Latest / QUESTION EVERYTHING / Why is Rent So Expensive? Ankur Jain is Disrupting + Rebuilding the System

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Why is Rent So Expensive? Ankur Jain is Disrupting + Rebuilding the System · QUESTION EVERYTHING

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Speaker 3: Big things happen when you're pretty, pretty bold, pretty clever,
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Speaker 3: and I have conversations that put a new spin on
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Speaker 3: pretty This is pretty smart. Encore Jane is a thirty
1:03
Speaker 3: one year old entrepreneur. He's the founder and CEO of
1:06
Speaker 3: a VC Cairo's Ventures. He built his first company at
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Speaker 3: eleven years old and at twenty six sold a company
1:14
Speaker 3: to Tinder and went on to run product for them.
1:16
Speaker 4: But while in Silicon Valley, he had a reckoning.
1:19
Speaker 5: People are talking about stupid shit like crypto kiddies and
1:23
Speaker 5: like this dumb VR app for you know whatever, right,
1:28
Speaker 5: and you're thinking of yourself right in this own backyard.
1:31
Speaker 5: We have one of the worst housing crises, so the
1:33
Speaker 5: worst access to healthcare, people, drowning, student loans. Those are
1:38
Speaker 5: trillion dollar problems and they're big issues that we have
1:42
Speaker 5: to solve for our generation. And that was kind of
1:45
Speaker 5: a moment where that became the purpose, and so I
1:48
Speaker 5: left Silicon Valley, moved to New York and started pulling
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Speaker 5: together smart people and capital to go try to figure
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Speaker 5: out how to fix it.
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Speaker 3: So instead, Encore invests in, supports, and nourishes the world's
2:02
Speaker 3: leading scientific discoveries and turns them into viable businesses.
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Speaker 5: You actually can make money by solving real problems.
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Speaker 3: He's taking on limited access to healthcare, housing, affordability, child
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Speaker 3: in home care, and education.
2:17
Speaker 5: Home Ownership is one of the few things that have
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Speaker 5: driven generational well for the last six generations in the
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Speaker 5: United States. Saving that fifty bucks at the end of
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Speaker 5: the month, you know that you were otherwise used to
2:29
Speaker 5: go out for dinner.
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Speaker 1: That's not going to make or break your path. Home ownership.
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Speaker 5: The cost of living has gone up so high relative
2:36
Speaker 5: to the fact that wages have not been and that's
2:39
Speaker 5: that's the issues we're just not able to save. We
2:42
Speaker 5: can figure out how to make housing more important, we
2:45
Speaker 5: can figure out to put cash back into people's pockets.
2:48
Speaker 5: Then it enables us as a generation to finally get ahead.
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Speaker 3: Richard Branson said this about him. Encore has a rare
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Speaker 3: ability to take on complex societal issues and come up
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Speaker 3: with simple, practical solutions.
3:01
Speaker 4: That make you wonder how no one has done this before.
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Speaker 5: If you can take that one chance to do something
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Speaker 5: big and solve a problem, there's no better time.
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Speaker 3: Okay, so, Encore, you had some childhood. It was not
3:21
Speaker 3: really traditional. Where did you grow up?
3:23
Speaker 1: I grew up in the suburbs of Seattle.
3:26
Speaker 3: And you created your first company when you were eleven
3:29
Speaker 3: years old. It was called my Online Quiz and I
3:32
Speaker 3: was laughing because it's not like a lemonade stand. At
3:34
Speaker 3: one point it had two million users.
3:37
Speaker 1: It was do you remember ao Messenger back in the day.
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Speaker 5: Of course, BBM were probably the two things that I
3:43
Speaker 5: missed most from my childhood, but Aos Messenger used to
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Speaker 5: have those profiles if you remember, like your little away
3:50
Speaker 5: messages and so by accident. My friend and I started
3:54
Speaker 5: off creating a way for people to take a quiz
3:57
Speaker 5: about like how well do you know me? And it
3:59
Speaker 5: just like turned into a thing which then built out
4:02
Speaker 5: this whole business around AOL instant messenger services, and so
4:07
Speaker 5: what started off as quizzes ended up becoming the first
4:11
Speaker 5: web to cell phone texting system. So if you remember
4:15
Speaker 5: back in the days, because we're now getting old, which
4:17
Speaker 5: is scary, but we had no kiaphones and we could
4:21
Speaker 5: only text on T nine with you know, three three
4:24
Speaker 5: three five FI five like, it was a really painful
4:27
Speaker 5: process to hammer out those messages and you could only
4:31
Speaker 5: send it one person at a time with one hundred
4:33
Speaker 5: and sixty character limit. And so we wrote the code
4:36
Speaker 5: to do the first ever messaging between your aim and
4:39
Speaker 5: someone's cell phone. Basically, I'm message put in two thousand
4:42
Speaker 5: and one and so that's and that's actually what drove
4:44
Speaker 5: the kind of crazy growth.
4:45
Speaker 3: It was such an idea before it's time. It's really
4:48
Speaker 3: cool to hear I'd actually didn't know that that was
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Speaker 3: the company. And then when you were eighteen, most kids
4:53
Speaker 3: are partying and starting college and you created your first
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Speaker 3: iteration of Cairos.
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Speaker 4: You launched a new company.
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Speaker 3: As I was reading about you, I was wondering if
5:02
Speaker 3: you felt disconnected from your peers at all.
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Speaker 1: Not really, I mean, so, look, I think the key
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Speaker 1: the thing that I've always found important.
5:10
Speaker 5: When entrepreneurship is such a thrown around word these days,
5:13
Speaker 5: it's like everybody is an entrepreneur, and I think, in truth,
5:17
Speaker 5: entrepreneurship historically has really just been about solving a problem, right,
5:21
Speaker 5: and often those problems are best solved when you can
5:25
Speaker 5: relate to them, your peers can relate to them. And
5:28
Speaker 5: so in two thousand and eight, when I was starting
5:30
Speaker 5: school there at Penn, I mean, the whole market, you remember,
5:33
Speaker 5: the whole world crash, right, the whole financial system disappeared,
5:37
Speaker 5: and all of a sudden, you have all of these
5:39
Speaker 5: people that you're in school with that don't have jobs anymore.
5:43
Speaker 5: Everybody's like dreams of getting a job, you know, in
5:47
Speaker 5: six months, twelve months, whatever is when they graduate, had disappeared.
5:50
Speaker 5: And so that problem became the opportunity that which led
5:54
Speaker 5: to Chiros, which is, hey, wait a second, all these
5:57
Speaker 5: smart people for the last you know, x decades have
6:00
Speaker 5: been graduating going into banking and consulting, right, personally, that
6:04
Speaker 5: feels like a waste of a lot of great talent.
6:06
Speaker 5: You've got some of the smartest people in the world
6:09
Speaker 5: going to make PowerPoint decks at investment banks instead of
6:12
Speaker 5: using that talent to try to solve real problems. And
6:16
Speaker 5: so Cairos in two thousand and eight, the original incubator
6:20
Speaker 5: was born out of this idea of what are the
6:21
Speaker 5: smartest young people took that opportunity where there isn't a
6:26
Speaker 5: job on Wall Street to actually refocus on creating products
6:29
Speaker 5: and companies to solve big, big problems like healthcare and education,
6:34
Speaker 5: clean tech, and over the first couple of years that
6:37
Speaker 5: started to prove itself.
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Speaker 1: I mean that group of young people.
