#180 with Furqan Rydhan - What it's Like Co-founding a $20B Company, Hardware for Mind Control & Vertical Farming

Anyone? I got one more in a different space that I think Sam will love. Uh, but you know, Sean, I told you about this book I read about vertical farming, and, uh, you know, basically like I read the book—

wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. You guys just were talking about crypto stuff and then he just said, I've got something I think Sam will like—

farming.

Is that big of a red flag to you?

I liked it too.

Yeah, I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no day All right, we have a special guest on the pod today. Furkan is here. He's my old co-founder, probably the smartest guy I know, especially tech-wise. So we talked about a bunch of things ranging from his last company, AppLovin, which just went public at a $20, $30 billion valuation. So we talked about, you know, the humble beginnings of that and all the way to a massive IPO, what he's doing with his money. You know, so you win the lottery, what are you going to do? And he talks about his new project that he's building out. And then we talked about a bunch of cool things that he, he shows me. So every, every week we do— I do a call with him called the Cool Shit Hour where I just sit there on video and I just say, hey, show me cool shit that you're interested in because he's like a total, you know, tech nut. He's on the bleeding edge of everything.. And so that's my hack to learn a bunch of things before they go mainstream. And so he talks about, you know, some hardware stuff that he's really interested in, like a brainwave measuring device that he's wearing. He talks about crypto, and then we talk about vertical farming and the future of that. So a bunch of cool topics on that side. I would say there's some part of the crypto stuff that might be over your head. So too many terms, acronyms, stuff you don't know about.

Here's my advice.

Two ways you could still get value even if you don't fully get it, because I only half get it. Furkan's usually 10 steps ahead of me. And so what I've learned in knowing Furkan for almost a decade now is when he thinks something's interesting, instead of just saying, I don't understand that, that's weird, lean in, go Google it later, look it up. If I had just followed a bunch of the things he was interested in, I would have made a killing investment-wise. Over the last decade, and I've learned the hard way that that's what I should do. The second thing is he shared a bunch of general advice about how he went about his career. You know, college dropout, choosing jobs that weren't the highest paying job and why he chose it, what he kind of optimizes for. I thought there was some good stuff in there. So if you are not subscribed to this podcast, if you're just listening to this podcast, maybe your friend told you about it, you know what you need to do. Open up the podcast app, Apple, the iTunes app. Or open up Spotify. On Spotify, you click follow. On the Apple Podcasts app, you're going to click subscribe. We are climbing the charts. I think we're number 12 in maybe business or investing category, and we are breaking into that top 10 and we're not leaving when we get there. So how do we do that? Subscribe. If you've enjoyed this podcast, you get value out of it, just hit the button. That's all you got to do. Hit the button.

Thank you. So Sean and I are both wearing Harvard shirts. I actually planned this. I saw you— a screenshot of you testing, and I went and grabbed my Harvard shirt.

I was about to go on this big, like, what a coincidence.

This is amazing.

No, I do have one that I wear, but I saw you were wearing it, so I wanted to wear the same thing because we normally wear black t-shirts.

Yeah. And, you know, for the record, neither of us went to Harvard, but we both do this thing where we'll wear Harvard stuff and then people will be like, oh, Harvard. And then you respond, you're like, miss that campus. Love it.

Love it there.

And you went on a tour and they actually went to Harvard. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, they're like, oh, you're wet? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I got a group on.

It was lovely. They showed me around. '04?

Oh, '04. Yeah. We almost overlapped. It's like, I don't know. I was there for lunch, but yeah.

Oh, what was it like? Were you there at noon?

Furkan's even better. Furkan didn't even finish college. So Furkan is, of all of us, he's the most, he's the smartest and most successful one. And he was smart enough to drop out after what, freshman year, sophomore year?

I was there for a couple of years. I mean, I tried to do— I went to San Jose State. I tried to do computer engineering because obviously that would have made sense. But I was running a company at the time, and every time I was deciding between electrical physics or on the phone with somebody trying to make a deal, and you know which one won.

So do you want to give a background, Sean, of Furqan? Because last time he was on, we were way smaller.

Yeah, Furqan is one of my best buddies. He was the guy I started my last company with, or was co-founder, CTO. So most co-founder pairings, I would say the most common one is one guy who can build and one guy who can sell. And that's kind of what we were, is like, I'm more like the sales guy and he's more the building guy. And so, yeah, we worked together for, I don't know, 6, 7 years, sold the company a year and a half ago. Furkan braved it out and made it one full year at a big corporation. So I got to give him props for that. That's like a an endurance challenge for you. But now he's doing his own thing. So he's got F.ink, which is— how do you describe it?

I just want to build cool things with cool people. So that's what I'm focused on. That's really it. I would describe it as if you're trying to start something, you want like a third co-founder. It's an interesting emerging tech idea. That's where I get excited and I want to put in time and money, uh, and incubate these things with you.

Fine, I'll give a different description. I'll give my, my view of it. Sweet. Basically, uh, Furkan is investing in himself like 15 years ago, whoever is that person. So if you're like a young engineer and you want to make some shit happen, and, uh, man, it'd be kind of helpful if you had somebody who's been around the block, who's done it before, who can either give you money, advice, build, actually get in the code and build with you. And so he's got this, it's kind of like Y Combinator. He's got this Discord group and every single company is like, I don't know, like a 23-year-old engineer. They get their own channel. And then basically on some of them, Furkan's actually like the backend engineer with them. On some of them, he's like the tough love investor who's like, dude, why aren't you focused on growth? Why are you talking about all this other bullshit? And in some cases it's like, oh, you need to move to San Francisco and like live on my couch. I think you've done that with a few engineers of like, literally come here, sleep on my couch, and I'll like not just seed fund you, I'll like fucking babysit you and incubate you literally and physically in my apartment.

I want to spend some time actually discussing that because I want, I want to like reminisce a little bit. But, but first, by the way, we got to congratulate Furkan also.

His, since he's come on, his last company, AppLovin, IPO'd. I don't know what, what is it at now? IPO'd close to $30 billion.

So, you know, yeah, I was going to say we have to give that part of the story, which is Furkan co-founded a company that is currently publicly traded for $20 billion.

Yeah, Furkan's rich is what I'm trying to say.

So that's like a pretty important— although it looks like you guys— did you guys just do an earnings? Something happened today where your stock just plummeted. Well, not plummeted, but went down a fair bit.

Yeah, I don't know.

I mean, all tech stocks are getting ravaged right now.

Yeah, but, you know, so congratulations. Like, basically that company, you guys were supposed to sell it for also like a huge amount, like $3 billion or something like a couple of years ago. And it And it failed. And then it turned out to be a blessing in disguise, it seems.

Well, you should explain that. That's a good story. So we're working together and Furqan's like, dude, like, I got some good news. And he's like, you know, my last company, we're going to sell for— we're going to sell— they're going to sell it. And I think it's— I don't know what it was, $1.4 billion or something like that, right? That's what the original sale price was.

Yeah, I think they put a $1.4 billion value. I think the terms were something like they're going to put in $1 billion. The value would be at $1.4 billion. They're going to buy a majority of the company. Most of the early employees would have gotten liquidated unless you're working there. You would have gotten kind of whatever new grants, uh, which would have been an amazing outcome anyways, right?

Oh wow, you built a company, $1.4 billion. That's, you know, that's a win. That's a grand slam. But then something happened. What happened and how did that work out in your favor?

And, uh, I don't know, to dumb it down, AppLovin is basically, uh, like they— you guys helped invent advertisements that you see in the middle of iPhone games, correct?

Yeah, so we started as an ad tech platform. That's when I was there. And, uh, you know, then after that they brought up, you know, kind of a— the gaming side. So they have a gaming studio which generates a lot of revenue Uh, if you think of them as like almost like a first-party game creator now, that's where I think the company's gone in the last years.

They bought Machine Zone, right? So they, they acquired a bunch of studios, they have their own studio, so they're almost more a gaming company than a mobile ad network now. So that's kind of crazy. But the funny part is, I remember you telling me like, oh, you know, we kind of did this sale, then a piece of paper is going to go sit on someone's desk, Trump comes into office, and now I think it was a Chinese company. A Chinese company is buying this. Anything that's over $1 billion, I believe there's some rule that it has to get a certain type of approval for the transaction to go through. And then it just sat there for, I don't know how many months, 6 months, 9 months, something like that. And then when they came out of that, he's like, yeah, by the way, we kind of get the best of both worlds. Their buyout turned into a minority investment, so we still got the money, but we get this free roll of, great, how big can we build this? And then Fast forward a few years and it goes public at like—

we just kind of— 20 times the value, you know, we just kind of skipped over something pretty amazing, which is he kind of was casual about it. You guys both were basically— you built this ad network that was doing wonderfully, huge company. And like, I'm going to say it in the same way, but basically you saw which games were doing cool and you go, we're just going to make games kind of like that and make them popular because we already know what's popular before even the people making the games know what's popular. And now you make all your revenue from making games. I mean, that's pretty astounding, right?

