Pod Insights Summation with Auren Hoffman Life360 $LIF CEO Chris Hulls - trust, data, and modern parenting About this episode Chris Hulls is the co-founder and CEO of Life360 (NASDAQ: LIF), the family safety platform used by over 70 million people worldwide. Life360 has a market cap of $3.3 billion. In this episode of World of DaaS, Chris and Auren discuss: Building a safety super-appThe rise of tech-enabled helicopter parentingPsychedelics and CEO mental healthWhy vision beats data in startups Looking for more tech, data and venture capital intel? Head to worldofdaas.com for our podcast, newsletter and events, and...
Transcript 11,298 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Auren Hoffman? Hello data nerds. Welcome to World of DAS. I'm your host, Orin Hoffman, CEO of Safegraph and GP of Flex Capital. Discover more episodes, get weekly data as a service news at worldofdaas.com. That's spelled world of D A A S dot com. Hello fellow data nerds. My guest today is Chris Halls. Chris is the founder and CEO of Lif360, the family safety platform used by over 70 million people worldwide. Lif360 trades on NASDAQ under the ticker L I F and has a market cap of over $3.3 billion. Chris, welcome to World of DAS.
0:38 Speaker 01 Thanks for having me. I'm excited.
0:40 Auren Hoffman? Very excited. We've been old friends. Now Lif360 started as a simple location sharing, help you manage, understand where your kids are going. Was there an insight that you had early on that this could be like a bigger platform play?
0:55 Speaker 01 I don't want to overstate our level of vision, but the story was a little bit different. We actually started to be very safety focused, inspired by Hurricane Katrina, helped families reconnect after big emergencies. Originally a school idea that was pre-smartphone. So the real insight we had is we built a prototype of the product for the then upcoming Android platform. iPhone was out, there were no third-party apps. So Android was the first phone where you were going to have background location access. And then the light bulb was, there's something bigger here. We're just seeing where someone is on a phone. It's very, very powerful. And we saw that safety sounds good, but out of sight, out of mind, but location was a daily use case. And it was the era of social networks for everything. Younger people probably don't even remember this,
1:40 Speaker 01 but social networks for people who like golden retrievers who happen to be gay.
1:45 Auren Hoffman? Yeah.
1:46 Speaker 01 And there were so many people that were doing social networks and our view was, if you're going after a segment, there are tons of family social networks. Like maybe it's a completely different approach and it was more about utility and safety. And we got founded with a different name and we had no money. It was a terrible name. But the idea, once we had that insight, this is actually the way to build the family social network, even though it doesn't look like the family social network. And the reason we said Lif- Three sixty is we had that platform vision essentially from that one and only pivot we did in our first year of existence. Three sixty meant everything in your life from people, pets, things. And our view was if we can get someone using a product so regularly and part of their workflow, it would open up all sorts of opportunities. The real secret sauce that we figured out was if you have safety, it's out of sight, out of mind.
2:31 Speaker 01 You just have a social product where you're competing with Facebook and all that, but you have no monetization. So we have daily engagement plus safety, and that's what people pay for. And then we get the very virtuous cycle of now we make money, we can reinvest that in growth and features and build a good product. It definitely grew much more through word of mouth than I ever expected. Even now, it's almost all organic. We built something people loved and it's really in some ways as simple as that.
2:56 Auren Hoffman? You were like my landlord. I was renting space from you back in the day. We had that office on Bryant Street in San Francisco almost 10 years ago in 2015. I was like, oh, this is cool, but I had no idea this could be like such a big business. What did I not see at the time?
3:11 Speaker 01 I think what most people didn't see, I think it ties in with echo chambers is the coastal elite, so to speak. And I'm not trying to get political here, but it does seem to have some skew on party lines. It would only be dumb horrible parents that would use such a thing. My kids are good, so why would I use that? And I'm not cheating on my family. It's very like the hoity-toity elites were like thumbing their nose.
3:36 Auren Hoffman? Almost like a privacy mindset. I don't want someone tracking that type of thing.
3:40 Speaker 01 It was deeper. It was you're a horrible parent and person if you use this. We're all about freedom and that worked so much in our favor. And all the privacy hysteria also works in our favor because the big guys just did not enter this space. So where we got really good luck, I'm digressing a bit, is we were so toxic and evil, so to speak, that we've just had like no competition. And now we're trying to get it. We've already gotten so big, which is great. But I think what people didn't realize was this was not about tracking people. Quite literally, definitionally it is, but the idea in my mind, I was a free range kid.
4:16 Auren Hoffman? It's like peace of mind.
4:17 Speaker 01 It's just convenient. I remember when cell phones were first coming out mainstream, people were saying like, if you have a cell phone, you're going to always be reachable. Does anyone say that anymore? Does anyone give up a cell phone? No, that was our insight. This is just useful. And one of the things I believe is people are lazy and take the path of least resistance. And if you build something useful, people are gonna say all these high and mighty things, but they're just gonna do whatever is useful. So I was surprised that people did not get that this was just like a very simple, practical use case.
4:50 Auren Hoffman? And you didn't even have kids at the time, so you weren't even come from experience at the time.
4:55 Speaker 01 No, I think one of the things I have been good at is step outside of myself and put myself in someone else's shoes. I'm probably at least mildly autistic. I'm slightly exaggerating. I'm in my head, so it's very fun for me to really figure out what makes people tick at a very fundamental level, even literally the big bang. What are these different forces that drive people? What is this all about? What are underlying triggers? Some of my favorite classes in college were psychology. It's not that professors almost knew much, but I'm really, really, really curious about what drives people. And I think one thing that worked very well for me in this business is that I've always been like a black sheep of black sheeps. And I think a lot of founders are black sheeps, but I'm even a black sheep from a founder perspective.
5:40 Speaker 01 And so I think a lot of younger founders at the time, and probably still today, they build products they would use themselves and do whatever's trendy. And I've never been trendy. I was a horrible salesman early on. I kind of just did whatever popped in my own head and didn't really care what conventional wisdom was.
5:57 Auren Hoffman? Now that you are a parent, and obviously a lot of your customers are parents, there's this kind of free range child movement now, Jonathan Haidt and others have talked about it. Do you think today, because of social media, because of cell phones, because of other types of things, kids are less independent than previous generations?
6:16 Speaker 01 I think yes, but I don't think that's the first order issue. I think the first order issue, and some of this gets into really hot button stuff, but the safety culture and paranoid cultures, some of it's like the decline of Western society.
6:31 Auren Hoffman? Yeah, safetyism is everywhere in society. It's not just parenting. There's a safetyism. Everything is kind of made of nerf nowadays.
