Latest / High Five Energy Founders / He Turned Down $5M, Built a $150M Company, Then Walked Away From Being CEO | Steve Martocci

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He Turned Down $5M, Built a $150M Company, Then Walked Away From Being CEO | Steve Martocci · High Five Energy Founders

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_04: What's up, guys?
• 0:00
  SPEAKER_04: I'm Jeff.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_04: I'm a serial entrepreneur and investor.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_04: And on this podcast, I sit down with the world's top founders to unpack how they actually build, scale, and think to help entrepreneurs get the tools and inspiration they need to succeed.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_04: Steve and I met in New York City when I had just started Ving, uh, which was a mobile app for video caller ID.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_04: I think we went to your apartment.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_04: That's probably we did.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_04: Uh epic entrepreneur.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_04: I've seen him do three amazing companies.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_04: A Group Me was the first text messaging app.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_04: It sold to Microsoft for I think 85 million-ish.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_02: I never confirmed the details.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, of course not.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: I like the note.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and then he decided to start the Uber for helicopters, Blade, which I heard about in New York and realized it was Steve, and that IPO'd.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_04: And then the coolest one, I think, because I'm a music guy, is Splice, which is uh music collaboration in the cloud, because everyone's using Logic Pro.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_04: I'm I'm a band, I'm a drummer.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and that took over music.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_04: So I always like to start at the beginning, Steve.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_04: First idea, what were you doing?
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_04: Did you have a job?
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_04: What was the idea and how to go?
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I remember I guess first idea was trying to register giftcertificates.com in sixth grade, and I didn't get it.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it was like the 90s, you had to fax in a form to get a domain name, and uh that didn't work.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_02: But I always kind of had dreamed of doing a software company.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um mostly self-taught, but went to Carnegie Mellon and uh not for CS because I would have failed out, but for information systems, which I think is like the closest thing to product management that there is.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_02: And um, you know, did a little couple of side projects in the beginning.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_02: I actually the first company I started, um, the first company uh was called Simpact Technologies.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_02: I was 20 years old.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_02: And uh it was dynamic images to try to be the Lance Armstrong bracelet for your MySpace page.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_02: I was trying to work with charities to show that you made donations.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_02: And the only way to get anything on a MySpace page was through an image.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_02: So we were dynamically rendering images that would show different content.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_02: What year is this?
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_02: Uh 2005 or something.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: Feels early.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it was a little early.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_02: Uh turns out that was good for email marketing, uh, because you could change email after it was sent.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so tried to make it, but it was so early.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_02: By the time I was, you know, really working on that, it was like 2009, and like the VC scene hadn't popped off in New York yet.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I had a couple conversations, it didn't really work.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_02: This was kind of my parents um had always had the dream of either doing grad school for me or funding uh an idea, and they they really started it for me.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_02: And uh we failed.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um the I I got good clients.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_02: I got like Starbucks and 1800 flowers and some cool things, but I was like so not ready and needed more guidance.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um, ended up shutting it down, going to work at Guilt Group, and because I thought I could sell it to them because I was like, oh, you know, like they need this technically.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_02: What was Guilt Group?
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: Guilt Group is a flash sales site that like was you know, it revolutionized New York tech.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_02: So Kevin Ryan, the founder of DoubleClick or CEO of DoubleClick, uh founded that and it brought together like all these incredible leaders.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I think, you know, of everyone on my team, I think everyone went on to either be a CTO founder or something like that.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_02: It was a pretty amazing moment in New York Tech.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_02: And one of my teammates uh ended up going and doing the original idea that I had had, gave me some equity in it, and then built it into a big company called Movable Inc.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_02: that just sold for$475 million.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_02: So um, so I turned that that was a failure that somehow parlayed.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_02: I think sort of one for one there.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: And then while I was there at Guilt Group, uh, you know, I was a I was I grew up a jam-band guy.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_02: So I've seen fish like 200 times and you know, all that kind of stuff.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you can clap them into that.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_02: Uh um and we were going to a con I had a friend of mine who I knew through uh seeing shows, and we wanted to we always wanted to build something together, but he would always have bad ideas.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_02: And uh finally he had an idea that was like, yo, how do we stay in touch at concerts we go to?
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, oh, I could fix that.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_02: And uh we went to a hackathon in New York and uh met the Twilio guys, who did it was an API for interacting with the phone system that just came out, and in 24 hours we built Group Me.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_02: I was at a hackathon.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_04: And what was GroupMe and its original?
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_02: So there was no, so this is the era between it's 2010.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: This is the era between you know, Blackberry is still a thing, iPhone had dropped but had no app store, I think when we first did it, or maybe just had an app store.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_02: And um, there was no group text messaging, like group MMS, I don't it didn't even exist at that point.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_02: So we kind of invented it by giving every group uh their own phone number that if you messaged it, it it fanned it out to everybody in the group.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_02: And uh and they it bridged the gap between every phone type, which was really cool.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_02: You could do it from BlackBerry, Android, iPhone, dumb phones.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_02: And um, that was a crazy ride.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_02: It was a 13-month journey.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_02: We sold it to Skype.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and uh, you know, it's so fun coming out of that, like little things.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_02: I had a an iMessage PM uh uh product manager interview for a Roll It's Place, and he said, Man, for my three years at iMessage at Apple, my job was to copy everything you built.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_02: So, like, you know, like when emojis go big when you send them on their own line.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_02: He's like, We stole that from you.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, Okay, all right.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I I can walk around a badge of being like the guy who came up with that, which is fun.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but we how were we gonna compete at that point?
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it was uh it was an interesting market at the time.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_02: Although, group me still to this day, every back to school number two.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_02: This year it was number two overall app in the app store.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: So it's still, you know, still kicking college kids particularly.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_04: Did it just go viral?
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_04: So you you lost you did it in a weekend, and then what happened?
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_02: You put it out there and it just word of mouth?
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_02: Every person you add to the group, uh, you know, every person who signs up basically invited six people because that was what a group looked like.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_02: And so it was just inherently viral.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, and that just kept going.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_02: And then eventually we built apps.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_02: It was all all over SMS in the beginning.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then we built the apps for it, and the apps became the dominant way of using it.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_02: We hit a cohort with college kids, and uh the crazy thing about them is like it's almost like a rite of passage in college to get into the group me's, and so it's like, you know, it's a really interesting, like self-replenishing niche that has like over and over been tried to kill.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_02: The amount of times I've had founders come to me or be like, meet someone that's like, oh, we're building the group me killer and like all that, and it's like cool, go for it.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it just hasn't been dethroned.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_04: How important is it for founders to find that killer audience, that killer channel?
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_04: And and what are ways of getting to that?
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_04: Because you found it.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_04: Was it the first one you you looked for with those college kids?
