Latest / AI for Founders with Ryan Estes / Bootstrapped Icons8 into millions of users
Transcript
- 0:00Welcome back to AI for Founders. I'm Ryan Estes.
- 0:02Today we're diving into the world of design, creativity, and
- 0:06AI with the true original Ivan Brown, founder of Icons 8.
- 0:11Ivan Story is wild. He started out as a UX designer,
- 0:14making banner ads for 100 bucks a month, then bootstrapped Icons
- 0:188 into a powerhouse that now serves millions of creators with
- 0:21icons, illustrations, photos, 3D models, even AI generated
- 0:26people. From hustling custom icon packs
- 0:29in 2012 to launching generated photos year before generative AI
- 0:33went mainstream, Ivan has been way ahead of the curve.
- 0:37And he's doing all this while living in Argentina, where he
- 0:40built a guest house for founders and digital nomads that somehow
- 0:43helps people learn faster and build better.
- 0:46We talk about bootstrapping, the evolution of stock assets,
- 0:49generative AI, and maybe even shark fishing on the Argentine
- 0:52coast. Let's jump in but for some
- 0:55business. This episode of AI for Founders
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- 1:51That's what Code Story is all about.
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- 2:28born, they're forged. One hard moment at a time.
- 2:30Code story.co. All right.
- 2:49Welcome to the show, Ivan. I thank you for inviting me.
- 2:55It's absolute pleasure. We're really excited to have
- 2:57you. We've got lots to cover about
- 2:59your really interesting business, the the, the dips and
- 3:03dives it's taken through AI. So why don't you introduce us a
- 3:07little bit to the product and tell us a little bit about
- 3:09yourself? I come from used design.
- 3:13I'm used designer and I used to run the used design agency for
- 3:19maybe 10 years. And then we transformed it to
- 3:22the product. We started creating the icons
- 3:25and selling them in packs. And then we switched to
- 3:28subscription business. And then we ventured to other
- 3:31types of stock assets such as illustrations, photography, and
- 3:37at some point we started creating AI tools based on our
- 3:42background and container. We how we started creating nice
- 3:45tools and we formed a company called Generated Photos for
- 3:49that. Amazing.
- 3:52And I, Ivan, I detect an accent. Where are you from?
- 3:55Texas. Argentina.
- 4:01Amazing. I've never been, but it seems
- 4:03like an extraordinary place. Tell tell us about where you're
- 4:07from. I live in a small town called
- 4:11Carilo. I wish people know about it
- 4:14because it's not a top destination for foreigners in
- 4:17Argentina. But all the Argentinians they
- 4:19know about this place. It's a forest on the ocean,
- 4:24beach and nice designed houses. Architecture that is just style.
- 4:33So I'm trying actually to make it a little bit more
- 4:37international. I've built a guest house to
- 4:41invite founders and helmets to live there and to work there,
- 4:45and they usually achieve pretty impressive results.
- 4:49Something there is something in the air that makes them learn
- 4:51the framework they always wanted to learn, or 3D modelling or
- 4:56whatever. Nice.
- 4:58I love that. The forest in the ocean, you
- 5:00know, I'm from Colorado and I am the definition of a Colorado
- 5:05boy. I mean, you look up Coloradan in
- 5:07the dictionary, you see a guy with a pickup truck, a flannel
- 5:10shirt and golden retriever. And that's me, you know, So I
- 5:14love hunting and fishing and that kind of thing.
- 5:16What's what's Argentina like as far as like sportsman?
- 5:19Is there good fishing? Do you got trout?
- 5:21Trout fishing in Argentina. We have, yeah, yeah.
- 5:26And we have ocean here. So I have a ranch close here and
- 5:32this is the spot for shark fishing.
- 5:37Really. Which Woodward species?
- 5:41It's a small sharks, maybe couple meters.
- 5:45The sharks I've seen, they're a couple meters long and you can
- 5:51eat them, but you you can, you can feed them and let them go.