6:37 Speaker 01 I'm so irritated at our school. You can't say strengths are weaknesses. It's strengths and stretches. It's fricking insane. They won't discipline the kids. It's terrible.
6:46 Auren Hoffman? Is this one of those schools where like everyone gets a trophy?
6:49 Speaker 01 Yes, everyone gets a trophy and there can't be an MVP on the soccer team. I'm in Mearns County, which is for people who don't know, right north of San Francisco and the most liberal place there is, but also very cloistered where it's like one percenters. There are luxury beliefs out there in spades. I don't think technology is their first order issue around safetyism and all that. I think the vector of addiction and just the skill of hitting dopamine cycles and all that. I think that's different, but related. I think people rise to whatever challenge they have to face and the world is so soft right now. And I think we have skewed more to good intentions around love and care and all that. But if you're not working that muscle of grit, it just doesn't happen.
7:33 Auren Hoffman? Parents are much more involved in kids' lives today than they were in the past. This idea of helicopter parenting and all your kids are on a travel team. You're constantly moving. You're constantly driving around all these places. Why has that happened? That's not a social media thing. That's something deeper.
7:50 Speaker 01 I think the non-controversial piece is it's kind of Maslow's hierarchy. I grew up in a town called Point Reyes. This is where I am right now. I'd really love it. There was 350 people in the town I grew up in and there were three buckets of people, ranch owners, ranch workers, and a very small sliver of eccentric kippies. My family was in that sliver of eccentric kippies, but ranchers were relatively wealthy and then my best friends were kids of illegal Mexican immigrants. And the reason I bring this up is what I saw from the Latino culture here. I'm not saying it's all Latinos by any means, but just that people had to get over the border, which I really admire about that. And my mom was actually an illegal immigrant as well, but illegal immigrant to Hong Kong from China, escaped in the bottom of a boat.
8:35 Speaker 01 If that is your life, you're thinking short term about survival. You do not have the ability to think about self-actualization and feeling good. We probably on some meta cycle of the world has become soft because we've had how many years of prosperity, especially in the Bay Area. And I think even look at this election, I'm saying this as an arms-length person. I did not vote for either major candidate. I think things have been working really well for the coastal elites, but it hasn't been working well for the middle of the country. I think that does directly tie into some of these luxury beliefs and why coastal people really didn't like light 360. I think the real helicopter parents, the ones that are bringing their kids like 17 activities per week and all that, and those are the same people that were like rolling their eyes at the evil light 360.
9:20 Auren Hoffman? My theory is that just for whatever reason, people care about where you go to college so much more. It's so important. Partially, I think it's the last thing parents are allowed to brag about. Chris, you could win a Nobel Prize, but if my kid goes to Harvard, like I've just trumped you in any type of conversation. And it's just the last thing we can talk about. And then people are just so intent on their kid going from the number X school to the number X minus 10 school better, 10 spots better than they were before. And so they're like doing travel, they're doing all this other random, they're like, I'm gonna get my kid into fencing type of thing. This is my theory. And they're just so wrapped up in it.
10:01 Speaker 01 I think I half agree. I think that's the very wealthy version, but I'm trying to think how that translates to regular Joe, middle class. And I think I agree with you overall, but I think there's a less, oh, I must go to Harvard version versus more like my identity is my children and this is what gives me meaning. And I think for moms in particular, the sacrifice you do for your children, you're allowed to brag about that. Just look at the Facebook posts and all that. And it's not always it's Harvard or whatever. My kid scored the goal or I'm trying to get my kids to go to community college for what it's worth. Keep them grounded and you can get into better schools that way anyway. But I don't want my kids to be my resume.
10:43 Auren Hoffman? I remember you telling me you were a free range kid. I think you told me you went to Africa by yourself when you were like 11 or something, which is crazy.
10:51 Speaker 01 My 12th birthday was in Africa, Thousand Acres, where the local family was watching me. There was no running water or electricity and to poop in a hole. And it was pretty cool. So I'm probably the most unexpected person bearing this company, but I think the fundamental misunderstanding is that we're tracking that. In theory, and I truly believe this and so I will use it with my kids when they're old enough, I'm an anxious person, which I have these competing personality types. I get anxious when my family members drive. It's not fully rational, although it kind of is. It's the one area where safety is like a real thing with driving, but use Life360 to have less anxiety and actually push into those comfort zones. I think the majority of our customers actually use it that way. It's just convenient to know how far someone away is. And instead of me being paranoid about my kids out there driving at night and not getting home,
11:36 Speaker 01 I have this app and it will keep me informed. The percentage of parents who go over the top, I am making this up based on some fuzzy intuition, but I would imagine 90% of people use Life360 in a very healthy way. 9% go over the top, but more roll your eyes over the top, and 1% are truly toxic with their kids. Actually, on the free range topic, I just saw it was Lenore Skanasi, who she's part of that free range movement. I don't know if she considers me an enemy or a friend. I consider her a friend because I actually support what she's up to. I think she doesn't believe me that I think tracking apps can be a good thing. But there was some parent that let their kids walk to school on their own at 10. 10 is freaking fine. And then they got in trouble and they're being forced to use a tracking app, which is insane to me.
12:21 Speaker 01 And I wonder like, why the absolute last thing any parent should worry about is their kid being kidnapped. It is so, so, so rare. And so I don't judge really anyone for how, where they want to be on the safety spectrum. But one thing that is weird to me is emotions over data or logic. If you want to jump out of planes or whatever, fine. Just make sure you're stack ranking correctly in your head, the appropriate level of risk. Sometimes people outside of my professional life, my personal life, I get judged for being reckless quite a bit. I don't want to bring family dynamics too much into it, but I am constantly told how reckless and crazy I am. But I know many people had little kids with like pools without covers on them.
13:06 Speaker 01 And I will guarantee I have never done anything with my kids that is anywhere as close to as dangerous as having an uncovered pool out there, period. So the whole idea of like social acceptability around risk, that's just human nature that probably hasn't changed. Maybe with social media, it's easier for these trends to go viral and then just jump on the emotional bandwagon. Do not worry about your kids being kidnapped. If you are using light 360 to prevent your kids from getting kidnapped, you are being an irrational user of our product. I'm happy for you to use it. Our marketing team now is great, but people used to told me not to say these sort of things. They undermine yourself. If you are using light 360 because you're worried about your kids getting kidnapped, you have your priorities wrong.
13:47 Auren Hoffman? What are some parenting behaviors that are currently maybe quote unquote weird that you think will be much more normal 10 years from now?
