The Exchanges

Q And then, like, Be so judicious about what I add back. Like, how do you think about that when you're building products?

A It's even more on our minds now than it used to be, and it was always on our mind. Our initial spiel, our tagline, was less software. When we launched Basecamp back in 2004, it was often contrasted with Microsoft Project and other kind of enterprise-y, heavy tools, and our pitch was always It's really good, but one of the reasons why it's really good is it's just less. There are fewer features, there's less to learn, there's less to teach, there's just less, and we focus on making the few things it does do, do very well. Now, In this new age where using agents and AI has made it so much easier to implement things, it becomes that much harder to stick to those principles because we used to be granted these constraints simply by the fact that it took a long time to build things. And especially in the early days of Basecamp, for example, we built the entire first version on me having 10 hours per week, not per day, per week. To build it. That is an enormous constraint on how you could do anything because you can waste 10 hours really quickly just chasing things around or focusing on the non-essentials if we wanted to get that product out. And we got it out in 380 hours. And the reason I remember this was at the time I was a contractor for Thursday signals. Jason had hired me at 15 dollars an hour. When I was in Copenhagen, Denmark, and he was in Chicago. And by the way, I got paid…

AI assessment note: “our pitch was always It's really good, but one of the reasons... is it's just less.”

Q What were you competing in when you were younger besides math competitions?

A Yeah, well basically everything, so obviously the main thing was math and programming competitions, and so ever since I was really young, that was like, That was, like, my, like, life, you know. My whole goal was to become, like, world champion of competitive programming. I would do that all the time as a kid. I would do, you know, the, the, the really great thing about these competitions too is, is, You know, you, you compete in your school competition, and if you do well enough in that, then you make it qualify for the, the local or like the city, um, competition, and then if you do well in that, then you get to like the regional competition and state competition, and then you get to go to the national thing, the international thing, right? And so it's, it's like a very nice setup where sooner or later you get to kind of meet people who are like you, basically. When I was a kid doing these competitions, going for that, it was like, oh, I really cared about those, People that I met through these national, international competitions were honestly more, like, they were my childhood friends more than, like, the people around me in Baton Rouge, Louisiana were. And it was like, we would hang out online, we would talk about math, we'd talk about problems. But all the other things, too, I mean, I played basically all the different competitive games. So, like, I, I played a lot of Sup…

AI assessment note: “I played a lot of Super Smash Brothers... Tetris. I played a lot of poker.”

Q finance team faster and happier. Many of the top founders and CEOs I know Run their business on ramp. I run my business on ramp and you should to go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time, save money and grow revenue. That is ramp.com. You mentioned inducing, the importance of inducing misery into your kids' lives. Do you still induce misery into your own?

A Yeah, no. I've gone full cycle and have spoiled myself with material things. Realized they don't make me happy at all. Got rid of a whole bunch of material things. I sold my fancy cars at a great discount. I just went and gone. It was one day I woke up. I just didn't want to have Cars with vowels and at the end of the name. I just got rid of them. I just wanted a more simple life. I wanted to, uh, to start to enjoy the little things in life. Now, having said that, I do have toys. I don't want to make sound like I'm leaving the life, I'm leading the life of a monk, but I have shattered assets on purpose just to simplify my life. And if you will get down to the really important things in life, which are really at the end of the day, Is your family and friends. That's really the most important thing.

AI assessment note: “I don't want to make sound like I'm leading the life of a monk”

Q I heard you say something on Harry's podcast. Did you actually think there's a lot more exceptional people out there than other people believe? Especially if you have a couple thousand employees.

A People. Character and, and, and also performance is not set in stone. So quite often it's also a matter of in larger companies, sometimes it might actually even be harder for people who have a, uh, 10 X potential to, to become a 10 X person. So it's a combination of things. It's probably harder to keep just hiring 10 out of 10 people, but also harder to develop them, but it's still worth it. I mean, the, the, the power law in, in talent is, is extreme and they're very few 10 out of 10 people, but they, Make, I mean, it's a cliche, but like we see this every day, they make a disproportionate difference to the company, so it is worth trying to find these people, and it is worth finding a way to, um, give them a home in, in a company where they can really thrive. We try to do this very, very systematically at Helsing, and we, we make for, I think hopefully for everyone, we, we, we create a, a great environment where they're surrounded by amazing people, but, um, you know, for the 10 out of tens, we, we, we go the extra mile.

