Episode 11 with Ruben Harris (Co-Founder & CEO of Career Karma)

Hello everybody. Welcome to yet another episode of Build in Public podcast. Well, in today's episode, I'm joined by a very special guest who's joining us all the way from Martha's Vineyard, Reuben Harris. He's no stranger to startup founders and investors and people who are breaking into tech. Breaking Into Startups. If you are figuring out like why I'm saying breaking into a couple of times, it's because that was exactly the name of his podcast, Breaking Into Startups. Welcome to the show, Reuben.

Thank you for having me, KP.

Lovely background. We were just chatting about like how amazing his view is. He's probably hanging out with some celebrities. He's not telling me the names.

There's other founders here. Look, that's a cool founder right there. You see that? Camille. She runs a clean tech startup.

Oh, nice.

There's a bunch of founders here. This is all Kapor Capital family. That's why I'm here. I'll be back in the Bay Area.

Love it. Love it. And he's also true Build in Public fashion. He just went live on Instagram and showed his audience what we're about to do. So in many ways, Ruben lives the principle of building in public. So of course, I wanted to chat with him and break down some of his key wins, key lessons, success stories, insights, and experiences being who he is in the last decade. So with that said, Ruben, you want to give us Give the audience here who, you know, the 3 people in the audience who may not have heard about you, a quick intro and a recap of your background.

Yeah. So CareerComma is the easiest way to find a job training program online. So we match workers to job training programs so they can get high-paying jobs in tech in about a year. We offer 6 different career paths in technical and non-technical roles. So software engineering, tech sales, design, data science, and the platform is completely free for people. The reason why we're able to keep it free for people is when we match someone to a school, the schools pay us a fee that we're able to reinvest back into the platform to create live audio rooms. So it's kind of like Discord and Clubhouse having a baby focused on careers where the individuals, the schools, and companies can give them support during the program through our community, during the job search, and for the rest of their life. The audio rooms are something that touches on our roots in podcasting. So before Career Karma, we started a podcast, as you mentioned, in 2016 called Breaking Into Startups, which It became the number one podcast in the world for people breaking into tech. We've interviewed guests like the people that you've interviewed, like Gary Vee, but put a big focus on everyday workers that figured out how to break into tech. Moms, dads, veterans, people that were formerly incarcerated, people from white-collar jobs switching into the tech industry, but also the schools, the job training programs that are teaching people to go from low income to high income in a short amount of time. We're in a very special time right now where after healthcare, I would argue there's no bigger Problem to solve other than getting millions and billions of people back on their feet. You're part of On Deck. On Deck is a great example of a training program that's helping people get trained outside of college. And the fact of the matter is that most people in the world have never gone to college. And increasingly there are more and more effective outcomes-driven training programs like bootcamps that help people get jobs. Traditional education is starting to copy that model as well. And now that most people in the world have not gone to college and they're looking for these things, there's platforms and podcasts like Building Public that are exposing to what's out there so that they can quickly get trained, get jobs. Um, and Career Karma is that, that platform that you can go to if you want to break into tech. Just download the app or go to careerkarma.com/apply and we will help you.

I love that. And I will make sure that I plug— I mentioned careerkarma.com and, and the other links we're going to talk about in the show notes. So one thing that stood out to me as I was doing some research, you know, about you and your, and your podcast and Especially Career Karma and the way you're driven and passionate about sort of going after this problem of reskilling and bringing a lot of people back into the employment engine is that it felt so personal to you. To me, it just oozed. It just felt like, you know, this is something super personal to Ruben. Clearly, this mission-driven founder. I'm curious about like, what about it is personal to you? Like, where did it start for you when it became like, yeah, this is something I want to spend a big chunk of my life on?

Yeah, no, I'm glad that that shines through. You know, a lot of people when they're raising money from venture capital, investors are looking for product market fit, right? So the fact that you've come up with a solution that solves a problem in the market, but in the beginning and even forever, you know, investors and the community and customers are looking for founder market fit. And to your point, this is personal to us. CareerCom is much bigger than a company. It's a mindset, it's a movement. And Career Karma honestly is the product we wish that we had when we were breaking into tech. My co-founders went to bootcamps, my brother went to a bootcamp. I technically went to a bootcamp for entrepreneurs with my co-founders. Y Combinator, it's like a bootcamp. On Deck is like a bootcamp.

Yep.

