Jason Fried on bootstrapping vs. VC, the Airbnb 2.0 pivot, on-prem vs. cloud economics, and his philosophy on wealth

guys. Good. Thanks for having me on. It's great to have you. Thanks so much, Jason. Uh, we've actually met in person once randomly at uh a restaurant that was one of my favorite restaurants in Malibu. We met and then it the restaurant shut down like a month later. I was super bummed. I would Which restaurant was that?

It was the Was it something? Uh, it was right by Whole Foods. There's a hamburger place there now. Oh, yeah. Like coconut. The real coconut. Real coconut was there. That's correct. Tragic. It's a tra that was that spot was the best. I don't know what happened, but Mal spot. They had a hard time. It's a tough market.

It's a tough market. Runs her high there for sure. Yeah. Uh anyways, great to have you on. Um we've both been looking forward to this. Yeah. Uh I mean, I'd love to just uh take your temperature on your view on the current state of venture capital and startups. Are things getting better? Are things getting worse?

It feels like people are raising more capital than ever.

potentially there's a bubble potentially uh at the same time companies are getting to really high run rates what's your feeling for the health of the startup economy in the tech world generally yeah I mean the way I look at it is I usually look at the ideas I don't really care so much about the funding side of it because if there's cheap money easy money there's going to be cheap money easy money if it's hard money there's not going to be as much around there's always going to be fluctuation there I look at the ideas obviously there's a lot of people building a lot of things right now which is very exciting I can't remember a time when more people were building more things truly except maybe at the beginning of the web late 90s kind of thing where everyone was just everything was new one knew what they were doing and so they're just making stuff like the early early enthusiast web was pretty spectacular so I think that that's very very healthy that said the hardest thing is not making something the hardest thing is maintaining something and it's become so easy just to make stuff and kind of just like vomit out ideas and I mean this in the in the in the best possible way.

You know, AI makes things really fast. You can make something really quickly that's sort of decent. Yep. It's ephemeral. It's ephemeral. And then the thing is like you have to prop that up. You have to keep that up. You have to support customers.

If you sell your product to people, like people are going to be using this. They're going to be depending on it.

And so I'm a little bit concerned that there's too much energy right now focused on just spitting out new ideas and not as much in invested in maintaining something and seeing it grow and seeing it through to fruition. So there's a lot of bragging about look how fast I made this thing. Yeah. Yeah.

You made a thing, but now what? That's my big question. And and I'm not seeing a lot of answers there yet, but I still am excited by all the things you can do today. Yeah. What's your take? I mean, do do you notice that? I feel like I must be other people that notice this, too.

We've talked about the iron law of the universe. What goes up quickly must come down quickly. Uh, well, I think to mere it's there's a very there's a very messy middle, right? I actually love the fact that software can be ephemeral now, right? I like I like that an app could basically be a meme, right?

How many people over the last couple decades have had an idea for an app that shouldn't it's not worth spending a million dollars and a year building it, but it would be fun for it to exist. And so I like that things can come to existence quickly, right?

I like that you can generate an image that I never would have paid a somebody to make a 3D render of. Yep. But is actually entertaining and and fun. Even even just in it just very casual format, right? Obviously, it has business applications as well, but John and I will generate images.

Like what if I put a wing on a Cadillac Escalade with a racing livery? Yeah. Simple. I can imagine that. Simple stuff like that. Um and then mix a Porsche car with a Cadillac Escalade. Exactly. That was exactly my prompt.

Yeah, I probably could have hired a designer to do that, but it would have taken a day and cost a bunch of money. And And that is like it's incredible that you can do that. I love that stuff. And I actually think what's going to end up happening is a lot of people are going to make software just for themselves. Exactly.

Yeah. And that's incredibly That's how I got started. I made software for myself. I was using something called FileMaker Pro way back in the day. And FileMaker Pro is the easiest way to make like an application that kind of ran. I didn't know how it worked behind the scenes, but it it ran.

That is a great feeling and a wonderful place to start. So, I'm all I'm all for that. Yeah. And where I was going is there's kind of the opposite spectrum of software that's really craftd driven software.

