#820 Building Consumer Products For Millions w/ Aarthi Ramamurthy

Aarthi Ramamurthy is the head of International at Clubhouse. She co-hosts "The Good Time Show" and was recently signed with WME as a creator focused on telling optimistic stories about technology. In this conversation, we talk about building technology products, connecting shared experiences globally, and Aarthi's fascinating background to get to where she is today. ======================= Mode, UK Fintech app, allows you to buy, earn and grow Bitcoin, all in one app. Not only is it a secure app to buy & hold Bitcoin, Mode allows you to pay & receive up to 10% Bitcoin Cashback from its growing list of online partner brands. Available on the App Store and Google Play. Download Mode at modeapp.com and set up your account to be in with the chance of winning ONE WHOLE Bitcoin. Offer ends Jan 31, 2022. Only available in the UK. ======================= Fundrise is largest direct-to-investor real estate investment platform out there, giving you the opportunity to achieve upside of an asset class previously reserved for institutions and high net worth individuals. That’s right, Fundrise is making high-end private market real estate investing accessible to everyone via an easy-to-use, automated platform. See for yourself how over 190,000 investors have built a better portfolio with private real estate. It takes just a few minutes to get started with as little as $10. Go to Fundrise.com/Pomp today and, for a limited time, get $10 when you place your first investment. That’s Fundrise.com/Pomp =======================

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Arthi Ramamurthy is the Head of International at Clubhouse. She also recently signed with WME as a creator focused on telling optimistic stories about technology. In this conversation, we talk about building technology products, about bringing all sorts of different experiences to people globally, and also about her personal story in the technology industry. I really enjoyed this conversation with Arthi, and I hope that you do as well. Before we get into this episode, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Mode. Mode is a trusted UK app that allows you to buy,

• 0:43Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:24Anthony Pompliano?

  the 30+ brands you can earn Bitcoin cash back from. Go check them out at modeapp.com, or go into the Google Play Store or the App Store and download the Mode app today. Today's episode is brought to you by Fundrise. You all know I believe that the best investors both understand and seek out extreme asymmetry. Fundrise is here to help you do just that. It's the largest direct-to-investor real estate investment platform out there, giving you the opportunity to achieve upside of an asset class previously reserved for institutions and high net worth individuals. That's right, Fundrise is making high-end, private market real estate investing accessible to everyone, be an easy-to-use automated platform. Its 1 million users already know that the investment with Fundrise is capable of producing strong appreciation returns and income generation, while helping to stabilize the day for

• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Portfolio. That's more important now than ever in our inflationary environment. See for yourself how over 190,000 other investors have built a better portfolio with private real estate. It takes just a few minutes to get started with as little as $10. Go to fundrise.com/pomp today and for a limited time, you'll get $10 when you place your first investment. Again, that's fundrise.com/pomp. Go check it out and when you make your first investment, they'll give you $10 on top of it. Fundrise.com/pomp. All right, let's get in this episode. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:05Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Arthi here with me. Thank you so much for doing this.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  Thank you. Thank you so much for having me here, Paul.

• 3:10Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm super excited about having this conversation because I feel like you transcend so many different aspects of the tech industry. You transcend geographies. You've transcended so many different companies. You transcend so many different types of modalities of the delivering of these technologies to the consumer. And you've got a ton of experience and the best way that I figured that we could do this was to start out where most people that are around mine or your age got into the internet, which was either AOL's Instant Messenger or Yahoo Messenger. And I've been told that you and your husband, Sri Ram, actually met on Yahoo Messenger. So talk to me about the kind of experience or your memory of that specific product.

• 3:55Anthony Pompliano?

  How many times did you spend on it? Why was that product so kind of important or foundational to you outside of also happening to meet Sri Ram? But for you personally, in terms of your journey, building technology products.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  That's a great first question. First of all, thanks so much for having me. Huge fan of the podcast and you know, you just do amazing content work and I'm always inspired just learning from you, Paul. So this is great. It's kind of a dream come true for me to be here. Yahoo Messenger. So like, I I wanna set the scene. Um. This is, you know, tw- nearly twenty years ago. And you're looking at a dial-up connection in India. Things barely working. My dad was kind of grumpy about getting our first computer. And he was like, this is such a waste of time. Are you sure you wanna do this? I'm like, yes. Uh. We plug in the first browser, like Netscape Navigator shows up and we think this is, this is it. This is the real deal.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  Um. Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, I don't know if you remember that back then. Um. All of these were the, you know, synchronous or async chat technologies then. Um. One of our friends, um, who, uh, wanted to build this website for college kids and school kids in India. He basically found the two nerdiest friends that he knew who could write code for this website. And that happened to be me and Shuram. And so we got connected, uh, on this Yahoo chat room and started working on this together. The project went nowhere, but you know, the chat app was just great for us. We added each other as friends. And, uh, six months later, I'm like purging through this list of contacts that I see on like Yahoo Messenger.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  And I look at, uh, this person and I'm like, who are, who are you? Like, I don't even remember this person. So I'm like, hey, I'm about to like, delete all these contacts. I just want to make sure that I haven't made a mistake. I just, who are you? And he responds, Shuram responds saying, oh, you know, we got added in this group for coding. Our first big fight was around which SQL server versus Oracle, which database to go use. Um. But, you know, for me at that time, it was just. It was just amazing to have technology, like having Yahoo Messenger. As ridiculous as it sounds now, at that time, we were like, I can talk to people who are far, far away. It's not a telephone call.

