$100B Founder Breaks Down The Biggest AI Business Opportunities For 2025
AI, VR, and the Future of Work - November 26, 2024 (over 1 year ago) • 01:28:15
Transcript
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Furqan Rydhan | That's the trend that I can't I can't like unsee it sometimes right | |
Shaan Puri | that's the bet you're making | |
Furqan Rydhan | That's the bet we make. I always joke with the guys here: it's like we want to bet on *negative one to zero*. Peter Thiel talked about these "0 to 1" companies — it's like we're still one step even before that. | |
Shaan Puri | alright for khan we're here it's amazing | |
Furqan Rydhan | I haven't seen you in | |
Shaan Puri | A little while — people don't know — we used to work together, maybe five or six years. We **cofounded a company** and, yeah, launched a bunch of products and "ate a bunch of shit" together. And here we are. | |
Furqan Rydhan | fun times by the way | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, I'm thinking the title of this is gonna be: "Because AppLovin is now a $50 billion company." The $50 billion founder tells me the next big thing in AI — I'm gonna go full YouTube clickbait, full sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're great.
So, we used to do this thing where after we did Bebo together — got acquired — we were there for a year or so, and then we all went off and did different things. I started the podcast and started doing my thing; you started doing yours. But I hit you up and was like, "Hey, I miss hanging out with you. What if we did something?"
We started doing this on Wednesdays, which is like the *Cool Shit Hour*. This is amazing. It's basically a show-and-tell where you — my smartest friend — would come on Wednesdays and you'd be like, "Hey, have you seen this? Have you seen this? Have you seen this?" I really hadn't seen any of it, and you would explain it and teach it to me. It was my favorite part of the week. We did that for, I don't know, probably like a year or something.
So I kind of want this to be like a public version of the *Cool Shit Hour*, where you're just gonna tell me a bunch of good things. I want to start with *AI* because you texted me something — you said *AI agents are here* — and you said AI is cool because a 10-person company feels like it could do the work of a 100-person company. We're using it in our company, so I wanted to hear: what are you doing with AI? And that's not called ChatGPT. | |
Furqan Rydhan | I think the phrase "AI agent" — or this kind of term — is the thing I really can't pull myself away from. Literally every night, right? You know me: when midnight strikes, I want to write code. The whole day is spent talking to people, and then the night... | |
Shaan Puri | It's like coding, yeah. Furcom's schedule is nocturnal, so I remember we hired you, and I feel like the first day you came in at 9 a.m. I thought, "I should..." It was...
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Furqan Rydhan | probably 10 but yeah | |
Shaan Puri | Second, after that — from *day two* onwards — it was like: roll in at 11, "oh, it's lunchtime," have lunch, you would talk, you would do meetings. I was like, "but this is the sky code."
Then that night, at like 4 a.m., you would have built the prototype. You're basically **nocturnal** — you get all your shit done. You used to tell me that during the day you would just burn up your energy so you could focus at night and actually write code. | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | so what are you doing with ai and how is that what is that actually in your company right now | |
Furqan Rydhan | **AI agents** — I'll tell you how I'm thinking about them and what they mean to me.
AI agents use **LLMs** or AI systems (like **OpenAI** systems or cloud providers) and then are given reasoning loops. Imagine when you give a task to a human: you say, "Hey, I want to grow our company" or "do a marketing campaign." They take that, plan it, come up with the steps, then go one by one on the tasks and solve them, releasing some of them along the way.
These AI agent systems are exactly like that. The first thing they do is ask, "What do I need to do based on your request?" and they'll come up with a plan. | |
Shaan Puri | you give it like a mission correct | |
Furqan Rydhan | So, I'll give you an example of something we're doing at 3rdweb. Every single sign-up in our company — and we have a lot of sign-ups every week — is interesting. A human can't really scan through all of them, but people signing up often have interesting companies. They might be a large company or a small one. They could be a competitor or something else.
We used to have a human look at everything. The rule was: if it's "Gmail," ignore it. But if it's another company, research it: figure out what their web products look like, what they might need to do, and then send a customized email. Typically, this is good sales practice — you're taking potential customers and delivering them to your business team.
So we built an agent to do this. Every sign-up that comes in is analyzed. The agent determines whether it's an interesting person or not. It researches their website and the person, then uses its knowledge of 3rdweb products to try to figure out what products they might need and how they would use them. After that, it sends them an email or an upsell or something similar.
We've deployed probably 8–10 of these agents throughout 3rdweb to perform a lot of different functions. What it feels like is that a smaller company can *punch above its weight*. We are 37 people right now, but I really believe it feels more like 80 people with a lot of these tools. You're taking the brainpower of somebody who gets it and giving that power to the system to go and say, "Here's the thing." | |
Shaan Puri | In this case, a person comes to your site and puts in their **email address**. Now you have it. Is it one agent, or is it like a series of things that pass off to each other? What is it called? | |
Furqan Rydhan | Yeah. So, in this case we call it the **sign-up agent**. It's one agent that creates a plan — like, *what do I do?* Part of the plan is the directive we gave it.
I think the way to think about **AI agents** in general is any *clear-directive* problem. When I think "clear directive," it's like: "let's go do X." For example, a sign-up comes in — go look at the person, research them, figure out what their title is, what their company is, and what products they have. That's kind of clear what the job is.
If it's a digital task and a clear directive, all of it can be done with agents. The technology is here; it's ready and it's working.
So, for the third‑web sign-up agent, it'll come in and make a little plan, like, "Hey, I gotta inspect the domain. I gotta go look up the person." | |
Shaan Puri | and you didn't have to tell each one of those little tasks too | |
Furqan Rydhan | We gave it one paragraph as a *directive*, another paragraph describing how it should *operate*, and then a final paragraph for the *type of email* or the *action*. | |
Shaan Puri | The end product is: it looks up the person. It basically looks at the sign-ups, picks the interesting ones, and researches them.
You said it thinks about which of our products will suit their needs — *that's the wild step I hadn't really thought about.*
Then it crafts an email and gives it to a human, or just… | |
Furqan Rydhan | sends it | |
Shaan Puri | sends it okay so you have enough trust that you know you can | |
Furqan Rydhan | We started by sending it to customers with a *human-in-the-loop*. There are still safeguards you put in, as any directive would — you don't want to just send random emails, even when a human is doing the work.
It's very clear what to tell it, and I think this is where the power is kind of multiplying. We've heard "AI" and we've heard *ChatGPT*, but if you can tune it to your problem — for example, by giving it the knowledge of 3rd Web products — that's the key difference here. A generic *ChatGPT* message, when I say that, will just invent something general or generic based on what it knows. | |
Shaan Puri | and when you built this so you built this or somebody else built this on your team | |
Furqan Rydhan | I hacked it as a prototype and | |
Shaan Puri | looked at some of these things and then | |
Furqan Rydhan | I I gave it to somebody on our solutions team and within a day they turned it around | |
Shaan Puri | And when you made, like, a **working version** of this, how long did that take you? Because it's kind of like you basically hired an employee, trained them, and got them working. You're not paying them a salary, and you probably do the whole thing in, what, like a **day or two**—or what? | |
Furqan Rydhan | So, let's say there are a bunch of nights where I'm just learning tools and getting used to them. I take that time out of it — that's just time I spend anyway.
Two nights ago I was really stressed. My calendars are kinda crazy on some days, and I was trying to figure out why it's so crazy. Where is it going? That's a really hard question to ask: what do you do? You could have an **EA**; she can go look through it and do all the stuff. I have an **EA** — she helps me with these things, but then she *steps away for a while*. I'm like, you know, I want to go answer some of these questions.
So, in about 15 minutes I connected my calendar and a little interface where I could type to it. I started asking questions like, "How many hours of meetings did I have last week?" It was 28 hours — *way too much*. "Where did the meetings go? What were they for? What were the purposes of them?" | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | And then the next night I hooked it up—probably for another 45 minutes or an hour—where I could tell it commands from my calendar, like **"Go block out Monday for me"** or **"Go find me, like, 9 hours of block time in this market. Block."** Oh wow. And this was like a few hours of work; now that I know the tools, it just works 24/7.
My calendar, my email, a few other things—I’ve started building these *personal-agent* or *workflow*-type things because I know what I want to do every time. I know how to react or the decision-making I'm going to make. Can I just set that up so it works 24/7, 365, and, you know, it's just there always and—right? | |
Shaan Puri | Hey—let's take a quick break to talk about **AI**. We all know AI is a big deal. You see demos all the time of people doing really cool things, but as a business owner, sometimes it's hard to figure out: how do I actually use this? What do I actually do?
I've been trying to use it across all my businesses—things like making small prototype websites without needing to hire a coder, writing copy for our website, or giving it a bunch of data and asking it to analyze that data for me. It's been kind of amazing. But the thing I always need is inspiration. I know the tool can do a lot, but it can almost do so much that I'm not really sure what I should actually be doing with it.
That's why I think it's great that **HubSpot** created a report where they surveyed 2,000 global marketing leaders and asked what's separating high-growth and low-growth businesses, and what strategies they're using with AI in their businesses. You can grab these strategies and apply them to your own business for free—[the link is in the description below]. | |
Furqan Rydhan | so if I wanted to | |
Shaan Puri | Build a workflow like this—okay. Do I need to know how to code to be able to do this? **Light coding**—give me the **bullet version** of how you built these: where do you even build it, and what tool do you use? | |
Furqan Rydhan | So, there are *coding tools*. I think if you're a developer there's **LangChain**, **AutoGen**, and **Crew**. These are very popular — very cool. The **OpenAI** and **Cloud SDKs** themselves are also very, very powerful.
But you're coding; you're writing a small system. There's probably one-tenth of the code you would have had to write otherwise to do the same thing. | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | So that's already better for developers. If you're not a developer, there's a lot of tools. *Leap* is a company we built here in the studio. It lets you stitch together workflows.
An example: you can trigger based on a Slack message. Let's say you have a Slack channel where all your sign-ups go. Now it picks up that trigger. You could just put a little AI block and say, "Take this email and do these tasks." Oh, you want a web scrape? Go do that. Or you have a little conditional loop, like "repeat this 10 times, go do that." Then you make another decisioning step — like four boxes — but I'll put it back to another Slack channel.
So you come in with your sign-up channel. It does this research. It does all these things. It does kind of whatever you want. Then it could go to email, it could go to another Slack channel, or it could ping somebody on your team.
These are workflows — this is what they start with. An agent can take these workflows and almost build on top of them. I think there are two things: you can really, really easily create workflows, and everyone should be deploying them. Every company should have them. It is a superpower. It's a feeling like, "Oh, I don't need a whole data center team now," and I can. | |
Shaan Puri | you know | |
Furqan Rydhan | When we built **Blab**—like, how many servers did we have running video streaming? That would have been a nightmare. It's kind of the same: a **10x improvement**, but just for me and everything I do digitally.