Somebody on the show, I think it was Jack Halton, was talking of this like Jirro dreams of sushi form of software where you're looking at an existing product category and there's a bunch of tools that already exist and just looking at it with a new set of eyes and just saying, I'm going to spend more time obsessing over this one product experience than anyone else and I'm going to make a great product.

And I think that's great. That's kind of like you can still use AI to do that, but uh it's not just, you know, slop, right?

But then there's this interesting messy middle right now in venture where you have 20 of the same 20 different teams approaching the same problem and both kind of everybody's kind of racing at it uh without a lot of real vision or craft. It's just about speed and just spewing stuff out and seeing what sticks.

And I think that that um is sort of an unfortunate byproduct of the state of things today. And it wasn't always that way, right? It used to be VCs weren't going to fund the eighth company attacking one problem. Y and uh at least for the last 5 years it's been the case. Yeah. Yeah.

It seems a little bit more like music now actually in a sense where there's a lot of people making a lot of music. You open Spotify there's like you know a billion artists making something.

And software is now becoming that which I think is pretty cool actually frankly that there can be a lot of people because there's a lot of talent out there. That's the other thing.

like you you turn on YouTube or you watch YouTube or you you pull up Spotify and you're like, you know, I'm trying to learn drums and I'm trying to learn a bit more guitar and I'm trying to learn how to draw a bit better and you find all these people online who are just extraordinarily gifted and talented at what they do.

Yet, nobody knows who they are or a small audience does. They'll never make it big because it's just it doesn't work that way. But there's just so much talent.

And what's cool about I think what's happening now is that if you have the talent and the imagination, you can actually make something today that before you had to maybe find someone else to make for you, which would have cost money and would have been hard to do. So I think this is all ultimately a very good thing.

But I could imagine I mean again I'm not really in the finance world or the venture world in that way but I can imagine how um you have to put more and more faith now maybe it's always been this way but more and more faith in the people and not just sort of what they quickly make because it seems like making something quickly is not the hard thing anymore.

You know it it's it's it's like are these people is there conviction there? Do they care about what they're making? Are they just trying to spin something up? I think there's a little bit more character evaluation perhaps that's going to be necessary.

Can you talk about um lessons from the first wave of the internet, the dotcom boom versus the roll out of AI? The bullcase for AI's roll out is that well everyone's already on the internet so they can just visit a URL and interact with a new uh product.

Stripe already exists and so they can start charging money immediately.

uh the the the kind of bearish case that we've been hearing is this idea that well there are plenty of scaled internet companies that are still in founder mode and I don't know if you ascri if you believe in that in that ideology but uh this idea that you know uh Mark Zuckerberg is not asleep at the wheel he is very much aware of AI and can move very very aggressively with huge resources to stay relevant and there are also plenty of companies in the hundred million revenue, billion dollar revenue categories that are already, you know, moving quickly.

They might be a little bit slower. Um, but but h how brittle do you think big tech is right now? How brittle do you think are the companies that are in a category they've been in for a few years? We talked to a few founders where they almost got bored pre- AAI and now they feel reinvigorated.

They still control their companies. Um, how do how are you wrestling with all of that? It's it's interesting.

It's kind of like um well there aren't a lot of parallels between the early days because in the in the early days there was nobody like it was just like everyone literally like was just learning HTML and just making a web page. Yeah.

It wasn't really I feel like I felt like Amazon when Amazon launched that was like the first kind of thing that felt a little bit different actually to me like someone's actually putting this together in a way where you could do something you couldn't do before.

Um that felt you know buying books online that whole thing and the in the early days was all about like you know people were even afraid to put their credit card online.

And we couldn't even get when we first launched Base Camp back in 2004, we couldn't even get a bank, well, we eventually did, but to give us a merchant account, which is what you needed to charge credit cards. Now, like your point with Stripe, you just like sign up and you can accept cards or Square or anything.