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, no.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I th well it was it's interesting.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_02: We started with just solving our own problem.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_02: Like I literally wanted to go to concerts with our friends.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_02: Like we used it at a show uh the first weekend.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and the thing that was interesting is my co-founder ended up using it for a baby that was being born in their family, and it worked for that too.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_02: So all of a sudden we came back after the first weekend of it existing, being like, oh shit, this works for a lot more than going to concerts.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_02: And uh it was crazy.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, like we would have so the product was so universal and the branding.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I still will never forget like drawing the logo.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_02: We were trying everything on logos, and then one day I just like got up on it, wasn't even a whiteboard, it was a piece of shower board in my studio apartment and like drew the little hash symbol, you know, what do we call it called?
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_02: Hashtag symbol like the hash and a smile and a smile under it.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, it's like you can type it as an emoticon, which is just so fun still to this day.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_02: Uh that one was just like universal and accessible and easy to use.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I'm not always the best personally.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_02: I think a lot of people give advice to being like, you know, really find that niche and like hit on it.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm kind of the guy who is like, I'm gonna make something that is like deep enough and powerful enough for the biggest power user, but simple enough for grandma to use.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_02: And like it'll reveal itself over time.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_02: You can unlock the functionality.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, like I'm I'm just not, I think for most people, you want to find that niche kind of bowling balls bowling pin strategy where you go after that one real good target and expand from there.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm kind of consistently uh not that good at that uh because I have that way of building product.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_04: So and the connection with Microsoft, how did that happen?
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_04: I just want to take a moment to talk about something that's really important to me and something I've been working on for years.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_04: If you like these conversations with founders, the mindset shifts, and the real questions behind building companies, I go much deeper on all that in my book, High Five Energy.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_04: I wrote it for people who are thinking about starting something or who already have, but want to lead with more clarity and purpose.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_04: The book gives you practical tools to get into high five energy flow state, attract the right people, and build in a way that actually feels aligned.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_04: High Five Energy includes interviews with 18 legendary founders who've had over 200 billion in exits and IPOs.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_04: If you're new to entrepreneurship or even just considering taking the leap, this book is for you.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_04: High Five Energy is available now wherever books are sold, or hit the link below.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so is it that was an interesting one?
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: So uh Facebook, there was this group messaging wars that was going on.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_02: Facebook had just bought one of our competitors and was building Messenger, which hadn't come out yet.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_02: iMessage just got announced, and we were struggling because we could only work in the US.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_02: And so we needed to be able to go international.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_02: And we were like, oh, we can use Skype as a partner to go international.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_02: And so we talked to them, and commercial partnership conversations eventually moved to um to MA.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_02: And we had another round raised, or like we had a round ready to go, and they they they made a great offer and to have it happen so fast.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, I was 60 grand in debt from the previous startup that failed.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_02: So uh getting a win at that point in time, you know, could we have parlayed that into something way bigger?
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_02: Very possibly, but it was really great to get a win under our belts.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_04: That feel like closing a deal that big so fast.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, it was so intense and so magical the 13 months that the day I remember going into the office the day after we sold, and the adrenaline was gone.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_02: And it was like a collapse, actually.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_02: Because all of that energy of like, oh my God, we could fail, we could be the biggest thing in the world, we could be like the waveform of like what could be was so wild that I remember the day after just being like, I wouldn't say depressed, but like coming off the roller coaster was just like such a drain of intensity.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um and then it was, you know, the money came kind of over a multi-year period, so it wasn't like you saw you saw like some money in your bank account, and then you saw like you're like, cool, you know, I could pay off my debts, but like it wasn't like some big yeah, like that's that group me was so fun and so such a lightning in a bottle experience.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, the product was built just us going out and we were in our 20s in New York, and I had a I had the most rambunctious group of uh team members you could ever imagine.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_02: 70% of my team were smokers.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: Like, what?
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_02: You know, and this is like this is just a group of people who wanted to have fun together and would go out, use the product, wake up hung over, and then fix whatever was broken using it the night before.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_02: So it was like just a feedback loop that was just so fun and so great that it's very, very hard to recapture that.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I think that the serendipity, you know, stuff you talk about, like when I used to talk about group me, I was like, that is a third luck, easily a third luck, if not more.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_02: Right time, no, like that little window, WhatsApp wasn't real, they were there, but they weren't like a thing.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_02: They were getting bigger, but we were like, let's we have group in our name, like focus on that.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_02: And uh yeah, it was just a it was just a really wild, wild ride.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_04: So, how long until the next one?
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so uh that's a great question.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_02: I was at uh Skype for two years in my earnout.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_02: I tried to change Skype from the inside.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_02: I like remember demanding 15 minutes uh on stage at their senior leadership conference, and I was so like didn't understand how this company was working.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, I walked them through what WhatsApp was able to do with 35-person team.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, if you just use servers instead of this P2P system that doesn't isn't needed anymore in the world of mobile and all this, like I showed them the path to like saving the company in my mind, uh the product, and um and I got booed off stage.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_02: And so I put my notice in a year into the two-year earnout, being like, you you better have a transition plan.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_02: And Skype is no more.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Groot me still still kicking strong.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_02: So um, so then it was interesting.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_02: I was um right up with that two-year mark.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_02: I wanted to like, I wanted to build again.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_02: Like I had had my kind of downtime and like you know, it felt good.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_02: And I had this idea.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_02: I I actually met a co-founder first, which was uh this guy, Matt Emanetti, who was on the kind of Ruby on Rails core team.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_02: I really admired him as an engineer.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, we should build something together.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_02: We didn't know what.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_02: We tried like a couple things, and it just, you know, I always say to people, if you can't build what you're you, you know, your startup, if you can't build it nights and weekends while doing something else, like it ain't happening because you're gonna spend nights and weekends on it.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_02: Like, don't quit your job.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so when I realized we weren't making progress on anything nights and weekends, we needed to change course.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_02: And I had a musician friend um, you know, who had gotten into programming after GroupMe was successful, comes off stage at a music festival and he's like, You want to know my best idea?
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_02: He's like, GitHub for music.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, I honestly this idea, same idea, had been at the top of my do not do this list.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_02: Top, top item.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_02: Because it's like, you know, you're going into an industry that is notoriously impossible to do VC in.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_02: The market's gonna be too small, you're gonna spend 10 years of your life on it, and nothing's gonna come from it.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_02: So don't do it.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_02: And he just said it to me and it just tipped, and I was like, I don't think I'm gonna do it.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_02: And and I told Matt uh about this, and he was like, Well, did you know I was an audio engineer for half my life?