• 6:15Speaker 02

  Um. And I can, and you know, we were obsessed. We were doing this like four AM, five AM in the morning. Would sleep for a couple of hours, then get to college or school. And then rinse, repeat, we would get back online. And this is how I met a lot of my initials. Of friends. We were just super fortunate because we ended up not so much growing up with technology, but you having access to technology at the time and we really needed it. Uh, and that was really great for us. I think, um, and I owe my entire career life to tech. And I think so does Srim. And so for us, we always see it as like, it sounds really cliched, but we are huge fans of like being optimists about technology and the future of it.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  And that's also, you know, I know you talk a lot about crypto and decentralization. And for us, we're really bullish on that because I feel like it's that same kind of atmosphere coming back up and I love that. So that's our story. That's how we met. And a year later, we met in person as a part of this bot coding competition. It gets nerdy. It gets very nerdy.

• 7:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, your first argue, your first argument was about which database to use, which already is a pretty good start.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, uh, you know, I, I, uh, take the train from my college, which is this in a small town in India to Srim's college. And he's built this bot SDK and I build this actual bot. And we fight like, you know, there are lots of other like contestants and we fight it out. And mine, I think we landed like second place or something. And that's when I met Srim for the first time. I'm like, holy crap, you're tall. That's kind of how it started. Um, and then, you know, a few years later, we ended up joining Microsoft around the same time, same manager, same team. And it just, you know, that's kind of how the whole thing started.

• 8:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What, what my biggest takeaway from this is you're living in India. You're in college, kind of, you know, coming out of high school age and in college. And your experience that you just described with Yahoo Messenger was no different than my experience with AWOL Instant Messenger. Right. And I was living in the United States and this whole idea of like, you can make friends on the internet. You could communicate with people. Uh, there was this element almost of like, when you got in front of the computer, it felt like you were, uh, in this whole new world. And then you would like, leave that world. And usually, uh, e- especially for my parents, that meant because they had to use the phone, right? Because it was blocking. Dial up service.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 8:41Anthony Pompliano?

  You would have to like get off the internet and then go. There was no sense of like being able to bring the internet with you everywhere. Obviously, we have smartphones today, etc. But it was very much like I'm opting into using this piece of technology and now I have to leave it and go and like back into my real life. So it's fascinating that, you know, on two different sides of the world, you have young people who have a very similar experience with.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  It's true. It's true. It feels like, you know, I don't know if you've seen this movie Ready Player One.

• 9:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  Where the virtual world is so much more exciting. And then when they disconnect, the real world is just really bad. They're living in these like containers and you know, it's just so, it's dystopian. But then the virtual world is so glamorous and it's like you can be whoever you want to be. And for a brief second, that's kind of how it felt even back then where and, and, and for me like now with pseudonymity and everything, it's all coming back again. And that's really exciting because you can be whoever you want to be. This is true meritocracy for me and it just, it feels really great. So that's really, you know, it, I'm tasting that again, because for many, many years in between, you kind of lost that with like your own identity and profiles and everything else.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  But the magic of the internet then was like, you could like leave your real world, go into this virtual world. These are like your true friends. You hang out with them all night. And then you build all this stuff and you talk about like, I remember having a physics group and astronomy group and all of that. And you just like hang out with all these people and then you can't come back to your like really boring college life. And that just felt like something you tolerated until like the night time again, and you could go back online and just work on stuff.

• 10:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it, it, it's amazing. Uh, when you went to Microsoft, you were working on Xbox. And one of the like classic narrative violations in the legacy tech world is that the Xbox was cool. And Microsoft supposedly was not cool. And so how did you feel about working at a big, large kind of, uh, what many people would think as an antiquated tech company? Even though they're still one of the most valuable companies in the world today, uh, but they. Produced something that seems so off, right, or so different from what they ultimately were known as. Just talk to me kind of about that difference and like, is that more of just an assumption from the outside? Or did it feel that way internally as well?

• 11:03Speaker 02

  No, so I joined Microsoft in two thousand five, a year before I graduated. Microsoft and my college had an agreement where I would go work full time at Microsoft, even though it would be considered a project as far as my college is concerned. So I got to be one of the richest college kids at that time, which was really cool. And so I ended up joining Microsoft and at that time, you know, I didn't start out on Xbox. I started working on developer tools and Visual Studio, the runtime loaders of systems. So, you know, for me, it was like very, this is, this is my world of like deep engineering products, get a thing. And so I developer ecosystem products. And so I worked on that for a while.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  And then when Xbox had an opening for a product leader, who knew something about the foundations, about the infrastructure, emulation system, multiplayer gaming, hosting. A lot of my initial products were around independent games, like indie games at that time. And indie games were always looked down upon. It was always this like, oh yeah, we had like Halo, we had all these like flagship products. But then here's this, here is this like whole ecosystem of developers who are trying to build indie games. So I specifically picked like the most unsexy part of the ecosystem. But for me, Xbox had done something that Microsoft, nobody had thought Microsoft would do.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  It had become, it had broken out of the Windows, Office, Visual Studio, very corporate, enterprisy, sales cycle driven kind of, you know, quote unquote boring products. To this very hip, you know, consumer centric. Now we take it for granted, but at that time, when the first, second, third iterations of Xbox came out, it was magical, like nobody had seen anything like it. Here's this console, you could like throw in this DVD and you know, you could play this game for hours and hours. We remember tracking spikes through Christmas mornings and who gifted whom and all of that stuff. And so it was just.

