$100B Founder Breaks Down The Biggest AI Business Opportunities For 2025

that's the trend that I can't, I can't like unsee it sometimes.

Right.

That's the bet you're making. That's the bet we make. And so I always joke with the guys here. It's like we want to bet on -1 to 0. Like Peter Thiel talked about the 0 to 1 companies. It's like we still want to step even before that. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never look back.

All right, we're gone. We're here.

It's amazing.

I haven't seen you in a little while. People don't know. We used to work together maybe 5, 6 years. We co-founded a company and launched a bunch of products and ate a bunch of shit together. And here we are.

Fun times, by the way.

Yeah. I'm thinking the title of this is going to be because AppLovin is now $50, $60 billion company.

Yeah.

$50 billion founder tells me the next big thing in AI. I'm going to go full YouTube clickbait with it. Yeah, yeah, they're great. We— so we used to do this thing where after we did Bebo together, got acquired, we were there for a year or so, and then we all, we went off and we did different things. I started the podcast and started doing my thing. You started doing yours. But I hit you up and I was like, hey, miss hanging out with you. What if we did something? And we started doing this on Wednesdays, which was like the cool shit hour. And this is amazing. It's basically a show and tell where you, my smartest friend, would come on Wednesdays and you'd be like, hey, have you seen this? Have you seen this? Have you seen this? And I really hadn't seen any of it. And you would kind of explain it and teach it to me. And it was my favorite part of the week. And we did that for, I don't know, probably like a year or something like that. So I kind of want this to be like a public version of the cool shit hour where you're just going to tell me a bunch of good things. I want to start with AI because you texted me something. You said AI agents are here and you said AI is cool because a 10-person company feels like it could do the work of a 100-person company and we're using it in our company. So I wanted to hear What are you doing with AI? And that's not called ChatGPT.

I think this word AI agent or this kind of phrase is the thing that I really can't pull myself away from. Like literally every night, like, you know me, like midnight strikes, I want to write code. Like the whole day is like talking to people and the night is like coding.

Yeah, Furqan's schedule is nocturnal. So I remember we, we hired you and I feel like the first day you came in at 9 AM to kind of like, I think I should.

It was probably 10, but yeah.

After that, from day 2 onwards, it was like roll in at 11. Oh, it's lunchtime. Have lunch. You would talk, you would do meetings. And I was like, when does this guy code? And then that night at like 4 a.m., you would have built the prototype and you're basically nocturnal. You get all your shit done. You like— you used to tell me you used to get during the day, you just burn up your energy so you could focus at night and actually write code.

Yeah.

So what are you doing with AI and how is that What is that actually in your company right now?

Yeah. And so I'll kind of tell you how I'm thinking about AI agents, right? And what it means to me. So AI agents are using LLMs or AI systems, right? Like the OpenAI systems or Claude, but then giving it reasoning loops. So imagine that when you go to a human, you give them something to do like, hey, I want to go grow our company, want to do a marketing campaign. They take that, they plan it, they come up with the steps to plan. Then they go one by one on the task and like solve them. They release some of them. And so these AI agent systems are exactly like that. The first thing it does, it goes, what do I need to do based on your request? And it'll kind of come up with a plan.

You give it like a mission, correct?

So in this case, person comes to your site, puts in their email address. Now you have— it's one agent or it's like a series of things that pass off to each other. How did— what is it called?

Yeah. So in this case, we call it the signup agent.

And so it's one agent. It creates a plan. Like, what do I do? And, you know, part of the plan is like the directive we gave it. And I think the way to think about AI agents in general is any like clear directive problem. And what I think about clear directive is like, let's go do X. Like sign up comes in, go look at the person, go research them, go figure out what's their title, what's their company, what products do they have. So that's like kind of clear what the job to do is. And if it's a digital task and a clear directive, All of it can be done with agents now. The technology is here, it's ready and it's working. And so for the Third Web signup agent, it'll kind of come in, it'll make a little plan like, hey, I got to inspect the domain, I got to go look up the person.

And you didn't have to tell it each one of those little tasks to do.

We gave it like kind of like a one, one paragraph directive and another paragraph of like how it should operate. And then maybe a paragraph at the end for like the type of email or the action to do.

And so the end product is it's looked up the person. It basically kind of looks at the signups, picks the interesting ones, researches them, You said thinks about what product of ours will suit their needs, which is— that's the wild step that I hadn't really thought about. And then it crafts an email and then it gives it to a human or just sends it.

Sends it.

Okay. So you have enough trust that you can send it to customers.

We started it with human in the loop and there are still like safeguards you put in, um, like any directive would, like you don't want to just send random emails even as a human doing the work. Um, but I mean, it's very clear what, what to tell it. And I think this is where the power is kind of multiplying. It's like we've heard, we've heard ChatGPT. If you can tune it to your problem. So for example, giving it the knowledge of Third Web products is the key difference here, right? A generic ChatGPT message, when I say that, it'll just invent something that's like general and generic or whatever it knows.

And when you built this, so you built this or somebody else built this on your team?

I hacked it as a prototype, like most things, and then I gave it to somebody on our solutions team and within a day they turned it around.

And when you made like a working version of this, how long did that take you? Because it's kind of like you basically hired an employee and trained them and got them working. You're not paying them a salary and you probably did the whole thing in what, like a day or two?

Yeah. So let's say there's like a bunch of like my nights of just learning tools and getting used to it. So I take that time out of it. That's just time I spend anyways. Right now, like 2 nights ago, I was like really stressed. Like my calendars are kind of crazy some of these days and I was trying to figure out like, why is it crazy? Where is it going? It's like a really hard question to like ask, like, what do you do? You could have an EA. She can go look through it, do all this stuff. And I have an EA. She like helps me with these things, but then she sleeps for like a while. I'm like, you know, I want to go answer some of these questions. So I probably in about 15 minutes, I connected my calendar and I connected a little interface where I could type to it. I started asking questions like, how many hours of meetings did I have last week? It was like 28 hours, like way too much. Where did the meeting go? What, what were they for? What were the purposes of it?

Right.

And then the next night I hooked it up probably about another 45 minutes or an hour where I could tell it commands from my calendar, like, go block out Monday for me or go find me like 9 hours of block time and just mark it block.

Oh, wow.

And this was like a few hours of work now that I know the tools, but it's like it just works 24/7 now, right? And so my calendar, my email, a few other things. I've started building these like personal agent or workflow type things 'cause I know what I want to do every time. I know how to react or the decision-making I'm going to make. Can I just set that up so it works 24/7, 365? And you know, it's just there always. And the cost of it is like—

So if I wanted to build a workflow like this, okay, do I, uh, you need to know how to code to be able to do this? Light coding? Like give me like the bullet point version of how, uh, how you built these. Like where, where do you even build it? What tool do you use?

So there's coding tools. I think, uh, if you're a developer, there's like LangChain and AutoGen and Crew. These are like very popular, very cool. The OpenAI and Claude SDKs themselves are very, very powerful. But you're coding, you're writing a little system. It's probably like 1/10 of the code you would have had to write to do something, right? So that's already better for developers. If you're not a developer, there's a lot of tools. So like Leap is a company we built here in the studio. It lets you stitch together workflows. So an example is like you can trigger based on a Slack message. So let's say you have this Slack message where all your signups go to. So now it picks up that trigger. You can just put a little AI block and say, okay, take this email and do these tasks. Oh, you want to web scrape? Go do that. Oh, you have a little conditional loop or like repeat itself 10 times? Go do that. And then you make a little another decisioning steps like 4 boxes. Output it back to another Slack channel. Yeah. So you come in with your signup channel, it does this research, it does all these things, it does kind of whatever you want. And then it could go to email, it could go to another Slack channel, ping somebody on your team. So you could kind of like, you know, these are workflows is what they start with. And an agent can kind of take these workflows and like almost build on top of them. And so I think there's these two things you could really, really easily create workflows, and I think everyone should be deploying them. Every company should have them. It is a superpower. It's like, I can't, you know, it's like a feeling of almost like cloud, like, oh, I don't need a whole data center team now. And I can, right? You know, when we build Blab and like how many servers that we have running video streaming, like that would have been a nightmare. It's kind of like the same you know, 10x improvement, but just for me, everything that I do digitally, right? And so tools like Leap are great. I think, you know, there's others out there that provide this. So there's a combination. If you don't know how to code, you just have to think about the steps that you would do and you can program that without writing any code. It's just writing directives. It's like writing intent basically of like what you want to accomplish, right?

