$100B Founder Breaks Down The Biggest AI Business Opportunities For 2025

Episode 653: Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talks to Furqan Rydhan ( https://x.com/FurqanR ) about the biggest opportunities in AI right now. — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (4:42) Define the Job-to-be-done (8:20) How to build an AI Agent workflow (11:16) AI Tools break down (27:05) How Polymarket won (31:48) Why VR is a sleeping giant? (44:43) Be a lifelong player in tech (58:52) The unbeatable combination (1:02:27) Adam Foroughi’s A+ execution (1:18:35) Betting on -1 to 0 — Links: • Furqan’s site - https://furqan.sh/ • Founders, Inc - https://f.inc/ • Applovin - https://www.applovin.com/ • Claude - https://claude.ai/ • OpenAI - https://platform.openai.com/ • Langchain - https://www.langchain.com/ • AutoGen - https://autogenai.com/ • Crew - https://www.crewai.com/ • CloudSDK - https://cloud.google.com/sdk/ • Perplexity - https://www.perplexity.ai/ • “Attention is all you need” - https://typeset.io/papers/attention-is-all-you-need-1hodz0wcqb • Anthropic - https://www.anthropic.com/ • Third Web - https://thirdweb.com/ • Luna’s AI Brain - https://terminal.virtuals.io/ • Oasis - https://oasis.decart.ai/welcome • Polymarket - https://polymarket.com/ • Gorilla Tag - https://www.gorillatagvr.com/ • Yeeps - https://tinyurl.com/59z2yrdu — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

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

• 0:00Furqan Rydhan?

  That's the trend that I can't, I can't like unsee it sometimes.

• 0:03Shaan Puri?

  Right. That's the bet you're making.

• 0:05Furqan Rydhan?

  That's the bet we make. And so I always joke with the guys here. It's like, we want to bet on negative one to zero. Like Peter Dill talked about the zero to one companies. It's like, we still one step even before that.

• 0:23Shaan Puri?

  All right. We're here.

• 0:25Furqan Rydhan?

  Amazing.

• 0:26Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I haven't seen you in a little while. People don't know. We used to work together. Maybe five, six years, we co-founded a company and

• 0:32Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 0:32Shaan Puri?

  Launched a bunch of products and uh, ate a bunch of shit together and here we are.

• 0:38Furqan Rydhan?

  Fun times, by the way.

• 0:39Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. I'm thinking the title of this is gonna be, cause AppLovin is now fifty, sixty billion dollar company.

• 0:46Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 0:47Shaan Puri?

  Fifty billion dollar founder tells me the next big thing in AI. I'm gonna go full YouTube clickbait with it.

• 0:52Furqan Rydhan?

  Send? Yeah, yeah, they're great.

• 0:54Shaan Puri?

  We, so we used to do this thing where after we did Bebo together, got acquired, we were there for a year or so. And then we, we went off and we did different things. I started the podcast and started doing my thing. You started doing yours. But I hit you up and I was like, hey, miss hanging out with you. What if we did something? And we, we started doing this on Wednesdays, which was like the cool shit hour. And this was amazing. It's basically a show and tell where you, my smartest friend, would come on Wednesdays and you'd be like, hey, have you seen this? Have you seen this? Have you seen this? And I really hadn't seen any of it. And you would kind of explain it and teach it to me. And it was my favorite part of the week. And we did that for, I don't know, probably like a year or something like that. So I kind of want this to be like a public version of the cool shit hour, where you're just gonna tell me a bunch of good things.

• 1:39Shaan Puri?

  I want to start with AI because you texted me something. You said, AI agents are here. And you said, AI is cool because a ten person company feels like it could do the work of a hundred person company and we're using it in our company. So I wanted to hear, what are you doing with AI? And that's not called chat GPT.

• 1:58Furqan Rydhan?

  I think this word AI agent or this kind of phrase is the thing that I really can't pull myself away from, like literally every night, like.

• 2:05Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 2:05Furqan Rydhan?

  You know me, like midnight strikes. I want to write code, like the whole day is like talking to people. When the night is like coding.

• 2:11Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, Furcon's schedule is nocturnal. So I remember we, we hired you and I feel like the first day you came in at nine AM to kind of like, I think I should.

• 2:20Furqan Rydhan?

  Probably ten, but yeah.

• 2:21Shaan Puri?

  After that, from day two onwards, it was like, roll in at eleven. Oh, it's lunchtime, have lunch. You would talk, you would do meetings. And I was like, this is this guy code. And then that night at like four AM, you would have built the prototype and you're basically nocturnal. You, you get all your shit done. You like, you used to tell me you used to get, during the day, you would just burn up your energy so you could focus at night and actually write code.

• 2:47Shaan Puri?

  So what are you doing with AI and how is that? What is that actually in your company right now?

• 2:52Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah. And so I'll kind of tell you how I'm thinking about AI agents, right? And what it means to me. So AI agents are using LLMs or AI systems, right? Like the OpenAI systems or Claude, but then giving it reasoning loops. So imagine that when you go to a human, you give them something to do like, hey, I want to go grow our company. Want to do a marketing campaign. They take that, they plan it, they come up with the steps to plan, then they go one by one on the tasks and like solve them. They release some of them. And so these AI agent systems are exactly like that. The first thing it does, it goes, what do I need to do based on your request? And it'll kind of come up with a plan.

• 3:28Shaan Puri?

  You give it like a mission.

• 3:29Furqan Rydhan?

  Correct. So let's say I'll give you an example of something we're doing at Third Web, which is every single signup in our company. And you know, we have a lot of signups every week and you know, a human can't really scan through them, but it's really interesting people signing up. They have interesting companies. We may know them. They might be a large company or a small one, could be a competitor or something else. And so we would used to have a human go and look at everything. It's like, oh, if it's Gmail, like ignore it. But if it's like, oh, like this other company over here, let's go research it. Right. Go figure out what Third Web products they might like, what they might need to do. And then you would send them an email, try to customize it. Typically, this is good sales practice. You're taking your customers and delivering them to your business team. And so we built an agent to do this and. Every signup that comes in, it looks at it, it determines is it an interesting person or not?

• 4:14Furqan Rydhan?

  It will research their website, it'll research them. It'll then use the knowledge it has of third web products and try to figure out what it actually like, what products they might need, how they would use it. And then it would send them an email or an upsell or something like that. And we've deployed probably eight or 10 of these throughout Third Web to do a lot of different functions. And what it feels like is a smaller company can punch above its weight. So like, we're like 37 people right now. I really believe we're more like 80 people. That's what it feels like with a lot of these tools. And you're taking the brain power of somebody who gets it and you're giving them that power to go and say, here's the thing.

• 4:53Shaan Puri?

  So in this case, person comes to your site, puts in their email address. Now you have, it's one agent or it's like a series of things that pass off to each other? How, what is it called?

• 5:02Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah. So in this case, we call it the signup agent.

• 5:04Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 5:04Furqan Rydhan?

  And so it's one agent, it creates a plan, like what do I do? And you know, part of the plan is like the directive we gave it. And I think the way to think about AI agents in general is any like clear directive problem. And what I think about clear directive is like, let's go do X. Like signup comes in, go look at the person, go research them, go figure out what's their title, what's their company, what products do they have? So that's like kind of clear what the job to do is. And if it's a digital task and a clear directive, all of it can be done with agents now. The technology is here, it's ready and it's working. And so for the third web signup agent, it'll kind of come in, it'll make a little plan like, hey, I gotta inspect the domain. I gotta go look up the person.

• 5:45Shaan Puri?

  And you didn't have to tell it each one of those little tasks to do.

• 5:47Furqan Rydhan?

  We gave it like, kind of like a one, one paragraph directive and another paragraph of like how it should operate. And then maybe a paragraph at the end for like the type of email or the action to do.

• 5:57Shaan Puri?

  And so, but the end product is it's looked up the person, it basically kind of looks at the signups, picks the interesting ones, researches them. You said thinks about what product of ours will suit their needs, which is, that's the wild step that I hadn't really thought about. And then it crafts an email and then it gives it to a human or it just sends it?

• 6:14Furqan Rydhan?

  Sends it.

• 6:14Shaan Puri?

  Okay. So you have enough trust that you can send it to customers?

• 6:17Furqan Rydhan?

  We started it with human in the loop and there are still like safeguards you put in, like any directive would like, you don't want to just send random emails even as a human doing the work. But I mean, it's very clear what, what to tell it. And I think this is where the power is kind of multiplying. It's like, we've heard AI, we've heard chat GPT. If you can tune it to your problem, so for example, giving it the knowledge of third web products is the key difference here.

• 6:42Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 6:42Furqan Rydhan?

  A generic chat GPT message, when I say that, it'll just invent something that's like general and generic or whatever it knows.

• 6:48Shaan Puri?

  And when you built this, so you built this or somebody else built this on your team?

• 6:52Furqan Rydhan?

  I hacked it as a prototype, like most things, and then I gave it to somebody on our solutions team and within a day they turned it around.

• 6:58Shaan Puri?

  And when you made like a working version of this, how long did that take you? Cause it's kind of like you basically hired an employee and trained them and got them working. You're not paying them a salary and you probably did the whole thing of what, like a day or two?

• 7:11Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah, so let's say there's like a bunch of like my nights of just learning tools and getting used to it. So I take that time out of it. That's just time I spend anyways. Right now, like two nights ago, I was like really stressed, like my calendars are kind of crazy some of these days. And I was trying to figure out like, why is it crazy? Where is it going? It's like a really hard question to like ask, like what do you do? You could have an EA, she can go look through it, do all the stuff. And I have an EA, she's like helps me with these things, but then she sleeps for like a while and like, you know, I want to go answer some of these questions. So I probably in about 15 minutes, I connected my calendar and I connected a little interface where I could type to it. I started asking questions, like how many hours of meetings did I have last week? It was like 28 hours, like way too much. Where did the meeting go? What, what were they for? What were the purposes of it?

• 7:52Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 7:53Furqan Rydhan?

  And then the next night I hooked it up, probably about another 45 minutes or an hour where I could tell it commands from my calendar, like go block out Monday for me or go find me in like nine hours of block time and just mark it block.

• 8:05Shaan Puri?

  Oh, wow.

• 8:05Furqan Rydhan?

  And this was like a few hours of work now that I know the tools, but it's like, it just works 24/7 now.

• 8:10Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 8:11Furqan Rydhan?

  And so my calendar, my email, a few other things, I've started building these like personal agent or workflow type things. Cause I know what I want to do every time. I know how to react or the decision making I'm going to make. Can I just set that up so it works 24/7, 365? And you know, it's just there always.

• 8:28Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 8:29Furqan Rydhan?

  The cost of it is like.

• 8:30Shaan Puri?

  So if I wanted to build a workflow like this, okay, do I, you need to know how to code to be able to do this light coding, like give me like the bullet point version of how, how you built these, like where, where do you even build it? What tool do you use?

• 8:42Furqan Rydhan?

  So there's coding tools. I think if you're a developer. There's like Langchain and Autogen and Crew. These are like very popular, very cool. The OpenAI and Claude SDKs themselves are very, very powerful. But your coding, you're writing a little system. It's probably like one tenth of the code you would have had a right to do something.

• 8:59Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 8:59Furqan Rydhan?

  So that's already better for developers. If you're not a developer, there's a lot of tools. So like Leap is a company we built here in the studio. It lets you stitch together workflows. So an example is like you can trigger based on a Slack message. So let's give this Slack message where all your signups go to. So it picks up that trigger. You can just put a little AI block and say, okay, take this email and do these tasks. Oh, you want a web scrape? Go do that.

• 9:21Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 9:21Furqan Rydhan?

  Or you have a little conditional loop or like repeat itself 10 times? Go do that. And then you make a little another decisioning steps like four boxes. Well, I'll put it back to another Slack channel.

• 9:30Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 9:31Furqan Rydhan?

  So you come in with your signup channel. It does this research. It does all these things. It does kind of whatever you want. And then it could go to email. It could go to another Slack channel to thank somebody on your team. So you could kind of like, you know, these are workflows. This is what they start with. And then agent or can kind of take these workflows and like almost build on top of them. And so I think there's these two things. You could really, really easily create workflows. And I think everyone should be deploying them. Every company should have them. It is a superpower. It's like, I can't, you know, it's like a feeling of almost a cloud, like, oh, I don't need a whole data center team now and I can.