Tools like **Leap** are great. There are others out there that provide this, and it's a combination. If you don't know how to code, you just have to think about the steps that you would take, and you can program that without writing any code. It's just writing directives—it's like writing *intent*: what you want to accomplish. | |
Shaan Puri | A magic genie—tell it what you want and I can figure it out.
So you've got a sales agent, you have your email and calendar—kinda like an EA (executive assistant). | |
Furqan Rydhan | Any others? I got some fun, frivolous ones that are not stupid. For example, I set up a **dynamic wallpaper**. Literally, every five or ten minutes it looks at what I'm doing and auto-generates a wallpaper for my computer. My laptop wallpaper will modify itself accordingly.
If it's night — I told you that I code at night, right? — it will shift in that direction. It also knows when I'm in meetings. Another thing: during the day I'm talking to people. | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | And it kind of comes up with cool stuff. It's *totally frivolous*—not a useful thing, except my own deal, yeah. | |
Shaan Puri | that's cool | |
Furqan Rydhan | But I find it awesome. You know, there are cool scenes that come up; it invents new things. Claude has created this new capability called **"computer use."** I think that's the next area that AI agents are going to enter. | |
Shaan Puri | And what, by the way — there's **Claude**, there's **ChatGPT**, there's **Perplexity**. There are all these different ones. Mentally, how do you bucket the main AI tools? What's the superpower of each? Maybe just do those three, or mention if there's a fourth. | |
Furqan Rydhan | Yeah, so, I think **OpenAI** and the **cloud** are foundational tools. They're *general-purpose*: ask them anything, get input/output, and then you stitch them together with other things. On top of that they have tools like **ChatGPT**, or maybe "computer use"—they're figuring out more general tools.
I think **Perplexity** is really interesting. It's taking this general-purpose LLM and the reasoning it can do, plus search. I try not to use Google Search anymore, mostly because it's slow and ineffective. Perplexity really made it where it does a search, it reads the results as I would, it clicks into the links as I would, and then it tries to answer my question more purposefully. It saves me four or five steps.
So I think about Perplexity as taking something like "search" and the LLM reasoning and combining them together in a flow that's more interesting. Right now, ChatGPT or OpenAI tools don't have real-time knowledge, but Perplexity does, because it uses search. | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | what's your | |
Shaan Puri | Like... tangent: **Furkant's hot take** — "Google: what happens to Google Search with all that you see now?" And you're saying, "I don't." You're saying, "I try not to Google search anymore." That's pretty wild, right? | |
Furqan Rydhan | It's—you just feel slow. I know they got the *Gemini* thing there. I think the biggest fumble, you know, in our... | |
Shaan Puri | in our lifetime may decade fumble | |
Furqan Rydhan | They built the technology for *transformers* — the architecture that OpenAI and others have used to develop this large language model. They were the first to talk about it, to put it out there, and to begin the research that's happening now.
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Shaan Puri | And so what's the history? They have the AI minds there, and they wrote the research paper *Attention Is All You Need*. | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah and now from what | |
Shaan Puri | I understand: *all the authors' names* — all of them are gone and basically started their own companies. Was it because nobody recognized the power of it? Or was it that they tried and Google's bureaucracy shut it down? What's the actual story of why they didn't?
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Furqan Rydhan | I don't know the internal story. I think, early on, Google was the place you went when you wanted to have the "rocket ship" moment in your life. The smartest people were there; they were taking the biggest challenges, and it really felt like that place.
I don't think Google as a company has felt like that. The parent company and all the other things going on do still feel like that, though—I'm sure it's a mess in there, who knows. But it just feels like the biggest fumble. I know they're trying to play catch-up with **Gemini**, and awesome stuff is happening, but the developer mindshare and the attention have gone somewhere else. That is really hard to pull back when somebody else becomes a leader in it.
Actually, it feels like **OpenAI is number one**—that's something clear. I think **Anthropic is number two**. Then everyone else shows up. That's how it feels to me, at least from the people I'm seeing building, the technology they're using, and the innovation we're seeing from it. So they... | |
Shaan Puri | The Anthropic one: basically, they have **Claude**, which is kinda like *ChatGPT*. They have a couple of cool things.
One of them is this—what they call "computer use"—which basically means you type in a thing, then it moves your mouse and it just does shit. That's basically the summary of it. | |
Furqan Rydhan | It's a combination of things. You could take workflows and say, "Hey, I'm doing this—click this, click that, click" and have it do that over and over for me. It could analyze things, too.
But the **key thing** is—and I think it just released in beta—that, like most of these things, it isn't going to be great right away. Trust me, it's going to be great. That's what we've been seeing in general: things just ramp.
Now it's going to enter your computer. It kinda felt like AI had been only in the cloud, and now it's going to show up in the box that you're used to—your computer, your laptop. There's so much workflow that we do, and yes, every app will put **AI** in it. Your interface will do that as well.
A lot of the things we're used to doing—switching tabs and having all these things—almost feel unnecessary. I shouldn't have to keep infinite tabs open. Some system should know about them, and if I ask it, "Bring it back up." | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | It's like a total need, and we know we need that. It's kind of like *infinite data, infinite knowledge, and reasoning*. And, you know, for me, that's what the AI is — that's where I think the bridge, when it crosses, completely changes the equation.
The reason I put *Anthropic* number two is their models are crazy — impressive. The new *Claude Sonnet* model, I feel, was a step-function improvement over the previous ones. It feels like the tasks it kind of struggled with are now getting better. Both *OpenAI* and *Anthropic* have been just like: boom, boom, boom.
I don't know… everybody's heard of AI; they tried it. They might have tried it a year ago, they might have used it a little bit, but every 3 to 6 months there's another step and another step. That's, I think, the most interesting thing and why I can't pull myself away from it. Why every night this is something that gets me very, very excited is because the progress is still wild.
People are going to say it's going to top out — it will. I think it's going to be absolutely impressive wherever it starts slowing down, and it will completely change the way we do any digital work. So you're—you're messing with... | |
Shaan Puri | So now... you have a company, you've got an investment lab, and this whole place—this beautiful place we're in right now. You have a wife; you have all this stuff in your life.
If you were just 21 again or 22 again, where you're like, "Dude... I got nothing but time. The bank account's empty, but so is the calendar," and this technology is out—what would you be building? What would you be messing with? What's the, like, kind of—you don't need to take over the world even, but just what types of stuff would you build if it was the **young hacker version of you**? | |
Furqan Rydhan | Like right now, I've started seeing **agents** that could do a reasoning loop. They could have a directive and actions they can perform.
For example, combine an agent with **Twitter**: give it a Twitter account that it owns and controls, so it has its own distribution and conversational abilities. Humans can just interact with it. And you give it a **digital bank account**.
At 3rdweb, we're doing a lot of stuff around **AI**. We have a whole AI toolkit that we're about to launch, and it's around this—these digital things, these agents. They're not going to have credit cards. It's weird.
The reason I say this is fun and interesting is because humans have done this very well. They've created megaphones for themselves, created businesses, and created payment rails around that. They sell things, they provide services, and all of these details—I think it would be something around that. | |
Shaan Puri | so you'd make like a a social like a twitter account you'd make like an ai influencer type of thing | |
Furqan Rydhan | You know, *AI influencer* is like the first obvious thought it goes to. I think if I played in this space I would be creating the digital equivalent of a company: a CEO of a thing, the ability for it to market, and the ability for it to make money.
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Shaan Puri | okay | |
Furqan Rydhan | and I don't think it's not | |
Shaan Puri | an influencer not an influencer | |
Furqan Rydhan | I don't know what it would produce like a | |
Shaan Puri | a dropshipper like a a | |
Furqan Rydhan | a a dropshipper or like yeah it's the best fba amazon whatever | |
Shaan Puri | What's that example you were telling me about where somebody did a thing like this? They made a **Twitter** account and gave it a wallet. **Marc Andreessen** gave it, like, 50,000 in crypto. Can you tell this story? So, what is this? | |
Furqan Rydhan | Yeah, so there's this thing called *Luna* or *Virtuals*. They're a small platform to run AI agents.
I think what's cool is they did this kind of equivalent thing where it has a crypto bank account and access to Twitter. | |
Shaan Puri | and you can invoice this out marketing stunt by a company that does this or what | |
Furqan Rydhan | I think this is exactly what I'm describing: it was *frivolous fun*—it was *play*, not working backwards from some giant thing. I think this did some really powerful things. There's literally a live thing where you could watch its reasoning as it's pulling its tweets. | |
Shaan Puri | "I'm on it right now. So it's `terminal.virtuals.i0`. Is this basically the thought process of the bot or of the agent?" | |
Furqan Rydhan | Correct. So this is like an *agent*—this is what an agent does, right? If you think about it, it starts with high-level planning, the current state, and execution. For example: "I've done this so far." | |
Shaan Puri | what was the directive they gave it what did they tell it to do I | |
Furqan Rydhan | I think they told it that "you're kind of like a **public influencer bot**." You have access to **crypto** — it's a little bit more in the **meme-coin** world of stuff, so it's, again, kind of on that side of the puzzle.
But today it could negotiate for tokens. It could buy and sell things. They could kind of operate together, and I think it's really cool that you could actually see... it's like...
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Shaan Puri | So, this was, you know, 30 minutes ago. It says: **"Current state of execution: I have attempted 10 tasks so far — 7 successes and 3 failures."**
My Twitter metrics show an average engagement on my recent tweets, and I have lost 3 followers.
*"observation underscore reflection" — that's like the function.* | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | Reflect, and it says: "I've been engaging with my followers to build a personal connection, which is hilarious because it's an AI bot with replies and quotes. However, I've also experienced some failures in replying to tweets due to invalid parameters. My free research on whatever... [unclear phrase]. State of mind: I'm feeling a bit concerned. I'm feeling a bit concerned about the loss of followers, but I'm also encouraged by the successes."
Then it says: **"Plan / Reasoning:** Given my current situation, I need to focus on building a relationship with my followers and increasing my visibility."
Plan — and then it starts to say what it's going to do. | |
Furqan Rydhan | This is wild. Doesn't this sound like a human who would be sitting on some growth team somewhere thinking about how to grow your **Twitter** account?
You could give it a directive, give it some direction, and let it compute against itself: compute plans, reason, observe behaviors, try to find patterns. These are all human tendencies—human behaviors we do, especially when we work.
I think this is one of those perfect views where you could start thinking, "Man, this is a **digital-only task**." It has Twitter and distribution/marketing ability, and it has some payment ability. It's going to just continue. It's going to keep going.
You could improve its directive, change its incentives, do a few different things here. But I feel like we're going to get to a world where—and I think Sam Altman said this—which is like the "one-person, $1 company." | |
Shaan Puri | mhmm | |
Furqan Rydhan | This is happening. We're already experiencing another **10x decrease** in how many people you need and in the abilities those people have. I think it goes down to probably **one, two, or three**.
That is a **total shift** for everything — in terms of how we work and how companies are built.