It's like a magic genie. Tell, tell, tell it what you want and it can figure it out. So you got a sales agent, you have your email calendar, kind of like EA agent there. Any other?

I got some fun frivolous ones that are kind of stupid. So like I set up a dynamic wallpaper. So literally like every 5 or 10 minutes it'll look at what I'm doing and like auto-generate me as—

Like your computer laptop?

My computer laptop wallpaper will modify itself to whatever. If it's night, it kind of— I told it I code at night. Right. So it will go towards that direction. It knows I'm doing meetings. Another thing during the day, I'm talking to people, right? And it kind of comes up with cool stuff. It's totally frivolous, like not like a useful thing except my own, like, yeah, that's cool. But I find it awesome. And, you know, like there's cool scenes that come up. It invents new things. You know, Claude has created this new capability called computer use. I think that's the next area that agents are going to enter.

And by the way, so there's Claude, there's ChatGPT, there's Perplexity, there's all these different ones. Mentally, how do you bucket like the main AI tools? What, what's like the superpower of each, each one? Maybe just do, do those 3 or if there's a 4th.

Yeah. So like I think OpenAI and Claude, I think of them as like foundational tools. So they're general purpose, ask it anything, input output, you stitch it together with things and then they have tools like ChatGPT on top or maybe Computer Use that they're figuring out more general tools. I think Perplexity is really interesting. It's taking this general purpose LLM and the reasoning it could do and search. And like, I try not to do Google search anymore, mostly because it's slow and ineffective. And Perplexity really made it where it does a search, it reads the result as I would, it clicks into the links as I would, and then it tries to answer my question more purposefully. And it saves me 4 or 5 steps. So I think about Perplexity as taking something like search and then the LLM reasoning and combining them together in a flow that, that's more interesting, right? So ChatGPT or OpenAI tools don't have like real-time knowledge, but Perplexity, because of search, does, right?

What's your like tangent? Furkan's hot take: Google. What happens to Google Search with all that you see now? And you're saying— I know you're saying I try not to Google Search anymore. That's pretty wild, right?

It just feels slow. And I know they got the Gemini thing there.

I think the biggest fumble you know, in our, in our lifetime, maybe decade fumble.

Yeah. Built the technology for Transformers, the thing that OpenAI and others have used to develop this large language model. They are the ones that were the first entry in like talking about it and throwing it out there and the research that's happening.

And so what's the history? So they're, they have the AI minds there. They write this research paper, Attention Is All You Need. Yeah. And now from what I understand, like there's all the authors' names, all of them are gone. And basically started their own companies. Was it because nobody recognized the power of it there? Was it that they tried and Google's bureaucracy shut them down? What's the, what's the actual story of why they didn't?

I don't know the internal story. I think early on Google was like the place you went to where you wanted to have the rocket ship moment in your life. The smartest people were here. They were taking the biggest challenges and it just really felt like that place. I think Google as a company hasn't felt like that. I think the parent company and all the other things going on do still feel like that. I'm sure it's a mess in there. Who knows? Like, but it just feels like the biggest fumble. And I know they're trying to play catch up with Gemini and awesome stuff is happening, but the developer mindshare and the attention has gone somewhere else. Yeah. And that is really hard to pull back when somebody else becomes a leader in it. And actually it feels like OpenAI number one, that's, I think, clear. I think Anthropic is number two. So then everyone else shows up is what it feels like to me, at least from people I'm seeing building. Or the technology they're using or the innovation that we're seeing from it.

So the Anthropic one, so basically they have Claude, which is kind of like ChatGPT, but they have a couple of cool things. One of them is this what they're calling computer use, which is basically you type in a thing and then you do this and it moves your mouse and it just does shit. That's basically the summary of it.

It's a combination of things. You could take workflows and like, hey, I'm doing this, click this, click that, click, do it over and over for me. It could analyze things. But like, I think the key thing is, and I think it just released, it's in beta. So like, like most of these things, like it kind of isn't going to be great now. Just trust me, it's going to be great. And that's what we've been seeing in general is like things just ramp. And so it's now going to enter your computer. It's kind of felt like it's been on the cloud only is where AI has been. And now it's going to show up like in the box that you're used to, which is your computer, your laptop. And there's so much workflow that we do. And yes, every app will put AI in it and then your interface will also do that. And I think a lot of like the things that we're used to doing, like switching tabs and having all of these things, like they almost feel like, I don't know, like why? Like I should have infinity tabs open and some system should know about it. And if I ask it, like bring it back up, right? It's like a total need and we know we need that. And so it's kind of like infinite data, infinite knowledge and reasoning. And then you know me, like that's what the AI, like that's where I think the bridge when it crosses. It completely changes the equation. And the reason I put Anthropic number 2 is their models are crazy, like, impressive. Like, the new Claude Sonnet model is like, I feel like it was a step factor improvement over the previous ones. And it feels like the task that it kind of struggled with now is getting better. And both OpenAI and Anthropic have been just like, boom, boom, boom. And I don't know, everybody's heard of AI. They tried it. They might have tried it a year ago. They might have used it a little bit. But every 3 to 6 months there's just another step and another step. And that's, I think, the most interesting thing and why I can't pull myself away from it. Like why every night this is a thing that gets me very, very excited is because the progress is still wild. People are going to say it's going to top out. It will. I think it's going to be absolutely impressive wherever it starts slowing down at.

Right.

And will completely change the way how we do any digital work.

Like, so you're messing with it now, but you have a company, you've got an investment lab, you've got this whole place, this beautiful place that we're in right now. You've got a wife, you got like all this stuff in your life. If you were just 21 again or 22 again, where you're like, dude, I, I got nothing but time, bank account's empty, but so is the calendar. This and this technology is out. What would you be building? What would you be like messing with? What's the like kind of like you don't need to take over the world even, but just like what types of stuff would you build if it was like young hacker version of you?

Like right now I've started seeing agents that it can do a reasoning loop, it could have a directive and it could have like actions it could perform. And then you combine like, for example, an agent with Twitter, give it a Twitter account that it owns and controls. So its own distribution and conversational ability. So humans can just interact with it. Humans are— and you give it, you give it like a digital bank account. And, you know, at Third Web, we're doing a lot of stuff around AI. We have a whole like AI toolkit that we're about to launch. And it's around this, which is these like digital things, like these agents, they're not gonna have credit cards. It's weird. And the reason I say this is fun and interesting is because, you know, humans have done this very well. They've created megaphones for themselves and they've created businesses and they created payment rails around that. So they sell things, they do things, they sell services and all of these details. I think it would be something around that.

So you'd make like a social, like a Twitter account, you'd make like an AI influencer type of thing.

Okay.

And I don't think—

not an influencer, not an influencer.

I don't know what it would produce.

Like an AI dropshipper.

Like an AI dropshipper or like, yeah, it's the best FBA, Amazon, whatever.

What's that example you were telling me about where the somebody did a thing like this. They made a, they made a Twitter account. They gave it a wallet. Marc Andreessen gave it like $50,000 of crypto. Can you tell this story? So what is this?

Yeah. So there's this thing called Luna or Virtuals, and they're a little platform to, you know, have AI agents run. And I think what's cool is they did this kind of equivalent thing where it's like it has a crypto bank account and it has like access to Twitter. And you can—

was this a marketing stunt by a company that does this or—

I think this is exactly what, what I'm describing is it was frivolous fun. Just play, not like working backwards from giant thing. I think this did some really powerful things. So there's literally like a live thing where you could watch its reasoning as it's like pulling its tweets.

I'm on it right now. So it's terminal.virtuals.io. And is this basically the thought process of the bot, of the agent?

Correct. So this is like an agent. This is what an agent does, right? So if you think about it starts with like a thing like high-level planning, current state of execution. It's like, I've done this so far.

What was the directive they gave it? What did they tell it to do?

I think they told it that you're kind of like a public influencer bot. You have access to crypto. It's a little bit more in the meme coin world of stuff. So it's like, again, kind of on that side of the puzzle. But today it could negotiate for tokens, it could buy and sell things, it could kind of operate together. And I think it's really cool that you could actually see it's like—

Okay. Should we switch to hardware stuff or is there any other AI stuff that you think is worth checking out?

