The American Wolf

[00:00:00] Speaker A: There are two wolves inside of me. The first one is like, well, wealth doesn't matter that much once you have enough. And enough is actually a pretty small amount. And then the other wolf inside me is like, Christian, that's just an excuse. [00:00:12] Speaker B: Like the American wolf. [00:00:14] Speaker A: Yeah, the American wolf. The capitalist wolf. Yes. [00:00:22] Speaker B: Welcome to the off site podcast. I am your host, Jordan Gahl. This is where I team up with friends to catch up on our work and just as importantly, what's going on on the work. As always, this podcast is brought to you by Rosie, the AI powered phone answering service for small businesses. Welcome back everybody to another episode of the off site podcast. Today I have my good friend Christian Genko. [00:00:48] Speaker A: How are you, Christian? Hello. I'm doing well. It's actually Genco. So how good of friends are we, Jordan? [00:00:53] Speaker B: Well, let's talk about that. [00:00:55] Speaker A: Jordan. Jordan Jaw. [00:00:57] Speaker B: There you go. Jordan gal. So the first time we met. [00:01:03] Speaker A: Yes. [00:01:03] Speaker B: Do you remember it? [00:01:04] Speaker A: I could confabulate a memory. Probably something in microconf. Yeah. No, I don't remember. [00:01:08] Speaker B: It might have been there. But what I recall is we had lunch in Portland. [00:01:13] Speaker A: Yes. [00:01:13] Speaker B: And I think about that as a very strange kind of experience. It's a one hour lunch, but I think about it regularly. [00:01:22] Speaker A: That's so interesting to me. What do you think about. Yeah, what do you think about what do you think about that lunch? [00:01:26] Speaker B: So first let's set this up. Cardhook. I used to live in Portland and Carthook used to have an office in Portland. And by coincidence it was around the corner from my favorite restaurant in Portland called Pudi. Incredible. Like North Thai place. Just my favorite atmosphere. I just loved going to that place. So you were in town, you reached out. [00:01:47] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:01:47] Speaker B: And we went and had lunch for, I don't know, hour, hour and a half kind of thing. And maybe part of why I think about it is because we were able to jump into a completely honest conversation. No errors. No. Maybe because we had met at MicroCon for something before. We had some Twitter kind of friendship happening. Do you happen to remember putting you on the spot. Do you remember any of our conversations? [00:02:12] Speaker A: I remember a lot of it. I also remember there was some kind of a noodle dish that had peanuts in it that we got. My impression of you then and now actually is like one of the most driven people I've ever like. There is a fire in you that like, I feel when I'm around you of like, this guy needs to get things done. That's one of the things that I was curious about. Kind of digging into when we had lunch. And I remember the place that we got with that was this phrase that you had in your head, this mantra of, I think it was millions of dollars in the bank post tax. And you did the 1, 2, 3 with your fingers. And I was like, all right, this dude knows what he wants. Okay, he's going to get it. So, yeah, that's the core detail I remember from that one. Okay, so. [00:02:51] Speaker B: So you nailed it from, from my memory also. So the, the funny thing is that I just wrote it in a tweet a few days ago and it. Maybe I. Maybe it came up and came out of, you know, my, my head because I knew we were going to talk today. But the, the phrase, the mantra was after tax money in your personal bank account. [00:03:10] Speaker A: Yes, yes, yes, yes. That's what it was. [00:03:12] Speaker B: And, and I think it came out of a conversation around bootstrapping, raising money, selling the business, going the base camp route. Like, we were talking about all these different options, this, this rainbow, this spectrum of approaches to online business that we see around us. And coming from the microconf community where we're always kind of engaged in this ongoing debate, I think where the line came out of was, well, that's the goal. All these other things are ways to get to the goal. You shouldn't really judge how someone decides to get to the goal. But I think what frustrated me and frustrates me is that that goal often goes unset. And I think it'd be better if people just said, well, I'm trying to make as much money as I possibly can in my personal bank account. And I'm going about it in this way. [00:04:05] Speaker A: Yeah. The closer you can get to what your actual motivations are, because I think it's sort of a faux pas to talk about that you want to be filthy rich and that's fine if you want to make a ton of money, you know. Yeah. Why? Exactly. And so people come up with all these. You know, the typical conversation I think I had around that time when talking to people building businesses was like, oh, I want to make an impact and oh, I want to positively influence the world to solve this thing. And I'm doing that by having this E Commerce product. Hold on, that doesn't quite make sense. That's not aligned. And I think in a lot of those conversations, if people were honest, they would have said something very similar to, no, I would like millions of dollars post tax and a personal bank account. So continuing on this theme of kind of digging deep, why is that the Goal, like why, why do you need millions of dollars post sex in a personal bank account? What, what does that do for you that you don't already have? [00:04:51] Speaker B: I guess I was driving toward like asking why several times. And then what you just put back to me is we'll ask why one more time. [00:04:59] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:05:00] Speaker B: And that part, I think is pretty personal to people's experience. [00:05:04] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:05:05] Speaker B: My experience is coming over to this country as an immigrant without money. [00:05:09] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. [00:05:10] Speaker B: And it's not surprising that I have a lot of drive to. I call it slaying the dragon. There's some therapy in there for you. But it does feel like this burden that I would like to remove. [00:05:24] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:05:25] Speaker B: And for a very long time, that was the driving force. Basically wanting to feel a certain way, no longer feel a certain way or think a certain way, no longer think a different way or remove certain limitations. At some point you gain enough wisdom to understand that is it's a worthwhile goal to an extent. Everything else, like being diminished or, or, or losing things is too high of an expense for only the monetary goal. Right. So it like moderates in its own way. I have a wife and three kids. That's more important to me. So, so it's been moderated over my personal experience. But businesses exist and we start them and work on them for income. Unless you're like post economic or maybe if you're so different from me that I have a hard time understanding your point of view, maybe that's me being honest and I shouldn't universalize it to, well, how come everyone else isn't being honest when in reality that's my thing. [00:06:22] Speaker A: Yeah, sure. It's more useful to talk about our own internal motivations. I can't speak for why everyone else is doing this. I have struggled with the idea of wealth for a long time because in college I had this idea of getting to a certain point, fire financial independence, retire early, which is figure out what the absolute minimum amount of money is that you need to live a decent life. And then once you have that minimum, you're done optimize the other things in your life. Sahil Bloom's book, the Five Types of Wealth. To be honest, I didn't like the book, but I like the idea behind it. I think there's a lot of fluff in it. The idea that there's five dimensions to be maximizing wealth in your life and one of them is family, like you said, one of them is health. I think that's probably the most important one for me right now, especially Looking forward to the singularity in 2045. Got to make it there. Nice and healthy. Financial wealth. And then two others. [00:07:06] Speaker B: That material experience or these different something like that. [00:07:12] Speaker A: People think about three of them. I think all involved relationships. It was your personal relationships and your friendships and your family, I think counted as three, if I'm remembering correctly. But yeah, so at the same time, there are two wolves inside of me. The first one is like, well, wealth, it doesn't matter that much once you have enough. And enough is actually a pretty small amount once you have more than I. I think the, the function of how much your life improves based on how much money you have is probably E X. Where like it does improve a little bit, but the further you go along that you