#45 - Drones Washing Windows, Airpod Guided Tours & Mario Kart VR with Furqan Rydhan

Furkan is here in the house.

How's it going, guys?

What's up?

So background, who's Furkan? Furkan is, uh, my co-founder, CTO at Bebo before we sold. And, uh, we've been working together, I don't know, 5, 6 years now, maybe 6, 7 years.

Yeah, it's getting towards 7.

I think it's one of those things where you just keep saying 5 years, you know, no matter how long it's been.

But he has an interesting background before that.

Very good background. You wanna give us like the, give the highlights.

All right, the highlights, I grew up here in the Bay Area. I got started just programming as a kid. And so I had a unique experience where I worked at a dot-com when I was 15. And that was kind of like—

Were you going to high school at the time or did you drop out?

I was going to high school. I had just finished my sophomore year and I was really into computers. And my dad was like, hey, I know this guy, they need to hire some people. They're looking to make like a website at the time. They had a router for hotel rooms. So it was like hotels wanted to put in DSL and kind of like good internet. And they're like, oh, you gotta, we needed this interface, like the Linksys interface for your router now.

Just the HTML side of things.

Yeah, and HTML at the time was really nothing. It was like you could put some stuff. And I showed my dad how to make a menu and he was like, wow, this is like groundbreaking. There's no JavaScript.

How much were you getting paid at 15 to do this?

If I had worked the whole year, it would have been about $120K.

Wow, pretty ridiculous. So this was dot-com boom.

Dot-com boom, probably because they're hiring 15-year-olds, but right.

And then that happens, then you did an e-commerce thing.

And it was like—

How old were you? I was 17.

Holy shit.

I was in high school at the time. And so, that was pretty crazy because it went from one corner of the garage to full 3-car garage to living room, family room. There's boxes everywhere. My parents were super supportive of this, obviously. And so, that was kinda like the early days, I would say.

And then we'll fast forward 'cause there's a lot more to the story, but we'll do the highlights. So, if I'm listening to this, whenever I ask people their background, really what I'm trying to say is, give people a sense of who you are and also, it's kinda just like credit abilities. Like, why should you be interested in what you're trying to make?

You're trying to impress people.

Yeah, it's like this is the time to basically brag. So I'll brag for you because you're a pretty humble guy, you don't brag a lot. So the other interesting parts are, took a couple years off, played poker professionally, kind of in Europe, traveling around.

That was fun.

When you came back, did your own startup, failed. But then the next startup, which you started with Adam and a couple other guys, you guys tried and failed on a bunch of ideas. I think probably 9 ideas.

Yeah, it was about 9 ideas across 2 or 3 years that we tried. Kind of, you know, one idea, what's— it was real serious. We tried that for about 9 months. And then you're going through like 3-month chunks of like really bad ideas and attempts.

And then— and my favorite anecdote of this whole time, because I think this is very real, very— you don't hear people talk about this— was sometimes when you guys were in between ideas or you just were— it wasn't working, what did you do? You'd come to the office and do what?

Uh, we would just play FIFA all day.

I mean, literally, that's what you guys did at Monkey Inferno.

Yeah, we would do it for like an hour. These guys were just like— that was the day.

Yeah, it was like 8 hours of FIFA. Oh man, that was a tough day. Let me get back home and kind of get back to it.

And did you think that was weird? Like, Adam and those guys had had success. So if part of you was probably like, look, if, if these successful guys think this is all right, this can't be too bad. But like, I would be anxious if we were doing that.

Um, there was some anxiety, but they were super calm and collected. So that kind of was like, well, why am I worried?

Well, so Adam was, uh, pretty wealthy.

Yeah. He previously worked on a couple of ad tech companies and they had grown to be pretty big. I would say like, you know, one was worth maybe $50 million and, you know, the one before that might've been in that range too. And so He had done some stuff. John, who was the other co-founder there, uh, had worked at like VMware early and he had worked at ad products like that got bought by—

and they were self-funding the company?

Yeah, they were self-funding.

And so I cannot believe how I would be like, no, we're getting to work, I think my fucking money.

Um, and I think we worked hard. I mean, the cool thing was you sat around, you talked about things.

How many people?

We were probably like 5 or 6 people.

Got it.

So it was pretty small. It wasn't— I mean, we had a good office in Palo Alto, bigger than we needed, but You could tell they're not worried, I shouldn't be worried. You sit around for a week, you get some ideas, then you go and work on them. And it all felt pretty natural at that point.

And the outcome of this was what?

Yeah, so you cracked the nut finally.

Yeah, so we had, you know, they had a previous background in ad tech. We had made this product called Applovin that was an app where you could see what apps your friends were using. So it was like a social network where if you're playing Candy Crush, oh, it says, hey, Sam's playing Candy Crush and you should play too. And we're like, wow, this is pretty interesting. People really convert with this. This should just be an ad product. And then that kind of drove it and said, wait, Wait, we should just make a real network out of this. And then we sat down, we built that for a couple of months, and then it kind of skyrocketed after that.

And how big, how big is it now?

Yeah. I mean, I heard that it sold like only 3 years after it started.

Yeah, it was really fast.

And it was doing like $600 or $700 million in revenue, like some crazy number.

So the, the AppLovin story is $4 million in self-funding initially. Then they raised a small strategic round, or I don't know exactly what the total is, but about $5 million total funding, right?

Yeah, I think that's exactly what it was.

And then the first liquidity event, they sold a portion of the company to a Chinese company for over $1.4 billion. And so that's like massive capital efficiency. You were, you know, CTO, kind of co-founder there. So we met after that, we started working together, became, you know, you know, really good friends and have built a bunch of stuff together. And what I like about you, which is why I wanted you on the podcast, is not necessarily— we're not even gonna talk too much about AppLovin. That's just establish who you are. You are like me, you're an idea guy. You always have a bunch of ideas, you see interesting stuff, but you're deeply technical, but then get the business side and the product side too. And there's very few people who do that.

I'm definitely gonna ask about AppLovin in a little bit.

Okay.