Right? All these accelerated forms of training that have an outcome at the end are what we went through. The thing that we realized as being people that have gone through these alternative forms of education ourselves is that there's a lot of pain To discover which program is best for you. Even when you find the programs best for you, there's a lot of psychological considerations that you're thinking about. Like, am I made for this? Like, do I belong here? Blah blah blah. So career navigation is very psychological. A lot of people think that education is the solution to career navigation, but it's only one part of it. And I would argue a small part of is a lot more factors outside of. psychology as well, like leadership skills, team management skills, a lot of things that are involved in order to like really successfully navigate a career, negotiation skills, things like that. And CareerCon was helping people do that. Related to this personal story as well, like I went to small church schools my whole life. I've been playing the cello since I was 4 years old. And when I was in school, I wasn't really focused on my grades. I was focused on throwing parties in clubs and also becoming the greatest musician in the world.

Mm-hmm.

So my mindset was like, as long as I could perform, it doesn't matter what it says on paper. But that mindset was wrong if I wanted to get into investment banking world, which is where I started. And I had a 2.98 GPA, right? I talk about the GPA because it was very hard to get people to accept me in a world where the 3.8 GPA is the minimum requirement to get in. And I had to tell a really good story. So I learned how to be a good communicator to do it. But today there's a big revolution happening in standardized tests as well. Right. You know, a lot of schools are dropping the requirement for the GMAT or the SAT. A lot of standardized test stuff is going away. Even the resume evaluation is going away because it's not about how many years you work somewhere. It's about what can you build, right? How can you add value today to an organization? So even if you never worked in tech, but you've been working as a food retail worker for a very long time, if you get a skill set really quickly through a bootcamp and you apply to a company like Instacart or Amazon, now you are Not a junior coder, you are a food retail executive that happens to know how to code, right?

Right.

And so I say all of this because there is no greater team that's out there to solve this problem better than us. And I'm not just saying that 'cause we're good at execution, which we are. I'm saying that because we've lived this life. On our podcast, you can hear who we're connected to that have lived this life. And now that we have a platform that we launched in 2018, and we have hundreds of thousands of people that have gone through our community and millions of people that come to us that trust us is continuing to build and compound as we continue moving forward towards our mission of helping a billion people in the next 10 years and connecting the world to the next opportunity. Wow.

There's several threads in what you just said that resonate with me. And the personal mission is, I think, one aspect to it, which right off the bat, we just discussed before turning this episode on that my story is similar. I came from non- Traditional startup background. Like I had zero pedigree before joining On Deck. I was like, you're, in your case, you came from investment banking. I came from Delta Airlines. Like I literally came from corporate background, did like a very product-driven, uh, like, but super large, you know, giant corporate company, you know, gigs. And I always felt like an outsider when it came to thinking about startups and tech. And I think that mental barrier you were referring to earlier is so real. And I'm saying this as someone who's neck deep now in startups, and there's hundreds of DMs that I get on Twitter, everywhere. They're like, I see so many people going through the same cycle that I went through mentally. And I'm looking from this vantage point, I'm saying, oh my God, have you seen— Instacart wants, how many Y Combinator wants, how many jobs Product Hunt wants and AngelList wants. What's crazy, Ruben, and I want to hear your thought on this and sort of your take on this, the non-symmetry of how many jobs there are right now in Series A to Series C companies looking for talent. They're obviously looking for talent. And how many people are out there in the job market who are partly because of COVID were affected, or they were genuinely curious about tech, but they always thought that they didn't belong because they felt like they watched one movie, Mark Zuckerberg or The Social Network, and they thought, okay, I'm not that guy. Hence, because I don't code, hence I don't belong. And that is the greatest mismatch, I think, of talent arbitrage that I'm noticing. And I'm like, that's why I think I'm super passionate about Career Karma and what you're building and paving the path there is you're building a bridge for this segment of people to come over to the other side and see what it's like.

That's right. So the question is, what's my perspective on all of that?

Yeah. What's your take? Because what I'm trying to ramble—

Sorry. I got it. Let me share my thoughts based on what you just said. So in the early Early days of Career Karma, when we were trying to help people understand how vast this opportunity was, we would ask them, how many people do you think is employed by Uber? Like you said, or how many people do you think is employed by SAP? You hear stories of companies like Instacart that got acquired early days with only 13 people, WhatsApp that got acquired with only 50 people, but how many people for real work at SAP that are engineers alone? It's like 30,000.

