a bunch. It's like an acronym anyway. It's, uh, uh, an academic publishing company in England, and it's like really controversial because I think it has like the second highest profit margin of all publicly traded companies in the world behind Public Storage. And the shtick behind it and why everyone hates it is because researchers at universities don't get paid anything for this. In fact, oftentimes they have to pay tuition in order to even go to these places, but they take your research and they put it behind like a $30,000 a year paywall. Uh, and so it's a very frustrating industry.

Yeah, it's a, that's the whole industry, right? Elsevier, I think, is the biggest one, and there's a bunch of controversy around that. And yeah, all of these are extremely hard margin businesses. They charge an arm and a leg for access. The researchers get paid nothing. The peer reviewers get paid nothing. All they're doing is just like taking the text and copy and pasting it and putting somewhere and maybe like printing it into a journal. Um, so how would this work?

You're talking about like you told Sam Altman to say, hey, can I just give ChatGPT my credentials and then it can go log in for me and use that information when I ask it questions? So that's exactly what he would have to do. How could a founder— well, how would a founder get around that, or how would they do this?

Yeah, I mean, you would need access to O3, the full model, first, because that's what Open Research is based on. But I mean, it's not terribly difficult to create something like a Deep Research. Um, there was a company called— there is a company called Genspark. So I'm friends with the founder of Genspark. He used to be VP of search at Baidu, which is the Google of China. And they made a version of Deep Research just using a different model. And so that's relatively easy to build. I think the storage of the credentials and logging in is a little bit more tricky.

Right. It also just seems like somebody could just create like SciencePal or something like that. It's like specifically for researchers. And it's a ChatGPT-like interface, but it's specifically trained on or going to access all of the journals, all of the, all of the academic research out there for you. Um, and just do it like a vertical thing. Isn't there like a Google for doctors that's like this, like Lumos or something like that?

There is. So there's, uh, so I'm deep in the space. There's a company called Elicit. There's a company called, uh, SciSpace. And what they allow you to do is they let you search abstracts where available. And also you can upload individual PDFs too, which also ChatGPT allows you to do, but there's nothing I've seen that is— lets you— that indexes the full text of all these journals, uh, with your credentials.

And why are you so interested in—

why—

what's all this research for? Is it for, uh, I, I— is it your daughter? And if it is, what's the story behind that?

Yeah, so my daughter was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor last September, um, and we've been doing everything we can to find new treatments for this because it's so rare, and you really get deep insight into the sentence and the structure of the, of the medical community. And one of the big learnings is that what is available as standard of care, meaning that's what's available if you go to a hospital or you talk to a doctor and what is available at the frontier, there's a huge gap already. And then further, when you have a rare disease, just the amount of research and data and treatments available is also just thin. Because you need to have like enough critical mass for, for the research to be worth it so they can recoup the, uh, research costs. And the other interesting thing that we learned is that the IP issues are really weird. So for example, there's this, uh, drug that is FDA-approved, non-prescription, that's been out since the '70s to treat pedworms. And over the past 20 years, there's a huge amount of compelling data. This might be a pretty good treatment for different kinds of cancer. And there's been no clinical trials for it because there's no money for it because you can't patent a pinworm drug. Um, and so all the money, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars are going to new molecules that are patentable, even if things are already available. And so once you get into this, you're like, wow, this is super, super broken. Um, and so yeah, I'm doing a lot of primary research in order to find repurposed drugs that might already exist that could treat I'd just fairly wear a brain tumor.

It's, you know, there's, obviously this is super serious and I'm sorry you're going through everything. But also there's like an interesting, like, there's like an interesting logistical thing of like, wait, so you are able just to just research potential cures or ways to help your daughter on your own and come up with a solution? I mean, is that like what you hope the outcome is?

Yeah, I mean, so there's, I'm not the first, uh, founder type who's been in this situation, right? So the co-founder of Clubhouse, Rohan, uh, his daughter has a rare genetic disease. Her name's Lydia and she, he runs the Lydia Foundation and he's going so far as manufacturing his own drugs, right? For very rare diseases, you can do a lot. Um, there is other people I've met have done similar things like N of 1 cures exist. And so you can go, this is what I mean. Like if you're sufficiently motivated and there's no one more motivated than a dad with a sick kid, you could do, you can go so much further than what is available as standard of care. And so even the last time we met with our primary care team, they were proposing like two particular paths, one involving like pretty aggressive surgery and radiation, another involving this like drug. I proposed a third path. And they were discussing it, and this is like neurosurgeons and clinicians. They came back a week later, it's like, actually, your pathing's more set. And the reason I was able to do that is like, because this disease is so rare, I am like more knowledgeable about the disease than anyone in the room because they have to like study 50 different cancers.

Yeah. Right.

Wow.

That's, that's pretty incredible. Also, my experience has been that the doctors, once you get off of the kind of standard of care. This is maybe I'm projecting just from like, you know, I just had a knee injury and I was asking the doctor, I was like, hey, like, would PRP or stem cells, like, is there anything? Should I take— what's a peptide? Can I put a peptide in there? And he's like, you know, there's not a lot of evidence, you know, that's not part of the protocol, right? We don't have great evidence. And he was sort of like, my hands are tied. He's an orthopedic surgeon. He's just like, you know, my hands are— I can only recommend what I can recommend. You could do those things. Uh, I don't know. And so then I felt like, you know, I'm on my own here. Have you, once you do this path, are you just outside of the medical system basically? Are you outside of your standard chain of, of command with your doctors and you have to get your own system set up?

