A Founder’s Mission Beyond Their Startup (feat. Neil Thanedar)

Hey everybody, welcome to the Build in Public podcast. I'm your host KP, and on this show I interview world-class entrepreneurs, ambitious startup founders, creators, and builders on the internet who are boldly building the future in public. This podcast is my excuse to take you all on a curious journey to understand, learn, and hopefully be inspired by the worldviews, insights, and stories of these fabulous people changing the world. So far, I've gotten a rare privilege to sit down with incredible We've had incredible guests like Gary Vee, Alexis Ohanian, Kat Cole, Sahil Lavingia, and many more leaders. So check out the full podcast listing at buildingpublicpodcast.com. Now buckle up and get ready for our latest episode. Hello everybody. Welcome to yet another episode of the Building Public Podcast. I'm your host, KP, and I am super thrilled To have Neil Thanedar joining us from Flint, Michigan. Neil, I just wanted to let you know how stoked I am to have you here. I've been meaning to get you on the show for at least 6, 7 months. And I think the post you made last week made the perfect sense and the perfect window for us to kind of open up and chat about, you know, what we're going to do together. So first of all, welcome to the show.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

You want to give a quick round of, you know, introduction to what you've been up to? I know that you've been doing a lot. Like, I have your bio printed in front of me and it's like, it's got a lot of bullet points. But top of mind, 30 to 40 seconds, how would you describe yourself? Like what you've been doing the last 3, 4 years? And then what are you— I guess, what's the big focus now?

Yeah, so I think for the last like 13, 14 years, I've been really focused on being a scientist CEO. And so I've founded 2 companies, seen them now all the way from the very beginning to the end of exits, right? And like seeing that process. And I was trying to think about what's next for me. And one of the places I looked at was if I was starting another startup as a scientist CEO, where would I And I've just wanted to solve problems for the scientist CEO. Is there a way to make an accelerator or invest in those scientists earlier? It's really been my passion.

Yeah. And you just touched on the exits, right? And the latest exit I know you've been biting my ear off about is Labdoor. Actually, tell the audience a little bit about how Labdoor story came about and kind of talk in terms of, I guess, inflection points, because it's a long journey, you know, to now that you're almost at the exit level. So,

yeah.

Like, yeah, give us a quick summary.

Yep. So this is an 11-plus-year story, right? So in 2012, started Labdoor, I think. And Labdoor even started as an insight from my last startup. So the startup before Labdoor, Avamine, we did product development and quality control for pharmaceuticals, supplements, cosmetics. And so from a—

Was that the one you started with your dad?

Yep, absolutely. And so, and so the— if we were kind of rewinding the The reason why I started my first business was because my dad lost all of his businesses in the 2008 recession. And so, he had been a PhD chemist, had quit his job when I was 2 years old, started a one-person testing lab, bootstrapped it in the '90s. Over a 10-year period, he got to a $3 million revenue business, about, I think, 50 employees all himself. Wow. Then started raising kind of Bank of America financing, not venture capital financing, expanded and was doing very well, had a $100+ million business that all kind of basically came down in the 2008 recession. And so he had a few bad quarters, the bank took the business and that was it. And we were in 2010 trying to figure out like, how do we save the family business? Like, what do we do now? And the idea was just like start a new testing lab. And so in 2010, we started a new testing lab in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I had just graduated. I started it first. He joined later. He moved to Michigan to join. And so at 21, I was assigned to CEO. And so it like put me into that seat. The two of us started the business. It, you know, in a couple of years it was 15 people and profitable, starting to scale. And that was when I did little things on the side. I was like learning to code. Codecademy was a thing in 2012 and I like, I did the whole Codecademy program, like I was trying to teach myself to code, trying to think about what was new or what was different. And that actually led me to doing a startup competition for my lab, Aave Mean, where I was able to pitch a lot of different successful entrepreneurs. And that's actually where I got to meet Mark Cuban. Mm-hmm. And that was the first time where I got to talk to him about what we did as a testing lab. And he was interested in this idea of, hey, is there any way to scale this data instead of doing it one company at a time? Is there a more scaled way to do this? And it had been an idea that I had had for a long time is that there should be a people's lab. If there's all these B2B labs in America, there's 9,000. You know, my dad ran one, I ran one. I knew that lab industry really well, but all the labs work for the companies, right? There should be a lab that works for the people. And so that was the idea that started Labdoor in 2012. And so I had met a few people in Indianapolis during that startup competition that became my co-founders. We started and we've been working together ever since. Right. And so we have kind of this strong co-founder structure. We all moved to San Francisco together, lived in—

That's when you went to YC, correct? Labdoor.

So that was— so we ended up going to YC a couple of years later. So 2012, like end of 2012, we need like the first $100,000 to get started. Rock Health was actually an accelerator focused on digital health, and they were really focused on this first check for digital health when before digital health was really a thing. HowdyTecho really made digital health a thing. And so that was where we got our first $100K that allowed us to actually move to San Francisco. Wow. We found the cheapest place we could live in, which was basically a flophouse in Chinatown. You know, like the bathroom's on the hall, you know, like wear sandals to go to the bathroom kind of thing. And we just like worked all day, worked most of the nights and just like got the first product shipped. And so it was just labdoor.com with the first couple categories. We had protein, energy drinks, and I think fish oil were the first 3 categories. And that was enough. The first 100 products, first 3 categories where we were able to raise our seed round. And so that's actually where we went back to Mark Cuban and said, hey, you know, we've been working on this for a year. We did it. We did what we talked about. And that he invested the next $250,000 after Rock Health. And then we were able to, we built a business for a couple years around, we had tested a few hundred products. We built a subscription. And then we had the classic startup issue where we had to pivot. The subscription was working, both consumers were buying it and professionals were buying it. So nutritionists, doctors, we had this like nice cottage business. But it was actually one of a number of things happened, but a Tim Ferriss tweet where he actually tweeted about Labdoor and it just made our traffic spike one day. But then when people were asking him, hey, do you like Labdoor? Would you recommend Labdoor? He kept saying, I like it except for the paywall. Or like he was complaining about the paywall. And it was— that was one thing that was always getting us stuck. stuck. I think the other thing that's getting us stuck is just this idea that we don't have an open science. Like, Labdoor's mission was always about open science. That's like, Labdoor was really the open science. Open door. Yeah, right. The open door. And then also the watchdog, the Labrador watchdog. And I really think that there should be a consumer watchdog for everyone. The data should be free, and then we'll figure the business model around that. And so we changed the model in 2014, actually had it— the data is free, the rankings are free. And then we have our marketplace and certifications built around it now, where if you buy a Labdoor-approved product or Labdoor-certified product, we make a commission on those. And so it was right around that 2014 time where we figured out the business model, where we pitched YC and almost like relaunched, where we kind of figured out the, like, the 0 to 1 was done. We knew we had the site, the marketplace, the certifications, and then YC really helped us go 1 to N to scale it the next level.