Right.

I think Target hired 3,000 software engineers last year, right? Goldman Sachs hiring 1,500 software engineer interns in a summer, right? There's like so many companies that are like traditional and non-traditional that are hiring talent today. I think there's like 9 million open jobs with like not enough people applying to them. And I think high level, it's important to understand that like half the world's not connected to the internet.

Yeah.

Right. There's like trillions of dollars that have been created from technology, but imagine what happens when the entire world is connected to the internet. There's 3 billion people in the workforce and the US is going to be— is currently at 7 billion people in the world. It's going to be 10 billion people by 2050. So the workforce is going to grow and every industry is not an industry anymore. It's going to be driven by tech. Yeah. So in the beginning, tech was creating things that were nice to have. Now it's starting to create things that are need to have. So in the beginning it was things like you said, like Facebook, Snapchat, which are cool companies, but those are vanity things. What are these needs? So I would argue things related to healthcare, transportation, housing, these deep structural things that are going to be revolutionized by tech, whether you want to or not. And historically, companies like GM and Ford, these car manufacturers were the biggest employers to people, but now it's going to be the tech companies.

And Amazon.

Look at Amazon. Exactly. Amazon employs like over half a million people by themselves.

Yeah, I think there was a stat last month that they had the highest number of—

yeah. Exactly, exactly. And in my opinion, I think that there's gonna be more non-technical roles in tech than technical roles. Fun fact, I'm running a tech company with my co-founders who are technical. They're software engineers, but I'm not a software engineer, right? My background is in sales at every startup that I work with, right? And I think the fastest way everybody can attack is either sales or coding. Naval says if you learn both, you're unstoppable. So fun fact, try that if you want to.

I say my version of that is if you know how to build and if you know how to build in public, then you're unstoppable, right? Because you can sell the story and create your app.

So I like that. Yeah, I love that. I love that version of it. But I think to your point, there's a million ways to get it. Choose one. There's marketing is not Mad Men anymore like it was with Don Draper. I love that show, but it's very digital now, you know, there's like, and you got to understand SEO and SEM, product management. Most people don't know what a product manager is, right? You know, design, which we're so creative, but so many of our people are just like creating amazing memes that go viral on the internet, but they're not getting paid for it.

Exactly.

Right? So get paid for your creativity and learn how to design and like start driving value for these organizations and eventually build your own so we can stop being digital cotton pickers. Like we're driving all the value, we're not capturing it. So We wanna help people not just get these jobs in tech and get paid and do what they love. 'Cause I think a reason why a lot of people wake up in the morning and they hate what they do is because they're not aligned with what they wanna do, but they would be energized by their work if they're aligned with the work that they feel that they were put on this earth to do or that they were challenged to do. And then use these new superpowers like coding or sales or design or marketing, whatever, data science, to add value in the world.

Right.

Like, I mean, everybody is special. We all have unique gifts that we've been given, but I would argue, Most people aren't in their zone of genius or in a place that allows them to utilize their full selves. And we're on a mission to unlock human potential.

Absolutely love that. The one fascinating thing that I noticed when I started working at On Deck and just startups in general is how incredibly autonomous my role felt. And I felt that the shift was like night and day difference compared to where I was in corporate, where I was just a cog in the giant wheel. You know, like I had to wait for someone's blessing and permission and approval. Whereas when I started On Deck, like so many things, including this podcast, was my own initiative, you know? And it's almost, almost where you're like, you, you ask for forgiveness. You don't ask for permission. I think that's one of the things, Ruben, right now that I encourage. And I'm, I'm, I'm sure, you know, you, you see a lot of people trying to break into tech and I'm like, what are you waiting on? Like, there's no gatekeepers anymore, y'all. It's over. Like, internet is the gatekeeper. Go to the internet, go to a podcast, start a podcast, start a racket. I don't know if you've heard of racket, it's the shorter version of podcast. And start creating content and make it relevant and valuable to the world. That part, definitely, if you talk just about you, you, you, you, of course, after a while, people get bored and like, what's in it for me? Right? But go look at Uber's story, create a 10-minute pitch on here's how Uber was in 2006 and Here's how they are today. And there you go. There's a piece of content that's relevant to the next generation of founders who want to emulate Uber's dual marketplace strategy. So I think that mind shift to back to your, again, self-doubt/psychological barriers. I think a lot of people, because they're currently— school trains them to be compliant, to be sort of like, you know, rule followers and like wait for permission, wait for the teacher to tell you go to the bathroom. I wonder how many people are just sitting on the fence and thinking like, man, I don't have it in me because I don't know, these guys do it. I don't know how to do it. So I'm curious, how do you do it? Why did you not care for permission? Why did you just go on and start a podcast, go to Valley, go on and start Career Karma?