- 5:55So cool. I'm going to want to come back
- 5:56to that, but I want to dive into your company now.
- 5:59It from the research I did, it looks like you founded Icons
- 6:03Eight in 2012 and fully bootstrapped it.
- 6:07Is that correct? Yeah, for 23 years.
- 6:12Yeah, incredible. So walk us through now I know
- 6:16that like early on, you know, I started working on in the
- 6:20Internet projects, you know, designing Myspace pages and then
- 6:24that got me into building websites and I kind of came back
- 6:27back door through through the music industry And early on icon
- 6:35sets, you know, were just like an absolute bear.
- 6:37And it was products like yours early on that were just like
- 6:40such a reprieve where it's like, Oh my gosh, I don't have to
- 6:44worry about icons, custom icon sets that would take hours and
- 6:48hours and hours. So early on, you know, in those
- 6:50early days, how did you recognize kind of there would be
- 6:53a market here? And then how did you bring that
- 6:55product to market? You're right, it was rough.
- 7:01Like in packs were rough. At the time I first of all, I
- 7:06didn't think about working on icons precisely.
- 7:09I was a web designer. There was the single
- 7:13professional designer. So I was prepared to do web
- 7:15design, branding and any part of my work where icons.
- 7:23And it became apparent that icons is the only thing people
- 7:32want from me. So they ignored all my offerings
- 7:35but wanted icons. So I started creating icons and
- 7:38I was greeting icons for maybe five years and I, I'm pretty
- 7:44much sick of it already. And then I've noticed that stock
- 7:52photography is sold by piece or by subscription later, but I can
- 7:58see. And so I created a small a
- 8:00single page website with just 40 icons and I was selling them for
- 8:05$40 a piece and I had plans for that.
- 8:10So we didn't have much time for engaging in this project, but we
- 8:20used it to lower the total bill for our customers.
- 8:23So we offer it Icos $460.00. But like look this and this and
- 8:29this, we take it ready and we don't charge you an extra.
- 8:33And then we created an icon pack for self promotion.
- 8:39Vista came out some really difficult to draw icons 3D like
- 8:44so it created a really nice icon pack for several icons.
- 8:48This was a massive success. So it was very posted
- 8:51everywhere, shared everywhere. And then we created more icons,
- 9:00more icons. At this time Windows 8 was in
- 9:05the air and it had such simple icons that everybody could
- 9:11create them. So we I didn't see the future of
- 9:15our custom icon business at this point.
- 9:17So I created the icon packs for self promotion, waiting for what
- 9:25will come next. And they were popular and one of
- 9:31them customers downloaders, he said, like, I like the icons,
- 9:36but I hate. So I, I required them to set the
- 9:39link for the license was link where you you sent the link to
- 9:43us in exchange for for this icons.
- 9:46So he was like, I like your icons, but I hate linking to
- 9:50you. How about 100 bucks?
- 9:53So we'd started charging 100 bucks for no link requirement
- 9:58that we still do it up to this point and then we enter it to
- 10:05other stock assets, yeah. Describe those stock assets.
- 10:13Where did you go to after 2012 and before you do?
- 10:16I want to set the table a little bit so people remember 2012 just
- 10:21like it was incredibly iconic. Ironically enough time in tech.
- 10:26So you have the rise of Instagram was taking place at
- 10:31this time. You have tablets are like the
- 10:35new hot product. And as a result, you, what you
- 10:39see is a lot of like this skew morphism that kind of dominated
- 10:42early iPhone editions. We're talking about iPhone now
- 10:45starts to give way. You see people that had these
- 10:48three-dimensional shadowed logos that were going to flat 2
- 10:54dimensional. Everything was simplifying.
- 10:56They were iconifying absolutely everything.
- 11:00So like icons, whether it's in the App Store, this all became
- 11:03super, super important across the board as far as design.
- 11:07So you very early and right on this early Crest of, of design.
