Ep 58 | Find the Right Co-Founder... It’s Everything (w/ Sandor Felber)

Hi Sandor, I am happy that you took some time out of your busy schedule and yeah, I would like to give you the opportunity to say hi, to introduce yourself, and then we dive right into what you're doing.

Hi there, no worries, thanks for booking this time for me, I really appreciate your time too. I'm doing great. It's a great day here in Massachusetts, Cambridge at MIT. How are you doing today?

Good, good. I normally give my guests the opportunity to tell a little bit about themselves and then we dive into— most likely we go back in time. Here with you, it's not too much back in time, but that will be interesting. So, hi.

Yeah, absolutely. So I, uh, was pretty entrepreneurial, I feel like, already in high school. Um, and after that, in, um, Edinburgh, I had the chance to also try my luck at a couple of stints, uh, be part of the Formula Student team, um, do a couple of summer internships, and then various other research programs. Um, I've done an exchange year at UCLA, so that's the University of California Los Angeles, and then finish off my master's at Edinburgh. And finally, after that, I've joined MIT, and now I'm about to go and join South Park Common as I'm accepting a founder fellowship that I've been offered from them.

Yeah, I think here's the main reason why we talk in the first place. We have a mutual friend of us Sandor Felber, who brought us together, and he said, because I'm always looking for people who are building something, and majority of my guests had been building companies in the past and running the companies and trying to grow them. But you are very early in your entrepreneurship. You said you did some, some things in, in high school as well, but here we're talking about like really forming a company and, and starting a company. You said that you were be able to get into that program. We get to this later, but I'm always trying to find out what is the environment that a person who would like to build some, a company or technology company, what kind of environment is that that you grew up. So what kind of parents or people you've been surrounded with. This is always something that is very interesting for me to really understand what is the patterns, what is the What is the world that is necessary to build to become a person like you?

Yeah, so that's a great question. And I think something, you know, there's something inherently about society and the way society works, I think, in different cultures and countries and the way people, engineers especially, tend to then, you know, think about life and their life goals. Something really interesting here is, I think, is kind of both of my parents were pretty entrepreneurial. I was raised a bit of that culture, but since I've been able to venture out to California through Edinburgh's Global Exchange Program, I've been able to expose myself a bit to that. When I was working for Tesla on their Optimus project, I was living in Silicon Valley in Palo Alto, and I found myself living right next to Stanford and this very entrepreneurial scene where everybody is doing some side project and is trying things out, building something. A culture of this. And there's also just an interesting thing that I've noticed over the course of my studies and over the course of my life, coming from kind of Central Europe to doing my undergraduate in the UK for the most part. Now I'm on the East Coast, but I've been living on the West Coast. Now I'm moving back to the West Coast again. And there's definitely a kind of societal, I think, shift between these three different parts of the world. So in Europe, and I feel like where I'm from, which is predominantly kind of aligned with, I think, the German, Swiss, Austrian, Polish, Czechian, like I'm from Hungary, Budapest, and we kind of, I think, have a lot of the shared values. And that means that engineering is held in a pretty high regard in society. But at the same time, most people think about engineering as like, a hard degree program after which you get a good salary at a company. And that's what you do. So, you know, you do your engineering degree and then you go work for some large, potentially German conglomerate engineering company typically. And I could mention a lot of the automotive industry that, you know, a lot of the, I feel like a lot of my peers are thinking about who have done engineering in Hungary. And, you know, you can do pretty cool things like, you know, you can go to Sweden and drive cars around. You can test track cars and you can do a lot of these things. And those are a lot of fun as an engineer, and you can really contribute to the company's success. Or also going to Formula 1, which is really big in Europe, and that's definitely something that a lot of the more ambitious folks are considering. Now, in the UK, the Formula 1 ambitions are shared by a few, but actually quite a lot of people from engineering end up going into banking and high finance. And that is probably due to the fact that it feels like to me, having, you know, gone to Edinburgh, which is a pretty like high-ranking— I was lucky enough to go before Brexit and I had a— luckily I received funding from the EU, like agreement between I suppose Scotland and Europe. I'm not really a lawyer, so I don't really know how that works, but Luckily, I managed to secure funding and I was lucky enough to go there. And there I experienced an environment where there was a lot of different kinds of kids. It wasn't very as elite as, for example, Oxford or Cambridge, but it was still pretty much up there. And I definitely experienced that a lot of my engineering, robotics, and then computer science and AI friends, after serving their time in the Formula Student team, in the Hyperloop team of the university and various other pretty prestigious engineering projects and CS and AI projects, they ended up going into finance just because, for example, the salary can be a couple of multitudes. And also the lifestyle that that offers is a lot less potentially stressful and can be a lot more looked upon as prestigious. So it looks like society in the UK values this more service-based jobs in, or at least for engineers. And in fact, what seems to be the case is that a lot of these companies are actively seeking out engineers over economics or finance majors to go and work for them, which to me is a bit sad because I love engineering and I would never, I can't really imagine myself working as a banker or in kind of high-frequency trading or that sort of thing. But it seems like there's also quite a lot of excitement about that. In the US, especially in the Bay Area, most ambitious engineers that graduate from these really top schools, they end up founding a company quite often. That company does not work out a lot of the times, but at least they fail and then they learn from that failure. After a couple of tries, quite a few people actually manage to get something that's maybe not like a major success, but it's to some extent successful. And that's a really interesting, I think, difference in value systems across these societies that I had to kind of discover. And it definitely opened my lens up that I've been able to travel quite a bit and see these different value systems and kind of pick and choose what works best for me.