Before we even get to the ideas, let me— I gotta tell you something real quick, 'cause this is related. So my best friend started Vungle, which AppLovin's competitor. They raised $16 million. When they got acquired, they had $100 million in cash. What did it sell for? $750 million, half of what you guys sold for. Very successful. Yesterday, Jack was— this was after you left. Okay. So we have to apologize a little bit. Yesterday, Lance Armstrong popped in and our episode got ruined, kind of ruined, or— or made, or made, whatever. It was hectic. And we did this thing. It was cool. Sean, you left. Jack was here. It was me and Lance and Adam and Jack just chilling right here. And Jack's kind of savanty. Like, he's like real smart, but he doesn't pay attention to a lot of things. And we were talking about the podcast and I was saying, Lance, how big is your podcast? He said, it's like whatever, 100,000 listeners. He goes, it took me a long time to build that up, you know, after I got cut out or cut off. And Jack was like, what? Cut out? What do you like? What happened? Like Apple shut you down or something? He goes, No, you know, like from the incident that happened 7 years ago, like everything dropped off. And he goes, Jack was like, what do you mean? And Lance looked at me and he goes, he's like, is this guy serious? I'm like, yeah, dude. He's like a business savant is what happens. He doesn't know. And he goes, this is awesome, Sam. You got to bring more people like this around me. And he goes, Lance goes, Jack, I basically went from hero to zero overnight. Like I lost everything. And Jack was like, oh, okay. And he like, did get, he was like, from, from, you know, like it was hilarious.

That's amazing. That's awesome. And if you, Jack did a whole episode and you can kind of tell he's like, and the stuff he cares about, he's so deep in the weeds. He's like Rain Man. And then other stuff he's completely oblivious to, which is awesome.

Yeah, it was, it was so funny. Um, and, uh, Jack started your guys' com— or maybe they were first, I don't know, but competitors. So that reminded me of that. So what do you want to do?

I want to hear some ideas. You said you have a story, or is that the story, or you know, I'll tell it tomorrow. Okay, cool. So we want to have guests that come in and bring their ideas, stuff they find interesting. So either little phenomenon they've observed, ideas they've been cooking up, something off their list they have on their phone, whatever it is. So do you have stuff like that? Do you have a list of ideas?

He does.

Or no, I wrote, I wrote down some ideas for this. Okay, you just keep them up here and like, you know, the important ones make their way out.

Let's talk about the process. Where do you get a lot of like, where do, when do ideas come to you?

Usually when I'm not trying to come up with an idea.

Like in the shower or whatever.

In the shower, driving, just kind of around, not really thinking about anything and then something pops up. The second one I would say is like when I'm reading online, like if you read something interesting, you're like, wait, that's cool, but it would be cooler if it was, and then like that's kind of where my mind wanders.

I think that the best ideas you just steal, right? So like, it's kind of like that. You're like, oh, but what if you applied it? Like the way this restaurant industry is, this restaurant's working, they should actually apply that to like Indian food and it would be way bigger, right?

Yeah, it's like remixing, right? It's like I want to sample some ideas real quick and then I want to turn into my own, right?

So what you got? What's interesting to you?

Okay, so I'll start with one that we went go-karting a couple weeks back, and so I'm really into kind of VR/AR. I mean, you know this, I've kind of gave you an Oculus. Yeah, you can, you know, feel my—

you gave him one?

Yeah, yeah, I gave him a great gift, right?

That's awesome.

Yeah, I was like, John, you got to do this. You're never going to buy one on your own. You're going to be a skeptic forever. Here you go.

Are you using it?

Yeah, because he was telling me, he's like, there's this one thing you're— because I was skeptical. I was like, is there any good games? Like, what am I going to do with this? And he's like, dude, you gotta try this PokerStars thing. And I was like, okay, what, VR poker? Why do I need that? It is fucking amazing. It is like— have you tried this thing?

Have you seen it?

Well, I've done boxing, I've played all the games, but I didn't—

you gotta try the poker one. It's incredible.

I'm gonna go buy an Oculus just to play.

Yeah, seriously, you should. They're sold out, so it's gonna be tough, but you know, maybe we can get you one too.

You really can't buy one right now?

They're out, dude. They're totally— from, from Christmas, they just completely sold out, and then they haven't been able to refill it. They said it was January, then February, and now it's March, and then they're talking about all these delays from China.

That's a good sign for VR.

Is this like the sandbox thing?

So this would be like sandbox or like Museum of Ice Cream. It'd be a place you go, put on this thing and play with a bunch of friends.

I'm big on sandbox, like laser tag.

It's like modern-day laser tag.

Do you think that Sandbox is a big business?

I think Sandbox is fantastic. I mean, it's hard to see if it's going to be successful or not because retail has all these problems and having space has all these problems.

But that's not retail.

Well, yeah, it's not retail, but they're— they kind of have retail spaces, right? Like they want to be brick and mortar, right? Yeah, they want to be like in a spot where there's a lot of—

yeah, I mean, it's just an activity. It's just like escape room or something.

It's like escape room, but it, uh, escape room— and I know, I know guys who own like 200 escape rooms. Are they awesome? It's an amazing business, because escape rooms are super lightweight. You don't do anything, you just have a room, one person, you buy the kit, and you just keep like reassembling the room, and you have these like very small—

How big is that company?

Well, it's not one company, but it's like, like you can just own a different franchise.

Yeah, but like you can own a McDonald's franchise, they still report revenues as one.

Yeah.

This is— this guy's private.

I've never been in— I would— I will never go to an escape room. That's my fear.

I don't want to— because I'm claustrophobic.

I'm really claustrophobic. I don't like flying. No, I will never go.

In general, VR or AR experiences are gonna be, I think, fantastic. And you could see theme parks going to this. Like, I heard about a theme park that has a roller coaster ride in VR where they give you goggles, you're in this kind of mechanical thing, but then you're actually in a dungeon and there's lava. And like, it's a totally immersed experience. And I think that people are going to experience it first like that. And I could totally see you coming up with all kinds of different content types. And whether it's Mario Kart or Escape room.