Like we had to provide deep financials. They didn't trust this internet thing. They wouldn't even allow us to charge annually for things. We had to charge monthly, which is actually a good thing in the end, but we're going to try to charge annually. They're like, "What if you go out of business in 6 months?

We're on the hook for this whole thing. So you have to charge monthly. You're charge your customers monthly so there's less risk. It's fascinating times. It's totally different. Totally.

What's interesting today about big tech is there's so much power um obviously in the handful of a handful of small well big companies but a small group of these companies.

But then again you have something like open AI right which kind of comes out of nowhere a few years ago in a sense and basically is is putting everybody on notice. I mean, you can do everything now with this command line tool essentially. You can write software, you can generate images like you were talking about.

Uh, why would you Google anything anymore? You can do it better this way. And so, there are always going to be brand new flashes that come out of nowhere that challenge big companies. Now, the thing is is that Open AI is now a very large company very quickly.

So I think what you're going to see one of the Yeah, I hate to cut you off, but an interesting point about the new generation of tech giants is that it seems like they're possible to build. You just need $5 billion, right?

If you look at like Tik Tok or OpenAI, it's like what what are the truly breakthrough consumer tech consumer tech specifically that Well, there's something unique about foundation models that they are incredibly capital intensive that feels different. Yeah.

The social network example is like, yeah, you can build a new social network. You just need to be able to spend billions of dollars on Meta and Snapchat acquiring the advertising. But yeah, I don't know. Yeah, but I think yes, you're right. But also, we're always going to be surprised.

The next newcomer is not going to be the obvious one. Mhm. It's going to be someone with a new model for what social media is or a new model for what search is or a new model for whatever whatever is. And they're always surprising, I think.

And that's the exciting thing about it is that if we just look to the existing players like they're not really going to be able to innovate that much. It's just someone new had to come along like OpenAI and they pushed everyone else to begin to innovate. So I don't know.

I think there's there's always going to be innovation. I think most of it ultimately comes from the shadows which is generally a small tight team typically. It's not a big comp big companies aren't innovating in this way.

They will then jump on the bandwagon because they have the money and they can buy the the incumbent or buy the the newcomers. But the new ideas come from the small the small teams, the small guys. And uh I think that's still gonna be true. Um I don't know if you saw the Airbnb relaunch Airbnb 2.

0, but Brian Chesy has I mean I'd love your take on just it feels like we were looking at the stock. It's been an $85 billion company for five years. It's kind of languishing. It feels like there's a little bit of restlessness like he just wants to do something new. Uh and I'd love your take on that.

also he has advocated for this idea of like an annual release cycle uh really pushing the whole team to unify around um this Steve Jobsesque keynote and from a product management perspective do you like that do you recommend that to other startups or or uh you know tech leaders generally yeah good questions um so this just launched what like two days ago so I'm not fully up on it but what I know is he's basically now offering personal services Not just, you know, rooms to rent.

Yeah. Find a hairdresser, find a personal trainer, that type of thing. Potentially dog walker. A lot of this, this actually launched Airbnb experiences eight years ago, uh, with, uh, you're going on a vacation and somebody can be your local tour guide or take you river rafting, for example.

But now he's trying to broaden out to, uh, you know, get your get your car washed or get your car detailed, for example. It's so interesting when I saw this. So, I had so many different thoughts and I'll share a few of them. First of all, I think Brian's probably one of the greatest CEOs around today.

So, I I it's it's I wouldn't I wouldn't bet against him, first off. Um I was a little I was surprised by it. I understand the like there is no good place, trustworthy place to go to find these kinds of services, right?

So, it's sort of natural that you'd expect somebody to do this, but you have to come with trust and you have to come with a big platform because it's hard to start small. Yeah. Two billion users. Two billion users. Yeah. Huge. Is that right? Two billion. I mean, isn't that crazy?

So, so, so what they're doing is they're lending their trust and their their sense of of taste and like the the vetting of these of these professionals who provide these services. That's a hard thing to do from scratch. like you have to have the the the the experience and the and the and the and the history, right?

