Fixing The Way The World Remembers People Who Have Died (feat. Rehan Choudhry)

Hey everybody, welcome to Build in Public podcast. I'm your host KP, and today I am super, super thrilled to be joined by a special guest, Rehan Chaudhuri, joining from New York. Hey Rehan, welcome to the show.

Hey, how you doing? Thanks for having me.

Of course, thank you. So I mean, we were just talking about the one big commonality we both share, which we missed last time when we connected, which is we both went to Vanderbilt. You know, I'm a Vandy grad too, went to School of Engineering grad school, and Rehan just shared with me that, He was in Owen School of Management. Rayhan, let's kick it off there. Then we'll come back to Chapter, come back to your, you know, multiple, you know, career pivots and wanna like understand the lessons that brought us to the startup that you're working on called Chapter. But let's go to your Vanderbilt time. This is 2007. Gimme a snapshot of what that Rayhan was doing in Nashville. What were the hopes and dreams of that Rayhan?

Yeah, so I was the— I was as much of an atypical candidate for graduate school as you're going to get. I did terribly in school for the vast majority of my life. I think I graduated college with a 2.2 GPA, and it wasn't for a lack of effort. I just, I just, I couldn't make it click. So after college, I ended up getting a couple of years of work experience. I was working for the Department of Homeland Security in the years after 9/11 and realized that I needed some sort of accelerant, not an accelerant in my career, but an accelerant in giving me a better sense of what I was capable of and what I could accomplish. And I applied to 10 business schools, 10 top-tier business schools, and I got rejected by 8 of them. I got into American University in D.C., and I got into— I got waitlisted at Vanderbilt University. And the day I got the waitlist letter, the bottom of the letter actually said, do not contact us. We will figure this out and come back to you. And I booked a flight. I went straight to Nashville, and I walked into one of the enrollment director's offices, and I go, look, I just— I got this letter yesterday, and I need to talk to you. So I I don't know why he let me talk, but he sat me down and I gave him the whole story. I was like, look, like, I know a lot of people say they want to come here. I need to come here. I need this in my life. I need a broader understanding of what the world looks like. I need a better understanding of what business looks like and what different ways in which people are using their strengths to accomplish big tasks. I need to be able to dream bigger. And at the end of it, I was like, look, like, I can't afford it, but I will write a deposit check right now if you would take it and accept me. And he's like, I can't do that, but let me, let me see what we can do. So I went back to my hotel, flew back home the next day, and I got an acceptance letter within the week.

I love that story.

Yeah. And then I was in Nashville, Tennessee, trying to figure out how I was going to really do the things that I wanted to do there and learn what I wanted to learn there.

What was yours? So you talked about a little bit about being— finding a way to accelerate through your life, sort of actualization or sort of, you know, higher levels of achievements. What were some of the big wide-eyed dreams you had at the time? Right. Like, you must have had something like, was it about starting a company or was it about, you know, ranks, going up the ranks in a corporate career. What were you dreaming about in grad school?

Yeah, it's funny. So, so right before I graduated, I think like a week before graduation, I had an offer in hand for Caesars Entertainment, the casino company. I was going to go work for them in a leadership development program. And I was talking to my mentor, who was a professor. His name was Bart Victor. And I was telling him how excited I was to go work in the casino industry. And he's like, yeah, that's great. You're going to play around there for a couple of years and then you'll do something else. And I was like, that's not very encouraging. You're supposed to coach me along here. And he said, He's like, look, you're an entrepreneur if I've ever seen one, and you haven't figured it out yet, but you'll get there and you'll call me when you do. And so to answer your question, at the time I had a very clear sense that I had started out in an entry-level position, but I was capable of more in a leadership position. But I had assumed that the only way to really accomplish that was working up within an organization. So I needed something that would provide an accelerant for me to be able to jump levels. And I think part of that limited focus was the result of being a first-generation American child of two Pakistani immigrant physicians who were as conservative as you could possibly get in our culture. The conversation at home is more about all the accomplishments that the other parents' kids had.