13:54 Speaker 01 Location sharing, that's our big one. We proved that one, right? A lot of the things I was hoping to change the world have become normal, have become normal. If you asked me five years ago, contrarian beliefs, I could tell you so many, but I feel very happy and relieved that a lot of them are less controversial now. A lot of people say there's going to be a return to like the real world and get out of this digital addiction we have. I'm very suspicious of that. And if anything, I think we're going to be uploaded to the hive mind and that's going to be normalized. And my reason for saying that is I don't think you can put toothpaste back in the tube. And if anything, these trends are accelerating.
14:34 Speaker 01 So I wonder, I'm not making this a prediction per se, but this whole idea of get off the screens, it might go the complete other way. And we're just plugged into the matrix at some point. In fact, I'd go so hard saying, I think there will be some sort of like, we are all plugged into the matrix moment. And I'm assuming we'll talk about this later, but in terms of data privacy, I think people completely get confused about data privacy. But there is a real concern like the future is like Westworld or the matrix or something. I think that is a fair debate.
15:00 Auren Hoffman? In our homes today, we have so many listening devices. Most of us have cameras everywhere. We're starting to see a world where we might start interacting with them more. You've got these classes where you might be interacting with, or you may have, I mean, already sometimes when doing homework with my son, we'll have a chat GPT listener that chimes in or something while we're doing it. How should we be thinking about this? Privacy thing, there's so many benefit, yet there's these scary things we're not sure about. How is that going to evolve over time?
15:31 Speaker 01 Privacy will lose. If you want a firm prediction, it will 100% lose. I'll take the 10 to one bet. It's going to be the same as location sharing. This is so evil. This is so bad. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, but the drive to better convenience, better productivity, they're going to lose. There's going to be the next generation of Luddites. It's kind of how I feel about the privacy advocates. They seem to really get tied in knots around just being completely illogical. They're zealots. I don't think these trends are going to reverse at all. And I'm not saying that that is good or it's bad. I'm just being very matter of fact that my read on human psychology, which we have been very good, is if something is convenient and better, people are going to go there over time. Location sharing, the cat's out of the bag. It's done.
16:15 Speaker 01 Video cameras everywhere, that trend is done, only going to accelerate. I'm probably in the vanguard of that, like 30 cameras everywhere. Are people going to watch me? No, I have a camera right here. And sometimes my wife chimes in and like spies on me as a joke. Then that's a little bit weird, but I don't mind.
16:30 Auren Hoffman? But you wouldn't necessarily want me spying in on you.
16:33 Speaker 01 I'm way more open than most people know. I don't want you spying on me when I'm working with him, but to the point, that fear is very misplaced.
16:40 Auren Hoffman? I could see the earnings thing you're working on or something on your laptop and I could somehow trade on it or something.
16:46 Speaker 01 I think that fear is very misplaced. I guess I probably should be a little bit more worried because I have the keys to this castle with all this data, but even I don't worry too much. But for the regular person, quantify what is this actually thing you're worried about? I had an engineer I really liked in our company, or top engineers, I was arguing with him because he was like really upset about us being in data. And then he's like, well, the main thing is like, you're making money off me without my permission. People give permission. What are you actually worried about? I don't know. I just don't like it, but you should get paid for it. Where would you like me to send your 30 cent a year check? This idea that these companies are making so much money off your data, you have to have huge critical mass.
17:25 Auren Hoffman? Yeah, and it usually is 30 cents a year type of thing. It's kind of in that range.
17:30 Speaker 01 Yes, the whole mental model people have around data is just so far off.
17:36 Speaker 01 I get worried about TikTok in China. Like, that seems fair. Mass manipulation and disinformation, that that seems like a very valid concern. But the idea of these companies doing something nefarious in the short term or midterm, I don't get it.
17:51 Auren Hoffman? There's a lot of regulators who care about it. The FTC cares about it. There's different attorneys general that care about it. Historically, certain senators like Ron Wyden and others have cared about it quite a bit. And then obviously, there's the EU, which may have different takes on it than other ones. Or even within states, California may have a slightly different take than Kansas. How do you see all these things evolving?
18:15 Speaker 01 First, I'll give a company answer. We got out of this controversy. It was not worth it for us as a business. Because once we were marked as evil there, it was just gonna be bad. And I have now experienced that the press can label people as bad. And they can make your life very miserable. And they go to the regulators and the politicians do what people want. So for Life360, we are out of the world of monetizing PII without explicit consent. We are doing stuff I'm very excited about. If you're a good driver, we'll tell you you're a good driver. Or, and did you know you're in the top 10% of drivers? We can literally save you $500 a year. Or we say, or you're in the worst 10% of drivers. If an insurance company ever asks you to share your data, do not do it because you're gonna get screwed.
18:57 Auren Hoffman? Don't do it. Don't do it. You're a terrible driver.
19:00 Speaker 01 But we're gonna tell you how anyone can say that's a bad thing is astounding to me.
19:06 Auren Hoffman? But do you think you have the data to predict if someone's going through some cognitive decline or something like that?
19:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, so my mom's unfortunately getting Alzheimer's now. So I've sadly living this thing. And so we are gonna get into elder care in two years. It's a good business move anyway. I think I'm a very good product person and I can actually build a product that I need. But yes, you can detect so many signals from this data. I think there's very rational reasons to be concerned about these big troves of data. I just think the advocates get it wrong. Companies just want to make money and sell you targeted ads and maybe do cool insights. This idea of these nefarious companies wanting to sell your kids' location data is just, it's beyond conspiracy level thinking. It's just, I think, low IQ thinking because it's like you don't have to trace the steps too much. Like, this is not, have any rational sense of how corporations operate. They're trying to make money.
19:55 Auren Hoffman? I do think there are scenarios where there is hypothetical harm. There may have not been actual harm ever done in any way.
20:04 Speaker 01 Or one in a million, but if there's one in a million harm, then we're not going to do anything.
20:08 Auren Hoffman? Even one in a million, it could be someone who was harmed and we can talk about that scenario of why they were harmed. Usually it's still, it's not even one in a million. It's no one's ever been harmed from this thing ever, but there's a hypothetical where they could be and we want to protect against a hypothetical. It goes back to that safetyism thing. You can make every road perfect so that no one could ever get an accident on the road, or you could maybe wait to see a couple of accidents in the middle. Okay, now we're going to make the road safer. It all depends on people's level of risk.
20:38 Speaker 01 Exactly. There is no right answer there, but I think you can say, are you stack ranking? Like that swimming pool thing. If you're worried about someone stealing your data, but you have an open swimming pool when your kids are there, you are making an illogical choice.