AI assessment note: “Character and, and, and also performance is not set in stone.”

Q But what is your reaction to this when they make this decision for Toy Story three? Is this when Steve says he's breaking off the, because there was a time period where Pixar breaks off the negotiations with Disney completely. Is this the same time?

A Well, no. What's happening is we're just getting near the end of the contract, but we're, we're getting close to the delivering the last film, and at, at which point, uh, Steve would not have let Pixar, um, stay with Disney. Steve, at this point, also knew that they had cancer, and he was, uh, Uh, it was very, very, an emotional time once in which, uh, actually, it's, it's actually when he showed us the first iPhone when it was a secret. And we're on this bridge between the one building and, uh, there's a bridge over that goes between another tall building next to it. And, and the secret lab is where they're designing it. And he told us that, uh, you know, he didn't know how long he was going to live. Um, and he lived several years after that, but he, he wanted to make sure that his family was taken care of. He wanted to see his son graduate from high school, and he wanted to make sure that Pixar was in, in good shape. It was very emotional at that time. Michael Eisner was still the CEO, and he would not have continued with Michael Eisner. So, since we were getting into the contract, he started discussions with other studios, um, which would mean, you know, them doing the distribution. In fact, Disney is the best at marketing films, including internationally. We started those discussions, and then the war over, uh, Michael Eisenberg got really heated up, and, um, They, they vot…

AI assessment note: “Well, no. What's happening is we're just getting near the end of the contract”

Q What does the business consist of at that point?

A It changed a lot. So when we first started, we grew really quickly, and I mean, we cleared over a hundred million dollars of EBITDA, and we had a very simple algorithm. In advertising business, the algorithm is key if you're doing performance ads. So our very early algorithm was if you play a solitaire and you play a poker game, people who play solitaire and poker also play these games. And it just pushed you games, and you'd see game, game, game, game, game. Eventually you download off of a simple algo like that. What we realized, um, as really machine learning technologies evolved, and, and Facebook built this fantastic platform. Over the 2010, once they got their mobile marketing platform out, they really did turn ads into content.

AI assessment note: “In advertising business, the algorithm is key if you're doing performance ads.”

Q Can you reconcile those two things for me?

A They're both very valuable. And so I would say that early CEO lesson was definitely a sign of not following my intuitions. It was like logically be another CEO rather than follow my intuition and build Roblox. I would say combining intuition with tenacity and taking the long view, if those things can coexist, it's super, super powerful. And I think along the way with, um, Ho, for example, that metaphor of building a clock, it's funny because when we started Roblox, we used to joke, we want to start a perpetual motion machine. And what is a perpetual motion machine? It's something that can keep going, get better and better. That's what kind of the, the notion of building a, Cloud, three D UGC system. We keep building that system. Creators are going to make more and more amazing content. We can keep tuning the system and we'll get kind of that perpetual motion machine. And the metaphor of that clock thing is really interesting because if we dive into that, um, it's harder to build a clock, but if you ask me the time every day for the next 20 years, it's probably easier to build the Clock than to tell you the time every day for the next 20 years. And that was part of the thought behind Roblox.

AI assessment note: “combining intuition with tenacity and taking the long view, if those things can coexist”

Q So were you taking ideas from that as well?

A There.com and Second Life, they really were early and in parallel to us. In a way, they were so early and so parallel, they made these very big visionary things. You know, Second Life's architecture was contiguous earth kind of thing, which had some issues around scaling, because in a contiguous earth type situation, which is just the way the real world makes, there's only one copy of that roller coaster, and when 30 people want to go on that roller coaster, No more can go. So we, I think we were a lot more practical around scale. We're just like, no man, if there's, if there's a 100,000 copies of that roller coaster, we're going to figure out how to route people to that. So we could have ten million people riding the roller coaster. But there were a lot of early, early visions out there, I would say at the same time, for sure.

AI assessment note: “There.com and Second Life, they really were early and in parallel to us.”

Q Are you interested in it at all? You guys are doing very unique things around marketing.