Yeah. I mean, I think you said a few things that I was talking about before that as well, which is like, how do you find your zone of genius? How do you find what you want to build in public? How do you find what you want to talk about on a day-to-day basis? A lot of people are trying to find a solution. to something, right? Immediately they're like, you know, what idea can I come up with that's gonna be a billion-dollar company? But I think a quick way to like hack your way into like figuring out what your zone of genius is, is like asking yourself like, what problem or struggle have I faced more than anyone else? That doesn't mean that you've overcome it, but like what problem or struggle that you've faced more than anybody else? It could be being broke. We have a lot of loans. It could be Diabetes, it could be all kinds of things, right? Because you're gonna know more about the issues than anybody else, right? Or you might have figured it out, right? You might have figured out how to like live frugally, or you might have figured out how to beat cancer, right? You live with cancer, you beat it. You might understand how to manage your mental health, like blah blah blah, right? And once you like ask yourself, okay, is this a struggle that I felt more than anybody else, or what subject do I know about more than anybody else? It could be the most niche thing in the world because it's the internet, right? There's always going to be a audience for whatever thing that you pick. And once you discover that, talk about that and like take it a little bit deeper. Like, was I put on this earth to talk about that or solve this problem or lead people to solve this problem? And then like address it. And if you don't have the answers on your podcast, like Eric said, it's not only a shortcut to networking. A podcast is not only a shortcut to networking. And Eric, by the way, is the co-founder of, or founder of On Deck that you're part of. It's also a shortcut to an education. Like, Find smart people on the thing that you are passionate about, which I'm just going to use diabetes as an example, and then just interview everybody that's like solved problems related to that. Through that process, you're going to learn so much. Ask them all the questions that you wanted to know, get answers to it. Your listeners will get those answers too, and they'll be blessed with the knowledge as well. And then as you're interviewing people, think about how can I solve that problem with software? Do millions and billions of people understand, have the same problem? If I create a solution for this problem for millions and billions of people, is it a problem that they face frequently? Ideally, the answer is yes, because then they're using the app that you create often. And when they use the app, is there a monetization event either from them or from some other entity? Now you're making money that's sustainable. That's not just like a greed business thing. It's like sustainable, right? Which is very important. Money is just like a value exchange. Right. A representation of value exchange. And so I know money is a lot deeper than that, but we'll just pause for that. But just long story short, I think that's a shortcut to finding your joy zone of genius. Why do I feel called to like do things the way that I do things in a rebellious way without permission? I mean, part of that is natural, right? I've always kind of had a rebellious spirit, like a breaking the tech spirit, a kick in the door mindset, like a Biggie type of mindset, even though It's a controversial opinion, but I think Tupac is my choice out of Tupac and Biggie. But, um—

The crowd is split at this point right now. The audience is—

I know, right?

2 people.

Hey, I was with you until you said that. Um, so for me, I truly believe I was chosen to do this by God, right? There's a really great quote by, um, Dr. Martin Luther King that I'm gonna slaughter, but it's almost perfect, where he says like, If you feel like you are doing what you were called to do, set out as if God Almighty called you at this very moment to do it in this moment in history, right? And it took me a while to get to this point. I used to want to be an investment banker, the best investment banker in the world. I don't believe that I was given the gift of music for no reason. I played the cello well on a world-class level. I've played in Carnegie Hall. I've played in studio music, like in studios with the best artists in the world, and it will be valuable later. Right? Especially when we think about distribution and media at a tech company, which I'm sure we'll talk about later. But like, for this season in my life, at least the next 10 years, my sole focus is Career Karma, helping people break into tech, getting to this billion people in the next 10 years. And that drives me. And I know that when I'm pointed towards that North Star, when things don't work out, that's actually like me getting closer to what will work out, right? And I trust my struggle. Right? Because rejection is redirection. Rejection's got protection, right? And so I just— that's what keeps me going. I do have like an abnormal amount of self-confidence, but like time and time again, it's proven to work out because it's not about me. It's because like I'm mission-driven. And if you are mission-driven, you'll see that evidence of you being called to serve something that, um, it's hard to describe unless You put into practice.

