Hey, what's up, dude? How's it going?
Hey, hey, what's up?
Have you been checking out the progress of this AI-generated art stuff?
I think it's gone off the rails since we last talked about using Dolly.
Yeah, I saw there was a Twitter war on this. There was a comment section. I just read all
of the angry comments and had a blast.
What are people angry about? Is it artists? You're like, this is the death of art.
Yeah, and I think it's like a mix of artists and people who generally just don't like tech
giants, et cetera. Hello, hello.
Hello.
That goes a couple.
What's going on? Nice to see you both again.
Nice to see you as well. We're talking about AI-generated art. Have you seen Dolly 2 and
Stable Diffusion and all this stuff?
I got yelled at back when I was working in Angel List because we were doing these blog
posts and I was like, you know, it's so silly. We pay $500 to have someone do an illustration
and actually there's this art that we can just use and we should just use this. All
the designers got really pissed at me.
It's so funny because as a computer programmer, I'm like, oh, hell yeah, this is amazing.
I've had some experience as a designer, but I'm not an artist at heart. The idea that
somebody can type a prompt into a computer and generate an image from scratch doesn't
really threaten me. It's just really exciting to me, to be honest, but apparently there
was some art competition. I don't know if you guys read about this, but somewhere in
the US, this town was doing an art competition and this guy used an AI to generate this very
cool painting of these women dressed in Victoria-era clothing, but they're on like a spaceship
in this cool sci-fi setting and he won first place over all the real artists who had actually
painted something and so people are pissed and they're saying it shouldn't count and
it's not real art and he's like, well, it's just a tool, but I think it is real art. I
think it really is just a tool and he had to sit down and design all the prompts to
get the AI to make this image and go back and edit the prompt and erase part of the
image and do another prompt, et cetera, et cetera. There was some artistry involved.
At some point, the AI will start generating the prompts and then he goes and goes all
down and you're like, oh, okay, all right.
And then we're all slaves. Slippery slope.
I'm not personally threatened. Obviously, I'm not an artist. I'm not a painter, but
I looked in the comment section, the angry comment section about this art competition.
Everyone's freaking out and they're like, you know, what's going to happen next is there's
going to be a writing competition where, you know, whatever CPT, whatever CP3, I don't
remember the name of the three is going to win a writing competition. And instantly I
felt like a heart palpitation because I mostly see myself a writer because you're a writer.
You're a fiction writer. That offends you if people started generating AIs that were
creating fiction stories and writing that was indistinguishable from what a professional
fiction writer would write and was winning awards.
No, it definitely wouldn't offend me. I feel like I'm a hybrid. I'm an English major. I
grew up surrounded by artist people, but then I got into tech. I'm a coder. And so I see
everything as a tool and I'm just like, oh, what ways can I integrate my skills with
like, you know, the efficiencies of a computer and then creates something totally new on
top of that.
But you've told me like plenty of times that when you're writing, like the thing that you
like the most is the process of like having these challenges. Like, what am I going to
do with this character? Where's the story going to go? And having these breakthroughs.
And if you're like working and sweating and like staying up late or waking up early in
the morning to do all this hard work and someone else is just clicking a button and then their
story is more popular and respected than yours, do you not feel replaced?
No, I mean, look, you're kind of saying it. There's two separate things that you could
care about. One of them is the feeling that you get inside your body, right? And inside
your brain just from the love of creating art. And then the other one is the whatever
the respect, the prestige of having a really cool outcome, right? Like I'm not into writing
because of status or money.
But if you are in writing, if you're a fiction writer and then all of a sudden AI starts
producing these stories where you're like, this is pretty good. And like it came through
in five minutes this morning as like a full novel, it would be incredibly frustrating.
I think it would too. Like one of my favorite things is anime. I love anime and I'm always
frustrated that there's not enough good anime. Like most of the shows that come out are just
not that good. And so in some alternate universe, I would probably open an anime studio and
just try to like create more shows because I think there should be better shows. But
if somebody came back from the future and said, Hey, Cortland, you know, 10 years from
now, there's going to be AIs that can generate entire anime shows. You just click a button,
you tell it what kind of art style you like, what kind of stories interest you, what kind
of humor you like, and it crunches some numbers for a few hours and spits out a show. Like
I would feel like that's amazing. And it would completely eliminate the need for me to create
my own studio to try to like create more good content for the world.
I feel that I'm not too worried about stories. I think that it can do a really good job of
things that are ultimately derivative, but a really good story. I mean, I'm reading a
biography of Leo Tolstoy and it's like he would write the story and then he would rewrite
it 30 different times because he wanted it to be as organic and sort of unexpected as
possible. And it's like without that iteration with a real human being, I don't know.
But that's like what you can do. Like there is iteration. And so like the guy who won
this real art competition by using AI, it's not like he just did a prompt and then he
went with the first one. He just kept giving it prompt after prompt, editing it, erasing
parts of it, changing it over and over and over again. And even though he wasn't like
a real artist with the skills to make this kind of painting, he did have like a fundamental
role in that feedback loop. And I've done the same thing. Like the shirts that we designed
for Indie Hackers that have like kind of the space man on it. Like that was me going to
99designs.com, hiring an artist and then basically giving the artist prompts for what I want and
the artists would come up with a design and then I would re-prompt the artist and they
would change it a little bit over and over. So like how is that any different? It's literally
an identical process for it.
Well, so it's not computer generation. It's human-computer interaction, which is still
really interesting, but it's like that is what it is.
You just replace the artist with the computer.
Well, it's an artist. It's almost like an artist and a computer.
You could still say, oh, this part of the story sucks. Like can you make this scene
a little bit softer or make this character a little bit more ruthless? And if you can
just keep iterating and then applying your own judgment, the computer doesn't have to
be that smart. It just has to give you enough material that you can eventually say that
one's good and move on.
But I digress. We're here to talk about Koppel. Koppel, welcome to the show. How are you?
Happy to be here. I'm good.
You are, your story is super inspirational. You are the founder, or one of the founders
of kind of two products. The most recent one, Tremendous does, I believe, correct me if
I'm wrong, eight figures in revenue. You don't share the specific amounts, but it's somewhere
between 10 million and $99 million a year, and it's profitable.
Yes, I can. There's nothing to correct there.