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_02: And like he was like, he was like, Let's go.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_02: And he woke up the next day and he had built like a whole bunch of stuff for it, and that's what I mean.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_02: Like, if you're once you get inspired, like for me, I'm like, I don't do anything that I'm not like super inspired to do.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_02: I just don't do it.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's um once we felt that energy go, it was clear.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_02: And I remember a competitor, someone with a similar idea had launched, and that was the first time I had felt that thing I said that disappeared the day after Group Me, that like real adrenaline, real intensity.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_02: It came back, and I was like, shit, I'm on the roller coaster again.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_02: Like, oh man, here we go.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_02: It was like you're clicking up the thing, you have all that anticipation.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_02: And I just remember jumping back on at that point.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_04: And for those who don't know, I you know, I was a musician for four years in a band.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_04: We used Logic Pro, heavy software application.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_04: We'd have to be in person, he'd bring his computer everywhere we went, and this was essentially that, but in the cloud.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we started by basically connecting the digital audio workstations, which are like uh Logic and Ableton, to do collaboration.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_02: And we were running into over the years, we actually ran into a bunch of problems.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_02: I made a big mistake there, which was that I didn't charge for it early enough because I thought that it was not good enough.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um and uh we needed to start charging for something.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, well, I don't think it's good enough because the people, when they're trying to collaborate, don't have the same sounds, they don't have the same plugins, which are basically virtual instruments.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, I'm gonna monetize that.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: And so we monetized uh a library of samples and loops that you could use royalty-free in your tracks, and it just blew up.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_02: Like this was it went quick from like no revenue to you know 10 million error, and like, I don't know.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, that was probably like two years at that point, I think.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_04: Uh but you were two years into it.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_04: I was multiple years into it.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, multiple years in.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_02: I was probably four years, I might have been three or four years into the company at that point.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_04: So let's before that, yeah, before that inflection point, are you raising money?
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_02: So uh it was funny.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I was I came off GroupMe, and anyone else in that moment would have been 100% shut down from every single BC.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I at least had my people who I had worked with originally, and one uh young partner at True Ventures, uh, this guy Adam Dugelli, who I love, uh, who was in music and like got it.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm telling you, I would go into pitches on people who I like.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_02: Group me was a really special thing in New York.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_02: We actually returned most people's first funds that you would heard of.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_02: So Box Group's first fund, Lear Ventures first fund, Thrive's first fund, SV Angel's first fund.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_02: Like we were we had minted these guys, right?
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_02: Now they're raising multiple funds on a quick return, like, you know, and they would be like, please do anything else.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_02: Please.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, eventually the the ones uh most of the ones that had supported me in the very early days, we we got around done.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_02: But uh let me tell you, when you have uh a small TAM in a VC's mind, it doesn't you could pull a rabbit out of a hat, you could turn water into wine, it doesn't matter.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_02: Uh if they because the more successful you are in a small TAM, they the less they believe, they're like, Great, you did great, but I like how much bigger can you get?
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the VC game is so particular in terms of what qualifies as a venture-backed company for people to invest in.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: And like, you really like don't please like internalize that and under internalize the market size opportunity and like why your company should be a venture-backed company with people who are playing these giant TAM games that are in IPO or bust mentalities, and that you're gonna leverage capital to win an infinitely large market.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_02: Like, if you're just not that dynamic, like you they might love you, they might think you're the best founder ever, but like it it's really hard to get over that line.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um okay, so where were we?
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_02: So around that time, same time, I had uh just the blade story, real quick.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_02: I had Rob Wiesenthal, who was an investor in GroupMe, kind of come into the office with this idea of like, yeah, it it was just kind of ridiculous.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, oh, I go to the Hamptons, uh, and I have my friends, we charter helicopters, but we would ride together.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_02: Like it was this whole thing.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_02: And I was just like, well, if Elon can have a rocket company on the side, I should be able to have a helicopter company on the side.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_02: And uh with that one, I uh I worked out a bunch of the initial dynamics.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_02: I did the brand, I named it, I built the app and hired the team, and then just like handed it off to Rob.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: Like Rob did all the relations with the he he knew the clients.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't know the clients.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_02: He knew the he was gonna deal with the aviation people, like and all that.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_02: And then he left, he was a president at Warner Music, he left to run it full time, and I just sat on the board.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and he grew it into being like, I don't know, it's like one of the most iconic brands in in New York City, really.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_02: This is amazing.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_02: And um, and then that went public via a SPAC, and then just they did just sold the passenger business to Joby to do like the e VTAL like drone kind of stuff, which is pretty cool.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_02: So what is that?
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_02: Like, like literally, like um the flights are gonna be with electronic takeoff and lift, like they look like big drones that you kind of ride in because the big complaint against helicopters is that they're loud.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_02: So all the neighbors, man, I got so many people who are like, you fly your helicopters over my house.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, Well, you bought a house next to the airport.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_02: Like, how is that my fault?
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, um, but it was uh, but that this will solve that problem.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_02: So this is a side project.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_02: For me, it was uh like I just loved it, like you know, with Splice, I was uh, you know, playing the I need to be a public company CEO kind of game.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_02: But at my core, what you see is I'm really a founder.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_04: Like Product Founder.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_02: Did you call yourself a product founder?
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_02: Product first, product first, very hands-on.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_02: Like I'm an engineer, I'm a software engineer.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_02: I build, you know, I built that group me in 24 hour thing.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_02: I built the prototypes of everything and still code a ton on my latest company subco, which we'll talk about.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_02: And um, but during Splice, you know, I was really I loved the music thing.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_02: It had tons of perks, like you're used by half a top 40 music, your favorite musicians think you're the coolest fucking dude around.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_02: It was great.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and uh and I had that aspiration to to kind of go as big as possible.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_02: And um, you know, things were were going well.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, I COVID hit.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_02: I I I had a rough leadership period there.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we got up to about 220 people.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_02: The company now is about 150 million AR uh profitable, like it's great.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_02: Because of the samples, is that I'd say the majority of the business is sample business.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_04: So that's that four-year inflection point, just to hit on that.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_04: Were you were your investors and yourself worried about how are you going to make money?
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_04: Did we do this wrong?
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_04: And then sample sort of just solved that overnight?
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it did.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_04: Who came up with that idea?
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_02: I did.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um and uh it was kind of like I, as I said, I if I had monetized the studio product, I actually believe it would have been successful.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I I I didn't want to.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_02: And I thought about this sample idea.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_02: We went out and licensed a bunch of content.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_02: We built it in a couple months and got it out the door, and it was like an instant hit, which was great.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I my investors that I, you know, they were very supportive of what we were doing.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_02: Her numbers were good in terms of engagement.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, they believed in the the overarching vision.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_02: I raised a kind of like bridge round.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_02: I used a little venture debt, actually, that it was like always a risky thing to do.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I was very confident in where we were gonna go and it worked.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um yeah.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_04: So you're founder, product-led growth, small team with GroupMe, you do the same thing at Splice.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_04: What was that transition like when you get to that next stage where now instead of a team of 15, you're actually have a team of 200, 250.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_04: Does it change?
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_04: Did you grow into that role?
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_04: Or was that tough?
