Life360 founder Chris Hulls on existential amusement and why public markets kill bold bets

Chris Hulls is the co-founder and executive chairman of Life360 ($LIF), the family safety and location-sharing app now worth over $5 billion. He was CEO for 17 years before stepping back last year. Before Life360, he served in the Air Force in Afghanistan. In this episode of Summation, Chris and Auren discuss: Why he took Life360 public in Australia and why he'd never run a public company againWhy "you want to sound smart, but not interesting" is the secret rule of corporate speakWhy nobody a...

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The public markets are brutal and if you don't perform as a public company, you get the crap beaten out of you. With freemium in general, if you get scale, it's an extremely defensible position because you can't disrupt free. So many people become data blind by not having that critical thinking behind it. So I would say if you're a founder, I will take the person with creative, high conviction.

• 0:26Auren Hoffman?

  Hello, fellow data nerds. My guest today is Chris Hulls. Chris is the co-founder and executive chairman of Life360, the family safety and location sharing app. Life360's ticker is L I F and has a market cap of over $5 billion. He ran as CEO for 17 years or so before stepping back last year and stay on as executive chairman. Before all this, he served in the air force in Afghanistan. Chris, welcome to Sumation.

• 0:53Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me.

• 0:54Auren Hoffman?

  Super excited. Okay, now we go way back, you and I.

• 0:56Speaker 00

  Long time, yeah.

• 0:58Auren Hoffman?

  Long time. I actually subletted office space from you back in 2015. And at the time, you guys were like super duper scrappy. Like, walk us back to those days back then.

• 1:10Speaker 00

  First, you're getting a conspiracy theory going there, Orin, like the data broker Orin with the evil kid data selling Life360. All, I don't think that's ever been said publicly, but I think that's far enough in the past that it doesn't matter. And I think the extreme activists have backed off. But anyways, that's a whole nother topic, data and privacy.

• 1:29Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:30Speaker 00

  I think we have trust in data is one of our questions, so we can talk into that. But yeah,

• 1:35Speaker 00

  you met us in a very scrappy part of our time.

• 1:39Speaker 00

  And like most things, they're only obvious in hindsight. I think we're doing okay by the time you were there. But the mainstreaming for us really happened when millennials started having kids.

• 1:48Auren Hoffman?

  Already by the time I was, but you did have extra office space to sublet to, you know, poor tenant like me, which is great. I wish you really appreciated it. Not too long after that, maybe a few years after that, you guys went public on the Australian stock market, which is, you know, I would say a pretty unusual move for a Silicon Valley company. Walk us through like how that happened and then kind of like how you eventually ended up on NASDAQ.

• 2:14Speaker 00

  There are a number of reasons behind that. I'd say the number one one is I grew up

• 2:22Speaker 00

  middle class, saw my dad be an entrepreneur, never quite made it. And for me, we were getting our preference stack getting bigger and bigger and bigger. I'm guessing most of your listeners know what a preference stack is, but basically all the money you have to pay back investors before you get anything. And if you're public, that goes away. Everyone's treated the same. You get some liquidity and a lot of my motivation.

• 2:41Auren Hoffman?

  You flatten the preference stack like immediately. Yep.

• 2:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so that was a big driver. It probably shouldn't be because in many ways, from a fiduciary standpoint, that, that it was best for the company. There are reasons it was, I'll get to, but that was really nice is that I think the anxiety of like having put like 10 years into something and getting nothing was always a little scary. And I'm the opposite of my co-founder. He's always like doubling down with poker and crazy stuff. So that was kind of like reason one, like being able to clear a stack was, was nice. I, we wouldn't have done it just for that, though. We did have a kind of a messier history, so to speak, just with different investors. We were not an overnight success. We honestly have probably seven years of barely making it before we kind of got to the stage where I met you and we were, we were doing all right, but kind of not the scale we're at.

• 3:28Speaker 00

  And going public also really let us reset our board. We were able to kind of move some corporates out.

• 3:34Auren Hoffman?

  You had people that had like certain board rights because they had a pref, you know, preferred stock that gave them the rights. And maybe those weren't like the most value add board members and you wanted to swap them out for somebody more value add or something.

• 3:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, more, more, it was all good people, but the strategic investor in particular, they had a board seat. They had been sold to someone else. Then sort of you have these strangers come into your board meetings and having views and how the company should be run. And it just was not the greatest dynamic. We actually all got along. It wasn't bad. I loved everybody, but it was time to just sort of just clean it all up. And we did go do the rounds in the valley for I think would have probably been a series D or something like that. And we were not a hot deal. I think we would have got it done, but if I look at kind of like a term sheet A, public being term sheet B, all things being equal, it's much better for a common shareholder

• 4:30Speaker 00

  to have the same price and not have all that money in front of you. So I think the valuation probably would have been close to identical. We've always been a black sheep company and I consider myself a black sheep of black sheeps. And so we were used to doing things our own way. For whatever reason, our category was looked at as super niche and just never going to work. I had this very funny in my mind reverse discrimination because at the time I was a single dude with no kids doing a mom app. And ironically, we, we, we were the kind of app that broke out. I think it's because we could look at the market a little bit more dispassionately that we were able to see how the, the, the, the regular family operated.

• 5:10Speaker 00

  You mentioned my very brief military background. I think being out of the Silicon Valley bubble also helped me see like what does real America look like? And that was, that was very helpful. But basically the long answer was that this was an interesting opportunistic way to clear our preference stack, clean up the board, get some liquidity. So I would never be homeless. And, and then the plan was just do a couple of years and then move to the NASDAQ. A couple of years, I think turned into six years or five years, five years. Because first we had COVID, which was 70% downloads dried up overnight for us. We were a location app that only makes sense when people are out of the house. So that was, that was disaster.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  I, I kind of, I like to say that CEOs should take credit for luck, both good and bad. But when I talk about my tenure as a public company CEO, I was like, look, I, I made guidance every single year except one year, which is COVID. And I'll be the first to admit, I did not have a pandemic putting people home and on the top 100 risks. So it'll be the one time I kind of call the universe pulling a fast one on us versus taking extreme ownership. And I, and we did take ownership and we dealt with it and we, we cut back and we got through it and came out stronger. And then we had the 2022 crash, which then just put every software stock in the, in the crapper. And then we went out in the NASDAQ in 2024.

• 6:30Speaker 00

  So we were on the ASX for five years. We're still there. We're dual listed and made that transition.

• 6:36Auren Hoffman?

  The bar to going public on the ASX is lower, right? So I, if you want to go public on NASDAQ, you've got to be a a certain size and have a certain kind of type of thing. Would you advise other companies? Or do you think, do you think it was, it's worth it or not? And obviously they're just calling pros and cons of being public company.

• 6:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. Situation specific, for sure. I have a few things I'll throw out. There are no particular order. One is you better be ready for it because you have to perform. The, the public markets are brutal. And if you don't perform as a public company, you get the crap beaten out of you. And you don't get to clean things up in the same way you can clean them up as a private company because it's, you're being watched quarter to quarter to quarter. And it's much more conducive in my mind for something that's a little bit more at a steady-ish state. And now we're talking about like SpaceX and Anthropos. Those are outlier of outliers of outliers.