And I think the two things that stand out to me the most here are that number one, you
and your co-founders, just three of you, you kind of came back from the brink. Like there
was a point at which your company was basically like stagnant and almost dead. Like a lot
of people would have just quit and that would have been the end of the story. And yet here
you are with like a profitable eight figure revenue company. And secondly, you and your
co-founders own 100% of the company, but you didn't bootstrap. You had investors and then
you and an amazingly smart move bought the company back from them and then grew to millions
of dollars in revenue, which is pretty cool.
The way that you make it sound was that we knew it was going to be this like uber monstrously
profitable great company. And we were like, hey, investors, we're going to guess what?
You don't know this yet. We're going to trick you and buy back the equity. But actually
at that point when we did it, we had no idea that the business would be what it became
today, but it's probably worth me just like describing what it is that we do.
Well, why don't I give it a shot? Because I'm curious.
Okay, go for it, please.
So you had two products. Gift Rocket was the first one, then it sort of pivoted and became
tremendous. Gift Rocket, also a cool business in its own right. I think you guys grew to
like almost $400,000 in revenue. If I try to describe it, it's basically it was some
sort of a digital gift card. So let's say somebody wanted to give me a gift. It's my
birthday. They would sign in to Gift Rocket, give you guys my email address, pick a store
like Target or something or a restaurant, buy $100 Gift Rocket. Then I would get an
email that's like, oh, your friend Jonathan gave you $100. And then I would have to go
to that Target and like press a button and you would check my location. And then it would
like unlock the money and I could spend it there. Is that how far?
That, that was actually the original idea is it was, this was back in 2010 when we came
up with it, which was like the heyday of Foursquare and Go Walla at the time for those of us who've
been in the industry for a really long time. But the idea was instead of like actually
giving you a gift card, like you get money that you would have to go to a specific location,
you'd have to check in in order to get it. And that was the original variant of it. So,
you know, we went through YC and eventually what we ended up doing was actually making
it just like a much more flexible version of a gift card where it was like, think about
it like paperless post combined with Venmo. It was money with a nice suggestion of how
to spend it. And really low friction and easy for someone to just sort of get it was a great
wedding gift. For example, that's what all my all the wedding gifts I sent over the last
10 years.
I'm actually curious about even before gift rocket, I'm curious about about you, like
where'd you grow up? Were you from the States?
So I was born in India and came to the US when I was four years old. Both my parents
are back then they were engineers, mechanical and electrical engineering is what they studied.
And that's what they went to grad school for. And eventually they actually became computer
scientists and saw how to code. My dad took a master's program in computer science where
he had no undergraduate qualifications for and just sort of talked his way into the program.
And then he helped my mom learn how to code and they are still sort of engineers, software
engineers to this day. They actually tried to talk me out of becoming a software engineer
because I took some AP classes in it in high school. And look, growing up on the West Coast,
like you see like computer sciences thing where like all these brilliant computer scientists
are creating the companies of like the future, but on the East Coast, it's more of like the
office space notion of programmers where you're kind of like the person who's doing the back
office work. And you know, for my parents, they were like, well, want something more
for you. And they didn't really know the West Coast world. So they actually tried to talk
me out of that and into becoming a business person. And eventually I guess I became a
hybrid of those two things.
At what point did you like, did you have like a crossroads or you had to decide, am I going
to do what my parents want and be a business person? Am I going to do what I want, be a
software engineer? Like when did you decide to basically start companies?
Good question. I think I like wanted, I knew I wanted to start a company like in eighth
grade or ninth grade. I like read some business book my dad had lying around and I was like,
this seems so cool. And it's probably not a very good business. I can reread it. But
you know, after college, I got a job at a consulting firm, which is what you do when
you got good grades and didn't know what your next job was or next thing was. And that was
pretty good for a few years. And then I just knew I was like bored there. And at that point,
Nick, my co-founder and the CEO of tremendous, he and I had been kicking around ideas for
startups and we're like, let's do it. And we didn't really know what we were going to
work on at the time, but we both quit our jobs and moved to Berkeley where we eventually
ended up founding gift rocket.
So you quit before you had anything? Yeah, it's not like I actually don't recommend
this to most people. It's like a burn the boat strategy. But we knew that we had enough
money saved up for both of us from our jobs. Nick was working in finance before that we
had at least a year of runway. And we also saw two of our friends from college who had
now, they're the founders of SeatGeek, had done something similar where a couple of years
in, they left their jobs and were like, we're going to run through a bunch of ideas and
just build stuff because this is more interesting than working our corporate jobs. And I actually
think for us at that stage in life, that was a pretty good formula.
It's interesting to me, what kinds of people take that leap? Because for me, that was also
an easy leap to take. I graduated from college. I had very little money. I guess I had worked
like an internship, but it was enough that I could go to San Francisco and survive for
a few months. And my plan was like, I hope I get into Y Combinator, which I actually
did the exact same batch that you did. But I had a lot of friends who like also like
were successful in college. And for them, it was like the idea of not kind of sticking
on the rails and going to get a high paying job was terrifying. It seemed like a huge
kind of waste. And if I look back, like I don't think I was especially smart or even
like risk taking. I was just kind of like reckless. What, what was going on with you?
I don't know. It was the same thing, I guess, because I remember thinking that, yeah, why
wouldn't we? We're like young and don't have like families. And this sounds like it's going
to be an interesting adventure at least. And optimizing for that and like taking risk was
like that was super exciting. And we didn't like, it's not like we loved our jobs or anything.
So this all seemed totally reasonable. And yet when I asked other people from that era
who were around me about it, they're like, you're crazy. Like you're out of your mind.
Like, isn't that so risky? And like, I mean, what's the worst thing that happens? Like
you go to business school or like, it wasn't a thing back then. Like it just, it just wasn't
that popular to start startups or do your own. Like nowadays, like every Gen Z or like
their number one, I think the number one most desired profession is like a YouTuber. It's
like common knowledge that you can go on the internet and basically work for yourself and
build an audience or build a product to make money. But in, what was this, like 2010, 2011,
when you started a gift rocket, like that wasn't, nobody was doing this. It was like
a very underground cult. Did, did you have like role models or, or like people who were
like maybe older than you or just like slightly ahead of you somewhere in life where who had
done this? Not really, dude. I was like probably the same as you. I was like reading like Paul
Graham's articles on his blog. And I was like, this sounds crazy. And it's like from the time
I was like a kid, I was like, I loved Bill Gates. I thought Bill Gates was cool. But the vast majority
of my friends at MIT were not computer programmers. They had no idea what I was talking about.
They would ask me questions like, why do you think you can do this? And like,
I didn't have a ready answer. I was just like, this seems way more fun than anything else.