A Yeah, thanks for noticing that. I mean, I wish I could take more credit for that. I actually think it's, it's the team entirely. Um, you know, they, they come and show me the things that they're doing, and I, I definitely, the only thing I'm doing is I'm trying to give them air cover to try crazy stuff. And basically, Whenever they show me something like, that's awesome, like run with it, you know, and whereas I think most organizations, some organizations would be like a little too cautious or hesitant, but yeah, what they're doing with like putting QR codes in the Super Bowl, or they just did this karaoke thing at the Super Bowl, or I don't know, they, they're trying more ambitious ideas, which, which I like. Um, it's also a lot of marketing now is It's actually more like content on the internet than like your, your typical brand ad running on TV. And, um, You know, just like a very simple thing actually was, I remember we were putting our earnings calls, you know, as a public company, you put out your earnings. They're usually kind of dry and boring. Like these analysts tune in, listen to these calls. You're on like a conference call. It was using this like really ancient technology and this ancient vendor that we were using. And I remember I was always so bored on these earnings calls. I was like, man, how do we spice these things up? Just do something more interesting. And…

AI assessment note: “the only thing I'm doing is I'm trying to give them air cover”

Q When you were in your twenties, though, you said, hey, I wanted to be perfect. Not only do I want to be perfect, I want everybody around me to be perfect. I wanted the universe to be perfect. Like, how long did it take for you to learn what you just explained?

A So when I stepped down From United Rentals. See, I still stayed as chairman. When I stepped down as CEO of United Rentals, had done it for about 10 years, and I wanted to do my next big thing. I wanted to do another startup from the beginning. You know, I was running a big company. I wanted to start it from scratch. And there was a period of a couple of years where I was trying to figure out what I was going to do, and, and I didn't find it, and then a great financial crisis came, and I was kind of lost. I was kind of, it was kind of, it was probably the only time in my life that I was depressed. I'm just not depressed, but that period of time, I was actually clinically depressed. I took the Beck Depression Inventory, and I came up, yep, depressed.

AI assessment note: “when I stepped down From United Rentals. See, I still stayed as chairman.”

Q So when you say you want to understand the founder's DNA, how do you go about understanding that?

A You gotta spend time with them. And you gotta ask them all the questions, and you gotta build a level of trust where, honestly, you don't have to talk about business that much. What kind of level of trust you gotta, how do you build that trust to talk to them in a way where they feel that they can trust you back, that they can call you when they cannot sleep at night? Those are the things that you gotta, I, I spend most of my time and the team at Revit spend most of the time doing, which is building that level of understanding and relationship so we know how they behave. Once you know how, how people behave, then everything's fine, because you will see consistency or they will break it.

AI assessment note: “You gotta spend time with them. And you gotta ask them all the questions”

Q So you lose the status part, is that?

A Whatever the fuck it is, I didn't care about any of that shit, I just wanted to stop feeling that feeling, you know what I mean? So I didn't have that, that wasn't a currency for me. It's a blessing and a currency, but I just said, I don't give a fuck, I don't wanna, I, I, I want this, I just don't wanna, I wanna get rid of the obsession. I mean, if you work, if you want to work past 70, 75, 80, if you're a founder of a company like Phil Knight, I understand that he's still involved with Nike, do it. If you're feeling it, it's not what I wanted to do, and it's what, not what I had to do for my own sanity.

AI assessment note: “I didn't care about any of that shit, I just wanted to stop”

Q Where it's like, well, I wrote this down, right? Changed my mind, but there's some kind of human element where it's like, ah, I don't want to contradict this because it's in writing.

A Yeah, exactly. Again, people like to be consistent over time. I just don't find that important. I, um, I will, I found the, the cheat code to always being right. It's just like, change your opinion every time you get better information, right? Like, so, because as you get closer to the point where you have to make decision, that means you will wind up with the right one. It's like if you do not stop at some point to incorporate new information, right? Like, and if, even if you were wrong, if I figure it out, you know, again, what do you do? Like, You have two, you have one momentarily chance, um, to, uh, steer your concern to the best possible outcome. Um, are you going to take it? Or are you going to be the person who just, like, leans into the comfort of, like, somehow character consistency? Like, why? For what? Like, again, what's the job you want to do? Do you want to look good or be good, right? And so you've got to, like, just change, um, like, it needs to be okay to, uh, change your mind when better information comes, um, It comes along. And again, here's the crazy thing. I think if you go through the transcript of this podcast, you will find, uh, or just ask an AI to do it. It will probably point out various contradictions inside of what I'm saying about what you do. Like, I, I, I'm like, in this, I'm probably on multiple sides. The reason is actually, this is the almos…

AI assessment note: “people like to be consistent over time. I just don't find that important.”

