Journey to jumpstart: from Meerkat to Houseparty to a crypto-native social network with Ben Rubin

Transcript

[Music] we are super fortunate this afternoon to have Ben Rubin co-founder and CEO of towns joining us for for those of you who don't know Ben is uh he's well one he's a really nice guy he's very humble uh so I'm going to embarrass him uh a little bit but I mean Ben is a renaissance man when it comes to starting amazing technology companies I think that you'll find that uh he has just a unique perspective on how to do things how to build company culture how to find product Market fit we're definitely going to talk about that um so please join me and welcoming that

thank you and so maybe we can just talk you know give us give us the thumbnail of your journey so far uh talk about some of the things that you've done I studed the architect at school uh buildings architecture I left at my third year I had a I actually a great time in architecture I really enjoyed it uh but at some point um I realized that building digital spaces might be more exciting so I left school to be I guess an architect of digital spaces I've been doing that for since I'm in for 12 years now maybe 13 years right off uh that

third year I started a company called life on air and we build mainly live steering product uh most of them failed and then one one got a breakthrough uh called mirek then after that another one that had a breakthrough called house party which was a group video chat um and then funny or not house party was supposed to also introduce a house party for reme work right in pandemic but that didn't happen cuz we sold the company before to epic games to epic games yeah um the two board members that supported that the decision are no longer with their with

their with their VCS um and uh we're talking seoa and Greylock so and uh after that I started working um on here not there uh which is making a protocol called River uh which is for the central Iz communication and a client called towns amazing and so you know one one of the things that I think is most well I mean so like you know a a three-time Serial entrepreneur in like Communications products uh two two so far like achieve their breakout moments at a time when the space was super crowded you know one of the things that you and I have talked a lot about is with house party in particular uh I thought you had a very you know almost

poetic way of thinking about uh how you wanted people to talk about the product and then you know at the dinner table and then that in turn influenced a bunch of features that you guys built that that made it break out maybe talk about that a little bit maybe just even start for those who don't know like what what was house party like what did it do uh House part is um at the time where we started 2016 was basically the easiest way to open your phone and start talking to to your friends you would need to call them uh we right now there is uh an apple API that allow you to update notifications with content but back then we kind of

like hacked together a way to remove the uh payload and update it and we were able to say oh this and you know Ben and Jason are talking in the house but uh house is a very light group chat experience um that one of the core principle of it was how fast can you talk to somebody of that is is is Meaningful in your life and uh what kind of meaningful conversations we don't have just because there's a lot of baggage calling someone you know sometimes you want to just call somebody but it's like would be too weird to call them uh but sometimes when you change the medium and you reframe the experience in something that gives plausible deniability for both parties then you can actually create some sort

of a market because everything is a market there is in the house party there is like the people who are willing to talk and the people who are willing to receive and and talk to those people so how can you reframe the market in a way that creates more liquidity um and I know it sounds very logical but it actually how how we interact with a lot of things in our life at least My Philosophy for finding product Market feed but it really depends what you're doing and like kind of actually my opinion is that it it's for anything but you know you should take it however it's that it it is important to think about the conver ation the dinner conversation in which someone is explaining what happened to them today

to their friends through your product like what is the thing that as they put their like knife and fork down and they find that 3 seconds silence that they can say something and they decide to share the experience that they had earlier today and that experience was with your product what do they say why would they do that and once you only you Founders nobody else once you feel that it's true like that that that uh Vision you have in your head of what would happen then you kind of want to work you kind of want to map The Funnel all the way to that moment let's say oh today I had in house oh today I talked to like

three friends that I haven't talked in a while and this is something somebody shared and you know we had a great experience we would never you know you know I would never talk to this dude from high school you remember him and then this guy showed up and it was amazing like how would he get to that point and then you start building The Funnel of your product of like must H what must have been true for them to get to that moment of time and then you put the stuff that you already have the stuff that you don't have then you ask yourself well how would you get them there then you start plotting the funnel and then the work be starts which is the creative work of how do you shorten it that that funnel and and it's also

required for you to make opinionated risks and Bets about what would be defaults that will you know somebody would be okay to move without selecting you know without like thinking too much and we're not talking about spamming invites and [ __ ] like that like we've never done it in our products like everything was opt in but there are ways in which people can feel like they can just cruise through your uh funnel all the way to that aha moment cool yeah and I one one of the things I love about that story right is you can you can you know when when you're building your company you can kind of Imagine like it's pretty easy to think about a conversation you'd

want someone to have at the dinner table about how amazing your product is and then it's a little harder but not too hard to think about like how you might map that funnel to like get to that point but then it's actually really hard to build the features that you imagine in your funnel in a way that they actually work um and talk about I remember um you you guys had some Metric about like the amount of time or number of clicks that it would take to like be in a conversation uh that that turned out to be pretty transformative I have an obsession with minimum amount of click to a h moment and uh when one of the things that Frost trates designed

