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The Founder Archetype Just Changed · The Expert Method

• speaker-0: I don't believe humans were built for safe. The entrepreneur has shifted twice and I believe it's shifting for a third time right now. If someone's willing to give you their money, their hard-earned money, that shows something. Why don't we have it as the same idea as like Shark Tank where people just pitch their idea and invest with scroll-fluid videos? Turn just some regular, just an idea you had in the shower or three o'clock in the morning into some billion dollar company. speaker-1: A lot of founders spent months trying to convince investors their idea is good before they've shown it to enough real people to know if it is. So with that, I'm excited to be joined by Eli Bozoglu. Eli is the founder of Fishtank, a platform built around the idea of turning fundraising into something public, continuous, and tied directly to how a founder shows up and builds. In our conversation, we discuss what it looks like when raising capital, building in public, and proving demand all collapse into the same process and platform. If you get value from this conversation, be sure to subscribe and share it with a friend. And now here is my conversation with Eli Bozoglu. Eli, thank you so much for being here. speaker-0: Thanks for having me. speaker-1: Absolutely. So, Ellie, you're building around this idea of opening up access to funding. I'm curious your take on this. Does giving more people access to capital actually lead to better startups or just create more? speaker-0: actually think it's none of the above because raising capital is very hard and getting people to open up their wallets is even harder. asking the public for capital to invest in your company is actually harder than asking a VC because you ask a VC, very easy to convince one person. Now, to get them on the phone with you, that's a whole different story. VCs don't really like to check their email inboxes. But convincing a whole group of individuals to invest in your crowdfunding, to invest in your company, is harder, but at the same time it's better because it's the easiest, it's the best way to validate your idea, my opinion. Because if you get 500 people to fund your solution, you know you found a real problem. Now, you won't be wasting the next six, seven months building something that... there's no market for it, there's no one who actually has this problem. You know that, okay, these people have this problem, they have this problem, and they believe in this solution so much that they're willing to give me money to build it, they're willing to give me money to bring it to market, they're willing to give me money to scale it, because they have this problem themselves. And I believe that it, not only will it stop people from creating these startups, because these people will be posting, and they'll say, okay, wait a minute, no one's investing, that means there's a very high chance that This isn't useful. Let me see. ⁓ Let me tweak a little bit. Let me see what the audience thinks. That's what I believe. speaker-1: Nice. So your vision with the investors on the platform, Fishtank, the people that would be investors ⁓ are going to be people who want the solution for themselves. speaker-0: Either those types of people, can be VCs, angels, they could be people like me and you. They could be people who are just looking to get on the next big thing. Personally, I think I could find the next Facebook. I think if someone, I think if Mark Zuckerberg would have pitched me Facebook back in 2003, back in 03, 04, I would have definitely said, wow, this is great, you got traction. I would put all my money in it and you know, famously every $200 that Peter Thiel put into Facebook turned into $200,000. So say you allocate a $500 budget a month to either crypto stocks, and you would have put that into Facebook back in 03, you would have half a million dollars, and that's off a $500 investment. So there's plenty of reasons why you would want to invest in a company. There's plenty of reasons why you'd want to sign up onto Fish Tank as an investor. speaker-1: Love it. And one thing that you mentioned is that the best way to validate your idea is to have investors, like people agreeing to invest in your company. But I would push back a little bit on that. The best way to validate your idea is to get people to pay you for the thing that you're creating. Right. But obviously like with software, with the startups that you'll likely see on this platform, it's going to be businesses that need some upfront capital in order to get the thing built. Is that right? speaker-0: Yeah, for sure. another thing that I'm sure most of your audience has heard of, it's building in public. Are you familiar with that term? So building in public is this, you look at any successful entrepreneur, they have some form of building, like an example that most people are going to say, what? makes no sense. Donald Trump. The name might be a little controversial, but the story ⁓ isn't. He was ⁓ in the midst of like declaring bankruptcy. None of his businesses were going well. And then he sort of pivoted to personal branding. Threw up Trump on all of the hotels he owned. He got on a reality TV show. His famous line, you're fired. And people sort