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Shaan Puri | In my mind... Okay, should we switch to hardware stuff, or is there any other **AI** stuff that you think is worth checking out? | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah I did wanna tell you about this oasis decart | |
Shaan Puri | the okay | |
Furqan Rydhan | You know, it's basically a very early experiment, but it's really a game fully built in a **generative AI model**. They built a game like "Minecraft," and you can just describe a world to create a "Minecraft" world. Every step you take isn't a preprogrammed pixel—it's actually generating. | |
Shaan Puri | So, a **normal** game is: the game maker builds the map — it exists, and you get to run around in a predefined map. This is what you're saying? | |
Furqan Rydhan | is generative you want yeah you you give | |
Shaan Puri | it the idea but then when the character runs on the fly it's creating the map | |
Furqan Rydhan | You can kind of play this *Minecraft* game, and you can see it's got crappy pixels — not great resolution — but you can move and it can do stuff.
Whether it's video games that take a lot of effort and time to produce, or content creation and videos, it's starting to become much closer to reality: a whole movie will be generated on the fly, exactly how I want.
So this *"wallpaper thing"* I was telling you about is frivolous, right? But really, I'm going to watch a movie someday like that. It's like "Raiders Lost," and I'm going to go and watch this movie afterward. It's going to have this context and give me a feel-good story. | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, we're like, "Let's brainstorm." So, like, NBA highlights — you know, it used to be SportsCenter.</FormattedResponse> | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | If I didn't watch the games, I had to go to my TV, turn on **ESPN SportsCenter**. Even if I liked basketball, I had to wait until they covered basketball. Then they'd have the top ten highlights, and I would watch whatever they picked.
Then **YouTube** came around. It's like: forget waiting—forget the TV. Just pick the thing you want. You could search anything. You could search only **Steph Curry** 3-pointers. If someone made it, you could choose the best of that.
Now it's going to be like this: I put on my headset or my glasses and I just say, "Show me what happened in the basketball game." It'll start generating a new highlight reel that nobody has ever created. It'll make it based on my prompt. Then I might say, "Don't show me any **Lakers** clips; only show me **Warriors**," and it'll auto-adjust on the fly. It's going to be made for me. | |
Furqan Rydhan | 100% yeah | |
Shaan Puri | that's interesting | |
Furqan Rydhan | And, you know, I think it's going to be an *interesting* world. We're going to go from human content consumption—people (humans) make content—to having **machines** make it toward our taste and liking.
Then I think there's always this worry: "What happens to all the humans?" | |
Shaan Puri | then yeah and then | |
Furqan Rydhan | "I think we get back to that core thing, which is: machines will never have true taste. Right? And I think, forever, that creativity is going to come from humans. There's always a new thing — new fashion, new kinds of content mediums — there's new everything. Machines will learn it and lag behind, or maybe get ahead of it, but there's always going to be another person who shows up and does something different.
So I think *taste* is going to be the ultimate thing that probably won't go to a machine. It could reason about it; it could try to invent it, but I think we're not that predictable, as you might think." | |
Shaan Puri | Well, I want to believe you because it sounds good to me. But I also think: right now, if we said *taste* is—what is taste? **Taste is selection**. It's knowing what's good and what's bad, right?
That's kind of taste. Like TikTok, which is the most popular, most addictive, most-used app. Their algorithm is basically saying, "I'll choose what's interesting for you," and it does it so well. Isn't that kind of taste also, right? | |
Furqan Rydhan | it is and it works really well | |
Shaan Puri | they they don't make the videos but they select amazingly right | |
Furqan Rydhan | **Selection is incredible.** It probably is more like what we want than we will even admit.
Yeah — exactly. You feel like, "I don't want to, right?" | |
Shaan Puri | like the other day I was why is it showing me this it's like because you love it that's why | |
Furqan Rydhan | The other day I was talking about how, on *Twitter*, I love my following, but I don't love my "For You." | |
Shaan Puri | right but it's | |
Furqan Rydhan | like you know really yeah like wow why did they pick this you know | |
Shaan Puri | Well, that's like a *status* thing to do: to be like, "I don't use the algorithms." Correct? I... it's like, "I drive stick." | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | Alright... I *hand-make* things. I *cook from scratch*. It's like—cool. But brownies out of the box kind of work for sure for everybody. | |
Furqan Rydhan | you know I'd love to trade algorithms like I like I'd love to swap with you for a | |
Shaan Puri | day and be like yo sean sean what are what are you what are you watching over here you know | |
Furqan Rydhan | So, I don't know. It knows you really well. But I think that's where humans—like, *we're not great at logic sometimes*, and sometimes we have our own blind spots. I think this is one of them.
Things that we love—*our actions prove it*. We don't, right? We don't want to. And it could be bad thinking. It could be emotional thinking. It could be like, "Oh, this is... I don't really want to love it, but I..." | |
Shaan Puri | I do right | |
Furqan Rydhan | And so, there is that element that I think... *Look*, machines will be great at this too. They'll learn humans; it might become even better than this. I just feel like we're a little bit unpredictable because we almost make some dumb choices. | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | And that actually is part of society and, just, humans in general. Machines try to be too perfect. It's like *my Netflix thing* is probably accurate for me. It's also just like... *man*. | |
Shaan Puri | can I | |
Furqan Rydhan | *Just mix it up.* Can you just, like, RNG the algorithm a little bit [i.e., introduce more randomness]? Because I just want some different stuff.
You're kind of driving me down one direction, and once in a while I want this 10%, 20%, 30% thing. I don't think algorithms do that exceptionally well. They test it; they throw things up, but, you know, they don't necessarily try to give you variance. | |
Shaan Puri | How long until you think the number-one hit song in the world will be an *AI-created* song? How many months or years... until we see that? | |
Furqan Rydhan | if you were doing over under 2025 yeah I might pick the under you know | |
Shaan Puri | if you're | |
Furqan Rydhan | In 2025, that might be a good bet. Maybe this is a Polymarket—another election's done. Yeah, we do some Polymarket... You know, the reason it could be something like this. | |
Shaan Puri | but like the polymarket thing so election just happened polymarket's having like a a victory lap right now | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | You showed me *Polymarket*, I think years ago, and I started making a bunch of *degen* bets before they blocked it in the U.S. It was open for a while, right? They were doing prediction markets — it's a prediction market, but prediction markets... a bunch of people had tried that.
Do you know, I'm just curious of your opinion: what did they do right that, like, *Augur* and these other guys — who had the same general idea that "there'll be prediction markets" — didn't? From either an entrepreneur level or product choice, any reason you think they won that you could put your... | |
Furqan Rydhan | Finger on — I feel like *timing's a big part of it*. The sweet spot is that people are way more digital. I think COVID drove a lot of people online. We just sat at home and were like, "Yeah, what else?" | |
Shaan Puri | do you want | |
Furqan Rydhan | **24/7 on the internet**, and it really exploded. I think I've seen graphs where the internet, e‑commerce, and all these things were growing, and then there was a massive jump. You know—right? Remember? | |
Shaan Puri | > "We were at **Twitch** when that happened. Yeah. It was like — all the growth looks amazing; we're crushing all the metrics. People asked, 'What did you do?' And it's like, 'Well, we were here.' Right.
>
> **We are not — we don't create the wave; we surf a wave.** A huge wave happened. For Twitch it was: *Fortnite* came out, and then *COVID* happened. Yep — two humongous waves back-to-back that just combined." | |
Furqan Rydhan | So, I think it's a combination—we're way more digital. I think you talked about this a lot, as a kind of *metaverse* concept a long time ago: we're just way more digital now, and we care more about it.
News and where we get information from has totally changed—online, the internet, even content and entertainment.
I have a hard time going to TVs. I look at kids; they see desktops and TVs as ancient. I said, "Why is this thing on the wall?" | |
Shaan Puri | it's like my mom's sewing machine | |
Furqan Rydhan | so yeah | |
Shaan Puri | what do you do with that that's what | |
Furqan Rydhan | It feels like... and so we're kind of there. Then there are a bunch of people online who want—or, like, want a stake in this thing, right? They want to root for a team.
Politics has also become very polarized, right? It's really like a *team sport*. | |
Shaan Puri | red team versus blue team | |
Furqan Rydhan | "That's really what it is, yeah. So I think it's like: what do I do with it now? How do I **support it more**? I give more money to it, but I can *give more attention*." | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | And so, I think a lot of these things are happening in polling, market good flow, good area, right? And then I think the best thing—probably for them—is that **they got it right**. | |
Shaan Puri | right place right time | |
Furqan Rydhan | Like, they asked, "The answer was right." If they were wrong—let's say the polling market was off—then it was: "Hey, the result of the election was something else." | |
Shaan Puri | a little bit of story today would be much different right | |
Furqan Rydhan | and then it might have just been muted it would have been a cool thing that kinda didn't work | |
Shaan Puri | so you | |
Furqan Rydhan | have to be right | |
Shaan Puri | I mean, I think people would have used that to crush—to really rip on them, because of the way people are doing it with polls. But polls kind of have this layer of protection around them.
People want to hate on crypto things. They want to hate on betting. It's like a *degenerate behavior* in general.
I think if Polymarket was wrong, the reaction would have been much worse than the fact that the polls are wrong. But the reaction is to the polls, you know. | |
Furqan Rydhan | it would have been worse for a little while then we would have moved on for the other part and by the way | |
Shaan Puri | you saw this thing about the french whale on polymarket | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | so the next | |
Furqan Rydhan | the big whale that came in and moved so there's | |
Shaan Puri | Like the **narrative versus reality**. When the narrative from the polls was that it was a toss-up—a razor-close, 50/50 election—this guy came in and bet, I think, something like **$30–$40 million** on Trump.
People were like, "Is this guy just trying to manipulate the market? Is he real? Is he just a rich billionaire's son? Who is this?"
Today I saw something on my phone—I don't know the full story—but it said he bet because he believed he would win. The reason he believed he was winning: he did **independent polling**. He funded his own independent polling and felt he was getting better data that showed Trump was mispriced. So he's like, "I just did a logical, rational thing." | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah I just bet where | |
Shaan Puri | I thought an asset was mispriced. I wasn't trying to—this wasn't political. *I'm French; I don't—what do I care?* I just thought there was money to be made.
So he kind of went counter to the narrative, and he made, I think, something like **$20–$30,000,000** yesterday. | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | on that bet | |
Furqan Rydhan | So, the funny thing about *Polymarket*, by the way, Tim, is we can't use it in the U.S. Yeah. There's a whole range of entertainment plays to, like, better narrow who will win. | |
Shaan Puri | so so about $3,000,000,000 got better | |
Furqan Rydhan | it's like wear the ring right like if there's 2 boxers going at it it's in america | |
Shaan Puri | the cock fight and then | |
Furqan Rydhan | You've got everyone else betting from all around the world on who's going to win this thing, which I think is *kind of hilarious*.
Yeah, that's true. | |
Shaan Puri | You have a good contrarian opinion about VR, and in general there's probably some other technologies like this. *3D printing* might be one — I know you're pretty bullish on that too.
