The Exchanges

Q Can I ask, who are you trying to prove it to?

A I think I try to prove it to myself at this point in time. Like, I, I think in the beginning it was a lot, a lot of the motivator was like, you know, my teachers at school were like, what's this kid doing talking about all of this business stuff? You should be focused on school. My parents were like, why, why don't you, you know, the rest of the class is, is, you know, thinking about college applications and getting good grades and extracurricular activities, and you're just so fixated on this. There's a point in time where they had hired a therapist To talk me out of running the business and just be a normal kid. And I think for a long time that had been like, and this was like years of my life had been like a motivating factor of like, I'm going to prove all of these people wrong and I'm going to be so successful. And I think like I did prove those people wrong. I felt like for a while, um, you know, especially as we started to gain a lot of traction and then I think it flipped. And I think it flipped, which is everyone's like, these guys are a foregone conclusion. They're the next Collison brothers. They're the next, you know, next big thing. It's just going to work. FISA is going to be a 10, twenty billion dollar business. And we're like, this feels weird. Like for our whole lives, we were trying to prove everyone wrong. And now we're in like, now everyone like believes in …

AI assessment note: “I think I try to prove it to myself at this point in time.”

Q Do you know what I'm saying? We need to get fucking customers. We need to get some revenue. Like, what the fuck is this stupid infrastructure discussion that we're having, whether it's, you know, the culture of a firm that's got few customers, or it's infrastructure problems for twenty-twenty-six. Like, is no one going? Hang on a minute. What the fuck is going on?

A No, because when you raise so much capital so quickly, and you have all of these great investors on your cap table, and everyone says this company's the shit, like you just think that it works, and like you, you've been at companies where you didn't actually, none of these people had to go out and find product market fit. They came into companies where there was already product market fit, and they just had to operate their little part of that company, or big part of that company, where they were kind of keeping its status quo. Most of these companies that they came from, We're just like, they haven't grown very much. Like, they're just there, and they're operating, and they're running their part, but like, none of them had defined product market fit. So they just assume, okay, when I come, this company's already got to figure it out. I'm just gonna do the same thing I did at X company. I'm gonna run my playbook that I did at X company, and I'm gonna bring it over to Vise. And you've got all these people with playbooks, versus first principle thinkers that are trying to actually understand the problem, and problem solve with you, um, to actually Drive product market fit. So it felt like that was the case. And we, we, we got so much pressure on us at the time that it was like, you know, we have to keep these people happy. They're going to solve our problems. That's why you bring…

AI assessment note: “none of these people had to go out and find product market fit”

Q Can I ask, who are you trying to prove it to?

A I think I try to prove it to myself at this point in time. Like, I, I think in the beginning it was a lot, a lot of the motivator was like, you know, my teachers at school were like, what's this kid doing talking about all of this business stuff? You should be focused on school. My parents were like, why, why don't you, you know, the rest of the class is, is, you know, thinking about college applications and getting good grades and extracurricular activities, and you're just so fixated on this. There's a point in time where they had hired a therapist To talk me out of running the business and just be a normal kid. And I think for a long time that had been like, and this was like years of my life had been like a motivating factor of like, I'm going to prove all of these people wrong and I'm going to be so successful. And I think like I did prove those people wrong. I felt like for a while, um, you know, especially as we started to gain a lot of traction and then I think it flipped. And I think it flipped, which is everyone's like, these guys are a foregone conclusion. They're the next Collison brothers. They're the next, you know, next big thing. It's just going to work. FISA is going to be a 10, twenty billion dollar business. And we're like, this feels weird. Like for our whole lives, we were trying to prove everyone wrong. And now we're in like, now everyone like believes in …

AI assessment note: “I think I try to prove it to myself at this point in time.”

Q Jesus, I played FIFA with your year. I mean, not too far off, to be honest, but yeah. Um, where are you then? Like, where do you want buyers to be then? Where do you want to be then?