of really started liking that. I I personally believe that's how he actually won the presidency. People knew who he was. He had no experience in politics. He was a businessman. How did he win all these people's hearts? Because they knew him. He was familiar. Trump was one of the first people to actually build in public. That's the way I see it. A thing with building in public is it takes a lot of time. People watch content, it's a 30 second video, ⁓ this probably took them a minute to do. Content is really ⁓ long, it's hard, and it really takes a lot of time. As a founder, when you're building the product, you have to raise capital. Raising capital is basically a full-time job. Content is also a full-time job. And then development takes also a pretty fair amount of time. However, it's getting better and better and do these AI tools, but it still takes a pretty pretty big chunk of time So why can't we cut that down to your building in public go-to-market? mixed with your Your fundraising for your startup and cut that down and that really that helps the founder and it's also ⁓ opening up this sort of form of investment to anyone speaker-1: ⁓ And I mean, it takes the, the work that you're doing on getting funding and turning it into something public facing, right? You talk about the idea of funding in public, right? Which is this new idea that you're pioneering, which is a really fascinating idea. So if, I guess, do you agree on the idea that the best way to validate your idea is to actually get customers paying you for the thing that you're building? speaker-0: Yeah, the best way to validate your idea is for people to pay for it. So whether that's paying for it in terms of investing, whether that's paying to get on a wait list, whether that's just donations, whatever it is, if someone's willing to give you their money, their hard-earned money, that shows something. speaker-1: Yeah, a hundred percent. then going back again, yeah, to the original question of typically if like those, that constraint of not having money in the beginning, in the startup times is usually what makes the most creative and best innovations. Is there any kind of like guardrail or any kind of thing that you want to put in place with this platform? I don't know if you even can to like ensure that the founders aren't just getting flushed with cash and then the product never gets delivered kind of thing, you know? You know what I mean? Like the companies, there's stories, there's countless stories in the past where this company, especially like in the dot com era, like the web boom in the late nineties, these companies were just getting funded like $15 million basically just by having a business plan. And then nothing was ever actually created. But then people like Mark Zuckerberg, when they had no money in the beginning, they had to like bootstrap their way to getting the first 10,000 customers, first thousand customers, whatever. So like, does that whole idea and dynamic play into how you've thought about building and designing fish tank? speaker-0: Well, it's not a slot machine. It's not a place where you just throw money and then you get a 10,000X on your money, right? It has a high ROI because it's not easy. Not only you have to judge the idea, the idea judging part is fairly easy because you ask a few of your friends, do you like this idea? They say yes. Then you can ask a few other people, would you use this? And then they say that, yeah, yeah, true, okay, it's a great idea. Now you gotta vet the founder. Now we have something called keeping up, is like following. And you basically keep up with the company. So the company posts updates, building in public, right? You could see the founder's journey. Okay, this guy's been building this product for four months, let's Demo link dropped. I've seen his journey. I've seen that he's grown tremendously on socials. I personally messaged him or I know that he's built something else in public, built something previously, scaled it. And then you have to judge yourself, right? Because investing in private companies, your job is to judge the entire business, the founder, the idea, the founders' content, everything about that. And that's why there's so much to win. There's so much to gain because of that. speaker-1: For sure. And like as a innovator on the platform, right, you're only going to attract capital. You're only going to attract investors if you can prove that you're developing something that's going to win, right? That's going to work out. Right. So there's the incentive of like, okay, we need to actually build something. We need to actually deliver something that's going to work. And it feels like it really democratizes this whole process of investing in private companies. It's not just the venture capital firms, which across a lot of different domains, that democratization process typically leads to better outcomes. Cause like market dynamics, whenever you apply that into anything, it's going to typically improve the outcomes of that ecosystem where this ecosystem is an ecosystem of startup businesses and you're taking market dynamics and applying it to that. So really excited to see what that ends up creating. Cause it's just the innovators are going be incentivized to, ⁓ for sure. speaker-0: I like to use the example of the app store, how