Q Like, we can't, we have to talk about quality, so like, do you want to, like, just pick up where that quote leaves off?

A Well, there, there's so many strands of quality, right? Um, um, it is both, um, sort of the distinction of taste, whether taste is subjective or objective, you can go so many ways with this question. But, um, the way I think about quality, um, is, um, I think so much of your early life, um, certainly my case was the formulation of just trying to go for more. And the further I've gotten, uh, I've realized, um, and, and it's about everything, right? You mass more stuff. Uh, you mass, uh, you try to do, uh, you know, more things at the same time. You try to do all of these things, um, at the same time. And the further you go, you realize that, um, It, it, it really is about sort of ultimately this very simplistic try thing, less is more. And, and the older I get, I feel more and more. Um, you know, we talked about it with friends. Um, I think most people, uh, start out thinking having more friends is better, but I think more people are happier with fewer but better friends than many friends. Um, and, and so I think quality is ultimately this sort of notion around, um, Focusing, um, distilling, uh, getting to the essence. Uh, we can even talk about, like, quality in communication is often trimming things down and saying less things, right? Um, why is it, for instance, that when we're talking about very hard things, most people's instant reaction is just to try to add more complexit…

AI assessment note: “the way I think about quality, um, is... focusing, um, distilling, uh, getting to the essence.”

Q So when did they take the viewpoint? If they took the viewpoint that Uber is injecting instability into their city or area?

A They never did, but they, at some point, Felt like we were, we may win. And instead of really seeing super problems at the, we didn't, for the most part, we were treated fairly at the cities for the most part, not completely, but for the most part, but what happened was the, I, what I would call, what I'd say at the time is that the China war went global. So we were spending, let's say tens of millions of dollars a month fighting DD in all these cities. And the fight was like, uh, I needed to subsidize rides to gain market share. When I gain market share, there's network effect because if I'm bigger, then my system is more efficient. And if I'm more efficient than them, they have to subsidize more than I do. To compete with me. So how do I subsidize where, when, how to get that efficiency edge, that network effect efficiency edge so that I subsidize less than them. This is why, you know, like Lyft is smaller than Uber because we were better at this part of this, the thing, and people don't really know that's what it takes. It's, but like, how do you get efficiency edge? Efficiency edge starts when somebody even downloads the app and signs up. If it's easier to sign up on one versus another, you have an efficiency edge. If it's easier to call a vehicle and like get it to you without problems, you have an efficiency edge. Cause you'll have less support. You'll have less like peop…

AI assessment note: “They never did, but they, at some point, Felt like we were”

Q Carbone's gonna be the first restaurant you would do?

A The idea of this elevated Italian-American restaurant was my big idea, right? Because what, what I saw was the following, and you know, to me, everything made perfect sense, but other people didn't see it, right? I, I saw that I'm, some of my favorite restaurants to go to, you know, Molino's, Colina Tella, Rayo's, etc. These are the best experiences, but like, at the end of the day, the food is not that good, and they were very expensive restaurants, and I would spend as much time, as many times I could go there, spend all my money going to these places. That's how much I love them. I love the moves at the beginning of the meal. I love what they put down. I love, I love the whole thing. And as a New Yorker, that's like the most classic style, you know, New York restaurant, right? These, these kind of finer dining Italian restaurants. My idea was, what if I take this But we take the entire thing to a different level. So instead of a veal chop being the shittiest veal you could buy pounded this thin, right? You know what I mean? It's gonna, why don't we buy the best veal you can buy and make it a beautiful chop and still make a veal parm out of it, but not pounded so it's just, you're eating breadcrumbs. You know, these little ideas. What if I made a lobster fra diavola, but the lobster was perfectly cooked. Never had happened at that point in time. Never, ok? It never had happen…

AI assessment note: “The idea of this elevated Italian-American restaurant was my big idea, right?”