• 7:38Speaker 00

  If you're one of them, the rules don't apply to you, but you already have to be an outlier to go public. You better have a predictable business. Because if you don't, it's just going to be really messy. And then my working mental model of being a public company is if you think of a bell curve of distribution, take a private company and lop off both ends, and that's what being public does. It really gets in the way of big crazy decisions, unless you're Elon, which is what I'm saying. Don't, don't look at the outliers, outliers. And it probably stops companies from making really stupid, stupid decisions. And it also stops them from making kind of the generational bold bets.

• 8:17Speaker 00

  And as we've gotten bigger and observing, like I, I can see why startups exist. I remember my co-founder and I would always joke like, okay, if you become a big old slow dinosaur, the first thing you got to do is high five because we became a big old slow dinosaur.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  Because most companies don't get to do that and we did. And so back to like, would I do it again? If I do another company, I never want to run a public company again.

• 8:43Speaker 00

  I, I think it gets in the way of someone like me who's a natural kind of aggressive user-led entrepreneur. Being public does drive in my mind this very myopic, metrics oriented culture.

• 8:57Auren Hoffman?

  There's some short-term goals you do have to hit for, if you've made, if you made some sort of commitment to your investors, you kind of feel obligated to hit those in a public company, right?

• 9:07Speaker 00

  I, I think that's the first order piece of it. The second order, and I think the bigger one is like, what are kind of the insidious? Things that emerge being public. I think one of our talking points later, looking at our Q and A is like the corporate speak. And I think corporate speak really ties in with being public because it's this weird pressure to be safe and not, not do something that makes you stand out. And then that impacts company culture. And so it's not just you have the short term thing. It's that you, it becomes a way of operating that you're not even aware of. So I absolutely can see how companies get to a certain scale.

• 9:49Speaker 00

  And this corporate professionalism takes over. And if you don't do the load balancing, right, I think I could see companies getting completely higher in their own supply and just not adapting to threats. So now I firsthand see, and it's also I see AI and why I've kind of been leaning in features. I, the whole, my, it clicked for me. I'm a mental model guy. Now I see why big companies get disrupted. And it ties in with being public. It ties with the corporate speak. It ties in with how people look at metrics and numbers. And it ties in with like, who are the types of people that enjoy working in these environments?

• 10:26Auren Hoffman?

  And the corporate speak one, you know, I remember having like some media training from some communications person who was really good at corporate speak when I was going to be interviewed. And she told me, she's like, you want to sound smart, but you definitely do not want to be interesting. Which is kind of the key way of doing corporate speak. She was basically trying to guide me not to say anything too quotable because that, that's something that could get the company in trouble, et cetera.

• 10:58Speaker 00

  I wonder if she was self-aware, he was self-aware when they said that to you. Cause I, sometimes I've seen, I've seen like, this is sort of related to corporate speak. We had a couple of kind of crisis moments in the comms standpoint. If you hire a crisis comms firm, they usually get to the same place, which is say nothing. But then there's, but sometimes people, the smart ones will give you all the reasons why you should say nothing. They're like, oh yeah, they're kind of smart. That's why we should say nothing. The dumb ones will just say, say nothing and not explain it. And I think sometimes that is the right move is say nothing, but it goes back to that culture piece like I, I, I think on average companies would be much more effective if they spoke the truth. Be bold and provocative.

• 11:44Speaker 00

  And is that going to blow up in your face sometimes? Sure. But I think you'll be being real. And I think as a, from a culture standpoint, then you have a company that speaks real and doesn't get high in its own supply. And I think would probably be better, make better decisions. One question I do have, and I think going back to, I've mentioned some of the outlier of outliers, very interesting, like I, are some of the rules in business breaking? Cause we do have, I do think Elon, and I'm not, not saying I'm an Elon fanboy. He might be a terrible person. I've never actually met him. I'm sure you've met him. If you just look at, how, how, how, how do you have now these giant companies?

• 12:26Speaker 00

  Not doing that? Is this the first time in modern history? Cause it does seem like these big companies are maybe getting in their own way. I mean, SpaceX, like he, there's no corporate speak there. And they, they are taking risk at scale. It's pretty impressive. Could turn into an economy tanking disaster, but man, like, there's a company that is taking bold bets and not speaking nonsense. I bet they're, I could say almost for certain Elon doesn't trust some comms consultant to tell him what to say. And they're doing provocative stuff that might be a complete disaster, but they're trying.

• 13:03Auren Hoffman?

  Things are really changing. What, what of the, one of the mental models I have on successful people is that there's these like, there's these, these insiders and these outsiders. And sometimes outsiders become insiders when they're successful. Insiders really never become outsiders when, you know, if they're stars insiders, they say.

• 13:25Auren Hoffman?

  But to me, you're a clear outsider and then even post-success, you remain a clear outsider. Like, do you see that in yourself?

• 13:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think so. And I don't, I guess, I guess I've said black sheep of black sheep's and it's not, it's not necessarily a point of pride, just sort of matter of fact. I feel that way.

• 13:44Speaker 00

  I think I'm, I try to be an authentic person. Probably most people do. I don't trust systems by nature.

• 13:51Auren Hoffman?

  What do you mean by don't trust systems by nature? Like what do you mean by like a system?

• 13:54Speaker 00

  I'm just very suspicious of, of organizations, why people do things. I, I don't trust.

• 14:00Auren Hoffman?

  Like motives?

• 14:01Speaker 00

  I don't trust the actual fabric of reality. I don't even know what real means. It's sort of an obsession of mine.

• 14:09Speaker 00

  Like sometimes when I'm feeling shitty or just feeling confused, I'll go look at that like, that Hubble deep field image of Andromeda. Have you seen it?

• 14:19Auren Hoffman?

  No, I haven't.

• 14:20Speaker 00

  Anyone should look at that, just do.

• 14:21Auren Hoffman?

  Just like the vast space kind of thing?

• 14:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. So Andromeda is our closest galaxy. However, many millions of light years away. And you just zoom in on it and it's a picture of like, I don't know, a hundred light years across. Hundred, thousand, hundreds of thousands of light years across, sorry. And you see like a trillion stars. And you're like,

• 14:45Speaker 00

  and there are trillion galaxies. And then like, you just think of like, right or wrong, all these different concepts people have, or just like the absurdity of existence. And so I think when I say suspicious of institutions, I think of even achievement, like, what does it even mean? And just like ego and pride and

• 15:09Speaker 00

  like, I just think we're all in this like crazy illusion. And then I, this is, I don't know how we're getting here, but it's probably where I'm going. Like, I sometimes look at, we're in the fancy rich person circles and stuff like, people look down at the little guy's accomplishments very easily. I remember, I grew up in a mixed area. I see a friend put her certificate being a hairstylist and I can sort of tell the smugness of other people like, what a real accomplishment is. And I just think about like accomplishment and

• 15:38Speaker 00

  what do we talk about as like the biggest waste of time? Like digging a hole. You're digging holes in the sand. But then look at the Olympics. People jump over a stick. And if, and so people are going to spend their whole lives jumping over a stick. And then the, all the elites, oh my God, they got a little medal to jump over a stick higher than anybody else. Like, can we just not see the absurdity of that? On one hand, we all use the little, the figure of speech of digging holes in the sand while we celebrate stick jumping. I'm not even judging it, but it's just, it's just like, what is this, what is this thing? Why, what, what decides what accomplishment is? But I'm human. So I'm not saying I don't have an ego and all that.

• 16:21Speaker 00

  But I guess I see the absurdity in every situation in a very deep way.