6:39
Speaker 5: We were all nineteen twenty years old, and that group
6:43
Speaker 5: ended up starting five six billion dollars worth of company's
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Speaker 5: tackling problems in the space.
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Speaker 1: And I think that's what.
6:49
Speaker 5: Happens when we start to move talent into real areas
6:54
Speaker 5: of issues and problems.
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Speaker 3: It's interesting because out of a problem came all this
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Speaker 3: opportunity and that's sort of what your business man model
7:00
Speaker 3: is as well.
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Speaker 5: That's right, I mean crisis, every crisis is an opportunity, right,
7:04
Speaker 5: and it's opportunity to reset, take a step back. Part
7:07
Speaker 5: of the challenge is when things are going really well,
7:09
Speaker 5: the incumbents don't really have a reason to do anything new, right,
7:12
Speaker 5: And so it's actually in these moments like in two
7:15
Speaker 5: thousand and eight, or in twenty sixteen after that most
7:18
Speaker 5: polarizing election you've had as a country, or in twenty
7:21
Speaker 5: seventeen when you started to see the shift inequality get
7:25
Speaker 5: even worse. I mean, those are the times when you
7:27
Speaker 5: can step back, even during COVID, those are the times
7:29
Speaker 5: when people can come together and challenge the status quo.
7:32
Speaker 5: And so I've always found that that's a good opportunity,
7:35
Speaker 5: especially for young people.
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Speaker 1: They're trying to break into these spaces.
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Speaker 3: Right, and when you're young, it's the stakes feel probably
7:42
Speaker 3: less high to take those risks, which is important.
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Speaker 5: I mean, when else in your life do you have
7:48
Speaker 5: that opportunity to take that risk, Especially when you're in
7:52
Speaker 5: your twenties. You've got maybe student loans, right, but you
7:55
Speaker 5: don't have five dependents, you don't have a family yet.
7:58
Speaker 5: So if you can take that one chance to do
8:00
Speaker 5: something big and solve a problem.
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Speaker 1: There's no better time. People want to help you.
8:06
Speaker 5: Right when you're coming out of school when you're young,
8:08
Speaker 5: they want to help you succeed. And I think a
8:10
Speaker 5: lot of people miss that opportunity and they wait till
8:12
Speaker 5: later in their career to try something, and they miss
8:15
Speaker 5: that window.
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Speaker 4: So I think you hit something on the head.
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Speaker 3: That's so important is people really want to help you,
8:21
Speaker 3: because you don't recognize that when you're young.
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Speaker 1: Right, especially in school.
8:25
Speaker 5: By the way, Like the most important thing I found
8:27
Speaker 5: out by accident school is anybody will respond to your emails?
8:31
Speaker 1: Yes, or at least you can.
8:33
Speaker 5: You can email somebody and say, hey, I'd just like
8:34
Speaker 5: to get together for coffee and get some advice. And
8:37
Speaker 5: if you're a student, I mean, look, some people will
8:39
Speaker 5: ignore you. Able to say half of them will respond.
8:41
Speaker 5: When you start to graduate and suddenly come to another person,
8:44
Speaker 5: look for a job harder and harder and harder. And
8:47
Speaker 5: so I think like taking advantage of that opportunity as
8:51
Speaker 5: a student is something so important people to do while
8:56
Speaker 5: they're in school and not after they graduate, to try.
9:00
Speaker 4: Take advantage of that dot edu email.
9:02
Speaker 3: Seriously, So, you started a company called Human in your twenties,
9:06
Speaker 3: and it was all about making it easier to remember
9:09
Speaker 3: and sort your contacts and then Tinder bought it in
9:11
Speaker 3: twenty sixteen. What was it like to sell a company
9:15
Speaker 3: at that age? It must be a wild feeling.
9:17
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean listen that there's this fun quote, right,
9:21
Speaker 5: It's like behind every overnight success is years and years.
9:24
Speaker 1: Of hard work.
9:25
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's in four or five years of grinding on
9:29
Speaker 5: that business. And I'll tell you, like every startup looks
9:33
Speaker 5: glamorous and fun, but it is hard to build a company.
9:36
Speaker 5: And you see it in building your own podcasts for sure.
9:39
Speaker 5: It's a lot of ups and downs. Right if you
9:43
Speaker 5: look at human even we went through phases of ups
9:46
Speaker 5: and downs and ups and downs before we had that moment,
9:49
Speaker 5: and so it was exciting, right, it was like it
9:52
Speaker 5: was a relief, and it was what was particularly exciting
9:54
Speaker 5: at the time was we had built what I think
9:57
Speaker 5: was the first attempt to really.
9:59
Speaker 1: Create a really relationship manager a context.
10:01
Speaker 5: It's them like a LinkedIn for people the way that
10:04
Speaker 5: we naturally interact. And the truth is most of my
10:08
Speaker 5: actual network lives in like your contacts or on your Instagram, right,
10:12
Speaker 5: And so how do you actually take those and start
10:15
Speaker 5: to contextualize them? You're you know, Lauren might be someone
10:19
Speaker 5: who I met through John, right, And so if I
10:22
Speaker 5: could open up my phone book and say who was
10:24
Speaker 5: that person I met through John or something super simple
10:28
Speaker 5: like who are all.
10:29
Speaker 1: My friends who live in Los Angeles? Right?
10:31
Speaker 5: I mean, still today, for whatever reason, there's no simple
10:35
Speaker 5: way to just say, show me everyone I know who
10:37
Speaker 5: lives in LA, which is crazy.
10:40
Speaker 3: So in my contacts I actually put LA New York
10:43
Speaker 3: Chicago like in the notes, because I agree it's it's
10:46
Speaker 3: weird that you can't sift that way.
10:48
Speaker 5: It seems like such a simple, obvious thing. But the
10:51
Speaker 5: way that technology was built was built by engineers. Built
10:54
Speaker 5: in a database structure, so you have a contact list
10:56
Speaker 5: that's ordered alphabetically, even though the most important person in
11:00
Speaker 5: my life.
11:00
Speaker 1: May may may not start with AA right. Funny, and
11:04
Speaker 1: that's just.
11:05
Speaker 5: How those systems were built. But if you think about
11:07
Speaker 5: it from a more human perspective, right, you think about
11:10
Speaker 5: the people you're closest to, people that you talk to
11:13
Speaker 5: the most, are the ones that you should see first
11:15
Speaker 5: when you open up your phone and see you remember
11:17
Speaker 5: people by how you met them, or where you met them,
11:20
Speaker 5: or who you know in common. Right, those are the
11:23
Speaker 5: contextual cues that should power our contact management and so
11:28
Speaker 5: that that was a PRODUCTY built.
11:30
Speaker 4: So you talked about the ups and downs.
11:32
Speaker 3: And I've heard a lot of entrepreneurs talk about entrepreneurship
11:36
Speaker 3: as the resilience Olympics, which is definitely the case. I've
11:41
Speaker 3: experienced it on a small scale in my own way.
11:43
Speaker 3: I can't imagine what it's like building an entire company
11:46
Speaker 3: and experiencing that. What do you think it is about
11:49
Speaker 3: your personality that lends itself to entrepreneurship time and time again.
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Speaker 5: So I think one of the biggest things that I
11:59
Speaker 5: learned throughout this process. You grow up and everything is
12:03
Speaker 5: about win or lose great getting an A or not
12:07
Speaker 5: getting into school, or not winning your sports division or
12:11
Speaker 5: not right. And one of the first things you learned
12:14
Speaker 5: in the startup world is there is no such thing
12:16
Speaker 5: as failure.