Yeah, I mean, um, I saw all of this from the outside, but like there are some key players in the company that I think were really instrumental in this. So there's this guy Rafi. He like, when, when I, you know, when we kind of created AppLovin, when we were working on the product before AppLovin, uh, this guy was just like somebody Adam knew. He knew his brother. He had worked with them before. He was like this 19-year-old guy. He's not going to go to college. He's, you know, all he wants to do is like do something big and play video games. So he'd spend all day, all night playing Street Fighter, but then he would talk to every single Japanese mobile gaming company all night, and he would just grind. And it was an awesome environment. I mean, I'm kind of like the person where if I get really excited about something, that's all I want to do. That's all I was doing at the time. So I'm at the office, Rafi's at the office. We spend all night. I'm hearing his conversations. I get pumped up about it. And then kind of during the day, we're building all these things. And you just saw people everywhere in the company that wanted to do something big and went and got it. So Rafi, I think at some point in this ad network was like, ah, I want to build games. They had built this thing called Lion Studios within AppLovin. I don't think it was very big at the start. It was kind of like some small games, but Rafi, I think he probably gets a lot of the credit to kind of spearheading that and just wanting to do it. And when I looked at the S-1 and kind of dug into it, it's like, I think it's half the business now. There's obviously details on how you determine where the business is, but I think it's half the company, which is incredible. Started with this ad network and then in 2 to 3 years towards the end of this going public era, you now have built up the second part of the business is also massive.

And the guy who started AppLovin, I mean, it was a few of you guys, but the main guy, his name's Adam, right?

Yeah, Adam.

And basically he had a— I don't know if it was mild or very successful outcome at another thing, And didn't you say that he put in like $4 million of his own money, which I don't know if that was a lot or a little to him, but a pretty substantial amount of his own money. And you guys kind of like dicked around for like 2 years, like, like you would say that like, well, let's try this. And it didn't work. And you're like, let's just go play video games and think about it. Or like, like, wasn't there like something like that where like, oh, we'll figure it out?

Yeah. Like, you know, just wranglerjeans.com. It's that easy. That's your website where you're going to shop. You don't need a Pinterest board to find Lee jeans.

Yeah, exactly. And then we messed around with a lot of different ideas and some of them weren't very good.. And I think Sean, we dealt with this a lot, right? Like you get excited about something because you have to come up with an idea, you make it, you're not really that confident with it before you even launch. You're like, this is trash. I don't even want this anymore. Get it away from me. And so there was definitely some of that.

Yeah, I think one of the things worth mentioning is that you, which I think it's worth mentioning because I remember every time I built a company, I'm always like,, well, this is just how I'm doing it. It's probably real wrong, but I don't know, the smart people probably do it this other way. And I remember feeling very comforted when you told me, like, yeah, at AppLovin, we went through 9 ideas. Is it this? Is it that? Is it this? Is it that? And some false hopes of, like, it kind of works. No, it's not going to work out. And then in between, you were like, yeah, there were some days we just came into the office, we didn't have the idea to work on, and so we just played FIFA for a bunch of hours and we would go eat, talk, come back, play some more FIFA, and then we would go home. And there were days, weeks like that. And I remember thinking, all right, that's probably not the method you should choose. But it reminded me that success is not so glamorous like they show in the movies where it's like, oh, I have the idea, I'm a visionary, I got it right away from day one, and then we work hard and we just A, B, C, D, E, it's done. And so I don't know, is that a fair representation of what you experience?

Yeah, it's definitely nonlinear. I mean, you can work really, really hard for a long time and feel like you've made zero progress, and you could be doing all the right stuff. You could be making the right calls. And the other challenge is you don't know, like, you don't get feedback right away on the things you're doing are good. I mean, you get customer feedback, but you don't get this kind of meta feedback that, like, the general type of things I'm working on are going to kind of work and hit. And, uh, I mean, Style Page was kind of one idea that we really dug ourselves into, that everything between StylePage and then AppLovin, the ad network, was just like, you know, it's just like kind of really small projects that you're not super confident about. You're trying to find some edge, you're trying to learn something. And, you know, mobile was just getting big, Android was getting big. There's some opportunities there, but you just don't know. You know, it's like how VR is today. You're like, I believe this is going to be a lot bigger in the future. What is exactly what people are going to do? It's really hard to predict. And when you tell somebody, they usually go, nobody's going to do that. Well, if nobody can predict these behaviors, how do we build them? You have to have this kind of blind conviction towards something and also get that right.

Yeah, a little luck.

Yeah, you definitely need some luck. You got to pick the right thing.

This guy Adam, how do you say Adam's last name?

Furugi.

So Furugi, Adam Furugi, he's the CEO now. And from what I've read about him, I don't know him, he seems like a wonderful CEO. Like, the Glassdoor reviews are great, he wins all these awards, he seems like a lovely guy. I've seen interviews with him. And then, but what you're describing is like a bunch of really like relaxed, calm people, just like, I'm, I'm kind of dismissing it but not really. Like, you guys are just kind of messing around and like, uh, trying to hope to— yeah, which isn't— of course that's not the reality. But how did this guy go from being this like kind of relaxed, calm dude just trying to hang out and find a hit to leading a $20 billion publicly traded company. I mean, when I look at him, he looks pretty polished. He looks like a good, good guy. That's like a pretty amazing transformation.

Yeah. And so I think relaxed is probably the wrong, the wrong word. I mean, we were intense when we played FIFA. It was like, I'm going to beat you 8 times in a row. It wasn't a casual game of FIFA, right? FIFA. So everything was competitive. And we would play mobile games competitively. That was a lot of our interest. Applovin, when we started, was actually an app where you could see what games and apps other people were playing in your social network. It was like kind of like a feed of apps. That was the first iteration of Applovin, and it was because we just wanted to see what people were playing because we wanted to kind of get those games and be competitive within it. So he's always been competitive. I think you really see that in him.

And— but you also used to say like, like Furkan's work schedule is like roll into the office at 11, lunch with the crew, catch up on what people are up to, just starts getting humming around, does a couple of meetings, starts getting home around 3, 4, and then basically by like 8:00 PM to 3:00 AM is when Furkan does his work. And then he repeats it the next day. And so I remember in our company there was a bunch of people who were just regular human beings that would work 9 to 5 and then they would go turn off their brain and go home.. And like for some of them it was really hard to have a boss and kind of like a leader who's on a completely alternate schedule. Some people were totally fine with it. They made it work. And then we recruited a bunch of like Rafi type dudes who were like, oh cool, we stay up till 3 AM here. Like, great, that's my optimal schedule too. Like, I'm down with that. And so, but at AppLovin, you had told me that Adam was the opposite. He was coming at 9, leave at 4 or 5, whatever. He's got like 5 kids, I think. And like every minute was efficient. Whereas I got to say, the way you work, it's not that every minute is like, boom, boom, boom, I'm doing this, this, this, this. Even at our company, we would take video game breaks every day at 4:00 PM. We'd go play Super Smash Bros for an hour, right? You had very opposite styles, but you guys made it work.

So let's switch to ideas. So me and you do a call every week. It's 1 hour and it's called the Cool Shit Hour. Every time I do it, I'm like, damn, I wish I'd recorded that for myself. But also people would love this. And so I want to do that basically.

Now you guys do this every week.

Yeah, we sometimes miss some weeks, but I had a kid and stuff like that, but we've been doing it pretty regularly for a couple ever since he left, you know, Twitch. I was like, well, I still want to hang out and keep in touch. It's like the best part of when we used to work together was just shooting the shit about stuff that's cool. And because Fergan, in his own words, he told me this once, was like, I'm kind of in the first 10,000 people to try any new technology and really dive deep and understand it. Because he does that, he just sees a bunch of cool shit before the mainstream does. And so my hack is, well, I'm never going to be as smart as this guy. I'm never going to understand technology. I'm not going to learn how to code, but I can be friends with him and he could explain it to me like I'm a kindergartner. Like, I'm really into this right now. Check this out. Watch this demo here. Try this out here. Open up this website. Watch this. And so we do that. And the thing with most of my relationships, including this podcast, I'm talking at least 50%+ of the time because I'm a talker. When I do the Cool Shit Hour with Fergun, I'm like, I just sit back into my desk and I like take notes as like, oh, this is cool. And I only stop to ask clarifying questions. I'm like, wait, how does that work? So I want to jump into some of those things. So we'll keep it open-ended. I have a few that I know you're interested in. I can guide us there. But let's start with open-ended, which is What are some things that are just cool or interesting to you? It doesn't have to be like something you're working on necessarily, but where's Furkan's attention right now? What stuff has caught your eye?