20:50 Auren Hoffman? I do think that is the case today where a lot of these regulators, there are so many more harms, just for instance, people being, taking advantage of older people being fished and hackers coming in and actually stealing money and doing nefarious things, yet they may be less focused on that and more focused on things that just haven't yet become harm.
21:09 Speaker 01 For sure. And then to take the side of the privacy advocates a little bit, I think this twinge of all this data, what does this mean for the future of the world? I think that can be scary because we have seen how people can be manipulated and how governments can misuse it. If you'd fast forward 50 years and if we do have the AI super hive mind, that does get very, very, very scary because it's a brave new world that no one can predict. It's what sci-fi is all about. What happens when you basically know people's patterns so well that you can predict what they're going to do in the future?
21:47 Auren Hoffman? Protecting the hypothetical is important. Sentiment matters. If you think of what is the FTC, what is their goal? Their goal is to enable more commerce. That is actually their goal. And people will create commerce if they feel safe and they feel like things are fair. If they think they're being taken advantage of all the time, they're going to be less likely to transact. And so it's not only just important that people are safe, it's actually potentially even more important that people feel safe for them to transact.
22:16 Speaker 01 Exactly. And then somehow data is evil when it passes between third parties. But if Facebook or Google or Apple has it all in a first party system, somehow that's okay.
22:25 Auren Hoffman? Correct. Yeah, that is the weirdest thing. That doesn't make any sense. Cause they're way more powerful because they can join 50 databases, whereas everyone else has this only tiny sliver that's out there. So you're right about that one. That one makes absolutely no sense.
22:38 Speaker 01 But if you do trace that, what are the things that we should truly be worried about? It's the mega corporation that is the dystopian future. And I don't think they're evil either.
22:47 Auren Hoffman? Well, there's more potential for their harm at Apple, Google, Amazon. It's just because they're so much bigger, not because they're any more evil. They may be even better run, but there's just way more potential for harm just because they have so much more access. So they have more ability to do harm if something goes wrong.
23:05 Speaker 01 And I would say to be intellectually honest, in the short term, especially when data was new, as you know as well as me, it was Wild West out there. I think in those early days of data.
23:14 Auren Hoffman? There were bad actors.
23:15 Speaker 01 It was just new though, and I'll give an example where we would get in trouble if we did this now, but it was, I'm going to get the year on, but probably 2012. We were brand new. We had a very senior person at Disney wanted to meet us and it was Kevin Mayer, who was CEO or something. We were excited about that meeting and me and my co-founder Alex, we just kind of hacked together. We did have a God mode into where everyone was. There was nothing nefarious about this. We never used it in a wrong way, but we did this data visualization of people in Disneyland. And then we traced individually back like, look, here's the exact home they live in. Here's the line. Look what you could do with all this. It was way before any of these laws came out, but it was nothing nefarious. Just look how cool this is. Look at all this opportunity. And then things evolved. I even was like, wait, that was a little loose that we could just log into a laptop and see where millions of people were.
24:00 Speaker 01 We probably didn't even have a million people then, but then of course it's Wild West and then you have scaffolding and all that. There probably were some bad actors. There probably were some things that were fast and loose. We always tried to be very above board and have strong restrictions. We always limited sales to governments. Were the governments trying to do weird stuff with it and bypass the fourth? I get all my amendments mixed up, but were they trying to bypass that? Probably, I don't know, but let's make the rules. Let's stop that from happening. Let's first realize that everything's messy when it's new. Doesn't make people evil. Me and Alex were single twenty somethings when we were doing all this. There was no big master evil plan. No one was evil. Let's solidify rules. Let's look at the big stuff.
24:45 Speaker 01 And why does it get so vilified? And there's probably some meta question around there are all these modern day religions. Privacy advocacy is like a modern day religion to me. I don't know if there are always modern day religions. We had more established mainstream ones, but it certainly seems like people latch on to issues and they just become massively blown out of proportion and illogical.
25:06 Auren Hoffman? Companies are like people. They make mistakes all the time. And sometimes it's not because there's any design. Sometimes it's just an oversight. They just didn't think it through or whatever. I didn't think through all the pieces. And to me, when the company makes a mistake, do they react to it? Do they admit? Do they make amends? Do they then fix it? So they're less likely to make that mistake in the future. Just like a person, when you have your toddler, are they learning from these things over time? Or are they can continue to do these things over and over again?
25:36 Speaker 01 And I bet one thing that people have run companies, especially got to some piece of scale is that the idea that there's some hive mind around a company, it just doesn't exist. It's stacking on layer on layer and layer of individual actions. And as you get bigger, people have a narrower and narrower aperture almost by definition. So you get this emergent behavior that might look like there's some master plan. But it's just emergent behavior of large masses of people.
26:05 Auren Hoffman? Yeah, exactly. Some person at Apple somewhere in the organization decided something. I doubt the CEO even knew about it. It may have not gone all the way to the top. Or the US government decided X was like, oh, and actually I doubt it went to the president. It's some random person somewhere decided and maybe tons of other people in the government disagree. But for whatever reason, that got decided. They're like, oh, the whole government's policy, you know, it's Bob's policy or Mary's policy.
26:31 Speaker 01 I'm not a billionaire, but I've gotten pretty far along. You're further along than me, but I know lots of these billionaires and I'm still waiting to figure out when they open the secret door where the true masterminds are. But the billionaires I know are as confused as I am, or I'm just haven't made the cut yet, or I'm just doing a good job of lying and deceiving people about the secret cabal.
26:52 Auren Hoffman? Everyone on this call knows you're in on the conspiracy. That's what someone in on the conspiracy would do. They would deny they're part of it.
26:58 Speaker 01 Exactly.
26:59 Auren Hoffman? All the companies I've been involved with that are like in the data world, they have this thing they call the mom test, where they basically take all the employees of the company and they basically take their collective mom and say, okay, like, what can we do to protect this person? For most people, their moms are not the most savvy internet users. They do need protection. They could be taken advantage of by scammers and stuff like that. We actually have an obligation to take care of her for almost every company I know. That mom is in the room of every product decision. Now, again, they might not always get it right, but she's in the room and they're actually taking that into account.
27:35 Speaker 01 Exactly.
27:36 Auren Hoffman? There was a point where, based on the dint of your cap table, you had to go public. And you kind of had to go public in an interesting way. You went public on the Australian stock market. Walk us through that journey.