12:17
Speaker 1: Right. Everything is just a pivot.
12:20
Speaker 5: And that mindset is really hard to get into because
12:24
Speaker 5: it's counter to everything you've been taught growing up, where
12:27
Speaker 5: people are scared to start a company because you fail.
12:30
Speaker 5: And the truth is you realize that you can fail
12:33
Speaker 5: at goals, but you can't fail at a purpose, right.
12:37
Speaker 5: And so if you start a company to just make
12:40
Speaker 5: a million dollars you're setting yourself.
12:41
Speaker 1: Up with failure on day one.
12:43
Speaker 5: If you start something to solve a problem, to make
12:47
Speaker 5: an impact, to pursue some purpose behind why it is.
12:52
Speaker 5: There's a thousand different ways to get there, and your
12:54
Speaker 5: first idea is almost always the wrong one. But that's
12:58
Speaker 5: never really a failure at that it's just a pivot
13:01
Speaker 5: into another another path. And so I even think that
13:04
Speaker 5: you see people talk about the journey like enjoying it.
13:07
Speaker 5: It's not even about the one company. I mean, you
13:09
Speaker 5: look at how many entrepreneurs. Elon Musk has been talking
13:12
Speaker 5: about going into space for decades, right, but he's gone
13:15
Speaker 5: through one company after another, and some of the step
13:18
Speaker 5: is worse that it has failed. And that's the case for anyone.
13:21
Speaker 5: Richard Grandson is the same thing. Half of these companies
13:23
Speaker 5: have failed, but to want a quite a traditional word
13:26
Speaker 5: of failure, right, but each fron them has gotten closer
13:29
Speaker 5: to building the brand and the foundation who needed to
13:32
Speaker 5: raise the capital to build what a couple of days
13:35
Speaker 5: ago took in the space as the first private suborbital tourist.
13:39
Speaker 3: This is such a funny accolade. I read that at
13:41
Speaker 3: twenty one Inc called you the best connected twenty one
13:44
Speaker 3: year old in the world, if you can point to
13:47
Speaker 3: one thing that your parents did or that your mom
13:51
Speaker 3: or dad did that fostered this spirit, and you what
13:56
Speaker 3: do you think it is?
13:58
Speaker 5: I think it's just genuine curiousity, right, I mean, I
14:01
Speaker 5: feel like it goes back to the same same thing
14:04
Speaker 5: about goals and which is taught to be such a
14:08
Speaker 5: high achieving society, especially for those who are quote unquote
14:13
Speaker 5: high achievers, And the problem is that the second you
14:15
Speaker 5: get into that rat race, you forget to just be
14:18
Speaker 5: curious and ask questions. And the funny thing is a
14:21
Speaker 5: lot of the best friendships relationships I've built, have just
14:24
Speaker 5: been from genuinely being curious about what it is they
14:28
Speaker 5: do and who they are and how they operate. And
14:30
Speaker 5: you learn so much that way in everything you do.
14:33
Speaker 5: And so I don't know, that's always just been something
14:36
Speaker 5: like I sit with both my parents, but you know,
14:38
Speaker 5: my dad grew up in a little village, India, and
14:41
Speaker 5: I still can't fathom he talks about being a kid
14:45
Speaker 5: in this village, loving space, you know, and looking up
14:49
Speaker 5: and wanting to one day like think about space. And
14:52
Speaker 5: he's now sixty in his sixties, right, but now he's
14:56
Speaker 5: come to the US, had a chance to build the
14:58
Speaker 5: American dream. In today he has a space expiration company
15:02
Speaker 5: where he's sending rockets to the moon, right, and like
15:05
Speaker 5: to think that someone that they can make that big
15:09
Speaker 5: of a jump. I mean, you think all of us
15:11
Speaker 5: who are lucky enough to be born here, just what
15:13
Speaker 5: we can accomplish by just learning and asking questions and
15:16
Speaker 5: being curious. And I think that's one of the things
15:20
Speaker 5: that I feel like gets lost in the rat race,
15:22
Speaker 5: is chasing one goal and trying to reach the next milestone,
15:26
Speaker 5: the next milestone, and the next one.
15:28
Speaker 3: I agree, My whole life has been based off of questions.
15:31
Speaker 3: So I love to hear you say that. So I
15:35
Speaker 3: loved hearing you talk about this because you're talking about
15:38
Speaker 3: you just mentioned space.
15:39
Speaker 4: You were working at Tinder in Silicon Valley and you
15:43
Speaker 4: had a reckoning. Can you tell me about it?
15:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, Look, this is the most frustrating.
15:47
Speaker 5: I look at what my parents had access to, coming
15:50
Speaker 5: to this country with nothing and having an opportunity forty fifteen,
15:54
Speaker 5: forty years ago to build the quote unquote American dream, right,
15:58
Speaker 5: and now you've got our generation coming up where you
16:02
Speaker 5: can do everything right right, you can go to school,
16:05
Speaker 5: take out the student loans, get the job, work the
16:08
Speaker 5: twelve hour days, the long weeks, sixty seventy hour weeks,
16:12
Speaker 5: and be ten years later in more debt, still no
16:16
Speaker 5: further along on the bathtome ownership, Still trying to figure
16:19
Speaker 5: out how to pay for your health care. I mean,
16:21
Speaker 5: that's crazy, right, And so here we are, we just
16:25
Speaker 5: sold tender. I'm looking to do my next thing. And
16:28
Speaker 5: here we're in Silicon Valley, where you have some of
16:30
Speaker 5: the smartest people in the world, billions and billions of dollars,
16:34
Speaker 5: and people are talking about stupid shit like crypto kiddies
16:38
Speaker 5: and like this dumb VR app for you know whatever, right, and.
16:43
Speaker 1: You're thinking of yourself.
16:44
Speaker 5: Right in the zonn backyard, we have one of the
16:47
Speaker 5: worst housing prices, some of the worst access to healthcare,
16:50
Speaker 5: people drowning in student loans. Those are trillion dollar problems,
16:55
Speaker 5: and they're big issues that we.
16:57
Speaker 1: Have to solve for our generation.
16:59
Speaker 5: How is it possible that more of that capital, more
17:02
Speaker 5: of these smart people aren't working on these problems. And
17:06
Speaker 5: that was kind of a moment where it just that
17:09
Speaker 5: became the purpose, and so I left Silicon Valley, moved
17:13
Speaker 5: to New York and started pulling together smart people and
17:17
Speaker 5: capital to go try to figure out how to fix that.
17:20
Speaker 5: How can we make renting more affordable, How can we
17:22
Speaker 5: get more people access to healthcare?
17:24
Speaker 1: We figure out a way to pay.
17:25
Speaker 5: Off people's student loans so they're not drowning in that
17:28
Speaker 5: for thirty years and that was the birth of Cairo's
17:32
Speaker 5: two point zero And so funny enough, Kiros actually in
17:35
Speaker 5: Greek means the right moment, right. And in two thousand
17:38
Speaker 5: and eight it was a crisis, and we started the
17:41
Speaker 5: original Chiros to help build solutions and create jobs right.
17:46
Speaker 5: Ten years later we bought the name back to start
17:48
Speaker 5: this new company, which is Cairo's h two. And the
17:52
Speaker 5: idea was, let's build a portfolio of products that solve
17:56
Speaker 5: the real shit people deal with every single day. And
17:59
Speaker 5: that's and a hell of a journey since.