Yeah, you know, that is crazy. If like your role models are people who you've never spoken to,
or like essays on the internet that you've read, and then you decide to move to San Francisco and
really go for it. Yeah, that's a level of risk that I think is like past what I took, you know,
for me, I had a co founder who was like, you know, my like back then, I went to Dartmouth out of the
CS program, there's like 15 kids in there. And Nick was one of the top students. And so to have
someone who actually knew how to code, I didn't know how to code at that point, except from like
my high school programming classes, to have someone that wanted to do that with you was like,
okay, no brainer already. And then, you know, we stayed at his dad's house in Berkeley to have a
place to do it. That was like close to, you know, San Francisco was it was a big deal. Like things
felt like they were actually set up reasonably well. So I'm looking at the stats for the gift
card industry, I just googled it. And I found a quote, I don't know how true this is, but it says
the global gift cards market size is valued at $620 billion in 2019. And it's projected to reach
basically $2 trillion by 2027 growing annually, basically a rate of 16%, which means like, hey,
this is a huge market. And it's also a market that's growing, which is kind of like a neat
hack for having a company that grows. It's like you just build inside of a market that's growing,
which somebody would have told me that 10 years ago. How did you guys decide to work on gift
rocket? Okay, remembers August when we August of 2010, when we started working on ideas,
and we didn't really do anything for the first month, it was like decompressing from our jobs.
And we started kicking around ideas. And actually, the one that we applied to YC with,
if you remember, like the YC application deadline was like October, was this like referral marketing
idea where like, if you referred a restaurant to a friend, you would get like a sort of discount,
and it was going to work through credit cards. It was a really bad idea. And we actually pitched it
to YC in our application there. I think Paul Graham, actually, this was back on Hacker News,
there used to be a functionality where you would apply through Hacker News, and then
PG could message you when he messaged us, like something like, you guys seem like you're smart,
why are you working on this terrible idea? And we were like, you know, I'd only read his essays
at that point. And this was like, we just applied. And we're like, like, it seemed like a good idea
to us. And so what ended up happening was he accepted us for an interview for this bad
referrals idea. And like, maybe three days before the interview, Nick and I were probably late at
night, like at Kitchen Island, just like shooting the shit. And I think he came up with the idea
for like a gift card that was just like check in based. And we were like, oh, that's a good idea.
And I don't remember whether the name had come. I think I think he did come up with the name pretty
early to Nick's credit. We were like, okay, let's just pitch this because like that other idea,
they already think it's bad. And we went in and pitched the idea for gift rocket to the YC team,
which was like, Paul, Jessica, Paul Buchheit, and I think Harge at the time. And Paul Graham,
I remember in this interview, like freaked out, he was like, this is like Twitter, this is like
the best idea that we've heard in so long. It's like undiscovered. It's just waiting to be
discovered. I can't believe no one else has pitched us on it. And we're like, interviews
10 minutes. We're like, oh, we've definitely got this. And then we're celebrating. And here's the
crazy part. That night, I think we got a rejection notice. And they're like, well, if you haven't
thought about like this enough, like you just came up with this idea two days ago, like I think they
got fired. And Nick and I immediately went out and like, I think drank some cocktails and started
watching the Jersey shores. Like that was how we would decompress at the time. And actually what
happened was three days later, they changed their mind and they were like, you know what,
we were probably being too harsh to figure it out. Like we'd like to let you into the program.
Just out of the blue, you didn't like campaign in your defense, like, oh, please change your mind.
There was no campaign. And actually the thing that they said to us was you haven't thought about
payments fraud enough. And I think what had happened somewhere in the background was
they were on the fence about us and PG spoke to one of the folks at Stripe. It was probably Patrick
at the time. And Patrick was like, these guys have no idea what they're doing, which is true.
We actually had no idea what we were doing. Afterwards, PG changed his mind and actually
set us up with all the folks in YC who were working on payments. And this was like a huge boost to two
kids who had no idea what they were doing to be connected to Stripe and WePay. And that was how
we got our start. I was a few in hindsight to have been connected to all these people who are
now like legends. Because like 2008. Far more successful. Yeah. No one knew who Patrick Colson
was back then. And the intervening years, it's like, oh, one of the youngest billionaires on
Earth, founder of Stripe. Did anything like stand out to you about any of these people that you were
meeting, getting connected to, did it seem like they were going to become what they became?
No. I mean, I had no idea for any of the people that we were around. Like I even remember Gary
Tan, who's now the president of YC. Yeah. Like Gary was an advisor to our batch. He was like
looking at landing pages that we were putting together. Yeah. And we're like, this looks like
you could probably change. Like he was telling me pixel pushing with me 12 years ago. So it was like
back, he was like a design advisor. So I think back then we knew that we were surrounded by smart
people in a special place. Like YC in 2010, I do think was like, it felt in some ways like the
center of the tech universe. And I'm just grateful to have been part of that program back then.
Yeah. And you were part of the same batch, right? Did you get the sense that you were surrounded
by any current or future legends at the time? I mean, you couldn't really tell because I also,
for example, was advised by Gary Tan. You'd go on to office hours and you would have like the
people who were sort of assigned to your company and they would like, look at your website, look
at your strategy and talk to you. And I had Gary Tan and Paul Bluehite who invented Gmail.
And I remember Gary Tan looking at our designs and saying, Oh, this is awesome. It's a scrap.
You should change that. And it's like, today's totally different reputation. But I also like
took the opposite approach that you did, Koppel. Cause I had been rejected from YC before and I
tried arguing to get into it. So I have an email I just pulled up from October 2008 from Paul Graham
to me and my co-founder. I was, I got, I had to be like 21 at the time and I was still in college.
And he's like, Hey, since you guys are both a semester short of graduating,
why don't you just apply in six months for the summer batch? Like what's the rush?
I remember we got that email. We were so excited because it sounded like you liked what we were
doing and that was his only reservation. So me and my co-founder like huddled and we like
tried to figure out what we were going to say, you know, and we were both like, Oh,
we're just so excited about this idea. You know, we can delay our graduation. And then he said,
take my word for it. It's better to graduate first. Otherwise it's very tempting to return to school
during the lean period that inevitably happens about six months in plus you'll have more time
to work on your idea. And then he just rejected us. So arguing back didn't actually work,
but Kabul Graham is such a tease. That's what I'm gaining from all of these stories.
Well, for him, he was just like rubber stamping like this person's in this person's out. But for
all of us, it was like, this is my life dream to do this. It was like such a big deal to get in
or not. So let's talk about, uh, your experience with the earliest stages of gift rocket. So you
eventually come up with this idea. You had a team. It was you and Nick. Did you have a third co-founder?