27:48 Speaker 01 So if I back up, I grew up very middle class and my dad was an entrepreneur, never had a big win and we kind of had some money when I was a kid and then lost it all in high school. And that was a jarring thing. And my mom almost starved to death as a kid as an immigrant from China post-communist takeover. So I have some deep seated insecurities about money. I didn't want to be an entrepreneur. There's a whole longer story about how I fell into this. I was very close to being a banker. And so when you go public, you clear out your preference stack. So everyone knows if you're private, the investors get paid before you and most founders eventually get fired and very few make it the whole way. And so there's so many companies, I think it's happened in 2022 after the market, you're like, you
28:30 Speaker 01 can work 10 years and you're out and you get nothing. I am very security focused. So I like being public. If you get a little bit woo wooed, I know a lot of CEOs do the Enneagram, which is horoscopes for smart people, but I am a rare one for CEO. I'm like a six, which is like the loyal skeptics. I'm very self preservation focused.
28:46 Auren Hoffman? Yeah, most people are like a three-ish.
28:48 Speaker 01 Three or eight, three is like an achiever, eight is challenger. So I'm an extreme minority. I'm anti-risk taking, but I'm here, which some parallel to the company overall. So being public was like, okay, I'm going to get a little bit of liquidity. I didn't, I didn't get FU money doing that by any means, but it meant that we would no longer have a situation where I would get fired or gone.
29:07 Auren Hoffman? And you had a pref stack also where maybe people had like a two X or three X type of thing?
29:12 Speaker 01 We didn't have any of that. It wasn't that messy, but it's getting bigger. One thing I think we were smart about was we were a freemium business model, which is a high risk business model, but we were prescient enough to realize like the only way life through 60 is sustainable is huge scale. Cause we did very quickly realize that we were on to a very fundamental use case enabled by mobile. And if you tried to put it behind a paywall, which many of our competitors do, you'd just be killed by the freemium product. That's what we beat out all the carriers who were trying to monetize early on. We put them all out of business. So that was one. It was just downside protection. For me, the other one is we were not an overnight success. We were probably literally seven years too early to this trend. And so we just had a messy cap table and it was a good moment to reset. And we were able to get some strategics out and they got to make some money too.
29:57 Speaker 01 So it was not like a nefarious thing. It's like time to transition.
30:01 Auren Hoffman? And Australia was just a easier place to make it happen as a public company?
30:06 Speaker 01 Our very first angel investor, now a very good friend and board member, happened to be Australian in Australia. And I was actually on a vacation there to visit him where we just did a couple of meetings and met the folks in the exchange. They were saying, come here instead of do the series D or whatever. And it was a very controversial thing to get through our board. It was such a weird, weird thing to do.
30:26 Auren Hoffman? Most of the other companies I know who were in public in Australia didn't survive. It was almost like a sign that it was a bad sign.
30:32 Speaker 01 I've seen a few, but yeah, we were more like first principles. Like who cares? And there are some problems with it. We have hedged our bets a lot and ironically we've never needed any of these hedges. We took venture debt early on and saved the company. And a lot of people say you don't take venture debt. I just want it as a rainy day fund. And so a couple of times my conservatism has paid off. But I think we started the ASX process like 30 or 50 million of revenue and now we're closer to 400. We've been fine. So I am happy with how it all worked out. If I had the same information, then I would not change that path. If I knew how well we have done, I wouldn't have done it because we wouldn't have needed to. But it worked quite well as that hedge. And if you try to say, well, it didn't work for other companies, but more first principles, this makes a lot of sense for us.
31:13 Auren Hoffman? And eventually you listed on NASDAQ. Is that really just because you're way more respectable? If you're on NASDAQ, that's where everyone treats the best companies and it's just like, okay, we have to go on NASDAQ as well?
31:25 Speaker 01 Yes and no. It's multiple things all at once, that being part of it. Sometimes you don't oversimplify. We are a US company in San Francisco. It's always a little bit weird. We have really not tried to do much corporate PR, but we want to attract good people. We want to have better access to capital. We want investors to understand us. It just makes sense for us to be on the NASDAQ. We were hopeful that multiples would go up. We always traded very poorly relative to our peers. Now we're much more in the range and that happened after our listing.
31:56 Auren Hoffman? You're attracting a different class of investor too.
31:58 Speaker 01 I really like our Australian investors and I think it could be easy. Oh, man, some of the questions they ask are so basic, but we went there, we went to them and they might've heard a pitch from like a coal mine earlier that day and then they're hearing a tech company and it's just small. So if I were to start getting a pitch from a coal mine, I would probably sound quite dumb. So they're not dumb at all.
32:18 Auren Hoffman? They invest in lots of things.
32:20 Speaker 01 Exactly. So it was a natural transition and then it has been great for us. The share price has done well. All of a sudden, it seems like we're recognized as a larger business. We were so under the radar and that actually worked in our favor because we had no competition, which is also very strange. It's getting much easier to hire. Moving to the NASDAQ, we'll give a great COO Lauren, who's just been amazing with the senior hires she's done. We have been one of the companies actually profitable, generating cash. So many tech companies, the big valuations were subsizing growth. We have always been very prudent managers. I think everyone said they were doing that, but it took 2022 to kind of let the tide come out and see who actually was. We never got ahead of our skis in terms of our burn and so it was very easy to navigate
33:02 Speaker 01 that transition. I think companies with our profile are getting recognized now in a way that they weren't when it was the go-go days.
33:08 Auren Hoffman? Now, a few personal questions. We're taping this right now and you're just coming off of almost a quarter sabbatical that you took off, which is pretty rare for anybody and it's even more rare for a CEO and it's even more rare for a public company CEO. So walk us through, how did you even think about it and how would you recommend that?
33:29 Speaker 01 I've wanted to do it for a number of years. This is my 17th year, so no one's going to accuse me of not putting in the time. We were waiting for the time being right and I'm really happy with our leadership team now. I am irrelevant day to day. I have no ego attached to my job. If I ever felt someone to do my job better, I would happily give them their aims. I still think I'm needed from a vision in a lot of things, but day to day I'm not, which was awesome. We got our listing done. We got through the right planning process and it was just, if I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it now. And I was just getting burned out. I only realized after this article how burned out I was. And it's very different than being depressed or stressed. Actually, I'm quite good at not getting stressed. I very rarely feel stressed about work, but just the feeling of in this hamster wheel.
34:15 Speaker 01 I wasn't lying to myself. It turned out that I was in this hamster wheel and I was able to get out of that. So I wonder if like every five years you should do a reset and it also forced the company to work without me and figure out where the weak points were and there weren't that many day to day. It was a good opportunity to step back and it was like, oh, I actually can be truly happy again. Not that I was depressed, but again, I was in a hamster wheel.
34:35 Auren Hoffman? I think maybe at the beginning of it, I happened to see you in Europe with you and your kids and your wife. But then I assume at some point your kids have to go back to school. What did you do during that time?
