Where early-stage founders MUST focus to success | E2244

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Quadratic - http://quadratic.ai/twist Today's show: Don't get distracted! Here are the MOST CRUCIAL aspects of running a startup, where founders need to keep their full and uninterrupted focus. - Make sure you're saving up your cash - Why you need to just get started and build SOMETHING - Trust and reliability is EVERYTHING for new products - Why distribution should be your top priority Download all this practical and tactical startup advice from seasoned veterans Jason Calacanis, Amanda Bradford, and William P. Barnes in this Tokyo edition of TWiST. Timestamps: (00:00) Amanda and Will's big takeaways from Founder U in Saudi Arabia and now Tokyo (3:19) Why cash flow management is so important before you find PMF (5:57) Why first-time founders get the order of operations wrong (6:45) Just build SOMETHING, even if it's taped together (11:19) "Focus is everything in the early stages" (14:17) From a wedge to a bridge (15:50) Quadratic - Bringing the productivity boost of AI into your spreadsheets. Visit http://quadratic.ai/twist to sign up and use the code TWIST to get one free month of their pro tier subscription. (18:45) What to put on your "Not Right Now" list (19:11) Embracing simplicity (22:00) The importance of trust and reliability (especially for Uber!) (28:12) Why innovation needs a constraining variable (33:40) To really drive word of mouth, you have to overdeliver (36:32) Distribution is the primary job of a founder/CEO (38:19) Some of the panel's favorite distribution hacks (45:54) Why Jason respects Japan's commitment to excellence and competency (49:38) Looking for "high slope" in early employees (53:11) Transitioning your team from early-stage startup to growth (57:45) Whoever writes it down gets credit for the idea (58:04) Q: Has the meaning of money changed for the panel now that they've had successful exits? * Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com/ Check out the TWIST500: https://twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons * Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm/ * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis/ * Thank you to our partners: (15:50) Quadratic - Bringing the productivity boost of AI into your spreadsheets. Visit http://quadratic.ai/twist to sign up and use the code TWIST to get one free month of their pro tier subscription. Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  I want you to unpack what you said before, which is founders, maybe especially first time ones, have this order of operations wrong.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:08Jason Calacanis?

  They think they need to convince investors of their vision and land some giant amount of money.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:18Jason Calacanis?

  And then deploy capital. Why is that wrong in 2026 as we sit here today?

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think, you know, you've been in the industry for a good amount of time. I think, you know, a long time ago, you would have to raise a lot of money and then build all this infrastructure, whether it's like servers, HR people, legal. You do all of those things to try and get a product out there in the hands of a customer. And I think, you know, through a whole range of technology, you can now do a lot of that validation without needing a lot of money. And I think that's why it's kind of moved how people should approach creating an MVP.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  Before I even had a prototype built while that was being developed, I basically strung together screenshots that, you know, you'd use in Figma and you can make it so that, you know, you click on a button and it opens another screenshot. So if you're showing it to a customer, it feels like the app is built. Like, my mom thought the app was built, but it was really just a series of like eight screenshots, hyperlinked to each other. So you can kind of do these hacky things to just initially get some, do a temperature check with people to say, hey, would this be interesting to you?

• 1:17Speaker 03

  Today's This Week in Startups is brought to you by Quadratic, bringing the productivity boost of AI into your spreadsheets. Visit quadratic.ai/twist to sign up and use the code TWIST to get one free month of their Pro tier subscription.

• 1:33Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Kallikanis. I am still in Japan and loving it. We've had an amazing time here launching Founder University. What's Founder University? If you haven't been listening to the program in the past year, where have you been, number one? Number two, it's a 12-week program that we started in the United States to help founders who are in year zero. In other words, they might not even be incorporated, they might still be building their team, or finding a co-founder. They're in that year zero. They know they're going to start, they're not sure when. And as part of that program in the United States... We look for companies that we might want to invest in. And then they go on to our accelerator, or some of them go on to Y Combinator, Techstars,

• 2:18Jason Calacanis?

  Antler, all these great programs all around the world, 500 Global. So it's a pre-accelerator. We launched it in the fall in the Middle East, specifically in Riyadh in Saudi with our partner, Sunable, which is the venture arm of the PIF there, the Sovereign Wealth Fund. And now we've launched it again here in Japan with the greatest partner you could ever have, Jetro, which is essentially the Economic Trade Group here in Japan that is supporting founders. And Japan is going through such an amazing, amazing resurgence. Not that it ever went away, but young people in Japan are looking at startups again as a viable career path.

• 2:59Jason Calacanis?

  And in a country where they have very low unemployment and plenty of jobs available, it's a very interesting moment in time when people will give up the security of those jobs to take the risk of starting a company. And that's what we do at our fund. So today, we're going to talk about what should founders in year zero, the year, you know, right as they're starting to incorporate, maybe even launch their product, what should they focus on? I'm very lucky to have two great friends in Austin. Amanda Bradford founded the League. We met Amanda, I think, at the Sequoia Scouts Program. And you've been on a bit of sabbatical, you're non-compete or...

• 3:39Speaker 02

  Resting and investing.

• 3:40Jason Calacanis?

  Resting and investing after selling your company to Match.com.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:44Jason Calacanis?

  Congratulations on that. So you've taken a company from the cradle all the way to the grave, all the way to sale.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Hopefully not the grave.

• 3:51Jason Calacanis?

  Not the grave, but yeah, I think you get the idea.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  To bigger and better things, yes.

• 3:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, to bigger and better things. You did a great talk here for the founders in this program, and you also came with me to Saudi. And so we'll talk today about what people should focus on. Pretty open dialogue. Of course, one of my besties, William Barnes, is here. He was Travis's right-hand man, left-hand man, front, back, everything. You got to work with Travis in the boom years of Uber. Yes. Also got to come with me to Saudi. Yep. And here. So let me start with that. You know, we've now launched the program in just five months or so in two cities. What have each of you noted? About each of those cities and what founders in year zero are most often asking you about as mentors in our program.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Well, I think the experience in Saudi and here is the entrepreneurial spirit is invigorating and kind of reminds me of being back in San Francisco, you know, 10, 15 years ago, there's so much kind of opportunity and that's very exciting. And the other thing that I've seen through the, you know, the investing with my venture fund and also speaking to founders here is I think one of the things that we've seen a lot is cash flow management. It's like easy to run out of money.

• 5:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  And I think keeping a focus on keeping the burn low before they find product market fit, I think is a key thing. I think a lot of people get excited, they see all the headlines about, you know, Facebook or, you know, maybe one of their friends raises a series B or a C and I think they get out ahead of themselves trying to build a company before they found a product. And so trying to spend as little as money as possible to find some product to scale.

• 5:30Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and we'll unpack that in just a moment. Amanda, what have you noticed in meeting the founders in Saudi, in Riyadh, and here in Tokyo, Japan?

• 5:39Speaker 02

  Well, there's tons of opportunity. I think everyone's been, the breadth of startups, I've been very impressed with, everything from healthcare to defense tech to consumer marketplaces. So I've been just impressed with the scope of what everyone's trying to tackle. I think the questions I've been getting the most, at least me, as someone who's built zero to one, is around hiring, is around finding co-founders. When should someone be a co-founder? When should you outsource? When should you fundraise? At what point in your kind of product development process should you go and ask for capital from investors? And similar to kind of Will's point, I always recommend people get an MVP or a Minimum Viable Product up and running and show investors that this product is going to be built regardless of if you take money from them and show them that, you know, this train is leaving the

• 6:24Speaker 02

  station and kind of put a little bit of skin in the game yourself, whether it's using some of your own money or getting people to work for equity, but really kind of showing a little bit of traction prior to going out and asking for money. I think that's a big.

• 6:35Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so I think we're going to start with what has come up now over and over again, which is product market fit first.

• 6:46Jason Calacanis?

  Product first, fundraising second. I think it's a fine way to put it. Yeah, well.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  I think there's, you've got to stage it and it depends on your life situation, whether or not you can, you have a lot of the time, you know, whether you've got some savings. But I think there's a lot that you can do before you start spending a lot of money, or certainly before you raise money. And I think Amanda, you know, talked about that on her presentation yesterday. You can go meet customers, you can kind of understand the problems they're facing and you can, especially in today's environment, whether it's vibe coding or having a very hacky front end and then doing things manually to try and validate whether or not you're solving a real problem. And I think, you know, evenings, weekends and using some of the AI tools, you can get a lot done to get some signal that what you're building is valuable or useful to somebody. And you can do all of those things before you raise money.