ERS that work with me is that I cannot look at any art board by itself it always need to be within the whole storyboard and the reason is because you have to ask yourself what is the entry point and the exit point it can be the one before and the one after it's like no no no no no let's look at all of the steps cuz like it could be exhausting to a user I mean users we are all users of products that we don't build and we don't have you know we don't have time for that we don't have time for any kind of friction I always ask the question of like how can a user get to this state without the preview

screen like is there a way for them to get there without the previous screen and sometimes it's really provocative but usually we find a way and you might get to a place where you have three screens and the median to have a conversation with three the median time to have a conversation with three people uh that you know is less than a minute and 43 seconds which is pretty damn good if you just download an app and all of a sudden you have a group conversation with three people that's kind of cool and you haven't had the call so that's I think kind of where we were and that was the median so I I bet some people had

like some crazy stories and I mean if I remember right when when you got to that point you could you could when when you sort of progressively whittel away the friction the time the number of clicks you could materially see engagement in the app ABS no absolutely because the thing is like you start from what would make somebody talk to you talk about your product in the dinner table and if you get them faster that uh unless you're like really you have a very unique character that is not you know most people don't feel the same you know then but if you truly believe that this is something exciting that somebody would share like yeah you bring people fast to this they will talk about it for

sure and that's how more people do it and more people do it and that's how you get to the network effects that you would want awesome yeah um so let's go let's go backwards as a way to move forward uh and and talk for a minute about mircat I'm how many people uh used or remember or like know what mircat was mircat was really uh the first live streaming uh video product uh and what what was that that was 20 so was B of live streaming video product the first one that I guess made it consumer the consumer and and broke through and so talk about the journey there because that was uh a high well you know it start with you know it would be

cool if I clicked about it cuz well we I was like really obsessed with um this is still the guy enforce in my life which is like how to bring people together in the most human way possible when they're physically apart I know it's a m mouthful but I really think that building spaces that create experiences that otherwise you couldn't feel is uh you know I have made peace with the fact that I can't uh bring kids to the world but if I can create spaces for people to have feeling I mean for me it's close enough you know um it's it's really close enough to Creation that could be because you're you're making other

people feel and I think maybe Jazz musicians or any musicians I guess feel the same or comedians um so it started with it would be cool if I can press a button and immediately have all of my uh audience watch and we're like well how would we do it and where all the other other products have failed is they didn't have this like okay how do we remove the screen and the only way to remove the screen was using uh a Twitter API that immediately onboarded all like the graph and immediately posted it on Twitter and anyone who wanted to watch

it on Twitter would would one click become a watcher so that means that like if you have 30,000 people following you on Twitter you would download mircat and you would go live and then it's right on your feed and anyone who watching and all of a sudden you see all of those people joining which is the positive reinforcement that you want but then it's like okay like how many steps to go live and I asked for one click to go live it was two and then one so the first time you need to add Twitter but then after this it's one click to go live which was also cool and it also speaks to the fact of how simple things done well where all of the

complexity is actually abstracted from the user in a way that thinks about what would be cool what would be a great experience and make opinionated decisions about default because the devil is in the details but God is in the defaults and it's important thing to remember like defaults are so important um it's not it's not a or b it's it's like we're doing a you can go to B but like we're doing a like defaults are important sounds amazing uh why aren't we all using mircat today did something happen with Twitter oh yeah so yeah so it's it's funny I think that

the M story has a lot of um layers to it for me personally as well because I think come in at the time I was you know an immigrant from Israel that comes all also with a lot of kind of like Dynamics in which you don't know exactly what kind of agency you have and um what what kind of strength do you have or don't have um but at the end of the day um we were using the API the way it's intended to be we're not going be using anything uh but they bought a company three months before we even launched um and they was they were really afraid of mirat because everybody

was using it Jimmy kibo I don't know like Ashton coer Seth Rogan all of these Madonna and uh they just decided to pull the graph without even releasing other product and then we told ourselves lies for like three months which is okay usually people tell themselves like like us founder Founders like oh it's going to be okay and we're going to figure it out and um but in in three months we kind of like okay decided that we're going to do a different a pivot and we're going to focus on a different type of uh Dynamic of user interaction that is more smaller group and instead of broadcast um well what we said instead