Right. It's fascinating. And also kind of like bringing us back from that inflection point to the last big numbers that I saw was what, Labdoor was at 20 million users, right? 20 million plus users, $7 million plus in funding, I think, over the years. It's crazy. Just blew up so big towards the end, right? Of course, 10-year overnight success story. By the way, my wife, when I mentioned Labdoor, it was the first time I was talking about you back, I don't know, when we first were DMing each other in 2019 or something. And I talked about all these other things and she was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I said Labdoor and she was like, oh yeah, I know Labdoor, right? Apparently she's been following, I guess, some of the workout protein supplements people who have been talking about Labdoor ratings or something. I was like, oh, okay. I

guess it's very— I would imagine our audience is— that's something that I would notice. I would imagine our audience is in the hundreds of millions, right? It's like for us to get the tens of millions of users that are kind of coming back, right? I think that's a big thing for us where this happens anywhere I go. If I go and someone asks me what I do and I say, oh, I work at Labdoor, the frequency of which people actually recognize and say, oh yeah, I love Labdoor.

The brand awareness aspect of Labdoor is way bigger, you know, even if it's not captured in the signups and in users, the DAU and things like that. I think the awareness is way bigger, especially because I think a lot of influencers, celebrities, a lot of these people, you know, they talk about this, like you said, Tim Ferriss, like they talk about the Labdoor rating or the Labdoor certification, that kind of thing. So yeah.

And that's really— that's actually a fun— yeah, it's a fun part of startups really, right? It's like, I think that's an underrated part of like being a creator where we think of creator sometimes as this, like the YouTuber or the Like other kinds of celebrity, right? But there's a cool way where if you build a really great scientific tech startup where you can actually have that experience where, you know, I wear a Labdoor shirt down the street and people like recognize it and say, hey, like, yeah, right. And that's fun. That's like, it's a very fun part of being a founder.

Yeah. I mean, I can't imagine like, you know, like Airbnb founders, like Uber founders, like it's just like, it's like people, especially with B2C, right? That's one thing that you were saying earlier when you bring so many of these things that were initially locked up in the B2B world to a B2C world. Yeah, I think it's fascinating. You know, I think there's something there we should definitely riff on, maybe another session, not on the podcast, where what are some other, you know, previously just accepted things that were just locked up in the B2B world that would be insanely cool for regular people to access? That was Robinhood, by the way, right?

Yeah.

Robinhood was for the longest time, it was— I don't think it was B2B per se, but it was more so like, you know, not— it was a prosumer Yeah. Right. Trading stocks was a prosumer thing. Like, I have a Joe like me and my wife, or, you know, someone like some kid in the college couldn't simply open up a brokerage account like that back in the day. And now Robinhood just made it, you know, democratize that access. So yeah, I love that. You also wrote a blog post about fractionalize everything, don't you?

Didn't you? Yeah. Yeah. I think that it has to be. And I think that if the startups can do that would be even amazing. And some of this is legal stuff, right? It's like political where if you fractionalize startups for real, it actually becomes a security, right? And it's like a challenge with that. Right. And so there needs to be ways where companies can essentially go public easier, right? And so all of those things, whether the democratizing of startups where it's easier for anyone to start a startup, I think there's so much democratization that can be done in healthcare where you take things that, like even biotech are like, it used to be a very B2B focused biotech. It's like you have, the only way you can sell biotech is through big pharma and you have to, sometimes you have to sell to the big company and then the big company does the distribution almost in like the old school Hollywood model or the old school music model, right? Right. And so there's now ways where I think if there's an increasing consumerization in biotech, then you'll also see more a different kind of startup be created. So scientist CEO that actually needs to understand consumer approach versus the biotech CEO who is the regulatory expert. And that's a different model. And so if we can kind of bet on the 2.0 biotech founders looking different and being different, that's also really fun.

You know, you— so you talked about scientist CEO, right? I feel like that's the identity that you obviously embody and it's close to your heart. Would you classify your dad as scientist CEO? Because he had a PhD, he built his own first company, right?

Absolutely.

And I wonder, like, how much of watching him be an entrepreneur and also doing it the bootstrap way, which is often like, you know, the scenic route, right? It's never the get the funding and get to TechCrunch route. How much of that really do you believe parlayed into how you view businesses and startups in general today?

I think it's both bootstrapping and VC both have pros and cons that we, I think, miss one or the other, right? Like, there are people who are just all in on bootstrapping, and there's people who are all in on VC, and they each speak their own book. And I've kind of seen— so I saw both the positives and the downsides of bootstrapping from my dad, right? It like really worked for, you know, almost 2 decades until it really didn't work, right? And there we talked about that. There was a— even if I had, you know, had I been a few years older and I understood what I knew about VC now, then could he have gone and raised like a bridge round funding that could have helped him get through that? Right. And then that $100 million business could have still gotten out. There's ways where VC can be very valuable, right? And then like there's a difference in like a VC might not have dropped the business in that spot in the same way that a bank did. And so that's— those are the negatives there. I think that there are negatives on the VC route where people who raise way too much money and then they basically lose their exits. There's a great Reddit post recently where someone said that going from $0 to $100 million to $0. Yeah, right. And right, and a big part of that is actually that You go from 0 to let's say $10 million or $20 million in value and you bootstrap or you do just a seed round to get there. And that part is very difficult. And then companies will end up going and raising 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 rounds after that. And those were less necessary. And then you might need to exit at $200, $300, $400 million to get the same equity per founder as you would if you just raised a seed round and exited at a $20 or $30 million value.

Right. This, you know, kind of leads me to open up about middlestands, right? You talked about middlestands, which is a, I think, fun German word. I just can't get it out of my head. Actually, I want you to kind of introduce what middlestands are for the audience and why do you believe those are necessary or what kind of role do you think they play in the startup world?

Yeah. So the kind of German definition for middlestand is this almost like family-owned business that generally scales to $10 million plus in revenue to $1 billion in revenue, usually is very stable, is either like passed down generationally or can even be employee-owned, right? In the UK especially, there's a stronger employee ownership culture. And so

that's one of the— Like a co-op kind of thing?

Yeah. So co-ops are more of a UK structure. I would love to see more of those type of structures come to the US. Like, US is very structured. It's like either it's a nonprofit, it's a C corp, it's an LLC, and there's kind of no in-between. And so I think there's more room for those types of things. And so the middle stand is this like a middle class of startups. It's this middle class business in the sense that it might make, you know, might be a $10 million to $100 million exited business might not be great for the classic VC. It might be really good for the founder and maybe a few, a few set angels.

Right.