Q know, this one little thing. My question to you is like, as ramp evolves and these new technologies, uh, you take advantage of all the, the new latest technology, uh, developments, In your mind, then, like, what is, it's not there now, but like, what is the ideal product? Is it literally self-driving money? It's like, you're not buying seats, software, it's, you're buying work? What is it to you?

A I think that's really well said, right? I'll just start with, like, who we serve today, right? A lot of our customers are, uh, business owners and finance organizations, and I think, Like, I, I remember meeting a lot of friends, right, who were studying accounting and finance, and, you know, back in college, like, I, I remember that the things you'd hear from them, like, the dreams they had is like, you know, I want to go be at the table where it matters, right? I want to be allocating resources to causes that are important. I want to help people understand businesses better so they can make better decisions. I want to create great products. Uh, I want to do things that are really meaningful, and you go study this kind of craft and trade of, of, of accounting, finance, whatever it may be. And then you are really awakened to the reality that's like, oh, no, no, you're not doing that. Your job is you're going to do the expenses. You're going to go and like take the bills and you're going to go process them. You're going to go rerun this analysis that we ran last month for, you know, a liquidity roll forward or financial projection again for this quarter. And you're going to spend like 80, 90% of your time just on road to recurring tasks because the machinery is so hard to operate. There's so much data split across all these tools today that is very difficult to operate. And part …

AI assessment note: “part of what we're doing is, one, just collapsing the number of tools”

Q But this instinct, I want to focus on your time and what you learned from George Lucas, but this instinct that to constantly share knowledge is something that happened in grad school, and you seem to perpetuate that throughout your entire career, correct?

A Yes. I, there was a succession of insights for me just at a personal level. One of them was at grad school as I was graduating, I can look back, and, and did, and, and just say that this was a fantastic four years. I loved my time. I loved the people. I loved the way the professors worked. I loved the support and the environment. It was invigorating. We all had different interests, and it was like, I, I, I said to myself, this is the kind of experience I want to have for the rest of my life. So that became one of the Foundational things for me is that way of working is a great way of working. We accomplished a lot. And I went to New York Tech, and I had a bunch of theories about how to manage. And the, uh, and what I found as I got into it was that some of my theories were a complete crock. I mean, I didn't know what I was doing. I never managed anything in my life. So, uh, and, and I boxed myself into a corner. Um, uh, at the same time, I, I also recognized there was something about the position I was, that was in that, that some of the newer people were treating me a little bit differently, even though I didn't feel I was different. So, this was an interesting psychological phenomenon that was going on, which I found interesting, because when I went there, I, I didn't really want to be a manager. I kind of liked the idea of being in charge, but I didn't want to do the hard pa…

AI assessment note: “Yes. I, there was a succession of insights for me just at a personal level.”

Q Does it have anything to do with technology?

A Uh, it had to do with the fact that the reason for Vestron to exist was that they were pioneering home entertainment, but everyone else got into home entertainment. You can never have a competitive advantage in the entertainment business through distribution only. That's why Netflix produces content. You can start with distribution only if you're a pioneer, but you got to immediately go into production and productions. It's very tough business, as I said earlier. So Vestron is not capitalized to be a diversified Film and television production company with a video game division, sorry, a video store division, not video games. And, um, it's, it's apparent to me they're gonna have problems. So I start looking around and, uh, for a job. And remarkably enough, at the age of 31, people are not exactly lined up, knocking on my door to ask me to be president of a major film studio. But Joe gets this job as chairman of Fox and behind the scenes. And this I was not aware of. But I became aware of it. Barry said to Joe, look, you've never worked at a major and you've never run a business. You're an independent producer, but he needed creative engine to turn around the studio. It was where that was, which was true. You got to hire a business guy to support you here, like to, to be your partner and building the business. So Joe comes from the independent world. Remember totally different wo…

AI assessment note: “it had to do with the fact that the reason for Vestron to exist”

Q So, the, was the TV the, The vast majority of the revenue of the business at, when you did this deal with Spike?