There's a lot of things I wanted to dive into. Didn't want to interrupt your flow. Thanks for giving though the such insights and then also different views on that. I think you're totally right. And I can see this here in, from, from Germany, from German perspective, and especially here in corporate, that you do need those trained engineers, right? And they're not trained to take too much risk, but that also, so that makes, that, that gives you the opportunity to improve existing workflows. Incrementally over time to be very good and stable, right? But that also hinders you somehow to drive innovation and really taking some risk and being aware that those risks are normal and necessary. But you don't want those kind of risks in your, in your workflow on, on the line, right? So I think this is those two different way of thinking. On one side, it is helping us to preserve the, the, the work that has been built before, but on the other side, it will, uh, yeah, prevent us from doing too many new things. Coming back to what you said in regards to the environment, so you think that being surrounded by like-minded people, or people that have this kind of drive and that have this kind of background and that have this kind of, uh, um, risk— how do you say this, uh, exciting for this kind of risk and understand this is, this risk is part of the progress. You think this is, this helped you to, to get this kind of spirit as well to, to, to become an entrepreneur? Is that something that you say?

Um, I believe so. So, um, maybe two interesting things, uh, to bring up here real quick. Uh, one of them is that I've kind of always been like, I feel like swimming against the stream, if that makes sense. So like, you know, in high school I tried to like lead the Model UN society and kind of try and found that. And then I was the president of that for a while until I graduated. And then also for the school newspaper, which are, you know, not at all engineeringy things, but I still, you know, tried my hand at these things. And, you know, it very much was not conventional for someone to take like that load on, especially in the final 2 years of your high school when you're preparing for your final examinations. And in most countries and most systems, there is some sort of a final examination, which pretty much then gets to decide where you end up in college. So, you know, just quite a lot of pressure, especially when you're 17. I feel like maybe I've never had kind of that much pressure on my shoulders. And that, you know, in a way that I feel like was much higher pressure back then than right now, at least that's how it felt like to me. Because I guess I just had this interesting, like, this lot more kind of naive and immature worldview that, you know, oh my God, if I don't, if I'm unable to really like get there and I'm unable to get into the best colleges, then I'm not going to be able to like pursue what I would love to pursue, or at least at the level that I would like to pursue it. So there's definitely that. And, you know, just fighting against like the kind of general people that I like. I literally had no one around me that was like this back then, but I was still, I feel like, you know, like there's patterns in my life that I think show that like I was already like kind of doing these kind of things. But, you know, then later on, like I found kind of my peer group and something interesting is definitely that like you have roughly 5 or 6 people that are like your closest, you know, friends, soulmates, partners. Life, like, you know, traveler company or whoever, and these closest 5 or 6 people, you tend to be the average of these people. And I think that's a very useful realization that I've had. And also in just, you know, choosing friends and kind of like figuring out like where you would like to pivot to or how you're like kind of building out those relationships as you go. And then like, you know, think about them. Like, I'm not saying you should only, you know, be friends with people that you actually thing that you are a good resemblance of. But I feel like if you have too many outliers in one way, then they will start skewing your picture because as you speak with your friends, psychologically you validate your thoughts and you normalize things. You make sense of the world by speaking to your friends, right? And so I think having those kinds of friends later on in my life, especially I feel like in the last 1.5 to 2 years where we have been trying to kind of found some sort of a company in various ways and kind of also had my stint at like 2 or 3 different ideas before I arrived at this current co-founder and the current idea. And so I think it's just kind of important to have that, you know, peer group of 6 where you'd like it to be so that you can freely and, you know, you can kind of develop yourself well. I think that's an important thing.