A I don't know the time horizon, but my vision is to build the asset manager of the future. Build a platform that enables all investors, regardless of their, their age, their net worth, to be able to deliver Deeply personalized portfolios across all asset classes, publics and privates, all in one beautiful, elegant software experience. And I think that, you know, the path to getting there requires a shift in the industry to move away from people, you know, human portfolio managers and, and, uh, you know, investment products like the mutual fund, like the ETF, like the separately managed account, Into, you know, platform driven investing. And I think that that's going to take some time and some shaping as an industry. And I think we're going to help, help that shaping happen. Um, but it's going to take time. And I think that in 10 years, hopefully we'll be well on our way to making this new market a reality.

AI assessment note: “my vision is to build the asset manager of the future.”

Q What was, what was tied to the expectations of the valuation?

A Just growth that was unrealistic. Like companies, I think VCs have built this ethos that if it doesn't get big fast, it's never going to get big. And the problem with that was, and we were getting big pretty fast, but Like, to grow into a, you know, a billion dollar valuation in 18 months from being a, from having our founders funded around it like four million, right, it's just like not possible. Like, it's, it is unrealistic. Um, I think I, in, in, especially in a market like ours where it is just a slow to change market, but billion dollar businesses aren't built overnight, right? And the, the bigger problem is that if a billion dollar business is built overnight, it means someone else can go build that same billion dollar business overnight, and you don't actually have a moat. Um, so I, I actually think that the expectations it created for us were, were, were a bad thing. Um, I think the type of people you recruit When they see that you're a billion dollar business aren't focused on, we have a value advice called burn the boats. They're not focused on burning the boats. They're focused on a stable career and growing within an organization and like assessing you alongside Google when, you know, you're really like the seed series A stage company. You're not Google. And the, there's going to be a lot of ups and downs and things that need to be figured out that, you know, a tru…

AI assessment note: “Just growth that was unrealistic.”

Q What are some big lessons when you made the decision to let people go, and how you did it, and what are some big lessons from that?

A If you feel like you should let someone go, you should just do it, and do it as fast as possible. Like, I've never once, actually one, one exception, but I've, most of the, 99.9% of the time, never regretted letting someone go. It was almost always the right decision. And I think too many people, too many founders, too many managers drag their feet. And it's oftentimes the incentive of the manager. So when you're the founder, and you've got a manager, and that manager's managing other people, and someone on their team isn't performing, they're not living up to their expectations, the manager is oftentimes not going to say, hey, let me fire them. Rather, it's, Let me take some time. Let me really nurture them. Let me, let me figure it out when we put them on a pip, something like that. And like, you just don't have time as a startup. You need to keep your bar super high. You're not a machine. You're a basketball team, right? You're not, you, you, you can only have five players on the court and all of those five, those five players have to be really good. They have to work together. They have to uphold the bar for all, for each of the other players. And I think a lot of people think about Their companies as factories, and if a part is broken for, for a little bit, they can fix the part, or, you know, at some point bring in a new part, but that's, that's not how you should think a…

AI assessment note: “If you feel like you should let someone go, you should just do it”

Q Did you worry about being a tarnished startup?

A We did for a little while, which is why, like, so in 2021, when we knew we had this bad executive team, when we knew we, our culture was wrong, when we knew we probably should have everyone just in the office and this remote work thing isn't working out, you know, when we knew we had too many people We were like, well, if we make a set of hard decisions, then, like, everyone's gonna think we're like a, a broken, failing, you know, company, and, you know, we're not gonna be able to raise more money, and we're not gonna be able to recruit great people, and customers aren't gonna like us, and we were just scared, and it's part of the reason why we didn't make the decision sooner, and at a certain point, I just like, this is too much, I'm just gonna do it, like, if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.

AI assessment note: “We did for a little while, which is why”

Q Okay. So you still have a shed load of cash then?