A Yeah. So, so, so television was huge, and, and The Ultimate Fighter literally did everything that we hoped it would do. It built a larger fan base. Um, it introduced a lot of people, not only to the sport and the brand, but to the fighters. I mean, coming off that show, Forrest Griffin became a massive pay-per-view star for us. Chuck Liddell, who was one of the coaches and, you know, it, it did what it was designed to do. When I launched businesses, like I launched Power Slap. I did the same thing. I launched, uh, uh, UFC BJJ. Did the same thing. So, Power Slap's, uh, reality show is at, like, fifty million views on YouTube. So it's, it's still a home run. The format is, is, is incredible.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. So, so, so television was huge”

Q Why did you not know that it was going on in your own company, though?

A Because the company was, like, let's say, like, um, four or 5000 people. You know, it's sort of quasi-distributed. We started all the work, and, uh, we had, like, Toronto office and Montreal office and so on. And so it just turned out that, like, you know, in The Toronto office, uh, there was a fairly big project to build the features to add to Shopify so, uh, you could use it for running a supermarket because, you know, just they decided that the supermarket industry is very large and we should go and, uh, capture one percent about it, like in the Dilbert comics. And so, uh, you know, and, and frankly, it, like, I, I'm not saying those were wrong decisions. The, the, the sort of really surprising thing about building a business, or just in decision-making in general, Is that, um, making the right decision is actually child's play, usually. Like, you can make wrong calls, which, which end up, because of work changes, ended up being wrong call later, and so on. That's a different thing. Um, um, but, like, most of the time, if you, like, the bad options in front of you just prune themselves away. They just don't make sense. They're too expensive, or just, like, off mission, or whatever. You, the problem is, and I think school, unfortunately, accidentally drills this into people, is that there's one right answer is sort of what people think. And, um, once they find a right answer …

AI assessment note: “Because the company was, like, let's say, like, um, four or 5000 people.”

Q And then how long from 28 till you realize this is going to be the, the simple organizing principle of how I'm going to live my life and spend my time?

A I, I, I actually don't think I could have articulated the principle as I just laid it out until very recently. So I, I could have told you about the power of Brett Victor's inventing on principle starting 10 years ago, or whenever I first saw it, but I would not have been able to articulate the principle to you cleanly, and that's because it's hard. It's hard to pin, for whatever reason, it's really hard to pin this down. Interestingly, I owe, I've never met Brett Victor. If he's listening, I'd love to meet him. Uh, I owe him an enormous debt of gratitude for one of my bigger career successes, which was, uh, I took his principle, not my own, but his principle of instant feedback and applied it as the primary design principle to software that I built in my last business, which worked really well. The software itself worked really well. The business grew a lot because of the software and the software worked well because of his principle. Of instant feedback on choices being made by the user, showing up in, in this case, in a visual that described their portfolio. And so I, I actually, before I had my own principle, I stole his principle to great effect, which just goes to show the power of a great principle. But I couldn't have articulated it for a really long time, and I can't explain to you why that's the case. I don't know.

AI assessment note: “I actually don't think I could have articulated the principle... until very recently.”

Q work is now changing other people's lives in that same way that you changed your own first, but you were the first beneficiary of it. And so what is your principle or why? I don't know. Maybe it's that you can, you don't have to just keep going the same direction that you were given. You can break off and, and found something new. Um, I think that's pretty amazing.

A I think there's a lot of times, I, I really resonate with what you said when you were, you found that book and you're like, you know, this, this paragraph, this sentence just like hits you with like a hammer to the face. This is also like, you know, I use podcasts for this reading mainly. It's like, I think people are rushing through things too, too fast. You know, I'm famous for only listening to podcasts on one X. Everybody's like, oh, you read a lot. You must read fast. I'm like, yeah, 25 pages an hour fast. Like I'm not speed reading here. I think I want understanding and like I want understanding of how things actually are, not how humans say they are. And humans, not only are we lying to ourselves constantly, which if you're lying to yourself, like, of course you're lying to other people about, like, why you're doing what you're doing, or what you're doing, uh, what it is that you're doing. And this is why I like autobiographies and biographies so much, because in many cases, the person's, like, long past dead, or they're older, and they're just like, I'm writing this book when I'm 80, like, I have no, I'm not incentivized to, to lie, and, like, here's the stuff I went through, and the trouble with whatever. Being, what kind of dad you are, trouble with women, trouble with business, which you realize, like, there's nothing that you're experiencing that somebody else hasn'…

AI assessment note: “what I want is, like, true understanding of, like, humanity as it is”

Q When did you figure that out? Did you know that at the beginning?