• 13:10Speaker 02

  It was a really fun time that was very atypical and you could see it even within the company like the Xbox people were considered cool. Um, and they had their own kind of buildings. It was all studio setup. Um, I attribute a lot of that to Jay Allard, who was a VP there at that time. Who had like was just this total visionary and came up with this whole new set of like suites of products and Xbox itself. Um, but yeah, I mean, I don't think it was just a external perception, even internally. There was, I don't think there was ever a belief that we could break out of that enterprise kind of ecosystem. For me, you know, I'm a junior PM there. I'm just trying to learn from all these people.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  Uh, at that time, they were just kind of conceptualizing connect, which was all about like. Uh, you know, just use your arms, like, you know, this was even I, it was kind of like the Wii. But even better because you didn't really have a controller. You could just move around and it would just pick up your motion and play. Um, I thought that was magical. So for me, it was a lot of it was just being a sponge and absorbing and learning. And really understanding what consumer products meant because I'd never had exposure there. Um, so how to price it, what does holiday season mean? What does gifting mean? Um, what do like updates in, you know, I think at that time there was the Xbox Red Ring of Death fiasco. So dealing with that stuff. So.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  Just a lot of trial by fire, just learning a lot of that and just being a sponge. That was really great.

• 14:41Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about um, that time, uh, is there one thing that you learned that you're like, you know, still to this day? I look back and this was the lesson I took away that I apply, you know, on a daily, weekly, monthly basis today?

• 14:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think a couple of things. Microsoft was our initial, you know, first foray into tech companies, getting a full-time job. And the number of people who just, you know, you now we say mentors and it means different things to different people. At that time, we had all these people uh, at Microsoft had been there for 20 years, 25 years. Who would just help you and they don't expect any. Thing in return, they would like talk to you about your career, talk to you about what you want to work on. Um, I, and you know, at that time, both Sharam and I, we would randomly walk up to uh, a vice president's office and it'd be like, oh, you know, you really need to take this technology seriously or

• 15:37Speaker 02

  we, I think at that time, I remember walking into Scott Cuthery's office and being like, Ruby on Rails, you really have to go invest in that. Like, I don't know how you're gonna do it, but you're gonna have to figure it out. And they would actually take us seriously, uh, without being like, oh, these children, so annoying, just get out of my office. Um, and you know, same with like when the first iPhone showed up and you know, for us, it was it again, sounds like such a cliche, but for Sharam and I, this was a magical time. Like, we were so grateful that this company had taken a chance on us. Uh, we would work two nights, three nights, four nights in a row, just have like sleep under uh, our desk with like this mattress until the janitor one day just kicked us out saying, I can't clean your cubicle, can you please get out?

• 16:22Speaker 02

  And so we would do that, uh, we would take the last shuttle back home, we would try and like, we were just so excited to be here and there were some times where we were like, you're paying us for this, can you believe it? This is insane. Um, and yeah, I hope when, uh, I never want to lose that feeling of just being grateful and feeling like, you know, um, people are taking a chance on you, you know, I think a lot of people, especially in tech, through the years, I've seen people have just gotten really cynical and jaded and they just take it for granted a lot. Uh, that's like on the philosophical side of things, but product side of things, just building a really awesome zero to one consumer product,

• 17:03Speaker 02

  when nobody ever thought you could. And now everyone knows like Xbox is a thing here to stay. At that time, it wasn't such an obvious bet. So that's a lesson for me, I would just take with me all along that if everyone tells you, oh my God, this pivot makes no sense, you always did this, don't try this other thing. Uh, I think Xbox for me is a great counter example where that wasn't true necessarily and they still made it work and massively successful and still scales and does really well.

• 17:33Anthony Pompliano?

  So after Microsoft, at some point you get to Netflix, which also executed what at the time was a very controversial kind of strategic decision, right? For for those that are listening to this and are young, younger than me at least, you may not realize that Netflix actually started out shipping or mailing physical DVDs to your mailbox. And I remember as a kid, when this first came out, you would basically get it and then you would have to return it and would send it back on your next kind of order, if you will, within like five days or whatever it was. And it was like you would go check the mailbox to see did the Netflix show up or not? The other thing was you had to make sure you didn't get it super scratched up or anything because when you went to return it, you didn't want to have any issues, all this.

• 18:17Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you go from that, which is a kind of logistics business, right, of physical DVDs, you eventually pivot towards streaming. And that was in hindsight, a very smart decision. Some could argue that there are bet the company decisions. This may have been a survive as a business at all cost decision. They were still mailing DVDs today. I don't know if they would be around. But during that time, internally, did people know this was a no brainer decision? Or was there very much like, hey, we think this is right, but like, everyone is saying that we're stupid and like, we may be wrong on this. So how are we handling it internally?