You, you said that, uh, you never felt the same kind of pressure when you were just about to finish, um, high school and enter university or college because you weren't unable to pursue the things you would like to do. Is that something that you still think is that way, or do you think, especially now through AI, now through the even more exploration of the internet and entrepreneurial sides of of businesses and ideas. Do you think, um, that this still holds valid, or do you think you would, um, tell your younger, your younger self, look, for sure you would like to go there, and there's, uh, there's definitely some things you can't see anywhere else, but there's either other ways to get there. So this is not the final exam, and this is not the final and only option to get into those programs. There's different way around. You can work for a few years, and then— so do you think this still there? And the other thing, do you think that even if you wouldn't go to university, there's still the opportunity for you to be part of this kind of world?

Absolutely. I do actually sometimes think about, you know, what would have happened if I actually took out a gap year. And I've been thinking about kind of the point of taking a gap year because a lot of the folks before joining Edinburgh have done so. There was one particularly interesting friend of mine with a pretty similar background from Hungary who actually traveled to Australia hitchhiking most of the way, which was a very interesting journey. And I was like, this person is so brave and at that age, that's something quite interesting to see and hear about in your cohort. And so, That was definitely of perspective to me and then definitely pushed me to be a bit more adventurous. I kind of explored that there's other things there than my worldview. I think coming from a pretty not so open community that Hungary and Budapest is, it is not like islanded entirely, but at the same time, it is also not For example, London or Boston, which is extremely international and there's a lot of different kinds of people with radically different worldviews, but there is maybe a slightly stronger consensus around most things and that I shared with my peer group. And I definitely noticed that that was the case at the time. And so, there wasn't much deviation from the normal or the mean kind of. Everybody was just focused on getting into the best college they could. For the most part in my high school, that meant Western European education systems. So mostly looking at the Netherlands, the UK, so this is pre-Brexit, and the US and Canada and kind of Spain, France, or maybe Germany and Switzerland for some of the folks. So those were the kind of colleges that people are trying to go for. And there was definitely some people that were quite ambitious and tried to get into Oxford and Cambridge, or Edinburgh Imperial, whatnot. Don't want to go through all of them, but there was also a lot of people that didn't have that ambition. And I think it's good to have the ambition just because you do want to try and place yourself to the most kind of, how should I put it, like the group that pushes you the most. And you can find that peer group at probably the university that aligns with you the most. And this might not be— and this is why I think rankings are quite distorted, because a lot of the rankings are based on research output actually, and not really based on like whether it matches your vibe. But I think it's so much more important that the university matches your vibe versus like what it— like what the ranking is. And I think, you know, I do encourage people to like try and visit as many of the colleges as they can before they go there. I personally visited Edinburgh At the time, I didn't like it that much, but I knew what its value system was. Edinburgh is, I feel like it's one of the more entrepreneurial colleges out there, at least in Scotland. There's definitely some culture on this. There's engineering courses on entrepreneurship that you can take and I have taken, which definitely helped me kind of normalize this idea of like, let's make a pitch deck, let's try and pitch it, let's take things seriously. I've definitely had some professors from the US, from Asia, from from various parts of the world, from South America, and it was really exciting to like, you know, get all those perspectives brought into the class. So that was quite lucky that I had that access to that, like those worldviews. And I think that's always just a good thing.

As you said that you are still early in your journey, because I have a lot of people here that have been in academia for a long time, did their PhD and then even stayed a little bit longer. And then there was a point in time where they decided, um, I would, I would like to do something on my own. I would like to do my research and, and my technology I was working on, on, um, and trying to form a product out of it, trying to form a company out of it. You said that you've been into university and been part of different kind of teams with different kind of missions and goals, but also being part of this kind of entrepreneurial programs that universities are all offering these days, right? Back then, 10, 15, 20 years ago, it was not like that. Only a few companies, only a few universities have this kind of mindset and entrepreneurial side of it. These days, I think it's, it's pretty good established. But, um, do you think that this kind of, um, incubator, but this kind of courses that— do you think this is a good first preparation? And people, uh, who have access to this kind of thing would be very well advised to not trying to figure out everything on your own, but being part of that, being part of this kind of community, get the kind of network. And as you said, maybe finding someone who can be a potential co-founder. Do you think that is valuable for you or for other people?