18:02
Speaker 3: So so many of the issues you're solving seem like
18:04
Speaker 3: they were generations in the making. A few stats in
18:08
Speaker 3: the US, over forty percent of citizens can't afford a
18:11
Speaker 3: four hundred dollars emergency expense. You mentioned one point five
18:16
Speaker 3: trillion in student loans. This was shocking. Half of American
18:20
Speaker 3: adults have more credit card debt than savings. There seem
18:24
Speaker 3: to be so many financial barriers for millennials and for
18:27
Speaker 3: Gen Z coming up. Do you think millennials were dealt
18:31
Speaker 3: a tough hand or is that just the narrative on
18:33
Speaker 3: social media?
18:34
Speaker 1: Now?
18:35
Speaker 5: Look, there's no question it's not a coincidence that you
18:38
Speaker 5: have a generation that works more hours than any prior
18:41
Speaker 5: generation and has more debt. Is the first generation in
18:44
Speaker 5: US history that's on track to be poor, that our parents' generation.
18:48
Speaker 1: That is the antithesis of the American right. And it's tough.
18:53
Speaker 1: We graduated in the two.
18:54
Speaker 5: Thousand and eight economic crisis right as things were starting
18:57
Speaker 5: to get good again. COVID hit right a decade to recover,
19:01
Speaker 5: and then people suddenly lost their jobs across the industry.
19:05
Speaker 5: People have been paying our student loans, Housing prices have
19:08
Speaker 5: been rising at record bases. So to say that it's
19:12
Speaker 5: the fault of our generation is crazy. Now, can we
19:15
Speaker 5: take responsibility and do something about it? But we kind
19:17
Speaker 5: of have no choice, right, And I think that's something
19:21
Speaker 5: that does define I get so sick of when people
19:24
Speaker 5: talk about our generation is entitled or lazy or whatever.
19:30
Speaker 5: It's like, what do you want people to do? You've
19:31
Speaker 5: got a tough hand, and we're still managing to make
19:34
Speaker 5: it work. What do people want us to do?
19:37
Speaker 4: I think about what the tough hand was made up of?
19:39
Speaker 3: A lot, Like I think there's a gig economy, right,
19:41
Speaker 3: so people don't have as many stable positions or long
19:45
Speaker 3: term jobs. There feels like there's less of a safety
19:49
Speaker 3: net in the public realm. What other factors can you
19:53
Speaker 3: point to.
19:54
Speaker 5: The cost of living has gone up so high relative
19:58
Speaker 5: to the fact that wages have not gone And that's
20:01
Speaker 5: that's the issue, is you're just not able to save.
20:03
Speaker 5: And if you can't save and you can't find the
20:06
Speaker 5: way to build equity. I mean, home ownership is one
20:09
Speaker 5: of the few few things that have driven generational well
20:14
Speaker 5: for the last you know, six generations in the United States, right,
20:18
Speaker 5: And if we're not even able to save to put
20:20
Speaker 5: down a down payment to buy a home because rent
20:23
Speaker 5: prices have gotten so high that you're just spending all
20:25
Speaker 5: your money on rent every month, Like saving that fifty
20:29
Speaker 5: bucks at the end of the month, you know that
20:31
Speaker 5: you were otherwise used to go out for a dinner.
20:33
Speaker 5: That's not going to make or break your path home ownership, right,
20:37
Speaker 5: And so there's there is a little bit of this, like, well,
20:40
Speaker 5: yol you know, and I think the key is that
20:43
Speaker 5: we can solve the underlying root issues. We can figure
20:46
Speaker 5: out how to make housing more affordable, we can figure
20:48
Speaker 5: out to put cash back into people's pockets. Right then
20:52
Speaker 5: it enables us as a generation to finally get ahead.
20:56
Speaker 5: And look, that's what a lot of these like, for
20:58
Speaker 5: better or for worse, some of this stimulus money that's
21:01
Speaker 5: come out over the last year is actually given a
21:03
Speaker 5: little bit of a buffer to for the first time
21:06
Speaker 5: get involved in the investing markets or put something in
21:09
Speaker 5: a safe into savings and hopefully that doesn't all get
21:13
Speaker 5: gambled away on Reddit, game stop stock, but there is
21:18
Speaker 5: an opportunity for us to actually for the first time
21:20
Speaker 5: in that thousand dollars makes a big difference.
21:22
Speaker 4: So enter Built. This is your new company.
21:25
Speaker 3: You are trying to solve for housing inequality in many ways,
21:28
Speaker 3: starting with rent. Can you kind of explain how this works?
21:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, so three years ago it actually started with us.
21:34
Speaker 1: First thing we started working on Colt Ryan.
21:36
Speaker 5: Right, and if you've ever rented, Danielle, you might remember
21:39
Speaker 5: you're I've been.
21:40
Speaker 3: A renter my whole life, and it's it's terrible. It's
21:43
Speaker 3: a horrible experience, every part.
21:46
Speaker 1: Of the experience, and it starts without moving it.
21:48
Speaker 5: Right, you want to move into an apartment and the
21:51
Speaker 5: first thing your landlord does is ask you for first
21:53
Speaker 5: month rent and security deposit and maybe last month.
21:56
Speaker 4: And where does that go? Where does that money go?
21:58
Speaker 5: So you're talking about like thousands of dollars in a
22:01
Speaker 5: security deposit that you give to your landlord and buy law.
22:06
Speaker 1: They put it into an Escro account that just sits there.
22:09
Speaker 5: So here people are where forty percent of Americans can't
22:12
Speaker 5: afford a four hundred dollars emergency expends and the landlords
22:16
Speaker 5: are asking for an average of fifteen hundred dollars to
22:18
Speaker 5: put into a bank account that just sits there. Right,
22:22
Speaker 5: think about the impact the stimulus checks have had over
22:24
Speaker 5: the last year. If you just gave people back their
22:27
Speaker 5: security deposit, right, that's forty five billion dollars that we
22:31
Speaker 5: can put back into the economy. So we created Rhino
22:34
Speaker 5: three years ago. It was a simple idea. When you
22:37
Speaker 5: rent a car, you don't give hurts like ten thousand
22:40
Speaker 5: dollars in case you get into an accident. Right, you
22:43
Speaker 5: pay five bucks a day for insurance and if something happens,
22:46
Speaker 5: hurts protected and you're protected. Right with Rhino, we said,
22:50
Speaker 5: why not just pay five dollars a month for insurance,
22:53
Speaker 5: So if something happens, your landlord's protected. But you can
22:56
Speaker 5: save thousands of dollars on movement all of a sudden,
23:00
Speaker 5: and you have fifteen hundred dollars more now to put
23:02
Speaker 5: in the savings to invest the payoff student loans.
23:05
Speaker 1: I mean that can mean like you.
23:07
Speaker 3: So that's the aspect that I find to be most
23:10
Speaker 3: interesting about all of this, is that equity compounds, and
23:15
Speaker 3: so it's the it's not just me being able to
23:19
Speaker 3: save that money from the security deposit. It's the long
23:22
Speaker 3: term effects and almost the generational effects of this that
23:25
Speaker 3: are so interesting.
23:26
Speaker 1: Which leads to home honors.
23:27
Speaker 5: Then the next problem with that was, Okay, we can
23:30
Speaker 5: give every American back and average fifteen hundred dollars just
23:33
Speaker 5: by using this new Rhino product. And by the way,
23:35
Speaker 5: we gave back a quarter billion dollars to people just
23:38
Speaker 5: during COVID. It was really exciting. But then we said, okay,
23:42
Speaker 5: but now you're spending money on rent every single month,
23:45
Speaker 5: it's your biggest expense, and you get nothing back.