• 10:03Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 10:03Furqan Rydhan?

  You know, when we build Blab and like, how many servers did we have running video streaming? Like, that would have been a nightmare. It's kind of like the same, you know, 10x improvement, but just for me, everything that I do digitally.

• 10:14Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 10:14Furqan Rydhan?

  And so tools like Leap are great. I think, you know, there, there's others out there that provide this. And so there's a combination. If you don't know how to code, you just have to think about the steps of it that you would do. And you can program that without writing any code. It's just writing directives. It's like writing intent basically of like what you want to accomplish.

• 10:32Shaan Puri?

  Right. It's like a magic genie. Tell, tell, tell it what you want and it can figure it out. So you got a sales agent, you have your email, calendar, kind of like EA agent there. And the other.

• 10:43Furqan Rydhan?

  I got some fun frivolous ones that are kind of stupid. So like, I set up a dynamic wallpaper. So literally like every five or 10 minutes, it'll look at what I'm doing and like auto generate me.

• 10:53Shaan Puri?

  Like your computer laptop.

• 10:55Furqan Rydhan?

  My computer laptop wallpaper will modify itself to whatever. If it's night, it kind of, I told that I code at night.

• 11:01Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 11:01Furqan Rydhan?

  So it will go towards that direction. It knows I'm doing meetings, another thing during the day I'm talking to people.

• 11:06Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 11:06Furqan Rydhan?

  And it kind of comes up with cool stuff. It's totally frivolous, like not like a useful thing, except my own like.

• 11:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's cool.

• 11:13Furqan Rydhan?

  But I find it awesome and you know, like there's cool scenes that come up, it invents new things. You know, Claude has created this new capability called computer use. I think that's the next area that AI agents are going to enter.

• 11:26Shaan Puri?

  And by the way, so there's Claude, there's ChatGPT, there's perplexity, there's all these different ones. Mentally, how do you bucket like the main AI tools? What, what's like the superpower of each, each one? Maybe just do, do those three or if there's a fourth.

• 11:39Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah. So like, I think OpenAI and Claude, I think of them as like foundational tools. So their general purpose, ask it anything, input, output, you stitch it together with things. And then they have tools like ChatGPT on top or maybe computer use that they're figuring out more general tools. I think perplexity is really interesting. It's taking this general purpose LLM and the reasoning it could do and search. And like, I try not to do Google search anymore, mostly because it's slow and ineffective. And perplexity really made it where it does a search, it reads the result as I would. It clicks into the links as I would, and then it tries to answer my question more purposefully. And it saves me four or five steps.

• 12:20Furqan Rydhan?

  So I think about perplexity as taking something like search and then the LLM reasoning and combining them together in a flow that, that's more interesting.

• 12:28Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 12:29Furqan Rydhan?

  So ChatGPT or OpenAI tools don't have like real time knowledge, but perplexity because of search does.

• 12:35Shaan Puri?

  Right. What's your like tangent, Furkant's hot take? Google, what happens to Google search with all that you see now? And you're saying, I don't, you're saying I try not to Google search anymore. That's pretty wild, right?

• 12:47Furqan Rydhan?

  It just feels slow and I know they got the Gemini thing there. I think the biggest fumble, you know, in our, in our lifetime.

• 12:54Shaan Puri?

  Decade fumble.

• 12:55Furqan Rydhan?

  They built the technology for transformers. The thing that OpenAI and others have used to develop this large language model. They are the ones that were the first entry and like talking about it and throwing it out there. And the research that's happening.

• 13:09Shaan Puri?

  And so what's the history? So there, they have the AI minds there. They write this research paper, attention is all you need.

• 13:15Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 13:16Shaan Puri?

  And now from what I understand, like there's all the authors' names, all of them are gone. And basically started their own companies. Was it because nobody recognized the power of it there? Was it that they tried and Google's bureaucracy shut them? What's the actual story of why they didn't?

• 13:29Furqan Rydhan?

  I don't know the internal story. I think early on, Google was like the place you went to where you wanted to have the rocket ship moment in your life. The smartest people were here. They were taking the biggest challenges. And it just really felt like that place. I think Google as a company hasn't felt like that. I think the parent company and all the other things going on do still feel like that. I'm sure it's a mess in there. Who knows? But it just feels like the biggest fumble. And I know they're trying to play catch up with Gemini and awesome stuff is happening. But the developer mind share and the tension has gone somewhere else.

• 14:02Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 14:03Furqan Rydhan?

  And that is really hard to pull back when somebody else becomes a leader in it. And actually, it feels like OpenAI number one, that's a thing clear. I think Anthropic is number two. So then everyone else shows up is what it feels like to me, at least from people I'm seeing building or the technology they're using or the innovation that we're seeing from it.

• 14:20Shaan Puri?

  So the Anthropic one, so basically they have Claude, which is kind of like ChatGPT, but they have a couple of cool things. One of them is this, what they're calling computer use, which is basically you type in a thing and then you do this and it moves your mouse and it just does shit. That's basically the summary of it.

• 14:34Furqan Rydhan?

  It's a combination of things. You could take workflows and like, hey, I'm doing this, click this, click that, click. Do it over and over for me. It could analyze things. But like, I think the key thing is, and I think it just releases in beta, so like, like most of these things, like it kind of isn't going to be great now. Just trust me, it's going to be great. And that's what we've been seeing in general is like things just ramp. And so it's now going to enter your computer. It's kind of felt like it's been on the cloud only is where AI has been. And now it's going to show up like in the box that you're used to, which is your computer, your laptop. And there's so much workflow that we do. And yes, every app will put AI in it. And then your interface will also do that. And I think a lot of like the things that we're used to doing, like

• 15:18Furqan Rydhan?

  switching tabs and having all these things, like they almost feel like out of all, why? Like, I should have infinity tabs open and some system should know about it. And if I ask it, like bring it back up.

• 15:28Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 15:28Furqan Rydhan?

  It's like a total need. We know we need that. And so it's kind of like infinite data, infinite knowledge and reasoning. And then you know me, like that's what the AI, like that's where I think the bridge when it crosses, it completely changes the equation. And the reason I put Anthropic number two is their models are crazy, like impressive. Like the new Claude Sonnet model is like. I feel like it was a step factor improvement over the previous ones. And it feels like the task that it kind of struggled with now it's getting better. And both OpenAI and like Anthropic have been just like boom, boom, boom. And I don't know, everybody's heard of AI. They tried it, they might have tried it a year ago, they might have used it a little bit. But every three to six months, there's just another step, another step. And that's, I think, the most interesting thing and why I can't pull myself away from it.

• 16:13Furqan Rydhan?

  Like why every night, this is a thing that gets me very, very excited. It's because the progress is still wild. People are going to say it's going to pop out, it will. I think it's going to be absolutely impressive wherever it like starts slowing down at.

• 16:26Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 16:26Furqan Rydhan?

  And will completely change the way how we do any digital work. Like.

• 16:29Shaan Puri?

  So you're, you're messing with it now, but you have a company. You've got an investment lab, you've got this whole place, this beautiful place that we're in right now. You've got a wife, you've got like all this stuff in your life. If you were just 21 again, or 22 again, where you're like, dude, I, I got nothing but time. Bank account's empty, but so is the calendar. This, and this technology is out, what would you be building? What would you be like messing with? What's the like, kind of like, you don't need to take over the world even, but just like, what types of stuff would you build if it was like young hacker version of you?

• 16:59Furqan Rydhan?

  Like right now, I've started seeing agents that it could do a reasoning loop. It could have a directive and it could have like actions it could perform. And then you combine like, for example, an agent with Twitter. Give it a Twitter account that it owns and controls. So its own distribution and conversational ability. So humans can just interact with it, humans are. And you give it, you give it like a digital bank account and, you know, at Third Web, we're doing a lot of stuff around AI. We have a whole like AI toolkit that we're about to launch. And it's around this, which is these like digital things, like these agents, they're not going to have credit cards. It's weird. And the reason I say this is fun and interesting is because, you know, humans have done this very well. They've created megaphones for themselves and they've created businesses.

• 17:43Furqan Rydhan?

  And they created payment rails around that. So they sell things, they do things, they sell services and all of these details. I think it would be something around that.

• 17:49Shaan Puri?

  So you'd make like a, a social, like a Twitter account. You'd make like an AI influencer type of thing.

• 17:54Furqan Rydhan?

  You know, AI influencer is like the first obvious thought it goes to. I think if I played in this space, I would be creating the digital equivalent of a company, which is a CEO of a thing. The ability for it to market and the ability for it to make money.

• 18:10Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 18:10Furqan Rydhan?

  And I don't think.

• 18:11Shaan Puri?

  So not an influencer.

• 18:12Furqan Rydhan?

  Not an influencer. I don't know what it would produce.

• 18:15Shaan Puri?

  Like an AI dropshipper.

• 18:16Furqan Rydhan?

  AI dropshipper. Or like, yeah, it's the best FBA, Amazon, whatever.

• 18:20Shaan Puri?

  What's that example you were telling me about where the, somebody did a thing like this? They made a, they made a Twitter account, they gave it a wallet. Marc Andreessen gave it like 50,000 of crypto. Can you tell this story? So what is this?

• 18:31Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah, so there's this thing called Luna or Virtuals and they, they're a little platform to, you know, have AI agents run. And I think what's cool is they did this kind of equivalent thing where it's like, it has a crypto bank account and it has like access to Twitter.

• 18:45Shaan Puri?

  And you can. Was this a, a marketing stunt by a company that does this or?

• 18:49Furqan Rydhan?

  I think this is exactly what, what I'm describing is it was frivolous, fun. It was play, not like working backwards from giant thing. But I think this did some really powerful things. So there's literally like a live thing where you could watch its reasoning as it's like pulling its tweets.

• 19:03Shaan Puri?

  I'm on it right now. So it's terminal dot virtuals.io. And is this basically the thought process of the bot of the agent?

• 19:11Furqan Rydhan?

  Correct. So this is like an agent. This is what an agent does, right? So if you think about it, starts with like a thing like high level planning, current state of executions. Like I've done this so far.

• 19:20Shaan Puri?

  What was the directive they gave it? What did they tell it to do?

• 19:23Furqan Rydhan?

  I think they told it that you're kind of like a public influencer bot. You have access to crypto. It's a little bit more in the meme coin world of stuff. So it's like, again, kind of on that side of the puzzle. But today it could negotiate for tokens. It could buy and sell things. It could kind of operate together. And I think it's really cool that you could actually see it's like.

• 19:43Shaan Puri?

  So, so this thing, this, this was, uh, you know, 30 minutes ago. It says, current state of execution. I have attempted 10 tasks so far, seven successes and three failures. My Twitter metrics show an average engagement on my last, on my recent tweets, and I have lost three followers. Observation underscore reflection. That's like the function.

• 20:01Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 20:01Shaan Puri?

  Reflect. And it says, I've been engaging with my followers to build a personal connection, which is hilarious because it's an AI bot. With replies and quotes. However, I've also experienced some failures in replying to tweets due to invalid parameters. My free research on whatever, well, state of mind. I'm feeling a bit concerned. I'm feeling a bit concerned. That's crazy. I'm feeling a bit concerned about the loss of followers, but I'm also encouraged by the successes. And then it says, um, plan reasoning. Given my current situation, I need to focus on building a relationship with my followers and increasing my visibility. Plan and then it starts to say what it's gonna do. This is wild.

• 20:35Furqan Rydhan?

  Doesn't this sound like a human that would be sitting in some growth team somewhere thinking about how to grow your Twitter account? And you know, you could give it directive, you could give it some direction and you could let it compute against itself. To compute plans, to reason, to observe behaviors, try to find patterns. These are all like human tendencies, like human behaviors that we do.

• 20:56Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 20:56Furqan Rydhan?

  Especially when we work. And I think this is one of those like perfect like kind of views where like you could start thinking about. Man, this is a digital only task. It has Twitter and distribution, marketing ability, and then it has some payment ability. It's like, it's gonna just continue.

• 21:11Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 21:11Furqan Rydhan?

  Like it's gonna keep going and you could improve its directive, you could change its incentive, you could do a few different things here, but. I feel like we're gonna get to a world where, and I think Sam Altman said this, which is like the one person doing all the company. Like this is happening, like we're already experiencing another 10x decrease and. How many people you need and the abilities that they have? And I think it goes down to probably one or two or three and. You know, like that is a, you know, total shift to everything.