- 11:12That was like seeing the importance of having unique but
- 11:16also variable icons that you could use in, in web design.
- 11:19Because now we're starting to get like really cool web design.
- 11:22You know, the we have high speed Internet now for kind of the
- 11:25first time. So you can get things, you can
- 11:27get animations to load, you can get different things happening.
- 11:30So you were able to capitalize on icons early on.
- 11:33Where did you go next as far as graphic offerings?
- 11:38Are you right about this camera Fusion?
- 11:41I, I, I wasn't able to draw them.
- 11:46So they were incredibly nice, but they were 3D rendered and
- 11:50now nobody of us use 3D Right now we have 3D department and
- 11:56they create wonderful assets. But at this point we, I was
- 12:01like, I didn't know where to stand.
- 12:04So we're trying to grow them in Illustrator and it was all
- 12:09right, but not awesome. And one of the directions where
- 12:18I wanted to venture was custom developments or designing,
- 12:23designing interfaces and developing them.
- 12:26And my friend he gave me is the best business advice I've got.
- 12:31He said developers need a company.
- 12:35Before we hired single developers or freelancers and
- 12:40they worked great for the first three months and then bad for
- 12:43another six months and then found another job afterwards.
- 12:47So he said, like developers, they need a company, they need
- 12:50party, they need to exchange, exchange ideas, they need to
- 12:55help each other. And so I had money for our
- 13:01developers for three months. So I hired 3 developers.
- 13:06I had money for three months. We needed to find something in
- 13:09the three months, some revenue stream which will pay for their
- 13:13existence. And I found a project and they
- 13:20hired one of our developers for several months and they, they
- 13:25then they stole came from us. But it was enough money to
- 13:30sustain us and to get in the profitable pathways with icons.
- 13:35And so now you have. 2 developers.
- 13:38I had two developers but I had managed to pay them.
- 13:43Great. And it was was the project they
- 13:46were working on icons and how did that go as far as like
- 13:49initially establishing the pricing going from like kind of
- 13:52one off pricing to then a subscription which seems to be
- 13:55the industry standard at this point?
- 13:59Yeah, it it wasn't obvious at all at the point.
- 14:02So I created the first stock icons, the first store of of of
- 14:07stock icons. And I'm not sure if I was the
- 14:111st subscription based icon or illustrations service, but one
- 14:17of the first we had the marketing person, a girl called
- 14:27Anya and she was just from the college.
- 14:30She worked for us for a year maybe.
- 14:34And then she found another job in Arab Emirates and before
- 14:42moving there she said move their subscriptions.
- 14:46And I was like, I'm not sure. She said move.
- 14:49And I was like, I'm not sure if I if somebody will pay $20.00 a
- 14:59month and she said they will charge even more.
- 15:03And this is the best pricing or marketing advice I've got in my
- 15:10life. Heck yeah.
- 15:13Now it's it's great because it's it's such a profitable legacy
- 15:18business over the years. And you guys have made a pivot
- 15:20into generative AI in a big way. So talk a little bit about
- 15:25generated dot photos. Like what was the origin story
- 15:29of that? And how did you kind of make a
- 15:31decision then to kind of move the company into that direction?
- 15:39It started with stock photography, so we venture it
- 15:42into different assets like illustrations.
- 15:44It's straightforward. Illustrations are just large
- 15:47icons. We had processes for that.
- 15:49We had skills for that. We just did it.
- 15:52And there was photography which is really different.
- 15:55And my idea at the time was majority before majority, we
- 16:03took bunch of 10s of thousands of photos of people with the
- 16:11same light, the same camera height, the same backdrop.
- 16:16We traced, we removed backgrounds and we created the
- 16:20backgrounds for them, such as different authors, home
- 16:25environment, 3D rendered and we took photos with the similar
- 16:30lighting and the idea was compose them into the scenes.
- 16:34Because stock photography is normally 90% good for your
- 16:40purpose. And so we wanted to create the
- 16:43rest 10% with collagen of actual photographs.