23:48
Speaker 1: I mean you don't get any closer to home ownership.
23:52
Speaker 1: You don't earn points.
23:53
Speaker 5: I mean I can earn points by using my credit
23:55
Speaker 5: card down the street and I get no points on rent.
23:58
Speaker 1: That could be my entire trip for christofa.
24:02
Speaker 3: And it doesn't help your credit score. Which is really interesting, which.
24:05
Speaker 5: Is to create rent is your single largest liability. But
24:08
Speaker 5: if you want to go apply for a mortgage, they'll
24:11
Speaker 5: tell you you don't have a credit history, even though
24:13
Speaker 5: you've been paying your rent on time every month for
24:16
Speaker 5: a decade.
24:18
Speaker 4: So what does liability mean?
24:20
Speaker 5: So when you sign a lease, you're signing a contract.
24:22
Speaker 5: You owe the landlord a year's worth of rent when
24:25
Speaker 5: you sign that lease. And what's crazy is you don't
24:28
Speaker 5: pay your rent, it hurts your credit score, but when
24:31
Speaker 5: you pay your rent, they don't report it to help
24:34
Speaker 5: your credit score. I mean, this is just another way
24:36
Speaker 5: renters get screwed every single month, right, And so we
24:40
Speaker 5: set out to solve that with a product called Built
24:44
Speaker 5: that's taken us three years to launch but finally got.
24:47
Speaker 1: Out a few weeks ago.
24:48
Speaker 5: And it's the first time that anybody in this country
24:51
Speaker 5: can now pay rent for no fees while earning points. Right,
24:56
Speaker 5: So think rewards points like the Delta points. Your American
24:58
Speaker 5: Airlines points now rent without any fees, earns you points.
25:03
Speaker 5: You can use those points for tree travel around the
25:05
Speaker 5: world at any major airliner or hotel. Or for the
25:09
Speaker 5: first time ever, you can now save those points and
25:12
Speaker 5: use them to buy a home. And we work through
25:14
Speaker 5: the US government to get the first ever regulatory approval.
25:17
Speaker 5: So now you can use your points to qualify for
25:20
Speaker 5: your down payment and your credit history from rent to
25:24
Speaker 5: qualify for a cheaper rate on your mortgage. So all
25:27
Speaker 5: of a sudden, you're saving tens of thousands of dollars
25:29
Speaker 5: on their home purchase. And that is how we get
25:32
Speaker 5: equity into this generation stands.
25:34
Speaker 3: It's really impactful and brilliant, and I think people will
25:39
Speaker 3: at first glance hear about this and say, okay, so
25:42
Speaker 3: who loses, right, because if renters are winning, does that
25:45
Speaker 3: mean that.
25:47
Speaker 5: I mean, so, this is the problem with this whole
25:49
Speaker 5: like mindset that I think politicians tend to have, and
25:53
Speaker 5: that we have an opportunity to solve with our kind
25:56
Speaker 5: of work as entrepreneurs. Right in politics, it is if
26:00
Speaker 5: it's good for the renters, it's bad for the landlords.
26:02
Speaker 5: If it's good for landlords. It's bad for renters. In
26:05
Speaker 5: the private sector and startups. We have an opportunity to
26:08
Speaker 5: create win wins.
26:10
Speaker 1: Right.
26:10
Speaker 5: If you look at Rhino, it's five dollars a month
26:13
Speaker 5: for the renter. There's a great insurance business to be
26:16
Speaker 5: built for the business. It's super affordable for a renter,
26:20
Speaker 5: and the landlord is still protected, fully insured, fully protected.
26:25
Speaker 1: I'm built.
26:26
Speaker 5: It's the same concept we said, Hey, how do you
26:29
Speaker 5: take a product like a credit card and allow you
26:31
Speaker 5: to earn points on rent? Well, people credit cards make
26:35
Speaker 5: money and use it to go buy groceries or spend
26:38
Speaker 5: money on airlines.
26:39
Speaker 1: So why not just create more.
26:41
Speaker 5: Value for the customer, right, give people free access to
26:45
Speaker 5: use it for rent to earn points. The landlords now
26:48
Speaker 5: don't have to collect checks anymore. You get to earn
26:51
Speaker 5: points and build your credit on rent, and these businesses
26:54
Speaker 5: get to acquire.
26:55
Speaker 1: Customers for all their other spend.
26:57
Speaker 5: Right. And so it's a unique win win win kind
27:00
Speaker 5: of opportunity that requires you to piece the puzzle piece together.
27:04
Speaker 3: You work hand in hand with politicians often to make
27:08
Speaker 3: sure that the more people are experiencing and using your companies.
27:14
Speaker 3: So I think you have an interesting perspective on this,
27:17
Speaker 3: it seems like we're leaning on the private sector more
27:19
Speaker 3: than ever to solve for issues that I think we
27:22
Speaker 3: used to lean on government for. In your mind, what
27:26
Speaker 3: responsibility does the private sector and the millionaire or billionaire
27:31
Speaker 3: people who found these companies have to help the lives
27:35
Speaker 3: of everyday people.
27:37
Speaker 5: I mean, it's the single responsibility of startups there should
27:42
Speaker 5: be to solve real problems, right, And it's like an
27:45
Speaker 5: interest should be aligned.
27:46
Speaker 1: I think there's two separations here.
27:48
Speaker 5: I think one like the private sector has the ability
27:51
Speaker 5: to make more change in governments, much faster and much
27:54
Speaker 5: bigger scale.
27:55
Speaker 1: Right.
27:56
Speaker 5: If you think about how long the government can spend
27:59
Speaker 5: to be something for years to get like a single
28:02
Speaker 5: road built, versus how fast Amazon could build a delivery
28:06
Speaker 5: network across the country.
28:08
Speaker 1: It's night and day, right, But it's up to us now.
28:12
Speaker 5: To make sure those efforts are spent on again, not
28:14
Speaker 5: crypto kiddies, but rather actually real problems that affect real people.
28:19
Speaker 5: Unfortunately that's not always the case. That's why you see
28:21
Speaker 5: a big backlash against the business sector today. I mean
28:24
Speaker 5: there's a lot of frustration with business leaders for just
28:29
Speaker 5: growing the company's and bottom line at the expense of
28:33
Speaker 5: real people, right, And I think that's the shift that's
28:37
Speaker 5: going to need to happen. And part of that is
28:39
Speaker 5: just setting a precedent that says, hey, you actually can
28:43
Speaker 5: make money by solving real problems, not just by working
28:46
Speaker 5: on you know, these silly things that are raising a
28:49
Speaker 5: bunch of venture capital money but never actually solving a problem.
28:53
Speaker 3: Well, in addition to that, I heard you say this
28:56
Speaker 3: in another podcast and it was so obvious and I've
28:59
Speaker 3: never thought of about it, is that you know there's
29:01
Speaker 3: one point five trillion dollars in student debt. Don't you
29:05
Speaker 3: think there's a huge monetary opportunity there to solve for that?
29:08
Speaker 3: So they don't They can go hand in hand.
29:11
Speaker 1: I mean they are handed.
29:12
Speaker 5: The biggest problems are the biggest opportunities, right. And it's
29:16
Speaker 5: like I said once before, you I don't know how
29:20
Speaker 5: big of a market a lot of these like smart
29:22
Speaker 5: home devices or alecsa this or crypto that. There's not
29:27
Speaker 5: that we don't know, right, But we do know the
29:30
Speaker 5: student loans are a one point five trillion dollar market.