We did. Um, after we got into YC, we convinced Nick's like elementary school friend, Jonathan,
who, um, was in a PhD program, um, for computer science to drop out. And it actually worked
partially because like the YC stamp of approval and there was like, you know, there's something
going on with what we were doing. And Jonathan was like, okay, I was bored at this program anyway.
And he joined us and he actually added the most credibility to our team because he'd worked at
Facebook before. Um, you know, at that point we had a sort of interesting, well-rounded team. We
just had to figure out what to build. I mean, I don't remember what your time during YC was like.
I mean, I spent like, we spent all of it just building stuff and I was actually designing
interfaces at the time. Yeah, it was such a competitive environment because essentially
the structure of the batch is like, you know, I guess our batch is probably like 40 companies
altogether meeting every Monday and every week you would see what everybody else had built. And
then we were like, vote, like who's going to be the best and you could talk to everybody. Like
remember Chris Chen, he was always like pivoting with his ideas and doing crazy stuff. He did like
a music startup, I think. And then there were the like, yeah, like FM. Then there were the like
little guys who like raised a bunch of money in the very beginning. It was like this very
competitive landscape. So it's like, I guess we were all super motivated to build as fast as we
possibly could. Like every single like social accountability and like your pride and like your
bank account, because we didn't get that much money in the beginning. Like every single factor
is pointing towards like build as fast as you possibly can. Yeah, I think it's actually what
everyone needed at the time. I don't know if it was healthy though, because at least for me,
I'm like an extremely competitive person. And you put me in like that situation where,
you know, like there's a bunch of us on treadmalls, like I'm going to crank my speed up on the
treadmill pretty high. And like, look at how fast everyone else is running in. You know,
like that's, I think something I've had to work on because the reality is everyone is like running
their own race and like the products, like whatever hill they're choosing to climb of like
the product that they're trying to build is like, well, building it faster is not necessarily the
solution. Maybe you need to take a step back and be like, does any of this make sense? Um,
I don't know if YC was great for that aspect, but it did get us to get stuff out pretty quickly.
Cortland, I just recommended that book, the status game to you, right?
Yeah, it actually reminds me of that. Yeah. Yeah. So a couple, I just recommended this
amazing book. It's by this guy will store about status games. It's just, it's basically like,
you know, Hey, makes it the case that, um, I mean, basically all humans all the time
are constantly being run by this, this status machinery. We're all kind of playing these games
kind of deep below the motivational layers that we're consciously aware of.
There's like three status games that that book talks about. Like I'm still reading it,
but it's like, okay, there's the dominance game. And so, uh, this is just like, I'm bigger and
stronger than you. I'm louder and more confident. And so listen to me. Uh, then you've got the
virtue status game, which is like, I'm in a more pure or more moral person than you and shame on
you. And that's the sort of way that you can kind of stand out. Um, you know, I've meditated longer
than you. I'm a more enlightened person than you. And then you've got the success status game,
which is definitely what, why common it was. It was like, who is the most successful and whoever
is the most successful, everybody wants to emulate them. Everybody wants to kiss up to them. Everybody
wants to be like them or surpass them. And other people who are successful, you don't want to let
let them down, right? You don't want to embarrass yourself in a meeting with Paul Graham or Paul
Buhite or Gary Tan. And so like a lot of that was at work. I don't know how much the first two were
at work. I'm assuming the premise of the book is like, we're really hard work on this stuff.
And YC was smart to use that because their goal is to make this batches sort of successful and
productive as possible. And it basically polished hurts. I mean, like if me and Cortland and YC
not really knowing anything about what we're doing and they're trying to put us in front of
investors pretty quickly, it does, I think it does have a really positive impact for like a short
term outcome. The problem was a few things. The first is that the measuring of how you figured
out who was like doing well and who wasn't was like a voting scheme that happened of like who's
going to be successful. Like at the end of every batch, which is like very, you know, reality TV
kind of phase, literally a popularity contest. Exactly. I didn't know about that. Yeah.
What is the most likely to succeed? I can't remember exactly. How did it work?
I think you wrote something down on a piece of paper and put it into like a
basket. How did they, how did they, wait a second. How did they explain the usefulness of this?
It's like, you had to be like, what comp, what team is like most likely to be successful after
demo day? And that was something you voted on. We were, I was never anywhere near the top of
that list, but it wasn't demotivating. Like there was never a point where I was like, Oh,
we're not near. It was just like, Oh, we need to get better. Right. You just like want to be better.
The second thing that we were measured by was like, how much did you raise and who did you raise
from? And obviously here we are on indie hackers talking about there's actually a lot of different
routes to like, you know, being successful for whatever your measure of that is. But you know,
in the YC environment, there's so many good things that came out of it. The other thing I will say
is that I don't actually, I think like the forces that be of like putting all these people together
and having like, um, demo day happen at the end of it leads you to this. But simultaneously,
like when we like post YC, when we started running into like traction problems, like Paul Graham was
like, uh, you guys shouldn't try to raise any more money. Like, why don't you go like figure
some stuff out and make sure you really have product market fit, which is actually quite
contrary to like the advice that you get now, which is like, raise as much money as you can,
like war chest. Like if it's out there, take it in. Yeah. He didn't quite have like a vote on
who's growing the most growing the revenue the most, but he did send you a private memo
at the end of YC to give you a hint that maybe you should work on product market fit.
Yeah. We were like, here's, he was like, what are your, I remember this email. It's like,
what are your traction numbers? Uh, he emailed, you know, the founders and we replied like,
here's how many of these we've sold per week. And it was like, you know, double digits, I think. And
he's like, Oh, you're in the trough of sorrow. Just like, Oh, okay. I guess that's where we are.
You guys should probably figure out how to grow. Here's some people you should talk to.
Maybe if you weren't before, you definitely felt sorrowful after probably
really tell us pretty happy before this call. If he tells you, you should feel sorrowful,
but you guys actually grew a lot. I mean, gift rocket got to about $400,000 a year in revenue,
which is awesome for a small group of founders. You just basically created your own sort of
salaries out of thin air. Um, why wasn't that good? You know, what was bad about that outcome?