Right. If you could either raise $1 million or less in a seed round and exit for $10 million plus, or bootstrap it all the way there and even exit for $1 million plus, right? Those are both great outcomes that I think the normal startup world misses. And so that I would love to see more people take those middle-class shots. And I'm looking for ways to fund that. I think Tiny Capital is trying to work on this. CompFund is trying to do this. There's a few places that are doing it more from a holdco or kind of that type of model where you— an incubator-style model where you're buying these companies and putting them together or private equity-style roll-ups. But I would love to see a more startup entrepreneurial-driven version of middlestands where people like— that's what my dad's company would be, a middlestand. The company that my dad and I created together was a middlestand. Those are great businesses. And in some ways there's a more repeatable playbook in middle stands where they're often service businesses. And so it's really about like doing the work every day, every week, every month. It's a— they're usually people-driven. You usually have to have like everyone in the same building. So if they're not service businesses, they're usually like manufacturing businesses, right? So there's like, it's good for the local economy to have more middle stands. And so there's like, it like Flint, Michigan actually does have a lot of good middle stands around us, right? There's, you've got like Bolt, Bolt and screw companies. And like, those are the types of things that you don't necessarily— the second, third tier auto suppliers that you never hear about, like, are often around these larger manufacturing companies. They're serving our bigger companies, they're serving the community, they're great employers. And so

there's so many of those, thousands of them even in America, right? Like, yeah, every time I drive by something like that, I always like try to like Google what the revenue is, right? I'm like one of those like people who like looks at the, you know, some company name, like there's a factory right next door. And we're like by our street and trying to look at, look up like how much revenue there. And it's like $17, $20 million. I'm like, damn, like $17, $20 million. And they're like, so you, nobody would recognize them, the name of them. Right. And they're, this is a wheel manufacturing company. Exactly. Whoa. Just making wheels, making like $20 million. So there's so many of them like that. You're to your point in every industry, like chemical, rubber, you know, all kinds of things. It's fascinating.

I think it depends on what you want to do. Right. And there might, and maybe you can segment your life in different ways. Right. So, I think if you're optimizing for quality of life, you might also be optimizing for a mission beyond startups, right? So, if you believe that you want to put $1 million in the bank and then do something that you really wanted to do your whole life, or, you know, and it might not be more than $1 to $10 million to like free you for life on like, yeah, you get to do your mission. Yeah, right. And that could be anything from like traveling the world to starting a church to starting a nonprofit to running for politics to like any of these things. If that's what you really want to do, then a middle stand might be the best way way to, hey, sprint 5, 10, 15 years, exit, and then the rest of your life is whatever you want. So I think in that case, I think we're leaving like a great opportunity that's good for founders on the table.

Yeah. You know, you touched on politics, so I have to ask you this. I feel like in the tech world, I feel like there's a whole disdain around politics, right? It's kind of like, you know, I guess now maybe they're taking a little bit of interest. I see like David Sacks and, you know, some of the All-In crew are a lot more political than I guess an average tech leader. But what is your stance on how should people in tech and startups see politics? What lens should they see in? And number 2, what are your— I guess what's overrated about politics and what's underrated of politics?

Interesting. I think the lens that we classically see through politics is the cynical lens, right? It's the— you're throwing—

lying politician, right? He comes Yeah, it's like, oh, just—

You're booing. It's a negative experience, right? And it's just like all politicians are evil, government is bad. And I think that that defeatist structure, I think, is what causes us in Silicon Valley to actually make a lot less impact on politics than we should, right? Is if we actually turn that around and used an ambitious optimist lens, and that's one of my blog posts is like, we both want to be ambitious and optimistic in politics. Because I think that there's a lot of ambitious cynics in politics. And that's what really kind of drives most of our political system now. But I think

that there's also— Armchair optimists. They're not like, you know, doing anything. They're just like opinionated, you know?

Exactly. And so I think we're hitting it from both sides, whereas like the optimists tend to be on the sidelines and the cynics tend to be in the arena. Right. And so it was like pushing the optimists into the arena and more of the entrepreneurs into the arena, too, because I think it's a very similar skill. And so, like, to complete the story about my dad, right? So after we sold the business that he and I created together and I was working on Labdoor, he decided in his retirement that he was going to run for politics. And so he's now run for 3 straight races. He lost the first one but won the next 2 and is now a US congressman representing Detroit. And so in that process, through these 3 races, we end up running— I mean, he's been an entrepreneur his whole life. That's a way we think about it is like the campaign is almost like a Startup business built around a person. It's a brand built around a person. And so everything is around that person. So it's whether it's the, like, the daily social media on like, what do we, what do we really want to convey on a daily basis? Like, what do we want to do? And a huge part of that, it builds around what he does. So like, he has a very like populist, like in the streets talking to people one-on-one kind of connection. And so that's what he does. He goes to like the Allen Park, like Town Hall Festival, you know, and like there's like the Lincoln Park Festival the next day. And he's just like every day he's at another thing or he's at the local churches on Sunday and he might do like 3, 4, 5 churches on one, on an individual Sunday. Like, and he's just like going to the different places. And so then the like social media is built around that and then the marketing is built around that. And then when you start talking to reporters, like the reporters see that and you like invite them on the trips. So, and you build this whole system around it to where you can now be more efficient with your work and you can actually promote things better. And then that can— that's the politics side of it. And then I think the next side of it is like, once you actually win the elections, then there's the government side of it. And I also think in the government side, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit, which I think like a lot of the overrated things happening right now is trying to— it's like the famous Sun Tzu quote is like, generals are always busy fighting the last battle, right? Yeah, right. It's like politics, like we're still fighting the, like, the Trump battle. Like, we're still in that system.

The 2020 thing has passed already, right?

Yeah, yeah, 16, 20, and like we're in '24. I think we're gonna probably have one more Trump Right. And so, like, we're still fighting that last battle versus if we thought about maybe what's next. And these things happen in cycles is like, where's the next Obama? Where's the next, like, ambitious optimist who's going to come in and actually take the wave in the other direction? And really not just from that optimistic perspective, but actually getting things done, right? Like passing major legislation. And that's something that I love about politics too, is there's a lot of low-hanging fruit that's actually 80%, 90% populist issues. The problem is that in the less than 10% are the moneyed interests on both sides. Right. And so if the issue is silent and only the money talks, then the bills will pass to the benefit of the 10% or the 1%. But there's— if you get loud, if you strategically get loud and actually publicize the issues and get them done, you can actually rally support in a way where you get that 80%, 90% on your side and basically the moneyed interests can't do anything about it. And so there's just this great lane now for ambitious optimists to pick key issues, focus on them, get them passed, and key people and getting key people in office and helping that process.

If you could wave a magic wand and get to a scenario where you really get to define, or let's say this is hypothetical, obviously, right? If you could design the perfect president for the United States, what traits would that person have looking into the future?