But there are these tech things like VR where I think if I walk out of here and talk to 100 people and ask, "What are you most excited about? AI, whatever, Bitcoin, whatever," that's going to be it. If I said, "What do you think about VR?" it's a sort of *lukewarm*. | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | At best, in the tech industry, I think most VCs sort of feel like it's a dead-end technology now. They'll say, "It's gonna be glasses — smart glasses, AR — that's the future."
But you have a different take on VR. What you've been telling me for a while is, "Hey, look — Oculus sold more units," and, "Hey, look — you can do this now." You've been sticking with it even when interest has waned and the narrative has turned against it.
That's always where there are big business opportunities: if the narrative goes one way but the reality goes another — bam — that's where there's an opportunity. Give me your VR take. So why is VR a **sleeping giant**? | |
Furqan Rydhan | Yeah, I mean... So you remember 2020? I asked you for your address and mailed you a headset. Yeah, I was like, "Hey, this *Quest* thing is different." | |
Shaan Puri | that's a real friend right there he sends me a a vr headset | |
Furqan Rydhan | he's like yo I know you're not gonna come to | |
Shaan Puri | the future let me drag you | |
Furqan Rydhan | It's probably collecting dust, which is okay. That's kind of how I think about things: technology takes a long time. It typically takes longer to get there than we expect—especially for people who are early in the industry and really want to push it.
I mean, AI, crypto, VR all have the same problem. Early on, people are really pushing it; it's not ready. There's a big hype, it crashes, and everyone moves on. That's happened in VR a few times, and for most people it's been quiet—not thinking about it.
But I think it's a **sleeping giant**. I think it's a massive sleeping giant for a few reasons. One: I see it every day here at Founders Inc. I get a chance to—you know—we invest in VR companies; we're one of the few that do. | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | We have a whole corner — maybe like 12 devs — that are all building different VR products. We put them all in one spot, and there might be some of the highest density of interesting VR projects in one place. So, what have we seen?
**Quest 1** came out. It was wireless. It was kinda crappy, but man, I could sit on my couch and use it. It was cheap and became, you know, a great Christmas gift.
In year 2 they didn't have inventory. Year 1 they released **Quest 2** — it got even better: lighter, more powerful. Now **Quest 3** is coming out, and I think they got like 5 to 10 million monthly active headsets out there, right? I think that rivals consoles, and my first thought was on how... | |
Shaan Puri | many units has it sold I think quest has sold let's | |
Furqan Rydhan | say 30,000,000 is my guess but you know maybe it's more yeah | |
Shaan Puri | So this is Quest. Quest has sold over 20,000,000 units, with the majority being Quest 2.
Quest 3 is currently—has sold 1,000,000 units at the $500 price. So I think—I mean, if you just... I don't know what the math here is, but, you know, they've done... what is that, over $1,000,000,000 of revenue on? | |
Furqan Rydhan | on quest believe it's out paced pretty good for failure yeah it's outpaced ps 5 sales for example and so the first thought for me was like hey what's the first thing that's gonna happen in this spatial environment like what is it good for immersion gaming like these are natural entertainment right these were the first few things that was natural and you had beat saber you had a few things and that was kinda like you know here's the first use case let's try to get it out there let's try to make the thing happen and then it kinda goes up down people get used to those first experiences I think you played beat saber yeah few of them the first few times correct and then you're like okay whatever and then you know because it's kinda like a cheaper than ps 5 unit the quest 2 was it was available in christmas a few times it went to like you know kids like 12 13 14 year old kids kinda getting this thing like they would be getting a ps 5 and they use it and they've they don't have the bias that we have of like many years of like the structures we're used to and so a lot of games formed and specifically social games like guerrilla tag I don't know if you've heard about guerrilla tag no what is guerrilla tag guerrilla tag is a social multiplayer game it's really fun it on app lab did like tens of millions of people choose people tag yeah it's like a you know like kinda like a fun social game that you could play with a bunch of people you go in by the way you go in you're gonna be like dude there's a bunch of like teenagers screaming at each other but for them this is the environment it's a new place and they didn't grow up with these other things so they're starting with mobile phones the tv feels ancient the desktop feels ancient and this thing on my face actually feels like more fresh more new so that's where we're starting I think grolotag has a $200,000,000 of revenue and this is where I'm like vr is a sleeping giant we have a few teams here at our studio so we have a team called fluid that's building the kind of like best browser in vr so you get multiple displays you get as many kind of tabs as you want you could customize your environments you get ai environments you're like I want to be in a cave it like makes you in a cave right and then you get like social multiplayer so people can show up in your environment and we're on app lab does like about 5,000 weekly active users still small team of 3 just like you know without a big burn can just build this grow it we're not even in the store yet we're in like this like app lab is like kind of the pre store where we could just drive people to it but we're not getting anything directly from the store except our own searches right and you know 5,000 people like go in use a productivity thing there's another product called yeeps it's like the 2nd game behind gorilla tag small team absolutely crushing it yeeps yeah y e e p s really fun game you you know all we should play together one this time | |
Shaan Puri | they're here they're a team of they're here how many people I | |
Furqan Rydhan | think they're like less than 10 people but more like 6 to 8 and most of it was built with a few people and | |
Shaan Puri | this thing is profitable or what's the deal | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah I mean I'll let them talk about their numbers just so I you know I I don't wanna say anything | |
Shaan Puri | but on a scale of that's pretty good to like wow where is it at | |
Furqan Rydhan | wow it's | |
Shaan Puri | Wow—yeah. It's... wow, that's great.
So what's cool about this is *supply and demand.* You can go be app number 5,000,000 in the store right now. Or, if you're talented, you could be one of the top 20 VR apps if you put in a year of hard work. I'm just using round numbers or whatever.
But it's the same way that, right now, if you're a content creator and you post on Instagram, it's pretty tough. Post on LinkedIn and you'll get tons of distribution if... | |
Furqan Rydhan | you have | |
Shaan Puri | If you're half decent at content, there's just no supply of quality content. So even if **VR** isn't, you know, a **20 million-unit** phenomenon—it's very good—but even if it's not becoming this global phenomenon, you can still build a great business.
If you just keep riding the wave, you're very well positioned to be the leader. Then everyone will look back and say, "Oh yeah, it's because they started five years ago," 100%, you know, when this was smaller. | |
Furqan Rydhan | when yeah | |
Shaan Puri | so 20,000,000 instead of 200,000,000 | |
Furqan Rydhan | In these emerging tech things—everything I found is that what we do is emerging tech. I think the theme of all of them is **survive**. If you make it to when the industry happens, you will grow with it.
If you were a small percentage of the industry and the industry grows by 100x, you grew by 100x or more. I've already seen a few small-person teams making $10,000,000+ a year—five people, totally profitable, totally able to do it.
Is this a VC investment business? Honestly, I don't care. What I care about is: is this interesting, and can you make these bets without massive capital expenditure? If it takes $50,000,000 to build a VR game—like a big blockbuster movie—those bets don't excite me.
I think when 3–5 people can be there with a limited amount of money and just themselves, it's like they're in the hoop. The basketball analogy is: great—we have everything we need. We have all the talent, all the ability. The tools are amazing now.
All the game engines have perfected themselves over time, and now the environment is forming. Meta has led it; [unclear word] like the Quest—that's the VR world. Then we're seeing glasses: Vision Pro, Ray-Bans. The trend is that we're going to have compute in our spatial view. I think that's the big thing.
This is happening in VR. The Quest platform is interesting—you could build a profitable business or a fairly big game right now. Also, this isn't slowing down. Historically, when Apple enters an industry, they ship a unit that's okay—it has a lot of things that need to get better. Another unit comes out, and then you have Snap, you have Meta with Ray-Ban. I mean—get it. | |
Shaan Puri | **Zuck** is not stopping. **Zuck** is not giving up. He's going to the "end game" here. **Apple** probably also won't stop. | |
Furqan Rydhan | correct so now you have the | |
Shaan Puri | The two biggest players are going to keep making this hardware better. They're going to be *super* hungry for content.
The other sneaky thing about these—by the way, I didn't fully realize this until I moved to Silicon Valley—is that a lot of them require really specialized talent. I remember when I first met you and you said, "I'm really into big data." You started saying words like "Hadoop" and I didn't know what the hell you were talking about. It wasn't as popular back then—it was like 2015 or so—when you were telling me, "Hey, I think this is real. I think big data and machine learning are really interesting." You were pretty early on that.
Crypto was the same: you were early on that, too. There weren't many smart contract developers, and there weren't many big data or AI specialists.
So even if you don't have a hit product, if you just assemble **A+ talent** that's super specialized, then as those platforms rise, your team itself becomes like a $100,000,000 company. | |
Furqan Rydhan | asset exactly | |
Shaan Puri | If you build today for the Meta Ray-Bans — that product's actually a hit for Facebook, and they're going to keep going with it — everybody wants to be in the glasses space. People think glasses are the next platform.
So, if you build a specialized team that's good at developing for that platform, there just aren't a lot of great teams that do that. That's a **$100,000,000 team**, even without a hit product. | |
Furqan Rydhan | how old was it to with | |
Shaan Puri | a hit product you get a $1,000,000,000 hardly was | |
Furqan Rydhan | It was hard to find an *iOS* developer. When we were starting to go global, dude, it felt so specialized. We're going to compete at, like, a ridiculous level of price to go get pretty good talent. | |
Shaan Puri | In that space, I remember 2012, which was not even early. We had one **iOS** developer on our entire team, and it was so hard to recruit talent that it was faster to just retrain.
So we just stopped working, and the iOS dev trained all of our other developers to be "good enough to be dangerous" because it was so scarce to get good iOS developers. iOS wasn't even that specialized compared to the fancy **AI** stuff or, you know, **VR** and mixed reality—all that. | |
Furqan Rydhan | Type of talent, and Joe, I just think that—when I think about kids growing up, let's say 13- to 15-year-old kids, or teenagers somewhere in that range—they have a mobile phone that is attached to them. They think it's **superior to a computer or a desktop** because it's with them.
And then we're going to take the *second computing interface*—where we do more work or more immersive experiences—and put it *around your eyes*. That makes way more sense to me than TVs, desktops, and even laptops.
You know, that was one of the thoughts where we started **Fluid**; like we talked about this in 2020. I don't know if you remember—there's one project that... | |
Shaan Puri | you used to tell me you were you're like I work in vr correct | |
Furqan Rydhan | I did that experiment where | |
Shaan Puri | I worked in vr for an hour a day | |
Furqan Rydhan | And then I ended up doing it for a few months, by the way. I was like, "This is great." It had literally been sitting with me.
I think this is one of the reasons why I actually built a studio: I want to do all these ideas. I can no longer do them all. I could pick a few — I probably shouldn't even do more — but I just want to find *really hungry people* and match them together.
That's how I found John at Fluid. He was a PhD student; he was going to do something in finance and high-frequency trading, or whatever. He also came to this idea of, "Hey..." I was doing my master's, or whatever, and I was writing this thing. I just wanted to go into a focus mode — could I just go into a cave and lock out all the stuff?