That's a great question. And I've had an almost similar conversation in the last meeting I was just describing. And so I saw it play out in real time. So the neurosurgeon said, hey, when we did this operation, we did it for this reason. Doing it for some other reason, it's not part of the standard of care. But our primary clinician, she is like, she runs, she's a principal investigator of one of the clinical trials, uh, the only one of two that treats this disease. And she was like, yeah, you're right. We don't have a lot of evidence because there hasn't been a lot of research into the tumor. And so sometimes you have to argue for first principles, and if it's a fairly rare disease, they're more open to being more creative. And in our case, our clinician was able to convince a neurosurgeon this was the right path, or at least it's worth trying. And she told us she was excited to have a partner who seems well-informed and is willing to think outside of the box. And I straight up said, I do not care what the standard of care is. I think the standard of care is crap. And she basically said, yeah, I think so too. I just can't say that. Right, dude.

And that's pretty cool that, that you're in San Francisco too, where hopefully you think that like, uh, the open-mindedness or the early adopter mindset, like even, uh, trickles out to like the doctors and things like like that. That's pretty cool that you're around a doctor who's like willing to try some crazy stuff, or what seems crazy to a lot of people.

So to answer Sean's question, like, if you do find your own drug, you do have to like show enough research and be well-informed enough that someone is willing to prescribe it off-label on a compassionate use basis. And so you just need to convince a doc, one doctor. And so if you can't find one, you can find others who's willing to do that, and then you're in, you're in the clear. And it's a lot easier if it's like a fairly serious rare disease.

Can you tell the story about— you tweeted out about your daughter's condition and then this crazy crypto turn of events happened where someone created a coin and then millions, maybe tens of millions. I don't even know how much money was raised. And then people got mad at you. People were speculating on this thing. I don't even understand it. Can you explain what was going on and also just explain Is this just, was there just degenerate gambling or did you maybe stumble upon a novel way that people might fund research in the future? I don't know which one of the two it is.

Yeah, I think I have a better idea which one it is after some reflection on it. So, okay, so explain what happened. Basically, yeah. Uh, Christmas, uh, I was going to Japan, uh, to ski with some friends and the family. And I was on a flight and I had a plan to start a GoFundMe for this lab. The Hinkeson Lab in the University of Colorado. So we were donating money to them once this happened because they're the only lab in North America that researches this particular tumor called the craniopharyngioma. And the treatment that we're on, they found. So I thought, okay, for Christmas, I thought it'd be great to do a GoFundMe, use my network and raise some money for this lab. So I tweeted this thread with this GoFundMe link and that we ended up raising about $250,000 for the lab, which is like, I think the biggest donation up to that point. But what happened is some people started asking about, hey, can I donate crypto? And so I said, okay, I, I posted my ENS, right? My Ethereum Name System address. And people started donating a little bit of ETH. And then some other people said, hey, do you have a SOL address? 'Cause we're on Solana. And I didn't have a SOL address. I was aware what Solana is, but I never touched it. And so the next day, once I landed, I created my first Solana wallet. I created this address and I tweeted it out. And basically what happened—

by the way, are you big in the crypto world? Why were all the crypto guys doing this for you? Just because what, what's the motivation other than it's good?

So I, I, I, it didn't occur to me. I thought it was people thought I had like 77,000 followers at a time. And I'm not big in the crypto world. I've like been on and off active in crypto since 2017, but never in a major way. I'm not a crypto account that people follow, but I found out why people did this later. And this answers the question of Sean, like, is this gambling or is this something else? But anyway, I posted a soft SOL address and basically an hour later I looked at my wallet and the wallet is at $400,000 and it was zero an hour before. So I'm looking, I'm like, what is going on? And it turns out So someone created a coin called Pump on Pump.fund, which is a platform where you can create a coin in literally like 30 seconds. And I was on ETH, right? And I haven't been active in crypto. This wasn't a thing. Creating a new token on Ethereum was like a whole process. Now they shorten it to 30 seconds.

Pump.fund? Is that what it's called?

Pump.fund. Yeah. It's crazy.

And have you seen this business, by the way?

No. That's like—

These guys made like $500 million of profit last year. Like more than that, I think.

More than that.

Yeah. And, and, and so you click a button and you make your own coin. And obviously the name, there's no hiding that the point of this is that it's a pump scheme, pump and dump scheme, right?

They made $500 million at least, at least specifically. That's just like the majority of the traffic on Solana. And so people are basically, uh, creating these new coins and trading them, trying to ride it. And it's basically, uh, musical chairs, right?

Have you guys gone to this website? It's crazy. It looks like a GeoCity website. Like there's like flashing banners. This is insane.

It's all real time.

Like yesterday during the Super Bowl, uh, somebody created, and for, for Dave Portnoy, instead of Barstool, created Jailstool.

Jailstool.

And then Jailstool ran up to like $100 million or something like that. But like you said, it's, it's musical chairs. So you're buying, trying to catch one of these 1000x waves. but it's gonna dump and you just gotta know when you're gonna get off the train. And then if you wait too long or you're the one who comes in late, you lose. So it is a, it's like being at a roulette table or whatever where you're, you're just throwing chips at the table trying to, trying to hit.