• 21:38Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 21:38Furqan Rydhan?

  In terms of how we work, how companies are built, uh, kind of in my mind.

• 21:46Shaan Puri?

  Okay, should we switch to hardware stuff or is there any other AI stuff that you think is worth checking out?

• 21:52Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah, I did wanna tell you about this Oasis D car, the, you know, there's like basically. You know, it's a very early experiment, but it's really like a game that's fully built in a generative AI model. And so they built a game like Minecraft and you could just describe a world and it makes you a Minecraft world like that. And like every step you take is like not a pre-programmed pixel.

• 22:17Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 22:17Furqan Rydhan?

  It's actually generating.

• 22:18Shaan Puri?

  So normal game is game maker builds the map. It exists, you then get to run around in a predefined map. What this is. What you're saying is generative.

• 22:28Furqan Rydhan?

  Whatever you want.

• 22:28Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you you give it the idea, but then when the character runs on the fly, it's creating the map.

• 22:34Furqan Rydhan?

  And you could kind of play this Minecraft game and you could see it's like crappy pixels, still like not great resolution. But you can move and it can do stuff and like whether it's video games that take a lot of effort and time to produce. Or it's like, you know, content creation and videos and stuff like that. It's starting to become like way closer to like, you know, reality that a whole movie will be generated on the fly. And exactly what I want. So this wallpaper thing is frivolous, right? That I was telling you about.

• 23:03Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 23:04Furqan Rydhan?

  But really like, I'm gonna watch a movie someday like that. It's like the Raiders lost and I'm gonna go and watch this movie after and it's gonna have this context and it's gonna give me like a feel good.

• 23:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we're like, let's brainstorm. So like, uh, NBA highlights. So you, you know, it used to be SportsCenter. Where if I didn't watch the games, I gotta go to my TV, turn on ESPN, SportsCenter would start. Even if I like basketball, I gotta wait till whenever basketball comes up and then they'll have the top 10 highlights and I watch whatever they picked. Then YouTube comes around, it's like, forget waiting, forget the TV. Just pick the thing you want. You could search anything. You could search only Steph Curry three pointers. If someone made it, you could choose the best of that. Now it's gonna be like, I just say, I just will put on my headset or put on my glasses or whatever. And I'm just gonna say,

• 23:53Shaan Puri?

  show me what happened to the basketball game. It'll it'll just start generating a new, a highlight reel that didn't, nobody has ever created. It'll just make it based on my prompt. And then I might be able to say, don't show me any Lakers clips, only show me Warriors and it'll just auto adjust on the fly like it's gonna be made for me.

• 24:08Furqan Rydhan?

  Hundred percent.

• 24:09Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's interesting.

• 24:10Furqan Rydhan?

  And and you know, like, I think it's gonna be an interesting world. We're gonna go from human content consumption, people, you know, humans make content. We're gonna like then have machines make it towards our tastes and liking. And then I think there's always this worry like, well, what happens to all the humans then?

• 24:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 24:26Furqan Rydhan?

  And then I think we get back to that core thing, which is machines will never have true taste. Right? Like, and I think forever that creativity is gonna come from humans and there's always a new thing. There's new fashion. There's new Right. Kind of, oh, you know, content mediums, there's new everything. Machines will learn it and lag behind or maybe get ahead of it. There's always gonna be another person that shows up and does something different. So I think taste is gonna be the ultimate thing that probably won't go to a machine. It could reason about it. It could try to invent it. But I think we're not that predictable as you meant we.

• 24:57Shaan Puri?

  Well, I want to believe you because it sounds good to me, but then I also think, well, right now, if we said taste is like, you know, what is taste? Taste is selection. It's knowing what's good and what's bad. It's right. That's kind of taste like TikTok, which is the most popular like app, most addictive app, most used app. Their algorithm is basically saying, I'll choose what's interesting for you. And it does it so well that isn't that kind of taste also, right? Like.

• 25:26Furqan Rydhan?

  It is. And it works really well.

• 25:29Shaan Puri?

  They don't make the videos, but they select amazingly.

• 25:31Furqan Rydhan?

  The selection is incredible. It probably is more like what we want than we will even admit.

• 25:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 25:39Furqan Rydhan?

  I don't want this.

• 25:40Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 25:40Furqan Rydhan?

  Like the other day I was talking.

• 25:41Shaan Puri?

  Why is it showing me this? It's like, because you love it. That's why.

• 25:44Furqan Rydhan?

  The other day I was talking about how like on Twitter, my following I love and my for you, I don't.

• 25:50Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 25:50Furqan Rydhan?

  But it's like, you know, really?

• 25:52Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 25:52Furqan Rydhan?

  Like, wow, why did they pick this?

• 25:53Shaan Puri?

  Well, that's like a status thing to do. It's be like, I don't use the algorithms.

• 25:56Furqan Rydhan?

  Correct.

• 25:57Shaan Puri?

  I hand, it's like, I drive stick.

• 25:59Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 25:59Shaan Puri?

  Right. I, I hand make things. I cook from scratch. It's like, cool. But brownies out of the box kind of work for everybody, you know?

• 26:06Furqan Rydhan?

  I'd love to trade algorithms. Like I'd like, I'd love to swap with you for a day and be like, yo, Sean, what are you, what are you, what are you watching over here? So I don't know. It knows you really well, but I think that's where human like we, we're not great at logic sometimes. And sometimes we have our own blind spots. I think this is one of them. Things that we, we love or actions prove it. We don't, we don't want to. And it could be like bad thinking. It could be like emotional thinking. Could be like, oh, this is, I don't really want to love it, but I, I do.

• 26:34Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 26:34Furqan Rydhan?

  And so there's, there is that element that I think, look, machines will be great at this too. They'll learn humans. It might become even better than this. I just feel like we're just a little bit not predictable because we almost make some dumb choices.

• 26:46Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 26:46Furqan Rydhan?

  And that actually is part of society and, and just humans in general. And machines try to be too perfect. It's like my Netflix thing is probably accurate for me. It's also just like, man, like, can I just mix it up? Can you just like RNG the algorithm a little bit? Cause I just want some different stuff. And you're kind of like driving me down one direction. And once in a while, like I want this 10, 20, 30% thing. And I don't think algorithms do that exceptionally well. They test it. They throw things up, but you know, they don't necessarily try to give you variants.

• 27:17Shaan Puri?

  How long until you think the number one hit song in the world will be just an AI created song? How many months or years?

• 27:25Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 27:25Shaan Puri?

  Until we see that?

• 27:26Furqan Rydhan?

  If we were doing over under 2025?

• 27:28Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 27:29Furqan Rydhan?

  I might pick the under, you know?

• 27:30Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 27:30Furqan Rydhan?

  2025, like that would be a good bet. Maybe this is a polymarket, another election's done.

• 27:35Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 27:35Furqan Rydhan?

  We did a new polymarket, you know, like reason? It could be something like this.

• 27:39Shaan Puri?

  But like a polymarket thing, so election just happened, polymarket's having like a victory lap right now.

• 27:44Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 27:44Shaan Puri?

  You showed me polymarket, I think, like years ago, and I started making a bunch of Dgen bets before they blocked it in the US. It was like, it was, it was like open for a while, right? But they were doing prediction markets, it's a prediction market, but prediction markets, a bunch of people had tried that. Do you know, like, I'm just curious your opinion, what did they do right? That like Augur and these other guys who were, had the same sort of general idea that, hey, there'll be prediction markets.

• 28:06Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 28:07Shaan Puri?

  Like from either entrepreneurial level or product choice, like any reason you think they won that you could put your finger on?

• 28:13Furqan Rydhan?

  I feel like timing's a big part of it. So like the sweet spot of like, people are way more digital. I think COVID drove a lot of people online. Like we just sat at home and we're like,

• 28:24Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, what else you got?

• 28:25Furqan Rydhan?

  24/7 on the internet and it really exploded the internet. Like I think I've seen some graphs where like the internet and e-commerce and all these things were like growing. And then there's like a massive jump like,

• 28:35Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 28:35Furqan Rydhan?

  You know, remember like,

• 28:36Shaan Puri?

  We were at Twitch when that happened.

• 28:38Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 28:38Shaan Puri?

  And it was like, all the growth looks amazing. We're crushing all the metrics, like what did you do? It's like, well, we were here.

• 28:46Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 28:46Shaan Puri?

  Right? We are not, we don't create the wave. We surf a wave and a huge wave happened for Twitch. It was like Fortnite came out and then COVID happened. Two humongous waves back to back that just combined.

• 28:57Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah. So I think it's a combination, we're way more digital. I think you talked about this a lot, like as a kind of metaphors concept a long time ago, that we're just way more digital now. We care more about it. I think news and like where we get information from has totally changed. Like online internet, even content and entertainment, like I have a hard time going to TVs. I look at kids, they look at desktops and TVs as like ancient. Like I said, why is this thing on the?

• 29:23Shaan Puri?

  It's like my mom's sewing machine.

• 29:24Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 29:25Shaan Puri?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 29:25Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 29:26Shaan Puri?

  What do you do with that?

• 29:26Furqan Rydhan?

  That's what it feels like. And so we're we're kind of there. And then there's a bunch of these people online that want or like want to stake in this thing, right? Like you want to root for a team. This politics has also become very polarized, right? It's really like a team sport. It's like

• 29:41Shaan Puri?

  Right, team versus blue team.

• 29:42Furqan Rydhan?

  That's really what it is. And so I think it's like, what do I do with it now? How do I support it more? I give more money to it, but I can give more attention.

• 29:48Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 29:49Furqan Rydhan?

  And so I think a lot of these things are happening in poly market. Good flow, good area.

• 29:53Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 29:54Furqan Rydhan?

  And then I think for the best thing probably for them is they got it right.

• 29:56Shaan Puri?

  Right place, right time.

• 29:57Furqan Rydhan?

  The answer was right. Like if they were wrong, let's say poly market was off.

• 30:01Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 30:02Furqan Rydhan?

  Like it was, hey, the the result of the election was something else.

• 30:06Shaan Puri?

  The story today would be much different, right?

• 30:09Furqan Rydhan?

  And then it might have been muted. It would have been a cool thing that kind of didn't work. He had to be right.

• 30:13Shaan Puri?

  I mean, I think people would have used that to crush, to to to really rip on them because like in the way that people are doing with polls, but polls kind of have this like layer of protection around them, whereas like people want to hate on crypto things. People want to hate on betting. It's like a degenerate behavior in general. I think if they were, I think if poly market was wrong, the reaction would have been much worse than the fact that the polls are wrong, what the reaction is to the polls, you know?

• 30:36Furqan Rydhan?

  It would have been worse for a little while, then we would have moved on, forgotten about it.

• 30:39Shaan Puri?

  And by the way, you saw this thing about the French whale on poly market?

• 30:42Furqan Rydhan?

  I didn't see it. So the The big whale that came in and moved.

• 30:45Shaan Puri?

  So there's like the narrative versus reality. When the narrative from the polls was it's a toss up razor close 50 50 election. This guy came in and bet, I think something like 30 or 40 million dollars on Trump.

• 30:57Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 30:57Shaan Puri?

  And people were like, is this guy just trying to manipulate the market? Is he real? Is he just a a rich billionaire son? Like, who is this? And today I saw something on my way here. I don't know the full story because it was on my phone, but it said he bet because he believed he would win. The reason he believed he was winning, he did independent polling.

• 31:15Furqan Rydhan?

  Wow.

• 31:16Shaan Puri?

  He funded his own independent polling and thought and felt that he was getting better data that was saying that Trump was mispriced. So he's like, I just did a logical rational thing.

• 31:26Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 31:26Shaan Puri?

  I just bet where I thought an asset was mispriced. I wasn't trying to, this wasn't political. I'm French. I don't, what do I care? I just thought there was money to be made and so he kind of went counter to narrative and he made I think like something like 20, 30 million dollars yesterday.

• 31:39Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 31:40Shaan Puri?

  Uh, on that bet.

• 31:40Furqan Rydhan?

  The funny thing about poly market, by the way, it's like, we can't use it in the U.S.

• 31:44Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 31:44Furqan Rydhan?

  So there's a whole range of entertainment plays to like bet on our like.

• 31:47Shaan Puri?

  Right. It's like $3 billion.

• 31:49Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah, it's like we're the ring, right? Like there's two boxers going at it. It's in America.

• 31:53Shaan Puri?