That's a great point.

So here's a cool model of this. Uh, I have a buddy who worked at this company called Two Bit Circus. Have you ever heard of them?

No.

So the guy, uh, the guy, the founder, his dad started Chuck E. Cheese as Nolan, whatever the guy's name is.

Atari guy.

Uh, yeah, started Atari, started Chuck E. Cheese. Now his son started this thing called Two Bit Circus, and I love the concept. I think the son kind of— I don't know the guy, but like my read on the situation is just sort of like, um, ADD, wants to do a million things, not really like executing on this business as he should. But the concept's amazing. They go city to city traveling circus like Cirque du Soleil or wherever. And, uh, they pop up this thing and it's like a weekend thing where parents bring their kids and all the attractions are like digital wonders. So it's like VR thing, a hologram thing. And they were doing really well. Every city they were going to, they're selling out like crazy. But he was also getting distracted and they were doing things like a company would be like, hey, we'll give you half a million dollars to do our company retreat. Yeah. And then boom, the whole company, the CEO comes in and says, Hey, we had to go do this corporate retreat. And the company's just like, dude, we need like one direction.

Okay, quick break. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about my Saturday morning routines. So every Saturday I wake up in the morning and, you know, some people watch cartoons, some people read the newspaper, some people check the mail, some people exercise. I go to QuietLightBrokerage.com and I check out what's for sale. So if you don't know, Quiet Light is a platform where you can buy and sell online businesses. So if you don't want to start something from scratch or you don't know if your idea is any good, you can go on here and you can see ideas that are already proven, already working to some extent, and you can either sell your business or you can buy a business off here and try to grow it and improve it. And so if you've been listening to the podcast, you know, one of our most popular episodes was with Ramon, Ramon Van Meer, who, you know, sold his soap opera blog even though he never watched soap opera in his life. He built one of the most popular soap opera blogs for $9 million in cash, uh, on this website. He has bought multiple businesses off Quiet Light as well. And, um, we had Paul on here. He sold his FBA business for 7 figures on Quiet Light. So it is a fantastic place to sell your business. It's a fantastic place for me to look for businesses. Like, I'm on it right now and I see a kids monthly subscription box. It started in 2018, so it's fairly new. Asking price is $149,000. So you could buy this on an SBA loan. You don't have to put too much money down. And, you know, it makes $50K a year in profit. And there's ones that go all the way up to millions of dollars in profit per year. So whether you're looking for something small or something big, Quiet Light's got a great, great little selection. And it's not just like everything that's for sale. They curate and they qualify. Only certain businesses get in and get on here. And when you're interested in something, they have all the financials in a folder organized. They have interviews with the founders that will tell you, you know, what how they run their business, how many hours a week they put in, that sort of thing. Very good business. Alright, so for any listeners for the podcast, they're offering a 25-point checklist to see how sellable is your online business. So if you have a business right now that's making money and you're interested, you would love to sell it someday, check out this thing. Check out what the 25-point checklist is to see how sellable your online business is. To get the free guide, it's at quietlightbrokerage.com/myfirstmillion. Again, that's quietlightbrokerage.com/myfirstmillion.

Can you look up Dave Buster's revenue and look up Chuck E. Cheese's? I bet Chuck E. Cheese is owned by private equity.

Chuck E. Cheese probably makes a killing.

And if you've gone to a Chuck E. Cheese's— They went way down to shit.

Well, where I'm from in Missouri, where they were probably popular, it's like where like trashy poor people go. I mean, it's pretty whack. Like, I wouldn't go there because it was famous for like the Parents would fight, get drunk and fight.

You'll get divorced.

Yeah, like Chuck E. Cheese. It was like peewee hockey and Chuck E. Cheese. That's like where parents get drunk and fight. What's the number? Dave Buster's is $332 million and $896 million for Chuck E.

Cheese.

Annual revenue. So Dave Buster's $330 million, Chuck E. Cheese almost $1 billion annual revenue, but definitely ripe for like doing something new because these things are stale.

Is Chuck E. Cheese public? It just says a public company. Trying to buy stock? Well, I want to see what the income is.

Trying to buy Chuck E. Cheese, you know?

No, I'm into this. I think that these things are cool. I think, uh, I'm terribly into it. When I tried Oculus, I was like, I'm gonna quit my company and only do this.

By the way, random story, I found this YouTube channel once that was talking about all these old brands that are just gone to shit, like a Chuck E. Cheese, and he was like, this guy just short stocks, and he was like, my short pick of the year It's Tootsie Roll. And he's like, you ever met anyone who likes Tootsie Roll?

I love him.

He's like, people like Tootsie Roll are all 35 and up. He's like, no kid wants Tootsie Roll. They go out for Halloween, they're a public company. They get Tootsie Roll, they throw that shit away. He goes, Tootsie Roll has no other products. It's just Tootsie Roll, and their population is dying. He goes, secondly, the owner is like some 76-year-old woman who will never sell the company, so nobody can turn it around. Nobody can change it. That company's just going to die.

Tootsie Roll is its own company.

And so he was like, you should short the stock. So I watched this 2-minute YouTube video And I was like, I took out a short position. It did great. It's been awesome.

That's badass. Is it public?

Link over here.

Yeah, this guy.

No, they tried to go public and it collapsed. So another thing that I would do— I, I love this— I would also, uh, Six Flags has had a hell of a turnaround, a positive. So, uh, the guy who— there's this guy named Bob Pittman, and he was one of the inspirations for me starting The Hustle because Bob Pittman, um, was he created MTV when he was in his 20s, and then he went and started the thing called— this thing called the Pilot Group, which launched loads of different email newsletters, including Thrillist, which is like a huge thing. It's like a billion-dollar media thing. Anyway, Bob Pittman was— is now the CEO of iHeartMedia and formerly was also the CEO of Six Flags, and he turned it around. And it— there it does— it's really good. It's been around forever, you know, and it ebbs and flows, but it's good.