Apple sort of democratized the application space because before that, you get your computer or you get your phone and there were pre-installed apps and people would use their phone as a phone. There was no such thing as people like this all day, glued to their phone all day. But obviously that's not really a good thing, but it's still, you could use it as an example of they really democratize it and change the way we see phones forever. When I say, I'm using my phone right now. You don't think like I'm on the phone with someone. You said that 15 years ago before the App Store, people would have assumed you're on the phone with someone. Or maybe you're sending them a text message or an email, but that's it. So now it's, it really like it shows when you give the power to the people, it changes everything. speaker-1: Yeah, a hundred percent. All evolution starts from the bottom up, right? All great evolution. There's a great book called the evolution of everything that just goes through every single domain that you could possibly think of and explains how all evolutionary processes within that domain start from a bottom up approach, which is as we're saying, you know, the population. So to pivot, you have said that fundraising system is broken, right? You went through this from your own personal experience. What specifically do you think is not working and what made you decide it needed to be rebuilt instead of just navigated better? speaker-0: there was a lot of problems. Now I could list them all to you, but then we'll be here till tomorrow and I don't think either of us want that. So I'm gonna start off with my personal experience, but around a year and a half ago I was building my web agency. We skilled around 20 employees. It was basically a Google form that they would fill out after cold calling and it would go straight to Lovable and then I streamlined the entire process where they would show the website to the client, they would approve, I would send. The invoice, the salesman would take 20 % commission. I would get the rest. Now I was basically sitting back in my chair with my feet up because I automated the entire process. Now, so I got a little bored. The team constantly told me, we never know why people are hanging up on us. It's annoying because you you get a cold call from someone. You don't say, hey, by the way, your pitch was horrible. This is exactly how you can improve it. No, you hang up on their face. Sometimes occasionally throw an F-U and That's it. It's over. So that was just a problem that I kept seeing. So I built an internal AI tool called Prospector where you could upload your previous calls that you recorded and then you could replay them with the AI and it tells you exactly what you did wrong, how you should have reacted to the objections, what you should have said, and you could practice it over and over again. The team loved it, right? They said it was amazing. It was great. They somehow managed to convince me to try to bring this to to bring it to market. I pushed back, knew that it wasn't fit for venture dollars because you know, it isn't like a venture portfolio company, right? Unless it's gonna be a multi-billion dollar company, they don't even wanna look at it. So I turned to crowdfunding. Only issue, the only people on these crowdfunding platforms are VCs because it's too boring for anyone else to look at. So these crowdfunding platforms essentially said, no, sorry, we can't have you. But why? If they don't want to invest, they don't have to. The problem is that it works with pitch decks. Let me give you an analogy. Let's say one in 1,000 startups succeed. That means there's another 999 fail. That means you would have to read through 999 15 to 25 page PDF decks just to find that great idea. Would you read all those slides? I wouldn't. That's what a VC's job is, essentially. So I said, well, what is something that people go through and a thousand of them a day is, you know, just a regular afternoon? Well, TikTok, Instagram. How many reels would you say you watch a day or TikToks? I can't count. I don't think you can either. I don't think anyone can. So why don't we have it as the same idea as like Shark Tank where people just pitch their idea and invest with scroll through those videos. And why don't we actually add something to that building in public art because that's exploding and people really love that authenticity, right? It's one thing to see someone and say, hey, this is what I'm building, invest. And it's another thing to see them actually doing it, them actually building the company. And we merged those two things and we've been getting great feedback from everyone who's been telling the idea to all these founders. They've been saying, wow, I never have time between building in public and raising. I almost feel like I have to pick and now I could do both. Not only is it both, like I get basically raised capital from the building in public. So it'll just motivate me to put in more creativity and then that creativity will not only raise capital, but it also source more users and it's just. I honestly think sometimes like how has no one else come up with this? it's it's wild to me. speaker-1: Yeah, those are typically the best ideas. speaker-0: That's my personal pain, right? I realized these platforms just outright reject you