29:32
Speaker 5: We do know that housing is a multi trillion dollar market.
29:36
Speaker 5: And these are markets which are clearly right for disruptions.
29:39
Speaker 5: People are paying more and getting less, And anytime you're
29:43
Speaker 5: paying more and getting less, there is an opportunity for
29:46
Speaker 5: someone new to enter the space and create something better
29:49
Speaker 5: for customers. Right. I think if I were twenty again
29:53
Speaker 5: coming out of college, that's the first place I look
29:55
Speaker 5: for starting a company, which is what are the expenses
29:58
Speaker 5: that our generation and all these all of us as
30:01
Speaker 5: young people are spending money on where we're getting screwed, right,
30:05
Speaker 5: and then go create something that's just actually good for
30:09
Speaker 5: consumers in these spaces like healthcare.
30:11
Speaker 1: I mean got health care, but there's a whole other
30:13
Speaker 1: separate I was.
30:15
Speaker 3: Going to ask you what you think the next big
30:16
Speaker 3: thing is, but in my mind, I'm like, it has
30:18
Speaker 3: to be healthcare.
30:19
Speaker 1: Elder care, Yeah, I mean, elder care is importance. It
30:22
Speaker 1: is a huge and we've been working on that a lot,
30:24
Speaker 1: even just for young people.
30:25
Speaker 5: Like to your point about the gig economy, so many
30:28
Speaker 5: young people say, you don't have health insurance, right, And
30:32
Speaker 5: it doesn't make sense for people to get health insurance
30:34
Speaker 5: right now because it's so expensive, deductibles are so high,
30:38
Speaker 5: and the likelihood of something happening is well, the problem
30:41
Speaker 5: is that something does happen to you. It puts you
30:44
Speaker 5: out for the rest of your life yea. And not physically,
30:47
Speaker 5: it's financially right, And that's that is the problem that
30:51
Speaker 5: if we don't solve, we're going to see an entire
30:53
Speaker 5: group of people get left behind. And look, I think
30:56
Speaker 5: the answer is going to be a public private solution, right,
30:59
Speaker 5: And so some of your points earlier like sometimes as
31:02
Speaker 5: frustrating as government has been, we have taken a stance
31:06
Speaker 5: of saying, how can we as a private sector engage
31:09
Speaker 5: them to help scale solutions. So I think the best
31:12
Speaker 5: type of partnership is let people like you come up
31:16
Speaker 5: with creative ideas that can solve real problems with people,
31:19
Speaker 5: build your business and then use the government as a
31:22
Speaker 5: way to help make it accessible to everybody, because that's
31:25
Speaker 5: what the government.
31:26
Speaker 1: Is good at.
31:26
Speaker 5: It can do policy changes that bring innovation fast forwarded
31:32
Speaker 5: to the market, and we've seen that like with our
31:35
Speaker 5: Rhino work, we work with millions of apartments across the
31:38
Speaker 5: country to give people affordable alternatives.
31:41
Speaker 1: Right.
31:41
Speaker 5: But as a business, it doesn't always make sense for
31:44
Speaker 5: us to work with every mom and pop landlord to
31:47
Speaker 5: set them.
31:47
Speaker 1: Up, offer the solution, etc.
31:50
Speaker 5: The government can do that, and so we've worked with
31:52
Speaker 5: mayors and governors who can say, hey, you know, in
31:55
Speaker 5: New York State there's eight billion dollars of cash locked
31:59
Speaker 5: up and security the right and during during that COVID,
32:04
Speaker 5: Governor Cuomo mandated that any renter at any apartment should
32:08
Speaker 5: be able to find affordable alternative cash security deposit, and
32:13
Speaker 5: landlords have to accept it.
32:15
Speaker 3: I think so many people look at these huge problems
32:19
Speaker 3: and think, one they're just too complex to solve and
32:24
Speaker 3: two not interested. What makes you run towards them? Do
32:28
Speaker 3: you see things in a different way? What do you
32:30
Speaker 3: think it is?
32:31
Speaker 5: So, look, this goes back to the same problem when
32:34
Speaker 5: I was like eleven, or when you know, trying to
32:36
Speaker 5: figure out a text on a KI. I mean, these
32:38
Speaker 5: are these are real problems that we are all facing
32:41
Speaker 5: and all our friends are facing. I mean, it's as
32:43
Speaker 5: real and tangible as it gets, right, And so what's
32:46
Speaker 5: a better motivation in fixing something that's frustrating you as
32:50
Speaker 5: a consumer yourself?
32:51
Speaker 1: I mean, it doesn't matter.
32:53
Speaker 5: We've been very lucky yourself, myself in our careers, but
32:57
Speaker 5: it doesn't make it doesn't feel any better to hand
32:59
Speaker 5: over to thousand dollars to your landlord. Can you move
33:02
Speaker 5: into an apartment or send the check every month and
33:05
Speaker 5: get nothing on that money every single month. Those are
33:08
Speaker 5: frustrating experiences, right seeing your best friend walk around without healthcare,
33:14
Speaker 5: saying everything's going to be fine, everything's going to be fine,
33:16
Speaker 5: everything's going to be fine, and just worried, sick in
33:19
Speaker 5: the back of your head that she's going to one
33:23
Speaker 5: day get Hopefully nothing happened, but if something did happen,
33:26
Speaker 5: get completely wiped out. I mean, I don't know what
33:30
Speaker 5: bigger motivation there is to to go fix these problems.
33:33
Speaker 3: I really admire your ability to take complicated things on
33:37
Speaker 3: and make them digestible.
33:39
Speaker 4: It's so unique.
33:40
Speaker 5: I appreciate that, and that's what that's what uh So
33:43
Speaker 5: you get to do every single day if you're listeners.
33:45
Speaker 3: So I don't I ask the questions to try and
33:48
Speaker 3: have smart people like you break it down. And it's
33:50
Speaker 3: because I'm genuinely curious about it. Okay, so we have
33:53
Speaker 3: some fun wrap up lighter questions because I asked you
33:56
Speaker 3: a lot of intense So when you get your best ideas, uh,
34:02
Speaker 3: usually after being pitched a really.
34:04
Speaker 5: Stupid idea, what happens is and I think you probably
34:08
Speaker 5: have dealt to this too. It's like when when you
34:10
Speaker 5: hear somebody like your landlord explained to you like you
34:14
Speaker 5: just have to give me two thousand dollars, and you're
34:16
Speaker 5: like why, and then they don't have an answer for you.
34:18
Speaker 5: It's the most frustrating thing ever. And that's usually what
34:21
Speaker 5: sparks well, why can't we just do this? Right?
34:25
Speaker 1: Malcolm?
34:25
Speaker 5: I don't remember that book blank blank blank. It was
34:29
Speaker 5: the other Malcolm Gladwell book. Yes, and it was interesting,
34:34
Speaker 5: you said. Some of the research they found is that
34:37
Speaker 5: the biggest driver of disruption was people are just asking why, right,
34:44
Speaker 5: even starting even as a kid. If you were talking
34:46
Speaker 5: about breeding the next generation innovators, it was just getting
34:50
Speaker 5: young people comfortable with asking why, right, And I think
34:55
Speaker 5: sometimes we forget to ask that. And I'll just tell
34:59
Speaker 5: one fun story that you might so. I remember Johnson
35:01
Speaker 5: and Johnson was working on this really cool thing this
35:04
Speaker 5: is about three years four years ago now, for oral hygiene,
35:08
Speaker 5: and they wanted to create kind of the next big
35:10
Speaker 5: innovation for dental health. Right, So they got together a
35:15
Speaker 5: committee of all the top dental hygienas, dentists, orthodontist, etc.