Cousins. Yeah.

Versus, of course. Yeah.

And extended family.

Yeah. And if you didn't have something that was a clear indicator of success on your resume, it wasn't valued. So entrepreneurship was considered something that you did if you had no direction and had nowhere else to go. And typically entrepreneurs Entrepreneurship in our culture was— and I'm using this as a real example because I've got several family members who did this, but like you would go franchise a Subway.

Yeah.

Somebody else in the family would pay for it. Yeah. And that was your seed investor.

Or a 7-Eleven, right? Yeah.

Yeah, that's exactly right. So at the time I went in purely thinking, I've got to figure out what my strengths are, what industry focus that was going to channel me to and what I wanted to learn. And I knew that I wanted a balance of strategy work and being in front of customers and actually working with customers at a very, very personal level. And one of the few industries that offered that was the casino industry. These businesses are multibillion-dollar businesses. At the time, Caesars was a Fortune 500 company, and they provided me that I could be up in a boardroom talking about the 10-year future development or the growth plan for the company. And an hour later, I could be down on the casino floor holding the hand of some 80-year-old woman who was trying to find the buffet. And I liked that dynamic because it never allowed you to forget who you were serving or who you were in service That's where I was headed in grad school. Being an entrepreneur was not even in the plan.

Right. It's amazing. And I mean, there's so many things I can unpack from that one, including how, like, when you think of, you know, entertainment industry, especially casinos and so on, like the first picture that comes to mind is sort of like this gala, the celebration, this party. But at the core of it is this service, you know, kind of like any other business, right? There's this exchange of service. And I'm so glad you brought up the 80-year-old looking for a buffet example because, you know, it speaks to what you actually noticed. While you were there, you know, what do you think? So give us a quick high level on like how deep you were in the sort of entertainment casino industry in a way, and how long you were there for, and like one or two top lessons you took away from that experience.

Yes, I started out and I interned for Caesars Entertainment in the middle of grad school. So that was in 2006 and I went full time in 2007. I was part of a leadership development program that was meant to teach you every aspect of the business before you found your fit and you kind of doubled down in one area. It seemed like my area was analytical marketing. Casino marketing, specifically getting people to gamble more, which I didn't necessarily approve of, but I thought it was an interesting marketing challenge. And then 6 months later, the 2008 recession hit and the entire world changed. In recessions, gambling becomes— the gambling business just disappeared entirely.

Right.

And all of a sudden you had these hotels where, at least out in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where I was, I don't know, 70%, 80% of their revenue more was directly tied to people putting money in slot machines. And that all but disappeared. And You had an entire local community that was struggling in the wake of the recession. So I saw an opportunity. It was either sit still and cross my fingers, close my eyes, and hope that the world would recover and I'd have a job again. Or I was like, I can just start taking some big swing risks and try to fix some things while also making a name for myself. So I proposed a lifestyle entertainment division for the company, which hadn't existed at the time. So lifestyle entertainment today is anything from food and wine festivals to art events to fashion shows. Anything in that category, right? And I basically told them, I was like, "Look, nobody wants to come here to gamble, but people would come here to see Bobby Flay and Rachel Ray cook on stage." And for some reason, they let me play around because I don't think they had a whole lot of other options. And within a couple years, I developed the leading lifestyle entertainment division for the casino industry that ended up getting adopted by largely the rest of the industry. So I was in Atlantic City for I don't know four years, and I caught the attention of Deutsche Bank. And at that time, bottom of the recession. This is now. 2010, Deutsche Bank had acquired a casino that they were an investor in halfway through construction at a foreclosure, which was called the Cosmopolitan. Mm-hmm. At the time, nobody really knew what was going on with the property, so they had hired a team to finish construction and launch it as a new multi-billion dollar casino. And they hired me to run entertainment for the property and actually open the casino. So I moved to Las Vegas and I took on a whole new challenge, which was trying to introduce a multi-billion dollar luxury casino Casino resort in a town that was devastated by the recession and an economy that was just starting to turn around. So my contribution to the city at that time was creating an entertainment program that was just hyper-focused on the local community. I brought the basics of it where I brought touring bands through Vegas that were not coming through Vegas at any single point, because at that time the only people that played on stage were Celine Dion and Elton John and similar acts.