• 16:28Auren Hoffman?

  I love this. I had no idea we were going to get into like the existential meaning of life here. Like this is awesome. I thought we were just going to talk about like consumer.

• 16:37Speaker 00

  Universe like a hundred times a day, probably. And I'm not exaggerating that.

• 16:41Auren Hoffman?

  Wow. Okay. I don't know that that's good for one psyche. I don't like that's a good thing, but you know.

• 16:47Speaker 00

  Well, I saw your stuff about self-analysis and how bad that is. I know you're talking, I think you're more talking about like therapy stuff. I don't know if it's good for one psyche, but it's just this, it's,

• 17:00Speaker 00

  I go all through the day, just wondering what this weird illusion is we're in and, and my mind ends up with like the heat death of the universe all day. And it's very weird.

• 17:10Auren Hoffman?

  Oh my gosh.

• 17:12Speaker 00

  That's not what I expected to talk about, but like it's.

• 17:14Auren Hoffman?

  No, I love it. This is amazing. But okay.

• 17:16Speaker 00

  But maybe that's my trust of institutions where like we exploded from a star a few billion years ago. And then we all walk around with like these absolutes. I speak in absolutes all the time. So I'm not, I'm not saying I've fully transcended it, but I'm, I'm aware of the absurdity. And no, no, Camus was very similar. I say like myth of Sisyphus and I think I've, I've moved from existential dread just to like existential amusement in a very similar way. This, this whole thing makes absolutely no sense. So.

• 17:43Auren Hoffman?

  It's a born a lot of it though, right?

• 17:44Speaker 00

  Well, otherwise it's despair. Cause then you look around and you see like people grasping at meaning, but these aren't solid objects and like, and yeah, we commend people for jumping, jumping over sticks. And then if you look at like the military, which I was in, that was part of maybe some of my corp, like the long arc there on human dynamics, but like. We indoctrinate people into like a sense of meaning that they will give the ultimate sacrifice for. That's the military's own words in aside, I remember in the military, like in the boot camp, they had a wall, a little poster on the wall and it was like, I'm an MTS military training instructor, like a drill instructor, named in the air force. And they're saying, we are experts in military indoctrination.

• 18:25Speaker 00

  It's like the word, there's indoctrination and they're not hiding from it. And I remember being in boot camp. It wasn't called boot camp in the air force, uh, basic training. Uh, everyone knows boot camp, like, um, coming in, oh, why'd you join? I remember like one guy, he basically was said, you can join the military, you can go to jail. And that was a thing back then. I don't know if it still is. Couple of months later, we're out. I joined, I joined because I love my country.

• 18:52Speaker 00

  Maybe you now do love your country, but I know for sure, just two months ago, you were saying something completely different. Interesting.

• 19:01Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, that is interesting.

• 19:02Speaker 00

  But there is something to tie this to this business, because this is a business topic. I was a young punk in the military. I thought everyone was stupid. Observing some of the absurdities of the system.

• 19:19Speaker 00

  I remember one time I was in the back of a C-130 is my job and I did, I was a loadmaster. I enlisted, I did that for high school, so I couldn't be a pilot, you had to finish college first for that. I was supposed to pre-flight the plane and one of the things we had to do is you'd have to check the chains for, uh, to tie down a tank or whatever.

• 19:36Speaker 00

  And a lot of times you'd just fly around in the plane when it was empty, because the pilots were doing their training. And so I did my pre-flight, I opened up the box, I saw the chains there and then my supervisor came in and, Airman Hall, did you pre-flight the plane? Yeah, I did. He's like, go look at the chains are there. Like, yeah, they're there. Take out the chains. He pulled out all the chains. He had hidden one on me. I'm like, but the, but the plane's empty. Like, I know we didn't need, there were chains were there. I, um, and I just thought like, what an ultimate waste of time. But now I get it. He got me, but now I actually have a ton more empathy and I understand why you do that.

• 20:15Speaker 00

  Because I've managed up to 500 people and the absurd things that happen at that scale are insane. And so can you imagine managing over a million people?

• 20:25Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 20:26Speaker 00

  Many of whom can't even read properly. And then that's not an exaggeration.

• 20:31Auren Hoffman?

  Also, you're also like, an 18-year-old man is kind of a dumbass sometimes, right?

• 20:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, all of, all of the above.

• 20:39Speaker 00

  And so I kind of get why for certain roles and certain jobs, you follow the damn checklist. And not every job is one that's more creative or cognitive. And there's not one better than the other necessarily, but he got me, but that was why the military, especially being enlisted, would not be for me, because I'm, I'm a boundary pusher and,

• 21:03Speaker 00

  I, I don't like it when people tell me what to do or think. Um, so I think I, by, by good chance and coincidence, I ended up exactly in the right profession for myself.

• 21:12Auren Hoffman?

  No, a lot of people think founders are risk-seeking, risk-taking. But so many founders I know are almost like risk averse, like they're, they're founders because they've done like the, the, the mental risk calculation. And they just think the MPB is higher there, or, you know, or something like, how do you think about risk?

• 21:32Speaker 00

  I am extremely risk averse.

• 21:37Speaker 00

  It was a weird sequence of events that led me, led me to even being a founder. If you want to get woo and believe in fate, man, I got the weirdest story that it all just happened to work out. I'm happy to share it. Um, so it'd be, it's probably a five, it's, it's a bit of a meander, but it's not too long, but I, no.

• 21:53Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, I want to hear it. Yeah.

• 21:54Speaker 00

  So I am very risk averse, as I kind of hinted, my dad was sort of tinkerer. Never hit a big, we were not, we were fine. Mom was a school teacher. But by the time, we went from, I thought we were kind of well to do, we grew up in a very blue collar area. I, I grew up in Point Reyes, which now is not blue collar, that's where I am now. I'm in a kind of a basement dungeon. So grew up an hour north of San Francisco, but in a, what was then a 350-person ranching town. So relative to the ranch workers, we were kind of a, we seemed like one of the wealthier families, but then by the time of high school, everyone, we were kind of penny pinching and it was tough, it was tight. My mom was a teacher, my dad's things didn't hit. So I, I was always like an entrepreneur by nature, selling things as, I had the proverbial lemonade, sams, I'd businesses all through high school.

• 22:37Speaker 00

  But I just did, I was very worried about not having money. And I was never money motivated to have the money, but just feeling stuck or like not being able to do things, that was something I really, I, I wanted financial freedom. And so after the military, um, which I've quickly realized wasn't for me,

• 22:57Speaker 00

  transferred out, as already, since going to Cal, got a, did a business degree. I was going to go into banking. Um, and so I, uh, applied to Goldman, but I applied for an internship after I graduated, not a full-time job.

• 23:13Speaker 00

  And the reason I applied for the internship, because I wanted a year to travel and my goal was to go to the South Pole. And so I got hired, uh, by Raytheon Polar Services to be a dishwasher at the South Pole. Very competitive job, because it's like lawyers and doctors and everyone applies to those jobs because that you just want to go to the South Pole and have an adventure. So I got hired and in my physical, they found a tumor in my neck. Uh, I'm fine, I'm missing half a thyroid. Actually turned out to be more of a false positive than anything.

• 23:44Speaker 00

  But along that time, I'd also applied to business school out of undergrad and I got into HPS.