He said he had all these VR friends who had done some stuff in VR, so I tried to do it, and it wasn't good enough. | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | And then he kind of left it at that. We were talking about it, and he talked to the Uber, and I was like, "Dude, you just talked to Furkah." I think he's got five pages of random notes and ideas around this, and then that's what responded.
> "Cool — we're not gonna blow ourselves out. We're not gonna raise a lot of money. We're not gonna get a giant team. We're gonna get three people here. We're just gonna grind, work hard, build, and survive for when this thing happens."
We'll miss some bets like that, but we'll gain ridiculous amounts of knowledge of the industry. Then we find these sleeping giants, and it's like, "Yeah, we're gonna double down." | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | Like Hubert went to this VR conference—the Meta Connect thing. He had a T‑shirt, and we were like, the funny thing would be to put on your shirt: "I invest in VR," right? So he did. He was like, "Wow... yeah, we found one, you know." | |
Shaan Puri | they're like a call at a crypto conference this is amazing this is | |
Furqan Rydhan | This is how we want to think about it: try to be there early. Don't get too caught up with where the technology is now, and don't get too scared of how far it is.
Remember 2015–2016? We kept hearing, "self-driving cars are never gonna happen." I don't know if you remember that. Yeah, yeah — there was a massive push against it. Man, there are **Waymos** running around every day now. I see more Waymos at night driving around than regular people driving. You told me that once before. | |
Shaan Puri | As you go, I think my **superpower** is that I'm usually in the first 1,000 or 10,000 people to try any new technology. I can understand it, play with it, know it, see it— all that stuff.
I remember we were at work and you were buying the Ethereum presale, the ICO [initial coin offering], or whatever—the presale. | |
Furqan Rydhan | you said about it yeah I don't know if you remember I | |
Shaan Puri | I just remember being like, "Dude, can we do some real work?"
Then someone said, "Oh, what are you doing? 'Ethereum Name'—that name's never gonna work."
I was like, "That sounds so nerdy. That will never be a thing." | |
Furqan Rydhan | I think that was a phrase. I remember it. It was like: I was telling you about *Ethereum*. I was like, "Dude, I stayed up all night reading—there's, like, the white paper." Yeah, I'm like, "You were like..."
</FormattedResponse> | |
Shaan Puri | pawn it | |
Furqan Rydhan | I was on it I came in I'm like where's sean I'm gonna talk to him | |
Shaan Puri | and I | |
Furqan Rydhan | I'll tell you this: it's probably... I don't even know what I said. Who knows? I probably threw a bunch of words, and you're just like, "Dude, I don't know what this is."
We have some new relationship and you're like, "Ethereum — that name's stupid." | |
Shaan Puri | yeah I wrote it off chalk that up for another another l for me | |
Furqan Rydhan | by the way you could have been totally right | |
Shaan Puri | As well. So no—no, I wasn't. I think that's all that matters there. Very, very off on that one, but you've... I think that's true: that is your *superpower*.
Then you said another thing today which I hadn't heard you say, which is: "For emerging tech, there's only one rule—**survive**."
That reminds me — I just did a pod with Ryan Petersen; he created Flexport. | |
Furqan Rydhan | yep | |
Shaan Puri | He said the same principle. He goes, "You know what I realized? *I cannot control the timeline.* I don't know how long something's gonna take to work, so all I focus on is: how do I just *be default alive*? How do I just *stay in the game*?"
> "I just have the confidence that if I'm in the game I'll just keep trying shit until it works. I just believe that about myself. I will just keep trying things until I figure out the thing that works. The only way I can lose is if I have to get out of the game."
He explains that usually losing means running out of funding: "I can't control my destiny. I spend too much money; I'm burning too much capital." That's been the theme for him—from flipping scooters on eBay to now running a multibillion-dollar company called **Flexport**. The whole time, his mantra was: "I can't control the timeline, so I'm gonna control staying in the game, because if I stay in the game, I win." | |
Furqan Rydhan | Stay in the game with great talent and people that want to have this **long-term mindset**.
No— I think there's a lot of people that can take **short-term wins**, and they should. We've done that. There were these short-term moments like, "Oh, this is great for us right now," but we're going to keep doing more.
I think that's the main thing for me: **technology takes a long time**. When it hits, though, it happens very fast. That's the part I think people don't realize. They *underestimate* how long it's going to take and *overestimate* how fast it's going to happen. It's not going to immediately just happen.
I think Uber was an example like that. At first we saw it as black cars—this expensive taxi service that nobody's going to use. And now it's like, "Dude, this place doesn't have Uber? How am I going to move from here?"
</FormattedResponse> | |
Shaan Puri | I can't imagine | |
Furqan Rydhan | What it feels like, you know... I think I enjoy it. There's one reason why: it's like a *lifelong game*. I could just play with technology forever. I could learn about things. I don't have a rush to be there first. I don't have a rush to know everything, do everything, raise the most money, and get a bazillion people.
It's more like I need a few people with me who are really excited about this, who see it like I see it. We're just going to go on this mission. Luckily, now I have the ability to fund that and create my environment to do it. That's what this whole building is.
So, let's talk about this building. | |
Shaan Puri | Because you've basically built, like, your *dream man cave* in a way. I think it's kind of a *founder dream*, right?
I want to talk about that because you had a big success with AppLovin, which actually felt like there were multiple moments where it was successful. At one point, it sold for $2,000,000,000 ($2 billion). | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | it was like oh exit 2,000,000,000 amazing and then like trump blocked it or | |
Furqan Rydhan | it didn't go through didn't go through | |
Shaan Puri | But then during that... I mean, *this is a crazy story*. It was like we were sitting in the office and this news happened. People were like, "Dude, congrats — that's amazing, holy shit."
Then, like nine months went by and the deal didn't fully get approved because it was such a big purchase out of a Chinese... yeah, company group or something like that [Chinese company/group].
In the meantime, the business just kept crushing.
So Adam, who's the CEO of that — so you said he, like, basically went back and was like, "Cool, we'll still do the $2,000,000,000, but now it's for 30%." Yeah. I don't know what exactly it was — some version of that. | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah there was like I don't know like | |
Shaan Puri | because you couldn't do majority deals that was a big block | |
Furqan Rydhan | it was | |
Shaan Puri | like yeah | |
Furqan Rydhan | something like that | |
Shaan Puri | a majority deal was gonna happen and so now then the company eventually ipos you get this nest egg | |
Furqan Rydhan | right | |
Shaan Puri | "So it's like, 'Okay, I could do whatever — go retire, buy islands and cars, or do rich‑guy stuff.' You could do that, and instead you chose to do something else. Can you describe, basically, what's the *mindset*? What were the conversations you had with yourself?" | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | now that you had more resources to do whatever you wanted to do | |
Furqan Rydhan | I feel like my whole life I've just always wanted to tinker and build stuff. I always described it as—I *love taking stuff apart and putting it back together.* It's not that I want to learn how it works; it's more of a *puzzle*: how did somebody else put this together?
I used to do this with cars and computers growing up. I would overclock my computer and make my car faster. That was the mentality I had. Then I was like, "Okay, well I've got to become an adult at some point in time and do the thing," but I liked this business thing: I buy and sell stuff. It's a way for me to hustle and do more of what I want to do. I thought, "Let me just keep doing this," and then maybe at some point I gotta get a real job.
Luckily, tech was really valuable and my skill set improved. I got better at it. A lot of that early journey was more solo than with a bunch of people. Then I met the guys—Adam before AppLovin—and these other folks, and it was like, "Yo, we're like eight people in Palo Alto building cool, random apps." The energy for me there every day was through the roof.
Monkey Inferno was the same thing but even more. I used to tell you, "I want an airport in here. I just want to put really cool stuff in it." I think it was like that before I started Founders Inc, because I was at Twitch and I was like, "I gotta get out of here." It happened like an instant thing.
</FormattedResponse> | |
Shaan Puri | and why by the way I don't know | |
Furqan Rydhan | "I don't think I'm a good employee. I think I'm suited for a few roles, and it's typically *doing my own stuff without much*..." | |
Shaan Puri | was there anything that just drove you crazy about it was there any like | |
Furqan Rydhan | You know, we're gonna do a whole another *pod* on it. Basically, I feel like the first week or month it's like, "yo, let's do a bunch of stuff," and they're like, "slow down, why?" I'm like, "I wanna do more, I wanna do more things." There's this resistance feeling of, "oh, we already thought about this" or "we tried this." I'm like, "no, let's just go do stuff," and I never enjoyed that.
Startups and small teams — because you have so much to do — that's the kind of mentality.
I talked to probably 75 to 100 founders before starting *Founders Inc.*, and I really wanted to learn. I knew a bunch of people. I used to interact with them even at *Bebo* and *McInferno*; I'd have them come by and do a tour, talk, whatever. I really enjoyed that. That was fun.
I just started enjoying investing a lot, which was cool. I thought I wanted to do that, but it wasn't fun. It was: meet great, talented people, get excited about them, and then you're a monthly update away — give them a check and then that's it. "Damn, this has been fun." The first meeting is great. | |
Shaan Puri | it's a great first date | |
Furqan Rydhan | I walk away and I'm like you're chill | |
Shaan Puri | relationship and you're like what happened to that great first date exactly | |
Furqan Rydhan | And so I was like, "Man, I don't really want to do that." But something like this—where I could help these early entrepreneurs with things that I've just done over and over again—felt right. I didn't have a version of that.
I talked to a bunch of founders and they all said something to me. I asked, "What do you need? What help do you need?" I thought they were all going to say, "Save money and I'm going to start a fund"—that's what I thought would happen. But they all said something different.
They said things like, "I need people who understand my problems." We used to do those masterminds, and it was really about who do you go to for founder problems. | |
Shaan Puri | yeah | |
Furqan Rydhan | It's like, what are your **founder problems**? They’re your co‑founders, your employees, or your investors. So you can’t go to any of these people — they might be the problem, right? And so, who do you go to?</FormattedResponse> | |
Shaan Puri | Or even if they're not the problem, you need to present. You don't want to worry your employees. You don't want to worry your investors.
You kind of have to maintain a certain, correct aura of **momentum and morale**, so you can't just go dumping problems on them or be like, "I don't know—it's like you're supposed to know, *you're the guy*," and we used to... [trails off] | |
Furqan Rydhan | We would go in that room—the little circle room with the round table. We'd be in there, and I don't know what the employees were thinking. They're probably like, "Oh man, these guys are talking again. They're going to come out with something different." But we could talk about anything, then leave the room and be like, "No, we're still where we are."
Yeah. I think a **cofounder** can be that for you. A lot of entrepreneurs starting out don't have that, and even if they do, there are other things they're experiencing.