A Oh, we, now we have a ton of cash. Yeah. We never have to raise again. Um, but like if we had kept burning and kept scaling at the rate we were, then we would be out of money. Like a lot of other growth stage companies that are for, in 2021 that didn't make hard decisions. We just made the hard decisions basically at the end of 2021, early 20 22, uh, before the markets had really reset. And I actually, it's funny, I wrote this, a year later I wrote this blog post called Refounding Vize. And the reason why I wrote that blog post, everyone thought we made the changes in early 2023, and like that was like a pivot moment, but it was actually a reflective blog post of the decisions, the changes we made in early 2022 to convince all of my founder friends who are running companies who hadn't made hard decisions that you can make a set of hard decisions and you're going to be just fine. Everything about Vize after we made those hard decisions was better. It was hard for a month, but then a month later, The team came together. Our burn was way down.

AI assessment note: “now we have a ton of cash. Yeah. We never have to raise again.”

Q When you think about like the impact of investors, you know, I think people often say an investor doesn't make a company, whatever, whatever. Like the brands of Founders Fund and Sequoia make a big difference. To what extent do they negatively versus positively impact the trajectory of a company?

A So it's a double-edged sword. And the reason why it's a double-edged sword is because on one hand, you've got all this great credibility by association. You have all of this social capital and that social capital allows you to hire people. It allows you to get great customers. It allows you to get in the press. It allows you to raise money from other investors. Everyone pattern matches to What is Sequoia? What is Founders Fund? What are these prominent investors doing? The reason why it's a double-edged sword is a lot of people see it as their, you know, especially prospective employees, see it as their get-rich-quick. You know, like, this company's a racket ship. They raised all this money from Sequoia. I'm gonna go join, and it's gonna work, and I'm gonna be, it's gonna be awesome, right? And it's an attractor for talent. And oftentimes, this is the wrong talent for your business, um, and you need to be Extra mindful of, is this person joining my company because of my company and the mission and, you know, the, the, you know, some irrational motivator as to why they're going to be really successful here, or are they joining my company because they see it as a quick path to an exit, um, because Sequoia backed it. And you don't want those people that are just joining because of Sequoia.

AI assessment note: “So it's a double-edged sword. And the reason why it's a double-edged sword is”

Q Okay. Who was the first big yes to you with Vise?

A That's actually funny. So I think there's two stories here. I think the first is our team early on, we didn't have that much money. We were consulting with these financial institutions, which is how we discovered the need, the problem to deliver personalized portfolio solutions in an automated way to financial advisors. We were actually consulting with these big financial institutions on AI. And, but we didn't have, like, a ton of money to actually pay people to, like, build us the product. So, you know, outside of us doing it ourselves, we found a team of engineers, um, mostly just through scraping AngelList and cold emailing people and reaching out to people on LinkedIn. Like, if you go through my LinkedIn in 2014, 20 15, 20 16, it's just, like, hundreds of cold messages. Um, we got the first, like, two engineers to say, oh, yeah, I'll, like, work on this on equity nights and weekends. So that was the, that was the first big yes, and that was able to help us build our MVP and, you know, get the first product to market. Um, and then our second big yes was actually, so my co-founder decided to go to college, which was a real challenge for me, because I had actually dropped out of high school to build this business and moved to the Bay Area. I was living in the Tenderloin, um, trying to, trying to bootstrap it to then raise capital, and my co-founder decides to go to UPenn, and …

AI assessment note: “we got the first, like, two engineers to say, oh, yeah, I'll, like, work”

Q Did you worry about being a tarnished startup?

A We did for a little while, which is why, like, so in 2021, when we knew we had this bad executive team, when we knew we, our culture was wrong, when we knew we probably should have everyone just in the office and this remote work thing isn't working out, you know, when we knew we had too many people We were like, well, if we make a set of hard decisions, then, like, everyone's gonna think we're like a, a broken, failing, you know, company, and, you know, we're not gonna be able to raise more money, and we're not gonna be able to recruit great people, and customers aren't gonna like us, and we were just scared, and it's part of the reason why we didn't make the decision sooner, and at a certain point, I just like, this is too much, I'm just gonna do it, like, if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.