if it's not a venture fit company. And that's not what crowdfunding was made for. When Obama authorized it back in 2013, I'm pretty sure, the idea was that the everyday person could invest in companies. And it's just so boring that the everyday person does not want to invest in private companies. Now we're actually, our mission is to bring back what is actually supposed to be, which is me, you, my dad, anyone to invest in these companies that they truly believe in. speaker-1: Incredible. So before we started recording, you had explained this idea of the evolution of the entrepreneur and like what skill sets were of value at different time periods. Could you walk us through that evolution of the entrepreneur? speaker-0: Yeah, so this is something I really, I truly believe in. So over the past 50 years, the entrepreneur has shifted twice, and I believe it's shifting for a third time right now. So take it 50 years ago, your entrepreneur was ⁓ real estate banker, know, type of, type of acumen type of, type of entrepreneur. Then the internet came out and that changed everything. Now to be an entrepreneur, you had to know how to code. You had to be a computer science major. You had to graduate from Stanford. You had to raise this sort of top venture capital because it was, you know, it took 50 engineers to build this product and you know, that's not cheap. But that's what it shifted to, the engineer. You're Elon Musk, you're Mark Zuckerberg, you're Jeff Bezos. Now that this is becoming so cheap, this is essentially a $20 subscription. and it's only getting better. So what's the next thing, right? Ideas are cheap, everyone knows this. The product is becoming cheaper and cheaper every day. The last thing left is bringing the product to market. And in 2026, what is the best way to bring a product to market? Social media. Putting your face out there, explaining what you're doing. So why are we still judging a founder's ability to build a company, which is essentially now just bringing it to market? Why are we judging a founder's ability to bring a product to market based off of the colors of their pitch deck? It makes no sense to me, right? Wrong font, pass. What? You're not marketing with pitch decks, right? So why don't we judge them based on their ability to bring product to market? Why don't we judge them off of their content? That ties back into what I said, the founder, the new founder archetype is the content creator. speaker-1: 100%. Not to say that those other things don't matter. They're just not a differentiator really anymore because more and more people are capable of doing those things a lot easier. But the, the content creator element, if you can effectively bring a product to market in this day and age, in this ecosystem, that is the real differentiator. So what do you think makes somebody a great, bring a product to marketer, right? Like how does somebody be a good, obviously you're building these Dynamics within the fish tank platform like you're going to be rewarded by being a good content creator on the fish tank platform So how have you thought about how have you broken down like what really makes a good? content creator speaker-0: Honestly, when it comes to content, there's no right or wrong the way I see it. because you see content of all types. You'll see a video doing great and then you'll see a video saying the literal exact opposite and it'll do well as well. There's no right or wrong. It's not what you do, it's how you do it. It's not what you say in your content, it's how you film it, how you edit it. The way you say it. That's what I believe are the most important characteristics of a good content creator. Now, what I was saying before, Acumen, engineering, those are still important. You still need acumen to build a company. You still need to understand product to build the product. It's just not the top priority. speaker-1: Right. Yeah. I mean, there's just nuance everywhere, right? There's always nuance in anything that you're talking about. But I do agree with you that I think the big differentiator between one CEO, one entrepreneur to the next is going to be your ability or somebody to be able to perform that function. Maybe it's not the CEO, maybe it's not the founder, but somebody within that team has to be able to perform the function of telling your story, communicating with the audience, connecting with others, promoting the product, delivering the product, bringing the product to the market through this content ecosystem. And I agree with you that I think the two most influential or most important characteristics of a great piece of content is number one, first and foremost, the topic. Like what is the piece of content about? It has to be an interesting, engaging topic. And then second, which is often overlooked, is how you deliver it, right? The energy that you speak with or, you know, you have to be able to captivate the audience with your energy, right? Like you could have an amazing script, an amazing idea, but if you're just delivering it with zero energy, right? Or zero... editing, whatever enthusiasm, the energy can come in like your tonality or the energy can come in like the pacing, the editing of the video for sure. Maybe in a combination of both is typically the answer versus if you have like a less great script or a less