35:21
Speaker 5: And one of the first questions that the not dental
35:25
Speaker 5: person asked.
35:25
Speaker 1: Was, so, why do we use toothbrushes?
35:28
Speaker 5: And everyone just started kind of laughing, like what a
35:30
Speaker 5: stupid question, Like, of course, you use a toothbrush your teeth,
35:34
Speaker 5: that's how it works. And they pressed, and what Jay
35:37
Speaker 5: and Jay's team realized was that nobody has actually asked
35:40
Speaker 5: that question in centuries. Toothbrushes invented in ancient Egypt when
35:47
Speaker 5: they had a wooden stick with bristles that they would
35:50
Speaker 5: do for after a meal to just kind of wipe
35:53
Speaker 5: their teeth down. And like, my Sonic care is just
35:55
Speaker 5: an incremental evolution of like the ancient Egyptian wooden stead, right,
36:01
Speaker 5: And if you actually look back, most of what's causing
36:04
Speaker 5: gum disease and tooth decay are these bacteria and plaque
36:09
Speaker 5: that gets stuck in your teeth that aren't really coming
36:11
Speaker 5: out with the traditional toothbrush. And so Jay and James
36:14
Speaker 5: for the last few years has been working on almost
36:17
Speaker 5: like a listerine type MEX solution, which is actually way
36:20
Speaker 5: better at preventing gun disease and tooth decay. Because they
36:24
Speaker 5: stopped trying to solve the toothbrush problem and you started
36:27
Speaker 5: to look at.
36:27
Speaker 1: It as well.
36:28
Speaker 5: Actually, the issue is the bacteria that gets stuck in
36:30
Speaker 5: your teeth between your gums, and so sometimes it's.
36:33
Speaker 1: Asking those really stupid questions.
36:35
Speaker 5: The curiosity that you're so good at, and the curiosity
36:38
Speaker 5: that more people I think can benefit from, is what
36:41
Speaker 5: drives those obvious answers.
36:44
Speaker 4: That is such a great story.
36:45
Speaker 3: Thank you for sharing that one thing you wish there
36:48
Speaker 3: was an app or a tech self for that hasn't
36:51
Speaker 3: been developed yet, like something that annoys you on a
36:54
Speaker 3: daily basis.
36:55
Speaker 5: Maybe well, right now, I got to tell you that
36:58
Speaker 5: my favorite app, which was uber and Left, is now
37:00
Speaker 5: my most frustrating app. I don't know if it's like
37:03
Speaker 5: this in LA, but for me to go anywhere in
37:05
Speaker 5: New York today, it's like thirty or forty dollars, which
37:08
Speaker 5: is insane. So I really hope someone comes up with
37:11
Speaker 5: the next version of this, maybe just as simple taxi hailing,
37:15
Speaker 5: because taxis are like a third of the price here
37:17
Speaker 5: in New York, which is crazy to.
37:18
Speaker 4: Think, crazy because it was always the opposite.
37:21
Speaker 5: It's always the opposite, and so hopefully someone fixes that
37:24
Speaker 5: pretty quickly.
37:26
Speaker 4: What's an invention you wish you came up with first?
37:30
Speaker 5: Going back to space. I am so excited to go
37:33
Speaker 5: to space one day, and so if I could be,
37:37
Speaker 5: if I could dedicate all of my time to working
37:40
Speaker 5: on that stuff with whether it's SpaceX or a virgin
37:44
Speaker 5: glactic or something, I would probably jump on that hardat
37:46
Speaker 5: The idea that at some point we as millennials will
37:51
Speaker 5: be the first generation where we can many of us
37:53
Speaker 5: will get to visit space in our lifetime is a.
37:55
Speaker 1: Pretty exciting concept.
37:58
Speaker 5: When you think about that humans have been around for
38:01
Speaker 5: x you know, ten to millions of years, right, It's like,
38:05
Speaker 5: all of a sudden, we're the first in human history
38:08
Speaker 5: where we're going to be getting a chance to go
38:10
Speaker 5: beyond Earth. It feels like that moment when you read
38:13
Speaker 5: about it in elementary school the first people who discovered
38:15
Speaker 5: in the America. Is what that must have been like
38:17
Speaker 5: to realize that there's more to the world. I don't know,
38:20
Speaker 5: it just it feels pretty transformative. And then you take
38:23
Speaker 5: into account the side benefit a suborbital space travel, which
38:28
Speaker 5: I can't imagine when you look back and you're like,
38:31
Speaker 5: how do people sit on a boat for two months
38:34
Speaker 5: to get from London New York. I think our kids
38:37
Speaker 5: are going to look back and say, how did you
38:38
Speaker 5: sit in a tiny metal tube strapped to the seat,
38:42
Speaker 5: sitting like this for seven hours to get from New
38:45
Speaker 5: York to a lot?
38:46
Speaker 1: I mean, it's crazy.
38:47
Speaker 5: And so with suborbital travel, you can get from New
38:51
Speaker 5: York to Australia in forty five minutes, right, And so
38:54
Speaker 5: what I can't this is in the next ten years
38:57
Speaker 5: or so, this will come out. So I'm just like
38:59
Speaker 5: jealous of the fact that my kids one day are
39:01
Speaker 5: going to have, you know, wake up in New York,
39:03
Speaker 5: have dinner in Sydney, Australia, go out to a party
39:07
Speaker 5: in Paris, and be home by curfew, you know. And
39:10
Speaker 5: I know that we have much more important problems on
39:12
Speaker 5: Earth to solve right now, but you know, we still
39:15
Speaker 5: have to move the world forward in parallel as well.
39:17
Speaker 1: So I think that type of stuff excites me as well.
39:21
Speaker 3: It's interesting you say that because you've spoken about space
39:24
Speaker 3: a lot. I know it's important to your dad too,
39:26
Speaker 3: and there's been a lot of talk about Jeff Bezos
39:29
Speaker 3: and Richard Branson going to space and a lot of
39:32
Speaker 3: negativity surrounding it. And my dad actually shared with me,
39:36
Speaker 3: and I didn't know this that so much R and D,
39:39
Speaker 3: and so many inventions have come from trying to get
39:43
Speaker 3: to space that like, not the whole story is being
39:47
Speaker 3: talked about. What are your thoughts on the two of
39:49
Speaker 3: them going to space right now?
39:50
Speaker 5: Handly, this frustration is understandable, right, It's a lot We
39:54
Speaker 5: deal with people dealing with these issues every single day
39:57
Speaker 5: at our business.
39:58
Speaker 1: Right.
39:58
Speaker 5: So when you're worrying about how to pay this month's
40:01
Speaker 5: bills because you're out of a job from COVID, your
40:06
Speaker 5: rent is getting jacked up, you can't afford health insurance.
40:09
Speaker 5: Then you see some guy running around, you know, sending
40:12
Speaker 5: himself to space and the rocket ship with billions of dollars.
40:15
Speaker 1: Obviously people are frustrated.
40:17
Speaker 5: Right. What I'll say to that is there is clearly
40:21
Speaker 5: a lot of money that gets wasted in the world
40:24
Speaker 5: right now, especially here in the United States and especially
40:27
Speaker 5: in Silicon Valley. But the types of businesses that are
40:30
Speaker 5: pushing their frontiers on technology and innovation are not one
40:34
Speaker 5: of those, right. And to your point, some of the
40:37
Speaker 5: technology to figure out, I mean, imagine what happens when
40:41
Speaker 5: you can now get transportation of goods from any point
40:44
Speaker 5: in the world to any point in the world in
40:47
Speaker 5: thirty minutes or forty minutes.