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: I will never forget the day I felt the change.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_02: I was, I think I was interviewing three product managers at the same three product management roles at the same time.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_02: And I remember going from like room to room, meeting with all these people, and it was very clear that I was scaling the team up too fast.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_02: And I hadn't worked hard enough to like define this is the culture of how we build things, this is the culture of how it's going to work, and kind of let this group of new PMs that came in run their own kind of smaller fiefdoms that were a bit in conflict with each other in terms of like what I thought was more of our values.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, at least like we had good company values, but it was more of the like software development side of things.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um and yeah, and so I think that transition from founder to CEO is like really hard.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_02: And there's a really rough period for everyone until you have like the exec team in place that lets you have fun again.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_02: But the transition between like founding exec team, you know, your friend's the CTO, because he was the first guy there, like that kind of stuff, until like someone who can really scale, it's hard.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_02: And the decisions that the mistakes that get made.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, like, I mean, I'll I remember we interviewed um, you know, the I won't I won't blow up their spot directly, but uh the we would interview big name people who are at different places and like you know, be like, oh my god, they were they were here.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_02: This is amazing.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_02: And you'd kind of overlook all these other things about them because like of their previous successes or their previous you know resume, and then come in and realize it's like a terrible fit.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_02: And that kind of like chasing the big name versus really understanding like what the values are you're looking for and the rapport you have with the executive team, you know, I think is a very common mistake that founders in the transition to CEO make.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_04: Let's hit on that for one second because I know there's a lot of more early stage founders.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_04: I have found the same issues with advisors and investors, like heavy advisors, even people that are sort of pitching it to become a partner, and you are enamored by their big name and their history, and you just ignore all of the blind spots and flags that are right in front of you.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_04: So I just a note, it's not really all phases.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_02: I'll tell you my thoughts on that.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_02: I do very, very few advisories.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I mostly have people invest, and certain ones, if they're bringing a lot to the table or their brand's gonna help market things, could get a little kicker in an advisory.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_02: But like I really make them put the money in.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_02: Like I remember when it came with Splice, like, you know, there was tons of musicians that wanted to be advisors, but you were just like, no, you know, like like what are you gonna do?
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_02: Like the smaller the check and like the more these people are, the more difficult they are to work with, the louder they are, they're like really they're not professional investors, or they're not really for for me, they weren't like they're just like wanted to hear their voice all the time, kind of we talked.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_02: But I but then someone like Tiesto, like who saw it, was like, take$175,000.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, you're my guy, you know.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and you know, the the I don't I spend very little time chasing down advisors or investors uh or or like celebrities because uh the amount of effort in is usually not worth uh the results.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_02: Like that everyone's in sell mode.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_02: Same with investors, they're all in sell mode about how great the value add is gonna be, what they're gonna do.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_02: And then like the day the check comes in and just kind of it goes down to about 10% of what they said they were gonna do.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't, I I like I generally for me, and look, I have a track record, I have experience with these.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_02: I go back to the people I've worked with before that I know I have no counterparty risk, that they're gonna be problematic.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_02: So Andy Weissman at Union Square Ventures, he was my first check, you know, in uh into GroupMe when he was at Betaworks, and then has led kind of many rounds for Splice and and Subco.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_02: I go back, we are we are allies and we're pretty much partners and friends throughout the whole thing.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_02: And uh I'll take less terms, like worse terms from people that I trust than I will from you know, chasing around uh just big numbers.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_04: So you've got a lot of highs during this process, just the entrepreneurial journey.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_04: Tell me about the when it gets hard.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_04: Tell me about a time where it wasn't as easy and and how do you get through that?
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, look, that transition to founder CEO, not fine.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_02: Like, look, I'm just not you just have to be prepared.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_02: If you're gonna be CEO throughout the whole thing, you are going to be a people manager, you know?
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_02: And like that people management, if you're a builder, is you're you're the thing for me is like when I as a builder, I'm always operating on my own time.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_02: Like I'll literally go program the thing, I'll go do now with AI, it's it's absurd.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_02: We'll probably talk about that at the end.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, so it's always like on my clock.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_02: But then once you have an executive team and you're doing your check-ins with them, you're kind of like on a shared clock with them.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_02: And like I get I get like antsy.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_02: Like I have trouble focusing in a meeting with them if they're not like moving at the same pace and stuff like that that I that I want them to.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and uh, and so that like you know, and I and I tried very hard to learn all the skills, learn the patience, do the things.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I honestly I I think I was doing a good job, to be honest.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_02: Like uh the team was was happy, we were we got to a really great spot.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, COVID hit where things got really hard for me.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_02: COVID was interesting.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_02: I was like one week ahead or two weeks ahead of, oh my gosh, we're all gonna be working from home for the next who knows how long.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_02: So we did a test work from home week.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and it was like two weeks ahead of everyone needing the supplies.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_02: So like everyone got their monitors ordered, all the stuff won.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, just in case.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_02: And and that was good, but the the camaraderie in person started fading that we had a really good in-person culture going.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, we did have remote engineering, but uh but you felt that.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_02: And then in the window from COVID starting, my uh and and like kind of COVID starts, my dad dies in May, uh George Floyd protests break out like that week or the week after, and uh just like my world like just like got just very complicated and it felt like a personal journey.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_02: And from there on, I don't I don't know if I ever recovered as a leader because um I so badly wanted to keep the team happy and you know sane through a very difficult time, I feel like, for the for the country, for the world, that everything was now HR.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_02: The amount of time I got to spend on products and you know seeing things exist in the world kind of faded down.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_02: And I I got really burnt out as a leader.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_02: And um so what do you do?
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_02: Uh well, things I did, right?
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_02: So I I was sort of always working on myself, had executive coaches, uh, executive coach.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I have a men's group that uh get to meet with uh a group of guys every week and we kind of go through our feelings and all that kind of stuff, which is really great.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um so I was working on my mental health through that.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_02: I took a little like small break, you know, of time off to try to see if I could get it back.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_02: And what I then was like, okay, I really need probably the biggest uh mistake, and it's not even a mistake because I tried, uh, was that I didn't have a strong number two, operational number two at Splice.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_02: And uh every time I was interviewing them, like the good number twos always wanted to be number ones.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_02: They're like, they wanted your job.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_02: And the other number twos I'd see, I'd be like, uh, I'm not inspired by you enough to kind of so I maybe I got too picky, maybe I didn't get the right uh people in the door.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_02: But I had recruited uh this amazing woman, uh Cockle, who was at Adobe, to be on our board.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_02: I was trying to recruit her to be number two.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_02: She's like, oh that sounds like I'm like, join the board.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so she joined the board, and you know, she came so close to signing as number two when I was looking at this.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not kidding.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_02: I was like leaving for it was my 40th birthday.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_02: I threw this nice big party and then I was going to Antarctica on this trip.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_02: And uh I'm like minutes from getting on the plane to let go, and we're like down to these final points, and all she has to do is like sign the dock, and she doesn't sign.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm just like, oh my god, fuck.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_02: Like, and I like I'm I can't be in touch for the next week and a half.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_02: I'm in Antarctica.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_02: And uh I came back and was kind of reflecting on it, and it was just like very clear that she really wanted to be a number one, and she was like super capable of being a number one, she's ready to be a number one, and I said, let's make you number one.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_02: And um it was such a relief for me to because I didn't have I knew at that point I didn't have it in me.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_02: We had to go, it was that kind of late 2021 period of needing to like all of a sudden everyone's focused on profitability over growth.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's we were gonna have to make a bunch of cuts, we're gonna have to get efficient and profitable, and all I wanted to do was like burn the whole core business down and invest in AI.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_02: That's literally all I wanted to do.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_02: Like, this is 2021.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_02: And uh the board was mixed on that plan.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_02: They're like, you have a great business, why would you want to do that?