Absolutely. So I definitely think having, you know, the right community is important and having the right value system that normalize, you know, doing a startup. So I've definitely had a couple of peers that were, that are currently still living in, you know, some of the places in the world, and I don't really want to like name them, but there is definitely a lot of the places in the world where like not being an entrepreneur is just the right thing to do because a lot of the entrepreneurs are just not very successful. And the chances of a startup succeeding is quite low. But I also think in a way, it's a bit of a luxury for a country to kind of be able to do that. And also for students, I definitely think having a good technical background. So for example, some kind of engineering or software development where you can very easily just find a job that gets you by or decently well, so you can live by is definitely a good safety net to have. And if you have that there and you're not really worried about the fact that getting employed or paying off potentially some loans or having to worry about that, then I think that definitely enables you to do startups more or focus on your startups more full-time. And the other thing is if other people also value this and you see that your best friend is there every day trying to work on his idea and putting in 12 hours a day, say, into that kind of work, or that idea that might be quite contrarian and then be just a tiny little bet in the world. But if they're putting in the time into that bet, then why couldn't you really do the same thing, right? And I think having that there, seeing other people do the same thing, there's definitely a critical mass kind of thing that you get a group vibe that, "Oh, we're all doing this and we're all believing in this." And it's definitely a thing. But I also think I wouldn't necessarily over-index on setting yourself up. So I've been taking a bit of time for myself just because I have had this amazing opportunity here at MIT to do the kind of research that I really cared about, and I really wanted to try do a bit more of that before I go into the entrepreneurial world. So that for me was quite important. And I've also learned quite a lot on this journey about how much actually research and kind of academia overlap with entrepreneurship. And that was a very interesting discovery that happened to me here at my time at MIT.

Um, as you're still— and I said this I think twice already— but as you are still kind of early in your journey and you haven't founded a company yet, right? And so there is no product that you are trying to sell to customers, right? I'm, um, uh, our mutual friend— I tried to convince him a few times to be on the podcast, and he said that he hasn't done anything yet, and so it wouldn't be worth having a podcast with him. And I said, I see this totally different because you are mentioning it just now that if, let's say, your best friend is doing something for, for days and days and hours and hours, that does something to you and your mindset. And, and I have a very good friend too. And when I started with social media, it was not necessarily only because of him, but I saw what he was able to do with that, right? What kind of leverage that you got with that. So, and especially it lowers the barrier, the threshold to enter this kind of world, whatever world that might be. And because you always think, I know this person and if he can do this, I can do this, right? Or to what was necessary for me to do, what was necessary for him to do that. And so you being early in that journey means not there is some people that is still, they're still behind you. So there's still people that are still doing undergrads or at high school, and they are hopefully maybe listening to this podcast and think, okay, so, so this is how it is to be in this kind of phase, right? Because if I'm talking to someone who is 30, 40, 50 years old, maybe a 17-year-old, 19-year-old, 20-year-old cannot relate too much because we grew up in a different world with different environment, with different opportunities. So you are at the MIT at the moment. I think this is a name for itself. I think you can be very proud where you actually are at the moment. But, but maybe you can take us now a little bit into how it is to do research, but how it is also to find someone. You said that you're already in contact with someone and you already have an idea. How's that being, um, and, and what do you think would be the next few steps. Maybe you can talk a little bit about this time that you are in right now and how it is for you and then also all those things.