need like 10 times more money to get a little bit more of a bump. And so that's kind of the first, the first mentality that I have of, you know, this bucket is pretty much full. There's not a lot of money that I need. And so let's, let's optimize on other things. And then the other wolf inside me is like Christian, that's just an excuse. [00:07:55] Speaker B: Like the American wolf. [00:07:57] Speaker A: Yeah, the American wolf. The capitalist wolf. Yes. Is like, you're just telling yourself this story that you have enough because that's an easy story to tell yourself so that you can be lazy and so that you don't approach this. Oh, like you said, the dragon. So that, so that you don't have to slay this dragon of making more money. And now this is this very easy narrative that you can say like, oh, yes, well of course this guy has more money than me and he's working harder than me. But like he hasn't realized this enlightened point of view that I have that you actually don't need as much money. And you know that that side of me is like, no, no, no, no excuses like make as much money as possible and keep going as hard as you can. And that side of me is really interested in like reading stories about ultra wealthy people. H.L. hunt. I'm reading a biography on this guy. Have you heard the name H.L. hunt? [00:08:40] Speaker B: Don't think so. [00:08:40] Speaker A: No one has. He was the richest man in the world for like a decade around the same time as John Paul Getty. And it's kind of contested like which one was wealthier. But he was a Texas oil man that got his start in poker and just fascinating guy. He had two secret families that didn't find out about each other until after he died. Wild Several movies made about him. [00:08:58] Speaker B: Of all the strange personality traits, the keeping two families thing is one that I, I'm not even close to understanding. [00:09:05] Speaker A: It's insane. I don't know, I don't know how this guy had bandwidth for it. Yeah, no, I'm struggling just with my wife and I have one daughter. That's, that's a full time thing. It's tough taking care of kids. This dude had like between his three families, I think something like 20 kids. Insane. Anyway, so, you know, the American capitalist wolf in me is looking at people like H.L. hunt thinking, man, when this guy was just a little bit older than me, he was bringing in millions of dollars per week from these oil fields. And like, I wouldn't be living my life in the same way that he did. You know, he, he valued having secret families. I wouldn't be devoting money towards that. But like, what's my version of that? What's, what's the sort of thing that I would be devoting resources to if, if I had a bunch of money and kind of letting myself dream out loud without feeling encumbered by more of this meek, you know, first wolf of well, I don't need that much and it's, you know, it's going to kind of limit my, the source of expenses that I need. So, yeah, that's. It's been a, it's been a dilemma in my head for a long time and, you know, bouncing back and forth between thinking in those two modes. [00:10:04] Speaker B: I want to get to, you know, what we're up to now and what, what you're doing, what I'm doing, and so on. It's Monday and I always pay attention to my experience on Mondays because it clarifies for me where I'm actually at on the weekend. I just turned the volume down. I let myself think. And maybe, you know, at night I'm on the laptop and I'm researching and I'm talking to chatgpt about something. Yeah, but the volume's turned all the way down on the work and intensity. And then Monday I kind of find out where I actually am now. That conversation between the two wolves, yeah, it's an ongoing conversation and it pops up here and there. Maybe I'm taking a walk and that conversation's louder. Maybe during the day I'm busy and that conversation goes all the way down. It kind of gets removed. How do you handle that? Is that something you're kind of thinking about? I acknowledge, or at least it feels to me, that the people that I normally Interact with. They don't seem to have that conversation very much at all. And I maybe have too much of myself. [00:11:03] Speaker A: Yeah. This is also something that I've struggled with in my. So you know, doing, doing this sort of bootstrapper, building a company thing, there's no set of guideline kinds of like in medical school. The path is laid out for you. You don't have to spend a lot of time thinking about the sort of work that you need to do. I view that as, you know, when you pay a medical school, part of what you're paying them for is I was supposed to be a doctor. So like this, this analogy is top of mind. Part of what you're paying a medical school for is to tell you what to do. They're going to assign you the books to read, they're going to assign you the things to learn. They're going to tell you what the next step is. Okay, now it's time to apply for residency and all that. Doing this sort of thing that we're doing, you don't have those rails. So you do need to take a step back and be in the mode of what the medical school is doing, of defining the work to do for yourself. So something that I've worked to be really conscious of is taking time to try to intentionally be in those different modes. So having like the worker me, that's the analog of if I was the doctor who had to sit down and do the work. Okay, I need to like put the blinders on. I've defined what the work is to do. I'm just going to sit down and do it and then separate mode, separate me. I'm going to go take a walk. I try to like physically distance myself from it. And yeah, talking to ChatGPT has been really helpful with this. But more of the, okay, I'm the CEO, yo. I'm steering the ship now in the steering mode and let's play out this conversation between these two wolves and let's do more of this exploratory, divergent thinking of are there other areas of my life that I'm neglecting? Are there other things I want to be doing? That's how I've been thinking about it. Like being more intentional about splitting time into limiting the scope of the sorts of things that I'm thinking about. CEO me does not do any work. CEOMe is just doing this broader picture, 10,000 Foot View. That's is how I'm thinking about it. How does this play out for you? [00:12:43] Speaker B: I think that that feels like it's learned over time. I used to be quite bad at it. As you were talking, the visual I had in my head was myself, just like shoveling coal into the train engine, because you need to do that to pick up momentum and steam and speed. And then sometimes you can just shut that gate and coast. And I feel like it took me a while to understand that I'll exhaust myself if I just keep trying to add more fuel. And so there is a time to frantically add fuel to go faster and then also to just sit down and read a book. And whether that is go to dinner with some friends, go hang out with your kids and not not look at your phone. But that balance is required. And maybe that's why on Monday, right, if we bring this all the way back to, like, where we are today. [00:13:35] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:13:35] Speaker B: I do feel much more frantic and energetic on Monday. My to do system is two of these yellow. Okay. One personal and one business. [00:13:46] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:13:46] Speaker B: And no matter what, on Monday, I start off by tearing the page and rewriting them. And then some of them will just leave the list because I've decided actually this doesn't need to be on my list. And some will go to the top. And then I'll do a little asterisk and I'll say, okay, this is what I'm going to get done this week. So in some ways, on Monday morning, I am shoveling a whole bunch of coal into the engine to say, you're. This is what you're going to get done this week to move things forward. [00:14:12] Speaker A: What does it look like for you right before you make a direction change? So you've pivoted companies at least twice that I'm aware of. Starting this podcast, I would say, is a. Is a pivot and change of direction. For me, that sort of. That sort of work doesn't come from a to do list. That comes from more of, like, this exploratory, divergent thinking of, you know, an epiphany that I get out on a walk when I'm thinking, okay, something doesn't feel quite right. I'm experiencing this pain or discomfort in this some way. Let me try to think about how I might address that. What does that look like for you? In what mode do those changes come from? [00:14:44] Speaker B: Maybe. And if I'm speaking practically for today, over the weekend. So long weekend, 4th of July, our kids are at camp right now, so it's just my wife and I, that means the weekend's slow, man, we had so much time. And I'm not surprised that I Walk in Monday morning, pretty energetic. And a lot of it came from the thinking. Not working, but thinking over the course of three or four days. And then that reshuffles my priorities and my