• 18:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I feel like I've joined all these companies at the peak of the controversial times. Maybe I'm causing them or maybe just think I'm attracted to it. I don't know what's going on, but every one of these companies just went through this bet the company crisis, right? It was there. Netflix, where we, I was one of the earliest people, product people, working on the Netflix streaming player. And, you know, as it wasn't really controversial at that time, but that was a time, and I don't know if you remember this, but at that time, they had this quickster fiasco, where they basically said the DVD business is going to become a different company. And then you're going to have this other company that just does streaming.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  We're splitting Netflix into two parts and one of them is going to be called Quickster. Um, and that became a huge controversy. People were like, how can you do this? I really like this one brand. And now in retrospect, I can't even articulate what the real controversy was. Uh, but at that time, I remember SNL sketches, the steel shirt with three tastings. And just so much going on then in the company that I think the stock price went from, I could be wrong about this, from somewhere like two hundred or dollars to like seventy dollars or so in a quarter. And it was, you know, internally, I'm not gonna lie, it was really crushing. Like, you know, a lot of people had joined very recently then.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  The company was just trying to really kick off streaming in a big way. Um, and it felt like, what did we do here joining this thing? Um, and just this moment of deep crisis. And Netflix did this thing at that time where every quarter, right before the quarterly results came out, they would do an all hands. But they would rent a local uh movie studio or movie theater. Uh, a cinema and you could go in there and that's where like it did project on this big screen. Um, and I remember the next quarter when they'd survived the whole thing, which felt like forever. They, the first, they do a banner, like a movie poster as like an introductory poster every time.

• 21:06Speaker 02

  And the poster that they had chosen at that time was the Comeback Kids. And I'll never forget that because like the entire audience just erupted in this huge applause. It felt like we'd made it. Um, but you know, that was very, very stressful within the company, even though now in retrospect. Uh, you've seen international programming, you've seen original content programming. You've seen multiple kinds of devices, like every device on the planet now has a Netflix streaming button on it. Um, it wasn't that obvious then that the company was going to make it.

• 21:39Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the things that you've talked about is that Reed Hastings and the rest of the executive team there, you know, they, they focused on a number of different things that it sounds like you learned about, but one of them was de-risking the business. And I don't remember who said this, but I've had probably multiple people have talked about the fact that entrepreneurs that end up becoming great executives aren't necessarily blind risk takers. They don't just seek out, oh, what's the riskiest thing? Let me go do that. Instead, it's the exact opposite. Identify the risk and kill the risk. Right? How do you de-risk as much as possible? So talk a little bit about what you learned there around de-risking a business while working at Netflix?

• 22:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think Bezos said that too. I was attending back then, like a decade ago, an AWS conference and AWS was very new. And I think some audience question was like, how do you take these risks? And how are you so bold? And Bezos was like, no, my whole job is to not take risks. I try really, really hard to not risk everything because I think people who take risks are people who don't really understand what they are losing. You really have to de-risk yourself as much as possible. And that's my advice for all founders. I didn't quite understand it back then, but having founded a company now, I totally get it. And for me, for Reed Hastings, I think that was the biggest lesson where, you know, just thinking about it, this was not something

• 22:59Speaker 02

  he said. I really like two things about Reed, like his long-term, very strategic thinking where he de-risks every part of the business. And how good he is at storytelling. He's just incredibly good at it. To this day, it's this long-term vision that he's still able to systematically lay out and paint this picture of what the future should look like. And I'm just so jealous of that skill or both these skills. And for, you know, at that time, this is 2010 Netflix. Streaming is just about taking off. It's not a big deal yet. No original content programming, really not

• 23:39Speaker 02

  even international. We are the small little office in Los Gatos, way south of the Bay Area. Like, we didn't even want an office in like the fancy part of

• 23:48Speaker 02

  The area or San Francisco, uh it was just like cheapest real estate all the way down in Los Catos. Uh three buildings and that's basically it. Uh I think the entire company was about seven hundred people. And uh but the company had gone public with just the DVD business side of things. And using the DVD business and using the margins there, he started out the streaming side of things. Effectively de-risking the whole thing, but you know, forging forward onto this whole new business model. Then came, you know, original content. But really, the way he tried original content was to renew a season of Arrested Development and see how it did. Like dipping his toes in that and testing it out.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  Um and once that proved to be pretty good from positive metrics impact. He started like investing more in original content and you saw House of Cards and everything else much later. Um then country expansion, we again dipped our toes in Latin America. Tried it out, lots of kinks there, things were like broken, especially with localization. Uh just people not being able to understand the content library that we had in the US. Um and so just trying to fix a lot of that stuff and uh. And so basically, he just took this multi-tiered approach where uh without risking the entire business, keeping the core business stable. He just kept adding on things.