Yeah, I would say there's probably 3 major things. One is in the hardware space, there's just this trend that I feel like I can't get out of my mind, which is commodity hardware, whether it's like a Raspberry Pi, kind of a simple device like that, or off-the-shelf gears and things like that. Hardware plus software like machine learning equals very advanced piece of hardware.

Sam, do you know what a Raspberry Pi is?

Yeah, well, I don't know what the application is, but it's basically like a $50— I don't remember how much it costs now.

Who makes Raspberry?

Uh, it's a company called Adafruit, I believe. Um, but they're, they're like an independent company. They're like probably one of the biggest obvious makerspace companies around. Um, because they've done, you know, I think they've sold like, I want to say like 100 million of these devices now.

And so they're just crushing it. They're just, it does well.

So, so what's, um, what's give me an example of something that you or somebody has built with a Raspberry Pi just so people have a tangible example.

So there's another device of this from NVIDIA. I'm using the NVIDIA Jetson. It's like a little version of a GPU, but I basically have a little GPU plugged into my TV. It has a webcam on it and we've messed around with some pose estimation. So you can open my TV and you could basically stand there and a little ball will come and if you hit that ball, it'll go blue, or you made like a Kinect, like an Xbox Kinect, you just made like a bootleg version of it. And then we kind of did some hand gestures where if you, you know, we basically, I think, did this, this, and then this. That's kind of like the 3 gestures, and we can kind of read that on the other side.

And so, and he basically just put up like, you put up like a 1, a 2, or a 3, basically, right?

But instead of like that company that sold to Lululemon for like $500, $600 million.

Mirror, I think. Yeah, exactly. Mirror is like $2,000. Right.

A huge piece of hardware for thousands of dollars that you have to mount onto your wall. Well, you already have a screen on your wall called your TV. What if you could just turn it into something smart? That's one of the, like, for $30 instead of $3,000.

Kind of, dude, I have, I have like a mirror competitor called Tempo. I pay $50 a month for the programming and then $2,000 for the machine.

Oh yeah.

And it's basically a flat screen TV with a— they don't call it a camera because they don't want to freak people out because like you work out like I work out shirtless in my underwear basically. So they don't call it a camera, but they call it a sensor. And it could like tell you if you're— are your poses in good form or not good form and it counts your pose, it counts your reps so you can compete. Pretty cool.

Yeah. And so that's one. I'm going to tell you about this other company. I invested in them, but I just really, really excited about it. So I'm going to tell you guys, there's a company called Neurocity. They make a brain-computer interface. So this sounds like future, but it's now. It's basically a device. And I actually wish I had it next to me, but you just put it on your head.

You can go get it if you want. I want to see if it's within the room.

Yeah, go in the room. It's in the other room.

So go for it. Me and Sam will just talk for a second. Yeah. So it'll be good for YouTube.

Sean. You know how, you know how on talk shows like morning shows, they have a guest come in and they're like, here's the latest products that you can buy for your kids this holiday season. And they're at a table and they go, this product is this, this, this, this. And they set it down, they go to the next one. That's what Furcon is right now. Basically, it's that segment where someone is just like, has placed like 8 cool things on the table and they're just going from thing to thing to thing, just dropping bombs. And I'm like, oh, great, cool, got it. Next. You know what I mean?

That's what's going on right now. This is, uh, FVC. This is Furkan's QVC competitor where he just picks up objects and is like, this is a fantastic holiday gift for the family.

Yeah. And so this is for, you know, kind of like developers and whatnot still. But this is what the device looks like, and I'll kind of give you guys a closer look. But you can see these little, uh, probe-looking things. So this would basically kind of rest on your head like that. And what this does is it listens to EEG waves happening in your brain. And I think there's many different wavelengths, but these guys have identified some set of them. And so why does this kind of relate to the story we're talking about? There's a little computer that's inside here that wouldn't have been able to happen 10 years ago. And so because you could put a little computer here that has Wi-Fi on it that can take these signals in and transmit it to the internet, this device is viable now.

And you could— So you wear that and it helps measure your, like, what, focus or your kind of— are you in flow state? It's kind of like a Fitbit in some way for your brain or what?

So the device itself first takes in raw signals, so it can detect a lot of stuff. They've added some machine learning, right? So the second part, they added software and they pre-programmed all these different actions. So there's some stuff like, are you focused right now? Are you calm right now? Uh, kind of things like that. Are you going to enter a sleeping state? They can detect all of these conditions. But there's other things that I'm really excited about, uh, where it can detect If you think about pinching your left hand, if you think about doing this action but don't do it, it can pick up that signal. Or if you think about moving your hand, your right arm, it could pick up that signal specifically. And so you could think of this as both a receive state and detect things, but also as an interface to kind of without having to move a muscle, just thinking about a muscle, you can trigger change the channel without going and picking up the remote.

So the guy who made this is like 17, right?

18? I don't know his age. I think he's a little bit older than that. But yeah, there's this guy, Alex. I believe he has a neuroscience background. And the CEO is this guy, AJ. And what's funny is I bought this device as a person, right? I'm just like, I bought this device. I think I was probably in the first 100 or 200 to buy it. And then I was like, I sent them a message. I'm like, I love this. I'm like an investor. Like, can I talk to you guys? And I don't think they responded to me. And then I joined. They sent a message like, hey, do you want to schedule like a customer call? Like they were doing customer discovery. And I'm like, sweet. So I like joined this customer discovery call, do the whole thing. But then at the end, I'm like, dude, I really love this. Like, this is me. There's a bunch of stuff about me, not some rando, but like I'm really excited about this. I want to invest. And then he was still kind of like, okay, kind of aggressive in the customer call to kind of get this. But then we followed up after I talked to him and ended up investing a little bit of money into them. But I love these devices. I love these things where it's like small piece of commodity hardware plus advanced machine learning equals potentially massive new output.

Right.

And I can go into some random ideas on how I would use this, but I'll stop.

So this is called— we got to make sure we let everyone know it's called Neurocity. So their website is neurocity.co. Their website is so awesome. When I'm on this, it— okay, so it's basically what this kind of looks like. It basically looks like a set of headphones, but you don't put it on your ear, you put it up on your head a little bit. It costs, I think, $900, and they claim that they manage your focus with music and that you minimize distractions and shifts your focus and hacks your flow. This is a brilliant website. I almost would buy this just because, like, it looks so mysterious is the right word, maybe.

I mean, it's definitely something new and early. And, you know, when people say like, hey, we're gonna manage your flow state, you always, you know, what do we all do? We kind of call bullshit on it, right? You're like, wait, like, how are you gonna do that? How are you gonna hack my body, right? And so, uh, you get a lot of snake oil in the world there. But this device, uh, it can for sure detect when I'm focused, it can detect when I'm calm, and different points. And I've programmed it to basically, like, when I have it connected to my computer, I can move my desktop around. Or, you know, I basically wanted to like see, can I open Brave Chrome, right? Like, can I open an application by thinking about something? And I can do that. That's miraculous to me. Like, that's the things you like read about in a book somewhere, and then it was in the Jetsons maybe, but it doesn't— it didn't really exist.

Can you really do that? So you could think to yourself like, move the cursor and it works?

Do you think move it? Do you think open Chrome? What do you actually think of to get get it to happen?

Yeah, so basically, uh, I programmed it to these kind of thinking of motor functions. So they have these pre-programmed like 40 or 80 motor functions like push, pull, move your right arm, move your left arm, move your index finger, like kind of. And you don't move it, you just think about that. And then you do a little training step. So like it just tells you think about moving your index finger and then stop thinking about it. And so it does like a little machine learning loop, like 20 iterations or whatever, And then again, this is a developer device still, but I can get it to run some arbitrary code when I think about my index.

Exactly.

Gotcha. Gotcha. Dude, I'm so excited to give this to my dog or to like an ape.

Dog, go to sleep. Boom.