ideas and what I think is most important to tackle and what will actually move things forward. And then I come in Monday, and it's almost like I turn the thinker off and I go toward doer. And maybe this is a bit of an extreme case, this long weekend thinking for a few days and then starting to work, but that feels, you know, when I describe myself as working seven days a week, but it's not work. A lot of it is just thinking, maybe that's what happens. You know, you kind of shut things down at the end of the day and you're not done working. You're just thinking instead of working and then the next day. So there is a lot of that. And if I'm being more descriptive around the experience with Rosie right now, we have put a lot of effort over the last few weeks into understanding what's happening on our funnel. A lot more data, a lot of UTM parameters, a lot of analysis, a lot of graphs. So a lot of that work. And that has really made me shift my priorities and strategy. [00:16:12] Speaker A: It sounds like the cadence is the weekends are for more of that divergent work. So during the weekend, when things are slower, you're thinking at a higher level. Okay. The way to build Rosie is to be figuring out analytics and data and how those funnels are better working. And then by the time you get to Monday morning, the to do list has crystallized itself on that. On that yellow legal pad. You've. You know what the next steps are to do. You just need to execute. And then you can put the blinders on on Monday and just run down the list. [00:16:36] Speaker B: Yes, yes. How about you? Does that. Is that familiar? [00:16:40] Speaker A: Things have gotten weird having a young daughter, because for the last few months, like, childcare has been kind of up in the air. We had a regular babysitter for a while, like, the first year or so of her life, and then things got a little more hectic. And so what I found is over the last few months, I've been spending a lot more time in dad mode, which is delightful. I've gone to the zoo, like, a dozen times. It's great. She'll just do, like, rounds on the carousel. So what I found from that is it's important to me to, like, be present with her. And also, there's times where she's just, like, playing in the dirt. Shoveling fistfuls of it into her mouth and, you know, kind of. Kind of just playing on her own. And I get to have more of that. Kind of just like, oh, let me. Let me dream about the sorts of things that I'm thinking about, which has given me more than any other point in my life. Like the, The. So the ratio for you, it sounds like, is, you know, you have two and a half ish days of more of the divergent kind of CEO level thought, and then the five days of. [00:17:34] Speaker B: Executing, I would say it's also evenings. So. So there's. There's five. Right. There's five days of work and then there's five evenings of thinking and a weekend of thinking. So I think that that's kind of more accurate to say in my case. [00:17:49] Speaker A: That's interesting. The ratio then might be like half and half in terms of number of hours. [00:17:52] Speaker B: Yeah, it might be more thinking. The truth is, I find that the more thinking I do, the better the business performs. So. So I don't shy away from it. And I take walks and I give myself excuses. I validate my excuses when I'm saying, oh, I didn't get anything done today. And then I think back and I say, yeah, but I made this decision based on this thing. And that is as important as knocking something out of the to do list. [00:18:19] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, Jeff Bezos has a quote about that of if he makes one good decision a week or something, he's a net positive. When he was. I think he stepped down as CEO of Amazon, but when he was at Amazon. [00:18:30] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:18:30] Speaker A: That's interesting. So when I've been in these periods, it's changed now because we have a regular babysitter and she's fantastic. So I've had a lot more time to do work. [00:18:36] Speaker B: First kid. [00:18:37] Speaker A: First kid, yeah. Year and a half, I think. 19 or 20 months. Yeah. [00:18:42] Speaker B: Okay, cool. So I have three daughters, so congratulations. [00:18:45] Speaker A: Thank you so much. Life changing. Amazing. I love it. [00:18:48] Speaker B: Amazing. I want to dig into it a little bit. What have you found? What's going on internally for you? You're 18 months in first kid. Yeah. For me, it drove me nuts that the capitalist wolf lost his mind. And I was like, whatever I thought I needed. I need so much more. I don't know if panic is a bit too strong forward, but it was pretty frantic. I really got more emotional about success and more driven and all that. I was harder on myself and also harder driving, like, all this stuff. What are you finding? You said, practically speaking, difficult to find Time. But what else? [00:19:24] Speaker A: I feel like I've gone through sort of spiritual enlightenment of like it was the same sort of thing of realizing that I needed so much more, but it wasn't financial for me. It was like emotional resilience, wise of realizing, oh, my goodness, I have a daughter. And now that I have a daughter, there are so many ways that I could lose a daughter. Like, you know, there's kidnapping and all the regular stuff, but also, you know, if we, if we have a bad relationship or if, I don't know, in high school, she makes the wrong group of friends and doesn't feel like she can come to my wife or I to get advice on it. Like, it's kind of terrifying. Oh, there's a funny story. When Sarah, my wife and I, when we were getting married, at our wedding, her mom came to us and said, you know, when I was pregnant with Sarah, when I first got pregnant, I was thinking, okay, I just have to make it past the first trimester, because that's when all the problems happen. So as soon as I get past the first three months, I'm out of the woods. First three months come and go. And she says, okay, well, I just have to wait until Sarah's bored because once she's here, once she's out, I can make sure she's okay. Take her to, like, I know she's okay. Then I'm finally out of the woods. And she was joking with us at the wedding, you know, last month I was thinking, oh man, if only Sarah can just get married, then I'm out of the woods. And so Sarah and I joke, now that we just live in the woods, now that there's, you know, our surface area of vulnerability is so much bigger. So from that, like, I think I developed a lot more sense of grounded resilience, might be how I put it, of like, I think I'm much more like, when low level things go wrong, of flights getting canceled or Amazon packages being delayed, that stuff doesn't bother me at all anymore. And just feeling like this calm sense of centered, focused, like, oh, I'm not in charge of anything. Like, I have no idea what's going to happen tomorrow. And kind of every moment that I have, and especially every moment that I have with my daughter Isabella, like, is a. Is an incredible gift. And so enjoy that to the fullest because, my gosh, I can't imagine any other way to go through it. Yeah, I think that's how I've changed. [00:21:19] Speaker B: Yeah. Perspective, resilience, proper prioritization, all these Things kind of contribute. So where does it lead you on work? Are you interested in the same things? Has your ambition level changed? Has your risk tolerance changed? [00:21:35] Speaker A: So my bandwidth for getting things done, I used to be able to get away with being a lot lazier and being a lot more distracted. So I would go on these eight hour experiments of like, oh, I have this idea for this tool, let me go and build that. And my ratio of time that I get to spend planning and thinking, particularly over the last few months when I've been more in dead mode than work mode, has shifted so that I have way more time to plan stuff than to actually execute on stuff. We also have Claude now though, which has made me a lot more effective in executing. But how I found that that's changed is I, more than any other part of my life, I think, have been much more focused on, okay, what's actually going to move the needle, what do I actually want, what businesses do I want to grow, what do I want the shape of the business to be? And then spending the majority of my time in this thinking mode planning out, okay, well, these are the obvious next steps that I need to do. And then when I actually do get to sit down and get some work done, it's just, oh, I can't remember how you described it, but I just get to run through this list of, okay, this is exactly what I need to do. This is the focus work. And I'm done with that time before I've been able to finish the list. And so now I can replenish it. Replenish it and focus it. So I think focus is the main word that I would use. I feel much more directed and much more like the strategy level feels much more fleshed out. I feel like I have more time to be a CEO and I feel like I'm a much better and