• 7:31Jason Calacanis?

  I want you to unpack what you said before, which is founders, maybe especially first time one, have this order of operations wrong.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:39Jason Calacanis?

  They think they need to convince investors of their vision and land some giant amount of money.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:48Jason Calacanis?

  And then deploy capital. Why is that wrong in 2026 as we sit here today?

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I, I think, you know, you've been in the industry for a good amount of time. I think, you know, a long time ago, you would have to raise a lot of money and then build all this infrastructure, whether it's like servers, HR people, legal, you do all of those things to try and get a product out there in the hands of a customer. And I think, you know, through a whole range of technology, you can now do a lot of that validation without needing a lot of money. And I think that's why it's kind of moved how people should approach creating an MVP.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, like with my company, we would even go, before I even had a prototype built, while that was being developed, I basically strung together screenshots that, you know, you'd use in Figma and you can make it so that, you know, you click on a button and it opens another screenshot. So if you're showing it to a customer, it feels like the app is built. Like my mom thought the app was built, but it was really just a series of like eight screenshots, hyperlinked to each other. So you can kind of do these hacky things to just initially get some, do a temperature check with people to say, hey, would this be interesting to you? So you can kind of.

• 8:46Jason Calacanis?

  And that was 10 years ago.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and now you can basically vibe code these now in a weekend.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  And you learn a lot through doing that. You're going to get like feedback, yes, no, people aren't going to sign up. But they are going to sign up and you learn things about your messaging.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  And we tested our onboarding for almost five months because that's how long it took me to develop my app. And what we learned, an example for us was we, you know, I had had LinkedIn. I was asking people to submit their LinkedIn to be able to apply to the league because we were, that was how we used to to kind of vet our applicants. But people got very weirded out by having LinkedIn be the first thing. No one was used to that. They wanted to, they were fine connecting Facebook, but LinkedIn freaked them out. So I basically, because of the the focus groups I did, I I changed the order and I put Facebook Connect first. And then by that time, the users sort of already invested in the onboarding flow. And then by putting the LinkedIn second, we had a much higher completion rate than just by putting LinkedIn first.

• 9:34Jason Calacanis?

  And that didn't require you to get permission from a seed fund with a 250 K check. That required you to be thoughtful and to talk to customers and to run these little experiments.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 9:45Jason Calacanis?

  And that scientific method talked about in the Lean Startup or the Startup Engine, lots of of different people.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  My scientific method was taking women to a wine night and asking, you know, giving giving feedback on this onboarding. But yes, it was it was scientific in some respects.

• 10:01Jason Calacanis?

  Those were clickable mockups and now we have vibe coding.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 10:03Jason Calacanis?

  So very important.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  It's a very exciting time to build right now, I will say.

• 10:07Jason Calacanis?

  In year zero, you can actually build these prototypes and test them. They don't have to be just clickable mockups. So let's go to our, what I think is our second point. I think we pretty much have consensus of this. I'm going to put it as second, but we'll we'll order these as we go. Finding those first customers, doing customer research, having met with the companies now and heard some stories about how they're doing that and our own personal experience doing it. What are the best practices front of mind for you right now, William Barnes?

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Well, I think this is why the cliche is still true, which is find a niche and try and go really kind of narrow. There's a variety of benefits of picking a narrow niche. You can tailor your messaging and the and the MVP to that niche. So the neat, the kind of the customer profile that you're talking to, they're going to feel more special, for want of a better word. And the marketing and the MVP is going to be more tailored to the problem that you're trying to solve for them. There's a higher chance that they're going to engage with you because they're going to feel. Feel like it's a specific solution to their problem. So the niching down, I think, is incredibly helpful and you'll learn more quickly. You know, if you go and talk to, you know, fifteen back offices that do importing and exporting in Japan,

• 11:21Speaker 01

  you're going to learn more quickly because you're having a similar conversation with a similar customer profile. So there's kind of like two benefits there of picking that niche.

• 11:28Jason Calacanis?

  So you picked that niche. We had an interesting company yesterday that pitched. In this one example, importing of exporting of products is a lot of paperwork. And you and I were talking about it at breakfast today. What a great idea it was. The pitch was a little bit off.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 11:43Jason Calacanis?

  The order of operations might have been wrong, but we both thought, wow, it's so messy in that back office. And if you talk to fifteen of them, you say it's just for the back office, operations of an export company. What actually happens in that pit? What happens in that boiler room, that back room where it's occurring? And how much progress can you make now? You might find out that there's not that much to it and you're going to very quickly solve their problems. But then you will inevitably discover more.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  You know, I think one of the reflections you and I had is they were kind of bundling two businesses together. There was the consumer facing part. And then it was almost they were going to figure out the import export paperwork to serve the consumer facing. And I think what you and I talked about is maybe unbundle those two things and focus just on the kind of the workflow piece. And then go and speak to, you know, a narrow set of customers, you know, all in, you know, the consumer facing product piece. But just go and solve that one and then make that a business first and it's a more narrow niche.

• 12:45Jason Calacanis?

  And dovetailing that, Amanda, with the first point we made, which is, hey, get that product really tight. And the fundraising will come later. If you're going to raise money and you've got two different products and they're extremely different, you're now scaring an investor or an angel that, oh, my God, you're building a consumer business and an enterprise business at the same time. Oh, and then you're explaining the marketplace? We've never seen that. Like Airbnb does not have an enterprise business.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Still.

• 13:15Jason Calacanis?

  Still.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  Focus is everything in the early stages.

• 13:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Exactly. And if you want to, we'll get to Fregalli later, but that customer obsession seems super critical. You specialize in that. I think maybe that is your superpower is this customer obsession. When we saw pitches yesterday and you've talked to companies here in Tokyo at Found University in Japan. What's top of mind for you thinking about maybe your next startup and customer? Don't tell anybody what it is, but just customer obsession and how you will go into your next startup with this new inspiration, having met so many of these companies in Saudi and here in Tokyo. What's top of mind for you?

• 13:54Speaker 02

  Well, I think it's, yeah, it's super serving a niche audience. And I think Peter Thiel talks about this a lot with PayPal. It was the early eBay Power users and with Amazon, it was a bookstore and eBay initially is eBay was Pez dispensers. Right? So it's, it may be a market that people immediately might say that's a small TAM. That's not big enough, but if you can like win that market, then there's going to be concentric markets that you can then go after. So, so don't be afraid to go super niche with us. You know, I was going after sort of like women who are like 28 to 34, who are career oriented, who are struggling with the dating, current dating apps and how dating worked. And so we, you know, people called my app MBA Date at the beginning because there were so many MBAs on it.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  And that was the demo that I, I knew really well as an MBA and I said, I am going to make sure that it works for this very small audience. And then of course they told friends, other people, you know, we eventually were more than just a 28 to 34 year old demographic, but we started very niche and I had a lot of investors be like, your TAM is not big enough.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  So kind of don't be scared of, of a small market to start.

• 14:57Jason Calacanis?

  Let's talk about that TAM not big enough. There is a very simple way to address that when talking to investors. And remember you're building your business. You're not building a performance to give to a venture capitalist that gets them to unlock money. Like you may have to do some things that are performative and answer questions, of course. But at its core, you need to have some niche audience that's willing to embrace your product. 28 to 34 year old women who have MBAs, who are desirable in market and are going to approach maybe dating differently than an average person. It's a really interesting group to start with. You know, in your heart of hearts, if it works for this group, there's adjacencies.

• 15:40Jason Calacanis?

  There's adjacencies. There's a next group. If it works for the back office, it's going to work in Japan, it might work for the back office in India. It might be slightly different, but they're still doing the same function, which is exporting something.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  What I've seen well with me when I get pitched this by founders is framing around sequencing. So I win this small piece of the market.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Your wedge, right.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  It's a wedge, and then I can sequence this to a bridge to a slightly bigger market. And then when, I really like it when founders say, well, here's a trigger for when we move to the next part.

• 16:10Jason Calacanis?

  So they're actually detailing the journey.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:12Jason Calacanis?

  First.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  Like what milestones need to be hit?

• 16:14Jason Calacanis?

  We're going to get to the new world, then we're going to.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  Land and expand.

• 16:18Jason Calacanis?

  Land and expand. Now, here we are, we're in the Northeast, but we're going to go figure out where are the different things we can find that might be.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  And they kind of handhold me through this sequence of small, medium, and then like there's this huge market that we're going to earn the right to, but we're laser focused on it.

• 16:33Jason Calacanis?

  Which makes you more credible.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100%.

• 16:35Jason Calacanis?