Either big superstars or nobody.

Yeah. Right. Yeah, that was it. You didn't have anyone else. So like, for the local community, you're not gonna see Celine Dion 20 times a year.

Yeah, right.

You need to have those venues where you can spend $10 to see an unknown band and catch somebody before they break. So we ended up building an incubator inside our resort where I had all levels of musical talent coming through, from complete nobodies to the biggest names. And it turned out that our nobody program was what defined us. So we had bands that nobody had heard of before when they came through. through, but ended up becoming big names. So we booked the first shows for Foster the People, Mumford Sons, Adele, the Black Keys. Wow. We did shows with Jay-Z, Coldplay, Kanye, Beyoncé, John Mayer. We did Florence and the Machine's first Vegas shows. Now, obviously, the bigger names were known, but like nobody knew who Adele was when we brought her through. And what it did was it gave the local community a sense of purpose.

Optimism.

Yeah. Not purpose in like their life by any means, because we're talking live entertainment. But I mean, a sense of purpose in that their city started to definition that they could then celebrate externally, right? Like, this is the place where we saw Foster the People on stage an hour before Pumped Up Kicks broke number 1 on the charts. Yeah. And that's where— so by 2012, the casino had been open for 2 years. We changed the face of live entertainment for the city, and I got really bored. I just didn't want to— I get into these modes, I think, where all of a sudden I wake up one day and I can see the next 10 years of my life. And if it looks exactly the same as the day before, that's when I'm like, I got to get the fuck out of here. Yeah. So I resigned within that week and sat in my kitchen and started coming up with ideas for businesses. And I came up with this idea for a music festival called Life Is Beautiful,

right,

that would help bring awareness to and support for young people who were dealing with increasing rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide. And today, Life Is Beautiful is one of the top 5 global music festivals. Yeah,

well, you, you just dropped a bomb on that one because that's such a big shift, going from an idea on a napkin at your kitchen table to building an elite, you know, festival like that. Give us a breakdown of some of the inflection points in that journey, you know, personally that you're so proud of, like that meant a lot for you going from— especially I'm curious about the zero to the first win moments. And then of course, a couple others too.

Yeah, I think what I learned out of those years is what it feels like to really take risks, to really put yourself out there. And it's not about necessarily the amount of money, the budgets were big at that time. But it's really the idea that like, you're willing to get in front of a TV camera or somebody write an article or on a podcast and say with confidence that I'm going to change the face of local music in Las Vegas, that we are going to do this, and having no idea how you were going to do it, right?

Making a bold claim, bold promise, right?

Yeah. So it's the idea of one being able to do that and then rallying a team around this unknown idea and actually getting people towards that goal. So that is zero-to-one entrepreneurship at its very core. But I was doing it for corporate companies. So in some ways we had some stability, but in other ways I was so young in my career, if I crashed and burned in that gig, I would have done so on a major, major scale. So I think the first thing was the first big learning was just knowing what bet you want to make and just leaning in, not focused on risk mitigation, but just go and just going in.

Right.

And knowing that it doesn't matter how you end up on the other side, the journey, you're going to be better for it. And the The end result looked like success, but I had a lot of failures during that time, and I learned a ton about what it feels like to just consistently get your ass kicked internally while you're being celebrated externally.

Right.

So I think that was, that was the second thing, was understanding how to balance ego against like the brutal realities of having to perform and then having to be held accountable.

What does that look like? I'm curious, like in terms of just emotionally processing the Internal realities. Give me a sense of, like, an example where outside there was some interview or some big news article about the progress, but internally you just know something's broken or something needs fixing or whatever. Can you add a little flavor to this?