great idea, but you're speaking with enthusiasm and yeah, or you're delivering it with energy enthusiasm that is going to perform so much better. So those are absolutely the two most important characteristics. And what's beautiful about that is if you get the founder or somebody who really cares about the product, the problem that they're solving. that enthusiasm, that charisma is going to just come through naturally in them talking about their business and talking about their product. Right? Because they genuinely care so much about this. Like, Ellie, if I'm talking with you about fish tank, like the energy, the enthusiasm just comes in automatically, right? Cause you give a ****, right? Like you really care about what you're building. So yeah, that's super exciting. And then the idea of product still really matter. And like, I think product is still king, right? great the best way to grow your business is to improve the quality of the product. Because if you have a great product, if you make a better product, you're going to make more happy customers and more happy customers is the best way to grow any business. Because a happy customer is going to stand for longer, they're going to refer others, they're going to provide a testimony, they're going to talk about you. So product is absolutely still. the peak, but creating a great product is easier, right? But yeah, is there a, do you anticipate seeing kind of like a, are you building anything into the platform? Do you have this on the product roadmap to have like feedback loops with the consumers? So you talked about having like, okay, you can release a demo of your product and then working in feedback loops for the founding team or the innovators on getting that feedback from people. speaker-0: You're talking about like investor to innovator? speaker-1: More so the people like the people. Yeah, yeah. Investor to innovator. Yeah. Like the everyday people that are using the product, giving them feedback on it. speaker-0: So if you're talking investor to the founders, we do have parameters that allow the founder to basically allow investors to send them a message. We have another feature that is coming soon, not on launch day, but it is something that will be coming out, which is live. So it's very hard to answer everyone's questions when you have so many people who are investing, right? It's not like you're asking one VC. So you can get the same question asked multiple times. You could have a bunch of people with different questions. what we do is we allow you to go live and all the investors keeping up with you, which is like following your company, could tune into the live and ask the questions, see you raw and edited, whatever it is, and really like build more of like a personal connection, more of a like, okay, fine, yeah, this is like, this guy knows what he's talking about or he answered all the questions, you know. Yeah, that's something, but if you're talking just like the founder's consumers for his platform, wouldn't be doing that. speaker-1: Cool. So yeah, you wouldn't be kind of facilitating that product feedback kind of idea. speaker-0: On their own product? No, but like between investors and founders, yeah. Yeah. speaker-1: Cool. Sweet. I just think like that is some of the most important things that the founders can hear is feedback from real people using their thing. Right? Cause that's the, like, that's the whole idea of the MVP, right? Like you don't want to build something, never deliver anything. And then once you finally have it quote unquote done, you deliver it. Nobody actually wants it, right? You want to just get what you're building in the hands of the people that are going to use it as soon as you possibly can to get that feedback, hear that feedback about it. Cool. Yeah. We don't need to. dive into the whole, I hear all the ideas for fish tank kind of thing. Cause those conversations that could go forever. And I'm sure you got the white, the board behind you filled with ideas. I love it. So, so obviously the big thing for this, right, is helping to facilitate, these, bringing these founders into this, like demonstrate the most important ability in today's age of being an entrepreneur, which is being a great content creator and being a great person who can bring the product to market through content creation. So how do you anticipate, like, do you have any kind of support that you're going to be providing to these founders and helping them to curate and create this content? Or are you just going to kind of be the platform? like, Hey, here is the platform where you can use it as tribute this content and connect with potential investors and facilitate that whole relationship. there any kind of like, as a founder, if I want to come onto this platform, are there any kind of tools or resources that you'll provide on helping me to create the content for the platform? speaker-0: No, we wouldn't be ⁓ helping the founders create content. However, once again, this is a feature, but ⁓ we do have something which would be like the daily prompt, which would be basically investors keeping up with you what they want to hear from you. So you could either throw up of a poll type of thing, or they could submit it and using AI, we would basically turn all of that. Like we get a bunch of similar questions that