  And that's, I think, maybe where some founders get tripped up. They think, oh, I'm going to do this and I'll be less credible. No, you can sequence it, as you're saying. When we win this war and we get the beach, then we'll go to the, you know, a little bit further inland. We'll secure the beach first. We got that beachhead market. That's why that term exists. It's a military term. Secure the beachhead. Okay, when we get back from a quick commercial break, I want to talk about founders going on the feature death march. Founders putting their head down and spending too much time building 10 or 20 features as opposed to the essentialism of finding what is the core feature loop value of my product when we get back on this week in startups.

• 17:24Jason Calacanis?

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• 18:07Jason Calacanis?

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• 18:34Jason Calacanis?

  All right, we're back at this week in startups here. We're working down our list of things that founders should focus on in year zero, building the team, finding the customers. This is before you raise money, when you're kind of doing that product discovery and figuring out what your startup will be. Amanda Bradford's with me. She built the league and sold it to match.com and she's going to do another startup at some point. She angel invest William Barnes from Carmen Ventures. Let's talk about founders going on that feature death march. They can't help themselves. They love building features. They get a little too precious, don't they, William?

• 19:08Speaker 02

  Customers also love giving feature requests.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  Yes, they do.

• 19:11Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yeah. And this is like the two things that will make founders go off track.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100%. I think it's an expression of psychology and I think there's kind of, there's two parts to it. There's a fear of going talking to more customers or doing more sales. It's like, it's a fear of that. Like, I don't want to go and do more sales and get more rejection. So here's something I can control.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  I can go and ship more product.

• 19:33Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  And the other one is it's an avoidance of not having product market fit and fi- and finding one feature that really solves a pain point and the customers using a lot. There are some exceptions to the rule, like if you'll be, you know, you're trying building a like a complex enterprise product or like, you know, say a horizontal piece of software. You are going to need to be more feature rich, but I think in general, uh, having the discipline to find one or two features that really solves something painful and then charging for it and then doing a lot of sales around it is the prevailing wisdom.

• 20:06Jason Calacanis?

  And if you do it that way, there's an essentialism. You understand and you've prioritized the feature set. It doesn't mean that you're not going to add those features later.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:18Jason Calacanis?

  Sequencing again. And I had a founder who said, the way he handled it inside his startup was he may, he said, he would say to the team members or investors or customers, it's a great idea. I'm going to write it down so we don't forget it here and we're going to put it in a, we're going to prioritize it and we're going to do a little research on it. And then he would tell the internal team, it's on the not right now list.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  The backlog, yep.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:40Jason Calacanis?

  But not right now was a very kind way of saying it to the team and it showed leadership. And let's talk a little bit about the simplicity of some of the most successful products in the world. Instagram, Amanda, had the ver- most simple, I remember.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  Sending postcards to each other.

• 20:57Jason Calacanis?

  Essentially, the, you, you upload a photo to the social feed, that's one function. And then you pick a filter by swiping and hit publish. That was it. They didn't even have a like button in the beginning. They didn't, certainly didn't have comments. And then those were added later. And if you open Instagram now, I feel like I am launching a rocket ship. I mean, there are so many features. When you swipe left, am I doing a story? Am I doing a post?

• 21:25Speaker 02

  Real.

• 21:25Jason Calacanis?

  A reel. I mean, I, I don't know the difference between any of these things. And then there's a bunch of buttons and you can do filters. And there's thousands of lenses. You put music behind it. It's so convoluted, but still growing. When, when you started thinking about your first product at the league, what was the analogy there?

• 21:43Speaker 02

  Oh, it was, it was simple AF, I would call it. Basically, it was five at five. You get five daily prospects at 5:00 PM. And that was it. You could message them, nothing else. We didn't even monetize for about two years. So especially in your consumer, I always say, make sure you're actually building something that people want before you start charging them. And so we did a kind of a smoke and mirrors implementation where I wanted to be able to tell my investors that I do have people willing to pay. You know, we were servicing a high net worth demographic. So I actually created a fake button where users could say, I want to upgrade. We could, we knew that about 10 to 15% of people would click that button. And then we actually gave them the feature, but we didn't actually charge their card because I wanted to be very simple and very focused on just, let's make the basic free

• 22:27Speaker 02

  product amazing and know that we had a 10 to 15% conversion rate, but not actually get distracted dealing with monetization with billing, which with refunds, which happens in consumer. And so that's like an example of kind of how you can sort of hack your way into building a little bit of features so you know there's a demand without, without ruining your focus.

• 22:45Jason Calacanis?

  It's so elegantly simple, yet complex. Five matches, 5:00 PM.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  Smoke and mirrors, yeah.

• 22:50Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, you say smoke and mirrors, I say essentialism.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:54Jason Calacanis?

  It gives you exactly what you're looking for. 15 would be overwhelming. Now it's a chore. Five?

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Yep. Our whole thing was quality over quantity, right? So that was our main message. That's how we differentiated from Tinder, from all these other apps out there was just, you're going to get five good prospects a day at 5:00 PM.

• 23:09Jason Calacanis?

  Which we'll get into in a minute in our discussion about trust, but let's keep talking about like this feature essentialism and avoiding the feature death march. What was it at Uber? I mean, I have my own ideas, but you were inside that.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  I mean, obviously with a high frequency consumer product, you are inundated all week with people making feature requests or suggestions. And as the team got better, bigger, you know, people were constantly making suggestions to Travis. I mean, Travis was relentless about focusing on reliability. As you can imagine, if you take Uber to travel from your office or your home to somewhere in the city and you take it there on a Friday or Saturday night, and then it gets to the end of the evening and you want to go home and it doesn't work, you're not going to use Uber again. And this is in a, in a world and in many cities, unlike Tokyo where the tax is not reliable. So you can quite literally be stranded. And so we focused a lot in the early days on making it reliable.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  And to, I think, to say yes to reliability, we had to say no to a lot of other things. Because for that reliability took a lot of operational and engineering resources. And so we were pretty obsessive about completed requests, ETA, which is like the time it would take to complete a request, and the driver rating. And we knew we had a product that had product market fit. So we were just very, very focused on making the thing that already had product market fit work really, really well.

• 24:33Jason Calacanis?

  So our first item, hey, let's get that product right first, and we'll worry about fundraising down the road. Which means you have to be, our second point, customer obsessed, really understand the customers, which costs $0. That's one of the beautiful things. And then today with vibe coding, even doing product first in these little experiments, also $0. Three, we want to avoid that death march with features. You really want to focus on what's essential. Now we're going to open up our fourth point today of what founders should focus on in year zero, which you did a perfect transition to, which is trust. Relentless focus on trust and reliability. Trust and reliability. Amanda, in dating, this is incredibly important as well.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  Trust is everything.

• 25:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So tell us about that and how much it costs to do that, the resources it took, and how you think about it, sitting here today, looking back on that decade-long journey to a very successful exit, and then carrying that into whatever your next product will wind up being, or you're choosing between three or four ideas. One of which you got inspired by here on the trip, but we won't say.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  A lot of ideas, a lot of domains in my GoDaddy shopping cart right now. Yeah, so for us, trust was, you know, can you trust that this product is going to serve you prospects or dating candidates, should you say, that you want, that, you know, fit your preferences? And for us, I actually vetted every single applicant manually. So, you know, eventually we did transition to using algorithms and machine learning and all that fancy stuff. But at the beginning, it was literally me and Amanda looking at everyone who applied and saying, you're accepted and you're rejected. And people downloaded the league and joined the league because of that, you know, reliability or trust that the people... People are going to be high quality vetted, they're going to have six photos, they're not going to do gym selfies, they're not going to be wearing sunglasses in their pictures or they would be rejected.

• 26:19Jason Calacanis?

  And those were specific things you did? No gym clothes, no?

• 26:22Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, we had a whole rules of, you know, eventually I trained people to do this. I wasn't always the one accepting all the candidates, but eventually, you know, we found we had almost a 50% acceptance rate as far as when people get a prospect, we call them prospects, in their batch, 50% of the time they liked them, which, you know, if you've been on any dating app today, you know, usually it's probably like one out of 20 that you're going to be swiping right on. And so, you know, getting a 50% acceptance rate was sort of unheard of, and is still unheard of today. And so that was because we spent, you know, a lot of, we did a lot of things that didn't scale. That was, what I was doing didn't scale, and then we also did customer support, so I had a human, that was me at the beginning too, the concierge. We had a concierge that would answer every question from a user regardless of if they paid us or not, help them with their profile.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  We said, "Hey, your third photo is actually better than your first, I went ahead and swapped it for you." And I would actually go, I remember before we launched, guys in particular are very bad at curating their photos, so I would go and take, find the best photo of the six they put and put it first, and then I turned everybody's photo black and white because everyone looks better in black and white. So we did a lot of these things that just made things, you know, made people trust the product and want to come back.