34:46 Speaker 01 To get the boring stuff out of the way, I did a trip to Europe, which overlapped with you a little bit in Europe. That was with the family. I love sitting at home. So I did that. I did a bunch of personal stuff to get affairs in order. I mentioned my mom getting Alzheimer's, so I lined up her care and did family planning stuff. And then I had a time where it was more inward and spending some time to reflect. I'm into journeys of the mind, so I got deeply into meditation and I've tried all sorts of different substances. I think that's something, if I have to make predictions, I think this whole psychedelic thing is here to stay. Maybe it'll stay a fringe-ish, but so many highly successful and competent people swear by them now. I continue that journey.
35:23 Auren Hoffman? So you think in the future, there'll be like significantly more people doing psychedelics than today?
35:29 Speaker 01 I think so, yeah. I don't know how much it breaks out. It seems like it's a secret hidden in plain sight and a lot of them are legal now.
35:35 Auren Hoffman? It does seem like we've reached peak marijuana use. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but it seems like that's leveling off and maybe even starting to go down a bit. In the US at least, there's just some sort of peak that it reached, but obviously psychedelics are less used today.
35:50 Speaker 01 I think they're so different. They're not fun, nor are they always easy. They're stretching you often.
35:55 Auren Hoffman? It's not a everyday use, like some people use for marijuana or something.
35:58 Speaker 01 Ketamine is an extremely powerful and legal one. Some people who have used it recreationally, I've kind of give them the full experience, like, no, you're missing the point. Well, it's not even the same feeling or drug or anything. So I don't think we're going to get a world where everyone's addicted on psychedelics. This is not how they work. It's often not pleasant, but good. The trend is here to stay, and I would make a prediction that of successful CEOs in the not too distant future, the majority will be using.
36:28 Auren Hoffman? Majority? Oh, wow.
36:30 Speaker 01 Well, put that at 10 year prediction.
36:32 Auren Hoffman? A majority are doing psychedelics at least once a year type of thing, or once or twice a year type of, is that what you think?
36:37 Speaker 01 Every few years. Some will go a lot more hardcore.
36:41 Auren Hoffman? Every few years. Okay. And not just at Burning Man, but they're doing it for other kind of things.
36:46 Speaker 01 Yeah. Personal development ways that will actually help them.
36:50 Auren Hoffman? Wow. The majority, I would be surprised. I guess we'll find out.
36:54 Speaker 01 That's a longer term, maybe a third, but I'm, I'm provocative. At some point it will be the majority. I'm not saying they're going to be doing it all every week and be these gurus or whatever, but I think it will be a very accepted part of the toolkit.
37:05 Auren Hoffman? For Silicon Valley CEOs of tech companies, maybe not public tech companies, but let's say series B enough tech companies. I would certainly say it's over 10%. Maybe it's higher than that. I don't know.
37:16 Speaker 01 It's moving up. The public company CEOs traditionally are older and are not the founders. I think the founders are the crazier, break the rule ones.
37:24 Auren Hoffman? People who rise through corporate ranks are probably less likely to do those things.
37:27 Speaker 01 They're more open to it. For creative people, I think they will hear so many respectable people talking about how powerful it was that they're going to get on the bandwagon. I think even Steve Jobs is talking about acid being such a fundamental thing for him, but it was illegal then.
37:41 Auren Hoffman? But he was doing it when he was 20.
37:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, but still doing it. I think this stuff sticks with you in terms of breaking you out of a rigid way of thinking.
37:50 Auren Hoffman? For somebody like me that has never done any marijuana, smoked a joint or anything, if you had to like try to convince me, what would you say?
37:58 Speaker 01 Do you like food?
37:59 Auren Hoffman? Kind of, yeah. I like donuts.
38:02 Speaker 01 Well, a lot of people say I don't need this. I can read about it. I get it. It's almost like someone saying like, oh, I read the recipe for the donut. I know what's in it. It's flour and sugar. Like, I don't need to try it. Look, I got the menu right here. You're reading the menu but not eating the food? First-person experience is a whole different ballgame. And I think one of the things we are seeing is there are different waves of science and all that. And I think we started overlooking the whole aspect of phenomenology. It's like everything's objective, third-party human experience is somehow like this thing that is lesser than. And it's more like all this arms-length cause and effect, all mathematical. What if consciousness is the more fundamental piece?
38:44 Speaker 01 How certain things are ineffable and can't really be easily put into words or numbers. Maybe everything can be numbers at some point. I don't know. But like words for sure. I would just say you can't logic chop your way to say that you know it or understand it. And then it's also extremely safe. The one I think should be used more is ketamine. And that's because it's fully legal, so I can be on here talking about it. And maybe some investor thinks I'm weird. Unfortunately, far enough in life, I don't really care about that. I don't want to lose my job or whatever, but if someone thinks I'm weird, that doesn't bother me. And even a public company CEO, you got a prescription, so it's legal. It's also extremely safe in that it was started as a combat anesthetic and it was combat anesthetic because it does not
39:29 Speaker 01 decrease your central nervous system. You will keep breathing. And then if your kid breaks their arm and goes to the ER, they will give them ketamine without your permission. It's going to be a dose that's far higher than the psychedelic dose. So the odds of this thing hurting you is essentially zero.
39:46 Auren Hoffman? I know people, especially in the tech community, that take ketamine. But sometimes it's to treat a specific thing, like to treat depression. It's not necessarily just to expand your mind or something like that, but you think it just has general benefits outside of those specific things.
40:00 Speaker 01 Absolutely. I used it both therapeutically and to explore the universe, so to speak.
40:07 Auren Hoffman? Speaking of exploring the universe, you a few years ago, or a year ago or so, entered into a pumpkin contest. I think for people watching the video can see it behind you. You grew a pumpkin? I don't even understand.
40:19 Speaker 01 This was during COVID and everyone got weird and I have a couple acres out in my small hometown and I just bought it then and decided I would try to win the world record pumpkin.
40:30 Auren Hoffman? Do you make the pumpkin?
40:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, I grew it. I got a seed. There's a whole subculture of pumpkin growers jockeying for in the black market for seeds and it really starts with the seeds.
40:39 Auren Hoffman? Just like I would find genes of a seven foot tall person if I wanted a super tall person?
40:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, they literally traced the lineage like pure breed dogs or whatever. So it's like male and female lines and they traced them.
40:51 Auren Hoffman? So when your pumpkin eventually went under, you could sell the seeds and make all this money and stuff?
40:57 Speaker 01 I unfortunately did not succeed in my goal. I only hit 13th in the Super Bowl of pumpkins.