AI assessment note: “We did for a little while, which is why, like, so in 2021”

Q What was, what was tied to the expectations of the valuation?

A Just growth that was unrealistic. Like companies, I think VCs have built this ethos that if it doesn't get big fast, it's never going to get big. And the problem with that was, and we were getting big pretty fast, but Like, to grow into a, you know, a billion dollar valuation in 18 months from being a, from having our founders funded around it like four million, right, it's just like not possible. Like, it's, it is unrealistic. Um, I think I, in, in, especially in a market like ours where it is just a slow to change market, but billion dollar businesses aren't built overnight, right? And the, the bigger problem is that if a billion dollar business is built overnight, it means someone else can go build that same billion dollar business overnight, and you don't actually have a moat. Um, so I, I actually think that the expectations it created for us were, were, were a bad thing. Um, I think the type of people you recruit When they see that you're a billion dollar business aren't focused on, we have a value advice called burn the boats. They're not focused on burning the boats. They're focused on a stable career and growing within an organization and like assessing you alongside Google when, you know, you're really like the seed series A stage company. You're not Google. And the, there's going to be a lot of ups and downs and things that need to be figured out that, you know, a tru…

AI assessment note: “Just growth that was unrealistic.”

Q Do you know what I'm saying? We need to get fucking customers. We need to get some revenue. Like, what the fuck is this stupid infrastructure discussion that we're having, whether it's, you know, the culture of a firm that's got few customers, or it's infrastructure problems for twenty-twenty-six. Like, is no one going? Hang on a minute. What the fuck is going on?

A No, because when you raise so much capital so quickly, and you have all of these great investors on your cap table, and everyone says this company's the shit, like you just think that it works, and like you, you've been at companies where you didn't actually, none of these people had to go out and find product market fit. They came into companies where there was already product market fit, and they just had to operate their little part of that company, or big part of that company, where they were kind of keeping its status quo. Most of these companies that they came from, We're just like, they haven't grown very much. Like, they're just there, and they're operating, and they're running their part, but like, none of them had defined product market fit. So they just assume, okay, when I come, this company's already got to figure it out. I'm just gonna do the same thing I did at X company. I'm gonna run my playbook that I did at X company, and I'm gonna bring it over to Vise. And you've got all these people with playbooks, versus first principle thinkers that are trying to actually understand the problem, and problem solve with you, um, to actually Drive product market fit. So it felt like that was the case. And we, we, we got so much pressure on us at the time that it was like, you know, we have to keep these people happy. They're going to solve our problems. That's why you bring…

AI assessment note: “No, because when you raise so much capital so quickly”

Q What are some big lessons when you made the decision to let people go, and how you did it, and what are some big lessons from that?

A If you feel like you should let someone go, you should just do it, and do it as fast as possible. Like, I've never once, actually one, one exception, but I've, most of the, 99.9% of the time, never regretted letting someone go. It was almost always the right decision. And I think too many people, too many founders, too many managers drag their feet. And it's oftentimes the incentive of the manager. So when you're the founder, and you've got a manager, and that manager's managing other people, and someone on their team isn't performing, they're not living up to their expectations, the manager is oftentimes not going to say, hey, let me fire them. Rather, it's, Let me take some time. Let me really nurture them. Let me, let me figure it out when we put them on a pip, something like that. And like, you just don't have time as a startup. You need to keep your bar super high. You're not a machine. You're a basketball team, right? You're not, you, you, you can only have five players on the court and all of those five, those five players have to be really good. They have to work together. They have to uphold the bar for all, for each of the other players. And I think a lot of people think about Their companies as factories, and if a part is broken for, for a little bit, they can fix the part, or, you know, at some point bring in a new part, but that's, that's not how you should think a…

AI assessment note: “If you feel like you should let someone go, you should just do it”

Q Okay. So you still have a shed load of cash then?