Yeah, I did want to tell you about this Oasis Decartes. The, you know, there's like basically, you know, it's a very early experiment, but it's really like a game that's fully built in a generative AI model. And so they built a game like Minecraft and you could just describe a world and it makes you a Minecraft world like that. And like every step you take is like not a preprogrammed pixel, right? It's actually generating.

So normal game is GameMaker builds the map, it exists. You then get to run around in a predefined map. What this is, what you're saying is you want— yeah, you give it the idea, but then when the character runs, on the fly, it's creating the map.

And you can kind of play this Minecraft game and you can see it's like crappy pixels, still like not great resolution, but you can move and it can do stuff. And like whether it's video games that take a lot of effort and time to produce or it's like, you know, content creation and videos and stuff like that, it's starting to become like way closer to like, you know, reality that a whole movie will be generated on the fly on exactly what I want. So this wallpaper thing is frivolous, right? That I was telling you about. Right. But really, like, I'm going to watch a movie someday like that. It's like the Raiders lost and I'm going to go and watch this movie after and it's going to have this context and it's going to give me like a feel-good story.

Yeah, we're like, let's brainstorm. So like, uh, NBA highlights. So, you know, used to be SportsCenter where if I didn't watch the games, I got to go to my TV, turn on ESPN, SportsCenter would start. Even if I like basketball, I gotta wait till whenever basketball comes up and then they'll have the top 10 highlights and I watch whatever they picked. Then YouTube comes around, it's like, forget waiting, forget the TV, just pick the thing you want. You could search anything. You could search only Steph Curry 3-pointers. If someone made it, you could choose the best of that. Now it's going to be like, I just say, I just will put on my headset or put on my glasses or whatever, and I'm just going to say, Show me what happened in the basketball game. It'll, it'll just start generating a new highlight reel that didn't— nobody has ever created. It'll just make it based on my prompt. And then I might be able to say, don't show me any Lakers clips, only show me Warriors. And it'll just auto-adjust on the fly. Like it's going to be made for me.

100%. Yeah.

That's interesting.

And, and, you know, like, I think it's going to be, uh, an interesting world. We're going to go from human content consumption. People, you know, humans make content. We're going to like then have machines make it towards our tastes and liking. And then I think there's always this worry like, well, what happens to all the humans then? Yeah. And then I think we get back to that core thing, which is machines will never have true taste, right? Like, and I think forever that creativity is going to come from humans and there's always a new thing. There's new fashion, there's new kind of, you know, content mediums, there's new everything. Machines will learn it and lag behind or maybe get ahead of it. There's always going to be another person that shows up and does something different. So I think taste is going to be the ultimate thing that probably won't go to a machine. It could reason about it. It could try to invent it. But I think we're not that predictable as humans. Like, we—

Well, I want to believe you because it sounds good to me. But then I also think, well, right now, if we said taste is like, you know, what is taste? Taste is selection. It's knowing what's good and what's bad. It's right. That's kind of taste. Like TikTok, which is the most popular, like, app, most addictive app, most used app. Their algorithm is basically saying, I'll choose what's interesting for you. And it does it so well. That isn't that kind of taste also, right?

Like, it is. Um, and it works really well.

They don't make the videos, but they select amazingly.

The selection is incredible. Uh, it probably is more like what we want than we will even admit. Sometimes you scroll through your feed like, I don't want this.

Right.

Like the other day I was talking about—

Oh, why is it showing me this? It's like, because you love it.

That's why. The other day I was talking about how like on Twitter my following I love and my for you I don't.

Right.

But it's like, you know, really?

Yeah.

Like, wow, why did they pick this?

Well, that's like a status thing to do is to be like, I don't use the algorithms.

Correct.

I hand do— it's like I drive stick. Yeah. Right. I hand make things. I cook from scratch. It's like, cool, but brownies out of the box kind of work for everybody.

You know, I'd love to trade algorithms. Like I'd love to swap with you for a day and be like, yo, Sean, what are you watching over here? So I don't know. It knows you really well. But I think that's where human, like, we're not great at logic sometimes. And sometimes we have our own blind spots. I think this is one of them. Things that we love, our actions prove it. We don't want to. And it could be like bad thinking. It could be like emotional thinking. Could be like, oh, this is— I don't really want to love it, but I do.

Right.

And so there is that element that I think look, machines will be great at this too. They'll learn humans. It might become even better than this. I just feel like we're just a little bit not predictable because we almost make some dumb choices. Right. And that actually is part of society and, and just humans in general. And machines try to be too perfect. It's like my Netflix thing is probably accurate for me. It's also just like, man, like, can I just mix it up? Can you just like RNG the algorithm a little bit? Because I just want some different stuff. And you're kind of like driving me down one direction. And once in a while, like I want this 10, 20, 30% thing. And I don't think algorithms do that exceptionally well. They test it, they throw things up, but you know, they don't necessarily try to give you variance.

How long until you think the number one hit song in the world will be just an AI, AI created song? How many months or years until we see that?

If we were doing over-under 2025, Yeah, I might pick the under, you know, in 2025. Like, that'd be a good bet. Maybe this is a Polymarket. Now that the election's done. Yeah, we do a new Polymarket, you know, like reason it could be something like this.

But like, think Polymarket thing. So election just happened. Polymarket's having like a victory lap right now. Yeah. You showed me Polymarket, I think like years ago, and I started making a bunch of degen bets before they blocked it in the US. It was like, it was, it was like open for a while, right? But they were doing prediction markets— it's a prediction market, but prediction markets, a bunch of people had tried that. Do you know, like, I'm just curious your opinion. What did they do right that like Augur and these other guys who were— had the same sort of general idea that, hey, there'll be prediction markets. Yeah. Like from either entrepreneur level or product choice, like any reason you think they won that you could put your finger on?

I feel like timing's a big part of it. So like the sweet spot of like people are way more digital. I think COVID drove a lot of people online. Like, we just sat at home and we're like, yeah, what else you got? 24/7 on the internet. And it really exploded the internet. Like, I think I've seen some graphs where like the internet and e-commerce and all these things were like growing. And then there's like a massive jump, like, right.

You know, we were at Twitch when that happened. Yeah. And it was like all the met— growth looks amazing. We're crushing all the metrics. Like, what did you do? It's like, well, we were here. Yeah, right. We are not, we don't create the wave, we surf a wave and a huge wave happened for Twitch. It was like Fortnite came out and then COVID happened. Two humongous waves back to back that just combined.

Yeah. So I think it's a combination. We're way more digital. I think you talked about this a lot, like as a kind of metaverse concept a long time ago that we're just way more digital now. We care more about it. I think news and like where we get information from has totally changed. Like online, internet, even content and entertainment. Like, I have a hard time going to TVs. I look at kids, they look at desktops and TVs as like ancient, right? Like I said, why is this thing on the wall?

It's like my mom's sewing machine. Yeah.

Oh, that's cool.

Yeah. What do you do with that?

That's what it feels like. And, um, so we're, we were kind of there. Um, and then there's a bunch of these people online that want a, like, want a stake in this thing, right? Like you want to root for a team. This politics has also become very polarized, right? It's really like a team sport.

It's like red team versus blue team.

That's really what it is. And so I think it's like, what do I do with it now? How do I support it more? I give more money to it, but I can give more attention, right? And so I think a lot of these things are happening in Polymarket. Good flow, good area, right? And then I think for the best thing, probably for them is they got it right.

Right place, right time.

The answer was right. Like if they were wrong, let's say Polymarket was off, right? Like it was, hey, the result of the election was something else.

The story today would be much different, right?

And then it might have just been muted. It would have been a cool thing that kind of didn't work. So you have to be right.

I mean, I think people would have used that to crush, to really rip on them because like in the way that people are doing with polls, but polls kind of have this like layer of protection around them, whereas like people want to hate on crypto things. People want to hate on betting. It's like a degenerate behavior in general. I think if they were, I think if Polymarket was wrong, the reaction would have been much worse. Than the fact that the polls are wrong, what the reaction is to the polls.

You know, it would have been worse for a little while, then we would have moved on, forgot about it.

And by the way, you saw this thing about the French whale on Polymarket?

I didn't see it. So the big whale that came in and moved.

So there's like the narrative versus reality. When the narrative from the polls was it's a toss-up, razor-close, 50-50 election, this guy came in and bet, I think, something like $30 or $40 million on Trump.