Oh my God. Yeah.

It's like the Trump coin, except you can create it in like 10 seconds, 30 seconds. But anyway, that's why people created this coin is because you're looking for these new narratives to gamble on. Right. And the more interesting, the more viral seeming the narrative is, the more valuable it becomes. If you're in early, it could really pump. So anyway, it was $400,000 and I tweeted a screenshot. There's this, there's this whole tweet sort of thread where I was like, what is going on? And I kept on adding those to the tweet thread with screenshots on my wallet. And so it was $400,000. I was like, what is happening? And people were trying to explain someone traded this coin called Mira. And there's a billion tokens and they sent me, someone bought half the supply and just sent it to my wallet. So I had 500 million tokens and once I tweeted, then I check again and it's now $4 million and I'm like, what? Uh, and an hour later it's $8, a couple hours later it became $15, and at one point it was $20 million just like the same day. And I thought like $40,000.

And the market cap of the whole thing, that means was $80 million.

Correct.

Okay.

No, no, I think peak market cap was around $60 million.

Okay. And you had $40 million of it.

Yeah, because I sold 10% immediately just to like capture something and I sold a bit more in the liquidity pool. So, you know, I got around $1 million out, but I still owned 30% of it. And immediately I was, I said, okay, I don't know what I'm gonna do with it, but every Dollar in my wallet is going to charity. This is nonprofit. It's not for me.

Not just charity, going to the research lab, going to research, researching the potential course to your daughter's thing.

Okay. So, um, I, I said, hey, I'm not going to move anything without 24 hours notice. Um, I'm gonna try to like be very transparent about this. And I thought about it and I said, I'm going to start selling $1,000 every 10 minutes until like We're done because I just don't have time to run a crypto project. And, you know, like, I want everyone to know where this is going. So that happened and the price started going down. But once we got to a million, uh, what happened in between is because it was such a big story, um, a bunch of rare disease organizations started reaching out to me and they're like, wow, this happened to you. Can we, how do we get in on this?

Because Throw the phone. They're like, did you say pump.fund? Okay. Uh-huh.

The average budget, annual budget for one of these organizations is like $100,000, $150,000. There's like not a whole lot of money. This is like more money than the community's ever seen. It's a lot of excitement there. So I thought, well, I was talking to some crypto friends and I thought, okay, how do we make this like a thing? And maybe we can make this more sustainable, long-lasting. And this idea turning Mira into a launchpad for other rare disease tokens where Mira is a liquidity pair token, uh, uh, was talked about. And so I thought, well, okay, that seems interesting. Uh, before I do that, I should probably figure out how a coin works and how you launch one of these. So I went on Pump.fun and I thought, okay, let's find out how one of these works. So I created a coin called $ZERO and I entered a description for the coin cuz you could do that. I said, hey, don't buy this coin. It literally says, don't buy this coin. It'll never be worth anything. I'm never going to do anything with it. It'll be worth $0. So I press the button and what I didn't realize is because I was on Ethereum for a long time, but I never had a watch wallet, what happened is I was in the background the most watched wallet in crypto. So within about 100 to 200 seconds, the market cap of this coin that I told people to not buy—

sorry, a watch wallet. Does a watch wallet mean that you are someone that should be monitored because you're a potential whale?

Yeah. Like people, people start tracking like, oh, what is Vitalik doing with his wallet? What is, what is so-and-so doing with their wallet?

Yeah.

People want to copy what you're doing.

And they think you're the man because your wallet is old or you have a lot in it.

Because I was sort of the main character of like crypto Twitter for like a few days. Right.

Got it. Okay. Understood.

So there were copy, there were bots, like just monitoring what I was doing and doing, buying whatever I was buying. And so they saw this new token. And so within 100, 200 seconds, the market cap of this token was $3.5 million. So I was just sitting there like panicking and I said, okay, I don't— this is bad. I don't want to have anything to do with this. So I had half of the entire supply and I sold it. And that was my main mistake. I should have burned it. which everyone would've been happy about, right? But because I sold, I crashed the price of this token and people got very upset because it was considered a rug. So now like, oh my God, everyone's— and, and when I sold, I made like $80,000 cuz even though it was $3.5 million in market cap, there's only about $100,000 or so in liquidity. And yeah, I, I started a thread explaining, oh my God, I didn't expect this to happen. I got on Spaces over video, just like, I'm really sorry. I, I, I'm like still trying to figure out how this works. And, you know, people don't, didn't care. And what I realized is just a different community than it was when I was really active on Twitter in 2017. Like people are on Ethereum, they're like very deep tech people, right? They're like nerdy. And with a Solana in 2024, I didn't realize like it's so much more mainstream. A lot of people maybe have like $50, $100 and they're just trying to turn into $1,000. And so the amount of emotion there is like very, very different.

Crypto transitioned from neckbeards to like everybody who looks like Jack Harlow in like 4 years.

Yeah.

Like the community, the Solana community all has like the line etched into the, into like the side of their haircut or like multiple the, It's very different than like the people that got me into Ethereum in the first place.