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_02: And uh I just I I was just I just didn't have it in me.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_02: So I having her come in and be able to lead was just you know a gift because she already knew the company, she already knew uh what it was on the board, and she was able to come in.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_02: And it's to be honest, took took a long time to make the change.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but the company's probably in the best spot right now that it may have ever ever been in.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it is profitable, it is growing.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_02: We are we are in uh so now we got embedded inside uh Ableton Live, which is the biggest DAW uh digital audio workstation for making music, and like that was like a dream of mine.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_02: And to see them deliver that, I'm just like, hell yeah.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_02: And um, the AI investment didn't do the whole burn the company down and do it in 21, but they're on pace right now to be able to make the transition.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_02: Because a very difficult time.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, look, if we talk about the macro, uh the market for you all also, and as founders, like we're a hundred and fifty million dollar a year business that's profitable and growing and have no idea what it's worth because everyone's just questioning about AI.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_02: And so we have really good inroads there, and we're going through big transitions into it.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um and we have strong business fundamentals as well, which feels great because if an AI bubble does burst, because many of these companies that are doing great, they have great numbers, but they're spending all their money on tokens and servers and all that, like we could be in a great place.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_02: We just don't know.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's like a tremendous amount of uncertainty right now.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but it's been it's been great to see that the team, you know, find a plan that I'm excited about that adapts to winning, really winning on the stuff that we know and making long-term investments.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it's a hard thing to pull off all that.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't think I could pull off all that back in 21.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_02: I think I would have had to go all in on one direction.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_04: We're gonna talk about AI, I promise.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_04: Sure.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_04: When we when you reflect on this journey, how important was trust?
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_04: Like trusting yourself and these decisions that you're making at the time when you reflect believing that the choice that you made at that time is the right choice and just owning that no matter what happens?
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_02: That's a great question.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, look, I I I think I ended up making a bunch of mistakes because of doubting myself.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_02: I think I have a lot of imposter syndrome, especially during those periods.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_02: And I was really able to pin, I would draw these slides to the board about what was coming when private equity was gonna enter the space and what the market was gonna look like when they did, and you know, what uh AI was gonna look like in the next X number of years.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_02: Like I would like to see that and I'd always be battling internally like this bit of a Steve, are you just crazy?
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_02: You know, like are you like how hard should you push on this thing?
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_02: And in some cases, when especially when it was in my control to build the thing, I would just go fucking build it.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_02: Like my team would tell me something was impossible.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_02: Don't ever tell me something is impossible because I'm gonna lock myself in a room in a week and show you why it is possible.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_02: So on build stuff, I would trust, I would trust my instincts really well.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_02: On buy stuff, which was like let's use a lot of money to make an acquisition or do some things.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_02: I got more gun shy because I didn't know enough, I didn't know the other people, you know.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_02: So like the uh trust for me works very well when it is in my domain, and it's way scarier when it's outside of my domain.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um so it's uh, you know, you you're not gonna get them all right, but I would think that I did have a good amount of boldness on things, and I would, but I was gun shy on some things that I probably would go look back on and want to be more aggressive on.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_04: And what about synchronicity?
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_04: You know, we I talk a lot in the book about when you're aligned with your mission and you're behind your passion, you do what you're supposed to do in this world, things just happen.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_04: And magic, I mean, I call it magic, but other people just call it you know being at the right place, right time, luck, cross-section of hard work and luck.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_04: Did that show up for you in your career?
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, synchronicity, like man, it's a topic for me because it shows up in work and it shows up in my personal life in ways that you know actually probably form my like religious beliefs.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, quick little story on that side.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_02: Like when my dad passed away in COVID, um this is crazy.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, we were allowed a 10-minute, 10-person funeral.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_02: And we get to the cemetery, and my half-sister is giving the eulogy.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_02: And she says, Since I was eight years old, my dad has asked me to sing this song, I Don't Know How to Love Him, from Jesus Christ Superstar at his funeral.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_02: And she's like, It freaked me out, it was weird, he did it for years, uh, and I'm not gonna sing it.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_02: But she went on and gave a beautiful eulogy.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_02: We leave to get in our cars to go to my aunt's house, and playing on the radio in two cars at the same time is this random B-side from Jesus Christ Superstar.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_02: So for me, synchronicity and my relationship with the universe, it it happens in great ways.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_02: There's times at work that I have teammates that are like, you're the luckiest person in the world because like the timing stuff happens.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_02: It happens in ways like that, and it's happened in terrible ways too.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_02: I um finished a three-year renovation on a house in the Palisades the morning the fire broke out.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_02: We woke up and said, This is the first day of the rest of our lives, and two hours later the house was gone.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_02: So it's um it's been positive enough for me on the journey that even that going wrong does not shake my faith in this synchronicity, this experience, this putting yourself out there.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_02: The more people who shut that, how do you create that?
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_02: How do you like get it out there?
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_02: Like you share your ideas, you talk with the world, you put things out in the world, it creates more opportunities, more luck, more synchronicity happens the more you're out there.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_02: If you're not telling people your ideas, you're making them sign NDAs, you're not like, no one has time to do your shit.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_02: You know, like once in my life I had someone, you know, go work on an idea that I mentioned and still worked out good for me.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_02: Like worked out great.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, just get it out there.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_02: So, like, you know, put yourselves out there, share.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you'll create more luck, you'll create more synchronicity, you'll create more opportunities because someone like you who's incredibly good at connecting people, incredibly good at putting, like you, you like just spread that synchronicity and luck because you just like you hear one little thing come in and you know exactly where to route that to.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_02: And there are people like you out there that like as you're talking to them, is that they're like, oh, that sparks this idea.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_02: I should go do this thing.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_02: And all of a sudden something, you know, looks like synchronicity and looks like an amazing thing.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_02: And it's just because you had it out there for someone to you know route in the right direction.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_02: So um, yeah, I I just get just be open, be expressive.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_02: Show people the world you want to see.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I think that's the thing with me.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_02: It's like I I'm I can't memorize shit.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_02: Like I can't, I don't, by the way, there's a million paths to success.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_02: Like everyone will be like, if if you put me on a a podcast and say, What's your favorite book?