There's nothing bad about the outcome, but if you wanted to create like a growing business,
then one of the fundamentals you need is like, you can't have crazy amounts of churn out the
other end. And given the way that the product worked, we were like, you know, trying to get
in consumers to like send to their friends. Um, they would find us sometimes like through search
or like, you know, we actually ranked pretty well for online gift cards. At some point,
I think we were number one back in 2012. So they would find us, but then they wouldn't repeat use
the product because it was a product for occasional use. It was literally for occasions like weddings
and holidays. So we would see spikes, but like retention rates were so low that it was like,
okay, well maybe this grows like a little bit, but this in itself is not like a big venture
pack business. And we had some serious talks. This is around 2012 or 2013 that we realized this.
We were like, are we climbing the right hill? Like is this, like we keep working on this exact
product. It feels like we're hitting a ceiling and this idea is like probably going to be somewhat
tapped out. Like we had other variations of it, but they all felt like they were still going to
succumb to the same problem, which is that if you were targeting consumers with a gifting product
idea, like how are you going to get them to send all of their gifts through you? That's,
that didn't seem feasible. And then even, even if they send all their gifts through,
I mean, I send four gifts a year on really charitable years. So what other axes, what
other levers can you pull? Well, how much money are you making? Like if someone's using you four
times a year, which I assume it was probably less, but like, I don't know, like father's day,
mother's day, somebody's birthday, another person's birthday, Christmas, et cetera.
Like how much are you making per customer when they're sending a hundred dollar gift
rocket? Just, just not that much. Like the fees up front are like, you know, we charge something
and we had like discounts on them. And, and, but the reality is I think the repeat rates were so
low that even like we didn't think that that was possible. Like I think it was like, if you sent
one year, your chances of sending again, like later that year, like within the next year,
we're like 5% or something like that. And it would drop off over time. So it was like,
okay, we've like created this utility that is like good every once in a while, but it's not going to
be like a replacement for some existing gifting behavior you have. Like plus you want to vary it
up. You're not going to send everyone like gift cards or like gift certificates. You're going to
want to send like a physical thing to someone. And so there were a bunch of startups that, um,
launched around the gifting space back in the early 2010s. Like, um, Karma was one of them.
There's another called Thinkful and they all ended up failing. Um, actually Karma ended up
getting acquired by Facebook for like $75 million, which arguably was probably a bad decision by
Facebook. Okay. So this went on for a while, right? You kind of hung out in this trough of sorrow,
if we want to call it that of sort of a situation with low retention, but eventually, you know,
you moved forward and you decided this sort of crazy idea to buy out your investors.
So what happened there? Yeah, we were like, okay, well we're making like, you know,
sizable, like reasonable money, but this isn't going to grow. And I don't know what the exit for
this is and investors like want to have their money. Like back in seven years, we're like,
this is not really going to happen. So we offered to buy people out with the cashflow. Um, and we
said, everyone can get pretty much double their money back. And I think YC got a pretty, like,
even better return and they all agreed to it. Um, so there was just like, you get your, this
much money back now. And then within two years, you get this much more and everyone was happy.
So we signed the papers. It was really straightforward negotiation. There was no
negotiation. They were like all like, wow, that's nice of you. So we raised from like
pretty good people. That was it. I think the standard sort of outcome for the vast majority
of YC companies was like, you die. So the idea that if an investor is like, oh, you're going to
get your money back. Um, hey, like at least they didn't completely die is like probably a good deal
for most of them. Although I'm sure there's like, you know, frequently some investors out there who
are like, no, you need to push yourself and become a unicorn. I don't care. I don't want my money
back. Yeah. There was one that thought we were like operating in bad faith and we were like, okay,
they were like fine. Um, but ultimately like, you know, I don't think the investors cared. I think
they thought that was generous of us for the most part, but like, you know, no one's buying a state
dinners or something like after we gave him a return cause for celebration for anyone.
So you, you've now started a company and grown into hundreds of thousands of revenue with your
co-founders decided that it's not a great idea, bought out your investors. Uh, and then I think
all of you guys went to work other jobs. How do you decide like what to do? And that sort of
crossroads period. Cause I think that, you know, my sort of philosophy is that most intelligent
ambitious people, like if you just keep starting companies, like eventually you'll have a company
that works. You'll learn a lot of lessons. Maybe that number is like nine companies for someone.
Maybe it's three, maybe it's 15 who knows, but like you started gift rocket at this point and
it kind of sort of worked. How did you decide what to do with your life? Yeah. I knew I wanted
to start another company and I think Nick was still all ready to go. So the two of us were like
starting to explore other things that we could do. Um, Jonathan at that point wanted to take some
time off and he ended up, um, doing that and eventually, um, becoming an investor. Uh, and
Nick and I ended up starting a couple of real estate companies actually for two years. And
fun fact, I think it was like the top, uh, seller of like single family homes and like the East Bay
for one of these real estate ideas for like a summer in 2014, where I think I sold like nine
up. Like I was happy with real estate. They sold like nine homes. Um, but this was an idea called
American Realty's that Nick and I actually started along with, uh, Sandy Spicer, who was also in our
Yep. Look, we were three engineers at that point and real estate is a miserable business. And so
we ended up like in 2014, just shutting it down. Um, Sandy went over to Flexport. Um, and I was
like actually working on yet another idea, but then I was like, you know, after four years of
like, I was like, I suck as an entrepreneur, none of this is working. I should get a job. And, um,
that's what I ended up doing. I took a engineering job at Angelist as like employee number 20 or
something. And Nick, uh, at that point was like the last founder who could possibly work on gift
rocket and there was some stuff to do there. So he actually went back to, to go work on that. He
didn't want to get a job. So it was gift rocket, like continuing to spit out cash while you guys
were all doing like, it was not like 400 K in revenue. You guys kind of quit to do other things
with still operating in the background. Yeah. I think it actually grew a sizable amount. So it
was a, what was weird about us, like all the founders sort of pausing, working on the business
was we actually did have one employee running operations. And we were like, that was a weird
conversation of like we had quit his commercial real estate job to like be our community manager.
That's what we had titled it. And he, um, we were like, Hey, everyone's quitting and we're going to
work on new ideas. And he's like, what all my bosses are quitting. And he, he ended up doing
fine. He, um, became a engineer and then a startup founder just stole his startup actually. Um, and
another friend of mine ended up taking like the core operations role, but during this time,
there's just one employee working on the operations of the site and things are growing.
Like at what point in time did you eventually transition to, you know,
yeah, this is a real thing. We should really go all in on this again.