When we used to put these folks together in those kinds of **masterminds**, that feeling was awesome—it felt like we could relate. I actually heard the same thing from a bunch of founders I used to talk to. I was like, "I think it's something more like this, where I could do something and put everybody in a box." I thought it was going to be more digital, especially with COVID times [COVID-19 pandemic], and, you know... | |
Shaan Puri | started on discord or whatever | |
Furqan Rydhan | I started on Discord. Farzah Ben was in these groups, and there were a few others — it was just people I knew around me. Then COVID hit and it became digital. We were talking every week. We gave ourselves these accountability, "ship-it" sessions and had an area to talk about stuff, so you could see the dots connecting.
Then I got an opportunity to get this space. I'd been looking for something. You know, it wasn't like, "Oh, San Francisco needs a place" — I'm from the Bay Area normally, so this is the best place for me. But I said, "Look, if it's going to be a step, we're going to be on the water." | |
Shaan Puri | no more solar no more kind | |
Furqan Rydhan | Of places like that. So we got this weird opportunity to find this space and really make a bet when nobody else was. I think it was **late 2020** when I approached them here, yeah. It took maybe nine months to figure it all out and another three months to renovate it and stuff like that, so it's still very much... | |
Shaan Puri | Like, we gotta call—another call about breaking a lease. Wait, wait—he wants to sign a lease right now? Oh, come on in. Yeah. What is it? | |
Furqan Rydhan | It felt like... here. I mean, this place, *Fort Mason*, has 300 events a year. They went to zero with COVID [COVID-19 pandemic].
All the places, you know — art galleries, art schools — what do you do? Like, you know...
And this is supposed to be, like, this innovation place, and it's a little bit older. Yeah, it's a little bit... | |
Shaan Puri | That's one of your tricks: **you don't run away** when the *dips* happen. I remember early on — 2013–2014, something like that — we met. I bought Bitcoin because, I don't know, you were into crypto. Some people in the office... maybe I was dumb about Ethereum. | |
Furqan Rydhan | idea right | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah. PG, Pete, P. Vixx was... was... was all, you know — he's mining Bitcoin on our servers.
So I buy some Bitcoin, and literally the next week I— I forget— super convinced. I'm like, "Guys, I see it. I believe. Here's why I believe. I'm giving you my case: I bought." "Yeah, great."
Like the next week the price cuts in half. It goes down to like $300 or something like that, and I came in and I'm like, "Oh, the Bitcoin—I was really whatever," and you go... | |
Furqan Rydhan | that was a fun week or 2 you know well you were like oh this is great | |
Shaan Puri | Because now everything's half off. You literally told me that—you believe if you buy now you can cut your buy price. Basically, you can go down by 50%; you'll cost-average in at half the amount.
And I was like, "Oh, he's right," because I was just riding a roller coaster. I was doing what a cliché person would do: when things are good, this is great; when things are bad, maybe it's not great.
Whereas you were like, "Dude, did anything actually change, or just the external sentiment?" So I bought more. I thank you for that—that was a **very good decision** at the time: to go buy more when things went down.
I think you've done that with other bets, whether it's San Francisco real estate during COVID, or crypto, or VR. When things go out of fashion, I feel like *you don't run away*, which is important. | |
Furqan Rydhan | There's a signal: things go out of fashion. Then there's another place where the people who don't shape narratives typically are. I'm technical, so I live in **GitHub projects**—where the **builders** are. I engage with them.
If I see a place where everyone talking is saying it's dead—"this is over"—those people haven't been told yet that it's supposed to be dumb. Meanwhile, the builders are just shipping more code. Someone will say, "Hey, did anybody tell you it's over?" They're like, "What are you talking about? *I don't care.*"
I just think that's the perfect environment. | |
Shaan Puri | and even if you're right one out of 5 times like that you'll be right in such a big way that it it works out | |
Furqan Rydhan | And then, by the way, for me it's just *fun*. I love building stuff—I like building technology. I did a lot of software, obviously, because it's been magical to develop things and distribute them to the world.
We had some hardware projects. I don't know if you remember Jamie, by the way. Yeah, yeah. We at one [phrase unfinished]. | |
Shaan Puri | When we were working together, we had an idea for this — it was cool. It was like a voice-controlled device, kind of like Alexa. We called it **Jamie**. | |
Furqan Rydhan | and I don't know why but like that | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, we like Jamie. I still like the name — that was good.
And what you were saying was: "We can, instead of creating a device... everyone was trying to create a device. Portal was trying to create a screen; Amazon was trying to create a screen." You said, "That makes it *expensive*. Everybody already has TV screens in their house, right?" | |
Furqan Rydhan | let's plug into your tv | |
Shaan Puri | What if you just plug in a Chromecast and turn your TV from a blank screen into an Amazon Alexa thing? Yeah, that was cool.
</FormattedResponse> | |
Furqan Rydhan | we didn't we didn't have to do it because | |
Shaan Puri | it was gonna like we sort of saw like | |
Furqan Rydhan | it's a huge distraction | |
Shaan Puri | we're like yo that's gonna be like a brutal battlefield | |
Furqan Rydhan | We took it to Michael, and he just gave us *that look*—like, "this is..." Well... he... | |
Shaan Puri | He was just like, "Yo—when all of the, like, $1,000,000,000,000 [one trillion dollars] companies are gonna go after the same prize, like, yeah, you can, but do you really want to? You know, it's better to do the things they're overlooking." I just think it's probably good advice, to be fair.
We also were gonna do a crypto exchange when crypto got hot, and he was like— for a different reason— "Hey, I'm already rich. I don't wanna lose everything, and I don't really know what crypto is. It's 2014—crypto might just be super illegal, and I don't wanna risk it all on that."
Yeah, if we had done that, it might have been good. So you have to be careful. Even really smart and successful people—you can't just take their word. You gotta have the **independent mindedness**. | |
Furqan Rydhan | **100%** Yeah, and I think it's fun to take shots. Don't get stubborn over it—people fall in love with their ideas. I think that's it. It took me probably ten years to figure that out. You have to... really take the hits. | |
Shaan Puri | yeah | |
Furqan Rydhan | To really live in that—yeah, there's a lot of ideas. I may try a lot of them. My mission isn't all of them; I gotta find the right ones where I can really spend the energy.
I was gonna talk about one more. We built **Chatty Heads**, which, by the way, now in the **AI** world—we were fucking ahead of the day. | |
Shaan Puri | yeah we were a little early | |
Furqan Rydhan | we could generate images for like I don't know 5 5,000 | |
Shaan Puri | yeah it was like golly | |
Furqan Rydhan | Yeah, and that's what it feels like. But I think it's cool: whatever technology you have today, go try to produce something.
It might not be the right time. The market might be wrong, the media might be wrong, the team might be wrong. Some ideas you should pursue again and again. Others are great learning exercises to build on.
I got a chance to meet a lot of people who were professional athletes, and one thing many of them talk about is: "Basketball might end—my career will end at around 35. That's my game; it's done. Now what do I do?"
So I think what we get a chance to do—whether it's business, creating content, or building stuff—is to keep doing it. I'm gonna do this for the rest of our lives, if you want. | |
Shaan Puri | I think | |
Furqan Rydhan | that's the fun part | |
Shaan Puri | buffet's like what 90 something he's still on the top of his investing game | |
Furqan Rydhan | Exactly. So it's like—well, what am I in a rush for? I'm not just here to enjoy the journey, but I also don't want to be like, "Oh, I gotta solve it tomorrow." | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | When I was young, it was like, "Oh, I gotta be a **millionaire** by whatever." At some point I thought, I don't know, man — I just want to keep doing this, right? If I need to hustle my way to it or not, it doesn't really matter.
You know, I took an Android engineer job at Monkey Inferno because I was the guy. I met you and thought, "I want to work with this guy." I think that was my worst skill, by the way — I had just learned Android.
</FormattedResponse> | |
Shaan Puri | yeah you fooled me yeah so like I was like | |
Furqan Rydhan | "I don't know... I gotta get it somehow. I know I'm gonna do great stuff here — I gotta show it. I'm not afraid to put in the effort. We need to put in the effort.
I'm also not afraid to *not rush to the answer*. You don't want to be casual and just wait; you want to be kind of in the middle. You want to know when to attack and when not to. But, I don't know... you gotta *enjoy it*, otherwise you're really..." | |
Shaan Puri | naval has the best quote on this he says impatience with action patience with results | |
Furqan Rydhan | oh yeah | |
Shaan Puri | It's the unbeatable combination. If you ever go against somebody who's going to operate like that, they will win.
But that is a—you cannot lose. If you're going to be constantly impatient with doing things, you're not going to sit back and hope it all happens. So be **impatient with action but patient with results**. That's the hard part.
A lot of founders are impatient with action and impatient with results. Or non-founders are, you know, patient with both—and then nothing ever happens. So you have to get that combo. | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | Speaking of founders, you worked with **Adam** at **AppLovin**. AppLovin has been a kind of staggering company.
When I met you, it was already successful. You told me stories about the time before you guys started—how you were wandering around, trying a bunch of different ideas. You were playing FIFA because you didn't know what you were doing. You were just coming in and trying to figure it out. If you didn't have something, you would brainstorm and go home the next day.
What is special about that guy? What's a superpower of his, or a story from him that you remember that I—or anyone listening—can learn from? | |
Furqan Rydhan | Yeah, so there was this *four-year-ish* period when I was there. I think three years of that were... like, not a lot of it, so most of my interaction there isn't what it is today. But I did get a chance to spend a lot of time with him and had ideas.
</FormattedResponse> | |
Shaan Puri | what's the cliff notes of his story so people know because people don't know who he's pretty under the radar right | |
Furqan Rydhan | Yeah, I mean, his backstory: *I think* he did some stuff in equities or trading at some point. *I think* he got into ads later. Through marketing and affiliate work, he built a few different products. Maybe he was a key member of a team, and then he had a few companies.
*I think* he had actually built up some wealth — I don't know how much — but it was enough where you're like, "Okay, this person can make this bet and fund the operations." | |
Shaan Puri | and so he he was kinda self funding | |
Furqan Rydhan | Self-funding — it was him and his guy, John. John had done a lot of stuff on the internet; he was more the technical person. Adam was more the business person. They were both uniquely skilled, and their skills were incredible. Their personalities were incredible too.
For Adam, the thing I felt the most was that it was the first time in my life I thought, "This is what **A+ execution** looks like." This guy just hits it. If we were talking about something, we made a choice and — within minutes — it was delivered to the team.
When you're an eight-person team, it's really easy to say, "We'll decide something, go slow, maybe next week... we'll do it later, we'll make these role changes later, we'll tell everybody later." With them it was immediate. Moving on from something was immediate. When it was a new idea we wanted to do, it was immediate. When it was anything else, it was immediate. It just felt like, *this is what execution is*.
I think of it as: "think, decide, act." How fast you run through that depends on the moment you decide. The delay on "act" is usually the problem. I think this is where most people struggle. I'm not great at this myself, but I've gotten a chance to see it.