- 16:49In retrospect it didn't work, but we've got that large data
- 16:56set of 80,000 images of people, same light.
- 17:04Amazing. Why didn't it work?
- 17:06What what what? What was the failure?
- 17:11People didn't use it for long. They played with it and then
- 17:17forgot about it. We had 5 minutes of fame when
- 17:30like kind of designer communities, they picked up the
- 17:33the tool. We had the composer for that.
- 17:36So they picked the tool and they created some hilarious memes.
- 17:41And this memes were published in all over the world in different
- 17:46magazine newspapers, which I'm not designer, which not
- 17:49technical, just in general audience and that's it.
- 17:55And like we we we sound like we created the meme tool, but
- 18:00apparently it was a one time thing.
- 18:04Crazy. OK, so you end up then with this
- 18:06gigantic database of photography and so did you use that as
- 18:11basically training material to create the the generated
- 18:16photography tool now? Yeah, there was NVIDIA library
- 18:25in NVIDIA created the library for generating people and there
- 18:29was a popular website which is called This person doesn't
- 18:33exist. This is this Pok library.
- 18:37The guy just installed it generated bunch of photos and
- 18:41was showing them randomly from some folder.
- 18:45We did about the same, but we trained it post trained it on,
- 18:50on our data set on for our models.
- 18:54And because it was such consistent data set shot in the
- 19:03same, in the same manner. And it was also very, they were
- 19:08like nice people. They are beautiful people.
- 19:11And we did makeup and hairstyle and did retouching some really
- 19:16beautiful photos. And this, this style gun trained
- 19:20the library of NVIDIA style gun trained on this images started
- 19:25producing really good pictures of people.
- 19:28This is fewer defects. And they, they actually were
- 19:35criticized for that. People said like, look.
- 19:38Too good. Are they all beautiful?
- 19:40They want someone like us. Yeah, that's funny.
- 19:46That's how I feel. I feel like it's good for for
- 19:49people like me because all the stock imagery now is so
- 19:53beautiful. It's like people are going to
- 19:55get tired of good looking people and then they can come deal with
- 19:57me. You.
- 20:03Also, look our first version, like the second version, it
- 20:06already included the people not beautified.
- 20:10We're called it, not beautified. Yeah.
- 20:14So cool. So how, how then do you start to
- 20:17incorporate these new, you have a new tool set with, with gener
- 20:22of AI. How does that fit into the
- 20:24subscriptions Now? How are you kind of
- 20:26differentiating the different business?
- 20:27Because I noticed there's multiple websites.
- 20:29So there's like the the photos is kind of its own product in a
- 20:33way, but it is linked on icons 8.
- 20:37We created generated photos as a separate entity before for two
- 20:43reasons. First, to separate it legally,
- 20:45because when we started, we had no nothing to like in practice,
- 20:54in legal practice to rely on and we wanted to to preserve.
- 21:00I can say it for for for that. And 2nd, we, I wanted to be a
- 21:09startup companies are cloud providers, GPUGPU providers.
- 21:15They are nice to startups and they are not so nice to 1220
- 21:21years old companies. We got some cloud credits, we
- 21:27got some recognition, some programs for, for startups.
- 21:30It was really useful. Yeah, 100%.
- 21:34And you know, the before the degenerative assets, which now
- 21:40are basically innumerable, there's 1.4 million digital
- 21:45assets available to users@icons8.com.
- 21:50How do you manage inventory like that?
- 21:53What what is it? What goes into that?
- 21:57It started there's thousand icons when we had thousand
- 22:00icons. I once wanted to find for icons
- 22:05for a mock up and creating and I spent 28 minutes by clock
- 22:12looking for them. I realized we can't continue
- 22:17just given the zip files, res images, we need some search and
- 22:22for that we need some database, we need some application and we
- 22:29need to tag icons. Title is not enough.