of theater it should feel like a house party because we were talking about feeling and then it stuck house party because we talked about what is the feeling of I want to build and we said house party so and then we're like we should call the house party but I mean but I mean Twitter uh taking away your access to the graph I mean that Bas completely threw the whole thing I I think at the end before we closed it well this is going to sound mean but it's not it's um the core users that were um I think L l21 on 30 which means like they use the app 21 unique days out of 30 days um

which is a metric um where actually and this is live streaming product people with with um that are their their their site is challenged because Mir was built with um a lot of accessibility features um so they were able to like hear who is joining like it will read to them that people join and I thought it was poetic that that the group that was staying using the product was actually the one of live stream product actually like the the one that has eyesight challenge um but yeah it kill it killed the product we'll talk about towns and

what you're or here not there and what you're building with River yeah and towns but I'm I'm curious how much if it all did the experience of you know having a great idea building it launching it see it take off like a rocket and then having the rug pulled out from under you like how much of that influence your curiosity around open networks and and crypto and the like oh 100% I think that there is a form of sin that we all do as Founders as creators where we want it to be about oursel in the beginning because we have something to prove

that's the only reason you know you would take a risk like this and not go and do something else I think over time as you do it over and over part of the beauties that are coming out of being in this profession is um that you realize that people are actually paying you for your Insight for your point of view that is in disagreement with the market if you're going to do what everybody else is doing there's no reason to back you we're just all going to sit here and do 8% year over year but it's because you have some sort of um emotional imbalance that can only be fulfilled through the Insight that you carry and the Insight that you carry about the market about

what you want to see is the asymmetrical return that um you know your backers and the people who are actually in listenting to your company are betting on and over time you kind of learn that the beauty of it is that it it comes from within it's not the destination of I want to be there or this is what has to happen these are the features that have to happen or these are the investors that we have to have or this is the type of write up I want somebody to write about me like it's really is about having fun doing something that you feel is Meaningful and be very clear about how you're going to make money and

I know it's not a popular take because people are talking about changing the world but like you are the atomic unit of that you know the chain event of your influence in the market and if you're not taking care of yourself and your happiness and you are constantly understanding if you're feeling that you're doing something that you're proud of that you can actually be rewarded and your team can be rewarded that Atomic unit will now become a molecule and it will now become a thing like it will just be you chasing after things and things and you know that's that's a lot of bad habits to unwind after you

know at this journey so the way I think about going back and building is actually it just it's not a decision it's it's a way of life it's almost like you're compelled to like like you're compelled to it's it's it's a set of other actions that I put in my being because I think of myself as a this is also going to sound weird but like I think of myself as a planter not as a flower and I think about like the soil and the and the water and uh how the Sun comes and are there any toxins I ask myself every Sunday what are the things that are an what are what is the things that bring

me anxieties you know about work and actually my to-do list is entirely uh a derivative of the anxiety list of Sunday so anything that happened the week before just like out of the window I don't care what are the things that keeping me uh like anxious right now and let's write it down and let's see what and and and my entire week is actually focused on bringing me back to uh sematic balance because when I'm in a sematic balance then the team is in somatic balance and if the team is in somatic balance then we can start making music you know that's right we've never talked about that before but I I literally have exactly the same process

every every Sunday I write down the list of things that are stressing me out and then in a separate column what am I going to do about it and then spend the week trying to trying to that list down by the way once you do that you stop going to the fridge at least for me many time you you got a lot of trips to the fridge uh well cool so talk I mean let let's talk about uh what are you building with here not there uh like what what is the thing that you found that compelled you to build again the idea is to build a network that is owned and operated it's think about like the back end of WhatsApp but it's owned and operated by the groups that are using it and the the the biggest I guess Gap that

we are focused on is that if you want to people who create online communities moderate online communities or you know kind of moderate um their job is tankless and exhausting and not rewarding and I think it's in this is not a company about moderation tools for mods but it goes to say that there the whole potential of online communities or in a better way uh the potential of people coming together on the internet around the goal and able to execute on it in a meaningful way way is

capped by the Mis incentive alignment that as that group grows there is more and more work that is not getting paid on the people that Foster Foster that the idea is what if we give sovereignty of the atomic unit is the group chat meaning who can read who can write what are the rules of of Engagement and by that it's essentially uh um you identify ownership of it um and then also allow them to solicit contributions in a way that is front and center so now we you know people have apps people don't app download app as much as they used to by the way which is