So I while I think it's sort of it's kind of far a field actually I think from what they do I like the other version of experiences just off the bat which is more uh related to to to you know going to a place. This feels a bit tangential. That said I wouldn't bet against them.

I'm sure they've thought about this more than I have in a day and a half for like five minutes. But I was I was a little bit surprised by it. It almost felt like a little bit um in some ways too um too easy. I don't know.

That's I know it wasn't easy, but like yeah or too obvious in a sense, but also then you're like but this hasn't happened yet really so why not them? Why not them? Will it translate? I don't know. I looked at a bunch of them yesterday in my area and um I'm cur I'm very curious.

I'm very very curious to see how this pans out. But uh I I I think you have to find revenue somewhere if you're a public company or a big company and um um you know there's only so many rooms. There's only so many people want to rent rooms.

They've they've done an incredible job with this and this is probably a good way to diversify the revenue stream and it is related enough even though it feels a little bit separate still but and the business is roughly the size of Marriott and Hilton now like it is basically a largecaled hotel chain and so yeah what is that act too?

It's a good question to ask. Uh I one way to think about it actually if you is it's more like a concierge at large. So if you go to a hotel right you go to the concierge desk and you're like I don't know what to do here or you know whatever. It's sort of like that without having to go anywhere.

First of all you can do it locally and you where you're going. So it to me I think of it as like as like the the massive concierge. Yeah. And and in that way it ties nice hospitality. So we'll see. And on uh the annual release cadence.

Cheser and smaller companies are starting to adopt it, but at a certain point you're such a small company, maybe you should be releasing every week or every six weeks or something like that. So, what's your take? Yeah, that's a great point. So, um I admire it, frankly.

Um, I admire it actually for the patience and I actually think in some strange ways it's it is a better way to capture attention. So, one of the things is like you want to people feel like they want to release a lot because they want to maintain a sense of presence in the market and want to get people's attention often.

But I think what I found at least what we found is has shifted over the years is that when you release a bunch of small things they it's hard to grab anyone's attention with a handful of small things these days. Yeah. when you have a big release, a big drop for example, uh, and there's a hundred new things.

I saw Square just did this recently, too. You're going to pay attention to that and you're going to be able to tell a much bigger, broader story. And I think in many ways people like, "Wow, that's a lot of stuff like an OS release or like, you know, a new phone release used to be, things like that.

" I think one of the reasons people don't pay attention to maybe Apple's releases as much is because um, they become predictable in that way. So, I think you can I I like I like what they're I like what Airbnb is doing and other brands are doing where it it still feels a bit unpredictable what's coming. Yeah.

Um Apple is too predictable now. It's like it's you know it's going to be a new iPhone and you know it's going to be a better camera and whatever. So that's not as interesting. Yeah. But I I do like the model. Well, we actually have a bit of a hybrid model. So we release these little releases every six weeks or so.

And then when we do a brand new like we're working on Base Camp 5, which is our newest version of Base Camp right now. We're going to do a bunch of these little things, hold them all back, and then release them all at once. So, that'll be like a big release for us.

But, as a model in general, I I think it's a good model, but I don't think it fits a brand new company on Apple uh Apple Intelligence. They kind of did the big annual release, but then they wound up shipping different things at different times, a lot of frustration.

Uh is that something that could be overcome with just better product management or do they need a different direction, more ambitious, more risk? I mean, generative AI is very unpredictable. You get hallucinations, very off-brand for Apple.

Uh, what's been your take and how have you processed the journey that Apple intelligence has been on? I think the mistake again like who who am I? They're a trillion what $3 trillion company? Yeah. Around there. Since you asked, the mistake I think they made is is they made a promise.

And promises to customers, I think, are typically very bad ideas unless you actually have something ready to go right now. Yeah. Or like within a week or two or something. But there's nothing easier in business to say yes, coming soon, yes, later. And that's what they did.

And um now, yeah, they sold the Apple they sold the new iPhone based on Apple. Every billboard Now, now they're behind the eightball simply because they promised, yeah, had they just talked about it, we're going to be rolling this out like, you know, it the expectations would be totally different.