Today I learned, or this month I learned. So anyway, the market cap was $3.5 million before I sold. It dumped to $300,000. And as I started talking about my mistake, the market cap came back and at one point it was like $5.5, $6 million just because I was like talking about it and people were just— the more upset people were, the more the coin pumped, the more money people made from the coin. So they were trying to make it like even more dramatic, um, which I didn't really understand at the time. I just thought I messed up and people were really upset at me. So anyway, so then that was like the main villain turn on Twitter and everyone was super upset at me because they saw me as a scammer. So I thought about what am I going to do with this? So first of all, like the $80,000 within a minute, I realized this is a mistake. So I bought back in into the coin and I burned it all, right? So I already was like, neutral and explained that no one cared because of the anonymity of crypto. They thought I had like 100 other wallets that was like, that I pumped and dumped on and made profit there and I can't prove otherwise. So I decided like, this is really shitty and I don't want any part of it. So what I decided to do is, I got some help from, you know, a friend who used to work for Coinbase and other people who didn't want to be named. to do on-chain analysis. So what I said on Spaces is I'm actually just gonna pay everyone back who lost money on this out of my own pocket. Um, and I'm not even gonna touch the charity wallet. So what we ended up doing is everyone who held in the first 200 seconds who owned any coins then up until the point 43 minutes later where the market cap fully recovered back to the same value If you sold and you realized a loss, I'm just going to airdrop you SOL. And it ended up being like $140,000 to $150,000 out of my own pocket. Uh, and I just paid everyone back, which has never happened on any pump fund coin before. Uh, and maybe like 10% of the people have heard about this. I tweeted about it. I had to like keep on responding because every time I tweet for the next like month, someone would say, oh, you're a scammer. What are you still doing here? And I had to say, no, I paid everyone back. And they were just like not saying anything.

This is like a crypto Larry David, like, thing. Like, it's like, this is like you're walking through Times Square and one of those fake monks put like a bracelet on your wrist and then like now expects you to give them like $20. It says, even though he called it a free gift, like, this is just, this is insane. So how much did you end up giving to the charity?

Yeah. So between GoFundMe, so it was $1 million from crypto. And there's like, I locked a bunch of the Mirror coin into a liquidity pool. So it's sort of still perpetually generating.

So you bought $1 million of charity for $150,000, basically.

That's correct. Yeah. And then we, the total was like $1.4 million. Um, we donated more, uh, to match like the mistake and we added a GoFundMe to it. So ended up being $1.4 million.

And then the lab actually like triple leveraged it up into the coin. They got hooked on Pumped Up Fun.

Would you, Sean, give back the $150 like he did?

I wouldn't.

Fuck that.

I would not have for that situation personally. I get why you did. It's almost just like, dude, this is crazy. All of this was unintentional. People are really mad. Okay, what's the sort of like, how can I just like clear up any possible confusion? But I don't think you needed to in this situation, right? You created a coin called Zero that you said is don't buy this. This is going to zero. It's a test coin. and if somebody went and randomly speculated on it using their, like, their sniper bots that are trying to track your wallet, you know, like, I wouldn't have given a shit personally. But then again, these, uh, this community is so, like, crazy that they'll just, like, make your life hell on Twitter for, like, the next 5 years. It might be, might be worth it, you know, just to clear your own conscience, go to sleep at night, you know?

Exactly. I couldn't, it was for me so I could sleep all at night because a lot of these people are fairly low income and the money is fairly meaningful. It was one reason. But another reason is like, people just don't read. Like I explained this, I mean, the coin says don't buy it. I explained this like a couple different times. And what I realized is like, you just don't read on the internet. And as far as anyone else knows, because it makes a little noise, like I, the, if you don't, don't read, what it sounds like is I created a scam coin using my own daughter's name to scam people out of money.

Right, right, right.

It's crazy.

Did you, um, In the end of this, is there anything here that's interesting for fundraising for research, or this is just straight like, I accidentally got into a gambling pool and kind of got some money for research, but this is not a sustainable thing for anybody.

I'm still trying to figure it out. So what I'm hoping to make Mira into is, so the way this works is you're, this is like sort of game theory around, okay, you own a bunch of this coin. Because this coin's narrative is attached to you, right? In the case of, you know, Dave Portnoy is doing something similar with Jailstool. And in order to turn it into real-world impact, you have to sell. There's no way around that. And so when you sell, then you're just like playing a zero-sum game against the community and they're all going to be upset for you for sure, no matter what. And so that's a very difficult dynamic. And I think my idea here is like the only sustainable way to do this is to lock a bunch of the token into a liquidity pool. And so that when people buy in or out of it, you get to exchange, you get the fees. And that's not really like selling into your community. I think imagine a version of Dogecoin where every time someone, you know, it's like Dogecoin is like a couple tens of billions of dollars market cap, but every time someone sells or buys it, it creates like up to, could be hundreds of thousands of dollars a day in fees and which you can then use to donate. I think that might be relatively sustainable.

This is insane. I don't even know what to say. Sounds like a great weekend.

Uh, no, it was a month. It was the last, it was Christmas up until like maybe, you know, now, and it ruined my vacation and it's been by far the most stressful time I've ever had in my life.