So the thing that initially pulled Nick in was that, you know, we're payments business and the
bank that we were built on top of, which at the time in 2014, a lot of startups were built on top
of just bank for Oaks bank, um, had had to shut down all of their like FinTech programs. And this
affected a lot of companies, including Angeles, where that was what I ended up working on as the
first project I did when I was there, um, is transitioning off like our banking code, um, over
and Nick was the only founder left at, uh, gift rocket. So he ended up doing that by himself is
like negotiating another deal with the bank, rewriting all of like the code that interfaces
with the banks like work. And, um, that was like a pretty big six to nine month project. And that
was the thing that pulled them back in. And at that point, you know, you've got your anchor project
and you're back in for him. That's when he started seeing the potential, um, in this B2C market,
because you look at, you know, we, we had this retention problem and you just do like the sequel
query of like, well, who's actually sending over and over again. And what we found was that,
well, there were a bunch of accounts that had signed up that were businesses that were starting
to, that were using gift rocket for the same use cases that we, the tremendous now serves,
which is like research incentives or like a referral incentive or something like that.
And because we were grouping by these users, we realized that there was no retention problem here
because these businesses needed to send these in like gift cards out as part of their line of
business. And that was the first insight that led Nick to transition the company that we had built
over to being a business to consumer payouts company. Yeah. There's this idea of like the pivot,
you know, you just start a company and maybe it doesn't go well, but you know, you keep working
on it and eventually you have this flash of insight, this realization, and you pivot into
something that works. And in my experience is pretty rarely a curse. It's not nearly as common
an occurrence as like it's talked about or used to be talked about, but like that's what happened
here. Tremendous ended up being, again, a business that's doing tens of millions of dollars in
revenue. It's profitable. It's owned by the founders. But at this point, like you didn't
have really much of anything. Like Nick had a little bit of inspiration. He thought this was
cool, but you were off doing other things or other co-founder was off doing other things.
Like what's the first thing that happened to sort of turn the ship around after Nick decided,
Hey, there might be some promise here. So start actually exploring this market. And there are two
things that I believe simultaneously happen. The first was we start, you know, you talk about the
YC philosophy of doing things. First thing you do is talk to your users. And Nick started reaching
out to market research firms, which ended up, you know, now are part of our bread and butter.
They send out like market research firms do research for on behalf of fortune 500 about new
products that they may launch. And they are constantly surveying. People are bringing in
focus groups and they have to compensate these people for their time and input. And the nature
of the market research industry is like, there are so many small firms out there that all have
this need for an incentives provider. And some of them had started using gift rockets. We just
started talking to them, realize that there was some unfulfilled need here. And the first thing
I think he did was he created something it was gift rocket rewards is like what we called it.
That eventually became tremendous. But that building that out, it was actually a fork of
the original gift rocket code base. Building that out, plus like doing the customer development
and sales, which is like honestly outreach on LinkedIn at the time, led to closing a couple
multimillion dollar deals. And I was like, Oh, shit, multimillion dollars as in like, that's
kind of the amount of money flowing through gift rocket or the amount of revenue you guys got to
pocket. Multiple millions of dollars of payments volume, which for some of the larger deals that
we've closed at like some of the early deals we close are like now spending like $9 million on
the platform. And that ends up being pretty sizable margins for us. You're at Angelus at
the time, right? So I'm sitting there at Angelus being like, what's going on?
What's going on? So is he keeping you, is he keeping you updated like throughout this entire
process? Or does he phone you up after he's closed to multimillion dollar deals? I'm like,
Hey, couple, you never believe this. Like how did that go down?
Yeah, when I was planning for you to quit and come back.
The funny thing was like, I was like, Oh, this seems like an interesting thread to pull on,
not realizing I'm not actually in the business talking to these people. So I don't know how
well it's working. And honestly, the initial sort of, there was just some skepticism around like,
well, this is like a different business. Like, is this actually going to work? It wasn't just me,
it was like other people that, you know, we were friends with in the startup community being like,
and it just took two years of pulling on the strings, pulling on a thread to realize, okay,
actually, this is like a gigantic underserved vertical and payouts is like payouts and like
B2C gift cards is actually this big, gigantic thing that we just didn't understand very well
before. So I'm like, kind of, you know, Angel list, I was a software engineer to start out and
eventually I became the COO of like, the job site, the talent business, which is a nice part of
Angel list. So like, you're basically kind of set. Yeah. And I was like, Oh, I have this like career
that's like really burgeoning. I've like never had a real job in tech. And like, you know, I'm like,
now an executive at this like, the hot startup and, and simultaneously just like advising Nick
on the side. And I'd become a manager, you know, the talent business had become like 80 people or
something like that. And so, tremendous to me as it was getting built was like kind of just this
thing that I was helping Nick with on the side, rather than being like something that was occupying
a lot of my time. So, you know, in this pivot, all credit goes to Nick, Ben, who is a friend of ours
who basically came on as a late co founder friend of ours from college who like helped transition
the company over. And some of the early employees, whereas like three is like a five person, four
person team. Your website talks about you guys being in hyper growth mode. So like you're like,
and some aspects are bootstrapped at this point, like the founders own 100% of the company.
And like, I think the traditional indie hacker right is like, okay, well, now you just make a
lot of money. And then you pay yourself a high salary. And like, that's it. That's the dream.
You built the business. But there's also the sort of stereotypical hyper growth Silicon Valley
startup path. You're like, no, I'm not happy with that. I'm trying to take over the world
and be a unicorn company worth billions of dollars. And it seems like you guys are still
on that trajectory. You're still trying to go that route, despite the fact that you don't have
high growth investors. So it's not that uncommon. GitHub is a good example. They didn't raise until
years after they were founded. And they required for billions of dollars. Zapier, we've interviewed
Wade Foster on the show, they raise a tiny amount of money, and then just basically bootstrapped
the rest. And then later on, raise money like a $5 billion valuation. So why not just stay
indie hackers? Like, why do you want to go for this sort of huge valuation and grow super fast?
I don't think we're targeting the valuation. Like, whatever, like that, that's some like
measuring stick, I think it's really about delivering value to users. And the reason we
say we're in hyper growth is because there's two aspects of the company that just keep doubling
every year. And maybe even faster than that, the first is like the number of customers and
accounts that we have. And all of that comes with complexity of like, we have 5,000 businesses that
are using our product, or have used our product to send payouts, which is like a really large number.
And transaction volume is like well into the hundreds of millions right now, or like the
number of use cases is proliferating. And so the complexity of the business is going up.
But along with that, like, you know, I rejoined Tremendous, Nick had recruited me back in 2020.