are asking the same type of point, would say, okay. This is what your followers want to know. This is what they want to know to build enough conviction to invest in this startup. They want to know, what are you doing with this if this happens? And then, okay, now you can film a piece on that. Other than that, it's entirely up to the founder. We want to see his creativity. We want the investors to judge their creativity, not our creativity. speaker-1: Love it. Cool. So in your journey and in the founders that you've spoken with and your analysis of the situation. So when a founder is getting ready to go out and raise money, right? They have this idea, they have this product that they're working on and they want to put their idea out there. They're getting ready to put their idea out there. Where do they usually get stuck? Is it like a lack of the platforms that exist out there for them to, where are they typically getting stuck in that process or where are they usually not doing a very good job? speaker-0: There are so many. Lack of credentials. One of the most ridiculous ones that is absurd, I kind of picture it as a meme in my head. It's like you go to the VC, you ask him, can I have money for my company? And he says, do you have money yet? And you say, no, that's why I'm asking you. And he says, well, I don't want to invest. Right? A thing VCs always ask is, do you have any money yet? Have you raised from anyone else yet? And most of the time when you haven't, they say no. And it's like, well, if you can't raise money, well then I don't want to invest. And it's like, well, that's... That's why I'm here right now. he's like, it's a very ridiculous thing where if you're not like some sort of Stanford graduate or ⁓ live in San Francisco and you're building something that has to do with AI, it's very hard to raise money in this day and age because if you look at the numbers, I'm pretty sure last I checked, was like over 65 % of Gen Z wants to be an entrepreneur. Obviously not all of them want to build software companies, but I would say a big chunk of them want to. So that means their inboxes are being flooded with pitch decks. mean, once again, I don't want to pitch decks. I don't know if you like to, but personally, I don't like reading those types of things. unless it's also, it has to be a warm intro. There are plenty of different things that they want, and it's very hard to meet all those criteria, especially when you live in a place like me. I live in Canada. speaker-1: Yeah, 100 % super tough. It's very much the a buddy system when you're trying to go out there and raise money, you got to know somebody. And then that question of have you raised before? It's like, well, no, that's why I'm asking you for money. It's like, yeah, classic. And I had not heard that statistic before about the number of people that want to become entrepreneurs. love that. Entrepreneurs are my favorite people on the planet. know, we are never, there's, don't think we could ever have too many entrepreneurs because we're never going to run out of problems. And entrepreneurs are just problem solvers and businesses are problem solving machines that those entrepreneurs then go on to create. This is an idea that's come up on the podcast a lot that through this transformation that we're going through, right? The job disruption from AI is going to be a very real thing. And I think more and more people are going to be forced into a situation where they have to figure out how to create their own value in the world, AKA solve problem, AKA become an entrepreneur. So I think a platform like this, like Fishtank, where you'll be able to, as an entrepreneur, as somebody who's starting your own business, building your own product, creating your own solution, solving your own problem, you can go to a platform like Fish Tank and demonstrate your ability to bring this product to market. really, the end all is just like you, like Fish Tank is gonna be the most effective way to raise money for your. for your business, right? Because on Fish Tank, you're demonstrating your ability to perform the most important skill set for an entrepreneur today, which is the ability to bring a product to market. And investors want to see that. So then as an innovator on that platform, you'll be able to raise more money on the platform, which is great. Is that something that you're seeing or something that you believe as well? I see it now in your head that more people are going to be forced into a situation like you just see more entrepreneurs in the future. speaker-0: Yeah, everywhere. mean, listen, it's absurd the amount of new entrepreneurs because people, you know, it's very hard to get a job. There's this joke I've seen recently. It's like, I'm gonna get a job so I could have money to build my own company. But then when you show up at the job interview, it's just as hard as when you get interviewed by that VC. So you just go straight, skip the job step, go straight to the VC. But yeah, getting a job now is impossible. Most people are firing, not hiring. And yeah, it's a completely new day and age. it's like, you never know what's gonna drop tomorrow. It's just a regular Tuesday and Anthropic just wipes out an entire workforce. it's like, ⁓ yeah, I see, you go on LinkedIn now. There are literal 13 year olds on there