Absolutely, yes. So during the last, I feel like, year or many months, I have chatted with a potential co-founder and then he was very married to an idea that I wasn't very keen to pursue anymore. And we ended up kind of splitting up. I didn't quite feel that I had the kind of say as well. So I think finding the right co-founder and getting that balance right between you and your co-founder, not just work-wise, like it's one thing to be able to work together, but it's also another thing to actually trust, you know, potentially your life's work. On this person and the way you're choosing this person. And I can't emphasize how important it is to find the right person there. I think for me, I was very lucky to stumble upon Nathan, Nathan Zhao, and he is my co-founder currently. We are very, we vibe very well, I think, outside of work as well. We have a lot of really, really good chats. Where we are just like talk about music or we talk about general tendencies in life. We talk about cars, we talk about various other things. And you know, one really interesting thing is that I didn't realize before founding a company, this is something I've learned from a friend, is that you actually get to know your co-founder better than your significant other in some ways. Like that definitely, like I never, I have been You know, despite I'm not like, I feel like very, very old since I'm still under 25. I have had a couple of long-term relationships of 2 to 3 years. And in those relationships, I feel like I never really got a chance to like get to know as well how the other person works, just because, you know, like you do your day work and then you do, you tend to kind of relax with potentially your partner usually. That's what's happening in the typical Western style 9 to 5 work schedule. Whereas here, you really spend 10 to 12 hours together on Sundays and especially during a hackathon. It's really intense. It can be a 24 or 40-hour sprint where you just really push. And I think it's definitely worth marinating that co-founder idea for a while. If you think you have a good fit, just try maybe give it like a month and see if there is something hard that comes along the way. And it's only through those hard things that you can actually learn whether you will be able to work together or not. Because things are easy to work out when things are easy, but when things are really, really hard and it's really a struggle, that's when a lot of these startups tend to, I think, break up. And from my current perspective, I feel like two of the ways that I really would like to avoid failing, because it seems like a very common case, is the co-founders not agreeing on something and having a debate and deciding to split up. So that's one of the ways. And the other one is if the idea is not ambitious enough. And these are really strongly interrelated as well, because usually if your idea is pretty ambitious, then both co-founders will be ever so slightly more agreeable maybe and try and work for it more. Versus if one of you are more ambitious than the other one, or there's a difference in mindset or what idea you would like to do and how you would like to pursue it and the scale to which you would like to grow it and the pace at which you'd like to work to be able to do this. Because a lot of this founding culture is, founder's culture is you're signing up for a lot of work and it's very intense. It's pretty long work hours. And so you will not have much time for life as a whole, like just to go to the cinema or go to, I don't know, the bar or wherever you would like to go after work or wherever people tend to go. You'll not have that much time for the professional pursuit, sports potentially, and a lot of these hobbies or side activities that you would normally have in what's normally considered as a healthy work-life balance. You'll have kind of less time and you have more pressure to make more out of your free time because you just have less of it. So there's more of a quality time expectation and from yourself to yourself and push as well. And I think managing that isn't always easy. And especially when your co-founder or like some of their stuff that they potentially have messed up is eating into that time, then that can be quite frustrating at times. So, you know, that can be just a lot of, and this is completely natural. This is not something that like, I think, you know, we are experiencing at Timesome. Like I've definitely experienced this with anyone that I've worked with that like, you know, sometimes some of these disagreements, you just need to put in some more time. Even if you'd like to really, really go to the gym and, you know, you haven't been in potentially weeks, it can be really, really useful to actually spend that time and make sure that things are ironed out. Just for the health of the company. It's a bit of a balance between, you know, your health and the company health and kind of that relationship's health as well. And so it's like, it's a bit of a love triangle in a way.

It's interesting that you say that it's worth spending time on those problems and arguments or discussions. I think a lot of people are avoiding those, especially if you kind of, you said there's a certain vibe, so your friends And sometimes it's hard to say the right things to friends, but then finding common ground again. So I think there's some, some lessons here. Um, so you already have a co-founder now and you already have an idea. Um, so what are the next steps? So if I'm— if, if I would be— if, if, yeah, if you could talk to yourself, uh, 2 years ago, um, or if someone who is just 3 months behind you what, what are the next steps? What are the things that you're doing at the moment?

So at the moment, it's a lot of, uh, kind of starting to do a lot of the administrative aspects. Um, so as, uh, since I'm not a U.S. citizen, I have to apply for a visa, and that's come kind of coming through South Park Commons. I would say that just about a month ago, my life was pretty different because I— we've received this South Park Commons offer then, and that was I feel like that was pretty life-changing for us in the sense that that was the first big signal that somebody's believing in us. I definitely noticed that more of the venture capitalist world is now trying to pay more attention to us. So we're getting chats with people that we didn't really have a chance to chat with. And that's definitely— well, it might not have been South Park Commons itself only, but There seems to be some tailwind that's coming from this as well. And kind of plans-wise, it's relocation that I'm actually quite concerned about, figuring out whether you're moving into the same place. So something again with your co-founder really important is whether you're actually living in the same place or not. And if you are living in the same flat, potentially in two different rooms, sharing some common spaces, then you're really spending all your time together. And it can be quite a bit of a conflict of interest in San Francisco where house pricing is crazy high to actually try and get two separate flats. It's actually quite hard to be able to match the price efficiency that you get from being able to share a kitchen and some of these common spaces. And I think making that decision, we actually spent quite a bit of time on thinking about this and talking to friends, talking to other people in the ecosystem, and that's why it's good to have a community so you can discuss your daily problems as well, these more pragmatic ones. Some other thing is just setting up some of these accounts that you need to be able to start in the US and incorporation and that sort of stuff. So we're going through a lot of that admin.