• 25:12Speaker 02

  Um just removing, ironing out all the kinks and keep building on top of it. And you know, at some point at CES, you know, it's like hundred and thirty countries, it's all live. But that didn't happen overnight. It happened because there were these twenty different chess moves. Which eventually led to this one moment where you had a ton of, you know, original content on it. Uh you had a lot of countries and support for countries and local language offering and all of that. And this also came because we were under, at that time Netflix was under existential threat. We had a bunch of studios threatening to pull out and not really have their content library on the platform. So you could argue that there was no real choice to, other than to do this.

• 25:57Speaker 02

  But I, for me, it was just this masterclass in watching Reed. Uh strategically move from one step to the other, learn from the mistakes. Address all of them and then be really aggressive and move on and keep going and keep going and keep going and. That was just great. And to this day, I still think about what strategic mastermind that team was, the executive team was to be able to have that happen at that time, like over a decade ago, and just follow through on those steps. So great lessons there. And also Reed's a great storyteller. Like anytime you watch Reed's interview, he will make you feel like he's your best friend. And he would also talk about not competition per se, but really about like,

• 26:43Speaker 02

  you know, my real competition with Netflix are is people who are bicycling or watching like something else, or they are going for a walk. And just free time is basically how he perceives competition for Netflix, which I thought was great because nobody ever articulates it that way. They're always like, those two companies, they are my competition kind of thing. And Reed doesn't do that. He's like, you have finite amount of time. And if you're able to dedicate thirty minutes for something else than Netflix, that's my competition. And I need to figure out what we can do there. And he's just very good at just addressing it.

• 27:19Anthony Pompliano?

  How much of the strategic decisions that get made were on day one, you know, hey, we might not have written an actual business plan, but we pretty much knew, let's launch the, you know, um, kind of subscription service for physical DVDs, then we'll go into streaming, then we'll go into original programming versus no, you start the business. And then as you get kind of to each new level of the business, then you evaluate your decisions and you make the decisions from there. So in hindsight, it looks like genius work, but actually what you're doing was just kind of solving the local obstacle.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  Exactly. So I think that was a ladder very much. I think it was very much about, let's figure out how to unblock ourselves right now. I think what Netflix had done really well was never losing sight of the end goal. Like, we want to be in all countries. We want to be, we want to fund all these like really interesting documentaries and TV shows and movies and everything else. We want to have studios come to us and bring the best content to us. That was the the north star of the vision. But if you just start With that in twenty ten, that would have sounded insane because you had to build so many layers on top. So Reid would always paint the picture of the future.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  But basically say, this is what we need to unlock right now and the next two years is going to be this. And then, you know, they announced a price increase, which again was super controversial because everybody had gotten used to Netflix at a particular price point. And and then like, you know, expanding that, they're basically saying, look, our catalog is so much bigger. Uh, this is what we are offering for an extra cup of coffee. Um, and just being able to scale that and get more demand. Um, and just being able to strategically do that. So it was very much the ladder of what you said, which is like build one on top of the other. And and but not lose sight of the North Star.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  And for me, that's that's still again a great lesson. I met Reid many years later at a, you know, a conference or an offsite or something. And I mentioned all of this to him and he he, I don't think he particularly sees it as like a very strategic thing. He just sees it as like, this is how you build a company. This is how you scale the business and to me, it's like I have all these lessons and I write about it and think about it a lot and all of that, but I think for him, it just comes naturally to him.

• 29:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that's a fantastic skill set for him to have for sure. Um, at at uh, next, after Netflix, uh, you end up starting your own business. Uh, and then you go on to Facebook and I think what, uh, in in my understanding of these two experiences in your life. Uh, one was actually you running the business. So you have to have a finder's, a founder's mindset to run a business. Uh, and that's, you know, kind of the best way to actually learn about a building businesses is to do it. It's almost like if you want to be good at baseball, go play baseball. You want to be good at basketball, go play basketball, right? Um, but also at uh, Facebook, having a founder's mindset in building products. So even though it's a big company, still having that mindset. Talk a little bit about

• 30:23Anthony Pompliano?

  taking that founder's mindset and applying it to one, your own company, but also to building products inside of a large organization like Facebook.

• 30:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, so. I've always wanted to start a company, always, always, for a very, very long time. Um, I don't, I think Shuram has been on the show before. But uh, our, one of our first date night movies was Pirates of Silicon Valley. And uh, you know, there, this guy who, like this Steve Jobs, basically has this whole monologue that says, you know, you, you want, why, if you had to have it, if you had a chance to make a dent in the universe, why won't you take it? And why won't you run with it? And um, and that really struck, stuck in our minds. And uh, you know, that's also why when we moved, we moved to the U S because of Microsoft. And they were, you know, we're super grateful for them moving us over to Seattle.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  And then after a while, we were like, we have to move to Silicon Valley. This is really where the magic is. And when we moved, we actually found a really crappy apartment, not so far from Steve Jobs's house. Uh, mostly because we were like, someday we'd like maybe run into him and it'll be great. Uh, unfortunately, at that time, he was already really sick and so we never got to see him. Uh, but for us, this, we were obsessed about this whole idea of the Silicon Valley ethos and people starting companies. Uh, making a difference, making a dent in the universe. So when the timing was right and you know, the immigration stuff got figured out, I got my green card and everything. Um, I wanted to go start a company. And so um, at that time, if you had asked me founder mindset, I would have probably just totally bullshitted.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  And I would have just said, oh, you know, like the ability to do specific things and whatever. But now, having been through the whole process, starting a company was both the, the hardest thing I've ever done professionally. Uh, and also the most gratifying, um, you know, most learning I've ever had. Uh, learning experience I've ever had in my entire career so far. I've always had a chip on my shoulder of not having an MBA. You know, I grew up all through the engineering track, I have a master's in computer science. And so for me, uh, you know, I'm not, I've always thought of myself as not as polished as, you know, a Stanford G S P or a Harvard Business School person.