  The cockfight.

• 31:54Furqan Rydhan?

  And then you've got everyone else betting from all around the world on who's going to win this thing, which is I think kind of a hilarious thing.

• 31:59Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's true. You have a good contrarian opinion about VR.

• 32:05Shaan Puri?

  And in general, there's probably some other technologies like this. 3D printing might be one. I know you're pretty bullish on tube, but there's these tech things like VR. Where I think if I walk out of here and I talk to a hundred people about what are you most excited about AI, whatever Bitcoin, whatever it's going to be, but if I said, what do you think about VR? It's sort of lukewarm.

• 32:24Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 32:24Shaan Puri?

  Uh, at best. Um, in the tech industry, I think most VC is sort of feels like it's kind of a dead end technology. Now they'll be like, it's going to be glasses and smart glasses, AR, that's the future. But you have a different take on VR. What, uh, you've been telling me for a while, like, hey, look, Oculus sold more units. Hey, look, you can do this now. And you've been staying with it when I think. Interest has, has sort of waned. The narrative has gone against it. And that's always where there's big business opportunities. If the narrative goes one way, but the reality goes another.

• 32:53Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 32:54Shaan Puri?

  That's where there's an opportunity. Uh, give me your VR take. So why is VR a sleeping giant?

• 32:58Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah. I mean, so you remember 2020, I like asked you for your address and mailed you a headset.

• 33:02Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 33:02Furqan Rydhan?

  I was like, hey, this quest thing is a different.

• 33:04Shaan Puri?

  That's a real friend right there. He sends me a VR headset. He's like, yo, I know you're not going to come to the future. Let me drag you.

• 33:10Furqan Rydhan?

  It's probably collecting dust, which is okay, but you know, I, that, that's kind of how I think about things and. Technology takes a long time. It typically takes longer to get there than we expect, like especially people who are early in the industry. We're really wanting to push it. I mean, AI, crypto, VR, all have the same problem, which is early on, people are like really pushing it to you. It's not ready. It's a big hype. It crashes. Everyone moves on. So that's happened in VR a few times and it's kind of, I would say for most people, been quiet, not thinking about it. But I think it's a sleeping giant and I think it's a massive sleeping giant for a few reasons. One, I see it every day here. Like here at Founders Inc., like I get a chance to, you know, one, we invest in VR companies. We're one of the few that do.

• 33:53Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 33:53Furqan Rydhan?

  We have a whole corner, maybe like 12 devs that are all building different VR products. You put them all in one spot and it might be some of the most density of interesting VR projects in one place. And so what have we seen? One, Quest 1 came out. It was wireless. It was kind of crappy. But man, I could sit on my couch and use it. It was cheap. Uh, became a, you know, a great Christmas gift in year two. They didn't have it in year one. They released Quest 2. It got even better, lighter, more powerful. Now Quest 3 is coming out and I think they got like five to 10 million monthly active headsets out there.

• 34:26Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 34:26Furqan Rydhan?

  I think that rivals consoles and my first thought was like.

• 34:29Shaan Puri?

  How many units has it sold? I think Quest has sold.

• 34:33Furqan Rydhan?

  I would say 30 million is my guess, but you know, maybe it's more.

• 34:36Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So this is Quest, uh, Quest has sold over 20 million units with the majority being Quest 2.

• 34:44Furqan Rydhan?

  Yep.

• 34:44Shaan Puri?

  Quest 3 is currently sell, uh, uh, has sold a million units, uh, at the $500 price point. Um, so I think, I mean, if you just, I don't know what the math here is, but you know, they've done, what is that? Over a billion dollars of revenue on.

• 34:57Furqan Rydhan?

  And I believe it's out.

• 34:59Shaan Puri?

  Pretty good for a failure.

• 35:00Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah. It's outpaced PS5 sales, for example. And so the first thought for me was like, hey, what's the first thing that's going to happen in the spatial environment? Like what is it good for? Immersion, gaming, like these are natural entertainment, right? These were the first few things that was natural and you had Beat Saber, you had a few things. And that was kind of like, you know, here's the first use case. Let's try to get it out there. Let's try to make the thing happen. And then it kind of goes up, down. People get used to those first experiences. I think you played Beat Saber.

• 35:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. You had to go the first few times.

• 35:28Furqan Rydhan?

  Correct. And then you're like, okay, whatever. And then, you know, because it's kind of like a cheaper than PS5 unit, the Quest 2 was. Um, it was available in Christmas a few times. It went to like, you know, kids, like. 12, 13, 14 year old kids kind of getting this thing like they would be getting a PS5 and they use it. And they don't have the bias that we have of like many years of like the structures we're used to. And so a lot of games formed and specifically social games like Gorilla Tag. I don't know if you've heard about Gorilla Tag.

• 35:58Shaan Puri?

  What is Gorilla Tag?

• 35:59Furqan Rydhan?

  Gorilla Tag is a social multiplayer game. It's really fun. It on AppLab did like tens of millions of dollars.

• 36:06Shaan Puri?

  People tag?

• 36:06Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah, it's like a, you know, like kind of like a fun social game that you could play with a bunch of people. You go in, by the way, you go in, you're gonna be like, dude, there's a bunch of like teenagers screaming at each other. But for them, this is the environment. It's a new place and they didn't grow up with these other things. So they're starting with mobile phones. The TV feels ancient, the desktop feels ancient, and this thing on my face actually feels like more fresh, more new. So that's where we're starting. I think Gorilla Tag has done $200 million revenue. And this is where I'm like VR is a sleeping giant. We have a few teams here at our studio. So we have a team called Fluid that's building the kind of like best browser in VR.

• 36:44Furqan Rydhan?

  So you get multiple displays, you get as many kind of tabs as you want. You could customize your environment. You get AI environments. You're like, I want to be in a cave. It like makes you in a cave.

• 36:52Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 36:52Furqan Rydhan?

  And then you get like social multiplayer so people can show up in your environment. And we're on AppLab, does like about 5,000 weekly active users still. Small team of three, just like, you know, without a big burn, can just build this, grow it. We're not even in the store yet. We're in like this like. AppLab is like kind of the pre-store where we could just drive people to it, but we're not getting anything directly from the store except our own searches, right? And, you know, 5,000 people like go in, use a productivity thing. There's another product called Yeps. It's like the second game behind Gorilla Tag. Small team, absolutely crushing it.

• 37:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeps.

• 37:27Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah, Y E E P S. Really fun game. You know, we should play together one more time.

• 37:34Shaan Puri?

  They're here. They're a team of how many people?

• 37:36Furqan Rydhan?

  I think they're like less than 10 people, but more like six to eight. And most of it was built with a few people.

• 37:41Shaan Puri?

  And this thing is profitable or what's the deal?

• 37:43Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah, I mean, I'll let them talk about their numbers. So I, you know, I don't want to say anything, but.

• 37:47Shaan Puri?

  On a scale of, uh, that's pretty good to like, wow, where is it at?

• 37:51Furqan Rydhan?

  Wow.

• 37:51Shaan Puri?

  It's wow.

• 37:52Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah, it's wow.

• 37:53Shaan Puri?

  That's great. So what's cool about this is like supply, demand, right? So like you can go be, you know, app number, you know, 5 million in the store right now. Or if you're talented, you could be like one of the top 20 VR apps. If you put in like, you know, a year of hard work, I'm just using like kind of round numbers or whatever. But it's the same way that right now, if you're a content creator, you go post on Instagram, it's pretty tough. Post on LinkedIn, you'll get tons of distribution if you're half decent at content because there's just no supply of quality content.

• 38:24Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 38:24Shaan Puri?

  So even if VR is not, you know, like 20 million units is very good. But even if it's not just like becoming this like global phenomenon, you could still be a great business. And, and if you just keep riding the wave, you're very well positioned to be the leader. And then everyone at that point will look back and be like, oh yeah, it's because they started five years ago.

• 38:44Furqan Rydhan?

  100%.

• 38:45Shaan Puri?

  You know, when this was smaller, when there's 20 million instead of 200 million.

• 38:48Furqan Rydhan?

  In these emerging tech things, so everything I've found is if we do is emerging tech, I think the theme of all of them is survive. If you make it to when the industry happens, you will grow with it. If you were a small percentage of the industry and the industry grows by like 100x, you grew by 100x or more. You've already been there and I've seen a few small person teams at like 10 million plus a year, like five people. Totally profitable, totally able to do it. Is this a VC investable business? Honestly, I don't care.

• 39:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 39:16Furqan Rydhan?

  Like what I care about is like, this is interesting and can you make these bets without massive capital? Like expenditure, right? Like if it takes like $50 million to build a VR game, it's like the big giant blockbuster movie. I don't, that, those bets don't excite me. I think when it's like three to five people can be somewhere, the limited amount of money and just them, it's like them in the hoop. Like the basketball analogy is like, great, we have everything we need. We have all the talent, we have all the ability, the tools are amazing now, like, you know, all the game engines have perfected themselves over time. And then now the environment's forming.

• 39:47Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 39:48Furqan Rydhan?

  Meta has led it, right? So like the Quest and this is the VR world. And then we're seeing glasses, Vision Pro, Ray Bans, like the trend is like, we're going to have compute in our spatial view.

• 39:59Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 39:59Furqan Rydhan?

  And I think that's the big like, yeah, this is happening in VR. The Quest platform's interesting, you could build a profitable business or a fairly big game right now. Also, this isn't slowing down. Historically, Apple, when they enter an industry, they come with a unit, it's okay. Has a lot of things that gotta get better. Another unit comes out and then you have Snap, you have Meta with Ray Ban, like, I mean like.

• 40:22Shaan Puri?

  Zuck is not stopping, Zuck is not giving up, he's, he's going to the end game here. Apple probably also won't stop.

• 40:29Furqan Rydhan?

  Correct.

• 40:29Shaan Puri?

  So now you have the two biggest players. They're they're gonna keep making this hardware better. They're gonna be super hungry for content. And the other sneaky thing about these, by the way, that I I didn't really fully realize until I moved to Silicon Valley, which is a lot of these require like really specialized talent. So I remember when I first met you, you were like, I'm really into big data. You started saying words like hadoop. I didn't know what the hell you were talking about. It wasn't as popular back this is like in 2015 or something like that, when you were telling me like, hey, I think this is real. I think this big data machine learning is really interesting. You were again, pretty early onto that. Crypto, same thing. You're early onto that. There weren't a lot of smart contract developers. There wasn't a lot of, um, you know, big data people, AI. So then if even if you don't have a hit product, if you just assemble like A plus talent, that's super specialized.

• 41:14Shaan Puri?

  Then as those platforms rise, your team itself becomes like a hundred million dollar asset.

• 41:20Furqan Rydhan?

  Exactly.

• 41:20Shaan Puri?

  If you built today for like, cause Meta Ray Bans like that product's actually a hit for for Facebook. And they're gonna keep going with that. And everybody wants to be in the glasses thing. People think glass is the next platform. So if you build a specialized team that's good at developing for that platform, there's just not a lot of great teams that do that. That's a hundred million dollar team, even without a hit product.

• 41:41Furqan Rydhan?

  How hard was it to?

• 41:42Shaan Puri?

  With a hit product, you get a billion dollars.

• 41:43Furqan Rydhan?

  Harder was it to find an iOS developer when we were starting to do mobile? It felt so specialized. We're gonna compete at like a ridiculous level of price to go get pretty good talent in that space.

• 41:53Shaan Puri?

  I remember 2012, which was not even early. We had one iOS dev on our entire team and it was so hard to recruit talent. It was faster to just retrain. So we used, we just stopped working and the iOS dev trained all of our other devs to be good enough to be dangerous because it was so scarce to get good iOS. iOS wasn't even that specialized compared to like the either the fancy AI stuff or, you know, VR mixed reality, all that, that type of talent.

• 42:17Furqan Rydhan?

  And so I just think that when I think about kids growing up and all the, let's say 13 to 15 year old kids or somewhere in the teenagers, they have a mobile phone that is attached to them. They think it's superior than a computer or a desktop because it's with them. And then we're gonna take the second computing interface where we do more work or more immersive experiences and we put it around your eyes. That makes way more sense to me than TVs, desktops and even laptops. Uh, and you know, that that was like one of the thoughts where we started fluid like, we talked about this in 2020. I don't know if you remember, there's one project that You used to tell me you were like, I work in VR. Correct. I did that experiment where I worked in VR for an hour a day. And then I ended up doing it for a few months, by the way, like, and I was like, this is great. And it had been like literally sitting with me.