kind of interesting to think about because everything exists in a balance so you have to ask yourself like you know you know what the think that is most exciting about AI is that like everything exists in a balance and you know derivatives out every deriv ative asset is just contributing to the core like main asset that is a derivative from so the most exciting thing about AI is that the more this crazy like alternative realities that are are going to happen the more like sitting and having coffee with your friend is going to be more valuable so I'm like excited about about this stuff you know because everything exists in a balance so if you think about it apps are in Decline like there is a big centralization moment towards the big

the big apps and I have this view that like we actually want those communities to behave almost like an app store or like you know it should be like if we're paying for an app we should be paying uh for a value that we get of being part of certain communities and they should have the accountability of like what are people you know what kind of how people reviewing like how what is the Cadence of the update what are the new features that the community is doing and actually think that there should be like any kind of geekery that you have I'm I'm like big on it's another weird thing I'm be on Aurora Aurora lights like the the the northern lights and I'm part of

communities like this I'm also part of a community that is specifically Tokyo um Disco glow from the 80s and all we do is trade trade like vinyls there which is where I met a lot of friends in Tokyo and usually what happened is that people could go and you know they put their heart there and they share stuff and then lo and behold like thousand members later somebody's like trying to sell some stuff that are like out of context and you're like uh um anyways so what we're trying to do is to create in create the entire substrate that is

needed in order for communities and um communities to own their their group chat to be able to solicit a reward contribution and make it so in a way that is sustainable so the protocol can also continue and do the job of moving around they enter encrypted messages that is the work and getting paid for it yeah I me one of the things I think is so cool about what we were building is I think I've never drawn this chart but I bet it wouldn't be that difficult if you if you look at the history of the internet you know going back to bulletin boards and then uset and then more modern group things like uh WhatsApp and Twitter at some level I think the I think the general Arc of communities on

the Internet is in the early days you know some of the most amazing connections and conversations happen there and then as the group grows as you were saying you know both the quality of conversation goes down uh and the work re value's been created but it's it stays with the third with a party you know like with the Discord with the group with the Facebook group with a it doesn't go to the people that actually create it and you guys actually have the opportunity to reverse the polarity of that absolutely and I think it's time for the internet to be as accessible but it needs to stop being free in the sense of let's tax you for your internet but more like you should be rewarded for the

work that you're putting on the internet like we should stop accepting the fact that things need to be free you know I mean so like group owners will be able to if they want they could they could sell their group for real absolutely yeah and members can sell their membership if they don't want which is the best form of um moderation I guess yeah rating you know amazing so I mean as you guys can hear I think you know one of the interesting things about Ben is that he's got a very unique way of looking at the world and I think that that perspective flows through into into how you build product so talk about I think you that the the same is true of how you've thought about you know creating the culture in the workplace um so maybe talk about I the three things

that always stand out to me are uh you know an offsite in Japan a um you know an Ask of your team to push hard like like basically defer joy and vacation as a way to hit a key company Milestone and then your own uh piano playing experience three three distinct things but I think all make the same point first everything exist in a balance there you go so that's the that's the first that's the first rule um so we're fully remote and one of the way to balance remote is first if you're going to do fully remote and you're in stage that I I assume people hear it's like 0 to one stage yeah 0 to one stage it's really hard um one of the ways that you

can you can mitigate it is hire only seniors if you're trying to do 0 to one with with I it's it's maybe a hot take but like it's really hard to get junior level um uh team members to have this is not about Juniors being bad this is about what you need to do in order and your commitment to a junior person that you hire to actually help them grow and become the best version of themselves this is actually a committed to anyone on your team and if you're hiring somebody's junior and they're not there like they're not going to be able to uh get what basically you promis them when they when they took the thing and I think that

creates over time I I've never seen it uh succeed so that's one one way to offset the balance and it should be coupled with like so what do we do to create vulnerability because if you're doing zero to1 stuff you really don't want to be like that's the idea that's the feature let's go like you actually want to be able to create um a culture when you speak about the motivation and how success should look like and feel like but you want to draw together and you want to be able to say when you feel something is not going to work and that kind of vulnerability actually doesn't translate remote like nobody likes to tell somebody that like

ah actually I don't know if it's going to work or like you know people are being more editorial and when you spend time together and learn the body cues and the human to human interaction action it becomes less anxiety and inducing to actually engage in a conversation that could be uncomfortable and for us what we did is that we every twice a year we choose a location we fly to it and we spend like a whole week together just just us it's been incredible to create that kind of like emotional elasticity that vulnerability requires um cuz in in the vulnerability