We used to make fun of Craig Clements came on here and he's like, best idea. He had 3 ideas at the end and his best idea was dog VR. And we were like, that's the stupidest idea. But this is actually better because this would be like a way to communicate with a dog., if you could get the dog to train it. But I don't know, that seems a little difficult. Um, all right, for— so that was the first one, which is cheap commodity hardware that now lets a software programmer like make hardware without having to have a lab and a, you know, physical material engineering, making motherboards and doing all that stuff. All right, that's one, one trend. What are some others?

And, you know, and so, so let's talk about crypto real quick. So you, uh, you can apologize now for not including me in the Ether crowdsale, which I know you were on top of at the time. Did you buy in the actual crowdsale or right after?

I bought a little bit after the crowdsale, but it was like single-digit dollars. It was very cheap. I'm pretty sure I said it out loud at lunch.

You did. I remember you saying that, and I was like, I remember thinking, Ethereum, dumb name. Uh, like, that's, that's like a weird name. Normal people aren't going to want to own Ethereum? Like, that seems weird. Literally, that was my dumbass thinking. And then, like, every year since then, I sort of think about, why don't I just listen more to Furkan? Why don't I just do the things he says and stop thinking for myself a little bit? So that's kind of where I'm at. So you initially bought some crypto. I remember sitting next to you while you were buying random ass, good stuff, and then the shitcoins also, just fucking around, seeing what's what. And then you sort of showed me what's going on in DeFi. So for people who don't know, here's how I'll explain DeFi, and then you tell me what you would say. So today there's like the normal financial system. There's a stock market, there's banks you can go drive and park and walk into. When you walk into that bank, you can say, hey, here's my money, store it safely for me, like put it in a savings account, give me some interest maybe, or I'd like to take a loan out. And then they say, great, let's just decide if you are creditworthy, if you can get a loan and how much you can get. So that's the traditional financial system, like in a nutshell, the simplified version, there's a parallel universe where all those same things have been built through code now instead of by law, right? So we used to write down contracts and put them in. Lawyers would write the contracts, and now programmers write the contracts. And so you could do all those same things. So you've showed me tools and got me set up where you take your crypto money, and you can put it in a savings account and you can earn 5%, 10% a year of yield. So you earn much better interest rates. You can lend it to other people, or you can take loans and get loans for things. So explain kind of like maybe what part is most interesting to you, or give an example of something you've done with crypto where you're actually not just like speculating in the, in the DeFi space, but you're actually using this alternate financial system.

And so what's an example of what you were just saying? What's like your favorite platform for that?

Yeah. And I think lending is a big part of it. I mean, lending is dangerous in many ways. Like, you know, I look at lending as like, this is bad. That's my first reaction to any lending thing because people do that, right? They basically take it and they leverage If you take it and you have purpose behind it and you're a long-term holder of something, that makes a lot of sense, right? You can kind of do that. And the reason I find DeFi exciting is you could take all the rules that you've seen get destroyed in the 2008 crash or the dot-com crash, and you could put a contract where that can't happen. And so, for example, there's this protocol called Liquidity Protocol. It's a new protocol. They do 0% interest loans on your ETH. ETH. So you can put up ETH, you take a 0% loan, and what they've done is they've created this system where they have a stability pool that will liquidate people if they go below their collateralization ratio. And so what happens with banks—

Explain that in simple terms.

So, okay, so how do I, how do I get, um, how do—

because they're not doing a credit check, because they're not asking for my W-2 income, how do they make sure that this loan eventually gets paid back? How do they do that?

So you put in, let's say, 100 Ethereum, right? So you put in some amount that has a dollar value today, and they let you take out their token called LUSD. It's like a USD stablecoin. So now you have the stablecoin. You can trade it for other stablecoins or other coins, or take it to Coinbase using whatever mechanism and kind of get it to dollars. What you've done is you've put up your Ethereum, and you have to basically maintain some, what they call collateralization ratio. Like, you have to be over the lending amount by at least 10%, otherwise you're going to get liquidated. And the action of liquidating means somebody will go and take your Ethereum and buy it for a discount because they have to do this liquidation task. And that's the risk. You're putting this collateral up like you would in another case.

So it's like if I take a mortgage out, I can't make my mortgage payments because I lost my job. Well, the bank has my house as collateral. They can foreclose on my house. It's the same concept, but instead of a physical house, it's whatever collateral you put up initially to get the loan, your stake.

And so the, the danger is I put up Ethereum, the price of Ethereum is very volatile, it goes down a lot. I was aggressive with my ratio and I kind of went below this number and I got liquidated. I still have my loan amount, right? So, but there's obviously risks with these platforms. Like there would be a risk of buying an investment property and not being able to make rent on it or not be able to make mortgage. What I like about it is the underneath, where in 2008, the bankers just went to the government and whoever else and was like, we need new rules right now. We're dying. And so you kind of invent new rules. This rule is built into the protocol. If you're at below this ratio, some liquidator can come in and be the liquidator. You don't get a choice of, hey, is this going to happen or not? It's encoded. And so when you build financial products with directly encoded values, it makes it so that it's going to happen whether it's a good situation for you or not, whether they like how you presented yourself or not. And having gone through bad times as a founder and gone through bad credit, I don't have good credit today still. I have a lot of money in the bank and sometimes I can't go get a credit card because literally my credit still sucks from whatever, 7 years ago or 5 years ago or however long ago those problems were. And if one little thing happens, like I had a small credit card that I forgot about, it's literally a $300 thing. I missed some yearly payment fee because every year you got that fee. Man, it showed up on my credit. Oh, that's a huge ding. Doesn't matter who you really are, what you can do. That financial system sucks. If you have the ability to kind of do some of these actions, I believe you should be able to do them. And that's the most interesting thing about DeFi is access and permissionless.

So that's the general— like, that's a good, I think, general overview because most people don't really understand what is even the point of this? How does this work? Let's go specific. Are you doing anything cool with DeFi? Do you have any good trades going? Are you making money doing this? Are you actually doing anything in the DeFi space right now?

I think Uniswap is probably one of my favorite companies in the space, and I think we've talked about this a little bit. But what Uniswap did, and I'll give you kind of the simple version of it, is usually when you wanted to trade two assets, you had to create a marketplace. So let's say I have one Sean coin and I want to sell it. I need Sam to show up and buy that Sean coin, right? And if there aren't two sides and they don't agree on the price, this trade won't, and what Uniswap did, and I think there were some others before it, but Uniswap has become the biggest player in this space, is they created a one-sided trading market where a buyer or seller can show up and they're trading against what's called a liquidity pool. Investors come in and put in both sides of the trade marketplace. So like 1 Ethereum and $3,000 would create, like, let's say, a liquidity pool., then, Sean, you can just show up and say, I want to sell, and you're going to sell against this pool. Uh, you don't need another side. The pool is always the other side. And they've created a simple algorithm. They call it like, you know, AMM, an automated market maker, where, you know, they want to keep the price close. And depending on how much liquidity there is and how much you're willing to sell, it's gonna slip away from that amount. And that's where the price movements will happen.

And you were in those pools. You were saying, I'm making good money by being the liquidity pool. Give us a— what was the yield you could get? Let's say you put $1,000 in. What were you making being the liquidity provider?

Right. Okay. All right. So that's good. I think probably a little too complicated for the general audience at this point.

So Sam, where do you want to take it? I'm wearing a Harvard shirt. That's about it.

Oh, sorry, my bad.

He's talking about—

yeah, it's just a t-shirt.

I got one more.

Anyone can buy it. Anyone.

I got one more in a different space that I think Sam will love. But, you know, Sean, I told you about this book I read about vertical farming. And, you know, basically, like, I read the—

wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. You guys just were talking about crypto stuff, and then he just said, I've got something I think Sam will like.

Farming.

Yeah, that big of a redneck to you.

I liked it too. This was one of our cool shit hours was he's like, I came in thinking he's going to tell me about, you know, WBTC. And I'm like, oh, fuck, I got to go look up all these acronyms. He's like, no, vertical farming. I was like, oh, brilliant. Tell me about it. Right. Because Furkan's got a wide range. Some days I remember early on when we were working together, he's like, when Uber had just kind of was getting big, he's like, I'm thinking, he's like, I got a bunch of friends who are kind of like, you know, not doing a whole lot nowadays. I'm thinking about just renting, like, buying 5 cars and just having them run a fleet. I think I could just make X dollars doing zero work by running my own little taxi fleet on Uber. Or he was like, there's these— I forgot what it was— float spas or cryo tank companies. What was that one that you were really into?

Yeah, the cryo tanks are something that if you have bad joints like me, it's like a night and day difference on how your body feels. And so, you know, like, I still want to put one in, and I think in the lab that I'm spinning up over here, and we'll get to that probably at some point, but wait, what's the—

what's this— what's said lab?