A Oh, we, now we have a ton of cash. Yeah. We never have to raise again. Um, but like if we had kept burning and kept scaling at the rate we were, then we would be out of money. Like a lot of other growth stage companies that are for, in 2021 that didn't make hard decisions. We just made the hard decisions basically at the end of 2021, early 20 22, uh, before the markets had really reset. And I actually, it's funny, I wrote this, a year later I wrote this blog post called Refounding Vize. And the reason why I wrote that blog post, everyone thought we made the changes in early 2023, and like that was like a pivot moment, but it was actually a reflective blog post of the decisions, the changes we made in early 2022 to convince all of my founder friends who are running companies who hadn't made hard decisions that you can make a set of hard decisions and you're going to be just fine. Everything about Vize after we made those hard decisions was better. It was hard for a month, but then a month later, The team came together. Our burn was way down.

AI assessment note: “Oh, we, now we have a ton of cash. Yeah. We never have to raise”

Q When you think about like the impact of investors, you know, I think people often say an investor doesn't make a company, whatever, whatever. Like the brands of Founders Fund and Sequoia make a big difference. To what extent do they negatively versus positively impact the trajectory of a company?

A So it's a double-edged sword. And the reason why it's a double-edged sword is because on one hand, you've got all this great credibility by association. You have all of this social capital and that social capital allows you to hire people. It allows you to get great customers. It allows you to get in the press. It allows you to raise money from other investors. Everyone pattern matches to What is Sequoia? What is Founders Fund? What are these prominent investors doing? The reason why it's a double-edged sword is a lot of people see it as their, you know, especially prospective employees, see it as their get-rich-quick. You know, like, this company's a racket ship. They raised all this money from Sequoia. I'm gonna go join, and it's gonna work, and I'm gonna be, it's gonna be awesome, right? And it's an attractor for talent. And oftentimes, this is the wrong talent for your business, um, and you need to be Extra mindful of, is this person joining my company because of my company and the mission and, you know, the, the, you know, some irrational motivator as to why they're going to be really successful here, or are they joining my company because they see it as a quick path to an exit, um, because Sequoia backed it. And you don't want those people that are just joining because of Sequoia.

AI assessment note: “So it's a double-edged sword. And the reason why it's a double-edged sword”

Q What was the hardest element of the investor base then?

A The mistake I made was underwriting people's emotions, not their incentives. And I was like, oh, this person is saying this particular thing to me. They feel this particular way. I don't want them to feel this particular way. I'm going to say this particular thing so they feel happy. And like, that's just like the wrong way to think. The right way to think is, what are my incentives? What are their incentives? How do we get to a shared, you know, outcome to the common good, which is make our, increase our enterprise value of the business? If it doesn't, right, if their incentives don't line with mine, right, then like, I'm cognizant of it. I can replay back why their incentives don't necessarily align with mine, but like, I'm going to do the right thing for the company. I'm not going to like, I'm not gonna, like, try and change myself or my emotional state or change something about the business to make that person feel happy.

AI assessment note: “The mistake I made was underwriting people's emotions, not their incentives.”

Q Do you worry about scaling into the valuation?

A No, because like, why, why does it matter, right? It would matter if I had a massive preference stack above me, but because we have so much money in the bank and we don't burn very much, um, I don't necessarily have to be, what matters more than your valuation is your preference stack, right? If you've got a billion dollar preference stack, not a billion dollar valuation, and you go sell the company for Five hundred million dollars , then you're still underwater, right? If you don't have all that in cash. But if you have, you know, a hundred and twenty million dollar preference stack, and you sell the company for a hundred million dollars, um, and you still have eighty million dollars of cash, that's, you know, was sixty million dollars of value that goes to, that waterfalls to the whole cap table.

AI assessment note: “No, because like, why, why does it matter, right?”

Q Do you worry about scaling into the valuation?

A No, because like, why, why does it matter, right? It would matter if I had a massive preference stack above me, but because we have so much money in the bank and we don't burn very much, um, I don't necessarily have to be, what matters more than your valuation is your preference stack, right? If you've got a billion dollar preference stack, not a billion dollar valuation, and you go sell the company for Five hundred million dollars , then you're still underwater, right? If you don't have all that in cash. But if you have, you know, a hundred and twenty million dollar preference stack, and you sell the company for a hundred million dollars, um, and you still have eighty million dollars of cash, that's, you know, was sixty million dollars of value that goes to, that waterfalls to the whole cap table.