A Yeah, no, no, no, I didn't. No, what I wanted was, what I wanted was craveable product, you know, and I knew from restaurants, you had that, the one craveable product on their menu, and then they have all these other menu items, all these other distractions. You're like, but everybody goes to Gino's to get that delicious carbonaro, right? Like it's like, focus on that, that, and do it extremely well. Don't try to be all things to all people, or you're going to be nothing to anybody, right? You have to be what people will be fanatical about. What they, and the restaurant is craveable. So, but what I want to do is create that craveable product everybody do. Then I saw the value of how quick I could do the drive-through, right? And so, it starts from when customer pulls up to the, to the order deal. The first time at Raising Gains, they look, they have to decide what they want, they do it. After that, they know what they want. Box combo, sweet tea, extra sauce. You know, whatever, whatever, whatever their, whatever their order is. So, the order's quick. Coming to the drive-through, we have a singular product focus, right, for that one menu item. We have one line, I'll take you back to the kitchen later. You can see down the line, toast is grilled on the end, you got chicken fryers, you got fry fryers, and you got the board. You can watch that cook-to-order process happen, like you…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, no, no, no, I didn't.”

Q So credit cards, SBA loan, you said it took a year for the development of So you had the lease before you opened it?

A Yeah, yeah, no, so it didn't sign the lease that doesn't hold it for you, right? So, but this location was available, and I knew it was going to be awesome. It took two years, two years from the business plan to where I actually opened up the restaurant. Took me two years, and so literally from writing the business plan from class, going to the banks, getting turned down, working in refineries, then working in, um, in Alaska for the summer, then coming back that fall, and we opened in 96, so it'll be the fall of 95 when I got back, Then, so I had, had some money on the deal. I went, got that SBA loan, and got, got the investors, and from there, then we started the construction process. We started getting the used equipment, and luckily, the equipment I went, I got from, from, I went into Houston and Dallas, restaurant supply houses, because, you know, restaurant business go out. Nine out of 10 go out of business. I could go buy stuff, and I'm like, I need a fryer that'll work for 60 days. Like, give me your cheapest fryers. They had to be 85 pound fryers, and they're like, well, this one's good. I'm like, yeah, it's 10 times as much. Like, I need something that lasts Because I know as soon as I prove this will work, I know I can get another loan, you know.

AI assessment note: “didn't sign the lease that doesn't hold it for you, right?”

Q So you had the whole market to yourself?

A The whole market to yourself opened up in, in, in, like, the West Bank. We opened up in the Harvey, and, like, it was in, like, not, 120 days or whatever for the next restaurant open. We fed first responders first, and when people came back, they just came in, and we were the only place to eat. They'd come in and eat. They'd, like, more come in and eat, right? Because it was like, you can come in, we got power, he's all generated power, we got generation all over the country. Got him in and set it up, and we galvanized at that point. Like, the team, and the community, and like, us being open, and then sales were nuts. Like, it was nuts. So now we had cash flow coming in. We could do these massive crew bonuses. We could give back to the community organizations, and I mean, I was just really, really proud of the team, and at the same time proud, I was, I was disappointed in myself, and I was disappointed in myself because I put all that in jeopardy. You know what I mean? I put all that in jeopardy for financing. From that day when I watched the levies break, I said, I'll never, ever, ever put the position, the company in a position That we're financially strapped. Like, I'll never do that again. And from that day, we got our metrics, and we worked towards, it took us a couple years to get there, but we worked towards those right, you know, it's like three times debt, equity, you …

AI assessment note: “120 days or whatever for the next restaurant open. We fed first responders first”

Q And he's like, all right, now we're coming with Osborne two, it's even new and improved and it's great. And you make the point, it's just like, Yeah, maybe, but it didn't ship in time, and so now you just made this big announcement where, like, we have this great new product. It's even better than one. What are you telling to the market?