saying, okay, I'm building a company. It's insane and I support it obviously. It's amazing, it's great. Yeah, it's this massive wave of entrepreneurs. And I feel like we're just like at the tip, like right before a massive wave comes, it's a small little wave that comes, but it's gonna be massive. speaker-1: For sure. And I'm personally super optimistic about it. Obviously it's going to be a really bumpy transition, right? There's going to be a lot of solutions like what you're building with Fish Tank that are going to help smooth out that transition process and help support those entrepreneurs, those new entrepreneurs in the process. But really for me, it all boils down to like, I feel like, I don't know, this might be a little controversial, which is also really good for content, by the way, being polarizing in your topic is also really good. This might be little controversial, but I feel like 75 % of people who are in a corporate job, hate their job, like aren't very enthusiastic about their job or hate their job. Right. And when you're forced into a situation where you have to figure out how to create your own value in the world, AKA start a business or be an entrepreneur. Right. The only real way that you can be successful is if you really care about what you're building, if you really care about the problem that you're solving and the solution and the product that you're building. Right. So by nature, in order to be successful, you have to be building something that you really care about, you're going to really care about it, right? So you're going to wake up, you're to be enthusiastic, you're to be engaged with what you're working on. And like, that sounds way better than just a zombie population of people who just clock into their nine to five, go home, numb themselves, then come back to work. Like I feel like a lot of people are doing a lot of useful useless stuff that they don't actually really care about. And this transition will be difficult because it's going to be like what's really nice about that. kind of rambling, so I apologize. But what's really nice about being able to just kind of show up to a job is like, you don't actually have to think. You're just told exactly what you need to do, which is very safe, right? It's really secure. Like it's not so scary, but like when you're out on your own, man, is it tough, right? Everybody talks about with entrepreneurship comes with all this freedom, right? But nobody talks about the flip side of that where nobody's telling you what you're supposed to do, right? It's completely up to you to make the decision on everything. Like you deciding what is actually important to work on what adjustments do I need to make to this product, like whatever. So it comes with a lot of responsibility and ownership over your own situation, which in the long run, I think is going to lead to a much better, happier, more engaged society. But it is going to be a real wake up call and a real difficult transition, I think. But I think it'll lead up to be for the best interest of the world in the end. speaker-0: I mean, I don't believe humans were built for safe, right? We weren't built for safe. We were built for, built this hut before the bear comes. Obviously, we don't live in that exact, obviously we don't live like that, but at the same time, it's kind of similar because it's, I better get the money to pay for the house or else I'm homeless. There still is that, does that mean that you should never get out of your cave, your hut, whatever it is, your safe space? No, right? A boat is safest when it's parked on a dock, but that's not what it built for. And that's something I really believe. speaker-1: Absolutely. And like, not only were humans not meant to be safe, but we're also meant to just like creative, we're creative beings, right? That is what makes us so special. And I feel like we're at our most creative when you're under the most amount of like pressure, I guess, like to be the most innovative, which kind of ties you, ties us back to that initial question. It's like when you're a startup, when you're starting a business and you have $0, you're to have to find a lot of ways to get super creative, right? In order to make this work and to keep pushing this forward. ⁓ but on a human level, like we're most creative and innovative when we're at a, when we're under pressure and yeah. And I think again, the path. to success in business starts with starting a business that solves a problem that you care about or that you're good at, like doing something that you're good at. You know, the most creative thing that we can do is just kind of pursue those interests, pursue those things that we're good at. So you'll just have to wind up in a situation where you're doing something that you really care about, which I think ⁓ is awesome. But thanks for exploring that idea with me for a bit. What is your, so just kind of wrap up. got two final questions for you, Ellie. Thank you again for the time. Again, if you've made it this far, go to fishtank.vc, join the beta. Ellie, tell us a little bit about like where you're at with Fishtank. speaker-0: Yes, so ⁓ I don't know if anyone knows this, but the government is fairly hard and difficult to work with. They take a very long time. ⁓ They're very slow. You know, when the world's richest man