- 22:32There are lots of collections of icons that just title them and
- 22:36there is search. And if there is a search, I can
- 22:39you, you have to type to to look for it like shorts you, you
- 22:43won't find it as find or when they fired us or something.
- 22:49So we we have to tag it. And for that, we try to keep our
- 22:58internal team small and outsource.
- 23:02Most of the work is there to mechanical Torque and now to AI
- 23:10and it's getting to psych AI Is, is, is incredible now.
- 23:16It wasn't before, but now it's incredible at tagging the icon.
- 23:20So we will, we keep our tagging team smaller and smaller.
- 23:24Right now it's for people. Amazing.
- 23:29Cool, you know, and for people that want to check it out, it's
- 23:33Icons 8.com and truly these are like very unique, beautiful
- 23:37designs. Whether you want to look at
- 23:39icons, illustration, 3D models, photos, music, and then there's
- 23:43the whole suite of generative AI functions.
- 23:47Now I speak to a lot of folks outside the States and their
- 23:51target market is always the US because you know, that's, that's
- 23:55how you make the big bucks. So how were you able to
- 23:58penetrate U.S. market because it looks like you've done so very,
- 24:02very well? We have about third of our plans
- 24:07from United States and 3rd. From third.
- 24:09OK, Yeah. And 3rd from everybody
- 24:13everywhere else, it's in dollar value for that, I think, I think
- 24:21the you have to create an international product.
- 24:25Yeah, you create, you use English, you create
- 24:28international product. You don't think about any
- 24:31specifics. It's like for, for for folks
- 24:35outside US, US is, is everything international.
- 24:39Like you watch Netflix, you, you get some financial analytics,
- 24:45you learn accounting, finance, you programming, you get VS
- 24:52version of it. So I think the key is use
- 24:57English and learning stuff in English and creating
- 25:01international version with everything best don't make AUS
- 25:09company for stripe, use stripe for billing.
- 25:14Use some cloud provider from the United States.
- 25:19Some your service must be hosted in the United States.
- 25:26Yeah. So like, go this path and it's
- 25:30going to be a viable US product upset.
- 25:34Now, I'm very interested in Argentina now.
- 25:37So my daughter's off at college and my son is a junior in high
- 25:41school. So he's got two years left,
- 25:43which means that we can start looking around at different
- 25:47places to end up, you know, or at least to go to for a little
- 25:50while. And we and, and me and Mrs.
- 25:51Estes have really been considering that like of moving
- 25:56somewhere else, trying something else.
- 25:59Make the argument why Argentina is a great place to go for,
- 26:03let's say digital nomads or startup founders or people that
- 26:06just kind of want to have a new place for an HQ.
- 26:13I think the major point is Argentinians like foreigners.
- 26:23They, I mean you, you get support everywhere.
- 26:28So you, you can get lost. You, there's like you probably
- 26:33will have a problem of too much help with someone walking you in
- 26:39all the places and it's already 4 hours.
- 26:42But you, you, you will be helped.
- 26:45And they actually like foreigners.
- 26:49Everybody has some grandma, granddad coming from Italy, from
- 26:55Spain somewhere, and they feel that foreigners are one of them.
- 27:03It's, it's, it's people. People take you really well.
- 27:08It's a friendly place, it's. It's a really friendly, yeah.
- 27:13And besides that, it's a really nice climb.
- 27:16It's like cuisine, which is Italian in great part.
- 27:22This is like good infrastructure.
- 27:27Buenos Aires is a great urbanistically, a great city
- 27:30urbanistically. It's like New York was a great
- 27:32of streets. And they have, we have the
- 27:40street corners. They're like a little bit like
- 27:44plazas and there are summer cafes on them.
- 27:48And the traffic is slow and there are like this trees, this
- 27:53tall trees on both sides of the street.
- 27:56It's it's a really nice place. What about the startup
- 27:59community? Is there a big kind of startup
- 28:01scene? Yeah, for Latin America, it's
- 28:06probably quite big. So we have some unicorns, most
- 28:09unicorns I think really either from Argentina or from Brazil,
- 28:15but it's also much bigger country.