more stringent CEO of what I can work on. And so that makes my work much more effective. [00:22:59] Speaker B: Okay, so you've restricted yourself a little bit on things that might be, I don't know, frivolous or unfocused or experiment. Experimental experimentation. [00:23:10] Speaker A: Experimental. Experimental. [00:23:11] Speaker B: Experimental. [00:23:12] Speaker A: Thank you. Experimental. Experimental sound. That sounded like a word. I think. [00:23:17] Speaker B: I think experiential is where my mind is going, but that ain't it. And what, what are you working on? You got one thing going. [00:23:25] Speaker A: I have one thing going and I'm going to sound hypocritical now, but things, things that are enabling the one thing to go a little bit faster. So the one thing is file inbox, which Is this. This is my dragon. Because this business on paper makes so much sense. This is a business that. This is like how I first got into bootstrapping. I started this, I don't know, 11 or 12 years ago now, and it's Wetransfer, but it's better. And I started this kind of on accident in college and didn't really have the foundation of understanding the business side of it or who the users were. I didn't really have a marketing channel. It just started, you know, a couple months after I started it, right after I graduated college and was supposed to go to medical school. Later that year, it started making $8,000 a month. And I was thinking, oh my gosh, what am I doing and what's going on? And I was scared to touch it because I didn't know why it was working and it was a whole thing. And so got connected with the Microcom network where we met and spent a number of years just backfilling that information of what marketing looks like and everything else. And at the same time, oh, so then Dropbox released their own native version of something that kind of did the same thing. And then I lost confidence in the product because I was thinking, well, if there's a free thing that does the same thing that mine does, no one's going to use this and, you know, I'll move on to the next thing. And that never happened. It's, you know, we're 12 years out now and MRR has gone down to, I think it's something like 3,500 or $4,000 a month. But like, it's been a long ramp down and I've tried a few things but gotten kind of frustrated with it. And the main story behind it is I would try something and not put enough effort into it and then I would skip onto another thing and then there would be a little bump in it of it went up. But I'm already under the new thing, so the consistency wasn't there. And I could go on for two hours about all the other stuff that I've worked on. And I was a co founder for a while and I did consulting for a little bit, but I've really come back home to like, the thing that I want is being totally honest a lifestyle SaaS that's making something on the order of like 20 to $50,000 a month because that's an outrageously comfortable amount of money and having it be mostly automated and having a business that looks very much like the shape of File Inbox, where it has really low churn. Once it gets installed, it's very low maintenance on my part. I hire someone to help with support or have Claude do support, which is a project I'm working on. And I just kind of iterate on that. And you know, we transfer was recently evaluated, I think in 2021, close to $1 billion for doing the same thing that I'm doing. And so I'm thinking if I just get a fraction of that market, like there's my lifestyle business, that's. That's all I need. So that's, that's the primary focus. And then things that I. Things that I feel hypocritical, hypocritical about. Like my Monday today was spent. I found out that I can actually do a meaningful amount of work on days where I am watching Isabella. So, like if we're out of the zoo and I have an idea for a thing that I want to do, I figured out this scheme where I can get Claude code, which is like the best AI tool I think right now. I can get Claude code on a server connected to my phone and I can prompt it from my phone and then have it like actually do work and actually ship features. And I've set things up in a way that it gets automatically tested so like I could be out and about, send a message from my phone and then have a feature pushed. And that is just amazing for me. I would love to be able to get to the point where like my, there is no worker me, there is only CEO me. And when I'm out for a walk thinking about stuff, I just talk to my phone and then features get pushed. So we're getting really close to that. And a hiccup that I've had in that is the interface on the phone. It's like this mobile terminal app is awful and like you can't scroll back. It's this whole thing. So I had an epiphany over the weekend of, oh my gosh, I could actually make a mobile app that's proxying this. That then is a better interface for it. And then I can use voice and a bunch of other stuff. So that's what I've been working on today. But in service of ostensibly getting stuff done on File Inbox. [00:26:58] Speaker B: That's pretty wild. [00:26:59] Speaker A: I know. [00:27:01] Speaker B: As you were describing it, I felt like the desire for that myself. So it's not surprising that you got to the point where you said I could use this and I bet others could use this. Do you think File Inbox is the most likely asset or business to get you to where you want to go, or do you think there's another one that will come out of the work that you're doing now? Right. You describe the lifestyle, lifestyle business with a specific revenue. I agree with you. That's the dream. A solid, reliable lifestyle business at that level of revenue that you described is a dream. Anybody would want that. So it's a. It's a good goal to have. And my question is, do you think filing box is the most likely to get to it or. Or is that another product or a combination of two? [00:27:50] Speaker A: The most likely is an interesting way to ask that. The main ingredient here is just is there something that I can focus on that I can push forward, that when I hit an obstacle, it doesn't matter. I'm just going to keep pushing forward in it. So I've had some long conversations with ChatGPT about there's like four other top contenders for things that I think could potentially hit this for me. And I will not be able to let go of File Inbox until I feel like I've given it a fair shot. There is some low hanging fruit things that I know would improve the business that I need to do. Things like there's this whole SEO plan of SEO pages on it. There's things like there's some broken features on it that I feel embarrassed to even talk about that I just need to fix those. And there's some marketing ideas I have, especially in the age of LLMs. LLMs now you can connect to keyword research tools. So I could have this feedback loop where Claude is like figuring out what the pages are to write and all that sort of thing. So I know I have to do that just to feel like I've conquered this dragon. And doing that I think has a really high probability of hitting those goals. And if that doesn't happen, that's fine. I have a lot of other things I'd like to work on. Could be this weird Claude thing from my phone, but I feel like I need to devote at least enough effort into file Inbox to get it to the point where I don't feel embarrassed by it, where I feel like I've cleaned up all this low hanging fruit and I think that probably has a really high potential of becoming the thing that I want it to be. And if not, I have slayed the dragon and it had no gold and that's okay. [00:29:16] Speaker B: Yeah, I really like the technique of taking these like questions around. What should I do? What should I not do? And just putting them on the other side of something else. Like, I'm going to do this first, and then I'll address those questions. [00:29:30] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:29:31] Speaker B: And almost certainly when you look at those questions again, you'll answer them differently then. Then you would now. So I. I do that regularly. We do that. Right. We have a team of six people. We don't want to try to overdo it. We don't want to try to do too many things at once. So a lot of times I will come up with a topic that I'm thinking about, and this is where Jessica, on our team, the VP of Product, is extremely helpful because she will allow me to go through the idea and then she will suggest taking that decision and putting it on the other side of these few things that we're working on right now. And inevitably, we have a very different perspective on the other side of it. Sometimes it will be as simple as, oh, that's just not important at all. Move it aside. Or it'll be knowing what we know. Now. Here's a completely different way to think about it or answer that question. [00:30:23] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. I love the role of Jessica in that. Because the failure mode of a CEO is that you're changing direction every day, and now the