• 32:45Speaker 02

  Uh, I'm very rough, very, you know, unpolished as such. And I've always had this as a chip on my shoulder. Uh, but then you go through starting a company and you realize that you learned so much in such a short, compressed amount of time. Um. Everything was difficult when we started. We applied through Y C. We got through. Um. And then fundraising was super hard. It took us uh two hundred plus uh angel investment uh meetings. Uh. We ultimately ended up taking checks from like thirty three angels or so for the first seed round. Um. And we had, you know, other people in my batch, like DoorDash was in my batch. And all these other companies were just killing it. And then there was us. We were definitely the black sheep of the whole batch.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  And uh, everything was hard. Hiding was terribly hard. Um. And uh, just scaling the business, talking to customers every single day. I would stand in line, in line at a Costco. Waiting for a printer tuner and some customer called and I would like step out of the line and be like. Yeah, this is no one customer support. How can I help you? And I would just like get into the call. But you just learned so much just doing it and like meeting customers in real life and uh. Um. Just doing the hard things over and over and over again. And once you get really good at it, you hire the right set of people and hand it over to them. Uh. And then pick the next big hard thing. So the job of a founder never ends. It gets even harder and uh.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  That was great. Like in retrospect, I would never, you know, trade it back for anything else. Just learned a whole bunch. And some point, I hope to do another company again. Um. But that, it just instills this mindset and the founder mindset now, after going through the whole thing. One is just charging through walls, being able to solve any problems that need charging. Uh. I've generally been, you know, pretty aggressive kind of personality, just getting, trying to get things done. So for me, it felt like this was a really natural fit. Uh. And uh, being able to demonstrate that where it's considered an adv- advantage, not a disadvantage. Uh. The raw, unpolished nature was actually great. Uh.

• 34:56Speaker 02

  Turns out that, you know, your employees, your staff, your co-founder, your investors, they all want that. They don't want super polished kind of uh. Uh, you know, dampened down.

• 35:09Speaker 02

  Kind of storytelling. And so for me, it worked out really well from that standpoint. We were able to set up partnership with one of the biggest retailers, Best Buy. And that, you know, if you told me a twenty thirty person startup goes to Minneapolis and sets up a partnership with the CEO of Best Buy would have been impossible. Uh, just tuck it out there, stay there for a couple of months, just, you know, try to like push this through and make it happen. And we finally signed the deal. We partnered with all these retailers and gadget companies and all of that. And so lots of lessons there for me. And that for me is like truly founder mindset. It's like being able to run through walls and solve whatever problem needs solving.

• 35:50Speaker 02

  Um, and being able to take that lesson and apply it in the future. And it I'm hoping that I never ever lose that because I just think it's so valuable. And the startups that I now invest in or advise. Um, I tell them this too. It's like a big part of your job is no problem is beneath you. You just have to go solve it. And you just have to have that culture of everyone just picking up the pieces and running with it. And that I think was great. It also helped me at Facebook later on.

• 36:20Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you take this mentality, one of the things that's fascinating to me is most people think about building and they think about building technology products, software, um, and think about building companies. But, uh, you've also built, uh, the Good Time Show, which, uh, i- i- in, uh, my opinion, um, I think there's a lot of similarities between building technology products or building companies and building, uh, these content. Uh, whether you think of them as platforms, whether you think of them as, uh, um, kind of uh, specific shows or however you want to think about the content itself. What, what has been your experience in building it? Maybe you can tell us a little bit about the show to start and then yeah, talk a little bit as to like how you guys, uh, have built this into what I think is probably the most popular show, if not one of the most popular shows on Clubhouse.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's uh it's been quite the journey. It's been a year old. Uh so here's what happened and totally random. I don't know if I ever talked about the origin story anywhere else, but last December, literally a year ago, um I was in the shower and I'm like thinking about how it's been like over a year of the pandemic and how everything's just been terrible. We haven't met our friends. We usually host a lot of, I get a lot of energy from meeting other founders. Uh and we haven't been able to do that. Um and we haven't, I haven't, both Sharam and I haven't gone back home to meet our parents in a long time. And we were like, wouldn't it be nice? And I'm just thinking in the shower, wouldn't it be nice to just host something?

• 37:50Speaker 02

  Where these people who would otherwise show up to our house or we would go to theirs, if they could just be in the same virtual space together. And we would host like a virtual dinner party of sorts. And that would kind of be nice, be casual, wouldn't it be cool kind of thing? So I get out, I ping Sharam and I'm like, maybe we should like think about this thing. And uh start this uh uh you know, show. And we didn't know what to call it. We called it Good Time Show because why not? Like not a lot of thought went into it. Um and uh started this whole thing end of last year.