Yeah. I mean, at the time, so this is when we were at the Cosmopolitan. I would spend my— I don't know, I'd spend half my day giving speeches and doing interviews, and I do television interviews. I get the COVID of newspapers. I got interviewed in Billboard and Rolling Stone. And these were, these were publications that I grew up with. I was living the life that the 14-year-old version of myself would have only dreamed to have been able to live. And then I'd get into the office and you had to deal with the realities of launching a major new business at the bottom of the recession, which is performance for the business overall was not what people had projected it to be. Cost-cutting measures were going into place. We had to try to figure out how to do the same results or more with less. And when businesses are struggling, bad— if you don't have a good culture.

Yeah.

When businesses are struggling, your first indicator that you have a weak culture is that people start blaming each other.

Yeah.

And people start attacking each other.

Right.

And all of a sudden it became really hard, even with evidence of the impact of what we were doing, it became really hard to convince people to take risks. And I think that was probably the first time that I really got the conviction around the idea that I should be an entrepreneur because I I started to sit in meetings and I started to realize that I couldn't deal with the idea that my ability to bring my ideas to life were going to be limited by somebody else's risk tolerance.

Yeah.

And not, not somebody else's department's risk tolerance and not somebody, not another company's risk tolerance. But at the end of the day, like managers, department heads, leaders, they're people.

Yeah.

And if they're personally feeling insecure, if let's say like the economy's falling apart, the business is struggling and they just just sent their kid to private school and they're dealing with a big tuition number that they got to pay. They're going to operate day to day in that company with the level of insecurity that their leadership isn't expecting them to.

Right.

But they are. And in my case, if I'm trapped under that person, you're done. You're just done. So it's not to say you can't make a career out of that. People, plenty of people make careers out of it. I just know myself, I was going to implode. So I think that was the other thing that I learned was that in a lot of cases, bad things aren't forced on you. You learn to to accept them and live with them. Because you can get out of a lot of circumstances. That's not the case for everything, right? Right. Like, a lot of people are trapped in situations in their life that they were born into and they're stuck into. But at least when you're dealing with your career, it doesn't matter how many years you put into it. And if it's wrong, it's wrong. For me, this is where the ego thing came into play. 'Cause in Las Vegas, Nevada in 2012, I was one of the most sought-after people to be associated with because I was leading the top entertainment program in the country. Right. And the day before I resigned, my phone was blowing up constantly. The day after I resigned, silence. Nobody wanted to touch me.

Interesting.

I was literally— all those people that used to go to shows with me, I would call them up, see if they wanted to hang out. Nobody wanted to hang out. I wasn't getting any of the interviews. Nobody wanted to talk to me. Nobody wanted to hear my perspective on things. It was the first time that I started to get the understanding of how fickle Awarenesses.

Yeah,

right. Like like hype-based awareness, right? And I think what I learned and what I what I embraced then was the understanding that if you're willing to take the risk and cut bait and make a make a shift, you got to deal with being alone for a minute.

Yeah,

and a lot of people can't do that.

Yeah,

a lot of people can't do that.

It's more than a minute though, right? For a long long time until you have the winds favoring you again, and then you're the hotshot again. Again, because of somebody—

I mean, a minute, a minute is 2 years. I've noticed this consistently, consistently, no matter what my idea is, it takes me 2 full years to get to the point where I start feeling the benefits of putting yourself out there, right? You start getting people to critique and give opinions and talk about it.

So it makes me want to ask, like, you know, it seems like these are uncomfortable years and positions that you're putting yourself— you've been putting yourself into. What gives you comfort in this discomfort?