Can we do a quick, uh, a quick detour? We were at a dinner once and you talked about some, I think it was a Stanford class you took. Called Touchy Feely, or that's the code name for it. I don't know. And it's something about communication and relationships. And I remember you said this really great thing at the dinner, but this was now many years ago and I don't remember it exactly, but can you say that bit again? I want to hear it again. And I think a lot of people might benefit from it.

So by the way, Sikky, how old are you?

Uh, I'm 41. I think you look like you could be 22 or 41.

I have no idea.

Yeah. Asian no raisin. Let's go. Um, Yeah, so I took actually now twice, I took class again since we talked, this class that was based on the Stanford Business School class called Interpersonal Dynamics, which is the highly rated and most popular class in Stanford Business School. It's taught by a professor called Carol Robbins and it's generally known as Tuxi Fili and it's famous for every participant at some point will like cry in the class. But Carol Robbins is now co-founder of a group called Leaders in Tech, which provides the same class for tech leaders. So one of the things that you get taught in this class is— so the purpose of the class is to teach you how to relate to people and build connections with other people because people work with other people. And one of the most useful frameworks I got from that class is how to think about your connection with other people and how to develop that connection. And so the two frameworks to connect is one is the two tracks of, of interpersonal communication and the five levels of it. So when you're talking with anyone else, um, there is two tracks. There's a content track and there's a relationship track. So the content track is filled with facts and a relationship track is filled with emotion and a relationship track is what, uh, is filled and what has to be filled for a relationship to get— become closer and for trust to increase. And the way you fill each of these tracks is through the 5 levels of communication. And the idea is when you are talking to someone, there's 5 levels at which you communicate, um, of increasing vulnerability and depth. So level 1 is what's called ritual. And that is, hey, how's it going? Hey, right? Where it doesn't really say anything. We're just, it's just ritualized greeting. Level 2 is extended ritual. So that is, how's the weather? How's it going? Right? You're, you're, you're, it's, it's a longer version of, hey, how's it going? Level 3 is content. So these are facts. How's the project? Is it late? What are we going to do with this particular idea? Level 4 It is emotional self-disclosure. So that is when you say something that discloses how you are feeling emotionally at the time. I feel sad. I feel angry. And there's a lot of talk about level 4 because people think they're doing level 4, but they're not. And that's a very common thing that's unique to the English language, which we can talk about. That was a fairly interesting insight. So level 5 is the deepest one. And level 5 is mutual emotional self-disclosure. And it is when you are expressing the emotion that you have about the other person. I feel angry at you. I feel proud of you. I feel disappointed by you. That's the deepest level of communication you can have with another person. And the content track is only filled by things from level 1 to 3. And the relationship track is only filled by level 4 and 5. And we are taught and we are taught to really not use level 4 and 5 in professional settings, but if you want to build a relationship, level 4 and 5 is kind of the only way you can do it. And so a lot of the training is about breaking past the barrier, the uncomfortableness of engaging level 4 and level 5 communication. And you basically sit in a circle with 12 people for 4 days straight. Until you like, so you can observe the impact of doing level 4 or 5 and not doing level 4 or 5 and how you are able to be closer to someone or further away from someone in emotional distance.

Has this made your running a company better?

I mean, I would say this is the most impactful thing I've ever done in my entire life. Like out of any class, I always like as a founder, somewhat see the company as some kind of machine and I didn't find it. I'm like, mildly ask for agree. So I found it difficult to relate to people, but it's completely transformed all my relationships, including my relationship with my wife. And so one of the ways— this was even just last week, we had an on-site and I was able to do a mini version of this with our customer success team where I just sat or, you know, I did a very condensed version of this lecture and then we sat and we just talked for about 4 hours. And the amount of closeness people got, insight people got, was transformative. And you wouldn't normally, you know, sit around for a couple hours in a work setting talking about your feelings. And it's very uncomfortable to do so. And it's intentionally so, like, it's very uncomfortable for the first couple of, in the case of a real life workshop, it's half a day. In the case of us, we had to like sort of speedrun it and it was uncomfortable about an hour, but then people were really into it and it's weird, but everyone at some point was crying about some disclosure that they heard or they've experienced. And as a result, the team got so much closer and the trust increased. That's wild.

Do you, so how do you do this in practice? Right? Cause when you talk about like, you know, I feel angry at you about X or I'm disappointed about Y, I could see. Myself not having the skills or finesse to be able to do that and let the end result be a positive one versus we start talking, you're upset by this. Well, the other person gets defensive or they push back and say, well, you did that, you know, blah, blah, blah. And so can you give me an example of a conversation that you had that like, maybe here's what I would love, a conversation that typically would have gone like this. Or maybe been avoided altogether. And instead, here's how the actual conversation went that was useful for you as a, as a, you know, CEO, leader, friend, whatever, husband, whatever, whichever example you want to choose.