I'm, I'm building a hardware and robotics lab here in San Francisco as a part of F.Inc. And, you know, the idea is software you can do in a coffee shop, in a living room, but you can't really build any one of these, even off-the-shelf hardware products, in your living room. And so What I want to do is take a lot of founders who are interested, or future founders who are interested in building these ideas. I'm going to have a machine shop and an electronics shop and a robotics shop in this facility. Going to be in this iconic location. And my goal is just to get a bunch of talented, hungry people in this roof and just have that great energy and build together. And so you see these companies form out of universities because they have two things. They have a shop there that you can access mostly for free. And then to have people in the shop that turns into your community. Like, as a kid, I can just show up and stand next to you while you're doing something and you go, you don't give me a weird look. You go, oh, you want to, you know how to use this? No. Okay, let me show you. Like, that little bit might be the difference between you willing to try and kind of get into a field or not.

And where are you setting up to support that?

What was that?

Where?

Where in the city?

You said it's iconic location.

Can you say where? We're looking at a place at Fort Mason in San Francisco. So it's not complete yet, but that's kind of like For me, the iconic locations are I can see the Golden Gate Bridge, I can be on the water. So we've explored stuff on the piers in general, in Crissy Field, Fort Mason. These locations, when I go there, I get excited. Going to Monkey Inferno was a fantastic office, but now outside, it wasn't that great. Like Soma, Mission, these areas, I don't get excited when I go there, and I usually don't go there too much.

How much are you willing to invest and to sink into this thing to make it interesting?

So dude, you're so cool.

Yeah, so Sam, the reason I said you're gonna like this idea and company is because, uh, I don't listen to very many podcasts, but I do listen to this podcast. This is probably the only one I listen to. This is not—

clip it, baby! We're taking that testimonial to the moon.

And I'm not even just pampering you guys, Sean. I mean, you know me, I'm not going to tell you like it is, but I really do listen you guys.

I know, because I'm pretty sure you didn't listen at the beginning when I was just interviewing folks, and then now that it's ideas and it's shooting the shit, Sam's here, he's listening now.

Yeah. And, uh, so you talked about like, hey, you know, you just sold the company. By the way, congratulations to you as well. And, uh, you were talking about how like you want to get your hands kind of into things and, you know, you want to like do some of that. So I was like, oh, okay, if I ever get back on the pod, I'm gonna tell Sam about this idea. Uh, and so I'm—

by the way, I'm sitting here taking notes, like I'm writing all this down..

And so I read this book, and this book was talking about vertical farming. I think— I don't know, I don't remember the name of the book, but basically, the first couple of chapters, it really talks about what the major problem in the US is as you're producing a lot of food. And the world, right? The world went from, I think, 3 billion people 100 years ago to almost 8 billion now. It's a pretty massive difference in how many people are on the world. You're starting to see effects. Like, we see the wildfires here in California. You hear about all these things. And so what's happening is as you start farming in soil, you basically destroy the soil, and after some period of time, you get no yield out of the soil. And so about 10 years ago, 15 years ago, vertical farming got very popular as a way to put food production closer to cities. Like, New York City requires millions of acres outside of New York City to support it. Wouldn't it make sense for that to be in the city? Well, how do you do that? Well, you could put it in these buildings, you could put it under kind of UV lights and You could drive water through it through hydroponics. And this got really popular. A lot of people invested in it.

So vertical farming is for someone like me who's zero, zero nature knowledge. What would— paint a mental picture. What is a vertical farm, bro?

Have you never grown weed in your apartment?

No, I don't smoke weed. I never grew weed. I don't do drugs.

I don't do crime. I don't either. But I feel like every 16-year-old has at least grown one pot plant. I read high school.

Yeah. So you think about plants in the ground because they need kind of nutrients from soil, but really they just need some of those nutrients and you could just put them, as long as you deliver them to the roots, it's going to pull that in. And so people figured out, hey, you can grow stuff without soil. And that's a huge, that's just a big unlock because it doesn't have to go in the ground.

So you use water, right?

Correct. You use water. And there's been more advances now where it's not just water, but it's like I think they call it aeroponics, but it's just misted, right? So it's kind of like more yield against the root and you still have to power it with sunlight. So you could put it inside a warehouse, but you need sunlight. And so big UV lights was kind of the strategy. And so phase one of vertical farming was we're going to put them in high rises, we're going to take some floors and we're going to turn them into a farm floor and that should support the building. And these are normally the pictures that you see, what people are kind of dreaming about vertical farming. It's like a giant building. Where a bunch of them are farms and it looks cool, but in practice it was like kind of a warehouse, like a data center. And that's where it ended up living. And I think that's fine. The reason these guys I got excited about, they're called Nebulum Farms. And what they do is they basically have direct-to-consumer lettuce, microgreens, and tomatoes. That's what they sell you. And so they started kind of in a different phase, kind of like Hey, we're building cool tech. Like, we've been in this, Sean, before where you're excited about computer vision and doing this thing. But actually, along the way, they realized, well, we don't really want to license out our thing. We can't franchise this. We can't do all these other ideas we had. People actually just want this. And what if we could put up a farm near you? And I think they have their first farm in Idaho, and they just have a monthly subscription to get lettuce and tomatoes, and these things show up to your door. And I mean, today they do same-day harvest to delivery. Because they've kind of taken the process down to this simple thing. They have this basic farm, and you can see some of the pictures that they have on their website of what their farm looks like, but it looks like a little data center. It's like a rack of lettuce. There's a little light that will kind of rotate and give it sunlight. And on the top, there's a mister that kind of makes sure—

What's this called? What's this called?

Nebulum Farms.

Nebulum Farms.

N-E-B-U-L-L-A-M Farms. And if you ever get a chance to go taste some vertical farmed lettuce, you will notice the taste difference. It is not the same lettuce. You're like, wait, lettuce has taste. It is good, crispy. It actually makes a huge difference in the quality of product. And I believe they can make this happen same day harvest to delivery for a large part of America.

So what they're on their website, it says less water. So you use 98% less water. And in places like California where there's Droughts, water shortages. That's a big deal. No pesticides because it's an indoor sort of controlled environment and no soil.

So no bugs, right? That's why you don't need the pesticides, right?

It says less human handling. I don't know about that. So always fresh. And basically the goal would be, hey, here's an eco-friendly thing, but also this tastes— this produce, it tastes better and you've actually had it. So what's the no bullshit like? Is it— if I didn't know, blind taste test, would I be able to tell the difference between these two or what?

Sam, why don't you get started just now?

The way that he was describing, I'm like, all right, they're mailing plants. That's not that— I mean, yeah, that's like, it's— they're okay. It's like different lettuce. It's like a candle. It's like those candles that have a ring in the bottom when you melt the candles. It's like a sticky novelty type of thing. It's cool once or twice. But the way that you're describing it now, I think, Perkan, I think what you're really good at is something I'm not as good at, which is like, you're really good at breaking your frame and like, changing— I don't know if I'm even phrasing this correctly, but kind of changing the whole paradigm, which is like, no, no, we're going to build the largest farm in the world. And now when you say that, I think, man, so you're just going to have to buy all this land and have this massive huge field. But you're kind of saying like, oh, but by the way, by farm, I mean it's like these little small things in every convenience store in America. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah. And that's kind of like the trade-off here, which is a farm that's like maybe in a 50,000-square-foot building, that might be like thousands or tens of thousands of land acres that you're replacing. Because vertical farming does many things. It reduces the water, but it also compacts how much space you need to do the action. So instead of buying large masses of land to produce this, you can buy warehouses, or facilities closer to the city center and serve that area, right? And so if you can be near like a city like Austin or San Francisco, you can kind of serve that city kind of efficiently with kind of a smaller, you know, kind of smaller landmass.

Brilliant. Yeah, that's so cool. And dude, like, I think what you're really good at— like, when I'm around you, I feel so inspired. And I want to bring something up in a second that's related to this, but basically, like, you are the type of— I hate when we talk about San Francisco, it's this lovely place everyone needs to go, But the type of people like you, there is a large density of that in San Francisco. And I am not at all naturally like you, but I felt I improved and just changed my opinion on so many things after hanging out with people like you. I don't know what we call that. I think Sean is a little bit more like you than, than I am. But we also have a handful of friends that are like that. And they just like— you guys think about stuff in such a way where maybe it's like when I ask them, when I ask myself, challenge myself to come up with an idea or think about what's the possibility of X, Y, and Z. I put these constraints on where like, well, there's no way I could pull off this because that technology for this doesn't work, or I'm not good enough to do this, or, but that's, it's always been done X. Whereas when you think of stuff, you're really good at being open-minded and defaulting to like, well, let's actually, that is kind of interesting. Let's play that out. And you don't have these constraints of like being held back that a lot of normal people like me have, I think. Do you know what I mean, Sean?