I think that there would be a very direct way of speaking, right? I think that the focus should be about tactics and execution and not about politics. And so I think there's a lane right now for an ideal president who really focuses on getting things done. And I hope that this is not crisis-induced. Usually this, like FDR, you get like a very active president because there was a crisis or a Great Depression.

Right.

But I think there would be a great lane for a politician to come in and say like, we're not fighting, we're not like talking about Republicans versus Democrats, we're just going to get as much done as possible in the 2 terms that I'm president and right and do all of this work. And it's just going to be a sprint and we're going to work with all sides. We're going to work with activists and with politicians. I think all of that, bringing that together is really key. I think the ideal president also has been working as an activist for a long time. I think that there's this interesting—

Wait, why do you believe that?

So I have this idea of the same way there's founders and CEOs and the founders create things and the CEOs manage things and often they're the same person at the beginning, but then later it can diverge. I think in similar ways, activism comes before politics. Wow. There are issues that when I talk about something that's an 80, 90% issue, maybe something like gay marriage might be an 80, 90% issue now, but 20 years ago it wasn't, 40 years ago it wasn't. And so, the activist's job is to change the percentage, right? It's like make it an 80, 90% popular issue by promoting it to people. And then the politicians kind of take it over the finish line and they actually make it law. And so, I think Barack Obama was a community organizer. He was an activist at the grassroots level and kind of understood what those problems were. And so, I think being— having some of that experience and being on the front lines helps you when you later on go at the end of the system and are trying to get things done.

Right. Groundwork first and then office work, right?

Yeah, I think it matters.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I mean, just to throw in like my, I guess, a couple things that I would probably chime in about who would be an ideal— I think to me this direct line of communication thing that you talked about is fascinating because I feel like often, you know, some of these— I guess let's looking at the Democratic You know, side of it. I feel like they're to try to appease to both sides and trying to you know build a big tent, which is you know like the whole focus. I don't think they take strong stances, and it's okay sometimes to take a strong stance as long as it's a very populist or you know it's a very popular opinion. You know of the common public. I think that's something I felt like Obama was towards the end not doing. You know, Hasan Minhaj recently addressed that. You saw that video?

Yeah.

Where he was saying, "I wish like I wish you just said." said something about when you saw this or saw that. And I think being a little bit more assertive would've been helpful. So to me, having that kind of conviction about what you believe in, communicating it with only a tiny caveat that I could be wrong, those are to me very inspiring, right? You could see just still being extremely confident, 95% that this is what I believe is what America needs, 5% I could be wrong and I'm ready to change my mind later, right? Yeah. Then you create the sense of momentum towards action because they're like, We know what this president wants and gets done, and he may course correct later. Right. And the other thing, obviously, to your point, just having that ambition. I feel like America, one of the things that I loved growing up in India, as you know, is that America is a magnet for ambitious people. And it's just the greatest stage, world's greatest stage, world's greatest arena for ambition. If you want to put people on Mars, if you want to put people on the moon, this is the place. Right. Yeah. Even that language I feel like is missing in our common political landscape right now. Most of them are playing safe, trying to appease to those money interests, like you said, unless maybe you have a crisis and then you'll have someone rise up. But you don't need a crisis to galvanize the nation. You just need someone to have the kind of ambition to look 10, 15, 20 years ahead and say, that's where we want to be. Also, this is my personal talk. I feel like there's so much reactive leadership as opposed to just proactive leadership. Yeah. Everybody, I feel like in the White House, or at least in the political spheres, is so reactive to what China is doing, what Taiwan is doing. I'm like, who cares? The real pioneers don't give a shit about— like Michael Phelps, remember that whole scene where when he's trying to be number one, he doesn't look around. He just wants to be number one, right? And I feel like there's the last few years, every time I see TV, I'm like, oh, they're so reacting to what China is doing, what they might be doing. I'm like, just be pioneers, which I think that's in the DNA of being American.

Yeah. I think that's something that's missing in politics in general. And that's, I think, the thing that you'd worry about with an Obama or some other great great politicians that we've had in the last couple generations where it's like the famous Steve Jobs quote about like the— like life is much different when you realize that everything that was built around you was like created by people who were no smarter than you.

Yes.

Right. And you can change it and mold it. And like, like that's— I think we haven't had that realization in politics. It's like everything, all these— like a lot of these bills might have only gotten passed like 5 years ago or 10 years ago. The very, very oldest bills are 100, 200, 300 years old, right? Like everything, any of that can be changed, right? Like things can be made better. We There's this thing that happened recently in Pennsylvania where a bridge collapsed and then the new governor decided to change all the systems and just drop all the classic regulations and they got this bridge built in days instead of months. Basically, everything in government could be like— take that microcosm and expand it. You can do that if you decide that all the rules are changeable. Right. So, I'm waiting for more opportunities like that where people just say, to come in for a 4 or 8-year sprint as a governor or president and just try to get as much done as possible, being as open with, you know, like everything can change, everything can move. And I think by doing that, you get— you can make much more progress.

Yeah. So talking about sort of reimagining things and, you know, sort of redefining what future could be, let's talk about YC, the impact of YC in your career, in your life as a founder. And I know you had some thoughts about YC 2.0, right?

Yeah.

So walk us through that.

Yeah.

I think for the audience, like, what was the role of YC in your life? Yeah. So I think, I mean,

Yeah, I think YC, for me, we got into YC in 2015. I think there was a real inflection point in YC where we knew that it was going to be great, and I think the people around us did, but it had just turned from $20,000 checks to $120,000 checks. Right. It was kind of in that inflection point in year 10. And for us, we had spent 2 and a half years really struggling trying to figure out the business. And once we did figure out the business, it was like you plug in YC and it's like truly an accelerator. And it, for like, especially for the next 1 to 3 years, fundraising got a lot easier. And then like till now it's like 8+ years later and it's still like there's a YC reunion coming up. Like you like want to be meeting YC founders constantly. It's a great way to, when you're reaching out cold to other people, being a YC founder really helps. I think it, the, the principles that YC created about really kind of sprinting as quickly as possible, especially in that 12-week period, measuring your growth rate in weeks instead of months or years. Mm-hmm. that tradition really helps. I also think the vision of kind of thinking as big as possible is really great about YC. Yeah. I love this idea of like, if we're talking about ambition, like YC is the place where ambition is really fostered and like it bounces off of each other and gets stronger. And so that feeling of like Paul Graham has a quote about that where like, if you assume that like ambitious people are normally distributed throughout the world at the beginning of their lives, like they're generally not gonna bump into that many other ambitious people around him. Right. But like when you finally put those ambitious people together, it's like, you know, it's like a plant that like finally sees sunlight, right? It's like starved of light and that finally blooms. Like that's kind of— YC is amazing for that. And so, I love that model and that like YC stamp of approval is so key. I think what Paul Graham did in 2005 with his thesis saying, you know, hackers can be great CEOs and like, and really taking something That was revolutionary at the time and now seems so ordinary. I truly believe it's important.