Yeah.

And people were like, is this guy just trying to manipulate the market? Is he real? Is he just a a rich billionaire's son. Like, who is this? And today I saw something on my way here. I don't know the full story because I was on my phone, but it said he bet because he believed he would win. The reason he believed he was— when he did independent polling, well, he funded his own independent polling and thought and felt that he was getting better data that was saying that Trump was mispriced. So he's like, I just did a logical, rational thing. Yeah, I just bet where I thought an asset was mispriced. I wasn't trying to This wasn't political. I'm French.

I don't— what do I care?

I just thought there was money to be made. And so he kind of went counter to narrative and he made, I think, like something like $20, $30 million yesterday on that bet.

So the funny thing about Polymarket, by the way, it's like we can't use it in the US. Yeah. So there's a whole entertainment place to like bet on our—

like, right. So it's like $3 billion got bet on.

It's like we're the ring, right? Like, there's two boxers going at it. This is in America. The cockfight. And then you've got everyone else betting from all around the world on who's going to win this thing, which is I think kind of a hilarious thing. Yeah, that's true.

You have a good contrarian opinion about VR. And in general, there's probably some other technologies like this. 3D printing might be one I know you're pretty bullish on too. But there's these tech things like VR where I think if I walk out of here and I talk to 100 people about what are you most excited about, AI, whatever, Bitcoin, whatever it's going to be. But I said, what do you think about VR? Eh, it's sort of lukewarm at best in the tech industry. I think most VC is sort of feels like it's kind of a dead-end technology. Now they'll be like, it's going to be glasses and smart glasses, AR, that's the future. But you have a different take on VR. What, uh, you've been telling me for a while, like, hey, look, Oculus sold more units. Hey, look, you can do this now. And you've been staying with it when I think interest has sort of waned. The narrative has gone against it. And that's always where there's big business opportunities. If the narrative goes one way, but the reality goes another, that's where there's an opportunity. Uh, give me your VR take. So why is VR a sleeping giant?

Yeah. I mean, so you remember 2020, I like asked you for your address and mailed you a headset. Yeah, I was like, hey, this Quest thing is a different—

that's a real friend right there. He sends me a VR headset. He's like, yo, I know you're not gonna come to the future. Let me drag you.

It's probably collecting dust, which is okay. But you know, I— that, that's kind of how I think about things. And technology takes a long time. It typically takes longer to get there than we expect. Like, especially people who are early in the industry, we're really wanting to push it. I mean, AI, crypto, VR all have the same problem, which is early on people are like really pushing it to you. It's not ready. So it's a big hype, it crashes, everyone moves on. So that's happened in VR a few times and it's kind of, I would say for most people, been quiet, not thinking about it, but I think it's a sleeping giant and I think it's a massive sleeping giant for a few reasons. One, I see it every day here, like here at Founders Inc. Like I get a chance to, you know, one, we invest in VR companies. We're one of the few that do, right? We have a whole corner, maybe like 12 devs that are all building different VR products. We put them all in one spot and there might be some of the most density of interesting VR projects in one place. And so what have we seen? One, Quest 1 came out. It was wireless. It was kind of crappy. But man, I could sit on my couch and use it. It was cheap. Uh, became a, you know, great Christmas gift in year 2. They didn't have inventory year 1. They released Quest 2. It got even better, lighter, more powerful. Now Quest 3 is coming out and I think they got like 5 to 10 million monthly active headsets out there.

Right.

I think that rivals consoles. And my first thought was like, how many units has it sold? I think Quest has sold, let's say 30 million is my guess, but you know, maybe it's more.

Yeah. So this is Quest, uh, Quest has sold over 20 million units with the majority being Quest 2.

Yep.

Quest 3 is currently sell, uh, has sold, uh, a million units, uh, at the $500 price point. Um, so I think, I mean, if you just, I don't know what the math here is, but you know, they've done. —what is that, over $1 billion of revenue on Quest?

And I believe it's outpaced—

Pretty good for a failure.

So this is— they're here. They're a team of how many people?

I think they're like less than 10 people, but more like 6 to 8. And most of it was built with a few people.

And this thing is profitable or what's the deal?

Yeah, I mean, I'll let them talk about their numbers, so I, you know, I don't want to say anything, but on a scale of, uh, that's pretty good to like, wow, where is it at?

Like, I mean, like, it's not stopping. Zuck is not giving up. He's going to the endgame here. Apple probably also won't stop.

Correct.

So now you have the two biggest players. They're, they're going to keep making the hardware better. They're going to be super hungry for content. And the other sneaky thing about these, by the way, that I didn't really fully realize until I moved to Silicon Valley, which is a lot of these require like really specialized talent. So I remember when I first met you, you were like, I'm really into big data. You start saying words like Hadoop. I didn't know what the hell you were talking about. It wasn't as popular back then. This is like in 2015 or something like that when you were telling me like, Hey, I think this is real. I think this big data machine learning is really interesting. You were again pretty early on to that. Crypto, same thing. You're early on to that. There weren't a lot of smart contract developers. There wasn't a lot of, you know, big data people, AI. So then if even if you don't have a hit product, if you just assemble like A+ talent that's super specialized, then as those platforms rise, your team itself becomes like a $100 million asset. Exactly. If you built today for like, because Meadow, Ray-Bans, like that product's actually a hit for, for Facebook and they're going to keep going with that. And everybody wants to be in the glasses thing. People think Glass is the next platform. So if you build a specialized team that's good at developing for that platform, there's just not a lot of great teams that do that. That's $100 million team even without a hit product.

How hard was it to find?

With a hit product, you get $1 billion.

How hard was it to find an iOS developer when we were starting to do mobile? Dude, it felt so specialized. We're going to compete at like a ridiculous level of price to go get pretty good talent in that space.

I remember 2012, which was not even early. We had one iOS dev on our entire team and it was so hard to recruit talent. It was faster to just retrain. So we used, we just stopped working and the iOS dev trained all of our other devs to be good enough to be dangerous because it was so scarce to get good. iOS wasn't even that specialized compared to like the, either the fancy AI stuff or, you know, VR, mixed reality, all that. That type of talent.

And so I just think that when I think about kids growing up and all the, let's say, 13 to 15-year-old kids or somewhere in the teenagers, they have a mobile phone that is attached to them. They think it's superior than a computer or a desktop because it's with them. And then we're going to take the second computing interface where we do more work or more immersive experiences and we put it around your eyes. That makes way more sense to me than TVs, desktops, and even laptops. And you know, that was like one of the thoughts where we started Fluid. Like we talked about this in 2020. I don't know if you remember, there's one project that—

You used to tell me, you're like, I work in VR. Correct.

I did that experiment where I worked in VR for an hour a day, and then I ended up doing it for a few months, by the way. Like, and I was like, this is great. And it had been like literally sitting with me. And I think this is one of the reasons why I actually built a studio is like, I want to do all these ideas. I can no longer do them all. I could pick a few. I probably shouldn't even go do more, but like, I just want to find really hungry people and like match them together. Right. That's how I found John at Fluid. It's like he was a PhD student. He was going to go do something in like finance and high-frequency trading and like whatever. And he also came to this idea of like, hey, when I was doing my, like, you know, master's, whatever, I was writing this thing. I just wanted to go into a focus mode. Like, could I just go into a cave and like lock, block out all the stuff He's like, I had all these VR friends and I had done some stuff in VR. So like, I tried to do it and it wasn't good enough. Right. And then he kind of left it at that. And then we were talking about it and he talked with Hubert and I was like, dude, you should talk to Furkan. I think he's got like 5 pages of like random notes and ideas around this. And then that's what spawned it. And it's like, cool. Like, we're not going to blow ourselves out. We're not going to go raise a lot of money. We're not going to go get a giant team. We're going to get 3 people here. We're just going to grind and work hard and build and survive. For when this thing happens. We'll miss some bets like that. We'll gain ridiculous amounts of knowledge of like the industry. And then we find these sleeping giants and it's like, yeah, we're going to double down, right? Like, Uber went to this like VR conference, like the Meta Connect thing, and he had a t-shirt and we're like, the funny thing would be like on your shirt, just put I invest in VR, right? And so he did. And it was like, wow, like, yeah, found one.

You know, you're like a girl at a crypto conference. This is amazing.