workers are like, one day we were going this way, and now we're going this way. Heaton Shaw has a funny story about that. In one of his first companies, they called it pulling a Heaton, that he would come in on Monday morning and be like, drop everything. We're working on this new thing. And they learn to just ignore it. Yeah. So having. Having a Jessica, or just having a rule for yourself of we don't get to change the plan until we've accomplished the work from it, and then we can be thinking about the next thing to do after the current batch of work. But the CEO doesn't get to change direction mid stroke. Yeah. [00:30:55] Speaker B: Yes. I think that's one of. One of the most helpful things about our team makeup and just having a team at all. It controls my impulses around changing direction. [00:31:05] Speaker A: Love it. [00:31:06] Speaker B: I'll describe a little bit about what we're doing internally because it relates to this. The way I would describe what we're doing right now is we are slowing down to speed up. And the reason for that is because we caught an enormous amount of speed and momentum, and then we started kind of careening off the road and heading into the wrong direction. And what I came up with was the only way to kind of course correct was to basically call a timeout and just slow everything back down for a minute. For us, that meant around our ad spend. So the beginning of this year, we started spending money on ads and revenue grew, and then we spent more on ads and revenue grew more and so on. And it just kind of kept going and then we hit a bit of a plateau and then it started to reverse itself, just the, the general return on ad spend. Like for every dollar we're spending, how many, you know, how many dollars and paying customers are we getting? An mrr? And my first instinct was kind of to ignore it and hope it got better because I thought actually that was reasonable because, you know, it's not a straight line. Advertising and performance and targeting and so on. [00:32:17] Speaker A: Sure. [00:32:17] Speaker B: But then it did get to a point, thanks to a lot of that data work that we did, to really understand what was going on, where I didn't think it made sense anymore to just keep spending and keep pushing and trying to figure it out while in flight. So last week we put almost all the advertising campaigns on pause. And over this weekend was this super interesting experience. For the first time in months, we just saw what would happen to our product and to our signups and to our everything with no ads running. [00:32:52] Speaker A: What happened? [00:32:52] Speaker B: Things got calm. So in Slack, right, we pipe in a bunch of events. Every signup, every business training. That's what we call a scrape, like someone connecting their website or Google business profile so that our agent can train on it. The billing channel, people adding cards, people churning. We just pipe in all these events into Slack. And Slack just got quiet. But then when I looked at our actual data, like in aggregate, like, okay, between this date and the state, how many signed up, it didn't look nearly as quiet as it felt in Slack. So we still grew churn. It didn't go crazy. It's just kind of, you know, nice and steady. So it generally made me feel more confident about where we are and the role that paid advertising plays for us. Maybe before, I was worried that if we stopped advertising, nothing would happen, no one would sign up. And what we found was that that's not true. And a lot of the SEO work that we've been doing is paying off more than we thought it was because everything that came in was, was effectively organic or maybe some, you know, leftover from the prior few days of someone clicking an ad and coming back, whatever else. But what it immediately made me want to do is divert more investment toward SEO, because that it kind of showed itself. Not only is the volume decent, it's not the same amount as ads. When you're kind of pushing that hard. [00:34:16] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:34:17] Speaker B: But the quality of signups much, much higher. The percentage of signups that went further into the onboarding and activated was like, much higher. [00:34:28] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:34:29] Speaker B: Like double the percentage. [00:34:31] Speaker A: That's surprising. Okay. Yeah, yeah. [00:34:33] Speaker B: So a lot of it was inadvertent. It was a little bit out of frustration. Last week I basically said to the ad team, okay, okay. You know, there's this weird thing with advertising campaigns these days where you can't just like make a change. You can't just pause an ad, you'll derail the whole thing. So there is this weird feeling of you can't stop spending because if, if you stop spending, you'll mess up the campaigns. [00:34:54] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:34:55] Speaker B: So that puts you like in an impossible situation. And last week I basically said, I'm all done with that argument. I hear you, but just pause the damn thing before we go into the weekend. [00:35:04] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:35:05] Speaker B: And I'm happy we did. Now we're going to restart back up very carefully around our targeting. But it was a bit of an unexpected experience to just feel what actually happens in the product and in our signups and in our funnel if we're not spending money on ads. [00:35:20] Speaker A: That's great. The part of that that stood out to me is that you feel so much better that you don't. It sounded like before this experiment you felt held hostage that you had to keep the ad spending up and then as it was falling down, what choice do you have? Do you now just bleed money and still get new users? But no, yeah, it sounds like you do have this calm base layer of this longer term strategy of the SEO where you don't have to be spending ads. It's something that you can spend money on to juice the pipeline. Doing it strategically, but you're not, you're not dependent on that. Where I would be curious about where you are on that is what are you trying to do with Rosie? Do you want, like, you could go entirely in the long term growth game and put all of your marketing dollars towards this long term stuff of SEO. And presumably, I don't know, five years down the line, the business is going to be in a much better spot because you have all this free traffic coming in, the free organic traffic. That's much higher intent where people are converting better versus if you want to grow as quickly as possible. If you feel like there's this tide and it's a winner take all sort of situation and it's about capturing as much of the market as quickly as possible, well, Then spending, even if you have to burn money, spending money on ads is going to get you more customers in the door sooner. So at a, at a high level, how are you thinking about that? What's. What, what do you want from. From the business? [00:36:41] Speaker B: I often find myself in a situation where I'm trying to have my cake and eat it too. That is a recurring theme in my decision making as CEO and person responsible for not running out of money. Sometimes that's good, sometimes that's bad. I don't mind it. That's just my style. And so I'm fine with it. So I'm trying to thread the needle in using inefficient channel like advertising to grow quickly in an effort to get revenue to sustainability and profitability. So I want to be sustainable and think longer term, but I'm okay with being inefficient in the spend to get there. [00:37:23] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:37:24] Speaker B: Because as long as the projections and the spreadsheet say that I'm heading in the right direction, I'm okay with it. [00:37:30] Speaker A: So the way investors do. Is there money from outside? [00:37:33] Speaker B: There is. Okay, there is. So Rosie. It does. That's right. So. So Rosie is a pivot at a rally. So at rally we raised 18 million bucks. Right. A lot of money. And we pivoted into Rosie when we had a few million bucks left in the bank. And so most of the same dynamics are there around looking for a bigger exit, liquidation preference, board of directors, projections, all the stuff that goes with it. So the way I look at it is I use projections in a spreadsheet and I just play around with our total spend of which advertising and marketing in general are a big portion. And that is discretionary. All right. You can choose. And then I look at the revenue growth and the assumptions connected between how much we're going to spend on marketing and advertising and how much growth needs to be in order for it to work out. 6, 8, 9, 12 months down the road. Down the road. So right now where I am is I'm trying to get to a specific ARR. A specific monthly revenue with a certain amount in the bank. So it's like this race between cash and Runway and revenue to get to a sustainable and then profitable place. [00:38:47] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Tricky problem. Okay. And the levers that you have on that are how much you're spending on ads. And there's a cap on that. It sounds like of or perhaps an optimization challenge of making ads that are good enough, that convert well enough so that the money that you put towards ads is. Is Getting you to that revenue number. [00:39:04] Speaker B: Yes. [00:39:04] Speaker A: Well enough. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. [00:39:06] Speaker B: So it's. Which, it is a funny optimization problem because sometimes you look at the spreadsheet and it surprises you. We don't spend as much on ads. But sometimes in the past, I have looked at that spreadsheet and actually concluded I think I actually should spend $200,000 a month on ads. [00:39:21] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. [00:39:21] Speaker B: Which is a very. You know, it sounds and feels strange, but if the ROI is there, then that is what we should do. [00:39:28] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. If you have a machine where you put a dollar in and you get $1.10 back, how much money do you put in the machine? [00:39:34] Speaker B: All of your money. All the money. That's right. That's right. It's spread out over time to make sure that you're right. So this is what happened to me, actually, in February. March. In February. March. Our ratio of ad spend to MRO growth was so good that I did the right thing in spending a lot more money on ads. [00:39:55] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:39:56] Speaker B: And it kept growing, and then it got a little wobbly and. And now we' where we are around, like, hold on, hold on. Timeout. Let's almost, like, restart this targeting to bring in the right people and restart a lot of the experiments and learning that we did over time because they deteriorated. [00:40:12] Speaker A: Is there anything else in play here? Are there any other ways that you can spend money to get customers? [00:40:16] Speaker B: Always. [00:40:19] Speaker A: Are you doing direct outreach? Are you doing cold calling? Or is it buying ads in print magazines or something? [00:40:26] Speaker B: So I'm pretty hesitant to diversify into too many channels. [00:40:30] Speaker A: It sounds like ads are working. It's just this optimization problem of, like, what is that? Cap? Yeah. Okay, that makes sense. [00:40:35] Speaker B: That's right. And so as soon as ads started working and my mind started to drift toward, well, now we should do pr and we should also do events, and we should also do outbound. I stopped myself and said, no, no, no. You are lucky that this channel is working so well. [00:40:49] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:40:50] Speaker B: So invest in this channel. And as long as there's enough money in the bank to continue investing in the channel, given its own dynamics of basically needing to be fed every day, then it's fine. I am more interested in diversification now because even when it's on a good track, a little hiccup is unhealthy. So it's great that you can just wake up one day and decide, I actually am not going to spend this money. Pause. That's a great positive. But it also can be fickle in its actual performance. [00:41:22] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. For sure. [00:41:23] Speaker B: When you think about this stuff around go to market, investing and attracting customers, where does your mind go? Right. Different than spending other people's money. You spend your own money. Very different approach. [00:41:35] Speaker A: Yeah, same. The same underlying strategy though. I think so. The strategy that comes to mind came from a book that I read called Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares. They talk about this bullseye method where you, he outlines every possible marketing channel for specifically SaaS apps. But it kind of works with any sort of business and so outlines, you know, there's SEO and there's paid ads and there's events and 19 of them, I think maybe more than 19. And the method that he recommends is brainstorm at least one idea for what you would do for each of these categories. So for events for File Inbox, well, I could, I could host a meetup the next time there's an accounting seminar in Dallas or something and buy everybody, I don't know, pizza or something. You go through that with every single idea and then you pick your favorite three. I wouldn't actually like to host an event. Stresses me out. Don't like it. The three that bubble up in the last two or three times that I've done this exercise are SEO. That's where most of the traffic is coming from. Now that's very high intent traffic. Also over the long term, it's a good long term game to play. You don't have to be paying for traffic. You invest it up front. The frustrating thing about it is, in my experience at least it takes a long time to see the results of your effort and paid ads. And I haven't figured out a way to get those to work for File Inbox. But I think that's a funnel problem. Like it's a product problem right now. And I want to experiment with video. So like as a third one, doing something like TikTok or something like YouTube and seeing if I can make something work there. So in the method, you know, you pick your top three and you design an experiment in the, in the book's terms, for a thousand dollars, that will take less than a month. And the criteria for the experiment is you have to be able to measure what your customer acquisition cost, your CAC is. So for a dollar that I spend on SEO, what did I get back from that? For the dollar that I spend on producing video and I have to like put my own time in there, I guess have some valuation on that. How much did I get back from that and which customers came from that? And in the method from Traction. After you've done that experiment with all three, you pick the one that works the best and you double down on that. So it's probably going to be SEO, although I might see more immediate results from ads. And so then it's just a game of, like, how do you juice everything you possibly can out of SEO until you get to that next stage of growth where it doesn't work anymore, and then you can go through the whole exercise again. That's my meta framework. And then, you know, the question of, you know, are you self funded or do you have your own money? I think it just changes the variables of, like, how far you can push the gas when you're doing these sorts of things. So with millions of dollars in funding, the experiment might look like, okay, well, instead of $1,000, let's try spending $10,000 on and, and see what that does. And once we're doubling down on it, instead of spending, what I would probably be comfortable with is like, I don't know, up to $1,000 a month in ads. If I had millions of dollars in funding, well, maybe it's $80,000 an ad. Right. It just kind of changes the coefficients of the, of the curves. But I think the game fundamentally is the same of what you're trying to do. [00:44:30] Speaker B: I want to change topics a little bit. You mentioned Claude several times. [00:44:34] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:44:34] Speaker B: I'm a new Claude convert, so I've been using ChatGPT and then I, I played around with CLAUDE for trying to think what it was. It was something specific around research, and it was really good. And then I found myself going back to it and I find myself, I'm guessing other people do this also. Just having one browser window, ChatGPT and one Claude, and I copy and paste the same prompt into both, and then I see the. And then fight sometimes who can do the better work for me, just go for it. Robots dance for me. Sounds like you're doing a lot with Claude. I mean, you're building features from your phone, which is kind of wild. What else are you doing? What else should we be aware of specifically on Go to Market? I know the development area is kind of very obvious for everyone because of the leverage it provides, but I'm pretty tuned into, like, what about the market? I literally have a little sticky note right now that I wrote myself last night. Like, bring more AI into our marketing. What can it do? [00:45:39] Speaker A: So at the risk of totally derailing what you were going to work on this week, I think this changes the game for everything at every level. Of software as a service. Any work that a human does that involves a computer can and probably will be completely automated by LLM Tools in the next, I don't know, 3ish years. So, like, tiny experiments that I've been running recently are. I've had an executive assistant for the last four or five years. And one of the main things that my executive assistant has been doing for me is triaging my personal email. Her job is to like, free up more of my time. I don't like going through email, so I pay her to do that. Okay. I built over the weekend a script automation setup thing that gets Claude code through an MCP server to do a better job than my assistant was doing. It checks