I don't know. I I think like we've all got a warrior story in us. We all do. And you choose to either embrace that or not. And I, when I was 23 years old, I just graduated from college and had a tough time in school. I had learning issues. I struggled in everything that I did, but I somehow managed to graduate. And I ended up getting this job working for the government. I was working for the Department of Homeland Security and I was riding a high. I was riding the highest high that I possibly could. I had a really good starting salary for that era. I wore a suit to work every day. I felt like I had a new car. I felt really good. And then one day I was at the gym and I was working out and I had a massive heart attack and collapsed and got rushed to the hospital to have emergency double bypass surgery. And all of a sudden my life was just sidelined and I had to relearn a lot of things about my life in light of that. And I think, I don't know if I got comfortable in those years being in like this questionable state where I didn't know if things were going to start getting better or go south really quickly, but I started finding this like deep-seated drive And motivation started being born out of that, out of that feeling. So I think for me, it's not— I sometimes joke that it's an addiction to entrepreneurship, and I don't think it's an addiction. I think it's that I found what inspires me and what keeps me moving and what makes me, what pushes me to be the best version of myself. And it's the risk of losing. It really is. And not the risk of losing like a competition, it's the risk of losing everything.

Because

that's the fear, is that even if I'm 42 years old and even at this age, I feel like I'm out on a limb, that if this doesn't work, I'm going to ruin my reputation and people are going to look at me seriously. And that's not real. That's like, that's something that we make up in our heads,

right?

But it's just a reality that you carry. I don't know if I answered your question.

No, I think you did. I mean, it seems to me like the comfort is in tying sort of the purpose of what you do into that warrior story and saying like, I got to do this, you know, like, I don't know what I would do if I don't do do this, right? I was talking to somebody the other day and like I got a nice compliment from them and I didn't even think of it as a compliment because for me that's just the reality. They were saying, KP, like I observe, like you say something on Monday and then you just do it on Wednesday. You don't wait for it. I'm like, I'm actually— I knew the reason why, because personally I don't believe— I'm not confident enough that I will be able to remember this idea or insight that I've had in my head 3 months later. So I'd much rather just go take action on it and manifest it in the world in an imperfect way. So at least it exists. As opposed to me thinking, you know what? I'll get to this in like Q1 2023. I can't. I just can't. I'm very impatient about those things. So I'm like, I mean, I thought that was a very good compliment. She said you have such a good bias to action. I'm like, but that's isn't that how everybody is? And like, they're no, no, it's not. And but I hang out in entrepreneurship communities all day, and like so like you, Rehan. So this is like our normal. Like the reason why we are all sort of we can read each other is because we're broken in this sense that we can't like sit on something for too long. Like your napkin story is so funny to me because it's like you just you just couldn't. You know, you were at the kitchen table. And you're like, you got to take action. And you went and did it. You know, how does all of that lead someone like you to starting Chapter? And first of all, what is Chapter? And I think we got to get to some technicals, like what is Chapter? It's an app. It's a place for you to grieve after the loss of loved ones. So, you know, again, that's just like my TLDR on it. But I want to understand your perspective on what do you think really brought you to Chapter?

Yeah, absolutely. I think so. Something you just said, That is, I think, really important to not only repeat, but like for people to really embrace. It's this idea that taking an idea from nothing to something in a very short period of time is not just a good trait, it's a superpower in the greatest sense. Because you have to remember that the vast majority of people that do, have lived, and will live on this planet can't get past taking an idea in their head to saying

Yeah,

their insecurity actually stops them from introducing something new out there.

Even vocalizing fear. Yeah,

and they can't even vocalize it out of fear of ridicule or condemnation or whatever it may be. They're just—that's the break, right? So like if you think that that's the floor, right? And what we do is it's a superpower. Yeah, I think that most founders don't get enough credit for that. We don't give ourselves enough credit for it because we get wrapped up in fundraising and we get wrapped up in planning. Budgets and all this stuff. And the only thing that's valued in our category, in our world, is creation. Yeah. That's it. So the only, like, the biggest advice that I would give to entrepreneurs is when you feel like you're stuck, just create, just do it. Right. Like, even if it's the smallest version, if you needed $1 million to raise to get your product off the ground and you raised $20 grand, just build, go.