You're probably one of the most ambitious founders I've interviewed on the podcast, and that includes Gary Vee. So it's remarkable how clear you are about what kind of communities and what kind of people you want to serve/empower, and whatever that number ends up being, whether it's a billion people or 100 million, I think it's so inspiring to watch and learn and observe your clarity in that direction, in the North Star. So I want to actually double down on that self-doubt thing, because I think that's something you talked about in a bunch of episodes on your podcast. And I've noticed that in my audience, in the people that I mentor and advise, there's a lot of people who are questioning themselves if they're fit for startups/tech because they don't know how to code. And the funny thing is I ran a fellowship at On Deck, and it's one of the programs that is one of the highly successful programs, and I still don't know how to code. And because I don't know how to code, I created a fellowship called No-Code Fellowship, and it's still massively relevant and useful in the tech world because there's so many things you can build with no-code. And back in the day, you could only build with code, right? And so, I mean, Marc Andreessen has always said like software is, you know, software is eating the world. And I had a funny sort of tongue-in-cheek tweet to that saying software is eating the world. No-code is snacking on software, you know, because you're enabling the majority of people in tech and startups who are not coders to go build something using web Adalo, Bubble, whatever these no-code tools are. And I'm sitting and most of the time I'm trying to evangelize this message and I'm like, there's these tools, pick up these tools. You don't need a 6-month bootcamp or JavaScript or whatever. It takes literally a month to learn something and train yourself, reskill, upskill in no-code and build something tangible that you can show to your future employer, to, you know, to your own portfolio, to whatever. Right. And it still seems to me, Ruben, it's a question of like, I don't know if I'm a good fit or not. And so how do you, like in Career Karma's perspective, like when you have these new people joining in, are there programs, are there initiatives within, within startup, within your company where you genuinely actually talk them into believing in themselves? Like there's some way that you help people to actually take shots on themselves?

Yes. Touch on a few things. So I think I like the no-code movement. Career Karma, fun fact, started off using no-code prototype on Bubble. We used Bubble to prototype it.

That's super dope.

And I think it's cool because it's easier to start something today than there ever has been a time to start something. The former CEO of Product Hunt, who was Eric's former boss, who now has a company called, I think a fund called Weekend Fund. Weekend Fund, yeah. Yeah, Ryan Hoover. He also says no-code is a gateway code, gateway drug to code, right? So you can't always, like if you're trying to start a company, you can't have it on no-code forever, but it does allow you to quickly prototype and test things. Maybe even if you're not a coder and you want to like figure out to show people that you know how to project manage something, there's a lot of things you could do with no-code. So it's like really valuable. And so you got to understand how that works, right? Because even to run a no-code company requires coders in there, but you don't have to be that. So I like that you touched on that. To address the way to overcome imposter syndrome, right? So one of the first books I read before I moved to the Bay was The Hard Thing About Hard Things. by Ben Horowitz, which was saying that CEOs have to manage their psychology. So that's one of the first things you gotta do. But I think that everybody needs to learn how to manage their psychology. That's why companies like Calm and Headspace are taking off these days. And for people that don't know what that is, those are mental health apps, but BetterUp, Focus On Coaching, so many apps that are doing this. I use mental tricks for myself that I actually believe. You can be like, oh man, like what's it like to be a black guy in tech? Everybody likes to ask me that, and I'm like, what do you mean? Like it's fucking awesome to be a black guy in tech. Like like I'm from Atlanta. Like most of us are black out there, and they're all successful, and they're like kings and queens, right? So if I'm in a place like Martha's Vineyard, right, which where I am right now, which is like 90% white, and I'm the only or the few one of the few black people here in Oak Bluffs, which is where all the black people are, I can look at that as a bad thing, or I can look at it as. an advantage where if there's a white piece of paper, you're naturally going to stare at the black dot and be like, okay, what is that that's different on this piece of paper? And so that can feel weird because it's kind of like being looked at on a, on a petri dish. Like you can think about it like that, like you've been looked at under a microscope. But if people are looking at you as weird, or if people are looking at you as less than, which I don't like to assume that, but let's say that they are, and they're underestimating you, that's actually an advantage. Right. Because if you're good and people are underestimating you, then it should be easy for you to exceed their expectations. Easier, right? Because they're setting themselves up to be surprised, right? If I'm coming into a pitch and you're expecting Career Karma to like not be the best or not solving the problem, I'm going to wow you every time, right? And even if you are coming with high expectations, I'm still going to wow you because I'm the best, right? Or like we're the best, right? Because it's a team effort, right? So like that mindset matters. I also think that Again, going back to that whole piece about, are you cultured? Do you truly believe that? Like, that's really going to help you. But again, changing your mindset from being underrepresented or a minority to being underestimated, which I got from Arlan Hamilton, who's one of our investors, that really helps because it's bigger than race. It's bigger than gender. It includes religion. I grew up in the church. It includes disabilities. It includes a lot of things like that. And like, you need to be proud of your unique differences. Why? Because if you want to be number one, You have to be weird. And weird is not a bad thing, right? If you, if you're not weird, then you're not number one. You're the same as everybody else, right?