• 23:49Speaker 00

  Straight from undergrad, I was a little bit older, because I'd been in the military. And then I had this position where they thought I had this possibly very bad form of cancer. They turned out to be wrong. Then all of a sudden went from no time on my hands to like, well, what do I do? I have time and, uh, I had taken a deferral from business school. Because I had this health thing and everyone's very nice to you when you have a health condition.

• 24:15Speaker 00

  And so like, well, what do I do? I had this idea that I came up with as part of a school project.

• 24:23Speaker 00

  My downside's going to Harvard for business school. So my downside is most people's upside. I have a year to do whatever I want. I think I have a really good idea, so I'm just going to try it out for a year, probably fail. And if it doesn't work out, I'll, I'll go to Harvard and then maybe I can go back to Goldman and maybe they'll take me as an associate instead of an analyst. And so I deferred for four years. And that finally they said, all right, are you coming? Are you not? And I said, no. But I lived, I had a free option for four years.

• 24:58Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:59Speaker 00

  So.

• 25:00Auren Hoffman?

  So in some ways, you really weren't taking a risk all the time.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  I didn't take any risk.

• 25:03Auren Hoffman?

  You always knew what the other side of the trade was, the other side was still fine.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  The, the other side of the trade was what almost everyone wanted. Um, so.

• 25:10Auren Hoffman?

  And you're, you know, you're going to Harvard Business School, your life is going to be, you know, basically set, you're going to be okay. Um, if you, if you do that.

• 25:17Speaker 00

  And I think I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, emotionally, like start things. If I look at the people I admired and what I was doing, if you kind of look at my actions, they were like, no one is surprised I'm an entrepreneur.

• 25:31Speaker 00

  When you went back to IPO questions, that when I really realized how lucky I got was when we did our IPO and really understanding what a banker did. I think actually a lot of junior bankers don't know what senior bankers even do. I bet most people applying for banking jobs don't even know what bankers do at any level. But it was very clear to me, like, I would not have made it. And it's not a knock on bankers at all. Um, I really like our bankers. Uh, they're so smart, so on top of it. But not me.

• 26:03Speaker 00

  And so good luck, fate, whatever. Um, I, I had something that was at the time, like the worst piece of news I'd ever had in my life turned out to be kind of the butterfly effect that, um, set me off on this path. And, uh, and if I hadn't got into HPS, I definitely would have just taken the Goldman job to be safe. And I'm sure they'd be fine. As one aside, kind of interesting dynamics in groups, the most successful group of people I have ever been with was the, the summer analyst class at Goldman, like every not, like the, the hit rate of those people's careers was amazing. So like it's, um, big partners at private equity firms and VCs and so

• 26:48Speaker 00

  that's very interesting. It's, it's that, that's actually the most successful group of, I've been in, in my career, despite all just picking young people and how, how, I don't know what they did, does, does massive success rates.

• 26:58Auren Hoffman?

  Figure it out. Yeah.

• 27:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. So anyway, I was in a very, I had no downsides, only upsides. Um, and then here we are.

• 27:05Auren Hoffman?

  No, let's talk about actually like building an app. Like, I mean, you built this app, Live360, where you get like entire families to go there basically and engage with it like every single day. Like, how does one think about that? How does one obsess with it in the right way? So that you, you get this like daily active habit.

• 27:25Speaker 00

  So I don't think it's one size fits all. And the market obviously has evolved so much. Um, as you know, I think you're just a few years older than me, so you thought even more, like this whole idea of like knowing what to do and like just.

• 27:41Speaker 00

  There wasn't like the knowledge base there is now. The valley was so much smaller. There were no incubators, so to speak. YC was just getting started and I was getting going.

• 27:52Speaker 00

  We had a brand new platform, which I guess we kind of do now with AI. So we just sort of were figuring out as we go. If I answer your question more indirectly, when I look at what we did, we made tons of mistakes, like everyone does, and humiliatingly bad ones. I think a couple of things, we made a couple of very smart decisions that stuck with us.

• 28:12Speaker 00

  Number one is we realized just like, what is the core of the thing we do? Do one thing really, really, really, really well and do not take your eye off the ball. And so much of my job, even as chairman is like-

• 28:24Auren Hoffman?

  Cause it seems so small. It was like, oh, like family, it didn't seem like when you were doing it, at least initially, it is this big thing. But even this thing that like seems small can become really, really, really big.

• 28:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. If you have a, if you have a daily use case, like it's going to be huge. But also like knowing what is paying your bills is important. And I think a lot of, a lot of people don't actually sometimes know what is that one thing that's driving your success or the company's success? And so we very quickly figured out the few things that can't break. And even to this day, team takes the eye off the ball. We kind of have a quality regression, whatever, we get beaten up for it. And so we remain and have to be the best location sharing app in the world. Mainly just being reliable, not killing your battery. And that's, that's why we won over everyone else. The other thing we did, going back to risk tolerance, I'm very risk averse, as I mentioned, but we went freemium.

• 29:19Speaker 00

  And so freemium, for people who don't know, like use the app for free, upsell to paid. That was unheard of in our category at the time. We were considered safety and utility and back then you would charge for safety and utility products. There were some exceptions, but as a general rule, we were not a normal fit for a freemium type product. With freemium in general, if you get scale, it's an extremely defensible position because you can't disrupt free. So you can't compete on price. And so, but it's also very hard to get there because you're, you're, you're losing money for a very long time until you get that big massive users.

• 29:57Speaker 00

  So the reason we did freemium though, was not because we were going for the big win per se. Cause for me, I just, if I could have cleared a few million bucks, I would have done it. Like I'll come back to that in a minute, but the reason we did freemium was because if we don't go free, someone else is going to disrupt us. And how are we going to compete with the carriers or the platforms? Cause they are probably going to go for free too.

• 30:25Auren Hoffman?

  Like Apple has a kind of a location sharing thing for families.

• 30:29Speaker 00

  We predicted it and we were competing against AT&T and Verizon, all those guys. And, and now probably for the younger generation, like what the carriers, they were a threat. Of course the carriers aren't going to compete with you. Not back then. The carriers were the big dogs. They, it was, the app stores were just coming out. Like, how are you going to compete when AT&T has family map, Verizon has like safety, whatever they called it. VCs thought there was no way we would compete against carriers. And we had a whole bunch of competitors coming out who charged for their products. And so if you go to those early days, we were just the one thing that didn't break. We actually did break because it was just the early, early mobile was bad, but we were better than anyone else and we were free. And then Apple came along in 2012. We'd already been around a while.

• 31:14Speaker 00

  It was actually good for us at the time because we were a better product and they, they made the category normal and then we took off. One of our big inflection points was when Find My launched, which was, and I, and I didn't necessarily predict that. We were very nervous when it happened, but it was a, it was like, okay, we had built a really good product. We were free. Apple made this no longer this creepy space. And that was sort of a beginning point of our inflection.

• 31:37Auren Hoffman?

  Usually a lot of these apps, like there's like a single player mode. And then as people like engage with that, then there's a way of like having like a multiplayer mode. In some ways, like there is no real single player mode for you, or it kind of starts multiplayer in a way, right?

• 31:54Speaker 00

  You have to get at least two people using it, you and a family member. And then once you're there, one of our big things, once you get other family members, can we just provide automatic value? So you've got school homework, whatever, like kind of get people in a loop and then loops, probably across all products, like you need loops, loops, loops, loops, loops, loops. And like, how do you get, for a consumer product person, like you have to close loops. You can't just go halfway. Like you need to get, you need to get some pattern happening. So we figured that out. And then this is not exactly what you asked, but other people in our space, there's usually an idea, there's a parent and a kid. The parents are going to get the, the control app. The kids are going to get the app. You can't see anything. We, one of our other good bets was we're treating everybody the same.