Who's helping you on that?

So Nathan is mostly doing it. I'm currently not very active on that side or that front. I'm mostly just thinking and still wrapping up my work at MIT. So I'm still full-time at MIT and I'm still focused on just doing this. I'm dedicating all my time, is what I mean, to my MIT work, whereby I'm very focused on my humanoid robots and trying to press out the papers, wrap up the projects that I've been working on. So that that can be a good continuation and that I don't have to worry about this. And I definitely think that's important before you both go full-time to kind of wrap up everything that you have been doing kind of before and really, really be able to focus on whatever you're going to be building. So we're also taking a bit of time to do that. And we are just conscious that, you know, these things are not instantaneous. Like, yes, you can just quit your job from today to tomorrow, but it is a bit of a life adjustment that you're taking. And, you know, just like, with your friend group, you have to update them as well and you have to wrap up the project. You do have to hand over. There's usually a notice period. So I'm also doing similar things right now where I'm thinking about that relocation and a lot of these more pragmatic things. And idea-wise, we're thinking a lot about just chatting with the right people. I think in validating your idea, what's really important is figuring out who to talk to. And getting those quality conversations. And sometimes that ratio can be quite bad and you only really realize it once you had a really, really high quality conversation. And that can be 100 chats with 100 different people and 100 one-hour meetings by the time you get one that was just as useful as all the other 100 cumulatively. And so it can be quite a challenge to find the right people to speak to and that can really point you in the right direction. And a lot of startups pivot 2 to 3 times before they get to their final form or the business plan and the whole biz dev side of things ends up being. And so it's definitely important to be open to some pivots and to share that openness with your co-founder. So for example, if one of the co-founders is open to much broader pivots than the other one is, then if you take consider this as an optimization problem. As a roboticist, I tend to often do this and I think about, okay, so what is the next best company that I could form given all these constraints in the market that I see right now? And if I'm more flexible in where I'm going than my co-founder is, then I might be able to find another point. In fact, it's quite likely that I'll find another point that I globally think it's better than what he sees under a more constrained landscape, if that happens to be the case. And I think luckily for us, we are pretty aligned on our mission. I think that's really important. And just, yeah, I think just before you move full-time with your co-founder, I think it's important to iron a couple of these things out. And one more thing that we have been kind of spending some time on is just communication really, like saying or expressing to each other, this is how we work. There is a book that I'm just forgetting the title of right now, but it's recommending the advice effectively is everybody should write a page, at least a one-pager of how I work. So when you go to a company and you are a new person, you can just send a link to some person and they can look at this and they can instantly know you're replying in shorter messages just because you prefer communication that way and you're not actually trying to be mean. You just try to be really, really efficient and that's your thing, for example. And there can be many other ways of communication. So for us with Nathan, he ever so slightly more prefers texting. I prefer maybe speaking and spending active time together. And I think both has pros and cons. So just discussing for us what kind of matters you can text each other and what kind of matters should be resolved in conversation. And being aligned on that, uh, I think is, is quite an important pragmatic advice that I can definitely give to my 2 to 3 months, uh, younger staff.

Uh, from what I've seen, I think this is definitely something that is a very good advice for everybody. This is a good advice for people who work for corporate. This is a good advice for people that work at startups. This is for people that are in relationships. Always like to be part of relationships. And even, uh, I mean, relationship is not only, um, with love interests, right? It can be a relationship with your siblings, with your friends. So, um, I think this is very well, a very good idea to, to be— I mean, first, it, it requires a kind of self-reflection that you are able to detect this kind of things, right? So for example, saying that this is the way I prefer because I'm more efficient person and And this is not because I don't like you, or this is not because I don't want to spend more time with you. It's the way I communicate when it comes to these kind of topics. Right. And then finding the balance between what you expect and what you give. And I think this is a very interesting topic here. Don't scratch on those things too often, to be honest here. So, and I had 56 episodes. So this, this, I think this alone, if people spend some time on that and realizing that The majority of problems are coming from not being able to articulate what you think and what you feel in a manner that the other person is able and willing to understand and feel and act on that, right? So thanks for that.