- 28:20Yeah. And if you want to like if you
- 28:23check meet up dot com you will you will see lots of events
- 28:27here. Yeah, you know, Brazil is great,
- 28:31but like, I don't want to learn Portuguese.
- 28:34Come on, everybody got time for that.
- 28:38It's so cool. All right, Are you ready for the
- 28:41founder challenge? Questions brought to you by
- 28:43kitcaster.com. This episode is brought to you
- 28:48by Moberst, the AI first growth engine trusted by iconic
- 28:52startups like Calm, Robin Hood, Reddit, Uber and Google.
- 28:57Moberst is a digital, full service, mobile first marketing
- 29:00agency that helps companies to scale and become category
- 29:04leaders. Whether you're finding product
- 29:06market fit or ready to accelerate growth, Moberst
- 29:09delivers creative, data-driven solutions that help with scale
- 29:13and efficiency and impact. At Moburst, we're not just
- 29:17guessing what works, we're predicting it.
- 29:19As an AI first agency, Moburst uses cutting edge tools to
- 29:23analyze user behavior, adapt creative in real time, and
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- 29:44At MO Burst, we believe that creative thinking, advanced
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- 29:51scale. If you're serious about scaling
- 29:53your business with precision and purpose, it's time to talk to MO
- 29:56Burst. Visit moburst.com.
- 29:58And let's build something category defining together.
- 30:03All right, perfect. OK, we're ready for the founder
- 30:06challenge question from kickcaster.com.
- 30:08Now I'm going to give you a couple of categories of
- 30:11questions that you can answer from.
- 30:14So we have 4 categories. We have unfiltered, we have
- 30:19intriguing, we have philosophical, and we have
- 30:24risky. Which category would you like to
- 30:26do? OK, let's do it.
- 30:34All right. Let's do it.
- 30:34Let's choose one. Let's go.
- 30:36Let's go. Let's go.
- 30:37Risky. Let's see.
- 30:41Here we go. What's the most desperate thing
- 30:45you've ever done to close a deal?
- 30:51And it still didn't close the deal of course.
- 30:58I mean what comes to my mind is recently there were 29 people
- 31:08wanted to stay in my guest house I rented an Airbnb to and it's
- 31:13for 16 people. So I offered them to make it
- 31:16basically a shelter from the living room and it still didn't
- 31:20work. They didn't rent it. 29 you got
- 31:27it. You'd have to build it.
- 31:30Yeah, you'd have to build a tree house or something Outback.
- 31:34Yeah, yeah. OK, let me do another one.
- 31:40I got it. We're going to do a couple of
- 31:41these The Founder Challenge questions.
- 31:44Here we go. OK, what's the most money you've
- 31:49wasted on something completely useless?
- 31:57That must be marketing. How so It's.
- 32:07We have of the marketing model, it was the business wallet works
- 32:12real well. This link link where license
- 32:18where people set links to us. So we're a great on Google.
- 32:21So when Google where people Google for icons, we get here
- 32:24and people who don't want to set link, which is probably most
- 32:30commercial software applications, they pay us $15
- 32:36and I will. I always wanted to try something
- 32:41within my control to some AdWords, some influencer
- 32:46marketing, some any paid advertising basically and it
- 32:52didn't work. Apples apples store advertising,
- 32:55it didn't work. None of it worked.
- 32:59It costed me, you know, hundreds of $1000 this experiments.
- 33:04No kidding. What?
- 33:05What do you think it was? Do you think it was the the
- 33:07product? You think it was the audience?
- 33:08What was it that misfired? I think we've sell cheap product
- 33:16is a little rhetoric on advertising board.
- 33:21So we compete with Better Business models such as
- 33:27Shutterstock for example. Somehow they they know how to
- 33:32get more dollars from the customers.
- 33:34So they are outbeat us. On the keywords.