Yeah, I think entertainment can always level up, and when you're leaving the house to go do something the more immersed, the more exciting it is. It like, that's what you want. Like, I can get all the rest of the stuff at home, but like, that's why I think Sandbox is fantastic. Like, uh, the only negatives I've heard is, hey, I've gone to it twice, it was similar content. But yeah, they're gonna work that out. They're gonna keep growing it. I think it's gonna be amazing. Um, I love this, the spin-off of this idea for the lazy people, uh, that I have. Because I was like, okay, you gotta go to this place and go go-kart. I'm like, all right, what's the other—

yeah, why can't I stay at home? Correct.

So if you replace the carts with drones drones, uh, and you let people sit at home on a controller and control these drones.

Real life drones.

Real life drones are flying around this warehouse and I'm fighting you. And again, same thing, it's all digital, so I can hit something, shoot you, your drone just like flies and breaks. You gotta go and start over again.

So there's a pit of people who just go pick up the drones.

They mail you a thing.

Yeah. I don't know if they— I don't know what the mailing system is. I don't know if you actually get mailed that thing or if it's a gift card that you get sent.

But, uh, I saw my friend doing this on his phone. I was like, what are you playing? What game is that? He goes, oh, there's an arcade in Japan and I'm controlling the claw. So this is like, what? Yeah, this is crazy.

We had talked about it at some point.

Okay, but here's how my buddy's building this business. He's building it to be like, like, he's building it to where it's going to take off and they're going to capture all the value and it's just going to slowly die.

I guess he's a known fad, basically, is what you're saying. Like, he knows it's a fad.

Yeah, which I love. I like that, those things.

But that's always building it on like Wish products because they're so cheap that you could kind of like have a subscription thing where it's like, hey, you have to get one random Wish product, right?

That's what Wish should do. You're browsing Wish and after 2 minutes it's like, enter bonus round. You have the claw in our warehouse, pick something up.

I'm into this. I think it's cool.

All right, what else you got?

Okay, so have you guys used—

wait, hold on. Here's what we'll do actually. The next couple days I'll come prepared with some Six Flags and Chuck E. Cheese numbers. Okay, I'm interested in this. I want to know what the startup costs are for SandboxVR.

And I'm curious, tweet at us if you like, because we nerd out on like, I wonder how that business does, and we go look up the numbers and figure out who this guy is, who's Bob Pittman, and how much income do they make. I don't know if we're unique in that, but if you like that stuff, like either in the Facebook group, uh, just My First Million, or on Twitter, tell us if that's like— just be like, more of that or less of that. Just be honest.

Yeah, that's great. You know, you're gonna get your listeners tell you what—

we'll see what happens.

Yeah, because that's the weird thing with podcasts, you don't know what they want.

Yeah, what else?

Uh, so in general, like, I look at themes. So it's like, okay, Apple releases a bunch of random devices. So I'll call them AirPods— not really random— but this Apple Pencil. I don't know if you guys have seen this.

I have one.

It's amazing. Yeah, it's $125.

It's expensive. And like, the iPad Pro is expensive. But then I'm like, great, this new capability is there. What product exists for it? And so, um, you know, recently I've been kind of playing around a lot with the iPad, and I'll kind of try to show you guys this.

I can hold the mic.

Do you use, uh, are you one of the, like, computer— you get rid of computer, only use iPad?

Um, I'm—

I think that's weird. I think it's fucking weird.

It's— I like this in certain cases, like when I'm traveling. It's a lot better than me lugging around my laptop.

Did work pay for that?

No, this is mine. So I just—

Furkan doesn't like to submit expenses, reimbursement.

Really bad.

Like when we sold Bebo, how many unreimbursed things? How much dollar amount did you have? I bet it's like in the tens of thousands.

Yeah, yeah, it's definitely in the 5-digit range. I should be better at that, but you know Adam did that.

I had to pay him $5 grand because he wouldn't like submit shit.

Life has been good to me, so I'm not really gonna—

not stressing anything. Yeah, um, but the general theme is like new hardware comes out, what can I do with this?

Yeah, that's the general theme. And so one of the things I've been playing with is this app called Flow, and it's basically like this kind of whiteboard app, right? And so, um, it's kind of hard to show obviously, but The idea for me was, you know, you sit in a meeting room, right? And you, you love the whiteboard. You love getting up and moving.

Yeah, he does that shit all the time.

You like getting up.

I like it. I like to get my Steve Jobs on.

Well, he always has like analogies over shit. He's like, we're trying to build a race car, but let's start with bicycle.

Yeah. And so the idea was, okay, you take this kind of experience with the iPad and Pencil, but this whiteboard over here should just be digital, right? So if I want to show you something, I just turn it on here. And it just shows up there. You're like, no, no, and you want to kind of feed off of it. And like, we could just have—

okay, so for those who can't see what he's saying, so he's basically saying you got a little iPad in front of you, a little tablet, you're in a big meeting room. If you— you should be able to quickly sketch something or write something or draw something, and it just used the whiteboard as a display like it's a TV, basically.

And then it's remote-friendly, so everybody can get the same whiteboard experience. Because I mean, what happens if you're remote?

That happened to me yesterday. I was remote conferencing in, the guy gets up, he's like, here's what— here's what this really means. He drew something on a whiteboard I can't see. And everyone in the meeting was like, oh yeah, that makes total sense. And you're like, I'm just the little bitch on video conference.

I talked to a bunch of people. So do you know this guy named Wayne? I forget his last name. He sold something to Twitter.

Yeah, they're doing digits now.

Ma, or is it Ma?

I think it's Mar.

Anyway, I was talking to him. He said they're 100% remote. And I was like, how do you do that? Because we're struggling with this whole whiteboard thing. And he was like, man, there's this one app that they never update. And that's kind of what we've hacked together to use. This is a problem that—

Yeah, I think people are going to remote work both because there's really good talent elsewhere store that you're like, man, this is a perfect fit, but you're not here, and that's not a good enough reason anymore. Uh, and then the second thing is just cost. Like, if you're in the city, like, people, they kind of don't like, you know, they don't want to pay that much for their house.

So just basically making the whiteboard work for remote workers.