The $20 grand version, right? Just bring it out. Yeah. Yeah. I couldn't agree more. Yeah, I mean, I see that even like I know we're kind of going on a tangent here, but I see that even in like media, right? Even in creation, like you know, I talk about building in public all the time, and eight years I spent on Twitter as a consumer, Rehan, and I was consuming all these things from everybody, all corners of the world. It's like parts of Twitter, parts of in general Twitter, and I always felt that I didn't have anything valuable to add, or I was not an expert yet. And so all these limiting beliefs limited me to not create. Create on a consistent daily basis and share my thoughts, share my ideas. So until 2018, I felt like I was like this, just like listening. And then I was like, and then I realized this, the hand that I'm showing, you know, for the folks who are watching this on video, it's ridiculous. But what I'm showing is that this is a self-imposed limiting belief. Nobody is stopping you from expressing yourself. You have to pay the price of not becoming a hotshot immediately. So instant results, if you can let go of your attachment towards instant results and followers and counts, oh my God, you You are on a whole different planet. I feel literally, and since 2018, I just looked at the other day, and from 2011 when I moved to the US to 2018, I made 400 tweets. From 2018 to 2022, I made 20,800 tweets.

Wow.

No shit. I have 35,000 followers. It's like for every tweet I'm getting a follower. So when I do the math in my head, I make like 30, 40 tweets a week and people ask like, how do you create, come up with tweets? I don't come up with, you guys are also thinking the things that I'm thinking except I'm vocalizing them. And maybe I've learned Because I've done it 20,000 times, I've learned a way to phrase it so that it's a succinct statement as opposed to like a half-baked thing. But even that, I disagree. I think some of the times I actually do half-baked shit. So my wife jokes that I tweet like I text her. That's a great compliment because that's how it should feel like. I wanna feel for my audience to understand that I'm not an expert in my domain. I'm just a curious, you know, practitioner of whatever I'm practicing. And I'm sharing— So that you catch the wake of my trail. That's it.

Yeah. I mean, look, I, I am one of your Twitter followers and I read your tweets.

You do? I apologize in advance for all the—

No, there's nothing to apologize over. I think the important thing is this, your succinct tweets, if used correctly, are brilliant thought starters for whatever happens next. And that's ultimately the best, in my opinion, the best use of Twitter as a consumer is to actually look for the content that inspires you to think of the next Yeah. It's not— Twitter is not like reading a book, right, where you're gonna read the thread and you're meant to walk away and say like, okay, I've learned what I can learn about that subject. It is inspiration to be able to do the next thing. And if you never do the next thing, then you're just burning time. But I, I think that like, look, I think that's what at least what I use your account for. Um, but I think the original question you'd asked—

So no, I think the, the original prompt was like taking action on an idea, not not letting anything get in the way, including your own limiting beliefs, right? That could be Twitter, that could be podcasting, that could be building an app, that could be writing a book, could be anything, right? If you want to start your career in entertainment, right, like, just do it. I mean, I wish somebody told me this 20 years ago, Rayhan, right? I grew up in India, right? And I always felt that, especially in the circles that I grew up in, like, I felt that I was not special and I was not precious, or I mean, not precious, but like, I was not a gifted personality or kid. And, you know, and I try my best to be a good dad now and tell my That just being born as human is a freaking triple miracle already. Like, you— I've seen, you know, watched the birth of my son and all those steps. I'm sure you know this too. Mind-blowing. Anywhere anything could have gone wrong and we would be not talking about this right now, you know? So the appreciation and gratitude that I have for him just like breathing and playing and like being like, like an idiot that he is and like tumbling and stuff. You killed it, dude. You beat like so many odds to be who you are. And now you're coming to tell me that you can't play the violin the 4th time and like that's not sounding good? True. Try seventh time, try eighteenth time. Don't give up because you're special. I don't care what you think you are. This is what I wish somebody told me when I was four, five, six, and I waited twenty-five, twenty-six years to finally accept the truth about myself that I am special. I just have to find out the talents that I have a slight edge on and use those in purpose of serving others. That's it. That's the whole life.