Yeah, I think it's simpler than that. I think for kind of, you know, everybody uses their own frame of reference, their own lens, and he looks at things through the lens of a technologist. So I think, and I remember sitting down next to you and being like, how did you get the way you are? And you were like, well, like, I remember when I was 5, my dad bought home, brought home like a printer and like we put it together or something, right? Wasn't that the story? Like a computer or a printer when you were like 5 or 6 years old?

Yeah, since my earliest memories, it was an XT computer. It was kind of like, you know, not even DOS yet. It was just like a screen. And he put it together, we booted it up, and I remember he had like a disk that had— you type like autoexec. I was just a kid. I knew how to type A-U-T-O-E-X-E-C. If I press enter, I get to this simulation football game, and that's all I could do. You pick a play and it runs it for you. You don't even actually play the game. But I remember that as the earliest memories. And I mean, I got started really young. I worked at a dot-com when I was 15. Just like my hobbies ended up being very valuable. I'm not a musician where I would have had to made it really big. It was like I was into computers and programming and doing things like that. And those things just happened to have become very valuable, especially in the Bay Area. And that kind of like lended itself to a lot of opportunity.

Also something that you're going to do with this. What are you calling your space again?

We call it Founders Inc. That's like the company name.

So, I want to like tell a quick story about that. So, back in 2000— and Sean, I can't see your face, so I can't tell if you're on board with this story, but I hope you are. Yeah, do it. Back in 2013, so basically, Sean, when did you start as the Monkey Inferno, like the guy in charge?

I think I joined at the end of 2012. So, basically, 2013 is kind of the actual beginning.

So, around that time, I was working out of the— I had just sold something and I didn't make a lot of money, but like $100 grand, let's say. I was looking to start something else and I found this guy named Dave and he had a thing called Founders Dojo, which was basically he rented an office. I don't know, Dave had a business that probably did half a million in sales and he probably profited $400,000. So he wasn't a rich, rich guy, but he had this office that he could spend $3K on a month and he let me and like 8 other people come and work out of his office. And we heard about it through friends of friends, like, hey, there's this thing called Founders Dojo. They're letting like people just worked there. And it's a dingy office. It wasn't nice. It was maybe 600, 500 square feet. And then down the street was the same thing, but it was far fancier. It was called Monkey Inferno. It was pretty much the exact same thing, but like way better. It was this guy named Michael Birch who was on the podcast. If you look up The Hippie Who Made $1 Billion, that Sean did that episode. And it was a guy who started and sold the company for hundreds of millions or close to $1 billion. And his like project was the same exact thing. It was nicer. You know, they had like you guys probably had like hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of interior decorating and it was like really fancy, but it was the same thing basically of like nerds and like weirdos and misfits. We all would come to these spaces and I would hang out at Monkey Inferno all the time and you guys sometimes came to our thing and we would, we would dork out to the stuff that people would make fun of. Like Dave loved Meerkat. Meerkat was basically a live streaming app, which kind of like was the early technology and early behavior for or even like a clubhouse or whatever. And he would do this thing called a Meerkathon, he called it. And he would meerkat for 24 hours straight. He would be in the office meerkatting for 24 hours straight. And he would meet these other dorks and they would come and fly into our office. And then it was just so weird. Like we did all this weird shit. One time we created this thing called, what do we call it? Coffee Rush, we called it. And you click a button and you get coffee inside of like, 20 minutes wherever you are in San Francisco and all these just nerdy, dorky little projects. But it was like the best time of my life and it was the most— one of the most formative. It was some of the best experiences I ever had as it relates to business and just like becoming a man and like tinkering with all these new things and having an open mind. And I think what you're setting up for Khanh is like the next— obviously this is like the next iteration of that. And I'm so fortunate that I've had people like you and you guys had Birch, Michael Birch, and I had Dave Grossblatt. I'm so fortunate that people like you guys exist in this world because these little silly things that like are fun and like that seem stupid on the outside. And the fact that there's these grown adults who are thankfully wealthy enough and willing to bet their money to do this stuff, it sounds outrageous and it sounds like a movie. And I'm so happy I was part of it. And it made such a huge difference. It's like the fact that these exist, it's a movie.

100%. And those places you talk about. So I know David Grossblatt as well, and I used to go to another place growing up, Hacker Dojo. It was in Mountain View. And even growing up in Silicon Valley, you didn't immediately have a network. I don't know a bunch of VCs just from growing up here. That's actually not how it worked. My block didn't have VCs on it. It was just normal people. And you really didn't find people like yourself. And so the internet changed a lot, right? It allowed people to connect with each other and find each other. But the in-person interactions they just operate differently and it's a lot more ad hoc. Like, I remember you being at the Monkey Inferno and a lot of other people that we would have work out of there. It was cool because you could just walk by, strike up a random conversation, talk about something, and maybe it resulted in nothing. And sometimes it would actually stick with you and it would be really important. And so at AppLovin, it felt the same way early on when we were kind of doing these random ideas. It was like, we're just a bunch of misfits together here that are just going to go on this journey. And that energy is just hard to replace. And it was really fun. And every time it's been there, it's been really instrumental for me and learning a lot. Like, conversations during the lunch table at Monkey Inferno shaped a lot about how people think, what are ways to conduct yourself, just things even outside of tech, right? Like, you interact with a lot of different people and you can bring good energy to it. And I think it's really critical. And so I've been on this mission slightly before COVID to kind of build this facility, but then COVID happened and obviously it's good in terms of new buildings, new opportunities, cheaper rent here in the city. Great. But I think this thing is kind of necessary for a lot of people who are in this builder phase. They might not be a founder yet, they might not go raise a bunch of money. They just want to build some stuff and hack on it. And I'm willing to kind of take a bet to build that facility.

And on this podcast, we talk a ton about buying businesses and we almost get to the point where it almost sounds like we're a bunch of banker PE types where it's like, oh, that's an interesting opportunity. But the coolest shit that I've ever done and the most fun I've ever done is just dorking out with people that were like me and just like, oh, this is kind of funny. This is silly. We could do that. And it all starts like, this is so stupid. It's so fun. And sometimes it turns into really cool, amazing stuff. And I think that that's fun to remember that that should be how a lot of stuff starts. Or maybe it's not should be, but it can be that way, which is, I think, better.

Yeah, organic is awesome, right? It just means that we just kind of sat around, we brainstormed some ideas, some of our experiences, we tried some things. You need to be able to try things. I think that's really important. And if I can reduce— for me growing up, I didn't have a lot of people that I could lean on that's like they had done this already or they were doing businesses. It was just like kind of fail as you go. Take a bunch of scars. And finding people like Adam and Sean was critical for me in the sense that I had people that I could talk to about business things that maybe other people I couldn't interact with. And I just want to kind of, if I can take that for, let's say, like Sean said earlier, myself 15 years ago, I could give myself some of that. That's what I feel like I'm kind of building over here.

Yeah. What's that cheesy phrase that's great, but cheesy. It's like, be the person you needed when you were a kid or something like that. It's one of those things that if everybody actually did it, the world would sort of be a great place. And I think that's what in many ways you're doing. I don't even know what I needed. I sort of had a different journey where I was kind of on autopilot for like 20 years. Didn't have an entrepreneurial bone in my body, didn't think about stuff. I just kind of was going with the flow. It was pretty I was trying to do good at school, but I was okay. Wasn't the best, wasn't particularly a hard worker, wasn't doing anything interesting, wasn't great socially. And I just felt like I kind of woke up when I was 21 years old and started— when I had my first idea for a company, that's when I started to be more like me. And so I think everybody— okay, why do I do this podcast? Well, I'm not going to say I do it to give back. That's not why I do it, because it's fun. But the side effect of doing it is that the person who's me when they're 18, 17, 16, 20 years old or 30, doesn't even matter how old. If you're kind of in that autopilot phase where you don't feel like you found your thing or you don't feel like, you know, you're excited every day to wake up, then all of a sudden you hear a couple of guys on a podcast shooting the shit. They sound really excited about life. They got great energy, they got ideas for days, and you start to look at yourself like, why don't I see ideas all the time? How are these guys able to come on the podcast 2 times a week and do it? And so what does that do? It proliferates more people that are like me. That's what I want. I am the way I want to be. So hopefully I can, like, you know, incept a bunch of other people in their brain that maybe they can pick that up. Right. Podcast is a vehicle to do that. You're doing the same thing. You know, when you were growing up, you were messing around with hardware and cars and business when you were 15, 16 years old and you were messing around with computers. And so, and a bunch of people helped you out, right? Your dad, bringing home the computer. Or I think you told me about a guy kind of in your neighborhood who had like the car stuff that you could use to go work on cars. He didn't have that hardware and you picked up those hobbies and you just followed those hobbies, doubled down, tripled down, even though that wasn't the common path, right? The common path was finish college, get a job, like get married, have kids, whatever, right? Like everybody has this like path that's kind of like your parents and society sort of throws at you.. And you went off that path. I think when you went off that path, you probably didn't have as much guidance as you're able to provide to that next wave where they should go on to do bigger and better things because you're able to knock down a few of those walls for them or with them.