Yeah.

And also, or even if you're here.

Yeah, yeah. Like, I still want a big view of it if I'm here. Like, if we're all here, we want to get that.

That's badass. I'm into it.

So the pencil and the iPad, I think, is a good combination to set to where people will have that around. I think it'll become more common. Now you can kind of connect all these groups together.

So last podcast I was saying meeting tech, stuff that makes meetings more effective and efficient, because all— like, so many billions of dollars are spent in people's time in meetings.

Do you know how cheap— I mean, you— it would cost way less than you think to make this. You know that? Okay, this is a screen. This is a 55-inch— I think out there we have a 65-inch TCL 4K, or no, we didn't get the 4K, 1080p. You know how much that costs?

It's like $399.

No, no, no, it was like $250 or $180.

It's like It's probably cheaper than this whiteboard.

That's the retail price. Yeah.

Like on Amazon, I bought it for, I think for sure less than $300, maybe less than $200.

Yeah, I believe it. Screens are really cheap. And so where else can you put screens? And I think you can actually enhance the meetings. If somebody puts up slides, I want to write over the slides. Like I, I think you unlock more capabilities than just supplement what you have today. And I think that that's where this will become superior than us going to the whiteboard with, you know, those Expo pens and kind of writing there. Right. So.

Meeting tech.

Yeah, meeting tech.

I didn't get it yesterday. I mean, I was—

but now you're getting it.

You, you didn't have—

you— I didn't have a good example.

You said a meeting in a box.

Yeah, it was, it was bad. It was bad.

I like your other idea, you know, the AR.

I was trying to get to that, but then I, I fumbled the initial thing. I said meeting in a box and it sounded stupid to me.

And then Lance Armstrong showed up.

Yeah, Lance Armstrong showed up. I felt like a chump.

It's a meeting in a box.

Fuck that guy.

The other one I like is, uh, so everyone has AirPods on now, right? And I think AirPods did one thing like Apple does really well, is nobody wanted to walk around with a Bluetooth headset, right? I think we all agree you didn't look cool, you looked like tacky.

It was a known douchebag thing.

Yeah, it was like having the cell phone on your belt.

Yeah, like, great analogy, perfect. And so I was like, great, people have AirPods now, and so what else can you build with this. Again, Apple's unlocking capabilities and hardware. So what software can you build? And so there's two ideas. One's mine, one's somebody else's, but I'll take it as my credit.

Yeah, exactly. Whoever says it, it's theirs.

Yeah. By the way, Apple or AirPods, what, how much?

10 million units, uh, in the last X amount of time.

So what's that? 10 billion? Is that 10 billion in sales?

Yeah. Just multiply by, let's say 100. It's just, it should be roughly plus in sales, right?

Yeah. Yeah. It would be a Fortune 500 company. Yeah.

I agree. It's fantastic. And so one of the things I was thinking about was great. If I have these on all day, can I just have this on? Kind of connected to like my wife or like somebody, right? So whether you do it for work or for personal, you always have it on. There's no audio flowing. But then if I'm like, hey Sean, what's up? It knows, do you have your AirPods on? If it doesn't, it tells me, hey, he's not there, but you can record a message, you'll get it later, right? But if you're there, you'll just hear my audio and you still aren't on yet. You kind of opt in again to be like, yo, what's up, man? Like, right? It's like, how do you take the phone call away from like that? And you're like, I'm not going to give this capability to everybody. There's a couple of close people in my life, like my wife, that I'm going to be like, great, I just want to have this on and this capability that's there.

And so it's like, uh, in The Office they do this in the TV show.

Oh yeah, Jim and Pam. Jim and Pam.

Just constantly. Yeah.

So phone calls feel weird. 100% right now.

Yeah. I, I, I'm, I, I'm less bullish on that than the first two.

Okay. Okay. Well, we'll do that. The, the second version of this idea with AirPods was, um, you know, Farza, right? Yep.

So he, you guys were over. Oh, your homie.

Yeah. One of our friends. And, uh, we're doing a small hackathon at the house, and he's like coming up with this idea again for AirPods.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, you're doing a hackathon at your home like for fun?

Yeah, just for fun.

Damn, maybe you do this like every week, right? Or like 2 weeks.

Like, so what do you guys do?

Like, Jake's here. Jake, you did— you go to the last one?

Yeah, we just kind of sit around a table. We're on our laptops. We're talking about ideas. We come up with something and we just kind of try to make it. Usually you don't end up finishing on the first one, but then the second one you try again, the third one you try.

Fucking nerds.

What'd you build? What'd you build at the last one?

You want me to talk about it? Yeah. So Jake, Jake was making this thing where he was like, it'd be cool if you could test your website from like locations around the world, but it would like video record what it looked like and how it loaded. So not only do you get this like technical—

not a number.

Yeah, you can show people this is how crappy our website looks like from some random country or in the US and what it looks like for other people.

And so that's awesome.

Yeah, that's really awesome.

Everyone's kind of testing numbers, but I mean, we're visual.

Yeah, what you care about is, oh, look how long that took to load.

Look how shitty this looks. Have you heard of user testing?

Is it UserVoice or UserTesting? UserTesting.

Yeah.

You know, UserTesting? I'm— that's like a $150 million a year business.

Shout out to my mom, works at UserTesting.

Really? It's, it's that— it's huge, right?

It's big. Oh, it's a, it's— they're trying to go public, you know, so that means they're at that scale where they're doing $100 million plus.

Yeah. And all they do is there's someone in the Midwest who's cheap, who screen records. All right, well, let me look at your website. Okay. I'm scrolling down. I don't really know what that means.

So that's more about like confusion. This is more about performance.

No, but they, but they, but they, they're similar. They're similar issues.

Yeah. And I think, you know, today he's looking at it like a performance tool. Like, how do you kind of make it load well? But I think you could totally look at it and apply some machine learning to it where it's like, this doesn't seem to work well. It's below the fold on these devices. Right. Like some of those things when you design it and then you like put it together, you're not thinking, oh, what does it look like on the iPad?