And I think the team was like eight or nine full time employees at the time. And now, you know,
within two years, we're at like 55. And I think we'll be 75 or so by the end of the year. And
that doubling of the team size, like, maybe every year or even faster than that, also comes with
like this feeling of wow, things are not just like this, it's not some like incremental change,
it's like a different company every year. And so the hyper growth thing refers to the fact that,
you know, every nine months, it feels like a different company. And that's not driven by
we're pulling in this VC money and have to spend it. It's driven by the product market fit that we
have, we're solving problems for our users, and they keep telling their friends about the product
and those people sign up and we have to like we say have to say no to business or sometimes we
have to say no to business. Like that's how you know. What do you know about this industry,
the gift industry that other people don't know? I mean, to take one example, you at least you
started out pulling on the thread of these research companies or research teams at companies.
I mean, is the market bigger than that? Or are you kind of pulling on different threads? Like what?
I think the thing that people don't understand about this industry is the role that gift cards
play in it. And they think about us as this gift card startup. And they tie that to like, oh,
I send my friends gift cards. But gift cards are actually this like incredibly low friction way to
transfer value from one person to another without having to like go through your payroll system.
Like you can buy an Amazon card and trade them around. And that's the reason that they're valuable
to market research firms is, well, if they have to send people like research incentives all of the
world will like some gift cards are kind of like one form of tender that allows them to do that in
a low friction way. Now, one of the other things that I think we got right pretty early on is we're
not really just a gift card company. We started out as like this gifting startup, but it's really
about low friction payouts. If you want to be able to transfer value to like some large number of
people on a one off basis, like can you imagine going into payroll software and being like,
let me upload is like it's going to ask for everyone's social security number. And they're
going to be like, no, but simultaneously, there's a threshold of like you transferred more value
than $600 to someone in the US. And then you actually have to collect a W nine form and like
share that with your CFO or your finance person. And all of this stuff, like approaching payments
from like, well, you start with the low friction side of like small amounts and build up leads you
to all these other use cases that you never thought of. And every time we looked at a vertical,
we really were like a department within company, we realized that there are lots of use cases for
this. So research is obviously a big one. And then you think about conversion rate optimization
of like marketers like wanting to like make sure people actually book demos or, you know, outreach
campaigns where like you offer an incentive to like take a conversation with someone and HR,
like you think about employee recognition of like wanting to send out gifts to your employees,
or even like sales bonuses, like those are a huge pain to pay out at the end of the month,
like these low friction transfers are like as diverse as the payments ecosystem itself. And
you're just not seeing because they're hidden. Right, right. Yeah, I'm always curious where like
these ideas come from that can generate 10s of millions of dollars, because everyone out there,
every indie hackers like what unsolved problem is there where I can make a debt. And I think
approaching this from the mindset of like a typical consumer, I'm like, transferring money
is easy, I just open my wallet, take out a bill and hand it to someone isn't it so easy. But that's
a very consumer mindset. And for businesses like you're talking about like they have a much more
complicated process of like, okay, you know, we're doing market research for ask your customers
questions and serving them like, we got to pay them, but they might live in dozens of different
countries, they might accept dozens of different currencies, there's all these forms and taxes and
other things. And so it's like one of these like almost hidden problems that the average person
will assume is really simple, but it's it's not. And it seems like you guys are just stumbling
on to all the ways that it was complex. Yeah, you know, I don't know that like,
we could have, you know, you give us like a case that has like all the information about like this
market existing, and we like immediately crack the idea without having a long iteration cycle and
approaching it from like an adjacent market that was more accessible to like us. We started out in
this like consumer gifting market. And then we noticed that some people that were using our site
were using it for business to consumer incentive payments. And then we realized like B2C payouts
is actually this big industry that actually relies on stored value products in a way to like actually
transfer value. Well, that's like a lot of hops. And I think that the business that we built
benefited from us having a lot of time to like notice those observations, because there's no way
that 25 year old us could have figured this out. Here's a kind of slightly meta question about
sort of like this being a hidden use case in a way. A lot of these these market research firms
that want to transfer this value that you're now selling to, did they all start knowing we already
know we want to do gift cards? And then you are now the gift card provider? Or are you going and
like selling them on gift cards as the thing that sort of will like solve that problem for them?
Does that make sense? It's actually the former. Like the things that research organizations were
doing before Tremendous was it was really like one of two things. The first is they were often
like writing checks. Like a lot of what we think about is like we replace checks. They're writing
checks to people and checks are, I mean, they're just a contract that has a bank account and
routing number printed on it and you hope that someone doesn't commit fraud, but that's what
they are. Or they would use Amazon cards or some other like single store value product and run
into the issues of like recipient preferences of like, oh, I don't want an Amazon card to
give you prepaid card or Amazon doesn't work here. Or like, can you give me a Walmart card?
And suddenly they had an operations person who was spending all their time just managing like
inquiries about this. The other place that they would come from is there's some legacy providers
that like kind of created access to this, but the technology for those providers was so bad that
they couldn't get any of the reporting or like money movement was like a hassle. And so
it was something that some of the legacy providers were doing a bad job of servicing,
but most people were actually using other substitutes that we happen to have a solution
where they were like, Oh, wow, like this is amazing. Like it just made all my problems go away.
Yeah. I also wonder about growth in general. Did you ever run into any plateaus or hard
to get over it? Because you're kind of doing like the sales led process. You're calling
on companies on the phone. You're like, Hey, you guys are doing research. We got the product for
you. Did that ever stop working? Did you ever have to like innovate to figure out how to move
to the next step? Because I know a lot of people who try to do those types of sales and it doesn't
work very well for them. Yeah, it was so we didn't keep doing the sales led strategy over
like the entire last four years. The sales led strategy worked pretty early on, because like,
Nick, the founder and CEO who can also like design interfaces and like understood business and could
just like write code was like, it was the equivalent of like, whatever stripe was doing
where they were just like, set it up for you. In the early days of like, you know, market research
firms like can you build this report for us and like we chip it and they'd be like, Oh, wow,
let's move all our spend over to tremendous. It seems great. What eventually ended up happening
was this is something that I think as engineers and builders we take for granted. When you make
a site that's like open for anyone to sign up using. It's not like a close enterprise,
like you can't register for it unless you're like a big company. Like anyone can sign up and start
sending on tremendous. We started running ads like pull inbound and we got all of these mid
market companies or large companies even like I think Google came to us through inbound actually
that could just sign up with the product and play with it. And then they would request a demo. And
this is like this, um, I think a lot of the new FinTech companies like Plaid, um, really believe
in product led growth. And that was, it was huge for us. Cause we would just bring in traffic,
let them experiment with the product and then they would immediately see the value and want to figure
out how they could do this at scale. The rich get richer. It worked well too, because you know,
for us with a lot of the players in the space, they were legacy providers. They just didn't have
the ability to build this, like building something that anyone can sign up for is
believed or not in the scope of like, you know, tech kind of a hard problem. Like it's not something
that all the legacy players do. So this is a huge advantage for us. Are there like problems you've
uncovered while doing this that like you don't have time to solve, but you think other startups
could cause I know like part of building any company is focused, right? You could do a million
different things, uh, but you can't do all of them. Like what, what have you seen in this industry?