my email every interval. I have it set to 30 minutes, but I could do whatever I want. And I have this little text document of the rules that I want it to triage it by. Here are the four things that you can do with an email. You can start so that I have to manually review it. If you do that, send me a notification. If it's spam, try to unsubscribe from it or delete it. And if it's a receipt or something, tell me what the receipt said and then archive it and send me summaries of this as the day goes on. And I get a little notification every half hour that's like, hey, you just got these two emails. This one was spam and this one is from this guy that I'm on the board of the hoa. So there's a lot of HOA stuff going on right now. It's like, you know, they're talking about this assessment coming up and I'm like, okay, great. And that has no limit. Like Claude code specifically, like runs off of the Claude models. But to me, it's the best existing interface for interacting with an LLM because it's very scriptable. So I can have it, I can plug stuff into it. MCP servers are a huge deal right now. So the way that I was able to get that working with my email, there is a Gmail MCP server. I just plug it in and now all of a sudden Claude has access to my email. Upcoming projects I have for that are hooking it up to my calendar. I mentioned earlier SEO tools. So like, I've hired SEO guys to do audits of my site. There's nothing that they're doing that Claude could not do with access to these base level tools. So, like, do I just get an SEO audit? I don't know every day and then it goes in and through another MCP server, it's editing the articles directly. Oh, my gosh. For direct outreach, like something I was talking with ChatGPT about the other day is what might a direct outreach campaign on X look like? These LLMs can now call people, as you're aware with Rosie, and they sound really good. What might a direct outreach campaign look like that was directly calling people or texting people that had some context on them that, like, felt like a human that wasn't just cold, you know, unpersonalized, it was directly replying to them, going through, like, Reddit posts. A machine that I want to build is anytime someone complains about Wetransfer, I would like my personal Reddit account to personally reply to them with the context and say, hey, I noticed that you said that this feature of WeTransfer wasn't working or you were looking for a way to do this. Here's an article I wrote that says exactly how to do that. And maybe the LLM just wrote that article on the fly. That's a possible thing that we could do. So, yeah, add optimization. I could go on and on, but yeah, I think any sort of computer work that any person is doing, I think is probably going to be able to be done better, faster, cheaper by LLM. [00:48:55] Speaker B: There's something that just bothers me, and that is knowing for sure that coming up with the right set of ideas and having executing on those ideas like that exists that I'm not taking advantage of. Like, there is a way to put these tools together to use that would explode Rosie's growth. And I'm limited by my imagination and, and, and it really bothers me that I'm not, I'm not being creative enough and I haven't, not been clever enough that I haven't figured out how to do it. And, and I think it's good that it bothers me. It's like this little scratching thing that I. You know, oftentimes you talk to normies who are not obsessed with the Internet the same way, and it's understandable they don't know what's possible. How could they? Why should they care? But this feels like a moment of arbitrage where you could really, really, really take advantage of these things before the market has effectively priced those in. Yeah, yeah, because everyone's doing them and they're ubiquitous and all these tools have, all these ideas have been incorporated into tools to execute on them more easily. And it feels to me like that window is closing over time, not like it's in danger of closing any minute. But that gap and the size of the arbitrage opportunity just closes over time. [00:50:15] Speaker A: Yeah, well, the same thing is true for everything. High alpha is how my hedge fund investor would phrase that. Yeah, there's huge alpha right now and there's a lot of low hanging fruit that people just haven't thought about the sorts of things that LLMs can be doing. So probably every SaaS model that currently exists, if you sat down and just thought about what does this look like in the age of LLMs? Help desk software. Oh my gosh. All of the AI stuff on existing help desk software is just bolted on and it's fine. But what would the concept of a help desk look like now that we have LLMs? What, if any, solo SaaS, there was a hotline that you could call and have it like walk through whatever problem you had and do custom onboarding and share your screen and it could tell you what sorts of things to click on. Like that's probably what help desk software is going to look like. And the first company that does that, my goodness, they're going to demolish the. Oh, Zendesk. I think it's like one of the top ones right now. Any company built on these older models, particularly if the company is built with LLMs in mind. So like Zendesk has a bunch of employees because of course that was the model that worked up until, you know, two years ago. But what's the company going to look like that's helped us? Software that's built by like, I don't know, one or two guys who've built their company in a way where it's using all these AI tools and they've built the product in a way that the product is this AI first. Like this is going to be true of every single industry across everything. And you know, we're in the early days of the Internet. [00:51:38] Speaker B: Yeah, it makes me really excited for new business ideas. [00:51:42] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:51:42] Speaker B: I would say a few years ago, not that I was losing. Yeah, okay. I was losing interest in Internet businesses. It was all SaaS and E commerce and I was like, oh, this didn't sound that interesting. [00:51:53] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:51:54] Speaker B: But what you're describing feels like just an actually exciting, not just a big opportunity, not only an exciting opportunity. I think it specifically lends itself to leveraging good ideas and thoughts and executing on those as opposed to hard work, determination over a long period of time, execution, hiring a big team, raising a lot of money. Like those were unfair advantages or those were proper advantages. And I Love the idea of the ideas being the key advantages. You have a better idea, a better way to execute something you can do a lot better. [00:52:34] Speaker A: I saw this tweet that was saying it's the era of the idea guy, that if you're just a guy who has ideas, like, now is your time, my dude. Let's go. [00:52:42] Speaker B: People have been, you know, I've been thinking badly of myself for being an ideas guy for 20 years. Maybe this next 10 years is my time. [00:52:50] Speaker A: This is your era. Yeah, for sure. [00:52:52] Speaker B: I want to talk about one last thing before we call it so on the Twitter timeline, there's all this news, right? What makes the headlines is 100 million dollar signing bonuses. Right. Just in insane numbers. So of course that's what gets the attention. But what I'm really interested in is what is going on in the Zuckerberg OpenAI battle. What is that? How do you get to a point where paying someone $100 million as an employee makes sense? Are we misjudging? Is this like Zuck buying Instagram and people being like, why would you pay that much money? And then him being very, very right about it? Like, are we, are we still under assuming what. What is going on and how valuable it is? [00:53:39] Speaker A: Zuckerberg is particularly interesting to me because I feel like he's had some really, really good calls. Like the Instagram purchase, amazing call. That was great. And things like investing in the metaverse. It may be too early to say, but my gut is that that was not the right call. I think he invested some. Some crazy amount of billions. But yeah, my wife and I both have Oculus headsets. During COVID it was great. We got to play VR golf with our family, and it's wonderful. But I don't think that's the future of computing. I think AR glasses might fit into it, but I think for the amount of investment and attention that people give to it, I don't like. I think it's going to be more of a niche product that you have the AR headset. The future of computing as I see it is increase intelligence as hard and as fast as you can. And the interface for it is invisible. It's an airpod in your ear. Oh, it's in the movie her, where you just have an AirPod and you're talking to this thing and it's able to do the work for you. I think that's probably where computing is going to go. And my read on Mr. Zuckerberg is that I think he realized that and felt like he