Like there, when you say hackers can be good CEOs, hackers at the time were low status.

Exactly.

They were not like— I guess now when you think of a hacker or developer, it's like high status, right? Someone working at Stripe or leaves Stripe, like I think 1,000 pre-seed checks try to get him, right? Yeah, him or her. But like 2005, like a hacker trying to create the next web widget was not a high status

Exactly. And so I think that there's a gap now with the scientist CEO where I think scientists are still low status in terms of the management CEO level, right? Yeah. I think there's this glass ceiling for scientists where there's a theory of like, well, scientists can— we want hundreds of brilliant scientists in our team, but we can't have one at the top, right? Versus what actually is the truth in biotech is a lot of these great companies, the Soligence and Ginkgo Bioworks and, you know, Curations and Quest, all scientist CEOs, all PhDs who it was their research that really spun everything out, right? And so if we actually give more trust to the scientists, I think there's a huge potential in biotech to accelerate them and help them do 0 to 1 in biotech. But then there's also like scientist CEOs in all these other places that could be potential. So like AI is a great space where who makes AI companies? They're researchers, they're scientists. To some extent, some of them are PhDs. They're coming out of universities. Starting to look— AI companies start to look a lot more like biotech companies now. Right. And the merging of all those, in all the cases now, we're now getting also platforms. So there's the OpenAI ChatGPT type platforms, and then you're building on top of that. Then you now get the application layer of each. And that's actually where Web 2.0 really flourished was when you got to the application layer. And then there's just so many winners. Right. Right. winners in the platforms, there's hundreds of winners. And that's really what makes YC work. That's really what makes VC work is when there's just a wide number of winners. And so it looks like biotech, AI, and then the scientist CEOs that are going to be starting those companies is where the next generation of those exits are going to come from.

I'm excited to, you know, kind of follow along and see all of that unfold. So let's talk about the power of writing in public. I was looking at some of the posts you made. I've been following, of course, for years now. I think somewhere you said that you have over 100 posts Yes. Over 80,000 words and it's just prolific. I remember it was just 4 or 5 years ago when we first met was through your writing. I think I replied to one of your threads and it was one of the blog posts you wrote that you posted and I replied to it and I slid into your DMs and here we are, right? 5 years later. But what is your, I guess, perspective on the power of writing? First of all, how did you discover that? Number one, the power, first of all, the taste of it. And second, what kind of role does it play now in your Yeah.

So I think I learned all the best investors that I consider the top VCs that I look up to, starting with Paul Graham. I know them because of their writing. And that even includes Brad Feld and Fred Wilson and Mark Seuster and Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz through Ben Horowitz's book and all these different things that learning the VC industry, learning the startup industry came from those blog posts. And so there's this way where when you're the kind of person who likes self-teaching and like absorbing that information is also like, it's a really fertile ground for the type of people who become founders anyways. Hmm. And so, I love that concept of trying to like share my ideas and kind of build on them as much as possible. I also think that there's a, just from a true writing as a practice perspective, I think that you have to get so much better at your ideas in order to get it to That finished form. And so, I even think about my writing, like if I'm really quickly sketching out an outline, I can, you know, 100 words, 200 words is probably enough for me to like a stop, a first stopping point. And then there's so many other stopping points after that, like 500 words, 1,000 words, 2,000 words. And then I get to a place where like a full idea, like 1,000 to 2,000 words might take me, you know, 10 to 20 hours over the course of a few weeks and in very random times. But it's a practice Of one, just like thinking about it from a top-down approach. I'm always thinking about like, what is the biggest problem that can be solved? What's the world's biggest problems that can be solved? And so, I have this kind of top-down system where I'm always searching for ideas. And then, whenever an idea hits that, it hits one of those big problems, then the words come out. Like, it's like 500 words can come out really easily. And so, I just have to like find the ground or find the spark for that.

And you've been writing for how long now? You said 100 posts. Is it like 2 years, 3 years, 4 years?

No. So, it's been 10+ years but maybe 30 to 40 of the posts were in the last 2. So, I've like— I've gotten to a higher pace. It definitely was like the first 10 years worth of writing. I also did a lot of writing for Labdoor. So, Labdoor is— another kind of underrated thing about Labdoor is we've done over 100 million page views from SEO alone on Labdoor, right? Like it's an SEO machine and so, a lot of how we built Labdoor in the early days was was— some of it was articles, but like even Labdoor as it's built in a structure is like there's labdoor.com, then every category like protein powders has a ranking. And so, like if you're searching best protein powder, you'll find the protein rankings. If you're searching for like Muscle Milk reviews, you'll find the product. And so, it's like this hierarchy and everything's built around that. And so, I really saw the power of SEO from Labdoor and I think I saw the power of like branding for writing from from like Paul Graham and all these other VCs. And I think that there's this challenge with like proving yourself or like getting in the door that is like, I love this idea of like, and we should talk about this more, like the front door, like YC, one of the things that it does really well is it actually, it makes the front door of VC easy. Yeah. Like the front door of VC is usually hard and like you used to have to know people and like, hey, it's my Stanford MBA buddy. And so, I know where the door is, but you don't, right? That changed with YC. The front door got easier to find. And so if we kind of change that and try to think about like, how do you like engineer that and like make it so that the front door is easy to find? That I think is a way you solve some of these big problems.

I love that. I love how much you in your speech and your writing, the word ambition shows up. You know, I was referring earlier this morning to a post of yours called Hidden Ambition, you know, and I was like, man, it spoke to And I think it's a great segue to talk about, sort of, first of all, what was that? Do you remember what was in that post? There were like signs about what you thought were ambition. And I want to parlay that into how we both met. That's, I think, the theme that we both really clicked on, right? Ambition. Yeah, absolutely. What was that post about? Hidden ambition?

Yeah, there's one specific line that actually hit me this morning. I was thinking about it again, so it's great timing. is like how many dreams end with like, what would my parents think of this?

Yeah.

Right? It's this idea of we self-censor ourselves and that's like a big part of hidden ambition is that we don't put our full selves out. We don't say what we really want to do because we're afraid that someone's going to make fun of us for being a nerd or a teacher's pet or whatever it is that was ingrained in our head as a little kid. And I think the process of fighting through Is the way— one big way ambitious people help each other when they are together is you normalize ambition. It's like, actually, being ambitious is good and let's share that and celebrate that. And so I think a core part of, I think, what makes me a good investor too, and just why I like helping founders, is because I like looking for that. I like looking for extreme ambition as a signal. And if I can see someone who is really pushing beyond not Not just their— like the job that they're in or the startup that they're working on now, but they're thinking in terms of decades and thinking in terms of what's the max potential that they could have. That excites me. And so, I think when the first time you reached out and when I read your stuff, I think at the time, I mean, now you have tens of thousands of followers. I think you had maybe 1,000 or less.