• 27:29Jason Calacanis?

  In the case of Airbnb, they said the photos were critical, and there's this famous story that the founders always tell of, you know, talking to Paul Graham at YC about...

• 27:39Speaker 02

  Getting the professional photo shoots, right?

• 27:40Jason Calacanis?

  Getting the professional photos, and he says, "Well," and he said, "Hey, and the most demand's in New York," he says, "So why aren't you in New York with cameras taking pictures of the best places and hiring photographers?" And they were like, "Oh, because we're startup founders and we want to focus on anything that's not the most essential thing." And that's what great mentors, great investors, or great programs like YC or hopefully ours can help you do, which is get to that essential... Important thing. Yeah. And those photos build trust. If you're going to stay somewhere and the photos look like a serial killer's apartment, you're not going to book it. But if it looks like the Aman Hotel, or it looks like the Ritz Carlton, okay, yeah, maybe I will stay there, which is why, William, when you look, they, they, they almost have a playbook.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:26Jason Calacanis?

  Of what the kitchen should look like, and they have a neon sign, and then they have the pods. I mean, they've literally figured it out. When you hear Amanda talk about it, it's, it seems obvious, but each of those nuances builds trust.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. What I hear when Amanda tells that story is somebody that is obsessed about making the core value proposition reliable. And she's obsessively vetting everybody. There's like, she's committed to five, five matches a day, or like five offerings a day, and she's handholding the, you know, kind of what she's serving up, and she's saying no to all these other features. And I think that level of obsession and, you know, not using tech necessarily and doing something that doesn't scale is a way to do that.

• 29:09Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, we've gone through four really important things that founders should focus on in year zero. We've got three to go. First up, hey, let's get focused on that product. Don't worry about fundraising. Number two, customer obsession. Number three, feature death march, feature creep, just staying really focused on making the thing the thing. And of course, fourth, working on that reliability and trust in your product. These are really important things to think about right now in year zero. And if you're listening to this and you're thinking about starting a company, you can go to founder.university, apply for the US, Riyadh, or coming to Tokyo, and everybody can apply to all three. It's competitive to get in. Let's talk about constraint. There's this expression that great art is driven by constraint.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. Innovation is, these are constraining variables.

• 29:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And they asked Bob Dylan, one of my favorite artists of all time, and my favorite album happens to be Blood on the Tracks. And they said, in this Rolling Stone interview, my gosh, this is my favorite album, and it starts talking about all these incredible songs. And what was the inspiration for this album? And Bob Dylan said, well, you know, I, I owed the, I owed Columbia Records a picture. I owed them an album, and they've been waiting a long time, and they said if I don't get it to them by the date, they would sue me to get the advance back. And I didn't have any money, I'd just been through a divorce.

• 30:33Jason Calacanis?

  And this poor interviewer was crushed that this album that meant so much to them. And I read it, I was crushed, that the inspiration of the album was the divorce and not getting sued to, because he hadn't, he was broke. That was the inspiration. There was a limiting factor. When you're making a movie, you have a certain number of days to shoot. With a startup, you have...

• 30:55Speaker 01

  You can, you can drag it out if you want, but you, you have the gun against your head of your burn rate, like how much money you have left. And I think cash flow management is the most important thing when it comes to managing a startup. Like, running out of money means the game's over. One thing I've seen time and time again, I get hundreds of investor updates, is you have some founders that I think get attracted to company building. You know, they want to play company building rather than finding a product that works and then testing and then proving that they can scale it in a economically rational way, where the economics make sense. You know, I think David Sacks came up with this term of burn

• 31:37Speaker 01

  multiple. Like, how mu, for every dollar that you spend, what's the incremental revenue that you generate?

• 31:41Jason Calacanis?

  Right. There's a constraint.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a constraint, right? And I think for, I defer to David on this one, but I think for a lot of, you know, SaaS metrics, you know, under two is, you know, a good signal and over three is a bad thing.

• 31:55Jason Calacanis?

  So you spend two million, you make a million, totally fine?

• 31:57Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 31:58Jason Calacanis?

  You spend three million to make a million, okay, that's not super efficient. What's going on here? And are you going to catch up next year?

• 32:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And, and so I, you know, there's a certain group of founders where you get the investor updates and they're being very kind of disciplined about how they start to increase spend. And again, it's sequencing. So do they, do they feel like they're really starting to solve a customer problem? Do they, have they then been able to prove that they can start scaling that through sales or, you know, SEM? And only then do they start to increase the spend relative to how much money they have in the bank.

• 32:29Jason Calacanis?

  Signs or thoughts about constraint? You tipped us off to a little bit of it. Constraint, five at five?

• 32:36Speaker 02

  Five at five. I mean, we also only launched in San Francisco. We were only in San Francisco for the first two years, so we made sure... We really understood that market and had a good product in that market prior to expanding. I think the other piece for me was time. I don't know, a lot of founders are wired like me where perfection is the enemy of done. I always say, and it's easy to just sit and spin and want to keep perfecting things. So by setting a launch date and saying, we are going to launch on this date and telling your customers that that we we we that forced us to actually get the product out or else I could have tried to make it perfect forever. So I always say to founders, give yourself a deadline, however you want to do that, whether it's telling your customers when you're going to launch. But I know that's what got my butt into gear. So.

• 33:16Jason Calacanis?

  So you have geographic, you have financial and timelines, you have the ratio of spend to revenue. Yeah, you also have maybe a waitlist.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 33:28Jason Calacanis?

  And limited availability.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  You then have a social contract.

• 33:31Jason Calacanis?

  Social contract.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:32Jason Calacanis?

  We were talking about a really interesting, beautifully designed app about helping people find friends and get out in the real world. And you and I were brainstorming about it and I said, you know, I wonder if, you know, there is a possibility of having two day parts. You know, the brunch, lunch period and nighttime. So that means seven days, there's 14.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  It's a lot of liquidity to to manage.

• 33:54Jason Calacanis?

  To fill.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:55Jason Calacanis?

  14 events occurring. I wonder if you took the peak loneliness, which probably occurs for people on Friday and Saturday nights. Not Amanda.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 34:04Jason Calacanis?

  Incredibly popular, but for you and I, sitting home Friday and Saturday night, like we're losers. We text each other and go get a drink or should we go get some sushi and we're losers no more. But I wonder if they just focused on Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday brunch. And that would be three of 14 and just nailing that, selling it out and creating pent up demand. That would work so much better than this open platform where everything can occur at any time and then nothing occurs.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  I think what you're saying is you're touching on several points we've talked about, which is what you're doing is you're niching down. And so now your marketing communication, how you pitch it to people can be more narrow. Right. So it's easier for them to understand because it's constrained. And then your ability to serve that product is easier because you've got, you know, now more narrow scope. So you're going to spend less money and make it easier for you to deliver on the promise.

• 34:56Jason Calacanis?

  When you put all that together, you don't need as much money, your ability to execute.

• 35:03Jason Calacanis?

  Because you've narrowed the constraint, you don't have to spend as much time.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:06Jason Calacanis?

  So you can get customer feedback quicker.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Yep. And you can like, you can nail the product more easily.

• 35:12Jason Calacanis?

  Correct.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  Because it's not, I don't think you can just like, do a good job. You have to absolutely nail it and like, over-deliver.

• 35:18Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  If you want to drive word of mouth.

• 35:20Jason Calacanis?

  So those five people, Amanda, have to be really high quality in your example, in this example. Just that came up in two different conversations, just, hey, what if there was only four events on the weekend with only eight spots each? Now you've only got to fill thirty-two.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  And you're going to crush them.

• 35:35Jason Calacanis?

  And just make each of them so wonderful and great.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  And it also prevents, like for us, you know, as a consumer marketplace, you're going to have the cold start problem. So I knew from the get-go, I was like, I'm not going to have nearly the liquidity that someone like Tinder does. And so by limiting that, by only showing you five, people don't have to know that maybe there's only fifteen people total. You know, you buy yourself a couple of days to give them, you know, give them your full set of inventory. So they don't have to know how small the pool is at the beginning.

• 36:00Jason Calacanis?