So, a promise is a very, very dangerous thing to be made far in advance. This is one of the things that Jobs is really good at. When he had a product to share, he waited, then they shared it, and you could buy it today or going on sale on a specific date or something very but very close, right?

He rarely had long-term tech demos or something. It was always about real stuff you could basically go buy.

Um, and this is also one of the things I I hate about concept cars, which is you see these amazing things and these cool ideas and you know you'll never be able to get them and you're like, why does this company spend all this money doing these concept cars and and it's just frustrating and that's kind of a Apple intelligence is a concept car.

Mhm. And you know, great take and it's tied to promises. Bad idea. So that's that's where I think they made a mistake. I think they will figure out a way to come back from this. Yeah. But I think this is going to re lead to a major major shakeup internally. Yeah.

It already has there's already been people moving around, right? But I mean I mean maybe a bigger shakeup like people sure not just moving around because moving around is like this is the wrong analogy. Really wrong analogy.

I mean you down uh the Catholic Church moved priests around when they made some big big mistakes. Right. going that's not how you solve the problem. Yeah. Yeah.

And and not to not to you know compare you know some buggy software to some very damaging it's not that no it makes sense that but but yeah no problem true true new leadership and doesn't solve the problem right for sure. Jordy does it worry you that the internet is killing long form writing?

It feels like right now you actually get penalized on X the longer the the post. You can still go decently viral with a longer form post, but usually like four words, five words seems like the most dopamine uh inducing. And it feels like there's a bunch of Why is no one talking about Steve Jobs?

No one's heard about this guy. Click this thread. Uh, no, but it seems like there's a bunch of really smart, you know, high potential people that don't think of themselves as writers, but maybe if they join the internet when you did, they would be. Mhm. Yeah.

I mean, I think long form writing has found a new place though, like you have Substack, which has become obviously a big deal for a lot of people.

I think that these platforms, what's interesting is that X now, you know, obviously allows you to write long posts and they even have articles, but they don't really, like you said, they don't really promote them as well. Yeah. Yeah, that, you know, that might change. I don't know. Who knows?

Um, I'm sure they have a better insight into it than we do, but but I think long form writing is alive and well. I think I think humanity actually craves it and wants it. Um, but it's not an engagement thing. So, if you're measuring that, hot takes are going to be, you know, more of that. But I think I I don't know.

I I think I think it's alive and well and I think it'll always be appreciated um for what it is by those who are motivated to to understand what it is that they're reading. You know, if you just want to kind of absorb it like candy, that's fine, too.

But like if you really want to get into something, it needs to be long. And also like podcasts are like long podcasts are a great example. Um that's essentially long form writing that someone's reading out loud. And there's a lot of people who are willing to spend two, three, four hours listening to a podcast.

Granted, they could do something else while that's happening that's a little bit different than reading. But I think long form depth, let's call it just depth, let's call it actually instead of long form, it's like depth versus shallowess or shallow versus de or whatever. I think there's a lot of interest in deep still.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's it says something that the platforms don't necessarily reward deep, but it's it's a it's again it's somewhat of a barbell where if it's deep, but truly, you know, groundbreaking or moving, you'll still get that sort of viral uh guy Chris Pike who keeps going viral with just drops a link to a Google doc and it's just such an interesting post that it still breaks through even though links are banned and no one reads long form.

Every time he drops one, it's Yeah. Everyone clicks it. Well, in the end, like it is like if it's good, it'll it'll surface. Um, I do think that contrast is very handy though. So, with a lot of short form platforms, X, Tik Tok, with these kinds of things, you create a contrast now.

And so, now, you know, you know, we can get long, you know, we can get short and I think each platform will will cater to this show will be experienced as a threehour live stream, but also I'm sure we're going to share a one minute clip of this, right? Uh, and that's just kind of the nature of the internet.

Uh, I want to talk about the hyperscalers and AWS. you recently moved some uh data on prem. Um my question is is there some sort of cartel dynamic going on with the clouds because you would expect these are fairly commoditized uh products. There's Azure, AWS, GCP. Why do they have high margins?