This is how we want to think about it is like try to be there early. Don't get too caught up with where the technology is now. Don't get too scared of how far it is. 2015, 2016, remember we heard self-driving cars are never going to happen? I don't know if you remember that. Yeah, massive, like, push against it. And there's Waymos running around every day now. I see more Waymos at night driving around than, like, regular people driving.

You've told me once before, you go, I think my superpower is that I'm usually in the top, in the first 1,000 or 10,000 people to try any new technology and like understand it, be able to play with it, know it, see it, all that stuff. I remember we were at work and you were buying the Ethereum presale, uh, the ICO or whatever the phrase was.

Do you remember what you said about it? Yeah, I don't know if you remember.

I just remember being like, dude, can we do some real work? What are you doing? Ethereum name, that name's never going to work. I was like, that sounds so nerdy. That'll never be a thing.

I think that was a phrase I remember. I was like, I was I was telling you about Ethereum. I was like, dude, I stayed up all night reading this white paper.

I'm like, you were like on it.

I was on it. I came in, I'm like, where's Tom? I got to talk to him. I tell you this, it's probably, I don't even know what I said. Who knows what? Probably threw a bunch of words in here. Just like, dude, I don't know what this is. We have something really to share. And you're like, Ethereum, that name's stupid. Yeah. I wrote it off.

I chalked that up for another, another L for me.

By the way, you could have been totally right as well. So no, no, I wasn't.

I think that's all that matters there. Very, very off on that one.

But you've—

I think that's true, that that is your superpower. And then you said another thing today, which I hadn't heard, which is for emerging tech, there's only one rule: survive. And that reminds me, we had— I just did a pod with Ryan Peterson. He created Flexport. He said the same, same principle. He goes, you know, what I realized was I cannot control the timeline. I don't know how long something's going to take to work. So all I focus on is how do I just be default alive? How do I just stay in the game? He goes, I just have the confidence that if I'm in the game, I'll just keep trying shit until it works. I just believe that about myself. I will just keep trying things until I figure out the thing to work. The only way I can lose is if I have to get out of the game, which is like, I can't, you know, usually it's like I run out of funding, I can't control my destiny, I spend too much money, I'm burning too much capital. And so he's like, that's been the name of the game for me from when he was flipping scooters on eBay to now, you know, runs a multibillion-dollar company called Flexport. And the whole time he's like, my whole thing is I can't control the timeline. So I'm going to control staying in the game because if I stay in the game, I win.

Stay in the game with great talent and people that want to have this long-term mindset. No, you know, I think there's a lot of people that can take short-term wins and they should. Like, we've done that, right? There are these short-term moments like, oh, this is great for us right now. Yeah, but we're going to keep doing more. And like, I think that's the main thing for me. Technology takes a long time. When it hits, though, it happens very fast. Like, that's the part that I think people don't realize. They like underestimate how long it's going to take and they overestimate how fast it's going to happen. It's like immediately going to just like happen. And, you know, I think Uber was an example like that. Like we saw it, it was black cars. Yeah. It's like, oh, there's like expensive taxi that nobody's going to use. And then now it's like, dude, this place doesn't have Uber. Like, how am I going to move? Yeah, I can't function. It feels like that, you know? And so I think I enjoy it. There's one reason why it's like, it's like a lifelong game. I could just play technology forever. I can learn about things. I don't have a rush to be there first. I don't have a rush to be like, I didn't know everything and like do everything and raise the most money and get a bazillion people. It's more like I need a few people with me that like are really excited about this. They see it like I see it and we're just going to go on this mission. And luckily now I have the ability to just like fund that and like create my like environment to do it. That's what this whole building is.

So let's talk about this building because you you've basically built like your dream, like man cave in a way. I think, you know, it's kind of like a founder dream, right? Like, and I want to talk about that because you had a big success with AppLovin where, uh, and actually kind of like felt like there was multiple moments where, you know, it was successful. And at one point it sold for like $2 billion. Yeah. It was like, oh, exit, $2 billion. Amazing. And then like, Trump blocked it or didn't go through, didn't go through. But then during that, this is a crazy story. It was like we were sitting in the office and this news happens like, dude, congrats. That's amazing. Holy shit. And then like 9 months goes by. The deal doesn't like fully get approved because it was such a big purchase out of a Chinese company group or something like that. And in the meantime, the business just kept crushing. So Adam, who's the CEO of that, you said he like basically went back, was like, cool. We'll still do the $2 billion, but now it's for 30%. Yeah, I don't know what exactly— some version of that.

Yeah, there was like, I don't know, like, uh, because you couldn't do majority deals. That was a big blocker. Yeah, something like that.

Majority deal was going to happen. And so now then the company eventually IPOs, you get this nest egg, right? So it's like, okay, I could do whatever. You could go retire. You could go buy islands and cars or do rich guy stuff. Like you could do that. And instead you like chose to do something else. Can you just describe basically like what's the mindset, what's the conversations you had with yourself? Yeah. Now that you had more resources to do whatever you wanted to do.

Yeah, I feel like my whole life I've just always wanted to tinker and build stuff. Like I always described it as like, I love taking stuff apart and putting it back together. It's not like some people will say it's like, oh, you want to learn how it works. It's not that. It's more of the puzzle. Okay, how does somebody else put this, like, you know, and I used to do this with cars and computers growing up. Like, I would overclock my computer and I would make my car faster. And like, that was like kind of just like the mentality that I had. And then it was like, okay, well, I've got to become an adult at some point in time and do the thing. But like, hey, I like this business thing. I buy and sell stuff. It's like a way for me to hustle and kind of do more of what I want to do. And then I was like, let me just keep doing this. And then maybe at some point I got to get a real job and kind of luckily, like, tech was really valuable and like my skill set improved. I got better at it. And but a lot of that early journey was like more solo than like with a bunch of people. And then met the guys, Adam, before AppLovin, like kind of like these other, other things. And it was like, yo, we're like 8 people in like Palo Alto, like building cool random apps. Like the energy for me there every day was like through the roof. And then Monkey Inferno was like the same thing, but like even more. And I think I used to tell you, like, I want an airport hangar. I just want to put a bunch of cool stuff in it. And I just think it was like that before I started Founders Inc as it is, because I was at Twitch and I'm like, I got to get out of here, right? It was like an instant, instant thing.

And why, by the way?

I don't know. I don't think I'm a good employee. I think I'm like suited for a few roles and it's typically like doing my own stuff without much.

Was there anything that just drove you crazy about it?

Was there any like You know, we're going to do a whole nother pod on it. Basically, I feel like the first week or month of like, yo, let's do a bunch of stuff. And they're like, slow down. Like, why? I want to do more. Like, I want to do more things. And this resistance feeling of like, oh, we already thought about this or we tried this. Like, no, let's just go do stuff. And I never enjoyed that. And I think startups and small teams just because you have so much to do, that's the kind of mentality. And so I talked to probably like 75 to 100 founders before starting Founders Inc. And I really wanted to learn this. Like, I knew a bunch of people. I used to interact with them even at like Bebo and Monkey Inferno. I'd have them come by and like just talk, whatever. And I really enjoyed that. That was like fun. I started angel investing a lot, which was like cool. I thought I wanted to do that, but it wasn't fun. It was like meet great talented people, get excited about them. And then you're like a monthly update away, like, give them the check and then that's it. Right.

Damn, this isn't fun. First meeting is great.

It's a great first date. I walk away and I'm like, then there's no relationship.

You're like, what happened to that great first date?

Exactly. And so I was like, man, I don't really want to do that, but something like this where I could help these like early entrepreneurs, things that I've just done over and over again. I didn't have this. Like, what's a version of that? And I talked to a bunch of founders and, um, they all said something to me that I was like, what do you need? Like, what, what help do you need? I thought they're all going to say money and I'm going to start a fund. Like that, that's what I thought was going to happen. And they all said something different. They said something like, I need people who understand my problems. And we used to do those masterminds. Um, and it was really about like, who do you go to for founder problems? Yeah. It's like, what are your founder problems? They're your co-founders, your employees, or your investors. So you can't go to any of these people. They might be the problem. Right. And so who do you go to?

Or even if they're not the problem, you need to present, you don't want to worry your employees, you don't want to worry your investors. You kind of have to maintain a certain aura of momentum and morale. So you can't just go be dumping problems on them or be like, I don't know, you're supposed to know, you're the guy.