• 38:28Speaker 02

  And uh you know, initially it was a lot of it was about like an advice kind of thing. We would get Mark Andreessen to come in, we'd get Stephen Sinofsky to come in. Um all these people would just come in and just share their wisdom. And a lot of it was just a place to talk about um how to hire new companies, how to do, you know, performance reviews, how do you fundraise? Like, you know, we just got in all these experts to come in and tell their story, give advice, that kind of thing. And then I think sometime in January, uh Elon Musk showed up on our show. And it just blew up. Like I, you know, we, everyone knows Elon Musk is very famous.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  But we kind of thought it would be like this segment that would be kind of fun, quirky, popular, and then we'd move on. But you know, leading up to that day was such a big deal. We had, I remember getting on the Clubhouse, the app and scrolling through and there were all these people, thousands of people being like, when is the show? And they were hosting all these rooms, helping us prepare for what to ask Elon. And that's when we were like, oh my God, there's real pressure. We have to get this right. Um, and I think the show really took off from that day. Uh, and then right after that, we got Zach on the show to talk about ER VR. Um, and then since then, you know, we've hosted a ton of people from, you know, music, fashion,

• 39:52Speaker 02

  a lot of folks who were, who were just getting into NFTs or who are just talking about their new company that they're setting up or, you know, I think Coinbase went public and Brian Armstrong came in on IPO day. And for us, a lot of it is about, it's so much fun to do it. Uh, I, I, I would have never estimated how much joy I derive from this because you're in this moment, you're there with these guests and they're celebrating or they're talking about the most complex challenge. And you're there and you're basically this container, this vessel who's basically able to like hold them and help them tell their story.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  And so you're really not, you know, the most important thing in the show. It's really just these guests coming in. And the stories were just amazing. And you realize that across music and sports and fashion and all these folks, the creators are exactly the same, very similar DNA. And you talk to Naomi Osaka, she's very similar to, you know, somebody like Virgil Abloh or Calvin Harris or any of these folks. They're also driven. They really want to create. They want to give back. And it's just been super inspiring to just see that whole act of creation. And Pump, I'm sure you see these patterns in your shows too, where you do this, you're way more prolific than we are. We are exhausted doing like two days a week.

• 41:18Speaker 02

  And, and for us, and the reason why we pick 10pm PST is that's when my daughter goes to sleep and able to grab some dinner and just get on. Show and do it. So we basically make it work for our convenience. And I know that's not the case for you. You work super hard on this. But I've just learned so much just doing this for a year. Like, one, I just watch how people tell their story. Two, it's inspired me to go take some chances because here are some like really crazy people doing outrageous things. Recently, we had the team of chain runners come in.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  And, you know, they'd never heard each other's voices until they were on the show together. They'd all been working on this project for so long. And they were like, this is what you sound like. And they're all like, you know, talking among themselves. It was great. And the energy was great. You know, they end the whole show. With like, you know, hack the world and, you know, all of that. And the discord's just popping and it's great. But yeah, I'm sure I'm overstating how great and positive it all is. There are times when we're like, oh, my God, can we actually sustain it and do it? But it's just, it's, it's been net positive for me multiple times over and for both me and Shira.

• 42:33Anthony Pompliano?

  So what is the number one memory over the last year? When you think back, you're like, I cannot believe that we did that. Is that talking to Elon? Is it Zuck? Is it Naomi Osaka? Like, what is the one either person or question or moment throughout the entire year-long timeline that you've been running this show now? Where you're like, that was crazy.

• 42:59Speaker 02

  I've had a couple of those. One was definitely the Elon moment. It's hard to understate. A month into this show, everyone just takes you seriously. And, you know, part of, I mentioned this way earlier in our conversation. Both Shira and I are techno optimists. Tech has given us everything. And we don't see this as a way to give back or anything, but for us. Honestly, we are a little sick and tired of seeing the stories in tech about how like how everything is negative and how, you know, um, tech founders are vilified. And I just think there is, there needs to be a space for people to just tell their stories, whether you agree with them or not.

• 43:41Speaker 02

  Like you don't, it doesn't have to be a narrative spin, but you just need a space and that's kind of what we've tried to provide. And I think the Elon moment was huge because it was not just because of Elon, like he brought in, uh, Vlad from Robin Hood. And at that time, they had this whole controversy. Um, and so, you know, there was this whole conversation where Elon was actually interviewing Vlad and asking about, uh, uh, you know, the Reddit forums and everything else. So that was a great moment, uh, which was completely unscripted, unexpected. We didn't expect Vlad to be there. It just happened. So I will always, always remember that.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  Um, two, um, a few rooms that, uh, we had hosted, uh, from, you know, founders in India, that I think for us was like very special. The most recent, uh, was Girish, uh, you know, he founded this company called Freshworks. And they just went public. And for somebody to come from a very, very humble background, uh, decade later, you know, take the company public and have this whole like Nasdaq moment with, we talked about like, you know, they come from a very similar part of India that I, me, both me and Shram came from. And so it was, I had goosebumps just getting into this show and just starting out. And I was so excited about it because for me it was like,

• 45:05Speaker 02

  it's such a dream come true because these are the founders who don't really get to tell their stories as much. So we got to talk to him about milestones in his career. At what point did he think the business was not going to work? At what point, uh, uh, did they think, you know, um, this is it, this is going to scale from here on? Uh, layoffs, otherwise, like all of that, like the entire story. And, uh, just having space for that conversation and just going direct to the people, I thought was really great. So a couple of moments there is hard to pick, but Elon's moment was definitely up there.