Yeah. And I like how you phrased it. The cheesy phrase is obviously interesting, but I don't think giving back is the right— that's not the right way to frame this because it's not charity, right? Obviously, I'm building a business. I do believe in the long run I want to make money with this business, and then things I'm going to invest in are going to, in the long run, pay off for me monetarily as well. But as a side effect, I do believe that kind of like your podcast, you're going to inspire a lot of people. I would love to inspire the next 1,000 builders or founders, kind of however you want to phrase it. And I think that side effect is fantastic. I don't think that business has to be detached from some side effect. I think if I wanted to make it a charity, I'd make it a nonprofit, right? That would be the way to go, and that would be kind of the way to do it. But I think there's a lot of benefit, and a lot of people will benefit, hopefully, from it. And ideally, not just because of me. Hopefully it's more like kind of what the Discord has become. It's like founders helping each other. That's the best version of this. And if I could be maybe the person that can first create the circle, then Awesome. Like, that would be the hope over here.

What's the biggest kind of like common mistake or trap you're seeing when you have those kind of young entrepreneurs in the Discord working on their projects? What is the advice you keep on giving over and over again that like you feel like is the common, the common mistakes, the common traps that they're falling into?

Sam, I don't know if you have a hard stop, but there's one other one that I think is interesting that Furqan could talk about. I don't know if you can talk about it, but PAC Protocol, or I don't know if— can you talk about that? Or is either that or I think the way you're setting up the DAO or any DAOs that you're a part of, I think are interesting. So pick one of those two and then talk about that.

Yeah. So DAO, decentralized autonomous organization, I'll call it a decentralized org because it's a little bit simpler to understand, is really just kind of like this thing happening in the crypto world where people are forming effectively these partnerships together, they're doing it on-chain, meaning as like an actual organization that kind of owns this code and things like that.

And so, you know, let me simplify for a second. So Sam, you started the hustle, you probably made a Delaware C-Corp, right? So you go to Delaware, that's the rule of law. That's kind of where you're going to go write down all your articles of incorporation. And you chose C-Corp as the like structure of your organization. And that lets you do certain things. You could take investment, you could do this, you could do that.. And so you could do an LLC, you could do an S corp, you could do it in Nevada, you could do it in California. So those are the current ways that you start when you have a project that where you need a bunch of people to work together and be financially incentivized as a group. Traditionally, you would use a Delaware C corp or LLC or something like that. So what he's providing, what he's talking about is an alternative that's been made. And I think for kind of the trick here is what What do they let you do that's different than just making it— why don't I just go do an LLC or a C corp in Delaware?

Well, it lets you first be— it lets you kind of detach yourself from the legal entity and how you are kind of like having your stake of ownership and kind of voting and governance of the company. So we talked a lot, Sean, before of like, man, it kind of sucks companies are like top heavy and everybody's putting a lot of energy and effort. And yeah, you might need a person that's responsible for making these choices, but wouldn't it be cool if— and a bunch of people on the internet basically took that. Wouldn't it be cool if we made a company that could be owned by everybody equally and you could do things like voting or managing the treasury or issuing new tokens or shares to people and you could incentivize them however you wanted? So if you bring on some people to help you market and like some, let's say, big celebrity, You can issue some governance to them. They could be a part of this. You can align incentive between investors, founders, community, the market, whoever you want.

And so here's an example of one, right, that you've shown me. So there's this thing called the LAO. Have you ever heard of this, Sam? So the LAO, L-A-O, what it is, is it's a venture fund. But instead of, like, if you go to Sequoia, Sequoia's got, you know, let's say the GPs, the general partners., it's got the managing director maybe, and it's got then the associates and the analysts. So it's like a traditional company. It's like a pyramid. And at the top is the people in charge. And what the DAO is, is basically here's a fund, you put your money in for however much money you put in, you get certain number of tokens. Tokens are like shares. And, uh, and then there's nobody specifically in charge and the fund basically can receive proposals. So there's just, they have a website. You can pitch them. The pitch goes in, everybody gets it in their inbox, everybody votes yes or no based on how many tokens they hold. That's their vote, that's their weight. And then if the majority of the DAO has voted yes, it gets the treasury, which is the bank account for the, for the, for the DAO, will pay out that project. Here's your investment. And then at any time, I, if I don't like the DAO, I can just sell my stake, sell it to anybody else. They could take my spot in the DAO and now they own, they have that share. So it's completely liquid at all times. Whether there's— maybe there's been great projects in there and now this thing looks really valuable. These tokens look more valuable than the initial money that was put in. Well, I can sell out. I don't have to wait 10 years for those projects to pan out. I can sell out today at double my money. Or, you know, I can say, I want to, I want to have more control. I'm going to buy out more tokens so that I have a greater say in this community because I'm going to spend a bunch of time and I really want to make sure my vote matters. And basically it ties your vote to your sort of your merits, how much value you put in, in this case, how much money you put into the Lao. So they did it as an investment vehicle. Other people did it as an art collecting vehicle, put money in, buy art. Art is owned by the group and you could sell and whatever. So there's these headless companies. There's no CEO in a suit at the top that is telling everybody what to do and deciding who gets hired and fired. It's just a bunch of shareholders together and you vote based on your shares. It's like a, you know, more like America, like a democracy, I guess. And then there's other variations of that too that I can't even wrap my head around. Those are the simple ones I've understood. There's others that I don't even understand yet.

Yeah, it's very complicated, very complex. But the simple version, I like how you phrase it, is kind of like a democracy times a company mixed in one. And maybe company is even the wrong phrasing there. But I'm very fascinated with this. It's a very different pattern. I don't know if it's better or worse than what we've seen traditionally, but it's definitely different. Right. And I've been wanting to kind of be a part of one, create one. And so I joined a couple, but I'm not some meaningful stakeholder in it. But then with a lot of the work that's been going on in NFTs, a lot of popularity, Top Shot has just taken over my friend's group and very popular. And I know you're super into BitCloud and some of these other platforms. And so I've been wanting to kind of wrap my head around NFTs.. And I started talking to a lot of developers and people that are interested about some of these ideas that I had. And I found like a group of 5, 6 people that I'm like, oh, we're all kind of really into this. Let's make a DAO. I'll kind of put in the first amount of money. And now a couple of my buddies are also putting in some money for getting some stake in this. And the idea is we're just going to be kind of a group of people that are going to build fun projects in the NFT space. And our goal is there's a lot of hype right now. We're in that hype cycle. Hype cycle is going to go away, right? It's the same pattern that we talked about before. Well, what are the valuable things that NFTs can do? Let's go build some of these. And so we have two ideas that we're working on right now as a group. One of them is like Shopify for NFTs. You come in, you click two buttons, and you can create your own. And I'll ask you this, Sean, you've heard a lot about NFTs, you talk a lot about them. Have you minted your own yet?

I have not.

Why not?

Uh, I don't know what the hell my NFT would be. So like, for example, we have a friend Jack Butcher who has minted many NFTs now himself, and he's a great designer, so he makes like a cool visual design.

It's like badass art.

And he's like, oh cool, instead of just posting this for free on Twitter for likes, I'll post this on Foundation and I'll sell it. And he sold some of these for $60,000, $70,000 each.. And so he's made, you know, a lot of money this year just basically selling his own kind of like his philosophies. He just makes it to like kind of a digital poster and he sells that digital poster to his fans. And so for me, I'm like, oh, that's cool. If I made an NFT, I don't know. I don't really have that artistic skill. I don't even know what the actual NFT would be. That's kind of my thought.

And then, but you haven't even just tried one, right? Like when you first saw Shopify, you went and created a store, right? Like you didn't, you didn't have to start a company, you know, or sell something, but you wouldn't do it.