And we, we would go in that room, that little circle room with the circle table, we'd be in there and I don't know what the employees were thinking. They're just like, oh man, these guys are talking again. They're going to come out with something different. But we could talk about anything and then leave the room, be like, nah, we're still where we are. Yeah. And I think, you know, co-founder can be that for you. A lot of entrepreneurs starting out, they don't have that. And even if they have it, there's like other things that they're experiencing. And so when we used to put these folks together in these kind of masterminds, that feeling was like awesome. And it felt like we could relate. And actually I heard the same thing from a bunch of founders I used to talk to. And I was like, I think it's something more like this where I could do something and put everybody in a box. And I thought it was going to be more digital.

I think COVID times and started on Discord or whatever, started on Discord.

I mean, like Farzad Ben was in these groups, like there's a few others, like it was just people I knew around me and kind of COVID hit, it was digital. We were talking every week. We would give ourselves these like accountability kind of Ship It sessions. We would have an area to talk about stuff and you could see the dots connecting. And then I got an opportunity to like get this space and I'd been looking for like something and You know, it wasn't like, oh, San Francisco needs a place. I'm from the Bay Area normally, so this is the best place for me. But I said, look, if it's going to be SF, we're going to be on the water. No Barcelona, no more kind of places like that. So we got this like weird opportunity to find this space and like really make a bet when like nobody else was. I think it was like late 2020 is when I approached them here. Yeah. And it took maybe like 9 months to figure it all out. Another 3 months to like renovate it and stuff like that. So still very much— I got—

we got to call another call about breaking a lease. Wait, wait, he wants to sign a lease right now? Oh, come on in. Yeah, that's what it felt like here. I mean, this place for Mason has 300 events a year.

They went to zero with COVID All the places, you know, art galleries, art schools, like, what do you, what do you do? Like, you know, and this is supposed to be like this innovation place and it's a little bit older and it's coming in.

That's one of your tricks is that you don't run away when the dips happen. I remember when early on, 2013, '14, something like that, we meet, I buy Bitcoin because I don't know, you're into crypto. Some people in the office, you know, maybe I was dumb about the Ethereum idea. Right. Yeah. PG, Pete, Pete Hicks was, was, was all, you know, he's mining Bitcoin on our servers. So I buy some Bitcoin and literally like the next week I get like super convinced. I'm like, oh guys, I see it. I believe. Here's why I believe. I'm giving you my case. I bought. Yeah, great. Like the next week price cuts in half. It goes down to like $300 or something like that. And I came in, I'm like, oh, Bitcoin. I was, you know, whatever.

And you go, that was a fun week or two, you know.

Well, you were like, oh, this is great. Because now everything's half off. Like, you, you literally told me that. You go, you believe if you, if you buy now, you can cut your buy price. Basically, you can go down by 50%. You'll cost average in at half the amount. Yeah. Like, and I was like, oh, he's right. Because I was just riding a roller coaster of like, you know, I was doing what a cliché person would do. When things are good, this is great. When things are bad, maybe it's not great. Whereas you were like, dude, did anything actually change or just the external sentiment. And so I bought more. So I thank you for that. That was a very good, you know, decision at the time to go buy more when things go down. I think you've done that with, with other, you know, bets, whether it's San Francisco real estate during the COVID time or it's, you know, whether it's crypto or VR, when, when things go out of fashion, I feel like you don't run away, which is important.

And even if you're right 1 out of 5 times like that, you'll be right in such a big way that it works out.

And then, by the way, for me, it's just fun. So like like this is fun. Like I love building stuff. I like building technology. I did a lot of software obviously, because it's been magical to develop things and like distribute it to the world. We have some hardware projects. I don't know if you remember Jamie, by the way. Yeah.

Yeah. We, at one point in time when we were, when we were working together, we had an idea for a, it was cool. It was like a voice control. It's kind of like Alexa. Yeah. We called it Jamie and I don't know why, but like, yeah, we like Jamie. I still like the name. That was good., and what you were saying was like, you're like, we can, instead of creating a, everyone was trying to create a device. Portal was trying to create a screen. Amazon was trying to create a screen. You're like, that makes it expensive. You're like, everybody already has TV screens in their house. What if you just plug in like a Chromecast and now you turn your TV from just a blank screen into like an Amazon, like Alexa thing? Yeah. That was cool. We didn't, we didn't do it because it was like, we sort of saw like huge distraction. We were like, yo, that's going to be like a brutal battlefield.

I remember we took it to Michael and he just gave us that look like, Uh, this is—

well, he was just like, yo, when all of the, like, trillion-dollar companies are going to go after the same prize, like, you can, but do you really want to? Like, you know, it's better to do the things they're overlooking. I just think it's probably good advice. To be fair, we also were going to do a crypto exchange when crypto got hot, and he was like, for a different reason, he's like, hey, I'm already rich. I don't want to lose everything. And I don't really know what crypto is. It's 2014. Like, crypto might just be like super illegal and I don't want to risk it all on that. Yeah. If we had done that, it might have been good. So you have to be careful. Like even really smart, successful people, you can't like just take their word. You know, you got to have the independent mindedness.

100%. And I think it's fun to take shots. Don't get stubborn over it. Like, damn, people fall in love with their ideas. I think that's— it took me probably like, I don't know, 10 years to figure that out. Like you have to get like almost like you have to like really take the hits. Yeah. To like really like live in that of like Yeah, there's a lot of ideas. I may try a lot of them. My mission isn't all of them. I got to find the right ones where I can really spend the energy on. But I was going to talk about one more. So we built Chatty Heads, which, by the way, now in the AI world, we were fucking ahead of the game.

Yeah, we were a little early.

We could generate images for like, I don't know, 5,000.

That was like DALL·E.

Yeah. And that's what it, that's what it feels like. But I think it's like cool. It's like whatever technology you have today, go try to produce a thing it might not be the right time. It might be the right moment. The medium might be wrong. The team might be wrong. Some of those you should pursue again and again. And some of those are great learning exercises to build on top of. And I, you know, I got a chance to meet a lot of people who were professional athletes. And I think one thing a lot of them talk about is like, you know, basketball might end. Like, my career will end at like 35. It's like, that's, that's my game. It's done. Now what do I do? I think what we get a chance to do, whether it's like business or, you know, content or like building stuff, like I'm going to do this for the rest of our lives. I want—

I think that's the fun part. Buffett's like, what, 90-something? Yeah. Yeah. Still at the top of his investing game. Exactly.

And so it's like, well, like, what am I in the rush for? Like, I'm not just here to, like, enjoy the journey, but I also don't want to be like, I got to solve it tomorrow, right? Like when I was young, it was like, I got to be the millionaire by whatever. It's like at some point I was like, I don't know, man, I just want to keep doing this. And if I need to like hustle my way to it or not, like it doesn't really matter. Like, you know, I took an Android engineer job at Monkey Inferno. Yeah. Because I was like, I, you know, I met you and I was like, I want to work with this guy. Yeah. I think that was my worst skill, by the way. I just learned Android.

Yeah, you fooled me.

Yeah. So like, I was like, I don't know, I got to get in somehow. And like, I know I'm going to do great stuff here. I got to show it. But like, I'm not afraid to put in the effort. We need to put in the effort. Also not afraid to like not rush to the answer. Right. And like, you don't want to be like casual and like, wait, you want to be kind of like in the middle there. You want to know when to attack and when to not. But like, I don't know, you got to enjoy it.

Yeah. So there was this like 4-year period-ish when I was there. I think 3 years of it was like not Ablauf. So like most of my intersection there is like not what it is today, but I did get a chance to spend a lot of time with him and ideate ideas.

What's the Cliff Notes of his story so people know? Because people don't know. He's pretty under the radar, right?

Yeah. I mean, his backstory, I think he did some stuff in like equities or trading at some point. I think he got into like ads at some point through like marketing and affiliate stuff. He built a few different products. Maybe he was a key member of the team and then he had like a few companies. I think he had actually built up some, like, you know, wealth. I don't know how much it was, but it was enough where, like, you're like, okay, this person can make this bet and, like, fund the operations.

And so he was kind of self-funding.