Yeah, less than 1,000, I think.

Yeah. Yeah, right? And so, I think that like—

Also, I think at the time I was a Delta Airlines fan. I was not even an on-deck.

Yeah, right? And so, I think there's something to be said And I think that's what you said for like, you can see that ambition in people. And like, it's like a game recognize game thing. It's like the people who are also like that is like, oh, he's like you. It's like you're starved of that. Like you're so ambitious and you're like looking for other people who are ambitious like you. And like when you meet other people like that, it pumps you up and then you want to like, you need that energy all the time. Mm-hmm. Right. And so I think we talk and that's like a big thing about how we talk is like we're trying to pump each other up and it's like, you know, you can do better, you can do bigger. back and forth. And that's a huge strength in life. And I think— And

that's the whole belief capital thing too, right? We talked—

I loved your post on belief capital.

I think you were one of the first people that sort of really embodied that for me. And later Eric Ternberg did that when I joined On Deck and a few others did that. I think so many people, they infuse it. But I feel like with you, I was stunned when you first responded. I think we jumped on a quick call I remember actually I was screenshotting that first DM exchange we both had for the VIPF cohort about something about being proactive, because I was just telling them, if you like someone, if you resonate with their tweets and content or ambition or whatever, just DM them, right? They're looking for you too. It's not just a one-way thing. They're also looking, which in our DM exchange, I'll try to put that screenshot in the show notes here. In our DM exchange, you immediately responded and you left your phone number there, which is crazy to think about. But I remember on that call, I felt like one thing every time I talked to you, and it started with that call, that you kind of raised the ceiling of what I thought was possible for me. And it's a belief capital thing, right? You kind of were investing that belief and saying, no, KP, you can do this. This is possible. What happens, I think, with a lot of ambitious people, if you're not raised around other ambitious people, which is I think a lot of people are. I grew up in a very low-income family and around me, they're very normal, ordinary, happy, and loving people, but they're by no definition ambitious, right? They're scared of even leaving a 9-to-5 job. So what happens is like anytime you have a little bit of a creative leap, you're faced with this bully, which is the inner resistance, the demon in your brain that's saying, oh no, what if you fail? Or no, what if you suck? Or no, what if people judge you, et cetera, et cetera. Which ironically, to your point earlier, it doesn't exist when you were born from 0 to 3 or 4 years old. My son Neil is 2 and a half years old. He doesn't have any bullies in his head, right? He doesn't even know the concept of resistance. Yeah, but to your point in that essay you were writing, you were saying that when you go to school, then you get you know that you get picked on because you were a nerd, you were obsessed about something, or you're too curious about something, and then you internalize that oh maybe maybe I should not be this curious about something, right? But it's weird because all of life's greatest success comes from actually being obsessed for decades, right? You know, like if you want to go to Mars, you have to be obsessed for thirty years, you know, to make sure. You get all the pieces of the SpaceX thing right. So I think all the reward in life, all of the results and outcomes in life are usually given to the obsessed and the curious, I feel. But because of the fact that we are raised through the high school and the college systems, we have this bully inside of us that's kind of pushing back our ambition and kind of keeping us in our place. And so when I first met you, you were helping me kind of fight that bully. And even recently when we reconnected, you know, when you were doing your thing and we reconnected and I was like, wow, Neil's so good at this. He's so good at, you know, giving other people belief capital, which is something I pride myself too, but it's hard for me to give to myself.

Yeah, I think everyone's got to find it in people, right? I think that there's a strength to that. And I think that's why I reached out to you and like want to work with you, right? Is that that idea is the people who believe at the earliest stages, that's We always remember that. You always remember the first investors. Yeah. You always remember the first advisor. Like, those people really matter.

And it's funny because you even talked about Rock Health and you never talked about the growth stage investors. I promise you they put more money in it, right?

Yeah. Yes. Right. There's— we had million-dollar checks. Right. And I think— and it's like, it's been great too. Right. And like, our Series A leads have been good too. Right. But I think you do— like, there's a challenge in that first check, right? Where it's like, there was no— like, we were in Indianapolis at the time. Like, they reached out through AngelList. Like we were able to, we flew out to San Francisco, we did an interview, like we didn't know whether we were going to like move or not. Like we had basically promised ourselves as co-founders, like we're moving to San Francisco either way, we need like, we need to figure out fundraising. And then, you know, the same day it was like they interviewed us, we, a few hours later they told us we were in and then we were like planning to move. And so like that, that we, I remember that like the, the difficulty of kind of, of what we knew or like how little that they knew about us and they were really just believing in a team and believing in an idea. Yeah. And so if there are more people like that, like there should be more investors like that. I think there's so much ambition around these, like being the next Y Combinator in terms of like competing with the current Y Combinator. So there's like so many people trying to write the $500,000 checks or the million-dollar checks, and they're just leaving a lane wide open to do the original YC. It's like, who's going to write $20,000, $50,000, $100,000 checks?

And you also touched on the one-to-end thing, right? YC is more of an acceleration. True accelerator. Yeah. Once you've figured out like the business model and you kind of navigated through the idea maze and you're at a point where you're like, okay, I'm ready to kind of put some gas, put some gasoline on this and kind of like really accelerate it. Yeah. I feel like that's where YC really shines in my view. Yep. But that, and also now there's 8 or 9 of them that are trying to do the same thing, right?

Yeah.

With the same kind of check size too. I think the magic sauce, I know we both align on this, is that we believe in the 0 to 1 phase, you know, and it's very clunky and messy because there's really clear, no clear outcome. Like you can't really sell that to, say, investors. yet, or seed investors. There's no demo day as such because like some company or some founder could spend 8 months in the idea maze and not have anything to show.

Yeah,

that would not exist. Like, you know, that would not happen in the 1-to-N stage.

Yeah. And so that— and that's— YC can be good at that, right? And for the reason that— and they used to be even better, I think, of this like forcing you to change or like trying to convince you to change. It's like, what's the most ambitious thing you could— can you pivot? Like the pivot in during the YC YC class. Like, some people have pivoted to totally different ideas in the YC class. And so I'm—

I think that my challenge— I mean, I could be wrong, but I feel like the 12 weeks thing is a clock that's ticking. Yeah. And so it's so much pressure to then think about idea maze because idea maze is like best— I feel like it's best done when you're not under crazy pressure like that. You're really kind of exploring, you know, like, okay, what do I feel like I want to spend the next 10 years? It's a pretty big decision. And you may want to talk to 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 people in the problem space to really think that, okay, I'm gonna take a jump into this for the next 10 years. And you can't, like, maybe you can do one pivot, but you can't do 5 pivots. But in the idea maze stage, I think you can do 8 pivots, 10 pivots and be okay, right?