• 43:02Furqan Rydhan?

  And I think this is one of the reasons why I actually built a studio is like, I want to do all these ideas. I can no longer do them all. I could pick a few. I probably shouldn't even go do more, but like, I just want to find really hungry people and like match them together. Right. That's how I found John at Fluid. It's like, he was a PhD student. He was gonna go do something in like finance and high frequency trading and like whatever. And he also came to this idea of like, hey, when I was doing my like, you know, masters, whatever. Um, I was writing this thing. I just wanted to go into a focus mode like, could I just go into a cave and like lock out all the stuff? He's like, I had all these VR friends that had done some stuff in VR. It's like, I tried to do it and it wasn't good enough. Right. And then he kind of left it at that. And then we were talking about it and he talked with Hubert. And I was like, dude, you just talked to Furkan. I think he's got like,

• 43:46Furqan Rydhan?

  five pages of like random notes and ideas around this. And then that's what responded and it's like, cool. Like we're not gonna blow ourselves out. We're not gonna go raise a lot of money. We're not gonna go get a giant team. We're gonna get three people here. We're just gonna grind and work hard and build and survive. When this thing happens, we'll miss some bets like that. We'll gain ridiculous amounts of knowledge of like the industry. And then we find these sleeping giants and it's like, yeah, we're gonna double down. Right. Uh, like Hubert went to this like VR conference, like the Meta Connect thing. And he had a T-shirt and we're like, the funny thing would be like, on your shirt, just put, I invest in VR. Right. And so he did. And it was like, wow, like, you found one, you know? You're like a girl at a crypto conference. This is amazing. This is how we want to think about it is like, try to be there early.

• 44:31Furqan Rydhan?

  Don't get too caught up with where the technology is now. Don't get too scared of how far it is. 2015, 2016, remember we heard self-driving cars are never gonna happen? I don't know if you remember that. Yeah, yeah. Massive like push against it. And there's Waymos running around every day now. I see more Waymos at night driving around than like regular people driving.

• 44:53Shaan Puri?

  You've told me once before, you go, "I think my superpower is that I'm usually in the first thousand or 10,000 people to try any new technology and like, understand it, be able to play with it, know it, see it, all that stuff." I remember we were at work and you were buying the Ethereum pre-sale, the ICO or whatever.

• 45:11Furqan Rydhan?

  Do you remember what you said about it? Yeah, I don't know if you remember.

• 45:13Shaan Puri?

  I just remember being like, "Dude, can we do some real work? What are you doing? Ethereum name? That name's never gonna work." I was like, "That sounds so nerdy. That'll never be a thing."

• 45:21Furqan Rydhan?

  I think that was a phrase I remember. I was telling you about Ethereum. I was like, "Dude, I stayed up all night reading this like, white paper." And I'm like, "You were on it." I was on it. I came in, I'm like, "We're soft." I gotta talk to him. And I tell you this, it's probably, I don't even know what I said. Who knows what? Probably a bunch of words and you're just like, "Dude, I don't know what this is. We have something real to ship." And you're like, "Ethereum? That name's stupid."

• 45:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I wrote it off. Chalked that up for another, another L for me.

• 45:42Furqan Rydhan?

  By the way, you could've been totally right as well. So no, no.

• 45:45Shaan Puri?

  I wasn't. I think that's all that matters there. Very, very off on that one. But you've, I think that's true, that is your superpower. And then you said another thing today, which I hadn't heard, which is for emerging tech, there's only one rule: survive. And that reminds me, we had, I just did a pod with Ryan Peterson. He created Flexport. He said the same, same principle. He goes, "You know, what I realized was, I cannot control the timeline. I don't know how long something's gonna take to work. So all I focus on is, how do I just be default alive? How do I just stay in the game?" He goes, "I just have the confidence that if I'm in the game, I'll just keep trying shit until it works. I just believe that about myself. I will just keep trying things until I figure out the thing to work. The only way I can lose is if I have to get out of the game." Which is like, I can't, you know, usually it's like, I run out of funding, I can't control

• 46:30Shaan Puri?

  my destiny, I spend too much money, I'm burning too much capital. And so he's like, "That's been the name of the game for me from when he was flipping scooters on eBay to now, you know, runs a multi-billion dollar company called Flexport." And the whole time, he's like, "My whole thing is, I can't control the timeline. So I'm gonna control staying in the game, because if I stay in the game, I win."

• 46:48Furqan Rydhan?

  Stay in the game with great talent and people that want, that have this long-term mindset. No, you know, I think there's a lot of people that can take short-term wins and they should. Like, we've done that, right? There were these short-term moments, like, "Oh, this is great for us right now."

• 47:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 47:01Furqan Rydhan?

  "But we're gonna keep doing more." And like, I think that's the main thing for me. Technology takes a long time. When it hits though, it happens very fast. Like, that's the part that I think people don't realize. They like, underestimate how long it's gonna take and then they overestimate how fast it's gonna happen. It's like, immediately gonna just like, happen. And you know, I think Uber was an example like that. Like we saw it was black cars.

• 47:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 47:22Furqan Rydhan?

  It's like, oh, there's like expensive taxi that

• 47:24Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 47:24Furqan Rydhan?

  Nobody's gonna use. And then now it's like, dude, this place doesn't have Uber. Like, how am I gonna move?

• 47:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I can't function.

• 47:29Furqan Rydhan?

  It feels like that, you know? And so I, I think I enjoy it. There's one reason why it's like, it's like a lifelong game. I could just play technology forever. I could learn about things. I don't have a rush to be there first. I don't have a rush to be like, I didn't know everything and like do everything and raise the most money and get a bazillion people. It's more like, I need a few people with me that like are really excited about this. They see it like I see it. And we're just gonna go on this mission. And luckily now I have the ability to just like fund that and like, create my like environment to do it. That's what this whole building is.

• 48:01Shaan Puri?

  So let's talk about this building, cuz you, um, you've basically built like your dream, like man cave in a way. I think, you know, it's kind of like a founder dream, right? Like, and I want to talk about that because you had a big success with AppLovin, where, uh, and actually kind of like felt like there was multiple moments where, you know, it was successful. At one point, it sold for like $2 billion.

• 48:27Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 48:27Shaan Puri?

  It was like, oh, exit $2 billion. Amazing. And then like, Trump blocked it or it was like,

• 48:32Furqan Rydhan?

  Didn't go through.

• 48:33Shaan Puri?

  Didn't go through. But then during that, this is a crazy story. It was like, we were sitting in the office and this news happens like, dude, congrats. That's amazing. Holy shit. And then like nine months goes by, the deal doesn't like fully get approved because it was such a big purchase out of a Chinese company group or something like that. And in the meantime, the business just kept crushing. So Adam, who's the CEO of that, you say like basically went back was like, cool. We'll still do the $2 billion, but now it's for 30%.

• 49:02Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah. I don't know what exactly.

• 49:03Shaan Puri?

  Some version of that.

• 49:04Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah, there was like, I don't know, like, uh,

• 49:06Shaan Puri?

  Cuz you couldn't do majority deals. That was the big block. It's like a majority deal was gonna happen. And so now then the company eventually IPOs, you get this nest egg, right? So it's like, okay, I could do whatever. You could go retire. You could go buy islands and cars or do rich guy stuff like you could do that. And instead you like chose to do something else. Can you just describe basically like, what's the mindset? What's the conversations you had with yourself?

• 49:32Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 49:32Shaan Puri?

  Now that you had more resources to do whatever you wanted to do.

• 49:36Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah, I feel like um, my whole life, I've just always wanted uh, to tinker and build stuff. Like I always described it as like, I love taking stuff apart and putting it back together. It's not like some people will say it's like, oh, you want to learn how it works. It's not that, it's more of the puzzle. How does somebody else put this like, you know, and I used to do this with cars and computers growing up. Like I would overlook my computer and I would make my car faster. And like, that was like kind of just like the mentality that I had. Um, and then I was like, okay, well, I've got to become an adult at some point in time and do the thing. But like, hey, I like this business thing, I buy and sell stuff, it's like a way for me to hustle and kind of do more of what I want to do. And then I was like, let me just keep doing this.

• 50:16Furqan Rydhan?

  And then maybe at some point I gotta get a real job and kind of luckily like tech was really valuable and like my skill set improved, I got better at it and but a lot of that early journey was like more solo than like with a bunch of people. Um, and then met the guys Adam before Apple oven, like kind of like these other other things. And it was like, yo, we're like eight people and like Palo Alto, like building cool random apps. Like the energy for me there every day was like through the roof. And then Monkey Inferno was like the same thing, but like even more. Um, and I think I used to tell you like, I want an airport hangar, I just want to put a pretty cool stuff in it. And I just think it was like that. Before I started Founders Inc. as it is, because I was at Twitch and I'm like, I gotta get out of here, right?

• 51:01Furqan Rydhan?

  Because it's like the instant, instant thing.

• 51:03Shaan Puri?

  And why, by the way?

• 51:05Furqan Rydhan?

  I don't know, I don't think I'm a good employee. I think I'm like suited for a few roles and it's typically like doing my own stuff without much.

• 51:11Shaan Puri?

  Was there anything that just drove you crazy about it? Was there any like?

• 51:14Furqan Rydhan?

  You know, we're gonna do a whole nother pod on this, basically. I feel like the first week or month of like, yo, let's do a bunch of stuff. And they're like, slow down. Like, why? I want to do more. Like, I want to do more things. And this resistance feeling of like, ah, we already thought about this, or we tried this. Like, no, let's just go do stuff. And I never enjoyed that. And I think startups and small teams, just because you have so much to do, that's the kind of mentality. And so I talked to probably like seventy five to a hundred founders before starting Founders Inc. And I really wanted to learn. It's like, I knew a bunch of people, I used to interact with them, even at like Bebo and Monkey Inferno. I'd have them come by and like, just talk, whatever. And I really enjoyed that. That was like fun.

• 51:56Furqan Rydhan?

  I started angel investing a lot, which was like, cool. I thought I wanted to do that, but it wasn't fun. It was like, meet great, talented people, get excited about them. And then you're like a monthly update away, like, give them the check and then that's it. Damn, this isn't fun.

• 52:10Shaan Puri?

  First meeting is great. It's a great first date.

• 52:12Furqan Rydhan?

  I walk away and I'm like,

• 52:14Shaan Puri?

  There's no relationship. And you're like, what happened to that great first date?

• 52:17Furqan Rydhan?

  Exactly. And so I was like, man, I don't really want to do that, but something like this where I could help these like early entrepreneurs, things that I've just done over and over again. I didn't have this. Like, what's a version of that? I talked to a bunch of founders and they all said something to me. And I was like, what do you need? Like, what, what help do you need? I thought they're all going to say money and I'm gonna start a fund. Like, that, that's what I thought was gonna happen. And they all said something different. They said something like, I need people who understand my problems. And we used to do those masterminds. And it was really about like, who do you go to for founder problems?

• 52:52Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 52:52Furqan Rydhan?

  It's like, what are your founder problems? They're your co-founders, your employees, or your investors? So you can't go to any of these people. They might be the problem, right? And so who do you go to?

• 53:00Shaan Puri?

  Or even if they're not the problem, you need to present, you don't want to worry your employees, you don't want to worry your investors, you kind of have to maintain a certain. Aura of momentum and morale. So you can't just go be dumping problems on them or be like, I don't know. You're supposed to know. You're the guy.

• 53:15Furqan Rydhan?

  And we, we would go in that room, that little circle room with the circle table. We'd be in there and I don't know what the employees were thinking. They're just like, oh man, these guys are talking again. They're gonna come out with something different. But we could talk about anything and then leave the room and be like, no, we're still where we are.

• 53:28Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 53:28Furqan Rydhan?

  And I think, you know, co-founder can be that for you. A lot of entrepreneurs starting out, they don't have that. And even if they have it, there's like other things that they're experiencing. And so when we used to put these folks together in these kind of masterminds, that feeling was like awesome and it felt like we could relate. And actually I heard the same thing from a bunch of founders I used to talk to. And I was like, I think it's something more like this, where I could do something and put everybody in a box. And I thought it was gonna be more digital. I think COVID times and, you know,

• 53:58Shaan Puri?