AI assessment note: “No, because like, why, why does it matter, right?”

Q You take responsibility for that though, don't you?

A Yeah. A hundred percent. Like it was my, again, it's my fault for hiring all of these people. Like the, the key is like you, I think founders don't realize this because for a long time, You don't get enough advice, and then you start getting capital, and you have stakeholders, and you get too much advice, and the problem is a lot of this advice is either bad advice, 99% of the advice is bad advice, and then the rest of the advice is contradictory to each other. So you don't necessarily know, and like someone who's built some super successful company or is at some world-renowned venture fund, you're going to just assume their advice is good advice, right, if you're, if you're a first-time founder, and I think that For us, like, we just assumed all this advice was good advice, and until we stopped listening to everyone's advice and, like, just started figuring it out for ourselves, the business just wasn't working. And then once we figured it out for ourselves, everything turned around. It was great.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. A hundred percent. Like it was my, again, it's my fault”

Q Are there any other big lessons in terms of the way that you build that team and what went wrong?

A See, I want people to do, when they come to Vise, I want them to feel like they're doing their life's work. And when I think about the people that are the best performers, and it's not like the most senior people, it's like all kinds of different types of backgrounds, right? We had this kid who was like a trader for a year at Guggenheim, who's now running, he's like, now he's 26, and he's running our entire, you know, enterprise, um, product strategy, right? We've, we had another guy who was just an investment strategy guy in his previous role, and he's now our, our chief investment officer, right? People have different irrational motivators, right? Some kind of chip on their shoulder, some drive to, to win, some kind of hidden fire, right? The same fire I had to prove myself in building this business. Um, and you need to unlock that in prospective candidates, right? I don't want someone who was like, I was a VP of engineering, and now I want to be a CTO, and then after that I want to be a COO. Like, I want someone who understands our customer problem, who understands our mission, Has a deep sense of passion, of desire, as something to prove as to why they're gonna work their tail off for us, um, why they're gonna, you know, push harder here than they would at any big company. And, you know, there's signals you could find in the interview process, but sometimes, quite frankly, …

AI assessment note: “you need to unlock that in prospective candidates”

Q Okay. Who was the first big yes to you with Vise?

A That's actually funny. So I think there's two stories here. I think the first is our team early on, we didn't have that much money. We were consulting with these financial institutions, which is how we discovered the need, the problem to deliver personalized portfolio solutions in an automated way to financial advisors. We were actually consulting with these big financial institutions on AI. And, but we didn't have, like, a ton of money to actually pay people to, like, build us the product. So, you know, outside of us doing it ourselves, we found a team of engineers, um, mostly just through scraping AngelList and cold emailing people and reaching out to people on LinkedIn. Like, if you go through my LinkedIn in 2014, 20 15, 20 16, it's just, like, hundreds of cold messages. Um, we got the first, like, two engineers to say, oh, yeah, I'll, like, work on this on equity nights and weekends. So that was the, that was the first big yes, and that was able to help us build our MVP and, you know, get the first product to market. Um, and then our second big yes was actually, so my co-founder decided to go to college, which was a real challenge for me, because I had actually dropped out of high school to build this business and moved to the Bay Area. I was living in the Tenderloin, um, trying to, trying to bootstrap it to then raise capital, and my co-founder decides to go to UPenn, and …

AI assessment note: “we got the first, like, two engineers to say, oh, yeah, I'll, like, work”

Q You take responsibility for that though, don't you?