One thing I've come to learn is that where I think we screwed up, because we did Monkey Inferno, which was basically our little idea lab, but we had a beautiful setup. It's like, yeah, you got funding already done. You have great team. You're in San Francisco, beautiful office, really talented team. Like, you know, we're not the PayPal Mafia, but like everybody's gone on to do kind of interesting shit. Everyone's, you know, uh, I don't think we had the level of success that we could have given the talent. My take was I think we were good execution, maybe even great execution, but poor project selection, meaning we were going after these like moonshots, like create the next hit social media app, which is like, you know, there's been like 7 ever. There's not that many of them ever to exist. So, you know, I think we did bad with project selection. It seems like one thing that Adam did aside from great execution was project selection. I think you told me some story about like they went to some conference, you guys were working on one thing altogether and he came back and had that very quick, like, think, decide, act loop where he's like, we're doing a mobile ad network, we're doing mobile games. I don't know the full story, but like, it seemed like just that one choice at that time. Yeah.

Is the make or break, you know, like, yeah, huge difference. And, you know, like, I think we had many of those moments. I wouldn't trade it, by the way. I think our learnings like, I still leverage them. A lot of the things that we talked about, how we ran the teams, like, they still radiate and resonate with me. And so, like, immense wealth and knowledge and, like, like, literally, like, experience of the thing, right?

Beyond, like, you're talking about when we worked together.

When we worked together. Yeah, exactly. But there were a few moments where project selection could have been massive for us and that outcome. Um, you know, like, they, you know, and we can talk about AppLovin a little bit on that in that journey, but like, we did Blab. It was a live streaming product, Google Hangouts, public live stream. Yeah.

Like if you saw Clubhouse get really popular, we had built basically a Clubhouse before Clubhouse. And it got to—

Kinda like what Twitch right now, like there's a big section of this, like just chatting, hanging out category. Right.

We built an app like that. It got to 4 million users, but it didn't become the next big thing.

I don't know if you remember this conversation, but we had this one time when we were deciding what to do next. Like, are we doing mobile? Version of this because we see other things happening, or do we do the B2B version? Yeah. And Zoom didn't exist. And that— I think that was— we were like, B2B.

I remember there was like— it was like so short of a conversation, which was so silly. We were just like, B2B, that's not cool.

It wasn't cool and it wasn't clear because if you think about this, like 2015, there wasn't a billion like B2B companies crushing it. Yeah. But like every year since then, it was like 7 or 9, like because I think at that time it was only a few had really reached, like, it was like, I don't know, Box.net and Dropbox.

And it wasn't, it definitely wasn't as obvious at the same time. It wasn't as hidden as we kind of made it seem. We totally, you know, like, I remember Citrix was like a multi-billion dollar product and Citrix Online was the way that people did these webinars, webinars and web conferencing at the time. And it was so bad. And their users, like, We were trying to make this cool social app and SAP and Oracle were using our tool just because it was better, even though it was like not meant for that.

Why is your color like weird and purple? Why do you got this weird star thing?

And instead of looking at those clues and being like, huh, maybe we could do that. We, we missed that project selection choice. I remember that day because that was a, that was a probably a multi-hundred million dollar fork in the road moment, you know? Yeah, maybe. You still had to execute, but. For sure.

I mean, we could execute, right? But it just, did we have the right selection and. Could we get the right insight in our mind to incept? And also when we decided to end Blab, I don't know if you remember, you went to this barbecue. I forgot who you met. James Currier. And they were telling us, you know, you're talking about like, hey, this content network problem. Because it was like the moment that entered our mind, it's like, oh shit, we're fucked. Like, that's what it felt like. Like, we don't have the ability to intersect these. And we kept looking at Twitch like, why? Okay, so we know we don't because people come on for an hour, they do a show. The Epic content is not on long enough for people to show up and intersect with it. How come Twitch wins? And then it turned out that, oh, people play games for 8 to 10 hours. Yeah.

So it didn't matter when you showed up. Correct.

And then the context reset. So it's like, I have— it was like, you know, the feeling a lot of Monkey Inferno to me and like the things we built was like, it's not slow down to speed up, but like, look for the clues. Don't be afraid of that. And again, the eager, you know, the ego or the stubbornness of like, We want to build a giant social app. Like, I want to go somewhere around the world where somebody is using my consumer product. Like, that was a stubbornness that we— that was the driver. Yeah. And it's like if we had just kind of unlocked it a little bit, there was these project selection moments. And so there was a lot of that. I still feel that sometimes, but I don't know, maybe it was because I'm older and I'm like less willing to like be nimble in that way. But I did want to talk about one more hardware robotics thing. Give it a few minutes. And so I think this is another like resurgence moment happening. Like for a long time, hardware has been too hard, too expensive. Software gets funded.

That's still a valid motto, right? Hardware is hard.

Hardware is hard. Software is easy. Software scales. It's eating the world. Like these were all the mentalities. I think it's flipping and I think it's a few things that have all kind of showed up together. So there's two types of hardware that I think are now like there and like ripe to build. Same recipe, Can small teams do it? Can you do it without a lot of funding? And then can your output be really big and like impact a lot of people? And so I think there's one around consumer products. So like the combination of Raspberry Pi and cloud AI has completely changed what it takes to build something, right? So there's a company in our studio, Magical Toys, they're building an AI teddy bear. We'll do a little demo of it after. We'll kind of get to that. And, you know, I think what that—

how old is that guy who's building that?

He's like young, right? I think Fatim's like 24 or 25.

And it's not like he has huge funding or a huge team, but he's able to— he showed up here.

Uh, I don't know how he got here, to be honest. I think like many people here, they meet somebody, they attract some people, just show up, by the way. And it's awesome. Like we've created that environment where it could make sense. He had done some small projects in college. Like he built this thing called Desk Buddy. It was a little like E Ink screen with like two eyes that just blinked. And that was really it. You couldn't talk to it. Couldn't do anything. It was just like a little desk buddy.

So you're not alone. Is that the idea?

Yeah, I don't know what it was, but I remember seeing it. I'm like, that's cool. Like I want one on my desk. Like, is this fun? And they brainstormed a bunch of ideas and, you know, the combination of like, hey, we got Raspberry Pis, we could do these little things, we could use 3D printers to build enclosures. And then now we've got this cloud AI thing that like can be really powerful. And they ended up coming with this idea, which was like, hey, we're going to build a toy. And first they literally made Ted, the stuffed animal Ted, and made it talk like it. I was like, oh, this is wild. Like, you know, and AI could do this, but everyone's trying to make coding faster. Or there's, you know, developers solving developer problems. And I love when somebody takes that and goes, let me go to this other place where nobody's thinking about. Right. And he spent probably the last 9 months sitting, refining. I think we sent you one of the first units. It probably broke.

Like when we built Jamie, I used a Raspberry Pi at that time, which was the first version. Raspberry Pi was thought of as this hobbyist market of tinkerers that are going to buy a few of them. They've, they've sold like 60 million units or something ridiculous like that. Like $35 a pop, 60 million. There's like a few billion dollars of Raspberry Pi out there.. And I think what it did is you used to have to make like custom boards, custom software. And you know, for a technical person like me, I don't want to go that far. Like I have certain skills that I could do really well. And typically it's like read a few guides on the internet and like stitch stuff together. It felt too far for even like somebody like me. It felt like, man, it's like really serious engineering. I need 10 people, $10 million. I gotta convince somebody there's a big market and now like build up this like company, which probably will fail because I raised too much, too much pressure, too much demand on return, etc. And to me, the Raspberry Pi was one of the unlocks. And there's the NVIDIA Jetson now, which has like GPUs on device and there's so much more there.

But so what are, what are other things besides magical toys that you saw somebody built, interesting things you're seeing built in the hardware robotics side?

Yeah. So we have, uh, AJ who's building the, you know, NeuroCity. He built that first version, which I think I've showed you before, which is a brain-computer interface. Now he has a second version, um, that's really tiny. It's like the size of AirPods. You could put it right here, special purpose. So really like the ability to prototype, develop the thing, get like hundreds or thousands of units out there, improve the design, and doing that without a giant team allows him to kind of continue. We've seen like a variety of things kind of come out on that front. I think the second area that's happening is, you know, there's a consumer hardware and then there's like this robotics, drones and kind of this other world where we have so much physical equipment in the world, forklifts and lawn mowers and cars and like, you know, all these things that we do that requires either a person like, you know, with drones, we invest in this company, Lucid Drones, which, you know, they built a power washing drone, could go up in buildings, could power wash the, you know, the glass instead of people hanging from the side. There's another company that—

and is that working? Like, do people— is it like—

Dave's Powerwashing. Dave's Powerwashing. Windows so clear you won't even know it's there.