this is where you actually get Innovation also yes sometimes it's crutch time and you say hey there's going to be moratorium but also like everything exists in a balance uh for example members of the team the moment they reach that Milestone they all get a a one-year bonus uh so you always want something that that they can go to they can go to the spouse and say Hey you know this this half year is going to be intense this is where working toward ones but in the end we're getting uh this cash bonus that is pretty meaningful I mean just a just a fully unpack that right you gave everybody an extra full year of well they're going to

get it once okay so you haven't hit the Milestone yet but basically said like this is essential to the company we need you to do whatever it takes to get us there but we're going to we're going to give you this once we it which and how's that how is that work so far it's working great we're eating our we're eating our Target things are being shipped on time I think that it was over as we were doing this like it was interesting to see that maybe breaking into smaller Milestone and like introducing some of the bonuses before um uh is is also help helpful it's important to State what you want you know it's important to be able to say this is what we want to achieve and get to agreement with the team and then

honor the fact that that means that you're taking something from them that you didn't initially agree to so that means that you need to replenish the misalignment that you did and be and and and build that trust that you're actually going to follow through and they they are going to you know get the car that they thought they going to get to years from now or being able to pay for renovation or whatever it is that it's important to them and it's also important that your team recognizes you as a leader that takes care of them uh and as a leader that when they spend time with you they're likely to make more money than if they were spending time somewhere else so I mean we talked about this before so uh life is a

three-legged stool right so the uh get the team together in Japan uh reward them when they're working hard what do you do to uh feed your own uh curiosity and artistic so so every everything everything needs to be fun meaningful and rewarding like everything every single thing needs to be fun meaningful falling rewarding otherwise it doesn't worth it as I'm thinking about my role what are the things that make my time fun meaningful and rewarding and for me music piano playing um and um hosting people at my place you know I

make I make sure that they happen and I make sure that they happen on a weekly base for example I take piano for two years I take them three times a week you know a guy come to my home three times a week and we play piano and it's 9 to 10 you know some people would have meetings but no I'm I'm playing piano and I think it's important because that gives it gives me a lot of solitude it also honors the kind of intention that I want everybody in the team to have which that you need to take care of yourself like there is a reason in the airplane they you first give the oxygen to yourself and then to the kid because it's like if you're not feeling like if you're

suffocated like that that shity is contagious you know and everybody needs to have fun feel like they're working on something they're proud of and have a clear understanding how it's going to be rewarding last last question and we'll open it up uh to you all for question so um you know a lot of a lot of CEOs and Founders spend uh a lot of time thinking about worrying about planning for the future um how do you how do you approach that I don't I don't think about the future at all I um I spend most of my time thinking about and spending time with my intuition and spending time with what I

wish I had now what I wanted to feel now not in the future and I think that thinking about the future is is a Fool's errand because if you're thinking there's so many like how would you even know you know I make decisions fast you know and I move very strong with my intuition and I have a lot of convictions but like I don't I don't even future not not for me I'm like there's so many things that you can't control but what you can control what you can control is really trying to build a better relationship with your

intuition and your somatic feelings about what would you want to see now and what feel exciting and meaningful to you because once you are able to articulate that it's not like you're going to do this and it's going to happen so as you're leaning into it we talked about insight and why it's important you know to to do that is like once you're leaning into it it's going to take time and if you have good intuition and you have a good insight and you really delved into what would you want you're likely to do something that you believe is Meaningful you're likely to have fun and guess what two years from M you know if it's alive and people like it you

kind of build the future but you know like it doesn't work future backwards it starts from the origin which is only you you know you can't be something else you can't be a version of yourself in the future you can't change who you are you can only work with yourself better as you guys can see B is a very thoughtful open and vulnerable person so I would I would encourage you to uh to go deep if you have uh if you have questions what's up Ben hey how uh how do yall think about go to market do you go after crypto native users in communities or are you all focused on you know more web two communities so I'm thinking about what would be

cool really I think about what would be cool and I think um I think about who is the target audience that we're talking to the target audience is not the community members is actually the the the the moderators the admin the people that created and then in that I asked myself what would be cool for them and I think the ability to own their spaces to own to on a permissionless protocol that lives forever um the ability for them to solicit contributions in a way that is transparent uh the online graph that they get of their users and the reputation and the fact that it's end to-end encrypted now you wrap all of this with the promise of what does it

mean that if you're successful here you're part owner of the protocol and how that actually rewards you we're going to speak to a really a part of a part of this Target customer that nobody spoke to it's like your work which is tankless exhausting and now rewarding is now being acknowledged it's it's going to be there on chain that you are the person who's doing the work that these are the contributions that are coming right and this is something that I think was not spoken to it's a part that was not spoken to and we're definitely going to lean into this really really hard