Yeah. So the first one is easy, actually. So most people just don't have the conversation, right? So the conversation wouldn't say, I'm angry. You would just be angry and you wouldn't say anything, right? And people can tell is the thing, like when you feel a certain way about someone, it gets, it leaks, right? Like there's a level of even you're not intending to be passive-aggressive, you're just kind of ignoring the person or it comes off like you're saying like, oh my God, it's late again. Right. Right. Or he didn't do this. And so that's the default. And that's when you have this negative feedback cycle of, well, okay, you already felt a certain way, then you expressed it unknowingly. And now the other person thinks you're angry at them and now they dislike you more. And then they do things that you dislike more because they dislike you more. And it just gets worse. That's how relationships get worse. And that's like the default. And so if you know that it leaks anyway, then it becomes easier to say, I'm going to express that. And you're going to express it no matter what. Your choice is, do you express it with words or do you express it with not words, but just like passive-aggressive behavior? And so, and then you combine that with everyone is entitled to know the things that they know. But they're not entitled to make things up about what other people are thinking. So you are entitled to seeing the same facts as everyone else, seeing the same behavior. You're not entitled to, uh, uh, read the minds of some other person and how they're thinking and how they're feeling, but you are 100% entitled to share what you're feeling because those are facts to you. That's reality. And so the mental model isn't And this is kind of like typical because people aren't used to expressing this. The mental model is like, oh, if I am expressing this emotion, that means I'm attacking someone. And that is true if you don't express an emotion and you're just acting it out. But if I were to say, you know, when I see you do this, the story I tell myself is that you don't respect me. And I don't know if that's true, but this is like what I'm thinking in my head. And because of that, I feel angry and I just want you to know that because I don't, I don't know if you know that you, I know that you probably don't because you can't read my mind, but I'm guessing you probably aren't intending to make me feel that way. And I thought it'd be helpful for you to share, for me to share that to you so that you are aware of it.

Um, and I just learned that technique in therapy last week.

Oh, amazing.

I seriously did.

That's the nonviolent, nonviolent communication framework, right? It is.

Yeah. It's very connected to that.

I literally just learned that.

Yeah. You're, you're, you're, you're, you're sharing information, right? So it's not an attack. Like you, if you are genuinely doing it because you understand that you can't read their mind, but other person can't read your mind either. And so by sharing it is you're offering them a gift of information.

One question, Siki, you said something about the English language making it harder. What did you mean by that?

So What you start seeing when you're in this class with these 12 people and you start realizing that, oh, like I really only feel closer and I get to know someone better when they say, I feel emotion, I feel sad, I feel angry when this happened. And I feel distance when they're expressing that emotion, but not saying it. You can tell on their faces that they're pissed off and it becomes scarier. So then you start learning that, oh, I need to say I feel. The thing about the English language is that we say I feel often without expressing any emotion at all. And that's some sort of a quirk that's kind of unique to English. So when you say I feel that, or I feel like, it is actually grammatically impossible for the next word to be an emotion. I feel that you're an asshole is not an emotion. I feel like this is fucked is not an emotion. I feel sad is an emotion. I feel happy is an emotion. And we're not used to saying that because the word feel is used, uh, is, is, has been, you know, disused, misused for other purposes. And so we just often is unconsciously, you, once you see it, you can't unsee it. People, we, I ask people to show emotion and they say, I feel like, I feel that, and it's never an emotion. And it's very, very hard to change the habit.

Do you guys do this where, like, Sean in particular, I'm curious if you do this, but do you guys do this where you like, you get into this type of shit, whatever you want to call it, the touchy-feely stuff, and you're like, this is the way. And then like, I get into it and then half the time I execute that poorly and all. And then like, the business sucks and I'm like, I got to have more patience with this person or I got to like, let them get away with shit more or whatever. And then I just go right back to the total opposite end where it's like, um, what do they call this? Doge, where I'm like, everyone has 15 minutes to fight for their job. Like, you know, like, like it's like I get influenced by either side and I don't, but there is no middle ground.

And that's like you, that the first sign of resistance, I crumble sometimes. So the, but the version of it that happens for me is let's say I, I hear this and I'm like, Ah, Sikhi just taught me something. This is great. Two content tracks, five levels. I'm in. I got this. I'm going level five, baby. I don't even need one through four. And then I'll go have the next conversation with my wife tonight and I'll give her like, I feel that. No, no. I feel upset. And I know you didn't mean that. And I tried to do the whole thing and she's like, what? And then she doesn't, she doesn't know all of this. She didn't, cause she didn't go to the seminar. And she didn't have the skills and the tools.

She's like, be a mad Sean, shut up.

It's on the front of her mind. And so she doesn't play back like the role play that I had heard was. And then I'm like, well, I don't really know the next move.

Okay.

Revert, revert back to my old asshole self.

Yeah. I mean, that's not a bad response, honestly, because I think, I think you have to do whatever works. And the reality is to get good at this, you know, it took me I did this 4-day program twice and every day was like 12 hours a day and you were just sitting in the circle practicing.

Did your wife go with you?

Uh, the first time she actually did. Okay.

So she kind of had to.

I kind of, no, I kind of smuggled her into the, into the hotel room. So she didn't go to the class, but I will say like the second night when I went home, she was like, who are you? 'Cause I was like, oh my God, I feel so bad. I've been such an asshole.

Dude, this sounds like, have you guys heard of the Hoffman Institute? Have you ever heard of this?

I've heard of it, but I haven't been.