can't solve the government, know, something's really wrong. But that's besides the point. It's very slow. So compliance-wise, of course, building something of this scale, of course, requires a lot of compliance, regulatory compliance, et cetera, et cetera. So on the actual investment compliance, we're not 100 % sure on when it's coming. However, we do plan on launching our Invest, our Innovator, which is the founder side, hopefully in the coming, in the coming weeks. And this will allow founders to actually start posting today. So once we launch, they have their foot in the door and they're the first videos, they're the first pitches that investors see. speaker-1: Amazing cool. Yeah, you'll see me in the beta group. If anybody's listening, you'll see me ⁓ getting content out there It'll be a good incentive for me to ⁓ stay more consistent with the content beyond just the podcast So yeah when you sign up for your fish tank keep up with me cool, man And then kind of a broader question What is the the vision that you have like for the change that you want fish tank to create in the world? speaker-0: I believe that this company will eventually become the meta, like metas in Facebook, of entrepreneurship. I want it to be where you go with literally a seed, something you came up with in the shower, and you post about it. Get destroyed on it. Reiterate. Post it. Get destroyed on it. Rebuild. And refine that idea. Find your first users. Have other people invest in the company. Those investors have a stake in it now, so they're going to tell their friends about it. While you can also recycle that content, putting it into either Facebook ads, Instagram ads, organic content. Turn just some regular, just an idea you had in the shower at three o'clock in the morning into some billion dollar company. all in this one app. from idea to IPO, everything, obviously not the actual IPO, but up until you get to that stage, like that's the graduation, right? That's what we want to be. speaker-1: man, you're gonna make it happen. I love it. And then my last question for you, Elliot, is a recurring question that I ask every guest. But if you had a giant billboard that everyone in the world could see for 10 seconds, what would it say and why? speaker-0: Failure is success. Why? Now the education system is fairly, you know, outdated in terms of like they're still like they're teaching people MS Paint with when there's like clog code coming out like makes no sense to me but like School teaches you that you failed your exam, have to, that's it, like, that's a bad thing. No. I believe failure is positive because I'm pretty sure you look up any person with a significant amount of wealth, they've failed countless amount of times. And most people truly believe that you fail once and that's it, it's over. But that's not true. Failure is success. You really have to rethink completely on the way you think about failure. Now, I'm not gonna ramble too much because I could go another three hours talking about this. This is what I believe the most. But yeah, I think that failure is success. speaker-1: Absolutely failure is success and that's at a small level is like a sales conversation right like you know failure is feedback or failure success where there's a lot of quotes related to that, but it's never a straight line and One of the more powerful lines about failure that has stuck with me is that you only fail if you quit or like you only fail if you give up if you stop Ellie I know that that's not gonna be you I'm excited to see and continue watching and participating and being an innovator on the Fishtank platform. But Eli, thank you so much for the time today. Thank you for listening. The part of our conversation that really stuck with me is how the role of the entrepreneur keeps changing and shifting based on what's scarce. It used to be access to capital. Then it was the ability to build the product. Now both of those things are getting easier or at least more accessible, which changes where the pressure goes. speaker-0: All right, thank you. speaker-1: What's left is getting the thing into the world and making people care about it. That shows up in how you talk about it, how often you show up, and whether people will pay attention when you do. It's less about whether you can build something and more about whether you can move it and deploy it into the market. Strong founders are already operating and focusing this way. They don't hide behind the product. They stay close to the market and let that shape what they do next. And if that becomes the main filter, it changes who wins and what is really like the most valuable skill. that you can have as an entrepreneur and also the platforms and how they promote. So like I think what Eli is building with Fishtank is directly in line with that philosophy, which is why I think he'll succeed. If you want to get connected with Eli, you can find his links in the description of this episode, including Fishtank and the Beta signup group. If you run a coaching program course or mastermind and your clients aren't completing the work, download the free program execution system toolkit in the description. It'll show you how to install execution infrastructure so clients actually follow through and get results. Thank you for listening and I'll see you in the next one.