Right.

And then you kind of just show it like that. And then you have a video, but also it could detect and say, say, man, this is like your main button. That's awesome. It's showing up down here, and you know, you could—

what are you gonna do with this?

Good job, Jake.

I like that project.

What was the other project?

So this idea was around cooking, and you're like in the kitchen, and you're like, oh, I want to like hear these recipes and things like that. And so again, your hands are dirty in the kitchen. Yeah. What do you do? You pull out your phone, your laptop? Doesn't make sense, right? Like, and so the idea was you have your AirPods on, it kind of walks you through the steps, and you can go next, go back, and it's like, you know, a little recipe thing. I forgot the name that he came up with for it, but I think you could come up with a better name for it.

But, you know, um, kitchen in a box. Yeah, there you go.

I think you call it like Kitchen Pods or something, and I was like, ah, that doesn't— right.

Have you, uh— okay, so this guy named Andrew Mason, you know, you know that name? He started Groupon. He, um, a few years ago, his second act, he started this thing, Detour. Detour, there it is. They shut it down and he pivoted to, uh, Descript. Descript, a podcast thing.

Look at us, look at us. Yeah, there we go.

And anyway, what was the first one? Detour. It was awesome. It was so cool. And this was before AirPods.

So explain what did you do?

So, oh, I used to do them all the time, but I understand how it wouldn't be huge, but I was a powerful product, not a great business.

And so what it was is, you know how when you go to a museum and you have a guided tour that says like, all right, when you get to this point, press this thing and then you press the button, you're like, all right, tell you about it. You see this painting, you see there's a small little smudge that you'll see up left. That what happened? He got angry, he did whatever. So what they do this, but they do it for cities. So it's guided guided walking tours. But you know, you know, This American Life, like, you know how it's like really highly, um, produced podcasts where you can like hear noises? And they did that, but it was GP— it was work at your GPS. And what they would do is they would say, um, all right, walk past the street, past Bush Street, keep walking, and then it would play music, and then it would tell when you got there, and it would say, now look down to your right, you see that hole that was there? That actually came here from this time. And it's, it's awesome, it's so cool. But he shut it Anyway, what you're describing is almost like the cooking version of that, right? The utility version, which would be significantly larger than the detour version, because the detour— because you cook all the time— the detour version, I would do it on like a— when my wife was out of town, I had nothing to do.

It does suck to have your hands covered in food and then be like, oh, let me go to my iPad or my phone and like try to like scroll and click and zoom and like figure out this recipe. How many tablespoons was it supposed to be?

Has there ever been a big business built around recipes other than an ad-based based media company?

Uh, not sure.

There's a problem with a lot of these ideas. You start thinking too far ahead, you're like, I don't want to go do this thing because what does it turn into? But I think generally the concept, if you took guided tours, like that concept, and you said, what else in my life could be guided?

That's interesting.

I think there's a couple of very interesting businesses there, or at least interesting products, right?

Totally interesting products, maybe interesting businesses too. Totally interesting product.

I think there's a workout version of this that's doing all right, which is like you go to the gym and it's like in your ears and it's music telling you what to do.

I use it all the time. Aptiv, you know what that is?

No, I haven't seen it.

It's similar. I use it on a regular basis. I pay $100 a year for it. Ethan spoke at HustleCon, tens of millions in subscription revenue. It's what you're describing, but it's for working out.

So I think if you have a great product in a space where a lot of people are doing it, you can come up with a business plan like $100 a year that matches some—

I agree with you.

So people cook, people go to the gym, like what else are they doing day to day? Like I think guided meditation is another one that—

Oh yeah, there's the model.

Right. And so there's probably 5 others in that space, but I think AirPods made it different than Bluetooth headsets and headphones, you know, like—

so here's a little guided meditation one. Yeah, I know, that's why we bring him in, that's why he gets the seat. For guided meditation, a lot of people don't like to sit and meditate, like that just doesn't do it for them, their mind races, all this stuff. And like the answer right now is like, no, that's the point, do it. And like, sure, that might be true, but for a lot of people what it means is like, fuck this, I'm gonna do something else. And so there's all these other types of meditation, like transcendental Tendo, whatever, where you're chanting. It's like a little more active. And, and there's all kinds of meditation. Hiking is meditation. Exercise is meditation because you're controlling your breathing in a certain way, you're clearing your mind space, and you, you know, you're freeing your mind. And so I'm curious if somebody can do this sort of detour version that's about walking. And, you know, it's basically guided meditation, but it's active, not sit down on a pillow and do nothing for 30 minutes or whatever.

Yeah, like when I would do those detours, you did them, right?

I never did one.

Well, we did one. I did one where I went to the Castro and it was all about the AIDS epidemic. And you got to know Harvey Snow— or Harvey Snow, what's it?

Harvey—

Harvey Milk, you know, the gay activist that was like killed, whatever. He was a gay activist that was murdered and it was during the '80s when the whole AIDS thing was going on. And the guy talking, he was like, now this is the last time that I hugged Harvey before he died. And, and then he's like, now this house up here, like like, these guys lived here, and on top, these guys lived here, they all died. And I was like, so emotionally—

right, okay, that gets me thinking. You know, I think this would be not— I don't think this would work, but like, you know, yesterday you and Lance Armstrong were both like, the podcast I like best are these true crime ones. What if you did a true crime version of the detour thing where it's murder mystery, kind of creeps you the fuck out as you walk around?

That's cool.

Real crimes from your city.

Yeah, or you have to— so we did on Trends, we did a report on this. These apps, what are those? What are those called again? The, uh, you know what I'm talking about. Serial? No, like these serialized video apps that fucking— the lady who started it, she sold her thing to Songify. Man, I gotta remember what it was. Anyway, you, you, you get— it's like choose-your-own-adventure app. Okay, for thriller novels. Okay, basically we did a report on it. Our hypothesis was that actually the erotic novels, romance novels, is the biggest segment.

You're talking about Hook? Hooked.

Yeah. Yeah. Hooked. Right. Anyway, I think it's a, I don't know if it's a great business, but it's an okay one.