  I've been thinking about that myself, reflecting on Founder University. In the United States, it was getting popular and popular. And I said, hey, listen, there's no cost to accepting more people. We should be just able to scale this. We did three hundred and fifty people the last time. And then what we found out was, because we had ten pods, there were thirty-five people in each pod. The great founders would skip the pod. Because the pod was being filled up with questions that were so rudimentary from the people who were just very early, or neophytes, or maybe not even cut out, let's be candid, to be founders. And I said, huh, did we know that coming in? And we're like, we kind of knew that some of them weren't ready, or maybe we're just being a little...

• 36:36Speaker 02

  It's your version of the gym selfie dudes. No, I'm kidding.

• 36:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, exactly. Like, maybe just too many people and are trying to do more. So I asked the team, hey, can we do less?

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. And your team is now spending less time with the best people. Right? Because they're more distracted.

• 36:52Jason Calacanis?

  Because they're more distracted with the squeaky wheels who get the most grease. And so in Saudi, we did sixty. Here, we did about thirty in Founder University. And then that makes the pod smaller. So then we had a really interesting, so what's the optimal number of founders to be in a pod every Thursday night, talking about their startups? And we came to, well, two or three is probably too small. Thirty is way too big, so between those two numbers, we think the right number is. It might be fifteen, it might be ten, it could wind up at twenty, but it's enough that everybody gets to participate and there's no cameras off. So the number's probably eight, nine, or ten, is my guess. But we don't know, we'll figure that out. But we are enforcing constraint, which I think is pretty interesting. Next up, we want to talk about distribution. We're cooking with oil right now.

• 37:37Jason Calacanis?

  First up, we talked about product first. Let's put fundraising down the road, and we're going to keep that burn rate low in order to do that. Customer obsession and meeting with customers and understanding them, that costs you zero dollars. Most founders are too scared to do it. If you're too scared to do it, you can't be a founder, you should quit now. Number three, feature creep, death march, doing too much, and why are you doing too much? Well, maybe you don't want to focus on your customers or build the product. Trust is just so critical, reliability. And then constraints, our fifth item. Now we're at distribution. How did you handle distribution, Amanda? And how do you think about distribution today? When's the right time to be thinking about distribution? And I'll include virality there, I'll include paid, I'll include social, I'll include everything.

• 38:22Jason Calacanis?

  Just distribution as a concept, some people might refer to it as go-to-market, some people might call it growth hacking, but just getting distribution for your product.

• 38:31Speaker 02

  Distribution is everything. So that is your main, primary job as founder and CEO, is to figure out if there are distribution hacks for your product, and you've got to go find them. So if you're not the one doing marketing, you should be at the very early stages. For us, you know, we found a combination of doing events, inviting press to events, and then pitching press were actually our biggest levers, and they were all somewhat free because the events didn't end up costing that much money. We were able to get bars and restaurants to sponsor or to say, hey, you can do this for free if you bring X number of people to our bar on a Monday night when they don't have anyone. So we were able to kind of find hacks to get that initial, you know, a couple thousand people in the database. And then we found a playbook. So what we found is that as we went to cities, we would get local press, so you know Dallas

• 39:15Speaker 02

  Morning News, San Francisco Chronicle, you get these local publications to write, you know, for us, the tagline was Tinder for the elites is coming. I mean, Dear City. And so we'd run that play over and over again for each city we went to. And press was our best friend.

• 39:30Jason Calacanis?

  And it was controversial.

• 39:31Speaker 02

  Oh, 100%. Don't be afraid to push against, you know.

• 39:34Jason Calacanis?

  You actually agitated it. You knew it was coming. And you said, hey, this event is only for people who can get into the league.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 39:42Jason Calacanis?

  And it's elite. And they were like, oh, my God, we're going to count the demographics. And we're going to write this. And you can go look up these pieces.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  We were the first ones to reject people from a dating app. So it was a, you know, it was a controversial concept at the time.

• 39:53Jason Calacanis?

  Which makes it worth writing about. So you figured out how to hack local PR.

• 39:58Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 39:58Jason Calacanis?

  And national PR.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  Journalists were our best friends today. In today's era, that would probably be influencers. You know, if you can find people with distribution on Twitter, on Instagram, on TikTok. If they're going to be talking about your product for free, that's amazing. You can get people to just try it. So inviting those people to events, those kind of things.

• 40:14Jason Calacanis?

  We. Zillow.

• 40:15Speaker 02

  Business Insider was our best friend.

• 40:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, they, they were doing link baiting and all of that just got people to know the domain name. Zillow did something similar. They created a very controversial device, not, you know, applied to become part of this dating site. It was the Zestimate. This is our estimate of the cost of your house. People got really upset. You're estimating the cost of my house. It's wrong. My house is worth more. Everybody thinks their house is worth more.

• 40:40Speaker 02

  You want to see what your house is valued at, right?

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Plays into vanity.

• 40:42Jason Calacanis?

  Plays into vanity, plays, yeah. And, and if something's wrong, people want to fix it. The same thing the Wikipedia had, which was sometimes the China page originally, when I first started using Wikipedia was one paragraph. And people were so upset that like, they're like, this is the largest country in the world. And it's one paragraph. This is an embarrassment. And they said, okay, hit the edit button. And they were like, okay, the population of China is. And like, then the next person was like, okay, you don't have anything about X, Y, and Z. Let's add that. And Zillow then made local reports about the zestimates of the local and the national. And then to this day, they send out reports every week, a different city or geo gets sent out so that their team can rotate from.

• 41:27Jason Calacanis?

  You know, Arizona to Texas to New York, really amazing. That's a great example. Way to get distribution. Give2get worked pretty well for Uber.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:36Jason Calacanis?

  Perhaps too well, yeah?

• 41:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. At times there were, there were groups of people that were hacking it. They would create landing pages and then drive SEM traffic against it to sell them.

• 41:48Jason Calacanis?

  They would buy ads.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:49Jason Calacanis?

  To go to a landing page. In fact, my friend, who I introduced Uber to. I love this story.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:53Jason Calacanis?

  He bought, my friend Nick, bought ads on Google that said, Uber is now in Los Angeles. Click here to get a free ride, to get $25.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  Oh, I remember, I remember this guy.

• 42:05Jason Calacanis?

  And it was $1 or $2 per click.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 42:08Jason Calacanis?

  He converted like every other click, so it was $4, and every time he got $25 credit in his account. He got to like 300 or 400 rides and he's like, I got turned off. I lost all the things, but I spent all this money. Can you get Travis to undo it? And I was like, yeah, let me bother Travis with you hacking the system against the terms of service yet. No, but Give2get.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:29Jason Calacanis?

  That was of the, of the moment.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  It was definitely of the moment. I mean, and I think the, the specific example, which you can turn into generalized advice is that your existing power users or people who love the product are the people that are most likely to be able to talk to and find other people that can love the product.

• 42:45Jason Calacanis?

  They're advocates.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, they can, you can turn them into advocates. If you have a customer that loves your product and is using it a lot, it's worth spending time with them and incentivizing them to find other people in their life that are like them.

• 42:57Jason Calacanis?

  There were, I think there was a moment of time where people were building tools to take their eBay listings or their Airbnb listing and get it onto Craigslist. And they built tools to just have that happen automatically and have it happen in different cities. And then it was like a little cat and mouse Craigslist trying to do it. But building these little tools that help people move inventory from one place to the other was enough to just make this work. And the people who had Airbnbs, well, they would set up their own landing page and send people to Airbnb.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  I mean, it's, I think it's a pattern that I'm guessing all three of us have seen is, you know, ten, fifteen years ago, building the technology was equally, if not the hardest part of the startup.

• 43:40Jason Calacanis?

  That took six months.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, it took six months. And I think with, you know, I think the, the term that all VCs like to throw around is Javon's paradox, you know, as something gets cheap.

• 43:49Jason Calacanis?

  Javon's.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Javon's paradox is things get cheaper, people use them more. And I think that's definitely true with AI and vibe coding. And so the, the product piece is getting easier. I mean, obviously, truly brilliant products are still hard, but it is easier to build product now. And so I think there is more and more value being created in distribution. And so that can either be, you know, the, the obvious example is influencers, people with podcasts.

• 44:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 44:16Speaker 02

  Dropbox is a great example, where, you know, you're sharing with a friend and then they have to create an account.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 44:21Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  To, that's like sort of the classic.

• 44:23Jason Calacanis?

  DocuSign is the best one. If you do DocuSign, it's like, we can say, this is saved in your locker.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:30Jason Calacanis?