- 33:39They think, yeah. So if if advertising not a big
- 33:42driver for you, what has been the best driver for new, new
- 33:46customers and growth for you guys?
- 33:50Already said about liquid license but what else?
- 33:55For example, Product Hunt. Product hunt, Yeah.
- 34:01So I there is a website with top product, hunt planters,
- 34:08creators, top product and #1 there it's stuck in time.
- 34:13It stopped updating maybe couple years ago, but so I'm probably
- 34:19#1 product hunter for for forever.
- 34:21You know, it's not easy launching on Product Hunt.
- 34:24How did you get such a big launch?
- 34:33Like before Hunters really mattered.
- 34:36So you, you want Chris Messina to launch you?
- 34:44He was #1 Hunter. So you write him, you want to,
- 34:49you pitch him, and if he chooses you, it's a great deal.
- 34:53Then they were not really clear. Always pick, not really like the
- 35:03product. Hunt is balancing between
- 35:05getting free promotion for themselves and not letting
- 35:12product is who stamped most people win.
- 35:15So you should go within the their little rooms right now.
- 35:19There are some certain boarding that is all right.
- 35:22So you we said, man, we have a mail in for a million people.
- 35:26So I was in the mailing to these people and we said without like
- 35:30help the lunch party on Proton and it's OK with them unless we
- 35:35don't say upvote us. Amazing cool.
- 35:39Yeah it's definitely changed a lot over the years, hasn't it?
- 35:42I, I still use it as like my my go to tab just to see I like to
- 35:47see like what product under the particularly the UIS, the the
- 35:51the front side of products to see kind of what's trending and
- 35:54what what design that people are really resonating with.
- 35:58There's always cool tools, you know, now it's just it's so
- 36:01dominated by so many AI tools now that it's kind of hard to to
- 36:05weed through it. But.
- 36:07It it is. Great for inspiration.
- 36:10Yes, thank 6 for for for keeping an eye on it and because project
- 36:15hunt getting product hunt top places is one thing, but
- 36:19another. The the next day comes the
- 36:21second wave of press investors and bloggers who are spread.
- 36:31Yeah. Totally love it.
- 36:34Couple of questions here. If you sold Icons 8 for a
- 36:40billion dollars today, what do you do tomorrow?
- 36:47They have 3 passions right now. Besides I can say it's
- 36:51motorcycles. Listening to classical music in
- 36:59my own cinema. Nice audio files, less classical
- 37:04music and GG. So I will enjoy this three for a
- 37:10while. Maybe I will buy more
- 37:16motorcycles. What kind of what kind of bikes
- 37:19you like? I just started man.
- 37:22I'm not like them all but I I would like some large adventure
- 37:28bike. I would like some some really
- 37:33heavy Harley-Davidson and Dura bike, maybe electric, electric
- 37:39and Dura bike. And I want my garage to be I
- 37:45would, I would, I would set the lights or I will switch on the
- 37:48light and there will be like this, this this light about for
- 37:52each of the motorcycles. Like Batman?
- 37:57You just. Yeah, you know, I've always been
- 38:01a big fan of the classic Indians from the 70s, but now they have
- 38:05a new product line that's super cool.
- 38:07I think they're they're called the scouts.
- 38:09And these Indian scouts kind of a more of a medium smaller size
- 38:13bike, but they are so cool. I mean, I was in high school is
- 38:19actually 1 to get a motorcycle the first time.
- 38:21And and my mom said that it was OK with her if I got a
- 38:25motorcycle, but I had to save enough money to pay for my
- 38:28funeral first. Now you have him running it.
- 38:33So I kind of discouraged it. Cool.
- 38:36Is there ACEO or founder that you follow or admire?
- 38:47Probably most druke I I admire Peter Druker, but he's not CEO.
- 38:55But there is Jesus Christ called high performance management, The
- 39:02CEO of Intel, I forgot his name, but he was a it's a great book,
- 39:10High performance management. I I really admire him.