Amazing, right? Dave's got a great tagline as well. And, you know, people end up finding that if you just sell to those, those small businesses, you give them more tools, they can serve more buildings, do it more efficiently. That distribution is built in. Maybe in the long run this starts changing, but like, Now there are a ton of these opportunities. I've seen one for farms and like, you know, mowing the weeds around certain fruits or kind of like inspecting them. You just send people between these things to go like do it. And now there's like a little like robot. And, you know, instead of the one person doing it for 2 weeks or 2 people, the one person's there monitoring it at the facility in air conditioning and like watching on the iPad, watching on the iPad. And it might get stuck early on or might detect something. Now they got to go fix that thing. This efficiency, I think, is like massive. And we're seeing it in many places. So the same thing I saw these two guys building here in San Francisco, they're like random warehouse in the back of some other store, like two dudes like literally grinding, bootstrapping, like, like just going there. I'm like, I like these guys. They took a forklift, they automated it. They took self-driving car tech that probably took billions of dollars to develop. And then all of that kind of flowed to like open source. And typically open source sometimes is behind than the cutting edge, but in 10 years that like normalizes. Uh, we see this elsewhere, like AI models like Llama, but like really they took cameras and some LiDAR stuff and they strapped a little computer to a forklift and they could move it around. You could talk to it. You could kind of get it to do things. And I think there's a massive resurgence. And so forklift, physical thing. You took a little Raspberry Pi, internet, some cameras, some technology like we were doing computer vision technology to score like Fortnite games. They're using that same kind of technology to look at, oh, this is a box. This is the barcode that I picked up, right? I can now use and figure out what's this thing. It could go walk around the warehouse and be like, oh, that pallet's in the wrong spot. How? It just scanned the barcode and detected, oh, there's this pallet here. Supposed to be over there. Go pick it up, move it over there. Like, these problems exist in warehouses. Like, I mean, you know, right? I think you've dealt with some of those things. I run a warehouse. And so to me it's like, what are the machines? Like, what are the traditional machines we've built probably for the last 100 years that you're going to slap a little computer on it and now it's a superpower? And I think this is bringing down the cost of like this robotic hardware, like building a robotic arm used to feel like, yo, I got to be like Tony Stark and like Iron Man. I've seen two people do it in our machine shop. I— there's a guy here, I don't even know his company, he's just showing— he just had a 3D-printed hand on his desk. And I'm like, that was this? It's like, oh yeah, like, I, I created the ability to develop a full hand with all the fingers and everything in just this 3D printer. There's a Bambu Lab printer, which honestly, 3D printer was great, and then Bambu Labs took it to a whole nother level. Like, a little bit of AI to help self-leveling and make prints great and like, like everybody loves it. And he just built his hand pretty high quality, took a little fishing net on the inside of the hand. So like, you know, in each finger he could like pull every finger and like do some stuff. It's like one dude, like few months hackathon and like, I don't know what he's going to produce from that, but I just think you could do these things now in like weeks and months when they took years and like a lot of money. I think there's a huge opportunity here. Still going to take time to like marinate and develop. But I look at it as one of those things where like if I was a mechanical engineer, if I liked hardware and I've been told that it's just AI and software and like your stuff isn't that interesting. It's like, no, no, this is very interesting right now. Like, right, you need to find a place to do it. And, you know, like I'll even say, like, I think we're going even further for us. Like we have this space we built here, we call it the Founder Lab. Like this is where a lot of people come, they tinker on stuff. We have founders here, we have builders, we have creators here, we have all kinds of people doing stuff. With a little machine shop. And that kind of pushed us to be like, wait, there's more. We're seeing more. We're talking to more people thinking about this. And so I ended up getting this kind of industrial space and called it the Garage. It's 20,000 square feet of industrial space. I'll show you in a little bit what it looks like. You know, San Francisco real estate is not the best. I think this is the time to make these bets. But I've talked to 25 to 50 founders in the last 12 months. That need a hardware space like this to tinker, to have smart people around them, to have the machines around them, to just being able to develop it probably for less than $100 grand. They can go and proof of concept and prototype the thing. And look, we're seeing the hype cycle of like humanoid robots, right? That's that like hype above. I'm more excited about all these startups that are going to form. They're going to build this expertise. They're going to be $100 million teams, whether it's their product or their knowledge. Right. That's happening now. And 2 people are doing it like every single day, like they're spawning these things. And so consumer hardware is one area, but I think robotics and what typically was known as like deep tech, like, I need like PhDs and like stacks of them and $50 million or $100 million. That's the second one. And I think it's like there's a few people seeing it. Maybe there are sectors like defense where it's like exciting, but like I don't know. I think we're gonna see machines everywhere and every kind of version of it. And I, I think I've seen people develop like cooking robots, laundry machine things, folding drones to inspect stuff, drones to map interior spaces. Like Matterport is a giant company and a human goes and puts a tripod everywhere. And like, this is a little drone that's gonna fly through the whole house and like map it for you. And that expands that and I just see 1 or 2 person teams able to do this faster than I've ever seen it. I feel more capable. Maybe I just really want to get into hardware again myself. And I think that's the point though.

It's a lot of people would want to mess with this. And if something goes from not tinkerable to tinkerable, suddenly it's now the like, it's kind of like before you're competing 1v1. Now it's one versus the field. Yeah, the field. Of course, any individual thing in the field might suck. Correct. But the field overall is super powerful. And now you're saying The field is open for, you know, hardware tinkerers, which it wasn't open before. That's a big deal.

Yeah, we do these like residencies here. We'll bring people here for a month or 6 weeks. We just tell them like, here's a theme, here's a space to go do things. When the Vision Pro came out, we did it. We had about 40 Vision Pro devs. We probably had the largest concentration of Vision Pro devs out of Apple, right? Anywhere. And the knowledge of that, like, look, it didn't produce some ridiculous outcome. We actually did invest in 1 or 2 teams from that. I think we just got a chance to see that technology deeply. We did this AI hardware one. I remember meeting this, this kid, and I don't know where he was in the world, and he shows me this like robot he like built, like a humanoid he built like in his bedroom. And it's like half— he only built the body, the legs, so it stopped like where the waist was, and it was like totally hand constructed. And I'm like, yeah, this is wild, but the fact that you could like bootleg this in your bedroom and like it could take steps. It's like crazy to me. I met these other guys, Premiere, and the same trend in Raspberry Pi. They took that trend and I mean, I love some of these. I just, you know, I love it because I could jump on the video and they're, they were up in Seattle or something and it's like their kitchen. And I'm like, is that a 3D printer in your sink? And it's just like their kitchen is like all machines. And I'm like, dude, you got to get out of your house and I got to give you a home to like do that. That's what I want is like people who will just turn their bedroom into this. It's like, no, no, no, you come do it here. We'll give you a little bit better facilities. We'll give you space. You get a better place to sleep. And they took this like Raspberry Pi trend and they're like, oh, people start with Raspberry Pis and then they build a custom board. Oh, we're building a modular Raspberry Pi. Right. We take that computer, next intermediate step. Oh, you want a speaker? Well, you could pick whatever speaker you want. Just put that in. Oh, you want to produce 2,000 units now? We have the ability to scale it for you. So they took the hobbyist world and the behavior that's happening, driving it, and they started this in there, literally in their kitchen. And like, I just think that, man, that's capable now. And that's the trend that I can't— I can't like unsee it sometimes. And right in hardware, both in consumer and more deep tech hardware, like drones, platform is massive, right? To be able to do things. So much opportunity to utilize that. I don't know how long it's going to take for this to become mass and mainstream, but I just keep seeing that trend right now. And I think for us, that's the bet you're making. That's the bet we make. And so I always joke with the guys here, it's like we want to bet on -1 to 0. Like Peter Thiel talked about the 0 to 1 companies. It's like we said one step even before that. Like you're at -1, you're wandering the forest, you need a place to tinker and like come and get the ideas to form. This is what we want.

This is what we want to do. Right. I love it. Uh, Furkan, this is amazing. Uh, good catching up as always. Uh, let's go check out some of these spaces.

Sweet. Let's do it. Thanks so much. I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.