• 32:35Speaker 00

  There is no kid, there is no parent in Life360. You can tag yourself whatever you want, but if you start the circle, you're the admin, you can do whatever you want. And by default, everyone gets to see the exact same thing. And that was all, the underlying bet behind that was we will do better by being a product that the teens don't feel as a control tool to the greatest extent possible. And any smart teens can outsmart you anyway. So let's just, it's easier to build for, if there's just one interface for everyone. So we, I think that was good branding and positioning.

• 33:06Speaker 00

  We were always, we made plenty of mistakes there, but it was so funny. We had an app, a competitor called Kid Control. We had one called Mama Bears. I guess, seriously? Why are you hurting yourself? Kid Control, Mama Bear? Like, like what are you doing? So good, good for you guys for missing the point.

• 33:23Speaker 00

  Cause yeah, you got to market to mom, but like you, you need everyone to use it and ideally love it. And that over the long term went better than expected. One interesting is that we always made in our pitch to VCs, like privacy around location for millennials is not going to be a thing. And we think kids, once they're using Life360, it's not going to be a problem. We were 100% proven right. One thing though, that went further, and I'll take it, and I, and I won't say that we predicted this, and I remain shocked. Gen Alpha or whatever we have now, the younger kids, not only do they not care about their parents knowing where they are, they want their parents to know where they are all the time.

• 34:05Speaker 00

  So the number of times that the kid gets Life360 and brings the parent in is astounding. And so I did not call that one. It worked very well for our business, but-

• 34:14Auren Hoffman?

  It is weird though. Like, I mean, like if I was like, I don't know, in college or something and I went to a party, I just like, it would have been weird back then for my parents to know where I was.

• 34:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think it's more like what, what is the thing that's private in this era? And I think it's,

• 34:32Speaker 00

  I'm sure there is stuff that's private, but it's not location. Cause the kids like everyone on Find My or Snap, like everyone just says where they are. And in some ways it kind of makes sense. Like what's actually private about that? I'd probably be more wonderful, like teenagers and social dynamics, more on Snap. Like I imagine that's the next, it's modern day bullying. Like are you with everyone else and you're off on your own at night? I could imagine that, but, but that's not what's considered private these days. I actually don't know what is. I don't know if you have a take on, on what teens consider private. My, my kids are eight and 11, so I'm not quite at that stage yet.

• 35:07Auren Hoffman?

  I'm not yet at the stage either. So I'm, I'm still figuring all these things out myself, actually. My kids are only a little bit older than yours.

• 35:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. I'm imagining that my kids won't want me to read their text messages.

• 35:19Auren Hoffman?

  It's also like some sort of level of trust with kids where you have to kind of understand, it's like a trust, but verify type of situation. If you have a reason to read their text messages, you'll probably want to be able to do that. If you, if you actually like really suspect something, but hopefully it doesn't get to that point. Like hopefully you don't have to read your kids' text messages because you've got a good relationship with them. And then, okay, yeah, there's might be situation and if somebody has five kids, okay, well maybe on one of them you do have to read it because of that. Just the situation that, and that evolves in that, in that, in that way.

• 35:53Speaker 00

  If we're getting very meta on privacy and you, you and I have both kind of been in the, in the, in this targets of the powers that be on that stuff. Like what, what is this privacy stuff people should worry about? And I think the LLM world is interesting. And if I look at what we're building with AI, this is the first time I'm like, okay, the, the privacy can feel real to me. And what I'm convinced, so one of our maxims, and I'd say this to any entrepreneur, I mean, you gotta earn people's trust. You can't do bad things to their data. And you shouldn't anyway. And we, anything I've ever done with our users, I've been part of myself. I love targeted ads. I think they're great. Like seriously, I've bought so many products.

• 36:35Auren Hoffman?

  I wish, I wish I got more, I wish the ads are better.

• 36:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, all targeted.

• 36:38Auren Hoffman?

  I want, I want the discovery of amazing products.

• 36:42Speaker 00

  So I think that's all overblown, but like I, man, giving access to an agent, your entire email.

• 36:51Speaker 00

  That's a little work and I mean, I'm YOLOing everything. I have OpenClive, Hermes. I have, I keep them running locally. At first I put in a digital ocean drop, but they're just running. Um, one thing I have, I'm using this product. I have, it's called a Fieldy and it records me 24/7 and if I have a to-do, it'll pull it out. And it'll, and it'll send it to my assistant. Um.

• 37:11Auren Hoffman?

  Wait, what's that product called?

• 37:13Speaker 00

  Called a Fieldy. I try everything.

• 37:15Auren Hoffman?

  Okay. Yeah.

• 37:16Speaker 00

  It's pretty good. I'm actually surprised how much this one's sticking. I promise it's not a product placement.

• 37:20Auren Hoffman?

  Looks like, I mean, for people who aren't seeing the video, this is like a very, very, very small thing. So just the battery, the battery lasts for a long time.

• 37:29Speaker 00

  I put it under my shirt and this is, maybe I'm invading people's privacy. You can't even see it.

• 37:32Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah. And still it can record, it records at least everything you say and even like some of the stuff other people say.

• 37:39Speaker 00

  But if someone's in the room with me, it gets it all.

• 37:41Auren Hoffman?

  Okay. Wow. Okay. And then you transcribe it later or it goes on your phone, your phone transcribes it like a granola transcription.

• 37:49Speaker 00

  Hermes picks it up, sends it to ChatGPT, extracts the day, pulls out to-dos and saves the logs.

• 37:57Auren Hoffman?

  Uh, is there a point like where you like actually take it off? Like it's like where you're like, okay, I'm, I'm having this like conversation with my kids or something, or I'm having, or I'm with some friends. And so, and then you, and you put it in a Faraday cage or something.

• 38:11Speaker 00

  I don't think that, I'm just not thinking too hard about it, but I guess if I'm going to back to like where, where, where could the privacy people be right? Consumers do not think about this stuff. Uh, but now I have this agent that has all my email, has every word I say. Has local computer use. Well, that's it. I, I don't want, now I do worry about data privacy.

• 38:34Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah. Oh, and by the way, there's like two, two things are like slightly related. There's like, there's privacy and then there's security. Right? Like you certainly don't want like someone stealing money from your bank accounts and stuff like that. Obviously like if you had a hack, right? Um, you know, or something that just can't, can't, or even, even everything you say, like you don't want it to be hacked to, for somebody. So it's like, who do you trust with that? That information presumably like, I don't know, I don't know much about this, this thing, but presumably they've got like strong privacy. Hopefully that they're not like selling that data on the side.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  How I hooked it up is I told my Hermes agent, like, fine field these APIs, extract the data, give me to-dos. It just did it and it actually worked. I have no idea what sat in the middle. And so it's an interesting world now where.

• 39:21Auren Hoffman?

  It's going through my private APIs actually.

• 39:24Speaker 00

  I, it could be, but imagine like if someone sits in the middle maliciously and they somehow sat there and did some, somehow they were the ones that the agent, so that the LLM found to link the API. I mean, there can be all sorts of attack vectors. And

• 39:43Speaker 00

  there's some, it would, if someone gets access to my agent, it would be very bad. Uh, and so I don't exactly know we got here, but like.