  If you ever want to look it up again, and then you're like, yeah, I gotta get that document. Is it still in my locker? It's like, yeah, don't worry, it's in your locker.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  But distribution can, can mean different things, right? So the, the obvious one is, you know, an influencer, somebody with a big audience. But distribution at an early stage can mean other things, like access to customers, you know, an industry insider, somebody that's worked inside an industry.

• 44:52Speaker 02

  Hiring someone with a Rolodex.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, hiring somebody with a Rolodex, an advisor, an early angel that has got deep relationships in an industry that you want to go and sell into, so they can help you go and find customers to go and do customer discovery with, is another good example. And the other one is a design partner. A design partner is, you know, kind of an anchor customer that's going to allow you access to their workflows, their data. They're essentially saying, like, hey, you're building a product, I will let you use my data. I will, I will kind of commit to giving you feedback and having access to.

• 45:24Speaker 02

  In return for testimonial, right?

• 45:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 45:26Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and you get.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  So there are different forms of distribution.

• 45:28Jason Calacanis?

  And, and that product council is what it used to be called, the enterprise software.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, customer council, yeah.

• 45:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, customer council, product council. It's like, people would, I remember when I was inside Sony for eighteen months, one of the few jobs I was able to hold. It was fourteen months now that I think about it. Anyway, I got asked to be on like, the Cisco one, or this one, and all it was, was a local sales rep, just trying to figure out how to take. Us out to more lunches and and bond with us so they could sell us more stuff.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:59Jason Calacanis?

  But we got to say that and put it on our resume. So my resume had, oh, I was part of this council, that council. And they're, oh, tell me about that when I go to next job.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:07Jason Calacanis?

  It's like, oh, well, they thought so highly of me. I I got to see their new products first.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:12Jason Calacanis?

  This is really amazing.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  The relationship, right? And so if they're trying to find, with Sony you were working on.

• 46:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. So if they're trying to sell into Sony somewhere, they're going to ask you for an introduction.

• 46:22Jason Calacanis?

  Of course.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  They're gonna, they're gonna, if they find a route into a decision maker, they're gonna ask you to forward an email.

• 46:26Jason Calacanis?

  They literally asked me for the corporate directory.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 46:29Jason Calacanis?

  I was like, I don't think I can give that to you. Like, yeah, no, we've done it many times.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. I was like, okay, yeah, I guess maybe I could. What are you looking for? Like, well, we need somebody in Jersey, you know, who does this thing. My gosh, we're having a great time in Tokyo. This is our second time as a group.

• 46:43Speaker 02

  I love this city.

• 46:43Jason Calacanis?

  Here. William, I took you last time. It was your first time coming here. So.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  Great French toast.

• 46:49Speaker 02

  And karaoke.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  And pizza.

• 46:51Jason Calacanis?

  Continue.

• 46:52Speaker 02

  And sushi, of course.

• 46:54Jason Calacanis?

  And wild boar and bear.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, smash burger.

• 46:58Jason Calacanis?

  The smash burger was exceptional.

• 47:00Speaker 02

  Wagyu mafia.

• 47:01Jason Calacanis?

  Wagyu mafia was great. Tonkatsu, pretty great.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Pretty much all the food here.

• 47:05Speaker 02

  Wagyu mafia was quite expensive, but.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:07Jason Calacanis?

  I gave you that bill.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  We, we thought it was in yen, but it was dollars.

• 47:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it was pretty deserving. And she.

• 47:13Speaker 02

  It was the one I decided to pay for to be nice.

• 47:15Jason Calacanis?

  Amanda's like, Jake, how you're paying for everything. I'll pay for wagyu mafia. I was like, okay, it's just a wagyu sando. And they charged her $350 for a sandwich with gold leaf and caviar on it.

• 47:25Speaker 02

  Times three, yeah.

• 47:26Jason Calacanis?

  Times three. So she got hit with a $1,000 wagyu bill.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  It was very yummy.

• 47:30Jason Calacanis?

  It was very yummy. But I, I always love introducing people to the culture here because, gosh, the commitment to excellence.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  It's, it's wonderful.

• 47:38Jason Calacanis?

  It's just wonderful to see people take the donut as seriously as the car, as seriously as the consumer electronic device, as serious as the hotel, as serious as when we lost our bags, Amanda. And we were frustrated. And then we had this moment of like, okay, let's put our entitlement aside. If we were in America and we had lost our bags, we would be in a 12-person line with a woman behind the counter who was extremely upset at us. For having.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  For being there.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  No, but I got a, I got a person with a lady with my sign name. She had my name on a sign.

• 48:12Jason Calacanis?

  She went to find you knowing your bag didn't make it.

• 48:14Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 48:14Jason Calacanis?

  And they asked you to describe your bag. What color is it?

• 48:19Speaker 01

  In detail, in a lot of detail.

• 48:20Jason Calacanis?

  What size? Does it have a zipper? Does it have a lock? Does it have the code? And they had.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  What material is it?

• 48:26Jason Calacanis?

  What material is it?

• 48:27Speaker 02

  Very meticulous.

• 48:28Jason Calacanis?

  And then William and I started joking. What were the next five questions you could ask us? I was like, are you happy with the bag? Have you considered other bag options?

• 48:38Speaker 02

  When did you first meet the bag?

• 48:39Jason Calacanis?

  And we were, we're just like, wow, this woman cares so much about getting Amanda her bag. And.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  Jekyll didn't get a sign.

• 48:49Jason Calacanis?

  I didn't get a sign.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  I don't know Japan that well. I'm not going to pretend to know the culture that well.

• 48:53Jason Calacanis?

  But your second trip, you're good.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  But my second trip, so I'm now an expert. It does seem that unlike in the United States, in the United States, there, there is social status associated with the job itself, like what job you're doing has social status. My limited observation here is that there seems to be social status not about the job, but how well you do the job.

• 49:12Jason Calacanis?

  Correct. And that is.

• 49:14Speaker 02

  Competency.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, your competency and the detail and, and your enthusiasm for pursuing excellence. And in order to do that, leads us to our seventh point, which is the team and team building. What'd you learn, Amanda, in your years of team building? And tell us the mistakes.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  So many mistakes. I think it's a different podcast, probably. But team is everything.

• 49:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, okay, great. Everything is everything. Product's everything. Distribution is everything. We always say everything's everything.

• 49:40Speaker 02

  Well, I was just saying.

• 49:41Jason Calacanis?

  But team is up there.

• 49:42Speaker 02

  For me, it was the hardest thing to learn and it's easy to ignore it at the beginning. You're so focused on the marketing and the product and, you know, those are kind of the glamorous things, front, front of the house, and then actually building and retaining and hiring and, and firing if people aren't working and being able to fire fast when, when it doesn't work. Those are actually what really should be taking almost 30% of your time in this zero to one stage. And it's easy to ignore it and spend maybe 10% of your time on that.

• 50:08Jason Calacanis?

  Where did you find great people and how did you assess their greatness and potential?

• 50:12Speaker 02

  Well, my favorite story is my first employee, Meredith, had to email me, I think, five times because I'm not great at responding to emails all the time. And so she learned quickly that she needed to follow up with me. And she was one of the few candidates that followed up enough to get the job.

• 50:27Jason Calacanis?

  So there's founder candidates.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  Persistence, grit, not, you know, not being offended because someone didn't write you back. I've had people like that. I know, understand that the founder's busy and they're going to go the extra mile and step up to, you know, get the job done. And so I think people that are willing to raise their hand and, you know, go the extra mile.

• 50:46Jason Calacanis?

  Well, what have you learned over the years in terms of talent and finding great talent, inspiring great talent, and maybe cutting talent that isn't going to do their best work at your company?

• 50:57Speaker 01

  I mean, I, I think hiring for, depending on if you're talking about hiring an early-stage company or.

• 51:03Jason Calacanis?

  We're talking about early-stage here.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  Early-stage.

• 51:05Jason Calacanis?

  So let's just say first two years.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, then I would, I would focus heavily on generalists that have incredible attitudes and like high slope.

• 51:13Speaker 02

  Yep, that was my first hire.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:14Jason Calacanis?

  Let's define and unpack high slope.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  High slope is somebody that you think has kind of the, they're open-minded, they're highly conscientious, they're low on neuroticism, and it's the type of person that you can throw at multiple problems and they're just going to go and figure it out. They're not necessarily going to be, you know, a domain, domain expert and become, you know, like a VP of like engineering, but for the, the years where you're early and you're trying to find out solutions to random problems and there's pivots and there's chaos and you're working late and there's psychological drama.

• 51:46Jason Calacanis?

  No, there's fear, the company could go out of business, it's not working.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  Most, really good.