  Started on Discord or whatever.

• 53:59Furqan Rydhan?

  Started on Discord. I mean, like Farza, Ben was in these groups, like just a few others. Like, it was just people I knew around me and kind of COVID hit, it was digital. We were talking every week. We would give ourselves these like accountability kind of ship it sessions. We would have an area to talk about stuff and you could see the dots connecting. And then I got an opportunity to like get this space and I'd been looking for like something. And, you know, it wasn't like, oh, San Francisco needs a place. I'm from the Bay Area normally. So this is the best place for me. But I said, look, if it's gonna be S F, we're gonna be on the water. No more, no more, kind of places like that. So we got this like weird opportunity to find this space and like really make a bet when like nobody else was. I think it was like late 2020 is when I approached them here.

• 54:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 54:43Furqan Rydhan?

  And it took maybe like nine months to figure it all out. Another three months to like renovate it and stuff like that. So it's still very much.

• 54:48Shaan Puri?

  Like, oh, we gotta call another call about breaking a lease. Wait, wait, he wants to sign a lease right now? Oh, come on in.

• 54:53Furqan Rydhan?

  That's what it felt like here. I mean, this place, Fort Mason, has 300 events a year. They went to zero with COVID. All the places, you know, art galleries, art schools, like what do you, what do you do? Like, you know, and this is supposed to be like this innovation place and. A little bit older and

• 55:07Shaan Puri?

  Yes, that's one of your tricks is that you don't run away when the dips happen. I remember when, uh, early on 2013, 14, something like that. Um, we meet, I buy Bitcoin, cause I don't know, you're into crypto. Some, some people in the office, you know, maybe I was dumb about the Ethereum idea.

• 55:25Furqan Rydhan?

  Right.

• 55:25Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, PG, uh, Pete, Pete Dix was, was, was all, you know, he's mining Bitcoin on our servers. So I buy some Bitcoin and literally like the next week, I, I forget like super convinced. I'm like, oh, guys, I see it. I believe, here's why I believe I'm giving you my case. I bought, yeah, great. Like the next week, price cuts in half. It goes down to like 300 bucks or something like that. And, uh, I came in, I'm like, oh, the Bitcoin, I was, you know, whatever.

• 55:51Furqan Rydhan?

  And you go, that was a fun week or two, you know?

• 55:53Shaan Puri?

  Well, you were like, oh, this is great. Cause now everything's half off. Like you, you, you literally told me that. You go, you believe if you, if you buy now, you can cut your buy price. Basically you can go down by 50%, you'll, you'll cost average in at half the amount.

• 56:06Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 56:06Shaan Puri?

  Like, and I was like, oh, he's right. Cause I was just riding a roller coaster of like, you know, I was doing what a cliche person would do.

• 56:13Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 56:13Shaan Puri?

  When things are good, this is great. When things are bad, uh, maybe it's not great. Whereas you were like, dude, did anything actually change or just the, the external sentiment? And so I bought more. So I thank you for that. That was a very good, uh, you know, decision at the time to go buy more when things go down. I think you've done that with, with other, you know, bets, whether it's San Francisco real estate during the COVID time, or it's, you know, whether it's crypto or VR, when, when things go out of fashion, I feel like you don't run away, which is important.

• 56:42Furqan Rydhan?

  There's a signal. It's like, things go out of fashion and there's another place where the people who don't shape narratives typically like, I'm technical, so I live in these like GitHub projects. I live where the builders are, I like engage with them. If I see that somewhere where it's like, huh. All the people talking are like against it. These people like, nobody told them yet. That like it's done, like, oh, this is dead, right? Like, they're all seeing it and then these guys are just shipping more code and like, hey, did anybody tell you it's over? Like, what are you talking about? I don't care. And I just think that's the perfect environment.

• 57:16Shaan Puri?

  And even if you're right, one out of five times like that, you'll be right in such a big way that it works out.

• 57:20Furqan Rydhan?

  And then, by the way, for me, it's just fun. So like, this is fun. Like, I love building stuff. I like building technology. I did a lot of software, obviously, because it's been magical to develop things and like distribute it to the world. Uh, we had some hardware projects. I don't know if you remember Jamie, by the way.

• 57:36Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, we, uh, at one point in time, when we're, when we were working together, we had an idea for a, uh, this is, it was cool. It was like a voice control, it's kind of like Alexa.

• 57:45Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 57:46Shaan Puri?

  Uh, we called it Jamie.

• 57:47Furqan Rydhan?

  I don't know why, but like,

• 57:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we like Jamie. I still like the name, that was good. Uh, and what you were saying was like, you're like, we can, instead of creating a, everyone was trying to create a device. Portal was trying to create a screen. Amazon was trying to create a screen. You're like, that makes it expensive. You're like, everybody already has TV screens in their house.

• 58:03Furqan Rydhan?

  Plug into your TV.

• 58:04Shaan Puri?

  What if you just plug in like a Chromecast and now you turn your TV from just a, a blank screen into like, an Amazon, like Alexa thing?

• 58:12Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 58:13Shaan Puri?

  That was cool. We didn't, we didn't do it because it was good, like, we sort of saw like,

• 58:16Furqan Rydhan?

  Huge distraction.

• 58:17Shaan Puri?

  We were like, yo, that's gonna be like a brutal battlefield.

• 58:20Furqan Rydhan?

  When we took it to Michael and he just gave us that look like, uh, this is,

• 58:24Shaan Puri?

  Well, he was just like, yo, when all of the like trillion dollar companies are gonna go after the same prize, like, you can, but do you really want to? Like, you know, it's, it's a better to do the things they're overlooking. I just think it's probably good advice, to be fair. We also were gonna do a crypto exchange with Crypto Got Hot and he was like, for a different reason, he's like, hey, I'm already rich. I don't want to lose everything and I don't really know what crypto is. It's 2014, like crypto might just be like super illegal and I don't want to risk it all on that.

• 58:51Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 58:52Shaan Puri?

  If we had done that, it might've been good. Yeah, so you have to be careful, like, even really smart and successful people, you can't like, just take their word. You know, you gotta have the independent mindedness.

• 59:01Furqan Rydhan?

  Hundred percent. And I think it's fun to take shots, don't get stubborn over it. Like, man, people fall in love with their ideas. I think that's, it took me probably like, I don't know, 10 years to figure that out. Like, you have to get like, almost like, you have to like really take the hits.

• 59:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 59:15Furqan Rydhan?

  To like, really like live in that of like, yeah, there's a lot of ideas. I may try a lot of them. My mission isn't all of them. I gotta find the right ones where I can really spend the energy on. But I was gonna talk about one more. So we built Chatty Heads, which by the way, now in the AI world, we were fucking ahead of the

• 59:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we were a little early.

• 59:31Furqan Rydhan?

  We could generate images for like, I don't know, 5,000

• 59:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it was like Dali.

• 59:34Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah. And that's what it, that's what it feels like. But I think it's like, cool. It's like, whatever technology you have today, go try to produce a thing. It might not be the right time. It might be the right moment. The media might be wrong. Team might be wrong. Some of those you should pursue again and again. And some of those are great learning exercises to build on top of. And I, you know, I got a chance to meet a lot of people who were professional athletes. And then one thing a lot of them talk about is like, um, you know, basketball might end. Like, my career will end at like 35. It's like, that's, that's my game. It's done. Now what do I do? And I think what we get a chance to do, whether it's like business, or, you know, content, or like building stuff, like, I'm gonna do this for the rest of my life if I want. I think that's the fun part.

• 1:00:16Shaan Puri?

  Buffett's like, what, 90 something?

• 1:00:17Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:18Shaan Puri?

  He's still at the top of his investing game.

• 1:00:20Furqan Rydhan?

  Exactly. And so it's like, well, like, what am I in the rush for? Like, I, I'm not just here to like, enjoy the journey. But I also don't want to be like, oh, I gotta solve it tomorrow.

• 1:00:29Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:00:29Furqan Rydhan?

  When I was young, it was like, oh, I gotta be the millionaire by whatever. It's like, at some point, it was like, I don't know, man, I just want to keep doing this.

• 1:00:35Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:00:36Furqan Rydhan?

  And if I need to like hustle my way to it or not, like, it doesn't really matter. Like, you know, I took an Android engineer job at Monkey Inferno.

• 1:00:43Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:43Furqan Rydhan?

  Cause I was the guy, you know, I met you and I was like, I want to work with this guy.

• 1:00:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:46Furqan Rydhan?

  I think that was my worst skill, by the way. I just learned Android.

• 1:00:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you fooled me.

• 1:00:50Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah. So like, I was like, I don't know, I gotta get it somehow. And like, I know I'm gonna do great stuff here. I gotta show it. But like, I'm not afraid to put in the effort. We need to put in the effort. Also not afraid to like, not rush to the answer.

• 1:01:03Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:01:03Furqan Rydhan?

  And like, you don't want to be like casual and like wait. You'll, you want to be kind of like in the middle there. You want to know when to attack and when to not. But like, I don't know. You gotta enjoy it. Otherwise, you're really

• 1:01:12Shaan Puri?

  Naval has the best quote on this. He says, impatience with action, patience with results.

• 1:01:16Furqan Rydhan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:16Shaan Puri?

  It's the unbeatable combination. If you ever go against somebody who's gonna operate like that, they will win.

• 1:01:20Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:21Shaan Puri?

  But that, that is a, you cannot lose if you're gonna be constantly impatient with, with doing things. You're not gonna sit back and hope it all happens. So you're impatient with action, but, but patient with results. That's, the hard part is a lot of founders are impatient with action and impatient with results.

• 1:01:34Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:34Shaan Puri?

  Or non-founders are, you know, patient with both. And then nothing ever happens. So you have to get that combo.

• 1:01:40Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:41Shaan Puri?

  Speaking of founders, you worked with Adam at Applevin and Applevin has been like kind of a staggering company because you know, when I met you, it was, you know, a successful company. You told me the stories about before you guys started that. You're like, we were wandering around, we tried a bunch of different ideas, we're playing FIFA because we didn't have, we didn't know what the heck we were doing. We were just come in, try to figure it out. If we didn't have it, we would brainstorm and go home the next day. What is special about that guy? What's a superpower from him or a story from him that you remember that, you know, I can learn from or you, anybody to listen to this can learn from?

• 1:02:16Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah. So there was this like four year period-ish when I was there. I think three years of it was like not Applevin. So like most of my intersection there is like not what it is today. But I did get a chance to spend a lot of time with him and ideate ideas.

• 1:02:30Shaan Puri?

  What's the Cliff Notes of his story? So people know, because people don't know, he's pretty under the radar, right?

• 1:02:34Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah. I mean, um, his backstory, I think he did some stuff in like equities or trading at some point. I think he got into like ads at some point through like marketing and affiliate stuff. He built a few different products. Maybe he was a key member of the team and then he had like a few companies. I think he had actually built up some like, you know, wealth. I don't know how much it was, but it was enough where like, you're like, okay, this person can make this bet and like fund the operations.

• 1:03:00Shaan Puri?

  So he was, he was kind of self-funding?

• 1:03:02Furqan Rydhan?

  Self-funding. It was him and this guy, John. John had done a lot of stuff on the internet. He was more the technical person. Adam was more the business person. Uh, they were both uniquely and the skills incredible, like their personalities incredible. For Adam, I think the thing that I felt the most was like, I think it's the first time in my life, I was like, man, this is what A plus execution looks like. Like this guy just hits it. Like if we were talking about something, we made a choice within like, it felt like within minutes that was like delivered to this team. And look, when you're like an eight person team, it's really easy to do it. To decide something, go slow, maybe next week, oh, we'll do it later. We'll make these role changes later. We'll tell everybody later. No, it was like immediate. And when it was like moving on from something, it was immediate.

• 1:03:46Furqan Rydhan?

  When it was a new idea we wanted to do is immediate. When it was something else, it was immediate. It was just like, it felt like this is what execution is, is like. You know, think, decide, act. And like, how fast you run through that depends on like, the moment you decide, the delay on act is like, usually a problem. I think this is where most, I, I'm not great at this myself, but I've gotten a chance to see that. I think it was kind of similar in a different realm. When I met you, I was like, I think this person's product thinking and like, ability to like, unpack like a complex thing like product or distribution, or maybe team motivation or whatever. It's like, you see A plus talent and you're like, you want to do it. Um, for me, it was like 10 or 12 years, almost like a solo founder journey.