• 39:54Auren Hoffman?

  Everyone's gonna have, everyone's gonna have more and more agents. Everyone's gonna have many agents. Some of the agents may have access to different things. Maybe not every agent's gonna have access to people's emails and stuff. But people, the agents will have access to things and then there are, there are just the amount of attack vectors. To look, you know, to learn about somebody or manipulate somebody or steal from somebody is, is likely going to go up.

• 40:17Speaker 00

  For sure. So maybe what I'm saying to all the regulators and data privacy advocates out there. Get off the targeted ad stuff, but now pay attention to what is actually happening. Cause we are.

• 40:25Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 40:25Speaker 00

  We're one degree away from, um, kind of like the West world.

• 40:32Speaker 00

  The, the hive mind that has everything on you. I actually think that could be the reality we're living in. Maybe I'm a simulation theorist in some ways. I can get even more meta on that one, but it's a, um.

• 40:45Speaker 00

  It's freaking weird.

• 40:46Auren Hoffman?

  It can be for sure. Now you, okay, you, you, what, what have you learned about families, right? You, you, you see tens of millions of families actually move throughout the world. Like what are the surprising things you learn about how families live? How they interact, how they et cetera, how much time they spend together or like, what, what have you learned that's like interesting? Like, uh, take on society.

• 41:10Speaker 00

  Just how uninteresting everyone is. And they're probably right. It's not, it's the, the homework schools.

• 41:17Auren Hoffman?

  Going to the local McDonald's and they're going to school.

• 41:19Speaker 00

  Teenage boys are reckless. Parents also aren't the best drivers, but if you're.

• 41:23Auren Hoffman?

  Right. It's true. You see how fast people are driving or how, yeah, right. Yep.

• 41:27Speaker 00

  Honestly, not a lot. And that's not surprising necessarily.

• 41:30Auren Hoffman?

  I mean, maybe that's a good thing. Yeah.

• 41:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, what do we? What I'm trying to think of is anything like truly, I mean, we have lots of interesting anecdotes for sure in terms of how people view the product and all that.

• 41:42Auren Hoffman?

  Okay. Like, okay, people are like, they're spending more time with their kids than you thought, or they're doing these, you know, or like.

• 41:49Speaker 00

  Pretty standard.

• 41:50Auren Hoffman?

  Pretty standard. Yeah.

• 41:52Speaker 00

  This isn't from our data, but sort of principles of like building for family products and consumers in general. And actually kind of tied into the data privacy of, a lot of people come to me with their family pitches, expecting I'll really be into it. And I'm usually not because I, I see how families behave. I would just say two things.

• 42:11Speaker 00

  Maybe for all consumers, but for families in particular, they are lazy.

• 42:17Speaker 00

  You cannot do a product that requires work. I do think AI is, this part of it's a game changer because things that used to be like X unit fence, but Y, Y units of output, X unit is bigger than Y. Now Y is going to be way bigger than X. And that's number one. Um, and then number two, it's actually tied to privacy. No one cares about privacy. They all talk about it. And I, I'm sure sometimes you get like a mob and maybe the mob will make it look like people care, but like, look what's happening with flock right now. I would bet 99% of people don't care. And it's this very loud minority. I'm not even saying right or wrong. I'm just kind of thing, matter of fact, like. Uh, so I think people, like if you, if you're worried about getting permissions to, if you're building an agentic startup like everyone in the world now, and you're worried about getting permission to access someone's email.

• 43:02Speaker 00

  If you can provide value that I'm, I'm convinced that all takes care of itself. So if you.

• 43:07Auren Hoffman?

  I'll, I'll argue like slightly here or maybe make a slight kind of addition to what you're saying. I, I. I think if you are, if someone is giving over information to you as a company, or even as an individual, if your friend gives you information that is private and, you know, whatever, um, that, that the receiver of the information has a responsibility to treat that information well. And do what's in the best interest of that person. So if you and I are having a conversation, you tell me something in confidence, you're having the expectation that I'm not going to go tell, you know, your sister or your other friends about it or whatever. And the same thing, like if, if I'm using an app.

• 43:52Auren Hoffman?

  You know, you want them to, you know, it's, it's the mom test. Like how would you treat your mom? Are they doing the right thing? Uh, et cetera. So there's, I think a lot of the privacy stuff was about this like thing that could happen. If, if the person just went crazy and went rogue, but not what did happen. But I think if it did happen, then it is, it is a reasonable thing, right?

• 44:12Speaker 00

  A hundred percent on the same page. I don't think we're saying anything contradictory. I'm more just saying what is, how does a consumer behave?

• 44:18Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 44:18Speaker 00

  And a consumer will give you everything. It's not an excuse for a company to do.

• 44:22Auren Hoffman?

  They'll give you, as long as you remain trustworthy.

• 44:24Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. A hundred percent. I'm just saying like.

• 44:26Auren Hoffman?

  If you do, um, something bad with it, then they're gonna stop, you know?

• 44:29Speaker 00

  And even if you don't, if you get, we're in the era of mobs, the mob could come after you, but like from a, I just tell people, if you provide value, people will give you the, the permission. Do not worry about the creepy factor. Don't worry about how it appears. Definitely don't read the New York Times to try to get a pulse sense of like a pulse of the culture. You're gonna, you're gonna get it wrong. Like most people, click, click, click, click, click. It's kind of like Trump just said, I could shoot one of my supporters in the street and still get elected, I think, or shoot someone in the street. I think whatever that quote was along those lines, like.

• 45:03Speaker 00

  It's not saying that he, anyone to shoot anyone in the street. It's more that people don't care. And I don't, I would say the same thing about privacy. The, the vast, vast majority of people will just click whatever button you put in front of them. It's, it's why the GDPR rules in Europe were so stupid and backfired because if most people probably gone to Europe who listen to your show, like you go to a webpage, you're clicking yes, yes, yes, no, no, no. Like no one's reading. So it actually made the problem worse because now everything's obfuscated and people read even less. So this idea that people are thoughtful.

• 45:33Auren Hoffman?

  It definitely, it had all the unintended consequences that one could have predicted.

• 45:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And to be clear, I'll say it again. I'm not encouraging people lose trust with, they're being nefarious with data. I'm just saying like, if you're building a product, do good things and, and you will get what, whatever access you need.

• 45:52Auren Hoffman?

  No, okay. You and I are in a bunch of group chats together of, of, of, of different levels and stuff like that. And, um, you're, you're fairly active in many of these group chats. I, I just find the UI of like WhatsApp and Signal just like super annoying. It's hard to follow. If I'm, if I miss like three days, it's like, I can't catch up. There's no threading or, you know, whatever, like it, could you? As since you have this great like B to C lens, could you design a better group chat, please? And like get it out there?

• 46:22Speaker 00

  We have a former engineer who's doing that right now. His product's called FEN, F E N N. So we have VCs. Founder's Charlie Dilleroch, an amazing engineer. Um, here's a smart guy putting a big bet on it. Um. It's a little slightly different audience, but pretty close. So if you want that product, I'll have him go pitch you, Orin.

• 46:44Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, I want it. I want it. I definitely want it.

• 46:47Speaker 00

  Okay, I'm gonna send him over to you.

• 46:49Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, please.