41:03 Auren Hoffman? You entered the Super Bowl of pumpkins. You came 13th place.
41:07 Speaker 01 13th place and I had long hair and I just went full on crazy and I just had a lot of fun. I put it in a trailer.
41:13 Auren Hoffman? But you got a thousand pound pumpkin, right?
41:15 Speaker 01 I won $200.
41:17 Auren Hoffman? Nice.
41:17 Speaker 01 I think the hotel room, if you say to the Ritz right next door, and I actually, I pulled up to the Ritz, my wife is an X7, so next fancy SUV and we had a big old pumpkin in a trailer in the back. And do you believe they charged me extra $50 to park with the pumpkin there? I was like, this should be fun for you. Come on, I'm spending how much to stay there?
41:32 Auren Hoffman? That's hilarious. So the seed is the key thing?
41:35 Speaker 01 The seed is the key.
41:37 Auren Hoffman? It's just like if I want to have a seven foot tall kid, it's probably unlikely I'm going to be able to do that, given my genes.
41:42 Speaker 01 Sorry, man. Not happening. So it's the seed and then it's very involved and one pumpkin plant can reach 2,000 square feet and you only grow one on a plant. I'm not exaggerating that number.
41:52 Auren Hoffman? Wait, wait, 2,000 square feet?
41:55 Speaker 01 Yes. So these things grow geometrically. So you have a main line, they branch out to secondary lines.
42:00 Auren Hoffman? Holy macro. That's like a house.
42:03 Speaker 01 Exponential growth, yes. So you do need a lot of area. They have special contests for growing in small areas. You don't actually want them to grow 2,000 square feet. It's pretty hardcore. They found the ideal size of leaf to plant ratio.
42:15 Auren Hoffman? Oh, because then it like confines it and it grows up and a little bit more and stuff like that?
42:20 Speaker 01 Yeah. So I think you want to use about 1,500 square feet because you don't want to put too much of the energy into the leaves. You want it to go into one fruit. It's very, very involved and you bury each leaf axle. The person who won, she told me she spends five hours a day on her pumpkins in peak growing season. So I have no time for that.
42:37 Auren Hoffman? What do you do during that? It's like, are you just constantly weeding it and stuff or praying?
42:42 Speaker 01 You're weeding it, putting nutrients, you're doing soil tests, you're pruning it, you're getting rid of diseases and bugs. I did not do that.
42:51 Auren Hoffman? So you just got lucky. You had one shot, basically.
42:53 Speaker 01 I did get lucky in that most people grow like five and usually one dies and you only have one pumpkin per plant because you want all the energy to grow into the one pumpkin. So I got lucky in that mine didn't die, but mine was only a thousand pounds. The world record's like 2,400 or something. It's made 27 now. Every year they're going up.
43:10 Auren Hoffman? Oh, wow. That's like the sumo wrestler pumpkin.
43:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, so I kept my $200 check. It's actually the wall to my right, it's on there, mementos.
43:20 Auren Hoffman? That's awesome.
43:21 Speaker 01 I'm stupidly competitive. The other trophy I have there was my early employee Andreas Gross. Maybe listen to this. We did a go-kart race. We bet $10 and I made us plaques, said first place me, Chris Hulls's last place Andreas Gross. So I put this up behind my desk and I took the $10 he gave me and I put it in that trophy.
43:38 Auren Hoffman? That's hilarious.
43:39 Speaker 01 Maybe there is something though, like don't take life too seriously. Like if you're a hyper competitive person as I am, just be competitive about stupid stuff. Going back to deconstructing human behavior. It's very interesting how judgmental people get about different accomplishments. One thing I think is very funny, everyone knows all analogy, like digging holes in the sand, how stupid that is. If someone's wasting time, they're digging a hole in the sand. But look at the Olympics. Go back to like first principles. How absurd is it? People dedicate their lives to jumping higher than somebody else. I jumped over a stick. It's so stupid.
44:11 Auren Hoffman? Yeah, especially nowadays when you could get an airplane or something.
44:15 Speaker 01 I'm not saying that judgmentally. I'm saying that this is the human condition.
44:20 Auren Hoffman? Yeah, we love it.
44:21 Speaker 01 Is there some intrinsic success I have because I started a company, went public? I can feel inferior because I'm not Elon Musk. In Bay Area, look to your left, you feel poor. You look to your right, you feel rich, but just the absurdity of human competition is just really go first principles. I don't know why it's the pole vaulting or whatever. I find it the most absurd. People getting so excited about jumping higher than somebody else. And I'm not anti-sports at all. I actually get it a lot, like discipline and teamwork. You need competitiveness to drive, but just. Most human behaviors are quite absurd when you unpack them.
44:55 Auren Hoffman? My father-in-law is a pole holder. It's the will to just do something different and compete. And of course, if people want to watch it, then it's even more exciting because well, it's like, well, then I'm entertaining people. It's just like the juggler or the magician that entertains you.
45:08 Speaker 01 And I'd say then, when I do see some people, because we're coastal elitists, they get very judgmental of small achievements. Like you see on Facebook, someone posted their cosmetology license they got, and they're so proud of themselves. It's very easy to be judgmental. So many people are playing status games, even if they don't realize it. Somehow your achievement's a real achievement, and I'm not being superficial. This is a real achievement. No, you're all dead in the end. And like, I disdain some of the elitism stuff now and the fancy dinners and awards and self-congratulatory behavior. It's this dumb as my pumpkin.
45:42 Auren Hoffman? Now, what is a conspiracy theory that you believe?
45:44 Speaker 01 I have more like an indirect conspiracy theory, which is I think the whole deep state thing is real, but in a different way than I think Trump or whatever. To me, the deep state is there are these individual actions of thousands of people who have been indoctrinated by different ideologies. And they miss the bigger picture, kind of like pole vaulting or growing pumpkins. And we have this machine that is growing like a cancer that will kill us. And this is not a Donald Trump pro statement by any means. I'm not political. But this conspiracy, I think that maybe it's deeper than America, that institutions will eventually self-corrupt by sheer size,
46:26 Speaker 01 because bureaucracies just grow and running companies, people always hire more people.
46:32 Auren Hoffman? All bureaucracies grow and then they take care of themselves and they don't always see the bigger picture. We all do that.
46:38 Speaker 01 Yeah. So I'm a believer in the deep state, but without a controlled central planner.
46:43 Auren Hoffman? So it's like a Darwinian deep state where it's just a survival fittest and just grows and evolves in an organic way, but without some sort of centralized design.