They scaled up revenue.

Hooked was doing, I think, $20 million plus in revenue if I remember correctly.

Yeah. But I think churn was stupidly high. Yeah. Uh, anyway, what we're describing is, and when we did the report, it was romance novels and, uh, thrillers had the highest.

And, uh, because that's a great framework, people's desires tend to stay the same. Yeah.

It's the tools of technology that updates and opens up new opportunities.

That's a good framework. Can I ask you about AppLovin'?

Yeah, I got one more idea.

Oh, go for it, go for it.

I'll kind of plug a company I invested into. So I invested in this company called Lucid Drone. I think I told you about it. They have, they basically created a drone that can window wash big buildings. And so instead of sending like a 5-person crew and a scaffold and whatnot.

Where did you find that?

They were a YC company. So, you know, YC produces still fantastic companies. I like these guys 'cause it was like, we got this, you know, it's not just drone tech and then it's out of nowhere, but it's like.

That is awesome.

Specific application.

Yeah, specific application. And then you think about it, you're like, yeah, 5 people hanging from a building or one guy working the drone from the bottom and washing it.

Are those legal?

Yeah. And so they're, they're out there in a couple of cities. I think there's going to be small regulations they're going to have to go, but this makes sense. It's a lot safer and a lot better.

When did they go?

Comes out of— saves you money if you're the building owner. Safer than having humans up there trying to wash windows. Sad way to lose a life.

What a bold idea.

Great idea.

Oh my God, I love this.

One way of looking at it was, oh, we're going to put those guys out of business. Instead said, no, you're my customer. Correct. We make you more efficient.

Exactly. And I think that's That's some of the best tech I see is that it's not about replacing the whole workflow. It's like, how do we make these people more efficient? How do we allow them to have more capabilities? And then they can do more, they can do a better job. And that's kind of like, I think, what I look for in the emerging tech, especially Lucid Drones.

We, uh, I'm big fans of boring things like window washing. I think it would— that would be right up my alley. And to add this thing to it would be neat. I never— if you told me that someone had that idea, I'd be like, what?

No, it's, uh, it's really interesting. And so my spin-off, the remix of their idea, was, uh, probably you guys— I don't know if you got— you have a car, right?

Yeah, I have a car.

Great, you guys both have cars. So I thought maybe none of you guys would have cars in the city, but but, uh, I never wash my car. I never go to a car wash. Me neither. You know, if I could just have a little drone that sits in, in my garage that can come up, wash my car for me every so often, or if you're in a place where it snows, like, how do I pour some water on the windshield so I don't got to go do that and I can get into the car? Like, that's what I want.

Oh, that's—

I like that.

You know, this was like a huge failure. Cherry.

But that was humans.

Yeah, so that, that, that—

this is a Roomba.

Yeah, I know.

I'm not— that washes your car.

Totally. That, that failed. But I looked at like the background of why. I was like, that's so stupid. Who would on earth think that was a good idea? It's a big thing in a lot of different countries. That, and check this out, bringing gas to you. Bring gas to you. Yeah, bring gas to you.

In foreign markets, that's like the way that gas works.

So car washes— I say wash funny. I always have to correct or tell people I say it funny. Get prepared. Car washing.

Um, can you not say wash?

I can't say that. It's a Midwestern thing. Wash.

I was like, it's easy. It's easier than giving Disclaimer.

No, I can't say, I can't say car wah. I, no, you just can't do it. My mouth does. It's like L's.

Now you have your interview questions.

Car cleaning.

Car cleaning.

If somebody says like, what's your greatest weakness? It's like, I can't say wah.

Rs.

Rogue Rs that just make their way into my words.

It's, it's a Midwestern thing. A lot of people say it. Uh, anyway, uh, that's interesting, but I never would've thought, I'm, I, I, that's kind of cool, but how on earth could you build a machine that does I mean, that's the thing.

Does the drone need to be pretty smart to do that or no?

You know, I think the thing I like about this technology space right now is a lot of the research work is done. And so people have made drones that can fly, that can follow you. Like, there's literally Skydio.

Yep.

It's $1,000. You go running in the woods— that's their like demo video— and it follows you.

If you haven't seen this demo video, search Skydio.

Is that bullshit though?

It's amazing. You literally go, you like throw the camera.

I've seen the—

the—

that one—

the other one failed. Yeah, these guys say they can do it.

How about this? Go on YouTube and look up the users who are doing this and they're recreating it, and you can see it works.

Okay, and so like snowboarding and skiing and stuff.

Yeah, snowboarding is another one. I mean, GoPro was like one step up, but now if you got this drone that can follow you around—

I love this shit, man. Drones and VR, just—

we need a drone filming this that's just whoever's talking, it just turns to them.

Oh, and just does the cut, just picks up the right mic in the right.

I had one of the first DJI ones and it fell out of sky at 1,000 feet. Ruined it.

You have?

Yeah, yeah. I programmed my own flight controller. That one didn't work as well. I used a pre-programmed flight controller that worked a lot better. But I get really excited about these technologies when I, without a college degree, without a deep technical expertise, can go and learn about it. And I really just use Google. Like, that's my source for everything.

How old are you?

I'm 35.

You're one of the more interesting people I've ever met.

Okay, great. Wow. I met Lance Armstrong yesterday.

He's blushing. Look at that.

He's not interesting. He's cool. I mean, he's interesting, but he's more—

And what's interesting to you?

He just— my interests align with yours, but he's more intelligent and more technically savvy, and he can I can actually make the things that I think I wish I could make. Yeah. Um, can you talk about AppLovin? Because you said something. So the other day I was talking to someone about businesses and I'm like, when, when it's working, do you know it's working? What's that feel like? And, uh, you made a comment earlier, like it's the first time I've ever seen where just this is what working feels like. Right. What, what, what, what was that like?

It's so obvious.