• 46:50Speaker 00

  I don't, I don't have huge opinions on this. I don't know what I don't know on that one. I wonder, I'm just throwing things out, like, maybe the messiness is part of it, because I've also noticed with group chats, they evolve, people come, people go. Uh, it's very interesting. I also noticed, like, how people show up in chats is so different than how they show up in person. Uh, it's just very weird. Where you can get super heated in a group chat, and like, some of the norms are so changed, and then the nicest, softest people in the real world. And it's probably some, it's probably some allusion to the kind of the polarization we have now, like.

• 47:31Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, and also like when you're in it, like, you might be, you might be just doing it, and then like, when you're like, late night in bed, or, you know, and you're randomly watching TV and distracted, or something, too.

• 47:41Speaker 00

  As an aside, I, one thing I say, and I get it, I say, on the toilet. And the reason I say on the toilet is, when I talk about building products, like, what do people do in the toilet? It's very provocative to just even say that, but I think it makes people.

• 47:53Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, you have a minute, and you're just doing something.

• 47:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, and, and when I say, like, hey, we're doing some stuff on Life360, and I like, is someone gonna pull out Life360 on the toilet? Because we're trying to do some, like, fun and utility stuff. Everyone knows the other stuff. I say, but on the toilet, it's like, I'm trying, just back to corporate speak. That's not very filtered, but it's like, what does someone do when they're taking a dump? Like, if you say this, oh, now I'm actually having to think, I'm not, oh, what do, just standing in line, well, it's not bad, but I'm trying, like, what? Get in the real human piece of it when you make decisions, and so line in toilet's the same, but like, if I say, what do you do when you're standing in line, I don't actually have to listen to you if I say, what apps to use when you're taking a dump, like, it makes you think in a different way.

• 48:32Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, totally.

• 48:33Speaker 00

  Because we all do it, we all probably pretend we don't, but.

• 48:35Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah. Yeah, I've almost dropped my, I've almost dropped my phone in the toilet a few times, actually. You said you personally can't wait for, it's like, kind of like a family drawer, a junk drawer, right? You know, your insurance card, and, you know, something, you know, you forgot, and your keys somewhere, that open up random things, like, what's the AI version of that family junk drawer?

• 49:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we're, actually, the features that I'm working on, and they're very early, they're exploratory. Um, and I was talking about family organization, there have been family organizers raising money and getting attention for longer than we've been around. And it goes back to like, how much time it takes to organize and do work. Um, imagine an AI that can sort everything for you. In your email, you probably have half of what you need. I have a perennial fight with my wife, where she texts me every, on some semi, it's like sarcastic terrorism, I don't know which month it's gonna come up, but she's gonna ask me for the insurance card, I'm gonna be pissed off, she didn't save it from the last time. So, I wish I could tell her, just like, look in the Life360 junk drawer.

• 49:43Speaker 00

  They could do it once, and the number of times I've emailed their insurance card, the LLM would, like, part of the scraping would be, go, go, go find the insurance cards that were sent, put it in the junk drawer. And then you're at the doctor's office, or we see there's an appointment coming up, and we have it all ready for you, or we tell you, like, hey, doctor next week, do you have the insurance card? And then the agent could go get it from a family member, and then it's there forever, so. Um, I, I, a lot of how we're thinking about building family AI is not trying to, it's not fighting the messiness, it's almost like embracing it. Like, there have been these, like, get super organized, like, all the things you need in this super organized folder system. AI lets us be human, just like junk drawer.

• 50:24Speaker 00

  Sort through it, what do I need? Hopefully we find it for you, and you don't have to do any work, and the machine will bring the context. And I think that's gonna really change so much of how products work, that same thing can be applied to so many different product themes and verticals.

• 50:38Auren Hoffman?

  How do you think about, like, the home itself? Like, when, when I was younger, um, before kids, I lived in an apartment, it was awesome. I didn't have to, like, worry about anything, I didn't have to do anything, it just kind of like, everything kind of like, was there, taking care of me. Then, you know, I became an adult and had kids, and then I had a house. Um, and a house, I got like, all these things, they're like, breaking all the time, there's other stuff going on, the roof needs to get fixed, the gutters need to get clean. You know, there's all the, the lawn needs to get mowed, there's all this stuff that needs to happen now, and it's just like, it's a, it's actually a lot of things. And things are like, constantly going wrong.

• 51:17Auren Hoffman?

  I mean, they're constantly, or just like, you know, whatever, the refrigerator is not, you know, whatever, all these things that are happening, like, have you thought about that problem?

• 51:25Speaker 00

  I've thought about it, uh, I don't have a good answer for it. I guess, I'll say something more indirect I was thinking about, like, I, um, I've gotten to a point in life where I have a lot of help, to the point that the younger me would probably, like, roll, roll their eyes at my cushiness, but I still seem just as busy. And so I have a bit of a working theory that with homes, the work is infinite. And, um,

• 51:52Auren Hoffman?

  You can always do this extra thing, or whatever.

• 51:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I have friends much richer than me, and much more anal than me. And you hear of people, the assistants, that they must have these five drinks in the fridge. I just had someone bring me a drink, that's why I walked over there, so I'm, I'm, I'm, I secretly tip in my hat that I, I've, someone brought me a drink. Like, how easy my life is. Um, so I think with a house, I'm just trying to think, why do I still feel like I'm doing all this time keeping my house in order? Uh, and I think it's because I just keep moving up the analness level of the things I want to do. Uh, and I'm saying this, I'm essentially have a full-time kind of handyman, and I somehow, I somehow, I'm just as busy. Um,

• 52:37Speaker 00

  so I don't think it's necessarily bad, because my living standard is very high, but I, I bet it's sort of like this infinite problem. Maybe it's almost a Jevons paradox example, of like, if you have more resources than time, you'll, you'll find more.

• 52:49Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, or like, oh, the, I gotta make, like, yeah, if you didn't, if, if the stone walkway for most people might be like, 300 on their priority, but if you get the other 299 things done, like, it becomes the number one thing on your pro, oh, the stones aren't perfectly aligned, we gotta make the stones perfectly aligned now, you know?

• 53:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, when, before I had, I have, I've been comfortably upper-middle class for a while, before I was like, wealthy, me and my wife would go to the Bay Club, and we would sometimes see each other at the Bay Club, we would, she would go to the one in Marin, not the one I'd see you at, but we would kind of joke about the middle-aged women sitting up there in the little coffee area, talking about how stressful their bathroom remodels were. And now, fast forward 10 years, my wife goes to the Bay Club, I go home, and she's stressed out about the new pantry we're building, a new laundry room, and I was like, you're not doing the laundry.

• 53:40Auren Hoffman?

  That's how you know you've made it in life, yeah.

• 53:42Speaker 00

  And, and it's like, wait, and, and I don't, why do you care about the laundry room? When's the last time you've had to do the laundry? This, so, and it's, it's just funny, right? And she does, actually, my, my wife is great, she does do the laundry, and we do have some help, but it's, I guess I bring that Bay Club one up, which is, like, I wasn't looking at that with disdain necessarily back then, but like, genuinely, the people there, where the gym in the middle of the day stressed out about the remodels.

• 54:12Auren Hoffman?

  People need to be stressed out about something, right?