A Yeah. A hundred percent. Like it was my, again, it's my fault for hiring all of these people. Like the, the key is like you, I think founders don't realize this because for a long time, You don't get enough advice, and then you start getting capital, and you have stakeholders, and you get too much advice, and the problem is a lot of this advice is either bad advice, 99% of the advice is bad advice, and then the rest of the advice is contradictory to each other. So you don't necessarily know, and like someone who's built some super successful company or is at some world-renowned venture fund, you're going to just assume their advice is good advice, right, if you're, if you're a first-time founder, and I think that For us, like, we just assumed all this advice was good advice, and until we stopped listening to everyone's advice and, like, just started figuring it out for ourselves, the business just wasn't working. And then once we figured it out for ourselves, everything turned around. It was great.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. A hundred percent. Like it was my, again, it's my fault”

Q Um, so I completely get you. What leadership skill do you not have that you would most like to get?

A It's something I, I, I started to learn as we had a, you know, a bigger team, and, you know, I had to manage people and managers, but like, you know, this feeling of like deep empathy and, you know, you know, the ability to, to, uh, to elevate, to, to, to elevate everyone around me, um, More than just on the vision of the business. Again, it comes with, with time, it comes with experience, but I think so much of my time, I'm just so focused on You know, the business on figuring out the drive to solving the problems of the business. And I'm not thinking about elevating everyone around me. And I think that, uh, I think there's some value in doing that. Like, I think it's important not to, to overcorrect. I think it's not, it's important not to get too close to Elon. I think, I think there's some, there is some balance where you are, you're really helping support and boost those around you in a meaningful way.

AI assessment note: “this feeling of like deep empathy and, you know, the ability to elevate everyone”

Q Not at all, my man, but I want to start with the beginnings of Vyze. Like, what was the aha moment for you with Vyze? And just take me back to that.

A So I think it's less the beginning of Vyze and more the beginning of our entrepreneurial journey. I think what's unique is I started my first startup at 12. Um, I was, I was at the summer program at Northwestern. My parents are like, You cannot go to traditional summer camp. Uh, you must do college courses. So, like, sixth grade onwards, they sent me to this college summer program at Northwestern, and one year, I think it was the summer of eighth grade, I met this kid, Runic, and he was the kid across the hall from me, and we're like, I'm from Cleveland. He's from Detroit. We're like, we're so bored in the Midwest. School's, like, pretty easy, and, like, the iOS programming language, Swift, it kind of came out recently, and it just started taking off, and we're like, let's build apps for small businesses. Let's learn how to code. Let's use Swift, and let's build apps for any small business that wants an app. And that was kind of how we got our start to our entrepreneurial journey. We started with a game, and then we built an app for a chain of car washes. We built an app for a medical conference. All kinds of different apps. We made like 30 grand by the time we were 14, which felt like a ton of money. Felt like we were rolling in it. And my co-founder got a research opportunity with a prestigious university in AI research, because he was a longtime math researcher. He was doing…

AI assessment note: “less the beginning of Vyze and more the beginning of our entrepreneurial journey.”

Q Are there any other big lessons in terms of the way that you build that team and what went wrong?

A See, I want people to do, when they come to Vise, I want them to feel like they're doing their life's work. And when I think about the people that are the best performers, and it's not like the most senior people, it's like all kinds of different types of backgrounds, right? We had this kid who was like a trader for a year at Guggenheim, who's now running, he's like, now he's 26, and he's running our entire, you know, enterprise, um, product strategy, right? We've, we had another guy who was just an investment strategy guy in his previous role, and he's now our, our chief investment officer, right? People have different irrational motivators, right? Some kind of chip on their shoulder, some drive to, to win, some kind of hidden fire, right? The same fire I had to prove myself in building this business. Um, and you need to unlock that in prospective candidates, right? I don't want someone who was like, I was a VP of engineering, and now I want to be a CTO, and then after that I want to be a COO. Like, I want someone who understands our customer problem, who understands our mission, Has a deep sense of passion, of desire, as something to prove as to why they're gonna work their tail off for us, um, why they're gonna, you know, push harder here than they would at any big company. And, you know, there's signals you could find in the interview process, but sometimes, quite frankly, …

AI assessment note: “People have different irrational motivators, right? Some kind of chip on their shoulder”

Q Do you think you hold Vengeance or revenge or do you think you kind of forget it?