Is this some sort of like Coke and Pepsi thing where they have a tacit agreement not to be get into price war? because you'd think that you'd be able to just go and get to some base level cost with three hyper competitive companies in the space. Yeah.

I mean, you would think that cost would be driven down considerably and maybe they haven't been in some in some areas. I mean, the airlines the airlines are directly competitive. They make no money, right? Airlines famously bad business. You would expect the cloud to be similar, but it's not the case. Yeah.

I I wonder if you know uh yeah, I don't know. I don't know the answer there. I mean, I I know that data data well, storage is cheaper than it has been, but but in general, I think what they're selling is convenience, and convenience is always expensive. Sure.

So, you go down to the corner store, the bodega, whatever, you're going to pay more for uh whatever for for your your Tide laundry detergent than you are if you buy it at Costco because you got to get in the car to go to Costco. You got to buy more. If you need something really quick, you go down there.

And really cloud services what we've determined at least what we feel are like it's about convenience. You can spin up really quick. You're not um you know you don't have to learn a lot of deep deep cisadmin stuff technically. You know you should know this stuff but you don't have to.

And so you're paying for convenience. And I think that that's always going to have a price premium.

What we've realized is that for us at our stage of of of development, been around for 25 years now, um it's wildly expensive to host in the cloud, to use cloud servers, and on-prem can save us a ton of money and it's not hard anymore like it used to be. It's gotten a lot easier.

You still have to have the knowledge, but it's not as hard. We're not as afraid of it. We're saving millions and millions of dollars now paying Amazon their fees.

But again, if you're starting up right now from scratch, you're going to try something out, it does make sense to start in the cloud because you don't want to invest anything else anymore than you need to and it's a good place to begin, but it's also a good place to leave. Uh, and we do this in life all the time.

We we start somewhere and then we become more expert at something and then we leave the beginner version of something. We go pro, whatever. Like to me, going pro is going back on prem.

And I think you're going to see more and more companies who've developed something, who have now have a steady, substantial, sustainable model revisit the cloud and probably go on prem big cloud. They don't want you to know this one simple trick going on prem. Yeah.

Uh I mean uh on back on big tech, uh I've been personally very disappointed with the roll out of Gemini in Gmail. It feels very bolted on uh turn and long email into some bullet points. I know how to skim. Uh, is there an opportunity for a green field AI email product?

Uh, we saw this with mailbox in the mobile era kind of creating the swipe pattern. Uh, that exited to Dropbox. Kind of a good outcome. They wind up shutting it down, but um, what are you thinking about the future of email? Obviously, you're deeply invested. Yeah, I mean, we we have a product called Hey, hi. com.

Um, which is we don't have any AI in it at all. Mhm. Um, my feeling is that a lot of this stuff's actually going to come to the OS level. So, like the idea of being able to like summarize a document or or shorten some writing. It's already in in in in, you know, Mac OS. Yeah. Probably in Windows.

I don't know enough about what's going on in the Windows world, but I should. But you can select some text and like do whatever you want with it. Like, you don't need to build that into your product. Sure.

I think the AI side of it is going to be handy for obviously search, finding things you, you know, you don't know how to describe. That's really useful. Um, I don't I'm not a big fan, frankly, of the idea of like AI telling me what's important, what isn't. Yeah.

I I think it's too easy for it to miss something and then you being really pissed and missing something. So, playing telephone. Say again. It's like playing telephone, you know? Yeah, it is. There's something's lost in translation. Like, I I don't want your I don't want those hands in my stuff.

Like, I get a lot of emails. A lot of emails. I know who's important. I know how to get the stuff. I screen, you know, with hey, you can say, "I don't want to hear from these people ever again. you'll never hear from again. Things like that. I want some human control over that.