Any question?

Yeah. If you don't mind, I have a few more questions regarding this because I think a lot of people who are in that kind of age group, I'm a bit older, so that means the people that I usually talk to are not below 25. But in my professional life and so in the startup world, there is a lot of people that are below 25, right? And so I think there's a lot of questions that are a few more questions that I have that you might be able to answer. You were talking about the problem of relocating, visa, all the administration stuff, and you were kind of lucky that you said Nathan is taking care of that, right? So what would happen if, if you would be Nathan? You cannot answer for Nathan. Oh, this is totally clear to me. But is that something I think a lot of people are fearing, that kind of world, right? This is— well, there's so much paperwork. I don't know how to answer all those things. Maybe through the conversation that you have with him, maybe you can give a little bit of insight in that. Not too much, but, but maybe, maybe a little bit.

Absolutely. So, yeah, I mean, I mostly— I like my visa. It's quite a lot of work. So I'm actually putting quite a lot of time into that. That on the side and I just like trying to figure that out for myself because that's mostly something that I have to be doing since it's my visa application. But at the same time, on the administrative side of things, yes, so I think, you know, none of us are attorneys or corporate lawyers that really understand how, you know, Dalvar, like corporate law works and how things work and we definitely are finding some things out as we are, you know, on the fly, like as we're figuring things out. I think you do have to be a bit just like this no-nonsense type of person and just like put up with a certain amount of just like stuff that comes up on the way. So you can't just, you know, go like, oh yeah, I don't want to do this because I feel like this is something that should be done by, you know, professional or that this is something that should be done by an admin type of person. Because then that might slow you down. And I think there is a line that you as founder and you as a person in society has to, you know, there is a certain obligation for you to, you know, figure your paperwork out and to have it like really like just about right and make sure that everything is nice and neat and ironed out. And I think that's important to be like rigorous, like it's very important, absolutely. But at the same time, I also think there's a lot of things that you can do yourself and, you know, you don't have to like hire professional personnel from the very beginning. You don't have to have a legal team to deal with all your legal matters from day one. That's definitely not the case. And in fact, I think a lot of the companies that I've seen being built have done so with quite a small, like, legal team. And there's also people you can always talk to. So this is the nice thing about the community and having that community there is that if you have the friends who have already done this, you can always advise, like, ask them, like, are you guys also using this platform? Did you guys have the same issue? Like, and, you know, there's like, in, if you are in the same or a similar, like, line of work, and, and, you know, chances are that you'll find somebody that is to some extent in a similar line of work, and that is not, you know, potentially leading the most successful startups in, in, like, in today's world. So you can definitely get, like, reach out to them and, you know, get, like, some advice. And I think just, like, being out there networking, which is, I think, again, one thing that, like, I've I've definitely learned the value of this in Silicon Valley that they host so many hackathons and these events. And a lot of the point of these is not to do technical development and learn a new skill, but that is partially part of the point too, but it's also a point of networking and just meeting other people and getting to know people that are like-minded and potentially interested in building something of sorts. And that might be quite weird and quite freaky in some cases to you, Definitely, I don't understand a lot of the biotech stuff. To me, the whole world is pretty crazy. What we can do with the human body is, with today's high-tech stuff, it's quite amazing. But at the same time, it's also a little bit scary. So there's that aspect too. But I think there's also this notion of just moving out of the comfort zone. I know it's cliché, but if you never do it, you never explore, right? So I think that's just useful to be a bit tolerant to these things and also Similar with fighting this admin battle of just making sure everything is on the top. And it's definitely a lot of extra overhead work, but it's much like research, which is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. To quote somebody, I forget again who said this at some point, I read this somewhere, but that's also true for, I think, startups to some extent that a lot of the work is just hardcore grinding. Groundwork that is not even technical potential, not even like the light bulb above your head, but it's just like you're trying to figure like, okay, how do I submit this form to this place so they can potentially release the funds that I've raised? Or how can I potentially order this now from this company? What's the process of ordering? And obviously having industrial and research experience, if you know, having done some purchases through purchase orders, sales orders, and knowing the process of this, is definitely useful. So I think, you know, industry and research, like, they both can be really useful and teach a lot about— you mentioned self-reflection, that I think is a very important skill that I've learned through my studies at Edinburgh. So these skills are important.