• 1:04:31Furqan Rydhan?

  Like, I had this e-commerce company, I had these other little things. I had like a startup, I had people with me, but I never saw somebody else that I was like, yo, like, I want to learn these skills. I bring something to the table that's A plus. I could pair it with this A plus person and now we're going to be like a superpower.

• 1:04:48Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:04:49Furqan Rydhan?

  I fell out with Adam. Uh, it was very clear and obvious. You know, like the size of company, I, I don't want to say not a surprise, but also it's not a surprise that this kind of person would go do it. Like, like it just is that. I think the same thing you're talking about, like Ryan at Flexport.

• 1:05:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:04Furqan Rydhan?

  It feels like some people are just like, they're built for that. You still need a lot of stuff to go right and make a ton of great decisions and a ridiculous team.

• 1:05:13Shaan Puri?

  One thing I've come to learn is that where I think we screwed up, because we did Monkey Inferno, which was basically our little idea lab, but we had a beautiful setup. It's like, you got funding already done. You have great team, you're in San Francisco, beautiful office, really talented team, like, you know, we're not the PayPal mafia, but like, everybody's gone on to do kind of interesting shit. Everyone's, you know, uh, I don't think we had the level of success that we could have, given the talent. My take was, I think we were, um, good execution, maybe even great execution, but poor project selection, meaning we were going after these like moonshots, like create the next hit social media app, which is like, you know, there's been like seven ever.

• 1:05:57Shaan Puri?

  There's not that many of them ever to exist. So, you know, I think we did bad with project selection. It seems like what, one thing that Adam did, aside from great execution was project selection. I think you told me some story about like, they went to some conference, you guys were working on one thing all together and he came back and had that very quick, like, think, decide, act loop, where he's like, we're doing a mobile ad network. We're doing mobile games. I, I don't know the full story, but like, yeah, it seemed like just that one choice at that time.

• 1:06:24Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:24Shaan Puri?

  Is the make or break, you know, like.

• 1:06:25Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah, yeah, huge difference. And, you know, like, I think we had many of those moments. I wouldn't trade it, by the way. I think our learnings, I still leverage them. A lot of the things that we talked about, how we ran the teams, like, they still radiate and resonate with me. And so like immense wealth in knowledge and like, like literally like experience of the thing.

• 1:06:46Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:06:47Furqan Rydhan?

  Beyond like.

• 1:06:48Shaan Puri?

  You're talking about when we worked here.

• 1:06:49Furqan Rydhan?

  When we worked.

• 1:06:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:06:49Furqan Rydhan?

  But there were a few moments where project selection could have been massive for us.

• 1:06:53Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:54Furqan Rydhan?

  That outcome. Um, you know, like they, you know, and we could talk about a little bit on that and that journey, but like, we did blob. It was a live streaming product, Google Hangouts, public live stream.

• 1:07:05Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, like if you saw a clubhouse get really popular, we had built basically a clubhouse before clubhouse. And it got.

• 1:07:10Furqan Rydhan?

  Kind of like what Twitch right now, like there's a big section of this, like just chatting, hanging out category.

• 1:07:15Shaan Puri?

  Right. We built an app like that. It got to four million users, but it didn't become the next big thing.

• 1:07:19Furqan Rydhan?

  I don't know if you remember this conversation, but we had this one time when we were deciding what to do next. Like, are we doing mobile version of this? Cause we see other things happening. Or do we do the P to B version?

• 1:07:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:30Furqan Rydhan?

  And Zoom didn't exist. And that, I think that was.

• 1:07:33Shaan Puri?

  And we were like, B to B. I remember there's like, it was like so short of a conversation, which was so silly. We were just like, B to B, that's not cool.

• 1:07:43Furqan Rydhan?

  It wasn't cool and it wasn't clear. Cause if you ever think of it, it's like 2015. There wasn't a billion like B to B companies crushing it.

• 1:07:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:50Furqan Rydhan?

  But like every year since then, it was like seven or nine, like, cause I think at that time it was only a few had really reached, like, it was like, I don't know, box.net and Dropbox and it wasn't.

• 1:08:01Shaan Puri?

  It definitely wasn't as obvious at the same time.

• 1:08:03Furqan Rydhan?

  It should have been obvious.

• 1:08:03Shaan Puri?

  It wasn't as hidden as, as we kind of made it seem.

• 1:08:06Furqan Rydhan?

  We totally, you know.

• 1:08:07Shaan Puri?

  Like, I remember Citrix was like a multi-billion dollar product. And Citrix is online was the way that people did these webinars, webinars and web conferencing at the time. And it was so bad. And their users, like, we were trying to make this cool social app and SAP and Oracle were using our tool just because it was better, even though it was like not meant for that.

• 1:08:27Furqan Rydhan?

  Why is your color like weird and purple? Why do you got this weird star thing?

• 1:08:31Shaan Puri?

  And instead of looking at those clues and being like, huh. Maybe we could do that. We missed that project selection choice. I remember that day because that was a probably a multi-hundred-million-dollar fork in the road moment, you know?

• 1:08:42Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 1:08:43Shaan Puri?

  You still had to execute, but...

• 1:08:44Furqan Rydhan?

  For sure. I mean, we could execute, right? But it is, did we have the right selection? And could we get the right insight in our mind to inception? It also, when we decided to end Blab, I don't know if you remember, you went to this barbecue, I forgot who you met.

• 1:08:56Shaan Puri?

  James Courier.

• 1:08:57Furqan Rydhan?

  And they were telling us, you know, you're talking about like, hey, this content network problem. Because it was like, the moment that entered our mind is like, oh shit, we're fucked. Like, that's what it felt like. Like, we don't have the ability to intersect these. And we kept looking at Twitch, like, why? Okay, so we know we don't, because people come on for an hour, they do a show. The epic content is not on long enough for people to show up and intersect with it. How come Twitch wins? And then it turned out that, oh, people play games for eight to 10 hours.

• 1:09:23Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so it didn't matter when you showed up.

• 1:09:25Furqan Rydhan?

  Correct. And then the context reset. So it's like, I have, it was like, you know, the feeling a lot of Monkey Inferno to me, and like, the things we built was like, it's not slow down, it's speed up, but like, look for the clues, don't be afraid of that. And again, the eager, you know, the ego or the stubbornness of like, we want to build a giant social app, like, I want to go somewhere around the world where somebody's using my consumer product. Like, that was the stubbornness that we all did unmask.

• 1:09:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:50Furqan Rydhan?

  And it's like, if we had just kind of unmasked it a little bit, there was these project selection moments. And so, there was a lot of that. I still feel that sometimes, but, I don't know, maybe it's because I'm older and I'm like, less willing to like, be nimble in that way. But I did want to talk about one more hardware robotics thing we've got a few minutes. And so, I think this is another, like, resurgence moment happening. Like, for a long time, hardware has been too hard, too expensive, software gets funded.

• 1:10:14Shaan Puri?

  That's a Silicon Valley motto, right? Hardware is hard.

• 1:10:16Furqan Rydhan?

  Hardware is hard, software is easy, software scales, it's eaten the world. Like, these were all the mentalities. I think it's flipping, and I think it's a few things that have all kind of showed up together. So there's two types of hardware that I think are now, like, there and like, ripe to build. Same recipe, can small teams do it? Can you do it without a lot of funding? And then can your output be really big and like, impact a lot of people? And so I think there's one around consumer products. So like, the combination of... Raspberry Pi and cloud AI has completely changed what it takes to build something. Right? So there's a company in our studio, Magical Toys, they're building an AI teddy bear. We'll do a little demo of it after. We'll kind of get to that. And you know, I think what that.

• 1:10:57Shaan Puri?

  How old is that guy who's been that? He's like young, right?

• 1:10:59Furqan Rydhan?

  I think Fatim's like 24, 25.

• 1:11:02Shaan Puri?

  And it's not like he has huge funding or a huge team, but he's able to.

• 1:11:04Furqan Rydhan?

  He showed up here. I don't know how he got here, to be honest. I think like many people here. They meet somebody, they attract someone, just show up by the way, and it's awesome. Like we've created that environment where it makes sense. He had done some small projects in college, like he built this thing called Desk Buddy. It was a little like ink screen with like two eyes that just blinked. And that was really it. He couldn't talk to it, couldn't do anything. It was just like a low desk buddy.

• 1:11:27Shaan Puri?

  So you're not alone? Is that the idea?

• 1:11:28Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah, I don't know what it was, but I remember seeing it. I'm like, that's cool. Like I want one on my desk. Like it was fun. And they brainstormed a bunch of ideas and you know, the combination of like, hey, we got Raspberry Pis, we could do these little things. We could use 3D printers to build enclosures. And then now we've got this cloud AI thing that like can be really powerful. And they ended up coming with this, you know, idea, which was like, hey, we're going to build a toy. And first they literally made Ted. The, you know, stuffed animal Ted, made it talk like it. I was like, oh, this is wild. Like, you know, and it. AI could do this, but everyone's trying to make coding faster. Or there's, you know, developer solving developer problems. And I love when somebody takes that and goes, let me go to this other place where nobody's thinking about.

• 1:12:09Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:12:09Furqan Rydhan?

  And he spent probably the last nine months sitting, refining. I think we sent you one of the first units. It probably broke.

• 1:12:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, first, first he gave me a teddy bear with the back, like the whole computer was just hanging out the back. Like a, like a half done surgery. Uh, but it was interesting. I gave it to my kids, you know, I think they were probably like two years old, three years old at the time. And every other toy we have in our living room is pre-programmed. So it's like, this is a toy, push this button, it'll say this thing. That's all it can do. With this toy, it was like, ignore the thing hanging out the back. It was like, um, hey, we love Paw Patrol. Can you ask us some Paw Patrol trivia? Certainly. I can tell you Paw Patrol. Who is the red dog? And Paw Patrol's like, Marshall. Correct. And I was like, hey, can you keep track of our points? He goes, okay.

• 1:12:57Shaan Puri?

  Two points. And I was like, whoa. And my kids were blown away because now you have an infinite toy. Whereas every toy is finite. It can only do the things it could do out of the box. Now suddenly you have a toy that's basically chat GPT shoved into a stuffed animal. And you're like, wow, now that can do anything. I could say, sing me a song. I could say, tell me a bedtime story. I could say, I can make it do many, many things now.

• 1:13:18Furqan Rydhan?

  And I think what was cool is Fatim and this little like lab that we built and the lab has like some 3D printers, some electronics area. Honestly, we started with like an empty room and people would come by. They're like, what's this room for? I'm like, oh, it's gonna be a machine shop, electronics lab one day. Like, oh, can I use it? I'm like, yeah, but we have nothing here. What do you need? You need tables? Great. We'll bring tables. Oh, you need like a little thing? Okay, we'll add that. You need 3D printers? We'll add that. And I've seen now like tens of people come through. Oh, you know, one person sit there, spend some time, tinker. And Fatim did that. Like, he built one. He showed us, he built another, he tried different varieties, different versions, you know, built, you know, new cases when he printed.

• 1:14:00Furqan Rydhan?

  Buying Raspberry Pis, new software. And like, I think he shipped like 60 to 70 units across four to six months. Which in software world just feels like, wow, ancient, like 60 users. In hardware, this might have cost like half a million to a million dollars. I think we did that for like 50 to 100 grand.

• 1:14:18Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:14:18Furqan Rydhan?

  So like that difference, one person, 3D printers, Raspberry Pis, some AI. And you could just sit there and deliver units and try it with people. When we showed Uber first, by the way, internally, everyone was like, no, I don't, I don't think kids are gonna do this. Weird. His daughter used it and it changed his mind. Like, like she changed his mind.

• 1:14:38Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:14:38Furqan Rydhan?

  Because he saw what it could do, but like, and how do you get that opportunity to prototype cheap?

• 1:14:43Shaan Puri?

  Right. So hardware being hard, where it's like, maybe hardware is not as hard as it used to be. That like Sam calls these inflections where, you know, something changes, like there's famously an inflection where uh, when Obamacare came out, then Oscar Health built a thing that was just to do Obamacare and like, you know, had, you know, became like a billion dollar company. It's like, so what are the inflections? So, oh, phones now have GPS in them. Now you can build Uber. You couldn't build Uber before because the driver and the rider needed to find each other. How were they gonna do that if you didn't have phones with with GPS on them? Uh, phones have cameras. Now you can have Instagram, right? So it's like the technology inflection can happen. It's one type of inflection.