Yeah. Like I have, I've contemplated going to it, but I think they, it's like, uh, they have a variety of locations. They have one in Connecticut near me and then they have a Boston one, but you go for, it's like not expensive. It's like $2,000 and you go for 4 days and you can't bring your cell phone. You can't, you're, you're gotta be completely disconnected or maybe it's even 5 days. It's kind of a lot. Uh, but they like everyone who I go, who goes to it, they won't tell me what happens there, but they all say that it's life-changing and they can now develop relationships and connections with other people. It's one of these really strange things that I'm so tempted to do, but the amount of time to be disconnected is very like nerve-wracking or, you know, just like scary. This sounds very similar.

It does. It's not the time to be disconnected. That's the scary part there.

Well, yeah, it is, dude. Could you— it might even be 7 days. Could you go 7 days without a phone away from your family?

Away from the family is a little harder. Yeah, that's hard.

Like in a hotel. Like, it's like crazy to be disconnected. But yeah, I don't want to like— also, I don't want to like cry with a bunch of strangers.

That's why I don't go to Tony Robbins.

I'm like, I don't want to go to Tony Robbins. I don't want to see anyone. I don't want anyone to see me dancing and singing. Like, you know what I mean? Yeah.

What's great about Leaders in Tech is like, is they're all like you know, well-known-ish founders, it's like not cheap to go. So, oh, even worse.

Be around awesome people. God, I wanna be my, my most vulnerable self around cool people.

No, actually it's really helpful because you realize that all the people that, some people that you look up to, like we're kind of all the same. Like there's very similar insecurities.

Whenever I hear about, whenever I, I hear about this stuff, I think of the Tony Soprano quote where he is like, whatever happened to the strong silent type? Like I'm like, can I just say like, hey chief, like, hi bub, and just know that person only at that amount and just say yes or no? But then he goes and kills about a dozen people.

Um, Siki, you have this, uh, interview question that I like. You said, my favorite interview question after 20 years of doing interviews with people is, what is your greatest strength that you are most worried about not coming across in an interview setting? Why that question?

I think I enjoy breaking the fourth wall, and interviews tend to be so standardized and formalized that my greatest anxiety when I'm interviewing is like, I'm actually really good at a thing and you're asking me to, you know, you know, reverse a linked list or something and it's just not coming across. What I find is that it breaks down this, the formality and lets people, gets people excited to talk about something that they're really, really good at, tell me great stories. And you get it, you get to know the person just a little bit better. And I think the prettier thing is like, if you just ask what's your greatest strengths, it sounds really formal, but what is the insecurity that you're bringing in that you're hoping to, that you're worried about not coming across interview setting? It changes the tone quite a bit.

It's a great question. I'm stealing that.

Yeah, that's a good one. You know, what's interesting is so you, you're, you're, you founded Runway, which is like a very serious business. Like, uh, you're gonna have to hire enterprise people, I would imagine, um, enterprise salespeople. Uh, like, it's like a, I'm basing like the future of my company off of some of the output that I'm going to learn from your software. But you have the vibe of like an artist to me where like you, you have a variety of like really intriguing projects. You're like this thinker, almost like a philosopher. Is this new to be doing so? Like, is this like a new challenge for you to be doing something so serious and regimented? Like, and, or can you still be like goofy and an artist in this B2B world?

So yeah, funny enough, he said Serious Business. That was the name of my first company and we built fun games.

I feel like if you call it serious, it isn't, you know?

Yeah, because we were a games company. Serious Business, fun games. But yeah, I mean, I think it's actually a pretty huge advantage, particularly for the things we consider serious. So, I mean, people have this stereotype of business and finance as being super serious and super rigid, but finance at its best is really about creating value. It's about looking forward and thinking about new ideas about how we can push the business forward and grow faster and all these things. And in order for us to be creative, we have to be in flow, and things that are fun keeps you in flow. And what we actually hear from our customers, that the thing that we hear quite often and we love hearing is This software feels fun and that's not a luxury. That is a fun that creates flow, that creates your creativity, that creates value. And when you use something that isn't fun, if something that feels slow or confusing, then you're not creative and you're making worse decisions. So I don't think they're in tension with each other. I think they're quite complementary. And that is like very deeply part of our philosophy.

I saw that.

Have you ever seen this?

Yes, that's, that's, that's what made me think of that question.

What's the story of this, Ikki?

This happened last week. Our marketing team is run by Cal Fries, who was a YC founder of a company called Tyka. He was the COO there. And we also have this woman named Julie Fritas, who was at Shopify. And I was in the office and I just saw them come out of the meeting. Kind of giggling and they got out this piece of cardboard and started like writing this. I'm like, what is this? Like, oh, you know how like, you know, you, you didn't want to do a billboard. We decided to just like create a billboard ourselves and just hold it on a freeway. And I'm like, that is such a cracked idea. Of course that's going to go viral. And, uh, I said, I'll do it. It's like, you will? I'm like, yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll do it. So they're like, okay. So we walked outside, we found a freeway entrance. and I was just holding the sign.

Um, what does it say, by the way?

It says, if you hate your finance platform, get Runway.com.

Are you, um, are you the only founder?

Uh, I have a, I had a co-founder, uh, Arya Asa Manfar, and he left the company about a year and a half ago, almost 2 years now.

Because that's like pretty rare. I mean, you're, I, I don't know when you launched, but I, I feel like you're very, very, very, very early in the period because I remember seeing you guys go on Twitter, like get, get popular on Twitter. Uh, that's going to be pretty, uh, different to be a kind of a, the only founder running a company. That'd be kind of exciting, right? You get to do whatever the hell you want, or is it, are you going to be lonely?