and besides that there is also the ideas of what our networks effects look like especially in the crypto community so the way we're thinking about it is that we're going to we're going to make sure that there is a large group of communities that are moving over at once because this is what we think is going to be cool you know and and I think we're going to do it because we're going to go one by one and I think we will be able to convince maybe half of the people that we talk to the other half is already going to be warm and going to be and and we have the tools to convince them because we can in a programmable immutable way show them how they can be part owner of the of the of the of the

network that they are going to take risk on um so this is how we're thinking about go to market like really about Target user and how to make it cool for them and how to appeal to a piece of their identity that was not was not not really spoken to I had a question around essentially communicating to users uh I think like consumer Tech is one part technology and how you build a product but largely how do you convey to that user base and crypto is very unique right the ownership word is confuses a lot of people I think um so I'm just curious the crypto users well no non- crypto users when you talk to someone about owning things on the internet um

so I'm just curious like exercises or ways of think about who is your target audience I mean for us we we build uh creative tools powered by artist trained AI models so our core customer is essentially building for artists IP holders um on the internet and helping them own their AI likeness um and so my question is centered around effectively like the ways that you go about building language well AR own what they make right so maybe you want to talk about what they don't make which is money yeah no for real no no that's I mean that's at the center of what we do I would just focus on that cuz like that that's what you would that's what you want because

like ownership is I've I've noticed it more in the last cycle when we just kind of like started like this is like I'm not saying to you or I'm just saying there is like a some Founders that are like dogmatic about decentralization and ownership like if you're building consumer stuff like who the [ __ ] cares we just want you know to talk about to talk about a stool without having West Alm like [ __ ] ads running after us for a week right we want to be able to put something on the Internet um that if it creates value then we get rewarded for this value right we care about mostly our safety and finding

finding somebody to mate with like these are the two things so when you talk about the artist like their safety is their ability to make money right um and I think that's kind of like how you want to you don't want to walk back from the crypto ideals into this because that's that's going to be you trying to prove that your thesis is right right what you want to do is just think about the motivation that got you to do what you're doing now and why it's important to you and why you think it's cool and meaningful and then from that you focus on the target audience that you think is is is going to be most you know relevant

to this and ask what would it what what is exciting here what would they say in a dinner table with other artists they're definitely not going to sit there and talk about ownership right they're going to say like today I got paid that's what they're going to say and now what happened what happened that they that they shared with everybody they got paid and you might arrive to different funnels or conclusion of how to get them to that sentence that is different than why would you otherwise ared if you walked crypto back so there was one thing that really resonated with me and that was holding responsibility for the people you hire and so we're like an early stage company we're trying to convince people from very secure very

safe jobs to join us um so you heard a certain responsibility to them so I'm wondering if you can share a situation where you may have failed an employee or how you what you talking about I'm sure I'm doing it right now um so how do you think about that is in a general sense well failing an employee is not the the problem that's we you you you must be okay with the idea that you're going to fail too because if you're not if you don't have the emot tional process to make room for the fact that you can fail and how you can learn and what how the other side of it is

actually growth and how you take inventory of the of what you learned and how you move forward with it you won't be able to extend the same amount of of of compassion to people who work for you right or for your company so it it it's all start with how you treat yourself how you hold yourself accountable the commitment you have to yourself for growth for learning for being okay with the fact that you can [ __ ] up from time to time and I think what somebody who comes and work for you want to know is not oh this guy will never [ __ ] up now don't don't go work to anyone who says that but you know if I [ __ ] up he's going to be there for you know

he's going to he's going to be there and if you [ __ ] up it's okay you're going to be communicating to the team how you [ __ ] up what did you do how you going to make it better and it's not going to be the end of the world you know because it's not so like blameless culture it's a very slow culture if nobody's allowed to [ __ ] up basically I don't know what they probably all sit in some office in Switzerland you know thanks yeah you talk about insights really like that so how do you know that it's real insight not a wishful thinking that your product will be the great Market fit how do I know it's not a visual thinking that

your product will be great so how do you trust that your Insight is real well it it start with you does it make you feel like you know it would be cool like is it is it cool do are you excited about it no for real though like that no great so the the thing I think where people may get it wrong is not well some of them some people get way too far on like ideas they live in the future and we can't control the future so we don't deal with that but like let's say you 100% like you see it it's exciting it's for you right most of the mistakes that are happening is how you get other people to feel what you feel not what