46:54 Speaker 01 No master plan. Maybe in some hyper-dimensional being, there's something, but yes, you could probably trace it down to like some neuronal behavior. There's a neuron that's black and this one's white, and then this one wants to be the opposite color of the other one. This weird emergent pattern evolves from like these very simple set of rules, almost like a fractal. I feel like maybe that's why all empires eventually seem to self-implode.
47:17 Speaker 01 And maybe why America has done so well is even if capitalism can be cruel and rugged, individualism is not the theoretical ideal end state. Star Trek had a good theoretical ideal end state, like money is supposed to scarcity, all that, like in this practical, terrible Darwinian world we are now. Maybe the reason America is so resilient is that we celebrate individualism and success because that is a way of breaking down strict, rigid institutional structures that, again, no master plan, but just self-reinforce.
47:48 Auren Hoffman? Our last question we ask all of our guests, what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?
47:54 Speaker 01 Well, I have one on startups. It's becoming accepted wisdom, but I'm happy because I was going on a limb here thinking that I was alone. So this probably won't be unconventional now, but still there's some last gasps of this. Vision is so much more important than data and the lean startup, one of the most toxic and terrible moves for Silicon Valley.
48:12 Auren Hoffman? I think this is still a little controversial.
48:15 Speaker 01 Smart people can make themselves very stupid by following frameworks.
48:18 Auren Hoffman? Obviously you have like Eric Ries and Steve Blank and you have all these very smart people have been writing books about this leaner startup thing.
48:26 Speaker 01 I don't even know if they disagree with me. I think it got perverted. It's become a cargo cult where I think if you're a founder, let's just go back to when all those big things came out. I missed the dot com boom, but now I guess I'm old because of the mobile boom. I'm curious if you agree with me on this, but go back 15 years. When people were founders, it was the archetype of people who are ambitious, follow their own paths, probably always certain often wrong stereotypes applied to VCs. Those were founders, overconfident. I think the lean startup was a very good thing for someone like that. Check your assumptions, measure everything. You're going to be wrong a lot. And by the way, this whole tech thing is very immature.
49:08 Auren Hoffman? It's just A B testing everything is kind of the lean startup way.
49:11 Speaker 01 Yeah. I think that actually makes a lot of sense, but now fast forward to where we are now, being the tech ecosystems probably 10 times bigger than 2008 and 100 times bigger than after the dot com crash. People starting companies that people are trying to like put a formula around startups. I think lean startup is called a cargo cult because, oh, look, we're A B testing. We're pivoting, we're learning, but they're just like a leaf in the wind is blowing around. I am overly confident. Yes, check my assumptions, check the data, that makes sense. So I don't think it's bad in theory, but I think it's being misapplied by people who want a playbook and that just doesn't exist. I think with the founders I know are really top ones.
49:55 Speaker 01 I have not heard a single founder saying that their team don't use data enough, but I hear so many founders and CEOs like, why are my teams so narrow minded and missing the bigger picture? And because it's like outcome versus output and running a lot of tests becomes like, I'm running tests. I'm doing my job, but no, you're not. Your job is to drive outcomes. And so it's not anti-data, it's just zooming out and how do we fit it into this bigger picture?
50:20 Auren Hoffman? There are so many companies, I think that they say they're using data, but they're not using it that well. And they would be better off almost using anecdotes or thinking about things. My mom is going through this issue, so therefore those types of things, maybe not perfect, but maybe better than the way they use data today.
50:38 Speaker 01 For sure. I would stack vision number one, judgment number two, data number three. And in some ways, judgment is this Bayesian pattern matching that we've got from our vision and tying it all together. So I think when people talk about intuition or judgment, it's not anti-data per se. I think it's like the synthesis of a vision and the data and that most people don't have that.
50:56 Auren Hoffman? A lot of people are wrong on their vision. And so the whole idea of lean startup is I think it was to make it a little less likely people would be wrong.
51:05 Speaker 01 But I think the other thing though is like, what was the ecosystem at that point in time? And a lot of that was applied to like mobile. It was a great time to A B test because there was not established incumbents all over the place.
51:17 Auren Hoffman? Yeah, you're doing a little app store things and stuff like that.
51:20 Speaker 01 You could launch a piece of crap and if people were searching in the app stores like, oh, there's demand here, but we're mature and just so maybe in AI, it is actually a great thing now. Try a bunch of stuff and to see if anything clicks is no competition. So start with first principles always. It's probably not controversial to you or any founder, but. You at least know why you're applying this framework when you're not. Just don't blindly apply it.
51:42 Auren Hoffman? The first principles thing is hard, though. Even that one is super hard. Like, you can't go to first principles on every single thing. Something you just have to accept conventional wisdom on. I've never proved to myself that the earth is round. I'm just accepting the conventional wisdom that it is round. I don't know that we didn't fake the moon landing or something, but just accepting the conventional wisdom that we went to the moon in 69.
52:04 Speaker 01 I completely agree, but then I think maybe have this tickle when like the conventional wisdom, something doesn't feel right, poke at a little bit.
52:11 Auren Hoffman? That's right. Then dive in. You gotta go dive in on something. You just can't dive in on everything.
52:16 Speaker 01 And then you probably also want to intentionally be contrarian on one or two things, because if you're not, you're probably like copying. So I completely agree. And we have to trust our experts. And I think like the big fights around climate change and people are so certain on both sides. I'm 99% sure you've never gone dug up an ice core. You're having to trust people. And so at some point, you need to trust people. And part of our problem now is we don't have these trusts and institutions and best practices and maybe some sort of pendulum. I think people trusted the lean startup way too much. It just became like a cult. When do you trust? When do you push? Not easy.
52:50 Auren Hoffman? Yeah, we trust our tribe, but we don't always trust other things outside the tribe.
52:55 Speaker 01 Maybe the lean startup became a tribe. It's become the thing in and of itself. And when do you test? When do you not test? I'm not anti-data whatsoever. It's just how do you apply it appropriately and know its limits?
53:07 Auren Hoffman? This has been amazing. Thank you, Chris Holes, CEO of Life360 for joining us on World of DAS. I follow you at Chris Holes on X. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage you there. This has been a ton of fun.
53:18 Speaker 01 Cool. Thank you so much, Auren. I appreciate it and good conversation.
53:23 Auren Hoffman? If you're a super data nerd, go to worldofdaas.com. That's D-A-A-S, worldofdaas.com, and sign up for our weekly Data as a Service Roundup newsletter.
53:36 Auren Hoffman? Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the show, consider reading this podcast and leaving a review. For more World of DAS, and DAS is D-A-A-S, you can subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or anywhere you get your podcasts. And also check out YouTube for videos. You can find me at Twitter at Auren, that's A-U-R-E-N, Auren, and we'd love to hear from you.
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