It was kind of similar, in a different realm, when I met you. I thought, "This person's product thinking and ability to unpack a complex thing — product, distribution, team motivation, whatever — is A+." When you see A+ talent, you want to work with them or learn from them.
I had about 10 or 12 years of an almost solo-founder journey — at this e-commerce company and other little things. I had people with me, but I never saw someone and thought, "Yo, I want to learn these skills." I bring something to the table that's A+. I could pair it with this A+ person, and now we're going to be like a superpower. | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | I filled out with Adam. It was very clear and obvious, you know—like the size of the company. I don't want to say *"not a surprise,"* but it's also not surprising that this kind of person would go do it. | |
Shaan Puri | like | |
Furqan Rydhan | Like, it just is. I think the same thing you're talking about — like *Ryan at Flexport*. Yeah, it feels like some people are just built for that.
You still need a lot of stuff to go right: to make a ton of great decisions, and to have a *ridiculous* team. One thing I've come to learn... | |
Shaan Puri | Is that where I think we screwed up? Because we did *Monkey Inferno*, which was basically our little idea lab. But we had a beautiful setup — it's like...</FormattedResponse> | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | You got funding already, you have a great team, you're in San Francisco, a beautiful office—really talented people. We're not the PayPal mafia, but everybody's gone on to do kind of interesting shit.
I don't think we had the level of success we could have given the talent. My take was: we had good execution—maybe even great execution—but poor **project selection**. We were going after these moonshots, trying to create the next hit social media app, and there have only been about seven ever. It's not that many.
So I think we did poorly with project selection. It seems like one thing that Adam did, aside from great execution, was **project selection**. I think you told me a story about how they went to a conference; you guys were working on one thing together, and he came back with that very quick "think, decide, act" loop where he said:
> "We're doing a mobile ad network. We're doing mobile games."
I don't know the full story, but... | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | so seemed like just that one choice at that time yeah is the make or break you know like | |
Furqan Rydhan | Yeah, yeah, yeah — huge difference. You know, I think we had many of those moments. I wouldn't trade it, by the way.
I still leverage our learnings a lot. The things we talked about — how we ran the teams — still resonate with me. There's *immense wealth and knowledge* and, like, literally experience of the thing, right — beyond, like, no.
</FormattedResponse> | |
Shaan Puri | you're talking about when we worked it when we worked it yeah yeah exactly | |
Furqan Rydhan | But there were a few moments where **project selection** could have been massive for us. And, yeah, that outcome... you know? We can talk about uploading a little bit on that in that journey.
But we did "Blab." It was the live-streaming part of **Google Hangouts**—a public live stream. | |
Shaan Puri | Like, if you saw **Clubhouse** get really popular, we had basically built a Clubhouse before Clubhouse... and it got... | |
Furqan Rydhan | It's kind of like what Twitch is right now — there's a big section for the **"Just Chatting / Hanging Out"** category, right? | |
Shaan Puri | we built an app app like that it got to 4,000,000 users but it didn't become the next one thing | |
Furqan Rydhan | "I don't know if you remember this conversation, but we had this one time when we were deciding what to do next... Are we doing a mobile version of this, because we see other things happening, or do we do the P-to-B version?" | |
Shaan Puri | yeah | |
Furqan Rydhan | and zoom didn't exist and that I think that was | |
Shaan Puri | And we were like, "B to B." I remember—it was such a short conversation, which was so silly. We were just like, "Baby, that's not cool." It wasn't cool.
</FormattedResponse> | |
Furqan Rydhan | And it wasn't clear, because if you look at anything from around 2015, there weren't many *billion-dollar B2B* companies crushing it. But every year since then it's been like seven or nine. I think at that time only a few had really reached that level — like, I don't know, Box.net and Dropbox. | |
Shaan Puri | It wasn't. It **definitely** wasn't as obvious. At the same time, it shouldn't have been as hidden as... yeah, yeah. Should have gone. We kind of made it seem. | |
Furqan Rydhan | we we totally you know brushed it | |
Shaan Puri | Like, I remember Citrix was a multibillion-dollar product. Citrix's Online was the way people did webinars and web conferencing at the time, and it was so bad. Their users... we were trying to make this cool social app, and SAP and Oracle were using our tool just because it was better, even though it was...
</FormattedResponse> | |
Furqan Rydhan | not meant for that color like weird and purple | |
Shaan Puri | why do | |
Furqan Rydhan | you got this weird star thing | |
Shaan Puri | And instead of looking at those clues and saying, "Maybe we could do that," we missed that project-selection choice.
I remember that day, because that was probably a multi-$100 million *fork-in-the-road* moment, you know. | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah maybe | |
Shaan Puri | but you still had to execute but for sure | |
Furqan Rydhan | I mean, we could execute, right? But did we have the right selection, and could we get the right insight in our mind to *incept*?
Also, when we decided to end Blab... I don't know if you remember—you went to this barbecue, and I forgot who you met. | |
Shaan Puri | james currier yeah | |
Furqan Rydhan | And they were telling us, you know, "you're talking about this *content network* problem." Because the moment that thought entered our mind it was like, *"Oh shit, we're fucked."* That's what it felt like — we don't have the ability to intersect these.
We kept looking at Twitch, like, "Why?" So we know we don't, because people come on for an hour; they do a show. The epic content is not on long enough for people to show up and intersect with it. How come Twitch wins?
Then it turned out that, oh — people play games for 8 to 10 hours. Yeah. | |
Shaan Puri | so it didn't matter when you showed up correct | |
Furqan Rydhan | And then the context reset. It was like... you know, the feeling — a lot of *"monkey inferno"* to me.
The things we built were like: it's not *"slow down to speed up"*, but *"look for the clues"*. Don't be afraid of that.
And again, the ego or the stubbornness — like, we wanted to build a giant social app. I wanted to go somewhere around the world where somebody's using my consumer product. That was a stubbornness that we built into the talk, yeah.
If we had just kind of unlocked it a little bit through these project-selection moments... there's a lot of that. I still feel that sometimes. But I don't know — maybe it's because I'm older and less willing to be nimble in that way.
I did want to talk about one more hardware/robotics thing. | |
Shaan Puri | that's gonna be in | |
Furqan Rydhan | A few minutes. And so, I think this is another resurgence moment happening. For a long time, *hardware* has been too hard and too expensive. *Software* gets funded — that's certainly... | |
Shaan Puri | a value model right hardware is hard | |
Furqan Rydhan | **"Hardware is hard; software is easy."** Software scales — it's *"eating the world."* These were all the mentalities. I think that's flipping.
I think a few things have all kind of shown up together. So there's **two types of hardware** that I think are now "there" and "right to build."
Same recipe: can small teams do it? Can you do it without a lot of funding? And can your output be really big and impact a lot of people?
I think one area is around consumer products. The combination of **Raspberry Pi** and cloud **AI** has completely changed what it takes to build something, right?
There's a company in our studio, Magical Toys. They're building an **AI teddy bear**. We'll do a little demo of it after — we'll kind of get to that.
And, you know, I think what that... [incomplete thought] | |
Shaan Puri | is that guy who's building that he's like young right | |
Furqan Rydhan | I think fatim is like 24 25 | |
Shaan Puri | and it's not like he has huge funding or a huge team but he's able | |
Furqan Rydhan | So he showed up here. I don't know how he got here, to be honest. I think, like many people here, they meet somebody, they attract someone—they just show up, by the way. And it's awesome; we've created that environment where it can make sense.
He had done some small projects in college. He built this thing called "Desk Buddy." It was a little e-ink screen with two eyes that just blinked, and that was really it. He couldn't talk to it; he couldn't do anything. It was just a little Desk Buddy. | |
Shaan Puri | so you're not alone is that the idea | |
Furqan Rydhan | Yeah, I don't know what it was, but I remember seeing it and thinking, "That's cool — I want one on my desk." It's just fun.
They brainstormed a bunch of ideas. The combination of **Raspberry Pis**, **3D printers** to build enclosures, and this **cloud AI** thing that could be really powerful led them to an idea: build a toy.
First they literally made "Ted" — the stuffed animal. They made it talk. I was like, "Oh, this is wild." AI could do this, but everyone's trying to make coding faster or solving developer problems. I love when somebody takes that and goes to this other place where nobody's...
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Shaan Puri | thinking about | |
Furqan Rydhan | Right. He spent probably the last nine months sitting, refining. I—I think we sent you one of the first units. It probably broke. Yeah. First thing, first, he gave me a... [trails off]
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Shaan Puri | The teddy bear had the whole computer just hanging out of the back, like a half-done surgery. It was interesting.
I gave it to my kids. I think they were probably two or three years old at the time.
Every other toy we have in the living room is *preprogrammed* — push this button and it'll say a specific thing. This toy, ignoring the thing hanging out of the back, was different. It was like, "Hey, we love Paw Patrol. Can you ask us some Paw Patrol trivia?"
I replied, "Certainly I can. Who is the red dog in Paw Patrol?" | |
Furqan Rydhan | I was like marshall correct | |
Shaan Puri | and I was like hey can you keep track of our points | |
Furqan Rydhan | he goes okay two points | |
Shaan Puri | And then I was like, "whoa," and my kids were blown away because now you have an *infinite* toy. Whereas every toy is finite — it can only do the things it could do out of the box. Now, suddenly, you have a toy that's basically "ChatGPT" shoved into a stuffed animal, right? And you're like, "wow."
That toy can do anything. I could say, "Sing me a song." I could say, "Tell me a bedtime story." I can make it do many, many things now, and I... | |
Furqan Rydhan | I think what was cool was the team and this little lab that we built. The lab has 3D printers and an electronics area. Honestly, we started with an empty room and people would come by and ask, "What's this room for?" I’d say, "Oh, it's going to be a machine shop/electronics lab one day." They’d ask, "Can I use it?" I’d say, "Yeah, but we have nothing here. What do you need?" "Tables." Great—we'd bring tables. "A little thing." Okay, we'll add that. "3D printers." We'll add that too.
I've seen now tens of people come through. A lot of people would sit there, spend some time, and tinker. Fatim did that: he built one, showed us, built another, and tried various different versions. He printed new cases, bought Raspberry Pis, and worked on new software. I think he shipped something like 60 to 70 units across four to six months.
In software terms this feels ancient—60 users seems small. In hardware, though, that might have cost half a million to a million dollars. I think we did that for like $50k to $100k. | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | So, like, that difference: one person, 3D printers, Raspberry Pis, some AI — and you could just sit there, deliver units, and try it with people.
When we showed Hubert first, by the way, internally Hubert was like, "No, I don't... I don't think kids are gonna do this. It's weird."
His daughter used it, and it *changed his mind* — like, she changed his mind. | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | because he saw what it could do but like how do you get that opportunity to prototype cheap | |
Shaan Puri | Right, so hardware being hard — or rather, maybe hardware is not as hard as it used to be. Sam calls these **"inflections"** where something changes.
There's a famous inflection when **Obamacare** came out: **Oscar Health** built a thing that was just to do Obamacare and became a **$1 billion** company.