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna say, like, uh Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I've read like so few things, like there's so many paths to success.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I do think that being open and do think that sharing, and do think that like just doing and embodying what you believe in is so important.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_02: Every startup I do, I really fundamentally believe in the world that I'm trying to create.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_02: And that way I don't have to memorize or, you know, put on a show.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_02: It's just coming from my heart.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_02: And um yeah, it's been it's been a really nice living that way.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_02: It also keeps me very far away.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_02: I'm never, I might be selling a dream of what the world's gonna look like, but I'm never, I'm never lying.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, I I try to be the most, I don't even try to be, I just can't handle not speaking either my truth of what is true now or what I truly believe is going to be.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and that's that has served me really well.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_04: A little round of applause for that one.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_04: And then we had to drop in.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you for sharing that.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_04: The world is changing rapidly.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_04: Um, AI is not only amazing, it's also scary.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_04: We just don't know what's happening and whatever we think we know on this plane.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_04: There are things happening with AI and other planes that I hear about that are just so advanced and so world-changing and potentially societal society changes.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_04: So, what's your relationship with that?
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_04: How is it changing the way you're building companies?
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_04: And tell me how it's inspiring what you're working on next.
• 42:26
  unknown: Wow.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh yeah.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_02: So it, you know, someone was asking, we I was at a dinner the other day, and there were some um, you know, AI skeptics that were like trying to use it in their jobs, and like then there was some that's like, why do you believe so much that AI is causing all this change?
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, oh, I just I can feel it in my like soul.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_02: Like, like there are some things about uh technologists that kind of like can just push themselves into the future, and like what I'm able to do now as a software engineer is just crazy.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_02: Like I like it is truly like we are in the like I know kung fu like from the matrix moment here.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_02: Like, like like it's crazy.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_02: Like the the the way like I have like armies of robots that program for me and I just review their like I don't even have keep a to-do list anymore.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_02: I keep a maybe done list, like because I'll fork off any idea I have for my new company Subco.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_02: We'll talk about that in a second.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_02: I just fork it off to a robot and then I come back and I review whether or not it's done.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's absurd.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_02: And so, like, the we're really shift you the the shift that's going to occur from this.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, even like seeing Sora 2 yesterday and the with the videos that are being created, like you just gotta remember this is the worst it's ever gonna be.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_02: And every the acceleration is like real here.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um for me as a founder, um, and I think the challenge that a lot of us like the way we understand what you know raising money looks like, what team building looks like, you know, I I had a 220-person team.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_02: I don't want that anymore.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_02: Like I want a small, tight team, and I need to spend my time actively figuring out how to maximize what a person is capable of before bringing another, you know, person on just because I don't like firing people, you know, like to be honest.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_02: I don't like the the startups are so notorious for overgrowing, then contracting and overgrowing and contracting.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I am trying to do things in a in a much more controlled way.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_02: But what uh what I'm experiencing engineering-wise, and is now starting to permeate permeate into the other factors of the business: content creation, uh, ad creative, uh, marketing optimization.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's just, you know, we're not really prepared for what is to come.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_02: Like we are, there's gonna be so much good.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_02: I think the acceleration on the health side is gonna be really, really good.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_02: I think that so can I talk about my company?
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, new company.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_02: So, what we haven't touched on at all uh is I used to be, when I was a kid, I was very overweight.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_02: Uh at times I was 300 pounds.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, I played every sport because I was tall.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_02: I would make the team, even though I was terrible.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, I would spend a whole football season, you know, doing two-a-day practices and all the stuff, and I wouldn't lose weight, I wouldn't get better.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_02: I was like this big disappointment.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um you were it was uh and then group me sold.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_02: I was still pretty unhealthy.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_02: I was like 270 pounds, and I was like, oh, I want to live.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, let's do this.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_02: I found functional medicine.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I started working with a doctor, doing diagnostics, uh, getting on thyroid medicine, adjusting hormones, just kind of like working through whatever my body was struggling with.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, recommitted to diet and exercise.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_02: And um, my people saw the change.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I got in in pretty great shape and uh not like you know, fitness influencer shape at all, but good for me.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and people would ask what I would what I did, and no one wanted to hear diet and exercise.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_02: And it was 10 years before I was Epic, it was a thing.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_02: So I would share this like really ugly Google spreadsheet of my supplements and medications that I took.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_02: This was my stack, is what called it.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_02: And it was out of date and and not fun, and uh, you know, no one knew what to do with it.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, after I did, I took about a year off after Splice and traveled the world, you know, met my partner, it was great.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, had a baby, which is great too.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_02: Talk about that all you want.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, it's great.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_02: I'm solo parenting this week for the first time, and it's it's pretty fun, actually.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_02: Gonna crush it.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_02: All right, yeah.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and uh uh I came back to this concept, you know.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_02: My friend had just started Function Health.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_02: I was an investor there, which is a diagnostics company.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm just like really in love with this self-directed health and kind of this uh longevity and kind of space.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_02: But I also think people struggle to every all these influencers are kind of biomaxing, I call it, instead of biohacking.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_02: They're like, do all of these crazy things.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like, dude, I got I got 90 minutes for three hours, three hours a week.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_02: Like, how the hell are you talking about?
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_02: But uh, the one space that uh was really unsolved was a supplement space for me.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it's the grayest kind of no one knows who to trust.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_02: We've got this huge battle between the institutions and clinical research and these individuals who are telling you they're changing their lives.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so I took that core stack sharing concept and I was like, I want to help everyone in the country build uh a tailored, you know, supplement stack to help them hit their health goals and inspire others.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so that was kind of the birth of SEPCO.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_02: And it turns out that the supplement industry is broken basically at every phase.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_02: What can they actually do for me?
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_02: Which nutrients should I take together as a kind of make a plan?
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_02: Which products and brands should I trust?
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_02: There is a lot of snake oil, there is a lot of bad stuff out there.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then can I get a good price for it?
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_02: Because honestly, the margins are insanely high.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um and then how do I make them work for me?
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_02: Uh people take them at the wrong time, they have the wrong expectations of how long they'll take to get to results.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_02: So it's just broken across the board.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, SUPCO is in the App Store.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_02: You can go to SUPP.co and download it.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_02: If you want to see what I take, you can go to uh SUP.co slash Steve, and you can see the 29 products I take on a daily basis.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and we've just been really going after trying to be the epicenter of the this this really gray space.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_02: It's great.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_02: We're you know, we launched a beta a year ago.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_02: The growth has been really just amazing.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_02: And uh what's fun about this one, music was really cool because we had uh you know these these heroes using it.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_02: But this one's cool because like grandma's message me, you know, like everyone, like it just it's just like so in the zeitgeist.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_02: Like we've never launched, I've never launched anything where like our feed, we have a feedback button in the top of the app.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_02: Hundreds, we were getting like hundreds of pieces of feedback a day at one point.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_02: And so like the user base is loving it, the MPS is like 70 plus, the market is huge, which is great.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so I'm and I'm and people are are getting results from it.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm just really happy to be playing in it.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, I'm doing it for fun, and uh and I'm really hands-on coding a lot, which has been fun for me.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so back to AI.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_04: It's time.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it's time.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_04: So we're gonna do QA in a couple minutes, but I do want to hit on uh not only AI, but advice you have for this group of people because most of the people here are working on something.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, people are vibe coding, some people are using cursor, they're a little bit more advanced.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_04: I use lovable, I make websites, you know, and then I show them to my friends.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_04: Like, look what I did, look what I vibe coded.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_04: What advice do you have for the founder listening to this really at all stages, from the most infants to see I have an idea to Series B folks that already have an engineering team that are sort of figuring out how to adapt to this new wave of technology?