I think the reason why we parted ways is things were just slower to make decisions and neither of us were having as much fun as we wanted to. So, um, and actually I didn't want him to leave. Like he, He's still on the board. I love him. He's just the most wise and high-integrity person I've ever met. He was one of Parag's peers at Twitter and I hired him out of school, my first company. And now he works for Bret Taylor at Sierra. But things were like going slower than he wanted and he identified that it was him or our relationship slowing us down and he decided to fire himself. Uh, and I didn't think he was right about that, but he was. He usually is right about just about everything, and it totally transformed the company.

He also must have attended interpersonal dynamics.

He did not.

You talked about Character AI and Chai, like some of these AI companies that are crushing it, just printing money right now. Are there any other companies that just have blown your mind in terms of how well they're doing or how fast they're growing right now? Like, uh, maybe AI, maybe not AI.

ElevenLabs. I'm a small investor in that company, but it's, they do like basically all of the audio translation generation, sometimes deepfakes. Um, and when I met them, there were like less than 10 people. They were just, they were ex-Google. They're working on the foundational model technology and they are now, I don't know what they last announced, but they're in the hundreds of millions AR in like a year, two, a year and a half or so. Um, and what, what blew my mind is I never seen a group of very good technologists that were also so good at commercializing the technology so rapidly.

They're at hundreds of millions and hundreds, hundreds. I feel like this just came out and they're, yeah, we should have invested.

They, uh, they dubbed our podcast. Remember that clip where they were like, you're speaking Hindi now. And it was amazing. And I DM'd them and we were like, hey, this is really cool. Like, so stupid of us not to have pursued that more.

Yeah, there's that graph, right, for Wise and the fastest growing SaaS companies. And I think Cursor is up there. I am fairly convinced that 11Labs is actually like faster than all of them. Um, but yeah, I think they announced some revenue milestone, but it's large.

We were tinkering with them. It was borderline. This is cool. This is cute too. I need, I can use this right now. It was like, it was like just there. So I guess they crossed it and people are actually using it like to actually do work.

Who are they selling to? Is it—

so, so Apple has audiobooks. Oh, so not podcasts, sorry, Apple audiobooks, right? Like, so previously they didn't have audiobooks and, you know, you would know that a lot of this, um, um, AI generated is powered by Level Labs.

Oh, so they, and they also, they also do AI agents for customer service and support agents and things like that. So they're the backend of all. Maybe potentially other software tools as well.

Yeah. So, so they have all kinds of product lines. They saw the book publishers, the power agents, they do—

why are they better than like what OpenAI, you know, like the risk with all these AI companies is that the, the general, the base models, OpenAI and Anthropic, etc., can just offer those capabilities, you know, as part of the main suite. Do they do something different? Are they fine-tuning it in some way? What's—

no, it's their own foundational models, um, and the quality and expressiveness is just better and the form factor is better. So you can use it for all these different use cases. And the voice API of OpenAI is actually like not as good or as easily usable.

Dude, you're super fun to talk to. I just like hearing all these, like, uh, I feel like you're like a, like a treasure box. I just like pick, like, I just grab something out of the toy chest and be like, tell me the story behind this. You know what I mean? I think that's awesome.

Yeah, thanks for coming on, dude. And, uh, give people a shout out for your company and where to follow you for more.

Yeah, runway.com. You can follow me at Blader, Blade with an R, or Runway Co. Um, and if you are a CFO, you should use our software.

How much did you have to pay for that domain?

A quarter million dollars. Uh, it's funny, Naval Ravikant named the company and suggested that we use it on the.com.

I think that was smart. A quarter million is not a lot, I feel like, for that.

Wait, wait, what do you mean Naval named the company? Like, you went to him being like, hey, what should we name this? Or he just suggested it?

When Clubhouse only had one room in April 2020, um, it was in the Naval app, right? I think you were on it quite a bit too. And so, uh, when I was thinking about what I want to do for next company, I said, I want to do a finance company. And I got a great name for it, Naval, CFO.AI. He's like, no, don't call it AI. It's going to be dated in like 2 years. Everything's going to be called AI. You should just call it Runway and you should get the.com. And he rode the first truck into Runway. And that's why we got the.com.

It's so funny that you said it was the Naval app at the time. It totally was. And it was amazing.

It was amazing.

By the way, I was using, uh, AirChat, like pretty religiously, uh, like for like 2 months.

Yeah.

Um, even though I knew AirChat's not going to work, I was like, oh, it doesn't matter. This is Naval's app. He's going to be on it 24/7.

Cool.

This is like, I, I like to hang out with Naval. I'm not going to. Email him like a million other people and say, hey, can we get a coffee?

Just $1,000 a month and you can talk to Naval whenever you want.

Yeah, exactly. I was like, I'm going to be on this. I'm going to be on this for 2 months. I'm going to be a power user for exactly 2 months and I'm going to hang out with Naval. And that's exactly what happened. I was very proud of myself for that. It was the most fun way to use that app.

Yep. Dude, thank you for doing this. You're the man. And, uh, uh, we're thinking of you and your daughter and hopefully that.

Thank you. Appreciate you, man.

All right. See you. Thank you. That's it. That's the pod.