One's easier than the other. One, you're typing in a user, fake new username and password.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, if I open a Shopify store, I also need to put a product there, right? Like, I can't also have a—

And so, so Sam, does that make sense of how— so like, for example, what we would do is we would say, oh cool, these guys built the infrastructure that makes it easy for us to do the following. We can create these little packs, meaning like a card pack or like a box, like a loot box. And basically put— it's a mystery box. You don't know what's inside. So you buy one, you open it up, and you're going to get one. You know, maybe you get the crap, or maybe you get the most VIP thing where Sam calls you and coaches you on your business for an hour.

And what's that called? What's the, what's the domain?

So NFTlabs.co is kind of like the main domain.

And so that's where— that's one of their projects. And so I think this is pretty cool because they're going to be able to get any like influencer like us. And so there's one thing to do what Jack's doing, which is— and actually Jack did this. I don't know if you saw this, Furkan, but he initially was selling a specific NFT. Hey, buy this thing. And then he sold 3 packs with inside was a mystery NFT.

You didn't know what was going to be. Yeah, he made many 6 figures, I believe. Yeah.

And like this mechanic, many, many games use these like loot box mechanics because it's fun. It's fun to go buy the thing and see, do you get the super rare valuable thing or did you get kind of the junk? And, you know, so you either get, you know, $0.60 on the dollar or you get $60 for every dollar you spent. And it is like this game of chance. And so what they're doing is They made a protocol where it's now easy for us to do that. We can make all these packs we could put inside, hey, tickets to our live show in Austin, or, you know, you get to be put into our like private members group, or here's a t-shirt, you know, with our, you know, here's a Harvard shirt, whatever. And so we could put any number of things, just stuff them into boxes and assign some probability, and then it'll generate the packs for us, which I think is pretty sweet.

Yeah. And, you know, like, I really just think a lot about like, what's the value underneath it? Like, we have to get to, you know, I mean, Art has value. Obviously the person buying it cares about it, but a lot of people look at that and go, wait, these things are selling for like $50 million plus and it's just a JPEG underneath. But I mean, a VIP meet and greet when you guys do your roadshow, that's pretty cool actually. And I think a lot of people would be really excited about it. It sucks if you only auction that off to the person who has the most money, right? And I think these packs give kind of the creators and influencers a way to interact with their fans kind of more broadly and say, all of you guys will get a chance, and here's kind of the things of it. By the way, you know, if there were only 10 VIP meet and greets, we'll make the third-party marketplace like Top Shot where somebody wants to go spend $100 grand for it. By the way, you guys will earn a cut of that secondary sale, plus somebody who got that, if they didn't want it and they wanted to sell it, they can kind of do that. And so you can support both sides of the ecosystem. You can make it kind of fan-friendly, but then you can go kind of get a lot of value out of it too. And so I don't know, I find creators really interesting because they're kind of an analogy to founders where, you know, I don't want to go work at a fan company. I mean, you, you know, I made it through Twitch, but it was not— it's not the right environment for me, right? Like, it's not where I'm gonna thrive, it's not where I'm gonna be excited. And I think creators have the same thing.

Yeah, that's really interesting. And I don't know, I think people should just, you know, ideally people can do the thing that they enjoy. They wake up every day, they're excited whether they got to drive to work or work from home or wherever it is. If you can do that, like that's a big unlock in your life. And a lot of people don't get that opportunity. And early on in my career, I just made those trades, like kind of no matter how financially painful or misguided, it might have seemed at the time, but I just wanted to work on things that I was excited about. And I think—

When you went to AppLovin, you had another job offer, right? What was the difference there?

But you took the move in with the parents option and then took the move in with the parents option in an absurd way.

Yeah.

How old are you? How old are you when you started at AppLovin?

Let's see, probably like 25, 26.

No, 26. So moving at home wasn't the worst, but yeah, it wasn't good.

No, actually, maybe a little bit. Yeah, 26.

That's maybe just old enough where it's kind of like, all right, what are you doing?

But definitely not quite inconvenient socially.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, when you move out, right, so you move out of your house and you move back in, it's not like a happy, like, oh yeah, I'm winning, high fives all around, right? Like, that's not the way you move back.

It's not like you had to move in with your wife or something like that.

Yeah, I mean, that—

that— moving with your wife?

Yeah, like, like, sorry, your wife Yeah, like, no, no, I mean like you, um, you're like in your 30s or like you have a family.

Oh, you know, if you have, you're like a little more established.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, 26 is old enough that it's still like you can still fuck around and maybe figure it out, which you did.

Uh, yeah, you know what I mean?

You know, I think almost be a kid.

Yeah, exactly. I think for me it was just like, I know I wanted to do this, it sounded more fun. More fun is always good. Uh, you're gonna be, you're gonna wake up, you're gonna be excited to go to work, it's not gonna be a drag. Like, you know, I would tell Sean this all the time because we used to do Sunday night calls, right, where we would kind of think about the week. And it was like my friends were always Sunday night like, oh man, work tomorrow, like Sunday like sucks, like weekend's over. And I always felt like, wait, it's exciting, like more stuff's gonna happen, this week's gonna be great. Like, and that's a big difference. If more people can do that, like that, that I think is a— when we do those—

when we did those Sunday calls, I remember I'd always be like, oh, like like, sorry, I gotta like, I'm doing this thing with family or friends or whatever. I'm like, I gotta go get on this call. And they're like, oh man, you have to do calls on Sunday nights? And I was like, I get to do calls. Like, I'm, I chose this. I want to do this. I can't wait for Monday. We got to do it tonight. You know, that was our mindset. And like, you know, we didn't have as like spectacular of an outcome, but I definitely had like a spectacular time building that out and learning all the different stuff. So anyways, I think that's, that's If you take away one thing, like maybe you didn't understand the technology, but like the meta lesson of Furkan to me is he always picked the more fun and interesting path regardless of the financial thing. And then on the financial side, just made sure that it was a bet on himself and a bet on equity so that if the fun, interesting thing does pan out, you actually do get paid out of it. And I've seen him make that trade of like, I'll work harder, I'll earn less, I'll move back in with my parents, I'll, you know, all these things, right? Like he's willing to work 3 times as hard as long as it's 3 times as fun.. And I think most people, at least from where I come from, they don't do that. They, when they make career choices, it's a rational, logical decision. And I think that gets you to a certain type of outcome. But if you hear these outcomes and you're like, how do I get some of that? I think you gotta follow the irrational playbook a bit more.

I mean, Sean, if you look across your journey at Monkey Inferno, I mean, you were a 24-year-old, pretty, pretty green, right? Like I, I think I saw your initial video. Interview that you had sent in to the Monkey Inferno. And like, whether the dollar outcome was there or not, like, I would say the rate of learning, like the growth difference for you, and I know for myself it's a massive difference. Like, I'm embarrassed at what I used to think about back then in terms of building compared to kind of after the journey. But you'd feel like that was like a 1,000x payoff and the rest of your career is going to kind of unlock because of it, right? Like, I would imagine you believe that, but I'm curious how you think about that journey.

Flip side is it's not easy, right? You're going to go the harder path, like, you know, I don't have a college degree. I didn't get that. A lot of people ask me, hey, should I go to college? I have these other things going on. And you don't have to. You can learn on your own, especially now. But it's definitely going to be a harder path. Don't expect linear returns where if I put in a year of work, I get a year of kind of success, and then I put in 5 years of work, I get 5 years of success. It might be nothing for a long time, and you might kind of get it in the end. But I don't know, the journey is very exciting. That to me is what matters because that's what you're going to do every day. You're going to wake up every day and you're going to go do this thing. Are you excited about that? And that's kind of like critical.

Yeah, thank you, dude. I always take a lot of notes. I'm taking notes now whenever you come. I'm excited for your success. That's so cool. I thought AppLovin was like this huge thing whenever it was supposed to sell a year or whenever, a few years ago now. And then now seeing what it is now, I'm like, oh my gosh, that's That's, that's, it's, it's blew my expectations. I'm sure it is yours as well. So congratulations, that's pretty badass. And what you're building is awesome. Founders Inc., that's badass.

Yeah, sweet. No, appreciate it. And, uh, yeah, no, this has been fun. Uh, I always like hearing you guys, so it's kind of fun to be on as well and shoot the shit a little bit.

Where do people find you? Founders— f.inc or founders.inc?

Yeah, f.inc, uh, that's the website. And so that's the domain. Uh, you can find me on Twitter, Furkan R. F-U-R-Q-A-N-R. So Furkan, thanks for coming in. Uh-huh. Yeah.