that what you feel is wrong you know like and by the way H what makes you excited about it to the way to the fact that it makes you take this amount of risk should be the one that gives back the asymmetrical returns assume in execution right there is not nobody's else's point of view that is not yours can do that you might see things along the way that will influence it and inform it and and will you know hydrate and you say like oh this is a good Nuance I should get that that's exciting now it becomes more

exciting but it always need to be you that is truly excited because there's going to be so many external distractions and things that are happening that if you're not steady on what you think is your taste like it's going to be miserable and you not going to be able to hold you're not going to be able to hold the the the driver um wheel steering wheel steering wheel you're not going to be able to hold the steering wheel I wanted to ask you um if you could expand on your advice about um hiring senior uh employees because that seems to me something you can do when um once you

have the capital once you're like when you're in a bootstrapping phase to me it seems more um like something totally higher them here sound like something more realistic is um um like higher intelligent Junior people who could but here next to you okay if you can't afford a senior remote or a senior here then then hire Junior but it needs to be next to you because I'll tell you what's not fair you have a point of view and they're not next to you to understand your point of view and they're also J Junior so they have a lot of anxieties a lot of skills that are off so they're insecure about their ability to perform already

and they're also not next to you to be like align with you in this so you're just like it's a waste of time right and basically not fair for them so hire Junior but they need to be next to you you know hey uh what is the single biggest difference uh between building your first company versus building your company now I know that's very open into Comm no it's not it's not my therapist ask me what is the role uh I have younger brothers and she asked me what do I think is my role and um took me a minute but I was like I think my role is just to normalize [ __ ] for them just to normalize [ __ ] for them

just this you know just like cuz I've been through stuff so I'm like H this is this is this is normal you know and and I think once you normalize things for your team or like things that and once you first normalize it to yourself cuz can't really do it to the team before you do it to yourself the second time a lot of things are normalized and because of this the um the emotional amplitude of anxiety is actually pretty stable you know and because of that you can spend time on the things that matter and you can also extend the kind

of calmness to to to the team so you know the the second time around you're just kind of like okay it's not it's normal you know so this is you being extra Cal this is me being extra Cal yeah great this is me hey Ben hey what's up good um I'm going to take Jason advice and diap a bit deeper um so you talked a lot about the fun the meaningful the rewarding parts of being a CEO a Founder a leader um I'm curious to kind of get your playbook on challenges on like serious companywide challenges and like what you tell me the chall let's let's give give

it give it it could be a lot it could be deciding you didn't you on the right direction in the product it could be that you're you know your the team you hired is not right it could be that you're going through something personally that impacts the company a big challenge that impacts company wi I can go to all of them in the the company I want I want to hear kind of the the the psychology of dealing with it is a kind of in at the same time you have to lead a company you have to be that kind of um let's say sounding board for for a team the responsibility you talked about and and tying all of that into that meaningful that finding the rewarding part the meaningful part of the job we can do all three examples with the context of of here and that there um so

if people have time for this um um so for example we had people that were uh few hires that you know aced their their um how do you call it like all the tests like intervie their interview yeah yeah like you know we do we do a pretty rigorous one um and it involved four different like pair pair programming with like our engineers and stuff and they aced it and then we started realizing man I think this person has like two jobs or something like something is not something is off something is not is not really clicking um and in those moment what and

one of them was not performing for example one there was a moment before we um got to a point where we're ready to put all the parts of the system together and start moving towards launch which was uh uh October last year where all of the sudden a lot of people that were working on their stuff separately when it was time to put things together we realize like wh what what the [ __ ] were you doing there you know um and in those moments I think you know to your to your question is like there is nothing wrong with saying you know what this is not going to work

but you know it's not going to work there's no reason to spend time if somebody is if I have a doubt that somebody may or may not have enough not a job or if I have a doubt if somebody did understood you know what they were supposed to do or not cuz given it enough time somebody who's supposed to be on the team would proactively understand especially if they're senior then they would understand that they need to that they need to that something is off here so in that moment I just I don't think it's about me I don't think it's about them I think it's about actually the rest of the team cuz the rest of the team needs to look left and right and if you have killers on

your team Killers want to be next to killers they do not want to look in to the left and say like why is this person here like they're not they're not pulling their way and that's the actual risk because we're all like no but it can do this work and what if we repurpose it for that thing and maybe he can do this other thing and then like you know somebody who was like an engineer become an office manager why you know like out and this is something that in the beginning I thought oh it's not nice it's not this it's going to create drama but actually people who get [ __ ] done want to be around people who get [ __ ] done and they are inspired so this is about hiring and it's okay to