• 45:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's so crazy to kind of hear because I can just literally see it, right? You're like, man, I really, really enjoyed doing this and just in one year, how much, how much amazing content and experience there is. And then I think my takeaway, kind of hearing you talk about it, is that's such a wide variety, both from founders, investors, geography, right? Kind of where we started the conversation of just, I feel like your career has been across geographies, companies, modalities, et cetera. And it feels like it's kind of coming full circle now where on a weekly basis, you all get to bring so many different types of people together in the show is, is pretty cool. When you look out over the next year or so, what, what's your hope for the show? Just bigger and better or anything special planned?

• 46:27Speaker 02

  I think honestly, do what kind of you're doing, just keep it consistent, like actually show up and do it. I think January, I, I messaged you and I was like, how do you do this? And what advice do you have for me? And you were like, just start, just do it. And I've taken that to heart and I feel like, you know, my goal for the next 12 months is not give up and keep going because I think that's most of the battle. I think there are lots of positive stories to tell and it doesn't have to again be positive spin, but tech is just so incredible as, you know, as just providing a level playing field.

• 47:09Speaker 02

  And I, for me, it really hurts and it kind of, it's not a great place to be when there's so much anti-tech kind of sentiment. Some of it I get, it's deserved. And I think a lot of it, when you have like especially new founders starting something new, you want to give them the space because starting a company itself is so hard and you really want to be there and help them be able to tell their story. So we're just hoping to keep this going and make it a space for people to actually share stuff and come over and tell us things. And also like for everything else, like music and sports and all of that, I, you know, we are not experts, we don't pretend to be, we get sometimes we get criticism being like,

• 47:54Speaker 02

  what, what do they know about, you know, tennis and Naomi Osaka? And we don't, we never pretended to know, but it turns out that. We're just curious. We just want to hear what people have to say and how they got started and what do they want to do and all of that. So our goal is to just, it's not so much bigger. It's not, hopefully it'll be better. We have a long ways to like keep it improving and iterating on it, but mostly just keep it going.

• 48:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's, it's so cool to see. Where, where can we send people if they want to tune in on a weekly basis? Where should they go?

• 48:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the, the show's on Clubhouse and it's called The Good Time Show. So if you search for this club called Good Time, that's us. We are the ones hosting it. And so you just follow the club. And every time we do a new room there, you'll get notification. We are also active on Twitter. I spam the crap out of everyone on all the shows that are coming up. We have some good new shows that are like lining up for next week and week after. And I just do this as a part-time job. I have a day job at Clubhouse. And then I do this on the side to just get the guests in, get them all set up, have the right questions for them. Like, you know, what do they

• 49:14Speaker 02

  want to talk about? Are they launching something, announcing something, all of that. So, yeah, so follow us on Good Time. And we just follow me on Twitter. And you should be able to get a notification or many notifications.

• 49:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Amazing. Listen, thank you so much for, for taking the time to do this. Before we wrap up, where, where should we send people to follow you on the internet? What Twitter, or is there somewhere else that you want to send people?

• 49:41Speaker 02

  It's Twitter right now. I mean, I'm trying really hard to separate my, you know, back to the whole pseudonymity stuff. So Discord has all got a different name. And so I have different identities. But Twitter is really where I am at. I'm RTR. That's my first name and last initial at, on Twitter. So that's really where to send me. And on Clubhouse is the same handle. Good Time is the name of the club. And that's where you can find me. So if you find me on Twitter, you'll also find a way to like reach out to me as well. You should see my email.

• 50:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Amazing. Well, listen, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I feel like I could talk to you forever. You have so many different ideas about kind of the technology industry. You've had so many different experiences and you know, Frank, I think we just need more folks like you helping to build these products and scale them because when you come from an kind of career of everything literally from Xbox robotics and then all the way up to software, it's, it's pretty unique. So please, please, please keep going and I'll be cheering you along. And I think everyone who's listening to this will quickly become a fan as well. And then if anyone who's listening to this has not tuned in to the Good Time Show, it's called The Good

• 50:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Time Show for a reason. So if you want to have a good time, you better go and tune in. But, but Aarthi, listen, thank you so much for doing this and we'll definitely have to do it again in the future.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  This is so much fun, Pom. Thank you so much for having me. This is just, I had such a blast and you're such a good host because now I know, now I know how terrible I am. I have to learn from you. And so this is great. Thank you so much for making time for this and making it happen.

• 51:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to pompscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry. It's a three-week intensive training program with over 50 events packed into that three-week time period. Go to pompscryptocourse.com to learn more and I'll meet you guys for the next episode.