• 51:51Jason Calacanis?

  Like a resource.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  Most really good founders are pretty obsessed and they can have quite sharp elbows and you need people around that founder.

• 51:59Speaker 02

  Can handle that.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  They can, they can handle that and they're so, that's why low neuroticism is helpful.

• 52:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Because they're not going to get derailed by those things and they're pretty steady and they're highly conscientious and they can grow into solving different problems. You know, I, I know this.

• 52:13Speaker 02

  They can juggle, right?

• 52:14Speaker 01

  And they can, they can juggle and they're high energy.

• 52:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  They're people that are like intrinsically high energy and they're, they're like learning machines.

• 52:21Jason Calacanis?

  And they're not going to get frazzled when you say, hey, we're going to Tokyo.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 52:26Jason Calacanis?

  And we need to find an AV crew to record the episodes and we need to get really unique food and I want to do some schwag. And they're like, they don't say, I don't do that.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're like, oh.

• 52:37Speaker 02

  Or I know how to do it.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  Okay, well, let me ask ChatGPT and Google and Gemini and like, how would I do this? If, if this is going to be true, what would need to be true?

• 52:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I think there's a fearlessness to certain individuals who, if they're built for a startup culture, we call them jack of all trades or janes of all trades in the United States, but it's somebody who will understand, hey, we're a five-person company, there's eventually going to be 20 people here doing 20 different jobs, but right now, there's five people doing four jobs each. And maybe, at best, we each know two of those jobs, but we're going to, on the fly, figure out paid marketing. On the fly, we're going to figure out how to find the restaurant and how to do PR. Because I assume, when you did all this great stuff on PR, you didn't have a PR firm advising you?

• 53:21Speaker 02

  No, I figured it all out, and then I gave it to Meredith, once I figured it out, and she would go and...

• 53:25Jason Calacanis?

  And Meredith was an assistant to you? Like, your admin?

• 53:27Speaker 02

  She was everything from an executive assistant, to doing customer support, to doing marketing, to sending emails to our customers, to doing Facebook ads, to talking to, you know, part restaurants and bars to get an event done. She did everything that I gave to her.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  So that's not always true, but I have seen, time and time again, someone very young.

• 53:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, she was...

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Somebody very young that hasn't, like...

• 53:47Speaker 02

  Couple of years out of school.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, they have come from a flyover state, and they have made their way to LA, New York, or San Francisco.

• 53:53Jason Calacanis?

  Interesting archetype.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  They didn't, they didn't...

• 53:55Speaker 02

  Flyover, very precise.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  They didn't, they didn't necessarily go to an Ivy League school, their parents definitely didn't go to an Ivy League school.

• 54:01Jason Calacanis?

  So they're hungry.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  They, they probably had jobs in high school, certainly worked in college.

• 54:06Jason Calacanis?

  Working class.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:08Jason Calacanis?

  Blue collar.

• 54:09Speaker 01

  And they played sports in college.

• 54:10Jason Calacanis?

  Hustle. So, discipline with the, with the sports.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they're very competitive.

• 54:13Jason Calacanis?

  And you were one of those people. They hired you as, you were from the flyover state of London.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, yes, exactly.

• 54:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  The backwater.

• 54:21Jason Calacanis?

  It is now. It's now, London has kind of devolved into a flyover.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Well, yeah.

• 54:26Jason Calacanis?

  It's like, we're going to Paris, or Germany.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  We're going to Dubai.

• 54:29Jason Calacanis?

  We're going to Dubai.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  I don't know if you want to go to Paris or Germany, I think you just keep going.

• 54:32Jason Calacanis?

  No, we're just going right to, right to UAE.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, we're not sending our students to London, it's too radicalized.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:38Jason Calacanis?

  It's the greatest headline ever.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  Amazing. My parents, yes, I sent that to my parents.

• 54:41Jason Calacanis?

  It took me three times to read that, to understand what I was reading.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:45Jason Calacanis?

  The world's changed.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  It looked like an Onion headline.

• 54:47Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, and, in all honesty, those kind of people are just so valuable to the company, especially early on. Later on, they get called special... Projects.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  Yes, because as the company gets bigger.

• 54:58Jason Calacanis?

  Or fixers.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, as the company gets bigger, you, you know, for better or worse, you get specializations.

• 55:04Speaker 02

  And you have to take things away.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:05Speaker 02

  And you have to have people that are okay with giving away some of their power and not taking that.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:09Speaker 02

  Personally, or, you know, wanting to keep their power base.

• 55:13Jason Calacanis?

  Go ahead and tell me how you would say that to Meredith, hey, we're taking PR away from you, you did it, you had this great success.

• 55:19Speaker 02

  Well, she was great at that, so I put her in that, but I took her away, you know,

• 55:21Jason Calacanis?

  So you specialized her to that.

• 55:22Speaker 02

  Yes, that's where she ended up staying, but like at the beginning, she was customer support, she was doing our mail, because I hated checking the mail. She would actually send the mail to my mom.

• 55:30Jason Calacanis?

  So, but when you did that, obviously, the mail, she probably wasn't bummed out about, but she might have loved customer support, how do you say, hey, we're taking this away from you, you didn't do anything wrong?

• 55:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, there's this actually great first round Capital article called Giving Away Your Legos, and so I had everyone on the team read that, and it's just about, as you scale, you are gonna have to give away parts of your job, and that's a good thing, that's not a bad thing.

• 55:50Jason Calacanis?

  In fact, a great founder is literally trying to get to the state where there is nothing, they come to the office on Monday, there's nothing left that they're, they have to do. That's when you actually know you're successful, I think, as a founder, is that when you take a week off, the company does as well or better than if you were there.

• 56:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  What I've seen work well in terms of taking projects or scope away from people is, first of all, understanding what, what their kind of career goals are, do they want to stay a generalist and stay early stage? And if they do, then like, it's time to get off, you know, the train, and I'll help you find something.

• 56:23Jason Calacanis?

  We have a four-year vest for a reason.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, and if you do want to specialize, which is, I would say seventy to five to eighty percent of the time, they want to specialize, okay, which area do you want to specialize in? Okay, so this, okay, well, my job is to go and find an expert with much more experience than you, they're gonna come in over you, and their job is gonna be to mentor you and help you achieve their career path. And I'm not gonna be able to do that, because I'm not a fifteen-year marketing expert, but my job is to find someone that you find inspiring, and if I don't hire that person, you've got every right to turn around and tell me I'm an idiot, and I'll help you find another job somewhere else.

• 56:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 56:58Speaker 02

  And the good ones will stay, and the bad ones, that'll make them leave, because some people don't want to get hired over, and those are not the people you want on your

• 57:05Speaker 01

  It's a little like if you if you think you know you're four years out of college and you know you're going to become a CMO of a series.

• 57:12Jason Calacanis?

  Happened to me on a board. I was on a board and they said, we want you to be on the audit committee. And I looked at the founder and I was like, I've never done anything like that. He's like, yeah, I just think it's an opportunity for you to learn. And then, you know, whatever, you fast forward two years, I learned how the audit works. I learned how to interface with the accountants. And I was like.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  Pretty exciting stuff.

• 57:32Speaker 02

  I see that as your superpower.

• 57:33Jason Calacanis?

  It was the worst two years.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  When I think of you, I think auditing.

• 57:36Jason Calacanis?

  The worst thing I had to go through. But I was like, you know what, if this is what the founder of that company in New Hampshire, Diane, wants me to do, I'm going to be loyal to him and suck it up and do it. This is 20 years ago. But I said, okay, you gave me a board seat, I'm doing it. I'm going to make this work.

• 57:51Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 57:52Speaker 02

  And that's not one of the points here, but just learning to delegate as a founder. I know I struggled with that. I kind of liked owning things and I wanted to do it. And you have to really learn to give work away and be okay with the fact that maybe it won't get done exactly as you would have done it. But 80% of the way is actually good enough in the startup world. And so you have to learn how to delegate.

• 58:09Jason Calacanis?

  One of the great things about delegating professional development that I've learned is it will lower the anxiety in the organization of if this person leaves, the company's.

• 58:21Speaker 02

  Hit by the train.

• 58:21Jason Calacanis?

  F. This is all coming off the rails. So what we do is, I will say, well, okay, you're running Founder University until this date. Six months later, you're going to work on the syndicate. Six months later, you're going to work on the fund. Six months later, you're going to go work on first calls with founders and running that department. So there's your 24 month experience.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  GE used to do this.

• 58:41Jason Calacanis?