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_02: So uh something that's interesting, it's really on you as the founder to be the one that is uh bringing the team into the future.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_02: Uh in big companies like Splice, the resistance to AI was extreme.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_02: It threatens everyone's jobs, it threatens decades of learning.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's the same things every time.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_02: Code base is too big, code base is too small, teams too junior, I don't need more code, I need better code.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_02: Like the I like everyone will defend why they like don't want it.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_02: And then uh because it threatens them.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, even my own team and a four-person team was like slow to adapt because they're also doing their day-to-day work, their shipping, they're doing their stuff.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_02: I took uh when the fires happened, I was off for a couple months trying to regroup.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_02: And uh when I I I just spent two weeks just using the tools and like just being like, I need to be the expert at this, and then came back from the fire like just churning out all this stuff.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_02: And so my staff, you know, I use cursor, I use sonnet, you know, Claude Anthropic.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_02: I use Den Devin as my like robot that I fire off stuff to.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but I'm I don't mandate which tools the team uses.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_02: Some people are Claude Code.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, every everybody uses different things for different stuff.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_02: And I would say it was probably when the when Claude 4.1 came out that the team's doubts were just completely gone.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_02: Like this is like all in at this point.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_02: And uh and you're starting to see splice, like these bigger companies starting to be like, oh and like you gotta like when when AI fails you, like it always is hard the first time you use it.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_02: You're like, oh, this doesn't do the thing I want to do.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_02: But like you gotta invest.
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_02: Like if you use cursor without a cursor rules file that defines your like how your code base works, like it's dumb, you know.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_02: But you gotta like, so my my advice is basically like CEO, maybe it's CTO if you're not technical, has to be leading the efforts.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_02: Give them time and space if they need two weeks to go use the tools and figure it out, like give them the time.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_02: And then when they get discouraged at first, just keep encouraging them to push through.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_02: And like, and then when when AI fails you, like do a retro on where it failed and be like, how is this gonna get better?
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_02: Could we do something better?
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_02: Is there another tool to go look at?
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_02: But just know that the exponential rate that it's moving, it is gonna be up to you and your team to know how to leverage these tools even more than do the work.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, right now, I would be completely hiring for tenacity over skill.
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_02: Like, you can give me someone who doesn't even know growth marketing and they are so motivated that they're gonna go spend a month before they join, getting up to speed on the latest tactics and come in and make a huge uh impact.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_02: So, tenacity right now, like it's hard, especially in remote hiring, to really feel that fire, uh, mission-aligned fire kind of drive for wanting to build.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_02: But that's that's the that's the hiring criteria right now.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um and honestly, like it I you know, it's it's really hard to see there, there's just gonna be so much revolution, and we're gonna have to uh you know really figure this out at all all fronts, you know, government and and uh big corporations stepping in and helping figure out what the future looks like because it's it's that transformative for for everyone.
• 53:31
  SPEAKER_04: I want to talk about this for another hour, but I I do want to hear from you and listen to your question.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_04: So thank you for all of that.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_04: Thanks.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_04: Uh all right, we got well wait for the microphone because we are recording this.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_04: This will be a podcast when I release this thing one day.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh wow.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh thank you for your candor and vulnerability and sharing your story.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh quite remarkable, especially having gone through not just the corporate side but the personal side.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_01: So uh really meant a lot that you shared that journey.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh as entrepreneurs in this room, many of us have, as you pointed out, you you had a bit of that imposter syndrome where you're questioning your decisions.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh thinking back to the experience where you were potentially going to be acquired or have MA with a company like a Skype?
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh my my current startup right now, we're growing and we're making decisions.
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_01: Do we grow organically?
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_01: Do we look at MA?
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_01: How does that work?
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_01: Can you walk us through the choices?
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_01: If not Skype, what would you have continued to grow?
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_01: If not MA, what would you have done?
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_01: And then maybe just for the benefit of those of us that are looking at that as a path, um, what are the things that you found through your experience that made those decisions the right ones?
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe what would you have changed looking back?
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh great.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_02: I have a couple of those.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so you know, in 24 hours of building Groupme, I created a ton of value for the company.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_02: But my co-founder, Jared, created just as much value in the last 24 hours.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um it came to MA conversations.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um back then I would say I in no way valued myself well in terms of I was like a broke software, overweight software engineer.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_02: Just fucking like, what?
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_02: We're doing a startup, cool, all right.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_02: You know, like uh I didn't know any of the New York tech VCs.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_02: Jared really kind of helped be my partner in that.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_02: And the the we always we went in with commercial partnership.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_02: We went in not to sell the business at all.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we had another round simultaneously raised, uh, which gave us an option to say no.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_02: So you really just need to have a second option.
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_02: Like we can fund this, we can raise money, or we can choose to sell the company.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_02: That really helped us drive the price up in a big way.
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_02: And uh and having the right like deal team around us to really, you know, I probably would have sold for like 50 bucks, you know.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_02: Like I just I didn't have it in me then.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um, now the opposite has happened to me.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, Spotify was very interested in acquiring Splice uh in pretty early on in Splice, and uh in fact, uh Twitter was interested in acquiring Group Me in the first two months.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_02: And uh they said five million, we said fifty, and then we never spoke again.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_02: You know?
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but if you play back both what five million dollars of Twitter stock or fifty million dollars of Spotify stock could have ended up doing for me financially, you'd be like, holy shit, you made the wrong choice, man.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_02: So um, you know, I I think that all these deals are very uh they're very personal too.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_02: Like at where I was in life, like the idea of putting that money in my pocket, like the idea of hundreds of millions of dollars and a huge outcome, like was so irrelevant, it was so like possible to me when I'm 60 grand in debt.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_02: And like being able to walk around with a solid base after that, you can start making better decisions.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_02: And um, it's one of the things that's been hard in in Splice is like I I played IPO and bust for or bust game there and still am.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, you know, in a 10-year journey, I've taken very little money off the table in that.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_02: So I have a ton of wealth, personal wealth, tied up in the in the state of a business that I'm no longer the CEO of.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so I think some of these, so again, you never want to sell your company, you want to be acquired.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you never want to have a single decision you're making around this is my only option because we're gonna run out of money or not.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_02: And um and yeah, and like, you know, it's it's gonna be personal and different.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_02: It is nice to have if someone who is really a founder, having a win under my belt changed everything.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_02: You know, like if Group me had rode out for seven, eight more years and not been successful, like I don't have anyone back to me again, you know.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_02: So uh your relationship with your VCs matter a lot.