40:48
Speaker 1: Right, what impact.
40:49
Speaker 5: Does that have when someone has a medical issue in
40:53
Speaker 5: Africa and we have the solution in Washington, DC and
40:57
Speaker 5: we can get that to that person in thirty minutes, right.
41:00
Speaker 1: We don't think about that.
41:00
Speaker 5: The iPhone has been the single greatest transformation for bringing
41:05
Speaker 5: people out of poverty in India because for the first time,
41:08
Speaker 5: farmers had transparent access to pricing on crops and so
41:12
Speaker 5: they weren't getting screwed by the middleman.
41:15
Speaker 1: I mean, now there's a whole separate government issue with.
41:17
Speaker 5: That, but for the first time farmers can section get
41:20
Speaker 5: a fair pricing for their produce, which brought a whole
41:24
Speaker 5: generation out of poverty, letting them know what to plan,
41:27
Speaker 5: where to spend their efforts, where to spend their investment
41:29
Speaker 5: for their agriculture.
41:30
Speaker 1: And like, people don't think about that.
41:32
Speaker 5: You don't think of the iPhone as the key to
41:34
Speaker 5: lifting poverty sometimes, but that technological advancement, I would say,
41:38
Speaker 5: is as important as the work that like leat Cairos
41:42
Speaker 5: are doing today to try to help the immediate problems
41:45
Speaker 5: of things like rent costs and healthcare.
41:47
Speaker 1: Costs doing well.
41:48
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think sometimes woke Twitter is quick to dismiss
41:53
Speaker 3: some important things. What book have you read that changed
41:57
Speaker 3: your life?
41:59
Speaker 1: Ben franklins oni biography was pretty fascinating to me.
42:02
Speaker 5: But you start to see these patterns and kind of
42:05
Speaker 5: again going back to purpose for a lot of these.
42:08
Speaker 1: Great leaders throughout human history, right.
42:10
Speaker 5: And I think for me, as much as I love
42:13
Speaker 5: reading Malcolm glad Tomo's books for intellectual curiosity or whatever,
42:16
Speaker 5: I actually find it most interesting to read autobiographies of
42:19
Speaker 5: just interesting people because we're all just doing the same
42:22
Speaker 5: thing over and over again, generation of the generation, right,
42:25
Speaker 5: And so you have a chance to kind of get
42:27
Speaker 5: ahead by learning what others learned the hard way.
42:31
Speaker 3: A time you failed miserably, but we're going to use
42:33
Speaker 3: a different word because fail really means pivot.
42:36
Speaker 4: We learned today. So a time you pivoted miserably, what
42:40
Speaker 4: did it teach you about yourself?
42:42
Speaker 1: Gosh? Well, all of these, all these situations are tough ones.
42:47
Speaker 5: I mean, I can tell you like that the story
42:49
Speaker 5: I've told this before, but when I was a kid
42:52
Speaker 5: was seventh grade, I was really trying hard to make
42:55
Speaker 5: the middle school basketball team. And I am I am
42:59
Speaker 5: not the most built for athletics person the market and
43:03
Speaker 5: so here I was scrindy, little Indian kid trying to
43:06
Speaker 5: make the middle school basketball team. Got cut, and so
43:10
Speaker 5: for eighth grade, I was like, this year, I'm gonna
43:12
Speaker 5: make it, and realized one I had I would barely
43:15
Speaker 5: grow and.
43:15
Speaker 1: I was like two indred dollars still couldn't done. But
43:18
Speaker 1: I saw an ad for.
43:19
Speaker 5: These jumpstules, which are like these pliometric things that help
43:23
Speaker 5: you jump, and I convinced myself I could just show
43:26
Speaker 5: people that I can dunk or touch the rim, I'll
43:29
Speaker 5: make the team. And so this process of getting cut
43:32
Speaker 5: sixth grade seventh grade led to actually what became funny enough,
43:37
Speaker 5: the first company. And so in order for me to
43:40
Speaker 5: get a hold of these, my parents went by this
43:42
Speaker 5: workout of it, and so I started calling up the
43:45
Speaker 5: fitness companies that make these piometrics, and the guy told
43:49
Speaker 5: me that if I could find a way to market
43:51
Speaker 5: his company, that he would send me a pair for free.
43:54
Speaker 5: And so that was actually originally how we started some
43:58
Speaker 5: of this mileline quiz stuff. I said, Okay, I'll put
44:00
Speaker 5: your ad and a bunch of stuff on AOLS as profiles,
44:03
Speaker 5: and I started learning coding to build that first product
44:07
Speaker 5: to create what became my first company, and I got
44:11
Speaker 5: my jumpsles.
44:11
Speaker 1: I still didn't make the team, but I started my
44:13
Speaker 1: first company.
44:14
Speaker 4: What a great story.
44:16
Speaker 3: Okay, So what's a non negotiable for you every day
44:18
Speaker 3: in order to be your best, most productive self.
44:21
Speaker 5: I cannot surround myself with no people and like negativity.
44:26
Speaker 1: I think it's just there's always a way to solve things.
44:28
Speaker 5: And I think one of the best lessons we said
44:31
Speaker 5: at our company was, I mean, there's really only one
44:34
Speaker 5: way to get to get fired quickly, and it's to
44:36
Speaker 5: just straight up say somethings that can't be done. We
44:41
Speaker 5: much rather would have a culture where walk me through
44:44
Speaker 5: the pros and cons, the trade offs, the costs, but
44:47
Speaker 5: that once you start setting in the mindset of it
44:49
Speaker 5: just can't be.
44:50
Speaker 1: Done, not possible, it's just toxic.
44:52
Speaker 5: And so that has been a non negotiable for me,
44:56
Speaker 5: our companies and just the culture around.
44:58
Speaker 3: I'm with you, Okay, last question, The smartest decision you've
45:02
Speaker 3: ever made.
45:03
Speaker 1: Moving to New York?
45:05
Speaker 4: Why is that?
45:06
Speaker 5: It is so you're going back to the same thing
45:10
Speaker 5: of curiosity. San Francisco is a single town city. Washington,
45:14
Speaker 5: DC a single town city. New York city has this
45:19
Speaker 5: life to it where you can go to you can
45:22
Speaker 5: walk outside and be surrounded by fashion designers, architects, real
45:27
Speaker 5: estate people, finance people, media people like you just are
45:31
Speaker 5: constantly meeting interesting, different people from different worlds that you
45:35
Speaker 5: can learn from, and you just I haven't been anywhere
45:38
Speaker 5: else in the world or you have that density of
45:41
Speaker 5: diversity in one place, and it's just it's been the
45:44
Speaker 5: most fun change.
45:45
Speaker 1: In my life.
45:47
Speaker 4: And we do a PSQ.
45:48
Speaker 3: I have a pretty smart card deck, so it's fifty
45:52
Speaker 3: two questions for deeper conversation. Yours was funny considering you
45:56
Speaker 3: don't like negativity. What's the thing you complain about.
45:59
Speaker 1: The most complainers?
46:04
Speaker 4: I love it. I'm so grateful for your time.
46:07
Speaker 3: Thank you, and I feel like I learned so much
46:09
Speaker 3: through you, so I really appreciate it.
46:29
Speaker 4: All right, Today is a good day. To have a
46:31
Speaker 4: good day. I'll see you next