Yeah, no, I mean, it's

did that resonate? Like, do you think? I don't know if my sort of experience of growing up in you know in India, like I don't know how much of that translates, but I always felt. That way, you know?

Yeah. Look, it's showing up is, I don't know, 90% of it. Yeah. The rest of it's luck. Arguably, you could say like showing up is 10% of it. The rest of it's luck. But I think the reality is like I share— I've shared this with some friends of mine who get down on themselves because they're like, oh, I just heard XYZ got, I don't know, some billionaire, some like really renowned entrepreneur to invest in their company via cold email. I don't know why that's not happened to me. My response is typically like, the reason why it didn't happen to you is because you didn't send the cold email. Yeah. It's not like you said like

that.

And it's not— and he didn't get it or she didn't get it because she sent out that one cold email to that one person. She got it because she probably sent 20,000 cold emails out over the last 5 years and one of them got responded to.

Right.

And that's the thing that people just do not give enough credit to, is the idea that it's not trying once and hoping for the result. And if you don't get it, you failed. It's like repeated attempts until it finally works.

Right.

And

it's like your earlier part about showing up in Nashville with with your waitlist letter. I feel like that itself is such a great example of being an entrepreneur. You know, literally, that's literally what it is. I remember, I think I shared earlier before we started the pod that, you know, I had a tough time paying for my applications to even like apply to these universities in America because, you know, each application was very expensive if you translate that in rupees, like Indian currency. But I remember that summer writing like 400+ emails to every department that I applied to, like literally showing them some proof of work that I've done in the past that applies to their research is about and saying, is there any way I could be a TA or RA or anything? I'm willing to— I'd love— because you should take a bet on me, right? 399 of them said no, or maybe. And one of them said yes, which is Vanderbilt. And that gave me a scholarship, changed my life. Here I am literally 11 years later. So it just takes one yes. And it takes like— I think that's wrapping— I mean, having a healthy association with rejection is another huge superpower. I think.

Yeah. I mean, rejection is just part of the journey as long as you're learning from it. Right. Right. So like, I typically say this to people who ask me about for advice on how to pitch their business, whether it's to customers or investors or anyone. And my answer is always the same. It's you got to start pitching today and every chance you get, you got to pitch. And like, well, what does that mean? I was like, I'm like, look, like you're going to be at Starbucks later today. Start a conversation with the person in front of you or behind you and work in the what do you do? And when they ask you what you do, give them a pitch. And the idea is by the time you give the pitch that that's gonna work, you're gonna have done 200 of them, but each one is meant to be different, right? Your next one is supposed to be a better version of your last one because you're learning. And the people who I see that struggle are either ones that do one pitch and when it doesn't work out, they walk away, or they do the same pitch over and over again expecting a different result. And that's the definition of insanity. Yeah, right. In our space, it's— you gotta— it's iterating. You just gotta keep— Iteration. Yeah. And that doesn't— that's not limited to product development. It's like your stories You got to, you got to continue to hone that as many times as you can. It's an interesting journey. Bring us a chapter.

Yeah, bring us a chapter. Let that be the last chapter of our episode.