• 58:17
  SPEAKER_02: They will can always convince you not to sell when your company's going well, they're they only win.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_02: Your VCs only win if you are a outsized return of like a hundred X return to their fund.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_02: Like anything in the in-between, it's like, all right, cool.
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_02: You know, but they will the good ones will support you if that is your personal decision, because they want you to go up to bad again.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so have a good relationship, I would say, with them throughout the process.
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_02: Know that their incentives always are for you to go the distance.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um if they are encouraging you to sell, then you you probably know they probably know you're not gonna make it, um, which is an interesting one to kind of have happen.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um and yeah, and so like that balance of I I would encourage if the company is doing well, I I would encourage you to take some secondary along the way, especially if you've been doing it for five years and you're quite QSBS qualified.
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um that's tax-free money.
• 59:15
  SPEAKER_02: You can take a lot less money off the table and not pay taxes on it and be in a really good position.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, if you don't know what QSBS is, your number one thing is to call the law firm that you recommend and make sure Michael Bess.
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_02: Call Michael Bess and get logged, make sure you are QSBS, set up for QSBS.
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_02: It even just changed that the Trump administration just changed it.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_02: No one asked for this.
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_02: But now it's a three years you can start besting.
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's usually a five-year thing.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_02: But it's probably the strongest tax advantage thing for a founders to be aware of.
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_02: So if if that's news to you, go do the research on it.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_04: Break out those emails.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_04: Any other questions?
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, over there.
• 59:55
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 59:55
  SPEAKER_00: So great talk.
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_00: I really enjoyed this discussion.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_00: It spoke to me in many ways.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I'm also very technical.
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_00: I was at Google until very recently.
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um like yourself, I have a small child now.
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh been in the big tech for some time, but I have a lot of ideas at the same time.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it it is making the transition from you know, the next choice of should I go take a leadership position at another big tech?
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_00: And it's safer to like actually, you know, going all in on some of these ideas.
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_00: How streamlined is this?
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like, how can I de-risk it?
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_00: How can I make the there's this you know, gut feeling that should I do it or not?
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, versus like, can it be made more uh streamlined in like being able to assess the chances, etc., to make that transition?
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um this is a really hard question because if you add up most founders, I would say, journeys through their lives compared against staying and ascending inside big tech, the net revenue to most people is going to say to favor of staying in big tech.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you have to be, you have to have a certain type of crazy under your belt to say, I'm gonna go take this risk because it's not de-riskable.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_02: And like that for me, I always just know I'm the worst employee ever.
• 1:01:21
  SPEAKER_02: I'll get fired from any job I work at.
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's just gonna happen.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_02: I'll get booed off stage, I'm just gonna cause a ruckus.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_02: So it's like not a decision for me.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_02: But like, you know, you watch some of the salaries that are often, you know, uh product leaders inside big tech right now and AI, and you're like, fuck, I made the wrong career decision, you know.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so you I think you answer that question yourself by you don't do the math.
• 1:01:47
  SPEAKER_02: It is there's this outside risk.
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_02: And if you're doing the math, uh then that it's it's always gonna work out for you to stay in your role.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_02: You have to take the you have to take the risk because you're crazy.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_02: You want to change the world, you want to make it something different.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you believe in yourself to do it.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_02: You have to have a you should have a very unique angle on why it's you that should go do this.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, and but what's interesting for me is I enjoy as much hours and hard it is in startup grind, I enjoy being in control of my time a lot more.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um than I I would probably really struggle inside a big tech org from a time perspective.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah.
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_04: I love that.
• 1:02:26
  SPEAKER_04: If you're doing the math, then it's not for you.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_04: Because every great founder I've ever met, there was no thought process.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_04: It's like you they couldn't sleep at night.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_04: You wake up, you dream about it.
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_04: It's the thing that you have to do.
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_04: And then when you do it, the world clears the road for you, right?
• 1:02:42
  SPEAKER_04: So I second.
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_02: I think you can you're allowed one shot hearing that advice to figure out whether or not it's for you or not.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_02: But that's just that's just there's no way to solve the math.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_02: That's what I would say.
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_03: All right.
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_03: Last question.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you, Steve.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um, as you go through the new business model with Subco, you know, the sourcing of ingredients and quality of bioavailability of supplements is certainly of the highest issues, as you know, you made reference to snake oil yourself.
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I'd be curious to know what you're doing as a corporation to ensure that what you sell is actually gonna help the people you're selling.
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_02: I'd love to answer that question because Rebecca, who's uh who does uh PR with us, is gonna be super happy that I clarified some of this.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_02: One, we don't sell supplements.
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh we are purely a platform to help you make the decisions.
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we have gone out, we've tracked 250,000 supplement products that exist in the market.
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_02: We have gone out and scored the top 500 brands and the top 30,000 products in the space with a trust score that basically analyzes all their manufacturing standards, sourcing, lot testing, heavy metals, inactive ingredients.
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, they all have a score that you can go check and reference.
• 1:03:50
  SPEAKER_02: And then we don't even trust that score and we go and take them off the shelf and we do independent lab testing on uh just starting that program right now.
• 1:03:57
  SPEAKER_02: And let me tell you, a lot of them come back and fail.
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_02: Good thing right now, the correlation between the high trust score and uh them passing has been strong.
• 1:04:07
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, please watch out for things like creatine gummies.
• 1:04:11
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we tested four out of the top six creatine gummies uh that that had zero creatine in them whatsoever.
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and this is the Amazon brands are notoriously bad about this.
• 1:04:23
  SPEAKER_02: They're just Alibaba repackaged things that are and they're and the highest, here's the sad thing too.
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_02: The highest rated ones on Amazon were the ones that returned with no creatine because they taste good.
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_02: So um, you know, the what you what you just asked is exactly like it is a core mission of what we are trying to do.
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and you know, the things our business model right now, uh, we have some really cool stuff coming down the line, but right now we have a premium offering that lets you get build a really deep personalized nutrient plan.
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_02: But I'm always gonna be just as aligned.
• 1:04:53
  SPEAKER_02: There's no company I can say in this space that's aligned with consumers uh to help them stop taking supplements as they are to try something new.
• 1:05:01
  SPEAKER_02: Uh everyone just says more, more, more, buy my thing.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we don't profit off that.
• 1:05:06
  SPEAKER_02: So the goal is to make sure you're taking the right thing.
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_04: All right.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_04: Well, let's give a huge round of applause for Steve.
• 1:05:15
  SPEAKER_04: If you got value from this conversation, make sure to subscribe so you don't miss future episodes.
• 1:05:20
  SPEAKER_04: This podcast is about sitting down with people who've actually built things and unpacking the mindset, decisions, and moments that make the difference.
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_04: Thanks for being here.
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_04: Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time.