I got to do X, Y, and Z to solve these problems that are coming up kind of day in and day out. And so it's definitely a feeling where the pull from the market is so strong that there's no middle ground. I always thought it was like, oh, I'm going to kind of realize when I'm close to it, but it's actually very binary. It's like you're here and it's not working and you're trying to push into the market, which you need to do. But when it happens, it just kind of takes off. And, you know, I just, I don't have really good analogies for it yet except for that. Like, it just, it's like the loss of control. The market is in control almost, and you're just like trying to catch up and like, you know, get into that mindset of like, okay, great, this is working. We're gonna keep like pushing whatever we need to do to kind of support this case.

What was the revenue growth? I mean, you guys were at zero, then was it like one month it could have been like $20 grand, the next month it was like a million? I mean, was it that substantial?

It wasn't that crazy, but But I think the interesting thing that I learned was there were a lot of players in the market where you'd go to this weather app, right? And the weather app would do like, you know, you never realize the scale of some of these apps even at that time. It's like, man, this thing is doing 200 million impressions per day. And I'm like, a weather app? Like, really? Like, why is it so big? And then you're like, great, if we get this customer, these things can happen.

And so I think the weather app does how many impressions?

I think I forgot which weather app it was, whether it was Weatherbug or the Weather app. But it was like 200 million impressions a day. Like, and I was like, I was really surprised at some of the scale of some of these apps. And like, you know, yes, we had the best ad platform. Yes, we made, you know, we made all these small tweaks to the product to like make it work better and we made our server scale and we did all these things. But I think to me, the fascinating thing was there were all these major players. You didn't actually realize how big some of these opportunities were and kind of working at AppLovin, I was like, wait, I want to go do this. And like when I left there, it was like, I'm not like a huge fan of like ad products. Like naturally that's not the product that I get excited about. Uh, I love money. So I like, great. It's a fantastic business. Uh, I like that. And I was like, oh, I'm gonna go make these apps and games that are gonna go do this. And actually that's how I ran into Sean. Uh, I think he had checked out one of my games after I think we connected on AngelList. Was that right? Yeah.

Yeah, I left a little bit on the table. Again, I'm not complaining because everything's been fantastic.

And— but it was something counterintuitive. I was like, why would this guy leave? Either he got kicked out, he got fired, he's not good, blah blah blah. I was like, or this guy's amazing, he really just does love— his story was like, I just love startups, I want to build something that consumers use, not really an ad tech platform. And he was like, I was interested in mobile because I saw how big these mobile apps were on our ad network.

So he locked himself himself in his bedroom.

It's like, I'm gonna learn mobile in the next 6 months. And he just built a bunch of Android games. And then I saw him on Twitter tweeting back with people who played his game, and I was like, dude, none of my developers— all the developers I have in my company that are great— none of them would ever go tweet at a customer and be like, hey, you know, I'm gonna fix that bug, you know, I can make this better. Hey, what do you think about this? So I was like, there's something different about this guy.

What apps were you shocked at, that how big they a weather app.

There's 200, you know, the casino game apps.

I mean, that's not shocking, is it?

The size of it was definitely shocking. Just because you always assume they're big and they're addictive, but then that, and then Candy Crush in their initial rise was the first time in the industry where I heard like, man, like this thing is a money printing machine. It's like, you know, they would, you know, and not all of this was at AppLovin. It's like once you're an ad tech, you're like learning about the industry, you're meeting other people and you're they're like, hey, these guys are willing to just blanket pay $8 for a user in the US. And I'm like, okay, well, that seems pretty expensive. Like, why are they doing that? And like, how much are they making?

$8 is what they were spending?

Well, you guys had that a little bit with AppLovin.

Yeah, AppLovin had that. I mean, I didn't have that, right? I don't have the same mechanic. Obviously you're at this company, you're vested, you have a shared interest in the long run. But me being me, I was like, I want that. I want the ability to have that and then the freedom to work on things. Things that I'm really excited about. And so I tried that. Obviously, it's a lot harder than just, you know, one person in their bedroom doing it.

But, um, what did Adam Applovin say? Was he like, this just— we had no idea? Or was he methodical enough to see?

or the other way around, clarity helps create speed.

Yeah. Or both. Right. Like, you know, and I think clarity in the sense that if you delay it, your team becomes unclear and then it gets a little muddy and then you're like, wait, what is, what's going on here? Why is this guy kind of acting like that and that person not? And I think just being very fast and quick in that execution, once you decide you should go ahead go and execute it. Uh, and I think that that's, that's the thing that I learned is like, how quickly can you do that? And how effectively can you do that? Whether it's an email, uh, and I, and I'm really not good at this. It's kind of one of the reasons I point at it cuz I see myself kind of like, oh, wait on this a little bit or send this email tomorrow. I don't wanna open up this can of worms right now. Like, ah, and then it's actually, that's the exact opposite trait. It's like, just go have a bias for action and, and kind of go do that. And so, uh, from him I learned learned just, just an amazing amount. And like, how do you operate at this level? And I mean, since I've left, they've grown so much that it feels like I was only at the 1% of it. Like, I feel like I don't know 90%, 99% of the story anymore because they've grown well beyond that. They've expanded into other areas. They're really big now from the revenue side. They're really big now from, you know, what their marketplace is. And they're very well known. And, you know, I kind of get all the benefits from, from being there a long time ago, which is great for me. But, I'm sure there were more learnings that I missed along the way.

This whole monologue on app loving, that's gonna be our clip. Nice. That was a good one.

Cool. We should wrap for today.

That was awesome, man.

Awesome. But Furkan works with me across the street, so anytime we want to do this again, we can do it. Um, so we'll have people, um, we'll put your Twitter handle in the bio, in the notes of this, and so people can get, you know, follow you, get, you know, tweet at you, whatever, after this as well.

And we don't know, I'm so uncertain as to how many listeners we have, but I do know that last time I asked for reviews, we got a few hundred of them in in a handful of hours, maybe 24, 48 hours. So if you like this one, tweet at him. You could say your handle in a second and then let us know and we'll, we'll figure out what, what next to do.

Yeah. Yeah. My handle's Furqan R on Twitter. That's F-U-R-Q-A-N-R.

Awesome. Thank you.