  And I rotate and we do professional development. And when the person hands it off to the next person, I say, do a Zoom call, record it, put it into our Notion database, and make a document with all the instructions, use AI to summarize it. Now, when we've done the first handoff of, hey, you're handing Founder University off, and you're going to work on the accelerator. Now you're leaving the accelerator, you're going to go work on the syndicate. Each time you hand that off. Now, we've done it two times or three times. Now, there's two or three calls, Zoom calls, on that page now.

• 59:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:15Jason Calacanis?

  The first time was handed up, the second time, the third. So, the next person who gets handed off, who can watch all three of those.

• 59:19Speaker 02

  It forces documentation. Yeah, exactly.

• 59:21Jason Calacanis?

  Which is right-first culture is how we say it, how Amazon says it.

• 59:25Speaker 02

  That was one of our values, write it down. Whoever writes it down gets credit for the idea.

• 59:29Jason Calacanis?

  It is a core tenet. Yeah, it is true. All right, listen, this has been over an hour. What an amazing episode. We will take two questions.

• 59:41Speaker 04

  So, there are a lot of folks in this room who will make money, some who won't. All three of you have gone through the process of making money.

• 59:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 59:49Speaker 04

  I'm curious, how has the meaning of money changed in your life? Has Eve accrued more?

• 59:53Speaker 01

  Money, I mean, you're both gonna laugh at me for this. Money has nonlinear value. Each incremental dollar you get, it becomes worth less than the one you had before. And there's probably some step function, depending on your lifestyle needs. Money solves money problems, and it just allows you to have more time to worry about other things or focus on things that I think are more valuable. I think having money is a bit like debt. It creates massive leverage, and so it amplifies the type of person you are. If, you know, you're the type of person that wants to spend lots of time with your family, you make a bunch of money, and then you're like, oh, I'm gonna spend a bunch of time with my family now. If you like lots of external validation from social, from playing social status games, you are now gonna do that more. So, it's an amplifier.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  I think people need money, obviously, but once you hit a certain threshold, acquiring more money is not about the utility it provides, it's about kind of the psychology of it.

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  Lot to unpack. I guess I would say it allows you to think bigger. I think, at least for me with the league, you know, that was sort of like, all my net worth was tied up in this company. And so, if the company, I don't know, all of a sudden had a class action lawsuit, and we were sued out of oblivion, or all of a sudden, I don't know, a new competitor comes out and wipes us out, I was nervous that like, all my work would go to zero. And so, I think, you know, by selling it and by earning enough to sort of have a nest egg, I now feel like I could swing and I could probably take more risk. So, you know, J Cal's just waiting for me to pick a big idea to do that with, but.

• 1:01:20Jason Calacanis?

  And she guaranteed I'd be the first investor, and William would be the second.

• 1:01:24Speaker 02

  I have not said that.

• 1:01:26Jason Calacanis?

  To William. She hasn't said it to William. She said it to me this morning.

• 1:01:30Speaker 02

  But yeah, I think it kind of allows you to get to whatever, you know, that ability to then sort of think bigger and think, what would I do if money was no issue, right? And think about solving those kind of problems versus like, how do I make X amount of money in my life?

• 1:01:47Jason Calacanis?

  Definitely, when you hear that term, FU money. Some people, I find, they get the money and it makes them...

• 1:01:54Speaker 02

  Go on sabbatical?

• 1:01:55Jason Calacanis?

  No, it makes them more guarded, more anxious, it becomes a distraction for them. And then some people, a smaller group of people, it does actually give them the ability to say, I'm going to do things and pursue them the way I want to, with my vision, without compromise. That's what it did for me. It just gave me the freedom to say, I'm going to use my own chip stack, I'm going to do it the way I want to do it. If anybody doesn't want to do it that way, I totally understand, but I'm doing it my way. And, you know, this purity of vision, I think, is very freeing. When you have a bunch of investors, when you have a board, you know, you have to build consensus. And that's good when you're young, because you're going to learn a lot.

• 1:02:37Jason Calacanis?

  And then there's a certain point where you're like, I think I know the playbook and I know what works for me. This has now given me the freedom that I don't have to compromise the vision. And so that can send you off the rails. Francis Ford Coppola just did a film. Megapalos. Megapalos that nobody has seen. And he's stole his watches and his vineyard and he made this perfect vision for him at the age of 80 or whatever.

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  There's a documentary about it.

• 1:03:02Jason Calacanis?

  And it's been a complete flop or whatever, but he wanted to make it, it made him happy. He's not going to be here for much longer. Okay, more power to him. But there are other people who also, you know, they started to get a taste of that money and all of a sudden 20 years of their life went to a Marvel franchise or a Star Wars franchise. And George Lucas said he always wanted to make small intimate films and then... He just, Star Wars be-

• 1:03:25Speaker 02

  Got addicted to the, to the money train?

• 1:03:27Jason Calacanis?

  And it just became bigger than him, right? And he, he never, who's, who knows? Who can tell me a George Lucas film that is not Star Wars?

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  American Graffiti.

• 1:03:37Jason Calacanis?

  But after Star Wars.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  Sorry.

• 1:03:38Jason Calacanis?

  Tell me, tell me a film, a film he made after Star Wars. He had a really hard time doing that, so it became a burden. So sometimes the success can then be a burden. I have that now. I mean, the podcasting I do is so successful. And Tim Ferriss has been going through this. Lex Friedman went through it. The podcasts that they did became so successful, they had a hard time having other things in their life that they wanted to pursue. So Lex was telling me he wants to do a startup. I think he's been pretty public about that. And he's trying to balance being a famous podcaster, making tons of money from the ads and doing that. Tim Ferriss, I, so I just tweeted, "Do you want me to do more podcasts? Or do you want me to do less podcasts with higher video production?" And, you know, when I, I was gonna text him, I'm gonna text him, "Do what you want, Tim.

• 1:04:22Jason Calacanis?

  I want you to do what you want." Now, I want you to do more audio ones, because I don't care about video. But he's looking at all the other podcasters who came 10 years after him and did this like high production. But I think he's got knocked off his game. Where he's like, "What do I need to do here?" You need to do what you enjoy. Do what you love, right? That's the freedom it gives you. And you don't have that early in your career. You, you-

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  I don't want to presume the question behind the question, but, you know, if you read biographies of successful entrepreneurs who have made a lot of money when they're much older, they all say, "I miss being young and building something. And I miss building something with a group of people."

• 1:05:00Jason Calacanis?

  And not having the resources.

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, and like the money, it's, obviously, it's, it's a luxury statement to say they don't care about the money because they're very wealthy, so they don't have to worry about the money. But they do, they all say the same thing, which is like building something with a group of people that you enjoy spending time with is the thing they miss more than anything else.

• 1:05:15Jason Calacanis?

  Here's the other thing I'll tell you. I realized this after a couple of friends of mine passed away.

• 1:05:20Jason Calacanis?

  Me going skiing on the mountain. Me owning a ski house. I own a really nice ski house. I can ski in and ski out of Lake Tahoe. And I ski 20 days a year in Lake Tahoe. And then there's somebody else who does 50 days a year. And they're broke. They bought the same Epic Pass I did for 800 bucks, you know, season pass. And they get the, they get twice as many days as me, three times as many as me. I'm jealous of that person. They get to ski three times as much. And I was trying to explain this to somebody like, when I go to dinner with Elon, myself, and then somebody who's broke, and then somebody else, the steak that we order tastes the same to everybody.

• 1:06:03Jason Calacanis?

  And there is an upper bound in almost all of these things that you can buy. And we both drive the same car, Model Y, because it has full self-driving. It's the best car ever made. But he also owns a really nice Porsche and I'm buying this super nice Corvette Hypercar. And it's like, ah, money. Well, no, I'm just like, but I'm not going to drive it. So I talked to him about his Porsche. That was his dream car and you're selling it now. And so that tells you everything you need to know. It's like.

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  15-year-old me is very pleased that I bought the Porsche.

• 1:06:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  And now 46-year-old me is like, okay, done.

• 1:06:35Jason Calacanis?

  Done. It's a checkbox and you move on. It's a great question. Another amazing episode. Thank you to William Barnes. Thank you to Amanda Bradford. Thank you to our friends at JetRO. And congratulations to all of the great founders in the first cohort of Founder University. If you want to learn more, go to founder.university. You'll see a link for Saudi, Tokyo, Japan, and the US. Programs apply. What do you got to lose? Maybe you'll be the next founder that changes the world and that we invest in. And hopefully, we could join you on that journey. See you next time on This Week in Startups. Bye-bye.