• 1:15:23Shaan Puri?

  And you're basically saying because of Raspberry Pi plus AI plus 3D printing.

• 1:15:29Furqan Rydhan?

  Consumer hardware is very easy now.

• 1:15:31Shaan Puri?

  Hardware is now possible now, like.

• 1:15:33Furqan Rydhan?

  Now more than ever.

• 1:15:34Shaan Puri?

  Two people can actually mess around and tinker till they get something right. Kind of wasn't feasible five, 10 years ago.

• 1:15:40Furqan Rydhan?

  Correct. And when we built Jamie, I used a Raspberry Pi at that time, which was the first version. Raspberry Pi was thought of as this hobbyist market of tinkers that are gonna buy a few of them. They've, they've sold like 60 million units or something ridiculous like that. Like 35 bucks a pop, 60 million, there's like a few billion dollars of Raspberry Pi out there. And I think what it did is you used to have to make like custom boards, custom software. And you know, for a technical person like me, I don't wanna go that far. Like I have certain skills that I could do really well. And typically it's like read a few guides on the internet and like stitch stuff together. It felt too far for even like somebody like me. It felt like, man, it's like really serious engineering. I need 10 people, 10 millions of dollars. I got convinced somebody there's a big market.

• 1:16:23Furqan Rydhan?

  And now like build up this company, which probably will fail because I raised too much, too much pressure, too much demand on return, et cetera. And to me, the Raspberry Pi was one of the unlocks and there's the Nvidia Jetson now, which has like GPUs on device. And there's so much more there, but.

• 1:16:38Shaan Puri?

  So what are, what are other things besides magical toys that you saw somebody built? Interesting things you're seeing built in the hardware robotics side?

• 1:16:44Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah. So we have AJ who's building the, you know, neurocity. He built that first version, which I think I've showed you before, which is brain computer interface. Now he has a second version that's really tiny. It's like the size of AirPods. You could put it right here, special purpose. So really like the ability to prototype, develop the thing, get like hundreds or thousands of units out there, improve the design and doing that without a giant team allows him to kind of continue. We've seen like a variety of things kind of come out on that front. I think the second area that's happening is, you know, there's a consumer hardware. And then there's like this robotics, drones and kind of this other world where we have so

• 1:17:26Furqan Rydhan?

  much physical equipment in the world, forklifts and lawnmowers and cars and like, you know, all these things that we do that requires either a person, like, you know, with drones, we invested in this company, Lucid Drones, which, you know, they built a power washing drone, could go up in buildings, could power wash, you know, the glass, instead of people hanging from the side. There's another company that, um, And is that working? Like, do people, is it like? Yeah, working very well. And, you know, like, what's interesting is there's like a unique business model to find here as well. And I think this is why I love like being in the weeds a little bit and like seeing it is like, most people think you're going to build this product and then you're going to take the people that like manually wash

• 1:18:09Furqan Rydhan?

  a building and you're going to like get rid of them. What actually happens is there's like a team that's like a little like small business somewhere. They have like five people at their company. Dave's Power Washing. Dave Power. Window's so clear, you won't even know it's there. Amazing, right? Dave's got a great tagline as well. And, you know, people end up finding that if you just sell to those, those small businesses, you give them more tools, they could serve more buildings, do it more efficiently. That distribution is built in. Maybe in the long run, this starts changing, but like now there are a ton of these opportunities. I've seen one for farms and like, you know, mowing the weeds around certain fruits or kind of like inspecting them. You just send people between these things to go like do it. And now there's like a little like robot and instead of the

• 1:18:53Furqan Rydhan?

  one person doing it for two weeks or two people, the one person's there monitoring it at the facility in air conditioning and like. Watching on the iPad. Watching on the iPad and it might get stuck early on or might detect something. Now they gotta go fix that thing. This efficiency, I think, is like massive and we're seeing it at many places. So same thing, I saw these two guys building here in San Francisco, they're like random warehouse in the back of some other store, like two dudes like literally grinding bootstrapping, like, I just go in there. I'm like, I like these guys. They took a forklift. They automated it. They took self-driving car tech. It probably took billions of dollars to develop. And then all of that kind of flowed to like open source and typically open source sometimes is behind than the cutting edge.

• 1:19:37Furqan Rydhan?

  But in 10 years, that like normalizes. Uh, we see this elsewhere, like AI models like Llama. But like, really, they took cameras and some LiDAR stuff and they scrapped a little computer to a forklift. And they could move it around. You could talk to it. You could kind of get it to do things. And I think there's a massive resurgence. And so forklift, physical thing. You took a little Raspberry Pi, internet, some cameras, some technologies, like we were doing computer vision technology to score like Fortnite games. They're using that same kind of technology to look at, oh, this is a box. This is the barcode that I picked up. Right. I could now use and figure out what's this thing. It could go walk around the warehouse and be like, oh, that pallet's in the wrong spot.

• 1:20:19Furqan Rydhan?

  How? It just scanned the barcode. It detected, oh, there's this pallet here. It's supposed to be over there. Go pick it up, move it over there. Like, these problems exist in warehouses. Like, I mean, you know. Right. I think you've dealt with some of those. I run a warehouse. And so to me, it's like, what are the machines? Like, what are the traditional machines we've built, probably for the last hundred years? That you're gonna slap a little computer on it and now it's a superpower? And I think this is bringing down the cost of like this robotic hardware. Like, building a robotic arm used to be like, yo, I gotta be like Tony Stark and like Iron Man. I've seen two people do it in a machine shop. I, there's a guy here, I don't even know his company. He just showed, he just had a 3D printed hand on his desk. And I'm like, what the hell was this?

• 1:21:00Furqan Rydhan?

  He's like, oh, yeah, like I, I, I created the ability to develop a full hand with all the fingers and everything. In just this 3D printer, there's a Bamboo Lab printer, which honestly, 3D printer was great. And then Bamboo Labs took it to a whole nother level, like a little bit of AI to help self-leveling and make prints great and like. Everybody loves it. And he just built his hand, pretty high quality, took a little fishing net on the inside of the hands. Like in each finger, he could like pull every finger and like do some stuff. It's like one dude, like a few months hackathon and like, I don't know what he's going to produce from that. But I just think you could do these things now in like weeks and months when they took years and like a lot of money. I think there's a huge opportunity here. Still going to take time to like marinate and develop.

• 1:21:45Furqan Rydhan?

  But I look at it as one of those things where like, if I was a mechanical engineer, if I liked hardware. And I've been told that it's just AI and software and like your stuff isn't that interesting. It's like, no, no, this is very interesting right now. Like you need to find a place to do it. And you know, like I'll even say, like, I think we're going even further for us. Like we have this space we built here, we call it the founder lab. Like this is where a lot of people come, they tinker on stuff. We have founders here, we have builders, we have creators here, we have all kinds of people doing stuff. It's a little machine shop and that kind of pushed us to be like, wait, there's more. We're seeing more, we're talking to more people thinking about this. And so I ended up getting this kind of industrial space and call it the garage. It's 20,000 square feet of industrial space. I'll show you in a little bit. But it looks like, you know, San Francisco real estate is not the best.

• 1:22:29Furqan Rydhan?

  I think this is the time to make these bets. But I've talked to 25 to 50 founders in the last 12 months that need a hardware space like this. To tinker, to have smaller people around them, to have the machines around them, to just being able to develop it. Probably for less than a hundred grand, they can go and proof of concept and prototype the thing. And look, we're seeing the hype cycle of like humanoid robots. Right. That's that like hype above. I'm more excited about all these startups that are going to form. They're going to build this expertise. They're going to be a hundred million dollar teams, whether it's their product or their knowledge. Right. That's happening now and two people are doing it like every single day.

• 1:23:11Furqan Rydhan?

  Like they're spawning these things. And so consumer hardware is is one area. But I think robotics and what typically was known as like deep tech. Like I need like PhDs and like stacks of them and $50 million or $100 million. That's the second one. And I think it's like, there's a few people seeing it. Maybe there are sectors like defense where it's like exciting, but like. I don't know. I think we're gonna see machines everywhere and every kind of version of it. And I think I've seen people develop like cooking robots, laundry machine things, folding, drones to inspect stuff, drones to map interior spaces like Matterport is a giant company and a human goes and puts a tripod everywhere and like this is a little drone that's gonna fly through

• 1:23:54Furqan Rydhan?

  the whole house and like map it for you and that expands that. And I just see one or two person teams able to do this faster than I've ever seen it. I feel more capable. Maybe I just really wanna get into hardware again myself and

• 1:24:06Shaan Puri?

  Well, I think that's the point, though. It's a lot of people would wanna mess with this. And if something goes from not tinkerable to tinkerable, suddenly it's now the like, it's kinda like before you're competing 1v1. Now it's 1 versus the field.

• 1:24:19Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:19Shaan Puri?

  The field, of course, any individual thing in the field might suck.

• 1:24:22Furqan Rydhan?

  Correct.

• 1:24:23Shaan Puri?

  But the field overall is super powerful. And now you're saying the field is open.

• 1:24:28Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:28Shaan Puri?

  For, you know, hardware tinkerers, which it wasn't open before. That's a big deal.

• 1:24:31Furqan Rydhan?

  Yeah, we do these like residencies here. We'll bring people here for a month or six weeks. We just tell them like, here's a theme, here's a space to go do things. When the Vision Pro came out, we did it. We had about 40 Vision Pro devs. We probably had the largest concentration of Vision Pro devs out of Apple.

• 1:24:46Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:24:46Furqan Rydhan?

  Anywhere. And the knowledge of that, like, look, it didn't produce some ridiculous outcome. We actually did invest in one or two teams from that. I think we just got a chance to see that technology deeply. It is AI hardware one. I remember meeting this, this kid, and I don't know where he was in the world. And he shows me this like robot, he like built like a humanoid, he built like in his bedroom. And it's like half, he only built the body, the legs. So it stopped like where the waist was. And it was like totally hand constructed. And I'm like, yeah, this is a wild, but the fact that you could like bootleg this in your bedroom and like, it could take steps. It's like crazy to me. I met these other guys, Premier, and the same trend in Raspberry Pi, they took that trend.

• 1:25:30Furqan Rydhan?

  And I mean, I love, some of these, I just, you know, I love it because I could jump on the video and they're, they were up in Seattle or something. And it's like their kitchen. And I'm like, Is there a 3D printer in your sink? And it's just like their kitchen is like all machines. And I'm like, dude, you gotta get out of your house and I gotta give you a home to like do that. That's what I want is like people who will just turn their bedroom into this. It's like, no, no, you come do it here. We'll give you a little bit better facilities. We'll give you space. You get a better place to sleep. And they took this like Raspberry Pi trend and they're like, oh, people will start with Raspberry Pis and then they build a custom board. Oh, we're building a modular Raspberry Pi thing. Between that computer.

• 1:26:05Shaan Puri?

  Next intermediate step.

• 1:26:07Furqan Rydhan?

  Oh, you want a speaker? Well, you could pick whatever speaker you want. Just put that in. Oh, you want to produce 2,000 units now? We have the ability to scale it for you. So they took the hobbyist world and the behavior that's happening, driving it. And they started this in their, literally in their kitchen. And like, I just think that, man, that's capable now. And that's the trend that I can't, I can't like unsee it sometimes.

• 1:26:28Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:26:28Furqan Rydhan?

  In hardware, both in consumer and more deep tech hardware, like drones platform is massive. Right? To be able to do things, so much opportunity to utilize that. I don't know how long it's going to take for this to become mass and mainstream, but I just keep seeing that trend right now. And I think for us.

• 1:26:45Shaan Puri?

  That's the bet you're making.

• 1:26:46Furqan Rydhan?

  That's the bet we make. And so I always joke with the guys here, it's like, we want to bet on negative one to zero. Like Peter Thiel talked about the zero to one companies. It's like, we still one step even before that. Like you're at negative one, you're wandering the forest. You need a place to tinker and like, come and get the ideas to form. This is what we will, this is what we wanted.

• 1:27:03Shaan Puri?

  Right. I love it. Ferguson, this is amazing. Good catching up as always. Let's go check out some of these spaces.

• 1:27:10Furqan Rydhan?

  Sweet.

• 1:27:10Shaan Puri?

  Let's do it. Thanks so much.