Yeah. And so I'm trying to figure out more of that. I think there's a gap there between the, what I wrote about it, I called it a founder accelerator, right? It's like if there was a Thiel Fellowship for people over 23, right? Yeah.

Why isn't there one? Can I also like, see, first of all, I felt But I think I came across Thiel Fellowship much later in my life, you know, because I was 23 when I moved to America. So I would have been by default disqualified from that. And I'm like, does Peter Thiel know how hard it was for me to even fucking come to the starting line? Yeah, like, are you kidding me? Like, to come to the starting line, I had to go through, you know, so much shit my life, you know. How many lower-income kids can make it to America from India, you know, to come to the starting line, and then you're disqualified because of age? I'm like, what the heck is that?

Yeah, I didn't, I didn't know about it until later too. I think the I think it's interesting to think about. I

think Silicon Valley overindexes on age. You know this. Like, I'm like, what is the glory about 18-year-olds? I don't get it. Yeah, I

think that's going away a little bit. It goes in waves too, right? I think that there's a challenge of every new generation when I think startups get hotter, you probably get younger kids coming in like right out of college. And I think as it gets harder, like maybe now, like in 2023, '24, the people who are like restarting like new starting companies now might be, I might guess, might be older. And so I'm curious about how those trends operate.

I think the hype cycle is inversely proportional to the age, right? The more the hype, the younger you get.

I think so. That would be my guess. I don't think it's necessarily good or bad. I think young founders are good, older founders are good. I think it's the bias of younger is necessarily better that I'm trying to get around. Yeah, because I've seen it

Yeah. I'm like, TechCrunch makes an article like, oh, 16-year-old, 16-year-old, I don't know, builds the crypto app. I'm like, I mean, so what? How is that? It's the same thing. A woman makes a crypto app. I'm like, okay, are you saying that they should not be making or what?

So

I think, I don't know, I just found that deal back to SEAL Fellowship. I thought the 23 mark was a little bit arbitrary. I think from his lens, maybe when it was the inception of that was to get people to stop going to work for big Yeah.

To stop going to college. His real idea was to get people to not go to college.

Okay, okay, gotcha.

So, he was almost solving a separate problem, whereas there's a meta solution here, which is actually what I call the money problem, which is the number one problem in the world's biggest problems list, is that there's a gap between what you're doing now and what you could be doing in your most ambitious self. And that gap might only be $50,000 or $100,000. It is like in some cases it's less. Like someone might quit their job if they had $10,000 in the bank or even if they had guaranteed healthcare, they might quit their job, right? It's like that's the only gap is their healthcare. And so, if you can actually solve it, like universal healthcare solves that problem, right? Right. And so, there might just be thousands of new founders that are unlocked just because of healthcare. Like now if you say there should be $10,000 or $50,000 or $100,000 checks should be more available, now you unlock another class of founders. And so, it's like where are the extra like the marginal founders, like how can we make more founders? That's something that is really important to me personally is like a mission is like how do we help anyone who wants to be as ambitious, whether if it's they want to be a great founder, like how do we make the front door, the on-ramp to being a founder as simple as possible? Not to make like startups are never going to be easy. It's just about making like finding the front door easy because otherwise you get a bias in who even starts. Right. And then like, and then everything after that in the entire industry is biased after that.

Right.

Right. There's so much of a— it keeps coming back to making a better front door, easier front door.

Right. On-ramps, a lot of on-ramps. I think, you know, to me, I remember the days where I was like stuck in this, you know, Delta Airlines, or I was like at Anthem Health Insurance after that during the COVID times. And then finally from there, I went to On Deck, you know. And once I went to On Deck, everything became easier, infinitely easier. The same talent, the same IQ, the same person now valued infinitely more because I think now I'm able to exercise my high agency, which I was not able to do in a corporate company that had 18 layers of bureaucracy for anything. to get done, right? And at On Deck, I could move it, you know, at super fast pace, you know, because there was literally— it was my division. I could run it the way I want it, you know, and the high agency thing, along with, you know, some of these problems that required, you know, like creative thinking, you know, which I think in some of the big corporates don't need that, right? You can just coast and it's okay to coast because they are part of a, you know, 80,000-person company. So going back to one thing you said earlier, the on-ramps are key. And one of the things that I found found to be super helpful, and I wish we do that to a lot of aspiring founders, is that there is a slight difference between aspiring founders and ambitious founders. And I think we touched on this once in my phone call with you. I, when I came to America in 2011, I was an aspiring founder, but I was not an ambitious founder. Because an ambitious founder talks about things like, I'm going to get a first round of investment, or no, things that are actually ambitious, or I'm going to build a 10-year-old company. I'm going to think in decades. All of these are Aspiring founders, I think they're talking about, they're wondering even the basic shit, like, am I even cut out to be a founder? Am I even a good leader? Or I don't even know how to hire people. How do I do a hiring call? All this bullshit basic things that both of us have passed through easily. But I remember the times when I was stuck in the aspiring founder, what would've taken for me to go from that to here? And I thought at the time that I needed to be smarter. Yeah. It was something about reading books or something, or I needed to be more intelligent. Actually, I think the— to me, the difference between aspiring and ambitious is that you just need to be around other ambitious founders. That's it.

Yeah.

You know, like, so it kind of— it's a contagious thing. You know, the more you hang out with other ambitious founders, the more you become an ambitious person, you know. So I think that's where community plays a role. Like, who do you think is your 5 to 10 people that you can count on plays a big role there.

Yeah, I think it's a huge thing. And I think the ambition bouncing off each other, I think, matters. I think the The aspiring part of it, it's— so for me, like, I got forced into it by a crisis. It was like my dad lost his business, so I had to be a founder. But I had been thinking about being a founder my whole life. I think, yeah, like, that was always an— it was always an aspiration for mine. And it like immediately— yeah, I was forced from flipping from aspiring to ambitious very quickly because I was just— I needed to work on it. I think that— so that's one of the challenges. And so I think one of the things that I would love to see more founders do is just more projects. It's like build in Yeah. If you almost like change the idea of like startup becomes like such a— it's aspirational because it feels so big. Yeah. It's like, oh, a startup is such this big thing. It was like a project is basically can turn into a startup.

So, you know, so I was— this is— I could talk about this to our fellows at the BIPF too, is that when I had my first startup, this is my 5th attempt as a startup slash company. My first startup, I spent I think 2 months trying to get the logo right, trying to get the domain right, trying to get the business cards right. I remember printing out business cards and walking I had $0 in sales. 8 months, I had $0 in sales, but I was doing all this like investment into, you know, like collaterals, marketing, website, GoDaddy, and all this bullshit. With BIPF, I went from idea to Google Doc MVP in like 1 day and went from $1K to like, I think $10K revenue in like 1 week. And it's still, it's like 8 months now, I still don't have business cards. So I think this is what it means to be an ambitious founder. So the younger KP, when he hangs out with someone like me now, realizes that, oh, that's all BS. BS. You don't need all that. You need a customer to have a business. Yeah. I think there's at least a million founders in the world right now as we speak, because the world is 8 billion people who are in the aspirational stage, Neil, who just need to know this fact and believe it, that you don't need any of that BS. You just need a customer. Like one paid customer makes you a real business person. Until then, you're in the aspiring bucket. But they don't know this actually.