I mean, Elon Musk is weird, right? I mean, exactly right. Like everybody, I think, is weird in one way, right?

The reason why Silicon Valley is special is because that's where all the weirdos are, right? And like being weird just means different, right? And I would argue whatever you feel, and this is a message, message, newsflash, whatever you think is weird about you is probably your superpower and what you want to double down on. So that's another trick to figure out what your zone of genius is. It's like, what's weird about me? What do I think is weird about me? Are there other weirdos that will resonate with that? How many of them, right? That's your superpower. I think I answered your question, but I don't know.

It does. No, it does. It does. It's also a great segue for me to like lead us into this another aspect of your story that I love so much about. And you're one of the very few founders that I think are doing it right, which is personal branding. And man, I so wish that more founders actually invested time, energy, and effort as they're getting big in terms of impact and their startups in personal branding as well. Because again, from my perspective, it is absolutely the fastest way to inspire the next generation. Because if you're not visible, if you're not present in public, then your story, your message, your ethos is not present in public. 99% of what I want to do is just show to the people that someone like me, looking like me with this accent coming from India, can make it in tech. For that to happen, I have to be fucking present, you know, and be public. So I'm curious with you, what does personal branding mean to you and why do you believe in it?

Well, number one, every company is a media company, right? So—

That's a tweet right there.

If every company is a media company, then like you have to invest in that. And as a CEO, what's a CEO's job? CEO's job is to Make sure the company never runs out of money, that they fundraise, that they tell the story of the company, that they're in charge of strategy, and that they hire people and fire people accordingly. That's the job, right? So if my job is storytelling as the CEO, if it's my job as a CEO to tell the story of the company, then I shouldn't always be in public, in my opinion, right? That's the way I think about it, as a walking advertisement for the company. And like, that actually doesn't feel corporate, right? to people. The reason why it doesn't feel corporate to people is because I've chosen a problem to solve that is personal. That is what I feel like I was called to do. That's why when you and others hear me talk about it, it comes off as genuine because it is, right? This is my life, this is our life, right? And what's awesome is when you see it impact other people's life. When I was at the ASU GSV conference, they asked me to speak on stage. What did I do? I said, I'm happy to do that, but you actually have to bring this woman that I just helped get a job in tech in New York. You gotta fly her out and put her on stage. It's not about me, it's about her.

Wow.

This is the real shit, right? She's a mom, Black woman, 2 kids, making $100,000 in New Zealand, former teacher. Amazing. So proud of her. She absolutely crushed it. And like, those are like living and breathing testaments out there, you know? So I like highlighting that. Also to your point, like, and I've always been talking about this with other founders here, there's some amazing people like the lady I showed you in the beginning, amazing people that are like closing Like huge rounds of money. Like there's that, and not just huge rounds of money, but like really solving fundamental problems. She's in clean tech. And as they're building, you can still inspire people to do things. Like it's important for not just me to win. I talk about how Black unicorns are coming. I talk about how brown unicorns are coming, right? Yellow unicorns are coming. We all coming, right? Half the world's not connected to the internet, right? Most of these people are in the developing world where there's some real problems to solve. And if there's some real problems to solve, there's some Big companies to make, right? Real big companies to make. And so I think it's important to have a personal brand just because fortunately and unfortunately, the leader of the organization matters, just like the investors of the organization matter, right? Just like the team in an organization matters, right? And what they all do matters. The curse of that is as I build my personal brand, my business is separate from the personal brand, but I do have to be mindful of what I do in my personal life because that could affect the company. So just Recognize the path that you're choosing, that like you will be public and you can control your own narrative, which I think is important whether you run a company or not, because if we don't tell our own stories, other people are going to tell stories about us. So like the answer to your question is that tell your own story or other people will tell stories about you. Put your own content out. So when people Google you, what you want to pop up is what pops up. Have you ever Googled your name? If you haven't, if you're listening to this and you haven't, do it today. And if you aren't happy with what pops up, fix it. And the way to fix it is by building in public. or creating in public or talking about things in public, because then it'll be surfaced on Google.