As we're coming towards the end of the podcast, and there's, um, there's still— what, what do you guys are working on? Is that something that you can, that you can give some insights? Is there something that you can share? Doesn't need to be too detailed, uh, an NDA necessary, but maybe you can tell us a little bit what you guys are working on, what you guys are aiming at?

Absolutely. So we're looking at deploying humanoid robots for various verticals. We haven't exactly picked the right domain of application just yet. We have a couple of them in mind. I wouldn't like to say yet what exactly it's going to be, but to offer a bit of a trailer, it's going to be, I think, very, very cool and interesting to see it. And that's also part of the reason why I signed up for this, because I just think this is going to be really cool and very amazing and exciting. And if you, you know, if you don't feel about your idea that way, like if you feel like, you know, your idea isn't like cool and amazing and like it's really like making life easier or better or in some way like causing general economic prosperity, then maybe your idea is not ambitious enough. So that's definitely something.

And even that was very broad. From a technical perspective, working on humanoids, there's so many things, and I see a lot of especially coming from, from, from the Bay Area. Open source humanoid projects might be a hand, might be an arm, might be a mobile manipulator, something that you can drive around. But when it comes to humanoids, there's not too many big projects that are coming, not from a, from, from the corporate, but You cannot do this if you're not raising a lot of money. There is no way to do this, right? There is the only option, the only few things I have seen so far are community-built open-source projects. Is that something that you guys are considering, or are you on the software side?

Is that something that you can, um, yeah, yeah, I think I can safely say that for now we are more bearish on that. So we're not really trying to communize or open-source kind bootstrap our project that way. We will primarily, I think, rely on more closed source forms of collaboration as a private company. So just actually hire founders, employees, and advisors. And I think there definitely can be really good points for open sourcing things. There's a really good article on open source things by, I think, the founder of Prusa, the 3D printing company. And I think I'm not entirely sure about how well that could work in today's world. I've definitely seen some ideas that are pretty promising in that space, but our idea just doesn't naturally lend itself to it that we're currently pursuing. So the short answer is no.

I'm keen to see what's coming out. You said they're part of the program that you've been lucky to get a spot on. Uh, when does that start?

So that starts next week, actually. So I'm like, I'm still calling in from, uh, Massachusetts, but next week I will already be, um, in the Bay Area and, and, you know, focusing on that full-time. Um, yeah, so pretty soon.

And, uh, would you be the only part? I mean, is that for you, or is that for you and your co-founder?

So in our case, we got in, I think, as a team really, and we received funding to both of us, so our kind of company. And yeah, it's the two of us together.

How long is the program?

I believe the Bootstrap, this initial part, is around 8 or so weeks. It might be 10 or 12, so it's like 2 to 3 months. And then I think there's like a building side of things, which is a couple more months. So one of the reasons why we chose South Park Commons is because they really don't push you to have a demo day sooner, or there's not really a concept of that. There is just a concept of like you do it whenever you're ready. And since we're building quite hard tech stuff, and as you mentioned, humanoid is a hard space where you potentially need to raise more funding than traditional SaaS-based B2B SaaS companies, we do believe that we might need that extra time. And so that's Part of the reason why we have accepted our offer here and why we think we would be a good fit for SAS Performance is because of this kind of alignment in mindset.

I mean, I'm saying this to a lot of guests on my podcast, and— but I think here it truly is valuable that I would like to have a second one where we can see what happened after 6 months, 8 months, 10 months, because this is a long-term project, right? So this is episode 57, I think, and Today is March 24th, so let's see what happens until the end of the year or early next year. I'm really keen to see what your future holds out for you and if it will be still with the same co-founder, it will be staying the same company, same kind of product or idea. Yeah, very interesting. And thanks for sharing all those insights and feelings and thoughts as well.

Yeah, well, thank you so much for asking all these great questions. I think there's definitely some really meaningful and very like good pushes and questions from you. Um, very much appreciate that and your time.

Only possible because people like you are sharing their stories, right? And I would like, and I would like to, to share those stories because there's a lot of people maybe that just maybe need a few words of, of, um, of whatever that what they are missing, right? And, and you can do this because I did this, or this is how I did it. And maybe something comes out of it. So I'm very happy that you took the time. And like I said, let's meet up end of, end of this year, next, early next year to see what comes out of it.

Sounds great. I'm also very excited to see and give you an update and hopefully share some more of our learnings on the way.

I say bye-bye and talk to you soon.

Thank you very much. Have a good day.

Bye-bye.