Yeah. So beginning of 2020, I was living anything but the Vegas entertainment life. I was in New York City, married. I had a 1-year-old son and a daughter who was on the way. My wife, for work— my wife's a news anchor— she was creating 60-second video tributes for the first COVID victims in New York. And this was at the very, very beginning of the pandemic. And New York was one of the first cities to go under full quarantine. So we were stuck in our apartment working together, and I had a front row seat to the entire journey. And the massive impact that these short videos had on these grieving communities was something I could have never expected. But then the next thing was how attached I got to the idea of trying to dissect that and figure out where the problem lay. And what I realized was memorialization is just fundamentally broken, and it's broken to the point where grieving communities are operating operating at a deficit as they continue to go through their lives because they're expected to, to move on, which is not a behavior we're supposed to do. And the second is future generations are going to struggle because they're going to grow up on a destabilized foundation because we're not knowledge transferring the way we used to. Mm-hmm. When 99.9% of people who walk life on this earth's stories will never be told, how on earth are we supposed to learn how to live our lives? So the idea was, could we get people to, as part of the grieving process, rebuild the life story of their loved one through their own memories, do so as a community, retain that community moving forward, and allow those memories and that history to be a point of empowerment that they can continue to draw inspiration from as they go through their life. So that, that person's ripple effect, that person who passed, the ripple effect of their existence would never stop rippling. And then the idea is, if you're able to do this en masse, if you're doing this at a global scale and you effectively democratize access to memorialization, imagine 100 years from now when you've done billions of stories of people who lived all kinds of lives, but now you can actually look them up and you can learn from them and you can get guidance from them in a way that can be truly additive to your existence. So all of a sudden, I found myself right back at— in grad school, at Caesars Entertainment, at the Cosmopolitan, at the early years of Life is Beautiful. I found myself with a problem, but in this case, one of the more meaningful ones I'd ever witnessed in my life.

Right.

And an opportunity to really change people's lives. people's lives. And so I went all in. I told my wife, I was like, hey, look, if I get your permission, I want to retire from live entertainment and festivals and dive into this. And she was like, I'd much rather you be home doing this than running around the country hitting music festivals, right? Like, if this is something that you're going to do for the next decade, then go do it. And I said, I think it is. So here we are.

That's amazing. So what— where are we in the journey? Like, I know you had a Product Hunt launch recently. Congratulations. You were, you know, number 1 on the day, Which is, you know, it's a big deal for folks who doesn't know. Product Hunt's like a platform where people can discover new products and tools. Where are you on the journey and what's coming next for Chapter?

So we launched Chapter, which is a mobile app dedicated to fixing the way the world remembers people who've died. We launched in beta about 6 months ago. We spent 4 months in closed beta working with real users, and then we launched publicly on the App Store and Google Play, but limited to friends and family. And then we launched on Product Hunt because that was our chance to get in front of real product people, real developers, real founders and get critiqued. Because you have a tendency to drink your own Kool-Aid when you've been working on something long enough, you fall in love with your own product. And what we got was a tremendous amount of feedback and insight and validation for a lot of our ideas. But we got a ton of support and we built an awareness level within that community that's going to be incredibly valuable moving forward as we continue to try to hone the product and make it more impactful. In addition to all that, the cherry on top or the sprinkles maybe on Top was this number one thing because there hadn't been a mental health platform or a memorialization platform or a death tech platform that had ever done that before. And I don't know if that's a function of our product being good or more so it being a topic that everybody is going to have to deal with. But either way, I'm grateful for the support that we got from people like you who literally took time out of their lives to show us the ropes. Because I've got a ton of experience in my life, but I'm a first-time tech founder. Right. This is a new world for me, and the only reason why I'm able to make the pivot the way I have is because people are willing to teach me.

Yeah, there's a lot of, you know, give-first mentality, you know, if you look in the right corners on the internet generally, but also I think just within our circles, which I feel like I've been in your shoes a couple years ago. So it's just that, you know, we're all lucky that there are— there's enough good in the world to go around. So no, that was great. I will include the link to the app in the App Store, but on both the Play Stores— I mean, both the app stores, uh, in the show notes. This is fun. This is Amazing. Thanks for catching up with me and chatting on live and talking about your, you know, decades of experience, different chapters of your life, and bringing us to chapter at the end.

Thank you for the opportunity. This was great. I really enjoyed it.

Awesome. Thank you, man. I appreciate it. You have a great one. Okay.

Thanks. Yeah.

Bye, Rehan.