just say hey we didn't do a good hire how can we improve we actually got to a conversation like this after the second time we're like there is no way to improve it we're actually doing pretty good on these things we don't know how we can make the process more aggressive we just need to check in more frequently after with their commits with the panel that that agreed to hire them like how are they doing to see if there's something that we're missing and maybe it's also was a false negative just because we were in a uh uh a Time spot that was more exploratory so we couldn't kind of pick up people who are not executed you know it's not a [ __ ] it's just a growing

organization and it needs to shed sometime as you're finding because you're defining your culture as well you know uh the second thing was the product direction right so the product direction oh my God we're changing it so much it like on the way to where we are now we changed it all like and it's not like big swings it's Allin the same motivation it's all within within the same like goal that we're trying to achieve but it's it wasn't until October last year that we were still like figuring out like how would we do the business model like how is this protocol going to ACR value and we have to think about like oh there's going to be a

membership system where you know town uh space Creator Town owners can charge money for people to join their space and the protocol will take a fee out of debt and then this is the thing that go but like this is a whole thing that we didn't have at all and thought about it at all coming in the last minute you know it's important to be okay until it feels great until it feels great to change the product Direction until it feels great because otherwise I mean the product was called like Zion in the beginning it was like called Zion 2 years ago we called it Zion and then I don't know there was there was like the naming changing things are changing and

I think it's important to keep the the company open to that because they they they need to how do you do that as a leader how do you keep the company because because we're not in the business of flowers you're in the business of creating a planter you know that flower Die Another one comes in it's it's about the the the the makeup that brings those things to life so it's not about if it's Zion and if it's if it's towns or if it's River or if it's it's about what are we trying to build here and as we're building to be okay with saying like Okay this doesn't work this work this doesn't work this work and it doesn't mean designed by committee or like get to some

compromises are bad by the way nobody wants compromises do not do compromises what you want to do is actually find option C that everybody's excited about especially in that in that in that stage in this stage let me propose two thematic themes and things and tell me if you agree so i' like to summarize what you're saying so one one is uh having strong conviction loosely held is important like so when you're going a direction you want to be you know 100% believing that that's the right direction but as you experience new stuff and gain new data you want to be able to let go of past beliefs and find something different and then the second thing is that I would say uh universally

employees care it's like you know Killers want to work with Killers or uh employees want to win right and so if you have a better idea for how to win you're you're better off changing direction to go after that than sticking with the old thing to be consistent yeah we had this um we had this talk with this um Community founder this uh Community called rabbit hole and the guy is like saying stuff about what they would want us to implement and he was like so how do you feel about it I'm like me I don't have any ego here let's if this is what's unblocking you let's let's get you unblocked you know I I don't mind building you know these features and stuff like it's not about it's not about me or us it's about what do we try to

get we try to get these communities on okay how we going to get it we're going to make it rewarding for them and we're going to make sure that there's no blockers on the way as a Founder how do you make sure that you're framing the questions you're asking in the right way or I guess I find that the best lawyers you explain to them what you want to achieve and then you give them boundaries I guess this is how I manage everything in my life but like this is you you give them boundaries and you say look I want it to be I want it to be a one- day you know turnaround I don't care about all the boilerplate stuff and these are the two things that I care and would you flag if this happens like

that's and always remember that you cannot get advice about how much risk you should take like as we were going through our like strategy regarding the protocol like I was very explicit with regarding to like you cannot really find a mutual language with a lawyer we will do an AI exercise hypothetically you can ask your lawyer you can instead of trying to gauge how much risk and what when he say risk would you say risk like hypothetically what are the things that are going to put me closer to jail right and what are the things that that are

not that are absolutely not and that could be a way for you to understand when they're saying like because they will say avoid everything right and like then again we're going back to the same office in Switzerland when nothing moves mine's not really about advice I I actually really like towns it seems like a really interesting projects from everything you've said I want to know what are the most exciting use cases that you see being built out on top of it is it more of like a decentralized Discord I see nothing we're we're on testet we're on testet so we we've been using what do you what do you want to see what are you excited for I'm just F again for the future future thing like I have ideas but the thing that is important to me is that our team has

been using it instead of slack for like three months and and just through that like just having fun on that just try to that's that's what I'm focused on like how our experience is is great and um we'll see you know we in a couple weeks we're going to start going in front of all these communities and and and show them you know and and we started a little bit already but like that's that's where we it's going to be exciting all right thanks all right thank you all for the great questions thank you [Music]