I love it. And, you know, just to underscore the last point around, like, as founders grow and their personal brands grow, it's really hard to draw a line between what's, what's the founder's personal brand and then the startup's brand. And it can impact the other way too. But I would argue the downside there is, of course, you know, it's real. You know, there is that downside that, you know, sometimes, you know, if you have a personal issue in your personal lives that may trickle into this company brand. But let me also point out that there's never been any tech CEO that was, uh, that could escape that anyway, like whether they were public or not public, right? Like, do you think they would cut any, like, you know, for Evan Spiegel or like Mark Zuckerberg, like they're not as public as, you know, like, you know, us, we're trying to be the next generation, but like every part of their life is analyzed through microscope anyway.

It's inevitable.

Inevitable. So no matter what you do, like eventually once you become sort of relevant and influential in tech, you know, people will have to—

That is your cross to bear.

Yeah. But it's key to your point to make sure that you have a direct line to your audience. And so—

If you don't, the media will create the narrative for you.

Create a narrative for you. Right. And so that's part of the reason why—

Which is not good.

It's not great. All right. Um, we're, we're About to hit our, um, 1-hour limit, so I'll be conscious of your time. And I want to touch on 2 topics, and both close to my heart, and I'll touch on them. One, Atlanta. 2, NBA. All right, so let's talk about Atlanta first. Give me your favorite Atlanta memory that you have.

My favorite Atlanta memory is probably the first party that we threw at a club called Studio 72 with my friend Pedro Farias.

Give me the location. I'm not really hot on the nightclub scene, but I'm like, if you tell me like where it is, it's shut down now.

It was in Tucker, Georgia.

Oh yeah.

Um, yeah, it was huge. It was modeled off of Studio 54 in Vegas, had a hot tub in it. It could fit 2,000 people. And the first party we had had like 1,500, 1,600 people in the party. And we had Tyrese there, and I was on stage with Tyrese I remember he performed Sweet Lady and like the whole crowd was like singing back and forth. And then Dr. Dre's Explode came on. And not only did he like turn the crowd up, he went into the crowd and crowd surfed.

Oh.

And it was just like a really cool, surreal moment of like a perfect curation of people, music. I believe DJ Infamous from B-103 was the guy that was on the mic, you know, shouting out different things that were happening, shouting me out. It was broadcast on the radio. When you went outside, new up-and-coming artists— there was an artist named Rocco at the time who had this song called This Morning. So I remember he was like, this morning I woke up feeling like money. I jumped up. That happened. And he was showing us his vehicles. He was like, yeah, this is my Wednesday car. And it was just super like— it was literally like a music video but in real life. And in Atlanta, pretty much every night there's a celebrity. But like, but the thing I'll say about it is like, I learned a lot about street teams. I learned a lot about graphic design. I learned a lot about marketing. This was during MySpace days.

Wow.

So Facebook, it was the Facebook, MySpace days. And I was actually more bullish on MySpace at the time. And I, we had like hundreds of thousands of people on MySpace. We would buy out the MySpace homepage to be the center of events. We like use similar to like what Facebook events is, we use MySpace for that. We learned a lot about email marketing and showing up in people's And like branding then. And, and the reason why I'm bringing this up is you probably see when I'm always posting pictures, I'm always posting pictures wherever I am, even here in Martha's Vineyard. I learned that through the parties. There was a guy named Prince from ATL Pics. Every night we had a party, he would— and this is more popular now, but he pioneered this— he would take pictures at the club that night. The next morning, he would have pictures that were dropped on his website that were branded ATL pics, and people would upload them as their profile pictures for their MySpace page. And so these high-quality pictures became the reason why a lot of people would show up to our parties, so they could get a high-quality picture taken at the club that they could upload to their MySpace page. So even now, like, when you see me at different places, I treat founders, VCs, celebs, my friends that are in tech as celebrities. So whenever I'm out, like, that encourages people to understand that tech is cool. Like, this is—

Right.