A I remember people that like gave up on me and I remember, like, I think it's, it's not necessarily the people that gave me no's, it's not the people that, like, didn't believe on me in the beginning. I think it's the people that gave up on me. I think it's the people that were like, this kid just doesn't get it, he's not listening to me, or, you know, I think this about him, you know, I'm just, I'm gonna move on to the, the next thing. Whether that's an investor, whether that's, you know, uh, executive, whether it's, you know, it's another founder, right, or a peer, Right. I think I deeply remember those people that, like, I was friends with at one point in time that I thought believed in me, that I thought, that told me they were along for the journey. They told me that I could call them at any night and at any hour of any day of the year, and they're going to be there for me. And those people in the time of need were not there for me.

AI assessment note: “I remember people that like gave up on me”

Q What was the hardest element of the investor base then?

A The mistake I made was underwriting people's emotions, not their incentives. And I was like, oh, this person is saying this particular thing to me. They feel this particular way. I don't want them to feel this particular way. I'm going to say this particular thing so they feel happy. And like, that's just like the wrong way to think. The right way to think is, what are my incentives? What are their incentives? How do we get to a shared, you know, outcome to the common good, which is make our, increase our enterprise value of the business? If it doesn't, right, if their incentives don't line with mine, right, then like, I'm cognizant of it. I can replay back why their incentives don't necessarily align with mine, but like, I'm going to do the right thing for the company. I'm not going to like, I'm not gonna, like, try and change myself or my emotional state or change something about the business to make that person feel happy.

AI assessment note: “The mistake I made was underwriting people's emotions, not their incentives.”

Q Do you see investor engagement differ when you're not a hot company?

A I wouldn't even say it's, like, investor engagement. I would say it's, like, generally speaking, like, I've heard a lot about people. Like, it's, and, like, I further affirmed my belief of, like, it's really important to have a core group of, like, close friends that are, like, your friends regardless, or your friends from when you were, like, a child, you know, onwards. Like, it's your true group of friends, because, like, a lot of people are going to come into your life, and they're going to come into your life for the wrong reasons, and I think a lot of people aren't aware of that. And when something starts to change, those people move out of your life. Um, and you, you know, you're like, well, like, what, did I do something wrong? Like, was I a bad person? Was I, but it's just like, you're not, you're not the cool hot thing. They're gonna move on to like, you know, crypto's hot, they're gonna move on to the cool crypto guy. Now AI's hot, they're all gonna move on to the, you know, the, the big AI founders. And they're gonna just keep moving from cycle to cycle to cycle. They're gonna chase the hot thing.

AI assessment note: “I wouldn't even say it's, like, investor engagement. I would say it's, like, generally”

Q What piece of advice were you given that you disregarded that you should have taken?

A I don't regret a lot. Like, I think I just kind of had to learn. There's a great piece of advice Ravi gave me that I should have internalized. I think there's a difference in terms of advice that, like, I think there's a world of difference in terms of what you know versus what you've internalized. So I think a lot of people can parrot things of like, you should do this particular thing, and it sounds like, like, you should have integrity, right? And like, yeah, it's like something you should have. You should have integrity, but like, Oftentimes people know that, but they don't, they don't have integrity, right? So I think, you know, there's a difference in terms of what people know and what they do, and I think, you know, one, one piece of advice that I was given is you can't necessarily learn other people's lessons for them. I would spend so much time on trying to, you know, get someone or, you know, some, you know, whether it's a team member, whether it's a, you know, someone to, to do something, to learn something, and They just, they wouldn't learn it. Then they would go and they would make that set of mistakes on their own, and they would, they would learn their lesson. And I think a lot of that applied to me as well, which is like, you can't, I can't just listen to successful founders and all of their advice just blindly adopt it. Like, I have to kind of learn for myself…

AI assessment note: “one piece of advice that I was given is you can't necessarily learn other people's lessons”