realized it. A little bit too late that after spending ungodly amounts of money in the metaverse and in VR stuff, then ChatGPT came and was this revolution, you know, it hit a billion users faster than any other app at the time. I think Cursor now has beaten it. But, yeah, and I think for a bit, he was scrambling of like, okay, hold on, this is the future. And from his position, like, he's sitting on a war chest. My God, Facebook has so much money, makes so much money. It's crazy. But he's looking for the next thing, and he knows that that's paid off before. He knows that spending money on Instagram was the best money he could have spent. That was the best way to grow Facebook. And so in that sort of position, I guess I'd love to see his spreadsheets of how he's calculating that it's worth $100 million. But you and I are sitting here, these little peons of like, oh, maybe If I spend $80,000 a month on ads, I might be able to capture a little more of the market. I think he's looking at this as like, he wants to be king. He wants to own the future of computing. He thought that was going to be in the metaverse. And so, pedal to the metal, he's going to dump as much money as he possibly has in the Metaverse. And I think he has realized that actually AI is the future. Yeah, AR and VR stuff is cool, but it's a different interface for, like a gaming console. It's amazing when you're in it, but that's just not the primary way that people are going to be interacting with computers. The primary way is going to be with LLMs and with intelligence. And then it's just sort of passively in your environment, talking with robots or talking with an Airpod. I think that's what's going on. I think he's whatever, whatever spreadsheet he's looking at of how much value there is in being able to own a little bit more of that slice. And this arms race of this winner take all thing of it, it's going to be one of five people. It's going to be either Zuckerberg or OpenAI or Deepseek, maybe be in there. Yeah, or XAI. And the first person to get to artificial general intelligence is just. They're just going to win and maybe be the God emperor of the world. So I think that might be what he wants. [00:56:40] Speaker B: I do think it's very competitive in nature, meaning he wants to make OpenAI lose. He wants to win more than he wants them to lose. But in order to win, he sees that he needs to. He needs to hobble them. Yeah, I'm all for it. We just made the switch from closed source models at Rosie to open source models. So Zuck is probably the most important person at the macro level for that strategy. Right. Our strategy is predicated on the assumption that the open source models will get to be just as good as the closed source models. So the more pressure in that direction, the better. So releasing lambda good, deep seek good, whatever pushes toward commoditization. I guess what he's seeing things that I don't see, and that is, well, where does OpenAI go from here? I guess I can take a peek at it in just my behavior and others in just the number of Google searches compared to ChatGPT conversations has gone from 100% to 0%. And now it is very far from 100 to 0. It's very far. So you can see, okay, they might really win a very large portion of the Internet economy overall if they continue in that direction. It's. I have a problem seeing how that connects directly to Facebook and meta and Instagram and that business model. But he thinks about it a lot more than I do. So he's looking out into the future and saying, well, I can't let that happen. I need to be involved in that or I need to undercut it and commoditize it or something. But I think it's good for us. [00:58:24] Speaker A: In general, certainly having more competition and, yeah, especially the open model. I think open models are probably better for you and I using these things. I would rather have open models than closed models. You asked how this ties into Facebook. I think he captured lightning in a bottle of being the social network and owning the social graph. And I think he has been trying to do that again ever since. And Instagram kind of like bolted onto that and, okay, now we have a bigger social graph, but social graph is not the new thing. That's not. Most people I talk to aren't on Facebook anymore. We kind of did that thing and we're done. And there's a lot of privacy concerns and hedonism and neuroticism, and it feeds the worst parts of you. And so I think the play he was trying to make with the Metaverse was, well, I'd like to own the next operating system. Apple owns the. They own the mobile phone with iPhones, Windows 1 in the previous technical revolution of the desktop. The next one is going to be Metaverse and VR and stuff. And so I would like to own that. I want to. That's the next thing that I can own. And I personally don't think that was the right call. It looked like it at the time, but I don't think that's the right forward. And it seems like he's realized the same thing and is now seeing that actually the future is in this AI stuff. And so however much he can put towards that, he wants to own whatever the next thing is. And it doesn't necessarily have to have anything to do with Facebook. As long as he wants to capture that lightning in a bottle again of owning the social graph, he wants to do that again in whatever the next paradigm is going to be. [00:59:54] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I think the, the difficulty that myself, maybe other people also is it's difficult to visualize what that ultimately looks like because, you know, Facebook, a social network, Instagram, Twitter, you. You can kind of visualize that. Okay, so a lot of people. There's one service that a lot of people use, it creates this one to many. It puts people together into these individuals pools of interest and all these things kind of like wrap my head around that. [01:00:23] Speaker A: Sure. [01:00:24] Speaker B: A distributed set of human to AI conversations siloed into their own. Like, you know, you and your AI relationships, you and Claude, you and chatgpt, myself, other people. It's hard for me to visualize what that turns into. Even like Google could wrap my mind around that. [01:00:48] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, right. [01:00:49] Speaker B: There's like a fresh coat of paint on top of all these different websites that are very helpful. And then you slap the business model around, advertise like, I got it. I don't know where it goes on the AI front, but it is a pretty safe assumption that the sheer volume of data and the number of people that business models that we are not familiar with will come out of it. [01:01:10] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:01:11] Speaker B: If you have billions of people using similar things all connected in some way. Yes, you can monetize in some way. Even if I don't know how. [01:01:19] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, he'll be able to figure it out. One of the ways I can think of is if he makes AGI. Well, okay, you've created a God. Have that. Do whatever you want now. Nothing else matters. Something else that comes to mind is I don't think he would have made Llama open wait if he wasn't playing on the chessboard where OpenAI was already playing. That was his way of getting an edge of that I see as more of a move of trying to harm AI than it was to try to monopolize it. Certainly. I can't imagine from a business perspective why that would make sense, you know, because that's, that's giving up control if, you know, it's a bunch of distributed conversations. I think you did that primarily to hurt OpenAI. [01:01:54] Speaker B: Yeah, what a trip. Let's spend a billion dollars on something and then just give it away. [01:01:59] Speaker A: You really have to. [01:02:01] Speaker B: That sounds amazing to be able to think that long term and that big and that like second order effects and. [01:02:05] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Very different. [01:02:07] Speaker B: Christian, I think we got to call it a day. Otherwise we can just keep going. This is going to turn into like a Joe Rogan three hour thing. [01:02:13] Speaker A: We'll have to schedule another one. [01:02:15] Speaker B: Yes, yes. You know, the goal of this podcast is kind of have these conversations, but not with someone new every single time. So I hope you come back over the next few weeks, months, catch back up, see where we are, see what's going on with File inbox and where things are with Rosie. [01:02:30] Speaker A: Where can people find you on X at C G E N C O. Or at my website, Gen Co G E N C O. And then File inbox is fileinbox.com and those are all the places. Cool. [01:02:44] Speaker B: Well, thank you very much for coming on, guys. Thank you for listening to another episode of Offsite. You can check us out on YouTube, Spotify, do all the things. What's the saying like and subscribe. See, I'm being a good podcaster now. Christian, thanks so much. [01:02:59] Speaker A: Thank you.