A The Osborne effect. I don't think people talk about it so much anymore, but back then, the Osborne effect was a thing where you introduce a new product that's better than your first product, and nobody buys your first product anymore, and you're, you're out of business. And so, you know, yeah, don't want to do that. So, so, Go make some mistakes nobody's ever made before. Try to make them in small increments. Fix your mistakes as fast as you find them, and you actually want to make mistakes. You just want to make them small and, you know, iterate and fix them quickly. I mean, one of the things when you're, when you're creating a new business in an area that has never been done, or with some new technology, new business model, there's no playbook. There's no, like, book you can read. So here's how you do it, right? And, and if you hire the people from the adjacent, you know, industry companies And ask them to go do it. Well, they're just going to go do what they were doing before, right? And so that's not going to work. So you need a lot of creativity, and you need to sort of intuit your way to the answer by experimenting. It's like, okay, uh, here's a theory that we think will work. Let's try it, right? And, and, and, and, you know, does it work?

AI assessment note: “nobody buys your first product anymore, and you're, you're out of business.”

Q So, so, so, uh, don't rely too much on that, right?

A This is why I think, uh, entrepreneurs have to, like, study past entrepreneurs, too, and it's, like, obviously very valuable. Like, it's, it's no surprise that, like, you were reading about these people, like, what I would say is, like, the greats all studied the greats. This is, like, very, like, they were doing it today, they were doing it 40 years ago, they were doing it 200 years ago. If you took, like, an average person in normal society, And the way they think about experts, ok? And the way it's discussed in all these biographies, it's like, they're very dismissive of experts, right? I just mentioned I was reading James Dyson's, uh, autobiography. You know, the whole thing is just like, he believes in the Edisonian principle of design, just constant iteration, you learn as you go, you can't predict, like you're, you just, you know, change one thing and then test it and see how it goes. And he mentions setting Henry Ford a lot in that book. And then James Lyson wrote an autobiography, 30 years after that, that he also mentions Henry Ford a lot. And the reason I thought of that is because as you were speaking about, you know, you go and ask an expert from 10 years ago, what's going to happen? Like, they're not going to tell you that ChatGPT is absolutely, you know, that my 13 year old, I use ChatGPT all the time, but I'm a nerd. I like to research stuff. I like to read abou…

AI assessment note: “they're very dismissive of experts, right?”

Q How are you using it? What are you doing? How's it affecting your work?

A Yeah, well, um, it changes by the month. So I, I, uh, this is a, this is a question that if we were to talk, you know, in the future, I'm not sure it'd be actually the same answer. Um, well, one of the first things I would say is You know, I think about some of the systems that we've architected here about how you can learn from doing things that don't scale all the way to, um, shipping, especially with something like coding. Right now, I think where the agents are, they're, they're still good at what I call, you know, functional tasks, um, for example, coding, um, but outside of coding and looking at cross-functional areas, they're not quite there yet for a lot of reasons, but, um, But within something like coding, the things that you could do today, um, where anyone actually, frankly, it doesn't have to be anyone of any function. Anyone can come up with an idea, run the prototype, run the experimentation and the analysis, and then actually ship to a small group of people all by themselves. Um, that is Very impressive, and that collapses, if you will, you know, the amount of activity required or speeds up the learning loop you can have in any scientific process inside your company that touches code. That's very cool. Second, um, LLMs, you know, what are they good at that humans are not good at or less good at? Well, they can have almost infinite memory and infinite context and…

AI assessment note: “where anyone actually... can come up with an idea, run the prototype”

Q When you were designing this, were there any, like, books you were reading or, like, were there any examples? You're like, okay, I'm going to take an economy that I see functioning well in the real world and just make the virtual version. How did you even come up with the set of rules that you had?

A We, I would say all four of us founders were very into high integrity systems, um, like what's the amount of float In the economy, how much currency we have, do you trade it and not trade it? We saw very early on in our economy, we had something really interesting in the early days of video games, people would have multiple currencies, and we had something that in retrospect, the Roblox community really loves, but isn't really a good idea, I don't think, and that is a, a participation-based currency called tickets, As well as a money-backed currency called Robux. We, the, the thing that comes out is when you have a participation-based currency, you get one ticket for every day you log in. That's really not a very good way to have people log into your system. You know, it's much better. They just love chatting with their friends or playing games. The other thing is any currency that, um, A user can get from work or log in will immediately be bought it now. And so we just, we could see people trying to bought that currency all day long and we had to ultimately get rid of it. Um, so we had some good learnings with that, but ultimately our current economy, it has, you know, as I've said, is kind of scaled better than linear with user engagement.

AI assessment note: “all four of us founders were very into high integrity systems”