But I would like to be able to search better. I like to be able to find things by describing them in different ways. I have some curiosity around that. We're exploring some things there. So I think mostly search and surfacing things and blind spots. Y this is to me where I think AI is very handy.

like insights that you wouldn't have known otherwise but not like here's what's important but by the way did you know that this that and the other thing or hey um you know you used to talk to this person a lot now you haven't in a while like why has this gone cold or this conversation you reply there was eight or nine replies back and forth and now it's gone cold like that kind of stuff I think is actually quite handy where you've archived 25 emails from the same sales representative do you want to just block them at this point things like that like the the as if someone's Yeah.

watching over your shoulder and making a suggestion. It's context. Yeah, context. So, I I think that that's where I think you'll see a lot of this. But the whole like summarization, shortening things, I don't know. It doesn't that's going to be OS level stuff. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Well, thank you so much, Jordy. We all done. I had I mean if you have another minute I know we have to jump in a second but um I have this theory that most people in tech that say they want to build a billion dollar company just want $2 million a year of free cash flow.

Uh and I think that that's like the I I think that like literally 90% of people that say they want a a unicorn just want stable income couple million bucks and it's more class. But I'm curious so so that's my opinion.

I'm curious if you have some uh sort of highlevel point of view on what people in the technology industry get wrong about money or or wealth. Yeah, I that's a really nice question. Um I think a billion dollars would be a burden. Frankly, I I I don't think I I I wouldn't want that. I don't care about that.

I don't see what the point is of that. Um, if you, let's say, have 10 million, 20 million, like you are going to live the best possible life that you could, um, and you're not going to have all the massive, massive weight on your shoulders from having a billion dollars or the expectation that goes with that.

Um, my general feeling is that you should find you should you should want to build a business that takes care of you nicely, takes care of your employees nicely, and is sustainable over time. um the idea that um you want to build it big.

I know a lot of people who built massive businesses on paper, billionaire billionaires, billionaire valuations that ended up with close to nothing except a lot of sleepless nights, exhaustion and frustration 15 years down the road when they realized that they diluted themselves into basically nothing.

The market changed and they have nothing now. I think you what you want to build is a business where you can take money off the table as you go, whatever that looks like. if it's 100 grand a year, if it's a million a year, if it's three million a year.

But the more money you can take off the table as you go, I think the better off you're going to be versus trying to pile it all back into the business, reinvest, reinvest, reinvest, reinvest, and bet on the future that you don't know is going to happen.

I think a lot of people actually end up in a deep stage of regret when they realize that they have nothing left after they put in all that work. So, my advice would be build something where you can take money off the table as you go.

And and if you're in it for 101 15 years, you're going to build a nice nest egg, a really good one. Could be tens of millions, could be 100 million. Uh and and you're going to be extremely happy that you did that because you don't know what's going to happen in the end. Except this, every business dies. Yeah.

Well, next time you come on, uh we'd love to introduce you to Soft Bank. I I think we could line up a really massive round for you guys. Really put you on a different trajectory. Uh I think it'd be great for you, actually.

Uh we were we were joking before you joined uh some some you know one of these platform venture funds comes there you know there's definitely a a number for base camp that that you know might be might be tough but but it you know what you're saying that the challenge is is uh venture capital is fundamental even you know a dollar of venture capital becomes at odds with this idea of taking money out of a business as it goes because the VCs will just say I don't want a distribution of $100,000 this here like go raise another 20 million and and it's the the reason I brought it you know up is because we're at this period where seedstage companies will have $10 million of revenue right we just heard from a friend of ours yesterday they invested in a company that came to them do ready to do their first financing with $10 million in revenue and uh it it is interesting because AI is giving people more leverage than ever more ability to build these sort of big fast growing businesses with a limited amount of resources and yet.

Uh, venture capital is um, doing its thing. But it's great to have you on the show. Really enjoy the conversation. Thanks for having me, guys. Appreciate it. This is great. We'll talk. Love to have you on again soon. Cheers. Next up, Virginia from Replica. Uh, kind of the flip side of the world coin debate.

Little watch spot. That was our second aquinaut of the week. I think that was an aquat. We didn't get a chance to ask uh Josh Wolf about whether Brandon Reeves has influenced him because he was not wearing a Holy Trinity watch, but Brandon Reeves famously wears a