• 54:15Speaker 00

  So. Yeah, so I guess around the home, I think we will, as, as, as our living standards go up, we probably will find interesting products to make, like, home management better. Um, I have my agent help me with, like, tasks on the house, I mean, extracts these, if I think of a, I actually have it right now, if I tell it a household task, I've been having it try to build me a list, like, and completely hand off, and it reminds me when something has to get done, because I have a couple of properties. And it does take a lot of overhead. And, and so it's, it's probably similar to like, how back in the day, you'd have to, like, we'd all have, like, little milk drawers, and you'd have refrigerators, and we, we are better off for it, so I, so I'm guessing that we will see interesting things happen for

• 54:56Speaker 00

  household ease, but this is gonna be replaced with something else. I mean, I think we've actually already had to think about Amazon Prime.

• 55:02Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 55:02Speaker 00

  Like, I can get almost anything within a couple of days.

• 55:05Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, and Instacart and all those other things that happen, I mean, it's just, it's just amazing.

• 55:11Speaker 00

  But have you heard anyone say they're not as busy, like, oh, I'm not, I'm, I have so much free time saved up because of Instacart or whatever, I think, said no one, right?

• 55:20Auren Hoffman?

  It's Jevons paradox, we'll always come up with a new thing to do.

• 55:23Speaker 00

  Well, you know what it is, I have opinions, and these are, I don't know if it's on PC, but I'm, I think it's, um, well, I hit the third rail a little bit for, like, stay-at-home moms, I was just looking at, I saw, it was like, the 1936 Housewife's Guide to a Daily Schedule. And it was like, 7:00 AM to 8:00 PM. I think it was like, 30 minutes of leisure. And the thing I bet you could directly, and it was, it was only like, 30 minutes of child rearing time or something, maybe 90 minutes, whatever, small.

• 55:48Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 55:49Speaker 00

  So I think what has happened is life has gotten easier, you've just put it into your kids, because the kids need it.

• 55:53Auren Hoffman?

  You've spent a lot more time with your kids, yeah.

• 55:54Speaker 00

  So, so I, I, I I have not seen any study on it, but I would almost say with certainty, the stay-at-home spouses have, we have had all this automated, and they're just putting it more into their kids, and more activities, and so I, I bet if you took the amount of time in 1930s or 50s, stay-at-home parent put with their kids versus now, it's probably up by some huge factor.

• 56:17Auren Hoffman?

  And by the way, even the working parent, uh, spends way more time with their kids now than they, probably spends 4X more time with their kids today than they did, uh, back then as well.

• 56:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, probably because, because we have microwaves, so if you're a working parent.

• 56:31Auren Hoffman?

  Or just, you know, and just in general, like, it's just more the norm to go to your kid's soccer games, and, you know, do some of these other types of things today.

• 56:38Speaker 00

  Probably because we have actually had technology advancing ease of home, so I guess, I don't know if your question had been more like, what do I think is coming up? I guess it went more to like, what's gonna happen, that the problem will never be solved.

• 56:50Auren Hoffman?

  [laughing]

• 56:51Speaker 00

  Infinite wants the needs, this is, there's a Buddhist element in there. Like, there's never it, and there's, once you can get, let go of it, and you're much happier. Um, but I think how, I think I'm, I'm a believer in robotics, I think we're gonna have humanoid robots soon. Soon might be a decade, but, maybe a decade, but I think.

• 57:12Auren Hoffman?

  I'm skeptical we'll have that in a house in a decade, but I hope so, that would be amazing, but I'm very skeptical, but I would love that to happen.

• 57:20Speaker 00

  A, a, I'm saying a decade. Uh, I'll, I'll, I'll take.

• 57:24Auren Hoffman?

  2036.

• 57:25Speaker 00

  Well, send me a calendar invite.

• 57:27Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, September 20, 2026, it was, uh, sorry, 2036, one of us is taking the other person out for burgers.

• 57:33Speaker 00

  I actually know what, I, I have a long bet that's coming, do you know, I made the same bet a year ago on self-driving cars, and it's come, and it's coming up, and I was, we will have self-driving cars in a decade. I forget what our, our, our deal was, but I actually literally have a, a calendar invite. I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna send you one right now, Warren.

• 57:51Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, amazing. I love it. It's gonna be great.

• 57:54Speaker 00

  What's the bet? Twenty, uh, do we, do we have a, do we have a humanoid robot?

• 58:01Auren Hoffman?

  You and I, because we can afford, you know, we would pay, we'd pay, I'd pay a hundred grand for one right now. Right? If it worked. So do you and I have one? And by the way, I hope I'm paying you. I hope I'm paying you on this bet. Uh, because I, I would, I would happily pay a hundred grand for a humanoid robot to help out and do some of the other types of things.

• 58:23Speaker 00

  Twenty thirty, oh, the Google dropdown is not letting me go by here. I might, might have to really push it 360 times to get through the year or something.

• 58:31Auren Hoffman?

  You, you can put it in.

• 58:31Speaker 00

  Why is it not like, oh, there, okay, I see.

• 58:33Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 58:34Speaker 00

  What's the date today?

• 58:35Auren Hoffman?

  UI problem. See, there we go. Like, this is, you gotta solve that one too. Yeah.

• 58:39Speaker 00

  Nine one. I've, uh, do we have a humanoid robot? Nine one twenty thirty six. I'm saying yes. Save. All right. Ten years.

• 58:52Auren Hoffman?

  Amazing. All right. I love it. Yeah. And we're gonna have the robot go back to this conversation just to make sure, you know, as well.

• 58:59Speaker 00

  No, but it doesn't have to go back to the conversation because we're gonna be in the hive mind because the AI is gonna have taken all our recordings and the illusion will be proven.

• 59:07Auren Hoffman?

  Now, uh, last question we ask all of our guests, what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

• 59:14Speaker 00

  Probably, I think you asked me this the last time. I'll say it again because I, I'm such a believer in it is these people ruin themselves by being myopic around data. So look at the data, look at the data. Yes, in the perfect world, look at the data, but I think being a good data person is knowing when you have incomplete data. And if you can trust the data and it's firm, absolutely be data driven. So many people become data blind by not having that critical thinking behind it. So I would say if you're a, if you are a founder, I will take the person with creative, high conviction. Then, then someone who is gonna have like, take the lean startup approach. I think that's becoming, that, that's getting less and less contrarian by the day.

• 59:54Auren Hoffman?

  It's getting less contrarian.

• 59:55Speaker 00

  But man, it was like a real, it was, I was like committing heresy to say that a few years ago.

• 59:59Auren Hoffman?

  Dude, that's probably right. Right.

• 1:00:00Speaker 00

  So I, so I, I, so I, I need a new one.

• 1:00:03Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:04Speaker 00

  I'll, I'll, I'll take the win on that one. So I need, if, if you bring me on again in a few years, or if you bring me on to admit defeat in the robot battle, I'll, I'll need to find something better.

• 1:00:13Auren Hoffman?

  I hope I'm the one admitting defeat. This has been amazing. Thank you, Chris Halls, uh, from Founder of Life 360 for joining us on Summation. I follow you on X, by the way, at Chris Halls. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage you there. This has been super awesome and a ton of fun.

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me, Warren. Looking forward to doing it again one day in a decade.

• 1:00:31Auren Hoffman?

  One more thing before we go. I read a blog called Summation. It's the same as this podcast. The blog is about non-obvious idea sharing on business, talent, data, longevity, and random contrarian takes. If you like the conversations on this show, you'll probably like the blog. It's free. New content comes out twice a month. You could subscribe at orin.substack.com. That's orin.substack.com.