Everything is built around that too, right? There's like, even like, it's like, should I get a co-founder? Yeah, it's also built around like, just do a project and maybe the person you do a project with will eventually be your co-founder.

Right. And there's so many things where I'm like, oh wow, those things used to take months for me, you know, to get around. Like also like, how do I learn to code? Like, no, now you can use no-code, right? Or AI, you know? And so there's so many, it's this whole like perfectionism syndrome that gets a lot of people, you know, sitting in the sidelines. And I think I think that's one of the reasons why I love to build in public. I love the fact that you are sharing as much as you can in public as well, because I want ideas to me are like magnets when you publish online, right? Because they attract other kind of people who believe in the same.

Yeah, it's hard for me too, because I think when I'm trying to think about all these different— I'm talking about startups and politics and trying to connect the two. I think that there's a unique lane there. It's interesting. I think it's a valuable where not that many people are talking about it, but it's also— it becomes that calling card where I want to find other people who are like that. It's like a selection thing where by writing— I think there's this same thing that happens with startups happens with writing too, where people are just like, oh, I want my first blog post or my 10th blog post to go viral. And it's not really about that. It's actually about there's 100+ blog posts there and different people know me for different blog posts, or there's a few that they really liked. And it's different for different people, but they like, it has a direct connection to like, I've clearly thought deeper about this than many other people. And so I have like a proof of work, like from a crypto term, right? Is like, I have clearly like worked and thought through these ideas at a really deep level. And so we can like start at a much higher level when we get into something. And so that's what I've been like trying to do that as much as possible of just like, and just like sharing all the information for free and just like pulling people in that way is just, that's the only way to succeed. I think it's like we talked about it, it's like building in public's like that, but it's like thinking in public, right? There's like another way to do it is like if you really kind of like building your brand in public or like you as a person are going public, not just your business, that's like really exciting. And so something that like I think we can talk about a lot more too.

Yeah, that's the path I'm on is, is I think after, you know, all my Twitter journey now I'm like, okay, I think I'm at a point where I just want to be me in public, share all my curiosities and obsessions. I've been encouraging our fellows to do that a lot. And often when they tell me why they can't do it, it's usually this bully, and the bully is the resistance, and the resistance usually is somebody else's judgment, which you actually don't care for. Right. And so it's fascinating. So I've been a lot more intentional this year to completely be me, whatever weird, deep obsessions that I have about whatever topic it is, just put it out there. And they're like, Recruiting agents to bring the kind of people into the orbit. Anyway, so we could go for hours, as you know. What is the next exciting thing that's top of mind for you? What are you looking forward to this year? And then we can talk about where can people find you?

Yeah, absolutely. I think I've been really focused on the future of investing. And so how do we get fast first checks to founders? How do we support scientist CEOs? I think Biotech 2.0 is extremely exciting now. And so I've been writing a lot about So I had a whole series on the future of biotech and how it has this great historical analogy to tech where I think tech 20, 30 years ago had a breakthrough after 20, 30 years prior to that where there was all this building phase that had happened, right? And so you needed all the hardware and platforms to be built before we got Web 2.0 and we got all the things that we got now. And I think the same thing is kind of happening finally in biotech. tech, where we're finally starting to get the platforms. We're starting to get AI and software impacting biotech and chemistry now. And so the future is a lot of new startups that are led by scientist CEOs in biotech and deep tech and AI. So I would love to support more scientist CEOs. And then I'm going to continue to write. I'm going to keep writing The World's Biggest Problems and keep helping founders. That's what I'm looking

at. You talked about the book on the blog. Like, do you have a deadline on the book? Is this happening right now as we speak?

So I'm writing it as we speak. So it's like worldsbiggestproblems.com. I've been writing it probably for 3 or 4 years now. At this point, it's about 30% done. I mean, I absolutely believe that in a decade-long process, that it is going to be my magnum opus. It's very important to me. I want it to be a bestselling book and the kind of key thing that people put on their shelves and say, flip to a page and like, hey, could I solve this problem today? Right. Like, I want it to be that reference or that encyclopedia for the biggest problems. And so, yeah, I don't think about it that way.

Even that is so ambitious. I love that. Like, who's writing a book for a decade? You know, I don't know anyone actively thinking like that.

I think the only way that it works is to do it in public. It's like, for such a long journey, if I was just doing it and putting it into my files in some Google Doc somewhere, it wouldn't be fun. But the fact Like, now I've got 100 solutions, 20 problems, so it'll be 120 chapters. We've got 36 done, so it's like right at 30%, right? So I'm like moving through this process, but like through those, like those blogs have, some of them have gone viral, some of them have become people's favorite blog posts. I'm getting connections in politics. I'm like, some of these things are starting to become bill ideas and I can share them as bills, right? I start thinking about in that term of like, if I'm writing about politics, could this this link be shared from one congressman to another and could explain the idea in a way that it could be a bill. Or if I wrote this startup idea or this is how a VC fund should operate, someone could take that idea and could actually create the startup based on it, or they could find that the startup already exists. And so the process of writing that whole book in public has just so much fun and then also has led me to connect with so many cool people.

That's Awesome. I'm wishing you well in that one. I mean, I know we're gonna stay in touch, you know, but where do you want to— what's the URL you want to, you know, plug at the end? Where do you want people to follow you online?

Yeah, so all of my articles are at neilthanedar.com. The World's Biggest Problems book is worldsbiggestproblems.com. And then I'm on Twitter @neilthanedar. If you've read any of these posts, you like The World's Biggest Problems, if there's a specific problem you're working on, let me know. If you want to debate And like one of the problems or solutions should be higher up, I love talking about that. That's like my favorite. Like if there's a solution that's not on my list that should be on my list, like let me know. It's the most fun to talk about the world's biggest problems.

Swarm his DMs, you know, just go slide into his DMs like I did many years ago. Neil, it's a blast, man. Every time I talk to you, I just get energized. And I know this was like a bit of a formal podcast format, you know, but even then, like you just managed to, you know, make me think about ambition, you know, a So grateful to have you as a friend in my life and grateful that our paths crossed thanks to Building in Public, writing in public. And this is just first chapter, right? Where we have multiple decades ahead of us for both of us. So looking forward to that and staying in touch.

Awesome. Thanks for having me.

Thank you. Have a good one. Bye.

Thanks.