- 39:14What's the company called? Intel, OH.
- 39:17Intel Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool.
- 39:19Yeah, he's a Co founder of Intel and he was CEO for lots of for
- 39:26for many years. Nice let me find out his name
- 39:29because I, I would love to look him up.
- 39:30That's that is a great company. You know those those kind of
- 39:33sleeper companies that are just baked into everything don't get
- 39:37a lot of attention until like NVIDIA, you know, and then he
- 39:40really they really blew blew up there founder of Intel.
- 39:44Let me see. It looks like Gordon Gordon
- 39:49Moore like. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 39:52You know, he has also a nice great book Christians of Chasm,
- 39:57but this one. Was a Robert Noyce.
- 40:02In Hyper for hyper performance, I'll probably look for a book.
- 40:08It's pretty amazing. Founded in 1968, It's
- 40:11incredible. I love those stories because,
- 40:14you know, you know, being a founder and as founders, it's
- 40:17like every company has a beginning, a middle and an end.
- 40:22And just depending on kind of like the longevity and the
- 40:25management of that company, they can come pretty quick.
- 40:28But you look at Intel, who's been dominant, I mean, and they
- 40:30are founded in 1968, you know? Yeah.
- 40:34And they rose 5% today, the stock.
- 40:37Did they really? The end of growth and when I
- 40:42opened Kindle. I read this book many times in
- 40:44many years ago, but it's still one of three of my top books in
- 40:49my Kindle. Amazing, amazing.
- 40:53Ivan, I really appreciate it. You've been so generous with
- 40:55your time. I got one more question for you.
- 40:59Which one should I do? I want to say if you were
- 41:03entering college today as a freshman, what would you study?
- 41:13I was really thinking sometimes that being in Stanford in
- 41:19computer science would give me a jump start in my career in life.
- 41:25So probably something that I had to learn for boring for 20 years
- 41:32would be given. So I would go and study computer
- 41:36science at Stanford. Amazing, Ivan, thank you so
- 41:40much. Thank you.
- 41:42All right, now let's do that. The fired segment.
- 41:46All right, Ivan, we're doing this little segment for
- 41:49founders, help founders. So maybe you could walk a step
- 41:52by step on a very interesting subject that you brought up,
- 41:56which is knowing when and what to do when you got to let
- 41:59somebody go. First of all, let him go now.
- 42:05It would be the worst day of your week, but next day would be
- 42:10the best day of your week. You already tried everything.
- 42:14You already tried performance reviews, you already tried
- 42:17coaching, you already tried resigning the task to them.
- 42:23It didn't work. So this is the way to go.
- 42:26And to do that, you have a frank conversation.
- 42:31Actually I am always thinking about sending an e-mail would be
- 42:40humane and get so you don't get the first reaction, the first
- 42:44shock of the person. The person could process it in
- 42:47private privately and then soon you have a conversation when you
- 42:52confirm you are fighting this person in soft.
- 42:57But for the words. If you want I can explain why
- 43:04normally people don't want and they know.
- 43:06So then you just let him go and you close all accounts.
- 43:12Now it's also rough but it's needed Slack accounts CRM
- 43:20system. In the best case he would be
- 43:26talking to others and bed wipes spreading the bed wipes in.
- 43:34In the worst case, he's downloading the list of
- 43:36customers or or worse. That's it.
- 43:42Amazing. And you know, it's, that's an
- 43:44interesting technique you have you found that emailing them
- 43:47first, just allowing themself is that kind of like to retain some
- 43:52dignity so it doesn't hit him so hard.
- 43:57I tried it couple times but normally I don't do that.
- 44:01I think it's a good idea. I still need some Bhd to confirm
- 44:05it's a good idea to start. Tremendous, Ivan.
- 44:10Thanks again so much. Really appreciate it.
- 44:15Hey founders, let me ask you this.
- 44:17Are you building with AI or getting left behind by it?
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