This is for you. This is for me. So a lot of stuff I learned from parties from that. So I'll say that's one. That's probably my favorite Atlanta memories.

That's a great crossover from tech to culture, right? All right. To sports now. Like, you have a favorite NBA player?

I have a favorite NBA team. I have a favorite NBA team. That's Chicago Bulls, NBA team.

The classic.

Yeah, the classic. The classic. Yeah, exactly. And I have a favorite coach. So I really like Phil Jackson. Yeah. I've studied 11 rings and And Sacred Hoops and all that. But go ahead.

My follow-up was, if you were to be an NBA player, who do you resemble the closest?

Who do you think?

Not physically, like attitude-wise, ethos-wise.

I'm curious.

Well, having known you the last hour and followed your content, I think you seem to be more like Jordan. You have that spirit, MJ spirit.

I like MJ a lot. I would say the person I study the most, probably his personality and his growth, is Kobe, who studies Jordan a lot. But I'll say it's a toss-up between Kobe and Allen Iverson.

Oh yeah.

Yeah. And let me tell you why that's like Allen Iverson. So now that I'm talking about it out loud, I actually think Allen Iverson is my favorite player. The lesson with Allen Iverson is, and I had all his shoes, like the question, you know, the answer, all that stuff. Like, The problem with Allen Iverson is he has so much talent that he wasted it, right? Even Kobe made commentaries about Allen Iverson, right? He made a lot of money that he, like, lost as well. I think $150 million that he lost. And he talks about this as well. Allen Iverson has the swag. Like, he had the music connections, he had the popularity, he had the talent, but he did not like to practice. Are we talking about games or are we talking about practice? Talking about practice. I show up to the game, don't I play it, right? That was me. with education and not caring about the grades. I showed up to show and perform, but practice matters, right? Homework matters, right? Watching film matters. Kobe was a student of the game. He studied the game and he showed up, right? It's kind of like Michael Vick back in the day, who was an Atlanta player too, you know? He was very talented, didn't want to practice, right? So, you know, growing up, my talent got in my way and I would, I would Not care about music theory, for example, just because I was better. And I, I have to play catch-up now with music theory. My brother's way better at music theory and perfect pitch than I am because I did not care about music history or music theory because I played better than everybody else. But that's God-given ability, not my full potential, right? That's lazy, you know. And so people like Jordan, people like Kobe are obsessed with the game, obsessed with winning. I like Kobe's development because in the beginning, he didn't have the best relationship with Phil Jackson.

Yeah.

But over time, he learned how to play as a team, right? Him and Shaq didn't have the best relationship in the beginning. Eventually, they did. Jordan, like, is a leader all the way. Always wanted to win, right? Triangle offense, like, all this type of stuff like this is— and he led by example. They all led by example, right? The Mamba Mentality, practicing after a game. Right. That's— I live that. Like yesterday I did a back workout and then I ran 4 miles, right? Tomorrow I'm gonna bike 40 miles, right? That's just how we do it. Um, so that's my answer to your question.

I love that. I love that. I mean, I definitely did not expect Kobe, but I kind of make— it kind of makes sense given how big of a student he was of the game. And I think so. I want to cap this off by saying, uh, well, it was a pleasure, first of all, Reuben. Get to hang out with you and get into, you know, break down some of your mental models and like, you know, get into your head a little bit. And I'm incredibly bullish about the potential for Career Karma. And like, as we discussed earlier, I think there's so much to be done. And even if you can get to the 10% of that journey, what's potential, what's possible, I think that itself will be a massive outcome for both the company and also just the community. You know, so I'm super bullish rooting for you, rooting for y'all. Would love to probably bring you back at maybe season 3 or something, because I think this is some great energy here and mutual respect.

I'm always down, man. I appreciate you having me on your show. Humbled to be on your show. You have awesome guests. So thank you for selecting me. Definitely want to be back. There's some, some big things that we're working on, which you'll see and we'll talk about.

I'm excited.

Hit me up.

Please hit me up. And my audience would love— I think that we have a lot of overlaps. I would love to to send this across to my audience too. Awesome.

Amazing.

Have a great one, Ruben. And my last point I was going to say is, yes, maybe in college you were like, I don't know, ever since talent got in the way, but I wish that you spent the rest of your tech career as Kobe, studying the game, getting better, and never resting. Right? So with that said, thank you so much, Ruben. See ya.

Let's get it, bro.