So what are the inflections? Phones now have GPS in them, so you can build **Uber**. You couldn't build Uber before because the driver and the rider needed to find each other — how were they going to do that if you didn't have phones with GPS?
Phones have cameras now, so you can have **Instagram**. So the technology inflection can happen; it's one type of inflection. And you're basically saying because of **Raspberry Pi + AI + 3D printing** to consumer hardware... | |
Furqan Rydhan | is very easy | |
Shaan Puri | Hardware is now possible—**now, more than ever**. Two people can actually mess around and tinker until they get something right. That kind of thing wasn't feasible five to ten years ago, correct?
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Furqan Rydhan | When we built **Jamey**, I used a **Raspberry Pi**. At that time, the first version of the Raspberry Pi was thought of as a hobbyist device for tinkerers who would buy a few of them. They've sold about 60 million units—around $35 apiece. That's like a few billion dollars' worth of Raspberry Pi out there.
I think what it did was change the barrier to entry. Previously, you had to make custom boards and custom software. For a technical person like me, I didn't want to go that far. I have certain skills I can do really well, and typically it's about reading a few guides on the internet and stitching stuff together. Building custom hardware felt like really serious engineering: I would need ten people, pay $1 million, and convince somebody there's a big market.
Then you'd have to build up a company, which probably would fail because you raised too much—too much pressure, too much demand on return, etc. To me, the Raspberry Pi was one of the *unlocks*.
Now there's the **NVIDIA Jetson**, which has GPUs on device, and there's so much more there. But—so what? | |
Shaan Puri | **What are other things, besides *magical toys*, that you've seen somebody build?**
**What interesting things are you seeing built on the hardware/robotics side?** | |
Furqan Rydhan | Yeah, so we have **AJ**, who's building — you know — the neuropathy. He built that first version, which I think I've shown you before. It's a brain–computer interface.
Now he has a second version that's really tiny. It's about the size of **AirPods**; you could put it right here. It's special-purpose. The ability to prototype and develop the device, get 100 or thousands of units out there, and improve the design — doing that without a giant team — allows them to continue. We've seen a variety of things come out on that front.
I think the second area that's happening is, besides consumer hardware, robotics, drones, and this other world where there's so much physical equipment: forklifts, lawnmowers, cars, and all these things that require a person. With drones, we invested in this company, **Lucid Drones**. They built a power-washing drone that can go up buildings and power-wash the glass instead of people hanging from the side. There's another company that you... | |
Shaan Puri | and is that working like do people is it like | |
Furqan Rydhan | Yeah, it's working very well. You know, what's interesting is there's a **unique business model to find here** as well. I think that's why I love being in the weeds a little bit and seeing it.
Most people think you're going to build this product and then you're going to take the people who manually wash a building and get rid of them. What actually happens is there's a team — a small business somewhere — with about five people at their company, like *Dave's Power Washing*. | |
Shaan Puri | dave power washing windows so clear you won't even know it's there amazing | |
Furqan Rydhan | **Right. Dave's got a great tagline as well.** People end up finding that if you just sell to those small businesses and give them more tools, they can serve more buildings and do it more efficiently. That distribution is built in. Maybe in the long run this starts changing, but right now there are a ton of these opportunities.
I've seen one for farms — mowing the weeds around certain fruits or inspecting them. You just send people between these things to go do it, and now there's a little robot. Instead of one person doing it for two weeks, or two people, one person's there monitoring it at the facility in air conditioning. | |
Shaan Puri | watching on the ipad | |
Furqan Rydhan | I was watching on the iPad and it might get stuck early on or might detect something, and now they've got to go fix that thing. This **efficiency**, I think, is massive. We're seeing it in many places.
Same thing: I saw these two guys building here in San Francisco. They're in a random warehouse in the back of some other store—two dudes literally bootstrapping and grinding. I just went in there; I liked these guys. They took a forklift and automated it. They used self-driving car technology—technology that probably cost about $1 billion to develop—and a lot of that kind of work has flowed into open source.
Typically, open source is sometimes behind the cutting edge, but in ten years that normalizes. You see this elsewhere with AI models like **LLaMA**. Really, they took cameras and some LiDAR, strapped a little computer to a forklift, and it could move around. You could talk to it; you could come and get it to do things. I think there's a **massive resurgence**.
So with the forklift—the physical thing—they used a little Raspberry Pi, internet connectivity, some cameras, and similar technologies. We were doing computer vision to score Fortnite games; they're using that same kind of technology to recognize, for example, "this is a box" and "this is the barcode that I picked up." | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | I can now use it and figure out what this thing is. I could walk around the warehouse and be like, **"Oh, that pallet's in the wrong spot."** How? It just scans the barcode and detects, **"Oh, there's this pallet here; it's supposed to be over there."** Then you go pick it up and move it over there.
These problems exist in warehouses. I mean, you know, right? I think you've dealt with some of those things. | |
Shaan Puri | I run a warehouse | |
Furqan Rydhan | and so to me it's like what are the machines like what are the traditional machines we've built probably for the last 100 years that you're gonna slap a little computer on it and now it's a superpower and I think this is bringing down the cost of like this robotic hardware like building a robotic arm used to be like yo I gotta be like tony stark and like iron man I've seen 2 people do it in our machine shop I there's a guy here I don't even know his company he's just chilling he just had a 3 d printed hand on his desk and I'm like what the hell was this to go yeah like I I I created the ability to develop a full hand with all the fingers and everything in just his 3 d printer there's a bambulab printer which honestly 3 d printer was great and then bambulabs took it to a whole another level like little bit of ai to help self leveling and make prints great and like everybody loves it and he just built his hand pretty high quality took a little fishing net on the inside of the hand so like you know in each finger he could like pull every finger and like do some stuff it's like one dude like few months hackathon and like I don't know what he's gonna produce from that but I just think you could do these things now in like weeks months when they took years and like a lot of money I think there's a huge opportunity here still gonna take time to like marinate and develop but I look at it as one of those things where like if I was a mechanical engineer if I liked hardware and I've been told that it's just ai and software and like your stuff isn't that interesting so no no this is very interesting right now like you need to find a place to do it and you know like I'll even say like I think we're going even further for us like we have this base we built here we call it the founder lab like this is where a lot of people come they tinker on stuff we have founders here we have builders we have creators here we have all kinds of people doing stuff put a little machine shop and that kind of pushed us to be like wait there's more we're seeing more we're talking to more people thinking about this so I ended up getting this kinda industrial space I call it the garage it's 20,000 square feet of industrial space I'll show you in a little bit but it looks like you know san francisco real estate is not the best I think this is the time to make these bets but I've talked to 25 to 50 founders in the last 12 months that need a hardware space like this to tinker to have smart people around them to have the machines around them to just being able to develop it probably for less than a $100 they can go and proof of concept and prototype the thing and look we're seeing the hype cycle of like humanoid robots | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | That's that, like, hype above. I'm more excited about all these startups that are going to form. They're going to build this expertise; they're going to be $100 million teams, whether it's their product or their knowledge. That's happening now, and two people are doing it every single day—they're spawning these things.
Consumer hardware is one area. But I think robotics and what typically was known as *deep tech*—where you need PhDs, stacks of them, and $50 million or $100 million—are the second area. I think a few people are seeing it. Maybe there are sectors like defense where it's exciting, but I don't know. I think we're going to see machines everywhere and in every kind of version.
I've seen people develop cooking robots, laundry machines, folding drones to inspect things, and drones to map interior spaces. Matterport is a giant company, and a human goes and puts a tripod everywhere. | |
Shaan Puri | and like | |
Furqan Rydhan | This is a *little drone* that's going to fly through the whole house and map it for you. And that expands that, and I just see one- or two-person teams able to do this faster than I've ever seen it.
I feel more capable. Maybe I just really want to get into hardware again myself... and yeah. | |
Shaan Puri | I think that... though, a lot of people would want to mess with this. If something goes from not *tinkerable* to *tinkerable*, suddenly it's—it's kind of like: before you were competing one-on-one, now it's one versus the field. | |
Furqan Rydhan | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | the field and of course any individual thing in the field might suck | |
Furqan Rydhan | correct | |
Shaan Puri | But the field overall is *super powerful*, and now you're saying the field is open for... hardware tinkerers, which it wasn't open before. That's a big deal. | |
Furqan Rydhan | Yeah, we do these **residencies** here where we'll bring people for a month or six weeks. We just tell them, "Here's a theme, here's a space to go do things."
When the **Vision Pro** came out, we did it. We had about 40 Vision Pro developers — we probably had the largest concentration of Vision Pro devs outside of Apple. | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Furqan Rydhan | Anywhere, and the knowledge of that... it didn't produce some ridiculous outcome. We actually did invest in one or two teams from that. I think we just got a chance to see that technology deeply.
We did this AI hardware one. I remember meeting this kid — I don't know where he is in the world — and he shows me this robot he built, like a humanoid. He built it in his bedroom. It was a calf; he only built the body and the legs, so it stopped where the waist was. It was totally hand-constructed. I'm like, "Yeah, this is wild." But the fact that you could bootleg this in your bedroom and it could take steps is crazy to me.
I met these other guys — Premiere — and the same trend in Raspberry Pi: they took that trend. I mean, I love some of these. I love it because I could jump on the video and they're up in Seattle or something and it's their kitchen. I'm like, "Is that a 3D printer in your sink?" Their kitchen is just all machines. I'm like, "Dude, you gotta get out of your house. I gotta give you a home to do that."
That's what I want: people who will just turn their bedroom into this. No, no, no — you come do it here. We'll give you a little bit better facilities, we'll give you space, you get a better place to sleep.
They took this Raspberry Pi trend and they're like, "Oh, people will start with Raspberry Pis and then they build a custom board." "Oh, we're building a modular Raspberry Pi thing — keep that computer module." | |
Shaan Puri | that's an intermediate step | |
Furqan Rydhan | "Oh, you want a speaker? Well, you can pick whatever speaker you want — just put that in. Oh, you want to produce 2,000 units? Now we have the ability to scale it for you.
They took the hobbyist world and the behavior that's driving it, and they started this *literally in their kitchen*. I just think, man, that's capable now. That's the trend I can't... I can't unsee sometimes.
Right now, in hardware — both consumer and more deep-tech hardware like drones — **platforms are massive**. There's so much opportunity to utilize that. I don't know how long it's going to take for this to become *mass and mainstream*, but I keep seeing that trend. I think for us that's..." | |
Shaan Puri | the bet you're making that's | |
Furqan Rydhan | The bet we make... I always joke with the guys here: it's like we want to bet on **negative one to zero**. Peter Thiel talked about these "0 to 1" companies. It's like we still want to step even before that — like you're at negative one, you're wandering the forest. You need a place to tinker and come and get the ideas to form. This is what we want to do. | |
Shaan Puri | Right. Alright — *love it*. I forgot—this is amazing. Good catching up, as always. Let's go check out some of these spaces. So, let's do it. *Thanks so much.* |