Cause I think there's a lot of problems where quite frankly, like you're right. Like the incumbents
can't really move fast enough to solve them, but like a scrappy team of creative hackers can.
You're asking me if there's like any brilliant startup ideas that I don't have time to work on.
This is the question. You know, I, I do think that there's a lot in terms of just like simple
primitives for, um, fintech companies. Like just a really simple example, like one of the sites that
I use the most is like, uh, IP data.co. Um, and we use this to use it for like fraud detection
and geolocation stuff. And like, uh, I've now implemented this, I implemented this at Angelus
too, which is fine. Like simple APIs that allow people to access information where like the core
service is like, um, taking in some data. It's like a microservice. Like you put it in an IP
address and it tells you all the information about it and it gives you some scoring on top.
And all it is is a simple site with a great API. And like, there are some like, you know,
usage based pricing, but for us, we're like, I will pay 200 to $500 a month for this. And
right. Exactly. And if you think about what all those primitives are within the fintech ecosystem
of like, you know, there's elements of KYC, like there's companies that are trying to build these
like all in ones, but I think the opportunity for folks that are indie is doing one of those
individual things and just doing it incredibly well and having it be simple. That that's the business
that like, you know, max mind is another one that does like, uh, um, fraud services and IP
like enrichment. Like clearbit is another example of like, their business is incredibly simple.
It's just like, I give you data when you make a request. Um, I think those are incredibly
interesting businesses and when they get integrated, like no one wants to rip them out.
So what do you want to, what do you want to do now? I mean, you're kind of on top of the world.
You're talking about, okay, you want to provide more value. You've grown your company. You've got
something like, what is it like 50 employees now? Yeah. How are you feeling personally as a founder
when you look at like, I don't know, your career and your goals? Are you like completely absorbed
by your business? Are you thinking about next steps? Like, how do you, how do you basically
plan a, try to course for your life once you've already achieved like this level of success?
This is a philosophical question. Yeah. I try not to let the lows make me feel really low and
I try not to let the highs make me feel really high. Like it's really about being tempered and,
um, somewhat, um, accepting of like what's happening. And I think that we are in a good
place as a business. Like when it comes to work, like it, where tremendous is going,
I have like a few desires. I want to build a great culture where all the people who work here
feel like they were able to be part of something special. Like that is actually for me more of my
personal mission. Um, and, and you think about how Nick and I are able to divide up responsibilities.
He really sort of thinks about like the long-term vision of the company. And I really care about
the organization and the people we have, like those, that sort of plays to our relative strengths.
Um, and I wanted to deliver value for our clients and just build good products. And, uh,
that's like, you know, it's, it's quite different than like the, we need to save the world by doing
X kind of philosophy, but it's always been the one that's more consistent with what we care about.
So like, you know, in terms of like company where we're at, like we just have to hire more people
and like maintain our culture and keep delivering value to our users. And we don't really worry
about the zeros too much as long as we're making more money than we're spending.
So like a very loyal company, man, because there's so many different answers you can give
like, Oh, you know, I like, I got Elon Musk did it. I'm going to follow that path.
All right. I mean, would you, it sounds like like, you know,
take it from Elon Musk himself. It sounds like, I think like being authentic to yourself in the
life that you want to build as a founder is like, look, you're probably not going to, like, it's
really challenging to, to actually make it so that you got that option. But when you do like,
don't try to live someone else's life. Like, you know, all that seems fine, but who cares?
Like I, I know what my life is and I don't think it's going to change very much based on how
tremendous like ends up doing, but I do care about my relationships with all the people who I bring
on and all the coworkers I have and how I spend my day. And I want to have that be like, amazing.
That sounds so healthy. The idea that your life isn't going to change that much,
regardless of how your company does. And then the most important thing is relationships.
Because I've been reading like books and essays and stuff on happiness, and they all basically say
the exact same thing. Happiness mostly comes down to the relationships in your life. And I think
people who think that making money is going to, you know, result in some massive change in their
life, especially if they're already pretty well offered, probably going to be disappointed.
Well, cool, couple. Thanks for coming on. Can I ask you to leave us with one piece of
advice for fledgling Andy hackers out there who maybe don't have an idea yet or maybe struggling
through the sort of early stages of getting started? Like, what's something that you've
encountered that's maybe unique to you that they might not have encountered?
Yeah, I'd say give yourself space and time. Like, this shit is hard. It took us
eight years and like we stopped working on the company and started working on it. But like,
it was a long journey. And I think in the early days, we didn't give ourselves space to like,
really try to figure this out. And that was why we did some of the bouncing around that we did.
And, you know, like I think about myself, 2014 being like, Oh, I'm a failure. It's like time
to get a job. Like I wasn't a failure. I'm not any different than I am now. Like the card, like,
you know, you're going to get a lucky hand or you're not. But if you start startups for long
enough, you will be successful is like one part of it. And so if you believe that, that giving
yourself time to like not believe that like, the first thing that you start is automatically
going to be a home run. Like it's not, you're gonna, it's gonna take time and space. So like,
if you actually give yourself that time and space, you have a much better chance of discovering it.
Otherwise, you're going to shut down what might be a promising idea, or, you know, in our case,
adjacent to a promising idea. I love that. It's almost like the number one hack is not how to
build a successful company and how to give yourself enough time and space to then figure
out how to build a successful company. And if you have that time and space, it's just a matter
of taking it. Yep. Apple colleague, thanks a ton for coming on. Can you let listeners know
where to find more about you online and about tremendous? Yeah, tremendous. You can learn more
about us at tremendous.com. And for me, oh, I don't know where to find me online. I actually
try to keep a very low online presence. You tweet a little bit. Very little increasingly
lasts as time passes. Same, same. All right. Thanks again for coming on. Later.